The article hints at a way to attack the virus in the lab. There is absolutely no attempt yet to do the same in a human body. Can it be done safely? While the article says the cholestrerol membrane is not the same as the one that occurs in things related to coronary disease, is it maybe in use somewhere else? Wouldn't be much point in an AIDS vacine that causes you to fall apart in a puddle.
But the cure for AIDS has been here for a long time. How many people do you know with AIDS? I am not just making another joke about slashdotters not having sex, which isn't funny at all damn you!, but am serious. AIDS was this terrible nightmare from a by gone era when some people who made a lot of noise in the media had unprotected sex with everyone else in the group.
When people stopped doing that, AIDS practically disappeared to the point that young people again think it is safe to have unprotected sex with anyone.
The cure is latex, it works, it has been tried and tested. Not science, or as you put it, the futures fault you refuse to take your medicine.
It has always struck me as odd that it tooks AIDS to get people to start using condoms. Like the other diseases out there are not highly dangerous. This story itself is more likely to kill more people before it can start to cure as people think, "Oh there is a cure, we can fuck around again with no condom". This was the result of all the previous aids blocker stories were people interpreted it as a cure and so didn't care anymore.
Odd stuff, just because we got cure for food poisoning doesn't mean people started eating rotten food on purpose.
As for Africa, the aids epidemic is a symthom not the disease itself. Remove aids and the causes for mass infections remain.
Good news that there is a potential new avenue to create a medicine BUT it not yet here and the underlying problems have not been tackled. Humanity is still its old self.
Slashdot is a commercial entity and it profits from user submitted content for which it does not pay, user comments for which it does not pay AND has its moderation done by users, who, you guess it, it doesn't pay.
Don't befriend them to begin with. You are awfully disparaging about these fried-whores but why did you befriend them to begin with and now want to unfriend them?
Watching the video, there are a LOT of actions to be taken. Doing them by hand seems bound to cost someone their fingers. Doing them with a robot is going to restrict the folding to only a handful of locations.
Those who think it might restrict truck movements, this is rarely the case. Trucks haul trailers with a container on it, a new trailer with container is delivered and an old empty one is taken away. You have to be a pretty big customer to be able to afford to unload containers with what is after all a pretty big crane. Remove the container from the trailer and the trailer got to go back empty one way or another. Same amount of trucking movements, just with empty trailers unless someone comes up with a way to fold them too. An empty trailer would consume less fuel certainly so there would be a benefit but only in large operations.
The article claims companies hate to ship empty containers... but that is in the nature of business. You might as well complain about having to carry your shopping bags empty to the store. Because containers tend to remain on the trailer, in trucking there is no real savings in the number of trips unless your hauling company can't schedule to bring a full one and pick up an empty one at the same time.
For shipping, it only matters if there is a large discrepancy in when containers are delivered and when they are being shipped back. Say a ship delivers a 1000 containers full from China to the US but there are no empty containers to haul back yet. So the ship has to sail back empty for the next load, then when it is halfway another ship has to pick up the 1000 empty containers (the idea goods are shipped from the US to China is clearly laughable). That would be a waste BUT that doesn't happen, there are always empty containers waiting to go back. And because these routes are routine they balance out.
About the only saving when folding them is that you can load 5 folded empty containers faster then 5 empty unfolded ones. Loading a ship is a lot of work and the larger the ship gets, the more time it wastes at the dock waiting to be loaded. A ship doesn't make money being tied up, it needs to move to make money.
But at what cost? Look at the video again. Talk about complicated. There are easier methods out there, a dutch container folds by having the standard loading crane pull up the lid, and it then collapses. No rods to be inserted (if you ever been around a shipping container you know they suffer a lot of dents) or very narrow (read unstable as hell) walls to be slided precisely by a forklift truck moving at the very edge off its capabilty (how many companies have a forklift capable of easily lifting this kind of weight especially as it will be wanting to fall the narrow fork lift arms with its huge width. The number of times in the folding where an accident might occur is just to fucking large if they expect this to happen at your average company.
It seems like a nice idea but I think there is a reason that nobody has been successful yet with a folding container. It just ain't easy enough. Space might be costly on a ship but time is even more costly, nobody in shipping has the time to do this folding process especially as it seems to take 2 people.
This is just a polite cought from IBM to remind Apple, MS, Google, HP, Samsung and the likes who invented original evil. This is classy stuff, forget about silly lawsuits and threathening to sue your customers. Control their every move like the drones they are. THAT is CLASS. That is pure unadulterated evil.
Basically they are saying, "Look out, we are still here and we are still the masters of darkness. Any of you whippersnappers forget that and we will have your headquarters surrounded by a thousand sheep following our GPS to their slaughter."
I have taken the hint and re-labelled my PC as an IBM-compatible to pay homage to the master.
During the holidays, people got other obligations AND when they login it will be spread over the entire day not a massive spike after work hours.
There may or may not be problems but people often forget just how much time normal people, not slashdotters, spend during weekends and holidays on social stuff. I know plenty of people who have more time off during the week then the weekend as it is all used to visit families or attend parties. Thank god I am a nerd so I get the entire weekend to myself... all alone... doing exactly as I please with nobody getting in my way...
Guild wars does not have a persistent world, it has a few chat room areas that are instanced to hell and back and then when you enter the game world itself you are in your own little instance with just your own people.
(To those who do not understand this, an ordinary PC is perfectly capable of running a game world for a FPS. Even sharing that world with a few other people is not impossible, see all the self-hosted FPS games the PC was famous for). But start upping the number of people in the same game world and performance takes a nosedive. Years ago there was a FPS game that was supposed to support 256 players at once. Massive battles BUT also massive costs, because where previous FPS companies relied for online play on customer supplying the hardware and bandwidth, this company had to do it themselves. It is the reason there are virtually no massive FPS games out there, nobody can afford to run the server for free.
