There's another thing to consider: the polarity of the earth creates an electromagnetic field around the earth protecting the earth from radiation, and as I understand it, largely decreasing/deflecting particulate matter from impacting the earth. Those are two pretty big things which would kill many of us fairly quickly.
The thing about disease lethality is that it runs contrary to the organism's ability to survive. That is, the more lethal a disease, the less it spreads due to killing off available hosts too quickly.
The thing about a 30% attrition rate due to a pandemic is that it's not just something as simple as "30% of the population dies". It's much more drastic, and the results upon a society of that kind of attrition due to illness is substantially worse than, say, 30% dying in war.
Even if we think for a moment on how catastrophic the loss of most of France's young male population was lost during WWI and WWII, the impact is severe. It crippled their culture and, without US assistance in rebuilding, would have likely resulted in France never returning to a status of economic well-being.
With a pandemic, not only do you have to deal with the loss of life, but you've got to deal with the sick people and the people who have survived yet are stuck with a defect or disability resulting from the illness (deafness, retardation, partial organ failure, bone/muscle problems, w/e). So while you lose 30% of the population, you've got another (guessing here) 30-50% of the population which is either sick at any one time or survived said illness (once the illness has been around for a while).
Finally, there's the "overhead" of dealing with the sick people: hospitals and the substantial need for (frequently replaced) additional staffing, lost work hours, delayed projects, and the like. Then you would have the necessary shift of work force from urban 'modern' tasks to more existential tasks (such as farming and ranching) as said farmers and ranchers get ill and/or die. These people would then produce at a diminished capacity due to lack of knowledge/experience.
Generally, the whole of a society stricken by these kinds of casualties operates probably not far from what we saw in the US or UK (as those are the ones I'm familiar with) during the Great Depression/WWII (or possibly worse due to the need to bury all the dead - cities would be overwhelmed with rotting corpses). This is not an environment where any semblance of scientific advancement takes place; I suspect that existing IT efforts would be relegated almost entirely to maintenance roles, and 'advancement' would slow or cease for the foreseeable (a generation or two) future - and likely flounder indefinitely after that due to the entire societal restructuring (and diminished emphasis on education) which has taken place in the interim.
And yet, MS isn't being threatened: they still completely (all but a couple percentage points - one or two) own the OS market.
Why?
This is getting a little tired, but it should be a little clear: Apple does not sell operating systems. Oh, sure, they make money from their OS software, no doubt. But it's an add-on or a feature for their product, which is hardware. You can not buy a computer of any kind with an Apple OS on it without skating into the "hacking" or "warez" scenes, albeit marginally. Without legitimacy, there is no market.
Basically, what I think is happening is this:
People aren't buying computers for operating systems. Obviously, they're buying them for 'what works'. This means people are, if they're buying computers at all, they are buying Apples.
I strongly suspect that the market downturn is impacting people's bottom line; they're making do with the computers they've got, or making do without. For most people, a computer is something that gets shoved in the corner of a room and turned on to look at the web/email/porn. If it breaks and they can't afford to get it going again (possibly accounting for a percentage point or two over the past year) they'll do without and use a friend's computer, or simply surf at work. And older computers needing life breathed into them might account for a marginal upswing in Linux - though I doubt it.
I'd really like to see the whole "linux on the desktop" argument put to death. Sure, linux in the corporate environment - good idea. Or linux in schools - awesome. But linux on the desktop? Please, no. That would be desirable if, and only if, we got a unified and sane graphical system in linux similar to what is now in OS X, and not until: something with a consistent interface (and sure, you could change) that ran using modern communication mechanisms.
But again, that will never* happen accounting software packages, popular social networking software, games, and whatever else a person's individual Killer App is - and there are a lot to pick from) being the main things holding adoption back. But I see fixing X and the GUI (for mass user adoption) as a necessary First Step to any of this even becoming considered.
