Here's a question though, sure they have stats now like only 50% of people completing Mass Effect, but how do they know more people used to finish games when those games were nearly always offline and hence they have no way of measuring completion rates of old games?
Dead on. I never totally finished any of the old Mario Brothers games, or Metroid, or Final Fantasy, etc. You could rarely save your place on the NES console; some had a small battery to hold your saved game, some would give you codes you could enter to get you back to where you were, but most did not. Shut off the console, and you would have to start over again. I remember putting sticky notes on my NES "Mom! Please don't turn this off!"
There's no way that more people finished games then, than do now.
This story is the first time I've seen the stupid "read more" link actually do something useful; displaying the second half (!!) of the post, rather than displaying the user's sig.
Also, "only" as much as a chest x-ray is still pretty horrifying. Every time I've gotten an x-ray, they drape a lead-filled shield over my crotch, and then the tech scurries out of the room before turning the beam on. We all know that you're not supposed to get too many doses of this. How often do you typically get an x-ray? Every few years, max?
So now we're supposed to get the same dose, multiple times a year? Do we get a little dose just waiting in line? What if you have to travel each week for work? If you develop carcinoma, can you file for workman's comp?
Yup, I'll opt to have a 19-yo grab my junk. Or not. The whole thing sucks.
That was the most heart-wrenching thing I've seen in a long time. The girl wasn't being bad or anything, she was just freaking out that this strange woman was poking her all over.
I'm driving for Christmas this year (12 hours) rather than fly. I want to visit an old friend of the family that lives in Alabama, and I'm in Chicago. I really hope they stop this BS before then. I'm just glad I don't have kids yet, I would probably assault a TSA agent if they did this to my child. You guys would write me in prison, right?
As far as I can tell, what you're looking for is just virtual hosting, with a few specific requirements. I would think you could find all of those requirements, although I'll concede that a lot of options available today kind of suck.
"Cloud Computing" in my understanding is in fact all about the automatic scaling. I want to do a proof of concept online, and then show it to a few potential clients. I want it to basically be turned off when I'm not using it, and scale up quickly if my clients start hammering it. I only want to pay for what gets used. If I'm not using it, sell that capacity to somebody else, and keep my costs down.
If your're a full-fledged business, and you want responsiveness, and you want to guarantee a certain level of service to your clients, then cloud hosting may not be the best bet, or even the cheapest. You could still use it for special cases though. I heard a neat example: this guy needed to convert several million images into thumbnails. He wrote a little service to do it, hosted it in the cloud, let it scale way up, and churned through all the images in a few days, and it cost him a few hundred bucks on his corporate credit card. The time and expense to set up dedicated servers for this one-off task would have been ridiculous.
Like every damn thing in computer science (and really, life) cloud computing is not the solution to all of our problems, and it's also not a complete waste of time. It's a useful tool, to be used when appropriate.
Ooo! Car analogy! If you commute every day by car, you should probably buy a car. If you take the train to work and just need the car for the occasional trip to Target, then a car-sharing service might work for you.
I like this explanation - it basically sums up why I like paper voting, not electronic voting. I'm a software developer with 10 years of experience, and I have no way of verifying what the voting machine is doing internally. With my paper ballot we can, in theory, recount the whole thing manually in front of cameras, and know what happened. I can explain this process to my grandmother, and she can understand it and participate in it. Using technology that is only comprehensible to a small number of people in society seems like the wrong approach.
I think a good compromise, since people seem so hell-bent on doing this, is a mixture of computer and paper. You can have computer kiosks, which have a lot of different languages, help for the sight-impaired, etc. You make your choices, and then it prints out a ballot for you. You take that ballot and drop it in the box. The machine can tally up votes quickly, but you can still audit specific machines, or do a full recount, etc.
Diebold gets paid - isn't that really the whole point?
If you're a fan of regressive taxation, then yes, it does rule. If you're not a fan of taxing the hell out of people that make minimum wage, then it sucks.
