The human race has always had two types, the herders and the solo players. It needs them both. It needs people to go out and explore. To dare to do new things that are not (yet) accepted by the mainstream. But those people in turn depend on the non-explorers, the followers.
The kids who are listening to the latest popular music are followers just like their parents are. They are following a different style of music but they are just as much part of the mainstream. The explorers are to far ahead. They are the ones experimenting with new types of music to far ahead to be followed. Some of it will get picked up by the mainstream, some will not.
You still seem not to understand a basic simple rule of the human tribe. There are very few rebels because being a rebel is about being alone and the human herding instinct is too strong in many of us. How can you be a rebel if you are doing exactly the same as your parents? Rebelling is doing something different. If the majorirty of childeren truly rebelled then why does nothing ever change?
But you need us arrogant assholes just as I need cattle like you. Of course the funny thing about cattle is that it never realises it can be as blindy arrogant as us pompous assholes. That is why I am laughing at you. I see you stampeding straight into the slaughter house. Have fun being a good little rebel on the human production line. You are doing exactly what the world demands of you.
The first thing anyone with at least some social skills should learn is how to ask in the local language if that person speaks another language.
Just starting to babble in your own language to someone who may or may not speak it is the hight of impoliteness. You always ask in the local language wether someone else speaks your language or another mutual language. How am I supposed to know that your speaking god knows what or even asking me a question? You might be warning me that I am about to step into some dog shit or a nutcase.
The only exception perhaps is english in holland. You can pretty much take it for granted that nobody in the world speaks dutch and english is pretty much a second language to us. We also don't really mind, we are a small nation in a big world and either we speak english or become like the french. Easy choice eh?
Anyway this is all about speaking in the real world. Personally I think it would greatly help if people tried to speak in english on the net. Why? Esperanto or whatever is deader then dead dodo on the day of the dead. Bury it already. The net is about exchanging information easily and accross the world. Bit hard if we are going to keep up the existing language barriers. Imagine if everyone on/. posted in their local language. It would die an instant death. Most amazing are the anti-socials who go to an english forum then post a question in their own language and wonder why no-one responds.
Countries have said this before and some even are following through but usually it happens before Gates visits. This happens after a visit and an alarmist speech AND it hasn't worked at all.
Poor MS. Why if this continues they may actually have to concentrate on selling a good product rather then scare the customer into staying with them. I am crying for all the MS coders who will loose their jobs, ignore the hysterical laughter that is just my way of showing grief. Really.
Anyone know the travelling plans of IBM or Novell or Sun or HP?
First of oled are not yet perfected, secondly all the companies are bitterly fighting with each other. Products being held back can only happen in relatively static conditions where all the players have a intrest in maintaining the current balance.
In electronics there is no such interest. The market for displaying things is huge. More and more things around the house have displays and who ever can make the cheapest/nicest can have a significant advantage.
But for now LCD is not yet dead. The screen size of oled is still low (sure it is going up but so is lcd). What you are suggesting is that the CRT was holding back the LCD. Or the tv industry the computer screen or the paper/dotmatrix industry the tv-screen industry.
Just because sony is having troubles doesn't mean oled isn't happening. As others have pointed out there are plenty of devices out there. I remember when camera's came with CRT viewers instead of the new fangled LCD. Nothing stopped the LCD except the tech and nothing will stop OLED except the tech. To many players who would love to get the holy grail of a cheap clear brilliant display.
So you still don't get the joke, by rebelling they are not rebelling so by not rebelling you are rebelling.
It is like people wanting to break traditions, except people been doing it so much that breaking traditions has become a tradition so the real way to break tradition is to stop breaking them.
If you can't get your head around this kinda logic I think you are still one of those kids who think they are rebelling by buying music targgetted at them by big companies to get the kids pocket money. Anyone who listens plays these games and think they are a rebel is in fact being a good little consumer. If a music style is popular enough to be used in mainstream media then it has become mainstream and anyone listening it is a member of the herd. There are no rebels in a herd just mindless cattle following where the cowboy (company executive) wants them to go. The real rebels have already moved on.
Sports are not about being the best
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Is Math A Sport?
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· Score: 1
They are about keeping the least of the street. If a person is any good in math they will be far to busy to bother with a non-paying event like the olympics. Only "special" members of our society needed sponsored jobs.
Well until the b-ark is finished.
What the olympics bringing peace and understanding? HA, you must never have watched the reports in them. The olympics have lost all value if they ever had one with them being hosted by the nazi's 2x, at least hitler waited with killing jews until after the olympics were over. The munich they did it during and it just went on because all of the sporters wanted their chance to win gold. In the tour de france you get "memorial" events like the team mates of person who died being allowed to finish first as a team or them all walking accross the finishing line. Not in the olympics. If even one had turned down the medal and given it instead to the killed israelis then the olympics could have had some meaning. Now it shows sports for what it is. A bunch of glory hunting selfish bastards.
Add the boycotts and it doesn't even work on a political level. Peace and understanding except if the game is held by your enemey?
Maths an olympic event? What has math done to be punished that badly.
Oh yeah that is rich. Reminds me of all those people who tried to be hip or whatever by doing a rap and being extremely bad at it. Politicians were probably the worst. You get some upper-clas white woman in a suit who never worked a day in her life or ever had to live it hard trying to be a pretend rapper. Sad.
Game programmers ain't much better. As someone said this is as real as Vanilla Ice.
As for how effective it is. Well the posts comments on how the 35 yr olds are just a small segment. Perhaps. But so are the 25-35 and 35+ segments. So are all the 0-25 who just don't like rap/hip-hop/streetcred. By focussing on one group that seems to be "in" at the moment you risk alienating all the rest. Just ask MTV.
I used to give this example and while it isn't entirely true anymore it still works. Look at the top ten most successfull films of all time and count the number with "classical" music and those with music that was current at the time.
