It is my believe that the whole left/right/conservative/libertarian concepts are very much mashed together in most people's mind. This was very much to be seen in the grandparent post.
Thus, the point of my post was to alert those people to the concept that in the political spectrum of thinking one's political beliefs in the right-left axis are independent of one's political beliefs in the libertarian-conservative axis.
My post was thus tunned to this target audience (those which are not aware of the independence between these ways of thinking) and excluded the more fine details of political thinking (for example that the vast majority of people are not at the extremes and that most real-life choices/decisions are too complex in their implications to be simply tagged right/left/libertarian/conservative) so as not to drown the core of my lesson in the noise of unecessary details.
Naturally, my "speech" was also slightly imbued with my way of thinking and my beliefs - not only do i believe that purelly logical argumentation will not "touch" most people, but my writing usually reflects who i am.
Notice how, now that my target audience is different, i'm "tunning my speech" in a different way;)
The irony of it is that most the people really pushing these laws are left of center! The very people who whine, piss and moan about "puritans" on the right! Last I checked, a puritan is someone who forces their views on someone else at gun point when they're not harming anyone or anyone's property. It's nice to see that the political social conservatives have competition, albeit in a dark sort of way.
Contrary to what many people seem to think, Left-Right is not the only axis in political thinking, there is actually another axis, Libertarian-Conservative.
These axis are orthogonal, meaning that being left-wing or right-wing is independent of one being conservative or libertarian.
Contrary to popular believe, being libertarian does not imply being pro-business (a characteristic mostly associated with being right-wing), nor does being left-wing imply not being conservative.
Any true libertarian (both right-wing and left-wing) would be against this kind of legislation - libertarianism = pro-freedom: the guys that passed this law are conservatives, plain and simple.
Actually outsourcing of services is just the natural extension of telecommuting: stuff that can be done remotelly for $X hour by somebody a couple of miles away can just as easilly be done for $Y hour (were Y < X) by somebody thousands of miles away.
In other words, anything that can be done remotelly is just as suitable for telecommuting as it is for outsourcing, since in it's simplest form outsourcing is just having your workers telecommute from a far place.
The point here is that anything that does not require the worker to be physically onsite always or often will end up being outsourced and that the great telecommuting revolution that some still seem to expecting has already been overtaken by the even greater outsourcing revolution - forget about working from a paradisian island for western wages, at this point the best one can aim for is telecommuting a couple of days a week.
So while it may seem necessary to use a sticky material to adhere one's boots to the floor -- its probably easier to carry 1000 lbs (Earthweight) of weights which would add an additional 166 lbs of Moonweight, making a 200lb earth person weigh 200 lbs on the moon.
Unfortunately, since inertia is independent of gravity, adding 1000 lbs of mass to a man with a mass of 200 lbs just makes it 5x harder for him to start-moving/accelerating or stopping/decelerating.
Thus your simple solution is excelent if people stand still or keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed, but it completly sucks in any other scenario.
BTW: How did this guy got moderated +4 Insightfull - mass, inertia, gravity and their relation are pretty much the most basic concepts in physics.
To survive, a better programmer is required. One that programs with this in mind: if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, will this code be understood and survive?
Actually i advise any good programmer to keep the following in his/her mind instead: - "Do i want to get stuck fixing all software i made for the rest of my career in this company because nobody else can understand it?"
No need for grand feelings of protecting the company in the event you're gone (temporary or for good) - good old selfishness and a little wisdom is all that it takes.
For my part, been there, done the mistake, learned from it.... then left the company;)
When refering to pulling something out of somebody's ass, stick with immaterial things like ideas, numbers, statistics and such
Posts about people pulling material things out of their asses, such as olive branches, baseball bats, cars, factories, bridges, PR representatives and lawyers have the nasty effect on some of of us of, even if only for a second, making our imagination conjure images worse than goatse...
Unless terrorists are so stupid they use their discount card when buying nitrate fertilizer or pay it their credit card or can't resist having a frequent flyer card for the frequent flyer miles of all those plane trips to training camps in the Middle East and Africa...
This is aimed at other purposes such as: - Profiling by seing what kind of books, music, magazines, newspapers and other such thing people buy. - Detecting criminals and people that try to escape taxes by estimating how much they are spending monthly and checking if it is more than the declared monthly income. - Figuring out patterns of movement in the population by massive tracking of the places where people buy things. - etc
The reason is related to the reason why in some countries crunch time happens so often and lasts so long that in the end, whatever extra work was done by having people working extra hours has been, due to the extra bugs introduced by stressed-up/tired designers and coders, totally wipped out and the delievery took even more time than it would without crunch time: - Inexperienced and/or incompetent managers always concentrate on immediate and visible positive effects and ignore delayed, hard-to-measure negative effects.
