Whether you intend for them to be tacticians, civilians, or just mindless grunts. on 'Easy' or 'Difficult' a bad guy should still know he should take cover, call for backup, etc.
I'd disagree:
A typical civilian is liable to run scared, shoot while running, empty their clip desperately, that kind of thing.
A regular soldier is liable to call for cover, move to a braced position or whatever for shooting, but still make some dumb mistakes.
A truly elite solider, the target is probably never going to know they and their squad were there until they are lying dead on the ground. They'll plan tactics in advance, have them well practiced and executed silently. They'll be better at scanning for targets, they'll be better at moving silently through the best areas of cover. When they do move, they'll be covered by an already well placed squadmate. Their communications will be as much via silent gestures as noisy radios.
Within that spectrum (and me not knowing much about elite forces), there's a huge range of variables for a given enemy. That security guard could be nothing more than a civilian in a uniform on easy difficulty yet an ex special forces soldier on high difficulty. They're still both "just a security guard" yet there's a huge range of differences in how their AI might act.
Ghost Recon has my all time favorite example of that. On the first mission, if you go around to the north of the valley, there's a slope that troops come down.
I'd played it once on easy. I managed to clear them all with just a single sniper and good reactions. As soon as they started getting shot, they just tried charging, firing wildly, hitting nothing.
On elite, the sniper died almost as soon as he gave away his position as half a dozen guys found cover, found him, lined their shots, then took him down.
Next I took a squad of three guys, including a light MG. I found some bushes near the bottom of the hill. I waited for them to come in to the open, then opened up. Quickly they dropped to the ground. Then they started moving in pairs back in to cover behind a boulder, the others providing supressing fire. As they kept the range between them and I, they were much harder to take down and I got maybe two of the six before they were safe. Now it became a case of do I have to clear them out or will they come after me? They answered that for me and came after me. Yet even then, they maintained great covering fire, from braced pairs who were taking advantage of the accuracy, moving from cover to cover.
In both cases, they were just about as accurate as before (they just used more accurate firing positions) and could take just as much damage (Ghost Recon is great for accurately handling how much mess a single bullet causes). It was entirely down to their use of tactics that they went from being a group of idiots to mop up to scarily hard adversaries.
Granted, those were skill settings, not an adaptive AI system. Still, that's what differing AI levels should be like. I can't stand games that differ difficulty by making shots do more or less damage, by simply upping numbers of enemies, by suddenly making enemies perfect shots while they still move in exactly the same way they always did.
>>The gym was really the secret for me. I've been a sworn night person for my entire life. After a month or two at the gym, my body got convinced it was supposed to fire up at 6:30am every day and started taking care of itself.
>Horrible. Most interesting things (art, social events, deep thoughts, love) happen at night. Let that be a warning: go to the gym and civilization goes down the tubes.
Dude, this is slashdot. The main type of love that goes on late at night involves one hand on the mouse, occasionally switching off to enter credit card numbers.
Seriously, most of the list you mentioned happens between about 7:30 and 10:30. That's evenings, not night. Just because you stop being a night owl doesn't mean you miss out on any of them. Some of the really late stuff, perhaps.
But then again, say you hit the gym at 6-7, are at work for 7:30, impressing your boss that you're in before him every day. You put in your 8+1 hour day and are out at 4:30. Now (on a typical day - granted it's winter right now) you get two hours at the beach, on the rollerblade paths, whatever, getting a whole range of cool activities which you overlooked because you're purely evening focused.
>>the attention from women'll more than make the effort worthwhile.
>Too bad you won't be awake to take advantage of it.
Would those be the hot women at the gym in the mornings? Or the ones at the beach in the late afternoon? Or the ones at all the events you mentioned that actually happen in the evening?
Sure, I do miss out on the women who're sitting in a corner, drooling, at 4am, at the end of a club night. On the other hand, perhaps there's a reason no one else has gone home with them yet?
Still, I'm not a selfish person. I'll share. I'll take the first group, you take the second. Sound good? *grins*
It took about three months before I wasn't really tired in the mornings.