* Or as close to never as counts, in internet years
Exactly: it's not the tech that would take adapting to, it's the culture. Try this thought experiment:
Would you rather (race/skin color not withstanding): a) live in colonial America b) live in Turkey during the height of the Turkish empire
Your answer might likely be different depending on your gender, religion, or even dietary preferences. Consider: there are people who immigrate in their 20s to a new country with relatively similar cultures and never fully assimilate, or actively resist assimilation.
Situation 2: would you rather live in a tribal society full of nut eating hippies or one with peaceful gun/weapon nuts?
Situation 3: would you rather live in a society with a totalitarian government or anarchy?
Situation 4: atomic family structure of hippie commune/no clear parental/child/etc. roles?
In one of the above comparisons, if you prefer one over the other strongly, living with the disfavorable one would be, to many, worse than death.
And hey: there's always living on the dole. That's much more possible today than it was at any time in the recorded past, and with much more style than was possible then, too. Artists of old would've killed to get the kind of accommodation welfare recipients receive in the modern western world.
Oh, someone, somewhere will do it. By someone, somewhere, I mean a country with amoral leaders and money to burn. (I'm thinking of China - after all, look what they'll put in food for the name of profit; think what a man would do for prologued life or a potential medical breakthrough. Or, for that matter, a way to potentially keep troops "fed and clothed" at negligible cost for prolonged periods of time.)
They had the opportunity and motive to learn that copper was something worthwhile to steal. Why did they not have the opportunity and motive to learn what electricity did? Surely they noticed that when the kid down the street got electrocuted, the electricity they used for things like cooking, TV, and hat have you went out.
You think these people don't know what electricity is, what it does, and where it comes from? Get real. What 5-year-old doesn't know what an electric shock feels like?
This is just stupid behavior. And yes, I'm also referring to your wanton American bashing.
My friends and I caught onto the obvious Orwellian undertones of the use of the word 'terrorism' shortly after 9/11. We used it to describe everything, from someone being a bastard (he was a terrorist) to a good hamburger ('this is terroristic!').
I dare say that these days, making a concerted effort to undermine said word would result in you, yourself, getting branded as a potential sympathizer. And it hasn't even been a decade since 9/11...
I've got an old Logitech PS/2 ball mouse you can have. It works great on the still-useful 486s and the like, but doesn't work that well for things which need a higher resolution.
Oh wait, that packaging material and the gas to get it to you would cost money, too, wouldn't it?
Oh well, I could still keep it. But wait: then I'd have to get a larger house ($$$) to keep all my stuff, which would cost more for heating and cooling due to the size..
Throwing things out that you no longer need and can find no suitable alternate use for (such as another person) is the ecologically responsible thing to do. Putting it underground to make better use of other existing resources instead of keeping it above ground, where it will get in the way, is a no brainer.
I'm all for making things last, and for making use of what you've got (even when it's not the originally intended use) but guess what? We live in a maleable world with things which break down and decay. Things lose their relative utility as newer, more effective things become available for the same tasks (what, you didn't know that farmers don't use their great-grandaddy's horse-drawn plow or grandaddy's John Deere to plow their fields?).
It's the way of life - it has been for every society in history, and always will be. If you don't believe me, go look for flint knappings and arrow heads and tell me they weren't disposed of or thrown out when something newer/better came along.
AFAIK so far there's no scientific theory to explain "self awareness"/"consciousness", and I suspect it's the very first observation all scientists make - observation of self.
Hardly. Apparently you don't know too many scientists. They can hardly be considered "self observant"; many of the ones I know could easily go outside naked without hardly realizing it.
called Virtual Peace, the intention of which is to help the gamer develop disaster relief and conflict resolution skills
I think they might be starting to get on to something here. Now, take this concept, and meld it with America's Army gameplay, and they'd have a winner for competitive play, for sure!
(The only realistic way to 'promote' peace is to demote aggression. That, of course, is exercised through force - which is anathema to the average 'peace' activist's modus operandi of aggressive passivism.)
But it isn't as efficient - for a number of reasons.
