Aw, but it's okay! Ol' Sam recognizes there's a need to "reignite growth in our country." Isn't that charming? As I'm currently doing work for IBM and also training my replacements in India, it's very comforting that he's thinking of me.
I'm skeptical about Bethesda's competence, but I'm going to buy it anyway.
First of all, they don't do DRM runarounds. That makes me, and my wallet in turn, very happy.
Second, I hope with all their talk of "listening to the community", they understand what went terribly, disgustingly wrong with Oblivion. The severely limited number of voice-actors. The world background and various storylines that fell flat because they were elaborate enough, but boring. The enormous world that gave no incentive to explore. The weird equipment/difficulty curve that encourages players to stay at level 2. So far, the only concern I haven't seen addressed when reading about Fallout 3 is making sure the damn thing doesn't crash and corrupt saves every 5 minutes.
Lastly, the Fallout universe is not very rigid. Its main components are the visual styles and humor elements, and a bit of good/evil decisionmaking that is not crucial but does affect the world. There's very little storyline to adhere to, and all the people and events of previous games are so far away they'll have little impact on this setting.
So... I'll bite. I figure they can't screw it up too badly.
Marketing educates consumers and businesses about their options.
That is a lie and you know it.
If I see an ad for laundry detergent I will not suddenly come to the realization I could add SOAP to the washer and make it more effective. In the store, I will not run over and clutch at your particular bottles with beloved familiarity and remain oblivious to the fact that there are other nearly-identical products surrounding it. I'm not dumb enough to believe that your particular bottle is better since you have advertising funds to waste, I'll try a couple different brands and see what works well (on larger purchases I'd seek outside, *impartial* advice on which product fits my needs).
90% of marketing is NOT informative at all, its only purpose is to counteract word-of-mouth support of a product.
Amen! Keep your postal services workers paid and employed on the backs of garbage-mailers.
I receive several monthly mailings for credit cards, the ones with a 'customer identification' barcode on the back always bring a gleeful smile as I cram that sucker as full as possible without wasting a half-cent's worth of tape on their sorry envelope.
I was infuriated to no end when they started printing a phone contact to stop receiving applications only to end up at a non-working number, that one got special treatment.
As a curious side-effect, I still get basically the same number of mailings, but I've stopped receiving the beloved Val-Pak coupon brick to use as stuffing material.
It's not entirely useless junk. Well, it's useless in terms of expressed genes, but there are also fragments of genes that have been suppressed by evolution but not eliminated completely, theoretically they could come back under an appropriate mutation.
More realistically, they are buffer zones. DNA gets damaged petty easily, and there are mechanisms to repair it but they aren't perfect. If random passing gamma rays have a 100% chance of screwing up something important, then mutations are going to be uncontrollably frequent. They can bash up the genetic spare-parts box a lot more safely, so there's no big biological incentive to do cleanup in there.
Well, maybe the DoD's never heard of folding@home. And the 'researcher' just found a nice, cushy way of modifying the FAH client, and blow the rest of his grant money on booze and hookers.
Well, for one thing, such selective genocide is stupid. There will not be another holocaust. Any race-based bioweapon will also kill off a section of populations around the world, EVERYONE will be pissed at whoever did it. Any retard dumb enough to want to use something like that would never be able to develop it.
Okay, so you know my genes and you want to kill me. Good luck with that. Viruses don't infect someone for their eye color, they can only detect an appropriate host by cell membrane proteins. I'm not too current on genetic engineering, but getting the viral payload to modify multiple specific gene sequences may be flat-out impossible, normally they just stick their data wherever it lands. And of course it has to be capable of replicating *before* the host dies, and also dodge the immune system.
Never mind the fact that you aren't looking for 10 genes, you're looking for *hundreds*. There is no 'slant-eye' gene or 'small hands' gene. There are a ton of poorly-understood timing controls that affect such minor individual differences, and there's no guarantee they're identical even in a specific group to be targeted. This possibility is securely in the tinfoil-hat realm.
With cameras, a totalitarian wannabe doesn't even have to train the Youth to do his bidding. The Tot already has stooges to inform on the population for violating arbitrary rules. His stooges (cameras, duh) give nearly-incontrovertible evidence---it's not just heresay, the jury can see it right there. And he can pick and choose who to target, since *everybody* gets caught on film.
