So arguably this would not be targeting me. That's not to say I don't appreciate music - on the contrary, I almost went into music as a profession - but I don't mind that my music isn't at CD quality when I listen to it on my iPod. I can't tell the difference between $5 Big Lots ear buds and $30 ones from Apple (although I can tell the difference between the $3 and the $5 ear buds at Big Logs, and that extra $2 is most definitely worth it.) I can tell the difference between the sound on those $5 ear buds and a pair of $100 headphones, but I don't *mind* the loss of sound quality, and I'll take the convenience of my seashells over the bulk of very good headphones any day.
Wasn't that the actual plot of the movie 2012? That the earth's core was slowing down and all that energy was being transferred into heat instead, causing the mantle (which was made of water for some reason) to boil?
I think I actually tuned out most of that movie because the science was so atrocious.
Java and Adobe's problem is the same - it asks permission to update instead of doing it silently. Heck, the last Reader update required a system reboot. Compare that to AdBlock or NoScript, which updates without you having to do anything and lets you know after the fact. I can force out Windows updates on the systems I manage, but I can't force users to update their Java, and the icon will sometimes sit there for weeks or months before they even bother to mention it.
Actually, I think it was ENG 4160 or something like that, but the short name of the class was "folklore" with emphasis on oral transmission. 10 years ago I argued that the "oral" part was obsolete because of the advent of the Internet, and I was shot down by the Luddite professor. I wonder how the class is taught today?
You're getting it confused with the time we cheered and high-fived when an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at him, one of the highest insults imaginable in Iraq. And even then, we only cheered and clapped because Bush's monkey reflexes allowed him to duck in time. The look on his face when the first shoe sailed toward him was priceless. Had one actually made contact with the President, no one would have laughed nearly as much.
Ever try FFXI? Storypoints occur from level 1 to level 75, and the pointless grind has pretty much been eliminated from level 30 on up, at least for level purposes. (You've still got to grind your skills and your gear for most jobs.) There is no PvP, and group play is done from three to 18 people for most activities. You can solo if you really want to, but you level much more quickly in a party. SE apparently siphoned all the awesome that they had hoped to pipe into XIV and dropped it into XI. It's $5-10 off Steam with a free 30 day trial, although I'd wait until they release the next bundled version with the last three mini expansions (which are what finally fixed the game after eight years), which they probably will in the next few months.
That's just it though. Most players aren't going to give a game more than an hour to form an initial first impression. You have to "wow" them, pardon the pun, in the timeframe, or you've lost them. It doesn't have to be fancy intro movies or easy quests leading into a skinner box or a tutorial, but a game does need a hook, something to entice the player to keep going. Any game that lacks that isn't going to become a juggernaut any time soon.
I find myself cleaning up the technical documentation of very smart people. I describe it as thus: "They know exactly what they're talking about, and they assume I do as well." But writing a technical manual isn't the same as writing code. I'm a technical writer, not a coder, so I naturally hum along at 60 WPM without even thinking about it. But the coders whose writing I decipher are all hunt and peck typists at best. Does their slow typing affect their work output? No, because it's clean, brilliant code, and because I'm paid to translate it into English for them. (Or more precisely, document the steps that includes their coding.) They can't do what I can do, but then again, I can't do what they can do. They're smarter than me in many respects - I can't think in looping algorithms or batch script processes. But I'm a better writer, and subsequently, a better typist.
The funniest thing is that the lawyers apparently are not willing to share the evidence of the copyright breach with the users, and have ordered them to not delete any files from their system.
If I were a user who actually HAD downloaded the move (and it could be traced to my drive), this would be the perfect time to "accidentally" take a hammer to my hard drive and rebuild the system.
If they don't have any evidence, then neither do I.
The only thing in danger because of these leaks are a lot of careers. So while I don't think anyone's actual life is in danger, quite a few livelihoods are probably at risk.
The cool factor for this is very high, but so is the cost. I'm not sure it's okay that a solider could be out there wielding a rifle that is worth more than his yearly salary.
compared to local stores on Black Friday, it might be worth it to pay the additional dollars for the right to sleep in. As my husband is doing after he snagged my Christmas present, a 2TB external drive, for $16 higher than the local price after shipping, not counting taxes, gas, and the immeasurable value of 6 extra hours of sleep.
Not that far off the mark - the prevailing theory is that cats domesticated themselves during the early stages of the agricultural revolution. Rather than being forced into servitude by the humans like the dogs were, the early domesticated cats noticed that there were these new things called granaries that seemed to attract a LOT of tasty food (rodents) and that the weird primates around the granaries didn't mind them eating the rodents. In fact, the primates seemed grateful for them and would leave out water to encourage them and would give them a warm nest to sleep in near the granary. Win/win for both cats and humans.
