As I think about it more, it seems that in the very worst case scenerio we would be fined, but we ( or our ISP on our behalf) would be able to levy matching fines against the source. In the end, this would level out from our perspective.
It seems like a big problem might be tracking fines. If all fines are immediately payable, in the scenerio I described above (which I realize shouldn't happen) a fine brokering agency (probably VISA) would walk away the winner.
I confess to not understanding the ISP industry as well as I should. Nor do I fully understand the proposal (which I did read). However, I do truly like the idea.
I worry that the masses who are more ignorant than I, will make this unpassable legislation. People will not be happy to learn that because their computer was attacked (they are victims) AOL is going to charge them more. The Representitive that brought them this might not be their favorite person.
The benifits of this program, while fairly obvious to techies, may well go almost entirely unnoticed by the masses. All they see is a higher bill at the end of the month.
First, we have to assume that the penalties involved will be relatively minor. Not catching a virus on your computer shouldn't put the average customer in the poorhouse. They should see a small jump in their bill and if they fail to react, have their service cut off.
Interestingly though, should this measure work and viruses are largely contained. All the investment the ISPs put forward will not be repayed by fines. Instead, the savings would have to come from them needing less bandwidth to accommadate attacks.
This also doesn't pose massive costs to the customer. Using ZoneAlarm and Mozilla's Email browser would cut their exposure to these risks dramatically and both are free.
I am curious about some things though. One incident I encountered at work saw somebody hitting us with a spoofed ip address. Our rejection responses (it turns out) were being used as part of a DDOS attack. We reacted to the matter once we realized what was going on 10 hours later. Should we have be liable for the time in between?
I was shopping for a car a year ago and considered a new hybrid civic. They are a couple k more expensive than the standard civic, but you get the hybrid.
My test drive was good. The car performed a lot like my old Tercel. The handling was good and the pick-up was acceptable. The best part, other than gas milage, was the readout which showed whether the batteries were being charged or drained.
In the end though, I bought a several year old Accord which was bigger, manual transmission and was much more fun to drive. It had reasonable gas mileage but not excellent. I'll buy when I have a bit more money, and they put the hybrid technology in a mid-sized sedan or luxury car. 60 mpg sure is impressive, but I'd love 35 in a car that's more comfortable and more fun to drive.
Interesting, but part of the foundation of the government is promote the welfare of it's people and defend them.
How aggressive should it be in achieving these goals? That's a matter for interpretation. The government has always been involved in your personal well being.
And no, the point wasn't to keep the government super weak. A key observation is that the Bill of Rights was a compromise. Some thought the constitution didn't explicitly protect enough rights. In order to get the const. ratified, founders had to promise to add those amendments. I would cite the premable as more indicitive to the founder's intent than Amendments tacked on after the ratification.
I would also observe that if they really wanted a weak federal government, they wouldn't have messed with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were so weak and pathetic, the government had to be strengthed in the most recent constitution.
I would also observe, that in many ways we are a freer country now than we were at the founding. For instance, we don't have fucking slavery. We also let women vote.
Moreover, the assumption that the founders had the perfect government envisioned and we need to follow their wishes endlessly, seems a bit naive. While some of them were certaintly brilliant folk, we have brilliant people today as well. That said, I tend to think messing with the constitution should be avoided as much as possible.
It's tied because when there is a large jump between this week's numbers and the numbers for the last several months, we are forced to ask "what changed?" One option is that pure randomness took hold. While possible, that is less than likely due to the very large number of people buying consoles tens or hundreds of thousands weekly. Next on the causality list might be that something made gamecube more desirable this week than it was last week. It is in the same colors and at the same price as last week so we can probably rule out the hardware (someone did mention the gameboy linker being included though). That just leaves software. If there is a highly anticipated game coming out, and there is a chance people who were considering buying the console would become convinced by that game, it makes sense to credit that game(s) with the higher sales of hardware.
Re:Guys lets put the zeolotry aside for a second
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 1
I tend to agree that if you are planning to write a windows gui app. You should go with.Net. That said, I don't know if I've ever downloaded a single one. My experianc here is limited, but writing the installer to get.Net in place when your app is delivered scares me when I think of a Windows 95 or NT 4.0 workstation.
