I disagree. I think the author is correct. Not only has innovation decreased, we've also lessened the definition of "innovation" so more things qualify. There's still a lot of evolutionary changes being made, but far fewer revolutionary changes, and not merely because of diminishing returns or all the "low-hanging fruit" being plucked. Take for example the fact the pinnacle of human exploration off our planet happened in 1969. Not only have we not exceeded the feat of putting a man on the moon, we haven't even matched it again. The reason it looks like we've hit a wall of diminishing returns is because such revolutionary discoveries by their very nature are generally unforeseen except by their originator, who may well be considered a crazy person whose ideas are a waste of time. We have no idea what technologies we might have seen and be using by now if technological innovation had progressed at the same rate. I'd guess there's dozens (if not hundreds) of ideas and/or inventions every year that could lead to revolutionary changes but get pushed aside and aborted because no one's willing to invest the time and money needed to bring them to fruition.
Sure, I understand that perspective. And the company I work for even offers extended warranties that provide that type of coverage, which is amazing. It doesn't matter though how much you do to inform the customer if the customer isn't listening. You'd have to be pretty excessively stupid to expect that driving your car off a cliff would be covered by a standard warranty. By the same token, it doesn't take a whole lot of brain to figure out that dropping your laptop off a table would also not be covered by a standard warranty. But when you caused a problem and you're looking for someone else to blame, anyone will do. If you can actually con them into paying for your mistake, so much the better. I can't say that I blame Apple for not wanting to be that scapegoat, even if it does cost them a few "customers".
Sorry, I hate responding to myself but with no edit function it's sometimes necessary. Upon re-reading I realized I missed an (somewhat) important part of the incident. His complaint wasn't simply about not receiving a warranty repair, he was also complaining about "poor quality" and having to get it repaired at all. Because of course, any laptop should have no trouble dealing with a 3-foot drop.
I don't work for Apple, but the company I do work for also has manufactured laptops in the past. Not so long ago I took a call from an individual that wanted to complain that his unit was now under warranty, and a third repair would not be covered. He'd already had the motherboard and hard drive repaired under warranty. The kicker is that *all* of the problems started only after he dropped the unit off a table, which "would never cause this kind of problem!". So at the time I took the call, he had already received free repairs twice by lying about damage he caused, and then had the audacity to complain about not receiving further repairs for failures resulting from the same drop incident, and threatening never to buy products from the company again because of it. There's nothing you can do about bad word-of-mouth negative advertising from an idiot like that, but Apple's plan may at least prevent wasting money on unwarranted repairs that a parasitic individual lied about.
Add to that, people who just accept it is a choice of the author of the web site to display those ads.
Chalk me up as one of those. I finally had to realize the harsh reality of the fact that ads are a necessary evil, unless I want to pay a monthly fee for access to virtually every site I like. I'm also using the Chrome browser now, for which there will never be an adblocker (for obvious reasons). Who knows, maybe I'll even buy something through one of those ads one day.
The problem is that in the video game industry, when you boycott by simply not buying, you instantly become a "pirate". We are way beyond this type of boycott having any kind of positive desirable effect.
There's tons of shit that is modded or built where MOST of the time it's only to do something illegal. In MOST cases it still doesn't make the modding or building of that shit illegal. And most of that shit is actually illegal for good reasons, not simply to keep all those vile wicked people from stealing Mickey Mouse for another 100 years.
...but what they don't realize is that "armor piercing" rounds for most rifles are referring to vehicle armor, not personnel. Against personnel armor it's all armor piercing.
Fixed that for you. Oh wait, was that too lame? So then "deal with" it!!
Ok, on a more serious note, you're absolutely correct.
To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.
There's also one major flaw in their assumption. Most (as in probably at least 99.9%) of computers that come into a repair shop have not been intentionally sabotaged by their owners. And in the few cases where they have, the owners will typically lie about it in a futile attempt to "save face", and getting the information that they tried to upgrade/remove/reinstall a piece of hardware can take longer than a few minutes all by itself. Without that information, no (even halfway) competent technician will quickly assume that it's something as simple as a ram module that's improperly installed.
When I play games like Guild Wars solo, it's not because "I want to be the hero" or because "I want all the lewts". It's because pick-up groups suck. You spend half an hour trying to round up people to fill out the group, and it only takes one of them being a moron to ruin the entire experience.
