You can see where they were coming from at least. I mean it came out of a hole in the ground, it might as well go back in there when you're done with it.:)
The best part is that back in the 60s a lot of those shadetree mechanics would have had well water instead of city water.
I disagree that tuning is just a way to work around an inferior AI. When you're only playing against the AI then tuning doesn't matter nearly as much since you can easily make the AI cheat to make up for its deficiencies. Where the tuning really matters is in PvP. If the player perceive (or even mathematically determine for themselves) that one faction/unit/tactic/etc... is "better", then you tend to get very one-dimensional online battles that get boring very quickly. If everything is about equal then you get variety and endless debate online as to which is "better".
Frankly, in SL I think you're doing pretty good if you make enough money to pay your tier (basically rent on your land), and that's an absolutely pathetic amount of money you need to make if you put your stipend towards your tier.
I think the article misses the point that people put actual value into virtual items. Heck, the entire online porn industry is built on this (all you get are some bits that happen to represent naughty images with no resale value). The thing is that they're only focusing on land prices, because that's the only area in SL were the money involved isn't tiny, but in reality outside of the land barons nobody makes money on the land. It's the kind of business you get into only if you're willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars into buying islands and breaking them up for resale. Like most SL articles, this one is stupid.
Eh, China's "average income" is a tricky thing to measure though. The vast throng of peasant farmers don't download digital music anyway because they don't have a computer. The moderized city dwellers however have the disposable income to spend on CDs/online music if they wanted to, but don't because pirated stuff is available everywhere and the legitimate stuff can be difficult to find. By offering people a way to buy stuff legitimately the labels aren't planning to wipe out piracy, but rather to actually make some money in a market where they've previously done almost nothing. You might say "but why would I buy something I can pirate for free?", but I'd point you to the iTunes Music Store and how much money it has made despite being in a very similar situation.
Everybody is worried that the opposition is going to be filled with elite PvP players just looking to gank n00bs, but I suspect the opposite will happen a lot. There will be plenty of players with no idea what they're going playing the grunts and you'll see the grunts shooting their buddies and falling off of cliffs a lot.
You know, in side by side comparisons I'm rarely ever able to tell the difference between organic and regular fruits and vegetables. I've tried. Sometimes the organic ones taste better, sometimes the conventional ones do. Typically the difference isn't enough for the markup IMHO (with organic products costing on average 50-100% more).
Worse, the Organic stocks appear to be refreshed more slowly than the conventional stocks (due to lower volume I guess), so they've often been sitting on the shelf for an extra day or two. Freshness makes a much bigger impact on flavor than the method it was grown. That's why it's generally preferable to buy produce from Farmers markets (although you have to be careful, many "farmers markets" are really just disguised grocery stores) where you know it hasn't been off of the ground for more than a day or two. Unfortunatly, this only works when you have farms nearby and stuff is in season, for the rest of the year you gotta stick with the grocery store offerings.
The biggest advantage of the organic stocks is sometimes you get to the store a couple of days after the regular vegetable shipment, but on the day of the organic shipment, so you can get fresher stuff from the organic aisle.
Flour, lentils of all kinds, sugar, rice, oats, etc... are all bad for you then? Man, this is really going to affect my diet, it's going to be hard to cook if I can't use staple foods.
Maybe I'm crazy, but if someone online is using your card and you find it blacklisted, maybe the best action would be to cancel that card and have it reissued with a new number? Banks are more than happy to reissue cards that you suspect may be compromised.
It is bad that it took you so long to figure out what the problem is. It's sadly common with security related errors like this for the people to keep the exact nature of the error vague in order to be "more secure" or something. In the end I think it has the opposite effect however.
I'm curious why you think it will pay itself off in a scant 30 years? From what I can tell he'll be dead before he starts realizing cost savings from this.
It still sounds to me like a camera with literally millions of moving parts though. Also, the sheer physics of getting the photons to the sensor (especially in low light conditions) when each pixel only has the most absolutely tiny slice of time to collect light seems rather difficult to surmount. In low light conditions it's easy to see where this could amount to only a handful of photons per pixel. It's hard to see how you wouldn't get lots of noise in low light conditions just due to the magnified effects of random variation in the number of photons hitting a lens per second.
Lets just say that the past 30 years have shown that missile defense of any kind is no easy matter. Identification is a computationally hard problem and as of yet we don't have any good solutions. Sure there might be a breakthrough at some point in AI work, but I'm not holding my breath.
