Would it be cynical of me to say "I KNEW IT!" - I've been pondering/theorising over the past few months when I think of Dubai of how quickly the place has boomed, everything is an incredible, ridiculous rush to try and convert their economy from oil to tourism. Surely correct planning is being simply thrown to the wayside. I mean I have no facts at all to back me up here, however - I have to at least ask the question, how well built is the Burj Dubai? Is it safe? Are the facilities reliable? - for example my work building is 38 stories and has 2 'service' lifts for cleaners / staff to move between floor besides the regular lifts. I firmly believe they should've built 3 service lifts, most cleaners are waiting 2 to 5 minutes each time they change a floor.
Now that's only a small basic example but has these kind of finer details been thought of in the Burj Dubai? I have to wonder, how's the water pressure? Sewerage system, network cabling, security, heating, energy efficiency in this building? (etc etc etc, you get the idea)
The entire place really is just an insane example of how to spend cash, it's totally not self sufficient (They have an indoor ski slope, how much energy does it take? Seriously.... is it on sustainable energy?) I don't mean to throw chip here, because western culture is pretty stupid and wasteful often but I see some real tacky shit over there, it seems like 'we have money, let's do the biggest!!!!!!!!!' (exclamation marks required)
I'm curious to see the place but mroe from sideshow freak kind of angle and I'm terrified if I ever went there, I'd say or do something taboo which would land me in jail for 4 goddamn years - frankly I think their tourism industry is doomed with such dopey laws.
I think they are kind of clutching at straws now. I wish them the very best but I think I'd start taking bets on them not getting this puppy out of the sand (even if they do, how do they know it's not thicker 5' away?) RIP little dude.
We may be geeks with PC's and gadgets but the issues with smartphones are excess physical size, weight, cost and so on. I bet most people saying they don't want a camera on their phone have a 'proper' camera - hence the comments. For many many years I didn't want a damn camera on my phone, they weren't worth a crap. Then I got an iphone 3G - still kinda crap, upgraded to a 3GS and now I finally have a camera which is at least 'acceptable' and doesn't protrude from the rear, making it.5 -> 2mm thicker, unlike many other phones.
Some/.'ers probably have a good mp3 player too and don't need mp3 playback - they just want a good, reliable, high quality phone with good signal strength and long battery life. Frankly I don't know where to turn anymore if I wanted such a thing, I don't know if it exists anymore.
I mean I am happy with my iphone but I went from a 7 year old Sony Ericsson T-630 to an iphone, I skipped many many phones to do this, there was a lot of crap inbetween, that's likely what they are referring to.
Thank you for this post!!! I'm sick and tired of whining Americans claiming "THEY WON'T LET ME USE MY LINK!!!!" you outline exactly why people simply can't thrash their link constantly. If you actually want a 30mbit line AND to thrash it 24/7 you need a business link. You can't whine because a 50$ / month cable job 'only' lets you download 250gb per month.
I'm in Australia, so I'm accustomed to having shitty expensive internet but that's the price, you get what you pay for, it's just one of those things. (I wish I could cite an example of other products in our lives which are similar but nothing comes to mind at the moment) Obviously we also shouldn't be paying 100$ per month for a 5gb limit, you need some give and take here but 250gb per month on a 30gb line is bloody fantastic, especially for a country like America with such open widespread population, if you want it super fast all the time with high limits, move to Korea or Japan.
I for one download a LOT of stuff I shouldn't (free to air TV is dead here) and I still can't max out 70gb per month. I'll gladly accept streaming TV, youtube, multiple people in the house, gaming, windows / linux updates - sure 150gb a household isn't bad - but I've seen Americans whine about 250 -> 300gb a month. STOP IT and use some common bloody sense.
We're sick and tired of hearing about it, it's over - it's finished, it's gone, finally! Can we not bring it up again? Ever? Just let it go, it was a joke, it's not even worth discussing. I'm so tired of seeing articles or comments regarding this game, there should be none, ever.
It really doesn't deserve the press it's gotten and like a whining little kid throwing a tantrum in McDonalds, it should be escorted out and forgotten promptly. Good riddance.
