Background/maintenance tasks! You are a hoot.
If your program is not using as much CPU as you think it should, it's not because the "idle" process isn't "giving it up". There are other bottlenecks besides the CPU - such as disk and network.
Sounds like something on your system is leaking memory, and causing a lot of swapping to disk, which would make your program wait on the swap to finish.
Ok, granted WoW is more casual-friendly than other MMO's. But it's still very casual UNfriendly to those who are used to something like FPS games. In FPS and almost any other game, you either know how to play or you don't. There's no treadmill, the faster you learn the game, the faster you become powerful in the virtual world. That concept doesn't exist in MMOs. It's virtualized, faked, artificial. Time-in-game is your biggest asset. That's is the very definition of casual UNfriendly.
What a load of utter hogwash. If you play WoW 20 minutes a day, your character will finally have all his abilities trained about 1-2 years later. Casual players are not going to grind, and they are not going to play WoW. They inevitably end up playing more than that, or quitting.
So the article is basically "How to install a bunch of shit that wasn't installed by default for good reasons". Not a good idea.
Binary drivers that are completely unsupportable.
A package manager that conflict with the default one.
3D whiz-bang eye candy that's unstable, and requires yet more binary drivers to get 3D.
But Beryl is so pretty.
Seriously, Expose (or "scale" in Beryl) is so much more effective than a taskbar, that alone is worth the price of admission. When you have 20 windows open, trying to find a tiny icon and a few characters of text that match a window you're looking for is too slow. You know what the window looks like, just find it on the screen. Couldn't be simpler.
Not only that, but sometimes you start several things going and are waiting for all of them. Rather than switching back and forth between windows, or resizing them manually, you can just "scale" and watch all of them.
When you hire someone to program for you, communication is absolutely crucial to success. If the person you hire doesn't speak the same language you do (or doesn't speak it well), you're probably not going to get what you ask for. Also consider how bad communication will be if you are unavailable (sleeping) most or all of the time they're working. You can only communicate once per day. If they have a question, they have to stop working until the next day when you've answered them.
A good portion of the time, outsourcing is just not worth it. It doesn't matter how cheap the labor is, when the product you end up with is not what you want.
My girlfriend bought a cheap Presario laptop for her mother (who only speaks Portuguese) and wanted me to configure it. It came with Vista. It was the first time I had used Vista and I thought it was God-awful. The fancy UI effects were enabled and ran terribly slowly, and I got constant security prompts. I turned these off, but it was still unacceptably slow. I suspect 512mb is too little memory for it.
I planned on wiping the drive and going back to XP, but I decided to see how Ubuntu Edgy would run, since I couldn't easily find a copy of windows in Portuguese. It was a night and day improvement, it ran the way it should, even with Beryl. My GF thinks her mother will do just fine with it.
Honestly my first impression of Vista is "train wreck". It was so unusable right off the bat, that I couldn't even explore what might be nice about it.
Hey! I've been to Phydeaux in Carrboro. Small world.
Getting back to the topic, the people you know are rich and/or non-technical.
Personally I would drop windows in an instant if I had a choice of paying for it, or switching to Ubuntu (or forking out more dough for a mac).
I don't know, I hear about all these problems. So you'd think that since I'm a casual player who just hit 60, wearing blues and greens, playing in nothing but PUGs, I'd be getting my ass handed to me by epic'd out pre-mades.
Yet, it doesn't happen. We win AB 85% of the time, and AV about 50%. But even the bg's we lose, it's not a slaughter. I am not seeing these unbeatable premade teams. How do my PUG's win 85% in AB? Now that we have cross-realm bg's, it has nothing to do with my realm, right?
I don't know that it's even possible to implement a PvP system that's bears any resemblance to actual war, and is also fun.
The problem is that it's a zero sum game. The joy people get from being on the winning side is reflected by equal suffering on the losing side. When you try to scale up the joy (say, by creating month-long campaigns), you scale up the suffering for half your subscribers and they end up quitting. Games are supposed to be fun, after all. After 3 iterations of this, you only have 12% of your subscribers left. Not a smart game design.
The only model that works are quick skirmishes that are run over and over again, a la WoW. So that even when you lose, it's quick and you have another chance to win immediately after. Sure they get old and aren't that rewarding even when you win. But I don't see any other way to do it.
Why exactly should a person be proud to serve their country? The vast majority of people are only citizens of that country because (to paraphrase Chris Rock) that's where they came out of their mama's pussy.
And lo and behold, about 18 years later, their beliefs and values and desires are directly in line with the politicians who run that country. And that is, to blow up people in another country. Coincidence? I don't think so. How often do people choose to serve some other nation's military?
You only get to choose *if* you serve, not who.
