On top of that, its not clear that RH needs to be bought. What are they missing? They seem to have decent capital available to them, and they are slowly cleaning up in the linux distro market. I would think IBM would be a better partner for them.
Cuz IBM *really* knows how to compete with MS in the OS marketspace...
While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS?? br.
br.
Dunno. I'm a geek, and I'd really rather not have AOL for my cable provider, but I do. I'd really rather not have AOL for my broadband provider, but I do (RoadRunner). I'd really rather not use AOL Instant Messenger, but my friends and coworkers all use it and I need to talk to them. And so on...
Yeah! Then we'd all be able to hate AOL/TW *AND* Microsoft. Oh wait a minute, we already do.
As you were.
Seriously though, I think that AOL/TW would be just as bad pimping a Linux distro as MS is pimping Windows. The only difference is that mainstream consumers would be choosing the lesser of 2 evils.
We'll still have our little corner of the universe, and still nobody will care but us.
The other day I was reading a news page at MSN, and when I clicked a link to view a story I was presented with the following:
The news story came up on the screen and was displayed for a few seconds (just long enough for me to get two or three sentences read) and then the entire window faded out and a full-window ad faded in to replace. There was a link in the ad page to take me back to the news story, and there was also a link to comment on the advertisement. I chose the comment link, and told them that it was the most fuck-brained advertising idea that I had ever seen, amongst other unflattering remarks.
I think that it's pretty obvious that there are tons of wonderful reasons why we should be opposed to these cards. I'm opposed to them from a moral, civil liberties, and privacy standpoint. The government already knows more about me than they should. And big business knows even more about me than the government! Why?
How much extra effort would it take for those airlines to run a second check against their own internal databases when you scan your card? Now big business has a record of your travelling, and they can market to you just like they do in grocery stores who use the club cards. Next, the grocery stores abandon club cards in favor of governemnt ID cards because they'll want an extra level of ID verification before accepting your check or your (possibly stolen) credit card. The potential abuses for this are endless, just like they were for the SSN cards.
If you really want this idea to be killed before it ever gets off the ground, we have to turn the majority of the American population against it, and make sure that they are vocally opoosed to it. Now I'm not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that we could potentially use the "crutch" of religion to fight this issue.
All you would have to do is convince some large, gullible religious groups (Jerry Falwell's church, the Southern Baptists, etc...) that this ID card is the "Mark of the Beast" from the bible, and blammo! They'll all oppose it with every ounce of their being. Not only that, they'll oppose the election of candidates that support such "evil plans". Granted, the average Slashdotter is probably not likely to want to align themselves with fundamentalist religious groups, but I think that this is one case where we can use the enemy against itself and actually win!
The pointer is important (to me), I like the 'eraser' type that IBM has, and some others, like Dell who have dual. I hate those touch pad things(personal preference).
Hell yeah. Down with the touchpad! Up with the Trackpoint! And I thought that I was the only one. Funny thing is, most laptop makers are slowly drifting towards the touchpad (at least in the consumer models). I'm sure IBM won't because it pioneered the Trackpoint, but it's irritating to see it going away everywhere else.
Not so. 256 MB of RAM in a laptop is nothing. I've got that in my 2 year-old Armada.
Mobile Athlon 4 chips are widely available now. I was at Best Buy the other day and saw HP and Compaq laptops with mobile Athlon 4 chips in them.
I haven't been looking that closely at the video chips available, but a quick browse past Nvidia's site shows that only Dell and Toshiba are making systems using the GeForce2Go. Unfortunately, neither of them are using Athlon 4 processors in any of their systems. Though I have been hearing rumours lately that Dell may start shipping a couple models with an Athlon 4, I wouldn't put much stock in them. They seem to go around and around with AMD every year and then just before they cut a deal Intel gives them a better price to stay Intel-only.
At any rate, a system with his desired specs shouldn't be too far off in the future. The GeForce2Go and the Athlon 4 are both fairly new products, but I imagine that by the end of the year he'd be able to find a system equipped as described.
That goes for just about all of them (though IBM seemed to have lower prices for upgrades and even has a "free" extra 64 MB upgrade for systems purchased). I just bought a pair of 128 MB PC100 SODIMMS for my Armada for ~$80 at Crucial, and I hate to think that Compaq was charging for it. Just make sure to the the correct specs (the Armada 7400 familiy uses CAS Latency 2 memory instead of the more common CAS Latency 3).
Yeah, they're not bad little machines. The company that I was working at was sold to a competitor and they're getting rid of hteir old equipment. I bought my Armada 7400 (PII 266 MHz) for $125 and got 256 MB of RAM for it from Micron/Crucial for ~$80. It's a handy little machine for spending $200, and I don't really have any complaints.
