Just wondering whether you have a source for "many 360 users have 120Gb drives"?
Might true for all I know. Anecdotally, I don't know anyone with an Elite or who has bought the 120Gb add-on, but here in the UK the video store is a) more recent, and b) considerably less well stocked than the US store, so that might be a big factor...
Long ago I subscribed to fileplanet, and included as part of the subscription package was a game from Direct2Drive. I chose Splinter Cell.
Fast forward a couple of years, and after building a new PC I wanted to reinstall Splinter Cell - so downloaded the installer, dug out the activation numbers from my email, and couldn't make it work. I contacted D2D support, and whilst they were very friendly and very professional, they also couldn't make it work. SC (the D2D version) wasn't compatible with my new system (with XP, I think, but I could be mistaken) and wouldn't activate.
There wasn't anything they could do - and to their credit, they were upfront about this and credited my account with sufficient points to buy a new game which would be compatible, so I can't fault their customer approach - but I was still left without the game I wanted.
Personally, I think this is interesting: according to this spreadsheet forecast from the US census bureau (and a quick SUM), the total number of deaths in the US for 2006-2007 was 2,820,930.
So you could say that almost 1 in 100 people who died in that period did so from a gunshot wound. That sounds...high, to me.
Re:Banks is not a good author
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
Earlier posters have already refuted the "does not get front place" line, so I'll just take issue with rest...
It's true that he doesn't give a complete history of the culture in each novel, but why would he? I joined mid-flow and it's fairly straightforward to infer the general state of affairs. Read other novels and you pick up the granular details, if you like what you read, but it's not necessary.
I'm also not sure how you can say "if you want a good British author read Terry Pratchett..." - you might as well say Jilly Cooper or Will Self. Good authors? Arguably. Remotely related to Iain M. Banks's work? Nope. You might prefer in-jokery in a fantasy world to space opera, but that doesn't necessarily make one author better than another.
Agreed, largely.
It does feel exactly like a product aimed at business class fliers from the regular management side of the room. Consultants. MBAs. People with helpdesks to solve "install software" and "backup data" problems.
The 3g bit could be a bigger problem though. The suits in question are all addicted to always-on. Blackberries, 3g datacards etc. When all the Dells are available with built-in no-dongle data, it's a silly omission.
I'm not sure how a "carrier issue" could really affect it though...
Agreed. It doesn't actually matter which software you use, as long as you teach *with* the software, not teach the software itself. Teaching high school kids the basics of image manipulation, sizing for the web, basic web design etc is what you're doing, not teaching them any particular software app. Employer
I think it's because, no matter how much people wear their "nerd cred" on their sleeve, and how super-duper-smart they might genuinely be, they're all still people - and so lots (most?) want to be famous, a celebrity. No matter how you slice it, I think that still means "being on TV", even if the TV is actually a video podcast or whatever. People still want to be looked at, as well as listened to.
I can't help but agree that we're not necessarily making the best use of video on the web. There are a whole bunch of things where the easy availability of reasonably high-quality* video makes a *massive* difference. How much better is a concert review with a clip of the performance? How much better is a video game clip than a screenshot? There are great uses for video on the web, loads of 'em. But an awful lot of video podcasts and "interview" materials aren't necessarily it.
Erm. Isn't turning a box into a router, however old the bits in it, essentially turning into a server of sorts? With focus on throughput rather than responsiveness, etc etc?
In my experience (fwiw: I work in exec. recruitment, but not as a recruiter) the people earning US$HUGE were pretty much all A students. Hell, the people recruiting them were all A students - first-class degrees from famous universities, MBAs from the big business schools, doctorates where appropriate. If by "move the world" you mean "run hugely successful businesses" then I'm not sure I agree. That ability to focus seems to be the differentiating factor.
Now if you're talking about creation - pure research, coding, engineering, etc. then perhaps you're right, I don't know. Maybe the people who *discover* things are the smart ones who get curious or distracted too easily and let their minds wander, and ultimately come across new ideas.
Also, don't forget that most devs are planning to produce a single disk for all territories (or all territories within a region) - so they'll have all the different-language versions of the game on a single disk.
