AFAIK there is much more to do in most MMOG than leveling/looting. Yes, that is a significant part of it, but not all of it. If it were just leveling and looting then why not play not-so-online game instead? MMOG, especially MMORPGS are all, on least some level, a social experience.
To many gamers, that social experience tends to orbit around the idea of leveling/looting as a matter of puffery as they climb to the top of their network of friends, but the act itself is not what is fun at all. If the only online game were chess, would we gripe about people always wanting to win?
During my tenure as a Windows slave I used Trillian 1.x with a skin to make it look just like regular windows. Then I decided that was taking up to much screen real estate so I went with one of the many "micro" skins. Other than being non-free, Trillian had no cons for me.
Now that I'm doing my time as a linux zombie I've been using Gaim for two reasons: ease of setup (ie. none, it is installed with the disto) and Jabber capabilities. I need to use Jabber because I can setup a Jabber server for internal use only. No non-work IM-ing for you! Get back to work!
Oh, and I've been logging your internet usage! You visit too/. to much!
The main (or at least a large) reason I never actively pursued a career in Java programming is because of need for buzzword-compliance. For example, let's say I want to make a program, any ol' program, what do I use? J2EE, JavaBeans, Eclipse, or "pure" Java? Java proponents say it's all about choice. I don't want choice. In C/C++, I write a program for windows with MFC, I write an application for linux with GTK. Why must there be a huge lack of standardization?
On a side note, the only job I did have to use Java in was a buzzword-compliant startup. Can you guess where they are now?
If C# still exists 10 years from now, is more opened, has better cross-platform capabilities, and has become as pervasive as Java and javascript, then we can talk. Until then, adieu.
You seem to be forgetting one important point blocking truly universal power: the buck.
Have you ever lost a cell phone charger, or needed a second one? You know what I'm talking about then. The blasted things cost (and apparently sell) for $30 to $50 from the cell company. Even off brand ones will cost you $15 or more. With some sort of universal power mechanism (splash pad, dc power at the plug, etc) many businesses lose a revenue stream.
I manage 60+ Linux boxes with a total of zero harddrives between them (via etherboot/pxe and "X -query $server").
These computers are as old as 75 mhz Pentiums, and other than bootup, run like a new machine. The only pieces of hardware that I have to replace are cpu, case, and power supply fans (with the rogue blown cpu or power supply when I don't replace a fan when it fails).
Especially since some of the companie's legitemate e-mails contained links to sites outside of their domain (eg. the Capital One e-mail).
Assuming their message doesn't get caught by my spam filters, it will never get past my own two eyeballs.
If a company that I do business with wants to e-mail me something, they'd better just say "go to our website" because I (and many others) won't ever give it a second look otherwise.
Maybe it's just me, but an even bigger problem arises out of color coding the address bar: Confusion.
Many users have significant problems when anything changes in their computer experience; my father for example. I tried moving him over to Firefox so that he could stay away from spyware et al, but he couldn't make the move because he couldn't navigate the user interface anymore. This man is no dullard either. He taught me to program when I was 8, has a PhD in (if I remember correctly) biology, pharmacology, or physics, teacheds microbiology, and is an associate dean at world-class university. For all of his smarts, he has had problems with computers ever since he was weened off of DOS and onto Windows 3.1. After many years of training he's finally to the point where he can work successfully in an evironment as long as nothing ever changes.
Skip ahead to Windows XP service pack 2. Automatic updates are now on. He's been trained to allow the updates to happen, but only after I get a phone call asking me if they're ok. Unfortunately, updating sometimes means that I have to spend an hour or so teaching how to burn cds, how to switch between home/work networks, how to play music, etc. at regular intervals. I rue Microsoft not for their lax security (well, not just for their lax security), but for their ever present desire to "upgrade" their interfaces to make them "easier."
At his work they upgrade computers relatively often. The day will come when he will have to call me each time he goes to a website with the "wrong" color.
It's all very simple. If you don't like reading reviews by certain reviewers or on particular review pages, don't read them.
This thinking can be extrapolated to all sorts of things:
Don't like your kids playing violent games? don't let them play it.
Don't like all of the sex on TV and in movies? find something more wholesome to do.
Don't like what I'm saying? ignore it.
In the consumer world, the dollar is king. If people are willing to spend time or money on something, there's a profit to be had. In this case extremely large amounts of people are willing to spend time reading reviews. Advertisers are willing to pay for hacks to spew out garbage reviews as long as people read them. If you think the guys a hack, stop reading. If enough people think he's a hack, and stop reading his stuff, the advertisers will move on.