GW runs a large farm of cheap cheerfull servers, each time a player or small group leaves the instanced chat room area, they enter their own small area that can be handled by ordinary cheap commodity PC hardware. Think off not just the CPU but also memory. Memory has a sweet point for price, if you can outfit your servers with 4gb at 50 or 8gb at 150 then if your server can make do with 4gb you save a LOT of money. And the memory difference for a full size persistent game world is far greater. Try 32-64 GB. Now look at your PC specs. Can it handle that? No. It can't. You need to go to server grade hardware and pay the price.
Each GW instance is much cheaper to run then a persistent world for say WoW because the hardware itself is cheaper. GW can also re-use its hardware far more efficiently, each server does not care what instance it runs, if all of GW's player base wanted to play the same instance, all its servers would run the same instance for all the individual groups. Very efficient BUT not a proper persistent world as western style MMO's know it.
Their customer support is also crap and they have no such thing as moderation.
Comparing Guild Wars with say WoW is like comparing McD drive through with a full service restaurant.And before any GW fans bite my head off, I am not saying McD is bad because it is cheap, I am saying that because of the different style, its low price cannot be compared to a restaurant offering a different service level
MMO's like AoC that use instancing are always slammed for it because people want to play in a big world, not their own little corner. Guild Wars took it to extremes. You can't run into another player during a quest or even socialize and meet up in the game world. No 100 man gatherings in GW.
Your english is better then mine, your understanding of MMO's is a lot worse.
If you want a clear example of costs, I played Lotro the most. I have had a number of encounters with customer support, all good to be honest BUT they each took about 5-10 minutes to resolve. Not a lot of time you might say BUT together they amount to a bit over an hour at least. How much does it cost to have a person spend 1 hour on a customer? Saleries vary a lot BUT it will come awfully close to 40-50 euro's even at the absolute lowest rates.
So... how is the company supposed to fund the development of the game, pay for bug fixes and new content, server costs AND support when just my support needs alone cost more then the game cost? And that is even supposing that the full box price goes to the game company, which it doesn't.
Really, when you claim you can run WoW and now SWTOR of the small sum a company gets for a box sales for years on end... you got to know that you are missing something.
Play Guild Wars and play WoW, you will see they are VERY different games. Why then does GW charge a price when there are games I can play online for free by running them on my own machine! THIEFS!
Margins on software in gaming... please, grow up. The 40 euro in the shop includes money that goes to the retaile
If you ignore the rampant fanboys then ARM is just slower then x86 and will likely remain so. Meanwhile desktop application developers like the power.
I have recently switched to a relatively lowpower E350 and while the power drain is far lower then a dualcore regular desktop, you can notice it struggling with some stuff. Take for instance a torrent client like Vuze. Bad example because it is a piece of bloatware? True enough but really capable torrent clients are hard to come by on Linux. Take uTorrent and its absolute bandwidth hogging traits (ran it for a while but the entire connection would slow to a crawl on even the simplest jobs. KTorrent opens a move window for every single file in a torrent it wants to move, turning you desktop into a flashing nightmare and showing KDE just plain ain't ready for the desktop.
But crap or not, almost all make the little desktop struggle at times. Not that it doesn't run but as my main desktop, it would get annoying REALLY quickly. So my main desktop is a massive 4 core machine running mostly on idle...
It sounds counter intuitive but a desktop runs best for the user when it is barely doing anything at all. Many people who think ARM could take over seem to reason that since they desktop is using only 1% of the resources then a computer with 1% of the computing power would give the same smooth experience.
It would not. If your PC showed the same performance as your phone or your tablet you would go stark raving mad.
ARM will take over on the desktop when people will buy cars that have just enough horse power to do realistic city acceleration. Go ahead, buy a car with a 10 horsepower engine... when you think that is okay, you are ready for an ARM PC and the retirement home.
And good luck with not paying road-tax for your newly bought car or having to keep filling it up with fuel.
As for your TV, what a rip-off, 8000 euro I payed for mine and now they expect me to pay a license fee AND the cable company AND for blu-ray movies.
You are perfectly correct in demanding for for about 40 euro a company keep a massive server farm running for years on end AND keep customer support on line every time you can't figure out a quest, all payed from the same 40 euro's.
What makes people so detached from reality that they think games like this can be run for free? Are they so in capable of doing any basic accounting that they truly can't see that a product with ongoing costs must have ongoing income?
Maybe to some its sound amazingly insightful that you are to cheap to pay 15 bucks for a piece of entertainment per month, to me it just says you are amazingly cheap. For most gamers it comes down to less then a buck an hour and quickly far far less. Only the internet is cheaper. Are you upset that when you payed for your modem the telephone company still wanted more money from you each month?
The simple fact is that human evolution and that of our near relatives is a science that is undergoing rapid development. A lot of changes are bound to occur as new evidence forces a rethink of existing theory. That is good, stick to the same theory for to long and you are no better then a religious person.
There are skeletons being discovered all the time that shows the old theories to be hopelessly wrong with a high probability that humans are not only much older but more cross linked then we thought.
A recent discovery showed what might be a mother son pair who had features that should belong to more modern man but the bones are older then the neanderthal. Where the hell do they fit on the old timeline? A seperate species?
As for your claims about cave art, well, the above pair was found only because what was once a closed cave (it is believed they somehow fell in and drowned) became exposed by erosion. But in reverse, how many open caves back then have become exposed? Or maybe people didn't like to draw in caves for a period of time. Or they didn't live on caves and carved on wood instead?
To many unknowns, the theory of human evolution itself is evolving and so far we are getting older and older and more complex all the time.
But if evolution is true, saying we had symbolic thought 50.000 years ago is bull, we would have evolved over time, SLOWLY getting better and better at it. And then only some individuals of the species who passed on their genes. Believing intelligence just burst on the scene and all of a sudden everyone was smart that is creationist thinking.
Holland, Zaandam, were most of the worlds chocolate is processed. At the end of the process molten chocolate is stored in large vats, sometimes somebody taking samples forgets to close the tap or it is filled while open and it poors onto the floor. The floor everybody walks on and where dead bugs collect. But chocolate is expensive so what do you do with the spilled chocolate? Scoop it back up and poor it back into the system, dead bugs and all.
