Having 100Mbps would be great, but it's not as if you're going to be able to pull files off of some Web server at the full speed. Many busy servers only have 100Mbps connectivity in total themselves.
You might suggest that 100Mbps would be great for BitTorrent and the like, but the flaw is that ISP's backbones and peering arrangements are measured in gigabits, not terabits. Even an OC-48 can only take 24 customers maxing out their bandwidth on this system. A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.
The ratio of guaranteed bandwidth to advertised bandwidth on this offering is crazy. Backbones just aren't there yet.
They kinda did hundreds of years ago. Early train timetables in the United Kingdom had to account for the different timezones of towns merely a hundred miles apart. It was the train network which eventually caused a single timezone to be adopted.
The "article" talks about revisions to the 14" line, and possibly a new 15" line. I really hope the 12" line doesn't go though. A lot of us bought iBooks because they're a lot smaller and cheaper than comparable PCs at that size. 12" is ideal for flights, carrying around like a book, and just throwing in your bag wherever you want to go. By all means, increase the res of the 12" (1024x768 is a let down), but don't ditch the line, because its compactness makes it useful. Whereas the 14"? It has the same res.. so a waste of money.
I think Apple's screen quality is surrounded in a lot of hype. I'm a real Mac die-hard these days, but I don't think the screens live up to what I've heard. I remember people claiming the iBook and PowerBook screens were amazingly "bright and crisp". Okay, the color accuracy is amazing, but bright? My iBook is not particularly bright at full brightness, and neither are any of the PowerBooks I've looked after or worked on. Put it this way, my father's Acer (avoid with a barge pole) has a much brighter and crisper screen than any Apple notebook I've seen. Even better are those Sony glare-free "coated" TFTs, which have insanely bright and vivid colors.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name. Consider that forced sterilization was widely practiced in the US before the Nazis picked up on it. We now live in a world that's heavily focused on allowing even the most defective DNA to be passed on from generation to generation. This is not necessarily a good thing. I'm not all out supporting eugenics here, but couldn't the forced reproduction of defective DNA cause us not to evolve properly as a species in future?
People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Many of us do. Without the good of the greater whole, charities could not exist, and there are thousands of them. Sure, the government forces you to hand over large sums of money so it can pay welfare, defend the country, and so forth.. but a significant amount of money is given voluntarily. Consider the crazy sums of money that organizations like the EFF and the Perl Foundation get each year.. that money doesn't come by force.
I believe that's where I first saw them too! There were a few DCC servers around, at which you could download MP3s at the grand speed of 2KB/sec.
I downloaded a couple of them to see what it was all about. The first I got was "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow, which I think was 1996? Interestingly I went on to buy all of Crow's CD albums. The next couple were by a band I'd never heard of called Reel Big Fish.. and I became a RBF fan too, but oh no.. MP3 = less revenues, of course..
DriveMeInsane.com was featured here a few years ago now. I believe the guy who started it is a Slashdotter himself. He basically hooked up all his lights to the Web, as well as a number of webcams, his sprinkler system, Christmas tree lights, etc. It was pretty hardcore back in the day. He's kept it going too, although it's up and down, but pretty much was "the" great example of this genre. Only seems to have two lights now though:-(
You might want to Google on this, but there was either a major story in Wired or on Slashdot about this phenomenon. Supposedly people are more forgiving when the virtual character is less perfect, and extremely damning when they're a lot more "realistic". It demonstrated how imperfections are more noticeable when the representation is trying to be 100% realistic, yet the imperfections are not noticed when the representation has more flaws.
Watch out. There's plenty of evidence that Dvorak provides no/little benefits ergonomically and with typing speed. Some of it has been cited above.
Anyway, yeah, it's certainly possible for the brain to switch. If you switch between US and UK keyboards, or between Mac and PC keyboards, you need to be aware of a number of switched keys and key combos. I need to be aware of this even between programs! I sometimes use pico, where internal cut and paste are ctrl+k and ctrl+u.. yet most programs use cmd+x and cmd+v..
