I was simply trying to point out the stupidity of the GP who claimed that because privacy wasn't enumerated, it didn't exist. But then went on to talk about other rights.
Of course that is the downside of that proposal, making the senators heads even more inflated and egotistical. Just what we need... a super ego John McCain, as if the gynormous ego he has now isn't already big enough.
How things work, why things don't work, where is it slow, etc.
We use SQL Analysis Services on our project, obviously it cannot be virtualized.
Our website, on the old ASP.NET 1.1 version, for whatever reason when the server was virtualized authenication and authorization requests slowed down tremendously. Like it was taking 30 seconds to authorize a user, basically checking if they were a member of an NT group.
I initiated a call with Microsoft, we did network traces and such and came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the.NET framework. Since 2.0 was going to be released shortly, they gave us some code to put in the global.asax to go around the.NET call and use Win32 libraries instead. That worked great.
We've recently converted to 2.0 and the problem went away.
But the point is, without taking that time to troubleshoot exactly what had become slow, our initial impression of virtualized hardware was also pretty low.
But the fixed site, the new site running on virtuals is just as snappy as on physicals.
I abandoned working with Linux/Unix back in the 1990s, and clearly Windows is the more technically superior platform, but...
In the old days, when you had to manually compile and launch every service you wanted under Linux, this was partially true. However, people forget the first worms were based on sendmail and other *nix services full of security problems.
These days, with GUI-installed Linux distributions, Linux suffers from the same problem Windows used to be derided for: services are on by default.
I don't believe this statement is true.
I guess, what do you mean by old days? I was working with Linux in 1992, with the.10 kernel. Back then, yeah everything was installed manually. But for a while there, the early distros everything was installed and running, namely say Redhat 4, or Slackware back in the day. But at least say 4 years ago when I last installed a Linux distro to see where things were, that certainly wasn't true.
I've been developing for about twenty years and Windows is still the most developer-friendly platform to develop for. The main reason for this doesn't have to do with availability of source code or documentation, but rather the ease with a single version of a product with a single installer can quickly get prospects up and running with the software. A lot of this advantage is eroding with web-based applications (that generally require no installation), but if you're writing "server" or "desktop" applications, it's generally less work to target "Windows" than "Linux" (or even Java).
I think this really depends. I used to do a lot of development on Linux back in the 1990s, now I'm exclusively doing.NET on Windows. From my perspective, Windows is more friendly with the existence of VS.NET, but also the.NET framework has essentially allowed me to stop having to worry too much about dependencies. That makes it very easy to drop down and start working.
That being said, for certain types of solutions there is a lot of stuff in the Unix world that is quite helpful and not readily available in the Windows world. Various libraries and such. Yeah, you can find the same thing, but they cost money.
It really depends on what kind of development you are doing. What problem you are trying to solve, etc. Windows is more suited for more general purpose stuff, but Linux has a niche.
To your first question... 535 tyrants can rarely come to agreement on any one thing.
To your second question... The size of congressional districts are more like 600,000 people.
I'd prefer it if the size of congressional districts were further reduced, down to 150,000 people. This would mean we'd have around 1200 representatives instead of 435, but as I said... 1200 people aren't likely to agree on anything, unless it's actually a good idea.
As to term limits. They're a HORRIBLE idea. When you place term limits on the legislature what you end up with is Rule by Bureaucrats. Last I checked, bureaucrats are not elected at all. This is the case in California and other states where this stupid idea has been tried.
How you measure a terabyte depends on whether you are buying disk, or monitoring disk usage on your server.
The disk manufacturers define it as 1000 megabytes which is 1000 kilobytes which is 1000 bytes.
The OS measures it as 1024 megabytes, which is 1024 kilobytes, which is 1024 bytes
Why? Because when you're buying a drive, 750 Gigs sounds bigger than 698.5 gigs.
Vista caused my harddrives to fail!
