"Core gamers" flock to the console with the best games. The reason gamers like me abandoned Nintendo was because even the first party titles were pretty crap. The third party titles were largely unmitigated crap even when they were, bad, ports of PS/XBOX games.
Nintendo used to have a reputation for quality games, which they abandoned with the Wii.
This is exactly my thinking. I don't care about the version numbers, as version systems are entirely arbitrary, but just the drive by Mozilla to subject us to new "features" (like removing established UI elements) constantly.
Browsers are old tech. Browsers are utilitarian. Non-technical people don't want a constantly evolving piece of basic software.
Mainstream browsers are not the place for "cool and cutting edge" development. I want a browser that focuses on security and standards compliance. New features outside that should be addons/plugins until they are so widely adopted, or self-evidently useful, that they get moved into the core of the browser. I call this the Blizzard model because that is the method they follow for World of Warcraft.
Mozilla seem to have adopted We-are-graphic-designers-and-so-know-better-than-you-plebs model that turned "Web 2.0" into a steaming pile of shit.
If the higher-ups really respected their soldiers they wouldn't put them in ridiculous situations at the behest of politicians (ie trying to do both Iraq and Afghanistan with not enough troops for either one). Also paying a living wage so that junior enlisted with families didn't need to rely on food stamps would probably help.
"The tents are air conditioned with diesel-powered ECUs because people get heat related illnesses when they are not."
Harden up sweet heart. Somehow British, Australian, Canadian, and other Commonwealth troops ran riot across Northern Africa and the Middle East in two world wars without their armies collapsing from heat stroke. Air conditioned tents are just a creature comfort like having fast food vendors on the bases is. It has nothing to do with military effectiveness (it probably detracts from it as the troops won't be properly acclimatised for when they are off base).
Alexander the Great CONQUERED Afghanistan and his troops were probably lucky to have woollen blankets and had walked all the way from Macedonia conquering what is now Iraq and Persia along the way.
P.S. The Soviet army response to their soldiers complaining about having to sleep in the snow with just a great-jacket was to make them spend more time training in the snow so they got used to it.
And like the power meter monitoring devices and intra-house networking over power cabling the devices emissions will stick to their allocated spectrum like a politician sticks to their promises.
Amateur radio was a fun hobby while it lasted. But Ofcom is leading the charge worldwide in killing it off (or at least forcing Hams into using only high power SDR digital modes). It is fun when Hams have to pass a test, pay a license fee, stuck with specially licensed equipment, legally required not to cause interference etc, and any jackass with an unlicensed spectrum can crap all over the radio spectrum with regulators doing nothing.
Now only Microsoft products will be able to have this feature! Other developers can just tell the police that adding intercept technology to their VOIP product would be a patent violation.
"because unless an add-on is needed for the company's use of the browser (unlikely)"
Really? Every enterprise environment I have seen has had at least 2-3 major addons, even when using IE. I can't even use my universities Wifi without an addon for their VPN.
The complaint is about Firefox putting a major release as EOL a few months after its release. EOL means no more security patches, which means everyone has to upgrade from that release or get owned by the next JavaScript exploit that comes along. It has nothing to do with adding "Enterprise features".
It is a pain for me, not a Fortune 500 company, because I have to make sure all my friends and family have updated Firefox with updated addons. If I have to re-check that every 3-4 months Firefox will lose a dozen plus customers just off annoying me.
In addition it makes it harder for me to recommend Open Source solutions because PHB's will hear about how Firefox EOL'd after a few months. Mozilla are basically reinforcing "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".
"Now the fact that Linux evolves faster, and so does Firefox, is only "a problem" for companies that are used to having to vet every slow-moving version of Windows. The habit of expecting breakage and avoiding patches is well established for Windows, because it was hugely necessary for Windows."
That isn't the reason you want a release to not be EOL'd after 3-4 months. It isn't just about addons breaking, it is about the effort required to go through and make sure a whole software stack works and is deployed with all the little tweaks that might be necessary (taking into account "HTML5" won't be a real standard for probably another ten years, business want a relatively fixed environment to build in). If Linux EOL'd a major release after 3-4 months it would be as popular as BeOS. Instead the standard is about 5+ years of security fixes.
Businesses don't run on pixe dust. They run on money. In particular they run by minimising the cost of infrastructure and the like. Firefox seems to be doing its best to increase those costs.
It is pointless as the problem with Wikipedia is no life social retards that camp articles or topics and only allow real contributions from those in their cabal. Adding a campaign to increase friendly human interaction is pointless as the mafias and cabals don't understand normal human interaction.