We had this exact discussion in my MBA class last night. My classmate was doing a presentation about an online shopping portal he wanted to make, and was planning to allow people to use it via SMS. Everybody jumped on him for using a "dying technology," one guy said "everyone I see has a smartphone, there's no point in catering to simple phones." Well, yeah. A lot of people going for their Master's degrees probably do have a smart phone. And in corporate jobs, most people do have smart phones now, either because they were given one for work, or because they bought it themselves. But the data says that 80% of cellular customers have simple phones, or "feature" phones, that don't have a data plan.
That's why you should use hard data, and not just look at what your friends are doing.
I wish I could worry about what my car sounds like in the winter. I stand on a 20-foot high metal platform with the wind cutting through my multiple layers of clothing, wondering when the damn train will get here.
Fair enough - you could easily chalk it up to the popularity of the iPhone with my geeky friends and coworkers. Them being on the clumsy side probably helps too.
Interestingly, if the Droid just stops working, then they'll always look good when you see them. The screen on my wife's Droid totally died, and had to be replaced. There was no option to just suffer with it. Hence, she has a shiny looking Droid, nobody knows any better.
I admit, I have no data to back this up, just anecdotal observations, but does it seem like a fair number of people walk around with iPhones with cracked screens? I don't think I've ever seen people walking around with Droids and Blackberry's with shattered screens. When it's happened to people I know, they'll admit that they dropped it, but I drop my Droid at least once a week, and so far it's OK (knock on wood).
I feel like the iPhone casing has gotten so minimal that there's not much to muffle the blow if you drop it on the edge - nothing left to give. I'll give Apple props for this though; even though the cracked screens look like crap, the phones still work, touch screen and all.
I work this way. Amazon's prices are on par with anybody else's, so any more I just go straight to Amazon to search and buy. For big purchases I may price shop elsewhere to be sure, but they've always been dependable. So now I have one place where pretty much all of my purchasing history is, which makes it really easy to do warranty exchanges, etc.
If Amazon brought a similarly good user experience to an Android App Store (The Amazoid store?) I would jump ship and never look at the crappy Google store again. I can see all the reviews? Search actually works? Maybe you'll give me weekly/monthly stats? You can easily contact the developer with issues? I'd be all over it.
Ideally, you could purchase on the site, and then just open the Amazoid store on your Droid, and it'd push the app down for you. This is how the Kindle app works, and works well.
Mods, the parent is not flamebait in my opinion. I think he makes a valid point about the Apple App Store being a single point of failure (if you will) that can be easily censored by governments. I hope somebody can fix this moderation.
I appreciate you sharing your opinion of e-readers, but please don't assume that you speak for some group of "serious" readers. My wife has a master's degree in English Literature, and as you might guess, she reads a LOT. And she's dying to get a Kindle, but it's been just a little bit too expensive until this latest version of the Kindle.
We live in Chicago, and the public libraries suck. They're generally pretty small, with a limited selection, and often the books that you would want to read are checked out, with at least one hold on them. We don't own a car and depend on public transportation, so it's tricky to get to the few large bookstores in the area. The local used bookstore that we went to from time to time closed.
So, from our point of view, a Kindle is a no-brainer. We can get two, and hook them into the same Amazon account, and read the same books. We can shop for books on the train, download them, and read them. When we travel, we can take a "stack" of books in one tiny device, instead of lugging a bunch of paper in our carry-on. The Kindle is lighter than any hard-cover book I've read, and the titles themselves are cheaper.
I understand being nostalgic about something, but books are going to be like records, probably in the next decade. Some artists still publish records, and there are little record stores, and some people covet their record players. Same with books: some will still be published, and there will be small specialized stores here and there, as well as online, but most of the reading population will move on to a more convenient form factor.
On the plus side, this may be the wedge that gets marijuana in the door; big agri-business, that donates to politicians and employs a bunch of people, that's too big to skirt taxes the way many small businesses could.
