That's not really true. Buying a X-Fi took my FPS in World of Warcraft (with MP3s playing in the background) up from ~30fps to ~55fps. The onboard audio eats up a significant fraction of the CPU (a 3800+), something like 20% of the total CPU time, when I benchmarked it.
Offloading that to a board was something I was more than willing to pay for, as I already had a top of the line video card (7900) and was not really interested in building a whole new box.
I'd get supremely bored of testing an OS for hundreds of hours, too. My lord, man, have you never heard of applications? I'd shoot myself after the 300th hour of "fun with notepad".
Although there's no must-have features, they'll bludgeon everyone with the DX10 stick and the "we won't patch XP any more stick after 2011" until everyone has bought it.
Fortunately Fry's still sells floppies... I've had to buy three in the last year. Found one at Best Buy (in their "Homebrew" section) and twice went to Fry's. Best Buy was something like $30, Frys was $10. All the windows machines I've built recently have used RAID drives (RAID0 for myself, RAID1 for my mother and fiancee), and the requirement for a floppy had to be the most annoying problem of installing XP. I guess Vista won't have that problem, but I still need to maintain my XP boxen.
It's incredibly arrogant, not to mention unsupported assertion...
Look up "Cultural Hegemony".
Notice the difference between me and you is that you thought I was just giving Christians all the credit for good things. That's not quite what I said. Many atheists will make "moral" decisions about refraining from sex, that aren't helpful to them, but are simply "Christian" values they've absorbed from our culture at large.
In other words, I was responding to the claim that the moral decisions of atheists are dictated by Judeo-Christian values.
Not dictated, but definitely inherited. One cannot take credit for an atheist "making up his own mind about morality" when his concepts of right and wrong have been defined by a Christian society.
Researchers are always being "astounded". Honestly, you'd think science reporters could have come up with some new verbs by now that don't make (presumably intelligent) researchers not sound like excitable pre-teens.
Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy.
I don't know, it hasn't seemed to have worked out too well for Europe. =)
While I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, America seems to be doing fine with the imperial system. It's not like we're growing crops of scientists who can't figure powers of 10.
Out of the last 8 non-laptop PCs (counting by motherboards) I've owned since 1996, 2 of them failed to caps blowing, 2 died due to CPU death, one had a hard drive die, one successfully retired in its old age, and two still operating. One CPU death was due to overclocking (Celeron 300A->450, natch), one CPU death to a power surge (the light bulbs in my house exploded at the same time and melted my computer through the decent surge protector). The hard drive death was also expected (was the original '95 hard drive, migrated to machine after machine). The cap deaths were much earlier than expected based on the age of the computer, and were positively annoying due to the fact that Windows 2000 would blue screen if you swapped motherboards on it.
I wouldn't say caps blowing is as rare as you say, and unlike other failure types, are pretty damn annoying.
Huh? The US has a very low TB rate, certainly lower than any of the developed countries in Europe.
From wikipedia: "In the United Kingdom, TB incidences range from 40 per 100,000 in London to less than 5 per 100,000 in the rural South West of England.[41]; the national average is 13 per 100,000. The highest rates in Western Europe are in Portugal (42 per 100,000) and Spain (20 per 100,000). These rates compare with 113 per 100,000 in China and 64 per 100,000 in Brazil. In the United States, the overall tuberculosis case rate was 4.9 per 100,000 persons in 2004.[39]"
Every man woman and child that has ever paid taxes, paid for health insurance, or paid for drugs.
No. The drug companies pay for R&D. If patents were eliminated, they'd continue selling the drugs they have and pay off their R&D budget in dividends.
A socialist or communist model of drug development doesn't work very well either. Count the number of drugs developed in Soviet Russia during the same time period as the US during the 50s-80s.
Yeah, but my family has played out Puerto Rico, too. =) We've done most of the big selling games... my personal favorites right now are Domaine and the Great Space Race. My friends also like Ticket to Ride.
Either way, I don't have much interest in a game system for myself, solo, but for family fun, so I think the Wii is a good choice. I'll see if I can pick one up tomorrow.
I'd only be happy if best buy went out of business and its execs all committed suicide for dishonoring their families by working for such a monstrously stupid company.
I hadn't been planning on buying any of the next gen gaming consoles. I have my PC, WOW, some other games, and a long backlog on my PS2 that I don't have time to get to. Why waste money? Especially since I'd need a badass TV to display the PS3 in all it's glory? I can feed my PS2 through my PC to play FF12 on my LCD monitor, and it's all right, though much uglier than even Quake1 (which I've gotten back into, incidentally -- Quake1 with Bloom is awesome. And free: www.customtf.com).
