Sorry, no punchline.
This article, like most of Katz's, belong in the Book Review section. Unless we want to create a "Book Summary" section.
Seriously, every "feature" from Katz that I've read takes all of its supporting evidence from a single book, and I wouldn't doubt that the writing also mimics the books structure.
Don't get me wrong, I think its great that Katz is reading, but he may want to consider researching the otherview point before posting a knee-jerk/. feature.
Plus, one source is still better than ninety percent of the journalism on the web.
If the goal was to find out what a tolerable ping was, then they went about the report went about it a little awkward. According to CounterStrike there are occasionally two servers near me with ZERO ping. I couldnt get that playing on the dorm LAN. Of course, the server is always full (wonder why?). I honestly don't know if its possible to find a "tolerable" ping time range strictly using behavioral analysis.
People are self-maximizing. If you really want to improve your game, put in some sort of "server monitor" feature/option. Then you could have a notification system and stuff. That way if a server that was full gets some space or if a better ping pops up, you can change.
Alternatively, use of UDP seems to boost pings. I know it did for ZSNES;).
I believe that he's referring to the random.c test that was supposed to mimic a real database situation. In that case, the ReiserFS looks pretty bad, being the slowest in both CPU and Real...
Now, I'm not saying that its impossible that the man could offer sincere and honest journalism, but I also don't think that article is it. If it was, there would have be SOME MENTION that the guy IS DIRECTLY INVOLVED with the welfare of SPIKE. Not this
"If it sounds like I'm a fan of SPIKE, the truth is that I am more properly a fan of little companies that do good work."
So what do I need the XBox for? I allready have a PC. And its got a lot more functionality than the XBox. And its allready got wireless toys. And good luck compiling DeCSS for XBox.
Actually I don't. The ruling only allowed districts religious freedom. It only hurt themselves if the did. Just remember that "the newspaper is always right, unless you happen to know about the event yourself." Newspapers always distort things, intentional or not. Most (if not all) public school districts didn't change. Changing would mean buying new books that didnt have evolution in them.
Personally, I'm all for that bill. Why? Because *my* school district was excellent. It invites people to actually LOOK at the education you recieve in high school. Sure I got a GPA of 3.6 (3.7 and i would have had a full ride), but I also took around 35 hours of college level classes in high school. Its time America started caring about teenagers.
Interestingly, this limitation: "No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state." would seem to put the damper on internet sales taxes, just as it has on catalog mail-order sales; if you're not in the state it's being shipped from, then the good is being exported and the state can levy no tax on it.
You're misinterpreting this one. The idea here is that the federal government taxes apply nationwide, not just to specific states.
While I agree that the world ain't no 6k years old, what reasons can you possibly have for the disillusionment of religious people? I no longer value the bible as an accurate account of some sort of history or truth, but some of what it teaches is quite valuable.
I mean just because the Egyptian's Tale of Noh and his zoo boat are strikingly similar to Noah and his ark doesnt mean that the phrase "Love your neighbor as yourself" is worthless. Its a good way to live, reguardless of whether theres a heaven, whether you go there, or how much it costs to get in.
The way I see it is that those that believe get their enjoyable experience from it, and those that don't should be protected under seperation of church and state.
Warning signs of potential self-violence include:
Previous suicide attempts
Significant alcohol or drug use
Threatening or communicating thoughts of suicide, death, dying or the afterlife
Sudden increase in moodiness, withdrawal, or isolation
Major change in eating or sleeping habits
Feelings of hopelessness, guilt or worthlessness
Poor control over behavior
Impulsive, aggressive behavior
Drop in quality of school performance or interest
Lack of interest in usual activity
Getting into trouble with authority figures
Perfectionism
Giving away important possessions
Hinting at not being around in the future or saying good-bye
A lot of these items look like normal teenage behavior to me... testing the bounds of the authority around them... teenage moods.... Even the Bible club should be monitored for their own good... Shit, I better remember never to say goodbye again, I might end up missing valuable classtime to talk with a counsoler about where my life is headed.
Of course, the quote does look a little absurd when taken from an objective perspective. If a paranoid list on a school district's website is what it takes for parent's to get involved, more power to them.
even though forking is possible, it's highly discouraged
Which is why we have fifty versions of rougelikes lying around, becuase forking is not only highly discouraged, but bad for consumers. I absolutely desipise having to choose between Nethack and Slash and Angband. Its definately taboo...
It seems that every four years we get yet another holy war to wage over which platform is the best, the only one deserving of everybody's money. Whats always most entertaining is the people who defend technologically inferior systems. Why? Because they refuse to concede that the system is inferior. Images of Blast Processing and 32 thousand colors spring to mind.
