Actually, it's not a silly question at all. It's a darned good one. The short answer is that it's a "best guess".
We still don't actually *know* how the solar system formed, and until then, there's no way we can actually definitely say how old the solar system is. What we think is that the system was formed in a nebula as a big cloud of dust that gradually started to clump around a center. As the protostar gathered mass, the cloud started to spin and formed into a disc, called an accretion disc. The theory is that all of the asteroids, planets and comets formed at the same time as the sun. This theory is supported, in that some of our observations have shown accretion discs in nebulae, but we really have no way to actually *prove* that this is how our solar system formed.
The thing is... if that's how our solar system formed, then we're able to measure the age of the solar system by looking at the age of some of the other objects in the solar system. Fact is that most of the objects out in the kuiper belt and oort cloud (think in the 50-100,000 AU radius) are about 4.5-5 billion years old. Given our current model for how the solar system formed, that would mean that the sun is about the same age. There are almost certainly some objects in our solar system that are older than the system itself... either as captured objects from other solar systems (100k AU is halfway to Proxima Centauri), or as objects that were part of the nursery nebula that we formed from.
As to the original article, it's really nothing special at all. "Organic" molecules just mean carbon compounds. The solar system is full of organic molecules. Something like 2/3 of the asteroids in the solar system, especially in the outer solar system, are carbonaceous. Organic != Life. It's cool that we've found a meteorite that's older than the solar system is thought to be, and it's cool that it's carbonaceous... but that's because it's extremely rare that a carbon-based meteorite survives entry into our solar system, and it's also very rare to find a meteorite that's older than the solar system. Finding the two in conjunction is a really cool thing. But it's in now ay proof of extra-terrestrial life.
I'd suggest you download and try TSLRP before you discount it. The amount of work that's being done on the project is significant, largely because the amount of cut content being restored is huge.
And before somebody asks the obvious question... when it's done. Probably some time between Christmas and Duke Nukem Forever.
As a moderately successful finance professional, I make almost $33 per day. That is, 6 days per week, 9 hrs per day and no overtime pay. It rhymes, so it must be good
*blink* what country do you live in? In a 1st world nation, that's *well* below the standard minimum wage. Here in Ontario, for example, minimum wage is $6.85/hour. Even after taxes are taken off, that's about $45/day if you're working full time, and I think there's talk about raising the minimum wage to $7.40. Hell, an untrained private in the Canadian army, who has just come in off the street and has no education after Grade 10, makes almost 3 times what you claim, and he doesn't have to pay for room/board.
The question is.. why are you assuming, and on what evidence, that God is the answer to those things? That is a big assumption, isn't it?
It's about as valid a question as why you're assuming that He isn't. The existence of God is something that, by definition, is outside of the scope of what we can measure. Until He/She/It decides to do an exclusive interview with CNN (and allows himself to be recorded), we really have no way to prove or disprove the existence of a divine being. Some people choose to deny that it exists, some people choose to accept it. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other, as long as these people realise that it's a choice that they've made of their own free will. That's where the problems of the world come from... it's a choice whether to believe in God, and that's a choice that you have to make for yourself.
Maybe it has something to do with Windows being on 90% of the computers out there.
Seriously. If you honestly think that you don't need to worry about security because you have a Mac or you run Linux, seek help. You're too stupid to own a computer. The reason there aren't more than a handful of viruses that target Linux isn't because it's innately more secure, it's because it doesn't run on many desktops. Once it starts seeing a decent market share (and that's only a matter of time), you'll start seeing viruses that target it. And believe me, many of the vectors that Windows-based viruses use to attack their targets are equally applicable to Linux or OS/X. No system is immune, and you're a hazard to everybody else on the Internet if you fool yourself into thinking it won't happen to you.
Apple simply never stopped selling systems, but we still hear people "I want to buy the Apple OS for my beige box" comments.
Actually, they did stop selling systems. Back in the '90s, they started licensing their OS out to 3rd party hardware vendors in an effort to compete against the rising dominance of Windows as the de facto standard OS. (any arguments about Linux aside, please....)
What happened was that Apple noticed that their 3rd party vendors didn't have exactly the same hardware as they did, or they didn't have as high production standards, and that the computers being produced in their name were, generally speaking, pretty crappy. They put an end to the licensing in order to maintain their branding and recognition as something that "just works".