I played through the game. The gameplay is simplistic, but the developers took the time to incorporate as much media and historical footage into the game as possible. The end result is a fairly well crafted game IMHO. Some aspects of it could use a little work--it follows the tried and true RPG "grind" of leveling up your characters. However, just like the real life version, the good guys aren't really a threat. It's possible to die if you're really sloppy right in the beginning of the attack, but after that you're doing the equivalent of killing rats in the forest for a couple of hours just to level up.
The second half of the game gets a bit more interesting gameplay wise, but the storyline really peters out. There's an island where you can talk to other characters for viewpoints on god and a final boss battle that still isn't very difficult. I have to admit that the second half of the game felt a bit tacked on.
I was only talking about trying to install the system on every airliner in the world, even the ones that don't fly in dangerous territory.
IMHO, it's unlikely that this system will ever be cheap, small, and reliable enough to be installed everywhere, especially in a scant 10 or 20 years. I could be wrong, but history has shown this to be a hard problem, and the costs for having this system misidentify something as a missile (or fail to identify a real missile) are high.
Just out of curiosity, how many commercial airliners in the US have been shot down with shoulder fired missiles? I haven't had any luck trying to find an instance in Google.
I could see a system like this for a plane that has to fly over Iraq or South Africa, but inside of the US/Canada/Europe/Australia/Asia it doesn't seem to be necessary, worse, a system like this is probably going to require massive power and have considerable complexity. Highly complex pieces of equipment are liable to malfunction at some point and possibly even cause a crash.
No, installing something like this in every airplane in the US fleet is just not realistic. Having it as an option for people who have to fly near areas where terrorists have shoulder fired missiles and a grudge against the west is good though.
When did muggers stop taking nice watches? I suspect if someone has their iPod stolen they would also lose their watch if the mugger thought they could get money for it (IE, you're not wearing a Wal*Mart special or some 10 year old Casio).
One could argue that there are more people with iPods than nice watches in rough neighborhoods I guess.
The thing about the European prices compared to the US prices is that in the US we don't include tax in the stated price, in Europe the opposite is true. The price listed is what you actually pay at the register, as opposed to the US where you have to add on state tax (unless you're buying online, and even then you're supposed to pay your state for the purchase later (although nobody does this)).
Factoring out the tax we see that the PS3 is right around 500 to 520 euros or so, which puts it around US$650, which is a fairly modest markup of about US$50 or about 8% or so.
Er, if you're throwing spindles at the problem RAID 5 might not be the best solution to the problem. A lot of times it makes more sense to configure it as RAID1_0, even though it's less effective storage space the speed is a lot higher. The complexity is lower too, which is a good thing because even on high end devices it's depressingly common to find bugs in the RAID5 support on controllers, especially once you start pushing them hard for months on end and have hundreds to manage. Every storage engineer dreads having to go to each machine (usually in the middle of the night) and upgrade the firmware yet again on their high priced controllers.
That's not to say you won't find a company willing to put one of these (or two, in a RAID 0 array) in a "gamer laptop". Sure it sucks down 5w and is going to get mighty hot unless the ventilation is set up correctly, but that's far from an insurmountable problem. The bigger problem will probably be getting the SAS interface in there. Sure the laptop is going to be better classified as a luggable, but that's hardly unusual with "lan party laptops". If they can figure out how to cram an 8800GTX in there, they can figure out how to cool 5W of dissipation off of the drive.
I thought Hymn decrypted the files without decoding them? It used the decryption key stored on the iPod to run the music through the decoder and then spit out the byte perfect unencrypted version. Apple broke it with an iPod update.
The thing about 120FPS is that when someone is quoting you that number, they're talking about the framerate when you're sitting in the entrance room after first booting up the game. In complex environments where you have lots of monsters and particle effects on the screen, that number can quickly drop down into the 30-60 range. While this is still more than playable, if you'd only started at 60 or 45FPS the game would bog down in the difficult sections (and those sections are typically where you need that extra accuracy and quicker response time).
But that's exactly what I'm talking about. "It's for a server so you're going to be buying server cards" is exactly the problem it had. If you wanted to install a fancier graphics card you were SOL. Sound cards were a nightmare too. Even network cards were hit or miss on the stupid thing. One might have an argument that it was the best ever Microsoft Server OS, but to say it was the best version of Windows is too much IMHO.
But then the kids would have different schedules from the adults. Presumably parents plan their morning around getting their kids off to school while they go to work (Remember this is wartime, so even in the 40s there were a lot of single parent households with a working parent) and making them rejigger their schedule twice a year is probably considered harder than making all of us change our clocks.
Ok, I'm talking out of my ass here. I really have no idea why.
