Brawl is not a "hardcore game", in any meaningful sense. It's not hardcore to get good at, it's not hardcore to play, it doesn't require hardcore hardware to play...
It's a button mashing fest that's pretty fun until someone gets good at it, then it ruins friendships. It's not well balanced. It has a huge level of randomness. It's just not a good game. It's certainly not a good fighting game.
It's a casual game for casual gamers. You can play it for 20 minutes, and then leave and do something else.
People who are serious into fighting games play Guilty Gear X or X2, SF4, SFAlpha3, Capcom Vs SNK 2, etc.
And the Wii hardware is not capable of even some of the games that they try to put out for it. Get 4 people together and play mario kart. Those things that are making that clanking sound on the floor? That's the frames that it's dropping to try and keep up with a graphically-unsophisticated game.
1.) Lazy. It's essentially a slightly more powerful gamecube. But, it allows you to sell the same stuff to the same people more than once. Also, in 2006, it was barely acceptable that it didn't put out high def. Now, in 2009, with a large percentage of people owning high def widescreen TVs, it's inconceivable that a modern console will top out at 480p.
2.) Price. It's not that expensive, but it has been out for almost THREE YEARS without a single price drop. Plus, $50 for a new controller. Plus $90 for a bathroom scale. Plus, $50 for the component cable to make it output 480p (see above). Plus, according to E3, a bunch more money for a bunch more controllers. Whenever you point out to someone that nintendo is using cheap hardware, paint-by-number game programming, and proprietary IP to print money, they always come back with "BUT IT'S FUN!!!". What's the last killer title for the Wii?
3.) Lack of killer titles. Zelda, metroid, Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, Wii Fit... there haven't been many for a console that's 3 years old. Where are the 3rd party games?!? The top 14 games (which comprise 40% of the total game sales of the console) are all proprietary IP; you have to go down to #15 to find a non-3rd party game, and that's Guitar Hero III.
We also use it extensively at Rackspace Email division. We generate about 200GB/day of logs from postfix and dovecot installs, and hadoop with mapreduce allows us to pull all sorts of metrics and diagnostic information in very short timeframes. It helps our customer facing support reps, as well as allows us to give more demanding customers the statistics and metrics that they want, plus it helps us with capacity planning and a bunch of other stuff.
As someone who has gone to a lot of shows for a lot of independent (non-RIAA) bands, when I say "giving money directly to the band", I mean literally, I will buy a CD at a rock show, and usually the guy behind the merch table is a MEMBER OF THE BAND.
If you're buying the CD at a show, usually it's no more than $8, and often $5. The band will get their cut, as will the producer, the person who masters it, the studio, etc. You know who doesn't get their cut? The distributor and the brick and mortar store (or virtual) store that I have to go to in order to buy it.
Seriously, I steal a LOT of music. I also go to see bands live, and buy merch from the bands. I'm under no impression that the latter legally cancels out the former, just that karmically, it does.
One trick to try is to convince your windows box that the printer is not remote.
Start, Settings, printers and faxes, Add a printer. Next, local printer attached to this computer (even if it's network), uncheck Plug and Play, next. Create a new port, TCP/IP port, next. New wizard, next, IP address of target printer, next. Then, just for S&G's, try using the "HP LaserJet Series II" driver for all of your black and white, laser and (some) inkjet needs. It usually works.
Initially, CCP was so isolated (geographically and otherwise) from their playerbase that they didn't even care when one of their developers helped his Alliance get access to the richest region of the game (Delve) and gave them exclusive rights to blueprints that gave them monopoly rights to some of the most powerful ships in the game.
1.) Delve isn't the richest region in the game. Fountain is, by MILES and MILES. Fountain has 12 Dysprosium moons and 19 Promethium moons; if you count Aridia, which is the low sec closest to fountain (and also controlled by Pandemic Legion), you can add 6 Dyspro and 7 Promethium moons to that. Delve has 8/12 dyspro and prom, and no additional moons in low sec near by except for the one in Sakht/Aridia. I can provide you with the list if you'd like.
2.) Bob moved there because CCP asked them to as part of a role playing event. There were other alliances that also participated in CCP-sponsored role playing events, but they've all fallen by the wayside as time has gone on. You have to understand - 4-5 years ago, the whole game was like that, and Band of Brothers is the only remaining throwback alliance to the elder days, so they catch a lot of shit from people who assume that this roleplaying stuff helped them be so strong. It simply isn't the case, it's just that none of the other old players are still around.
