Another poster has noted Open Offices identifies 8 American countries using Imperial, rest of world (190 or so countries) using metric. Get with the 21st century, Americans! (and Burmese and Liberians as well I believe).
Metric is all that I was ever taught in school here. Imperial is used for temperatures, speeds, and square footage of houses.
It is an odd decision, for sure. At first glance, it seems counter-productive, because leaving aside any potential lost sales (and to be honest, I doubt too many of those will actually materialise), there must surely be more cost in providing some bespoke matchmaking system than in sticking in a server browser and letting people host dedicated servers. However, thinking about it, I can think of a few of the factors that are likely behind this. Note that I'm not saying I endorse them; just that I think these are the obvious candidates.
There is also a chance that they are using one of a number of pre-packaged PC game matchmaking systems and that this saves them the time and effort of creating a dedicated server.
There are some Source engine Mods I have which, of course, use dedicated servers, but because the user base is so small finding a dedicated server with people on it is very hard. An automatic match making system could help this problem, I could fire the game up in the background and it could sit there searching for someone to play with and after 5 or so minutes alert me when it found a match. As it is today, I start the Mod up, see that no one is playing on any of the servers, and close it down. There may very well be 5 other people doing the same thing at the same time!
In general though I do agree that dedicated servers are much better. They allow for a sense of community, something you cannot get with random player matches.
However, I haven't found such issues with mathematicians, artists or musicians, that provided helpful advice in a much more friendly way, even discussion and tips, linking to user-friendly references that were easy to understand and straight to the point, without the wide load of "TV character" sarcasm provided by developers or extremely technical papers.
One problem you may be facing is that a lot of people do go onto IRC and community forums asking for code that they can cut, paste, and compile. It is a very frequent occurance, and unfortunatly people who regularly hang out in technical chat rooms have become suspicious of almost everyone outside of their known group. From students asking for answers to their HW, to even employees of some cheap off shore programming firms looking for help with their commercial project, experienced programmers have unfortgunatly beocme wary of helping others.
I would recommend you join a community that is specifically focused on helping beginning game programmers. Such communities do exist, something such as XNA might be of help, it is DirectX and C# based, not OpenGL, and although DirectX and OpenGL differ by a fair bit, the important thing is that you find an established community of people willing to help you.
Programming is really one of the more open fields. Compared to the physical sciences it has a very low entry price (the price of a computer, no other supplies needed!) and as you have found out for yourself, it is something that anyone who has a desire to can take up.
(Also IRC is full of dicks:P Try a discussion forum, #1 search result is OpenGL coding: beginners)
Instead of links to advanced reading material, maybe the not-so-advanced reading material could have been more useful. What left me with the impression of elitism was the way they reacted, being totally rude and overdone, like if I they thought I was someone they hated in disguise.
People have on hand the references that they use most often, it may very well be that the people you are asking are not aware of the latest up to date introductory references, as it has been a while since they themselves made use of that sort of material.
My Win7 quad core AMD system that boots in under 10 seconds, is rock solid stable, and runs every game I throw at it blindingly fast would care to disagree with you.:)
Link to my PC build out. I was going more for cosmetics (30 lbs of brushed aluminum, I don't much like the blue LEDs though, I am burnt out on blue LEDs) than for power, I have friends who consider a 10 second boot with Win7 to be slow. Not that I boot very often, more likely I am coming out of Hibernate which I can do in ~3-5 seconds, which is pretty good timing for 8GB of RAM.
I've never been able to put my finger on it, but Windows simply doesn't run as well on AMD chips as it does on Intel chips. I always end up switching back to Intel.
Intel makes very stable chipsets. If you tried AMD during the days that they were relying on Via chipsets (or used some of AMD's early chipsets) I can see how you could easily get this impression. Intel is good at putting together barebones kits and working with OEMs to put out stable systems.
Also don't skimp on the mobo, get a good middle of the range one, and read reviews on it. AMD's platforms have always offered a lot of diversity, which can be both a strength and a weakness; depending on how educated the system builder is about the relative merits (including stability) of those choices.
AMD is often seen as a cost cutting measure (and their CPUs are very financially efficient) but a lot of people, both OEMs at individuals, take cost cutting a bit too far and once they go with AMD they also skimp on the power supply, motherboard, and even RAM.
