Now first of, my work OS is Linux. But I can see OSX taking over. It is always a bit of a hassle to get everything working right. Oh, sound and such are fine but dual monitor setup is still not 100% smooth in both KDE and Gnome. Gnome can't handle multiple wallpapers (and this looks bad monitors are different dimensions) and KDE just isn't smooth with positionting them.
It is usuable, but OSX is just that much smoother and you get it running from the moment you boot your new shiny machine. Nerds are dying out, not because there are fewer of them but because there are more computer users. Their percentage dwindles.
For me, the unique features linux offers (and please gnome stop robbing them) which is mostly complete control are worth the initial setup hassle. But if you are going to shop for a new laptop, and you can do math, then a mac makes a lot of sense especially if you opensource is just free apps to you.
But I know from personal experience that Windows is in decline. It has become easier and easier during job interviews to ask wether a linux desktop is acceptable, to the point that recently it ain't even an issue worth raising anymore because it has already become common in development environments.
Used to be only the boss had a mac and maybe the admin had a linux machine for some tasks. Now they are very common indeed and IT departments have gone from barely tolerating them to supporting them.
Price doesn't really matter to students. Either Windows comes with the price or they pirate it. Same really with OSX. Linux can't compete on price of people don't know the costs of windows.
Only nerds use linux, and statistically we are a rounding error.
I lived near "A bridge to far" and in some movies, that is very eary. You realize your house is one of the landing fields. But then, I used to often go past a spot in the woods were if you went of the bicycle path a little bit, down, there was a small monument were people were killed by the germans.
If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting.
OSX has fewer steps then Ubuntu because there is no partitioning to be done, it doesn't have a swap space. It also doesn't bother with asking you about your keyboard layout, because it knows. The Mac knows all. Including what you are going to download to it. That is why you pay Apple, to hush up your Mac.
You claim media should list their sources and that old media fails because it doesn't do so.
But you then are supposed to be new media, social media, and you don't list your sources either.
You make claims, with no way for me to verify them.
See how EASY it is to sounds like a know it all who claims to hold the one truth in his hands and expect everyone to believe you on your word alone?
I am willing to bet that the article you read that made these claims didn't list its sources either and that those sources were some highly biased research were someone found that the Britannica didn't say what he thought it should say and insisted that because Wikipedia listed the Muslin[sic] Obama was president one pico-second earlier, that is is more up-to-date, accuracy be damned.
SOURCES. Or you are just blowing air.
And what are facts anyway. Who knows what Obama believes in his own mind. He could be a scientologist! Claims he ain't a muslim are based on what? A mind probe? If he IS a spy, then he would hardly say so would he? A lot of facts can't be proven, we assume them to be true. For that matter I can't even verify he ain't Muslin, never met the guy and never met anyone who met him or anyone who met someone who met him. He could be a disney robot for all I know.
Facts, not nearly as common as people like to think.
Were are the cables the internet is carried accross? Oh, can PRIVATE landowners now DENY access to public companies wanting to dig up their land? How about cable companies pay FULL rent on EVERY square meter of ground they got cables in? How about they pay for disruption to traffic?
No, the cable companies will not open this can of worms if they are smart.
Now if you excuse me, I have to clean my cats litter box, buy food for it, entertain it, and sit still for about 8 hours as it sleeps on my lap unless I wish to talk in a high voice.
FREE HUMANS! Oh shit, it heard HELP M[CARRIER LOST]
Thompson, you got the banking industry, now make sure you are NOT distracted by those luscious red-headed twins they will send after you or for god sakes, say NO to the bulging envelopes of cash.
William, you got the pizza place down the block. And for god sakes, stay away from their cousin Agnes, she fancies you and the last guy was crushed to death when she jumped on him. Oh, you are a slashdot reader? Then this might be your only chance.
You misspelled "be" as "bp", that is just beyond stupid. It is not like the p is even close to the e. And stop making that annoying whoosh sound. Why do people always do that?
Someone recently linked an image comparing the CNN homepage with Al Jazeera Home page. The difference is extreme. One is a gossip rag, the other a, highly biased, news source.
But CNN probably makes more money, or used to anyway.
Remember the story about Ballmer being a bad CEO despite raising revenue and profits? That is because in the United Corporations of America, making a profit isn't enough you always go to be growing your profits and growing the amount by which your profits grow. Raise your profits for 10 years in a row by 25% and you are doing badly, it should be year 1: 25%, year 2: 40%, year 3: 60% etc etc. Impossible? Yes it is, but is what the stock market wants, what employees payed in stock options want.
So everything in the UCA is constantly squeezed, cost cutting here, cost cutting there. Spend a little less, earn a little more until you are left with... well it the iPhone 4. Made with slave labour, broken by design. And no this isn't just about Apple. Dell is even better at it. Sold broken PC's, broke anti-trust laws everything to increase the bottom line year after year.
And then you apply it to news. And news isn't cheap or efficient or effective. And you won't notice when it is gone until it is far to late. Until you get to a state that "politicians" refuse to speak to journalists and have them barred from events and only ask questions submitted in advance and then only those they like. Sarah Palin anyone? If you think she is bad, the exact same thing has been going on for a long time. Ask the wrong questions and forget about getting invited to the special events. So no reporter at a white house press briefing asks hard questions, at least not without prior approval.
