This simply isn't true. The amount of data transferred per hour is something like 30mb down and 3mb up. That's not a lot of data. Additionally, are you seriously trying to tell me that for every person playing SimCity, they've got some sort of a massive high end computational system setup remotely to calculate everything?
Very little is done remotely. All of your own city's activities are calculated locally on your machine. The server clearly only handles "state" and possibly any interaction between cities in the region (which is also limited).
After playing the game for a very short period, it'll be clear just how little the servers are actually doing, other than maintaining the save state.
I haven't had a single problem since I played the first time the night of the launch.
All the problems I've run into are simply the shitty game, itself, with all the problems everyone has already covered a thousand times over (social, regional stuff, tiny cities, crappy road system, inability to build an all inclusive city, etc).
After playing for a bit, I wanted to reset my city and start from scratch, again. I could not find any way to do it, whatsoever.
Eventually I got tired of it (probably about five hours worth of play, into it) and I don't know that I'll ever go back to it. I wasted my money and I regret it. I buy a lot of games and put up with a lot of let-downs as just part of being a gamer, but this one felt like a particular waste of money. Especially after all these years of being excited that someday we'd eventually have a new awesome Sim City game with all that having it on modern hardware would offer (which, as it turns out, is nothing).
I don't see the point of any of this. Either you are productive or you are not. The work you do should be pretty easy to evaluate. What's with all the silly stuff like "how often did you xyz from the VPN"? Granted, I am constantly using our company VPN, because it's necessary for me to access a lot of vital information -- but it is not directly indicative at all of how much or little actual work I produce.
Excessive use of a service for content you already have access to (but maybe not to that extent) justifies threatening him with the rest of his life in prison? Are you mother fucking insane? You slap him with some community service, a record, and maybe at the most extreme a short probation.
For all we know, he could have been using the systems in that closet to access the military's launch command for nuclear missiles! We should have executed him for treason, by that same line.
My understanding of the case is that Swartz "broke the law" int he same way that Slashdot telling me "you can't mass download content from Slashdot" when I create my account here and then writing a spider that ignores robots.txt and the terms of service when I signed up and just crawls and downloads all the Slashdot content.
Hell, plenty of companies and web services are guilty of that, due to poor writing of their spiders that go nuts (sometimes even crushing their victims, by accident) until they catch on and fix them.
Who cares which president was worse? They were both fucking incredibly detrimental to the country and the next guy will be, too. We have crossed a threshold and we won't ever be back to pre 9-11 days. Things will only become more restrictive and absurd and the justification for them more ludicrous. The things we've lost in the last dozen years are things which you don't get back without starting over from a clean slate and that will never ever happen in this country.
Most Americans don't know that they're being oppressed, happily give up their freedoms, and relish the opportunity to strip others of theirs -- especially if it is in pursuit of pushing their own personal (usually religious) morality, while they're at it.
We have to teach citizens not to misbehave or dissent now. It might have cost a fairly innocent, innovative, and (from what I've understood) nice young man's life, but at least it serves as an example to the rest of us to shut the fuck up, put our heads down, and fucking behave less we be the next example.
Exactly. And fifteen days of minor inconvenience for a few people that might have utilized this service from your campus demands the individual responsible for excessive use of that access (and violation of a TOS -- oh noes!) spend the rest of their life in prison, among hardened criminals.
Most people who get arrested actually committed a crime.
Case in point, it's really east to be an opinionated asshole if you base you opinion on politics not reality.
What an idiotic statement. That ranks right up there with "where there's smoke, there's fire" and "if you have nothing to hide, why do you need privacy?" and "he must be guilty of something, because they're investigating, questioning, or arresting him". None of which is true. All of which is a detriment to our idealized system of justice, where people are innocent until proven otherwise and, sometimes, guilty but justifiable.
Plea bargains are an abomination of US justice system whose only purpose is to blackmail people into forfeiting their constitutional rights.
