[sarcasm off] For the record, I believe 100% that the landings were real, but I also believe that nothing short of dragging the conspiracy nuts up to the moon themselves will convince them of the fact. Maybe not even that.
Lies! You have simply kidnapped me and whisked away to an entirely convincing sound stage. And I weigh about 1/6th as much as I normally do. This is simply conclusive proof that you have invented antigravity. Will you not stop at any length to perpetuate this vile lie?!
Many of the things you complain about were "fixed" in the post-Starcraft RTS games released during the heyday of RTS (when there was competition). For instance, in Age of Kings, units automatically march in sensible formations, which avoids your complaint, and the AI is also decent, if not spectacular -- better than Starcraft's, for sure. Newer RTS games seem to be a step backwards. Supreme Commander has abysmal AI, and neither it nor the latest C&C features formations.
I played the Supreme Commander demo last night and that was the first thing I groaned about after gushing over the sparkly graphics. I've been looking at the newer ones first so that would explain why I'm not seeing much impressive. How annoying are the Total War games? The only one I've played was Shogun. Beautiful graphics, lots of good effort on art, absolutely zero play-testing. It was a terribly frustrating game, lots of good ideas with an unpolished execution. The first sequel, Medieval Total War, I read was unbalanced and unplayable even while it impressed with the sparkly. Is anything else worth looking at in the series?
I was a big fan of RTS from the early days with Dune 2 up to Total Annihilation. But Starcraft was where I finally started to ask "Is there nothing else?" Sure, it was an incredibly polished game and I would have been astounded by it five years before. But the thing is, it really was little more than Orcs in Space. Snazzy voice acting, high production values, but the gameplay was little more advanced. Now I'm sure that there are a million South Koreans who are ready to flame me on this so fine, let's say it's the pinnacle of RTS gaming, we'll run with that for a second. Has anyone done better since then? No.
No matter how advanced the graphics have become, no matter how much more bling has been shoved onto the disc, at the end of the day the AI's still suck and the controls are maddeningly primitive. Here, five units I want to move! Select, click move, watch them run into each other and eventually form a ragged column and then approach a target one at a time, allowing themselves to be crushed in detail.
I've been away from PC gaming for a few years and am catching up on demos of games that have come out in the meantime. So far there's little evidence of any advancement in all these years. The videos for Starcraft 2 look like 3D representations of exactly what went on in Starcraft 1. I suppose if Starcraft was the pinnacle of RTS design for you then a graphics buff is all you need.
You know, I always thought it was pretty weird how your crew would be mad at you if you sold a bunch of them to the Druuge, but they never seemed to care when dozens of them would die because I was too drunk to avoid smacking the ship into a planet.
Because it's all part of the plan. If the crew dies because I smack into a planet or pick a fight with a bigger ship, nobody panics, because it's all part of the plan. But when I say I'm going to sell a few crew to the Druuge because I need some credits, well then everyone loses their minds!
How the crap do you do that? Lets see, Intel makes a top of the line CPU called the Core i7, however within 3 years, that CPU will be considered mid to low end. So what is Intel to do? Stop making CPUs until they manage to make the fastest one ever then abandon the CPU market? Heck, most of the waste was caused by the government mandating the DTV switch. Technology evolves independent of the manufacturer.
The problem is a matter of properly accounting for the full cost to society. If I have a tree on my property and it falls in your yard, I have to pay for disposal. If I'm burning leaves in my yard and catch your house on fire, I'm on the hook. This makes sense.
If I'm a mega-corp and am pumping pollutants in the sky, nobody really gets on my case for it. I could increase the local cancer rate and any class-action suit against me would be tied up in courts for years as I force you to try and prove the connection. The lawyer fees are chump change compared to what I'm saving by not cleaning my emissions.