Real MMOs have less of a problem with that than GW though, because in a real MMO you actually have to care about your reputation as a player at least a little bit. In GW it doesn't matter because you'll never see anyone from the same group again anyway. You can be a shit player having good players carry you through the game the whole way and never group with the same person twice, without trying. In an MMO, you can get away with that for a while, but if you do it too much it eventually catches up with you, unless you keep paying for name and/or server changes.
And you're right - pugs in GW absolutely suck. In fact, as a general rule all of the game is easier to play with one friend than with a pug.
For those few of you who don't know, that's the guy who doesn't know how to get where you're going, can't properly follow your directions to get there, tries to boss around the party when he finally does get there even though he clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and then fifteen minutes into the group says, "o man i have 2 go.. mom wants me 2 clean my room".
He's also the guy drawing the cock & balls on the compass minimap, or just otherwise cluttering it up so no one can use it.
Exactly. This article and summary should both be tagged troll. The only actual news here is that 34% of the companies surveyed already have plans to have it deployed by the end of next year and it's not even released yet!
Now I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but I'd guess this is about their best pre-release effort ever. They have definitely done some things right this time around.
People really hate to dig their wallet out for their credit card too, even if they only make an online purchase once a week.
There's always a time period of a few days or weeks where people are still memorizing their new password, regardless of how frequently they have to type it in, and during that time period, guess what's going to happen. That's right: sticky note. After enough password changes it becomes difficult just to remember which password you're using right now, even when you know the password itself. The issue just compounds itself as people get older, because it gets harder to memorize at all, and they've got a lot more memorized things stored in memory. I've always been excellent at memorizing things, and even I can tell it's significantly more difficult for me than it was just 10 years ago - and I haven't even hit 30 yet. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone 50+ who's never been that great at memorization in the first place.
Hence why when most people talk about "skill" (in most things) they're talking about the execution part. There's a few things like Chess where the execution is easy, but there's lots of room for improvement in the "understanding" part, however in most PC games (and MMOs in particular) neither one is particularly difficult. In FPSs moreso than really any other PC game genre, the execution part can be tuned to allow for a lot more player execution skill to come into play. (It often isn't, but it can be.) The UT series is a great example of this - no matter how well you know the game, unless you're one of the top 10 players in the world there's still someone out there that can utterly destroy you on the execution part. That is quite simply not the case with any successful MMO ever released. In an MMO, the power of your character depends on 1. Level, 2. Gear, 3. Class, 4. Player strategic skill (planning) and 5. Player tactical and execution skill. Usually in that order.
Following your logic, $1.92 million at $0.99 per song (ie. around iTunes price) she'd have to have uploaded 1.92 million songs. Assuming an average 3.5mb per song, that's 6.4 terabytes of data uploaded. On a 256kbps uplink, that's 6.7 years of continuous uploading.
(As an aside - holy shit is Google getting scary! To calculate that, I typed in "1.92 million * 3.5 megabytes" and it said "6.40869141 terabytes". Then I asked it "6.41 terabytes / 256kbps" and got 6.81574337 years. I'm starting to think we should be referring to Google as 'a logic called Joe'.:S )
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It's simple then. Just find out from the ISP how much on average the infringer uploaded per month, take that times the number of months the infringer had the infringing material on the hard drive, and boom... there's your maximum possible damages.
It's not that your analogy was too complex... it's that it was just flat wrong. Nowhere does it say he was "insulting" anyone. It's like instead of playing basketball, both teams were just standing there chatting about nothing in particular and hogging the public court. He decided to start shooting some hoops, and some moron got hit on the head by the ball because he didn't move. Or perhaps the moron was standing there holding a public basketball that belongs with the court, and he decided to 'steal' the ball and start actually playing. There's plenty of analogies that would fit. Yours was not one.
I'm not sure which server he played on, but it definitely wasn't the one I played on. Going by the bits and pieces I've heard though, it sounds like he was on Virtue.
Personally I think he was pretty clever in getting the villains close enough to the police drones to be able to teleport them within range. If I'd been there, I would have helped him. Teleport... poof! I have to chuckle just imagining it. I'm sure it wouldn't have worked on my server, as the villains there for the most part wouldn't be that stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except you're about 8 years too late. I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot more than a "seriously nasty letter" now.