So long as small businesses can still grow small quantities too, I don't see the problem. I can legally brew small batches of beer in my home, but if I want to start producing and selling I have to get in compliance with the liquor board. Should be the same with pot.
Excellent point. I'm not a scientist (I don't call myself a "computer scientist") but I've followed scientific developments closely since I was a little kid. Even so, I find myself getting more and more skeptical about news that I hear. When we finally agreed that smoking tobacco did, in fact, cause cancer, and any "science" that tried to claim otherwise was bunk, the entire industry moved into food. As food science discovers new vitamins or micro-nutrients that are supposedly essential to health, these are repackaged into processes foods to make them more healthy. Decades later, we find out that these were of marginal benefit, or even dangerous. Vitamin-enriched (and high-sugar) breakfast cereals, omega-6 fatty acids were OK, but now will kill you, the simpler sugars in high fructose corn syrup are supposedly the same as real sugar, and so on.
The common theme is that behind the supposed scientific breakthroughs is an industry trying to make money. You can get all of the nutrients that you need eating fresh fruits, vegetables and meats - obviously, since we survived for a long time as a species without a factory putting our food together. If you're a processed food company though, it's not cost-effective to package an apple and sell it, you'll make more money synthesizing the taste of an apple, filling it with cheap grain, adding artificial vitamins, and selling it as Apple Jacks. Since you're spending millions on advertising anyway, why not support some scientific investigations on just how incredibly healthy your product is? And how to make it cheaper at the same time? Meanwhile, who the hell is going to pay for a study on how healthy the apple is?
So yeah, the public doesn't trust scientists. I barely do, even though I really love the scientific process and believe it's the only way to discover the truth about our world. But how do we know who to trust? And if scientists were horribly wrong about things like saturated fat 10 years ago, why should I believe them now?
Is there really much chance that the government is going to pull out of the business of marriage? In any reasonable timeframe? I think not, and I bet you would agree with me.
Given that that's the situation we're in, the only reasonable way to give homosexuals the same rights (or entitlements if you prefer) is to allow them to marry. This is a straight civil rights issue - heterosexual couples can marry, share property, visit their spouse and family in the hospital, share medical benefits, and so on. Homosexual couples generally cannot, unless their employer allows it, or their state specifically allows it, etc.
If you vote against same-sex marriage, you're screwing a bunch of people out of privileges that a bunch of other people in the community get for free. If it's more important to you to take a stand against government involvement in marriage, then good for you. I just hope there aren't a lot of people out there with your priorities.
Wow, that's a really specific allergy. I guess people can be allergic to about anything. But I've never heard of being allergic to a specific metal before.
It's really common, actually. It sounds like the GP has a stronger allergy to nickel, but lots of people are alergic to nickle in earings and other jewelry, as I am. I can't wear cheap costume earings, only stainless steel, or high grade silver or gold. Yeah, that's how I roll...
Sensitized individuals may show an allergy to nickel affecting their skin, also known as dermatitis. Sensitivity to nickel may also be present in patients with pompholyx. Nickel is an important cause of contact allergy, partly due to its use in jewellery intended for pierced ears.[43] Nickel allergies affecting pierced ears are often marked by itchy, red skin. Many earrings are now made nickel-free due to this problem. The amount of nickel which is allowed in products which come into contact with human skin is regulated by the European Union. In 2002 researchers found amounts of nickel being emitted by 1 and 2 Euro coins far in excess of those standards. This is believed to be due to a galvanic reaction
Do you guys not have issues with judges/sheriffs/etc being the buddies of the elected officials? The supposed advantage of having these officials elected is that you can boot them if they're not doing their job.
John "Heckuva job" Brown was appointed by Bush, and that didn't work out great.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a question though, sure they have stats now like only 50% of people completing Mass Effect, but how do they know more people used to finish games when those games were nearly always offline and hence they have no way of measuring completion rates of old games?
