Actually I wasn't referring to the government spying. I was referring to AT&T making a fraudulent claim against me because one of their clerks screwed up when I returned a cable modem 9 years ago. They tried to charge me ridiculous fees saying I never returned my cable modem. I produced a receipt and they still didn't remove the claim.
Al Gore actually won the 2000 popular election. Jeb Bush helped his brother cheat.
"Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
I agree that solid execution of a concept is worth its weight in platinum. The problem that I have is there are too many solid executions of bad concepts lately.
And having bought, played, and watched games for over 25 years, I do have a lot of insight as to what's going to fail in today's market.
I certainly respect anyone who can ship a game, but this concept is nowhere near unique. It's very dated. At least the mechanics are. Seeing gameplay videos of this reminds me of plenty of failed games over the years. Not being able to see where you are has been a severe gameplay mechanic problem that was solved both with better hardware and with better artistic direction. For a game that relies on acrobatics, not being able to see where you are is an epic fail in my view.
You should have seen the original incarnation of portal created by a bunch of european college students. they had no idea of the power of their concept. Their execution was decent for college students, but their game was just not the same experience as portal. Valve came along and recognized the power of that concept and put great designers on that project.
And finally, the whole article is about how the developers' vision of the game never changed through the years. In my book, games whose developers have tunnel vision usually end up with robotic frogs.
It's subjective, and I can't really justify spending $500 on a video card, but I still want to.
I have bought high end cards for over a decade. I've been happy with all of the except the first. I originally bought an ATI Rage128 card before they came out from buy.com. The product didn't ship on time, and so I waited six months (buy.com was happy to take my $160), and I got an obsolete product. After that I got my first geforce 2 card. And the rest is history. I'm an nVidia fanboy and I'm not ashamed of it.
Those who spend that much money on a single component are usually going to spend a lot more on the rest. There's nothing worse than a yugo with a chevy 350 big block in it (to use a car analogy).
If you don't want to sped that much, you will get far less performance than me. And that makes a lot of difference to the experience of gaming.
The state of Kentucky doesn't have the legal authority to seize domain names owned by people who don't live in Kentucky. Especially not those registered or hosted elsewhere. This is going to be overturned on appeal or worse. Kentucky made a brash move here. Not the smartest move either.
I want a lower price. What makes ISPs so brash that they can just alter the terms of an agreement to suit them and we're expected to pay the same price.
I have a subscription to netflix, and xbox live. I also use amazon to download video to my pc and tivo. I watch video on my tivo that is downloaded from the Internet. I buy a lot of games from steam. I also watch HDTV on hulu and network websites. These are all perfectly legitimate uses. I actually do use all these services. So now comcast wants to say that I should be "delayed" because I'm using too much bandwidth?
utter nonsense. These tactics are in place to prevent me from using the service I pay for to view the content I want.
I'm terribly worried about account security. I think it's an issue they need to work on. They need to put in place some sane policies regarding account security.
If your account gets stolen, you may end up losing hundreds of dollars in games.
I've bought from D2D before, no complaints really, but steam has a convenient application to store your games in and downloads are always available. I've bought from ubisoft direct download store. Sort of lacking in value though.
Fresh out of a 4-year college, your average salary will be 50% more than a teacher, and they need a masters!
Not here in Miami, unfortunately. Here you are expected to start at $30k a year while teachers who only have a bachelors make slightly more. Cheap labor is already here from the endless supply of immigrants.
Care to guess how long doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers work? I'll give you a hint, it's also a lot.
doctors who work in the ER work in long shifts but have at least 3 days off. They also get paid 3 times what your average IT worker does. Lawyers don't do anything without billing for it. Engineers are slightly akin to IT workers except they're unionized already. And managers. Ah yes, managers. They leave at 3:30 unless they have someone watching them. Then they leave at 5:00 on the dot.
Meanwhile, IT workers are expected to be on call 24/7 unless there's a second shift at a larger shop. In a smaller shop, they have to deal with unrealistic deadlines for projects while still doing support and maintaining their regular systems. They have to work 16 hours a day to get those projects done or they risk losing their job to someone cheaper.
Disrespectful management is more of an epidemic with IT workers. Usually management only needs them when there's a problem. So managers tend to treat us like we're the cause.