Actually what I'm primarily implying is that as business's and end users are forced to switch to 64bit (ideally beginning in 12 months, as long as 3 years from now) they will almost certainly not bother with 64bit XP and just go for 64bit Win7 instead. Therefore, IE8 and Microsoft effectively get free sales, not just because people want the new Windows but because their hand is forced. Good riddance 32bit O/S's
You're going to see IE8 be absolutely huge over the next 5 years - even if firefox is preferred by geeks and the somewhat tech savvy. As the huge 32/64bit transition begins (next 12 to 36 months my guess) business's finally can roll out 64bit Windows 7, avoiding Vista entirely and finally retiring Windows XP. This is going to continue to increase IE8 marketshare much like IE6's was boosted from XP, so what we can only hope is that IE8 isn't garbage (me, I don't know? I use Firefox also)
For what it's worth, I work for one of the state govt's of Australia and one of our departments has just switched from Win2k to XP:/ so I'm guessing we won't be moving to Windows 7 for at least 2 years.
This isn't about youtube, this is about the shit implimentation of video in flash as it is, period - it doesn't matter if it's youtube or any site, flash videos buffering code is frankly, fucking terrible - it's designed for US 30mbit internet connections with 50ms latency, not the 300ms we have. Yes some videos are fine, infact many are - but I'm still having to work around shitty buffering code due to lack of foresight from developers. I'm with iinet btw and I have the same problem at work on a government link.
I'd like to apologise about me not knowing about any apps supporting this. Last time I checked most apps did not support it and those which did it/simply didn't work properly/ much like the old Nero buffer never really ever worked.
We've got 4gb standard in machines now yet I can still see underrun stuff kick in way too fast on 4x DVD burns:/ As long as they support a couple of hundred mb buffer (for local video) apps, that would be good I'd think so I may try some of the suggestions, curse the entire wifi industry "54mbits" indeed, I always thought it was 8 bits to a byte not 21.6:/
Does this exist yet? We need a truly anonymous network for P2P transactions, even if it is slower, being free would be nice too. (although sadly, I can imagine our pals the kiddie porn crew making use of it and having whatever it is, outlawed)
This is a completely terrible answer, 'get a new ISP' doesn't cut it when I'm one of the fastest and most reliable in the country. This isn't going to change any of the facts in my post about poor buffering code in the vast majority of media player packages - this is not just applicable to youtube, it's across the web in general and for LOCAL media playback, the simple facts are they are not coded robustly for sub optimal conditions.
I still don't see enough buffering code and SPECIFICALLY buffering controls for users in any media player. I frequently play back files which just happen to be close to the bitrate of my wireless connection, why can't I have the program specifically pre-buffer 100mb of data and then play back from the 100mb? Then when the bitrate is higher, it drops to 80 or 50 but when it's lower, it re-fills. This is pretty straightforward stuff and yet, do we have these kind of controls? I want this on my PS3 media playbakc, my Xbox 360, Media player classic, GOM, VLC - everything damnit! I'm willing to goddamn wait as long as the end result is a smoother experience! I live in Australia, youtube and many flash videos here are frankly, bloody annoying, often we open a youtube video here, click play, let it start playing then quickly hit pause so it fills the full buffer:/ (if you don't quickly hit pause and it plays up to where the buffer end is, that can be a problem too)
FWIW: I'm not a coder, perhaps this is significantly more complex than it sounds to impliment but damnit it could make many things smoother and simpler.
Do any slashdotters still have the recording of the customers voicemail regarding the lost data on his hard disk? I think it was to Compaq or maybe even Canon (?) it'd be over 10 years old and they replaced his hard disk without telling him and he went proper, proper insane in this voicemail. I haven't heard it in years, I do recall the line along the lines of "last 4 years of my goddamn fucking life" or something.
"Due to the cooperative nature of the Scheme, any major changes to classification policy, such as the introduction of an R 18+ classification for computer games, must be unanimously agreed by Commonwealth, State and Territory Censorship Ministers."
Atkinson will stop it, don't bother getting your hopes up, it's pointless.
I'm not a programmer but I am an intense user and do some admin functionality on a machine from time to time. I can't think of anything BETTER than music to help focus when I really need to concerntrate or work faster. (ideally, no lyrics, I don't like them generally) This man clearly has no clue - I'd have to say to go with the earmuff AND or earplug move, I know it's going to look strange and possibly cause some kind of 'don't be ridiculous' speech from the boss but frankly fuck the guy - it should help. Also find a new job, the man is an idiot.