They're just aiming for the luxury market. LVMH don't make many products in the "stack 'em high and flog 'em cheap" aisles. Premium pricing of a premium product often makes it *more* attractive. Hell, premium pricing of a crappy product works - witness prices for t-shirts with CK, Emporio etc. written on the front. Or football jerseys (works for UK & US, I'd bet). Cheap nylon shirt, logo on front, big numbers on the price tag.
The only wrinkle is that they're aiming to be the massmarket luxury option - but again, look at the common-or-garden "designer" wear you can buy - people will pay money for something they are told is worth it.
Is it not the case that essays/papers and exams (be they multiple-guess, true/false, short format or long) should be assessed as a whole?
Researching, writing and referencing an essay or paper is a process which "teaches" as well as assesses, presuming of course the student does the work rather than plagiarises another. If papers are graded in conjunction with a relatively short test on the subject, or a related subject which would have been uncovered during the research process, then the student's performance in the test should reflect the amount of work that went into the essay.
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
We have a Creston-based integrated system for videoconference, presentation, tv, video etc etc. So - there are 3 60" plasmas and a couple of easily accessible DVD/SVCRs, and a couple of portable Crestron touchpads, with a simple interface along the lines of "screen1" -> DVD, "screen2" -> PC1 etc etc.
We have two people from our helpdesk to cover it. Even with the most amazingly user-friendly setup, be prepared to go running when, with 5 mins to go, nothing's working.
Don't forget that a massive part of Valve's revenue model (much like ID's, and Epic's) is the licensing of their game engine to 3rd party developers.
How many games are based on (perhaps modified) versions of the quake engines? On the Unreal engine? There's already one announced game based on the Source (HL2) engine - can't remember what it is right now but read about it in Edge magazine (UK) last week.
I don't know exactly how Valve's licensing model works, but I'd guess there's a fee for using the engine in a commercial product, and probably a royalty for each copy of the product sold. Open-sourcing the engine makes them utterly reliant on sales of HL2. Not an ideal situation for a business.
There are different ways of working with Lexis, but for a company like NYT they will likely have an account which allows them a certain value of searches per month/week/year/given period. This is negociated & re-evaluated each year.
If they go over their allocated monthly usage, the premiums are very large - searches on Lexis can be stunningly expensive if the complete list of sources are used. Most researchers using Lexis tend to restrict the sources they use, and the time period covered. Its still not unusual for members of a research dept to have a personal Lexis spend of $90,000/month - and that's a professional researcher (admittedly making many searches) trained to minimise the cost and use the system most efficiently. Whatever the relative merits of Lamo and his actions, and however NYT react, its entirely possible that the claimed $300,000 for Lexis searches is correct.
Once the initial build's finished (and you can speed that up a fair way by starting at stage 3), I think Gentoo is a distro for the lazy - think about it: instead of having to find an application, download it, (build and) install it, all you need is one command and 1 minute/hour/day/week of compile time.
Without downloading IE6 to be sure, I can't confirm this (anybody?), but 60Mb would get you IE6, Outlook Express, int'l support, windows media player and probably various help and other files.
As you're comparing IE6 to Firebird, you should compare the browser-only download option - no OE, no help, etc. Very probably Firebird will still be slimmer by a reasonable margin, but not by 50Mb+.
I know that the TLD regulations were relaxed, then them more or less abandoned, and that many places (including the UK) aren't that bothered if people from outside the UK register URLs there, but...
I think it makes sense to restrict the number of TLDs for the very practical reason that a limited number of domain endings are more memorable. Yes, I know there are such things as favourites/bookmarks, but still - thinking something.com, something-else.org or whatever is possibly more user friendly than having to remember "this-is-my-website.loadacrap" or whatever.
I can't decide whether this is trolling or not - if it is, its pretty clever - appeal to the functional luddites.
Faster processors = less efficient programs - as someone already said, so? Granted there's some really dog rough code lurking about, but...? For the most part, its not relevant.