And wouldn't you know that right after I bought it I just found a Dell Latitude CPx (PIII 600) in storage that they're selling for $600. I may just have to upgrade since I like the CPx much better than the 7400s (not to mention the speed increase).
But if I were buying a laptop new I'd definitely go with an IBM Thinkpad. They're by far the highest quality laptops that I've ever used. Unfortunately they'll set you back $1500-$2000 for the low-end machines.
I've seen Compaq Presario (I hear they're junk) and HP consumer-level laptops in stores for $1200-$1300 + a rebate, but I can't vouch for their quality. What I can say is definitely go for something with a nice long warranty. A faulty LCD panel for my Armada 7400 is almost $900 to replace (I had to replace a few at work) if it's not under warranty. And being portable you're much more likely to have something break on a laptop than your desktop machine.
Since they are within 12 miles of their shores, Great Britain can easily come forward and claim what is rightfully theirs.
Nah...do a little research and you'll discover that in the 60's and 70's this was all worked out in the British courts. IIRC, some British citizen in a boat got too close to Sealand and the King of Sealand started shooting at him. The boater reported it to the police, who arrested (illegally) the King of Sealand for violating British laws. When he stood trial, his defence was that he was the king of a sovereign nation defending his territory and was no subject to British law. The courts pretty much agreed with im and set him free.
Again, this was back in the day before Britain claimed 12 miles of territorial water. When Britain expanded, I believe that Sealand did as well and that they share some of the same territorial waters (so that Sealand isn't boxed in).
There are some other interesting stories about a time when a German man tried to invade Sealand for his own purposes. The government of Sealand took him as a POW and the government of Germany was forced to negotiate with Sealand for his release. First the Germans tried going through Britain, but Britain washed it's hands of the matter because Sealand was a sovereign nation.
Sealand has a quite fascinating (albeit short) history.
I was answering people's questions on Compuserve, Prodigy, Fidonet, and USENET since I was 12. Computer-related, not law-related questions, though. I think a lot of people here can say the same.
I do have a complaint about that though. Most of the people that I see handing out computer advice are woefully under-equipped to do so. Granted, most of the tech advice that I see is on discussion forums for certian games that I play, but most of it is junk. 80% of the time the response to a question will be "You need a new [COMPONENT]. Get [PRODUCT X] it's what I use and it works fine." Or something similar. The advice almost always includes throwing money at the probelm to clear it up when some careful tweaking would do. While often times that resolves the issue, it is usually a solution that is akin to killing a fly with a tactical nuke.
That always irritiates me. The next 19% of the advice that I see is blatantly wrong. I correct it when I see it usually. Finally, there is the 1% of answers that are correct. It just amazes me that somehow because a person can unpack a PC from a box marked "Compaq" and plug everything in that they think that qualifies them as a "hardware expert."
At any rate, I hope that the advice on Askme.com is more accurate than most of what I see on the Internet. Just because information is out there doesn't mean that it is correct.
That's not uncommon at all. For many months my father (who is on medication for various illnesses) was plagued with a number of symptoms that indicated that he had a prolactinoma (a kind of brain tumor basically). After several months of tests and much discomfort and emotional difficulty, the doctors could find no evidence of an actual prolactinoma, even though the symptoms were a perfect match. They insisted that the CAT scans had to be wrong and sent him back for more. In the meantime, my mother (who only has a high school diploma) did some research on the Internet and discovered that identical symptoms could be caused by a certain medication that my father was in fact taking. She asked his doctor about it and after some research the doctor concurred with my mother's opinion. He changed the medication to a different type and the symptoms went away.
I shudder to think of all of the many thousands of dollars that his insurance company spent on tests for this non-existant brain-tumor when a simple search on the internet would have turned up a solution sooner.
I went through a similar situation when I was in high school (though we didn't have the Internet back then) where I saw 12 different doctors and had numerous tests to diagnose a medical disorder that is very commonplace in the US, but is very uncommon in teenagers. None of the doctors knew what was causing my problems, but a friend of the family who had the same condition spotted it right away when he heard the symptoms.
It's all about information. And sometimes it takes a naive person who doesn't have 8 years of professional training to be humble enough to ask for a solution.
On top of that, your lawyer must be knowledgeable about precedences that have been set (i.e. decisions on similar cases in the past), as precedences carry a lot of weight. Judges/juries must often follow precedence despite their personal misgivings in order to facilitate equal protection under the law (i.e. if Joe gets fined $500 for X, everyone else should be fined $500 for X... but in order to know that, your lawyer would have had to know about Joe vs. Foo). It is this staggering (and ever growing!) ammount of information that you are paying your lawyer to possess.