Sidenote: wouldn't it be nice if some of these damned 'ask slashdot' articles had follow ups on the results?
It seems quite good here and I frequently have to defend slashdot on other sites, purely because of the Microsoft hate here (which in my opinion has significantly weakened over the last 10 years) I will say one thing about the comments here and that's that a contrary position is not shunned completely and mod'd down, Digg comments are absolutely and utterly horrible, to be blunt they are effectively a clusterfuck of circle jerk madness - if you're not part of 'them' you're the enemy and be prepared to be mod'd down - heavily, gave up 3 times with Digg and the last time was the final time, not interested (and don't even use the site anymore)
To make my point though, I could have said how terrible slashdots comments and users are, contrary to your claim but as long as I wrote it out fairly well, I'd still be moderated relatively well
When this change occured yesterday afternoon, I found that a wizard popped up and it prompted me to set new settings or import old ones. Long story short, I did anything and everything I could to lock stuff down but sadly could not lock as much down as I previously had. However I've found several people who have got completely blocked profile pictures, friends list, the whole lot. They are completely locked down as I used to be, no 'add this friend' no 'send message' no 'view friends' etc. Furthermore I've already found a loophole in the new system, I've personally locked my account down so you can't do a search to find me, however if you find one of my friends, go through his friends list - bam, there I am, then click on my profile and you can view my friends and my picture. The lack of consistency is frankly, bullshit and the invasion of privacy sucks.
The **REAL** problem here, from what I read is that Facebook want to get some of the twitter market and that's fine, I understand why they would want to do this, I have no qualms with that. The problem is they simply didn't think this out, they should have flat created a new blogging interface based off the status updates, so you can be a 'fan of' someone without being a friend, so you can follow their 'facebook feed' of 'tweets' assuming they have them set to public. This way, I can follow someones feed without seeing their personal shit. It's simply a case of being a fan of someones feed or being a friend with someone. They could have stolen the twitter market within 6 months, just replicate twitters functionality with a full social network and friend backend the same way the previous system runs, once people are 'friended' They've pissed off quite a few people with this change and I've no doubt a few people may actually leave. I'm not willing to call it the beginning of the end for them but it's certainly not a good move.
I beleive the 'donotwant' tag is quite sufficient here. I couldn't care less about this and it's going to dilute the blu ray market which is already unfortunately weak. I believe this is a foolish move.
What a refreshing post and bravo. I've tried saying the same thing several times across the web and the GT fanboys are relentless people, it's total idiocy. Since the last full GT game, Turn 10 have released ALL THREE Forza games and the third one is bloody, bloody good.
Furthermore, yes the stupid physics (And the noises, tire squeel especially) seem recycled from GT4 into GT5 Prologue. They are adding WRC, F1, Nascar, rumoured motorcycles to GT5 yet ultimately they are just diluting the pot. Can they really get decent physics across such a spectrum? I doubt it personally.
That team have been consistently arrogant, refusing to even LOOK at the competition (admitted in an interview) because they simply are 'the leaders' in their mind. Meanwhile Forza has improved on GT in almost every conceivable way now. Just to put the full weight of my post here, I am a HUGE PS3 fan, I mostly dislike the 360, I dislike paying for live and I found the PS3 a pleasant surprise. I still bought a 360, JUST for Forza 3. and to be honest, it's worth it.
Really, GT trained you with an emergency situation so you didn't crash / get hurt? Even without a damage or penalty simulation?:) Sure you're not talking about Forza?
You have some valid points but I have actually seen a Compaq mouse have a specific incompatibility with an IBM PC, I'd never seen anything like it but it was a consistent fault. Also the rest of your post reads like you're the exact kind of guy we don't want to deal with, always trying to find a way to breach security, demanding shit instantly and generally treating support staff like lower people. I may be only a couple of rungs higher than a helpdesk but at least I came from one and respect what the poor schmucks do every day. I wish I could sack you idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be cynical of me to say "I KNEW IT!" - I've been pondering /theorising over the past few months when I think of Dubai of how quickly the place has boomed, everything is an incredible, ridiculous rush to try and convert their economy from oil to tourism.
