I've seen this kind of scam done to the main spanish phone company, Telefonica. This case was even more embarassing, since the voice mail systems used were owned by the phone company itself. This meant that by the end of the month, nobody reviewed a monthly/bimonthly bill,so finding one single vioce mailbox was enough to call for months!. I suppose that Telefonica's fraud protection system has improved since then. If not, at least this explains their outrageous long distance rates!
Yes, Games Workshop has made selling as many overpriced miniatures as they can their single goal. Why did they stopped making Blood Bowl? A payer needed onlt a $40-$60 investment on miniatures to be able to play as much as he wanted. Why do you need new miniatures when the rules change? Why, 10 years ago when they were still adding new races to the game, the latest army always seemed better than the one you already owned? Money, money, money.
Wizards of the Coast's major products, like Magic the Gathering ar D&D do sell themselves, and are horribly overpriced. However, Woc does not do try to screw the retailers. A store can sell the products at any price they want. It's cmmon to be able to buy Magic cards for half of the MSRP on e-bay, and Wizards has tried to do nothing to stop it. I'm not trying to say that they are the most gaming friendly company ever, but they are in a completely different league from GW in the "evilness" factor
I've read similar papers about the effect of nano particles of substances that are considered "safe", like titanium dioxide. It seems that particles of such a small size are not expelled from the lungs by normal breathing, and thus can stay inside your lungs for 10+ years.
This is not stopping nanotech research though: it just means that the typical factory that would make let's say, nanotubes for LCDs, will need to have high quality air filters so that this particles do not escape to other areas of the factory. This just makes the product more expensive, it will not stop nanotech from being used
I don't think this changes their stance on xbox live in any way. EA does not support live because, after developing their own gaming infrastructure for the PC for years, they'd rather use their own online system than paying to use Microsoft's. They do release some xbox games from time to time. After all, it's not any different from developing for the Gamecube.I don't see them backing down from their xbox live stance though
I don't know if you've been following videogames for the last couple of years, but IMO, most EA games are not really good games. EA caters to the casual gamer, not precisely the most common breed among home Linux users.
Have you visited their webpage lately? If they were to release their entire PC lineup on Linux, yhey'd get marginal sales from their EA Sports line, and maybe some sales from Battlefield 1942, but that's about it.
You got lucky with it... I owned a 17' KDS that for some reason died when there were 3 or 4 video mode changes in the same 3 seconds. How do I know this was the reason? The replacement monitor died in the same similar situation (Program testing video modes, in this case). By then it was out of the warranty, and I bought a Samsung instead. It's worked fine for 5 years now.
I'd rather have a monitor that does not break than one that gets replaced quickly.
Even though the page makes some good points, it's pretty hard to take seriously a page that uses the "100 times performace difference" between tar and jar. Try comparing with tar + gzip instead..
Re:VESA is not a resoulution
on
Duke3d in Linux
·
· Score: 1
There was a bus architecture called VESA, but there is also an old standard to interface with svga videocards. After a few resident programs were created to make old svga cards compliant with the VESA standard most videogames started taking advantage of high resolution video modes.Writing different code for every vendor's standard was a PAIN. w/o VESA videogame graphics would not be where they are today.
It has a lot to do with a market full of people with CS degrees that allows employers to pay programmers and sysadmins what in the US would be considered minimum wage. If the employer can get a replacement willing to take your job for about 1000 euros a month, it's pretty hard to get a good salary. Only a few companies I know of are willing to pay "real" salaries, and those expect you to work 80-90 hour weeks... that's not what I'd call living.
If you want to make a good living in Spain working on computers you have to start your own company, or have good friends in high places. That's why I moved to the US:)
I work for a company that sells billing and number management software to most of the big cellphone carriers. At this point, the upgrades necessary to support transfering phone numbers from company to company are either in production already or in very late stages of testing.
In most older systems, the carriers had boxes dedicated to keep a DB with every single phone number they really had access to. Changing this system to support transferring phone numbers between companies was neither cheap nor easy.
