From an administrative & hardware standpoint I'd say you save money by virtualizing. No need to have dedicated machines any more since you can run a fixed amount of hardware and spawn instances on demand.
From a marketing perspective they may make more money by shutting down servers but it could easily be counterproductive too. If people become aware that they get maybe 12-18 months tops and their their game is deliberately crippled they might avoid EA titles.
Surely it is not beyond the resources of EA to buy a server farm and run virtualized instances of game servers on demand. If a game becomes less popular, the VMs timeout and shutdown. If it's very popular more instances get spawned. I don't see any reason that they have to physically decommission or repurpose anything in this day & age.
The short answer is a qualified YES. All imaging technologies can (help) save us from (some) terrorists. Specifically, those individuals carrying dangerous/unknown objects or materials outside their body,
Hmm, if only there were some orifice the terrorists could stuff their explosives to defeat this technology.
I used to work in a place where if you worked on you got a free meal in the canteen. People used to work 2 or 3 hours extra and all for the price of a meal. They cut out the practice and guess what the result was?
There must be hundreds of apps for distance learning, some of them with dedicated interfaces, video / audio chat, file exchange, presentation, white boarding. About the only SL brings to the table is chat. I doubt is any use at all for the other things.
Second Life is not a new concept. TinyMUD did more or less the same thing in text form 20 years ago. Users could create content and visitors could look at that content.
Whether graphical or text what these player created realms have in common is that for the most part you are wallowing in a sea of shit looking for the odd gem. The majority of the place is a boring, inconsistent wasteland of geometric shapes and broken scripts. And since there is no fundamental purpose to the place the places that are populated are used like glorified chat rooms.
Where Linden have introduced a novel twist is by allowing players to exchange real money for imaginary money and vice versa. I'm sure it's very profitable for Linden. They get to rake currency exchanges, to sell land, to set the exchange rate and of course manage / benefit from all the real money while people play with the L$ counterpart. However it means Second Life has been home to all kinds of scams - gambling, ponzi, MLM, dubious "banks" etc. and the place has a mercenary streak throughout. It's really quite seedy even before exploring some of the more adult themed aspects.
So I wouldn't be concerned if the thing crashed and burned. It's probably overdue if it is a fad.
It probably doesn't stack up at all. IGP chips are fine for netbooks and budget PCs but don't expect to be able to run any graphically demanding game on them. I expect that some performance benefit comes from integrating the CPU & GPU into one chip.
...is like saying solar panels are too hard to build when you run out of slave labor in hamster wheels.
No it isn't. It's a legitimate issue with IPv6 addresses. I totally understand the need for IPv6 but there is no denying what a pain in the ass the format is to type in. About the only useful notation is::1. Having to type out potentially 8 colon separated hex values is an exercise in pain and suffering.
Well to be fair, they are supposed to dump it at the treatment works and face very severe fines if they don't. But it does demonstrate a very fundamental issue with the place that trucks are even required to do this.
I agree but new Amigas could have preserved backwards compatibility in new custom chipsets. Look at PC land where SVGA, VGA, EGA, CGA, MGA graphics and Adlib / Soundblaster / SBPro / SB16 audio were all as hardcoded in their own way as original / advanced Amiga chipsets.
Commodore simply didn't do enough to keep the chipsets up to date. Perhaps it was funding or manpower issues but by the time I jumped ship I was able to buy a PC with a 24 bit 800x600 display (with full backwards compatibility for DOS games) vs some crappy 256 colour mode in an A4000.
Perhaps the Amiga was ultimately doomed, but I think in hindsight that if they'd perhaps licenced their audio & video chipsets and produced clean driver interfaces that they would have stood a far better chance of keeping up with the competition than they did.
The writing was on the wall before Windows 95 showed up, and it was Commodore who managed to kill themselves. In about 1993 I was on the phone to a dealer to order an A4000 and I was told Commodore had jacked the price up by 100 pounds. Much though I loved the Amiga I was not going to fucked over like that.
The price hike tipped it even for an ardant fan like myself. I bought a copy of PC World and went looking through some the adverts. I bought a PC, which had more memory, more HDD capacity, a faster CPU, 24-bit graphics, and a monitor for less than an A4000.
Commodore simply failed to maintain the Amiga's technical advantage that it once enjoyed or gain the marketshare or market it properly. I still fire up an emulator for the nostalgia, but I'm glad I left when I did. Switching to a PC and learning to program it has kept me gainfully employed ever since.
