They're selling two different versions of the game? Is the new version the same as the old, with the word "not" whited out in one section of the rulebook?
This should sell well among those people who believe that the rulebooks that come with games are legally enforceable. I've been playing Uno with homespun rules for years, so I guess I'm the type of guy who likes to live on the edge.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cost $720 million dollars. There are over 75 million students in the United States. Please reply with your plans for fixing the education system with a budget of $9.60 per child.
Personally, I can't think of a better way to encourage students to dream big and to pursue science than a mission like this one.
The Reason article was so frustrating to read. Here we see a gifted teacher who demonstrated a vastly better way to teach mathematics, and for all his success, he ends up having to leave the school. Worst of all, no one except his students seemed to learn from him. The techniques he used could be studied and applied to schools around the country. Not all teachers could have the same impact as Escalante, but surely they could make serious improvements.
Instead, we get counter-productive programs such as No Child Left Behind. We get an educational system deathly afraid of change. We invest more in our under-performing kids than we do in the exceptional ones. We are insane.
These restrictions, gimmicks, and weird clauses tied to the purchase of a game are probably legal. However, they are clearly an attempt to damage a product's resale value, and they are in spirit a violation of the first sale doctrine.
We need strong laws to protect the right to resell digital content, just as the first sale doctrine protects our rights to resell our physical property as we choose. Such a law would clearly be fair and in the best interest of the consumer.
The more information the government collects on people, the more control it will have over them. The Constitution requires that the population be counted every 10 years to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. All the census really needs to know is how many people live at each address. Citizens should refuse to answer any census question except for the number of residents. A partial boycott of the census questionnaire is a tiny but important step to safeguard our remaining liberties. Citizens are not obliged to pave the data highway for Leviathan's next intrusion into their lives.
Does anyone know the legal and practical implications of following this advice? I've heard talk of a $100 fine and a $5000 fine, but I don't know how those are applied. If I follow this advice, will a census person come to my house to request more information? Can I refuse them without penalty? Please provide citations if possible.
That's a good point. I can think of a few output-only uses for a tablet that would make it useful for me:
Quick check of the weather, news headlines, etc. from any room.
Displaying recipes in the kitchen
An mp3 player with a more robust interface, for use in my car or while traveling
Take it to the gym, play a TV show from a.avi file while I use the stationary bike.
Show photos to friends.
The key here is that the device needs to be cheap and simple. It should boot in < 3 seconds, cost < $200, and require little thought or maintenance. The tablet-as-a-PC-replacement is just too much.
This is a step in the right direction. Consoles are computers, and they can run all sorts of software. This service is still limited to games, and doesn't seem to allow free games to be distributed. I'm sure it's limited in other ways too, but it is much more open than what used to be allowed on a console.
Imagine if consoles offered the equivalent of Apple's App Store. Sure, the app store has frustrating limitations as well, but it does offer many interesting programs. I'd love to see popular free, cross-platform games available to play on consoles for free. I'm also curious what non-game applications might prove useful for the living room.
Of course, the console makers will resist this amount of openness, because they want to sell games. If you're spending your time on free games, you're not buying anything. But it is encouraging to see Microsoft move in this direction. If Google TV or other set top boxes take off, and they allow the user to run any Android based software, the console makers may be forced to open up their platforms in order to compete.
Another problem to be addressed is repetitive quotes. These are not lines from cut scenes, but rather lines that are triggered based on game actions. For example, a sidekick who says "nice shot" or "they're everywhere" in response to the action.
If the game is a shooting game, those lines will be repeated many times, and this really takes away from the sense of immersion. It sounds like an audio clip, not like a genuine comment.
The way to handle this is to include many takes that mean the same thing, and cycle through them. I don't mean to cycle through 3-5 lines, I mean to cycle through 50-100. Some of those lines might be the same words, just spoken with slightly different timing, but they need to feel unique.
You have discounted the Zend Framework, but perhaps you should give it another look. It does exactly what you describe. If you want session management, you only need to include one or two files. You can ignore the rest of ZF and just take what you need! The code is generally clean and well documented.
