I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. In every other way, the Karma is the superior product.
While arguably better designed, the Karma also suffered from spotty hard drive performance (check out the Amazon reviews) and a (IMO) insulting warranty. 90 days for a portable hard drive? I don't think so, Jack. That's one of the reasons the iPod costs as much as it does -- you're getting a one-year limited warranty, with the option to purchase another whole year. Now *that* is support.
Of course, you can use statistics to say anything you want... unless the figures are as obvious as they are here. Difficult to tweak for that daily anti-GTA propaganda : /
My point is that they have to really do something different if they want to improve their ratings and this has to be one of the hardest challenges facing any game designer in the world right now. How do you take a regular sport and make a game out of it that will release a new title each year, without boring the hell out of your fans? It's hard.
You do it by not insultingly milking your fan base with needless annual installments. You offer a downloadable roster (and charge a reasonable fee), instead of attempting to shoehorn underwhelming gameplay adjustments like they did this year.
What's important to understand about the new QB Vision is that it takes longer to throw the ball and at the same time the defensive line is just as fast as before. This schism makes for a lot more sacks and rushed throws -- instead of more fun.
The problem isn't that Madden 06 is demonstrably worse than the previous entry, because it's not. What's happening is that people are finally waking up to the fact that EA has been repackaging an annual roster update for $50 a pop, while adding just enough garnishing to make it look like a sequel. And since this BS is now the only officially license NFL game in town, people are especially annoyed. The overwhelming impression is that Tiburon is resting on its laurels, despite repeated protestations that they wouldn't -- protestations in response to concerns leveled by the press as soon as EA secured exclusive rights to the NFL.
When you turn QB Vision off and ignore the embarrassingly under-implemented NFL Superstar mode (or whatever they call it), you have Madden 05 with a new roster.
Publishing (1) a for-profit niche journal about (2) technology on (3) the Internet, with (4) two full-time eds and three part-timers... Respectfully, I'm surprised you've been able to last as long as you have in such a competitive category, without aggressive marketing. I consider myself a pretty heavy Internet user, for about fifteen years now, and I've never heard of your publication.
There's only so much overhead that 200k/mo uniques can cover (I assume these are unique, domain-wide visitors, and not just PVs) when all you have on the front page is a tucked-away AdSense box. You are going to have to bite the bullet and put some banners and skyscrapers on your site if you want to survive. Slashdot does it, EFF.org does it...
...And you'll notice that EFF.org's bandwidth is sponsored. Hardocp.com gets its bandwidth sponsored by theplanet.com. These sites get at least one order of magnitude of traffic more than you, and yet they can find someone to cover the bandwidth bills. I think you can too -- you just haven't been looking.
You see, the gradual traffic growth on the Internet, fueled simply by more and more people having an Internet connection every, does not necessarily lead to increased traffic (and more revenue) for your site. The major hubs can and do find ways to keep those increasing numbers funnelling towards their domains. There's an intertial snowball effect as well.
If you don't have a dedicated employee pimping out your content, and at competitive prices; if you don't have sufficient ad presence on your pages; if you rely on natural market growth to provide increased revenue, you will very likely fail in the niche you have chosen.
I would strongly recommend appointing someone to whom you will have to grant more branding control than you would like. A cheerleader/publicist/marketer you appear to be lacking. And I would recommend aggressively pursuing sponsored bandwidth. Your site obviously has a lot of prestige, and I think it's past time to leverage that.
I think that price point includes matinee and non-urban prices. The West Coast and Northeast tend to get gouged as well. Seeing a flick in middle America is generally significantly cheaper than, say, Manhattan, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
Vintage science fiction filled peoples' heads with all kinds of dreamy notions of the human race fanning out to the stars and whatnot, but these pie-eyed imaginings had little understanding for the internia of global identity and the hard realities of applied, long-term space travel -- a domain in which hard radiation reigns supreme.
Of course, I'm overshooting the topic at hand (Mars), but this is the undercurrent beneath our greatly protracted exploration of our environment. Complicating the fact is that Mars appears to be an essentially dead planet, in which case it's difficult to get people to pay attention when you want to spend (from their perspective) a billion dollars to study rocks on another planet. There is no real, juicy carrot at the end of the stick.
