I walked through that exit on Sunday - Continental @ Newark and there's a bored guard and a sign that reads if you pass this sign, you have to go through security again. JFK has a slightly different system where there's a huge (large enough to accommodate a person and their luggage) rotating glass door. No idea if it has a turnstile mode or if it can pushed from either side.
Which one is really better? Not sure but the guard @ JFK seems to be paying attention anyway. Isn't a full height turnstile the easiest way to fix this?
Yeah I'm one of those people who have no patience for griefers. Sure they exist, there are games that legitimize their asinine behavior, but that doesn't mean I need to hang out with them. You can try Anarchy Online if you want a game with futuristic themes and less griefing. It has different resource issues - mostly that cities can only be placed in limited areas that are already taken, but if you can live with having to find someone with a city rather than buying your own, you can solo pretty much most of the content in the game if you like.
You hit the nail on the head: there's no reason to do it altruistically. On the other hand if there was a tax writeoff involved I'm sure you'd see plenty of action.
Or if government decided to start reclaiming this space as abandoned property like they are trying to do with unused calling card minutes. Either one would work.:-)
Personally I'd love to go IPV6 - my ISP doesn't support it natively. Yes I do route and firewall (not nat) IPv6 to my internal machines that support V6 but so what? It is tunneled and I pay a performance penalty to do so - you won't see me making it the default any time soon.
Only if you define "fun" as grinding through levels 1-80, and if that's the case you can always do it again with another character. I did it exactly once as a shadow/holy priest and that was enough. Should you just click to get premades ala the test realm and have a 80'th level character with no effort? No, but the 55->80 thing for Death Knights Blizzard did to shortcut leveling made perfect sense. They need to make that an option for any character class after you've leveled once to 80 the "hard way" in my opinion.
I don't define 1-80 as fun. What's fun for me in WoW is the going after and completing hard content - hard modes in Ulduar, 3 drakes up in Obsidian Sanctum and of course PVP. Let's face it people will always outclass the AI which seems to be the big selling point in EVE. It is possible to fail in WoW. I have been in guilds that struggled to complete Naxx, so WoW exposes the best of people when your guild or battleground group makes the goal, and the worst in people when they fail to not stand in the fire or defend the flag. The folks who came late to World of Warcraft have it easier, but so what? Do they really need to spend all the time early players did grinding to 60? Not really when the emphasis is on "end game" content anyway. It's great to be nostalgic for the days before Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King, but there's no compelling reason for it take bloody forever to make 80 any more - the challenge has moved to elsewhere, and that's fine.
I miss the "real" slashdot that was mostly highly educated folks educating, informing and sometimes debating the hard technical details of a story. That was great - I literally learned something every time I read a post and it was wasn't spam for a weightloss scheme or the latest wharrgabl conspiracy theory junk. True, there was an undercurrent of 'my OS is better than your OS' crap there occasionally but it wasn't until the really vocal elements on this site stopped getting shouted down and told to grow up that we lost it. Letting any extremist group no matter how much you agree with their agenda run rampant over everyone else just encourages more polarization and ends rational, civic debate no matter the topic because people see this invective filled shouting match as the norm.
Slashdot's still a fun place to come but there's much more chaff than wheat now and we're all poorer for it.
I would look to BSD. OpenBSD is my personal favorite but any of Open, Free or Net should run fine on that.
I think you'll find that modern-day web pages and their heavy client-side requirements have left these desktops behind more than the operating systems. Any OS will run great, until you load a web page filled with AJAX and Flash.
You were correct until scripting for Android http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ was released; now "Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, and shell are currently supported, and we're planning to add more."
So without trying to offend anyone - if a developer can't manage to bang out an app in one of the many languages now supported, do you really want to run their app?
Natural gas does actually need refinement -- each MMBTU of gas sold has been filtered so that the energy per unit volume is consistent at the burner tip. This is achieved in part by removing lots of other naturally occurring hydrocarbons which is profitable for the person doing the removing.
