That sounds right, but I think bulk mail is still bad for us. I would rather spend a dollar apiece on the 2 or 3 letters I send out each year than spend time almost every day wading through junk mail.
If Dell offered a PC sans OS at a discount from the regular price it would sell very well. They would stock bare drives to supply these configurations. Dell doesn't sell naked boxes because Microsoft won't let them. They know that 99% of all blank hard drives end up with a pirated copy of Windows on them.
I remember visiting my dad at the UCSC computer center. There was an observation window with a view into their brightly lit dinosaur pen. There were rows of computers and tape drives that looked more like appliances. People were scurrying around attending to the care and feeding of these machines.
A few years ago I went back to this same computer center. The lights were off and no one was there. There were a variety of behemoth machines in the shadows around the room that looked like they hadn't been fired up in years. There was a row of relatively tiny Sun servers running down the middle of the room that appeared to be handling the workload that previously took a room full big iron. My dad showed me one Vax 11/780 in the corner that was still being used as a mail server. But there was already a plan to decommission this last vestige of a bygone era, thanks to its enormous appetite for power.
Have you actually held a Gamecube controller? It's nothing like a PS DualShock controller. In addition to the numerous changes you mentioned the right thumb buttons are different sizes. All these changes mean that generally the most commonly used controls are right under your thumb/finger, and you can easily tell the difference between every control by touch. The PS controller is reasonably comfortable, but since all the buttons are so similar it is really easy to get them confused when you are playing a new game.
When you put it like that, it sounds so simple. All I have to do is mark dozens of individual slips and then sort them into the correct boxes myself instead of going to enormous effort of checking boxes on a couple pages and then dropping them into a single ballot box. What the hell were we thinking when we set up the single ballot system?
Many others have posted their proposed uses for massively parallel processing units. Personally I see this as a great server platform for running software that is already optimized for multiprocessor architectures. But you also bring up a good point in that most software is not optimized for multithread CPUs, especially on the desktop.
A few years ago only expensive servers had multiple processors. Now every major CPU maker produces a multicore chip as their flagship product. Many of these chips have hit consumer level prices. I think it is only a matter of time before we start seeing a proliferation of multithreaded software.
There are several cuts of pork that contain a reasonable proportion of fat to protein. The tenderloin is the best example; the ratio of protein to fat is something like 3 or 4 to 1. And even the higher fat bits make good flavor accents.
saves a two-edged sword
on
Black Review
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I basically agree with you, but unlimited saves is a two-edged sword. Unlimited saves adds a non-fun element to gaming - saved-game management. If you save frequently enough then you get to the point where the UI hiccups when displaying your save game snapshots. So then you have to pick savegames to delete. And unlimited saves also opens the door to perfectionism, where you feel compelled to repeat a section until you feel you've done it well enough to make it worth saving. It can be quite frustrating to make it through a particularly harrowing section of an FPS, only to realize that you are low on health and ammo, so you feel compelled to try it again.
The most spectacular accidents occur after the phrases "Watch this" or "Hold my beer" are uttered. You are in for a real treat when someone says "Hold my beer and watch this!"
You sound like a math snob yourself - packet routing and cryptography are both much more interesting mathematically than computationally. But don't summarily dismiss multithreading. Many recent benchmarks on recent multicore processors point to the immaturity of multithreading in modern client software. It seems that many compute-intensive programs don't make effective use multiprocessor hardware.
Real Computer Scientists have to run their programs on Real Computers, which means you can't ignore the hardware. And recent trends point to increasingly parallel processing architectures.
Only the DoD can afford Real Programmers. Game Companies have to settle for Quiche Eaters. On the bright side, Octopiler does a great job with Pascal code.
I never heard the term "gold farmer" until now. At first I thought it sounded crazy that people could get paid real money to play a video game. Then I realized that it seems at least as crazy that people spend real money on a monthly subscription and on virtual goods just so they can spend their own valuable time playing said video game.
How can this poll possibly be correct when not a single game console made it? You'd think that one of the the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, the Playstation or the Game Boy would have managed to at least earn an honorable mention. I read that the total video game industry is about the size of the movie industry, and growing faster!
Microsoft bought Bungie while they were in the middle of development for Halo, which was originally going to be released as a PC game. All Microsoft did was deprive the PC gaming community of Halo for a year or so. I'm not thanking them for that.
factually correct, but bad conclusion
on
The ESRB Gets An 'F'
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They gave the ESRB an F for ratings accuracy because M games have gotten racier. Well duh! Games have actually gotten a lot more graphic in the last 10 years. And I suspect the success of the GTA franchise has made a large contribution to this trend.