3.) T20 (the "dirty developer") spawned five T2 ammo blueprints and a Sabre blueprint. These aren't "the most powerful ships in the game". The fact that it happened at all is despicable, but it provided BoB almost no tactical advantage at all. Having the blueprints doesn't mean that the items themselves are free, for one. Not to mention, Evolution has a Sabre BPO anyway.
4.) T20 was reprimanded as soon as it was found that this happened. This was handled internally. Then, 6 months later, when the scandal became public (because someone HACKED A MEMBER'S PRIVATE FORUM), there was an outcry. CCP's response was "look, this is true, and it's been dealt with". What were they going to do, punish him twice for the same incident?
The system isn't perfect - the community representative for faction warfare is intentionally filtering out player suggestions so she can help her own Alliance - but it's created a stronger game. The skill queue system means that my friends and I can log in when it suits us, log off to do other things, and not have to babysit the game every time a game finishes. That's directly due to the CSM system.
5.) Factional Warfare doesn't allow alliances to compete - which is a bad thing, if you're a role playing alliance. I have no idea what you're talking about, and I suspect you don't either. There's nothing gained or lost in Factional Warfare - the NPC rewards are essentially worthless, so it's pretty much just free newbie PVP in low security.
Only new players give a crap about the skill queue. But yes, it is a direct result of CSM action. Much more important is the Attribute remap, for those of us with badly spread attributes to be able to take advantage of some better speeds at skill training. These are some of the only things that the CSM has done. It's basically a popularity contest.
Often, this is enough to make a playable map, anyway. For example, I play Counterstrike Gun Game, which is focused entirely on player skill, not on objective or a vague version of reality.
I think this is in general how Valve does level design. I'm not sure if they use the same Orangeish-Yellow for vertical surfaces and Grey for horizontal surfaces style, but it's got to be something like that. Before you spend any significant time doing the prettying up, it helps to know if the map is good and balanced and fun.
The same steps were taken with UT3, if I remember - they rendered generic low-res textures, slapped them on a wireframe map, and deathmatched the map to hell - then if they liked it, went back and finished it.
I can't imagine this not being the first thing that most people think of when doing level design.
I would really like to be able to use more than 3gb of ram. However, I don't want to go to Vista, and XP 64 bit has been problematic all around.
The next desktop I build will probably be 4 cores and 8gb or 16gb of ram running Windows 7 64 bit.
That's one of the killer features for me. I don't really need 8 or 16 probably, but it's so cheap now... and I have run into situations where I wished I had more than 2gb.
Thank you! You just said, in a reasoned and articulate way, what I would have taken a much more acid tone to say.
I can't believe how people on Slashdot, of all places, are OK with companies using loopholes to headquarter OUT of the US, send jobs overseas, and still do their primary business and receive their primary income from the US, and then not even pay taxes on that!
I have two things to add to your list:
1.) People who are questioning why corporations should pay taxes on revenue received from the US should be reminded that it is the stability and wealth of the citizens and government of the US that provide the disposable income to purchase these companies' products in the first place. Or else, why are Ireland and Bermuda not paying as much per capita in purchases of Microsoft's products.
2.) In addition to the reasons that my parent poster outlined as to why decreasing the amount of money available through tax loopholes is not the same as increasing the tax on businesses, I should point out this: People are complaining that these prices will simply be passed on to the consumer. Some will, but that is only one possible outcome. This decrease in corporate net income could simply equate to a decrease in corporate profits if the corporation's products are sold at a consistent rate. Why would companies not raise rates and instead accept less profits? For one, they can only raise their prices to a level where people will continue to buy them. Product prices are not infinitely elastic, and there is no rule that says a company is supposed to be able to make X amount of profit per sale. At some point, maybe there is only Y amount of money to be made in a given sector, not Y+$loophole.
Whatever, I'm idealistic, but a guy can hope. I work for an IT company that is headquartered and does almost their entire business here, in the US, with US R&D (hi), US call centers, US accountants, US techs, and using US built equipment.
There's nothing wrong inherently with a 10 year old datacenter. Guys, 2000 was 10 years ago. It isn't like we're talking about datacenters from the paleolithic era.
If you already have a building with 5 or 10 megawatts of power run to it from the utility company, and already having some generators hanging around, why not use it? It's not like there have been quantum leaps in cooling or fire suppression or generator technology or how raised floor is put together.