Each generation needs their own kind of music to be able to rebel against those who came before. Nothing new there and nothing to worry about except that possibly one day we are going to run out of new music but then we can just start again. One day youths on the streetcorner will be grooving to beethoven and old folks passing by will say "shame in our day we listened to real music and what are these kids of today wearing, suit? Tie, a HAT? and look at his pants, they are not even down to the knees!".
Anyway I think that any game that attempts streetcred by including the current "hip" music and street talk is as pretend as a hollywood movie doing the same. You know that is just marketing by some 40yr old in a suit and the only ones stupid enough to think that playing these games gives you real street cred are exactly the people the 40yr old wants to reach. Middle-class white boys who want to show they are hard but still live at home with mommy and get daddy to pay their bills.
Funny how kids always think they are rebbelling by doing exactly what all the other kids are doing. Wouldn't it be a real rebbelion for a kid not to rebel? (I am as anti-social as they come and so the herding instinct is extremely low in me. I don't conform. Ever. Not even by not conforming. Doesn't make me better but it does give me some laughs when I see poor little rich kid gangsta's.)
What does looking glass DO. I seen the demo and am totally unimpressed. That CD catalog thing was just sad. Oh wow, I can see the pictures of the cd's I got in some kind of weird layout. Yeah that will show winamp. Music playing on the pc is background noise, just create a long playlist and play. Real audio fans would recoil in horror at the idea of listening to audio from a soundcard.
As for browsing music there got to be a better interface then this. I would be far more impressed with a player that can browse by mood, instruments used (In the mood for some sax right now:P) etc etc. An interface that allows me to browse cd covers on my desktop is not needed. I got the cd's, I can browse them just fine in the physical world.
The organising of windows too seemed just to be little tricks and gadgets, it been tried before and people just don't use it after the novelty wears off.
There should be a better way to organize your desktop but I seen to many of these "fancy badass" things in my past to hold out much hope. The current desktop been around a long long time and while horrible if it gets occupied I don't see this helping any. Just look at the space taken up by just 5 windows "shaded".
duh, try to pay attention, Kid plays violent game, grows up and becomes a criminal. Same with pot, masturbation and rock music.
Of course what really happened was that the kid grew up to be stupid blind and deaf. A teenager infact. Now computer games also ensure they are virgins. You should think that makes the republicans happy.
So what is their dream again?
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To create music and perform? Or to get filthy rich?
Sounds to me they just want to become filthy rich by making music and performing. Good luck to them but that doesn't make them to me real artists. Real artists would be real artist even if they got to keep their day job.
Most major artist (depends on what you call major) might tour just to promote but even there it is not true, a program of the bbc examined the incomes of various artists and the live performances were often a good source of income except for a few who went overboard.
BUT the fast majority of artists make their living doing just live. A record is a bonus. Remember real artists are not created by a records comany, they do not have a single out before their first concert. Real artists start performing at the local pub and are just another worker getting paid for showing up and doing their job.
Well they also suffered from other issues. MULTIPLE issues. Like say me never having seen them in shops (except the lynx ages ago). Matters since you can't buy things not being sold.
But as I said battery life is going to be important. Hopefully sony will realise this.
I do have some hopes however. Lets not forget that sony knows about portables. It created more battery operated gizmo's then nintendo has games. Unless they are completly screwing it up I think that the battery life is not going to be as insanely bad as in the other "color handhelds".
I like what they did with a mini-disc player I have. It has an internal rechargable but for extra play time you can screw on a battery pack. (carries 2 AA)
Sleek for "normal" use. Long playtime when needed. They know it works.
If sony can avoid the well known pitfalls, lack of games, lack of sale points, battery life, then the price difference and the lack of the gigantic back catalog are not going to be as big an issue as many here seem to think I think.
The GBA graphics are nothing to write home about, the games are fun to play and I enjoyed it. But for my next gen when I get the choice between "playeble" graphics on a "I am not a 12 yr old anymore with 20-20 vision" GB screen or the gigantic (or using really small hands in the photos) screen of the PSP I don't think my choice is going to be that hard.
There were 3 sides I remember all happily killing each other. Serbs kroats and muslims. There really wasn't a right or a wrong side except that this is not how the media likes it so it pretty soon became "poor muslims" and "bad serbs" with some "slightly poor kroats but not as bad as the serbs" thrown in. The reality was that they all were trying to exterminate the others and the serbs were just a little bit better at it. (being natural allies of the russians (russians don't like kroats == nazis and muslims (I can't help but feel the russians are rolling on the floor laughting at americas problems in iraq and aghanistan))
The kroats have recently admitted that they too killed muslims and the various investigation around the dutch "protected" muslims enclaves showed that this enclace (wich fell and where thousands where slaughterd) was also used by muslims warriors (making it a legal military target (not legal of course to slaughter captured muslims) to the serbs and convincing the serbs the UN was really not an unbiased outsider seeking to restore peace but their enemy.
And in all this trouble someone goes to play a game of chess (for big bucks) creating endless propaganda oportunities? His hosts where committing genocide and you don't think his actions were criminal?
God I like to see the world when guys like you are in charge. Provided I can be a safe distance away. Like the next galaxy. People like you are the people who said we should protect the kurds from saddam by sending in troops and imposing santions, then that the santions were harming iraq and should be lifted, then that the lifted sanctions didn't stop iraq from going after the kurds and then that no troops should be used.
I think I spotted what you really want. You want to whine. You are a woman. You just want to whine about the world troubles. Not have them fixed.
Either law is enforced or there is no law
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Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 1
It is not like anyone sane would deny that some nasty stuff happened in Yugoslavia. Embargo/santions were put in place to try to stop it. Do they work? Ask Nelson Mandella or Fidel Castro. Yes and No they will probably answer.
BUT unless you want to use the two other options (ignore or war) then you got to enforce embargo's/santions. Even 12 yrs later. Just as you got to prosecute war crimes 10 20 50 100 yrs later if you can.
