Personally I feel that the dev should never do the testing of their own code as they are too close to the subject to test every angle.
No, the dev should never do final testing, since they have a subconscious incentive to do it badly in order to find less mistakes. However, nobody is as qualified to know the edge cases and weaknesses than the individual who just wrote it. So, the best result comes from giving the developers a large incentive to find problems in their own code before the reviewer gets to it. The system I have seen work very well in the past is to create a culture of accountability, where as part of finding the bug, if nobody owns up to making a mistake, the SVN logs are traced to find the originator of the bug and it filed as part of the bug report. It sounds vindictive, but it is more a learning exercise to find out the weaknesses in our development process. What this does however is give someone a great incentive to test every case before committing, since their mistakes will be known to the whole team soon. Nobody tests better than the original dev, when his pride is on the line.
However, this system's result is very much dependant on culture. In Australia, people are used to being told "you fucked up mate" the minute that their mistakes are uncovered, in other places, maybe not. The system is very much dependant on individuals expected to set a good example, such as managers and senior staff acknowledging when they themselves make a mistake without prompting.
As of 2010-08-16 15:00 Beijing time, flickr is not blocked. Sounds like you were being fed a line by a lazy customer service rep. Apathetic handling of refunds transcends nationality, race, colour or creed.
Right now, youtube, facebook, twitter and other "web 2.0" type user generated content sites are precisely the sites that are being blocked, for exactly this reason. Compared to Youtube and Facebook, blocking flickr will cause absolutely no backlash at all. If you want flickr to be blocked in China, then you're going about it the right way by publishing this story.
Also, covert channels through tunnelling is already working quite well, there are many, many technologies to do this, of which steganography is only one. This achieves nothing but causing suspicion towards the remaining user generated content sites that are not blocked. Steganography is security through obscurity by definition, this only works if you keep it a secret. It it astounding how many well meaning idiots love freedom so much that they decide to utilise their freedom of speech by blurting out something stupid and causing trouble for a lot of other, innocent people without those freedoms.
Well, I for one like the the Beijing Subway. Line 10 goes between my house and my workplace, it is two yuan (US$0.30) to go anywhere on the extensive network, trains are clean and frequent and best of all: when you change lanes, you don't have to worry about it being on top of you with its support struts engulfing you from all sides like some monster, ready to shear you in half if you, um, well, behave like a Chinese driver.
By definition a subway is under ground where you can just ignore it when you are not riding it. You can't merge into it, you can't cut in front of it, you can't run in front of it, with screen doors you cannot even fall in front of it. You don't have to listen to it, you don't have to look at it, you can ride it if you want and if you don't want to, you never have to think about it. This is what a subway can provide. If this bus is a tenth of what a subway costs, then that shows that you get what you pay for. It is so lucky that there is absolutely nothing that I or anyone else remotely cares about in Mentougou district and I can pretend that this does not exist, just as if it were underground.
In 1998, I would agree with you thoroughly. Total Annihilation used cutting edge technology, good structure and some crafty tricks to just give the player a feel that no other game of the time could deliver. The shells would wizz in their properly calculated ballistic trajectories, the tanks and battleships would pitch and roll as their cannons fired, fighter jets would weave overhead, dodging missiles. The general feel was epic. I was a huge Warcraft fan and having played TA while waiting for Starcraft, I was shattered to see what I considered to be a vastly inferior game.
However, now I would argue that they are different. Total Annihilation is about feel, Starcraft is about structure. In Total Annihilation, thousands of mathematical calculations would be made every second, ballistic trajectories, missile turning rates, ray cast, wind direction, etc. The calculations are supposed to be beyond human comprehension but reflect human expectation, that is what gives it the feeling it has. In Starcraft, the calculations are rare, but fully understood by the players and the designers. This means that in general, the implications of most actions in Starcraft are fairly predictable, this means that they can be carefully scrutinised and discussed on forums.
In short, there are people who just like careful, well understood things like Starcraft. But most average players probably play for the excitement, action and violence. This means that back in 1998, when Starcraft was released, TA was a year old and regular gamers spent half their time playing RTS, most players playing Starcraft would have had more fun playing Total Annihilation. However, these days, players who like Starcraft, like it for a reason Total Annihilation cannot provide. The players looking for a thrill in RTS now play things like Total War and Supreme Commander which have had ten years to improve on TA in SFX, scale and immersion. Starcraft on the other hand was technologically extremely dated when it was released in 1998 and did not seem to hurt it then, so why should that be an issue now.
So, in short, in 1998 when TA was cutting edge and Starcraft used earlier tech, TA was better. Now they are both thoroughly retro, technology doesn't matter, so I'll give it to Starcraft since it has appeal that is unrelated to what tech can deliver.
Back when Ubuntu started, Canonical contributed nothing to Gnome, the highest profile "Gnome community" members it hired was not a real developer but more of a professional narcissist employed to accumulating credit for the company. Also, Ubuntu manages to take the bulk of its packages from Debian without crediting it which has infuriated many people from that community also.
However, Ubuntu does what it does well, it provides a fully configured and ready to run desktop. And it is for that reason that I use it personally and would not hesitate from recommending it to others.
