Yeah, but the first word of the article is BERLIN...so, we really should excuse the submitter.
Besides, Germans and Austrians are all the same anyway, right? I mean, both of those countries are outside the United States, and thus populated by 'foreigners'.
Now's not yet the time. Apple needs to get their own machines on the market, and get comfortable buildign and selling them before they can repeat the clone situation. They didn't handle direct competition very well last time, so they need to be able to get everything running like a well-oiled machine before they license the OS. I do think it will eventually happen...just not yet.
Dell is, if anything, just going with the market and seeing what happens. As someone else has said here, if they think they can get more market traction by distancing themselves a little bit, then they will. I don't think this confluence of events is necessarily symbolic of much, except that Dell may be preparing for a change in the market by hedging their bets a little.
But I certainly think that when Vista (or whatever it is) comes out, Dell will be all up in that bandwagon with everyone else.
I think it's a big pseudopsychological masturbation-fest from some asshole who can't control his porn watching habits, and feels that he has a "problem", so he deals with it by concocting this big bullshit treatise on the perfect partner as a way of dealing with his problem.
I don't think it's about price, I think it's about control.
The RIAA is, essentially, a cartel. They don't make money by providing a service, really, they have happened to be able to build an empire only because they have sold a product which was unique in that it could not be distributed without a strong central authority.
File sharing really didn';t affect their revenue at all; that's a lie (they intentionally released fewer albums and so forth during the 'fight Napster' days. But what it did do was remove their POWER. And power is really the only thing they have that has worth.
All of the people who really matter in the industry -- musicians, producers, publicists...even lawyers...all could essentially be freelancers. The only thing the labels offer, essentially, is complete control of a whole infrastructure (they own music, they own radio, they own distribution, they own the chart makers).
But when radio becomes obsolete, charts can be tracked in real-time with o funny business, artists can distribute on their own...then I ask you, what, again, do the labels have to offer?
This is what they fear: the truth that their entire business model is a sham. That they basically make money by exploiting artists and controlling a cartel. They just want to figure out how to get you to pay for "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" one more fucking time...by selling you an album, and a cassette, and a CD, and a digital file, and by incorporating the price into some video game or movie it's used in, or by charging the bar royalties on the jukebox.
Their whole business model is complete nonsense. The fact that they are demanding a share of IPOD profits proves that they are drunk on power. If I were Apple, I'd be smiling, because soon, they can just encourage artists to self-distribute through the iTunes store, and give them a fat chunk of the profits, rather than the bullshit pennies on the dollar the labels will give them.
That way, artists won't need to worry about being as mass-market popular to make the same amount of money. This should mean that artists will stop releasing so much tripe that caters to the herd, since they will be able to make a living in much smaller niches.
The metrics of the industry are going to change, eventually...it will just take time, but the real losers in all of this will be the labels, and that's why they're acting like such assholes.
So yes, i think most microsoft employees understand and even appreciate that competition makes us work better
Too bad the Microsoft execs disagree with that.:(
Uhh...you mean the one named Gates who said it in TFA?
In those areas where somebody else has done well, that's great. We'll match what they do, we'll bring new things to it, do it better and integrate it in with other things. And so it's very healthy for the consumer. We see that in search, we see it in music. It's not new at all that that's out there.
I mean, seriously, man. If you really believe that Microsoft Execs don't understand that competition makes better products, you're either an 'Asshat' or a 'Fucktard'. I don't know which. And this is coming from a Mac user.
I think you should restate it more like this: A company like Microsoft, whose goal os to make money, will save money by not innovating unless they have to. You see, it's not that they don't understand how to innovate, it's more like: why bother if you have the market locked up and you're going to make your money anyway.
I was wondering what these things were, but didn't care enough to look. I've seen these going around my neighborhood for a couple of months now (East Village, New York City). It looks like the NYC Parks Department is one of their customers; they are probably good for shuttling between the various myriad of parks in the city.
And no, since the average car speed in Manhattan is 4 MPH, I don't think theyre holding anything up. (Sometimes I will walk down a street faster than a bus gets down the same distance...forget about the bus if I'm on my bike.)
