You can't persuade countries to your way of thinking without a credible threat to their security. The quite credible US/Israeli threat to Iran is why they've been dragging their feet on a nuclear programme for 30 years, and why they're working so damn hard to hide what exactly they're up to. North korea is essentially the same situation.
Nor can you persuade countries to your way of thinking without a credible augment to their security. Japan, Israel, hell canada all go along with the US because if it comes to it we are under the (sometimes misguided) impression that you can cover our backs.
But ya, it is somewhat tangential, because it's not clear what assets you need to be credible. Sure, if you could design new payloads and new platforms for any problem in 3 months you'd have a credible deterrent to just about everything. But that's absurd.
The key seems to be their integration strategy moving forward. You can't really avoid Metro in windows 8, there's a desktop there, but it's decidedly second fiddle to metro.
By this time next year I expect they're planning to have a full range of integrated products. Windows 8 desktop, tablet, phone, windows 8 phone or tablet connecting your PC or Xbox as something, a mechanism to better manage programs on windows 8 etc.
Ultimately supporting windows phone 8 is going to just be supporting windows 8. You may need a recompile and some work to port to ARM, but basically the core of programming should be the same between the two. So there's not a whole lot of reason not to support windows phone when you're writing an application for windows 8 (which is where the real money in software is anyway) you may as well set it up so it can handle a small screen size at the same time.
That doesn't mean you have enough time to devise an all new set of military equipment for the wars you feel the need to get involved in though. Joining the korean war in 1955 would have been as useful as trying to invade vietnam in 1980.
US entry in the war may be voluntary, but the timing is somewhat constrained. The rwandan genocide took 100 days roughly, at that point the US 'entering the war' would have been too late anyway so there was no point, and that's the problem, if there's something you are obliged to do (stop genocide, stop torture, defend someone from an invasion or the like) you don't have a whole lot of time to decide (or even know) what you need, let alone build it.
I'll grant you that the recolonization efforts in Iraq were mostly a manufactured timeline, but Afghanistan not so much. There's a big difference between a 3 month build up and 3 years.
People have been arguing over the best value in military equipment for standing armies for the better part of 2 centuries, this isn't anything new.
And no one is right. General purpose versatile weapons that are useful against relatively weak powers if the next war you fight is against a relatively weak power, but you can't anticipate which one, where specialized equipment is useful against a specific target when you know who you're fighting.
If you could predict the future and know what enemy you'd have to fight next, and what weapons you'd want for that war then sure, you could reasonably guess what platforms you want, or what payloads you want. His view is that the US can innovate on those things separately fast enough to adapt to any new threat, he might be right of course, but probably for relatively low involvement conflicts he's wrong, and knowing the future mix is tough.
The specific criticism of stealth isn't anything new. By the time you ever have to fight anyone important they'll probably be able to see stealth aircraft so you're not getting much, on the other hand if you have to go into Syria by the end of the month stealth could payoff. Transferring research to longer range weapons (standoff weapons in his parlance) isn't an inherently bad idea, but of course the longer a munition has to travel the easier it is to disrupt or intercept so you could spend a lot of research dollars on something that will just fail to deliver. Electromagnetically launched weapons probably have a place, but that's only one piece of a large puzzle.
I'm not sure WoW is a bad MMO. But it does suffer from feature bloat, multiple raid sizes for the same content is stupid, there's too much emphasis on the 'world first' community etc.
There are a lot of things I could improve with WoW, but they have a decent product, unfortunately it's starting to suffer all of the problems any software project does after so long: Feature creep, a growth in complexity that is beyond a lot of new users, trying to contrive a reason for their existence. It's not that, for example, Pandas are particularly good or bad by themselves, it's that they seem like blizzard is really reaching to justify pandas in WoW. I think they ran out of their own story, and like an 30 minute interview in an hour long time slot, they now have to fill time. It can still be fun, but man, pet battles? With SWTOR you can clearly see where they could improve for years in the future, more space game, pod racing etc. etc. etc. And yet I'd expect them to screw up the attempt.
You have to keep in mind, WoW is basically a 3rd generation product in the MMO business (at least graphical MMO). UO had too much pvp and was a bit too hardcore, although still going strong with 100k subs apparently. EQ came along and showed how PVE could really do well, but it was mostly aimed at kids and housewives because the time commitment required was too much. Blizzard took that niche product and said "how can I play WoW *and* keep my job and get my kids to school" and it took them a while to get there, but it meets that basically evolution well. BioWare *thought* (wrongly) that the next step in the process was to add a fleshed out story with voice acting. I'm not really sure where they got the idea that was what was wrong with the business. But they did. And it's cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to have guessed that seriously wrong.
