One of the very first missions has you helping out Little John... Who asks you to drive for him because he acknowledges dope makes him unsafe to drive.
Yet, strangely, no "Jack Thompson lauds Rockstar's stance on designated drivers."
Instead of 4 CPU cores on a quad-core chip, why not put 2xCPU cores and 2xGPU cores? Because now they have to make [number of CPU options] x [number of GPU options] variants rather than [number of CPU options] + [number of GPU options].
Even taking a small subset of the market: 8600GT, 8800GT, 8800GTS, 6600, 6700, 6800
Six products sit on shelves. Users buy what they want. As a competitor to say the 8600GT comes out, Best Buy has to discount one product line.
To give users the same choices as an integrated solution, that'd be 9 variants:
8600GT/6600 - Budget 8600GT/6700 - Typical desktop user 8600GT/6800 - Photoshop user/media encoder 8800GT/6600 - Poor gamer 8800GT/6700 - Mid range gamer 8800GT/6800 - Serious desktop user who likes to game 8800GTS/6600 - Exclusive but somewhat poor gamer 8800GTS/6700 - Gaming enthusiast 8800GTS/6800 - Hardcore power gamer/3D Modeller
Most users are now left scratching their heads as to whether the similarly priced 8600GT/6800 or the 8800GTS/6600 is better or worse for them than the also similarly priced 8800GT/6700.
Plus, every time one part of the market is perceived as less valuable, the stores have to price many different skus.
Now add in the gamer who bought a $200 GPU and a $300 CPU a little while before a great new mid range GPU option turns up. They can toss their $200 investment which sucks but that's probably it when it comes to upgrading. Or the guy who bought the $450 (we'll grant a small discount for single purchases) combined unit now has to toss both. Plus he most likely has to buy a new motherboard and memory because memory speed requirements and processor sockets change faster than Britney Spears' moods can swing.
Actually, humans survived for millenia without medical care. They rarely survive more than a few weeks without food.
Arguably, medical care isn't a fundamental necessity. Of huge value if you'd like to live comfortably for longer and have greater odds of surviving to maturity... but not actually a necessity for the species.
The problem is we mistake medical care for being a fundamental necessity. Then, when idiots choose to make payments on a bigger car or TV, instead of their health insurance, we wring our hands and give a damn when the consequences of "I'd rather have more money now and accept the increased likelihood of suffering or dying later." come back and bite them. Instead, "Wow? You made a really dumb choice, didn't you. Hope the TV was worth it." becomes "Oh, that's tragic. Look how the system failed to provide you with your basic necessity. We must do something!"
Medical care isn't a fundamental necessity - just damn nice to have and pretty sensible. If people would own their own dumb choices, it wouldn't be such an issue. Instead, we're in a society where we make stupid short term choices then whine about how unfair it is when the consequences hurt us, expecting others to help mitigate our stupidity.
You've never seen MySpace have you? I always thought MySpace was designed specifically with the blind in mind. It's sure as hell not something anyone with functioning eyeballs would want to visit.
That's cute and all, but what is that in pocket money? When you take out taxes, health care, rent, gas, water, electricity, phone, internet, etc... how much is left? Is there still an advantage in the UK? Speaking as both an England to America immigrant and as someone who's worked in the games industry:
You pay more tax in the UK but you get more benefits to it. By the time you pay to get those benefits back, you get about the same end result.
Yes, American healthcare is "private" - but the standard private healthcare in the U.S. is very similar in level to NHS care in the UK. The waiting lists might be a little shorter but bean counters are still the order of the day, you're still going in to crowded waiting rooms, the hours are still inconvenient and you get charged far more in copays. Whilst free British compares to paid American, paid British is in a totally different league - nothing I've seen in the states comes close to what I got under WorldCom's BUPA coverage in London.
Food is curious one. When it comes to true budget items, the 5p tins of baked beans and 11p loaves of cheap white bread I bought as a student don't translate in to 9c tins and 20c loaves. Eating out appears cheaper in the U.S. but you then whack on 8% in taxes and the social pressure of 20% tips vs. the UK where tax is already included and tipping is something you do to reward good service, not because the owners are too cheap to pay properly.
Cars... I buy British anyway. Just paid $30,000 for a very comfortably spec'd Mini Cooper S. Would likely pay a little more in Europe, even though there's less shipping. In part that's simply because the dollar's so weak right now. The Lotus I have my heart set on is $45k + options, UK runs about $55k in the US, again because of the weak dollar. Then again, a tube pass cost a fraction of that and wasn't an issue when regularly drunk.
Gas is insanely cheaper in the U.S. Even in California with the current craziness, it's about half the price.
Rent in San Diego gets you a nicer, bigger place than you'd get in London - but doesn't get much cheaper. Commute time is about the same. Distances are much greater but your own car and lighter traffic beats waiting for a tube.
Net access... I don't recall that much of a difference. US companies advertise cheaper rates but they only really apply for three months and then they shoot up plus they tack on endless hidden charges. UK companies get a spanking when they try that.