I disagree. I think the author is correct. Not only has innovation decreased, we've also lessened the definition of "innovation" so more things qualify. There's still a lot of evolutionary changes being made, but far fewer revolutionary changes, and not merely because of diminishing returns or all the "low-hanging fruit" being plucked. Take for example the fact the pinnacle of human exploration off our planet happened in 1969. Not only have we not exceeded the feat of putting a man on the moon, we haven't even matched it again. The reason it looks like we've hit a wall of diminishing returns is because such revolutionary discoveries by their very nature are generally unforeseen except by their originator, who may well be considered a crazy person whose ideas are a waste of time. We have no idea what technologies we might have seen and be using by now if technological innovation had progressed at the same rate. I'd guess there's dozens (if not hundreds) of ideas and/or inventions every year that could lead to revolutionary changes but get pushed aside and aborted because no one's willing to invest the time and money needed to bring them to fruition.
Sure, I understand that perspective. And the company I work for even offers extended warranties that provide that type of coverage, which is amazing. It doesn't matter though how much you do to inform the customer if the customer isn't listening. You'd have to be pretty excessively stupid to expect that driving your car off a cliff would be covered by a standard warranty. By the same token, it doesn't take a whole lot of brain to figure out that dropping your laptop off a table would also not be covered by a standard warranty. But when you caused a problem and you're looking for someone else to blame, anyone will do. If you can actually con them into paying for your mistake, so much the better. I can't say that I blame Apple for not wanting to be that scapegoat, even if it does cost them a few "customers".
Sorry, I hate responding to myself but with no edit function it's sometimes necessary. Upon re-reading I realized I missed an (somewhat) important part of the incident. His complaint wasn't simply about not receiving a warranty repair, he was also complaining about "poor quality" and having to get it repaired at all. Because of course, any laptop should have no trouble dealing with a 3-foot drop.
wanted to complain that his unit was now not under warranty,
I don't work for Apple, but the company I do work for also has manufactured laptops in the past. Not so long ago I took a call from an individual that wanted to complain that his unit was now under warranty, and a third repair would not be covered. He'd already had the motherboard and hard drive repaired under warranty. The kicker is that *all* of the problems started only after he dropped the unit off a table, which "would never cause this kind of problem!". So at the time I took the call, he had already received free repairs twice by lying about damage he caused, and then had the audacity to complain about not receiving further repairs for failures resulting from the same drop incident, and threatening never to buy products from the company again because of it. There's nothing you can do about bad word-of-mouth negative advertising from an idiot like that, but Apple's plan may at least prevent wasting money on unwarranted repairs that a parasitic individual lied about.
Add to that, people who just accept it is a choice of the author of the web site to display those ads.
Chalk me up as one of those. I finally had to realize the harsh reality of the fact that ads are a necessary evil, unless I want to pay a monthly fee for access to virtually every site I like. I'm also using the Chrome browser now, for which there will never be an adblocker (for obvious reasons). Who knows, maybe I'll even buy something through one of those ads one day.
The problem is that in the video game industry, when you boycott by simply not buying, you instantly become a "pirate". We are way beyond this type of boycott having any kind of positive desirable effect.
There's tons of shit that is modded or built where MOST of the time it's only to do something illegal. In MOST cases it still doesn't make the modding or building of that shit illegal. And most of that shit is actually illegal for good reasons, not simply to keep all those vile wicked people from stealing Mickey Mouse for another 100 years.
...but what they don't realize is that "armor piercing" rounds for most rifles are referring to vehicle armor, not personnel. Against personnel armor it's all armor piercing.
Fixed that for you. Oh wait, was that too lame? So then "deal with" it!!
Ok, on a more serious note, you're absolutely correct.
To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.
There's also one major flaw in their assumption. Most (as in probably at least 99.9%) of computers that come into a repair shop have not been intentionally sabotaged by their owners. And in the few cases where they have, the owners will typically lie about it in a futile attempt to "save face", and getting the information that they tried to upgrade/remove/reinstall a piece of hardware can take longer than a few minutes all by itself. Without that information, no (even halfway) competent technician will quickly assume that it's something as simple as a ram module that's improperly installed.
When I play games like Guild Wars solo, it's not because "I want to be the hero" or because "I want all the lewts". It's because pick-up groups suck. You spend half an hour trying to round up people to fill out the group, and it only takes one of them being a moron to ruin the entire experience.
Real MMOs have less of a problem with that than GW though, because in a real MMO you actually have to care about your reputation as a player at least a little bit. In GW it doesn't matter because you'll never see anyone from the same group again anyway. You can be a shit player having good players carry you through the game the whole way and never group with the same person twice, without trying. In an MMO, you can get away with that for a while, but if you do it too much it eventually catches up with you, unless you keep paying for name and/or server changes.
