Cable, Telephone are monopolies because people in government have no clue how to manage natural monopolies (utilities). City should own the INFRASTRUCTURE and auction the lease off to the utility company for 5, 10, 15, or 25 years (depending on type) and define the proper "service level agreement" they want for their citizens.
I think that sounds good. It's not what I would have called libertarian, but if it is, I guess I'm more "libertarian" than I thought.
It's not very libertarian. Libertarians (or at least the Libertarian Party) do not want government ownership of infrastructure. For instance they're all about private ownership of roads and having all roads be toll roads.
You should update your links! You link to an older "this cost $200 billion" story, but the same group has a new article raising that price to $320 billion. I'd link to it, but buggy Chrome seems to have broken cut'n'paste for me, and I'd rather not type out the whole URL by hand. But it's the top story on newnetworks.com
Oh damn, did you just say "government ownership" of the lines "for the common good?" Shit, son, that won't fly, not today. Apparently a majority of America now feels like the government is overreaching for the little it already does.
I do agree though, I think infrastructure ownership is one of the -few- areas that the government should be involved in -- lack of government ownership has actually stifled the free market.
The next MacOS release will require signed applications and guess what.... only Steve gets to sign.
Only for those things put on the App Store. The app store will not be an exclusive place to download apps on OS X. Stop spreading lies.
Steve has explicitly stated that he'd -like- to move in that direction for OSX, but I would have been very surprised if that'd already been the case for 10.7 or whatever.
Can't say they've ever happened to me yet. I guess if I had a crappy internet connection I'd have an issue, but I would complain to my ISP or change ISPs if I did.
It happened all the time for me in Diablo 2 days. It (and the 30-day limit for not logging in before a character was deleted) were the two primary reasons why my friends and I always played Diablo 2 LAN games even though we weren't physically close together.
It's also why I was leery of World of Warcraft when it first came out, since it was online-only and Battle.Net was so crappy back then. They beefed up the service though for that game.
Eventually, you need to connect to WoW to "check in" every 30 days?
Nope, Diablo II required that (and it's one of the things that makes it so difficult for me to get back into multiplayer D2), but in World of Warcraft every character you create along with every item, quest, etc, that entire state, is stored permanently. Even if you cancel your account and resubscribe a few years later, everything will be just as you left it. Characters do not get expired.
The only 30 day limit I know of is the in-game mail system, where mails (including mailed items) get bounced back to the sender if they've been unread for 30 days.
[quote]Any competent guild can take any j.random jerk, carry them most of the way through ICC 10, and get them halfway decent gear. With my guild, it's far more important to make sure they're someone we actually WANT to spend time with (in terms of guild membership). [/quote]
I wish there was a GearScore for asshattery. Or awesome.
"Meh, my awesome meter pegs him at 2000. He's probably going to complain that we're doing it wrong the whole time."
"This guy's at 5000. He'll be agreeable, prepared, and knowledgeable of the fights."
Oh I wish that a mod could tell me that.
GearScore is useful for a quick "what's the POTENTIAL of this person to do their job well?"... its fine for PUGging soemone in, but I'd care a lot more about ability, experience, and personality if I were looking for a new regular member of my raids.
All of this is very true. GearScore is useful in setting the maximum potential of what someone can do. It says nothing about what that person's minimum performance will actually be, but it can be useful for finding out if it's mathematically possible for a character to pass certain bars that are set. If a tank has 30k health and the boss hits for 35k, that tank won't be lasting very long, regardless of how good a player he is. If a person in Naxx gear joins your Heroic ICC 10 group, he's going to get carried. In some cases it won't matter -- maybe everyone else overgear's the encounter so much that it won't make a difference.
Both of these statements are wrong: "GearScore will tell me if this guy is going to perform well." "GearScore sucks and won't tell me anything I need to know."
So what I would tell people forming raids is that GearScore won't tell you whether or not a person will perform well, but whether it's gear that will be the limiting factor in their performance.
and don't force mental illness inducing celibacy on their priests.
That's really more of a Catholic thing than a Christian thing. Amazingly unhealthy, but fortunately for them, Western Protestant priests can have as much sex with their wives as they wish (as long as they don't use birth control...)
