"If any of these are a problem for you, perhaps you shouldn't be pc gaming. Or gaming at all."
Shouldn't be gaming at all? Uh, what?
The grandparent poster gave a reasonable list of console gaming advantages. Do you have some other set of criteria you'd like to propose? Or are you arguing that the hundreds of millions of people who own video game consoles are all fundamentally wrong and the entire industry shouldn't even exist? Because that seems a bit arrogant. Not to mention rather aggressively short-sighted, given that a number of companies that make very popular PC games would probably collapse if they didn't have the additional revenue streams from console sales.
"wanting to put up for sale the data of over one billion users is getting dangerously close to his goal after releasing another 65.5 million records last week and reaching a grand total of 932 million records overall."
"Dangerously close"? I'm not going to argue that this isn't bad, but does something magical happen when he releases the data for the billionth user and reaches his goal that makes it especially dangerous? Shouldn't releasing records 932,000,001 through 1,000,000,000 be at _most_ about 6.8% as dangerous as all the records he's released already?
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
IMHO, out west the best options for a burger are:
1: In-n-Out
2: Fat Burger
3: Five Guys
4: Burger King
OTOH, for fries the best options, when _fresh_, are:
1: In-n-Out
2: Del Taco
3: Five Guys
4: Fat Burger/Burger King
(In-n-Out fries get a boost in my personal rating because i can get them animal style, but admittedly out of all the options they're also the fries that deteriorate most quickly if you get them to go.)
Agreed! I just got a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact a couple months ago. I was going to get the XZ2, but since it it's a little larger and doesn't have a headphone jack i decided to go back one generation. Now that Sony no longer seems to be doing new Compacts i have no idea what i'm going to get next, but i don't have a lot of incentive to stick with Sony at this point.
Well the article did specify it was the first national chain to offer the _Impossible_ burger, while Carl's Jr has the Beyond burger. Obviously the phrasing used is intentionally very specific since other national chains already have the Beyond burger and other non-national chains already have the Impossible burger, but what else do you expect from a PR release intended to build hype?
I don't know if there are official rules about what minimum area/number of states would qualify a chain as "national", but at 13 states White Castle sounds pretty regional to me. As someone who grew up on the west coast i'd never even heard of them until i went to college and made some friends from the east coast.
Well at least it makes a little more sense than banning just plastic straws like California? Not being able to get a plastic straw when drinking out of a plastic cup with a plastic lid is just silly. Especially when waxed paper cups work as a much better alternative to plastic than the stupid flimsy paper straws we're supposed to use instead.
A company can define what's in the best interest of itself, and thus their shareholders, and it does not have to be "maximize profits." Of course many companies decide that maximizing profit is the best path, but the idea that it is a legal requirement is a myth.
I'm quite willing to believe that listening to music is distracting. However in my case if i don't have _any_ distractions i get bored with my current task and let myself get sidelined completely by more significant distractions. (...like Slashdot =P) Being a little distracted by audio is far better than getting totally distracted by something else.
I have three different categories of things i listen to at work, music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Each of which works well for a certain task. If i'm doing something totally repetitive and mind-numbing audiobooks work well. For most other tasks podcasts are only slightly more distracting than music, unless the task in question involves a lot of mental verbalization (filling out a form, writing an email, etc) in which case podcasts take up too much of that part of my brain. Music is also best if i need something to match or adjust my mood, either bouncing along in a hyper mood or trying to wake myself up if i'm feeling slow. But because music also provides the least distraction i'll find myself straying from my work tasks more often than with podcasts.
And pretty much all of them are better than listening to people having loud conversations at the desks right next to me or in the meeting room right around the corner that usually has the doors left open for some reason.
So Verizon/Oath announce on Dec 3rd that Tumblr, one of the companies under the banner of Oath, will ban anything "pornographic". By the end of that day their stock has dropped $2 a share. Verizon has 4.13 billion shares outstanding. That's a value loss of $8.26 billion. A week later they cut the value of Oath by $4.6 billion.
Seems like they might actually be underselling(?) the loss?
During his testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee [...] Pichai replied that he was "not aware of the specifics about it."
How does a CEO of a company worth almost a trillion dollars go into a high profile meeting with the US House Judiciary Committee and _not_ already know about the things they're likely to ask about?
Maybe Pichai is in too much of a billionaire bubble to know about it directly, but he has people that ought to have informed him about probable topics long before the meeting itself. The implication is that either no one in the company is actually aware of what YouTube is recommending to people, no one in the company is willing to pass word up the chain of command if YouTube is recommending videos that should be reviewed, or someone in that chain of command believes that it doesn't matter what content YouTube is promoting as long as it gets them more views and thus gets them more ad revenue.