...uh...they didn't really list anything 'personal' about the CEO at all. He lives somewhere, he makes money, he attended a political fundraiser. None of that is particularly private information, unless my expectations of 'privacy' are really skewed.
So, I guess Google is really being the asshole here.
The thing that the article is pointing out -- rightly -- is that Google appears to be on the road toward becoming a major information clearinghouse. And the information is, rather than most similar things, information about everything. They have manifested a desire to aggregate this knowledge and use it in certain ways (i.e., targeted ads by reading the content of your email), and for now they are behaving as a 'good netizen'.
The thing is, as soon as these two idealistic PhD guys get fed up and cash in and decide to buy an island in the South Pacific and go live there, I fear that so will go Google's ethos of being the good guy, and the marketing weasels and fucking lawyers schmucks will pervert Google amazing technology to do some Seriously Evil Shit (tm).
I mean, if you can't maintain and be compliant with the standards, then why even try
Are you honestly saying that you can't understand the economics of this situation?
If you're Microsoft, you want to work *just enough* on standards compliance to get some of the standards-whiners to shut the hell up, and so Web pages will display nicely enough, and so you can splash out another press release saying "standards compliance" so all the press will report on your being a "good netizen".
I mean, shitty though that may be, I have a hard time believing that you can't understand it...Microsoft has ~90% browser share, so whatever shitty browser they make, you and me and all the other guys have to make our Web sites work with it, regardless, or else we are alienating a staggeringly large percentage of available customers/viewers. Sure, I know there is a line they can't cross (i.e., if the broke viewability of 90% of the Web sites by crappy rendering, then they'd lose market share), but I think their strategy is to do "just enough" to continue to be successful. Anything else is wasted engineering resources.
That Apple/Intel FAQ makes many assumptions and declarations without any basis in fact.
A few examples:
It ignores the New York Times articles which offered the most compelling information for why the switch happened: namely that Apple demanded certain pricing from IBM that IBM refused to give them. I guess they omitted that because it reflects poorly on Apple?
It says that the 68k to PowerPC switch was "as seamless as practical", and says that they have completed a switch of this magnitude before. It says this, assuming (a) what the magnitude of this switch is before it even happens, and ignoring (b) that Apple had about 12% market share when it began the PowerPC transition, and 5% afterward. I mean, yes, they made their transition, but it was certainly not "seamless" there was a major developer outcry, and they lost most of their customer base. I think it's debateable, therefore, how well it went.
The FAQ contradicts itself: It correctly states in the first question that Apple announced that the first Intel-based machines would ship before mid-2006, and then down the page, in discussing "should I buy a Mac", it says "x86-based Macs won't even begin shipping until mid-2006". How the hell can they make this assertion, when Apple has announced no shipping plans? Apple could very well have Intel-based Macs available earlier than "mid-2006" (say, at Macworld in January), which would also go with what they announced (the transition begins BEFORE mid-2006). I think the answer of whether to buy a Mac now is much greyer than this FAQ implies.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the the purpose of this "FAQ" appears to be to make people feel like "everything's going to be OK", rather than just presenting facts. I wouldn't pay much attention to it. Read the Mac press instead; whoever set that up clearly has a very pro-Mac agenda that's coloring their interpretation of things. Shit, it reads like it was written by Apple and Intel's PR departments.
(And I say all this as a Mac user...the answers to many of their questions ought to be "we don't really know".)
What I think is interesting about your posting is that apparently, in the Netherlands, sex is also the highest trigger for a high rating. And, as another poster pointed out in a different section of the thread, you can see it in for example Samurai movies (lots of violence no sex), Indian action flicks, and so on.
So, it's clearly not just in America that sex is the 'most adult' thing that ensures your adult rating. Granted, Americans are particularly idiotic about sex, but it seems like a worldwide phenomenon.
So, I ask you....why? Why is blowing a cop's head off not worse than a woman...err...blowing your head off? Personally, some fucking in a video game isn't going to bother me much, and I think kids ought to go through sex education BEFORE they go through puberty, so they're aware of what they're in for...
