Step 1: Join Scavenge mode with your mic on, play with randoms. Step 2: Rate the players you encounter...prefer the more mature ones, dislike the screaming 14 yr old. Step 3: Add players you come to recognize/come to recognize you.
Doing this, I've added 3 L4D2 buddies, on top of my RL friends who own the game.
This doesn't really work though. The infrastructure was built using government funds. It has already been paid for. Any usage fees are upkeep and profit. Guess which one is the reason the fees keep going up?
Yeah, bunch of linux droids around here who think MySQL and Oracle are the Big Boys. Funny they forget Microsoft. If anybody's going to eat Oracle's lunch in the database market it's MS. Frankly SQL 2005 was better by a lot of metrics than Oracle, 2008 has just extended that. But most around here live in some kind of reality distortion field (i.e. don't know what the fuck they're talking about).
Man...what glue were you huffing? What metrics? Imaginary marketspeak metrics?
First-hand experience: It's a hell of a lot easier to script DBA tasks in Oracle than in SQL Server 2005. The backup, cloning, and recovery is no contest: Oracle beats the shit out of SQL Server, even on windows (and even better than that on any flavor of *NIX or Solaris).
A GPS also typically presents a very small view onto a route with no abaility to get an overview of the surrounding area. Sometimes it may really be better to go from A to C via B for other reasons. This in particular can be mitigated by the use of other services such as Google Earth/Maps on a laptop as a backup.
Funny, my cheap ($200) GPS can do exactly what you describe. Tap screen to get overhead map view, zoom out a few times. Done.
Sure. But how many copies will a pure single-player gamer (who will only play through the game once and then shelve it) buy? One. How many copies will a hardcore multi-player gamer (who will play it obsessively for years and years until he finally croaks in an internet café) buy? One. Once you've bought your copy, it doesn't matter how much or for how long you play it.
Maybe true now, where digital download is the new thing..But my gamer friends and I (6 of us) have paid for at least 10 copies of Starcraft over the years, due to lost CD-keys and hardware failures/upgrades.
Sorry but I'll use my limited resources and political capital for projects that make sense to me and the business, not to make some web developers life easier.
Here's some business sense for you:
Business is all about minimizing risk. By trying to minimize current costs, you could end up spending a lot more in the long run simply because you're increasing the risk (in the form of increased damages, or increased likelihood of happening). Is it better to have a small staff work on training and upgrading a new system now, so that you are prepared to switch over quickly, or to have your entire IT staff cleaning up a mess because one of your employees visited an exploit site?
The only possible strategy for us would be to move to Firefox for general web browsing but that requires significant additional effort and buy-in from the users.
Seriously? Significant effort? I've got your strategy right here:
1. Lock down IE6 to only be usable with your enterprise applications, making it unusable for any other web browsing. (A proxy setting would make this trivial)
2. Install $BROWSER.
3. Send email to users, stating web browsing will no longer be possible in IE6, and they must use $BROWSER. If they don't like it, too fucking bad. There are plenty of qualified people looking for jobs that could do what they do for less pay.
Total effort required: 1 hour for a system admin to make a group policy change to IE. Deploy Firefox (only hard if you don't have any sort of remote installation) 10 minutes to compose email.
Savings: The risk that some idiot employee takes down your whole network due to an exploit for an unsupported browser.
Yes, that is true...but look at what else star trek is, which the movie does well, in my opinion:
Action, mixed with a good balance of techno-babble...check.
Witty banter between crew members...check.
This movie served it's function well: A reboot, which excites a new generation of fans. Look at Lost, JJ's kickoff. He deals with moral qualms and delves greatly into character interaction, which is more important to establish early on, before moving into the deep stuff.
Coming from a not-hardcore trekkie, some thoughts on your points:
1. Good point. Although, the way all those federation ships were wiped out...I don't think it would have mattered much.
2. Same as 1, except with and additional point: 7 ships wiped out relatively quickly, with no notification back to earth. This is fairly early in Trek history (not too familiar with Enterprise), so there wasn't neccesarily a need for massive planetary defenses. Hard to recall a fleet, when you have no warning...