Evidence of *what* exactly? Look, this jackass I don't like just did a hit-and-run on a parked car! Watch me be evil and throw his ass in jail for a crime he... comitted. How is a dumb stationary camera less trustworthy than a witness who's deliberately lying to police/courts?
You make criminal activity sound like radioactive decay happening at random, frequent intervals that every single individual is powerless to stop. If you have to bitch about people being charged for bullshit crimes, then don't blame the tools, blame the bullshit laws!
Is it any better that a *larger* section of the populace is stupid, and it's just spread more widely? If I'm sensible in other regards but absolutely, passionately believe that GWB is an alien, does that make me smart?
I don't like the idea of encouraging celebrity endorsement except for very, VERY low-level things like education in general. It's too easy for them to get confused about the difference between facts and propaganda, and trusting them to do a bit of investigative work is pretty naive. People are gullible and stupid, celebs included, pushing them toward critical thinking is far better than turning them loose to champion some misinformed cause.
Don't forget how many billions of square miles of planet surface could be reclaimed if agriculture didn't need to expand over every moderately-fertile lump of dirt.
Artifical farming hasn't taken off because there's no incentive yet, hydroponic factories are just outrageously expensive toys. I'd gladly pay a bit more for tank-grown food if it could be done, but it'd require abundant, cheap energy to be possible to even come *close* to matching the cost/output of agriculture, and that's not happening any time soon either.
Presumably the testing isn't over, the researchers just decided that 2 years is a pretty good success indicator, especially when they've been injecting BSE prions *directly into the brains* of the test animals. If the infection can't take hold in that condition, I'd say it pretty well surpasses any naturally occuring scenarios. Still too early to say with absolute certainty, but they have good reason to celebrate so far.
I'm more interested in where this heads beyond the BSE scare, since it'll be a lot harder to genetically scrub out CJD and CWD, but at least the possibility is opening up. I'm really interested to see if this manipulation ends up with no side-effects since it means that genetic cruft is seriously dangerous. With the genome mapped, will there be mumbles about getting the non-functional buffer sections tailored and zeroed out to ward off other mysterious and rare afflictions?
Wow. You do an excellent job putting words in his mouth.
Soooo... what if he's doing business with xyzcorp, and sees the sales schmuck has an e-mail address in a crapmail.biz domain? I'd guess he would consider that just as stupid as a freebie mail account.
See, the neat thing about domain names is that they usually reflect the name of the company that runs the mailserver.
It's been pretty rare for me to find a.pst file truly corrupted post-office2k. The main culprit when it happens? Running a big.pst file from a network share. That's not a serious problem since a quick (well, 20-60 minutes) repair can fix it, but it is a hassle. Worse is that it makes users utterly helpless without a network hookup.
What MS really needs is a scheduled function within Outlook to run backup operations, since only it can reliably control access to the.pst storage. There are already cleanup routines built-in, but they can only move contents, not create a copy. Just having it spit out a non-locked copy of the file occasionally would make backup work immensely easier and keeping a local copy safe for even the most paranoid users.
That depends on your budget. At my workplace there isn't even an attempted solution to the mail storage/backup dilemma. Exchange server storage is limited. Well gee, if that storage space is so tight, obviously there's also no budget for generic network storage either. So the result is that most of the packrats just buy an external hard drive and do their own backups. Problem solved. They can keep all the bullshit ancient e-mail archives they want. And they do. Granted, some are under legal paranoia requiring such measures, but IT makes no special favors to help them.
Outlook is perfectly capable of storing a ridiculous amount of data in local files, especially with the recent changes in file formats to allow >2GB. There is little reason to abuse servers by storing this info remotely, it's certainly not cost-effective. After upgrade costs to handle the added bandwidth, extra hardware maintenance, and tape archival work, it's a rather expensive fix for a minimal problem.
I'm tempted to wonder just what kind of checks are really run on the data. What's to stop a rogue.dwg file from being opened and subsequently saved in AutoCAD to scrub it back to a sanctioned file? Might it be possible for ODA to instead develop an AutoCAD plugin that does this instead of fudging a digital signature?
