Why pay to play a game, and then have a computer play it for you?
Funny because it's true. In actuality, such games are not so much about the 'enjoyment of playing' but the 'enjoyment of collection'. It's like when I was a kid and spend endless money on football cards. Sometimes obsessively so to try and get a special card from a pack, or go to 'specialty stores' to buy it specifically from someone else.
Like that, WoW and other MMO's are about collection or completing 'sets' of things. In this case, leveling your character to the level cap.
That's an attitude I've never been able to understand. In game after game I see the same thing: "I've ground my $template to $levelcap and I'm bored! There's nothing to do but $handful of stuff!"
Well, duh idiot. You ground yourself right past all the content! WTF did you expect? When you play a console game or PC RPG you don't try and leap right to the boss fight - why do you do that in a MMO?
That's because you're an "Explorer" type player while he's a "Collector" type player - to put thing another way, you mostly enjoy the trip, he mostly enjoys arriving at the finish.
Both are perfectly valid ways of enjoying a MMORPG though quite diferent and somewhat at odds with each other: "Collectors" will moan all the way to max level about the grind they have to go through to get to the finish while "Explorers" will complain loudly about the how there's no more fun to the game after reaching the last level and how there's no point in maxing most of your skills.
I hardly consider a notebook or an iMac to be a real "portable music player" and they're the closest you can get to it if you're using iTunes to play the music.
I dunno. Maybe it is just an American vs European viewpoint thing, but I'd say someone who managed to understand the marketplace so well that they build a product that comes to dominate that market, and offer services that support only that device - well, that's a successful business person.
Yes, if Apple went to music distributors and said something like "distribute your songs exclusively over ipods or we'll ban you" that would be unreasonably using market dominance. But to claim that there's some unreasonable market behavior just because you make your products and services work with each other to the exclusion of others? That's just goofy.
First let me point out that the current strategical direction being taken by the majority of big hardware companies (for example, IBM and Cisco) is more services and less pushing iron around. This is because margins are beter in services than hardware.
In addition to it, notice that the portable music player market has low barriers to entry (meaning just about anybody can create an sell a new player) and is currently under attack from other markets (eg mobile phones that play MP3s).
Another point is that the more devices people have that can play digital music the more they value interoperability - in other words, most people get seriously pissed-off when they find out that the music they bought in iTunes for their iPod will not play in their brand new car stereo.
Also, as the top dog in the portable music player, Apple has only one way to go in that market - down.
The last detail in this picture is that, since iTunes sells music in a format which only works in the iPod, the success of iTunes has an upper boundary which is the success of the iPod - in other words, iTunes can only sell music to iPod owners and the amount of music it sells is limited by the installed base of iPods. If iPods become less successful (for example, by loosing market) then iTunes is bound to become less successful.
In that sense, Steve Jobs might very well be betting that the success of Apple in the portable music market is not in the hardware side, but in the services (eg selling music) side. At the very least, now that market for digital music is big enough, he would like to decouple the iTunes business from the iPod business. The only way to achieve that is if iTunes can sell music that works in any portable music player - and thus the need to use the (by far) most widelly supported format: MP3 (which happens to be DRM-less).
So i do agree in the superior business accumen of Steve Jobs (even though i'm an european;)). I do, however i think your argument for that is actually shortsighted. I believe he's playing a much longer term game here than "the iPod is master (now) let's see how much extra we can squeeze out of iTunes" - i think he's proactivelly aiming at the long term (read 5+ years) success of Apple in the portable music market, and not simply trying to exploit the current (and already under attack) dominance of the iPod.
In some workplaces if you are able to get things done in normal business hours, that means you don't have enough to do, and you will get more work assigned to you.
And at that moment you point out that it's not physically possible to do all that work in the available time and you ask for a prioritization of what's more important to do. (do this via e-mail and keep the e-mail and the responses)
Then you proceed to work as usual and when the deadline arrives, the least important things will not be ready but the most important things will.
Now, if you had the guts to follow me all the way here (yes, i work this way all the time) you will notice the unexpected absense of people shouting in your ears or complaining that you are late - that's because you: a) Told them up-front that it wasn't possible b) Got the really important things done on time
If, however your direct manager does accuse you of being late, politelly point out that you let him know up front in an e-mail (you kept the e-mail, right!??) that it wasn't possible (in other words, that his deadline was unrealistic). That will shut him up.
If the manager persists in pestering you at this point (only happened to me once), escalate this to an e-mail discussion and CC at least a couple of key business stakeholders in the project. Make sure you attach your original e-mail (the one saying "this is not possible to do in the given timeframe") and his responses, including the prioritization. Also make sure you let everybody around you know how bad your manager is and why. (By the way, the only manager that ever got to this point with me got "shelved" some time after i left the company).
PS: Contrary to what most people seem to think, this kind of behaviour actually increases your standing because you will consistently deliver the important things within the agreed timeframe. This will positivelly compare to the "i'll work as hard as i can" crowd since they usually end up delivering late and/or with missing/buggy key functionalities.
how much of the gains in productivity reported by the federal reserve are due to precisely this; businesses wringing extra, unpaid, work out of their employees.
i let it run out of battery, i forget it, i don't use it. but i'm not climbing the ladder, i'm just sitting here watching the wheels go 'round and 'round.
I'll tell you a little secret about promotions in IT: - They go to those who invest time in socializing, making themselfs look good and knowing the right persons in the company.
Working hard and/or being a good techie might, at the most, result in a very slow career progress inside a restricted branch in the technical tree. In truth, if you're very good at a technical position and you don't try hard to get out of it you will be kept in that position for all ethernity or (more likelly) until the relevant technologies are phased out.
Don't get me wrong, if there is the need for the 12th hour effort, and 110% to get something working for whatever reason...I'm there for the duration...but, I WILL get paid for that time and effort.
I work as a contractor (freelancer) and in some assignments i get payed by the hour.
In my experience, when a manager has been spewing his crap about "it's a tight deadline and we're gonna have to work long hours and weekends to do it" and you point out that you're payed by the hour, the need for extra hours "magically" disappears.
