No, the problem is that there are too many pieces of technology to know how to use. And more and more keeps coming. Users don't give a crap how something works, they just want it to work. That's why the pay engineers to make thinsg work, so they don't have to.
I'm a user. I don't give a rat's festering gonads about compiling a program. Just install the damned binaries and let me get back to work.
Re:Space Elevator - speed an issue?
on
Columbia Coverage
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· Score: 1
It doesn't really matter how long it takes. It could take hours, days, whatever. It's all a matter of how fast of a tracction motor you want to use.
As for wind, doesn't much matter, either. You build the lifting box to be strong and secure. The cable will hold it in place. The wind resistance of the length of cable that is in the atmosphere will be far greater than the wind resistance of the lifting box. Miles and miles of 1-meter thick cable adds up very quickly.
I just said that we had to take terrorist considerations into account.
Well, no shit. Don't you think they already thought of that?
And the SE would be a worthless target. The whole point of terrorism is to scare the bejesus out of the general public. The Hood was an easy target because no one expected a small boat to cause that much damage and it was in an unfriendly port. That won't happen again for a long time. The WTC towers were good targets because they were in civilian airspace, easy to see and big enough to hit even for a half-assed pilot with almost no skill. An island thousands of miles away from land with an active security system is going to a worthless target.
And do you really think that the US Government will let just anybody near the SE, even as a tourist? To get there you will need to go by plane or ship, both methods would be tightly controled and subjected to security searches.
The world has not changed. Terrorists have always been able to cause massive damage and loss of life with a little money and a willing "martyr" or two. Do you think you could fly a plane near a shuttle launch and not get shot down? You won't be able to get near the SE eaither.
Re:how to re-work it
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The problem here is that you are assuming that it is the monthly fee keeping people out. That is simply not true for most people.
The real problem is that the game is boring. And this is coming from someone who not only played The Sims for two years, and bought every expansion pack (I don't have "Unleashed" as I stopped playing after "Vacation" came out) and even ran a popular (and expensive) website for two years! While The Sims is boring to a lot of people, The Sims Online is boring to almost everybody! I don't know of ANY of my The Sims friends (real one, you know, meatsacks) who even care about TSO.
Making it cheaper by stuffing it full of ads (Sweet Merciful Jesus! Is there anywhere we can escape the endless onslaught of advertisers?) will not solve anything.
would not be filled with tens of thousands of civilians (which is what they were after, if you remember)
It would be a VERY difficult think to attack, especially in the paranoid days after 9/11.
But let's not even bother thinking about getting on with our lives. Let's just bury our pathetic, frightened heads in the sand and hope those nasty bad mens don't shove another 767 up our pasty fat asses.
Jumping Jesus!
Re:Taking pictures with satellites
on
Columbia Coverage
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· Score: 1
Spy/Geo satelites are designed to take pictures of teh earth. Their telescopes are design specifically for that task.
In order to get good pictures you not only need telescopes designed to take images of objetcs the size of the shuttle, you also need satelites in properly aligned orbits.
The Hubble is sitting in a well known orbit and has for years. They've had plenty of time to line up orbits with other satelites. This is not true of the shuttle.
Yes, satelite technology has come a long way on five years, but is the shuttle near enough to one of those new-fangled satelites for it to even matter?
It's not as simple as pointing a telescope in a given direction. Satelites are in constant motion and getting any two of them, or a satelite and the shuttle, in the right orbits is a pain in the ass! Look at all the hubbub and work needed to get the Shuttle to the Hubble. It's not trvial by any means.
It's hard to get good writing when Those In Charge willingly sacrifice continuity and quality for apecial effects and out of character jokes. Rick Berman is the problem. Firing him is the solution.
As far as I was aware, the overriding theme of humanity throughout the development of society has been of increasing and ever more complex technology...
Read more history books. The concept of continious progress is very new. Maybe 500 years old. For the bulk of "western" (European) history the exact opposite has been true. Throughout the Dark Ages there was almost no technological (or cultural) progress at all. The Romans and Ancient Greeks both beleived that the world was in active decay, falling from the Golden Age of past glory. The idea of "progress" as we understand it came about in The Renaissance.
Intellivision was a success, actually. The reason you don't see many of them is that they came out in the late 1970's and most are either dead, rotting in someone's parent's basements, or thrown away long ago.
