I distinctly remember reading a graph published in Scientific American (Sorry, no reference!) many years ago which showed efficiency of travel by means of calories expended, per kilogram, per kilometre travelled.
It was much as one might expect, except at the extreme top end of efficiency: the most efficient form of movement on the planet is a man on a racing bicycle, but he is only slightly ahead of a fully laden 747 which flies in excess of 5000 miles.
Hmm...if 747s are so efficent compared to, say, freight trains or cargo ships, why do we still use them for everything? It's not like diesel is particularly cheap anymore. I smell bullshit. Let's see how the math comes out...
Freight train cross-country = ~(350 ton-miles of cargo per gallon of diesel) / (37000 kcal/gal) =.0094 ton-miles/kcal Bicyclist @ 20mph = ~(.08 tons * 20 mph) / (1100 kcal/hour) =.0015 ton-miles/kcal VW Golf Diesel = ~(.25 tons of cargo * 40 miles per gallon) / (37000 kcal/gal) =.00027 ton-miles/kcal 747-400 (freighter) max haul = ~(124 tons of cargo * 4400 miles / 57000 gallons of Jet-A) / (37500 kcal/gal) =.00026 ton-miles/kcal
Ok, not that surprising...a 747 freighter and a VW Golf are comparable. A modern freight train blows them away by a factor of 40 or so. Bicycling isn't bad, but it gets a boon from counting the bicyclist's weight, when the locomotive, car engine, and jet engines did not count as useful cargo. Analyzing a cargo bicycle or a rickshaw would be better, but I couldn't find kcal/hour figures on driving those.
Apple computer doesn't sell Beatles songs to anybody. With the exception of one collaboration album, the Beatles are not distributed via iTMS.
Even if they only sell one album, they are still selling Beatles songs. Remember that the overwhelming majority of artists in the iTMS music store only have one album in the store too.
Did you also have to pause for a bit when the author used the phrase, "a continuous function (one with a connected graph)" Until I pretended I were back in grade school, I was really wondering how we jumped to graphs.
Shut up, fools, 99+% of you are going to end up using Vista anyway.
Maybe...
I have no doubt that 99+% will still encounter situations where Windows is the best tool for the job. That doesn't mean Vista necessarily will be. XP is five years old, yet I constantly encounter businesses still using Win2K, simply because it does what they need it to do with a minimum of hassle. To put that upgrading slowdown in perspective, how many people were still using Windows 3.1 when XP was released? The previous pressure to upgrade is nowhere near that level.
The usability/stability/security of XP is certainly "good enough" from the perspective of most CFOs out there. Where is the incentive for Vista?
I wonder if all this negative press will affect their stock price [yahoo.com] in trading today. (Makes you feel sorry for their shareholders!)
1) Shareholders don't give a shit about daily price fluctuations. Stock traders do.
2) All this negative press? Yeah, Slashdot really is a cornerstone of the financial world. Especially regarding Microsoft, the insightful, objective, detailed, timely, and accurately predictive nature of Slashdot articles is known worldwide. On the other hand, this could just be a fark in a hurricane...I'm not sure.
the other infamous line 95% of the stuff on the Internet is junk anyhow (well show me the bright spark that has looked at more that a billion web pages to make that analysis, that everybody else repeats)
This has nothing to do with the internet specifically and much more to do with the fact that 90% of everything is crap.
While the mass produced crap deserves it's repuation as being better after urination than before
I brew my own but also drink that "mass produced crap". I used to be a beer snob, but over the years, I've learn that that "crap" has alot going for it.
-I can get it anywhere...any country, any state, any town I'm in, and I don't even need to ask. I know they have it. -Usually, I'm really just looking for something cold and wet. -Usually, the beer is just an accessory to the journey; it's not the destination. I'm more interesting in what's going on around me. -It is still booze. After a few drinks, it doesn't matter what you are drinking.
and most importantly...