Perhaps it's just because sex is our strongest biological urge, and if we don't keep a lid on it somehow, we'll never get anything done?
Much of what Steve says is right, when the level of graphics and presentation presented called for realism, old models of spawning monsters behind you when you pick up something doesn't work anymore. That worked in an arcade game, but not in a story driven game focusing on realism.
Seems to me like this is kind of a paradox, complaing about monsters coming up behind you as being not realistic.
I dunno, if I was a monster, I wouldn't just dance around in front of you until you decided to shoot me...I'd probably hide in a corner, and then come out and stab you in the back. What's not realistic about this?
It seems to me what you really want is a lack of realism...you want all the monsters in front of you, in full view, so you can have your shooting gallery game. That's fine -- and that even qualifies as a 'fun' game -- but I'd hardly call it 'realistic'.
The problem with making games 'realistic' is that on the computer screen you can't have peripheral vision. Therefore, when a monster comes up behind you, it seems unrealistic, whereas if you had the ability to perceive things in real life, and spot movement out of the middle of your range of view, you could put more stealth into the game without people complaining.
To comment on the main topic: first person shooters and kind fo dumb games. Personally, I like them networked with friends, but personally I don't see the point of adding realism tyo a genre which is inherently unrealistic. I mean, in real life the bad guys would have shot your ass on 'level 1' and been done with it. These games haven't changed since Space Invaders, on a basic conceptual level.
I was going to say this same thing, but noticed that you did first.
t's actually a little more interesting than that. Amtrack owns (almost?) no track - they run pretty much entirely on track owned by the standard commercial railroads.
I'm originally from Maine, though I now live primarily in New York City. Occasionally, I now take the train to Boston and then on the "Downeaster" route, but it took them years to run a train from Boston to Portland. There were a lot of reasons why this took a while, but I remember that one chief problem was that passenger trains needed to go a certain speed. Amtrak wanted the train to go over a hundred miles per hour, but it ended up going slower than that.
Amtrak doesn't own the tracks from Boston through Maine (or, apparently, anywhere else). They're owned by a commercial shipping company. The freight companies have absolutely no interest in upgrading their track to handle higher speeds. You can see why it's not in their best interest...you don't want a million tons of coal going 200 miles per hour, after all.
Anyway, I'm about as far from a socialist as you can get, but I think that internal transportation and communication networks are integral to the function of a country and ought to be publically owned, or that the government should step in and force the freight companies to upgrade track, or give up the track altogether. I'm one that would join in the chorus of not invading Iraq -- or not giving money and weapons to Israel -- and instead spending 30 billion dollars putting in mag-lev trains, starting on the West and East coasts, and working inward, much like we did in the 1800s.
The prospect of going from New York to Boston in two hours, or New York to Chicago in...say...6 hours...would appeal to me as an alternative to flying, especially when I factor in that it takes me an hour to get to any of my local airports from Manhattan, that I have to show up ridiculously early to go through security checks, and when I get there it takes another hour to get into the city I'm traveling to, whereas trains just go from city center to city center, and there's no reason to show up early.
I see my mistake: apparently cable customers could have been the "most satisfied", whatever that means, but DSL customers had the highest percentage of people who were "highly satisfied".
The opening sentence of the cable/DSL section was written with some kind of weird cable bias. The sentence is phrased as follows:
Not only did cable customers make up the largest proportion of our survey respondents--nearly 44 percent--they were also the most satisfied (along with their DSL counterparts; see "For Overall Satisfaction, Broadband Is King" below).
Then, in the referenced chart, it says that DSL customers were 68% satisfied, and that cable customers were 66% satisfied. So...who was "the most" satisfied? Cable customers, along with their DSL counterparts....or....DSL customers, along with their cable counterparts?
I know this is minor, but it struck me as odd that they would downplay DSL in the opening sentence and push cable in that way.
Chess is a game of pattern matching that requires basically no abstract though (well, OK it requires a little, but for the most part, it's just data recall). Computers ought to trounce human beings at this sort of endeavor.
Wake me up when a computer can beat a Go master...
...When flash supplies the ability to block popups, stop automatic installs...