I can't stand scripted games. The only ones I've found enjoyable were those in the HalfLife series. The best games are ones which have no length.
Things like SimCity, sports games, racing games, Tetris, puzzles, real time strategy.. you can hop into and out of those games. They match the way our spare time is structured these days. Lately I'm playing Wario Ware and Mario Kart on the GBA because I can just hop in and out for five minutes here and there.. most people nowadays don't have big blocks of time to spend on games.
So, developers, try and drop the scripts, and make games more accessible to casual gamers. Of course, the hardcore "I've got 6 solid hours to spend on a game" crew should be catered for, but I feel that with the advances in technology nowadays.. scripts aren't needed, and games can be truly dynamic.
I'm also from London, am aware of the term and have heard it used, though don't think I've ever used it myself. It's one of those "know what it means but never use it" words like "mullah" or "moolah", which has the same meaning.
You might not be working class enough to have heard it used a lot. It tends to be used by "duckers and divers" and chancers, market traders, etc. It's the sort of word people like Del Boy use.. I imagine he probably has used it in the show.
Anyway, It's definitely a real term. While not common by any means, it's a lot more common than the bullshit rhyming slang some people claim is popular like "Claire Rayners" for trainers!!!
Hmm, your response is implying that I was the Anonymous Coward who made that stupid comment in response to yours. It was not, and I'm really sick of trolls pulling that shit.
Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.
Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).
Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?
Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.
There are a lot of "casual" gamers out there who aren't interested in the full price titles, and perhaps only have a couple. (I only have one full price PS 2 game - Gran Turismo 4) Casual gamers prefer cheaper and smaller games to pass away an hour now and then. I paid £10 ($18) for a reasonably unknown pool game which has been great fun to play.. but £30-£40 ($50-$60) for a single full price game which might suck is crazy.
We've had lots of articles on/. lately talking about how "casual gaming" is becoming a massive industry of its own. Casual gamers and hardcore gamers are rarely interested in the same stuff, so why don't companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo produce games for this audience too? We'll pay $20 for simple, fun games with low production costs.. and not $60 for over-produced, multi million dollar titles. Where are the simple console games? Bring em on!
Everything is just "piled on"
on
Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree with the parent. There seems to be no real cohesion to the new theme. Everything just seems to be bundled on top of each other. If these were the first Longhorn screenshots out, that'd be fine.. but we've been seeing the same for a year now.
In the screenshots it appears there's no difference made between menus and toolbars anymore.. the menus just kinda blur into them. Icons are different sizes. Different sized toolbars just smudge into each other and look messy. There seems to be no thought put into it.
Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. The company has billions of dollars (and they don't get it by writing checks I know) but they supposedly have some of the "best minds" out there.. and yet their products and interfaces are so scrappy? I know being Microsoft isn't easy.. they've got to be compatible, they've got lots of products to integrate.. lots of hardware to support.. but heck, can't they at least get decent interface design? It's not like it's a billion dollar job. Even people working for nothing, like the xfce people, do a better job.
Postal 2 may let you kill anyone you want in bloody and disgusting ways - but that's not what it is about either. It is, by nature, a tech demo in the abilities of programmers and AI.
Oh, so 9/11 was just a demonstration of how well a plane can stay intact when colliding with a building.. and the Unabomber was just testing the ability for volatile materials to stay intact through the USPS? I can get used to making up this sort of bullshit!
I always find the results to be way higher than what anyone I know in the industry makes, senior positions or not. You get results showing things like the average entry level Perl coder makes $50K.. are they heck! Perhaps I just know a lot of people who work at sweatshops.
They have the gravitational wobble effect on the star, which gives them mass.
I'm no astrophysicist, but if there are other undiscovered planets orbiting this star wouldn't they invalidate any calculations to get the mass for this planet?
I think I wrote my post in a ambiguous, confusing manner.. oops! I apologise for that.