Most viruses these days aren't really interested in destroying your data. The only negative effect is that they consume resources and slow down your computer.
But not half as much as AV scans do! Your computer is useless for several hours while AV sifts through every single byte on your hard drive. Oh and those "live" scans? Watch out for race conditions! Any other software that monitors filesystem changes (such as google desktop) will set your computer to "perma thrash".
I'd rather have a virus.
Ok, i'm not a "typical" user. But i disable AV on almost every computer I use. I've gotten an infection here and there, but it's easy enough for me to identify the offending process, look up how to disinfect, and remove it. And yeah, i know you can stop the race condition I mentioned by telling Google Desktop to skip the AV program's files. My point is that AV produces the exact same symptoms of the disease it claims to cure.
I'm not a networking guy, but I thought TCP packets required one and only one IP address.
Well, technically that is true that you can only have 1 destination address per packet. However, when the destination address is the subnet's broadcast address (for instance 192.168.0.255 on some people's home networks), the network hardware will fire off a packet to everyone on the subnet.
Using broadcast could definitely work in the GP's scenario.
Firstly, there is an upper limit (temperature-wise) in which humans can survive. There are areas near the equator which are beyond this limit now, and a slight increase in temperature would enlarge them considerably - possibly as far as Spain, or equivilant southwards.
That's absurd. There's no "areas near the equator" that are too hot for humans to survive. There's no such "area" anywhere on earth. Daily temps of 120+ are easily survivable - Las Vegas sees that regularly. See, humans have these things called "sweat glands". All they need is water and they can survive the heat.
But what if there's no water, you say? Well then, the problem isn't the heat.
In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
Um, NOBODY noticed the obvious error in this statement?
They're saying one bulb equals 1.3 million cars? So if we change 1000 bulbs, it'll be like taking 1.3 BILLION cars off the road (in other words, every car in the entire world).
Well why didn't anyone say so! This whole Middle East/oil/terrorism/environment thing could be solved just by changing the lightbulbs in the freaking White House.
I guess the conspiracy theorists were right!
Nor is it the world's fastest kayak, at least not according to TFA. The best it's finished in a competitive race is 6 seconds out of 1st place.
So? It could still be the world's fastest kayak. Maybe it's the kayaker who isn't so great.
"Microsoft has done in hardening the security of the Windows operating system has forced the bad guys to look for lower-hanging fruit in applications that run on top of Windows"
Um. Isn't "lower hanging fruit" the easier fruit to get? I think you mean just the opposite, Mr. Editor.
World of Warcraft is a game, but you're not the one playing it.
Your character is.
To prove this, play a lvl60 character, and fight someone who's lvl30. You win easily right? You're so good at the game! Now log on with a new lvl1 character, and fight the same guy. You are obliterated.
So it's not *you*, the human player who is improving his skills at a game. It's your character.
It should have been a java applet. Then it could have been done ten years ago.
Ajax and a lot of other web technologies are terrible hacks that applets have always been a simpler solution for.
HTML was designed to contain *documents*, not applications. Everything on top of HTML (javascript, Ajax) is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. The base of all web applications (HTML) was not designed to do what it's being used for, I wish it would just topple over already so we can move on to something more elegant.
Applets were originally designed to be real applications that could be automatically downloaded and run anywhere via a web browser. I still think they are much simpler to develop than Ajax/HTML. I never understood why the tide turned against applets. Too hard to install the plugin? Not really a problem these days.
Applets also give you more control over what the application does on your system. A runaway javascript routine or flash app (cough, advertisements) are harder to regain control from (without killing your browser process which would take other webapps down with it). A JVM you can just reduce priority or raise niceness.
Ha, that's what I thought when I shorted GOOG at $195. But I underestimated just how far the love affair with Google would go, I ended up bailing out. It could reach 600, 800, 1000 before it comes back down to earth. Who knows. I thought $80 was too high when it IPO'd.
In all honesty I think they'll make lots of money in the next few years, but I doubt they'll be able to hold onto the reins in the long term. Microsoft has wiped lots of innovative and profitable companies off the map before. But then again, someone someday is going to unseat Microsoft as king of the mountain. I don't think Google is the one to do it, I just don't see them competing with a lot of MS's core products.
Microsoft: please, for the love of god, implement KILL -9. Without a reboot. Thanks.
This is at least one step closer to kill -9. Try pskill.exe from sysinternals.com. It can kill a lot of processes that in Task Manager tell you "Access Denied".
There are a few processes it won't kill (and i don't mean critical OS processes - it WILL allow you to kill those). But the same is true for 'kill -9'.
Hey at least they both did "War of the Worlds" in addition to having the same last name, so you can see why it's easy to confuse them. So it's not as bad as Homer Simpson confusing Cesar Chavez with Caesar Romero.