-Mass produced beers don't attract a gaggle of shallow buffoons that judge people by what they drink.
If humans aren't involved in the letter opening process, it's time to have some real fun...see how well their machines handle foreign substances
1) Save the return envelope. 2) Fold up a blank piece of paper with a nice wad of chewing gum/peanut butter/diaper contents/etc 3) Mail your "application" 4) ??? 5) Profit
From what I can tell, there aren't any "locally restricted" options for any MMOG
The first word in MMOG is "massive", which isn't what you are looking for. If you want to get a small group together for a dungeon hack, why not fire up Neverwinter Nights and grab the latest top-quality mod?
Granted, WoW's EULA forbids your from both purchasing gold from a 3rd party and allowing someone else to play your account, even your brother (the account is considered exclusive and non-transferable).
What if the account is owned by a Limited Liability Partnership formed by you and your brother?
Its basically putting a human side on gold farming. Most of these chinese farmers folks live in the worst kind of situation and they do what they do for a living. You gotta do what you gotta do to put bread on the table right ?
Born with a silver spoon in your mouth? Since when has a desk job ever been the "worst kind of situation?" Boring as hell, sure, but as far as human employment preferences go, being seated with a roof over your head ranks rather highly.
People want to call it censorship and such. But what about Rockstar? Are they not being irresponsible to some extent making games like this?
Rockstar is being just as irresponsible as Mark Twain, Roy Rogers, Elvis Presley, Gary Gygax, Richard Pryor, Madonna, John Carmack, Jerry Bruckheimer, and everyone else who has wantonly corrupted the minds of innocent children throughout history, according to the lobbyists of the era.
They had separate computers set up in the lounge area for IM, web email, games, etc. They were outside the network, and the rules on using them were very lax. We could do whatever we wanted on them, but IT wouldn't come running all that quickly if they were broken. Basically, it was like having a foosball table, but far more practical.
The flipside of this policy was that all the other machines were for pure work-related usage...period. Company email was for company business...period. As wierd as it sounds, the employees really liked this setup.
It's the 21st century...employees have an expectation of being reachable by family and friends when they are on the job, even if it's not a life-threatening emergency. Companies that institute an outright ban on this behavior are living in the past. Companies that let a single computer be used for both personal and professional business are asking for a world of pain.
Like Morrowind before it, Oblivion is going to be a poorly realized, buggy, performance-hoging, bore of a game.
It seems you have already played the entire retail version of Oblivion; clearly you have far more specific insights to share. Do you realize how much money you could make writing magazine articles instead of whining on/.
Competition is good; too bad they aren't competing with ISPs from Japan or Korea, else we'd get getting 100M/100M connections for $10-15 a month.
I've been living in the US for 30 years, 5 different states, a dozen different addresses...and I have never been able to choose between two cable providers for a given location (actual coax-to-the-house cable). As far as I'm aware, consumers actually having a choice of cable providers is exceedingly rare in the US.
The only competitive pressure the providers face that I know of is having too many customers switch to DSL/satellite/what-not and being bought out by a more successful provider.
Yet somehow "all men are created equal" didn't stop France from imperial/colonial expansion in Africa, nor did it prevent France from trying to conquer Mexico, or the US the Phillipines.
Bypassing that cognitive dissonance is dead simple...you just define the natives/undesirables as "sub-human" and continue on your merry way. Every successful* culture in history did and still does this.
*I think most metrics of cultural dominance can be used here
Surely if you were able to take a baby from ancient times and transplant him to the present, he'd grow up to really be no different than the rest of us.
Is this a tenet of faith, or can you cite research supporting this claim? Science doesn't advance by upholding what you think is "patently obvious".
Perhaps this is testable...find the DNA of long-dead humans and clone them. One heaping of luck/tenacity finding the DNA and one heaping of Jurassic Park semi-sci-fi...shake, stir, and repeat a statistically significant number of times.