Yep. You Europeans also get it in normal, non-metallic colors. I've read in a few places that the metallic paint the SP uses gets scratched way too easily.
That's the best idea I've read yet. Morale might be better off if the copmany does "aggressive" layoffs, and if business is better than expected, hiring back some of the former employees.
It worked pretty well at the pace I work. When we started seeing people rehired, morale went up dramatically
50 scheduled, but don't expect many in 2003. I am still concerned that MS is still hyping Halo 2, which is at least one year away from release, according to Bungie themselves.
Besides, a pretty big amount of european xbox owners have modded consoles, so they won't be playing xbox live any time soon.
That scenario does not seem much different from South America during the XVI and XVII centuries. Christian missionaries were sent to convert the amazonian tribes. There isn't much left from them.
I thought the same thing at first, but then I realized that slashdot would never report the world's end, since it would be impossible to post a dupe 2 weeks later.
I think that the whole purpose of educating children is to prepare them to make good decisions and take control of their lives. Being an adult does not mean pain and suffering, there is no reason to try to slow down a child's intellectual and moral growth. The parents are supposed to be the driving force in the children's growth, exposing their child to new information when the kid is ready to accept it.
The problem of letting the parents have total control of their children's access to information is that not all parents are any good at parenting. In fact, many have no idea of what they are doing. A parent does not need to beat their children, or come back home drunk every night, to hinder a child's chances in life. Making sure that a girl has no sexual education by the time she is 14, for example, can easily ruin her life. Not teaching basic social skills, the dangers of drug abuse or just basic finances reduces the kid's chances of success in life. I belive that the schools have the obligation of helping the kid grow up, despite the parent's incompetence.
I'd rather make parents prove their ability to raise a child before having one, but since making babies is easy and entertaining, I don't think that'd ever work:). Thus, I think that having schools teach basic life information to children is a good thing as long as it is done without trying to push teh children's agenda to the children. IMO Religion and anything but basic politics should not be taught w/o the parent's consent.
If a person, regardless of his/her age, is happy just because of lack of knowledge, is that happiness really worth having? I'd rather be wiser and maybe become a little less happy than just be happy and ignorant.
This post will probably send my Karma into the negatives, but this needs to be said:
Charities need donations from the wealthy to function. A government needs money from the wealthy too, but it takes the money by force. This fact makes al the difference.
I'm sure that you would donate all the money you'd save by not paying taxes that go towards social programs to your favourite charity, which probably does a much better job with your money that the government does. However, I don't think that most people would. In fact, I belive that most would not donate a single penny unless they are forced to.
Social justice through donations would work really well if people were smart enough to understand what's good for them in the long term. On the other hand, if most people are greedy idiots as I belive, all you get is a glorified form of feudalism.
I'm not claiming that current governments are perfect. However, once you take into consideration human greed, most options are much worse in the long term
If it wasn't, most distributions would be in a similar than MS is. With some major distros spanning 7+ CDs and bundled with everything from a Fortran 77 compiler to a rewrite of the Ultima VII engine, Microsoft's bundling doesn't seem strange. In fact, if current market share was not an issue, there would be very few reasons to pick a MS OS over any major Linux distro. After all, almost every piece of software Joe Sixpack might ever want to use comes in the distro!
I belive that MS's bundling is evil (like the axis), and maybe even criminal. However, we have to understand that it is wrong just because of MS's stranglehold of the market. If the mere act of bundling one product with another was the core of the problem, Linux distros would be the greater evil.
Canada already has such a visa program. Their visa program is so geek friendly that my girlfriend(PhD candidate) and I easily qualify for a visa that is pretty similar to a green card from the US. Working for a few years there with a temprary visa makes moving there pretty easy.