This round started off with old school member of underdog Naughty Dog insinuating that ease of development and development time were not a concern for 'real' developers (though to my limited knowledge, Naughty Dog has yet to create a quality PS2 title).
Recently Dennis Dyack from Silicon Knights, and old PSX developer, fired off a round of shots against XBox, seemingly taking a cue from Naughty Dog.
, When asked if any Xbox title at Gamestock impressed the group at Silicon Knights, Dyack mused, "Yes, Photoshop. It is very versatile and allows users to be very creative." The SK head followed with another stab at the shady Microsoft showing. Questioned on whether or not GameCube would have trouble running any of the software at Gamestock, he joked: "You know, I don't think Photoshop could run on the GCN unless it was expressly compiled for it." taken from cube.ign.com
"A group of us gathered around to look at screenshots and I said 'Wow, that is running at only 50% of expected final speed of the XBox hardware! Imagine how fast Photoshop will be on the final hardware!'"
Ah, yea. I do run windows, and I guess that was the problem. I got Getright for the Counterstrike 1.1 release (mmm, segmented downloads). I ended up just uninstalling Opera all together and starting over from scratch. There really outta be some way to dump bookmarks.
On a related note, how long will it take for Opera to steal the functions of getright? You know, all those features that other browsers will be copying off of Opera in future releases. Stuff like autocomplete... Well, I guess the cost of having a compitent engineering team is a crappy marketing team.
What about another use for something like that? "What else can a huge, invisible speaker be used for?" I hear you say. Why, I do believe it would make an excellent microphone.
Obviously a lot of people on slashdot have a natural distaste for corporations, and the grey areas marched into daily it seems. But somebody has to write the policy and press releases and actually make the executive decisions. So why would a person make a decision? By the time a person has the power to make such decisions, they're presented with stock options, provided they didnt start the job with them. Either way, stock options are an executive staple. So decisions are made in the hopes of edging up that stock price enough to eventually cash in and leave the horrible job, maybe to start your own job, maybe to be a VC, or maybe to become an investor yourself.
At the same time, many a slashdotters it seems have enjoyed the benefits of playing the stock market wisely. My point here is that everybody should take a deep look at themselves(myself included). The stock market is a large (but not only) factor in the corporate world. When you become an investor, what do you look for in a company? How do you determine what to invest (if you do) in? Reliable profit margins? Cost to earnings ratios? Potential for growth?
If you don't "vote with your" money, so to speak, and just buy based what your broker tells you, or what you think brokers and mutual funds managers will like, then you're just adding to the "evil corporations" encroaching "your rights online" daily.
My apologies to any poor slashdotters who have no options to exercise, money to invest, or don't feel that corporations are evil. And good for you.
You wanna know why this is bad? For staters, its indicative of an overall police state. Second off, this kind of power is greatly desired by more than just your law enforment agency. And it would be very rare indeed to find an entire chain that can resist the temptation to fund expansion with private money, or whatever else you feel like buying. My point is that this data WILL NOT be the police's alone, and can be used by various other groups. Background checks perhaps? Maybe your potential employer decides that you're not the kind of person to hire since you associate with africans or maybe because you're gay. Maybe someone needs some dirt on you. Of course, this is all about granted access. Its certainly possible that this network gets hacked into. All the most ethical employees in the world wont stop breached access. Just think what you could do then. Feed data of a crime with whomever you need gone. Remove data of a crime in progress.
My question to you is, why is it that a thousand eyes arent enough?
I am not a communist, just an individual concerned about the lofty ideals our institutions were created with, and the wordly whoring of said institute.
I'm also not a big conspiracy buff, but I do believe that there are many concealed motives in the today's politics... too many to guess the connections.
C. Server Upgrades / Service Changes
Client authorizes CommuniTech.Net to charge credit card on file for any authorized server upgrades or changes. Such changes shall be agreed to in writing and faxed to CommuniTech.Net at (816)300-5321. Server upgrades and service changes shall not be performed until payment in full is received. Client may pay for server upgrades or service changes by check or money order. Such payment must be received in advance.
So basically, you pay them X dollars a month for some hardware and a bandwidth connection. I'm starting to wonder where the value in "value added service" comes into play here.
On a side note, to all the people whining about how CommuniTech uses Solaris with sparse reasoning, or how raQs are pieces of junk, apparenty (I'm not a big networking dude) the raQ uses Linux over Solaris, even though the front page says they only use Solaris for what basically comes down to accountabilty and security in case of fuckups: they feel Sun is more likely to pay up if things go bad for them.