Think about it, if journalists asked real questions, guys like Bush and Blair would have been as embarrased as when they meet a private citizen who manages to corner them. Brits might remember Blair being totally unable to counter woman questioning him on public health care. Brown the same. What NO report mentioned is that not a SINGLE ONE OF THE PRESS CORE asked those questions. If you are reporter and you haven't had a poltician cry, then suck. And this is the same around the world.
In Holland we have tv news for children. If you compare that show from ten years ago with the adult news, you will find that the adult news now is softer then the children news from way back.
But who is to blame? Big business intrests? Perhaps, but we the public let them. We let the likes of Murdoch own every newssource. We don't refuse to watch fluf pieces on the news and now the fluff has become the news.
And don't blame it on the right either. The left is just as guilty of it. The right has fluff pieces that ignore global warming and corporate corruption. The left has fluff pieces that ignore problems with immigration and culture clashes.
Fluff is not just Idols, it is news that doesn't upset you.
If you read a news source and you agree with it, then you are reading fluff. And we like it. See how quickly people resort to flamebait and troll to silence troubling thoughts on slashdot.
There was another piece, that people seek communities in games that give them the least amount of stress. Well, that is also how we seek out news. Be REALLY honest with yourself, how often do you purposefully seek out news from a source critical to your own world views?
Just bought a Cowon J3 despite the fact that the iPod Touch is the more logical buy. But I like the mentality behind the Cowon while I despise the iEverything with a passion.
Funny thing is, that the other side is always the one most in the wrong... wonder why that is.
Linux geeks: Apple users are heartless selfish bastards.
Apple snobs: Linux users live in their mothers basement and never ever talked to a girl... which is a blatent lie, how do you think we got our mother to let us live in the basement. We ASKED her, by TALKING to HER! So there!
On a serious note, of course I have had intimate contact with women. Knee to the groin counts, doesn't it? Some people pay extra for that:P
If there is no faster then light method of travelling possible, then there are unlikely to be any visitors ever. End of story.
And while 400 planets sounds like a lot, in the milky way it isn't much at all, especially if you consider the short timespan that humans have been capable of even seeing into deep space let alone make their presence known. And there are countless disasters that can wipe out a civilization.
There are aliens out there, in the deep vastness of space and time. Just as somewhere there is a smart intelligent girl that totally digs D&D. To bad she was born 200 years ago.
The way the story is reported you would think this guy was recording someone ELSES traffic stop, or at most that it was a non-sense traffic stop like a routine stop where they stop all motorists for an alcohol test.
NOT that this guy was seriously speeding and pulling stunts on a public road with total disregard for everyone elses safety.
Somehow, that tells me that there is FAR more going on. I never trust anyone who tells only HALF of a story. They always got something to hide. So since they hidden that this guy is an asshole, what more are they hiding?
ACLU and every other privacy nutgroup, learn that if you expect people to take you serious, you got to be more honest then everyone else. Because I personally think speeders should be locked up for life, I do not give a shit if this person goes to jail. what next, Amnesty complaining Hitler never got a fair trail? Cry me a river!
This is for the change for Lord of the Rings Online Monthly Subscription/Lifetime membership model to a hybrid form in which you can play for free but have to buy content, similar to what they did with Dungeon & Dragons Online.
Now, having played the game a lot, I can tell give you a rough impression of the prices involved and what they mean.
Take dye. 125 points. An outfit consists of 6 items. If you color them all, that is 750 points. IF 100 points are 1 dollar (widely assumed but not yet confirmed) then that is a fairly hefty sum just to color your outfit. And the dyes can also be created in game. If you are willing to pay 750 points, then surely you would be willing to donate say 1 dollar to my paypal account for the dyes?
Crafting scrolls are even more laughable they give a 15% increase to your critical change when crafting for 30 seconds. Not a long time at all. 40 points. I crank them out by the truckload.
The content itself is far more expensive 500+ points. There are in the original game: Lone-lands, North Downs, Evendim, Forochel, Trollshaws, Misty Mountains, Angmar. 500+ points per area. Say that it is 5 dollars per area. Then you need to spend 35 dollars... how much did the entire game cost again? Oh, its budget now. 10 euro's...
So... buy them in the item shop or a real one, 20 dollar difference. And then you get all orginal classes, full character slots no chat limits etc etc.
Need I go on? It seems pretty clear that the item shop in this case is NOT the cheap option.
To be true micro transactions such items as a dye need to cost about 1 cent. But that isn't profitable. And how many dyes do they need anyway? So Lotro item mall also has scrolls that give a permanent +30 to any stat. OOOPS! Pay to Win anyone?
The old fashioned model of box-game with a monthly subscription is simple, the customer knows what he gets and so does the game company. Micro transactions only work on those who can't do maths and for those who are really going to play your game for free.
I am afraid that for regular games it will be just more of the examples we already seen. Race games were every car has to be bought, RPG's with horse armour for 1/10 of the full game.
Stop nicke and diming us to death. Gamers are not infinitly stupid and once we caught on it will be to late to change anything. We will have stopped buying and you will have gone bankrupt.
Stock is a LOUSY indication of a CEO's performance. Even the article itself makes this clear, earnings went up together with profits, yet stock price went down.