Exactly what are you smoking that makes you think only showing an action once the user has already started it is intuitive?
To help you to understand: If I instruct you to hit the red button and there is only a green button but the green button turns red when you hit it, you are going to complain about that button and me a lot.
UI design mistakes are pretty common, as a designer you try to be original but forget that other people might not have the same mindset as you. It is very sad but either you are pushing things and upsetting people, or keeping people comfortable but always staying the same.
Americans are born with a great arrogance. Take MS and how certain it was that when it was gracious enough to offer an OS for mobile devices, the phone companies would come knocking at its door... and they didn't... HTC got their big break as a chosen partner (meaning MS payed them a shit load of money) to make for instance the XDA and HTC used that money to become an android phone maker...
It seems MS at no point was capable of thinking that the entire world was NOT waiting at its feet to release its next bit of software. In fact it seems that MS just never understood, still doesn't, just how much bitter hatred it has generated in the world. Why do you think Nokia was opposed so long to use MS for all its phones? Why do you think the industry first embraced Symbian and now Android? Why do you think several phone makers are involved in Linux research? Because they prefer ANYTHING over dealing with MS exclusively.
Apple seems to have fallen in the same trap. They believe they own the rectangle (look at a tablet and see how fucking similar it is to ANY monitor screen out there) and can't believe that anybody else might disagree with them. Believing they can own the market and therefor tell the market what to do (don't make tablets in their most logical form) they started to sue... and now they find the entire industry against them. Or do you think MS is going to be happy to have no minimal design tablets for Windows 8 out there? If Samsung can't produce Android tablets, it can't produce Windows 8 tablets either.
And with so many enemies, one is sooner or later going to find something that sticks and Apple is going to be in deep shit. Because Apple doesn't have any safe cash cows generating money. Kill the iPhone and Apple is dead in the water. And with so many enemies, one of them will perfectly willing to finish it off.
Unless they got some fiendishly clever plan I really can see the people at Apple going "Oh shit, what the fuck did we get ourselves into". If they weren't arrogant Americans. But they are, so they probably think they are not just going to win but that god is on their side.
One of the problems Apple might have ignored is that asian companies are closely tied to their governments and each other. They cooperate a LOT more then in the west, even across borders.
Apple didn't just piss off Samsung, it pissed off Asia.
My bet is that within half a year, Apple will plead for mercy and offer a deal. Good chance it won't be taken.
They are on trial for stating that it was SAFE despite numerious warnings. The claim is that because people where told it was safe, they returned to their houses to sleep inside and died. Those that didn't listen to the scientists saying it was safe stayed outside for the night and were safe.
The scientist in question could have said, "We don't know, there are a lot of shocks, they might be the lead in fora big one, they might not". Then people would have chosen the safe options and slept outside and not have died.
The real case is in finding out WHY the lead scientist was so willing to say it was SAFE, which is MAKING A PREDICTION, when you claim no prediction can be made.
This case is NOT about scientist being unable to make a prediction, the case is why they made a prediction they now claim they couldn't make.
And if you look more into the case, the scientists might have had other motives then the welfare of the people when they made the claim it was SAFE.
In corridor shooters such as Bad Company, the AI is atrocious and completely incapable of achieving anything. You are not the hero because you are so great but because everyone else is so crap.
AI routinely is running into a corner and needs to be reset to catch up to you. Almost all games have issues like this. But that is okay, you are the hero in the lead taking all the lead so you don't notice the keystone cops behind you.
BUT as games like Operation Flashpoint shows, when you have to rely on your own sides AI, things often get hairy. This is why the successor games added a LOT more purely scripted events, rather then AI events. I once had to cancel a mission because a second squad was unable to board a vehicle.
If in this game you are not just going to be filming perfectly scripted events, then how many wars will not happen because the AI got stuck? Or you are in location A watching a soldier trying to shoot a wall and the action happens in location B? That is life you say but life sucks. It reminds me of racing games in which the most spectacular crashes happens and you don't see anything because you are on the other side of the circuit. In game, you want to be in center, not miss the action because that is realism.
It sounds an intresting idea but I think it will fail as they realize just why all FPS are so much the same. Same reason all porn movies show the money shot, because a closeup of the lights at the moment might be artsy but not what the audience wants.
We are not talking about mobile phones, this is about PC's and PC makers have traditionally not given a royal fuck what you install once bought their PC. MS cares, Dell doesn't. But if Dell wants to use the Windows logo, MS will make them care.
MS is thinking of REQUERING any device maker that wants to use the windows logo on their product to secure the boot process so no other system can interfere with it, it is MS making these demands, not the device makers. No device maker cares about what you do with their product but MS cares about people installing another OS on hardware.
And if you think everyone who runs their own software can afford to buy a key from a registar, you are just a dumb fuck Windows user trading security for freedom.
Unless your English sucks as bad as your critical thinking, I would be interested to know how MS research will make it into my Linux desktop and Android phone?
Or are you so smitten with Ballmer that the concept of someone NOT buying Microsoft just doesn't occur to you?
Seriously, claiming Zune is still going strong because it is bundled free with phones that aren't selling. I also got a rm codec in mplayer, must mean realmedia is doing stellar trading.
As some of you Americans who do not think the rest of the world is Hawaii and dragons might know, the greeks are in a bit of trouble. They are basically bankrupt but everyone is afraid to say it except the people but who listens to them.
When the rest of EU tried to rally their voters to support the greeks one of the arguments was that the Greeks aren't work shy, corrupt, tax dodgers but they work longer hours then say in Holland.
They do. Holland has a rather unique combination of short work hours (40 with many people working 36 or even 32 for a fulltime job) and HIGH productivity, in fact one of the highest in the world... a fact shared by many Northern European nations.
Turns out how many hours you are on the job has nothing to do with how productive you are. The English nations often beat themselves on their chest with their 60 hour weeks totally ignoring that the economic results show that they are doing less work in 60 then we do in 40.
Que outraged Americans claiming that they work 80 hours and more and that clearly their economic results show how much better they do.