If I'm a beverage bottler, I'm pumping out a billion plastic bottles a year. It's holding five minutes worth of beverage and will be on this planet for ten thousand years or more. Currently there's no law telling me what I'm doing is wrong but it has as much impact as my previous example of burning leaves and setting your house on fire. Because the problems are bigger and harder for us to grasp, they're harder for us to deal with effectively.
Nobody is telling manufacturers they aren't allowed to remain in business but they are being told that they have to consider the environmental impact of their business model just as carefully as they look into their market research.
So we have a pile of old laptops that we need to recycle. We dump them in one of those industrial shredders that reduce them to powder. We run the powder through centrifuges to separate the pieces by weight. This part's probably the really, really complicated bit but the end result is purified feedstock to put back into the manufacturing process. Here's the aluminum, here's the old bits of plastic, and so forth.
Obviously, if this were really cheap and economical the companies would be doing it already, they wouldn't be going out to get fresh feedstock. So, I take it the crushing and separating just isn't economical yet? Or is it not even quite technically possible?
So this quote doesn't fully address the One True Controller debate, but I think it's important to realize that we were all children when this equipment came out and we may have a bad case of rose-colored glasses.
You raise a good point with the curmudgeon angle. I can't stand playing shooters with a console controller, I need a mouse and keyboard. But this does not discount that there are people very, very good with the console controller. You probably can't argue the inherent superiority of one over the other but you can certainly see how personal preference can enter into it. I grew up on mouse and keyboard control for shooters so it feels more natural.
There's probably still good room for controller innovation and it would also depend on the kind of game you're playing. Digital controls suck for racing. The analog sticks are ok but you really need a wheel for it to feel right. Likewise, flight sims don't feel right with anything other than a proper joystick to control the aircraft.
I think there's a lot of room out there for controller innovation but the downside is that it greatly increases the cost of the game. I was skeptical about the potential for Guitar Hero due to requiring an expensive guitar controller for the full experience. I was extremely skeptical about the equipment cost for Rock Band. Turns out those games were popular enough to support it. The Wii motion controller is great for games designed with it in mind but there are many genres where the motion controller just doesn't cut it, you need a traditional gamepad.
We've traditionally seen more innovation in the arcade game market since the special hardware development is simply part of designing the game and it all comes with the cabinet. As electronics become cheaper, we might end up seeing more customized controllers for specific games.
As soon as Global Gaming Factory X buys it, you can say bye-bye to all the torrents, and worst of all, all the trackers. Which means pretty much the end of BitTorrent as we know it, since most of the pirated content in the world is tracked TPB.
Yeah, and when Napster died, that was the end of mp3 distribution as we knew it. Then came the era of mp3 distribution as we had not known it. After Audio Galaxy died something else came along. Supernova died, Mininova came. Pirate Bay dies, something else comes along.
P2P is like the Borg, endlessly adapting to whatever attack you come up with. Blast it with a phaser? The next one has a phaser shield. Modulate the phaser beam, the next one has modulated shields. Rip its its arm off and use it to club the thing to death, the next one will have sturdier arms that can't be ripped off.
This is actually quite funny because p2p services operate off the same popularity dynamics as normal products and services. Something like McDonalds comes along, it monopolizes the fast food burger market and also serves to suppress the wide-scale popularity of potentially better burger chains. If McDonalds folded tomorrow, we'd see an explosion of innovation and potentially better burgers.
The same inertia works in the p2p world. If Napster was never destroyed, we'd likely still be listening to crappy, half-broken mp3's to this day. People tend to stick with what works, even if it doesn't work well. Kill Napster, now suddenly there's a wide-open market for better clients and protocols to compete in. Kill off one of them, now the next generation can compete. The RIAA is like an incomplete course of antibiotics and the p2p networks are like MRSA. You don't kill 'em off completely and they'll just come back to eat your face.
So, the Pirate Bay is dead. Long live p2p. You know something else is coming.
Because he was a former head of Nasdaq. He was one of the rule makers. You do not expect the head of the major exchange to be a Ponzi schemer. Just like a head of police is very unlikely to be a drug dealer.
