How many "school shootings" in the past 10 or 20 years? Go back to your 50 years and replace "knife" with "gun", and check again. I bet you'll find that in lower-income schools especially, school violence has remained relatively constant. Or else the difference may be that they simply waited until after school?
How many turned out to be related to violent gangs?
What, pray tell, makes "violent video games" (however you're defining them - is Nerf FPS a "violent" game? Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball? Super Mario Bros, with evil Mario jumping on those poor innocent mushroom-men's heads?) any different from other "violent" media or "violent" play?
Those who are predisposed to be violent, will be violent. You cannot deny that there are those in society who simply, through some mental or developmental defect, are incapable of empathy and/or derive a very sick thrill from watching the pain or death of other beings. There are people out there who will react to absolutely normal stimuli in very abnormal ways.
Are those who have been involved in "video game related" (hate to even use the term, since it brings up shades of Jack Chick and Jack Thompson) instances of violence a large enough number to indicate anything other than that they were part of the percentage of humans who are, to use an indelicate term, mentally fucked up to start with? The incredibly low number of instances that can actually be pointed to would seem to indicate not.
To claim that instances are "on the rise"... carefully examine murder rates and the rates of associated crimes, and you find that those crimes have a lot more causal relation with other societal problems - the breakdown of the family dynamic in lower-income groups, the phenomenon of organized criminal groups using "underage" members for many of their crimes, the general adulation given by certain population groups to criminal thugs as role models, the promotion of misogynist behavior in those same groups.
Oh, but nevermind. Because we can cherry-pick a "metastudy", using a carefully picked small number of previous "studies", many of which have themselves already been debunked as critically flawed, and derive "conclusions" from a body of "data" that is in no way even close to representative of the major body of work regarding "violent" play and "violent" media.
And then we can use it to attack a convenient scapegoat that we know certain groups (PTC, fundie christian nutjobs, Jack Thompson, Joe LIEberman, etc) just love to attack, because after all, what's a "metastudy" without a witch hunt to follow afterwards?
"Metastudy" is another way of saying "we had 1000 studies to pick from, so we picked the ones we agreed with and then wrote that the data and conclusions match our carefully picked sampling bias."
I looked through the study. He very carefully picked only studies that agreed with his conclusion, and it's a small and not at all representative sample of the body of work regarding "violent" play.
Or I can look at it, observe and analyze its methodology, check up on which "studies" it chooses to put into its "metastudy" cherry-picked study, and rightfully call it pure, refined nuclear weapons-grade bolognium.
Why use stats when unsubstantiated conjecture confirms personal prejudice so much more effectively?
If it is true that these findings are confirmed by experimental protocols, what that means is you can take a randomly selected group of people, have some of them play violent games, and they'll be more violent than those in the control group who did not play the games. If true, this is a much stronger form of evidence than personal anecdotes and ad hominem attacks, which rules out 99% of the slashdot comments to this thread.
Unfortunately, it is entirely false. The only way to reach the "utmost confidence" conclusion he's talking about is to cherry-pick "studies" that agree with his position, throw out those that don't, and perform some very tortured and mathematically invalid data-"cleaning."
The way I like to think of it is like cake. No one would argue that cake isn't a causal factor in obesity. Likewise no one would argue that a healthy child can't have any cake.
Same basis applies. Many case studies have been done on serial killers, who tend to have a "trigger" that causes them to pick their targets. The trigger is often something very random and something which would cause no normal, sane person to decide to rape/assault/murder anyone, but for these psychopaths, the combination of something triggers them and they compulsively go into killer mode.
If someone is predisposed to be violent, they will find an outlet in society. It will feed off itself (anyone wonder about Mike Tyson, perhaps?) The same influences to which a normal, sane human could be exposed with no trouble, will cause problems for them. Alcohol addicts are warned to avoid not just alcohol, but situations in which they normally would drink. People trying to quite smoking are advised similarly. Violence, in the context of an addiction, is the same way. They get a thrill that a normally functioning brain wouldn't get, they crave more of it, and it's a loop. A normal, sane person would not fall into the loop, but they do because they're abnormal.