1) How much energy is required from other sources - usually NG, coal, or nuclear - to produce that hydrogen? Gasoline is just a refinement process; if hydrogen was anywhere near as efficient or cost effective it would be offered as an alternative already. 2) Hydrogen falls short in that it requires substantially more resources to store and transport in liquid form (IE added cost), and the expanded gas itself is less efficient, per gallon, than gasoline.
Why is it we keep hearing about hydrogen as a power source? It makes (almost) as much sense to talk about running our cars on pure water.
It's simple: you can't get more energy from a material than you put into it - in fact, you will get less due to entropy, period. Hydrogen has less potential energy than gasoline, per molecule. Using it in cars, in an ICE, will require substantially more hydrogen than gas (which is a significant problem due to the storage limitations of hydrogen).
Thinking that hydrogen will eventually replace gasoline in ICEs is foolhardy at best; you're basically saying you believe in perpetual motion. Indeed, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels is one of, if not the, most ecologically irresponsible policies I can think of due to the conversion loss. Especially when it's coal.
Realistically, there are maybe only three technical possibilities for 'gasoline replacement' using materials we're aware of today: 1) miniaturized nuclear reactors in vehicles. For a myriad of reasons, this is not going to happen. 2) A new, higher-density, longer-lifespan storage medium for some other power source (hydrogen included), though from the looks of it, hydrogen powered cars (as we know them today) are more likely 3) a breakthrough in energy->motion conversion
Do you really want to put a client's eye into your server room's inner workings? It's a bit unnerving to have management doing that, but clients? No thanks.
If this is going to be for marketing, whatever you display needs to be 'sanitized' of any potential and perceived potential error. Disk failure? Link failure? System crash? Yeah, you don't want that stuff flying around a screen in the lobby when a big client comes in.
You want to support a group which actually support and encourage honest-to-god animal and wildlife conservation?
Then support groups like Ducks Unlimited which actually concentrate on conserving animal habitat while keeping the populations in check. You know, organizations supported by hunters - people who have a vested interest in the populations remaining a) large b) healthy and c) sustainable - in contrast to PETA and like, which would prefer to see the world overrun by mountain lions and deer die to due starvation (for lack of predators). Yes, I realize those two things are in contention.
Most game stories/writing sucks, in part, due to the primary kind of games being developed: first person shooters. Kind of hard to weave a consistent story amidst shooting *whatever*, and there's really not much point (from a developer's perspective) because that's not why people buy the game.
The film equivalent is the action movie. Think about how many actual original action films are out there (IE not counting graphic novel/comic adaptations) which could conceivably be converted into a game. Or, for that matter, simply good and memorable action films. There aren't many! I can count on one hand the action films since the early 1990s which I'd consider "good" and memorable (Die Hard, Under Siege, The Boondock Saints, Braveheart, Ronin, maybe a couple others I can't immediately think of). There are even fewer good movies action movies which could also be made into a good game.
Though, there are such movies. Ronin and Die Hard, for instance, could probably be made into decent shooters/role playing games, or in the case of Ronin and BDS, used as a template/theme on which to base a game. They'd still need a good writer, of course.
And there ARE original English games (ie with good writing) which come out from time to time, even outside the RPG market. Deus Ex, which is part RPG, is one of hte best stories of all time. Max Payne, which is 100% shooter, is also a fantastic story (the best one in gaming I can remember - damn the film adaptation for ruining it). And who can forget Half-Life, which as a shooter has a very good story interwoven into it - certainly better than most zombie/undead/etc. movie in recent years.
Maybe your qualifications for "good story" and "good writing" are different than mine. I wouldn't read Nancy Drew or watch a soap opera, because it's all meaningless emotional shit. I can't imagine the stories in erotica-stripped erotica being much different than either of those.
It's kind of crazy how so many benchmark reviews completely overlook actual use and go for one or two "bullet list" type qualifiers for their benchmarks. Granted, I understand this is mainly in the interest of page hits and ad revenue, and by making it controversial they increase those things, but c'mon. Benchmarks are supposed to be pragmatic, and in order to be pragmatic, they have to operate at or near userland conditions, considering CPU, bus, memory and network speed, and the like - as they pertain to the user (whether the user is a hosting company or a desktop end user).