I don't know about that. IANAL, but it seems to me that the majority of the whole "being a lawyer" thing is being familiar with how the various court systems work and how to manage reference sources. No lawyer knows all the precedents in his field. They likely know a few of the major ones in his area of specialty at best. The value in a lawyer is being someone who may not know the answer but knows how to get it and present it in the courts. They still have to do all the research for their filings once they have a notion of which way they want to go. And over time perhaps their knowledge of precedent and obscure laws grow. But that hardly means that a layperson couldn't learn to practice law as well as or even better than a lawyer.
It's like I tell all of my prospective employers: You're hiring me for 2 things. First, I have a sizeable amount of knowledge and 3 years experience in my field. I will have many answers off the top of my head. Secondly, for those answers that I do not have, I know how to find them and I have the understanding to be able to use them. Sure, you could hire someone with 3 times the knowledge that I have and pay 3 times as much for it. Or they could hire me and get a much better value.
That's the best way to go, because it felt like a long cut-scene. It was beautiful graphically, but Katz does have some good points:
One, the plot was pretty weak. In most movies, you have the baseline life, followed by a conflict, followed by a search for a remedy to the conflict, which finally climaxes and ends with an epilogue. At least that's the way that we do it in the states. In the FF movie, we start with the baseline and conflict having already been assumed, as well as the search for the remedy. They come in working towards what should be a climax, but since we have nothing to compare it with it doesn't seem like there was a climax. Finally the movie ends with a mellow song, with no explanation of life post-climax. Overall I think that it really reminds me of a lot of the anime that I've seen...pretty to look at, but hard to follow.
Secondly, the "acting." Most of the time the scenes were beautifully done, but you could tell which ones were done by an animater and which ones were done with motion-capture. There is a very obvious difference in the movie. The motion-capture scenes were great. The range of facial expressions were iffy at best. Some of the simpler expressions (like when one of the women gives somebody the "cold shoulder treatment") were very realistic. I actually thought to myself, "Boy have I seen that expression before." Smiles were well done. But the more intense emotions (fear, rage, pain) were not displayed very well at all in their characters, making them seem somewhat...weak. I don't recall seeing the characters really blinking at all, which for some reason gave everything a dream-like quality. It's funny how you don't notice something so commonplace until it is gone.
Overall, I was pleased with the effort. But then I only went to see the technology, not for the story.
Who is complaining when coca-cola buys another soft-drink brand ?? No one, but fact is that almost every thing you drink is owned by coca-cola and produced in country's where 14 year old kids are working in factory's and earn a wage of what you and I couldn't live half a day of. But do I hear complains about that ??
No, you don't. Because it's a blatant lie.
Granted, Coca-Cola is no saint (just check out the article entitled "Coca-Karma" on the GNN web site). But Coca Cola is produced and bottled locally. Most major cities have a Coca-Cola bottler that takes care of producing the product for their region. And most of the bottlers aren't even owned by Coca-Cola, they merely license the formula and packaging. Are there Coca-Cola bottling plants in 3rd-world countries that pay 14-year olds to bottle coke? Probably (though the lines are mostly automated so plentiful cheap labor isn't that much of an issue), but they are bottling their own Coke that will be sold in their own country at their own relative prices.
obtw- Intel does not own the Athlon core, only the Alpha EV6 bus it runs on.
Which AMD already licensed from Compaq/Digital, so they should have rights to it for as long as they need them. This is further encouraged by statements from Compaq offiers that the sale of the Alpha designs to Intel were not an exclusive deal, so it would seem that Compaq/Digital could continue to license the technology to additional companies.
UO was in a constant state of beta test (Charging users $10 a month for the privilidge) for as long as the Linux client worked. And you couldn't just stand around and chat or practise your skills without some obnoxious fuck coming along and pickpocketing you or trying to kill you by manipulating the game (or both.) It got really old really fast.
I never played on the Linux client (wasn't even aware that there had been one), but I'm not surprised that development for it lagged behind that of the Windows client. That's been par for the course for years on most software that originates on Windows.
As far as the in-game halfwits go, that problem has been largely done away with when they split the worlds in facets. There's one facet where anything goes, and another where you cannot PK and stealing doesn't work. It's pretty simple to travel between the two with your character, so most of those problems have gone away while still allowing the player to choose which style they enjoy more. Nowdays the worst problem you tend to encounter is a foul-mouthed punk, but you'll get those in any game and they're easy enough to ignore or block.
