I stopped playing video games after Mechwarrior 4. Partly because I had other things to do (like raise a child) but partly because I haven't been able to get interested in computer games since.
With a new Mechwarrior out, I will probably go out and get a modern joystick and give it a shot. I'm especially glad they went back to the Clans, as they had the more interesting mechs and backstory.
I'm hoping that we see some new abilities in the new game. I always thought it was odd that in the 31st century you fired weapons by manually lining up a hood ornament on your enemy, when 20th century technology has object recognition and automatic targeting. Or, at least, some kind of helmet tracking. What, did computer technology get lost in the intervening years?
In a slightly different vein, it seems like in all that time someone would have thought to weld on a few weapons backwards on the chassis. (With associated hardpoint and weight penalties, of course.) A lot of knife fights depended solely on how fast you could turn your chassis to bring weapons to bear. This doesn't seem reasonable in the 31st century. I want to be able to glance in my rearview mirror and squeeze off a few rounds or missiles at that mech sneaking up behind me. Or -- this would be cool -- have the arms be articulate enough to temporarily point backwards.
It should be possible in this day and age to have the mechs be as fully articulate as the backstory led us to believe.
> This is just another example of a fundamental flaw in how campaign finance works in the US, and the current party in power shares the culpability with the prior party in power.
A fair, reasoned, objective response. This is slashdot! Not allowed!
It's been a bizarre progression. A few years ago I got a new stereo for the car which included (amongst other things) a navigator with turn-by-turn instructions. It was really expensive. Map updates for this beast are available every two years for a street price of about $150. (List price $270.)
A short time later, I could buy a Garmin (with free map updates) for the cost of just the map updates for my current, car-bound GPS. (You'd think the manufacturer of my unit would respond to this market reality by lowering the price of their updates. Nope.)
But I don't have to buy a Garmin, because a few months ago I acquired a free application on my Blackberry that gives turn-by-turn instructions and also has free updates.
I can see the appliance manufacturers moving to software solutions to survive. I hope they realize that ease of use is paramount. I've rejected a few apps because they were too annoying to program.
But I suspect there will always be specialist applications for GPS that require an appliance. For when you need a screen bigger than 3 inches wide, or you're away from cellular service.
> I'm not sure where profit goes in there, but this also happened in the late 1970's through early 1980's. Right when other means of fuel production came online and people had invested a lot of money in the new technologies, the price of oil suddenly dropped causing the alternatives to quickly go broke and effectively stifle competition for the next couple decades.
I think part of the mechanism is that large scale attempts at conservation and/or alternate fuels has a natural tendency to drive down the price of oil. Part of this is normal market pressure, and part, I believe, is deliberate -- the oil suppliers don't want to lose their market, and will adjust prices to make a legitimate threat less attractive.
This creates an odd situation where you can purposely drive down the price of oil by investing in credible (or credible-sounding) alternate energies. Which may explain why those who have large petroleum-based interests will jump on the alternative bandwagon -- it helps lower their costs and improves profit margin.
The perverse side of me wonders whether the more the government tries to force the issue, the lower the wholesale price of oil could go in response. Unless the feds get really draconian -- like banning oil refining and delivery -- alternates may not become practical until we're actually out of oil.
> In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system
It's a common problem. Windmills in your back yard with easy access to the power grid, or windmills in a remote location where access to the grid is problematic.
> * You buy the, absolute, cheapest CF bulbs possible.
That's it. You can't honestly be surprised that most people will buy the cheapest blister-pack Costco-special CF bulbs. The kind that have significant warm-up time, high infant mortality rate and shorter than average life. And throw them in the trash when they quit. It's the nature of consumerism.
His behavior makes me wonder what he's like in real life. I'm reminded of the lawyer who decided that a cleaner's "customer satisfaction guaranteed" sign meant he could demand $54 Million for a pair of lost pants, on the theory that he wasn't satisfied until he got that amount, and the shop had guaranteed his satisfaction.
There is the letter of the law, and there is what is collectively considered proper. I'm sure the "researcher" knows that. I wonder how he behaves in real life; if he is rude and inconsiderate and takes advantage of people where the rules don't specifically forbid his behavior. For instance, if you're not fussy, you can live on water, condiments and free pretzels whilst surfing the web on the restaurant's free wifi, at least until the owner points out that these things are intended as perks for paying customers. Of course, this lets you be stunned and saddened that the owner would get mad at you, since this policy isn't on a sign anywhere. Maybe even write an academic paper about it.