Thus people working many hours NOW is immediate and easy to check - people spending, later, a much bigger percentage of their time than it would be needed otherwise debugging and re-writting code is delayed and harder to know for sure (how can you know it's a "lot more time than otherwise needed" if you can't compare it with the "no-crunch" situation)
The same effect applies to QA - saving money NOW by not having good requirements upfront (needed for proper regression testing) and by hiring some guys of the street to do QA is immediate and visible by comparisson with sub-contracting-to/maintaining a well paid, professional QA team which will save a LOT of time (and money) by shortening debugging time and getting those developers doing productive stuff instead of trying to reproduce badly reported bugs.
FYI - I'm a (very senior) software designer and developer, i've done some tester work on occasion and i've worked with both very good testers and very bad ones.
the quality of Mac hardware has plummeted now that they have been forced to turn to Intel for chips and I don't see many people rushing to trade in their existing non-Mac hardware.
I'm sorry, what? I fail to see even the slightest logical connection in the switch to Intel chips being due to the low quality of Apple hardware.
What exactly are you comparing the quality to? Certainly not your average PC...
I think you misunderstood the causal relation the GP is trying to describe - the meaning is that now that Apple has been forced to switch to Intel chips the quality of Mac hardware has plummeted.
Thus your knee-jerk, Apple-fanboy reaction was aimed at the wrong place.
Then again, logic never stoped blind faith before.
I think what everybody is missing is the right context to interpret the word "rush" here, so i'll give it a try at sketching it:
Imagine you have a snail. The snail has been moving from one city to another distant city. This has been going on for the last 5 years.
Thus "rush" in this context means making the snail go faster, but still within it's capabilities.
Now, just fill in the blanks by considering that the Duke Nukem Forever development team departed one year before the snail and the snail already overtook them and you'll get the picture...
Having played all 3 genres (RTS/RPG/FPS) both online and offline including both online variants of MMOs (MMORPG and MMOFPS) and being reasonably proeficient at all of them, i came to the conclusing that the by far most demanding on the mouse genre is FPS, followed by the RTS and last by the RPGs (online or off).
If your mouse works well in the hectic, fast paced situation which is playing a FPS (where both speed and precision are important), then it's quite likelly well suited for then somewhat less demanding RTSs and RPGs (RTSs can have somewhat more frequent "clicks", RPGs not so much since the skills/spells/actions usually either take some time to execute or have a cool-down timer).
This is not a comment on the overal quality of the Razer, only on the validity of any "beter for RTS/MMO" claim by a mouse manufacturer - personally i read "beter for RTS/MMO" as "possibly not really good for FPS"
Scientists developed a new way of hidding images inside other images, in which, if understood it right, both images are treated as complex waves, and the image to be hidden is amplitude modulated into the waveform of the host (carrier) image. This is a bit similar to how sound waves are modulated into the carrier wave in radio transmission, only in this case the carrier wave is not a fixed frequency wave.
The modulation of the image to hide into the host image is controlled via a phase key. The phase key used in the modulation of the hidden image into the host image is required to extract the hidden image from the encoded image.
Also, this method allows adding multiple hidden images to the host image, as long as they have different phase keys.
How exactly this is beter (in terms of avoiding that an attacker can get the hidden image) than encrypting the image to hide and then merging the resulting data stream into the host image in a straightforward way (for example, using the least significat digit of every RGB value) i don't know (the article doesn't cover it). I suspect this new method might be more rubust when transformations are applied to the encoded image, such as compression, cropping, etc...
It's a $40 USB mouse which looks like a normal mouse but has a fancy side rubber grip strip thingie that shines in the dark.
The mouse has more sensitivity and a wider data path and the manufacturer came up with an APM (Actions Per Minute) measurement to try and show that you can do a lot of "actions" per minute on the mouse so it's good for RTSs and MMORPGs.
In practice this mouse is but another decent gamers mouse, just as good for FPSs as it is for RTSs and MMORPGS. The whole RTS/MMORPG specific thing is just a marketing gimmik of the manufacturer to try and distinguish it from the competition.
By the way: FPTRTFA (First Post That Read The F... Article)
Your reasoning starts from way too many assumptions about the inherent honesty and good intentions of the US people and the US government. Basically you start from the axiom that "we [the US] are good and they are not" and then go around trying to prove that same axiom via circular logic.