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
I had two of these 4 year old 80 gig drives. I slapped on in a USB case and brought it into work, and the other was a backup drive on my Vista desktop at home.
Well, a month after i installed Vista the drives failed! Both of them. The one at work, connected to my XP laptop, and the one at home as a backup drive.
It's obviously Vista's fault. I read somewhere on/. that Vista is the suck, and it causes all sorts of problems. It must have transmitted a spike or something through the internets to get at the other drive just to make sure it failed. I'm sure of it! Vista is a giant conspiracy to force us to replace hardware!/snark
I had to replace my soundcard... Soundblaster PCI-512... bought an Audigy SE for $30 at bestbuy.
Other than that, it worked fine with all of my other hardware(P4 3.0Ghz, 2 Gigs RAM, nVidia 7600GS), etc. I think at the time I installed there were no drivers for the built-in RAID of my D875PBZ motherboard, so I used software RAID.
I play BF2, and do VS.NET 2005 development on it. It had drivers for my Lexmark E312. Worked fine with my router, DHCP server, DNS server, Active Directory domain, everything.
It's not nearly as big of a deal as going from Win3.1 to 95 was, or from 95 to NT4, or NT4 to XP. Hell with NT4, we were waiting for some drivers a year after it's release.
A few years ago, say back in like 2000 Norton went to this subscription model. After a year, it popped up saying your subscription had expired, do you want to renew? It was only like $6/year.
But as I upgraded to XP, I needed Norton 2002 so I bought that for $10.
Ok, so then after a year, they wanted $30. I figured out if I rebuilt my machine and reinstalled Norton, I'd get another year. But I ended up getting Norton 2003 to fix a bug in their bloody email scanner. Another $10.
Then I got a laptop and wanted another copy of Norton, so I found a deal to get Norton 2005 3-user edition for $15. Installed that. But now they got smarter, and the subscription was hard wired to a key that was on their servers. So after a year, I had no choice... couldn't reinstall, had to buy an upgrade. They wanted $39 to upgrade my 3-user edition.
But I found 2006 3-user edition for $15., so I bought that.
Well, a year passed again, and this time I went to see what the upgrade rate was. It was $80 for the 3-users!
Well, at the time I was also planning to upgrade to Vista, and I needed something that supported it. I found Norton 2007 3-user for $15 again, through buy.com after rebate.
But after the $80 thing, I'd had enough. I looked around and I ended up installing the AVG free edition on all three of my computers.
So Norton lost another customer, because of their playing games. The $6 subscription upgrade from the 2000 version was acceptable, but charging me twice or more the new product price is not.
I'm frequently subjected to Windows at work. I'm under the impression that it kind of sucks for automated building. Various debugging and other popups frequently hang our build system. If we could just rip the goddamn UI out of that thing and run it text mode only it might actually almost not suck for our needs.
Huh? My build system is entirely automated. Cruisecontrol.NET, nant, msi installs, everything. I either click a button on a web page and the build happens, or it kicks off from a continuos integration or fixed schedule.
I've been reading/. for a long time, and I'm getting the distinct impression that many of the regular posters here haven't left the 1990s in terms of technology knowledge. I guess not surprising, but it's rather amazing.
Not much of a concern, I would think. Considering the item is clearly used.
What's probably more of a concern is all the people who are shoplifting from department stores and selling the stuff online. This is really going cut into their profit margins!
Racial profiling works when used properly, and does not work when misused. In the end, it's nothing more than applied statistics. Whether it is ethically wrong or not is another issue.
There was a story a few years ago of a woman who was found trying to carry a bomb onto a plane. The woman was pregnant, she was alone, and she was trying to travel to a country where she did not have any family. Israeli security identified this during their brief questioning and thought it very odd. So they pulled her aside and did a thorough search of her luggage and found a bomb.
The woman didn't know there was a bomb. She was simply offered a sum of money to carry a bag.