I played several games before WoW came out. Horrible, bug ridden messes (EVE Online was the worst offender here, although it kinda survived despite that. But the day before release they patched it and they actually re-introduced most bugs from the last 3 patchrounds). And it was accepted because "everyone did it like that".
And along came Blizzard with the beta for WoW - and it didn't crash. It just ran. Flawlessly. My friends and myself all bought it and played it for years because we could see the quality control behind it and thought "if something's wrong, they'll fix it - because they've already shown their level of commitment". I think I've had about two crashes over the years - both caused by addons, not the game itself.
What? That comes close to revisionism.
First, most of the MMOs that have come and gone came out in reaction to the success of Everquest and, more-so, World of Warcraft. I was surprised to see that EVE (2003) had been out so long, predating World of Warcraft (2004). But Conan, FF11, LOTR Online, Everquest 2, Warhammer, all were supposed to be the Warcraft-killers. Warcraft built off the success of Everquest and Ultima Online, but most of the buggy incomplete MMOs came out later.
When World of Warcraft came out in late 2004, to call it simply buggy and incomplete would be a bit generous. The world content was complete, but character classes weren't -- the majority of the patches for the next eight months fixed, finished, and redesigned each character class one by one. And the server instability was legendary -- several times Blizzard had to give the entire player population for a good chunk of the servers free weeks or months of playtime because the servers would lag out entirely or just up and crash. Penny Arcade awarded World of Warcraft their game of the year award in 2004 and then retroactively removed that award a few months later because the game was almost unplayable. 6-9 months after release and after a number of server upgrades and game patches and the game was thoroughly playable. For some time though it was rough. The Burning Crusade in early 2007 was a smoother upgrade (probably because the expansion had to be delayed, losing Blizzard the Holiday season), and Wrath of the Lich King in late 2008 was smoother still. The recent 4.0 patch, once I had actually patched the game (the fully-downloaded patch took hours to install), went well at first. Tuesday night it was as if no patch had taken place... no game crashes once I'd removed all my addons (which I fully expected I'd have to do) and no server crashes on my realm. Since then, though... mmmm. Icecrown is a bit unstable, and interacting with almost anything that turns your cursor into a gear icon (mage tables, summoning stones, the teleporter in ICC, fish feasts) causes half the clients to outright freeze.
The difference though was that the game was well-designed enough and -fun- enough from a gameplay perspective that people were willing to tough out the initial headaches, since the first several months of WoW were a doozy.
funny slashdotters always talk about gaming when complaining about desktop Linux. most people I know don't even use their PC for games, they have dedicated game appliances. Some of the most popular game appliances in the world don't even run windows, imagine that. A WII, for example, uses customized Linux kernel....
True, but just because something uses Linux doesn't mean it is Linux. It'd be hard to argue any gaming system is open and modifiable. It's probably about the only case where I actually prefer the system to be closed.
Apple will wind down OS X over the decade - the PC era is over.
For users, this was heralded by the advent of the iPad, which will usher in 10,000 copies. For data centers, this came with large-scale, production virtualization.
Your beloved PC? Now a "content creator's" workstation. Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app".
I really really hope you're wrong. Having the iPad take over would be one of the worst nightmares computing could face. Hell, I'd even rather have had a 90's-era Microsoft win.
The only thing wrong is their broken business model, information was never designed to be propertized in an internet age. Tough shit for them.
That's what all the dot-coms said a decade ago. About the only ones left after all this time are the ones that figured out how to successfully propertize their information.
The right to own and do what I want with my owned property. This software is meant to prevent the owner of his property using it in the way he sees fit.
You have the right to do what you want with your owned property. You do not, however, have the inalienable right for them to make it easy for you. And once you decide you want to use their network, all bets are off.
I've found many manufacturers to play fast and loose with the definition of "HD." -Fortunately- most of them have stopped calling widescreen 480p (like 848x480) high definition, which many did in the earlier days of HD simply because it was higher resolution than TV broadcasts. HD now typically means either 720p or 1080i/p (some HD TV channels use 720p, others 1080i, and it's hard to find 1080p outside of Blu-Ray).