These days, those are precisely the kind of people I'm the most suspicious of.
When running on a browser without ad block, pages will take forever to load. The basic shell will come up but it will lag when feeding content from the advertiser servers. You cannot move on with your life until the ad loads and the page content will not load until the ad. Very annoying.
Also surprising is how much of the lag comes from the computer, not the bandwidth. I upgraded the home machine recently and am amazed at how quickly sites load now. I'd assumed previously that delays in loading were just waiting for data from the site but it appears that there's a lot of overhead with the bloat that is the modern browswer. I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
I cannot even begin to describe how utterly nice it felt to know nothing more than he's dead and I don't have to be inundated with inane television coverage.
I do think his funeral is going to be a bigger circus than the pope and Reagan combined.
Way back when I was playing Syndicate for the first time and marveling at how awesome it was, I was still struck by how much cooler it would be if I could level buildings. Even these days, games like GTA would be even cooler if buildings could be as thoroughly trashed as the cars are. Real world physics has come a long way in games these days but there's so much more that could be done.
Bunch of meddlesome twats, right? Yeah, Iranian people. You get the comparison, right? Because nobody likes Gandalf, the same way nobody likes America!!!
Heh. This is the most tone-deaf thing I've heard about since the operation to capture Saddam. Codename for that one? Red Dawn. What did they use as identifiers for Iraqi positions around Saddam? Wolverine 1, Wolverine 2, etc. If you're going to make allusions to movies, try not to pick one where you're comparing yourself to the Soviets.
Productivity apps can cost whatever, based on the size of their target market.
Those are the prices I grew up knowing. True inflation has got to be biting these companies in the ass. Dos 5 was $90 if I recall. I also remember games sold on the 5-1/4 floppies in the huge boxes going for $50 and seeing the Sierra games listed in their catalog at something like $75. With all the inflation, that $50 can't be worth what it was back in the day even though it still feels like a chunk of change.
This is not a defense of Microsoft's prices, more just shaking my head in bewilderment at inflation. I know I damn well won't pay $100 for a game, no matter how good it is.
I know. Just like those silly Interstate highways, the US Marine Corps, the US Postal Service that'll deliver a package of paper to any door in the US within a day or two for an affordable flat fee, and those terribly inefficient and socialized Firefighters and that neo-communist socialized Police Department. Government. Pah! Who needs it?
The Republicans are involved at the highest levels of government. If anybody would be in a position to fix it instead of complaining about it then it would be them, or at least them when they had control of all three branches not too long ago. So why didn't they do anything about it? And if it's a system that cannot be fixed and they do not believe in it, why are they still a part of it?
If us IT geeks went about our jobs like Republicans, we'd be saying stuff like "Bah, stupid computers! Management wants to do another IT project. Just another pointless boondoggle that will get screwed up, mark my words! We'd all be better off going back to paper! Who wants some pencil-necked geek standing between you and your work telling you what you can or can't do with some stupid blinking box?"
Years back when the digitals were first hitting the market they were even more power-hungry than now. They could suck a set of batteries dry with just a half hour's use. Crafty owners thought they could get around this expense by using rechargeable batteries. Responsible manufacturers will anticipate problems and stick warnings on the box, on neon sheets inside the packaging, etc, when a potential fuckup could happen. The way these cameras were designed, rechargeable batteries would destroy them. I don't know how or why. All of the 1-star reviews on Amazon mentioned the recharge problem and how people had ruined cameras that Kodak would not RMA because they didn't read the manual. The only warning was on page 215 in one unbolded and otherwise unremarkable sentence.
I never bought another one of their products again. This was utter asshattery. Users would expect to be able to use rechargeable batteries, especially since other cameras on the market did not have this limitation. Certainly a warning on the box would have been helpful, or maybe one of those big neon cards that you simply cannot miss. Maybe a warning sticker taped over the battery compartment. But it's obvious that Kodak knew this would be a deal-breaker for people so they deliberately concealed this design defect.