It seems like a pretty trivial matter to do something like this. Say, use something like MySQL for starters - it's available for a dozen or so systems (major Linux distros, OS X, Windows, etc.) It's also typically offered by the vendor, so you'd be able to get an 'ideal' setup for each release.
Or, how about something like a "Firefox benchmark" as that's user-applicable and can use all hardware. Time how long it takes to start FF on all systems with, say, 50 tabs running.
Or how about a straight-up media playing benchmark for 2D performance? Launch a dozen or so DivX videos at once and see how well it performs: measure CPU load, memory use, and the time it takes for FF to start up completely.
Or how about lengthy disk access (maybe crawling a storage tree or such) and measure the time it takes, as well as the amount of memory which gets cached for the process?
This benchmark, as well as most others, seem pretty trivial and useless, and not all that well thought out. They're certainly not scientific!
Here's something I've always thought to be a bit hokey and religious of contemporary science: why do we assume Neanderthals were less intelligent than we are? Their brains were larger than our brains are or were. Somehow, this is meant to mean that they were less intelligent - they needed more brain mass to work their body. Yet, we've got massive dinosaurs which had the smallest of brains. And human brain size seems linked to intelligence to some degree.
There could be any number of reasons why they died off and we survived that does not include intelligence. They might have been susceptible to a different diseases; they may have hunted themselves out of existence, they might have had homosexual preferences or a lack of sex drive and may have simply dwindled in population to the point of unsustainability.
And another thought: have we concluded that their genome is significantly/markedly different than that of homo sapiens? I ask, because I recall hearing postulation that neanderthals really weren't anything different than us - just old/sick/etc. homo sapiens or those with significantly different dietary inputs (ie all meat instead of meat + grains which could account for the shorter lifespans, larger brains, longer periods between pregnancy, and more prominent features).
I don't believe I tried to use a backwards logical approach such as that.
A cursory google search will provide all sorts of evidence as to Obama's Marxist background - as much evidence as one can provide for a philosophical bent. His mom was a red diaper baby, he participated in multiple events throughout his early career which were the predominant field of Marxists, and many of his good friends and acquaintances throughout life have been avowed Marxists/proponents of activism to bring about Marxist change.
Hell, the man's every word is doublespeak for Marxist agenda.
Nazis came to power through promises of giving preference to Arians. That promise was made good on - by killing the 'unfavorables'. Class preference and persecution of undesireables is the hallmark of totalitarian socialist and other totalitarian states.
Openoffice is free, Java is free (no money), you are asked if you wish OpenOffice only when you install Java (not every time you use it), how is it absurd for one free product to advertise another free product, once ?
Well, it doesn't. It asks repeatedly - via the system tray notification daemon.
Regarding Java gobbling CPU while checking for new versions, is it something strange ? Windows does it, Ubuntu does it, many more do it, why should Java not do it ?, and you can just disable it from the java control panel
It does more than that - it sits there and eats a fair amount of resources via the system tray.
I'm not bashing Java to the exclusion of the others - just in this post. They all have their shortcomings, but Java was the topic of this post/thread. Personally, I find Flash to be significantly more irritating - though that, at least, appears to be getting better.
Part of the reason that Redhat was relegated to the background, except for corporate stuff, is because they went stagnant. They got behind the package management curve at an important time, and their QA started to decrease as well.
A lot of geeks moved from RedHat at that time, in part due to their corporate licensing and the way they changed their product structure (ie gotta pay to get our goods), and in part due to RPM remaining behind the curve - ie, a lot of geeks jumped to Debian due to apt.
I also seem to recall Redhat getting pretty bloaty and 'corporately oriented' at a time when systems couldn't really handle the load - think 700MHz or so with 256M standard yet a lot o stuff preloaded. Though that might be a false memory...
Also, the userland isn't nearly as bloated (in terms of stuff that is running in the background and unneeded packages installed) and the configuration hasnt been butchered.