Show me the part of the constitution where it says "And the state shall not do anything that might make administration of the judicial process cheaper, faster, and more efficient." There's no depriving of due process, there's nothing saying the defendant can't have the right not to self-incriminate. Plea bargaining is just that: Bargaining. And there's nothing in the constitution that says you can't bargain with the prosecutor, or vice versa.
But by all means, beat your chest and rip up the grass thinking people are being "blackmailed" to give up their non-existant non-rights. This is the internet afterall, where everyone's an armchair constitutional scholar!
Actually, that is pretty much exactly depriving the defendant of due process. Due process is not merely about "getting a trial in a reasonable amount of time". It's about fair, non-arbitrary, reasonable treatment.
But by all means, continue offering excuses for treating the prosecution of citizens like a game to gather the most points before leveling up rather than dealing with a human being's life.
Really? That's the only complaint? You haven't seen all the complaints of how idiotic and unappealing the region stuff is? How prone it is to abuse by griefers? How constraining the tiny city spaces feel? How rudimentary the transportation feels?
I like SimCity, because I get to be the mayor of an ever-growing city; not because I want to play a Facebook game with a tiny playing field or being forced to play eight or sixteen other cities all on my own, to make sure all the services and facilities I used to be able to handle in one city can no longer be done that way, because of a shitty need to justify poor DRM and online services.
Real Racing 3 won't "demand" money from you to keep playing. It just requires you to wait. A long time. After an hour of playing, I was already hitting periods where I had to wait five or ten minutes for my car to be repaired or upgraded. You can pay money to speed that up, which is the gimmick. Someone recently did the calculations and found that it would take you about 500 hours of sitting around doing nothing waiting for timers to reach the limit of the game *or* pay more than $500.
It's pretty shitty, but on the other hand, it doesn't really seem like a "real" game, to me. I mean, you can practically make it do the driving for you. If you want a real driving game, there's decent ones on the PC and consoles. Real Racing 3 seems more like a quick little toy (and a decent one, really, if you ignore the whole micro-transaction bullshit) made for playing on the toilet or at a bus stop.
Once I felt I finally had the hang of things after a few hours, I wanted to wipe my city and start over. I can find no way of doing this. I don't really think there is one. It doesn't matter, though, because in the meantime I've grown bored of it and chalked this down as an expensive disappointment.
I've played it for a few hours, now. I don't think I'll go back and I am truly regretting my purchase. I haven't felt ripped off like this for a long time. I haven't followed this as intently as I follow some other games through to launch, but there wasn't much coverage about the negatives of this game, leading up to it. All the "journalists" I read and watched covering it presented it as this massive, enormous, beautiful (meh, it isn't that impressive even on three 4gb 670s) cities with unlimited possibilities. Not once did I see them say "it's just too bad the transportation sucks and the cities are tiny as fuck".
Anyway, in the short time I've played, I've already had to upgrade almost every street I have into the biggest street possible. Even nice residential areas have six lane roads with trolly car tracks surrounding them. And even at that, there are major traffic congestion problems. No matter what your population is, it seems the bigger you make your roads, the more traffic they'll see. You'll never reach a sort of sane equilibrium.
Everyone remembers what Maxis stated about that. It's just that we're not stupid to buy that absolutely bullshit line. Do you seriously believe that, rather than letting my i7-3700K CPU right here in front of me do all the crunching, they have some massive series of super-computers somewhere that are doing the massive cumulative processing for everyone? And just how much bandwidth do you figure that is consuming? It'd be an enormous constant stream.
The ONLY thing being offloaded to the cloud is the negotiations of state between the cities in your region, operated by different players. The only reason THAT whole portion exists is to poorly justify the online component, which needs to exist to facilitate the shitty DRM.
And, frankly, all of this would be acceptable to a lot of people if the game itself wasn't so poor. No procedurally generated lands. Very small cities (too small to be able to build a self-contained city -- you run out of space quickly and have to rely on other people's cities for services that you dont physically have room for on the playfield to build).
That's a series of rather ignorant statements, considering all of the (often DRM-free) success stories on the PC.