What you are saying makes some sense except the law of santions still is effect, it just doesn't apply to that area of the world anymore. It is kinda like you getting out of speeding ticket because the temporary speed limit is no longer in effect on the day of your trial. I suggest you don't try this cause you will be laughed out of court.
Also the point is hardly moot. Sanctions are in use today and will be in use in the future. Unless you want to remove the existince of santions and leave only ignore and war as the UN options you can't let sanction busting going on.
Embargo's are used when you want to convince someone to stop doing something by limiting their access to something. You use them when direct force is not an option.
It is "popular" to use against nations that aren't very nice to their own people or other people if for what ever reason war is not an option. Note how many of the "america is so evil" crowd say that the UN should have had more time to use santions to get Saddam to behave.
There can be various forms of sanctions, goods travel and cultural. Goods is easy, close the borders and stop them importing and exporting. Except medice cause that would be inhumane and the resources they need to export to pay for the medicine imports and farm equipment cause you can't have them starving. And food exports to pay for the farm equipment, to process they food they need chemicals etc etc etc. Pretty soon the goods embargo is merely on paper and trade happens as before. Either you have a complete ban or you don't have a ban at all. A complete ban means going after any breaking the embargo no matter how small or how big.
Travel is the same but in the modern world travel is not really needed. After all most of these "bad" countries would like their people not to travel.
Cultural however is really hard, cause it is a propaganda war. Having a country effectivly banned from sports, arts and entertainment affects the local population far more directly (people can do without imported clothes if the country is any size, but having the national soccer team banned from the EK can cause riots). Sanction busters like this Fisher asshole are also used by the local goverments as propaganda tools. So a guy like him is way more damaging then a fuel truck slipping by.
Either you enforce an embargo or there is no point. Of course the world could have just ignored yugoslavia except most people where saying that the world should do something.
So yes it is a big deal. Tell me would you be as big hearted if say exxon sold some oil to the serbs? Chess players don't play for kicks, they get paid big bucks to even show up. More if they win.
Anyway I wonder what fishers excuse is against the muslims killed in yugoslavia by his hosts or is that the jews fault as well. His kind somehow manages to blame everything on someone else.
Funny how hypocryt people are
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 2, Informative
All the people against the iraq war was saying america wasn't giving the UN and its sanctions a chance. Now the UN is going after a sanction buster and the same people are crying foul.
Sanction like this have been used before against south-africa. Put the country into total isolation and hope that this will become to big a burden to bear.
Does it work? Well it doesn't for cuba and north-korea (wether it is right or not is another discussion) but it worked in South-Africa.
But if a sanction is going to work it got to be complete. It is sorta like any law. You can have a speeding law but let person X speed because going after just one guy isn't "nice".
There was an embargo, he broke it, he goes to jail. That is was "merely" a chess game is exactly the point. This was a cultural embargo. The entire point of it is to make it very clear to the people inside the embargo that they are no longer welcome in the world unless they learn to behave.
There are just three choices to deal with countries that are "misbehaving", ignore/santion/war. All of them been tried and all failed and succeeded. If you can come up with a better one be sure to tell the world. But at least be consistent. You don't want embargo/santions and don't want war. Then don't whine ever again about something nasty happening to population X by population Y.
Doesn't help this guys case that he is a nutter. There won't be much of a public outcry cause as soon as he opens his mouth people will be on the opposite side. Oh well couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
The GBA frankly has a tiny screen, the GB was impossible to see. They where cheap and cheerfull so kids got them and adults played with them BUT there also wasn't really anything else out there. Sure others tried but they got multiple things wrong, idiotic battery life, gigantic size, small library of games, limited availabitlty.
The PSP next to the DS however shows the PSP as having a far far far far superior screen. Will that matter? Well yes. IF sony can avoid the mistake of the "also ran" portables. Can it improve the battery life. Does it have a decent library of games. Isn't the big screen immensly vulnarable. Are the graphics on that big screen not going to disappoint.
The price issue is moot, just look at THE mp3 player. iPod is easily the most expensive and Apple just can't ship them fast enough. People got money but can sony make the PSP into a gPod? They sure weren't able to make the iPod despite the fact they invented the walkman.
The really big threat to the PSP is that it will be to restricted. Playing movies on it sounds nice but watching my pvr recorded tv on it that I didn't have time to watch at home on my way to work instead sounds far more usefull. Especially in the more public transport using areas of the world.
The DS has the background of a winner line but could also suffer badly from over confidence. We put up with the crappy screen of the GBA because the alternatives sucked even worse. But if the PSP is sitting in the shelves next to it I fear Nintendo might get an ugly wakeup call.
Just that I seen to many frontpage/asp sites that where so badly made by kids (people younger then me) that I tend to generalize and put all asp people in the same basket. Not right but it saves time. There are plenty of wrong PHP sites as well but at least PHP doesn't have extensions built into it that are windows only.
I seen this problem before, the trick is hardly unknown. And yet there seems to be very little movement in people switching browsers. Sure a lot of noise is made about it here but just look at the statistics. How much did IE loose in a recent/. story? 1% wasn't it. OH WOOPIE. That was right after one of the biggest security hits in the history of computing (several regular sites being used to steal information and forward it to criminals) that was only stopped because it was to successfull and the receiving server was overloaded.
Of course I don't know if the guy with the problem has an IE only site, I was only speculating, but I have argued this point in the past with customers and employers and it rarely gets across. I found that the only way to reliable create a cross-browser site is if I am the person in control and then to just do it. Don't mention it, it doesn't cost any extra so no need for the customer ever to known his brand new site works with every graphical browser on every OS (well linux windows and OS-X) and can even be used with links. (lynx is harder)
I never ever had a customer or employer ask for cross-browser compitabilty let alone cross-platform.
My answer nowadays when people ask me about obvious MS caused spyware/trojans/virusses/bugs. "I don't know."
