I can see these easily replacing all of those Raptors and being huge in a typical server environment.
Consider that with a raid array, failures are rarely catastrophic in nature. But the time wouldn't be months (mostly due to heat killing the drives quicker), but years. With these, though, you'd save enormous amount of power, have much less heat, require smaller power supplies, and so on.
Imagine a raid array at a major company. 200 drives. 1KW power supply driving it all.
This shows how out of touch most PC users really are.
Name me the last game that was released for PC and PC only.
Right - it never happens anymore. 95% of all new PC games are out on the 360 or PS3 or similar as well. So the real question is why don't you just buy a used 360 for the same price as a copy of Vista? Same games, quicker and easier to play, and even HD suppport right out of the box.
Spiderman 3? Dual-Platform UT3? Same. Test Drive Unlimited? Yep.
The list is very small for most PC-only releases. Enough that they could easily be overlooked. And some, like Bully and Halo 3, are console-only(or come out on PC more than a year later)
Get a good console. Any version of *IX will do all of the rest for free. If you are truly brain-dead, just pay for a copy of Xandros and you'll have all the hand-holding you can deal with. Also, a copy of a better emulator for business apps than WINE.($40 of the cost right there)
There's really no good reason anymore not to switch.
1 - tiny bit(more of a film) on my fingers - massage the heatsink and cpu surface until I start to get a little heat from friction(have to work it in a bit). This fills the pores and grooves in the metal. The cpu and heatsink should look like they have a thin film of oil or grease on them. Utterly transparent and not visible unless you angle it so that the light hits it right is the goal.
2 - put a tiny blob in the middle. Now, by tiny blob, I mean really tiny. Half to one quarter the size of a tic-tac. A 2mmx2mm blob. One tube of Arctic Silver or simmilar is enough for about *20* CPUS using this method. You want an ubsurdly small amount.
3 - seat the CPU. The springs on most aftermarket heatsinks like Zalman makes require 15-20lbs of pressure or more to snap into place. Leave the entire assembly overnight and don't breathe on it until the whole thing sets up and locks into place.
This has probably been pointed out somewhere in the last 5-6 pages of posts, but the problem with enacting a law like this is that it won't work at all.
Well, it will inside the U.S., for U.S. retailers. But some company over in China... You guessed it - they won't care or be able to even be sued if they dump their stuff on us.
Oh, wait - they already DO that - so all this would do is really drive more consumers away from U.S. products. Why not just get it over, pull the trigger, with and impose tariffs to put the consumer out of their misery while you're at it?
This is as shortsighted as the miserable fees they are going to charge internet radio. All it will do is drive the companies offshore and thereby suck money OUT of the U.S. economy.
I ran across this comment reading this: **** My assumption was that with the whole "Previous Version" feature you can do on a folder or file (which is actually kinda cool), that it was making copies for historical purposes. **** It occurs to me that it might very well be doing this so that it's easier for the various agencies and so on to spy on you - or to figure out what you were doing if or when they decide to impound your hardware.
What got me thinking about this was - remember the story about a year ago where the U.K. was asking for MS to create a backdoor for them? I suspect that this is some of that legacy code filtering its way into the U.S. version.
Look! It keeps track of everything you ever did!
Charming. I just want to move my database over to another partition and I'm getting nerfed in the process. No thank you.
The backlash by the fans in the U.K. when they even mentioned that they might cancel it was enormous. And the Doctor IIRC, still has 3 more regenerations(though technically 5 more, since there's an evil version of hi in the "future" and the 8th doctor which was in that once movie - well, we don't know - the actor could come back as a later version of himself(time travel and whatnot - go figure - lol)
Not going anywhere. And, yes, it's a bit campy.
The real news, though, is that it appears as if Tom Baker himself might be playing The Master sometime in the future - which should be really neat.(or at least possibly playing the Valeyard(sp?) - his evil future self, since he's not too far off in appearance these days from the originals, oddly enough).
Which is why thye need to drastically re-think this Blue-Ray nonsense.
The reality is that none of the games actually use 50 gigs of data, or even close to ten, so a standard dual-layer DVD would suffice. $30 their cost versus $300.
I'd personally stop releasing games in Blue-Ray format, which is about hat - 30 of them, total, of any worth, and start over with DVD based titles.
Because you are exactly right - all of the games are about multi-platform these days. And the 360 is tons cheaper for the same exact game. As long as the PS3 is a dime more expensive than the 360, it'll flop.