I was trying to get at the point that something more like the Creative Commons licenses for code would work well. The Creative Commons licenses let individual content creators add and remove certain provisos to the core license, whereas the GPL is rather concrete, and many people do not understand what it actually states. CC licenses, on the other hand, are very simple and flexible.
As a semi-open source developer (most of my code is closed, but some is open) I have noticed a big swing away from the GPL in many areas. The Ruby on Rails project is MIT licensed, and most Rails developers who release their code also use the MIT or BSD license.
Major projects like Apache, MySQL, X11, Perl, and PHP eschew the GPL in favor for homebrew alternatives, and while the GPL offers a single license for a disparate range of software.. I agree with ESR, and I believe that licensing of open source software may be better done in a simpler, less arcane way.
PHP websites are more vulnerable to worms. Just six months ago, many PHP run forums were shut down and destroyed. The exploit was something that worked only with PHP forums.
I don't think PHP sites are inherently more vulnerable because they use PHP. I think it's because PHP coders are more likely to be amateurs, and PHP projects more likely to be developed by new coders, that they'd have holes. It's not a failure of PHP IMHO. It just happens that more bad coders use PHP.
One problem is working out how to buy. It looks obvious to you, but I got to the site, read what I could see "above the fold", then clicked around, and went to "Shop" to see how much the CD was, then couldn't find it there. I stumbled across it eventually, but, yes, most users are as dumb as I am. The "buy" link is not underlined and is in tiny text, which makes it even less obvious.
Furthermore, I'd say you should also have the album available to buy in dollars. I know PayPal does dollars, but Americans are touchy when it comes to other currencies. Also, buying a physical CD will put a lot of people off (myself included, I'm afraid), as nowadays we'd rather pay a little less and get some high quality MP3 files. All CDs I'm forced to buy end up getting ripped then thrown on the trash pile anyway. I'm sure it's the same for a lot of us.
Anyway... I have just downloaded a couple of your tracks and will now check them out.. from the text description it sounds right up my alley!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Having 100Mbps would be great, but it's not as if you're going to be able to pull files off of some Web server at the full speed. Many busy servers only have 100Mbps connectivity in total themselves.
You might suggest that 100Mbps would be great for BitTorrent and the like, but the flaw is that ISP's backbones and peering arrangements are measured in gigabits, not terabits. Even an OC-48 can only take 24 customers maxing out their bandwidth on this system. A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.
The ratio of guaranteed bandwidth to advertised bandwidth on this offering is crazy. Backbones just aren't there yet.
They kinda did hundreds of years ago. Early train timetables in the United Kingdom had to account for the different timezones of towns merely a hundred miles apart. It was the train network which eventually caused a single timezone to be adopted.
The "article" talks about revisions to the 14" line, and possibly a new 15" line. I really hope the 12" line doesn't go though. A lot of us bought iBooks because they're a lot smaller and cheaper than comparable PCs at that size. 12" is ideal for flights, carrying around like a book, and just throwing in your bag wherever you want to go. By all means, increase the res of the 12" (1024x768 is a let down), but don't ditch the line, because its compactness makes it useful. Whereas the 14"? It has the same res.. so a waste of money.
I agree.
I think Apple's screen quality is surrounded in a lot of hype. I'm a real Mac die-hard these days, but I don't think the screens live up to what I've heard. I remember people claiming the iBook and PowerBook screens were amazingly "bright and crisp". Okay, the color accuracy is amazing, but bright? My iBook is not particularly bright at full brightness, and neither are any of the PowerBooks I've looked after or worked on. Put it this way, my father's Acer (avoid with a barge pole) has a much brighter and crisper screen than any Apple notebook I've seen. Even better are those Sony glare-free "coated" TFTs, which have insanely bright and vivid colors.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name. Consider that forced sterilization was widely practiced in the US before the Nazis picked up on it. We now live in a world that's heavily focused on allowing even the most defective DNA to be passed on from generation to generation. This is not necessarily a good thing. I'm not all out supporting eugenics here, but couldn't the forced reproduction of defective DNA cause us not to evolve properly as a species in future?
