...the current issue of Business Week has an article that says yes, the reasons companies love rebates is because of breakage and lack of redemption. I'd link to the article but you have to be a subscriber...it's on the cover of the current issue (this week).
The article explains that while companies may not necessarily be going out of their way to make rebates difficult, they're also not doing anything to make them easier and they love the fact that they're not easy. Some retailers are trying to make it easier, but it's a lame half-way answer.
The rebate solution I want is simple: if Best Buy is selling something that retails for $100 and there's a $25 rebate, they charge me $75 and take the $25 rebate themselves. The first store that does that will win a lot of business.
(And no, none of them will...time value of money and all that).
I got a copy just before traveling for a couple weeks...really tried to get into it while chilling in the hotel...just could not.
The classic answer is "well, that's because you're a male. Females like the virtual dollhouse. It all goes back to the dawn of time when men were out hunting woolly mammoths and..."
That may be. But for me it wasn't the lack of things to kill or the non-goal-oriented nature of it or even the "there is no winner" gameplay. It was two things:
All the tedious, day-to-day bother of going to work, paying bills, etc.
The stilted social model
The worry, bother, and stress of the Sim's day-to-day life was a big putoff...all that time spent trying to keep your dudes and dudettes happy & balanced, on time for work, socially fulfilled, etc. I just didn't find that fun. It's just chasing dollars (er, Simoleons) or trying to get meters aligned right. When kids play with dolls, they skip over the boring stuff! Why wouldn't a game?
I'd expected that tedium of that to be handled by the game while I focused on more interesting things (relationships, etc.) A game where you're constantly mapping out relationships among many people, interacting, building social networks, and of course all the politics that goes along with that could be very interesting. But no - it was a constant struggle to get the bills paid, keep everyone from being depressed, etc. Just a lot of chores that were not fun. I also found the social scale rather lacking - I expected hundreds of Sims, not handfuls.
I also found the focus on "stuff" rather tedious. This is not to say I've abandoned materialism, live in a yurt, and eat only grasshopper droppings. But the game focused too much on stuff to buy, how to decorate your house, etc. The interactions with other Sims was rather crude and didn't go anywhere besides marriage and reducing your loneliness. The only reason to interact with other Sims is to push a lonely meter down. If I took either life or the game more seriously, I'd make some weighty comparisons between real life and the game, since tedious materialism and empty relationships often abound in each...
I am willing to stipulate that perhaps if I'd really gotten into the game (beyond two weeks of nightly play), perhaps I would have found strategies for raking in loot, etc. that would have reduced that part of the tedium. But to me it's just a flawed focus...all of that day-to-day boring stuff should have been out of scope and done by the game, while I focused on Fun Stuff. And nothing would save the social model - perhaps because computers simply aren't there yet to make really interesting social simulations.
My comment was not an evaluation of the current state of Unix security but rather the statement that "security cannot be retro-fitted to a system". Security was retro-fitted to Unix - from the original crude rwx user/group/world system to later ACLs, role-based access controls, BSD's kernel params, etc. Linux didn't start with selinux, it was added later - Solaris's trust computing variants - the examples are nearly endless.
I wouldn't celebrate Unix as a great example of secure computing design...several other operating systems come to mind as systems that were more secure from the start. However, Unix is a great example of how you can retrofit security and still achieve a good result.
Think of a thread as a set of instructions for a program's job.
Now really, if you're reading this site, you should know what a thread is, for pity's sake...and if you didn't, now you certainly don't because that's not a good definition.
Should popular mechanics explain what a combustion engine is? Is this news for nerd-wannabes?
is why the industry is having problems attracting parts of the mainstream audience.
Right, because no one is buying those X-Box 360s or Playstations. They're just sitting in the store unsold. It's so sad.
I can't believe this wanker referred to the Tragedy of Commons. Comparing anything to the ToC practically screams "I want to be an important thinker! Really I do! Please! I am serious! I have Big Thoughts!"
Gaming is already huge. Show me ten males under the age of 21. How many of them have never played a computer game? Zero. How many do not own a PC with games on it or a console? Perhaps one. Yeah, games are so not mainstream, right...
Granted, there are some games that are not mainstream - but tactical simulations, the Operational Art of War, play-by-email Diplomacy, etc. are never going to appeal to a wide audience.
If we could get out of our cultural rut and design games that appealed to them, we could make money.
So go do it already, instead of sitting around getting high with your high school buddies philosophizing ad nauseum about the "decline of the gaming industry".
The only real downside to the architecture required for CLuster is that all of the data is stored in RAM based tables
...for an "only real downside" that's a pretty big one. I mean really, what sort of database is this - 256MB? 500MB? 1GB? Fine for small websites, not fine for large apps. I don't mean to be a "big shop" snob, but this is a ridiculous limitation.
