I don't get it. Dell is famous for crap support an
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Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't get it. Dell is famous for crap support and yet people keep buying from them. Don't respond with "dell gave me great support" I am not talking about you. I am talking to the people that keep coming back to have their asskicked.
I always hear it from people that tech support doesn't help at all. Then why do you buy from those companies and not from some local shop were you get support in person? Cause dell offers phone tech support. ARGH.
Personally I rarely use tech support in fact the only calls in a years time were to my isp to get a new password. Simple stuff and still it took a good ten minutes.
Outsourced tech support is known to be crap. They get paid per call not by satisfied customer. Anyone with a single braincell can then figure out what kinda personal they want. It is also easy to figure out the kinda callers they desire. Idiots that can be made to call time and time again but for short calls.
Until people start voting with their dollars and take their business elsewhere companies like dell will see nothing wrong and keep outsourcing their tech support with the same pay per call contracts.
No some games don't need it and some gamers don't want it. I didn't mean to imply that say UFO Aftermath and Silent Storm or even the orignal UFO games needed it. I mean't to say that a saving grace for this game might be that it offers multiplayer.
As a single player game it can't compete against the new games, S2 just beats if on all fronts except install size and price. But it has an extra angle, multiplayer, that can give it its own little niche. It would be kinda nice to finally solve the "who is a better player" question.
I personally can't blind type properly (real typist look neither at the screen or the keys but at the input). I only use a few of my fingers mostly the index and the thumbs. But if I am at an odd angle and can't see the keys I notice that once I find the first correct one I can type with one hand without error (bash cli not english). Of course for this I use the feel of the keys. A is very easy to find because of the gap between A and caps lock.
That is what these people are complaining about I guess. Personally my typos are due my amazingly bad spelling. I hit the right key it just isn't the right letter.
What they are missing is that a physical keyboard takes up a lot of space. A projected keyboard is very small, the size of a pen I think:), and is therefore far easier to take with you.
Some people just don't seem able to think outside their own frame of reference. Oh that is not how I use my pc so it must be useless.
I doubt this will see the light of day as it is far easier to fit this into a regular form pda and therefore a lot cheaper. But it is an intresting idea. The main part of the computer is perhaps handing from you belt. You take a pen sized object from you pocket unroll it like a miniature projection screen (thanks to those flexible screens they been promising us) a keyboard is projected from the top and voila, instant workstation. Beats a laptop anyday for those who are on the move and need fast and easy access for short times.
First of I liked the real time element in X-com apocalypse so be warned.
The orignal UFO Enemy Unknown (only infidels know it as x-com) was a classic game. I played the demo to bits. You were in charge of a single base and a hand full of soldier, scientist and engineers. Your job. Stop the increasing alien incursions. Your crap started crap with crap equipment and no idea of who you faced. But as you gained experience in battle you retrieved both bodies and weapons and even live aliens who your scientist could research and whose technology your engineers could copy.
of course as your weapons increased so did the alien incursions so you were in a constant arms race.
The strategic element was mostly realtime (time stopped when making money decissions) but the combat was turnbased. The graphics were good for the day but will probably cause permenant damage to your eyes today.
More importantly was that you had real tactical capability. Alien sniping you from a window? Shoot a rocket through the wall behind and catch him in the cross fire. You could start fires and smoke them out. Brilliant.
UFO enemy from the deep put it all at the bottom of the sea. Essentially more of the same it was a bit disappointing.
X-com apocalypse (the infidels having won the naming war) added an optional real time element. Your soldiers carried out your order but also could take some action for themselves. No longer did you have to target and pull the trigger on each and every alien. Put the squad in good positions and just watch the alien attack being grinded down. Of course if you did it wrong your soldiers would be scrambling for cover while trying to defend their assigned positions. Even more brilliant.
Then....... nothing. Well there was x-com in space and x-com the fps but they were crap.
Fans had given up.
So it is no wonder the some fans wanted to make their own game. That is what the post is about. Nice work. Except. They are too late sort of. UFO Aftermath dumped the turnbased style but forgot to inherit the AI for your soldiers. This left you with soldiers who get totally confused when the enemy does something as cunning as walk behind a lightpole and then happily get slaughtered. It was the worst of both turn-based (your soldiers being idiots) and real-time (to much going on to keep track of).
But rescue was close by. Silent Storm is pure turnbased but added a shitload of extra features the most important totally destructable scenery in an excellent engine. Fans soon discovered that hidden features included the geoscope from the original UFO games making it only a matter of time before a mod will be done.
So is there room for this game? Well. It is the first to add multiplayer. If they get this to work, it ain't in the demo, then they have a reason for being. Without it they can't compete against S2.
Their graphics are barely acceptable. They lack a lot of options like crawling. The soldiers seem unable to see or target behind a small pillar.
Had it been released a year ago it would have been great. Now it might be great fun in multiplayer mode only.
Don't get me wrong. It is a fun game to play. Just if you played S2 then it just can't compete in single player mode.
True, I thought he meant laser eye surgery not lenses. My bad. Just that people keep suggesting it since a company doing it was doing an ad campaign. Apart from the cost there is a risk (small) that your eye sight goes even worse. Not worse as in -6 but worse as in partially or completly blind. Eeek.
Someone build a fun new plane they have succesfully tested. Not some toy model but fully functional jet plane that can take of and land and is easily controlled by remote.
And what is the reaction? Oh it will never fly, it did fly. It is to unstable to control, they did control it and without a crash. Now most/. stories have a lot of uninformed opinions but usually there are at least a couple of people who happen to know what they are talking about. Where are the pilots today?
The thing does fly, wether it is safe with a human on top remains to be seen. But the aircraft without the pilot is not that different from a simple flying wing design. Flying wings are hardly new.
What is different is the placement of the payload. In the movie she lies down flat on top of it and stands on it. Most flying wing designs put the payload inside the wing.
First of laying on top of it. While this would be the most logical thing to do (look at a commercial airliner and replace the tube of the fuselage with a human body same idea) and not disrupt the aircrafts stability you would be just a passenger since there are no traditional controls (some way to move the ailerons) and you would be unable to affect the aircraft much with a shifting in weight (yes hanggliders can but the pilot is farther away from the wing making a small movement have a bigger effect). Depending on the size of the final aircraft you would also have to be carfull not to let the feet dangle in front of the exhaust. A running jet engine is not something you want to be close too. (carrier crew member around?).
