If you do that, you'll see large gaps ("Kirkwood gaps") develop at radii corresponding to orbital resonances with Jupiter. These gaps take far more than six thousand years to develop. If you look at the asteroid belt, such gaps actually exist. If the Universe is six thousand years, how did they get there? (No credit for "The universe is young but God wanted it to look old".)
Interesting, didn't hear about that one before. Of course, even if you ignore everything about fossils, genetics and evolution there's about a zillion more examples that the world is older than 6000 years, like tree rings, glacier layers, sediment layers, stalagmite caves and so on. We got perfectly good models of how the grand canyon or ayers rock was formed, just not in that timeframe. Young earth creationists are discarding the book of science because we're quibbling over the footnote on page 547, with an approach to history that'd be criminal in other context. It's pretty much like saying "Well, you haven't proved where prisoner 3523453 ended up so Holocaust didn't happen" and expect to be taken seriously. And my apologies to Godwin.
It's important to note that there is almost never any "preferred" or "special" release of Linux to use. (...) And when in doubt, just don't upgrade. Not very many machines can take advantage of all of the cool bleeding-edge features that come with each release, anyways. Lots of older versions get "adopted" by someone who will continue to maintain that single kernel release.
As a guess pulled out of my nethers 99% use their distro's default shipping kernel, which means there's maybe a dozen kernels in widespread use with a long tail. Unless you're living on the bleeding edge that's what you want to do, otherwise you have to keep up with and patch stuff like this yourself. I'd much rather trust that than not upgrading or picking some random kernel version and hope it's adopted by someone.
Wouldn't be such a bad deal, if I'd continue to get the same service as TPB today only legally - pretty much unlimited access to all mainstream media. Trouble is, that's not what GGF is selling because it's not theirs to sell. All they have is a brand name and a torrent indexer/tracker that is ready for another hydra trick, chop of TPB and two new heads appear. I don't think the deal will ever happen though, the deal will just fall apart and the train wreck left over won't be worth anything.
Legally, that's a plus. Morally, it depends on whether you can picture yourself as an ISP or not as Freenet is kinda like one big network of cache servers. If you think everything what goes through there is none of your business anymore than it's your ISPs business what you do, then fine. If you want to be the editor controlling everything passing through your line and cache, you're better off with torrents.
You don't have to violate the DMCA to copy a DVD. Just copy the files to a blank disk.
Please try. You may find that this is impossible because your burner can't write to the CSS key sector and regular disks have the CSS key sector zeroed out. And I sure as hell wouldn't try to rely on that as a legal defense.
Also surely they cannot intervene to collect the awarded money when there is still an appeal pending.
Actually, following the first conviction they can and have tried to freeze assets to cover the liability. It's not awarded yet, but they can do that while waiting for appeals. It's rather harsh but the alternative of people holding fire sales and moving money abroad is a serious problem too.
Version numbers is about communication and it doesn't matter one bit how fancy your system is if it's not communicated and understood by the intended recipiants. That can be things like API compatibility, binary compatibility, scope of UI/feature/fix changes or just the time of year (Ubuntu version numbers, anyone?) - there's really only one cardinal sin, and that's releasing something with an version number that doesn't correspond to the expectations. I don't mean version number nazis that insist you can't have an RC if you know it'll need another patch, but real mismatches that mislead users. Everything else is either bonus or useless fluff.
I have to ask, are you really holding so much media data that you need to run 7TB in redundant RAID.
First off, I don't have 7TB in RAID, I have 7TB because I don't run RAID - with RAID1 it'd only be 3,5T, the newest disks in there are 3x1TB drives the others older. Practically, I have about 1,5TB of things that'd be hard to replace, mostly HDV footage, digikam pics and other documents and rare stuff. Not completely unreplacable most as I could get things back from family and friends but it does tend to add up. Those are stored twice to fill 3TB. About 1TB is currently free space. the remaining 3TB are mostly replacable mainstream media that I only store once. CDs, DVDs, game install images and all that is packed away, all my media is on my media server.
A storage array of that size is going to need at least two redundant power supplies and a real RAID card with battery backup and proven track record -- unless you want a solid guaranty to loose that amount of data at some point in the near future.