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You can see where they were coming from at least. I mean it came out of a hole in the ground, it might as well go back in there when you're done with it. :)
The best part is that back in the 60s a lot of those shadetree mechanics would have had well water instead of city water.
I disagree that tuning is just a way to work around an inferior AI. When you're only playing against the AI then tuning doesn't matter nearly as much since you can easily make the AI cheat to make up for its deficiencies. Where the tuning really matters is in PvP. If the player perceive (or even mathematically determine for themselves) that one faction/unit/tactic/etc... is "better", then you tend to get very one-dimensional online battles that get boring very quickly. If everything is about equal then you get variety and endless debate online as to which is "better".
Frankly, in SL I think you're doing pretty good if you make enough money to pay your tier (basically rent on your land), and that's an absolutely pathetic amount of money you need to make if you put your stipend towards your tier.
I think the article misses the point that people put actual value into virtual items. Heck, the entire online porn industry is built on this (all you get are some bits that happen to represent naughty images with no resale value). The thing is that they're only focusing on land prices, because that's the only area in SL were the money involved isn't tiny, but in reality outside of the land barons nobody makes money on the land. It's the kind of business you get into only if you're willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars into buying islands and breaking them up for resale. Like most SL articles, this one is stupid.
It will be funny if life imitates Penny Arcade.
Eh, China's "average income" is a tricky thing to measure though. The vast throng of peasant farmers don't download digital music anyway because they don't have a computer. The moderized city dwellers however have the disposable income to spend on CDs/online music if they wanted to, but don't because pirated stuff is available everywhere and the legitimate stuff can be difficult to find. By offering people a way to buy stuff legitimately the labels aren't planning to wipe out piracy, but rather to actually make some money in a market where they've previously done almost nothing. You might say "but why would I buy something I can pirate for free?", but I'd point you to the iTunes Music Store and how much money it has made despite being in a very similar situation.
Everybody is worried that the opposition is going to be filled with elite PvP players just looking to gank n00bs, but I suspect the opposite will happen a lot. There will be plenty of players with no idea what they're going playing the grunts and you'll see the grunts shooting their buddies and falling off of cliffs a lot.
You know, in side by side comparisons I'm rarely ever able to tell the difference between organic and regular fruits and vegetables. I've tried. Sometimes the organic ones taste better, sometimes the conventional ones do. Typically the difference isn't enough for the markup IMHO (with organic products costing on average 50-100% more).
Worse, the Organic stocks appear to be refreshed more slowly than the conventional stocks (due to lower volume I guess), so they've often been sitting on the shelf for an extra day or two. Freshness makes a much bigger impact on flavor than the method it was grown. That's why it's generally preferable to buy produce from Farmers markets (although you have to be careful, many "farmers markets" are really just disguised grocery stores) where you know it hasn't been off of the ground for more than a day or two. Unfortunatly, this only works when you have farms nearby and stuff is in season, for the rest of the year you gotta stick with the grocery store offerings.
The biggest advantage of the organic stocks is sometimes you get to the store a couple of days after the regular vegetable shipment, but on the day of the organic shipment, so you can get fresher stuff from the organic aisle.
Flour, lentils of all kinds, sugar, rice, oats, etc... are all bad for you then? Man, this is really going to affect my diet, it's going to be hard to cook if I can't use staple foods.
Maybe I'm crazy, but if someone online is using your card and you find it blacklisted, maybe the best action would be to cancel that card and have it reissued with a new number? Banks are more than happy to reissue cards that you suspect may be compromised.
It is bad that it took you so long to figure out what the problem is. It's sadly common with security related errors like this for the people to keep the exact nature of the error vague in order to be "more secure" or something. In the end I think it has the opposite effect however.
I'm curious why you think it will pay itself off in a scant 30 years? From what I can tell he'll be dead before he starts realizing cost savings from this.
It still sounds to me like a camera with literally millions of moving parts though. Also, the sheer physics of getting the photons to the sensor (especially in low light conditions) when each pixel only has the most absolutely tiny slice of time to collect light seems rather difficult to surmount. In low light conditions it's easy to see where this could amount to only a handful of photons per pixel. It's hard to see how you wouldn't get lots of noise in low light conditions just due to the magnified effects of random variation in the number of photons hitting a lens per second.
Lets just say that the past 30 years have shown that missile defense of any kind is no easy matter. Identification is a computationally hard problem and as of yet we don't have any good solutions. Sure there might be a breakthrough at some point in AI work, but I'm not holding my breath.