Simply saying "it's all about the games" does not do the "problem" justice. As long as there is money to be made with advertisements, reviews of all sorts, and pandering to all demographics will exits.
Soldier: Get down on the floor!!! Everyone runs out of the door and gets shot. Doesn't sound too funny to me.
Shit like this has to work in an environment where life and death decisions are made based on the perceived the quality of a translation. Hilarious glitches won't lighten the mood unless you're a true sadist.
Go read it yourself, make up your own mind. If you can get to the end... ALL ON YOUR OWN... and enjoy it then, maybe he doesn't suck very badly.
Okay...done and done. I guess it doesn't suck very badly after all.
Shakespeare is good on two levels: the academic one where the historical value of early pop culture reigns supreme, and the other where the fact that all of his stories are original, classic, and thoroughly entertaining to this day is the way to go. If you can't see the sentances for the words (and not many can decently nowadays), rent a movie or two. Put into action you can get a better feel for the context of individual phrases that people quote (like 2B ? NT2B ?).
So are they following in that ridiculous "ubonics" tradition and further degrading the English language or what?
Ebonics was a social failure because of two things: it tried to artificially change language and it was rather racist. This will fail for mainly just the first reason.
Language oddities used with text messages or "elite" speek are often said to be bastardizations for the English language. Well, how do you suppose the English language come about? Magic?
Languages evolve; sometimes rather quickly. This fact is easily seen by how hard it is for teenagers to grasp the meaning of Shakespeare, Beowulf, etc. These works provide a slice of literary history. They are studied not just for their content, but for their grammatical structure as well. Modern literature is no less valid because it uses more modern English (Ulysses, Kubla Kahn, etc). Grammer, punctuation, spelling, etc. are all artificial means of measurement. Language is too fluid to measured for any time longer than an instant. The idea that a language can degraded is ludicrous. If languages didn't "degrade" everyone on the planet would speak in a series of grunts and hand gestures. Languages evolve; deal with it.
Alright, maybe Microsoft wants to be on the Top500, but I don't. If they can offer a solution that, through clustering techniques, is more reliable, faster, and more expandable than their current solution, those of us who want to make the Top500000 (ie. what it takes to run a medium size enterprise database, a website that won't slashdotted to oblivion, etc.), $100,000 would probably get us there with 25 top-of-the-line, off-the-shelf boxes. That's the linux solution.
Now take into account an extra $25,000 (wild-ass-guess) for licenses and you've got the windows solution. If it costs you $25,000 less a year to get a Microsoft trained IT team than a linux or Unix IT team, then this would seem like a decent trade off to the CFO and CTO; especially if they get to keep their same IT team with minimal training.
From the NYT article: "Our focus is not on the very highest-end systems but on divisional and departmental computing systems," said Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's director of high-performance computing.
all be functionally replaced by
- CAT5e with RJ45 connectors?
No.
Network cable has very high gauge (ie. skinny as hell) wire; bad quality, easy to burn out with high-voltage. It's not shielded very well (compare to a decent Monster cable); really bad quality problems. It's also got the wrong number of wires for just about everything.
Instruction set has nothing to do with speed. There might be faster x86 processors available, but there's also fast IA64 processors, PPC processors, x86_64 processors, etc.
At best, x86 is slower than RISC based processors since, without fancy scheduling, and other nifty tricks, RISC processors do more per cycle than their x86 counterparts. See the, albeit flawed, benchmarks comparing G5s to P4s. Better yet, look at the top 500 supercomputers notice how #1 BlueGene/L is running on PowerPC 440s. Not until #10 do you get an x86 based architecture (even then it's x86_64).
Here's a general question about the Shannon limit. You seem to know your stuff, so I'll ask you.
Does the Shannon limit take into account software error correction at all? As far as I can tell, the Shannon limit gives you the maximum throughput of error-free data. What if it doesn't matter whether the data is error-free or not? For example, if I can only get 50% of the way to the Shannon limit using hardware in a real-world environment, could I boost that number by ignoring symbols that are indistinguishable and just let error correction (like reed-solomon) take care of the missing parts?
I lost 10 lbs in 3 months, and then another 35 lbs in less than 3 weeks.
How? I joined the Marines.
At first, as a DEPer, I had no change in habit other than twice a week aerobic excersices for less than an hour. Once at MCRD San Diego, the following became my schedule:
5 minutes before Revelle: Wake up, go to the bathroom, brush teeth, get back in rack.
