The problem is that without the grounding in the lower levels the programmers (I use the word loosely here) don't understand about simple concepts, or at least don't understand the ramifications of poor design choices.
As a result you get systems that (for example) use Strings everywhere, for numeric values, dates, etc. They understood what a String was! They probably didn't get StringBuffers sadly, and why they are a solution to the limitation of Strings (in Java) for certain issues. They didn't get that you should use Strings for, well I know it's a toughy to grasp this, textual material. Then you ask them to add a method to sort by the date, and they say it can't be done easily. You check, it's a String! In the format "dd/MM/yy". FFS. They didn't even use "yyyy-MM-dd". Then you find utility classes elsewhere that do things to get values out of these datestrings.
It's odd, but most people that programmed in their teenage years seem to be good programmers all round. Of course I'm coming at this at an age where my contemporaries learnt BASIC and then assembly. I did BASIC and then Z80 assembly for example (and Pascal at school, and a tiny amount of C) before I went to university. Of course to flatten the students out for better assessment the first course was a functional language, ML, and that's why a functional language is good as the first programming language course! Also when you start programming on a 4MHz Z80 with 64KB of RAM, you get to understand the limits very quickly. A good university course should teach you all you need to know about functional and O.O. programming so that you can learn any language easily. A bad university course will train you to do a single language without understanding the actual concepts of computer science.
In my company there's this huge rules engine in use. It appears that said rules engine gave up on the idea of having a decent data structure in favour of passing a HashMap of Strings through it. Never mind the random key names. There's a GUI front end for the rule definitions. You get things like "if foo_bar_amount > 1000" and you know that behind the scenes it's converting amount into an integer before the comparison, with all the try-catch that entails... what should be a single machine language instruction for CMP becomes tens of dozens or more. I wouldn't be surprised if the 1000 was being stored as a string within the beast's guts too.
Yes, the Java Collections API is great, and should be used instead of reimplementing the wheel. But you need to understand when to use them.
Err, if the files aren't changing, why is there a difference in the amount of backups you can have if you backup daily or twice daily?
There's plenty of information available on Time Machine, some in this story even, so you can easily find out what Time Machine has and why it is different to the offerings in XP and Vista. I'd guess a major one would be ease of use, getting more than 4% of users actually backing up their files. Functionality is pointless without accessibility and usability.
That's great if you know the date you want to restore too.
Time Machine's ability to simply browse backwards through time in the folder, whilst still having the folder functionality usable is far beyond BackupPC. Indeed I bet there are many times that you just want to do this, you don't want to restore the file or the folder as it was then, you just want to quickly glance inside the file as it was.
There's nothing amazingly clever about Time Machine, but it is Apple "Getting It Right(tm)" interface-wise (excluding silly starfield, etc) and functionality-wise.
I meant in reference to the computer industry, and you knew that, but as an SI nerd you had to argue about it and alter my argument to make a point.
In the computer industry, the SI binary prefixes aren't well known, and the misuse of the existing decimal SI prefixes is the defacto standard.
However the end point should be that the expected number is on the hard drive, whether or not the characters after it are "GB" or "GiB". Power-of-10 capacities should not be given.
Well you can have your hard drive that is formatted with 500 byte blocks and has software struggling to handle things efficiently because of this.
I'll take my block sizes in powers of 2 thank you very much. What is it now, 4KB per block - that's 4096 bytes btw.
That's why hard drive capacities should be expressed using the defacto standard, not the imposed SI standard meaning of GB/MB/etc. However if the capacities were expressed in MiB, GiB, etc, that would be a fair compromise between the SI nerds and the desire to have an accurate capacity given.
The fact that the storage of data on a floppy disc (and hard drives) is segregated into blocks that are sized in powers of two (512 bytes for most floppies) suggests that the capacity of said drives should be expressed as a number that is a multiple of said block size.
Any other argument is totally pointless to be totally fair. If you want a base 10 capacity for binary data that is not stored in blocks of base 2 size you use bits, e.g., 20Mbit. For example TCP/IP packets can be any size, so using bits is common for networking capacities/bandwidths.
I appreciate that there are SI units, but they are not in common use apart from total SI/standards nerds, and their creation was misguided and based upon a core misunderstanding of the issue.
I hope this means that hard drives, flash memory, and so on, are now sold with the true capacity on the label.