TV costs... Far more choice in the U.S., most of it crap, almost all of it with more commercials than content. Compared to the BBC, it's insane. Even compared to ITV, there's WAY more advertising to sit through. Most of the good US shows make it to the UK. Most of the good UK shows get remade badly for the states while the originals turn up on strange channels.
There's one other huge difference: The European Working Time Directive vs. Overtime Exempt. In Europe you run in to all kinds of issues for pushing much over 40 hours. Granted, most people end up drifting up around 50 but it doesn't go much higher. In the U.S. gaming industry, 80 hour weeks are very common with crunches up around the 100-120 hour point. That work life balance is worth a fortune.
So, in the scheme of things, life's been pretty comparable. I'm more comfortable than I was in the UK but then I'm also more senior now. Like for like, things may seem more or less expensive but hidden vs. apparent costs quickly bring them back to roughly the same point.
Of course, what England doesn't have, and the main reason I'll probably always stay in Southern California, is consistently good weather. No one here really knows what Seasonal Affective Disorder means. The best comparrison is the best day of any given season in England is the worst day of the same season in California. Hence, even in mid winter, you can wander outside in a t-shirt at lunchtime, soak up the sun, and feel good about life. Of course that's just one part of the states. Try it in Minnesota and you're in for a shock.
"Honest baby! I'm not shooting home porn. It's a LifeBlog(tm). I film everything. No... Come back.... Come back!"
Unless you're dating someone with the IQ of Paris Hilton... Or the exhibitionist streak of Paris Hilton... I see some problems here. And if you are dating Paris Hilton, good God man, you've got problems enough.
Most music journalists will flag Nirvana as being the most important band of the last 20 years.
Watch the beginning/end of Dumb on MTV Unplugged. Kurt outright admits that they can't normally play Dumb and On A Plain back-to-back "because they're exactly the same song" but that TV editing will fix it.
8 million people bought Nevermind (On A Plain) 4 million people bought In Utero (Dumb) 5 million people bought MTV Unplugged (both)
Apparently a good song is still a good song, even if you record it as two separate ones.
a botnet of 400,000 zombies...is undetectable in over 80 percent of machines So, does that mean it's a botnet of 2,000,000 zombies, or that there are actually only 80,000 that have been detected but they're pretty sure they're only finding 20% of them so 400,000 sounds right?
If it's truly undetectable, how would you know what percentage of cases were undetectable? Surely, be definition, you couldn't tell?
In other news, most women think I'm damn sexy. It's just undetectable in 99% of cases. But I'm sure they do!
Yeah they took an established franchise millions loved (warcraft) and made an MMO out of it StarWars is vastly more beloved but sandbox so beautifully complex it took two years to seed itself and never really became easy to use before being so brutally modified as to lose what those who had persevered loved didn't make anywhere near WoW numbers.
Marvel Online got cancelled before ever seeing the light of day despite massive numbers of comic book readers past and present.
Matrix Online had a HUGE franchise that translated in to a game no one cared about.
Disney has a massive fanbase yet Toontown putters along quietly.
Ultima Online followed on the back of a game series that many people would argue was far more beloved than Warcraft - long established as near a dozen of the greatest RPG experiences on the PC. Even there, its numbers were never anything close to WoWs.
I think the IP helps. It certainly got a lot of the initial interest though I'd suggest most people who've since picked it up only heard of the RTS series later. But I'd suggest there's more to it than just milking an IP.
the company created a new type of product line by selling ongoing subscriptions for online access to the game, said Unnikrishnan at CSU Fullerton. "Blizzard remains ahead of the competition because the company was able to parlay its strength in one game format to create an online service, which created a whole new product line and different type of revenue stream," he said. Wow. Imagine a world before WoW where there were absolutely no MMOs an no one had ever thought of a monthly fee for these games that didn't exist.
The irony of this whole piece is that just about every single on of Blizzards "innovations" are things Sony Online was doing with EverQuest for half a decade before it (Beta tests, test servers, employees playing the game, upgrades, cancelling titles that didn't work, broad demographics, stats analysis, the fun of a gaming company).
The more interesting thing is, EverQuest only ever achieved roughly a twentieth of WoW's subscription figures. So, more valuable than simply listing the things SOE already did as Blizzard innovations* would be to look at what Blizzard did differently that got them 20 times SOE's subscriber base - and fifty times that of most other competitors.
As a fluff piece, it's nice to congratulate Blizzard for innovations they didn't come up with. The thing is, they evidently did something different and the article manages to miss that far more fascinating angle.
*Note: Not claiming SOE came up with the innovations either. Ultima Online was doing much of it several years earlier still. And they took over from a lot of MUDs, MUSHes, etc. If anything, there've been a series of advances that have been made one at a time, everyone else copying whenever someone else has success with a new idea.
I'd suggest Blizzards real achievements were something more like:
Truly earn loyalty from your customers: People who bought Diablo and Starcraft played for years on a service they didn't have to pay any extra for. Any other company would have turned those servers off once they weren't making money from boxed copies of the game. Blizzard kept providing it and earned a fierce loyalty from their fans where everyone else leaves their fans feeling screwed the moment the dollar signs don't add up in the short term.