-Lengthy download instead of a trip to the store. -Price comparable to a Bluray off of Amazon. -Quality less than Bluray. -Limited to watching it on my PS3.
But wait, there's more!
-Quickly fill up your PS3 hard drive. -Wonder what happens if your hard drive crashes or if you want to switch to another console. -No more saving money by selling a movie or by buying movies used. -No more borrowing movies among friends.
The national ID card proposals have met a lot of resistance, so someone had a clever idea - let's tie it to a popular cause. It's a recession, so everyone wants their jobs protected, and they'll go for anything.
If this doesn't work, the next attempt will be an ID card to prove that you're not a sex offender. You know, to protect the children.
I'm curious what would happen if this program actually worked as intended. What do all the illegal immigrants who suddenly have no means of income do? Surrender to immigration or turn to crime?
This sort of thinking is the same as what inspired the Newsweek article from 1995 which was discussed earlier today. That article predicted that the internet would never catch on because it was hard to use in its current form. You have to remember that the platform is going to continue to improve and be refined.
Already, the Google apps are easy to use for basic tasks. They load quickly, and while they may lack certain features and polish that can be found in the latest version of Office, they are quite usable. They're only going to get better, and browsers and PCs are only going to keep improving. There isn't much that can be added to Office for 95% of users, so the gap will close.
The biggest advantage to web apps is file management. I don't have to consider where my files are stored, or which computers have access to them. I don't have to worry that I have two different versions if I worked on a file remotely. I don't have to worry about what happens if my hard drive crashes. Users hate worrying about those things.
That's how it should be, but that's not what I'm finding in the job market. I am currently a job seeker with ten years of web coding experience and the ability to "bounce around between different API's and syntaxes" as you said. However, I only have one year of experience with popular language X.
When I apply for a job using popular language X, I am told that I lack experience. I am told only my experience in X is counted for anything. Anyone with coding experience knows how insane that is, but it's the current reality.
Bendable screens will be excellent if they come to market, because they will allow for a trifold display. It wouldn't actually fold on the ends, but it would make two tight bends. This will finally give a screen that is very portable but not tiny.
How is Microsoft going to make a profit in the cloud? The cloud is about the centralization and automatic configuration of vast amounts of computing resources. It will allow smaller companies to turn over their infrastructure management to cloud hosting companies.
When they were self-hosting, those smaller companies were often paying licensing fees to Microsoft because of some perceived cost benefit such as support or simplicity of administration. However, when shopping for cloud services, they don't need to worry about such details, and so they can focus much more on cost. A Windows based cloud hosting company would need thousands of licenses from Microsoft, and so they could save millions by using free software instead. These savings would lead to a huge price difference.
Microsoft could always offer special savings on bulk licenses, but they are going to have to offer major price drops. The centralization of hosting will give them far fewer direct customers. Where is the great amount of money to be made in this?
Their only hope is to offer things that can't be found in free software, or to reduce administrative costs enough to offset the cost of licenses. It will be a difficult challenge.
I think it's true that my Mom will never have use for a computer faster than what she's using today. But I find that I am still waiting on computers on a regular basis. The real bottleneck for me is multitasking. I get into several projects at once, with perhaps ten applications and 50 browser tabs open, and then the computer starts choking. Some of the problem may be more to do the available memory or with the operating system's code quality, but the point is that computers have not yet reached that point for me where I can't max them out.
If you want a practical application for the everyday user, look at HD video. Many people might have interest in recording HD video and processing it in various ways. We've just recently reached the point where many computers can handle a single 1080p stream. But what happens when someone wants to download HD video from their camcorder, record an HD over-the-air broadcast, have a three-way HD video chat with their friends, while downloading some files in the background and running a video conversion for the HD video they just edited of their wedding footage? Until that becomes easy, we have a ways to go.
This application is basically on online version of the Picasa editing tools. I find it hard to believe that Google would not already be working on adding those tools to Picasaweb. Will this really help them to do that any faster? Or does this just clear the way for the launch of those tools, while also providing an initial user base?