And you're right - pugs in GW absolutely suck. In fact, as a general rule all of the game is easier to play with one friend than with a pug.
For those few of you who don't know, that's the guy who doesn't know how to get where you're going, can't properly follow your directions to get there, tries to boss around the party when he finally does get there even though he clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and then fifteen minutes into the group says, "o man i have 2 go.. mom wants me 2 clean my room".
He's also the guy drawing the cock & balls on the compass minimap, or just otherwise cluttering it up so no one can use it.
It has FLYING!! And PvPvE!!... ...or something like that. I swear I read it on the internets so I know it must be true.
*Yawn*
No it's not. Neither CoH/V nor Guild Wars uses it.
Great. And I just recently downloaded and installed Chronicles of Spellborn. Wish I'd seen this a few weeks ago.
Exactly. This article and summary should both be tagged troll. The only actual news here is that 34% of the companies surveyed already have plans to have it deployed by the end of next year and it's not even released yet!
Now I'm no huge fan of Microsoft, but I'd guess this is about their best pre-release effort ever. They have definitely done some things right this time around.
People really hate to dig their wallet out for their credit card too, even if they only make an online purchase once a week.
There's always a time period of a few days or weeks where people are still memorizing their new password, regardless of how frequently they have to type it in, and during that time period, guess what's going to happen. That's right: sticky note. After enough password changes it becomes difficult just to remember which password you're using right now, even when you know the password itself. The issue just compounds itself as people get older, because it gets harder to memorize at all, and they've got a lot more memorized things stored in memory. I've always been excellent at memorizing things, and even I can tell it's significantly more difficult for me than it was just 10 years ago - and I haven't even hit 30 yet. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone 50+ who's never been that great at memorization in the first place.
Don't worry, it's not. Cataclysm will be their new MMO.
C'mon guys, give him a break. After all, he couldn't really ask which keyboard was best for it, now could he?
Did it loose 73% of its core developer?
I dunno, but what I'm interested in is what they did with the other 27% of him.
Hence why when most people talk about "skill" (in most things) they're talking about the execution part. There's a few things like Chess where the execution is easy, but there's lots of room for improvement in the "understanding" part, however in most PC games (and MMOs in particular) neither one is particularly difficult. In FPSs moreso than really any other PC game genre, the execution part can be tuned to allow for a lot more player execution skill to come into play. (It often isn't, but it can be.) The UT series is a great example of this - no matter how well you know the game, unless you're one of the top 10 players in the world there's still someone out there that can utterly destroy you on the execution part. That is quite simply not the case with any successful MMO ever released. In an MMO, the power of your character depends on 1. Level, 2. Gear, 3. Class, 4. Player strategic skill (planning) and 5. Player tactical and execution skill. Usually in that order.
Actually, it doesn't. You won't find the servers listed until page 6 in his .doc report linked from TFA.
Following your logic, $1.92 million at $0.99 per song (ie. around iTunes price) she'd have to have uploaded 1.92 million songs. Assuming an average 3.5mb per song, that's 6.4 terabytes of data uploaded. On a 256kbps uplink, that's
6.7 years of continuous uploading.
(As an aside - holy shit is Google getting scary! To calculate that, I typed in "1.92 million * 3.5 megabytes" and it said "6.40869141 terabytes". Then I asked it "6.41 terabytes / 256kbps" and got 6.81574337 years. I'm starting to think we should be referring to Google as 'a logic called Joe'. :S )
Reply to This
It's simple then. Just find out from the ISP how much on average the infringer uploaded per month, take that times the number of months the infringer had the infringing material on the hard drive, and boom... there's your maximum possible damages.
It's not that your analogy was too complex... it's that it was just flat wrong. Nowhere does it say he was "insulting" anyone. It's like instead of playing basketball, both teams were just standing there chatting about nothing in particular and hogging the public court. He decided to start shooting some hoops, and some moron got hit on the head by the ball because he didn't move. Or perhaps the moron was standing there holding a public basketball that belongs with the court, and he decided to 'steal' the ball and start actually playing. There's plenty of analogies that would fit. Yours was not one.
I'm not sure which server he played on, but it definitely wasn't the one I played on. Going by the bits and pieces I've heard though, it sounds like he was on Virtue.
Personally I think he was pretty clever in getting the villains close enough to the police drones to be able to teleport them within range. If I'd been there, I would have helped him. Teleport... poof! I have to chuckle just imagining it. I'm sure it wouldn't have worked on my server, as the villains there for the most part wouldn't be that stupid.