Blurred screen shots, off-handed mention of files and sites...
Why not at least release specifics so that we can avoid these sites?(or at least get them to clean up their act)? Why not give us details about the actual filenames and so on?
Or at least give us details on the actual control application and the files it is paid to infect the computers with so that we can avoid them.
Articles like this annoy me because they accomplish nothing constructive.
Linux might be "free" but if you include the support contract, [re-]training, only then do you start to get close to its real cost in a business. ****
This only holds true if you are wrongly adding in not having to train people who have been doing the same old thing forever.
If you add up the costs for new employees who you would have to train either way, it's fairly close. But the downtime issues and security involved is a clear win for *IX. Mostly because your IT staff can't be a bunch of no-brain idiots. You have to hire good people who know their stuff to run *IX.
It's about a wash. But being free of Microsoft? Well, that's priceless.
My parents bought a G5 tower about a year and a half ago. New, shiny, and sleek. The machine came with all of the software that they needed.
To date, they have installed the following applications that they've paid for(or cost money - they're not pirating it, either):
Apple may be more expensive initially, but it's perfectly possible to pay the same as Linux for the software that you use. this blows a huge hole in Microsoft's claims.
Yes, it does feel like cheating. If it's driven at 65mph, the range drops to close to half that figure, which is also what one would expect for a battery of that size and a vehicle of that weight. There is no free lunch/you can't have a highway speed range of 280miles+ without losing half of the weight magically. Or having well over 100% efficient motors somehow.
Nice car. Too bad it'll get eviscerated in the press and market when it actually gets closer to 100-120miles per charge despite its ungodly high official rating. Because nobody's going to drive this thing at 28mph and accelerate like it has an egg for an accelerator pedal. They should have claimed a more realistic range and then if people got higher than the conservative figure, it would be seen as a bonus. But claiming 200+ miles range which no normal driver will get...
My suggestion was to not do annoying stuff like that but make it so that you NEED the manual to play the game. Or to include things like 3d glasses or keyboard overlays or a hint book to it to make it worth getting over just downloading the game itself.
I bought Far Cry 2 - but I honestly haven't read the manual or done the tutorial or anything. I just jumped in and was playing in 5 minutes. This makes it a prime candidate for pirating as there is nothing OF added value beyond the program itself.
edit: I just looked at the manual - it's 14 pages long if you discount the pages of legalese and covers. It really wasn't worth bothering to read.
The easiest way is to add physical content. Way way back in the days of 8 bit computing, there was the Ultima series of games. Now, they could easily be cracked, of course, but the real reason everyone bought the real game was because the thing HAD NO TUTORIAL. You absolutely required the map and instruction manual to understand how to play the game. It also was far too large to easily copy.
Other games required a complex manual to be able to identify enemy units and understand specifics and tactics as well. Submarine and aircraft simulations come to mind here - few people pirated them because you needed the manual to play it properly.
Other games have such a huge set of rules that you need it - the NeverWinter Nights series is a good example. You're always flipping the manual back and forth to look up something.
Where game companies go wrong is that they ship the games in a tiny DVD box, have a idiot-proof tutorial, no manual(but a PDF file!), and a lot of hand-holding, as well as an easy way to look up and reassign keys. As a result, there's no reason to do anything other than obtain the program and go. I don't expect this approach to work, though. Most of the younger players are seriously dumb as a rock and would whine about having to read and use their brains for a change.
But a 100 page printed manual that's required to really play and get the most out of a game, or other items... That's worth something. So the compromise solution would be quite easy:
- stop releasing the help guides for the games and include one in the box. My son wants that new Pokemon game and the $19.95 help book for it is 300+ pages long and almost 2 inches thick(!). If the only way to get that was to buy the actual game... Problem solved.
The nation is flooded with CS and MBA and similar "tech" people. Many are out of work or worse, when there is a job, it's moved overseas.
But a degree in engineering is gold. There is a massive shortage of them in almost every nation on the planet, and it's a solid degree that can be leveraged into almost any technical field. Doubly so if you have a BS in Computers. It's essentially the MBA of the science world. But it doesn't have the glut or the backlash that the MBA suffers from.
Lastly, a masters in computers is really only good for teaching. Not that that's bad - most of my family and relatives are/were teachers - but it's basically seen as "more of the same... where's the experience?" by companies. While there may BE a difference in level and skill, they just don't care and would just as soon hire a guy with a BS and 5-10 years of hands-on experience(often for less money as well). A MSEE, though, is relevant and required for many fields as a minimum level by employers.