All three possibilities are disturbing and slightly scary, but i'd easily believe that any of them are true, especially that last one.
Sometimes when it becomes clear that people don't want to switch they eventually cancel the old service instead, forcing everyone to either switch to the new, buggy, service with less features or leave the Google ecosystem entirely. (e.g. the old Google News & Weather app vs the new Google News app.)
There's probably also some positive feedback at the start. You don't want a place to seem _too_ quiet. A little noise makes a place seem lively and popular. So if the current architecture trends amplify sound it probably makes it seem more hospitable for the first couple groups of the night. It's only after that (initially) hospitable atmosphere has done its work and started to draw in a larger crowd that the noise reaches an intolerable level.
There's a pretty good bar right around the corner from us that we like to go to if we can get there early enough when it's more than half empty and quiet. But on more than one occasion we've noped the hell out of there because the evening crowd had already arrived and just walking in the door was already making our ears hurt.
Microsoft "helpfully" remembers some of the applications that it closed before doing an automatic update and reopens them when it restarts (and annoyingly frequently starts one or more Youtube channels playing when it does so) and some applications auto-save on a regular basis and will prompt you to restore lost data when you reopen them. But some applications don't, and even though a warning will pop up if you try to shut down windows with those programs still open with unsaved data the Windows update will just ignore those flags and go ahead and purge all your data.
I realize that to a certain extent that it's my own fault for not saving as early and often as i ought to, but I still feel like Microsoft bears some of the blame for the malicious way in which they go about handling updates.
IANAL, but i'm pretty sure tampering with potential evidence is obstruction even if they can't prove there was anything incriminating in the evidence in the same way that police searching without a warrant/probable cause invalidates actual incriminating evidence, even if they argue that they would eventually have found that same evidence via legal means.
Basically the people who write the laws aren't _completely_ braindead. If the burden of proof were the other way around all potential suspects would always destroy all potential evidence, even after being indicted and while in full view of officials, and all police would always search you without a warrant and then back off and wait for a warrant if they actually found something that looked like it might be incriminating. (And one or both of those things still obviously happens quite a lot anyways, but at least there's some legal recourse this way.)
"The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems."
They're concerned about housing for tens of thousands of workers and they're considering New York City as one of the options? I haven't lived there myself, but from everything i've heard decent, reasonably priced housing is not something that can be found in New York City.
Title: "IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm"
Blurb: "they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them."
So companies will presumably use a similar method to design AIs that will maximize corporate profit with only a _small_ amount of acceptable human murdering in the process?
So #1, skipping out on the Wii U was a good idea. But it's a mistake to dismiss the Switch out of hand. Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey are both critically acclaimed, and Breath of the Wild in particular either totally re-imagined the series and/or returned it to its NES Legend of Zelda/Link to the Past roots. (As someone who was never to get into any of the earlier 3D Zelda games, including Ocarina of Time, i tend to view it as the later.) And most of the other franchise sequels have been pretty good too. It's also got a lot of other more unusual games (the Mario vs Rabbids tactical strategy game, the sports RPG Golf Story, the retro RPG Octopath Traveler, among others) and quite a number of high quality ports (most recently I'm quite excited about Valkyria Chonicles 4 and Valkyria Chronicles Remastered.)
Now maybe none of those games appeal to you, but there are a lot of other people that they do appeal to.
#2, the Switch is selling about as well as the PS4. Which also of course means that like the PS4 it's crushing the XBox.
So they're managing to produce critically acclaimed sequels, start new potential franchises, attract third parties, and are effectively tied for first in the console race at the current rate of sales. Giving up on console hardware could have been conceivable in the middle of the Wii U doldrums, by why would Nintendo consider that _now_?
All of this could change of course (sooner or later it always does in this industry, especially for Nintendo.) Maybe sales will slow down and not be revived by the releases of Smash and Pokemon. Maybe third parties will change their minds and stop making/porting games. But right now Nintendo is looking pretty rosy.
Slashdot Mirror
"If any of these are a problem for you, perhaps you shouldn't be pc gaming. Or gaming at all."
Shouldn't be gaming at all? Uh, what?
The grandparent poster gave a reasonable list of console gaming advantages. Do you have some other set of criteria you'd like to propose? Or are you arguing that the hundreds of millions of people who own video game consoles are all fundamentally wrong and the entire industry shouldn't even exist? Because that seems a bit arrogant. Not to mention rather aggressively short-sighted, given that a number of companies that make very popular PC games would probably collapse if they didn't have the additional revenue streams from console sales.