I've been using meebo.com for a week at work, and I've already stopped using GAIM / Pidgin at home and switched to meebo there as well.
It's nice having the chat histories persisted and accessible from any computer.
I strongly suspect that if someone writes a native app for the iPhone / iPod Touch that is simply a full-screen browser component pointed at meebo, the IM issue on the iPhone will be fully solved (excluding audio, video,...). However I wouldn't mind Adium being ported either.
This weekend I downloaded over 100GB of files from the web, several gigs of files using Bit Torrent, and had several gigs of mail.
Crikey, how much pr0n are you getting through?! I hope you don't digitally horde the media after "using" it, it's never quite worth watching for a second time I find.
However once you decide to rip your (not small) CD collection to FLAC, then generate AAC files for the iPod from that, and MP3 files for another device, you suddenly realise that 500GB is small. And that's just for music...
4TB hard drives will be filled rapidly with HD rips - it's only a couple of hundred movies (at ~20GB a movie).
What that article says may become true, but in 100 years time, not 50.
In 50 years time I expect a colony of up to 200 people on the moon. 10 by 2030, 40 by 2040, 100 by 2050... unless they get moon-side construction techniques down to a tee very quickly. By 2099 we'll probably be at the stage where the TV show Space 1999 thought we would be 8 years ago. Sad, eh?
Also I think space elevators will be like flying cars. They're a nice idea and concept, but not before 2057. 2107 maybe.
Space related research and exploration is a tiny proportion of money in comparison to military expenditure, and whilst it remains small things will be very very slow. Maybe the USA will get its arse in gear if China start having some successes, but by the time the cogs of political will have turned China will be at least 10 years ahead.
He did identify himself according to the laws of the state he lived in.
He wasn't driving. What if he didn't have a driving license on him? Arrested for not carrying a driving license! That's the same as having a national ID card scheme, like soviet nations used to, and countries in protracted wars, and countries with very few civil liberties. Hell, even the UK didn't have ID cards during the IRA terror campaign of 30 years. It's only because the UK's government is following the same path to a police state as the US is that they're now interested even though it's never been safer.
I hope this story is atypical of the situation in America, seriously. Otherwise you're all being brainwashed into the police state.
What I don't understand is how when the cashier puts the goods you've bought into the bag, that you would put anything else in there between the pay desk and the door, which is usually a very clear, unobstructed walk. Surely the security guard just needs to look out for people who are coming with bags from other parts of the store...
Well now you can assess a high cost purchase for only the small friendly sum of $2.50, surely that's worth paying to protect yourself from the potentially larger loss!
All this tells me (in my pessimistic mode) is that a large number of upcoming '360 games are so crap that they want to get some income up front because nobody would buy it. Now maybe if the demo lasted an hour or two it would be worthwhile, it would be like buying a part of a game, but if it was just a video/non-interactive content then I would be livid.
Regardless, 400 full discharge-recharge cycles to get to 80% capacity will extend beyond 2 years for the vast majority of people. If your phone is that important that you use it all the time and hit that sooner then you'll have AppleCare anyway (if the battery drops to 50% capacity), or dropping $120 won't phase you a bit.
Clearly Apple think that the battery will remain over 50% for the vast majority of users for two years, otherwise they wouldn't offer AppleCare for that long.
I don't know about the capacity/time graph for Li-Poly batteries - it could be that it takes 400 cycles to get to 80%, then another 100 to get to 20% rather than a more gradual thing, anyone know?
Apple's current mouse has 4 buttons and a scroll-wheel (that gets gunked up sometimes). Although I actually like the ctrl+tap action, oddly enough. It also encourages making common functions into UI visible elements, rather than context-click actions.
Sure, a couple of years ago you had a point (although you could always use your own multi-button mouse even then).
A quick and easy way to switch tracks AND volume should be required on all mp3 devices
I don't know why you were moderated up, but just for you, on an iPod:
Tap the "Next Track" or "Previous Track" buttons to switch track.
Scroll the scroll wheel to change volume (whilst playing a track). Indeed this is far better than buttons, it's like a rotary volume knob in use, rather than the crappy +/- volume buttons so beloved of other manufacturers.
Wow, that was hard! Wonder if the rest of your post is worth reading...
Apparently for fat-fingered folks, the iPhone's keyboard is great because you just mash the key in the area you need, and the system works out what word you typed based upon where you tapped - i.e., if you typed: queue but you mashed wiwyw it would let you choose "queue" (by pressing space, so no special actions required) (bet someone tries this and it doesn't work, lol).