I don't know of many homeless or starving engineers.
A feature that I d love to see added to a motherboard is to add 1-4 dedicated slots that can be configured as a ramdisk at the BIOS level. That way you'd need no drivers and it would survive a reboot. Surely this could be done fairly easily.
I'd be happy with even 6 or 8 slots. It's been largely worthless to try to run large amounts of ram on most OSs lately because with 2 or 4 slots at most on most motherboards, you're limited to 8 or 16GB. At least cheaply, since nobody can afford 8 or 16GB modules.
I give them 3 years, tops, until they have a cluster like this that has the computing power of a human brain. If they can increase the size to 1 million per chip in a few years(quite reasonable, IMO), then it would only need a thousand. We've done 1000 CPU clusters before. I think there's even a name for that...;)
if you ever want to play in offline mode, simply check the "remember your login info" checkbox next time you log in. -- its not an action which needs to be done every time you want to be offline. then any time you start up and you can't get online you have the option "start in offline mode", as the GP posted.
Correct. I once lost Net while moving for three solid weeks. It never once asked me for validation after doing this as long as I didn't go online/try to play an online game(duh) and also turned off automatic updates on the specific title. This last part is WHY it tries to log in.
Note - if you run mods, you of course also need to turn this off.
You need to set offline mode as Andy said above and "remember your login info" and then disable "keep this game up to date". It's really not the huge hairball that people imagine.
People keep thinking about it being smarter than humans and doing typical science fiction type nonsense. The real problem isn't that but instead how such a small cluster these of chips could be made into a device to crack codes, bypass security, run a botnet, and do any similar task that generally requires human input or monitoring to react to changes or to invent new strategies. Computers have been historically bad at lateral thinking in the past. Are we sure we want to give them that ability?
Think of it like a dog that moves 1000x faster than you do. You go out to get the mail and when you get back a few minutes later, it's chewed your furniture into tatters, ate all the food, dug 50 holes in the back yard, and left about a dozen piles of poop to clean up. Leave for work and come back 8 hours later...(roughly equal to a year being left alone to the dog in this case)
Obviously a computer as smart as a human causes alarms to go off and people to be wary of it. But what harm can a bunch of robots with 1/10th the IQ do?(sic for the impaired) It's the ones that fly below the radar and are seen as "benign" that are the real cause for concern.
- I can move computers or reinstall as I wish. I can play a game "delete" it, and later on, reinstall it - just load the main game file and go. No install and reinstall idiocy. If I need to clear up some HD space, I can delete the game main game file in a few seconds and poof - 4 or 5 gigs free.
If I have to reinstall my OS, I don't have to play CD or DVD shuffling and look for CD keys and other idiocy. I just install the steam client, validate, and hit "stun" and let it d/l all 40-50 gigs of junk overnight. Note - you can also back up your steam apps directory and toss the compressed files back in with a reinstalled OS. It'll check and validate and you're good to go. With DVDs, you're SOL - because it has to do all sorts of tweaking and stuff with the registry. Steam does this for you. Nice.
- None of UbiSoft's or EA or Sony's malware DRM rootkits. I'd rather have one app that checks to see if I'm who I am(perfectly reasonable, IMO). No CD crippling software, no nonsense that mangles my DirectX. In fact, I'll only buy games from those three PITA companies when it comes out on Steam.
- Updating and patches and support is quick - often in hours or days to fix loading bugs and sound issues. Patches the game for you, as well. Always up to date if you wish.
- As easy as Direct2Drive(another company I also like) to order and buy from. Good prices, too. Often better than the local game store, due to nearly daily promotions and specials. No boxes cluttering up my desk, either. Case in point - last night, Assassin's Creed was a paltry $10. Latest director's cut version, all the goodies. Just buy, D/L, and run an hour later.
- Loads of older games that were impossible to run on Vista from the W2K/W98 era. Many are well worth playing, even today.
- Movie trailers and so on are MUCH easier to manage and less spammy than the major websites and places like Apple. HD trailers are a snap as well to d/l and clearly tell you the resolution and quality up front. Having to watch a trailer online in a little box at most sites is a major hassle.