IANA drafter, but I can sympathize that someone's retard clients would panic on seeing the compatibility warning message. But really, if that message becomes commonplace wouldn't it just fall into the realm of dozens of other crap "warnings" that computer users see and ignore on a daily basis?
Right, it's *impossible* that they'd be able to resist the sweet lure of GUI crap. Screw that. I turned off all the extra bullshit in XP until I realized that I was basically running 2000, so I just went back to that. Oh, boo hoo! It looks like Win95 and everyone's going to make fun of me! Hopefully I can stop sobbing long enough to open Glass2k to get window transparency before breaking into fresh tears at not spending $400 for the feature.
The ONLY feature I care about in Vista is thumbnail view on taskbar items. Not worth it. And dicking in policy settings to stop the constant permissions prompting is enough hassle to counterbalance that.
I'll suffer the end-of-life for win2k and happily keep on using it until the 64-bit transition actually goes somewhere.
It's like... a bad analogy, that makes you come up with another bad analogy as a counterargument. (Hm. Meant to be insulting/ironic, but I guess that's sorta correct.)
It doesn't matter. The Indian gov't is not banning VOIP as the the frantic headline said. It doesn't care if you do a data-to-data call. Or run a webcam. Or a complete virtual reality sensory and mental link to the hivemind through tcp/ip. All TFA is talking about is data-to-pbx where it will then go out on an actual phone line. Since the PBX is all the telecoms can see, they can't trace calls or seat licenses or anything like that. That's it.
But 'IED' is also extremely vague, as it doesn't say much about what the threat is. And what if it's not an explosive at all, just a trap with a bunch of rusty nails?
See, the resistance to the term is that there already *was* a descriptive term, and doesn't take any longer to say. I suspect too that 'booby trap' is a lot more recognizable if the speaker has a strong accent of any kind.
Notes is not an e-mail client. Yeah, its database capabilities can handle part of the job already, but it's too ugly and clumsy and stupid for anything besides database sharing. It's like adding mail functions into Photoshop, and about as painful to use for simple tasks.
WHAT?! How dare you say that! Our marketing department gave very specific numbers and the focus groups we were paying found creepy disappearing ghost girls to be 63% scary! Oh, and um- also to be 95% cliche, but we ignored that.
Bleh. FEAR sucked. No more scary than Doom3, and that ain't saying much. It's obviously built to be a title with followup sequels, maybe one of those will get it right.
I agree the longevity of the series is a lot more impotant to consider than sophomore-letdowns. Castlevania's another good example that had a weird, clumsy #2, and then came back strong on #3. But then it went on to even more sequels that were better still, and made *all* the NES predecesors look a bit weak.
I liked SMB-2, even if it was a departure from the series. Is it really accurate to call it a poor game just because the mechanics were different in the rest of the Mario franchise?
Heck, I'd just call it a cause to celebrate that there's at least a subconscious rebellion against serialization, even if it does get strapped down with a sequel's title. 'Wayward' doesn't have to equal 'bad', some variety is great to see, even if it has a sneaky way of getting marketshare.
I agree that he's a bit soft on interviews, but if Bush came on the show I doubt he would have been given that treatment, simply because it's too irresistible of an opportunity. Remember Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire? He *can* be more bitingly critical when given a chance.
I don't remember if Craig Kilborn was the same way with interviews, but their loyalty to Comedy Central has always been stronger than pretending to be a real news show. If it's possible to pull off both at once, they will though.
Bleh. F.E.A.R. sucked. Ooo! Look, trippy hallucinations and a ghostly little girl! Scary!
If you want a better but older version of a paranormal suspense shooter, pick up Second Sight. It's not immensely replayable, but it's definitely a neat title.
But you can skip the stupid minigames, and you should, by all means! Squix gave a nice option that you can play on the high difficulty level and get the 'reward' ending without sitting there retrying the minigames over and over. Save your sanity and put the challenge where it belongs.
