I'm aware that it's an HDL. I learned a crapton of programming models and languages, and I found that there's nothing out there that's that great or really extended my ability to process data. Learning Verilog was easy and actually gave me access to new functionality that no programming language could.
I know it's not a programming language, but it's my answer to people looking for a new programming language for a challenge or to enhance their skills. A programming language will not foot that bill, IMO. Maybe if you've never used an OO or Functional language, then you should learn one. Past that, they're just faster/better/easier/more ways to do the same thing.
I develop in both the Java and.NET frameworks. I like the Java language a lot more than C#. Unfortunately, users like Windows.Forms a lot more than Swing.
Once you have a lawsuit filed, you pretty much have to shut up. So is SCO exempt from this? If there's one thing Darl McBride didn't do for the first year of this lawsuit, it's shut up.
The difference here being that this would be the equivilant of consolodating that information into one file for all the major sections of your site, permitting easy navigation with a small download.
It's too bad that the specification only covers information relevant to search engines.
How about a <description> tag? I would take great interest in a sitemap specification that gives me enough information to navigate major parts of a site with a viewer plugin (of some sort) in a web browser.
There's nothing worse than fumbling around navigating page after page when the web server is slow, the pages are image- or ad-heavy, or the navigation on the page just plain sucks.
I'd love to see anyone try to see someone try to do this in WoW.
Blizzard bans accounts for trading gold while running an in-game poker mod.
Blizzard accounts for transferring large quantities of goods from one character to another with no gold transfer.
Then again, Blizzard will ban your account if you log into anyone else's account, regardless of whether that person gave you permission or not.
They will also ban you for
Anything that Blizzard Entertainment considers contrary to the "essence" of World of Warcraft.
To be even more explicit, the plaintiff is asserting the legal firm called him after finding his details on the internet. That ought to raise all sort of warning flags and brings the legal firms credibility in to further disrepute (it is possible that's a lie, but it would be a ridiculous thing to lie about as it's going to be reasonably easy to prove or disprove either way from call logs from the operator).
In all fairness, given the relative age of the product, where else would they find consumer feedback on this product other than the Internet? More importantly, where would they find opinions about high-tech toys so wordily vocalized, often with somewhat-knowlegable voices behind them other than the blogosphere?
If I wanted to start a class action lawsuit on a product months old, I certainly wouldn't be waiting for the next Consumer Reports to start. Then again, I'm not one of those litigious bastards.
Gee, I play World of Warcraft on it, and I seem to be able to read its fonts just fine. In fact, I play many games on it, and they seem to be playable also. I played games at 1024x768 for years and was able to read the fonts, so why not 1280x720?
Having played AoEIII (which has horrible fonts that I can't read on my HDTV at all--Thanks Microsoft!), I would have to deem Colonization a far better teaching aid for this time period / sequence of events... and you can crank the video settings and still get perfect framerates;)
Or 4. This keeps decisions from needing to be justified. With much questioning you can always say "the developers must have their reasons" rather than them being vetted by the community at large. It also helps them justify the snail's pace of fixing classes (1 talent revamp PER patch? wtf?).
Better than EQ's simultaneous nerf-and-buff patches?
MMORPGs aside, since when is changing multiple variables simultaneously when working towards a balance a good thing? AFAICT, the best way to acheive balance is changing things very slowly and in small steps. Think about:
Oh my, this scale doesn't balance. I'll just take a bunch of stuff from one side and put it on the other.... Wait, it still doesn't balance, I should now move stuff from this side to that side.
Vs.
Oh my, this scale doesn't balance. I'll gradually add small peices to the lighter side until the scale balances.
Now think about the fact that you have 8 races, each with different racial abilities (which should be balanced), 2 factions (which should be balanced) with characters from each playing as 8 different classes per faction (which should all, of course, be balanced). Add tradeskills and mix.