Netscape, Nullsoft, Compuserve, MapQuest, Digital Cities, Moviefone. Each of the the "divlets" had huge potential as independent entities while still offering innovation or tech that AOL could leverage. Instead AOL interfered with them, fucked with their culture, diverted their development efforts towards the AOL service, forced them to adopt AOL email addresses, even to use the AOL client even for business (yes really) and of course lay people off.
AOL central managed to squander all that potential. Is it any wonder most of these brands are now dead or just hollowed out husks? AOL is almost like King Midas except everything it touches turns to shit. Even Time Warner must seriously regret the day it "merged" with AOL.
It has too much clutter in the menus, it feels like a Windows 95 era application and many areas are clunky by comparison with MS Office.
For example the style manager is extremely primitive - the one in Word shows you a preview of the style in the list, and even lets you select instances of that style in the document and change them in one go to some other style. Tables can be a pain to use - Word lets you draw them and drag columns to change the widths whereas OO forces you down the old fashioned route and adjusting the table means messing around in the ruler and risking inadvertantly changing indent sliders. On several occasions, I have even been trapped in a table, unable to get the cursor to move below it no matter what I did until finally I had to cut and pasted the whole table up a bit just to put blank space below it. The Navigator's headings mode is very primitive compared to Word where you get a full outline mode can easily promote / demote content inline.
It's lots of things like that and they all stack up. I still use OpenOffice (I don't even use Word/Excel for personal work), but it's still clunky. The UI needs a usability makeover, much the way GNOME got one. It would benefit everyone, not just novices.
True too. I was implying that this alternative god was a hands-off but benevolent god who looked kindly on good works, sort of how he is described in the New Testament.
4. And why does this god need all people to send donations to fund megachurches and expensive lifestyles for preachers when it should be used for charitable works?
The thing is for all that talk you discounted the obvious and very likely reason that someone comes in a wheelchair and leaves walking - because they weren't completely immobile to start with. Lots of people in wheelchairs can walk to some degree and with some encouragement (such as sticking them on stage in front of hundreds of people and commanding them to), may be able to walk. It may even be this person was (conveniently) offered a wheelchair when they turned up for the event.
Read a book like The Faith Healers by James Randi and you will see how these "miracles" and more are performed.
If LED bulbs last longer than incandescents it follows that incandescent traffic lights are out of service or faulty more often as a result. So how many people have been killed due to faulty lights?
It may well be that in some circumstances LED bulbs are not suitable, or need to be augmented by heating elements, but if they are more reliable at other times they may be safer overall.
Funnily enough the Aum cult used to recruit engineers too and of course Heaven's Gate was packed with web developers. It's weird because you would think that engineers would be the most immune to religion, or at least moderate it. After all engineers are taught to seek out answers, to be rational and logical and not to resort to special pleading (e.g. "it was God's will") when something doesn't work properly.
I frequently hear the "print-to-pdf" feature touted as a major advantageous feature of Ooo - but with the wide availability of pdf 'printer' programs I don't see this as a feature at all. A separately installed pdf-printer program is available to all other programs (print to pdf from esoteric scientific program, notepad, browser, whatever) instead of tying the feature into Ooo itself. In fact, this seems contrary to the mentality of most programming (and by extension, to the open source movement) logics - aren't we supposed to want a single copy of code that can be called by any program, rather than code living in a walled garden that is replicated in each program?
I'm aware of PDF printers and I use them, but none of them are as simple to use. The one built into OpenOffice works with a single click a button, and a file dialog. That's it. Most PDF drivers lead you through 2 or 3 dialogs and fail to pick up the document metadata or hinting stuff like column flow because they're being called as if they're printers. The Impress app also exports presentations as Shockwave Flash files which is also a similarly excellent feature. It would be great if Ooo exported into more formats, things like EPUB for example.
It certainly doesn't stop you adding a PDF printer driver (such as PDFCreator on Win32) and using it from other apps though.
...its GUI is more like Microsoft Office pre-2007 than Microsoft Office 2007 is, and I have never gotten used to the 2007 interface.
Ooo has an incredibly ugly UI and some glaring usability issues. I think it would win many more converts if it focused on usability for its next release even if it never added a single new feature. Drag the UI kicking and screaming into the 21st century and smooth some of the rough edges in the process. From my own experience, I tolerate the UI simply because the suite is free and has some excellent functionality like Print to PDF built-in, but I reckon tasks like creating tables, document outline mode and diagrams take me a good 2-3x as long as they do than in MS Word.
I still maintain that this simply can't work, and that it's an absolutely braindead money pit of an idea if it's not a total scam.
