Like everyone has said, doesn't matter whether your candidate has a chance of winning, the important part is to vote for someone who actually represents your interests. You know why?
Canadian politics shows the answer quite nicely. The NDP continually come up with new policies that Canadians show interest in, and start to swing votes their way. The parties that actually stand a chance of winning notice this, steal the policies that are winning votes, and pull the votes back to them. But if people didn't vote NDP in the first place, those policies would never be adopted. They do it because they're scared that if they don't, the numbers will *keep* swinging to the other people. I think it could work the same way in the US. If everyone just voted for candidates they liked, rather than "the one I like best out of the ones who might win," then the candidates would see what policies people actually want, and would be more likely to steal those policies to steal those votes.
Like I said, "if WoW fails," they're fucked. I've never bought that "10,000,000+" subscribers bit, though. If you take out bots, farmers, people who hold multiple accounts, and lapsed accounts that get reactivated for a month when a new expansion comes out, the number's probably less than half that.
That said, even 2 million (a really pessimistic estimate of the impact of the above factors) subscribers is a fuck-ton, and it'd take a lot to screw that up, I agree. However, just because every game they've done recently (Warcraft II on, let's say) has been a hit doesn't mean that ones they do in the future will be. The majority of the WoW subscribers are not going to be buying other games, period. You can't use the WoW numbers to predict the success of future non-WoW offerings. A better idea would be to look at equivalent offerings. For Diablo III, we compare to Torchlight, for instance. There have been a lot of point-click dungeon crawlers since DII. Hell, the term "Diablo-clone" is used a lot. So, to stand out from that, DIII is going to have to bring something new and better to the table. And from the press releases, screenshots, and all the other data available, DIII isn't anything new. It's just the old, prettied up and with a few gimmicks.
Starcraft II is in a better position, since RTS games aren't as prevalent in the market (Though I still want SupCom2, dammit), however, a lot of people who would have bought it *are* going to be put off by the design decisions. Splitting the campaigns turns away players like me who enjoy battling the CPU players, and killing normal LAN alienates players who love to just get together and run rampant while in the same room. Yes, it still happens.
Honest analysis of the situation shows that neither of these two games are guaranteed to win back their investment. Blizzard could survive either game tanking, or probably both. But if both tanked, Blizzard would be severely damaged. If that happened, you'd probably see a lot of scrambling.
I fully admit that while I'm giving SCII a pass, if more previews show me wrong about DIII, I'll be right up with the fanboys, grabbing it. I put hundreds of hours in to the first two Diablos, so if they can give me something slightly fresh, I'll forgive the 8 years+ of neglect.
I've actually said for a while now that Blizzard's doomed due to WoW. Apart from WoW, they've not actually released a game in what, a decade? More? And StarCraft II has bad will towards it from being split up to three parts, and not having proper LAN play, Diablo III is constantly delayed, and had backlash over the art style, and that's it. That's their catalogue. They killed Starcraft: Ghost ages ago. I'm sure they'll have their loyal fan base purchase these, but with all the delays and general bad will they randomly generate, I don't know if the core fans will be enough profit to cover costs on those, so if WoW buckles, they're toast.
Coca-cola had Union Organizers murdered by thugs-for-hire at their plants in South America. Of course, the transaction was kept at a distance far enough that the authorities in the area were easy to pay off.
A lot of companies try to instill fanaticism into their customer-base to the point where choosing the wrong item can lead to effects ranging from simple ostracism to violent beatings or stabbings by those who are purchasing the competing products.
So, yeah, when you try and either stand up to a company, or just avoid their products, you can end up dead.
Lesser examples are rife even within more "civilized" communities. On Slashdot, you get brutalised textually for genuinely liking Microsoft, or for disliking whatever the program-du-jour is. And it's all spurred by companies. Again, I don't see a difference beyond overt method of operation.
I'd say IE 8 is a different beast on the same underlying engine, like a game running on the UT III engine is different than UT III. 7, though, is just 6 with a facelift.
I've never understood this "Government is evil, but corporations are good" mentality. You're fine with private companies keeping your data, so long as they don't give it to the government.