IANAL, but as far as I recall, Rental companies are under no obligation to accept business with cash payments, but any business they've allready done can be paid for in cash. But legal tender laws only deal with debts. They can still require you to have a credit card, etc.
Having said that, I'm sure they might take your cash deposit, because they like staying in business. However, the concept of legal tender is only applied to debts incurred, not forcing someone to create a debt. Its a minor point, but I'm sure there are cases where it would be important.
Information theory and Nintendo
on
Mario's Revenge?
·
· Score: 1
Ever wonder what Nintendo could possibly have to gain by being so secretive about their plans? Sony launched a huge campaign and the pimpage of MGS 2 has allready started with the sale of the MGS2 demo (if i recall, it was even packaged with a game!). Microsoft apparently has in store ads for their consoles. So why does Nintendo remain quiet? The answer lies in who knows what and who knows what other whos know. In short: Nintendo gains by letting the competition guess at their plans, and by guessing what the compitition will guess.
So what does Nintendo know that Microsoft and Sony know? What does every industry analyst and game journalist know? For starters, Nintendo has the childrens' market hands down. They have the category so dead, that nobody even seems willing to take them on, save Bandai. Sony and Microsoft must then either market to an older audience, or wage a costly war against pokemon. Secondly, Microsoft and Sony both rely heavily on third party publishers, who have a vested interest in the success of their games, thus only having an indirect interest in certain consoles. Take SSX. Given several awards and highly lauded as the best snowboarding and possibly PS2 game ever, SSX is definately a boon to Sony. The problem lies in that SSX is also being ported to every console the developers can get their hands on. Why? More consoles means a larger audience. We also know that Nintendo owns the handheld market, but we also know about Nintendo's plans to use it to its best advantage. We also know about Nintendo's recruitment of several Nintendo console only developers, many of whom have lots of experince in the 8-14 demographics.
How does this help Nintendo? The one thing everyone neglects is Nintendo's longevity. Nearly every gamer over the age of 21 now knows of Zelda, even if they haven't played much. Second off, a lot of those second parties arent working on childrens games. They're working on the reason nintendo needs third parties: the adult market. These two facts meld quite nicely. This is likely the reason why Metroid was sadly converted to an FPS. While its still much too early to tell exactly how detrimental this will be to the game, it also targets a slightly older market. And camelot, known for their cartoonish (cartoonish enough to earn the Mario liscence) golf games, is now reporting that its working on an RPG of NGC. And RARE will continue to make adult games with Perfect Dark and the like. Nintendo will continue to use its marketing and child game expertise to maintain its stranglehold on the younger audience, while liscencing out titles it doesn't have the resources to do justice to. They've done it with Zelda, Metroid, Excitebike, and they can easily lend their Mario Franchise to games with no easily defined bracket (think SmashBrothers). Its like the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
So Nintendo can take the market quite easily. By maintaining their current unchallenged child user base coupled with the more broad games by HudsonSoft, Sega, and Team Sonic, Nintendo is in prime postion to tear more mature consumers in two: Metroid or Metal Gear? Zelda or Final Fantasy? Excitebike or Gran Tourismo? Halo or Turrican? Just remember that Zelda isn't gonna be on PS2(or even PS9) but Sons of Liberty has no such bound.
The real reason that Nintendo has made the majority of the quality titles available on the n64 is because they're driven off most of their Japanese publisher/developer partners. Obviously Square, but also Enix, Capcom, and Konami. All of these people left Nintendo camp for Sony. Only recently have they come back to Nintendo, and that was for their Gameboy.
On another note, plenty of Nintendo's triple A titles are contracted out. Smash Brothers and Mario Party were both done by hudson. Pokemon was made in part by quite a few ventures: GameFreak, Jupiter(they're some sorta advertising company if I recall) and Nintendo.
On the whole, I agree with you that Nintendo isn't fucked. In fact, if anyone's fucked its Microsoft. Its quite clear that games sell consoles, not the other way around. PSX took off thanks to Square and ToShinDen. n64 banked on (and sadly baited consumers with) Zelda for two years, selling lots. The gbc has done well with both pokemon and classic NES games like Bionic Commando and Mario Deluxe. Mortal Kombat and Sonic were the reasons to get the Genesis. Tetris sold the original Gameboy like crazy. The only flagship title microsoft has at the moment is some Oddworld game, and I'm not sure theres enough consumer recognition over it. And the current japanese sentiment seems to have turned sour on MS, between the crazy old man in charge of nintendo's accusations of incompitence and Metal Gear Solid 2 seeming to have been dropped from the XBox plans (on a side note, the original Metal Gear was published in asia on the MSX, a partially owned Microsoft endevor). With American demand for japanese content like RPGs and anime, it just doesn't seem like a wise idea to rely on superior game performance to attract a critical user base.