IMHO, the vast majority of the time, the need for extra hours is born out of a bad manager knowingly giving optimistic estimates to upper management/the client to make himself look good or a bad sales person knowingly selling a project on the cheap to get the contract (and the bonus). As long as they can get out of budget extra hours from those working on the project they can keep the illusion that they're good managers/sellers. If the extra hours are budgeted, then it becomes glaring obvious that they're actually dowing a sub-par job.
The way to see if there's a real need for the extra work is if they're willing to pay for the extra hours at 150% or more rate (if they're only willing to pay the same as for standard hours, they're probably knowingly understaffed).
I agree. Using that logic, you could return anything you don't like, whether or not it's really defective. It completely absolves the customer of any accountability for doing research prior to making a purchase.
Buying things takes time and effort.
Returning things takes time and effort.
Your scenario of people abusing the system only really applies to students or unemployed people for whom time has very little value. For those of us who actually work for a living, wasting time is not something to do sistematically.
Thus, if researching to find a movie one likes before buying it takes less time than a cycle of multiple buying a movie and then returning it over and over until one finds a movie one likes, then people will go for the research option.
For years now, consumer rights protection here in Europe gives us the right to return an item if were not satisfied with it and yet, your scenario has never come to be. It turns out that the vast majority of people around here doesn't engage in impulsive buying followed by returning of items. Instead people mostly return items if they feel that it's not what it was advertised to be or that it is not suitable to one's purpose (for example, a video cable with the wrong plug for your PVR). The end result of this is that misleading advertising is much rarer (since the result of misleading advertising is a lot of returns) and product-manufacturers/retailers put a lot more effort in making sure that people get the right product (eg, the right cable) without need for a return and replacement.
As with most social things, it's the second level effects (beter advertising, beter upfront service) instead of the first level ones (people returning products) that are the real reason for a law.
It's hard to argue that the US is economically broken, but socially we're just as fucked as every other society.
Sorry but at the moment your socially more fucked up than most western societies.
What makes the US especially fucked up is not the high rate of criminality, the low rate of social mobility (lower than India as somebody pointed up above) or the amount of inequality. What really makes the US fucked up is the number of ignorant, brainwashed americans that blindly believe (not to mention spew up that crap for all to hear) that they live in the greatest country on earth.
Few would deny the past greatness of the US, but nowadays you guys have more and more symptoms of an empire in decay.
As most psychologists would say, the first step to solve a problem is to stop denying it.
For example, stop using Maynar for comparisson when it comes to freedom and respect to human rights and aim a little higher.
Damage from programmer's fuckup < Damage from designer's fuckup < Damage from manager's fuckup < Damage from executive director's fuckup
Reciprocally the cost of fixing the damage goes the other way around (bigger for executive director, smaller for programmer).
Note that the pay scale in most companies follows the same order as the "how much does it costs us when you fuckup" scale.
The justification for paying the big bucks to executive directors is that they're very specialized workers in positions of great responsability and whose decisions have a lot of influence in a companie's bottom line and future.
This is why if executive directors are making the wrong decisions because of arrogance it's news, while if programmers are making the wrong decisions because of arrogance almost nobody cares.
A couple of points: - I'm a (very senior) freelance software engineer (meaning i code too but i do a lot more) and i'm constantly being brought in to sort out applications (or even development processes) which came to be because the software (or the way the team works) was originaly created by a bunch of junior developers. A word of advice - the reduced maintenability (read: extra costs covered by the warranty and thus your costs, not the client's) and extendability (read: ability to add features to the existing stuff when the client comes with more work) of software designed/developed by junior teams (which are basically learning on the job) means that in the medium to long term, due to the highly increased overhead in supporting/changing that software you're loosing money by comparisson with the mixed seniority teams. [Not that i mind: i get payed big bucks because of my superior ability to maintain brittle/crappy software and even clear up some of the mess in the process] - For bright junior software developers out there wanting to learn a lot fast, i suggest you work for a consultancy. If indeed you are bright you will soon get to be known as somebody that makes the impossible happen. Managers will be fighting to get your time and all sorts of complicated problems will get thrown your way. [Been there, done it. Nowhere else did i ever learned so much in so little time]
If you're at all familiar with the fundamentals of CPU design, it should be blindingly obvious that the Cell should be very good at handling streaming vector data, but relatively poor at more general purpose calculations.
Would that mean that Cell is optimized for graphics generation (read eye-candy) but not for AI or physics engines?
I seem to recall a number of instances of the US propping up dictators - hell, even Saddam was US' pall once.
How about if you people stopped the shinny-eyed self-delusion that the US will use it's power for some abstract "greater good" and once and for all admitted that the US does (like all other countries) use it's power for it's own good (in the case of Iraq that would be stability of the US oil supplies).
History is full death and destruction when the greed of some was dressed in the grand, fine clothes of noble objectives - it seems that some people either never learn or keep believing everybody else is ignorant and dumb.
I studied EE (Electronics Engineering) in a University in Portugal. In my experience, most people that directy went for a Phd or a Masters (in an Engineering/Computing area) after getting their degree were doing so mostly to remain inside the protected (and much less demanding) university environment instead of going out in working their asses out in the "real" world.
In more scientific areas (like physics, which was what i first studied before changing to EE), a Phd is a must, but in Engineering or Computing???!
I believe that in such heavilly hands-on/practical areas such Engineering/Computing a Phd without real world experience is less than worthless.
PS: This is not to denigrate the inteligence of those working-on/with a Phd. I knew some very bright people that went for a Phd. My point is that there are also a lot of very bright people that don't go for a Phd immediatly after getting a degree, and in the end, due to their experience with doing real things in the real world, the later are more likelly to do the real breakthroughs that actually work in practice.
Maybe this is a localized thing (only in Portugal?), but somehow i doubt that, anywhere in the world, spending 5 years in the University getting a Phd is any harder than working in the private sector for those 5 years.