Slashdot Mirror
Aw, but it's okay! Ol' Sam recognizes there's a need to "reignite growth in our country." Isn't that charming? As I'm currently doing work for IBM and also training my replacements in India, it's very comforting that he's thinking of me.
I'm skeptical about Bethesda's competence, but I'm going to buy it anyway.
First of all, they don't do DRM runarounds. That makes me, and my wallet in turn, very happy.
Second, I hope with all their talk of "listening to the community", they understand what went terribly, disgustingly wrong with Oblivion. The severely limited number of voice-actors. The world background and various storylines that fell flat because they were elaborate enough, but boring. The enormous world that gave no incentive to explore. The weird equipment/difficulty curve that encourages players to stay at level 2. So far, the only concern I haven't seen addressed when reading about Fallout 3 is making sure the damn thing doesn't crash and corrupt saves every 5 minutes.
Lastly, the Fallout universe is not very rigid. Its main components are the visual styles and humor elements, and a bit of good/evil decisionmaking that is not crucial but does affect the world. There's very little storyline to adhere to, and all the people and events of previous games are so far away they'll have little impact on this setting.
So... I'll bite. I figure they can't screw it up too badly.
Marketing educates consumers and businesses about their options.
That is a lie and you know it.
If I see an ad for laundry detergent I will not suddenly come to the realization I could add SOAP to the washer and make it more effective. In the store, I will not run over and clutch at your particular bottles with beloved familiarity and remain oblivious to the fact that there are other nearly-identical products surrounding it. I'm not dumb enough to believe that your particular bottle is better since you have advertising funds to waste, I'll try a couple different brands and see what works well (on larger purchases I'd seek outside, *impartial* advice on which product fits my needs).
90% of marketing is NOT informative at all, its only purpose is to counteract word-of-mouth support of a product.
Amen! Keep your postal services workers paid and employed on the backs of garbage-mailers.
I receive several monthly mailings for credit cards, the ones with a 'customer identification' barcode on the back always bring a gleeful smile as I cram that sucker as full as possible without wasting a half-cent's worth of tape on their sorry envelope.
I was infuriated to no end when they started printing a phone contact to stop receiving applications only to end up at a non-working number, that one got special treatment.
As a curious side-effect, I still get basically the same number of mailings, but I've stopped receiving the beloved Val-Pak coupon brick to use as stuffing material.
It's not entirely useless junk. Well, it's useless in terms of expressed genes, but there are also fragments of genes that have been suppressed by evolution but not eliminated completely, theoretically they could come back under an appropriate mutation.
More realistically, they are buffer zones. DNA gets damaged petty easily, and there are mechanisms to repair it but they aren't perfect. If random passing gamma rays have a 100% chance of screwing up something important, then mutations are going to be uncontrollably frequent. They can bash up the genetic spare-parts box a lot more safely, so there's no big biological incentive to do cleanup in there.
Well, maybe the DoD's never heard of folding@home. And the 'researcher' just found a nice, cushy way of modifying the FAH client, and blow the rest of his grant money on booze and hookers.
Well, for one thing, such selective genocide is stupid. There will not be another holocaust. Any race-based bioweapon will also kill off a section of populations around the world, EVERYONE will be pissed at whoever did it. Any retard dumb enough to want to use something like that would never be able to develop it.
Okay, so you know my genes and you want to kill me. Good luck with that. Viruses don't infect someone for their eye color, they can only detect an appropriate host by cell membrane proteins. I'm not too current on genetic engineering, but getting the viral payload to modify multiple specific gene sequences may be flat-out impossible, normally they just stick their data wherever it lands. And of course it has to be capable of replicating *before* the host dies, and also dodge the immune system.
Never mind the fact that you aren't looking for 10 genes, you're looking for *hundreds*. There is no 'slant-eye' gene or 'small hands' gene. There are a ton of poorly-understood timing controls that affect such minor individual differences, and there's no guarantee they're identical even in a specific group to be targeted. This possibility is securely in the tinfoil-hat realm.
With cameras, a totalitarian wannabe doesn't even have to train the Youth to do his bidding. The Tot already has stooges to inform on the population for violating arbitrary rules. His stooges (cameras, duh) give nearly-incontrovertible evidence---it's not just heresay, the jury can see it right there. And he can pick and choose who to target, since *everybody* gets caught on film.