I'm not sure how to handle the meddling of those people running around claiming some invisible, disembodied patriarch told some old guy in Rome to tell everyone else this experiment is bad.
Even better, what about several of these running in a closed environment, like a plane in a 4 hour flight! re-cycled smog!
A methanol fuelcell for a laptop produces CO2 and water vapor at about the rate of a single human lung. The average human anus releases a far greater quantity of toxic gas than one of these fuelcells. If you are worried about smog in airplanes, processing the human flatus would yield more for your efforts.
So while this tax loophole sucks, it's $3 billion a year not $9 billion. That means it's a year's worth of taxes for 6.6 million people who make 20K, not 20 million.
Actually, it is a year's worth of taxes for 20 million people earning $20K/yr. Less than one in three citizens at that income level file with the IRS or otherwise pay federal income tax.
So, If I understand correctly, Jimmy Carter started the subsidy program to produce fuel the Nazi way - who would have guessed.
Do you want the world to ignore 15 years of scientific innovation from one of the world's largest economies simply because of the Nazi party? To answer your question, no, you do not understand correctly.
Judging by your post, I'd wager you don't understand anything at all, actually.
Dude, don't you know that if you buy a new computer for a specific game, you are ensuring that the game will be delayed? Hell, just my own experiences with this are sufficiently numerous to be statistically significant.
At least we all know that you are the reason Oblivion was delayed...thanks alot. Bastard.
Morrowing loaded so horrendously slow, I could decode complex cryptographical messages from zee Germans in between screens. And I don't even know ROT13! Also, the very fact that you could _often_ get stuck in the game was friggen terrible. Not only did you lose your last hours+ of gaming, you had to wait for it to load again after a reboot!
Slashdot Mirror
I distinctly remember reading a graph published in Scientific American (Sorry, no reference!) many years ago which showed efficiency of travel by means of calories expended, per kilogram, per kilometre travelled.
.0094 ton-miles/kcal .0015 ton-miles/kcal .00027 ton-miles/kcal .00026 ton-miles/kcal
It was much as one might expect, except at the extreme top end of efficiency: the most efficient form of movement on the planet is a man on a racing bicycle, but he is only slightly ahead of a fully laden 747 which flies in excess of 5000 miles.
Hmm...if 747s are so efficent compared to, say, freight trains or cargo ships, why do we still use them for everything? It's not like diesel is particularly cheap anymore. I smell bullshit. Let's see how the math comes out...
Freight train cross-country = ~(350 ton-miles of cargo per gallon of diesel) / (37000 kcal/gal) =
Bicyclist @ 20mph = ~(.08 tons * 20 mph) / (1100 kcal/hour) =
VW Golf Diesel = ~(.25 tons of cargo * 40 miles per gallon) / (37000 kcal/gal) =
747-400 (freighter) max haul = ~(124 tons of cargo * 4400 miles / 57000 gallons of Jet-A) / (37500 kcal/gal) =
Ok, not that surprising...a 747 freighter and a VW Golf are comparable. A modern freight train blows them away by a factor of 40 or so. Bicycling isn't bad, but it gets a boon from counting the bicyclist's weight, when the locomotive, car engine, and jet engines did not count as useful cargo. Analyzing a cargo bicycle or a rickshaw would be better, but I couldn't find kcal/hour figures on driving those.
Apple computer doesn't sell Beatles songs to anybody. With the exception of one collaboration album, the Beatles are not distributed via iTMS.
Even if they only sell one album, they are still selling Beatles songs. Remember that the overwhelming majority of artists in the iTMS music store only have one album in the store too.
Did you also have to pause for a bit when the author used the phrase, "a continuous function (one with a connected graph)" Until I pretended I were back in grade school, I was really wondering how we jumped to graphs.
I guess some folks are normal to reality.
Shut up, fools, 99+% of you are going to end up using Vista anyway.
Maybe...