They aren't going to start licensing OS/X for other systems because it would throw them back into that hole again. It would be a bad business move, especially if they were to start releasing it for the general public (rather than to selected manufacturers who adhered to their designs), because it would introduce them to driver hell, and would severely limit their ability to control what kind of hardware makes it into their systems. The look & feel of a Mac goes well beyond the screen itself, and depends a lot on the hardware.
They're a hardware company, plain and simple. And as much as I would love to have OS/X without having to shell out for the Apple-branded hardware, I realize that's not going to happen. I'll just have to live without until the games I play become usable in OS/X.
It's a belt of very high radiation... basically, it's where the Earth's magnetic field deflects the solar wind and other upper-atmosphere radiation. Ambient radiation levels are easily high enough to kill a human, and most forms of life on the planet. Two belts... lower and higher. Geosynchronous orbit lies between them.
Thing is... the shuttle orbits in the Van Allen belts, as does the ISS. We've sent hundreds of manned spacecraft through the belts over the years. This kind of radiation is nothing new to science, and most certainly something that we can shield against. I'd be more concerned about the effect on sensitive electronics that by virtue can't be shielded (such as the solar cells, communication equipment, and electric motors) than I would about the effect on passengers.
I would be willing to bet that most ISPs do not want their users sharing their internet connection. Maybe there are some ISPs that forget to put something in their user agreement that forbids it, but I doubt there are many.
Depends on the ISP, really. The big ones around here (Ottawa, Ontario) forbid it. Those would be Rogers and Bell Sympatico. The smaller ISPs that don't operate on a national scale? The TOS for my DSL connection through Magma specifically says that it's my own connection and I can do whatever I darned well please with it. This includes running servers and sharing the connection with neighbours. Likewise... you may find this one interesting. It's from the TOS for National Capital Freenet (who only charge $30/month for a 5mbit/800kbit DSL line)
Yes, NCF encourages members to share their DSL with their neighbours. NCF believes that cooperation among neighbours helps make Ottawa a better place.
They go on to provide instructions for how to do it with a wireless net.
So like I say, it depends on the ISP. Some of them actively encourage sharing your connection with others.
About 4 years ago, I came across a friend's machine. She was complaining that it was running "a little slow". I brought in a copy of AVG with the latest definitions (downloaded that morning) on a CD, and did what I could for the box. The result? 483 unique viruses, 41,000 or so infected files.
I thought it was some kind of record. But reading other posts, I guess it isn't.:p
wow... haven't heard that one before.... No, really. I haven't.
No system is immune to viruses. All it takes is a stupid user to allow it, and we all know there's no shortage of that. That's why antivirus products exist for every major OS out there. Even Linux has antivirus apps (though granted, most of them are geared towards Linux boxen running as servers for Windows-based networks).
Oh wait. Technically, if it requires a stupid user's interaction to get in, it's not a virus. It's a trojan. I guess Vista really could be immune to viruses....;)
Actually, I think he was going for sarcasm. He probably should have used italics instead of bold face on the word "never", but meh.
It's a ridiculous request. And more importantly... among the information stored on his hard drive, theoretically, is his address book. Spammers pay big money for known-good e-mail addresses.... (well, used to. not so sure about that since they started using dictionary attacks)
On the other hand, what happens when you strap someone who tells lies for a living (character actor, politician, marketeer) into any lie detector device? If they truly believe, or convince themselves to believe, that what they are saying is true even if it's not, will their statement register as truthful? What happens when someone who is insane, imbalanced, or incapable of discerning the concept of truth is examined with a polygraph?
Depends on the degree of lie being told. As part of my drama class in high school, I was hooked up to a polygraph. I was able to convince it (or the person writing the test) that I'd been born in and grew up in a country that I'd never been to before, and that I was a member of the royal family. I was not, however, able to convince it that I was sent by the martians to learn to understand human society in preparation for an invasion. I don't think I could even have kept a straight face with that one....
All that you need to fool a polygraph is to remain calm. It really is quack science, and can easily be bypassed by anybody who understands what it's actually measuring. And yes... a character actor can most certainly fool a lie detector convincingly.
I think to some extent, it may depend on when you started using computers. Back in the day, multitasking OSes didn't exist. Even when it became possible to have multiple windows open at any given time, the hardware wasn't fast enough to have multiple windows open at the same time. Some of us are a little slow to adapt to faster hardware....