Certainly true. Although I can see an argument for having an MMO without mods precisely because requiring mods to play significantly changes the game as time goes on, and is a barrier to entry for some people for whom the mods become more confusing than helpful. Think AVR, or even deadly boss mods. Mods can reduce the game to responding to little bars on the screen, and there's probably a legitimate case to have a game that doesn't even offer that. Unfortunately your designers have to understand that, and design the game assuming you don't have all of those little timers and so on.
Which I think is the root of everything wrong with SWTOR. The people in charge of *design* (not the underlying technology, although that has some issues too) never understood what the playerbase was going to be, or how it was to spend its time. The "Ancient Pylons" encounter on hard mode was maddening because had to solve a trivial puzzle in two places (two groups one goes north, one goes south) in a specific order on hard mode. But it never told you anywhere that this was a new mechanic for hard mode or that you needed to solve it this way, or if it was just a bug. And there was no indication why it failed when it didn't work.
Games are a series of interesting choices, and solving problems, in an MMO that's solving problems collectively of course, but you can't give someone a choice or a problem without telling them what the choice actually is, or the what the problem they're trying to solve is. And then you can't make it inconvenient to get to the problems that you do have.
Now days I think most of us who play MMO's don't want to be stuck there 3 hours a day, I'd be happy to log in a couple of days a week even 10 hours a week for a semi serious player and 5 or 6 for a casual could be enough. But there has to be something there for me to do, that I can actually get effective use of my 1 hour today, and not spend 15 minutes on load screens, and some indication that I'm actually getting somewhere. Credit where credit is due to diablo III, within 30 seconds of the game being fully loaded you can be fighting *something*. And that game doesn't have mods - there's a place for elegant simplicity, but then you need to tell the player everything they need to know with the default UI.
It only takes about 80 hours to level. Maybe 100 your first time through. If you do all of the group quests you'll hit 50 in the same 80-100 hours but have more leftovers to do at level cap.
But bioware worked very hard on the first 100-200 hours of gameplay. They completely under delivered on the next 800-1800, which is what you do with a leveled character before the next expansion. They had some content, but it was just inconvenient to get to, required you know things they didn't tell you (and it wasn't always clear what was intentional or not), and full of too many load screens and a lot of 'active travel' where you have to pay attention to getting your character from wherever it is to wherever it needs to be to actually play the game.
The end game is an was terrible. Bad balance between professions and loot drops. Bizarre itemization and gearing requirements as you move past the first tier of raiding. Buggy content (floors not spawning, interactive objects not working properly). Dailies take an excruciatingly long time to do not because the dailies themselves are bad, but because there are so many load screens etc.
Then the population started dropping and the game became a shell. They've moved just about everyone onto about 10 or 12 mega servers, which is actually a good idea, generally, but they implemented it poorly.
The game has a series of hard DPS checks, which is fine, but then it didn't provide tools to asses dps. Problems like that basically plague the game. You can't ask players to reach a benchmark they can't see, or understand (gearing is especially guilty of this). And the game performs badly on loading, which by itself is forgivable, except they didn't design the game to be bad at loading, (which would mean doing things like giving players free teleports to group or the like) they just... expected you to put up with it.
It's interesting how much the 'convenience' stuff in WoW matters. Having a calendar, so you knew who was going to show up to a raid in game was a whole lot better than trying to use and outside tool. Being able to summon everyone in the group to a summoning stone, again huge improvement. WoW didn't start with those things, but they make a huge difference to how much time you can spend actually playing the game versus how much time you spend getting to the content. I think the difference is that as WoW has evolved the people who make the game want time to be able to both play the game, and have jobs and lives at the same time - so they've molded the game into something they can actually approach as adults. SWTOR didn't get that initially, and to some degree still doesn't. So it's not approachable.
Making a game accessible doesn't necessarily mean making it easy. Hard mode Ragnaros was a fucking hard boss (in Firelands not molten core), and I never did manage to kill him with my group. But I didn't have to spend 15 minutes running between 3 or 4 loading screens to get to him. And Rag is a long run back by modern WoW standards.
You know, I kind of like the idea of deciding for myself what medication I take and when
Anyone who knows anything about evolution disagrees with you. Or medicine for that matter. If you were qualified to safely decide what drugs you could stick in your body, in what doses, and for how long we wouldn't need pharmacists, or doctors.
People with your attitude have been deciding they feel better and no longer need to take medications have been breeding drug resistant diseases. Thanks. Just what we needed.
But that takes us to your second point.
some sort of medical prisoner
This is, believe it or not, both a very serious problem and one of the two drivers behind something like this. If you're bipolar, or schizophrenic or any of a slew of various psychiatric conditions you could very well pose a serious danger to yourself or the general public when off your meds. Good thing those people have the freedom to decide when to take medication and when not to just like you right? There are lots of people who, as a condition of release from various legal proceedings have to take meds, but how do you verify? That means they're an expensive burden to monitor, the cheaper you can make that monitoring the better it is for everyone. Being able to verify for less money, and eventually remotely gives them much more capacity for normal function in society and independence.
