How is AT&T a deal breaker for a lot of customers? The only other option is T-Mobile, which is not an option if you actually want your phone to be able to do basic things like receive and make calls.
Despite claims of a roaming deal with AT&T, for at least the last half of 2008, no T-Mobile SIM would function anywhere near where I live, the nearest coverage (along a major New York State freeway, soon to be I-86) was 15 miles to the east. Meanwhile, AT&T has 3G coverage in my town. It's so bad that if you swap a T-Mobile SIM into an unlocked phone, turn it on, turn it back off, and put the AT&T SIM back in, the phone's IMEI will be blacklisted by the tower for about 15 minutes.
T-Mobile phones still are unreliable in Ithaca, NY, a town where AT&T has had solid 3G coverage for a few years.
I don't know if our Xerox MFDs can be emailed to, but: 1) You can scan stuff and have it emailed to you 2) They have a "Secure Print" feature where you set a PIN number for your print job and it won't actually print it until you go there and enter the PIN.
That may just say they're better at getting caught in Chicago.
I find it hard to believe they're ranked above Newark, NJ and the surrounding areas in terms of corruption.
One of NJ's politicians once said, "When I die, I want to be buried in Bergen County so I can remain active in politics." (People in Bergen County have an uncanny ability to continue to vote in elections after death.)
I think there is some cyclical variation in hard drive quality.
When I was in high school, my school (and myself) had lots of problems with WD drives (esp. 540MB ones) failing right and left.
For a while in the late 1990s, IBM was top dog in quality - then they released the Deathstar series which destroyed their quality reputation within 2-3 years.
Then Seagate seemed to be on the rise, and was the only manufacturer I bought products from for a few years. Lately they seem to have been having a lot of firmware bug problems.
WD seems to be your best bet now, but that may not hold true 2-3 years from now.
If you're expecting a beer taste, then yeah, it'll taste awful. Utopias tastes more like brandy than beer. However, if you like brandy, you will probably like Utopias.
I had a small snifter of Utopias about two months ago for the first time and really liked it.
And yeah, I agree - it seems that most of those who have managed to beat Utopias have been cheating by doing the "ice beer" thing. Utopias may still be the strongest naturally fermented beer that hasn't had post-fermentation concentration techniques applied.
Interesting side note - Freezing pre-fermentation is how ice wine is made. In most European countries, you may only legally call it ice wine if it was naturally frozen in certain conditions, and as a result it is very expensive. In the United States, you're allowed to stick the grapes in the freezer.
Since you're in NYS - Try to find some of Southern Tier's "Blackwater Series" imperial stouts. Typically 10-12% ABV, sold only in 22 ounce bottles. Their Creme Brulee is amazing, the Mokah (mix of Jahvah and Choklat) is really good, and the Jahvah and Choklat on their own are quite good too. Right now they're on my list of favorite beers. Finger Lakes Beverage Center in Ithaca usually has some of ST's stouts, not sure about locations closer to Roch. Wegmans doesn't carry those particular Southern Tier beers in Ithaca or Johnson City, but might in the Roch area.
Utopias is great, although it tastes more like a brandy than a beer.
One of the few things that I don't like about one of my favorite restaurants is the fact that the majority of their beers are pale ales/India pale ales - all of them are quite hoppy. Apparently the staff there likes hoppy.
I, however, don't. I tend to prefer more "roasty" flavors - porters, imperial stouts.
People consistently rant that newer cars don't seem to be getting significantly better mileage ratings than older vehicles.
Problem is you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison because in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the EPA changed the standards for the mileage test to be more realistic (more stringent).
For example, in the old EPA tests, you could run your test without the air conditioner running even if the car had it. New EPA tests require that the AC is run for a certain portion of the test unless the car doesn't have any AC unit.
Also, in general, engine power outputs have gone up significantly since the 1980s and mid-1990s while keeping the same gas mileage.
So a vehicle that scored 32MPG in the 1970s might only be able to score 20-25 MPG on the new EPA tests.
"but the whole design in my opinion does not work well at all for high res mouse environments." Um that's the exact point.
It's designed for people who are building HTPCs, connecting them to a TV, and controlling them with a remote control.
The idea is that if you have to touch a mouse or keyboard (assumption: properly configured remote control is attached to the system), the XBMC developers have failed in their UI design.
