I'm sure he thinks so...Tetris is the sort of thing that only has to be seen for a few minutes before you know all you need to know to create your own. OSS people do that, and he sells less copies of his game. C'est la vie. If there were companies that depended on Tetris these days...Well...Sucks to be them.
It's pretty much only when the jury comes to a conclusion that is in opposition with the known facts of the case, though the whole thing can be tossed because of irregularities in the conduct of the lawyers as well.
The judges also have a large amount of say in the verdict, though there they have to follow precedent and the law; if a jury tries to award an absurdly high (or low) amount of money (based on precedent) the judge can throw out or modify the verdict within the scope of the law.
The exact opposite is what happened here; a bunch of slick, highly paid lawyers smooth-talked the jury, and then the judge tossed the jury verdict and stuck the plaintiff with the costs for their litigation.
This kind of thing is most common when the lawyers get out of control...If the judge decides that the lawyers are running amok, they can throw the whole thing out and charge them with contempt or whatever. There is some precedent in also tossing cases where the juries decision contravenes the material facts of the case, but that's a much greyer area, though it has been upheld more often than not.
I never thought this one would stand up to appeal...The judge threw out the jury verdict and then made the plaintiff pay the court costs. Read that again: he threw out the jury verdict.
And the appeals court backed him up! Holy crap! I guess that's one way to deal with stupid juries and slick lawyers...Get some decent judges who aren't willing to put up with the crap.
I'm with you...If I get killed by something lame over and over, it's just frustrating. On the other hand, if you're charging along and turn a corner right into a rocket spray fired by someone who didn't even know you were coming, it's entertaining.
I don't know...I can take pleasure in someone else's skill/luck, same as I can take pleasure in my own skill/luck. I can take pleasure in my own hilariously improbable death, or my own stupidity. Rocket bounce a sniper off his high camping perch, and have him nail you while falling through the air a second before he dies SPLAT on the ground...I don't know, it's entertaining.
Re:For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellen
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
No one really understands the way the stock prices are going to go. Intel has the dominant chips right now; nVidia is a long-time winner in the graphics card market...My card experiences are almost exactly the opposite of yours, so generally I buy nVidia, though my purchases don't exactly drive the market.
Basically I, like a lot of people, buy the best thing right now for my needs. It's not any kind of conspiracy. I bought a ton of AMD when their dual procs were faster, cooler, and more expensive than intel's. Now that intel is doing better, I'm buying more intel. If I need a graphics card, I check to see who has the best in my price range, and I buy that.
I hope AMD catches up and I hope they stay a solid market competitor...but it's not because I have a bias one way or the other; it's because I like CPU price wars. That's the best reason to root for a company...You want them to make things better for you. Buying from a company just because you like them more is kinda crazy...They're all out to separate you from your cash, so why make it easy for 'em?
Everything on the market depends on perception. It doesn't matter what your revenue is. It doesn't matter what your P&E ratio is. Doesn't matter how much debt you have.
What matters is perception. Period. If everyone thinks your stock sucks, it will suck. If everyone thinks your stock is wonderful, it will be wonderful, at least for a while.
All these brokers and analysts put all this research into the stocks; they can tell you everything about the company. But what they really really want to know is what the average person thinks about the stock, because private investment drives the market, and that will make or break a stock.
So it's not "manipulation". The prices are set by Joe Investor, and Joe Investor invests based on a complex formula involving Fox News, Beer, and what his barber thinks. You can try to manipulate that, but it's as likely to not work as it is to work. Whether or not a Slashdot editor thinks the stock is going to go up or down doesn't matter. I think it's going to go down as well; I think they're screwed until they get to 45nm, and I think everyone is screwed because of the perception of an economic downturn (the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy).
And finally, if you're in the market short term with the nature of the market right now, you better either be a psychic or willing to lose your ass. The smart thing to do is move some of your stable investments (bonds/money market/etc) into cash so you can pick up a few bargains as stocks tank, but keep in mind that again, you can lose your ass if you bet against Joe.
Who cares, I just want to see Spock and Yoda in a lightsaber battle.
Not to be one to pick a nit (especially this geeky a nit), but Star Trek science is bad, but Star Wars science is non-existent. Popularizing science using Star Wars is like popularizing science using Pokemon.