The stock market is about emotion and it seems to be run by 12yr old boys. "OMG the MS did notzers hve 9 trillion winnezers, SELLORS!" This is after all the stock market that gave billions in value to web companies that gave things away for free and refused to buy stocks in decades old companies with reliable safe markets.
Ballmer, as much as I despise the guy, is the CEO MS has to have. Yes, MS COULD try to be an Apple, but it can't. No Zune team, the problem ain't Ballmer, the problem is YOU! The MS staff, those 100.000 people who couldn't come up with an original thought if it bid them on the ass because you are to busy watching the stock market.
Just as a dog reflects its owner, a CEO reflects his company. MS is the boring spreadsheet maker. It can't do an iPod or indeed a PS3. Little Big Planet could NEVER have been a MS project. Simply doesn't fit. Why do you think MS bought up so many game companies and then sold them again? They try to buy the color they lack only to find everything turning gray in their hands. They got the midas touch, expect that everything turns to lead. And lead sells very well indeed. But it ain't sexy.
MS can't ever be sexy, it is not its role in life. IBM isn't sexy either and it does very well because of it. If you want sexy, you go to Sun... and yes that Sun has been bought up says a LOT about how well sexy works. If you want a boring reliable server, you go IBM.
And if you want to outfit 10000 workplaces with an OS/productivity solution, you go MS.
The Zune and Windows Mobile are side excercises, they may someday result in a profit on their own but the cash cows remain Windows and Office and nothing has changed under Ballmers leadership. It is just that in the stock market, improving your earnings and profits results in a lower stock price because you didn't give all your money away and hope to make it up in bulk.
One simple reason why China can never be a democracy. "One Child" policy. it is needed, it is essential and without China would soon need all its resources just to control the food riots and clean up the countless starvation corpses.
But would anyone vote for it? Hell no. Just as the US will never vote to have SUV drivers neutered.
Dictatorship is underrated when it comes to being able to make decisions that have to be made but aren't popular.
It ain't nice, but as the cattle in Germany's Love Parade have shown, people ain't smart as a group.
And I use cattle for a reason. The migration of the wildebeest is necessary for the species as a whole. It MUST move or face starvation. But the migration will inevitably result in the death of many, so if wildebeest had a democracy and elected official would be faced with having to be elected for "Lets march for miles on end across rivers filled with crocodiles while your children are trampled to death and every mile the weakest amongst us are picked of by predators".
Yeah, that will run. And the other candidate will say "Nah, we don't need to march, that is just leftist propaganda, there is no proof their will be a dry season this year again, we can stay!" (Meanwhile pocketing generous donations from Lions Inc.)
China the democracy will be a disaster. Its population will explode and then its population will vote to take care of this the old fashioned way. War.
A dutch program from my youth tried to explain dyslexia by showing street signs in Hebrew, rather then dutch. It looked apparently very confusing. Except to my mother who could read it. The clutter wasn't there for her because she parsed it as readily as dutch.
ANY foreign language will look cluttered because you brain is trying to create meaning out of chaos and failing. If you watch a loading dock you will see chaos. A person who knows the process will see organization.
People who say in this topic that Tokyo is crowded obviously never been to Time Square or for that matter the Kalverstraat. But your brain can parse those signs and classify them as unimportant.
Your brain, being inhabited in tasty meat, is trained to react strongly to things it doesn't expect because it expects them to be a hungry animal on the lookout for said tasty meat. We don't have to notice that tree we have grown up around, but we have to notice the addition of two eyes and a twitchy tail to its branches.
Here is a simple test: Install a japanese language pack in your OS and change the setting so everything is in japanese. Notice how cluttered it all of sudden is? Excactly the same layout, but you suddenly can't find anything.
For that matter, put slashdot through google translate and see how suddenly the site seems filled with random ramblings by sociopaths who live in their mothers basement.
The US lives in a dream, it starts with the "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." and deteriorates from there.
If you don't get what is wrong with the above sentence written by slave-owners, then you are an American. Congrats, stop reading, you will never get the rest of this post.
Americans believe at their core that everyone wants to be an American. They must because if they didn't, then they might have to look to other countries and perhaps ask, why are they doing better? Why are there fewer child deaths in Cuba? Why can the EU afford free universal healthcare, why are other car companies not on a government bailout?
Dangerous thoughts that could all to easily lead to, is working 80 hours a week to afford to suvs and a 50 inch TV really all that life is about?
Vietnam is not just a strategy lesson, learning from it would involve questioning the "American Dream". 8 million civilians killed by US soldiers, when you know the inefficiency of bombing vs gas chambers comes dangerously close to the Holocaust. That doesn't fit with the "American Dream".
The US can never learn from these wars because it would have to stop being the US, and start being a regular country.
You have a valid point HOWEVER it puzzles me why you then forget to mention the OTHER side in this conflict. The Taliban/Al Queda (or dare I say it, Islam) is involved in far MORE wars then the US.
Odd that you leave that bit out. There are two sides to every conflict. Oh and other countries are close seconds, lets not forget that the US is not fighting this war alone.
War mongering is a common business of countries. It is just that Joe Public doesn't notice much of it.
Your argument is valid, but you are arguing about social values to people with no social values. Me, myself and I. That is all of society to them.
That certain things like the utility grid, public transport, mail, air traffic control make no sense as non-monopolies, doesn't fit in their tiny little world of "as long as I get it cheap I don't care about anything else".