Might have simply been "too early in the porting process".
At that point the codebase would still have been heavily Xbox-focused (and optimized towards that platform).
Over the years as the Xbox has become a less optimal platform for media (can't really do HD, and the whole world has basically gone to high def), so the devs have moved focus towards platforms other than xbox.
The CPU in any nettop (at the worst a single core Intel Atom) is somewhat better than the 733 MHz PIII in the Xbox (Maybe significantly? I'm assuming the PIII has significantly better performance per clock cycle than the Atom, but I'm not sure if it's enough of a delta to make up for less than half the clock speed), and the Ion is a significantly better NVidia chipset than the one in the Xbox.
One of the big limitations is the fact that most content now is high definition (720p, 1080i, 1080p) - The xbox simply can't display HD video to appropriate display devices.
Which is why my xbox has been on a shelf for 3-4 years without ever getting turned on at this point. I bought it as a MythTV frontend, and it worked for that purpose for a while, but then I bought a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun digital tuner in early 2006 and that rendered the xbox a paperweight as far as MythTV usage was concerned.
"They had immediately started construction of a second well to collect oil from the same reserve."
Um, I have not seen any evidence of this. Do you mean the relief wells? Those are a bit of a misnomer - the name implies that it relieves the pressure forcing the leak by sucking out oil, but apparently a "relief well" is actually the standard way of injecting kill mud deep into a well (as opposed to a "top kill" which is apparently less likely to work.).
Not sure if they'll continue the relief well to ensure that the current well is 100% dead by getting kill mud deeper down into the well.
It depends on your class - Some classes solo much better than others.
For a Templar - you've gotta group or you'll be in pain.
For many other classes, it's much faster to solo grind XP than it is to go to some of the outdoor elite spawns. Part of the problem is the XP penalty gets brutal if even one person in your group is just a level or two above the mobs.
1.9 looks promising, but it's coming too late - lots of people have already quit. I'll be unsubbing this weekend because my friends unsubbed, although I should have done so 1-2 months ago - I've barely played in that period of time.
I think that's the key - a long journey to max level would be fine if it were fun. Problem was: 1) Not enough quests to level on quests w/o grinding 2) XP mechanics when grouped effectively actively discouraged grouping - this was a real killer! 3) Loot in dungeons was crap - combined with the pitiful group XP, this made dungeons a real drag, almost as bad as solo grinding 4) The group-finding system was awful compared to even WoW's old system. WoW's new system makes finding dungeon groups easy.
"Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying." This is how a non-grindy MMO like WoW appeals to the achievers...
Those haven't been killers for WoW, but that may be because WoW got it "reasonably" right to begin with.
Aion, on the other hand, had a brutal grind initially, driving away all but the most hardcore. Releasing a broken MMO and fixing it later doesn't work - see the epic failure of Dark Age of Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion. ToA destroyed the game, and by the time Mythic accepted that fact and fixed the problems, their subscriber base had already been decimated.
Too many MMO developers are reactive "we're losing subscribers, fix it!" rather than proactive "WoW is clearly successful - how can we compete with them without being a clone?". Once you're already losing subscribers, it is too late.
I find it amusing that Aion planned to fail from the beginning - They refused to provision enough servers initially because they planned for their populations to drop like a rock, citing Warhammer as an example of "overprovisioning" when in reality, underprovisioning gives your game a perception of being laggy/buggy/badly executed and refusing to address it makes you look like an asshole to your customers, both of which are a killer to MMOs, and Warhammer was underprovisioned initially and just had a shitty game that couldn't retain a subscriber base. The reality is that at least 50%+ of MMO subscribers try a new game because their friends are trying it - If their friends have a bad experience, others won't even give the game a chance. As frustrated as I was with the grind, I was going to continue giving Aion a chance until two of my hardcore gaming friends quit - with them gone, there's no real reason for me to grind.
It says much about the sad state of MMOs these days that said hardcore friends have taken up, of all things, Mafia Wars...
Negative effects of trying: Possible crustal cracking, causing the oil formation to leak all over the place. All of the Russian successes with stopping wells with nukes were aboveground wells - no one knows what a nuke below the seafloor would do. People have detonated underground nukes, people have detonated undersea nukes, no one has ever detonated a nuke below the seafloor.
At least the leak is concentrated at one hole right now.