Set the barrier of entry LOW: While SOE was playing with the brilliant idea but agonizing experience of StarWars Galaxies and everyone else was chasing prettier graphics, Blizzard put out a game with cartoony graphics that everyone and their mom could play. Ten million general players doing something simpler beats out a few hundred thousand beardy ones and housewives with enough time to learn your complex game mechanics.
Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."
"The goal: $3B USD savings by 2011." If all you're after are cost reductions, Dell could save 100% of their annual costs by simply closing up and going out of business.
Profit, remaining the difference between income and costs however, isn't as simple as "reduce costs, increase profit"... you stop selling things, you stop getting the income too.
Speaking as a manager who purchases regularly... Dell's god awful love of non standard components to try and drive customers back to them for upgrades is next to inexcusable. I tolerate it because office machines can be bought to the spec I need without cracking the case. To now be told, "Oh? You need a high end processor and ram but don't care about the rest of the system? Sorry, that only comes in our high end system and you now have to pay for media burners, graphics cards, hard drives and Vista Ultimate that you don't want."... Especially when I can't buy a lower end system and swap out the processor because the old motherboard won't support it and can't swap out the motherboard because the case uses non standard connectors and fan mounts... I'm going to be going straight to the competition.
So, yes, Dell will cut $3B in costs. Part of that will be the costs of all the systems they used to sell to me. Along with the profits on those systems too. Assuming the same holds true for others, they successfully cut off their $4-5B nose to spite their $3B face.
A campus survey showed that 68% of college females had an experience where a male mistook signs of friendliness for affection. They find only two thirds of people can even point to one or more bad experience?
Now factor in one idiot regularly repeating his mistake and you come out with...
Some men sometimes misread signals enough for women to notice but, by and large, it doesn't happen that often, from that many of them, to the point where a full third of women can't even think of a time where any man has ever done it with them.
Not exactly a compelling argument.
Honestly, if anything, I'd expect more women to have had at least one experience... one idiot in a nightclub should really be pushing that number higher. Still wouldn't say anything about men in general but I'd find it much more likely.
By the same logic:
Near 100% of male drivers have had an experience of a woman driver cutting them up because she was talking on the phone. Clearly all women are dangerous drivers. Or, alternatively, a few stupid/selfish women drivers have affected enough people that a skewed perception is given.
Now factor in the statistic looks at college aged women and was paid for by an alcohol concern group with a vested interest and you come out with: Suprisingly low numbers of women can report men misreading signals even when we deliberately targeted drunk ones, despite our best efforts.
But, much like "Study shows n% of people have experienced threatening behavior from Muslims" and 1930s/40s style "Negroes found to have limited mental capacity, can't fly planes." It's not so much good science as it is sensationalist headlines that they know will grab the attention of both the people who want proof of what their bigotted beliefs already tell them and the attention of those it gets angry... both ways, those who publish it get more readers and attention.
These days people who can drag-and-drop call themselves programmers. Poeple who can spell "l337" are one! What about people who can consistently spell people?;)
Using a substantially faster video card in a PC doesn't provide nearly the performance of a slower spec'd console. The console isn't burdened by nearly as much overhead, but that should not affect the GPU noticably. Like pixels?
The XBox360 (which I own and love too), sortakinda does 720p. That's 1280x720. I say sortakinda because checking framebuffers on launch titles revealed some of them weren't even managing that... They were rendering fairly significantly lower resolutions and then upscaling to fill 720p in order to keep their framerates up.
Compare that to a $200 8800GT that laughs at 1280x720 for most games. Sure, there are some games with graphical effects WAY beyond anything I get on my console... but I can switch it down to console levels and play at full 1080p and beyond (I play most games at 1920x1200 on a 24" widescreen with the vast majority of settings maxed out).
Now it's true... An optimized system will always out perform a generalized one with identical parts when asked to perform identical tasks.
However, consoles also have absolutely zero room for upgrading over their five to ten year life cycles whilst PCs sit there benefiting from Moore's Law.
At launch, high end PCs usually match the console but for significantly more money. A year later, mid range PCs match the console for more money. A year after that, low end PCs tend to match the console for hardly anything more. From there on out, the only real arguments in favor of console performance come from comparing frame rates between a low resolution console with no AA (Forza, I'm looking at you) and a PC at dramatically higher resolutions, AA and AF maxed and a whole bunch of cool new graphical tweaks that aren't even an option on the optimized console version.
Both paths are equally valid. The PC, by going generic, has the ability to keep up with Moore's law and not wait on five plus year release cycles. Consoles, by going heavily optimized, can get the best bang for the buck at launch, translating in to greater profits for the makers/lower prices over time, and providing a single environment for games to be optimized for.
The bigger issue, however, is more likely how easy it is to download NOCD hacks, etc. for the PC and have one set of disks passed around a whole group of friends. Console gamers tend to need mod chips and, with Microsoft and Sony controlling the keys to the kingdom, can screw you the moment you go online and get the next forced patch. Game companies factor that in and would rather sell 2-5m units at $60 of Halo 17 with 3-6m turning up with copies etc. than sell 500,000 copies of Doom 18, at $30 a piece after Best Buy slashes prices, with 5-10m copies out there.