It's quicker for me to throw a can into my open-top "can bin" and food and cardboard into the "green bin" in my kitchen than it is to flip the lid on the main bin. Of course as they're smaller bins, they do need emptying more often, and my main rubbish is now mostly plastics and foil-lined containers.
As for getting people to recycle? Simple - follow the UK model:
1) You have a recycling bin, and a non-recycling bin (+ boxes for newspapers and glass) 2) We will not collect anything that is not in those bins 3) If the bin is overflowing, we will not collect it 4) We will halve the collection rates, and add recycling collections in the place of the cancelled collection
After a month or so, the effect is that people are forced to sort their recyclables from the non-recyclables because otherwise they can't get all their rubbish collected. Also people are actually quite good about these things - glass collection on the door? Excellent, no more trips to the bottle bank.
That still doesn't do anything about the fact that many recycling collections end up being shipped abroad and dumped in landfills there, rather than actually getting recycled. I believe that my green (vegetable, cardboard, food) recycling collections end up being composted at high heat by the local council however. You can then buy the compost back at a later date. Apparently my area has a 50% recycling rate.
I don't think I could handle a 6 hour day. 3 hours of light, 3 hours of dark. It would be rather hectic.
Even if you assumed that they were doing 8 hours of work a day (a far more reasonable assumption) then it's 15 per hour. Never mind the overtime (another 8 hours) that's unpaid (or 7.50 an hour overall). We'll assume that sleeping is time off.
On the other hand, tax free and no way to spend it? You'll come out with ~60k which isn't bad as a savings scheme if you're young, or just retired (rent out your house and get even more retirement money!).
Heh, so there is even a rating supporting my argument! Thanks for pointing it out:) Not all sex shops would sell it, but many are more 'adult' shops than purely sex focused, they'll suffice. Anyway, it's one way of getting new people into the shop - selling 18R video games!
The point is that the adults buying the games for their children are ignoring the ratings even though the ratings are very pertinent in today's quite realistic games.
Anything to make them think twice would be good, and preferable to a ban. Adults can go into a sex shop and get material that is deemed adult, be it porn, gigantic studded strap ons, or "extreme" material like this game. Right now the game is completely banned which is a restriction by some self-appointed "morality police", whereas they should simply be classifying the material - in this case "mature adults only" (that sounds far more important than "18" doesn't it? maybe that's what the games industry needs). On the other hand "mature 18 year olds" are quite rare unfortunately.
How US policies apply in this discussion is really quite confusing and irrelevant. The age ratings in the UK are U, PG, 12A, 15 and 18.
The issue is that the game will be played by people under the age of 18, even if they can't buy it. Leaving aside the matter of downloading the game from the internet, most parents seem happy to buy games rated 18 for their 12-17 year old offspring without a second thought.
Ratings on games are ignored far more (and by a larger age gap) than ratings on movies. Probably because of the word 'game'. Even if the stores hold up the game's rating at the point of sale, the parents will still go and buy their kid the game for them.
This is the situation in the murder case - the parent's bought their 14 year old sun an 18 certificate game. Aside from that irresponsible act, it had nothing to do with the child's death unless he was goading on a drug addled thug with themes from the game.
99% of kids of 14+ can handle 18 films and games without an issue I'd hazard a guess. However that other 1% can cause a lot of issues, hence the ratings.
I'm totally against bans however. I think the game should be made available, but not via the usual routes. Sell it in sex shops, so adults can buy it, but they'll stop and think about why their getting their 12 year old kid something from a sex shop. If they're happy to buy their kid things from a sex shop, then quite clearly the game isn't the issue at fault anyway.
Is there an open source SimCity-alike game around?
One that is like the original SimCity even, with updated graphics for hi-res screens would be cool. I don't even need the isometric graphics of SC2000, although water and subways would be appreciated.
If not, who's with me in creating one? SDL? OpenGL (in 2D, allowing for smooth zoom ins and outs and effects)? Hell, it's probably easier to do 3D buildings and map textures than do the 2D artwork, but we could keep a GTA1 style perspective...
If someone can't work out how to install NeoOffice on a Mac then they don't deserve to be reviewing it.
