He is 50% Hispanic. Also 50% white. So he's "hispanic" only by the same racist logic which claims Barak Obama is "black."
In America, apparently you have to take the label of your darkest ancestor, no matter how small a percentage.
What's amazing is how many otherwise intelligent, tolerant people will still insist vociferously that Obama is black even while being forced to admit that he's just as white as black. It's becaise peopel don't care about race really, they care about labels, stereotypes, and personal identity issues.
Here's a suggestion: drop video entirely. Really. Stick with your core competency and do that well. Don't expand just for the sake of expansion.
A poll for the owners of Slashdot:
Which of the following things do you think is true?
1) There isn't enough video content on the internet. 2) Slashdot, a text-based news site, is qualified to do video better than it's being done anywhere else on the Internet. 3) Slashdot's user base has been clamoring for video. All these years we've been reaidng text stories but secretly pining for video 4) If Slashdoit doesn't do video it will be "stale" and not "hip" enough for "the kids" 5) It isn't enough to just do one thing well forever, you have to keep adding new things until you do NONE of them well, and die.
Seriously. You are a text-based geek news site. You do that really well. Just do what you know. Don't dliute yourself into mediocrity like so many other sites. Don't let the MBAs take over. They don't know shit about geek stuff.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think a lot of people have the same reaction I do: Making a profit is fine. The question is whether it's an OBSCENE profit or not, and if that obscene profit is coming at the cost of killing people.
If you want to make a new blender and sell it for a 2000% profit, have at it. I don't care. If people want your blender, they'll pay more for it. If they don't want it, they won't. You may lose money, but no one dies. Same thing with shit like Botox. I don't care if rich old bags pay 500% profit on something like that. But if there's something that PEOPLE WILL DIE WITHOUT, then it becoems a moral question. Even then, making a reasonable profit is understandable. 100%? Well, OK. 200%? Starting to raise my eyebrows here. The truth is that one of the huge reasons healthcare keeps climbing so fast is largely because medical fields have realized that 1) people want to live, and 2) will pay anything to continue doing so, and thus 3) you can just keep raising the prices as much as you want and feeding the profit to your investors.
If I were president of the world, I'd pass a law saying that medically required devices and medications (i.e., from injury and illness, not cosmetic stuff) could not be marked up more than, say, 300%. If you say "no point in making something if you can't make a profit", OK, fair enough. But if you're saying "Waaaah!!! 300% isn't ENOUGH profit, I don't care if people die, I need MORE!!" then I reply: "Fuck you, you soulless greedy assholes."
I couldn't disagree more. Donaldson has a terrible writing style that has a few brief moments of greatness and a lot of tawdry mediocrity. He doesn't come close of Tolkien on any level, and I found "The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the unbeliever" to be very dull for the most part. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.
I complete agree with you. I couldn't even finish the first one, because I *HATED* the protagonist so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sophisticated reader (degree in English) and I can handle the concept of anti-hero, or hero you don't like that much, protagonist who isn't that sympathetic, whatever. But i just literally HATED Thomas Covenant. He was such a whiny little BITCH that I wished he was real so I could hunt him down and slap him as hard as I could. It was like reading a book about a rich, entitled, spoiled 12-year-old who just wouldn't shut up.
Challenge the reader with a protagonist who isn't that likable or makes questionable decisions? Sure. But writ a book where the protagonist just ANNOYS THE PISS out of you? Well, maybe it's brave in some literary sense, but I'm sure as hell not going to torture myself to read it. It's like a novelist writing a book and insisting that you read it in the same room as a busy band saw. Sorry, pal. Maybe it's good and all, but I'll never know because they annoyance level makes it so not worth the effort.
Peat, there have been lost of angry replies, and while this situation makes me a little mad too, I think i can briefly and succinctly sum up the problem people have without using harsh language (though it's tempting):
1) Your automated system automatically issues takedowns when what it should do is send potential violations to a human for confirmation before any takedowns are issued. Lots of people probably won't fight takesdowns, which means you win by default. Many people here feel that's dirty pool, that the original poster is only getting the decision reversed because he got attention on Slashdot, and if he hadn't, he would have been out of luck.
2) Even after the automated takedown was disputed, your system sent an automated response falsely clamining that the piece had been reviewed and confirmed. That, as other people have pointed out, was a bald-faced lie. The fact that Rumblefish even automates its responses to takedown appeals is incredibly annoying. Clearly, your company wants to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to appeal. Can you see how this might infuriate people? It's not just "talk to the hand, dude", it's "I can't be bothered to say 'talk to the hand', so you can talk to my robot's hand.'" Basically, you clam to have judged the situation, but your judge is a just a parrot who squawks "Confirmed!!" at any dispute.