We wanted a PS2 with better graphics and speed. What we got was a yuppie toy that nobody can afford.
I once read that the component cost of a PS3 minus the Blue-Ray drive is less than half of what it is now. Basically, what this means in plain language is that if they shipped the PS3 with a normal DVD drive instead of a Blue-Ray drive, the price to the consumer would be $200-$250.(!)
The perfect solution, and I really hope someone at Sony reads this, is to offer a PS3 "lite" with a DVD drive and make the Blue-ray drive an extra option, much like how you can get a hard drive for the XBox360. Buy it, remove the original drive, and snap the new one in place. Or not - because there is currently no game made that a dual-layer DVD won't handle.(and expected Blue-Ray games are exactly zero for the forseeable future)
Windows Vista Setup does something smart: It creates a folder called Windows.old in your root directory that contains your old Documents and Settings, Program Files and Windows folders."
Funny thing...
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/home_edition. html
The premium edition has a very nice utility that imports everything from Windows as well.
The price? $40 of that is for CodeWeavers, which is optimized to run Windows apps directly in Linux. It also has free techinical support and a simple as can be upgrade and install application.
It's not Ubuntuu, but it is as close to "Linux for Dummies" as it gets(more hand-holding than even your grandmother would need), and by far the easiest to upgrade and adjust to when moving from Windows that I know of.
A steal at $60(if you look online) - Considering Codeweavers is $40 of that, it's really $20 for the two CDs, tech support and the manual - not too unreasonable for a newbie *ix user.
Wow. Been forever since I last saw such blatant Troll Necromancy. That's an ancient, almost chain-letter-esque posting.
***anyways...*** The emphasis on the money is because well, it's like the RIAA but for business. And by most estimates, over half of all companies use pirated software or have out of data licenses. If you get hit by them, your company might as well be fighting the IRS - it basically comes down to you pay or you pay plus court fees. For a large company with a few hundred employees, this can be a silly amount of money.
It should be: "Forever free and good enough to get the job done." That's a powerful incentive for many small and medium businesses as well, since a hundred thousand in software fines or more can effectively cripple you. Not to mention the nonsense Microsoft reqires to upgrade to Vista and so on if you have servers - it's plain nuts.
The parallels are shockingly simmilar. The big, bloated behemoth floundering under its own weight. The same reaction - to consolodate power, make things more proprietary, raise prices, and put a new and largely useless and mypoic CEO in charge. Business as usual, despite the looming cliff.
All while the smaller, leaner guys eat them for breakfast.
Right now, all I hear from my IT friends, co-workers, and so on is how XP is a disaster and wondering if there isn't ANY alternative out there. Because the OS isn't the big deal - it's when you have to lay out cold, hard cash to replace half of your PC that it is.
The actual number of Macs in use is nearly double what they report, because they count PC hardware sales like Mac sales, but they also add in PC *software* sales into the figures.
Apple sells both together at the same time and so for every Mac sold, it is reported as 1/2 of a PC sale.
The end result if that you can take ALL of the numbers in these articles for Mac and almost double them, which is very close to the reality we see. 15% in the U.S. - actual computer units(OS aside), and an installed "still in use" base of closer to 25% or so. Especially considering educational markets, where Apple is easily 50% in use, given the typical school or university's idea of a computer lab being somethng they install and forget about for a decade. IE - the PC labs on campus are a last resort, never maintained, and if it runs 2000, you are lucky - W95 being still common. The PC labs are deserted and the Mac labs have a waiting list, typically. A mac from 1995 will still run perfectly well by comparison(and that's usually what's still in the lab, chugging away. Not the newest OS, but System 8.x wasn't a bad OS at the time, either)
But none of this is really the main issue, which these articles point out. PCs can own business for all Apple cares. They are doing an end-run and making new markets. Apple still owns education, high-end poblishing, video and audio work, and so on - all incredibly high-end or niche markets with high profitibility. The point someone made here about it being like auto sales is key.
Apple is like BMW. They make high-end performance products aimed at high-end markets. Dell is essentially Chevy. They churn out cheap stuff for the masses. A high percentage of their sales are to rental fleets as well.(PC equivalent to corporate accounts) Comparing both on the same page is nearly impossible except that they both are cars being sold to comsumers.
I keep reading all of these all-too-typical horror stories and one thing keeps coming to my mind, which is that if you are the guy who gets it done and your manager/boss/etc is grinding you and asking for stuff that is impossible, either move to another job or just do an end-run around him and go up the food chain.(after you've secured another possible job of course - heh).
