A point to you sir. That sshot of Amarok is AWFUL! Whoever came up with that needs to be shot. The worst part is that I have the damn program, and I didn't notice how truly awful that was. Now I'm angry.
I guess my feeling lies in that many pages don't render well wider than 1024 or so. As an example, cnn.com takes up about 1/2 of the width of my screen. The other bits are just a gray box around it. I agree that you don't gain much, but really, how many tabs do you run? With Tree Style Tabs collapsing the tabs you're not using, I can fit about 30 tabs down the left side of my screen, with the text horizontal. Granted, only the first 18 characters + an icon are shown, but if you need more, a mouse-over shows the details.
I just don't run into enough websites which make use of 1680 horizontal pixels to justify NOT using the most I can of the 1050 I have vertically. The numbers change, but the ratio stays close to the same for most of the displays I work on.
Seriously - if you haven't tried it, install Tree Style Tabs, and move your url bar and search bar up to the navigation bar line. (Mine goes back/forward/reload/stop/home/URL/Search) Two less vertical lines in firefox really makes the browser seem far larger. I know it's only a handful of pixels, but it really works for me. If most websites made use of the width I have, it wouldn't be all that great. But a lot don't.
Due to my EEE I went with the Tree Style Tabs plugin. For short & wide screens, it doesn't make sense to cripple the vertical space available. If I could get a legitimate menu on the left, I'd do that too.
I see no problem with that. I've been using Tree Style Tabs since I ran into issues with the amount of vertical real estate on my EEE. The tabs are constrained in about 1" of screen on this massive 22" widescreen, and the mouse-over shows you the full title. That gives me the maximum vertical space for webpages on the many wide monitors I use.
Since almost all webpages are designed to be tall, reducing the amount of vertical space to display them is stupid.
And I don't get where you came up with sideways text. You must have a lot of crazy stuff in your ass to be able to pull things like that out.
Try the Tree Style Tabs plugin for Firefox. It's how tabs should have been done in the first place, in my opinion.
Not necessarily. At some point, it won't be profitable for them to continue pursuing p2p traffic. If you're doing deep inspection, that takes processor power, and the code to do it. If you're not writing it in house, you're probably licensing that code.
The ISPs will have countermeasures until those cut too deeply into their profit. I don't have a guess at what point that will be, but it logically has to occur at some point down the line.
The problem here is that EA has mindshare. They have a ton of franchises with rabid fans. They don't need to advertise to their fans, they need to keep providing them with quality games so they STAY fans.
If we were talking about some no-name company, what you said would be spot on. But we're talking about one of the largest game publishers in the US. This is that company that published everything from Ultima Online to Dungeon Keeper, all the Madden NFL games, the decade+ running FIFA and Need for Speed series, American McGee's Alice, the entire Battlefield series, etc.
It really looks like EA has pulled resources from making games to marketing, to make up for lower sales, because their games are now sucking hard. They have the fans - all they need are games that don't suck.
This isn't some joe-bob company who's making games in their basement. This is the Mafia of game producers we're talking about here.
The issue is that the amount of money you spend on marketing vs the effectiveness is likely to take the vague shape of a bell curve. I think part of what the GP is saying is that some brands have moved to that peak in marketing vs effectiveness, and realize that spending the 50% extra on marketing is pointless.
Continuing to throw money at marketing just because your sales are low doesn't mean you'll make more sales. If you're already at that peak, due to the economy, market saturation, the quality of your game, etc., more marketing doesn't translate into more sales.
In the case of EA, I've seen a fair bit of questionable marketing from them. Commercials on channels that seem to be far outside their target audience, commercials that failed to make a game look good or worth buying, horribly obnoxious commercials that made me change the channel, etc. That said, I've been screwed by the DRM in EA games more than once, and I've played enough shitty games from them that they're off my list entirely now.
One of my best friends did that long, long ago. He had horror stories of the dank, dark, dangerous underground secret base beneath Disney...
You see, the workers aren't allowed to be seen in the park. They aren't allowed to be seen out of costume. EVER. So the park has a massive underground network to get them from one part to another.
Sex, drugs, and violence, in a secret underground network, beneath the shining face of Disney above. It's a fantastic metaphor for the company itself.
