WoW seems an odd companion to those other games, I've always felt the CPU was the primary bottleneck in that beast, but be that as it may..
For me, I can't recall ever solving an issue or getting noticeable performance improvements from upgrading graphics drivers. I have, however, had several issues introduced by it.
Nowadays I stick to the old "if it works don't try to fix it" mantra, with a few exceptions. For example, I kept up-to-date for a bit after Win7 release, assuming there would be teething issues for a few revisions. If buying a bleeding edge recently released card I would also stay on top of drivers for a month or two. But other than that, just leave them be I say.
What you _can_ do, at least in the case of these Toyotas, is hit the brake. The sticky gas pedal on the Toyotas is a mechanical issue, not an electronic one, and pushing the brake real hard causes the electronics to cut the gas.
In other words, electronics saving you from mechanical failure.
Assuming the information sent from Toyota isn't a blatant lie, obviously.
A couple of years back I remember writing PC Gamer requesting them to add DRM info to their reviews. While DRM certainly won't make me buy a game, some DRM will most definitely rule the game out, regardless of score.
I was very happy when I saw it making an appearance along with a magazine redesign (obviously, I take full credit; I'm sure nobody else requested it). They seem to be fairly serious about including proper information there as well.
When a major games magazine makes a point of informing the public about what sort of DRM a game includes, isn't it about time the bean counters wake up and realize that perhaps it's not terribly good PR? I know one thing, the DRM info isn't listed as a sales point (except, perhaps, when it says "None").
As for this particular DRM, the first thing I found myself doing was double-check the date to make sure I hadn't warped to April 1st. Previous notions of requiring gamers to go online once every week or two to reactivate were vociferously shot down by the public. How did Ubisoft take that as a sign that the public are ready to accept being online permanently to play? It redefines the meaning of draconian.
I'm truly baffled this even got past the planning stage.
If you don't find it interesting, that's fine, but I think one of the prime reasons that people don't find it appealing is that it's SO character-driven.
Is it? I just don't see it. I find pretty much every single character bland, uninteresting and virtually exactly the same as the first time they were introduced. I find myself not for one second _caring_ about any of them. They're just too...flimsy. Too unreal.
Firefly was a heavily plot-driven series
Ironically, what I loved so about Firefly were the characters. They made sense in the world they were in. They were each interesting and fresh in their own way. And they had excellent interaction and chemistry. I don't feel Dollhouse has any of those things.
I could probably watch the Firefly characters have lunch for an entire episode, and love every second of it. I can't imagine anything the Dollhouse characters might do or say in such a setting that would make it worthwhile watching.
Tastes differ. Obviously those that love Dollhouse see something in it that I do not.
It should be added, that since then we have barely spent any money on roads (cars are evil, we should all be waiting for trains that never run instead).
Which means we're juddering along on roads with 1960s standards much of the time.
For me, Dollhouse started slow and never got moving. I find there's virtually no character development or interaction of any interest. No greater story arc to keep me interested. After seeing "Epitaph One", my first thought was that I wish the show had been set in that time period, unraveling the past over the course of a season. That might have been interesting.
Buffy never appealed to me, but obviously a lot of people disagree with me on that one.
It might be. But there are a lot of other "not on the paper" aspects as well. Gut feeling, chemistry etc. Sure, in the end, it may come down to "hey, I spend my weekends coding compilers for obscurolanguage 27, just cause I can!", but for me it would be pretty far down the list of things Iæd care about.
I think a company that outright won't hire someone unless they code at home, has issues I'd rather not be faced with. The most basic of which would be trying to dictate what I do in my spare time.
As the other reply says, I was not talking about deciding what you need to go to (though at times that would be the case, like if there's an equipment upgrade incoming the relevant staff would surely be sent on a course about those), but that you get to learn what you need during working hours when at all possible, and always during paid hours.
If you have an extra interest, go you. But it should not be _required_ in order to be able to do your job.
I would rather end up in a hospital where they value knowledge enough to send their employees to (important/relevant) symposiums, than one where they assume employees do it in their spare time...
Where I work we're migrating to a new technology platform. Do they tell us to go home and install a compiler and learn the new language and framework? Of course not. They schedule a full four weeks worth of courses for every developer during paid working hours.
When you're looking to hire a gardener, do you examine his previous work, or do you make sure he spends at least x hours a day tending his own garden?
If you do the latter, you're the bigger schmuck.
I'd also like to point out, that this Ted fellow did not say "I'd never work someplace where any of the other employees code at home". He says "I don't want to work someplace where coding at home is _a requirement_". There's a big difference.
Operators have a hard limit on the amount of service they can actually provision. Allowing any and all devices to run willy nilly on the network would be certain death, even for the best-laid network.