A more accurate statement would be that lazy components within the videogame industry have been blaming piracy for the lacking success of their bad games for years.
SimCity fans want to be the mayor of a growing city - not the superintendent of eight or sixteen cities forced upon them by the nature of a game aimed to usher them into multiplayer/online ties.
Of course it doesn't matter. The same way the actual reliability of a drug sniffing dog alerting on you doesn't matter. This will be yet another thing with massive false positives that is merely used to justify the choices of the police force, without them having to accept the blame for their decisions.
I work an average of 60+ hours a week and I take zero lunch breaks. I basically have a quick breakfast before walking into my home office. I sit down. I don't get up again for 8-12 hours. By that time, I'm usually starving to the point that I almost feel sick. I find something quick to eat. Then I go do home stuff for awhile, with my day/shift over with.
Within a few hours, I usually find myself having somehow wandered back into my home office and doing work again, just because it's there and needs to be done by someone.
But, you know, I'm one of those "lazy work-from-home" people, and all, I guess.
Google allows telecommuting, but only in certain situations. It's not really part of their culture. However, enticing employees to want to be at work through extensive efforts of making the rest of their life easier is part of the google culture. Transportation, babysitting, food, relaxation, concierge services, and plenty of other initiatives are available. That is not something most other companies are doing. After the dot-bomb days, most of those things were axed and you might be fortunate if your company offers a free doughnut or bagel to the office one day a week.
Google's office environment is unique. You can't just say "well, google doesn't like telecommuting, so there you go!" is disingenuous. The important thing to take away from what google does is "Google places emphasis on making the office environment one that is desirable to employees and serves their interests to the fullest possible extent so that employees want to be in that office". In other words, your mileage may vary if you follow the "no telecommuting" principal, but don't change your shitty office environment that treats employees less as an asset and more as a liability.
Slashdot Mirror
This simply isn't true. The amount of data transferred per hour is something like 30mb down and 3mb up. That's not a lot of data. Additionally, are you seriously trying to tell me that for every person playing SimCity, they've got some sort of a massive high end computational system setup remotely to calculate everything?
Very little is done remotely. All of your own city's activities are calculated locally on your machine. The server clearly only handles "state" and possibly any interaction between cities in the region (which is also limited).
After playing the game for a very short period, it'll be clear just how little the servers are actually doing, other than maintaining the save state.
And when/if sales are lackluster because of the shit DRM or the shit quality of the game *itself*, they'll blame *that* on "piracy".
I haven't had a single problem since I played the first time the night of the launch.
All the problems I've run into are simply the shitty game, itself, with all the problems everyone has already covered a thousand times over (social, regional stuff, tiny cities, crappy road system, inability to build an all inclusive city, etc).
After playing for a bit, I wanted to reset my city and start from scratch, again. I could not find any way to do it, whatsoever.
Eventually I got tired of it (probably about five hours worth of play, into it) and I don't know that I'll ever go back to it. I wasted my money and I regret it. I buy a lot of games and put up with a lot of let-downs as just part of being a gamer, but this one felt like a particular waste of money. Especially after all these years of being excited that someday we'd eventually have a new awesome Sim City game with all that having it on modern hardware would offer (which, as it turns out, is nothing).
I don't see the point of any of this. Either you are productive or you are not. The work you do should be pretty easy to evaluate. What's with all the silly stuff like "how often did you xyz from the VPN"? Granted, I am constantly using our company VPN, because it's necessary for me to access a lot of vital information -- but it is not directly indicative at all of how much or little actual work I produce.
So what?
Excessive use of a service for content you already have access to (but maybe not to that extent) justifies threatening him with the rest of his life in prison? Are you mother fucking insane? You slap him with some community service, a record, and maybe at the most extreme a short probation.
For all we know, he could have been using the systems in that closet to access the military's launch command for nuclear missiles! We should have executed him for treason, by that same line.
My understanding of the case is that Swartz "broke the law" int he same way that Slashdot telling me "you can't mass download content from Slashdot" when I create my account here and then writing a spider that ignores robots.txt and the terms of service when I signed up and just crawls and downloads all the Slashdot content.