I used to recommend firebird or opera. And everytime I get repaid by having them complain to me that site X doesn't work anymore. Worse when I used to remove spyware they complained about their missing desktop toys. I only did that a couple of times. Waste of time.
Fat people don't listen to advice on diets, drunks don't listen to advice on not drinking, windows users don't listen to advice on security. If they did they wouldn't be fat drunk windows users.
BUT you could restore my faith in mankind, well womankind at least. Did your customer switch browser? I bet my cynisism against a shred of hope for the human race she didn't.
He is very shy mentioning his business so lets presume it is not something big like a bank asking this. Just a tiny webshop trying to survive. Sure they could be courageos and suggest people install a real webbrowser instead of the bug collection known as IE but very few people are brave. It would be like a shop deciding to charge for parking (no return of parking fee with a purchase in the shop) and tell people to take the bus instead.
Making sure your web application works in most browsers is ofcourse sound advice but requires you to hire programmers and designers who know their business. You would be suprised to learn how many sites are setup by some frontpage kiddie. Or worse ASP kiddie. Ugh. They wouldn't know about cross-browser capabilitie if you hit them with the IE open-bug log.
And they would be spending all their time telling their client that IE is the default browser and that coding for the others is not worthwhile because if they don't they are out of a job. As to the market share of Mozilla and others. Supermarkets in holland are involved in a prize fight over 0.1% market shares. Denying browsers other then certain IE versions is like turning away full percentages of customers at the door. Doesn't make sense does it to fight for fractions and then refuse them entry.
Frankly there is no solution, if this tech manager has made sure that his web page can be accessed in every browser (if he hasn't he is beyond help anyway). He can't force his clients to switch browser (clients with a clue will have switched by now and no business can survive turning away the clueless braindead zombies that are still on IE), he can't stop spyware, he can't ask his clients to install something like vnc (or ensure that vnc isn't killed by spyware). He is screwed. Maybe he should sue MS for putting him out of business and costing jobs. Closed source IE costing jobs. Oh well, it made me laugh.
you compile/build the blue print to get the exe/car. This is more like a parts list, or the remains of the car after being squashed. Or perhaps anologies just don't work when taken to far:)
We only just send dutroux to jail for life AND a special extra sentence that should mean that even if he gets parole he still doesn't get out (In dutch it is called TBS Ter beschikking stelling and means you are sentenced to follow treatment that basically last until your cured)
So finally after years a horrible pedo case comes to a conclusing and only a few days later another emerges. A frenchman living in belgium (same country as dutroux) is turned in by his wive (the wive of dutroux got a very hefty sentence for not helping the killed childeren or reporting anything to the police) and he so far confessed to 9 killings.
You got some horrible cases in holland and some nasty ones in holland. People here are very ready for such a scheme.
of course it is all pointless. All the horrific things could have been reduced if the goverment had just been doing it jobs and the cry babies had kept their mouth shut. All of the killers had been well known to the police but somehow failed to be put in jail for life even after raping kids before.
This scheme in japan won't stop them if the criminals caught emerge 2 yrs later from jail, move to another area and aren't known to the local police.
In england a conviced child molester was hired AS A TEACHER. He of course killed two kids and noone in charge of the screw up has so far been shot for being a waste of space.
So my solution, send child molesters to the chair but after you kill all the cry babies who insist people should be allowed to rape two kids. (that is what a second chance amounts to, pedophilia can't be cured, pedo's themselves who know they are in jail for life with no chance out no matter how much they lie admit this.)
Oh and if you insist even these scum deserve a second change since they are now "healed" I have a simple solution. Fine they are let out BUT if they ever offend again you go to the chair with them. Oh you aren't willing to bet your life on the fact they are really cured? Why should someone else bet their kids life on it then? Put your life where your mouth is or shut the fuck up.
The combat droids are a total waste in melee AKA tanks as they don't last anytime against creature. Once you gotten at least basic melee skills you can tank better. Doesn't make them useless, with basic melee it can take a long time and the robots do do damage and don't take xp but I found even when playing and not grinding it doesn't take long to go from 4-th brawler to master melee. For marksman they are slightly more usefull because while they aren't good tanks they are at least better then a novice marksman or even a midlvl rifleman.
The droid repair works and with 2 combat droids and master creature handler I was a one man army. Small snag, useless. 1 minute to call them all out. So only worked in really prepared raids. Most hunts had people dying left and right while I was still calling my pets.
Try again Sony. Combat droids are to expensive and too fragile. Once you can afford them you don't need them. Also the batteries run out to fast and the colors fade to early.
Stimpack droid. Talk about a totally useless piece of crap. They can only carry the lowest stims available and those are really low. Even the lowest medic who bought some stim-b can heal much much better then these droids. they don't work on their own, like healing anyone in range or even heal those who gone down. Crap. just Get novice medic buy a crate of stim-b and heal youreselve. You can't heal youreselve of course but neither can the droid.
Scout droid, capable of harvesting resources from creatures. Well it can't loot so it is useless for this purpose. The harvesting doesn't give XP so it is only usefull for those who don't need scout XP and for some reason are not close enough to the corpse to harvest. Riflemen are the only ones who can use it. Get the harvest droid and pets out. Set the pets to attack and lie down at optimal range and shoot away. Then as the critter goes down target next, set pets and you attacking the new critter then target the corpse and get the bot too harvest. Why not harvest immidiatly as the critter goes down? Cause there is a frigging long delay before the command is spoken and the droid responds. All this time you are not attacking the enemy.
Sony seems to have a real fear of making things to powerfull. Both the medic and harvest droid could have been extremely usefull if sony had dared to give them some AI. In star wars R2-D2 saves the day. In SWG he is a retard who can't do shit.
