Lol 5-13% inflation? Um, try the vast majority of the last 20 years inflation as been somewhere between 1-4%. Source ( http://inflationdata.com/Infla... ) 1-4% is a healthy range for an economy, if it is below or above bad things will happen (Deflation on the low side, runaway inflation on the other end). Deflation causes people to sit on their money, not invest in new tech, not invest in the future and not expand their businesses (who wants to expand when the money used to do so would be worth more then the investment made?).
A zero percent inflation rate is unattainable (population growth, a million other factors) so keeping it around and low in the 1-4 range is good for everybody.
Or perhaps that since the results were made public and reported on, smarter people, the people who read the news relatively currently, have actively looked for and taken the quiz. People who like to take little quizzes like this do it because scoring higher probably makes them feel a little better about themselves. Uninformed people probably don't seek out things that will, in all likelyhood, make them feel dumb.
The cause of worldwide amphibian population declines is the Chytrid Fungus. However many do think that global warming is making the situation happen faster and to a more serious degree. Here is some quick links if you want to read more on the subject...
Most internet browsing is with relatively small amounts of data, so wouldn't front-loading of this nature noticeably increase browsing performance? Since this kind of performance is noticed by the majority of users it would seem to be something that increases their perception of their connections' speed.
I'm not saying that Comcast might not be cheating on purpose for speed tests, I just think that there might be another reason behind it other than just to make their test scores artifically high.
That's insane, if you can't live comfortably on at least half of that and save the rest then you need to investigate which bills are really needed and which ones aren't. Get a smaller house, move 2 miles down the road where the property values are 30% less, don't eat out 5 nights a week, whatever.
100k is plenty of money if you know how to spend it.
"I don't think the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which apparently has no physical existence, will be much more durable."
Umm, the Inventor's Hall of Fame is a real museum in Akron, OH. I've been there, it's a fairly interesting place (beats the Football Hall of Fame (Canton, OH) hands down). The museum has no busts, it trys to present inventions and the science behind them in a very understandable way with many hands-on exhibits.
"The shuttle mission will likely be in early 2008."
Now that's not exactly a launch date but I would say it is better then "No date was reported for the mission, other than before the shuttle fleet is retired."
"Sci-fi, could be anything. And that's tougher. You're now creating very original IP. I think that some day someone's going to get it right. Nobody has yet - nobody's even come close to getting it right."
While the part about the challenge of creating original IP in Sci-Fi is true, it is harder to come up something from total scratch, I think EVE is pretty damn close to "getting it right". Its a Sci-Fi MMO that is big, diverse , pretty to look at and lots of fun.
Oh, and the part about guns, total hogwash! In fantasy, bows/magic spells take the place of guns and work just fine. They are both just kinds of ranged weapons, the only thing that is really different is the on-screen graphics.
"Which is worse: A game that introduces its features sparsely but regularly, or one that gives them all to you at once and then never gives you another one? I would much rather play the former."
Would Tony Hawk games be as much fun if you could only do 1/4 the moves in the begining? Course, as your stats increase throughout the game certain moves go from tough/impossible to easy but you can still basically do almost everything at the very beginning when it comes to moves.
Unlockables are fun but some games take this concept to far...
If you can't spend 700-800 dollars on electronics then you need to get a better job.
This is a tech site, we all are overpayed pro's. If this was a site for factory workers and cleaners I could understand but not software engineers and other techies. This ain't a place for minimum wage workers.
Are you serious? I won't be getting a PS3 because I can't afford one, I would just have to save up for it. I won't be getting one because the competition is much cheaper and I can get much more bang for my buck.
That isn't even my big problem with your statement. Slashdot isn't all about overpaid engineers, many of us are not at that stage of our careers and/or are in different lines of work. One can be a geek and only make 30-40k a year. To most people 700-800 bucks is alot of money. To most slashdotters 700-800 bucks is alot of money.