But the conclusion they are drawing is incorrect. M rated games aren't supposed to be sold to young children anyway. So the fact that these games are even more inappropriate is moot. It's like that old expression, "the food is bad and the portions are small."
I have no problem boosting an author's Pagerank if his or her articles are good. This article is not. It falls into the category of "scientist discovers what psychologists have known for decades."
I felt the same way about Armageddon when I first saw it, but it actually gets better when you watch it again. There is a lot of Unintentional Comedy in the sheer excess in every aspect of Armageddon's production. The plot is ridiculous. The religious overtones are heavy-handed. The effects are way overdone. The dialog is laughable. The music is manipulative. Even the casting is over the top. Every last detail has been attended to.
Armageddon is actually a bit like Starship Troopers. The major difference is that I get the impression that Paul Verhoeven wants his movies to ridicule the action genre with excess violence and social commentary. OTOH Michael Bay just can't help himself; he has to crank everything up to 11 and comedy ensues.
Actually Einstein was chagrined that he included the cosmological constant. He could have postulated the expanding nature of the universe years before Hubble measured the red shift of distint astronomical objects. He was disappointed that he used this factor to make his equations fit the static universe model that was the standard of his time.
Yow! I actually have one of the tainted albums! Good thing I basically stole it with P2P software, or else I might have a serious problem with my computer.
The fashion industry spends millions in advertising to give folks the impression they should pay the exorbitant markups that fashionable clothes demand. Of course they are bitter that an entire industry virtually ignores fashion. If you spent thousands of dollars on clothes and hours of time to put yourself together in the morning wouldn't you be bitter too if you saw folks saunter into work in relative disarray with no negative repercussions?
Typically the opening weekend of a movie dictates the maximum amount of money it will make. Consoles stay on the market for considerably longer than movies, but sales at introduction are still important. Sony helped guarantee success by selling in Japan first, where they were virtually guaranteed to succeed. By the time they initiated sales in the US they had a lot of positive buzz.
There is something to be said about introducing your product in a smaller market as well. If you have any problems with the product you have time to fix them before starting sales in larger markets. We often rolled out our software enhancement to smaller user communities overseas before the US so that we could verify everything worked.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds right, but I think bulk mail is still bad for us. I would rather spend a dollar apiece on the 2 or 3 letters I send out each year than spend time almost every day wading through junk mail.
We've known for years that many (if not most) people have a brain in their colon. It is the natural result of having your head up your ass.
If Dell offered a PC sans OS at a discount from the regular price it would sell very well. They would stock bare drives to supply these configurations. Dell doesn't sell naked boxes because Microsoft won't let them. They know that 99% of all blank hard drives end up with a pirated copy of Windows on them.
Looks like you mispelled "ghey".
I remember visiting my dad at the UCSC computer center. There was an observation window with a view into their brightly lit dinosaur pen. There were rows of computers and tape drives that looked more like appliances. People were scurrying around attending to the care and feeding of these machines.
A few years ago I went back to this same computer center. The lights were off and no one was there. There were a variety of behemoth machines in the shadows around the room that looked like they hadn't been fired up in years. There was a row of relatively tiny Sun servers running down the middle of the room that appeared to be handling the workload that previously took a room full big iron. My dad showed me one Vax 11/780 in the corner that was still being used as a mail server. But there was already a plan to decommission this last vestige of a bygone era, thanks to its enormous appetite for power.
Have you actually held a Gamecube controller? It's nothing like a PS DualShock controller. In addition to the numerous changes you mentioned the right thumb buttons are different sizes. All these changes mean that generally the most commonly used controls are right under your thumb/finger, and you can easily tell the difference between every control by touch. The PS controller is reasonably comfortable, but since all the buttons are so similar it is really easy to get them confused when you are playing a new game.
When you put it like that, it sounds so simple. All I have to do is mark dozens of individual slips and then sort them into the correct boxes myself instead of going to enormous effort of checking boxes on a couple pages and then dropping them into a single ballot box. What the hell were we thinking when we set up the single ballot system?
Many others have posted their proposed uses for massively parallel processing units. Personally I see this as a great server platform for running software that is already optimized for multiprocessor architectures. But you also bring up a good point in that most software is not optimized for multithread CPUs, especially on the desktop.
A few years ago only expensive servers had multiple processors. Now every major CPU maker produces a multicore chip as their flagship product. Many of these chips have hit consumer level prices. I think it is only a matter of time before we start seeing a proliferation of multithreaded software.