That's a multidimensional scale you're now trying to balance, with weight requiring distribution evenly across all facets. If that scale moves too far in ANY direction, you'll have every player with that Race/Class combo complaining in the forums you've provided them to communicate with you with. Granted, that's what it's there for, but can you see why there is scrutiny over every change?
Now, what if during one of your touted multi-class-talent-revamp-patches, someone finds a problem (x' class totally sucks compared to y' class)? What do you change? How do you find the imbalance you've introduced? Nerfing y' back towards y will only anger the players who were just pleased with you. Buffing x' classes towards x'' may cause almost all other players to be angry with you (where are my buffs?).
Perhaps you're just upset your class hasn't got a good improvement in a while. One thing that must be understood is that the reason for class upgrades is to bring those classes towards being balanced with respect to the others. They're improving with respect to, but not surpassing the remainder of the classes (by very much).
I can certainly understand the pain of another class' upgrade, as the recent Hunter revamp makes simple earthly creatures far surpass the demons that I summon from the nether realm, and the tradeskill-likeness that is my summoning procedure (except that you can't outright buy soul shards) goes unchanged. I try not to complain, except by masking it as part of an argumentative statement as part of a totally unrelated argument on a tech news site, because I know that Blizzard is working on it, and doing a damned fine job of it.
As to the arguments that Blizzard hasn't answered anything and is failing to expose their developers to PR pressure, I ask you: is it a part of their job description? This is why they have a PR department in the first place. So that programmers can program, making some of the featureset requested by the community. Making it very well, one might add. Now you're expecting them to stop working on the next patch with all the big and little features you've asked for and explain their decisions to you? Are you suggesting replacing the PR department, whose job it is to relate with the public (read: you) , and use programmers' time to answer questions when they could easily be working hard to try to make the game better?
Umm... 800MHz and 900MHz are bands... within each band resides spectrum. Carriers use spectrum.
So, let's say, I could have a 200KHz wide carrier centered at, say, 937.9725MHz. That would be a 200KHz carrier in the 900MHz band.
Subcarriers don't propagate separately from their carriers.
Get me some of the crack you're smoking, because in no universe does that make sense in the given context.
Oooooohh... I get it. You're a 'troll', right? You're just making up stuff to insult other people with, posting as AC because you don't really want anyone to know you're actually a moron. Let me be the first to say: you make no sense and don't know what you're talking about.
Let me also be the first to say that the symbol for 'hertz' is not 'hz'. It's 'Hz'. What on earth is a 'henry z'?
Administering a wireless telecommunications switch, I have to ask: do you want a network of your own with no ties to other carriers, or just a cell?
If you're looking for a "just you" thing, good luck. The GSM standards are pretty easy to get your hands on, and with a little ingenuity, you could build a GSM switch. It's basically a few DBs and hardware interfaces. That's where things get tricky. GSM cells (which you could easily purchase for $100,000 (CDN)) need to communicate to the switch using a standardized protocol over T1. So you'd have to build THAT network stack over some sort of Frame-Relay-over-T1 interface (which are often rather expensive in and of themselves... also, good luck with Linux drivers...).
I left out the possibility of buying a GSM switch, because I doubt you'd be on Ask Slashdot if you had that kind of cash.
Now I know you said "apart from FCC regulations" or something, but that's what's going to kill you. GSM uses a 200KHz carrier (at least with the 800 and 900 MHz spectrum), and to put a site on the air with any sort of wattage in any location of any use (you are in rough terrain, no? So you'd put in on a peak... and spread your signal pretty far) without interfering with anyone else and without the FCC turning your way is going to be quite tricky.
I used to think Toronto smog was bad, too. I live in a 27th floor apartment that affords me a view of both downtown, the 401, and the airport. I see a light brown tinge on the horizon on non-precipitation days. D.C. had not light brown, not transparent, but a solid dark brown blur on the horizon. I honestly couldn't see where the ground ended and the sky began. Toronto smog couldn't begin to measure up to that.
And, as for Canadian politics...
