The fact of the matter is, if you're not confident enough in your data centre's reliability to throw the switch, your data centre just isn't reliable enough.
Well, yeah. That's really the whole point in this discussion - they don't know it's reliable enough. Therefore, throwing the switch on the whole center at this point is foolish at best. You don't do that until you're reasonably confident based on other smaller tests you've done first. Which I believe was exactly what was being stated. Sometimes you have to learn to read between the lines, and understand things without having every little detail explicitly spelled out for you.
Even if someone does use this to stalk your character, how will that even matter? What are they going to do, send illicit chat messages? Try to follow your character around in-game? Good luck with that.
And as for the tie from character to real-life person, if that tie exists just change your character's name. Also, the most anyone could glean from such a tie is what time of day you're normally on your PC. There's no other way a stalker could possibly get that info, right?
Hate to break it to you, but Joe Sixpack isn't that savvy. He doesn't know what DRM is, and he hasn't a clue what fucked up his music. Same thing for Grandma Jones. They're more likely to think it's somehow the band's fault that their CD didn't work, and will never buy their music again, in any form. Or they believe that the CD player is broken, because the disc worked in a different player.
Also, bad as DRM is, most people actually don't have trouble with it.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic or actually serious, but I always watch and I very consistently get my full 1.5Mbps down, from my ISP at least. There are several reasons 1.5Mbps feels sluggish these days though.
1. Websites in general are a *lot* more bloated than they were 10 years ago. Dialup really isn't fast enough for even just basic web browsing any more. Imagine trying to browse nfl.com with a 56K.
2. Many websites are simply overloaded, or intentionally restrict bandwidth. A good example (of the former I hope) is Youtube. Many times I've gone to watch a video, and no matter how much bandwidth I have there, it just doesn't download fast enough to keep up. A great example of the latter is ASUS' driver server. Good luck getting anything over 10KBps from there. (Actually, good luck getting even 10KBps.)
All great points. There's also one possible effect that is even harder to measure (perhaps impossible) and that's morale. You can watch the slower worker all day and not realize that he's the one that's keeping all the other faster guys happy and doing good work at a good pace.
You may think that, but you would be dead wrong. I didn't get the chance to watch the original Star Wars movies when I was a kid, and as a result Phantom Menace was the first one I watched. I couldn't really figure out why people thought Star Wars movies were so great. Then I watched the original trilogy, and I found out. I've since then watched the trilogy multiple times (I own the DVD boxed set as well as the DVD releases that include the original theatrical versions), and even managed to watch episodes 2 & 3 twice. But I've never yet managed to bring myself to sit through a repeat viewing of the fecal matter that was episode one.
Seriously. It's not news, it's not stuff that mattes, and nothing the guy is writing is in any way original. Multiplayer RPGs that pit players vs. tough NPC characters will always eventually have players min/maxing into the 3 basic roles. Well, that is if the game is any good. Otherwise (as someone else posted) it's just a chaotic free-for-all. A perfect example is WoW. The game has not one but (count 'em) THREE hybrid classes, that are (theoretically) able to do not one, but all three of the basic jobs (yes yes, I know shaman can't really tank, but they can do so well enough with a shield to get through most low-level dungeons). And as the talent trees sat to begin with, they were all able to do just that reasonably well in much of the content. But then you hit the hard stuff (ie. epic dungeons) and that hybrid spec that let you do so well solo just didn't cut it any more. If you played one of those three classes, you didn't even get a spot if you weren't spec'd just right. Now, these classes are if anything even less capable of switching from one basic role to another without redoing the talents. And you're pretty much never going to switch from one to the other in the middle of combat.
No conclusions can be drawn from a self-assessment of ones own ability.
Sure there can. After reading the article, I have drawn the conclusion that the participants in the survey consider themselves more literate than they are.
There was no disrespect towards Linux. I would have thought it would be fairly obvious that in my previous post the comparison was about economic impact on others, not the end-user value of upgrading one or the other.
The reason this is significant is twofold: first, because Windows XP is easily the biggest competitor to Vista and now Windows 7, and second, because an upgrade from Windows XP to 7 [usually] means $$$ for Microsoft, while an upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 means nothing except perhaps a little bandwidth consumption.
Or, they could do what any sane person would do, and realize that at any given moment only a tiny fraction of their users are using ANY bandwidth
Exactly. And that's precisely what makes the whole not-enough-bandwidth problem so ridiculous. No one's asking them to provide the total theoretical amount of bandwidth that they're selling. But they're overselling by so much that they can't even cover what their customers ARE trying to use, let alone what they're actually selling. It's basically the equivalent of an airline selling 500 tickets for a 120-passenger flight. Not to mention the fact that (in the US) they have already been paid by the government to add infrastructure and expand bandwidth.
