To raise that mass by 1 C requires 22,964.44 J of energy.
Even assuming you meant ~23,000 kilojoules (as your energy figure suggests), this is still off by many orders of magnitude. One kilogram of water takes 4.184 kJ, so ~23 MJ will raise ~5500 liters of water by 1 C. Per Wikipedia, the ocean is estimated at 1.3 * 10^21 liters. Raising that by 1 C takes 5.44 * 10^24 joules, which is equivalent to ~60,500 metric tons. Based on your assumption of 1 C per 100 years, that's 60.5 tons per year for the ocean alone, or 37% of the 160 tons given in the summary. Add in the rock and the atmosphere (including water vapor) and you've probably got a wild overestimate.
Now will the entire volume of the planet get a 1 C increase? I doubt it, but I'm not an earth scientist. I suspect it would mostly be the atmosphere, part of the ocean, and part of the dirt and rock. But the estimate given is definitely not 16 orders of magnitude off.
liz on January 31, 2012 at 9:17 pm said: Indeed – we have to use an x-ray machine with microscopy to ensure all the pads are connected properly. And NOBODY has one of those at home.
This post has just been Slashdotted. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/31/203229/why-the-raspberry-pi-wont-ship-in-kit-form Plenty of commenters there appear downright insulted that we don’t think they’ve got ovens, masks, and an x-ray machine at home, along with the dexterity of a TINY TINY PIXIE. (They don’t have any of those things, but they’re still insulted.) Sometimes I really hate Slashdot.
Is the analog hole even a significant factor? I got the impression everyone just cracks the digital encryption. I don't think I've ever seen a video that was pirated from a VGA connection.
I suspect is this is a cost saving measure. The hardware to produce the VGA signal costs something, and video card manufacturers are probably tired of paying for it.
The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job...
Not at all. You hit the talk show circuit, give motivational lectures to businesspeople, write a book, and do whatever else you can to capitalize on your new-found fame. That should get you more than enough money to retire on. Alternately, you keep it secret while starting a company, hit the market a couple years ahead of everyone else, *then* release the plans to the public.
Silicon Valley and other islands of technology define their economic model by success in the marketplace, not by the manipulations of ivy league finance wizards.
So ten years later, the dotcom bust has been completely forgotten? And I know we've had some unreasonably large IPOs since then...
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
But how do you tell who's accurate and who isn't? It's not as simple as some people lying and other people telling the truth. To validate an information source, you have to do the work of a journalist, and thus become your own information source, breaking the division of labor. That problem isn't going to go away on its own. We're still going to be reliant on the same flawed web-of-trust scheme that we are now.
Network connectivity doesn't change human nature. When you move civilization onto the internet, you don't get a utopia, you just get better data transfer.
The summary is quite clear that it's the combination of an iPad with a blutooth keyboard that he using.
I wasn't clear what a "Zagg keyboard" was before I followed the link. Misleading title, then.
How are you managing to list "a clean UI" in the positives and "the apps" in the negative?
Read the article. The clean UI is iOS, which lacks the menu and icon overhead of a traditional desktop OS. The apps are less powerful than similar desktop software (e.g. Photoshop).
It's also a misleading summary. The guy isn't truly using a tablet as his primary computer, because the first thing he does is get a Bluetooth keyboard. What he likes is super-long battery life, built-in mobile broadband, and a clean user interface. Everything tablet-specific -- the touchscreen, the apps, the screen size -- he describes as worse than a laptop.
The main difference between the various PC and console platforms is the controls. If you back at the 1990s you can see fundamental differences in game design between consoles (played with one or more gamepads on a sofa) and PCs (played with a keyboard, mouse, and possibly joystick at a desk). Unfortunately, you can't really design for one set of controls if you're making a cross-platform game. It used to be that PCs and console had totally different genres. Now we're adding smartphones to the mix. I wonder what compromises will be made to support touchscreens?
I had a Canon Powershot point-and-shoot for a few years, then moved up to a Digital Rebel XS SLR. For image quality at reasonable viewing sizes (not 100% zoom on a huge monitor), they're more or less identical. Proper lighting, exposure, and white balancing are more important than the sensor. I see no advantage to a DSLR for daylight photography (fast shutter speeds), still shots (use a tripod), or generic vacation/group photos. P&S cameras can fit in your pocket, which is a huge advantage. They're also cheap.