It's not that at all. Human output via gaseous means is minimal.
The largest amount of N2O is from certain bacteria that live in the soil. They are a very uncommon species, but do a fantastic job turning nitrogen based fertilizers into N2O. While they aren't common, farmland is. And the amount of fertilizer we dump onto the ground is massive.
As an American, BBC news is my #3 news source, behind our National Public Radio news, and my local news. It's my #1 source for non-US news. Nothing else comes close in that area.
Murdoch isn't really involved in news, so I don't know what his issue is. I guess if your business revolves around stories told incompletely for sensation, openly biased reporting to fuel flames, and blatantly made up shit, you might have issues with BBC News. They're probably the most likely to make you look like a fool.
In addition, it's ad-free. NOAA and the NWS are some of the unsung heroes of government organizations. There, you can actually see your tax dollars at work. If you're giving Accuweather or Weather.com your clicks, you're giving them free money for not doing much of anything.
Worse, it's going to reflect/refract light. Maximum light transmission to the solar cells will come at noon, through clear glass. However, at anything other than noon, at anywhere other than the equator, a fairly large amount of light will glance off. This is bad on tar or cement, which reflect a tiny percentage of light. With glass, it would be horrific. Plus, as you said, it'd be slippery.
Their solution is to rough up the glass. However, I'm very skeptical of this. The more you rough up the glass, the less light is going to penetrate, meaning your efficiency takes a nosedive. In addition, the more angles you have in the surface, the more chances for reflection/refraction you set up.
My optics background was always poor at best, but I really don't see how they will avoid blinding drivers at sunrise/sunset, and still get good performance out of their solar cells.
I'm from the NE, and you can burn yourself on sand and pavement around here as well. Granted, for much less of the year, but it's still possible. The issue with pulling heat out of the road is that you need some substrate to absorb the heat, and then move out of the road to where you can turn that into energy.
Roads are far from stable, and any sort of thing you embed into it is going to break with thermal expansion/contraction, heavy traffic, etc. The autobahn is heralded as one of the best highways in the world. However, the roadbed is something like 2'-3' thick, and completely solid. If you put tubes in this, it would severely compromise the structural engineering of the road. If you did that with a regular US road with all of 6" of tar, it wouldn't last very long at all.
That was my first thought. My second was "sidewalks". They tend to run past houses, and don't have much in the way of heavy traffic. If these can stand up to road traffic, (and I'm doubtful, having lived in place which have winter most of my life) they should definitely be able to stand up to pedestrian traffic. And in most places I've ever been sidewalks, houses, and the power infrastructure are very near each other.
4G will still be susceptible to interference from all sorts of things, from weather to foliage, metal, other transmissions, etc. While there are plenty of places it makes sense, there are also plenty of places where it doesn't.
Most cities already have a wire system, from power to phone to cable. Adding another cable to it isn't that much of a big deal, and you are immune to interference. Of course, "good enough" might mean we see 4G instead of fiber, since lost packets and slow speeds aren't really noticeable to someone sending an email, browsing facebook, and downloading off iTunes, and those folks seem to be a majority on the web now.
The answer to your question is that this is a Federal Court. Sure, from a Federal standpoint, there's competition. From a local one, you're spot on that there is none.
It looks like the court looked around, and said, "There's Charter, Comcast, Time Warner....looks like competition to me!" Look a little closer, at one state, one town, and the reality is far different.
Bah, STDs aren't bad. Kids you don't want are far worse.
I'm an inhuman monster who things we should sterilize everyone at 12. If they want kids some time later, have them pass a simple parenting test, and the process is reversed.
Having spent a lot of time around kids who were the product of "oh shit, I'm pregnant", it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. Parents who are willing to jump through hoops to have a kid are far more likely to raise a good one than those who didn't want one, but had one anyway.
I agree - that's the #2 pressing problem the world faces at the moment. The #1 is enough clean drinking water, something a large part of the US and 1st world don't pay any attention to. Of course, if you solve #2, there's a good chance you can use that energy to solve #1 as well.
I found myself wondering the same a month or two back.