Cons: - It sits in the background and hogs resources. Impossible to play even HL via Steam versus the original standalone boxed game cleanly unless you have a dual core processor. My old P3 could run HL1 without stuttering. My P4 couldn't. My dual-core now is fine, but really...
- Many AV and Net monitoring/firewall apps just have a fit with it.
- Loads new content and patches and so on sometimes in the background without me ever allowing it.
- Worries about not being able to access my programs. But given the money Valve is making, I suspect it'll be around for at least 10-20 more years.
One would assume it does a slow throttled attempt, starting with the true idiot passwords like "admin", "administrator", "root", "password" etc. Those four alone probably get you into 10% of those routers.
The number of clients that I used to run into doing consulting that had no password set on their machines at all on any level was about 10-20%. They buy it and plug it in and that's that. Then the insanity starts as they are often connected to a DSL or cable connection 24/7 without any real protection.
I can deal with scripts and various Ai and realism modes and so on, but the thing that really irks me is when the computer is obviously cheating or being super-human in small ways. It's because the AI is often just tossed in at the end.
It's not impossible, for instance, to program in LOS and distance/fog of war calculations. Older games like Deus Ex did that quite well, in fact, and even X-Com if you go that far back. But nobody does it. So you get idiocy like every enemy firing at you the second their body physically makes LOS contact with you. You need a scope but they see you in the weeks and start firing at you from 1500 ft away.(can't hit at that range, but still...)
The Hitman series, for instance, was very rewarding to play just because of the fact that the enemies reacted to sounds and your visibility even somewhat. Remaining silent throughout a level to keep the enemy unaware had rewards. And shooting off a canon, well, yes, everyone in the level should start searching for you. Otherwise it's equally inane. And gunshots do travel blocks. Larger things like an explosion, well, you can hear that miles away sometimes.
If you go in making a huge amount of noise and blowing stuff up all Rambo style, the big boss and the rest of them should go right for you and completely overwhelm you. In real life, a major threat gets the biggest guns on it from the beginning and not after you've taken out the smaller grunts. Of course this also means you need the tools to keep the noise down to reasonable levels.
If you sneak and lurk around corners, you should almost always be rewarded with getting the first shot off before they react. If you are quiet, they should send our smaller patrols and take a few minutes to figure out what's going on.
It's not the scripts or AI. It's that the programmers just don't care to try to add in human limitations. If you have enough limitations and exploits built into the game, the AI can have perfect aim and reactions and be scripted but it doesn't feel like it. You shouldn't program in mistakes or dumb actions, but instead, each level of difficulty adds in or deletes certain enemy limitations and abilities that it can or can't use.
Easy: Enemy has no special gear and sees and hears like you do. They have cheap gear and basic guns.(budget's tight) Hard: They get better gear and guns and scopes on some. Some cameras and security. Hardest: Enemy has scopes, silencers, night vision, and radar/listening devices, as well as extra cameras and so on. They have better guns and extra/better ammo(which can still run out and you can obtain off of their bodies)
Also, it's worth pointing out that this test shows IE is faster at loading cached pages, not uncached websites. From their paper:
In the Internet Explorer lab: We visit each site prior to starting any site test. Preloading the cache prior to a test helps ensure systems are at a known base before starting.
So wait - let me get this straight...
Half of the time IE8 is SLOWER than the others even when preloading/precaching? I think this is a bigger headline than the original, to be honest. Let me make a new headline:
"IE8's precached performance is slower than the competition's uncached performance 50% of the time"
China, which is kind of like our Wild West(tm) right now, does whatever it wants. And it's going to completely leave us behind much as we did with Europe. Remember, Europe at the time had very restrictive guilds, laws, and regulations. The U.S. didn't. So we invented and invented. We built and didn't really care that much if it was someone else's idea.
Just like China now is doing.
And you wonder why they are going to put up their own space station modules next year and beat us to a habitat on the moon... We have to dismantle the idiocy or we'll never be able to move fast enough to keep up.
Honestly, if I was interested in space or technology or just making new things, I'd be making a beeline to China and doing it there without the millions of laws and tens of thousands of lawyers all suing everyone into oblivion over idiotic patents.
Say he has 800,000songs he serves (around 7years solid of music) that is 4TB of space. And lets say the rest is videos. That is about 88,000 DVDs. That since movies began there would be 880 movies a year worth watching. Movies weren't that big until recently but I bet this year hollywood isn't going to release 880movies to theaters. This figure also blows away what netflix has to offer. Ignoring the fact that you would have to watch like 6 movies a day to get through the list. It doesn't make any sense.