I have no doubt that 99+% will still encounter situations where Windows is the best tool for the job. That doesn't mean Vista necessarily will be. XP is five years old, yet I constantly encounter businesses still using Win2K, simply because it does what they need it to do with a minimum of hassle. To put that upgrading slowdown in perspective, how many people were still using Windows 3.1 when XP was released? The previous pressure to upgrade is nowhere near that level.
The usability/stability/security of XP is certainly "good enough" from the perspective of most CFOs out there. Where is the incentive for Vista?
I wonder if all this negative press will affect their stock price [yahoo.com] in trading today. (Makes you feel sorry for their shareholders!)
1) Shareholders don't give a shit about daily price fluctuations. Stock traders do.
2) All this negative press? Yeah, Slashdot really is a cornerstone of the financial world. Especially regarding Microsoft, the insightful, objective, detailed, timely, and accurately predictive nature of Slashdot articles is known worldwide. On the other hand, this could just be a fark in a hurricane...I'm not sure.
Microsoft is pulling some staff from an finished project and assigning them to an unfinished project...targeting a similar market, no less...
Brilliant!
the other infamous line 95% of the stuff on the Internet is junk anyhow (well show me the bright spark that has looked at more that a billion web pages to make that analysis, that everybody else repeats)
This has nothing to do with the internet specifically and much more to do with the fact that 90% of everything is crap.
Sturgeon' Law...definitely in the top 10%
While the mass produced crap deserves it's repuation as being better after urination than before
I brew my own but also drink that "mass produced crap". I used to be a beer snob, but over the years, I've learn that that "crap" has alot going for it.
-I can get it anywhere...any country, any state, any town I'm in, and I don't even need to ask. I know they have it.
-Usually, I'm really just looking for something cold and wet.
-Usually, the beer is just an accessory to the journey; it's not the destination. I'm more interesting in what's going on around me.
-It is still booze. After a few drinks, it doesn't matter what you are drinking.
and most importantly...
-Mass produced beers don't attract a gaggle of shallow buffoons that judge people by what they drink.
Throwaway from "The Fugitive":
If they can dye the river green for St. Patty's Day, why can't they dye it blue every other day of the year?
If humans aren't involved in the letter opening process, it's time to have some real fun...see how well their machines handle foreign substances
1) Save the return envelope.
2) Fold up a blank piece of paper with a nice wad of chewing gum/peanut butter/diaper contents/etc
3) Mail your "application"
4) ???
5) Profit
From what I can tell, there aren't any "locally restricted" options for any MMOG
The first word in MMOG is "massive", which isn't what you are looking for. If you want to get a small group together for a dungeon hack, why not fire up Neverwinter Nights and grab the latest top-quality mod?
Granted, WoW's EULA forbids your from both purchasing gold from a 3rd party and allowing someone else to play your account, even your brother (the account is considered exclusive and non-transferable).
What if the account is owned by a Limited Liability Partnership formed by you and your brother?
Its basically putting a human side on gold farming. Most of these chinese farmers folks live in the worst kind of situation and they do what they do for a living. You gotta do what you gotta do to put bread on the table right ?
Born with a silver spoon in your mouth? Since when has a desk job ever been the "worst kind of situation?" Boring as hell, sure, but as far as human employment preferences go, being seated with a roof over your head ranks rather highly.
People want to call it censorship and such. But what about Rockstar? Are they not being irresponsible to some extent making games like this?
Rockstar is being just as irresponsible as Mark Twain, Roy Rogers, Elvis Presley, Gary Gygax, Richard Pryor, Madonna, John Carmack, Jerry Bruckheimer, and everyone else who has wantonly corrupted the minds of innocent children throughout history, according to the lobbyists of the era.
Yawn.
I've worked at one employer that understood.
They had separate computers set up in the lounge area for IM, web email, games, etc. They were outside the network, and the rules on using them were very lax. We could do whatever we wanted on them, but IT wouldn't come running all that quickly if they were broken. Basically, it was like having a foosball table, but far more practical.