Some of us are poor college CS students, some of us are people struggling to find a job out of college, some of us are at help desk jobs looking for better opportunities, and some of us are high school math teachers who enjoy what we do but aren't paid all that well. Not to mention having a good job but saving for college funds every month because you have 2 little rugrats who are going to need an education someday.
In a way I'm kinda glad Sony has gone the way they have. A year ago I thought I might end up buying 2 systems at near the same time. Now I can just be excited about spending $300 at the end of the year for a game system instead of still wondering what I am going to buy and how much it will end up costing.
They see the winds are blowing slightly in favor of the anti-net neutrality crowd, so while this letter does add their voice, at the same time it makes them seem not to be speaking from blatant self-interest. They try to act as if their voice is semi-neutral and hopefully have more credence acredited to it.
If the scales were tipping towards the net neutrality crowd they probably would have sent a stronger message. If a corporation doesn't see a great need to express a yes/no political opinion they generally don't, as they don't want to alienate any potential customers.
Have you forgotten who is making this device? This is Nintendo, the king of making robust pieces of technology that can withstand a beating. Everything I've had of theirs' has been crazy hard to break. Heck my old SNES still works fine, can anybody at all say the same thing about their old PS1?
Didn't I read somewhere that headlines are drifting to more descriptive/non-misleading so that they would get a better pagerank on google on searchs that are applicable?
Ok you're right, "back-up" was incorrect language. What I really meant was "Time-shift". Silly me.
When you time shift brodcast television you don't claim to own the broadcast right? It was on the airways and you were being granted the chance to watch it then so according to fair use you can 'save' it for later and watch it then. Fair use isn't codified anywhere, its a grey area. Renting materials and then time-shifting them for later doesn't sound any different to me then time shifting the last episode of LOST with your Tivo. You are just paying for the content differently, one you pay money for and the other you watch advertising for.
I was just relating my own personal experience with NF and the particulars of their irrational 'throttling' procedure. That is what this thread is supposed to be about right? I wouldn't have posted if I didn't think I had a unique experience to share.
I never provided any of the stuff I rented to bittorrent or anything. I'm just busy with work and wanted to watch the DVD's on my own schedule. It may be copyright infringment I guess, but it has to be like the tamest kind. I'm not downloading, I am actually paying to rent the stuff.
I signed up like 2.5 months ago because I didn't feel like buying DVD sets of TV series as much. Put a bunch of Alias, Babylon 5, and World Poker Tour DVD seasons in my queue.
I live in northeast ohio and the closest center is about an hour away in Cleveland, so I figured my responce time would be pretty good. And it was, at least for the first 1.5 months. I'd get 3 DVD's in the mail, I'd rip them to my HD for encoding and backup (to watch later), and send them out the next day. The day after I sent them Netflix would confirm that they had them and send out the next ones. Everything in my queue had the "Now" availablity and I always got my top 3. Every return envelope was also addressed to PO Box in Cleveland (their closest dist. center).
After about a month or so of this cycle there 'throttling' method kicked in. It affected the service in a number of interesting ways. First, even though everything in my queue had the best availability possible I now no longer got my top 3... ever. They seemed to pick 3 out of my top 15 almost at random. Instead of them shipping my new picks out the same day they got my returns, Netflix would aknowledge receipt and then say "Shipping tommorrow". And to top it off every return envelope I got was for a out-of-state center, Minnesota, New York, even Oregon (So that it would take longer to reach them).
This sent my monthly total from about 17-18 to 10-11. Now 10 rentals for 18 bucks is still cheap but what made me cancel was because of the unpredictablity of the resulting service. I never knew what I was getting, if my turnaround would be 2 days or 4.
I really have no problem with Netflix curtailing their heavy users (As I was) but they should be more upfront about it and just put a limit on monthly rentals then. If I could get their "normal" service for just the first 2.5 weeks of the month and then they would say "Your allocation is used up" that'd be worth it to me. At least then I would know when to expect the dvd's. $1.80 a rental (10 a month for $18) feels cheap enough for me for those DVD sets I'm to cheap to buy. But if I don't know which ones I'm getting or when I'm getting them it is so not worth it.