Steve Jobs may have had a liver transplant, still not confirmed by the company, now makes one of Apple's assertions from January -- that Jobs was suffering only from a hormonal imbalance -- seem like a deliberate untruth."
"Deliberate untruth?" How about "bald-faced lie?" That's like trying to recast rape as "surprise sex."
Apple deliberately lied and concealed the state of Steve's health because they wanted to prevent a public panic. The public would panic because Jobs' has been made the public face of the company, is Apple to the public's perception, and the wheels will fall off if he's out of the picture. Whether or not that would be the case, this is how the public feels. Given his rock star CEO status and given that the stock may well drop with this disclosure, there may very well be a case for the shareholders to file a class-action suit calling this fraud.
I do think that the lack of public awareness of any succession policy within Apple, the naming of an appointed and groomed successor puts the company at risk. Smart people have always worked at Apple but we saw how lost they became after Jobs was kicked out. Smart people working at cross purposes leads to a giant mess. The wiki writeup on the development of OSX was an eye-opener. Jobs had to be brought in as a consultant to clean up the mess left by the aborted OS9 replacement efforts. The company needed a benign dictator to sort things out.
Some will point out that many other technology companies survive without having a CEO who is on a first name basis with the global public. This is true but Apple is as much a fashion label as a technology company. He's more akin to Oprah or Richard Branson than, say, the heads of Sony or IBM or Samsung whose names I can't even think of at the moment because nobody's made an issue of it. I don't think anybody would panic if the CEO of American Airlines dropped dead but if Richard Branson croaked, I think the Virgin brands would take a hit even if it wasn't really warranted.
To all the people mocking his investment, your missing one thing. You do not know what the price of energy is going to do in the next few years. The guy in the article however is guaranteed a minimum amount of power each year from his solar panels at a rate he knows. (His initial investment / Life time of the panels). If the companies decide to hike the prices in two years time due a deterioration in Gulf politics for example, he is sheltered from its effects and lets be honest it's very unlikely the price is going to go down per kwh. He is also sheltered to a certain extent from the failure of the power network so if a situation does arise where there are rolling blackouts again, he knows he will a least have some electricity each day. One of the things that people constantly underestimate the price of is certainty.
And the price of energy is artificially low since we don't really factor the environmental cost into things. If you factor in environmental remediation, health care for people poisoned by the power plant pollution, etc, etc, fossil fuels would be very expensive. Just imagine how much gas would cost if we didn't pay for the military with payroll taxes but with a gas tax -- total out of pocket for the tax payer being the same, just let them see what they're really paying to make sure they have gas at the pump. Because the main reason we have a military is to protect our access to foreign oil. Don't tell me we need a military bigger than the rest of the world combined to protect us from Mexico and Canada.
Seriously, queue the obfuscation != security thing. If your email address is carefully protected, it is not displayed on a web page, obfuscated or not.
You say you want a spam resolution Well, you know We all want to save our email You tell me that it's obfuscation Well, you know That kind of security'll fail So when you talk about Javascript munging Don't you know that you can count me out If it's on the net it ain't secure, all right? all right, all right
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We'd all love to can the spam You ask me for some retribution Well, you know The Russian Mafia's got a plan When you spam the boxes of people with minds that hate All I can tell is brother you sealed your fate That spammer's gonna be canned all right all right, all right
Slashdot Mirror
[sarcasm off] For the record, I believe 100% that the landings were real, but I also believe that nothing short of dragging the conspiracy nuts up to the moon themselves will convince them of the fact. Maybe not even that.
Lies! You have simply kidnapped me and whisked away to an entirely convincing sound stage. And I weigh about 1/6th as much as I normally do. This is simply conclusive proof that you have invented antigravity. Will you not stop at any length to perpetuate this vile lie?!