3) It appears to me, and apparently some others, that your business model is unsustainable if done responsibly because there's a fundamental conflict. If you employ enough humans to do it with honesty and integrity, you won't make any money. But if you use tons of automation, you end up with your pants down in fiascos like this. I think I speak for some others when I say that it seems your company cares more about making money, no matter what little guys get hurt, than it does about integrity. Obviously you can get away with this behaviour because anyone with two brain cells know that in this country only people with money can afford to buy the law they need. But it doesn't make it right.
10 I don't encrypt my mail because the people I send mail to aren't set up for decryption 20 The people I send mail to aren't set up for decryption because they don't have to be because no one sends encrypted mail. 30 GOTO 10
Why do something as smart as eliminating timezones and then do something as stupid as keep DST? Whatever we do with time zones, DST should already have been eliminated as an ancient, useless relic decades ago.
It's a pretty simple equation: if the cost of the stuff you buy is less than what you'd pay for an average subscription (say, $15/month) then you're probably getting a pretty good deal.
My strategy is to buy very little extra content, but I will once in a while if it's something I really want, like an unlockable class I want to play, an item that makes my life easier, or a new region to play in. I definitely NEVER pay for purely cosmetic shit like fancy clothing, or min/maxing like a weapon that does 1 or 2 more damage than the best one I can get playing free.
Treat the game like you (hopefully) treat real life - don't buy stupid shit, don't spend too much, think about your purchases carefully, etc. For me there are lots of games that I would never pay $15/month to maintain, but might keep around on my hard drive to jump into for a couple hours here and there and maybe spend a couple bucks a month.
It's a good model. I always though the perfect MMO pricing model would be "by-the-hour with a maximum". I won't pay $15/month every month to keep a WoW subscription. But if they had a scheme where I paid $1/hour, UP TO A MAX OF $15 (after with subsequent hours are free) it would be awesome. People like me who just want to jump in for 3-4 hours one Friday night a month could do that, pay $3-$4, and on months we didn't play, we'd pay nothing. If I happened to get really into it one month and play 30 hours, then I don't pay more than I would have with a normal subscription. And people who play heavily every month would not notice any difference, they'd just hit the $15 max every month. And Blizzard gets a few extra bucks from me that the don't now get because I just stay unsubscribed. Win/win for everyone. I get to enjoy playing once in a while but not pay for a full subscription every month, Blizzard gets money from me they would not otherwise have gotten.
But if even if you practice and get good at using chopsticks as well as a fork.... why bother at all? Assuming you grew up in the west, you grew up using a fork. If you NOW live full-time in Asia and have to use chopsticks because they're what's available, that's a valid reason. But westerners who live in the west and use chopsticks (only for Asian food, of course) are simply going out of their way to acquire a smug and annoying affectation.
That's the way it would seem at first glance, and certainly true if Google tried to hire an army of people to look at each site in their index. What's needed is clearly some kind of human-moderated system just like Slashdot has, where you use a browser plugin or something to "Report this site to Google as a link farm/SEO abuse". Then Google can investigate the ones that get the most reports.
Overall, it would be a fantastic thing to have a general "user rating" for ALL sites on the web, and Google would be just the one to be able to pull it off and have the incentive since it would greatly improve their search results.
As 99% of you are doubtless about to point out, any kind of rating/reporting system is open to abuse. As soon as something were implemented, the SEO assholes would start finding ways to game the system with vote-bots etc. But I think it could be minimized/prevented with some combination of the following possibilities:
1) Negative reports only, so you could report something as questionable but NOT "vote it up". Link farmers would have no incentive to submit reports on their own sites. 2) Not allowing more than 1 vote per account per minute, to make robo-tools exceedingly slow. 3) Some kind of identity verification where you have to prove you are a real live human being to get voting rights for your account (and I don't mean captchas, I mean like address verification or something else difficult/expensive to spoof). 4) Charge one cent per report, or make the first few free with the cost going up on a sliding scale the more ratings you do.harge more per report. Normal users, who might report a half dozen or even fifty sites a month would find the cost laughably negligible, but anyone trying to do it on a large/automated scale would quickly run into some costs 5) A "karma"/reputation system where your trustworthiness and the weight of your vote is affected by what others think of you - though that might be a little too easy to rig.
Removing Bombadil and the Barrow Downs was unfortunate but did make sense - it didn't change the story and it would have added a lot of time.
Leaving out the Scouring of the Shire, however, COMPLETELY changed the entire meaning and message of the book, so removing it was absolutely unforgivable. I will never forgive Jackson for that.