ColecoVision was a HUGE success. It sold a lot of units. It was pretty much the first affordable in-home game console. Almost everyone I knew had one when I was in high school.
The article wasn't about "bad" consoles, just the ones that failed. Lots of good products fail. All you need is a bad price point, or a lack of cevelopers and even the best product can fail.
Re:U.S. may suffer.. Citizens will survive..
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
1) U.S. workers get paid more than than peers in other countries.
Yes, but that's not the fault of the American worker, is it? Used to be a time when a working man could feed his family on a single income. Now it takes two working parents to get a family through.
2) U.S. companies want to get more for their payroll dollar.
Not really. What these companies want is to maximise dividends. The disparity between the wages of top management and the average employee of the average large US coproration is the highest in the world.
What is killing the American job market are large corproations that no longer care about the long term health of their business. All they care about now is their next quarterly profit statement. Which is exactly the kind of crap going on in 1929.
Doesn't matter how well you were rebuilt. You are still dead. Now there is a copy of you running around. Fine for him, but not for you.
Sorry, but I'll slow boat it across the universe.
You will be waiting a long time.
on
25 Best Linux Games
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I wish another game would come along with the impact that Doom had.
I'm afraid that you will be waiting a long time. It's not even the gaming industry's fault on this one. Games like DOOM (or whatever your first quality game of any genre is) are like your first love: you never quite recapture the feeling of that very first (insert first sexual encounter here).
DOOM did a good enough job at faking 3D that when we got real 3D it wasn't that big of a deal. And now that we have 3D, what's left? Better graphics. And one day, maybe, passable AI.
The closest I've gotten to recapturing the feelings I had when playing DOOM have been with Half-Life and Halo. But neither of these games made me stare into my monitor at an odd angle trying to see around the corner, and they only made me jump out of my chair about three times each.
No, they need to see people actually make money with their Linux ports, and that just isn't happening. Quake 1 and 2 were sold as Windows games with downloadable Linux binaries. id didn't make a dime they could prove was from Linux sales. Quake 3: Arena was sold as a Windows, Mac and Linux (via Loki) native game and Loki is out of business.
The problem with people actually buying games on Linux are two fold:
Linux ports usually don't come out (if they ever do) for up to six months after the initial Windows release. By this time most of the people who are going to buy the game already have.
Too many Linux users (too many vocal ones, at least) demand that everything for Linux be free (as in beer) and will lowdly flame any company that dares try to actually charge money for a product on Linux.
Issue One will not be addressed until Issue Two has been dealt with. And I just don't see Isssue Two going away any time soon.
You're not really supposed to use that PCI slot anyway as it shares IRQs and whatnot with the AGP slot. I allways seem to run into stability issues if I put anything more demanding than a SoundBastard 16-PCI in that slot.
It's a mindless rant written by someone that does not want to compile anything or upgrade.
And guess what? Most people who try Linux don't want to compile or upgrade. They want it to work! This group is growing in size and will soon account for most of the Linux population (if it has not already happened). Most Linux users will be just that, "users" and developers need to start thinking in those terms if they want people to use thier programs and Linux in general.
This replacement^H^H^H err... upgrade cycle is the reason I have totally lost interest in console gaming.
That's odd. Because all of those games you bought for your old console still work. There is nothing, save physical damage to the media or the console (or if you've lost bits and pieces) that will keep you from being able to enjoy any of the games you have.
Contrast that with the PC gaming environment where you are constantly having to upgrade your existing computer to play the latest and greatest games only to find that last year's "must have" game no longer works!
All of my old PSX games still work. Every one (except the one that I rolled my chair over, but that's MY fault). All of my Dreamcast games still work. Contrast that with games for my PC. Unreal no longer works in my system. Dues Ex only runs in software mode. Sin (HAHAHA!) doesn't work anymore at all! I have a pile of games that I can no longer play on my PC because either my system is too fast, has too much RAM (WTF?), is using the wrong version of Windows, has too new a version of DirectX, no longer has a SoundBastard 16 sound card, no longer has a Voodoo1 card, no longer has a Voodoo2 card, etc... ad nausium.
Sure, the upgrade cycle with consoles is a bitch, but it's NOTHING like the nightmare that is the upgrade cycle with PCs where a simple video driver upgrade can kill a game! Sure, new consoles come out and new games for the old systems dry up. But at least the old games keep working!
