but there are people that I always see playing that can school me like a noob.
The thing that drives me nuts with Counter Strike is the blatant cheating that is just rampant despite all the counter measures. I dont mind losing consistently to someone who is better than me, but Almost every game I join after 5 rounds I've picked out at least three people who have mystic abilities to aim at other people through solid walls, to pick off fast moving players at 4,000 yards with a sniper rifle, etc.
The processes behind cooking may be science, but the act of cooking is art, or at the very least talent and skill.
But I think AB teaching the science behind cooking is the key to becoming and artist with food. By helping people understand what is happening, it helps them experiment in useful directions. Understanding why one quickbread recipe calls for baking soda and another does not frees me from discouraging failed experiments, thanks to AB I know its about pH balance. Good Eats encourages experimentation, unlike many other cooking shows.
But I think the comparison to art is good in another way, because almost every good artist out there knows the science behind his medium, wither its a photographer understanding the film grain and how the optics distort the images he produces, to a sculptor understanding the composition and weaknesses of his materials. Some artists may never understand "how" it is they know these things, much like many major league sluggers fail at coaching because they never had a concious understanding of what they did.
Those chefs who can look at dough at tell wether it will rise or fall know because they've seen thousands of doughs, they know the smell of healthy yeast, know the pliability of the dough they want, know how sticky it should be, etc. They get that from years of cooking, experimenting, failing.
I dunno. Those SUVs get some pretty decent air when the roll over.
I saw an econobox get pretty good air once when the driver locked up the brakes at 80. Had a cool time dilation effect as we whipped past his car spinning airborne on at least two axes. Amazingly, they kid was unhurt thanks to seatbelt, though the car had seen better days...
Go and watch a live or taped meatloaf show, listen to the changes in his voice when he is active, Now, watch britney spears, note that she can do a cartwheel without panting or missing a note...
For the record, I'm pretty sure Ms. Spears is in better physical condition than Mr. Loaf. But then, IANAPT.
for example a live artist will typically not run around the stage full tilt while singing...the pre-packed stuff will perform a double backflip in the middle of a verse and not miss a note
I think its the difference between a "Show" and a "concert". People go to see Britney dancing an inticately correographed show, to the music of her album. People go to hear artists like Bob Dylan sing. People go to see Jimmy Buffet and the dead for the crowds. In the 70's we saw a rise of artists who wished to add "show" elements to their performances, Genesis, Pink Floyd, the Who, and probably reached its zenith with David Bowie. At which point it sort of broke, and acts that were as much about appearance, heavy metal pyrotechnics, hair bands, as they were about music, probably feuled by MTV tying images to music.
So give up your whining about it, realize your tastes are not the same as a 13 year old girls, and your fighting the same battle that a gourmet would convincing a 13 year old that great blue cheese is really better than Kraft individually wrapped slices.
I'm more concerned about when publications will start publishing customized content, So that Rush Limbaugh thinks MagA is a conservative read, and Ralph Nader thinks its a left wing read.
Double your readership;)
Re:WRONG! -- Facts included.
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Completely wrong.
Interesting stats, but it neither proves nor disproves the parents premise. The stats you mention are for the casino as a whole, the parent was refering to locations within the Casino.
If a Casino has 1,000 slot machines, it might determine that 20 of them are in "LURE" locations, and they payoff at 103%. The remaining 980 machine can pay off at 94.84% and you casino will average a payout of 95%. Now consider the amount of tech and monitoring casinos do, the variety of machines at their disposal, etc. You really think every machine pays off at the same rate?
Heck, this theory even explains why off-strip casinos pay out more, they have a lower ratio of high visibility to low visibilty slots, meaning their average will be higher.
Still doubting? Its not widely disseminated, but the big advantage of electronic Slots is that while their payouts must be the same, its perfectly legal for them to dangle jackpots just off the screen in non-scoring positions. They are carefully timed to show up when you might be getting disappointed, but not so often that you see the line and the stick attached to the carrot.
The corporate Vegas of today is far more cut-throat than the gangster Vegas of yesteryear, Its not Vinny in the back figuring how to lure you, its a crack team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists...
Not necessarily. Depending on the MTBF stats, it may very well be excellent math.