I tied my career to ideology 15years ago. I swore to myself "I will NEVER work in a job where I have to support a Microsoft product ever again." My friends got all snooty and superior made dire predictions about my future employability. Now here it is 15 years later, my career is advancing wonderfully with me ONLY supporting Linux and Solaris. Not only do I make *more* money specializing in UNIX (since everyone and his cousin claims to be an "experienced Windows admin") but I'm also SO much happier now that I don't have to pull my hair out and beat my head bloody against walls every day. My blood pressure is completely normal while my Windows colleagues all have high blood pressure.
Also, I don't have to constantly run on the training treadmill trying to endlessly keep up on whatever MS's fancy new product is this year, whatever new programming language is "in", or whatever. I keep sharp on new features and technologies in UNIX but in the end it doesn't change that much.
Best career move I ever made. Most important thing: I"m much happier. If all you want to do is make a few extra dollars, I guess then you should become a whore and pimp whatever skill sells best that day. If you prefer happiness, then making career decisions based on ideology is not a bad idea at all.
From what I can tell it seems that there are two versions of the Kinect. One version is designed for people who already own an Xbox 360 and are buying the Kinect to add to it. That version requires a separate power supply and (presumably) has a standard USB port. The other version comes with the new 360 Slim/Kinect bundle. That version does not require a separate power supply - it gets its power from some kind of special port on the back of the new Xbox that kinda-sorta looks roughly like a USB port but is clearly different.
I wonder if the driver will be the same for both? At first, no doubt the drivers will be designed for the sold-separately Kinect, but as time goes on and more bundles are sold, more people will have the version with the special connector.
I wonder if that was a kindness by Microsoft (so we don't need yet another Wall Wart), or a cost-saving measure (don't have to sjip power supplies), or a proprietary thing (using a special connector that no one else has in order to prevent this kind of reverse engineering). Probably some of all three.
I'm sorry, but this is nothing but a troll. I've been reading all these comments and mentally laughing at all the people who are throwing hate and yet have never even used it - they were just speculating on what *might* be bad. But this person... this person is simply outright LYING. Bad speculation based on something you haven't even used, well - it';s annoying but this is Slashdot so it's expected. But i can't sit still for the above from someone who *allegedly* "tried one yesterday". Let me give you some real, true, unbiased information from someone who owns one. To be sure, I've only had it a for a few days, but I can give you my impressions.
I, too, have/had an EyeToy. I had several games for it and used them quite a bit. When it decided to work, it did vaguely alright for the very simplest games that only needed to recognize things like "jump" or "lean sideways". Anything other than that, and the responses were dismally horrible, causing intense frustration. Overall, you know what? The EyeToy sucked ass. Its only selling point was that there was nothing else like it. It was SO super-sensitive to lighting that you had to spend 50% of your time running around moving lamps (or buying new ones). The Kinetic, while perhaps not 100% perfect, is about sixteen jillion light years better at its job than they EyeToy, and anyone who says otherwise is being paid by Microsoft. No person with two brain cells to rub together could conclude otherwise.
Now, I'm a MS-hater like most other people here, and I'm definitely no fanboy,. I didn't even *own* a console until I picked up the 360 on the day the Kinetic was released. Personally, I can't stand consoles and think PC gaming is infinitely superior since all console games are just "twicth" shooters for hyperactive teenage boys. So why did I buy an Xbox? For the same reason I bought a Wii - as exercise equipment. Of course, Wii Fit turned out to have a weight limit (!) so it was history very quickly.
But even though I'm a Microsoft and console-hater, I have to say... I'm impressed with both the Kinetic and the Xbox. I vaguely knew that the Xbox could stream video or whatever, but when i set it up to stream all my home movies and audio directly from my PC in about 3 minutes flat, that was nice. The Netflix streaming is *far* more polished than the very basic functionality on my Tivo. The voice commands are nice and I hope they develop them much further.
But the Kinetic was the thing I really wanted, and Your Shape looked like the killer fitness program. And, with some minor caveats, I think that will pretty much be the case. the Kinect tracks you *very* well - not 100%, but pretty damn well. the tip to avoid baggy clothing is very true, though - if you're wearing a big shirt or loose sweatpants, the tracking will definitely be affected. Wear shorts and a t-shirt or something relatively close-fitting. The Your Shape fitness program is amazing, not just because of the gee-whiz thats-so-cool factor of seeing your body there one the screen, with lines and joints superimposed. It really is a great exercise program. It will lead you through a whole aeroobic lesson, or you can play fungames, or do kickboxing or whatever. The tracking works just dandy. Oh, and it doesn't seem to care much about lighting, probably because it has an infrared sensor, so THAT particular annoyance is gone. I haven't tried it in the pitch black - I should, for fun. The one criticism I've seen here that's actually true is that you do need a fair amount of space. I have a pretty big living room so it's not that big of a deal for me, but I did have to move the coffee table. People with tiny apartments might definitely have a problem. But that's my only reasonable critique.
