Oh, no, I played Doom and Quake. The latter quite a bit, and until relatively recently. I've played at HL2 and UT, but I got out of gaming for a couple of years and have only recently returned.
Now, I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I have not found the game buggy nor prone to crashes. Of course, I just built a comp specifically for gaming (AMD64-3400, x800xl) so that might explain some of it. It can be laggy at times, but that's more the server load than anything. The weapons upgrades seem like a good idea to me, as it gives something "concrete" to strive for as oppossed to just running up a score. The kits can't be too realistic, or else no one would play them. If Medics didn't have some type of rifle, very few people would play them. As for commanders getting "unfairly punished", they need to learn that they can't just willy-nilly call in artillery, which is the most powerful weapon in the game by far, and not expect repercussions.
Now, I played BFV quite a bit even though it was only for a span of about 3 months, and in my opinion BF2 is vastly superior. If you want a fanmade mod that sucks, try POE some time. That was buggy, laggy, and very unbalanced.
I'm curious, why would you characterize BF2 as a huge debacle? I realize they are having problems with the first patch, even rescinding it, but the problems seem to me to be relatively minor. I'm playing with the "discredited" patch, and haven't run into any major difficulties.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an EA fanboy. Requiring that one logs into their "account servers" to play on the net hints at the eventual adoption of a subscription model, not to mention introduces an artificial choke point on playing. I haven't had any problems yet, but the potential is certainly there.
As for the game itself, I think it's a blast, and a great improvement in the line. Of course, I came to the games late, only starting to play BFV 3 months ago, and never really playing BF1942 much at all.
Total Man-Years Slashdot has Stolen from American Business
Assume 100k people spend 0.5 hours/day reading slashdot at work. This is a very conservative estimate, considering the uids are up to nearly a million, and a half an hour seems low by usage patterns I've seen. So, even assuming these low ball numbers, that's 50k man-hours per workday, or roughly 25 man-years of productivity per workday. Slashdot has been around for 7 years, so that would be 45,500 man-years of productivity lost. If we assume the average pay of a slashdot reader is $20/hour (again, probably low, but it's hard to say as it's a very wide spectrum), slashdot has caused 1.8 BILLION dollars of lost productivity since its inception.
I don't know about you, but I couldn't be prouder.
There was also a Office 95, and before that 4.3/2 (with Access/without Access). I think there was an Office 98 for Macs. It's been a while, but I think Office 95 was the release that had all the app versions go to 6.0, no matter what their previous version number was. Word went from 2.0 to 6.0 in one fell swoop, as a means of making it seem better than WordPerfect at version ~5.2 or so. Silly, of course, but that's marketing for you.
You're assuming that the missing 2200 are a representative subset of the whole. While ideally they would be, in a situation such as Florida 2000 there's plenty of reason to suspect they were not. Sure, no one can prove anything; that's what happens when evidence is destroyed.
Now, that is a cite. However, it does not prove anything, as if you'll read the story:
The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators.
Since the margin was only about 300 or so, and since there were definite partisan shenanigans going on at the precinct level, those 2200 "problem ballots" are more than enough to swing the count the other way. Basically, we'll never know for sure.
He did not cite 3 sources, he made a claim regarding 3 newspapers that, if true, would validate his contention.
To illustrate the difference, here's an obvious example. If I were to say: "Bush said that his primary mission as president is to line the pockets of his supporters", I did not cite Bush, rather attributed a (presumably) false paraphrase to him.
You can still get it stand-alone at Wal-Mart or Target in their $10 game sections. Or the box set with Broodcraft, an expansion module for it, for $20.
Then by that logic, the machines that Apple is distributing to developers now and which they will sell in about a year aren't Macs either, rather OSX running on a PC.
No one will go to space for raw materials, as there are very very few materials for which the cost addition wouldn't be a killer. It costs ~$1000/lb to launch. Even assuming you can reduce that by a factor of 100, and assuming the cost of returning something from the moon is comparable to launching from earth into LEO, you're still talking $10/lb of added transport costs. That ignores the additional mining costs/lb. None but the rarest of materials could compete against earth-based mining with that added cost. Gold, diamonds, platinum would be about the only materials that would be worth it even considering the extremely optimistic assumptions.