The second one, is for people who have either lost some of their minds and can't remember if they've taken their medications, or if they're being monitored by staff, and you don't want a mixup. Usually the same group of people say in old folks homes of varying degrees. This is a serious problem, because people in that situation could have very serious complications if they double dose, or miss a dose. In the routine of caring for someone 365 days a year, for years, even a 0.1% chance of making a mistake can be very serious.
What's next, is he going to give me forced ball-shock treatments
No, if only ball-shock treatments cured stupid. Though this would help your insurer (including the government as an insurer in civilized countries) track when you're not taking your drugs, and if they might have a street value they can arrest you for deciding you wanted cash in your pocket more than you wanted to finish the medications prescribed, that they paid for. It means they can stop prescribing certain drugs (e.g. painkillers) if you aren't using them, and it means they can monitor your behaviour and stop you being an idiot and trying to breed drug resistant diseases.
The Wikipedia article on Compliance medicine even has this helpful blurb: The failure to complete treatment regimens as prescribed has significant negative health impacts worldwide.[1] Examples of the rate and consequences of non-compliance for selected medical disorders is as follows: Diabetes non-compliance (98% in US) is the principal cause of complications related to diabetes including nerve damage and kidney failure Hypertension non-compliance (93% in US, 70% in UK) is the main cause of uncontrolled hypertension-associated heart attack and stroke Asthma non-compliance (28-70% worldwide) increase the risk of severe asthma attacks requiring hospitalization
And two of those are conditions where you directly and immediately impact the state of your condition on a regular basis. With Diabetes of course it comes down to what you eat, and Asthma the air you're breathing (which you may not have control over, but if you drive into a smoggy area for example you should be reasonably aware that it's going to immediately aggravate your condition).
Once it hits the $1/day limit, ads get paused until the next day, automatically.
So then the question is what is the minimum number of bots you're going to be hit with, so even at 1 cent an ad, how many real people are you getting for that.
doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about
No, but managing 10 million lines of code successfully is something to brag about.
However it got there, it's there now, and trying to figure out what to do with it, in a way that gets customers their product, teams their appropriate access, doesn't break every time a new intern looks at it, and can track changes back to individual employees so you can evaluate them somehow.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem other people haven't solved - certainly they have, but different solutions may offer some pieces of unique insights.
Sure, but you end up with both metro and the desktop in this unwieldy mess. It's not really a problem with keyboard and mouse in metro, it's the same as media centre and it works pretty much the way you'd expect it to, if it stays in one mode or the other.
The problem is that it's not sure what it wants to be.
Don't get me wrong, they've made a lot of technical improvements, but they've combined it with this bizarre design set of design decisions that are just wildly inconsistent, and that's fatal.
Try teaching a 65 year old how to use a TV remote, and then come back and ask that question. Also, Skydrive with it's rather onerous terms of service that will ban your account for profanity make it simply unsuitable for anyone. Even if that wasn't the case, as I say, if you can figure out how to use it (students) it's conceptually a good idea. If you can't figure out what 'files' are, or how to open them, skydrive storing data magically in the cloud may as well be someone offering you a sql server.
Windows 8 puts the application --- the task --- front and center.
No, windows 8 inconsistently puts different UI's in front of you for no apparent reason. That's actually what's wrong with it. It's not the browser, it's not the desktop.
That may be closer to the truth of how ordinary people are using their PCs and mobile devices
well definitely their mobile devices. To reiterate my 65 year old with a TV remote example, where they fill their desktop with links to web pages as though they were apps. So I agree, that's how lots of users approach their desktop. Except with windows 8 it doesn't do that. Well it does. And then it doesn't, for no apparent reason. Again, that's what's wrong with it. It's inconsistent.
Possible, but I'd guess you're mixing their 'cpc' (cost per click) and 'cpm' (cost per 1000 clicks) numbers somewhere. Though their page https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=219791638048948 would seem to indicate the minimum price for an ad is 1 cent per click, and you bid up from there so 50-60 cents per click might be right. I'm not really sure if that's worthwhile or not. I guess it depends on what you're selling, and what your buy rate is from the ads.
Even then, if you're getting hit with 80 bots a month at 2 dollars a bot then you're paying 160 bucks a month for base advertising costs. That doesn't seem like it would be worth having a fit over. 800 bots a month would put you closer to their '2000 dollars a month to change their name' bracket, which they did have a fit over.
Ya but who cares about windows on ARM? That's dead in the water from the get go. They're trying to negotiate a better deal with Intel/AMD and to get them to get their acts in gear for mobile, it's not a serious product.