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There's another thing to consider: the polarity of the earth creates an electromagnetic field around the earth protecting the earth from radiation, and as I understand it, largely decreasing/deflecting particulate matter from impacting the earth. Those are two pretty big things which would kill many of us fairly quickly.
The thing about disease lethality is that it runs contrary to the organism's ability to survive. That is, the more lethal a disease, the less it spreads due to killing off available hosts too quickly.
The thing about a 30% attrition rate due to a pandemic is that it's not just something as simple as "30% of the population dies". It's much more drastic, and the results upon a society of that kind of attrition due to illness is substantially worse than, say, 30% dying in war.
Even if we think for a moment on how catastrophic the loss of most of France's young male population was lost during WWI and WWII, the impact is severe. It crippled their culture and, without US assistance in rebuilding, would have likely resulted in France never returning to a status of economic well-being.
With a pandemic, not only do you have to deal with the loss of life, but you've got to deal with the sick people and the people who have survived yet are stuck with a defect or disability resulting from the illness (deafness, retardation, partial organ failure, bone/muscle problems, w/e). So while you lose 30% of the population, you've got another (guessing here) 30-50% of the population which is either sick at any one time or survived said illness (once the illness has been around for a while).
Finally, there's the "overhead" of dealing with the sick people: hospitals and the substantial need for (frequently replaced) additional staffing, lost work hours, delayed projects, and the like. Then you would have the necessary shift of work force from urban 'modern' tasks to more existential tasks (such as farming and ranching) as said farmers and ranchers get ill and/or die. These people would then produce at a diminished capacity due to lack of knowledge/experience.
Generally, the whole of a society stricken by these kinds of casualties operates probably not far from what we saw in the US or UK (as those are the ones I'm familiar with) during the Great Depression/WWII (or possibly worse due to the need to bury all the dead - cities would be overwhelmed with rotting corpses). This is not an environment where any semblance of scientific advancement takes place; I suspect that existing IT efforts would be relegated almost entirely to maintenance roles, and 'advancement' would slow or cease for the foreseeable (a generation or two) future - and likely flounder indefinitely after that due to the entire societal restructuring (and diminished emphasis on education) which has taken place in the interim.
And yet, MS isn't being threatened: they still completely (all but a couple percentage points - one or two) own the OS market.
Why?
This is getting a little tired, but it should be a little clear: Apple does not sell operating systems. Oh, sure, they make money from their OS software, no doubt. But it's an add-on or a feature for their product, which is hardware. You can not buy a computer of any kind with an Apple OS on it without skating into the "hacking" or "warez" scenes, albeit marginally. Without legitimacy, there is no market.
Basically, what I think is happening is this:
People aren't buying computers for operating systems. Obviously, they're buying them for 'what works'. This means people are, if they're buying computers at all, they are buying Apples.
I strongly suspect that the market downturn is impacting people's bottom line; they're making do with the computers they've got, or making do without. For most people, a computer is something that gets shoved in the corner of a room and turned on to look at the web/email/porn. If it breaks and they can't afford to get it going again (possibly accounting for a percentage point or two over the past year) they'll do without and use a friend's computer, or simply surf at work. And older computers needing life breathed into them might account for a marginal upswing in Linux - though I doubt it.
I'd really like to see the whole "linux on the desktop" argument put to death. Sure, linux in the corporate environment - good idea. Or linux in schools - awesome. But linux on the desktop? Please, no. That would be desirable if, and only if, we got a unified and sane graphical system in linux similar to what is now in OS X, and not until: something with a consistent interface (and sure, you could change) that ran using modern communication mechanisms.
But again, that will never* happen accounting software packages, popular social networking software, games, and whatever else a person's individual Killer App is - and there are a lot to pick from) being the main things holding adoption back. But I see fixing X and the GUI (for mass user adoption) as a necessary First Step to any of this even becoming considered.
* Or as close to never as counts, in internet years
Exactly: it's not the tech that would take adapting to, it's the culture. Try this thought experiment:
Would you rather (race/skin color not withstanding):
a) live in colonial America
b) live in Turkey during the height of the Turkish empire
Your answer might likely be different depending on your gender, religion, or even dietary preferences. Consider: there are people who immigrate in their 20s to a new country with relatively similar cultures and never fully assimilate, or actively resist assimilation.