Reveille: Wake up (again)
Rev + 5 seconds: Get dressed, make rack
Rev + 60 seconds: Get on the street in formation
Rev + 90 seconds: Start marching to morning chow
Eat breakfast in 5 minutes or less
Continue marching, running, PT, etc until mid-day chow
Eat lunch in 5 minutes or less
Continue marching, running, PT, etc until evening chow
Eat dinner in 5 minutes or less
Continue marching, running, PT, etc until an hour before taps
Clean, study, write home, etc.
Taps
Add in lots of cleaning and some classes and you have the first month of basic training. The mentality of "hurry up and wait" pays off when you have to run like hell and then stand straight as a board dozens of times an hour. I can't really go into detail about Phase II or Phase III since they kicked me out on T-15.
I went from over 200 lbs to less than 170 during the formation week, and two weeks of training. Believe me; there is absolutely no quicker way to lose weight than joining the corps.
Slashdot Mirror
To many gamers, that social experience tends to orbit around the idea of leveling/looting as a matter of puffery as they climb to the top of their network of friends, but the act itself is not what is fun at all. If the only online game were chess, would we gripe about people always wanting to win?
Who would've thought that Zonk would on today?
Now that I'm doing my time as a linux zombie I've been using Gaim for two reasons: ease of setup (ie. none, it is installed with the disto) and Jabber capabilities. I need to use Jabber because I can setup a Jabber server for internal use only. No non-work IM-ing for you! Get back to work!
Oh, and I've been logging your internet usage! You visit too /. to much!
On a side note, the only job I did have to use Java in was a buzzword-compliant startup. Can you guess where they are now?
I guess that's true...ish.
It's true in the same way that Oranges > Apples.
If C# still exists 10 years from now, is more opened, has better cross-platform capabilities, and has become as pervasive as Java and javascript, then we can talk. Until then, adieu.
Have you ever lost a cell phone charger, or needed a second one? You know what I'm talking about then. The blasted things cost (and apparently sell) for $30 to $50 from the cell company. Even off brand ones will cost you $15 or more. With some sort of universal power mechanism (splash pad, dc power at the plug, etc) many businesses lose a revenue stream.
It's very, very unlikely to happen any time soon.
"We're producing a procedure where the patient is their own cure. You can't patent a patient's own cells, thank God." [emphasis mine]
this and this.
Hope those help.
I manage 60+ Linux boxes with a total of zero harddrives between them (via etherboot/pxe and "X -query $server").
These computers are as old as 75 mhz Pentiums, and other than bootup, run like a new machine. The only pieces of hardware that I have to replace are cpu, case, and power supply fans (with the rogue blown cpu or power supply when I don't replace a fan when it fails).
Dust is my only enemy.
Assuming their message doesn't get caught by my spam filters, it will never get past my own two eyeballs.
If a company that I do business with wants to e-mail me something, they'd better just say "go to our website" because I (and many others) won't ever give it a second look otherwise.
Many users have significant problems when anything changes in their computer experience; my father for example. I tried moving him over to Firefox so that he could stay away from spyware et al, but he couldn't make the move because he couldn't navigate the user interface anymore. This man is no dullard either. He taught me to program when I was 8, has a PhD in (if I remember correctly) biology, pharmacology, or physics, teacheds microbiology, and is an associate dean at world-class university. For all of his smarts, he has had problems with computers ever since he was weened off of DOS and onto Windows 3.1. After many years of training he's finally to the point where he can work successfully in an evironment as long as nothing ever changes.
Skip ahead to Windows XP service pack 2. Automatic updates are now on. He's been trained to allow the updates to happen, but only after I get a phone call asking me if they're ok. Unfortunately, updating sometimes means that I have to spend an hour or so teaching how to burn cds, how to switch between home/work networks, how to play music, etc. at regular intervals. I rue Microsoft not for their lax security (well, not just for their lax security), but for their ever present desire to "upgrade" their interfaces to make them "easier."
At his work they upgrade computers relatively often. The day will come when he will have to call me each time he goes to a website with the "wrong" color.
This thinking can be extrapolated to all sorts of things:
In the consumer world, the dollar is king. If people are willing to spend time or money on something, there's a profit to be had. In this case extremely large amounts of people are willing to spend time reading reviews. Advertisers are willing to pay for hacks to spew out garbage reviews as long as people read them. If you think the guys a hack, stop reading. If enough people think he's a hack, and stop reading his stuff, the advertisers will move on.
Simply saying "it's all about the games" does not do the "problem" justice. As long as there is money to be made with advertisements, reviews of all sorts, and pandering to all demographics will exits.