Depends on what you want it for. I got a 7TB server w/12 disks using a single power supply and JBOD - I could use RAID1 if I wanted, but I prefer the manual double copies and knowing at once when a disk has failed since the last time I messed with RAID I lost a RAID5 set because the warnings never reached me. Works like a charm with all disks running cool and stable as a rock, much cheaper than this. I'm also very aware of the limitations of this setup, it's in no way a redundant setup in any sense. If I wanted 10TB of highly available enterprise grade information then all the following apply:
a) I wouldn't use my cheap gaming case b) I wouldn't use my single non-redundant PSU c) I'd get a server mobo with surveilance d) I'd get a real RAID card with staged boot etc. e) I'd get hotswap drive bays f) I wouldn't be using consumer SATA drives
This sounds like the half-way being neither really cheap nor really reliable. What good is that?
There is a difference between referencing a trademark in your advertisement and using that trademark to sell your product. For example, it is acceptable to say my shoes are better than Nikes, but it is not acceptable for me to sell my shoes under Nikes name. IMHO, allowing Google to redirect trademark searches to a competitors site is a trademark violation.
So if I search for "ford honda mazda" which search results should I get then? None? I think it's fundamentally flawed to assume that just because I search for brand name(s) I shouldn't get an ad that says "See the new Toyota 2009 models". I think it's perfectly fair that companies can advertise to say "Hey, we're an alternative to $foo that you just searched for". Comparing it to selling under a competitor's name is comparing apples and pink flamingos.
I guess the bottom line is, if you are coming out with a new product, you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.
Not to mention: 2. First contact with reality, your customers will think other missing features are important. 3. Get a revenue stream going, don't squeeze for profit just realize money = developers.
It's like many other not-so-great standards, just by getting enough money and momentum behind it you can fix it later. Just run with it and eventually you'll get to where everyone links to youtube because everyone links to youtube. The same really goes for software, you want what's popular because that's what is easy to find people for, easy to find solutions for, basicly finding out how to do things differently every time is hard. I'm sure many here have thought "Sigh, that's the Windows solution. Where's the Mac/Linux solution???".
Well I make my career by joining late projects and doing everything to fix them.
Yes, but it's a different story when you're hired in to try rescuing a ship rather than being accused of sinking it. That says you're a specialist we send in when average people have failed.
But we'll come up with something else. I don't do video editing but by all accounts you eat up hard drive space like candy.
I do have "the ultimate" in hard disk space eating, a HD video camera. But even that... there's limits to how many hours of boring home video anyone really wants to watch and there's not that many GB/hour of film. I'm sure that for Japanese photo freaks that seem far more busy photographing where they've been than being where they're at will have problems, but not me.
The next revolution we desperately need is reliable archival storage. Tapes tend to suck and backing up to a second external drive just makes me think of the RAID admonishment -- "RAID is not backup." (...) No, DVD's are worrisome when talking about really important data.
RAID is not backup because any error will immidiately propagate to all the disks. Multiple independent copies like say an external drive is backup, and that's what I use. For the important stuff I keep triple copies - two online and one offline. A few things remotely sync'ed to an offsite location too.
summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Hmm not the trends I've noticed. From what I've paid attention to: 1) Spinning platters hasn't changed that much, but they've gone down substantially in price. The sweet spot on capacity/cost including SATA connections and everything has gone up considerably and is now at 1.5TB/disk, which are only minimally more expensive than 1.0TB while the 2.0TB disks are top of the line and very expensive.
2) SSD prices were in freefall up until around march. Since then there's been 4 months of increased prices, very abnormal for computer equipment. Not sure if this means the prices will go much slower from here, if so that's bad because they're still at enthusiast pricing.
Basicly, it looks to me like we're header for SSDs as primary drives and 1.5TB+ disks for vast disk arrays that SSDs won't touch for a long while, they still have a 25:1 cost disadvantage compared to the cheapest bulk storage. Now I still got plenty old disks, but if I replaced all 12 in my Antec 1200 with the cheapest 1.5TB disk you can now deliver 18TB for less than 2000$ for the whole system, it'd be close to 100$/TB but slightly over. That's just freakishly huge compared to five years ago, so I still say things are moving along nicely.