I spent years thinking Evian water was Naive water...That was back when bottled water was weird, so I was surprised that a company would so obviously insult their customers. Very punk rock.
I was quite disappointed when I found out the truth.
I wasn't sure...You can definitely hear the difference between a Deck and a regular mechanical keyboard, but you can also hear a pronounced difference between a Deck and the usual crap keyboards available these days.
I still have one; it's a hell of a keyboard, and in some respects I like the way it feels better than the traditional mechanical...The keypress is smooth, without the variable resistance of a regular click keyboard, but its still got a satisfying *whack* to it.
Way ahead of you...Check this one: Das Keyboard. When I hit a coding run, people come from down the hall to see where the hell all the noise is coming from. The blank keys are also good for the whole alpha geek thing, and forget having your boss ever try to type anything on your keyboard.
I used to use a Deck keyboard; they've got a good heft, and though the keys aren't sitting on mechanical switches, they still have a nice solid action and a good sound, but the backlit keyboards have exactly the opposite effect on bystanders...People always want to type on your keyboard, and if that irritates you (as it does me) it's a bad choice to have one sitting around.
For someone with a musical background, who may have the subtlety of touch required, that would be fine. I personally prefer something a bit less responsive, as I have a tendency to slide my fingers across the keyboard which leads to a lot of typos on more responsive keyboards.
If I'm doing a lot of typing I prefer a heavier keyboard; I find accuracy and action of the keyboard more than compensate for the increased "work" of typing.
That being said, I can't imagine paying for a keyboard with the LED picture keys. That makes no sense at all to me. To get any kind of speed out of typing, you have to NOT look at the keys, not be forever distracted by the "Ooooooo shiny!" keys.
Re:Micro-Transactions and game balance
on
The Future of MMOs
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· Score: 1
I don't believe in playing a game where you can just buy a character that is superiour to a character that has been leveled "from scratch"...Doesn't make any sense, and it rips all sense of accomplishment away from the people who did it the hard way.
On the other hand, I stopped playing WoW because WoW puts too much emphasis on the endgame's eternal grind...I can make it to 70 as fast as most anyone, but then I quickly devolve into noobdom because I'm not willing to run the instance progression until I'm maxed out in tier 5...It's insanely boring to me.
Likewise I'm not terribly interested in pvp for the same reasons...Run the same pvp mission a zillion times, fight the same pvp arena battle a thousand times (these are especially boring because it is so heavily dependent on team composition)...So while pvp starts off entertaining, my disinterest in spending all my time doing the same thing over and over means that my gear quickly becomes inferior, so while I can out skill the average player, I still may not be able to beat them due to the relative levels of gear.
At that point I completely lose interest, and once you drop out of the loot grind in WoW, you realize that there isn't anything else to the game.
One of the only MMOs I ever played that allowed for both leveling and yet allowed new players to be competitive was Planetside...A high level character in Planetside could do a lot of things a new character couldn't, but the new character could still be competitive because the game was skill-based, rather than gear based.
And irrelevant when talking about Linux. Breaking into a *nix machine is trivial if you have physical access; trying to keep out anyone who can use google is almost impossible without an encrypted file system or a physical barrier.
Speaking as an American, where all our telecoms basically conspire to screw the consumer and offer substandard bandwidth, I long for the day when the demand for bandwidth surpasses the ability of their crappy networks to handle it, sparking an all out bandwidth arms race amongst providers desperate to cater to the needs to demanding consumers. I dream of the slug-like cable and phone companies being driven under by agile local providers...It will get to the point where small networks will be able to compete, because the advantages of a giant infrastructure are of limited use in a local environment.
So pardon me if I don't give a crap if the little ISPs are feeling the pinch. If they'd used a little foresight, they'd have plenty of free bandwidth.
Yea, it seems like it should be a lot easier to get more endurance out of these things than they're getting...The balloon idea is mainly interesting as a jump off for some basically autonomous station keeping signal platforms...A small blimp covered with solar cells or powered by a large betavoltaic battery or something...
As long as they're just spamming platforms that last for a day or two, the idea is pretty much doomed. The loss rate is going to be astronomical, and sending guys out in a truck to pick 'em up is in no way cost efficient.