Indeed, an AMD system with a very well performing CPU that has been hooked up to a crash prone motherboard running no-name RAM all powered by a flaky PSU, can indeed give one a very negative impression of AMD as a whole.:)
AMD MoBos are typically cheaper than comparable quality Intel MoBos, so you can save some money there, but don't be cheap with any other parts of the system. You will still save a good chunk of change (how much depends on which company has done price drops most recently) and you will get a stable, reliable, very well performing system.
Why can't we simply rebury the material where it came from?
That is exactly what the current strategy has been up until now. The problem is that some substances have a bad habit of seeping into ground water unless carefully packaged up and contained.
Recycling only happens if it is "economically feasible", which means cheaper than burying it or cheaper than finding a way around government regulations.
On a pretty regular basis/. has stories about research progressing just towards breaking down various types of toxis waste.
After a certain point though, you end up with either very simple molecules or just crap like lead that you can't break down any more. A lot of effort went into gathering up some of the component materials and concentrating them together for whatever reason. Aside from reburying stuff in the ground (which if you think about it, is exactly what half the cleanup proposals are!) there isn't much that can be done with matter in such a simplified form.
It seams that xbox-live would be particularly susceptible to cheating because of the lack of dedicated game servers/communities doing proper verification
Cheating is rampent on Xbox live. So is the ban hammer.
As an ultimate punishment, MS can disable one's entire Xbox live account. Worst case, that costs the cheater $$. Or of course they have a huge supply of 48 hour free trial gold cards, but then they have to spend their free time hunting additional 48 hour free trial gold cards.:P
Most cheats for Xbox live games are fairly low tech. Purposefully inducing lag spikes, crap like that.
The "researcher" who is quoted in this article comes off like a moron.
He complains that there is no way to hide one's gamerscore. NO SHIT. It is called social networking. GAMERSCORE = (imagined) PENILE LENGTH INCREASE. You don't farking hide it, the entire point is to show it off.
Next up, sending someone a message "g1ve me urz PW and I'll givez you 1,000,000 gamerscores!!" is not hacking. It is exploiting people's greed. There is a big difference.
Likewise wussies DOS'ing a game server to get back at the people who kicked their wimpy arse is also not new, it happens WAY more often in PC games, since the majority of PC games have dedicated servers whereas only a few (but popular) Xbox 360 titles use dedicated servers.
In summary, these are not "hackers targetting Xbox Live". 99% of them don't even rank as script kiddies.
Able to quickly zoom in on any region, select state from drop down, or enter a ZIP code, all from home page
Location of graphical icons on map shows business or organization's location.
Can download data in KML format
Variety of options of filtering displayed data on map
Recovery.com
Flash Map of USA
Click on a state, long loading time of state specific page
Cannot graphically locate fund allocation on map
Data is spread across multiple pages, smallest filtering option is to split data up by city.
While showing the data in page format is definitely more accessible from the POV of a screen reader, the graphical map is more useful in terms of finding out how money is being spent around where I live.
The recovery.gov website is actually pretty good, in under a minute I was finding how funds were being allocated in my neighborhood.
Ahh, the old "its ok to steal to feed your family"
Asking someone who has no training and is paid on commision for help with a purchase is not the smartest thing to do.
It has been noted on/. before that Fry's is dirt cheap at least in part because of how little training their employees have. Fry's has to cut costs somewhere. People enjoy the cheap prices, having to do product research on their own is the cost they pay in return for those cheap prices.
That's how you separate those with morals from those without.
Or in an economy like this, it is how you separate those who are willing to go without food from those who enjoy eating.
Can we really blame the employees for the store's lack of willingness to give employees a few hours training when they are assigned to a department?
While Computer sales are rather complicated, most other departments are not that complicated. An hour and a half is plenty of time to go over everything a sales person needs to know about selling digital cameras, and knowing about sensor sizes and lens quality would help dramatically improve the sale person's ability to up sell.
Likewise similar training would be quick and easy for TV/AV systems, home appliances, and most other departments in an electronics superstore.
