The major difference is that these hardware sites are running the product through quantitative benchmarks to compare products. This throws doubt onto that whole entire notion of comparison.
If you could say.. foster that doubt sufficiently, you might be able to make a business out of buying and benchmarking hardware, hand picking the good stuff and selling it at a boosted price as "guaranteed best."
Then throw a "credited rating system" around it, and you could potentially have a nice little middleman racket like what card shops sort of have.
Once again I think the summarizer has confused the words and thus the discussion.
The key word here is robbery, which means violence or intimidation being used to steal the property.
I'm sure the number of laptop thefts is vastly higher. I worked at one company in the south of market area a few years back that was broken into several times and lost nearly 10 laptops alone.
Yet people trust Dell and Gateway, which only really sell computers with Microsoft software installed on them. Why wouldn't their ratings be dragged down with Microsoft? In fact Dell appears to be the 3rd most trusted brand there.
I suspect the fact that people never had to choose for themselves to buy a Microsoft product is a big part of why they aren't inclined to say they trust them.
I think people are more likely to say they trust something after they made the conscious decision to go with it so that they'll feel better about their decision.
I guess Oracle appears to know what you are talking about:
"Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer."
And Microsoft too, kinda:
"We originally announced pricing of Visual Studio Express at US$49. We are now offering Visual Studio Express for free, as a limited-in-time promotional offer, until November 6, 2006. Note that we are also offering SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as a free download, and that this offer is not limited to the same promotional pricing period as Visual Studio Express."
I guess "Express" is some kind of magic phrase:
"With DB2 Express-C, faculty and students have direct access to an easy to learn and easy to use database for relational and XML data at no charge."
I don't think it's in these vendors' best interests to have such high bars to entry for the worker either.
Jumping the shark doesn't imply they will immediately and noticably start failing. It can be the turning point which begins a long and drawn out decline.
I can see how graphical ads on google's search pages, could potentially be that point. The lack of annoying graphical ads is perhaps the biggest reason google grew so fast. The relevancy of their search results has been slowly declining over the course of years (at least in my opinion) as people get better and better at gaming them.
Go look as Ask Jeeves's and MSN's search results pages, no graphical ads. They had to do that to compete with Google, but now it could give them the edge they need to start taking back noticable numbers of people.
Nintendo's entire point with vastly simplifying the control over the other current generation offerings isn't to 'change games forever', it's to create a new market away from what most people currently consider video games to be.
They are trying to make Xbox360/PS3 vs Revolution an irrelevant argument by creating something for people that can't even fathom playing Xbox360 and PS3. Once they start marketting it heavily, it'll probably be mostly about showing grandmas playing with their grandchildren and any other 'fish-out-of-water' type imagery they can come up with that tries to change peoples' notions of who a video gamer is.
Even if it does become possible for grandma to play video games, I can't quite fathom how nintendo is going to convince grandma that she wants to. I guess that lies entirely in what games are made. It's already been shown that grandma will play internet card games if she can manage basic internet usage, I imagine Nintendo could muster up an easier to use version of that, but will they?
Please don't do that. Let them do what they want to do. Give them free time. Real prodigies naturally know what it is they are good at it. Heck, I think this applies to most kids.
The best thing I think you can do with them is to pay attention to what it is they are doing on their own and help facilitate that to some extent without taking over what it is they are already doing.
I think the most dangerous thing affecting 'prodigies' is that they are put aside and told how smart they are. That's just plain wrong. It gives them a false sense of superiority and busts their natural incentive to be creative.
I think the major problem with this kind of thinking is that gifted programs generally are mostly just trying to take up more of a kid's time. They basically just seem to give extra homework, and are maybe advanced by a year or so in terms of what they are studying.
I don't know anybody who's public school 'gifted program' gave them what they really needed, self expression. Smart kids generally will give that to themselves, but gifted programs, in my opinion, actually stifle their ability to do so by trying to fill up all their time with academic busywork, as if somehow rigid structure is going to make them smarter.
Intelligence is next to nothing without creativity. The benefits of being a couple years ahead of your peers academically diminish greatly as you age. Missing out on the freetime of youth is something very difficult to make up for.
Countdown until loyalty cards with RFID and RFID sensors throughout store in..
5..
4..
3..