3. Dunno, mild oversight. Black hole would have taken care of it eventually.
4. No, it was nearer to Earth, but Saturn was close enough to get in transporter range (I think). Again, slight oversight. The Narada warped away, possibly far enough to avoid interfering with the solar system (at least in the short term).
6. Don't know the extent of time skipping throughout the movie. I'm sure some other Trekkie could give a more detailed analysis.
Frankly, I loved this movie, and I rank it equal to WoK, and better in several respects. It is a different kind of Trek, one that I would love to see more movies of.
If both happened in 1998 (and I'm yet to be convinced there's been anything but more media attention to the crime rates) then they are unrelated because people in this country overwhelmingly did not own guns before that date.
Don't know the facts for sure, but that's a slightly flawed argument. The following is pure conjecture:
Knife crime might have risen because the majority of handgun owners were in an area where they worried about getting stabbed. Take away their guns, guess what? Now they're getting stabbed.
So in that case, the handgun banning and knife crime WOULD be related, because before the ban, there was no knife crime.
In essence, a gun ban created crime where there was none before.
Fuck that, any european barista knows their shit way better than any of us non euros could wish for. Turkish coffee is easily the worlds best though, preferably right next to Cuban cigars.
Actually, Cuban cigars are crap now. Lack of proper farming techniques have rendered their crops crap. The only reason they still sell is on reputation alone. Dominican cigars are now top of the line, fwiw.
And EVEN if this game was in the market it would still be pirated. So again, stop attempting to justify this fud. People pirate because they don't want to pay the cost of the game. Not playing Mother 3 will not cause you to die so get over it.
This is incorrect. If there was a legit English copy, there would be far fewer pirated copies, simply because people might not want to go through the hassle of setting up a chipped system to play one game.
Look at TV piracy. If every show I watched showed up On-Demand a day later, I wouldn't download any TV episodes. Case in point: I didn't download a single episode of Dexter, because I could watch them all On-Demand. I download every episode of Dollhouse because I can't.
I download Dr.Who, because I don't want to wait for months for my next fix. If I could watch Dr.Who legally less than a week later, I wouldn't pirate it.
In these examples, explain how a 3rd party is affected: Tobacco: Smoked at home, or outdoors away from crowds (regular air pollution is far worse) Cannabis: When vaporized or eaten Alcohol: Drank at home, and didn't go out to drive
The long and short of it is that almost anything we do can have an affect on 3rd parties. But this stems from irresponsible usage of anything: drugs, video games, food, automobiles.
The root cause is responsibility, not the substance. That's why we punish drunk drivers, not ban alcohol. The killer, not the gun.
Banning drugs just leads to the creation of worse drugs, similar to how if we ban a weapon, a new weapon will be used to fill the void. If cocaine was available cheaply and legally...would crystal meth even exist? And I think we can agree that crystal meth is far more dangerous than cocaine.
The simple truth of the matter is that Linux has roughly the market share that is shown on these websites. Sure, it will be different for every website. Sure, there will be users who change their user-agent strings. That's what averages are for.
Assuming: Windows: 88% Mac: 10% Linux: 2%
Suppose 80% of Linux users are masquerading around as windows users 100% of the time. Look at the percentages now: Windows: 80% Mac: 10% Linux: 10%
If user-agent switching was the sole cause of the discrepancy, a simple survey of Linux users could determine a "true" result. However, unless that result is much greater than 50%, it means Linux still has next to no market share.
$.75 manufacturing (including damaged/returned items) $1.50 shipping/packing/distribution $1.50 advertising $2.50 retail mark-up (for the store selling it) $.75 effectively going to various taxes/fees $1.50 to the record label $1.50 to the artist
Let me fix that for you: $1.25 manufacturing/shipping/packing/distribution $.50 retail markup (News flash: Retail distributors don't make squat on CDs and DVDs. They are used to lure customers in to buy other stuff) $0.0 going to various taxes/fees. Those are all included in other cost estimates. $1.20 going to artist $8.05 going to record label
Significant difference if you ask me. Also keep in mind that the artist has to pay the label back for some expenses from that $1.20 cut of theirs. Weird Al gets something like $0.35 for each CD.
Because they offer nothing that I want to listen to or watch.
