I tip between 15% and 20%, sometimes more if I don't feel like asking for change... but in all honesty I really hate the tipping culture.
I hate it, because it is used as a substitute for proper wages and staff management. I hate the fact that I'm expected to tip when I get good service, yet I get labeled an asshole if I don't tip an awful host. I wish the restaurants/bars would fire the bad staff, and pay their good waiters decent money. Up your prices by 10% and give it directly to the staff! That way if someone does their job properly, they are properly compensated. If they are exceptional, nothing prevents me from tipping on top of that, but it should not be an expectation.
Do you tip your sysadmin when he (she?) delivers outstanding service and perfect uptime ? No. Why not ? After all, it takes skill, perseverance and patience to keep a Windows box running 24/7, just like a waiter needs skill, perseverance and patience to peddle food back and forth all day.
So, the next time I do tech support for a bar or restaurant, if they don't give me a 15% tip, I'll badmouth them and install viruses in their POS terminals. Sounds good ?
Big disclaimer: French is (or was) my first language. I live 100% in English, 'cept when I visit long-time friends or family.
As an ex-Quebecer, I have absolutely no pity for unilingual French speakers. English is the de facto language of business and of the world. Chinese people speak English. Indian people speak English. Dutch people speak English. Hell, Chinese people IN QUEBEC speak French and English. So why the hell do less than half of all Quebecers speak any English ? I'll be quite frank: if they're too dumb to learn English, they're too dumb for me to give a damn. I make one very narrow exception, and that's for people who didn't have English classes in school at the time - that was a while ago!
Now don't get me wrong, I think French is a lovely, expressive, intelligent language, and I would never want it to vanish. Even our cussing is artful and rich! But less than two percent of the whole world speaks French, and the great majority of them live in France, about 90% of all French speakers, to be exact. There are roughly twice as many French speakers in France as there are Canadians in Canada! So really, why does our so-called Government force every single business to do backflips for this tiny demographic sliver of society ?
I don't know of any other non-religious nation that is so anal about language. Do English people in Japan whine to the government about not being about to read anything on the goddamned menus ? No.
Who cares about French outside of Quebec ? Sure, it would suck for Quebecers but somehow I don't think they would care that much in the first place. They're certainly not anywhere near the front of the technology curve, their strengths lie elsewhere.
Me, I'm in perfectly English-speaking Ontario, and I'd like a unilingual Inspiron N, thank you.
Having to authenticate to a remote server every time you want to play, and being locked out of your game if either your connection or the servers' goes down, is a wholly different beast.
And as others have mentioned, LAN gaming should not involve remote authentication. In fact, a lot of LAN parties don't even have net access, especially if they're renting the venue, or sometimes you just don't feel like dicking with your iptables for a bunch of greasy IRC buddies who are likely to surf kiddie/horse/goatse pr0n.
Just because you have smart people in the same building, doesn't mean the entire staff is mentally capable. They hire people in the want-ads just like any other company.
What everyone seems to forget is that consoles are the ultimate in DRM
Yes, but a console doesn't have the annoying habit of mangling your OS and making your work PC slow and unstable.
And I'm pretty damned sure no current console harbors this mindless "10-day activation" scheme. Consoles just check to see if your game disc is legitimate, so you need that disc in the drive. Well I'd much rather put up with needing the disc, than having some slop-fest of a kernel hack phone home every other week to ensure I still have the right to play a stupid game.
PC gamers are so arrogant about their graphics on the handful of games and get violent if you suggest that mouse and keyboard is not the solution to the world's problems
Well that's kind of the whole point, no ? I've got this beefy media workstation with gobs of ram, disk and CPUs. I can add a graphics card to it, that costs less than the average console, and reap superior graphics. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Of course, nothing's preventing the console makers from selling/supporting keyboards and mice, for those people who do not need nor want a high-end PC.
Me, I have the consoles, but I still prefer PC games. That's partly because the wife hogs the TV with her gazillion dramas and reality shows, and also partly because I have a bitchin' workstation with a really big LCD that pwns our TV anyway. Plus I can fire up a game in a window, while keeping an eye on a long render or network job, chatting on ICQ and reading a walkthrough/strategy guide (yes, I suck!) - all without moving my hands away from the keyboard and/or mouse.
If I had a simpler life where I could genuinely devote unshared time to gaming, I might be happy with consoles, but seeing how I've been pushing bits around since the early 80s, I don't see how (or why) I'd ever change.