The major difference of course is that loyalty cards tend to offer pretty difficult to ignore discounts. If a website come out and said "Turn on your cookies to get great features like.. blah blah blah.." then it'd be almost exactly like loyalty cards now.
I pretty much feel that web surfing does decrease productivity overall.
What makes it so nefarious in my mind isn't the _amount_ of time spent web surfing, but how easy it is for a tiny little brain fart to turn into a web surfing session, and how that time is not the same as a normal break.
Next time you need to think over something before you do it, need a little break, are waiting for something to finish, etc, try talking a little walk and just get away from the computer.
I've found that web surfing tends to so completely lock up my mind that my subconcious problem solving ability is significantly reduced, but if I'm away from the computer, just kinda going 'duuuh', looking at some trees or chillin in a chair looking at the cieling, solutions to problems will often just dawn on me.
Also web surfing doesn't tend to be a very refreshing break, going from working to surfing to working again doesn't stretch you out, doesn't rest your eyes, barely rests your hands, etc.
I see all these unused rec rooms with couches, pool, foosball, etc, everybody is just sitting at their computer surfing or IMing instead of meeting up in those rooms to chill for a second. Heck, even without those, I barely see people hanging out near water coolers or coffee bars.
I think people never do so because they won't look busy, even though surfing/IMing is just as unproductive generally.
In the case of video games (for example, Sony Playstation or Nintendo games) and computer software, we use the ESRB, Entertainment Software Rating Board, ratings (EC, E, T, M, and AO) as we make decisions about which products to carry. We do not carry software rated adults only (as rated by the ESRB). As a rule, we do not carry Parental Advisory stickered products.
After reading various discussion about this mod around the internet, I would like to make the following statement:
All the contents of this mod was already available on the original disks. Therefor the scriptcode, the models, the animations and the dialogs by the original voice-actors were all created by RockStar. The only thing I had to do to enable the mini-games was toggling a single bit in the main.scm file. (Of course it was not easy to find the correct bit). The Nude models that are used as a bonus in the Quick action version of the mod, were also already present on the original disk.
But all this material is completely inaccesible in an unmodded version of the game. It can therefor not be considered a cheat, easter-egg or hidden feature. But is most probably just leftover material from a gameplay idea that didn't make the final release. I would really like to stress that this material is only accessible after willfully applying the hot coffee mod (or something similar) to the game.
My sony laptop's power supply effectively has this. The point where it connects to the laptop can come out pretty easily, but if you are tripping on it at the perfect angle where it can't come out, the power supply box itself has a cable connection point that will unplug.
It'd be next to impossible to trip on it perfectly so that at least one couldn't come undone.
The presentation was closed to the press. He told the reporters after the presentation. That seems pretty clear to me, especially seeing as how the Sun Valley is the name of the entire city.
There's what seems to be like a lot of natural light, there is some kind of rather public business looking door to the left in one of the photos, and they are all excessively low res. Do those tables have glass tops? Why are there so many empty seats?
That place looks like it has a much nicer setup then my last job in downtown san francisco.
The whole entire article doesn't ring true at all. It reads like something from a creative writing class. 'The gold comes back clean'.. ?
I was a pretty active planetside player for around a year on Markov... That game's development was just one massive mistake after another.
Everything was going great in beta, but the downhill started one -day 1- of the game's release. They made a massive and totally untested change, even the manual described the way the game was in beta.
In beta, you got -full- XP for every kill anybody in your squad made. On release day 1, they divided it by the number of players. On average, if you were used to 10 man squads, you got 1/10th the XP you were used to, drawing out the level up period by a factor of 10.
But that wasn't the only effect, there was a massive unintended consequence. You could still get pretty good XP if you sat inside of the Spheres of Influence while capturing bases.
Result: everybody and their mom was stuffing themselves into these spheres of influence constantly. They made up maybe 10% of the overall landmass and were very repetitive and uninteresting locations. There were only a few base designs and everything became focused on the rather weak indoor combat as opposed to the much more epic and cool outdoor vehicle combat.
The massive outdoor battles of the beta were gone and replaced by overcrowded lag fests that started crashing servers. Same number of players as beta, but because they pushed player density way up with this totally untested change, network traffic and server load increased exponentially since it normally didn't have to transmit the locations of players to so many people since they were more spread out.