No. If you don't think that there is any form of media that you would possibly want to listen to or watch, then you obviously have no appreciation for music or movies.
I haven't purchased a CD in over 4 years
News flash: You can download plenty of old music, movies. You don't necessarily have to get "the latest and greatest." Some of my favorite "new" music was actually made in 1997, but I never heard of it because it didn't get any radio time.
I can get plenty of live music locally
You can also download plenty of recorded music from regional bands from around the globe, not just what you are restricted to geographically.
I cannot even remember the last movie that I went to the cinema to watch...and all those ever so expensive movies end up on TV within six months and I don't have to pay anything extra to watch them. Should I wish, I can also record them from TV without breaking any laws.
So...you can watch a horribly edited, commercial-laden version of a movie months, maybe even years after it came out? Instead of a full, unedited version possibly weeks BEFORE it came out?
Also...some of the best movies never receive air-time on major networks, because they're too busy showing the Austin Powers movies over and over again. Watch "Old Boy." One of my favorite movies. Will never air on American TV, and even if it did...it would not be the same movie.
That's why I object to having to pay a tax just so that others can continue to download illegally.
I object paying a tax so that you can send your kids to school. I don't have kids, why should I pay? Maybe you shouldn't have kids, or home school them.
Slashdot Mirror
On the Xbox at least, this is easy to do:
Step 1: Join Scavenge mode with your mic on, play with randoms.
Step 2: Rate the players you encounter...prefer the more mature ones, dislike the screaming 14 yr old.
Step 3: Add players you come to recognize/come to recognize you.
Doing this, I've added 3 L4D2 buddies, on top of my RL friends who own the game.
This doesn't really work though. The infrastructure was built using government funds. It has already been paid for. Any usage fees are upkeep and profit. Guess which one is the reason the fees keep going up?
Yeah, bunch of linux droids around here who think MySQL and Oracle are the Big Boys. Funny they forget Microsoft. If anybody's going to eat Oracle's lunch in the database market it's MS. Frankly SQL 2005 was better by a lot of metrics than Oracle, 2008 has just extended that. But most around here live in some kind of reality distortion field (i.e. don't know what the fuck they're talking about).
Man...what glue were you huffing? What metrics? Imaginary marketspeak metrics?
First-hand experience: It's a hell of a lot easier to script DBA tasks in Oracle than in SQL Server 2005. The backup, cloning, and recovery is no contest: Oracle beats the shit out of SQL Server, even on windows (and even better than that on any flavor of *NIX or Solaris).
A GPS also typically presents a very small view onto a route with no abaility to get an overview of the surrounding area. Sometimes it may really be better to go from A to C via B for other reasons. This in particular can be mitigated by the use of other services such as Google Earth/Maps on a laptop as a backup.
Funny, my cheap ($200) GPS can do exactly what you describe. Tap screen to get overhead map view, zoom out a few times. Done.
Sure. But how many copies will a pure single-player gamer (who will only play through the game once and then shelve it) buy? One. How many copies will a hardcore multi-player gamer (who will play it obsessively for years and years until he finally croaks in an internet café) buy? One. Once you've bought your copy, it doesn't matter how much or for how long you play it.
Maybe true now, where digital download is the new thing..But my gamer friends and I (6 of us) have paid for at least 10 copies of Starcraft over the years, due to lost CD-keys and hardware failures/upgrades.
I have two words for you: calms forte
Best sleep aid/anti-anxiety on the planet. 4 of those and you'll have one of the best night's sleep in your life.
Sorry but I'll use my limited resources and political capital for projects that make sense to me and the business, not to make some web developers life easier.
Here's some business sense for you:
Business is all about minimizing risk. By trying to minimize current costs, you could end up spending a lot more in the long run simply because you're increasing the risk (in the form of increased damages, or increased likelihood of happening). Is it better to have a small staff work on training and upgrading a new system now, so that you are prepared to switch over quickly, or to have your entire IT staff cleaning up a mess because one of your employees visited an exploit site?
The only possible strategy for us would be to move to Firefox for general web browsing but that requires significant additional effort and buy-in from the users.