How many laid off factory workers are there? How many laid off software engineers are there? Phone support techs? Database Administrators? I have honestly never met a DBA who wasn't Indian. And I've met alot while working contracts. They are apparently all from India. I know they know their stuff, but damn we have no DBAs from Brooklyn or Chicago or L.A. or Miami or Boise even?
And, I'm not well off. I get work very sparingly. I have a specialized skill set in being a Linux Administrator. I haven't been able to find permanent employment since Clinton was in office. That's no exaggeration. I've been working contracts and handling my own customers since then. It's sparse. I have it very bad in fact. My contract pay is low and the hours are low. And some of the companies are grateful when you finish and others thank you by disabling your proxcard. I work in a city where a computer guy will charge $20 a hour for a service call. How can you compete with that?
Yeah, I mostly need to get the hell out of Miami. But that's not feasible right now. So, I'm learning spanish as fast as I can, but that's no guarantee. This market sucks for me.
I have never cause damage to company systems for being "disgruntled" I have too much professional pride to sink so low.
but again, I'm surprised at how little this actually happens.
The whole point here is, IT workers generally hold the keys to businesses and we're being dumped on.
A lot of people think that unionizing will send work oversees. For some that may happen. But I highly doubt that companies will send positions that require you to be in-house to India or China. Even if they do, the jobs will come back within a few months due to security breaches and different working hours. There are some jobs which can't be done overseas. Generally, IT support is one of those. Unless you're talking about data grunt work.
I say this is only going to get worse because I don't see a solution in sight. Business isn't taking steps to keep us happy workers.
Union workers get paid higher wages on average than non-union workers doing the same job. That's a fact. Granted, those costs eat into profits.
I say take that extra money from executive salaries. My father worked for a company where the highest paid employee couldn't get paid more than 7 times what the lowest paid employee made. It kept things honest and productive. Salaries were tied to results. The CEO didn't get bonuses for showing up.
IT Staff are already treated like indentured servants in most companies. Pay is insultingly low. Hours are almost illegal. Management is disrespectful, ignorant and arrogant. Jobs are moving overseas or moving "underseas" (my term for cheap H1B labor). There is no union support. There are no wage standards. There are too many unqualified people working while qualified people keep looking. Most positions require too many skill sets for not enough pay (There are many doctors who don't have as many 'medical specialties' as some administrators I know.).
These companies are lucky to get away with as little damages as are done.
They need to wake up and realize that business doesn't get done without computers.
1. build a great working product that is interoperable with open source products 2. price it right 3. treat your customers right 4. maintain the product 5. profit
Comcast is taking steps to backtrack on their service agreements. They are looking at ways to provide much less service for the same price. Instead of spending monies to expand network capacity and access areas as required by law, they are trying to get by with what they have. They are breaching contract with hundreds of thousands of members. They are providing less. They are also taking steps to limit customer access to the Internet. Instead steering customers into services on their own network. Comcast would rather provide content to their customers and they are taking steps to see there is no alternative. This is anti-competitive behavior and also desperate behavior. The FCC must act to prevent this blatant monopolistic behavior. Comcast must lower their prices for providing less service. They must also stop charging illegal modem rental fees.
I feel like this is the veil of the darkside here. Net neutrality and government accountability were cornerstones of his tech platform, now they've been removed in the last month. I just don't know if I can support that. Those issues are extremely important to me.
I think Joe Biden has influenced these changes. Who knew he was so in bed with the IAAs? That's special interest. That's bad for America.
This is a slap in the face to plenty of people who have been supporting Obama since before the primary.
Slashdot Mirror
Those recounts did not involve all counties.
Bush never won in the 3 largest counties in FL.
Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties have always voted Democrat. They did it for Clinton and the did it for Gore.
considering that these three counties have the largest population in the whole southeast United States, Bush never won the popular vote in FL.
Actually I wasn't referring to the government spying. I was referring to AT&T making a fraudulent claim against me because one of their clerks screwed up when I returned a cable modem 9 years ago. They tried to charge me ridiculous fees saying I never returned my cable modem. I produced a receipt and they still didn't remove the claim.
That's a large part of why I don't trust AT&T.
read up
Al Gore actually won the 2000 popular election. Jeb Bush helped his brother cheat.
"Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
The tires would burn in a matter of seconds. it would do donuts and never go anywhere.
It's impractical from a high performance standpoint and that was my point.
I agree that solid execution of a concept is worth its weight in platinum. The problem that I have is there are too many solid executions of bad concepts lately.