Would you think it a good idea if airtraffic control was a non-monopoly, that just anyone could start directing aircraft around the world?
And how about true competition on the grid? Ten different raillines next to each other, competing with each other. 20 electric cables coming in your house.
And indeed, 20 different mailboxes. London forced telecoms to have public phoneboxes, so you had multiple sitting next to each other because that is how you show competition while they weren't in remote areas because companies weren't intrested in that.
Mail is "costly" because you can post a letter anywhere and it will be delivered. if you only payed for delivering it from major city to major city it would be cheaper but the service as a whole would collapse AND THEN even those profitable services would collapse.
This is most easily explained with public transport. Clearly trains running empty are costing money. So any service outside rush hour should be cut. but that means that if you have to be an half hour early at work, you can't use it, and if you stay an half hour late, you can't. So, even the rush hour service looses out because people are forced to seek alternatives anyway.
Some services just have to be run as a monopoly and with a build in in-effiency if you want the service to be the service it is.
There is no need for a US postal service that only delivers to high profit areas. Mail has to be mailed to anyone or it stops being mail and insteads becomes a courier service.
I have been on a recent job hunt. Granted, as a LAMP developer. At each interview I asked, is it possible to use a non-windows desktop. Answer: Yes. Mac or Ubuntu didn't matter as long as you could do your job.
These weren't small companies either although they weren't the type to run IE6 either.
There is a slow but steady march towards opensource and for the really old, it is the same march that made Microsoft a household name.
There was a time when if you asked for a DOS machine at work, you would have had to be working in the technological vanguard to get it. Because HERE we use mainframes kid, not this new fangled dos/windows 1.0 stuff. that is kid stuff, for hobbyists.
Dell? Missing the boat. But then, they are being surpassed on every front. I can understand why Dell doesn't want to do Ubuntu, they aren't about giving away free customizations. Sure your dell laptop can be pink, that will be 50 euro's thank you very much. All for a different colored piece of plastic. But when you are at the absolute bottom price wise your are just asking to be picked off by the next guy who can go even cheaper.
I predict that before to long, there will be a chinese company, currently supplying the big names in the west, who starts selling direct. And then Dell will be left with overpriced hardware that doesn't offer anything different.
How much of private gun ownership results in legal use? Protecting the person from criminals (not as in, if I have a gun I am safe but actually stopping a crime in progress because you a private citizen has a gun) vs it being used by criminals? Wouldn't be at all suprised if the figure is even lower. Yet the US allows gun ownership because of those few who are able to use it legally.
Management skills and combat skills have both the same difficulty, hard to train without doing it for real and the risk are often just to big for it to be done for real.
How do you gain leadership experience when no business in their right mind is going to give a kid a chance? Oh we got this project that the future of the company depends on, lets give it to the new guy. See if he got what it takes.
That is why things like taking part in school activities, running the school newspaper COUNT during a job interview. Shows you did more then just sit on your arse, that you can do something. Lead, take charge.
MMO raid leaders and guild leaders are just the new coach of the highschool soccer team.
If you never played these games, or suck at it, it might not be clear, so allow me to illustrate with Lord of the Rings Online, my own waste of time.
Situation: Minstrels are the primary healing class and you can't find any. What do you do?
Answer 1: I sit there for hour after hour spamming the chat channels asking, demanding no screaming for a minstrel.
Answer 2: I look at the classes I have got and adjust the strategy to handle the situation, for instance by relying on captains for healing and asking the DPS classes to trade some DPS for survivability.
Who would you hire? NO, the point is NOT that knowing that captains can very effective healers or that good champions (dps class that dies a lot) can adjust their style to be less squishy makes you a good manager. The trick is that the second answer showed you can be flexible. Work around a problem rather then beat yourself to death against it.
Situation: Level 65, the discussion on whether the game should be more solo friendly.
Person A: Yes, I am a champ and never can find anyone for the very hard stuff I can't just DPS my way through and I am not a member of a kin because they all suck and expect constant hand holding.
Person B: No, I am a captain and finding a fellowship is easy enough, I start by asking in chat channel if someone else needs it, and if I need to I ask for help from my kin and friend list, since I am a captain, I can always summon someone to my side, a really useful skill. And a captain is always welcome since we give nice boosts to everyone else.
Who do you hire for your team? The DPS who can only DPS because everyone is working their ass of the keep him alive? The prima dona? Or the team player, the guy who knows he is best when he works with others to offset his own shortcoming and augment other peoples strong points?
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Being a successful raid leader means you can make over a dozen people work together who all have their own agenda and who can't be fired. Compared to that, running a multi-national is a piece of cake. Not because leading a raid is the same as leading a business team but because the essential skills have a lot in common. It is what the obstacle course is to real combat. Not the same at all, but the best you can get without actually going to war to train your soldiers. How else is a 16 year old going to get leadership experience? I am perfectly willing to raid with a young kid in charge even if they never done it before. That is how you learn, but have the same kid lead a project at work? No thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Now first of, my work OS is Linux. But I can see OSX taking over. It is always a bit of a hassle to get everything working right. Oh, sound and such are fine but dual monitor setup is still not 100% smooth in both KDE and Gnome. Gnome can't handle multiple wallpapers (and this looks bad monitors are different dimensions) and KDE just isn't smooth with positionting them.
