It reads a little bit like: Prove that i will make profit while the parameters discussed make up only a samall percentage of the business.
The best argument i can bring forward: I bet my own money on Sun/Oracle doing so. We've just invested about 100.000 Euros into a software that requires OpenSolaris. If Sun/Oracle doesn't prosper, OpenSolaris will get axed and my own efforts & money will not pay off. I require Sun/Oracle to succeed. We're producing an appliance based on OpenSolaris and Sun Hardware. To make a profit ourselves, we have to sell about 20 installations. 20 installations would mean more than 100.000 Euros for Sun in Hardware and Service Contracts.
Already tried to produce a laser capable of illuminating an area of several hundred square miles in broad daylight? Even if such a laser would already be feasible, the power supply would require a nuclear reactor.
if you need just 1W per square meter (very low for a visible light), 100 square miles (a tsunami danger zone would probably be bigger) would require >200MW.
I think we are currently 2-5 magnitudes away from feasability.
What i wonder: Is it legal in the US to store the race of an employee in his records? If you would do something like this here in germany, you would be in very deep trouble.... Due to the history with the Nazi regime the term "race" has been heavily discredited.
How do you assign a "race" to an employee? Can he dispute that assignment?
How do you determine a "race" scientifically? The Nazis had a complete bureaucracy with scientific staff to do this and the results were still completely at haphazard. Mostly they went for the religion of the grandparents.
If boredom could kill, the german military in the 80's would have run casualties higher than at Stalingrad. I've never been so bored before or after ever. You were given a task that would you take 5min at a crawling pace, 4 hours of time and the order not to leave the room while being denied anything to read and bereft of all company. If boredom could kill, i would have been a casualty then.....
First of all i have to mention that i am addicted to reading.
This was already a problem as a kid: Once i was ill my aunt gave me five books as a gift. The next morning i called her and asked for more. In a hindsight, this was really embarrassing.
But once i started earning good money, this problem has multiplied. I am running out of shelf space. With my marriage i gave away about 1.000 books to friends just to have a little space for my wifes books.
So started with ebooks as a measure of self defence. I started with the Iliad Irex about 3-4 years ago. Since then i purchased several hundred ebooks. The good thing is: i drive on vacation without any fear of running out of input.
Therefor i am very interested in everything that concerns costs of books.
I totally hate any kind of DRM. Since i started i went through several different reader. Any restriction to move a book with me feels like theft. This one reason my favorite publisher is Baen. They have the most honest approach towards the reader. I think Eric Flints Introducing the Baen Free Library gives the best summary on that topic ever written.
I also worked as author, editor and publisher for books (on a very small scale). Therefor i know how much money is in the production (very little) and distribution (a lot) process and how little ends up with the authors. So i think that ebooks will greatly improve the percentage an author will get from the book sales (but not the overall revenue).
Current contracts give authors a certain percentage of all revenue. So it is in the interest of publishers and authors to get the prices as high as possible. But while the publishers still get the same share, they do a lot less for the sale of an ebook than for one of a paperback.
So at this point customers are on the side of Amazon, that an ebook should cost significantly less than a paper based book.
Currently the frontlines run between Amazon and the customers on one side and publishers and authors on the other. But the authors are not on that side due to their own interest but due to the current publishing system. I don't think that this situation will remain static. The publishers are bound to loose the authors as allies and then the fight next.
A typical question is: It's the same book, why shpould the reader pay less for an eboook?
It is the same book but it is not the same service. With a paper based book, they have to print it, ship it through the world, provide shelf space in the bookstore, pay the cashier guy,...
The transport of an ebook is by a factor 1.000 cheaper than a paper book, the cashier is fully automated, it does not take shelf space,....
If the producer has less costs, the product should become cheaper.
Where i agree: The author provides the same service, so he/she should get the same amount as before.
Who works less is the publisher and the bookstore. They should get less for an ebook.
