When you go to see a movie, a sports game, a concert, or any other form of hosted entertainment, would you claim that "no money is made" simply because the dollars only move from one pocket to another? It's amazing the entire entertainment industry still exists despite this dire situation...
So does anybody have a figure for how much energy is used, how much CO2 is produced and how much other waste is produced in order to generate a kW/h of nuclear power?
Mod me down all you like, it is still an old fashioned treasure hunt. Nothing new and nothing revolutionary.
They've added the collectable-card mechanism to this game. They are hoping players are willing to shell out wads of cash buying the exact same puzzles over and over on the off chance they might find a "rare" puzzle that will actually help them progress.
What's the point of sending FFT loads to the GPU in the first place?
This strikes me as the latest incarnation of co-processor fetish that has reared it's ugly head every few years for the past three decades. Except for device I/O, all the offloaded capabilites get folded back into the CPU for the next iteration. Crap like this has always been more trouble than it's worth.
Is there a good reason the GPU should be handling major FFT work?
IMHO, the "no viruses yet" for me isn't very telling. Most Slashdot readers have enough common sense that they would probably never get a virus even if they skipped the virus checkers entirely. I have never had a known virus on any machine I've used since the days of booting DOS off of floppies. Heck, even my parents who manage to load up their machine with spyware don't get viruses anymore (at least nothing the virus checkers actually catch). IMHO, most antivirus software has been useless for years now. It's software like Adaware and Spybot S&D that seem most important.
I've given up on virus scanners for my folks...they definitely cause more problems than they solve nowadays. Firefox/Adaware/Spybot all work damn well for keeping their machines in a working state. A good hosts file also keeps out 95% of the crap...if they can't see the ads, they can't click them.
No, it's more like saying childrens books should be rated R if page 100 is blank but if you shine uv light on it, it's a picture of Jenna Jameson.
The content IS there (although I'd debate said content is worth an M), it's just not normally visible. If someone produced an patch for oblivion that added porn videos to all the walls, then that content was not on the disk and shouldn't affect the rating.
This mod puts the the shirtless male torso texture onto a female character. If you squint really hard, and ignore that the shadows are all wrong, you might convince yourself you are looking at some pixelated nudity.
It's a real a stretch to call this "hidden porn". If that's the case, then any game with a female character model and some other flesh-colored object has "hidden porn". Just mod the game to apply texture A to model B, and...boobies!
The only accurate figure in reality is the number of pirated DVDs they have actually found in the possession of consumers, even copies still in the piraters hands don't count as they have as yet to be sold. Let's set that number and compare the diffrence between the guestimate and actual numbers, I wouldn't be suprised if the ratio was something like 10,000 or even 100,000 to one.
To be fair, outside of the US, the EU, and Japan, it's really hard to find authentic DVDs. Practically every movie sold in the rest of the world is a bootleg. If the **AAs hadn't had their heads up their asses when internet distribution got practical, I might even have an iota of sympathy for them.
If 15% of potential revenue is lost from physical media not making the trip from factory to customer in useable form, regular musicians need to put together a class action suit addressing Sony's gross incompetence.
Removing the AC sure does. 10% better mileage on the outside.
You'll piss away that 10% a savings when the employees drive with the windows open on that AC-less car. Rolling down the windows at highway speeds can easily increase gas usage by 20% or more.
Well what ARE you more concerned about? Your privacy, or the safety of America's children?
If America sacrifices its ideals and stops being America, there won't be any "American" children to protect. Your proposal is not a solution to the problem.
If the real problem in protecting children from predators or child pornographers is family or acquaintences and not random scary internet people, how can we take steps to combat that problem without resorting to passing globally-invasive internet legislation just to make it look like we're doing something?
Raising kids w/o television is going to be an interesting ride, though.
Its probably going to be easier than you expect. When you and I were growing up (assuming your age from wife/no kids/planning), everybody watched TV. Lunchroom chatter was about TV. Sometimes I watched stuff I didn't care about just to not be left out of the next day's conversation.