Personally, I try to minimize the number of apps I have open at any given time. If I'm not actually using the program, it's closed. I've got the same range of apps installed that you do, most likely, but I don't use GIMP often enough to have it open full time. Or any of the other slow-loading programs that I have on my system. Firefox opens relatively quickly, so does Thunderbird. And when I'm playing games like GuildWars, I run full screen so I try to free up as many resources as possible to squeeze those 3 extra frames per second out of it.
So... in response to your question, the only program I leave open full time is GAIM. Everything else, I close when I'm not using it.
Now... I've seen ID-10T error, I can see PEBCAM... but yeah. The Chair and the Keyboard....
The other one I've used, and when I was at Compaq I actually said it point blank to a customer, was that "the user-interface instruction set has not been properly assimilated."
You can probably respond to my first instinct when I read his article, then....
I seem to remember (granted, my memory is pretty much a sieve) that laptop hard drives used to be thinner platters that were a *lot* more fragile than they are today. A jarring motion while the drive was reading/writing could puncture the disc, leaving part (or all) of the hard drive unusable. My first laptop had a 1.2GB hard drive, and this happened to me, leaving the space from 40MB-190MB completely unreliable. It was easier for me to just partition the drive so that all partitions started at 200MB.
My current laptop, of course, is more resilient, which I assume to be a result of better logic, faster servos that move the read/write heads to park, and more resilient platters.
Wouldn't moving to a foil-like platter open the doorway for a whole lot more disk failures of the type I experienced with my laptop? Wouldn't you have to sacrifice a *lot* of storage density for the kind of resilience that you see with a ceramic platter?
You're right. it is chump change. Do you know how much was spent developping SpaceShipOne? Or the other entries? My guess is that $10 million doesn't begin to cover the amount of capital spent on development....
It's not the money that makes them do it. It's the competition. The notion that other people are competing for the same prize awakens something primal in human nature, and drives us to the goal. $200k isn't much money, but it's enough to get the attention of the people competing.
Why not just call up EA (+1-650-628-8468) and ask them if it does do this, ask for a copy of the full EULA while you're at it and voice your concern.
Because it's long distance, and they don't accept collect calls. Particularly not international collect calls. One of the myriad ways that companies employ to discourage people from calling tech. support. HP Canada also does this... when I was working for Compaq shortly after the merger, we had a directive not to give out the 1-800 number and to instead give the Toronto-area number when asked for it.
If you want to tell them what you think of this kind of thing, just don't buy the product. Send 'em a letter explaining why you aren't buying the product if you feel like it. But just try to keep in mind that enough retards exist who will buy the product, they will play it and say how the advertising in-game improves the realism, and EA will still make lots of money off it. Probably a lot more than they lose by alienating people like you and me with moves like this.
Games on the PC has had "HD" content for years. I remember playing Quake 2 at 1025*768! And we had 5.1 sound for some time too (my first true 5.1 game was Doom 3 in 2004). How come they could fit the game on a batch of CD then?
Two main reasons... firstly, the ingame cinematics that actually played at that resolution were almost always rendered in real time using your graphics card's rendering power. If you take a look at the cines in a game like GuildWars, for example, you'll notice that until recently there's no lip movement at all, and even now, the lip sync leaves a lot to be desired. I mention that the cines that actually played at resolution were rendered on the fly... that's because a *lot* of games packages low-res movies to play. The movies in Civilization 2, for example, were 320x200 resolution. In KOTOR, they were 640x480 stereo. And they were all short. The Mechwarrior series? They were all short, low-res movies. If you played the game at high resolution (back when I played those games a lot, I had a 21" CRT, and usually played at 1920x1440), it became glaringly obvious when they dropped the res to play a movie full screen, then increased it again.
The other reason that they could fit those games on a CD is that there's a *huge* difference between a series of sound effects that get played back in 5.1 and an actual 5.1 soundtrack. The latter requires 6 channels of cd-quality audio for the full duration of the recording, while the former requires short audio clips and information about which speaker(s) to play them through and which volume level to use. Think of it as the difference between a MIDI file and an MP3.
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you created your resume in Abiword have you actually gotten?