You do realize that both are made up of people? The main difference is that if the government pisses off people, the specific people in charge will be removed, whereas with a company, they have to piss off shareholders. No, wait, I'm sorry, there is no difference. Both want your money, both don't really care about you beyond getting that money. The more information they have on you, the easier it is to manipulate you, the easier their task becomes. At least the Government takes care of things like National Defence, and keeping roads in working order. Companies will give you whatever they damn well feel like giving you.
Er, I highly doubt you'll be making the same wages as an accountant at either place. Any place that can be described as "local" isn't often going to employ a dedicated accountant. You're going to need to pick up several accounts to work out to the same pay-scale, and then you're going to be expected to provide the same level of service _to each one_ that a single dedicated accountant would be able to provide. So, good luck doing more for the same pay, only now it's more difficult because you need to fix your own damn computer when it breaks.
The Napoleonic Wars were less than 30 years after you'd declared independence. I doubt you'd have been able to do anything at that point, what with the giant ocean between you and it, and every other factor.
As for your "British-French wars," there's no war called that. There's the "Anglo-French" wars, which are mostly all before the founding of the US. And since the French assisted your Revolutionary War against Britain, you were right smack in the middle of one, used as a proxy.
Technically. It could be exported in CSV format, but since to move to a new program, we'd pretty much have to rebuild each file's database structure. For instance, we've got one database with reviewers' addresses, but also every book we've done, and which they've reviewed. We'd have to create a field in the new database for each book, in the order they're in the old database (not alphabetically). And considering this is a ten-person operation, I don't see us being able to spare that much time. So, we're stuck with a database program that's not really much of a database program, since there's no order enforced on any of the fields.
But yeah, we've an ancient version of it, and basically no assurances that the newer versions would read the files as they are, and it's just a giant clusterfuck. From what I can gather, this database has been around longer than anyone currently working here! Oh, and it grew "organically."
Filemaker Pro. We've got about two dozen separate databases, each with 500+ entries. And no database has exactly the same data as another. Similar, but not the same.
Three, Mozilla rolls out a patch that includes a feature when it's ready, and rolls out a different patch when a security update is ready, and combines them if/when possible. That would still be "with" security updates, after a fashion, and it would be the logical, intelligent way to do so.
I've had more crashes with Windows 7 in the two months that I've had it than in the entire 4 years I ran the Windows XP box it replaced.
I can't speak for a business environment, but for a home environment, running over-clocked even, I've not had a single OS crash, and I could probably count the number of program crashes on both hands, and that's just running the RC since it became available, and on a machine that's over two years old. I've also not had a single issue with audio (running onboard AND a soundblaster), not had the issue with the interface, and my networking is solid as a really large, flat rock. And that's with having a router over a year old, the desktop, a 360, a dvd player, a NAS (with a printer hooked in), and my laptop, each streaming video in some fashion.
I'd say I'd pushed, networking-wise, about as far as you'd be likely to go and it'd just be a matter of scaling up for a business environment. I don't know where your issues come from, but they're not pervasive across the install base.
My place runs a Mac environment, and we've a database program dependant on OS 9, and we only have one machine capable of running it any more: an old eMac. The database program is horrible. It barely works. But, it's organized in such a way that exporting all the data in a usable format is nearly impossible, so we're stuck with it. Personally, I'm just waiting for the day the machine explodes, wiping out the database (we can't even back up the contents properly). I'm gonna laaaaugh and laaaaaugh and laaaaaugh on that day. Mostly because the database is just for marketing, and doesn't relate to my job at all.
Besides, if it's a small, flexible mat, you can take it with you just as easily as a USB-ended charging adaptor. Maybe more easily, if it doesn't require some form of brick.
They were talking about the GP's "leave it to charge anywhere in the house." In that case, you *would* have the potential for people to leech power from outside.
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Having actually run projectors, both ones 2 decades old, and 5 years old, I have to say, you're full of shit. Film projectors in movie theatres do NOT show each frame twice. How do I know this? I've hand-cranked them to ensure they were threaded correctly. Frame is shown while shutter is open, frame moves while shutter closes. This allows it to not be a smear across the screen while the film moves. Showing the same frame twice in a row wouldn't do shit but *decrease* the frame rate, since you'd be showing 12 frames in the space of what should have been 24.