Fortunately, Israel is smarter than most idiots and doesn't do racial profiling, but rather intelligent profiling. Questioning, looking for things which don't make sense, looking for behaviors which reveal nervousness or deceptiveness, etc.
Consider how easy it would be to con a grandmother traveling with her family. Not hard at all... you've won a trip for your whole family, but since we represent Supreme Luggage, you must use our bags. So much for your "intelligent" racial profiling.
OS/2 on 4 Megs of RAM would boot, and that's about it. It's equivalent to Vista on 256 Megs of RAM.
In 1995 I bought 16 megs of RAM for my system, to run Win 95, but also OS/2 Warp, Linux, etc. 16 megs. It cost me $500... USED! I bought 32 Megs for a machine at work, and that cost use $1200.
Today... I can get 2 gigs for $200, and 4 gigs for $500.
In 1995 I paid like $275 for a 1 gig harddrive. Today I'm getting 500 gig drives for $150.
The level of resources required by Win95, Linux, OS/2, etc. back in the days when they came out was expensive. Vista is cheap by comparison.
In all my CS courses they were playing up recursive algorithms, and brow beat me for using for loops to do the same thing in 1/100th the memory footprint.
Huh? The only reason you do recursion is if your list has multiple levels, and you need to drop down and follow those levels too. But your recursion includes a loop.
I've been programming for a very long time, since I was junior in high school back in 1982. I used to write assembler for 8080 and 6502 for fun back then. The guy claiming computers doesn't do much more now than they did then is full of fucking shit.
I've had jobs doing digital mapping in the 1990s that was impossible in the 1980s. We do analytical processing today that was impossible in the 1990s. In some cases we do the same things, but the volume of what we do is staggeringly more complex. Yes, some people get carried away and design systems which over utilize resources just because they can get away with it.
I remember taking a class in college on data structures. We talked about indexes, all sorts of things. Today? don't care, Oracle and SQL server take care of that for me.
I think some of the old school developers weren't necessarily better. They just pine for the days when you had to figure out how to do everything. Today we're spending less time writing hash table algorithms, and more time solving problems for someone else. We had a guy where I worked who didn't trust the malloc() routines of the OS, and decided to write his own. Old school vax head. What was the point? what he ultimately built wasn't any better, and it just wasted a lot of time and money, plus ongoing support.
Having come of age in the 1980s of computing, I do not yearn or pine for it one bit.
Living without morals or ethics is not a great hindrance. For example, the last 20 odd years have shown that a man who is not ethically or morally encumbered can become the richest person on Earth. So don't worry about having a weak moral sense; there are other ways to lead a good life.
Or you just look at the Whitehouse today and realize you can be a man completely bereft of morals and ethics and become President.
Religious, conservative. I really don't care. The labels are meaningless any more.
I was living in Iowa in 1988, and attended the Republican caucuses when Pat Robertson came in 2nd place behind Bob Dole. The fact of the matter was, that this Kansas School Board was Republican. Their anti-evolution position is a platform of the Republican Party.
Just today there was another article about how two Republican congressmen from Georgia and Texas were promoting a website in house memos which not only denies Darwin, but even Copernicus(earth revolves around the sun for those who don't know). fixedearth.com, look it up. Apparently science is part of some Jewish conspiracy according to them.
What's the next argument? The earth is flat, and all of us who say differently hate Christianity?
What's amazing is how they've distorted even good old fashioned morality and religion.
Like they're against science and evolution, but they totally support legalized gambling, and spending beyond your means. Look up the name Mac Hammond. He's turned his mega church up here in Minnesota into a very profitable con game. And this guy endorsed one of our local Republican representatives form his pulpit, and campaigns for Republicans all over the country. He preaches the Prosperity Bible, as he calls it. That you too can go out and con your fellow man and steal his wealth, and not feel bad about it cause Jesus loves you.