I am a bit of a fan of Scotch, and was sipping on a decent (I thought) Speyside single malt. I happened to be on a Vent server playing a game, along with a guy from Scotland. So, since I had this magical link to Scotland going, I asked him about the scotch I was drinking. He was surprised that A) I was able to find it in the US, and B) that I had chosen what he'd consider a pretty good scotch.
So there I was, drinking and playing a video game at home, and learning something about my drink, from the land it was made in, 6,000 miles away. I realized that if this had been twenty years ago, while I might have had the scotch, I wouldn't have the ability to freely talk to someone from Scotland on a whim.
I remember the first time when I was talking to my parents about one of the games I was playing, and mentioned someone from England. They were amazed that I was just casually chatting with someone thousands of miles away while playing video games. When I pointed out that we had people from the rest of Europe and the Middle East and Asia on the server too, they were astounded.
Forget a literary revolution - we're in the middle of communications revolution. An ideas revolution. A cross-cultural exchange the likes of which has never been seen before.
I'm in a small city in the middle of the US now, and can find food and language from dozens and dozens of countries here. If I want to know more about those things, the internet is a click away. I have a Thai coconut curry sauce in my refrigerator. I saw Thai Eggplants, an Oriental Root Radish, and Chinese Kale at a local farmer's market.
Between the internet and the airplane, we have the ability to mix cultures and ideas like never before. I, like you, really wonder what the world will be like in 50 years, when kids just being born grow up in this sort of world.
If this was just a limited-funds, limited experience job, replacing the hard drive would be enough. The bigger issue is if this is a well-funded, experienced spy operation. Then you have to be suspicious of all the hardware, from the keyboard to the wireless and wired ports.
Damn! You win that one! I missed the post with that instruction. All I know is that whenever I cut&paste anything other than a-z, 1-0, slashdot fucks it up. What's the secret?
Because when I cut and paste what you wrote, it looks like this:
And you'd be wrong. The school I worked in scheduled from June until September. School schedules are STUPIDLY complicated. I went in assuming you'd drop student numbers and requested classes into a computer, and they'd magically do a best-fit algorithm, and all would be well. The reality is far different....In no particular order:
Lunches. How long are lunches? Well, lets say 20 minutes. But is that enough time to ring a bell, have kids show up, stand in line, get food, find a place to sit, eat, return tray, etc? Lets suppose it is, but you need 5 lunches to feed all the kids. How long are classes? If they aren't in multiples of 20 minutes, what do you do with the kids who aren't in lunch? Are classes longer? (In my school, they were. 14 minutes longer during the lunch period. That was awesome for trying to keep classes on generally the same topic...) What does the teacher contract say about lunches? About teaching period length?
Vocational/tech/trade school/college classes/etc. Lots of schools send kids off to other places for services they don't offer. But what if you have to offer an English class for seniors heading off to somewhere else? That has to be first thing in the morning, tying up those teachers and that slot.
Sports. If you're sending kids off early 1-2 days a week to play away games, are they missing one class all the time? Do you have to schedule around it?
Advanced Placement and College Prep Classes. How do you schedule those? Do you do like my school, and schedule Calculus and Physics at the same time, so kids have to choose? AP History and AP English at the same time? Or like my last year teaching, where they scheduled AP Bio and Physics at the same time. There were 3 kids who wanted to go into Sports Medicine or Physical therapy who had to choose one or the other.
Back to the teacher contract. How many periods does each teacher teach? How many periods of class does each kid have to take? Do those match up?
State regulations. In my state, there was a limit on how many kids per square foot could be allowed into a lab science class. Twice we forced them to reschedule because they put too many kids in our lab science classes. (Should they have known? Yes. That's an administrator's JOB! Did they? No.)
There's a good chance they were fighting with the schedule all summer. If they were incompetent, even more likely. I had a principal delete 2-3 weeks of scheduling work in the middle of august. The head of guidance was STILL fuming about it in the fall.
Slashdot Mirror
A point to you sir. That sshot of Amarok is AWFUL! Whoever came up with that needs to be shot. The worst part is that I have the damn program, and I didn't notice how truly awful that was. Now I'm angry.