No, I tried it recently and quit recently. I only seen a few publishes and none added anything good. The droids I explained, the image designers are up in arms, just try it, see how long it takes to lvl up. Oh play the game while leveling up. That is damn hard. Only thing you can is change lipstick and hair color and only then the most basic colors. Even on very busy servers I seen nobody who wanted it even if they had to wait 30 minutes for a more advanged ID to change their stats (a few were kind enough to allow me to experiment on them since it doubles the XP from 50 to 100 but that still takes 1 min in the tent, 5000 xp needed for second box / 100 == 50 min just to get the second box.)
The only "fun" things outside combat (wich if you are not into PvP isn't that exciting, how many times can you kill the same enemy) is creating things. However there is far to little use in creating nice items. Just look at armor, composite is what everyone wants. Some are smart enough to use ubese since critters don't do anything but kinetic damage but all the other armours are useless. Useless in stats. the 10% resists they give does not make up for the horrible stat damages.
Weapons, nothing to make nice about here.
Furniture. A tiny handfull bother. The rest have empty houses.
Clothes. Again only a tiny handfull care. To many just running around in their underpants.
No SWG was a nice idea and while I played it it was fun, but never fun because of excellent game design or anything sony did. Fun because I was playing with fun people. Then again I could play IRC triviant with these people and it is fun.
To me it seems that sony is determined to take all the fun out of SWG.
Let them get infected, let them loose valuable data they can't recover. Let them suffer in misery and let them come to you on their knees to please safe them. THEN TURN THEM AWAY.
Well unless you like being blamed for the rest of your live for every IE only site and everytime they can't get those free icons and other spyware toys.
Everyone with even the slightest clue has switched by now. The ones remaining on IE are the true dumbshits and the diehard fans. They can't be saved or even want to be saved and if you try they will only resent you for it.
The best linux/firefox advocate does not try to convert people, we are not christians or muslims. There is no bible saying we have to convert the unbelievers. (I think jews are forbidden and don't know about other religions)
The best linux/firefox advocate just keeps working while all the windows users are running around patching and let the few windows users with a brain who still haven't gotten the message figure it out themselves.
Of course once people have realized that they need to switch THEN YOU GIVE THEM ALL THE HELP THEY NEED AND YOU CAN GIVE. But then they will be wanting your help. You won't be forcing it upon them. If you don't believe me just ask youreselve how much you like unsolliceted advice.
Lets try it shall we, you should ditch windows and linux and run minix instead, it got zero exploits. Like it?
Slashdot Mirror
The kids who are listening to the latest popular music are followers just like their parents are. They are following a different style of music but they are just as much part of the mainstream. The explorers are to far ahead. They are the ones experimenting with new types of music to far ahead to be followed. Some of it will get picked up by the mainstream, some will not.
You still seem not to understand a basic simple rule of the human tribe. There are very few rebels because being a rebel is about being alone and the human herding instinct is too strong in many of us. How can you be a rebel if you are doing exactly the same as your parents? Rebelling is doing something different. If the majorirty of childeren truly rebelled then why does nothing ever change?
But you need us arrogant assholes just as I need cattle like you. Of course the funny thing about cattle is that it never realises it can be as blindy arrogant as us pompous assholes. That is why I am laughing at you. I see you stampeding straight into the slaughter house. Have fun being a good little rebel on the human production line. You are doing exactly what the world demands of you.
Just starting to babble in your own language to someone who may or may not speak it is the hight of impoliteness. You always ask in the local language wether someone else speaks your language or another mutual language. How am I supposed to know that your speaking god knows what or even asking me a question? You might be warning me that I am about to step into some dog shit or a nutcase.
The only exception perhaps is english in holland. You can pretty much take it for granted that nobody in the world speaks dutch and english is pretty much a second language to us. We also don't really mind, we are a small nation in a big world and either we speak english or become like the french. Easy choice eh?
Anyway this is all about speaking in the real world. Personally I think it would greatly help if people tried to speak in english on the net. Why? Esperanto or whatever is deader then dead dodo on the day of the dead. Bury it already. The net is about exchanging information easily and accross the world. Bit hard if we are going to keep up the existing language barriers. Imagine if everyone on /. posted in their local language. It would die an instant death. Most amazing are the anti-socials who go to an english forum then post a question in their own language and wonder why no-one responds.
Poor MS. Why if this continues they may actually have to concentrate on selling a good product rather then scare the customer into staying with them. I am crying for all the MS coders who will loose their jobs, ignore the hysterical laughter that is just my way of showing grief. Really.
Anyone know the travelling plans of IBM or Novell or Sun or HP?
In electronics there is no such interest. The market for displaying things is huge. More and more things around the house have displays and who ever can make the cheapest/nicest can have a significant advantage.
But for now LCD is not yet dead. The screen size of oled is still low (sure it is going up but so is lcd). What you are suggesting is that the CRT was holding back the LCD. Or the tv industry the computer screen or the paper/dotmatrix industry the tv-screen industry.
Just because sony is having troubles doesn't mean oled isn't happening. As others have pointed out there are plenty of devices out there. I remember when camera's came with CRT viewers instead of the new fangled LCD. Nothing stopped the LCD except the tech and nothing will stop OLED except the tech. To many players who would love to get the holy grail of a cheap clear brilliant display.
It is like people wanting to break traditions, except people been doing it so much that breaking traditions has become a tradition so the real way to break tradition is to stop breaking them.
If you can't get your head around this kinda logic I think you are still one of those kids who think they are rebelling by buying music targgetted at them by big companies to get the kids pocket money. Anyone who listens plays these games and think they are a rebel is in fact being a good little consumer. If a music style is popular enough to be used in mainstream media then it has become mainstream and anyone listening it is a member of the herd. There are no rebels in a herd just mindless cattle following where the cowboy (company executive) wants them to go. The real rebels have already moved on.
Well until the b-ark is finished.
What the olympics bringing peace and understanding? HA, you must never have watched the reports in them. The olympics have lost all value if they ever had one with them being hosted by the nazi's 2x, at least hitler waited with killing jews until after the olympics were over. The munich they did it during and it just went on because all of the sporters wanted their chance to win gold. In the tour de france you get "memorial" events like the team mates of person who died being allowed to finish first as a team or them all walking accross the finishing line. Not in the olympics. If even one had turned down the medal and given it instead to the killed israelis then the olympics could have had some meaning. Now it shows sports for what it is. A bunch of glory hunting selfish bastards.
