Should try that other MMO called "real life." Some folks even manage to eke out a living by playing.
RL has good graphics and very good immersion, but the quests suck, and the amount of grinding required to get anywhere puts Korean MMO's to shame. Besides, I'm not big on permadeath...
It's not just me, and it's not the first phone people used for Internet access. Email and browsing were possible on my previous smartphone, but I rarely used them because they were so cumbersome; if I was anywhere near a real computer I'd use that. On the iPhone I fing myself checking emails even when I am at my desktop computer. Yes, the user interface makes that much difference (and I wouldn't have believed that at first, either). Quite a few people around the office have an iPhone and they're easy to spot: they always have them out.
Then there's the apps that make information instantly accessible, which is another big improvement. Take the train schedule, on my old phone I had to navigate to the rail company's website, a sucky experience even with a mobile-enabled website. Looking up schedules, adding favorite trains, checking if the train is late, all of that is so much quicker. It makes the difference between having this information at your fingertips, and not bothering to use the phone to find out.
and it has taken an astounding share of that usage compared to it's market share
The iPhone was not very innovative from a technological point of view, but what it did to the market is nothing short of amazing. For a phone that sucked so badly in some functions, even really basic ones, it managed to create a buzz and won over many people (like myself) who had previously not used Apple products and were always a little ware of the fanboys. The iPhone's UI is a strong selling point, but I'd say the attractive package was a factor as well. The real kicker tough is the touch screen, without which that wonderful UI would not have been so great. I'm not thinking about pinch-zooming here, but about the ability to whip out the phone and use it without a stylus, even being able to quickly punch out an SMS using nothing but my chubby fingers.
All those things came together nicely for the first time in the iPhone; it's the first phone I've come across that really invites people to use it, especially when it comes to apps and the internet. Mobile data usage has jumped since the iPhone's introduction, and it has taken an astounding share of that usage compared to it's market share, even though many phones with similar capabilities already existed. Without being very innovative itself, it has proven to be a gamechanger in the market.
I can do better than that, I remember reading about counting ants and similar experiments in a popular science magazine when I was a kid. Sorry, no link, as the article predates the Internet...
but people can pirate apps from the App Store?! I thought Apple had it pretty much locked up.
Pirating apps from the app store works pretty much the same as pirating games or music: you buy a legal copy from the store, remove DRM if necessary (not on the iPhone), then distribute it through pirate sites. If your iPhone is jailbroken, you can rip software from it and install pirated stuff on it.
Personally, the only reason for me to jailbreak my iPhone would be to get access to apps that do not exist in the App Store. For example, an app that displays the day's calendar on the unlock screen. Not available in the App Store (and not even possible with the phones standard API I think), but apparently it can be done on jailbroken iPhones. Then again, it's not worth the bother for me.
They are just going with the flow. Most knowledge workers I know have already lost the art of writing good documents, reports, or even a well-structured email. All written communication is dumbed down to lists of bullet points. Sometimes managers demand it (sometimes they even specify the required number of bullets), but it has become the default form of communication for most.
In college we did a course on effective communications... one of the things they drilled into us is that the slides are not the handout or the report, the slides belong with the presentation. Somewhat paradoxically good slides cannot stand on their own; if you provide them as a handout, they will require supporting text (which Powerpoint provides space for, by the way!). Don't be tempted to put everything on the slides themselves.
Sadly I see more and more reports and documents being crammed into monolythic and insanely ill-structured Powerpoints, which get presented then get mailed round as the final documentation to be archived. Send a "proper" presentation with supporting documentation, and you'll get complaints about the poor quality of your slides; the document that contains the imformation that is actually important will go unread, of course. Send only the document, and they'll reply: "I am not reading all that", even if there is a good executive summary.
(ps. That doesn't mean that we do not produce Word documents anymore, on the contrary! Preferably documents based on ill-designed templates asking for meaningless and/or useless informations, that serves only to tick certain boxes in the process, and will be filed unread and unused. Oh, I'm not bitter or anything...)
