I'm sure that would be blocked by legislation. Politicians would be more than happy to run to the aid of the weak if they can spin it out like they're a champion of justice. Personally I could see this as being a valuable tool for other reasons. Many companies can project costs and make adjustments on future strategies. For example if they could predict an influx of some type of illness, they could better prepare themselves to deal with that cost instead of being reactionary as they're forced to be now. Not to say that excessive forecasting wouldn't be just as dangerous, if not more so; but I could see some value to this.
I played WoW since the middle of BC. I've seen a decent amount of the join / quit cycle, and it's very different this time. The "community" has become excessively caustic over the course of Wrath. People talk about running groups out of guild like it's torture. Most people who have an aptitude to play WoW, have played it - the only people coming in are probably kids who are just starting to get into gaming. I'm supposing it's not coincidental how that's affected the maturity level of the average player. I mention all this because it was getting pretty tough to put up with in Wrath when every boss was a loot pinata. Now that things got tough it's not worth it to many people. Out of about 40 people in my guild who were regular players (one even being acquainted with the game since the Alpha), it's withered to about 5 who might keep playing.
WoW has run out of ideas, and run out of decent people to replenish its ranks. I'm not sure I'd say it's "doomed", but it's on a hell of a decline. My subscription runs out in 2 months, and I think I'm done with MMOs as well.
Honestly I think that's as much a fault of the system (Windows) as the game. As soon as you want to install a program and you click through the authorization process, a program is basically free to rape and destroy your system as it sees fit. A hundred start menu entries, icons on the desktop, worthless programs bundled together, files strewn over the whole system? Too bad man, you clicked ok. Sorry if the uninstall doesn't work, we don't care.
While this has been the windows experience for as long as I can remember, I'm puzzled why people still think this is fine. Another reason to play console games imo.
And on the sf side, as a lifelong sf fan, it *used* to be that there were 10 year or so cycles, where you'd get more fantasy for 10 years, then more sf; the last 15 or so, it's overwhelmingly fantasy. My take is that with the dumbing down of the educational system, and especially the unravelling of the Space Program, kids don't see a chance for them, so they go off into fantasy worlds where *something* can happen, and maybe they'll win the lottery, too.
It looks like science fiction in general is in a significant decline. I haven't read science fiction in years because there's hardly any science left in it. Most of what is labeled SF is in fact high tech fantasy, with no effort to explain anything. Spells and dragons are simply replaced with things like starships and hyperspace. I guess that makes sense with the lack of knowlege these days, where few people want to understand anything and just have someone else gloss over the details for them.
That sort of address will more than likely still be rejected because of the domain name that looks like a dynamic block. Simply having a matching ptr is often not enough.
The article summary is a bit inaccurate. It would be better described as you should never need to reboot a unix server to fix a problem. Personally I like to reboot machines about every 120 days or so - with FreeBSD boxes I just do it during version upgrades which is close enough. On boxes others mess with, it's a good idea just to make sure it comes up clean. It's come back to bite me in the ass before where there was a major problem (like a power loss), I wasn't there and when someone else at the company brought it up there were problems - sometimes compounded with many changes made incrementally over time. While already being in panic mode, they screw things up more and turn it into a clusterfuck.
Just because you never plan on having a fire doesn't mean you shouldn't have a fire drill.
Looking at how long it's taken to get browsers even approaching standards compliance, I dread the spec not being finalized for another 3 years. But I tend to look at the bright side. That's another 3 years that HTML 4 will be the defacto standard and will allow pretty much every thing that can read html to standardize on. Hell even IE might support it correctly 3 years from now. A moving target is very hard to implement, and while HTML4 has been out forever, only recently has MS gotten on board with making the effort to support it. Whatever happens to HTML after this point, at least we'll always be able to make pages against the HTML4 standard and know they will render correctly in just about everything.
GPU power consumption seems to be a different market though. No one cared about CPU power utilization until businesses started to care and AMD began processing per watt. That was mainly a question of scale though, because businesses have tons of servers and that adds up. Graphics cards are generally consumer items. Even enthusiasts would rarely have more than 3. And would someone willing to drop $500 per video card really care that much about power consumption?
Those of us that want decent performance at reasonable power consumption seem to be rare. For a while I thought perhaps power consumption would be limited when they couldn't drag any more power through the PCIE slot, but then they added a power connector. Figured eventually that power connector would top out and that would be the limiting factor, but now they just add more power connectors. I'm starting to think the only thing that will finally reign this in is how much power you can suck out of a wall socket. Chalk up another attribute for console gaming I guess.