Surely correct planning is being simply thrown to the wayside. I mean I have no facts at all to back me up here, however - I have to at least ask the question, how well built is the Burj Dubai?
Is it safe? Are the facilities reliable? - for example my work building is 38 stories and has 2 'service' lifts for cleaners / staff to move between floor besides the regular lifts. I firmly believe they should've built 3 service lifts, most cleaners are waiting 2 to 5 minutes each time they change a floor.
Now that's only a small basic example but has these kind of finer details been thought of in the Burj Dubai? I have to wonder, how's the water pressure? Sewerage system, network cabling, security, heating, energy efficiency in this building? (etc etc etc, you get the idea)
The entire place really is just an insane example of how to spend cash, it's totally not self sufficient (They have an indoor ski slope, how much energy does it take? Seriously.... is it on sustainable energy?)
I don't mean to throw chip here, because western culture is pretty stupid and wasteful often but I see some real tacky shit over there, it seems like 'we have money, let's do the biggest!!!!!!!!!' (exclamation marks required)
I'm curious to see the place but mroe from sideshow freak kind of angle and I'm terrified if I ever went there, I'd say or do something taboo which would land me in jail for 4 goddamn years - frankly I think their tourism industry is doomed with such dopey laws.
I think they are kind of clutching at straws now.
I wish them the very best but I think I'd start taking bets on them not getting this puppy out of the sand (even if they do, how do they know it's not thicker 5' away?)
RIP little dude.
We may be geeks with PC's and gadgets but the issues with smartphones are excess physical size, weight, cost and so on. .5 -> 2mm thicker, unlike many other phones.
I bet most people saying they don't want a camera on their phone have a 'proper' camera - hence the comments.
For many many years I didn't want a damn camera on my phone, they weren't worth a crap. Then I got an iphone 3G - still kinda crap, upgraded to a 3GS and now I finally have a camera which is at least 'acceptable' and doesn't protrude from the rear, making it
Some /.'ers probably have a good mp3 player too and don't need mp3 playback - they just want a good, reliable, high quality phone with good signal strength and long battery life. Frankly I don't know where to turn anymore if I wanted such a thing, I don't know if it exists anymore.
I mean I am happy with my iphone but I went from a 7 year old Sony Ericsson T-630 to an iphone, I skipped many many phones to do this, there was a lot of crap inbetween, that's likely what they are referring to.
Thank you for this post!!!
I'm sick and tired of whining Americans claiming "THEY WON'T LET ME USE MY LINK!!!!" you outline exactly why people simply can't thrash their link constantly.
If you actually want a 30mbit line AND to thrash it 24/7 you need a business link. You can't whine because a 50$ / month cable job 'only' lets you download 250gb per month.
I'm in Australia, so I'm accustomed to having shitty expensive internet but that's the price, you get what you pay for, it's just one of those things. (I wish I could cite an example of other products in our lives which are similar but nothing comes to mind at the moment)
Obviously we also shouldn't be paying 100$ per month for a 5gb limit, you need some give and take here but 250gb per month on a 30gb line is bloody fantastic, especially for a country like America with such open widespread population, if you want it super fast all the time with high limits, move to Korea or Japan.
I for one download a LOT of stuff I shouldn't (free to air TV is dead here) and I still can't max out 70gb per month. I'll gladly accept streaming TV, youtube, multiple people in the house, gaming, windows / linux updates - sure 150gb a household isn't bad - but I've seen Americans whine about 250 -> 300gb a month. STOP IT and use some common bloody sense.
We're sick and tired of hearing about it, it's over - it's finished, it's gone, finally!
Can we not bring it up again? Ever? Just let it go, it was a joke, it's not even worth discussing.
I'm so tired of seeing articles or comments regarding this game, there should be none, ever.
It really doesn't deserve the press it's gotten and like a whining little kid throwing a tantrum in McDonalds, it should be escorted out and forgotten promptly.
Good riddance.
Are you seriously questioning if machines will ship with 4 or more gb of memory within 36 months? I'll take that bet!
Actually what I'm primarily implying is that as business's and end users are forced to switch to 64bit (ideally beginning in 12 months, as long as 3 years from now) they will almost certainly not bother with 64bit XP and just go for 64bit Win7 instead.