However, as for Canonical, well, I suspect they don't really know anything useful for enterprise customers because they really have never got any experience doing anything themselves, they don't know the codebase of anything important. I would never ever consider paying for Canonical services when they have not demonstrated they have the ability to take responsibility for the software that they are putting brand onto. I consider Ubuntu to be a "community supported" distro like Debian or Fedora. In my past experience this attitude is quite common, Ubuntu is not an enterprise distro, for that, you can use something like Red Hat, Ubuntu is for workstations that you don't really care about. Canonical may wish that this attitude was different, but I really think it is not.
Sounds like you don't like your job. You can find a new one or work for yourself. Alternatively, because you live in Australia, not America you can enrol in a university or TAFE program and collect enough money to live on from the government.
The #1 thing Australia has that the US doesn't have for workers is the dole. Not that workers collect the dole mind you (because they work), but because all jobs must pay a fair bit more than than as the dole for an Australian to want to do it.
Australia has half the unemployment of the US and unemployment is also less scary meaning that workers are much more valuable and have more bargaining power. The minimum wage in the US is $7.25, Australia's is more than double that and most people pay more.
Anyway, as I said before, Australians have no idea about what the rest of the world is like and I think you just want to rant and bitch about your current employment (which you should quit if you hate it so much).
Also, I think hiring female administrators is a good idea in companies with mostly male workers, since it will lead to a more balanced atmosphere and seem much less like being at sea. It is very easy to find female administrators so it might be an easy way to adjust the gender balance.
But seriously, just quit your job, there are many others.
Online multiplayer against strangers is fun for the first month or two a game is out for me. After that, most of the regular people and average skilled gamers have left and all you've got are people that are some combination of... better than me... and assholes
Sometimes the case, see Tribes Vengeance for an example, where the only people playing were the ones who were _really_ into Tribes. However, sometimes not the case. I once came first on a 64 player BF2 server a year after it had been released and I am not particularly great at it. The trick is, you can't kill the people who are better than you, learn who they are and just avoid them, but you can kill the assholes. Maybe a public BF2 server would be 20% hardcore players and 40% asshole and 40% regular guys wanting some fun(yes, they exist). You don't have to beat the 20% to have fun, since even if you don't, you can still come in a damn respectable position and have a good time. The point is, 14th place out of 64 is well within your reach after playing for a few weeks with just a bit of natural reflexes, tactical thinking and intuition. But first place is elusive, you may reach it once every 100 hours of play and not all players will even play for that long. This is because everyone else wants to come 1st too, and some of them will be better than you.
And here is the crux of the single/multi divide: that people can expect to win in single player. People can expect to be treated as the messiah by NPCs, have the world's timeline based around their progress, have only their best attempt at an encounter counted, with their failures washed away (through checkpoints and quicksaves), all with a steady progression and balanced difficulty curve. Basically you are the centre of your own universe.
Multiplayer is more like real life, you do well sometimes, you do poorly sometimes. The cake is divided up between many people and to get a bigger slice is to deny someone their slice. If you act like it is single player, by restarting when you are loosing, using cheap tricks to game the system and treating others like computer controlled entities designed to give you entertainment, you will find people don't like playing with you.
I think this situation is both why single player is so popular and why there are so many assholes in multiplayer. People want to treat the world as their possession and act with contempt. People want to have the universe engineered to lead towards their inevitable triumph. It is extremely unhealthy, though I do play 70% single player games myself, I find my character in real life is better when I have played multi recently.
I think it is reasonable for an employer expect you to be working 35 hours a week if there is work to be done. If you are surfing political websites, it probably means you are not working. Some employees can be trusted to use their own discretion to control the websites they visit and kill time strictly when time must be killed and only then in a way that does not disturb others. In some forms of work, there is always something to, always something to be improved and employees are expected to take some control and initiative in finding new tasks. In other situations, the work flow is not constant, employees finish assigned tasks and wait for new ones. In the first situation, I see no real issue with blacklisting since the employer is already providing stimulating work. In the second, perhaps it is cruel to deny employees stimulation through reading websites.
As for why this is blocked and not others, just imagine who's job it is to build a blacklist by looking at DNS records. If they are even in Australia, they are probably paid $15/hr, don't know about the "sex party" and don't really care about their work. If they are in India, they probably have not heard of any Australian political party, let alone the tiny ones. One of them had "sexparty.org.au" or whatever flash up on their screen and hit "block" because honestly, the term _does_ sound like it means "orgy" to most Australians who think about sex a whole lot more than politics. This really sounds like it is more likely to be a slip up than any actual political censorship.
I've been making plans to get a job in another country.
I'm an Aussie living abroad. I have been to many, many countries and I've got to say, that there will always be something wrong with most places. I think it is once thing to see something bad happen in your own country, like seeing your own house in flames is worse than your neighbours, but you can never find a country which is how you like it.
This story is a beat up anyway, this is just private internal networks, they can block the Labor, Liberal, National, Greens or whoever they want for all I care. I think doing stupid shit in your business is part of the great freedom that Australians enjoy.
Getting back to the point, where will you run to? The world is full of conflicting social agendas. There will always be things you can say and things you can't. I caught my Chinese girlfriend wearing this extraordinarily racist T-shirt. She told me that she should be able to say what she wants about the Japanese because she doesn't like them. She can wear it on the streets of Beijing without a hassle, but would be at least severely reprimanded in most "free" countries.