The result was a mutually beneficial relationship between cats and humans that has lasted thousands of years. So while cats didn't exactly invent humans... the cats sort of invented themselves, instead.
A study confirmed that the short term memory of the average ordinary housecat is 16 hours, which gives them the longest short term memory of any non-primate, beating out canines by several hours.
That said, cats are perfectly capable of being trained, depending on the breed. Much like dogs. There are some breeds which are nearly impossible to train, and others that take to their training without any problems. Other dogs have had the brain size bred right out of them over the generations in an effort to get a streamlined face (look at collies who have very little frontal lobe left), and still others have been so inbred that even with larger brains they're about as intelligent as Charles II of Spain and have critical health problems (the most famous recent example being Uga VII of UGA, who died of a heart attack at the age of 2, forcing them to outbreed the line for his successor.)
Tabbies, or cats who have reverted to "wild type," tend to be the most intelligent and social cats, probably for the same reasons that dogs whose lines are closer to their original wolf lines are smarter than toy poodles.
A bit more constraining than paints, pens, and papers, but my niece (who just turned 10) eats them up. She got the American Girl kits for "cootie catchers", for scrapbooking, for flower decorations, and for picture frames, along with a big 150 sheet pad of printed papers. She tore into the cootie catchers kit the second she finished opening her presents. Another hit for her was "decorate your own tea set" which she got for Christmas last year. Her younger brother is a fan of papercraft kits for dinousaurs and such.
My old XP install started giving me blue screens, and attempts to resurrect it via a clean install from an external CD drive and even a hacked together USB installation all failed. (On the upside, I'm now set up to install XP via BartPE on USB any time I need to, which is pretty handy.) So Ubunto 10.10 it was. When nothing else will run because the hardware is dying, it suddenly goes from the worst option to the best option.
Really, though, half my applications won't even run without some extensive witchery, and the final result was that I'd rather fork out the cash for a shiny new netbook than continue to be forced to use Ubuntu on the old one. It's not bad by any stretch, but as the results show, the video capabilities leave a lot to be desired.
On the one hand, it rather angers me that people out there are able to buy their way through undergrad (and grad school too) by buying papers. I wrote every single paper I turned in, and even if I had wanted to cheat, could not have afforded it.
On the other hand, I now work as an IT technical writer, and I'm surrounded by very smart people who are not very adept at writing things down. Since it's an area I excel at (from writing all my own papers and doing technical documentation for all the companies I've worked at even when it's not in my official job description), their lack of writing talent has ensured that I have a long, happy career ahead of me as a technical writer.
So march on, paper mills! Churn out more terrible writers from college so that I may continue to have easy work available!
In its present form, it has critical stability problems. I don't give a poop about compatibility when I get "internet explorer has stopped working" every other page.
Since.COM has been around so much longer, and since eighty bazillion Internet squatters snapped up addresses during the dot com bubble, only to abandon them after the bubble burst, there's a lot more unattended.COM real estate overall. Very sophisticated hackers don't even have to pay money - they just need to break into an unattended URL, use the 50 free megs of space that most websites came with through Dot Easy or whatever, and stuff their malware there.
In Chrome 5 it was Resolving Host, and in Chrome 6 it became Sending Request and Uploading 0%. Same bug, different message. It turns my otherwise lightning fast browser into a relic of the 28 baud modem era - waiting literally minutes for a website to load. Annoying as heck.
Not the shoelace, or the specific pattern of holes and shoelace, but the actual process by which one ties a shoe.
Since so many methods can be employed to produce a rollover image, patenting the effect of an onMouseOver is really, really unfair.
Those of us fortunate to own one (as opposed to merely borrowing one from the school) often go our first introduction to programming through the TIs. I personally started a collection of digital art on mine which I then used a cable to offload to PC, where it wasn't as impressive, but that foreshadowed how I would spend the next few years in calc labs - making cool 3D objects instead of doing my homework.
No, students don't *need* anything this fancy. But if it encourages kids to start coding on their own, what's the harm?
Those of us in the FFXI community are quite pleased that the XIV development team returned our good content creators (i.e. the battle team) and took away all the bad content creators as their directors. We've had two mini expansion patches in the last six months that raised our level caps to 85 and added a ton of new content.
FFXIV will be the EQ2 to FFXI's EQ.
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I donate platelets regularly and get paid in T-shirts and cookies. I think it's a fair deal.