Less chance of being hit with optically guided missiles was probably a reason why we contacted a lot of activity at night, but there were other signifigant reasons.
The war was conducted in a way that was designed to try to make the enemy give up and run as quickly as possible. Constant neverending attack is an important part of this stratedgy. Never being able to sleep because of constant bombing destroys morale alot faster then actually trying to kill them. Bombs that target at night just as well as they do during the day make every strike seem guided by a unstoppable force.
The morale reason was probably the biggest reason for strikes all throughout the day and night.
Napster helped me find the IRC and the little communities inside, I'm sure it did that to others as well. It also felt cleaner and maybe looked nicer then Kazaa, etc (well maybe BT is better, but it lacks staying power, its only fault).
Clueless Windoz people were not the only people who used Napster.
For all you people who think that McD's came up with everything, remember that the first fast food place to come up with the drive-thru window was Wendy's. May seem obvious now, but back then it was huge that you could get your food in less then 10 minutes.
Who knows how long we wouldn't have the drive-thru had McD's stifled all the Wendy's and Burger Kings out there from making their own innovations.
I have started formating my drives every 90 days. It seems the longer my computer goes without a format the crazyer it gets. Refusing to turn on right, failing to respond to commands, etc. In theory I think it is because my computer is forming a primitive-type of intelligence and deciding to be lazy. I could be wrong.
Um, can we have some warning when a link is posted to a non-english site? It might sound annoyingly american or whatever but I'm sure it catches Koreans, etc. by surprise and annoys them to....
Just a "(German site)" is all I'm asking for next to the link.
Slashdot Mirror
Lol 5-13% inflation? Um, try the vast majority of the last 20 years inflation as been somewhere between 1-4%. Source ( http://inflationdata.com/Infla... ) 1-4% is a healthy range for an economy, if it is below or above bad things will happen (Deflation on the low side, runaway inflation on the other end). Deflation causes people to sit on their money, not invest in new tech, not invest in the future and not expand their businesses (who wants to expand when the money used to do so would be worth more then the investment made?).
A zero percent inflation rate is unattainable (population growth, a million other factors) so keeping it around and low in the 1-4 range is good for everybody.
Or perhaps that since the results were made public and reported on, smarter people, the people who read the news relatively currently, have actively looked for and taken the quiz. People who like to take little quizzes like this do it because scoring higher probably makes them feel a little better about themselves. Uninformed people probably don't seek out things that will, in all likelyhood, make them feel dumb.
The cause of worldwide amphibian population declines is the Chytrid Fungus. However many do think that global warming is making the situation happen faster and to a more serious degree. Here is some quick links if you want to read more on the subject ...
From Nat Geo:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080401-frog-fungus.html
The NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/science/04frog.html
The CDC:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no12/03-0804.htm
Most internet browsing is with relatively small amounts of data, so wouldn't front-loading of this nature noticeably increase browsing performance? Since this kind of performance is noticed by the majority of users it would seem to be something that increases their perception of their connections' speed.
I'm not saying that Comcast might not be cheating on purpose for speed tests, I just think that there might be another reason behind it other than just to make their test scores artifically high.
Well if we are talking about NYC well then I totally agree, but I was responding to the poster who said this...
If you live in NY, $100k per year pays the mortgage and the bills - barely.
NYC != NY
New York is a big(ish) state with plenty of rural places to live.
That's insane, if you can't live comfortably on at least half of that and save the rest then you need to investigate which bills are really needed and which ones aren't. Get a smaller house, move 2 miles down the road where the property values are 30% less, don't eat out 5 nights a week, whatever.
100k is plenty of money if you know how to spend it.
"I don't think the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, which apparently has no physical existence, will be much more durable."
Umm, the Inventor's Hall of Fame is a real museum in Akron, OH. I've been there, it's a fairly interesting place (beats the Football Hall of Fame (Canton, OH) hands down). The museum has no busts, it trys to present inventions and the science behind them in a very understandable way with many hands-on exhibits.