Standing on top of it would create a huge amount of drag but would be doable. It is hardly a new stunt to stand on the wings of an aircraft. Don't forget that even the scale model is hardly small. The final aircraft would be pretty normal in wingspan to existing single seaters. As for controlling the aircraft in this way. Unless the aircraft is naturally very close to stable but not to stable I think it would be hard. Airliners are designed to be stable and the aircraft needs constant pressure to change its flightpath from straight and level. An F16 is extremely unstable and can only be flown by a computer. The pilot only telling the computer what the desired attitude is.
Both are not exactly designs you would want to control by shifting weights around. All but hanggliders control flight by altering the shape of the wing (correct me if I am wrong). This might be the hardest thing to do. BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE. If the aircraft can be made stable enough of its own then a mere shifting of weight should affects its flightpath. Only direct control you can't do without is a throttle.
Moving between lying down and standing up would also significantly alter the profile of the aircraft. Unless the final aircraft is so big that the change in drag is meaningless.
I am not a flight engineer but I do have an avid intrest in flight and am the kinda idiot that devours books and docu's on flight pioneers. I think the makers of this plane know a lot more about flight then me and the people that have reacted so far.
There are cheap stores with cheap frames but they offer a very small selection.
In more upbeat stores frames are closer to designer clothing. You pay because the costs of designing a new model is only spread over a few models. Ford Focus costs less then say the latest ferrari and that ain't just the cost of manufacturing.
But yes for those in need a single frame design in a couple of sizes (for different size heads) is not that expensive. Just ask any army that used to issue soldiers with glasses. Or for that matter look at the cost of sunglasses.
How about those of us who rather were glasses or contact then having someone cut at our eyes with a laser? -5 ain't so bad as being blind thank you very much.
But seriously this guy made two wonderfull inventions. They now collect "old" glasses to send to third world but this is a logistics nightmare.
Imagine a simple jeep outfitted with these inventions doing the rounds in poor areas. Put the tester on and voila few minutes later a pair of glasses. 1 day per village. Couple of jeeps. Shouldn't take long at all (after all it is not like glasses need to replaced that often, even in the west once a year is good enough even for still growing kids).
As far as I know it ain't the material that is costly in glasses but the whole distribution process. Plenty of bargain chains around that can offer really really cheap glasses due to scale and not offering specialist lenses. This looks even cheaper for hard to reach areas.
We had those scratch cards first. They were sold in places like supermarkets. But "Albert Heyn" a rather big supermarket chain now does it differently. All its cash registers are hooked up to a system so that the number is now printed on your receipt. The ultimate last minute ordering system. 0 second delivery and 0 stock.
Should be trivial to add support to the system ALREADY in place at that supermarket for game subscriptions. Other stuff could benefit as well.
As for going it globally, no worries. That supermarket chain is pretty big, you probably shop at one owned by them. Stuff like this is also hardly new. Think about lottery sales. Public Transport tickets (maybe unique to holland) and other stuff that essentially involves you buying a piece of paper to indicate you bought something else from a third party.
and their would always be several funny cars that did the weirdest thing. Two citroen CV (ugly ducking) fronts put back to back so the car could drive either way. A volkswagen that would break in the middle (disney probably would sue if they knew about it). A daf (dutch car extremely cheap) with a rolls royce nose. Essential? Hardly!
Fun and perfectly normal? Of course. Several of my old relatives were tinkerers. Their cars never went to the garage they fixed them themselves. Good luck doing that with the black boxes you got nowadays.
Opensource is back to the days when you could FIX your tv, replace parts of your washingmachine, tune your own car. I can't really think of any product outside computers that I am not allowed to mess around with to my hearts content. Sure I void the warranty but I got the choice.
Why should drivers be any different? They are an essential part of the hardware yet they are completly closed. I find it odd.
So is it bad that Intel wants to release binary only? Well yes. No it is not the end of the world but if a company comes along that offers full opensource drivers I will buy them.
And not just for the OSS of it. I buy from Intel a hardware solution. What kind of stuff are they pulling in the software that is so secret? Is the centrino in reality like those winmodems? (probably not of course but I wonder with video cards)
Don't tell me that these games (the good bits meaning the none dungeon crawling bits) weren't inspired by "Saving private ryan" and "Band of brothers".
At least it is not the old interactive movie crap.
And script writing for games is very very hard. In movies the audience is passive. In games the audience is supposed to be in some kind of control.
I hate the movie script of Max Payne. I am in a warehouse killing bad guys left and right without any worries about police procedure. Then I hear a couple of thugs holding someone hostage. So what happens? Control is taken away and ME does something really really stupid and gets the hostage killed. BAD writing. It could work in a movie but in a game I AM MAX PAYNE and I am not an idiot.
OFP Resistance has the main character constantly whining about how he hates wars and really doesn't want to fight. Yes nice speech. Except I am supposed to be the character and I bought a war game. Spare the pacifism and lets go shoot someone. (when are we getting a war game in wich units can surrender? (and that ain't hex-based))
This has been true for all games with a story. How to make sure the personality of the player and the character in the game match. Dramatic plot twist like the dead of a character are the proven elements in a movie but hard to do in a game apparently. All somehow seem determined to make it integrate with the players action. Wing commander, you kill all the baddies in a second yet still your wingmate buys the farm. Doesn't matter how good or bad you are, it is scripted and she dies. BAD
The better way? Make it happen outside the PERCEIVED area of control of the player. You and her go on different patrols. You hear her patrol being ambushed and change course to intercept. As you come closer you hear more messages until you are close and the patrol is wiped out. Far less frustating I think, a really good script writer could improve it of course.
System Shock worked well for me since all the plot happened before you arrived on the scene. So people fighting and dying is totally outside your control yet you still can have the plot of finding out about a desperate struggle. But all the deaths are outside your characters control.
People who loan money because the intrest is lower then what they get on their own money don't need loans. These are the kinda loaners banks like, people with money. The real cash strapped those who have no choice (in america you need a car to work) but to take out a loan those are the ones the banks hate. They have special goverment backed city banks here to give out loans to those the bank refuses. You know loans to buy a washing machine. Essential stuff but a bad risk for banks.