The devs turned an absolute blind eye to how they had ruined the game and populations dropped by what seemed like 75% in the first month as people chose not to subscribe because the game was pretty much unplayable during prime time. Continents were crashing so often that the sanctuary continent you'd get kicked to when they crashed, would crash, and you couldn't login at all.
There were -more- people in the free public beta and it was very stable towards the end, how in the world were the devs so dense as to not to see what their change had done?
So basically there is very little hope of seeing the highest res data reintegrated? That is a massive bummer, I most likely will not be renewing my subscription.
I was a Keyhole subscriber for a little over a year before google bought them.
As nice of an improvement the Google Earth software is, overall the product has become worse since google bought it.
The overall resolution has been decreased from many covered areas and super high-res areas have been removed entirely.
You used to be able to clearly make out the exact shapes of cars in the SF Bay Area, now they are blurry colored blobs. In the super high res areas, you could pretty much identify the model of most cars and sometimes even make out individual people.
If you are a long time subscriber like me, google placates you with an option to login to the 'legacy' database.. but if you are new.. no dice.
Doesn't that seem strange? I really hope they reintegrate the higher res data, it is profoundly better.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that when they increased their coverage area they had technical issues with the highest res data, but it's been awhile now and they havn't changed their stance of "Oh.. umm yea..login to legacy.." since the new primary database came out.. so I'm fairly worried.
If we arbitrarly set time as a 4th dimension, which encompasses some arbitrary number of 3 dimensional states, space, then can't probability be a 5th dimension that contains all the different possible timelines?
We unintentionally move forward through the 4th dimension of time right now. Let's say we can move through time freely with a time machine, but by doing so there is an unintentional movement 5th dimensionally through possibility.
We see no time travelers because in our timeline the time machine is never created, but we might eventually create one, but every time we go back in time with it, we travel unintentionally through probability and there's probably already a bunch of time travellers there, we can't ever go back to our own original histories.
Given the fact that future games will most likely automatically update the firmware.. ( I wouldn't be in the least surprised if UMD movies do as well )
I have to choose whether I want to -buy- more software for their system or just keep the flexibility of homebrew... and.. since either direction means not going back to the other.. homebrew pretty much comes out on top.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's slick boot camp website
This is not the layout or speak of a piece of beta software. It is a marketting page.
The top titles are:
"Macs do Windows, too"
"As elegant as it gets"
"Included Amenities"
The major difference is that these hardware sites are running the product through quantitative benchmarks to compare products. This throws doubt onto that whole entire notion of comparison.
If you could say.. foster that doubt sufficiently, you might be able to make a business out of buying and benchmarking hardware, hand picking the good stuff and selling it at a boosted price as "guaranteed best."
Then throw a "credited rating system" around it, and you could potentially have a nice little middleman racket like what card shops sort of have.
Once again I think the summarizer has confused the words and thus the discussion.
The key word here is robbery, which means violence or intimidation being used to steal the property.
I'm sure the number of laptop thefts is vastly higher. I worked at one company in the south of market area a few years back that was broken into several times and lost nearly 10 laptops alone.
This was my first thought as well. Who is going to admit or say they are going to play more video games or watch more TV?
Polls like this are almost next to worthless except when you use them to look at the disparity between what people say and reality (sales figures)
Imagine how the junk and fast food companies stocks would fall if people put stock into these kinds of polls for those things.
Yet people trust Dell and Gateway, which only really sell computers with Microsoft software installed on them. Why wouldn't their ratings be dragged down with Microsoft? In fact Dell appears to be the 3rd most trusted brand there.
I suspect the fact that people never had to choose for themselves to buy a Microsoft product is a big part of why they aren't inclined to say they trust them.
I think people are more likely to say they trust something after they made the conscious decision to go with it so that they'll feel better about their decision.
I guess Oracle appears to know what you are talking about:
"Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer."
And Microsoft too, kinda:
"We originally announced pricing of Visual Studio Express at US$49. We are now offering Visual Studio Express for free, as a limited-in-time promotional offer, until November 6, 2006. Note that we are also offering SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as a free download, and that this offer is not limited to the same promotional pricing period as Visual Studio Express."
I guess "Express" is some kind of magic phrase:
"With DB2 Express-C, faculty and students have direct access to an easy to learn and easy to use database for relational and XML data at no charge."
I don't think it's in these vendors' best interests to have such high bars to entry for the worker either.