Many of the things you complain about were "fixed" in the post-Starcraft RTS games released during the heyday of RTS (when there was competition). For instance, in Age of Kings, units automatically march in sensible formations, which avoids your complaint, and the AI is also decent, if not spectacular -- better than Starcraft's, for sure. Newer RTS games seem to be a step backwards. Supreme Commander has abysmal AI, and neither it nor the latest C&C features formations.
I played the Supreme Commander demo last night and that was the first thing I groaned about after gushing over the sparkly graphics. I've been looking at the newer ones first so that would explain why I'm not seeing much impressive. How annoying are the Total War games? The only one I've played was Shogun. Beautiful graphics, lots of good effort on art, absolutely zero play-testing. It was a terribly frustrating game, lots of good ideas with an unpolished execution. The first sequel, Medieval Total War, I read was unbalanced and unplayable even while it impressed with the sparkly. Is anything else worth looking at in the series?
I was a big fan of RTS from the early days with Dune 2 up to Total Annihilation. But Starcraft was where I finally started to ask "Is there nothing else?" Sure, it was an incredibly polished game and I would have been astounded by it five years before. But the thing is, it really was little more than Orcs in Space. Snazzy voice acting, high production values, but the gameplay was little more advanced. Now I'm sure that there are a million South Koreans who are ready to flame me on this so fine, let's say it's the pinnacle of RTS gaming, we'll run with that for a second. Has anyone done better since then? No.
No matter how advanced the graphics have become, no matter how much more bling has been shoved onto the disc, at the end of the day the AI's still suck and the controls are maddeningly primitive. Here, five units I want to move! Select, click move, watch them run into each other and eventually form a ragged column and then approach a target one at a time, allowing themselves to be crushed in detail.
I've been away from PC gaming for a few years and am catching up on demos of games that have come out in the meantime. So far there's little evidence of any advancement in all these years. The videos for Starcraft 2 look like 3D representations of exactly what went on in Starcraft 1. I suppose if Starcraft was the pinnacle of RTS design for you then a graphics buff is all you need.
You know, I always thought it was pretty weird how your crew would be mad at you if you sold a bunch of them to the Druuge, but they never seemed to care when dozens of them would die because I was too drunk to avoid smacking the ship into a planet.
Because it's all part of the plan. If the crew dies because I smack into a planet or pick a fight with a bigger ship, nobody panics, because it's all part of the plan. But when I say I'm going to sell a few crew to the Druuge because I need some credits, well then everyone loses their minds!
Druuge ships, Star Control II.
How the crap do you do that? Lets see, Intel makes a top of the line CPU called the Core i7, however within 3 years, that CPU will be considered mid to low end. So what is Intel to do? Stop making CPUs until they manage to make the fastest one ever then abandon the CPU market? Heck, most of the waste was caused by the government mandating the DTV switch. Technology evolves independent of the manufacturer.
The problem is a matter of properly accounting for the full cost to society. If I have a tree on my property and it falls in your yard, I have to pay for disposal. If I'm burning leaves in my yard and catch your house on fire, I'm on the hook. This makes sense.
If I'm a mega-corp and am pumping pollutants in the sky, nobody really gets on my case for it. I could increase the local cancer rate and any class-action suit against me would be tied up in courts for years as I force you to try and prove the connection. The lawyer fees are chump change compared to what I'm saving by not cleaning my emissions.
If I'm a beverage bottler, I'm pumping out a billion plastic bottles a year. It's holding five minutes worth of beverage and will be on this planet for ten thousand years or more. Currently there's no law telling me what I'm doing is wrong but it has as much impact as my previous example of burning leaves and setting your house on fire. Because the problems are bigger and harder for us to grasp, they're harder for us to deal with effectively.
Nobody is telling manufacturers they aren't allowed to remain in business but they are being told that they have to consider the environmental impact of their business model just as carefully as they look into their market research.
This idea seems solid, tell me what I'm missing.