Over and over the pattern is: We work like dogs and the boss gets the recognition.
Well, what would happen if the project failed? If the employees didn't do all of that extra work? More likely, the manager, faced with a general revolt and his ass on the line, will take steps to fix the problem(usually it means hiring extra workers).
Oh - and the #1 rule of employment in IT is?
ALWAYS WORK HOURLY. Never ever *ever* take a salaried job with any company unless you are management/getting in as one of the initial employees/partners/etc. "They worked us 60 hours a week" isn't bad if you're getting overtime or even just straight extra hours(hired as a consultant, for instance).
The sad thing is that this oney-grab by the recording industry will do noting except move all of th internet radio stations ofshore. All of the potintial sales and possible deals, plus the money they currently pay - poof - gone.
Talk about myopic. I can see a board meeting a few months ago: "Hey I have an idea! Let's raise the fees for internet streaming to a level that forces them all to go out of business or move offshore!" Somebody needs to be fired for this nonsense, since they way that you stimulate any business like this is by making it easier and less painful to comply/utilize it.
There are a few problems here tha CCP still ignores. 1: It isn't one employee. It's that since the game's beginning, a majority of the employees have been playing as part of BoB, and it has created a snowball effect. They mysteriously know about special events and spawns first, they know what skills to train for the upcoming patches first, they get blueprints and ships first...
It's not MUCH, but getting a 1-2 week jump on everyone for three years has created a situation where they are easily twice the size that they should be.
See, 9 months ago, player-owned stations didn't exist. There was no way to take and hold areas/territory. Now there is, and the jsmp they got during the summer(and trust me, it's not just one employee - he's just the fallguy here) translated into a massive boost that allowed them to roll over a huge area of the map prtty much unopposed.
My alliance at the time was front and center in the conflict and the running joke was that BoB was like some Hydra - you'd blow up a (capitol - the big ones) ship and it would be replaced almost instantly. Their supply of ships and intel was essentially inexhaustable and nearly perfect. At a very critical time in the game's development.
As of yet, nothing has been done and BoB still has the goal of taking over the whole map - and likely will accomplish it, since most of the Devs still are members(though are much more careful about diong things that they can get caught for) Note - the official response at the time was in effect "we'll take steps so that we're more stealthy from now on", since the official corporate rule is that you can play online as long as you don't get outed or caught. (abuse potential is patently obvious).
2:Eve still routinely edits, censors, and punishes players for raising a stink of any kind on their online forums or in-game. This is unacceptable, since the problems still exist.
3:When their error/problem cue gets to be too large to handle, they jsut delete it and say "re-submit it". This is a errible corporate policy and both of these "points" were repeatedly brought up by members here and yet never made it into the interview. Forget about the cheating, the way they handle feedback and problems is apalling to say the least. It almost reminds me of Microsoft's oblivious attitude. Once you buy their program, well, who cares - they have the money and if you don't like it, tough. Even WoTC is better with this sort of thing.
4:While the newbie tutorials are good, there is virtually no manual of any kind for most of the new areas. Take exploration(new skill/money making area in the last patch) - it was 100% up to the community to figure out how to do it - CCP made no attempt to even give a primer on it. This is true for most of the game - if you want to know how to actually do anything, you have to go offline to some third party site to read a FAQ. this shows a serious lack of willingness to support the community. This also wasn't brought up in the interview. This would be like valve creating a new game and saying "you figure it out..." almost like a typical coin-operated video game(rows of buttons and nothng else).
5:The items in the game are all there. Just they are controlled and fixed by cartels and groups of developer-led individuals(for the most part). They generate huge sums of money. While this is legitimate and proper within the game, there is to date no method to address the fact. Blueprints for these items are still rare and largely unavailable. The "lottery" is a disaster and remains to this day the #1 problem in the game. Yes, they routinely shut down and delete discussions about this on their forums, as expected.
6:Lastly, the interview cold be summed up by one sentance: "We have taken these issues under consideration."(roundfiled them in plain English)
Seriously. No data, no anything - and TCO for them when they probably get Windows for free now... yeah, whatever. Either that or they have some really stupid *ix admins and support staff.(because *ix takes 1/2 the manpower to run compared to Windows)
For everyone else, thouhg, it's clear. As long as your current machine keeps running, it will run every distribution of most every version of *ix for the next decade. No upgrade cost, no new hardware, and no having it blow up on you every hour or two.