I played through the game. The gameplay is simplistic, but the developers took the time to incorporate as much media and historical footage into the game as possible. The end result is a fairly well crafted game IMHO. Some aspects of it could use a little work--it follows the tried and true RPG "grind" of leveling up your characters. However, just like the real life version, the good guys aren't really a threat. It's possible to die if you're really sloppy right in the beginning of the attack, but after that you're doing the equivalent of killing rats in the forest for a couple of hours just to level up.
The second half of the game gets a bit more interesting gameplay wise, but the storyline really peters out. There's an island where you can talk to other characters for viewpoints on god and a final boss battle that still isn't very difficult. I have to admit that the second half of the game felt a bit tacked on.
I was only talking about trying to install the system on every airliner in the world, even the ones that don't fly in dangerous territory.
IMHO, it's unlikely that this system will ever be cheap, small, and reliable enough to be installed everywhere, especially in a scant 10 or 20 years. I could be wrong, but history has shown this to be a hard problem, and the costs for having this system misidentify something as a missile (or fail to identify a real missile) are high.
Just out of curiosity, how many commercial airliners in the US have been shot down with shoulder fired missiles? I haven't had any luck trying to find an instance in Google.
I could see a system like this for a plane that has to fly over Iraq or South Africa, but inside of the US/Canada/Europe/Australia/Asia it doesn't seem to be necessary, worse, a system like this is probably going to require massive power and have considerable complexity. Highly complex pieces of equipment are liable to malfunction at some point and possibly even cause a crash.
No, installing something like this in every airplane in the US fleet is just not realistic. Having it as an option for people who have to fly near areas where terrorists have shoulder fired missiles and a grudge against the west is good though.
When did muggers stop taking nice watches? I suspect if someone has their iPod stolen they would also lose their watch if the mugger thought they could get money for it (IE, you're not wearing a Wal*Mart special or some 10 year old Casio).
One could argue that there are more people with iPods than nice watches in rough neighborhoods I guess.
The thing about the European prices compared to the US prices is that in the US we don't include tax in the stated price, in Europe the opposite is true. The price listed is what you actually pay at the register, as opposed to the US where you have to add on state tax (unless you're buying online, and even then you're supposed to pay your state for the purchase later (although nobody does this)).
Factoring out the tax we see that the PS3 is right around 500 to 520 euros or so, which puts it around US$650, which is a fairly modest markup of about US$50 or about 8% or so.
Er, if you're throwing spindles at the problem RAID 5 might not be the best solution to the problem. A lot of times it makes more sense to configure it as RAID1_0, even though it's less effective storage space the speed is a lot higher. The complexity is lower too, which is a good thing because even on high end devices it's depressingly common to find bugs in the RAID5 support on controllers, especially once you start pushing them hard for months on end and have hundreds to manage. Every storage engineer dreads having to go to each machine (usually in the middle of the night) and upgrade the firmware yet again on their high priced controllers.
That's not to say you won't find a company willing to put one of these (or two, in a RAID 0 array) in a "gamer laptop". Sure it sucks down 5w and is going to get mighty hot unless the ventilation is set up correctly, but that's far from an insurmountable problem. The bigger problem will probably be getting the SAS interface in there. Sure the laptop is going to be better classified as a luggable, but that's hardly unusual with "lan party laptops". If they can figure out how to cram an 8800GTX in there, they can figure out how to cool 5W of dissipation off of the drive.
I thought Hymn decrypted the files without decoding them? It used the decryption key stored on the iPod to run the music through the decoder and then spit out the byte perfect unencrypted version. Apple broke it with an iPod update.
The thing about 120FPS is that when someone is quoting you that number, they're talking about the framerate when you're sitting in the entrance room after first booting up the game. In complex environments where you have lots of monsters and particle effects on the screen, that number can quickly drop down into the 30-60 range. While this is still more than playable, if you'd only started at 60 or 45FPS the game would bog down in the difficult sections (and those sections are typically where you need that extra accuracy and quicker response time).
But that's exactly what I'm talking about. "It's for a server so you're going to be buying server cards" is exactly the problem it had. If you wanted to install a fancier graphics card you were SOL. Sound cards were a nightmare too. Even network cards were hit or miss on the stupid thing. One might have an argument that it was the best ever Microsoft Server OS, but to say it was the best version of Windows is too much IMHO.
But then the kids would have different schedules from the adults. Presumably parents plan their morning around getting their kids off to school while they go to work (Remember this is wartime, so even in the 40s there were a lot of single parent households with a working parent) and making them rejigger their schedule twice a year is probably considered harder than making all of us change our clocks.
Ok, I'm talking out of my ass here. I really have no idea why.
3.51 had serious hardware support issues that prevent it from taking the top spot in my book.
Easy solution: Try installing Linux.