Most often when [sic] is used it is meant to show the person being quoted as being too stupid to get it right. "This ain't my mistake, it was the original idiot who wrote it like this".
Editors do correct language all the time, it is their job. Unless there is a pressing need to preserve the original quote you shouldn't carry over grammar errors. In the case of asking how babies are formed, there is no need to carry over the errors as there is no value in them.
Only quote directly when it is needed.
but the fact that Venus has no signs of life proofs that women do not really exist and are just the results of a fevered imagination. This handily explains why slashdot, a bastion of clear thinking, has no women.
Like his lawyer didn't dress him up and tried to pass him off as a clean living kid who just had a terrible accident happen to him while the angels are crying.
As long as the defence is allowed to lie about their clients attitude the prosecution should be allowed to use the truth to tear those lies down.
The reps get the reputation of being though and so can use it to keep their backers happy. The dems get the rep that they are really against it and would change it if only they could and so keep their backers happy.
US politics has no left and right anymore as far as the major political events are concerned. The entire trick is to keep your own backers happy enough NOT to go voting for a 3rd party or stay home while taking as much of the center as possible.
Look at the current campaign. What is really going to be changed by either side? Nothing.
You cannot have a two party democratic system because it will by the nature of popularity contests (which is what western style democracy really is) always tend to have both parties come together in the middle because that is where the votes are.
The US is not alone to suffer from this. In france they recently had an election with the slogan. "Elect the crook, not the fascist". The voter could only choose between a known corrupt politician and an openly fascist one. Long live big parties, the best way to kill democracy.
TV stations BUY tv programs and pay for them in hard cash BEFORE they are aired. This makes it fairly easy to do your balance book if you produce content. Hell, most content is even PAID before it is ever produced. What happens is that you pitch an idea, get money to produce a pilot. Show the pilot and get money to produce a season. It is the way the industry works.
With internet ad income the producers would need to finance everything in advance and then just hope the money trickles in over time. There are also issues with advertising. Does an advertiser prefer to air his ads on certain timeslots on tv OR god knows when on a user screen? People on slashdot seem a bit to fond of new tech to be able to see the many difficulties internet ads bring.
TV is also a onetime affair. Want to watch it again, buy the DVD. If it is always available on the internet, why buy the DVD? If you think ad revenues way up against dvd sales, you are just silly.
But I think it is the story and the lightness of it all.
Sure Oblivion is great but where is the story, the character development, the iron rails I can follow easily towards the end?
Same with games like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment. Choices? Choosing my own destiny? Moral questions? No thanks! FF has its story laid out in front of you, what happens has all been decided. It makes for a far smoother and polished experience.
FF you are playing a movie and some people like that. No, not me, but I also know lots of people don't like Bioware games either.
This is about worms and such that spread across the internet, not about trojans and virusses people download.
Afterall, I could surfe google for years without ever getting a single virus and go to a.ru site and be infected in seconds.
No, the 4 minutes is for a windows PC directly connected to the internet (no router in between) doing nothing but being connected. What will happen to a lot of people who just bought a new computer and are using a direct connection to the internet like many a cable company offers.
If your connection to the internet has only ONE ethernet port or is a USB modem or something similar this means you.
ADSL typically uses routers in my experience (more then one computer can be connected) and this effectively closes of your PC from the internet meaning it can't be contacted.
Compromising is something you do at the end, you don't do it at the start.
Produce as clean a Linux as possible, then at the end when there are no other options remaining you compromise with closed source solutions for the few remaining problems.
If you start with the idea that closed source is okay you will soon enough end up not even trying anymore and before you know it you have a horrible mess of closed code that even with the best efforts you can't open up anymore and everyone wondering why you even bother.
Proof? Video. Both the cards and video playback. Why did Ati take so long to go open? Why is Nvidia still not doing it? Because they don't want to? no, because they adopted closed source code into their drivers to the point where they can't just opensource their drivers because not all the code is theirs.
Why was DVD playback an issue for so long? Because Linux is free and DVD playback isn't.