No, the only reason to mine in space is to build in space. From an economic perspective, the only reason to build in space is to provide services to earth. Even assuming the rosiest and most aggressive colonization efforts, that won't change in any of our lifetimes. Thus, communication satellites and perhaps esoteric manufacturing that can't be done on earth are the only things worth it.
Rather, it's always been about the application of science, even speculative science. FTL, wormholes, time travel, etc, it's always the devices that drive the story, not the science behind them. Consequently, the genre really should be called "Engineering Fiction", with hard vs soft now defined as being based on science as we know it vs speculative science.
Even the devices don't really "drive" the story, rather only enable it. You can't have a poignant reflection on the universal truths shared among different sentient beings if you can't get to their planet. And it loses its immediacy if the trip takes a millenium. Hence, the McGuffin of FTL drives.
I think this might be a case of mis-communication. I interpreted NitsujTPU post:
Ok, so, draw a logarithmic chart and you should get a nice line;-)
as meaning to do a graph with the y axis as a log scale. Graphing the function on such a chart would, indeed, get you a straight line. Basically, it comes down to differentiating between "graphing a log function" and "doing a log graph". Or even more directly, the difference between a "graph of log" vs a "log graph". It's semantic, I know, but that's the usage that I'm accustomed to.
If one were to graph Richter on the y axis, and energy on the x with a normal linear scale on both axes, then the graph would indeed be the same as a graph of the log function with scaling variables. Just solve the above equation for R to see that. R is a logrithmic function of Energy. Energy is an exponetial fuction of Richter. These statements are all saying the same thing.
We've still got a few boxes running 95, and some running NT. It's not a license thing, due to site licensing, it's a time thing. I'm the IT guy by default at my site, though it's not my primary job at all. I swap out boxes when I need to, upgrade memory, re-image, and re-deploy to the next person that has problems. It's very much a JIT system, but without dedicated IT personnelle and a very busy primary job function, it's the best I can do.
I've actually run XP longer than W2k, having gotten it on a new laptop in early 2003 before started using W2k at work. W2k is better, imho, as it doesn't throw a lot of extra eye-candy crap at you, nor does it force you to use wizards for everything. In a business environment, xp extra features such as video and audio applications are actually counter-productive.
If you use a log graph (non-linear on one or both axis, distances go as the log function), then you would get a straight line.
Consider the data you gave. I don't know if it's right, but it sounds ballpark. You could curve-fit this data to the equation:
E = 1 MT*2^(5*(R -6))
Where E is the energy in MegaTons (MT) and R is the Richter magnitude. Get the equation unitless by dividing by 1 MT:
E/MT = 2^(5*(R-6))
Now, take the log of both sides:
Log(E/MT) = 5*(R-6)*log(2)
So we do have a linear relation between the log(E/MT) and R. The slope of the line is 5*log(2) and the intercept is -30*log(2). If we graph log(E/MT) vs R, we have a staight line. Conversely, we could use log paper (logarithmic scale on y axis) and plot the original equation. It would be a straight line as well.
Apple Market cap: 31 billion Intel Market cap: 171 billion
Intel could swallow Apple, but why would it merge? And why would it push its biggest driver of demand, Microsoft, into its rival's, AMD, camp? Even if Intel were insane enough to do this, and Jobs were willing to become another Intel executive, wouldn't this open the door to MS buying AMD to stay competitive? Now there would be a battle royale.
Why not AMD? Volume production, that's why. Intel is the only vendor who can consistently deliver on large volume and maintain R&D. Don't get me wrong, AMD is great, but they just don't have the capacity of Intel. Hell, IBM doesn't have the specialized capacity of Intel which, coupled with IBM putting R&D more in console direction makes this a good move.
Now, I suspect very strongly that Apple is going to lock this hardware down, either through custom chipsets or perhaps by linking the OS license to the CPU id. Some commercial software on Sun boxes does this. Hobbiest won't be rolling their own beige boxes and installing OSX. At least, not at first, if ever. The argument for Apple has been very similar as the argument for consoles: limited hardware choices make for a more stable system. Just because they're now using Intel chips doesn't necessarily change that, they'll just enforce it another way.
This has been done before, as reported by slashdot almost six years ago. Of course, the guy in the '99 story used a styrofoam cooler, while the newer one upgraded to an aquarium, so I guess progress marches on!