Their website is http://www.invent.org/
From the article:
"The shuttle mission will likely be in early 2008."
Now that's not exactly a launch date but I would say it is better then "No date was reported for the mission, other than before the shuttle fleet is retired."
"Sci-fi, could be anything. And that's tougher. You're now creating very original IP. I think that some day someone's going to get it right. Nobody has yet - nobody's even come close to getting it right."
While the part about the challenge of creating original IP in Sci-Fi is true, it is harder to come up something from total scratch, I think EVE is pretty damn close to "getting it right". Its a Sci-Fi MMO that is big, diverse , pretty to look at and lots of fun.
Oh, and the part about guns, total hogwash! In fantasy, bows/magic spells take the place of guns and work just fine. They are both just kinds of ranged weapons, the only thing that is really different is the on-screen graphics.
"Which is worse: A game that introduces its features sparsely but regularly, or one that gives them all to you at once and then never gives you another one? I would much rather play the former."
Would Tony Hawk games be as much fun if you could only do 1/4 the moves in the begining? Course, as your stats increase throughout the game certain moves go from tough/impossible to easy but you can still basically do almost everything at the very beginning when it comes to moves.
Unlockables are fun but some games take this concept to far...
If you can't spend 700-800 dollars on electronics then you need to get a better job.
This is a tech site, we all are overpayed pro's. If this was a site for factory workers and cleaners I could understand but not software engineers and other techies. This ain't a place for minimum wage workers.
Are you serious? I won't be getting a PS3 because I can't afford one, I would just have to save up for it. I won't be getting one because the competition is much cheaper and I can get much more bang for my buck.
That isn't even my big problem with your statement. Slashdot isn't all about overpaid engineers, many of us are not at that stage of our careers and/or are in different lines of work. One can be a geek and only make 30-40k a year. To most people 700-800 bucks is alot of money. To most slashdotters 700-800 bucks is alot of money.
Some of us are poor college CS students, some of us are people struggling to find a job out of college, some of us are at help desk jobs looking for better opportunities, and some of us are high school math teachers who enjoy what we do but aren't paid all that well. Not to mention having a good job but saving for college funds every month because you have 2 little rugrats who are going to need an education someday.
In a way I'm kinda glad Sony has gone the way they have. A year ago I thought I might end up buying 2 systems at near the same time. Now I can just be excited about spending $300 at the end of the year for a game system instead of still wondering what I am going to buy and how much it will end up costing.
They see the winds are blowing slightly in favor of the anti-net neutrality crowd, so while this letter does add their voice, at the same time it makes them seem not to be speaking from blatant self-interest. They try to act as if their voice is semi-neutral and hopefully have more credence acredited to it.
If the scales were tipping towards the net neutrality crowd they probably would have sent a stronger message. If a corporation doesn't see a great need to express a yes/no political opinion they generally don't, as they don't want to alienate any potential customers.
Have you forgotten who is making this device? This is Nintendo, the king of making robust pieces of technology that can withstand a beating. Everything I've had of theirs' has been crazy hard to break. Heck my old SNES still works fine, can anybody at all say the same thing about their old PS1?
Didn't I read somewhere that headlines are drifting to more descriptive/non-misleading so that they would get a better pagerank on google on searchs that are applicable?
Commas are used as decimal separators in the English language. Periods are used over in Europe.
:)
N umbers
Ex. 15 million = 15,000,000 not 15.000.000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_(punctuation)#
Ok you're right, "back-up" was incorrect language. What I really meant was "Time-shift". Silly me.
When you time shift brodcast television you don't claim to own the broadcast right? It was on the airways and you were being granted the chance to watch it then so according to fair use you can 'save' it for later and watch it then. Fair use isn't codified anywhere, its a grey area. Renting materials and then time-shifting them for later doesn't sound any different to me then time shifting the last episode of LOST with your Tivo. You are just paying for the content differently, one you pay money for and the other you watch advertising for.