Unfortunately there are still folks who use HD as a marketing term without ensuring that term has anything to do with the content. In Costco the other day I found a DVD featuring restored WWII film stock, and was labeled as being World War II front-line footage in HD. Never mind that it was an HD source that was reduced to a widescreen DVD -- dvd, not blu-ray. 480p was still being advertised as 'HD'.:-(
I suspect it's Windows he's talking about. The common way to use Windows is to have all your windows maximized and most apps are written with this in mind. And most people using Windows have a nasty habit of having fairly low-res monitors (I know several "hardcore" gamers who have $2,500+ rigs hooked up to cheap-o monitors only capable of 1440x900 or so, but great response times though).
Gaming is a slightly different beast. You don't necessarily want a high resolution in a full-screen game. Indeed, that can actually be quite a drawback, as you'll usually be sacrificing performance for detail. As I found out the hard way, detail is pointless if your framerate is low.
It must be nice to have a company willing to let you do that. My experience has been different, and there has been a subtle expectation that your "free" time isn't really free, you should probably be doing something related to work.
Then you have a really shitty job. You'd better be getting paid for the "free time" that you use to do work.
There's a reason that although you can hook up two monitors and line them up vertically, almost no one ever does.
The fact that most desks are a single horizontal surface rather than a tower of stacked platforms might play into this.
The reason the grandparent hinted at is that it's just harder for us to look at a very tall display than it is a wide display. We see more horizontally, and it's much much easier on the neck to turn side to side than it is up and down.
Bizarre. I don't know if that's a bad example, but I actually found the iptables example a lot more readable and intuitive. Something that I wasn't expecting.
Not to mention that it's strange that they're going to put this out in December - I wonder how Activision feels about having a new WoW release to compete with the rest of its Christmas schedule?
Sorry for posting twice..
I don't think that Activision is crying too much about having a guaranteed huge seller right before the holiday season every two years.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think that now that the private sector has spent billions paying to have these lines installed, the government should just take them over?
In most cases, it was the government that gave the private sector the money to put those lines in in the first place.
I don't have a problem coming up with a price for those lines and then reimbursing the companies.
I think that sounds good. It's not what I would have called libertarian, but if it is, I guess I'm more "libertarian" than I thought.
It's not very libertarian. Libertarians (or at least the Libertarian Party) do not want government ownership of infrastructure. For instance they're all about private ownership of roads and having all roads be toll roads.
You should update your links! You link to an older "this cost $200 billion" story, but the same group has a new article raising that price to $320 billion. I'd link to it, but buggy Chrome seems to have broken cut'n'paste for me, and I'd rather not type out the whole URL by hand. But it's the top story on newnetworks.com
Oh damn, did you just say "government ownership" of the lines "for the common good?" Shit, son, that won't fly, not today. Apparently a majority of America now feels like the government is overreaching for the little it already does.
I do agree though, I think infrastructure ownership is one of the -few- areas that the government should be involved in -- lack of government ownership has actually stifled the free market.
The next MacOS release will require signed applications and guess what.... only Steve gets to sign.
Only for those things put on the App Store. The app store will not be an exclusive place to download apps on OS X. Stop spreading lies.
Steve has explicitly stated that he'd -like- to move in that direction for OSX, but I would have been very surprised if that'd already been the case for 10.7 or whatever.
Can't say they've ever happened to me yet. I guess if I had a crappy internet connection I'd have an issue, but I would complain to my ISP or change ISPs if I did.
It happened all the time for me in Diablo 2 days. It (and the 30-day limit for not logging in before a character was deleted) were the two primary reasons why my friends and I always played Diablo 2 LAN games even though we weren't physically close together.
It's also why I was leery of World of Warcraft when it first came out, since it was online-only and Battle.Net was so crappy back then. They beefed up the service though for that game.
Eventually, you need to connect to WoW to "check in" every 30 days?
Nope, Diablo II required that (and it's one of the things that makes it so difficult for me to get back into multiplayer D2), but in World of Warcraft every character you create along with every item, quest, etc, that entire state, is stored permanently. Even if you cancel your account and resubscribe a few years later, everything will be just as you left it. Characters do not get expired.