The material wouldn't be strong enough for those sorts of applications. The abrasion with the ground, if nothing else, would quickly wear down the material...Self healing wouldn't apply when floored the gas and left half your tire in a patch of rubber on the ground. Likewise tennis shoes...Their wear is less to do with broken bonds, and more to do with abrasion, and softer rubber would be more vulnerable to abrasion.
Wonder what it does to it's melting point, and flammability? Seems like if you treated the rubber with any of the usual chemicals used to produce a more fire-resistant product, you'd kill the self-healing properties. Seems like the best use might be for some of the cold-weather applications where standard rubber becomes too brittle to be used effectively.
I'm not saying the whole world, per se, but quite often you see a little blurb story about someone who was outraged that a sex kink of theirs ended up on a college gossip site. The original link is one of those things that actually is pretty ephemeral, but the stories that talk about it, and the cache, and any number of other items make it every so slightly better known than if the subject had just ignored it.
Not national news, of course. But if you google them, it'll be one of the top returns.
It's definitely a lesser scale, but it still applies.
One of the interesting things about journalism is learning how much work goes into those goddamn money mismanagement stories. You have a bunch of journalists, half of whom don't balance their checkbooks terribly well, going over publicly available monetary expenditures line by line by line. They do good work, by and large, but the absurd tedium, the volume of material, and the fact that you may come to the end of two weeks of work with no story, combines to make those stories pretty uncommon. Lot of people get away with a lot of stuff, even when the records are publicly available.
This is a perfect example. Who in their right mind would have gone through this stuff unless they knew that there was a story there? Who could have gotten permission to work on it? But now it's everywhere! There are smart bastards in media outlets all over the country trying to confirm it, and they will, because the stuff is never hidden all that well once people start looking.
Something incriminating ends up online, and you have two options.
1) Ignore it, and hope that no one notices it.
2) Try to get it removed, guaranteeing that everyone in the world will hear about it.
Sadly, this works the same way whether its true or false information...The information trail almost always increases when you try to have something taken down, so while it may have been only 1 data point before, your attempts to bring it down can create many more...In cases like this, a ridiculously large number.
Probably the best policy is trying to brazen it out...Hardly ever is the information that good...You can always try to laugh it off, but trying to bury it makes it look like you've something to hide.
I'm not a huge privacy nut, so this doesn't necessarily bother me, but I wonder if a lot of the free-speech/privacy buffs are starting to feel a little worried. When everything is free, even the most trivial stuff can end up online, and it's pretty obvious that once it's there, it's never coming down.
These days jesus...I knew people who were marrying their MUD girlfriends in 1991. And the phrase "mail order bride" is from the period when mail meant...well, mail.
But yea, why not? Take two people who are lonely enough to try an online dating service, give 'em 500 questions to answer, and match up the people whose answers are similar. Seems like a no-brainer. That's all most people want in a relationship anyway, and it's immensely soothing to date someone who shares your interests.
I did it the old fashioned way myself--just as well because matching my geeky interests and my non-geeky interests would require polygamy--and it still feels attractive, intellectually. All that crap that takes you years to find out, all laid out in front of you. All you have to do is meet the person, and decide if they're going to do it for you or not.
Hell, there are whole cultures that are based on arranged marriages, usually arranged with some consent on both sides, and while we generally don't look to that sort of thing, the fact that it works for them says that most of a good relationship is in the moment, not in the details.
It's lousy enough that I wouldn't do something like advocate the use of inefficient electrolysis to separate hydrogen from water.
On the other hand, it's efficient enough that, if a good solution for creating it came along, I certainly wouldn't disdain it. Yea, there are storage issues, but they're certainly no more insurmountable than the battery problem.
In a lot of cases its better to have potential energy than it is to have actual energy; that's what our current problem is wrt petroleum. Barring the battery/capacitor breakthrough everyone is longing for, a straight-to-hydrogen solution has a lot of promise.
40% is still in the lab. It remains to be seen if we can get anything like that out in the real world, though if we can, there is certainly a hell of a lot that we could do with it. Even if we do get it though, this technology would still have a place.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure he thinks so...Tetris is the sort of thing that only has to be seen for a few minutes before you know all you need to know to create your own. OSS people do that, and he sells less copies of his game. C'est la vie. If there were companies that depended on Tetris these days...Well...Sucks to be them.