And if they're claiming that NeoOffice is a "WordPad-like application" then so is OpenOffice, and just what freeware Office suite were they using on Windows that had a "decent word processor"? Hey, they only used it for a month, they could have used the Office 2004 Trial.
Bluetooth? Does he have a mobile phone? Even my technophobe parents have a bluetooth enabled photo printer, and got it working in seconds with their iMac. It's useful.
Wireless? Not having wireless would make ANY modern computer system WORTHLESS to most people. We can't all choose where the internet comes into the house, and living with cables strung across the house "because we don't need wireless" would make people laugh at you.
Not only is there tonnes of software available on the Mac, a lot of the payware is still cheap, yet developed with care and is good, and there's equal "freeware" as any BSD or Linux. Adium makes Pidgin look weak (interface wise), yet offers far more integration than MSN Messenger. Or there is Skype.
The only argument against Mac OS X is the lack of modern games. Oh well, install the cheapest Windows you can then.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed of NeoOffice 2.1 + the latest patch.
It starts up almost immediately on a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo iMac.
Previous versions take ages to start up.
They've also improved the GUI appearance no end from the primitive OpenOffice look and feel which is stuck in the mid 90s.
This is a perfect solution for education as it will handle all educational needs without a problem, and save the education authority and schools a lot of money. This is a sound business decision for education.
The MacBook's screen is better than the iBook's screen. Shame really, as I have an iBook, but on the other hand I'm not using it to do professional graphics work (and anyone who does their entire graphics pipeline on any laptop is barking mad IMO).
As for CRTs, they usually have better colour spectrum and brightness, especially compared to laptop screens that have very low brightnesses in order to save power. LED backlit LCD screens have better colour reproduction than traditional LCDs by the way, and some displays are getting better than 100% NTSC colour gamut reproduction now (although not in the laptop screen arena I guess).
I'd hazard a guess that the LCD panels can be told which of A, B and C to do by the OS.
In that case I expect that Windows is telling it to do C, and Mac OS X is telling it to do B, which would explain the 'grainier' appearance.
Or the grainier appearance is caused completely externally to the display (this is what I think is most likely), maybe by the OpenGL driven interface rendering the interface slightly incorrectly and barely noticeably.
The problem is theremore most likely solveable with an updated driver. Hopefully Apple are working on this instead of refusing to do anything because the complaint is technically incorrect.
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Java in itself is not the problem.
... what should be a single machine language instruction for CMP becomes tens of dozens or more. I wouldn't be surprised if the 1000 was being stored as a string within the beast's guts too.
The problem is that without the grounding in the lower levels the programmers (I use the word loosely here) don't understand about simple concepts, or at least don't understand the ramifications of poor design choices.
As a result you get systems that (for example) use Strings everywhere, for numeric values, dates, etc. They understood what a String was! They probably didn't get StringBuffers sadly, and why they are a solution to the limitation of Strings (in Java) for certain issues. They didn't get that you should use Strings for, well I know it's a toughy to grasp this, textual material. Then you ask them to add a method to sort by the date, and they say it can't be done easily. You check, it's a String! In the format "dd/MM/yy". FFS. They didn't even use "yyyy-MM-dd". Then you find utility classes elsewhere that do things to get values out of these datestrings.
It's odd, but most people that programmed in their teenage years seem to be good programmers all round. Of course I'm coming at this at an age where my contemporaries learnt BASIC and then assembly. I did BASIC and then Z80 assembly for example (and Pascal at school, and a tiny amount of C) before I went to university. Of course to flatten the students out for better assessment the first course was a functional language, ML, and that's why a functional language is good as the first programming language course! Also when you start programming on a 4MHz Z80 with 64KB of RAM, you get to understand the limits very quickly. A good university course should teach you all you need to know about functional and O.O. programming so that you can learn any language easily. A bad university course will train you to do a single language without understanding the actual concepts of computer science.
In my company there's this huge rules engine in use. It appears that said rules engine gave up on the idea of having a decent data structure in favour of passing a HashMap of Strings through it. Never mind the random key names. There's a GUI front end for the rule definitions. You get things like "if foo_bar_amount > 1000" and you know that behind the scenes it's converting amount into an integer before the comparison, with all the try-catch that entails
Yes, the Java Collections API is great, and should be used instead of reimplementing the wheel. But you need to understand when to use them.
Err, if the files aren't changing, why is there a difference in the amount of backups you can have if you backup daily or twice daily?