Slashdot Mirror
Just met to full out snogging in seven minutes (real time). It's easy if you bother to figure out how.
No, the problem is that there are too many pieces of technology to know how to use. And more and more keeps coming. Users don't give a crap how something works, they just want it to work. That's why the pay engineers to make thinsg work, so they don't have to.
I'm a user. I don't give a rat's festering gonads about compiling a program. Just install the damned binaries and let me get back to work.
It doesn't really matter how long it takes. It could take hours, days, whatever. It's all a matter of how fast of a tracction motor you want to use.
As for wind, doesn't much matter, either. You build the lifting box to be strong and secure. The cable will hold it in place. The wind resistance of the length of cable that is in the atmosphere will be far greater than the wind resistance of the lifting box. Miles and miles of 1-meter thick cable adds up very quickly.
Well, no shit. Don't you think they already thought of that?
And the SE would be a worthless target. The whole point of terrorism is to scare the bejesus out of the general public. The Hood was an easy target because no one expected a small boat to cause that much damage and it was in an unfriendly port. That won't happen again for a long time. The WTC towers were good targets because they were in civilian airspace, easy to see and big enough to hit even for a half-assed pilot with almost no skill. An island thousands of miles away from land with an active security system is going to a worthless target.
And do you really think that the US Government will let just anybody near the SE, even as a tourist? To get there you will need to go by plane or ship, both methods would be tightly controled and subjected to security searches.
The world has not changed. Terrorists have always been able to cause massive damage and loss of life with a little money and a willing "martyr" or two. Do you think you could fly a plane near a shuttle launch and not get shot down? You won't be able to get near the SE eaither.
The problem here is that you are assuming that it is the monthly fee keeping people out. That is simply not true for most people.
The real problem is that the game is boring. And this is coming from someone who not only played The Sims for two years, and bought every expansion pack (I don't have "Unleashed" as I stopped playing after "Vacation" came out) and even ran a popular (and expensive) website for two years! While The Sims is boring to a lot of people, The Sims Online is boring to almost everybody! I don't know of ANY of my The Sims friends (real one, you know, meatsacks) who even care about TSO.
Making it cheaper by stuffing it full of ads (Sweet Merciful Jesus! Is there anywhere we can escape the endless onslaught of advertisers?) will not solve anything.
- would not be in cvivilian airspace
- would not be eanywhere near a civilian airport
- would not be left unguarded
- would not be easy to see at a distance
- would not be filled with tens of thousands of civilians (which is what they were after, if you remember)
It would be a VERY difficult think to attack, especially in the paranoid days after 9/11.But let's not even bother thinking about getting on with our lives. Let's just bury our pathetic, frightened heads in the sand and hope those nasty bad mens don't shove another 767 up our pasty fat asses.
Jumping Jesus!
- Spy/Geo satelites are designed to take pictures of teh earth. Their telescopes are design specifically for that task.
- In order to get good pictures you not only need telescopes designed to take images of objetcs the size of the shuttle, you also need satelites in properly aligned orbits.
- The Hubble is sitting in a well known orbit and has for years. They've had plenty of time to line up orbits with other satelites. This is not true of the shuttle.
- Yes, satelite technology has come a long way on five years, but is the shuttle near enough to one of those new-fangled satelites for it to even matter?
It's not as simple as pointing a telescope in a given direction. Satelites are in constant motion and getting any two of them, or a satelite and the shuttle, in the right orbits is a pain in the ass! Look at all the hubbub and work needed to get the Shuttle to the Hubble. It's not trvial by any means.It's hard to get good writing when Those In Charge willingly sacrifice continuity and quality for apecial effects and out of character jokes. Rick Berman is the problem. Firing him is the solution.
I had a copy of Super BustOut! I played it on my CoCo2! It was a lot of fun.
;)
Of course, I used to program in 6809 Assembler for fun, too.
Read more history books. The concept of continious progress is very new. Maybe 500 years old. For the bulk of "western" (European) history the exact opposite has been true. Throughout the Dark Ages there was almost no technological (or cultural) progress at all. The Romans and Ancient Greeks both beleived that the world was in active decay, falling from the Golden Age of past glory. The idea of "progress" as we understand it came about in The Renaissance.