It is suitable to say this. Apart from "information is lost" being a technical term with a precisely defined meaning, it is also common sense. If you use a modem on a bad phone line, information will be lost (or more likely, the modem will detect this and compensate by reducing speed, but this is beyond the point). Or try to listen to a recording of someone speaking, that is being played through a guitar fuzz-box, while you are taking a shower. This adds distortion and noise. Most likely, information will be lost this way too, as you will not be able to understand what is being said.
Anyway, unless you are able to come up with an exact copy of the input signal, information will be lost whenever you run it through an amplifier, storage medium, etc..., or convert from analog to digital, or the other way around. Exactly how much information is lost, is a more technical question, and requires a long-winded technical answer. But these things can be quantified, even though it's usually of theoretical interest only. The important thing is that each time you do something to the signal, it degrades, and becomes less like the original. If you copy a cassette tape 10000 times, you will most likely end up with only hiss. All information will be lost. Better quality equipment might give you better results. How much the signal degrades per "operation"/copy/etc is more or less a question of how much money you want to spend (at least in the audio domain).
Actually distorcion can be removed if you know the formula of the distorcion itself. This trick is actually used in practice for improving signals from specific sources.
However any added noise does indeed destroy (without recourse) part of the original signal.
The other guy is correct. "Lossy" is a technical term that applies to compression algorithms that throw away "unimportant" data, so that information content is permanently lost, yet the important stuff remains. Lossy algorithms are used in audio compression, image compression, video compression, and other more specialized fields. This is in contrast to non-lossy compression algorithms, that will always be able to recreate the original data exactly. Using "lossy" to describe the physical limitations of analog equipment and/or storage media, or digital sampling method, is incorrect usage of a technical term. Just because "information is lost", doesn't mean something is "lossy". Both are technical terms, and needs to be used correctly.
Actually if you dig up in the thread i gave a link somewhere to a dictionary (Webster i think) where the definition of "lossy" is actually related to losses in electrical lines.
I am well aware of the most common meaning of the word in the context of processing of binary information - i actually learned (about 10 years ago) all about compression algorithms including the lossy ones (JPEG has been around for a while now;).
It's just that i like to be flexible in my use of languages (especially when it comes to new words):))) [ hey, as long as the other side gets the message, who cares;) ]
16-bits per sample at 44.1 kHz wasn't chosen completely arbitrarily. It was chosen because it is considered adequate for audio. That being said, the limits of CD audio is *very* close to what you can hear. It takes care to encode CDs properly. Most music producers these days, try the opposite thing, namely to create a CD that will play as loud as possible. No wonder even old vinyl recordings sound better!
As with most things having to do with engineering i strongly suspect there was a tradeoff between cost (eg, more bits = more cost) and suitability. Thus, i suspect that the standards chosen for CDs are good enough for the vast majority of people but there is a small number which can detected the difference - for example, some people can hear beyond 22,05 KHz, while CDs can only sample sounds up to that frequency.
But yeah, is quite likelly that most of the problem with CDs nowadays have to do with the bad choices of the producers.
I disagree with the grandparent's claim that accurate digital sampling is expensive. Take a look at the GNU Radio, which can sample 2.4GHz+ signals accurately, all for under $500.
I didn't knew that.
Last time i used a digital osciloscope, it costed an arm and a leg and had trouble with frequencies in the MHz range
My discussion with the parent poster was never about which best: analog or digital.
The whole thing was about the suitability of saying that information is lost when an analog signal is converted to digital, independently of the compression algorith used on the digital information.
- I think it is. - The other guy seems to dislike using the word "lossy" for things other than compression algorithms and accuses analog storage of also loosing information (i guess it's true, adding noise and distorting an analog signal can be considered "loss of information", though in the case of distortion, it's possible to recover that information if you know the formula of the distorcion).
It's a whole different ball game to discuss whether analog systems are beter or worse than digital systems. Even though converting a signal from analog to digital looses information due to the nature of digital encoding itself, one can always add more bits per sample and make more samples per second until the information that is lost is not important for domain at hand.
Thus in the audio domain, if you can't hear the difference then the information "lost" on A-D conversion is not important (quite likelly, it would get lost in the human hearing system anyways).
Thus, even though in a purelly physical/mathematical sense information was "lost", in real life nobody cares.
Of course, this does not mean that 16-bits per sample and a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz (what's used on CDs) is adequate for audio.
Some people seem to think it's not and that the old (consumer) system (vinyl) is beter.
Personally, i'm perfectly happy with 128kbps encoded MP3s, so i'm hardly one to have problems with CDs.
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As for the vinyl stuff, it all came about when discussing loss of information / distortion on analog system. For consumer systems, vinyl is the best solution in the analog space.
As pointed above, it might still be beter that CDs in terms of fidelity (at least with little used discs). Naturally, compared to CDs, vinyl has extra problems with decay of the signals stored on it due to: - the reading process envolving physical contact - the easiness to damage the layer storing the data in vinyl discs (in CDs, that layer is not even exposed to air) - the fact that vinyl discs don't have reduncancy (which CDs have since data in CDs is stored in an encoding with redundancy).
I'll leave that discussion to anybody with a beter hearing than me.
Actually the Heisenberg principle never does come into play - the noise produced by the fact that the whole circuit is at room temperature is way much bigger than any error related to the Heisenberg principle - go check the Wikipedia article yourself: you'll notice that the Heisenberg constant is extraordinarilly small.
Buy hey, since we're already (to use a dutch proverb) "fucking ants" here, we might as well take in account the losses due to electrons crossing electric potential boundaries due to quantum tunnelling.
My point still remains: during convertion from analog to digital, due to the limits of the digital side, information is lost.
Depending on the sampling rate of the digital system and the number of bits used for each sample (plus any tricks used that take in account the limitations of human hearing), the result might sound just as accurate as the original.
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As for the usage of "lossy", you were the one that stated that it can only be used in context of algorithms that lose binary information during compression. In response i gave you an example on how "lossy" is used in a different context. To be perfectly honest, the first online dictionary i checked (Cambridge) didn't even contain the word "lossy".
