Category: News

If you count tablets as PCs, and if you count Android a free OS, then I guess you can say that the majority of PCs sold now run on free software.

Mark Shuttleworth Marks Bug 1 – ‘Microsoft Has Majority Marketshare – As Fixed

It had to happen one day – and today is as good as any, right? The infamous Bug #1 has been marked as fixed by Mark Shuttleworth.

Since we’ve got a new puppy in the house, we’re quite focussed on helping her learn how to live comfortably with us. I found Dogmantics intriguing.  The philosophy in a nutshell:

1) Training by rewarding desirable behaviors so they will be more likely to occur in the future, while preventing reinforcement of behaviors that are undesirable.
2) Interrupting and preventing undesirable behaviors without physical or psychological intimidation, as well as rewarding an alternate response (training a behavior you find desirable in it’s place).
3) Taking an animal’s emotional state and stress levels into account.
4) Socializing and teaching an animal to cope with his environment using reinforcement.
5) Using a marker to train, whether it be a clicker, some other noise-maker, your voice or touch, or a visual marker. Or, on the other hand, not using a marker, and instead for example reinforcing an animal by feeding a treat directly to his mouth.
6) Employing humane, effective, respectful training based on the latest scientific evidence.

It’s the non-aggression principle applied to dogs.

Dogmantics Dog Training | Progressive Reinforcement Dog Training

Emily Larlham is an internationally renowned dog trainer and artist who resides in Malmö, Sweden.

Emily combines her artistic background and training skills to come up with creative, fast and reliable ways of training and modifying behaviors.  Her passion is using Progressive Reinforcement Training to solve behavior problems in dogs as well as teaching highly complex behaviors and tricks.  Emily created the term Progressive Reinforcement Training to describe a non-violent way of training animals that involves no forms of physical or psychological intimidation.

Again, Dwarf Fortress pokes it’s ugly head up to beg “come play me”. And I keep asking myself, how important is it that I embrace loss?

But also, we’ve been playing Skyrim, which offers its own moral choices. I’ve played Grand Theft Auto. It’s like watching a gangster movie, and I can view the atrocious behavior of the main character as drama. If you join the Thieves Guild in Skyrim, you can expect to steal stuff. This kind of bugs my kids. It really bugs them if they accidentally harm an innocent–even though they know they can reload. Part of me wants to comfort them–it’s just a game afterall. And it’s a nice feature of the game that you can call do-overs. We use it as a context to argue about what’s right. It’s similar to many arguments during D&D games of my youth without the stupefying baggage of Gygax’s alignment system.

In life and drama, the following formula applies. Step 1: find two opposing beliefs held by your target. Step 2: bring that opposition into full consciousness. Step 3: be entertained.

Born to Lose

Another game that has attracted attention in recent years is Dwarf Fortress, famous for its motto that “losing is fun.” In the game, you work to oversee an entire fortress of alcoholic dwarves, each with his or her own appearance, emotions, relationships, desires, skills, beard-grooming standards, and – eventually – gruesome deaths. In an e-mail interview, Dwarf Fortress’s creator, Tarn Adams, told me, “It’s important that people learn to embrace loss, or the world can’t be enriched by their passing.” Only by seeing how easy it is to accidentally drive a dwarf mad, leading them to throw themselves down a well, or how easily a poorly planned fort leads to war-wounded dwarf veterans dying without medical care, can you come to value their individual lives. The death of a dwarf is both tragic and common, which makes a dwarf’s survival against the odds worth celebrating. At the same time, if they live long enough to gain titles and to name their weapons, it is that much worse when the inevitable dragon attack cuts their life short.