Meanwhile, our future is mapped by Asimov, Bester, Heinlein, Stephen Baxter, et al... most of whom were scientists. So I find myself amused at their dismissal of the soft sciences, from which I believe they could have drawn some temperament. There's just no way, in my opinion, that the human race is going to spread its wings just because it can. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think we'll get our asses of this rock until we've almost completely ruined it. And by then, it may be too late.
Because in our community, we take intelligence for granted. No, we really do. How many times a day do you find yourself extremely aggravated at the sum of stupidity you deal with on a daily basis? That's because you're encountering the general public, which on the whole is a pretty average bunch of people. But it is this group that holds the reins of the future, for better or worse, primarily through the buying decisions they make and how they choose to conserve, either through recycling or not leaving the tap on when they brush their teeth.
These people are slow to gather around a movement. They aren't into science fiction. As long as the Right Now is good enough and doesn't give them too many problems, the seductions of gadgetry and possibility aren't quite strong enough to get them on the bandwagon.
and I'll say it again: Apple wants OS X to be pirated. First, you pirate OS X and start to like it, then next time you go to buy a computer you choose an Apple because, hey, you get some advantages to running a legit copy and you can still dual boot Windows or Linux if you want.
And it's still very, very doubtful that Apple would want its OS exposed to a million peripheral combinations it has no support layer for. If OSX can handle all the cards, mice, keyboards, HDDs, optical drives, sound cards, et cetera... I will be absolutely fucking astonished.
Speaking as a life-long atheist, I find that most religious texts carry some wisdom, even though I don't believe in their literal truth ("Let him without sin cast the first stone" is a good tenet to live by, whether you believe in the godhood of the guy who said it or not).
Part of being a successful atheist is being familiar with the beliefs you don't ascribe to. You can't not believe if you don't even know what the belief is really about, can you. Otherwise, you give informed atheists a bad name.
For example, Jesus is not commonly granted godhood. He is the son of a god.
In this case, I'd say the Revelations comment is relevant
The last book of the Bible is also not pluralized.
This is pretty basic stuff. Are you sure you're an atheist -- or are you just easily annoyed by people who hear voices in their heads and have imaginary friends?
This news piece was very, very likely generated from a message board posting... in which the OP did not state a specific store, provide photographic evidence, or any proof of any kind. Nor did they ever return to the thread.
If you are intent on "making a difference" with respect to managerial communications, you are more than welcome to calendar an interface session with your supervisor with a view to enhancing the vital strategic employer-employee partnerships and evolving organisational synergy.
No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated.
I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy, myself. And although I am no astronomer, it occurs to me that the data could have been shared and therefore processed within two years. The discoverers still get primary credit, right? Why sit on this for so long?
If the loss of one or two users that use non-IE browsers is negligible at the time, then why waste the money on cross-platform testing?
I think the real problem is that IE is far enough away from standards compliance as to be a different platform. Granted, Gecko/Moz isn't perfect either, but it's a hell of a lot closer.
And although the Mozilla platform is still a small part of the pie chart, that's just a global average. Moz spikes dramatically with the younger demographic and the more technically inclined. Unlike other age-based metrics, however, Moz is not a phase that the younger set goes through, like pop music or certain TV shows. It's at the forefront of a generational gap of more informed users and will only increase its install base with every passing month.
I think the only way IE can remain dominant is to discard what doesn't make it behave like Mozilla. IBM is pushing Moz, Google is pushing Moz (with a custom startup page and probably a branded browser on the horizon), and you can't ignore that kind of zeitgeist.
We used IE because the blue E was there on the desktop. Then a lot of us got annoyed by the holes, the bugs, the pseudo-compliance, the quirks, the banner ads and pop-ups, and we felt burned. We found something else, and word-of-mouth has spread like wildfire. There is, at this point, a contingent that will never, ever go back to IE, and they will keep the spark going no matter what.