Her: "What the FUCK! The fuckheads in IT gave some new bullshit version of Word on my fucking computer and it is completely fucking different. I spent like a fucking hour trying to find how to do "X". Where the fuck are my fucking toolbars? There is this new bullshit toolbar that is completely useless."
Typical. It's not the corporate world adopting a bunch of crap or forcing things down people's throats. It's not Microsoft's fault for making buggy badly designed garbage. No it's all the "fuckheads in IT". Small wonder job satisfaction in IT is so low and the businesses can push this kind of crap out with impunity.
Considering the quality and how those companies tend to treat users, as an American I wouldn't mind being free from many of those American companies myself.
I suppose this is supposed to be a scare mongering type message, but oddly enough I find it's going the wrong way. So we work for them, so what? If anything the best thing that could happen to America would be manufacturing more goods and services for export. Why do we care who we work for if we don't salt the earth we live on? Do the Chinese complain about "working for us"? Anything but.
I pay a fraction of what I would have had to pay 20 years ago. However I don't buy hot off the presses games either. If you wait about 2 years to buy a release, you can buy them brand new for about $20. Two decades ago stores rarely kept games in stock like that, so it was buy it new or you might not be able to get it at all down the road. Availability through the Internet changed things a lot.
Is there any reason they couldn't just implement version numbers as they gain better support and address functionality? HTML 4 was intended to reign browsers in that had gone in all directions, to a standard implementation. Now I'll be back to checking what the big 3 browsers have in common so I can start using new features. Congratulations to W3C in managing to marginalize their relevance, yet again.
Don't get your hopes up (as I was starting to). If you go to the website you see that the 2.x series still looks like garbage and has screwed up arrangement and functionality. I used to cite Amarok as a killer app for kde, and now it's just total junk. How or why they would do this to a project/application that was already wildly popular is puzzling.
Can most people honestly tell the difference between a diamond and high quality crystal? Why bother with diamonds (synthetic or not) at all if we're just going for sparkly stuff? It's strange to think about, but cheap plastic jewelry we consider garbage today, would have been fascinating and probably fetched a very good sum of money two thousand years ago. But we don't really seem to care if it's sparkly.. just if it sparkles and costs a lot.
It is a tough problem however. For instance having a lot of things rated at say 0, gives the reader the impression that you simply don't like much of anything. I had this sort of problems doing reviews myself. The stuff I thought was generally pretty good, but when everything was pretty good, nearly everything rated a 7. So I spent a LONG time going through them and normalizing nearly everything from a 5. I took the titles I rated low and dropped them pretty low as you suggested, and thought a lot more about if something really was better than the average. In the end I still ended up with 7.5 and so-forth, but it became harder and harder for a title to get closer to a 10. I think one of the more important things to do, even if no one will read it; is to clarify how you scale your ratings and what a 0 actually means compared to a 5. I agree that the scales are out of wack to the point that they don't mean anything, but no one really bothers to explain how the ratings are actually done from the reviewers point either.
Seeing as how debian only releases every century or so, that's not really a problem. The current release is the one you hear about. If it's not that it's the one you vaguely remember. The one before your kids were born, you were in high school, or possibly back when MTV played music videos (or insert some other thing waay back). If it's a version you haven't heard of it's so outdated that only the old long bearded unix sages locked up in corporate server farms programing cobol/fortran remember much about.
I don't know, I mean what would you expect Blizzard to say about this anyway? Even one of the loading tips says "all things in moderation, including world of warcraft". I think Blizzard is a company that honestly is concerned about people having fun. Idealy I would think a game company like that would want you to have a healthy activity in playing their game, not an overwhelming addiction - just for the simple fact that it's a better image to portray on the game. They also make money whether you play for 30 minutes a month, or 100 hours. Drawing out the subscription is the important part, so people having an "addiction" would probably mean that when they quit, they have to quit all together. Casual play is a huge money maker for them.
I wonder if that's why they put the geeky shows on Fridays. You either have nothing to do on Friday nights, or your capable enough with technology to go watch it on Hulu. To be honest, now that summer has hit I watch it on Hulu myself. That probably wouldn't even have occurred to me but they advertised that you could watch it on the web at your convenience.
I wonder if Firefly would have met the same fate if people could have gotten past the scheduling fiasco by simply watching it online. Having a glued fanbase with a show you can just shuffle to whatever open time slot could be a nice asset to Fox.