As a hardware medium, they're simply different choices. One gets more rewards up front, one pays them out over time. As a business medium for game makers, Microsoft and Sony tightly holding the keys to going on line makes consoles a FAR better investment.
Stick a $30 webcam under a pile of junk so it's not hugely obvious. You've already said your machine is networked all night. Leave it taking a shot every half second and uploading it to an external server.
Sure, it'll still get stolen. Assuming your office has even basic security to ensure only known people enter, you'll also have a nice and recognizable picture of the thief on a machine they can't access. The next morning, you walk in, grab the image, have them pulled in front of their manager, demand the return of the laptop, have them fired and press charges.
Honestly, the vast majority of cases where people have been convinced someone's stolen their stuff, everywhere I've worked, have turned out to be their misplacing things. Most likely, the theft rate is nowhere near what you fear it is.
Locking your laptop in a big ol box is an ugly pain in the ass for little gain. Hell, if someone really wants it, a crowbar will get through most of them, bolt cutters will get through most chains. And it does nothing to protect the iPod, digital camera, phone, etc. you left beside it. A simple webcam, backing up externally, does a far better job of protecting everything so long as it's subtly enough hidden so no one has any idea they need to avoid being seen by it.
The biggest problem with physical security measures... If someone's determined, they try forcing it. You may get lucky and not have them manage to get whatever they went for... But it'll likely get trashed in the process. The University of the West of England added those U plates to their PC cases, years back... All that happened was thieves trashed the cases. A few less got stolen but they were pretty much destroyed anyway. Having a picture of the thief with your still 100% intact laptop is way better than their trashing it, trying to get it out of a cage.
So even if it runs at a higher temperature, its confined to a very small space.
This isn't dangerous at all. You pierce the side of a regular lightbulb and it'll maybe shatter and you might get some hot glass on you. Worst case you manage to brand yourself with the tungsten wire.
You pierce a CFL, you get almost enough mercury for the Mad Hatter to raise an eyebrow. Little enough that you can fairly safely clean it up on your own. Large enough that EPA standards imply you need the famous $2,000 clean up crew.
Anyone care to suggest what [I assume is] very high pressure plasma, at 6,000K (~10,000F) will do when there's a small hole between it and a much lower pressure room?
Look Mommy! I made a working scale model of the Deathstar!
The problem is the mercury -- enough in one bulb to contaminate 1,000 gallons of water, even in newer low-mercury bulbs.
The number on another scaremongering article was 6,000.
Either way...
There's a gaping flaw in the logic that if you count PPM for a safe dose, look at the volume, then multiply up. It assumes the mercury is even close to equally disolved in that water.
If a drop, the volume of which is found in a typical CFL, dropped in to a thousand gallons of water and sank to the bottom, whilst I wouldn't happily do so, I'd still be willing to drink a glass from off to the side of where that drop went in. A little more nervously, I'd still be willing to do so a few weeks later, assuming the drop was still largely intact at the bottom.
On the flip side, let that drop sink in to a million gallons of water, thus apparently a thousand times under the "safe dose"... and I challenge anyone to be willing to drink the cupfull taken from where the drop sank, original drop included.
Yes, mercury is bad for you. It turns you in to a character in Alice In Wonderland.
On the other hand, we're druming up fear by pointing to a perfect distribution and the safe level (accepting that safe levels are usually many times lower than the point at which harm is a likelihood that's why they're called "safe" not "minimal risk" levels).
If you're going to get your panties in a bunch about that, you'd better not each fish (particularly swordfish, shark, smallmouth bass and pickerel). With an FDA "safe for human consumption" of 1ppm, shark ranged 0.30-3.53ppm in samples tested, averaging 0.88ppm and swordfish at 0.36-1.68ppm, averaging at 0.88 (FDA).
By comparison, the mercury maybe getting out of a bulb, disolved properly in to ground water, getting in to the water supply and failing to get filtered past the safe level is somewhat less of a risk than the statistical variance that means you'll almost certainly clear the safe levels in at least one case if you have a nice swordfish steak half a dozen times at your favorite restaurant.
Neither is likely to do you much harm. In both cases, getting in to your car and driving to work is a vastly greater risk, yet it puts the silliness of the debate in context when simply eating fish is far worse for you (on that one very limited axis).
if your hard drive crashed and killed everything on it, you could simply re-download your whole collection. And on that fun 20GB/month tiered access plan the cable companies are looking to roll out, it'll only take you eight months to "simply re-download" that 160GB iPod Video's collection. Of course, you could always get the high end, more expensive, 40GB/month plan - then it'd only be a third of a year.
Or you could run up against the hidden bandwidth cap and have your service disconnected in just a few hours for "abuse of service."
It's a great idea but falls apart as you get away from tiny iPhone flash drives and get in to the proper hard drive based models.