I had to stop, like that, because of a medical diagnosis. Well, I could have continued but the consequences were unspeakable.
The same diagnosis turned around pretty much everything, health-related, in my life. I changed my diet and started going to the gym every morning.
The gym was really the secret for me. I've been a sworn night person for my entire life. After a month or two at the gym, my body got convinced it was supposed to fire up at 6:30am every day and started taking care of itself.
It's convinced me that there are morning and night people, just not in the permanent, unalterable way most people think of it. Your metabolism shifts very slowly to suit what you do with your body. If, like most coders, you do next to no exercise during the day but regularly push your body to perform coding jags late at night, your metabolism will have shifted to suit that time of day. If you cut out the late nights and start pushing your body to the gym every morning, it will convert over.
The only problem is, it takes a good month or two of serious commitment. I always swore people who said what I just said were full of it - but then I would try it for a couple of weeks, or go to the gym two mornings a week while sneaking in several late nights. Once I had to completely switch over, it happened relatively quickly.
So, caffine is one way to get going in the mornings. Alternatively, get to the gym, every morning, without fail, and cut out the late nights, for two months. If, like me, you lose 10% of your body weight in the process, the attention from women'll more than make the effort worthwhile.
Just one request: Leave it a couple of months. Those of us who go regularly already have to put up with the New Year's Resolution crowd for the next six weeks.;)
will reduce the cost of space travel to a fraction to what it is today
Have you noticed how they never reduce things to multiples - always to fractions? Is it possible to reduce something to anything other than a fraction?
what's going to happen to the Dell users who have all of these +R drives if it turns out that -R wins out in the long run?
You wait the two years that it'll take to make them obsolete and then you buy a $19.99 drive (after rebates).
It's just the same as buying a $19.99 CD-RW now when they were $100 a couple of years ago. Prices drop. Does it really matter what you get for free now as you won't be paying current prices for a drive in two years time?
It depends on your definition of what the "best" game is:
Is a successful game one which is creatively successful or one which is financially successful?
For every ten games (and I'm being generous) that try to push the envelope, creatively, only one succeeds. Even with a creative success, in the vast majority of cases, it is critically successful but doesn't pay the bills well enough to keep the developer in business, especially when the next couple of "creative" ideas don't pay off well and sink what profits were made.
EA makes its money the same way the movie industry does. It produces to a formula that it knows will make it a consistent small profit. It may not be creative but, ten years down the line, they'll still be in business while most create houses won't be.
What about companies like Origin or Blizzard? Origin got bought out by EA and how many of the original creative types are still there? Blizzard became such a hammered part of the Vivendi Universal empire that most of the original senior people left earlier this year (World Of Warcraft may be an old style Blizzard creative success but will it remain so after years of having to appease VU's moneymen?).
Sadly, safe but boring, not original but risky, is what keeps games companies in business - and the ones that recognise that (like EA) can always just buy the few who make it anyway (like Westwood and Origin). Yes, there are a few ids but there are much bigger EAs.
Does anyone else get the feeling the horse has left the stable, walked down the street, gone in to an electronics store, bought an IPOD and got the hell out of town already?
The problem is that there are perfectly good alternatives without DRM technology. Why would anyone by something new that restricts their existing options? Even worse, why would a consumer pay the extra $x for their media player to buy the rights from a DRM patents company?
Perhaps it's time companies stopped chasing after the music DRM market, let it go, and simply learned their lessons for the still [largely] unfought movie market?
But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud? Hex, baby, hex!
Programmers today! Whatever happened to binary? Why, in my day we were luck t' have ones OR zeros, and we had t' punch them in to little cards, in the snow! And when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young people of today that..... they won't believe you.
Among the massive pannel of international experts, you can choose from: The founder... uh, the founder... um, the founder... and, uh, the founder. Nope, that's about it. One expert. And that's the founder of the company.
They have, however discovered the secret of efficient flight: Vapour.
The employer (which happens to be the state) wants to know if the employee is really doing the work (or as much of the work as) the employee claims.