I would also ask which portions of the library you thought were vastly improved. Other than building windows uis I didn't notice any significat advantages aside from a slightly easier persistence model for my application.
That's pretty clever. My initial attempt had a mix of capturing and lure into limited fights. My problem was the final mission where I simply didn't have enough ships for my talent to win the map. So I went back, did the salvage captures and had enough ships to the final mission.
One of the things you'll here the guys from relic talk about is the challenges of making a game in space that is fun. Space itself is a pretty boring place. Not much there. If you want any variation from the challenges of blowing up the bad guys, you need to introduce some form of terrain, even if that's not perfectly realistic. Cut them some slack.
That, and the level just wasn't that hard once you figured out that you weren't go to mine the high speed asteriods, you were going to blow them up.
The previous poster was correct, the radiation one was a greater pain in the ass. But a good challenge nonetheless.
What irritated me, was that I couldn't beat the last level without spending fricken forever on the second to last level, "the giant sphere o ion frigates", using salvage ships to capture ion frigate after ion frigate. That might just be a comment on my own lack of creativity, but maybe that's just how hard the game was. Personally, I like a game that's got a bit of challenge to it.
There is limited truth to this. The trick comes in when someone has a middle of the road game that will compete with other middle of the road games for the gamer dollar. If one company drops their price by five or ten dollars they may be able to steal market share from a competitor. If this starts happening, then competitive pressure will push down prices. Unfortunately for gamers right now, we seem to really want individual titles and don't walk into the store and pick up whatever looks good and is cheap.
That said, I did walk into my local shop two weeks ago unsure of whether I would get Soul Calibur or F-Zero. I went with SC, but a $10 differance might have changed my mind. Honestly though, by Christmas I'll have both.
For my Senior CS project, we built a system that would contain class information for the people in that class. It would also tie all your classes together into a single portal. One of our "wouldn't it be great if" goals would be to take take the class information on our site (similar to MIT's content in theory) package it, and ship it to other universities. What would be nifty about that, is there are many schools who simply don't have staff capable of putting together a class of the calibur MIT does in subjects such as Engineering. By using a prepackaged course and modifying it to their own needs, smaller (or poorer) universities could raise the quality of education they provide. I'm not saying they'll become MIT, but they could improve on their current situation.
I'm really excited to see if other big name schools will follow MIT's lead and provide simila r materials. Even if they aren't quite as kind and do charge for them, I'd still be excited.
The "people addicting to Everquest are addicts anyway" arguement seems a bit off color. It implies that if they weren't addicted to Everquest, they'd be addicted to something else. Having been fairly deeply involved in a Mud (that's where my handle comes from), I know that if I played a pretty MUD like Everquest, I'd be screwed. I might come back to reality and I might not. It would have a detrimental affect on my work and personal lives. Now, I don't have problems with drugs or booze and am particularly prone to addiction. However, Everquest and the like scare me to death and I refuse to even play a demo.
They can't afford to produce for the console? Well, earn your stripes in the world of pc games. Once you can make money there, you can license the stuff for the consoles and move on.
This really doesn't seem like the end of the world.
Go into a jewelery store and check out rubies these days. You'll notice some bright clear pretty ones and a some dark kinda ugly ones. The pretty ones are lab manufactured and half the price. The mined ones still sell well enough to be in the store though.
I fully expect a reply on the high quality of the natural ones, and I bet I'll learn something.
This may get them far, but not as far as they would want. For an engagement ring, or the like, I would spend the extra money and get a real diamond. For a pair of earings, or even a bracelet, the beauty of the item is more important than sentimental value and I would happily get more bang for my buck. For an engagement ring, you sure don't want to give something that in any way implies falseness, deception or that you're cheap.
Your arguement has little bits of truth in it, which is what makes it so tempting to believe. On the whole though, it is largely off.