I mean how many people do you think would like to run OSX on a cheap Dell pc? How many people do you think would like to run Windows or Linux on a cool looking mac? Of course the Apple fanboys would still run OSX on the mac, but could they be getting more market by offering choices?
I'm sure hardware QA will be a blast, considering you've only added a billion cards, chips, and drives that OSX would now have to be compatible with. One of the things that makes OSX so great is that it just works. One of the reasons it just works is because the pool of hardware is very tightly controlled and tested. Switch to open x86, and you'll discover a whole new world of instability. Choice is great, but booting to the desktop is better.
Indeed. IBM registers a couple of thousand of patents each year, and in the (relatively distant) past has been just as evil as MS is percieved to be today.
Is this really true? Because most of the people I've talked to in IT who've been around the block say that IBM was never as reviled as MS is now.
Corporations exist to extract as much money from me as possible.
Then they must not be doing a very good job, since you're still alive...
Consider the notion that a corporation is not, in fact, interesting in turning your pockets out. Competition may force them to charge less than they would like. Monopoly may allow them to charge more than they should. But believe it or not, there are people within these organizations who are interested in serving the customer to the best of their ability. People who actually enjoy providing a quality good or service. I know, such notions are shocking.
But just as being independent does not necessarily grant a person authenticity or talent, being a corporation or the member of a corporation does not necessarily cause bloodthirsty avarice.
As it turns out, there appears to be a serious problem with how DICE coded EAX handling, which is purported to be fixable by following the instructions in this thread.
There's also a beta Audigy 2 ZS driver which is supposed to improve BF2 performance. (It's the second "Download Now" link from the top.)
As for missing a lot with MP5 at short range, I've come to the conclusion that the game can have a lot of packet loss, even while the ping time is low. Mostly due to people trying to run servers on inferior hardware, and the game's problematic memory management.
Is it just me or have long, elaborate, thought out first posts become more prevalent on slashdot lately? Is this shit rigged?
Agreed. As far as I know, it is physically impossible for an AC to type out, let alone formulate, a response of that length in sixty seconds (or less).
Something is definitely up. I've seen some borderline FPs lately, but this one takes the cake.
There's also the issue of battery life -- I doubt watching videos on-the-go will be practical.
I also doubt that people will buy movies when they can rip their own (since I think it's safe to say that we won't be seeing feature films anywhere near the $1.99 price point. Probably music videos... which can be streamed for free from many legit sites already).
Oh, and he appears to be an exec at Sun. Maybe he's one of those academics who just doesn't know his way around a computer, no matter what his education is.
I like this wiki better. It talks about how Japan was already devastated by firebombing, a fact which Robert S. McNamara finally admits in the recent Fog of War documentary.
"The first firebombing raid was on Kobe on February 3, 1945, and following its relative success the USAAF continued the tactic. Much of the armor and defensive weaponry of the bombers was also removed to allow increased bomb loads; Japanese air defense in terms of night-fighters and anti-aircraft guns was so feeble it was hardly a risk. The first such raid on Tokyo was on the night of February 23-24 when 174 B-29s destroyed around one square mile (3 km) of the city. Following on that success 334 B-29s raided on the night of March 9-10, dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Around 16 square miles (41 km) of the city was destroyed and over 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the fire storm. The destruction and damage was at its worst in the city sections east of the Imperial Palace. It was the most destructive conventional raid of the war against Japan. In the following two weeks there were almost 1,600 further sorties against the four cities, destroying 31 square miles (80 km) in total at a cost of only 22 aircraft. There was a third raid on Tokyo on May 26."
There was plenty enough conventional massacre by the time Fat Man and Little Boy rolled around, my friend. Japan wasn't a virgin isle of paradise when the two nukes dropped. It was a war-torn, bombed out nation. Fog of War documents it to numbing effect.
There's a lot of history that America doesn't teach its children.
Slashdot Mirror
I would put my Karma up against any iPod, any day. The only thing the iPod had over the Karma was looks. In every other way, the Karma is the superior product.