The plans are much older than that, in the Netherlands I remember a plan from the 80's called the "Lievense Plan" which consisted of a huge water reservoir into which water was pumped, and then used to generate hydro power. The original plan was to fill the reservoir with any surplus power, wind as well as nuclear (which was looked upon favourably at the time), the idea being to keep less power plants running at capacity 24/7, instead of building more power plants to handle peak hours.
Recently scientists and planners have run the numbers again on this idea. One little change they made is that the system will now pump water out of the reservoir, generating power when it flows back in, so that a serious break in the encircling dyke does not flood the lands beyond (have to keep the eeevil terrorists in mind, you know?)
There is one glaring issue with this setup: it requires iTunes. I love this combination and it is what I use to play music in my living room. The ease of control afforder by using an iPod touch or iPhone as a remote offers is one that is unparalleled by any other solution I've seen on the market.
But... it requires iTunes, which means I have to run my noisy and power-hungry computer. My NAS on the other hand draws as much as a single lightbulb when active, is quiet, and for those reasons it's always on. I'd love to be able to have a similar solution running on Linux alone (which is what the NAS runs on). Is there a solution for this?
Next best thing would be to snap up an old Mac Mini and stick iTunes on that, I suppose...
Or... it's a smokescreen. If I were a government intent on rigging an electronic election, or a manufacturer of voting machines intent on drawing attention away from the real issues with my machines, this is exactly the sort of sham I'd stage.
Hacking by outsiders is a concern, of course, but the real worry is hacking by insiders. It is incredibly hard if not impossible to devise a system of electronic voting that can be verified. More importantly, any random Joe Blow needs to be able to verify the results.
Paper ballots have many advantages when it comes to verifying the results, and I consider those advantages to be actual requirements:
- The voting and tallying process can be described, in its entirety, on one or a few sheets of paper. And anyone with half a brain can understand that process.
- Because of that, most citizens posess enough smarts to sit in a voting station and keep an eye on the proceedings, making sure nothing untoward happens.
- Because of such impartial and effective observers, all of us can rely that the tally will be correct, and that if there is any fraud, it will be limited to a small area at least. And in many cases it will be detectable by a followup investigation.
The spectre of electronic voting is one of massive, undetected fraud. The mostly IT-savvy/. crowd might be able to state with certainty that a particular machine works as intended, and that the code it runs on contains no fraudulent capabilities. But are we able to verify that the machines we vote on actually runs the same software come election day? And more importantly... why would the general public have to trust these machines and our judgment, instead of their own? I think that is a key question for a working democracy.
Vista was somewhat unfairly blasted, Windows 7 is being somewhat unfairly hyped.
Windows 7 is to Vista what XP was to ME, as some have said? Perhaps. I prefer to think of Windows 7 as the Obama of operating systems. Promising, though anything but proven, and its main achievement seems to be being different to a wildly unpopular predecessor.
There may be some good news for PC gamers: the longer development cycles for console hardware. Several console manufacturers have mentioned that the next-gen console is further away than expected due to rising complexity and development cost. In contrast, PC gaming hardware development is continuous and fast.
Like it or not, a good part of gaming is still eye-candy. Players like to go ohh and ahh over the latest games' visuals, while developers still like to show off their cutting-edge engines. And the good news is: with most games these days, that cutting edge hardware is entirely optional: you can upgrade if you want the pretty colors, or leave you system as is to just play the game. Most gamers do not mind spending a few hundred bucks every year on their system to keep up, which is enough to enjoy the latest gimmicks. Perhaps this is enough to keep PC gaming alive.
What worries me a lot more is the tendency to port games directly from consoles to PCs, without taking advantage of the edge PCs have over consoles. That's not just more up-to-date video hardware, but also includes things like keyboard an mouse, multi-screen capability, etc. There are already a few games out there with crappy menu's and crappy avatar control that appear to come straight from consoles. And lets not forget the latest news that has gamers in a fit: the fact that the new COD title will not have a proper multiplayer server selections screen, but instead uses a craptastic console-style random matchmaker function for finding multiplayer games. These are precisely the reasons I am still playing PC games, but if those games lose those extra features, I might as well turn to consoles and make do.