But he's not considering MTBF. Which on many inexpensive printers these days, the MTBF isn't all that good.
Its hard to say what the quality level he's looking at is, but judging by the rest of his post, he's a quantity over quality guy. So lets give him a MTBF of two years, and say he bought 6. That means within two years, he'll have three failed printers, on average. How long was that warranty good for?
The other thing thats being overlook is the terms of the warranty. You mention by the time the second or third item fails, newer/better/faster/more will be available. Well, under the terms of many of these mass retailer warranties, if the identical item is not available that day, you usually get a credit for the original purchase price to replace it with an "equivalent" model. Meaning you get newer/better/faster/more as a warranty replacement. So again, bad math.
The point isn't really that warranties always make sense, just that what he was comparing wasn't really equal.
Actually, I think they have used window not windowS.
And would have called them WINDOWS if there had been more than one of them, unless you can show they actually called more than one window WINDII.
I seem to recall seeing a quote somewhere that MS had intentionally named their products after generic terms to avoid being sued themselves. Hence, WORD instead of WORDPERFECT or WORDSTAR or WORDSTUFF, WINDOWS instead of OS/2, SOLARIS, etc.
The cats are out of the bag, its too late to close the gate now.
We saved money by just buying an extra printer. If anything bad happens we'll just toss one and immediately substitute the spare. It is cheaper that way.
And when the second problem develops? What about the third? Note that having a replacement handy is not neccessarily a replacement for a warranty, thats just bad math.
Which is better, a 99.999999% reliable server for $100,000, or 10 99% reliable servers for $5000 each?
Thing will depend on your usage. Is this an application you need uptime for? Can you effectively cluster the multiple boxes Will the performance scale effectively? These are very important questions that could easily make that $100k server a bargain and those $5,000 servers a money pit.
If having a plotter goes down will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, then you should have more than one of them.
I think you missed the posters point. Buying a $6,000 plotter that has to be replaced every 1.5 years is more expensive and troublesome than buying a $10,000 plotter that runs reliably for 4 years. Wasting Space (which costs money) on a spare in the closet is not a genius plan. Buying a workgroup class printer which can be shared, costs less per page, and is more reliable/maintainable/etc. is probably a far wiser plan, although certainly there are circumstances when this is not the case.
THey came along, took a week internet tool (the search) and did it better than anyone else.
I think weak is a poor choice of words. There were many search engines, and they all had their advantages/disadvantages. Problem was, by and large they had all been beaten via meta-tags and other stuffing tricks. Google came out with in innovative idea, rank pages based on links to them rather than on the page itself, that took folks a while to beat. In the end, it was defeated by simple brute force (link farms). In the end, it will cost us because almost all the other options have been driven under short of Yahoo and Microsoft...
Of course it is, this is Slashdot. In perfect competition, such as selling pork bellies or other commodities, companies eat the cost of their mistakes, and go under if they can't. Which is part of the reason so many American Farmers are hurting. But I'm sure you recognize, Office Suites ain't perfect competition.
Office applications from other companies (when they were still around) cost about a fifth of what MS office costs.
Yes, right before the other office suites collapsed, they were selling bargain basement prices in a desparate attempt to prop up market share. Before that, they were priced competitively with MS. Before that, MS trumped them by bundling their individual apps together in an "Office" suite which could be had for a significant discount over the individual application prices. So fo 150% of MS Word's price, you could get Office. Folks flocked to it, forcing other companies to react. Before that, MS was invited to enter the Application market by Apple because the dominant player didn't want to support their new computer with its radical GUI.
And don't say that people were more willing to by MS because of quality, we all know that isn't true.
Why I won't argue that its the reason they succeeded, I will argue that any of their competitors were way ahead of them.
So if microsoft continues to manipulate the market, and raises prices even more, the ammount of the settlements will need to go up to compensate for the further illegeal market manipulation.