But then I was hanging out with my family for the holidays and was trying to figure out something for everyone to do (nobody wanted to play Settlers of Catan yet again) when I suddenly realized that a Wii would be the perfect thing (we're all a pretty techie family). I went out to all the stores in the area, and found it's totally sold out, more or less everywhere. Bummer. And once the holidays are over, my desire to own one will drop back down to nil, since I'm not going to play my Wii with myself.
You ask, basically, "Without patents, who will fund new drug research?" That's a really interesting question, and I wish I had a good clean answer for you.
I'll give you a good, clean, answer. It's not the government. It's the drug companies. While it is certainly true they do spend more on marketing than on R&D, they do spend an incredible amount on R&D, and the amount per drug is rising sharply. You see, new drugs must not only be safe(r), they must be better than old drugs.
The system as it works now has issues, but at least it works. Patents for drugs are drastically shorter than patents for things like telephones: you get something like only 10 years of patent protection, with extension up to 14 years. Drug companies have to recoup all of their R&D costs for the drug, plus the R&D cost for all their failed drugs, in that 10-14 year window. Plus, you know, make a profit. But then 10-14 years later, any company can come and duplicate their drug (without doing any R&D work at all) and provide a low cost, safe and effective drug for the general public. During the high price phase of the drug, before the generics come out, various ameliorative programs are available for people who can't afford the drug, and don't have any alternatives.
I'm marrying a pharmacist, and one of my buddies is the head of R&D at a drug company, so I'm reasonably confident when I say that while there's a lot of issues with the current system, there's not really any system better. Something like patenting tumeric shouldn't have happened, of course, since there's 2,000 years of prior art.
What on Earth does Technological Literacy have to do with being able to evaluate a web site's authority and timeliness?
Seriously, that's more of library science issue, or whatever you call it. Technological literacy is the ability to use technology to get stuff done. Website criticism isn't really much part of that.
In my experience, in-game ads haven't been terribly burdensome to look at, and in many cases they blend in reasonably well so as not to detract from the overall experience (TFA mentions NBA Live, where banner ads can even add to the realism as seen on TV). On the bright side, selling advertisements subsidizes the cost of the game for the consumer at the expense of the product being advertised. For those of you feeling smugly superior because you intentionally disregard the ads, congratulations, your game was made cheaper because of them.
I don't believe so. I think they just make extra money. They aren't going to charge more or less for a game since they have an advertising stream, unless that stream is *really* significant. Prices are more or less standard across the industry, in fact.
I agree that ads in games like NBA live are pretty fitting, but imagine Cheetos ads in, say, Thief III. Or Britney Spears ads in the alien spaceship in Prey. Some of the in-game ads really are that jarring, and make me want to buy their product never, since they've pissed me off so badly.
Of course, a good technique could thus be running ads for the competing company inside of the games, but maybe that's illegal or something.
. It simply reports positive feelings and emotions are closely correlated to resistance to acquiring or displaying symptoms from influenza (rhinovirus).
Influenza != Rhinovirus. Rhinovirus (family Picornaviridae) is the common cold, not the flu (which is Orthomyxoviridae).
It only matters if you're someone that has to hit 100% completion of everything.
For me, at some point I realized I had a light (mage) armor that was better than any of the full plate I had, so my black mage became my tank. I don't know where I got it from, but I think it was a rare drop steal off some random monster (my gambits are set to automatically steal so I don't pay a lot of attention to it). I like the fact that my game will be different from other people's. I quite intentionally don't read the strategy guides, and don't really give a rat's ass that you can get a mage masher (it's a 25% chance) the first time you run through the sewer system. I happened to get lucky and get it, but there's no way in hell I'm restarting my PS2 and replaying the 10 minutes it takes to get back to the chest to try over and over on it. I almost think they made it intentionally aggravating to try to stop the "gotta catch em all" fanboys that permeate the FF series. The people that farm for Rat's Tails, or that box from FFVI, or chocobo breeding in FFVII.
Re:As Famitsu is to Japan, Edge is to the U.S. and
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That's not really true. Buying a X-Fi took my FPS in World of Warcraft (with MP3s playing in the background) up from ~30fps to ~55fps. The onboard audio eats up a significant fraction of the CPU (a 3800+), something like 20% of the total CPU time, when I benchmarked it.
Offloading that to a board was something I was more than willing to pay for, as I already had a top of the line video card (7900) and was not really interested in building a whole new box.
