I really don't have much direct experience with WoW. I tried it briefly when it first came out and it just didn't grab me. My wife plays it though.
Lord of the Rings Online and City of Heroes are the two games I have played that were concentrated on PvE, and didn't really seem to let PvP concerns affect that. There is some PvP in both games (now), but they're obviously just side areas for those that enjoy that sort of thing. I'm fine with that...:-)
Just based on the fact that it's a PvP oriented game, I know I'm not really going to be interested in it. Same goes for Warhammer. As someone who has much more fun in PvE play, I appreciate games where I can expect that there won't be huge changes made based on PvP concerns.
...of a store opening to sell something they have no inventory of, and have no hope of having inventory of for quite some time due to already existing waiting lists. Seems like an expensive way to just keep their name/product visible, opening a store that can't sell anything.
And I don't (necessarily) mean the quality of program. I just mean the basic quality of video and audio. Currently most web videos are nowhere near the quality of even the old NTSC standard, much less HDTV. YouTube is just painful to watch, with the blocky videos in tiny windows.
...and I got less done with my own office than at any other point in my working life. I vastly prefer the type of environments I've been in for the past several years, which are basically giant rooms with desks (not cubicles) and occasional bookshelfs. I can talk to anyone I need to by standing up, and it keeps me more focused on what I should be doing in general.
I've spent the past five years in the workplace programming primarily in Java, along with some PHP and the always ubiquitous SQL. In close to a decade now of workplace programming, I have yet to actually have a need for any systems level programming of any kind. I used to be extremely fluent in C and even dabbled with assembly language for fun, but those are skills I just don't need at work generally speaking. I'm much more likely to need to remember esoteric Linux system administration details.
That's why I haven't been to a library in years. That and the fact that most research I do is on the Internet anyway. Libraries certainly fill a need, but not going to them doesn't necessarily imply negative things about us I don't think.
I agree completely. I really don't buy books that often, but... they just accumulate over the years. I'm sure I have at least a thousand in various bookcases around the house.
I've never understood this. The BSA is obviously just a trade group with no authority whatsoever to conduct raids and such. If they decide they need to "raid" a business, then generally they would just have a suspicion that this business 'might' have some of their software installed and some of that software 'might' not be fully licensed. Is that really enough for local law enforcement to go along with it? A lot of the coverage I've read about BSA raids seems to imply that the business involved went along with the raid voluntarily, and I have trouble understanding why any business would do so.
I remember reading that when it was first posted, and yes it's much more amusing now. From the Wikipedia entry on VA Linux:
VA Software is notable because of its IPO on December 9, 1999. The shares for the IPO were offered at $30, but the traders held back the opening trade until the offers hit $299. LNUX later popped up to $320, and closed their first day of trading at $239.25, a 698% return. However, this high-flying success was short-lived, and within a year the stock was selling at well below the initial offer price, in a classic example of the dot-com stock market bubble. As of 2005, this is still the most "successful" IPO of all time. The stock price reached an intra-day nadir of 54 cents on July 24, 2002. It then soared more than 1000% to an intra-day high of $6.38 on September 11, 2003. As of November 26, 2006, the stock closed at $4.64.
It's because we didn't actually ban gambling. If the U.S. had just banned all forms of gambling, that would have been fine and the WTO would have accepted that with no problems. But instead, we banned only certain specific forms of gambling (e.g. Internet poker and casino games) while specifically allowing others (e.g. brick and mortar casinos, horse and dog racing, fantasy sports betting) and even protecting some as a governmental monopoly (state lotteries). It's the U.S.'s schizophrenic way of simultaneously banning and allowing gambling that's had the Antigua and the WTO complaining for so long.
Re:Not Any Time Soon
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My favorite story is about Janice Kim (professional 3-dan). Back in 1997 the programmer of Handtalk was apparently boasting about the program's capabilities when Janice Kim stated flatly that he was wrong about it and she could defeat it easily with any handicap. Apparently this developed into a bit of pissing match and Janice offered a TWENTY FIVE STONE handicap (the largest handicaps generally used in human player are nine stones, by comparison). Things looked bad at first with such an enormous handicap of course, but Janice went on to defeat Handtalk by a few points. And honestly, the Go playing programs I've seen really haven't developed much in the previous decade. They have small incremental improvements, run on faster hardware, etc. but are still orders of magnitude worse than some humans that have studied the game for only a couple of months. Just as they were a decade ago.