Parenthetically, I wonder is if he wasn't exploiting a weakness in the game. He must have been good at the game to make it to the arena, but his "power" seems to give him an unbeatable advantage. Reminds me of a similar weakness in a game I played years ago -- you could mount the longest range weapon on a fast chassis and be essentially unbeatable, because you could stay out of everyone's range and still tag them. In order to make the game enjoyable, we had to all adopt this tactic, which would defeat 90% of the point of the game, or agree that nobody does it.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the "researcher" has merely found a different way to deliberately piss people off and then whine that nobody likes him. It's no different from being a dick on Usenet from an anonymous account. (Esh, I'm showing my age.)
I think that the major companies will have to figure out how to cache a certain number of ads on their own servers and rotate them through. Having a page be slow loading because an ad is slow, or worse, having a page not come up at all because the ad site is down, is absolutely unacceptable when your livelihood depends on it. The solution will probably be something like what radio does now -- the studio has a copy of the ad which they insert at the proper moment.
Another thing driving this is that the more this happens, the more people will turn to ad blockers, which also deny companies revenue. It's a problem that needs to be solved quickly if sites are going to continue to rely on ad revenue.
Somewhat related, have anyone else had problems with extreme captcha slowness lately? It seems like every login page I've hit recently has an unacceptably long pause before the challenge arrives.
Yes, exactly. My daughter does something similar. It's not necessarily the ads -- If she can't choose the content and control it like a video, she's not interested. This makes the cable TV uninteresting by definition.
I can't make myself just plop down and watch whatever is on. There are too many other things to do. My TV viewing is either movies, or older series that I can watch in sequence (Netflix is great). I am of the "TV viewing" generation, (color became common when I was in grade school) so I can't explain this, except it might have something to do with early (1980's) connection to the internet.
By far, our household's primary usage of cable TV is for wife to watch soaps. (She records her daytime soaps, and watches nighttime soaps -- er, hospital and crime dramas -- live.) Were it not for that, we could easily get along without cable or broadcast TV.
This makes me wonder -- is it a generation thing? Are people of my generation the last of the traditional TV demographic -- the people who plant butt on couch during prime time and watch whatever is on? Could it be that after we die out, or become demographically irrelevant, the whole concept of broadcast TV will cease to have meaning?
I have to disagree. There will always be hardcores who prefer to torrent a show rather than put up with any amount of advertisement whatsoever, but I think most people have a more favorable level of pain than that. Sitting through a half minute of commercials at the beginning I can do. That's enough better than having the story flow disrupted every 12 minutes that I would put up with it rather than make the effort to download. I don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm even willing to pay a reasonable price. I have no problem paying 99 cents an episode off itunes, for instance, as long as I can back up my investment.
The issues I have with Hulu are (1) resolution (currently sucks) and (2) integration with a media appliance (lacking). I want to watch the show on my primary flatscreen TV using my remote, durnit, not on the laptop messing about with a mouse.
Well, one thing they could do is create rainy-day funds during times of prosperity instead of growing the government a corresponding amount. Some states do this, but I think most don't bother, because a big lump of cash sitting there is too much of a temptation to spend. And investing the rainy day funds raises the risk of being wiped out in the same downturn that the funds were for.
Regarding maintaining roads, at least in my state that's the first thing they cut out of the budget in a downturn. Speaking as someone who recently had a $3,000 insurance claim for damage done to my vehicle by a really deep pothole downtown.
But back to the question above, "what is the state to do?", it is a conundrum, because increased taxes in a downturn invariably stalls recovery, putting the government in an unwelcome position -- charity now, or prosperity later? The additional cost of the taxes to pay John Q. Unemployed's extended unemployment benefits may have been the money the company needed to hire him. Or worse, it may be the impetus for the company to move to a more business-friendly state, causing the jobs to disappear forever.
Cute, but besides the stomp boxes another has mentioned, it's not unknown for a real modern electric guitar to have a built-in preamp that requires a 9 volt battery.
I occasionally get writer's block. The solution that works for me is to write down my thoughts as simple as possible, in Dick and Jane style, as very simple sentences or even sentence fragments, on separate lines, without trying to put them in any particular order. Repeat until I run out of ideas.
Then, go back over what I've written, delete the obvious redundancies, and sort the ideas in rough order.
Then, go back and connect the fragments together.
Then, leave it alone for an hour.
When I go back and look, it'll be (roughly) my story, but seemingly written by a nine-year-old. Fix it, done. It's almost trivial to fix a badly written story, compared to writing a good story from scratch.
In this case, your ideas are functions, loops, database calls, matrix operations, or whatever is appropriate for what you're doing. The solution is rattling around in your head, but you're having trouble getting it out in one piece. Take it out in small, simple pieces, and then paste them together later.