Popups are controlled by Javascript. "Automatic installs" doesn't even make any sense, unless you're talking about the auto-download feature of ActiveX.
Show me one instance where Flash "takes away the control of a browser". It works exactly like any other plugin....say QuickTime, Real, etc. And I have never once lost control of my browser.
I tried really hard to respond to your drivel without using the word "fuckwit", but alas, I failed.
I'm wondering why ALL third parties in the United States don't band together on one issue that would help all of them: changing our voting procedure.
Whether you are Libertarian, Green, Constitutionalist, Natural Law, Reform, or anything else...you would benefit if the United States adopted a voting system similar to Australia's, where instead of voting for one (and only one) candidate, we could put our candidates in order of preference, so that if our preferred choice wasn't a contender, our vote would automatically be cast for our second choice, and so on.
It seems to me that our two party system is guaranteed by the mathematics of the constitution, and that a simple modification like that would make third parties more viable, in that even though they still probably wouldn't win, at least people would feel free to vote for the candidate who most represents their ideals, thus enhancing the visibility of the platforms you espouse.
Wouldn't it be in your interests to spearhead public debate with all third parties (even if you don't agree with them on other issues) in order to make change like this possible?
I don't know how much the car itself will change from a design sense (if that's what is meant by 'look like'), and I'm not sure how much the act of driving a car will change.
It does seem that there is a trend toward all these 'driver aid' tools, like GPS systems and ubiquitous Big Brother-like organizations that can control your car and track you. I do think, therefore, that the act of driving is going to be considerably less free, as an experience.
The real change will be under the hood, as Peak Oil passes, and the petroleum supplies begin to dwindle rather than grow (there are currently zero large oil fields set to come online in 2008, and only one in 2007, so it might be here faster than we think). I'd expect, therefore, that cars will become a luxury commodity once again, as the cost of powering them starts to become prohibitively expensive.
As this happens, there will likely be another trend in the 2010s similar to the 1980s, when there was a premium placed on economy, rather than size, because if the price of gas balloons in the 2010s to something more like $5-$7 a gallon, as some in the oil industry predict, it means saving a 10 MPG increase in economy can make a dig difference to the TCO of an automobile.
When I was in high school in the late '80s, I worked at the mall at Record Town, a brand that has been replaced now. Back then they were owned by Trans-World music, and were the penultimate example of the overpriced, middle American record store.
We had this gizmo for a while, before CDs fully supplanted cassettes, and before burnable CDs were de rigeur (I believe Philips was holding the patent, and the record industry cartel was trying to block them from releasing it...sound familiar?). Anyway, it basically was a touch screen CD jukebox that'd let you peruse a rather large catalog (for its time) of music and select a number of songe which were automatically recorded to cassette for you. Since I worked there, I got a few of these tapes, and it was a cool way to get some music that I didn't otherwise want to purchase.
Anyway, I am struck by how this is exactly the SAME THING all over again...just as CDs are about to be replaced by digital files, someone is going to try to cash in on the last bit of the CD money before it evaporates.
The real issue here is that the idiotic music industry is basically a 'singles machine', though they desperately want to be an 'album machine'. They have been fightint tooth and nail against models like this that move the "single" to the paramount of importance, even though the real truth is, we have always cared about singles, for the most part, rather than long droning albums. Most bands have one or two good songs in them anyway. I wish they'd just wake up and realize this...
I think I've worked at enough failed dot-coms to know why this is happening. Basically, they've got budget X, to maintain the Web site for these political nitwits, and they have to spend it somehow, so that the Corporate Man will keep the greenbacks flowing next time around.
So, they have to piss it away somehow, but really...how can you piss away a great big budget just creating some CMS to handle the candidate's boring "news alerts" and other shit that no one reads? Hence, here comes the "brainstorm", and they all come up with the same bunch of tired old ideas to waste the money and justify their jobs that we've all implemented in the past. You know, polls, "online communities", and Flash games! "Young people like games. We need to lure young voters. Our game will be so kewl that they will all like flock to polling booths and totally elect us!"
And then these stupid little wastes of hard disk space serve to preach to their already converted Beavises and/or Buttheads who are all like "this is so cool...i can like...shoot money with president bush's head...heh heh, heh heh".