Evidence of *what* exactly? Look, this jackass I don't like just did a hit-and-run on a parked car! Watch me be evil and throw his ass in jail for a crime he... comitted. How is a dumb stationary camera less trustworthy than a witness who's deliberately lying to police/courts?
You make criminal activity sound like radioactive decay happening at random, frequent intervals that every single individual is powerless to stop. If you have to bitch about people being charged for bullshit crimes, then don't blame the tools, blame the bullshit laws!
Is it any better that a *larger* section of the populace is stupid, and it's just spread more widely? If I'm sensible in other regards but absolutely, passionately believe that GWB is an alien, does that make me smart? I don't like the idea of encouraging celebrity endorsement except for very, VERY low-level things like education in general. It's too easy for them to get confused about the difference between facts and propaganda, and trusting them to do a bit of investigative work is pretty naive. People are gullible and stupid, celebs included, pushing them toward critical thinking is far better than turning them loose to champion some misinformed cause.
Don't forget how many billions of square miles of planet surface could be reclaimed if agriculture didn't need to expand over every moderately-fertile lump of dirt.
Artifical farming hasn't taken off because there's no incentive yet, hydroponic factories are just outrageously expensive toys. I'd gladly pay a bit more for tank-grown food if it could be done, but it'd require abundant, cheap energy to be possible to even come *close* to matching the cost/output of agriculture, and that's not happening any time soon either.
Presumably the testing isn't over, the researchers just decided that 2 years is a pretty good success indicator, especially when they've been injecting BSE prions *directly into the brains* of the test animals. If the infection can't take hold in that condition, I'd say it pretty well surpasses any naturally occuring scenarios. Still too early to say with absolute certainty, but they have good reason to celebrate so far.
I'm more interested in where this heads beyond the BSE scare, since it'll be a lot harder to genetically scrub out CJD and CWD, but at least the possibility is opening up. I'm really interested to see if this manipulation ends up with no side-effects since it means that genetic cruft is seriously dangerous. With the genome mapped, will there be mumbles about getting the non-functional buffer sections tailored and zeroed out to ward off other mysterious and rare afflictions?
Wow. You do an excellent job putting words in his mouth.
Soooo... what if he's doing business with xyzcorp, and sees the sales schmuck has an e-mail address in a crapmail.biz domain? I'd guess he would consider that just as stupid as a freebie mail account.
See, the neat thing about domain names is that they usually reflect the name of the company that runs the mailserver.
It's been pretty rare for me to find a .pst file truly corrupted post-office2k. The main culprit when it happens? Running a big .pst file from a network share. That's not a serious problem since a quick (well, 20-60 minutes) repair can fix it, but it is a hassle. Worse is that it makes users utterly helpless without a network hookup.
What MS really needs is a scheduled function within Outlook to run backup operations, since only it can reliably control access to the .pst storage. There are already cleanup routines built-in, but they can only move contents, not create a copy. Just having it spit out a non-locked copy of the file occasionally would make backup work immensely easier and keeping a local copy safe for even the most paranoid users.
That depends on your budget. At my workplace there isn't even an attempted solution to the mail storage/backup dilemma. Exchange server storage is limited. Well gee, if that storage space is so tight, obviously there's also no budget for generic network storage either. So the result is that most of the packrats just buy an external hard drive and do their own backups. Problem solved. They can keep all the bullshit ancient e-mail archives they want. And they do. Granted, some are under legal paranoia requiring such measures, but IT makes no special favors to help them.
Outlook is perfectly capable of storing a ridiculous amount of data in local files, especially with the recent changes in file formats to allow >2GB. There is little reason to abuse servers by storing this info remotely, it's certainly not cost-effective. After upgrade costs to handle the added bandwidth, extra hardware maintenance, and tape archival work, it's a rather expensive fix for a minimal problem.
I'm tempted to wonder just what kind of checks are really run on the data. What's to stop a rogue .dwg file from being opened and subsequently saved in AutoCAD to scrub it back to a sanctioned file? Might it be possible for ODA to instead develop an AutoCAD plugin that does this instead of fudging a digital signature?