There is nothing new to what I am saying, by the way. This one area has been extensively covered. I will not claim the science is conclusive since research is ongoing, but it is a very, strongly working model for many, many cases and seems quite relevant to the question at hand.
My sample set is small, but those who I know personally and play violent games have less empathy for others, are more likely to be self-oriented and generally perform worse in academic pursuits.
Funny. According to my sample set, people who have less empathy for others are generally self-oriented, and perform just fine in academic pursuits but would rather play solo games or directly "self-interested" competitive games than team games, but there are plenty of team and solo games that are violent. There's no correlation between being "self-oriented" or "team-oriented" and preferring violent or "nonviolent" games, whether virtual or physical.
And of course, people who play team physical sports in high school tend to be in the bottom 1/4 of their class academically. Oddly enough, the intelligence factor remains; an ungodly smartest few play chess, the less smart are in music/theater, the less go into baseball or soccer, and then the "dumb as rocks" ones go into basketball or football or cheerleading.
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to violence, violence leads to cheese danishes... wait that's not right...
Sorry. The people taking science by the neck and slitting its throat these days are the ones who produce cherry-picked "metastudies" trying to reach a pre-picked "conclusion" and call it "science."
If they are predisposed to go nutso when exposed to violent video games, they are predisposed to go nutso. Period. They would go nutso if they had moved out to the "wild west." They would go nutso if some idiot let them command the 7th Cavalry. They would go nutso if exposed to UFC, or pro wrestling, or underground boxing rings in New York, or joined a thug gang, or any of a thousand other things. Their personality is predisposed to find a reason to go nutso. Period.
What are the statistics on "video game related" violence, anyways? The most that has ever been found is anecdotal crap, usually because someone dug up a copy of an incredibly popular video game that almost all kids had access to somewhere, and tried to blame that for the violence, rather than the fact that the kid had an alcoholic parent beating them up, or dickweed kids at school were torturing and harassing them while shithead administrators turned a blind eye, or local gang members were threatening enough that they decided they needed "self-defense" in some way...
I note that it's an anonymous coward who puts forth the "how many..." strawman. It's the common refuge of someone who is looking for an all-or-nothing approach, a dishonest call for "action" against something they have decided to dislike, whether it's the real cause of a "problem" (and sometimes not even an overarching problem) or not. Sister to "think of the children", half-brother to "if you use oil then the terrorists win."
To answer your question: how many postal workers have to "go postal" before we say fuck-it and shut down the post office?
Another day, another "lies, damn lies, and statistics" bullshit study.
Psychology provides interesting insights. There are people who become "desensitized", but they're a pretty small minority. There are people who get more aggressive temporarily after a "violent" game (this includes contact sports, "violent" video games, watching a slasher flick, watching UFC, or anything of the sort), calm down for a half hour, and are much calmer than they were before watching. There are people who can watch the most violent stuff on the planet entirely dispassionately, discussing whether a boxer is holding his hands too high or low, telegraphing his moves or not... there are people who discuss the "ring psychology" of pro wrestling, the way that the actors play to the crowd to get a response.
At the end of the day, violent games or violent media cause those who are predisposed to go nutso anyways to find something to fixate on. If they didn't have violent video games, they might go play football. Or full contact street basketball. Or get involved in the underground "street fighting" circuit. Or become UFC devotees. And a few of them will go nuts.
The media's also going crazy popping stories about how that raving lunatic professor who shot up her campus was a "fan" of Dungeons & Dragons. Oddly enough, if you compare the statistics of the playerbase to the population at large, D&D fans are LESS likely to go raving nuts and shoot someplace up or get into bloody fistfights, but that little statistic never makes the news because it's not sensationalist.
Finally, after a rather rude conversation with the human he realized he had no business reverting it.
And if the editor had been one of wikipedia's "admins", he would have simply gone "ban. lock talkpage." And he'd have gone right on his merry way to abuse someone else.