10 years ago I was doing wordprocessing and spreadsheets on an 8086 - an Amstrad PC1512 (probably a UK-only thing). It worked, but I would't dream of going back to it. No way. I can say with utter certainty that the wordprocessors and spreadsheets I use today are VASTLY superior. Vastly.
You don't need a P4 with 128Mb?? RAM. Actually, if you were using XP, it would run like crap anyway. Most of the researchers in our office are using something between PIII-600 and PIII-1Ghz, with multiple browser windows, multiple documents and proprietary databases open. It works for them.
"Niche" applications are the only ones that need power? Er, that's crap. Talk to some "average" computer users - I think you'll find that the marketing campaigns have worked. They don't just want to send email and write letters. Why? - Digital cameras - Digital video - Gaming - Music - Home entertainment
All of these use serious computing power. You don't have to be a Photoshop pro to need power for processing the 100 3megapixel images from your consumer-level digicam.
You don't have to work for Dreamworks to need computing power to edit together your cam footage from the summer barbecue, or your 5 year old's birthday, before burning a copy for the in-laws.
And I haven't even touched on ease of use. The fact that my I've been able to persuade my mum to use email, and show her its not that complicated - that's worth the admission price alone. It would never have happened with a CLI email client. I'm not saying there's no use for them, but my mum would never have bothered. Would your gran? Your parent? So if a few processor cycles are used making it look pretty, so someone who's not comfortable with technology is happy to give it a try, I say use 'em.
Yay. And then in two years, ATI will be the big scary company, Nvidia will be the underdog, and we can all applaud Nvidia for providing ATI with some competition. The cycle will complete itself, ad nauseum.
...rooting for the little guy seems to be normal human behaviour. More importantly, as someone is guaranteed to have already mentioned, competition is inherently a good thing. Competition can stimulate innovation (gotta build a better product) and pins down prices to realistic levels (gotta be best value).
The alternative is everyone's favourite word, monopoly. How many of those do we like?
Slashdot Mirror
Just wondering whether you have a source for "many 360 users have 120Gb drives"?
Might true for all I know. Anecdotally, I don't know anyone with an Elite or who has bought the 120Gb add-on, but here in the UK the video store is a) more recent, and b) considerably less well stocked than the US store, so that might be a big factor...
Why would Google get in trouble for *not* hiring ex-military people?
I'm not in the US - is there some kind of legal obligation, or is it just something that normally happens?
Just a fair warning about this sort of thing:
Long ago I subscribed to fileplanet, and included as part of the subscription package was a game from Direct2Drive. I chose Splinter Cell.
Fast forward a couple of years, and after building a new PC I wanted to reinstall Splinter Cell - so downloaded the installer, dug out the activation numbers from my email, and couldn't make it work. I contacted D2D support, and whilst they were very friendly and very professional, they also couldn't make it work. SC (the D2D version) wasn't compatible with my new system (with XP, I think, but I could be mistaken) and wouldn't activate.
There wasn't anything they could do - and to their credit, they were upfront about this and credited my account with sufficient points to buy a new game which would be compatible, so I can't fault their customer approach - but I was still left without the game I wanted.
Personally, I think this is interesting: according to this spreadsheet forecast from the US census bureau (and a quick SUM), the total number of deaths in the US for 2006-2007 was 2,820,930. So you could say that almost 1 in 100 people who died in that period did so from a gunshot wound. That sounds...high, to me.
Earlier posters have already refuted the "does not get front place" line, so I'll just take issue with rest...
It's true that he doesn't give a complete history of the culture in each novel, but why would he? I joined mid-flow and it's fairly straightforward to infer the general state of affairs. Read other novels and you pick up the granular details, if you like what you read, but it's not necessary.
I'm also not sure how you can say "if you want a good British author read Terry Pratchett..." - you might as well say Jilly Cooper or Will Self. Good authors? Arguably. Remotely related to Iain M. Banks's work? Nope. You might prefer in-jokery in a fantasy world to space opera, but that doesn't necessarily make one author better than another.