Especially in office jobs there is a LOT of time wasted, if you can cut that, you can get the same amount of work done but in fewer hours. I noticed that when I work for English companies that the amount of overhead tends to skyrocket. Estimates, re-estimates, adjustments, time tracking, analysis... and the end result? Projects go overtime by default but hey, at least we got every second accounted for... that most make the figures up that are then ineffectively scrutinized seems to escape them all together.
As for weekly strategy meetings... if you need to change your strategy every week, you don't have a strategy.
I can well imagine that for a lot of jobs, the amount of time saved by skipping all the crud can easily reduce a work day to an hour. As a developer I don't expect any developer to be able to work more then half a day of a work day in the office to begin with. And if it was possible to arrange it that each developer could work without interruption they could either do more OR spend less time to do the same amount of wo...
What people forget is that bulk really allows you to cut costs. Call center support is a good example. Running multiple call centers is expensive so can't be done for small setups BUT this means you need night shifts. The bigger the support, the more I can specialize each support tech and still have them work full time. Example? Apple could have one person answering all the calls for how to start your phone and have them busy all the time. Your local plumber's wife probably got to call her husband who is out on a job to answer a technical question.
I know this because I have been in both situations, written applications that were supported by a tech center with scripts and been in places were the receptionist just patched customers through to me, the developer. Needless to say that the small setup spend more and therefor had to charge more then the big place.
WoW does alright but it does it because it is the only game in town and some claim they have left the game because of the lousy support and the lack of moderation leading to lots of assholes misbehaving.
I am reminded of Pathe, a dutch cinema chain. For years they neglected their cinema's leading to lots of stable customers leaving because they had their movie interrupted by late comers, misbehaving people, callers etc etc. Now they are trying to cleanup BUT this is going to cost them way more because they will have a time when neither group of customers will be coming. The late comers will be refused a ticket and I am watching on my home cinema.
How is this related? Support costs, WoW charges little but does little and the game is overrun by 12 year olds who complain about the high fee. While people like me play other games and could happily pay tenfold for a smoother experience if there was the option.
One of the reasons I know how high costs are is that years ago I researched the option of human assisted config. It wasn't always simple and making it simple would involve to many elements, so why not have people do it over the phone instead. Since that company already payed a LOT to call customers back who had done it wrong. Then I learned just how much a call costs. I believe the absolute minimum we got at was a guilder (half a euro or so) per minute and that was leaving lots of costs like the building out. And what can you do in a minute? Jack of twice of course but not much in the way of support. Try it. No, not the fapping!
As for the high charge rate, Apple actually got a low rate because of their size. I can't tell you the rates I work with because they are highly confidential but the transaction costs for iDeal (dutch bank system) are very low in comparison consisting of a mere flat fee per transaction of 45-55 cents depending on the amount you do. Whenever I tell this figure to American businesses in trying to persuade them to do business in Europe, they don't believe me, no way can it be that cheap.
Apples taking 30%, the credit card companies laugh at that.
The best thing that could happen to online transactions is for the credit card companies to finally get some competition.
Why do you think Credit Cards are so unpopular in the rest of the world? Many dutch business charge nothing for iDeal but charge a couple of euro's for CC because that is what they end up paying. On a thousand dollars that is the cost of doing business but on 1 dollar.
Another piece of proof? Dutch shops WANT you to pay with pin (debit card system) rather then cash for ANY transaction, even a CHEAP cup of coffee. Try that with a credit card.
Odd, as a consumer I don't see that as bad. In fact the higher the revenue in an App store the worse that market seems for me.
But maybe I am just to used to Linux on the desktop/laptop and the cheapness of just installing what I need for free.
I don't play simplistic games that were old fashioned on the commodore for just a few bucks (but if you count investment makes them more expensive then full price games) and the idea of having to pay a buck here and a buck there for trivial functionality that on a desktop is just part of the base makes no sense to me.
Maybe I am just being allergic to being nickle and dimed to death but when people say they got several hundred dollars worth of apps on their phones I take the hint and stay well clear.
To put it simple, you just proven that a fool with an iPhone is soon parted from his money. Taking all your money, there is an app for that.
You do know about credit cards right? There are all kinds of fees for a transaction and this makes a 15 times a $1 fee NOT the same in money earned as a 1 time 15$ fee. It is part of why iTunes is so expensive, the CC companies are cleaning up on those small transactions. That is why micro-transactions are often done through points, so that you don't end up paying most of your small payment to the credit card company and NOT the company you are buying from.
Expect about half of a dollar transaction not to make it to the company at the end. That means your proposal would net them 7.50$ for a months worth of playing... oh my goodness! The richess! If you even make ONE support email that can be answered easily and with no going back and forth, they are already paying you to play.
It is part of the whole MMO problem, MMO players are stuck witht the idea that 14,99 is not only the amount games should cost for 20 years already but complaining that this is insanely expensive! While drinking 5$ dollar coffees.
Most MMO companies keep their figures hidden but anyone who has ever run a service requiring support knows just how expensive it all becomes especially if you want to moderate. Players often demand instant assistence in the game but refuse flat out to pay for it.
It would be interesting to get an honest answer from players in a poll like way to this question:
How many minutes of support from a human being do you expect for 14,99 in a month?
Pretty damn sure the answer will show absolutely zero understanding of the costs of labor. Just look at budget airlines, the reason they are so cheap is because they cut all the service but then people complain they don't get service for their 50 dollar around the world ticket... no shit sherlock.
It was nice to read the parents post, just another reminder about how little the average MMO gamer understands about economy. He should have mentioned how Guild Wars can offer a MMO for just the box price! Prooof! (that offering an extremely cut down MMO experience with no support and no moderation is cheaper then offering a full game)
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I say several times UNPROTECTED sex. I mention latex explicitly. Was I being that subtle in referring to condoms?
And the underlying cause in Africa is not sex, it is rape. Mass rape. It is an cultural attitude to women that is getting ever more brutal.
Read a little about conditions in for instance South Africa before you go all indignant.
