Not really. Even if statistically one should hit every 600 000 years, it is statistically possible to go 2 million years without any impact.
Flip a coin. You've got 50% chance of getting heads or tails. But it is possible to get heads 10 times in a row. The odds of this combination happening is 0.5^10*100 (in percentage = 0.09765% chance of happening).
An event that has 1/600 000 years chance of happening does not have a 100% chance of happening every 600 000 years.
Been a while since my stats course and I'm still trying to erase the painfull memory, but someone probably has the knowledge fresh enough in his head to calculate the probability of this happening after 1 year or 2 million years if the odds are 1 in 600 000 years. It would probably look like : 1 year : 1X10^-xx %. 2 000 000 year : 99%. 200 000 000 years : 99.9999999%.
It just never would be 100% except with an infinite time.
Had an interview with GE Hydro (not sure if it's wise to mention their names, but anyways). I'm a mechanical engineer. The job was to inspect work being down on big hydro-electric projects everywhere in the world, a lot of them being in China, and mainly oversee the progress of the work and do some basic QA management.
They were offering 14$ canadian per hour...
So basically they wanted you to say goodbye to your life, work on 3 months stetches in obscure parts of the globe with unstable governments and god-forsaken diseases, and pay me less than I was making doing tech support for an ISP during college.
Someone there made the equation "tough job" + "total isolation" + "14 000$ below average starting engineering job" = PROFIT!
Sad thing is some poor guy (or girl) probably took the job.
There's a large step between "not supported" and "use the windows itunes and say hello to your new 400$ paperweight". The simple fact that it rendered the ipod useless for music playback, and that it put the device in a non-reversible state is a big issue.
One of two things should have happened : A: Ipod should not have let programs do something to damage it or B: Software should detect if it's an older Ipod and not do whatever it did to screw it up.
In your analogy, if we put the VW dashboard back and find out that the motor was toasted by having a different dashboard, there's a serious fault in the design of the VW.
Ever heard of McGill University in downtown Montreal? Go take a walk there, you won't feel like it's not getting it's "Juicy Share". If 80% of the students are french, don't it make sense that french universities get 80% of the funding. There is no "tilt", it's just common sense.
If you don't know what the hell you're talking about, why do you bother talking about it, and why is this "informative".
FYI, the english are not a hated minority. Go to Montreal yourself, go to a restaurant, and you WILL be served in english with a smile. If you go outside of Montreal (like real far, 100+miles) you probably will run into some places where they don't talk english, because they don't need to.
I was born from francophone parents that were bilingual, and now I work anywhere from the southeast US to Northwest Ontario to the Maritimes. And I've been told in some backwater places that I shouldn't be allowed to speak french to my french technicians. But I don't judge every single anglophone because of a handful of bigot rednecks.
Remember bigotry starts with ignorance and gross generalization, it's seems to be just fashionable when it's against french speaking people. Quebec and France history has been separated since about thirty years before France's Revolution. The people in France and Quebec have a radically different history in the past 243 years.
I'm an AMD proponent anyways, 8X AGP has been here for a big while, 64 bit cpus coming later this year (who knows, maybe even before apple's), I don't care about FW800, much like everybody else so that's a moot point. I'll just stick a card in there if I ever need it, at least I have the option of not paying for it.
Quick look at a computer store near me, all prices in canadian dollars:
Asus V8420 GeForce4 TI-4200 64Mb $216.86
ATI All In Wonder 9700 Pro 128Mb DDR $715.00
Someone seriously needs to explain to me why i'd spend more than three times as much (plus all the canadian taxes) to do the "former" instead of the "latter". And it really doesn't help that i'm an old school gamer that has always made a distinction between a game and its graphics. To me Simcity 4 is gonna be different to Master of Orion 3, but all the other FPS that are gonna be coming out in 2003 are basically the same game with different themes.
You can make your character forget skills thus allowing you to put those skill points elsewhere. Than you can develop experience to those skills thus allowing you to ship focus of your character. Hell, you can even set new goals for your base stats and they will migrate in time to those new stats. SWG character are extremely living and malleable concepts.
On a personnal note i'd like to congratulate whoever submitted this story. SCS vs MCS has been totally polluting the SWG boards and now thanks to you I can read about it on Slashdot too!
