Well, there's the whole "No plan survives contact with the enemy." thing going on.
They can do all sorts of studies and modelling and focus group testing and STILL have stuff get broke all to hell by the general populace.
And, organized or not, there's always the possibility that the development and implementation teams quite simply didn't fully grasp the product they were trying to deliver nor the processes required to deliver it in a usable format.
So you get things like "Your apps is great! It's stellar! We want it in the market so bad! So we're going to expedite this by refusing to put it up. Oh. And we don't have a reason why. Uhh...Oh look! SQUIRREL!" *Wildhandwaving*
I see this tablet/phone foray as one of Microsoft's last rolls of the dice. If this doesn't work then they'll be marginalized sooner rather than later. I know its been 'heralded' for too long, but we are actually seeing a shift in the primary use of computers. PCs, like it or not are fast heading towards niche status.
I advise you to now swallow a few grains of salt.
Uh yeah...no. This is just a vaguely redressed "The PC is dying." argument.
The PC has been "dying" for the last 30+ years. It's harder to kill than my grandmother (had a bunch of major strokes back in the mid-80's and a host of doctors over the next 15 years told her she didn't have 5 years left, she outlived all of them and didn't die until late 2011).
PCs aren't heading towards niche ANYTHING.
As a primary productivity platform, with one in front of just about everybody on the planet, there's no longer room for explosive growth. This means people will be on a 3-7 year upgrade cycle and there'll be some market normalization as people who simply don't need the power a PC puts in their hands migrate off to something less.
Whereas media CONSUMPTION devices, like tablets, still have relatively low percentile market penetration. So there's at least potential for explosive growth.
Uhm. The OS is released and there's major dumb-fuckery going on in their online store, the ONLY place you can buy apps from for certain versions of the new OS.
No, thinking you have the right to commit violence on another person over words you don't like makes you an idiot, and a savage...
I don't know. Some guy with a knife saying "I'm going to gut you, then rape your wife and daughter."?
I wouldn't like those words.
And yeah, I'd do violence unto someone saying those things to me.
It's REALLY easy to lay out a generalization.
Where most people get into trouble is in dealing with the specifics.
This is one of the reason blanket "zero tolerance" type policies are so damned stupid.
Basically things like this relieve people of the obligation to be both involved and proactive. Then they can scoot by on minimal effort being reflexive and reactionary with all sorts of travesties taking place.
Case in point.
Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger, current Pope) was a member of the Hitler Youth.
This makes him evil right?
WRONG.
Membership in the Hitler Youth, in 1941, was compulsory. It was required by German law. Little Joe had exactly ZERO say in it. He wasn't an enthusiastic member, and by all accounts, never attended meetings.
He was later conscripted, right out of seminary, as a child soldier by the German Army. And did he fight for them? Nope. When the allies drew near his station, he took the opportunity to desert.
But nowadays, we live in the world of the sound byte and the thought-free "fact". It's just easier for assorted mental defectives to regurgitate simple bullet points to support their idiocies, without having to actually think their way through various exceptions. Never mind that SPECIFIC information can result in a complete change of context.
Seriously. Some of these people only have room in their heads for hatred, bigotry, and other forms of outright criminal idiocy. If the cloud expands this, do we really expect these mental defectives to do anything other than create a corollary to "Work expands to fill the space given to it"?
My high school "computer" classes were little more than "how to use a spreadsheet" on already-old-at-the-time Apple II computers (late 80's) with a Typing prereq. It was an absolute waste of time. The typing class destroyed my GPA because I'd been using word processing software for nearly a decade at that point and every time I'd glance over to check my work, the teacher would take a full letter grade off.
The lack of turn by turn was APPLE'S problem, not Google's.
Google has had turn by turn working for a while now.
Apple's existing license was simply for mapping data without turn by turn. So they went to Google to renegotiate. Apple just threw a fit when Google asked for better branding in their app, got pigheaded and figured "We're Apple, we can do it BETTER! This shouldn't take long!"
Basically this attitude is going to stretch Apple thin trying to do everything and doing none of it excellently. In short, they're going to become Microsoft.