Although any type of honesty would destroy sales of Monster cables.:P
A friend of mine used to work at Fry's. He told me that they have no training at all, they are just put into an area of the store to sell stuff, more senior sales staff get to work more lucrative departments. From his description, sales people basically spouted off random technical sounding words in an attempt to get customers to buy stuff, most of them really had no idea about the products they were selling. He quite after a few months because he couldn't stand lying to customers anymore.
I believe that the Driver Development Kit (DDK) comes with Platform Builder for Windows Mobile which isn't available for distribution. You can download the 120 day evaluation version of PB for WinCE5.0 (which Windows Mobile is based off of), I believe it comes with a DDK and there is a ton of shared features and source between WinCE5 and WinMo5.x to 6.5.
I am guessing that since it is not possible to plug 3rd party HW into WM devices, that no need was seen to release a public DDK.
Also check to see which Bluetooth stack your device is using, both Widcomm's and Microsoft's Bluetooth stack can be found on retail devices. Also note that some device manufacturers disable portions of the Bluetooth stack, so some devices may not support all features of Bluetooth that the stack is capable of.
Surely the zero-cost technology that's available to Skype and Google is also available to the world's cell carriers. In other words, there's no practical reason that cell carriers (ours and the overseas ones) should charge so much -- only a greedy reason.
Skype is not zero cost. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, using Skype at home you pay for the bandwidth by way of your ISP. Heavy Skype usage would screw over the already overloaded cellular networks and they would lose money on it.
Seems fair, right? It is -- up until the day you finish reimbursing your carrier for your phone. Maybe that happens in the eighth month of ownership, maybe in the 14th month. But at some point during the two years, you'll have finished repaying the subsidy.
And here's the part you can legitimately get angry about. If your monthly fee includes payment for the phone itself, how come that monthly bill doesn't suddenly drop in the month when you've finished paying off that handset?
For many contracts the carrier does not MAKE any money until you pay off the subsidy. What used to go into paying off the phone subsidy instead becomes profit, you know, that thing companies try to earn so that they can stay in business, not to mention spend tens of billions of dollars per year upgrading their cellular networks.
TEXT-MESSAGING FEES Why has the price of a text message gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years? There was no big technology shift. There was no spike in the cost of electrons.
Because carriers want people to move to unlimited messaging plans. Holy shit how easy is that to figure out? Why do half size products at the super market cost 70% of the price of the full size product? It isn't all due to packaging, it is to encourage you to buy the larger size package!
And then when I call in for messages, I'm held up for 15 more seconds. "To listen to your messages, press 1." Why else would I be calling!?
I have never seen a US carrier (I haven't looked at pay as you go plans though) that counts checking voice mail against your minutes. I have only examined bills for AT&T and T-Mobile though, so maybe Verizon or Sprint is screwing him here.
Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising.
Looking at the numbers he links to, that is actually impressively low considering how much more they spend on R&D.
AT&T did not say how much it will spend on this year's upgrades but said it spent more than $6 billion on infrastructure statewide from 2006 to 2008. It said its capital expenditures companywide for 2009 will total between $17 billion and $18 billion.
AT&T announced that since the Telecom and Video Reform Act (HEA 1279) was signed into law in 2006, through 2008, AT&T's total capital investment has exceeded $1 billion across Indiana. As part of its ongoing expansion, AT&T also unveiled plans to add more than 35 new cell sites throughout Indiana in 2009.
Now I don't like AT&T. I don't like Verizon. I am pretty meh about Sprint, and I do like T-Mobile's customer service. I think the carriers all do rip people off, saying they should give us free international calling or not make a profit anymore is downright stupid.
Lovely lovely speeds, on an isolated unpopulated cell tower. Two customers on that tower downloading movies? Speed cut in half. Aww crap, 100 people? You are going to be waiting awhile.
And again, speeds would need to be around 45 MegaBYTES per second, well over 300mbit, and even if we cut that down to just 100mbit per second, do you really think companies are going to run enough fiber to give each user on a tower 100mbit of bandwidth on every cell tower in a city?
The difference between what almost any standard can theoretically support and what you actually get is pretty significant, but large numbers do make for nice press releases.
When downloading a file through your phone's web browser you most certainly are using TCP/IP.
That said, the processor in many cell phones is no less powerful than the processor in many home routers, typically it is an issue of a MIPS CPU versus an ARM CPU, but in a general sense they have similar capabilities (specialized instructions on each not withstanding).