Therefore, IE8 and Microsoft effectively get free sales, not just because people want the new Windows but because their hand is forced.
Good riddance 32bit O/S's
I certainly care not to, I like having a job.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that complete, idiot ruling.
Not often I side with Microsoft - I do on this one- silly.
You're going to see IE8 be absolutely huge over the next 5 years - even if firefox is preferred by geeks and the somewhat tech savvy.
As the huge 32/64bit transition begins (next 12 to 36 months my guess) business's finally can roll out 64bit Windows 7, avoiding Vista entirely and finally retiring Windows XP.
This is going to continue to increase IE8 marketshare much like IE6's was boosted from XP, so what we can only hope is that IE8 isn't garbage (me, I don't know? I use Firefox also)
For what it's worth, I work for one of the state govt's of Australia and one of our departments has just switched from Win2k to XP :/ so I'm guessing we won't be moving to Windows 7 for at least 2 years.
That's the one - excellent job! Such a classic.
This isn't about youtube, this is about the shit implimentation of video in flash as it is, period - it doesn't matter if it's youtube or any site, flash videos buffering code is frankly, fucking terrible - it's designed for US 30mbit internet connections with 50ms latency, not the 300ms we have.
Yes some videos are fine, infact many are - but I'm still having to work around shitty buffering code due to lack of foresight from developers.
I'm with iinet btw and I have the same problem at work on a government link.
I'd like to apologise about me not knowing about any apps supporting this. /simply didn't work properly/ much like the old Nero buffer never really ever worked.
Last time I checked most apps did not support it and those which did it
We've got 4gb standard in machines now yet I can still see underrun stuff kick in way too fast on 4x DVD burns :/ :/
As long as they support a couple of hundred mb buffer (for local video) apps, that would be good I'd think so I may try some of the suggestions, curse the entire wifi industry "54mbits" indeed, I always thought it was 8 bits to a byte not 21.6
Does this exist yet? We need a truly anonymous network for P2P transactions, even if it is slower, being free would be nice too.
(although sadly, I can imagine our pals the kiddie porn crew making use of it and having whatever it is, outlawed)
This is a completely terrible answer, 'get a new ISP' doesn't cut it when I'm one of the fastest and most reliable in the country.
This isn't going to change any of the facts in my post about poor buffering code in the vast majority of media player packages - this is not just applicable to youtube, it's across the web in general and for LOCAL media playback, the simple facts are they are not coded robustly for sub optimal conditions.
I still don't see enough buffering code and SPECIFICALLY buffering controls for users in any media player. :/ (if you don't quickly hit pause and it plays up to where the buffer end is, that can be a problem too)
I frequently play back files which just happen to be close to the bitrate of my wireless connection, why can't I have the program specifically pre-buffer 100mb of data and then play back from the 100mb? Then when the bitrate is higher, it drops to 80 or 50 but when it's lower, it re-fills.
This is pretty straightforward stuff and yet, do we have these kind of controls?
I want this on my PS3 media playbakc, my Xbox 360, Media player classic, GOM, VLC - everything damnit! I'm willing to goddamn wait as long as the end result is a smoother experience!
I live in Australia, youtube and many flash videos here are frankly, bloody annoying, often we open a youtube video here, click play, let it start playing then quickly hit pause so it fills the full buffer
FWIW: I'm not a coder, perhaps this is significantly more complex than it sounds to impliment but damnit it could make many things smoother and simpler.
Do any slashdotters still have the recording of the customers voicemail regarding the lost data on his hard disk? I think it was to Compaq or maybe even Canon (?) it'd be over 10 years old and they replaced his hard disk without telling him and he went proper, proper insane in this voicemail.
I haven't heard it in years, I do recall the line along the lines of "last 4 years of my goddamn fucking life" or something.
"Due to the cooperative nature of the Scheme, any major changes to classification policy, such as the introduction of an R 18+ classification for computer games, must be unanimously agreed by Commonwealth, State and Territory Censorship Ministers."
Atkinson will stop it, don't bother getting your hopes up, it's pointless.
I'm not a programmer but I am an intense user and do some admin functionality on a machine from time to time.
I can't think of anything BETTER than music to help focus when I really need to concerntrate or work faster.