Now don't get me wrong though, if someone wants to use a bot to aid in finding vandalism, that would help. But if the system is so frail that Wikipedia cant exist without computer program editors, It may be time to revisit the system. As others have stated, pushing edits into a queue would be much more sane than direct to live edits.
"Bots" are used for everything these days on wikipedia, and inevitably, they don't work right. The question of whether they "don't work right" so badly that even the one or two sane admins left call attention to it and lock them out, or whether they simply go on doing what they do (some were even programmed by the insane portions of the wikipedia admins to control certain pages), is predicated on the politics of whether a wikipedia admin supports it or not.
The UN doesn't really do anything very well... and this won't be any different.
What do you expect of a "democratic" body made up of representatives from almost entirely undemocratic/fascist/theocratic/monarchic and abusive regimes?
After all, this is the same body that makes a yearly game of putting countries like Cuba, Libya, Syria, and Zimbabwe on "human rights" panels so that they can issue reports bitching and moaning about how bad "human rights abuses" are in places like Europe, Canada, and the US. Also the same body that cheerfully broke the shit out of its own charter, ejecting a charter member and installing to the seat instead the illegitimate militarist/communist regime now running "mainland china."
Also the same body whose "chief nuclear inspector" is ineffective people like Hans Blix and Mohammed Elbaradei - they wouldn't even fire Elbaradei after he admitted, right on camera, that he was just running interference so that Iran could finish their nuclear weapon research.
Heh. Parker & Stone had it right: "Hans Blix: Then let me look around, so I can ease the UN's collective mind. I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else. Kim Jong Il: Or else what? Hans Blix: Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are."
All you should need is actually a cloned/alternate process tied in to treat 127.0.0.1 as the server.
Save locally. Play without having to be connected. God forbid someone would want to play a SINGLE PLAYER title somewhere where they didn't have a network connection up and running...
Alternatively, the "hardcore" types tend to PvP, while everyone else stays away from them since it's no fun being level 30 and constantly ganked by the previously-mentioned "griefing fucktards" who populate the free-PvP servers.
Thus, the casual players explore over time, and there are a LOT more of them, whereas the "top guilds" from the PvP servers make sense because they're the only ones with so little social life (or even just job responsibilities) that they can handle playing the 18+ hours per day required to retain "top guild" status.
This is the same dynamic that killed Asheron's Call 2. The entire gameworld was set up to be a sanctioned grief-fest.
95% of the players spent time hating on the "carebear" players (the ones in the non-PVP server). The non-PvP'ers, meanwhile, all bailed because most of the game's content meant interacting with the griefing fucktards.
The rest of the players went to the "faction" servers or the "hardcore" servers, where you either griefed the other faction with impunity, or griefed everyone with impunity. Or, if you weren't one of the cheating motherfuckers who used exploits to get to the level cap 2 weeks after game launch, ran around getting griefed till you found a griefer-guild to powerlevel you, or left the game.
And no, there aren't enough "hardcore griefers" to spend enough money supporting a game like that with a subscription model. So it folded. Big surprise. Jessica Mulligan, who had previously said that PvP is only fun if "consensual", went on to design a gameworld setup where getting griefed was a way of life.
I am reminded of George Lucas saying "A special effect without a story is boring" in 1977. Hey George, regarding Episodes 1-2-3 (Ep1 especially)...?
The answer is: Windows (up to XP) had an incredibly crappily coded structure for handling HDD caching (which ought to result in improved performance) and Swap (which only improves performance in certain instances).
One of the old workarounds, believe it or not, was to format your system in a very specific way: create a very small (~5GB or so) partition right next to the cylinder dedicated to nothing but the swap file, then a second partition "outside" onto which the OS went. The idea being to keep the Swap file (accessed very often) in a confined and predictable space, rather than letting it spread itself in fragments all over the platter. Some people even took it to the logical extreme of buying a small-capacity but high performance drive (say, a 10-20GB 7200RPM UATA133) to keep their swapfile on while using a larger but slower (and less expensive), say 5400rpm 130GB platter, for the OS and their files.