The problem is the typical contract between author and publisher. Usually there is a certain fix percentage of the revenue (no matter wether ebook or paper book) designated for the author. While the percantage of an author at a book is around 10-15%, it should be higher (e.g. 30%) for ebooks. Of course the publishers are not in favor....
Publishers dislike ebooks not just due to the prices. If ebooks become too popular, the need for publishers is decreasing. An author could go just directly to Amazon without the help of publisher. Currently an ebook will not sell very well if there is no paper book to create demand. But this will change. The publishers (like the RIAA before them) wants to fight it. But they will have as much success as fighting entropy....
Personally i am totally in favor of the development. The service i am interested in is someone like Pat writing fascinating novels. I am also willing to pay for the editor and the distribution. But i am not interested in trees getting chopped down and trucks blowing carbon dioxide into the air while carrying harcovers.
I don't think there is much in the current world to surprise you, if you've read John Brunners The Shockwave Rider. The biggest surprise is when you look at the time it was published: 1975. It has always astounded me, how clearly Johns eyes have seen....
There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them. My favorite: There are two kinds of fools: One says, "This is old therefore it is good." The other one says, "This is new therefore it is better."
I think the thesis "Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise" is correct. At least i can say it worked for me.
> First off, if latency were mainly dependent on the signal speed in the cables, they would be only a few milliseconds and would certainly be negligible for the last mile.
Please note:
1. I never said that the signaling speed would affect latency. 2. I said the bandwidth affects the latency of the line involved. 3. My analogy was: If you assume the internet connection is a highway where cars travel at the same speed (hghway: 70mph, internet: signaling speed) than the bandwidth represents the number of lanes i terms of throughput. With more lanes/bandwidth you can transport more in the same time. 4. The analogy of lanes and bandwidth is not a perfect one, but i wanted to stay in the picture of the original post.
Trust? In what way, beyond what you would give *any* online merchant to whom you provide your credit card info?
It's like with honest politician: I trust them to stay bought....
Something i value with my games is to take an old savegame and try something new. If i don't "own" the game but just purchased a service, the game or the savegame may disappear.
If e.g. Amazon takes my money and won't deliver my copy of Mass Effect 2, i have a good chance to get my money back. But if i purchase OnLive to play Mass Effect 2 and they remove the game from their list, my "invested" time and some of my money is gone. If this happens 1-2 years after the purchase, there is nothing i can do that will have any effect.
Someone taking my credit card credentials and using them fraudulently is a known process i know how to handle.
Satellite is a very special case. You cannot (as i did) speak of "the last mile" here.... It's more "the last 20.000+ miles";-). Even then the formula still holds up if you use sufficently large packets:-). The formula is valid if the packet size is larger than the storage capacity of the line (a 10mbps satellite link has a storage capacity of ~200KB, which is no reasonable packet size).
Without making a lecture, the last mile is usually one of the Latency Hogs for a lot of the users. By increasing the bandwidth you can reduce the latency. Other parameters include your continent (not easily changed), the quality of your provider (carefully obfuscated by marketing), the technology used (black box for most users), the peerings of your provider (traceroute is your friend), etc.
BTW: Most users think of bandwidth only in one direction. But espescially if you do serious gaming, the uplink may be responsible for a lot of your latency. Moving the crosshair and pressing a button in a shooter may result in a 400 byte package. If you have a 128kbps uplink, this gives you already 25ms latency on the way out. Usually incoming and outgoing bandwidth are tied together in package by your provider. So increasing the bandwidth, may really help gamers.
For our example 0.5C is sufficently close to C to call it "speed of light":-). As you point out, the "speed of light" is not the same as C. I can find materials where the speed of light is below 0.5C. So saying that the electric signal travels at the speed of light is correct since i didn't mention any matrial i would be measuring the speed of light in....