Or maybe not. Maybe it's brilliant political strategy.
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Well, actually Roz Ho from the Microsoft MacBU announced it. Steve Jobs just introduiced her.
Yeah, but the first word of the article is BERLIN...so, we really should excuse the submitter.
Besides, Germans and Austrians are all the same anyway, right? I mean, both of those countries are outside the United States, and thus populated by 'foreigners'.
85 to 1.
Now's not yet the time. Apple needs to get their own machines on the market, and get comfortable buildign and selling them before they can repeat the clone situation. They didn't handle direct competition very well last time, so they need to be able to get everything running like a well-oiled machine before they license the OS. I do think it will eventually happen...just not yet.
Dell is, if anything, just going with the market and seeing what happens. As someone else has said here, if they think they can get more market traction by distancing themselves a little bit, then they will. I don't think this confluence of events is necessarily symbolic of much, except that Dell may be preparing for a change in the market by hedging their bets a little.
But I certainly think that when Vista (or whatever it is) comes out, Dell will be all up in that bandwagon with everyone else.
I think it's a big pseudopsychological masturbation-fest from some asshole who can't control his porn watching habits, and feels that he has a "problem", so he deals with it by concocting this big bullshit treatise on the perfect partner as a way of dealing with his problem.
I know, I know...fact-checking a joke is lame. But I had a Yikes! It was 350 Mhz. :)
I don't think it's about price, I think it's about control.
The RIAA is, essentially, a cartel. They don't make money by providing a service, really, they have happened to be able to build an empire only because they have sold a product which was unique in that it could not be distributed without a strong central authority.
File sharing really didn';t affect their revenue at all; that's a lie (they intentionally released fewer albums and so forth during the 'fight Napster' days. But what it did do was remove their POWER. And power is really the only thing they have that has worth.
All of the people who really matter in the industry -- musicians, producers, publicists...even lawyers...all could essentially be freelancers. The only thing the labels offer, essentially, is complete control of a whole infrastructure (they own music, they own radio, they own distribution, they own the chart makers).
But when radio becomes obsolete, charts can be tracked in real-time with o funny business, artists can distribute on their own...then I ask you, what, again, do the labels have to offer?
This is what they fear: the truth that their entire business model is a sham. That they basically make money by exploiting artists and controlling a cartel. They just want to figure out how to get you to pay for "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" one more fucking time...by selling you an album, and a cassette, and a CD, and a digital file, and by incorporating the price into some video game or movie it's used in, or by charging the bar royalties on the jukebox.
Their whole business model is complete nonsense. The fact that they are demanding a share of IPOD profits proves that they are drunk on power. If I were Apple, I'd be smiling, because soon, they can just encourage artists to self-distribute through the iTunes store, and give them a fat chunk of the profits, rather than the bullshit pennies on the dollar the labels will give them.
That way, artists won't need to worry about being as mass-market popular to make the same amount of money. This should mean that artists will stop releasing so much tripe that caters to the herd, since they will be able to make a living in much smaller niches.
The metrics of the industry are going to change, eventually...it will just take time, but the real losers in all of this will be the labels, and that's why they're acting like such assholes.
Uhh...you mean the one named Gates who said it in TFA?
In those areas where somebody else has done well, that's great. We'll match what they do, we'll bring new things to it, do it better and integrate it in with other things. And so it's very healthy for the consumer. We see that in search, we see it in music. It's not new at all that that's out there.
I mean, seriously, man. If you really believe that Microsoft Execs don't understand that competition makes better products, you're either an 'Asshat' or a 'Fucktard'. I don't know which. And this is coming from a Mac user.
I think you should restate it more like this: A company like Microsoft, whose goal os to make money, will save money by not innovating unless they have to. You see, it's not that they don't understand how to innovate, it's more like: why bother if you have the market locked up and you're going to make your money anyway.
I was wondering what these things were, but didn't care enough to look. I've seen these going around my neighborhood for a couple of months now (East Village, New York City). It looks like the NYC Parks Department is one of their customers; they are probably good for shuttling between the various myriad of parks in the city.