He may be making assumptions, but this is fairly accurate from what Blizzard themselves has commented on. A few months after the latest expansion, Ghostcrawler commented that something like only 60% had a max level character. Keep in mind that the insane race led to one person having a level 80 two days after release. The percentage that never enter an endgame dungeon is well below 50%, but it's still more than you would think (that's off the top of my head, I don't have any citation for that)
Hardcore is of course a relative term. There are people who completely obsess about every aspect of the game, and raid continuously. There are however also a lot of "casual" people who never really raid but spend a significant amount of time in the game doing other things. Or sometimes nothing at all. I've met a few soccer moms who basically use it as an amusing chat room. They watch their kids and you hardly ever get a reply from them within 10 minutes because they're almost always AFK (away from keyboard), but they're on for a significant amount of time.
World of Warcraft isn't really taylored to anyone anymore. There's a LOT of things to do whether you raid or not. Achievements in particular moved in this direction.
That was actually a fun arms race I can recall. First it started with noscript, but then they started closing noscript tag if found - for at least a month you could do noscript twice and it still blocked the popup. You could also put <!-- at the end for a while too. Eventually you ended up putting all sorts of crazy garbage at the end in an attempt to break the popup window while geocities would try to figure out how to unbreak it, but most people had long given up before that.
I think they were trying to move towards social networking, but didn't have an idea of how to do that. As you said they moved people with similar interests together. You could then assume that people would be able to find people with similar interests based on that. All you really need to do is browse your neighborhood or just change the number in the URL bar.
However that broke down pretty quickly because neighborhood pools were of a given size (4 digits). That's why I ended up in Area51 instead of Tokyo where my page should have been located. Also personal homepages were often rather scatterbrained, and people changed interests over time and pages became dislocated that way. I mean where do you put someone's Xena/Sailor Moon homepage anyway?
I think that social networking was a concept many were aware of could more tightly nit a "community" but no one really knew how to actually get that community together. They just sort of threw stuff in a pile and hoped it would work itself out - which it usually didn't. With the technology at the time, maybe there wasn't a whole lot they could do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that would be blocked by legislation. Politicians would be more than happy to run to the aid of the weak if they can spin it out like they're a champion of justice. Personally I could see this as being a valuable tool for other reasons. Many companies can project costs and make adjustments on future strategies. For example if they could predict an influx of some type of illness, they could better prepare themselves to deal with that cost instead of being reactionary as they're forced to be now. Not to say that excessive forecasting wouldn't be just as dangerous, if not more so; but I could see some value to this.
The same part as Final that Fantasy doesn't understand?
I played WoW since the middle of BC. I've seen a decent amount of the join / quit cycle, and it's very different this time. The "community" has become excessively caustic over the course of Wrath. People talk about running groups out of guild like it's torture. Most people who have an aptitude to play WoW, have played it - the only people coming in are probably kids who are just starting to get into gaming. I'm supposing it's not coincidental how that's affected the maturity level of the average player. I mention all this because it was getting pretty tough to put up with in Wrath when every boss was a loot pinata. Now that things got tough it's not worth it to many people. Out of about 40 people in my guild who were regular players (one even being acquainted with the game since the Alpha), it's withered to about 5 who might keep playing.
WoW has run out of ideas, and run out of decent people to replenish its ranks. I'm not sure I'd say it's "doomed", but it's on a hell of a decline. My subscription runs out in 2 months, and I think I'm done with MMOs as well.
Honestly I think that's as much a fault of the system (Windows) as the game. As soon as you want to install a program and you click through the authorization process, a program is basically free to rape and destroy your system as it sees fit. A hundred start menu entries, icons on the desktop, worthless programs bundled together, files strewn over the whole system? Too bad man, you clicked ok. Sorry if the uninstall doesn't work, we don't care.
While this has been the windows experience for as long as I can remember, I'm puzzled why people still think this is fine. Another reason to play console games imo.
And on the sf side, as a lifelong sf fan, it *used* to be that there were 10 year or so cycles, where you'd get more fantasy for 10 years, then more sf; the last 15 or so, it's overwhelmingly fantasy. My take is that with the dumbing down of the educational system, and especially the unravelling of the Space Program, kids don't see a chance for them, so they go off into fantasy worlds where *something* can happen, and maybe they'll win the lottery, too.