Maybe you should lower your standards. These days, I'm impressed when people are able to tell the difference between "its" and "it's".
That's ridiculous. Nobody wants context sensitive ads on maps.
If your map is telling you how to get to your friend's new house, why would you want an ad for some business that happens to be on the way? You don't care to buy anything, you just want a map. Ads are irrelevant. The reason people like Google (amongst others) is that their ads are at least somewhat relevant.
Google local search is different from the main search engine. The local search already has a logical way of sorting what results are most relevant - by distance. On a map, businesses are already visible because of their proximity. No business 100 miles away is going to pay big bucks to be moved up to #1. No one is going to drive that far anyway.
I just don't see ads on maps as a viable source of revenue for them. If they make everyone pay to appear on their map, then no end users will bother with the mapping service, because it lacks the information that you currently have on google local search. If they don't make people pay to appear on the map (the current situation), no one will pay, because they will already be visible to their target audience.
This solution won't work either. There is just no completely reliable way to tell whether an incoming email from someone you don't know is wanted or not, without reading it. Filtering by domain-based keys isn't granular enough - it wouldn't separate individual users of the domain. Some may be legit while others are (perhaps unwittingly) spammers. You could block ALL unknown senders, but that would make establishing communication with anyone rather difficult.
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Background/maintenance tasks! You are a hoot. If your program is not using as much CPU as you think it should, it's not because the "idle" process isn't "giving it up". There are other bottlenecks besides the CPU - such as disk and network. Sounds like something on your system is leaking memory, and causing a lot of swapping to disk, which would make your program wait on the swap to finish.
Ok, granted WoW is more casual-friendly than other MMO's. But it's still very casual UNfriendly to those who are used to something like FPS games. In FPS and almost any other game, you either know how to play or you don't. There's no treadmill, the faster you learn the game, the faster you become powerful in the virtual world. That concept doesn't exist in MMOs. It's virtualized, faked, artificial. Time-in-game is your biggest asset. That's is the very definition of casual UNfriendly.
What a load of utter hogwash. If you play WoW 20 minutes a day, your character will finally have all his abilities trained about 1-2 years later. Casual players are not going to grind, and they are not going to play WoW. They inevitably end up playing more than that, or quitting.
But Beryl is so pretty.
Seriously, Expose (or "scale" in Beryl) is so much more effective than a taskbar, that alone is worth the price of admission. When you have 20 windows open, trying to find a tiny icon and a few characters of text that match a window you're looking for is too slow. You know what the window looks like, just find it on the screen. Couldn't be simpler.
Not only that, but sometimes you start several things going and are waiting for all of them. Rather than switching back and forth between windows, or resizing them manually, you can just "scale" and watch all of them.
I can't think of a single thing Americans are "starved" of, compared to the rest of the world.
When you hire someone to program for you, communication is absolutely crucial to success. If the person you hire doesn't speak the same language you do (or doesn't speak it well), you're probably not going to get what you ask for. Also consider how bad communication will be if you are unavailable (sleeping) most or all of the time they're working. You can only communicate once per day. If they have a question, they have to stop working until the next day when you've answered them.
A good portion of the time, outsourcing is just not worth it. It doesn't matter how cheap the labor is, when the product you end up with is not what you want.
My girlfriend bought a cheap Presario laptop for her mother (who only speaks Portuguese) and wanted me to configure it. It came with Vista. It was the first time I had used Vista and I thought it was God-awful. The fancy UI effects were enabled and ran terribly slowly, and I got constant security prompts. I turned these off, but it was still unacceptably slow. I suspect 512mb is too little memory for it.
I planned on wiping the drive and going back to XP, but I decided to see how Ubuntu Edgy would run, since I couldn't easily find a copy of windows in Portuguese. It was a night and day improvement, it ran the way it should, even with Beryl. My GF thinks her mother will do just fine with it.
Honestly my first impression of Vista is "train wreck". It was so unusable right off the bat, that I couldn't even explore what might be nice about it.
Hey! I've been to Phydeaux in Carrboro. Small world. Getting back to the topic, the people you know are rich and/or non-technical. Personally I would drop windows in an instant if I had a choice of paying for it, or switching to Ubuntu (or forking out more dough for a mac).
Yet, it doesn't happen. We win AB 85% of the time, and AV about 50%. But even the bg's we lose, it's not a slaughter. I am not seeing these unbeatable premade teams. How do my PUG's win 85% in AB? Now that we have cross-realm bg's, it has nothing to do with my realm, right?
I don't know that it's even possible to implement a PvP system that's bears any resemblance to actual war, and is also fun.
The problem is that it's a zero sum game. The joy people get from being on the winning side is reflected by equal suffering on the losing side. When you try to scale up the joy (say, by creating month-long campaigns), you scale up the suffering for half your subscribers and they end up quitting. Games are supposed to be fun, after all. After 3 iterations of this, you only have 12% of your subscribers left. Not a smart game design.