From reading the original post it is pretty clear the guy ain't rich and the advice I give is standard advice given out by all consumer groups. Car financing is expensive. If it is at all possible save some money and instead go for a real bank loan for the rest. Non-financing loans have lower interest and are not tied to your car so they can't just reposses meaning you loose the car even though you paid half. With a normal bank loan the car is yours fully paid. You now just got a debt with the bank but at least you own the car. Save as much you can every 100 bucks not borrowed is money you don't have to pay intrest over. Of course I know that saving anything when poor is hard but this guy sounds like an adult.
Offering advice isn't condenscending. Consumer programs constantly tell people this because those offering finance deals never tell the truth but are really good at selling. But I suppose they should mind their own business too.
Biggest problem for me with current mmo games is that I don't have a credit card. Had a case of bad debt and although it is now paid off and I make a decent income I am reluctant to make a debt again no matter how small. Cash and debet only please.
There are other reasons as well. As a dutch person I am used to free debet cards. Why should I pay a bank to hold my money? So no CC for me and for plently of others. How many kids can use their parents credit card outside the US?
Selling the game instead through stores would solve all that. Mobile phones really took off with prepaid cards. There is now even a very simple infrastructure in place for that. You go the cash register and say the phone brand you want and how many minutes. The receit has a special code printed on it that you can use to upgrade your phone. Flawless.
So why not the same for games? It would also solve that pesky problem of charge backs.
In order to break this system those spam you received would have to have been send by someone those people know. Not just send to a lot of people you know that is in fact what would tip the system something is wrong.
I send you and your sister a spam. While both of you are getting the spam, to both of you I am an unknown and therefore the system would flag me. ONLY if I send the spam to you while pretending to be your sister would the system break. I would need to know both your email and the email of someone you know. This would not be impossible to harvest with virusses stealing addressbooks but is not what is currently happening. Currently email address lists used by spammers are very simple flat text files. Of course nothing complex would be needed. Simply a similar text file but now with two emails per line. The first the recipient, the second the person to forge as the sender. Simple but more work.
So it looks like a pretty clever idea. Especially for work place email where most mail is by people you know and very little email from outside usually arrives. And even when it is done it is usually from a known domain namely a client or supplier.
Will it work? Who knows. Gotta be worth a try. Unless you want to wait for Bill Gates to fix it. We all know how well the security problems in windows were fixed eh?
There is not going to be a magic bullet that fixes spam. We will just have to use a lot of ordinary lead ones. Don't worry Bush says they are safe.
Slashdot certainly has its share of sensationalist headlines that are usually just over the top but sometimes completly different from what the actually linked stories tell. As for some of the comments by the originals posters. Ouch. Tabloid doesn't even begin to describe it.
The problem you describe is however hardly isolated to america. It happens around the world. Here in holland we used to have an tv news program at 8 o'clock on the first channel (we only had one when I grew up then two and now three). It was reasonably good proffesional guy in suit telling the news headlines with a bit behind. Not terribly deep but you got what had happened and could read the indepth stuff in next days newspaper.
What has changed. Well first of all it has gotten shorter not just in pure time but the opening jingle and ending credits have become longer, they have a summary at the beginning and end wich each take about a minute from what is now 15-20 minutes. They extended weather and now always have some human intrest stuff. I remember that during heavy suicide bombings in Israel they had a 5 minute piece on the royal family opening some art show. Good grief. The final killer is that they took the presenter from the childeren news (used to be very good, the biggest real news stories explained a bit more with simpler language or complex words explained) and got all the other presenters to use her language.
To describe the news here now is impossible. CNN is better. At least they don't talk to me in kid speak. Americans complain that american news is biased. It is perhaps. So is dutch news. Doesn't matter if the news is pro-israel or pro-palenstine. They are both biased and not telling the thruth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
You know what the really funny thing is? All this dumbing down was to get more viewers. Tiny little detail? The old news was often the most watched program, not well watched. ONE in the ratings. Now viewing figures are down. So they are dumbing down even more to attract more viewers.
Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall.
There are enough FACTS about saddam to make him out to be the second coming of hitler. He DID start a horrible war with Iran (with american backing). He did gass koerds (with gas made with western equipment and materials). He did kill anyone who disagreed with him and everyone close to them.
So a very nasty fellow. But focussing on the history of nastyness by Saddam would have prompted question as why nothing was done about it before. Who was supporting him while he was doing it and how the hell he got into power in the first place.
All questions america rather would not answer.
So WMD it was. As a reasonably intelligent person I can see what the real reason was. Saddam was like the guard dog that had snapped and had to be put down. Nasty and perhaps better care should have been given but this is the real world not some pacifists lala land.
For me and apparently you the reasons that saddam was a loose cannon with same very nasty habbits was enough. For many others it wasn't.
How does this relate to the hiding or falsyfing scientific evidence? Very closely. Instead of just saying, well yes lead is bad but so is making thousands of people jobless and we need the lead, they instead make up fancy reports saying lead ain't bad at all. It insults people like you and me but the people who elected him swallow it hook line and sinker.
Oh he was elected by a majority of americans. To remain silent implies consent and the majority of voters remained silent therefore consenting to bush. Still no option, "none of the above", I guess.
Poster should have spellchecked but poster is a lazy bastard
Would you have preffered if you had been given the loan at say twice the interest rate? Carsloans are often not paid fully. If they can't reclaim the car then it is people like you who do pay of their loans who pay for it. So either you pay the car for every person who doesn't fullfill their contract or you take this device.
Yes it sucks for you and quite frankly this is the first I heard about such a thing. Then again if this is the sixth car you buy on a loan and it is a used car might I suggest that you set off every alarm bell at every finacial institution? You need the loan (I presume) because you don't have the money. Banks hate this. They want to be sure they get their money back plus interest. They don't like to take a gamble. Not even with a used car.
Oh and this might be rude but since you don't sound young (sixth car and all) can I suggest that you now start saving so you can buy the next car cash or with only a small bank loan instead of financing. Yes saving is hard but it will save you lots of money in the long run. Do the math sometime. You could probably have bought a new car of the paid interest.
