Re:In outer space the asteroid captures YOU!
on
On Orbital Fuel Stations
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Given the mass of a space station or an asteriod, the attraction of gravity really wouldn't have any real noticeable pull on either object. The asteroid would have to be ginourmous, and therefore unmanageable to have any real pull and I think at that point they start calling them small planets.
Actually you're wrong. I read an article recently (where escapes me now) that when hiring managers were asked whether they'd take a candidate who had led a startup and failed or a candidate who hadn't the majority picked the failure. The kind of person that would start a company and take a risk often has characteristics that are important to employers such as drive and ambition.
Really? That's kind of interesting. Let's see, I buy an XBox 360 for $400. Estimates around the web (by googling 'cost to make xbox 360') put the cost to make an X-Box 360 anywhere between $525 and $715. So you're telling me that by me buying Guantlet for like $5 on XBox Live that Microsoft is all of a sudden turning a profit? Even if I buy Oblivion for $60 and Microsoft gets every penny (though it's probably closer to less than $10 per packaged game) that's still $65 short of making a profit.
Now, let's do some rounding and averaging. XBox 360 console cost me $400 and let's for the sake of argument say that all went to Microsoft. Now Microsoft typically got about $8 a game for the original XBox so let's pretend that's still true. If you buy 16 games you'll just about have equalled the cost of parts for the 360, nevermind labor to put it together and shipping and marketing and all that other overhead. 16 games from retail is a lot. Sounds like a losing equation any way you slice it unless Live is picking up a lot of slack.
Well when else are you supposed to break into the shops and talk all the loot? Also the wait function (the back button on the xbox360 version) easily remedies this problem if you're always finding yourself shopping at night.
Record profits? Really? What sources are you citing? Last I heard, ticket sales are way down, though maybe video and other sources of revenue are making up for this but record profits? I'd like to see some proof on that.
When you have great games like FEAR or Civ IV or HL2 or Battlefield 2 still being produced, you can hardly say that PC games are on the way out. I don't buy the argument that if you're providing less and less shelf space for a product that the product itself is getting marginalized. If customers know it's there they'll seek it out and grab at it. I think the shrinking shelf space is a symptom of pressure to push crappy console games from EA or the fact that the used console games market is where games stores are really making their money and reselling PC games is sort of an area that most retailers would rather tread lightly in if at all.
Take a look at Walmart. Walmart deals in small margins anyway so they don't care what you buy as long as you're buying. They give just as much shelf space to PC games as they do the each of the major consoles.
Well if you RTFA you would have noticed that they're lobbying for congress and the FCC to lift restrictions which refers to telephone service providers as "common carriers." The common carrier thing essentially means they can't discriminate on the kinds of traffic they carry, they must carry all traffic and offer all services to everyone. They want these restrictions lifted so they can peek at what we're trying to do on the internet and limit it if they see fit or unless we pay a fee or a per download rate. In short. RTFA.
Rounding errors aren't really at issue though. It is common accounting practice to round everything to the nearest dollar, in fact you do this on any 1040 form, you're told to round off all of the dollar you input into it. I'm sure the algorithms are not that complex and only as precise as they need to be.
The 'tern' pun at the end of the write up should be attributed to the article in which they say "Was there still a market nowadays for a tern-based game?"
I'd like to second one of your points and clarify a bit. I think there are a lot of real good games journalists. I think there are two problems though.
a) they are scattered throughout a number of publications that have a lot of crappy writers. In an environment like that, it is easy to rise to the point of editor and then you're in charge of a bunch of no talent hacks but would you take a pay cut and a demotion in title to go work for another magazine? Probably not, so gathering up the good writers in the industry would be tough.
b) A majority of gamers just want to know if a game is gonna rock and what its production values are. It's the minority that cares about depth of story and the story behind the games (Id software is still in business and doing quite well!). To really grab the attention of this minority you've got to differentiate yourself from the other magazines and sites out there and that can be a very difficult thing to do.
If you want real good games journalism go check out gamers quarterly (gamersquarter.com). It goes beyond reviews, previews, screenshots and whiney editorials to really look at the game experience from a more artful perspective and its free (and no I have no stake in it either, I just think it's good).
If you had even skimmed the article you would have read the last paragraph
Y'know what? Nevermind. I'm already a murderer fifteen times over. My soul is as damned as can be. At this point, if the sacrificing of one life can bring my love back hers, then it's something I've got to do. I'm going right now to kill that fucker.
So the article was about a decision and a debate, external and internal, quite well written I think.
Maybe the real reason EA's earnings are down is that they make formulaic games. They just acquire a license and then slap it on top of a crappy engine and voila, another game that gets put on the shelves just because it has the EA label.