As you approach fully connecting the network, the time complexity to compute one time-step approaches O(N^2) where N is the number of neurons.
No brain is fully connected.
The real pain to simulate is that you have a very complicated differential equation going on at each synapse.
Counterstrike was a rehash of Team Fortress, but with less coding skill.
That is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.
Bless vi humor.
I'd get supremely bored of testing an OS for hundreds of hours, too. My lord, man, have you never heard of applications? I'd shoot myself after the 300th hour of "fun with notepad".
Although there's no must-have features, they'll bludgeon everyone with the DX10 stick and the "we won't patch XP any more stick after 2011" until everyone has bought it.
Fortunately Fry's still sells floppies... I've had to buy three in the last year. Found one at Best Buy (in their "Homebrew" section) and twice went to Fry's. Best Buy was something like $30, Frys was $10. All the windows machines I've built recently have used RAID drives (RAID0 for myself, RAID1 for my mother and fiancee), and the requirement for a floppy had to be the most annoying problem of installing XP. I guess Vista won't have that problem, but I still need to maintain my XP boxen.
Believe me, if you sprawl daily, you will not get fat. The survey is clearly erroneous.
% 29)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_%28grappling
It's incredibly arrogant, not to mention unsupported assertion...
Look up "Cultural Hegemony".
Notice the difference between me and you is that you thought I was just giving Christians all the credit for good things. That's not quite what I said. Many atheists will make "moral" decisions about refraining from sex, that aren't helpful to them, but are simply "Christian" values they've absorbed from our culture at large.
In other words, I was responding to the claim that the moral decisions of atheists are dictated by Judeo-Christian values.
Not dictated, but definitely inherited. One cannot take credit for an atheist "making up his own mind about morality" when his concepts of right and wrong have been defined by a Christian society.
Researchers are always being "astounded". Honestly, you'd think science reporters could have come up with some new verbs by now that don't make (presumably intelligent) researchers not sound like excitable pre-teens.
Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy.
I don't know, it hasn't seemed to have worked out too well for Europe. =)
While I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, America seems to be doing fine with the imperial system. It's not like we're growing crops of scientists who can't figure powers of 10.
Out of the last 8 non-laptop PCs (counting by motherboards) I've owned since 1996, 2 of them failed to caps blowing, 2 died due to CPU death, one had a hard drive die, one successfully retired in its old age, and two still operating. One CPU death was due to overclocking (Celeron 300A->450, natch), one CPU death to a power surge (the light bulbs in my house exploded at the same time and melted my computer through the decent surge protector). The hard drive death was also expected (was the original '95 hard drive, migrated to machine after machine). The cap deaths were much earlier than expected based on the age of the computer, and were positively annoying due to the fact that Windows 2000 would blue screen if you swapped motherboards on it.
I wouldn't say caps blowing is as rare as you say, and unlike other failure types, are pretty damn annoying.
We have a high incidence for a developed country
Huh? The US has a very low TB rate, certainly lower than any of the developed countries in Europe.
From wikipedia:
"In the United Kingdom, TB incidences range from 40 per 100,000 in London to less than 5 per 100,000 in the rural South West of England.[41]; the national average is 13 per 100,000. The highest rates in Western Europe are in Portugal (42 per 100,000) and Spain (20 per 100,000). These rates compare with 113 per 100,000 in China and 64 per 100,000 in Brazil. In the United States, the overall tuberculosis case rate was 4.9 per 100,000 persons in 2004.[39]"
Who pays for drug R&D?
Every man woman and child that has ever paid taxes, paid for health insurance, or paid for drugs.
No. The drug companies pay for R&D. If patents were eliminated, they'd continue selling the drugs they have and pay off their R&D budget in dividends.
A socialist or communist model of drug development doesn't work very well either. Count the number of drugs developed in Soviet Russia during the same time period as the US during the 50s-80s.
Yeah, but my family has played out Puerto Rico, too. =) We've done most of the big selling games... my personal favorites right now are Domaine and the Great Space Race. My friends also like Ticket to Ride.
Either way, I don't have much interest in a game system for myself, solo, but for family fun, so I think the Wii is a good choice. I'll see if I can pick one up tomorrow.
I'd only be happy if best buy went out of business and its execs all committed suicide for dishonoring their families by working for such a monstrously stupid company.
