Will they count the cable TV connection as part of that cap?
Haven't heard anything to that effect. It wouldn't really make sense either, the distribution of their cable content is completely different from the net traffic (as far as their costs and capacity go, I mean).
Just order 5 movies from Comcast, 5 from NetFlix and then download a couple of the new game demo's, most half to a full gig anymore.
Comcast movies don't count. NetFlix gives you 18 hours for $18 and the maximum quality is 3mbit/s, that's about 24GB (or less than 10% of the cap) that NetFlix limits you to. 10 game demos at half gig each: 5GB, how many new games come out a month?
250GB is 55 full DVD movies (which there's no reason to download). I'm sorry, but all the hand-waving about "things adding up" is just bullshit - the only way to hit that cap is to constantly max out your connection with P2P traffic.
All of which is pretty much irrelevant to begin with - the service they are willing to provide is 250GB/month for $whatever price, it's not really a discussion. When you go to a bakery and get 12 cupcakes for $4, do you feel entitled to complain that you wanted, say, 23 cupcakes for $4?
Last but not least lets not forget the console players out there. That limit will surely be blown by anyone who plays Xbox Live, or something like for playstation, online.
Surely? Based on what? Console games will use, at most, half a GB for a solid 24 hours of gaming - playing games nonstop, 24/7 will only get you to about 5% of 250GB (the actual estimate I've seen around was 10MB down / 6MB up per hour, so you are allowed ~35 concurrent, 24/7 gaming sessions).
A draconian option for those who don't toe the line? Blatant efforts to control their customers? Corporate interference? Are you sure you aren't being just a teensy wee bit melodramatic about this?
I recently got Comcast (they are the only provider available at my new place), I routinely get download speeds around 1-2MB/s (with a 'bytes', not a 'bits'), including torrents, and the price is more or less reasonable. By my calculations I am damn unlikely to ever hit the 250GB cap (I may use 8GB in day from time to time, but far from most days), and even if I do, I was aware of this limitation of the service before signing up.
So remind me, why am I so damn outraged about this? Is it because someone would dare to suggest that there be some kind of limit to the amount of porn and movies I can download for 60 bucks a month?
I used to pay through the nose for Speakeasy, so far I'm getting a better service from Comcast.
The guy who flips the switch better bring along a crowbar.
Re:Game vs. Experience Score
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 0
Black And White was a slightly worse game yet, even with a more limited scope, is still discussed as being a key moment in gaming history where people's eyes were opened.
Ah, Black & White, it certainly raised the bar in the whole "skull-fuckingly obnoxious" department. I believe the best candidate for that "key moment" in gaming history was the 35 minute, unskippable, interactive "tutorial" you had to go through, just in case you forgot how the mouse works, every time you wanted to start a new game, even if it was just because the creature AI file got corrupted (again), making the thing just sit around, drooling quietly.
And the rest of the "user experience" built on that solid foundation from there.
Uh, I don't actually have anything useful to contribute; that game just always brings back fond memories.
funny thing, although you were being difficult, the mods agreed with me that he should get points...
Oddly enough someone seemed to agree with me as well (for what that's worth).
were you suggesting that nobody should post anything that could be found by Google?
I'm suggesting that I'm completely baffled by these "Here's the Wikipedia link / Google search / first result link" posts that have no original or informative content. It seems like most people here are probably pretty comfortable with the whole "highlight -> right-click -> Search Google for..." process - are there those who actually can't define an unknown term until someone posts a link to a Google search for it?
However, you needed a stay permit (it was called 'propiska') to permanently move to another city. Getting this permit was a quite different story.
Which went something like this: to get the permit you had to have a job in the city, and you couldn't get a job without the permit. They were really good at little bureaucratic flourishes like that.
Yes, turns out murder is a bad thing. One doesn't normally expect people to "win" in these kinds of things.
The DA's office lost a lot of time and money over the last two years prosecuting this case.
They spent that time and money as intended - doing their jobs; not exactly the same thing as "lost". If DAs didn't prosecute people they wouldn't need money.
I think this is where a lot of people get artist and artisan mixed up (probably because artisan isn't often used any more).