Not ALL EA games are like that but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
So Mother Theresa was only maybe chaotic good? Or Ghandi was sort of more lawful neutral? How about Churchill's dedication to, uhm, I don't know, saving all of England/The World? Or maybe the Framers' dedication to freedom from tyrany? These didn't - in some capacity - have a positive impact on the lives of many? Sure the above had many detractors but I bet if you put Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Churchill, Washington and RMS in one room they'd all look at RMS and whisper to each other, 'this guy is craaaazy.'
We recently went over this in my computer organization class. Intel is reluctant to release their ISA documentation because they got burned when AMD started to implement every feature, thereby making their actitechture completely compatible without understanding their inner workings. I imagine other companies want to keep that to a minimum as well.
Or you could pick SE, in which you actually learn about the technology before you start ordering coders around and expecting the impossible (I'm sorry but the MIS program at my school is a joke.) If you want to manage technical types, nobody's going to hire you right out of college and put them in front of a bunch of CS or EE guys who have been in the field for a few years and say, "Okay, here's your team, get to it." With SE, you learn to swim with the programmers but are prepared to step up and take leadership positions after you get those years of experience under your belt.
You mean the same guys who'd gladly sell their mother for a first edition copy of Chainmail or who spend $45 on wall hangings of their favorite videogame/anime characters? I think you'll find the basement dwellers will be first in line with their thrift store grade suits and lack of deodorant.
Just to avoid confusion, Chruchill's comment was, "Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all others." So you kind of drew a negative parallel there.
Tolkein quite thouhrougly denies any allegory in his works, but thanks for trying. He said he was telling a story for the sake of telling a story. In fact he hates allegory. That said, he said that life experience is bound to influence anybodies work. His experiences in World War I probably influenced his writing of the Dead Marshes but he was not trying to make any sort of symbolism. So before you go spouting out big words and dissing people who can only take so much conflict you may wish to check your facts... or perhaps your ritalin ran out before you could do that.
That said, I happen to like the scouring of the Shire because it shows that the hobbits aren't the pansies the movies make them out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the mass of a space station or an asteriod, the attraction of gravity really wouldn't have any real noticeable pull on either object. The asteroid would have to be ginourmous, and therefore unmanageable to have any real pull and I think at that point they start calling them small planets.
Actually you're wrong. I read an article recently (where escapes me now) that when hiring managers were asked whether they'd take a candidate who had led a startup and failed or a candidate who hadn't the majority picked the failure. The kind of person that would start a company and take a risk often has characteristics that are important to employers such as drive and ambition.
Really? That's kind of interesting. Let's see, I buy an XBox 360 for $400. Estimates around the web (by googling 'cost to make xbox 360') put the cost to make an X-Box 360 anywhere between $525 and $715. So you're telling me that by me buying Guantlet for like $5 on XBox Live that Microsoft is all of a sudden turning a profit? Even if I buy Oblivion for $60 and Microsoft gets every penny (though it's probably closer to less than $10 per packaged game) that's still $65 short of making a profit.
Now, let's do some rounding and averaging. XBox 360 console cost me $400 and let's for the sake of argument say that all went to Microsoft. Now Microsoft typically got about $8 a game for the original XBox so let's pretend that's still true. If you buy 16 games you'll just about have equalled the cost of parts for the 360, nevermind labor to put it together and shipping and marketing and all that other overhead. 16 games from retail is a lot. Sounds like a losing equation any way you slice it unless Live is picking up a lot of slack.
Good thing that Oblivion's not a MMORPG...
Well when else are you supposed to break into the shops and talk all the loot? Also the wait function (the back button on the xbox360 version) easily remedies this problem if you're always finding yourself shopping at night.
Heretic and Hexen are technically FPSes with bows and arrows and magic. Sort of the same gig just without all the stats and quests.
Record profits? Really? What sources are you citing? Last I heard, ticket sales are way down, though maybe video and other sources of revenue are making up for this but record profits? I'd like to see some proof on that.
When you have great games like FEAR or Civ IV or HL2 or Battlefield 2 still being produced, you can hardly say that PC games are on the way out. I don't buy the argument that if you're providing less and less shelf space for a product that the product itself is getting marginalized. If customers know it's there they'll seek it out and grab at it. I think the shrinking shelf space is a symptom of pressure to push crappy console games from EA or the fact that the used console games market is where games stores are really making their money and reselling PC games is sort of an area that most retailers would rather tread lightly in if at all.
Take a look at Walmart. Walmart deals in small margins anyway so they don't care what you buy as long as you're buying. They give just as much shelf space to PC games as they do the each of the major consoles.
From the original posting:
Compensation: $15/hr for first 2 - 4 weeks: Likely leads to $30K - $35K annual compensation + benefits and 401K
While not great, the job isn't quite as bad as misquoting by ommision.