Piracy still exists in all its forms. No a luxury liner or cargo ship doing the run between america and europe or cruising the coastal waters of these countries is safe. That is because these waters are heavily patrolled by extremely powerfull ships that nobody but a goverment can afford.
But in the east piracy still happens exactly as it happened in the time of sailing ships. Sure the movies may have shown pirate ships with three decks of cannons taking on the british navy but that is fiction. Most pirates used small fast ships wich could out manouver their prey (don't forget that canons of those days were more or less fixed and you needed to move the entire ship to aim) and then board and overwhelm the largely civilian crew.
This is still the way it goes. Pirate ships have gotten smaller but then most civilian ships these days are totally unarmed anyway and their crews have gotten smaller.
Piracy of a different sorts exists in areas where drug running takes place where pleasure yachts(?) are captured and the owners forced to smuggle drugs or simply killed.
For the facts on piracy today search google with "piracy lloyds" (lloyds is a famous insurance company) you will find countless links talking about the costs, the risks and people offering protection. The lloyds bits helps keeping the filesharing "piracy" links down.
So I agree with the judge who might have said that calling filesharing piracy is wrong. Piracy is a current and far different crime.
The hardware platform doesn't matter much but there has long been a fascination in the computer world with running everything from one CPU. This has left the cpu as the bottleneck and a very hot and expensive bottleneck too.
However there are some minor signs this may be changing. Most of this is rumors but I think the X-box2 and the new gameboy are both going have more then 1 cpu. Plenty of phones already have more then 1 cpu to spread the load of the increasing demands of the software on them. All the chipmakers seem to be working on putting more then one CPU on a single core.
So if phone companies, console makers and chip companies think it is the way of the future why not for consumer appliances?
Think about it, exactly how much cpu power is needed to decode a video stream when a cpu can be dedicated to that task and nothing else? You don't need to go with a SMP like setup. You can simply have one simple processor wich does all the interface stuff. One wich decodes the video. Another perhaps wich decodes the sound. All geared and dedicated to their specific task. Costly? Well to a certain point this is already how PC's work. GPU for visuals. Soundcard for ehm sound.
Of course such a board will be far more expensive to design then a simple board you pick up of the shelf. With consumer electronics like this still extremely unproven the cost may be too high. Until then simply accept the bigger size and other bad points of PC architecture. Have you ever seen the first generation tv's? Video records? Mobile Phones? Etc Etc? They all had one thing in common. THEY WERE HUGE. Hell the first pocket transistor radio's were so big that the sellers had special shirts with enlarged pockets. (got it from an interview with sony people years ago I am sure someone else can better tell this anecdote).
Why did the browser war happen. What did MS have to gain and why should we care.
MS doesn't seem to care about a lot of different programs made by third parties for the Windows OS. You don't see MS trying to compete with Photoshop and the like. 3D animation programs or IRC programs. So what is different with browsers.
Once the web was a total free for all. Everyone could run a site and everyone could visit them. This was in the days when universities owned the net. It was good and peacefull and cheerfull mess and it wasn't making a profit.
Some companies didn't like this and they wanted to create a different net. The PORTAL net. You would have a home page from wich you would start every browsing session and from there navigate to things that might be of intrest and more importantly things wich the Portal owner wants you to be intrested in. You will note no links to Linux distro's on MSN Portal. Yahoo doesn't link to MSN. Google does not have a link page to every other search engine.
The reason they wanted this was simple. Advertising. Control where a person can go or the links he sees and you can easily sell targetted advertising and surf behaviour. This was thought to be very big business indeed. Marketings wetdream.
So how to own the web. Well since most people are lazy and stupid the easiest way to get them to your portal and therefore your advertising and tracking programs is by making it the default page of the browser. The old netscape took you to the netscape portal site. IE takes you to MSN. Since mozilla no longer does it would be very fair to presume that netscape.com doesn't get the same amount of visitors anymore. How many people do you think use MSN search because it is the default?
But this whole advertising idea burst like a bubble didn't it? True but the browser wars happened before that.
Anyway there is a more sinister reason. MSN and IE may not be making MS money but that doesn't matter. It has stopped netscape.com from making money or even worse selling competing webservers (yes netscape has its own webserver product). Apache has stopped MS IIS (or iss) from taking total control since the MS is crap and Apache is free but ISS (or iss) is still selling because of its extra's (wich only work well with IE and.net).
In MS's book it is often not about winning but about stopping others from winning. Oh and not that MS is alone in this desire. It is just in a rather unique position. Wich other company do you know that controls such a large portion of its market?
So IE is given away for free because MS wants everyone to use it and not any competing products that might lead people to think that they might replace other bits of the computer software as well.
If you make a mistake you should own up and correct the mistake. Not cover it up and cry think of the poor employees. What about the poor consumer?
IBM released a product that was crap and it seems they knew it was crap. If they had been selling it at a fraction of the price it might have been okay. What they however did was knowningly and delibaretly screw their customer.
If IBM had made a simple mistake then the answer would have been simple. Issue a complete recall and replace the drives at no cost to the consumer. Even better offer free assistence in recovering any lost data. If they had issued the recall in time their would have been very little lost data to recover as people could have copied the data from the still functioning drives.
But no IBM spun marketing into action and let people loose data and then claim it was their fault. Sadly the only way to get companies to stop doing this kinda stuff is to sue.
You sir are an idiot. Go stand inline with the other idiots and prepare to be kicked in the ass until your head pops out.
There is a lot of EU laws like this that get proposed and never are passed. Even fewer that ever get adopted by the individual countries.
The EU is even more extreme in its introduced laws then the US because of the far greater number of political parties. Fortunally we also got far more parties that will therefore be opposed to the more extreme proposals. Not like the US were at times one or the other party is supposed to be in control.
So yes we should be worried about this proposal but if democracy still works then it will fail as with similar proposals before. Europe may not get much done but they have succeeded so far in getting a lot of things not done. Including people not getting sentenced because the european of human rights overturns national laws that slipped through. And given its track record so far that court would never hold up a case based on this. Long live the lawyers eh.
Repeat after me. HTML RENDERING IS NOT HARMFULL. We are here on slashdot not the bloody bbc. All that rendering html in an email could do is send info that you read the email by opening a link to a server under a spammers. Yes this is undesirable since it allows them to verify a spammed address is alive.