Also I didn't get the Intel SSD, but I did get the 120GB Vertex and it flies. I can start a torrent doing 2MB/s random writes and I barely notice I'm doing it. The world is moving forward a lot, but honesly with faster Internet I don't feel quite the same need to store everything locally anyway. Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
It sounds like you're confusing loyalty and professionalism with laziness. Personally if I'm hired to do a job I stick it out until the job is finished. Even if the project ends in spectacular failure, as long as I did my absolute best I stay until the job is done and I expect those I work with to do the same. Everyone works, no one quits.
For me you sound like two extremes on a scale and I think you're both wrong. Yes, if you quit the first time a project you're in is in trouble then you're a quitter. But if it's a huge project or it's a repeated problem, why do you want to inflict a death march project of on yourself? You know the kind where you know the project will be a failure even if your part is flawless. That kind of thing is just a soul-destroyer of morale, making you feel like you live in a Dilbert strip. If the company is just too stupid to cut their losses, are you supposed to loyally and blindly follow their stupidity? Draining every last paycheck before the project burns isn't exactly building confidence in the consultants that either, then you're just blamed for bleeding them dry and leaving them with crap. In fact, I'm quite sure I've heard more accusations of that than the opposite. Of all the reaosns a project fails, "horrible internal project mismanagement" is always the very last option if you got noone else to blame. Try to guide them through the rough waters, but if they insist on heading full speed like Titanic against the ice berg, then I say abandon ship. The honor of going down with the ship may gladly be left to the captain, not the crew.
As for the whole "proud to vote for a black man" thing... that IS racist. If you're more proud to vote for a particular candidate due to his race, you're a bigot, regardless of whether he's black, white, green, or purple.
If you think that he deserves the position, but in the past you wouldn't have voted for him anyway but now you do, then that's something to be proud over. Sure you might say that you're just doing the right thing you should have done all along, though I disagree. Overcoming your bigotry is hard and cause for pride.
Of course, if you didn't really think he was the best candidate only that the country needed a token black precident as a racial feelgood measure then I agree. Then you've just clouded your judgement again with a new kind of bigotry.
So if I feel like killing you, is it the desire or the voicing of it? If it's is the former it's thoughtcrime and if it's the latter it's censorship (and if you want to say "it is" = it's not its). Maybe the world isn't that simple that everything falls into those two categories.
Hate speech laws are for the most part the group versions of libel/slander, death threats and so on. You have to understand a bit of how hate crime works, for the accusers it's a little bit like accusing someone of witchcraft, like you're a jew or you're an arab muslim so you're "in on it". It doesn't require any proof of your personal involvement, thus it's practicly impossible to disprove. In fact, in only generally requires a vague idea of what the crime is too, basicly you blame them for everything wrong with society. Perferably on top of that you throw in some light conspiracy theory, as you see tendencies too now in Europe, where some seem to think we're being populated to death by a coordinated effort by many millions of muslims. Perhaps they simply have a culture positive to having children unlike native europeans who can't even sustain the population with birth rates going down, age of first birth going up and an increasing number not reproducing at all. But no, let's make it a conspiracy about eradicating us, sigh.
Anyway, before I digress so far I never get back to my point is that because of the muddiness of the accusation you don't have to be very specific. Even Hitler didn't talk loud about his "entgültige Lösung" = final solution in straight words, even at the height of Holocaust. "All" he did do was tell the germans they were a plague, a pest, a disease, compared them with rats, told them that's why the economy was in the stinker, why they were unemployed, why society's morals had fallen, why there was so much crime, the whole works. Even in the worst of propaganda films I saw from Nazi Germany they ever said it out loud, but the message was still clear as day. Eventually people got the message of *wink, wink, nudge, nudge* and took the rage out on the jews as the scapegoats of everything wrong.
To think that we live in a world of "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" is more than naive. If pedophiles are grooming children, well then these people are grooming adults. They're shaping tomorrow's brownshirts, tomorrow's variation on the Kristallnacht, tomorrow's Nazi death camp crews. The names, victims and ideology may be different but the underlying premise is the same, the purpose the same and - unless they're stopped - the outcome will be the same. I'm far from enthusiastic on letting in more immigrants and about what's happening to my country, but quite frankly some of those alledgely on "my" side on the extreme right scare the shit out of me. Make no mistake, there's people today who would like to see another genocide on European soil. That's more than a minor abuse of free speech in opinion.
