This has nothing to do with Google integrating anything
To an extent.
The rest of the evil does have to do with Google integrating things. It's evil because part of Google's approval process for devices carrying the Android name apparently requires Google's geolocation which is built in to the infrastructure of Android. That geolocation could be pulled out or disabled, but then you can't call it Android and you can't put the Market on the device. That is not open. It's similar to Tivoization, only on a device which is purported to be open.
The phone call and this particular incident have nothing to do with it. It's an instance of the problem. Microsoft is being heavy handed and keeping Android from being open due to their oversight into the "compatibility" process, and the fact that they require some of their own services to be used "for compatibility."
The premise is that Wal Mart can outlast pretty much anyone and undercut them enough to put them out of business. If they are capable of that, they would be capable of outlasting new startups unless the startup was capable of competing on something other than price.
He believed that the conventions of society, the law, and the policies of his employer don't apply to him. At age 27.
I don't care that the targets were minors. The issue is the blatant abuse of power.
In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.
He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back.
Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.
It seems part of the reason Barksdale snooped through the teens' Gmail and Gtalk accounts was to show off the power he had as a member of a group with broad access to company data. A self-described "hacker," Barksdale seemed to get a kick out of flaunting his position at Google
So he has a long history of flaunting his power, overriding people's attempts to block him, and intercepting communications. The guy should probably be arrested, but you make a pretty good point--his IT career is probably over, and that is likely punishment enough for a geek.
If they're doing server-side password strength verification e.g. the password requirements mentioned in the GP, then they're probably receiving the password and keeping it in some kind of storage (even if it's RAM) for some amount of time (even if it's mere microseconds.)
Even if you believe that, there's a thing called a formula sheet. The instructor can even write it on the blackboard for you, and provide hard copies to students as needed for ADA reasons (on specially colored paper.)
You're supposed to master the material. No wonder the US is in such piss-poor shape in academia.
For the sake of argument, if your taxes go up to support welfare for the people who lost their jobs, maybe spending a little extra at the grocery store would have been better. I dunno. Those are hard numbers to crunch.
I live by myself. Now if I had a family a landline phone alone might be cheaper, but today even children have cellphones, and carriers offer family plans.
That's the thing. Most people have cell phones anyway. Land lines are a dying breed, primarily useful because of the ancient (and robust) infrastructure. If you have a landline corded phone, it takes lots and lots of things failing for you to be unable to make an emergency call. But corded phones are unpopular and getting harder to find.
If anything, the places that couldn't compete where the ones milking their local monopoly.
It's not always milking. Wal Mart deals with vast economies of scale that let them drive prices down. They sell more stuff than specialist stores, meaning that they can have smaller margins on everything that they sell and still turn a profit. They can afford to sell loss leaders. And they have about as vertically integrated corporate structure as a business can while selling other people's products.
When people say that local shops can't compete, they mean it literally.
may be cheaper to shop at Walmart once, but not twice (which is the minimum number of times you'd end up buying most of their shit).
I hear this a lot, and I just don't get it. There is a huge amount of stuff at Wal Mart which is meant to be used up (toiletries, food, office supplies), stuff which just doesn't wear out like this (place settings, placemats, DVDs, CDs, games) and then a few things which I think might apply (furniture, clothes). However having bought a futon and a computer desk from Wal Mart, I can say that they've held up. They're both going on 8 years, survived 2 moves, and are still being used. I have received clothes from Wal Mart as gifts, and I haven't noticed them wearing much more quickly than clothes bought at any other big retailer.
I'm certainly not saying that my particular experience is the common one--I just doubt the veracity of your statement without any sort of evidence that it is true. If nothing else, items which simply don't wear out in the medium run (or which are intended to be used up) as I listed above would be reasonable to purchase at the cheapest price you could find.
Furthermore, if the specialist bookstore can't figure out a way to attract customers then specialist authors deserve to suffer. Or what did I misunderstand?
From a strict market standpoint, yeah, they do.
What's unfortunate is that this means that our works of art will be reduced to the lowest common denominator under this scenario. But for people who worship the market, you have provided precisely the desired result.
No one in their right mind would try to compete with Wal Mart unless they're already established. Wal Mart could just drop prices again and the competitor could watch all of their startup capital disappear.
There's a special Hell for the developers who designed the Rygar port.
I left that one on pause once overnight, and came back to an overheated (and locked up) NES. I think that's the last time I played the game until I got a Game Genie.
I'm not talking about realism, or "what the enemy would want." It's about game design. What's the point of a health bar if the enemy can stun-lock you until you die? What's the point if there are so many pits that a single hit is instant death unless you are very lucky? These things, in my opinion, make a game very frustrating.
I think it must depend upon the degree of frustration, or the type of person you are.