While arguably better designed, the Karma also suffered from spotty hard drive performance (check out the Amazon reviews) and a (IMO) insulting warranty. 90 days for a portable hard drive? I don't think so, Jack. That's one of the reasons the iPod costs as much as it does -- you're getting a one-year limited warranty, with the option to purchase another whole year. Now *that* is support.
...And youth violence has been on a steady and significant decline since about 1997. Around when the PlayStation 1 launched, coincidentally.
Check it out here.
Of course, you can use statistics to say anything you want... unless the figures are as obvious as they are here. Difficult to tweak for that daily anti-GTA propaganda : /
My point is that they have to really do something different if they want to improve their ratings and this has to be one of the hardest challenges facing any game designer in the world right now. How do you take a regular sport and make a game out of it that will release a new title each year, without boring the hell out of your fans? It's hard.
You do it by not insultingly milking your fan base with needless annual installments. You offer a downloadable roster (and charge a reasonable fee), instead of attempting to shoehorn underwhelming gameplay adjustments like they did this year.
What's important to understand about the new QB Vision is that it takes longer to throw the ball and at the same time the defensive line is just as fast as before. This schism makes for a lot more sacks and rushed throws -- instead of more fun.
The problem isn't that Madden 06 is demonstrably worse than the previous entry, because it's not. What's happening is that people are finally waking up to the fact that EA has been repackaging an annual roster update for $50 a pop, while adding just enough garnishing to make it look like a sequel. And since this BS is now the only officially license NFL game in town, people are especially annoyed. The overwhelming impression is that Tiburon is resting on its laurels, despite repeated protestations that they wouldn't -- protestations in response to concerns leveled by the press as soon as EA secured exclusive rights to the NFL.
When you turn QB Vision off and ignore the embarrassingly under-implemented NFL Superstar mode (or whatever they call it), you have Madden 05 with a new roster.
There's only so much overhead that 200k/mo uniques can cover (I assume these are unique, domain-wide visitors, and not just PVs) when all you have on the front page is a tucked-away AdSense box. You are going to have to bite the bullet and put some banners and skyscrapers on your site if you want to survive. Slashdot does it, EFF.org does it...
You see, the gradual traffic growth on the Internet, fueled simply by more and more people having an Internet connection every, does not necessarily lead to increased traffic (and more revenue) for your site. The major hubs can and do find ways to keep those increasing numbers funnelling towards their domains. There's an intertial snowball effect as well.
If you don't have a dedicated employee pimping out your content, and at competitive prices; if you don't have sufficient ad presence on your pages; if you rely on natural market growth to provide increased revenue, you will very likely fail in the niche you have chosen.
I would strongly recommend appointing someone to whom you will have to grant more branding control than you would like. A cheerleader/publicist/marketer you appear to be lacking. And I would recommend aggressively pursuing sponsored bandwidth. Your site obviously has a lot of prestige, and I think it's past time to leverage that.
Good luck.
Einstein's NP was for his paper on the photoelectric effect.
The Nobel Prize is not awarded for a single act or document, but for a collection thereof. Books do not win Nobel Prizes, for example. Authors do.
I think that price point includes matinee and non-urban prices. The West Coast and Northeast tend to get gouged as well. Seeing a flick in middle America is generally significantly cheaper than, say, Manhattan, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
Mod parent up. Movies really don't make as much as they used to.
Here's a link to the top 100 films, by domestic gross, adjusted for inflation. It tells a very different story. Titanic isn't even in the top 5.
Vintage science fiction filled peoples' heads with all kinds of dreamy notions of the human race fanning out to the stars and whatnot, but these pie-eyed imaginings had little understanding for the internia of global identity and the hard realities of applied, long-term space travel -- a domain in which hard radiation reigns supreme.
Of course, I'm overshooting the topic at hand (Mars), but this is the undercurrent beneath our greatly protracted exploration of our environment. Complicating the fact is that Mars appears to be an essentially dead planet, in which case it's difficult to get people to pay attention when you want to spend (from their perspective) a billion dollars to study rocks on another planet. There is no real, juicy carrot at the end of the stick.