Slashdot Mirror
I can confirm this, as I am also running BF2 on W2k with no problems at all.
Oh, no, I played Doom and Quake. The latter quite a bit, and until relatively recently. I've played at HL2 and UT, but I got out of gaming for a couple of years and have only recently returned.
Now, I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I have not found the game buggy nor prone to crashes. Of course, I just built a comp specifically for gaming (AMD64-3400, x800xl) so that might explain some of it. It can be laggy at times, but that's more the server load than anything. The weapons upgrades seem like a good idea to me, as it gives something "concrete" to strive for as oppossed to just running up a score. The kits can't be too realistic, or else no one would play them. If Medics didn't have some type of rifle, very few people would play them. As for commanders getting "unfairly punished", they need to learn that they can't just willy-nilly call in artillery, which is the most powerful weapon in the game by far, and not expect repercussions.
Now, I played BFV quite a bit even though it was only for a span of about 3 months, and in my opinion BF2 is vastly superior. If you want a fanmade mod that sucks, try POE some time. That was buggy, laggy, and very unbalanced.
I'm curious, why would you characterize BF2 as a huge debacle? I realize they are having problems with the first patch, even rescinding it, but the problems seem to me to be relatively minor. I'm playing with the "discredited" patch, and haven't run into any major difficulties.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an EA fanboy. Requiring that one logs into their "account servers" to play on the net hints at the eventual adoption of a subscription model, not to mention introduces an artificial choke point on playing. I haven't had any problems yet, but the potential is certainly there.
As for the game itself, I think it's a blast, and a great improvement in the line. Of course, I came to the games late, only starting to play BFV 3 months ago, and never really playing BF1942 much at all.
Total Man-Years Slashdot has Stolen from American Business
Assume 100k people spend 0.5 hours/day reading slashdot at work. This is a very conservative estimate, considering the uids are up to nearly a million, and a half an hour seems low by usage patterns I've seen. So, even assuming these low ball numbers, that's 50k man-hours per workday, or roughly 25 man-years of productivity per workday. Slashdot has been around for 7 years, so that would be 45,500 man-years of productivity lost. If we assume the average pay of a slashdot reader is $20/hour (again, probably low, but it's hard to say as it's a very wide spectrum), slashdot has caused 1.8 BILLION dollars of lost productivity since its inception.
I don't know about you, but I couldn't be prouder.
There was also a Office 95, and before that 4.3/2 (with Access/without Access). I think there was an Office 98 for Macs. It's been a while, but I think Office 95 was the release that had all the app versions go to 6.0, no matter what their previous version number was. Word went from 2.0 to 6.0 in one fell swoop, as a means of making it seem better than WordPerfect at version ~5.2 or so. Silly, of course, but that's marketing for you.
You're assuming that the missing 2200 are a representative subset of the whole. While ideally they would be, in a situation such as Florida 2000 there's plenty of reason to suspect they were not. Sure, no one can prove anything; that's what happens when evidence is destroyed.
He did not cite 3 sources, he made a claim regarding 3 newspapers that, if true, would validate his contention.
To illustrate the difference, here's an obvious example. If I were to say: "Bush said that his primary mission as president is to line the pockets of his supporters", I did not cite Bush, rather attributed a (presumably) false paraphrase to him.
Yes, you are right, it is Starcraft: Brood War.
You can still get it stand-alone at Wal-Mart or Target in their $10 game sections. Or the box set with Broodcraft, an expansion module for it, for $20.
So it's a trick question; 1.0 hasn't been released yet (last stable version 0.9.8.2137, latest nightly 0.9.9.3334), but real soon now!
Except OS X has nothing to do with Linux. BSD, yes, but not Linux.
Then by that logic, the machines that Apple is distributing to developers now and which they will sell in about a year aren't Macs either, rather OSX running on a PC.
No one will go to space for raw materials, as there are very very few materials for which the cost addition wouldn't be a killer. It costs ~$1000/lb to launch. Even assuming you can reduce that by a factor of 100, and assuming the cost of returning something from the moon is comparable to launching from earth into LEO, you're still talking $10/lb of added transport costs. That ignores the additional mining costs/lb. None but the rarest of materials could compete against earth-based mining with that added cost. Gold, diamonds, platinum would be about the only materials that would be worth it even considering the extremely optimistic assumptions.