While it can be argued that when you tax a company, those expenses get passed along to everyong surrounding the company, the fact remains that the tax is only on that company. Now, if that company takes it's profits offshore or hides them or otherwise doesn't pay taxes, that revenue must be made up for elsewhere. Everybody else (who does pay taxes) has to pay more taxes to make up for the cheater. That money comes directly out of the economy. Meanwhile, someone with offshore bank accounts (or whatever) has moved money out of the country. Let's also keep in mind the US government is the perfect consumer. It spends money recklessly, keeping practically nothing in savings, and buys almost exclusively American. At the same time, it employs a big pile of American citizens. The company not paying taxes raises the cost for everyone else and hurts the general economy while doing it.
Regarding raising taxes on the undertax as opposed to lowering taxes on the undertaxed, I believe you would find that the recent tax cuts aimed to do just that - to the extent they could politically. More commonly though, you find raising taxes as the government is more often than not underfunded. Right now would be a good example of that. I'm not saying that deficit spending is always bad, but using 15% of our budget to pay interest seems less than ideal.
Now, I do pay all my own FICA, so I have a comment on this one. Employers see things two ways. They know they have the $60K in the budget to spend on somebody. They do the FICA and assorted calcs and hire someone at an official $45K or whatever. The fact that they have 60K available lets them make the hire, but don't beleive that they would pay that employee 60K if the taxes weren't there. What your salary is, is a function of what you will accept. Now, if you paid your own FICA you might not be able to accept less than a higher amount. Probably, if FICA didn't exist at all, your offical salary would be 7.5% lower, not 7.5% higher. I may be naive, or inexperianced, but from what I've seen moving between consultant work and salary work, FICA is a non-issue as to what I take home.
I'm a recent graduate from the CS program at CU. Let me tell you that some majors are more apt for partying than others. Don't get your hopes up if you are going into engineering. You may be able to party hard your freshmen and sophmore years (still wouldn't reccommend it) but upper classmen who do that suffer badly in classes.
My wife graduated with Econ and Math majors. She's pretty confident she could have partied hard and done well in econ, but the lunatics who are math majors would have killed her on the curve if she wasn't busting her butt on work.
There are plenty of soft majors and kids that don't care about school. I saw entire floors of girls spend ->Thursday- evening getting ready for a wild night of partying. That said, I didn't see that (for whatever reason) in the engineering dorms and you could always find people (yes, even Saturday night) at the library or working in the labs in the Engineering Center.
CU is great because it is whatever you make out of it. You have more than enough oppurtunity to party, but that doesn't mean you'll survive a hard major.
There are unique games out there, you just have to look. Most of them are not out for xBox, mostly because there is a big financial risk in launching that on a platform.
Some examples:
The Sims: It's getting older now, but despite taking the Sim _____ series title, it was really original in what it considered to be a game. Hey, take this family and uh.. make them cook stuff and go to work. Surprise, huge franchise and a massively multiplayer extension.
Dance Dance Revolution: Gimicky peripheral games have been around, but this was a new take on the thing. You don't try to shoot bad guys or win a race, instead you're "dancing." Suprise! It doesn't suck and is a great party game because normal people (my parents) and even normal girls think it's fun.
Nintendo's Cute games: Those Japanese have a stack of really, really weird cute games. I've looked at a bunch of comments and reviews and thought wow, that's odd. Never played them, but they generally seem original as heck.
Odd Massively Multiplayer Games: Let's face it, Everquest is a MUD with pictures, not terribly original. But there are some differant ones out there. My favorite are a couple that have appeared where the players are businessmen and their holdings are active 24 hours per day. You just have to log in enough to keep things going straight. Very differant. Also, Planetside has really changed the FPS genre for me. Taking FPS into the massively multiplayer realm may have been obvious, but it is new and presents another oppurtunity to franchise. Couple cool and new programs in this department.
When I look around, check out the upcoming and recent releases, I see a bunch of oddball games that I probably won't buy, but are look very differant from what I play. There are a lot of games out there take a look.
I disagree. I think that IBM (who is credited with getting Linux a green light from Homeland Defense) has plenty of money to setup a fact finding group for Linux. I know you may hate to think of Big Blue as a "Linux company" but they have pretty much bet their server business on it.