No surprise he's a follower of Pat Robertson, who said we should be kind to the dictator of Liberia, Charles Taylor. Because he was a good wholsome Christian, said Robertson. In reality, it's because Robertston had struck a deal with him to get access to diamond mines using slave labor.
These people aren't religious. They are con-artists. Sure maybe there are some stupid sheeple who follow the con artists blindly. But we shouldn't confuse their immoral putrid faith of con artists with wholesome religion and faith.
Hmm. Well my point was simply that representing a person's goal by distorting it isn't helpful.
Anyway, I honestly don't know much about Smart Growth. And I don't have a problem with people wanting to live far away from the city. I went to college in Iowa, I grew up in the country. I understand the appeal.
But what I do think is fundamental, is that people see the real costs of choosing to live somewhere and not have those costs subsidized by others who are trying to make intelligent decisions of their own. Namely, if you want to live 50 miles away from work and drive in every day... Well that's 50 miles of roads that we have to maintain for your use.
So it seems to me that you, not me who lives 4 miles from work, should have to pay the burden of that road construction. Perhaps then people will understand that commuter trains are cheaper and stop demanding the Government pay for them to live out in bumfuck nowhere.
Somehow though, my desire to make you pay what it costs you to live somewhere doesn't mesh with the libertarian thinkers. Amazing that.
I play shooters, and have for a long time. netrek was my first online multiplayer internet game. I never got into the whole MUD thing, for the same reason I don't like RPGs today. The game isn't about skill, but rather how much shit you collect.
I've played Doom, RTCW, Call of Duty, BF2, etc. The reason I like the shooter games is because you get better not because of the shit you've collected, but because of your skill moving the mouse and whacknig the keyboard, learning the map. Along with your ability to work together as a team, to predict what might happen and counter it, etc.
So I can understand that point. When i switch from one shooter to another, it doesn't take me months to get good. I need to learn the interface, and maybe some new rules. But I already know how to work as a team, to communicate, and all that stuff. So I have a chance, to be competitive against the guy who has been playing for months in just a matter of weeks... I don't have to run around collecting shit to become a 49th level super ninja with dynamite punch.
What is disappointing is that this difference has become lost on many of the shooter game makers. BF2 tried to make it so as you played you got access to more weapons. War Rock appears to be something similar. And so on. I guess they do this to try to drag you and keep you playing the game longer. But what it does is make the game more frustrating up front, and as such one is less likely to switch to playing the new game from something old.
But because of this changing the game to a form of collecting shit... while you can take the skills to another game, you can't take the shit.
This guy may be the first AMERICAN presidential candidate on second life, but we already have a few french presidential candidates there for a couple of mounthes now.
Oh hell, we've had a French President for the past six years.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that.
I was simply trying to point out the stupidity of the GP who claimed that because privacy wasn't enumerated, it didn't exist. But then went on to talk about other rights.
I see no Right to Life specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
1200 house members... not senators.
Of course that is the downside of that proposal, making the senators heads even more inflated and egotistical. Just what we need... a super ego John McCain, as if the gynormous ego he has now isn't already big enough.
How things work, why things don't work, where is it slow, etc.
.NET framework. Since 2.0 was going to be released shortly, they gave us some code to put in the global.asax to go around the .NET call and use Win32 libraries instead. That worked great.
We use SQL Analysis Services on our project, obviously it cannot be virtualized.
Our website, on the old ASP.NET 1.1 version, for whatever reason when the server was virtualized authenication and authorization requests slowed down tremendously. Like it was taking 30 seconds to authorize a user, basically checking if they were a member of an NT group.
I initiated a call with Microsoft, we did network traces and such and came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the
We've recently converted to 2.0 and the problem went away.
But the point is, without taking that time to troubleshoot exactly what had become slow, our initial impression of virtualized hardware was also pretty low.
But the fixed site, the new site running on virtuals is just as snappy as on physicals.
I don't believe this statement is true.