You are 100% correct but forgot to include one thing -- each class jealously TRYING to get some advantage over their identical rivals. See the recent nerfing of priests and buffing of other healing classes to address a bunch of QQ + whining. Sadly Blizzard is playing nerf whack-a-mole these days forcing balance where there shouldn't be any; if priests are the top healers in one situation (say using AOE heals) it doesn't mean they are or should be in all situations. But you have Blizzard trying to nerf and buff like it is that way.
I've been an unabashed computer nerd since the word go - taught myself programming, worked in the field even during high-school and college, and never looked back. But at some point, somewhere around a 3 AM disaster involving a failed firehose controller, I decided the classic UNIX SA/DBA role - at least in frontline support - was wearing thin. I took a job as an architect instead, but at least I mostly got to sleep nights. Then I switched jobs again about 5 years ago and started in a role that was prod support and team lead. 5 years later I manage 30'sh people - a mix of j2ee server admins and dba's and I still need to be somewhat technical but I don't have to log into a console anywhere and deploy code or debug anything any more.
The years of technical experience mean I'm still driving troubleshooting when it gets really bad. I still bang out perl scripts when I need to, and I still get into architectural discussions with the application development teams who want to do stupid things because it's easy or cheap for them.
Being a manager (at least in my world) means dealing with an entirely different layer of issues, though. You have to be able to influence people and coerce them into doing what they should be doing anyway: No you can't have all the available memory for your JVM cache, no you can't have 6 TB of disk space to keep online backups "just in case", yes you really have to make your code clustered and resilient. Yes you really have to give the prod support guys real docs and a way to recover if something fails. I feel like my title should be "Master of stating the obvious" and if we're ever allowed to pick our titles that will be on my business card. But the point is - you still need (and will have) the technical skills you accrued and you'll be using them.
Some orgs look for people who have "pure" management backgrounds and can't wield a screwdriver, but they usually suffer from management myopia "anything I don't understand must be easy to do." My personal opinion is the best managers of tech organizations are those who have some sort of technical background, even if it's no longer current - the problem-solving mindset remains.
Well except the ones running under a dedicated non-root user, preferably with sysjail or the like. But you mean default installs, right?
I expect the android platform will be next... it's really linux, it has full blown access to your contact list, and it too accepts SMS. Hell it's probably pingable! I'll have to try it when I get my replacement device.
LOL Seriously. But the reason things are marked "no individual resale" is because the person who sold it packaged it in bulk for sale to the public. Probably to make a certain profit, but just to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps with less packaging that items meant for resale would have.
Either way it has absolutely nothing to do with actual resale of games, or anything else that is a durable item, versus something that's a consumable. I regularly purchase used games for my disabled aunt on a fixed income - and even then the $8 or $10 I pay for her games I consider steep for something that's 6 or 7 years old. People are living in a fantasy world if they think the million'th sale or resale of any title is going to yield the same profit that the first did. Trying to legislate that into being (no resale of games or CDs!11eleven) just means the usual slashdot paths are taken: 1) finding artists or publishers who are consumer friendly (open source publishing, as it were), 2) huge reduction in demand due to the egregious restrictions, 3) piracy. Note: I list the huge reduction in demand *first* because despite RIAA/MPAA's protestations it is format restrictions, cost, and product quality that drive down retail consumer demand, not piracy. Piracy is just the after-effect once the barrier to entry for a legitimate sale is too high.
Agreed... once you've dinged 80, do you really need 80 levels to learn how to play another character? From 55 to 80 seems like plenty, frankly. Obviously there was pent-up demand for both starting at a high level and a new class w/o all the levelling: look at all the DK's floating around! WoW is lousy w/em.
I was an early adopter of DVD for the picture quality and owned a laser-disc player before that. Convenience was secondary to picture quality when DVD's first came out -- they were certainly priced *above* their tape counterparts, so it was about the better picture and sound options. So I assure you, sir, it wasn't just about convenience when Criterion was remastering DVDs from source material for the best possible transfers. Now that they're throw-aways, yes it's all about convenience.