A couple of examples:
For one, the US has had "the bomb" for over 60 years, and developed/improved it in response to actual threats (ostensibly from Japan, but primarily from the Soviets). There is no comparable threat to Iran (yeah, you might say the US, but the only thing Iran has to worry about from the US is caused directly by their nuclear weapon ambitions in the first place).
I one sentence you state that Iran might want to have the bomb because they feel threathened by the US, yet the reason they might feel threatened by the US is that they are trying to get the bomb.
Nice chicken and egg argument.
You forgot that they their decision to start developing the bomb occured BEFORE they actually started developing the bomb (which in your words is the reason why they might have reason feel threatened by the US). Thus their decision came BEFORE your stated reason for them to feel threathened. In other wordss, your argument is void.
Also your argument about their lack of reason to feel threathened rests on three assumptions: a) For their "threat assessment", Iran is only considering the present situation (including for example which administration is in power in the US) and not the possible future situations. b) The US would not take any action against Iran (be it in the diplomatic, economic or battle fields) if Iran did not start developing the bomb. This is a tall assumption given the Bush's "Axis of Evil" speach. c) No other countries can be considered a threat to Iran except the US. One word: Israel
For another, the US maintains its stockpiles of nuclear weapons solely to serve as a deterrent against other nations, while Iran's leadership has publicly and repeatedly declared that Israel should not exist as a state and has funded terrorist acts in order to remove it - it may very well use nuclear weapons in a first-strike effort against Israel, and even the threat of this occurring destabilizes the Middle East further than it already is.
ASSUMPTION: "the US maintains its stockpiles of nuclear weapons solely to serve as a deterrent against other nations"
Can anybody be 100% sure it is completely so now? Will it be so in 5 years? 10 years? 25? 50? Are you completly sure there will never be an american president that uses nukes for a "preemptive attack" and "for the good of the american people"? Are you sure no US administration will be tempted to use nukes in (more and more wide ranging) "tactical" situations? (Notice that the Bush administration has restarted work in developing new nuclear weapons)
Besides all this, if developing a new nuclear weapon design allows the US to decrease its active stockpile of warheads, thereby reducing the cost of maintaining those weapons, decreasing the hazard their existence presents (aside from their use, of course), and generally reducing the overwhelming overkill the stockpile represents, isn't that a good thing?
Please explain how a new nuke design will help decrease the US' "active stockpile of warheads" - i fail to see the connection.
Although some re-designing of nuclear weapons in the US is targeted at increasing life-expectancy and reducing maintenance of nukes in storage, there is also some designing of new weapons going on such a nuclear bunker busters. How exactly will adding nuclear bunker busters decrease the US stockpile of nukes?
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After all this, i must state that i am in fact against letting Iran develop nuclear weapons. This because: a) I personally don't trust the current Iranian regime. Furthermore, i agree with the parent poster in that the
Broad Reach : Requires unique integration title by title
Accountable : Effectiveness is only measured by sell-thru
Easy to Integrate : Game teams pushing back, resisting due to it being a lot of work to integrate
Agencies Drive Value : Agencies have a very limited role
The whole thing completly bypasses the issue of what will consumers (you know, those people that actually buy - or not - the games) accept or not as advertising in a game. The stated 5 Ways to Improve In-Game Advertising all have to do with how game makers can make it easier for ad-agencies to sell adverts in games - all the while ignoring the important side-effect that adverts in a game have in the profitability of that game: how much will sales of a game decrease because of the quantity/type of adverts in that game.
Here's a couple of points coming from a gamer: - If your game is situated in a present time scenario, adverts are actually a good thing as long as they are present in the same places and forms as they would be in comparable real life situations. Thus, for example, a football (soccer for you americans) simulator should have adverts around the playing fields, just like they have in real life - in this situation adverts give depth and realism to the game. - If your game is not situatied in a present-time/real-life-like scenario don't do in-game adverts. If you really, really want to make money from adverts, get companies to sponsor official mods and extensions for the game and make those available for free from a website while avertising (in that website) for the company that sponsored the mod/extension. - Just follow the example of TV - in pay-TV, at most you'll see some product placement in those movies/series whose story takes place in a real-life-like present-day environment, never, for example, in science fiction movies. Free TV goes a step further an has adverts before and after each block of free content. Notice how pay-TV is way lighter on adverts than free TV - that's because most people are not willing to pay for seing adverts (at least not where i live): keep that in mind.
Having a similar background as you (so both C++ and Java development) i believe that the reason why Java pushes developers harder towards a specific paradigm than C++ does is because the ideal situation for software development - a team of experienced software developers all with at least some software design experience, lead by an senior designer/technical architect and with realistic deadlines - is very rare in the real world.
