Chances are it will be satellite based internet anyway, making it useless for interactive games (you could play a card game or something like that, but FPS/RTS/etc... are right out thanks to the high latency).
I've always wondered just how much money the airlines make from those seatphones. I've never seen anybody use one, ever.
Actually, Netflix doesn't hurt theater sales too much, but it's murder on DVD sales. DVDs have been taking it in the rear for the past year or so and the MPAA is using it as an excuse to get lawmakers to pass legislation to stop them thar pirates who be stealing arr sales.
I have to admit, after getting Netflix my urge to actually buy DVDs dried up pretty quick. I'll still get stuff here and there (especially if I plan to show it to friends/lend it out), but for the most part my collection has been stagnant for a couple of years now.
I trust them about as much as I trust random yahoos on Youtube. That's why it's important to do real research on your own, with peer reviewed journals and everything. Or use some common sense and a little bit of research, that usually works too.
I doubt it, they're still advertising on TV for the Christmas holiday. The DRM removal patch (if it ever comes out) will probably be in a year or so. If you really want to avoid it you'll probably just have to pirate the game.
Is this a Euro thing?
on
BioShock Backlash
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Heavy backlash against Bioshock? From what I've seen most people seem to like Bioshock. It had a lot of "game of the year" mentions among my friends. Is this a Euro thing where they are supposed to hate the game because it doesn't punish the player enough? I've played the game with basically no-vita chambers (just reload from the last save every time you die) and it really doesn't seem to add much to the game. Besides, none of that makes one iota of difference to the part that really pushed Bioshock into the "great games of the year" category: The storyline.
While there are parts of the game that I thought could have used some work (the Crafting is pretty halfassed and the Hacking got tedious after awhile), I considered my complaints minor. Also, the ending was underrated. I thought it wrapped up the story nicely (at least with the good ending) and in a very touching way.
Also, anybody who didn't think there would be a Bioshock 2, please raise your hands so we can laugh at you. Even if the entire team quit and 2K had to hire a bunch of hacks to make it, you can count on the fact that they're going to bank on the Bioshock name.
Actually, it is a little worrisome that so many of the developers have apparently moved on already. Gaming (and especially PC gaming) is rife with crappy sequels made by a different development group than the great original game.
I think that patch would have been an excellent time to redo the crafting system and make it interesting. The existing system is pretty halfassed. Adding a mode that penalizes you for using the Vita chambers (make them cost money!) would have been a nice touch too.
As far as the actual improvements are concerned, the Sonic Boom will probably end up being one of those Novelty plasmids (Bees, Cyclone Trap, Security System Override) that end up being situational at best. The EVE reducer could go a long way towards letting players focus more on Plasmids than weapons though. The extra damage vs. anything hackable is pointless and even counterproductive since you usually don't want to destroy those things, you want to hack them. Cheaper stuff at the Vending Machines is ok, but I'm betting it's not a huge difference. It might be worthwhile in the early game, but later on when you're rolling in dough and full up on ammo anyway it'll probably get deslotted (I wonder when you get it?).
That's one of the very good reasons why DRM is a bad idea. The others include: What if the company goes out of business (not so much of a problem in Amazon's case, but it's still an issue), and How do I resell this stuff like the physical version (books, CDs, DVDs, etc...)?
Ultimately, this is another example of how DRM is not about protecting you, it's about protecting the company at your expense.
But really, posting any more about why DRM is bad on Slashdot is just preaching to the choir.
Anyway, the 3 Wii rule is to cut down on people who buy them just to resell them on eBay for a markup. It's basically an anti-scalping provision, and thus does not garner much complaint from me. The punishment is pretty draconian however.
According to the bumps Venture Brothers has been renewed for two seasons, a fact which brought joy to my heart, especially since they have been advertising even more Tim Eric crap lately.
Your mother is not alone. I've seen experiments online where people put water in the microwave to warm it up, cool it back down, and then grow plants with it and they say the plants perform poorly with the microwaved water, saying that the oven basically poisons the water and we shouldn't use it.