As I've explained elsewhere, bluray is not compelling because to truly benefit you need a decent high-res flat-panel to go along with your shiny new bluray player. Now that bluray players don't take 5 minutes to boot and play (read: they are more convenient) you'll probably see a slow increase in use by the general masses. The first time wal-mart bundles a player, a cheap flat panel and 5 movies for $500 @ Christmas, you'll know it has reached critical mass.
I have an up-converting DVD player connected via HDMI to a 720p flat panel, and I also have a Windows Media Center box driving the same flat-panel via HDMI. Both render a *really* nice picture. Could I get an even better picture from bluray source material? Sure. But I also need to upgrade my flat panel to fully benefit from bluray. So now it's $200 for the player and another $600+ for a new "reasonably" (32" or more) sized 1080p flat panel. That's a steep barrier to entry when 95% of my TV watching is either downloaded torrents or streamed from Netflix. I'm sure Netflix would send me bluray movies instead of regular def DVD with no incremental costs. But still, it's not worth it. Not yet.
If I do buy anything *right now* I'll go buy a $200 bluray player with netflix streaming. Incrementally another $100 for a bluray player instead of $100 for a roku? I can justify that.
Someone stole my identity after finding my wallet and ordered themselves a Sprint phone. Fortunately for me, my SSN card was *not* in my wallet, so the SSN they gave Sprint was bogus. Sprint send the thief a phone anyway. I know because I was waiting for his punk ass at the UPS store where it was to be delivered with "his" license presented by his "nephew". Unfortunately the UPS security people let the thief know they were on to him so he never showed. Dammit.
This is why we need to go back to Eisenhower-era concrete road beds meant for B-52's to land on. I'm talking foot deep steel reinforced concrete baby. Grew up with those bad boys in my little rural town in Texas. Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north so I could be talking out of my backside, but these things appeared well-nigh indestructible.
Pretty much this ^ 1000 - it was a change IBM introduced - and before that it was easy peasy to use wordstar's control key mechanism to move around in word(star) docs. IBM flipping the key caused no end of annoyances while I adjusted.
LOL I'm sure you are just trolling, but I guess I'll bite anyway... so far every carrier effort to lock down the platform has failed because engineering bootloaders and rooting processes are widely known and available. It'll be interesting to see what happens the first time a device hits the market without the equivalent development device available. My guess is the phones that can't be rooted will barely sell next to their extensible counterparts. Remember - at the end of the day this thing is just a linux box running Google's JVM. Once you drop a new OS on it, the carrier really can't tell without going through lots of machinations. I don't really expect every HTTP request to be signed with a carrier-only key, and until that happens and 3g is just a big dumb pipe the OS is really easily switched out as I have said.
So, let's wait and see how the locked versus the hackable versions sell.
Unless you barely use your cellphone, you'll find that the netbook's battery is your biggest limiting factor. Particularly if you use a bluetooth headset so you aren't walking around with a cabled headset plugged into the netbook. There are 802.11 based SIP phones that can serve the same purpose.
but Android has a bunch of hacks meant to deal with running in a phone environment. My apologies -- there is a video explaining it in more detail but youtube is blocked at work.
Blackberries are *excellent* devices - I carried them for years. For e-mail and contact management, you can't touch them. Seriously - world class. The G1 although much less mature in contact management, and actively hostile towards e-mail carriers other than google offers a much better integration experience between the components on the phone. Example: installing the twitter client twidroid automatically extends the camera application's share feature to include twitter. Applications also play well with each other - Buddy Runner will pause playing music, speak to my mileage goal (.5 miles run, pace x.y miles per min) and then unpause the music. You just don't see that happening on the BBerry where everything is a separate and distinct application and in which only very rare cases is aware of or integrates with other apps on the phone.
If I wouldn't be so embarrassed by it, I would post a youtube video of myself with and without anti-pronation running shoes... it's horrible! The switch caused me to use slightly different muscles during running and I backtracked on pace for a while, but I'm able to run much, much longer now and without knee pain.
Slashdot Mirror
I walked through that exit on Sunday - Continental @ Newark and there's a bored guard and a sign that reads if you pass this sign, you have to go through security again. JFK has a slightly different system where there's a huge (large enough to accommodate a person and their luggage) rotating glass door. No idea if it has a turnstile mode or if it can pushed from either side.