I have not been to Australia for close to a year, but last time I was there, the amount of stuff you can get away with saying, looking at online, keeping for personal use or doing in your bedroom was astoundingly high by world standards. My advice is that unless Family First and Christian Democrats form a coalition government or Sharia law is established in Western Sydney that moving somewhere else for more freedom may be a counterproductive piece of theatrics that only has the consequence of giving the country one less supporter of liberal policies.
By all means, if you want to own a big gun, go to somewhere like the Philippines, if you want drugs and porn, you could go to Amsterdam. If you want to escape racism, you can go to somewhere diverse like Singapore or if you want to indulge in racism, just pick any other country in Asia. If you want freedom to be in a legally sanctioned Homosexual marriage, you can go to Belgium, or if you want freedom to say you hate homosexuals you can go to Saudi Arabia. But I guarantee you, something about wherever you are will piss you off and you will act like your standard whiny Aussie expat moaning about how Australia does X better. Something akin to the flood of wannabe refugees threatening to pour over the Saint Laurence river in either direction whenever some unpopular policy comes up on one side of it.
The problem with Australia is the bitching. Some people complain about "hostile workplaces" so they bring in filters to block porn. The porn filter apparently blocks this "sex party" because someone thought it referred to a site about orgies so it is met with another tide of complaints.
Australia is unfair, just like the planet on which it is located. By all means, decry your country at the pub, but just remember, that kind of behaviour is enough to get you flattened by rednecks in other free countries. And honestly, if you think redacting a non-binding discussion paper released to the public is on the same level as what happens in the "Democratic People's Republic" of Korea or the German "Democratic" Republic, then that just shows how sheltered you are in your little country and how much of a shock you'd get if you left.
Why couldn't china do that? Why could it not say "Well, reduce your debt by 30Billion and we'll call it quits, meanwhile, where's my money, mutha?"?
Because that would be stupid, China bought US debt for a reason, it's not just like some bar tab accumulated by a dodgy customer. China likes to buy large amounts of foreign currency to allow them to effectively peg the value of the RMB lower. So much so that if one year China decided to import four times as much as usual, it would end the year still slightly in the black. Government bonds allow them to invest that money in a conservative way since the People's Bank of China trusts the US treasury to pay on its debts in the agreed manner at the agreed time.
However, things are changing, China's investments have diversified, specially towards the mining industry and have largely stopped increasing their share of treasury holdings, while continuing to hold some. China is not buying treasury bonds to help the US treasury, it just needs a good place to put US dollars, if it did not want that debt, it can and would divest itself of it pretty quickly.
Here's something I don't get about Americans. Every country has things to be proud about. What I think the #1 thing that Americans should be proud of is their space program, America has shot rockets further than anyone else, they've shot off bigger rockets than anyone else, they've gone to the moon with people, launched and maintained the Hubble telescope despite multiple problems and hundreds of other important research satellites and probes. America is a rich, developed country with a population of 300M, three to twenty times the population of other countries with similar standards of living which has lead to some great successes.
Now here's the thing, despite that, Americans and their representatives seem to want to squabble over the contracts like it is done for state welfare, not for national achievement, caring only about their little township and forgetting that because they live in such a huge and powerful nation that they get to have a successful space program. Lets face it, rockets are awesome, they are big, powerful, fast moving and to be honest, shaped quite similarly to giant flying penises. If Ares V does ever fly, all Americans should just be proud of their nation building such a big, powerful machine. But if Americans don't really want a new giant rocket to fly to space, maybe they should just spend the money on something else that they do like.
ATK was given the contract to build the main stage for Ares I, and the contract for the Ares V boosters has not been awarded. In fact, the whole premise of Ares was to reuse as many components from the shuttle as possible including liberal usage of the space shuttle main engines and boosters.
The US doesn't have a heavy lift rocket anymore; Titan is no more.
US has two heavy lift rockets called Delta IV and Atlas 5, Titan 4 was thoroughly obsolete by the time it was retired and did not have as much payload capacity as Delta IV Heavy and cost more to launch than the newer rockets. Delta IV Heavy is capable of lobbing roughly the same amount into orbit as the shuttle. Unless you really have to lob a 100 ton object into obit, there was not much point in using Ares V as a heavy lift, if there was really justification for that capability then Saturn V would never have been retired. Ares I (the manned rocket) and Ares V (the heavy lift) are essentially two projects with little in common apart from the name. But talking about states and parties, it sounds like you care more about them than you care about rockets and launching important stuff into space. Which is all well and good, apart from when there is actually something that needs to be lifted into space.
Yeah, it didn't ripoff films, but it came pretty goddamned close to Bungie's Oni. You might even say it... ripped off Oni.
Seriously? And you were the one complaining about the "lies" about marathon. Oni is third person game focussing on combat, mirrors edge is a first person game focussing on platforming. From a gameplay perspective chalk and cheese, from a setting perspective they seem to both do the same teriyaki
1984 thing but it isn't all that similar either.
HSBC isn't really Chinese, it just owns Hong Kong, I'll tell you a story about it.