I'll one up you: I'm waiting for Spore to be cracked, because there is no way I'm going to tolerate that ridiculous 10-day reactivation DRM. I'll gladly buy the game, but only if I can play it without being encumbered with SecuROM, which is the most invasive piece of filth ever coded. It is like an executable goatse.cx
Seeing how Bioshock employs some of the most insulting DRM available today (SecuROM), they can't actually blame it on piracy, at least not without getting lynched by hordes of frustrated game owners.
I'd guess that the specs are something like a top of the line dual 64 bit processor with 2 or more gigabytes of RAM, ultra-high-end video cards and tons of hard disk space.
So basically, last year's typical desktop ?:P
I realize I'm a PC freak, but I've been on 4+ cores and 8+ GB for several years. That said, I don't think one should need that much machine just to run a web browser, but clearly Microsoft have never been too concerned with efficiency.
Me, I think Firefox is bloated. I don't care that it's caching rendered pages, I don't like it using up 200+ MB just to display HTML and run a few simple Javascripts. It seems like a desperate tradeoff, given how a high-memory machine is also likely to have a fast multi-core CPU anyway, so why jump through hoops to save 2/10ths of a second ? I'm less concerned with sub-second performance than I am with the actual rendering capability. A fast browser is worthless if it fails to render properly.
Anyone here know how they calculate "impact probability" ? I mean, my poor man's logic seems to think you either hit something, or you don't. Bool 1, or Bool 0.
If you miss something by a mile, how does that wind up being a 1 in 72 probability ? No offense to the space buffs, of which I am not one, but that sounds like game show odds to me: "You're bound to lose, but let's all act excited anyway!"
Okay, I realize most of/. is too trigger-happy to actually play devil's advocate, but let's look at the problem here: this article is about Quebec.
Quebec is the most highly taxed province in Canada. Despite this, it's also home of the worst roads and one of the lowest average income levels (competing with the Maritimes). Quebec's government is great to you if you're retarded, pregnant, have a selectively recurring "back injury" or are otherwise unable/unwilling to work, as it will steal from the rich and give to the leeches. Now I'm not saying those people don't need help, but there seems to be a lot more abuse in Quebec than in any other province.
Now the government takes a chunk of money out of everyone's paycheck... fine. Why do they have to go and take more money out of business income ? Do businesses ever benefit from the Quebec government's activities ? Not really, unless your business involves processing short-term disability assessments or discounted legal aid.
Let's think about it for a moment: these "zappers" had to be written by someone. In some instances, I'm sure it was a friend or relative that quickly hacked up a sloppy script, but many of these owners will have paid someone to do it. What does that tell us ? That means the cost of hiring a hacker is less than the perceived unfairness of the tax system. I don't know about you, but if I were knowingly writing one such "zapper", I'd ask for quite a bit more cash than I normally charge, due to the risk and severity of getting caught. For these black-hat services to be justifiable, that means the tax must be ridiculously high.
Combine that with the insulting practice of taxing wait staff based on 15% tips (yeah, right!), and you'll quickly realize why restaurant owners are fed up with the government. These "digital signature devices" they speak of, that's just not going to happen. Not only are the devices going to be unwieldy and largely incompatible with the large variety of restaurant software, but they will simply not be welcomed in these businesses. You'll either see a lot of restaurants close down and move out-of-province, or they will simply continue to operate without the device, a form of silent protest. Either way, RevQuebec won't be allowed to further their rape of the provincial economy.
IMHO I don't believe that "everyone has their price," but I could just be naive.
As much as I wish there were any bit of integrity left in humanity, I have to say you're probably just slightly more naive than average. Those who cannot be bought, can be silenced via threats, which come in many forms, many of them 100% legal in today's environment.
But I've got this Jump To Conclusions mat that's so much fun to play!
Conspiracy or not, the guy probably wouldn't be dead if the cops hadn't arrested him. That's a big blunder for the already tense environment over there. It doesn't really matter who shot, what matters is WHERE the guy was when he was shot. If you're in police custody and they fail to ensure your safety, that's really bad!
Ok sure, so they've taken a page from AMD's book. Care to show me how that matters to anyone ? I know this represents several changes in the CPU and chipset, but in the end it's just a bus. It's not like the FSB was at any significant disadvantage vs Hypertransport. Core2's don't have anywhere near as many stalling problems as the old Netburst, so the FSB has been quite satisfactory so far.