Windows on ARM is a shitty gadget, if that's what people want then why not? But I don't see windows on ARM as a serious product.
What monstrosity is that? Metro is just a UI, I am still able to run directx 8 code on windows 8 without any problems it looks like (including the Long long long long depreciated directplay), and yes, I tried this to see if it would break, not for any other reason.
Microsoft could certainly shoot themselves in the foot with the whole metro apps thing, but they might be able to massage all of them into fullscreen windowed mode applications and never have to think about metro again.
There's nothing particularly technically broken in Windows 8, the UI is horrid as a design, but you could have said the same things about vista.
Read their actual page on facebook linked in the summary. Only 1-2% of their traffic were of the 'no script' variety (which is actually between 5 and 10% of their legitimate traffic), the 80% is bots they couldn't find the source of.
Now the things I'm not sure of here, is how much they were spending on advertising in the first place, and how many clicks they were getting. As part of their own writeup they say 2k/month on facebook advertising was way more than they wanted to pay for a name change. That's fair enough, but then how much were they paying? Which leads into the second point, how many clicks are we talking about here? If there are say 80 bots (or even 800) that just are always out there trolling pages, and you only get 100 hits, or 1000 hits or whatever, then sure, you're getting hit for 80% bots, but your cost has to be pretty low too. If you're getting a million hits and 800k of them are bots then there's a very serious problem, but then if you're getting a 200k legitimate page views maybe 2000 bucks a month is reasonable (depends a lot on what your business does).
Facebook does run, and needs to run bots on its service, if part of the cost of doing business with them is paying for when the bots are hitting your page to verify that you're in compliance that's fine, just as long as facebook is up front about how often those bots should hit your page and therefore how much you're paying. On the other hand, if it's a bot farm selling services to a SEO or something then you have a very different problem.
Fuck homebrew. You want to write your own games? Do it on the PC. Until that's locked down at least.
The PC is never really going to be 'locked down'. If you look at the Apple app store, google play, etc. you can always release shitty student project games for free on those. The PC is no different, so long as you can download and run an executable you can play a homebrew game on it.
The consoles are fundamentally different in that they are intended to lock you out of running arbitrary code - that's both good and bad. Bad if you don't have any other means of getting software, good if you want a device that is safe to hand to your 13 year old and know he's not going to accidentally get a virus and blank your data or the like. The consoles also require a certain level of quality and so on for games to show up there, that means you know that whatever you buy on a console will behave a certain way to some degree, you have no such guarantees on the PC. Which is why there's a market for both, not everyone wants to use their brain the think about games.
But yes, generally, if you want to give away your product for free, and you don't want to be bound by onerous requirements the way to do that is PC or Apple or Google, not XBL/PSN/Wii.
injecting them back into your problem areas in a concentrated form basically.
which does what good exactly? What risks are associated with doing that? Are their risks to the procedure itself rather than just the stem cells?
Sad...this one is a battle that should have been won by the doctors,
this is a battle that should revoke medical licences for anyone who was providing such 'treatments'. If you don't have strong evidence of the risks/benefits of a procedure you shouldn't be allowed to perform it on the general public. That's basic consumer safety. Most of these 'treatments' are at the level of undergraduate guessing in a laboratory, and have no place in the general public, and anyone so reckless as to perform them should not be practicing medicine.
Stem cell therapy is very promising, but that doesn't give you the right to sell someone the chance to be a poorly thought out lab experiment. That could go real badly real fast. Offering a procedure without any proven benefit is nothing but theft.
That assumes, wrongly, that you are capable of understanding the facts in context, and that you would be capable of finding alternatives and assessing facts against those. There's a reason doctors can't just prescribe you any damn thing they feel like, but rather have be to be given a list of allowed and approved medications, it is that they don't have the background even.
It's only a fairly small set of the research community who have enough of a background in both stats and other pharmaceuticals to accurately assess data from trails, and trials themselves need layers of regulation so you don't kill any more people than is absolutely necessary. And even then they take far too long to even document the risk/benefit rewards of drugs for anyone on an individual basis to wait on their work.
Also, companies would simply lie or obfuscate any facts about their drugs that are inconvenient to sales (they try and do that already to doctors and drug approval boards). The only real way to deal with that is to make sure you have a layer of experts who are supposed to have working bullshit detectors between the pharma companies and the public.
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You can't persuade countries to your way of thinking without a credible threat to their security. The quite credible US/Israeli threat to Iran is why they've been dragging their feet on a nuclear programme for 30 years, and why they're working so damn hard to hide what exactly they're up to. North korea is essentially the same situation.
Nor can you persuade countries to your way of thinking without a credible augment to their security. Japan, Israel, hell canada all go along with the US because if it comes to it we are under the (sometimes misguided) impression that you can cover our backs.