...for in this time the Empire was a devil of many faces, a merchant in India and a gaoler to Australia. But to the Chinese they appeared as Cai Shen, the god of wealth and bid the city folk pay sacrifice in the hall of HSBC and be rewarded with prosperity and monthly compounded interest.... And though the empire now sleeps in the dust, the high priest Sir Thomas Jackson still stands where his empress once stood, under the shadow of his great temple to money, which towers like a steeple over Hong Kong and reminds all those who look upon it of their piety.
Also China doesn't own the majority of American debt, they own roughly the same amount as Japan or the US does domestically, and the banks that own it are predominately the People's Bank of China (central bank) as well as the big 4 (ICBC, CCB, BOC, ABC)
Woops, I meant juan3 (U+5377), I don't know why I used zh there, the input method usually picks that stuff up. I have never seen a taco in China so I just called it a Mexican roll, which is something they have at KFC.
I live in Beijing, but I was attempting to write CCTV Mandarin, rather than dialect, it doesn't surprise me if I screwed up one or two times.
Ah, pinyin, the writing system that 1.3 billion people can write, and only primary school kids can read. To be able to write in a valid language and never be fear that it will be read by anyone important is liberating. For example:
xie2xian4dian3 shi4 zhai2nan2 de xin1wen2 dan1shi4 wang2zhan4 de ji4shu4 fang1mian4 chu1chou4, er2qie4 nei4rong2 shi4 gou3pi4. wo3 gan4le4 zhong1xiao4 mo4xi1ge1zhuan3 de ma1 de bi1. (Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters. Commander Taco's mother is a classy lady)
Though on a more serious note, this is a little bit worrying. OK, ICANN is allowing Chinese domain names, this is no huge problem to me, since I can read and write Chinese anyway. But the Chinese will be pissed off when Japanese start using Kana and they are no longer able to enter the correct domain names to look up porn. I think this just screws the world all over in the long run, at least EVERYONE knows ascii.
Well, I think failing a background check is most likely to be "guilty since proven guilty". Well, depends if the conviction or simply the arrest record is checked. But if for example, a conviction for manslaughter or robbery might qualify as being "proven guilty" and also might be good grounds for not allowing this individual to have a weapon.
Both of my parents are trained real lawyers and my grandfather is also, so I have been exposed to many discussions on the topic of law. It is extremely correct that the publics perception of laws is slightly inaccurate. However, a lawyers view on public ignorance in their field is not all that different to most scientists or engineers. Laws are like computers, if you use them you should understand them. Nobody is expected to know every law, just like not every scientist is supposed to understand every fact, but if you think you have some "loophole" of your own figured out, based on your own limited understanding, you better hope you are right. Lawyers and particularly judges have a particular supply of contempt reserved for those who wish to use a law in a wrong manner that makes an IT worker's ire of an incompetent PC user seem harmless. Ignorance of law can never be used a defence, courts always expect you to make an effort to know the rules that apply to you and read everything you sign, otherwise idiots would be untouchable, because ignorance is a powerful force indeed.
I think this is the way with all professions, doctors are another fine example of people who do not abide idiots making moronic speculations. The number of ridiculous theories and misguided distrust expressed to doctors each day makes an IT helpdesk look like the pope giving communion, normally engineers don't have to ever see the morons they are trying to help, doctors have a line of them every day, half of them who want to voice an opinion about how they think the human body works.
Generally speaking engineers, mathematicians, physicists, etc. get off far, far lighter than others who have to suffer the burden of being knowledgeable in a subject.
Unfortunately time and again, women politicians have proven themselves to be just as incompetent and corrupt (especially with their favouritism towards big business and their contributions) as male politicians.
Ah I miss the 80's. We had Prime Ministers Thatcher and Ghandi teaming to refute any claim from women that world peace remains elusive simply because of men. Oh well, nothing left to do than hope that the Right Honourable Ms Gillard is more like the former than the latter.
Or sell in New Zealand, or Australia, or anywhere else in the Pacific, or deal with immigrants, or be used by anyone who has a Chinese name?
It is reasonable to expect all names in New Zealand and Australia to be written in an appropriate romanisation scheme such as Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles or Yale. The reason for this is that Latin script is fairly well understood in these areas where people cannot be expected to transcribe names referring to people that they may not even need to directly communicate with.
Latin script is an official script in all Chinese speaking territories, whereas comprehension of Han characters is low in Australia and New Zealand, even among ethnic Chinese who may speak their parent's tongue fluently, there is no reason for such databases to interpret non latin characters as anything but an error since it would diminish the utility of the identifier.
At the moment, in China, I'm seeing the US google page with SSL markings on the image, Google's certificate is signed to Google by Thawte Consulting (Pty.) Ltd. All looks legit to me. As for CNNIC, if you don't trust them there is nothing to stop you from taking it out of your list of trusted certificate authorities, but I have never seen it actually used to issue fake certificates before, I figure it could only really do that trick once.
So basically Australia said, "We need to renew your overly used passport and the authorities are looking into how you got a hold of a blacklist from our government."
Well, what the article doesn't mention is how the government conspired to wear his passport out ahead of time. Where was it mentioned that an Australian Secret Intelligence Service agent was hypothesized to have sabotaged the air conditioning system at Changi Airport so the tropical heat would make his sweat run into the pages? Where was it mentioned the secret back room treaties to cause foreign nations to stamp a new page when there is still space left on an existing page? These questions need answers. Next time you look at your passport and see it warped, don't dismiss it as just an arse imprint due to an hour long ride on the Moscow metro with it in your back pocket when it may be your own government out to silence you.