I'd always heard the stories of street sweepers (I live in San Diego, live we ever see a snow plough) hanging out for most of their shift, then driving quickly to notch up the mileage at the end, but I'd figured it was overblown hype.
Then, on thanksgiving, I stopped by a local deserted target lot where a friend was working security. We were standing in the lot, talking, when a street sweeper litteraly flew by.
If you watch Formula 1 racing, you'll see the drivers, on the warm up lap, swerving from side to side as much as possible to get as much mileage (and therefore as much warming) as possible in to the tyres. Well, this guy seemed to be doing the same. About 30 miles an hour, swerving from one side to the other of the lot, rocketing down one row and then up the next.
There was nothing, whatsoever, to indicate street cleaning was actually happening: He was churning up, not cleaning away, the biggest cloud of dust I've ever seen from one of those things. The was just no way the vehicle could actually clean at those speeds.
What he was obviously doing was notching up the correct number of miles, somewhere largely deserted, before logging his vehicle back in.
Charmed as I am to pay taxes for that "service", I'd personally much rather he was tracked by GPS and actually had to do the job he's paid for. Privacy has got nothing to do with it - set the system to turn off during scheduled breaks, attach it to the vehicle not him, whatever you like. It's all about stopping people from taking advantage of jobs they know are hard to supervise and monitor.
They actually have to do the job they're paid for? My heart bleeds.
If I were MPAA, I'd consider it "free advertising"
But, often, the last thing they want you knowing is how bad the movie is before you go and see it.
Look at the amount of launch week advertising a movie has: The more pre-launch advertising, the worse the studio knows it is and therefore know they only have one weekend to fool people in to seeing it before word of mouth tanks it.
The last thing they want is "free advertising" that actually shows people what they're going to get. They want you to have seen a cool trailer that looks impressive and gives you no idea how much you're wasting your ten bucks.
Taking more of a look around her site, I can't see anywhere where she actually claims to be a web dev.
A couple of personal web pages != being a web developer... Whatever horny wannabe nerds want to believe about a slightly geeky looking chick with a webcam. So, my apologies for disecting skills I can't find her ever claiming to have.
On the other hand, she is in California and she is begging for money - which pretty much fits the profile of most genuine web devs out here right now.;)
No self respecting web designer would have that stupid-ass mouse trailer on their own website.
...Which explains the need for a webcam in place of actual webdev chops. Still, you can fool some of the people all of the time. "Oooh, look. A chick with a webcam! And she says she's a web developer. If only she claimed she used Linux as well. She could be my goddess!"
Even worse, under the shameless link, she has a paypal begging jar. *shudder*
"Whereas computers today weigh 1 ton and require 18,000 vaccum tubes, computers in the future will weigh only 1/2 ton and have under 1,000 vaccum tubes." -- Popular Mechanics, 1949.
Who would have though, back in 1949, they could predict the X-Box's controller?
BlockBuster, at least my local store, is trying to do a NetFlix style rental program for video games.
On the positive side: You can drop by your local branch and swap one game for another immediately, without waiting on the mail.
On the major negative side: Being individual stores, not one centralized distribution center, they've had horrible problems with access to particular games. As everyone else has the keep a game for as long as you want membership, the three copies of [whatever the latest game is] immediately disappear, not to be returned for six weeks (at which point someone else takes them for six weeks). Plus, while you can survive a slightly scratched rental DVD movie, a scratched game disc is next to useless.
For me, the negatives massively outweighed the positives (only getting to rent games no one else wants just isn't fun) and I quit my membership after the first month. On the other hand, if you work at BlockBuster or have a friend that does, so you can get one of those three copies before they're on the shelf, it could be a great program.
Kind of ironic, isn't it. One state announces its program as another country announces someone who was named was murdered.
Remember: It's only been within the last year that some states have been legally blocked from finding consensual, adult, homosexual relationships a sex crime - sodomy. Those who have been found guilty in the past, for crimes that still stand though are no longer prosecuted, would still be named. And, in many of those states, hate crimes against gays still result in people being murdered.