So arguably this would not be targeting me. That's not to say I don't appreciate music - on the contrary, I almost went into music as a profession - but I don't mind that my music isn't at CD quality when I listen to it on my iPod. I can't tell the difference between $5 Big Lots ear buds and $30 ones from Apple (although I can tell the difference between the $3 and the $5 ear buds at Big Logs, and that extra $2 is most definitely worth it.) I can tell the difference between the sound on those $5 ear buds and a pair of $100 headphones, but I don't *mind* the loss of sound quality, and I'll take the convenience of my seashells over the bulk of very good headphones any day.
Wasn't that the actual plot of the movie 2012? That the earth's core was slowing down and all that energy was being transferred into heat instead, causing the mantle (which was made of water for some reason) to boil? I think I actually tuned out most of that movie because the science was so atrocious.
Java and Adobe's problem is the same - it asks permission to update instead of doing it silently. Heck, the last Reader update required a system reboot. Compare that to AdBlock or NoScript, which updates without you having to do anything and lets you know after the fact. I can force out Windows updates on the systems I manage, but I can't force users to update their Java, and the icon will sometimes sit there for weeks or months before they even bother to mention it.
Actually, I think it was ENG 4160 or something like that, but the short name of the class was "folklore" with emphasis on oral transmission. 10 years ago I argued that the "oral" part was obsolete because of the advent of the Internet, and I was shot down by the Luddite professor. I wonder how the class is taught today?
You're getting it confused with the time we cheered and high-fived when an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at him, one of the highest insults imaginable in Iraq. And even then, we only cheered and clapped because Bush's monkey reflexes allowed him to duck in time. The look on his face when the first shoe sailed toward him was priceless. Had one actually made contact with the President, no one would have laughed nearly as much.
Ever try FFXI? Storypoints occur from level 1 to level 75, and the pointless grind has pretty much been eliminated from level 30 on up, at least for level purposes. (You've still got to grind your skills and your gear for most jobs.) There is no PvP, and group play is done from three to 18 people for most activities. You can solo if you really want to, but you level much more quickly in a party. SE apparently siphoned all the awesome that they had hoped to pipe into XIV and dropped it into XI. It's $5-10 off Steam with a free 30 day trial, although I'd wait until they release the next bundled version with the last three mini expansions (which are what finally fixed the game after eight years), which they probably will in the next few months.
That's just it though. Most players aren't going to give a game more than an hour to form an initial first impression. You have to "wow" them, pardon the pun, in the timeframe, or you've lost them. It doesn't have to be fancy intro movies or easy quests leading into a skinner box or a tutorial, but a game does need a hook, something to entice the player to keep going. Any game that lacks that isn't going to become a juggernaut any time soon.
I find myself cleaning up the technical documentation of very smart people. I describe it as thus: "They know exactly what they're talking about, and they assume I do as well." But writing a technical manual isn't the same as writing code. I'm a technical writer, not a coder, so I naturally hum along at 60 WPM without even thinking about it. But the coders whose writing I decipher are all hunt and peck typists at best. Does their slow typing affect their work output? No, because it's clean, brilliant code, and because I'm paid to translate it into English for them. (Or more precisely, document the steps that includes their coding.) They can't do what I can do, but then again, I can't do what they can do. They're smarter than me in many respects - I can't think in looping algorithms or batch script processes. But I'm a better writer, and subsequently, a better typist.
The funniest thing is that the lawyers apparently are not willing to share the evidence of the copyright breach with the users, and have ordered them to not delete any files from their system.
If I were a user who actually HAD downloaded the move (and it could be traced to my drive), this would be the perfect time to "accidentally" take a hammer to my hard drive and rebuild the system.
If they don't have any evidence, then neither do I.
The only thing in danger because of these leaks are a lot of careers. So while I don't think anyone's actual life is in danger, quite a few livelihoods are probably at risk.
The cool factor for this is very high, but so is the cost. I'm not sure it's okay that a solider could be out there wielding a rifle that is worth more than his yearly salary.
compared to local stores on Black Friday, it might be worth it to pay the additional dollars for the right to sleep in. As my husband is doing after he snagged my Christmas present, a 2TB external drive, for $16 higher than the local price after shipping, not counting taxes, gas, and the immeasurable value of 6 extra hours of sleep.
Not that far off the mark - the prevailing theory is that cats domesticated themselves during the early stages of the agricultural revolution. Rather than being forced into servitude by the humans like the dogs were, the early domesticated cats noticed that there were these new things called granaries that seemed to attract a LOT of tasty food (rodents) and that the weird primates around the granaries didn't mind them eating the rodents. In fact, the primates seemed grateful for them and would leave out water to encourage them and would give them a warm nest to sleep in near the granary. Win/win for both cats and humans.