Slashdot Mirror
They're selling two different versions of the game? Is the new version the same as the old, with the word "not" whited out in one section of the rulebook?
This should sell well among those people who believe that the rulebooks that come with games are legally enforceable. I've been playing Uno with homespun rules for years, so I guess I'm the type of guy who likes to live on the edge.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cost $720 million dollars. There are over 75 million students in the United States. Please reply with your plans for fixing the education system with a budget of $9.60 per child.
Personally, I can't think of a better way to encourage students to dream big and to pursue science than a mission like this one.
The Reason article was so frustrating to read. Here we see a gifted teacher who demonstrated a vastly better way to teach mathematics, and for all his success, he ends up having to leave the school. Worst of all, no one except his students seemed to learn from him. The techniques he used could be studied and applied to schools around the country. Not all teachers could have the same impact as Escalante, but surely they could make serious improvements.
Instead, we get counter-productive programs such as No Child Left Behind. We get an educational system deathly afraid of change. We invest more in our under-performing kids than we do in the exceptional ones. We are insane.
It's simple enough, swimming pools and porn are both ways that the devil gets inside you.
I have a much more effective solution to save ink on printed emails. Just add the following code the webmail software:
These restrictions, gimmicks, and weird clauses tied to the purchase of a game are probably legal. However, they are clearly an attempt to damage a product's resale value, and they are in spirit a violation of the first sale doctrine.
We need strong laws to protect the right to resell digital content, just as the first sale doctrine protects our rights to resell our physical property as we choose. Such a law would clearly be fair and in the best interest of the consumer.
There are helper monkeys? And here I've been getting my own beer from the fridge like a sucker!
From TFA:
Does anyone know the legal and practical implications of following this advice? I've heard talk of a $100 fine and a $5000 fine, but I don't know how those are applied. If I follow this advice, will a census person come to my house to request more information? Can I refuse them without penalty? Please provide citations if possible.
That's a good point. I can think of a few output-only uses for a tablet that would make it useful for me:
The key here is that the device needs to be cheap and simple. It should boot in < 3 seconds, cost < $200, and require little thought or maintenance. The tablet-as-a-PC-replacement is just too much.
This is a step in the right direction. Consoles are computers, and they can run all sorts of software. This service is still limited to games, and doesn't seem to allow free games to be distributed. I'm sure it's limited in other ways too, but it is much more open than what used to be allowed on a console.
Imagine if consoles offered the equivalent of Apple's App Store. Sure, the app store has frustrating limitations as well, but it does offer many interesting programs. I'd love to see popular free, cross-platform games available to play on consoles for free. I'm also curious what non-game applications might prove useful for the living room.
Of course, the console makers will resist this amount of openness, because they want to sell games. If you're spending your time on free games, you're not buying anything. But it is encouraging to see Microsoft move in this direction. If Google TV or other set top boxes take off, and they allow the user to run any Android based software, the console makers may be forced to open up their platforms in order to compete.
The world appreciates it! We'd hate for the next Celine Dion or Nickelback to go undiscovered.
Another problem to be addressed is repetitive quotes. These are not lines from cut scenes, but rather lines that are triggered based on game actions. For example, a sidekick who says "nice shot" or "they're everywhere" in response to the action.
If the game is a shooting game, those lines will be repeated many times, and this really takes away from the sense of immersion. It sounds like an audio clip, not like a genuine comment.
The way to handle this is to include many takes that mean the same thing, and cycle through them. I don't mean to cycle through 3-5 lines, I mean to cycle through 50-100. Some of those lines might be the same words, just spoken with slightly different timing, but they need to feel unique.
You have discounted the Zend Framework, but perhaps you should give it another look. It does exactly what you describe. If you want session management, you only need to include one or two files. You can ignore the rest of ZF and just take what you need! The code is generally clean and well documented.
Zend Sessions: http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.session.basic_usage.html
But wait, there's more!
-Quickly fill up your PS3 hard drive.
-Wonder what happens if your hard drive crashes or if you want to switch to another console.
-No more saving money by selling a movie or by buying movies used.