Jumping the shark doesn't imply they will immediately and noticably start failing. It can be the turning point which begins a long and drawn out decline.
I can see how graphical ads on google's search pages, could potentially be that point. The lack of annoying graphical ads is perhaps the biggest reason google grew so fast. The relevancy of their search results has been slowly declining over the course of years (at least in my opinion) as people get better and better at gaming them.
Go look as Ask Jeeves's and MSN's search results pages, no graphical ads. They had to do that to compete with Google, but now it could give them the edge they need to start taking back noticable numbers of people.
Nintendo's entire point with vastly simplifying the control over the other current generation offerings isn't to 'change games forever', it's to create a new market away from what most people currently consider video games to be.
They are trying to make Xbox360/PS3 vs Revolution an irrelevant argument by creating something for people that can't even fathom playing Xbox360 and PS3. Once they start marketting it heavily, it'll probably be mostly about showing grandmas playing with their grandchildren and any other 'fish-out-of-water' type imagery they can come up with that tries to change peoples' notions of who a video gamer is.
Even if it does become possible for grandma to play video games, I can't quite fathom how nintendo is going to convince grandma that she wants to. I guess that lies entirely in what games are made. It's already been shown that grandma will play internet card games if she can manage basic internet usage, I imagine Nintendo could muster up an easier to use version of that, but will they?
It was a dark and stormy night, and there was a nearly limitless pot of fun on to boil.
The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest
"What to do with prodigies? Keep them busy"
Please don't do that. Let them do what they want to do. Give them free time. Real prodigies naturally know what it is they are good at it. Heck, I think this applies to most kids.
The best thing I think you can do with them is to pay attention to what it is they are doing on their own and help facilitate that to some extent without taking over what it is they are already doing.
I think the most dangerous thing affecting 'prodigies' is that they are put aside and told how smart they are. That's just plain wrong. It gives them a false sense of superiority and busts their natural incentive to be creative.
I think the major problem with this kind of thinking is that gifted programs generally are mostly just trying to take up more of a kid's time. They basically just seem to give extra homework, and are maybe advanced by a year or so in terms of what they are studying.
I don't know anybody who's public school 'gifted program' gave them what they really needed, self expression. Smart kids generally will give that to themselves, but gifted programs, in my opinion, actually stifle their ability to do so by trying to fill up all their time with academic busywork, as if somehow rigid structure is going to make them smarter.
Intelligence is next to nothing without creativity. The benefits of being a couple years ahead of your peers academically diminish greatly as you age. Missing out on the freetime of youth is something very difficult to make up for.
Countdown until loyalty cards with RFID and RFID sensors throughout store in..
5..
4..
3..
The major difference of course is that loyalty cards tend to offer pretty difficult to ignore discounts. If a website come out and said "Turn on your cookies to get great features like.. blah blah blah.." then it'd be almost exactly like loyalty cards now.
I pretty much feel that web surfing does decrease productivity overall.
What makes it so nefarious in my mind isn't the _amount_ of time spent web surfing, but how easy it is for a tiny little brain fart to turn into a web surfing session, and how that time is not the same as a normal break.
Next time you need to think over something before you do it, need a little break, are waiting for something to finish, etc, try talking a little walk and just get away from the computer.
I've found that web surfing tends to so completely lock up my mind that my subconcious problem solving ability is significantly reduced, but if I'm away from the computer, just kinda going 'duuuh', looking at some trees or chillin in a chair looking at the cieling, solutions to problems will often just dawn on me.
Also web surfing doesn't tend to be a very refreshing break, going from working to surfing to working again doesn't stretch you out, doesn't rest your eyes, barely rests your hands, etc.
I see all these unused rec rooms with couches, pool, foosball, etc, everybody is just sitting at their computer surfing or IMing instead of meeting up in those rooms to chill for a second. Heck, even without those, I barely see people hanging out near water coolers or coffee bars.
I think people never do so because they won't look busy, even though surfing/IMing is just as unproductive generally.
Basically Wal-mart won't carry AO.
Senate Testimony to that effect
That is all.
My sony laptop's power supply effectively has this. The point where it connects to the laptop can come out pretty easily, but if you are tripping on it at the perfect angle where it can't come out, the power supply box itself has a cable connection point that will unplug.
