It's a combination of what's in the ship and your twitch skills. That's not really a bad thing.
If you don't have a good engine, then you can't expect to turn quite fast enough to face the oncoming enemy. If you don't have stout enough shields, you can't expect a very lengthy amount of time before hits start impacting your armor. If you don't have stout armor, then you can expect to be in the vacuum fairly quickly.
If you take two similarly equipped players, then you can expect the combat to be based mostly upon their twitch skills. If you take two very differently equipped players, then you can expect a significant difference in their ability to fight.
If you actually play the game, then you would be able to see that you needn't spend a terrible amount of time in the game to get to the point where you would be decently equipped. Being part of a Player Association/Guild that is actually helpful to one another would increase the amount of decent equipment that you can mount in your ship.
From a RL and In game friend, I was given a very decent shield generator for my character's ship, from my PA's group treasury, I was able to pull out some very decent weapons for my character's ship and the ship is very well equipped. Honestly, that's not to bad for someone that can play for only a few hours a few nights a week.
...my wife and I were watching a scene taking place in the SVU Precinct office and we both noticed, near the middle of screen right behind the officers a PC.
My wife turned to me and said, "It looks like they need to update their Anti-Virus"
Right in the center of the really busy screen was the Norton Anti-Virus "Update your Anti-Virus Definitions" window.
Marketing is where you come up with an idea, get together with focus groups and determine needs/wants for a potential product.
Advertising is when you try and tell people outside of the group the product is originally marketed for, that they need it more then anything else.
One is filled with lies, the other is filled with attempting to make the right thing. Knowing that difference is very important.
If I had a choice between having a good marketer or a good advertiser move into upper management, I would take the marketer all day long, any day. Based on the simple fact that the marketer is trained to find out what is needed and work towards that goal and teh advertiser is trained to take what they have and lie all the way to bank about it.
...of course it probably hasn't entered into anyone's mind here that the whole thing is a 'hoax' project designed to cover up whatever actual project they might be wanting to or actually are currently working on.
No, I am not suggesting some kind of bizarre conspiracy, just some 'front project' to cover up something that may involve new laser assault/defense systems, sonic weaponry, or new methods of fighter control mechanisms or something that might be really cool, really plausible or equally 'cool' yet disturbingly vile that they would rather not explain to the American public or Congress.
So, seeing that most of the nation, albiet only by a small fraction in the larger scheme of things, would fall for such crap, they decided to trot out that story. One, to be able to push it past such science-blind people as the majority of this nation and secondly to thumb their noses at the rest of us that would know and understand such a thing is bollox, yet are unfortunately unable to do anything significant about it...
Cheney has annoucned on several occasions that he will not be running for the Presidency in four years. The man is old, he has heart problems and apparently wants to retire from politics in 4 years, maybe sooner.
Actually Linux is perfectly acceptable in this discussion. My original statements asked if Macs were superior at a number of tasks.
The next section of my initial post decsribed a scenario using the most commonly used desktop OS, which happens to be Windows. I could and probably should have brought out Linux then.
However, doing so would have resulted in the "That stuff is all free, the interfaces all suck, you can't get anything done... blah blah blah..." attacks that are all to common from Windows and MacOSX users.
No. Just because Macs are more obscure and thereby less exploited than PC's does NOT make them more secure. If people made a mass switch to Macs to avoid windows worms then Mac worms would flourish.
Actually, this is a logical fallacy. If that was truly the case, then we would be constantly hearing about how inecure the Apache web-server is, since it is used to run more web-sites then any other web-server. However, Microsoft IIS is the most cracked web-server even though it serves less then 25% of the web-server market.
The rest of your response, minuse the fanboy reference, if spot on.
Yes. With the advent of always on connections, the existance of worms began an increase the likes of which has never been seen before. Taking a windows PC and plugging it into any network connection that isn't behind your own firewall runs the risk of an infected computer in 5 minutes or less. To safely surf the internet on a PC you need at least, a firewall, virus scanner, ad aware or similar program, and a decent popup blocker. To do the same on a mac, you just need, well, a mac.
Regardless of the computer Operating System that you connect to the Internet, you should have some method of protection between your Computer and the Internet. I don't care if you are running Linux, Amiga, MacOSX, Windows, Acorn, IRIX, AIX, Solaris or what have you. Connecting directly to the Internet is asking for trouble.