Yes, that is how unions start out. Most unions *used* to be that way in the US as well. People have good reason to moan about US unions now though, and it's *you* who has no knowledge of how US unions work.
At that time, the inner regions of the long fjords where the settlements were located were very different from today. Excavations show that there were considerable birch woods with birch trees up to 4 to 6 meters high in the area around the inner parts of the Tunuliarfik- and Aniaaq-fjords, the central area of the Eastern settlement, and the hills were grown with grass and willow brushes.
Of course, that raises the question of why a large island covered with an ice sheet was ever called Greenland to begin with. I suppose they were being sarcastic at the time?
The article has some good points, and I agree with most of their predictions, but not all. First, paper. Mobile phones will never make paper obsolete. The only thing that could *possibly* make paper (as we know it) obsolete is electronic paper. Any device small enough to be considered a mobile phone is too small to replace paper, plain and simple. Same thing goes for netbooks. If mobile phones were going to replace netbooks, netbooks would never have happened. Mobile phones already have everything to offer that could possibly make them a replacement for netbooks (prime example, LG env Touch), and yet netbooks are still selling like mad. It's because netbooks hit that perfect balance between usability and portability. They're small enough to put in just about any bag, yet big enough to (relatively) easily type on, and have a screen that's just large enough to properly display things like websites. Again, mobile phones are just too small for this. I also don't see phones truly replacing portable game consoles - there's a lot to be said for a discrete d-pad, shoulder buttons, etc. You can only do so much with a touch screen, no matter how good it is. And as for thinking... gosh I hope not.
But for the rest, yeah it's already happened for me.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact of the matter is, if you're not confident enough in your data centre's reliability to throw the switch, your data centre just isn't reliable enough.
Well, yeah. That's really the whole point in this discussion - they don't know it's reliable enough. Therefore, throwing the switch on the whole center at this point is foolish at best. You don't do that until you're reasonably confident based on other smaller tests you've done first. Which I believe was exactly what was being stated. Sometimes you have to learn to read between the lines, and understand things without having every little detail explicitly spelled out for you.
... and nothing of value was lost.
Time to hand in your geek badge then.
I knew it was a firefly reference the second I saw the first name was Jayne.
People just seem to get whiny that Blizzard wants to publish info about their characters. I say who cares?
Agreed. And if it's really *that* big a deal, you can always, you know, just quit playing.
Even if someone does use this to stalk your character, how will that even matter? What are they going to do, send illicit chat messages? Try to follow your character around in-game? Good luck with that.
And as for the tie from character to real-life person, if that tie exists just change your character's name. Also, the most anyone could glean from such a tie is what time of day you're normally on your PC. There's no other way a stalker could possibly get that info, right?
As usual, a bunch of FUD.
Online poll reveals sudden decrease in geek virgins.
Hate to break it to you, but Joe Sixpack isn't that savvy. He doesn't know what DRM is, and he hasn't a clue what fucked up his music. Same thing for Grandma Jones. They're more likely to think it's somehow the band's fault that their CD didn't work, and will never buy their music again, in any form. Or they believe that the CD player is broken, because the disc worked in a different player.
Also, bad as DRM is, most people actually don't have trouble with it.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic or actually serious, but I always watch and I very consistently get my full 1.5Mbps down, from my ISP at least. There are several reasons 1.5Mbps feels sluggish these days though.
1. Websites in general are a *lot* more bloated than they were 10 years ago. Dialup really isn't fast enough for even just basic web browsing any more. Imagine trying to browse nfl.com with a 56K.
2. Many websites are simply overloaded, or intentionally restrict bandwidth. A good example (of the former I hope) is Youtube. Many times I've gone to watch a video, and no matter how much bandwidth I have there, it just doesn't download fast enough to keep up. A great example of the latter is ASUS' driver server. Good luck getting anything over 10KBps from there. (Actually, good luck getting even 10KBps.)
All great points. There's also one possible effect that is even harder to measure (perhaps impossible) and that's morale. You can watch the slower worker all day and not realize that he's the one that's keeping all the other faster guys happy and doing good work at a good pace.