People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Many of us do. Without the good of the greater whole, charities could not exist, and there are thousands of them. Sure, the government forces you to hand over large sums of money so it can pay welfare, defend the country, and so forth.. but a significant amount of money is given voluntarily. Consider the crazy sums of money that organizations like the EFF and the Perl Foundation get each year.. that money doesn't come by force.
Imagine PacMan or Tetris set to Philip Glass's compositions. You'd be in a trance for days :)
I believe that's where I first saw them too! There were a few DCC servers around, at which you could download MP3s at the grand speed of 2KB/sec.
I downloaded a couple of them to see what it was all about. The first I got was "All I Wanna Do" by Sheryl Crow, which I think was 1996? Interestingly I went on to buy all of Crow's CD albums. The next couple were by a band I'd never heard of called Reel Big Fish.. and I became a RBF fan too, but oh no.. MP3 = less revenues, of course..
I just tried it and.. nope.
DriveMeInsane.com was featured here a few years ago now. I believe the guy who started it is a Slashdotter himself. He basically hooked up all his lights to the Web, as well as a number of webcams, his sprinkler system, Christmas tree lights, etc. It was pretty hardcore back in the day. He's kept it going too, although it's up and down, but pretty much was "the" great example of this genre. Only seems to have two lights now though :-(
You might want to Google on this, but there was either a major story in Wired or on Slashdot about this phenomenon. Supposedly people are more forgiving when the virtual character is less perfect, and extremely damning when they're a lot more "realistic". It demonstrated how imperfections are more noticeable when the representation is trying to be 100% realistic, yet the imperfections are not noticed when the representation has more flaws.
Watch out. There's plenty of evidence that Dvorak provides no/little benefits ergonomically and with typing speed. Some of it has been cited above.
Anyway, yeah, it's certainly possible for the brain to switch. If you switch between US and UK keyboards, or between Mac and PC keyboards, you need to be aware of a number of switched keys and key combos. I need to be aware of this even between programs! I sometimes use pico, where internal cut and paste are ctrl+k and ctrl+u.. yet most programs use cmd+x and cmd+v..
I was referring to pronunciation rather than official spellings for the words :)
I can't stand scripted games. The only ones I've found enjoyable were those in the HalfLife series. The best games are ones which have no length.
Things like SimCity, sports games, racing games, Tetris, puzzles, real time strategy.. you can hop into and out of those games. They match the way our spare time is structured these days. Lately I'm playing Wario Ware and Mario Kart on the GBA because I can just hop in and out for five minutes here and there.. most people nowadays don't have big blocks of time to spend on games.
So, developers, try and drop the scripts, and make games more accessible to casual gamers. Of course, the hardcore "I've got 6 solid hours to spend on a game" crew should be catered for, but I feel that with the advances in technology nowadays.. scripts aren't needed, and games can be truly dynamic.
I'm also from London, am aware of the term and have heard it used, though don't think I've ever used it myself. It's one of those "know what it means but never use it" words like "mullah" or "moolah", which has the same meaning.
You might not be working class enough to have heard it used a lot. It tends to be used by "duckers and divers" and chancers, market traders, etc. It's the sort of word people like Del Boy use.. I imagine he probably has used it in the show.
Anyway, It's definitely a real term. While not common by any means, it's a lot more common than the bullshit rhyming slang some people claim is popular like "Claire Rayners" for trainers!!!
Hmm, your response is implying that I was the Anonymous Coward who made that stupid comment in response to yours. It was not, and I'm really sick of trolls pulling that shit.
Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.
Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).
Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?
Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.
There are a lot of "casual" gamers out there who aren't interested in the full price titles, and perhaps only have a couple. (I only have one full price PS 2 game - Gran Turismo 4) Casual gamers prefer cheaper and smaller games to pass away an hour now and then. I paid £10 ($18) for a reasonably unknown pool game which has been great fun to play.. but £30-£40 ($50-$60) for a single full price game which might suck is crazy.