I suspect that, like so many new technologies, how much people like this game will have everything to do with the software. A program that's clearly well-designed, well-tested, and carefully thought out like Your Shape or Dance central will be a joy to play. A game that just h
The amazing thing to me is that so few people - bother workers and management - seem to be able to see the real effect of this kind of thing. When you look at it, it's a system that incetivizes doing less work.
To wit: if you're not very good at dealing with large amounts of information, you're less efficient. When you're less efficient, you get less done. When you get less done, people lower their expectations and either give you less work or more time to do it. Of course, there's a lower limit - at some point you will get fired. But the limit is pretty low.
By contrast, people who have good information-management skills are more efficient. They get more stuff done, faster. Their reward for this is having their workload increase. When you get more done, do you get a raise? No, you just get more work. Your boss sees how good they are and starts assigning all the hard projects to them, all the last-minute stuff, all the critical high-visibility stuff, and just more tasks in general. Result: more work and more stress for the efficient worker but (usually) no corresponding increase in pay. They work much harder and get much more done than their less-efficient cow orker but probably don't get paid any more.
So one could say that there's a direct correlation between efficiency and stress, but not efficiency and reward. The smart person in this case would do the minimum required to avoid being fired, and be happier (less stressed) as a result. The inefficient worker has no real incentive to learn better information management skills.
Management would do much better to base rewards on tasks accomplished and not on "time-ass-is-in-chair". If bosses said to employees "Any time you have left over after completing your tasks for the day you can take off and go fishing (or playing Eve Online)", you better believe people would get more efficient. Time is the most valuable commodity there is, so if employees could get that as a reward for doing a good job, they would have incentive to become more efficient. Managers usually respond "But I pay for 8 hours and I want them working 8 hours!" No, you don't pay for a certain number of hours. You pay to have a function performed, a role filled, tasks completed. It makes no sense to punish someone who efficiently completes their work in six hours by giving them busywork while the inefficient worker gets 8 hours to do the original task.
Since when did it become front-page news when a web site goes down? So it's popular - B.F.D.! It's not as if anything bad will happen. So people will have to wait a couple hours to find out what their 6,249 "friends" had for breakfast. Sheesh.
Even MBA management courses limit the level of emphasis on reading and writing skills, because the focus is on the team-building and practical learning exercises.
It's easy to tell that this is very true, given the extraordinarily crappy reading and writing skills of so many MBAs. Many of them, it's hard to believe they got accepted as undergrads at all, let alone get graduate degrees. When you get *business* emails from people with MBAs who use textspeak like "u" and "2" instead of "you" and "too", you know the educational system has hit rock-bottom and they're just nothing but diploma mills now.
They should spend more time in useful things like reading and writing and less time on useless touchy-feely bullshit like "team building".
What's this? A useful and informative actual *answer* to an "Ask Slashdot" question? Not just some silly comment which spawns a huge thread with no actual answers at all?
Seems like he went though a lot of trouble. Why didn't he just use a robots.txt file, as Google invited him to do on several occasions?
A classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. He doesn't like the idea of people "stealing" his content, so his solution is... to keep people from finding it, because they can't "steal" what they can't find. How clever, Rupert! Hey, dumbass: ANYTHING THE GETS EYEBALLS ON YOUR PAGE IS GOOD.
I think Google will be laughing their asses off as traffic to his sites drops off a cliff down to whatever trickle Yahoo and Bing bring in (unles she blocks them too).
I always thought his name should Ruprecht (from "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels")
In my opinion, on the one hand I agree that any child porn, even computer-generated stuff in which no real kids were hurt, is pretty sick and depraved. I think we all agree on that. And I would certainly *rather* not have it exist. But I imagine it's at least some kind of outlet for very sick people, and I'd rather have them working out their lusts by themselves using porn involving virtual beings, than out on the streets looking for real kids.
That's why I don't think that kiddie porn with virtual kids should be outlawed - not because I don't think it's yucky, I do. But if it provides an outlet for people who might otherwise turn to more-harmful activities, then I'd rather have it exist than porn involving *real* kids.
Slashdot Mirror
He is 50% Hispanic. Also 50% white. So he's "hispanic" only by the same racist logic which claims Barak Obama is "black."
In America, apparently you have to take the label of your darkest ancestor, no matter how small a percentage.
What's amazing is how many otherwise intelligent, tolerant people will still insist vociferously that Obama is black even while being forced to admit that he's just as white as black. It's becaise peopel don't care about race really, they care about labels, stereotypes, and personal identity issues.