You may think that, but you would be dead wrong. I didn't get the chance to watch the original Star Wars movies when I was a kid, and as a result Phantom Menace was the first one I watched. I couldn't really figure out why people thought Star Wars movies were so great. Then I watched the original trilogy, and I found out. I've since then watched the trilogy multiple times (I own the DVD boxed set as well as the DVD releases that include the original theatrical versions), and even managed to watch episodes 2 & 3 twice. But I've never yet managed to bring myself to sit through a repeat viewing of the fecal matter that was episode one.
Seriously. It's not news, it's not stuff that mattes, and nothing the guy is writing is in any way original. Multiplayer RPGs that pit players vs. tough NPC characters will always eventually have players min/maxing into the 3 basic roles. Well, that is if the game is any good. Otherwise (as someone else posted) it's just a chaotic free-for-all. A perfect example is WoW. The game has not one but (count 'em) THREE hybrid classes, that are (theoretically) able to do not one, but all three of the basic jobs (yes yes, I know shaman can't really tank, but they can do so well enough with a shield to get through most low-level dungeons). And as the talent trees sat to begin with, they were all able to do just that reasonably well in much of the content. But then you hit the hard stuff (ie. epic dungeons) and that hybrid spec that let you do so well solo just didn't cut it any more. If you played one of those three classes, you didn't even get a spot if you weren't spec'd just right. Now, these classes are if anything even less capable of switching from one basic role to another without redoing the talents. And you're pretty much never going to switch from one to the other in the middle of combat.
Yes, because gold's value will always remain constant, right?
No conclusions can be drawn from a self-assessment of ones own ability.
Sure there can. After reading the article, I have drawn the conclusion that the participants in the survey consider themselves more literate than they are.
...they're getting back on their normal release schedule. Good for them.
There was no disrespect towards Linux. I would have thought it would be fairly obvious that in my previous post the comparison was about economic impact on others, not the end-user value of upgrading one or the other.
The reason this is significant is twofold: first, because Windows XP is easily the biggest competitor to Vista and now Windows 7, and second, because an upgrade from Windows XP to 7 [usually] means $$$ for Microsoft, while an upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 means nothing except perhaps a little bandwidth consumption.
Or, they could do what any sane person would do, and realize that at any given moment only a tiny fraction of their users are using ANY bandwidth
Exactly. And that's precisely what makes the whole not-enough-bandwidth problem so ridiculous. No one's asking them to provide the total theoretical amount of bandwidth that they're selling. But they're overselling by so much that they can't even cover what their customers ARE trying to use, let alone what they're actually selling. It's basically the equivalent of an airline selling 500 tickets for a 120-passenger flight. Not to mention the fact that (in the US) they have already been paid by the government to add infrastructure and expand bandwidth.
Yes, that is how unions start out. Most unions *used* to be that way in the US as well. People have good reason to moan about US unions now though, and it's *you* who has no knowledge of how US unions work.
Because when it was discovered we had a short warm age.
Now, isn't that interesting.
Who were presumably going to settle on an icecap? Really?
How about I quote from the very next paragraph?
At that time, the inner regions of the long fjords where the settlements were located were very different from today. Excavations show that there were considerable birch woods with birch trees up to 4 to 6 meters high in the area around the inner parts of the Tunuliarfik- and Aniaaq-fjords, the central area of the Eastern settlement, and the hills were grown with grass and willow brushes.
Of course, that raises the question of why a large island covered with an ice sheet was ever called Greenland to begin with. I suppose they were being sarcastic at the time?
The article has some good points, and I agree with most of their predictions, but not all. First, paper. Mobile phones will never make paper obsolete. The only thing that could *possibly* make paper (as we know it) obsolete is electronic paper. Any device small enough to be considered a mobile phone is too small to replace paper, plain and simple. Same thing goes for netbooks. If mobile phones were going to replace netbooks, netbooks would never have happened. Mobile phones already have everything to offer that could possibly make them a replacement for netbooks (prime example, LG env Touch), and yet netbooks are still selling like mad. It's because netbooks hit that perfect balance between usability and portability. They're small enough to put in just about any bag, yet big enough to (relatively) easily type on, and have a screen that's just large enough to properly display things like websites. Again, mobile phones are just too small for this. I also don't see phones truly replacing portable game consoles - there's a lot to be said for a discrete d-pad, shoulder buttons, etc. You can only do so much with a touch screen, no matter how good it is. And as for thinking... gosh I hope not.
But for the rest, yeah it's already happened for me.
Exactly.
Parent post needs to be modded up.
Yes, there's an official signup page:
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/
I used it, and had my invite within a week or two.