/. lately talking about how "casual gaming" is becoming a massive industry of its own. Casual gamers and hardcore gamers are rarely interested in the same stuff, so why don't companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo produce games for this audience too? We'll pay $20 for simple, fun games with low production costs.. and not $60 for over-produced, multi million dollar titles. Where are the simple console games? Bring em on!
We've had lots of articles on
I agree with the parent. There seems to be no real cohesion to the new theme. Everything just seems to be bundled on top of each other. If these were the first Longhorn screenshots out, that'd be fine.. but we've been seeing the same for a year now.
In the screenshots it appears there's no difference made between menus and toolbars anymore.. the menus just kinda blur into them. Icons are different sizes. Different sized toolbars just smudge into each other and look messy. There seems to be no thought put into it.
Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. The company has billions of dollars (and they don't get it by writing checks I know) but they supposedly have some of the "best minds" out there.. and yet their products and interfaces are so scrappy? I know being Microsoft isn't easy.. they've got to be compatible, they've got lots of products to integrate.. lots of hardware to support.. but heck, can't they at least get decent interface design? It's not like it's a billion dollar job. Even people working for nothing, like the xfce people, do a better job.
Postal 2 may let you kill anyone you want in bloody and disgusting ways - but that's not what it is about either. It is, by nature, a tech demo in the abilities of programmers and AI.
Oh, so 9/11 was just a demonstration of how well a plane can stay intact when colliding with a building.. and the Unabomber was just testing the ability for volatile materials to stay intact through the USPS? I can get used to making up this sort of bullshit!
I always find the results to be way higher than what anyone I know in the industry makes, senior positions or not. You get results showing things like the average entry level Perl coder makes $50K.. are they heck! Perhaps I just know a lot of people who work at sweatshops.
They have the gravitational wobble effect on the star, which gives them mass.
I'm no astrophysicist, but if there are other undiscovered planets orbiting this star wouldn't they invalidate any calculations to get the mass for this planet?
I think I wrote my post in a ambiguous, confusing manner.. oops! I apologise for that.
I was trying to get at the point that something more like the Creative Commons licenses for code would work well. The Creative Commons licenses let individual content creators add and remove certain provisos to the core license, whereas the GPL is rather concrete, and many people do not understand what it actually states. CC licenses, on the other hand, are very simple and flexible.
As a semi-open source developer (most of my code is closed, but some is open) I have noticed a big swing away from the GPL in many areas. The Ruby on Rails project is MIT licensed, and most Rails developers who release their code also use the MIT or BSD license.
Major projects like Apache, MySQL, X11, Perl, and PHP eschew the GPL in favor for homebrew alternatives, and while the GPL offers a single license for a disparate range of software.. I agree with ESR, and I believe that licensing of open source software may be better done in a simpler, less arcane way.
PHP websites are more vulnerable to worms. Just six months ago, many PHP run forums were shut down and destroyed. The exploit was something that worked only with PHP forums.
I don't think PHP sites are inherently more vulnerable because they use PHP. I think it's because PHP coders are more likely to be amateurs, and PHP projects more likely to be developed by new coders, that they'd have holes. It's not a failure of PHP IMHO. It just happens that more bad coders use PHP.
I hope you don't take this as needless criticism.
:)
One problem is working out how to buy. It looks obvious to you, but I got to the site, read what I could see "above the fold", then clicked around, and went to "Shop" to see how much the CD was, then couldn't find it there. I stumbled across it eventually, but, yes, most users are as dumb as I am. The "buy" link is not underlined and is in tiny text, which makes it even less obvious.
Furthermore, I'd say you should also have the album available to buy in dollars. I know PayPal does dollars, but Americans are touchy when it comes to other currencies. Also, buying a physical CD will put a lot of people off (myself included, I'm afraid), as nowadays we'd rather pay a little less and get some high quality MP3 files. All CDs I'm forced to buy end up getting ripped then thrown on the trash pile anyway. I'm sure it's the same for a lot of us.
Anyway... I have just downloaded a couple of your tracks and will now check them out.. from the text description it sounds right up my alley!