But ya, it is somewhat tangential, because it's not clear what assets you need to be credible. Sure, if you could design new payloads and new platforms for any problem in 3 months you'd have a credible deterrent to just about everything. But that's absurd.
The key seems to be their integration strategy moving forward. You can't really avoid Metro in windows 8, there's a desktop there, but it's decidedly second fiddle to metro.
By this time next year I expect they're planning to have a full range of integrated products. Windows 8 desktop, tablet, phone, windows 8 phone or tablet connecting your PC or Xbox as something, a mechanism to better manage programs on windows 8 etc.
Ultimately supporting windows phone 8 is going to just be supporting windows 8. You may need a recompile and some work to port to ARM, but basically the core of programming should be the same between the two. So there's not a whole lot of reason not to support windows phone when you're writing an application for windows 8 (which is where the real money in software is anyway) you may as well set it up so it can handle a small screen size at the same time.
That doesn't mean you have enough time to devise an all new set of military equipment for the wars you feel the need to get involved in though. Joining the korean war in 1955 would have been as useful as trying to invade vietnam in 1980.
US entry in the war may be voluntary, but the timing is somewhat constrained. The rwandan genocide took 100 days roughly, at that point the US 'entering the war' would have been too late anyway so there was no point, and that's the problem, if there's something you are obliged to do (stop genocide, stop torture, defend someone from an invasion or the like) you don't have a whole lot of time to decide (or even know) what you need, let alone build it.
I'll grant you that the recolonization efforts in Iraq were mostly a manufactured timeline, but Afghanistan not so much. There's a big difference between a 3 month build up and 3 years.
People have been arguing over the best value in military equipment for standing armies for the better part of 2 centuries, this isn't anything new.
And no one is right. General purpose versatile weapons that are useful against relatively weak powers if the next war you fight is against a relatively weak power, but you can't anticipate which one, where specialized equipment is useful against a specific target when you know who you're fighting.
If you could predict the future and know what enemy you'd have to fight next, and what weapons you'd want for that war then sure, you could reasonably guess what platforms you want, or what payloads you want. His view is that the US can innovate on those things separately fast enough to adapt to any new threat, he might be right of course, but probably for relatively low involvement conflicts he's wrong, and knowing the future mix is tough.
The specific criticism of stealth isn't anything new. By the time you ever have to fight anyone important they'll probably be able to see stealth aircraft so you're not getting much, on the other hand if you have to go into Syria by the end of the month stealth could payoff. Transferring research to longer range weapons (standoff weapons in his parlance) isn't an inherently bad idea, but of course the longer a munition has to travel the easier it is to disrupt or intercept so you could spend a lot of research dollars on something that will just fail to deliver. Electromagnetically launched weapons probably have a place, but that's only one piece of a large puzzle.
I'm not sure WoW is a bad MMO. But it does suffer from feature bloat, multiple raid sizes for the same content is stupid, there's too much emphasis on the 'world first' community etc.
There are a lot of things I could improve with WoW, but they have a decent product, unfortunately it's starting to suffer all of the problems any software project does after so long: Feature creep, a growth in complexity that is beyond a lot of new users, trying to contrive a reason for their existence. It's not that, for example, Pandas are particularly good or bad by themselves, it's that they seem like blizzard is really reaching to justify pandas in WoW. I think they ran out of their own story, and like an 30 minute interview in an hour long time slot, they now have to fill time. It can still be fun, but man, pet battles? With SWTOR you can clearly see where they could improve for years in the future, more space game, pod racing etc. etc. etc. And yet I'd expect them to screw up the attempt.
You have to keep in mind, WoW is basically a 3rd generation product in the MMO business (at least graphical MMO). UO had too much pvp and was a bit too hardcore, although still going strong with 100k subs apparently. EQ came along and showed how PVE could really do well, but it was mostly aimed at kids and housewives because the time commitment required was too much. Blizzard took that niche product and said "how can I play WoW *and* keep my job and get my kids to school" and it took them a while to get there, but it meets that basically evolution well. BioWare *thought* (wrongly) that the next step in the process was to add a fleshed out story with voice acting. I'm not really sure where they got the idea that was what was wrong with the business. But they did. And it's cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to have guessed that seriously wrong.
Certainly true. Although I can see an argument for having an MMO without mods precisely because requiring mods to play significantly changes the game as time goes on, and is a barrier to entry for some people for whom the mods become more confusing than helpful. Think AVR, or even deadly boss mods. Mods can reduce the game to responding to little bars on the screen, and there's probably a legitimate case to have a game that doesn't even offer that. Unfortunately your designers have to understand that, and design the game assuming you don't have all of those little timers and so on.