Connecting to the Internet with any computer without a firewall protection shows an incredible lack of understanding regarding computer security.
Again the answer is yes. A windows PC by default would download and activate embedded programs and files in emails, causing mass spreads of viruses. Again, further indoctrination of users to safe habits is always useful, but once again, the mac doesnot run these by default, and even if it did, it couldn't execute them.
You are wrong here. A Windows PC, by default, doesn't perform this act. Microsoft Outlook, by default, USED to perform this act. Of course, Microsoft sort of fixed that issue. However, you are neglecting that there are quite a few more Email reading programs then just Outlook for the Windows PC. I believe very few of those applications are set to automatically run attachments. All I know is that Mozilla Mail will not do such a thing.
This is once again another yes answer. Behavior on macs is very consistant through all applications, and simple basic features of the mac are shown to increase your effectiveness. It's probably not a largely noticeable difference in the application itself (infact I would argue that there's little difference if any there) but a system which lends itself to easily and effectively getting work done out of the box will shave time off of your activities.
Again, you are confusing doing office tasks on a Windows PC with Microsoft Office as the only available application. If you download and isntall Open Office or purchase StarOffice for a Windows PC, you see a very consistent Layout for the applications with all of the menu options, where you would expect them.
The key word here is adequetely. With a mac, it can be performed well. Infact, all the basic tools are included with the system, not only Photo, but video, DVD production, music production, all part of the basic tool set.
Depending upon where you buy your Windows PC and who made it, all of those tools are also included with the 'base package'. Dell, for instance, includes DVD authoring software, basic photo editing software and other nifty gadgets.
However, there is also Linux. With your typical Linux distros on a PC, you get all of that and MORE. You get FULL programing environments with Source Code. Where is that with your basic Apple Desktop PC?
"I happen to think that my time is kinda valuable and if by using a mac I can surf the web and not have to spend lots of my time cleaning off spyware etc every week/month then I say, its absolutely fucking 'superior'"
I use Windows XP at home and I don't have Spyware or Virus infections to clean out. I haven't used Internet Explorer for anything besides hitting Windows Update since prior to Windows 98 being released. I have also been careful about what I download and install. That's common sense, if you aren't careful about what you download and install in your Mac, you can indeed run into problems with malware.
"Same arguement can also be made here..oh wait, when was my Mac infected with an email borne virus.....oh thats right, it hasn't So again, the lack of downtime, is a huge plus, thereby gaining my approval of the 'superior' tag.."
I have never had any of my PCs infected with an email virus. Most of my emailing activity has been performed through a web-based email provider and if I do use a local email client, I use Mozilla Mail and had used Netscape before that.
Again, I am not seeing the 'superiority' of the Mac platform on anything beyond being much more expensive. Besides, as other posters have metioned, all of those tasks are perfectly safe with using Linux on PC hardware.
That is an objective statement that is more opinion then anything else.
Is a Mac 'superior' at surfing the Internet? No.
Is a Mac 'superior' at sending/recieving email? No.
Is a Mac 'superior' at performing standard office taks? (Make a spreadsheet, text document and so on.) Again, no.
Those tasks can be perfectly performed on a Windows based PC for much less. Even non-professional and professional photo editing can be performed very adequetely on a Windows Based PC. Sure, you might see some speed increase for some photo editing tasks on a Mac, but from what I have seen, shaving 10 seconds here and there, upwards of a minute here or there, means nothing to *home* users.
All of that, for less then what it costs to do those same tasks on a Mac. Seems to me that the Mac is only truly superior at costing more money.
If I stop playing games on my PC, then I stop using Windows on my PC. When that happens, I am moving to Linux, not MacOSX. Because the Mac hardware still costs more and likely always will cost more then commodity PC Hardware.
...I was chatting through IM with a young woman, a few years back, that was a low-level reporter for a 'news' organization in the area. She was telling me about this story she was putting together and it was so biased, so emotionally charged and lacked so much context that it was milimeters away from being an opinion piece.