Well if you RTFA you would have noticed that they're lobbying for congress and the FCC to lift restrictions which refers to telephone service providers as "common carriers." The common carrier thing essentially means they can't discriminate on the kinds of traffic they carry, they must carry all traffic and offer all services to everyone. They want these restrictions lifted so they can peek at what we're trying to do on the internet and limit it if they see fit or unless we pay a fee or a per download rate. In short. RTFA.
Yeah. That pretty much sums up a lot of the articles. Just WoW.
Rounding errors aren't really at issue though. It is common accounting practice to round everything to the nearest dollar, in fact you do this on any 1040 form, you're told to round off all of the dollar you input into it. I'm sure the algorithms are not that complex and only as precise as they need to be.
The 'tern' pun at the end of the write up should be attributed to the article in which they say "Was there still a market nowadays for a tern-based game?"
I'd like to second one of your points and clarify a bit. I think there are a lot of real good games journalists. I think there are two problems though.
a) they are scattered throughout a number of publications that have a lot of crappy writers. In an environment like that, it is easy to rise to the point of editor and then you're in charge of a bunch of no talent hacks but would you take a pay cut and a demotion in title to go work for another magazine? Probably not, so gathering up the good writers in the industry would be tough.
b) A majority of gamers just want to know if a game is gonna rock and what its production values are. It's the minority that cares about depth of story and the story behind the games (Id software is still in business and doing quite well!). To really grab the attention of this minority you've got to differentiate yourself from the other magazines and sites out there and that can be a very difficult thing to do.
If you want real good games journalism go check out gamers quarterly (gamersquarter.com). It goes beyond reviews, previews, screenshots and whiney editorials to really look at the game experience from a more artful perspective and its free (and no I have no stake in it either, I just think it's good).
If you had even skimmed the article you would have read the last paragraph
Y'know what? Nevermind. I'm already a murderer fifteen times over. My soul is as damned as can be. At this point, if the sacrificing of one life can bring my love back hers, then it's something I've got to do. I'm going right now to kill that fucker.
So the article was about a decision and a debate, external and internal, quite well written I think.
Maybe the real reason EA's earnings are down is that they make formulaic games. They just acquire a license and then slap it on top of a crappy engine and voila, another game that gets put on the shelves just because it has the EA label. Not ALL EA games are like that but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
So Mother Theresa was only maybe chaotic good? Or Ghandi was sort of more lawful neutral? How about Churchill's dedication to, uhm, I don't know, saving all of England/The World? Or maybe the Framers' dedication to freedom from tyrany? These didn't - in some capacity - have a positive impact on the lives of many? Sure the above had many detractors but I bet if you put Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Churchill, Washington and RMS in one room they'd all look at RMS and whisper to each other, 'this guy is craaaazy.'
Anandtech.com is on slashdot enough, you'd think they'd have some better servers by now.
We recently went over this in my computer organization class. Intel is reluctant to release their ISA documentation because they got burned when AMD started to implement every feature, thereby making their actitechture completely compatible without understanding their inner workings. I imagine other companies want to keep that to a minimum as well.
Or you could pick SE, in which you actually learn about the technology before you start ordering coders around and expecting the impossible (I'm sorry but the MIS program at my school is a joke.) If you want to manage technical types, nobody's going to hire you right out of college and put them in front of a bunch of CS or EE guys who have been in the field for a few years and say, "Okay, here's your team, get to it." With SE, you learn to swim with the programmers but are prepared to step up and take leadership positions after you get those years of experience under your belt.
I'm sorry but I'll take my reviews from people who don't use words like 'dramatical'
You mean the same guys who'd gladly sell their mother for a first edition copy of Chainmail or who spend $45 on wall hangings of their favorite videogame/anime characters? I think you'll find the basement dwellers will be first in line with their thrift store grade suits and lack of deodorant.
Just to avoid confusion, Chruchill's comment was, "Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all others." So you kind of drew a negative parallel there.
Tolkein quite thouhrougly denies any allegory in his works, but thanks for trying. He said he was telling a story for the sake of telling a story. In fact he hates allegory. That said, he said that life experience is bound to influence anybodies work. His experiences in World War I probably influenced his writing of the Dead Marshes but he was not trying to make any sort of symbolism. So before you go spouting out big words and dissing people who can only take so much conflict you may wish to check your facts... or perhaps your ritalin ran out before you could do that.
That said, I happen to like the scouring of the Shire because it shows that the hobbits aren't the pansies the movies make them out to be.
As any good description should have included, here's some reviews3 /review.html
m int=1
o lid-3-snake-eater/566899p1.html
http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/metalgearsolid
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/566/566279p1.html?fro
http://ps2.gamespy.com/playstation-2/metal-gear-s