No. Because reprocessing of spent nuclear waste, even into usable nuclear fuel for second-stage deployment has been around for decades.
A bunch of "Nuclear = bomb = baaaaaaaaaad" sheeple will bitch about storage anyhow. They'll bitch about transportation of the waste in both pre and post-processed forms.
And pretty much ANYTHING else that'd allow companies and government agencies to handle nuclear power (even its shutdown) in a safe, intelligent and responsible manner.
Okay, it's 2012 for fuck's sake. None of the processors being discussed are pure "RISC" or pure "CISC". They're all hybrids, or at least any of the ones manufacturers actually want to put inside a device...
There's always going to be a bunch of "academic" holdouts so they have an example of "Hey! The RISC-Not-In-Anything-30519 IS a pure RISC chip (that's totally unsuitable to general computing applications, or even specialized device applications)!"
But for the most part, this argument died decades ago. Let it fucking go already.
Brilliance: An online repository of knowledge on pretty much anything.
Idiocy: Having to know someone in the editor cartel or have someone who knows nothing about a subject corroborate actual authorities trying to share real knowledge.
I'm just shocked that they decided to sunset this game in such an abrupt manner.
Yeah, it wasn't a megajillions earner like Aion or their other Triple A games. But it was a steady earner all along. The game's essentially been paid for for years. And, especially in the last year, it's been doing gangbuster business after the change to the hybrid model.
But, apparently that wasn't enough to save it. Especially after the drubbing Aion and GW2 have taken.
Paragon and its employees have nothing but my respect.
Actually HIV is just one thing. And, mainly, it's for third-world countries with poor sanitation.
HPV is another such thing it helps cut down on. Not a HUGE problem for guys, but HPV is one of the suspected causes of cervical cancer in women.
Third, it helps cut down on the prevalence of certain types of penile cancer. Granted, most of these types are fairly rare, but would you rather have a small ribbon of skin cut off with anesthetic while you're a baby and unlikely to remember anything or wind up having to effectively become a girl because you contracted one of these cancers and needed to have your penis removed?
I may not be "everyone". But I'd rather my parents have made the former choice. Even if it was for silly, religious reasons. And, this way, I don't have to pay for the procedure and experience the pain as an adult.
You can pooh pooh the science all you like (luddites always do), but the science behind the procedure is solid.
The problem is, the basic premise of the procedure feeds into insecure mens' castration anxiety. As such, some people will go to any lengths to excise even the hint of such a thing happening from their lives. Even if it means being anti-science, or contributing to the ills of mankind.
I'd take a day in pain and feces over oblivion any day of the week. Maybe I've never experienced true pain but it seems to me that *anything* is better than nothing.
One day is nothing. Try it for years and years on end, every moment of your life, waking or sleeping.
At some point, even the very toughest person is going to break.
That's the thing. The "getting old" part is what really sucks.
Any idiot can die.
Death isn't scary. You wanna know what scary is?
Being old and shriveled and constantly in pain while sitting in your own shit and being so senile that you don't remember anything for more than a minute.
Now if there was some way to preserve quality of life. THAT would be a bigger breakthrough than simple prevention of death. Age to sometime between 20-30 and then just stop and stay there (biologically) until you fall over dead. Granted, the ability to retard/stop physical aging that way would, in itself, probably extend life by an unknown quantity (if not permanently).
The way I'm going right now, and all the damage I've done to myself in my life already, if I don't die early, I'll be an old man confined to a bed going "It hurts to live!"
I think I'd MUCH rather take up cordless bungee jumping.
Lance won and kept winning even against younger, superior talent. Something isn't right there.
Ah. Bullshit ageism rears its ugly head.
Younger means fuck-all.
And if they didn't win (and he wasn't doping) they were NOT "superior".
You have a guy who's been a professional athlete all his life. Isn't it safe to assume that, though some quirky confluence of genetics and training regimen that he simply might be even fractionally better suited for a certain type of activity than the next random person in the sport? Even at an advanced age, meaning he had more experience in some of these races and was, thus, more familiar with the courses, granting him an edge?