I'm probably gonna get karma burned for this, but I'll answer to your post. I call this reply : "A word of sanity".
Your association of this story with the video player that removed Ad-Aware is a gross misassociation and an inexcusable exageration. You then proceed to linking Sony with that situation and advancing that they will be sued. A fine example of poor logic. What Sony is doing is simply trying to level the playing field by making it harder for cheaters to gain an advantage through outside means. They OWE it to the other 99% of ALSO PAYING CUSTOMERS that do not want others to have unfair advantage. The customers paid for the right to access the online world, not to try and break the rules.
There's a reason the client gets a lot of info about thing the player cannot see. For instance the tracking skill needs the info of all the mobs in the area to work properly. Sony is not uploading your e-mails to the CIA. And of all things, what people using ShowEQ are doing is anything but fair. Your post is seriously delusionnal.
Sony has much more of a monopoly over Joe Public's possesions than MS do
I disagree. In every industry where Sony gets money from, they have a lot of healthy competitors. Just name one and I'll name two companies with superior products, and at least three that sell comparable products for less. They have to fight Toshiba, RCA, Pioneer, Samsung, Hitachi, Kenwood in almost every market segment. Digital cameras? They have to contend with companies like Nikon and Olympus. Mitsubishi competes with them on a lot of levels. Sony music isn't the only game in town either. Speakers? I don't know any audiophile that would use a Sony speaker instead of North american or european brands.
Every cent Sony makes in those markets are because of intelligent business and technological decision. Microsoft has destroyed and absorbed countless companies using the sales of Windows (Apple and RedHat put together have a fraction of the sales compared to it) and Office. I find there's a huge difference.
Okay, I agree that the Nissan Computer has right to nissan.com because they own a real company named Nissan. But Bill Wyman runs a fansite about the Rolling Stone musician! Come on. I expected to go to his site and find a site about a journalist named Bill Wyman and see his work. Even if we disregard the fact that it is quite, hmm, "amateur-ish", the fact that the guy that owns the site is also named "Bill Wyman" should not be a factor if it's not even about him.
Hello dear companies. Now that you're getting along, could I PLEASE be permitted to buy your products. Me and my fellow canucks would very much like to prevent the doom of your market by welcoming you with open arms into our stores and give you our money, while it's still worth something. Now I know that you've been ignoring us for the few last years but we're willing to forgive you and pay for your services. Thank you for your attention... Oh, btw, Canada is that small country just north of the USA, you should be able to find quite easily.
I don't think this analysis is so great. You make the same mistake as a lot of other posters in confusing freedom of speech with freedom of the press. The incident you cited in Canada is a good example. From what you state, the shipment was intercepted at customs and the propaganda was inspected. This incident did not affect the ability of a journalist to freely do his job. The french example is basically slander/libel, which is a really bad example. If a journalist damages the reputation of somebody based on incorrect information he his responsible for the damages. Okay, so Costa Rica only stopped giving prison sentences eight months ago, it is still the first latin country to do so, and the freedom of the journalists of the country to report news as effectively improved.
Journalist in the US will not be able to report stories where the sources wishes to remain confidential because they might get thrown in jail for not revealing the sources afterwards. Reporters without frontiers is a "by journalists, for journalists" association. This is an issue about the freedom you have of working as a journalist in those countries, and in the US the fact is you can end up in jail if you prize your journalistic integrity as far as source confidentiality goes. It's as simple as that.
Yes, PVR technology in Canada is still not here. What we really need right now is for the big cable companies (Rogers, Shaw, Videotron) to roll out their PVR enabled digital receivers and for our big electronic shops (i.e Futureshop) to carry some independant PVR solutions. It's really stupid, they have 15 000 dollards plasma on display (and like 10 different models) but they don't sell any PVR at all, at least in the montreal region.
And just like you, I'm not about to switch to Bell tv just for the PVR capability.
And how does SCART compare to component (Y-Pb-Pr) input? Component input is available on non-hdtv's (for exemple toshiba projection tv, keyword is colorstream).
It would probably be wiser to buy a tv with component input (new toshibas hdtv have two component inputs) than to move to europe and try your other standard.