Of course, who's really fucked here is Sega...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, every "feature" from Katz that I've read takes all of its supporting evidence from a single book, and I wouldn't doubt that the writing also mimics the books structure.
Don't get me wrong, I think its great that Katz is reading, but he may want to consider researching the otherview point before posting a knee-jerk /. feature.
Plus, one source is still better than ninety percent of the journalism on the web.
Artificial Scarcity
People are self-maximizing. If you really want to improve your game, put in some sort of "server monitor" feature/option. Then you could have a notification system and stuff. That way if a server that was full gets some space or if a better ping pops up, you can change.
Alternatively, use of UDP seems to boost pings. I know it did for ZSNES ;).
I believe that he's referring to the random.c test that was supposed to mimic a real database situation. In that case, the ReiserFS looks pretty bad, being the slowest in both CPU and Real...
Now, I'm not saying that its impossible that the man could offer sincere and honest journalism, but I also don't think that article is it. If it was, there would have be SOME MENTION that the guy IS DIRECTLY INVOLVED with the welfare of SPIKE. Not this "If it sounds like I'm a fan of SPIKE, the truth is that I am more properly a fan of little companies that do good work."
Is that the complete truth "Mr. Cringely?"
So what do I need the XBox for? I allready have a PC. And its got a lot more functionality than the XBox. And its allready got wireless toys. And good luck compiling DeCSS for XBox.
Actually I don't. The ruling only allowed districts religious freedom. It only hurt themselves if the did. Just remember that "the newspaper is always right, unless you happen to know about the event yourself." Newspapers always distort things, intentional or not. Most (if not all) public school districts didn't change. Changing would mean buying new books that didnt have evolution in them. Personally, I'm all for that bill. Why? Because *my* school district was excellent. It invites people to actually LOOK at the education you recieve in high school. Sure I got a GPA of 3.6 (3.7 and i would have had a full ride), but I also took around 35 hours of college level classes in high school. Its time America started caring about teenagers.
Gives new meaning to the term "Thought Police," huh? (think Intellectual Property)
I mean just because the Egyptian's Tale of Noh and his zoo boat are strikingly similar to Noah and his ark doesnt mean that the phrase "Love your neighbor as yourself" is worthless. Its a good way to live, reguardless of whether theres a heaven, whether you go there, or how much it costs to get in.
The way I see it is that those that believe get their enjoyable experience from it, and those that don't should be protected under seperation of church and state.
Of course, the quote does look a little absurd when taken from an objective perspective. If a paranoid list on a school district's website is what it takes for parent's to get involved, more power to them.
You know, there are classes that mirror the primitives, if thats really an issue.
Which is why we have fifty versions of rougelikes lying around, becuase forking is not only highly discouraged, but bad for consumers. I absolutely desipise having to choose between Nethack and Slash and Angband. Its definately taboo...
This round started off with old school member of underdog Naughty Dog insinuating that ease of development and development time were not a concern for 'real' developers (though to my limited knowledge, Naughty Dog has yet to create a quality PS2 title).
Recently Dennis Dyack from Silicon Knights, and old PSX developer, fired off a round of shots against XBox, seemingly taking a cue from Naughty Dog.
Ah, yea. I do run windows, and I guess that was the problem. I got Getright for the Counterstrike 1.1 release (mmm, segmented downloads). I ended up just uninstalling Opera all together and starting over from scratch. There really outta be some way to dump bookmarks. On a related note, how long will it take for Opera to steal the functions of getright? You know, all those features that other browsers will be copying off of Opera in future releases. Stuff like autocomplete... Well, I guess the cost of having a compitent engineering team is a crappy marketing team.
Careful what you say....
funny, my Opera install crashes on startup..
At the same time, many a slashdotters it seems have enjoyed the benefits of playing the stock market wisely. My point here is that everybody should take a deep look at themselves(myself included). The stock market is a large (but not only) factor in the corporate world. When you become an investor, what do you look for in a company? How do you determine what to invest (if you do) in? Reliable profit margins? Cost to earnings ratios? Potential for growth?
If you don't "vote with your" money, so to speak, and just buy based what your broker tells you, or what you think brokers and mutual funds managers will like, then you're just adding to the "evil corporations" encroaching "your rights online" daily.
My apologies to any poor slashdotters who have no options to exercise, money to invest, or don't feel that corporations are evil. And good for you.
My question to you is, why is it that a thousand eyes arent enough?