A quote from the BBC article really sums it up: "But whatever he has done in the past does not give people the right to attack and kill him."
Segway technology will almost certainly be outdated
We can only hope. The current president has already proved himself too stupid to use an unarmed version of Segway technology safely. Imagine what he could do with one with guns?!
from the deployment of 65,000 smart cards (let's see, at $50 a piece, that comes to....?)
Either way, the implicit statement's invalid (that buying 65,000 x $n is wasteful).
Microsoft has, what, $40 billion in cash floating around? I work for a company that is lucky to have $40 million in cash floating around - does that make 65 smart cards wasteful? If your company has $4m, are 6.5 smart cards wasteful? If you have under a half a million in readily available assets, should you not use smart cards at all?
It's a simple scale thing. Microsoft is stupidly large when compared to most other companies. 65,000 of anything sounds like a big number, and it is. Still, relative to the size of their business, it's bordering on frugal, not wasteful.
See, I have so much Karma I can even occasionally support Microsoft on something.;)
Tomorrow's Story...
on
Superball!
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"The Gravity and Chaos Club at Western Washington University dropped 4000+ connections every 70 milliseconds through one of our servers. We took numerous pictures and filmed numerous videos including: from the server logs watching the server hit the ground, from telnet watching the server drop, from http looking straight up as the server dropped..."
I'm thinking they can drop the "Gravity and" part of their name now. The other half, they've definitely earned. That they're almost all slashdot readers kind of implies this chaos was deliberately staged for the above "tomorrow's story".
Enough to justify that the average CEO get a 1000 times in wages what his engineers get?
Have you ever noticed, it's always the engineers who're complaining that the CEOs get thousands of times the salary for [mariginal or no] extra work?
As engineers, we must be remarkably stupid not to be working as engineers and not pillaging this goldmine of easy to get, totally undeserved CEO money. After all, if it's so undeserved and so out of proportion, how on earth could we be so stupid as to not retrain, recareer and be making that kind of silly money within five to ten years ourselves?!
Either that or maybe, just maybe, we're letting our bitterness blind us to them actually earning their money.
Either way, pouting and complaining about how wrong and unfair it is kind of implies we're pretty stupid.
Supply and demand forms an equilibrium. Maybe not instantly (as it takes people time to retrain) but it does form a [somewhat chaotic] equilibrium.
That's what happened to IT: During the late 90s, any sensible engineer extorted the hell out of dotcom-crazy companies. Every highschool kid in the country realised that devs were getting several times what the same amount of work would pay in another industry. So thousands of them went to university to get IT degrees. As the market crashed and a million freshly minted IT graduates swamped it, salaries plumeted.
The same happened to accounting in the late 80s/early 90s.
People have been complaining about CEOs not deserving their salaries since corporations began a good century-plus ago. You'd think, were it really the case, everyone would be getting MBAs and flooding that job-market too. But then, perhaps, just perhaps, it isn't really the case?
Sure, a few earn silly amounts. But then it's like acting or music. Some do earn a fortune but most don't make it to where they assumed they would. Most of the MBAs who thought they'd make millions end up in mid-level management positions, earning maybe $100,000 a year, that barely covers the loan repayments for their MBA and the expensive suits they need to wear to play the part, with no likelihood of ever actually becoming a CEO. All the while, they get pissed off at managing a department staffed with whatever the current hot IT skill is that pays $50,000 a year more than they get.
If the board of directors of a company is deciding how to pay the CEO more (because the CEO is on THEIR board of directors) this isn't supply and demand - it's called "milking the system".
And shareholders have never forced a board appointed CEO out anyway.
Pretty much the whole premise of the article was, "Some careers [appear] to ignore the laws of supply and demand." Just because you're ignorant of all of the factors involved in the supply and demand and it feels unfair to you, doesn't necessarily mean it actually is - it might just mean you're ignorant.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you intend for them to be tacticians, civilians, or just mindless grunts. on 'Easy' or 'Difficult' a bad guy should still know he should take cover, call for backup, etc.
I'd disagree:
A typical civilian is liable to run scared, shoot while running, empty their clip desperately, that kind of thing.