In Ontario, the Liberals have committed to closing all coal-fired generating stations by 2008. They have no plan on how they're going to provide high-availability electricity. Nuclear surely isn't. CANDU reactors have a 2-week startup time. Coal is under an hour.
I digress. I'm not on a political side here. I'm on the side of reason. Build more aparments near places of business. Enforce a commuter tax. Too many people drive from Woodbridge, Hamilton, and Oshawa to work in Toronto. Pollution from traffic on the 401 far exceeds that produced by all the coal-fired generating stations in Ontario. If people think coal is the problem, put money into cleaner coal burning, and stop chasing cockamamie low-availability technology like wind or solar. Be reasonable. We can reduce emissions without crippling the power grid, and most of that can be done by individuals and not government or industry. That's why.gov.ca hired jumped-the-shark Rick Mercer to promote everyday emission reductions.
GASP! Not my car. I can't live without it. No, you don't understand, I really need it. I have to go to work 20 Km away, the doctor I've always seen in my hometown, my relatives, my favourite grocery store (I don't like the one right by my house), etc. etc. I earned my car. I deserve a car.
I'm disgusted with the commuter society. FTLOG, take transit. Move closer to work. Don't be picky. FFS, people and thier cars. There is a mall in Mississauga that has been developed around the commuter crowd. Heartland mall sprawls square kilometers, and you can't even walk from one store to the next if you tried because there are no sidewalks throughout the parking lots connecting it all. You have to drive. I am disgusted by people who have cars in Toronto. Selfish self-important egotistical yuppies.
No, blame coal. Blame industry. It's easier than personal responsibility.
Bush will never force the industry of his country (including power generation) to conform to the Kyoto accord. It's bad business.
In fact, he passes laws that relax the current regulations on pollution. His not-so-aptly-named "Clean Skies" initiative allows coal-fired generating stations to increase the amount of pollution they produce in favour of dumping more wattage on the grid.
This sort of behaviour disgusts me. I live in Toronto, and although we have a busy airport and traffic corridor, we don't produce nearly as much pollution as our neighbours to the south. Nanticoke generating station generates enough power for the city of Toronto without running at full capacity. It produces less emmissions than a plant half its size in Detroit. It does this with not-so-new-but-expensive technology that is invested in in favour of oh, say, being able to breathe.
I went down to D.C. recently, and when I left on the plane, looking east, I couldn't tell where the ground ended and the sky began. It was a disgusting layer of brown that looked like it spanned five hundered meters in the air... probably more.
I hope someone manages to bring sanctions against the Bush administration. His lack of regard for anything not minted or drilled or slipped into his pocket is disgusting.
I hate to be the one to gripe about industry relying on technology like GPS, but here goes.
I work for a wireless telecommunications provider. Our cell sites rely on a highly accurate time source as a basis for their RF modulation. They get this clock source from GPS signals. They also use this information for E911 telemetry. The cell sites, as with most high-precision GPS devices, require 4 satellites to be "strongly tracked". If the US were to one day "shut off" sections of GPS coverage, here are the immediate issues I would have (being on-call to maintain the system)
Cell sites would no longer be able to tell 911 reporting centers where people calling 911 were
After 4 hours, every site we have would shut itself down to prevent frequency shifting. It is assumed that the internal clock can only maintain accuracy for that long
I would receive three alarms for every site, then have to fill out a report about each and every alarm
The technology my company uses is an extension of GSM, and I can guarantee you that ANY RF technology that requires a high degree of accuracy (anything digital will) will require such accurate timing. Granted, some technologies are capable of taking this timing off of the T1 lines that they are using for communications back to the switch.
The US must know that disabling sections of GPS could cause adverse effects on their own wireless telecommunications network, why would they even consider this an option?
Parents buy GTA for their kids, do you really think that Penny Arcade needs to sensor?
You've used the wrong homophone here! What you said here literally means "do you really think that Penny Arcade needs to [object that responds to stimulus]?", which clearly makes no sense.