Well it could work, but only for sedentary games where a bit of lag doesn't kill the experience, it might even offer some interesting scenarios for network play such as pitting one street or town against another.
Even so, the tech just seems to be a bit of a white elephant. Latency does limit what it can do, as will the sort of loads the server at the other end can tolerate. I expect it may appeal to cable / optical fibre networks looking to justify renting some piece of crap device to customers, but I'm not sure why actual users would care for it.
With the advent of DHT & magnet URIs, the main remaining purpose of torrent sites is search functionality. Since DHT could handle search too, I wonder how long it is until Bittorrent follows the likes of eDonkey / eMule by being largely for peer to peer for pretty much everything.
The responsiveness of Firefox is just fine on any modern PC (i.e. made in the last 5 years). I even use it on a Asus Eee 701 netbook and it's still usable although it suffers from the small cramped display.
Google Chrome certainly starts faster and feels a small bit more responsive but these are hardly deal breakers IMO. As a prospective user I would be more concerned about the amount of information you'd be feeding Google just by using their browser. Now they have the potential to see EVERYWHERE you go, not just what you choose to search for through their site.
Just compile the damn stuff into something faster! Like a library, but a bit safer (sandboxed).
It already does. On first boot XUL / JS is parsed into objects which are serialized as prototypes into XUL.mfl where mfl stands for Mozilla Fast Load. The next time the app starts it constructs the prototypes from the fast load file rather than the XML. The mfl file is regenerated when the XUL changes of course.
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From an administrative & hardware standpoint I'd say you save money by virtualizing. No need to have dedicated machines any more since you can run a fixed amount of hardware and spawn instances on demand.
From a marketing perspective they may make more money by shutting down servers but it could easily be counterproductive too. If people become aware that they get maybe 12-18 months tops and their their game is deliberately crippled they might avoid EA titles.
Surely it is not beyond the resources of EA to buy a server farm and run virtualized instances of game servers on demand. If a game becomes less popular, the VMs timeout and shutdown. If it's very popular more instances get spawned. I don't see any reason that they have to physically decommission or repurpose anything in this day & age.
Hmm, if only there were some orifice the terrorists could stuff their explosives to defeat this technology.
I used to work in a place where if you worked on you got a free meal in the canteen. People used to work 2 or 3 hours extra and all for the price of a meal. They cut out the practice and guess what the result was?
There must be hundreds of apps for distance learning, some of them with dedicated interfaces, video / audio chat, file exchange, presentation, white boarding. About the only SL brings to the table is chat. I doubt is any use at all for the other things.
Whether graphical or text what these player created realms have in common is that for the most part you are wallowing in a sea of shit looking for the odd gem. The majority of the place is a boring, inconsistent wasteland of geometric shapes and broken scripts. And since there is no fundamental purpose to the place the places that are populated are used like glorified chat rooms.
Where Linden have introduced a novel twist is by allowing players to exchange real money for imaginary money and vice versa. I'm sure it's very profitable for Linden. They get to rake currency exchanges, to sell land, to set the exchange rate and of course manage / benefit from all the real money while people play with the L$ counterpart. However it means Second Life has been home to all kinds of scams - gambling, ponzi, MLM, dubious "banks" etc. and the place has a mercenary streak throughout. It's really quite seedy even before exploring some of the more adult themed aspects.
So I wouldn't be concerned if the thing crashed and burned. It's probably overdue if it is a fad.
I think there will be a tablet device but I question who is meant to buy it.
It probably doesn't stack up at all. IGP chips are fine for netbooks and budget PCs but don't expect to be able to run any graphically demanding game on them. I expect that some performance benefit comes from integrating the CPU & GPU into one chip.
No it isn't. It's a legitimate issue with IPv6 addresses. I totally understand the need for IPv6 but there is no denying what a pain in the ass the format is to type in. About the only useful notation is ::1. Having to type out potentially 8 colon separated hex values is an exercise in pain and suffering.
Well to be fair, they are supposed to dump it at the treatment works and face very severe fines if they don't. But it does demonstrate a very fundamental issue with the place that trucks are even required to do this.
Commodore simply didn't do enough to keep the chipsets up to date. Perhaps it was funding or manpower issues but by the time I jumped ship I was able to buy a PC with a 24 bit 800x600 display (with full backwards compatibility for DOS games) vs some crappy 256 colour mode in an A4000.
Perhaps the Amiga was ultimately doomed, but I think in hindsight that if they'd perhaps licenced their audio & video chipsets and produced clean driver interfaces that they would have stood a far better chance of keeping up with the competition than they did.