I spent some time asking her the 'hard questions', you know the type of questions that add context, put things into a different perspective and such. The real silly thing is that I was partial to the slant she was writing into the story, it was just interesting that someone like me, without a college degree, could actually educate someone with a "News Reporting" degree on how to actually tell the news...
It seems to me that we need to have people that weren't trained to be reporters actually doing the reporting in this country.
Seriously, this is the same exact thinking that has existed in the Information Technology for decades and will likely exist for many more decades.
Why is it suddenly a big 'issue' now when most all of us have been guilty at one point or another of implementing, designing something without thinking for a moment how some non-technical person would interact with it?
Oh, that's right it is about voting now. So, suddenly we are supposed to throw out decades of learned behavior that the IT industry thrives on because our glaring failure is suddenly involved in something important...
Reality Check, our glaring failure has existed in extremely important aspects of life for nearly the entire life of the computer industry. I don't care who you are in the IT Industry, if you aren't considering non-technical end-users in your design (of most applications/interfaces), you are only contributing to the problem.
...there are many applications for MS Windows that simple refuse to run unless they have either Admin Privileges or are provided some fairly strong access to the system with the 'Power User' group setting.
Yeah, you can get away with running some applications using the "RunAs" command, but that is nowhere near as powerful or as capable as the much older *nix version of that.
Seriously though, out of the millions of people that use computers running Windows, very few of those people are even aware different levels of access to the PC and a smaller number of those folk understand that there is a utility in MS Windows called "RunAs".
This isn't a case of just selling somewhere else. Wal-Mart is the largest retail chain in the world. It is the retail chain that is shopped the most.
If you are selling your Do-dad for $9.99 everywhere, including Wal-Mart. (Which sells more of your Do-dads then all the other places combined, thus giving you the greatest amount of total revenue.) Then Wal-Mart tells you that you either start selling the Do-dad for $4.97 or they will stop carrying your product and buy it from a manufacturer in China. What choice do you have?
You look at your books and you see that you either sell your Do-dad at the price Wal-Mart sets, or you lose most of your business and possibly go out of business. In either case, you are forced to cut costs by closing down factories and or moving operations oversea to take advantage of lower operating costs.
This is simple global economics it is nearly impossible not to understand, unless you are purposefully/willfully choosing to be ignorant about it.
...in recent months there has been a cornucopia of stories detailing how Wal-Mart does business.
Some of those stories details how Wal-Mart abuses its position as the largest, wealthiest and subsequently most powerful retail chain in the world.
They have squeezed their suppliers enough that many suppliers have had no choice but to shut down all manufacturing operations in the United States and move those operations into foreign markets where they can continue to stay in business.
The option is either lose their largest customer and possibly enough revenue to shut down completely or shutdown all US Factories, put anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand American factory workers out of a job and stay in business. Business-wise, they have no choice but to comply with Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, that isn't good for the US workers that just lost their jobs.
You can say things like, "Well, those American workers should have learned to live with earning less money."
It's not all about just the money paid to an hourly worker. It's about the cost of benefits, cost of mandatory operation fees, like licenses, worker's compensation, unemployment office fees and a number of additional aspects that raise the cost of production in the US.
Then, you also have to take into account the minimum wage law. If you can have something produced overseas by workers that are fine with making, over the couse of a single day, the same amount that a highly skilled American manufacturing worker, like a Tool & Die Maker (Which is between $19 and $25 an hour), is paid for one hour. As a business, what are you gonig to do? Stay in business or go out of business?
Wal-Mart has done more to help decrease the number of available manufacturing jobs in the United States then most people think.
I am sorry, but the "Bad Guy" is in charge of a place called "Freeport" and the "Good Chick" is in charge of a place call "Qeynos".
That goes against everything we know about Fantasy world villain leaders and good people leaders...
Villains are supposed to come from places with hard to pronounce or oddly named places, like "Qeynos" and good people are supposed to come from places like "Freeport"...
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom. I for one do NOT welcome our convention thwarting overlords...
EQ2? Ha! More like EQ-Spew... That ruins everything...
Last time I checked, it was about 600 numbers away from 40,000. You may as well as say that Lexmark is recalling a hundred gajillion million billion printers if you don't want to be accurate that is.
The difference, at $200 a printer, is about $12,000 of value, plus shipping, handling and repair costs, which could inflate that price difference up around $17,000 to $20,000.