How is being able to tell your interviewer "I quit in the middle of projects I don't think will succeed, because it's good for my career" good for your career?
Well, you are taking advice from a guy with the nick "ILuvRamen" - maybe there's a connection?
Sseriously, even in the worst of times there are businesses that are growing. Those that do are well aware of the situation and know that in this market they can hire high quality workers at reasonable prices, even the kind of employees no sane employer would normally lay off that they'd normally have to headhunt with huge paychecks. So yeah, many people are in the "nod, smile and say yes if offered a job" mode you shouldn't assume it's that way for everyone.
Only focusing on realism is stagnation. There's very little innovation in realism. It takes very little artistic vision. It's the easy wasy, all you need is money.
By and itself yes... but if you got life-like charactoers in a life-like environment, how many games could you make out of that? Well at least as many as there are movies, unless you want to tell me that every movie worth making is already made.
I don't think that kind of immersion is much related to the graphics, really. Graphics is more like this: Imagine you were sitting down to watch the latest Bond movie. You don't think you're Bond, you have no control over the action - but there's a story unfolding. Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
Of course, in a movie they'd cut it but since a game is rendered live you don't have that luxury. Every time the graphics act unnatural it breaks the fantasy, reducing you back to "Yeah, it's just a bunch fo pixels thrown together". Of course you knew that all along just like you know Bond is a fictional movie character but it doesn't matter. It's not about making the fiction reality, it's about not breaking the fiction.
Now if you consider the fact that we have no TRUE enemies among the countries capable of a useful mars mission, you will realize that COOPERATION is what will drive the next great exploration of the solar system.
Yeah, because one global UN space program would get sooo much done. One of the biggest problems with doing something unique is estimating efficiency. How much "should" it cost to send a probe to Neptune nad do X? Who knows, but if you have multiple space agencys doing their own things sooner or later someone will ask "Hey, why are those guys spening half the money and get twice the results?"
You don't have to be a space program to experience this, how often on slashdot haven't we heard of the IT wiz keeping everything together with bits of string and duct tape, yet noone recognizes how damn good an employee they really have because their job is unique. At least not until he resigns or gets fired and they get a baseline to compare to.
I'm not really talking about competition in that sense, take for example the health care system where different countries aren't in competition but they get benchmarked and compared against each other. Once you put everyone in the same organization, things align with corporate policy, company culture and the result is often mediocre but noone really want to call it.
If it's CounterStrike or GTA IV, there's no such thing as "too realistic". Even in most fantasy/sci-fi settings like say Oblivion or Fallout 3 you expect fire to act like fire, water to act like water and so on.
Other games are just about putting you in the right mood, like say Super Mario Galaxy - it's a cartoon. Or pretty much everything from Telltale like Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Monkey Island etc. Where it's important but not realism-important, where a 3D CGI animation can deliver a visual gag the way lesser graphics can't.
Finally, there's games where it doesn't matter. I play chess from time to time with a black and white 2D board, plain as it gets. Because I'm playing people and it's about the strategy, not the battle chess animations (though that was fun for fun's sake too).
I'm just one person but the importance of graphics vary from "very high" to "very low" for me alone, suggesting there is no answer. Look at your genre, is it important? Yes, then it's important. If you don't want to compete aganst all that, you can find a genre where it's not. If you still want to get in on the graphicly intense stuff, make a creative new game with decent graphics and try taking them on head-to-head in a sequel.
The problem with too many RPGs is that easy encounters are easy, and hard encounters are impossible until you level up, at which point they are easy. It FEELS like you are gaining skill at the game, which is enjoyable, but in fact your character is just tougher. You didn't learn shit.
Half true, half false. Usually you have more attacks, more skills, more HP and mana management at higher levels. You just don't notice it because you're getting pretty good at it. Of course every MMORPG includes one click-the-button class (usually warrior) for those that just want to be part of the group and not manage anything like that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you do that, you'll see large gaps ("Kirkwood gaps") develop at radii corresponding to orbital resonances with Jupiter. These gaps take far more than six thousand years to develop. If you look at the asteroid belt, such gaps actually exist. If the Universe is six thousand years, how did they get there? (No credit for "The universe is young but God wanted it to look old".)