Amen to that, except that I think that their best is Vitalogy. I think it's obvious that the people that think everything after Vs is not so good are just the trendy a-holes that stopped listening to pearl jam after it could not help their high-school popularity contest. In short, they never actually heard the other album in full and since they weren't playing the clips every hour on MTV they assumed that the band now sucked. That's how trendy people think.
Mr Poole is evidently a die-hard fan of the spiderman comic books. But he must realize that if a commercial movie was made to be 100% faithful to the comic books it would probably fail and only appeal to those few die-hards. Marvel comic books written in the 50's,60's and 70's are all tainted with issues and a view of the world of those years. It was just after the discovery of atomic powers, so half of the super-heroes just needed to have some contact with radiation to get super powers. Now most people know that if they did get in contact with radiation they'd get super-burns or super-cancer, not super-powers.
Today's world preoccupations have changed, and if you want those old stories to have an effect on people you need to adapt them to the present. This is something that Mr Raimi understands but Mr Poole seems oblivious to. X-men would have been a huge flop if they had spandex costumes and just took a plot line straight from the comic books with no adaptation.
So in the end you should just respect the artistical and technical choice of the film makers and try to enjoy the movie. It's not like they re-wrote the holy bible...
Call me crazy, but in LOTR Sam takes the ring after Frodo gets stung by Shelob in Cirith Ungol and leaves him for dead. He does not chop his finger off. Maybe he was referring to Gollum who bites Frodo's finger off to get the ring but ends up falling in Mount Doom. Gollum is hardly Frodo's best friend.
For the record I'm currently finishing my degree in mechanical engineering in a Canadian University(and I mean CURRENTLY, taking a break from finishing up my end of degree project right now). I cannot believe that a place of learning would discourage helping others out. Where I go to school people help each other out constantly. If somebody has trouble with a course, for example a tough pure-math course, you help him out and try to explain to him what he doesn't understand. If somebody has trouble using certain softwares for some courses you help them(I'm personally a Matlab Guru). Hell for the last four years I was part of a student commitee that gathers past exams to help people study up for future tests(amongst other activites, most of which involving beer). You don't go through your degree hoping the others will fail, you hope that everyone will be able to succeed.
This is the difference between teaching people to be team players and teaching them to be back-stabbing office jerks that everybody hates. Hurray for Georgia Tech...
That may be true, but VF4 isn't PS2 exclusive - it's being ported to xbox, with a new character and some new environments.
This was news to me, I tried a few x-box sites, sega's site and google searches, but could not find anything pertaining to VF4 on x-box. Is there any site containing information to confirm this? All x-box release schedules for 2002 that I've seen show no trace of Virtua Fighter 4.
Concerning your last paragraph, I know what you mean about your feelings about newer games. The only thing is that you're not seeing that it's mainly nostalgia that makes you think that older games used to be better. Kinda like people that love old cars that had 0 handling, weighed 4 tons and didn't absorb any energy in an event of collision.
About DOA3, and the DOA series as a whole : comparing DOA to virtua fighter is like comparing backgammon to chess. Virtua fighter has immense replay value and a fighting system with a level of complexity that lets expert players play on a whole different level than normal players(for example, using a sure throw move but following it by an evade, three different throw escapes and leaves you in a blocking stance, virtually impossible to do without huge practice and a good arcade stick). Virtua fighter 4 is THE best fighting game(starting with oldies like Double Dragon 1, and including most arcade game of the '90s) I have ever played, and the only other game that can even compete with it is the Tekken series. So basically what I'm saying is that if somebody uses DOA3 to promote X-box superiority, sorry but Sega did a better game than that, and it's ps2 exlusive.
About price drops that MS could do, they probably will be forced to because of Sony's new manufacturing process that will allow them to churn out new PS2 at a much lower price(this was discussed earlier this week right here on slashdot, too lazy to post a link).
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Even if statistically one should hit every 600 000 years, it is statistically possible to go 2 million years without any impact.
Flip a coin. You've got 50% chance of getting heads or tails. But it is possible to get heads 10 times in a row. The odds of this combination happening is 0.5^10*100 (in percentage = 0.09765% chance of happening).
An event that has 1/600 000 years chance of happening does not have a 100% chance of happening every 600 000 years.