You obviously don't understand memory access design. It's all about feeding the CPU. There are two sorts of relationships we can use to make this work: temporal and sequential.
Hard drives are the largest-capacity storage (well unless you want to go to tape). But they're slow. Even the fastest high-RPM SCSI or SATA drives are SLOW compared to what's above them. This is mitigated, somewhat, by putting some cache memory on the drive's controller board itself. Still, having to "hit" the hard drive for information is, as you say, a slowdown. Same goes for "external" storage (Optical media, USB media, etc).
So you try to keep as much information as possible in RAM (next step up). Hitting RAM is less expensive than hitting the H/D in terms of a performance hit. In the original days of computing (up until the 486DX line for Intel CPUs), RAM and CPU operated on a 1:1 clock speed match, so that was that.
Once you factor in the "clock multiplier" of later CPU's, even the fastest RAM available today can't keep from "starving" the CPU. So we add in cache - L3, L2, and L1. the 486 implemented 8KB (yeah a whole 8K, wow!) in order to keep itself from starving. L3 is the "slowest", but largest, L2 is faster still but smaller, and L1's the smallest of all, but the fastest because it is literally on the same die as the CPU. That distinction is important, and in general you'll find that a "slower" CPU with more L1 Cache will benchmark better than a "faster" CPU with less.
The CPU looks for what it wants as follows: - I want something. Is it in L1? Nope. - Is it in L2? Nope. - Is it in L3? Nope. - Is it in RAM? Nope. - Is it in the H/D Cache? (helps avoid spin-up and seek times) Nope. - Crap, it's on the H/D. Big performance hit.
Everything except for the L1 check, technically, was a performance it. The reason for pre-caching things (based on temporal and sequential relationships) is all about predicting and getting what will be needed next into the fastest available place.
Yes, I suppose you can run an entire system where it all goes into "RAM", and you'll see it as "more responsive" simply because you never have to touch the hard drive. But turning off HDD caching is a BAD idea. It makes cache misses that much more expensive because then, instead of having even the chance of finding what you needed in RAM or in the HD's onboard cache, you have to wait for the H/D to spin up and seek to the right sector.
"Peer Reviewers" are "anonymous" in the same sense that you could do an "anonymous" poll of people inside a political headquarters. You can examine the consistency of editorial and content decisions of a particular journal and very easily tell where, on the whole, the bias of their "peer review" stable lies.
Nope. No available option to insure any of the accessories.
And of course every time there's a new phone model, there's a new fucking adapter jack to make sure your old chargers don't work.
They sell you the phone, they sell you the insurance, they give you a "package deal" on accessories, and NEVER do they mention that out of all the stuff you just purchased in a single lump, the only thing the insurance is covering is the phone itself, even if THEY choose to replace it with a different model and outmode all your other accessories.
I'll continue to listen to the experts that actually have a basic understanding of what's going on around here.
Funny you should say that. Every so-called "expert" I have seen shows very little understanding beyond what they need to say to get money into their pockets.
Remember that ozone hole in the Antarctic? The one that everyone SWORE couldn't be caused by humans? It's closing up just as predicted
Funny, it started reopening in several active-volcanic years. Because, well, volcanoes are a bigger source of CFC's than humans ever were or will be.
AGW deniers AGW deniers AGW deniers AGW deniers
I shall let you return to your religious service now. Please be informed that I hold you with the same contempt I hold for fundamentalist Xtians, Mohammedians, and so on. Actually, strike that, I'll put you in with the $cientologists, since your beliefs are closest to theirs about "keep the money flowing through the scam."
Slashdot Mirror
How many "school shootings" in the past 10 or 20 years? Go back to your 50 years and replace "knife" with "gun", and check again. I bet you'll find that in lower-income schools especially, school violence has remained relatively constant. Or else the difference may be that they simply waited until after school?
How many turned out to be related to violent gangs?
How many were actually "videogame related"? And no, Columbine doesn't count, despite the propaganda and misinformation you've been hearing.