A regular soldier is liable to call for cover, move to a braced position or whatever for shooting, but still make some dumb mistakes.
A truly elite solider, the target is probably never going to know they and their squad were there until they are lying dead on the ground. They'll plan tactics in advance, have them well practiced and executed silently. They'll be better at scanning for targets, they'll be better at moving silently through the best areas of cover. When they do move, they'll be covered by an already well placed squadmate. Their communications will be as much via silent gestures as noisy radios.
Within that spectrum (and me not knowing much about elite forces), there's a huge range of variables for a given enemy. That security guard could be nothing more than a civilian in a uniform on easy difficulty yet an ex special forces soldier on high difficulty. They're still both "just a security guard" yet there's a huge range of differences in how their AI might act.
Ghost Recon has my all time favorite example of that. On the first mission, if you go around to the north of the valley, there's a slope that troops come down.
I'd played it once on easy. I managed to clear them all with just a single sniper and good reactions. As soon as they started getting shot, they just tried charging, firing wildly, hitting nothing.
On elite, the sniper died almost as soon as he gave away his position as half a dozen guys found cover, found him, lined their shots, then took him down.
Next I took a squad of three guys, including a light MG. I found some bushes near the bottom of the hill. I waited for them to come in to the open, then opened up. Quickly they dropped to the ground. Then they started moving in pairs back in to cover behind a boulder, the others providing supressing fire. As they kept the range between them and I, they were much harder to take down and I got maybe two of the six before they were safe. Now it became a case of do I have to clear them out or will they come after me? They answered that for me and came after me. Yet even then, they maintained great covering fire, from braced pairs who were taking advantage of the accuracy, moving from cover to cover.
In both cases, they were just about as accurate as before (they just used more accurate firing positions) and could take just as much damage (Ghost Recon is great for accurately handling how much mess a single bullet causes). It was entirely down to their use of tactics that they went from being a group of idiots to mop up to scarily hard adversaries.
Granted, those were skill settings, not an adaptive AI system. Still, that's what differing AI levels should be like. I can't stand games that differ difficulty by making shots do more or less damage, by simply upping numbers of enemies, by suddenly making enemies perfect shots while they still move in exactly the same way they always did.
>>The gym was really the secret for me. I've been a sworn night person for my entire life. After a month or two at the gym, my body got convinced it was supposed to fire up at 6:30am every day and started taking care of itself.
>Horrible. Most interesting things (art, social events, deep thoughts, love) happen at night. Let that be a warning: go to the gym and civilization goes down the tubes.
Dude, this is slashdot. The main type of love that goes on late at night involves one hand on the mouse, occasionally switching off to enter credit card numbers.
Seriously, most of the list you mentioned happens between about 7:30 and 10:30. That's evenings, not night. Just because you stop being a night owl doesn't mean you miss out on any of them. Some of the really late stuff, perhaps.
But then again, say you hit the gym at 6-7, are at work for 7:30, impressing your boss that you're in before him every day. You put in your 8+1 hour day and are out at 4:30. Now (on a typical day - granted it's winter right now) you get two hours at the beach, on the rollerblade paths, whatever, getting a whole range of cool activities which you overlooked because you're purely evening focused.
>>the attention from women'll more than make the effort worthwhile.
>Too bad you won't be awake to take advantage of it.
Would those be the hot women at the gym in the mornings? Or the ones at the beach in the late afternoon? Or the ones at all the events you mentioned that actually happen in the evening?
Sure, I do miss out on the women who're sitting in a corner, drooling, at 4am, at the end of a club night. On the other hand, perhaps there's a reason no one else has gone home with them yet?
Still, I'm not a selfish person. I'll share. I'll take the first group, you take the second. Sound good? *grins*
It took about three months before I wasn't really tired in the mornings.
;)
I had to stop, like that, because of a medical diagnosis. Well, I could have continued but the consequences were unspeakable.
The same diagnosis turned around pretty much everything, health-related, in my life. I changed my diet and started going to the gym every morning.