Been a while since my stats course and I'm still trying to erase the painfull memory, but someone probably has the knowledge fresh enough in his head to calculate the probability of this happening after 1 year or 2 million years if the odds are 1 in 600 000 years. It would probably look like :
1 year : 1X10^-xx %.
2 000 000 year : 99%.
200 000 000 years : 99.9999999%.
It just never would be 100% except with an infinite time.
Had an interview with GE Hydro (not sure if it's wise to mention their names, but anyways). I'm a mechanical engineer. The job was to inspect work being down on big hydro-electric projects everywhere in the world, a lot of them being in China, and mainly oversee the progress of the work and do some basic QA management.
They were offering 14$ canadian per hour...
So basically they wanted you to say goodbye to your life, work on 3 months stetches in obscure parts of the globe with unstable governments and god-forsaken diseases, and pay me less than I was making doing tech support for an ISP during college.
Someone there made the equation "tough job" + "total isolation" + "14 000$ below average starting engineering job" = PROFIT!
Sad thing is some poor guy (or girl) probably took the job.
There's a large step between "not supported" and "use the windows itunes and say hello to your new 400$ paperweight". The simple fact that it rendered the ipod useless for music playback, and that it put the device in a non-reversible state is a big issue.
One of two things should have happened :
A: Ipod should not have let programs do something to damage it or
B: Software should detect if it's an older Ipod and not do whatever it did to screw it up.
In your analogy, if we put the VW dashboard back and find out that the motor was toasted by having a different dashboard, there's a serious fault in the design of the VW.
Same with the ipod. (bye bye Karma)
SCIENTIST : With this you could create a Quantum computer.
ENGINEER : Uhhm, it's not that simple...
SLASHDOTTER : Yes it is! Keep up please!
Total an utter slandering.
Ever heard of McGill University in downtown Montreal? Go take a walk there, you won't feel like it's not getting it's "Juicy Share". If 80% of the students are french, don't it make sense that french universities get 80% of the funding. There is no "tilt", it's just common sense.
If you don't know what the hell you're talking about, why do you bother talking about it, and why is this "informative".
FYI, the english are not a hated minority. Go to Montreal yourself, go to a restaurant, and you WILL be served in english with a smile. If you go outside of Montreal (like real far, 100+miles) you probably will run into some places where they don't talk english, because they don't need to.
I was born from francophone parents that were bilingual, and now I work anywhere from the southeast US to Northwest Ontario to the Maritimes. And I've been told in some backwater places that I shouldn't be allowed to speak french to my french technicians. But I don't judge every single anglophone because of a handful of bigot rednecks.
Remember bigotry starts with ignorance and gross generalization, it's seems to be just fashionable when it's against french speaking people. Quebec and France history has been separated since about thirty years before France's Revolution. The people in France and Quebec have a radically different history in the past 243 years.
I'd love to see a team full of cheese-puff eating mountain dew drinking gamers go against a nfl team. I'd pay to see the carnage.
Whatever happened to Quarterdeck? Belly up or bought out?
Where is the apple one? Is it available? No.
I'm an AMD proponent anyways, 8X AGP has been here for a big while, 64 bit cpus coming later this year (who knows, maybe even before apple's), I don't care about FW800, much like everybody else so that's a moot point. I'll just stick a card in there if I ever need it, at least I have the option of not paying for it.
Quick look at a computer store near me, all prices in canadian dollars :
Asus V8420 GeForce4 TI-4200 64Mb $216.86
ATI All In Wonder 9700 Pro 128Mb DDR $715.00
Someone seriously needs to explain to me why i'd spend more than three times as much (plus all the canadian taxes) to do the "former" instead of the "latter". And it really doesn't help that i'm an old school gamer that has always made a distinction between a game and its graphics. To me Simcity 4 is gonna be different to Master of Orion 3, but all the other FPS that are gonna be coming out in 2003 are basically the same game with different themes.
You can make your character forget skills thus allowing you to put those skill points elsewhere. Than you can develop experience to those skills thus allowing you to ship focus of your character. Hell, you can even set new goals for your base stats and they will migrate in time to those new stats. SWG character are extremely living and malleable concepts.
On a personnal note i'd like to congratulate whoever submitted this story. SCS vs MCS has been totally polluting the SWG boards and now thanks to you I can read about it on Slashdot too!