"slowing and then ceasing altogether, like the dwindling reports from a bag of microwave popcorn."
Any idiot can write a meandering tangle of pretentious and meaningless wank about a game that I will never care about, but only Jerry Holkins can finish it a simile so clever that I will be actually glad I read that drivel. That's why he's the one with a web comic and we're all posting on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the dev should never do final testing, since they have a subconscious incentive to do it badly in order to find less mistakes. However, nobody is as qualified to know the edge cases and weaknesses than the individual who just wrote it. So, the best result comes from giving the developers a large incentive to find problems in their own code before the reviewer gets to it. The system I have seen work very well in the past is to create a culture of accountability, where as part of finding the bug, if nobody owns up to making a mistake, the SVN logs are traced to find the originator of the bug and it filed as part of the bug report. It sounds vindictive, but it is more a learning exercise to find out the weaknesses in our development process. What this does however is give someone a great incentive to test every case before committing, since their mistakes will be known to the whole team soon. Nobody tests better than the original dev, when his pride is on the line.
However, this system's result is very much dependant on culture. In Australia, people are used to being told "you fucked up mate" the minute that their mistakes are uncovered, in other places, maybe not. The system is very much dependant on individuals expected to set a good example, such as managers and senior staff acknowledging when they themselves make a mistake without prompting.
As of 2010-08-16 15:00 Beijing time, flickr is not blocked. Sounds like you were being fed a line by a lazy customer service rep. Apathetic handling of refunds transcends nationality, race, colour or creed.
Idiots
Right now, youtube, facebook, twitter and other "web 2.0" type user generated content sites are precisely the sites that are being blocked, for exactly this reason. Compared to Youtube and Facebook, blocking flickr will cause absolutely no backlash at all. If you want flickr to be blocked in China, then you're going about it the right way by publishing this story.
Also, covert channels through tunnelling is already working quite well, there are many, many technologies to do this, of which steganography is only one. This achieves nothing but causing suspicion towards the remaining user generated content sites that are not blocked. Steganography is security through obscurity by definition, this only works if you keep it a secret. It it astounding how many well meaning idiots love freedom so much that they decide to utilise their freedom of speech by blurting out something stupid and causing trouble for a lot of other, innocent people without those freedoms.
Well, I for one like the the Beijing Subway. Line 10 goes between my house and my workplace, it is two yuan (US$0.30) to go anywhere on the extensive network, trains are clean and frequent and best of all: when you change lanes, you don't have to worry about it being on top of you with its support struts engulfing you from all sides like some monster, ready to shear you in half if you, um, well, behave like a Chinese driver.
By definition a subway is under ground where you can just ignore it when you are not riding it. You can't merge into it, you can't cut in front of it, you can't run in front of it, with screen doors you cannot even fall in front of it. You don't have to listen to it, you don't have to look at it, you can ride it if you want and if you don't want to, you never have to think about it. This is what a subway can provide. If this bus is a tenth of what a subway costs, then that shows that you get what you pay for. It is so lucky that there is absolutely nothing that I or anyone else remotely cares about in Mentougou district and I can pretend that this does not exist, just as if it were underground.
In 1998, I would agree with you thoroughly. Total Annihilation used cutting edge technology, good structure and some crafty tricks to just give the player a feel that no other game of the time could deliver. The shells would wizz in their properly calculated ballistic trajectories, the tanks and battleships would pitch and roll as their cannons fired, fighter jets would weave overhead, dodging missiles. The general feel was epic. I was a huge Warcraft fan and having played TA while waiting for Starcraft, I was shattered to see what I considered to be a vastly inferior game.
However, now I would argue that they are different. Total Annihilation is about feel, Starcraft is about structure. In Total Annihilation, thousands of mathematical calculations would be made every second, ballistic trajectories, missile turning rates, ray cast, wind direction, etc. The calculations are supposed to be beyond human comprehension but reflect human expectation, that is what gives it the feeling it has. In Starcraft, the calculations are rare, but fully understood by the players and the designers. This means that in general, the implications of most actions in Starcraft are fairly predictable, this means that they can be carefully scrutinised and discussed on forums.
In short, there are people who just like careful, well understood things like Starcraft. But most average players probably play for the excitement, action and violence. This means that back in 1998, when Starcraft was released, TA was a year old and regular gamers spent half their time playing RTS, most players playing Starcraft would have had more fun playing Total Annihilation. However, these days, players who like Starcraft, like it for a reason Total Annihilation cannot provide. The players looking for a thrill in RTS now play things like Total War and Supreme Commander which have had ten years to improve on TA in SFX, scale and immersion. Starcraft on the other hand was technologically extremely dated when it was released in 1998 and did not seem to hurt it then, so why should that be an issue now.
So, in short, in 1998 when TA was cutting edge and Starcraft used earlier tech, TA was better. Now they are both thoroughly retro, technology doesn't matter, so I'll give it to Starcraft since it has appeal that is unrelated to what tech can deliver.