What, pray tell, makes "violent video games" (however you're defining them - is Nerf FPS a "violent" game? Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball? Super Mario Bros, with evil Mario jumping on those poor innocent mushroom-men's heads?) any different from other "violent" media or "violent" play?
Those who are predisposed to be violent, will be violent. You cannot deny that there are those in society who simply, through some mental or developmental defect, are incapable of empathy and/or derive a very sick thrill from watching the pain or death of other beings. There are people out there who will react to absolutely normal stimuli in very abnormal ways.
Are those who have been involved in "video game related" (hate to even use the term, since it brings up shades of Jack Chick and Jack Thompson) instances of violence a large enough number to indicate anything other than that they were part of the percentage of humans who are, to use an indelicate term, mentally fucked up to start with? The incredibly low number of instances that can actually be pointed to would seem to indicate not.
To claim that instances are "on the rise"... carefully examine murder rates and the rates of associated crimes, and you find that those crimes have a lot more causal relation with other societal problems - the breakdown of the family dynamic in lower-income groups, the phenomenon of organized criminal groups using "underage" members for many of their crimes, the general adulation given by certain population groups to criminal thugs as role models, the promotion of misogynist behavior in those same groups.
Oh, but nevermind. Because we can cherry-pick a "metastudy", using a carefully picked small number of previous "studies", many of which have themselves already been debunked as critically flawed, and derive "conclusions" from a body of "data" that is in no way even close to representative of the major body of work regarding "violent" play and "violent" media.
And then we can use it to attack a convenient scapegoat that we know certain groups (PTC, fundie christian nutjobs, Jack Thompson, Joe LIEberman, etc) just love to attack, because after all, what's a "metastudy" without a witch hunt to follow afterwards?
"Metastudy" is another way of saying "we had 1000 studies to pick from, so we picked the ones we agreed with and then wrote that the data and conclusions match our carefully picked sampling bias."
I looked through the study. He very carefully picked only studies that agreed with his conclusion, and it's a small and not at all representative sample of the body of work regarding "violent" play.
Or I can look at it, observe and analyze its methodology, check up on which "studies" it chooses to put into its "metastudy" cherry-picked study, and rightfully call it pure, refined nuclear weapons-grade bolognium.
Why use stats when unsubstantiated conjecture confirms personal prejudice so much more effectively?
Why merely use stats when you can lie with statistics?
If it is true that these findings are confirmed by experimental protocols, what that means is you can take a randomly selected group of people, have some of them play violent games, and they'll be more violent than those in the control group who did not play the games. If true, this is a much stronger form of evidence than personal anecdotes and ad hominem attacks, which rules out 99% of the slashdot comments to this thread.
Unfortunately, it is entirely false. The only way to reach the "utmost confidence" conclusion he's talking about is to cherry-pick "studies" that agree with his position, throw out those that don't, and perform some very tortured and mathematically invalid data-"cleaning."
Try seeing the comment above yours. They comment:
The way I like to think of it is like cake. No one would argue that cake isn't a causal factor in obesity. Likewise no one would argue that a healthy child can't have any cake.
Same basis applies. Many case studies have been done on serial killers, who tend to have a "trigger" that causes them to pick their targets. The trigger is often something very random and something which would cause no normal, sane person to decide to rape/assault/murder anyone, but for these psychopaths, the combination of something triggers them and they compulsively go into killer mode.
If someone is predisposed to be violent, they will find an outlet in society. It will feed off itself (anyone wonder about Mike Tyson, perhaps?) The same influences to which a normal, sane human could be exposed with no trouble, will cause problems for them. Alcohol addicts are warned to avoid not just alcohol, but situations in which they normally would drink. People trying to quite smoking are advised similarly. Violence, in the context of an addiction, is the same way. They get a thrill that a normally functioning brain wouldn't get, they crave more of it, and it's a loop. A normal, sane person would not fall into the loop, but they do because they're abnormal.
There is nothing new to what I am saying, by the way. This one area has been extensively covered. I will not claim the science is conclusive since research is ongoing, but it is a very, strongly working model for many, many cases and seems quite relevant to the question at hand.
