Except Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets look very similar. The asus models look pretty much exactly the same, except the Windows 8 versions come in thicker/larger models, but aside for that they're the same. Convertible tablets with keyboard add-ons.
When the hardware looks the same, and the UI of the operating system looks the same... its easy for even some geeks to get confused.
Bingo. Especially in fields with high demand, your starting salary will be heavily dependent on how good you are at negotiating, and is only loosely proportional to your qualification. How hardball you can play during negotiation, and more importantly, how long you mind waiting for a job, can make a 30-40% difference easily.
If you're, let say, worried about feeding your family, you're much less likely to decline an offer because you got offered $X instead of $X + 5000, while when I'm looking for a job, I'll look at what's average in my area for someone with my qualification, and I'll just refuse offers until I get something substantially over it (assuming all positions are equal). Just because I can.
Of course, the difference in personality over things like this between genders is partly affected by gender discrimination to begin with, but that's not all of it.
That's true in the us too which I think was the point. I'm in the US and can get 300mb. 75+ is fairly available. It's more expensive than in other countries but adjusted to cost of living only a few have it much cheaper It's still not as good as it could be but...
Control panel: get your mouse in the bottom left corner, right click -> control panel.
Want to see your documents: same place -> file explorer.
Those will work from anywhere, metro app, start screen or desktop.
The only one that im a bit iffy about right now is doing a search for specific files. I didn't see a "classic" version of it, just the metro version, and that one's on the iffy side.
Yeah, testing out the RTM from MSDN here too. At first my initial reaction was on the negative side, mainly because without touch, some of the little "tricks" to get around aren't as intuitive as they should be... they tell you most of them during install, but not all of them.
After that, it was pretty good. My only complaint is that some of the built-in Metro apps are lacking in polish a bit. The messenger app doesn't let you use a different windows account than your main account (I moved country, my msn account is from Canada, which cannot be used on the US app store, but the messenger app wont let me use a different one). The photo app won't look at network shares (while the music app and the video app do it just fine...). Little things like that.
I'm not too worried about the built in apps though since third party apps will be superior soon enough.
Aside that and a few minor glitches on the desktop, its pretty solid.
Diamonds are just as bad, but differently. Diamonds aren't rare. They aren't even particularly uncommon, except for enormous ones. Rather, their scarcity is artificially maintained by DeBeers, whose existence depends on maintaining that scarcity. Heck, synthetic diamonds are cheaply available for industrial use, so any use of diamonds as money is effectively turning tools into cash overnight.
And jewelry grade synthetics are starting to show up. The ones I've seen were still brutally expensive (relatively speaking), but since they tend to be better in every way than the natural one, are cheaper than the (extremely rare) natural equivalent.
If we're talking about SSDs in the last 14 month period, give or take a few months, keep in mind there was a huge batch of sandforce-based SSDs that, for a while, had very, VERY buggy firmwares that caused everything from constant crashes, blue screens, freezing, bad writes that corrupted everything whenever you patched the system or installed new software.... The firmware updates eventually came out that fixed the issue completely, but that took a while, and I expect most people who bought one of these (they were the cheapest "fast" SSDs for quite some time...don't know about time) to be having nothing but trouble, and resellers would replace them under warranty (which was pointless: the new one would also have the bad firmware).
We went through 3 of these ourselves until we realized it was a firmware issue, and it took 2-3 firmware updates each stating they would "FINALLY" fix it before they actually did.
Not saying that covers all the cases, but considering how common those SSDs were last year, it probably is the cause of quite a few.
Such systems do exist in the US, they're just not totally universal, depending on who you deal with.
But i totally can pay all my bills, rent, utilities, everything, via a unified system. Its not accessible from "anywhere" like the parent talked about, but it is accessible from ATMs everywhere and from my bank's website. I'm from Canada where the system is a bit more universal, but now that I live in the US, at least anything I actually need to deal with works through that system. Good enough. Everything at the end of the pipeline hits my credit card and I get 1-2% cashback on that (which adds up quickly if all my purchases not done at small chinatown restaurants go through it).
At first glance the problem in the US isn't that such systems don't exist. Its that there are -too many of them- so it took longer for standards to get accepted.
Only certain types of transfers cost money. Generally to the same banks they're free, and to pay bills and whatsnot, they're also free (at least to the payer).