Seriously? Significant effort? I've got your strategy right here:
1. Lock down IE6 to only be usable with your enterprise applications, making it unusable for any other web browsing. (A proxy setting would make this trivial)
2. Install $BROWSER.
3. Send email to users, stating web browsing will no longer be possible in IE6, and they must use $BROWSER. If they don't like it, too fucking bad. There are plenty of qualified people looking for jobs that could do what they do for less pay.
Total effort required:
1 hour for a system admin to make a group policy change to IE.
Deploy Firefox (only hard if you don't have any sort of remote installation)
10 minutes to compose email.
Savings: The risk that some idiot employee takes down your whole network due to an exploit for an unsupported browser.
I would only need one domain on that list:
experts-exchange.com
Yes, that is true...but look at what else star trek is, which the movie does well, in my opinion:
Action, mixed with a good balance of techno-babble...check.
Witty banter between crew members...check.
This movie served it's function well: A reboot, which excites a new generation of fans. Look at Lost, JJ's kickoff. He deals with moral qualms and delves greatly into character interaction, which is more important to establish early on, before moving into the deep stuff.
Coming from a not-hardcore trekkie, some thoughts on your points:
1. Good point. Although, the way all those federation ships were wiped out...I don't think it would have mattered much.
2. Same as 1, except with and additional point: 7 ships wiped out relatively quickly, with no notification back to earth. This is fairly early in Trek history (not too familiar with Enterprise), so there wasn't neccesarily a need for massive planetary defenses. Hard to recall a fleet, when you have no warning...
3. Dunno, mild oversight. Black hole would have taken care of it eventually.
4. No, it was nearer to Earth, but Saturn was close enough to get in transporter range (I think). Again, slight oversight. The Narada warped away, possibly far enough to avoid interfering with the solar system (at least in the short term).
6. Don't know the extent of time skipping throughout the movie. I'm sure some other Trekkie could give a more detailed analysis.
Frankly, I loved this movie, and I rank it equal to WoK, and better in several respects. It is a different kind of Trek, one that I would love to see more movies of.
Though, if Obama sticks to his promise about not raising taxes by a single cent for the bottom 95% of income earners, he should veto this bill.
He already broke that promise with the cigarette tax. More poor people smoke than rich people.
No silly. Everyone knows that "The Baby Jesus" is sqrt(-1)!
That's a dumb argument.
Show me a remote control that plugs in and recharges like a smart phone.
That's a dumber counter-argument.
Why would I need to plug in a remote that lasts for months?
If both happened in 1998 (and I'm yet to be convinced there's been anything but more media attention to the crime rates) then they are unrelated because people in this country overwhelmingly did not own guns before that date.
Don't know the facts for sure, but that's a slightly flawed argument. The following is pure conjecture:
Knife crime might have risen because the majority of handgun owners were in an area where they worried about getting stabbed. Take away their guns, guess what? Now they're getting stabbed.
So in that case, the handgun banning and knife crime WOULD be related, because before the ban, there was no knife crime.
In essence, a gun ban created crime where there was none before.
Fuck that, any european barista knows their shit way better than any of us non euros could wish for. Turkish coffee is easily the worlds best though, preferably right next to Cuban cigars.
Actually, Cuban cigars are crap now. Lack of proper farming techniques have rendered their crops crap. The only reason they still sell is on reputation alone. Dominican cigars are now top of the line, fwiw.
And EVEN if this game was in the market it would still be pirated. So again, stop attempting to justify this fud. People pirate because they don't want to pay the cost of the game. Not playing Mother 3 will not cause you to die so get over it.
This is incorrect. If there was a legit English copy, there would be far fewer pirated copies, simply because people might not want to go through the hassle of setting up a chipped system to play one game.
Look at TV piracy. If every show I watched showed up On-Demand a day later, I wouldn't download any TV episodes. Case in point: I didn't download a single episode of Dexter, because I could watch them all On-Demand. I download every episode of Dollhouse because I can't.
I download Dr.Who, because I don't want to wait for months for my next fix. If I could watch Dr.Who legally less than a week later, I wouldn't pirate it.
Availability decreases piracy.
I seriously doubt that.
People with their first character don't even know how to turn with a mouse, let alone install addons.
This stuff happened in WoW BEFORE QuestHelper even existed. People are idiots. It's part of playing an MMO.
Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram.