The reason to go to an SLR is if you have a specific need that isn't being met. For instance, I like to take lower-light pictures indoors, so I like wide-aperture lenses. Macro photography also uses special lenses. I think SLR lenses also have shallower depth of field for nicely blurred backgrounds. You can also do weird things like tilt-shift or ultra-wide angle if you want to get artistic.
The biggest downside of SLRs is that they're big. Everyone else has said this, but I'll say it again but it's important. SLRs are not convenient. At all. They won't fit in your pocket. They'll tire your neck if you wear a camera strap. Carrying a second lens is even worse (they're typically 2.5in diameter at least, which is awkward in a pocket). They second-biggest downside is the price. All those neat lenses I mentioned above? Get ready to pay $500-1500 for just one of those on top of the camera body. Forget photographing birds or sports; you'll be paying the price of a car (not joking -- look at 600mm or 80mm lenses on Amazon). The lens that comes with the body is... less than stellar. There are cheap lenses, but they're obviously not as nice. Expensive lenses also usually have more limited zoom ranges.
The biggest downside of P&S is the control lag. Zooming is usually done electronically. The viewfinder is the LCD on the back, which has its own delay. It usually takes a moment after you press the shutter button before the picture is taken. If you want to take pictures of fast-moving subjects, this is a no-go. You're also limited to what the built-in lens can do. In my opinion, at the $100-200 price point, an SLR lens won't be much better than the P&S.
My advice is to get a mid-range P&S, then learn the basics of photography and see what you can do. Focus on using the program, aperture priority, and shutter priority modes, and set your white balance manually. Turn the flash off (except in direct sunlight -- counterintuitive). If you're still not satisfied after several months, then get an SLR, but realize that you'll easily spend >$1000 to get what you want.
In addition, the AI class constantly ambushes the student with questions that have not yet been covered, and then cover the material afterward. Ugh. That's frustrating. That's a teaching method I call "here's what I should have taught you before asking you this question", or if I were less generous, "here's why you're wrong." It's not a good method of teaching, IMHO.
I have to disagree with this. It's more of a Socratic method than anything else, and I haven't seen any unreasonable questions. Personally, I love it -- the quizzes are a good focus to get me thinking about a problem, and when I'm wrong it clears up misconceptions a lot faster than the lectures do. You can always skip them and come back to them, and they don't count toward the final grade. They're also good for practice and reviews. There's no downside to having them. I suspect a lot of people (not necessarily you) are frustrated because they don't really have the background for the course -- one of those "90% of people think they're above average" problems.
To do so, I have to go re-stream each question video in turn until I figure out which one I got wrong.
No you don't. Click the question mark next to the video link on the Course page in the Available Units list and it'll take you right to the question. You can also skip the quizzes by clicking on the link to the next video.
I think they're talking about flash memory, which does involve confining excess electrons in an isolated piece of material (the "floating gate") to produce zeros.
So... links to cherry-picking from right-wing blogs. Did you even follow these?
First link: Lackluster applause when the speaker identifies himself as a communist, somewhat more when he talks about people-powered democracy and the history of the labor movement. Even the people on camera don't look excited. This alternates with video of two guys carrying red flags who say that they're "just here to support". When asked what the protests are about, they say the 99%, not communism.
Second link: This and all of its associated links have exactly one picture of an anti-semitic sign.
Third link: A handful of people cheer for someone who advocates violent revolution.
You're kinda proving my point here. Of course there are a few actual communists in the United States. But they are a tiny minority and are not capable of producing large-scale protests. Anyone can set up a PA system and get a few friends to cheer.
I'd love to see something better, but the rhetoric sounds a WHOLE lot like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
The biggest right-wing propaganda coup of the last twenty years has been convincing people like you that anyone to the left of the Republican Party wants a communist overthrow of the United States. It's just... not true. At all. In any way. Returning to the tax rates of the 1990s is not Bolshevism. Decoupling financial games from the productive economy is not Bolshevism. Pointing out that income inequality is widening is not Bolshevism. Yes, there are stupid college students in the protests. So what? There are stupid college students everywhere. What almost all of the protesters want is a sensible mixed economy.