Which I think is the root of everything wrong with SWTOR. The people in charge of *design* (not the underlying technology, although that has some issues too) never understood what the playerbase was going to be, or how it was to spend its time. The "Ancient Pylons" encounter on hard mode was maddening because had to solve a trivial puzzle in two places (two groups one goes north, one goes south) in a specific order on hard mode. But it never told you anywhere that this was a new mechanic for hard mode or that you needed to solve it this way, or if it was just a bug. And there was no indication why it failed when it didn't work.
Games are a series of interesting choices, and solving problems, in an MMO that's solving problems collectively of course, but you can't give someone a choice or a problem without telling them what the choice actually is, or the what the problem they're trying to solve is. And then you can't make it inconvenient to get to the problems that you do have.
Now days I think most of us who play MMO's don't want to be stuck there 3 hours a day, I'd be happy to log in a couple of days a week even 10 hours a week for a semi serious player and 5 or 6 for a casual could be enough. But there has to be something there for me to do, that I can actually get effective use of my 1 hour today, and not spend 15 minutes on load screens, and some indication that I'm actually getting somewhere. Credit where credit is due to diablo III, within 30 seconds of the game being fully loaded you can be fighting *something*. And that game doesn't have mods - there's a place for elegant simplicity, but then you need to tell the player everything they need to know with the default UI.
seriously? That's messed up.
I only ever seriously played empire, and I had a light side and dark side character and didn't have that problem.
It only takes about 80 hours to level. Maybe 100 your first time through. If you do all of the group quests you'll hit 50 in the same 80-100 hours but have more leftovers to do at level cap.
But bioware worked very hard on the first 100-200 hours of gameplay. They completely under delivered on the next 800-1800, which is what you do with a leveled character before the next expansion. They had some content, but it was just inconvenient to get to, required you know things they didn't tell you (and it wasn't always clear what was intentional or not), and full of too many load screens and a lot of 'active travel' where you have to pay attention to getting your character from wherever it is to wherever it needs to be to actually play the game.
The end game is an was terrible. Bad balance between professions and loot drops. Bizarre itemization and gearing requirements as you move past the first tier of raiding. Buggy content (floors not spawning, interactive objects not working properly). Dailies take an excruciatingly long time to do not because the dailies themselves are bad, but because there are so many load screens etc.
Then the population started dropping and the game became a shell. They've moved just about everyone onto about 10 or 12 mega servers, which is actually a good idea, generally, but they implemented it poorly.
The game has a series of hard DPS checks, which is fine, but then it didn't provide tools to asses dps. Problems like that basically plague the game. You can't ask players to reach a benchmark they can't see, or understand (gearing is especially guilty of this). And the game performs badly on loading, which by itself is forgivable, except they didn't design the game to be bad at loading, (which would mean doing things like giving players free teleports to group or the like) they just... expected you to put up with it.
It's interesting how much the 'convenience' stuff in WoW matters. Having a calendar, so you knew who was going to show up to a raid in game was a whole lot better than trying to use and outside tool. Being able to summon everyone in the group to a summoning stone, again huge improvement. WoW didn't start with those things, but they make a huge difference to how much time you can spend actually playing the game versus how much time you spend getting to the content. I think the difference is that as WoW has evolved the people who make the game want time to be able to both play the game, and have jobs and lives at the same time - so they've molded the game into something they can actually approach as adults. SWTOR didn't get that initially, and to some degree still doesn't. So it's not approachable.
Making a game accessible doesn't necessarily mean making it easy. Hard mode Ragnaros was a fucking hard boss (in Firelands not molten core), and I never did manage to kill him with my group. But I didn't have to spend 15 minutes running between 3 or 4 loading screens to get to him. And Rag is a long run back by modern WoW standards.
That would make for an interesting 2020 or 2030 US census. Race: Purple 95%. Blue: 5% (people who are Red Green colourblind)
but aren't under the direct supervision of a nurse or other care giver.
or who are, and they need to make sure that the next shift doesn't accidentally double dose, or miss a dose.
You know, I kind of like the idea of deciding for myself what medication I take and when
Anyone who knows anything about evolution disagrees with you. Or medicine for that matter. If you were qualified to safely decide what drugs you could stick in your body, in what doses, and for how long we wouldn't need pharmacists, or doctors.
People with your attitude have been deciding they feel better and no longer need to take medications have been breeding drug resistant diseases. Thanks. Just what we needed.
But that takes us to your second point.
some sort of medical prisoner
This is, believe it or not, both a very serious problem and one of the two drivers behind something like this. If you're bipolar, or schizophrenic or any of a slew of various psychiatric conditions you could very well pose a serious danger to yourself or the general public when off your meds. Good thing those people have the freedom to decide when to take medication and when not to just like you right? There are lots of people who, as a condition of release from various legal proceedings have to take meds, but how do you verify? That means they're an expensive burden to monitor, the cheaper you can make that monitoring the better it is for everyone. Being able to verify for less money, and eventually remotely gives them much more capacity for normal function in society and independence.