I was just relating my own personal experience with NF and the particulars of their irrational 'throttling' procedure. That is what this thread is supposed to be about right? I wouldn't have posted if I didn't think I had a unique experience to share.
I never provided any of the stuff I rented to bittorrent or anything. I'm just busy with work and wanted to watch the DVD's on my own schedule. It may be copyright infringment I guess, but it has to be like the tamest kind. I'm not downloading, I am actually paying to rent the stuff.
I signed up like 2.5 months ago because I didn't feel like buying DVD sets of TV series as much. Put a bunch of Alias, Babylon 5, and World Poker Tour DVD seasons in my queue.
... ever. They seemed to pick 3 out of my top 15 almost at random. Instead of them shipping my new picks out the same day they got my returns, Netflix would aknowledge receipt and then say "Shipping tommorrow". And to top it off every return envelope I got was for a out-of-state center, Minnesota, New York, even Oregon (So that it would take longer to reach them).
I live in northeast ohio and the closest center is about an hour away in Cleveland, so I figured my responce time would be pretty good. And it was, at least for the first 1.5 months. I'd get 3 DVD's in the mail, I'd rip them to my HD for encoding and backup (to watch later), and send them out the next day. The day after I sent them Netflix would confirm that they had them and send out the next ones. Everything in my queue had the "Now" availablity and I always got my top 3. Every return envelope was also addressed to PO Box in Cleveland (their closest dist. center).
After about a month or so of this cycle there 'throttling' method kicked in. It affected the service in a number of interesting ways. First, even though everything in my queue had the best availability possible I now no longer got my top 3
This sent my monthly total from about 17-18 to 10-11. Now 10 rentals for 18 bucks is still cheap but what made me cancel was because of the unpredictablity of the resulting service. I never knew what I was getting, if my turnaround would be 2 days or 4.
I really have no problem with Netflix curtailing their heavy users (As I was) but they should be more upfront about it and just put a limit on monthly rentals then. If I could get their "normal" service for just the first 2.5 weeks of the month and then they would say "Your allocation is used up" that'd be worth it to me. At least then I would know when to expect the dvd's. $1.80 a rental (10 a month for $18) feels cheap enough for me for those DVD sets I'm to cheap to buy. But if I don't know which ones I'm getting or when I'm getting them it is so not worth it.
Less chance of being hit with optically guided missiles was probably a reason why we contacted a lot of activity at night, but there were other signifigant reasons.
The war was conducted in a way that was designed to try to make the enemy give up and run as quickly as possible. Constant neverending attack is an important part of this stratedgy. Never being able to sleep because of constant bombing destroys morale alot faster then actually trying to kill them. Bombs that target at night just as well as they do during the day make every strike seem guided by a unstoppable force.
The morale reason was probably the biggest reason for strikes all throughout the day and night.
Napster helped me find the IRC and the little communities inside, I'm sure it did that to others as well. It also felt cleaner and maybe looked nicer then Kazaa, etc (well maybe BT is better, but it lacks staying power, its only fault).
Clueless Windoz people were not the only people who used Napster.
For all you people who think that McD's came up with everything, remember that the first fast food place to come up with the drive-thru window was Wendy's. May seem obvious now, but back then it was huge that you could get your food in less then 10 minutes.
Who knows how long we wouldn't have the drive-thru had McD's stifled all the Wendy's and Burger Kings out there from making their own innovations.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start makes your RC car have 30 lives ;)
I have started formating my drives every 90 days. It seems the longer my computer goes without a format the crazyer it gets. Refusing to turn on right, failing to respond to commands, etc. In theory I think it is because my computer is forming a primitive-type of intelligence and deciding to be lazy. I could be wrong.
Heh, its 6:30am on the east coast right now, and I just drove my girlfriend home.
;)
I'm glad you guys had fun last night without me
Um, can we have some warning when a link is posted to a non-english site? It might sound annoyingly american or whatever but I'm sure it catches Koreans, etc. by surprise and annoys them to....
Just a "(German site)" is all I'm asking for next to the link.