Which brings us back to square one, MS raises prices to pay exhorbitant fines, which brings on new rounds of lawsuits. The only folks who make out are MS, lawyers, and the government. I would argue that the point of these lawsuits aren't to deter MS, but to cash in to cover budget shortfalls, etc.
this company should be broken up to at least prevent it from using Windows to force microsofts other shitty software down peoples throats. This has happened many times before (Standard Oil, Bell) and is perfectlly reasonable and warranted
Why this might help, it might just make things worse. Is the new "Windows" division prevented from selling non-OS software? Heck, lets look at one of the cases you site, Bell. Ma Bell was broken into many "Baby Bells" which continued to have a monopoly on their market. They ceased using Long Distance to underwrite local phone calls, so local service prices skyrocketed. The Baby Bells have used their local monopolies to strong arm competitors in the DSL market and slow the adoption of new services. In fact, the Bell breakup is generally regarded as a disaster.
Standard Oil, of course, was a success because of how it was broken up. Instead of breaking it into the "refinery division" and the "delivery division" and the "station division", it was broken into four or so companies that competed up and down the chain. To do this to MS, we should break the comapny into three companies, each of which would recieve full source code and future plans documentation for IE, Windows, Office, and all other apps. Spin MSN off so it can sink or swim on its own. Use the cash reserves to pay Mr Gates and any other significant stockholders out of two of the remaining companies, because if they share significant stakeholders they wont be truely independant. But even then you have no real guarantee that you wont end up with disaster.
Why would you support a company that forces you to pay for its mistakes?
Not to be pendantic, but pretty much ALL companies pass the costs of their mistakes on to their customers, else they go out of business. Stores increase prices to cover the costs of shoplifting, doctors increase prices to cover the costs of malpractice insurance, etc.
While I'm not a fan of MS either, but folks seem to be taking the criminal's point of view when they create bogus claims, or collect undeserved welfare payouts. They have so much money, they'll just write it off. Which is a bit of a bad analogy, because I don't mean to imply that MS did no wrong, or that the state shouldn't have punished them; it just that the premise that you can extract $X million dollars from a company and then be surprised when there are repercussions.
We don't call it AMERICAN FOOTBALL in this country, even though thats what the rest of the world calls it...
On Topic
If this guy isn't interested in corporate life, he should find a small company, or start one of his own. The vast majority of jobs in the US are for small companies, after all. Moving to Canada wont change all that much.
Ok, so thier trying to have other companies pay for thier own stupidity?
Anybody not see this coming from a company that patents ideas coming from a industry meeting, slipped their proprietary IP into open standards, sued the manufacturers of their products, and generally behaved as a two year old in the ethics department?
First Principles refers to the three or four core assumptions that make up a numerical system, which I can't recall exactly, but its basically stuff like A+B=B+A; AB=BA; everything else can and should be proved from just those few items. So while it might be easy to prove knowing theorom A, you must first prove A, which depends on B, which likewise must be proved, until at last you reach First prinicples. Its really sort of fascinating how much can be reduced to just a few simple assumptions, and how radically things can change when you change those assumptions. Then realise that this is what some folks used to do for fun 200 years ago, because there were no video games.
I double majored in Math/Comp Sci. I took a lot of logic courses, Diff. Eq., etc. The benefit is really understanding how all the numbers work so you can find intelligent methods of calculating things, instead of simply brute forcing your way through it all.
I usually thought of it as the difference between learning how to program vs memorizing a bunch of useful code snippets and how to translate them to different languages.
The agency is censoring pages coming into its organization, not the internet in general, like China and Iran are attempting to do. Why it's comical and ironic, this submission is a bit misleading.
And I dount they have much choice. Government agencies often have this stuff mandated on them to "protect" the workspace, avoid having citizens groups screaming about government employees surfing porn on the job, hostile workplace regulation, etc.
And if the PW is so averse to thinking, how can he pose a threat to even a low-end corporate attorney?
The point isn't that PW poses a threat, its that the companies lawyers are ringing up hourly charges while laughing their buts off at his case, all the while making sure to cross all their T's and dot all their I's because they don't want to lose to PW on a technicality. Just because PW is willing to devote his time to reading enough law to become dangerous to himself and others doesn't mean small and medium sized companies can risk sending a mail clerk to defend themselves. These cases cost money, which is why they often get paid off to make them go away. which only encourages PW.
Nobody said PW was dumb, just that he's suffering from some serious failures in logic. The sort that prevent him from realizing how foolish it is to blow dry your hair while showering.