Which one is really better? Not sure but the guard @ JFK seems to be paying attention anyway. Isn't a full height turnstile the easiest way to fix this?
Yeah I'm one of those people who have no patience for griefers. Sure they exist, there are games
that legitimize their asinine behavior, but that doesn't mean I need to hang out with them.
You can try Anarchy Online if you want a game with futuristic themes and less griefing. It
has different resource issues - mostly that cities can only be placed in limited areas
that are already taken, but if you can live with having to find someone with a city rather
than buying your own, you can solo pretty much most of the content in the game if you like.
You hit the nail on the head: there's no reason to do it altruistically. On the other hand
if there was a tax writeoff involved I'm sure you'd see plenty of action.
Or if government decided to start reclaiming this space as abandoned property like :-)
they are trying to do with unused calling card minutes. Either one would work.
Personally I'd love to go IPV6 - my ISP doesn't support it natively. Yes I do route
and firewall (not nat) IPv6 to my internal machines that support V6 but so what?
It is tunneled and I pay a performance penalty to do so - you won't see me making
it the default any time soon.
Only if you define "fun" as grinding through levels 1-80, and if that's the case you can always
do it again with another character. I did it exactly once as a shadow/holy priest and that was enough.
Should you just click to get premades ala the test realm and have a 80'th level character with no effort?
No, but the 55->80 thing for Death Knights Blizzard did to shortcut leveling made perfect sense. They need
to make that an option for any character class after you've leveled once to 80 the "hard way" in my opinion.
I don't define 1-80 as fun. What's fun for me in WoW is the going after and completing hard content -
hard modes in Ulduar, 3 drakes up in Obsidian Sanctum and of course PVP. Let's face it people will
always outclass the AI which seems to be the big selling point in EVE. It is possible to fail in WoW.
I have been in guilds that struggled to complete Naxx, so WoW exposes the best of people when your guild
or battleground group makes the goal, and the worst in people when they fail to not stand in the fire
or defend the flag. The folks who came late to World of Warcraft have it easier, but so what? Do they
really need to spend all the time early players did grinding to 60? Not really when the emphasis is on
"end game" content anyway. It's great to be nostalgic for the days before Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King,
but there's no compelling reason for it take bloody forever to make 80 any more - the challenge has moved
to elsewhere, and that's fine.
I miss the "real" slashdot that was mostly highly educated folks educating, informing and sometimes
debating the hard technical details of a story. That was great - I literally learned something
every time I read a post and it was wasn't spam for a weightloss scheme or the latest wharrgabl
conspiracy theory junk. True, there was an undercurrent of 'my OS is better than your OS' crap
there occasionally but it wasn't until the really vocal elements on this site stopped getting
shouted down and told to grow up that we lost it. Letting any extremist group no matter
how much you agree with their agenda run rampant over everyone else just encourages more
polarization and ends rational, civic debate no matter the topic because people see this
invective filled shouting match as the norm.
Slashdot's still a fun place to come but there's much more chaff than wheat now and we're all poorer for it.
I would look to BSD. OpenBSD is my personal favorite but any of Open, Free or Net should run fine on that.
I think you'll find that modern-day web pages and their heavy client-side requirements have left
these desktops behind more than the operating systems. Any OS will run great, until you load a web
page filled with AJAX and Flash.
You were correct until scripting for Android http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ was released;
now "Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, and shell are currently supported, and we're planning to add more."
So without trying to offend anyone - if a developer can't manage to bang out an app in one of the many languages
now supported, do you really want to run their app?
Natural gas does actually need refinement -- each MMBTU of gas sold has been
filtered so that the energy per unit volume is consistent at the burner tip. This is achieved in part by removing
lots of other naturally occurring hydrocarbons which is profitable for the person doing the removing.
Sadly,
You are 100% correct but forgot to include one thing -- each class jealously TRYING to get some
advantage over their identical rivals. See the recent nerfing of priests and buffing of
other healing classes to address a bunch of QQ + whining. Sadly Blizzard is playing nerf whack-a-mole
these days forcing balance where there shouldn't be any; if priests are the top healers in one
situation (say using AOE heals) it doesn't mean they are or should be in all situations.