Dead on. I never totally finished any of the old Mario Brothers games, or Metroid, or Final Fantasy, etc. You could rarely save your place on the NES console; some had a small battery to hold your saved game, some would give you codes you could enter to get you back to where you were, but most did not. Shut off the console, and you would have to start over again. I remember putting sticky notes on my NES "Mom! Please don't turn this off!"
There's no way that more people finished games then, than do now.
This story is the first time I've seen the stupid "read more" link actually do something useful; displaying the second half (!!) of the post, rather than displaying the user's sig.
Also, "only" as much as a chest x-ray is still pretty horrifying. Every time I've gotten an x-ray, they drape a lead-filled shield over my crotch, and then the tech scurries out of the room before turning the beam on. We all know that you're not supposed to get too many doses of this. How often do you typically get an x-ray? Every few years, max?
So now we're supposed to get the same dose, multiple times a year? Do we get a little dose just waiting in line? What if you have to travel each week for work? If you develop carcinoma, can you file for workman's comp?
Yup, I'll opt to have a 19-yo grab my junk. Or not. The whole thing sucks.
The video was taken down from YouTube, but this guy has it for now:
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1258192/pg1
That was the most heart-wrenching thing I've seen in a long time. The girl wasn't being bad or anything, she was just freaking out that this strange woman was poking her all over.
I'm driving for Christmas this year (12 hours) rather than fly. I want to visit an old friend of the family that lives in Alabama, and I'm in Chicago. I really hope they stop this BS before then. I'm just glad I don't have kids yet, I would probably assault a TSA agent if they did this to my child. You guys would write me in prison, right?
As far as I can tell, what you're looking for is just virtual hosting, with a few specific requirements. I would think you could find all of those requirements, although I'll concede that a lot of options available today kind of suck.
"Cloud Computing" in my understanding is in fact all about the automatic scaling. I want to do a proof of concept online, and then show it to a few potential clients. I want it to basically be turned off when I'm not using it, and scale up quickly if my clients start hammering it. I only want to pay for what gets used. If I'm not using it, sell that capacity to somebody else, and keep my costs down.
If your're a full-fledged business, and you want responsiveness, and you want to guarantee a certain level of service to your clients, then cloud hosting may not be the best bet, or even the cheapest. You could still use it for special cases though. I heard a neat example: this guy needed to convert several million images into thumbnails. He wrote a little service to do it, hosted it in the cloud, let it scale way up, and churned through all the images in a few days, and it cost him a few hundred bucks on his corporate credit card. The time and expense to set up dedicated servers for this one-off task would have been ridiculous.
Like every damn thing in computer science (and really, life) cloud computing is not the solution to all of our problems, and it's also not a complete waste of time. It's a useful tool, to be used when appropriate.
Ooo! Car analogy! If you commute every day by car, you should probably buy a car. If you take the train to work and just need the car for the occasional trip to Target, then a car-sharing service might work for you.
I like this explanation - it basically sums up why I like paper voting, not electronic voting. I'm a software developer with 10 years of experience, and I have no way of verifying what the voting machine is doing internally. With my paper ballot we can, in theory, recount the whole thing manually in front of cameras, and know what happened. I can explain this process to my grandmother, and she can understand it and participate in it. Using technology that is only comprehensible to a small number of people in society seems like the wrong approach.
I think a good compromise, since people seem so hell-bent on doing this, is a mixture of computer and paper. You can have computer kiosks, which have a lot of different languages, help for the sight-impaired, etc. You make your choices, and then it prints out a ballot for you. You take that ballot and drop it in the box. The machine can tally up votes quickly, but you can still audit specific machines, or do a full recount, etc.
Diebold gets paid - isn't that really the whole point?
Great link, thanks.
I want this for my .sig now.
If you're a fan of regressive taxation, then yes, it does rule. If you're not a fan of taxing the hell out of people that make minimum wage, then it sucks.