None... but then, I haven't actually applied to any. My sister-in-law's mother works in HR, and she's the one that told me about the software. Me, I'm one of those rare lucky SOB's who loves their job, gets a raise every year, lots of advancement opportunities, and works in an industry where there's no chance of ever getting laid off or downsized (they can fire me, but it's a meritocracy and they would only do that if I fucked up royally). Actually, the way things are going these days, it's a growth industry....
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you're asked for resumes in.doc format have you actually gotten?
I ask, because there's a few tools that HR departments are in love with lately that parse.doc files in batches looking for specific keywords. You feed into the program the keywords you're looking for, it opens every.doc in the directory you point it at, and it returns a (hopefully) shorter list of the resumes that meet that criteria. Refine the searchwords as needed to create as short a list as needed. Often stuff like "award", and some of the words and titles that appear in the job description they're advertising for. The thing is, such programs are usually not smart enough to read other file formats, and will treat every document as a binary MS Word document. Sending them a plain text file or an RTF document that would open up in MS Word just fine accomplishes nothing if their software doesn't have the smarts to deal with documents that aren't MS Word binary.
Sometimes, it isn't some idiot in HR that's in love with MS Word. Sometimes, it's an overworked HR person who is realistically expecting hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single position, and wants to pare down the list of applicants quickly.
As an aside, I use AbiWord. It's free, and it has a passable MS Word import/export facility. It's also got filters for WordPerfect files, which is a major bonus when you're dealing with orgs that prefer that software.
The Question should be: does low IQ increase BMI? (Are Dumb people fatter?)
Well... IQ doesn't really measure anything at all. It's a number that people like to bandy about so that they can claim to be smarter than somebody else, and doesn't *really* have any bearing on whether you can function, or even exceed, in today's society. No doubt that some people are downright dumb, but any average person can exceed pretty easily, as long as they are willing to put in a little work.
Also, BMI doesn't really measure anything at all. It is simply a ratio of your weight to your height, and they've abritrarily declared that a BMI over X is considered "overweight", over Y is "obese". It's a number that doesn't take into account anybody with an active lifestyle, or certain body types that are prone to large muscle mass. The real number that tells how fat you are is your percent body fat... it's just harder to calculate. I know, for example, that I have a BMI of 33 (178cm tall, 105kg). According to the arbitrary numbers, that puts me in the "obese" category, but that's a description that simply doesn't gel with my body fat percentage, which was tested a month ago at 12.5%, and that certainly makes a lot more sense, since I walk about 20km a day, and I jog 5km before I start to get tired. Why is my BMI so high? Because I have the build of a rugby player (funny that, since I am a rugby player...) There aren't too many morbidly obese people who wear a 34" waist.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not a silly question at all. It's a darned good one. The short answer is that it's a "best guess".
We still don't actually *know* how the solar system formed, and until then, there's no way we can actually definitely say how old the solar system is. What we think is that the system was formed in a nebula as a big cloud of dust that gradually started to clump around a center. As the protostar gathered mass, the cloud started to spin and formed into a disc, called an accretion disc. The theory is that all of the asteroids, planets and comets formed at the same time as the sun. This theory is supported, in that some of our observations have shown accretion discs in nebulae, but we really have no way to actually *prove* that this is how our solar system formed.
The thing is... if that's how our solar system formed, then we're able to measure the age of the solar system by looking at the age of some of the other objects in the solar system. Fact is that most of the objects out in the kuiper belt and oort cloud (think in the 50-100,000 AU radius) are about 4.5-5 billion years old. Given our current model for how the solar system formed, that would mean that the sun is about the same age. There are almost certainly some objects in our solar system that are older than the system itself... either as captured objects from other solar systems (100k AU is halfway to Proxima Centauri), or as objects that were part of the nursery nebula that we formed from.
As to the original article, it's really nothing special at all. "Organic" molecules just mean carbon compounds. The solar system is full of organic molecules. Something like 2/3 of the asteroids in the solar system, especially in the outer solar system, are carbonaceous. Organic != Life. It's cool that we've found a meteorite that's older than the solar system is thought to be, and it's cool that it's carbonaceous... but that's because it's extremely rare that a carbon-based meteorite survives entry into our solar system, and it's also very rare to find a meteorite that's older than the solar system. Finding the two in conjunction is a really cool thing. But it's in now ay proof of extra-terrestrial life.