In other words, my phone has a 600mhz CPU with 256MB of RAM, I don't think TCP/IP is going to be the limiter.
Now the crappy SD chipset implementation, ah, that might pose some issues!:)
They are claiming use of the 2100mhz spectrum. Given the spectrum they are claiming to be using, there is no way to use cellular technology (wireless towers, multiple customers handled per tower) to get those types of speeds.
Sure, if they crap all over everyone's licensed EM bands they could maybe pull it off, but even then they would encounter issues with running enough fiber out to every single cell tower to support users on any arbitrary tower pulling down in excess of 200mb/s, assuming a well compressed, somewhat short, 5GB HD movie.
It is just not possible with using a cellular network laid out how we presently do it. Even using some futeristic weird uber-mesh network it would be hard as hell to pull off, and even then, you would need more than just some small slice of the 2100mhz band.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, you have either HW or driver issues.
None of my four Windows machines don't go down except for once every month for security patch reboots.
Metric is all that I was ever taught in school here. Imperial is used for temperatures, speeds, and square footage of houses.
Well that and paper sizes.
There is also a chance that they are using one of a number of pre-packaged PC game matchmaking systems and that this saves them the time and effort of creating a dedicated server.
There are some Source engine Mods I have which, of course, use dedicated servers, but because the user base is so small finding a dedicated server with people on it is very hard. An automatic match making system could help this problem, I could fire the game up in the background and it could sit there searching for someone to play with and after 5 or so minutes alert me when it found a match. As it is today, I start the Mod up, see that no one is playing on any of the servers, and close it down. There may very well be 5 other people doing the same thing at the same time!
In general though I do agree that dedicated servers are much better. They allow for a sense of community, something you cannot get with random player matches.
Half-Life 2 DM baby! w00t.
All, umm, 50 or of or so! :)
One problem you may be facing is that a lot of people do go onto IRC and community forums asking for code that they can cut, paste, and compile. It is a very frequent occurance, and unfortunatly people who regularly hang out in technical chat rooms have become suspicious of almost everyone outside of their known group. From students asking for answers to their HW, to even employees of some cheap off shore programming firms looking for help with their commercial project, experienced programmers have unfortgunatly beocme wary of helping others.
I would recommend you join a community that is specifically focused on helping beginning game programmers. Such communities do exist, something such as XNA might be of help, it is DirectX and C# based, not OpenGL, and although DirectX and OpenGL differ by a fair bit, the important thing is that you find an established community of people willing to help you.
Programming is really one of the more open fields. Compared to the physical sciences it has a very low entry price (the price of a computer, no other supplies needed!) and as you have found out for yourself, it is something that anyone who has a desire to can take up.
(Also IRC is full of dicks :P Try a discussion forum, #1 search result is OpenGL coding: beginners)
People have on hand the references that they use most often, it may very well be that the people you are asking are not aware of the latest up to date introductory references, as it has been a while since they themselves made use of that sort of material.
My Win7 quad core AMD system that boots in under 10 seconds, is rock solid stable, and runs every game I throw at it blindingly fast would care to disagree with you. :)
Link to my PC build out. I was going more for cosmetics (30 lbs of brushed aluminum, I don't much like the blue LEDs though, I am burnt out on blue LEDs) than for power, I have friends who consider a 10 second boot with Win7 to be slow. Not that I boot very often, more likely I am coming out of Hibernate which I can do in ~3-5 seconds, which is pretty good timing for 8GB of RAM.
Intel makes very stable chipsets. If you tried AMD during the days that they were relying on Via chipsets (or used some of AMD's early chipsets) I can see how you could easily get this impression. Intel is good at putting together barebones kits and working with OEMs to put out stable systems.
Also don't skimp on the mobo, get a good middle of the range one, and read reviews on it. AMD's platforms have always offered a lot of diversity, which can be both a strength and a weakness; depending on how educated the system builder is about the relative merits (including stability) of those choices.
AMD is often seen as a cost cutting measure (and their CPUs are very financially efficient) but a lot of people, both OEMs at individuals, take cost cutting a bit too far and once they go with AMD they also skimp on the power supply, motherboard, and even RAM.