Situation 2: would you rather live in a tribal society full of nut eating hippies or one with peaceful gun/weapon nuts?
Situation 3: would you rather live in a society with a totalitarian government or anarchy?
Situation 4: atomic family structure of hippie commune/no clear parental/child/etc. roles?
In one of the above comparisons, if you prefer one over the other strongly, living with the disfavorable one would be, to many, worse than death.
And hey: there's always living on the dole. That's much more possible today than it was at any time in the recorded past, and with much more style than was possible then, too. Artists of old would've killed to get the kind of accommodation welfare recipients receive in the modern western world.
Oh, someone, somewhere will do it. By someone, somewhere, I mean a country with amoral leaders and money to burn. (I'm thinking of China - after all, look what they'll put in food for the name of profit; think what a man would do for prologued life or a potential medical breakthrough. Or, for that matter, a way to potentially keep troops "fed and clothed" at negligible cost for prolonged periods of time.)
They had the opportunity and motive to learn that copper was something worthwhile to steal. Why did they not have the opportunity and motive to learn what electricity did? Surely they noticed that when the kid down the street got electrocuted, the electricity they used for things like cooking, TV, and hat have you went out.
You think these people don't know what electricity is, what it does, and where it comes from? Get real. What 5-year-old doesn't know what an electric shock feels like?
This is just stupid behavior. And yes, I'm also referring to your wanton American bashing.
My friends and I caught onto the obvious Orwellian undertones of the use of the word 'terrorism' shortly after 9/11. We used it to describe everything, from someone being a bastard (he was a terrorist) to a good hamburger ('this is terroristic!').
I dare say that these days, making a concerted effort to undermine said word would result in you, yourself, getting branded as a potential sympathizer. And it hasn't even been a decade since 9/11...
Oh really?
I've got an old Logitech PS/2 ball mouse you can have. It works great on the still-useful 486s and the like, but doesn't work that well for things which need a higher resolution.
Oh wait, that packaging material and the gas to get it to you would cost money, too, wouldn't it?
Oh well, I could still keep it. But wait: then I'd have to get a larger house ($$$) to keep all my stuff, which would cost more for heating and cooling due to the size..
Throwing things out that you no longer need and can find no suitable alternate use for (such as another person) is the ecologically responsible thing to do. Putting it underground to make better use of other existing resources instead of keeping it above ground, where it will get in the way, is a no brainer.
I'm all for making things last, and for making use of what you've got (even when it's not the originally intended use) but guess what? We live in a maleable world with things which break down and decay. Things lose their relative utility as newer, more effective things become available for the same tasks (what, you didn't know that farmers don't use their great-grandaddy's horse-drawn plow or grandaddy's John Deere to plow their fields?).
It's the way of life - it has been for every society in history, and always will be. If you don't believe me, go look for flint knappings and arrow heads and tell me they weren't disposed of or thrown out when something newer/better came along.
AFAIK so far there's no scientific theory to explain "self awareness"/"consciousness", and I suspect it's the very first observation all scientists make - observation of self.
Hardly. Apparently you don't know too many scientists. They can hardly be considered "self observant"; many of the ones I know could easily go outside naked without hardly realizing it.
called Virtual Peace, the intention of which is to help the gamer develop disaster relief and conflict resolution skills
I think they might be starting to get on to something here. Now, take this concept, and meld it with America's Army gameplay, and they'd have a winner for competitive play, for sure!
(The only realistic way to 'promote' peace is to demote aggression. That, of course, is exercised through force - which is anathema to the average 'peace' activist's modus operandi of aggressive passivism.)
But it isn't as efficient - for a number of reasons.
1) How much energy is required from other sources - usually NG, coal, or nuclear - to produce that hydrogen? Gasoline is just a refinement process; if hydrogen was anywhere near as efficient or cost effective it would be offered as an alternative already.