I guess my feeling lies in that many pages don't render well wider than 1024 or so. As an example, cnn.com takes up about 1/2 of the width of my screen. The other bits are just a gray box around it. I agree that you don't gain much, but really, how many tabs do you run? With Tree Style Tabs collapsing the tabs you're not using, I can fit about 30 tabs down the left side of my screen, with the text horizontal. Granted, only the first 18 characters + an icon are shown, but if you need more, a mouse-over shows the details.
I just don't run into enough websites which make use of 1680 horizontal pixels to justify NOT using the most I can of the 1050 I have vertically. The numbers change, but the ratio stays close to the same for most of the displays I work on.
Seriously - if you haven't tried it, install Tree Style Tabs, and move your url bar and search bar up to the navigation bar line. (Mine goes back/forward/reload/stop/home/URL/Search) Two less vertical lines in firefox really makes the browser seem far larger. I know it's only a handful of pixels, but it really works for me. If most websites made use of the width I have, it wouldn't be all that great. But a lot don't.
Due to my EEE I went with the Tree Style Tabs plugin. For short & wide screens, it doesn't make sense to cripple the vertical space available. If I could get a legitimate menu on the left, I'd do that too.
I see no problem with that. I've been using Tree Style Tabs since I ran into issues with the amount of vertical real estate on my EEE. The tabs are constrained in about 1" of screen on this massive 22" widescreen, and the mouse-over shows you the full title. That gives me the maximum vertical space for webpages on the many wide monitors I use.
Since almost all webpages are designed to be tall, reducing the amount of vertical space to display them is stupid.
And I don't get where you came up with sideways text. You must have a lot of crazy stuff in your ass to be able to pull things like that out.
Try the Tree Style Tabs plugin for Firefox. It's how tabs should have been done in the first place, in my opinion.
Downside? This is a fucking UPSIDE!
Before, it was "I sent you that order HOURS ago! Why the HELL haven't you processed it?!?!?!"
Now it's, "Damn, your email was out too?"
The more people who move into the Gmail cloud, the less likely it is that only one side has an issue with their email.
Not necessarily. At some point, it won't be profitable for them to continue pursuing p2p traffic. If you're doing deep inspection, that takes processor power, and the code to do it. If you're not writing it in house, you're probably licensing that code.
The ISPs will have countermeasures until those cut too deeply into their profit. I don't have a guess at what point that will be, but it logically has to occur at some point down the line.
The problem here is that EA has mindshare. They have a ton of franchises with rabid fans. They don't need to advertise to their fans, they need to keep providing them with quality games so they STAY fans.
If we were talking about some no-name company, what you said would be spot on. But we're talking about one of the largest game publishers in the US. This is that company that published everything from Ultima Online to Dungeon Keeper, all the Madden NFL games, the decade+ running FIFA and Need for Speed series, American McGee's Alice, the entire Battlefield series, etc.
It really looks like EA has pulled resources from making games to marketing, to make up for lower sales, because their games are now sucking hard. They have the fans - all they need are games that don't suck.
This isn't some joe-bob company who's making games in their basement. This is the Mafia of game producers we're talking about here.
The issue is that the amount of money you spend on marketing vs the effectiveness is likely to take the vague shape of a bell curve. I think part of what the GP is saying is that some brands have moved to that peak in marketing vs effectiveness, and realize that spending the 50% extra on marketing is pointless.
Continuing to throw money at marketing just because your sales are low doesn't mean you'll make more sales. If you're already at that peak, due to the economy, market saturation, the quality of your game, etc., more marketing doesn't translate into more sales.
In the case of EA, I've seen a fair bit of questionable marketing from them. Commercials on channels that seem to be far outside their target audience, commercials that failed to make a game look good or worth buying, horribly obnoxious commercials that made me change the channel, etc. That said, I've been screwed by the DRM in EA games more than once, and I've played enough shitty games from them that they're off my list entirely now.
One of my best friends did that long, long ago. He had horror stories of the dank, dark, dangerous underground secret base beneath Disney...
You see, the workers aren't allowed to be seen in the park. They aren't allowed to be seen out of costume. EVER. So the park has a massive underground network to get them from one part to another.