Interesting, didn't hear about that one before. Of course, even if you ignore everything about fossils, genetics and evolution there's about a zillion more examples that the world is older than 6000 years, like tree rings, glacier layers, sediment layers, stalagmite caves and so on. We got perfectly good models of how the grand canyon or ayers rock was formed, just not in that timeframe. Young earth creationists are discarding the book of science because we're quibbling over the footnote on page 547, with an approach to history that'd be criminal in other context. It's pretty much like saying "Well, you haven't proved where prisoner 3523453 ended up so Holocaust didn't happen" and expect to be taken seriously. And my apologies to Godwin.
It's important to note that there is almost never any "preferred" or "special" release of Linux to use. (...) And when in doubt, just don't upgrade. Not very many machines can take advantage of all of the cool bleeding-edge features that come with each release, anyways. Lots of older versions get "adopted" by someone who will continue to maintain that single kernel release.
As a guess pulled out of my nethers 99% use their distro's default shipping kernel, which means there's maybe a dozen kernels in widespread use with a long tail. Unless you're living on the bleeding edge that's what you want to do, otherwise you have to keep up with and patch stuff like this yourself. I'd much rather trust that than not upgrading or picking some random kernel version and hope it's adopted by someone.
Wouldn't be such a bad deal, if I'd continue to get the same service as TPB today only legally - pretty much unlimited access to all mainstream media. Trouble is, that's not what GGF is selling because it's not theirs to sell. All they have is a brand name and a torrent indexer/tracker that is ready for another hydra trick, chop of TPB and two new heads appear. I don't think the deal will ever happen though, the deal will just fall apart and the train wreck left over won't be worth anything.
Legally, that's a plus. Morally, it depends on whether you can picture yourself as an ISP or not as Freenet is kinda like one big network of cache servers. If you think everything what goes through there is none of your business anymore than it's your ISPs business what you do, then fine. If you want to be the editor controlling everything passing through your line and cache, you're better off with torrents.
You don't have to violate the DMCA to copy a DVD. Just copy the files to a blank disk.
Please try. You may find that this is impossible because your burner can't write to the CSS key sector and regular disks have the CSS key sector zeroed out. And I sure as hell wouldn't try to rely on that as a legal defense.
Also surely they cannot intervene to collect the awarded money when there is still an appeal pending.
Actually, following the first conviction they can and have tried to freeze assets to cover the liability. It's not awarded yet, but they can do that while waiting for appeals. It's rather harsh but the alternative of people holding fire sales and moving money abroad is a serious problem too.
Version numbers is about communication and it doesn't matter one bit how fancy your system is if it's not communicated and understood by the intended recipiants. That can be things like API compatibility, binary compatibility, scope of UI/feature/fix changes or just the time of year (Ubuntu version numbers, anyone?) - there's really only one cardinal sin, and that's releasing something with an version number that doesn't correspond to the expectations. I don't mean version number nazis that insist you can't have an RC if you know it'll need another patch, but real mismatches that mislead users. Everything else is either bonus or useless fluff.
I have to ask, are you really holding so much media data that you need to run 7TB in redundant RAID.
First off, I don't have 7TB in RAID, I have 7TB because I don't run RAID - with RAID1 it'd only be 3,5T, the newest disks in there are 3x1TB drives the others older. Practically, I have about 1,5TB of things that'd be hard to replace, mostly HDV footage, digikam pics and other documents and rare stuff. Not completely unreplacable most as I could get things back from family and friends but it does tend to add up. Those are stored twice to fill 3TB. About 1TB is currently free space. the remaining 3TB are mostly replacable mainstream media that I only store once. CDs, DVDs, game install images and all that is packed away, all my media is on my media server.
A storage array of that size is going to need at least two redundant power supplies and a real RAID card with battery backup and proven track record -- unless you want a solid guaranty to loose that amount of data at some point in the near future.