So we have a pile of old laptops that we need to recycle. We dump them in one of those industrial shredders that reduce them to powder. We run the powder through centrifuges to separate the pieces by weight. This part's probably the really, really complicated bit but the end result is purified feedstock to put back into the manufacturing process. Here's the aluminum, here's the old bits of plastic, and so forth.
Obviously, if this were really cheap and economical the companies would be doing it already, they wouldn't be going out to get fresh feedstock. So, I take it the crushing and separating just isn't economical yet? Or is it not even quite technically possible?
So this quote doesn't fully address the One True Controller debate, but I think it's important to realize that we were all children when this equipment came out and we may have a bad case of rose-colored glasses.
You raise a good point with the curmudgeon angle. I can't stand playing shooters with a console controller, I need a mouse and keyboard. But this does not discount that there are people very, very good with the console controller. You probably can't argue the inherent superiority of one over the other but you can certainly see how personal preference can enter into it. I grew up on mouse and keyboard control for shooters so it feels more natural.
There's probably still good room for controller innovation and it would also depend on the kind of game you're playing. Digital controls suck for racing. The analog sticks are ok but you really need a wheel for it to feel right. Likewise, flight sims don't feel right with anything other than a proper joystick to control the aircraft.
I think there's a lot of room out there for controller innovation but the downside is that it greatly increases the cost of the game. I was skeptical about the potential for Guitar Hero due to requiring an expensive guitar controller for the full experience. I was extremely skeptical about the equipment cost for Rock Band. Turns out those games were popular enough to support it. The Wii motion controller is great for games designed with it in mind but there are many genres where the motion controller just doesn't cut it, you need a traditional gamepad.
We've traditionally seen more innovation in the arcade game market since the special hardware development is simply part of designing the game and it all comes with the cabinet. As electronics become cheaper, we might end up seeing more customized controllers for specific games.
can't wait to see it in action the next michael bay movie
Why not just put it in your Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC.
He said "low-budget", not "no talent".
As soon as Global Gaming Factory X buys it, you can say bye-bye to all the torrents, and worst of all, all the trackers. Which means pretty much the end of BitTorrent as we know it, since most of the pirated content in the world is tracked TPB.
Yeah, and when Napster died, that was the end of mp3 distribution as we knew it. Then came the era of mp3 distribution as we had not known it. After Audio Galaxy died something else came along. Supernova died, Mininova came. Pirate Bay dies, something else comes along.
P2P is like the Borg, endlessly adapting to whatever attack you come up with. Blast it with a phaser? The next one has a phaser shield. Modulate the phaser beam, the next one has modulated shields. Rip its its arm off and use it to club the thing to death, the next one will have sturdier arms that can't be ripped off.
This is actually quite funny because p2p services operate off the same popularity dynamics as normal products and services. Something like McDonalds comes along, it monopolizes the fast food burger market and also serves to suppress the wide-scale popularity of potentially better burger chains. If McDonalds folded tomorrow, we'd see an explosion of innovation and potentially better burgers.
The same inertia works in the p2p world. If Napster was never destroyed, we'd likely still be listening to crappy, half-broken mp3's to this day. People tend to stick with what works, even if it doesn't work well. Kill Napster, now suddenly there's a wide-open market for better clients and protocols to compete in. Kill off one of them, now the next generation can compete. The RIAA is like an incomplete course of antibiotics and the p2p networks are like MRSA. You don't kill 'em off completely and they'll just come back to eat your face.
So, the Pirate Bay is dead. Long live p2p. You know something else is coming.
Because he was a former head of Nasdaq. He was one of the rule makers. You do not expect the head of the major exchange to be a Ponzi schemer. Just like a head of police is very unlikely to be a drug dealer.
These days, those are precisely the kind of people I'm the most suspicious of.
Why is there a furry on the cover? I thought the mascot was a cute little robot.