The article hints at a way to attack the virus in the lab. There is absolutely no attempt yet to do the same in a human body. Can it be done safely? While the article says the cholestrerol membrane is not the same as the one that occurs in things related to coronary disease, is it maybe in use somewhere else? Wouldn't be much point in an AIDS vacine that causes you to fall apart in a puddle.
But the cure for AIDS has been here for a long time. How many people do you know with AIDS? I am not just making another joke about slashdotters not having sex, which isn't funny at all damn you!, but am serious. AIDS was this terrible nightmare from a by gone era when some people who made a lot of noise in the media had unprotected sex with everyone else in the group.
When people stopped doing that, AIDS practically disappeared to the point that young people again think it is safe to have unprotected sex with anyone.
The cure is latex, it works, it has been tried and tested. Not science, or as you put it, the futures fault you refuse to take your medicine.
It has always struck me as odd that it tooks AIDS to get people to start using condoms. Like the other diseases out there are not highly dangerous. This story itself is more likely to kill more people before it can start to cure as people think, "Oh there is a cure, we can fuck around again with no condom". This was the result of all the previous aids blocker stories were people interpreted it as a cure and so didn't care anymore.
Odd stuff, just because we got cure for food poisoning doesn't mean people started eating rotten food on purpose.
As for Africa, the aids epidemic is a symthom not the disease itself. Remove aids and the causes for mass infections remain.
Good news that there is a potential new avenue to create a medicine BUT it not yet here and the underlying problems have not been tackled. Humanity is still its old self.
Slashdot is a commercial entity and it profits from user submitted content for which it does not pay, user comments for which it does not pay AND has its moderation done by users, who, you guess it, it doesn't pay.
Pot calling kettle!
Don't befriend them to begin with. You are awfully disparaging about these fried-whores but why did you befriend them to begin with and now want to unfriend them?
I think the drama starts closer at home for you.
Watching the video, there are a LOT of actions to be taken. Doing them by hand seems bound to cost someone their fingers. Doing them with a robot is going to restrict the folding to only a handful of locations.
Those who think it might restrict truck movements, this is rarely the case. Trucks haul trailers with a container on it, a new trailer with container is delivered and an old empty one is taken away. You have to be a pretty big customer to be able to afford to unload containers with what is after all a pretty big crane. Remove the container from the trailer and the trailer got to go back empty one way or another. Same amount of trucking movements, just with empty trailers unless someone comes up with a way to fold them too. An empty trailer would consume less fuel certainly so there would be a benefit but only in large operations.
The article claims companies hate to ship empty containers... but that is in the nature of business. You might as well complain about having to carry your shopping bags empty to the store. Because containers tend to remain on the trailer, in trucking there is no real savings in the number of trips unless your hauling company can't schedule to bring a full one and pick up an empty one at the same time.
For shipping, it only matters if there is a large discrepancy in when containers are delivered and when they are being shipped back. Say a ship delivers a 1000 containers full from China to the US but there are no empty containers to haul back yet. So the ship has to sail back empty for the next load, then when it is halfway another ship has to pick up the 1000 empty containers (the idea goods are shipped from the US to China is clearly laughable). That would be a waste BUT that doesn't happen, there are always empty containers waiting to go back. And because these routes are routine they balance out.
About the only saving when folding them is that you can load 5 folded empty containers faster then 5 empty unfolded ones. Loading a ship is a lot of work and the larger the ship gets, the more time it wastes at the dock waiting to be loaded. A ship doesn't make money being tied up, it needs to move to make money.
But at what cost? Look at the video again. Talk about complicated. There are easier methods out there, a dutch container folds by having the standard loading crane pull up the lid, and it then collapses. No rods to be inserted (if you ever been around a shipping container you know they suffer a lot of dents) or very narrow (read unstable as hell) walls to be slided precisely by a forklift truck moving at the very edge off its capabilty (how many companies have a forklift capable of easily lifting this kind of weight especially as it will be wanting to fall the narrow fork lift arms with its huge width. The number of times in the folding where an accident might occur is just to fucking large if they expect this to happen at your average company.
It seems like a nice idea but I think there is a reason that nobody has been successful yet with a folding container. It just ain't easy enough. Space might be costly on a ship but time is even more costly, nobody in shipping has the time to do this folding process especially as it seems to take 2 people.
This is just a polite cought from IBM to remind Apple, MS, Google, HP, Samsung and the likes who invented original evil. This is classy stuff, forget about silly lawsuits and threathening to sue your customers. Control their every move like the drones they are. THAT is CLASS. That is pure unadulterated evil.
Basically they are saying, "Look out, we are still here and we are still the masters of darkness. Any of you whippersnappers forget that and we will have your headquarters surrounded by a thousand sheep following our GPS to their slaughter."
I have taken the hint and re-labelled my PC as an IBM-compatible to pay homage to the master.
During the holidays, people got other obligations AND when they login it will be spread over the entire day not a massive spike after work hours.
There may or may not be problems but people often forget just how much time normal people, not slashdotters, spend during weekends and holidays on social stuff. I know plenty of people who have more time off during the week then the weekend as it is all used to visit families or attend parties. Thank god I am a nerd so I get the entire weekend to myself... all alone... doing exactly as I please with nobody getting in my way...
WAAAAH
Guild wars does not have a persistent world, it has a few chat room areas that are instanced to hell and back and then when you enter the game world itself you are in your own little instance with just your own people.
(To those who do not understand this, an ordinary PC is perfectly capable of running a game world for a FPS. Even sharing that world with a few other people is not impossible, see all the self-hosted FPS games the PC was famous for). But start upping the number of people in the same game world and performance takes a nosedive. Years ago there was a FPS game that was supposed to support 256 players at once. Massive battles BUT also massive costs, because where previous FPS companies relied for online play on customer supplying the hardware and bandwidth, this company had to do it themselves. It is the reason there are virtually no massive FPS games out there, nobody can afford to run the server for free.