Don't forget to add in porn, movies from Japan, China, Russia, Australia, Europe, India, and of course, TV shows and a few TB of various computer apps, naturally.
The BBC alone spits out more than a TB a year of TV shows and various rubbish on its various channels, and that's just (nearly)worthless off-the-air programming. U.S. TV shows...
Recording is so cheap that it can be done reasonably well with equipment costing a few thousand dollars or less. That means it's pretty much accessible to everyone. For $10/month you can sign up with a digital music distributor who will put your mp3s on Amazon.com, itunes, etc. Set up a myspace page for your band or register a domain and get an inexpensive web host and you've got a web presence.
All that results from such attempts at "recording" is a low quality product that nobody wants to actually buy. GOOD recording and mastering is still as expensive and time consuming as it ever was. Nobody buys the equipment - they all rent a fully outfitted studio and do it that way.
But you are right about the fact that the big companies aren't required to be part of the picture any more, thanks to the easy availability of recording studios and equipment.
I worked for a company once and after I left, I waited a few months.(rolled a die for the number of months just to be random) then I sent an email or two anonymously to the SPA and similar places.
They were plainly able to afford licenses but refused to do so because they were notoriously cheap.
My current employer is a "good egg" though and is fully compliant. Nice to work for a place that has decent morals for once...(yes they do exist from time to time)
Slashdot Mirror
Blurred screen shots, off-handed mention of files and sites...
Why not at least release specifics so that we can avoid these sites?(or at least get them to clean up their act)? Why not give us details about the actual filenames and so on?
Or at least give us details on the actual control application and the files it is paid to infect the computers with so that we can avoid them.
Articles like this annoy me because they accomplish nothing constructive.
Linux might be "free" but if you include the support contract, [re-]training, only then do you start to get close to its real cost in a business.
****
This only holds true if you are wrongly adding in not having to train people who have been doing the same old thing forever.
If you add up the costs for new employees who you would have to train either way, it's fairly close. But the downtime issues and security involved is a clear win for *IX. Mostly because your IT staff can't be a bunch of no-brain idiots. You have to hire good people who know their stuff to run *IX.
It's about a wash. But being free of Microsoft? Well, that's priceless.
My parents bought a G5 tower about a year and a half ago. New, shiny, and sleek. The machine came with all of the software that they needed.
To date, they have installed the following applications that they've paid for(or cost money - they're not pirating it, either):
Apple may be more expensive initially, but it's perfectly possible to pay the same as Linux for the software that you use. this blows a huge hole in Microsoft's claims.
I'll bet you that the servers that Microsoft is using to store its original code on aren't running Vista.
Yes, it does feel like cheating. If it's driven at 65mph, the range drops to close to half that figure, which is also what one would expect for a battery of that size and a vehicle of that weight. There is no free lunch/you can't have a highway speed range of 280miles+ without losing half of the weight magically. Or having well over 100% efficient motors somehow.
Nice car. Too bad it'll get eviscerated in the press and market when it actually gets closer to 100-120miles per charge despite its ungodly high official rating. Because nobody's going to drive this thing at 28mph and accelerate like it has an egg for an accelerator pedal. They should have claimed a more realistic range and then if people got higher than the conservative figure, it would be seen as a bonus. But claiming 200+ miles range which no normal driver will get...
My suggestion was to not do annoying stuff like that but make it so that you NEED the manual to play the game. Or to include things like 3d glasses or keyboard overlays or a hint book to it to make it worth getting over just downloading the game itself.
I bought Far Cry 2 - but I honestly haven't read the manual or done the tutorial or anything. I just jumped in and was playing in 5 minutes. This makes it a prime candidate for pirating as there is nothing OF added value beyond the program itself.
edit:
I just looked at the manual - it's 14 pages long if you discount the pages of legalese and covers. It really wasn't worth bothering to read.
The easiest way is to add physical content. Way way back in the days of 8 bit computing, there was the Ultima series of games. Now, they could easily be cracked, of course, but the real reason everyone bought the real game was because the thing HAD NO TUTORIAL. You absolutely required the map and instruction manual to understand how to play the game. It also was far too large to easily copy.