Back when Ubuntu started, Canonical contributed nothing to Gnome, the highest profile "Gnome community" members it hired was not a real developer but more of a professional narcissist employed to accumulating credit for the company. Also, Ubuntu manages to take the bulk of its packages from Debian without crediting it which has infuriated many people from that community also. However, Ubuntu does what it does well, it provides a fully configured and ready to run desktop. And it is for that reason that I use it personally and would not hesitate from recommending it to others.
However, as for Canonical, well, I suspect they don't really know anything useful for enterprise customers because they really have never got any experience doing anything themselves, they don't know the codebase of anything important. I would never ever consider paying for Canonical services when they have not demonstrated they have the ability to take responsibility for the software that they are putting brand onto. I consider Ubuntu to be a "community supported" distro like Debian or Fedora. In my past experience this attitude is quite common, Ubuntu is not an enterprise distro, for that, you can use something like Red Hat, Ubuntu is for workstations that you don't really care about. Canonical may wish that this attitude was different, but I really think it is not.
Sounds like you don't like your job. You can find a new one or work for yourself. Alternatively, because you live in Australia, not America you can enrol in a university or TAFE program and collect enough money to live on from the government.
The #1 thing Australia has that the US doesn't have for workers is the dole. Not that workers collect the dole mind you (because they work), but because all jobs must pay a fair bit more than than as the dole for an Australian to want to do it. Australia has half the unemployment of the US and unemployment is also less scary meaning that workers are much more valuable and have more bargaining power. The minimum wage in the US is $7.25, Australia's is more than double that and most people pay more.
Anyway, as I said before, Australians have no idea about what the rest of the world is like and I think you just want to rant and bitch about your current employment (which you should quit if you hate it so much).
Also, I think hiring female administrators is a good idea in companies with mostly male workers, since it will lead to a more balanced atmosphere and seem much less like being at sea. It is very easy to find female administrators so it might be an easy way to adjust the gender balance.
But seriously, just quit your job, there are many others.
Sometimes the case, see Tribes Vengeance for an example, where the only people playing were the ones who were _really_ into Tribes. However, sometimes not the case. I once came first on a 64 player BF2 server a year after it had been released and I am not particularly great at it. The trick is, you can't kill the people who are better than you, learn who they are and just avoid them, but you can kill the assholes. Maybe a public BF2 server would be 20% hardcore players and 40% asshole and 40% regular guys wanting some fun(yes, they exist). You don't have to beat the 20% to have fun, since even if you don't, you can still come in a damn respectable position and have a good time. The point is, 14th place out of 64 is well within your reach after playing for a few weeks with just a bit of natural reflexes, tactical thinking and intuition. But first place is elusive, you may reach it once every 100 hours of play and not all players will even play for that long. This is because everyone else wants to come 1st too, and some of them will be better than you.
And here is the crux of the single/multi divide: that people can expect to win in single player. People can expect to be treated as the messiah by NPCs, have the world's timeline based around their progress, have only their best attempt at an encounter counted, with their failures washed away (through checkpoints and quicksaves), all with a steady progression and balanced difficulty curve. Basically you are the centre of your own universe.
Multiplayer is more like real life, you do well sometimes, you do poorly sometimes. The cake is divided up between many people and to get a bigger slice is to deny someone their slice. If you act like it is single player, by restarting when you are loosing, using cheap tricks to game the system and treating others like computer controlled entities designed to give you entertainment, you will find people don't like playing with you.
I think this situation is both why single player is so popular and why there are so many assholes in multiplayer. People want to treat the world as their possession and act with contempt. People want to have the universe engineered to lead towards their inevitable triumph. It is extremely unhealthy, though I do play 70% single player games myself, I find my character in real life is better when I have played multi recently.
I think it is reasonable for an employer expect you to be working 35 hours a week if there is work to be done. If you are surfing political websites, it probably means you are not working. Some employees can be trusted to use their own discretion to control the websites they visit and kill time strictly when time must be killed and only then in a way that does not disturb others. In some forms of work, there is always something to, always something to be improved and employees are expected to take some control and initiative in finding new tasks. In other situations, the work flow is not constant, employees finish assigned tasks and wait for new ones. In the first situation, I see no real issue with blacklisting since the employer is already providing stimulating work. In the second, perhaps it is cruel to deny employees stimulation through reading websites.
As for why this is blocked and not others, just imagine who's job it is to build a blacklist by looking at DNS records. If they are even in Australia, they are probably paid $15/hr, don't know about the "sex party" and don't really care about their work. If they are in India, they probably have not heard of any Australian political party, let alone the tiny ones. One of them had "sexparty.org.au" or whatever flash up on their screen and hit "block" because honestly, the term _does_ sound like it means "orgy" to most Australians who think about sex a whole lot more than politics. This really sounds like it is more likely to be a slip up than any actual political censorship.
I'm an Aussie living abroad. I have been to many, many countries and I've got to say, that there will always be something wrong with most places. I think it is once thing to see something bad happen in your own country, like seeing your own house in flames is worse than your neighbours, but you can never find a country which is how you like it.
This story is a beat up anyway, this is just private internal networks, they can block the Labor, Liberal, National, Greens or whoever they want for all I care. I think doing stupid shit in your business is part of the great freedom that Australians enjoy.