...want to see the general populace actually become smart enough to see everyday scams.
What will I do for fun if I am not able to see those extremely hilarious informercials about how you can do *nothing* and the fat will just dissolved off your body!
Slashdot Mirror
It's a combination of what's in the ship and your twitch skills. That's not really a bad thing.
If you don't have a good engine, then you can't expect to turn quite fast enough to face the oncoming enemy. If you don't have stout enough shields, you can't expect a very lengthy amount of time before hits start impacting your armor. If you don't have stout armor, then you can expect to be in the vacuum fairly quickly.
If you take two similarly equipped players, then you can expect the combat to be based mostly upon their twitch skills. If you take two very differently equipped players, then you can expect a significant difference in their ability to fight.
If you actually play the game, then you would be able to see that you needn't spend a terrible amount of time in the game to get to the point where you would be decently equipped. Being part of a Player Association/Guild that is actually helpful to one another would increase the amount of decent equipment that you can mount in your ship.
From a RL and In game friend, I was given a very decent shield generator for my character's ship, from my PA's group treasury, I was able to pull out some very decent weapons for my character's ship and the ship is very well equipped. Honestly, that's not to bad for someone that can play for only a few hours a few nights a week.
My wife turned to me and said, "It looks like they need to update their Anti-Virus"
Right in the center of the really busy screen was the Norton Anti-Virus "Update your Anti-Virus Definitions" window.
Know the Difference.
Marketing is where you come up with an idea, get together with focus groups and determine needs/wants for a potential product.
Advertising is when you try and tell people outside of the group the product is originally marketed for, that they need it more then anything else.
One is filled with lies, the other is filled with attempting to make the right thing. Knowing that difference is very important.
If I had a choice between having a good marketer or a good advertiser move into upper management, I would take the marketer all day long, any day. Based on the simple fact that the marketer is trained to find out what is needed and work towards that goal and teh advertiser is trained to take what they have and lie all the way to bank about it.
If I had a million or one Mod points, they would all be yours. Your above statement hits the nail right on the head.
This is what Americans should be caring about. This is what Americans should want more then anything.
No, I am not suggesting some kind of bizarre conspiracy, just some 'front project' to cover up something that may involve new laser assault/defense systems, sonic weaponry, or new methods of fighter control mechanisms or something that might be really cool, really plausible or equally 'cool' yet disturbingly vile that they would rather not explain to the American public or Congress.
So, seeing that most of the nation, albiet only by a small fraction in the larger scheme of things, would fall for such crap, they decided to trot out that story. One, to be able to push it past such science-blind people as the majority of this nation and secondly to thumb their noses at the rest of us that would know and understand such a thing is bollox, yet are unfortunately unable to do anything significant about it...
Cheney has annoucned on several occasions that he will not be running for the Presidency in four years. The man is old, he has heart problems and apparently wants to retire from politics in 4 years, maybe sooner.
Actually Linux is perfectly acceptable in this discussion. My original statements asked if Macs were superior at a number of tasks.
The next section of my initial post decsribed a scenario using the most commonly used desktop OS, which happens to be Windows. I could and probably should have brought out Linux then.
However, doing so would have resulted in the "That stuff is all free, the interfaces all suck, you can't get anything done... blah blah blah..." attacks that are all to common from Windows and MacOSX users.
No. Just because Macs are more obscure and thereby less exploited than PC's does NOT make them more secure. If people made a mass switch to Macs to avoid windows worms then Mac worms would flourish.
Actually, this is a logical fallacy. If that was truly the case, then we would be constantly hearing about how inecure the Apache web-server is, since it is used to run more web-sites then any other web-server. However, Microsoft IIS is the most cracked web-server even though it serves less then 25% of the web-server market.
The rest of your response, minuse the fanboy reference, if spot on.
Yes. With the advent of always on connections, the existance of worms began an increase the likes of which has never been seen before. Taking a windows PC and plugging it into any network connection that isn't behind your own firewall runs the risk of an infected computer in 5 minutes or less. To safely surf the internet on a PC you need at least, a firewall, virus scanner, ad aware or similar program, and a decent popup blocker. To do the same on a mac, you just need, well, a mac.