I've used computers for um... 28 years. In that time, I've used over a dozen different OSs and Windows without a doubt is the worst(OS/2 aside - that deserves a special place in OS hell). Until I used Wondows, having a machine running for days or weeks at a time without a single crash or glitch was the norm. Somehow Microsoft has made everyone complacent with computers crashing - sometimes several times a day - as routine.
*ix is such an improvement that it literally feels like you are driving a nice Porsche and discovered than there are more than two gears. Suddenly the whole world snaps into focus and everything is quick and smooth as glass.
Novel - they forget this part - *ix systems result in much higher worker productivity and happiness/less stress. Less work and stress for the IT department as well. And that effects the whole business. Oh well, their loss, I guess... They'll learn when Microsoft crashes and burns like Apple did in the mid 90s.(eerily simmilar pattern we're seeing right now)
I don't know if anyone mentioned this or not(Don't have time to read hundreds of replies today), but get a pair of lightweight Patagonia/Capelene thermal underwear. These are amazing if the weather gets cold or rainy and wick away moisture quickly.
Alternate Reality: The City, for instane, was the very first 3-D graphical RPG. EVER. The list of innovations was astounding. Basically it was an 8-bit computing equivalent of Eye of the Beholder. Just... back in the early 80s. (yes, not a typo - way way WAY before Windows or Macintosh ever came about.
Elite also is notable as it is the very first 3-d space exploration/trading game. Even today it plays remarkably well.
They also forgot Rogue/Hack/Angband/etc. - the very and I mean the VERY FIRST RPG/Dungeon crawl. Ever.
We need CIS/CS departments for one critical reason, which is that the past and the future(10-20 years from now) belong to unix. It just took this insane detour through Windows and MacOS(pre OS-X) for a while.
And you can't do anything meaningful in unix without exercising your grey matter. They jsut need to stop teaching applications and get back to the basics/start teaching programming again.
That said, Cap will be back. Steve Rogers was not the only Captain America and he won't be the last. William Naslund, Jeff Mace, a "fake" Steve Rogers, and most recently, John Walker briefly took the mantle of "Captain America" from Rogers. I am sure another Marvel hero will assume the role of Captain America in his stead. **** Sounds like a re-hash of Green Lantern to me.
Started out as one guy... now it's whatever guy currently has the ring(plus the hundreds of them apparently out in the wider galaxy).
I'm voting for some (Al-Queda type group) scientist cloning his DNA to make an anti-Cap supersoldier.
This also works for any implanted chip/scanner/biometric data tracker/etc.
Just hit the thing with a stungun for a second. This also will fry a computer motherboard instantly by just touching the case with the arc.(not that I've done this - lol - just to show how effectively it nukes anything with a microchip in it)
Considering that they recently managed to stop a beam of light entirely, speeding light up doesn't sound so farfetched.
Of course, the catch being it ONLY apparently works for light that way. Ie - nothing can go faster than the speed of light except, it appears, light itself.(interesting loophole)
Imagine a tube filled with water, for instance. The tube is made of a plastic that glows when a chemical-filled water flows through it, kind of like a glow-stick. It has thousands of tiny holes. We see the glow from where the light touches our space/dimmensions and flows out of these holes(it also touches other dimmensions we can't easily see/interface with, hence the pattern of contact-points/holes)
If it goes faster in the "tube", we still see it all light up - just the area in the middle has to play "catch-up" since the rate at which it flows out of the holes and interfaces with our reality is constant(C). So our POV sees it emerge before the middle shows it. Yet nothing went back in time. Nothing got broken. The space/dimmensions is just reacting slower than expected and we get confused(relativistic effect working against our poor brains)
Side note - this would possibly explain dark matter. It's just going too fast to interface or isn't interfacing with our space-time/dimmensions properly. Of course, gravity still works mostly the same, reguardless, so we can tell its there.
All it will do is shift the markets overseas/to other countries.
And everyone suffers because internet radio currently does pay ISPs and employs people and pays fees already. But with this change, not one will be able to stay in business. Yet they will still BE in business. Just giving that money to Mexico or the U.K. or wherever our insane laws don't apply.
Good move. (insert killing the golden goose fable for the impared, which seem to be everyone in the recording industry these days)
Slashdot Mirror
I can see these easily replacing all of those Raptors and being huge in a typical server environment.