Other games required a complex manual to be able to identify enemy units and understand specifics and tactics as well. Submarine and aircraft simulations come to mind here - few people pirated them because you needed the manual to play it properly.
Other games have such a huge set of rules that you need it - the NeverWinter Nights series is a good example. You're always flipping the manual back and forth to look up something.
Where game companies go wrong is that they ship the games in a tiny DVD box, have a idiot-proof tutorial, no manual(but a PDF file!), and a lot of hand-holding, as well as an easy way to look up and reassign keys. As a result, there's no reason to do anything other than obtain the program and go. I don't expect this approach to work, though. Most of the younger players are seriously dumb as a rock and would whine about having to read and use their brains for a change.
But a 100 page printed manual that's required to really play and get the most out of a game, or other items... That's worth something. So the compromise solution would be quite easy:
- stop releasing the help guides for the games and include one in the box. My son wants that new Pokemon game and the $19.95 help book for it is 300+ pages long and almost 2 inches thick(!). If the only way to get that was to buy the actual game... Problem solved.
[Monty Python Skit mode]
Ubuntu? BSD? Feh. Back in my day we had CPM and liked it...
[/Monty Python Skit mode]
Q: just for fun, what is the most primitive or obscure OS you could install on it?
I have to second this suggestion as well.
The nation is flooded with CS and MBA and similar "tech" people. Many are out of work or worse, when there is a job, it's moved overseas.
But a degree in engineering is gold. There is a massive shortage of them in almost every nation on the planet, and it's a solid degree that can be leveraged into almost any technical field. Doubly so if you have a BS in Computers. It's essentially the MBA of the science world. But it doesn't have the glut or the backlash that the MBA suffers from.
Lastly, a masters in computers is really only good for teaching. Not that that's bad - most of my family and relatives are/were teachers - but it's basically seen as "more of the same... where's the experience?" by companies. While there may BE a difference in level and skill, they just don't care and would just as soon hire a guy with a BS and 5-10 years of hands-on experience(often for less money as well). A MSEE, though, is relevant and required for many fields as a minimum level by employers.
I don't know of many homeless or starving engineers.
I officially hate California now.
Yes, I've lived here my whole life and there's lot wrong that we all complain about here, but this is too much.
P.S. what if your car doesn't have A/C?
A feature that I
d love to see added to a motherboard is to add 1-4 dedicated slots that can be configured as a ramdisk at the BIOS level. That way you'd need no drivers and it would survive a reboot. Surely this could be done fairly easily.
I'd be happy with even 6 or 8 slots. It's been largely worthless to try to run large amounts of ram on most OSs lately because with 2 or 4 slots at most on most motherboards, you're limited to 8 or 16GB. At least cheaply, since nobody can afford 8 or 16GB modules.
http://www.gridswatch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1242&Itemid=14
There already is a proposed 2048 computer cluster being built. Putting 5000 of these in a massive server farm and linking them all together isn't completely beyond consideration or current technologies.(5000*200K=1 billion)
I give them 3 years, tops, until they have a cluster like this that has the computing power of a human brain. If they can increase the size to 1 million per chip in a few years(quite reasonable, IMO), then it would only need a thousand. We've done 1000 CPU clusters before. I think there's even a name for that... ;)
if you ever want to play in offline mode, simply check the "remember your login info" checkbox next time you log in. -- its not an action which needs to be done every time you want to be offline.
then any time you start up and you can't get online you have the option "start in offline mode", as the GP posted.
Correct. I once lost Net while moving for three solid weeks. It never once asked me for validation after doing this as long as I didn't go online/try to play an online game(duh) and also turned off automatic updates on the specific title. This last part is WHY it tries to log in.
Note - if you run mods, you of course also need to turn this off.
You need to set offline mode as Andy said above and "remember your login info" and then disable "keep this game up to date". It's really not the huge hairball that people imagine.
People keep thinking about it being smarter than humans and doing typical science fiction type nonsense. The real problem isn't that but instead how such a small cluster these of chips could be made into a device to crack codes, bypass security, run a botnet, and do any similar task that generally requires human input or monitoring to react to changes or to invent new strategies. Computers have been historically bad at lateral thinking in the past. Are we sure we want to give them that ability?