Last time I checked, Australia's inmigration requirements were almost as lax. Videgames get released many months later than in the US though:)
NVidia's point is not just that the test does not represent the typical DirectX use during games. They also claim that 3Dmark3 does not use most of DirectX 9 features, and thus is a pretty bad DX9 benchmark. Read the secong page of tech-report's article
as an European, I agree with the author analysis. People create hierarchies naturally. It just happens that if there is nothing better to measure, we will just base our hierarchies in popularity. Most European systems handle this situation by segregating students based on performance, and thus making sure that academic performance is the student's target. However, this does not mean that life as a teenager is much better.
I was lucky/unlucky enough to go to a private high school in Spain. There we had one twist over the typical grades race: The grades had little to do with your actual knowledge, and a lot to do with your ability to be liked by the teachers. I think that I still have a photocopy of very similar papers, turned in by different people but graded by the same teacher, that got 50/100, 72/100 and 92/100 respectively.
To spice things up, the educational system in Spain is set up in such a way that getting good grades in high school determines if you're going to be able to study the major of your choice. This made every student take the popularity game very seriously. I know plenty of people that were unable to major in CompSci or EE because no school would let them enroll in their engineering programs.
If you ask me, I'd rather have the American system, where HS and JHS can be painful, but probably won't ruin the rest of your life.
In The Net, Sandra Bullock plays a software developer who works from home and spends her free time in online chat sessions. She is so isolated from in-person social interactions that when her identity is stolen, she can't find a single individual that can physically identify her.
I know many people like that. I'm sure that if a policeman asked me, I'd say I don't know them. On the other hand, if any of them looked like Sandra Bullock...
Linh Ly, 38, of Rosemead, Calif., agreed to plead guilty to violating the DMCA and distributing hardware that ultimately resulted in a loss of slightly more than $560,000 to DirecTV and Dish Network
Over half a million dollars? That's outrageous!. I suppose that DirectTV is just assuming that anybdy that bought modded equipment was going to buy every single channel and every single pay-per-view event/movie they ever offered. I'm sure that phone companies will start calculating damages from cellphne fraud by assuming that every hacked account was calling to a sex-line in Sudan 24/7. Or even better, that the account was calling to every single phone number in the world, at once 24/7.
Now that I think about it, that would be really amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this kind of scam done to the main spanish phone company, Telefonica. This case was even more embarassing, since the voice mail systems used were owned by the phone company itself. This meant that by the end of the month, nobody reviewed a monthly/bimonthly bill,so finding one single vioce mailbox was enough to call for months!. I suppose that Telefonica's fraud protection system has improved since then. If not, at least this explains their outrageous long distance rates!
Yes, Games Workshop has made selling as many overpriced miniatures as they can their single goal. Why did they stopped making Blood Bowl? A payer needed onlt a $40-$60 investment on miniatures to be able to play as much as he wanted. Why do you need new miniatures when the rules change? Why, 10 years ago when they were still adding new races to the game, the latest army always seemed better than the one you already owned? Money, money, money.
Wizards of the Coast's major products, like Magic the Gathering ar D&D do sell themselves, and are horribly overpriced. However, Woc does not do try to screw the retailers. A store can sell the products at any price they want. It's cmmon to be able to buy Magic cards for half of the MSRP on e-bay, and Wizards has tried to do nothing to stop it. I'm not trying to say that they are the most gaming friendly company ever, but they are in a completely different league from GW in the "evilness" factor
I've read similar papers about the effect of nano particles of substances that are considered "safe", like titanium dioxide. It seems that particles of such a small size are not expelled from the lungs by normal breathing, and thus can stay inside your lungs for 10+ years.
This is not stopping nanotech research though: it just means that the typical factory that would make let's say, nanotubes for LCDs, will need to have high quality air filters so that this particles do not escape to other areas of the factory. This just makes the product more expensive, it will not stop nanotech from being used
It can get even better than that. Since you can use your card to defeat the security system it's circunvention device that goes against the DMCA!
Let's ban all cards with a magnetic stripe!