And no, since the average car speed in Manhattan is 4 MPH, I don't think theyre holding anything up. (Sometimes I will walk down a street faster than a bus gets down the same distance...forget about the bus if I'm on my bike.)
Well....errr....yes. Care to explain to us why it wouldn't?
Not trying to pick nits, but I dunno, I think that CSI (particularly the Vegas original one) is as much about science as it is about cops...
Of course, I realize it's not about engineers, but the reason I like it is for the forensic science.
So, I guess Google is really being the asshole here.
The thing that the article is pointing out -- rightly -- is that Google appears to be on the road toward becoming a major information clearinghouse. And the information is, rather than most similar things, information about everything. They have manifested a desire to aggregate this knowledge and use it in certain ways (i.e., targeted ads by reading the content of your email), and for now they are behaving as a 'good netizen'.
The thing is, as soon as these two idealistic PhD guys get fed up and cash in and decide to buy an island in the South Pacific and go live there, I fear that so will go Google's ethos of being the good guy, and the marketing weasels and fucking lawyers schmucks will pervert Google amazing technology to do some Seriously Evil Shit (tm).
It's really just a matter of time...
I mean, if you can't maintain and be compliant with the standards, then why even try
Are you honestly saying that you can't understand the economics of this situation?
If you're Microsoft, you want to work *just enough* on standards compliance to get some of the standards-whiners to shut the hell up, and so Web pages will display nicely enough, and so you can splash out another press release saying "standards compliance" so all the press will report on your being a "good netizen".
I mean, shitty though that may be, I have a hard time believing that you can't understand it...Microsoft has ~90% browser share, so whatever shitty browser they make, you and me and all the other guys have to make our Web sites work with it, regardless, or else we are alienating a staggeringly large percentage of available customers/viewers. Sure, I know there is a line they can't cross (i.e., if the broke viewability of 90% of the Web sites by crappy rendering, then they'd lose market share), but I think their strategy is to do "just enough" to continue to be successful. Anything else is wasted engineering resources.
That Apple/Intel FAQ makes many assumptions and declarations without any basis in fact.
A few examples:
It ignores the New York Times articles which offered the most compelling information for why the switch happened: namely that Apple demanded certain pricing from IBM that IBM refused to give them. I guess they omitted that because it reflects poorly on Apple?
It says that the 68k to PowerPC switch was "as seamless as practical", and says that they have completed a switch of this magnitude before. It says this, assuming (a) what the magnitude of this switch is before it even happens, and ignoring (b) that Apple had about 12% market share when it began the PowerPC transition, and 5% afterward. I mean, yes, they made their transition, but it was certainly not "seamless" there was a major developer outcry, and they lost most of their customer base. I think it's debateable, therefore, how well it went.
The FAQ contradicts itself: It correctly states in the first question that Apple announced that the first Intel-based machines would ship before mid-2006, and then down the page, in discussing "should I buy a Mac", it says "x86-based Macs won't even begin shipping until mid-2006". How the hell can they make this assertion, when Apple has announced no shipping plans? Apple could very well have Intel-based Macs available earlier than "mid-2006" (say, at Macworld in January), which would also go with what they announced (the transition begins BEFORE mid-2006). I think the answer of whether to buy a Mac now is much greyer than this FAQ implies.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the the purpose of this "FAQ" appears to be to make people feel like "everything's going to be OK", rather than just presenting facts. I wouldn't pay much attention to it. Read the Mac press instead; whoever set that up clearly has a very pro-Mac agenda that's coloring their interpretation of things. Shit, it reads like it was written by Apple and Intel's PR departments.
(And I say all this as a Mac user...the answers to many of their questions ought to be "we don't really know".)
What I think is interesting about your posting is that apparently, in the Netherlands, sex is also the highest trigger for a high rating. And, as another poster pointed out in a different section of the thread, you can see it in for example Samurai movies (lots of violence no sex), Indian action flicks, and so on.
So, it's clearly not just in America that sex is the 'most adult' thing that ensures your adult rating. Granted, Americans are particularly idiotic about sex, but it seems like a worldwide phenomenon.