Yours truly, DarthEuler.
I'm probably gonna get karma burned for this, but I'll answer to your post. I call this reply : "A word of sanity".
Your association of this story with the video player that removed Ad-Aware is a gross misassociation and an inexcusable exageration. You then proceed to linking Sony with that situation and advancing that they will be sued. A fine example of poor logic. What Sony is doing is simply trying to level the playing field by making it harder for cheaters to gain an advantage through outside means. They OWE it to the other 99% of ALSO PAYING CUSTOMERS that do not want others to have unfair advantage. The customers paid for the right to access the online world, not to try and break the rules.
There's a reason the client gets a lot of info about thing the player cannot see. For instance the tracking skill needs the info of all the mobs in the area to work properly. Sony is not uploading your e-mails to the CIA. And of all things, what people using ShowEQ are doing is anything but fair. Your post is seriously delusionnal.
Sony has much more of a monopoly over Joe Public's possesions than MS do
I disagree. In every industry where Sony gets money from, they have a lot of healthy competitors. Just name one and I'll name two companies with superior products, and at least three that sell comparable products for less. They have to fight Toshiba, RCA, Pioneer, Samsung, Hitachi, Kenwood in almost every market segment. Digital cameras? They have to contend with companies like Nikon and Olympus. Mitsubishi competes with them on a lot of levels. Sony music isn't the only game in town either. Speakers? I don't know any audiophile that would use a Sony speaker instead of North american or european brands.
Every cent Sony makes in those markets are because of intelligent business and technological decision. Microsoft has destroyed and absorbed countless companies using the sales of Windows (Apple and RedHat put together have a fraction of the sales compared to it) and Office. I find there's a huge difference.
Okay, I agree that the Nissan Computer has right to nissan.com because they own a real company named Nissan. But Bill Wyman runs a fansite about the Rolling Stone musician! Come on. I expected to go to his site and find a site about a journalist named Bill Wyman and see his work. Even if we disregard the fact that it is quite, hmm, "amateur-ish", the fact that the guy that owns the site is also named "Bill Wyman" should not be a factor if it's not even about him.
Or maybe I'm the only one that sees it that way.
Hello dear companies. Now that you're getting along, could I PLEASE be permitted to buy your products. Me and my fellow canucks would very much like to prevent the doom of your market by welcoming you with open arms into our stores and give you our money, while it's still worth something. Now I know that you've been ignoring us for the few last years but we're willing to forgive you and pay for your services. Thank you for your attention... Oh, btw, Canada is that small country just north of the USA, you should be able to find quite easily.
I don't think this analysis is so great. You make the same mistake as a lot of other posters in confusing freedom of speech with freedom of the press. The incident you cited in Canada is a good example. From what you state, the shipment was intercepted at customs and the propaganda was inspected. This incident did not affect the ability of a journalist to freely do his job. The french example is basically slander/libel, which is a really bad example. If a journalist damages the reputation of somebody based on incorrect information he his responsible for the damages. Okay, so Costa Rica only stopped giving prison sentences eight months ago, it is still the first latin country to do so, and the freedom of the journalists of the country to report news as effectively improved.
Journalist in the US will not be able to report stories where the sources wishes to remain confidential because they might get thrown in jail for not revealing the sources afterwards. Reporters without frontiers is a "by journalists, for journalists" association. This is an issue about the freedom you have of working as a journalist in those countries, and in the US the fact is you can end up in jail if you prize your journalistic integrity as far as source confidentiality goes. It's as simple as that.
Yes, PVR technology in Canada is still not here. What we really need right now is for the big cable companies (Rogers, Shaw, Videotron) to roll out their PVR enabled digital receivers and for our big electronic shops (i.e Futureshop) to carry some independant PVR solutions. It's really stupid, they have 15 000 dollards plasma on display (and like 10 different models) but they don't sell any PVR at all, at least in the montreal region.
And just like you, I'm not about to switch to Bell tv just for the PVR capability.
And how does SCART compare to component (Y-Pb-Pr) input? Component input is available on non-hdtv's (for exemple toshiba projection tv, keyword is colorstream).
It would probably be wiser to buy a tv with component input (new toshibas hdtv have two component inputs) than to move to europe and try your other standard.