Here's a suggestion: drop video entirely. Really. Stick with your core competency and do that well. Don't expand just for the sake of expansion.
A poll for the owners of Slashdot:
Which of the following things do you think is true?
1) There isn't enough video content on the internet.
2) Slashdot, a text-based news site, is qualified to do video better than it's being done anywhere else on the Internet.
3) Slashdot's user base has been clamoring for video. All these years we've been reaidng text stories but secretly pining for video
4) If Slashdoit doesn't do video it will be "stale" and not "hip" enough for "the kids"
5) It isn't enough to just do one thing well forever, you have to keep adding new things until you do NONE of them well, and die.
Seriously. You are a text-based geek news site. You do that really well. Just do what you know. Don't dliute yourself into mediocrity like so many other sites. Don't let the MBAs take over. They don't know shit about geek stuff.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think a lot of people have the same reaction I do: Making a profit is fine. The question is whether it's an OBSCENE profit or not, and if that obscene profit is coming at the cost of killing people.
If you want to make a new blender and sell it for a 2000% profit, have at it. I don't care. If people want your blender, they'll pay more for it. If they don't want it, they won't. You may lose money, but no one dies. Same thing with shit like Botox. I don't care if rich old bags pay 500% profit on something like that. But if there's something that PEOPLE WILL DIE WITHOUT, then it becoems a moral question. Even then, making a reasonable profit is understandable. 100%? Well, OK. 200%? Starting to raise my eyebrows here. The truth is that one of the huge reasons healthcare keeps climbing so fast is largely because medical fields have realized that 1) people want to live, and 2) will pay anything to continue doing so, and thus 3) you can just keep raising the prices as much as you want and feeding the profit to your investors.
If I were president of the world, I'd pass a law saying that medically required devices and medications (i.e., from injury and illness, not cosmetic stuff) could not be marked up more than, say, 300%. If you say "no point in making something if you can't make a profit", OK, fair enough. But if you're saying "Waaaah!!! 300% isn't ENOUGH profit, I don't care if people die, I need MORE!!" then I reply: "Fuck you, you soulless greedy assholes."
I couldn't disagree more. Donaldson has a terrible writing style that has a few brief moments of greatness and a lot of tawdry mediocrity. He doesn't come close of Tolkien on any level, and I found "The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the unbeliever" to be very dull for the most part. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.
I complete agree with you. I couldn't even finish the first one, because I *HATED* the protagonist so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sophisticated reader (degree in English) and I can handle the concept of anti-hero, or hero you don't like that much, protagonist who isn't that sympathetic, whatever. But i just literally HATED Thomas Covenant. He was such a whiny little BITCH that I wished he was real so I could hunt him down and slap him as hard as I could. It was like reading a book about a rich, entitled, spoiled 12-year-old who just wouldn't shut up.
Challenge the reader with a protagonist who isn't that likable or makes questionable decisions? Sure. But writ a book where the protagonist just ANNOYS THE PISS out of you? Well, maybe it's brave in some literary sense, but I'm sure as hell not going to torture myself to read it. It's like a novelist writing a book and insisting that you read it in the same room as a busy band saw. Sorry, pal. Maybe it's good and all, but I'll never know because they annoyance level makes it so not worth the effort.
Peat, there have been lost of angry replies, and while this situation makes me a little mad too, I think i can briefly and succinctly sum up the problem people have without using harsh language (though it's tempting):
1) Your automated system automatically issues takedowns when what it should do is send potential violations to a human for confirmation before any takedowns are issued. Lots of people probably won't fight takesdowns, which means you win by default. Many people here feel that's dirty pool, that the original poster is only getting the decision reversed because he got attention on Slashdot, and if he hadn't, he would have been out of luck.
2) Even after the automated takedown was disputed, your system sent an automated response falsely clamining that the piece had been reviewed and confirmed. That, as other people have pointed out, was a bald-faced lie. The fact that Rumblefish even automates its responses to takedown appeals is incredibly annoying. Clearly, your company wants to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to appeal. Can you see how this might infuriate people? It's not just "talk to the hand, dude", it's "I can't be bothered to say 'talk to the hand', so you can talk to my robot's hand.'" Basically, you clam to have judged the situation, but your judge is a just a parrot who squawks "Confirmed!!" at any dispute.
3) It appears to me, and apparently some others, that your business model is unsustainable if done responsibly because there's a fundamental conflict. If you employ enough humans to do it with honesty and integrity, you won't make any money. But if you use tons of automation, you end up with your pants down in fiascos like this. I think I speak for some others when I say that it seems your company cares more about making money, no matter what little guys get hurt, than it does about integrity. Obviously you can get away with this behaviour because anyone with two brain cells know that in this country only people with money can afford to buy the law they need. But it doesn't make it right.