"Adobe's player is not great, but it works" Depends on how you define "working". I define "working" as "can play H.264 video with at most a 50% CPU resource penalty compared to other implementations".
By this definition, it isn't working - a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom has no problem playing Hulu-resolution H.264 video smoothly. (Actually, thanks to rtmpdump, I have tested actual Hulu content), while a 2 GHz Athlon XP slideshows, and an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 + Nvidia 8800GT still has visible framerate stuttering on a regular basis.
Or at least full and complete Flash documentation (Where is an official RTMPE specification, not the clean-room reverse engineered one that Adobe has sent DMCA takedown notices to anyone trying to implement said spec.), not a partial spec which is not sufficient to implement a fully compliant player.
Oh yeah, and a promise not to sue those who add RTMPE support to third-party players would be nice too.
Yup, Adobe claims that Flash is an open standard, but pretty consistently takes measures to make sure their implementation is the only one that works with content out there (typically by deploying a Flash update along with a new spec, or not documenting proprietary extensions in their implementation.)
Let's not forget the fact that they sue everyone who attempts to add RTMPE support into their implementation, which is required for a large number of current Flash applications.
That's pretty much what is done with failed GEO satellites - the problem with this one is that navigation and control failed but the payload is still active and they can't turn it off.
To their credit, the actual cost to an employer to retain an employee (administrative costs, employer contributions to insurance plans,etc.) is quite a big higher than their salary.
However: 1) 280k is still very high 2) Is there really enough market for 500,000 more developers?
Yup - "IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into "ailing economies." "
The question is - WHERE would that money come from?
Chances are, if somehow forced to "go legit" on a particular piece of software, rather than cough up the money, people in third-world countries would instead: 1) Choose an OSS alternative 2) Choose a more reasonably priced commercial alternative (PSP instead of Photoshop for example) 3) Choose no alternative, i.e. choosing to simply forgo that functionality altogether
Um, that's definately a false comment. Intel controlled (and still does) effectively control USB, but Apple was probably the biggest manufacturer to "push" USB when they released the iMac - long BEFORE they had switched from PowerPC to Intel processors.
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How is AT&T a deal breaker for a lot of customers? The only other option is T-Mobile, which is not an option if you actually want your phone to be able to do basic things like receive and make calls.
Despite claims of a roaming deal with AT&T, for at least the last half of 2008, no T-Mobile SIM would function anywhere near where I live, the nearest coverage (along a major New York State freeway, soon to be I-86) was 15 miles to the east. Meanwhile, AT&T has 3G coverage in my town. It's so bad that if you swap a T-Mobile SIM into an unlocked phone, turn it on, turn it back off, and put the AT&T SIM back in, the phone's IMEI will be blacklisted by the tower for about 15 minutes.
T-Mobile phones still are unreliable in Ithaca, NY, a town where AT&T has had solid 3G coverage for a few years.
I don't know if our Xerox MFDs can be emailed to, but:
1) You can scan stuff and have it emailed to you
2) They have a "Secure Print" feature where you set a PIN number for your print job and it won't actually print it until you go there and enter the PIN.
That may just say they're better at getting caught in Chicago.
I find it hard to believe they're ranked above Newark, NJ and the surrounding areas in terms of corruption.
One of NJ's politicians once said, "When I die, I want to be buried in Bergen County so I can remain active in politics." (People in Bergen County have an uncanny ability to continue to vote in elections after death.)
I think there is some cyclical variation in hard drive quality.
When I was in high school, my school (and myself) had lots of problems with WD drives (esp. 540MB ones) failing right and left.
For a while in the late 1990s, IBM was top dog in quality - then they released the Deathstar series which destroyed their quality reputation within 2-3 years.
Then Seagate seemed to be on the rise, and was the only manufacturer I bought products from for a few years. Lately they seem to have been having a lot of firmware bug problems.
WD seems to be your best bet now, but that may not hold true 2-3 years from now.
If you're expecting a beer taste, then yeah, it'll taste awful. Utopias tastes more like brandy than beer. However, if you like brandy, you will probably like Utopias.
I had a small snifter of Utopias about two months ago for the first time and really liked it.
And yeah, I agree - it seems that most of those who have managed to beat Utopias have been cheating by doing the "ice beer" thing. Utopias may still be the strongest naturally fermented beer that hasn't had post-fermentation concentration techniques applied.