Now, if you mean "each frame is duplicated on a reel, making it twice as long as it would have been had each frame only been present once," again, my time splicing reels together to run on those same projectors proves you an idiot, not to mention naive at best. Film is expensive to make, and costly to transport (and needs to be transported securely). You really think they'd have designed a system that takes up twice as many resources as they could otherwise get away with?
When something isn't funny, people rarely know the whole story either. You gonna criticize people who get sad over someone's death, and say "You don't know, they could have been a serial rapist, or they could have been in constant pain." You should be happy they're dead.
Grief is a selfish emotion. When you're grieving, you're not thinking "Oh, the departed are so poorly off, I wish I could improve their lot in death!" You're thinking "I miss them, I want them back, I want them not dead. I want I want I want." You actually want people to be *more* selfish by wishing they had random people they never knew be not-dead? You don't know the people, you don't know the whole story. That's exactly why it's okay to laugh. Triply so since most of the stories are "unverified" so often. It's cathartic. It's a way of getting out any resentment towards the teeming multitudes of stupid people out there. And if you don't have any resentment, you've obviously never worked customer service.
To my eternal shame, I played the first Rainbow Six for about 10 minutes. Why not longer? Because I couldn't figure out how to open the door to the next training area. Didn't have a manual, tried every button on the keyboard, nothing. I was stuck. Fuck me sideways.
Or, in the real world, people realize that a product will eventually reach the end of where it can be tweaked usefully, and it becomes easier and cheaper to start on a fresh base. For some reason this never applies to computers though, people think it should last forever. Do people still insist that cars be remodels of the Model T? That houses be originally log cabins? No. People realize with damned near every other product that it changes, and you can't just keep tacking on to the old. Eventually you need to rip it down and start with something new.
Slashdot Mirror
Like everyone has said, doesn't matter whether your candidate has a chance of winning, the important part is to vote for someone who actually represents your interests. You know why?
Canadian politics shows the answer quite nicely. The NDP continually come up with new policies that Canadians show interest in, and start to swing votes their way. The parties that actually stand a chance of winning notice this, steal the policies that are winning votes, and pull the votes back to them. But if people didn't vote NDP in the first place, those policies would never be adopted. They do it because they're scared that if they don't, the numbers will *keep* swinging to the other people. I think it could work the same way in the US. If everyone just voted for candidates they liked, rather than "the one I like best out of the ones who might win," then the candidates would see what policies people actually want, and would be more likely to steal those policies to steal those votes.
And I'm suddenly reminded of the Night of Long Knives...
Like I said, "if WoW fails," they're fucked. I've never bought that "10,000,000+" subscribers bit, though. If you take out bots, farmers, people who hold multiple accounts, and lapsed accounts that get reactivated for a month when a new expansion comes out, the number's probably less than half that.
That said, even 2 million (a really pessimistic estimate of the impact of the above factors) subscribers is a fuck-ton, and it'd take a lot to screw that up, I agree. However, just because every game they've done recently (Warcraft II on, let's say) has been a hit doesn't mean that ones they do in the future will be. The majority of the WoW subscribers are not going to be buying other games, period. You can't use the WoW numbers to predict the success of future non-WoW offerings. A better idea would be to look at equivalent offerings. For Diablo III, we compare to Torchlight, for instance. There have been a lot of point-click dungeon crawlers since DII. Hell, the term "Diablo-clone" is used a lot. So, to stand out from that, DIII is going to have to bring something new and better to the table. And from the press releases, screenshots, and all the other data available, DIII isn't anything new. It's just the old, prettied up and with a few gimmicks.
Starcraft II is in a better position, since RTS games aren't as prevalent in the market (Though I still want SupCom2, dammit), however, a lot of people who would have bought it *are* going to be put off by the design decisions. Splitting the campaigns turns away players like me who enjoy battling the CPU players, and killing normal LAN alienates players who love to just get together and run rampant while in the same room. Yes, it still happens.
Honest analysis of the situation shows that neither of these two games are guaranteed to win back their investment. Blizzard could survive either game tanking, or probably both. But if both tanked, Blizzard would be severely damaged. If that happened, you'd probably see a lot of scrambling.