10 I don't encrypt my mail because the people I send mail to aren't set up for decryption
20 The people I send mail to aren't set up for decryption because they don't have to be because no one sends encrypted mail.
30 GOTO 10
Why do something as smart as eliminating timezones and then do something as stupid as keep DST? Whatever we do with time zones, DST should already have been eliminated as an ancient, useless relic decades ago.
It's a pretty simple equation: if the cost of the stuff you buy is less than what you'd pay for an average subscription (say, $15/month) then you're probably getting a pretty good deal.
My strategy is to buy very little extra content, but I will once in a while if it's something I really want, like an unlockable class I want to play, an item that makes my life easier, or a new region to play in. I definitely NEVER pay for purely cosmetic shit like fancy clothing, or min/maxing like a weapon that does 1 or 2 more damage than the best one I can get playing free.
Treat the game like you (hopefully) treat real life - don't buy stupid shit, don't spend too much, think about your purchases carefully, etc. For me there are lots of games that I would never pay $15/month to maintain, but might keep around on my hard drive to jump into for a couple hours here and there and maybe spend a couple bucks a month.
It's a good model. I always though the perfect MMO pricing model would be "by-the-hour with a maximum". I won't pay $15/month every month to keep a WoW subscription. But if they had a scheme where I paid $1/hour, UP TO A MAX OF $15 (after with subsequent hours are free) it would be awesome. People like me who just want to jump in for 3-4 hours one Friday night a month could do that, pay $3-$4, and on months we didn't play, we'd pay nothing. If I happened to get really into it one month and play 30 hours, then I don't pay more than I would have with a normal subscription. And people who play heavily every month would not notice any difference, they'd just hit the $15 max every month. And Blizzard gets a few extra bucks from me that the don't now get because I just stay unsubscribed. Win/win for everyone. I get to enjoy playing once in a while but not pay for a full subscription every month, Blizzard gets money from me they would not otherwise have gotten.
But if even if you practice and get good at using chopsticks as well as a fork.... why bother at all? Assuming you grew up in the west, you grew up using a fork. If you NOW live full-time in Asia and have to use chopsticks because they're what's available, that's a valid reason. But westerners who live in the west and use chopsticks (only for Asian food, of course) are simply going out of their way to acquire a smug and annoying affectation.
"Do not handicap your children by making life easy for them." - Robert A. Heinlein
That's the way it would seem at first glance, and certainly true if Google tried to hire an army of people to look at each site in their index. What's needed is clearly some kind of human-moderated system just like Slashdot has, where you use a browser plugin or something to "Report this site to Google as a link farm/SEO abuse". Then Google can investigate the ones that get the most reports.
Overall, it would be a fantastic thing to have a general "user rating" for ALL sites on the web, and Google would be just the one to be able to pull it off and have the incentive since it would greatly improve their search results.
As 99% of you are doubtless about to point out, any kind of rating/reporting system is open to abuse. As soon as something were implemented, the SEO assholes would start finding ways to game the system with vote-bots etc. But I think it could be minimized/prevented with some combination of the following possibilities:
1) Negative reports only, so you could report something as questionable but NOT "vote it up". Link farmers would have no incentive to submit reports on their own sites.
2) Not allowing more than 1 vote per account per minute, to make robo-tools exceedingly slow.
3) Some kind of identity verification where you have to prove you are a real live human being to get voting rights for your account (and I don't mean captchas, I mean like address verification or something else difficult/expensive to spoof).
4) Charge one cent per report, or make the first few free with the cost going up on a sliding scale the more ratings you do.harge more per report. Normal users, who might report a half dozen or even fifty sites a month would find the cost laughably negligible, but anyone trying to do it on a large/automated scale would quickly run into some costs
5) A "karma"/reputation system where your trustworthiness and the weight of your vote is affected by what others think of you - though that might be a little too easy to rig.
Removing Bombadil and the Barrow Downs was unfortunate but did make sense - it didn't change the story and it would have added a lot of time.
Leaving out the Scouring of the Shire, however, COMPLETELY changed the entire meaning and message of the book, so removing it was absolutely unforgivable. I will never forgive Jackson for that.
I tied my career to ideology 15years ago. I swore to myself "I will NEVER work in a job where I have to support a Microsoft product ever again." My friends got all snooty and superior made dire predictions about my future employability. Now here it is 15 years later, my career is advancing wonderfully with me ONLY supporting Linux and Solaris. Not only do I make *more* money specializing in UNIX (since everyone and his cousin claims to be an "experienced Windows admin") but I'm also SO much happier now that I don't have to pull my hair out and beat my head bloody against walls every day. My blood pressure is completely normal while my Windows colleagues all have high blood pressure.