Dear Enterprises, Please don't use Linux or other Open Source OSes where Firefox is the only real option. In fact you should use Internet Explorer on Windows and get locked into the Microsoft ecology.
Thanks, The Firefox team.
Why are we still holding these jackasses up as bastions of the open source community? Frankly, I am sick of it. Years of moving family members and acquaintances on to Firefox and now Mozilla is too good to support* the people who got it where it is today. Fuck Mozilla!
* Retarded release schedule that constantly breaks addons. Retarded release schedule that makes Firefox unsuitable for business use, thus making it hard to suggest open source solutions. Retarded basic browser UI designs for no goddamn reason.
It is absurd to pat-down or scan ANYONE boarding a flight. A bomb carried on a person in such a way that it would be detected by this screening is entirely incapable of bringing down an air-plane. It could kill people but that would probably work better in the security line then when seated in an aircraft.
And yes profiling works (to a degree). The problem is that by profiling you alienate that group from society and from law enforcement. It has been proven time and again that the only way to stop ethnic crime is by the police forging strong ties with the community.
That data is old but as the US nuclear power industry has been stagnant for about 30 years due to fear-mongering, and the coal industry isn't a great innovator, it is still pretty accurate. Does anyone think a nuclear plant would get away with releasing over 5 tons of uranium a year into the air? The average coal plant does.
Here in Australia the government is still suppressing a report that investigated lung disease vs proximity to coal power plants.
P.S. I enjoy telling my "No nukes!" hippie mother that she and her friends are responsible for tens of thousands of cancer deaths.
You say that like you think it will impress me. Even if the system was being run for a once in 500 year event (which it probably wasn't, because generally people like dams to be partially full for water security, recreational, and environmental reasons) obviously this event must have been more then a once in 500 year event.
I live in a flood prone area. I don't bitch and whine about floods when they happen. People need to understand that our climate has extremes that happen on very short geological time scales and plan accordingly.
The "large rainfall and snowmelt" figures are based on statistical analysis of what mostly happens. ie they are average figures which was why the dam system was run the way it was. Exceptional weather events weren't taken correctly into account.
If you don't want to get flooded don't live on a fucking flood plain.
Systems built around "average" rainfall will fail eventually because the climate is NOT stable on a year to year basis. You either build levees and dams for a once in a thousand years worst case scenario or you accept you will get the occasional massive flood that overwhelms systems built around "average" rainfall.
What actually happens is the dams and levees get built to handle the last major flood. That plan failed in Queensland Australia at the beginning of this year.
People need to accept that they don't have absolute control over their lives. Nature happens.
Exactly. If he had been diagnosed with moderate to severe Autism or something and basically lived inside his own head it might be some excuse for his actions (ie not being able to understand they were criminal). Asperger's syndrome just means you have some of the cognitive issues, particularly in regard to social situations, that people with Autism share. If you have those symptoms to the point they are crippling you will generally get diagnosed with Autism.
Yeah they aren't (ab)using the filter to block anything but the "worst of the worst" now, but the whole uproar over the original filter was unaccountable bureaucrats deciding what would go on the SECRET filter list. I don't see how Telstra deciding what goes on the secret filter list is really any better.
When some idiots claim that the works of Bill Henson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Henson) are child pornography (and thus a significant portion of classical and renaissance paintings and sculpture) then I don't trust the whole system at all.
The previous government already paid for filtering software for anyone who wanted it, so "accidental" exposure isn't an issue. And filtering HTTP does no good in actually stopping pedophiles from obtaining child pornography as they have mostly shifted to other protocols years ago. There is absolutely zero sensible reason for the filter.
Stop making excuses for Duke Nukem Forever. It was just bad, the poor reaction to it had nothing to do with nostalgia.
I play plenty of old games (or remakes, or clones with the same mechanics) and find them just as good as I did when I was a kid. What the author is missing is the massive dopamine rush that some experiences produce and that you can never normally replicate (because your brain adapts, this is why junkies have to keep increasing their dose).
Then either ASUS has extra smart engineers on that range or you were a lot gentler then the general public. I have seen people carry a laptop around a house and thump it down on a table while watching a movie (thus defeating the auto spin down technology that more expensive laptops have). I think most technical users either buy higher end laptops or just don't treat them as roughly as non-technical users*.
* eg My little brother who has his schools laptop in for the third time for hardware repairs in a year. And that is a Lenovo Thinkpad model, which is a cut above what most people buy.