(Other files in that directory might not be safe to look at while at work. So browse with care.)
True. But that didn't stiop my family from living here at the time.
What the hell does the second sentence have to do with the first? Columbus was a Spaniard, not an American (as there were no "Americans" at the time).
Besides, the first person to "discover" America was wandered over a land bridge from eastern Siberia some 10,000 - 15,000 years ago.
Intellivision was a success, actually. The reason you don't see many of them is that they came out in the late 1970's and most are either dead, rotting in someone's parent's basements, or thrown away long ago.
ColecoVision was a HUGE success. It sold a lot of units. It was pretty much the first affordable in-home game console. Almost everyone I knew had one when I was in high school.
The article wasn't about "bad" consoles, just the ones that failed. Lots of good products fail. All you need is a bad price point, or a lack of cevelopers and even the best product can fail.
Yes, but that's not the fault of the American worker, is it? Used to be a time when a working man could feed his family on a single income. Now it takes two working parents to get a family through.
2) U.S. companies want to get more for their payroll dollar.
Not really. What these companies want is to maximise dividends. The disparity between the wages of top management and the average employee of the average large US coproration is the highest in the world.
What is killing the American job market are large corproations that no longer care about the long term health of their business. All they care about now is their next quarterly profit statement. Which is exactly the kind of crap going on in 1929.
Doesn't matter how well you were rebuilt. You are still dead. Now there is a copy of you running around. Fine for him, but not for you.
Sorry, but I'll slow boat it across the universe.
I'm afraid that you will be waiting a long time. It's not even the gaming industry's fault on this one. Games like DOOM (or whatever your first quality game of any genre is) are like your first love: you never quite recapture the feeling of that very first (insert first sexual encounter here).
DOOM did a good enough job at faking 3D that when we got real 3D it wasn't that big of a deal. And now that we have 3D, what's left? Better graphics. And one day, maybe, passable AI.
The closest I've gotten to recapturing the feelings I had when playing DOOM have been with Half-Life and Halo. But neither of these games made me stare into my monitor at an odd angle trying to see around the corner, and they only made me jump out of my chair about three times each.
The problem with people actually buying games on Linux are two fold:
- Linux ports usually don't come out (if they ever do) for up to six months after the initial Windows release. By this time most of the people who are going to buy the game already have.
- Too many Linux users (too many vocal ones, at least) demand that everything for Linux be free (as in beer) and will lowdly flame any company that dares try to actually charge money for a product on Linux.
Issue One will not be addressed until Issue Two has been dealt with. And I just don't see Isssue Two going away any time soon.You're not really supposed to use that PCI slot anyway as it shares IRQs and whatnot with the AGP slot. I allways seem to run into stability issues if I put anything more demanding than a SoundBastard 16-PCI in that slot.
Terrorists, er, Microsoft has already won. Too bad, they could have used the competition.
And guess what? Most people who try Linux don't want to compile or upgrade. They want it to work! This group is growing in size and will soon account for most of the Linux population (if it has not already happened). Most Linux users will be just that, "users" and developers need to start thinking in those terms if they want people to use thier programs and Linux in general.
That's odd. Because all of those games you bought for your old console still work. There is nothing, save physical damage to the media or the console (or if you've lost bits and pieces) that will keep you from being able to enjoy any of the games you have.
Contrast that with the PC gaming environment where you are constantly having to upgrade your existing computer to play the latest and greatest games only to find that last year's "must have" game no longer works!
All of my old PSX games still work. Every one (except the one that I rolled my chair over, but that's MY fault). All of my Dreamcast games still work. Contrast that with games for my PC. Unreal no longer works in my system. Dues Ex only runs in software mode. Sin (HAHAHA!) doesn't work anymore at all! I have a pile of games that I can no longer play on my PC because either my system is too fast, has too much RAM (WTF?), is using the wrong version of Windows, has too new a version of DirectX, no longer has a SoundBastard 16 sound card, no longer has a Voodoo1 card, no longer has a Voodoo2 card, etc... ad nausium.
Sure, the upgrade cycle with consoles is a bitch, but it's NOTHING like the nightmare that is the upgrade cycle with PCs where a simple video driver upgrade can kill a game! Sure, new consoles come out and new games for the old systems dry up. But at least the old games keep working!