Depends on what you want it for. I got a 7TB server w/12 disks using a single power supply and JBOD - I could use RAID1 if I wanted, but I prefer the manual double copies and knowing at once when a disk has failed since the last time I messed with RAID I lost a RAID5 set because the warnings never reached me. Works like a charm with all disks running cool and stable as a rock, much cheaper than this. I'm also very aware of the limitations of this setup, it's in no way a redundant setup in any sense. If I wanted 10TB of highly available enterprise grade information then all the following apply:
a) I wouldn't use my cheap gaming case
b) I wouldn't use my single non-redundant PSU
c) I'd get a server mobo with surveilance
d) I'd get a real RAID card with staged boot etc.
e) I'd get hotswap drive bays
f) I wouldn't be using consumer SATA drives
This sounds like the half-way being neither really cheap nor really reliable. What good is that?
There is a difference between referencing a trademark in your advertisement and using that trademark to sell your product. For example, it is acceptable to say my shoes are better than Nikes, but it is not acceptable for me to sell my shoes under Nikes name. IMHO, allowing Google to redirect trademark searches to a competitors site is a trademark violation.
So if I search for "ford honda mazda" which search results should I get then? None? I think it's fundamentally flawed to assume that just because I search for brand name(s) I shouldn't get an ad that says "See the new Toyota 2009 models". I think it's perfectly fair that companies can advertise to say "Hey, we're an alternative to $foo that you just searched for". Comparing it to selling under a competitor's name is comparing apples and pink flamingos.
I guess the bottom line is, if you are coming out with a new product, you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.
Not to mention:
2. First contact with reality, your customers will think other missing features are important.
3. Get a revenue stream going, don't squeeze for profit just realize money = developers.
It's like many other not-so-great standards, just by getting enough money and momentum behind it you can fix it later. Just run with it and eventually you'll get to where everyone links to youtube because everyone links to youtube. The same really goes for software, you want what's popular because that's what is easy to find people for, easy to find solutions for, basicly finding out how to do things differently every time is hard. I'm sure many here have thought "Sigh, that's the Windows solution. Where's the Mac/Linux solution???".
Well I make my career by joining late projects and doing everything to fix them.
Yes, but it's a different story when you're hired in to try rescuing a ship rather than being accused of sinking it. That says you're a specialist we send in when average people have failed.
But we'll come up with something else. I don't do video editing but by all accounts you eat up hard drive space like candy.
I do have "the ultimate" in hard disk space eating, a HD video camera. But even that... there's limits to how many hours of boring home video anyone really wants to watch and there's not that many GB/hour of film. I'm sure that for Japanese photo freaks that seem far more busy photographing where they've been than being where they're at will have problems, but not me.
The next revolution we desperately need is reliable archival storage. Tapes tend to suck and backing up to a second external drive just makes me think of the RAID admonishment -- "RAID is not backup." (...) No, DVD's are worrisome when talking about really important data.
RAID is not backup because any error will immidiately propagate to all the disks. Multiple independent copies like say an external drive is backup, and that's what I use. For the important stuff I keep triple copies - two online and one offline. A few things remotely sync'ed to an offsite location too.
summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
Hmm not the trends I've noticed. From what I've paid attention to:
1) Spinning platters hasn't changed that much, but they've gone down substantially in price. The sweet spot on capacity/cost including SATA connections and everything has gone up considerably and is now at 1.5TB/disk, which are only minimally more expensive than 1.0TB while the 2.0TB disks are top of the line and very expensive.
2) SSD prices were in freefall up until around march. Since then there's been 4 months of increased prices, very abnormal for computer equipment. Not sure if this means the prices will go much slower from here, if so that's bad because they're still at enthusiast pricing.
Basicly, it looks to me like we're header for SSDs as primary drives and 1.5TB+ disks for vast disk arrays that SSDs won't touch for a long while, they still have a 25:1 cost disadvantage compared to the cheapest bulk storage. Now I still got plenty old disks, but if I replaced all 12 in my Antec 1200 with the cheapest 1.5TB disk you can now deliver 18TB for less than 2000$ for the whole system, it'd be close to 100$/TB but slightly over. That's just freakishly huge compared to five years ago, so I still say things are moving along nicely.