It is usuable, but OSX is just that much smoother and you get it running from the moment you boot your new shiny machine. Nerds are dying out, not because there are fewer of them but because there are more computer users. Their percentage dwindles.
For me, the unique features linux offers (and please gnome stop robbing them) which is mostly complete control are worth the initial setup hassle. But if you are going to shop for a new laptop, and you can do math, then a mac makes a lot of sense especially if you opensource is just free apps to you.
But I know from personal experience that Windows is in decline. It has become easier and easier during job interviews to ask wether a linux desktop is acceptable, to the point that recently it ain't even an issue worth raising anymore because it has already become common in development environments.
Used to be only the boss had a mac and maybe the admin had a linux machine for some tasks. Now they are very common indeed and IT departments have gone from barely tolerating them to supporting them.
Price doesn't really matter to students. Either Windows comes with the price or they pirate it. Same really with OSX. Linux can't compete on price of people don't know the costs of windows.
Only nerds use linux, and statistically we are a rounding error.
Then again, only nerds used dos and windows 1.
I lived near "A bridge to far" and in some movies, that is very eary. You realize your house is one of the landing fields. But then, I used to often go past a spot in the woods were if you went of the bicycle path a little bit, down, there was a small monument were people were killed by the germans.
If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting.
OSX has fewer steps then Ubuntu because there is no partitioning to be done, it doesn't have a swap space. It also doesn't bother with asking you about your keyboard layout, because it knows. The Mac knows all. Including what you are going to download to it. That is why you pay Apple, to hush up your Mac.
Just used the disc myself on a Macbook recently. Two discs, one for the OS, one for other software.
So what kind of nonsense are you spouting? Ever owned a Mac?
You claim media should list their sources and that old media fails because it doesn't do so.
But you then are supposed to be new media, social media, and you don't list your sources either.
You make claims, with no way for me to verify them.
See how EASY it is to sounds like a know it all who claims to hold the one truth in his hands and expect everyone to believe you on your word alone?
I am willing to bet that the article you read that made these claims didn't list its sources either and that those sources were some highly biased research were someone found that the Britannica didn't say what he thought it should say and insisted that because Wikipedia listed the Muslin[sic] Obama was president one pico-second earlier, that is is more up-to-date, accuracy be damned.
SOURCES. Or you are just blowing air.
And what are facts anyway. Who knows what Obama believes in his own mind. He could be a scientologist! Claims he ain't a muslim are based on what? A mind probe? If he IS a spy, then he would hardly say so would he? A lot of facts can't be proven, we assume them to be true. For that matter I can't even verify he ain't Muslin, never met the guy and never met anyone who met him or anyone who met someone who met him. He could be a disney robot for all I know.
Facts, not nearly as common as people like to think.
Were are the cables the internet is carried accross? Oh, can PRIVATE landowners now DENY access to public companies wanting to dig up their land? How about cable companies pay FULL rent on EVERY square meter of ground they got cables in? How about they pay for disruption to traffic?
No, the cable companies will not open this can of worms if they are smart.
But that sir is without question. Pets == Slaves.
Now if you excuse me, I have to clean my cats litter box, buy food for it, entertain it, and sit still for about 8 hours as it sleeps on my lap unless I wish to talk in a high voice.
FREE HUMANS! Oh shit, it heard HELP M[CARRIER LOST]
Can you imagine the roll call?
Thompson, you got the banking industry, now make sure you are NOT distracted by those luscious red-headed twins they will send after you or for god sakes, say NO to the bulging envelopes of cash.
William, you got the pizza place down the block. And for god sakes, stay away from their cousin Agnes, she fancies you and the last guy was crushed to death when she jumped on him. Oh, you are a slashdot reader? Then this might be your only chance.
You misspelled "be" as "bp", that is just beyond stupid. It is not like the p is even close to the e. And stop making that annoying whoosh sound. Why do people always do that?
Someone recently linked an image comparing the CNN homepage with Al Jazeera Home page. The difference is extreme. One is a gossip rag, the other a, highly biased, news source.
But CNN probably makes more money, or used to anyway.
Remember the story about Ballmer being a bad CEO despite raising revenue and profits? That is because in the United Corporations of America, making a profit isn't enough you always go to be growing your profits and growing the amount by which your profits grow. Raise your profits for 10 years in a row by 25% and you are doing badly, it should be year 1: 25%, year 2: 40%, year 3: 60% etc etc. Impossible? Yes it is, but is what the stock market wants, what employees payed in stock options want.
So everything in the UCA is constantly squeezed, cost cutting here, cost cutting there. Spend a little less, earn a little more until you are left with... well it the iPhone 4. Made with slave labour, broken by design. And no this isn't just about Apple. Dell is even better at it. Sold broken PC's, broke anti-trust laws everything to increase the bottom line year after year.
And then you apply it to news. And news isn't cheap or efficient or effective. And you won't notice when it is gone until it is far to late. Until you get to a state that "politicians" refuse to speak to journalists and have them barred from events and only ask questions submitted in advance and then only those they like. Sarah Palin anyone? If you think she is bad, the exact same thing has been going on for a long time. Ask the wrong questions and forget about getting invited to the special events. So no reporter at a white house press briefing asks hard questions, at least not without prior approval.