Good luck with positional evaluation
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Let's just take the final position of a game of Go. It takes a certain level of Go knowledge merely to determine which groups are alive, which are dead, which can be taken off the board, etc. in order to determine the final score. Beginning Go players will often not be able to determine this on their own and will have to "prove" to themselves that a group really is dead. And then there are the rare cases of dual life, which beginning Go players are frequently not warned about at all. Programming this stuff is HARD. There's a reason why the scoring portion of playing a Go game online is still done interactively (each player taking turns marking dead stones)... it's because there are no algorithms as of yet that can do it accurately enough. With this in mind, I have no idea why they would believe that searching huge numbers of positions would be helpful when computers are extremely hard pressed to come up with useful information about the score of the game at any given stage.
Have you ever tried uploading a significant amount of data to the Internet? It's well known that home cablemodem and ADSL service has low upload bandwidth. But even my workplace has only a 1.5MBps upstream connection. My webhosting account gives me around 500GB of disk space. Unfortunately even if I completely saturated my workplace's Internet, it would still take a couple of MONTHS to upload that much data. Why would I want to do so? Well... backups for one thing. Availability of data online for another. When people in the U.S. need to move a significant amount of data between computers on the Internet, it's often faster and easier to snail mail a hard drive.
Depends on what state you live in. I'm in Texas, which is known as one of the most debtor-friendly states there is. Basically all they can do is put the judgement on my credit record and harrass me by phone and/or mail about paying them. Garnishing of wages and liens can only be done in cases where taxes are owed I believe, or for child support.
Then the answer is going to have to be "not very far". I can't see game developers getting that excited about something supported only on a version of the operating system that people are specifically NOT migrating to in droves.
I've barely touched my copy of Photoshop (v7.0... yeah it's been awhile) since downloading Lightroom. If you use Photoshop primarily for working with digital camera photos, I barely see a point to having Photoshop at all unless you're wanting to do extensive photo editing. I paid $169 for Lightroom I believe, and was only too happy to do so.
The last time I checked Dreamhost's prices, it was $20/month for 1 TB of disk space. At this point, I believe you are primarily limited by the upload speed of your Internet connection as far as how much data you're able to actually backup off-site to your webhosting account. I left an external USB hard drive (with my backups) at work over the weekend, uploading to the webhosting account. Cheap and easy backup solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't have much direct experience with WoW. I tried it briefly when it first came out and it just didn't grab me. My wife plays it though.
Lord of the Rings Online and City of Heroes are the two games I have played that were concentrated on PvE, and didn't really seem to let PvP concerns affect that. There is some PvP in both games (now), but they're obviously just side areas for those that enjoy that sort of thing. I'm fine with that...:-)
Just based on the fact that it's a PvP oriented game, I know I'm not really going to be interested in it. Same goes for Warhammer. As someone who has much more fun in PvE play, I appreciate games where I can expect that there won't be huge changes made based on PvP concerns.
...of a store opening to sell something they have no inventory of, and have no hope of having inventory of for quite some time due to already existing waiting lists. Seems like an expensive way to just keep their name/product visible, opening a store that can't sell anything.
I think this is it:
http://www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html
Somehow, I think it might succeed with the goal of one million now...:-)
I took it in Pascal. Is that better or worse than C++ and Java? Morale of the story is that, as usual, the exact language doesn't particularly matter.
And I don't (necessarily) mean the quality of program. I just mean the basic quality of video and audio. Currently most web videos are nowhere near the quality of even the old NTSC standard, much less HDTV. YouTube is just painful to watch, with the blocky videos in tiny windows.
...and I got less done with my own office than at any other point in my working life. I vastly prefer the type of environments I've been in for the past several years, which are basically giant rooms with desks (not cubicles) and occasional bookshelfs. I can talk to anyone I need to by standing up, and it keeps me more focused on what I should be doing in general.
I've spent the past five years in the workplace programming primarily in Java, along with some PHP and the always ubiquitous SQL. In close to a decade now of workplace programming, I have yet to actually have a need for any systems level programming of any kind. I used to be extremely fluent in C and even dabbled with assembly language for fun, but those are skills I just don't need at work generally speaking. I'm much more likely to need to remember esoteric Linux system administration details.
Full list of 1,025 (!!!) posted here and here.
I actually started to read TFA, but discovered that it appears to just be a bunch of high school drama. Or something.
That's why I haven't been to a library in years. That and the fact that most research I do is on the Internet anyway. Libraries certainly fill a need, but not going to them doesn't necessarily imply negative things about us I don't think.