So what, you have to go and buy 30 million bucks worth of power switching, 10 million worth of UPS switching and batteries, and maybe 30 million worth of chillers and cooling apparatus. Then, slap a $500,000 raised floor, drop in a couple of gigabits of fiber transport, and hire a contractor to run the power and networking, and you'll have $400 million left to spend on racks and racks of Dell R710's or whatever strikes your fancy. Better than building a building from scratch.
There are lots of government facilities "around" DC that aren't "in" DC, by the way, Herndon and Fairfax are full of them (just look for the unassuming buildings with the black fence and gated access that's back from the road in office parks).
This happened at a place that I used to consult for.
We would pay verizon about $30/mo per customer to get access to the physical infrastructure, and on top of that, we had to pay for the throughput bandwidth and support costs. We sold DSL at about $50/mo.
Then Verizon came in and started direct selling DSL to the customer for $30/mo.
I mean, we were paying them for local loop access, AND we were buying our upstream bandwidth (a fractional DS3, i think?) from them.
They get their goddamn money either way.
Now, someone like a city of 40,000 people probably has the clout to have a major ISP like Cogent or Level3 or someone trunk a connection at a much cheaper rate, skipping Verizon entirely.
Ok, that article on scaling is 1.) 3 years old 2.) Comparing some random postgres alpha to a mysql 5.1 beta 3.) Actually not comparing them at all, since there's all these pretty graphs of Postgres performance, and then it's like "lol this is better than mysql".
How about using a stable release? How about doing comparative testing?
As someone who's recently upgraded some mysql write masters to 8 core / 16 GB ram / 8x 300gb 2.5" SAS in Raid10 boxes, it scales vertically just fine.
If you're interested in some fiction that's not quite so fanboy specific, you might want to check out http://eve.klaki.net/fiction/ which is a collection of stories written by Istvaan Shogaatsu set in the Eve universe. You might remember Istvaan better as the perpetrator of the Eve Heist that was covered in PCGamer as well as here on Slashdot. ( http://eve.klaki.net/heist/ )
Istvaan is also Tom Czerniawski, who has had several stories published in the Eve magazine EON. On the article linked at Massively, there's a picture of the front cover of a story he's written.
If I'd seen that review without a big name reviewer attached to it - say, on a bunch of fan sites - I'd swear up and down it was Fox doing their own astroturfing. This review was SO POSITIVE that it's hard to believe they wouldn't want the word to get out anyway. I mean, the movie is owned by 20th century fox, and the review is by a fox employee.... I don't see the down side. The guy actually said it was better than The Dark Knight, which - if true - will mean that it's going to make a mint.
That free download thing mostly killed Legends: the game (http://www.legendsthegame.net/) which was sort of someone trying to make an open source Tribes-like game, with some graphical updates and a few fixes like auto-ski, etc.
Sry, nop. My store was lower than that number. I didn't want to mention it, though, cause.. i dunno, I'm paranoid. Don't want anyone to link me to stuff like that? Whatever.
You haven't worked at Best Buy long enough to know better.
I worked at a Best Buy back in the late 90's and early 2000's, eventually becoming the Senior product specialist in the Computer department. The service plan USED to be pushed VERY hard. We were graded on the percentage of overall revenue that was service plans. I remember being told by MANAGERS, not supervisors, that if some customer didn't want to buy the $220 service plan with their $2000 laptop, that I should discourage them from buying it, or try to get them into a cheaper one. We learned all the tricks, what to point out that looked fragile or otherwise likely to break due to "normal wear and tear", etc.
It was always a big deal that we weren't supposed to "inboard", which meant reducing the price of something in order to get the customer to buy the service plan. But the unwritten rule was to not get caught doing it, since reducing the price to include the service plan both got the sale and increased the percentage of the sale that was the service plan.
This may sound really weird to you now, but back in the day, we'd set people up with the computer, and staple the service plan 8.5x11 trifold brochure to the - what's it called, the 3 part carbon copy paper they use to change prices. Anyway, the brochure used to have a blank square on the bottom of the back page, where you wrote in your employee number. Even though there was no commission, they kept track of individual performance, and would use that in your performance reviews, etc.
It's gotten better. When they refocused (after i left) on making the sale and getting the revenue, it became a more pleasant place to shop.
Similar story: I used to have a cell phone with SunCom (I think). This was around 1999.
I don't remember the specifics but it was something like I had free roaming. But in the fine print, it said you have to make 50%+1 minutes of your calls on suncom towers or verizon towers, or something. And I took the phone to college, where there weren't any towers.