Allow closed source of any kind and sooner or later it will bite you in the ass. Look at MS itself with Flash. They allowed it and now are faced with the fact that the web, their own internet explorer NEEDS a 3rd party tool they don't control to function. Do you think MS is pushing Silverlight because they want this tool? No, it is because they want to break the dependency on Adobe for making the web work.
You can see it on linux where you have to jump through hoops to make it Flash work on anything but the most basic install AND because that was allowed it Flash has become bigger and more widespread making Linux even more dependent on having Flash.
Without any effort to produce a clean linux at least as the base the OS would pretty soon be just the same a Windows, closed drivers everywhere were you have no idea what the hell what it is doing.
Let the compromises happen on the users desktop, not at the developers.
For those who don't know, these free games are all the rage in places like korea. Instead of buying a boxed game and then paying a monthly subscription ala World of Warcraft, you download the game for free and play it for free BUT all the advanced items are not looted or crafted but bought.
The earliest games just made some useful but not-essential items buyable. Buyable but still lootable or at least tradeable. Think Second Life where 1 person buying linden dollars can buy stuff from players who never spend any real cash.
But that isn't profitable enough, so slowly the "buy" items have become more and more essential to play the game beyond the basics.
One example is a game, might be Perfect World, where you get one free sample of a pet. A little pig that picks up loot for you that drops in the world. Handy no? But hardly essential? No, the game drops so much loot that anyone trying to pick stuff up AFTER the free pet has run out will find the game near impossible to play. So where do you get more piggies? From the shop.
And then of course the smart players are going to do a small sum, exactly HOW much do you have to pay each month to play the game succesfully? Oh dear, an amount very similar to the monthly subscription of WoW. Execpt for ONE small problem, that is the MINIMUM sum. You can easily spend more and we all know how addictive these games can become. Blizzard can only charge you the monthly fee, although Blizzard and SOE are learning how to fleece their customer for more, but the Korean games go far further.
Remember all the outcry when console games for the x-box and 360 started charging, one racing game where most tracks and cars had to be bought after you bought theboxed game?
The Koreans go far further.
I don't see this as the future.
Do you REALLY want games entirely designed around selling you items? An RTS where every upgrade for your units has to be paid for, an adventure where puzzle items have to be bought, an RPG where every skill is paid for?
As expensive as single player games have become at least that is a fixed one time charge (oh okay ignoring games like Oblivion) where you know the game can be finished for that amount of money. I really don't want a future in which a company makes its money from me playing the game over and over.
lets not forget also that this means the end of modding. Do you really think that if EA manages to introduce the sale of single pieces of furniture in The Sims that they would allow the countless free mods that exist?
How are you going to sell a FPS with bought items if any modder can add far better weapons?
No, just produce games that are decent value, remove the damn DRM so paying customers ain't punished and accept that perhaps the market isn't in producing the Xth FPS but in producing unique fun games that the people want to pay and play. Remember that the biggest game ever is The Sims. A series that launched WITHOUT drm and allowed open modding and made the company more money then they could ever have dreamed. The PC market is alive and well but you got to stop aiming for the 12yr old boys. I know quite a few The Sims fans and they don't give a shit about buying a new expansion, all they care about is new options to produce free content for EA. That is how you make money. Sell to people willing to pay for your product, not fight a loosing war.
Yeah right. You got extreme right and extremist right and that is it.
Far left in the US, what a joke.
Oh and what you are basically saying is that Obama should become yet another middle of the roader, neither left nor right. That doesn't work, it only leads to the slow ruin the US is currently experiencing.
It doesn't really matter if a country is run by the left or the right as long as they stick to it. Try to appease everyone and you end up with a complete mess.
Lets hope it is not as bad as that one shall we? Don't look forward to WW3 at all even if it is my best chance of getting laid if I manage to be the only male survivor.
Your argument kind of depends on the idea that the "west" or the US in particular could have done anything different to stop groups from hating them.
It sounds sensible until you use your argument at a lower level of violence. Rape.
Basically you would say to every raped woman that she brought it on herself because she provoked the rapists. True enough in a sense, if only she hadn't been there, if only she had brought friends, if only she hadn't been a woman.