Getting back to the point, where will you run to? The world is full of conflicting social agendas. There will always be things you can say and things you can't. I caught my Chinese girlfriend wearing this extraordinarily racist T-shirt. She told me that she should be able to say what she wants about the Japanese because she doesn't like them. She can wear it on the streets of Beijing without a hassle, but would be at least severely reprimanded in most "free" countries.
I have not been to Australia for close to a year, but last time I was there, the amount of stuff you can get away with saying, looking at online, keeping for personal use or doing in your bedroom was astoundingly high by world standards. My advice is that unless Family First and Christian Democrats form a coalition government or Sharia law is established in Western Sydney that moving somewhere else for more freedom may be a counterproductive piece of theatrics that only has the consequence of giving the country one less supporter of liberal policies.
By all means, if you want to own a big gun, go to somewhere like the Philippines, if you want drugs and porn, you could go to Amsterdam. If you want to escape racism, you can go to somewhere diverse like Singapore or if you want to indulge in racism, just pick any other country in Asia. If you want freedom to be in a legally sanctioned Homosexual marriage, you can go to Belgium, or if you want freedom to say you hate homosexuals you can go to Saudi Arabia. But I guarantee you, something about wherever you are will piss you off and you will act like your standard whiny Aussie expat moaning about how Australia does X better. Something akin to the flood of wannabe refugees threatening to pour over the Saint Laurence river in either direction whenever some unpopular policy comes up on one side of it.
The problem with Australia is the bitching. Some people complain about "hostile workplaces" so they bring in filters to block porn. The porn filter apparently blocks this "sex party" because someone thought it referred to a site about orgies so it is met with another tide of complaints.
Australia is unfair, just like the planet on which it is located. By all means, decry your country at the pub, but just remember, that kind of behaviour is enough to get you flattened by rednecks in other free countries. And honestly, if you think redacting a non-binding discussion paper released to the public is on the same level as what happens in the "Democratic People's Republic" of Korea or the German "Democratic" Republic, then that just shows how sheltered you are in your little country and how much of a shock you'd get if you left.
Because that would be stupid, China bought US debt for a reason, it's not just like some bar tab accumulated by a dodgy customer. China likes to buy large amounts of foreign currency to allow them to effectively peg the value of the RMB lower. So much so that if one year China decided to import four times as much as usual, it would end the year still slightly in the black. Government bonds allow them to invest that money in a conservative way since the People's Bank of China trusts the US treasury to pay on its debts in the agreed manner at the agreed time.
However, things are changing, China's investments have diversified, specially towards the mining industry and have largely stopped increasing their share of treasury holdings, while continuing to hold some. China is not buying treasury bonds to help the US treasury, it just needs a good place to put US dollars, if it did not want that debt, it can and would divest itself of it pretty quickly.
Replying again.
Here's something I don't get about Americans. Every country has things to be proud about. What I think the #1 thing that Americans should be proud of is their space program, America has shot rockets further than anyone else, they've shot off bigger rockets than anyone else, they've gone to the moon with people, launched and maintained the Hubble telescope despite multiple problems and hundreds of other important research satellites and probes. America is a rich, developed country with a population of 300M, three to twenty times the population of other countries with similar standards of living which has lead to some great successes.
Now here's the thing, despite that, Americans and their representatives seem to want to squabble over the contracts like it is done for state welfare, not for national achievement, caring only about their little township and forgetting that because they live in such a huge and powerful nation that they get to have a successful space program. Lets face it, rockets are awesome, they are big, powerful, fast moving and to be honest, shaped quite similarly to giant flying penises. If Ares V does ever fly, all Americans should just be proud of their nation building such a big, powerful machine. But if Americans don't really want a new giant rocket to fly to space, maybe they should just spend the money on something else that they do like.
ATK was given the contract to build the main stage for Ares I, and the contract for the Ares V boosters has not been awarded. In fact, the whole premise of Ares was to reuse as many components from the shuttle as possible including liberal usage of the space shuttle main engines and boosters.
US has two heavy lift rockets called Delta IV and Atlas 5, Titan 4 was thoroughly obsolete by the time it was retired and did not have as much payload capacity as Delta IV Heavy and cost more to launch than the newer rockets. Delta IV Heavy is capable of lobbing roughly the same amount into orbit as the shuttle. Unless you really have to lob a 100 ton object into obit, there was not much point in using Ares V as a heavy lift, if there was really justification for that capability then Saturn V would never have been retired. Ares I (the manned rocket) and Ares V (the heavy lift) are essentially two projects with little in common apart from the name. But talking about states and parties, it sounds like you care more about them than you care about rockets and launching important stuff into space. Which is all well and good, apart from when there is actually something that needs to be lifted into space.
Yeah, it didn't ripoff films, but it came pretty goddamned close to Bungie's Oni. You might even say it... ripped off Oni.
Seriously? And you were the one complaining about the "lies" about marathon. Oni is third person game focussing on combat, mirrors edge is a first person game focussing on platforming. From a gameplay perspective chalk and cheese, from a setting perspective they seem to both do the same teriyaki 1984 thing but it isn't all that similar either.
HSBC isn't really Chinese, it just owns Hong Kong, I'll tell you a story about it.