Intel seems to like talking about the future... Nehalem, Nehalem... I've been hearing about it for five years now. If Nehalem's going to be god's gift to PC freaks, then why are they wasting everyone's time and money with all these in-between products that are hardly distinguishable from the old stuff ? P35 can do just about everything the X38/X48 do, but few people care to spend their money on disappointing DDR3, at least not until the chipsets figure out how to actually make it faster.
I must admit, my knowledge of Vapochill / Prometeia is quite dated, back when they sounded like old fridges and you had to give it 5-10 minutes before booting your PC. I guess they faded into obscurity a few years ago and I assumed they were dead.
Personally, I wish I could seize control of CoolIT and bump up their build quality several notches. I've owned both the puny Freezone and the Elite, and while they're both decent coolers, they both have stupid things that bother me - like the idiotic 92mm fan on the old one, who the $*@% has 92mm fans anymore ? And on the new one, well they managed to find the noisiest freakin' 120mm fan I've ever heard, and it's a pain to swap it out.
Quiet computing is within reach, but it seems everyone is doing it wrong. The fact that someone can take any of these high-end coolers, spend $20 and an hour of modding work, and end up with a far superior result, to me that's proof that these companies are full of fail. Why can't they make it perfect from the factory ? Why is it that an illiterate teenager on XtremeSystems.org can do a better job than the guys that built it in the first place ?
Modest socialism is the driving force behind many successful societies. Why else would we want governments in the first place ? Think of it as a co-op. If you think co-ops are nothing good, well them I'm wasting my time with you.
Seriously, big business can't be competitive in markets where any Joe with a chequing account can participate. There is little advantage to being a big company, because everyone ends up paying Flextronics and others to do the actual assembly. Dell, HP and others do it directly, while the small guys do it via Asus and Foxconn.
The slightly increased cost of having a middle-brand pales in comparison to the long chain of inefficiency that scales geometrically with the number of employees in a company.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because that whooshing sound has rendered me hard of hearing.
Seriously, anyone got the Simple English version ?
[rubs eyes] WTF!? It's not even on the shelves yet!
So why does EA even try ?
That's what the file cache is for. I have hundreds of gigs of disk space, but only a few gigs of Ram, so get the hell out of my Ram!
I tip between 15% and 20%, sometimes more if I don't feel like asking for change... but in all honesty I really hate the tipping culture.
I hate it, because it is used as a substitute for proper wages and staff management. I hate the fact that I'm expected to tip when I get good service, yet I get labeled an asshole if I don't tip an awful host. I wish the restaurants/bars would fire the bad staff, and pay their good waiters decent money. Up your prices by 10% and give it directly to the staff! That way if someone does their job properly, they are properly compensated. If they are exceptional, nothing prevents me from tipping on top of that, but it should not be an expectation.
Do you tip your sysadmin when he (she?) delivers outstanding service and perfect uptime ? No. Why not ? After all, it takes skill, perseverance and patience to keep a Windows box running 24/7, just like a waiter needs skill, perseverance and patience to peddle food back and forth all day.
So, the next time I do tech support for a bar or restaurant, if they don't give me a 15% tip, I'll badmouth them and install viruses in their POS terminals. Sounds good ?
Thank you for that excellent reply. Makes perfect sense!
Big disclaimer: French is (or was) my first language. I live 100% in English, 'cept when I visit long-time friends or family.
As an ex-Quebecer, I have absolutely no pity for unilingual French speakers. English is the de facto language of business and of the world. Chinese people speak English. Indian people speak English. Dutch people speak English. Hell, Chinese people IN QUEBEC speak French and English. So why the hell do less than half of all Quebecers speak any English ? I'll be quite frank: if they're too dumb to learn English, they're too dumb for me to give a damn. I make one very narrow exception, and that's for people who didn't have English classes in school at the time - that was a while ago!
Now don't get me wrong, I think French is a lovely, expressive, intelligent language, and I would never want it to vanish. Even our cussing is artful and rich! But less than two percent of the whole world speaks French, and the great majority of them live in France, about 90% of all French speakers, to be exact. There are roughly twice as many French speakers in France as there are Canadians in Canada! So really, why does our so-called Government force every single business to do backflips for this tiny demographic sliver of society ?
I don't know of any other non-religious nation that is so anal about language. Do English people in Japan whine to the government about not being about to read anything on the goddamned menus ? No.
Who cares about French outside of Quebec ? Sure, it would suck for Quebecers but somehow I don't think they would care that much in the first place. They're certainly not anywhere near the front of the technology curve, their strengths lie elsewhere.