Anyway, after 3 months of not making 50% of calls on suncom towers, they switched my plan to X minutes + roaming.
Coincidentally that xmas break, my family was flying out of DC on vacation. Our flight got canceled because of snow, and we used my cellphone to find a new flight. Which said it was connected to a suncom tower. Which actually turned out to be AT&T identifying its self with a code that my phone interpreted as suncom. Right after my plan had been unknowingly switched from the unlimited roaming plan.
Something that everyone forgets is that many companies use downturns as a time to clean house, to get rid of people that they feel are more dead weight than not.
And some companies are trying to aggressively go after the cream of the crop that are being laid off - or even the ones still employed but that are worried about their job security. Some companies are looking to use the economic crisis to pick up some really top quality people.
There are plenty of developers out there who's projects have been canceled or downsized despite the fact that they were building some really far out next gen stuff, plenty of systems admins who are being cut to save on the budget because the IT department is expendable - quality people, hard workers, who need jobs.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you should eliminate page files / swap space entirely.
I know there are edge cases, and one would be where you're moving something from disk into a ramdisk or some such thing, but in my experience... there's no circumstance under common usage where running out of ram and swapping to disk is preferable to running out of ram and having the program crash. To be honest, I would rather things hard crash than run in a slow degraded state.
And these days, with 8 and 16 GB of ram being sort of standard in servers, if something fills up 8GB of ram and you weren't anticipating it to do so, it's going to fill up another 1/4/8/16GB or whatever of swap.
Swap, I think, is a legacy and we should shed it sooner rather than later. Now, having said that, I'm not exactly brave enough to do that in a production environment.
Part of the problem stateside is that transportation isn't that cheap. Even in New York, which can't survive without mass transit, it costs $2 every time you get on the subway. I think you can parlay that into a bus pass, but if you're coming from Newark or something, it can easily cost you $15/day in transit, between a train trip and subway fees. That's roughly 250 euros per month.
Now, can you run a car on 3000 Euros per year? Probably. Also, thanks for being an insolent shit and not getting your facts straight, assuming Americans don't use public transit because of malice towards the environment or Europe or 3rd world countries or god knows what. If there were a way that people who commute to Washington or New York could pay $60/mo ($47 euro) for unlimited public transit, people would jump on it by the millions.
Just to drive the point home, let's say you live in a suburb of Washington, DC like... Stafford VA. Step 1: Drive to Fredericksbug and get on the train. Here's your fare: http://www.vre.org/service/fares.htm That gets you to L'Enfant Plaza in DC, from which you have to transfer onto the Metro, and head to, say, DuPont Circle (you work in the diplomatic corps). that's $1.35 each way. So, when you add up a monthly pass on the VRE plus $2.70/day on the metro, you're talking $325/mo plus wear and tear on your car, plus whatever they charge for parking at the train station, to commute aproximately 45 miles to work. Let's call it $400/mo. That actually works out to more like 3600 euros a year.
But of course, we're the bad guys for shunning mass transit. Please choke on your self righteousness.
It can't be a law unless it can fit on one page, single sided, 12 point times-new-roman, double spaced.
Everyone has time to read one page of text. That's where the bullshit gets thrown into the laws, on the 600th page, in small print, under Article XVII, Section 125, subsection 43, paragraph 68. Laws should be simple. If it requires explaining, it isn't a good law, or it should be broken up into sub-laws.
And in the case of things like Gallente Carrier V, which my alt is training now, something like 65 days. =P
But yeah, evemon is a MUST for eve. Used to be you'd put your eve username and password into evemon to retrieve your skills (that or download your xml skill sheet every few days), something that CCP tell you never to do, but because of the utility of the program, it was the only 3rd party tool that I know of that they officially endorsed. It was almost certainly the major reason that they implemented the API key system.
Slashdot Mirror
... by selling you a gamecube-hardware-level console twice, but telling you it's 2 different consoles?
Brawl is not a "hardcore game", in any meaningful sense. It's not hardcore to get good at, it's not hardcore to play, it doesn't require hardcore hardware to play...
It's a button mashing fest that's pretty fun until someone gets good at it, then it ruins friendships. It's not well balanced. It has a huge level of randomness. It's just not a good game. It's certainly not a good fighting game.
It's a casual game for casual gamers. You can play it for 20 minutes, and then leave and do something else.
People who are serious into fighting games play Guilty Gear X or X2, SF4, SFAlpha3, Capcom Vs SNK 2, etc.
