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Stepping out
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2–4 minutes·
No comments on Stepping outSo for a couple of hours this evening I tried to replicate the Dance Dance Revolution experience using my PC. Waiting for me at Cambridge today were two nice new Playstation gamepad USB adaptors that I bought off Ebay; I was intending to hook my two dance mats up to the computer via USB, download…
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Digital TV
An interesting quotation from this week’s New Scientist confirms what I’ve suspected* for a while: The latest 42 inch widescreen flat plasma panel screens cost around $7000, not counting a $250 wall mount and the digital tuner needed to receive broadcasts. Yet customers appear unconvinced of their quality. It turns out you cannot see the…
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WMD
In the Sunday Times today is a short opinion article by John Humphries; it’s a relatively pedestrian essay about how we shouldn’t make AK-47s any more, etc etc. Not really worthy of note, other than the fact that its title, ‘AK-47s are weapons of mass destruction too’ is quite obviously ripped off from Michigan’s Lake…
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Calling you
Why is it the case that on Orange, you can call any number in the USA at any time of the day for 15p/minute, while it costs 35p/minute to make calls to anyone in the UK at peak time? This only applies for the popular Everyday 50 tariff, but I suspect it’s still cheaper to…
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Timeshare
Seen on Usenet, about spacecraft yachts for the rich: “Larry Ellison would probably go for it — but even he isn’t rich enough. Here’s an idea, though: An orbital timeshare. Ellison can use it six months of the year; Bill Gates gets it the rest of the time.”
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Ragging
Is ragging – making new initiates/players/students perform pointless tasks – the key to forming a strong community?
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Benevolent
Take a look at the LambdaMOO constitution (about halfway down the page). It confirms my belief that the most efficient and often best form of governance for an online community is essentially a benevolent dictatorship. LambdaMOO is basically an virtual online world. In their constitution, the LambdaMOO administrators (‘Wizards’) explicitly state that they will sometimes…
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Milestones
A few days ago, the world (for me) passed another technological milestone – I now had full and unmetered Internet access for 99% of the time*. I’d just bought the Orange SPV Smartphone. This phone is quite a nice piece of kit; it has a decent sized colour screen with a reasonably fast processor. Importantly,…
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How to get rich
How to get rich – an interesting lecture by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a very good book, on the whole). Fairly woolly, but it has some useful points.