Me, I'm in perfectly English-speaking Ontario, and I'd like a unilingual Inspiron N, thank you.
Entering a 20-character key once, that's fine.
Having to authenticate to a remote server every time you want to play, and being locked out of your game if either your connection or the servers' goes down, is a wholly different beast.
And as others have mentioned, LAN gaming should not involve remote authentication. In fact, a lot of LAN parties don't even have net access, especially if they're renting the venue, or sometimes you just don't feel like dicking with your iptables for a bunch of greasy IRC buddies who are likely to surf kiddie/horse/goatse pr0n.
Just because you have smart people in the same building, doesn't mean the entire staff is mentally capable. They hire people in the want-ads just like any other company.
All the 4-5 letter domains are taken
No kidding, I just bought two of them a few weeks ago.
Wanna give me more than $1000 for yjack.com/org ? Come on, you know you wanna!
What everyone seems to forget is that consoles are the ultimate in DRM
Yes, but a console doesn't have the annoying habit of mangling your OS and making your work PC slow and unstable.
And I'm pretty damned sure no current console harbors this mindless "10-day activation" scheme. Consoles just check to see if your game disc is legitimate, so you need that disc in the drive. Well I'd much rather put up with needing the disc, than having some slop-fest of a kernel hack phone home every other week to ensure I still have the right to play a stupid game.
PC gamers are so arrogant about their graphics on the handful of games and get violent if you suggest that mouse and keyboard is not the solution to the world's problems
Well that's kind of the whole point, no ? I've got this beefy media workstation with gobs of ram, disk and CPUs. I can add a graphics card to it, that costs less than the average console, and reap superior graphics. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Of course, nothing's preventing the console makers from selling/supporting keyboards and mice, for those people who do not need nor want a high-end PC.
Me, I have the consoles, but I still prefer PC games. That's partly because the wife hogs the TV with her gazillion dramas and reality shows, and also partly because I have a bitchin' workstation with a really big LCD that pwns our TV anyway. Plus I can fire up a game in a window, while keeping an eye on a long render or network job, chatting on ICQ and reading a walkthrough/strategy guide (yes, I suck!) - all without moving my hands away from the keyboard and/or mouse.
If I had a simpler life where I could genuinely devote unshared time to gaming, I might be happy with consoles, but seeing how I've been pushing bits around since the early 80s, I don't see how (or why) I'd ever change.
Colossal Caves.
I'll one up you: I'm waiting for Spore to be cracked, because there is no way I'm going to tolerate that ridiculous 10-day reactivation DRM. I'll gladly buy the game, but only if I can play it without being encumbered with SecuROM, which is the most invasive piece of filth ever coded. It is like an executable goatse.cx
Seeing how Bioshock employs some of the most insulting DRM available today (SecuROM), they can't actually blame it on piracy, at least not without getting lynched by hordes of frustrated game owners.
I'd guess that the specs are something like a top of the line dual 64 bit processor with 2 or more gigabytes of RAM, ultra-high-end video cards and tons of hard disk space.
So basically, last year's typical desktop ? :P
I realize I'm a PC freak, but I've been on 4+ cores and 8+ GB for several years. That said, I don't think one should need that much machine just to run a web browser, but clearly Microsoft have never been too concerned with efficiency.
Me, I think Firefox is bloated. I don't care that it's caching rendered pages, I don't like it using up 200+ MB just to display HTML and run a few simple Javascripts. It seems like a desperate tradeoff, given how a high-memory machine is also likely to have a fast multi-core CPU anyway, so why jump through hoops to save 2/10ths of a second ? I'm less concerned with sub-second performance than I am with the actual rendering capability. A fast browser is worthless if it fails to render properly.
Anyone here know how they calculate "impact probability" ? I mean, my poor man's logic seems to think you either hit something, or you don't. Bool 1, or Bool 0.
If you miss something by a mile, how does that wind up being a 1 in 72 probability ? No offense to the space buffs, of which I am not one, but that sounds like game show odds to me: "You're bound to lose, but let's all act excited anyway!"
Okay, I realize most of /. is too trigger-happy to actually play devil's advocate, but let's look at the problem here: this article is about Quebec.
Quebec is the most highly taxed province in Canada. Despite this, it's also home of the worst roads and one of the lowest average income levels (competing with the Maritimes). Quebec's government is great to you if you're retarded, pregnant, have a selectively recurring "back injury" or are otherwise unable/unwilling to work, as it will steal from the rich and give to the leeches. Now I'm not saying those people don't need help, but there seems to be a lot more abuse in Quebec than in any other province.