It's pretty much only when the jury comes to a conclusion that is in opposition with the known facts of the case, though the whole thing can be tossed because of irregularities in the conduct of the lawyers as well.
The judges also have a large amount of say in the verdict, though there they have to follow precedent and the law; if a jury tries to award an absurdly high (or low) amount of money (based on precedent) the judge can throw out or modify the verdict within the scope of the law.
The exact opposite is what happened here; a bunch of slick, highly paid lawyers smooth-talked the jury, and then the judge tossed the jury verdict and stuck the plaintiff with the costs for their litigation.
This kind of thing is most common when the lawyers get out of control...If the judge decides that the lawyers are running amok, they can throw the whole thing out and charge them with contempt or whatever. There is some precedent in also tossing cases where the juries decision contravenes the material facts of the case, but that's a much greyer area, though it has been upheld more often than not.
I never thought this one would stand up to appeal...The judge threw out the jury verdict and then made the plaintiff pay the court costs. Read that again: he threw out the jury verdict.
And the appeals court backed him up! Holy crap! I guess that's one way to deal with stupid juries and slick lawyers...Get some decent judges who aren't willing to put up with the crap.
I'm with you...If I get killed by something lame over and over, it's just frustrating. On the other hand, if you're charging along and turn a corner right into a rocket spray fired by someone who didn't even know you were coming, it's entertaining.
I don't know...I can take pleasure in someone else's skill/luck, same as I can take pleasure in my own skill/luck. I can take pleasure in my own hilariously improbable death, or my own stupidity. Rocket bounce a sniper off his high camping perch, and have him nail you while falling through the air a second before he dies SPLAT on the ground...I don't know, it's entertaining.
No one really understands the way the stock prices are going to go. Intel has the dominant chips right now; nVidia is a long-time winner in the graphics card market...My card experiences are almost exactly the opposite of yours, so generally I buy nVidia, though my purchases don't exactly drive the market.
Basically I, like a lot of people, buy the best thing right now for my needs. It's not any kind of conspiracy. I bought a ton of AMD when their dual procs were faster, cooler, and more expensive than intel's. Now that intel is doing better, I'm buying more intel. If I need a graphics card, I check to see who has the best in my price range, and I buy that.
I hope AMD catches up and I hope they stay a solid market competitor...but it's not because I have a bias one way or the other; it's because I like CPU price wars. That's the best reason to root for a company...You want them to make things better for you. Buying from a company just because you like them more is kinda crazy...They're all out to separate you from your cash, so why make it easy for 'em?
Everything on the market depends on perception. It doesn't matter what your revenue is. It doesn't matter what your P&E ratio is. Doesn't matter how much debt you have.
What matters is perception. Period. If everyone thinks your stock sucks, it will suck. If everyone thinks your stock is wonderful, it will be wonderful, at least for a while.
All these brokers and analysts put all this research into the stocks; they can tell you everything about the company. But what they really really want to know is what the average person thinks about the stock, because private investment drives the market, and that will make or break a stock.
So it's not "manipulation". The prices are set by Joe Investor, and Joe Investor invests based on a complex formula involving Fox News, Beer, and what his barber thinks. You can try to manipulate that, but it's as likely to not work as it is to work. Whether or not a Slashdot editor thinks the stock is going to go up or down doesn't matter. I think it's going to go down as well; I think they're screwed until they get to 45nm, and I think everyone is screwed because of the perception of an economic downturn (the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy).
And finally, if you're in the market short term with the nature of the market right now, you better either be a psychic or willing to lose your ass. The smart thing to do is move some of your stable investments (bonds/money market/etc) into cash so you can pick up a few bargains as stocks tank, but keep in mind that again, you can lose your ass if you bet against Joe.
Who cares, I just want to see Spock and Yoda in a lightsaber battle.
Not to be one to pick a nit (especially this geeky a nit), but Star Trek science is bad, but Star Wars science is non-existent. Popularizing science using Star Wars is like popularizing science using Pokemon.
I spent years thinking Evian water was Naive water...That was back when bottled water was weird, so I was surprised that a company would so obviously insult their customers. Very punk rock.