Yup. The latest "craft" game is almost always a key part of our cross platform Lan parties. We've had excellent success getting the networking to work smoothly and the various machines to play nice.
I've seen a lot of these sorts of comments. What it shows to me is that the company is very poor at managing it's staff and it's relations with clients. Having worked support with my current employer, I know we haven't had much of a turnover rate at all. We are small, encourage the employees to work together on problems, and generally maintain a positive relationship with our clients.
Still, a straight day or week or tech support is draining. However, if that day is broken up with other work (writing code, scripts, documentation, testing, etc) tech support isn't that bad.
You do need to quickly adapt your language to the technical sophistication of the caller. Sometimes, they will know more about X than you do, othertimes they will call the desktop "the screen with all the pictures." If you keep in mind that they are not trying to be difficult and probably aren't dumb, just ignorant, a little effort can get you past most of these problems. The intolerance I'm reading on this board saddens me. It's why some people are frightened to call support and others feel they need to be overly assertive (read abusive).
Treat people with respect and more often than not you'll be treated the same way. This goes for the tech support worker taking calls as well as the manager who struggles with absurd turn-over rates.
Right on. The balance needs to be struck between filling and calories / food.
One more caution. I've known several active people who have done Atkins. Two of them have had problems with light-headedness when excercising. They simply couldn't ramp the blood-sugar up from fat quickly enough. If you are nuts enough to do Atkins (which does work) be really cautious when exerting yourself. Rock-climbing and bike riding might not be safe.
Seems to me that there are a number of credit cards and even more ATM systems that generally interoperate ok. Some vendors won't accept all micropayment schemes but if they all accept a few having 2 or 3 accounts to manage all your micropayments will probably work out.
I thought the exact same thing. I agree with the President on a handful of issues and I'll send him a supporting letter on one of those. I expect several requests for money from the RNC thereafter which I will promptly throw away smiling and knowing that I have fined the RNC bulk postage for their stupidity.
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As I think about it more, it seems that in the very worst case scenerio we would be fined, but we ( or our ISP on our behalf) would be able to levy matching fines against the source. In the end, this would level out from our perspective.
It seems like a big problem might be tracking fines. If all fines are immediately payable, in the scenerio I described above (which I realize shouldn't happen) a fine brokering agency (probably VISA) would walk away the winner.
I confess to not understanding the ISP industry as well as I should. Nor do I fully understand the proposal (which I did read). However, I do truly like the idea.
I worry that the masses who are more ignorant than I, will make this unpassable legislation. People will not be happy to learn that because their computer was attacked (they are victims) AOL is going to charge them more. The Representitive that brought them this might not be their favorite person.
The benifits of this program, while fairly obvious to techies, may well go almost entirely unnoticed by the masses. All they see is a higher bill at the end of the month.
First, we have to assume that the penalties involved will be relatively minor. Not catching a virus on your computer shouldn't put the average customer in the poorhouse. They should see a small jump in their bill and if they fail to react, have their service cut off.
Interestingly though, should this measure work and viruses are largely contained. All the investment the ISPs put forward will not be repayed by fines. Instead, the savings would have to come from them needing less bandwidth to accommadate attacks.
This also doesn't pose massive costs to the customer. Using ZoneAlarm and Mozilla's Email browser would cut their exposure to these risks dramatically and both are free.
I am curious about some things though. One incident I encountered at work saw somebody hitting us with a spoofed ip address. Our rejection responses (it turns out) were being used as part of a DDOS attack. We reacted to the matter once we realized what was going on 10 hours later. Should we have be liable for the time in between?
I was shopping for a car a year ago and considered a new hybrid civic. They are a couple k more expensive than the standard civic, but you get the hybrid.
My test drive was good. The car performed a lot like my old Tercel. The handling was good and the pick-up was acceptable. The best part, other than gas milage, was the readout which showed whether the batteries were being charged or drained.