With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerized voice. Wow, that sounds an awful lot like my prior art:
With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their fingers without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the "keyboard" and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them in to words spoken by a computerized voice.
Really? That was all I had to do to invent telepathy a decade ago? I hereby bequeath my invention to the good of all mankind.
Speaking without moving your lips is generally ventriloquism, not telepathy.
Granted, telling off color jokes with disturbing old man/child connotations doesn't sound quite as cool as reading minds and joining the X-Men. Still, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck without moving its bill, it's still a ventriloquist duck and not a telepath.
Of course, RobYou-RefuseToTakeYouToABunchOfPlaces-GetLost-WeaveDownAlternatingStreetsToUpTheMileage-ForceYouToListenToCrapMusic-AndSpeakDebatableEnglish-Cab turned out to be a bit of a mouthful.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the very first missions has you helping out Little John... Who asks you to drive for him because he acknowledges dope makes him unsafe to drive.
Yet, strangely, no "Jack Thompson lauds Rockstar's stance on designated drivers."
Even taking a small subset of the market:
8600GT, 8800GT, 8800GTS, 6600, 6700, 6800
Six products sit on shelves. Users buy what they want. As a competitor to say the 8600GT comes out, Best Buy has to discount one product line.
To give users the same choices as an integrated solution, that'd be 9 variants:
8600GT/6600 - Budget
8600GT/6700 - Typical desktop user
8600GT/6800 - Photoshop user/media encoder
8800GT/6600 - Poor gamer
8800GT/6700 - Mid range gamer
8800GT/6800 - Serious desktop user who likes to game
8800GTS/6600 - Exclusive but somewhat poor gamer
8800GTS/6700 - Gaming enthusiast
8800GTS/6800 - Hardcore power gamer/3D Modeller
Most users are now left scratching their heads as to whether the similarly priced 8600GT/6800 or the 8800GTS/6600 is better or worse for them than the also similarly priced 8800GT/6700.
Plus, every time one part of the market is perceived as less valuable, the stores have to price many different skus.
Now add in the gamer who bought a $200 GPU and a $300 CPU a little while before a great new mid range GPU option turns up. They can toss their $200 investment which sucks but that's probably it when it comes to upgrading. Or the guy who bought the $450 (we'll grant a small discount for single purchases) combined unit now has to toss both. Plus he most likely has to buy a new motherboard and memory because memory speed requirements and processor sockets change faster than Britney Spears' moods can swing.
>> medical care is a fundamental necessity
> Food is a fundamental necessity.
Actually, humans survived for millenia without medical care. They rarely survive more than a few weeks without food.
Arguably, medical care isn't a fundamental necessity. Of huge value if you'd like to live comfortably for longer and have greater odds of surviving to maturity... but not actually a necessity for the species.
The problem is we mistake medical care for being a fundamental necessity. Then, when idiots choose to make payments on a bigger car or TV, instead of their health insurance, we wring our hands and give a damn when the consequences of "I'd rather have more money now and accept the increased likelihood of suffering or dying later." come back and bite them. Instead, "Wow? You made a really dumb choice, didn't you. Hope the TV was worth it." becomes "Oh, that's tragic. Look how the system failed to provide you with your basic necessity. We must do something!"
Medical care isn't a fundamental necessity - just damn nice to have and pretty sensible. If people would own their own dumb choices, it wouldn't be such an issue. Instead, we're in a society where we make stupid short term choices then whine about how unfair it is when the consequences hurt us, expecting others to help mitigate our stupidity.
You pay more tax in the UK but you get more benefits to it. By the time you pay to get those benefits back, you get about the same end result.
Yes, American healthcare is "private" - but the standard private healthcare in the U.S. is very similar in level to NHS care in the UK. The waiting lists might be a little shorter but bean counters are still the order of the day, you're still going in to crowded waiting rooms, the hours are still inconvenient and you get charged far more in copays. Whilst free British compares to paid American, paid British is in a totally different league - nothing I've seen in the states comes close to what I got under WorldCom's BUPA coverage in London.
Food is curious one. When it comes to true budget items, the 5p tins of baked beans and 11p loaves of cheap white bread I bought as a student don't translate in to 9c tins and 20c loaves. Eating out appears cheaper in the U.S. but you then whack on 8% in taxes and the social pressure of 20% tips vs. the UK where tax is already included and tipping is something you do to reward good service, not because the owners are too cheap to pay properly.
Cars... I buy British anyway. Just paid $30,000 for a very comfortably spec'd Mini Cooper S. Would likely pay a little more in Europe, even though there's less shipping. In part that's simply because the dollar's so weak right now. The Lotus I have my heart set on is $45k + options, UK runs about $55k in the US, again because of the weak dollar. Then again, a tube pass cost a fraction of that and wasn't an issue when regularly drunk.
Gas is insanely cheaper in the U.S. Even in California with the current craziness, it's about half the price.
Rent in San Diego gets you a nicer, bigger place than you'd get in London - but doesn't get much cheaper. Commute time is about the same. Distances are much greater but your own car and lighter traffic beats waiting for a tube.
