We have both a DVD and streaming subscription. There is a lot of content only available on DVD. We've basically watched the streaming content of interest, but have a long DVD queue we are slowing going through 1 disc at a time.
Cat A is a lean sleak hunter, who is older. She's very clever. She solves any cat toy or puzzle quickly and efficiently. When we were trying to control her food intake, she figured out how to open the door to the room where we were keeping food, went to the backside of the bag, ripped a small hole, and ate some; then left the room and closed the door after her. She did this for a week before she failed to close the door completely and we noticed. She sort of knows her name, and may just be responding to us using intonation.
Cat B is very food motivated, but easily fooled by puzzles. However, he knows his name, the other cat's name, the words "lunch", "treat", and "bed time"; and has a remarkable sense of time and our patterns of doing things. As an example, he gets fed his favorite wet food every day at 11:30am when I get lunch (I do remote work and keep a regular schedule). Starting at about 11am he makes sure to come in and lay wherever I am. If I get up any time start at about 11:25, and say a sentence with "unch" in it, he'll run to where his wetfood cans are stored in the kitchen and point at them. If I say his name instead, he'll get up, and watch where I'm walking to. If I don't say either of those words, he'll lay there and look dejected because I'm failing in my duties to provide him food. My partner has come in to the office at 11 and mentioned something about lunch, and cat B ran to the kitchen... Similarly he understands the word "treat", and if we say that in the dining room, he'll move towards the room where his treats are kept and then keep looking back at us to follow.
This seems like its a related to the observations from the article going around earlier claiming that millennials are killing businesses because they are to poor to be good consumers. Younger folk are more willing to move, but you can only move if you can afford to move.
How about instead of forcing everyone to handle paper and coins, they instead require any bank wanting to do business in NYC to issue a fee-less checking account to anyone who requests it in person regardless of ID status? Maybe cap the maximum total deposit until they meet certain ID requirements to prevent money laundering issues.
So this metric needs to be changed to unmetered broadband access. There is no point in having lots of bandwidth if you don't have the allowed bits to use it. The speed metric should be allowed_bits/time.
So I look at this and think "some machine, some where has to be running the code". When you play flash games, all the work is being done on your local machine. When I play wow, its pegging a 2ghz processor to the extent it slows other things running in the background noticeably. When you start doing complex work in photoshop, your limitation is often the amount of memory in the machine running it. While this is awesome for streaming content from remote servers, I really question the ability to provide the server resources to run these applications in any sort of high volume situation. What would the system requirements be to be able to run 10,000+ users through a single machine?
The study assumes you are getting rid of your car to use public transit. There are so many things that are not public transit accessible that still require a car that they are not putting any replacement cost in for.
In Boston, a rental car for a weekend with insurance is ~$300. I use my car 3 weekends a month to travel outside of public transit range. Adding in the cost of getting a rental each weekend and suddenly 12.6k I'm saving is reduced by 7.8k (plus fuel costs and a lot of overhead dealing with rentals). The study is assuming depreciation of the car -- which likely means its assuming a purchase of new car. The cost conscious folks are either purchasing used cars or driving cars for far longer than a normal depreciation period.
And this doesn't even count the opportunity cost of travel time. I live in a near suburb (Arlington) and work in Cambridge. I can walk/bus to the T, and take the T to work. It takes about 1.25 hours each way. It takes me 20 minutes each way driving. I value the ~2 hours per day I save by driving pretty highly. Admittedly, if I have to drive during rush hours, my commute goes to 45-50 minutes each way and public transit becomes much more attractive.
I had the same thing happen with speakeasy. I run my own domain and created a unique email address for them. When I started getting spam to it (within 3 days of setting it up), I contacted their customer support. Their customer support said that spammers were randomly sending to different names at my domain and it was clearly just the only one that lined up. My mail server logs indicated otherwise -- but speakeasy wasn't interested in hearing it. They just closed the ticket again and ignored the logs proving that no name fishing was going on.
I was unimpressed and cancelled the line I was trying to get with them.
The cable company told my father that they'd sell him a cable modem if he could arrange to pay the cost to run the cable up the road he lives on. Even splitting the cost over all the houses on the road, it was still not reasonable. Of course, this also explained why the cable company hadn't run it itself.
Just some intro caveats: I'm a casual player. I think I've been in a raid-group of more than 5 twice. I am friends with several people who are serious raiders, but I'm not one.
Initially when you first start the new content, the items you receive feel unbelievably good. They are meant to bring you up to just barely under the power level of the folks who have spent the past years raiding. And because of this, the new stuff felt really munchkin initially. Fun, but munchkin. Epic items from pre-BC were replaced with green(normal) items found in BC. The quests are good - a lot of the little annoying bits have been toned down (fewer pointless long runs, flagging quests that really require multiple people as requiring 2 or 3 people as appropriate). There is a lot of nice flavor here.
One thing the reviewer missed is that a lot of BC is really beautiful. Each zone is very distinctive. And there have been several times when I just paused to admire the beauty. With the addition of flying mounts, there are some really gorgeous views that can be found. Several of the instances are visually stunning as well. This is a pretty game.
