You can still run a query against an Excel file, it just takes a little more work than scrolling through the cells of data.
How they ended up with a spreadsheet with 100 or so names on it is the real question, since most people would keep the results in a database and it would include all of the results, not just a selection of people that tested positive.
Of course, in most of the databases I work with, the names of people are stored separately from most of the other data related to those people, so if I wanted information about a specific person, I would first query their ID number to use in the where clause of the rest of my queries, and would never see anyone else's data.
Except that wasting their time and my money investigating MLB hasn't stopped them from screwing up anything, since they've been doing both for years now.
The physical analogy everyone seems to be missing is if they went to the drug testing lab and asked for the person's records in question, then followed the records keeper to a room full of filing cabinets, watched him open a drawer labelled something along the lines of 'Baseball players that failed their drug test', and then forcefully took every folder in the cabinet, rather than waiting for him to find the one for which they were given a warrant.
The thing is that if they had formed the query on the database properly, it never would have shown them the other records, but instead they went on ahead and grabbed everything they could get their hands on once someone gave them access to the database.
I think most people are already decided on open source before they hear/read anything Stallman has to say. By that point, they have a bigger decision to make, and most of them just ignore it, and him, and go on with their lives using GPL software anyway.
What they were really talking about is constantly f*sking with their file formats so that when a user with a new system sends a document to a user with an old system the recipient can't open it... even if the document does not use any of the new 'features' of the updated software... and they then suffer the social shame of *still* being on last year's s/w?
That's an even worse argument than the one the previous poster was countering. Microsoft released a patch for older versions of Office programs to be able to read the newer file formats, and the newer versions of Office programs can be set to save in the older versions of the formats by default. Not to mention that the newer formats are loosely XML based.
Even going back to the 90s (the last time they made a major change to the Office format), there was such an uproar over the change in file formats that they had no choice but to patch the older versions to be able to read the newer format.
Despite what people would like others to believe, it's not normal for businesses to upgrade their software just because a new version came out. Most companies might have a commitment to stay within 3 versions of the current software, and most want to keep everything under a support contract, but they don't upgrade just because something new is out there, even if the file formats change (or perhaps especially if the file formats change, since some businesses are required to use certain file formats when dealing with other companies and government). Businesses will set an arbitrary upgrade cycle on the hardware based primarily on the support contracts they're willing to buy with that hardware, and upgrade the software according to what's available (and covered by their current licensing), but the software upgrades generally only come with the hardware upgrades, unless there's a major reason to switch (ie the company I work for is getting rid of Lotus Notes so we're all switching email clients eventually).
A couple of different games have already tried swordfights, and done a pretty miserable job of it. Maybe the motion will help, but I wonder if anyone else is going to bother.
The higher tax bracket only applies to money earned in that tax bracket, and it's still only 34%, it's not more than you're making.
In other words, if the tax bracket for 30% were 50,000, and you made 51,000, you'd pay the higher percentage only on the last 1,000, not on the whole 51,000.
The place they get you, though, is on the estimated tax withholding they put on your paycheck, so when you get a bonus or overtime they often tax you as if you were making that amount on every paycheck, when it was just a little extra. In the end it settles out to roughly the right amount (whether you owe them money or they give you a refund), but it can make it a pain to figure out what you should claim on your taxes.
It's not a mistake if you're making WoW, where your long term users are paying you every month. It's certainly not helping you, though, if you're making StarCraft or Half-Life, where your users only pay once, and the long-term users expect you to update the product every few months in response to balance issues that may or may not exist in a contrived multiplayer environment for 1-10% of the long term player base.
In the case of a non-MMO game, the value of a given player decreases with the amount of time for which they play your game, unless you can determine that those long-term users will be more likely to buy expansions and sequels than the short term users (neither of which is usually the case, in fact long term users may be less likely to buy sequels because they feel they're somehow inferior to the original).
I use the music to block out the external noise, because my headphones do not reduce the outside noise enough to do so. I learned at an early age to disregard familiar music in the background, but I have a very hard time ignoring people shuffling, typing, coughing, and talking in other rooms.