Agreed, largely. It does feel exactly like a product aimed at business class fliers from the regular management side of the room. Consultants. MBAs. People with helpdesks to solve "install software" and "backup data" problems. The 3g bit could be a bigger problem though. The suits in question are all addicted to always-on. Blackberries, 3g datacards etc. When all the Dells are available with built-in no-dongle data, it's a silly omission. I'm not sure how a "carrier issue" could really affect it though...
Agreed. It doesn't actually matter which software you use, as long as you teach *with* the software, not teach the software itself. Teaching high school kids the basics of image manipulation, sizing for the web, basic web design etc is what you're doing, not teaching them any particular software app. Employer
I think it's because, no matter how much people wear their "nerd cred" on their sleeve, and how super-duper-smart they might genuinely be, they're all still people - and so lots (most?) want to be famous, a celebrity. No matter how you slice it, I think that still means "being on TV", even if the TV is actually a video podcast or whatever. People still want to be looked at, as well as listened to. I can't help but agree that we're not necessarily making the best use of video on the web. There are a whole bunch of things where the easy availability of reasonably high-quality* video makes a *massive* difference. How much better is a concert review with a clip of the performance? How much better is a video game clip than a screenshot? There are great uses for video on the web, loads of 'em. But an awful lot of video podcasts and "interview" materials aren't necessarily it.
Erm. Isn't turning a box into a router, however old the bits in it, essentially turning into a server of sorts? With focus on throughput rather than responsiveness, etc etc?
Sure. The press release is here: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/news/stories/20070417.html and the study itself (PDF link) here: http://www.bbfc.co.uk/downloads/pub/Policy%20and%2 0Research/BBFC%20Video%20Games%20Report.pdf
What do you mean by "move the world"?
In my experience (fwiw: I work in exec. recruitment, but not as a recruiter) the people earning US$HUGE were pretty much all A students. Hell, the people recruiting them were all A students - first-class degrees from famous universities, MBAs from the big business schools, doctorates where appropriate. If by "move the world" you mean "run hugely successful businesses" then I'm not sure I agree. That ability to focus seems to be the differentiating factor.
Now if you're talking about creation - pure research, coding, engineering, etc. then perhaps you're right, I don't know. Maybe the people who *discover* things are the smart ones who get curious or distracted too easily and let their minds wander, and ultimately come across new ideas.
Also, don't forget that most devs are planning to produce a single disk for all territories (or all territories within a region) - so they'll have all the different-language versions of the game on a single disk.
They're just aiming for the luxury market. LVMH don't make many products in the "stack 'em high and flog 'em cheap" aisles. Premium pricing of a premium product often makes it *more* attractive. Hell, premium pricing of a crappy product works - witness prices for t-shirts with CK, Emporio etc. written on the front. Or football jerseys (works for UK & US, I'd bet). Cheap nylon shirt, logo on front, big numbers on the price tag. The only wrinkle is that they're aiming to be the massmarket luxury option - but again, look at the common-or-garden "designer" wear you can buy - people will pay money for something they are told is worth it.
Is it not the case that essays/papers and exams (be they multiple-guess, true/false, short format or long) should be assessed as a whole? Researching, writing and referencing an essay or paper is a process which "teaches" as well as assesses, presuming of course the student does the work rather than plagiarises another. If papers are graded in conjunction with a relatively short test on the subject, or a related subject which would have been uncovered during the research process, then the student's performance in the test should reflect the amount of work that went into the essay.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. We have a Creston-based integrated system for videoconference, presentation, tv, video etc etc. So - there are 3 60" plasmas and a couple of easily accessible DVD/SVCRs, and a couple of portable Crestron touchpads, with a simple interface along the lines of "screen1" -> DVD, "screen2" -> PC1 etc etc. We have two people from our helpdesk to cover it. Even with the most amazingly user-friendly setup, be prepared to go running when, with 5 mins to go, nothing's working.
Don't forget that a massive part of Valve's revenue model (much like ID's, and Epic's) is the licensing of their game engine to 3rd party developers.
How many games are based on (perhaps modified) versions of the quake engines? On the Unreal engine? There's already one announced game based on the Source (HL2) engine - can't remember what it is right now but read about it in Edge magazine (UK) last week.