If you want to look at history, you might try examining some recent data:
You might also review the history of the Industrial Revolution, in which unchecked corporate power created hideous working conditions for the benefit of a tiny minority.
Tell that to my Himalayan salt or my Mediterranean sea salt, both of which imply unspecified exotic trace elements.
They're the same trace elements as all unprocessed salt -- minerals that were also dissolved in the ocean. I ran across a site that claimed Himalayan salt has 84 elements, although that's impossible without including some toxic and/or radioactive ones. The claim seems to be based on a lab report that lists 84 elements, many of which are not present in detectable quantities in the salt.
[I was in a bad mood one day and ran across the stuff at Whole Foods. It prompted me to do some research.]
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.
To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.
I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.
I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.
But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies wi
One of the big advantages of Slashdot is that we have a community with experts from a wide variety of fields. As a way to improve the overall signal to noise ratio, I think it would be neat to be able to moderate commenters' expertise on different subjects. For example, a physicist posting inside information on a physics story would get modded +1 for physics. At certain thresholds, they would get progressively larger moderation boosts for comments posted under physics stories and be marked as an expert. This would fit into the normal moderation system, so everyone else's comments would still be visible. Basically, the goal is to reward people for talking about things they understand rather than BSing based on one pop science book they read ten years ago.
The downside is that this requires a revamp of the topic system -- maybe it could work with tagging? It would also benefit from a removal of the +5 moderation cap.
FFXII is basically a single-player MMO. The engine and game mechanics seem to be borrowed from XI, and the big side quests are all tedious monster hunting. I found the story to be substandard, partly because there wasn't much to it, and partly because every story event was separated by hours of grinding the aforementioned side quests.
Reviews can be very misleading. Metal Gear Solid 4 gets 4.5 stars on Amazon, but I have literally seen high school students write, direct, and act better than those cut scenes. It's that bad. I read somewhere that a lot of gamers don't even watch cut scenes. Maybe that explains it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood why a receive-only technology is disabled by something meant to stop emission of radio waves...
Radio receivers use a local oscillator to demodulate the signal. This oscillator can radiate interference. Here's some more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver#Local_oscillator_radiation
To raise that mass by 1 C requires 22,964.44 J of energy.
Even assuming you meant ~23,000 kilojoules (as your energy figure suggests), this is still off by many orders of magnitude. One kilogram of water takes 4.184 kJ, so ~23 MJ will raise ~5500 liters of water by 1 C. Per Wikipedia, the ocean is estimated at 1.3 * 10^21 liters. Raising that by 1 C takes 5.44 * 10^24 joules, which is equivalent to ~60,500 metric tons. Based on your assumption of 1 C per 100 years, that's 60.5 tons per year for the ocean alone, or 37% of the 160 tons given in the summary. Add in the rock and the atmosphere (including water vapor) and you've probably got a wild overestimate.
Now will the entire volume of the planet get a 1 C increase? I doubt it, but I'm not an earth scientist. I suspect it would mostly be the atmosphere, part of the ocean, and part of the dirt and rock. But the estimate given is definitely not 16 orders of magnitude off.
The gravitational mass would go up. Energy produces gravitation as well.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/592#comment-10077
Is the analog hole even a significant factor? I got the impression everyone just cracks the digital encryption. I don't think I've ever seen a video that was pirated from a VGA connection.
I suspect is this is a cost saving measure. The hardware to produce the VGA signal costs something, and video card manufacturers are probably tired of paying for it.
The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job...
Not at all. You hit the talk show circuit, give motivational lectures to businesspeople, write a book, and do whatever else you can to capitalize on your new-found fame. That should get you more than enough money to retire on. Alternately, you keep it secret while starting a company, hit the market a couple years ahead of everyone else, *then* release the plans to the public.
Silicon Valley and other islands of technology define their economic model by success in the marketplace, not by the manipulations of ivy league finance wizards.
So ten years later, the dotcom bust has been completely forgotten? And I know we've had some unreasonably large IPOs since then...
I think our current chaotic information pool will improve in quality as honest brokers of info bundling and verification services emerge and thus develop a reputation.