Nowadays, why would kids watch TV when they can sit at the computer after school and stay in constant contact? Now the responses to "Did you see (modern replacement for SNL)?" will be "Nah, I was busy", "I tivoed it", "I watched (something else from the 500 channel) instead", "Who cares".
The golden age of TV is defintely over. Our kids probably won't even care.
There has been a massive shift in behavior and values in the last few decades, and little of that has been for the good. People are more violent and less happy.
You need to study some history. Human behavior has not changed one iota in the "behavior and values" department for 10,000 years. Of course, that includes the fact that there is always some Chicken Little running around telling everyone that life is getting worse.
Living for 70+ years and having far more leisure time than our ancestors could dream about certainly sounds harsh when you are dealing with puberty, but don't worry...it will pass.
And you talk about suing over copyright infringement. Suppose some hobbyist named Bill McDonald had bought McDonalds.com before McDonald's decided to get on the internet scene. Should they be able to sue Bill for copyright infringement? I should hope not.
As far as mcdonalds.com goes, it should probably go to McDonalds Inc. instead of Bill if we examine this simply from an efficiency perspective. Almost every reader visiting the page is expecting the company, not the hobbyist. DNS is, after all, designed to make things easy on the reader.
A more interesting example would be delta.com. Airplanes? Faucets? Power Tools? Most traffic is going to Delta Airlines, but there are still plenty of people in the world whose first reaction to "Delta" is thinking of some other company.
Keep in mind this a Tom's Hardware article. The National Inquirer has more credibility.
Notice that the article only posts the results from one review model and one retail model. For all we know, the author could have cherry-picked the retail model just to create a lucrative, ad-revenue-whoring "scandal". Given Tom's history, that's the more likely explanation.
Seriously, what can be possibly better than electric trains?
Hmm...I can think of alot of things.
I guess you are just thinking transport systems, so here's one: Star Trek-style transporters. I think those beat the crap out of electric trains any day.
to be a dominant economic and technological force. They already know we rely on them for cheap manufacturing.
Countries can't effectively be both. As the education and productivity of a workforce rises, so do labor costs. It won't be long until China is outsourcing labor-intensive manufacturing to the cheap labor pool of southeast Asia. After that, when Vietman/Laos/Cambodia/Malaysia/etc is no longer cost-effective, maybe Central Africa will get its chance at the 20th century.
What I find most offensive is when words that are not verbs, are made into verbs
"I'm most offended by the verbing of nouns."...much simpler.
English is flexible...change it to suit your needs. If verbing nouns or nouning adjectives helps you get your message across, don't let the rules of grammer stop you. Those 'rules' only exist to aid communication by standardization. When the rules get in the way, toss them out the window.
Consider grammar as a pile of RFCs, not the ten commandments. If you need a new rule, make one.
My own father, a smart enough man normally, felt the need to sit me down and ask me if I understood that I wasn't really casting spells and fighting monsters.
Be thankful...you've got a good father. The question may have sounded stupid to you, but if your dad actually bothered to ask you what you are up to, get your feedback on why it interests you, and trust your judgement as to whether it was a healthy hobby, I hope you are walking around knowing he's the shit.
Wal-Mart isn't strong because of it's buying power - it is strong because of it's selling power.
Add in the oft-forgotten corollary...Walmart succeeds because it provides better service and better products than the small retailers it drives out of business. Before you rant, remember that the only reasonable metric of a product's worth is whether people will fork over cash in exchange for it. Walmart didn't get huge because nobody shopped there.
For as much as people moan about the Walmart effect, keep in mind that at the end of the day, no retailer has the power to supress a true quality product. If a product has merit, it will sell...whether Walmart stocks it or not. As far as video games go, the Walmart effect will be irrelevant in the reasonably near future, since digital content has less need for a B&M retailer than almost anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
With gambling, on average, no money is made.
When you go to see a movie, a sports game, a concert, or any other form of hosted entertainment, would you claim that "no money is made" simply because the dollars only move from one pocket to another? It's amazing the entire entertainment industry still exists despite this dire situation...
Give it another fortnight, and there will be nuclear fusion power plants everywhere.
That's as true today as it was a fortnight ago.