Ah, here it is: Microwaved Water and Plants. I would like to see someone replicate this in the lab, thus far nobody has been able to reproduce her result.
I'm sure the public will be able to grossy overestimate the risk once a movie comes out where people die from breathing nanoparticles or something.
The craziest thing is that with the average Joe the most common concern I've heard about nanotech is fear of the "grey goo" scenario, which in my mind is probably the least likely way we're going to destroy all life as we know it. The practical considerations of that scenario are enormous and we'd be lucky to get within 5 orders of magnitude of having to even worry about it.
The bigger concern in my book is the stuff that acts like asbestos in your lungs and gives you cancer or just makes a mess of cell walls.
That's interesting, would you care to run some benchmarks like the people in the article and posting your own article about it? I'd like to see what areas Microsoft focused their optimization efforts, because it was clearly not the ones tested in the article. As much faith as I put in anecdotal evidence from people on the internet, I would like to see some sort of methodology behind the "greatly improved performance" claim you have made.
I wish there were a way to tell Windows not to page out your applications. I've looked and the only thing I've found is a setting that is already set to "prefer applications".
Why not just put a "blind person mode" on the phone (probably with a more PC name)? This mode would emphasize voice dialing and whatnot and have the 911 alarm, but could be turned off by people who do not need it. In fact it could be off by default and turned on by the representative at the store if the person buying the phone needs it.
I imagine they are pushing against the ionosphere or something like that. It's just enough thrust to keep you from falling out of orbit and it comes "for free" from the solar panels bolted on the side. I imagine your payload is under a fairly strict energy budget, but that's hardly unusual for satellites.
One does not have a choice about the operating systems much of the time. I run FreeBSD on my home machine, but my work makes me jump through hoops if I want to run anything other than their "trusted" XP install on a machine. It's not worth my effort, plus they've been seduced into running Exchange, so I have to deal with the bloated and slow piece of crap that is Outlook.
One more tip: it's actually better to spread your credit around. Your credit score takes a hit if any card is anywhere close to the limit. If you have a ridiculous limit and pay it off every month it probably won't matter (I did this for awhile and discovered that if I just used my main card it wouldn't ever get close enough to matter), but if you have several cards with small limits it's better to spread the love.
The big advantage of only using one card is that you only have one bill to pay each month, which is easier to remember.
Maybe that's a regional thing? I've never ever seen a sign that suggests anything like that in any store in my 30 years. I've been across much of the US, but spend most of my time on the eastern seaboard, so maybe it's a west coast thing?
That behavior drives me crazy about Windows, so much so that I will often resort to forcing the page file down to 2MB just to keep it from swapping my applications out when I Minimize them. I hate having a system with 2GB of memory and having to wait 30 seconds for it to page some application back in (slow laptop HDDs don't help) just because it thought I might want a lot of free memory for some reason.
So the story is written (and I use that term loosely) to suggest that the Judge doesn't know a Spam when he sees it and punishes the wrong party. However, from the quality of the writing in the article I can't help but to wonder if this guy talks like this in real life, IE like a crazy person. Maybe he's one of those guys who's in small clams court every couple of weeks with what the Judge thinks is some frivolous nonsense that just eats up his time and pushes back the docket even further. Maybe this guy has ignored the Judge's warning not to bring this claptrap back into the court? Finally the Judge got fed up and just ruled against the guy to try to discourage him from doing it again?
If you want 100% uptime (which is impossible, but you can put enough 9s in your reliability to be close enough), you need to have your data distributed across multiple data centers, geographically separate, and over provisioned enough that the loss of one data center won't cause the others to be overloaded. It's important to keep your geographical separation large because you never know when the entire eastern (or western) seaboard will experience complete power failure or when a major backhaul router will go down/have a line cut. Preferably each data center should get power from multiple sources if they can, and multiple POPs on the internet from each center is almost mandatory.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are it will be satellite based internet anyway, making it useless for interactive games (you could play a card game or something like that, but FPS/RTS/etc... are right out thanks to the high latency).