And having bought, played, and watched games for over 25 years, I do have a lot of insight as to what's going to fail in today's market.
I certainly respect anyone who can ship a game, but this concept is nowhere near unique. It's very dated. At least the mechanics are. Seeing gameplay videos of this reminds me of plenty of failed games over the years. Not being able to see where you are has been a severe gameplay mechanic problem that was solved both with better hardware and with better artistic direction. For a game that relies on acrobatics, not being able to see where you are is an epic fail in my view.
You should have seen the original incarnation of portal created by a bunch of european college students. they had no idea of the power of their concept. Their execution was decent for college students, but their game was just not the same experience as portal. Valve came along and recognized the power of that concept and put great designers on that project.
And finally, the whole article is about how the developers' vision of the game never changed through the years. In my book, games whose developers have tunnel vision usually end up with robotic frogs.
AT&T cannot ever be trusted.
It's subjective, and I can't really justify spending $500 on a video card, but I still want to.
I have bought high end cards for over a decade. I've been happy with all of the except the first. I originally bought an ATI Rage128 card before they came out from buy.com. The product didn't ship on time, and so I waited six months (buy.com was happy to take my $160), and I got an obsolete product. After that I got my first geforce 2 card. And the rest is history. I'm an nVidia fanboy and I'm not ashamed of it.
Those who spend that much money on a single component are usually going to spend a lot more on the rest. There's nothing worse than a yugo with a chevy 350 big block in it (to use a car analogy).
If you don't want to sped that much, you will get far less performance than me. And that makes a lot of difference to the experience of gaming.
I devised a concept a decade ago about a game based on escape and evade. The focus wasn't on combat, but being clever, skilled, and athletic.
This game, however is going to suck. First person action games are not about doing things, they are about seeing things.
The third time you run off a pipe in midair because you can't see where the hell you are, you're going to throw this game away.
I don't think the game is necessarily bad, but the execution being first person only just doesn't mesh with modern games or what modern gamers expect.
The state of Kentucky doesn't have the legal authority to seize domain names owned by people who don't live in Kentucky. Especially not those registered or hosted elsewhere. This is going to be overturned on appeal or worse. Kentucky made a brash move here. Not the smartest move either.
there are constitutional matters with the patriot act too.
I just wonder if this decision isn't self-serving somehow, or if they realize that the jig is up and we'd call bullshit on them.
are we supposed to fall for this?
That was their selling point.
I want a lower price. What makes ISPs so brash that they can just alter the terms of an agreement to suit them and we're expected to pay the same price.
It's still worth it when there's no other broadband providers in your area.
they're blocking people who use the Internet?
I have a subscription to netflix, and xbox live. I also use amazon to download video to my pc and tivo. I watch video on my tivo that is downloaded from the Internet. I buy a lot of games from steam.
I also watch HDTV on hulu and network websites.
These are all perfectly legitimate uses. I actually do use all these services. So now comcast wants to say that I should be "delayed" because I'm using too much bandwidth?
utter nonsense. These tactics are in place to prevent me from using the service I pay for to view the content I want.
How much of that will go to artists? apparently none since no one is keeping track of the artists whose music is played.
Nope, this is more payola. Fat Tony wants 10.5% of the take for your continued ability to play music without issue.
Notice, it says 10.5% of the yearly revenue. Not yearly profit.
Yep, this is bad for artists and bad for consumers and bad for everyone except the RIAAfia
I'm terribly worried about account security. I think it's an issue they need to work on. They need to put in place some sane policies regarding account security.
If your account gets stolen, you may end up losing hundreds of dollars in games.
I've bought from D2D before, no complaints really, but steam has a convenient application to store your games in and downloads are always available.
I've bought from ubisoft direct download store. Sort of lacking in value though.
Never heard of any others.
I use webhostingbuzz.com and I pay $60 a year.
5TB transfer, 375GB disk, unlimited domains and emails.
are these same scientists trying to bring back the brick phone or black & white TV?
What is the point of this?
IEEE
http://www.ieee.org/portal/site
you're just ignorant eh?
The players cost $300+
The movies cost $25+
The TV to display everything in native resolution is $800+
It's too expensive you dumb shits!
player should be $150
movies should be $15
The TV should cost much less than it does.