I agree with this. Put it all online somewhere and maintain it for 17 years. Really if you choose good formats for a website type of presentation, you might not have to do anything more than update the markup every 5 years or so.
Broadband users would certainly be more active participants in online games and programs like Steam, but it has little to do with PC gaming in general. The fact that PC games slipped into the mindset of catering to online players in the mid-90s and have more or less stayed there since (or moved towards indy gaming and casual gaming) only means there is a bigger appetite out there for good offline play in PC gaming.
The Steam surveys have always been skewed towards a top percentage (perhaps not as badly as say the system requirements of some 3D games from other manufacturers, though), based on the people willing to maintain systems to play the latest games produced by Valve at high framerates with all features enabled. The store bought off-the-shelf computer can't even play an FPS on Steam. The combination of the default configuration of Vista and on-board Intel video chipsets with shared RAM (often on systems with too little RAM to begin with) makes Steam itself a pain to run, never mind the games.
Consider that while Steam's survey shows nVidia with 65% of the respondents, the actual combined market share for nVidia and ATI is less than 50%. While there's definitely overlap in the market in that any gamer with an Intel video chipset on their motherboard is going to buy an aftermarket card with an nVidia or ATI chip to handle their gaming, the overwhelming majority of systems are sold with Intel chips handling the video processing.
So, if they're showing 4% of respondents using the video chipset that makes up over 50% of the market share in the world of PC users, what does that mean for the 2.93% of their respondents that use dial-up? That basically represents the people that are absolutely incapable of getting broadband but will still deal with it while trying to take advantage of Steam's digital distribution system and online matchmaking. Not to mention that Valve specifically has catered their netcode to this nearly 3% of their market for most of the last 10 years.
Of the millions of people that bought StarCraft, what percentage ever played the game online in the ladder systems? They're making the same mistake Valve did when they started focusing on those survey responses. They're focusing on the people that make up a small percentage of their overall user base, but which might make for longer term users. Then again, Blizzard has gained a vast marketshare in Asia, where they can pretty well depend on most of their users having broadband and making use of those ladder systems.
One of the reasons military applications of medical advancements go to market so quickly is that there is a large body of "volunteers" for human trials who have little or no chance of ever successfully suing the makers of the drugs or devices tested on them (and usually don't even know they're part of some sort of test in the first place).
In the short term, I'll be happy with teeth. Maybe when I'm older and have to worry about kidney failure or heart failure, I'll want them to have progressed to the point where they can simply grow a new one for me, but for now I'd like to see the ability for them to pull a rotten tooth out of my head and inject a few cells into the gum to regrow a tooth a few years from now rather than have to put in a bridge or some other garbage like they would now.
My wife's had problems with her teeth from a very young age, and we definitely worry about whether my daughter will have the same problems. Something like this would save her from a lot of problems in the long run if this were the case.
Sometimes, though, you get two whole people from those single cells when things go a little different from the plan. It's not really such a leap to go from a tooth to something more complex, it's just that people are taking research that one hopes will lead down this path and making the leap to think that this somehow makes it possible now, rather than in the future as the research advances down the path the researchers hope to follow.
The whole area still uses aerial phone, power, and cable lines, because (at least most claim) the water table is so close to the surface, though fiber is buried in most of the area. I've lived in suburban, somewhat rural, and nearly urban areas of the Hampton Roads area, and haven't had any particular reason to use the landline phone service since moving from the first place (which was a townhouse in a suburban area). The cell coverage is generally very good, depending on carrier, and the only time the system seems close to overload is during major storms when the phone service goes out (since it's on the same poles as the power and cable, they usually all go out at the same time, when a tree falls over and takes out the line). Power is always the first to be restored, because the phone and cable companies aren't really going near those poles until the power company gets their end taken care of.
I don't think the phone or cable companies have done much to enhance the 'last mile', so to speak, to the end users in this area. They have done a lot of work, though, to squeeze everything they can down the existing pipe.
umm didn't most of us hear about it long before this poll came out anyway? Not to mention that people don't take the consoles back to the retailers (especially since all 3 come with paperwork telling you not to do that).