No, the only reason to mine in space is to build in space. From an economic perspective, the only reason to build in space is to provide services to earth. Even assuming the rosiest and most aggressive colonization efforts, that won't change in any of our lifetimes. Thus, communication satellites and perhaps esoteric manufacturing that can't be done on earth are the only things worth it.
Rather, it's always been about the application of science, even speculative science. FTL, wormholes, time travel, etc, it's always the devices that drive the story, not the science behind them. Consequently, the genre really should be called "Engineering Fiction", with hard vs soft now defined as being based on science as we know it vs speculative science.
Even the devices don't really "drive" the story, rather only enable it. You can't have a poignant reflection on the universal truths shared among different sentient beings if you can't get to their planet. And it loses its immediacy if the trip takes a millenium. Hence, the McGuffin of FTL drives.
If one were to graph Richter on the y axis, and energy on the x with a normal linear scale on both axes, then the graph would indeed be the same as a graph of the log function with scaling variables. Just solve the above equation for R to see that. R is a logrithmic function of Energy. Energy is an exponetial fuction of Richter. These statements are all saying the same thing.
We've still got a few boxes running 95, and some running NT. It's not a license thing, due to site licensing, it's a time thing. I'm the IT guy by default at my site, though it's not my primary job at all. I swap out boxes when I need to, upgrade memory, re-image, and re-deploy to the next person that has problems. It's very much a JIT system, but without dedicated IT personnelle and a very busy primary job function, it's the best I can do.
I've actually run XP longer than W2k, having gotten it on a new laptop in early 2003 before started using W2k at work. W2k is better, imho, as it doesn't throw a lot of extra eye-candy crap at you, nor does it force you to use wizards for everything. In a business environment, xp extra features such as video and audio applications are actually counter-productive.
If you use a log graph (non-linear on one or both axis, distances go as the log function), then you would get a straight line.
Consider the data you gave. I don't know if it's right, but it sounds ballpark. You could curve-fit this data to the equation:
E = 1 MT*2^(5*(R -6))
Where E is the energy in MegaTons (MT) and R is the Richter magnitude. Get the equation unitless by dividing by 1 MT:
E/MT = 2^(5*(R-6))
Now, take the log of both sides:
Log(E/MT) = 5*(R-6)*log(2)
So we do have a linear relation between the log(E/MT) and R. The slope of the line is 5*log(2) and the intercept is -30*log(2). If we graph log(E/MT) vs R, we have a staight line. Conversely, we could use log paper (logarithmic scale on y axis) and plot the original equation. It would be a straight line as well.
Good luck finding drivers. For OSX. Running on Intel. Yeah, bet that works like a dream.
Apple Market cap: 31 billion
Intel Market cap: 171 billion
Intel could swallow Apple, but why would it merge? And why would it push its biggest driver of demand, Microsoft, into its rival's, AMD, camp? Even if Intel were insane enough to do this, and Jobs were willing to become another Intel executive, wouldn't this open the door to MS buying AMD to stay competitive? Now there would be a battle royale.
You're on the right track, but the correct answer is:
Only nerds know how to properly tweak a box.
Ok, I'm very sorry for that.
Why not AMD? Volume production, that's why. Intel is the only vendor who can consistently deliver on large volume and maintain R&D. Don't get me wrong, AMD is great, but they just don't have the capacity of Intel. Hell, IBM doesn't have the specialized capacity of Intel which, coupled with IBM putting R&D more in console direction makes this a good move.
Now, I suspect very strongly that Apple is going to lock this hardware down, either through custom chipsets or perhaps by linking the OS license to the CPU id. Some commercial software on Sun boxes does this. Hobbiest won't be rolling their own beige boxes and installing OSX. At least, not at first, if ever. The argument for Apple has been very similar as the argument for consoles: limited hardware choices make for a more stable system. Just because they're now using Intel chips doesn't necessarily change that, they'll just enforce it another way.
This has been done before, as reported by slashdot almost six years ago. Of course, the guy in the '99 story used a styrofoam cooler, while the newer one upgraded to an aquarium, so I guess progress marches on!