When running on a browser without ad block, pages will take forever to load. The basic shell will come up but it will lag when feeding content from the advertiser servers. You cannot move on with your life until the ad loads and the page content will not load until the ad. Very annoying.
Also surprising is how much of the lag comes from the computer, not the bandwidth. I upgraded the home machine recently and am amazed at how quickly sites load now. I'd assumed previously that delays in loading were just waiting for data from the site but it appears that there's a lot of overhead with the bloat that is the modern browswer. I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
Next week: What to do with this big golden box thing? We tried opening it and some guy's face melted.
Guy 1: It's the Ark of the Covenant!
Guy 2: No, it's a spare reactor core. Same effect.
I cannot even begin to describe how utterly nice it felt to know nothing more than he's dead and I don't have to be inundated with inane television coverage.
I do think his funeral is going to be a bigger circus than the pope and Reagan combined.
Way back when I was playing Syndicate for the first time and marveling at how awesome it was, I was still struck by how much cooler it would be if I could level buildings. Even these days, games like GTA would be even cooler if buildings could be as thoroughly trashed as the cars are. Real world physics has come a long way in games these days but there's so much more that could be done.
A game of hang man...
/|\ /|\
-----
|/ |
| 0
|
| |
|
/ \
===========
Or virtual snuff porn? You decide.
NOW it looks like virtual snuff porn. (and also like he's been run through a wood chipper.)
Bunch of meddlesome twats, right? Yeah, Iranian people. You get the comparison, right? Because nobody likes Gandalf, the same way nobody likes America!!!
Heh. This is the most tone-deaf thing I've heard about since the operation to capture Saddam. Codename for that one? Red Dawn. What did they use as identifiers for Iraqi positions around Saddam? Wolverine 1, Wolverine 2, etc. If you're going to make allusions to movies, try not to pick one where you're comparing yourself to the Soviets.
An OS should never cost more than $80.
System Utilities should never cost more than $40.
Games should never cost more than $50.
Productivity apps can cost whatever, based on the size of their target market.
Those are the prices I grew up knowing. True inflation has got to be biting these companies in the ass. Dos 5 was $90 if I recall. I also remember games sold on the 5-1/4 floppies in the huge boxes going for $50 and seeing the Sierra games listed in their catalog at something like $75. With all the inflation, that $50 can't be worth what it was back in the day even though it still feels like a chunk of change.
This is not a defense of Microsoft's prices, more just shaking my head in bewilderment at inflation. I know I damn well won't pay $100 for a game, no matter how good it is.
More bullshit courtesy of the U.S. Gubmint!
I know. Just like those silly Interstate highways, the US Marine Corps, the US Postal Service that'll deliver a package of paper to any door in the US within a day or two for an affordable flat fee, and those terribly inefficient and socialized Firefighters and that neo-communist socialized Police Department. Government. Pah! Who needs it?
The Republicans are involved at the highest levels of government. If anybody would be in a position to fix it instead of complaining about it then it would be them, or at least them when they had control of all three branches not too long ago. So why didn't they do anything about it? And if it's a system that cannot be fixed and they do not believe in it, why are they still a part of it?
If us IT geeks went about our jobs like Republicans, we'd be saying stuff like "Bah, stupid computers! Management wants to do another IT project. Just another pointless boondoggle that will get screwed up, mark my words! We'd all be better off going back to paper! Who wants some pencil-necked geek standing between you and your work telling you what you can or can't do with some stupid blinking box?"
Years back when the digitals were first hitting the market they were even more power-hungry than now. They could suck a set of batteries dry with just a half hour's use. Crafty owners thought they could get around this expense by using rechargeable batteries. Responsible manufacturers will anticipate problems and stick warnings on the box, on neon sheets inside the packaging, etc, when a potential fuckup could happen. The way these cameras were designed, rechargeable batteries would destroy them. I don't know how or why. All of the 1-star reviews on Amazon mentioned the recharge problem and how people had ruined cameras that Kodak would not RMA because they didn't read the manual. The only warning was on page 215 in one unbolded and otherwise unremarkable sentence.