I don't think this changes their stance on xbox live in any way. EA does not support live because, after developing their own gaming infrastructure for the PC for years, they'd rather use their own online system than paying to use Microsoft's. They do release some xbox games from time to time. After all, it's not any different from developing for the Gamecube.I don't see them backing down from their xbox live stance though
I don't know if you've been following videogames for the last couple of years, but IMO, most EA games are not really good games. EA caters to the casual gamer, not precisely the most common breed among home Linux users.
Have you visited their webpage lately? If they were to release their entire PC lineup on Linux, yhey'd get marginal sales from their EA Sports line, and maybe some sales from Battlefield 1942, but that's about it.
You got lucky with it... I owned a 17' KDS that for some reason died when there were 3 or 4 video mode changes in the same 3 seconds. How do I know this was the reason? The replacement monitor died in the same similar situation (Program testing video modes, in this case). By then it was out of the warranty, and I bought a Samsung instead. It's worked fine for 5 years now.
I'd rather have a monitor that does not break than one that gets replaced quickly.
Even though the page makes some good points, it's pretty hard to take seriously a page that uses the "100 times performace difference" between tar and jar. Try comparing with tar + gzip instead..
There was a bus architecture called VESA, but there is also an old standard to interface with svga videocards. After a few resident programs were created to make old svga cards compliant with the VESA standard most videogames started taking advantage of high resolution video modes.Writing different code for every vendor's standard was a PAIN. w/o VESA videogame graphics would not be where they are today.
It has a lot to do with a market full of people with CS degrees that allows employers to pay programmers and sysadmins what in the US would be considered minimum wage. If the employer can get a replacement willing to take your job for about 1000 euros a month, it's pretty hard to get a good salary. Only a few companies I know of are willing to pay "real" salaries, and those expect you to work 80-90 hour weeks... that's not what I'd call living.
If you want to make a good living in Spain working on computers you have to start your own company, or have good friends in high places. That's why I moved to the US :)
I work for a company that sells billing and number management software to most of the big cellphone carriers. At this point, the upgrades necessary to support transfering phone numbers from company to company are either in production already or in very late stages of testing.
In most older systems, the carriers had boxes dedicated to keep a DB with every single phone number they really had access to. Changing this system to support transferring phone numbers between companies was neither cheap nor easy.
Yep. You Europeans also get it in normal, non-metallic colors. I've read in a few places that the metallic paint the SP uses gets scratched way too easily.
That's the best idea I've read yet. Morale might be better off if the copmany does "aggressive" layoffs, and if business is better than expected, hiring back some of the former employees.
It worked pretty well at the pace I work. When we started seeing people rehired, morale went up dramatically
50 scheduled, but don't expect many in 2003. I am still concerned that MS is still hyping Halo 2, which is at least one year away from release, according to Bungie themselves.
Besides, a pretty big amount of european xbox owners have modded consoles, so they won't be playing xbox live any time soon.
That scenario does not seem much different from South America during the XVI and XVII centuries. Christian missionaries were sent to convert the amazonian tribes. There isn't much left from them.
I thought the same thing at first, but then I realized that slashdot would never report the world's end, since it would be impossible to post a dupe 2 weeks later.
I think that the whole purpose of educating children is to prepare them to make good decisions and take control of their lives. Being an adult does not mean pain and suffering, there is no reason to try to slow down a child's intellectual and moral growth. The parents are supposed to be the driving force in the children's growth, exposing their child to new information when the kid is ready to accept it.
The problem of letting the parents have total control of their children's access to information is that not all parents are any good at parenting. In fact, many have no idea of what they are doing. A parent does not need to beat their children, or come back home drunk every night, to hinder a child's chances in life. Making sure that a girl has no sexual education by the time she is 14, for example, can easily ruin her life. Not teaching basic social skills, the dangers of drug abuse or just basic finances reduces the kid's chances of success in life. I belive that the schools have the obligation of helping the kid grow up, despite the parent's incompetence.