Indeed, an AMD system with a very well performing CPU that has been hooked up to a crash prone motherboard running no-name RAM all powered by a flaky PSU, can indeed give one a very negative impression of AMD as a whole. :)
AMD MoBos are typically cheaper than comparable quality Intel MoBos, so you can save some money there, but don't be cheap with any other parts of the system. You will still save a good chunk of change (how much depends on which company has done price drops most recently) and you will get a stable, reliable, very well performing system.
That is exactly what the current strategy has been up until now. The problem is that some substances have a bad habit of seeping into ground water unless carefully packaged up and contained.
Recycling only happens if it is "economically feasible", which means cheaper than burying it or cheaper than finding a way around government regulations.
Please tell me you are trolling or just joking.
On a pretty regular basis /. has stories about research progressing just towards breaking down various types of toxis waste.
After a certain point though, you end up with either very simple molecules or just crap like lead that you can't break down any more. A lot of effort went into gathering up some of the component materials and concentrating them together for whatever reason. Aside from reburying stuff in the ground (which if you think about it, is exactly what half the cleanup proposals are!) there isn't much that can be done with matter in such a simplified form.
Cheating is rampent on Xbox live. So is the ban hammer.
As an ultimate punishment, MS can disable one's entire Xbox live account. Worst case, that costs the cheater $$. Or of course they have a huge supply of 48 hour free trial gold cards, but then they have to spend their free time hunting additional 48 hour free trial gold cards. :P
Most cheats for Xbox live games are fairly low tech. Purposefully inducing lag spikes, crap like that.
The "researcher" who is quoted in this article comes off like a moron.
He complains that there is no way to hide one's gamerscore. NO SHIT. It is called social networking. GAMERSCORE = (imagined) PENILE LENGTH INCREASE. You don't farking hide it, the entire point is to show it off.
Next up, sending someone a message "g1ve me urz PW and I'll givez you 1,000,000 gamerscores!!" is not hacking. It is exploiting people's greed. There is a big difference.
Likewise wussies DOS'ing a game server to get back at the people who kicked their wimpy arse is also not new, it happens WAY more often in PC games, since the majority of PC games have dedicated servers whereas only a few (but popular) Xbox 360 titles use dedicated servers.
In summary, these are not "hackers targetting Xbox Live". 99% of them don't even rank as script kiddies.
Quick comparison:
Recovery.gov
Recovery.com
While showing the data in page format is definitely more accessible from the POV of a screen reader, the graphical map is more useful in terms of finding out how money is being spent around where I live.
The recovery.gov website is actually pretty good, in under a minute I was finding how funds were being allocated in my neighborhood.
Asking someone who has no training and is paid on commision for help with a purchase is not the smartest thing to do.
It has been noted on /. before that Fry's is dirt cheap at least in part because of how little training their employees have. Fry's has to cut costs somewhere. People enjoy the cheap prices, having to do product research on their own is the cost they pay in return for those cheap prices.
There are plenty of reasons to upsell on laptops.
"So do you like waiting 20 seconds for web pages to render?"
"Do you want to be able to see your screen when anything resembling sunlight is nearby?"
"Tell me, is scrolling something you really enjoy doing? If not, may I recommend a higher resolution screen?"
Or in an economy like this, it is how you separate those who are willing to go without food from those who enjoy eating.
Can we really blame the employees for the store's lack of willingness to give employees a few hours training when they are assigned to a department?
While Computer sales are rather complicated, most other departments are not that complicated. An hour and a half is plenty of time to go over everything a sales person needs to know about selling digital cameras, and knowing about sensor sizes and lens quality would help dramatically improve the sale person's ability to up sell.
Likewise similar training would be quick and easy for TV/AV systems, home appliances, and most other departments in an electronics superstore.
Although any type of honesty would destroy sales of Monster cables. :P
A friend of mine used to work at Fry's. He told me that they have no training at all, they are just put into an area of the store to sell stuff, more senior sales staff get to work more lucrative departments. From his description, sales people basically spouted off random technical sounding words in an attempt to get customers to buy stuff, most of them really had no idea about the products they were selling. He quite after a few months because he couldn't stand lying to customers anymore.