Add the boycotts and it doesn't even work on a political level. Peace and understanding except if the game is held by your enemey?
Maths an olympic event? What has math done to be punished that badly.
Game programmers ain't much better. As someone said this is as real as Vanilla Ice.
As for how effective it is. Well the posts comments on how the 35 yr olds are just a small segment. Perhaps. But so are the 25-35 and 35+ segments. So are all the 0-25 who just don't like rap/hip-hop/streetcred. By focussing on one group that seems to be "in" at the moment you risk alienating all the rest. Just ask MTV.
I used to give this example and while it isn't entirely true anymore it still works. Look at the top ten most successfull films of all time and count the number with "classical" music and those with music that was current at the time.
Each generation needs their own kind of music to be able to rebel against those who came before. Nothing new there and nothing to worry about except that possibly one day we are going to run out of new music but then we can just start again. One day youths on the streetcorner will be grooving to beethoven and old folks passing by will say "shame in our day we listened to real music and what are these kids of today wearing, suit? Tie, a HAT? and look at his pants, they are not even down to the knees!".
Anyway I think that any game that attempts streetcred by including the current "hip" music and street talk is as pretend as a hollywood movie doing the same. You know that is just marketing by some 40yr old in a suit and the only ones stupid enough to think that playing these games gives you real street cred are exactly the people the 40yr old wants to reach. Middle-class white boys who want to show they are hard but still live at home with mommy and get daddy to pay their bills.
Funny how kids always think they are rebbelling by doing exactly what all the other kids are doing. Wouldn't it be a real rebbelion for a kid not to rebel? (I am as anti-social as they come and so the herding instinct is extremely low in me. I don't conform. Ever. Not even by not conforming. Doesn't make me better but it does give me some laughs when I see poor little rich kid gangsta's.)
As for browsing music there got to be a better interface then this. I would be far more impressed with a player that can browse by mood, instruments used (In the mood for some sax right now :P) etc etc. An interface that allows me to browse cd covers on my desktop is not needed. I got the cd's, I can browse them just fine in the physical world.
The organising of windows too seemed just to be little tricks and gadgets, it been tried before and people just don't use it after the novelty wears off.
There should be a better way to organize your desktop but I seen to many of these "fancy badass" things in my past to hold out much hope. The current desktop been around a long long time and while horrible if it gets occupied I don't see this helping any. Just look at the space taken up by just 5 windows "shaded".
So exactly what functionaty does it give?
Of course what really happened was that the kid grew up to be stupid blind and deaf. A teenager infact. Now computer games also ensure they are virgins. You should think that makes the republicans happy.
Sounds to me they just want to become filthy rich by making music and performing. Good luck to them but that doesn't make them to me real artists. Real artists would be real artist even if they got to keep their day job.
BUT the fast majority of artists make their living doing just live. A record is a bonus. Remember real artists are not created by a records comany, they do not have a single out before their first concert. Real artists start performing at the local pub and are just another worker getting paid for showing up and doing their job.
But as I said battery life is going to be important. Hopefully sony will realise this.
I do have some hopes however. Lets not forget that sony knows about portables. It created more battery operated gizmo's then nintendo has games. Unless they are completly screwing it up I think that the battery life is not going to be as insanely bad as in the other "color handhelds".
I like what they did with a mini-disc player I have. It has an internal rechargable but for extra play time you can screw on a battery pack. (carries 2 AA)
Sleek for "normal" use. Long playtime when needed. They know it works.
If sony can avoid the well known pitfalls, lack of games, lack of sale points, battery life, then the price difference and the lack of the gigantic back catalog are not going to be as big an issue as many here seem to think I think.
The GBA graphics are nothing to write home about, the games are fun to play and I enjoyed it. But for my next gen when I get the choice between "playeble" graphics on a "I am not a 12 yr old anymore with 20-20 vision" GB screen or the gigantic (or using really small hands in the photos) screen of the PSP I don't think my choice is going to be that hard.
The kroats have recently admitted that they too killed muslims and the various investigation around the dutch "protected" muslims enclaves showed that this enclace (wich fell and where thousands where slaughterd) was also used by muslims warriors (making it a legal military target (not legal of course to slaughter captured muslims) to the serbs and convincing the serbs the UN was really not an unbiased outsider seeking to restore peace but their enemy.
And in all this trouble someone goes to play a game of chess (for big bucks) creating endless propaganda oportunities? His hosts where committing genocide and you don't think his actions were criminal?
God I like to see the world when guys like you are in charge. Provided I can be a safe distance away. Like the next galaxy. People like you are the people who said we should protect the kurds from saddam by sending in troops and imposing santions, then that the santions were harming iraq and should be lifted, then that the lifted sanctions didn't stop iraq from going after the kurds and then that no troops should be used.
I think I spotted what you really want. You want to whine. You are a woman. You just want to whine about the world troubles. Not have them fixed.
BUT unless you want to use the two other options (ignore or war) then you got to enforce embargo's/santions. Even 12 yrs later. Just as you got to prosecute war crimes 10 20 50 100 yrs later if you can.
What you are saying makes some sense except the law of santions still is effect, it just doesn't apply to that area of the world anymore. It is kinda like you getting out of speeding ticket because the temporary speed limit is no longer in effect on the day of your trial. I suggest you don't try this cause you will be laughed out of court.
Also the point is hardly moot. Sanctions are in use today and will be in use in the future. Unless you want to remove the existince of santions and leave only ignore and war as the UN options you can't let sanction busting going on.
It is "popular" to use against nations that aren't very nice to their own people or other people if for what ever reason war is not an option. Note how many of the "america is so evil" crowd say that the UN should have had more time to use santions to get Saddam to behave.