The only thing that would make this better is if Lenovo sold ad space. Imagine explaining the pr0n popups during your next big presentation. This seems so inevitable that I'm astonished that they haven't already done it.
One doesn't fumble with AAs, one has them pre-loaded nice and tight in the AA battery pack.
One doesn't necessarily use AA or AAA batteries by choice, but it is important, especially when traveling, when the highest cost is being there, that one have the option.
> Besides, you'll have a harder and more expensive time finding film now that Kodachrome is being discontinued.
Enh, no, there's still lots of film out there. One of the (many) reasons Kodachrome died is that Fuji Velvia has largely replaced it, except, of course, with the most hard-nosed of purists. I've read that Kodak still makes even super-8 film, except not, of course, in the Kodachrome formula any more. (This is off topic.)
There's lots of things that film is still good for, besides working without batteries.
Two of my film cameras have motor drives with the option of a sealed rechargeable pack or an adapter that holds conventional batteries. I wouldn't have it any other way. Both of them will work without batteries, but who wants to live in the stone age?
This isn't about film vs digital, or even, when you get down to it, about cameras. I have a pro digital camera that runs on double-As with a (rather expensive) adapter. The point-n-shoot takes two double-As, conventional or rechargeable. Our cordless phones (for a non-camera example) take a proprietary battery pack. I'm sizing up replacements, and one requirement is that they take standard rechargeables. (Some do -- you just have to check.)
Specifically regarding photography, if you're in a place you'll never in your life be again, do you really want a proprietary battery in your camera? Or do you want a camera that will run on local carbon-zinc double-As if necessary?
And you have to ask yourself -- with the plethora of good common choices out there, why, other than in rare form-factor cases, would a manufacturer go to the trouble of making a proprietary, single-source battery for their devices? And knowing that, why the heck would you want to do business with them?
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I stopped playing video games after Mechwarrior 4. Partly because I had other things to do (like raise a child) but partly because I haven't been able to get interested in computer games since.
With a new Mechwarrior out, I will probably go out and get a modern joystick and give it a shot. I'm especially glad they went back to the Clans, as they had the more interesting mechs and backstory.
I'm hoping that we see some new abilities in the new game. I always thought it was odd that in the 31st century you fired weapons by manually lining up a hood ornament on your enemy, when 20th century technology has object recognition and automatic targeting. Or, at least, some kind of helmet tracking. What, did computer technology get lost in the intervening years?
In a slightly different vein, it seems like in all that time someone would have thought to weld on a few weapons backwards on the chassis. (With associated hardpoint and weight penalties, of course.) A lot of knife fights depended solely on how fast you could turn your chassis to bring weapons to bear. This doesn't seem reasonable in the 31st century. I want to be able to glance in my rearview mirror and squeeze off a few rounds or missiles at that mech sneaking up behind me. Or -- this would be cool -- have the arms be articulate enough to temporarily point backwards.
It should be possible in this day and age to have the mechs be as fully articulate as the backstory led us to believe.
> This is just another example of a fundamental flaw in how campaign finance works in the US, and the current party in power shares the culpability with the prior party in power.
A fair, reasoned, objective response. This is slashdot! Not allowed!
It's been a bizarre progression. A few years ago I got a new stereo for the car which included (amongst other things) a navigator with turn-by-turn instructions. It was really expensive. Map updates for this beast are available every two years for a street price of about $150. (List price $270.)
A short time later, I could buy a Garmin (with free map updates) for the cost of just the map updates for my current, car-bound GPS. (You'd think the manufacturer of my unit would respond to this market reality by lowering the price of their updates. Nope.)
But I don't have to buy a Garmin, because a few months ago I acquired a free application on my Blackberry that gives turn-by-turn instructions and also has free updates.
I can see the appliance manufacturers moving to software solutions to survive. I hope they realize that ease of use is paramount. I've rejected a few apps because they were too annoying to program.
But I suspect there will always be specialist applications for GPS that require an appliance. For when you need a screen bigger than 3 inches wide, or you're away from cellular service.
> I'm not sure where profit goes in there, but this also happened in the late 1970's through early 1980's. Right when other means of fuel production came online and people had invested a lot of money in the new technologies, the price of oil suddenly dropped causing the alternatives to quickly go broke and effectively stifle competition for the next couple decades.
I think part of the mechanism is that large scale attempts at conservation and/or alternate fuels has a natural tendency to drive down the price of oil. Part of this is normal market pressure, and part, I believe, is deliberate -- the oil suppliers don't want to lose their market, and will adjust prices to make a legitimate threat less attractive.