It'd be next to impossible to trip on it perfectly so that at least one couldn't come undone.
If anybody was on to you, they could sit down at your desk and do some nefarious things under your network login and you'd be ultra hosed.
Sure, you could pretty much no matter what with physical access to the machine, but not locking up at night would practically be inviting it.
The presentation was closed to the press. He told the reporters after the presentation. That seems pretty clear to me, especially seeing as how the Sun Valley is the name of the entire city.
Completely agree.
.. ?
There's what seems to be like a lot of natural light, there is some kind of rather public business looking door to the left in one of the photos, and they are all excessively low res. Do those tables have glass tops? Why are there so many empty seats?
That place looks like it has a much nicer setup then my last job in downtown san francisco.
The whole entire article doesn't ring true at all. It reads like something from a creative writing class. 'The gold comes back clean'
I was a pretty active planetside player for around a year on Markov... That game's development was just one massive mistake after another.
Everything was going great in beta, but the downhill started one -day 1- of the game's release. They made a massive and totally untested change, even the manual described the way the game was in beta.
In beta, you got -full- XP for every kill anybody in your squad made. On release day 1, they divided it by the number of players. On average, if you were used to 10 man squads, you got 1/10th the XP you were used to, drawing out the level up period by a factor of 10.
But that wasn't the only effect, there was a massive unintended consequence. You could still get pretty good XP if you sat inside of the Spheres of Influence while capturing bases.
Result: everybody and their mom was stuffing themselves into these spheres of influence constantly. They made up maybe 10% of the overall landmass and were very repetitive and uninteresting locations. There were only a few base designs and everything became focused on the rather weak indoor combat as opposed to the much more epic and cool outdoor vehicle combat.
The massive outdoor battles of the beta were gone and replaced by overcrowded lag fests that started crashing servers. Same number of players as beta, but because they pushed player density way up with this totally untested change, network traffic and server load increased exponentially since it normally didn't have to transmit the locations of players to so many people since they were more spread out.
The devs turned an absolute blind eye to how they had ruined the game and populations dropped by what seemed like 75% in the first month as people chose not to subscribe because the game was pretty much unplayable during prime time. Continents were crashing so often that the sanctuary continent you'd get kicked to when they crashed, would crash, and you couldn't login at all.
There were -more- people in the free public beta and it was very stable towards the end, how in the world were the devs so dense as to not to see what their change had done?
So basically there is very little hope of seeing the highest res data reintegrated? That is a massive bummer, I most likely will not be renewing my subscription.
I was a Keyhole subscriber for a little over a year before google bought them.
As nice of an improvement the Google Earth software is, overall the product has become worse since google bought it.
The overall resolution has been decreased from many covered areas and super high-res areas have been removed entirely.
You used to be able to clearly make out the exact shapes of cars in the SF Bay Area, now they are blurry colored blobs. In the super high res areas, you could pretty much identify the model of most cars and sometimes even make out individual people.
If you are a long time subscriber like me, google placates you with an option to login to the 'legacy' database.. but if you are new.. no dice.
Doesn't that seem strange? I really hope they reintegrate the higher res data, it is profoundly better.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that when they increased their coverage area they had technical issues with the highest res data, but it's been awhile now and they havn't changed their stance of "Oh.. umm yea..login to legacy.." since the new primary database came out.. so I'm fairly worried.
If we arbitrarly set time as a 4th dimension, which encompasses some arbitrary number of 3 dimensional states, space, then can't probability be a 5th dimension that contains all the different possible timelines?
We unintentionally move forward through the 4th dimension of time right now. Let's say we can move through time freely with a time machine, but by doing so there is an unintentional movement 5th dimensionally through possibility.
We see no time travelers because in our timeline the time machine is never created, but we might eventually create one, but every time we go back in time with it, we travel unintentionally through probability and there's probably already a bunch of time travellers there, we can't ever go back to our own original histories.
Given the fact that future games will most likely automatically update the firmware.. ( I wouldn't be in the least surprised if UMD movies do as well )
I have to choose whether I want to -buy- more software for their system or just keep the flexibility of homebrew... and.. since either direction means not going back to the other.. homebrew pretty much comes out on top.
and also (paraphrase) "Saying everybody is special is just another way of saying nobody is."
Maybe we're just paraphrasing the same line. I thought that was a fairly poignant bit as well.