At his age, response time, peripheral vision and quickness just arent what they were 15-20 years ago.
That'd probably mean something...for a boxer...or an MMA fighter, etc. Lance was a CYCLIST.
Response time isn't the biggest determinant here. Flat out quickness isn't either.
Staying power and control over one's cycle and body are. And even someone his age, who's been training most of his adult life, should have that in spades.
Also, his age isn't so advanced that reduction in peripheral vision should be a problem. He's only about to turn 41.
Plus when you throw in the towel, it means you don't care or the allegations are correct. I doubt that he doesn't care.
Thing is. You take enough ass-chewing, sooner or later, all they're getting is scar tissue. Which is damn low on nerve endings. He's been fighting allegations for what? 17 YEARS? Is he supposed to just go on and on and on with this until he falls over dead in an arbitration room and the other side declares victory?
Sorry, but there are more important things in life than wasting it trying to shut up a bunch of abusive, power-hungry jackasses who just won't leave you alone no matter how hard you try to make them do so. Lance pretty much knows this, and he's reached the point where he either has to commit the rest of his life to facing down these assholes on a daily basis or he can just walk away and live his life.
Anyone else ever been in a situation where you knew you were right, had the evidence mostly on your side, and give up? Yeah, me neither.
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Well, there's the whole "No plan survives contact with the enemy." thing going on.
They can do all sorts of studies and modelling and focus group testing and STILL have stuff get broke all to hell by the general populace.
And, organized or not, there's always the possibility that the development and implementation teams quite simply didn't fully grasp the product they were trying to deliver nor the processes required to deliver it in a usable format.
So you get things like "Your apps is great! It's stellar! We want it in the market so bad! So we're going to expedite this by refusing to put it up. Oh. And we don't have a reason why. Uhh...Oh look! SQUIRREL!" *Wildhandwaving*
Ah but the growing markets (China, India, Africa, South America) are not buying PCs but ARE buying Smart Phones and Tablets.
The pie is getting bigger every day and PCs are not keeping up.
Honestly. Smart phones and tablets are essentially media "consumption" devices.
Not everyone needs the full functionality a desktop or laptop PC gives them.
That's fine. But it doesn't mean these devices are going to kill the PC. They're simply going to push out their own market niche, with some overlap.
It'll live 18-36 months and die horribly.
Like just about every non-x86 platform Microsoft has made a foray into.
Maybe he's commenting on specific anatomical areas.
Though how he'd know this for a fact raises some fairly creepy notions.
I see this tablet/phone foray as one of Microsoft's last rolls of the dice. If this doesn't work then they'll be marginalized sooner rather than later. I know its been 'heralded' for too long, but we are actually seeing a shift in the primary use of computers. PCs, like it or not are fast heading towards niche status.
I advise you to now swallow a few grains of salt.
Uh yeah...no. This is just a vaguely redressed "The PC is dying." argument.
The PC has been "dying" for the last 30+ years. It's harder to kill than my grandmother (had a bunch of major strokes back in the mid-80's and a host of doctors over the next 15 years told her she didn't have 5 years left, she outlived all of them and didn't die until late 2011).
PCs aren't heading towards niche ANYTHING.
As a primary productivity platform, with one in front of just about everybody on the planet, there's no longer room for explosive growth.
This means people will be on a 3-7 year upgrade cycle and there'll be some market normalization as people who simply don't need the power a PC puts in their hands migrate off to something less.
Whereas media CONSUMPTION devices, like tablets, still have relatively low percentile market penetration. So there's at least potential for explosive growth.
Uhm. The OS is released and there's major dumb-fuckery going on in their online store, the ONLY place you can buy apps from for certain versions of the new OS.
That's not a "could have a big problem" thing.
That's a "HAS a big problem" thing.
No, thinking you have the right to commit violence on another person over words you don't like makes you an idiot, and a savage...
I don't know. Some guy with a knife saying "I'm going to gut you, then rape your wife and daughter."?
I wouldn't like those words.
And yeah, I'd do violence unto someone saying those things to me.