I don't often get frustrated by games unless I feel that luck has a huge role, or if a particularly difficult move is required and I have no ability to practice that particular move unless I spend ten minute getting to a particular point in the game.
Ninja Gaiden has the latter in spades. I consider it frustrating.
Mario Kart Wii has the former in spades. Damned blue shells.
I started with Mega Man, and I agree. Try playing them one right after the other, and you'll notice that the controls tightened up significantly with the sequel--which is a huge improvement and makes the platformer much easier.
Interestingly, I think a lot of the old 8- and 16-bit games were difficult because of poor programming. Bad collision-detection and poor controls are high on the list of what made a lot of games hard. Super Mario Bros. head pretty bad controls--far from the worst on the NES, but probably the worst out of the entire series.
Then you have bad design patterns that were repeated over and over throughout the industry--enemies that respawn if a particular tile goes offscreen, being knocked back uncontrollably by enemies (often into pits), enemies which simply can't be avoided or killed no matter what you try... It's really a combination of these three which made Ninja Gaiden (and many other games) super hard. Difficulty without frustration is hard to achieve, but modern games do better at it.
Of course, death and repetition are what made games last any reasonable amount of time in the early NES days. Before you had passwords and saves, forcing you to master every level to get to the end was part of the experience. That's not universally true--some games like Metroid had an explorative element that extended playing time.
Say what you will about Nintendo and Mario games, but by and large they are fun.
I assume that the people replaying the same FPS with a slightly different skin think that they're having fun, too.
But yeah, all FPS all rely on almost exactly the same mechanics as Doom, and if you consider them merely 3D extensions of 2D mechanics, then they're "using the same mechanics" as e.g. Commander Keen. If it's fair to say that Super Mario Galaxy uses the same mechanics as Super Mario Bros, then my comparison of an FPS to a 2D shooter is fair.
Those big words exist for a reason, and it's usually to communicate an idea which has either a very specific meaning or a very subtle meaning which can be hard to otherwise articulate.
Using one "big" word[*] instead of several smaller ones to communicate the same idea is also more efficient, assuming all parties to the communication understand the word.
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This has nothing to do with Google integrating anything
To an extent.
The rest of the evil does have to do with Google integrating things. It's evil because part of Google's approval process for devices carrying the Android name apparently requires Google's geolocation which is built in to the infrastructure of Android. That geolocation could be pulled out or disabled, but then you can't call it Android and you can't put the Market on the device. That is not open. It's similar to Tivoization, only on a device which is purported to be open.
The phone call and this particular incident have nothing to do with it. It's an instance of the problem. Microsoft is being heavy handed and keeping Android from being open due to their oversight into the "compatibility" process, and the fact that they require some of their own services to be used "for compatibility."
The premise is that Wal Mart can outlast pretty much anyone and undercut them enough to put them out of business. If they are capable of that, they would be capable of outlasting new startups unless the startup was capable of competing on something other than price.
He believed that the conventions of society, the law, and the policies of his employer don't apply to him. At age 27.
I don't care that the targets were minors. The issue is the blatant abuse of power.
In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.
He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back.
Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.
It seems part of the reason Barksdale snooped through the teens' Gmail and Gtalk accounts was to show off the power he had as a member of a group with broad access to company data. A self-described "hacker," Barksdale seemed to get a kick out of flaunting his position at Google
So he has a long history of flaunting his power, overriding people's attempts to block him, and intercepting communications. The guy should probably be arrested, but you make a pretty good point--his IT career is probably over, and that is likely punishment enough for a geek.
If they're doing server-side password strength verification e.g. the password requirements mentioned in the GP, then they're probably receiving the password and keeping it in some kind of storage (even if it's RAM) for some amount of time (even if it's mere microseconds.)
In other words he is acting like a teenager.
Once you grow up, the term becomes "sociopath."
Even if you believe that, there's a thing called a formula sheet. The instructor can even write it on the blackboard for you, and provide hard copies to students as needed for ADA reasons (on specially colored paper.)
You're supposed to master the material. No wonder the US is in such piss-poor shape in academia.
Jesus Christ, you kids are pampered. In my day, you had to know the damned material when you took the test, or you flunked.
And get off my lawn.
For the sake of argument, if your taxes go up to support welfare for the people who lost their jobs, maybe spending a little extra at the grocery store would have been better. I dunno. Those are hard numbers to crunch.
I live by myself. Now if I had a family a landline phone alone might be cheaper, but today even children have cellphones, and carriers offer family plans.
That's the thing. Most people have cell phones anyway. Land lines are a dying breed, primarily useful because of the ancient (and robust) infrastructure. If you have a landline corded phone, it takes lots and lots of things failing for you to be unable to make an emergency call. But corded phones are unpopular and getting harder to find.
If anything, the places that couldn't compete where the ones milking their local monopoly.