Meanwhile, our future is mapped by Asimov, Bester, Heinlein, Stephen Baxter, et al... most of whom were scientists. So I find myself amused at their dismissal of the soft sciences, from which I believe they could have drawn some temperament. There's just no way, in my opinion, that the human race is going to spread its wings just because it can. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think we'll get our asses of this rock until we've almost completely ruined it. And by then, it may be too late.
Because in our community, we take intelligence for granted. No, we really do. How many times a day do you find yourself extremely aggravated at the sum of stupidity you deal with on a daily basis? That's because you're encountering the general public, which on the whole is a pretty average bunch of people. But it is this group that holds the reins of the future, for better or worse, primarily through the buying decisions they make and how they choose to conserve, either through recycling or not leaving the tap on when they brush their teeth.
These people are slow to gather around a movement. They aren't into science fiction. As long as the Right Now is good enough and doesn't give them too many problems, the seductions of gadgetry and possibility aren't quite strong enough to get them on the bandwagon.
and I'll say it again: Apple wants OS X to be pirated. First, you pirate OS X and start to like it, then next time you go to buy a computer you choose an Apple because, hey, you get some advantages to running a legit copy and you can still dual boot Windows or Linux if you want.
And it's still very, very doubtful that Apple would want its OS exposed to a million peripheral combinations it has no support layer for. If OSX can handle all the cards, mice, keyboards, HDDs, optical drives, sound cards, et cetera... I will be absolutely fucking astonished.
And then I will buy myself a copy!
Speaking as a life-long atheist, I find that most religious texts carry some wisdom, even though I don't believe in their literal truth ("Let him without sin cast the first stone" is a good tenet to live by, whether you believe in the godhood of the guy who said it or not).
Part of being a successful atheist is being familiar with the beliefs you don't ascribe to. You can't not believe if you don't even know what the belief is really about, can you. Otherwise, you give informed atheists a bad name.
For example, Jesus is not commonly granted godhood. He is the son of a god.
In this case, I'd say the Revelations comment is relevant
The last book of the Bible is also not pluralized.
This is pretty basic stuff. Are you sure you're an atheist -- or are you just easily annoyed by people who hear voices in their heads and have imaginary friends?
This news piece was very, very likely generated from a message board posting... in which the OP did not state a specific store, provide photographic evidence, or any proof of any kind. Nor did they ever return to the thread.
That's what "unconfirmed reports" means.
If you are intent on "making a difference" with respect to managerial communications, you are more than welcome to calendar an interface session with your supervisor with a view to enhancing the vital strategic employer-employee partnerships and evolving organisational synergy.
Thanks, I think I just vomited in my mouth.
No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated.
I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy, myself. And although I am no astronomer, it occurs to me that the data could have been shared and therefore processed within two years. The discoverers still get primary credit, right? Why sit on this for so long?
If the loss of one or two users that use non-IE browsers is negligible at the time, then why waste the money on cross-platform testing?
I think the real problem is that IE is far enough away from standards compliance as to be a different platform. Granted, Gecko/Moz isn't perfect either, but it's a hell of a lot closer.
And although the Mozilla platform is still a small part of the pie chart, that's just a global average. Moz spikes dramatically with the younger demographic and the more technically inclined. Unlike other age-based metrics, however, Moz is not a phase that the younger set goes through, like pop music or certain TV shows. It's at the forefront of a generational gap of more informed users and will only increase its install base with every passing month.
I think the only way IE can remain dominant is to discard what doesn't make it behave like Mozilla. IBM is pushing Moz, Google is pushing Moz (with a custom startup page and probably a branded browser on the horizon), and you can't ignore that kind of zeitgeist.
We used IE because the blue E was there on the desktop. Then a lot of us got annoyed by the holes, the bugs, the pseudo-compliance, the quirks, the banner ads and pop-ups, and we felt burned. We found something else, and word-of-mouth has spread like wildfire. There is, at this point, a contingent that will never, ever go back to IE, and they will keep the spark going no matter what.
I mean how many people do you think would like to run OSX on a cheap Dell pc? How many people do you think would like to run Windows or Linux on a cool looking mac? Of course the Apple fanboys would still run OSX on the mac, but could they be getting more market by offering choices?