Think about it, if journalists asked real questions, guys like Bush and Blair would have been as embarrased as when they meet a private citizen who manages to corner them. Brits might remember Blair being totally unable to counter woman questioning him on public health care. Brown the same. What NO report mentioned is that not a SINGLE ONE OF THE PRESS CORE asked those questions. If you are reporter and you haven't had a poltician cry, then suck. And this is the same around the world.
In Holland we have tv news for children. If you compare that show from ten years ago with the adult news, you will find that the adult news now is softer then the children news from way back.
But who is to blame? Big business intrests? Perhaps, but we the public let them. We let the likes of Murdoch own every newssource. We don't refuse to watch fluf pieces on the news and now the fluff has become the news.
And don't blame it on the right either. The left is just as guilty of it. The right has fluff pieces that ignore global warming and corporate corruption. The left has fluff pieces that ignore problems with immigration and culture clashes.
Fluff is not just Idols, it is news that doesn't upset you.
If you read a news source and you agree with it, then you are reading fluff. And we like it. See how quickly people resort to flamebait and troll to silence troubling thoughts on slashdot.
There was another piece, that people seek communities in games that give them the least amount of stress. Well, that is also how we seek out news. Be REALLY honest with yourself, how often do you purposefully seek out news from a source critical to your own world views?
Just bought a Cowon J3 despite the fact that the iPod Touch is the more logical buy. But I like the mentality behind the Cowon while I despise the iEverything with a passion.
Funny thing is, that the other side is always the one most in the wrong... wonder why that is.
Linux geeks: Apple users are heartless selfish bastards.
Apple snobs: Linux users live in their mothers basement and never ever talked to a girl... which is a blatent lie, how do you think we got our mother to let us live in the basement. We ASKED her, by TALKING to HER! So there!
On a serious note, of course I have had intimate contact with women. Knee to the groin counts, doesn't it? Some people pay extra for that :P
Is interstellar space travel feasable?
If there is no faster then light method of travelling possible, then there are unlikely to be any visitors ever. End of story.
And while 400 planets sounds like a lot, in the milky way it isn't much at all, especially if you consider the short timespan that humans have been capable of even seeing into deep space let alone make their presence known. And there are countless disasters that can wipe out a civilization.
There are aliens out there, in the deep vastness of space and time. Just as somewhere there is a smart intelligent girl that totally digs D&D. To bad she was born 200 years ago.
My ISP is often a matter of little choice, if I want to access the internet, I MUST go through an ISP.
I never ever have to go to google or any other domain. It is trivial to avoid any domain I wish, just put it in hosts file with local ip.
Especially since Google doesn't know my personal details. My ISP does.
The way the story is reported you would think this guy was recording someone ELSES traffic stop, or at most that it was a non-sense traffic stop like a routine stop where they stop all motorists for an alcohol test.
NOT that this guy was seriously speeding and pulling stunts on a public road with total disregard for everyone elses safety.
Somehow, that tells me that there is FAR more going on. I never trust anyone who tells only HALF of a story. They always got something to hide. So since they hidden that this guy is an asshole, what more are they hiding?
ACLU and every other privacy nutgroup, learn that if you expect people to take you serious, you got to be more honest then everyone else. Because I personally think speeders should be locked up for life, I do not give a shit if this person goes to jail. what next, Amnesty complaining Hitler never got a fair trail? Cry me a river!
http://www.mordororbust.com/233-lotro-store-beta-screenshots/
This is for the change for Lord of the Rings Online Monthly Subscription/Lifetime membership model to a hybrid form in which you can play for free but have to buy content, similar to what they did with Dungeon & Dragons Online.
Now, having played the game a lot, I can tell give you a rough impression of the prices involved and what they mean.
Take dye. 125 points. An outfit consists of 6 items. If you color them all, that is 750 points. IF 100 points are 1 dollar (widely assumed but not yet confirmed) then that is a fairly hefty sum just to color your outfit. And the dyes can also be created in game. If you are willing to pay 750 points, then surely you would be willing to donate say 1 dollar to my paypal account for the dyes?
Crafting scrolls are even more laughable they give a 15% increase to your critical change when crafting for 30 seconds. Not a long time at all. 40 points. I crank them out by the truckload.
The content itself is far more expensive 500+ points. There are in the original game: Lone-lands, North Downs, Evendim, Forochel, Trollshaws, Misty Mountains, Angmar. 500+ points per area. Say that it is 5 dollars per area. Then you need to spend 35 dollars... how much did the entire game cost again? Oh, its budget now. 10 euro's...
So... buy them in the item shop or a real one, 20 dollar difference. And then you get all orginal classes, full character slots no chat limits etc etc.
Need I go on? It seems pretty clear that the item shop in this case is NOT the cheap option.
To be true micro transactions such items as a dye need to cost about 1 cent. But that isn't profitable. And how many dyes do they need anyway? So Lotro item mall also has scrolls that give a permanent +30 to any stat. OOOPS! Pay to Win anyone?
The old fashioned model of box-game with a monthly subscription is simple, the customer knows what he gets and so does the game company. Micro transactions only work on those who can't do maths and for those who are really going to play your game for free.
I am afraid that for regular games it will be just more of the examples we already seen. Race games were every car has to be bought, RPG's with horse armour for 1/10 of the full game.
Stop nicke and diming us to death. Gamers are not infinitly stupid and once we caught on it will be to late to change anything. We will have stopped buying and you will have gone bankrupt.