I'd suggest you download and try TSLRP before you discount it. The amount of work that's being done on the project is significant, largely because the amount of cut content being restored is huge.
And before somebody asks the obvious question... when it's done. Probably some time between Christmas and Duke Nukem Forever.
*blink* what country do you live in? In a 1st world nation, that's *well* below the standard minimum wage. Here in Ontario, for example, minimum wage is $6.85/hour. Even after taxes are taken off, that's about $45/day if you're working full time, and I think there's talk about raising the minimum wage to $7.40. Hell, an untrained private in the Canadian army, who has just come in off the street and has no education after Grade 10, makes almost 3 times what you claim, and he doesn't have to pay for room/board.
It's about as valid a question as why you're assuming that He isn't. The existence of God is something that, by definition, is outside of the scope of what we can measure. Until He/She/It decides to do an exclusive interview with CNN (and allows himself to be recorded), we really have no way to prove or disprove the existence of a divine being. Some people choose to deny that it exists, some people choose to accept it. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other, as long as these people realise that it's a choice that they've made of their own free will. That's where the problems of the world come from... it's a choice whether to believe in God, and that's a choice that you have to make for yourself.
Not going to hell. Just going blind. This *is* the Internet, after all.
Yes.... but the OP was talking about multiple-disciplines. Curie won for Chemistry and for Physics, not twice in Physics or twice in Chemistry. ;)
Maybe it has something to do with Windows being on 90% of the computers out there.
Seriously. If you honestly think that you don't need to worry about security because you have a Mac or you run Linux, seek help. You're too stupid to own a computer. The reason there aren't more than a handful of viruses that target Linux isn't because it's innately more secure, it's because it doesn't run on many desktops. Once it starts seeing a decent market share (and that's only a matter of time), you'll start seeing viruses that target it. And believe me, many of the vectors that Windows-based viruses use to attack their targets are equally applicable to Linux or OS/X. No system is immune, and you're a hazard to everybody else on the Internet if you fool yourself into thinking it won't happen to you.
Actually, they did stop selling systems. Back in the '90s, they started licensing their OS out to 3rd party hardware vendors in an effort to compete against the rising dominance of Windows as the de facto standard OS. (any arguments about Linux aside, please....)
What happened was that Apple noticed that their 3rd party vendors didn't have exactly the same hardware as they did, or they didn't have as high production standards, and that the computers being produced in their name were, generally speaking, pretty crappy. They put an end to the licensing in order to maintain their branding and recognition as something that "just works".
They aren't going to start licensing OS/X for other systems because it would throw them back into that hole again. It would be a bad business move, especially if they were to start releasing it for the general public (rather than to selected manufacturers who adhered to their designs), because it would introduce them to driver hell, and would severely limit their ability to control what kind of hardware makes it into their systems. The look & feel of a Mac goes well beyond the screen itself, and depends a lot on the hardware.
They're a hardware company, plain and simple. And as much as I would love to have OS/X without having to shell out for the Apple-branded hardware, I realize that's not going to happen. I'll just have to live without until the games I play become usable in OS/X.
It's a belt of very high radiation... basically, it's where the Earth's magnetic field deflects the solar wind and other upper-atmosphere radiation. Ambient radiation levels are easily high enough to kill a human, and most forms of life on the planet. Two belts... lower and higher. Geosynchronous orbit lies between them.
Thing is... the shuttle orbits in the Van Allen belts, as does the ISS. We've sent hundreds of manned spacecraft through the belts over the years. This kind of radiation is nothing new to science, and most certainly something that we can shield against. I'd be more concerned about the effect on sensitive electronics that by virtue can't be shielded (such as the solar cells, communication equipment, and electric motors) than I would about the effect on passengers.
Depends on the ISP, really. The big ones around here (Ottawa, Ontario) forbid it. Those would be Rogers and Bell Sympatico. The smaller ISPs that don't operate on a national scale? The TOS for my DSL connection through Magma specifically says that it's my own connection and I can do whatever I darned well please with it. This includes running servers and sharing the connection with neighbours. Likewise... you may find this one interesting. It's from the TOS for National Capital Freenet (who only charge $30/month for a 5mbit/800kbit DSL line)
They go on to provide instructions for how to do it with a wireless net.