Nothing else. All the other troubles are due to the execution of scripts. If the various graphical email programs would just stick to rendering html and leave javascript and others untouched then there would be no email-virusses. (well except for the ones launched through buffer overflows)
So it would only require a little bit of thought to give people the "nice" look off html email without the security problems. Prohibit external links and only allow links to attached files (wich since they are links without script can't be executed until the viewer clicks them) and you will even remove the privacy invasion. All the attractiveness of the web without the insecurity.
Given all that why exactly was the execution of code added to email? There must have been a decission made at MS at sometime but anyone ever see the reasons for it?
Oh and don't get me wrong. I hate html formatted emails since they are pain to read on remote shell. Sadly I am a linux geek and everyone else seems to disagree. No other slashdotters do not matter, you are geeks too.
You buy a piece of hardware and a lot of software for it. Then because it doesn't work you buy another one.
So you me a few hundred dollars and buy stuff from people who give me a few dollars as well. Then I beat your face in and you give me another few hundred dollars?
Am I missing something?
I can understand that you may have invested to much in software to be able to afford to let the x-box go unused but think about the message you are sending to MS. Wow this customer must really like our stuff. He bought TWO!!! Cancel that order to make the X-box2 hardware more rugged. Our customers love us.
I don't think intel has to worry.
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AMD Back in the Black
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I am currently installing gentoo on a dual opteron server as well as a 1u celeron machine that will contain backups. No suprise that there is a performance difference but the gap is gigantic. Same with better specced dual P3 and P4 machines. Even the dual Xeon P4 is left behind easily.
HOWEVER, the dual opteron contains an intel raid and soon an intel network card. And I must say that installing the pentiums in the past was an awfull lot easier.
Price/performance opteron is currently the clear winner, its giganctic cache and better memory structure heads above the same price Xeons. As far as support and quality of the hardware goes. Intel all the way. Sadly for intel the bubble has burst and web companies cannot afford the Itanium. So Opteron it is.
But AMD has been on top before and they always managed to screw up. Intel screws up to but somehow manages to keep making money during the down times. AMD is not so lucky.
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I always hear it from people that tech support doesn't help at all. Then why do you buy from those companies and not from some local shop were you get support in person? Cause dell offers phone tech support. ARGH.
Personally I rarely use tech support in fact the only calls in a years time were to my isp to get a new password. Simple stuff and still it took a good ten minutes.
Outsourced tech support is known to be crap. They get paid per call not by satisfied customer. Anyone with a single braincell can then figure out what kinda personal they want. It is also easy to figure out the kinda callers they desire. Idiots that can be made to call time and time again but for short calls.
Until people start voting with their dollars and take their business elsewhere companies like dell will see nothing wrong and keep outsourcing their tech support with the same pay per call contracts.
No some games don't need it and some gamers don't want it. I didn't mean to imply that say UFO Aftermath and Silent Storm or even the orignal UFO games needed it. I mean't to say that a saving grace for this game might be that it offers multiplayer.
As a single player game it can't compete against the new games, S2 just beats if on all fronts except install size and price. But it has an extra angle, multiplayer, that can give it its own little niche. It would be kinda nice to finally solve the "who is a better player" question.
That is what these people are complaining about I guess. Personally my typos are due my amazingly bad spelling. I hit the right key it just isn't the right letter.
What they are missing is that a physical keyboard takes up a lot of space. A projected keyboard is very small, the size of a pen I think :), and is therefore far easier to take with you.
Some people just don't seem able to think outside their own frame of reference. Oh that is not how I use my pc so it must be useless.
I doubt this will see the light of day as it is far easier to fit this into a regular form pda and therefore a lot cheaper. But it is an intresting idea. The main part of the computer is perhaps handing from you belt. You take a pen sized object from you pocket unroll it like a miniature projection screen (thanks to those flexible screens they been promising us) a keyboard is projected from the top and voila, instant workstation. Beats a laptop anyday for those who are on the move and need fast and easy access for short times.
The orignal UFO Enemy Unknown (only infidels know it as x-com) was a classic game. I played the demo to bits. You were in charge of a single base and a hand full of soldier, scientist and engineers. Your job. Stop the increasing alien incursions. Your crap started crap with crap equipment and no idea of who you faced. But as you gained experience in battle you retrieved both bodies and weapons and even live aliens who your scientist could research and whose technology your engineers could copy.
of course as your weapons increased so did the alien incursions so you were in a constant arms race.
The strategic element was mostly realtime (time stopped when making money decissions) but the combat was turnbased. The graphics were good for the day but will probably cause permenant damage to your eyes today.
More importantly was that you had real tactical capability. Alien sniping you from a window? Shoot a rocket through the wall behind and catch him in the cross fire. You could start fires and smoke them out. Brilliant.
UFO enemy from the deep put it all at the bottom of the sea. Essentially more of the same it was a bit disappointing.
X-com apocalypse (the infidels having won the naming war) added an optional real time element. Your soldiers carried out your order but also could take some action for themselves. No longer did you have to target and pull the trigger on each and every alien. Put the squad in good positions and just watch the alien attack being grinded down. Of course if you did it wrong your soldiers would be scrambling for cover while trying to defend their assigned positions. Even more brilliant.
Then....... nothing. Well there was x-com in space and x-com the fps but they were crap.
Fans had given up.
So it is no wonder the some fans wanted to make their own game. That is what the post is about. Nice work. Except. They are too late sort of. UFO Aftermath dumped the turnbased style but forgot to inherit the AI for your soldiers. This left you with soldiers who get totally confused when the enemy does something as cunning as walk behind a lightpole and then happily get slaughtered. It was the worst of both turn-based (your soldiers being idiots) and real-time (to much going on to keep track of).
But rescue was close by. Silent Storm is pure turnbased but added a shitload of extra features the most important totally destructable scenery in an excellent engine. Fans soon discovered that hidden features included the geoscope from the original UFO games making it only a matter of time before a mod will be done.
So is there room for this game? Well. It is the first to add multiplayer. If they get this to work, it ain't in the demo, then they have a reason for being. Without it they can't compete against S2.
Their graphics are barely acceptable. They lack a lot of options like crawling. The soldiers seem unable to see or target behind a small pillar.
Had it been released a year ago it would have been great. Now it might be great fun in multiplayer mode only.