Hell, plenty of companies and web services are guilty of that, due to poor writing of their spiders that go nuts (sometimes even crushing their victims, by accident) until they catch on and fix them.
Who cares which president was worse? They were both fucking incredibly detrimental to the country and the next guy will be, too. We have crossed a threshold and we won't ever be back to pre 9-11 days. Things will only become more restrictive and absurd and the justification for them more ludicrous. The things we've lost in the last dozen years are things which you don't get back without starting over from a clean slate and that will never ever happen in this country.
Most Americans don't know that they're being oppressed, happily give up their freedoms, and relish the opportunity to strip others of theirs -- especially if it is in pursuit of pushing their own personal (usually religious) morality, while they're at it.
We have to teach citizens not to misbehave or dissent now. It might have cost a fairly innocent, innovative, and (from what I've understood) nice young man's life, but at least it serves as an example to the rest of us to shut the fuck up, put our heads down, and fucking behave less we be the next example.
Exactly. And fifteen days of minor inconvenience for a few people that might have utilized this service from your campus demands the individual responsible for excessive use of that access (and violation of a TOS -- oh noes!) spend the rest of their life in prison, among hardened criminals.
Most people who get arrested actually committed a crime.
Case in point, it's really east to be an opinionated asshole if you base you opinion on politics not reality.
What an idiotic statement. That ranks right up there with "where there's smoke, there's fire" and "if you have nothing to hide, why do you need privacy?" and "he must be guilty of something, because they're investigating, questioning, or arresting him". None of which is true. All of which is a detriment to our idealized system of justice, where people are innocent until proven otherwise and, sometimes, guilty but justifiable.
Plea bargains are an abomination of US justice system whose only purpose is to blackmail people into forfeiting their constitutional rights.
Show me the part of the constitution where it says "And the state shall not do anything that might make administration of the judicial process cheaper, faster, and more efficient." There's no depriving of due process, there's nothing saying the defendant can't have the right not to self-incriminate. Plea bargaining is just that: Bargaining. And there's nothing in the constitution that says you can't bargain with the prosecutor, or vice versa.
But by all means, beat your chest and rip up the grass thinking people are being "blackmailed" to give up their non-existant non-rights. This is the internet afterall, where everyone's an armchair constitutional scholar!
Actually, that is pretty much exactly depriving the defendant of due process. Due process is not merely about "getting a trial in a reasonable amount of time". It's about fair, non-arbitrary, reasonable treatment.
But by all means, continue offering excuses for treating the prosecution of citizens like a game to gather the most points before leveling up rather than dealing with a human being's life.
Really? That's the only complaint? You haven't seen all the complaints of how idiotic and unappealing the region stuff is? How prone it is to abuse by griefers? How constraining the tiny city spaces feel? How rudimentary the transportation feels?
I like SimCity, because I get to be the mayor of an ever-growing city; not because I want to play a Facebook game with a tiny playing field or being forced to play eight or sixteen other cities all on my own, to make sure all the services and facilities I used to be able to handle in one city can no longer be done that way, because of a shitty need to justify poor DRM and online services.
The region play is idiotic and feels constrained and limiting. It's enough to drive me off of the game after one day and regret the purchase.
Real Racing 3 won't "demand" money from you to keep playing. It just requires you to wait. A long time. After an hour of playing, I was already hitting periods where I had to wait five or ten minutes for my car to be repaired or upgraded. You can pay money to speed that up, which is the gimmick. Someone recently did the calculations and found that it would take you about 500 hours of sitting around doing nothing waiting for timers to reach the limit of the game *or* pay more than $500.
It's pretty shitty, but on the other hand, it doesn't really seem like a "real" game, to me. I mean, you can practically make it do the driving for you. If you want a real driving game, there's decent ones on the PC and consoles. Real Racing 3 seems more like a quick little toy (and a decent one, really, if you ignore the whole micro-transaction bullshit) made for playing on the toilet or at a bus stop.