It's not quite that black-and-white: both 'artist' and 'artisan' derive from the Latin ars, which can mean both 'art' (as you are describing) and 'skill' (or 'craft'). In Greek, as well, the word techne, 'skill' (hence 'technical', 'technology', etc), was primarily used to describe things we call 'art' (and is often mistranslated as such).
So, the word 'art' has had these two distinct (though related) meanings from the very beginning, and neither one is more "legitimate" than the other.
I've heard people say it about programming of all things, even Donald Trump said that writing good business contracts was his art.
I think it's generally understood that when people say this they mean 'art' in the sense of "highly refined skill", rather than "tortured self-expression"; nobody is trying to elevate their activity to something it isn't. Then again, people do tend to see beauty, of the "artistic" kind, in the most refined examples of their craft (but that's more of a subjective opinion).
I think before anyone calls anything an 'art' (and this goes particularly for anything that comes with a built in 'undo' function) they should go pick up a 2d pencil and a piece of paper and try to draw someone they know.
Since we seem to be back to the definition of 'art' as "skill as the result of practice", I would argue that learning to draw is no more difficult than learning to program. I might as well say that anyone who doesn't consider programming to be 'art' should grab a C compiler and whip me up an Ethernet controller driver - what's the point?
(Not that I want to take sides in the whole "video games/comics/etc are/aren't art" debate - that's just a banal waste of time)
Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984 should be required reading in our schools. But I don't think the folks who want to hang on to their power would like that.
Both are, in fact, commonly found in high school curricula - no reason to get all melodramatic (it takes more than a couple of books, no matter how poignant, to trouble those who "want to hang on to their power").
Somebody does an interesting hypothetical study and half of Slashdot suddenly decides that someone is trying to tell them that the hypothetical is Truth.
The problem is that all these people do is "hypothetical studies" (read "mathematical masturbation"), since none of it is even remotely testable, and their own theories are very convincing to them, they just start talking about this stuff like it's real. Gets annoying after a while.
I take your point, but we are not the only ones who need to take a step back here.
And now that you mention it, any reference to all this garbage (I'm sorry, "research") being hypothetical is suspiciously missing from that article.
So, now we are just treating this whole "multiple universes" thing as a given? I'm glad they threw in some Dark Matter in there, too, just to be on the safe side.
Can you define free will first so that a meaningful discussion can follow?
Well, in a word, no.
That's what makes it one of the Great Questions of the ages that can never be answered: people use several, completely unrelated, definitions of "free will" interchangeably, allowing them to carry on this "debate" for several thousand years now.
Why would you consider this a "ripoff"? Patents are granted for 20 years, with the express intention that after that period, the invention can be freely used by others.
Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children.
You are confusing being able to afford more children with actually having more children.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of people in the developed world both survive into adulthood and reproduce, making the average number of offspring the only differentiating factor - that's not exactly natural selection.
Let alone the fact that he doesn't create real cyberpunk anymore; snow crash and the diamond age were great, but then he went bonkers and started doing alternative-history "steampunk" crap.
He doesn't claim to write cyberpunk anymore - everything since Cryptonomicon on is plain old historical fiction, with a geeky bent; and there is nothing "steampunk" about it either. I am not sure what "fad" you are talking about here, I guess "fiction"?
He hasn't written cyberpunk for over a decade now, is it really worth it to keep complaining that he stopped? We only really need one William Gibson.
Slashdot Mirror
Will they count the cable TV connection as part of that cap?
Haven't heard anything to that effect. It wouldn't really make sense either, the distribution of their cable content is completely different from the net traffic (as far as their costs and capacity go, I mean).
Just order 5 movies from Comcast, 5 from NetFlix and then download a couple of the new game demo's, most half to a full gig anymore.
Comcast movies don't count. NetFlix gives you 18 hours for $18 and the maximum quality is 3mbit/s, that's about 24GB (or less than 10% of the cap) that NetFlix limits you to. 10 game demos at half gig each: 5GB, how many new games come out a month?
250GB is 55 full DVD movies (which there's no reason to download). I'm sorry, but all the hand-waving about "things adding up" is just bullshit - the only way to hit that cap is to constantly max out your connection with P2P traffic.
All of which is pretty much irrelevant to begin with - the service they are willing to provide is 250GB/month for $whatever price, it's not really a discussion. When you go to a bakery and get 12 cupcakes for $4, do you feel entitled to complain that you wanted, say, 23 cupcakes for $4?