Don't get me wrong. It is a fun game to play. Just if you played S2 then it just can't compete in single player mode.
True, I thought he meant laser eye surgery not lenses. My bad. Just that people keep suggesting it since a company doing it was doing an ad campaign. Apart from the cost there is a risk (small) that your eye sight goes even worse. Not worse as in -6 but worse as in partially or completly blind. Eeek.
Someone build a fun new plane they have succesfully tested. Not some toy model but fully functional jet plane that can take of and land and is easily controlled by remote.
And what is the reaction? Oh it will never fly, it did fly. It is to unstable to control, they did control it and without a crash. Now most /. stories have a lot of uninformed opinions but usually there are at least a couple of people who happen to know what they are talking about. Where are the pilots today?
The thing does fly, wether it is safe with a human on top remains to be seen. But the aircraft without the pilot is not that different from a simple flying wing design. Flying wings are hardly new.
What is different is the placement of the payload. In the movie she lies down flat on top of it and stands on it. Most flying wing designs put the payload inside the wing.
First of laying on top of it. While this would be the most logical thing to do (look at a commercial airliner and replace the tube of the fuselage with a human body same idea) and not disrupt the aircrafts stability you would be just a passenger since there are no traditional controls (some way to move the ailerons) and you would be unable to affect the aircraft much with a shifting in weight (yes hanggliders can but the pilot is farther away from the wing making a small movement have a bigger effect). Depending on the size of the final aircraft you would also have to be carfull not to let the feet dangle in front of the exhaust. A running jet engine is not something you want to be close too. (carrier crew member around?).
Standing on top of it would create a huge amount of drag but would be doable. It is hardly a new stunt to stand on the wings of an aircraft. Don't forget that even the scale model is hardly small. The final aircraft would be pretty normal in wingspan to existing single seaters. As for controlling the aircraft in this way. Unless the aircraft is naturally very close to stable but not to stable I think it would be hard. Airliners are designed to be stable and the aircraft needs constant pressure to change its flightpath from straight and level. An F16 is extremely unstable and can only be flown by a computer. The pilot only telling the computer what the desired attitude is.
Both are not exactly designs you would want to control by shifting weights around. All but hanggliders control flight by altering the shape of the wing (correct me if I am wrong). This might be the hardest thing to do. BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE. If the aircraft can be made stable enough of its own then a mere shifting of weight should affects its flightpath. Only direct control you can't do without is a throttle.
Moving between lying down and standing up would also significantly alter the profile of the aircraft. Unless the final aircraft is so big that the change in drag is meaningless.
I am not a flight engineer but I do have an avid intrest in flight and am the kinda idiot that devours books and docu's on flight pioneers. I think the makers of this plane know a lot more about flight then me and the people that have reacted so far.
Cool stuff.
In more upbeat stores frames are closer to designer clothing. You pay because the costs of designing a new model is only spread over a few models. Ford Focus costs less then say the latest ferrari and that ain't just the cost of manufacturing.
But yes for those in need a single frame design in a couple of sizes (for different size heads) is not that expensive. Just ask any army that used to issue soldiers with glasses. Or for that matter look at the cost of sunglasses.
But seriously this guy made two wonderfull inventions. They now collect "old" glasses to send to third world but this is a logistics nightmare.
Imagine a simple jeep outfitted with these inventions doing the rounds in poor areas. Put the tester on and voila few minutes later a pair of glasses. 1 day per village. Couple of jeeps. Shouldn't take long at all (after all it is not like glasses need to replaced that often, even in the west once a year is good enough even for still growing kids).
As far as I know it ain't the material that is costly in glasses but the whole distribution process. Plenty of bargain chains around that can offer really really cheap glasses due to scale and not offering specialist lenses. This looks even cheaper for hard to reach areas.
Brilliant.
Should be trivial to add support to the system ALREADY in place at that supermarket for game subscriptions. Other stuff could benefit as well.
As for going it globally, no worries. That supermarket chain is pretty big, you probably shop at one owned by them. Stuff like this is also hardly new. Think about lottery sales. Public Transport tickets (maybe unique to holland) and other stuff that essentially involves you buying a piece of paper to indicate you bought something else from a third party.
Fun and perfectly normal? Of course. Several of my old relatives were tinkerers. Their cars never went to the garage they fixed them themselves. Good luck doing that with the black boxes you got nowadays.
Opensource is back to the days when you could FIX your tv, replace parts of your washingmachine, tune your own car. I can't really think of any product outside computers that I am not allowed to mess around with to my hearts content. Sure I void the warranty but I got the choice.
Why should drivers be any different? They are an essential part of the hardware yet they are completly closed. I find it odd.
So is it bad that Intel wants to release binary only? Well yes. No it is not the end of the world but if a company comes along that offers full opensource drivers I will buy them.
And not just for the OSS of it. I buy from Intel a hardware solution. What kind of stuff are they pulling in the software that is so secret? Is the centrino in reality like those winmodems? (probably not of course but I wonder with video cards)
At least it is not the old interactive movie crap.
And script writing for games is very very hard. In movies the audience is passive. In games the audience is supposed to be in some kind of control.
I hate the movie script of Max Payne. I am in a warehouse killing bad guys left and right without any worries about police procedure. Then I hear a couple of thugs holding someone hostage. So what happens? Control is taken away and ME does something really really stupid and gets the hostage killed. BAD writing. It could work in a movie but in a game I AM MAX PAYNE and I am not an idiot.
OFP Resistance has the main character constantly whining about how he hates wars and really doesn't want to fight. Yes nice speech. Except I am supposed to be the character and I bought a war game. Spare the pacifism and lets go shoot someone. (when are we getting a war game in wich units can surrender? (and that ain't hex-based))
This has been true for all games with a story. How to make sure the personality of the player and the character in the game match. Dramatic plot twist like the dead of a character are the proven elements in a movie but hard to do in a game apparently. All somehow seem determined to make it integrate with the players action. Wing commander, you kill all the baddies in a second yet still your wingmate buys the farm. Doesn't matter how good or bad you are, it is scripted and she dies. BAD
The better way? Make it happen outside the PERCEIVED area of control of the player. You and her go on different patrols. You hear her patrol being ambushed and change course to intercept. As you come closer you hear more messages until you are close and the patrol is wiped out. Far less frustating I think, a really good script writer could improve it of course.