-No more borrowing movies among friends.
Your sig also breaks it, unless one adds a period.
If I enter your comment, it ends up commenting on your sig.
Finally, the requisite phrase leads to messages of peace.
The national ID card proposals have met a lot of resistance, so someone had a clever idea - let's tie it to a popular cause. It's a recession, so everyone wants their jobs protected, and they'll go for anything.
If this doesn't work, the next attempt will be an ID card to prove that you're not a sex offender. You know, to protect the children.
I'm curious what would happen if this program actually worked as intended. What do all the illegal immigrants who suddenly have no means of income do? Surrender to immigration or turn to crime?
This sort of thinking is the same as what inspired the Newsweek article from 1995 which was discussed earlier today. That article predicted that the internet would never catch on because it was hard to use in its current form. You have to remember that the platform is going to continue to improve and be refined.
Already, the Google apps are easy to use for basic tasks. They load quickly, and while they may lack certain features and polish that can be found in the latest version of Office, they are quite usable. They're only going to get better, and browsers and PCs are only going to keep improving. There isn't much that can be added to Office for 95% of users, so the gap will close.
The biggest advantage to web apps is file management. I don't have to consider where my files are stored, or which computers have access to them. I don't have to worry that I have two different versions if I worked on a file remotely. I don't have to worry about what happens if my hard drive crashes. Users hate worrying about those things.
Robot charged with battery!
Film at 11.
That's how it should be, but that's not what I'm finding in the job market. I am currently a job seeker with ten years of web coding experience and the ability to "bounce around between different API's and syntaxes" as you said. However, I only have one year of experience with popular language X.
When I apply for a job using popular language X, I am told that I lack experience. I am told only my experience in X is counted for anything. Anyone with coding experience knows how insane that is, but it's the current reality.
Bendable screens will be excellent if they come to market, because they will allow for a trifold display. It wouldn't actually fold on the ends, but it would make two tight bends. This will finally give a screen that is very portable but not tiny.
The other possibility is a roll-out display.
How is Microsoft going to make a profit in the cloud? The cloud is about the centralization and automatic configuration of vast amounts of computing resources. It will allow smaller companies to turn over their infrastructure management to cloud hosting companies.
When they were self-hosting, those smaller companies were often paying licensing fees to Microsoft because of some perceived cost benefit such as support or simplicity of administration. However, when shopping for cloud services, they don't need to worry about such details, and so they can focus much more on cost. A Windows based cloud hosting company would need thousands of licenses from Microsoft, and so they could save millions by using free software instead. These savings would lead to a huge price difference.
Microsoft could always offer special savings on bulk licenses, but they are going to have to offer major price drops. The centralization of hosting will give them far fewer direct customers. Where is the great amount of money to be made in this?
Their only hope is to offer things that can't be found in free software, or to reduce administrative costs enough to offset the cost of licenses. It will be a difficult challenge.
I seriously doubt the existence of IE Heaven. But I hope it's there, because that would mean that IE6 is now rotting in IE Hell.
I think it's true that my Mom will never have use for a computer faster than what she's using today. But I find that I am still waiting on computers on a regular basis. The real bottleneck for me is multitasking. I get into several projects at once, with perhaps ten applications and 50 browser tabs open, and then the computer starts choking. Some of the problem may be more to do the available memory or with the operating system's code quality, but the point is that computers have not yet reached that point for me where I can't max them out.
If you want a practical application for the everyday user, look at HD video. Many people might have interest in recording HD video and processing it in various ways. We've just recently reached the point where many computers can handle a single 1080p stream. But what happens when someone wants to download HD video from their camcorder, record an HD over-the-air broadcast, have a three-way HD video chat with their friends, while downloading some files in the background and running a video conversion for the HD video they just edited of their wedding footage? Until that becomes easy, we have a ways to go.
This application is basically on online version of the Picasa editing tools. I find it hard to believe that Google would not already be working on adding those tools to Picasaweb. Will this really help them to do that any faster? Or does this just clear the way for the launch of those tools, while also providing an initial user base?