Sir...I call bullshit. I can run Questhelper fine on a crappy Compaq laptop running Vista on 1 GB of RAM.
Although TourGuide (w/ the WoW-Pro guides) is better, and I use that now anyway.
Ok, counterpoint:
In these examples, explain how a 3rd party is affected:
Tobacco: Smoked at home, or outdoors away from crowds (regular air pollution is far worse)
Cannabis: When vaporized or eaten
Alcohol: Drank at home, and didn't go out to drive
The long and short of it is that almost anything we do can have an affect on 3rd parties. But this stems from irresponsible usage of anything: drugs, video games, food, automobiles.
The root cause is responsibility, not the substance. That's why we punish drunk drivers, not ban alcohol. The killer, not the gun.
Banning drugs just leads to the creation of worse drugs, similar to how if we ban a weapon, a new weapon will be used to fill the void. If cocaine was available cheaply and legally...would crystal meth even exist? And I think we can agree that crystal meth is far more dangerous than cocaine.
Undoing some mods for this....
WWWWOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSHHH!
The simple truth of the matter is that Linux has roughly the market share that is shown on these websites. Sure, it will be different for every website. Sure, there will be users who change their user-agent strings. That's what averages are for.
Assuming:
Windows: 88%
Mac: 10%
Linux: 2%
Suppose 80% of Linux users are masquerading around as windows users 100% of the time. Look at the percentages now:
Windows: 80%
Mac: 10%
Linux: 10%
If user-agent switching was the sole cause of the discrepancy, a simple survey of Linux users could determine a "true" result. However, unless that result is much greater than 50%, it means Linux still has next to no market share.
Source:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=120&qpmr=100&qpdt=1&qpct=0&qpcustomc=
$.75 manufacturing (including damaged/returned items)
$1.50 shipping/packing/distribution
$1.50 advertising
$2.50 retail mark-up (for the store selling it)
$.75 effectively going to various taxes/fees
$1.50 to the record label
$1.50 to the artist
Let me fix that for you:
$1.25 manufacturing/shipping/packing/distribution
$.50 retail markup (News flash: Retail distributors don't make squat on CDs and DVDs. They are used to lure customers in to buy other stuff)
$0.0 going to various taxes/fees. Those are all included in other cost estimates.
$1.20 going to artist
$8.05 going to record label
Significant difference if you ask me. Also keep in mind that the artist has to pay the label back for some expenses from that $1.20 cut of theirs. Weird Al gets something like $0.35 for each CD.
It's not difficult to produce a no-income album. http://www.beonworkshop.com/temp/calc.html
Also look at this for printing costs:
http://www.cdprintexpress.com/CompletePackages2.aspx#over1000
Because they offer nothing that I want to listen to or watch.
No. If you don't think that there is any form of media that you would possibly want to listen to or watch, then you obviously have no appreciation for music or movies.
I haven't purchased a CD in over 4 years
News flash: You can download plenty of old music, movies. You don't necessarily have to get "the latest and greatest." Some of my favorite "new" music was actually made in 1997, but I never heard of it because it didn't get any radio time.
I can get plenty of live music locally
You can also download plenty of recorded music from regional bands from around the globe, not just what you are restricted to geographically.
I cannot even remember the last movie that I went to the cinema to watch...and all those ever so expensive movies end up on TV within six months and I don't have to pay anything extra to watch them. Should I wish, I can also record them from TV without breaking any laws.
So...you can watch a horribly edited, commercial-laden version of a movie months, maybe even years after it came out? Instead of a full, unedited version possibly weeks BEFORE it came out?
Also...some of the best movies never receive air-time on major networks, because they're too busy showing the Austin Powers movies over and over again. Watch "Old Boy." One of my favorite movies. Will never air on American TV, and even if it did...it would not be the same movie.
That's why I object to having to pay a tax just so that others can continue to download illegally.
I object paying a tax so that you can send your kids to school. I don't have kids, why should I pay? Maybe you shouldn't have kids, or home school them.
I read the summary about ClickOnce. You know what my brain saw?
ActiveX 2.0
Everything that is old is new again...
Yes, it reduces reliance on IE.
It also increases reliance on Windows, and .NET in particular.