Point, game and match:-)
CU, Martin
P.S. I have references to materials reducing the speed of light to 17m/s (38mph for you imperial bastards) without significant absorption. So even our cars goes at the speed of light....
If say the speed-limit on a motorway was 70mph, and there was no congestion on the road; why would adding in extra lanes to the motorway increase how fast I get to my destination?
You get the car analogy wrong. A packet of 100 bytes is not similar to a single car. It consists of 800 cars (bits). So if you increase the number of lanes more cars can travel. Each car travels still the same speed (of light) but by allowing more cars at the same time, the delivery (packet) distributed over 800 cars gets delivered faster.
The time a packet takes to get transmitted is roughly: packetsize/bandbidth.
Say you have a 10mbps line and a 1000bytes packet. This will take 8000 bit / 10.000.0000 bit / s = 0,00008 s or 0,8ms (one way). So the latency through the line will be roughly 1,6ms. If you got to 100mbps ethenet or even gigabit ethernet, the time will go down by factor 10 each step.
But there are some side effects: Sometimes packets are packed into larger packets to fill the line better. This will increase the latency. When the speed of the line is high, the time the OS needs to send/receive the packets gets more influence on the latency. Also the latency may occur in your providers network because he overbvooks the service (selling access for more cars than the lanes allow and therfor creating congestion).
To see wether your line is the chokepoint use Traceroute to see where the latency happens. If the latency already occurs close to you, a faster line may improve the latency. Also look for features from your provider as "fastpath".
CU, Martin
P.S. This is a very short overview of the topic. A complete coverage would come as a book. BTW the books have already been written: Richard W. Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated.
Latency (for a not overbooked line) depends on bandwitdh and packet size. Same packetsize and ten times the bandwidth reduces the latency nearly by a factor of ten (on a single line).
Overall latency depends on the sum of all latencies for each lines on the way plus a bonus for each router. The bonus for the routers is not the issue. The number of hops can be influenced by a service provider like OnLive through Peering Agreements. Something OnLive cannot influence, is the last mile to the customer. Usually 30-50% of the total latency happens here. So an increase in bandwidth will help there.
In my case if have a latency of about 25-30ms to the major hosting providers here in germany (which is due to a fast line [6mbps + Fastpath]). The time can be distributed as follows:
- 2ms (my home network) - 12ms my DSL line - 2ms my Provider - 10ms Upstrean Provider - 1ms Hosting Provider
Even in my case nearly 50% of the latency is created on the last mile. The packet travels Kiel -> Hamburg -> Hannover -> Duesseldorf -> Frankfurt. That amounts to perhaps 400 miles. 50% of the latency on 1% of the way seems to me as a pretty conclusive argument that more bandwidth to the enduser would overall latency significantly.
CU, Martin
P.S. This all depends on the Bandwidth not being overbooked.....
I think the results are as expected or even slightly better than expected (at least from my viewpoint). It shows that something like OnLive will be workable in the future with slightly faster interenet access.
My problems with OnLive are not related to the technical side. Even though i am mostly a casual gamer (at least since i gave up WoW) and i could profit from Pay-per-Hour, i am not sure i would like this. It would require a lot of trust from my side, OnLive has still to earn.
While the police action did not speak for much common sense and understanding of modern communication, neither does the Twitter posting speak of intelligence of the poster. Saying "You got one week to get your shit together or i will blow you sky high" can be interpreted wrongly and IMHO you have to be quite dumb to make such jokes in public.
I think both parties involved have trouble with Twitter. The police had no method of putting that posting into a context. They interpreted it as a standalone message. The poster did not care, how that statement looks as a standalone message. For him his own Twitter context was applied automagically.
While i put quite some blame on the police, i do not think the poster is free of it. Been questioned for several hours seems to be fair for that. But being suspended from the job and banned for life from that airport is very excessive IMHO.
He treats the parameters "age-appropriate" and "physically attractive" as independent from each other. I am seriously doubt that they are for him. Furthermore: The percentage of college degrees among women is higher in the goup aged 24-34 than in the group 80+. I'm not sure he takes this into account.