As i see it, a process is lossy when information is lost. Even if we limit this to the digital world, A-D (Analog-Digital) conversion is a borderline case (since it's a process that produces digital information). I believe i've seen the word "lossy" used in the context of A-D conversion of signals from analog sensors, but i'm not absolutly sure.
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PS: Exactness of wording in natural languages is actually not that important for engineering - important information in engineering domains is mostly conveyed in the language of numbers.
The inability to accurately measure and encode a signal is not the same as a mathematical algorithm designed to deliberately discard data to improve compression. "Lossy" applies only to the later.
I never used the word "Lossy" - i said that information is lost in analog to digital convertion.
Still, from the Merrian-Webster Dictionary: Main Entry: lossy Pronunciation: 'lo-sE Function: adjective : causing attenuation or dissipation of electrical energy
Guess we EE boys have prior art on that one.
Also note that this has absolutely nothing to do with analog vs. digital. It is impossible to avoid losing information when copying an analogy signal regardless of whether you are copying it to an analogy or a digital representation.
As i've stated in my the "For electronics-aware geeks" section, analog systems also have built-in limits to precision (due to noise) and frequency (the capacitance of a system limits the speed with which a signal can change). In audio systems, the limitations of analog systems are usually much less than the ones of the digital system (unless we're talking about things like 1930s radios).
It's possible to make a digital system which is as good as an analog system, only it would be much more expensive than the equivalent analog system (not to mention requiring a lot more storage space per minute recorded), so nobody does it (at least not in the consumer space).
Information is not lost when copying analog signals, at most it's distorted and noise might be added. The damaging of an analog signal during copying is due to bad electronics systems and to the fact that many analog storage systems amplify/decrease frequency ranges in the signal (for example, tapes decrease amplitude in the higher frequencies).
The reason why audiophiles prefer vinyl is preciselly because there is no loss of information during recording due to digitalization (it goes directly from the microfone to the master disc) and vinyl is the storage medium that introduces the least amount of distortion.
You also make want to look up the meaning of the word "loose" because while you can lose information, it's pretty hard to "loose" it.
I fail to see how my lack of absolute mastery of the written form of a language which is not my mother thong has any bearing on the validity of my argument. Still, IAAEE (I Am An Electronics Engineer) by training and back when i was learning it we took great pride in our exceptional ineptness with (any) written language (we reckoned that fancy writting was for lawyers).
I've *ahem* kinda noticed that you also seem to share that philosophy *looks up at quote*...
The point of the GP is that conversion to digital from an analog source is in itself a process which looses information. This happens in 2 ways: 1) An analog signal has pretty much infinite precision - when a sound is encoded as an electric signal between x V and y V, all voltage values in between can be used. A digital signal on the other hand can only have a limited number of values (2 to the power of the number of bits) - when converting from analog to digital (and back), each binary value corresponds to a voltage value and any input signal that does not exactly match one of those values is assigned the binary value with the nearest voltage value. 2) Analog signals are continuous - they flow from one voltage value to another going through all intermediate values. This is always true, independently of the speed of that change. Digital signals are "sampled" - when converting from analog to digital, z times per second a sample is taken from the analog input source, matched to the closest binary value and placed in the output buffer (this is where the bytes per second comes from). A transition in the analog input signal that is faster than the sampling rate will not be registered - for example, if in between to samples the input signal goes from a start values all the way up to max and back to the start value, the digital side will simply output the start value (before the spike in the signal) followed by the start value again (since the signal was sampled AFTER the spike was over and the input returned to the start value).
So: converting an analog input to a digital output looses information on amplitude (ie the input value) because x bytes can only represent a finite number of values and on frequency (especially higher frequencies) because digital systems only support a limited number of (sampled) values per second.
There are a number of techniques to try and make it so that most of the losses fall outside the human hearing (very high frequencies) or are less perceptible to the human ear (for example, we are less sensitive to amplitude differences in loud sounds so the voltage values assigned to each binary value in that area can be further appart).
Still, converting a input signal from analog to digital looses information. This is independent of whether compression is used or not in the resulting digital value stream.
Note for the electronics-aware geeks: a) There are indeed limits to the "usefull" precision of an analog signal. Electric noise imposes in practice a limit since for a small enough signal (or a small enough signal difference) the "real" signal is indistinguisheable from the noise. b) There is also a limit to the frequency of a signal in analog - in any electrical system (even just a wire), due to capacitance in the system, voltages will not change faster than a certain speed. However, in any system which was not purposefully designed with a lot of capacitance, this "speed limit" will not be felt before the hundreds of Khz, much higher that what the human ear can hear (24khz for really gifted people).
I bet that the NSA uses "feature" a lot more than the FBI, and when they do it they certainly don't tell anybody about it.
The big difference is that the NSA will use this for counter-terrorism and also for industrial espionage, while the FBI probably only really uses it for crime investigation.
As something of a tangent, the reason that gas taxes are a non-solution is that the demand is inelastic because the basic infrastructure of the country forces the existing level of consumption.
The demand for travel is somewhat inelastic (though as one can see from the OP, it does change: for example, people can choose to walk the 500m to their mailbox at the end of the street instead of driving there and those livingf in the inner city often do have access to public transportation)
The demand for fuel, however is much more elastic. Simply put, when different cars consumed different amounts of fuel to travel the same distance AND the difference in fuel consumption represents a significant amount of money, people will give more weight to the fuel consumption factor when choosing a new car.
Hence gas taxes should contribute to reduced fuel consumption (and cleaner fuels if they're setup correctly) by giving incentives to people to choose cars that consume less fuel per mile traveled.
The really elegant things about gas taxes are: - It taxes a very close proxy to polution. In a sense consumers pay for what they polute. - It does not "fixate" in any type of car - a low consumption SUV model will still be cheaper to drive than a high-consumption saloon. - It does not impose choices or remove choices - people are still free to drive around in a monster truck with wheels as tall as a small building and a fuel consumption of 0,5 miles per galon: they'll just pay extra for the priviledge.
I believe Vista is supposed to be able to unload a lot of itself when necessary freeing up the resources it held. On top of that, only Vista is going to have DirectX 10. Gamers will buy it eventually.