There are those who hate just for the sake of hating. Some people argue that Muslims are the new bogyman now that the soviet union has collapsed, there is some truth in this BUT what is often forgotten by racists (like you) is that other groups need their bogyman as well.
The USA wasn't the only one to fight the soviet union and rise to power because of it. Look at the history of Al Quada with the collapse of the soviet union and the earlier retreat by them from Afghanistan all of sudden they had to prove that they could run a country without being able to blame anyone.
If certain western groups need a bogyman then so do other groups. The trick to doing this succesful is to ride on resentment already there and build it up out of all proportion.
Take for instance the occupied terretories in Israel, you won't be able to find a single muslim who doesn't think that is wrong. Ask them about the Kurds, about Marokko occupation of the Sahara, the various dirty wars fought my Muslims in Africa like Dafur and plenty of others and most won't even know what they hell you are talking about.
It is all to easy for so called moderate folks to become outraged at something while very ably turning a blind eye towards equal or even greater evils. Japan, who still pretends to be the victim of the atom bomb, but never ackknowledging their countless human right violations that forced the use of that bomb.
Germans crying over Dresden never mentioning that the civilians who died happily supported (or at least took no action to stop it) the bombing of dozens of other cities.
There are two risks. First is that you do NOT blind yourself into thinking your own actions are "right" and everyone else is wrong BUT also to not blindly assume that others are right and your own "side" is wrong because of that.
If you look at the history of this conflict you start to realize that on all sides (there are far more then just two interested parties) there is careful manipulation going on. Sadly the western media and cry babies such as you are a bit to scared or racist to allow the other side the same level of deviousness as you think western leaders have.
Exactly how does a goat herder in pakistan ever hear of a danish cartoon? Answer me that and you will have come a lot closer to understand just how this conflict is working.
And testers and designers. Basically every bad project I ever been involved in always was managed to death.
Or rather, not so much managed to death as starved of actual work because if the managers actually managed the few people who do the actual work could get it done.
Rather the abundance of managers keep the people who actual code/design/test from doing their bloody job.
The problem is not unique to IT.
I worked in a lot of different fields and seen it elsewhere, with more and more managers who come from outside the field they are supposed to manage you loose the awareness that the factory floor is where it happens.
Simple example, warehouse. Double the order, so just work overtime. After all the suits do overtime no problem so why not the people in the warehouse? Because the suits start an hour late, have constant coffee breaks, 2 hour lunches, leave an hour early and only do overtime for an hour? The people in the warehouse start an hour early got only official breaks and do overtime for 4 hours doing back breaking work?
It is a simple disconnect between the factory floor and the office and the same happens in IT except that it is even more hidden because all you see of a programmer/tester/designer is someone who is sitting behind a desk, so how hard can it be?
I had one memorable project that was so bad it even reached the front page of a serious newspaper and had the company that bought the company it happened to take legal steps because they had been misled were at one point I was NOT just the only programmer but had also been lumbered with keeping the servers running despite having NO experience whatsoever with it. And when I complained I was told I was the one who had caused the delay by the person who had delayed the most by never ever getting anything done at all. (Needed a database dump from an old system, took 13 months)
I learned my lesson since then, if the number of managers is greater then ONE, RUN LIKE HELL!
Dilbert is wrong. it shows just one pointy haired boss and 4 techies. The reality is a dozen pointy haired bosses and just one techie wondering when he will get around to do some actual work between all the meetings and morale boosting excursions.
I don't think you can fix the problem because the people who have to manage the managers are managers themselves. They CAN'T see the problem, because if they could they would only have one option and that is to fire themselves for having let things out of control and no manager would EVER do that.
Star Wars Galaxy was supposed to be for the PS2 as well as for the PC. And there are some rumours that Age of Conan is to appear on the 360.
If you know either game, you might realize the problem. Memory.
The PS2 wasn't as powerful as PC's of that era, few game consoles ever are. The problem is simple, gamers get the latest intel/amd straight from the factory. But consoles need to be build around whatever tech has been developed. During the development Consoles always seem to be posses godlike powers but in the years they take to get to the market they just end up aging incredibly fast.