Funny how head-to-head (2+ people playing on 1 PC) gaming is evolving... One of the first "console" games, that thing with 4 Pong-like games and two paddles that you hooked up to the TV, already had multiplayer. PC games (and by PC I mean anything from the C64 to Windows-bases computers) quickly followed suit, bringing games with split-screen head to head action or coop modes.
Modern consoles put an end to that. They're just the thing for when you have some friends over; you don't want to play games sitting in the den crowded around a keyboard and a tiny crt, better to get to the living room sofa to play games together on a big screen TV. Head-to-head games have naturally moved from the PC to the console.
Sadly, the latest consoles are all Internet-capable as well... and it seems there are fewer and fewer proper head-to-head games. The Wii might be an exception, not sure about the Xbox 360 though...and the selection for the Playstation 3 is piss-poor. There are some head-to-head titles, but they are the exception rather than the rule as it used to be.
You do not need a dedicated server; you can host a Battlefield game from your own PC. Besides, CoD will not have servers provided by IW either; they still rely on games hosted by players.
I am a casual player of BF2, not into clans, but... I still rather like the ability to pick the game to join. If I find a good and stable server with an interesting map rotation, good moderation, and with a few grown-up regulars playing there, that server goes on my Favorites list. Even as a casual player you'll sometimes make a few friends on those servers. And in general, I found most BF2 clans have a stable and fair ruleset, and fair moderators when online.
Semi-random matchmaking means you are thrown in with the asshats, and you cannot find and play with your friends. There's a few games (Farcry 2 or Crysis IIRC?) that do this and it's awful. Worse, those games throw you back to the matchmaking screen after evry round, so even if you find a good bunch of people to play with, the group's broken up after the round is over. I've not bothered with multiplayer on those games since, and if this is what COD/MW2 will offer, I will not pick it up. A shame.
For me the overwhelming argument in favour of e-books is ease of reading. I really like reading off a more or less paperback sized screen, as opposed to a small PDA screen. The e-paper is also a lot easier on the eyes if you're like me and read for hours on end. And unlike a computer screen or even a laptop, e-books are just as easy to read as regular books lying on the sofa, in bed, on the train, etc. A decent reader is about the size of a paperback and half as thick, so they are as easy to carry as a paper book.
Also, many e-book readers these days support multiple formats; open or DRM-less formats as well as the more prevalent DRM schemes such as Mobipocket. The notable exception is the Kindle and Amazon's e-books... I am really disappointed that one of the largest distributor of books decided to go with their own reader and their own closed DRM scheme, which really doesn't help, and which means I will not be buying e-books off Amazon. I like having one e-book reader, but I'd hate to have to own more than one just to beat the format wars.
The main problem with these e-readers is different formats, iffy DRM (the idiocy of that book being pulled off people's Kindles did nothing to increase e-book popularity), and the high price of e-books (people expect to pay a lot less for electronic books). People might like other functions on these devices, but I already have my phone on me, which is small enough to carry with me at all times, and fulfills all those functions you mention. If I want to read, I bring an e-book in addition to my phone. If I need a bigger screen or a real keyboard, I'll bring a laptop.
I've visited Vegas a couple of weeks ago... Lots of fun! No need to gamble either, we put a buck or two in the 1c video poker machine and played a bit for a couple of free beers. But there's plenty to see outside the astounding tackiness of the Strip. Trips to Red Rock, lake Mead, Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, etc. Some very good restaurants there, and there's plenty of shows to go to in the evening.
Monte Carlo (or Monaco in general) is a playgfround for the rich... you are allowed to walk around and gape at a 90 year old corpse clambering out of a Ferrari with his young blonde trophy wife going for a night at Baccarat, but that's it. Oh, it's interesting to see the roads where they have the F1 race, and there's a nice botanical garden. For the rest it's boring as hell. If I had a choice to spend a week in Monaco or Vegas, I'd pick Vegas any time.