When junior programmers, developers without the design experience to see how the code fits into the wider application/system design or irrealistic deadlines the are thrown into the picture then:
The likellyhood of programming/design errors increases faster with C++ than it does with Java
Coding mistakes/bad-choices tend to have wider-ranging effects (as in affecting other people's code) in C++ than in Java
Is it just me, or could this be a plausible marketing ploy? Sony wants the biggest install base of the PS3 as possible to make some money, and have better market penetration than the 360 or Wii. What if they're releasing a high priced player closer to the window of the launch of the PS3 on purpose? If you had your choice between a box that did Blu Ray for $1000, or a box that did Blu Ray + lots of other stuff, for $600, a lot of non-elitist consumers are going to go with the cheaper bargain. It's entirely possible that sony is releasing an over priced blu ray player now (btw, $1000? I can get a HD-DVD drive for under $200!), to increase adoption of the ps3 by the "I love HD, but my pocket book hates it" crowd.
I believe you are seing things the wrong way around: - If those that already want to get a Blu-Ray player get a PS3 instead because the standalone Blu-Ray players are not yet on the market, than all it happens is the sale of one more PS3 and one less standalone player. The total number of sold Blu-Ray players does not change because those people already wanted to get one anyways.
The point of putting a Blu-Ray player in the PS3 is to increase the number of Blu-Ray players in the hands of consumers by, in addition to selling Blu-Ray players to those that want such a player (be it standalone or in a PS3), also selling Blu-Ray players (built-in on the PS3) to gamers which would otherwise not have aquired such a player.
In that sense, and assuming that the PS3 is being sold at a loss while the standalone players will be sold at a profit, if Blu-Ray early adopters get the players on a PS3 instead of standalone, then Sony looses money.
Since at this moment the number of gamers (or even just PS2 gamers) far outweights the number of Blu-Ray early adopters, the inverse scenario of trying to make more (PSx) gamers by getting Blu-Ray early adopters to get a PS3 instead of a standalone player seems less than wise in a business sense. Still, it's Sony we're talking about here...;)
Unfortunate postings to Slashdot are also pretty, well, unfortunate, because Slashdot has a high Google-rank, so your Slashdot postings will place highly in Google on a search for your name. I don't think you can get a Slashdot comment removed.
Which is why most of us use nicknames which are totally unrelated to our real names and don't post our real names anywhere on slashdot.
I would rather save sharing my political opinions until after i get the job and only to those i think will care.
In the same way i would rather save my opinion on the average competence (or should i say incompetence) of management in IT until after i've been working for a month or two and management thinks that when it comes to software development i'm more productive than a truck full of gurus, wiser than Buda and more experienced than Don Juan - at that point they actually listen to my advice.
As a related note, after 8 years being a machine that transforms cofee into code, a couple of weeks ago i completelly stopped drinking cofee (and all other caffeinated drinks) - because i wanted to prove myself i could.
The results were very interesting: - During the day, i'm less tired now than i was before - I don't need to sleep as much at night as i did before - No more headaches on the weekends for lack of cofee
This is pretty much the opposite of what i expected (except the last one) - i had been drinking cofee to keep me awake and sharp and it turns out is was making me tired and (especially in the afternoon) sluggish.
Because a hot-shit graphics card will run you $400
Nobody needs a hot-shit graphics card to run games unless you're aiming at running the latest games at 1600x1280 with 4xAA and 12xAF which is way much more eye candy than a PS3 and requires a monitor with a higher resolution than an HDTV.
Contrary to the stuff put out on PC gaming and gaming hardware sites and by compupenis exibitionist bloggers and forum posters, playing a game at 1600x1280 and 250 fps on a $4000 machine does not significantly enhance one's fun.
A $200 card (middle range, NOT the top of the range latest generation cards) and a 1024x768 monitor is more than good enough if all you want is match (or even surpace) the performance of the latest generation consoles.
So get a $500 PC with monitor and a $200 graphics card and you have a good game machine (just make sure you get 1GB memory and disable the built-in graphics card) which can also be used for all kinds of other things, such as surfing the web, IM, e-mailing, writting documents, and much, much more.
Hey, if you don't mind cutting a couple of corners (like HD size and no AA on most games) you can even make do with a $400 PC and a $125 graphics cards - thats just $25 above the cheapest PS3.
Also because the PS3 is supposed to play PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, as well as Blu-Ray movies (FWIW). PC plays PS1 games, and not necessarily all that well.