There are several cuts of pork that contain a reasonable proportion of fat to protein. The tenderloin is the best example; the ratio of protein to fat is something like 3 or 4 to 1. And even the higher fat bits make good flavor accents.
I basically agree with you, but unlimited saves is a two-edged sword. Unlimited saves adds a non-fun element to gaming - saved-game management. If you save frequently enough then you get to the point where the UI hiccups when displaying your save game snapshots. So then you have to pick savegames to delete. And unlimited saves also opens the door to perfectionism, where you feel compelled to repeat a section until you feel you've done it well enough to make it worth saving. It can be quite frustrating to make it through a particularly harrowing section of an FPS, only to realize that you are low on health and ammo, so you feel compelled to try it again.
The most spectacular accidents occur after the phrases "Watch this" or "Hold my beer" are uttered. You are in for a real treat when someone says "Hold my beer and watch this!"
You sound like a math snob yourself - packet routing and cryptography are both much more interesting mathematically than computationally. But don't summarily dismiss multithreading. Many recent benchmarks on recent multicore processors point to the immaturity of multithreading in modern client software. It seems that many compute-intensive programs don't make effective use multiprocessor hardware.
Real Computer Scientists have to run their programs on Real Computers, which means you can't ignore the hardware. And recent trends point to increasingly parallel processing architectures.
Only the DoD can afford Real Programmers. Game Companies have to settle for Quiche Eaters. On the bright side, Octopiler does a great job with Pascal code.
You have a seat on your toilet? Luxury!
I never heard the term "gold farmer" until now. At first I thought it sounded crazy that people could get paid real money to play a video game. Then I realized that it seems at least as crazy that people spend real money on a monthly subscription and on virtual goods just so they can spend their own valuable time playing said video game.
How can this poll possibly be correct when not a single game console made it? You'd think that one of the the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, the Playstation or the Game Boy would have managed to at least earn an honorable mention. I read that the total video game industry is about the size of the movie industry, and growing faster!
Microsoft bought Bungie while they were in the middle of development for Halo, which was originally going to be released as a PC game. All Microsoft did was deprive the PC gaming community of Halo for a year or so. I'm not thanking them for that.
They gave the ESRB an F for ratings accuracy because M games have gotten racier. Well duh! Games have actually gotten a lot more graphic in the last 10 years. And I suspect the success of the GTA franchise has made a large contribution to this trend.
But the conclusion they are drawing is incorrect. M rated games aren't supposed to be sold to young children anyway. So the fact that these games are even more inappropriate is moot. It's like that old expression, "the food is bad and the portions are small."
I have no problem boosting an author's Pagerank if his or her articles are good. This article is not. It falls into the category of "scientist discovers what psychologists have known for decades."
I felt the same way about Armageddon when I first saw it, but it actually gets better when you watch it again. There is a lot of Unintentional Comedy in the sheer excess in every aspect of Armageddon's production. The plot is ridiculous. The religious overtones are heavy-handed. The effects are way overdone. The dialog is laughable. The music is manipulative. Even the casting is over the top. Every last detail has been attended to.
Armageddon is actually a bit like Starship Troopers. The major difference is that I get the impression that Paul Verhoeven wants his movies to ridicule the action genre with excess violence and social commentary. OTOH Michael Bay just can't help himself; he has to crank everything up to 11 and comedy ensues.
Actually Einstein was chagrined that he included the cosmological constant. He could have postulated the expanding nature of the universe years before Hubble measured the red shift of distint astronomical objects. He was disappointed that he used this factor to make his equations fit the static universe model that was the standard of his time.
William Gibson wrote one truly great novel. The problem is that he kept writing it over and over again.
Yow! I actually have one of the tainted albums! Good thing I basically stole it with P2P software, or else I might have a serious problem with my computer.
The fashion industry spends millions in advertising to give folks the impression they should pay the exorbitant markups that fashionable clothes demand. Of course they are bitter that an entire industry virtually ignores fashion. If you spent thousands of dollars on clothes and hours of time to put yourself together in the morning wouldn't you be bitter too if you saw folks saunter into work in relative disarray with no negative repercussions?
Typically the opening weekend of a movie dictates the maximum amount of money it will make. Consoles stay on the market for considerably longer than movies, but sales at introduction are still important. Sony helped guarantee success by selling in Japan first, where they were virtually guaranteed to succeed. By the time they initiated sales in the US they had a lot of positive buzz.
There is something to be said about introducing your product in a smaller market as well. If you have any problems with the product you have time to fix them before starting sales in larger markets. We often rolled out our software enhancement to smaller user communities overseas before the US so that we could verify everything worked.