There can be various forms of sanctions, goods travel and cultural. Goods is easy, close the borders and stop them importing and exporting. Except medice cause that would be inhumane and the resources they need to export to pay for the medicine imports and farm equipment cause you can't have them starving. And food exports to pay for the farm equipment, to process they food they need chemicals etc etc etc. Pretty soon the goods embargo is merely on paper and trade happens as before. Either you have a complete ban or you don't have a ban at all. A complete ban means going after any breaking the embargo no matter how small or how big.
Travel is the same but in the modern world travel is not really needed. After all most of these "bad" countries would like their people not to travel.
Cultural however is really hard, cause it is a propaganda war. Having a country effectivly banned from sports, arts and entertainment affects the local population far more directly (people can do without imported clothes if the country is any size, but having the national soccer team banned from the EK can cause riots). Sanction busters like this Fisher asshole are also used by the local goverments as propaganda tools. So a guy like him is way more damaging then a fuel truck slipping by.
Either you enforce an embargo or there is no point. Of course the world could have just ignored yugoslavia except most people where saying that the world should do something.
So yes it is a big deal. Tell me would you be as big hearted if say exxon sold some oil to the serbs? Chess players don't play for kicks, they get paid big bucks to even show up. More if they win.
Anyway I wonder what fishers excuse is against the muslims killed in yugoslavia by his hosts or is that the jews fault as well. His kind somehow manages to blame everything on someone else.
Sanction like this have been used before against south-africa. Put the country into total isolation and hope that this will become to big a burden to bear.
Does it work? Well it doesn't for cuba and north-korea (wether it is right or not is another discussion) but it worked in South-Africa.
But if a sanction is going to work it got to be complete. It is sorta like any law. You can have a speeding law but let person X speed because going after just one guy isn't "nice".
There was an embargo, he broke it, he goes to jail. That is was "merely" a chess game is exactly the point. This was a cultural embargo. The entire point of it is to make it very clear to the people inside the embargo that they are no longer welcome in the world unless they learn to behave.
There are just three choices to deal with countries that are "misbehaving", ignore/santion/war. All of them been tried and all failed and succeeded. If you can come up with a better one be sure to tell the world. But at least be consistent. You don't want embargo/santions and don't want war. Then don't whine ever again about something nasty happening to population X by population Y.
Doesn't help this guys case that he is a nutter. There won't be much of a public outcry cause as soon as he opens his mouth people will be on the opposite side. Oh well couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
The PSP next to the DS however shows the PSP as having a far far far far superior screen. Will that matter? Well yes. IF sony can avoid the mistake of the "also ran" portables. Can it improve the battery life. Does it have a decent library of games. Isn't the big screen immensly vulnarable. Are the graphics on that big screen not going to disappoint.
The price issue is moot, just look at THE mp3 player. iPod is easily the most expensive and Apple just can't ship them fast enough. People got money but can sony make the PSP into a gPod? They sure weren't able to make the iPod despite the fact they invented the walkman.
The really big threat to the PSP is that it will be to restricted. Playing movies on it sounds nice but watching my pvr recorded tv on it that I didn't have time to watch at home on my way to work instead sounds far more usefull. Especially in the more public transport using areas of the world.
The DS has the background of a winner line but could also suffer badly from over confidence. We put up with the crappy screen of the GBA because the alternatives sucked even worse. But if the PSP is sitting in the shelves next to it I fear Nintendo might get an ugly wakeup call.
Just that I seen to many frontpage/asp sites that where so badly made by kids (people younger then me) that I tend to generalize and put all asp people in the same basket. Not right but it saves time. There are plenty of wrong PHP sites as well but at least PHP doesn't have extensions built into it that are windows only.
Anyway still plenty of time to go.
I seen this problem before, the trick is hardly unknown. And yet there seems to be very little movement in people switching browsers. Sure a lot of noise is made about it here but just look at the statistics. How much did IE loose in a recent /. story? 1% wasn't it. OH WOOPIE. That was right after one of the biggest security hits in the history of computing (several regular sites being used to steal information and forward it to criminals) that was only stopped because it was to successfull and the receiving server was overloaded.
Of course I don't know if the guy with the problem has an IE only site, I was only speculating, but I have argued this point in the past with customers and employers and it rarely gets across. I found that the only way to reliable create a cross-browser site is if I am the person in control and then to just do it. Don't mention it, it doesn't cost any extra so no need for the customer ever to known his brand new site works with every graphical browser on every OS (well linux windows and OS-X) and can even be used with links. (lynx is harder)
I never ever had a customer or employer ask for cross-browser compitabilty let alone cross-platform.
My answer nowadays when people ask me about obvious MS caused spyware/trojans/virusses/bugs. "I don't know."
I used to recommend firebird or opera. And everytime I get repaid by having them complain to me that site X doesn't work anymore. Worse when I used to remove spyware they complained about their missing desktop toys. I only did that a couple of times. Waste of time.
Fat people don't listen to advice on diets, drunks don't listen to advice on not drinking, windows users don't listen to advice on security. If they did they wouldn't be fat drunk windows users.
BUT you could restore my faith in mankind, well womankind at least. Did your customer switch browser? I bet my cynisism against a shred of hope for the human race she didn't.
Making sure your web application works in most browsers is ofcourse sound advice but requires you to hire programmers and designers who know their business. You would be suprised to learn how many sites are setup by some frontpage kiddie. Or worse ASP kiddie. Ugh. They wouldn't know about cross-browser capabilitie if you hit them with the IE open-bug log.
And they would be spending all their time telling their client that IE is the default browser and that coding for the others is not worthwhile because if they don't they are out of a job. As to the market share of Mozilla and others. Supermarkets in holland are involved in a prize fight over 0.1% market shares. Denying browsers other then certain IE versions is like turning away full percentages of customers at the door. Doesn't make sense does it to fight for fractions and then refuse them entry.