The only 30 day limit I know of is the in-game mail system, where mails (including mailed items) get bounced back to the sender if they've been unread for 30 days.
[quote]Any competent guild can take any j.random jerk, carry them most of the way through ICC 10, and get them halfway decent gear. With my guild, it's far more important to make sure they're someone we actually WANT to spend time with (in terms of guild membership).
[/quote]
I wish there was a GearScore for asshattery. Or awesome.
"Meh, my awesome meter pegs him at 2000. He's probably going to complain that we're doing it wrong the whole time."
"This guy's at 5000. He'll be agreeable, prepared, and knowledgeable of the fights."
Oh I wish that a mod could tell me that.
GearScore is useful for a quick "what's the POTENTIAL of this person to do their job well?" ... its fine for PUGging soemone in, but I'd care a lot more about ability, experience, and personality if I were looking for a new regular member of my raids.
All of this is very true. GearScore is useful in setting the maximum potential of what someone can do. It says nothing about what that person's minimum performance will actually be, but it can be useful for finding out if it's mathematically possible for a character to pass certain bars that are set. If a tank has 30k health and the boss hits for 35k, that tank won't be lasting very long, regardless of how good a player he is. If a person in Naxx gear joins your Heroic ICC 10 group, he's going to get carried. In some cases it won't matter -- maybe everyone else overgear's the encounter so much that it won't make a difference.
Both of these statements are wrong: "GearScore will tell me if this guy is going to perform well." "GearScore sucks and won't tell me anything I need to know."
So what I would tell people forming raids is that GearScore won't tell you whether or not a person will perform well, but whether it's gear that will be the limiting factor in their performance.
Seriously. Their names get stupider every release.
Well, what would you prefer? Names of characters from a popular series of movies?
That's because Bruce Perens used to work as a software developer for Pixar before moving to the Debian world.
That's why I waited about 2 years before actually making an account.
It wasn't laziness, no sir...
and don't force mental illness inducing celibacy on their priests.
That's really more of a Catholic thing than a Christian thing. Amazingly unhealthy, but fortunately for them, Western Protestant priests can have as much sex with their wives as they wish (as long as they don't use birth control...)
What? That comes close to revisionism.
First, most of the MMOs that have come and gone came out in reaction to the success of Everquest and, more-so, World of Warcraft. I was surprised to see that EVE (2003) had been out so long, predating World of Warcraft (2004). But Conan, FF11, LOTR Online, Everquest 2, Warhammer, all were supposed to be the Warcraft-killers. Warcraft built off the success of Everquest and Ultima Online, but most of the buggy incomplete MMOs came out later.
When World of Warcraft came out in late 2004, to call it simply buggy and incomplete would be a bit generous. The world content was complete, but character classes weren't -- the majority of the patches for the next eight months fixed, finished, and redesigned each character class one by one. And the server instability was legendary -- several times Blizzard had to give the entire player population for a good chunk of the servers free weeks or months of playtime because the servers would lag out entirely or just up and crash. Penny Arcade awarded World of Warcraft their game of the year award in 2004 and then retroactively removed that award a few months later because the game was almost unplayable. 6-9 months after release and after a number of server upgrades and game patches and the game was thoroughly playable. For some time though it was rough. The Burning Crusade in early 2007 was a smoother upgrade (probably because the expansion had to be delayed, losing Blizzard the Holiday season), and Wrath of the Lich King in late 2008 was smoother still. The recent 4.0 patch, once I had actually patched the game (the fully-downloaded patch took hours to install), went well at first. Tuesday night it was as if no patch had taken place... no game crashes once I'd removed all my addons (which I fully expected I'd have to do) and no server crashes on my realm. Since then, though... mmmm. Icecrown is a bit unstable, and interacting with almost anything that turns your cursor into a gear icon (mage tables, summoning stones, the teleporter in ICC, fish feasts) causes half the clients to outright freeze.