Consider that with a raid array, failures are rarely catastrophic in nature. But the time wouldn't be months (mostly due to heat killing the drives quicker), but years. With these, though, you'd save enormous amount of power, have much less heat, require smaller power supplies, and so on.
Imagine a raid array at a major company. 200 drives. 1KW power supply driving it all.
This shows how out of touch most PC users really are.
Name me the last game that was released for PC and PC only.
Right - it never happens anymore. 95% of all new PC games are out on the 360 or PS3 or similar as well. So the real question is why don't you just buy a used 360 for the same price as a copy of Vista? Same games, quicker and easier to play, and even HD suppport right out of the box.
Spiderman 3? Dual-Platform
UT3? Same.
Test Drive Unlimited? Yep.
The list is very small for most PC-only releases. Enough that they could easily be overlooked. And some, like Bully and Halo 3, are console-only(or come out on PC more than a year later)
Get a good console. Any version of *IX will do all of the rest for free. If you are truly brain-dead, just pay for a copy of Xandros and you'll have all the hand-holding you can deal with. Also, a copy of a better emulator for business apps than WINE.($40 of the cost right there)
There's really no good reason anymore not to switch.
Heh. Of course, Diebold hits a brick wall when they get to this item:
"The device must provide adequate security to ensure tampering isn't possible."
I can't imagine something like this isn't in the specs. That, and having a verifiable paper trail.
The way that I always did it was the following:
1 - tiny bit(more of a film) on my fingers - massage the heatsink and cpu surface until I start to get a little heat from friction(have to work it in a bit). This fills the pores and grooves in the metal. The cpu and heatsink should look like they have a thin film of oil or grease on them. Utterly transparent and not visible unless you angle it so that the light hits it right is the goal.
2 - put a tiny blob in the middle. Now, by tiny blob, I mean really tiny. Half to one quarter the size of a tic-tac. A 2mmx2mm blob. One tube of Arctic Silver or simmilar is enough for about *20* CPUS using this method. You want an ubsurdly small amount.
3 - seat the CPU. The springs on most aftermarket heatsinks like Zalman makes require 15-20lbs of pressure or more to snap into place. Leave the entire assembly overnight and don't breathe on it until the whole thing sets up and locks into place.
This has probably been pointed out somewhere in the last 5-6 pages of posts, but the problem with enacting a law like this is that it won't work at all.
Well, it will inside the U.S., for U.S. retailers. But some company over in China... You guessed it - they won't care or be able to even be sued if they dump their stuff on us.
Oh, wait - they already DO that - so all this would do is really drive more consumers away from U.S. products. Why not just get it over, pull the trigger, with and impose tariffs to put the consumer out of their misery while you're at it?
This is as shortsighted as the miserable fees they are going to charge internet radio. All it will do is drive the companies offshore and thereby suck money OUT of the U.S. economy.
I ran across this comment reading this:
****
My assumption was that with the whole "Previous Version" feature you can do on a folder or file (which is actually kinda cool), that it was making copies for historical purposes.
****
It occurs to me that it might very well be doing this so that it's easier for the various agencies and so on to spy on you - or to figure out what you were doing if or when they decide to impound your hardware.
What got me thinking about this was - remember the story about a year ago where the U.K. was asking for MS to create a backdoor for them? I suspect that this is some of that legacy code filtering its way into the U.S. version.
Look! It keeps track of everything you ever did!
Charming. I just want to move my database over to another partition and I'm getting nerfed in the process. No thank you.
The backlash by the fans in the U.K. when they even mentioned that they might cancel it was enormous. And the Doctor IIRC, still has 3 more regenerations(though technically 5 more, since there's an evil version of hi in the "future" and the 8th doctor which was in that once movie - well, we don't know - the actor could come back as a later version of himself(time travel and whatnot - go figure - lol)
Not going anywhere. And, yes, it's a bit campy.
The real news, though, is that it appears as if Tom Baker himself might be playing The Master sometime in the future - which should be really neat.(or at least possibly playing the Valeyard(sp?) - his evil future self, since he's not too far off in appearance these days from the originals, oddly enough).
Which is why thye need to drastically re-think this Blue-Ray nonsense.
The reality is that none of the games actually use 50 gigs of data, or even close to ten, so a standard dual-layer DVD would suffice. $30 their cost versus $300.
I'd personally stop releasing games in Blue-Ray format, which is about hat - 30 of them, total, of any worth, and start over with DVD based titles.