Not here in Miami, unfortunately. Here you are expected to start at $30k a year while teachers who only have a bachelors make slightly more. Cheap labor is already here from the endless supply of immigrants.
doctors who work in the ER work in long shifts but have at least 3 days off. They also get paid 3 times what your average IT worker does.
Lawyers don't do anything without billing for it. Engineers are slightly akin to IT workers except they're unionized already.
And managers. Ah yes, managers. They leave at 3:30 unless they have someone watching them. Then they leave at 5:00 on the dot.
Meanwhile, IT workers are expected to be on call 24/7 unless there's a second shift at a larger shop. In a smaller shop, they have to deal with unrealistic deadlines for projects while still doing support and maintaining their regular systems. They have to work 16 hours a day to get those projects done or they risk losing their job to someone cheaper.
Disrespectful management is more of an epidemic with IT workers. Usually management only needs them when there's a problem. So managers tend to treat us like we're the cause.
How many laid off factory workers are there? How many laid off software engineers are there? Phone support techs? Database Administrators? I have honestly never met a DBA who wasn't Indian. And I've met alot while working contracts. They are apparently all from India. I know they know their stuff, but damn we have no DBAs from Brooklyn or Chicago or L.A. or Miami or Boise even?
And, I'm not well off. I get work very sparingly. I have a specialized skill set in being a Linux Administrator. I haven't been able to find permanent employment since Clinton was in office. That's no exaggeration. I've been working contracts and handling my own customers since then. It's sparse. I have it very bad in fact. My contract pay is low and the hours are low. And some of the companies are grateful when you finish and others thank you by disabling your proxcard. I work in a city where a computer guy will charge $20 a hour for a service call. How can you compete with that?
Yeah, I mostly need to get the hell out of Miami. But that's not feasible right now. So, I'm learning spanish as fast as I can, but that's no guarantee. This market sucks for me.
I have never cause damage to company systems for being "disgruntled" I have too much professional pride to sink so low.
but again, I'm surprised at how little this actually happens.
The whole point here is, IT workers generally hold the keys to businesses and we're being dumped on.
A lot of people think that unionizing will send work oversees. For some that may happen. But I highly doubt that companies will send positions that require you to be in-house to India or China. Even if they do, the jobs will come back within a few months due to security breaches and different working hours. There are some jobs which can't be done overseas. Generally, IT support is one of those. Unless you're talking about data grunt work.
I say this is only going to get worse because I don't see a solution in sight. Business isn't taking steps to keep us happy workers.
Union workers get paid higher wages on average than non-union workers doing the same job. That's a fact. Granted, those costs eat into profits.
I say take that extra money from executive salaries. My father worked for a company where the highest paid employee couldn't get paid more than 7 times what the lowest paid employee made. It kept things honest and productive. Salaries were tied to results. The CEO didn't get bonuses for showing up.
IT Staff are already treated like indentured servants in most companies. Pay is insultingly low. Hours are almost illegal. Management is disrespectful, ignorant and arrogant. Jobs are moving overseas or moving "underseas" (my term for cheap H1B labor). There is no union support. There are no wage standards. There are too many unqualified people working while qualified people keep looking. Most positions require too many skill sets for not enough pay (There are many doctors who don't have as many 'medical specialties' as some administrators I know.).
These companies are lucky to get away with as little damages as are done.
They need to wake up and realize that business doesn't get done without computers.
We need to unionize.
1. build a great working product that is interoperable with open source products
2. price it right
3. treat your customers right
4. maintain the product
5. profit
Comcast is taking steps to backtrack on their service agreements. They are looking at ways to provide much less service for the same price. Instead of spending monies to expand network capacity and access areas as required by law, they are trying to get by with what they have. They are breaching contract with hundreds of thousands of members. They are providing less. They are also taking steps to limit customer access to the Internet. Instead steering customers into services on their own network. Comcast would rather provide content to their customers and they are taking steps to see there is no alternative. This is anti-competitive behavior and also desperate behavior. The FCC must act to prevent this blatant monopolistic behavior. Comcast must lower their prices for providing less service. They must also stop charging illegal modem rental fees.
I feel like this is the veil of the darkside here. Net neutrality and government accountability were cornerstones of his tech platform, now they've been removed in the last month. I just don't know if I can support that. Those issues are extremely important to me.
I think Joe Biden has influenced these changes. Who knew he was so in bed with the IAAs? That's special interest. That's bad for America.
This is a slap in the face to plenty of people who have been supporting Obama since before the primary.