While I agree that some parents are clearly using violent games and television programming as an excuse for lack of personal responsibility for their children, I wonder where your parents' personal responsibility was for your education.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware that it's an HDL. I learned a crapton of programming models and languages, and I found that there's nothing out there that's that great or really extended my ability to process data. Learning Verilog was easy and actually gave me access to new functionality that no programming language could. I know it's not a programming language, but it's my answer to people looking for a new programming language for a challenge or to enhance their skills. A programming language will not foot that bill, IMO. Maybe if you've never used an OO or Functional language, then you should learn one. Past that, they're just faster/better/easier/more ways to do the same thing.
If you know C, learn Verilog. Then you can do anything. Anything.
Since when is the US military budget spent on "defense"?
What about the power level of the handset's TX? I know that (falcon series) iDEN handsests are 600mW, what's CDMA and GSM running at?
I develop in both the Java and .NET frameworks. I like the Java language a lot more than C#. Unfortunately, users like Windows.Forms a lot more than Swing.
On Apology is a great reference on the matter, for any interested.
The difference here being that this would be the equivilant of consolodating that information into one file for all the major sections of your site, permitting easy navigation with a small download.
It's too bad that the specification only covers information relevant to search engines.
How about a <description> tag? I would take great interest in a sitemap specification that gives me enough information to navigate major parts of a site with a viewer plugin (of some sort) in a web browser.
There's nothing worse than fumbling around navigating page after page when the web server is slow, the pages are image- or ad-heavy, or the navigation on the page just plain sucks.
I'd love to see anyone try to see someone try to do this in WoW.
Blizzard bans accounts for trading gold while running an in-game poker mod.
Blizzard accounts for transferring large quantities of goods from one character to another with no gold transfer.
Then again, Blizzard will ban your account if you log into anyone else's account, regardless of whether that person gave you permission or not.
They will also ban you for (WoW Terms of Use 3-B(v))
In all fairness, given the relative age of the product, where else would they find consumer feedback on this product other than the Internet? More importantly, where would they find opinions about high-tech toys so wordily vocalized, often with somewhat-knowlegable voices behind them other than the blogosphere?
If I wanted to start a class action lawsuit on a product months old, I certainly wouldn't be waiting for the next Consumer Reports to start. Then again, I'm not one of those litigious bastards.
Gee, I play World of Warcraft on it, and I seem to be able to read its fonts just fine. In fact, I play many games on it, and they seem to be playable also. I played games at 1024x768 for years and was able to read the fonts, so why not 1280x720?
Don't speak on that which you do not understand.
Having played AoEIII (which has horrible fonts that I can't read on my HDTV at all--Thanks Microsoft!), I would have to deem Colonization a far better teaching aid for this time period / sequence of events... and you can crank the video settings and still get perfect framerates ;)
Just my 0.02CAD
I by no means offer this to you as an "I-told-you-so".
I hope you're as pleased as I am to read it though.
For the Warlocks
Better than EQ's simultaneous nerf-and-buff patches?
MMORPGs aside, since when is changing multiple variables simultaneously when working towards a balance a good thing? AFAICT, the best way to acheive balance is changing things very slowly and in small steps. Think about:
Oh my, this scale doesn't balance. I'll just take a bunch of stuff from one side and put it on the other.... Wait, it still doesn't balance, I should now move stuff from this side to that side.
Vs.
Oh my, this scale doesn't balance. I'll gradually add small peices to the lighter side until the scale balances.
Now think about the fact that you have 8 races, each with different racial abilities (which should be balanced), 2 factions (which should be balanced) with characters from each playing as 8 different classes per faction (which should all, of course, be balanced). Add tradeskills and mix.
That's a multidimensional scale you're now trying to balance, with weight requiring distribution evenly across all facets. If that scale moves too far in ANY direction, you'll have every player with that Race/Class combo complaining in the forums you've provided them to communicate with you with. Granted, that's what it's there for, but can you see why there is scrutiny over every change?