I pay my rent via transfer, and it doesn't cost anything (and I doubt the owners are paying the fee for me, because they charge a stupid fee for credit card payments).
Absolutely. My main point was that people just seem to like arbitrary limits for no reason, even in other scenarios and apply that logic to passwords which is even worse
People just seem to like putting data limits for the sake of limiting. Like in databases. How many times do you see a company that has a small-ish data set (a few hundred mb to a few gb tops), running on a machine with several terrabytes of discs, then the people designing the database stop and argue for 15 minutes about if some data field or another should allow 20 or 22 characters.
Just put variable 500 (or whatever) and call it a day. Now of course Microsoft's systems are much bigger in scale, but I'd think if you have so many users that the length of the password of a select VERY FEW is causing you performance/storage problem, you're in good shape business wise to tackle it =P
As many have stated, the point of the patch fee isn't to make money (though it doesn't hurt on that front). Its to make sure the consoles don't end up like PCs where games are often nowhere close to being in a "releasable state" at launch. Its a "tax/penalty" for releasing shitty code and to force devs to test their stuff.
I guess its because at the time Microsoft got slapped with anti-thrust, the world was very different. Keep in mind their sanctions and stuff are for misbehaving a LONG time ago, not for doing so today.
If you erased Microsoft's past, and they started bundling IE today, nothing would happen (which is probably why they will get away with doing bundling on Windows RT with office and stuff...they don't have a monopoly in that space).
The functional (ish) programming model, the better handling of events, the abstraction of bug and workaround...
and the plain fact that as much as browsers are converging, they still simply aren't the same. They use different javascript engine, so stuff like Safari and Chrome have quite a few differences.
Jquery's not my favorite javascript library, but it beats vanilla javascript anytime (and thats speaking as someone who spent quite a bit of time in the last few years submitting major patches to more than one of the major javascript libraries out there.)
Its not all lost though. Its definitely a net negative (I would assume), but a LOT of retailers only exist because of online now. I work for an online-only retailer, and while we do have our own website that accounts for 95%++ of our sales, we do sell products on the amazon market and that does increase our sales quite a bit. A lot of small time shops sell ONLY on the amazon marketplace.
And there needs to be people to ship those things (Fedex and UPS aren't complaining about the increase in online shopping, thats for sure), staff those warehouses... And Amazon itself is expanding a fair bit. They just opened an engineer office in Cambridge, MA, just this year, and the average salary of a developer there is quite high.
So a lot of places closes, but a few new businesses popup to take their places. Not nearly enough, for sure, but its not a TOTAL loss.
Right now take a transformer prime, plug it with a 3 bucks HDMI cable to your TV, and use any xbox 360 controller that would work with a PC (wifi or wired, both will work, but for wifi you need that PC adapter thing), load up Sonic 4, Showgun or whatever and you're there, albeit at a vastly higher price point than even a normal console because, well, its a full feature tablet.
Not surprised someone would cut cost by removing the screen/battery/etc and call it a day.
Chrome prefetching and Safari's home page sku results like crazy. Safari is especially annoying since you need to look at an http header to filter out hits from it, and if your pages are made up of static content cached by an edge caching service (let say Akamai), it becomes non-trivial to deal with it with Google Analytics (other analytic solutions will work though). On popular websites that can account for 20-25% of hits.
Now thats not whats happening here, but a lot of ecommerce site owners start thinking Mac owners are 40%+ of their customers or some such and make marketing decisions accordingly. What a mess.
I'm confused. On one side you tell people to go where the jobs are and on the other side you say that the only way to get over 100k is to go in specific roles. You do realize that in the big zones (California, Massachusetts and new york come to mind) , if you have over 5 or 6 year experience, don't completely suck and make under 100k you are getting screwed even if you're a code monkey, right?
Some drugs for very rare conditions cost a fortune because they take just as much research as any other drug, but only apply to a few hundred people, if that. If it cost 1 billion to research, but 100 bucks to apply the treatment...you're never making the money back if your competitor just looks at what you did, sell it for $100 * 300 treatments, and call it a day.
There's confusion and historical reasons to it. The US is near Canada, which is a totally terrible health care system (oh look, its FREE! Except for all the things that aren't free, which is everything where your life doesn't depend on it, and seeing a family doctor if you don't have one already will take 6 months... Lets not get started about the ER).