System Shock worked well for me since all the plot happened before you arrived on the scene. So people fighting and dying is totally outside your control yet you still can have the plot of finding out about a desperate struggle. But all the deaths are outside your characters control.
From reading the original post it is pretty clear the guy ain't rich and the advice I give is standard advice given out by all consumer groups. Car financing is expensive. If it is at all possible save some money and instead go for a real bank loan for the rest. Non-financing loans have lower interest and are not tied to your car so they can't just reposses meaning you loose the car even though you paid half. With a normal bank loan the car is yours fully paid. You now just got a debt with the bank but at least you own the car. Save as much you can every 100 bucks not borrowed is money you don't have to pay intrest over. Of course I know that saving anything when poor is hard but this guy sounds like an adult.
Offering advice isn't condenscending. Consumer programs constantly tell people this because those offering finance deals never tell the truth but are really good at selling. But I suppose they should mind their own business too.
There are other reasons as well. As a dutch person I am used to free debet cards. Why should I pay a bank to hold my money? So no CC for me and for plently of others. How many kids can use their parents credit card outside the US?
Selling the game instead through stores would solve all that. Mobile phones really took off with prepaid cards. There is now even a very simple infrastructure in place for that. You go the cash register and say the phone brand you want and how many minutes. The receit has a special code printed on it that you can use to upgrade your phone. Flawless.
So why not the same for games? It would also solve that pesky problem of charge backs.
Oh well I wish them good luck.
I send you and your sister a spam. While both of you are getting the spam, to both of you I am an unknown and therefore the system would flag me. ONLY if I send the spam to you while pretending to be your sister would the system break. I would need to know both your email and the email of someone you know. This would not be impossible to harvest with virusses stealing addressbooks but is not what is currently happening. Currently email address lists used by spammers are very simple flat text files. Of course nothing complex would be needed. Simply a similar text file but now with two emails per line. The first the recipient, the second the person to forge as the sender. Simple but more work.
So it looks like a pretty clever idea. Especially for work place email where most mail is by people you know and very little email from outside usually arrives. And even when it is done it is usually from a known domain namely a client or supplier.
Will it work? Who knows. Gotta be worth a try. Unless you want to wait for Bill Gates to fix it. We all know how well the security problems in windows were fixed eh?
There is not going to be a magic bullet that fixes spam. We will just have to use a lot of ordinary lead ones. Don't worry Bush says they are safe.
The problem you describe is however hardly isolated to america. It happens around the world. Here in holland we used to have an tv news program at 8 o'clock on the first channel (we only had one when I grew up then two and now three). It was reasonably good proffesional guy in suit telling the news headlines with a bit behind. Not terribly deep but you got what had happened and could read the indepth stuff in next days newspaper.
What has changed. Well first of all it has gotten shorter not just in pure time but the opening jingle and ending credits have become longer, they have a summary at the beginning and end wich each take about a minute from what is now 15-20 minutes. They extended weather and now always have some human intrest stuff. I remember that during heavy suicide bombings in Israel they had a 5 minute piece on the royal family opening some art show. Good grief. The final killer is that they took the presenter from the childeren news (used to be very good, the biggest real news stories explained a bit more with simpler language or complex words explained) and got all the other presenters to use her language.
To describe the news here now is impossible. CNN is better. At least they don't talk to me in kid speak. Americans complain that american news is biased. It is perhaps. So is dutch news. Doesn't matter if the news is pro-israel or pro-palenstine. They are both biased and not telling the thruth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
You know what the really funny thing is? All this dumbing down was to get more viewers. Tiny little detail? The old news was often the most watched program, not well watched. ONE in the ratings. Now viewing figures are down. So they are dumbing down even more to attract more viewers.
Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall.
So a very nasty fellow. But focussing on the history of nastyness by Saddam would have prompted question as why nothing was done about it before. Who was supporting him while he was doing it and how the hell he got into power in the first place.
All questions america rather would not answer.
So WMD it was. As a reasonably intelligent person I can see what the real reason was. Saddam was like the guard dog that had snapped and had to be put down. Nasty and perhaps better care should have been given but this is the real world not some pacifists lala land.
For me and apparently you the reasons that saddam was a loose cannon with same very nasty habbits was enough. For many others it wasn't.
How does this relate to the hiding or falsyfing scientific evidence? Very closely. Instead of just saying, well yes lead is bad but so is making thousands of people jobless and we need the lead, they instead make up fancy reports saying lead ain't bad at all. It insults people like you and me but the people who elected him swallow it hook line and sinker.
Oh he was elected by a majority of americans. To remain silent implies consent and the majority of voters remained silent therefore consenting to bush. Still no option, "none of the above", I guess.
Poster should have spellchecked but poster is a lazy bastard
Yes it sucks for you and quite frankly this is the first I heard about such a thing. Then again if this is the sixth car you buy on a loan and it is a used car might I suggest that you set off every alarm bell at every finacial institution? You need the loan (I presume) because you don't have the money. Banks hate this. They want to be sure they get their money back plus interest. They don't like to take a gamble. Not even with a used car.
Oh and this might be rude but since you don't sound young (sixth car and all) can I suggest that you now start saving so you can buy the next car cash or with only a small bank loan instead of financing. Yes saving is hard but it will save you lots of money in the long run. Do the math sometime. You could probably have bought a new car of the paid interest.
Author arrested for TUI.
But in the east piracy still happens exactly as it happened in the time of sailing ships. Sure the movies may have shown pirate ships with three decks of cannons taking on the british navy but that is fiction. Most pirates used small fast ships wich could out manouver their prey (don't forget that canons of those days were more or less fixed and you needed to move the entire ship to aim) and then board and overwhelm the largely civilian crew.
This is still the way it goes. Pirate ships have gotten smaller but then most civilian ships these days are totally unarmed anyway and their crews have gotten smaller.
Piracy of a different sorts exists in areas where drug running takes place where pleasure yachts(?) are captured and the owners forced to smuggle drugs or simply killed.
For the facts on piracy today search google with "piracy lloyds" (lloyds is a famous insurance company) you will find countless links talking about the costs, the risks and people offering protection. The lloyds bits helps keeping the filesharing "piracy" links down.