That is why the idea of spawning more copies of the same game zone as it fills up is not such a bad idea. Not just for spreading the load across different servers, but also for making sure the game world doesn't get too crowded. Age of Conan (and a few others) do this... when AoC launched, the servers were chock-full but I never saw any queue. The popular game zones could have as many as 8 instances, but each of those had a reasonable populace without being overcrowded. As players inevitably left the game (most MMOs these days seem to draw a big crowd and lose most of it in the first few months), the number of parallel instances of each game zone dwindled as well. These days most zones rarely spawn a second instance, but since everyone is in the same zones, they do not feel that empty either.
Good advice. I had a similar but even weirder experience, working for an IT consultancy company. One sales guy sent me to interview with a client, having already sent them my CV which he had embellished without even knowing what position I was being interviewed for. He pointed out as much when I asked him.
I went to the interview; I mentioned the inaccuracies in my CV and told them I had very little briefing from our account manager, and if they could perhaps tell me a little more about the job? Turns out the guys interviewing me didn't know either. They hired me anyway. After that I "fired" that account manager by quitting the concultancy firm.
Oh...and that job turned out to be pretty interesting!
This isn't a government problem; it's private companies that won't hire ex-cons.
Do companies in the US have access to that kind of information? In the Netherlands, these records are private, but companies often will require a "declaration of no objection" from new hires for positions of trust. These are requested from the police, and the declaration (if issued) will state that the applicant has nothing in his record indicating a risk for the position he applies for. This to ensure a convicted embezzler doesn't get to work as an accountant again, or a child molester gets a job at a day care center, or a violent criminal a membership at a gun range, while keeping irrelevant facts on that record private.
One problem I have with HP is their driver support. I have one of their SOHO models, and HP have so far refused to provide Vista or Windows 7 drivers for the thing.
So, I can print using a generic PCL5 driver, but the scanning and faxing capabilities cannot be used from Vista or Windows 7; I have to switch to an older machine running XP for that. Pretty crappy support if you ask me; of course one cannot expect them to provide drivers in perpetuity, but when Vista appeared on the market, this line of printers had only recently been replaced by newer models.
Rubbish... Even someone like Friedman subscribes to the idea of market failure; in his book "Free to choose" he gives a clear explanation of what it is and when it can occur. Yes, it is used as an excuse to have the government step in and make a bigger mess, but the problem exists, and a competent government can sometimes fix it. The real problem is that we have so little competent government.
Imagine you and your wife looking fit as a fiddle, but with short tempers, twitchy eyebrows and a serious case of the munchies all day, because the government allows you to have only weak tea, raw carrot and soybean pudding?
Fix your own damn diet, and don't go looking for excuses to have it fixed for you and everybody else.
If government doesn't take care of the unwashed masses, corporate interests will step up to the plate. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have the nanny be the one without the profit motive.
The choice is between the government forcing us to eat healthy, or corporations offering us a selection of food ranging from healthy to junk food. I know which one I'll pick... I enjoy good food but I do want to indulge in a burger and fries every now and then; it does makes sense to advise me not to overdo it. But I see very little justification for anyone ordering me to...
By the way, if you are looking for purity of motives in politicians, you'll be sorely disappointed. How about we let the unwashed masses take care of
themselves, and stop all this nanny crap? Treat people like infants and they will start behaving like infants.
I got laid off in 2002 specifically because I was vocal and did my best to try and make for a better work environment.
What do you mean by being vocal? If you are constantly suggesting changes to the way people work, people may start to see you as a troublemaker even if your suggestions are good. I've seen the type: young, over-eager and making many good suggestions... to the wrong people. Going over their bosses' heads. Upstaging senior teammates. Even claiming credit for team efforts. That sort of thing.
On the other hand... celebrate success! That is what the article is on about. When your team completes an objective, send an email to the stakeholders: "Today we rolled out system xyz, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the team!", something like that. And make sure you are in a position to send that mail! If you are the project manager, it'll likely be ok. If you have someone above you who is also closely involved with your work, check with them first. And if they prefer to handle such announcements, make sure they do it!