Last but not least lets not forget the console players out there. That limit will surely be blown by anyone who plays Xbox Live, or something like for playstation, online.
Surely? Based on what? Console games will use, at most, half a GB for a solid 24 hours of gaming - playing games nonstop, 24/7 will only get you to about 5% of 250GB (the actual estimate I've seen around was 10MB down / 6MB up per hour, so you are allowed ~35 concurrent, 24/7 gaming sessions).
two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish...
Like, into a Business Professor Archon? Sweet.
He's extremely blunt.
Yeah, that's a terrible quality. Much better to be nice to people and not provide useful information.
While many are VERY helpful and detailed, a number are a sentence or two long that, paraphrased, consist of "you're an idiot."
There's a critical piece of data missing: were those posters, in fact, asking idiotic questions?
Oh, and Viktor makes an altogether non-arduous request of people he's already helped, albeit in a brusque manner - I'm burning with outrage.
Phone sex operators are there to be indiscriminately nice to people - it's not a very useful quality on support lists.
your bandwidth will get throttled long, long before that if you do anything their software deems "excessive."
"excessive"? Is it really so inconceivable that some users produce excessive traffic?
A draconian option for those who don't toe the line? Blatant efforts to control their customers? Corporate interference? Are you sure you aren't being just a teensy wee bit melodramatic about this?
I recently got Comcast (they are the only provider available at my new place), I routinely get download speeds around 1-2MB/s (with a 'bytes', not a 'bits'), including torrents, and the price is more or less reasonable. By my calculations I am damn unlikely to ever hit the 250GB cap (I may use 8GB in day from time to time, but far from most days), and even if I do, I was aware of this limitation of the service before signing up.
So remind me, why am I so damn outraged about this? Is it because someone would dare to suggest that there be some kind of limit to the amount of porn and movies I can download for 60 bucks a month?
I used to pay through the nose for Speakeasy, so far I'm getting a better service from Comcast.
but it starts to get a bit old when you scroll all the way down a thread and can't find anything that adds a bit of information to the discussion
/. readers to add?
It's a couple of pixels showing an unidentified object, somewhere in the universe - how much information do you expect
The guy who flips the switch better bring along a crowbar.
Black And White was a slightly worse game yet, even with a more limited scope, is still discussed as being a key moment in gaming history where people's eyes were opened.
Ah, Black & White, it certainly raised the bar in the whole "skull-fuckingly obnoxious" department. I believe the best candidate for that "key moment" in gaming history was the 35 minute, unskippable, interactive "tutorial" you had to go through, just in case you forgot how the mouse works, every time you wanted to start a new game, even if it was just because the creature AI file got corrupted (again), making the thing just sit around, drooling quietly.
And the rest of the "user experience" built on that solid foundation from there.
Uh, I don't actually have anything useful to contribute; that game just always brings back fond memories.
funny thing, although you were being difficult, the mods agreed with me that he should get points...
Oddly enough someone seemed to agree with me as well (for what that's worth).
were you suggesting that nobody should post anything that could be found by Google?
I'm suggesting that I'm completely baffled by these "Here's the Wikipedia link / Google search / first result link" posts that have no original or informative content. It seems like most people here are probably pretty comfortable with the whole "highlight -> right-click -> Search Google for..." process - are there those who actually can't define an unknown term until someone posts a link to a Google search for it?
It just seems weird to me.
This is a good post, I had no idea what it meant.
Yeah, me neither! If only we also had this "Google" thing.
So bottom line is that you could send the drive in to Western Digital, and they could probably recover the raw data with about 90% accuracy.
That's a pretty impressive number, to just pull out of your ass.
However, you needed a stay permit (it was called 'propiska') to permanently move to another city. Getting this permit was a quite different story.
Which went something like this: to get the permit you had to have a job in the city, and you couldn't get a job without the permit. They were really good at little bureaucratic flourishes like that.
Finally, the end to a tragic tale. Nobody won.
Yes, turns out murder is a bad thing. One doesn't normally expect people to "win" in these kinds of things.
The DA's office lost a lot of time and money over the last two years prosecuting this case.
They spent that time and money as intended - doing their jobs; not exactly the same thing as "lost". If DAs didn't prosecute people they wouldn't need money.