Do you have any examples of this? Apart from the non-standard system needed to support the iPhone's voice mail stuff, I can't figure out what you might be referring to.
There are valid reasons to think twice before allowing online voting. The most common being that it's impossible to verify that the voter is not being influenced by someone at the time of voting.
Goodness, I got way too much work to do today to answer every single one of those points. But I'll pull out a few examples, because you're reading those slides just as biased from the other direction compared to Microsoft's angle. The images in the link has since gone dead, so I might not remember exactly right either I suppose.
You say WoW is an outright lie. Please show me the page where Blizzard states any other platform beyond Mac and Windows is supported. The point isn't that you _can't make it run_, it's that it's not supported and that no attempt is being made by the company to make it so. Which is true for the vast majority of (commercial) games and software.
Until you can slap in a cd/dvd, click next a few times, and end up with an icon on your desktop where you can start the application, most people will consider it "not working". That's just how it is.
"there is no guarantee.. blablabla... users are on their own" -> lie
Unless you can show me an iron clad contract from a company swearing "we'll fix anything you report, even if you're just using a free distro", that's no lie. Of course, it's no different with Windows, but that's beside the point. They're only _implying_ Windows is any better, and playing on the "Microsoft is a tangible entity, you can trust us" fallacy.
Camera, iPod, MP3 Compatibility? incredibly high for Linux at least for cameras and mp3.
Again, much of it works (with varying degrees of time invested to make it so), but it is in most cases not _supported_ (and of course, forget about the included software). Whereas you know it will be in Windows.
"It can be unclear to user whether.. or are optional" -> lie. It's written in big fat bolded font to which category each update belongs (at least in Ubuntu and Mint.. but they attacked Ubuntu directly, so here it goes)
If they indeed segmented the updates into showing first critical fixes, then further down a new segment with only optional fixes, I would agree. Especially if they added a separate button to only install critical fixes.
That wasn't the case last I ran Ubuntu though. I think it might have been noted in each patch's description, for those that had one, but clicking through four pages worth and installing each invidiually is pretty "unclear" to me. But if they made significant changes to this in the latest version, I'll readily concede this point.
"Linux requires a lot of time to maintain" -> lie.
I believe the slide specifically mentioned amount and frequency of updates here. In that they are correct. Ubuntu gets _far_ more updates _far_ more often than Windows does. I'm not sure why Microsoft feel that a lack of patches and updates is in fact a point in their favor, but they're not lying.
What i don't get is the "Windows is safer than Linux" statement. Now this is being a little pedantic but Linux is only the kernel.
That's because you were asleep the past decade or so, during which "Linux" became synonymous with "any Linux based distribution" when it comes to the mass media/general public.
I have yet to have had an Ubuntu issue I've been able to readily solve via the included documentation. It's always google and end up in a 20 page forum thread, wherein lurks the solution. So on par with Windows, pretty much.
With "self help tutorials" they are most likely referring to, for example, the network troubleshooting wizard. Last I ran Ubuntu, if the network didn't work, it didn't work. There was no "click here for help", followed by a list of specific suggestions on what to try.
While I totally agree it's shady, it ain't no outright lie. And this bullet point was probably _the_ most shady of the lot, so I'm curious about the "one out of many" statement of yours.
Personally, I'll go to the store that gives me real advice instead of a sales pitch any day of the week. Even if they are more expensive (within reason).
He didn't say it was a violent crime, that may have a different definition, he said it was violence.
And, according to the definition of the word, unless they took great care in rendering these towers silent in a non-destructive fashion, it is most definitely violence.
I don't have much of an issue with the list itself. Obviously it's heavily biased, but I see nothing on there that can be called an outright lie.
My problem is the purpose of BestBuy sending staff to a presentation like that. It's specifically intended to give staff arguments to persuade customers to buy Windows. When the real goal of the staff should be to identify each customer's needs and guide them based on that.
It's one thing to make mention of a more expensive product to see if there's a chance of an upsale, it's quite another to be as one-sided as this presentation is. Whether the staff will recite that presentation to any and all customers, or simply use it as input for any customer that asks for examples of why to pick one over the other, remains to be seen. But I have a feeling....
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WoW seems an odd companion to those other games, I've always felt the CPU was the primary bottleneck in that beast, but be that as it may..
For me, I can't recall ever solving an issue or getting noticeable performance improvements from upgrading graphics drivers. I have, however, had several issues introduced by it.
Nowadays I stick to the old "if it works don't try to fix it" mantra, with a few exceptions. For example, I kept up-to-date for a bit after Win7 release, assuming there would be teething issues for a few revisions. If buying a bleeding edge recently released card I would also stay on top of drivers for a month or two. But other than that, just leave them be I say.