We had this exact discussion in my MBA class last night. My classmate was doing a presentation about an online shopping portal he wanted to make, and was planning to allow people to use it via SMS. Everybody jumped on him for using a "dying technology," one guy said "everyone I see has a smartphone, there's no point in catering to simple phones." Well, yeah. A lot of people going for their Master's degrees probably do have a smart phone. And in corporate jobs, most people do have smart phones now, either because they were given one for work, or because they bought it themselves. But the data says that 80% of cellular customers have simple phones, or "feature" phones, that don't have a data plan.
That's why you should use hard data, and not just look at what your friends are doing.
I live in Chicago, you insensitive clod!
I wish I could worry about what my car sounds like in the winter. I stand on a 20-foot high metal platform with the wind cutting through my multiple layers of clothing, wondering when the damn train will get here.
Where are my mod points!? +1 for somehow cramming a car analogy in there.
Fair enough - you could easily chalk it up to the popularity of the iPhone with my geeky friends and coworkers. Them being on the clumsy side probably helps too.
Interestingly, if the Droid just stops working, then they'll always look good when you see them. The screen on my wife's Droid totally died, and had to be replaced. There was no option to just suffer with it. Hence, she has a shiny looking Droid, nobody knows any better.
I admit, I have no data to back this up, just anecdotal observations, but does it seem like a fair number of people walk around with iPhones with cracked screens? I don't think I've ever seen people walking around with Droids and Blackberry's with shattered screens. When it's happened to people I know, they'll admit that they dropped it, but I drop my Droid at least once a week, and so far it's OK (knock on wood).
I feel like the iPhone casing has gotten so minimal that there's not much to muffle the blow if you drop it on the edge - nothing left to give. I'll give Apple props for this though; even though the cracked screens look like crap, the phones still work, touch screen and all.
That "whooshing" sound you hear is either mankind's first warp drive coming online ... or just the sound of the joke going over your head.
I work this way. Amazon's prices are on par with anybody else's, so any more I just go straight to Amazon to search and buy. For big purchases I may price shop elsewhere to be sure, but they've always been dependable. So now I have one place where pretty much all of my purchasing history is, which makes it really easy to do warranty exchanges, etc.
If Amazon brought a similarly good user experience to an Android App Store (The Amazoid store?) I would jump ship and never look at the crappy Google store again. I can see all the reviews? Search actually works? Maybe you'll give me weekly/monthly stats? You can easily contact the developer with issues? I'd be all over it.
Ideally, you could purchase on the site, and then just open the Amazoid store on your Droid, and it'd push the app down for you. This is how the Kindle app works, and works well.
Mods, the parent is not flamebait in my opinion. I think he makes a valid point about the Apple App Store being a single point of failure (if you will) that can be easily censored by governments. I hope somebody can fix this moderation.
I appreciate you sharing your opinion of e-readers, but please don't assume that you speak for some group of "serious" readers. My wife has a master's degree in English Literature, and as you might guess, she reads a LOT. And she's dying to get a Kindle, but it's been just a little bit too expensive until this latest version of the Kindle.
We live in Chicago, and the public libraries suck. They're generally pretty small, with a limited selection, and often the books that you would want to read are checked out, with at least one hold on them. We don't own a car and depend on public transportation, so it's tricky to get to the few large bookstores in the area. The local used bookstore that we went to from time to time closed.
So, from our point of view, a Kindle is a no-brainer. We can get two, and hook them into the same Amazon account, and read the same books. We can shop for books on the train, download them, and read them. When we travel, we can take a "stack" of books in one tiny device, instead of lugging a bunch of paper in our carry-on. The Kindle is lighter than any hard-cover book I've read, and the titles themselves are cheaper.
I understand being nostalgic about something, but books are going to be like records, probably in the next decade. Some artists still publish records, and there are little record stores, and some people covet their record players. Same with books: some will still be published, and there will be small specialized stores here and there, as well as online, but most of the reading population will move on to a more convenient form factor.
On the plus side, this may be the wedge that gets marijuana in the door; big agri-business, that donates to politicians and employs a bunch of people, that's too big to skirt taxes the way many small businesses could. So long as small businesses can still grow small quantities too, I don't see the problem. I can legally brew small batches of beer in my home, but if I want to start producing and selling I have to get in compliance with the liquor board. Should be the same with pot.