Also I didn't get the Intel SSD, but I did get the 120GB Vertex and it flies. I can start a torrent doing 2MB/s random writes and I barely notice I'm doing it. The world is moving forward a lot, but honesly with faster Internet I don't feel quite the same need to store everything locally anyway. Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
It sounds like you're confusing loyalty and professionalism with laziness. Personally if I'm hired to do a job I stick it out until the job is finished. Even if the project ends in spectacular failure, as long as I did my absolute best I stay until the job is done and I expect those I work with to do the same. Everyone works, no one quits.
For me you sound like two extremes on a scale and I think you're both wrong. Yes, if you quit the first time a project you're in is in trouble then you're a quitter. But if it's a huge project or it's a repeated problem, why do you want to inflict a death march project of on yourself? You know the kind where you know the project will be a failure even if your part is flawless. That kind of thing is just a soul-destroyer of morale, making you feel like you live in a Dilbert strip. If the company is just too stupid to cut their losses, are you supposed to loyally and blindly follow their stupidity? Draining every last paycheck before the project burns isn't exactly building confidence in the consultants that either, then you're just blamed for bleeding them dry and leaving them with crap. In fact, I'm quite sure I've heard more accusations of that than the opposite. Of all the reaosns a project fails, "horrible internal project mismanagement" is always the very last option if you got noone else to blame. Try to guide them through the rough waters, but if they insist on heading full speed like Titanic against the ice berg, then I say abandon ship. The honor of going down with the ship may gladly be left to the captain, not the crew.
As for the whole "proud to vote for a black man" thing ... that IS racist. If you're more proud to vote for a particular candidate due to his race, you're a bigot, regardless of whether he's black, white, green, or purple.
If you think that he deserves the position, but in the past you wouldn't have voted for him anyway but now you do, then that's something to be proud over. Sure you might say that you're just doing the right thing you should have done all along, though I disagree. Overcoming your bigotry is hard and cause for pride.
Of course, if you didn't really think he was the best candidate only that the country needed a token black precident as a racial feelgood measure then I agree. Then you've just clouded your judgement again with a new kind of bigotry.
So if I feel like killing you, is it the desire or the voicing of it? If it's is the former it's thoughtcrime and if it's the latter it's censorship (and if you want to say "it is" = it's not its). Maybe the world isn't that simple that everything falls into those two categories.
Hate speech laws are for the most part the group versions of libel/slander, death threats and so on. You have to understand a bit of how hate crime works, for the accusers it's a little bit like accusing someone of witchcraft, like you're a jew or you're an arab muslim so you're "in on it". It doesn't require any proof of your personal involvement, thus it's practicly impossible to disprove. In fact, in only generally requires a vague idea of what the crime is too, basicly you blame them for everything wrong with society. Perferably on top of that you throw in some light conspiracy theory, as you see tendencies too now in Europe, where some seem to think we're being populated to death by a coordinated effort by many millions of muslims. Perhaps they simply have a culture positive to having children unlike native europeans who can't even sustain the population with birth rates going down, age of first birth going up and an increasing number not reproducing at all. But no, let's make it a conspiracy about eradicating us, sigh.
Anyway, before I digress so far I never get back to my point is that because of the muddiness of the accusation you don't have to be very specific. Even Hitler didn't talk loud about his "entgültige Lösung" = final solution in straight words, even at the height of Holocaust. "All" he did do was tell the germans they were a plague, a pest, a disease, compared them with rats, told them that's why the economy was in the stinker, why they were unemployed, why society's morals had fallen, why there was so much crime, the whole works. Even in the worst of propaganda films I saw from Nazi Germany they ever said it out loud, but the message was still clear as day. Eventually people got the message of *wink, wink, nudge, nudge* and took the rage out on the jews as the scapegoats of everything wrong.
To think that we live in a world of "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" is more than naive. If pedophiles are grooming children, well then these people are grooming adults. They're shaping tomorrow's brownshirts, tomorrow's variation on the Kristallnacht, tomorrow's Nazi death camp crews. The names, victims and ideology may be different but the underlying premise is the same, the purpose the same and - unless they're stopped - the outcome will be the same. I'm far from enthusiastic on letting in more immigrants and about what's happening to my country, but quite frankly some of those alledgely on "my" side on the extreme right scare the shit out of me. Make no mistake, there's people today who would like to see another genocide on European soil. That's more than a minor abuse of free speech in opinion.