Two words: DRM, WGA
The problem is not as much the suitability of Vista for gaming (we won't really know that until it gets tested), it's the fact that it's the first time that when you buy a PC you pay for it but somebody else controls it.
Unfortunatly for most people, they will only realize how far they have been shafted with Vista when a false negative in the license validation process causes their PCs to turn into vegetables or they have to buy their music all over again when a harddrive breaks (even though they had backups) or they buy a new CPU/Motherboard and the system thinks it's not the same PC.
Those of us in the know will avoid Vista like the plague and warn our friends about it's less publicized "features".
Personally i intend to get a Wii for my gaming needs (up to now i've always played games on the PC and never got a console) and phase out gaming on the PC (basically i'll stick with XP and older games and will never buy a game that requires DirectX 10, possibly switching to Linux once and for all - i've had it as dual boot for almost a decade now - and used Cedega).
I read "unfinished" as "incomplete" - which is correct with episodic content since you can't actually play the game until the end before the last episode is out.
Compare episodic games with a TV series: - Most episodes are more or less self-contained mini-stories with a beginning and an end, which take place in the "universe" created by the previous episodes and are slightly connected with previous stories. - Sometimes, there is a "big episode" which is split in two episodes. Things just hang at some point at the end of the first episode and the viewer has to wait for a week before seing how things turn out. This can be quite frustrating. - Often, the last episode of a season will be part one of one such "big episode". In this situation, viewers have to wait months to figure out how the store ends or, if they're unlucky, the next season wasn't filmed yet and gets cancelled, in which case they'll never see the end.
The last situation is the most akin to episodic game content: get a game episode, play it for some hours until you reach the end of the episode and then wait for several months for the next episode, never knowing for sure if there will be a next episode.
Kinda puts self-flagelation into a whole new context.
Actually I was and still am vehemntly against the invasion and think the whole thing is one huge cockup. However, I am willing to look at any new info/evidence anyone can provide, hence me asking questions. A little less assumption next time, huh?
Sorry, my bad.
Here on/. i've been excessivelly exposed to brainswashed americans that think CNN and Fox News are unbiased sources of information and will harp about the greatness of the US and how "we're the good ones and anyone against us are the evil ones". On top of that there is the deceitfull behaviour of the Bush administration (preaching about how the US are the good guys and then saying that it's acceptable to use torture).
So i kinda developed a kneejerk reaction against any statements that sound anything like what a brainwash, self-deluded, US flag-worshiper might say.
It seems i've gone too far and am even reacting against those that just try to keep an open mind... *sigh*
A friend of mine here in the UK which has a lot more contact with americans than i do, told me about a common question from americans to non-americans when discussing politics:
"Do you think America is a power for good or a power for evil?"
Conclusions about what this question shows of the prejudices, beliefs and way of thinking of (at least some) americans are left to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you're an "Explorer" type player while he's a "Collector" type player - to put thing another way, you mostly enjoy the trip, he mostly enjoys arriving at the finish.
Both are perfectly valid ways of enjoying a MMORPG though quite diferent and somewhat at odds with each other: "Collectors" will moan all the way to max level about the grind they have to go through to get to the finish while "Explorers" will complain loudly about the how there's no more fun to the game after reaching the last level and how there's no point in maxing most of your skills.
I hardly consider a notebook or an iMac to be a real "portable music player" and they're the closest you can get to it if you're using iTunes to play the music.
First let me point out that the current strategical direction being taken by the majority of big hardware companies (for example, IBM and Cisco) is more services and less pushing iron around. This is because margins are beter in services than hardware.
In addition to it, notice that the portable music player market has low barriers to entry (meaning just about anybody can create an sell a new player) and is currently under attack from other markets (eg mobile phones that play MP3s).
Another point is that the more devices people have that can play digital music the more they value interoperability - in other words, most people get seriously pissed-off when they find out that the music they bought in iTunes for their iPod will not play in their brand new car stereo.
Also, as the top dog in the portable music player, Apple has only one way to go in that market - down.
The last detail in this picture is that, since iTunes sells music in a format which only works in the iPod, the success of iTunes has an upper boundary which is the success of the iPod - in other words, iTunes can only sell music to iPod owners and the amount of music it sells is limited by the installed base of iPods. If iPods become less successful (for example, by loosing market) then iTunes is bound to become less successful.
In that sense, Steve Jobs might very well be betting that the success of Apple in the portable music market is not in the hardware side, but in the services (eg selling music) side. At the very least, now that market for digital music is big enough, he would like to decouple the iTunes business from the iPod business. The only way to achieve that is if iTunes can sell music that works in any portable music player - and thus the need to use the (by far) most widelly supported format: MP3 (which happens to be DRM-less).
So i do agree in the superior business accumen of Steve Jobs (even though i'm an european
And at that moment you point out that it's not physically possible to do all that work in the available time and you ask for a prioritization of what's more important to do. (do this via e-mail and keep the e-mail and the responses)
Then you proceed to work as usual and when the deadline arrives, the least important things will not be ready but the most important things will.
Now, if you had the guts to follow me all the way here (yes, i work this way all the time) you will notice the unexpected absense of people shouting in your ears or complaining that you are late - that's because you:
a) Told them up-front that it wasn't possible
b) Got the really important things done on time
If, however your direct manager does accuse you of being late, politelly point out that you let him know up front in an e-mail (you kept the e-mail, right!??) that it wasn't possible (in other words, that his deadline was unrealistic). That will shut him up.
If the manager persists in pestering you at this point (only happened to me once), escalate this to an e-mail discussion and CC at least a couple of key business stakeholders in the project. Make sure you attach your original e-mail (the one saying "this is not possible to do in the given timeframe") and his responses, including the prioritization. Also make sure you let everybody around you know how bad your manager is and why.
(By the way, the only manager that ever got to this point with me got "shelved" some time after i left the company).
PS: Contrary to what most people seem to think, this kind of behaviour actually increases your standing because you will consistently deliver the important things within the agreed timeframe. This will positivelly compare to the "i'll work as hard as i can" crowd since they usually end up delivering late and/or with missing/buggy key functionalities.