Take for instance the game Mass Effect. Play it on a PC. Sure it looks great... does it? Does it really? Don't get me wrong, the art direction is top notch BUT what is with, for instance, the hair? 2000 called, they want their 8 styles of hair should be enough for an entire galaxy back. Why are the levels so insanely small? Surely my PC should be capable of loading all of the presidium in its memory? A simple look at the memory usage confirm it, total memory usage 1 gig, that is with highest textures. 3 gig sitting idle.
And how is that my PC which on paper should be slower can actually play the game with higher rez, higher textures FASTER then the 360? Mine is only a dual core, surely the 360 super chip should be faster? Well no. It simply ain't.
Not that pure speed matters that much, the memory is the simple killer.
SWG back then was a game that ran best if you had 2 gigs of memory. The PS2 had 32 mb (if I remember right). I don't care how much you optomize and gain from not having to run a full OS in the background, that is simply NOT going to fit.
And while console games like Mass Effect can get away with insanely small levels, current MMO's need to be huge. AoC is being critized for being to small already and yet it barely runs on a 2 gig machine ideally needing 4 gig. Imagine how much smaller areas have to be to fit in a consoles memory.
Console games often pull tricks to get around their limitations. A racing game can layout the data in such a way that the next bit of the track is next on the CD/DVD so it can be loaded quickly. Levels contain 1 type of enemy but levels are small so you have low memory requirements but still get diversity.
But MMO's can have 100 people in the same area all in different outfits. All those textures and models need to fit somewhere.
It can be done, but you need to cut corners and be really thight in your design of the game and frankly MMO designers just ain't got what it takes.
All the other stuff the article mentions can be worked around but the simple fact that not a single MMO out there would even fit in the memory of current consoles on lowest setting is the biggest killer.
SOE and others just don't manage to keep the games small enough to run in the limited memory of consoles.
What exactly is subtle about showing up all dressed in white and telling you in front of witnesses "I do"?
Get your wife on here and let her tell how well you read her subtle hints early on, or did she have to knock you out and drag you back to her cave before you caught on that maybe this girl liked you.
Oh, and since you had sex, hand in your slashdot account on the way out. Traitor!
I know that my country holland was one of the most liberal countries in the world and proud of amsterdam being the gay capital.
Now dutch teachers are afraid to discuss homosexuality in class because muslim kids take offence, violently.
Teachers are afraid to teach about the holocaust because of the reaction from muslim kids.
Islam is tearing this country apart because for far too long everyone has tried to cover up any problems. The really bad part is that if this had been dealt with from the beginning their wouldn't be a problem, but now an entire generation of muslim kids has grown up who think they got the right as a minority to dictate how the country should be run.
Make no mistake, some muslims want to introduce Sharia law into this country and are deadly serious about this.
The problem is not the religion itself, we got other extremists here, but the fact that nobody dares to stand up to it.
There is a small religious party that does not allow women to be elected. They are condemned, but when a muslim group suggests that it should be okay to marry at 14, all the powers that be shit their collective pants for fear of offending.
Wilders and others are the voice of the people who are sick to death of this cowardly behavuour and no longer want the problems ignored.
The sad fact is that muslims extremists simply aren't dealt with the same as other extremists and this had led to problems. Take the riots in france, now says that catholics had done the rioting, would the world have been nearly as apologetic? What if it had been blacks? No.
Wilders says a lot of things, but mostly people hear someone who finally is showing a backbone. Don't think Wilders is alone, the socialist SP is riding on the same wave of resentment against how the mainstream has been doing business.
the current goverment only exist because Pim Fortuyn got killed. If he had lived he might well have had the largest party. Wilders is a lot more extreme and people know this, but they hope that he will force the major parties to finally do something and not just bury their heads in the sand.
Slashdot Mirror
Most often when [sic] is used it is meant to show the person being quoted as being too stupid to get it right. "This ain't my mistake, it was the original idiot who wrote it like this". Editors do correct language all the time, it is their job. Unless there is a pressing need to preserve the original quote you shouldn't carry over grammar errors. In the case of asking how babies are formed, there is no need to carry over the errors as there is no value in them. Only quote directly when it is needed.