There are more models of netbooks now then during the height of the netbook craze. What has died is Linux powered netbooks with cheap SSDs. From retailer reports a lot of people who bought netbooks weren't satisfied with Linux and weren't satisfied with the storage of the cheap SSDs. So now days you have cheap Windows netbooks with conventional spinning disc drives, and very expensive small laptops with expensive SSDs.
To me the whole appeal of the netbook was something small and light that I could chuck in my backpack and not worry about, which doesn't work with a spinning disc HDD (when I worked in computer repair 90% of laptop issues were damaged HDDs. A certain brand of laptops we sold had a MTBF of its drives of probably 3 months in actual real world usage).
Unfortunately that wouldn't stop real organised crime. It would stop a lot of stupid gang banger struggles over territory*, but the guys who corrupt law enforcement and politicians so they can conduct their "legitimate business" will just move to a more lucrative area. The corruption of the authorities is more of a threat then some gang bangers shooting each other.
* But those are still mostly a product of ignorant, poor youth. The drug war just gives them cash to better arm themselves.
Conroy isn't doing this for "political" reasons (of the sort that most Australian politicians have were they back down when it polls badly). He apparently strongly believes in censorship. Also people who blame Christian and other faith based groups for this are wrong, Conroy is pushing for it for his own reasons and not to buy votes. The rest of his party have pretty much dropped it because they are polling at around sub-30% approval or something silly.
I am an Evangelical Christian and am against filtering not only because it is a threat to democracy (the government originally wanted to block material related to political debate like euthanasia) but because there is almost no evidence that censoring material related to certain acts actually reduces the rate of offences. Instead the evidence seems to be pointing the other way (eg access to porn reduces sexual assaults, violent video games reduce violence). And what we know from psychology's studies into behavioural theory backs this up (ie that if you are denied the opportunity to partake in a desired behaviour your desire for that behaviour just increases, hence why food restriction diets don't work).
People abuse children because they are either paedophiles and hence sexually attracted to children, or just get off on controlling and domineering others and children are easy targets. They don't do it because they saw a picture of a naked child.
Slashdot Mirror
"Core gamers" flock to the console with the best games. The reason gamers like me abandoned Nintendo was because even the first party titles were pretty crap. The third party titles were largely unmitigated crap even when they were, bad, ports of PS/XBOX games.
Nintendo used to have a reputation for quality games, which they abandoned with the Wii.
You reap what you sow.
This is exactly my thinking. I don't care about the version numbers, as version systems are entirely arbitrary, but just the drive by Mozilla to subject us to new "features" (like removing established UI elements) constantly.
Browsers are old tech. Browsers are utilitarian. Non-technical people don't want a constantly evolving piece of basic software.
Mainstream browsers are not the place for "cool and cutting edge" development. I want a browser that focuses on security and standards compliance. New features outside that should be addons/plugins until they are so widely adopted, or self-evidently useful, that they get moved into the core of the browser. I call this the Blizzard model because that is the method they follow for World of Warcraft.
Mozilla seem to have adopted We-are-graphic-designers-and-so-know-better-than-you-plebs model that turned "Web 2.0" into a steaming pile of shit.
If the higher-ups really respected their soldiers they wouldn't put them in ridiculous situations at the behest of politicians (ie trying to do both Iraq and Afghanistan with not enough troops for either one). Also paying a living wage so that junior enlisted with families didn't need to rely on food stamps would probably help.
"The tents are air conditioned with diesel-powered ECUs because people get heat related illnesses when they are not."
Harden up sweet heart. Somehow British, Australian, Canadian, and other Commonwealth troops ran riot across Northern Africa and the Middle East in two world wars without their armies collapsing from heat stroke. Air conditioned tents are just a creature comfort like having fast food vendors on the bases is. It has nothing to do with military effectiveness (it probably detracts from it as the troops won't be properly acclimatised for when they are off base).
Alexander the Great CONQUERED Afghanistan and his troops were probably lucky to have woollen blankets and had walked all the way from Macedonia conquering what is now Iraq and Persia along the way.
P.S. The Soviet army response to their soldiers complaining about having to sleep in the snow with just a great-jacket was to make them spend more time training in the snow so they got used to it.
And like the power meter monitoring devices and intra-house networking over power cabling the devices emissions will stick to their allocated spectrum like a politician sticks to their promises.