There's plenty of information available on Time Machine, some in this story even, so you can easily find out what Time Machine has and why it is different to the offerings in XP and Vista. I'd guess a major one would be ease of use, getting more than 4% of users actually backing up their files. Functionality is pointless without accessibility and usability.
That's great if you know the date you want to restore too.
Time Machine's ability to simply browse backwards through time in the folder, whilst still having the folder functionality usable is far beyond BackupPC. Indeed I bet there are many times that you just want to do this, you don't want to restore the file or the folder as it was then, you just want to quickly glance inside the file as it was.
There's nothing amazingly clever about Time Machine, but it is Apple "Getting It Right(tm)" interface-wise (excluding silly starfield, etc) and functionality-wise.
I meant in reference to the computer industry, and you knew that, but as an SI nerd you had to argue about it and alter my argument to make a point.
In the computer industry, the SI binary prefixes aren't well known, and the misuse of the existing decimal SI prefixes is the defacto standard.
However the end point should be that the expected number is on the hard drive, whether or not the characters after it are "GB" or "GiB". Power-of-10 capacities should not be given.
Well you can have your hard drive that is formatted with 500 byte blocks and has software struggling to handle things efficiently because of this.
I'll take my block sizes in powers of 2 thank you very much. What is it now, 4KB per block - that's 4096 bytes btw.
That's why hard drive capacities should be expressed using the defacto standard, not the imposed SI standard meaning of GB/MB/etc. However if the capacities were expressed in MiB, GiB, etc, that would be a fair compromise between the SI nerds and the desire to have an accurate capacity given.
The fact that the storage of data on a floppy disc (and hard drives) is segregated into blocks that are sized in powers of two (512 bytes for most floppies) suggests that the capacity of said drives should be expressed as a number that is a multiple of said block size.
E.g., Floppy Drive: 2 sides * 80 tracks * 9 sectors * 512 bytes = 720KB
Any other argument is totally pointless to be totally fair. If you want a base 10 capacity for binary data that is not stored in blocks of base 2 size you use bits, e.g., 20Mbit. For example TCP/IP packets can be any size, so using bits is common for networking capacities/bandwidths.
I appreciate that there are SI units, but they are not in common use apart from total SI/standards nerds, and their creation was misguided and based upon a core misunderstanding of the issue.
I hope this means that hard drives, flash memory, and so on, are now sold with the true capacity on the label.
I've been using meebo.com for a week at work, and I've already stopped using GAIM / Pidgin at home and switched to meebo there as well.
...). However I wouldn't mind Adium being ported either.
It's nice having the chat histories persisted and accessible from any computer.
I strongly suspect that if someone writes a native app for the iPhone / iPod Touch that is simply a full-screen browser component pointed at meebo, the IM issue on the iPhone will be fully solved (excluding audio, video,
Crikey, how much pr0n are you getting through?! I hope you don't digitally horde the media after "using" it, it's never quite worth watching for a second time I find.
However once you decide to rip your (not small) CD collection to FLAC, then generate AAC files for the iPod from that, and MP3 files for another device, you suddenly realise that 500GB is small. And that's just for music...
4TB hard drives will be filled rapidly with HD rips - it's only a couple of hundred movies (at ~20GB a movie).
What that article says may become true, but in 100 years time, not 50.
... unless they get moon-side construction techniques down to a tee very quickly. By 2099 we'll probably be at the stage where the TV show Space 1999 thought we would be 8 years ago. Sad, eh?
In 50 years time I expect a colony of up to 200 people on the moon. 10 by 2030, 40 by 2040, 100 by 2050
Also I think space elevators will be like flying cars. They're a nice idea and concept, but not before 2057. 2107 maybe.
Space related research and exploration is a tiny proportion of money in comparison to military expenditure, and whilst it remains small things will be very very slow. Maybe the USA will get its arse in gear if China start having some successes, but by the time the cogs of political will have turned China will be at least 10 years ahead.
He did identify himself according to the laws of the state he lived in.
He wasn't driving. What if he didn't have a driving license on him? Arrested for not carrying a driving license! That's the same as having a national ID card scheme, like soviet nations used to, and countries in protracted wars, and countries with very few civil liberties. Hell, even the UK didn't have ID cards during the IRA terror campaign of 30 years. It's only because the UK's government is following the same path to a police state as the US is that they're now interested even though it's never been safer.