This creates an odd situation where you can purposely drive down the price of oil by investing in credible (or credible-sounding) alternate energies. Which may explain why those who have large petroleum-based interests will jump on the alternative bandwagon -- it helps lower their costs and improves profit margin.
The perverse side of me wonders whether the more the government tries to force the issue, the lower the wholesale price of oil could go in response. Unless the feds get really draconian -- like banning oil refining and delivery -- alternates may not become practical until we're actually out of oil.
> In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system
It's a common problem. Windmills in your back yard with easy access to the power grid, or windmills in a remote location where access to the grid is problematic.
> Toyota's goal: to make it difficult for other auto makers to develop their own hybrids without seeking licensing from Toyota
Oh well. I guess it's back to conventional cars, then.
All that work, and they netted less than a half million?
I don't think I'd pay $84K for the copyright on any of those songs.
Seems like this could be interpreted as a way for nerds to be gangsta. Keeping it real.
> * You buy the, absolute, cheapest CF bulbs possible.
That's it. You can't honestly be surprised that most people will buy the cheapest blister-pack Costco-special CF bulbs. The kind that have significant warm-up time, high infant mortality rate and shorter than average life. And throw them in the trash when they quit. It's the nature of consumerism.
Caveat: I haven't played online games in years.
His behavior makes me wonder what he's like in real life. I'm reminded of the lawyer who decided that a cleaner's "customer satisfaction guaranteed" sign meant he could demand $54 Million for a pair of lost pants, on the theory that he wasn't satisfied until he got that amount, and the shop had guaranteed his satisfaction.
There is the letter of the law, and there is what is collectively considered proper. I'm sure the "researcher" knows that. I wonder how he behaves in real life; if he is rude and inconsiderate and takes advantage of people where the rules don't specifically forbid his behavior. For instance, if you're not fussy, you can live on water, condiments and free pretzels whilst surfing the web on the restaurant's free wifi, at least until the owner points out that these things are intended as perks for paying customers. Of course, this lets you be stunned and saddened that the owner would get mad at you, since this policy isn't on a sign anywhere. Maybe even write an academic paper about it.
Parenthetically, I wonder is if he wasn't exploiting a weakness in the game. He must have been good at the game to make it to the arena, but his "power" seems to give him an unbeatable advantage. Reminds me of a similar weakness in a game I played years ago -- you could mount the longest range weapon on a fast chassis and be essentially unbeatable, because you could stay out of everyone's range and still tag them. In order to make the game enjoyable, we had to all adopt this tactic, which would defeat 90% of the point of the game, or agree that nobody does it.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the "researcher" has merely found a different way to deliberately piss people off and then whine that nobody likes him. It's no different from being a dick on Usenet from an anonymous account. (Esh, I'm showing my age.)
Let's hope he doesn't get caught.
I think that the major companies will have to figure out how to cache a certain number of ads on their own servers and rotate them through. Having a page be slow loading because an ad is slow, or worse, having a page not come up at all because the ad site is down, is absolutely unacceptable when your livelihood depends on it. The solution will probably be something like what radio does now -- the studio has a copy of the ad which they insert at the proper moment.
Another thing driving this is that the more this happens, the more people will turn to ad blockers, which also deny companies revenue. It's a problem that needs to be solved quickly if sites are going to continue to rely on ad revenue.
Somewhat related, have anyone else had problems with extreme captcha slowness lately? It seems like every login page I've hit recently has an unacceptably long pause before the challenge arrives.
We're all running out of places to go.
Yes, exactly. My daughter does something similar. It's not necessarily the ads -- If she can't choose the content and control it like a video, she's not interested. This makes the cable TV uninteresting by definition.
I can't make myself just plop down and watch whatever is on. There are too many other things to do. My TV viewing is either movies, or older series that I can watch in sequence (Netflix is great). I am of the "TV viewing" generation, (color became common when I was in grade school) so I can't explain this, except it might have something to do with early (1980's) connection to the internet.
By far, our household's primary usage of cable TV is for wife to watch soaps. (She records her daytime soaps, and watches nighttime soaps -- er, hospital and crime dramas -- live.) Were it not for that, we could easily get along without cable or broadcast TV.
This makes me wonder -- is it a generation thing? Are people of my generation the last of the traditional TV demographic -- the people who plant butt on couch during prime time and watch whatever is on? Could it be that after we die out, or become demographically irrelevant, the whole concept of broadcast TV will cease to have meaning?
That would be so cool... :-)
I have to disagree. There will always be hardcores who prefer to torrent a show rather than put up with any amount of advertisement whatsoever, but I think most people have a more favorable level of pain than that. Sitting through a half minute of commercials at the beginning I can do. That's enough better than having the story flow disrupted every 12 minutes that I would put up with it rather than make the effort to download. I don't think I'm alone in this.