Now the government takes a chunk of money out of everyone's paycheck... fine. Why do they have to go and take more money out of business income ? Do businesses ever benefit from the Quebec government's activities ? Not really, unless your business involves processing short-term disability assessments or discounted legal aid.
Let's think about it for a moment: these "zappers" had to be written by someone. In some instances, I'm sure it was a friend or relative that quickly hacked up a sloppy script, but many of these owners will have paid someone to do it. What does that tell us ? That means the cost of hiring a hacker is less than the perceived unfairness of the tax system. I don't know about you, but if I were knowingly writing one such "zapper", I'd ask for quite a bit more cash than I normally charge, due to the risk and severity of getting caught. For these black-hat services to be justifiable, that means the tax must be ridiculously high.
Combine that with the insulting practice of taxing wait staff based on 15% tips (yeah, right!), and you'll quickly realize why restaurant owners are fed up with the government. These "digital signature devices" they speak of, that's just not going to happen. Not only are the devices going to be unwieldy and largely incompatible with the large variety of restaurant software, but they will simply not be welcomed in these businesses. You'll either see a lot of restaurants close down and move out-of-province, or they will simply continue to operate without the device, a form of silent protest. Either way, RevQuebec won't be allowed to further their rape of the provincial economy.
IMHO I don't believe that "everyone has their price," but I could just be naive.
As much as I wish there were any bit of integrity left in humanity, I have to say you're probably just slightly more naive than average. Those who cannot be bought, can be silenced via threats, which come in many forms, many of them 100% legal in today's environment.
But I've got this Jump To Conclusions mat that's so much fun to play!
Conspiracy or not, the guy probably wouldn't be dead if the cops hadn't arrested him. That's a big blunder for the already tense environment over there. It doesn't really matter who shot, what matters is WHERE the guy was when he was shot. If you're in police custody and they fail to ensure your safety, that's really bad!
Ok sure, so they've taken a page from AMD's book. Care to show me how that matters to anyone ? I know this represents several changes in the CPU and chipset, but in the end it's just a bus. It's not like the FSB was at any significant disadvantage vs Hypertransport. Core2's don't have anywhere near as many stalling problems as the old Netburst, so the FSB has been quite satisfactory so far.
Intel seems to like talking about the future... Nehalem, Nehalem... I've been hearing about it for five years now. If Nehalem's going to be god's gift to PC freaks, then why are they wasting everyone's time and money with all these in-between products that are hardly distinguishable from the old stuff ? P35 can do just about everything the X38/X48 do, but few people care to spend their money on disappointing DDR3, at least not until the chipsets figure out how to actually make it faster.
I must admit, my knowledge of Vapochill / Prometeia is quite dated, back when they sounded like old fridges and you had to give it 5-10 minutes before booting your PC. I guess they faded into obscurity a few years ago and I assumed they were dead.
Personally, I wish I could seize control of CoolIT and bump up their build quality several notches. I've owned both the puny Freezone and the Elite, and while they're both decent coolers, they both have stupid things that bother me - like the idiotic 92mm fan on the old one, who the $*@% has 92mm fans anymore ? And on the new one, well they managed to find the noisiest freakin' 120mm fan I've ever heard, and it's a pain to swap it out.
Quiet computing is within reach, but it seems everyone is doing it wrong. The fact that someone can take any of these high-end coolers, spend $20 and an hour of modding work, and end up with a far superior result, to me that's proof that these companies are full of fail. Why can't they make it perfect from the factory ? Why is it that an illiterate teenager on XtremeSystems.org can do a better job than the guys that built it in the first place ?
Talk about AC. I didn't say socialism was a bad thing.
My point is that the bank still makes money, even though the line item doesn't appear on your monthly statement.
Repeat after me: "Enough with the red fear"
Modest socialism is the driving force behind many successful societies. Why else would we want governments in the first place ? Think of it as a co-op. If you think co-ops are nothing good, well them I'm wasting my time with you.
Another fantastic reason! :)
Seriously, big business can't be competitive in markets where any Joe with a chequing account can participate. There is little advantage to being a big company, because everyone ends up paying Flextronics and others to do the actual assembly. Dell, HP and others do it directly, while the small guys do it via Asus and Foxconn.
The slightly increased cost of having a middle-brand pales in comparison to the long chain of inefficiency that scales geometrically with the number of employees in a company.