Unfortunately, open source hasn't caught up to the big guys yet in the area of replication.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, I can log on to WoW and play two hours a night after the kids are asleep.
Of course, nothing prevents you from playing any tabletop game on-line...chat rooms, IRC, etc. People have been doing this for a long time.
If you're serious, a good place to start is a CCNA cert. I'm not big on certs, but the CCNA is generally well-regarded. You can get a book with a simulator CD and that's about all you'll need.
If you want to get beyond that (CCNP or CCIE), you need some real network gear (i.e., real routers and switches). I'm not saying that Cisco certs are the end-all of network knowledge, but if your goal is to really learn about networks, then they're good guideposts.
Um, no he didn't. He faired rather poorly. First, his money is worth ~3% less today than it was a year ago due to inflation.
If he'd put the money in a U.S. Treasury bill (aka the risk free rate), he'd have made ~4.125%. So his net gain was 1.125%. THAT is what alternatives should be compared to, because any idiot can do that. Comparing it to what some fool does in day trading is completely specious. -3% vs. 1.125% - it's obvious that "recouping his investment" is a poor decision.
Of course, he might have (in order of ascending interest rates) a mortgage, car loan, or credit card bill. If he could have paid off 24% credit card debt, then he was really stupid.
(Of course, presumably he got some pleasure or emotional satisfaction from this endeavor, but as an investment, it was daffy).
No, because there's no reason to play the Apple fashion premium if you're not going to use the iTunes service. I have an mp3 player...but I couldn't care less about an iTunes player.
Exactly. I want something I can store on a hard drive as a file, because 20 years from now when I want to watch -Murder on the Orient Express- again, I won't have to worry that they're not making DVD players or iPods or whatever anymore. Or if I want to watch it on a different format, a different kind of player, etc.
I replaced a lot of my music collection when I went from vinyl to CD.
I replaced a lot of my video collection when I went from VHS to DVD.
I'm not paying for the same bitstreams again!
Right now, DVDs are "rent once, rip once, play anywhere" because I can play DivX on my computer, burn to an optical, or whatever. Downloading something in a proprietary format that only works with certain software or hardware - blech. That's why I don't own an iPod.
Nice idea, but it's trivially easy for the company to get it bumped up to a regular, non-small-claims court. In that case, you need a lawyer, and now it isn't worthwhile - you're not going to pay someone $200 an hour over a $100 memory chip. If the company is big enough to have an in-house attorney (so the cost to the company is virtually nothing), that's sure to be their first move.
And of course collecting on a judgement is a whole other issue...
I'm hoping there's more to cdargs than the example, because assigning pathnames to mnemonics is pretty old hat and you don't need a new binary to do it. e.g., in bash:
$ export WWW=/var/www/localhost/htdocs $ cd $WWW
I can put that in whatever dotfile and it'll always be there...and I don't have to install cdargs first - nice if your home directory is NFS-mounted and you're working on various machines. Variations of that work in every shell known to man (and you can also use aliases with different syntax, etc.)
cdargs might have other exciting features, in which case the author chose a poor example.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, what office, Taco? From what I saw in "Revolution O/S," you lie around on a couch...
The article explains that while companies may not necessarily be going out of their way to make rebates difficult, they're also not doing anything to make them easier and they love the fact that they're not easy. Some retailers are trying to make it easier, but it's a lame half-way answer.
The rebate solution I want is simple: if Best Buy is selling something that retails for $100 and there's a $25 rebate, they charge me $75 and take the $25 rebate themselves. The first store that does that will win a lot of business.
(And no, none of them will...time value of money and all that).
The classic answer is "well, that's because you're a male. Females like the virtual dollhouse. It all goes back to the dawn of time when men were out hunting woolly mammoths and..."
That may be. But for me it wasn't the lack of things to kill or the non-goal-oriented nature of it or even the "there is no winner" gameplay. It was two things:
The worry, bother, and stress of the Sim's day-to-day life was a big putoff...all that time spent trying to keep your dudes and dudettes happy & balanced, on time for work, socially fulfilled, etc. I just didn't find that fun. It's just chasing dollars (er, Simoleons) or trying to get meters aligned right. When kids play with dolls, they skip over the boring stuff! Why wouldn't a game?
I'd expected that tedium of that to be handled by the game while I focused on more interesting things (relationships, etc.) A game where you're constantly mapping out relationships among many people, interacting, building social networks, and of course all the politics that goes along with that could be very interesting. But no - it was a constant struggle to get the bills paid, keep everyone from being depressed, etc. Just a lot of chores that were not fun. I also found the social scale rather lacking - I expected hundreds of Sims, not handfuls.