Net access... I don't recall that much of a difference. US companies advertise cheaper rates but they only really apply for three months and then they shoot up plus they tack on endless hidden charges. UK companies get a spanking when they try that.
TV costs... Far more choice in the U.S., most of it crap, almost all of it with more commercials than content. Compared to the BBC, it's insane. Even compared to ITV, there's WAY more advertising to sit through. Most of the good US shows make it to the UK. Most of the good UK shows get remade badly for the states while the originals turn up on strange channels.
There's one other huge difference: The European Working Time Directive vs. Overtime Exempt. In Europe you run in to all kinds of issues for pushing much over 40 hours. Granted, most people end up drifting up around 50 but it doesn't go much higher. In the U.S. gaming industry, 80 hour weeks are very common with crunches up around the 100-120 hour point. That work life balance is worth a fortune.
So, in the scheme of things, life's been pretty comparable. I'm more comfortable than I was in the UK but then I'm also more senior now. Like for like, things may seem more or less expensive but hidden vs. apparent costs quickly bring them back to roughly the same point.
Of course, what England doesn't have, and the main reason I'll probably always stay in Southern California, is consistently good weather. No one here really knows what Seasonal Affective Disorder means. The best comparrison is the best day of any given season in England is the worst day of the same season in California. Hence, even in mid winter, you can wander outside in a t-shirt at lunchtime, soak up the sun, and feel good about life. Of course that's just one part of the states. Try it in Minnesota and you're in for a shock.
"Honest baby! I'm not shooting home porn. It's a LifeBlog(tm). I film everything. No... Come back.... Come back!"
Unless you're dating someone with the IQ of Paris Hilton... Or the exhibitionist streak of Paris Hilton... I see some problems here. And if you are dating Paris Hilton, good God man, you've got problems enough.
If it's such an obviously private street, why did this guy watch them drive down it and not say anything?
Next door neighbor, watching them go down the 'obviously private' street.
Most music journalists will flag Nirvana as being the most important band of the last 20 years.
Watch the beginning/end of Dumb on MTV Unplugged. Kurt outright admits that they can't normally play Dumb and On A Plain back-to-back "because they're exactly the same song" but that TV editing will fix it.
8 million people bought Nevermind (On A Plain)
4 million people bought In Utero (Dumb)
5 million people bought MTV Unplugged (both)
Apparently a good song is still a good song, even if you record it as two separate ones.
If it's truly undetectable, how would you know what percentage of cases were undetectable? Surely, be definition, you couldn't tell?
In other news, most women think I'm damn sexy. It's just undetectable in 99% of cases. But I'm sure they do!
Marvel Online got cancelled before ever seeing the light of day despite massive numbers of comic book readers past and present.
Matrix Online had a HUGE franchise that translated in to a game no one cared about.
Disney has a massive fanbase yet Toontown putters along quietly.
Ultima Online followed on the back of a game series that many people would argue was far more beloved than Warcraft - long established as near a dozen of the greatest RPG experiences on the PC. Even there, its numbers were never anything close to WoWs.
I think the IP helps. It certainly got a lot of the initial interest though I'd suggest most people who've since picked it up only heard of the RTS series later. But I'd suggest there's more to it than just milking an IP.
"Blizzard remains ahead of the competition because the company was able to parlay its strength in one game format to create an online service, which created a whole new product line and different type of revenue stream," he said. Wow. Imagine a world before WoW where there were absolutely no MMOs an no one had ever thought of a monthly fee for these games that didn't exist.
The irony of this whole piece is that just about every single on of Blizzards "innovations" are things Sony Online was doing with EverQuest for half a decade before it (Beta tests, test servers, employees playing the game, upgrades, cancelling titles that didn't work, broad demographics, stats analysis, the fun of a gaming company).
The more interesting thing is, EverQuest only ever achieved roughly a twentieth of WoW's subscription figures. So, more valuable than simply listing the things SOE already did as Blizzard innovations* would be to look at what Blizzard did differently that got them 20 times SOE's subscriber base - and fifty times that of most other competitors.
As a fluff piece, it's nice to congratulate Blizzard for innovations they didn't come up with. The thing is, they evidently did something different and the article manages to miss that far more fascinating angle.
*Note: Not claiming SOE came up with the innovations either. Ultima Online was doing much of it several years earlier still. And they took over from a lot of MUDs, MUSHes, etc. If anything, there've been a series of advances that have been made one at a time, everyone else copying whenever someone else has success with a new idea.
I'd suggest Blizzards real achievements were something more like:
Truly earn loyalty from your customers: People who bought Diablo and Starcraft played for years on a service they didn't have to pay any extra for. Any other company would have turned those servers off once they weren't making money from boxed copies of the game. Blizzard kept providing it and earned a fierce loyalty from their fans where everyone else leaves their fans feeling screwed the moment the dollar signs don't add up in the short term.
Set the barrier of entry LOW: While SOE was playing with the brilliant idea but agonizing experience of StarWars Galaxies and everyone else was chasing prettier graphics, Blizzard put out a game with cartoony graphics that everyone and their mom could play. Ten million general players doing something simpler beats out a few hundred thousand beardy ones and housewives with enough time to learn your complex game mechanics.
Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."
Profit, remaining the difference between income and costs however, isn't as simple as "reduce costs, increase profit"... you stop selling things, you stop getting the income too.
Speaking as a manager who purchases regularly... Dell's god awful love of non standard components to try and drive customers back to them for upgrades is next to inexcusable. I tolerate it because office machines can be bought to the spec I need without cracking the case. To now be told, "Oh? You need a high end processor and ram but don't care about the rest of the system? Sorry, that only comes in our high end system and you now have to pay for media burners, graphics cards, hard drives and Vista Ultimate that you don't want."... Especially when I can't buy a lower end system and swap out the processor because the old motherboard won't support it and can't swap out the motherboard because the case uses non standard connectors and fan mounts... I'm going to be going straight to the competition.
So, yes, Dell will cut $3B in costs. Part of that will be the costs of all the systems they used to sell to me. Along with the profits on those systems too. Assuming the same holds true for others, they successfully cut off their $4-5B nose to spite their $3B face.
A little smart application of the third one actually removes the need for the first two.
Don't opt-in to opt-out holes and try not to opt-out of opt-in holes, then we won't need to ask and you won't need to tell.
This in a confused world where the Senator Ted Stevens says the internet is a series of tubes and Bush's nomination for Surgeon General says that male and female "plumbing" explains why homosexuality is bad. Clearly they're linked. Teh intarwebs are teh gey.
Now factor in one idiot regularly repeating his mistake and you come out with...
Some men sometimes misread signals enough for women to notice but, by and large, it doesn't happen that often, from that many of them, to the point where a full third of women can't even think of a time where any man has ever done it with them.
Not exactly a compelling argument.
Honestly, if anything, I'd expect more women to have had at least one experience... one idiot in a nightclub should really be pushing that number higher. Still wouldn't say anything about men in general but I'd find it much more likely.
By the same logic:
Near 100% of male drivers have had an experience of a woman driver cutting them up because she was talking on the phone. Clearly all women are dangerous drivers. Or, alternatively, a few stupid/selfish women drivers have affected enough people that a skewed perception is given.
Now factor in the statistic looks at college aged women and was paid for by an alcohol concern group with a vested interest and you come out with: Suprisingly low numbers of women can report men misreading signals even when we deliberately targeted drunk ones, despite our best efforts.
But, much like "Study shows n% of people have experienced threatening behavior from Muslims" and 1930s/40s style "Negroes found to have limited mental capacity, can't fly planes." It's not so much good science as it is sensationalist headlines that they know will grab the attention of both the people who want proof of what their bigotted beliefs already tell them and the attention of those it gets angry... both ways, those who publish it get more readers and attention.
Didn't PCs come along because people needed some kind of a "personal computer" as opposed to a mainframe?
In other news: today, aircraft carrier sales are a tiny fraction of the weekend pleasure cruiser market.
The XBox360 (which I own and love too), sortakinda does 720p. That's 1280x720. I say sortakinda because checking framebuffers on launch titles revealed some of them weren't even managing that... They were rendering fairly significantly lower resolutions and then upscaling to fill 720p in order to keep their framerates up.
Compare that to a $200 8800GT that laughs at 1280x720 for most games. Sure, there are some games with graphical effects WAY beyond anything I get on my console... but I can switch it down to console levels and play at full 1080p and beyond (I play most games at 1920x1200 on a 24" widescreen with the vast majority of settings maxed out).
Now it's true... An optimized system will always out perform a generalized one with identical parts when asked to perform identical tasks.
However, consoles also have absolutely zero room for upgrading over their five to ten year life cycles whilst PCs sit there benefiting from Moore's Law.
At launch, high end PCs usually match the console but for significantly more money. A year later, mid range PCs match the console for more money. A year after that, low end PCs tend to match the console for hardly anything more. From there on out, the only real arguments in favor of console performance come from comparing frame rates between a low resolution console with no AA (Forza, I'm looking at you) and a PC at dramatically higher resolutions, AA and AF maxed and a whole bunch of cool new graphical tweaks that aren't even an option on the optimized console version.
Both paths are equally valid. The PC, by going generic, has the ability to keep up with Moore's law and not wait on five plus year release cycles. Consoles, by going heavily optimized, can get the best bang for the buck at launch, translating in to greater profits for the makers/lower prices over time, and providing a single environment for games to be optimized for.
The bigger issue, however, is more likely how easy it is to download NOCD hacks, etc. for the PC and have one set of disks passed around a whole group of friends. Console gamers tend to need mod chips and, with Microsoft and Sony controlling the keys to the kingdom, can screw you the moment you go online and get the next forced patch. Game companies factor that in and would rather sell 2-5m units at $60 of Halo 17 with 3-6m turning up with copies etc. than sell 500,000 copies of Doom 18, at $30 a piece after Best Buy slashes prices, with 5-10m copies out there.
As a hardware medium, they're simply different choices. One gets more rewards up front, one pays them out over time. As a business medium for game makers, Microsoft and Sony tightly holding the keys to going on line makes consoles a FAR better investment.