I don't know exactly how Valve's licensing model works, but I'd guess there's a fee for using the engine in a commercial product, and probably a royalty for each copy of the product sold. Open-sourcing the engine makes them utterly reliant on sales of HL2. Not an ideal situation for a business.
There are different ways of working with Lexis, but for a company like NYT they will likely have an account which allows them a certain value of searches per month/week/year/given period. This is negociated & re-evaluated each year.
If they go over their allocated monthly usage, the premiums are very large - searches on Lexis can be stunningly expensive if the complete list of sources are used. Most researchers using Lexis tend to restrict the sources they use, and the time period covered. Its still not unusual for members of a research dept to have a personal Lexis spend of $90,000/month - and that's a professional researcher (admittedly making many searches) trained to minimise the cost and use the system most efficiently. Whatever the relative merits of Lamo and his actions, and however NYT react, its entirely possible that the claimed $300,000 for Lexis searches is correct.
Once the initial build's finished (and you can speed that up a fair way by starting at stage 3), I think Gentoo is a distro for the lazy - think about it: instead of having to find an application, download it, (build and) install it, all you need is one command and 1 minute/hour/day/week of compile time.
Without downloading IE6 to be sure, I can't confirm this (anybody?), but 60Mb would get you IE6, Outlook Express, int'l support, windows media player and probably various help and other files.
As you're comparing IE6 to Firebird, you should compare the browser-only download option - no OE, no help, etc. Very probably Firebird will still be slimmer by a reasonable margin, but not by 50Mb+.
I know that the TLD regulations were relaxed, then them more or less abandoned, and that many places (including the UK) aren't that bothered if people from outside the UK register URLs there, but... I think it makes sense to restrict the number of TLDs for the very practical reason that a limited number of domain endings are more memorable. Yes, I know there are such things as favourites/bookmarks, but still - thinking something.com, something-else.org or whatever is possibly more user friendly than having to remember "this-is-my-website.loadacrap" or whatever.
I can't decide whether this is trolling or not - if it is, its pretty clever - appeal to the functional luddites.
Faster processors = less efficient programs - as someone already said, so? Granted there's some really dog rough code lurking about, but...? For the most part, its not relevant.
10 years ago I was doing wordprocessing and spreadsheets on an 8086 - an Amstrad PC1512 (probably a UK-only thing). It worked, but I would't dream of going back to it. No way. I can say with utter certainty that the wordprocessors and spreadsheets I use today are VASTLY superior. Vastly.
You don't need a P4 with 128Mb?? RAM. Actually, if you were using XP, it would run like crap anyway. Most of the researchers in our office are using something between PIII-600 and PIII-1Ghz, with multiple browser windows, multiple documents and proprietary databases open. It works for them.
"Niche" applications are the only ones that need power? Er, that's crap. Talk to some "average" computer users - I think you'll find that the marketing campaigns have worked. They don't just want to send email and write letters. Why?
- Digital cameras
- Digital video
- Gaming
- Music
- Home entertainment
All of these use serious computing power. You don't have to be a Photoshop pro to need power for processing the 100 3megapixel images from your consumer-level digicam.
You don't have to work for Dreamworks to need computing power to edit together your cam footage from the summer barbecue, or your 5 year old's birthday, before burning a copy for the in-laws.
And I haven't even touched on ease of use. The fact that my I've been able to persuade my mum to use email, and show her its not that complicated - that's worth the admission price alone. It would never have happened with a CLI email client. I'm not saying there's no use for them, but my mum would never have bothered. Would your gran? Your parent? So if a few processor cycles are used making it look pretty, so someone who's not comfortable with technology is happy to give it a try, I say use 'em.
Yay. And then in two years, ATI will be the big scary company, Nvidia will be the underdog, and we can all applaud Nvidia for providing ATI with some competition. The cycle will complete itself, ad nauseum.
...rooting for the little guy seems to be normal human behaviour. More importantly, as someone is guaranteed to have already mentioned, competition is inherently a good thing. Competition can stimulate innovation (gotta build a better product) and pins down prices to realistic levels (gotta be best value).
The alternative is everyone's favourite word, monopoly. How many of those do we like?