The only model that works are quick skirmishes that are run over and over again, a la WoW. So that even when you lose, it's quick and you have another chance to win immediately after. Sure they get old and aren't that rewarding even when you win. But I don't see any other way to do it.
Why exactly should a person be proud to serve their country? The vast majority of people are only citizens of that country because (to paraphrase Chris Rock) that's where they came out of their mama's pussy. And lo and behold, about 18 years later, their beliefs and values and desires are directly in line with the politicians who run that country. And that is, to blow up people in another country. Coincidence? I don't think so. How often do people choose to serve some other nation's military? You only get to choose *if* you serve, not who.
Most viruses these days aren't really interested in destroying your data. The only negative effect is that they consume resources and slow down your computer.
But not half as much as AV scans do! Your computer is useless for several hours while AV sifts through every single byte on your hard drive. Oh and those "live" scans? Watch out for race conditions! Any other software that monitors filesystem changes (such as google desktop) will set your computer to "perma thrash".
I'd rather have a virus.
Ok, i'm not a "typical" user. But i disable AV on almost every computer I use. I've gotten an infection here and there, but it's easy enough for me to identify the offending process, look up how to disinfect, and remove it. And yeah, i know you can stop the race condition I mentioned by telling Google Desktop to skip the AV program's files. My point is that AV produces the exact same symptoms of the disease it claims to cure.
Won't your database get full of posts that were never verified? I suppose you could auto-expire them.
Using broadcast could definitely work in the GP's scenario.
That's absurd. There's no "areas near the equator" that are too hot for humans to survive. There's no such "area" anywhere on earth. Daily temps of 120+ are easily survivable - Las Vegas sees that regularly. See, humans have these things called "sweat glands". All they need is water and they can survive the heat.
But what if there's no water, you say? Well then, the problem isn't the heat.
Nor is it the world's fastest kayak, at least not according to TFA. The best it's finished in a competitive race is 6 seconds out of 1st place. So? It could still be the world's fastest kayak. Maybe it's the kayaker who isn't so great.
Um. Isn't "lower hanging fruit" the easier fruit to get? I think you mean just the opposite, Mr. Editor.
So it's not *you*, the human player who is improving his skills at a game. It's your character.
And that is why WoW is a complete waste of time*
* I play several hours a day.
Applets were originally designed to be real applications that could be automatically downloaded and run anywhere via a web browser. I still think they are much simpler to develop than Ajax/HTML. I never understood why the tide turned against applets. Too hard to install the plugin? Not really a problem these days.
Applets also give you more control over what the application does on your system. A runaway javascript routine or flash app (cough, advertisements) are harder to regain control from (without killing your browser process which would take other webapps down with it). A JVM you can just reduce priority or raise niceness.
In all honesty I think they'll make lots of money in the next few years, but I doubt they'll be able to hold onto the reins in the long term. Microsoft has wiped lots of innovative and profitable companies off the map before. But then again, someone someday is going to unseat Microsoft as king of the mountain. I don't think Google is the one to do it, I just don't see them competing with a lot of MS's core products.
This is at least one step closer to kill -9. Try pskill.exe from sysinternals.com. It can kill a lot of processes that in Task Manager tell you "Access Denied".
There are a few processes it won't kill (and i don't mean critical OS processes - it WILL allow you to kill those). But the same is true for 'kill -9'.
Maybe you should lower your standards. These days, I'm impressed when people are able to tell the difference between "its" and "it's".
That's ridiculous. Nobody wants context sensitive ads on maps. If your map is telling you how to get to your friend's new house, why would you want an ad for some business that happens to be on the way? You don't care to buy anything, you just want a map. Ads are irrelevant. The reason people like Google (amongst others) is that their ads are at least somewhat relevant. Google local search is different from the main search engine. The local search already has a logical way of sorting what results are most relevant - by distance. On a map, businesses are already visible because of their proximity. No business 100 miles away is going to pay big bucks to be moved up to #1. No one is going to drive that far anyway. I just don't see ads on maps as a viable source of revenue for them. If they make everyone pay to appear on their map, then no end users will bother with the mapping service, because it lacks the information that you currently have on google local search. If they don't make people pay to appear on the map (the current situation), no one will pay, because they will already be visible to their target audience.
This solution won't work either. There is just no completely reliable way to tell whether an incoming email from someone you don't know is wanted or not, without reading it. Filtering by domain-based keys isn't granular enough - it wouldn't separate individual users of the domain. Some may be legit while others are (perhaps unwittingly) spammers. You could block ALL unknown senders, but that would make establishing communication with anyone rather difficult.