Amateur radio was a fun hobby while it lasted. But Ofcom is leading the charge worldwide in killing it off (or at least forcing Hams into using only high power SDR digital modes). It is fun when Hams have to pass a test, pay a license fee, stuck with specially licensed equipment, legally required not to cause interference etc, and any jackass with an unlicensed spectrum can crap all over the radio spectrum with regulators doing nothing.
Now only Microsoft products will be able to have this feature! Other developers can just tell the police that adding intercept technology to their VOIP product would be a patent violation.
"because unless an add-on is needed for the company's use of the browser (unlikely)"
Really? Every enterprise environment I have seen has had at least 2-3 major addons, even when using IE. I can't even use my universities Wifi without an addon for their VPN.
I think you don't know that English is constantly evolving. The way I used "retarded" falls under one of the dictionary definitions.
The complaint is about Firefox putting a major release as EOL a few months after its release. EOL means no more security patches, which means everyone has to upgrade from that release or get owned by the next JavaScript exploit that comes along. It has nothing to do with adding "Enterprise features".
It is a pain for me, not a Fortune 500 company, because I have to make sure all my friends and family have updated Firefox with updated addons. If I have to re-check that every 3-4 months Firefox will lose a dozen plus customers just off annoying me.
In addition it makes it harder for me to recommend Open Source solutions because PHB's will hear about how Firefox EOL'd after a few months. Mozilla are basically reinforcing "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".
"Now the fact that Linux evolves faster, and so does Firefox, is only "a problem" for companies that are used to having to vet every slow-moving version of Windows. The habit of expecting breakage and avoiding patches is well established for Windows, because it was hugely necessary for Windows."
That isn't the reason you want a release to not be EOL'd after 3-4 months. It isn't just about addons breaking, it is about the effort required to go through and make sure a whole software stack works and is deployed with all the little tweaks that might be necessary (taking into account "HTML5" won't be a real standard for probably another ten years, business want a relatively fixed environment to build in). If Linux EOL'd a major release after 3-4 months it would be as popular as BeOS. Instead the standard is about 5+ years of security fixes.
Businesses don't run on pixe dust. They run on money. In particular they run by minimising the cost of infrastructure and the like. Firefox seems to be doing its best to increase those costs.
It is pointless as the problem with Wikipedia is no life social retards that camp articles or topics and only allow real contributions from those in their cabal. Adding a campaign to increase friendly human interaction is pointless as the mafias and cabals don't understand normal human interaction.
Dear Enterprises,
Please don't use Linux or other Open Source OSes where Firefox is the only real option. In fact you should use Internet Explorer on Windows and get locked into the Microsoft ecology.
Thanks,
The Firefox team.
Why are we still holding these jackasses up as bastions of the open source community? Frankly, I am sick of it. Years of moving family members and acquaintances on to Firefox and now Mozilla is too good to support* the people who got it where it is today. Fuck Mozilla!
* Retarded release schedule that constantly breaks addons. Retarded release schedule that makes Firefox unsuitable for business use, thus making it hard to suggest open source solutions. Retarded basic browser UI designs for no goddamn reason.
It is absurd to pat-down or scan ANYONE boarding a flight. A bomb carried on a person in such a way that it would be detected by this screening is entirely incapable of bringing down an air-plane. It could kill people but that would probably work better in the security line then when seated in an aircraft.
And yes profiling works (to a degree). The problem is that by profiling you alienate that group from society and from law enforcement. It has been proven time and again that the only way to stop ethnic crime is by the police forging strong ties with the community.
Not only that, but in the US coal plants release more radioactive isotopes (mostly thorium and uranium) then are CONTAINED in all the nuclear plants.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
That data is old but as the US nuclear power industry has been stagnant for about 30 years due to fear-mongering, and the coal industry isn't a great innovator, it is still pretty accurate. Does anyone think a nuclear plant would get away with releasing over 5 tons of uranium a year into the air? The average coal plant does.
Here in Australia the government is still suppressing a report that investigated lung disease vs proximity to coal power plants.
P.S. I enjoy telling my "No nukes!" hippie mother that she and her friends are responsible for tens of thousands of cancer deaths.
You say that like you think it will impress me. Even if the system was being run for a once in 500 year event (which it probably wasn't, because generally people like dams to be partially full for water security, recreational, and environmental reasons) obviously this event must have been more then a once in 500 year event.
I live in a flood prone area. I don't bitch and whine about floods when they happen. People need to understand that our climate has extremes that happen on very short geological time scales and plan accordingly.
The "large rainfall and snowmelt" figures are based on statistical analysis of what mostly happens. ie they are average figures which was why the dam system was run the way it was. Exceptional weather events weren't taken correctly into account.