My sample set is small, but those who I know personally and play violent games have less empathy for others, are more likely to be self-oriented and generally perform worse in academic pursuits.
Funny. According to my sample set, people who have less empathy for others are generally self-oriented, and perform just fine in academic pursuits but would rather play solo games or directly "self-interested" competitive games than team games, but there are plenty of team and solo games that are violent. There's no correlation between being "self-oriented" or "team-oriented" and preferring violent or "nonviolent" games, whether virtual or physical.
And of course, people who play team physical sports in high school tend to be in the bottom 1/4 of their class academically. Oddly enough, the intelligence factor remains; an ungodly smartest few play chess, the less smart are in music/theater, the less go into baseball or soccer, and then the "dumb as rocks" ones go into basketball or football or cheerleading.
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to violence, violence leads to cheese danishes... wait that's not right...
"War on science"?
Sorry. The people taking science by the neck and slitting its throat these days are the ones who produce cherry-picked "metastudies" trying to reach a pre-picked "conclusion" and call it "science."
If they are predisposed to go nutso when exposed to violent video games, they are predisposed to go nutso. Period. They would go nutso if they had moved out to the "wild west." They would go nutso if some idiot let them command the 7th Cavalry. They would go nutso if exposed to UFC, or pro wrestling, or underground boxing rings in New York, or joined a thug gang, or any of a thousand other things. Their personality is predisposed to find a reason to go nutso. Period.
What are the statistics on "video game related" violence, anyways? The most that has ever been found is anecdotal crap, usually because someone dug up a copy of an incredibly popular video game that almost all kids had access to somewhere, and tried to blame that for the violence, rather than the fact that the kid had an alcoholic parent beating them up, or dickweed kids at school were torturing and harassing them while shithead administrators turned a blind eye, or local gang members were threatening enough that they decided they needed "self-defense" in some way...
I note that it's an anonymous coward who puts forth the "how many..." strawman. It's the common refuge of someone who is looking for an all-or-nothing approach, a dishonest call for "action" against something they have decided to dislike, whether it's the real cause of a "problem" (and sometimes not even an overarching problem) or not. Sister to "think of the children", half-brother to "if you use oil then the terrorists win."
To answer your question: how many postal workers have to "go postal" before we say fuck-it and shut down the post office?
Sigh.
Another day, another "lies, damn lies, and statistics" bullshit study.
Psychology provides interesting insights. There are people who become "desensitized", but they're a pretty small minority. There are people who get more aggressive temporarily after a "violent" game (this includes contact sports, "violent" video games, watching a slasher flick, watching UFC, or anything of the sort), calm down for a half hour, and are much calmer than they were before watching. There are people who can watch the most violent stuff on the planet entirely dispassionately, discussing whether a boxer is holding his hands too high or low, telegraphing his moves or not... there are people who discuss the "ring psychology" of pro wrestling, the way that the actors play to the crowd to get a response.
At the end of the day, violent games or violent media cause those who are predisposed to go nutso anyways to find something to fixate on. If they didn't have violent video games, they might go play football. Or full contact street basketball. Or get involved in the underground "street fighting" circuit. Or become UFC devotees. And a few of them will go nuts.
The media's also going crazy popping stories about how that raving lunatic professor who shot up her campus was a "fan" of Dungeons & Dragons. Oddly enough, if you compare the statistics of the playerbase to the population at large, D&D fans are LESS likely to go raving nuts and shoot someplace up or get into bloody fistfights, but that little statistic never makes the news because it's not sensationalist.
Finally, after a rather rude conversation with the human he realized he had no business reverting it.
And if the editor had been one of wikipedia's "admins", he would have simply gone "ban. lock talkpage." And he'd have gone right on his merry way to abuse someone else.
Now don't get me wrong though, if someone wants to use a bot to aid in finding vandalism, that would help. But if the system is so frail that Wikipedia cant exist without computer program editors, It may be time to revisit the system. As others have stated, pushing edits into a queue would be much more sane than direct to live edits.