Excellent point. I'm not a scientist (I don't call myself a "computer scientist") but I've followed scientific developments closely since I was a little kid. Even so, I find myself getting more and more skeptical about news that I hear. When we finally agreed that smoking tobacco did, in fact, cause cancer, and any "science" that tried to claim otherwise was bunk, the entire industry moved into food. As food science discovers new vitamins or micro-nutrients that are supposedly essential to health, these are repackaged into processes foods to make them more healthy. Decades later, we find out that these were of marginal benefit, or even dangerous. Vitamin-enriched (and high-sugar) breakfast cereals, omega-6 fatty acids were OK, but now will kill you, the simpler sugars in high fructose corn syrup are supposedly the same as real sugar, and so on.
The common theme is that behind the supposed scientific breakthroughs is an industry trying to make money. You can get all of the nutrients that you need eating fresh fruits, vegetables and meats - obviously, since we survived for a long time as a species without a factory putting our food together. If you're a processed food company though, it's not cost-effective to package an apple and sell it, you'll make more money synthesizing the taste of an apple, filling it with cheap grain, adding artificial vitamins, and selling it as Apple Jacks. Since you're spending millions on advertising anyway, why not support some scientific investigations on just how incredibly healthy your product is? And how to make it cheaper at the same time? Meanwhile, who the hell is going to pay for a study on how healthy the apple is?
So yeah, the public doesn't trust scientists. I barely do, even though I really love the scientific process and believe it's the only way to discover the truth about our world. But how do we know who to trust? And if scientists were horribly wrong about things like saturated fat 10 years ago, why should I believe them now?
If they don't find enough offensive content, will they have to create their own to justify their existence?
Have you seen the internet?
Is there really much chance that the government is going to pull out of the business of marriage? In any reasonable timeframe? I think not, and I bet you would agree with me.
Given that that's the situation we're in, the only reasonable way to give homosexuals the same rights (or entitlements if you prefer) is to allow them to marry. This is a straight civil rights issue - heterosexual couples can marry, share property, visit their spouse and family in the hospital, share medical benefits, and so on. Homosexual couples generally cannot, unless their employer allows it, or their state specifically allows it, etc.
If you vote against same-sex marriage, you're screwing a bunch of people out of privileges that a bunch of other people in the community get for free. If it's more important to you to take a stand against government involvement in marriage, then good for you. I just hope there aren't a lot of people out there with your priorities.
Wow, that's a really specific allergy. I guess people can be allergic to about anything. But I've never heard of being allergic to a specific metal before.
It's really common, actually. It sounds like the GP has a stronger allergy to nickel, but lots of people are alergic to nickle in earings and other jewelry, as I am. I can't wear cheap costume earings, only stainless steel, or high grade silver or gold. Yeah, that's how I roll...
Sensitized individuals may show an allergy to nickel affecting their skin, also known as dermatitis. Sensitivity to nickel may also be present in patients with pompholyx. Nickel is an important cause of contact allergy, partly due to its use in jewellery intended for pierced ears.[43] Nickel allergies affecting pierced ears are often marked by itchy, red skin. Many earrings are now made nickel-free due to this problem. The amount of nickel which is allowed in products which come into contact with human skin is regulated by the European Union. In 2002 researchers found amounts of nickel being emitted by 1 and 2 Euro coins far in excess of those standards. This is believed to be due to a galvanic reaction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel#Toxicity
My favorite:
It was voted Allergen of the Year in 2008 by the American Contact Dermatitis Society.
That's gotta be a fun awards ceremony..
Do you guys not have issues with judges/sheriffs/etc being the buddies of the elected officials? The supposed advantage of having these officials elected is that you can boot them if they're not doing their job.
John "Heckuva job" Brown was appointed by Bush, and that didn't work out great.
I wish I could mod you up - this is the only reason I understood the joke.
(shakes head sadly)