Then you have the fact that its already a private-ish system, and prices are sky high, as opposed to a private/regulated system like what is in Germany (if what I've been told is correct), so doing the transition would be problematic: the prices are so high and out of control, socializing part of it is absurdly expensive.
So in the end, the US is between a rock and a hard place because they didn't do this sooner. A private but heavily regulated system is what seems to be working best in hindsight from countries that have it, but its too late to put that in place easily...thus the problem.
The one thing i'm scared of is that the content that is similar-ish to what more typical MMOs in the last few years offered (the dungeons) are designed for specific levels. You can overlevel them and get scaled down, but you don't get scaled up and can't really participate until you are of that level. And when you hear that the big bad Elder Dragon boss that will be available at launch is in the highest level dungeon, that will require you to be 70+, a lot of people will get the wrong idea, rush to max level, do the dungeon, and whine "Ok now what?", having missed all the earlier content.
And while the game is designed so you can just go back, they won't, and the forums will be filled with whiners. Hopefully Arenanet doesn't cave in after that.
GW1 is much closer to WoW (not saying its close. Nowhere close, but "closer") than GW2. GW1 has the party mechanic with healers/support, the guy in front taking the hits, and the constant running of areas for loot.
GW2, aside for a select few dungeons, is all open, all the classes can do all of the roles to most extent (just with totally unique skills), the classes are different to a fundamental level (often with totally different engine mechanics, as opposed to just different numbers and variations of summon/heal/nuke/attack).
Generally so far, diehard stereotypical WoW players -hate- the way GW2 is going.
GW2's story telling is far better, with choices during your story quest that actually change the quest in a meaningful way (so 2 people of the same class/race who made the same choices during character creation, can still end up with a different main quest).
As for the dialogue? GW2 has about the same percentage of REAL spoken dialog as SWTOR did. SWTOR just "cheated", and reused a ton of lines, and used alien dialog for the rest. That ended up being pretty annoying after the 15th time in a row you hear "The jedi way is to serve!" and "Dying wasn't in my agenda for today!" (the further in the game you got, the worse it got). In GW2 that stuff is text based. Still, the majority of the story driven content is spoken dialog, in about the same ratio.
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Except Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets look very similar. The asus models look pretty much exactly the same, except the Windows 8 versions come in thicker/larger models, but aside for that they're the same. Convertible tablets with keyboard add-ons.
When the hardware looks the same, and the UI of the operating system looks the same... its easy for even some geeks to get confused.
Id say GWT if i had to guess.
Bingo. Especially in fields with high demand, your starting salary will be heavily dependent on how good you are at negotiating, and is only loosely proportional to your qualification. How hardball you can play during negotiation, and more importantly, how long you mind waiting for a job, can make a 30-40% difference easily.
If you're, let say, worried about feeding your family, you're much less likely to decline an offer because you got offered $X instead of $X + 5000, while when I'm looking for a job, I'll look at what's average in my area for someone with my qualification, and I'll just refuse offers until I get something substantially over it (assuming all positions are equal). Just because I can.
Of course, the difference in personality over things like this between genders is partly affected by gender discrimination to begin with, but that's not all of it.
WP7, not Win7. That is Windows Phone 7 -> Windows Phone 8.
That's true in the us too which I think was the point. I'm in the US and can get 300mb. 75+ is fairly available. It's more expensive than in other countries but adjusted to cost of living only a few have it much cheaper
It's still not as good as it could be but...
Control panel: get your mouse in the bottom left corner, right click -> control panel.
Want to see your documents: same place -> file explorer.
Those will work from anywhere, metro app, start screen or desktop.
The only one that im a bit iffy about right now is doing a search for specific files. I didn't see a "classic" version of it, just the metro version, and that one's on the iffy side.
Yeah, testing out the RTM from MSDN here too. At first my initial reaction was on the negative side, mainly because without touch, some of the little "tricks" to get around aren't as intuitive as they should be... they tell you most of them during install, but not all of them.
After that, it was pretty good. My only complaint is that some of the built-in Metro apps are lacking in polish a bit. The messenger app doesn't let you use a different windows account than your main account (I moved country, my msn account is from Canada, which cannot be used on the US app store, but the messenger app wont let me use a different one). The photo app won't look at network shares (while the music app and the video app do it just fine...). Little things like that.