I guess, what do you mean by old days? I was working with Linux in 1992, with the
I think this really depends. I used to do a lot of development on Linux back in the 1990s, now I'm exclusively doing
That being said, for certain types of solutions there is a lot of stuff in the Unix world that is quite helpful and not readily available in the Windows world. Various libraries and such. Yeah, you can find the same thing, but they cost money.
It really depends on what kind of development you are doing. What problem you are trying to solve, etc. Windows is more suited for more general purpose stuff, but Linux has a niche.
To your first question... 535 tyrants can rarely come to agreement on any one thing.
To your second question... The size of congressional districts are more like 600,000 people.
I'd prefer it if the size of congressional districts were further reduced, down to 150,000 people. This would mean we'd have around 1200 representatives instead of 435, but as I said... 1200 people aren't likely to agree on anything, unless it's actually a good idea.
As to term limits. They're a HORRIBLE idea. When you place term limits on the legislature what you end up with is Rule by Bureaucrats. Last I checked, bureaucrats are not elected at all. This is the case in California and other states where this stupid idea has been tried.
How you measure a terabyte depends on whether you are buying disk, or monitoring disk usage on your server.
The disk manufacturers define it as 1000 megabytes which is 1000 kilobytes which is 1000 bytes.
The OS measures it as 1024 megabytes, which is 1024 kilobytes, which is 1024 bytes
Why? Because when you're buying a drive, 750 Gigs sounds bigger than 698.5 gigs.
I had two of these 4 year old 80 gig drives. I slapped on in a USB case and brought it into work, and the other was a backup drive on my Vista desktop at home.
/. that Vista is the suck, and it causes all sorts of problems. It must have transmitted a spike or something through the internets to get at the other drive just to make sure it failed. I'm sure of it! Vista is a giant conspiracy to force us to replace hardware! /snark
Well, a month after i installed Vista the drives failed! Both of them. The one at work, connected to my XP laptop, and the one at home as a backup drive.
It's obviously Vista's fault. I read somewhere on
I had to replace my soundcard... Soundblaster PCI-512... bought an Audigy SE for $30 at bestbuy.
Other than that, it worked fine with all of my other hardware(P4 3.0Ghz, 2 Gigs RAM, nVidia 7600GS), etc. I think at the time I installed there were no drivers for the built-in RAID of my D875PBZ motherboard, so I used software RAID.
I play BF2, and do VS.NET 2005 development on it. It had drivers for my Lexmark E312. Worked fine with my router, DHCP server, DNS server, Active Directory domain, everything.
It's not nearly as big of a deal as going from Win3.1 to 95 was, or from 95 to NT4, or NT4 to XP. Hell with NT4, we were waiting for some drivers a year after it's release.
A few years ago, say back in like 2000 Norton went to this subscription model. After a year, it popped up saying your subscription had expired, do you want to renew? It was only like $6/year.
But as I upgraded to XP, I needed Norton 2002 so I bought that for $10.
Ok, so then after a year, they wanted $30. I figured out if I rebuilt my machine and reinstalled Norton, I'd get another year. But I ended up getting Norton 2003 to fix a bug in their bloody email scanner. Another $10.
Then I got a laptop and wanted another copy of Norton, so I found a deal to get Norton 2005 3-user edition for $15. Installed that. But now they got smarter, and the subscription was hard wired to a key that was on their servers. So after a year, I had no choice... couldn't reinstall, had to buy an upgrade. They wanted $39 to upgrade my 3-user edition.
But I found 2006 3-user edition for $15., so I bought that.
Well, a year passed again, and this time I went to see what the upgrade rate was. It was $80 for the 3-users!
Well, at the time I was also planning to upgrade to Vista, and I needed something that supported it. I found Norton 2007 3-user for $15 again, through buy.com after rebate.
But after the $80 thing, I'd had enough. I looked around and I ended up installing the AVG free edition on all three of my computers.