Hey, I *wish* my city would be corrupted!
Once I felt I finally had the hang of things after a few hours, I wanted to wipe my city and start over. I can find no way of doing this. I don't really think there is one. It doesn't matter, though, because in the meantime I've grown bored of it and chalked this down as an expensive disappointment.
I've played it for a few hours, now. I don't think I'll go back and I am truly regretting my purchase. I haven't felt ripped off like this for a long time. I haven't followed this as intently as I follow some other games through to launch, but there wasn't much coverage about the negatives of this game, leading up to it. All the "journalists" I read and watched covering it presented it as this massive, enormous, beautiful (meh, it isn't that impressive even on three 4gb 670s) cities with unlimited possibilities. Not once did I see them say "it's just too bad the transportation sucks and the cities are tiny as fuck".
Anyway, in the short time I've played, I've already had to upgrade almost every street I have into the biggest street possible. Even nice residential areas have six lane roads with trolly car tracks surrounding them. And even at that, there are major traffic congestion problems. No matter what your population is, it seems the bigger you make your roads, the more traffic they'll see. You'll never reach a sort of sane equilibrium.
Everyone remembers what Maxis stated about that. It's just that we're not stupid to buy that absolutely bullshit line. Do you seriously believe that, rather than letting my i7-3700K CPU right here in front of me do all the crunching, they have some massive series of super-computers somewhere that are doing the massive cumulative processing for everyone? And just how much bandwidth do you figure that is consuming? It'd be an enormous constant stream.
The ONLY thing being offloaded to the cloud is the negotiations of state between the cities in your region, operated by different players. The only reason THAT whole portion exists is to poorly justify the online component, which needs to exist to facilitate the shitty DRM.
And, frankly, all of this would be acceptable to a lot of people if the game itself wasn't so poor. No procedurally generated lands. Very small cities (too small to be able to build a self-contained city -- you run out of space quickly and have to rely on other people's cities for services that you dont physically have room for on the playfield to build).
That's a series of rather ignorant statements, considering all of the (often DRM-free) success stories on the PC.
A more accurate statement would be that lazy components within the videogame industry have been blaming piracy for the lacking success of their bad games for years.
SimCity fans want to be the mayor of a growing city - not the superintendent of eight or sixteen cities forced upon them by the nature of a game aimed to usher them into multiplayer/online ties.
Of course it doesn't matter. The same way the actual reliability of a drug sniffing dog alerting on you doesn't matter. This will be yet another thing with massive false positives that is merely used to justify the choices of the police force, without them having to accept the blame for their decisions.
I work an average of 60+ hours a week and I take zero lunch breaks. I basically have a quick breakfast before walking into my home office. I sit down. I don't get up again for 8-12 hours. By that time, I'm usually starving to the point that I almost feel sick. I find something quick to eat. Then I go do home stuff for awhile, with my day/shift over with.
Within a few hours, I usually find myself having somehow wandered back into my home office and doing work again, just because it's there and needs to be done by someone.
But, you know, I'm one of those "lazy work-from-home" people, and all, I guess.
This is called being salaried. How much of your life it sucks up is irrelevant. :)
Google allows telecommuting, but only in certain situations. It's not really part of their culture. However, enticing employees to want to be at work through extensive efforts of making the rest of their life easier is part of the google culture. Transportation, babysitting, food, relaxation, concierge services, and plenty of other initiatives are available. That is not something most other companies are doing. After the dot-bomb days, most of those things were axed and you might be fortunate if your company offers a free doughnut or bagel to the office one day a week.
Google's office environment is unique. You can't just say "well, google doesn't like telecommuting, so there you go!" is disingenuous. The important thing to take away from what google does is "Google places emphasis on making the office environment one that is desirable to employees and serves their interests to the fullest possible extent so that employees want to be in that office". In other words, your mileage may vary if you follow the "no telecommuting" principal, but don't change your shitty office environment that treats employees less as an asset and more as a liability.