(ideally, no lyrics, I don't like them generally)
This man clearly has no clue - I'd have to say to go with the earmuff AND or earplug move, I know it's going to look strange and possibly cause some kind of 'don't be ridiculous' speech from the boss but frankly fuck the guy - it should help.
Also find a new job, the man is an idiot.
Sidenote: wouldn't it be nice if some of these damned 'ask slashdot' articles had follow ups on the results?
It seems quite good here and I frequently have to defend slashdot on other sites, purely because of the Microsoft hate here (which in my opinion has significantly weakened over the last 10 years)
I will say one thing about the comments here and that's that a contrary position is not shunned completely and mod'd down, Digg comments are absolutely and utterly horrible, to be blunt they are effectively a clusterfuck of circle jerk madness - if you're not part of 'them' you're the enemy and be prepared to be mod'd down - heavily, gave up 3 times with Digg and the last time was the final time, not interested (and don't even use the site anymore)
To make my point though, I could have said how terrible slashdots comments and users are, contrary to your claim but as long as I wrote it out fairly well, I'd still be moderated relatively well
When this change occured yesterday afternoon, I found that a wizard popped up and it prompted me to set new settings or import old ones.
Long story short, I did anything and everything I could to lock stuff down but sadly could not lock as much down as I previously had.
However I've found several people who have got completely blocked profile pictures, friends list, the whole lot. They are completely locked down as I used to be, no 'add this friend' no 'send message' no 'view friends' etc.
Furthermore I've already found a loophole in the new system, I've personally locked my account down so you can't do a search to find me, however if you find one of my friends, go through his friends list - bam, there I am, then click on my profile and you can view my friends and my picture.
The lack of consistency is frankly, bullshit and the invasion of privacy sucks.
The **REAL** problem here, from what I read is that Facebook want to get some of the twitter market and that's fine, I understand why they would want to do this, I have no qualms with that.
The problem is they simply didn't think this out, they should have flat created a new blogging interface based off the status updates, so you can be a 'fan of' someone without being a friend, so you can follow their 'facebook feed' of 'tweets' assuming they have them set to public.
This way, I can follow someones feed without seeing their personal shit. It's simply a case of being a fan of someones feed or being a friend with someone.
They could have stolen the twitter market within 6 months, just replicate twitters functionality with a full social network and friend backend the same way the previous system runs, once people are 'friended'
They've pissed off quite a few people with this change and I've no doubt a few people may actually leave. I'm not willing to call it the beginning of the end for them but it's certainly not a good move.
I beleive the 'donotwant' tag is quite sufficient here.
I couldn't care less about this and it's going to dilute the blu ray market which is already unfortunately weak.
I believe this is a foolish move.
What a refreshing post and bravo.
I've tried saying the same thing several times across the web and the GT fanboys are relentless people, it's total idiocy.
Since the last full GT game, Turn 10 have released ALL THREE Forza games and the third one is bloody, bloody good.
Furthermore, yes the stupid physics (And the noises, tire squeel especially) seem recycled from GT4 into GT5 Prologue. They are adding WRC, F1, Nascar, rumoured motorcycles to GT5 yet ultimately they are just diluting the pot. Can they really get decent physics across such a spectrum? I doubt it personally.
That team have been consistently arrogant, refusing to even LOOK at the competition (admitted in an interview) because they simply are 'the leaders' in their mind. Meanwhile Forza has improved on GT in almost every conceivable way now.
Just to put the full weight of my post here, I am a HUGE PS3 fan, I mostly dislike the 360, I dislike paying for live and I found the PS3 a pleasant surprise. I still bought a 360, JUST for Forza 3. and to be honest, it's worth it.
Really, GT trained you with an emergency situation so you didn't crash / get hurt? Even without a damage or penalty simulation? :)
Sure you're not talking about Forza?
You have some valid points but I have actually seen a Compaq mouse have a specific incompatibility with an IBM PC, I'd never seen anything like it but it was a consistent fault.
Also the rest of your post reads like you're the exact kind of guy we don't want to deal with, always trying to find a way to breach security, demanding shit instantly and generally treating support staff like lower people.
I may be only a couple of rungs higher than a helpdesk but at least I came from one and respect what the poor schmucks do every day.
I wish I could sack you idiots.