So like I say, it depends on the ISP. Some of them actively encourage sharing your connection with others.
About 4 years ago, I came across a friend's machine. She was complaining that it was running "a little slow". I brought in a copy of AVG with the latest definitions (downloaded that morning) on a CD, and did what I could for the box. The result? 483 unique viruses, 41,000 or so infected files.
:p
I thought it was some kind of record. But reading other posts, I guess it isn't.
wow... haven't heard that one before.... No, really. I haven't.
;)
No system is immune to viruses. All it takes is a stupid user to allow it, and we all know there's no shortage of that. That's why antivirus products exist for every major OS out there. Even Linux has antivirus apps (though granted, most of them are geared towards Linux boxen running as servers for Windows-based networks).
Oh wait. Technically, if it requires a stupid user's interaction to get in, it's not a virus. It's a trojan. I guess Vista really could be immune to viruses....
Actually, I think he was going for sarcasm. He probably should have used italics instead of bold face on the word "never", but meh.
It's a ridiculous request. And more importantly... among the information stored on his hard drive, theoretically, is his address book. Spammers pay big money for known-good e-mail addresses.... (well, used to. not so sure about that since they started using dictionary attacks)
Yup. And I still love the parachute drop level in that game, too. Still haven't found all of the intelligence items on that level, hehe....
Depends on the degree of lie being told. As part of my drama class in high school, I was hooked up to a polygraph. I was able to convince it (or the person writing the test) that I'd been born in and grew up in a country that I'd never been to before, and that I was a member of the royal family. I was not, however, able to convince it that I was sent by the martians to learn to understand human society in preparation for an invasion. I don't think I could even have kept a straight face with that one....
All that you need to fool a polygraph is to remain calm. It really is quack science, and can easily be bypassed by anybody who understands what it's actually measuring. And yes... a character actor can most certainly fool a lie detector convincingly.
I think to some extent, it may depend on when you started using computers. Back in the day, multitasking OSes didn't exist. Even when it became possible to have multiple windows open at any given time, the hardware wasn't fast enough to have multiple windows open at the same time. Some of us are a little slow to adapt to faster hardware....
Personally, I try to minimize the number of apps I have open at any given time. If I'm not actually using the program, it's closed. I've got the same range of apps installed that you do, most likely, but I don't use GIMP often enough to have it open full time. Or any of the other slow-loading programs that I have on my system. Firefox opens relatively quickly, so does Thunderbird. And when I'm playing games like GuildWars, I run full screen so I try to free up as many resources as possible to squeeze those 3 extra frames per second out of it.
So... in response to your question, the only program I leave open full time is GAIM. Everything else, I close when I'm not using it.
Now... I've seen ID-10T error, I can see PEBCAM... but yeah. The Chair and the Keyboard....
The other one I've used, and when I was at Compaq I actually said it point blank to a customer, was that "the user-interface instruction set has not been properly assimilated."
Vista RC1 and XP Pro SP2. Not able to duplicate. Methinks PEBKAC.
You can probably respond to my first instinct when I read his article, then....
I seem to remember (granted, my memory is pretty much a sieve) that laptop hard drives used to be thinner platters that were a *lot* more fragile than they are today. A jarring motion while the drive was reading/writing could puncture the disc, leaving part (or all) of the hard drive unusable. My first laptop had a 1.2GB hard drive, and this happened to me, leaving the space from 40MB-190MB completely unreliable. It was easier for me to just partition the drive so that all partitions started at 200MB.
My current laptop, of course, is more resilient, which I assume to be a result of better logic, faster servos that move the read/write heads to park, and more resilient platters.
Wouldn't moving to a foil-like platter open the doorway for a whole lot more disk failures of the type I experienced with my laptop? Wouldn't you have to sacrifice a *lot* of storage density for the kind of resilience that you see with a ceramic platter?
You're right. it is chump change. Do you know how much was spent developping SpaceShipOne? Or the other entries? My guess is that $10 million doesn't begin to cover the amount of capital spent on development....
It's not the money that makes them do it. It's the competition. The notion that other people are competing for the same prize awakens something primal in human nature, and drives us to the goal. $200k isn't much money, but it's enough to get the attention of the people competing.