Because you are exactly right - all of the games are about multi-platform these days. And the 360 is tons cheaper for the same exact game. As long as the PS3 is a dime more expensive than the 360, it'll flop.
We wanted a PS2 with better graphics and speed. What we got was a yuppie toy that nobody can afford.
I once read that the component cost of a PS3 minus the Blue-Ray drive is less than half of what it is now. Basically, what this means in plain language is that if they shipped the PS3 with a normal DVD drive instead of a Blue-Ray drive, the price to the consumer would be $200-$250.(!)
The perfect solution, and I really hope someone at Sony reads this, is to offer a PS3 "lite" with a DVD drive and make the Blue-ray drive an extra option, much like how you can get a hard drive for the XBox360. Buy it, remove the original drive, and snap the new one in place. Or not - because there is currently no game made that a dual-layer DVD won't handle.(and expected Blue-Ray games are exactly zero for the forseeable future)
Funny thing...
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/home_edition. html
The premium edition has a very nice utility that imports everything from Windows as well. The price? $40 of that is for CodeWeavers, which is optimized to run Windows apps directly in Linux. It also has free techinical support and a simple as can be upgrade and install application.
It's not Ubuntuu, but it is as close to "Linux for Dummies" as it gets(more hand-holding than even your grandmother would need), and by far the easiest to upgrade and adjust to when moving from Windows that I know of.
A steal at $60(if you look online) - Considering Codeweavers is $40 of that, it's really $20 for the two CDs, tech support and the manual - not too unreasonable for a newbie *ix user.
Wow. Been forever since I last saw such blatant Troll Necromancy. That's an ancient, almost chain-letter-esque posting.
***anyways...***
The emphasis on the money is because well, it's like the RIAA but for business. And by most estimates, over half of all companies use pirated software or have out of data licenses. If you get hit by them, your company might as well be fighting the IRS - it basically comes down to you pay or you pay plus court fees. For a large company with a few hundred employees, this can be a silly amount of money.
It should be: "Forever free and good enough to get the job done." That's a powerful incentive for many small and medium businesses as well, since a hundred thousand in software fines or more can effectively cripple you. Not to mention the nonsense Microsoft reqires to upgrade to Vista and so on if you have servers - it's plain nuts.
Right... Mid 90s. Apple Computer.
The parallels are shockingly simmilar. The big, bloated behemoth floundering under its own weight. The same reaction - to consolodate power, make things more proprietary, raise prices, and put a new and largely useless and mypoic CEO in charge. Business as usual, despite the looming cliff.
All while the smaller, leaner guys eat them for breakfast.
Right now, all I hear from my IT friends, co-workers, and so on is how XP is a disaster and wondering if there isn't ANY alternative out there. Because the OS isn't the big deal - it's when you have to lay out cold, hard cash to replace half of your PC that it is.
The actual number of Macs in use is nearly double what they report, because they count PC hardware sales like Mac sales, but they also add in PC *software* sales into the figures.
Apple sells both together at the same time and so for every Mac sold, it is reported as 1/2 of a PC sale.
The end result if that you can take ALL of the numbers in these articles for Mac and almost double them, which is very close to the reality we see. 15% in the U.S. - actual computer units(OS aside), and an installed "still in use" base of closer to 25% or so. Especially considering educational markets, where Apple is easily 50% in use, given the typical school or university's idea of a computer lab being somethng they install and forget about for a decade. IE - the PC labs on campus are a last resort, never maintained, and if it runs 2000, you are lucky - W95 being still common. The PC labs are deserted and the Mac labs have a waiting list, typically. A mac from 1995 will still run perfectly well by comparison(and that's usually what's still in the lab, chugging away. Not the newest OS, but System 8.x wasn't a bad OS at the time, either)
But none of this is really the main issue, which these articles point out. PCs can own business for all Apple cares. They are doing an end-run and making new markets. Apple still owns education, high-end poblishing, video and audio work, and so on - all incredibly high-end or niche markets with high profitibility. The point someone made here about it being like auto sales is key.
Apple is like BMW. They make high-end performance products aimed at high-end markets.
Dell is essentially Chevy. They churn out cheap stuff for the masses. A high percentage of their sales are to rental fleets as well.(PC equivalent to corporate accounts)
Comparing both on the same page is nearly impossible except that they both are cars being sold to comsumers.