Slashdot Mirror
RL has good graphics and very good immersion, but the quests suck, and the amount of grinding required to get anywhere puts Korean MMO's to shame. Besides, I'm not big on permadeath...
Then there's the apps that make information instantly accessible, which is another big improvement. Take the train schedule, on my old phone I had to navigate to the rail company's website, a sucky experience even with a mobile-enabled website. Looking up schedules, adding favorite trains, checking if the train is late, all of that is so much quicker. It makes the difference between having this information at your fingertips, and not bothering to use the phone to find out.
and it has taken an astounding share of that usage compared to it's market share
Citation needed?
iPhones account for 50% of USA smartphone data traffic in 2009 (Note that the second table lists share of data traffic, not market share).
iPhone market share (as % of all smartphones) is 19%
The iPhone was not very innovative from a technological point of view, but what it did to the market is nothing short of amazing. For a phone that sucked so badly in some functions, even really basic ones, it managed to create a buzz and won over many people (like myself) who had previously not used Apple products and were always a little ware of the fanboys. The iPhone's UI is a strong selling point, but I'd say the attractive package was a factor as well. The real kicker tough is the touch screen, without which that wonderful UI would not have been so great. I'm not thinking about pinch-zooming here, but about the ability to whip out the phone and use it without a stylus, even being able to quickly punch out an SMS using nothing but my chubby fingers.
All those things came together nicely for the first time in the iPhone; it's the first phone I've come across that really invites people to use it, especially when it comes to apps and the internet. Mobile data usage has jumped since the iPhone's introduction, and it has taken an astounding share of that usage compared to it's market share, even though many phones with similar capabilities already existed. Without being very innovative itself, it has proven to be a gamechanger in the market.
I can do better than that, I remember reading about counting ants and similar experiments in a popular science magazine when I was a kid. Sorry, no link, as the article predates the Internet...
Pirating apps from the app store works pretty much the same as pirating games or music: you buy a legal copy from the store, remove DRM if necessary (not on the iPhone), then distribute it through pirate sites. If your iPhone is jailbroken, you can rip software from it and install pirated stuff on it.
Personally, the only reason for me to jailbreak my iPhone would be to get access to apps that do not exist in the App Store. For example, an app that displays the day's calendar on the unlock screen. Not available in the App Store (and not even possible with the phones standard API I think), but apparently it can be done on jailbroken iPhones. Then again, it's not worth the bother for me.
They are just going with the flow. Most knowledge workers I know have already lost the art of writing good documents, reports, or even a well-structured email. All written communication is dumbed down to lists of bullet points. Sometimes managers demand it (sometimes they even specify the required number of bullets), but it has become the default form of communication for most.
In college we did a course on effective communications... one of the things they drilled into us is that the slides are not the handout or the report, the slides belong with the presentation. Somewhat paradoxically good slides cannot stand on their own; if you provide them as a handout, they will require supporting text (which Powerpoint provides space for, by the way!). Don't be tempted to put everything on the slides themselves.
Sadly I see more and more reports and documents being crammed into monolythic and insanely ill-structured Powerpoints, which get presented then get mailed round as the final documentation to be archived. Send a "proper" presentation with supporting documentation, and you'll get complaints about the poor quality of your slides; the document that contains the imformation that is actually important will go unread, of course. Send only the document, and they'll reply: "I am not reading all that", even if there is a good executive summary.
(ps. That doesn't mean that we do not produce Word documents anymore, on the contrary! Preferably documents based on ill-designed templates asking for meaningless and/or useless informations, that serves only to tick certain boxes in the process, and will be filed unread and unused. Oh, I'm not bitter or anything...)
The plans are much older than that, in the Netherlands I remember a plan from the 80's called the "Lievense Plan" which consisted of a huge water reservoir into which water was pumped, and then used to generate hydro power. The original plan was to fill the reservoir with any surplus power, wind as well as nuclear (which was looked upon favourably at the time), the idea being to keep less power plants running at capacity 24/7, instead of building more power plants to handle peak hours.