Interesting side note - Freezing pre-fermentation is how ice wine is made. In most European countries, you may only legally call it ice wine if it was naturally frozen in certain conditions, and as a result it is very expensive. In the United States, you're allowed to stick the grapes in the freezer.
Since you're in NYS - Try to find some of Southern Tier's "Blackwater Series" imperial stouts. Typically 10-12% ABV, sold only in 22 ounce bottles. Their Creme Brulee is amazing, the Mokah (mix of Jahvah and Choklat) is really good, and the Jahvah and Choklat on their own are quite good too. Right now they're on my list of favorite beers. Finger Lakes Beverage Center in Ithaca usually has some of ST's stouts, not sure about locations closer to Roch. Wegmans doesn't carry those particular Southern Tier beers in Ithaca or Johnson City, but might in the Roch area.
Utopias is great, although it tastes more like a brandy than a beer.
One of the few things that I don't like about one of my favorite restaurants is the fact that the majority of their beers are pale ales/India pale ales - all of them are quite hoppy. Apparently the staff there likes hoppy.
I, however, don't. I tend to prefer more "roasty" flavors - porters, imperial stouts.
People consistently rant that newer cars don't seem to be getting significantly better mileage ratings than older vehicles.
Problem is you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison because in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the EPA changed the standards for the mileage test to be more realistic (more stringent).
For example, in the old EPA tests, you could run your test without the air conditioner running even if the car had it. New EPA tests require that the AC is run for a certain portion of the test unless the car doesn't have any AC unit.
Also, in general, engine power outputs have gone up significantly since the 1980s and mid-1990s while keeping the same gas mileage.
So a vehicle that scored 32MPG in the 1970s might only be able to score 20-25 MPG on the new EPA tests.
"but the whole design in my opinion does not work well at all for high res mouse environments."
Um that's the exact point.
It's designed for people who are building HTPCs, connecting them to a TV, and controlling them with a remote control.
The idea is that if you have to touch a mouse or keyboard (assumption: properly configured remote control is attached to the system), the XBMC developers have failed in their UI design.
Might have simply been "too early in the porting process".
At that point the codebase would still have been heavily Xbox-focused (and optimized towards that platform).
Over the years as the Xbox has become a less optimal platform for media (can't really do HD, and the whole world has basically gone to high def), so the devs have moved focus towards platforms other than xbox.
Nearly all nettops are NVidia ION based.
The CPU in any nettop (at the worst a single core Intel Atom) is somewhat better than the 733 MHz PIII in the Xbox (Maybe significantly? I'm assuming the PIII has significantly better performance per clock cycle than the Atom, but I'm not sure if it's enough of a delta to make up for less than half the clock speed), and the Ion is a significantly better NVidia chipset than the one in the Xbox.
One of the big limitations is the fact that most content now is high definition (720p, 1080i, 1080p) - The xbox simply can't display HD video to appropriate display devices.
Which is why my xbox has been on a shelf for 3-4 years without ever getting turned on at this point. I bought it as a MythTV frontend, and it worked for that purpose for a while, but then I bought a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun digital tuner in early 2006 and that rendered the xbox a paperweight as far as MythTV usage was concerned.
"They had immediately started construction of a second well to collect oil from the same reserve."
Um, I have not seen any evidence of this. Do you mean the relief wells? Those are a bit of a misnomer - the name implies that it relieves the pressure forcing the leak by sucking out oil, but apparently a "relief well" is actually the standard way of injecting kill mud deep into a well (as opposed to a "top kill" which is apparently less likely to work.).
Not sure if they'll continue the relief well to ensure that the current well is 100% dead by getting kill mud deeper down into the well.
It depends on your class - Some classes solo much better than others.
For a Templar - you've gotta group or you'll be in pain.
For many other classes, it's much faster to solo grind XP than it is to go to some of the outdoor elite spawns. Part of the problem is the XP penalty gets brutal if even one person in your group is just a level or two above the mobs.
1.9 looks promising, but it's coming too late - lots of people have already quit. I'll be unsubbing this weekend because my friends unsubbed, although I should have done so 1-2 months ago - I've barely played in that period of time.
I think that's the key - a long journey to max level would be fine if it were fun. Problem was:
1) Not enough quests to level on quests w/o grinding
2) XP mechanics when grouped effectively actively discouraged grouping - this was a real killer!