The price hike tipped it even for an ardant fan like myself. I bought a copy of PC World and went looking through some the adverts. I bought a PC, which had more memory, more HDD capacity, a faster CPU, 24-bit graphics, and a monitor for less than an A4000.
Commodore simply failed to maintain the Amiga's technical advantage that it once enjoyed or gain the marketshare or market it properly. I still fire up an emulator for the nostalgia, but I'm glad I left when I did. Switching to a PC and learning to program it has kept me gainfully employed ever since.
AOL central managed to squander all that potential. Is it any wonder most of these brands are now dead or just hollowed out husks? AOL is almost like King Midas except everything it touches turns to shit. Even Time Warner must seriously regret the day it "merged" with AOL.
For example the style manager is extremely primitive - the one in Word shows you a preview of the style in the list, and even lets you select instances of that style in the document and change them in one go to some other style. Tables can be a pain to use - Word lets you draw them and drag columns to change the widths whereas OO forces you down the old fashioned route and adjusting the table means messing around in the ruler and risking inadvertantly changing indent sliders. On several occasions, I have even been trapped in a table, unable to get the cursor to move below it no matter what I did until finally I had to cut and pasted the whole table up a bit just to put blank space below it. The Navigator's headings mode is very primitive compared to Word where you get a full outline mode can easily promote / demote content inline.
It's lots of things like that and they all stack up. I still use OpenOffice (I don't even use Word/Excel for personal work), but it's still clunky. The UI needs a usability makeover, much the way GNOME got one. It would benefit everyone, not just novices.
True too. I was implying that this alternative god was a hands-off but benevolent god who looked kindly on good works, sort of how he is described in the New Testament.
4. And why does this god need all people to send donations to fund megachurches and expensive lifestyles for preachers when it should be used for charitable works?
Read a book like The Faith Healers by James Randi and you will see how these "miracles" and more are performed.
It may well be that in some circumstances LED bulbs are not suitable, or need to be augmented by heating elements, but if they are more reliable at other times they may be safer overall.
Funnily enough the Aum cult used to recruit engineers too and of course Heaven's Gate was packed with web developers. It's weird because you would think that engineers would be the most immune to religion, or at least moderate it. After all engineers are taught to seek out answers, to be rational and logical and not to resort to special pleading (e.g. "it was God's will") when something doesn't work properly.
I'm aware of PDF printers and I use them, but none of them are as simple to use. The one built into OpenOffice works with a single click a button, and a file dialog. That's it. Most PDF drivers lead you through 2 or 3 dialogs and fail to pick up the document metadata or hinting stuff like column flow because they're being called as if they're printers. The Impress app also exports presentations as Shockwave Flash files which is also a similarly excellent feature. It would be great if Ooo exported into more formats, things like EPUB for example.
It certainly doesn't stop you adding a PDF printer driver (such as PDFCreator on Win32) and using it from other apps though.
Ooo has an incredibly ugly UI and some glaring usability issues. I think it would win many more converts if it focused on usability for its next release even if it never added a single new feature. Drag the UI kicking and screaming into the 21st century and smooth some of the rough edges in the process. From my own experience, I tolerate the UI simply because the suite is free and has some excellent functionality like Print to PDF built-in, but I reckon tasks like creating tables, document outline mode and diagrams take me a good 2-3x as long as they do than in MS Word.
Well it could work, but only for sedentary games where a bit of lag doesn't kill the experience, it might even offer some interesting scenarios for network play such as pitting one street or town against another.
Even so, the tech just seems to be a bit of a white elephant. Latency does limit what it can do, as will the sort of loads the server at the other end can tolerate. I expect it may appeal to cable / optical fibre networks looking to justify renting some piece of crap device to customers, but I'm not sure why actual users would care for it.
With the advent of DHT & magnet URIs, the main remaining purpose of torrent sites is search functionality. Since DHT could handle search too, I wonder how long it is until Bittorrent follows the likes of eDonkey / eMule by being largely for peer to peer for pretty much everything.
Google Chrome certainly starts faster and feels a small bit more responsive but these are hardly deal breakers IMO. As a prospective user I would be more concerned about the amount of information you'd be feeding Google just by using their browser. Now they have the potential to see EVERYWHERE you go, not just what you choose to search for through their site.
It already does. On first boot XUL / JS is parsed into objects which are serialized as prototypes into XUL.mfl where mfl stands for Mozilla Fast Load. The next time the app starts it constructs the prototypes from the fast load file rather than the XML. The mfl file is regenerated when the XUL changes of course.