So, I ask you....why? Why is blowing a cop's head off not worse than a woman...err...blowing your head off? Personally, some fucking in a video game isn't going to bother me much, and I think kids ought to go through sex education BEFORE they go through puberty, so they're aware of what they're in for...
Perhaps it's just because sex is our strongest biological urge, and if we don't keep a lid on it somehow, we'll never get anything done?
Seems to me like this is kind of a paradox, complaing about monsters coming up behind you as being not realistic.
I dunno, if I was a monster, I wouldn't just dance around in front of you until you decided to shoot me...I'd probably hide in a corner, and then come out and stab you in the back. What's not realistic about this?
It seems to me what you really want is a lack of realism...you want all the monsters in front of you, in full view, so you can have your shooting gallery game. That's fine -- and that even qualifies as a 'fun' game -- but I'd hardly call it 'realistic'.
The problem with making games 'realistic' is that on the computer screen you can't have peripheral vision. Therefore, when a monster comes up behind you, it seems unrealistic, whereas if you had the ability to perceive things in real life, and spot movement out of the middle of your range of view, you could put more stealth into the game without people complaining.
To comment on the main topic: first person shooters and kind fo dumb games. Personally, I like them networked with friends, but personally I don't see the point of adding realism tyo a genre which is inherently unrealistic. I mean, in real life the bad guys would have shot your ass on 'level 1' and been done with it. These games haven't changed since Space Invaders, on a basic conceptual level.
Yeah, because as humans, we do a really good job of making that distinction. Hopefully that's not the model we're using to train these robots...
I was going to say this same thing, but noticed that you did first.
I'm originally from Maine, though I now live primarily in New York City. Occasionally, I now take the train to Boston and then on the "Downeaster" route, but it took them years to run a train from Boston to Portland. There were a lot of reasons why this took a while, but I remember that one chief problem was that passenger trains needed to go a certain speed. Amtrak wanted the train to go over a hundred miles per hour, but it ended up going slower than that.
Amtrak doesn't own the tracks from Boston through Maine (or, apparently, anywhere else). They're owned by a commercial shipping company. The freight companies have absolutely no interest in upgrading their track to handle higher speeds. You can see why it's not in their best interest...you don't want a million tons of coal going 200 miles per hour, after all.
Anyway, I'm about as far from a socialist as you can get, but I think that internal transportation and communication networks are integral to the function of a country and ought to be publically owned, or that the government should step in and force the freight companies to upgrade track, or give up the track altogether. I'm one that would join in the chorus of not invading Iraq -- or not giving money and weapons to Israel -- and instead spending 30 billion dollars putting in mag-lev trains, starting on the West and East coasts, and working inward, much like we did in the 1800s.
The prospect of going from New York to Boston in two hours, or New York to Chicago in...say...6 hours...would appeal to me as an alternative to flying, especially when I factor in that it takes me an hour to get to any of my local airports from Manhattan, that I have to show up ridiculously early to go through security checks, and when I get there it takes another hour to get into the city I'm traveling to, whereas trains just go from city center to city center, and there's no reason to show up early.
I see my mistake: apparently cable customers could have been the "most satisfied", whatever that means, but DSL customers had the highest percentage of people who were "highly satisfied".
The opening sentence of the cable/DSL section was written with some kind of weird cable bias. The sentence is phrased as follows:
Then, in the referenced chart, it says that DSL customers were 68% satisfied, and that cable customers were 66% satisfied. So...who was "the most" satisfied? Cable customers, along with their DSL counterparts....or....DSL customers, along with their cable counterparts?
I know this is minor, but it struck me as odd that they would downplay DSL in the opening sentence and push cable in that way.
Chess is a game of pattern matching that requires basically no abstract though (well, OK it requires a little, but for the most part, it's just data recall). Computers ought to trounce human beings at this sort of endeavor.
Wake me up when a computer can beat a Go master...
Popups are controlled by Javascript. "Automatic installs" doesn't even make any sense, unless you're talking about the auto-download feature of ActiveX.