Recently scientists and planners have run the numbers again on this idea. One little change they made is that the system will now pump water out of the reservoir, generating power when it flows back in, so that a serious break in the encircling dyke does not flood the lands beyond (have to keep the eeevil terrorists in mind, you know?)
There is one glaring issue with this setup: it requires iTunes. I love this combination and it is what I use to play music in my living room. The ease of control afforder by using an iPod touch or iPhone as a remote offers is one that is unparalleled by any other solution I've seen on the market.
But... it requires iTunes, which means I have to run my noisy and power-hungry computer. My NAS on the other hand draws as much as a single lightbulb when active, is quiet, and for those reasons it's always on. I'd love to be able to have a similar solution running on Linux alone (which is what the NAS runs on). Is there a solution for this?
Next best thing would be to snap up an old Mac Mini and stick iTunes on that, I suppose...
Or... it's a smokescreen. If I were a government intent on rigging an electronic election, or a manufacturer of voting machines intent on drawing attention away from the real issues with my machines, this is exactly the sort of sham I'd stage.
/. crowd might be able to state with certainty that a particular machine works as intended, and that the code it runs on contains no fraudulent capabilities. But are we able to verify that the machines we vote on actually runs the same software come election day? And more importantly... why would the general public have to trust these machines and our judgment, instead of their own? I think that is a key question for a working democracy.
Hacking by outsiders is a concern, of course, but the real worry is hacking by insiders. It is incredibly hard if not impossible to devise a system of electronic voting that can be verified. More importantly, any random Joe Blow needs to be able to verify the results.
Paper ballots have many advantages when it comes to verifying the results, and I consider those advantages to be actual requirements:
- The voting and tallying process can be described, in its entirety, on one or a few sheets of paper. And anyone with half a brain can understand that process.
- Because of that, most citizens posess enough smarts to sit in a voting station and keep an eye on the proceedings, making sure nothing untoward happens.
- Because of such impartial and effective observers, all of us can rely that the tally will be correct, and that if there is any fraud, it will be limited to a small area at least. And in many cases it will be detectable by a followup investigation.
The spectre of electronic voting is one of massive, undetected fraud. The mostly IT-savvy
Everything has been reported as a hoax at one time or another. Do you have a source?
Vista was somewhat unfairly blasted, Windows 7 is being somewhat unfairly hyped.
Windows 7 is to Vista what XP was to ME, as some have said? Perhaps. I prefer to think of Windows 7 as the Obama of operating systems. Promising, though anything but proven, and its main achievement seems to be being different to a wildly unpopular predecessor.
There may be some good news for PC gamers: the longer development cycles for console hardware. Several console manufacturers have mentioned that the next-gen console is further away than expected due to rising complexity and development cost. In contrast, PC gaming hardware development is continuous and fast.
Like it or not, a good part of gaming is still eye-candy. Players like to go ohh and ahh over the latest games' visuals, while developers still like to show off their cutting-edge engines. And the good news is: with most games these days, that cutting edge hardware is entirely optional: you can upgrade if you want the pretty colors, or leave you system as is to just play the game. Most gamers do not mind spending a few hundred bucks every year on their system to keep up, which is enough to enjoy the latest gimmicks. Perhaps this is enough to keep PC gaming alive.
What worries me a lot more is the tendency to port games directly from consoles to PCs, without taking advantage of the edge PCs have over consoles. That's not just more up-to-date video hardware, but also includes things like keyboard an mouse, multi-screen capability, etc. There are already a few games out there with crappy menu's and crappy avatar control that appear to come straight from consoles. And lets not forget the latest news that has gamers in a fit: the fact that the new COD title will not have a proper multiplayer server selections screen, but instead uses a craptastic console-style random matchmaker function for finding multiplayer games. These are precisely the reasons I am still playing PC games, but if those games lose those extra features, I might as well turn to consoles and make do.