In the end though, I bought a several year old Accord which was bigger, manual transmission and was much more fun to drive. It had reasonable gas mileage but not excellent. I'll buy when I have a bit more money, and they put the hybrid technology in a mid-sized sedan or luxury car. 60 mpg sure is impressive, but I'd love 35 in a car that's more comfortable and more fun to drive.
Interesting, but part of the foundation of the government is promote the welfare of it's people and defend them.
How aggressive should it be in achieving these goals? That's a matter for interpretation. The government has always been involved in your personal well being.
And no, the point wasn't to keep the government super weak. A key observation is that the Bill of Rights was a compromise. Some thought the constitution didn't explicitly protect enough rights. In order to get the const. ratified, founders had to promise to add those amendments. I would cite the premable as more indicitive to the founder's intent than Amendments tacked on after the ratification.
I would also observe that if they really wanted a weak federal government, they wouldn't have messed with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were so weak and pathetic, the government had to be strengthed in the most recent constitution.
I would also observe, that in many ways we are a freer country now than we were at the founding. For instance, we don't have fucking slavery. We also let women vote.
Moreover, the assumption that the founders had the perfect government envisioned and we need to follow their wishes endlessly, seems a bit naive. While some of them were certaintly brilliant folk, we have brilliant people today as well. That said, I tend to think messing with the constitution should be avoided as much as possible.
It's tied because when there is a large jump between this week's numbers and the numbers for the last several months, we are forced to ask "what changed?" One option is that pure randomness took hold. While possible, that is less than likely due to the very large number of people buying consoles tens or hundreds of thousands weekly. Next on the causality list might be that something made gamecube more desirable this week than it was last week. It is in the same colors and at the same price as last week so we can probably rule out the hardware (someone did mention the gameboy linker being included though). That just leaves software. If there is a highly anticipated game coming out, and there is a chance people who were considering buying the console would become convinced by that game, it makes sense to credit that game(s) with the higher sales of hardware.
I tend to agree that if you are planning to write a windows gui app. You should go with .Net. That said, I don't know if I've ever downloaded a single one. My experianc here is limited, but writing the installer to get .Net in place when your app is delivered scares me when I think of a Windows 95 or NT 4.0 workstation.
I would also ask which portions of the library you thought were vastly improved. Other than building windows uis I didn't notice any significat advantages aside from a slightly easier persistence model for my application.
That's pretty clever. My initial attempt had a mix of capturing and lure into limited fights. My problem was the final mission where I simply didn't have enough ships for my talent to win the map. So I went back, did the salvage captures and had enough ships to the final mission.
One of the things you'll here the guys from relic talk about is the challenges of making a game in space that is fun. Space itself is a pretty boring place. Not much there. If you want any variation from the challenges of blowing up the bad guys, you need to introduce some form of terrain, even if that's not perfectly realistic. Cut them some slack.
That, and the level just wasn't that hard once you figured out that you weren't go to mine the high speed asteriods, you were going to blow them up.
The previous poster was correct, the radiation one was a greater pain in the ass. But a good challenge nonetheless.
What irritated me, was that I couldn't beat the last level without spending fricken forever on the second to last level, "the giant sphere o ion frigates", using salvage ships to capture ion frigate after ion frigate. That might just be a comment on my own lack of creativity, but maybe that's just how hard the game was. Personally, I like a game that's got a bit of challenge to it.
There is limited truth to this. The trick comes in when someone has a middle of the road game that will compete with other middle of the road games for the gamer dollar. If one company drops their price by five or ten dollars they may be able to steal market share from a competitor. If this starts happening, then competitive pressure will push down prices. Unfortunately for gamers right now, we seem to really want individual titles and don't walk into the store and pick up whatever looks good and is cheap.
That said, I did walk into my local shop two weeks ago unsure of whether I would get Soul Calibur or F-Zero. I went with SC, but a $10 differance might have changed my mind. Honestly though, by Christmas I'll have both.
Sorry, botched that link and didn't preview.