Frankly there is no solution, if this tech manager has made sure that his web page can be accessed in every browser (if he hasn't he is beyond help anyway). He can't force his clients to switch browser (clients with a clue will have switched by now and no business can survive turning away the clueless braindead zombies that are still on IE), he can't stop spyware, he can't ask his clients to install something like vnc (or ensure that vnc isn't killed by spyware). He is screwed. Maybe he should sue MS for putting him out of business and costing jobs. Closed source IE costing jobs. Oh well, it made me laugh.
you compile/build the blue print to get the exe/car. This is more like a parts list, or the remains of the car after being squashed. Or perhaps anologies just don't work when taken to far :)
So finally after years a horrible pedo case comes to a conclusing and only a few days later another emerges. A frenchman living in belgium (same country as dutroux) is turned in by his wive (the wive of dutroux got a very hefty sentence for not helping the killed childeren or reporting anything to the police) and he so far confessed to 9 killings.
You got some horrible cases in holland and some nasty ones in holland. People here are very ready for such a scheme.
of course it is all pointless. All the horrific things could have been reduced if the goverment had just been doing it jobs and the cry babies had kept their mouth shut. All of the killers had been well known to the police but somehow failed to be put in jail for life even after raping kids before.
This scheme in japan won't stop them if the criminals caught emerge 2 yrs later from jail, move to another area and aren't known to the local police.
In england a conviced child molester was hired AS A TEACHER. He of course killed two kids and noone in charge of the screw up has so far been shot for being a waste of space.
So my solution, send child molesters to the chair but after you kill all the cry babies who insist people should be allowed to rape two kids. (that is what a second chance amounts to, pedophilia can't be cured, pedo's themselves who know they are in jail for life with no chance out no matter how much they lie admit this.)
Oh and if you insist even these scum deserve a second change since they are now "healed" I have a simple solution. Fine they are let out BUT if they ever offend again you go to the chair with them. Oh you aren't willing to bet your life on the fact they are really cured? Why should someone else bet their kids life on it then? Put your life where your mouth is or shut the fuck up.
The droid repair works and with 2 combat droids and master creature handler I was a one man army. Small snag, useless. 1 minute to call them all out. So only worked in really prepared raids. Most hunts had people dying left and right while I was still calling my pets.
Try again Sony. Combat droids are to expensive and too fragile. Once you can afford them you don't need them. Also the batteries run out to fast and the colors fade to early.
Stimpack droid. Talk about a totally useless piece of crap. They can only carry the lowest stims available and those are really low. Even the lowest medic who bought some stim-b can heal much much better then these droids. they don't work on their own, like healing anyone in range or even heal those who gone down. Crap. just Get novice medic buy a crate of stim-b and heal youreselve. You can't heal youreselve of course but neither can the droid.
Scout droid, capable of harvesting resources from creatures. Well it can't loot so it is useless for this purpose. The harvesting doesn't give XP so it is only usefull for those who don't need scout XP and for some reason are not close enough to the corpse to harvest. Riflemen are the only ones who can use it. Get the harvest droid and pets out. Set the pets to attack and lie down at optimal range and shoot away. Then as the critter goes down target next, set pets and you attacking the new critter then target the corpse and get the bot too harvest. Why not harvest immidiatly as the critter goes down? Cause there is a frigging long delay before the command is spoken and the droid responds. All this time you are not attacking the enemy.
Sony seems to have a real fear of making things to powerfull. Both the medic and harvest droid could have been extremely usefull if sony had dared to give them some AI. In star wars R2-D2 saves the day. In SWG he is a retard who can't do shit.
No, I tried it recently and quit recently. I only seen a few publishes and none added anything good. The droids I explained, the image designers are up in arms, just try it, see how long it takes to lvl up. Oh play the game while leveling up. That is damn hard. Only thing you can is change lipstick and hair color and only then the most basic colors. Even on very busy servers I seen nobody who wanted it even if they had to wait 30 minutes for a more advanged ID to change their stats (a few were kind enough to allow me to experiment on them since it doubles the XP from 50 to 100 but that still takes 1 min in the tent, 5000 xp needed for second box / 100 == 50 min just to get the second box.)
The only "fun" things outside combat (wich if you are not into PvP isn't that exciting, how many times can you kill the same enemy) is creating things. However there is far to little use in creating nice items. Just look at armor, composite is what everyone wants. Some are smart enough to use ubese since critters don't do anything but kinetic damage but all the other armours are useless. Useless in stats. the 10% resists they give does not make up for the horrible stat damages.
Weapons, nothing to make nice about here.
Furniture. A tiny handfull bother. The rest have empty houses.
Clothes. Again only a tiny handfull care. To many just running around in their underpants.
No SWG was a nice idea and while I played it it was fun, but never fun because of excellent game design or anything sony did. Fun because I was playing with fun people. Then again I could play IRC triviant with these people and it is fun.
To me it seems that sony is determined to take all the fun out of SWG.
Well unless you like being blamed for the rest of your live for every IE only site and everytime they can't get those free icons and other spyware toys.
Everyone with even the slightest clue has switched by now. The ones remaining on IE are the true dumbshits and the diehard fans. They can't be saved or even want to be saved and if you try they will only resent you for it.
The best linux/firefox advocate does not try to convert people, we are not christians or muslims. There is no bible saying we have to convert the unbelievers. (I think jews are forbidden and don't know about other religions)
The best linux/firefox advocate just keeps working while all the windows users are running around patching and let the few windows users with a brain who still haven't gotten the message figure it out themselves.
Of course once people have realized that they need to switch THEN YOU GIVE THEM ALL THE HELP THEY NEED AND YOU CAN GIVE. But then they will be wanting your help. You won't be forcing it upon them. If you don't believe me just ask youreselve how much you like unsolliceted advice.
Lets try it shall we, you should ditch windows and linux and run minix instead, it got zero exploits. Like it?