The PC cannot play PS2/3 games and the PS3 cannot play any PC games (at all). What's your point here?
Sure, a $525 PC (or even the $700 one) will not play Blu-Ray movies. Then again further discussion in this direction would inevitably lead us to discussing if there is actually any point in investing money for playing Blu-Ray movies at all, something which has already been thouroughly covered elsewere, so i won't go into that.
I strongly suspect that Sony, owner of amongst others Sony Pictures will never make hardware with capabilities which might negativelly affect other parts of their business - like for example PVRs which would affect sales of movies and TV series on DVD...
Just look at how they are risking the success of their latest generation gaming console (PS3) by bundling hardware (Blu-Ray drive) with it in an attempt at becoming the next generation de facto standard for motion pictures distribution (and in the process pricing the PS3 above the commonly acceptable range).
For quite a while now, the decisions on the types and characteristics of the products their consumer goods and electronics division put out have been molded by the wishes of their music and film production division to get consumers to buy the same music/movies multiple times for multiple devices (forget about piracy, the real point of DRM is to avoid that people copy the contents of the media they have aquired to different devices - as in, to technologically eliminate fair-use).
Slashdot Mirror
It is my believe that the whole left/right/conservative/libertarian concepts are very much mashed together in most people's mind. This was very much to be seen in the grandparent post.
;)
Thus, the point of my post was to alert those people to the concept that in the political spectrum of thinking one's political beliefs in the right-left axis are independent of one's political beliefs in the libertarian-conservative axis.
My post was thus tunned to this target audience (those which are not aware of the independence between these ways of thinking) and excluded the more fine details of political thinking (for example that the vast majority of people are not at the extremes and that most real-life choices/decisions are too complex in their implications to be simply tagged right/left/libertarian/conservative) so as not to drown the core of my lesson in the noise of unecessary details.
Naturally, my "speech" was also slightly imbued with my way of thinking and my beliefs - not only do i believe that purelly logical argumentation will not "touch" most people, but my writing usually reflects who i am.
Notice how, now that my target audience is different, i'm "tunning my speech" in a different way
In certain countries, getting payed overtime and having evenings and weekends for oneself is actually the standard way of working in IT.
Overworking in IT is very much a US problem (and, IMHO, one of the big causes of chronical delays and buggy software for releases)
Contrary to what many people seem to think, Left-Right is not the only axis in political thinking, there is actually another axis, Libertarian-Conservative.
These axis are orthogonal, meaning that being left-wing or right-wing is independent of one being conservative or libertarian.
Contrary to popular believe, being libertarian does not imply being pro-business (a characteristic mostly associated with being right-wing), nor does being left-wing imply not being conservative.
Any true libertarian (both right-wing and left-wing) would be against this kind of legislation - libertarianism = pro-freedom: the guys that passed this law are conservatives, plain and simple.
Actually outsourcing of services is just the natural extension of telecommuting: stuff that can be done remotelly for $X hour by somebody a couple of miles away can just as easilly be done for $Y hour (were Y < X) by somebody thousands of miles away.
In other words, anything that can be done remotelly is just as suitable for telecommuting as it is for outsourcing, since in it's simplest form outsourcing is just having your workers telecommute from a far place.
The point here is that anything that does not require the worker to be physically onsite always or often will end up being outsourced and that the great telecommuting revolution that some still seem to expecting has already been overtaken by the even greater outsourcing revolution - forget about working from a paradisian island for western wages, at this point the best one can aim for is telecommuting a couple of days a week.
Unfortunately, since inertia is independent of gravity, adding 1000 lbs of mass to a man with a mass of 200 lbs just makes it 5x harder for him to start-moving/accelerating or stopping/decelerating.
Thus your simple solution is excelent if people stand still or keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed, but it completly sucks in any other scenario.
BTW: How did this guy got moderated +4 Insightfull - mass, inertia, gravity and their relation are pretty much the most basic concepts in physics.
Well ... they are rocket scientists
Actually i advise any good programmer to keep the following in his/her mind instead:
- "Do i want to get stuck fixing all software i made for the rest of my career in this company because nobody else can understand it?"
No need for grand feelings of protecting the company in the event you're gone (temporary or for good) - good old selfishness and a little wisdom is all that it takes.
For my part, been there, done the mistake, learned from it
When refering to pulling something out of somebody's ass, stick with immaterial things like ideas, numbers, statistics and such
...
Posts about people pulling material things out of their asses, such as olive branches, baseball bats, cars, factories, bridges, PR representatives and lawyers have the nasty effect on some of of us of, even if only for a second, making our imagination conjure images worse than goatse
Please don't.