AT&T merging with Time-Warner is fine, Disney and Fox merging is fine, but T-Mobile and Sprint is going too far?
I'm all well and good with the DOJ exercising its functions in general, but maybe they should have started exercising them a little earlier?
"wanting to put up for sale the data of over one billion users is getting dangerously close to his goal after releasing another 65.5 million records last week and reaching a grand total of 932 million records overall."
"Dangerously close"? I'm not going to argue that this isn't bad, but does something magical happen when he releases the data for the billionth user and reaches his goal that makes it especially dangerous? Shouldn't releasing records 932,000,001 through 1,000,000,000 be at _most_ about 6.8% as dangerous as all the records he's released already?
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
.
Since their detection rate was already abysmal i'll gladly take a little less theater to go with my "security".
IMHO, out west the best options for a burger are:
1: In-n-Out
2: Fat Burger
3: Five Guys
4: Burger King
OTOH, for fries the best options, when _fresh_, are:
1: In-n-Out
2: Del Taco
3: Five Guys
4: Fat Burger/Burger King
(In-n-Out fries get a boost in my personal rating because i can get them animal style, but admittedly out of all the options they're also the fries that deteriorate most quickly if you get them to go.)
Agreed! I just got a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact a couple months ago. I was going to get the XZ2, but since it it's a little larger and doesn't have a headphone jack i decided to go back one generation. Now that Sony no longer seems to be doing new Compacts i have no idea what i'm going to get next, but i don't have a lot of incentive to stick with Sony at this point.
Well the article did specify it was the first national chain to offer the _Impossible_ burger, while Carl's Jr has the Beyond burger. Obviously the phrasing used is intentionally very specific since other national chains already have the Beyond burger and other non-national chains already have the Impossible burger, but what else do you expect from a PR release intended to build hype?
I don't know if there are official rules about what minimum area/number of states would qualify a chain as "national", but at 13 states White Castle sounds pretty regional to me. As someone who grew up on the west coast i'd never even heard of them until i went to college and made some friends from the east coast.
Also, if you're buying companies at a point when they're already worth billions, that's not exactly being "prophetic".
I'm willing to believe there are. However what's currently being offered at restaurants are flimsy paper straws or nothing.
Well at least it makes a little more sense than banning just plastic straws like California? Not being able to get a plastic straw when drinking out of a plastic cup with a plastic lid is just silly. Especially when waxed paper cups work as a much better alternative to plastic than the stupid flimsy paper straws we're supposed to use instead.
A company can define what's in the best interest of itself, and thus their shareholders, and it does not have to be "maximize profits." Of course many companies decide that maximizing profit is the best path, but the idea that it is a legal requirement is a myth.
Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
I'm quite willing to believe that listening to music is distracting. However in my case if i don't have _any_ distractions i get bored with my current task and let myself get sidelined completely by more significant distractions. (...like Slashdot =P) Being a little distracted by audio is far better than getting totally distracted by something else.
I have three different categories of things i listen to at work, music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Each of which works well for a certain task. If i'm doing something totally repetitive and mind-numbing audiobooks work well. For most other tasks podcasts are only slightly more distracting than music, unless the task in question involves a lot of mental verbalization (filling out a form, writing an email, etc) in which case podcasts take up too much of that part of my brain. Music is also best if i need something to match or adjust my mood, either bouncing along in a hyper mood or trying to wake myself up if i'm feeling slow. But because music also provides the least distraction i'll find myself straying from my work tasks more often than with podcasts.
And pretty much all of them are better than listening to people having loud conversations at the desks right next to me or in the meeting room right around the corner that usually has the doors left open for some reason.
So Verizon/Oath announce on Dec 3rd that Tumblr, one of the companies under the banner of Oath, will ban anything "pornographic". By the end of that day their stock has dropped $2 a share. Verizon has 4.13 billion shares outstanding. That's a value loss of $8.26 billion. A week later they cut the value of Oath by $4.6 billion.
Seems like they might actually be underselling(?) the loss?
During his testimony on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee [...] Pichai replied that he was "not aware of the specifics about it."
How does a CEO of a company worth almost a trillion dollars go into a high profile meeting with the US House Judiciary Committee and _not_ already know about the things they're likely to ask about?