It looks like science fiction in general is in a significant decline. I haven't read science fiction in years because there's hardly any science left in it. Most of what is labeled SF is in fact high tech fantasy, with no effort to explain anything. Spells and dragons are simply replaced with things like starships and hyperspace. I guess that makes sense with the lack of knowlege these days, where few people want to understand anything and just have someone else gloss over the details for them.
That sort of address will more than likely still be rejected because of the domain name that looks like a dynamic block. Simply having a matching ptr is often not enough.
The article summary is a bit inaccurate. It would be better described as you should never need to reboot a unix server to fix a problem. Personally I like to reboot machines about every 120 days or so - with FreeBSD boxes I just do it during version upgrades which is close enough. On boxes others mess with, it's a good idea just to make sure it comes up clean. It's come back to bite me in the ass before where there was a major problem (like a power loss), I wasn't there and when someone else at the company brought it up there were problems - sometimes compounded with many changes made incrementally over time. While already being in panic mode, they screw things up more and turn it into a clusterfuck.
Just because you never plan on having a fire doesn't mean you shouldn't have a fire drill.
And if I'm not on there, you can bet I'm going to keep my trap shut until I need to say something.
This is why bcc is dangerous and I discourage people from using it. Because it requires intelligence.
Looking at how long it's taken to get browsers even approaching standards compliance, I dread the spec not being finalized for another 3 years. But I tend to look at the bright side. That's another 3 years that HTML 4 will be the defacto standard and will allow pretty much every thing that can read html to standardize on. Hell even IE might support it correctly 3 years from now. A moving target is very hard to implement, and while HTML4 has been out forever, only recently has MS gotten on board with making the effort to support it. Whatever happens to HTML after this point, at least we'll always be able to make pages against the HTML4 standard and know they will render correctly in just about everything.
GPU power consumption seems to be a different market though. No one cared about CPU power utilization until businesses started to care and AMD began processing per watt. That was mainly a question of scale though, because businesses have tons of servers and that adds up. Graphics cards are generally consumer items. Even enthusiasts would rarely have more than 3. And would someone willing to drop $500 per video card really care that much about power consumption?
Those of us that want decent performance at reasonable power consumption seem to be rare. For a while I thought perhaps power consumption would be limited when they couldn't drag any more power through the PCIE slot, but then they added a power connector. Figured eventually that power connector would top out and that would be the limiting factor, but now they just add more power connectors. I'm starting to think the only thing that will finally reign this in is how much power you can suck out of a wall socket. Chalk up another attribute for console gaming I guess.
Her: "What the FUCK! The fuckheads in IT gave some new bullshit version of Word on my fucking computer and it is completely fucking different. I spent like a fucking hour trying to find how to do "X". Where the fuck are my fucking toolbars? There is this new bullshit toolbar that is completely useless."
Typical. It's not the corporate world adopting a bunch of crap or forcing things down people's throats. It's not Microsoft's fault for making buggy badly designed garbage. No it's all the "fuckheads in IT". Small wonder job satisfaction in IT is so low and the businesses can push this kind of crap out with impunity.
Considering the quality and how those companies tend to treat users, as an American I wouldn't mind being free from many of those American companies myself.
If you look at the picture in the article, there is still another key in its place. How hard it will be to remap remains to be seen of course.
I suppose this is supposed to be a scare mongering type message, but oddly enough I find it's going the wrong way. So we work for them, so what? If anything the best thing that could happen to America would be manufacturing more goods and services for export. Why do we care who we work for if we don't salt the earth we live on? Do the Chinese complain about "working for us"? Anything but.
I pay a fraction of what I would have had to pay 20 years ago. However I don't buy hot off the presses games either. If you wait about 2 years to buy a release, you can buy them brand new for about $20. Two decades ago stores rarely kept games in stock like that, so it was buy it new or you might not be able to get it at all down the road. Availability through the Internet changed things a lot.
Is there any reason they couldn't just implement version numbers as they gain better support and address functionality? HTML 4 was intended to reign browsers in that had gone in all directions, to a standard implementation. Now I'll be back to checking what the big 3 browsers have in common so I can start using new features. Congratulations to W3C in managing to marginalize their relevance, yet again.
Don't get your hopes up (as I was starting to). If you go to the website you see that the 2.x series still looks like garbage and has screwed up arrangement and functionality. I used to cite Amarok as a killer app for kde, and now it's just total junk. How or why they would do this to a project/application that was already wildly popular is puzzling.