I also found the focus on "stuff" rather tedious. This is not to say I've abandoned materialism, live in a yurt, and eat only grasshopper droppings. But the game focused too much on stuff to buy, how to decorate your house, etc. The interactions with other Sims was rather crude and didn't go anywhere besides marriage and reducing your loneliness. The only reason to interact with other Sims is to push a lonely meter down. If I took either life or the game more seriously, I'd make some weighty comparisons between real life and the game, since tedious materialism and empty relationships often abound in each...
I am willing to stipulate that perhaps if I'd really gotten into the game (beyond two weeks of nightly play), perhaps I would have found strategies for raking in loot, etc. that would have reduced that part of the tedium. But to me it's just a flawed focus...all of that day-to-day boring stuff should have been out of scope and done by the game, while I focused on Fun Stuff. And nothing would save the social model - perhaps because computers simply aren't there yet to make really interesting social simulations.
I wouldn't celebrate Unix as a great example of secure computing design...several other operating systems come to mind as systems that were more secure from the start. However, Unix is a great example of how you can retrofit security and still achieve a good result.
Then we'd better stop using Unix.
I hope you don't code in Lisp.
Hahahahahahahahahaha! Good one. Next you'll tell us Taco actually reads this site...
Now really, if you're reading this site, you should know what a thread is, for pity's sake...and if you didn't, now you certainly don't because that's not a good definition.
Should popular mechanics explain what a combustion engine is? Is this news for nerd-wannabes?
Hey Yoda, can you translate into English for the rest of us?
Right, because no one is buying those X-Box 360s or Playstations. They're just sitting in the store unsold. It's so sad.
I can't believe this wanker referred to the Tragedy of Commons. Comparing anything to the ToC practically screams "I want to be an important thinker! Really I do! Please! I am serious! I have Big Thoughts!"
Gaming is already huge. Show me ten males under the age of 21. How many of them have never played a computer game? Zero. How many do not own a PC with games on it or a console? Perhaps one. Yeah, games are so not mainstream, right...
Granted, there are some games that are not mainstream - but tactical simulations, the Operational Art of War, play-by-email Diplomacy, etc. are never going to appeal to a wide audience.
If we could get out of our cultural rut and design games that appealed to them, we could make money.
So go do it already, instead of sitting around getting high with your high school buddies philosophizing ad nauseum about the "decline of the gaming industry".
Biggest. Wanker. Ever.
Unfortunately, open source hasn't caught up to the big guys yet in the area of replication.
Of course, nothing prevents you from playing any tabletop game on-line...chat rooms, IRC, etc. People have been doing this for a long time.
Why are gas-guzzling SUVs evil but gas-guzzling minivans are not?
No, he didn't. Go back and read what I wrote, especially the "his money is worth ~3% less today than it was a year ago due to inflation" part.
If you want to get beyond that (CCNP or CCIE), you need some real network gear (i.e., real routers and switches). I'm not saying that Cisco certs are the end-all of network knowledge, but if your goal is to really learn about networks, then they're good guideposts.
Another fine thing to digest is Stevens' classic book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1.
If he'd put the money in a U.S. Treasury bill (aka the risk free rate), he'd have made ~4.125%. So his net gain was 1.125%. THAT is what alternatives should be compared to, because any idiot can do that. Comparing it to what some fool does in day trading is completely specious. -3% vs. 1.125% - it's obvious that "recouping his investment" is a poor decision.
Of course, he might have (in order of ascending interest rates) a mortgage, car loan, or credit card bill. If he could have paid off 24% credit card debt, then he was really stupid.
(Of course, presumably he got some pleasure or emotional satisfaction from this endeavor, but as an investment, it was daffy).
(Wikipedia notes that "Sound levels of around 200 dB can cause death to humans").
No, because there's no reason to play the Apple fashion premium if you're not going to use the iTunes service. I have an mp3 player...but I couldn't care less about an iTunes player.
I replaced a lot of my music collection when I went from vinyl to CD.
I replaced a lot of my video collection when I went from VHS to DVD.
I'm not paying for the same bitstreams again!
Right now, DVDs are "rent once, rip once, play anywhere" because I can play DivX on my computer, burn to an optical, or whatever. Downloading something in a proprietary format that only works with certain software or hardware - blech. That's why I don't own an iPod.
And of course collecting on a judgement is a whole other issue...
cdargs might have other exciting features, in which case the author chose a poor example.
Agreed! Worst. Ask Slashdot. Ever!
...got a 4.1% COLA this year.
Um, where do you think Ruby got the idea from? ;)