Think of it as SCO vs IBM in minature. Dozen's of small businesses go under because of brushes with PW robbed them of operating capital, sank them into debt, raised their insurance costs, etc.
I'd rather have something newer just because there's less to patch.
You might want to look at maintaining your own copy of the distribution and doing NFS installs. Its pretty easy to patch in updates, just replace the old package with the new and run mkgenhd. Next Installs start with all the latest packages that way.
Don't forget the converse, where pathetic wacko sues company while representing himself. The company is forced to spend tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, defending itself against the outrageous claims of the loon. All because he feels his hair dryer should have had a warning that it should not be used in the shower.
Sure, the company will win eventually, but that money and time is gone, and what would the company do with his trailer home anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that drives me nuts with Counter Strike is the blatant cheating that is just rampant despite all the counter measures. I dont mind losing consistently to someone who is better than me, but Almost every game I join after 5 rounds I've picked out at least three people who have mystic abilities to aim at other people through solid walls, to pick off fast moving players at 4,000 yards with a sniper rifle, etc.
My wife told me it was either her or the video games
God I'll miss her!
But I think AB teaching the science behind cooking is the key to becoming and artist with food. By helping people understand what is happening, it helps them experiment in useful directions. Understanding why one quickbread recipe calls for baking soda and another does not frees me from discouraging failed experiments, thanks to AB I know its about pH balance. Good Eats encourages experimentation, unlike many other cooking shows.
But I think the comparison to art is good in another way, because almost every good artist out there knows the science behind his medium, wither its a photographer understanding the film grain and how the optics distort the images he produces, to a sculptor understanding the composition and weaknesses of his materials. Some artists may never understand "how" it is they know these things, much like many major league sluggers fail at coaching because they never had a concious understanding of what they did.
Those chefs who can look at dough at tell wether it will rise or fall know because they've seen thousands of doughs, they know the smell of healthy yeast, know the pliability of the dough they want, know how sticky it should be, etc. They get that from years of cooking, experimenting, failing.
I dunno. Those SUVs get some pretty decent air when the roll over.
I saw an econobox get pretty good air once when the driver locked up the brakes at 80. Had a cool time dilation effect as we whipped past his car spinning airborne on at least two axes. Amazingly, they kid was unhurt thanks to seatbelt, though the car had seen better days...
For the record, I'm pretty sure Ms. Spears is in better physical condition than Mr. Loaf. But then, IANAPT.
I think its the difference between a "Show" and a "concert". People go to see Britney dancing an inticately correographed show, to the music of her album. People go to hear artists like Bob Dylan sing. People go to see Jimmy Buffet and the dead for the crowds. In the 70's we saw a rise of artists who wished to add "show" elements to their performances, Genesis, Pink Floyd, the Who, and probably reached its zenith with David Bowie. At which point it sort of broke, and acts that were as much about appearance, heavy metal pyrotechnics, hair bands, as they were about music, probably feuled by MTV tying images to music.
So give up your whining about it, realize your tastes are not the same as a 13 year old girls, and your fighting the same battle that a gourmet would convincing a 13 year old that great blue cheese is really better than Kraft individually wrapped slices.
Double your readership ;)
Interesting stats, but it neither proves nor disproves the parents premise. The stats you mention are for the casino as a whole, the parent was refering to locations within the Casino.
If a Casino has 1,000 slot machines, it might determine that 20 of them are in "LURE" locations, and they payoff at 103%. The remaining 980 machine can pay off at 94.84% and you casino will average a payout of 95%. Now consider the amount of tech and monitoring casinos do, the variety of machines at their disposal, etc. You really think every machine pays off at the same rate?
Heck, this theory even explains why off-strip casinos pay out more, they have a lower ratio of high visibility to low visibilty slots, meaning their average will be higher.
Still doubting? Its not widely disseminated, but the big advantage of electronic Slots is that while their payouts must be the same, its perfectly legal for them to dangle jackpots just off the screen in non-scoring positions. They are carefully timed to show up when you might be getting disappointed, but not so often that you see the line and the stick attached to the carrot.
The corporate Vegas of today is far more cut-throat than the gangster Vegas of yesteryear, Its not Vinny in the back figuring how to lure you, its a crack team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists...