I hope this story is atypical of the situation in America, seriously. Otherwise you're all being brainwashed into the police state.
What I don't understand is how when the cashier puts the goods you've bought into the bag, that you would put anything else in there between the pay desk and the door, which is usually a very clear, unobstructed walk. Surely the security guard just needs to look out for people who are coming with bags from other parts of the store...
Well now you can assess a high cost purchase for only the small friendly sum of $2.50, surely that's worth paying to protect yourself from the potentially larger loss!
All this tells me (in my pessimistic mode) is that a large number of upcoming '360 games are so crap that they want to get some income up front because nobody would buy it. Now maybe if the demo lasted an hour or two it would be worthwhile, it would be like buying a part of a game, but if it was just a video/non-interactive content then I would be livid.
I thought it was a Li-Poly battery?
Regardless, 400 full discharge-recharge cycles to get to 80% capacity will extend beyond 2 years for the vast majority of people. If your phone is that important that you use it all the time and hit that sooner then you'll have AppleCare anyway (if the battery drops to 50% capacity), or dropping $120 won't phase you a bit.
Clearly Apple think that the battery will remain over 50% for the vast majority of users for two years, otherwise they wouldn't offer AppleCare for that long.
I don't know about the capacity/time graph for Li-Poly batteries - it could be that it takes 400 cycles to get to 80%, then another 100 to get to 20% rather than a more gradual thing, anyone know?
Apple's current mouse has 4 buttons and a scroll-wheel (that gets gunked up sometimes). Although I actually like the ctrl+tap action, oddly enough. It also encourages making common functions into UI visible elements, rather than context-click actions.
Sure, a couple of years ago you had a point (although you could always use your own multi-button mouse even then).
I don't know why you were moderated up, but just for you, on an iPod:
Wow, that was hard! Wonder if the rest of your post is worth reading...
Because you've used it?
Apparently for fat-fingered folks, the iPhone's keyboard is great because you just mash the key in the area you need, and the system works out what word you typed based upon where you tapped - i.e., if you typed: queue but you mashed wiwyw it would let you choose "queue" (by pressing space, so no special actions required) (bet someone tries this and it doesn't work, lol).
It's quicker for me to throw a can into my open-top "can bin" and food and cardboard into the "green bin" in my kitchen than it is to flip the lid on the main bin. Of course as they're smaller bins, they do need emptying more often, and my main rubbish is now mostly plastics and foil-lined containers.
As for getting people to recycle? Simple - follow the UK model:
1) You have a recycling bin, and a non-recycling bin (+ boxes for newspapers and glass)
2) We will not collect anything that is not in those bins
3) If the bin is overflowing, we will not collect it
4) We will halve the collection rates, and add recycling collections in the place of the cancelled collection
After a month or so, the effect is that people are forced to sort their recyclables from the non-recyclables because otherwise they can't get all their rubbish collected. Also people are actually quite good about these things - glass collection on the door? Excellent, no more trips to the bottle bank.
That still doesn't do anything about the fact that many recycling collections end up being shipped abroad and dumped in landfills there, rather than actually getting recycled. I believe that my green (vegetable, cardboard, food) recycling collections end up being composted at high heat by the local council however. You can then buy the compost back at a later date. Apparently my area has a 50% recycling rate.
I don't think I could handle a 6 hour day. 3 hours of light, 3 hours of dark. It would be rather hectic.
Even if you assumed that they were doing 8 hours of work a day (a far more reasonable assumption) then it's 15 per hour. Never mind the overtime (another 8 hours) that's unpaid (or 7.50 an hour overall). We'll assume that sleeping is time off.
On the other hand, tax free and no way to spend it? You'll come out with ~60k which isn't bad as a savings scheme if you're young, or just retired (rent out your house and get even more retirement money!).
Heh, so there is even a rating supporting my argument! Thanks for pointing it out :)
Not all sex shops would sell it, but many are more 'adult' shops than purely sex focused, they'll suffice. Anyway, it's one way of getting new people into the shop - selling 18R video games!
The point is that the adults buying the games for their children are ignoring the ratings even though the ratings are very pertinent in today's quite realistic games.