Unless terrorists are so stupid they use their discount card when buying nitrate fertilizer or pay it their credit card or can't resist having a frequent flyer card for the frequent flyer miles of all those plane trips to training camps in the Middle East and Africa ...
This is aimed at other purposes such as:
- Profiling by seing what kind of books, music, magazines, newspapers and other such thing people buy.
- Detecting criminals and people that try to escape taxes by estimating how much they are spending monthly and checking if it is more than the declared monthly income.
- Figuring out patterns of movement in the population by massive tracking of the places where people buy things.
- etc
Here's my take on why most QA teams suck:
The reason is related to the reason why in some countries crunch time happens so often and lasts so long that in the end, whatever extra work was done by having people working extra hours has been, due to the extra bugs introduced by stressed-up/tired designers and coders, totally wipped out and the delievery took even more time than it would without crunch time:
- Inexperienced and/or incompetent managers always concentrate on immediate and visible positive effects and ignore delayed, hard-to-measure negative effects.
Thus people working many hours NOW is immediate and easy to check - people spending, later, a much bigger percentage of their time than it would be needed otherwise debugging and re-writting code is delayed and harder to know for sure (how can you know it's a "lot more time than otherwise needed" if you can't compare it with the "no-crunch" situation)
The same effect applies to QA - saving money NOW by not having good requirements upfront (needed for proper regression testing) and by hiring some guys of the street to do QA is immediate and visible by comparisson with sub-contracting-to/maintaining a well paid, professional QA team which will save a LOT of time (and money) by shortening debugging time and getting those developers doing productive stuff instead of trying to reproduce badly reported bugs.
FYI - I'm a (very senior) software designer and developer, i've done some tester work on occasion and i've worked with both very good testers and very bad ones.
I'm turning myself up for using company resources for personal benefict.
Maybe they'll be lenient - the paper was already printed on one side.
I think you misunderstood the causal relation the GP is trying to describe - the meaning is that now that Apple has been forced to switch to Intel chips the quality of Mac hardware has plummeted.
Thus your knee-jerk, Apple-fanboy reaction was aimed at the wrong place.
Then again, logic never stoped blind faith before.
I think what everybody is missing is the right context to interpret the word "rush" here, so i'll give it a try at sketching it:
Imagine you have a snail. The snail has been moving from one city to another distant city. This has been going on for the last 5 years.
Thus "rush" in this context means making the snail go faster, but still within it's capabilities.
Now, just fill in the blanks by considering that the Duke Nukem Forever development team departed one year before the snail and the snail already overtook them and you'll get the picture...
Having played all 3 genres (RTS/RPG/FPS) both online and offline including both online variants of MMOs (MMORPG and MMOFPS) and being reasonably proeficient at all of them, i came to the conclusing that the by far most demanding on the mouse genre is FPS, followed by the RTS and last by the RPGs (online or off).
If your mouse works well in the hectic, fast paced situation which is playing a FPS (where both speed and precision are important), then it's quite likelly well suited for then somewhat less demanding RTSs and RPGs (RTSs can have somewhat more frequent "clicks", RPGs not so much since the skills/spells/actions usually either take some time to execute or have a cool-down timer).
This is not a comment on the overal quality of the Razer, only on the validity of any "beter for RTS/MMO" claim by a mouse manufacturer - personally i read "beter for RTS/MMO" as "possibly not really good for FPS"
The article is indeed about stenography.
Scientists developed a new way of hidding images inside other images, in which, if understood it right, both images are treated as complex waves, and the image to be hidden is amplitude modulated into the waveform of the host (carrier) image. This is a bit similar to how sound waves are modulated into the carrier wave in radio transmission, only in this case the carrier wave is not a fixed frequency wave.
The modulation of the image to hide into the host image is controlled via a phase key. The phase key used in the modulation of the hidden image into the host image is required to extract the hidden image from the encoded image.
Also, this method allows adding multiple hidden images to the host image, as long as they have different phase keys.
How exactly this is beter (in terms of avoiding that an attacker can get the hidden image) than encrypting the image to hide and then merging the resulting data stream into the host image in a straightforward way (for example, using the least significat digit of every RGB value) i don't know (the article doesn't cover it). I suspect this new method might be more rubust when transformations are applied to the encoded image, such as compression, cropping, etc...
It's a $40 USB mouse which looks like a normal mouse but has a fancy side rubber grip strip thingie that shines in the dark.
The mouse has more sensitivity and a wider data path and the manufacturer came up with an APM (Actions Per Minute) measurement to try and show that you can do a lot of "actions" per minute on the mouse so it's good for RTSs and MMORPGs.