But he's not considering MTBF. Which on many inexpensive printers these days, the MTBF isn't all that good.
Its hard to say what the quality level he's looking at is, but judging by the rest of his post, he's a quantity over quality guy. So lets give him a MTBF of two years, and say he bought 6. That means within two years, he'll have three failed printers, on average. How long was that warranty good for?
The other thing thats being overlook is the terms of the warranty. You mention by the time the second or third item fails, newer/better/faster/more will be available. Well, under the terms of many of these mass retailer warranties, if the identical item is not available that day, you usually get a credit for the original purchase price to replace it with an "equivalent" model. Meaning you get newer/better/faster/more as a warranty replacement. So again, bad math.
The point isn't really that warranties always make sense, just that what he was comparing wasn't really equal.
And would have called them WINDOWS if there had been more than one of them, unless you can show they actually called more than one window WINDII.
I seem to recall seeing a quote somewhere that MS had intentionally named their products after generic terms to avoid being sued themselves. Hence, WORD instead of WORDPERFECT or WORDSTAR or WORDSTUFF, WINDOWS instead of OS/2, SOLARIS, etc.
The cats are out of the bag, its too late to close the gate now.
And when the second problem develops? What about the third? Note that having a replacement handy is not neccessarily a replacement for a warranty, thats just bad math.
Which is better, a 99.999999% reliable server for $100,000, or 10 99% reliable servers for $5000 each?
Thing will depend on your usage. Is this an application you need uptime for? Can you effectively cluster the multiple boxes Will the performance scale effectively? These are very important questions that could easily make that $100k server a bargain and those $5,000 servers a money pit.
If having a plotter goes down will cost you tens of thousands of dollars, then you should have more than one of them.
I think you missed the posters point. Buying a $6,000 plotter that has to be replaced every 1.5 years is more expensive and troublesome than buying a $10,000 plotter that runs reliably for 4 years. Wasting Space (which costs money) on a spare in the closet is not a genius plan. Buying a workgroup class printer which can be shared, costs less per page, and is more reliable/maintainable/etc. is probably a far wiser plan, although certainly there are circumstances when this is not the case.
I think weak is a poor choice of words. There were many search engines, and they all had their advantages/disadvantages. Problem was, by and large they had all been beaten via meta-tags and other stuffing tricks. Google came out with in innovative idea, rank pages based on links to them rather than on the page itself, that took folks a while to beat. In the end, it was defeated by simple brute force (link farms). In the end, it will cost us because almost all the other options have been driven under short of Yahoo and Microsoft...
The GMAT books are already giving formula essays to get you past any writers block that might happpen on the exam day...
Of course it is, this is Slashdot. In perfect competition, such as selling pork bellies or other commodities, companies eat the cost of their mistakes, and go under if they can't. Which is part of the reason so many American Farmers are hurting. But I'm sure you recognize, Office Suites ain't perfect competition.
Office applications from other companies (when they were still around) cost about a fifth of what MS office costs.
Yes, right before the other office suites collapsed, they were selling bargain basement prices in a desparate attempt to prop up market share. Before that, they were priced competitively with MS. Before that, MS trumped them by bundling their individual apps together in an "Office" suite which could be had for a significant discount over the individual application prices. So fo 150% of MS Word's price, you could get Office. Folks flocked to it, forcing other companies to react. Before that, MS was invited to enter the Application market by Apple because the dominant player didn't want to support their new computer with its radical GUI.
And don't say that people were more willing to by MS because of quality, we all know that isn't true.
Why I won't argue that its the reason they succeeded, I will argue that any of their competitors were way ahead of them.
So if microsoft continues to manipulate the market, and raises prices even more, the ammount of the settlements will need to go up to compensate for the further illegeal market manipulation.