The difference though was that the game was well-designed enough and -fun- enough from a gameplay perspective that people were willing to tough out the initial headaches, since the first several months of WoW were a doozy.
funny slashdotters always talk about gaming when complaining about desktop Linux. most people I know don't even use their PC for games, they have dedicated game appliances. Some of the most popular game appliances in the world don't even run windows, imagine that. A WII, for example, uses customized Linux kernel....
True, but just because something uses Linux doesn't mean it is Linux. It'd be hard to argue any gaming system is open and modifiable. It's probably about the only case where I actually prefer the system to be closed.
The Desktop OS is dead.
Apple will wind down OS X over the decade - the PC era is over.
For users, this was heralded by the advent of the iPad, which will usher in 10,000 copies. For data centers, this came with large-scale, production virtualization.
Your beloved PC? Now a "content creator's" workstation. Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app".
I really really hope you're wrong. Having the iPad take over would be one of the worst nightmares computing could face.
Hell, I'd even rather have had a 90's-era Microsoft win.
"It still feels kind of wrong though."
The only thing wrong is their broken business model, information was never designed to be propertized in an internet age. Tough shit for them.
That's what all the dot-coms said a decade ago. About the only ones left after all this time are the ones that figured out how to successfully propertize their information.
The right to own and do what I want with my owned property. This software is meant to prevent the owner of his property using it in the way he sees fit.
You have the right to do what you want with your owned property. You do not, however, have the inalienable right for them to make it easy for you. And once you decide you want to use their network, all bets are off.
Nearly every 30" widescreen monitor sold today, including Apple's, Dell's, and HP's, run at a resolution of 2560x1600 (16:10).
I've found many manufacturers to play fast and loose with the definition of "HD." -Fortunately- most of them have stopped calling widescreen 480p (like 848x480) high definition, which many did in the earlier days of HD simply because it was higher resolution than TV broadcasts. HD now typically means either 720p or 1080i/p (some HD TV channels use 720p, others 1080i, and it's hard to find 1080p outside of Blu-Ray).
Unfortunately there are still folks who use HD as a marketing term without ensuring that term has anything to do with the content. In Costco the other day I found a DVD featuring restored WWII film stock, and was labeled as being World War II front-line footage in HD. Never mind that it was an HD source that was reduced to a widescreen DVD -- dvd, not blu-ray. 480p was still being advertised as 'HD'. :-(
I suspect it's Windows he's talking about. The common way to use Windows is to have all your windows maximized and most apps are written with this in mind. And most people using Windows have a nasty habit of having fairly low-res monitors (I know several "hardcore" gamers who have $2,500+ rigs hooked up to cheap-o monitors only capable of 1440x900 or so, but great response times though).
Gaming is a slightly different beast. You don't necessarily want a high resolution in a full-screen game. Indeed, that can actually be quite a drawback, as you'll usually be sacrificing performance for detail. As I found out the hard way, detail is pointless if your framerate is low.
It must be nice to have a company willing to let you do that. My experience has been different, and there has been a subtle expectation that your "free" time isn't really free, you should probably be doing something related to work.
Then you have a really shitty job. You'd better be getting paid for the "free time" that you use to do work.
There's a reason that although you can hook up two monitors and line them up vertically, almost no one ever does.
The fact that most desks are a single horizontal surface rather than a tower of stacked platforms might play into this.
The reason the grandparent hinted at is that it's just harder for us to look at a very tall display than it is a wide display. We see more horizontally, and it's much much easier on the neck to turn side to side than it is up and down.
No, but if you have some land, are you entitled to have someone pay a cop to keep people from trespassing on it?
Not if you don't pay property taxes.
See the recent Idle story about the section of Tennessee that only includes fire protection if you pay the $75 annual fee.
Bizarre. I don't know if that's a bad example, but I actually found the iptables example a lot more readable and intuitive. Something that I wasn't expecting.
Sorry for posting twice..
I don't think that Activision is crying too much about having a guaranteed huge seller right before the holiday season every two years.
I remember going to Blizzcon in.. I think it was late July or August 2009, and attendees could play the starting zones for the goblins and wargen.
And few playable scenarios for Diablo 3, but I think they abandoned much of that D3 work.