So Norton lost another customer, because of their playing games. The $6 subscription upgrade from the 2000 version was acceptable, but charging me twice or more the new product price is not.
Huh? My build system is entirely automated. Cruisecontrol.NET, nant, msi installs, everything. I either click a button on a web page and the build happens, or it kicks off from a continuos integration or fixed schedule.
I've been reading
One of the design requirements for the new IIS7 is better support for PHP.
/ PHP-and-the-FastCGI-Module-for-IIS-7.0.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/10/31
Apparently competition sucks when Linux is on the trailing edge, eh?
Not much of a concern, I would think. Considering the item is clearly used.
What's probably more of a concern is all the people who are shoplifting from department stores and selling the stuff online. This is really going cut into their profit margins!
Not when you consider the modern definition of conservatism.
That is, no real governing ideology, but is just opposition to leftist moonbatism.
As such, disagreeing with any argument made by a so-called conservative makes you a leftist moonbat.
Where's the statistics to back up your claim?
There was a story a few years ago of a woman who was found trying to carry a bomb onto a plane. The woman was pregnant, she was alone, and she was trying to travel to a country where she did not have any family. Israeli security identified this during their brief questioning and thought it very odd. So they pulled her aside and did a thorough search of her luggage and found a bomb.
The woman didn't know there was a bomb. She was simply offered a sum of money to carry a bag.
Fortunately, Israel is smarter than most idiots and doesn't do racial profiling, but rather intelligent profiling. Questioning, looking for things which don't make sense, looking for behaviors which reveal nervousness or deceptiveness, etc.
Consider how easy it would be to con a grandmother traveling with her family. Not hard at all... you've won a trip for your whole family, but since we represent Supreme Luggage, you must use our bags. So much for your "intelligent" racial profiling.
All you are really doing is justifying racism.
And the Amiga invented the Blue Screen of Death!
I probably sank $2500 into my Amiga 500, so I'm not sure I buy the whole cheaper argument.
OS/2 on 4 Megs of RAM would boot, and that's about it. It's equivalent to Vista on 256 Megs of RAM.
In 1995 I bought 16 megs of RAM for my system, to run Win 95, but also OS/2 Warp, Linux, etc. 16 megs. It cost me $500... USED! I bought 32 Megs for a machine at work, and that cost use $1200.
Today... I can get 2 gigs for $200, and 4 gigs for $500.
In 1995 I paid like $275 for a 1 gig harddrive. Today I'm getting 500 gig drives for $150.
The level of resources required by Win95, Linux, OS/2, etc. back in the days when they came out was expensive. Vista is cheap by comparison.
Huh? The only reason you do recursion is if your list has multiple levels, and you need to drop down and follow those levels too. But your recursion includes a loop.
I've been programming for a very long time, since I was junior in high school back in 1982. I used to write assembler for 8080 and 6502 for fun back then. The guy claiming computers doesn't do much more now than they did then is full of fucking shit.
I've had jobs doing digital mapping in the 1990s that was impossible in the 1980s. We do analytical processing today that was impossible in the 1990s. In some cases we do the same things, but the volume of what we do is staggeringly more complex. Yes, some people get carried away and design systems which over utilize resources just because they can get away with it.
I remember taking a class in college on data structures. We talked about indexes, all sorts of things. Today? don't care, Oracle and SQL server take care of that for me.
I think some of the old school developers weren't necessarily better. They just pine for the days when you had to figure out how to do everything. Today we're spending less time writing hash table algorithms, and more time solving problems for someone else. We had a guy where I worked who didn't trust the malloc() routines of the OS, and decided to write his own. Old school vax head. What was the point? what he ultimately built wasn't any better, and it just wasted a lot of time and money, plus ongoing support.
Having come of age in the 1980s of computing, I do not yearn or pine for it one bit.
Or you just look at the Whitehouse today and realize you can be a man completely bereft of morals and ethics and become President.