Because it's long distance, and they don't accept collect calls. Particularly not international collect calls. One of the myriad ways that companies employ to discourage people from calling tech. support. HP Canada also does this... when I was working for Compaq shortly after the merger, we had a directive not to give out the 1-800 number and to instead give the Toronto-area number when asked for it.
If you want to tell them what you think of this kind of thing, just don't buy the product. Send 'em a letter explaining why you aren't buying the product if you feel like it. But just try to keep in mind that enough retards exist who will buy the product, they will play it and say how the advertising in-game improves the realism, and EA will still make lots of money off it. Probably a lot more than they lose by alienating people like you and me with moves like this.
Two main reasons... firstly, the ingame cinematics that actually played at that resolution were almost always rendered in real time using your graphics card's rendering power. If you take a look at the cines in a game like GuildWars, for example, you'll notice that until recently there's no lip movement at all, and even now, the lip sync leaves a lot to be desired. I mention that the cines that actually played at resolution were rendered on the fly... that's because a *lot* of games packages low-res movies to play. The movies in Civilization 2, for example, were 320x200 resolution. In KOTOR, they were 640x480 stereo. And they were all short. The Mechwarrior series? They were all short, low-res movies. If you played the game at high resolution (back when I played those games a lot, I had a 21" CRT, and usually played at 1920x1440), it became glaringly obvious when they dropped the res to play a movie full screen, then increased it again.
The other reason that they could fit those games on a CD is that there's a *huge* difference between a series of sound effects that get played back in 5.1 and an actual 5.1 soundtrack. The latter requires 6 channels of cd-quality audio for the full duration of the recording, while the former requires short audio clips and information about which speaker(s) to play them through and which volume level to use. Think of it as the difference between a MIDI file and an MP3.
None... but then, I haven't actually applied to any. My sister-in-law's mother works in HR, and she's the one that told me about the software. Me, I'm one of those rare lucky SOB's who loves their job, gets a raise every year, lots of advancement opportunities, and works in an industry where there's no chance of ever getting laid off or downsized (they can fire me, but it's a meritocracy and they would only do that if I fucked up royally). Actually, the way things are going these days, it's a growth industry....
And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you're asked for resumes in .doc format have you actually gotten?
.doc files in batches looking for specific keywords. You feed into the program the keywords you're looking for, it opens every .doc in the directory you point it at, and it returns a (hopefully) shorter list of the resumes that meet that criteria. Refine the searchwords as needed to create as short a list as needed. Often stuff like "award", and some of the words and titles that appear in the job description they're advertising for. The thing is, such programs are usually not smart enough to read other file formats, and will treat every document as a binary MS Word document. Sending them a plain text file or an RTF document that would open up in MS Word just fine accomplishes nothing if their software doesn't have the smarts to deal with documents that aren't MS Word binary.
I ask, because there's a few tools that HR departments are in love with lately that parse
Sometimes, it isn't some idiot in HR that's in love with MS Word. Sometimes, it's an overworked HR person who is realistically expecting hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single position, and wants to pare down the list of applicants quickly.
As an aside, I use AbiWord. It's free, and it has a passable MS Word import/export facility. It's also got filters for WordPerfect files, which is a major bonus when you're dealing with orgs that prefer that software.
Well... IQ doesn't really measure anything at all. It's a number that people like to bandy about so that they can claim to be smarter than somebody else, and doesn't *really* have any bearing on whether you can function, or even exceed, in today's society. No doubt that some people are downright dumb, but any average person can exceed pretty easily, as long as they are willing to put in a little work.
Also, BMI doesn't really measure anything at all. It is simply a ratio of your weight to your height, and they've abritrarily declared that a BMI over X is considered "overweight", over Y is "obese". It's a number that doesn't take into account anybody with an active lifestyle, or certain body types that are prone to large muscle mass. The real number that tells how fat you are is your percent body fat... it's just harder to calculate. I know, for example, that I have a BMI of 33 (178cm tall, 105kg). According to the arbitrary numbers, that puts me in the "obese" category, but that's a description that simply doesn't gel with my body fat percentage, which was tested a month ago at 12.5%, and that certainly makes a lot more sense, since I walk about 20km a day, and I jog 5km before I start to get tired. Why is my BMI so high? Because I have the build of a rugby player (funny that, since I am a rugby player...) There aren't too many morbidly obese people who wear a 34" waist.