I'll tell you a little secret about promotions in IT:
- They go to those who invest time in socializing, making themselfs look good and knowing the right persons in the company.
Working hard and/or being a good techie might, at the most, result in a very slow career progress inside a restricted branch in the technical tree. In truth, if you're very good at a technical position and you don't try hard to get out of it you will be kept in that position for all ethernity or (more likelly) until the relevant technologies are phased out.
Sad but true.
I work as a contractor (freelancer) and in some assignments i get payed by the hour.
In my experience, when a manager has been spewing his crap about "it's a tight deadline and we're gonna have to work long hours and weekends to do it" and you point out that you're payed by the hour, the need for extra hours "magically" disappears.
IMHO, the vast majority of the time, the need for extra hours is born out of a bad manager knowingly giving optimistic estimates to upper management/the client to make himself look good or a bad sales person knowingly selling a project on the cheap to get the contract (and the bonus). As long as they can get out of budget extra hours from those working on the project they can keep the illusion that they're good managers/sellers. If the extra hours are budgeted, then it becomes glaring obvious that they're actually dowing a sub-par job.
The way to see if there's a real need for the extra work is if they're willing to pay for the extra hours at 150% or more rate (if they're only willing to pay the same as for standard hours, they're probably knowingly understaffed).
Buying things takes time and effort.
Returning things takes time and effort.
Your scenario of people abusing the system only really applies to students or unemployed people for whom time has very little value. For those of us who actually work for a living, wasting time is not something to do sistematically.
Thus, if researching to find a movie one likes before buying it takes less time than a cycle of multiple buying a movie and then returning it over and over until one finds a movie one likes, then people will go for the research option.
For years now, consumer rights protection here in Europe gives us the right to return an item if were not satisfied with it and yet, your scenario has never come to be.
It turns out that the vast majority of people around here doesn't engage in impulsive buying followed by returning of items. Instead people mostly return items if they feel that it's not what it was advertised to be or that it is not suitable to one's purpose (for example, a video cable with the wrong plug for your PVR).
The end result of this is that misleading advertising is much rarer (since the result of misleading advertising is a lot of returns) and product-manufacturers/retailers put a lot more effort in making sure that people get the right product (eg, the right cable) without need for a return and replacement.
As with most social things, it's the second level effects (beter advertising, beter upfront service) instead of the first level ones (people returning products) that are the real reason for a law.
Sorry but at the moment your socially more fucked up than most western societies.
What makes the US especially fucked up is not the high rate of criminality, the low rate of social mobility (lower than India as somebody pointed up above) or the amount of inequality. What really makes the US fucked up is the number of ignorant, brainwashed americans that blindly believe (not to mention spew up that crap for all to hear) that they live in the greatest country on earth.
Few would deny the past greatness of the US, but nowadays you guys have more and more symptoms of an empire in decay.
As most psychologists would say, the first step to solve a problem is to stop denying it.
For example, stop using Maynar for comparisson when it comes to freedom and respect to human rights and aim a little higher.
It's all a question of scale:
Damage from programmer's fuckup < Damage from designer's fuckup < Damage from manager's fuckup < Damage from executive director's fuckup
Reciprocally the cost of fixing the damage goes the other way around (bigger for executive director, smaller for programmer).
Note that the pay scale in most companies follows the same order as the "how much does it costs us when you fuckup" scale.
The justification for paying the big bucks to executive directors is that they're very specialized workers in positions of great responsability and whose decisions have a lot of influence in a companie's bottom line and future.
This is why if executive directors are making the wrong decisions because of arrogance it's news, while if programmers are making the wrong decisions because of arrogance almost nobody cares.
This is pretty much "Society 101"
A couple of points:
- I'm a (very senior) freelance software engineer (meaning i code too but i do a lot more) and i'm constantly being brought in to sort out applications (or even development processes) which came to be because the software (or the way the team works) was originaly created by a bunch of junior developers. A word of advice - the reduced maintenability (read: extra costs covered by the warranty and thus your costs, not the client's) and extendability (read: ability to add features to the existing stuff when the client comes with more work) of software designed/developed by junior teams (which are basically learning on the job) means that in the medium to long term, due to the highly increased overhead in supporting/changing that software you're loosing money by comparisson with the mixed seniority teams. [Not that i mind: i get payed big bucks because of my superior ability to maintain brittle/crappy software and even clear up some of the mess in the process]
- For bright junior software developers out there wanting to learn a lot fast, i suggest you work for a consultancy. If indeed you are bright you will soon get to be known as somebody that makes the impossible happen. Managers will be fighting to get your time and all sorts of complicated problems will get thrown your way. [Been there, done it. Nowhere else did i ever learned so much in so little time]
Would that mean that Cell is optimized for graphics generation (read eye-candy) but not for AI or physics engines?
I seem to recall a number of instances of the US propping up dictators - hell, even Saddam was US' pall once.
How about if you people stopped the shinny-eyed self-delusion that the US will use it's power for some abstract "greater good" and once and for all admitted that the US does (like all other countries) use it's power for it's own good (in the case of Iraq that would be stability of the US oil supplies).
History is full death and destruction when the greed of some was dressed in the grand, fine clothes of noble objectives - it seems that some people either never learn or keep believing everybody else is ignorant and dumb.
I studied EE (Electronics Engineering) in a University in Portugal. In my experience, most people that directy went for a Phd or a Masters (in an Engineering/Computing area) after getting their degree were doing so mostly to remain inside the protected (and much less demanding) university environment instead of going out in working their asses out in the "real" world.
In more scientific areas (like physics, which was what i first studied before changing to EE), a Phd is a must, but in Engineering or Computing???!
I believe that in such heavilly hands-on/practical areas such Engineering/Computing a Phd without real world experience is less than worthless.
PS: This is not to denigrate the inteligence of those working-on/with a Phd. I knew some very bright people that went for a Phd. My point is that there are also a lot of very bright people that don't go for a Phd immediatly after getting a degree, and in the end, due to their experience with doing real things in the real world, the later are more likelly to do the real breakthroughs that actually work in practice.