I'm the only person I know that owns a 360 that isn't a replacement for an RRoD unit. How hard is it for me to believe that they actually have a 54% failure rate when I've seen a significantly higher rate among people I know?
Then again, I've never had a console fail on me, I reserve that for PCs (which are usually my own fault).
DSL is the only one of those I find valid in my area.
My security system uses the cell network to phone home. The phone lines in the area generally suck, so you're not likely to get better sound quality on a landline than you would get with a decent cell phone. During hurricane Isabel a few years ago, the cell coverage was only slightly diminished, whereas the phone and cable lines were down over a week.
When I had DSL I saved a significant amount of money by paying for only the bare minimum phone service (911 only, toll service on local calls) and never had a phone hooked up to the line.
But in those cases you wouldn't turn it over to the drive destruction company in a readable state, anyway, and would still end up saving money using a device similar to this one after you wiped the data from the drive.
In most local school districts teachers are no more permitted to use cell phones in class than students. Sure, it would be a minor inconvenience when they have a break, but their classrooms and offices likely already have phones in them.
The main issue is that they should just be taking the phones when and if they see (or hear) them, rather than spending all of this money to block them. When I was in high school they went as far as confiscating hats from students on campus because teachers would waste time telling students to take them off in class rooms, but they were still just taking them away.
Even in states that have inspections, what they inspect varies. For instance, I used to live in California, where they pretty much just do a smog check every other year (until your car is old enough to no longer require the checks). Everything else they figure is something they can give you a fix-it-ticket for anyway, and is therefore not inspected.
In Virginia, where I now live, they inspect all of the crap for which they would normally give you a fix-it-ticket, but they don't seem to care much if you have a service engine light on and the car doesn't have the smog equipment with which it was equipped when it was purchased. No matter what, you will be paying for your headlights to be re-aligned, and they'll probably find a bulb somewhere that isn't working right.
The one fact that keeps rearing its head is that even after you take out other socioeconomic variables, ADD and ADHD is much more prevalent in fatherless households. There is a very high correlation. And yes, I know correlation!=causation. However, you have to make some pretty big leaps of faith to get around it. Dads have a much different parenting style and discipline style than moms. It stands to reason that this would have an impact on the outcome of the children.
While I had a hard time believing in ADD/ADHD when I was a kid, my step-brother was diagnosed with it at an extremely young age, when he was still in a 2-parent household with an active father. I was recently diagnosed with it as an adult, having grown up in a 2-parent household until I was 9, and living with my father the remaining time (with a step-mother a couple years later).
In many ways the reason I was diagnosed so late in life is that I also had social anxiety that was a strong control on the ADHD, caused in part by the parenting style of my mother. It was only when I took steps to counter the social issues so I could live a normal life that many of the attention deficit issues became noticeable to others. I also changed jobs recently to one which requires greater organizational skills and self-monitoring of one's time, both of which I've found are nearly impossible without medication and discipline.
In most cases where we see an increase in the diagnosis of a particular disease or problem in the population, it has more to do with the increased awareness of the disease and increased screening than a major shift in society itself. Additionally, the fact that we're less likely to beat children into submission when they speak out of turn or won't sit still means we're causing fewer additional problems that simply mask the problems they already have.
My high school actually had it on the curriculum alongside Brave New World, but removed it the year before I was supposed to read it. Of course, in 8th grade my English teacher asked me to read it for extra credit, after she got permission from my father to allow me to read it.
The game really suffered for driver issues, especially since it came out right at the time when the whole graphic card universe took an epic shift and destroyed 3dfx, but before Direct3D really took a strong hold on the market (in other words, everyone had problems with graphics drivers at that time). In fact, it gained a bit of a reputation for having been overly ambitious with the graphics and turning into a lagfest in single player due to the graphics capabilities of systems at the time, and this was from people with fairly high end systems.
In the end, I think I got a copy of Descent 3 bundled with some hardware, but never played it because of its reputation, and the fact that I was busy playing Freespace by that point.
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You can still run a query against an Excel file, it just takes a little more work than scrolling through the cells of data.