I am not a communist, just an individual concerned about the lofty ideals our institutions were created with, and the wordly whoring of said institute. I'm also not a big conspiracy buff, but I do believe that there are many concealed motives in the today's politics... too many to guess the connections.
So basically, you pay them X dollars a month for some hardware and a bandwidth connection. I'm starting to wonder where the value in "value added service" comes into play here. On a side note, to all the people whining about how CommuniTech uses Solaris with sparse reasoning, or how raQs are pieces of junk, apparenty (I'm not a big networking dude) the raQ uses Linux over Solaris, even though the front page says they only use Solaris for what basically comes down to accountabilty and security in case of fuckups: they feel Sun is more likely to pay up if things go bad for them.
But he was also murdered, thereby creating the "irony" aforementioned. The suspected murderer of Miranda refused to incriminate himself.
Having said that, I'm sure they might take your cash deposit, because they like staying in business. However, the concept of legal tender is only applied to debts incurred, not forcing someone to create a debt. Its a minor point, but I'm sure there are cases where it would be important.
So what does Nintendo know that Microsoft and Sony know? What does every industry analyst and game journalist know? For starters, Nintendo has the childrens' market hands down. They have the category so dead, that nobody even seems willing to take them on, save Bandai. Sony and Microsoft must then either market to an older audience, or wage a costly war against pokemon. Secondly, Microsoft and Sony both rely heavily on third party publishers, who have a vested interest in the success of their games, thus only having an indirect interest in certain consoles. Take SSX. Given several awards and highly lauded as the best snowboarding and possibly PS2 game ever, SSX is definately a boon to Sony. The problem lies in that SSX is also being ported to every console the developers can get their hands on. Why? More consoles means a larger audience. We also know that Nintendo owns the handheld market, but we also know about Nintendo's plans to use it to its best advantage. We also know about Nintendo's recruitment of several Nintendo console only developers, many of whom have lots of experince in the 8-14 demographics.
How does this help Nintendo? The one thing everyone neglects is Nintendo's longevity. Nearly every gamer over the age of 21 now knows of Zelda, even if they haven't played much. Second off, a lot of those second parties arent working on childrens games. They're working on the reason nintendo needs third parties: the adult market. These two facts meld quite nicely. This is likely the reason why Metroid was sadly converted to an FPS. While its still much too early to tell exactly how detrimental this will be to the game, it also targets a slightly older market. And camelot, known for their cartoonish (cartoonish enough to earn the Mario liscence) golf games, is now reporting that its working on an RPG of NGC. And RARE will continue to make adult games with Perfect Dark and the like. Nintendo will continue to use its marketing and child game expertise to maintain its stranglehold on the younger audience, while liscencing out titles it doesn't have the resources to do justice to. They've done it with Zelda, Metroid, Excitebike, and they can easily lend their Mario Franchise to games with no easily defined bracket (think SmashBrothers). Its like the Nintendo Seal of Approval.
So Nintendo can take the market quite easily. By maintaining their current unchallenged child user base coupled with the more broad games by HudsonSoft, Sega, and Team Sonic, Nintendo is in prime postion to tear more mature consumers in two: Metroid or Metal Gear? Zelda or Final Fantasy? Excitebike or Gran Tourismo? Halo or Turrican? Just remember that Zelda isn't gonna be on PS2(or even PS9) but Sons of Liberty has no such bound.
On another note, plenty of Nintendo's triple A titles are contracted out. Smash Brothers and Mario Party were both done by hudson. Pokemon was made in part by quite a few ventures: GameFreak, Jupiter(they're some sorta advertising company if I recall) and Nintendo.
On the whole, I agree with you that Nintendo isn't fucked. In fact, if anyone's fucked its Microsoft. Its quite clear that games sell consoles, not the other way around. PSX took off thanks to Square and ToShinDen. n64 banked on (and sadly baited consumers with) Zelda for two years, selling lots. The gbc has done well with both pokemon and classic NES games like Bionic Commando and Mario Deluxe. Mortal Kombat and Sonic were the reasons to get the Genesis. Tetris sold the original Gameboy like crazy. The only flagship title microsoft has at the moment is some Oddworld game, and I'm not sure theres enough consumer recognition over it. And the current japanese sentiment seems to have turned sour on MS, between the crazy old man in charge of nintendo's accusations of incompitence and Metal Gear Solid 2 seeming to have been dropped from the XBox plans (on a side note, the original Metal Gear was published in asia on the MSX, a partially owned Microsoft endevor). With American demand for japanese content like RPGs and anime, it just doesn't seem like a wise idea to rely on superior game performance to attract a critical user base. Of course, who's really fucked here is Sega...