I've always wondered just how much money the airlines make from those seatphones. I've never seen anybody use one, ever.
Actually, Netflix doesn't hurt theater sales too much, but it's murder on DVD sales. DVDs have been taking it in the rear for the past year or so and the MPAA is using it as an excuse to get lawmakers to pass legislation to stop them thar pirates who be stealing arr sales.
I have to admit, after getting Netflix my urge to actually buy DVDs dried up pretty quick. I'll still get stuff here and there (especially if I plan to show it to friends/lend it out), but for the most part my collection has been stagnant for a couple of years now.
Well, they can't send the Hollywood (or Bollywood, or wherever) producers to jail for making crappy movies, those are the guys that pay their salary!
I trust them about as much as I trust random yahoos on Youtube. That's why it's important to do real research on your own, with peer reviewed journals and everything. Or use some common sense and a little bit of research, that usually works too.
I doubt it, they're still advertising on TV for the Christmas holiday. The DRM removal patch (if it ever comes out) will probably be in a year or so. If you really want to avoid it you'll probably just have to pirate the game.
Heavy backlash against Bioshock? From what I've seen most people seem to like Bioshock. It had a lot of "game of the year" mentions among my friends. Is this a Euro thing where they are supposed to hate the game because it doesn't punish the player enough? I've played the game with basically no-vita chambers (just reload from the last save every time you die) and it really doesn't seem to add much to the game. Besides, none of that makes one iota of difference to the part that really pushed Bioshock into the "great games of the year" category: The storyline.
While there are parts of the game that I thought could have used some work (the Crafting is pretty halfassed and the Hacking got tedious after awhile), I considered my complaints minor. Also, the ending was underrated. I thought it wrapped up the story nicely (at least with the good ending) and in a very touching way.
Also, anybody who didn't think there would be a Bioshock 2, please raise your hands so we can laugh at you. Even if the entire team quit and 2K had to hire a bunch of hacks to make it, you can count on the fact that they're going to bank on the Bioshock name.
Actually, it is a little worrisome that so many of the developers have apparently moved on already. Gaming (and especially PC gaming) is rife with crappy sequels made by a different development group than the great original game.
I think that patch would have been an excellent time to redo the crafting system and make it interesting. The existing system is pretty halfassed. Adding a mode that penalizes you for using the Vita chambers (make them cost money!) would have been a nice touch too.
As far as the actual improvements are concerned, the Sonic Boom will probably end up being one of those Novelty plasmids (Bees, Cyclone Trap, Security System Override) that end up being situational at best. The EVE reducer could go a long way towards letting players focus more on Plasmids than weapons though. The extra damage vs. anything hackable is pointless and even counterproductive since you usually don't want to destroy those things, you want to hack them. Cheaper stuff at the Vending Machines is ok, but I'm betting it's not a huge difference. It might be worthwhile in the early game, but later on when you're rolling in dough and full up on ammo anyway it'll probably get deslotted (I wonder when you get it?).
Well, it could tell you if you want to make your annual charity donation to the Parkinson's prevention or the Alzheimers prevention people. :)
That's one of the very good reasons why DRM is a bad idea. The others include: What if the company goes out of business (not so much of a problem in Amazon's case, but it's still an issue), and How do I resell this stuff like the physical version (books, CDs, DVDs, etc...)?
Ultimately, this is another example of how DRM is not about protecting you, it's about protecting the company at your expense.
But really, posting any more about why DRM is bad on Slashdot is just preaching to the choir.
Anyway, the 3 Wii rule is to cut down on people who buy them just to resell them on eBay for a markup. It's basically an anti-scalping provision, and thus does not garner much complaint from me. The punishment is pretty draconian however.
Don't worry, you'll never find 3 Wiis in stock in the same month anywhere anyway.
According to the bumps Venture Brothers has been renewed for two seasons, a fact which brought joy to my heart, especially since they have been advertising even more Tim Eric crap lately.
Your mother is not alone. I've seen experiments online where people put water in the microwave to warm it up, cool it back down, and then grow plants with it and they say the plants perform poorly with the microwaved water, saying that the oven basically poisons the water and we shouldn't use it.