Also, I don't have to constantly run on the training treadmill trying to endlessly keep up on whatever MS's fancy new product is this year, whatever new programming language is "in", or whatever. I keep sharp on new features and technologies in UNIX but in the end it doesn't change that much.
Best career move I ever made. Most important thing: I"m much happier. If all you want to do is make a few extra dollars, I guess then you should become a whore and pimp whatever skill sells best that day. If you prefer happiness, then making career decisions based on ideology is not a bad idea at all.
From what I can tell it seems that there are two versions of the Kinect. One version is designed for people who already own an Xbox 360 and are buying the Kinect to add to it. That version requires a separate power supply and (presumably) has a standard USB port. The other version comes with the new 360 Slim/Kinect bundle. That version does not require a separate power supply - it gets its power from some kind of special port on the back of the new Xbox that kinda-sorta looks roughly like a USB port but is clearly different.
I wonder if the driver will be the same for both? At first, no doubt the drivers will be designed for the sold-separately Kinect, but as time goes on and more bundles are sold, more people will have the version with the special connector.
I wonder if that was a kindness by Microsoft (so we don't need yet another Wall Wart), or a cost-saving measure (don't have to sjip power supplies), or a proprietary thing (using a special connector that no one else has in order to prevent this kind of reverse engineering). Probably some of all three.
$4.99? If Oracle sold it, it wouldn't be a bottle, it would be a per-anus charge of $4,999 for each... "application".
At least I OWN one and have USED it for more than "a little while yesterday." I'd say I speak a lot more authoritatively on the issue.
And yeah, "rampant fanboys" usually start off their rants with "I hate Microsoft and I hate console gaming."
I'm sorry, but this is nothing but a troll. I've been reading all these comments and mentally laughing at all the people who are throwing hate and yet have never even used it - they were just speculating on what *might* be bad. But this person... this person is simply outright LYING. Bad speculation based on something you haven't even used, well - it';s annoying but this is Slashdot so it's expected. But i can't sit still for the above from someone who *allegedly* "tried one yesterday". Let me give you some real, true, unbiased information from someone who owns one. To be sure, I've only had it a for a few days, but I can give you my impressions.
I, too, have/had an EyeToy. I had several games for it and used them quite a bit. When it decided to work, it did vaguely alright for the very simplest games that only needed to recognize things like "jump" or "lean sideways". Anything other than that, and the responses were dismally horrible, causing intense frustration. Overall, you know what? The EyeToy sucked ass. Its only selling point was that there was nothing else like it. It was SO super-sensitive to lighting that you had to spend 50% of your time running around moving lamps (or buying new ones). The Kinetic, while perhaps not 100% perfect, is about sixteen jillion light years better at its job than they EyeToy, and anyone who says otherwise is being paid by Microsoft. No person with two brain cells to rub together could conclude otherwise.
Now, I'm a MS-hater like most other people here, and I'm definitely no fanboy,. I didn't even *own* a console until I picked up the 360 on the day the Kinetic was released. Personally, I can't stand consoles and think PC gaming is infinitely superior since all console games are just "twicth" shooters for hyperactive teenage boys. So why did I buy an Xbox? For the same reason I bought a Wii - as exercise equipment. Of course, Wii Fit turned out to have a weight limit (!) so it was history very quickly.
But even though I'm a Microsoft and console-hater, I have to say... I'm impressed with both the Kinetic and the Xbox. I vaguely knew that the Xbox could stream video or whatever, but when i set it up to stream all my home movies and audio directly from my PC in about 3 minutes flat, that was nice. The Netflix streaming is *far* more polished than the very basic functionality on my Tivo. The voice commands are nice and I hope they develop them much further.
But the Kinetic was the thing I really wanted, and Your Shape looked like the killer fitness program. And, with some minor caveats, I think that will pretty much be the case. the Kinect tracks you *very* well - not 100%, but pretty damn well. the tip to avoid baggy clothing is very true, though - if you're wearing a big shirt or loose sweatpants, the tracking will definitely be affected. Wear shorts and a t-shirt or something relatively close-fitting. The Your Shape fitness program is amazing, not just because of the gee-whiz thats-so-cool factor of seeing your body there one the screen, with lines and joints superimposed. It really is a great exercise program. It will lead you through a whole aeroobic lesson, or you can play fungames, or do kickboxing or whatever. The tracking works just dandy. Oh, and it doesn't seem to care much about lighting, probably because it has an infrared sensor, so THAT particular annoyance is gone. I haven't tried it in the pitch black - I should, for fun. The one criticism I've seen here that's actually true is that you do need a fair amount of space. I have a pretty big living room so it's not that big of a deal for me, but I did have to move the coffee table. People with tiny apartments might definitely have a problem. But that's my only reasonable critique.