GW runs a large farm of cheap cheerfull servers, each time a player or small group leaves the instanced chat room area, they enter their own small area that can be handled by ordinary cheap commodity PC hardware. Think off not just the CPU but also memory. Memory has a sweet point for price, if you can outfit your servers with 4gb at 50 or 8gb at 150 then if your server can make do with 4gb you save a LOT of money. And the memory difference for a full size persistent game world is far greater. Try 32-64 GB. Now look at your PC specs. Can it handle that? No. It can't. You need to go to server grade hardware and pay the price.
Each GW instance is much cheaper to run then a persistent world for say WoW because the hardware itself is cheaper. GW can also re-use its hardware far more efficiently, each server does not care what instance it runs, if all of GW's player base wanted to play the same instance, all its servers would run the same instance for all the individual groups. Very efficient BUT not a proper persistent world as western style MMO's know it.
Their customer support is also crap and they have no such thing as moderation.
Comparing Guild Wars with say WoW is like comparing McD drive through with a full service restaurant.And before any GW fans bite my head off, I am not saying McD is bad because it is cheap, I am saying that because of the different style, its low price cannot be compared to a restaurant offering a different service level
MMO's like AoC that use instancing are always slammed for it because people want to play in a big world, not their own little corner. Guild Wars took it to extremes. You can't run into another player during a quest or even socialize and meet up in the game world. No 100 man gatherings in GW.
Your english is better then mine, your understanding of MMO's is a lot worse.
If you want a clear example of costs, I played Lotro the most. I have had a number of encounters with customer support, all good to be honest BUT they each took about 5-10 minutes to resolve. Not a lot of time you might say BUT together they amount to a bit over an hour at least. How much does it cost to have a person spend 1 hour on a customer? Saleries vary a lot BUT it will come awfully close to 40-50 euro's even at the absolute lowest rates.
So... how is the company supposed to fund the development of the game, pay for bug fixes and new content, server costs AND support when just my support needs alone cost more then the game cost? And that is even supposing that the full box price goes to the game company, which it doesn't.
Really, when you claim you can run WoW and now SWTOR of the small sum a company gets for a box sales for years on end... you got to know that you are missing something.
Play Guild Wars and play WoW, you will see they are VERY different games. Why then does GW charge a price when there are games I can play online for free by running them on my own machine! THIEFS!
Margins on software in gaming... please, grow up. The 40 euro in the shop includes money that goes to the retaile
If you ignore the rampant fanboys then ARM is just slower then x86 and will likely remain so. Meanwhile desktop application developers like the power.
I have recently switched to a relatively lowpower E350 and while the power drain is far lower then a dualcore regular desktop, you can notice it struggling with some stuff. Take for instance a torrent client like Vuze. Bad example because it is a piece of bloatware? True enough but really capable torrent clients are hard to come by on Linux. Take uTorrent and its absolute bandwidth hogging traits (ran it for a while but the entire connection would slow to a crawl on even the simplest jobs. KTorrent opens a move window for every single file in a torrent it wants to move, turning you desktop into a flashing nightmare and showing KDE just plain ain't ready for the desktop.
But crap or not, almost all make the little desktop struggle at times. Not that it doesn't run but as my main desktop, it would get annoying REALLY quickly. So my main desktop is a massive 4 core machine running mostly on idle...
It sounds counter intuitive but a desktop runs best for the user when it is barely doing anything at all. Many people who think ARM could take over seem to reason that since they desktop is using only 1% of the resources then a computer with 1% of the computing power would give the same smooth experience.
It would not. If your PC showed the same performance as your phone or your tablet you would go stark raving mad.
ARM will take over on the desktop when people will buy cars that have just enough horse power to do realistic city acceleration. Go ahead, buy a car with a 10 horsepower engine... when you think that is okay, you are ready for an ARM PC and the retirement home.
And good luck with not paying road-tax for your newly bought car or having to keep filling it up with fuel.
As for your TV, what a rip-off, 8000 euro I payed for mine and now they expect me to pay a license fee AND the cable company AND for blu-ray movies.
You are perfectly correct in demanding for for about 40 euro a company keep a massive server farm running for years on end AND keep customer support on line every time you can't figure out a quest, all payed from the same 40 euro's.
What makes people so detached from reality that they think games like this can be run for free? Are they so in capable of doing any basic accounting that they truly can't see that a product with ongoing costs must have ongoing income?
Maybe to some its sound amazingly insightful that you are to cheap to pay 15 bucks for a piece of entertainment per month, to me it just says you are amazingly cheap. For most gamers it comes down to less then a buck an hour and quickly far far less. Only the internet is cheaper. Are you upset that when you payed for your modem the telephone company still wanted more money from you each month?
The simple fact is that human evolution and that of our near relatives is a science that is undergoing rapid development. A lot of changes are bound to occur as new evidence forces a rethink of existing theory. That is good, stick to the same theory for to long and you are no better then a religious person.
There are skeletons being discovered all the time that shows the old theories to be hopelessly wrong with a high probability that humans are not only much older but more cross linked then we thought.
A recent discovery showed what might be a mother son pair who had features that should belong to more modern man but the bones are older then the neanderthal. Where the hell do they fit on the old timeline? A seperate species?
As for your claims about cave art, well, the above pair was found only because what was once a closed cave (it is believed they somehow fell in and drowned) became exposed by erosion. But in reverse, how many open caves back then have become exposed? Or maybe people didn't like to draw in caves for a period of time. Or they didn't live on caves and carved on wood instead?
To many unknowns, the theory of human evolution itself is evolving and so far we are getting older and older and more complex all the time.
But if evolution is true, saying we had symbolic thought 50.000 years ago is bull, we would have evolved over time, SLOWLY getting better and better at it. And then only some individuals of the species who passed on their genes. Believing intelligence just burst on the scene and all of a sudden everyone was smart that is creationist thinking.
Holland, Zaandam, were most of the worlds chocolate is processed. At the end of the process molten chocolate is stored in large vats, sometimes somebody taking samples forgets to close the tap or it is filled while open and it poors onto the floor. The floor everybody walks on and where dead bugs collect. But chocolate is expensive so what do you do with the spilled chocolate? Scoop it back up and poor it back into the system, dead bugs and all.