It's not always milking. Wal Mart deals with vast economies of scale that let them drive prices down. They sell more stuff than specialist stores, meaning that they can have smaller margins on everything that they sell and still turn a profit. They can afford to sell loss leaders. And they have about as vertically integrated corporate structure as a business can while selling other people's products.
When people say that local shops can't compete, they mean it literally.
may be cheaper to shop at Walmart once, but not twice (which is the minimum number of times you'd end up buying most of their shit).
I hear this a lot, and I just don't get it. There is a huge amount of stuff at Wal Mart which is meant to be used up (toiletries, food, office supplies), stuff which just doesn't wear out like this (place settings, placemats, DVDs, CDs, games) and then a few things which I think might apply (furniture, clothes). However having bought a futon and a computer desk from Wal Mart, I can say that they've held up. They're both going on 8 years, survived 2 moves, and are still being used. I have received clothes from Wal Mart as gifts, and I haven't noticed them wearing much more quickly than clothes bought at any other big retailer.
I'm certainly not saying that my particular experience is the common one--I just doubt the veracity of your statement without any sort of evidence that it is true. If nothing else, items which simply don't wear out in the medium run (or which are intended to be used up) as I listed above would be reasonable to purchase at the cheapest price you could find.
Furthermore, if the specialist bookstore can't figure out a way to attract customers then specialist authors deserve to suffer. Or what did I misunderstand?
From a strict market standpoint, yeah, they do.
What's unfortunate is that this means that our works of art will be reduced to the lowest common denominator under this scenario. But for people who worship the market, you have provided precisely the desired result.
No one in their right mind would try to compete with Wal Mart unless they're already established. Wal Mart could just drop prices again and the competitor could watch all of their startup capital disappear.
There's a special Hell for the developers who designed the Rygar port.
I left that one on pause once overnight, and came back to an overheated (and locked up) NES. I think that's the last time I played the game until I got a Game Genie.
I agree that many old-school games had these characteristics. Most of the ones I remember were the ones which also had very good mechanics.
Don't get me wrong--they're all hard. But I think that the sloppy controls in 1 made it a bit hard.
I think it was both. I knew many people who couldn't make it past the first stage. One eventually threw the game away in disgust.
I'm not talking about realism, or "what the enemy would want." It's about game design. What's the point of a health bar if the enemy can stun-lock you until you die? What's the point if there are so many pits that a single hit is instant death unless you are very lucky? These things, in my opinion, make a game very frustrating.
I think it must depend upon the degree of frustration, or the type of person you are.
I don't often get frustrated by games unless I feel that luck has a huge role, or if a particularly difficult move is required and I have no ability to practice that particular move unless I spend ten minute getting to a particular point in the game.
Ninja Gaiden has the latter in spades. I consider it frustrating.
Mario Kart Wii has the former in spades. Damned blue shells.
I started with Mega Man, and I agree. Try playing them one right after the other, and you'll notice that the controls tightened up significantly with the sequel--which is a huge improvement and makes the platformer much easier.
Interestingly, I think a lot of the old 8- and 16-bit games were difficult because of poor programming. Bad collision-detection and poor controls are high on the list of what made a lot of games hard. Super Mario Bros. head pretty bad controls--far from the worst on the NES, but probably the worst out of the entire series.
Then you have bad design patterns that were repeated over and over throughout the industry--enemies that respawn if a particular tile goes offscreen, being knocked back uncontrollably by enemies (often into pits), enemies which simply can't be avoided or killed no matter what you try... It's really a combination of these three which made Ninja Gaiden (and many other games) super hard. Difficulty without frustration is hard to achieve, but modern games do better at it.
Of course, death and repetition are what made games last any reasonable amount of time in the early NES days. Before you had passwords and saves, forcing you to master every level to get to the end was part of the experience. That's not universally true--some games like Metroid had an explorative element that extended playing time.
I'm paying about $50 for 3meg. I'd pay $140 for 100meg (up and down) in a heartbeat.
I'd love to be able to stream my movie collection while I'm travelling.
Easy. Superman 64.
Say what you will about Nintendo and Mario games, but by and large they are fun.
I assume that the people replaying the same FPS with a slightly different skin think that they're having fun, too.
But yeah, all FPS all rely on almost exactly the same mechanics as Doom, and if you consider them merely 3D extensions of 2D mechanics, then they're "using the same mechanics" as e.g. Commander Keen. If it's fair to say that Super Mario Galaxy uses the same mechanics as Super Mario Bros, then my comparison of an FPS to a 2D shooter is fair.
To a point.
Those big words exist for a reason, and it's usually to communicate an idea which has either a very specific meaning or a very subtle meaning which can be hard to otherwise articulate.
Using one "big" word[*] instead of several smaller ones to communicate the same idea is also more efficient, assuming all parties to the communication understand the word.
[*] Where "big" really doesn't mean long.