3) Loot in dungeons was crap - combined with the pitiful group XP, this made dungeons a real drag, almost as bad as solo grinding
4) The group-finding system was awful compared to even WoW's old system. WoW's new system makes finding dungeon groups easy.
"Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying."
This is how a non-grindy MMO like WoW appeals to the achievers...
Those haven't been killers for WoW, but that may be because WoW got it "reasonably" right to begin with.
Aion, on the other hand, had a brutal grind initially, driving away all but the most hardcore. Releasing a broken MMO and fixing it later doesn't work - see the epic failure of Dark Age of Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion. ToA destroyed the game, and by the time Mythic accepted that fact and fixed the problems, their subscriber base had already been decimated.
Too many MMO developers are reactive "we're losing subscribers, fix it!" rather than proactive "WoW is clearly successful - how can we compete with them without being a clone?". Once you're already losing subscribers, it is too late.
I find it amusing that Aion planned to fail from the beginning - They refused to provision enough servers initially because they planned for their populations to drop like a rock, citing Warhammer as an example of "overprovisioning" when in reality, underprovisioning gives your game a perception of being laggy/buggy/badly executed and refusing to address it makes you look like an asshole to your customers, both of which are a killer to MMOs, and Warhammer was underprovisioned initially and just had a shitty game that couldn't retain a subscriber base. The reality is that at least 50%+ of MMO subscribers try a new game because their friends are trying it - If their friends have a bad experience, others won't even give the game a chance. As frustrated as I was with the grind, I was going to continue giving Aion a chance until two of my hardcore gaming friends quit - with them gone, there's no real reason for me to grind.
It says much about the sad state of MMOs these days that said hardcore friends have taken up, of all things, Mafia Wars...
Negative effects of trying: Possible crustal cracking, causing the oil formation to leak all over the place. All of the Russian successes with stopping wells with nukes were aboveground wells - no one knows what a nuke below the seafloor would do. People have detonated underground nukes, people have detonated undersea nukes, no one has ever detonated a nuke below the seafloor.
At least the leak is concentrated at one hole right now.
"and you could always write a better one."
Please show me a link to an RTMPE specification.
Reverse engineered ones are not allowed.
"Adobe's player is not great, but it works"
Depends on how you define "working". I define "working" as "can play H.264 video with at most a 50% CPU resource penalty compared to other implementations".
By this definition, it isn't working - a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom has no problem playing Hulu-resolution H.264 video smoothly. (Actually, thanks to rtmpdump, I have tested actual Hulu content), while a 2 GHz Athlon XP slideshows, and an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 + Nvidia 8800GT still has visible framerate stuttering on a regular basis.
Or at least full and complete Flash documentation (Where is an official RTMPE specification, not the clean-room reverse engineered one that Adobe has sent DMCA takedown notices to anyone trying to implement said spec.), not a partial spec which is not sufficient to implement a fully compliant player.
Oh yeah, and a promise not to sue those who add RTMPE support to third-party players would be nice too.
Yup, Adobe claims that Flash is an open standard, but pretty consistently takes measures to make sure their implementation is the only one that works with content out there (typically by deploying a Flash update along with a new spec, or not documenting proprietary extensions in their implementation.)
Let's not forget the fact that they sue everyone who attempts to add RTMPE support into their implementation, which is required for a large number of current Flash applications.
That's pretty much what is done with failed GEO satellites - the problem with this one is that navigation and control failed but the payload is still active and they can't turn it off.
To their credit, the actual cost to an employer to retain an employee (administrative costs, employer contributions to insurance plans,etc.) is quite a big higher than their salary.
However:
1) 280k is still very high
2) Is there really enough market for 500,000 more developers?
Yup - "IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into "ailing economies." "
The question is - WHERE would that money come from?
Chances are, if somehow forced to "go legit" on a particular piece of software, rather than cough up the money, people in third-world countries would instead:
1) Choose an OSS alternative
2) Choose a more reasonably priced commercial alternative (PSP instead of Photoshop for example)
3) Choose no alternative, i.e. choosing to simply forgo that functionality altogether
Um, that's definately a false comment. Intel controlled (and still does) effectively control USB, but Apple was probably the biggest manufacturer to "push" USB when they released the iMac - long BEFORE they had switched from PowerPC to Intel processors.