Maybe this is a localized thing (only in Portugal?), but somehow i doubt that, anywhere in the world, spending 5 years in the University getting a Phd is any harder than working in the private sector for those 5 years.
Actually distorcion can be removed if you know the formula of the distorcion itself. This trick is actually used in practice for improving signals from specific sources.
However any added noise does indeed destroy (without recourse) part of the original signal.
Actually if you dig up in the thread i gave a link somewhere to a dictionary (Webster i think) where the definition of "lossy" is actually related to losses in electrical lines.
I am well aware of the most common meaning of the word in the context of processing of binary information - i actually learned (about 10 years ago) all about compression algorithms including the lossy ones (JPEG has been around for a while now
It's just that i like to be flexible in my use of languages (especially when it comes to new words)
[ hey, as long as the other side gets the message, who cares
As with most things having to do with engineering i strongly suspect there was a tradeoff between cost (eg, more bits = more cost) and suitability. Thus, i suspect that the standards chosen for CDs are good enough for the vast majority of people but there is a small number which can detected the difference - for example, some people can hear beyond 22,05 KHz, while CDs can only sample sounds up to that frequency.
But yeah, is quite likelly that most of the problem with CDs nowadays have to do with the bad choices of the producers.
I didn't knew that.
Last time i used a digital osciloscope, it costed an arm and a leg and had trouble with frequencies in the MHz range
Granted, it was 10 years ago
My discussion with the parent poster was never about which best: analog or digital.
The whole thing was about the suitability of saying that information is lost when an analog signal is converted to digital, independently of the compression algorith used on the digital information.
- I think it is.
- The other guy seems to dislike using the word "lossy" for things other than compression algorithms and accuses analog storage of also loosing information (i guess it's true, adding noise and distorting an analog signal can be considered "loss of information", though in the case of distortion, it's possible to recover that information if you know the formula of the distorcion).
It's a whole different ball game to discuss whether analog systems are beter or worse than digital systems. Even though converting a signal from analog to digital looses information due to the nature of digital encoding itself, one can always add more bits per sample and make more samples per second until the information that is lost is not important for domain at hand.
Thus in the audio domain, if you can't hear the difference then the information "lost" on A-D conversion is not important (quite likelly, it would get lost in the human hearing system anyways).
Thus, even though in a purelly physical/mathematical sense information was "lost", in real life nobody cares.
Of course, this does not mean that 16-bits per sample and a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz (what's used on CDs) is adequate for audio.
Some people seem to think it's not and that the old (consumer) system (vinyl) is beter.
Personally, i'm perfectly happy with 128kbps encoded MP3s, so i'm hardly one to have problems with CDs.
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As for the vinyl stuff, it all came about when discussing loss of information / distortion on analog system. For consumer systems, vinyl is the best solution in the analog space.
As pointed above, it might still be beter that CDs in terms of fidelity (at least with little used discs). Naturally, compared to CDs, vinyl has extra problems with decay of the signals stored on it due to:
- the reading process envolving physical contact
- the easiness to damage the layer storing the data in vinyl discs (in CDs, that layer is not even exposed to air)
- the fact that vinyl discs don't have reduncancy (which CDs have since data in CDs is stored in an encoding with redundancy).
I'll leave that discussion to anybody with a beter hearing than me.
Actually the Heisenberg principle never does come into play - the noise produced by the fact that the whole circuit is at room temperature is way much bigger than any error related to the Heisenberg principle - go check the Wikipedia article yourself: you'll notice that the Heisenberg constant is extraordinarilly small.
Buy hey, since we're already (to use a dutch proverb) "fucking ants" here, we might as well take in account the losses due to electrons crossing electric potential boundaries due to quantum tunnelling.
My point still remains: during convertion from analog to digital, due to the limits of the digital side, information is lost.
Depending on the sampling rate of the digital system and the number of bits used for each sample (plus any tricks used that take in account the limitations of human hearing), the result might sound just as accurate as the original.
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As for the usage of "lossy", you were the one that stated that it can only be used in context of algorithms that lose binary information during compression. In response i gave you an example on how "lossy" is used in a different context. To be perfectly honest, the first online dictionary i checked (Cambridge) didn't even contain the word "lossy".
As i see it, a process is lossy when information is lost. Even if we limit this to the digital world, A-D (Analog-Digital) conversion is a borderline case (since it's a process that produces digital information). I believe i've seen the word "lossy" used in the context of A-D conversion of signals from analog sensors, but i'm not absolutly sure.
--
PS: Exactness of wording in natural languages is actually not that important for engineering - important information in engineering domains is mostly conveyed in the language of numbers.
I never used the word "Lossy" - i said that information is lost in analog to digital convertion.
Still, from the Merrian-Webster Dictionary:
Main Entry: lossy
Pronunciation: 'lo-sE
Function: adjective
: causing attenuation or dissipation of electrical energy
Guess we EE boys have prior art on that one.
As i've stated in my the "For electronics-aware geeks" section, analog systems also have built-in limits to precision (due to noise) and frequency (the capacitance of a system limits the speed with which a signal can change). In audio systems, the limitations of analog systems are usually much less than the ones of the digital system (unless we're talking about things like 1930s radios).
It's possible to make a digital system which is as good as an analog system, only it would be much more expensive than the equivalent analog system (not to mention requiring a lot more storage space per minute recorded), so nobody does it (at least not in the consumer space).
Information is not lost when copying analog signals, at most it's distorted and noise might be added. The damaging of an analog signal during copying is due to bad electronics systems and to the fact that many analog storage systems amplify/decrease frequency ranges in the signal (for example, tapes decrease amplitude in the higher frequencies).
The reason why audiophiles prefer vinyl is preciselly because there is no loss of information during recording due to digitalization (it goes directly from the microfone to the master disc) and vinyl is the storage medium that introduces the least amount of distortion.
I fail to see how my lack of absolute mastery of the written form of a language which is not my mother thong has any bearing on the validity of my argument. Still, IAAEE (I Am An Electronics Engineer) by training and back when i was learning it we took great pride in our exceptional ineptness with (any) written language (we reckoned that fancy writting was for lawyers).