It's REALLY easy to lay out a generalization.
Where most people get into trouble is in dealing with the specifics.
This is one of the reason blanket "zero tolerance" type policies are so damned stupid.
Basically things like this relieve people of the obligation to be both involved and proactive. Then they can scoot by on minimal effort being reflexive and reactionary with all sorts of travesties taking place.
Case in point.
Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger, current Pope) was a member of the Hitler Youth.
This makes him evil right?
WRONG.
Membership in the Hitler Youth, in 1941, was compulsory. It was required by German law.
Little Joe had exactly ZERO say in it. He wasn't an enthusiastic member, and by all accounts, never attended meetings.
He was later conscripted, right out of seminary, as a child soldier by the German Army. And did he fight for them?
Nope. When the allies drew near his station, he took the opportunity to desert.
But nowadays, we live in the world of the sound byte and the thought-free "fact".
It's just easier for assorted mental defectives to regurgitate simple bullet points to support their idiocies, without having to actually think their way through various exceptions.
Never mind that SPECIFIC information can result in a complete change of context.
Give him a break. You can't go *whoosh* in a vacuum...
Once. You go *whoosh* ONCE.
Seriously. Some of these people only have room in their heads for hatred, bigotry, and other forms of outright criminal idiocy. If the cloud expands this, do we really expect these mental defectives to do anything other than create a corollary to "Work expands to fill the space given to it"?
My high school "computer" classes were little more than "how to use a spreadsheet" on already-old-at-the-time Apple II computers (late 80's) with a Typing prereq. It was an absolute waste of time. The typing class destroyed my GPA because I'd been using word processing software for nearly a decade at that point and every time I'd glance over to check my work, the teacher would take a full letter grade off.
If it has a rocket engine it's not a car. It's a ballistic device with a (hopefully) flat trajectory and just happens to have wheels.
What's politician for "Go die in a fire while being sodomized by a nail-spiked telephone pole"?
The lack of turn by turn was APPLE'S problem, not Google's.
Google has had turn by turn working for a while now.
Apple's existing license was simply for mapping data without turn by turn.
So they went to Google to renegotiate.
Apple just threw a fit when Google asked for better branding in their app, got pigheaded and figured "We're Apple, we can do it BETTER! This shouldn't take long!"
Basically this attitude is going to stretch Apple thin trying to do everything and doing none of it excellently.
In short, they're going to become Microsoft.
No. Because reprocessing of spent nuclear waste, even into usable nuclear fuel for second-stage deployment has been around for decades.
A bunch of "Nuclear = bomb = baaaaaaaaaad" sheeple will bitch about storage anyhow.
They'll bitch about transportation of the waste in both pre and post-processed forms.
And pretty much ANYTHING else that'd allow companies and government agencies to handle nuclear power (even its shutdown) in a safe, intelligent and responsible manner.
"Thanks Wesley! We couldn't have done it without you!"
Even knockoff stealth fighters now!
WOO!
Okay, it's 2012 for fuck's sake.
None of the processors being discussed are pure "RISC" or pure "CISC". They're all hybrids, or at least any of the ones manufacturers actually want to put inside a device...
There's always going to be a bunch of "academic" holdouts so they have an example of "Hey! The RISC-Not-In-Anything-30519 IS a pure RISC chip (that's totally unsuitable to general computing applications, or even specialized device applications)!"
But for the most part, this argument died decades ago. Let it fucking go already.
Unfortunately, even offshore wind-farms can bother people. Because NIMBY just has no limits.
The proper term is BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)
You've seen the movie. Don't make me go through all the stuff again.
Just ask the Pharaoh...Oops! My bad!
Brilliance: An online repository of knowledge on pretty much anything.
Idiocy: Having to know someone in the editor cartel or have someone who knows nothing about a subject corroborate actual authorities trying to share real knowledge.
I've been playing for just over 4 years now.
I'm just shocked that they decided to sunset this game in such an abrupt manner.
Yeah, it wasn't a megajillions earner like Aion or their other Triple A games. But it was a steady earner all along. The game's essentially been paid for for years. And, especially in the last year, it's been doing gangbuster business after the change to the hybrid model.