Stick a $30 webcam under a pile of junk so it's not hugely obvious. You've already said your machine is networked all night. Leave it taking a shot every half second and uploading it to an external server.
Sure, it'll still get stolen. Assuming your office has even basic security to ensure only known people enter, you'll also have a nice and recognizable picture of the thief on a machine they can't access. The next morning, you walk in, grab the image, have them pulled in front of their manager, demand the return of the laptop, have them fired and press charges.
Honestly, the vast majority of cases where people have been convinced someone's stolen their stuff, everywhere I've worked, have turned out to be their misplacing things. Most likely, the theft rate is nowhere near what you fear it is.
Locking your laptop in a big ol box is an ugly pain in the ass for little gain. Hell, if someone really wants it, a crowbar will get through most of them, bolt cutters will get through most chains. And it does nothing to protect the iPod, digital camera, phone, etc. you left beside it. A simple webcam, backing up externally, does a far better job of protecting everything so long as it's subtly enough hidden so no one has any idea they need to avoid being seen by it.
The biggest problem with physical security measures... If someone's determined, they try forcing it. You may get lucky and not have them manage to get whatever they went for... But it'll likely get trashed in the process. The University of the West of England added those U plates to their PC cases, years back... All that happened was thieves trashed the cases. A few less got stolen but they were pretty much destroyed anyway. Having a picture of the thief with your still 100% intact laptop is way better than their trashing it, trying to get it out of a cage.
This isn't dangerous at all. You pierce the side of a regular lightbulb and it'll maybe shatter and you might get some hot glass on you. Worst case you manage to brand yourself with the tungsten wire.
You pierce a CFL, you get almost enough mercury for the Mad Hatter to raise an eyebrow. Little enough that you can fairly safely clean it up on your own. Large enough that EPA standards imply you need the famous $2,000 clean up crew.
Anyone care to suggest what [I assume is] very high pressure plasma, at 6,000K (~10,000F) will do when there's a small hole between it and a much lower pressure room?
Look Mommy! I made a working scale model of the Deathstar!
The problem is the mercury -- enough in one bulb to contaminate 1,000 gallons of water, even in newer low-mercury bulbs.
The number on another scaremongering article was 6,000.
Either way...
There's a gaping flaw in the logic that if you count PPM for a safe dose, look at the volume, then multiply up. It assumes the mercury is even close to equally disolved in that water.
If a drop, the volume of which is found in a typical CFL, dropped in to a thousand gallons of water and sank to the bottom, whilst I wouldn't happily do so, I'd still be willing to drink a glass from off to the side of where that drop went in. A little more nervously, I'd still be willing to do so a few weeks later, assuming the drop was still largely intact at the bottom.
On the flip side, let that drop sink in to a million gallons of water, thus apparently a thousand times under the "safe dose"... and I challenge anyone to be willing to drink the cupfull taken from where the drop sank, original drop included.
Yes, mercury is bad for you. It turns you in to a character in Alice In Wonderland.
On the other hand, we're druming up fear by pointing to a perfect distribution and the safe level (accepting that safe levels are usually many times lower than the point at which harm is a likelihood that's why they're called "safe" not "minimal risk" levels).
If you're going to get your panties in a bunch about that, you'd better not each fish (particularly swordfish, shark, smallmouth bass and pickerel). With an FDA "safe for human consumption" of 1ppm, shark ranged 0.30-3.53ppm in samples tested, averaging 0.88ppm and swordfish at 0.36-1.68ppm, averaging at 0.88 (FDA).
By comparison, the mercury maybe getting out of a bulb, disolved properly in to ground water, getting in to the water supply and failing to get filtered past the safe level is somewhat less of a risk than the statistical variance that means you'll almost certainly clear the safe levels in at least one case if you have a nice swordfish steak half a dozen times at your favorite restaurant.
Neither is likely to do you much harm. In both cases, getting in to your car and driving to work is a vastly greater risk, yet it puts the silliness of the debate in context when simply eating fish is far worse for you (on that one very limited axis).
Or you could run up against the hidden bandwidth cap and have your service disconnected in just a few hours for "abuse of service."
It's a great idea but falls apart as you get away from tiny iPhone flash drives and get in to the proper hard drive based models.
With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their fingers without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the "keyboard" and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them in to words spoken by a computerized voice.
Really? That was all I had to do to invent telepathy a decade ago? I hereby bequeath my invention to the good of all mankind.
Speaking without moving your lips is generally ventriloquism, not telepathy.
Granted, telling off color jokes with disturbing old man/child connotations doesn't sound quite as cool as reading minds and joining the X-Men. Still, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck without moving its bill, it's still a ventriloquist duck and not a telepath.
You've evidently not paid a cab fair in London.
Of course, RobYou-RefuseToTakeYouToABunchOfPlaces-GetLost-WeaveDownAlternatingStreetsToUpTheMileage-ForceYouToListenToCrapMusic-AndSpeakDebatableEnglish-Cab turned out to be a bit of a mouthful.