2) Hydrogen falls short in that it requires substantially more resources to store and transport in liquid form (IE added cost), and the expanded gas itself is less efficient, per gallon, than gasoline.
Why is it we keep hearing about hydrogen as a power source? It makes (almost) as much sense to talk about running our cars on pure water.
It's simple: you can't get more energy from a material than you put into it - in fact, you will get less due to entropy, period. Hydrogen has less potential energy than gasoline, per molecule. Using it in cars, in an ICE, will require substantially more hydrogen than gas (which is a significant problem due to the storage limitations of hydrogen).
Thinking that hydrogen will eventually replace gasoline in ICEs is foolhardy at best; you're basically saying you believe in perpetual motion. Indeed, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels is one of, if not the, most ecologically irresponsible policies I can think of due to the conversion loss. Especially when it's coal.
Realistically, there are maybe only three technical possibilities for 'gasoline replacement' using materials we're aware of today:
1) miniaturized nuclear reactors in vehicles. For a myriad of reasons, this is not going to happen.
2) A new, higher-density, longer-lifespan storage medium for some other power source (hydrogen included), though from the looks of it, hydrogen powered cars (as we know them today) are more likely
3) a breakthrough in energy->motion conversion
Do you really want to put a client's eye into your server room's inner workings? It's a bit unnerving to have management doing that, but clients? No thanks.
If this is going to be for marketing, whatever you display needs to be 'sanitized' of any potential and perceived potential error. Disk failure? Link failure? System crash? Yeah, you don't want that stuff flying around a screen in the lobby when a big client comes in.
You want to support a group which actually support and encourage honest-to-god animal and wildlife conservation?
Then support groups like Ducks Unlimited which actually concentrate on conserving animal habitat while keeping the populations in check. You know, organizations supported by hunters - people who have a vested interest in the populations remaining a) large b) healthy and c) sustainable - in contrast to PETA and like, which would prefer to see the world overrun by mountain lions and deer die to due starvation (for lack of predators). Yes, I realize those two things are in contention.
Most game stories/writing sucks, in part, due to the primary kind of games being developed: first person shooters. Kind of hard to weave a consistent story amidst shooting *whatever*, and there's really not much point (from a developer's perspective) because that's not why people buy the game.
The film equivalent is the action movie. Think about how many actual original action films are out there (IE not counting graphic novel/comic adaptations) which could conceivably be converted into a game. Or, for that matter, simply good and memorable action films. There aren't many! I can count on one hand the action films since the early 1990s which I'd consider "good" and memorable (Die Hard, Under Siege, The Boondock Saints, Braveheart, Ronin, maybe a couple others I can't immediately think of). There are even fewer good movies action movies which could also be made into a good game.
Though, there are such movies. Ronin and Die Hard, for instance, could probably be made into decent shooters/role playing games, or in the case of Ronin and BDS, used as a template/theme on which to base a game. They'd still need a good writer, of course.
And there ARE original English games (ie with good writing) which come out from time to time, even outside the RPG market. Deus Ex, which is part RPG, is one of hte best stories of all time. Max Payne, which is 100% shooter, is also a fantastic story (the best one in gaming I can remember - damn the film adaptation for ruining it). And who can forget Half-Life, which as a shooter has a very good story interwoven into it - certainly better than most zombie/undead/etc. movie in recent years.
Maybe your qualifications for "good story" and "good writing" are different than mine. I wouldn't read Nancy Drew or watch a soap opera, because it's all meaningless emotional shit. I can't imagine the stories in erotica-stripped erotica being much different than either of those.
It's kind of crazy how so many benchmark reviews completely overlook actual use and go for one or two "bullet list" type qualifiers for their benchmarks. Granted, I understand this is mainly in the interest of page hits and ad revenue, and by making it controversial they increase those things, but c'mon. Benchmarks are supposed to be pragmatic, and in order to be pragmatic, they have to operate at or near userland conditions, considering CPU, bus, memory and network speed, and the like - as they pertain to the user (whether the user is a hosting company or a desktop end user).