Shit like this has to work in an environment where life and death decisions are made based on the perceived the quality of a translation. Hilarious glitches won't lighten the mood unless you're a true sadist.
Soldier: I said "where are the bombs?"
Prisoner: I told you! I only have one Mom!
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I, for one, welcome our new slashvertisement overlords.
Okay...done and done. I guess it doesn't suck very badly after all.
Shakespeare is good on two levels: the academic one where the historical value of early pop culture reigns supreme, and the other where the fact that all of his stories are original, classic, and thoroughly entertaining to this day is the way to go. If you can't see the sentances for the words (and not many can decently nowadays), rent a movie or two. Put into action you can get a better feel for the context of individual phrases that people quote (like 2B ? NT2B ?).
Ebonics was a social failure because of two things: it tried to artificially change language and it was rather racist. This will fail for mainly just the first reason.
Language oddities used with text messages or "elite" speek are often said to be bastardizations for the English language. Well, how do you suppose the English language come about? Magic?
Languages evolve; sometimes rather quickly. This fact is easily seen by how hard it is for teenagers to grasp the meaning of Shakespeare, Beowulf, etc. These works provide a slice of literary history. They are studied not just for their content, but for their grammatical structure as well. Modern literature is no less valid because it uses more modern English (Ulysses, Kubla Kahn, etc). Grammer, punctuation, spelling, etc. are all artificial means of measurement. Language is too fluid to measured for any time longer than an instant. The idea that a language can degraded is ludicrous. If languages didn't "degrade" everyone on the planet would speak in a series of grunts and hand gestures. Languages evolve; deal with it.
Now take into account an extra $25,000 (wild-ass-guess) for licenses and you've got the windows solution. If it costs you $25,000 less a year to get a Microsoft trained IT team than a linux or Unix IT team, then this would seem like a decent trade off to the CFO and CTO; especially if they get to keep their same IT team with minimal training.
From the NYT article: "Our focus is not on the very highest-end systems but on divisional and departmental computing systems," said Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's director of high-performance computing.
No.
Network cable has very high gauge (ie. skinny as hell) wire; bad quality, easy to burn out with high-voltage. It's not shielded very well (compare to a decent Monster cable); really bad quality problems. It's also got the wrong number of wires for just about everything.
To sum up: use the right tool for the job.
...from Deseret News here
How else would I be able to find out what credit cards I pre-approved for?
Oh, you poor, uninformed miscreant.
Instruction set has nothing to do with speed. There might be faster x86 processors available, but there's also fast IA64 processors, PPC processors, x86_64 processors, etc.
At best, x86 is slower than RISC based processors since, without fancy scheduling, and other nifty tricks, RISC processors do more per cycle than their x86 counterparts. See the, albeit flawed, benchmarks comparing G5s to P4s. Better yet, look at the top 500 supercomputers notice how #1 BlueGene/L is running on PowerPC 440s. Not until #10 do you get an x86 based architecture (even then it's x86_64).
Create a view for that table.
The view would have a field "My Value" that return "ColA" || "+" || "ColB". You can even index "My Value" if you want.
Does the Shannon limit take into account software error correction at all? As far as I can tell, the Shannon limit gives you the maximum throughput of error-free data. What if it doesn't matter whether the data is error-free or not? For example, if I can only get 50% of the way to the Shannon limit using hardware in a real-world environment, could I boost that number by ignoring symbols that are indistinguishable and just let error correction (like reed-solomon) take care of the missing parts?
How? I joined the Marines.
At first, as a DEPer, I had no change in habit other than twice a week aerobic excersices for less than an hour. Once at MCRD San Diego, the following became my schedule:
5 minutes before Revelle: Wake up, go to the bathroom, brush teeth, get back in rack.
Reveille: Wake up (again)
Rev + 5 seconds: Get dressed, make rack
Rev + 60 seconds: Get on the street in formation
Rev + 90 seconds: Start marching to morning chow
Eat breakfast in 5 minutes or less
Continue marching, running, PT, etc until mid-day chow
Eat lunch in 5 minutes or less
Continue marching, running, PT, etc until evening chow
Eat dinner in 5 minutes or less
Continue marching, running, PT, etc until an hour before taps
Clean, study, write home, etc.
Taps
Add in lots of cleaning and some classes and you have the first month of basic training. The mentality of "hurry up and wait" pays off when you have to run like hell and then stand straight as a board dozens of times an hour. I can't really go into detail about Phase II or Phase III since they kicked me out on T-15.
I went from over 200 lbs to less than 170 during the formation week, and two weeks of training. Believe me; there is absolutely no quicker way to lose weight than joining the corps.