...for in this time the Empire was a devil of many faces, a merchant in India and a gaoler to Australia. But to the Chinese they appeared as Cai Shen, the god of wealth and bid the city folk pay sacrifice in the hall of HSBC and be rewarded with prosperity and monthly compounded interest .... And though the empire now sleeps in the dust, the high priest Sir Thomas Jackson still stands where his empress once stood, under the shadow of his great temple to money, which towers like a steeple over Hong Kong and reminds all those who look upon it of their piety.
Also China doesn't own the majority of American debt, they own roughly the same amount as Japan or the US does domestically, and the banks that own it are predominately the People's Bank of China (central bank) as well as the big 4 (ICBC, CCB, BOC, ABC)
Woops, I meant juan3 (U+5377), I don't know why I used zh there, the input method usually picks that stuff up. I have never seen a taco in China so I just called it a Mexican roll, which is something they have at KFC.
I live in Beijing, but I was attempting to write CCTV Mandarin, rather than dialect, it doesn't surprise me if I screwed up one or two times.
Ah, pinyin, the writing system that 1.3 billion people can write, and only primary school kids can read. To be able to write in a valid language and never be fear that it will be read by anyone important is liberating. For example:
xie2xian4dian3 shi4 zhai2nan2 de xin1wen2 dan1shi4 wang2zhan4 de ji4shu4 fang1mian4 chu1chou4, er2qie4 nei4rong2 shi4 gou3pi4. wo3 gan4le4 zhong1xiao4 mo4xi1ge1zhuan3 de ma1 de bi1. (Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters. Commander Taco's mother is a classy lady)
Though on a more serious note, this is a little bit worrying. OK, ICANN is allowing Chinese domain names, this is no huge problem to me, since I can read and write Chinese anyway. But the Chinese will be pissed off when Japanese start using Kana and they are no longer able to enter the correct domain names to look up porn. I think this just screws the world all over in the long run, at least EVERYONE knows ascii.
Well, I think failing a background check is most likely to be "guilty since proven guilty". Well, depends if the conviction or simply the arrest record is checked. But if for example, a conviction for manslaughter or robbery might qualify as being "proven guilty" and also might be good grounds for not allowing this individual to have a weapon.
Both of my parents are trained real lawyers and my grandfather is also, so I have been exposed to many discussions on the topic of law. It is extremely correct that the publics perception of laws is slightly inaccurate. However, a lawyers view on public ignorance in their field is not all that different to most scientists or engineers. Laws are like computers, if you use them you should understand them. Nobody is expected to know every law, just like not every scientist is supposed to understand every fact, but if you think you have some "loophole" of your own figured out, based on your own limited understanding, you better hope you are right. Lawyers and particularly judges have a particular supply of contempt reserved for those who wish to use a law in a wrong manner that makes an IT worker's ire of an incompetent PC user seem harmless. Ignorance of law can never be used a defence, courts always expect you to make an effort to know the rules that apply to you and read everything you sign, otherwise idiots would be untouchable, because ignorance is a powerful force indeed.
I think this is the way with all professions, doctors are another fine example of people who do not abide idiots making moronic speculations. The number of ridiculous theories and misguided distrust expressed to doctors each day makes an IT helpdesk look like the pope giving communion, normally engineers don't have to ever see the morons they are trying to help, doctors have a line of them every day, half of them who want to voice an opinion about how they think the human body works.
Generally speaking engineers, mathematicians, physicists, etc. get off far, far lighter than others who have to suffer the burden of being knowledgeable in a subject.
Ah I miss the 80's. We had Prime Ministers Thatcher and Ghandi teaming to refute any claim from women that world peace remains elusive simply because of men. Oh well, nothing left to do than hope that the Right Honourable Ms Gillard is more like the former than the latter.
It is reasonable to expect all names in New Zealand and Australia to be written in an appropriate romanisation scheme such as Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles or Yale. The reason for this is that Latin script is fairly well understood in these areas where people cannot be expected to transcribe names referring to people that they may not even need to directly communicate with.
Latin script is an official script in all Chinese speaking territories, whereas comprehension of Han characters is low in Australia and New Zealand, even among ethnic Chinese who may speak their parent's tongue fluently, there is no reason for such databases to interpret non latin characters as anything but an error since it would diminish the utility of the identifier.
At the moment, in China, I'm seeing the US google page with SSL markings on the image, Google's certificate is signed to Google by Thawte Consulting (Pty.) Ltd. All looks legit to me. As for CNNIC, if you don't trust them there is nothing to stop you from taking it out of your list of trusted certificate authorities, but I have never seen it actually used to issue fake certificates before, I figure it could only really do that trick once.
Well, what the article doesn't mention is how the government conspired to wear his passport out ahead of time. Where was it mentioned that an Australian Secret Intelligence Service agent was hypothesized to have sabotaged the air conditioning system at Changi Airport so the tropical heat would make his sweat run into the pages? Where was it mentioned the secret back room treaties to cause foreign nations to stamp a new page when there is still space left on an existing page? These questions need answers. Next time you look at your passport and see it warped, don't dismiss it as just an arse imprint due to an hour long ride on the Moscow metro with it in your back pocket when it may be your own government out to silence you.
Any idiot can write a meandering tangle of pretentious and meaningless wank about a game that I will never care about, but only Jerry Holkins can finish it a simile so clever that I will be actually glad I read that drivel. That's why he's the one with a web comic and we're all posting on slashdot.