I started playing when the game was released in 1997 and only played for a couple months because I kept getting PKed and it was painful to play over a 24kbps dialup connection. I got back into it about a year and a half ago and have been going strong since.
BTW: The asian game has its own unique problems... From what I hear, the police over there have special RL/PK units to combat the new phenomenon of taking RL revenge on an in-game PK.
Yes, I've read similar articles. There is apparently some organized crime/gang influence in the situations that you describe. However, I think that is perhaps more of a cultural issue than a game issue.
As an example, Asheron's Call from Microsoft. 30,000 players and an average concurrent userbase of over 2000 per 'world'. Heck, even Everquest is still going. Asheron's Call has been in continuous operation since 1999 with content and feature updates EVERY MONTH.
Microsoft may be the distributor, but they sure didn't code it. Do you really think that MS could make a product that would support 2000 concurrent anythings?
Besides, you left out the grandaddy of them all: Ultima Online. The original and still the best, it's been chugging along for 300,000+ users (makes Asheron's Call look like a drop in the bucket!) since October of 1997. And they have regular content/scenario updates as well.
The excuse "it's a big project, this is hard, noone has done this before" has worn damn thin after being repeated by so many people who should have learned the lessons of others.
That's why I can't wait until Richard Garriott's new company eventually releases their MMORPG. Most of the people who work for him now are former Ultima Online and Ultima Online 2 developers. They've been through it, and they know how it works. And Garriott is the kind of guy that (assuming the company lets him) will make sure that it's very playable and clean before it gets released (his more recent problems with UO and Ultima IX were largely related to EA's pushing). And I think that they'll have the financial stability to be able to pull it off because their first project isn't going to be their game, but instead porting and supporting one from a Korean company (that is insanely successful in Asia).
So they picked a relatively simple but cash-generating venture for their first attempt so that when they get around to making their own game they will have the money and tons of experience with different MMORPG systems. Great idea, eh?
What if the user base they sold to figure out they've been sold a bill of goods (which is what appears to be happening right now...)- they're going to be leaving in droves and spreading the word about the game being a piece of crap.
Yes, but that's not what they're concerned about. If they run out of cash, it's "game over." If they get an injection of cash that carries them through what should have been the beta period, then they'll probably make out OK eventually.
Remember, they aren't looking at what happens over the next year and a half. They are looking long-term. Ultima Online has been around for nearly 4 years and it not only going strong, but growing. Ultima Online had some pretty serious issues when it finally released as well (and it was pioneering the MMORPG genre, so it was even worse then), but they managed to fix it up quite nicely. I'm sure that the AO people are hoping for the same thing.
The other thing to remember about a company that is out of cash and about ready to go under: they never do what is "right" for their customers or their employees. They do what they believe will give them the immediate influx of cash to have the company survive, even if it means cutting off their arms to do it.
You're making a false connection. I wasn't implying that by teaching the kids how to use the command-line that they would magically have knowledge of the workings of PCs. I was implying that if you started with the simplistic pictures of a GUI, and once that is mastered then move on to the more abstract/less intuitive command-line interfaces, you will have covered the whole of the system pretty well in a graduated manner.
One of the benefits of the command-line interface is that you can easily chain together series of commands or scripts to create bigger scripts and mini-programs to get the system to do exactly what you want. You learn the kinds of commands that the OS uses behind it's pretty GUI. You learn the principle of a directory tree (which most people completely miss if they've only been trained on the GUI interface). If you teach someone how to use a command-lines interface, they will come out of it with a much more complete understanding of the OS than they would if you told them to just point and click because you actually have to learn something about the computer rather than relying on an intuitive user interface.
Unless it clouds over in which case it can take much longer to get to the finish line.
Probably, but not much longer. Many of the designs (if not all of them) incorporate some sort of battery system. The solar cells provide energy to drive the motor, but they also charge a battery to be used when it's not as bright out/overcast. I also wouldn't be suprised if they incorporated some sort of energy reclamation system into the brakes (like the one on the Honda Insight) to help keep the battery charged.
Granted, a couple days of serious overcast/thunderstorms would cause quite a bit of delay, but then the car that was most efficient would probably have an advantage (having larger energy reserves, being able to build power on lower light levels). That's the cool thing about engineering races.
Slashdot Mirror
On top of that, its not clear that RH needs to be bought. What are they missing? They seem to have decent capital available to them, and they are slowly cleaning up in the linux distro market. I would think IBM would be a better partner for them.
Cuz IBM *really* knows how to compete with MS in the OS marketspace...