There are some class balance issues -- but I think at least part of the issues are that the classes changed a bit and people have not adapted their thinking. For example, it used to be hard to try to be a raiding druid in the tank role -- there was effectively one set of gear that all tank-druids went for. BC has added a large variety -- which means the class is a lot more viable in a role than it used to be. Is this unbalancing? No. It is different and changes some of the feel of the game.
One of my housemates is doing graduate work in education. We've spent a while theorizing how to use a MMORPG with a working player driven economy (like Puzzle Pirates / http://www.puzzlepirates.com/ ) as a teaching aid. We are pretty certain that with the right sort of guidance, a MMORPG could be the ultimate teaching tool for group interactions (like economics). We came to this conclusion after he saw me giving officer training to a new officer in which I was sitting and explaining economic theory so that the new officer could be more successful in trading.
Having taken a couple college classes dealing with marketing and economics, I can tell you the simulations don't compare to actually playing against real people. The simulations are good, but people are better. And the MMORPG give a large base of willing people to learn from.
I've been playing this game for about a year now. I run a small crew of skilled pirates.
One of the things that keeps me coming back is the way this game has so many levels. When you first start playing the game, it is all about mastering different puzzles. After a while, you realize that their are ships to run. And you move to the level where you are not only doing a puzzle, but managing a ship and other pirates. You then spend your next chunk of time learning to do this well. It is often an exercise is multitasking combined with a bit of being social. After a while, you realize there are things to do and places to go with your ship. You start exploring the ocean and investigating how the economy works. This leads you in to investigating running a shop. At this point you start playing the economy game -- running a shop, managing labor and raw materials, and selling goods. Puzzle Pirates has a real, working, complex economy. Evenutally, you'll realize that your crew is in a flag and that your flag is involved in politics. And these politics can be fascinating.
And that's the level I'm at. And I suspect there is something more out there, but I'm still looking. At this point, I sometimes log in and just play the economy game - no puzzling involved. At other times I log in and puzzle for a couple hours. And sometimes I just log in to chat with all the interesting people I've met in game.
Puzzle Pirates (puzzlepirates.com, clients for mac/linux/win) has changed all the hat designs to have very spooky masks and changed all the map graphics to have appropriate themed island maps.
One of the main problems I see with most of the smaller form factor PC's out there these days is the onboard video cards they come with. For even moderate gaming, these onboard video cards are not sufficient. To make the smaller form factor really useful as a gaming machine, the small form factor machines need to cease having the video card built into the motherboard and need to provide an AGP slot.
Slashdot Mirror
We have both a DVD and streaming subscription. There is a lot of content only available on DVD. We've basically watched the streaming content of interest, but have a long DVD queue we are slowing going through 1 disc at a time.
So we have 2 cats.
Cat A is a lean sleak hunter, who is older. She's very clever. She solves any cat toy or puzzle quickly and efficiently. When we were trying to control her food intake, she figured out how to open the door to the room where we were keeping food, went to the backside of the bag, ripped a small hole, and ate some; then left the room and closed the door after her. She did this for a week before she failed to close the door completely and we noticed. She sort of knows her name, and may just be responding to us using intonation.
Cat B is very food motivated, but easily fooled by puzzles. However, he knows his name, the other cat's name, the words "lunch", "treat", and "bed time"; and has a remarkable sense of time and our patterns of doing things. As an example, he gets fed his favorite wet food every day at 11:30am when I get lunch (I do remote work and keep a regular schedule). Starting at about 11am he makes sure to come in and lay wherever I am. If I get up any time start at about 11:25, and say a sentence with "unch" in it, he'll run to where his wetfood cans are stored in the kitchen and point at them. If I say his name instead, he'll get up, and watch where I'm walking to. If I don't say either of those words, he'll lay there and look dejected because I'm failing in my duties to provide him food. My partner has come in to the office at 11 and mentioned something about lunch, and cat B ran to the kitchen... Similarly he understands the word "treat", and if we say that in the dining room, he'll move towards the room where his treats are kept and then keep looking back at us to follow.
This seems like its a related to the observations from the article going around earlier claiming that millennials are killing businesses because they are to poor to be good consumers. Younger folk are more willing to move, but you can only move if you can afford to move.
How about instead of forcing everyone to handle paper and coins, they instead require any bank wanting to do business in NYC to issue a fee-less checking account to anyone who requests it in person regardless of ID status? Maybe cap the maximum total deposit until they meet certain ID requirements to prevent money laundering issues.
Make banking freely available to all.
So this metric needs to be changed to unmetered broadband access. There is no point in having lots of bandwidth if you don't have the allowed bits to use it. The speed metric should be allowed_bits/time.
So I look at this and think "some machine, some where has to be running the code". When you play flash games, all the work is being done on your local machine. When I play wow, its pegging a 2ghz processor to the extent it slows other things running in the background noticeably. When you start doing complex work in photoshop, your limitation is often the amount of memory in the machine running it. While this is awesome for streaming content from remote servers, I really question the ability to provide the server resources to run these applications in any sort of high volume situation. What would the system requirements be to be able to run 10,000+ users through a single machine?
This study is comparing apples and oranges.