So I agree with the judge who might have said that calling filesharing piracy is wrong. Piracy is a current and far different crime.
However there are some minor signs this may be changing. Most of this is rumors but I think the X-box2 and the new gameboy are both going have more then 1 cpu. Plenty of phones already have more then 1 cpu to spread the load of the increasing demands of the software on them. All the chipmakers seem to be working on putting more then one CPU on a single core.
So if phone companies, console makers and chip companies think it is the way of the future why not for consumer appliances?
Think about it, exactly how much cpu power is needed to decode a video stream when a cpu can be dedicated to that task and nothing else? You don't need to go with a SMP like setup. You can simply have one simple processor wich does all the interface stuff. One wich decodes the video. Another perhaps wich decodes the sound. All geared and dedicated to their specific task. Costly? Well to a certain point this is already how PC's work. GPU for visuals. Soundcard for ehm sound.
Of course such a board will be far more expensive to design then a simple board you pick up of the shelf. With consumer electronics like this still extremely unproven the cost may be too high. Until then simply accept the bigger size and other bad points of PC architecture. Have you ever seen the first generation tv's? Video records? Mobile Phones? Etc Etc? They all had one thing in common. THEY WERE HUGE. Hell the first pocket transistor radio's were so big that the sellers had special shirts with enlarged pockets. (got it from an interview with sony people years ago I am sure someone else can better tell this anecdote).
MS doesn't seem to care about a lot of different programs made by third parties for the Windows OS. You don't see MS trying to compete with Photoshop and the like. 3D animation programs or IRC programs. So what is different with browsers.
Once the web was a total free for all. Everyone could run a site and everyone could visit them. This was in the days when universities owned the net. It was good and peacefull and cheerfull mess and it wasn't making a profit.
Some companies didn't like this and they wanted to create a different net. The PORTAL net. You would have a home page from wich you would start every browsing session and from there navigate to things that might be of intrest and more importantly things wich the Portal owner wants you to be intrested in. You will note no links to Linux distro's on MSN Portal. Yahoo doesn't link to MSN. Google does not have a link page to every other search engine.
The reason they wanted this was simple. Advertising. Control where a person can go or the links he sees and you can easily sell targetted advertising and surf behaviour. This was thought to be very big business indeed. Marketings wetdream.
So how to own the web. Well since most people are lazy and stupid the easiest way to get them to your portal and therefore your advertising and tracking programs is by making it the default page of the browser. The old netscape took you to the netscape portal site. IE takes you to MSN. Since mozilla no longer does it would be very fair to presume that netscape.com doesn't get the same amount of visitors anymore. How many people do you think use MSN search because it is the default?
But this whole advertising idea burst like a bubble didn't it? True but the browser wars happened before that.
Anyway there is a more sinister reason. MSN and IE may not be making MS money but that doesn't matter. It has stopped netscape.com from making money or even worse selling competing webservers (yes netscape has its own webserver product). Apache has stopped MS IIS (or iss) from taking total control since the MS is crap and Apache is free but ISS (or iss) is still selling because of its extra's (wich only work well with IE and .net).
In MS's book it is often not about winning but about stopping others from winning. Oh and not that MS is alone in this desire. It is just in a rather unique position. Wich other company do you know that controls such a large portion of its market?
So IE is given away for free because MS wants everyone to use it and not any competing products that might lead people to think that they might replace other bits of the computer software as well.
IBM released a product that was crap and it seems they knew it was crap. If they had been selling it at a fraction of the price it might have been okay. What they however did was knowningly and delibaretly screw their customer.
If IBM had made a simple mistake then the answer would have been simple. Issue a complete recall and replace the drives at no cost to the consumer. Even better offer free assistence in recovering any lost data. If they had issued the recall in time their would have been very little lost data to recover as people could have copied the data from the still functioning drives.
But no IBM spun marketing into action and let people loose data and then claim it was their fault. Sadly the only way to get companies to stop doing this kinda stuff is to sue.
You sir are an idiot. Go stand inline with the other idiots and prepare to be kicked in the ass until your head pops out.
The EU is even more extreme in its introduced laws then the US because of the far greater number of political parties. Fortunally we also got far more parties that will therefore be opposed to the more extreme proposals. Not like the US were at times one or the other party is supposed to be in control.
So yes we should be worried about this proposal but if democracy still works then it will fail as with similar proposals before. Europe may not get much done but they have succeeded so far in getting a lot of things not done. Including people not getting sentenced because the european of human rights overturns national laws that slipped through. And given its track record so far that court would never hold up a case based on this. Long live the lawyers eh.
Nothing else. All the other troubles are due to the execution of scripts. If the various graphical email programs would just stick to rendering html and leave javascript and others untouched then there would be no email-virusses. (well except for the ones launched through buffer overflows)
So it would only require a little bit of thought to give people the "nice" look off html email without the security problems. Prohibit external links and only allow links to attached files (wich since they are links without script can't be executed until the viewer clicks them) and you will even remove the privacy invasion. All the attractiveness of the web without the insecurity.
Given all that why exactly was the execution of code added to email? There must have been a decission made at MS at sometime but anyone ever see the reasons for it?
Oh and don't get me wrong. I hate html formatted emails since they are pain to read on remote shell. Sadly I am a linux geek and everyone else seems to disagree. No other slashdotters do not matter, you are geeks too.
So you me a few hundred dollars and buy stuff from people who give me a few dollars as well. Then I beat your face in and you give me another few hundred dollars?
Am I missing something?
I can understand that you may have invested to much in software to be able to afford to let the x-box go unused but think about the message you are sending to MS. Wow this customer must really like our stuff. He bought TWO!!! Cancel that order to make the X-box2 hardware more rugged. Our customers love us.
HOWEVER, the dual opteron contains an intel raid and soon an intel network card. And I must say that installing the pentiums in the past was an awfull lot easier.
Price/performance opteron is currently the clear winner, its giganctic cache and better memory structure heads above the same price Xeons. As far as support and quality of the hardware goes. Intel all the way. Sadly for intel the bubble has burst and web companies cannot afford the Itanium. So Opteron it is.
But AMD has been on top before and they always managed to screw up. Intel screws up to but somehow manages to keep making money during the down times. AMD is not so lucky.