While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS?? br. br. Dunno. I'm a geek, and I'd really rather not have AOL for my cable provider, but I do. I'd really rather not have AOL for my broadband provider, but I do (RoadRunner). I'd really rather not use AOL Instant Messenger, but my friends and coworkers all use it and I need to talk to them. And so on...
Yeah! Then we'd all be able to hate AOL/TW *AND* Microsoft. Oh wait a minute, we already do.
As you were.
Seriously though, I think that AOL/TW would be just as bad pimping a Linux distro as MS is pimping Windows. The only difference is that mainstream consumers would be choosing the lesser of 2 evils.
We'll still have our little corner of the universe, and still nobody will care but us.
The other day I was reading a news page at MSN, and when I clicked a link to view a story I was presented with the following:
The news story came up on the screen and was displayed for a few seconds (just long enough for me to get two or three sentences read) and then the entire window faded out and a full-window ad faded in to replace. There was a link in the ad page to take me back to the news story, and there was also a link to comment on the advertisement. I chose the comment link, and told them that it was the most fuck-brained advertising idea that I had ever seen, amongst other unflattering remarks.
The times, they are a changin'.
Seriously though, why not?
I think that it's pretty obvious that there are tons of wonderful reasons why we should be opposed to these cards. I'm opposed to them from a moral, civil liberties, and privacy standpoint. The government already knows more about me than they should. And big business knows even more about me than the government! Why?
How much extra effort would it take for those airlines to run a second check against their own internal databases when you scan your card? Now big business has a record of your travelling, and they can market to you just like they do in grocery stores who use the club cards. Next, the grocery stores abandon club cards in favor of governemnt ID cards because they'll want an extra level of ID verification before accepting your check or your (possibly stolen) credit card. The potential abuses for this are endless, just like they were for the SSN cards.
If you really want this idea to be killed before it ever gets off the ground, we have to turn the majority of the American population against it, and make sure that they are vocally opoosed to it. Now I'm not a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that we could potentially use the "crutch" of religion to fight this issue.
All you would have to do is convince some large, gullible religious groups (Jerry Falwell's church, the Southern Baptists, etc...) that this ID card is the "Mark of the Beast" from the bible, and blammo! They'll all oppose it with every ounce of their being. Not only that, they'll oppose the election of candidates that support such "evil plans". Granted, the average Slashdotter is probably not likely to want to align themselves with fundamentalist religious groups, but I think that this is one case where we can use the enemy against itself and actually win!
So what do you think?
The pointer is important (to me), I like the 'eraser' type that IBM has, and some others, like Dell who have dual. I hate those touch pad things(personal preference).
Hell yeah. Down with the touchpad! Up with the Trackpoint! And I thought that I was the only one. Funny thing is, most laptop makers are slowly drifting towards the touchpad (at least in the consumer models). I'm sure IBM won't because it pioneered the Trackpoint, but it's irritating to see it going away everywhere else.
Not so. 256 MB of RAM in a laptop is nothing. I've got that in my 2 year-old Armada.
Mobile Athlon 4 chips are widely available now. I was at Best Buy the other day and saw HP and Compaq laptops with mobile Athlon 4 chips in them.
I haven't been looking that closely at the video chips available, but a quick browse past Nvidia's site shows that only Dell and Toshiba are making systems using the GeForce2Go. Unfortunately, neither of them are using Athlon 4 processors in any of their systems. Though I have been hearing rumours lately that Dell may start shipping a couple models with an Athlon 4, I wouldn't put much stock in them. They seem to go around and around with AMD every year and then just before they cut a deal Intel gives them a better price to stay Intel-only.
At any rate, a system with his desired specs shouldn't be too far off in the future. The GeForce2Go and the Athlon 4 are both fairly new products, but I imagine that by the end of the year he'd be able to find a system equipped as described.
That goes for just about all of them (though IBM seemed to have lower prices for upgrades and even has a "free" extra 64 MB upgrade for systems purchased). I just bought a pair of 128 MB PC100 SODIMMS for my Armada for ~$80 at Crucial, and I hate to think that Compaq was charging for it. Just make sure to the the correct specs (the Armada 7400 familiy uses CAS Latency 2 memory instead of the more common CAS Latency 3).
Memory prices are ridiculously cheap right now.