I'm sure hardware QA will be a blast, considering you've only added a billion cards, chips, and drives that OSX would now have to be compatible with. One of the things that makes OSX so great is that it just works. One of the reasons it just works is because the pool of hardware is very tightly controlled and tested. Switch to open x86, and you'll discover a whole new world of instability. Choice is great, but booting to the desktop is better.
Indeed. IBM registers a couple of thousand of patents each year, and in the (relatively distant) past has been just as evil as MS is percieved to be today.
Is this really true? Because most of the people I've talked to in IT who've been around the block say that IBM was never as reviled as MS is now.
Corporations exist to extract as much money from me as possible.
Then they must not be doing a very good job, since you're still alive...
Consider the notion that a corporation is not, in fact, interesting in turning your pockets out. Competition may force them to charge less than they would like. Monopoly may allow them to charge more than they should. But believe it or not, there are people within these organizations who are interested in serving the customer to the best of their ability. People who actually enjoy providing a quality good or service. I know, such notions are shocking.
But just as being independent does not necessarily grant a person authenticity or talent, being a corporation or the member of a corporation does not necessarily cause bloodthirsty avarice.
Soundblaster Audigy 2 (in 4 channel mode)
As it turns out, there appears to be a serious problem with how DICE coded EAX handling, which is purported to be fixable by following the instructions in this thread.
There's also a beta Audigy 2 ZS driver which is supposed to improve BF2 performance. (It's the second "Download Now" link from the top.)
As for missing a lot with MP5 at short range, I've come to the conclusion that the game can have a lot of packet loss, even while the ping time is low. Mostly due to people trying to run servers on inferior hardware, and the game's problematic memory management.
I agree with the general assessment of the review, but I wouldn't characterize it as "numerous patches." There's only been one patch, then a hotfix.
Nah, I just noticed that I sometimes speak before I think. :(
Ah, never mind, I figured it out. Yay for not being able to delete my own posts. :(
Is it just me or have long, elaborate, thought out first posts become more prevalent on slashdot lately? Is this shit rigged?
Agreed. As far as I know, it is physically impossible for an AC to type out, let alone formulate, a response of that length in sixty seconds (or less).
Something is definitely up. I've seen some borderline FPs lately, but this one takes the cake.
There's also the issue of battery life -- I doubt watching videos on-the-go will be practical.
I also doubt that people will buy movies when they can rip their own (since I think it's safe to say that we won't be seeing feature films anywhere near the $1.99 price point. Probably music videos... which can be streamed for free from many legit sites already).
...would be quite comfortable with reformatting.
Oh, and he appears to be an exec at Sun. Maybe he's one of those academics who just doesn't know his way around a computer, no matter what his education is.
I like this wiki better. It talks about how Japan was already devastated by firebombing, a fact which Robert S. McNamara finally admits in the recent Fog of War documentary.
"The first firebombing raid was on Kobe on February 3, 1945, and following its relative success the USAAF continued the tactic. Much of the armor and defensive weaponry of the bombers was also removed to allow increased bomb loads; Japanese air defense in terms of night-fighters and anti-aircraft guns was so feeble it was hardly a risk. The first such raid on Tokyo was on the night of February 23-24 when 174 B-29s destroyed around one square mile (3 km) of the city. Following on that success 334 B-29s raided on the night of March 9-10, dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Around 16 square miles (41 km) of the city was destroyed and over 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the fire storm. The destruction and damage was at its worst in the city sections east of the Imperial Palace. It was the most destructive conventional raid of the war against Japan. In the following two weeks there were almost 1,600 further sorties against the four cities, destroying 31 square miles (80 km) in total at a cost of only 22 aircraft. There was a third raid on Tokyo on May 26."
There was plenty enough conventional massacre by the time Fat Man and Little Boy rolled around, my friend. Japan wasn't a virgin isle of paradise when the two nukes dropped. It was a war-torn, bombed out nation. Fog of War documents it to numbing effect.
There's a lot of history that America doesn't teach its children.