I'm not too worried about the built in apps though since third party apps will be superior soon enough.
Aside that and a few minor glitches on the desktop, its pretty solid.
And jewelry grade synthetics are starting to show up. The ones I've seen were still brutally expensive (relatively speaking), but since they tend to be better in every way than the natural one, are cheaper than the (extremely rare) natural equivalent.
If we're talking about SSDs in the last 14 month period, give or take a few months, keep in mind there was a huge batch of sandforce-based SSDs that, for a while, had very, VERY buggy firmwares that caused everything from constant crashes, blue screens, freezing, bad writes that corrupted everything whenever you patched the system or installed new software.... The firmware updates eventually came out that fixed the issue completely, but that took a while, and I expect most people who bought one of these (they were the cheapest "fast" SSDs for quite some time...don't know about time) to be having nothing but trouble, and resellers would replace them under warranty (which was pointless: the new one would also have the bad firmware).
We went through 3 of these ourselves until we realized it was a firmware issue, and it took 2-3 firmware updates each stating they would "FINALLY" fix it before they actually did.
Not saying that covers all the cases, but considering how common those SSDs were last year, it probably is the cause of quite a few.
Such systems do exist in the US, they're just not totally universal, depending on who you deal with.
But i totally can pay all my bills, rent, utilities, everything, via a unified system. Its not accessible from "anywhere" like the parent talked about, but it is accessible from ATMs everywhere and from my bank's website. I'm from Canada where the system is a bit more universal, but now that I live in the US, at least anything I actually need to deal with works through that system. Good enough. Everything at the end of the pipeline hits my credit card and I get 1-2% cashback on that (which adds up quickly if all my purchases not done at small chinatown restaurants go through it).
At first glance the problem in the US isn't that such systems don't exist. Its that there are -too many of them- so it took longer for standards to get accepted.
Only certain types of transfers cost money. Generally to the same banks they're free, and to pay bills and whatsnot, they're also free (at least to the payer).
I pay my rent via transfer, and it doesn't cost anything (and I doubt the owners are paying the fee for me, because they charge a stupid fee for credit card payments).
International transfers are another story.
Absolutely. My main point was that people just seem to like arbitrary limits for no reason, even in other scenarios and apply that logic to passwords which is even worse
People just seem to like putting data limits for the sake of limiting. Like in databases. How many times do you see a company that has a small-ish data set (a few hundred mb to a few gb tops), running on a machine with several terrabytes of discs, then the people designing the database stop and argue for 15 minutes about if some data field or another should allow 20 or 22 characters.
Just put variable 500 (or whatever) and call it a day. Now of course Microsoft's systems are much bigger in scale, but I'd think if you have so many users that the length of the password of a select VERY FEW is causing you performance/storage problem, you're in good shape business wise to tackle it =P
As many have stated, the point of the patch fee isn't to make money (though it doesn't hurt on that front). Its to make sure the consoles don't end up like PCs where games are often nowhere close to being in a "releasable state" at launch. Its a "tax/penalty" for releasing shitty code and to force devs to test their stuff.
I guess its because at the time Microsoft got slapped with anti-thrust, the world was very different. Keep in mind their sanctions and stuff are for misbehaving a LONG time ago, not for doing so today.
If you erased Microsoft's past, and they started bundling IE today, nothing would happen (which is probably why they will get away with doing bundling on Windows RT with office and stuff...they don't have a monopoly in that space).
The functional (ish) programming model, the better handling of events, the abstraction of bug and workaround...
and the plain fact that as much as browsers are converging, they still simply aren't the same. They use different javascript engine, so stuff like Safari and Chrome have quite a few differences.
Jquery's not my favorite javascript library, but it beats vanilla javascript anytime (and thats speaking as someone who spent quite a bit of time in the last few years submitting major patches to more than one of the major javascript libraries out there.)
Its not all lost though. Its definitely a net negative (I would assume), but a LOT of retailers only exist because of online now. I work for an online-only retailer, and while we do have our own website that accounts for 95%++ of our sales, we do sell products on the amazon market and that does increase our sales quite a bit. A lot of small time shops sell ONLY on the amazon marketplace.