How they ended up with a spreadsheet with 100 or so names on it is the real question, since most people would keep the results in a database and it would include all of the results, not just a selection of people that tested positive.
Of course, in most of the databases I work with, the names of people are stored separately from most of the other data related to those people, so if I wanted information about a specific person, I would first query their ID number to use in the where clause of the rest of my queries, and would never see anyone else's data.
Except that wasting their time and my money investigating MLB hasn't stopped them from screwing up anything, since they've been doing both for years now.
The physical analogy everyone seems to be missing is if they went to the drug testing lab and asked for the person's records in question, then followed the records keeper to a room full of filing cabinets, watched him open a drawer labelled something along the lines of 'Baseball players that failed their drug test', and then forcefully took every folder in the cabinet, rather than waiting for him to find the one for which they were given a warrant.
The thing is that if they had formed the query on the database properly, it never would have shown them the other records, but instead they went on ahead and grabbed everything they could get their hands on once someone gave them access to the database.
I think most people are already decided on open source before they hear/read anything Stallman has to say. By that point, they have a bigger decision to make, and most of them just ignore it, and him, and go on with their lives using GPL software anyway.
and change type/colors every couple of years for a small fee, too.
What they were really talking about is constantly f*sking with their file formats so that when a user with a new system sends a document to a user with an old system the recipient can't open it... even if the document does not use any of the new 'features' of the updated software... and they then suffer the social shame of *still* being on last year's s/w?
That's an even worse argument than the one the previous poster was countering. Microsoft released a patch for older versions of Office programs to be able to read the newer file formats, and the newer versions of Office programs can be set to save in the older versions of the formats by default. Not to mention that the newer formats are loosely XML based.
Even going back to the 90s (the last time they made a major change to the Office format), there was such an uproar over the change in file formats that they had no choice but to patch the older versions to be able to read the newer format.
Despite what people would like others to believe, it's not normal for businesses to upgrade their software just because a new version came out. Most companies might have a commitment to stay within 3 versions of the current software, and most want to keep everything under a support contract, but they don't upgrade just because something new is out there, even if the file formats change (or perhaps especially if the file formats change, since some businesses are required to use certain file formats when dealing with other companies and government). Businesses will set an arbitrary upgrade cycle on the hardware based primarily on the support contracts they're willing to buy with that hardware, and upgrade the software according to what's available (and covered by their current licensing), but the software upgrades generally only come with the hardware upgrades, unless there's a major reason to switch (ie the company I work for is getting rid of Lotus Notes so we're all switching email clients eventually).
A couple of different games have already tried swordfights, and done a pretty miserable job of it. Maybe the motion will help, but I wonder if anyone else is going to bother.
The higher tax bracket only applies to money earned in that tax bracket, and it's still only 34%, it's not more than you're making.
In other words, if the tax bracket for 30% were 50,000, and you made 51,000, you'd pay the higher percentage only on the last 1,000, not on the whole 51,000.
The place they get you, though, is on the estimated tax withholding they put on your paycheck, so when you get a bonus or overtime they often tax you as if you were making that amount on every paycheck, when it was just a little extra. In the end it settles out to roughly the right amount (whether you owe them money or they give you a refund), but it can make it a pain to figure out what you should claim on your taxes.
It's not a mistake if you're making WoW, where your long term users are paying you every month. It's certainly not helping you, though, if you're making StarCraft or Half-Life, where your users only pay once, and the long-term users expect you to update the product every few months in response to balance issues that may or may not exist in a contrived multiplayer environment for 1-10% of the long term player base.
In the case of a non-MMO game, the value of a given player decreases with the amount of time for which they play your game, unless you can determine that those long-term users will be more likely to buy expansions and sequels than the short term users (neither of which is usually the case, in fact long term users may be less likely to buy sequels because they feel they're somehow inferior to the original).
I use the music to block out the external noise, because my headphones do not reduce the outside noise enough to do so. I learned at an early age to disregard familiar music in the background, but I have a very hard time ignoring people shuffling, typing, coughing, and talking in other rooms.
I agree with this. Put it all online somewhere and maintain it for 17 years. Really if you choose good formats for a website type of presentation, you might not have to do anything more than update the markup every 5 years or so.