And the Wii hardware is not capable of even some of the games that they try to put out for it. Get 4 people together and play mario kart. Those things that are making that clanking sound on the floor? That's the frames that it's dropping to try and keep up with a graphically-unsophisticated game.
~X
My problems with the Wii are as follows:
1.) Lazy. It's essentially a slightly more powerful gamecube. But, it allows you to sell the same stuff to the same people more than once. Also, in 2006, it was barely acceptable that it didn't put out high def. Now, in 2009, with a large percentage of people owning high def widescreen TVs, it's inconceivable that a modern console will top out at 480p.
2.) Price. It's not that expensive, but it has been out for almost THREE YEARS without a single price drop. Plus, $50 for a new controller. Plus $90 for a bathroom scale. Plus, $50 for the component cable to make it output 480p (see above). Plus, according to E3, a bunch more money for a bunch more controllers. Whenever you point out to someone that nintendo is using cheap hardware, paint-by-number game programming, and proprietary IP to print money, they always come back with "BUT IT'S FUN!!!". What's the last killer title for the Wii?
3.) Lack of killer titles. Zelda, metroid, Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, Wii Fit... there haven't been many for a console that's 3 years old. Where are the 3rd party games?!? The top 14 games (which comprise 40% of the total game sales of the console) are all proprietary IP; you have to go down to #15 to find a non-3rd party game, and that's Guitar Hero III.
That's pretty much it.
~X
We also use it extensively at Rackspace Email division. We generate about 200GB/day of logs from postfix and dovecot installs, and hadoop with mapreduce allows us to pull all sorts of metrics and diagnostic information in very short timeframes. It helps our customer facing support reps, as well as allows us to give more demanding customers the statistics and metrics that they want, plus it helps us with capacity planning and a bunch of other stuff.
And it's designed to run on commodity hardware.
http://highscalability.com/how-rackspace-now-uses-mapreduce-and-hadoop-query-terabytes-data
~Wx
No, no, no, no.
As someone who has gone to a lot of shows for a lot of independent (non-RIAA) bands, when I say "giving money directly to the band", I mean literally, I will buy a CD at a rock show, and usually the guy behind the merch table is a MEMBER OF THE BAND.
If you're buying the CD at a show, usually it's no more than $8, and often $5. The band will get their cut, as will the producer, the person who masters it, the studio, etc. You know who doesn't get their cut? The distributor and the brick and mortar store (or virtual) store that I have to go to in order to buy it.
Seriously, I steal a LOT of music. I also go to see bands live, and buy merch from the bands. I'm under no impression that the latter legally cancels out the former, just that karmically, it does.
One trick to try is to convince your windows box that the printer is not remote.
Start, Settings, printers and faxes, Add a printer.
Next, local printer attached to this computer (even if it's network), uncheck Plug and Play, next.
Create a new port, TCP/IP port, next.
New wizard, next, IP address of target printer, next.
Then, just for S&G's, try using the "HP LaserJet Series II" driver for all of your black and white, laser and (some) inkjet needs. It usually works.
There. No drivers.
Sometimes.
~Wx
Wow, you're mis-informed.
Initially, CCP was so isolated (geographically and otherwise) from their playerbase that they didn't even care when one of their developers helped his Alliance get access to the richest region of the game (Delve) and gave them exclusive rights to blueprints that gave them monopoly rights to some of the most powerful ships in the game.
1.) Delve isn't the richest region in the game. Fountain is, by MILES and MILES. Fountain has 12 Dysprosium moons and 19 Promethium moons; if you count Aridia, which is the low sec closest to fountain (and also controlled by Pandemic Legion), you can add 6 Dyspro and 7 Promethium moons to that. Delve has 8/12 dyspro and prom, and no additional moons in low sec near by except for the one in Sakht/Aridia. I can provide you with the list if you'd like.
2.) Bob moved there because CCP asked them to as part of a role playing event. There were other alliances that also participated in CCP-sponsored role playing events, but they've all fallen by the wayside as time has gone on. You have to understand - 4-5 years ago, the whole game was like that, and Band of Brothers is the only remaining throwback alliance to the elder days, so they catch a lot of shit from people who assume that this roleplaying stuff helped them be so strong. It simply isn't the case, it's just that none of the other old players are still around.