But you have Blizzard trying to nerf and buff like it is that way.
Buy a flush hinge for your outward opening door. Problem solved.
I've been an unabashed computer nerd since the word go - taught myself programming, worked in
the field even during high-school and college, and never looked back. But at some point,
somewhere around a 3 AM disaster involving a failed firehose controller, I decided the
classic UNIX SA/DBA role - at least in frontline support - was wearing thin. I took a
job as an architect instead, but at least I mostly got to sleep nights. Then I switched jobs
again about 5 years ago and started in a role that was prod support and team lead. 5 years later
I manage 30'sh people - a mix of j2ee server admins and dba's and I still need to be somewhat
technical but I don't have to log into a console anywhere and deploy code or debug anything any more.
The years of technical experience mean I'm still driving troubleshooting when it gets really bad.
I still bang out perl scripts when I need to, and I still get into architectural discussions with
the application development teams who want to do stupid things because it's easy or cheap for them.
Being a manager (at least in my world) means dealing with an entirely different layer of issues, though.
You have to be able to influence people and coerce them into doing what they should be doing anyway:
No you can't have all the available memory for your JVM cache, no you can't have 6 TB of disk space
to keep online backups "just in case", yes you really have to make your code clustered and resilient. Yes
you really have to give the prod support guys real docs and a way to recover if something fails. I feel
like my title should be "Master of stating the obvious" and if we're ever allowed to pick our titles that will
be on my business card. But the point is - you still need (and will have) the technical skills you accrued
and you'll be using them.
Some orgs look for people who have "pure" management backgrounds and can't wield a screwdriver, but they usually
suffer from management myopia "anything I don't understand must be easy to do." My personal opinion is the
best managers of tech organizations are those who have some sort of technical background, even if it's no longer
current - the problem-solving mindset remains.
Well except the ones running under a dedicated non-root user, preferably with sysjail or the like.
But you mean default installs, right?
I expect the android platform will be next... it's really linux, it has full blown access to your contact
list, and it too accepts SMS. Hell it's probably pingable! I'll have to try it when I get my replacement device.
LOL Seriously. But the reason things are marked "no individual resale" is because the person who
sold it packaged it in bulk for sale to the public. Probably to make a certain profit, but just
to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps with less packaging that items meant for resale would have.
Either way it has absolutely nothing to do with actual resale of games, or anything else that is a durable
item, versus something that's a consumable. I regularly purchase used games for my disabled aunt on a fixed
income - and even then the $8 or $10 I pay for her games I consider steep for something that's 6 or 7 years old.
People are living in a fantasy world if they think the million'th sale or resale of any title is going to yield
the same profit that the first did. Trying to legislate that into being (no resale of games or CDs!11eleven) just
means the usual slashdot paths are taken: 1) finding artists or publishers who are consumer friendly (open source
publishing, as it were), 2) huge reduction in demand due to the egregious restrictions, 3) piracy. Note: I list
the huge reduction in demand *first* because despite RIAA/MPAA's protestations it is format restrictions, cost,
and product quality that drive down retail consumer demand, not piracy. Piracy is just the after-effect
once the barrier to entry for a legitimate sale is too high.
Just my opinion, of course.
Agreed... once you've dinged 80, do you really need 80 levels to learn how to play another character? From 55 to 80 seems like plenty, frankly. Obviously there was pent-up demand for both starting at a high level and a new class w/o all the levelling: look at all the DK's floating around! WoW is lousy w/em.
I was an early adopter of DVD for the picture quality and owned a laser-disc player before that.
Convenience was secondary to picture quality when DVD's first came out -- they were certainly
priced *above* their tape counterparts, so it was about the better picture and sound options.
So I assure you, sir, it wasn't just about convenience when Criterion was remastering DVDs from source material
for the best possible transfers. Now that they're throw-aways, yes it's all about convenience.