And there needs to be people to ship those things (Fedex and UPS aren't complaining about the increase in online shopping, thats for sure), staff those warehouses... And Amazon itself is expanding a fair bit. They just opened an engineer office in Cambridge, MA, just this year, and the average salary of a developer there is quite high.
So a lot of places closes, but a few new businesses popup to take their places. Not nearly enough, for sure, but its not a TOTAL loss.
Right now take a transformer prime, plug it with a 3 bucks HDMI cable to your TV, and use any xbox 360 controller that would work with a PC (wifi or wired, both will work, but for wifi you need that PC adapter thing), load up Sonic 4, Showgun or whatever and you're there, albeit at a vastly higher price point than even a normal console because, well, its a full feature tablet.
Not surprised someone would cut cost by removing the screen/battery/etc and call it a day.
Chrome prefetching and Safari's home page sku results like crazy. Safari is especially annoying since you need to look at an http header to filter out hits from it, and if your pages are made up of static content cached by an edge caching service (let say Akamai), it becomes non-trivial to deal with it with Google Analytics (other analytic solutions will work though). On popular websites that can account for 20-25% of hits.
Now thats not whats happening here, but a lot of ecommerce site owners start thinking Mac owners are 40%+ of their customers or some such and make marketing decisions accordingly. What a mess.
I'm confused. On one side you tell people to go where the jobs are and on the other side you say that the only way to get over 100k is to go in specific roles. You do realize that in the big zones (California, Massachusetts and new york come to mind) , if you have over 5 or 6 year experience, don't completely suck and make under 100k you are getting screwed even if you're a code monkey, right?
Some drugs for very rare conditions cost a fortune because they take just as much research as any other drug, but only apply to a few hundred people, if that. If it cost 1 billion to research, but 100 bucks to apply the treatment...you're never making the money back if your competitor just looks at what you did, sell it for $100 * 300 treatments, and call it a day.
Just an example among many.
There's confusion and historical reasons to it. The US is near Canada, which is a totally terrible health care system (oh look, its FREE! Except for all the things that aren't free, which is everything where your life doesn't depend on it, and seeing a family doctor if you don't have one already will take 6 months... Lets not get started about the ER).
Then you have the fact that its already a private-ish system, and prices are sky high, as opposed to a private/regulated system like what is in Germany (if what I've been told is correct), so doing the transition would be problematic: the prices are so high and out of control, socializing part of it is absurdly expensive.
So in the end, the US is between a rock and a hard place because they didn't do this sooner. A private but heavily regulated system is what seems to be working best in hindsight from countries that have it, but its too late to put that in place easily...thus the problem.
The one thing i'm scared of is that the content that is similar-ish to what more typical MMOs in the last few years offered (the dungeons) are designed for specific levels. You can overlevel them and get scaled down, but you don't get scaled up and can't really participate until you are of that level. And when you hear that the big bad Elder Dragon boss that will be available at launch is in the highest level dungeon, that will require you to be 70+, a lot of people will get the wrong idea, rush to max level, do the dungeon, and whine "Ok now what?", having missed all the earlier content.
And while the game is designed so you can just go back, they won't, and the forums will be filled with whiners. Hopefully Arenanet doesn't cave in after that.
GW1 is much closer to WoW (not saying its close. Nowhere close, but "closer") than GW2. GW1 has the party mechanic with healers/support, the guy in front taking the hits, and the constant running of areas for loot.
GW2, aside for a select few dungeons, is all open, all the classes can do all of the roles to most extent (just with totally unique skills), the classes are different to a fundamental level (often with totally different engine mechanics, as opposed to just different numbers and variations of summon/heal/nuke/attack).
Generally so far, diehard stereotypical WoW players -hate- the way GW2 is going.
GW2's story telling is far better, with choices during your story quest that actually change the quest in a meaningful way (so 2 people of the same class/race who made the same choices during character creation, can still end up with a different main quest).
As for the dialogue? GW2 has about the same percentage of REAL spoken dialog as SWTOR did. SWTOR just "cheated", and reused a ton of lines, and used alien dialog for the rest. That ended up being pretty annoying after the 15th time in a row you hear "The jedi way is to serve!" and "Dying wasn't in my agenda for today!" (the further in the game you got, the worse it got). In GW2 that stuff is text based. Still, the majority of the story driven content is spoken dialog, in about the same ratio.