I keep reading all of these all-too-typical horror stories and one thing keeps coming to my mind, which is that if you are the guy who gets it done and your manager/boss/etc is grinding you and asking for stuff that is impossible, either move to another job or just do an end-run around him and go up the food chain.(after you've secured another possible job of course - heh).
Over and over the pattern is: We work like dogs and the boss gets the recognition.
Well, what would happen if the project failed? If the employees didn't do all of that extra work? More likely, the manager, faced with a general revolt and his ass on the line, will take steps to fix the problem(usually it means hiring extra workers).
Oh - and the #1 rule of employment in IT is?
ALWAYS WORK HOURLY. Never ever *ever* take a salaried job with any company unless you are management/getting in as one of the initial employees/partners/etc. "They worked us 60 hours a week" isn't bad if you're getting overtime or even just straight extra hours(hired as a consultant, for instance).
The sad thing is that this oney-grab by the recording industry will do noting except move all of th internet radio stations ofshore. All of the potintial sales and possible deals, plus the money they currently pay - poof - gone.
Talk about myopic. I can see a board meeting a few months ago:
"Hey I have an idea! Let's raise the fees for internet streaming to a level that forces them all to go out of business or move offshore!" Somebody needs to be fired for this nonsense, since they way that you stimulate any business like this is by making it easier and less painful to comply/utilize it.
There are a few problems here tha CCP still ignores.
1: It isn't one employee. It's that since the game's beginning, a majority of the employees have been playing as part of BoB, and it has created a snowball effect. They mysteriously know about special events and spawns first, they know what skills to train for the upcoming patches first, they get blueprints and ships first...
It's not MUCH, but getting a 1-2 week jump on everyone for three years has created a situation where they are easily twice the size that they should be.
See, 9 months ago, player-owned stations didn't exist. There was no way to take and hold areas/territory. Now there is, and the jsmp they got during the summer(and trust me, it's not just one employee - he's just the fallguy here) translated into a massive boost that allowed them to roll over a huge area of the map prtty much unopposed.
My alliance at the time was front and center in the conflict and the running joke was that BoB was like some Hydra - you'd blow up a (capitol - the big ones) ship and it would be replaced almost instantly. Their supply of ships and intel was essentially inexhaustable and nearly perfect. At a very critical time in the game's development.
As of yet, nothing has been done and BoB still has the goal of taking over the whole map - and likely will accomplish it, since most of the Devs still are members(though are much more careful about diong things that they can get caught for) Note - the official response at the time was in effect "we'll take steps so that we're more stealthy from now on", since the official corporate rule is that you can play online as long as you don't get outed or caught. (abuse potential is patently obvious).
2:Eve still routinely edits, censors, and punishes players for raising a stink of any kind on their online forums or in-game. This is unacceptable, since the problems still exist.
3:When their error/problem cue gets to be too large to handle, they jsut delete it and say "re-submit it". This is a errible corporate policy and both of these "points" were repeatedly brought up by members here and yet never made it into the interview. Forget about the cheating, the way they handle feedback and problems is apalling to say the least. It almost reminds me of Microsoft's oblivious attitude. Once you buy their program, well, who cares - they have the money and if you don't like it, tough. Even WoTC is better with this sort of thing.
4:While the newbie tutorials are good, there is virtually no manual of any kind for most of the new areas. Take exploration(new skill/money making area in the last patch) - it was 100% up to the community to figure out how to do it - CCP made no attempt to even give a primer on it. This is true for most of the game - if you want to know how to actually do anything, you have to go offline to some third party site to read a FAQ. this shows a serious lack of willingness to support the community. This also wasn't brought up in the interview. This would be like valve creating a new game and saying "you figure it out..." almost like a typical coin-operated video game(rows of buttons and nothng else).
5:The items in the game are all there. Just they are controlled and fixed by cartels and groups of developer-led individuals(for the most part). They generate huge sums of money. While this is legitimate and proper within the game, there is to date no method to address the fact. Blueprints for these items are still rare and largely unavailable. The "lottery" is a disaster and remains to this day the #1 problem in the game. Yes, they routinely shut down and delete discussions about this on their forums, as expected.
6:Lastly, the interview cold be summed up by one sentance:
"We have taken these issues under consideration."(roundfiled them in plain English)
Seriously. No data, no anything - and TCO for them when they probably get Windows for free now... yeah, whatever. Either that or they have some really stupid *ix admins and support staff.(because *ix takes 1/2 the manpower to run compared to Windows)
For everyone else, thouhg, it's clear. As long as your current machine keeps running, it will run every distribution of most every version of *ix for the next decade. No upgrade cost, no new hardware, and no having it blow up on you every hour or two.