If you don't want to get flooded don't live on a fucking flood plain.
Systems built around "average" rainfall will fail eventually because the climate is NOT stable on a year to year basis. You either build levees and dams for a once in a thousand years worst case scenario or you accept you will get the occasional massive flood that overwhelms systems built around "average" rainfall.
What actually happens is the dams and levees get built to handle the last major flood. That plan failed in Queensland Australia at the beginning of this year.
People need to accept that they don't have absolute control over their lives. Nature happens.
Exactly. If he had been diagnosed with moderate to severe Autism or something and basically lived inside his own head it might be some excuse for his actions (ie not being able to understand they were criminal). Asperger's syndrome just means you have some of the cognitive issues, particularly in regard to social situations, that people with Autism share. If you have those symptoms to the point they are crippling you will generally get diagnosed with Autism.
Yeah they aren't (ab)using the filter to block anything but the "worst of the worst" now, but the whole uproar over the original filter was unaccountable bureaucrats deciding what would go on the SECRET filter list. I don't see how Telstra deciding what goes on the secret filter list is really any better.
When some idiots claim that the works of Bill Henson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Henson) are child pornography (and thus a significant portion of classical and renaissance paintings and sculpture) then I don't trust the whole system at all.
The previous government already paid for filtering software for anyone who wanted it, so "accidental" exposure isn't an issue. And filtering HTTP does no good in actually stopping pedophiles from obtaining child pornography as they have mostly shifted to other protocols years ago. There is absolutely zero sensible reason for the filter.
Stop making excuses for Duke Nukem Forever. It was just bad, the poor reaction to it had nothing to do with nostalgia.
I play plenty of old games (or remakes, or clones with the same mechanics) and find them just as good as I did when I was a kid. What the author is missing is the massive dopamine rush that some experiences produce and that you can never normally replicate (because your brain adapts, this is why junkies have to keep increasing their dose).
Then either ASUS has extra smart engineers on that range or you were a lot gentler then the general public. I have seen people carry a laptop around a house and thump it down on a table while watching a movie (thus defeating the auto spin down technology that more expensive laptops have). I think most technical users either buy higher end laptops or just don't treat them as roughly as non-technical users*.
* eg My little brother who has his schools laptop in for the third time for hardware repairs in a year. And that is a Lenovo Thinkpad model, which is a cut above what most people buy.
There are more models of netbooks now then during the height of the netbook craze. What has died is Linux powered netbooks with cheap SSDs. From retailer reports a lot of people who bought netbooks weren't satisfied with Linux and weren't satisfied with the storage of the cheap SSDs. So now days you have cheap Windows netbooks with conventional spinning disc drives, and very expensive small laptops with expensive SSDs.
To me the whole appeal of the netbook was something small and light that I could chuck in my backpack and not worry about, which doesn't work with a spinning disc HDD (when I worked in computer repair 90% of laptop issues were damaged HDDs. A certain brand of laptops we sold had a MTBF of its drives of probably 3 months in actual real world usage).
Unfortunately that wouldn't stop real organised crime. It would stop a lot of stupid gang banger struggles over territory*, but the guys who corrupt law enforcement and politicians so they can conduct their "legitimate business" will just move to a more lucrative area. The corruption of the authorities is more of a threat then some gang bangers shooting each other.
* But those are still mostly a product of ignorant, poor youth. The drug war just gives them cash to better arm themselves.
Conroy isn't doing this for "political" reasons (of the sort that most Australian politicians have were they back down when it polls badly). He apparently strongly believes in censorship. Also people who blame Christian and other faith based groups for this are wrong, Conroy is pushing for it for his own reasons and not to buy votes. The rest of his party have pretty much dropped it because they are polling at around sub-30% approval or something silly.
I am an Evangelical Christian and am against filtering not only because it is a threat to democracy (the government originally wanted to block material related to political debate like euthanasia) but because there is almost no evidence that censoring material related to certain acts actually reduces the rate of offences. Instead the evidence seems to be pointing the other way (eg access to porn reduces sexual assaults, violent video games reduce violence). And what we know from psychology's studies into behavioural theory backs this up (ie that if you are denied the opportunity to partake in a desired behaviour your desire for that behaviour just increases, hence why food restriction diets don't work).
People abuse children because they are either paedophiles and hence sexually attracted to children, or just get off on controlling and domineering others and children are easy targets. They don't do it because they saw a picture of a naked child.