Enjoy your chocolate turd with real crunchy bits.
Exactly what are you smoking that makes you think only showing an action once the user has already started it is intuitive?
To help you to understand: If I instruct you to hit the red button and there is only a green button but the green button turns red when you hit it, you are going to complain about that button and me a lot.
UI design mistakes are pretty common, as a designer you try to be original but forget that other people might not have the same mindset as you. It is very sad but either you are pushing things and upsetting people, or keeping people comfortable but always staying the same.
Because without opensource, IE6 is all you would have. Love it, it is the only way.
Americans are born with a great arrogance. Take MS and how certain it was that when it was gracious enough to offer an OS for mobile devices, the phone companies would come knocking at its door... and they didn't... HTC got their big break as a chosen partner (meaning MS payed them a shit load of money) to make for instance the XDA and HTC used that money to become an android phone maker...
It seems MS at no point was capable of thinking that the entire world was NOT waiting at its feet to release its next bit of software. In fact it seems that MS just never understood, still doesn't, just how much bitter hatred it has generated in the world. Why do you think Nokia was opposed so long to use MS for all its phones? Why do you think the industry first embraced Symbian and now Android? Why do you think several phone makers are involved in Linux research? Because they prefer ANYTHING over dealing with MS exclusively.
Apple seems to have fallen in the same trap. They believe they own the rectangle (look at a tablet and see how fucking similar it is to ANY monitor screen out there) and can't believe that anybody else might disagree with them. Believing they can own the market and therefor tell the market what to do (don't make tablets in their most logical form) they started to sue... and now they find the entire industry against them. Or do you think MS is going to be happy to have no minimal design tablets for Windows 8 out there? If Samsung can't produce Android tablets, it can't produce Windows 8 tablets either.
And with so many enemies, one is sooner or later going to find something that sticks and Apple is going to be in deep shit. Because Apple doesn't have any safe cash cows generating money. Kill the iPhone and Apple is dead in the water. And with so many enemies, one of them will perfectly willing to finish it off.
Unless they got some fiendishly clever plan I really can see the people at Apple going "Oh shit, what the fuck did we get ourselves into". If they weren't arrogant Americans. But they are, so they probably think they are not just going to win but that god is on their side.
One of the problems Apple might have ignored is that asian companies are closely tied to their governments and each other. They cooperate a LOT more then in the west, even across borders.
Apple didn't just piss off Samsung, it pissed off Asia.
My bet is that within half a year, Apple will plead for mercy and offer a deal. Good chance it won't be taken.
They are on trial for stating that it was SAFE despite numerious warnings. The claim is that because people where told it was safe, they returned to their houses to sleep inside and died. Those that didn't listen to the scientists saying it was safe stayed outside for the night and were safe.
The scientist in question could have said, "We don't know, there are a lot of shocks, they might be the lead in fora big one, they might not". Then people would have chosen the safe options and slept outside and not have died.
The real case is in finding out WHY the lead scientist was so willing to say it was SAFE, which is MAKING A PREDICTION, when you claim no prediction can be made.
This case is NOT about scientist being unable to make a prediction, the case is why they made a prediction they now claim they couldn't make.
And if you look more into the case, the scientists might have had other motives then the welfare of the people when they made the claim it was SAFE.
In corridor shooters such as Bad Company, the AI is atrocious and completely incapable of achieving anything. You are not the hero because you are so great but because everyone else is so crap.
AI routinely is running into a corner and needs to be reset to catch up to you. Almost all games have issues like this. But that is okay, you are the hero in the lead taking all the lead so you don't notice the keystone cops behind you.
BUT as games like Operation Flashpoint shows, when you have to rely on your own sides AI, things often get hairy. This is why the successor games added a LOT more purely scripted events, rather then AI events. I once had to cancel a mission because a second squad was unable to board a vehicle.
If in this game you are not just going to be filming perfectly scripted events, then how many wars will not happen because the AI got stuck? Or you are in location A watching a soldier trying to shoot a wall and the action happens in location B? That is life you say but life sucks. It reminds me of racing games in which the most spectacular crashes happens and you don't see anything because you are on the other side of the circuit. In game, you want to be in center, not miss the action because that is realism.
It sounds an intresting idea but I think it will fail as they realize just why all FPS are so much the same. Same reason all porn movies show the money shot, because a closeup of the lights at the moment might be artsy but not what the audience wants.
We are not talking about mobile phones, this is about PC's and PC makers have traditionally not given a royal fuck what you install once bought their PC. MS cares, Dell doesn't. But if Dell wants to use the Windows logo, MS will make them care.
MS is thinking of REQUERING any device maker that wants to use the windows logo on their product to secure the boot process so no other system can interfere with it, it is MS making these demands, not the device makers. No device maker cares about what you do with their product but MS cares about people installing another OS on hardware.
And if you think everyone who runs their own software can afford to buy a key from a registar, you are just a dumb fuck Windows user trading security for freedom.
You expect a bonus for doing an ActiveX the next generation?
If that is how you do IT, get used to not getting any bonuses.
"many of your future products."
Unless your English sucks as bad as your critical thinking, I would be interested to know how MS research will make it into my Linux desktop and Android phone?
Or are you so smitten with Ballmer that the concept of someone NOT buying Microsoft just doesn't occur to you?
Seriously, claiming Zune is still going strong because it is bundled free with phones that aren't selling. I also got a rm codec in mplayer, must mean realmedia is doing stellar trading.
As some of you Americans who do not think the rest of the world is Hawaii and dragons might know, the greeks are in a bit of trouble. They are basically bankrupt but everyone is afraid to say it except the people but who listens to them.
When the rest of EU tried to rally their voters to support the greeks one of the arguments was that the Greeks aren't work shy, corrupt, tax dodgers but they work longer hours then say in Holland.
They do. Holland has a rather unique combination of short work hours (40 with many people working 36 or even 32 for a fulltime job) and HIGH productivity, in fact one of the highest in the world... a fact shared by many Northern European nations.