Sex, drugs, and violence, in a secret underground network, beneath the shining face of Disney above. It's a fantastic metaphor for the company itself.
It's not that at all. Human output via gaseous means is minimal.
The largest amount of N2O is from certain bacteria that live in the soil. They are a very uncommon species, but do a fantastic job turning nitrogen based fertilizers into N2O. While they aren't common, farmland is. And the amount of fertilizer we dump onto the ground is massive.
As an American, BBC news is my #3 news source, behind our National Public Radio news, and my local news. It's my #1 source for non-US news. Nothing else comes close in that area.
Murdoch isn't really involved in news, so I don't know what his issue is. I guess if your business revolves around stories told incompletely for sensation, openly biased reporting to fuel flames, and blatantly made up shit, you might have issues with BBC News. They're probably the most likely to make you look like a fool.
In addition, it's ad-free. NOAA and the NWS are some of the unsung heroes of government organizations. There, you can actually see your tax dollars at work. If you're giving Accuweather or Weather.com your clicks, you're giving them free money for not doing much of anything.
Worse, it's going to reflect/refract light. Maximum light transmission to the solar cells will come at noon, through clear glass. However, at anything other than noon, at anywhere other than the equator, a fairly large amount of light will glance off. This is bad on tar or cement, which reflect a tiny percentage of light. With glass, it would be horrific. Plus, as you said, it'd be slippery.
Their solution is to rough up the glass. However, I'm very skeptical of this. The more you rough up the glass, the less light is going to penetrate, meaning your efficiency takes a nosedive. In addition, the more angles you have in the surface, the more chances for reflection/refraction you set up.
My optics background was always poor at best, but I really don't see how they will avoid blinding drivers at sunrise/sunset, and still get good performance out of their solar cells.
I'm from the NE, and you can burn yourself on sand and pavement around here as well. Granted, for much less of the year, but it's still possible. The issue with pulling heat out of the road is that you need some substrate to absorb the heat, and then move out of the road to where you can turn that into energy.
Roads are far from stable, and any sort of thing you embed into it is going to break with thermal expansion/contraction, heavy traffic, etc. The autobahn is heralded as one of the best highways in the world. However, the roadbed is something like 2'-3' thick, and completely solid. If you put tubes in this, it would severely compromise the structural engineering of the road. If you did that with a regular US road with all of 6" of tar, it wouldn't last very long at all.
And mashed critters....
That was my first thought. My second was "sidewalks". They tend to run past houses, and don't have much in the way of heavy traffic. If these can stand up to road traffic, (and I'm doubtful, having lived in place which have winter most of my life) they should definitely be able to stand up to pedestrian traffic. And in most places I've ever been sidewalks, houses, and the power infrastructure are very near each other.
4G will still be susceptible to interference from all sorts of things, from weather to foliage, metal, other transmissions, etc. While there are plenty of places it makes sense, there are also plenty of places where it doesn't.
Most cities already have a wire system, from power to phone to cable. Adding another cable to it isn't that much of a big deal, and you are immune to interference. Of course, "good enough" might mean we see 4G instead of fiber, since lost packets and slow speeds aren't really noticeable to someone sending an email, browsing facebook, and downloading off iTunes, and those folks seem to be a majority on the web now.
The answer to your question is that this is a Federal Court. Sure, from a Federal standpoint, there's competition. From a local one, you're spot on that there is none.
It looks like the court looked around, and said, "There's Charter, Comcast, Time Warner....looks like competition to me!" Look a little closer, at one state, one town, and the reality is far different.
Bah, STDs aren't bad. Kids you don't want are far worse.
I'm an inhuman monster who things we should sterilize everyone at 12. If they want kids some time later, have them pass a simple parenting test, and the process is reversed.
Having spent a lot of time around kids who were the product of "oh shit, I'm pregnant", it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. Parents who are willing to jump through hoops to have a kid are far more likely to raise a good one than those who didn't want one, but had one anyway.
I agree - that's the #2 pressing problem the world faces at the moment. The #1 is enough clean drinking water, something a large part of the US and 1st world don't pay any attention to. Of course, if you solve #2, there's a good chance you can use that energy to solve #1 as well.