The result was a mutually beneficial relationship between cats and humans that has lasted thousands of years. So while cats didn't exactly invent humans... the cats sort of invented themselves, instead.
A study confirmed that the short term memory of the average ordinary housecat is 16 hours, which gives them the longest short term memory of any non-primate, beating out canines by several hours.
That said, cats are perfectly capable of being trained, depending on the breed. Much like dogs. There are some breeds which are nearly impossible to train, and others that take to their training without any problems. Other dogs have had the brain size bred right out of them over the generations in an effort to get a streamlined face (look at collies who have very little frontal lobe left), and still others have been so inbred that even with larger brains they're about as intelligent as Charles II of Spain and have critical health problems (the most famous recent example being Uga VII of UGA, who died of a heart attack at the age of 2, forcing them to outbreed the line for his successor.)
Tabbies, or cats who have reverted to "wild type," tend to be the most intelligent and social cats, probably for the same reasons that dogs whose lines are closer to their original wolf lines are smarter than toy poodles.
A bit more constraining than paints, pens, and papers, but my niece (who just turned 10) eats them up. She got the American Girl kits for "cootie catchers", for scrapbooking, for flower decorations, and for picture frames, along with a big 150 sheet pad of printed papers. She tore into the cootie catchers kit the second she finished opening her presents. Another hit for her was "decorate your own tea set" which she got for Christmas last year. Her younger brother is a fan of papercraft kits for dinousaurs and such.
My old XP install started giving me blue screens, and attempts to resurrect it via a clean install from an external CD drive and even a hacked together USB installation all failed. (On the upside, I'm now set up to install XP via BartPE on USB any time I need to, which is pretty handy.) So Ubunto 10.10 it was. When nothing else will run because the hardware is dying, it suddenly goes from the worst option to the best option.
Really, though, half my applications won't even run without some extensive witchery, and the final result was that I'd rather fork out the cash for a shiny new netbook than continue to be forced to use Ubuntu on the old one. It's not bad by any stretch, but as the results show, the video capabilities leave a lot to be desired.
On the one hand, it rather angers me that people out there are able to buy their way through undergrad (and grad school too) by buying papers. I wrote every single paper I turned in, and even if I had wanted to cheat, could not have afforded it.
On the other hand, I now work as an IT technical writer, and I'm surrounded by very smart people who are not very adept at writing things down. Since it's an area I excel at (from writing all my own papers and doing technical documentation for all the companies I've worked at even when it's not in my official job description), their lack of writing talent has ensured that I have a long, happy career ahead of me as a technical writer.
So march on, paper mills! Churn out more terrible writers from college so that I may continue to have easy work available!
In its present form, it has critical stability problems. I don't give a poop about compatibility when I get "internet explorer has stopped working" every other page.
Since .COM has been around so much longer, and since eighty bazillion Internet squatters snapped up addresses during the dot com bubble, only to abandon them after the bubble burst, there's a lot more unattended .COM real estate overall. Very sophisticated hackers don't even have to pay money - they just need to break into an unattended URL, use the 50 free megs of space that most websites came with through Dot Easy or whatever, and stuff their malware there.
In Chrome 5 it was Resolving Host, and in Chrome 6 it became Sending Request and Uploading 0%. Same bug, different message. It turns my otherwise lightning fast browser into a relic of the 28 baud modem era - waiting literally minutes for a website to load. Annoying as heck.
I'd actually run out and buy a PS3 for that.
Not the shoelace, or the specific pattern of holes and shoelace, but the actual process by which one ties a shoe. Since so many methods can be employed to produce a rollover image, patenting the effect of an onMouseOver is really, really unfair.
Those of us fortunate to own one (as opposed to merely borrowing one from the school) often go our first introduction to programming through the TIs. I personally started a collection of digital art on mine which I then used a cable to offload to PC, where it wasn't as impressive, but that foreshadowed how I would spend the next few years in calc labs - making cool 3D objects instead of doing my homework. No, students don't *need* anything this fancy. But if it encourages kids to start coding on their own, what's the harm?
Those of us in the FFXI community are quite pleased that the XIV development team returned our good content creators (i.e. the battle team) and took away all the bad content creators as their directors. We've had two mini expansion patches in the last six months that raised our level caps to 85 and added a ton of new content. FFXIV will be the EQ2 to FFXI's EQ.