Regardless of the computer Operating System that you connect to the Internet, you should have some method of protection between your Computer and the Internet. I don't care if you are running Linux, Amiga, MacOSX, Windows, Acorn, IRIX, AIX, Solaris or what have you. Connecting directly to the Internet is asking for trouble.
Connecting to the Internet with any computer without a firewall protection shows an incredible lack of understanding regarding computer security.
Again the answer is yes. A windows PC by default would download and activate embedded programs and files in emails, causing mass spreads of viruses. Again, further indoctrination of users to safe habits is always useful, but once again, the mac doesnot run these by default, and even if it did, it couldn't execute them.
You are wrong here. A Windows PC, by default, doesn't perform this act. Microsoft Outlook, by default, USED to perform this act. Of course, Microsoft sort of fixed that issue. However, you are neglecting that there are quite a few more Email reading programs then just Outlook for the Windows PC. I believe very few of those applications are set to automatically run attachments. All I know is that Mozilla Mail will not do such a thing.
This is once again another yes answer. Behavior on macs is very consistant through all applications, and simple basic features of the mac are shown to increase your effectiveness. It's probably not a largely noticeable difference in the application itself (infact I would argue that there's little difference if any there) but a system which lends itself to easily and effectively getting work done out of the box will shave time off of your activities.
Again, you are confusing doing office tasks on a Windows PC with Microsoft Office as the only available application. If you download and isntall Open Office or purchase StarOffice for a Windows PC, you see a very consistent Layout for the applications with all of the menu options, where you would expect them.
The key word here is adequetely. With a mac, it can be performed well. Infact, all the basic tools are included with the system, not only Photo, but video, DVD production, music production, all part of the basic tool set.
Depending upon where you buy your Windows PC and who made it, all of those tools are also included with the 'base package'. Dell, for instance, includes DVD authoring software, basic photo editing software and other nifty gadgets.
However, there is also Linux. With your typical Linux distros on a PC, you get all of that and MORE. You get FULL programing environments with Source Code. Where is that with your basic Apple Desktop PC?
"I happen to think that my time is kinda valuable and if by using a mac I can surf the web and not have to spend lots of my time cleaning off spyware etc every week/month then I say, its absolutely fucking 'superior'"
I use Windows XP at home and I don't have Spyware or Virus infections to clean out. I haven't used Internet Explorer for anything besides hitting Windows Update since prior to Windows 98 being released. I have also been careful about what I download and install. That's common sense, if you aren't careful about what you download and install in your Mac, you can indeed run into problems with malware.
"Same arguement can also be made here..oh wait, when was my Mac infected with an email borne virus.....oh thats right, it hasn't So again, the lack of downtime, is a huge plus, thereby gaining my approval of the 'superior' tag.."
I have never had any of my PCs infected with an email virus. Most of my emailing activity has been performed through a web-based email provider and if I do use a local email client, I use Mozilla Mail and had used Netscape before that.
Again, I am not seeing the 'superiority' of the Mac platform on anything beyond being much more expensive. Besides, as other posters have metioned, all of those tasks are perfectly safe with using Linux on PC hardware.
That is an objective statement that is more opinion then anything else.
Is a Mac 'superior' at surfing the Internet? No.
Is a Mac 'superior' at sending/recieving email? No.
Is a Mac 'superior' at performing standard office taks? (Make a spreadsheet, text document and so on.) Again, no.
Those tasks can be perfectly performed on a Windows based PC for much less. Even non-professional and professional photo editing can be performed very adequetely on a Windows Based PC. Sure, you might see some speed increase for some photo editing tasks on a Mac, but from what I have seen, shaving 10 seconds here and there, upwards of a minute here or there, means nothing to *home* users.
All of that, for less then what it costs to do those same tasks on a Mac. Seems to me that the Mac is only truly superior at costing more money.
If I stop playing games on my PC, then I stop using Windows on my PC. When that happens, I am moving to Linux, not MacOSX. Because the Mac hardware still costs more and likely always will cost more then commodity PC Hardware.
I spent some time asking her the 'hard questions', you know the type of questions that add context, put things into a different perspective and such. The real silly thing is that I was partial to the slant she was writing into the story, it was just interesting that someone like me, without a college degree, could actually educate someone with a "News Reporting" degree on how to actually tell the news...