Funny how head-to-head (2+ people playing on 1 PC) gaming is evolving... One of the first "console" games, that thing with 4 Pong-like games and two paddles that you hooked up to the TV, already had multiplayer. PC games (and by PC I mean anything from the C64 to Windows-bases computers) quickly followed suit, bringing games with split-screen head to head action or coop modes.
Modern consoles put an end to that. They're just the thing for when you have some friends over; you don't want to play games sitting in the den crowded around a keyboard and a tiny crt, better to get to the living room sofa to play games together on a big screen TV. Head-to-head games have naturally moved from the PC to the console.
Sadly, the latest consoles are all Internet-capable as well... and it seems there are fewer and fewer proper head-to-head games. The Wii might be an exception, not sure about the Xbox 360 though...and the selection for the Playstation 3 is piss-poor. There are some head-to-head titles, but they are the exception rather than the rule as it used to be.
You do not need a dedicated server; you can host a Battlefield game from your own PC. Besides, CoD will not have servers provided by IW either; they still rely on games hosted by players.
I am a casual player of BF2, not into clans, but... I still rather like the ability to pick the game to join. If I find a good and stable server with an interesting map rotation, good moderation, and with a few grown-up regulars playing there, that server goes on my Favorites list. Even as a casual player you'll sometimes make a few friends on those servers. And in general, I found most BF2 clans have a stable and fair ruleset, and fair moderators when online.
Semi-random matchmaking means you are thrown in with the asshats, and you cannot find and play with your friends. There's a few games (Farcry 2 or Crysis IIRC?) that do this and it's awful. Worse, those games throw you back to the matchmaking screen after evry round, so even if you find a good bunch of people to play with, the group's broken up after the round is over. I've not bothered with multiplayer on those games since, and if this is what COD/MW2 will offer, I will not pick it up. A shame.
For me the overwhelming argument in favour of e-books is ease of reading.
I really like reading off a more or less paperback sized screen, as opposed to a small PDA screen. The e-paper is also a lot easier on the eyes if you're like me and read for hours on end. And unlike a computer screen or even a laptop, e-books are just as easy to read as regular books lying on the sofa, in bed, on the train, etc. A decent reader is about the size of a paperback and half as thick, so they are as easy to carry as a paper book.
Also, many e-book readers these days support multiple formats; open or DRM-less formats as well as the more prevalent DRM schemes such as Mobipocket. The notable exception is the Kindle and Amazon's e-books... I am really disappointed that one of the largest distributor of books decided to go with their own reader and their own closed DRM scheme, which really doesn't help, and which means I will not be buying e-books off Amazon. I like having one e-book reader, but I'd hate to have to own more than one just to beat the format wars.
The main problem with these e-readers is different formats, iffy DRM (the idiocy of that book being pulled off people's Kindles did nothing to increase e-book popularity), and the high price of e-books (people expect to pay a lot less for electronic books). People might like other functions on these devices, but I already have my phone on me, which is small enough to carry with me at all times, and fulfills all those functions you mention. If I want to read, I bring an e-book in addition to my phone. If I need a bigger screen or a real keyboard, I'll bring a laptop.
I've visited Vegas a couple of weeks ago... Lots of fun! No need to gamble either, we put a buck or two in the 1c video poker machine and played a bit for a couple of free beers. But there's plenty to see outside the astounding tackiness of the Strip. Trips to Red Rock, lake Mead, Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, etc. Some very good restaurants there, and there's plenty of shows to go to in the evening.
Monte Carlo (or Monaco in general) is a playgfround for the rich... you are allowed to walk around and gape at a 90 year old corpse clambering out of a Ferrari with his young blonde trophy wife going for a night at Baccarat, but that's it. Oh, it's interesting to see the roads where they have the F1 race, and there's a nice botanical garden. For the rest it's boring as hell. If I had a choice to spend a week in Monaco or Vegas, I'd pick Vegas any time.
Reminds me of the great movie "Casino".
"There's no way to determine they cheated, mr. Rothstein"
- "Yes there is, an infallible way: they won".