I never bought another one of their products again. This was utter asshattery. Users would expect to be able to use rechargeable batteries, especially since other cameras on the market did not have this limitation. Certainly a warning on the box would have been helpful, or maybe one of those big neon cards that you simply cannot miss. Maybe a warning sticker taped over the battery compartment. But it's obvious that Kodak knew this would be a deal-breaker for people so they deliberately concealed this design defect.
Steve Jobs may have had a liver transplant, still not confirmed by the company, now makes one of Apple's assertions from January -- that Jobs was suffering only from a hormonal imbalance -- seem like a deliberate untruth."
"Deliberate untruth?" How about "bald-faced lie?" That's like trying to recast rape as "surprise sex."
Apple deliberately lied and concealed the state of Steve's health because they wanted to prevent a public panic. The public would panic because Jobs' has been made the public face of the company, is Apple to the public's perception, and the wheels will fall off if he's out of the picture. Whether or not that would be the case, this is how the public feels. Given his rock star CEO status and given that the stock may well drop with this disclosure, there may very well be a case for the shareholders to file a class-action suit calling this fraud.
I do think that the lack of public awareness of any succession policy within Apple, the naming of an appointed and groomed successor puts the company at risk. Smart people have always worked at Apple but we saw how lost they became after Jobs was kicked out. Smart people working at cross purposes leads to a giant mess. The wiki writeup on the development of OSX was an eye-opener. Jobs had to be brought in as a consultant to clean up the mess left by the aborted OS9 replacement efforts. The company needed a benign dictator to sort things out.
Some will point out that many other technology companies survive without having a CEO who is on a first name basis with the global public. This is true but Apple is as much a fashion label as a technology company. He's more akin to Oprah or Richard Branson than, say, the heads of Sony or IBM or Samsung whose names I can't even think of at the moment because nobody's made an issue of it. I don't think anybody would panic if the CEO of American Airlines dropped dead but if Richard Branson croaked, I think the Virgin brands would take a hit even if it wasn't really warranted.
To all the people mocking his investment, your missing one thing. You do not know what the price of energy is going to do in the next few years. The guy in the article however is guaranteed a minimum amount of power each year from his solar panels at a rate he knows. (His initial investment / Life time of the panels). If the companies decide to hike the prices in two years time due a deterioration in Gulf politics for example, he is sheltered from its effects and lets be honest it's very unlikely the price is going to go down per kwh. He is also sheltered to a certain extent from the failure of the power network so if a situation does arise where there are rolling blackouts again, he knows he will a least have some electricity each day. One of the things that people constantly underestimate the price of is certainty.
And the price of energy is artificially low since we don't really factor the environmental cost into things. If you factor in environmental remediation, health care for people poisoned by the power plant pollution, etc, etc, fossil fuels would be very expensive. Just imagine how much gas would cost if we didn't pay for the military with payroll taxes but with a gas tax -- total out of pocket for the tax payer being the same, just let them see what they're really paying to make sure they have gas at the pump. Because the main reason we have a military is to protect our access to foreign oil. Don't tell me we need a military bigger than the rest of the world combined to protect us from Mexico and Canada.
That doesn't seem to flow very well....
My friends call me MC Frozen Toothpaste.
Seriously, queue the obfuscation != security thing. If your email address is carefully protected, it is not displayed on a web page, obfuscated or not.
You say you want a spam resolution
Well, you know
We all want to save our email
You tell me that it's obfuscation
Well, you know
That kind of security'll fail
So when you talk about Javascript munging
Don't you know that you can count me out
If it's on the net it ain't secure, all right?
all right, all right
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to can the spam
You ask me for some retribution
Well, you know
The Russian Mafia's got a plan
When you spam the boxes
of people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you sealed your fate
That spammer's gonna be canned all right
all right, all right