Think of it like a dog that moves 1000x faster than you do. You go out to get the mail and when you get back a few minutes later, it's chewed your furniture into tatters, ate all the food, dug 50 holes in the back yard, and left about a dozen piles of poop to clean up. Leave for work and come back 8 hours later...(roughly equal to a year being left alone to the dog in this case)
Obviously a computer as smart as a human causes alarms to go off and people to be wary of it. But what harm can a bunch of robots with 1/10th the IQ do?(sic for the impaired) It's the ones that fly below the radar and are seen as "benign" that are the real cause for concern.
Here's what I really like about Steam:
- I can move computers or reinstall as I wish. I can play a game "delete" it, and later on, reinstall it - just load the main game file and go. No install and reinstall idiocy. If I need to clear up some HD space, I can delete the game main game file in a few seconds and poof - 4 or 5 gigs free.
If I have to reinstall my OS, I don't have to play CD or DVD shuffling and look for CD keys and other idiocy. I just install the steam client, validate, and hit "stun" and let it d/l all 40-50 gigs of junk overnight. Note - you can also back up your steam apps directory and toss the compressed files back in with a reinstalled OS. It'll check and validate and you're good to go. With DVDs, you're SOL - because it has to do all sorts of tweaking and stuff with the registry. Steam does this for you. Nice.
- None of UbiSoft's or EA or Sony's malware DRM rootkits. I'd rather have one app that checks to see if I'm who I am(perfectly reasonable, IMO). No CD crippling software, no nonsense that mangles my DirectX. In fact, I'll only buy games from those three PITA companies when it comes out on Steam.
- Updating and patches and support is quick - often in hours or days to fix loading bugs and sound issues. Patches the game for you, as well. Always up to date if you wish.
- As easy as Direct2Drive(another company I also like) to order and buy from. Good prices, too. Often better than the local game store, due to nearly daily promotions and specials. No boxes cluttering up my desk, either. Case in point - last night, Assassin's Creed was a paltry $10. Latest director's cut version, all the goodies. Just buy, D/L, and run an hour later.
- Loads of older games that were impossible to run on Vista from the W2K/W98 era. Many are well worth playing, even today.
- Movie trailers and so on are MUCH easier to manage and less spammy than the major websites and places like Apple. HD trailers are a snap as well to d/l and clearly tell you the resolution and quality up front. Having to watch a trailer online in a little box at most sites is a major hassle.
Cons:
- It sits in the background and hogs resources. Impossible to play even HL via Steam versus the original standalone boxed game cleanly unless you have a dual core processor. My old P3 could run HL1 without stuttering. My P4 couldn't. My dual-core now is fine, but really...
- Many AV and Net monitoring/firewall apps just have a fit with it.
- Loads new content and patches and so on sometimes in the background without me ever allowing it.
- Worries about not being able to access my programs. But given the money Valve is making, I suspect it'll be around for at least 10-20 more years.
One would assume it does a slow throttled attempt, starting with the true idiot passwords like "admin", "administrator", "root", "password" etc. Those four alone probably get you into 10% of those routers.
The number of clients that I used to run into doing consulting that had no password set on their machines at all on any level was about 10-20%. They buy it and plug it in and that's that. Then the insanity starts as they are often connected to a DSL or cable connection 24/7 without any real protection.
I can deal with scripts and various Ai and realism modes and so on, but the thing that really irks me is when the computer is obviously cheating or being super-human in small ways. It's because the AI is often just tossed in at the end.
It's not impossible, for instance, to program in LOS and distance/fog of war calculations. Older games like Deus Ex did that quite well, in fact, and even X-Com if you go that far back. But nobody does it. So you get idiocy like every enemy firing at you the second their body physically makes LOS contact with you. You need a scope but they see you in the weeks and start firing at you from 1500 ft away.(can't hit at that range, but still...)
The Hitman series, for instance, was very rewarding to play just because of the fact that the enemies reacted to sounds and your visibility even somewhat. Remaining silent throughout a level to keep the enemy unaware had rewards. And shooting off a canon, well, yes, everyone in the level should start searching for you. Otherwise it's equally inane. And gunshots do travel blocks. Larger things like an explosion, well, you can hear that miles away sometimes.
If you go in making a huge amount of noise and blowing stuff up all Rambo style, the big boss and the rest of them should go right for you and completely overwhelm you. In real life, a major threat gets the biggest guns on it from the beginning and not after you've taken out the smaller grunts. Of course this also means you need the tools to keep the noise down to reasonable levels.