For my Senior CS project, we built a system that would contain class information for the people in that class. It would also tie all your classes together into a single portal. One of our "wouldn't it be great if" goals would be to take take the class information on our site (similar to MIT's content in theory) package it, and ship it to other universities. What would be nifty about that, is there are many schools who simply don't have staff capable of putting together a class of the calibur MIT does in subjects such as Engineering. By using a prepackaged course and modifying it to their own needs, smaller (or poorer) universities could raise the quality of education they provide. I'm not saying they'll become MIT, but they could improve on their current situation.
I'm really excited to see if other big name schools will follow MIT's lead and provide simila r materials. Even if they aren't quite as kind and do charge for them, I'd still be excited.
The "people addicting to Everquest are addicts anyway" arguement seems a bit off color. It implies that if they weren't addicted to Everquest, they'd be addicted to something else. Having been fairly deeply involved in a Mud (that's where my handle comes from), I know that if I played a pretty MUD like Everquest, I'd be screwed. I might come back to reality and I might not. It would have a detrimental affect on my work and personal lives. Now, I don't have problems with drugs or booze and am particularly prone to addiction. However, Everquest and the like scare me to death and I refuse to even play a demo.
They can't afford to produce for the console? Well, earn your stripes in the world of pc games. Once you can make money there, you can license the stuff for the consoles and move on.
This really doesn't seem like the end of the world.
Go into a jewelery store and check out rubies these days. You'll notice some bright clear pretty ones and a some dark kinda ugly ones. The pretty ones are lab manufactured and half the price. The mined ones still sell well enough to be in the store though.
I fully expect a reply on the high quality of the natural ones, and I bet I'll learn something.
This may get them far, but not as far as they would want. For an engagement ring, or the like, I would spend the extra money and get a real diamond. For a pair of earings, or even a bracelet, the beauty of the item is more important than sentimental value and I would happily get more bang for my buck. For an engagement ring, you sure don't want to give something that in any way implies falseness, deception or that you're cheap.
Your arguement has little bits of truth in it, which is what makes it so tempting to believe. On the whole though, it is largely off.
While it can be argued that when you tax a company, those expenses get passed along to everyong surrounding the company, the fact remains that the tax is only on that company. Now, if that company takes it's profits offshore or hides them or otherwise doesn't pay taxes, that revenue must be made up for elsewhere. Everybody else (who does pay taxes) has to pay more taxes to make up for the cheater. That money comes directly out of the economy. Meanwhile, someone with offshore bank accounts (or whatever) has moved money out of the country. Let's also keep in mind the US government is the perfect consumer. It spends money recklessly, keeping practically nothing in savings, and buys almost exclusively American. At the same time, it employs a big pile of American citizens. The company not paying taxes raises the cost for everyone else and hurts the general economy while doing it.
Regarding raising taxes on the undertax as opposed to lowering taxes on the undertaxed, I believe you would find that the recent tax cuts aimed to do just that - to the extent they could politically. More commonly though, you find raising taxes as the government is more often than not underfunded. Right now would be a good example of that. I'm not saying that deficit spending is always bad, but using 15% of our budget to pay interest seems less than ideal.
Now, I do pay all my own FICA, so I have a comment on this one. Employers see things two ways. They know they have the $60K in the budget to spend on somebody. They do the FICA and assorted calcs and hire someone at an official $45K or whatever. The fact that they have 60K available lets them make the hire, but don't beleive that they would pay that employee 60K if the taxes weren't there. What your salary is, is a function of what you will accept. Now, if you paid your own FICA you might not be able to accept less than a higher amount. Probably, if FICA didn't exist at all, your offical salary would be 7.5% lower, not 7.5% higher. I may be naive, or inexperianced, but from what I've seen moving between consultant work and salary work, FICA is a non-issue as to what I take home.
I'm a recent graduate from the CS program at CU. Let me tell you that some majors are more apt for partying than others. Don't get your hopes up if you are going into engineering. You may be able to party hard your freshmen and sophmore years (still wouldn't reccommend it) but upper classmen who do that suffer badly in classes.
My wife graduated with Econ and Math majors. She's pretty confident she could have partied hard and done well in econ, but the lunatics who are math majors would have killed her on the curve if she wasn't busting her butt on work.