I'd rather make parents prove their ability to raise a child before having one, but since making babies is easy and entertaining, I don't think that'd ever work :). Thus, I think that having schools teach basic life information to children is a good thing as long as it is done without trying to push teh children's agenda to the children. IMO Religion and anything but basic politics should not be taught w/o the parent's consent.
If a person, regardless of his/her age, is happy just because of lack of knowledge, is that happiness really worth having? I'd rather be wiser and maybe become a little less happy than just be happy and ignorant.
This post will probably send my Karma into the negatives, but this needs to be said:
Charities need donations from the wealthy to function. A government needs money from the wealthy too, but it takes the money by force. This fact makes al the difference.
I'm sure that you would donate all the money you'd save by not paying taxes that go towards social programs to your favourite charity, which probably does a much better job with your money that the government does. However, I don't think that most people would. In fact, I belive that most would not donate a single penny unless they are forced to.
Social justice through donations would work really well if people were smart enough to understand what's good for them in the long term. On the other hand, if most people are greedy idiots as I belive, all you get is a glorified form of feudalism.
I'm not claiming that current governments are perfect. However, once you take into consideration human greed, most options are much worse in the long term
If it wasn't, most distributions would be in a similar than MS is. With some major distros spanning 7+ CDs and bundled with everything from a Fortran 77 compiler to a rewrite of the Ultima VII engine, Microsoft's bundling doesn't seem strange. In fact, if current market share was not an issue, there would be very few reasons to pick a MS OS over any major Linux distro. After all, almost every piece of software Joe Sixpack might ever want to use comes in the distro!
I belive that MS's bundling is evil (like the axis), and maybe even criminal. However, we have to understand that it is wrong just because of MS's stranglehold of the market. If the mere act of bundling one product with another was the core of the problem, Linux distros would be the greater evil.
Canada already has such a visa program. Their visa program is so geek friendly that my girlfriend(PhD candidate) and I easily qualify for a visa that is pretty similar to a green card from the US. Working for a few years there with a temprary visa makes moving there pretty easy.
Last time I checked, Australia's inmigration requirements were almost as lax. Videgames get released many months later than in the US though :)
NVidia's point is not just that the test does not represent the typical DirectX use during games. They also claim that 3Dmark3 does not use most of DirectX 9 features, and thus is a pretty bad DX9 benchmark. Read the secong page of tech-report's article
There is another decent article about the issue right here
as an European, I agree with the author analysis. People create hierarchies naturally. It just happens that if there is nothing better to measure, we will just base our hierarchies in popularity. Most European systems handle this situation by segregating students based on performance, and thus making sure that academic performance is the student's target. However, this does not mean that life as a teenager is much better.
I was lucky/unlucky enough to go to a private high school in Spain. There we had one twist over the typical grades race: The grades had little to do with your actual knowledge, and a lot to do with your ability to be liked by the teachers. I think that I still have a photocopy of very similar papers, turned in by different people but graded by the same teacher, that got 50/100, 72/100 and 92/100 respectively.
To spice things up, the educational system in Spain is set up in such a way that getting good grades in high school determines if you're going to be able to study the major of your choice. This made every student take the popularity game very seriously. I know plenty of people that were unable to major in CompSci or EE because no school would let them enroll in their engineering programs.
If you ask me, I'd rather have the American system, where HS and JHS can be painful, but probably won't ruin the rest of your life.
I know many people like that. I'm sure that if a policeman asked me, I'd say I don't know them. On the other hand, if any of them looked like Sandra Bullock...
Over half a million dollars? That's outrageous!. I suppose that DirectTV is just assuming that anybdy that bought modded equipment was going to buy every single channel and every single pay-per-view event/movie they ever offered. I'm sure that phone companies will start calculating damages from cellphne fraud by assuming that every hacked account was calling to a sex-line in Sudan 24/7. Or even better, that the account was calling to every single phone number in the world, at once 24/7.
Now that I think about it, that would be really amusing.