As I've explained elsewhere, bluray is not compelling because to truly benefit you need a decent high-res
flat-panel to go along with your shiny new bluray player. Now that bluray players don't take 5 minutes to boot
and play (read: they are more convenient) you'll probably see a slow increase in use by the general masses.
The first time wal-mart bundles a player, a cheap flat panel and 5 movies for $500 @ Christmas, you'll know
it has reached critical mass.
I have an up-converting DVD player connected via HDMI to a 720p flat panel, and I also have a
Windows Media Center box driving the same flat-panel via HDMI. Both render a *really* nice picture.
Could I get an even better picture from bluray source material? Sure. But I also need to upgrade my
flat panel to fully benefit from bluray. So now it's $200 for the player and another $600+ for a new
"reasonably" (32" or more) sized 1080p flat panel. That's a steep barrier to entry when 95% of my
TV watching is either downloaded torrents or streamed from Netflix. I'm sure Netflix would send me bluray
movies instead of regular def DVD with no incremental costs. But still, it's not worth it. Not yet.
If I do buy anything *right now* I'll go buy a $200 bluray player with netflix streaming. Incrementally another $100
for a bluray player instead of $100 for a roku? I can justify that.
Someone stole my identity after finding my wallet and ordered themselves a Sprint phone.
Fortunately for me, my SSN card was *not* in my wallet, so the SSN they gave Sprint was bogus. Sprint send the thief a phone anyway.
I know because I was waiting for his punk ass at the UPS store where it was to be delivered with "his" license presented by
his "nephew". Unfortunately the UPS security people let the thief know they were on to him so he never showed. Dammit.
This is why we need to go back to Eisenhower-era concrete road beds meant for B-52's to land on. I'm talking foot deep steel reinforced concrete baby. Grew up with those bad boys in my little rural town in Texas. Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north so I could be talking out of my backside, but these things appeared well-nigh indestructible.
Pretty much this ^ 1000 - it was a change IBM introduced - and before that it was easy peasy to use wordstar's control key mechanism to move around in word(star) docs. IBM flipping the key caused no end of annoyances while I adjusted.
LOL I'm sure you are just trolling, but I guess I'll bite anyway... so far every carrier effort
to lock down the platform has failed because engineering bootloaders and rooting processes
are widely known and available. It'll be interesting to see what happens the first time
a device hits the market without the equivalent development device available. My guess is
the phones that can't be rooted will barely sell next to their extensible counterparts. Remember -
at the end of the day this thing is just a linux box running Google's JVM. Once you drop a new
OS on it, the carrier really can't tell without going through lots of machinations. I don't really
expect every HTTP request to be signed with a carrier-only key, and until that happens and
3g is just a big dumb pipe the OS is really easily switched out as I have said.
So, let's wait and see how the locked versus the hackable versions sell.
Unless you barely use your cellphone, you'll find that the netbook's battery is
your biggest limiting factor. Particularly if you use a bluetooth headset so you aren't walking around
with a cabled headset plugged into the netbook. There are 802.11 based SIP phones that can serve the same purpose.
Funny,
but Android has a bunch of hacks meant to deal with running in a phone environment.
My apologies -- there is a video explaining it in more detail but youtube is blocked at work.
Blackberries are *excellent* devices - I carried them for years. For e-mail and contact management, you can't touch them.
Seriously - world class. The G1 although much less mature in contact management, and actively hostile towards
e-mail carriers other than google offers a much better integration experience between the components on the phone.
Example: installing the twitter client twidroid automatically extends the camera application's share feature to include twitter.
Applications also play well with each other - Buddy Runner will pause playing music, speak to my mileage goal (.5 miles run, pace x.y miles
per min) and then unpause the music. You just don't see that happening on the BBerry where everything is a separate and distinct
application and in which only very rare cases is aware of or integrates with other apps on the phone.
If I wouldn't be so embarrassed by it, I would post a youtube video of myself with and without anti-pronation running shoes... it's horrible!
The switch caused me to use slightly different muscles during running and I backtracked on pace for a while, but I'm able to run much,
much longer now and without knee pain.
I have tried OpenSolaris w/ZFS on a 8GB flash drive. It was incredibly slow. Incredibly, incredibly slow.