Ah, here it is: Microwaved Water and Plants. I would like to see someone replicate this in the lab, thus far nobody has been able to reproduce her result.
I'm sure the public will be able to grossy overestimate the risk once a movie comes out where people die from breathing nanoparticles or something.
The craziest thing is that with the average Joe the most common concern I've heard about nanotech is fear of the "grey goo" scenario, which in my mind is probably the least likely way we're going to destroy all life as we know it. The practical considerations of that scenario are enormous and we'd be lucky to get within 5 orders of magnitude of having to even worry about it.
The bigger concern in my book is the stuff that acts like asbestos in your lungs and gives you cancer or just makes a mess of cell walls.
That's interesting, would you care to run some benchmarks like the people in the article and posting your own article about it? I'd like to see what areas Microsoft focused their optimization efforts, because it was clearly not the ones tested in the article. As much faith as I put in anecdotal evidence from people on the internet, I would like to see some sort of methodology behind the "greatly improved performance" claim you have made.
I wish there were a way to tell Windows not to page out your applications. I've looked and the only thing I've found is a setting that is already set to "prefer applications".
Why not just put a "blind person mode" on the phone (probably with a more PC name)? This mode would emphasize voice dialing and whatnot and have the 911 alarm, but could be turned off by people who do not need it. In fact it could be off by default and turned on by the representative at the store if the person buying the phone needs it.
I imagine they are pushing against the ionosphere or something like that. It's just enough thrust to keep you from falling out of orbit and it comes "for free" from the solar panels bolted on the side. I imagine your payload is under a fairly strict energy budget, but that's hardly unusual for satellites.
Because then Windows gives you grief about turning it off every time you boot the machine.
One does not have a choice about the operating systems much of the time. I run FreeBSD on my home machine, but my work makes me jump through hoops if I want to run anything other than their "trusted" XP install on a machine. It's not worth my effort, plus they've been seduced into running Exchange, so I have to deal with the bloated and slow piece of crap that is Outlook.
One more tip: it's actually better to spread your credit around. Your credit score takes a hit if any card is anywhere close to the limit. If you have a ridiculous limit and pay it off every month it probably won't matter (I did this for awhile and discovered that if I just used my main card it wouldn't ever get close enough to matter), but if you have several cards with small limits it's better to spread the love.
The big advantage of only using one card is that you only have one bill to pay each month, which is easier to remember.
Maybe that's a regional thing? I've never ever seen a sign that suggests anything like that in any store in my 30 years. I've been across much of the US, but spend most of my time on the eastern seaboard, so maybe it's a west coast thing?
That behavior drives me crazy about Windows, so much so that I will often resort to forcing the page file down to 2MB just to keep it from swapping my applications out when I Minimize them. I hate having a system with 2GB of memory and having to wait 30 seconds for it to page some application back in (slow laptop HDDs don't help) just because it thought I might want a lot of free memory for some reason.
So the story is written (and I use that term loosely) to suggest that the Judge doesn't know a Spam when he sees it and punishes the wrong party. However, from the quality of the writing in the article I can't help but to wonder if this guy talks like this in real life, IE like a crazy person. Maybe he's one of those guys who's in small clams court every couple of weeks with what the Judge thinks is some frivolous nonsense that just eats up his time and pushes back the docket even further. Maybe this guy has ignored the Judge's warning not to bring this claptrap back into the court? Finally the Judge got fed up and just ruled against the guy to try to discourage him from doing it again?
If you want 100% uptime (which is impossible, but you can put enough 9s in your reliability to be close enough), you need to have your data distributed across multiple data centers, geographically separate, and over provisioned enough that the loss of one data center won't cause the others to be overloaded. It's important to keep your geographical separation large because you never know when the entire eastern (or western) seaboard will experience complete power failure or when a major backhaul router will go down/have a line cut. Preferably each data center should get power from multiple sources if they can, and multiple POPs on the internet from each center is almost mandatory.