The second one, is for people who have either lost some of their minds and can't remember if they've taken their medications, or if they're being monitored by staff, and you don't want a mixup. Usually the same group of people say in old folks homes of varying degrees. This is a serious problem, because people in that situation could have very serious complications if they double dose, or miss a dose. In the routine of caring for someone 365 days a year, for years, even a 0.1% chance of making a mistake can be very serious.
What's next, is he going to give me forced ball-shock treatments
No, if only ball-shock treatments cured stupid. Though this would help your insurer (including the government as an insurer in civilized countries) track when you're not taking your drugs, and if they might have a street value they can arrest you for deciding you wanted cash in your pocket more than you wanted to finish the medications prescribed, that they paid for. It means they can stop prescribing certain drugs (e.g. painkillers) if you aren't using them, and it means they can monitor your behaviour and stop you being an idiot and trying to breed drug resistant diseases.
The Wikipedia article on Compliance medicine even has this helpful blurb:
The failure to complete treatment regimens as prescribed has significant negative health impacts worldwide.[1] Examples of the rate and consequences of non-compliance for selected medical disorders is as follows:
Diabetes non-compliance (98% in US) is the principal cause of complications related to diabetes including nerve damage and kidney failure
Hypertension non-compliance (93% in US, 70% in UK) is the main cause of uncontrolled hypertension-associated heart attack and stroke
Asthma non-compliance (28-70% worldwide) increase the risk of severe asthma attacks requiring hospitalization
And two of those are conditions where you directly and immediately impact the state of your condition on a regular basis. With Diabetes of course it comes down to what you eat, and Asthma the air you're breathing (which you may not have control over, but if you drive into a smoggy area for example you should be reasonably aware that it's going to immediately aggravate your condition).
Once it hits the $1/day limit, ads get paused until the next day, automatically.
So then the question is what is the minimum number of bots you're going to be hit with, so even at 1 cent an ad, how many real people are you getting for that.
doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about
No, but managing 10 million lines of code successfully is something to brag about.
However it got there, it's there now, and trying to figure out what to do with it, in a way that gets customers their product, teams their appropriate access, doesn't break every time a new intern looks at it, and can track changes back to individual employees so you can evaluate them somehow.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem other people haven't solved - certainly they have, but different solutions may offer some pieces of unique insights.
I think you meant to suggest I had an extra letter in deprecated, but in the end you came across as a dick. Thanks for trying though.
Sure, but you end up with both metro and the desktop in this unwieldy mess. It's not really a problem with keyboard and mouse in metro, it's the same as media centre and it works pretty much the way you'd expect it to, if it stays in one mode or the other.
The problem is that it's not sure what it wants to be.
Don't get me wrong, they've made a lot of technical improvements, but they've combined it with this bizarre design set of design decisions that are just wildly inconsistent, and that's fatal.
What is so difficult about using SkyDrive?
Try teaching a 65 year old how to use a TV remote, and then come back and ask that question. Also, Skydrive with it's rather onerous terms of service that will ban your account for profanity make it simply unsuitable for anyone. Even if that wasn't the case, as I say, if you can figure out how to use it (students) it's conceptually a good idea. If you can't figure out what 'files' are, or how to open them, skydrive storing data magically in the cloud may as well be someone offering you a sql server.
Windows 8 puts the application --- the task --- front and center.
No, windows 8 inconsistently puts different UI's in front of you for no apparent reason. That's actually what's wrong with it. It's not the browser, it's not the desktop.
That may be closer to the truth of how ordinary people are using their PCs and mobile devices
well definitely their mobile devices. To reiterate my 65 year old with a TV remote example, where they fill their desktop with links to web pages as though they were apps. So I agree, that's how lots of users approach their desktop. Except with windows 8 it doesn't do that. Well it does. And then it doesn't, for no apparent reason. Again, that's what's wrong with it. It's inconsistent.
Possible, but I'd guess you're mixing their 'cpc' (cost per click) and 'cpm' (cost per 1000 clicks) numbers somewhere. Though their page https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=219791638048948 would seem to indicate the minimum price for an ad is 1 cent per click, and you bid up from there so 50-60 cents per click might be right. I'm not really sure if that's worthwhile or not. I guess it depends on what you're selling, and what your buy rate is from the ads.
Even then, if you're getting hit with 80 bots a month at 2 dollars a bot then you're paying 160 bucks a month for base advertising costs. That doesn't seem like it would be worth having a fit over. 800 bots a month would put you closer to their '2000 dollars a month to change their name' bracket, which they did have a fit over.
