prospero

44 ms·

391.
by prospero 18y ago
NetHack is a good example of emergent gameplay, Daggerfall is another. They do not, however, have compelling stories. All fan-fiction to the contrary, "I kill the kobold and take his chainmail leggings" fifty times in a row doesn't consti
392.
by prospero 18y ago
I think video games are held to a different (lower) standard than most other mediums with respect to storytelling. This is a shame, but there's a good reason: you can't embed a narrative inside emergent, non-formulaic gameplay. Either you
393.
by prospero 18y ago
You seem to be suggesting that there's a lot of overlap between LinkedIn, Facebook, and your address book (in Outlook or otherwise). That's true, and certainly it suggests a certain blurring between work and personal life. My incredulity s
394.
by prospero 18y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that as "Generation Y" grows up, they'll start using Facebook in a business context? Facebook's great for light, non-detailed interaction, but the idea that I'm going to hash out the details of my day-to-day wo
395.
by prospero 18y ago
What's your definition of "not touch typing"? Do you use two fingers? Do you keep your fingers on the home row?
396.
by prospero 18y ago
It would be kind of hilarious to overrun Ritual with decidedly non-hipster types. I vote for this.
397.
by prospero 18y ago
This has always been my favorite pulp cover: http://www.moviegoods.com/assets/product_images/1020/410188.... It's supposedly the first cover set in outer space, but even if that's not true, it's pretty exceptional.
398.
by prospero 18y ago
Aggregators are the new portals.
399.
by prospero 18y ago
But if someone is wildly successful with an AppEngine site, it's a much simpler acquisition because it already sits on top of the Google infrastructure. Conversely, it's much less appealing to any competitors for the same reason.
400.
by prospero 18y ago
Porsche has made little except high-performance sports cars for more than fifty years (certainly that's where they've focused their branding). Apple gained huge market share before making an iPod that did anything other than play music. As
401.
by prospero 18y ago
But an iPod or Porsche are used for very specific things (listening to music and going fast, respectively). His point was that the original Eee was useful in a way normal laptops or PCs are not. To apply the same name to more conventional d
402.
by prospero 18y ago
The home page linked me to http://www.kosmix.com/topic/In-N-Out as a sample search. Is that really superior? If I were in middle school, doing a research paper on In-N-Out, I could see the appeal. It seems fairly humming with informatio
403.
by prospero 18y ago
I wonder how reponsive this really is. A fair number of people get nauseous when there is a ~250ms lag between their command to move (i.e. moving the mouse to look up) and their view actually moving. A lot more would find it irritating, a
404.
by prospero 18y ago
This is going to be voted down into oblivion, but he's pretty much right; too many people treat being "creative" as a lifestyle. Having vague artistic or musical aspirations doesn't make you creative, creating something does.
405.
by prospero 18y ago
No, my point was that age is a red herring. The only binary distinction being posited here is that some people know what they're looking for, and other people find it.
406.
by prospero 18y ago
The transcript of Malcolm Gladwell's talk ( http://www.davidgalenson.com/malcolmgladwell-lecture.pdf ) is a lot more interesting than the blog entry that's discussing it. It's not so much about age (i.e. you must be either 20 or 60 to make
407.
by prospero 18y ago
Location isn't one dimensional, and area is the most space-efficient way to represent a scalar value.
408.
by prospero 18y ago
The ACLU'S weird about that sort of stuff, inasmuch as they seem to mostly object to indiscriminate surveillance. I work for a company that does "smart" surveillance, which allows for both improved cross-referencing of footage and a finer
409.
by prospero 18y ago
I have to say, the guys I've known who wear shorts and sandals year round and grow their hair out for years at a time did not "know" women and snort cocaine. The dichotomy Cringely seems to be drawing here is between people who don't confor
410.
by prospero 18y ago
I have to say, UC Irvine (the school discussed in the article) isn't really a Java school. Introductory students are taught Scheme, and the required curriculum includes language design, algorithms, and operating systems. Optional courses
411.
by prospero 18y ago
If you're just saying Ada doesn't guarantee that the program does what you really need... no language can do that. That was basically my point. I agree Ada's pretty cool, but Dewar listed Ada and C (!) as the only two languages suitable f
412.
by prospero 18y ago
I dunno, you deal with the risk of standing on thin air no matter what you use, unless you've designed your device from the silicon up. There's not a strong argument to be made for using Java in an industrial setting, but I'm not clear that
413.
by prospero 18y ago
What we need are software engineers who understand how to build complex systems. By the way Java has almost no presence in such systems. At least as of a few months ago, there was not a single line of safety-critical Java flying in commer
414.
by prospero 18y ago
I think that only happens once the squirrels start bringing you food while you're under the tree.
415.
by prospero 18y ago
If you have a way to make multi-core processors improve the speed of day-to-day tasks, then all the "average Joe" has to know if that it makes his computer faster. And because that's something that he does care about, you have a $100 mil
416.
by prospero 18y ago
I think what he was trying to say was that selling your startup to a large company is only a no-brainer if you have significant equity in the company. If you don't, selling to another company isn't an exit strategy, it's just a transition
417.
by prospero 18y ago
From the article: The new, unnamed product will continue to have "technologies and features that others can't match," according to the CFO. I took that to mean that it's entirely new, but it is a press release, so maybe they're talking ab
418.
by prospero 18y ago
Granted, there are bound to be other price reductions, but the article makes explicit mention of a new product. Also, unless they plan to take a significant loss on the SSDs, I don't see how making them standard will make their hardware m
419.
by prospero 18y ago
An Atom-based laptop, maybe? I don't think that the Eee or Wind are proper competitors, but even the most expensive versions cost around half what a basic MacBook costs. People are willing to forgive a lot for that sort of price different
420.
by prospero 18y ago
So emancipate yourself, and get financial aid. It doesn't sound like there's much holding you back.

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