What you _can_ do, at least in the case of these Toyotas, is hit the brake. The sticky gas pedal on the Toyotas is a mechanical issue, not an electronic one, and pushing the brake real hard causes the electronics to cut the gas.
In other words, electronics saving you from mechanical failure.
Assuming the information sent from Toyota isn't a blatant lie, obviously.
A couple of years back I remember writing PC Gamer requesting them to add DRM info to their reviews. While DRM certainly won't make me buy a game, some DRM will most definitely rule the game out, regardless of score.
I was very happy when I saw it making an appearance along with a magazine redesign (obviously, I take full credit; I'm sure nobody else requested it). They seem to be fairly serious about including proper information there as well.
When a major games magazine makes a point of informing the public about what sort of DRM a game includes, isn't it about time the bean counters wake up and realize that perhaps it's not terribly good PR? I know one thing, the DRM info isn't listed as a sales point (except, perhaps, when it says "None").
As for this particular DRM, the first thing I found myself doing was double-check the date to make sure I hadn't warped to April 1st. Previous notions of requiring gamers to go online once every week or two to reactivate were vociferously shot down by the public. How did Ubisoft take that as a sign that the public are ready to accept being online permanently to play? It redefines the meaning of draconian.
I'm truly baffled this even got past the planning stage.
For a while. You can jump through a number of hoops with Blizzard support to get the account unlinked from the authenticator.
I think it took about 48 hours when I had to do it back when my authenticator decided it no longer wanted to turn itself on.
A word of caution to any in a similar boat: CALL Blizzard. They can take a week or two to get to the email, you probably don't want to wait that long.
If you don't find it interesting, that's fine, but I think one of the prime reasons that people don't find it appealing is that it's SO character-driven.
Is it? I just don't see it. I find pretty much every single character bland, uninteresting and virtually exactly the same as the first time they were introduced. I find myself not for one second _caring_ about any of them. They're just too...flimsy. Too unreal.
Firefly was a heavily plot-driven series
Ironically, what I loved so about Firefly were the characters. They made sense in the world they were in. They were each interesting and fresh in their own way. And they had excellent interaction and chemistry. I don't feel Dollhouse has any of those things.
I could probably watch the Firefly characters have lunch for an entire episode, and love every second of it. I can't imagine anything the Dollhouse characters might do or say in such a setting that would make it worthwhile watching.
Tastes differ. Obviously those that love Dollhouse see something in it that I do not.
Hasn't it been shown in numerous studies that overweight and unfit is what's causing the health issues? Overweight and fit, does not.
But I suppose this isn't about being healthy, but about fitting in with the current "perfect body" image.
It should be added, that since then we have barely spent any money on roads (cars are evil, we should all be waiting for trains that never run instead).
Which means we're juddering along on roads with 1960s standards much of the time.
Touché
For me, Dollhouse started slow and never got moving. I find there's virtually no character development or interaction of any interest. No greater story arc to keep me interested. After seeing "Epitaph One", my first thought was that I wish the show had been set in that time period, unraveling the past over the course of a season. That might have been interesting.
Buffy never appealed to me, but obviously a lot of people disagree with me on that one.
Firefly I think is pure genius.
Have you seen Dollhouse?
I like Whedon as much as the next guy, but he's not by any means an "all he touches turns to gold" kind of guy.
I have never heard of a company who's policy is to "not hire people unless they code at home"
Me neither. But that particular point is what the blog entry was all about, so that's what we're discussing.
Who do you hire? Its a no brain decision.
It might be. But there are a lot of other "not on the paper" aspects as well. Gut feeling, chemistry etc. Sure, in the end, it may come down to "hey, I spend my weekends coding compilers for obscurolanguage 27, just cause I can!", but for me it would be pretty far down the list of things Iæd care about.
I think a company that outright won't hire someone unless they code at home, has issues I'd rather not be faced with. The most basic of which would be trying to dictate what I do in my spare time.
As the other reply says, I was not talking about deciding what you need to go to (though at times that would be the case, like if there's an equipment upgrade incoming the relevant staff would surely be sent on a course about those), but that you get to learn what you need during working hours when at all possible, and always during paid hours.
If you have an extra interest, go you. But it should not be _required_ in order to be able to do your job.
I would rather end up in a hospital where they value knowledge enough to send their employees to (important/relevant) symposiums, than one where they assume employees do it in their spare time...
Where I work we're migrating to a new technology platform. Do they tell us to go home and install a compiler and learn the new language and framework? Of course not. They schedule a full four weeks worth of courses for every developer during paid working hours.
When you're looking to hire a gardener, do you examine his previous work, or do you make sure he spends at least x hours a day tending his own garden?
If you do the latter, you're the bigger schmuck.