Stock is a LOUSY indication of a CEO's performance. Even the article itself makes this clear, earnings went up together with profits, yet stock price went down.
The stock market is about emotion and it seems to be run by 12yr old boys. "OMG the MS did notzers hve 9 trillion winnezers, SELLORS!" This is after all the stock market that gave billions in value to web companies that gave things away for free and refused to buy stocks in decades old companies with reliable safe markets.
Ballmer, as much as I despise the guy, is the CEO MS has to have. Yes, MS COULD try to be an Apple, but it can't. No Zune team, the problem ain't Ballmer, the problem is YOU! The MS staff, those 100.000 people who couldn't come up with an original thought if it bid them on the ass because you are to busy watching the stock market.
Just as a dog reflects its owner, a CEO reflects his company. MS is the boring spreadsheet maker. It can't do an iPod or indeed a PS3. Little Big Planet could NEVER have been a MS project. Simply doesn't fit. Why do you think MS bought up so many game companies and then sold them again? They try to buy the color they lack only to find everything turning gray in their hands. They got the midas touch, expect that everything turns to lead. And lead sells very well indeed. But it ain't sexy.
MS can't ever be sexy, it is not its role in life. IBM isn't sexy either and it does very well because of it. If you want sexy, you go to Sun... and yes that Sun has been bought up says a LOT about how well sexy works. If you want a boring reliable server, you go IBM.
And if you want to outfit 10000 workplaces with an OS/productivity solution, you go MS.
The Zune and Windows Mobile are side excercises, they may someday result in a profit on their own but the cash cows remain Windows and Office and nothing has changed under Ballmers leadership. It is just that in the stock market, improving your earnings and profits results in a lower stock price because you didn't give all your money away and hope to make it up in bulk.
One simple reason why China can never be a democracy. "One Child" policy. it is needed, it is essential and without China would soon need all its resources just to control the food riots and clean up the countless starvation corpses.
But would anyone vote for it? Hell no. Just as the US will never vote to have SUV drivers neutered.
Dictatorship is underrated when it comes to being able to make decisions that have to be made but aren't popular.
It ain't nice, but as the cattle in Germany's Love Parade have shown, people ain't smart as a group.
And I use cattle for a reason. The migration of the wildebeest is necessary for the species as a whole. It MUST move or face starvation. But the migration will inevitably result in the death of many, so if wildebeest had a democracy and elected official would be faced with having to be elected for "Lets march for miles on end across rivers filled with crocodiles while your children are trampled to death and every mile the weakest amongst us are picked of by predators".
Yeah, that will run. And the other candidate will say "Nah, we don't need to march, that is just leftist propaganda, there is no proof their will be a dry season this year again, we can stay!" (Meanwhile pocketing generous donations from Lions Inc.)
China the democracy will be a disaster. Its population will explode and then its population will vote to take care of this the old fashioned way. War.
A dutch program from my youth tried to explain dyslexia by showing street signs in Hebrew, rather then dutch. It looked apparently very confusing. Except to my mother who could read it. The clutter wasn't there for her because she parsed it as readily as dutch.
ANY foreign language will look cluttered because you brain is trying to create meaning out of chaos and failing. If you watch a loading dock you will see chaos. A person who knows the process will see organization.
People who say in this topic that Tokyo is crowded obviously never been to Time Square or for that matter the Kalverstraat. But your brain can parse those signs and classify them as unimportant.
Your brain, being inhabited in tasty meat, is trained to react strongly to things it doesn't expect because it expects them to be a hungry animal on the lookout for said tasty meat. We don't have to notice that tree we have grown up around, but we have to notice the addition of two eyes and a twitchy tail to its branches.
Here is a simple test: Install a japanese language pack in your OS and change the setting so everything is in japanese. Notice how cluttered it all of sudden is? Excactly the same layout, but you suddenly can't find anything.
For that matter, put slashdot through google translate and see how suddenly the site seems filled with random ramblings by sociopaths who live in their mothers basement.
The US lives in a dream, it starts with the "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." and deteriorates from there.
If you don't get what is wrong with the above sentence written by slave-owners, then you are an American. Congrats, stop reading, you will never get the rest of this post.
Americans believe at their core that everyone wants to be an American. They must because if they didn't, then they might have to look to other countries and perhaps ask, why are they doing better? Why are there fewer child deaths in Cuba? Why can the EU afford free universal healthcare, why are other car companies not on a government bailout?
Dangerous thoughts that could all to easily lead to, is working 80 hours a week to afford to suvs and a 50 inch TV really all that life is about?
Vietnam is not just a strategy lesson, learning from it would involve questioning the "American Dream". 8 million civilians killed by US soldiers, when you know the inefficiency of bombing vs gas chambers comes dangerously close to the Holocaust. That doesn't fit with the "American Dream".
The US can never learn from these wars because it would have to stop being the US, and start being a regular country.
You have a valid point HOWEVER it puzzles me why you then forget to mention the OTHER side in this conflict. The Taliban/Al Queda (or dare I say it, Islam) is involved in far MORE wars then the US.
Odd that you leave that bit out. There are two sides to every conflict. Oh and other countries are close seconds, lets not forget that the US is not fighting this war alone.
War mongering is a common business of countries. It is just that Joe Public doesn't notice much of it.
Your argument is valid, but you are arguing about social values to people with no social values. Me, myself and I. That is all of society to them.