But how do you tell who's accurate and who isn't? It's not as simple as some people lying and other people telling the truth. To validate an information source, you have to do the work of a journalist, and thus become your own information source, breaking the division of labor. That problem isn't going to go away on its own. We're still going to be reliant on the same flawed web-of-trust scheme that we are now.
Network connectivity doesn't change human nature. When you move civilization onto the internet, you don't get a utopia, you just get better data transfer.
Can't you just turn off the swap file? That's what I do. It speeds up application switching remarkably.
The summary is quite clear that it's the combination of an iPad with a blutooth keyboard that he using.
I wasn't clear what a "Zagg keyboard" was before I followed the link. Misleading title, then.
How are you managing to list "a clean UI" in the positives and "the apps" in the negative?
Read the article. The clean UI is iOS, which lacks the menu and icon overhead of a traditional desktop OS. The apps are less powerful than similar desktop software (e.g. Photoshop).
It's also a misleading summary. The guy isn't truly using a tablet as his primary computer, because the first thing he does is get a Bluetooth keyboard. What he likes is super-long battery life, built-in mobile broadband, and a clean user interface. Everything tablet-specific -- the touchscreen, the apps, the screen size -- he describes as worse than a laptop.
The main difference between the various PC and console platforms is the controls. If you back at the 1990s you can see fundamental differences in game design between consoles (played with one or more gamepads on a sofa) and PCs (played with a keyboard, mouse, and possibly joystick at a desk). Unfortunately, you can't really design for one set of controls if you're making a cross-platform game. It used to be that PCs and console had totally different genres. Now we're adding smartphones to the mix. I wonder what compromises will be made to support touchscreens?
I had a Canon Powershot point-and-shoot for a few years, then moved up to a Digital Rebel XS SLR. For image quality at reasonable viewing sizes (not 100% zoom on a huge monitor), they're more or less identical. Proper lighting, exposure, and white balancing are more important than the sensor. I see no advantage to a DSLR for daylight photography (fast shutter speeds), still shots (use a tripod), or generic vacation/group photos. P&S cameras can fit in your pocket, which is a huge advantage. They're also cheap.
The reason to go to an SLR is if you have a specific need that isn't being met. For instance, I like to take lower-light pictures indoors, so I like wide-aperture lenses. Macro photography also uses special lenses. I think SLR lenses also have shallower depth of field for nicely blurred backgrounds. You can also do weird things like tilt-shift or ultra-wide angle if you want to get artistic.
The biggest downside of SLRs is that they're big. Everyone else has said this, but I'll say it again but it's important. SLRs are not convenient. At all. They won't fit in your pocket. They'll tire your neck if you wear a camera strap. Carrying a second lens is even worse (they're typically 2.5in diameter at least, which is awkward in a pocket). They second-biggest downside is the price. All those neat lenses I mentioned above? Get ready to pay $500-1500 for just one of those on top of the camera body. Forget photographing birds or sports; you'll be paying the price of a car (not joking -- look at 600mm or 80mm lenses on Amazon). The lens that comes with the body is... less than stellar. There are cheap lenses, but they're obviously not as nice. Expensive lenses also usually have more limited zoom ranges.
The biggest downside of P&S is the control lag. Zooming is usually done electronically. The viewfinder is the LCD on the back, which has its own delay. It usually takes a moment after you press the shutter button before the picture is taken. If you want to take pictures of fast-moving subjects, this is a no-go. You're also limited to what the built-in lens can do. In my opinion, at the $100-200 price point, an SLR lens won't be much better than the P&S.
My advice is to get a mid-range P&S, then learn the basics of photography and see what you can do. Focus on using the program, aperture priority, and shutter priority modes, and set your white balance manually. Turn the flash off (except in direct sunlight -- counterintuitive). If you're still not satisfied after several months, then get an SLR, but realize that you'll easily spend >$1000 to get what you want.
In addition, the AI class constantly ambushes the student with questions that have not yet been covered, and then cover the material afterward. Ugh. That's frustrating. That's a teaching method I call "here's what I should have taught you before asking you this question", or if I were less generous, "here's why you're wrong." It's not a good method of teaching, IMHO.