It should be mandatory viewing because among other things it shows how little real power politicians have.
After all, how long does a general serve compared to a senator? And the general doesn't have to fight a war every 2 years and defeat his rivals.
but the fact that Venus has no signs of life proofs that women do not really exist and are just the results of a fevered imagination. This handily explains why slashdot, a bastion of clear thinking, has no women.
Like his lawyer didn't dress him up and tried to pass him off as a clean living kid who just had a terrible accident happen to him while the angels are crying.
As long as the defence is allowed to lie about their clients attitude the prosecution should be allowed to use the truth to tear those lies down.
The reps get the reputation of being though and so can use it to keep their backers happy. The dems get the rep that they are really against it and would change it if only they could and so keep their backers happy.
US politics has no left and right anymore as far as the major political events are concerned. The entire trick is to keep your own backers happy enough NOT to go voting for a 3rd party or stay home while taking as much of the center as possible.
Look at the current campaign. What is really going to be changed by either side? Nothing.
You cannot have a two party democratic system because it will by the nature of popularity contests (which is what western style democracy really is) always tend to have both parties come together in the middle because that is where the votes are.
The US is not alone to suffer from this. In france they recently had an election with the slogan. "Elect the crook, not the fascist". The voter could only choose between a known corrupt politician and an openly fascist one. Long live big parties, the best way to kill democracy.
I gues tis shoves uz tat te dhing too doe iz zhoot gramaar nazii's on te spoot.
Instead of solving the catchpa they want you to pay up for the payed service that doesn't have the catchpa.
Rapidshare WANTS to delay you and make it hard because the free users just cost them money.
I agree with you, but I am not a big time content producer. I wasn't defending their stance, just explaining it.
With internet ad income the producers would need to finance everything in advance and then just hope the money trickles in over time. There are also issues with advertising. Does an advertiser prefer to air his ads on certain timeslots on tv OR god knows when on a user screen? People on slashdot seem a bit to fond of new tech to be able to see the many difficulties internet ads bring.
TV is also a onetime affair. Want to watch it again, buy the DVD. If it is always available on the internet, why buy the DVD? If you think ad revenues way up against dvd sales, you are just silly.
Where was counterstrike developed? Thanks for playing but you failed at scaremongering.
Sure Oblivion is great but where is the story, the character development, the iron rails I can follow easily towards the end?
Same with games like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment. Choices? Choosing my own destiny? Moral questions? No thanks! FF has its story laid out in front of you, what happens has all been decided. It makes for a far smoother and polished experience.
FF you are playing a movie and some people like that. No, not me, but I also know lots of people don't like Bioware games either.
I take the sexy magical elf babes thank you very much, you can have monkeyboy.
This is about worms and such that spread across the internet, not about trojans and virusses people download. Afterall, I could surfe google for years without ever getting a single virus and go to a .ru site and be infected in seconds.
No, the 4 minutes is for a windows PC directly connected to the internet (no router in between) doing nothing but being connected. What will happen to a lot of people who just bought a new computer and are using a direct connection to the internet like many a cable company offers.
If your connection to the internet has only ONE ethernet port or is a USB modem or something similar this means you.
ADSL typically uses routers in my experience (more then one computer can be connected) and this effectively closes of your PC from the internet meaning it can't be contacted.