I fully admit that while I'm giving SCII a pass, if more previews show me wrong about DIII, I'll be right up with the fanboys, grabbing it. I put hundreds of hours in to the first two Diablos, so if they can give me something slightly fresh, I'll forgive the 8 years+ of neglect.
Ah, right. Forgot about Warcraft III. Other than that, it'd have been a decade since a non-WoW game.
I've actually said for a while now that Blizzard's doomed due to WoW. Apart from WoW, they've not actually released a game in what, a decade? More? And StarCraft II has bad will towards it from being split up to three parts, and not having proper LAN play, Diablo III is constantly delayed, and had backlash over the art style, and that's it. That's their catalogue. They killed Starcraft: Ghost ages ago. I'm sure they'll have their loyal fan base purchase these, but with all the delays and general bad will they randomly generate, I don't know if the core fans will be enough profit to cover costs on those, so if WoW buckles, they're toast.
Coca-cola had Union Organizers murdered by thugs-for-hire at their plants in South America. Of course, the transaction was kept at a distance far enough that the authorities in the area were easy to pay off.
A lot of companies try to instill fanaticism into their customer-base to the point where choosing the wrong item can lead to effects ranging from simple ostracism to violent beatings or stabbings by those who are purchasing the competing products.
So, yeah, when you try and either stand up to a company, or just avoid their products, you can end up dead.
Lesser examples are rife even within more "civilized" communities. On Slashdot, you get brutalised textually for genuinely liking Microsoft, or for disliking whatever the program-du-jour is. And it's all spurred by companies. Again, I don't see a difference beyond overt method of operation.
Nope. Companies will lie, cheat, and steal whenever they can. Just because you can opt out doesn't make them better.
I'd say IE 8 is a different beast on the same underlying engine, like a game running on the UT III engine is different than UT III. 7, though, is just 6 with a facelift.
I love you in a completely platonic fashion.
I've never understood this "Government is evil, but corporations are good" mentality. You're fine with private companies keeping your data, so long as they don't give it to the government.
You do realize that both are made up of people? The main difference is that if the government pisses off people, the specific people in charge will be removed, whereas with a company, they have to piss off shareholders. No, wait, I'm sorry, there is no difference. Both want your money, both don't really care about you beyond getting that money. The more information they have on you, the easier it is to manipulate you, the easier their task becomes. At least the Government takes care of things like National Defence, and keeping roads in working order. Companies will give you whatever they damn well feel like giving you.
Er, I highly doubt you'll be making the same wages as an accountant at either place. Any place that can be described as "local" isn't often going to employ a dedicated accountant. You're going to need to pick up several accounts to work out to the same pay-scale, and then you're going to be expected to provide the same level of service _to each one_ that a single dedicated accountant would be able to provide. So, good luck doing more for the same pay, only now it's more difficult because you need to fix your own damn computer when it breaks.
The Napoleonic Wars were less than 30 years after you'd declared independence. I doubt you'd have been able to do anything at that point, what with the giant ocean between you and it, and every other factor.
As for your "British-French wars," there's no war called that. There's the "Anglo-French" wars, which are mostly all before the founding of the US. And since the French assisted your Revolutionary War against Britain, you were right smack in the middle of one, used as a proxy.
Technically. It could be exported in CSV format, but since to move to a new program, we'd pretty much have to rebuild each file's database structure. For instance, we've got one database with reviewers' addresses, but also every book we've done, and which they've reviewed. We'd have to create a field in the new database for each book, in the order they're in the old database (not alphabetically). And considering this is a ten-person operation, I don't see us being able to spare that much time. So, we're stuck with a database program that's not really much of a database program, since there's no order enforced on any of the fields.
But yeah, we've an ancient version of it, and basically no assurances that the newer versions would read the files as they are, and it's just a giant clusterfuck. From what I can gather, this database has been around longer than anyone currently working here! Oh, and it grew "organically."
Filemaker Pro. We've got about two dozen separate databases, each with 500+ entries. And no database has exactly the same data as another. Similar, but not the same.
Yes, you're missing option 3.
Three, Mozilla rolls out a patch that includes a feature when it's ready, and rolls out a different patch when a security update is ready, and combines them if/when possible. That would still be "with" security updates, after a fashion, and it would be the logical, intelligent way to do so.