If i were a young, intelligent and attractive woman, i would aim for a guy with better math:-).
You're at least partially right... the "ending" felt real big:-). And the lenght of the quest chain was really impressive.
But it wasn't the end: By the time we defeated Ragnaros, Nefarian already loomed ahead. We eliminated Lady Vashji to get to Mount Hjial.
It was the feeling of achievment that mattered. And this what the article meant: The biggest achievment may no longer be to "finish" the game. I'm not opposed to this trend. The older i get (now 43), the more casualized kind of gamer i become. Can't help... I can no longer play as much as i want and reflexes/skills are going down. But i still want to have my moments:-).
The "ending" is not going out of style. But instead of one "grand ending" there are now more smaller ones. While reaching a big ending may be quite satisfying, not all players are able to achieve it with 20-40 hours of gaming time. So several small endings may help them to enjoy games more. If this is good or bad depends on the individual taste.
I remember from my WoW-times, that killing Ragnaros or Lady Vashji (which were only small endings) for the first time was vastly more satisfying than any other game ending. Small endings does not mean small satisfaction.
The problem lies in the advanced security mechanisms (EMV chip). The fix (currently) is to disable advanced security features (either by disabling the chip by taping it or in POS device). I can already hear the Skimmers jubilating. They will profit greatly... Another problem will be that a lot of people will become wary of security features.
Slashdot Mirror
It reads a little bit like: Prove that i will make profit while the parameters discussed make up only a samall percentage of the business.
The best argument i can bring forward: I bet my own money on Sun/Oracle doing so. We've just invested about 100.000 Euros into a software that requires OpenSolaris. If Sun/Oracle doesn't prosper, OpenSolaris will get axed and my own efforts & money will not pay off. I require Sun/Oracle to succeed. We're producing an appliance based on OpenSolaris and Sun Hardware. To make a profit ourselves, we have to sell about 20 installations. 20 installations would mean more than 100.000 Euros for Sun in Hardware and Service Contracts.
Sincerely yours, Martin
if you need just 1W per square meter (very low for a visible light), 100 square miles (a tsunami danger zone would probably be bigger) would require >200MW.
I think we are currently 2-5 magnitudes away from feasability.
CU, Martin
What i wonder: Is it legal in the US to store the race of an employee in his records? If you would do something like this here in germany, you would be in very deep trouble.... Due to the history with the Nazi regime the term "race" has been heavily discredited.
How do you assign a "race" to an employee? Can he dispute that assignment?
How do you determine a "race" scientifically? The Nazis had a complete bureaucracy with scientific staff to do this and the results were still completely at haphazard. Mostly they went for the religion of the grandparents.
Completely baffled, Martin
If boredom could kill, the german military in the 80's would have run casualties higher than at Stalingrad. I've never been so bored before or after ever. You were given a task that would you take 5min at a crawling pace, 4 hours of time and the order not to leave the room while being denied anything to read and bereft of all company. If boredom could kill, i would have been a casualty then.....
Hi,
First of all i have to mention that i am addicted to reading.
This was already a problem as a kid: Once i was ill my aunt gave me five books as a gift. The next morning i called her and asked for more. In a hindsight, this was really embarrassing.
But once i started earning good money, this problem has multiplied. I am running out of shelf space. With my marriage i gave away about 1.000 books to friends just to have a little space for my wifes books.
So started with ebooks as a measure of self defence. I started with the Iliad Irex about 3-4 years ago. Since then i purchased several hundred ebooks. The good thing is: i drive on vacation without any fear of running out of input.
Therefor i am very interested in everything that concerns costs of books.
I totally hate any kind of DRM. Since i started i went through several different reader. Any restriction to move a book with me feels like theft. This one reason my favorite publisher is Baen. They have the most honest approach towards the reader. I think Eric Flints Introducing the Baen Free Library gives the best summary on that topic ever written.