I was quite disappointed when I found out the truth.
I wasn't sure...You can definitely hear the difference between a Deck and a regular mechanical keyboard, but you can also hear a pronounced difference between a Deck and the usual crap keyboards available these days.
I still have one; it's a hell of a keyboard, and in some respects I like the way it feels better than the traditional mechanical...The keypress is smooth, without the variable resistance of a regular click keyboard, but its still got a satisfying *whack* to it.
I tried to get a good Cyrillic clicky keyboard and failed. It's no fricking wonder Volapuk got so fricking popular.
Way ahead of you...Check this one: Das Keyboard. When I hit a coding run, people come from down the hall to see where the hell all the noise is coming from. The blank keys are also good for the whole alpha geek thing, and forget having your boss ever try to type anything on your keyboard.
I used to use a Deck keyboard; they've got a good heft, and though the keys aren't sitting on mechanical switches, they still have a nice solid action and a good sound, but the backlit keyboards have exactly the opposite effect on bystanders...People always want to type on your keyboard, and if that irritates you (as it does me) it's a bad choice to have one sitting around.
For someone with a musical background, who may have the subtlety of touch required, that would be fine. I personally prefer something a bit less responsive, as I have a tendency to slide my fingers across the keyboard which leads to a lot of typos on more responsive keyboards.
If I'm doing a lot of typing I prefer a heavier keyboard; I find accuracy and action of the keyboard more than compensate for the increased "work" of typing.
That being said, I can't imagine paying for a keyboard with the LED picture keys. That makes no sense at all to me. To get any kind of speed out of typing, you have to NOT look at the keys, not be forever distracted by the "Ooooooo shiny!" keys.
I don't believe in playing a game where you can just buy a character that is superiour to a character that has been leveled "from scratch"...Doesn't make any sense, and it rips all sense of accomplishment away from the people who did it the hard way.
On the other hand, I stopped playing WoW because WoW puts too much emphasis on the endgame's eternal grind...I can make it to 70 as fast as most anyone, but then I quickly devolve into noobdom because I'm not willing to run the instance progression until I'm maxed out in tier 5...It's insanely boring to me.
Likewise I'm not terribly interested in pvp for the same reasons...Run the same pvp mission a zillion times, fight the same pvp arena battle a thousand times (these are especially boring because it is so heavily dependent on team composition)...So while pvp starts off entertaining, my disinterest in spending all my time doing the same thing over and over means that my gear quickly becomes inferior, so while I can out skill the average player, I still may not be able to beat them due to the relative levels of gear.
At that point I completely lose interest, and once you drop out of the loot grind in WoW, you realize that there isn't anything else to the game.
One of the only MMOs I ever played that allowed for both leveling and yet allowed new players to be competitive was Planetside...A high level character in Planetside could do a lot of things a new character couldn't, but the new character could still be competitive because the game was skill-based, rather than gear based.
And irrelevant when talking about Linux. Breaking into a *nix machine is trivial if you have physical access; trying to keep out anyone who can use google is almost impossible without an encrypted file system or a physical barrier.
And sometimes demand drives supply.
Speaking as an American, where all our telecoms basically conspire to screw the consumer and offer substandard bandwidth, I long for the day when the demand for bandwidth surpasses the ability of their crappy networks to handle it, sparking an all out bandwidth arms race amongst providers desperate to cater to the needs to demanding consumers. I dream of the slug-like cable and phone companies being driven under by agile local providers...It will get to the point where small networks will be able to compete, because the advantages of a giant infrastructure are of limited use in a local environment.
So pardon me if I don't give a crap if the little ISPs are feeling the pinch. If they'd used a little foresight, they'd have plenty of free bandwidth.
Yea, it seems like it should be a lot easier to get more endurance out of these things than they're getting...The balloon idea is mainly interesting as a jump off for some basically autonomous station keeping signal platforms...A small blimp covered with solar cells or powered by a large betavoltaic battery or something...
As long as they're just spamming platforms that last for a day or two, the idea is pretty much doomed. The loss rate is going to be astronomical, and sending guys out in a truck to pick 'em up is in no way cost efficient.