In practice this mouse is but another decent gamers mouse, just as good for FPSs as it is for RTSs and MMORPGS. The whole RTS/MMORPG specific thing is just a marketing gimmik of the manufacturer to try and distinguish it from the competition.
By the way: FPTRTFA (First Post That Read The F... Article)
A couple of examples:
I one sentence you state that Iran might want to have the bomb because they feel threathened by the US, yet the reason they might feel threatened by the US is that they are trying to get the bomb.
Nice chicken and egg argument.
You forgot that they their decision to start developing the bomb occured BEFORE they actually started developing the bomb (which in your words is the reason why they might have reason feel threatened by the US). Thus their decision came BEFORE your stated reason for them to feel threathened. In other wordss, your argument is void.
Also your argument about their lack of reason to feel threathened rests on three assumptions:
a) For their "threat assessment", Iran is only considering the present situation (including for example which administration is in power in the US) and not the possible future situations.
b) The US would not take any action against Iran (be it in the diplomatic, economic or battle fields) if Iran did not start developing the bomb. This is a tall assumption given the Bush's "Axis of Evil" speach.
c) No other countries can be considered a threat to Iran except the US. One word: Israel
ASSUMPTION: "the US maintains its stockpiles of nuclear weapons solely to serve as a deterrent against other nations"
Can anybody be 100% sure it is completely so now? Will it be so in 5 years? 10 years? 25? 50?
Are you completly sure there will never be an american president that uses nukes for a "preemptive attack" and "for the good of the american people"? Are you sure no US administration will be tempted to use nukes in (more and more wide ranging) "tactical" situations?
(Notice that the Bush administration has restarted work in developing new nuclear weapons)
Please explain how a new nuke design will help decrease the US' "active stockpile of warheads" - i fail to see the connection.
Although some re-designing of nuclear weapons in the US is targeted at increasing life-expectancy and reducing maintenance of nukes in storage, there is also some designing of new weapons going on such a nuclear bunker busters. How exactly will adding nuclear bunker busters decrease the US stockpile of nukes?
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After all this, i must state that i am in fact against letting Iran develop nuclear weapons. This because:
a) I personally don't trust the current Iranian regime. Furthermore, i agree with the parent poster in that the
The whole thing completly bypasses the issue of what will consumers (you know, those people that actually buy - or not - the games) accept or not as advertising in a game. The stated 5 Ways to Improve In-Game Advertising all have to do with how game makers can make it easier for ad-agencies to sell adverts in games - all the while ignoring the important side-effect that adverts in a game have in the profitability of that game: how much will sales of a game decrease because of the quantity/type of adverts in that game.
Here's a couple of points coming from a gamer:
- If your game is situated in a present time scenario, adverts are actually a good thing as long as they are present in the same places and forms as they would be in comparable real life situations. Thus, for example, a football (soccer for you americans) simulator should have adverts around the playing fields, just like they have in real life - in this situation adverts give depth and realism to the game.
- If your game is not situatied in a present-time/real-life-like scenario don't do in-game adverts. If you really, really want to make money from adverts, get companies to sponsor official mods and extensions for the game and make those available for free from a website while avertising (in that website) for the company that sponsored the mod/extension.
- Just follow the example of TV - in pay-TV, at most you'll see some product placement in those movies/series whose story takes place in a real-life-like present-day environment, never, for example, in science fiction movies. Free TV goes a step further an has adverts before and after each block of free content. Notice how pay-TV is way lighter on adverts than free TV - that's because most people are not willing to pay for seing adverts (at least not where i live): keep that in mind.
No wonder guys are often accused of thinking with the wrong head ... it's all 'cause of porn
When junior programmers, developers without the design experience to see how the code fits into the wider application/system design or irrealistic deadlines the are thrown into the picture then:
Is it just me, or could this be a plausible marketing ploy? Sony wants the biggest install base of the PS3 as possible to make some money, and have better market penetration than the 360 or Wii. What if they're releasing a high priced player closer to the window of the launch of the PS3 on purpose? If you had your choice between a box that did Blu Ray for $1000, or a box that did Blu Ray + lots of other stuff, for $600, a lot of non-elitist consumers are going to go with the cheaper bargain. It's entirely possible that sony is releasing an over priced blu ray player now (btw, $1000? I can get a HD-DVD drive for under $200!), to increase adoption of the ps3 by the "I love HD, but my pocket book hates it" crowd.