Amen to that, except that I think that their best is Vitalogy. I think it's obvious that the people that think everything after Vs is not so good are just the trendy a-holes that stopped listening to pearl jam after it could not help their high-school popularity contest. In short, they never actually heard the other album in full and since they weren't playing the clips every hour on MTV they assumed that the band now sucked. That's how trendy people think.
I can't stand football, but I watched the Superbowl for the commercials!
And with PVRs, you can watch the commercials and skip the game!
I thought for a moment that maybe Gibson had said or signalled something to Mulder - but that wasn't the case
Actually Gibson shakes his head signaling NO when Mulder leaves after Kurst tells him to head north. If you taped it watch it again, you'll see.
Mr Poole is evidently a die-hard fan of the spiderman comic books. But he must realize that if a commercial movie was made to be 100% faithful to the comic books it would probably fail and only appeal to those few die-hards. Marvel comic books written in the 50's,60's and 70's are all tainted with issues and a view of the world of those years. It was just after the discovery of atomic powers, so half of the super-heroes just needed to have some contact with radiation to get super powers. Now most people know that if they did get in contact with radiation they'd get super-burns or super-cancer, not super-powers.
Today's world preoccupations have changed, and if you want those old stories to have an effect on people you need to adapt them to the present. This is something that Mr Raimi understands but Mr Poole seems oblivious to. X-men would have been a huge flop if they had spandex costumes and just took a plot line straight from the comic books with no adaptation.
So in the end you should just respect the artistical and technical choice of the film makers and try to enjoy the movie. It's not like they re-wrote the holy bible...
Call me crazy, but in LOTR Sam takes the ring after Frodo gets stung by Shelob in Cirith Ungol and leaves him for dead. He does not chop his finger off. Maybe he was referring to Gollum who bites Frodo's finger off to get the ring but ends up falling in Mount Doom. Gollum is hardly Frodo's best friend.
For the record I'm currently finishing my degree in mechanical engineering in a Canadian University(and I mean CURRENTLY, taking a break from finishing up my end of degree project right now). I cannot believe that a place of learning would discourage helping others out. Where I go to school people help each other out constantly. If somebody has trouble with a course, for example a tough pure-math course, you help him out and try to explain to him what he doesn't understand. If somebody has trouble using certain softwares for some courses you help them(I'm personally a Matlab Guru). Hell for the last four years I was part of a student commitee that gathers past exams to help people study up for future tests(amongst other activites, most of which involving beer). You don't go through your degree hoping the others will fail, you hope that everyone will be able to succeed.
This is the difference between teaching people to be team players and teaching them to be back-stabbing office jerks that everybody hates. Hurray for Georgia Tech...
That may be true, but VF4 isn't PS2 exclusive - it's being ported to xbox, with a new character and some new environments.
This was news to me, I tried a few x-box sites, sega's site and google searches, but could not find anything pertaining to VF4 on x-box. Is there any site containing information to confirm this? All x-box release schedules for 2002 that I've seen show no trace of Virtua Fighter 4.
Concerning your last paragraph, I know what you mean about your feelings about newer games. The only thing is that you're not seeing that it's mainly nostalgia that makes you think that older games used to be better. Kinda like people that love old cars that had 0 handling, weighed 4 tons and didn't absorb any energy in an event of collision.
Good posts, a few comments :
About DOA3, and the DOA series as a whole : comparing DOA to virtua fighter is like comparing backgammon to chess. Virtua fighter has immense replay value and a fighting system with a level of complexity that lets expert players play on a whole different level than normal players(for example, using a sure throw move but following it by an evade, three different throw escapes and leaves you in a blocking stance, virtually impossible to do without huge practice and a good arcade stick). Virtua fighter 4 is THE best fighting game(starting with oldies like Double Dragon 1, and including most arcade game of the '90s) I have ever played, and the only other game that can even compete with it is the Tekken series. So basically what I'm saying is that if somebody uses DOA3 to promote X-box superiority, sorry but Sega did a better game than that, and it's ps2 exlusive.
About price drops that MS could do, they probably will be forced to because of Sony's new manufacturing process that will allow them to churn out new PS2 at a much lower price(this was discussed earlier this week right here on slashdot, too lazy to post a link).