Compromising is something you do at the end, you don't do it at the start. Produce as clean a Linux as possible, then at the end when there are no other options remaining you compromise with closed source solutions for the few remaining problems. If you start with the idea that closed source is okay you will soon enough end up not even trying anymore and before you know it you have a horrible mess of closed code that even with the best efforts you can't open up anymore and everyone wondering why you even bother. Proof? Video. Both the cards and video playback. Why did Ati take so long to go open? Why is Nvidia still not doing it? Because they don't want to? no, because they adopted closed source code into their drivers to the point where they can't just opensource their drivers because not all the code is theirs. Why was DVD playback an issue for so long? Because Linux is free and DVD playback isn't. Allow closed source of any kind and sooner or later it will bite you in the ass. Look at MS itself with Flash. They allowed it and now are faced with the fact that the web, their own internet explorer NEEDS a 3rd party tool they don't control to function. Do you think MS is pushing Silverlight because they want this tool? No, it is because they want to break the dependency on Adobe for making the web work. You can see it on linux where you have to jump through hoops to make it Flash work on anything but the most basic install AND because that was allowed it Flash has become bigger and more widespread making Linux even more dependent on having Flash. Without any effort to produce a clean linux at least as the base the OS would pretty soon be just the same a Windows, closed drivers everywhere were you have no idea what the hell what it is doing. Let the compromises happen on the users desktop, not at the developers.
For those who don't know, these free games are all the rage in places like korea. Instead of buying a boxed game and then paying a monthly subscription ala World of Warcraft, you download the game for free and play it for free BUT all the advanced items are not looted or crafted but bought.
The earliest games just made some useful but not-essential items buyable. Buyable but still lootable or at least tradeable. Think Second Life where 1 person buying linden dollars can buy stuff from players who never spend any real cash.
But that isn't profitable enough, so slowly the "buy" items have become more and more essential to play the game beyond the basics.
One example is a game, might be Perfect World, where you get one free sample of a pet. A little pig that picks up loot for you that drops in the world. Handy no? But hardly essential? No, the game drops so much loot that anyone trying to pick stuff up AFTER the free pet has run out will find the game near impossible to play. So where do you get more piggies? From the shop.
And then of course the smart players are going to do a small sum, exactly HOW much do you have to pay each month to play the game succesfully? Oh dear, an amount very similar to the monthly subscription of WoW. Execpt for ONE small problem, that is the MINIMUM sum. You can easily spend more and we all know how addictive these games can become. Blizzard can only charge you the monthly fee, although Blizzard and SOE are learning how to fleece their customer for more, but the Korean games go far further.
Remember all the outcry when console games for the x-box and 360 started charging, one racing game where most tracks and cars had to be bought after you bought theboxed game?
The Koreans go far further.
I don't see this as the future.
Do you REALLY want games entirely designed around selling you items? An RTS where every upgrade for your units has to be paid for, an adventure where puzzle items have to be bought, an RPG where every skill is paid for?
As expensive as single player games have become at least that is a fixed one time charge (oh okay ignoring games like Oblivion) where you know the game can be finished for that amount of money. I really don't want a future in which a company makes its money from me playing the game over and over.
lets not forget also that this means the end of modding. Do you really think that if EA manages to introduce the sale of single pieces of furniture in The Sims that they would allow the countless free mods that exist?
How are you going to sell a FPS with bought items if any modder can add far better weapons?
No, just produce games that are decent value, remove the damn DRM so paying customers ain't punished and accept that perhaps the market isn't in producing the Xth FPS but in producing unique fun games that the people want to pay and play. Remember that the biggest game ever is The Sims. A series that launched WITHOUT drm and allowed open modding and made the company more money then they could ever have dreamed. The PC market is alive and well but you got to stop aiming for the 12yr old boys. I know quite a few The Sims fans and they don't give a shit about buying a new expansion, all they care about is new options to produce free content for EA. That is how you make money. Sell to people willing to pay for your product, not fight a loosing war.
The more you run away from it, the closer you get to it. So now things are as inevitable as Death, Taxes and C.
A frightful three-some indeed.
Yeah right. You got extreme right and extremist right and that is it.
Far left in the US, what a joke.
Oh and what you are basically saying is that Obama should become yet another middle of the roader, neither left nor right. That doesn't work, it only leads to the slow ruin the US is currently experiencing.
It doesn't really matter if a country is run by the left or the right as long as they stick to it. Try to appease everyone and you end up with a complete mess.
Lets hope it is not as bad as that one shall we? Don't look forward to WW3 at all even if it is my best chance of getting laid if I manage to be the only male survivor.