I'd also like to point out, that this Ted fellow did not say "I'd never work someplace where any of the other employees code at home". He says "I don't want to work someplace where coding at home is _a requirement_". There's a big difference.
Operators have a hard limit on the amount of service they can actually provision. Allowing any and all devices to run willy nilly on the network would be certain death, even for the best-laid network.
Do you have any examples of this? Apart from the non-standard system needed to support the iPhone's voice mail stuff, I can't figure out what you might be referring to.
Slow start indeed. We've had MMS since 2002 here. After seven years it's still barely used.
As you say, we're moving towards free data plans now anyways so MMS will be rather pointless compared to email and IM services.
This has nothing to do with developing for Android. It has to do with illegally distributing somebody else's software for the Android.
Any developer too dim to realize the difference between those two, I don't think I'd want any software from anyways.
There are valid reasons to think twice before allowing online voting. The most common being that it's impossible to verify that the voter is not being influenced by someone at the time of voting.
Goodness, I got way too much work to do today to answer every single one of those points. But I'll pull out a few examples, because you're reading those slides just as biased from the other direction compared to Microsoft's angle. The images in the link has since gone dead, so I might not remember exactly right either I suppose.
You say WoW is an outright lie. Please show me the page where Blizzard states any other platform beyond Mac and Windows is supported. The point isn't that you _can't make it run_, it's that it's not supported and that no attempt is being made by the company to make it so. Which is true for the vast majority of (commercial) games and software.
Until you can slap in a cd/dvd, click next a few times, and end up with an icon on your desktop where you can start the application, most people will consider it "not working". That's just how it is.
"there is no guarantee .. blablabla... users are on their own" -> lie
Unless you can show me an iron clad contract from a company swearing "we'll fix anything you report, even if you're just using a free distro", that's no lie. Of course, it's no different with Windows, but that's beside the point. They're only _implying_ Windows is any better, and playing on the "Microsoft is a tangible entity, you can trust us" fallacy.
Camera, iPod, MP3 Compatibility? incredibly high for Linux at least for cameras and mp3.
Again, much of it works (with varying degrees of time invested to make it so), but it is in most cases not _supported_ (and of course, forget about the included software). Whereas you know it will be in Windows.
"It can be unclear to user whether .. or are optional" -> lie. It's written in big fat bolded font to which category each update belongs (at least in Ubuntu and Mint .. but they attacked Ubuntu directly, so here it goes)
If they indeed segmented the updates into showing first critical fixes, then further down a new segment with only optional fixes, I would agree. Especially if they added a separate button to only install critical fixes.
That wasn't the case last I ran Ubuntu though. I think it might have been noted in each patch's description, for those that had one, but clicking through four pages worth and installing each invidiually is pretty "unclear" to me. But if they made significant changes to this in the latest version, I'll readily concede this point.
"Linux requires a lot of time to maintain" -> lie.
I believe the slide specifically mentioned amount and frequency of updates here. In that they are correct. Ubuntu gets _far_ more updates _far_ more often than Windows does. I'm not sure why Microsoft feel that a lack of patches and updates is in fact a point in their favor, but they're not lying.
That's because you were asleep the past decade or so, during which "Linux" became synonymous with "any Linux based distribution" when it comes to the mass media/general public.
I have yet to have had an Ubuntu issue I've been able to readily solve via the included documentation. It's always google and end up in a 20 page forum thread, wherein lurks the solution. So on par with Windows, pretty much.
With "self help tutorials" they are most likely referring to, for example, the network troubleshooting wizard. Last I ran Ubuntu, if the network didn't work, it didn't work. There was no "click here for help", followed by a list of specific suggestions on what to try.
While I totally agree it's shady, it ain't no outright lie. And this bullet point was probably _the_ most shady of the lot, so I'm curious about the "one out of many" statement of yours.
Notice, I said "should be".
Personally, I'll go to the store that gives me real advice instead of a sales pitch any day of the week. Even if they are more expensive (within reason).
He didn't say it was a violent crime, that may have a different definition, he said it was violence.
And, according to the definition of the word, unless they took great care in rendering these towers silent in a non-destructive fashion, it is most definitely violence.
I don't have much of an issue with the list itself. Obviously it's heavily biased, but I see nothing on there that can be called an outright lie.
My problem is the purpose of BestBuy sending staff to a presentation like that. It's specifically intended to give staff arguments to persuade customers to buy Windows. When the real goal of the staff should be to identify each customer's needs and guide them based on that.
It's one thing to make mention of a more expensive product to see if there's a chance of an upsale, it's quite another to be as one-sided as this presentation is. Whether the staff will recite that presentation to any and all customers, or simply use it as input for any customer that asks for examples of why to pick one over the other, remains to be seen. But I have a feeling....