I have to disagree with this. It's more of a Socratic method than anything else, and I haven't seen any unreasonable questions. Personally, I love it -- the quizzes are a good focus to get me thinking about a problem, and when I'm wrong it clears up misconceptions a lot faster than the lectures do. You can always skip them and come back to them, and they don't count toward the final grade. They're also good for practice and reviews. There's no downside to having them. I suspect a lot of people (not necessarily you) are frustrated because they don't really have the background for the course -- one of those "90% of people think they're above average" problems.
To do so, I have to go re-stream each question video in turn until I figure out which one I got wrong.
No you don't. Click the question mark next to the video link on the Course page in the Available Units list and it'll take you right to the question. You can also skip the quizzes by clicking on the link to the next video.
I think they're talking about flash memory, which does involve confining excess electrons in an isolated piece of material (the "floating gate") to produce zeros.
Really? A DIY thread does you in? This seemed pretty legitimate to me.
So... links to cherry-picking from right-wing blogs. Did you even follow these?
First link: Lackluster applause when the speaker identifies himself as a communist, somewhat more when he talks about people-powered democracy and the history of the labor movement. Even the people on camera don't look excited. This alternates with video of two guys carrying red flags who say that they're "just here to support". When asked what the protests are about, they say the 99%, not communism.
Second link: This and all of its associated links have exactly one picture of an anti-semitic sign.
Third link: A handful of people cheer for someone who advocates violent revolution.
You're kinda proving my point here. Of course there are a few actual communists in the United States. But they are a tiny minority and are not capable of producing large-scale protests. Anyone can set up a PA system and get a few friends to cheer.
I'd love to see something better, but the rhetoric sounds a WHOLE lot like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
The biggest right-wing propaganda coup of the last twenty years has been convincing people like you that anyone to the left of the Republican Party wants a communist overthrow of the United States. It's just... not true. At all. In any way. Returning to the tax rates of the 1990s is not Bolshevism. Decoupling financial games from the productive economy is not Bolshevism. Pointing out that income inequality is widening is not Bolshevism. Yes, there are stupid college students in the protests. So what? There are stupid college students everywhere. What almost all of the protesters want is a sensible mixed economy.
If you want to look at history, you might try examining some recent data:
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10
You might also review the history of the Industrial Revolution, in which unchecked corporate power created hideous working conditions for the benefit of a tiny minority.
Tell that to my Himalayan salt or my Mediterranean sea salt, both of which imply unspecified exotic trace elements.
They're the same trace elements as all unprocessed salt -- minerals that were also dissolved in the ocean. I ran across a site that claimed Himalayan salt has 84 elements, although that's impossible without including some toxic and/or radioactive ones. The claim seems to be based on a lab report that lists 84 elements, many of which are not present in detectable quantities in the salt.
[I was in a bad mood one day and ran across the stuff at Whole Foods. It prompted me to do some research.]
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.
To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.
I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.
I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.
But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies wi
One of the big advantages of Slashdot is that we have a community with experts from a wide variety of fields. As a way to improve the overall signal to noise ratio, I think it would be neat to be able to moderate commenters' expertise on different subjects. For example, a physicist posting inside information on a physics story would get modded +1 for physics. At certain thresholds, they would get progressively larger moderation boosts for comments posted under physics stories and be marked as an expert. This would fit into the normal moderation system, so everyone else's comments would still be visible. Basically, the goal is to reward people for talking about things they understand rather than BSing based on one pop science book they read ten years ago.
The downside is that this requires a revamp of the topic system -- maybe it could work with tagging? It would also benefit from a removal of the +5 moderation cap.
To be fair, there are a lot of posts that are overrated even at Score:1.
FFXII is basically a single-player MMO. The engine and game mechanics seem to be borrowed from XI, and the big side quests are all tedious monster hunting. I found the story to be substandard, partly because there wasn't much to it, and partly because every story event was separated by hours of grinding the aforementioned side quests.
Reviews can be very misleading. Metal Gear Solid 4 gets 4.5 stars on Amazon, but I have literally seen high school students write, direct, and act better than those cut scenes. It's that bad. I read somewhere that a lot of gamers don't even watch cut scenes. Maybe that explains it.