The flipside of this policy was that all the other machines were for pure work-related usage...period. Company email was for company business...period. As wierd as it sounds, the employees really liked this setup.
It's the 21st century...employees have an expectation of being reachable by family and friends when they are on the job, even if it's not a life-threatening emergency. Companies that institute an outright ban on this behavior are living in the past. Companies that let a single computer be used for both personal and professional business are asking for a world of pain.
Like Morrowind before it, Oblivion is going to be a poorly realized, buggy, performance-hoging, bore of a game.
/.
It seems you have already played the entire retail version of Oblivion; clearly you have far more specific insights to share. Do you realize how much money you could make writing magazine articles instead of whining on
Competition is good; too bad they aren't competing with ISPs from Japan or Korea, else we'd get getting 100M/100M connections for $10-15 a month.
I've been living in the US for 30 years, 5 different states, a dozen different addresses...and I have never been able to choose between two cable providers for a given location (actual coax-to-the-house cable). As far as I'm aware, consumers actually having a choice of cable providers is exceedingly rare in the US.
The only competitive pressure the providers face that I know of is having too many customers switch to DSL/satellite/what-not and being bought out by a more successful provider.
Yet somehow "all men are created equal" didn't stop France from imperial/colonial expansion in Africa, nor did it prevent France from trying to conquer Mexico, or the US the Phillipines.
Bypassing that cognitive dissonance is dead simple...you just define the natives/undesirables as "sub-human" and continue on your merry way. Every successful* culture in history did and still does this.
*I think most metrics of cultural dominance can be used here
Surely if you were able to take a baby from ancient times and transplant him to the present, he'd grow up to really be no different than the rest of us.
Is this a tenet of faith, or can you cite research supporting this claim? Science doesn't advance by upholding what you think is "patently obvious".
Perhaps this is testable...find the DNA of long-dead humans and clone them. One heaping of luck/tenacity finding the DNA and one heaping of Jurassic Park semi-sci-fi...shake, stir, and repeat a statistically significant number of times.
I'm not sure how to handle the meddling of those people running around claiming some invisible, disembodied patriarch told some old guy in Rome to tell everyone else this experiment is bad.
Even better, what about several of these running in a closed environment, like a plane in a 4 hour flight! re-cycled smog!
A methanol fuelcell for a laptop produces CO2 and water vapor at about the rate of a single human lung. The average human anus releases a far greater quantity of toxic gas than one of these fuelcells. If you are worried about smog in airplanes, processing the human flatus would yield more for your efforts.
Laptops arent the only electronic device that benefits from small fuel-cells.
I can see Schick planning its response to the Gillette Turbo now....
So while this tax loophole sucks, it's $3 billion a year not $9 billion. That means it's a year's worth of taxes for 6.6 million people who make 20K, not 20 million.
Actually, it is a year's worth of taxes for 20 million people earning $20K/yr. Less than one in three citizens at that income level file with the IRS or otherwise pay federal income tax.
So, If I understand correctly, Jimmy Carter started the subsidy program to produce fuel the Nazi way - who would have guessed.
Do you want the world to ignore 15 years of scientific innovation from one of the world's largest economies simply because of the Nazi party? To answer your question, no, you do not understand correctly.
Judging by your post, I'd wager you don't understand anything at all, actually.
Dude, don't you know that if you buy a new computer for a specific game, you are ensuring that the game will be delayed? Hell, just my own experiences with this are sufficiently numerous to be statistically significant.
At least we all know that you are the reason Oblivion was delayed...thanks alot. Bastard.
Morrowing loaded so horrendously slow, I could decode complex cryptographical messages from zee Germans in between screens. And I don't even know ROT13! Also, the very fact that you could _often_ get stuck in the game was friggen terrible. Not only did you lose your last hours+ of gaming, you had to wait for it to load again after a reboot!
I had a computer that slow too once.