I also worked as author, editor and publisher for books (on a very small scale). Therefor i know how much money is in the production (very little) and distribution (a lot) process and how little ends up with the authors. So i think that ebooks will greatly improve the percentage an author will get from the book sales (but not the overall revenue).
Current contracts give authors a certain percentage of all revenue. So it is in the interest of publishers and authors to get the prices as high as possible. But while the publishers still get the same share, they do a lot less for the sale of an ebook than for one of a paperback.
So at this point customers are on the side of Amazon, that an ebook should cost significantly less than a paper based book.
Currently the frontlines run between Amazon and the customers on one side and publishers and authors on the other. But the authors are not on that side due to their own interest but due to the current publishing system. I don't think that this situation will remain static. The publishers are bound to loose the authors as allies and then the fight next.
A typical question is: It's the same book, why shpould the reader pay less for an eboook?
It is the same book but it is not the same service. With a paper based book, they have to print it, ship it through the world, provide shelf space in the bookstore, pay the cashier guy,...
The transport of an ebook is by a factor 1.000 cheaper than a paper book, the cashier is fully automated, it does not take shelf space,....
If the producer has less costs, the product should become cheaper.
Where i agree: The author provides the same service, so he/she should get the same amount as before.
Who works less is the publisher and the bookstore. They should get less for an ebook.
The problem is the typical contract between author and publisher. Usually there is a certain fix percentage of the revenue (no matter wether ebook or paper book) designated for the author. While the percantage of an author at a book is around 10-15%, it should be higher (e.g. 30%) for ebooks. Of course the publishers are not in favor....
Publishers dislike ebooks not just due to the prices. If ebooks become too popular, the need for publishers is decreasing. An author could go just directly to Amazon without the help of publisher. Currently an ebook will not sell very well if there is no paper book to create demand. But this will change. The publishers (like the RIAA before them) wants to fight it. But they will have as much success as fighting entropy....
Personally i am totally in favor of the development. The service i am interested in is someone like Pat writing fascinating novels. I am also willing to pay for the editor and the distribution. But i am not interested in trees getting chopped down and trucks blowing carbon dioxide into the air while carrying harcovers.
CU, Martin
I don't think there is much in the current world to surprise you, if you've read John Brunners The Shockwave Rider. The biggest surprise is when you look at the time it was published: 1975. It has always astounded me, how clearly Johns eyes have seen....
There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them. My favorite: There are two kinds of fools: One says, "This is old therefore it is good." The other one says, "This is new therefore it is better."
I think the thesis "Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise" is correct. At least i can say it worked for me.
CU, Martin
> First off, if latency were mainly dependent on the signal speed in the cables, they would be only a few milliseconds and would certainly be negligible for the last mile.
Please note:
1. I never said that the signaling speed would affect latency.
2. I said the bandwidth affects the latency of the line involved.
3. My analogy was: If you assume the internet connection is a highway where cars travel at the same speed (hghway: 70mph, internet: signaling speed) than the bandwidth represents the number of lanes i terms of throughput. With more lanes/bandwidth you can transport more in the same time.
4. The analogy of lanes and bandwidth is not a perfect one, but i wanted to stay in the picture of the original post.
CU, Martin
Trust? In what way, beyond what you would give *any* online merchant to whom you provide your credit card info?
It's like with honest politician: I trust them to stay bought....
Something i value with my games is to take an old savegame and try something new. If i don't "own" the game but just purchased a service, the game or the savegame may disappear.
If e.g. Amazon takes my money and won't deliver my copy of Mass Effect 2, i have a good chance to get my money back. But if i purchase OnLive to play Mass Effect 2 and they remove the game from their list, my "invested" time and some of my money is gone. If this happens 1-2 years after the purchase, there is nothing i can do that will have any effect.