Your argument kind of depends on the idea that the "west" or the US in particular could have done anything different to stop groups from hating them. It sounds sensible until you use your argument at a lower level of violence. Rape. Basically you would say to every raped woman that she brought it on herself because she provoked the rapists. True enough in a sense, if only she hadn't been there, if only she had brought friends, if only she hadn't been a woman. There are those who hate just for the sake of hating. Some people argue that Muslims are the new bogyman now that the soviet union has collapsed, there is some truth in this BUT what is often forgotten by racists (like you) is that other groups need their bogyman as well. The USA wasn't the only one to fight the soviet union and rise to power because of it. Look at the history of Al Quada with the collapse of the soviet union and the earlier retreat by them from Afghanistan all of sudden they had to prove that they could run a country without being able to blame anyone. If certain western groups need a bogyman then so do other groups. The trick to doing this succesful is to ride on resentment already there and build it up out of all proportion. Take for instance the occupied terretories in Israel, you won't be able to find a single muslim who doesn't think that is wrong. Ask them about the Kurds, about Marokko occupation of the Sahara, the various dirty wars fought my Muslims in Africa like Dafur and plenty of others and most won't even know what they hell you are talking about. It is all to easy for so called moderate folks to become outraged at something while very ably turning a blind eye towards equal or even greater evils. Japan, who still pretends to be the victim of the atom bomb, but never ackknowledging their countless human right violations that forced the use of that bomb. Germans crying over Dresden never mentioning that the civilians who died happily supported (or at least took no action to stop it) the bombing of dozens of other cities. There are two risks. First is that you do NOT blind yourself into thinking your own actions are "right" and everyone else is wrong BUT also to not blindly assume that others are right and your own "side" is wrong because of that. If you look at the history of this conflict you start to realize that on all sides (there are far more then just two interested parties) there is careful manipulation going on. Sadly the western media and cry babies such as you are a bit to scared or racist to allow the other side the same level of deviousness as you think western leaders have. Exactly how does a goat herder in pakistan ever hear of a danish cartoon? Answer me that and you will have come a lot closer to understand just how this conflict is working.
And testers and designers. Basically every bad project I ever been involved in always was managed to death. Or rather, not so much managed to death as starved of actual work because if the managers actually managed the few people who do the actual work could get it done. Rather the abundance of managers keep the people who actual code/design/test from doing their bloody job. The problem is not unique to IT. I worked in a lot of different fields and seen it elsewhere, with more and more managers who come from outside the field they are supposed to manage you loose the awareness that the factory floor is where it happens. Simple example, warehouse. Double the order, so just work overtime. After all the suits do overtime no problem so why not the people in the warehouse? Because the suits start an hour late, have constant coffee breaks, 2 hour lunches, leave an hour early and only do overtime for an hour? The people in the warehouse start an hour early got only official breaks and do overtime for 4 hours doing back breaking work? It is a simple disconnect between the factory floor and the office and the same happens in IT except that it is even more hidden because all you see of a programmer/tester/designer is someone who is sitting behind a desk, so how hard can it be? I had one memorable project that was so bad it even reached the front page of a serious newspaper and had the company that bought the company it happened to take legal steps because they had been misled were at one point I was NOT just the only programmer but had also been lumbered with keeping the servers running despite having NO experience whatsoever with it. And when I complained I was told I was the one who had caused the delay by the person who had delayed the most by never ever getting anything done at all. (Needed a database dump from an old system, took 13 months) I learned my lesson since then, if the number of managers is greater then ONE, RUN LIKE HELL! Dilbert is wrong. it shows just one pointy haired boss and 4 techies. The reality is a dozen pointy haired bosses and just one techie wondering when he will get around to do some actual work between all the meetings and morale boosting excursions. I don't think you can fix the problem because the people who have to manage the managers are managers themselves. They CAN'T see the problem, because if they could they would only have one option and that is to fire themselves for having let things out of control and no manager would EVER do that.