Now, what if during one of your touted multi-class-talent-revamp-patches, someone finds a problem (x' class totally sucks compared to y' class)? What do you change? How do you find the imbalance you've introduced? Nerfing y' back towards y will only anger the players who were just pleased with you. Buffing x' classes towards x'' may cause almost all other players to be angry with you (where are my buffs?).
Perhaps you're just upset your class hasn't got a good improvement in a while. One thing that must be understood is that the reason for class upgrades is to bring those classes towards being balanced with respect to the others. They're improving with respect to, but not surpassing the remainder of the classes (by very much).
I can certainly understand the pain of another class' upgrade, as the recent Hunter revamp makes simple earthly creatures far surpass the demons that I summon from the nether realm, and the tradeskill-likeness that is my summoning procedure (except that you can't outright buy soul shards) goes unchanged. I try not to complain, except by masking it as part of an argumentative statement as part of a totally unrelated argument on a tech news site, because I know that Blizzard is working on it, and doing a damned fine job of it.
As to the arguments that Blizzard hasn't answered anything and is failing to expose their developers to PR pressure, I ask you: is it a part of their job description? This is why they have a PR department in the first place. So that programmers can program, making some of the featureset requested by the community. Making it very well, one might add. Now you're expecting them to stop working on the next patch with all the big and little features you've asked for and explain their decisions to you? Are you suggesting replacing the PR department, whose job it is to relate with the public (read: you) , and use programmers' time to answer questions when they could easily be working hard to try to make the game better?
Oh, wait.... this is Slashdot. Nevermind.
So, let's say, I could have a 200KHz wide carrier centered at, say, 937.9725MHz. That would be a 200KHz carrier in the 900MHz band.
Get me some of the crack you're smoking, because in no universe does that make sense in the given context.
Oooooohh... I get it. You're a 'troll', right? You're just making up stuff to insult other people with, posting as AC because you don't really want anyone to know you're actually a moron. Let me be the first to say: you make no sense and don't know what you're talking about.
Let me also be the first to say that the symbol for 'hertz' is not 'hz'. It's 'Hz'. What on earth is a 'henry z'?
Administering a wireless telecommunications switch, I have to ask: do you want a network of your own with no ties to other carriers, or just a cell?
If you're looking for a "just you" thing, good luck. The GSM standards are pretty easy to get your hands on, and with a little ingenuity, you could build a GSM switch. It's basically a few DBs and hardware interfaces. That's where things get tricky. GSM cells (which you could easily purchase for $100,000 (CDN)) need to communicate to the switch using a standardized protocol over T1. So you'd have to build THAT network stack over some sort of Frame-Relay-over-T1 interface (which are often rather expensive in and of themselves... also, good luck with Linux drivers...).
I left out the possibility of buying a GSM switch, because I doubt you'd be on Ask Slashdot if you had that kind of cash.
Now I know you said "apart from FCC regulations" or something, but that's what's going to kill you. GSM uses a 200KHz carrier (at least with the 800 and 900 MHz spectrum), and to put a site on the air with any sort of wattage in any location of any use (you are in rough terrain, no? So you'd put in on a peak... and spread your signal pretty far) without interfering with anyone else and without the FCC turning your way is going to be quite tricky.
Forget Norway, Come to Kenya!
Nanticoke does not but can. Obviously the distance causes loss that makes it impractical to do so.
As a matter of capacity, Nanticoke can produce more than enough power to serve Toronto.
I used to think Toronto smog was bad, too. I live in a 27th floor apartment that affords me a view of both downtown, the 401, and the airport. I see a light brown tinge on the horizon on non-precipitation days. D.C. had not light brown, not transparent, but a solid dark brown blur on the horizon. I honestly couldn't see where the ground ended and the sky began. Toronto smog couldn't begin to measure up to that.
.gov.ca hired jumped-the-shark Rick Mercer to promote everyday emission reductions.