Someone taking my credit card credentials and using them fraudulently is a known process i know how to handle.
CU, Martin
Why am I suddenly wearing a black helmet and breathing through a respirator?
If you're calculating in inches, pounds, gallons or miles: that's worse. I can forgive any honest villain, but not non-metric....
Satellite is a very special case. You cannot (as i did) speak of "the last mile" here.... It's more "the last 20.000+ miles" ;-). Even then the formula still holds up if you use sufficently large packets :-). The formula is valid if the packet size is larger than the storage capacity of the line (a 10mbps satellite link has a storage capacity of ~200KB, which is no reasonable packet size).
Without making a lecture, the last mile is usually one of the Latency Hogs for a lot of the users. By increasing the bandwidth you can reduce the latency. Other parameters include your continent (not easily changed), the quality of your provider (carefully obfuscated by marketing), the technology used (black box for most users), the peerings of your provider (traceroute is your friend), etc.
BTW: Most users think of bandwidth only in one direction. But espescially if you do serious gaming, the uplink may be responsible for a lot of your latency. Moving the crosshair and pressing a button in a shooter may result in a 400 byte package. If you have a 128kbps uplink, this gives you already 25ms latency on the way out. Usually incoming and outgoing bandwidth are tied together in package by your provider. So increasing the bandwidth, may really help gamers.
CU, Martin
Quibbler :-) You wanted it....
For our example 0.5C is sufficently close to C to call it "speed of light" :-). As you point out, the "speed of light" is not the same as C. I can find materials where the speed of light is below 0.5C. So saying that the electric signal travels at the speed of light is correct since i didn't mention any matrial i would be measuring the speed of light in....
Point, game and match :-)
CU, Martin
P.S. I have references to materials reducing the speed of light to 17m/s (38mph for you imperial bastards) without significant absorption. So even our cars goes at the speed of light ....
If say the speed-limit on a motorway was 70mph, and there was no congestion on the road; why would adding in extra lanes to the motorway increase how fast I get to my destination?
You get the car analogy wrong. A packet of 100 bytes is not similar to a single car. It consists of 800 cars (bits). So if you increase the number of lanes more cars can travel. Each car travels still the same speed (of light) but by allowing more cars at the same time, the delivery (packet) distributed over 800 cars gets delivered faster.
The time a packet takes to get transmitted is roughly: packetsize/bandbidth.
Say you have a 10mbps line and a 1000bytes packet. This will take 8000 bit / 10.000.0000 bit / s = 0,00008 s or 0,8ms (one way). So the latency through the line will be roughly 1,6ms. If you got to 100mbps ethenet or even gigabit ethernet, the time will go down by factor 10 each step.
But there are some side effects: Sometimes packets are packed into larger packets to fill the line better. This will increase the latency. When the speed of the line is high, the time the OS needs to send/receive the packets gets more influence on the latency. Also the latency may occur in your providers network because he overbvooks the service (selling access for more cars than the lanes allow and therfor creating congestion).
To see wether your line is the chokepoint use Traceroute to see where the latency happens. If the latency already occurs close to you, a faster line may improve the latency. Also look for features from your provider as "fastpath".
CU, Martin
P.S. This is a very short overview of the topic. A complete coverage would come as a book. BTW the books have already been written: Richard W. Stevens: TCP/IP Illustrated.
Latency (for a not overbooked line) depends on bandwitdh and packet size. Same packetsize and ten times the bandwidth reduces the latency nearly by a factor of ten (on a single line).
Overall latency depends on the sum of all latencies for each lines on the way plus a bonus for each router. The bonus for the routers is not the issue. The number of hops can be influenced by a service provider like OnLive through Peering Agreements. Something OnLive cannot influence, is the last mile to the customer. Usually 30-50% of the total latency happens here. So an increase in bandwidth will help there.