That certain things like the utility grid, public transport, mail, air traffic control make no sense as non-monopolies, doesn't fit in their tiny little world of "as long as I get it cheap I don't care about anything else".
Would you think it a good idea if airtraffic control was a non-monopoly, that just anyone could start directing aircraft around the world?
And how about true competition on the grid? Ten different raillines next to each other, competing with each other. 20 electric cables coming in your house.
And indeed, 20 different mailboxes. London forced telecoms to have public phoneboxes, so you had multiple sitting next to each other because that is how you show competition while they weren't in remote areas because companies weren't intrested in that.
Mail is "costly" because you can post a letter anywhere and it will be delivered. if you only payed for delivering it from major city to major city it would be cheaper but the service as a whole would collapse AND THEN even those profitable services would collapse.
This is most easily explained with public transport. Clearly trains running empty are costing money. So any service outside rush hour should be cut. but that means that if you have to be an half hour early at work, you can't use it, and if you stay an half hour late, you can't. So, even the rush hour service looses out because people are forced to seek alternatives anyway.
Some services just have to be run as a monopoly and with a build in in-effiency if you want the service to be the service it is.
There is no need for a US postal service that only delivers to high profit areas. Mail has to be mailed to anyone or it stops being mail and insteads becomes a courier service.
I have been on a recent job hunt. Granted, as a LAMP developer. At each interview I asked, is it possible to use a non-windows desktop. Answer: Yes. Mac or Ubuntu didn't matter as long as you could do your job.
These weren't small companies either although they weren't the type to run IE6 either.
There is a slow but steady march towards opensource and for the really old, it is the same march that made Microsoft a household name.
There was a time when if you asked for a DOS machine at work, you would have had to be working in the technological vanguard to get it. Because HERE we use mainframes kid, not this new fangled dos/windows 1.0 stuff. that is kid stuff, for hobbyists.
Dell? Missing the boat. But then, they are being surpassed on every front. I can understand why Dell doesn't want to do Ubuntu, they aren't about giving away free customizations. Sure your dell laptop can be pink, that will be 50 euro's thank you very much. All for a different colored piece of plastic. But when you are at the absolute bottom price wise your are just asking to be picked off by the next guy who can go even cheaper.
I predict that before to long, there will be a chinese company, currently supplying the big names in the west, who starts selling direct. And then Dell will be left with overpriced hardware that doesn't offer anything different.
How much of private gun ownership results in legal use? Protecting the person from criminals (not as in, if I have a gun I am safe but actually stopping a crime in progress because you a private citizen has a gun) vs it being used by criminals? Wouldn't be at all suprised if the figure is even lower. Yet the US allows gun ownership because of those few who are able to use it legally.
TO MUCH INFORMATION
This should be on a need to know basis, and I do not need to know.
Ignorance is bliss.
With kind regards,
The voting public.
Management skills and combat skills have both the same difficulty, hard to train without doing it for real and the risk are often just to big for it to be done for real.
How do you gain leadership experience when no business in their right mind is going to give a kid a chance? Oh we got this project that the future of the company depends on, lets give it to the new guy. See if he got what it takes.
That is why things like taking part in school activities, running the school newspaper COUNT during a job interview. Shows you did more then just sit on your arse, that you can do something. Lead, take charge.
MMO raid leaders and guild leaders are just the new coach of the highschool soccer team.
If you never played these games, or suck at it, it might not be clear, so allow me to illustrate with Lord of the Rings Online, my own waste of time.
Situation: Minstrels are the primary healing class and you can't find any. What do you do?
Answer 1: I sit there for hour after hour spamming the chat channels asking, demanding no screaming for a minstrel.
Answer 2: I look at the classes I have got and adjust the strategy to handle the situation, for instance by relying on captains for healing and asking the DPS classes to trade some DPS for survivability.
Who would you hire? NO, the point is NOT that knowing that captains can very effective healers or that good champions (dps class that dies a lot) can adjust their style to be less squishy makes you a good manager. The trick is that the second answer showed you can be flexible. Work around a problem rather then beat yourself to death against it.
Situation: Level 65, the discussion on whether the game should be more solo friendly.
Person A: Yes, I am a champ and never can find anyone for the very hard stuff I can't just DPS my way through and I am not a member of a kin because they all suck and expect constant hand holding.
Person B: No, I am a captain and finding a fellowship is easy enough, I start by asking in chat channel if someone else needs it, and if I need to I ask for help from my kin and friend list, since I am a captain, I can always summon someone to my side, a really useful skill. And a captain is always welcome since we give nice boosts to everyone else.
Who do you hire for your team? The DPS who can only DPS because everyone is working their ass of the keep him alive? The prima dona? Or the team player, the guy who knows he is best when he works with others to offset his own shortcoming and augment other peoples strong points?
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Being a successful raid leader means you can make over a dozen people work together who all have their own agenda and who can't be fired. Compared to that, running a multi-national is a piece of cake. Not because leading a raid is the same as leading a business team but because the essential skills have a lot in common. It is what the obstacle course is to real combat. Not the same at all, but the best you can get without actually going to war to train your soldiers. How else is a 16 year old going to get leadership experience? I am perfectly willing to raid with a young kid in charge even if they never done it before. That is how you learn, but have the same kid lead a project at work? No thanks.