It seems to me that we need to have people that weren't trained to be reporters actually doing the reporting in this country.
Seriously, this is the same exact thinking that has existed in the Information Technology for decades and will likely exist for many more decades.
Why is it suddenly a big 'issue' now when most all of us have been guilty at one point or another of implementing, designing something without thinking for a moment how some non-technical person would interact with it?
Oh, that's right it is about voting now. So, suddenly we are supposed to throw out decades of learned behavior that the IT industry thrives on because our glaring failure is suddenly involved in something important...
Reality Check, our glaring failure has existed in extremely important aspects of life for nearly the entire life of the computer industry. I don't care who you are in the IT Industry, if you aren't considering non-technical end-users in your design (of most applications/interfaces), you are only contributing to the problem.
Yeah, you can get away with running some applications using the "RunAs" command, but that is nowhere near as powerful or as capable as the much older *nix version of that.
Seriously though, out of the millions of people that use computers running Windows, very few of those people are even aware different levels of access to the PC and a smaller number of those folk understand that there is a utility in MS Windows called "RunAs".
This isn't a case of just selling somewhere else. Wal-Mart is the largest retail chain in the world. It is the retail chain that is shopped the most.
If you are selling your Do-dad for $9.99 everywhere, including Wal-Mart. (Which sells more of your Do-dads then all the other places combined, thus giving you the greatest amount of total revenue.) Then Wal-Mart tells you that you either start selling the Do-dad for $4.97 or they will stop carrying your product and buy it from a manufacturer in China. What choice do you have?
You look at your books and you see that you either sell your Do-dad at the price Wal-Mart sets, or you lose most of your business and possibly go out of business. In either case, you are forced to cut costs by closing down factories and or moving operations oversea to take advantage of lower operating costs.
This is simple global economics it is nearly impossible not to understand, unless you are purposefully/willfully choosing to be ignorant about it.
Some of those stories details how Wal-Mart abuses its position as the largest, wealthiest and subsequently most powerful retail chain in the world.
They have squeezed their suppliers enough that many suppliers have had no choice but to shut down all manufacturing operations in the United States and move those operations into foreign markets where they can continue to stay in business.
The option is either lose their largest customer and possibly enough revenue to shut down completely or shutdown all US Factories, put anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand American factory workers out of a job and stay in business. Business-wise, they have no choice but to comply with Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, that isn't good for the US workers that just lost their jobs.
You can say things like, "Well, those American workers should have learned to live with earning less money."
It's not all about just the money paid to an hourly worker. It's about the cost of benefits, cost of mandatory operation fees, like licenses, worker's compensation, unemployment office fees and a number of additional aspects that raise the cost of production in the US.
Then, you also have to take into account the minimum wage law. If you can have something produced overseas by workers that are fine with making, over the couse of a single day, the same amount that a highly skilled American manufacturing worker, like a Tool & Die Maker (Which is between $19 and $25 an hour), is paid for one hour. As a business, what are you gonig to do? Stay in business or go out of business?
Wal-Mart has done more to help decrease the number of available manufacturing jobs in the United States then most people think.
Obviously the sarcasm was lost today...
I am sorry, but the "Bad Guy" is in charge of a place called "Freeport" and the "Good Chick" is in charge of a place call "Qeynos".
That goes against everything we know about Fantasy world villain leaders and good people leaders...
Villains are supposed to come from places with hard to pronounce or oddly named places, like "Qeynos" and good people are supposed to come from places like "Freeport"...
This flies in the face of conventional wisdom. I for one do NOT welcome our convention thwarting overlords...
EQ2? Ha! More like EQ-Spew... That ruins everything...
...of these Apes or do we have to fund an expedition to bring back some photographic evidence of these creatures?
Last time I checked, it was about 600 numbers away from 40,000. You may as well as say that Lexmark is recalling a hundred gajillion million billion printers if you don't want to be accurate that is.
The difference, at $200 a printer, is about $12,000 of value, plus shipping, handling and repair costs, which could inflate that price difference up around $17,000 to $20,000.
What will I do for fun if I am not able to see those extremely hilarious informercials about how you can do *nothing* and the fat will just dissolved off your body!