There are plenty of soft majors and kids that don't care about school. I saw entire floors of girls spend ->Thursday- evening getting ready for a wild night of partying. That said, I didn't see that (for whatever reason) in the engineering dorms and you could always find people (yes, even Saturday night) at the library or working in the labs in the Engineering Center.
CU is great because it is whatever you make out of it. You have more than enough oppurtunity to party, but that doesn't mean you'll survive a hard major.
There are unique games out there, you just have to look. Most of them are not out for xBox, mostly because there is a big financial risk in launching that on a platform.
Some examples:
The Sims: It's getting older now, but despite taking the Sim _____ series title, it was really original in what it considered to be a game. Hey, take this family and uh.. make them cook stuff and go to work. Surprise, huge franchise and a massively multiplayer extension.
Dance Dance Revolution: Gimicky peripheral games have been around, but this was a new take on the thing. You don't try to shoot bad guys or win a race, instead you're "dancing." Suprise! It doesn't suck and is a great party game because normal people (my parents) and even normal girls think it's fun.
Nintendo's Cute games: Those Japanese have a stack of really, really weird cute games. I've looked at a bunch of comments and reviews and thought wow, that's odd. Never played them, but they generally seem original as heck.
Odd Massively Multiplayer Games: Let's face it, Everquest is a MUD with pictures, not terribly original. But there are some differant ones out there. My favorite are a couple that have appeared where the players are businessmen and their holdings are active 24 hours per day. You just have to log in enough to keep things going straight. Very differant. Also, Planetside has really changed the FPS genre for me. Taking FPS into the massively multiplayer realm may have been obvious, but it is new and presents another oppurtunity to franchise. Couple cool and new programs in this department.
When I look around, check out the upcoming and recent releases, I see a bunch of oddball games that I probably won't buy, but are look very differant from what I play. There are a lot of games out there take a look.
I disagree. I think that IBM (who is credited with getting Linux a green light from Homeland Defense) has plenty of money to setup a fact finding group for Linux. I know you may hate to think of Big Blue as a "Linux company" but they have pretty much bet their server business on it.
Yup. The latest "craft" game is almost always a key part of our cross platform Lan parties. We've had excellent success getting the networking to work smoothly and the various machines to play nice.
I've seen a lot of these sorts of comments. What it shows to me is that the company is very poor at managing it's staff and it's relations with clients. Having worked support with my current employer, I know we haven't had much of a turnover rate at all. We are small, encourage the employees to work together on problems, and generally maintain a positive relationship with our clients.
Still, a straight day or week or tech support is draining. However, if that day is broken up with other work (writing code, scripts, documentation, testing, etc) tech support isn't that bad.
You do need to quickly adapt your language to the technical sophistication of the caller. Sometimes, they will know more about X than you do, othertimes they will call the desktop "the screen with all the pictures." If you keep in mind that they are not trying to be difficult and probably aren't dumb, just ignorant, a little effort can get you past most of these problems. The intolerance I'm reading on this board saddens me. It's why some people are frightened to call support and others feel they need to be overly assertive (read abusive).
Treat people with respect and more often than not you'll be treated the same way. This goes for the tech support worker taking calls as well as the manager who struggles with absurd turn-over rates.
One more caution. I've known several active people who have done Atkins. Two of them have had problems with light-headedness when excercising. They simply couldn't ramp the blood-sugar up from fat quickly enough. If you are nuts enough to do Atkins (which does work) be really cautious when exerting yourself. Rock-climbing and bike riding might not be safe.
Apple is in the process of releasing iTunes for the Pc.
Seems to me that there are a number of credit cards and even more ATM systems that generally interoperate ok. Some vendors won't accept all micropayment schemes but if they all accept a few having 2 or 3 accounts to manage all your micropayments will probably work out.
I thought the exact same thing. I agree with the President on a handful of issues and I'll send him a supporting letter on one of those. I expect several requests for money from the RNC thereafter which I will promptly throw away smiling and knowing that I have fined the RNC bulk postage for their stupidity.