I agree completely. I really don't buy books that often, but... they just accumulate over the years. I'm sure I have at least a thousand in various bookcases around the house.
I've never understood this. The BSA is obviously just a trade group with no authority whatsoever to conduct raids and such. If they decide they need to "raid" a business, then generally they would just have a suspicion that this business 'might' have some of their software installed and some of that software 'might' not be fully licensed. Is that really enough for local law enforcement to go along with it? A lot of the coverage I've read about BSA raids seems to imply that the business involved went along with the raid voluntarily, and I have trouble understanding why any business would do so.
Well first you talk to your lawyer if you have one (I suspect the telcos do). And then you don't do it.
The official name for the Ivory Coast, in Africa.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/10/0821224
I remember reading that when it was first posted, and yes it's much more amusing now. From the Wikipedia entry on VA Linux:
It's because we didn't actually ban gambling. If the U.S. had just banned all forms of gambling, that would have been fine and the WTO would have accepted that with no problems. But instead, we banned only certain specific forms of gambling (e.g. Internet poker and casino games) while specifically allowing others (e.g. brick and mortar casinos, horse and dog racing, fantasy sports betting) and even protecting some as a governmental monopoly (state lotteries). It's the U.S.'s schizophrenic way of simultaneously banning and allowing gambling that's had the Antigua and the WTO complaining for so long.
My favorite story is about Janice Kim (professional 3-dan). Back in 1997 the programmer of Handtalk was apparently boasting about the program's capabilities when Janice Kim stated flatly that he was wrong about it and she could defeat it easily with any handicap. Apparently this developed into a bit of pissing match and Janice offered a TWENTY FIVE STONE handicap (the largest handicaps generally used in human player are nine stones, by comparison). Things looked bad at first with such an enormous handicap of course, but Janice went on to defeat Handtalk by a few points. And honestly, the Go playing programs I've seen really haven't developed much in the previous decade. They have small incremental improvements, run on faster hardware, etc. but are still orders of magnitude worse than some humans that have studied the game for only a couple of months. Just as they were a decade ago.
Let's just take the final position of a game of Go. It takes a certain level of Go knowledge merely to determine which groups are alive, which are dead, which can be taken off the board, etc. in order to determine the final score. Beginning Go players will often not be able to determine this on their own and will have to "prove" to themselves that a group really is dead. And then there are the rare cases of dual life, which beginning Go players are frequently not warned about at all. Programming this stuff is HARD. There's a reason why the scoring portion of playing a Go game online is still done interactively (each player taking turns marking dead stones)... it's because there are no algorithms as of yet that can do it accurately enough. With this in mind, I have no idea why they would believe that searching huge numbers of positions would be helpful when computers are extremely hard pressed to come up with useful information about the score of the game at any given stage.
It might actually get some traction that way, if it's not just being used to shove Windows Vista at people...:p
Have you ever tried uploading a significant amount of data to the Internet? It's well known that home cablemodem and ADSL service has low upload bandwidth. But even my workplace has only a 1.5MBps upstream connection. My webhosting account gives me around 500GB of disk space. Unfortunately even if I completely saturated my workplace's Internet, it would still take a couple of MONTHS to upload that much data. Why would I want to do so? Well... backups for one thing. Availability of data online for another. When people in the U.S. need to move a significant amount of data between computers on the Internet, it's often faster and easier to snail mail a hard drive.
Depends on what state you live in. I'm in Texas, which is known as one of the most debtor-friendly states there is. Basically all they can do is put the judgement on my credit record and harrass me by phone and/or mail about paying them. Garnishing of wages and liens can only be done in cases where taxes are owed I believe, or for child support.
Then the answer is going to have to be "not very far". I can't see game developers getting that excited about something supported only on a version of the operating system that people are specifically NOT migrating to in droves.
I've barely touched my copy of Photoshop (v7.0... yeah it's been awhile) since downloading Lightroom. If you use Photoshop primarily for working with digital camera photos, I barely see a point to having Photoshop at all unless you're wanting to do extensive photo editing. I paid $169 for Lightroom I believe, and was only too happy to do so.
The last time I checked Dreamhost's prices, it was $20/month for 1 TB of disk space. At this point, I believe you are primarily limited by the upload speed of your Internet connection as far as how much data you're able to actually backup off-site to your webhosting account. I left an external USB hard drive (with my backups) at work over the weekend, uploading to the webhosting account. Cheap and easy backup solution.