Yeah, they're not bad little machines. The company that I was working at was sold to a competitor and they're getting rid of hteir old equipment. I bought my Armada 7400 (PII 266 MHz) for $125 and got 256 MB of RAM for it from Micron/Crucial for ~$80. It's a handy little machine for spending $200, and I don't really have any complaints. And wouldn't you know that right after I bought it I just found a Dell Latitude CPx (PIII 600) in storage that they're selling for $600. I may just have to upgrade since I like the CPx much better than the 7400s (not to mention the speed increase). But if I were buying a laptop new I'd definitely go with an IBM Thinkpad. They're by far the highest quality laptops that I've ever used. Unfortunately they'll set you back $1500-$2000 for the low-end machines. I've seen Compaq Presario (I hear they're junk) and HP consumer-level laptops in stores for $1200-$1300 + a rebate, but I can't vouch for their quality. What I can say is definitely go for something with a nice long warranty. A faulty LCD panel for my Armada 7400 is almost $900 to replace (I had to replace a few at work) if it's not under warranty. And being portable you're much more likely to have something break on a laptop than your desktop machine.
They're almost a private army. They're contracted for security at various military/secret stuff installations.
Yep. You know those guys in the white jeeps who will bust a cap in your ass if you get too close to Area 51/Groom Lake/Dreamland? That's Wackenhut.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Since they are within 12 miles of their shores, Great Britain can easily come forward and claim what is rightfully theirs.
Nah...do a little research and you'll discover that in the 60's and 70's this was all worked out in the British courts. IIRC, some British citizen in a boat got too close to Sealand and the King of Sealand started shooting at him. The boater reported it to the police, who arrested (illegally) the King of Sealand for violating British laws. When he stood trial, his defence was that he was the king of a sovereign nation defending his territory and was no subject to British law. The courts pretty much agreed with im and set him free.
Again, this was back in the day before Britain claimed 12 miles of territorial water. When Britain expanded, I believe that Sealand did as well and that they share some of the same territorial waters (so that Sealand isn't boxed in).
There are some other interesting stories about a time when a German man tried to invade Sealand for his own purposes. The government of Sealand took him as a POW and the government of Germany was forced to negotiate with Sealand for his release. First the Germans tried going through Britain, but Britain washed it's hands of the matter because Sealand was a sovereign nation.
Sealand has a quite fascinating (albeit short) history.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
I was answering people's questions on Compuserve, Prodigy, Fidonet, and USENET since I was 12. Computer-related, not law-related questions, though. I think a lot of people here can say the same.
I do have a complaint about that though. Most of the people that I see handing out computer advice are woefully under-equipped to do so. Granted, most of the tech advice that I see is on discussion forums for certian games that I play, but most of it is junk. 80% of the time the response to a question will be "You need a new [COMPONENT]. Get [PRODUCT X] it's what I use and it works fine." Or something similar. The advice almost always includes throwing money at the probelm to clear it up when some careful tweaking would do. While often times that resolves the issue, it is usually a solution that is akin to killing a fly with a tactical nuke.
That always irritiates me. The next 19% of the advice that I see is blatantly wrong. I correct it when I see it usually. Finally, there is the 1% of answers that are correct. It just amazes me that somehow because a person can unpack a PC from a box marked "Compaq" and plug everything in that they think that qualifies them as a "hardware expert."
At any rate, I hope that the advice on Askme.com is more accurate than most of what I see on the Internet. Just because information is out there doesn't mean that it is correct.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
That's not uncommon at all. For many months my father (who is on medication for various illnesses) was plagued with a number of symptoms that indicated that he had a prolactinoma (a kind of brain tumor basically). After several months of tests and much discomfort and emotional difficulty, the doctors could find no evidence of an actual prolactinoma, even though the symptoms were a perfect match. They insisted that the CAT scans had to be wrong and sent him back for more. In the meantime, my mother (who only has a high school diploma) did some research on the Internet and discovered that identical symptoms could be caused by a certain medication that my father was in fact taking. She asked his doctor about it and after some research the doctor concurred with my mother's opinion. He changed the medication to a different type and the symptoms went away.
I shudder to think of all of the many thousands of dollars that his insurance company spent on tests for this non-existant brain-tumor when a simple search on the internet would have turned up a solution sooner.
I went through a similar situation when I was in high school (though we didn't have the Internet back then) where I saw 12 different doctors and had numerous tests to diagnose a medical disorder that is very commonplace in the US, but is very uncommon in teenagers. None of the doctors knew what was causing my problems, but a friend of the family who had the same condition spotted it right away when he heard the symptoms.
It's all about information. And sometimes it takes a naive person who doesn't have 8 years of professional training to be humble enough to ask for a solution.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
On top of that, your lawyer must be knowledgeable about precedences that have been set (i.e. decisions on similar cases in the past), as precedences carry a lot of weight. Judges/juries must often follow precedence despite their personal misgivings in order to facilitate equal protection under the law (i.e. if Joe gets fined $500 for X, everyone else should be fined $500 for X... but in order to know that, your lawyer would have had to know about Joe vs. Foo). It is this staggering (and ever growing!) ammount of information that you are paying your lawyer to possess.