Show me one instance where Flash "takes away the control of a browser". It works exactly like any other plugin....say QuickTime, Real, etc. And I have never once lost control of my browser.
I tried really hard to respond to your drivel without using the word "fuckwit", but alas, I failed.
Hi there:
I'm wondering why ALL third parties in the United States don't band together on one issue that would help all of them: changing our voting procedure.
Whether you are Libertarian, Green, Constitutionalist, Natural Law, Reform, or anything else...you would benefit if the United States adopted a voting system similar to Australia's, where instead of voting for one (and only one) candidate, we could put our candidates in order of preference, so that if our preferred choice wasn't a contender, our vote would automatically be cast for our second choice, and so on.
It seems to me that our two party system is guaranteed by the mathematics of the constitution, and that a simple modification like that would make third parties more viable, in that even though they still probably wouldn't win, at least people would feel free to vote for the candidate who most represents their ideals, thus enhancing the visibility of the platforms you espouse.
Wouldn't it be in your interests to spearhead public debate with all third parties (even if you don't agree with them on other issues) in order to make change like this possible?
I don't know how much the car itself will change from a design sense (if that's what is meant by 'look like'), and I'm not sure how much the act of driving a car will change.
It does seem that there is a trend toward all these 'driver aid' tools, like GPS systems and ubiquitous Big Brother-like organizations that can control your car and track you. I do think, therefore, that the act of driving is going to be considerably less free, as an experience.
The real change will be under the hood, as Peak Oil passes, and the petroleum supplies begin to dwindle rather than grow (there are currently zero large oil fields set to come online in 2008, and only one in 2007, so it might be here faster than we think). I'd expect, therefore, that cars will become a luxury commodity once again, as the cost of powering them starts to become prohibitively expensive.
As this happens, there will likely be another trend in the 2010s similar to the 1980s, when there was a premium placed on economy, rather than size, because if the price of gas balloons in the 2010s to something more like $5-$7 a gallon, as some in the oil industry predict, it means saving a 10 MPG increase in economy can make a dig difference to the TCO of an automobile.
When I was in high school in the late '80s, I worked at the mall at Record Town, a brand that has been replaced now. Back then they were owned by Trans-World music, and were the penultimate example of the overpriced, middle American record store.
We had this gizmo for a while, before CDs fully supplanted cassettes, and before burnable CDs were de rigeur (I believe Philips was holding the patent, and the record industry cartel was trying to block them from releasing it...sound familiar?). Anyway, it basically was a touch screen CD jukebox that'd let you peruse a rather large catalog (for its time) of music and select a number of songe which were automatically recorded to cassette for you. Since I worked there, I got a few of these tapes, and it was a cool way to get some music that I didn't otherwise want to purchase.
Anyway, I am struck by how this is exactly the SAME THING all over again...just as CDs are about to be replaced by digital files, someone is going to try to cash in on the last bit of the CD money before it evaporates.
The real issue here is that the idiotic music industry is basically a 'singles machine', though they desperately want to be an 'album machine'. They have been fightint tooth and nail against models like this that move the "single" to the paramount of importance, even though the real truth is, we have always cared about singles, for the most part, rather than long droning albums. Most bands have one or two good songs in them anyway. I wish they'd just wake up and realize this...
I think I've worked at enough failed dot-coms to know why this is happening. Basically, they've got budget X, to maintain the Web site for these political nitwits, and they have to spend it somehow, so that the Corporate Man will keep the greenbacks flowing next time around.
So, they have to piss it away somehow, but really...how can you piss away a great big budget just creating some CMS to handle the candidate's boring "news alerts" and other shit that no one reads? Hence, here comes the "brainstorm", and they all come up with the same bunch of tired old ideas to waste the money and justify their jobs that we've all implemented in the past. You know, polls, "online communities", and Flash games! "Young people like games. We need to lure young voters. Our game will be so kewl that they will all like flock to polling booths and totally elect us!"
And then these stupid little wastes of hard disk space serve to preach to their already converted Beavises and/or Buttheads who are all like "this is so cool...i can like...shoot money with president bush's head...heh heh, heh heh".
Or maybe not. Maybe it's brilliant political strategy.