The gym was really the secret for me. I've been a sworn night person for my entire life. After a month or two at the gym, my body got convinced it was supposed to fire up at 6:30am every day and started taking care of itself.
It's convinced me that there are morning and night people, just not in the permanent, unalterable way most people think of it. Your metabolism shifts very slowly to suit what you do with your body. If, like most coders, you do next to no exercise during the day but regularly push your body to perform coding jags late at night, your metabolism will have shifted to suit that time of day. If you cut out the late nights and start pushing your body to the gym every morning, it will convert over.
The only problem is, it takes a good month or two of serious commitment. I always swore people who said what I just said were full of it - but then I would try it for a couple of weeks, or go to the gym two mornings a week while sneaking in several late nights. Once I had to completely switch over, it happened relatively quickly.
So, caffine is one way to get going in the mornings. Alternatively, get to the gym, every morning, without fail, and cut out the late nights, for two months. If, like me, you lose 10% of your body weight in the process, the attention from women'll more than make the effort worthwhile.
Just one request: Leave it a couple of months. Those of us who go regularly already have to put up with the New Year's Resolution crowd for the next six weeks.
will reduce the cost of space travel to a fraction to what it is today
Have you noticed how they never reduce things to multiples - always to fractions? Is it possible to reduce something to anything other than a fraction?
what's going to happen to the Dell users who have all of these +R drives if it turns out that -R wins out in the long run?
You wait the two years that it'll take to make them obsolete and then you buy a $19.99 drive (after rebates).
It's just the same as buying a $19.99 CD-RW now when they were $100 a couple of years ago. Prices drop. Does it really matter what you get for free now as you won't be paying current prices for a drive in two years time?
Will it stand the test of time? Of course not...
"...bring down the soot and carbon dioxide emissions."
Sounds like vapourware to me.
Which proves my long held belief that you really do have to be a rocket scientist to give a woman one of those.
Apparently my wife, yelling through from the other room, agrees all too well.
But which approach really creates the best games?
It depends on your definition of what the "best" game is:
Is a successful game one which is creatively successful or one which is financially successful?
For every ten games (and I'm being generous) that try to push the envelope, creatively, only one succeeds. Even with a creative success, in the vast majority of cases, it is critically successful but doesn't pay the bills well enough to keep the developer in business, especially when the next couple of "creative" ideas don't pay off well and sink what profits were made.
EA makes its money the same way the movie industry does. It produces to a formula that it knows will make it a consistent small profit. It may not be creative but, ten years down the line, they'll still be in business while most create houses won't be.
What about companies like Origin or Blizzard? Origin got bought out by EA and how many of the original creative types are still there? Blizzard became such a hammered part of the Vivendi Universal empire that most of the original senior people left earlier this year (World Of Warcraft may be an old style Blizzard creative success but will it remain so after years of having to appease VU's moneymen?).
Sadly, safe but boring, not original but risky, is what keeps games companies in business - and the ones that recognise that (like EA) can always just buy the few who make it anyway (like Westwood and Origin). Yes, there are a few ids but there are much bigger EAs.
>>if you keep putting it off, you'll never buy anything.
>You say that like it's a bad thing.
That's un-American thinking, right there, Mister!
Does anyone else get the feeling the horse has left the stable, walked down the street, gone in to an electronics store, bought an IPOD and got the hell out of town already?
The problem is that there are perfectly good alternatives without DRM technology. Why would anyone by something new that restricts their existing options? Even worse, why would a consumer pay the extra $x for their media player to buy the rights from a DRM patents company?
Perhaps it's time companies stopped chasing after the music DRM market, let it go, and simply learned their lessons for the still [largely] unfought movie market?
But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud? Hex, baby, hex!
..... they won't believe you.
Programmers today! Whatever happened to binary? Why, in my day we were luck t' have ones OR zeros, and we had t' punch them in to little cards, in the snow! And when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young people of today that
I think the author meant nonundeirregardless.
Arguably the funniest part of the site is What the experts say.
Among the massive pannel of international experts, you can choose from: The founder... uh, the founder... um, the founder... and, uh, the founder. Nope, that's about it. One expert. And that's the founder of the company.