"Bots" are used for everything these days on wikipedia, and inevitably, they don't work right. The question of whether they "don't work right" so badly that even the one or two sane admins left call attention to it and lock them out, or whether they simply go on doing what they do (some were even programmed by the insane portions of the wikipedia admins to control certain pages), is predicated on the politics of whether a wikipedia admin supports it or not.
The UN doesn't really do anything very well ... and this won't be any different.
What do you expect of a "democratic" body made up of representatives from almost entirely undemocratic/fascist/theocratic/monarchic and abusive regimes?
After all, this is the same body that makes a yearly game of putting countries like Cuba, Libya, Syria, and Zimbabwe on "human rights" panels so that they can issue reports bitching and moaning about how bad "human rights abuses" are in places like Europe, Canada, and the US. Also the same body that cheerfully broke the shit out of its own charter, ejecting a charter member and installing to the seat instead the illegitimate militarist/communist regime now running "mainland china."
Also the same body whose "chief nuclear inspector" is ineffective people like Hans Blix and Mohammed Elbaradei - they wouldn't even fire Elbaradei after he admitted, right on camera, that he was just running interference so that Iran could finish their nuclear weapon research.
Heh. Parker & Stone had it right:
"Hans Blix: Then let me look around, so I can ease the UN's collective mind. I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else.
Kim Jong Il: Or else what?
Hans Blix: Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are."
All you should need is actually a cloned/alternate process tied in to treat 127.0.0.1 as the server.
Save locally. Play without having to be connected. God forbid someone would want to play a SINGLE PLAYER title somewhere where they didn't have a network connection up and running...
It's easy.
1 - Microsoft's lawyers wasted a small forest worth of paper filing frivolous motion after frivolous motion.
2 - smaller plaintiff couldn't keep up.
3 - money could probably have changed hands to the judge. Is that a new swimming pool with the Windows logo in his backyard?
Alternatively, the "hardcore" types tend to PvP, while everyone else stays away from them since it's no fun being level 30 and constantly ganked by the previously-mentioned "griefing fucktards" who populate the free-PvP servers.
Thus, the casual players explore over time, and there are a LOT more of them, whereas the "top guilds" from the PvP servers make sense because they're the only ones with so little social life (or even just job responsibilities) that they can handle playing the 18+ hours per day required to retain "top guild" status.
This is the same dynamic that killed Asheron's Call 2. The entire gameworld was set up to be a sanctioned grief-fest.
95% of the players spent time hating on the "carebear" players (the ones in the non-PVP server). The non-PvP'ers, meanwhile, all bailed because most of the game's content meant interacting with the griefing fucktards.
The rest of the players went to the "faction" servers or the "hardcore" servers, where you either griefed the other faction with impunity, or griefed everyone with impunity. Or, if you weren't one of the cheating motherfuckers who used exploits to get to the level cap 2 weeks after game launch, ran around getting griefed till you found a griefer-guild to powerlevel you, or left the game.
And no, there aren't enough "hardcore griefers" to spend enough money supporting a game like that with a subscription model. So it folded. Big surprise. Jessica Mulligan, who had previously said that PvP is only fun if "consensual", went on to design a gameworld setup where getting griefed was a way of life.
I am reminded of George Lucas saying "A special effect without a story is boring" in 1977. Hey George, regarding Episodes 1-2-3 (Ep1 especially)...?
The answer is: Windows (up to XP) had an incredibly crappily coded structure for handling HDD caching (which ought to result in improved performance) and Swap (which only improves performance in certain instances).
One of the old workarounds, believe it or not, was to format your system in a very specific way: create a very small (~5GB or so) partition right next to the cylinder dedicated to nothing but the swap file, then a second partition "outside" onto which the OS went. The idea being to keep the Swap file (accessed very often) in a confined and predictable space, rather than letting it spread itself in fragments all over the platter. Some people even took it to the logical extreme of buying a small-capacity but high performance drive (say, a 10-20GB 7200RPM UATA133) to keep their swapfile on while using a larger but slower (and less expensive), say 5400rpm 130GB platter, for the OS and their files.