Star Wars Galaxy was supposed to be for the PS2 as well as for the PC. And there are some rumours that Age of Conan is to appear on the 360. If you know either game, you might realize the problem. Memory. The PS2 wasn't as powerful as PC's of that era, few game consoles ever are. The problem is simple, gamers get the latest intel/amd straight from the factory. But consoles need to be build around whatever tech has been developed. During the development Consoles always seem to be posses godlike powers but in the years they take to get to the market they just end up aging incredibly fast. Take for instance the game Mass Effect. Play it on a PC. Sure it looks great... does it? Does it really? Don't get me wrong, the art direction is top notch BUT what is with, for instance, the hair? 2000 called, they want their 8 styles of hair should be enough for an entire galaxy back. Why are the levels so insanely small? Surely my PC should be capable of loading all of the presidium in its memory? A simple look at the memory usage confirm it, total memory usage 1 gig, that is with highest textures. 3 gig sitting idle. And how is that my PC which on paper should be slower can actually play the game with higher rez, higher textures FASTER then the 360? Mine is only a dual core, surely the 360 super chip should be faster? Well no. It simply ain't. Not that pure speed matters that much, the memory is the simple killer. SWG back then was a game that ran best if you had 2 gigs of memory. The PS2 had 32 mb (if I remember right). I don't care how much you optomize and gain from not having to run a full OS in the background, that is simply NOT going to fit. And while console games like Mass Effect can get away with insanely small levels, current MMO's need to be huge. AoC is being critized for being to small already and yet it barely runs on a 2 gig machine ideally needing 4 gig. Imagine how much smaller areas have to be to fit in a consoles memory. Console games often pull tricks to get around their limitations. A racing game can layout the data in such a way that the next bit of the track is next on the CD/DVD so it can be loaded quickly. Levels contain 1 type of enemy but levels are small so you have low memory requirements but still get diversity. But MMO's can have 100 people in the same area all in different outfits. All those textures and models need to fit somewhere. It can be done, but you need to cut corners and be really thight in your design of the game and frankly MMO designers just ain't got what it takes. All the other stuff the article mentions can be worked around but the simple fact that not a single MMO out there would even fit in the memory of current consoles on lowest setting is the biggest killer. SOE and others just don't manage to keep the games small enough to run in the limited memory of consoles.
What exactly is subtle about showing up all dressed in white and telling you in front of witnesses "I do"?
Get your wife on here and let her tell how well you read her subtle hints early on, or did she have to knock you out and drag you back to her cave before you caught on that maybe this girl liked you.
Oh, and since you had sex, hand in your slashdot account on the way out. Traitor!
I know that my country holland was one of the most liberal countries in the world and proud of amsterdam being the gay capital.
Now dutch teachers are afraid to discuss homosexuality in class because muslim kids take offence, violently.
Teachers are afraid to teach about the holocaust because of the reaction from muslim kids.
Islam is tearing this country apart because for far too long everyone has tried to cover up any problems. The really bad part is that if this had been dealt with from the beginning their wouldn't be a problem, but now an entire generation of muslim kids has grown up who think they got the right as a minority to dictate how the country should be run.
Make no mistake, some muslims want to introduce Sharia law into this country and are deadly serious about this.
The problem is not the religion itself, we got other extremists here, but the fact that nobody dares to stand up to it.
There is a small religious party that does not allow women to be elected. They are condemned, but when a muslim group suggests that it should be okay to marry at 14, all the powers that be shit their collective pants for fear of offending.
Wilders and others are the voice of the people who are sick to death of this cowardly behavuour and no longer want the problems ignored.
The sad fact is that muslims extremists simply aren't dealt with the same as other extremists and this had led to problems. Take the riots in france, now says that catholics had done the rioting, would the world have been nearly as apologetic? What if it had been blacks? No.
Wilders says a lot of things, but mostly people hear someone who finally is showing a backbone. Don't think Wilders is alone, the socialist SP is riding on the same wave of resentment against how the mainstream has been doing business.
the current goverment only exist because Pim Fortuyn got killed. If he had lived he might well have had the largest party. Wilders is a lot more extreme and people know this, but they hope that he will force the major parties to finally do something and not just bury their heads in the sand.
Until you observed it.
She sorta knows already (damn you got a small freezer) now get home so I can hear me 500.000 for today!