Which brings us back to square one, MS raises prices to pay exhorbitant fines, which brings on new rounds of lawsuits. The only folks who make out are MS, lawyers, and the government. I would argue that the point of these lawsuits aren't to deter MS, but to cash in to cover budget shortfalls, etc.
this company should be broken up to at least prevent it from using Windows to force microsofts other shitty software down peoples throats. This has happened many times before (Standard Oil, Bell) and is perfectlly reasonable and warranted
Why this might help, it might just make things worse. Is the new "Windows" division prevented from selling non-OS software? Heck, lets look at one of the cases you site, Bell. Ma Bell was broken into many "Baby Bells" which continued to have a monopoly on their market. They ceased using Long Distance to underwrite local phone calls, so local service prices skyrocketed. The Baby Bells have used their local monopolies to strong arm competitors in the DSL market and slow the adoption of new services. In fact, the Bell breakup is generally regarded as a disaster.
Standard Oil, of course, was a success because of how it was broken up. Instead of breaking it into the "refinery division" and the "delivery division" and the "station division", it was broken into four or so companies that competed up and down the chain. To do this to MS, we should break the comapny into three companies, each of which would recieve full source code and future plans documentation for IE, Windows, Office, and all other apps. Spin MSN off so it can sink or swim on its own. Use the cash reserves to pay Mr Gates and any other significant stockholders out of two of the remaining companies, because if they share significant stakeholders they wont be truely independant. But even then you have no real guarantee that you wont end up with disaster.
Not to be pendantic, but pretty much ALL companies pass the costs of their mistakes on to their customers, else they go out of business. Stores increase prices to cover the costs of shoplifting, doctors increase prices to cover the costs of malpractice insurance, etc.
While I'm not a fan of MS either, but folks seem to be taking the criminal's point of view when they create bogus claims, or collect undeserved welfare payouts. They have so much money, they'll just write it off. Which is a bit of a bad analogy, because I don't mean to imply that MS did no wrong, or that the state shouldn't have punished them; it just that the premise that you can extract $X million dollars from a company and then be surprised when there are repercussions.
Thats because you live in CANADA
We don't call it AMERICAN FOOTBALL in this country, even though thats what the rest of the world calls it...
On Topic
If this guy isn't interested in corporate life, he should find a small company, or start one of his own. The vast majority of jobs in the US are for small companies, after all. Moving to Canada wont change all that much.
What, for really, really, tiny pedestrians and bicyclists?
Anybody not see this coming from a company that patents ideas coming from a industry meeting, slipped their proprietary IP into open standards, sued the manufacturers of their products, and generally behaved as a two year old in the ethics department?
Man, who would chose to work for this company?
I can't imagine why any manufacturer would have done a thing like that.
First Principles refers to the three or four core assumptions that make up a numerical system, which I can't recall exactly, but its basically stuff like A+B=B+A; AB=BA; everything else can and should be proved from just those few items. So while it might be easy to prove knowing theorom A, you must first prove A, which depends on B, which likewise must be proved, until at last you reach First prinicples. Its really sort of fascinating how much can be reduced to just a few simple assumptions, and how radically things can change when you change those assumptions. Then realise that this is what some folks used to do for fun 200 years ago, because there were no video games.
I usually thought of it as the difference between learning how to program vs memorizing a bunch of useful code snippets and how to translate them to different languages.
And I dount they have much choice. Government agencies often have this stuff mandated on them to "protect" the workspace, avoid having citizens groups screaming about government employees surfing porn on the job, hostile workplace regulation, etc.
The point isn't that PW poses a threat, its that the companies lawyers are ringing up hourly charges while laughing their buts off at his case, all the while making sure to cross all their T's and dot all their I's because they don't want to lose to PW on a technicality. Just because PW is willing to devote his time to reading enough law to become dangerous to himself and others doesn't mean small and medium sized companies can risk sending a mail clerk to defend themselves. These cases cost money, which is why they often get paid off to make them go away. which only encourages PW.
Nobody said PW was dumb, just that he's suffering from some serious failures in logic. The sort that prevent him from realizing how foolish it is to blow dry your hair while showering.
Think of it as SCO vs IBM in minature. Dozen's of small businesses go under because of brushes with PW robbed them of operating capital, sank them into debt, raised their insurance costs, etc.
You might want to look at maintaining your own copy of the distribution and doing NFS installs. Its pretty easy to patch in updates, just replace the old package with the new and run mkgenhd. Next Installs start with all the latest packages that way.
Sure, the company will win eventually, but that money and time is gone, and what would the company do with his trailer home anyway?