... ;)
I believe you are seing things the wrong way around:
- If those that already want to get a Blu-Ray player get a PS3 instead because the standalone Blu-Ray players are not yet on the market, than all it happens is the sale of one more PS3 and one less standalone player. The total number of sold Blu-Ray players does not change because those people already wanted to get one anyways.
The point of putting a Blu-Ray player in the PS3 is to increase the number of Blu-Ray players in the hands of consumers by, in addition to selling Blu-Ray players to those that want such a player (be it standalone or in a PS3), also selling Blu-Ray players (built-in on the PS3) to gamers which would otherwise not have aquired such a player.
In that sense, and assuming that the PS3 is being sold at a loss while the standalone players will be sold at a profit, if Blu-Ray early adopters get the players on a PS3 instead of standalone, then Sony looses money.
Since at this moment the number of gamers (or even just PS2 gamers) far outweights the number of Blu-Ray early adopters, the inverse scenario of trying to make more (PSx) gamers by getting Blu-Ray early adopters to get a PS3 instead of a standalone player seems less than wise in a business sense. Still, it's Sony we're talking about here
Unfortunate postings to Slashdot are also pretty, well, unfortunate, because Slashdot has a high Google-rank, so your Slashdot postings will place highly in Google on a search for your name. I don't think you can get a Slashdot comment removed.
Which is why most of us use nicknames which are totally unrelated to our real names and don't post our real names anywhere on slashdot.
I would rather save sharing my political opinions until after i get the job and only to those i think will care.
In the same way i would rather save my opinion on the average competence (or should i say incompetence) of management in IT until after i've been working for a month or two and management thinks that when it comes to software development i'm more productive than a truck full of gurus, wiser than Buda and more experienced than Don Juan - at that point they actually listen to my advice.
As a related note, after 8 years being a machine that transforms cofee into code, a couple of weeks ago i completelly stopped drinking cofee (and all other caffeinated drinks) - because i wanted to prove myself i could.
The results were very interesting:
- During the day, i'm less tired now than i was before
- I don't need to sleep as much at night as i did before
- No more headaches on the weekends for lack of cofee
This is pretty much the opposite of what i expected (except the last one) - i had been drinking cofee to keep me awake and sharp and it turns out is was making me tired and (especially in the afternoon) sluggish.
Because a hot-shit graphics card will run you $400
Nobody needs a hot-shit graphics card to run games unless you're aiming at running the latest games at 1600x1280 with 4xAA and 12xAF which is way much more eye candy than a PS3 and requires a monitor with a higher resolution than an HDTV.
Contrary to the stuff put out on PC gaming and gaming hardware sites and by compupenis exibitionist bloggers and forum posters, playing a game at 1600x1280 and 250 fps on a $4000 machine does not significantly enhance one's fun.
A $200 card (middle range, NOT the top of the range latest generation cards) and a 1024x768 monitor is more than good enough if all you want is match (or even surpace) the performance of the latest generation consoles.
So get a $500 PC with monitor and a $200 graphics card and you have a good game machine (just make sure you get 1GB memory and disable the built-in graphics card) which can also be used for all kinds of other things, such as surfing the web, IM, e-mailing, writting documents, and much, much more.
Hey, if you don't mind cutting a couple of corners (like HD size and no AA on most games) you can even make do with a $400 PC and a $125 graphics cards - thats just $25 above the cheapest PS3.
Also because the PS3 is supposed to play PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, as well as Blu-Ray movies (FWIW). PC plays PS1 games, and not necessarily all that well.
The PC cannot play PS2/3 games and the PS3 cannot play any PC games (at all). What's your point here?
Sure, a $525 PC (or even the $700 one) will not play Blu-Ray movies. Then again further discussion in this direction would inevitably lead us to discussing if there is actually any point in investing money for playing Blu-Ray movies at all, something which has already been thouroughly covered elsewere, so i won't go into that.
I strongly suspect that Sony, owner of amongst others Sony Pictures will never make hardware with capabilities which might negativelly affect other parts of their business - like for example PVRs which would affect sales of movies and TV series on DVD ...
Just look at how they are risking the success of their latest generation gaming console (PS3) by bundling hardware (Blu-Ray drive) with it in an attempt at becoming the next generation de facto standard for motion pictures distribution (and in the process pricing the PS3 above the commonly acceptable range).
For quite a while now, the decisions on the types and characteristics of the products their consumer goods and electronics division put out have been molded by the wishes of their music and film production division to get consumers to buy the same music/movies multiple times for multiple devices (forget about piracy, the real point of DRM is to avoid that people copy the contents of the media they have aquired to different devices - as in, to technologically eliminate fair-use).