The material wouldn't be strong enough for those sorts of applications. The abrasion with the ground, if nothing else, would quickly wear down the material...Self healing wouldn't apply when floored the gas and left half your tire in a patch of rubber on the ground. Likewise tennis shoes...Their wear is less to do with broken bonds, and more to do with abrasion, and softer rubber would be more vulnerable to abrasion.
Wonder what it does to it's melting point, and flammability? Seems like if you treated the rubber with any of the usual chemicals used to produce a more fire-resistant product, you'd kill the self-healing properties. Seems like the best use might be for some of the cold-weather applications where standard rubber becomes too brittle to be used effectively.
I'm not saying the whole world, per se, but quite often you see a little blurb story about someone who was outraged that a sex kink of theirs ended up on a college gossip site. The original link is one of those things that actually is pretty ephemeral, but the stories that talk about it, and the cache, and any number of other items make it every so slightly better known than if the subject had just ignored it.
Not national news, of course. But if you google them, it'll be one of the top returns.
It's definitely a lesser scale, but it still applies.
Why would you have? It's deadly boring stuff.
One of the interesting things about journalism is learning how much work goes into those goddamn money mismanagement stories. You have a bunch of journalists, half of whom don't balance their checkbooks terribly well, going over publicly available monetary expenditures line by line by line. They do good work, by and large, but the absurd tedium, the volume of material, and the fact that you may come to the end of two weeks of work with no story, combines to make those stories pretty uncommon. Lot of people get away with a lot of stuff, even when the records are publicly available.
This is a perfect example. Who in their right mind would have gone through this stuff unless they knew that there was a story there? Who could have gotten permission to work on it? But now it's everywhere! There are smart bastards in media outlets all over the country trying to confirm it, and they will, because the stuff is never hidden all that well once people start looking.
Something incriminating ends up online, and you have two options.
1) Ignore it, and hope that no one notices it.
2) Try to get it removed, guaranteeing that everyone in the world will hear about it.
Sadly, this works the same way whether its true or false information...The information trail almost always increases when you try to have something taken down, so while it may have been only 1 data point before, your attempts to bring it down can create many more...In cases like this, a ridiculously large number.
Probably the best policy is trying to brazen it out...Hardly ever is the information that good...You can always try to laugh it off, but trying to bury it makes it look like you've something to hide.
I'm not a huge privacy nut, so this doesn't necessarily bother me, but I wonder if a lot of the free-speech/privacy buffs are starting to feel a little worried. When everything is free, even the most trivial stuff can end up online, and it's pretty obvious that once it's there, it's never coming down.
These days jesus...I knew people who were marrying their MUD girlfriends in 1991. And the phrase "mail order bride" is from the period when mail meant...well, mail.
But yea, why not? Take two people who are lonely enough to try an online dating service, give 'em 500 questions to answer, and match up the people whose answers are similar. Seems like a no-brainer. That's all most people want in a relationship anyway, and it's immensely soothing to date someone who shares your interests.
I did it the old fashioned way myself--just as well because matching my geeky interests and my non-geeky interests would require polygamy--and it still feels attractive, intellectually. All that crap that takes you years to find out, all laid out in front of you. All you have to do is meet the person, and decide if they're going to do it for you or not.
Hell, there are whole cultures that are based on arranged marriages, usually arranged with some consent on both sides, and while we generally don't look to that sort of thing, the fact that it works for them says that most of a good relationship is in the moment, not in the details.
It's lousy enough that I wouldn't do something like advocate the use of inefficient electrolysis to separate hydrogen from water.
On the other hand, it's efficient enough that, if a good solution for creating it came along, I certainly wouldn't disdain it. Yea, there are storage issues, but they're certainly no more insurmountable than the battery problem.
After turning on the loading of unnecessary pictures, viewing the exceedingly crappy picture, and clicking on it, you sir, are correct.
However, I don't believe in feeding page views to a site that does nothing but summarize someone else's article, poorly.
In a lot of cases its better to have potential energy than it is to have actual energy; that's what our current problem is wrt petroleum. Barring the battery/capacitor breakthrough everyone is longing for, a straight-to-hydrogen solution has a lot of promise.
40% is still in the lab. It remains to be seen if we can get anything like that out in the real world, though if we can, there is certainly a hell of a lot that we could do with it. Even if we do get it though, this technology would still have a place.