I'm even willing to pay a reasonable price. I have no problem paying 99 cents an episode off itunes, for instance, as long as I can back up my investment.
The issues I have with Hulu are (1) resolution (currently sucks) and (2) integration with a media appliance (lacking). I want to watch the show on my primary flatscreen TV using my remote, durnit, not on the laptop messing about with a mouse.
> What is the state to do?
Well, one thing they could do is create rainy-day funds during times of prosperity instead of growing the government a corresponding amount. Some states do this, but I think most don't bother, because a big lump of cash sitting there is too much of a temptation to spend. And investing the rainy day funds raises the risk of being wiped out in the same downturn that the funds were for.
Regarding maintaining roads, at least in my state that's the first thing they cut out of the budget in a downturn. Speaking as someone who recently had a $3,000 insurance claim for damage done to my vehicle by a really deep pothole downtown.
But back to the question above, "what is the state to do?", it is a conundrum, because increased taxes in a downturn invariably stalls recovery, putting the government in an unwelcome position -- charity now, or prosperity later? The additional cost of the taxes to pay John Q. Unemployed's extended unemployment benefits may have been the money the company needed to hire him. Or worse, it may be the impetus for the company to move to a more business-friendly state, causing the jobs to disappear forever.
Cute, but besides the stomp boxes another has mentioned, it's not unknown for a real modern electric guitar to have a built-in preamp that requires a 9 volt battery.
I'm forgetting something here... Oh yes. "You insensitive clod!"
I occasionally get writer's block. The solution that works for me is to write down my thoughts as simple as possible, in Dick and Jane style, as very simple sentences or even sentence fragments, on separate lines, without trying to put them in any particular order. Repeat until I run out of ideas.
Then, go back over what I've written, delete the obvious redundancies, and sort the ideas in rough order.
Then, go back and connect the fragments together.
Then, leave it alone for an hour.
When I go back and look, it'll be (roughly) my story, but seemingly written by a nine-year-old. Fix it, done. It's almost trivial to fix a badly written story, compared to writing a good story from scratch.
In this case, your ideas are functions, loops, database calls, matrix operations, or whatever is appropriate for what you're doing. The solution is rattling around in your head, but you're having trouble getting it out in one piece. Take it out in small, simple pieces, and then paste them together later.
The only thing that would make this better is if Lenovo sold ad space. Imagine explaining the pr0n popups during your next big presentation. This seems so inevitable that I'm astonished that they haven't already done it.
Were you a pro, you should know better.
One doesn't fumble with AAs, one has them pre-loaded nice and tight in the AA battery pack.
One doesn't necessarily use AA or AAA batteries by choice, but it is important, especially when traveling, when the highest cost is being there, that one have the option.
> Besides, you'll have a harder and more expensive time finding film now that Kodachrome is being discontinued.
Enh, no, there's still lots of film out there. One of the (many) reasons Kodachrome died is that Fuji Velvia has largely replaced it, except, of course, with the most hard-nosed of purists. I've read that Kodak still makes even super-8 film, except not, of course, in the Kodachrome formula any more. (This is off topic.)
There's lots of things that film is still good for, besides working without batteries.
Yeah... If it means I have to use a proprietary battery that might not be available in a couple years, I don't need a camera that small.
Hey guys, look at the old phart!
Two of my film cameras have motor drives with the option of a sealed rechargeable pack or an adapter that holds conventional batteries. I wouldn't have it any other way. Both of them will work without batteries, but who wants to live in the stone age?
This isn't about film vs digital, or even, when you get down to it, about cameras. I have a pro digital camera that runs on double-As with a (rather expensive) adapter. The point-n-shoot takes two double-As, conventional or rechargeable. Our cordless phones (for a non-camera example) take a proprietary battery pack. I'm sizing up replacements, and one requirement is that they take standard rechargeables. (Some do -- you just have to check.)
Specifically regarding photography, if you're in a place you'll never in your life be again, do you really want a proprietary battery in your camera? Or do you want a camera that will run on local carbon-zinc double-As if necessary?
And you have to ask yourself -- with the plethora of good common choices out there, why, other than in rare form-factor cases, would a manufacturer go to the trouble of making a proprietary, single-source battery for their devices? And knowing that, why the heck would you want to do business with them?
If I can't use AA or AAA batteries (or some reasonable equivalent) I'm not interested. Even my pro D-SLR has an adapter to use double As.
Just say no to crap like this. Who needs Panasonic? There are lots of choices out there.