3.) T20 (the "dirty developer") spawned five T2 ammo blueprints and a Sabre blueprint. These aren't "the most powerful ships in the game". The fact that it happened at all is despicable, but it provided BoB almost no tactical advantage at all. Having the blueprints doesn't mean that the items themselves are free, for one. Not to mention, Evolution has a Sabre BPO anyway.
4.) T20 was reprimanded as soon as it was found that this happened. This was handled internally. Then, 6 months later, when the scandal became public (because someone HACKED A MEMBER'S PRIVATE FORUM), there was an outcry. CCP's response was "look, this is true, and it's been dealt with". What were they going to do, punish him twice for the same incident?
The system isn't perfect - the community representative for faction warfare is intentionally filtering out player suggestions so she can help her own Alliance - but it's created a stronger game. The skill queue system means that my friends and I can log in when it suits us, log off to do other things, and not have to babysit the game every time a game finishes. That's directly due to the CSM system.
5.) Factional Warfare doesn't allow alliances to compete - which is a bad thing, if you're a role playing alliance. I have no idea what you're talking about, and I suspect you don't either. There's nothing gained or lost in Factional Warfare - the NPC rewards are essentially worthless, so it's pretty much just free newbie PVP in low security.
Only new players give a crap about the skill queue. But yes, it is a direct result of CSM action. Much more important is the Attribute remap, for those of us with badly spread attributes to be able to take advantage of some better speeds at skill training. These are some of the only things that the CSM has done. It's basically a popularity contest.
So, um, yeah. Learn your history first, pl0x.
Often, this is enough to make a playable map, anyway. For example, I play Counterstrike Gun Game, which is focused entirely on player skill, not on objective or a vague version of reality.
A good portion of the gun game maps are built entirely with the default textures, see:
http://www.css-maps.eu/dlpics/aim_ag_texture20015.jpg
http://bwfhw.de/downloads/maps/aim_maps/aim_ag_texture_city-komplex.jpg
I think this is in general how Valve does level design. I'm not sure if they use the same Orangeish-Yellow for vertical surfaces and Grey for horizontal surfaces style, but it's got to be something like that. Before you spend any significant time doing the prettying up, it helps to know if the map is good and balanced and fun.
The same steps were taken with UT3, if I remember - they rendered generic low-res textures, slapped them on a wireframe map, and deathmatched the map to hell - then if they liked it, went back and finished it.
I can't imagine this not being the first thing that most people think of when doing level design.
~W
I would really like to be able to use more than 3gb of ram. However, I don't want to go to Vista, and XP 64 bit has been problematic all around.
The next desktop I build will probably be 4 cores and 8gb or 16gb of ram running Windows 7 64 bit.
That's one of the killer features for me. I don't really need 8 or 16 probably, but it's so cheap now... and I have run into situations where I wished I had more than 2gb.
Thank you! You just said, in a reasoned and articulate way, what I would have taken a much more acid tone to say.
I can't believe how people on Slashdot, of all places, are OK with companies using loopholes to headquarter OUT of the US, send jobs overseas, and still do their primary business and receive their primary income from the US, and then not even pay taxes on that!
I have two things to add to your list:
1.) People who are questioning why corporations should pay taxes on revenue received from the US should be reminded that it is the stability and wealth of the citizens and government of the US that provide the disposable income to purchase these companies' products in the first place. Or else, why are Ireland and Bermuda not paying as much per capita in purchases of Microsoft's products.
2.) In addition to the reasons that my parent poster outlined as to why decreasing the amount of money available through tax loopholes is not the same as increasing the tax on businesses, I should point out this: People are complaining that these prices will simply be passed on to the consumer. Some will, but that is only one possible outcome. This decrease in corporate net income could simply equate to a decrease in corporate profits if the corporation's products are sold at a consistent rate. Why would companies not raise rates and instead accept less profits? For one, they can only raise their prices to a level where people will continue to buy them. Product prices are not infinitely elastic, and there is no rule that says a company is supposed to be able to make X amount of profit per sale. At some point, maybe there is only Y amount of money to be made in a given sector, not Y+$loophole.
Whatever, I'm idealistic, but a guy can hope. I work for an IT company that is headquartered and does almost their entire business here, in the US, with US R&D (hi), US call centers, US accountants, US techs, and using US built equipment.
There's nothing wrong inherently with a 10 year old datacenter. Guys, 2000 was 10 years ago. It isn't like we're talking about datacenters from the paleolithic era.
If you already have a building with 5 or 10 megawatts of power run to it from the utility company, and already having some generators hanging around, why not use it? It's not like there have been quantum leaps in cooling or fire suppression or generator technology or how raised floor is put together.