I think this is where a lot of people get artist and artisan mixed up (probably because artisan isn't often used any more).
It's not quite that black-and-white: both 'artist' and 'artisan' derive from the Latin ars, which can mean both 'art' (as you are describing) and 'skill' (or 'craft'). In Greek, as well, the word techne, 'skill' (hence 'technical', 'technology', etc), was primarily used to describe things we call 'art' (and is often mistranslated as such).
So, the word 'art' has had these two distinct (though related) meanings from the very beginning, and neither one is more "legitimate" than the other.
I've heard people say it about programming of all things, even Donald Trump said that writing good business contracts was his art.
I think it's generally understood that when people say this they mean 'art' in the sense of "highly refined skill", rather than "tortured self-expression"; nobody is trying to elevate their activity to something it isn't. Then again, people do tend to see beauty, of the "artistic" kind, in the most refined examples of their craft (but that's more of a subjective opinion).
I think before anyone calls anything an 'art' (and this goes particularly for anything that comes with a built in 'undo' function) they should go pick up a 2d pencil and a piece of paper and try to draw someone they know.
Since we seem to be back to the definition of 'art' as "skill as the result of practice", I would argue that learning to draw is no more difficult than learning to program. I might as well say that anyone who doesn't consider programming to be 'art' should grab a C compiler and whip me up an Ethernet controller driver - what's the point?
(Not that I want to take sides in the whole "video games/comics/etc are/aren't art" debate - that's just a banal waste of time)
Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell's 1984 should be required reading in our schools. But I don't think the folks who want to hang on to their power would like that.
Both are, in fact, commonly found in high school curricula - no reason to get all melodramatic (it takes more than a couple of books, no matter how poignant, to trouble those who "want to hang on to their power").
In case you are stuck on the first page, here's a link to page 2: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3766/atari_the_golden_years__a_.php?page=2
Also, in case you don't know what Atari is, here's the Google search, and an explanation of what Google is.
Seriously, why do people do this? You know that we all have web browsers and mice, and can just click the same links ourselves, right?
Somebody does an interesting hypothetical study and half of Slashdot suddenly decides that someone is trying to tell them that the hypothetical is Truth.
The problem is that all these people do is "hypothetical studies" (read "mathematical masturbation"), since none of it is even remotely testable, and their own theories are very convincing to them, they just start talking about this stuff like it's real. Gets annoying after a while.
I take your point, but we are not the only ones who need to take a step back here.
And now that you mention it, any reference to all this garbage (I'm sorry, "research") being hypothetical is suspiciously missing from that article.
So, now we are just treating this whole "multiple universes" thing as a given? I'm glad they threw in some Dark Matter in there, too, just to be on the safe side.
Can you define free will first so that a meaningful discussion can follow?
Well, in a word, no.
That's what makes it one of the Great Questions of the ages that can never be answered: people use several, completely unrelated, definitions of "free will" interchangeably, allowing them to carry on this "debate" for several thousand years now.
It's essentually just a bunch of water vapor suspended in the air with some dust particles.
In the interest of pedantry: it's actually water droplets (extremely small water droplets, at that); water vapor is invisible.
So we are still pretending that 'meme' is a commonly used word that you can just throw in a sentence and expect people to understand you?
Step 1: Rip off 20 year old patented technology
Why would you consider this a "ripoff"? Patents are granted for 20 years, with the express intention that after that period, the invention can be freely used by others.
What's bad about this?
Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children.
You are confusing being able to afford more children with actually having more children.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of people in the developed world both survive into adulthood and reproduce, making the average number of offspring the only differentiating factor - that's not exactly natural selection.
but pretending that all the money being taken from educating boys to be used educating in a female friendly way has consequences
Yes, what are these people thinking, spending money to educate women, when they could've used it to educate men?
Let alone the fact that he doesn't create real cyberpunk anymore; snow crash and the diamond age were great, but then he went bonkers and started doing alternative-history "steampunk" crap.
He doesn't claim to write cyberpunk anymore - everything since Cryptonomicon on is plain old historical fiction, with a geeky bent; and there is nothing "steampunk" about it either. I am not sure what "fad" you are talking about here, I guess "fiction"?
He hasn't written cyberpunk for over a decade now, is it really worth it to keep complaining that he stopped? We only really need one William Gibson.