I've used computers for um... 28 years. In that time, I've used over a dozen different OSs and Windows without a doubt is the worst(OS/2 aside - that deserves a special place in OS hell). Until I used Wondows, having a machine running for days or weeks at a time without a single crash or glitch was the norm. Somehow Microsoft has made everyone complacent with computers crashing - sometimes several times a day - as routine.
*ix is such an improvement that it literally feels like you are driving a nice Porsche and discovered than there are more than two gears. Suddenly the whole world snaps into focus and everything is quick and smooth as glass.
Novel - they forget this part - *ix systems result in much higher worker productivity and happiness/less stress. Less work and stress for the IT department as well. And that effects the whole business. Oh well, their loss, I guess... They'll learn when Microsoft crashes and burns like Apple did in the mid 90s.(eerily simmilar pattern we're seeing right now)
I don't know if anyone mentioned this or not(Don't have time to read hundreds of replies today), but get a pair of lightweight Patagonia/Capelene thermal underwear. These are amazing if the weather gets cold or rainy and wick away moisture quickly.
Now Unbuntu has become un-cool.
It should be called "sorry, PC games only"
Alternate Reality: The City, for instane, was the very first 3-D graphical RPG. EVER. The list of innovations was astounding. Basically it was an 8-bit computing equivalent of Eye of the Beholder. Just... back in the early 80s. (yes, not a typo - way way WAY before Windows or Macintosh ever came about.
Elite also is notable as it is the very first 3-d space exploration/trading game. Even today it plays remarkably well.
They also forgot Rogue/Hack/Angband/etc. - the very and I mean the VERY FIRST RPG/Dungeon crawl. Ever.
Typical rubbish.
We need CIS/CS departments for one critical reason, which is that the past and the future(10-20 years from now) belong to unix. It just took this insane detour through Windows and MacOS(pre OS-X) for a while.
And you can't do anything meaningful in unix without exercising your grey matter. They jsut need to stop teaching applications and get back to the basics/start teaching programming again.
That said, Cap will be back. Steve Rogers was not the only Captain America and he won't be the last. William Naslund, Jeff Mace, a "fake" Steve Rogers, and most recently, John Walker briefly took the mantle of "Captain America" from Rogers. I am sure another Marvel hero will assume the role of Captain America in his stead.
****
Sounds like a re-hash of Green Lantern to me.
Started out as one guy... now it's whatever guy currently has the ring(plus the hundreds of them apparently out in the wider galaxy).
I'm voting for some (Al-Queda type group) scientist cloning his DNA to make an anti-Cap supersoldier.
This also works for any implanted chip/scanner/biometric data tracker/etc.
Just hit the thing with a stungun for a second. This also will fry a computer motherboard instantly by just touching the case with the arc.(not that I've done this - lol - just to show how effectively it nukes anything with a microchip in it)
Considering that they recently managed to stop a beam of light entirely, speeding light up doesn't sound so farfetched.
Of course, the catch being it ONLY apparently works for light that way. Ie - nothing can go faster than the speed of light except, it appears, light itself.(interesting loophole)
Imagine a tube filled with water, for instance. The tube is made of a plastic that glows when a chemical-filled water flows through it, kind of like a glow-stick. It has thousands of tiny holes. We see the glow from where the light touches our space/dimmensions and flows out of these holes(it also touches other dimmensions we can't easily see/interface with, hence the pattern of contact-points/holes)
If it goes faster in the "tube", we still see it all light up - just the area in the middle has to play "catch-up" since the rate at which it flows out of the holes and interfaces with our reality is constant(C). So our POV sees it emerge before the middle shows it. Yet nothing went back in time. Nothing got broken. The space/dimmensions is just reacting slower than expected and we get confused(relativistic effect working against our poor brains)
Side note - this would possibly explain dark matter. It's just going too fast to interface or isn't interfacing with our space-time/dimmensions properly. Of course, gravity still works mostly the same, reguardless, so we can tell its there.
All it will do is shift the markets overseas/to other countries.
And everyone suffers because internet radio currently does pay ISPs and employs people and pays fees already. But with this change, not one will be able to stay in business. Yet they will still BE in business. Just giving that money to Mexico or the U.K. or wherever our insane laws don't apply.
Good move. (insert killing the golden goose fable for the impared, which seem to be everyone in the recording industry these days)