Turns out how many hours you are on the job has nothing to do with how productive you are. The English nations often beat themselves on their chest with their 60 hour weeks totally ignoring that the economic results show that they are doing less work in 60 then we do in 40.
Que outraged Americans claiming that they work 80 hours and more and that clearly their economic results show how much better they do.
Especially in office jobs there is a LOT of time wasted, if you can cut that, you can get the same amount of work done but in fewer hours. I noticed that when I work for English companies that the amount of overhead tends to skyrocket. Estimates, re-estimates, adjustments, time tracking, analysis... and the end result? Projects go overtime by default but hey, at least we got every second accounted for... that most make the figures up that are then ineffectively scrutinized seems to escape them all together.
As for weekly strategy meetings... if you need to change your strategy every week, you don't have a strategy.
I can well imagine that for a lot of jobs, the amount of time saved by skipping all the crud can easily reduce a work day to an hour. As a developer I don't expect any developer to be able to work more then half a day of a work day in the office to begin with. And if it was possible to arrange it that each developer could work without interruption they could either do more OR spend less time to do the same amount of wo...
Hold on, call.
What people forget is that bulk really allows you to cut costs. Call center support is a good example. Running multiple call centers is expensive so can't be done for small setups BUT this means you need night shifts. The bigger the support, the more I can specialize each support tech and still have them work full time. Example? Apple could have one person answering all the calls for how to start your phone and have them busy all the time. Your local plumber's wife probably got to call her husband who is out on a job to answer a technical question.
I know this because I have been in both situations, written applications that were supported by a tech center with scripts and been in places were the receptionist just patched customers through to me, the developer. Needless to say that the small setup spend more and therefor had to charge more then the big place.
WoW does alright but it does it because it is the only game in town and some claim they have left the game because of the lousy support and the lack of moderation leading to lots of assholes misbehaving.
I am reminded of Pathe, a dutch cinema chain. For years they neglected their cinema's leading to lots of stable customers leaving because they had their movie interrupted by late comers, misbehaving people, callers etc etc. Now they are trying to cleanup BUT this is going to cost them way more because they will have a time when neither group of customers will be coming. The late comers will be refused a ticket and I am watching on my home cinema.
How is this related? Support costs, WoW charges little but does little and the game is overrun by 12 year olds who complain about the high fee. While people like me play other games and could happily pay tenfold for a smoother experience if there was the option.
One of the reasons I know how high costs are is that years ago I researched the option of human assisted config. It wasn't always simple and making it simple would involve to many elements, so why not have people do it over the phone instead. Since that company already payed a LOT to call customers back who had done it wrong. Then I learned just how much a call costs. I believe the absolute minimum we got at was a guilder (half a euro or so) per minute and that was leaving lots of costs like the building out. And what can you do in a minute? Jack of twice of course but not much in the way of support. Try it. No, not the fapping!
As for the high charge rate, Apple actually got a low rate because of their size. I can't tell you the rates I work with because they are highly confidential but the transaction costs for iDeal (dutch bank system) are very low in comparison consisting of a mere flat fee per transaction of 45-55 cents depending on the amount you do. Whenever I tell this figure to American businesses in trying to persuade them to do business in Europe, they don't believe me, no way can it be that cheap.
Apples taking 30%, the credit card companies laugh at that.
The best thing that could happen to online transactions is for the credit card companies to finally get some competition.
Why do you think Credit Cards are so unpopular in the rest of the world? Many dutch business charge nothing for iDeal but charge a couple of euro's for CC because that is what they end up paying. On a thousand dollars that is the cost of doing business but on 1 dollar.
Another piece of proof? Dutch shops WANT you to pay with pin (debit card system) rather then cash for ANY transaction, even a CHEAP cup of coffee. Try that with a credit card.
Odd, as a consumer I don't see that as bad. In fact the higher the revenue in an App store the worse that market seems for me.
But maybe I am just to used to Linux on the desktop/laptop and the cheapness of just installing what I need for free.
I don't play simplistic games that were old fashioned on the commodore for just a few bucks (but if you count investment makes them more expensive then full price games) and the idea of having to pay a buck here and a buck there for trivial functionality that on a desktop is just part of the base makes no sense to me.
Maybe I am just being allergic to being nickle and dimed to death but when people say they got several hundred dollars worth of apps on their phones I take the hint and stay well clear.
To put it simple, you just proven that a fool with an iPhone is soon parted from his money. Taking all your money, there is an app for that.
You do know about credit cards right? There are all kinds of fees for a transaction and this makes a 15 times a $1 fee NOT the same in money earned as a 1 time 15$ fee. It is part of why iTunes is so expensive, the CC companies are cleaning up on those small transactions. That is why micro-transactions are often done through points, so that you don't end up paying most of your small payment to the credit card company and NOT the company you are buying from.
Expect about half of a dollar transaction not to make it to the company at the end. That means your proposal would net them 7.50$ for a months worth of playing... oh my goodness! The richess! If you even make ONE support email that can be answered easily and with no going back and forth, they are already paying you to play.
It is part of the whole MMO problem, MMO players are stuck witht the idea that 14,99 is not only the amount games should cost for 20 years already but complaining that this is insanely expensive! While drinking 5$ dollar coffees.
Most MMO companies keep their figures hidden but anyone who has ever run a service requiring support knows just how expensive it all becomes especially if you want to moderate. Players often demand instant assistence in the game but refuse flat out to pay for it.
It would be interesting to get an honest answer from players in a poll like way to this question:
How many minutes of support from a human being do you expect for 14,99 in a month?
Pretty damn sure the answer will show absolutely zero understanding of the costs of labor. Just look at budget airlines, the reason they are so cheap is because they cut all the service but then people complain they don't get service for their 50 dollar around the world ticket... no shit sherlock.
It was nice to read the parents post, just another reminder about how little the average MMO gamer understands about economy. He should have mentioned how Guild Wars can offer a MMO for just the box price! Prooof! (that offering an extremely cut down MMO experience with no support and no moderation is cheaper then offering a full game)