So does anybody have a figure for how much energy is used, how much CO2 is produced and how much other waste is produced in order to generate a kW/h of nuclear power?
Is the centrifuge nuclear powered?
Mod me down all you like, it is still an old fashioned treasure hunt. Nothing new and nothing revolutionary.
They've added the collectable-card mechanism to this game. They are hoping players are willing to shell out wads of cash buying the exact same puzzles over and over on the off chance they might find a "rare" puzzle that will actually help them progress.
It's a great idea...for 1996.
Ok, stupid question time:
What's the point of sending FFT loads to the GPU in the first place?
This strikes me as the latest incarnation of co-processor fetish that has reared it's ugly head every few years for the past three decades. Except for device I/O, all the offloaded capabilites get folded back into the CPU for the next iteration. Crap like this has always been more trouble than it's worth.
Is there a good reason the GPU should be handling major FFT work?
Yeah, but it's tough getting relocations when they'll have to rent, no matter what salary you can offer them.
IMHO, the "no viruses yet" for me isn't very telling. Most Slashdot readers have enough common sense that they would probably never get a virus even if they skipped the virus checkers entirely. I have never had a known virus on any machine I've used since the days of booting DOS off of floppies. Heck, even my parents who manage to load up their machine with spyware don't get viruses anymore (at least nothing the virus checkers actually catch). IMHO, most antivirus software has been useless for years now. It's software like Adaware and Spybot S&D that seem most important.
I've given up on virus scanners for my folks...they definitely cause more problems than they solve nowadays. Firefox/Adaware/Spybot all work damn well for keeping their machines in a working state. A good hosts file also keeps out 95% of the crap...if they can't see the ads, they can't click them.
No, it's more like saying childrens books should be rated R if page 100 is blank but if you shine uv light on it, it's a picture of Jenna Jameson.
The content IS there (although I'd debate said content is worth an M), it's just not normally visible. If someone produced an patch for oblivion that added porn videos to all the walls, then that content was not on the disk and shouldn't affect the rating.
This mod puts the the shirtless male torso texture onto a female character. If you squint really hard, and ignore that the shadows are all wrong, you might convince yourself you are looking at some pixelated nudity.
It's a real a stretch to call this "hidden porn". If that's the case, then any game with a female character model and some other flesh-colored object has "hidden porn". Just mod the game to apply texture A to model B, and...boobies!
Polyorcamy would warrant mature in this political climate.
What's a polyorchid orc to do?
The only accurate figure in reality is the number of pirated DVDs they have actually found in the possession of consumers, even copies still in the piraters hands don't count as they have as yet to be sold. Let's set that number and compare the diffrence between the guestimate and actual numbers, I wouldn't be suprised if the ratio was something like 10,000 or even 100,000 to one.
To be fair, outside of the US, the EU, and Japan, it's really hard to find authentic DVDs. Practically every movie sold in the rest of the world is a bootleg. If the **AAs hadn't had their heads up their asses when internet distribution got practical, I might even have an iota of sympathy for them.
Once they started suing customers...eh, fuck 'em.
15% for breakage? WTF?
If 15% of potential revenue is lost from physical media not making the trip from factory to customer in useable form, regular musicians need to put together a class action suit addressing Sony's gross incompetence.
Sony...home of One Sigma Quality.
Removing the AC sure does. 10% better mileage on the outside.
You'll piss away that 10% a savings when the employees drive with the windows open on that AC-less car. Rolling down the windows at highway speeds can easily increase gas usage by 20% or more.
Well what ARE you more concerned about? Your privacy, or the safety of America's children?
If America sacrifices its ideals and stops being America, there won't be any "American" children to protect. Your proposal is not a solution to the problem.
If the real problem in protecting children from predators or child pornographers is family or acquaintences and not random scary internet people, how can we take steps to combat that problem without resorting to passing globally-invasive internet legislation just to make it look like we're doing something?
Government cameras in every household, duh.
Add in golf-cart and clubs, plus drinks afterwards, it's easy to drop $120 to go golfing.
I take it you haven't been to a baseball game lately either.
Raising kids w/o television is going to be an interesting ride, though.