You obviously don't understand memory access design. It's all about feeding the CPU. There are two sorts of relationships we can use to make this work: temporal and sequential.
Hard drives are the largest-capacity storage (well unless you want to go to tape). But they're slow. Even the fastest high-RPM SCSI or SATA drives are SLOW compared to what's above them. This is mitigated, somewhat, by putting some cache memory on the drive's controller board itself. Still, having to "hit" the hard drive for information is, as you say, a slowdown. Same goes for "external" storage (Optical media, USB media, etc).
So you try to keep as much information as possible in RAM (next step up). Hitting RAM is less expensive than hitting the H/D in terms of a performance hit. In the original days of computing (up until the 486DX line for Intel CPUs), RAM and CPU operated on a 1:1 clock speed match, so that was that.
Once you factor in the "clock multiplier" of later CPU's, even the fastest RAM available today can't keep from "starving" the CPU. So we add in cache - L3, L2, and L1. the 486 implemented 8KB (yeah a whole 8K, wow!) in order to keep itself from starving. L3 is the "slowest", but largest, L2 is faster still but smaller, and L1's the smallest of all, but the fastest because it is literally on the same die as the CPU. That distinction is important, and in general you'll find that a "slower" CPU with more L1 Cache will benchmark better than a "faster" CPU with less.
The CPU looks for what it wants as follows:
- I want something. Is it in L1? Nope.
- Is it in L2? Nope.
- Is it in L3? Nope.
- Is it in RAM? Nope.
- Is it in the H/D Cache? (helps avoid spin-up and seek times) Nope.
- Crap, it's on the H/D. Big performance hit.
Everything except for the L1 check, technically, was a performance it. The reason for pre-caching things (based on temporal and sequential relationships) is all about predicting and getting what will be needed next into the fastest available place.
Yes, I suppose you can run an entire system where it all goes into "RAM", and you'll see it as "more responsive" simply because you never have to touch the hard drive. But turning off HDD caching is a BAD idea. It makes cache misses that much more expensive because then, instead of having even the chance of finding what you needed in RAM or in the HD's onboard cache, you have to wait for the H/D to spin up and seek to the right sector.
You're forgetting rule #1 of law: He who has enough money to buy off a judge, decides what the legal opinion will be.
I'm sure the judge is enjoying his new Wii-shaped swimming pool.
It's clear science isn't on the side of the AGW cultists, so what's left to them is $cientology level tactics.
Purely absurd. Grow up and leave the cult.
Yes, but Verizon puts a crippleware OS on their phones, and in my area T-Mobile (the "distant third") is almost nonexistent and has crappy coverage.
"Peer Reviewers" are "anonymous" in the same sense that you could do an "anonymous" poll of people inside a political headquarters. You can examine the consistency of editorial and content decisions of a particular journal and very easily tell where, on the whole, the bias of their "peer review" stable lies.
Nope. No available option to insure any of the accessories.
And of course every time there's a new phone model, there's a new fucking adapter jack to make sure your old chargers don't work.
They sell you the phone, they sell you the insurance, they give you a "package deal" on accessories, and NEVER do they mention that out of all the stuff you just purchased in a single lump, the only thing the insurance is covering is the phone itself, even if THEY choose to replace it with a different model and outmode all your other accessories.
I'll continue to listen to the experts that actually have a basic understanding of what's going on around here.
Funny you should say that. Every so-called "expert" I have seen shows very little understanding beyond what they need to say to get money into their pockets.
Remember that ozone hole in the Antarctic? The one that everyone SWORE couldn't be caused by humans? It's closing up just as predicted
Funny, it started reopening in several active-volcanic years. Because, well, volcanoes are a bigger source of CFC's than humans ever were or will be.
AGW deniers AGW deniers AGW deniers AGW deniers
I shall let you return to your religious service now. Please be informed that I hold you with the same contempt I hold for fundamentalist Xtians, Mohammedians, and so on. Actually, strike that, I'll put you in with the $cientologists, since your beliefs are closest to theirs about "keep the money flowing through the scam."