Has been for quite some time.
Ever since Best Buy, etc. stopped carrying Linux distributions on the shelf.
Religious, conservative. I really don't care. The labels are meaningless any more.
I was living in Iowa in 1988, and attended the Republican caucuses when Pat Robertson came in 2nd place behind Bob Dole. The fact of the matter was, that this Kansas School Board was Republican. Their anti-evolution position is a platform of the Republican Party.
Just today there was another article about how two Republican congressmen from Georgia and Texas were promoting a website in house memos which not only denies Darwin, but even Copernicus(earth revolves around the sun for those who don't know). fixedearth.com, look it up. Apparently science is part of some Jewish conspiracy according to them.
What's the next argument? The earth is flat, and all of us who say differently hate Christianity?
What's amazing is how they've distorted even good old fashioned morality and religion.
Like they're against science and evolution, but they totally support legalized gambling, and spending beyond your means. Look up the name Mac Hammond. He's turned his mega church up here in Minnesota into a very profitable con game. And this guy endorsed one of our local Republican representatives form his pulpit, and campaigns for Republicans all over the country. He preaches the Prosperity Bible, as he calls it. That you too can go out and con your fellow man and steal his wealth, and not feel bad about it cause Jesus loves you.
No surprise he's a follower of Pat Robertson, who said we should be kind to the dictator of Liberia, Charles Taylor. Because he was a good wholsome Christian, said Robertson. In reality, it's because Robertston had struck a deal with him to get access to diamond mines using slave labor.
These people aren't religious. They are con-artists. Sure maybe there are some stupid sheeple who follow the con artists blindly. But we shouldn't confuse their immoral putrid faith of con artists with wholesome religion and faith.
Hmm. Well my point was simply that representing a person's goal by distorting it isn't helpful.
Anyway, I honestly don't know much about Smart Growth. And I don't have a problem with people wanting to live far away from the city. I went to college in Iowa, I grew up in the country. I understand the appeal.
But what I do think is fundamental, is that people see the real costs of choosing to live somewhere and not have those costs subsidized by others who are trying to make intelligent decisions of their own. Namely, if you want to live 50 miles away from work and drive in every day... Well that's 50 miles of roads that we have to maintain for your use.
So it seems to me that you, not me who lives 4 miles from work, should have to pay the burden of that road construction. Perhaps then people will understand that commuter trains are cheaper and stop demanding the Government pay for them to live out in bumfuck nowhere.
Somehow though, my desire to make you pay what it costs you to live somewhere doesn't mesh with the libertarian thinkers. Amazing that.
I play shooters, and have for a long time. netrek was my first online multiplayer internet game. I never got into the whole MUD thing, for the same reason I don't like RPGs today. The game isn't about skill, but rather how much shit you collect.
I've played Doom, RTCW, Call of Duty, BF2, etc. The reason I like the shooter games is because you get better not because of the shit you've collected, but because of your skill moving the mouse and whacknig the keyboard, learning the map. Along with your ability to work together as a team, to predict what might happen and counter it, etc.
So I can understand that point. When i switch from one shooter to another, it doesn't take me months to get good. I need to learn the interface, and maybe some new rules. But I already know how to work as a team, to communicate, and all that stuff. So I have a chance, to be competitive against the guy who has been playing for months in just a matter of weeks... I don't have to run around collecting shit to become a 49th level super ninja with dynamite punch.
What is disappointing is that this difference has become lost on many of the shooter game makers. BF2 tried to make it so as you played you got access to more weapons. War Rock appears to be something similar. And so on. I guess they do this to try to drag you and keep you playing the game longer. But what it does is make the game more frustrating up front, and as such one is less likely to switch to playing the new game from something old.
But because of this changing the game to a form of collecting shit... while you can take the skills to another game, you can't take the shit.
It's essentially a form of vendor lock-in.
And that's why they do it.
Oh hell, we've had a French President for the past six years.