Its probably going to be easier than you expect. When you and I were growing up (assuming your age from wife/no kids/planning), everybody watched TV. Lunchroom chatter was about TV. Sometimes I watched stuff I didn't care about just to not be left out of the next day's conversation.
Nowadays, why would kids watch TV when they can sit at the computer after school and stay in constant contact? Now the responses to "Did you see (modern replacement for SNL)?" will be "Nah, I was busy", "I tivoed it", "I watched (something else from the 500 channel) instead", "Who cares".
The golden age of TV is defintely over. Our kids probably won't even care.
There has been a massive shift in behavior and values in the last few decades, and little of that has been for the good. People are more violent and less happy.
You need to study some history. Human behavior has not changed one iota in the "behavior and values" department for 10,000 years. Of course, that includes the fact that there is always some Chicken Little running around telling everyone that life is getting worse.
Living for 70+ years and having far more leisure time than our ancestors could dream about certainly sounds harsh when you are dealing with puberty, but don't worry...it will pass.
And you talk about suing over copyright infringement. Suppose some hobbyist named Bill McDonald had bought McDonalds.com before McDonald's decided to get on the internet scene. Should they be able to sue Bill for copyright infringement? I should hope not.
As far as mcdonalds.com goes, it should probably go to McDonalds Inc. instead of Bill if we examine this simply from an efficiency perspective. Almost every reader visiting the page is expecting the company, not the hobbyist. DNS is, after all, designed to make things easy on the reader.
A more interesting example would be delta.com. Airplanes? Faucets? Power Tools? Most traffic is going to Delta Airlines, but there are still plenty of people in the world whose first reaction to "Delta" is thinking of some other company.
Keep in mind this a Tom's Hardware article. The National Inquirer has more credibility.
Notice that the article only posts the results from one review model and one retail model. For all we know, the author could have cherry-picked the retail model just to create a lucrative, ad-revenue-whoring "scandal". Given Tom's history, that's the more likely explanation.
Seriously, what can be possibly better than electric trains?
Hmm...I can think of alot of things.
I guess you are just thinking transport systems, so here's one: Star Trek-style transporters. I think those beat the crap out of electric trains any day.
to be a dominant economic and technological force. They already know we rely on them for cheap manufacturing.
Countries can't effectively be both. As the education and productivity of a workforce rises, so do labor costs. It won't be long until China is outsourcing labor-intensive manufacturing to the cheap labor pool of southeast Asia. After that, when Vietman/Laos/Cambodia/Malaysia/etc is no longer cost-effective, maybe Central Africa will get its chance at the 20th century.
What I find most offensive is when words that are not verbs, are made into verbs
...much simpler.
"I'm most offended by the verbing of nouns."
English is flexible...change it to suit your needs. If verbing nouns or nouning adjectives helps you get your message across, don't let the rules of grammer stop you. Those 'rules' only exist to aid communication by standardization. When the rules get in the way, toss them out the window.
Consider grammar as a pile of RFCs, not the ten commandments. If you need a new rule, make one.
My own father, a smart enough man normally, felt the need to sit me down and ask me if I understood that I wasn't really casting spells and fighting monsters.
Be thankful...you've got a good father. The question may have sounded stupid to you, but if your dad actually bothered to ask you what you are up to, get your feedback on why it interests you, and trust your judgement as to whether it was a healthy hobby, I hope you are walking around knowing he's the shit.
Hell, invite him to join your next session.
Wal-Mart isn't strong because of it's buying power - it is strong because of it's selling power.
Add in the oft-forgotten corollary...Walmart succeeds because it provides better service and better products than the small retailers it drives out of business. Before you rant, remember that the only reasonable metric of a product's worth is whether people will fork over cash in exchange for it. Walmart didn't get huge because nobody shopped there.
For as much as people moan about the Walmart effect, keep in mind that at the end of the day, no retailer has the power to supress a true quality product. If a product has merit, it will sell...whether Walmart stocks it or not. As far as video games go, the Walmart effect will be irrelevant in the reasonably near future, since digital content has less need for a B&M retailer than almost anything else.
It would seem that apple corps really will be laughed out of court.
That tends not to happen those with Knighthood.