Anything to make them think twice would be good, and preferable to a ban. Adults can go into a sex shop and get material that is deemed adult, be it porn, gigantic studded strap ons, or "extreme" material like this game. Right now the game is completely banned which is a restriction by some self-appointed "morality police", whereas they should simply be classifying the material - in this case "mature adults only" (that sounds far more important than "18" doesn't it? maybe that's what the games industry needs). On the other hand "mature 18 year olds" are quite rare unfortunately.
How US policies apply in this discussion is really quite confusing and irrelevant. The age ratings in the UK are U, PG, 12A, 15 and 18.
The issue is that the game will be played by people under the age of 18, even if they can't buy it. Leaving aside the matter of downloading the game from the internet, most parents seem happy to buy games rated 18 for their 12-17 year old offspring without a second thought.
Ratings on games are ignored far more (and by a larger age gap) than ratings on movies. Probably because of the word 'game'. Even if the stores hold up the game's rating at the point of sale, the parents will still go and buy their kid the game for them.
This is the situation in the murder case - the parent's bought their 14 year old sun an 18 certificate game. Aside from that irresponsible act, it had nothing to do with the child's death unless he was goading on a drug addled thug with themes from the game.
99% of kids of 14+ can handle 18 films and games without an issue I'd hazard a guess. However that other 1% can cause a lot of issues, hence the ratings.
I'm totally against bans however. I think the game should be made available, but not via the usual routes. Sell it in sex shops, so adults can buy it, but they'll stop and think about why their getting their 12 year old kid something from a sex shop. If they're happy to buy their kid things from a sex shop, then quite clearly the game isn't the issue at fault anyway.
Is there an open source SimCity-alike game around?
One that is like the original SimCity even, with updated graphics for hi-res screens would be cool. I don't even need the isometric graphics of SC2000, although water and subways would be appreciated.
If not, who's with me in creating one? SDL? OpenGL (in 2D, allowing for smooth zoom ins and outs and effects)? Hell, it's probably easier to do 3D buildings and map textures than do the 2D artwork, but we could keep a GTA1 style perspective...
If someone can't work out how to install NeoOffice on a Mac then they don't deserve to be reviewing it.
And if they're claiming that NeoOffice is a "WordPad-like application" then so is OpenOffice, and just what freeware Office suite were they using on Windows that had a "decent word processor"? Hey, they only used it for a month, they could have used the Office 2004 Trial.
Bluetooth? Does he have a mobile phone? Even my technophobe parents have a bluetooth enabled photo printer, and got it working in seconds with their iMac. It's useful.
Wireless? Not having wireless would make ANY modern computer system WORTHLESS to most people. We can't all choose where the internet comes into the house, and living with cables strung across the house "because we don't need wireless" would make people laugh at you.
Not only is there tonnes of software available on the Mac, a lot of the payware is still cheap, yet developed with care and is good, and there's equal "freeware" as any BSD or Linux. Adium makes Pidgin look weak (interface wise), yet offers far more integration than MSN Messenger. Or there is Skype.
The only argument against Mac OS X is the lack of modern games. Oh well, install the cheapest Windows you can then.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed of NeoOffice 2.1 + the latest patch.
It starts up almost immediately on a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo iMac.
Previous versions take ages to start up.
They've also improved the GUI appearance no end from the primitive OpenOffice look and feel which is stuck in the mid 90s.
This is a perfect solution for education as it will handle all educational needs without a problem, and save the education authority and schools a lot of money. This is a sound business decision for education.
The MacBook's screen is better than the iBook's screen. Shame really, as I have an iBook, but on the other hand I'm not using it to do professional graphics work (and anyone who does their entire graphics pipeline on any laptop is barking mad IMO).
As for CRTs, they usually have better colour spectrum and brightness, especially compared to laptop screens that have very low brightnesses in order to save power. LED backlit LCD screens have better colour reproduction than traditional LCDs by the way, and some displays are getting better than 100% NTSC colour gamut reproduction now (although not in the laptop screen arena I guess).
I'd hazard a guess that the LCD panels can be told which of A, B and C to do by the OS.
In that case I expect that Windows is telling it to do C, and Mac OS X is telling it to do B, which would explain the 'grainier' appearance.
Or the grainier appearance is caused completely externally to the display (this is what I think is most likely), maybe by the OpenGL driven interface rendering the interface slightly incorrectly and barely noticeably.
The problem is theremore most likely solveable with an updated driver. Hopefully Apple are working on this instead of refusing to do anything because the complaint is technically incorrect.