Broadband users would certainly be more active participants in online games and programs like Steam, but it has little to do with PC gaming in general. The fact that PC games slipped into the mindset of catering to online players in the mid-90s and have more or less stayed there since (or moved towards indy gaming and casual gaming) only means there is a bigger appetite out there for good offline play in PC gaming.
The Steam surveys have always been skewed towards a top percentage (perhaps not as badly as say the system requirements of some 3D games from other manufacturers, though), based on the people willing to maintain systems to play the latest games produced by Valve at high framerates with all features enabled. The store bought off-the-shelf computer can't even play an FPS on Steam. The combination of the default configuration of Vista and on-board Intel video chipsets with shared RAM (often on systems with too little RAM to begin with) makes Steam itself a pain to run, never mind the games.
Consider that while Steam's survey shows nVidia with 65% of the respondents, the actual combined market share for nVidia and ATI is less than 50%. While there's definitely overlap in the market in that any gamer with an Intel video chipset on their motherboard is going to buy an aftermarket card with an nVidia or ATI chip to handle their gaming, the overwhelming majority of systems are sold with Intel chips handling the video processing.
So, if they're showing 4% of respondents using the video chipset that makes up over 50% of the market share in the world of PC users, what does that mean for the 2.93% of their respondents that use dial-up? That basically represents the people that are absolutely incapable of getting broadband but will still deal with it while trying to take advantage of Steam's digital distribution system and online matchmaking. Not to mention that Valve specifically has catered their netcode to this nearly 3% of their market for most of the last 10 years.
Of the millions of people that bought StarCraft, what percentage ever played the game online in the ladder systems? They're making the same mistake Valve did when they started focusing on those survey responses. They're focusing on the people that make up a small percentage of their overall user base, but which might make for longer term users. Then again, Blizzard has gained a vast marketshare in Asia, where they can pretty well depend on most of their users having broadband and making use of those ladder systems.
One of the reasons military applications of medical advancements go to market so quickly is that there is a large body of "volunteers" for human trials who have little or no chance of ever successfully suing the makers of the drugs or devices tested on them (and usually don't even know they're part of some sort of test in the first place).
In the short term, I'll be happy with teeth. Maybe when I'm older and have to worry about kidney failure or heart failure, I'll want them to have progressed to the point where they can simply grow a new one for me, but for now I'd like to see the ability for them to pull a rotten tooth out of my head and inject a few cells into the gum to regrow a tooth a few years from now rather than have to put in a bridge or some other garbage like they would now.
My wife's had problems with her teeth from a very young age, and we definitely worry about whether my daughter will have the same problems. Something like this would save her from a lot of problems in the long run if this were the case.
Sometimes, though, you get two whole people from those single cells when things go a little different from the plan. It's not really such a leap to go from a tooth to something more complex, it's just that people are taking research that one hopes will lead down this path and making the leap to think that this somehow makes it possible now, rather than in the future as the research advances down the path the researchers hope to follow.
The whole area still uses aerial phone, power, and cable lines, because (at least most claim) the water table is so close to the surface, though fiber is buried in most of the area. I've lived in suburban, somewhat rural, and nearly urban areas of the Hampton Roads area, and haven't had any particular reason to use the landline phone service since moving from the first place (which was a townhouse in a suburban area). The cell coverage is generally very good, depending on carrier, and the only time the system seems close to overload is during major storms when the phone service goes out (since it's on the same poles as the power and cable, they usually all go out at the same time, when a tree falls over and takes out the line). Power is always the first to be restored, because the phone and cable companies aren't really going near those poles until the power company gets their end taken care of.
I don't think the phone or cable companies have done much to enhance the 'last mile', so to speak, to the end users in this area. They have done a lot of work, though, to squeeze everything they can down the existing pipe.
umm didn't most of us hear about it long before this poll came out anyway? Not to mention that people don't take the consoles back to the retailers (especially since all 3 come with paperwork telling you not to do that).
I'm the only person I know that owns a 360 that isn't a replacement for an RRoD unit. How hard is it for me to believe that they actually have a 54% failure rate when I've seen a significantly higher rate among people I know?