I've had more crashes with Windows 7 in the two months that I've had it than in the entire 4 years I ran the Windows XP box it replaced.
I can't speak for a business environment, but for a home environment, running over-clocked even, I've not had a single OS crash, and I could probably count the number of program crashes on both hands, and that's just running the RC since it became available, and on a machine that's over two years old. I've also not had a single issue with audio (running onboard AND a soundblaster), not had the issue with the interface, and my networking is solid as a really large, flat rock. And that's with having a router over a year old, the desktop, a 360, a dvd player, a NAS (with a printer hooked in), and my laptop, each streaming video in some fashion.
I'd say I'd pushed, networking-wise, about as far as you'd be likely to go and it'd just be a matter of scaling up for a business environment. I don't know where your issues come from, but they're not pervasive across the install base.
My place runs a Mac environment, and we've a database program dependant on OS 9, and we only have one machine capable of running it any more: an old eMac. The database program is horrible. It barely works. But, it's organized in such a way that exporting all the data in a usable format is nearly impossible, so we're stuck with it. Personally, I'm just waiting for the day the machine explodes, wiping out the database (we can't even back up the contents properly). I'm gonna laaaaugh and laaaaaugh and laaaaaugh on that day. Mostly because the database is just for marketing, and doesn't relate to my job at all.
Are you seriously railing against redundancy?
Besides, if it's a small, flexible mat, you can take it with you just as easily as a USB-ended charging adaptor. Maybe more easily, if it doesn't require some form of brick.
They were talking about the GP's "leave it to charge anywhere in the house." In that case, you *would* have the potential for people to leech power from outside.
Having actually run projectors, both ones 2 decades old, and 5 years old, I have to say, you're full of shit. Film projectors in movie theatres do NOT show each frame twice. How do I know this? I've hand-cranked them to ensure they were threaded correctly. Frame is shown while shutter is open, frame moves while shutter closes. This allows it to not be a smear across the screen while the film moves. Showing the same frame twice in a row wouldn't do shit but *decrease* the frame rate, since you'd be showing 12 frames in the space of what should have been 24.
Now, if you mean "each frame is duplicated on a reel, making it twice as long as it would have been had each frame only been present once," again, my time splicing reels together to run on those same projectors proves you an idiot, not to mention naive at best. Film is expensive to make, and costly to transport (and needs to be transported securely). You really think they'd have designed a system that takes up twice as many resources as they could otherwise get away with?
its alot less funny when people die.
Not really.
When something isn't funny, people rarely know the whole story either. You gonna criticize people who get sad over someone's death, and say "You don't know, they could have been a serial rapist, or they could have been in constant pain." You should be happy they're dead.
Grief is a selfish emotion. When you're grieving, you're not thinking "Oh, the departed are so poorly off, I wish I could improve their lot in death!" You're thinking "I miss them, I want them back, I want them not dead. I want I want I want." You actually want people to be *more* selfish by wishing they had random people they never knew be not-dead? You don't know the people, you don't know the whole story. That's exactly why it's okay to laugh. Triply so since most of the stories are "unverified" so often. It's cathartic. It's a way of getting out any resentment towards the teeming multitudes of stupid people out there. And if you don't have any resentment, you've obviously never worked customer service.
oh come on, that would never work. You'd be constantly feeding them, or one would die and you'd lose the system. Time investment totally not worth it.
To my eternal shame, I played the first Rainbow Six for about 10 minutes. Why not longer? Because I couldn't figure out how to open the door to the next training area. Didn't have a manual, tried every button on the keyboard, nothing. I was stuck. Fuck me sideways.
the first game I entered started with me walking all of four feet
I read this as "walking on all four feet". My first reaction? "Damn, that's not very realistic. Since when the hell did people have four feet?" Heh.
Or, in the real world, people realize that a product will eventually reach the end of where it can be tweaked usefully, and it becomes easier and cheaper to start on a fresh base. For some reason this never applies to computers though, people think it should last forever. Do people still insist that cars be remodels of the Model T? That houses be originally log cabins? No. People realize with damned near every other product that it changes, and you can't just keep tacking on to the old. Eventually you need to rip it down and start with something new.