I found myself wondering the same a month or two back.
I am a bit of a fan of Scotch, and was sipping on a decent (I thought) Speyside single malt. I happened to be on a Vent server playing a game, along with a guy from Scotland. So, since I had this magical link to Scotland going, I asked him about the scotch I was drinking. He was surprised that A) I was able to find it in the US, and B) that I had chosen what he'd consider a pretty good scotch.
So there I was, drinking and playing a video game at home, and learning something about my drink, from the land it was made in, 6,000 miles away. I realized that if this had been twenty years ago, while I might have had the scotch, I wouldn't have the ability to freely talk to someone from Scotland on a whim.
I remember the first time when I was talking to my parents about one of the games I was playing, and mentioned someone from England. They were amazed that I was just casually chatting with someone thousands of miles away while playing video games. When I pointed out that we had people from the rest of Europe and the Middle East and Asia on the server too, they were astounded.
Forget a literary revolution - we're in the middle of communications revolution. An ideas revolution. A cross-cultural exchange the likes of which has never been seen before.
I'm in a small city in the middle of the US now, and can find food and language from dozens and dozens of countries here. If I want to know more about those things, the internet is a click away. I have a Thai coconut curry sauce in my refrigerator. I saw Thai Eggplants, an Oriental Root Radish, and Chinese Kale at a local farmer's market.
Between the internet and the airplane, we have the ability to mix cultures and ideas like never before. I, like you, really wonder what the world will be like in 50 years, when kids just being born grow up in this sort of world.
Since when are iPhones, data plans, and apps from the app store free?
If this was just a limited-funds, limited experience job, replacing the hard drive would be enough. The bigger issue is if this is a well-funded, experienced spy operation. Then you have to be suspicious of all the hardware, from the keyboard to the wireless and wired ports.
Aaah, the source code for the page tells all. It's obviously:
Touché
GOD DAMN YOU SLASHDOT!!!!
Damn! You win that one! I missed the post with that instruction. All I know is that whenever I cut&paste anything other than a-z, 1-0, slashdot fucks it up. What's the secret?
Because when I cut and paste what you wrote, it looks like this:
Touché.
And you'd be wrong. The school I worked in scheduled from June until September. School schedules are STUPIDLY complicated. I went in assuming you'd drop student numbers and requested classes into a computer, and they'd magically do a best-fit algorithm, and all would be well. The reality is far different....In no particular order:
Lunches. How long are lunches? Well, lets say 20 minutes. But is that enough time to ring a bell, have kids show up, stand in line, get food, find a place to sit, eat, return tray, etc? Lets suppose it is, but you need 5 lunches to feed all the kids. How long are classes? If they aren't in multiples of 20 minutes, what do you do with the kids who aren't in lunch? Are classes longer? (In my school, they were. 14 minutes longer during the lunch period. That was awesome for trying to keep classes on generally the same topic...) What does the teacher contract say about lunches? About teaching period length?
Vocational/tech/trade school/college classes/etc. Lots of schools send kids off to other places for services they don't offer. But what if you have to offer an English class for seniors heading off to somewhere else? That has to be first thing in the morning, tying up those teachers and that slot.
Sports. If you're sending kids off early 1-2 days a week to play away games, are they missing one class all the time? Do you have to schedule around it?
Advanced Placement and College Prep Classes. How do you schedule those? Do you do like my school, and schedule Calculus and Physics at the same time, so kids have to choose? AP History and AP English at the same time? Or like my last year teaching, where they scheduled AP Bio and Physics at the same time. There were 3 kids who wanted to go into Sports Medicine or Physical therapy who had to choose one or the other.
Back to the teacher contract. How many periods does each teacher teach? How many periods of class does each kid have to take? Do those match up?
State regulations. In my state, there was a limit on how many kids per square foot could be allowed into a lab science class. Twice we forced them to reschedule because they put too many kids in our lab science classes. (Should they have known? Yes. That's an administrator's JOB! Did they? No.)
There's a good chance they were fighting with the schedule all summer. If they were incompetent, even more likely. I had a principal delete 2-3 weeks of scheduling work in the middle of august. The head of guidance was STILL fuming about it in the fall.