Well, that's the thing. Not the subject matter, but the quality of the writing itself. A good writer can keep your interest in a story about mowing the lawn, while a bad writer can make a murder boring.

Ah, but the worst writer in the world? He can make your own murder boring.

That's a fine generalization, and may or may not be generally true, but my folks and I attended a presbyterian church for 4 years. We stopped when we were told not to return until we wanted to tithe appropriately.

It's a tax, enforced by social ostracism and in our case at least, direct pronouncements from the pastor. Calling it anything else is disingenuous.

That being said, the Xenu guys are way more obvious about it.

It's much worse than that. Put up a porn site. Use free content. Have a "Solve captcha to get free pics!" blocker.

Now, grab a captcha you want to break, show to pornaholics, get solution, pass it back to the original site.

Perfectly unbeatable captcha solving, for virtually free, and totally automated.

Feh.

Let me just start this discussion off with a great big "Attaboy!" to our top-notch Slashdot editors.

For those of you not intimately related with all of Google's many acquisitions, etc. Jaiku is a microblogging and social-networking site. JaikuEngine is the underlying tech that makes it work. Seems to be written in Python. Designed to run on Google Apps.

There, was that so hard?

in this modern day-and-age, most stuff is just data anyways, and that is all database. Moving to a true client architecture, oh wait, all the data is still stored centrally, and most reports are all done via stored procedures.

I'm not sure what kind of work you do, but as someone who is developing a lot of web apps right now, I'll say straight up that the data is the easy part. The internals of any system are well understood and the border cases are easy to handle.

What takes time, and what breaks, and what drives me nuts, is the UI - validation, layout, rendering quirks, etc., etc., etc.

I've recently started playing around with Adobe's Webkit-based AIR framework for this reason. It lets me interact with the local file-system, have a data store that's not reliant on a network, and above all, has a consistent UI environment.

"It's just data" is a data-centric way of looking at things, and is true in a sense. But the argument being made here is about the interface between the client and the data - not the data itself.

I dont want to kill anyone, but I am a big supporter of public humiliation. part of his sentence needs to be 5 days in public stockades where people can throw non sharp objects at his face. and or take a few whacks with a switch to his body.

What is reminding him of high-school supposed to achieve?

I think pressing the quicksave button is itself part of the challenge. Do you want to overwrite your last save with this new one? What if one of the choices you made between it and where you are now was what determined your game ending?

That's the rationalization I used to use, to make the endless save/restore cycle seem tolerable. But I'll venture a guess here - you've never regretted hitting save, but you HAVE regretted getting into the game, really enjoying things, and FORGETTING to save. You get hit hardest for being the most immersed. Saving is an unnatural act in gaming - it breaks the metaphor.

Oh, and that rationalization? About constantly choosing to save/not save? That's a variation on the too many choices fallacy. I don't really need more anxiety in my life. Save/Restore should die. I applaud games such as BioShock that are moving towards its abolishment.

I haven't played PoP yet, but from this discussion, I'm going to be doing so soonest. Here's to letting go of mechanisms that hinder our immersion in the game.

We have no TV. Our son had a nanny (no daycare, very very few playdates). We read stories about bunnies.

His third word was "truck".

We gave him dolls.

He ran them over with his trucks.

If you're on a machine where you have sudo privs but no root (fairly common in hosted/managed servers) you can 'sudo bash' to get a full root shell. Veeeeery handy in some cases...

It's kind of obvious in hindsight, but I just learned this one last week. ;-)