I don't know about that. IANAL, but it seems to me that the majority of the whole "being a lawyer" thing is being familiar with how the various court systems work and how to manage reference sources. No lawyer knows all the precedents in his field. They likely know a few of the major ones in his area of specialty at best. The value in a lawyer is being someone who may not know the answer but knows how to get it and present it in the courts. They still have to do all the research for their filings once they have a notion of which way they want to go. And over time perhaps their knowledge of precedent and obscure laws grow. But that hardly means that a layperson couldn't learn to practice law as well as or even better than a lawyer.
It's like I tell all of my prospective employers: You're hiring me for 2 things. First, I have a sizeable amount of knowledge and 3 years experience in my field. I will have many answers off the top of my head. Secondly, for those answers that I do not have, I know how to find them and I have the understanding to be able to use them. Sure, you could hire someone with 3 times the knowledge that I have and pay 3 times as much for it. Or they could hire me and get a much better value.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
That's the best way to go, because it felt like a long cut-scene. It was beautiful graphically, but Katz does have some good points:
One, the plot was pretty weak. In most movies, you have the baseline life, followed by a conflict, followed by a search for a remedy to the conflict, which finally climaxes and ends with an epilogue. At least that's the way that we do it in the states. In the FF movie, we start with the baseline and conflict having already been assumed, as well as the search for the remedy. They come in working towards what should be a climax, but since we have nothing to compare it with it doesn't seem like there was a climax. Finally the movie ends with a mellow song, with no explanation of life post-climax. Overall I think that it really reminds me of a lot of the anime that I've seen...pretty to look at, but hard to follow.
Secondly, the "acting." Most of the time the scenes were beautifully done, but you could tell which ones were done by an animater and which ones were done with motion-capture. There is a very obvious difference in the movie. The motion-capture scenes were great. The range of facial expressions were iffy at best. Some of the simpler expressions (like when one of the women gives somebody the "cold shoulder treatment") were very realistic. I actually thought to myself, "Boy have I seen that expression before." Smiles were well done. But the more intense emotions (fear, rage, pain) were not displayed very well at all in their characters, making them seem somewhat...weak. I don't recall seeing the characters really blinking at all, which for some reason gave everything a dream-like quality. It's funny how you don't notice something so commonplace until it is gone.
Overall, I was pleased with the effort. But then I only went to see the technology, not for the story.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Who is complaining when coca-cola buys another soft-drink brand ?? No one, but fact is that almost every thing you drink is owned by coca-cola and produced in country's where 14 year old kids are working in factory's and earn a wage of what you and I couldn't live half a day of. But do I hear complains about that ??
No, you don't. Because it's a blatant lie.
Granted, Coca-Cola is no saint (just check out the article entitled "Coca-Karma" on the GNN web site). But Coca Cola is produced and bottled locally. Most major cities have a Coca-Cola bottler that takes care of producing the product for their region. And most of the bottlers aren't even owned by Coca-Cola, they merely license the formula and packaging. Are there Coca-Cola bottling plants in 3rd-world countries that pay 14-year olds to bottle coke? Probably (though the lines are mostly automated so plentiful cheap labor isn't that much of an issue), but they are bottling their own Coke that will be sold in their own country at their own relative prices.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
obtw- Intel does not own the Athlon core, only the Alpha EV6 bus it runs on.
Which AMD already licensed from Compaq/Digital, so they should have rights to it for as long as they need them. This is further encouraged by statements from Compaq offiers that the sale of the Alpha designs to Intel were not an exclusive deal, so it would seem that Compaq/Digital could continue to license the technology to additional companies.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
UO was in a constant state of beta test (Charging users $10 a month for the privilidge) for as long as the Linux client worked. And you couldn't just stand around and chat or practise your skills without some obnoxious fuck coming along and pickpocketing you or trying to kill you by manipulating the game (or both.) It got really old really fast.
I never played on the Linux client (wasn't even aware that there had been one), but I'm not surprised that development for it lagged behind that of the Windows client. That's been par for the course for years on most software that originates on Windows.
As far as the in-game halfwits go, that problem has been largely done away with when they split the worlds in facets. There's one facet where anything goes, and another where you cannot PK and stealing doesn't work. It's pretty simple to travel between the two with your character, so most of those problems have gone away while still allowing the player to choose which style they enjoy more. Nowdays the worst problem you tend to encounter is a foul-mouthed punk, but you'll get those in any game and they're easy enough to ignore or block.