The study assumes you are getting rid of your car to use public transit. There are so many things that are not public transit accessible that still require a car that they are not putting any replacement cost in for.
In Boston, a rental car for a weekend with insurance is ~$300. I use my car 3 weekends a month to travel outside of public transit range. Adding in the cost of getting a rental each weekend and suddenly 12.6k I'm saving is reduced by 7.8k (plus fuel costs and a lot of overhead dealing with rentals). The study is assuming depreciation of the car -- which likely means its assuming a purchase of new car. The cost conscious folks are either purchasing used cars or driving cars for far longer than a normal depreciation period.
And this doesn't even count the opportunity cost of travel time. I live in a near suburb (Arlington) and work in Cambridge. I can walk/bus to the T, and take the T to work. It takes about 1.25 hours each way. It takes me 20 minutes each way driving. I value the ~2 hours per day I save by driving pretty highly. Admittedly, if I have to drive during rush hours, my commute goes to 45-50 minutes each way and public transit becomes much more attractive.
I had the same thing happen with speakeasy. I run my own domain and created a unique email address for them. When I started getting spam to it (within 3 days of setting it up), I contacted their customer support. Their customer support said that spammers were randomly sending to different names at my domain and it was clearly just the only one that lined up. My mail server logs indicated otherwise -- but speakeasy wasn't interested in hearing it. They just closed the ticket again and ignored the logs proving that no name fishing was going on.
I was unimpressed and cancelled the line I was trying to get with them.
The cable company told my father that they'd sell him a cable modem if he could arrange to pay the cost to run the cable up the road he lives on. Even splitting the cost over all the houses on the road, it was still not reasonable. Of course, this also explained why the cable company hadn't run it itself.
The joys of living in rural areas.
Just some intro caveats: I'm a casual player. I think I've been in a raid-group of more than 5 twice. I am friends with several people who are serious raiders, but I'm not one.
Initially when you first start the new content, the items you receive feel unbelievably good. They are meant to bring you up to just barely under the power level of the folks who have spent the past years raiding. And because of this, the new stuff felt really munchkin initially. Fun, but munchkin. Epic items from pre-BC were replaced with green(normal) items found in BC. The quests are good - a lot of the little annoying bits have been toned down (fewer pointless long runs, flagging quests that really require multiple people as requiring 2 or 3 people as appropriate). There is a lot of nice flavor here.
One thing the reviewer missed is that a lot of BC is really beautiful. Each zone is very distinctive. And there have been several times when I just paused to admire the beauty. With the addition of flying mounts, there are some really gorgeous views that can be found. Several of the instances are visually stunning as well. This is a pretty game.
There are some class balance issues -- but I think at least part of the issues are that the classes changed a bit and people have not adapted their thinking. For example, it used to be hard to try to be a raiding druid in the tank role -- there was effectively one set of gear that all tank-druids went for. BC has added a large variety -- which means the class is a lot more viable in a role than it used to be. Is this unbalancing? No. It is different and changes some of the feel of the game.
One of my housemates is doing graduate work in education. We've spent a while theorizing how to use a MMORPG with a working player driven economy (like Puzzle Pirates / http://www.puzzlepirates.com/ ) as a teaching aid. We are pretty certain that with the right sort of guidance, a MMORPG could be the ultimate teaching tool for group interactions (like economics). We came to this conclusion after he saw me giving officer training to a new officer in which I was sitting and explaining economic theory so that the new officer could be more successful in trading.
Having taken a couple college classes dealing with marketing and economics, I can tell you the simulations don't compare to actually playing against real people. The simulations are good, but people are better. And the MMORPG give a large base of willing people to learn from.
I've been playing this game for about a year now. I run a small crew of skilled pirates.
One of the things that keeps me coming back is the way this game has so many levels. When you first start playing the game, it is all about mastering different puzzles. After a while, you realize that their are ships to run. And you move to the level where you are not only doing a puzzle, but managing a ship and other pirates. You then spend your next chunk of time learning to do this well. It is often an exercise is multitasking combined with a bit of being social. After a while, you realize there are things to do and places to go with your ship. You start exploring the ocean and investigating how the economy works. This leads you in to investigating running a shop. At this point you start playing the economy game -- running a shop, managing labor and raw materials, and selling goods. Puzzle Pirates has a real, working, complex economy. Evenutally, you'll realize that your crew is in a flag and that your flag is involved in politics. And these politics can be fascinating.
And that's the level I'm at. And I suspect there is something more out there, but I'm still looking. At this point, I sometimes log in and just play the economy game - no puzzling involved. At other times I log in and puzzle for a couple hours. And sometimes I just log in to chat with all the interesting people I've met in game.
Puzzle Pirates (puzzlepirates.com, clients for mac/linux/win) has changed all the hat designs to have very spooky masks and changed all the map graphics to have appropriate themed island maps.
One of the main problems I see with most of the smaller form factor PC's out there these days is the onboard video cards they come with. For even moderate gaming, these onboard video cards are not sufficient. To make the smaller form factor really useful as a gaming machine, the small form factor machines need to cease having the video card built into the motherboard and need to provide an AGP slot.