And, as for Canadian politics...
In Ontario, the Liberals have committed to closing all coal-fired generating stations by 2008. They have no plan on how they're going to provide high-availability electricity. Nuclear surely isn't. CANDU reactors have a 2-week startup time. Coal is under an hour.
I digress. I'm not on a political side here. I'm on the side of reason. Build more aparments near places of business. Enforce a commuter tax. Too many people drive from Woodbridge, Hamilton, and Oshawa to work in Toronto. Pollution from traffic on the 401 far exceeds that produced by all the coal-fired generating stations in Ontario. If people think coal is the problem, put money into cleaner coal burning, and stop chasing cockamamie low-availability technology like wind or solar. Be reasonable. We can reduce emissions without crippling the power grid, and most of that can be done by individuals and not government or industry. That's why
GASP! Not my car. I can't live without it. No, you don't understand, I really need it. I have to go to work 20 Km away, the doctor I've always seen in my hometown, my relatives, my favourite grocery store (I don't like the one right by my house), etc. etc. I earned my car. I deserve a car.
I'm disgusted with the commuter society. FTLOG, take transit. Move closer to work. Don't be picky. FFS, people and thier cars. There is a mall in Mississauga that has been developed around the commuter crowd. Heartland mall sprawls square kilometers, and you can't even walk from one store to the next if you tried because there are no sidewalks throughout the parking lots connecting it all. You have to drive. I am disgusted by people who have cars in Toronto. Selfish self-important egotistical yuppies.
No, blame coal. Blame industry. It's easier than personal responsibility.
Bush will never force the industry of his country (including power generation) to conform to the Kyoto accord. It's bad business.
In fact, he passes laws that relax the current regulations on pollution. His not-so-aptly-named "Clean Skies" initiative allows coal-fired generating stations to increase the amount of pollution they produce in favour of dumping more wattage on the grid.
This sort of behaviour disgusts me. I live in Toronto, and although we have a busy airport and traffic corridor, we don't produce nearly as much pollution as our neighbours to the south. Nanticoke generating station generates enough power for the city of Toronto without running at full capacity. It produces less emmissions than a plant half its size in Detroit. It does this with not-so-new-but-expensive technology that is invested in in favour of oh, say, being able to breathe.
I went down to D.C. recently, and when I left on the plane, looking east, I couldn't tell where the ground ended and the sky began. It was a disgusting layer of brown that looked like it spanned five hundered meters in the air... probably more.
I hope someone manages to bring sanctions against the Bush administration. His lack of regard for anything not minted or drilled or slipped into his pocket is disgusting.
I work for a wireless telecommunications provider. Our cell sites rely on a highly accurate time source as a basis for their RF modulation. They get this clock source from GPS signals. They also use this information for E911 telemetry. The cell sites, as with most high-precision GPS devices, require 4 satellites to be "strongly tracked". If the US were to one day "shut off" sections of GPS coverage, here are the immediate issues I would have (being on-call to maintain the system)
The technology my company uses is an extension of GSM, and I can guarantee you that ANY RF technology that requires a high degree of accuracy (anything digital will) will require such accurate timing. Granted, some technologies are capable of taking this timing off of the T1 lines that they are using for communications back to the switch.
The US must know that disabling sections of GPS could cause adverse effects on their own wireless telecommunications network, why would they even consider this an option?
STOP, kids! Let's make the MOST of this POST!
Let's see what what you've got so far!
Parents buy GTA for their kids, do you really think that Penny Arcade needs to sensor?
You've used the wrong homophone here! What you said here literally means "do you really think that Penny Arcade needs to [object that responds to stimulus]?", which clearly makes no sense.
While I agree that some parents are clearly using violent games and television programming as an excuse for lack of personal responsibility for their children, I wonder where your parents' personal responsibility was for your education.
I'm rather impressed with Sodipodi. Not exactly an Illustrator killer, but good nonetheless.
Baka!