I've *ahem* kinda noticed that you also seem to share that philosophy *looks up at quote*
The point of the GP is that conversion to digital from an analog source is in itself a process which looses information. This happens in 2 ways:
1) An analog signal has pretty much infinite precision - when a sound is encoded as an electric signal between x V and y V, all voltage values in between can be used. A digital signal on the other hand can only have a limited number of values (2 to the power of the number of bits) - when converting from analog to digital (and back), each binary value corresponds to a voltage value and any input signal that does not exactly match one of those values is assigned the binary value with the nearest voltage value.
2) Analog signals are continuous - they flow from one voltage value to another going through all intermediate values. This is always true, independently of the speed of that change. Digital signals are "sampled" - when converting from analog to digital, z times per second a sample is taken from the analog input source, matched to the closest binary value and placed in the output buffer (this is where the bytes per second comes from). A transition in the analog input signal that is faster than the sampling rate will not be registered - for example, if in between to samples the input signal goes from a start values all the way up to max and back to the start value, the digital side will simply output the start value (before the spike in the signal) followed by the start value again (since the signal was sampled AFTER the spike was over and the input returned to the start value).
So: converting an analog input to a digital output looses information on amplitude (ie the input value) because x bytes can only represent a finite number of values and on frequency (especially higher frequencies) because digital systems only support a limited number of (sampled) values per second.
There are a number of techniques to try and make it so that most of the losses fall outside the human hearing (very high frequencies) or are less perceptible to the human ear (for example, we are less sensitive to amplitude differences in loud sounds so the voltage values assigned to each binary value in that area can be further appart).
Still, converting a input signal from analog to digital looses information. This is independent of whether compression is used or not in the resulting digital value stream.
Note for the electronics-aware geeks:
a) There are indeed limits to the "usefull" precision of an analog signal. Electric noise imposes in practice a limit since for a small enough signal (or a small enough signal difference) the "real" signal is indistinguisheable from the noise.
b) There is also a limit to the frequency of a signal in analog - in any electrical system (even just a wire), due to capacitance in the system, voltages will not change faster than a certain speed. However, in any system which was not purposefully designed with a lot of capacitance, this "speed limit" will not be felt before the hundreds of Khz, much higher that what the human ear can hear (24khz for really gifted people).
I bet that the NSA uses "feature" a lot more than the FBI, and when they do it they certainly don't tell anybody about it.
The big difference is that the NSA will use this for counter-terrorism and also for industrial espionage, while the FBI probably only really uses it for crime investigation.
The demand for travel is somewhat inelastic (though as one can see from the OP, it does change: for example, people can choose to walk the 500m to their mailbox at the end of the street instead of driving there and those livingf in the inner city often do have access to public transportation)
The demand for fuel, however is much more elastic. Simply put, when different cars consumed different amounts of fuel to travel the same distance AND the difference in fuel consumption represents a significant amount of money, people will give more weight to the fuel consumption factor when choosing a new car.
Hence gas taxes should contribute to reduced fuel consumption (and cleaner fuels if they're setup correctly) by giving incentives to people to choose cars that consume less fuel per mile traveled.
The really elegant things about gas taxes are:
- It taxes a very close proxy to polution. In a sense consumers pay for what they polute.
- It does not "fixate" in any type of car - a low consumption SUV model will still be cheaper to drive than a high-consumption saloon.
- It does not impose choices or remove choices - people are still free to drive around in a monster truck with wheels as tall as a small building and a fuel consumption of 0,5 miles per galon: they'll just pay extra for the priviledge.
Two words: DRM, WGA
The problem is not as much the suitability of Vista for gaming (we won't really know that until it gets tested), it's the fact that it's the first time that when you buy a PC you pay for it but somebody else controls it.
Unfortunatly for most people, they will only realize how far they have been shafted with Vista when a false negative in the license validation process causes their PCs to turn into vegetables or they have to buy their music all over again when a harddrive breaks (even though they had backups) or they buy a new CPU/Motherboard and the system thinks it's not the same PC.
Those of us in the know will avoid Vista like the plague and warn our friends about it's less publicized "features".
Personally i intend to get a Wii for my gaming needs (up to now i've always played games on the PC and never got a console) and phase out gaming on the PC (basically i'll stick with XP and older games and will never buy a game that requires DirectX 10, possibly switching to Linux once and for all - i've had it as dual boot for almost a decade now - and used Cedega).
I read "unfinished" as "incomplete" - which is correct with episodic content since you can't actually play the game until the end before the last episode is out.
Compare episodic games with a TV series:
- Most episodes are more or less self-contained mini-stories with a beginning and an end, which take place in the "universe" created by the previous episodes and are slightly connected with previous stories.
- Sometimes, there is a "big episode" which is split in two episodes. Things just hang at some point at the end of the first episode and the viewer has to wait for a week before seing how things turn out. This can be quite frustrating.
- Often, the last episode of a season will be part one of one such "big episode". In this situation, viewers have to wait months to figure out how the store ends or, if they're unlucky, the next season wasn't filmed yet and gets cancelled, in which case they'll never see the end.
The last situation is the most akin to episodic game content: get a game episode, play it for some hours until you reach the end of the episode and then wait for several months for the next episode, never knowing for sure if there will be a next episode.
Kinda puts self-flagelation into a whole new context.
Sorry, my bad.
Here on
On top of that there is the deceitfull behaviour of the Bush administration (preaching about how the US are the good guys and then saying that it's acceptable to use torture).
So i kinda developed a kneejerk reaction against any statements that sound anything like what a brainwash, self-deluded, US flag-worshiper might say.
It seems i've gone too far and am even reacting against those that just try to keep an open mind
A friend of mine here in the UK which has a lot more contact with americans than i do, told me about a common question from americans to non-americans when discussing politics:
"Do you think America is a power for good or a power for evil?"
Conclusions about what this question shows of the prejudices, beliefs and way of thinking of (at least some) americans are left to the reader.