That is why the idea of spawning more copies of the same game zone as it fills up is not such a bad idea. Not just for spreading the load across different servers, but also for making sure the game world doesn't get too crowded. Age of Conan (and a few others) do this... when AoC launched, the servers were chock-full but I never saw any queue. The popular game zones could have as many as 8 instances, but each of those had a reasonable populace without being overcrowded. As players inevitably left the game (most MMOs these days seem to draw a big crowd and lose most of it in the first few months), the number of parallel instances of each game zone dwindled as well. These days most zones rarely spawn a second instance, but since everyone is in the same zones, they do not feel that empty either.
Good advice. I had a similar but even weirder experience, working for an IT consultancy company. One sales guy sent me to interview with a client, having already sent them my CV which he had embellished without even knowing what position I was being interviewed for. He pointed out as much when I asked him.
I went to the interview; I mentioned the inaccuracies in my CV and told them I had very little briefing from our account manager, and if they could perhaps tell me a little more about the job? Turns out the guys interviewing me didn't know either. They hired me anyway. After that I "fired" that account manager by quitting the concultancy firm.
Oh...and that job turned out to be pretty interesting!
This isn't a government problem; it's private companies that won't hire ex-cons.
Do companies in the US have access to that kind of information? In the Netherlands, these records are private, but companies often will require a "declaration of no objection" from new hires for positions of trust. These are requested from the police, and the declaration (if issued) will state that the applicant has nothing in his record indicating a risk for the position he applies for. This to ensure a convicted embezzler doesn't get to work as an accountant again, or a child molester gets a job at a day care center, or a violent criminal a membership at a gun range, while keeping irrelevant facts on that record private.
One problem I have with HP is their driver support. I have one of their SOHO models, and HP have so far refused to provide Vista or Windows 7 drivers for the thing.
So, I can print using a generic PCL5 driver, but the scanning and faxing capabilities cannot be used from Vista or Windows 7; I have to switch to an older machine running XP for that. Pretty crappy support if you ask me; of course one cannot expect them to provide drivers in perpetuity, but when Vista appeared on the market, this line of printers had only recently been replaced by newer models.
Rubbish... Even someone like Friedman subscribes to the idea of market failure; in his book "Free to choose" he gives a clear explanation of what it is and when it can occur. Yes, it is used as an excuse to have the government step in and make a bigger mess, but the problem exists, and a competent government can sometimes fix it. The real problem is that we have so little competent government.
Imagine you and your wife looking fit as a fiddle, but with short tempers, twitchy eyebrows and a serious case of the munchies all day, because the government allows you to have only weak tea, raw carrot and soybean pudding?
Fix your own damn diet, and don't go looking for excuses to have it fixed for you and everybody else.
The choice is between the government forcing us to eat healthy, or corporations offering us a selection of food ranging from healthy to junk food. I know which one I'll pick... I enjoy good food but I do want to indulge in a burger and fries every now and then; it does makes sense to advise me not to overdo it. But I see very little justification for anyone ordering me to...
By the way, if you are looking for purity of motives in politicians, you'll be sorely disappointed. How about we let the unwashed masses take care of themselves, and stop all this nanny crap? Treat people like infants and they will start behaving like infants.
I got laid off in 2002 specifically because I was vocal and did my best to try and make for a better work environment.
What do you mean by being vocal? If you are constantly suggesting changes to the way people work, people may start to see you as a troublemaker even if your suggestions are good. I've seen the type: young, over-eager and making many good suggestions... to the wrong people. Going over their bosses' heads. Upstaging senior teammates. Even claiming credit for team efforts. That sort of thing.
On the other hand... celebrate success! That is what the article is on about. When your team completes an objective, send an email to the stakeholders: "Today we rolled out system xyz, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the team!", something like that. And make sure you are in a position to send that mail! If you are the project manager, it'll likely be ok. If you have someone above you who is also closely involved with your work, check with them first. And if they prefer to handle such announcements, make sure they do it!