If you sneak and lurk around corners, you should almost always be rewarded with getting the first shot off before they react. If you are quiet, they should send our smaller patrols and take a few minutes to figure out what's going on.
It's not the scripts or AI. It's that the programmers just don't care to try to add in human limitations. If you have enough limitations and exploits built into the game, the AI can have perfect aim and reactions and be scripted but it doesn't feel like it. You shouldn't program in mistakes or dumb actions, but instead, each level of difficulty adds in or deletes certain enemy limitations and abilities that it can or can't use.
Easy: Enemy has no special gear and sees and hears like you do. They have cheap gear and basic guns.(budget's tight)
Hard: They get better gear and guns and scopes on some. Some cameras and security.
Hardest: Enemy has scopes, silencers, night vision, and radar/listening devices, as well as extra cameras and so on. They have better guns and extra/better ammo(which can still run out and you can obtain off of their bodies)
Also, it's worth pointing out that this test shows IE is faster at loading cached pages, not uncached websites. From their paper:
In the Internet Explorer lab: We visit each site prior to starting any site test. Preloading the cache prior to a test helps ensure systems are at a known base before starting.
So wait - let me get this straight...
Half of the time IE8 is SLOWER than the others even when preloading/precaching? I think this is a bigger headline than the original, to be honest. Let me make a new headline:
"IE8's precached performance is slower than the competition's uncached performance 50% of the time"
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_0_s_5_1_aa&usg=AFQjCNGsDHmB0V2Lvm7g2ez2R97ZatTnvw&cid=1309739635&ei=MZS4SZCvNJTG8ASH5N_FAw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fhostednews%2Fafp%2Farticle%2FALeqM5iybcZW-FJGDR9LlLNi2RC3vR7uxQ
China plans first space docking for 2011
Sure looks like they've figured out how to make things other than bicycles.
China, which is kind of like our Wild West(tm) right now, does whatever it wants. And it's going to completely leave us behind much as we did with Europe. Remember, Europe at the time had very restrictive guilds, laws, and regulations. The U.S. didn't. So we invented and invented. We built and didn't really care that much if it was someone else's idea.
Just like China now is doing.
And you wonder why they are going to put up their own space station modules next year and beat us to a habitat on the moon... We have to dismantle the idiocy or we'll never be able to move fast enough to keep up.
Honestly, if I was interested in space or technology or just making new things, I'd be making a beeline to China and doing it there without the millions of laws and tens of thousands of lawyers all suing everyone into oblivion over idiotic patents.
Say he has 800,000songs he serves (around 7years solid of music) that is 4TB of space. And lets say the rest is videos. That is about 88,000 DVDs. That since movies began there would be 880 movies a year worth watching. Movies weren't that big until recently but I bet this year hollywood isn't going to release 880movies to theaters. This figure also blows away what netflix has to offer. Ignoring the fact that you would have to watch like 6 movies a day to get through the list. It doesn't make any sense.
Don't forget to add in porn, movies from Japan, China, Russia, Australia, Europe, India, and of course, TV shows and a few TB of various computer apps, naturally.
The BBC alone spits out more than a TB a year of TV shows and various rubbish on its various channels, and that's just (nearly)worthless off-the-air programming. U.S. TV shows...
There goes the best source of free entertainment online. They always are worth at least half an hour of laughs.
Recording is so cheap that it can be done reasonably well with equipment costing a few thousand dollars or less. That means it's pretty much accessible to everyone. For $10/month you can sign up with a digital music distributor who will put your mp3s on Amazon.com, itunes, etc. Set up a myspace page for your band or register a domain and get an inexpensive web host and you've got a web presence.
All that results from such attempts at "recording" is a low quality product that nobody wants to actually buy. GOOD recording and mastering is still as expensive and time consuming as it ever was. Nobody buys the equipment - they all rent a fully outfitted studio and do it that way.
But you are right about the fact that the big companies aren't required to be part of the picture any more, thanks to the easy availability of recording studios and equipment.
I worked for a company once and after I left, I waited a few months.(rolled a die for the number of months just to be random) then I sent an email or two anonymously to the SPA and similar places.
They were plainly able to afford licenses but refused to do so because they were notoriously cheap.
My current employer is a "good egg" though and is fully compliant. Nice to work for a place that has decent morals for once...(yes they do exist from time to time)