I believe that the Driver Development Kit (DDK) comes with Platform Builder for Windows Mobile which isn't available for distribution. You can download the 120 day evaluation version of PB for WinCE5.0 (which Windows Mobile is based off of), I believe it comes with a DDK and there is a ton of shared features and source between WinCE5 and WinMo5.x to 6.5.
I am guessing that since it is not possible to plug 3rd party HW into WM devices, that no need was seen to release a public DDK.
It looks like there is a Bluetooth HID driver available from TekSoft, but MSDN says at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa455763.aspx that WM supports HID mice and keyboards and other input devices so YMMV.
Also check to see which Bluetooth stack your device is using, both Widcomm's and Microsoft's Bluetooth stack can be found on retail devices. Also note that some device manufacturers disable portions of the Bluetooth stack, so some devices may not support all features of Bluetooth that the stack is capable of.
Back in 1996 or so I had a Netscape 4 plugin that did this.
Someone tries to do it again every few years.
*sigh*
People need to study their history.
Google may succeed in this because of the wide distribution of their toolbar, but that is the only difference in this effort.
And now I am thankful I didn't play any board games at PAX... To think how close I was to going! :)
Skype is not zero cost. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, using Skype at home you pay for the bandwidth by way of your ISP. Heavy Skype usage would screw over the already overloaded cellular networks and they would lose money on it.
For many contracts the carrier does not MAKE any money until you pay off the subsidy. What used to go into paying off the phone subsidy instead becomes profit, you know, that thing companies try to earn so that they can stay in business, not to mention spend tens of billions of dollars per year upgrading their cellular networks.
Because carriers want people to move to unlimited messaging plans. Holy shit how easy is that to figure out? Why do half size products at the super market cost 70% of the price of the full size product? It isn't all due to packaging, it is to encourage you to buy the larger size package!
I have never seen a US carrier (I haven't looked at pay as you go plans though) that counts checking voice mail against your minutes. I have only examined bills for AT&T and T-Mobile though, so maybe Verizon or Sprint is screwing him here.
Looking at the numbers he links to, that is actually impressively low considering how much more they spend on R&D.
---Asterisk VOIP News
Also
---http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/newsitem.asp?ID=34689
(Emphasis mine)
Now I don't like AT&T. I don't like Verizon. I am pretty meh about Sprint, and I do like T-Mobile's customer service. I think the carriers all do rip people off, saying they should give us free international calling or not make a profit anymore is downright stupid.
I am lazy. Vista and Win7 both have decent photo import UIs. :) Photos are copied, tagged, and deleted, all I have to do is type in the tag.
Picasa uses your gmail login.
Lovely lovely speeds, on an isolated unpopulated cell tower. Two customers on that tower downloading movies? Speed cut in half. Aww crap, 100 people? You are going to be waiting awhile.
And again, speeds would need to be around 45 MegaBYTES per second, well over 300mbit, and even if we cut that down to just 100mbit per second, do you really think companies are going to run enough fiber to give each user on a tower 100mbit of bandwidth on every cell tower in a city?
The difference between what almost any standard can theoretically support and what you actually get is pretty significant, but large numbers do make for nice press releases.
When downloading a file through your phone's web browser you most certainly are using TCP/IP.
That said, the processor in many cell phones is no less powerful than the processor in many home routers, typically it is an issue of a MIPS CPU versus an ARM CPU, but in a general sense they have similar capabilities (specialized instructions on each not withstanding).
In other words, my phone has a 600mhz CPU with 256MB of RAM, I don't think TCP/IP is going to be the limiter.
Now the crappy SD chipset implementation, ah, that might pose some issues! :)
They are claiming use of the 2100mhz spectrum. Given the spectrum they are claiming to be using, there is no way to use cellular technology (wireless towers, multiple customers handled per tower) to get those types of speeds.
Sure, if they crap all over everyone's licensed EM bands they could maybe pull it off, but even then they would encounter issues with running enough fiber out to every single cell tower to support users on any arbitrary tower pulling down in excess of 200mb/s, assuming a well compressed, somewhat short, 5GB HD movie.
It is just not possible with using a cellular network laid out how we presently do it. Even using some futeristic weird uber-mesh network it would be hard as hell to pull off, and even then, you would need more than just some small slice of the 2100mhz band.