They have, however discovered the secret of efficient flight: Vapour.
The employer (which happens to be the state) wants to know if the employee is really doing the work (or as much of the work as) the employee claims.
I'd always heard the stories of street sweepers (I live in San Diego, live we ever see a snow plough) hanging out for most of their shift, then driving quickly to notch up the mileage at the end, but I'd figured it was overblown hype.
Then, on thanksgiving, I stopped by a local deserted target lot where a friend was working security. We were standing in the lot, talking, when a street sweeper litteraly flew by.
If you watch Formula 1 racing, you'll see the drivers, on the warm up lap, swerving from side to side as much as possible to get as much mileage (and therefore as much warming) as possible in to the tyres. Well, this guy seemed to be doing the same. About 30 miles an hour, swerving from one side to the other of the lot, rocketing down one row and then up the next.
There was nothing, whatsoever, to indicate street cleaning was actually happening: He was churning up, not cleaning away, the biggest cloud of dust I've ever seen from one of those things. The was just no way the vehicle could actually clean at those speeds.
What he was obviously doing was notching up the correct number of miles, somewhere largely deserted, before logging his vehicle back in.
Charmed as I am to pay taxes for that "service", I'd personally much rather he was tracked by GPS and actually had to do the job he's paid for. Privacy has got nothing to do with it - set the system to turn off during scheduled breaks, attach it to the vehicle not him, whatever you like. It's all about stopping people from taking advantage of jobs they know are hard to supervise and monitor.
They actually have to do the job they're paid for? My heart bleeds.
If I were MPAA, I'd consider it "free advertising"
But, often, the last thing they want you knowing is how bad the movie is before you go and see it.
Look at the amount of launch week advertising a movie has: The more pre-launch advertising, the worse the studio knows it is and therefore know they only have one weekend to fool people in to seeing it before word of mouth tanks it.
The last thing they want is "free advertising" that actually shows people what they're going to get. They want you to have seen a cool trailer that looks impressive and gives you no idea how much you're wasting your ten bucks.
Taking more of a look around her site, I can't see anywhere where she actually claims to be a web dev.
;)
A couple of personal web pages != being a web developer... Whatever horny wannabe nerds want to believe about a slightly geeky looking chick with a webcam. So, my apologies for disecting skills I can't find her ever claiming to have.
On the other hand, she is in California and she is begging for money - which pretty much fits the profile of most genuine web devs out here right now.
...Which explains the need for a webcam in place of actual webdev chops. Still, you can fool some of the people all of the time. "Oooh, look. A chick with a webcam! And she says she's a web developer. If only she claimed she used Linux as well. She could be my goddess!"
Even worse, under the shameless link, she has a paypal begging jar. *shudder*
"Whereas computers today weigh 1 ton and require 18,000 vaccum tubes, computers in the future will weigh only 1/2 ton and have under 1,000 vaccum tubes." -- Popular Mechanics, 1949.
Who would have though, back in 1949, they could predict the X-Box's controller?
BlockBuster, at least my local store, is trying to do a NetFlix style rental program for video games.
On the positive side: You can drop by your local branch and swap one game for another immediately, without waiting on the mail.
On the major negative side: Being individual stores, not one centralized distribution center, they've had horrible problems with access to particular games. As everyone else has the keep a game for as long as you want membership, the three copies of [whatever the latest game is] immediately disappear, not to be returned for six weeks (at which point someone else takes them for six weeks). Plus, while you can survive a slightly scratched rental DVD movie, a scratched game disc is next to useless.
For me, the negatives massively outweighed the positives (only getting to rent games no one else wants just isn't fun) and I quit my membership after the first month. On the other hand, if you work at BlockBuster or have a friend that does, so you can get one of those three copies before they're on the shelf, it could be a great program.
So who wants to start a pool on when the first sex offender will be lynched?
Today?
Kind of ironic, isn't it. One state announces its program as another country announces someone who was named was murdered.