I started playing when the game was released in 1997 and only played for a couple months because I kept getting PKed and it was painful to play over a 24kbps dialup connection. I got back into it about a year and a half ago and have been going strong since.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
BTW: The asian game has its own unique problems... From what I hear, the police over there have special RL/PK units to combat the new phenomenon of taking RL revenge on an in-game PK.
Yes, I've read similar articles. There is apparently some organized crime/gang influence in the situations that you describe. However, I think that is perhaps more of a cultural issue than a game issue.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
As an example, Asheron's Call from Microsoft. 30,000 players and an average concurrent userbase of over 2000 per 'world'. Heck, even Everquest is still going. Asheron's Call has been in continuous operation since 1999 with content and feature updates EVERY MONTH.
Microsoft may be the distributor, but they sure didn't code it. Do you really think that MS could make a product that would support 2000 concurrent anythings?
Besides, you left out the grandaddy of them all: Ultima Online. The original and still the best, it's been chugging along for 300,000+ users (makes Asheron's Call look like a drop in the bucket!) since October of 1997. And they have regular content/scenario updates as well.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
The excuse "it's a big project, this is hard, noone has done this before" has worn damn thin after being repeated by so many people who should have learned the lessons of others.
That's why I can't wait until Richard Garriott's new company eventually releases their MMORPG. Most of the people who work for him now are former Ultima Online and Ultima Online 2 developers. They've been through it, and they know how it works. And Garriott is the kind of guy that (assuming the company lets him) will make sure that it's very playable and clean before it gets released (his more recent problems with UO and Ultima IX were largely related to EA's pushing). And I think that they'll have the financial stability to be able to pull it off because their first project isn't going to be their game, but instead porting and supporting one from a Korean company (that is insanely successful in Asia).
So they picked a relatively simple but cash-generating venture for their first attempt so that when they get around to making their own game they will have the money and tons of experience with different MMORPG systems. Great idea, eh?
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
What if the user base they sold to figure out they've been sold a bill of goods (which is what appears to be happening right now...)- they're going to be leaving in droves and spreading the word about the game being a piece of crap.
Yes, but that's not what they're concerned about. If they run out of cash, it's "game over." If they get an injection of cash that carries them through what should have been the beta period, then they'll probably make out OK eventually.
Remember, they aren't looking at what happens over the next year and a half. They are looking long-term. Ultima Online has been around for nearly 4 years and it not only going strong, but growing. Ultima Online had some pretty serious issues when it finally released as well (and it was pioneering the MMORPG genre, so it was even worse then), but they managed to fix it up quite nicely. I'm sure that the AO people are hoping for the same thing.
The other thing to remember about a company that is out of cash and about ready to go under: they never do what is "right" for their customers or their employees. They do what they believe will give them the immediate influx of cash to have the company survive, even if it means cutting off their arms to do it.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
You're making a false connection. I wasn't implying that by teaching the kids how to use the command-line that they would magically have knowledge of the workings of PCs. I was implying that if you started with the simplistic pictures of a GUI, and once that is mastered then move on to the more abstract/less intuitive command-line interfaces, you will have covered the whole of the system pretty well in a graduated manner.
One of the benefits of the command-line interface is that you can easily chain together series of commands or scripts to create bigger scripts and mini-programs to get the system to do exactly what you want. You learn the kinds of commands that the OS uses behind it's pretty GUI. You learn the principle of a directory tree (which most people completely miss if they've only been trained on the GUI interface). If you teach someone how to use a command-lines interface, they will come out of it with a much more complete understanding of the OS than they would if you told them to just point and click because you actually have to learn something about the computer rather than relying on an intuitive user interface.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
But the only thing they give out are harmless gasses such as oxygen and hydrogen.
:-)
Harmless? I wouldn't call them harmless. Maybe not even mostly harmless. Remember the Hindenberg?
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Unless it clouds over in which case it can take much longer to get to the finish line.
Probably, but not much longer. Many of the designs (if not all of them) incorporate some sort of battery system. The solar cells provide energy to drive the motor, but they also charge a battery to be used when it's not as bright out/overcast. I also wouldn't be suprised if they incorporated some sort of energy reclamation system into the brakes (like the one on the Honda Insight) to help keep the battery charged.
Granted, a couple days of serious overcast/thunderstorms would cause quite a bit of delay, but then the car that was most efficient would probably have an advantage (having larger energy reserves, being able to build power on lower light levels). That's the cool thing about engineering races.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.