But, apparently that wasn't enough to save it. Especially after the drubbing Aion and GW2 have taken.
Paragon and its employees have nothing but my respect.
NCSoft won't see another dime from me though.
Actually HIV is just one thing. And, mainly, it's for third-world countries with poor sanitation.
HPV is another such thing it helps cut down on. Not a HUGE problem for guys, but HPV is one of the suspected causes of cervical cancer in women.
Third, it helps cut down on the prevalence of certain types of penile cancer. Granted, most of these types are fairly rare, but would you rather have a small ribbon of skin cut off with anesthetic while you're a baby and unlikely to remember anything or wind up having to effectively become a girl because you contracted one of these cancers and needed to have your penis removed?
I may not be "everyone". But I'd rather my parents have made the former choice. Even if it was for silly, religious reasons. And, this way, I don't have to pay for the procedure and experience the pain as an adult.
You can pooh pooh the science all you like (luddites always do), but the science behind the procedure is solid.
The problem is, the basic premise of the procedure feeds into insecure mens' castration anxiety. As such, some people will go to any lengths to excise even the hint of such a thing happening from their lives. Even if it means being anti-science, or contributing to the ills of mankind.
I'd take a day in pain and feces over oblivion any day of the week. Maybe I've never experienced true pain but it seems to me that *anything* is better than nothing.
One day is nothing. Try it for years and years on end, every moment of your life, waking or sleeping.
At some point, even the very toughest person is going to break.
That's the thing. The "getting old" part is what really sucks.
Any idiot can die.
Death isn't scary. You wanna know what scary is?
Being old and shriveled and constantly in pain while sitting in your own shit and being so senile that you don't remember anything for more than a minute.
Now if there was some way to preserve quality of life. THAT would be a bigger breakthrough than simple prevention of death. Age to sometime between 20-30 and then just stop and stay there (biologically) until you fall over dead. Granted, the ability to retard/stop physical aging that way would, in itself, probably extend life by an unknown quantity (if not permanently).
The way I'm going right now, and all the damage I've done to myself in my life already, if I don't die early, I'll be an old man confined to a bed going "It hurts to live!"
I think I'd MUCH rather take up cordless bungee jumping.
Lance won and kept winning even against younger, superior talent. Something isn't right there.
Ah. Bullshit ageism rears its ugly head.
Younger means fuck-all.
And if they didn't win (and he wasn't doping) they were NOT "superior".
You have a guy who's been a professional athlete all his life. Isn't it safe to assume that, though some quirky confluence of genetics and training regimen that he simply might be even fractionally better suited for a certain type of activity than the next random person in the sport? Even at an advanced age, meaning he had more experience in some of these races and was, thus, more familiar with the courses, granting him an edge?
At his age, response time, peripheral vision and quickness just arent what they were 15-20 years ago.
That'd probably mean something...for a boxer...or an MMA fighter, etc. Lance was a CYCLIST.
Response time isn't the biggest determinant here.
Flat out quickness isn't either.
Staying power and control over one's cycle and body are. And even someone his age, who's been training most of his adult life, should have that in spades.
Also, his age isn't so advanced that reduction in peripheral vision should be a problem. He's only about to turn 41.
Plus when you throw in the towel, it means you don't care or the allegations are correct. I doubt that he doesn't care.
Thing is. You take enough ass-chewing, sooner or later, all they're getting is scar tissue. Which is damn low on nerve endings. He's been fighting allegations for what? 17 YEARS? Is he supposed to just go on and on and on with this until he falls over dead in an arbitration room and the other side declares victory?
Sorry, but there are more important things in life than wasting it trying to shut up a bunch of abusive, power-hungry jackasses who just won't leave you alone no matter how hard you try to make them do so. Lance pretty much knows this, and he's reached the point where he either has to commit the rest of his life to facing down these assholes on a daily basis or he can just walk away and live his life.
Anyone else ever been in a situation where you knew you were right, had the evidence mostly on your side, and give up? Yeah, me neither.