Ya but who cares about windows on ARM? That's dead in the water from the get go. They're trying to negotiate a better deal with Intel/AMD and to get them to get their acts in gear for mobile, it's not a serious product.
Windows on ARM is a shitty gadget, if that's what people want then why not? But I don't see windows on ARM as a serious product.
What monstrosity is that? Metro is just a UI, I am still able to run directx 8 code on windows 8 without any problems it looks like (including the Long long long long depreciated directplay), and yes, I tried this to see if it would break, not for any other reason.
Microsoft could certainly shoot themselves in the foot with the whole metro apps thing, but they might be able to massage all of them into fullscreen windowed mode applications and never have to think about metro again.
There's nothing particularly technically broken in Windows 8, the UI is horrid as a design, but you could have said the same things about vista.
No.
Read their actual page on facebook linked in the summary. Only 1-2% of their traffic were of the 'no script' variety (which is actually between 5 and 10% of their legitimate traffic), the 80% is bots they couldn't find the source of.
Now the things I'm not sure of here, is how much they were spending on advertising in the first place, and how many clicks they were getting. As part of their own writeup they say 2k/month on facebook advertising was way more than they wanted to pay for a name change. That's fair enough, but then how much were they paying? Which leads into the second point, how many clicks are we talking about here? If there are say 80 bots (or even 800) that just are always out there trolling pages, and you only get 100 hits, or 1000 hits or whatever, then sure, you're getting hit for 80% bots, but your cost has to be pretty low too. If you're getting a million hits and 800k of them are bots then there's a very serious problem, but then if you're getting a 200k legitimate page views maybe 2000 bucks a month is reasonable (depends a lot on what your business does).
Facebook does run, and needs to run bots on its service, if part of the cost of doing business with them is paying for when the bots are hitting your page to verify that you're in compliance that's fine, just as long as facebook is up front about how often those bots should hit your page and therefore how much you're paying. On the other hand, if it's a bot farm selling services to a SEO or something then you have a very different problem.
Fuck homebrew. You want to write your own games? Do it on the PC. Until that's locked down at least.
The PC is never really going to be 'locked down'. If you look at the Apple app store, google play, etc. you can always release shitty student project games for free on those. The PC is no different, so long as you can download and run an executable you can play a homebrew game on it.
The consoles are fundamentally different in that they are intended to lock you out of running arbitrary code - that's both good and bad. Bad if you don't have any other means of getting software, good if you want a device that is safe to hand to your 13 year old and know he's not going to accidentally get a virus and blank your data or the like. The consoles also require a certain level of quality and so on for games to show up there, that means you know that whatever you buy on a console will behave a certain way to some degree, you have no such guarantees on the PC. Which is why there's a market for both, not everyone wants to use their brain the think about games.
But yes, generally, if you want to give away your product for free, and you don't want to be bound by onerous requirements the way to do that is PC or Apple or Google, not XBL/PSN/Wii.
One would assume that usage of Microsoft's built-in stuff is pretty prevalent, so the implications of this are pretty big.
so too then is it relatively easy to replace, with a windows update rollout.
injecting them back into your problem areas in a concentrated form basically.
which does what good exactly? What risks are associated with doing that? Are their risks to the procedure itself rather than just the stem cells?
Sad...this one is a battle that should have been won by the doctors,
this is a battle that should revoke medical licences for anyone who was providing such 'treatments'. If you don't have strong evidence of the risks/benefits of a procedure you shouldn't be allowed to perform it on the general public. That's basic consumer safety. Most of these 'treatments' are at the level of undergraduate guessing in a laboratory, and have no place in the general public, and anyone so reckless as to perform them should not be practicing medicine.
Stem cell therapy is very promising, but that doesn't give you the right to sell someone the chance to be a poorly thought out lab experiment. That could go real badly real fast. Offering a procedure without any proven benefit is nothing but theft.
That assumes, wrongly, that you are capable of understanding the facts in context, and that you would be capable of finding alternatives and assessing facts against those. There's a reason doctors can't just prescribe you any damn thing they feel like, but rather have be to be given a list of allowed and approved medications, it is that they don't have the background even.
It's only a fairly small set of the research community who have enough of a background in both stats and other pharmaceuticals to accurately assess data from trails, and trials themselves need layers of regulation so you don't kill any more people than is absolutely necessary. And even then they take far too long to even document the risk/benefit rewards of drugs for anyone on an individual basis to wait on their work.
Also, companies would simply lie or obfuscate any facts about their drugs that are inconvenient to sales (they try and do that already to doctors and drug approval boards). The only real way to deal with that is to make sure you have a layer of experts who are supposed to have working bullshit detectors between the pharma companies and the public.