I hadn't been planning on buying any of the next gen gaming consoles. I have my PC, WOW, some other games, and a long backlog on my PS2 that I don't have time to get to. Why waste money? Especially since I'd need a badass TV to display the PS3 in all it's glory? I can feed my PS2 through my PC to play FF12 on my LCD monitor, and it's all right, though much uglier than even Quake1 (which I've gotten back into, incidentally -- Quake1 with Bloom is awesome. And free: www.customtf.com).
But then I was hanging out with my family for the holidays and was trying to figure out something for everyone to do (nobody wanted to play Settlers of Catan yet again) when I suddenly realized that a Wii would be the perfect thing (we're all a pretty techie family). I went out to all the stores in the area, and found it's totally sold out, more or less everywhere. Bummer. And once the holidays are over, my desire to own one will drop back down to nil, since I'm not going to play my Wii with myself.
You ask, basically, "Without patents, who will fund new drug research?"
That's a really interesting question, and I wish I had a good clean answer for you.
I'll give you a good, clean, answer. It's not the government. It's the drug companies. While it is certainly true they do spend more on marketing than on R&D, they do spend an incredible amount on R&D, and the amount per drug is rising sharply. You see, new drugs must not only be safe(r), they must be better than old drugs.
The system as it works now has issues, but at least it works. Patents for drugs are drastically shorter than patents for things like telephones: you get something like only 10 years of patent protection, with extension up to 14 years. Drug companies have to recoup all of their R&D costs for the drug, plus the R&D cost for all their failed drugs, in that 10-14 year window. Plus, you know, make a profit. But then 10-14 years later, any company can come and duplicate their drug (without doing any R&D work at all) and provide a low cost, safe and effective drug for the general public. During the high price phase of the drug, before the generics come out, various ameliorative programs are available for people who can't afford the drug, and don't have any alternatives.
I'm marrying a pharmacist, and one of my buddies is the head of R&D at a drug company, so I'm reasonably confident when I say that while there's a lot of issues with the current system, there's not really any system better. Something like patenting tumeric shouldn't have happened, of course, since there's 2,000 years of prior art.
What on Earth does Technological Literacy have to do with being able to evaluate a web site's authority and timeliness?
Seriously, that's more of library science issue, or whatever you call it. Technological literacy is the ability to use technology to get stuff done. Website criticism isn't really much part of that.
In my experience, in-game ads haven't been terribly burdensome to look at, and in many cases they blend in reasonably well so as not to detract from the overall experience (TFA mentions NBA Live, where banner ads can even add to the realism as seen on TV). On the bright side, selling advertisements subsidizes the cost of the game for the consumer at the expense of the product being advertised. For those of you feeling smugly superior because you intentionally disregard the ads, congratulations, your game was made cheaper because of them.
I don't believe so. I think they just make extra money. They aren't going to charge more or less for a game since they have an advertising stream, unless that stream is *really* significant. Prices are more or less standard across the industry, in fact.
I agree that ads in games like NBA live are pretty fitting, but imagine Cheetos ads in, say, Thief III. Or Britney Spears ads in the alien spaceship in Prey. Some of the in-game ads really are that jarring, and make me want to buy their product never, since they've pissed me off so badly.
Of course, a good technique could thus be running ads for the competing company inside of the games, but maybe that's illegal or something.
Anyone else think it's a terrible name? I mean, not attack of the clones bad, but still...
At least from what I've investigated, the facts look pretty solid that he's guilty.
. It simply reports positive feelings and emotions are closely correlated to resistance to acquiring or displaying symptoms from influenza (rhinovirus).
Influenza != Rhinovirus. Rhinovirus (family Picornaviridae) is the common cold, not the flu (which is Orthomyxoviridae).
It only matters if you're someone that has to hit 100% completion of everything.
For me, at some point I realized I had a light (mage) armor that was better than any of the full plate I had, so my black mage became my tank. I don't know where I got it from, but I think it was a rare drop steal off some random monster (my gambits are set to automatically steal so I don't pay a lot of attention to it). I like the fact that my game will be different from other people's. I quite intentionally don't read the strategy guides, and don't really give a rat's ass that you can get a mage masher (it's a 25% chance) the first time you run through the sewer system. I happened to get lucky and get it, but there's no way in hell I'm restarting my PS2 and replaying the 10 minutes it takes to get back to the chest to try over and over on it. I almost think they made it intentionally aggravating to try to stop the "gotta catch em all" fanboys that permeate the FF series. The people that farm for Rat's Tails, or that box from FFVI, or chocobo breeding in FFVII.
Really? The Penny Arcade article today says something different:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/12/18
Scroll down to Gabe's post.