It seems like a pretty trivial matter to do something like this. Say, use something like MySQL for starters - it's available for a dozen or so systems (major Linux distros, OS X, Windows, etc.) It's also typically offered by the vendor, so you'd be able to get an 'ideal' setup for each release.
Or, how about something like a "Firefox benchmark" as that's user-applicable and can use all hardware. Time how long it takes to start FF on all systems with, say, 50 tabs running.
Or how about a straight-up media playing benchmark for 2D performance? Launch a dozen or so DivX videos at once and see how well it performs: measure CPU load, memory use, and the time it takes for FF to start up completely.
Or how about lengthy disk access (maybe crawling a storage tree or such) and measure the time it takes, as well as the amount of memory which gets cached for the process?
This benchmark, as well as most others, seem pretty trivial and useless, and not all that well thought out. They're certainly not scientific!
Here's something I've always thought to be a bit hokey and religious of contemporary science: why do we assume Neanderthals were less intelligent than we are? Their brains were larger than our brains are or were. Somehow, this is meant to mean that they were less intelligent - they needed more brain mass to work their body. Yet, we've got massive dinosaurs which had the smallest of brains. And human brain size seems linked to intelligence to some degree.
There could be any number of reasons why they died off and we survived that does not include intelligence. They might have been susceptible to a different diseases; they may have hunted themselves out of existence, they might have had homosexual preferences or a lack of sex drive and may have simply dwindled in population to the point of unsustainability.
And another thought: have we concluded that their genome is significantly/markedly different than that of homo sapiens? I ask, because I recall hearing postulation that neanderthals really weren't anything different than us - just old/sick/etc. homo sapiens or those with significantly different dietary inputs (ie all meat instead of meat + grains which could account for the shorter lifespans, larger brains, longer periods between pregnancy, and more prominent features).
That was very well said - one of the best posts in this thread (and I've read most of them).
I don't believe I tried to use a backwards logical approach such as that.
A cursory google search will provide all sorts of evidence as to Obama's Marxist background - as much evidence as one can provide for a philosophical bent. His mom was a red diaper baby, he participated in multiple events throughout his early career which were the predominant field of Marxists, and many of his good friends and acquaintances throughout life have been avowed Marxists/proponents of activism to bring about Marxist change.
Hell, the man's every word is doublespeak for Marxist agenda.
What?
Nazis came to power through promises of giving preference to Arians. That promise was made good on - by killing the 'unfavorables'. Class preference and persecution of undesireables is the hallmark of totalitarian socialist and other totalitarian states.
Openoffice is free, Java is free (no money), you are asked if you wish OpenOffice only when you install Java (not every time you use it), how is it absurd for one free product to advertise another free product, once ?
Well, it doesn't. It asks repeatedly - via the system tray notification daemon.
Regarding Java gobbling CPU while checking for new versions, is it something strange ? Windows does it, Ubuntu does it, many more do it, why should Java not do it ?, and you can just disable it from the java control panel
It does more than that - it sits there and eats a fair amount of resources via the system tray.
I'm not bashing Java to the exclusion of the others - just in this post. They all have their shortcomings, but Java was the topic of this post/thread. Personally, I find Flash to be significantly more irritating - though that, at least, appears to be getting better.
Part of the reason that Redhat was relegated to the background, except for corporate stuff, is because they went stagnant. They got behind the package management curve at an important time, and their QA started to decrease as well.
A lot of geeks moved from RedHat at that time, in part due to their corporate licensing and the way they changed their product structure (ie gotta pay to get our goods), and in part due to RPM remaining behind the curve - ie, a lot of geeks jumped to Debian due to apt.
I also seem to recall Redhat getting pretty bloaty and 'corporately oriented' at a time when systems couldn't really handle the load - think 700MHz or so with 256M standard yet a lot o stuff preloaded. Though that might be a false memory...
Compelling reason?
dpkg/apt > rpm/yum
Also, the userland isn't nearly as bloated (in terms of stuff that is running in the background and unneeded packages installed) and the configuration hasnt been butchered.