Maybe Pichai is in too much of a billionaire bubble to know about it directly, but he has people that ought to have informed him about probable topics long before the meeting itself. The implication is that either no one in the company is actually aware of what YouTube is recommending to people, no one in the company is willing to pass word up the chain of command if YouTube is recommending videos that should be reviewed, or someone in that chain of command believes that it doesn't matter what content YouTube is promoting as long as it gets them more views and thus gets them more ad revenue.
All three possibilities are disturbing and slightly scary, but i'd easily believe that any of them are true, especially that last one.
That's inaccurate!
Sometimes when it becomes clear that people don't want to switch they eventually cancel the old service instead, forcing everyone to either switch to the new, buggy, service with less features or leave the Google ecosystem entirely. (e.g. the old Google News & Weather app vs the new Google News app.)
There's probably also some positive feedback at the start. You don't want a place to seem _too_ quiet. A little noise makes a place seem lively and popular. So if the current architecture trends amplify sound it probably makes it seem more hospitable for the first couple groups of the night. It's only after that (initially) hospitable atmosphere has done its work and started to draw in a larger crowd that the noise reaches an intolerable level.
There's a pretty good bar right around the corner from us that we like to go to if we can get there early enough when it's more than half empty and quiet. But on more than one occasion we've noped the hell out of there because the evening crowd had already arrived and just walking in the door was already making our ears hurt.
Microsoft "helpfully" remembers some of the applications that it closed before doing an automatic update and reopens them when it restarts (and annoyingly frequently starts one or more Youtube channels playing when it does so) and some applications auto-save on a regular basis and will prompt you to restore lost data when you reopen them. But some applications don't, and even though a warning will pop up if you try to shut down windows with those programs still open with unsaved data the Windows update will just ignore those flags and go ahead and purge all your data.
I realize that to a certain extent that it's my own fault for not saving as early and often as i ought to, but I still feel like Microsoft bears some of the blame for the malicious way in which they go about handling updates.
IANAL, but i'm pretty sure tampering with potential evidence is obstruction even if they can't prove there was anything incriminating in the evidence in the same way that police searching without a warrant/probable cause invalidates actual incriminating evidence, even if they argue that they would eventually have found that same evidence via legal means.
Basically the people who write the laws aren't _completely_ braindead. If the burden of proof were the other way around all potential suspects would always destroy all potential evidence, even after being indicted and while in full view of officials, and all police would always search you without a warrant and then back off and wait for a warrant if they actually found something that looked like it might be incriminating. (And one or both of those things still obviously happens quite a lot anyways, but at least there's some legal recourse this way.)
That's sad, but at least there is no man who can muck with what he left behind...
oh wait =P
.
"The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems."
They're concerned about housing for tens of thousands of workers and they're considering New York City as one of the options? I haven't lived there myself, but from everything i've heard decent, reasonably priced housing is not something that can be found in New York City.
Title: "IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm"
Blurb: "they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them."
So companies will presumably use a similar method to design AIs that will maximize corporate profit with only a _small_ amount of acceptable human murdering in the process?
Forks and derivative software
Well that looks like a mess! At least the re-mergers keep it from being a 100% textbook case of the xkcd on standards?
.
So #1, skipping out on the Wii U was a good idea. But it's a mistake to dismiss the Switch out of hand. Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey are both critically acclaimed, and Breath of the Wild in particular either totally re-imagined the series and/or returned it to its NES Legend of Zelda/Link to the Past roots. (As someone who was never to get into any of the earlier 3D Zelda games, including Ocarina of Time, i tend to view it as the later.) And most of the other franchise sequels have been pretty good too. It's also got a lot of other more unusual games (the Mario vs Rabbids tactical strategy game, the sports RPG Golf Story, the retro RPG Octopath Traveler, among others) and quite a number of high quality ports (most recently I'm quite excited about Valkyria Chonicles 4 and Valkyria Chronicles Remastered.)
Now maybe none of those games appeal to you, but there are a lot of other people that they do appeal to.
#2, the Switch is selling about as well as the PS4. Which also of course means that like the PS4 it's crushing the XBox.
So they're managing to produce critically acclaimed sequels, start new potential franchises, attract third parties, and are effectively tied for first in the console race at the current rate of sales. Giving up on console hardware could have been conceivable in the middle of the Wii U doldrums, by why would Nintendo consider that _now_?
All of this could change of course (sooner or later it always does in this industry, especially for Nintendo.) Maybe sales will slow down and not be revived by the releases of Smash and Pokemon. Maybe third parties will change their minds and stop making/porting games. But right now Nintendo is looking pretty rosy.