Remember: It's only been within the last year that some states have been legally blocked from finding consensual, adult, homosexual relationships a sex crime - sodomy. Those who have been found guilty in the past, for crimes that still stand though are no longer prosecuted, would still be named. And, in many of those states, hate crimes against gays still result in people being murdered.
A quote from the BBC article really sums it up: "But whatever he has done in the past does not give people the right to attack and kill him."
Segway technology will almost certainly be outdated
We can only hope. The current president has already proved himself too stupid to use an unarmed version of Segway technology safely. Imagine what he could do with one with guns?!
from the deployment of 65,000 smart cards (let's see, at $50 a piece, that comes to....?)
;)
Either way, the implicit statement's invalid (that buying 65,000 x $n is wasteful).
Microsoft has, what, $40 billion in cash floating around? I work for a company that is lucky to have $40 million in cash floating around - does that make 65 smart cards wasteful? If your company has $4m, are 6.5 smart cards wasteful? If you have under a half a million in readily available assets, should you not use smart cards at all?
It's a simple scale thing. Microsoft is stupidly large when compared to most other companies. 65,000 of anything sounds like a big number, and it is. Still, relative to the size of their business, it's bordering on frugal, not wasteful.
See, I have so much Karma I can even occasionally support Microsoft on something.
"The Gravity and Chaos Club at Western Washington University dropped 4000+ connections every 70 milliseconds through one of our servers. We took numerous pictures and filmed numerous videos including: from the server logs watching the server hit the ground, from telnet watching the server drop, from http looking straight up as the server dropped..."
I'm thinking they can drop the "Gravity and" part of their name now. The other half, they've definitely earned. That they're almost all slashdot readers kind of implies this chaos was deliberately staged for the above "tomorrow's story".
Enough to justify that the average CEO get a 1000 times in wages what his engineers get?
Have you ever noticed, it's always the engineers who're complaining that the CEOs get thousands of times the salary for [mariginal or no] extra work?
As engineers, we must be remarkably stupid not to be working as engineers and not pillaging this goldmine of easy to get, totally undeserved CEO money. After all, if it's so undeserved and so out of proportion, how on earth could we be so stupid as to not retrain, recareer and be making that kind of silly money within five to ten years ourselves?!
Either that or maybe, just maybe, we're letting our bitterness blind us to them actually earning their money.
Either way, pouting and complaining about how wrong and unfair it is kind of implies we're pretty stupid.
Supply and demand forms an equilibrium. Maybe not instantly (as it takes people time to retrain) but it does form a [somewhat chaotic] equilibrium.
That's what happened to IT: During the late 90s, any sensible engineer extorted the hell out of dotcom-crazy companies. Every highschool kid in the country realised that devs were getting several times what the same amount of work would pay in another industry. So thousands of them went to university to get IT degrees. As the market crashed and a million freshly minted IT graduates swamped it, salaries plumeted.
The same happened to accounting in the late 80s/early 90s.
People have been complaining about CEOs not deserving their salaries since corporations began a good century-plus ago. You'd think, were it really the case, everyone would be getting MBAs and flooding that job-market too. But then, perhaps, just perhaps, it isn't really the case?
Sure, a few earn silly amounts. But then it's like acting or music. Some do earn a fortune but most don't make it to where they assumed they would. Most of the MBAs who thought they'd make millions end up in mid-level management positions, earning maybe $100,000 a year, that barely covers the loan repayments for their MBA and the expensive suits they need to wear to play the part, with no likelihood of ever actually becoming a CEO. All the while, they get pissed off at managing a department staffed with whatever the current hot IT skill is that pays $50,000 a year more than they get.
The grass is always greener.
If the board of directors of a company is deciding how to pay the CEO more (because the CEO is on THEIR board of directors) this isn't supply and demand - it's called "milking the system".
And shareholders have never forced a board appointed CEO out anyway.
Pretty much the whole premise of the article was, "Some careers [appear] to ignore the laws of supply and demand." Just because you're ignorant of all of the factors involved in the supply and demand and it feels unfair to you, doesn't necessarily mean it actually is - it might just mean you're ignorant.