So what, you have to go and buy 30 million bucks worth of power switching, 10 million worth of UPS switching and batteries, and maybe 30 million worth of chillers and cooling apparatus. Then, slap a $500,000 raised floor, drop in a couple of gigabits of fiber transport, and hire a contractor to run the power and networking, and you'll have $400 million left to spend on racks and racks of Dell R710's or whatever strikes your fancy. Better than building a building from scratch.
There are lots of government facilities "around" DC that aren't "in" DC, by the way, Herndon and Fairfax are full of them (just look for the unassuming buildings with the black fence and gated access that's back from the road in office parks).
This happened at a place that I used to consult for.
We would pay verizon about $30/mo per customer to get access to the physical infrastructure, and on top of that, we had to pay for the throughput bandwidth and support costs. We sold DSL at about $50/mo.
Then Verizon came in and started direct selling DSL to the customer for $30/mo.
I mean, we were paying them for local loop access, AND we were buying our upstream bandwidth (a fractional DS3, i think?) from them.
They get their goddamn money either way.
Now, someone like a city of 40,000 people probably has the clout to have a major ISP like Cogent or Level3 or someone trunk a connection at a much cheaper rate, skipping Verizon entirely.
Ok, that article on scaling is
1.) 3 years old
2.) Comparing some random postgres alpha to a mysql 5.1 beta
3.) Actually not comparing them at all, since there's all these pretty graphs of Postgres performance, and then it's like "lol this is better than mysql".
How about using a stable release? How about doing comparative testing?
As someone who's recently upgraded some mysql write masters to 8 core / 16 GB ram / 8x 300gb 2.5" SAS in Raid10 boxes, it scales vertically just fine.
I dunno, dude, it's been a while since my high sec alt based in metropolis has seen a high-sec ore belt with any asteroids in it.
Seriously, if it's not macrominers, then there's millions of gypsy miners moving from belt to belt, system to system.
If you're interested in some fiction that's not quite so fanboy specific, you might want to check out http://eve.klaki.net/fiction/ which is a collection of stories written by Istvaan Shogaatsu set in the Eve universe. You might remember Istvaan better as the perpetrator of the Eve Heist that was covered in PCGamer as well as here on Slashdot. ( http://eve.klaki.net/heist/ )
Istvaan is also Tom Czerniawski, who has had several stories published in the Eve magazine EON. On the article linked at Massively, there's a picture of the front cover of a story he's written.
Wow, and they fired him for this?
Like, did they read his review?
If I'd seen that review without a big name reviewer attached to it - say, on a bunch of fan sites - I'd swear up and down it was Fox doing their own astroturfing. This review was SO POSITIVE that it's hard to believe they wouldn't want the word to get out anyway. I mean, the movie is owned by 20th century fox, and the review is by a fox employee.... I don't see the down side. The guy actually said it was better than The Dark Knight, which - if true - will mean that it's going to make a mint.
Sheesh.
That free download thing mostly killed Legends: the game (http://www.legendsthegame.net/) which was sort of someone trying to make an open source Tribes-like game, with some graphical updates and a few fixes like auto-ski, etc.
Was a decent game for a while.
Sry, nop. My store was lower than that number. I didn't want to mention it, though, cause .. i dunno, I'm paranoid. Don't want anyone to link me to stuff like that? Whatever.
You haven't worked at Best Buy long enough to know better.
I worked at a Best Buy back in the late 90's and early 2000's, eventually becoming the Senior product specialist in the Computer department. The service plan USED to be pushed VERY hard. We were graded on the percentage of overall revenue that was service plans. I remember being told by MANAGERS, not supervisors, that if some customer didn't want to buy the $220 service plan with their $2000 laptop, that I should discourage them from buying it, or try to get them into a cheaper one. We learned all the tricks, what to point out that looked fragile or otherwise likely to break due to "normal wear and tear", etc.
It was always a big deal that we weren't supposed to "inboard", which meant reducing the price of something in order to get the customer to buy the service plan. But the unwritten rule was to not get caught doing it, since reducing the price to include the service plan both got the sale and increased the percentage of the sale that was the service plan.
This may sound really weird to you now, but back in the day, we'd set people up with the computer, and staple the service plan 8.5x11 trifold brochure to the - what's it called, the 3 part carbon copy paper they use to change prices. Anyway, the brochure used to have a blank square on the bottom of the back page, where you wrote in your employee number. Even though there was no commission, they kept track of individual performance, and would use that in your performance reviews, etc.