In my case if have a latency of about 25-30ms to the major hosting providers here in germany (which is due to a fast line [6mbps + Fastpath]). The time can be distributed as follows:
- 2ms (my home network)
- 12ms my DSL line
- 2ms my Provider
- 10ms Upstrean Provider
- 1ms Hosting Provider
Even in my case nearly 50% of the latency is created on the last mile. The packet travels Kiel -> Hamburg -> Hannover -> Duesseldorf -> Frankfurt. That amounts to perhaps 400 miles. 50% of the latency on 1% of the way seems to me as a pretty conclusive argument that more bandwidth to the enduser would overall latency significantly.
CU, Martin
P.S. This all depends on the Bandwidth not being overbooked.....
I think the results are as expected or even slightly better than expected (at least from my viewpoint). It shows that something like OnLive will be workable in the future with slightly faster interenet access.
My problems with OnLive are not related to the technical side. Even though i am mostly a casual gamer (at least since i gave up WoW) and i could profit from Pay-per-Hour, i am not sure i would like this. It would require a lot of trust from my side, OnLive has still to earn.
CU, Martin
While the police action did not speak for much common sense and understanding of modern communication, neither does the Twitter posting speak of intelligence of the poster. Saying "You got one week to get your shit together or i will blow you sky high" can be interpreted wrongly and IMHO you have to be quite dumb to make such jokes in public.
I think both parties involved have trouble with Twitter. The police had no method of putting that posting into a context. They interpreted it as a standalone message. The poster did not care, how that statement looks as a standalone message. For him his own Twitter context was applied automagically.
While i put quite some blame on the police, i do not think the poster is free of it. Been questioned for several hours seems to be fair for that. But being suspended from the job and banned for life from that airport is very excessive IMHO.
CU, Martin
He treats the parameters "age-appropriate" and "physically attractive" as independent from each other. I am seriously doubt that they are for him. Furthermore: The percentage of college degrees among women is higher in the goup aged 24-34 than in the group 80+. I'm not sure he takes this into account.
If i were a young, intelligent and attractive woman, i would aim for a guy with better math :-).
CU, Martin
At least gamers have a tendency towards Buddhism: They get reborn after death and can try the level again.
You're at least partially right... the "ending" felt real big :-). And the lenght of the quest chain was really impressive.
But it wasn't the end: By the time we defeated Ragnaros, Nefarian already loomed ahead. We eliminated Lady Vashji to get to Mount Hjial.
It was the feeling of achievment that mattered. And this what the article meant: The biggest achievment may no longer be to "finish" the game. I'm not opposed to this trend. The older i get (now 43), the more casualized kind of gamer i become. Can't help... I can no longer play as much as i want and reflexes/skills are going down. But i still want to have my moments :-).
CU, Martin
The "ending" is not going out of style. But instead of one "grand ending" there are now more smaller ones. While reaching a big ending may be quite satisfying, not all players are able to achieve it with 20-40 hours of gaming time. So several small endings may help them to enjoy games more. If this is good or bad depends on the individual taste.
I remember from my WoW-times, that killing Ragnaros or Lady Vashji (which were only small endings) for the first time was vastly more satisfying than any other game ending. Small endings does not mean small satisfaction.
CU, Martin
The problem lies in the advanced security mechanisms (EMV chip). The fix (currently) is to disable advanced security features (either by disabling the chip by taping it or in POS device). I can already hear the Skimmers jubilating. They will profit greatly...
Another problem will be that a lot of people will become wary of security features.
Now i have :-)
It looks to me more like "I had to destroy MySQL in order to save it". He is (IMHO) not doing anyone a favor.....
Yep, it's all a goverment conspiracy
I new there was something wrong with my plan. Now i've got 10.000 arches and no buyer....
All detected particles are due to abnormal solar activity.
The detected particles will melt the crust within the next three years. Buy tickets for the arch from me now! Just 1.000.000 Euro each... No checks
CU, Martin
P.S. Guess which movie i watched yesterday :-)