Then again, I've never had a console fail on me, I reserve that for PCs (which are usually my own fault).
DSL is the only one of those I find valid in my area.
My security system uses the cell network to phone home.
The phone lines in the area generally suck, so you're not likely to get better sound quality on a landline than you would get with a decent cell phone.
During hurricane Isabel a few years ago, the cell coverage was only slightly diminished, whereas the phone and cable lines were down over a week.
When I had DSL I saved a significant amount of money by paying for only the bare minimum phone service (911 only, toll service on local calls) and never had a phone hooked up to the line.
But in those cases you wouldn't turn it over to the drive destruction company in a readable state, anyway, and would still end up saving money using a device similar to this one after you wiped the data from the drive.
In most local school districts teachers are no more permitted to use cell phones in class than students. Sure, it would be a minor inconvenience when they have a break, but their classrooms and offices likely already have phones in them.
The main issue is that they should just be taking the phones when and if they see (or hear) them, rather than spending all of this money to block them. When I was in high school they went as far as confiscating hats from students on campus because teachers would waste time telling students to take them off in class rooms, but they were still just taking them away.
Even in states that have inspections, what they inspect varies. For instance, I used to live in California, where they pretty much just do a smog check every other year (until your car is old enough to no longer require the checks). Everything else they figure is something they can give you a fix-it-ticket for anyway, and is therefore not inspected.
In Virginia, where I now live, they inspect all of the crap for which they would normally give you a fix-it-ticket, but they don't seem to care much if you have a service engine light on and the car doesn't have the smog equipment with which it was equipped when it was purchased. No matter what, you will be paying for your headlights to be re-aligned, and they'll probably find a bulb somewhere that isn't working right.
The one fact that keeps rearing its head is that even after you take out other socioeconomic variables, ADD and ADHD is much more prevalent in fatherless households. There is a very high correlation. And yes, I know correlation!=causation. However, you have to make some pretty big leaps of faith to get around it. Dads have a much different parenting style and discipline style than moms. It stands to reason that this would have an impact on the outcome of the children.
While I had a hard time believing in ADD/ADHD when I was a kid, my step-brother was diagnosed with it at an extremely young age, when he was still in a 2-parent household with an active father. I was recently diagnosed with it as an adult, having grown up in a 2-parent household until I was 9, and living with my father the remaining time (with a step-mother a couple years later).
In many ways the reason I was diagnosed so late in life is that I also had social anxiety that was a strong control on the ADHD, caused in part by the parenting style of my mother. It was only when I took steps to counter the social issues so I could live a normal life that many of the attention deficit issues became noticeable to others. I also changed jobs recently to one which requires greater organizational skills and self-monitoring of one's time, both of which I've found are nearly impossible without medication and discipline.
In most cases where we see an increase in the diagnosis of a particular disease or problem in the population, it has more to do with the increased awareness of the disease and increased screening than a major shift in society itself. Additionally, the fact that we're less likely to beat children into submission when they speak out of turn or won't sit still means we're causing fewer additional problems that simply mask the problems they already have.
I'm 31, that was when Bush's father was President. Clinton was President when they pulled the book out of the high school curriculum.
Amazon didn't know that it was still under copyright in the US,
The book's only about 60 years old. Where do they think they are? Copyright lasts forever in the US.
My high school actually had it on the curriculum alongside Brave New World, but removed it the year before I was supposed to read it. Of course, in 8th grade my English teacher asked me to read it for extra credit, after she got permission from my father to allow me to read it.
The game really suffered for driver issues, especially since it came out right at the time when the whole graphic card universe took an epic shift and destroyed 3dfx, but before Direct3D really took a strong hold on the market (in other words, everyone had problems with graphics drivers at that time). In fact, it gained a bit of a reputation for having been overly ambitious with the graphics and turning into a lagfest in single player due to the graphics capabilities of systems at the time, and this was from people with fairly high end systems.
In the end, I think I got a copy of Descent 3 bundled with some hardware, but never played it because of its reputation, and the fact that I was busy playing Freespace by that point.