It's gotten better. When they refocused (after i left) on making the sale and getting the revenue, it became a more pleasant place to shop.
~X
Similar story: I used to have a cell phone with SunCom (I think). This was around 1999.
I don't remember the specifics but it was something like I had free roaming. But in the fine print, it said you have to make 50%+1 minutes of your calls on suncom towers or verizon towers, or something. And I took the phone to college, where there weren't any towers.
Anyway, after 3 months of not making 50% of calls on suncom towers, they switched my plan to X minutes + roaming.
Coincidentally that xmas break, my family was flying out of DC on vacation. Our flight got canceled because of snow, and we used my cellphone to find a new flight. Which said it was connected to a suncom tower. Which actually turned out to be AT&T identifying its self with a code that my phone interpreted as suncom. Right after my plan had been unknowingly switched from the unlimited roaming plan.
They sent me a bill for $450. We didn't pay it.
Something that everyone forgets is that many companies use downturns as a time to clean house, to get rid of people that they feel are more dead weight than not.
And some companies are trying to aggressively go after the cream of the crop that are being laid off - or even the ones still employed but that are worried about their job security. Some companies are looking to use the economic crisis to pick up some really top quality people.
There are plenty of developers out there who's projects have been canceled or downsized despite the fact that they were building some really far out next gen stuff, plenty of systems admins who are being cut to save on the budget because the IT department is expendable - quality people, hard workers, who need jobs.
(Hi, we're right here.)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you should eliminate page files / swap space entirely.
I know there are edge cases, and one would be where you're moving something from disk into a ramdisk or some such thing, but in my experience... there's no circumstance under common usage where running out of ram and swapping to disk is preferable to running out of ram and having the program crash. To be honest, I would rather things hard crash than run in a slow degraded state.
And these days, with 8 and 16 GB of ram being sort of standard in servers, if something fills up 8GB of ram and you weren't anticipating it to do so, it's going to fill up another 1/4/8/16GB or whatever of swap.
Swap, I think, is a legacy and we should shed it sooner rather than later. Now, having said that, I'm not exactly brave enough to do that in a production environment.
~x
Part of the problem stateside is that transportation isn't that cheap. Even in New York, which can't survive without mass transit, it costs $2 every time you get on the subway. I think you can parlay that into a bus pass, but if you're coming from Newark or something, it can easily cost you $15/day in transit, between a train trip and subway fees. That's roughly 250 euros per month.
Now, can you run a car on 3000 Euros per year? Probably. Also, thanks for being an insolent shit and not getting your facts straight, assuming Americans don't use public transit because of malice towards the environment or Europe or 3rd world countries or god knows what. If there were a way that people who commute to Washington or New York could pay $60/mo ($47 euro) for unlimited public transit, people would jump on it by the millions.
Just to drive the point home, let's say you live in a suburb of Washington, DC like ... Stafford VA.
Step 1: Drive to Fredericksbug and get on the train. Here's your fare:
http://www.vre.org/service/fares.htm
That gets you to L'Enfant Plaza in DC, from which you have to transfer onto the Metro, and head to, say, DuPont Circle (you work in the diplomatic corps). that's $1.35 each way.
So, when you add up a monthly pass on the VRE plus $2.70/day on the metro, you're talking $325/mo plus wear and tear on your car, plus whatever they charge for parking at the train station, to commute aproximately 45 miles to work. Let's call it $400/mo. That actually works out to more like 3600 euros a year.
But of course, we're the bad guys for shunning mass transit. Please choke on your self righteousness.
Even Better, how about this:
It can't be a law unless it can fit on one page, single sided, 12 point times-new-roman, double spaced.
Everyone has time to read one page of text. That's where the bullshit gets thrown into the laws, on the 600th page, in small print, under Article XVII, Section 125, subsection 43, paragraph 68. Laws should be simple. If it requires explaining, it isn't a good law, or it should be broken up into sub-laws.
~X
And in the case of things like Gallente Carrier V, which my alt is training now, something like 65 days. =P
But yeah, evemon is a MUST for eve. Used to be you'd put your eve username and password into evemon to retrieve your skills (that or download your xml skill sheet every few days), something that CCP tell you never to do, but because of the utility of the program, it was the only 3rd party tool that I know of that they officially endorsed. It was almost certainly the major reason that they implemented the API key system.