I suspect that, like so many new technologies, how much people like this game will have everything to do with the software. A program that's clearly well-designed, well-tested, and carefully thought out like Your Shape or Dance central will be a joy to play. A game that just h
The amazing thing to me is that so few people - bother workers and management - seem to be able to see the real effect of this kind of thing. When you look at it, it's a system that incetivizes doing less work.
To wit: if you're not very good at dealing with large amounts of information, you're less efficient. When you're less efficient, you get less done. When you get less done, people lower their expectations and either give you less work or more time to do it. Of course, there's a lower limit - at some point you will get fired. But the limit is pretty low.
By contrast, people who have good information-management skills are more efficient. They get more stuff done, faster. Their reward for this is having their workload increase. When you get more done, do you get a raise? No, you just get more work. Your boss sees how good they are and starts assigning all the hard projects to them, all the last-minute stuff, all the critical high-visibility stuff, and just more tasks in general. Result: more work and more stress for the efficient worker but (usually) no corresponding increase in pay. They work much harder and get much more done than their less-efficient cow orker but probably don't get paid any more.
So one could say that there's a direct correlation between efficiency and stress, but not efficiency and reward. The smart person in this case would do the minimum required to avoid being fired, and be happier (less stressed) as a result. The inefficient worker has no real incentive to learn better information management skills.
Management would do much better to base rewards on tasks accomplished and not on "time-ass-is-in-chair". If bosses said to employees "Any time you have left over after completing your tasks for the day you can take off and go fishing (or playing Eve Online)", you better believe people would get more efficient. Time is the most valuable commodity there is, so if employees could get that as a reward for doing a good job, they would have incentive to become more efficient. Managers usually respond "But I pay for 8 hours and I want them working 8 hours!" No, you don't pay for a certain number of hours. You pay to have a function performed, a role filled, tasks completed. It makes no sense to punish someone who efficiently completes their work in six hours by giving them busywork while the inefficient worker gets 8 hours to do the original task.
Since when did it become front-page news when a web site goes down? So it's popular - B.F.D.! It's not as if anything bad will happen. So people will have to wait a couple hours to find out what their 6,249 "friends" had for breakfast. Sheesh.
Wow, it's a historic moment - the first actually useful message ever sent on Twitter. And the first one anyone ever cared about.
Even MBA management courses limit the level of emphasis on reading and writing skills, because the focus is on the team-building and practical learning exercises.
It's easy to tell that this is very true, given the extraordinarily crappy reading and writing skills of so many MBAs. Many of them, it's hard to believe they got accepted as undergrads at all, let alone get graduate degrees. When you get *business* emails from people with MBAs who use textspeak like "u" and "2" instead of "you" and "too", you know the educational system has hit rock-bottom and they're just nothing but diploma mills now.
They should spend more time in useful things like reading and writing and less time on useless touchy-feely bullshit like "team building".
Starting a FIRE at a company called "Bayonet Point OXYGEN" doesn't sound very bright to me.
What's this? A useful and informative actual *answer* to an "Ask Slashdot" question? Not just some silly comment which spawns a huge thread with no actual answers at all?
MY GOD, HAS HELL FROZEN OVER?? :)
Seems like he went though a lot of trouble. Why didn't he just use a robots.txt file, as Google invited him to do on several occasions?
A classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. He doesn't like the idea of people "stealing" his content, so his solution is... to keep people from finding it, because they can't "steal" what they can't find. How clever, Rupert! Hey, dumbass: ANYTHING THE GETS EYEBALLS ON YOUR PAGE IS GOOD.
I think Google will be laughing their asses off as traffic to his sites drops off a cliff down to whatever trickle Yahoo and Bing bring in (unles she blocks them too).
I always thought his name should Ruprecht (from "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels")
In my opinion, on the one hand I agree that any child porn, even computer-generated stuff in which no real kids were hurt, is pretty sick and depraved. I think we all agree on that. And I would certainly *rather* not have it exist. But I imagine it's at least some kind of outlet for very sick people, and I'd rather have them working out their lusts by themselves using porn involving virtual beings, than out on the streets looking for real kids.
That's why I don't think that kiddie porn with virtual kids should be outlawed - not because I don't think it's yucky, I do. But if it provides an outlet for people who might otherwise turn to more-harmful activities, then I'd rather have it exist than porn involving *real* kids.