I'm sure Windows 7 developers will still be employable after the October release.
I don't know, can we have a show of hands for Windows ME developers that are still employed in IT?
How is being able to tell your interviewer "I quit in the middle of projects I don't think will succeed, because it's good for my career" good for your career?
Well, you are taking advice from a guy with the nick "ILuvRamen" - maybe there's a connection?
Sseriously, even in the worst of times there are businesses that are growing. Those that do are well aware of the situation and know that in this market they can hire high quality workers at reasonable prices, even the kind of employees no sane employer would normally lay off that they'd normally have to headhunt with huge paychecks. So yeah, many people are in the "nod, smile and say yes if offered a job" mode you shouldn't assume it's that way for everyone.
Only focusing on realism is stagnation. There's very little innovation in realism. It takes very little artistic vision. It's the easy wasy, all you need is money.
By and itself yes... but if you got life-like charactoers in a life-like environment, how many games could you make out of that? Well at least as many as there are movies, unless you want to tell me that every movie worth making is already made.
I don't think that kind of immersion is much related to the graphics, really. Graphics is more like this: Imagine you were sitting down to watch the latest Bond movie. You don't think you're Bond, you have no control over the action - but there's a story unfolding. Now Bond trips over something so it breaks and you see it's only a cardboard prop. That'd break all the immersion and remind you it's all just illusion.
Of course, in a movie they'd cut it but since a game is rendered live you don't have that luxury. Every time the graphics act unnatural it breaks the fantasy, reducing you back to "Yeah, it's just a bunch fo pixels thrown together". Of course you knew that all along just like you know Bond is a fictional movie character but it doesn't matter. It's not about making the fiction reality, it's about not breaking the fiction.
Now if you consider the fact that we have no TRUE enemies among the countries capable of a useful mars mission, you will realize that COOPERATION is what will drive the next great exploration of the solar system.
Yeah, because one global UN space program would get sooo much done. One of the biggest problems with doing something unique is estimating efficiency. How much "should" it cost to send a probe to Neptune nad do X? Who knows, but if you have multiple space agencys doing their own things sooner or later someone will ask "Hey, why are those guys spening half the money and get twice the results?"
You don't have to be a space program to experience this, how often on slashdot haven't we heard of the IT wiz keeping everything together with bits of string and duct tape, yet noone recognizes how damn good an employee they really have because their job is unique. At least not until he resigns or gets fired and they get a baseline to compare to.
I'm not really talking about competition in that sense, take for example the health care system where different countries aren't in competition but they get benchmarked and compared against each other. Once you put everyone in the same organization, things align with corporate policy, company culture and the result is often mediocre but noone really want to call it.
If it's CounterStrike or GTA IV, there's no such thing as "too realistic". Even in most fantasy/sci-fi settings like say Oblivion or Fallout 3 you expect fire to act like fire, water to act like water and so on.
Other games are just about putting you in the right mood, like say Super Mario Galaxy - it's a cartoon. Or pretty much everything from Telltale like Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Monkey Island etc. Where it's important but not realism-important, where a 3D CGI animation can deliver a visual gag the way lesser graphics can't.
Finally, there's games where it doesn't matter. I play chess from time to time with a black and white 2D board, plain as it gets. Because I'm playing people and it's about the strategy, not the battle chess animations (though that was fun for fun's sake too).
I'm just one person but the importance of graphics vary from "very high" to "very low" for me alone, suggesting there is no answer. Look at your genre, is it important? Yes, then it's important. If you don't want to compete aganst all that, you can find a genre where it's not. If you still want to get in on the graphicly intense stuff, make a creative new game with decent graphics and try taking them on head-to-head in a sequel.
The problem with too many RPGs is that easy encounters are easy, and hard encounters are impossible until you level up, at which point they are easy. It FEELS like you are gaining skill at the game, which is enjoyable, but in fact your character is just tougher. You didn't learn shit.
Half true, half false. Usually you have more attacks, more skills, more HP and mana management at higher levels. You just don't notice it because you're getting pretty good at it. Of course every MMORPG includes one click-the-button class (usually warrior) for those that just want to be part of the group and not manage anything like that.