IANA drafter, but I can sympathize that someone's retard clients would panic on seeing the compatibility warning message. But really, if that message becomes commonplace wouldn't it just fall into the realm of dozens of other crap "warnings" that computer users see and ignore on a daily basis?
Right, it's *impossible* that they'd be able to resist the sweet lure of GUI crap. Screw that. I turned off all the extra bullshit in XP until I realized that I was basically running 2000, so I just went back to that. Oh, boo hoo! It looks like Win95 and everyone's going to make fun of me! Hopefully I can stop sobbing long enough to open Glass2k to get window transparency before breaking into fresh tears at not spending $400 for the feature.
The ONLY feature I care about in Vista is thumbnail view on taskbar items. Not worth it. And dicking in policy settings to stop the constant permissions prompting is enough hassle to counterbalance that.
I'll suffer the end-of-life for win2k and happily keep on using it until the 64-bit transition actually goes somewhere.
No, no, NO!
It's like... a bad analogy, that makes you come up with another bad analogy as a counterargument. (Hm. Meant to be insulting/ironic, but I guess that's sorta correct.)
It doesn't matter. The Indian gov't is not banning VOIP as the the frantic headline said. It doesn't care if you do a data-to-data call. Or run a webcam. Or a complete virtual reality sensory and mental link to the hivemind through tcp/ip. All TFA is talking about is data-to-pbx where it will then go out on an actual phone line. Since the PBX is all the telecoms can see, they can't trace calls or seat licenses or anything like that. That's it.
But 'IED' is also extremely vague, as it doesn't say much about what the threat is. And what if it's not an explosive at all, just a trap with a bunch of rusty nails?
See, the resistance to the term is that there already *was* a descriptive term, and doesn't take any longer to say. I suspect too that 'booby trap' is a lot more recognizable if the speaker has a strong accent of any kind.
Indeed. And TFA is good justification.
Spraying a money shot of Silly String all over Janet's exposed 'booby trap' is a pretty darn obscene image, don't you think?
Notes is not an e-mail client. Yeah, its database capabilities can handle part of the job already, but it's too ugly and clumsy and stupid for anything besides database sharing. It's like adding mail functions into Photoshop, and about as painful to use for simple tasks.
WHAT?! How dare you say that! Our marketing department gave very specific numbers and the focus groups we were paying found creepy disappearing ghost girls to be 63% scary! Oh, and um- also to be 95% cliche, but we ignored that.
Bleh. FEAR sucked. No more scary than Doom3, and that ain't saying much. It's obviously built to be a title with followup sequels, maybe one of those will get it right.
I agree the longevity of the series is a lot more impotant to consider than sophomore-letdowns. Castlevania's another good example that had a weird, clumsy #2, and then came back strong on #3. But then it went on to even more sequels that were better still, and made *all* the NES predecesors look a bit weak.
I liked SMB-2, even if it was a departure from the series. Is it really accurate to call it a poor game just because the mechanics were different in the rest of the Mario franchise?
Heck, I'd just call it a cause to celebrate that there's at least a subconscious rebellion against serialization, even if it does get strapped down with a sequel's title. 'Wayward' doesn't have to equal 'bad', some variety is great to see, even if it has a sneaky way of getting marketshare.
I agree that he's a bit soft on interviews, but if Bush came on the show I doubt he would have been given that treatment, simply because it's too irresistible of an opportunity. Remember Jon Stewart's appearance on Crossfire? He *can* be more bitingly critical when given a chance.
I don't remember if Craig Kilborn was the same way with interviews, but their loyalty to Comedy Central has always been stronger than pretending to be a real news show. If it's possible to pull off both at once, they will though.
Bleh. F.E.A.R. sucked. Ooo! Look, trippy hallucinations and a ghostly little girl! Scary!
If you want a better but older version of a paranormal suspense shooter, pick up Second Sight. It's not immensely replayable, but it's definitely a neat title.
But you can skip the stupid minigames, and you should, by all means! Squix gave a nice option that you can play on the high difficulty level and get the 'reward' ending without sitting there retrying the minigames over and over. Save your sanity and put the challenge where it belongs.