Can most people honestly tell the difference between a diamond and high quality crystal? Why bother with diamonds (synthetic or not) at all if we're just going for sparkly stuff? It's strange to think about, but cheap plastic jewelry we consider garbage today, would have been fascinating and probably fetched a very good sum of money two thousand years ago. But we don't really seem to care if it's sparkly.. just if it sparkles and costs a lot.
It is a tough problem however. For instance having a lot of things rated at say 0, gives the reader the impression that you simply don't like much of anything. I had this sort of problems doing reviews myself. The stuff I thought was generally pretty good, but when everything was pretty good, nearly everything rated a 7. So I spent a LONG time going through them and normalizing nearly everything from a 5. I took the titles I rated low and dropped them pretty low as you suggested, and thought a lot more about if something really was better than the average. In the end I still ended up with 7.5 and so-forth, but it became harder and harder for a title to get closer to a 10. I think one of the more important things to do, even if no one will read it; is to clarify how you scale your ratings and what a 0 actually means compared to a 5. I agree that the scales are out of wack to the point that they don't mean anything, but no one really bothers to explain how the ratings are actually done from the reviewers point either.
Seeing as how debian only releases every century or so, that's not really a problem. The current release is the one you hear about. If it's not that it's the one you vaguely remember. The one before your kids were born, you were in high school, or possibly back when MTV played music videos (or insert some other thing waay back). If it's a version you haven't heard of it's so outdated that only the old long bearded unix sages locked up in corporate server farms programing cobol/fortran remember much about.
I don't know, I mean what would you expect Blizzard to say about this anyway? Even one of the loading tips says "all things in moderation, including world of warcraft". I think Blizzard is a company that honestly is concerned about people having fun. Idealy I would think a game company like that would want you to have a healthy activity in playing their game, not an overwhelming addiction - just for the simple fact that it's a better image to portray on the game. They also make money whether you play for 30 minutes a month, or 100 hours. Drawing out the subscription is the important part, so people having an "addiction" would probably mean that when they quit, they have to quit all together. Casual play is a huge money maker for them.
I wonder if that's why they put the geeky shows on Fridays. You either have nothing to do on Friday nights, or your capable enough with technology to go watch it on Hulu. To be honest, now that summer has hit I watch it on Hulu myself. That probably wouldn't even have occurred to me but they advertised that you could watch it on the web at your convenience.
I wonder if Firefly would have met the same fate if people could have gotten past the scheduling fiasco by simply watching it online. Having a glued fanbase with a show you can just shuffle to whatever open time slot could be a nice asset to Fox.
He may be making assumptions, but this is fairly accurate from what Blizzard themselves has commented on. A few months after the latest expansion, Ghostcrawler commented that something like only 60% had a max level character. Keep in mind that the insane race led to one person having a level 80 two days after release. The percentage that never enter an endgame dungeon is well below 50%, but it's still more than you would think (that's off the top of my head, I don't have any citation for that)
Hardcore is of course a relative term. There are people who completely obsess about every aspect of the game, and raid continuously. There are however also a lot of "casual" people who never really raid but spend a significant amount of time in the game doing other things. Or sometimes nothing at all. I've met a few soccer moms who basically use it as an amusing chat room. They watch their kids and you hardly ever get a reply from them within 10 minutes because they're almost always AFK (away from keyboard), but they're on for a significant amount of time.
World of Warcraft isn't really taylored to anyone anymore. There's a LOT of things to do whether you raid or not. Achievements in particular moved in this direction.
That was actually a fun arms race I can recall. First it started with noscript, but then they started closing noscript tag if found - for at least a month you could do noscript twice and it still blocked the popup. You could also put <!-- at the end for a while too. Eventually you ended up putting all sorts of crazy garbage at the end in an attempt to break the popup window while geocities would try to figure out how to unbreak it, but most people had long given up before that.
I think they were trying to move towards social networking, but didn't have an idea of how to do that. As you said they moved people with similar interests together. You could then assume that people would be able to find people with similar interests based on that. All you really need to do is browse your neighborhood or just change the number in the URL bar.
However that broke down pretty quickly because neighborhood pools were of a given size (4 digits). That's why I ended up in Area51 instead of Tokyo where my page should have been located. Also personal homepages were often rather scatterbrained, and people changed interests over time and pages became dislocated that way. I mean where do you put someone's Xena/Sailor Moon homepage anyway?
I think that social networking was a concept many were aware of could more tightly nit a "community" but no one really knew how to actually get that community together. They just sort of threw stuff in a pile and hoped it would work itself out - which it usually didn't. With the technology at the time, maybe there wasn't a whole lot they could do.