Who cares if it's an advert? If it interests you then you'd read it whether it was or not, and if it doesn't interest you then you just have to do the mammoth task of scrolling past it.
That's what I thought from the start. I mean all they do is count. Kinda like, I dunno, say, a calculator. You don't see the headline "calculators recalled due to 32,768 bug" do you
You'd think after seeing that 10000 ips all logged in with the same username and all happened to have slashdot as the referer that they might take the initiative of deleting the accounts.. unless they dno't mind in which case why is the site reg-only to start with.
hypothetical scenario - they "upgrade" the 7 PCs. the 60,000 other PCs start going down left and right. the guys say "oh shit!" and they restore these 7 PCs... and the other 60,000 PCs *do not come back up*. what do you do then?
TA is certainly lacking on info so we don't know a lot about these PCs.
My guess would be that the 60k would actually just be drones. I mean, it seems daft that each would contain individual information. On that basis, a) the 7 may have been feeding them and a simple reinstall from one backup (as we've both said, as if) should be able to fix one office at a time and b) just reboot the 60k and they'll reconnect to the leaders... if they had been restored that is.
Dunno, not enough info given, but I find it too unlikely that 60000 down means 60000 seperate repair jobs.
I meant restore the 7 pcs they'd upgraded. I would assume the 60,000 died either because those 7 were feeding them, or because or an incompatibility with the upgrade. If you're upgrading ANYTHING that might affect anything else you should do a back up. So in both cases I would have thought a simple restore would have made everything happy again..
If something is actually working right (and it's rare), change it!
I can imagine it now Intern: "Sir, Microsoft have bought out Windows XP Service Pack 2. It's had numerous bug reports of dying pcs and software not working anymore. THIS is the time to upgrade to Windows XP, then upgrade to SP2 because windowsupdate won't stop bugging the hell out of us until we do!" Boss: "You mean we could cock something up, and it might not even be our fault for a change?! Lets pay someone vast amounts of money to do it!"
The Gaurdian reports it was a week long outage. Now, I may be completely wrong here, but surely all they had to do was restore those pcs back to their previous Windows 2000 state using the daily backups they do... I mean, it's only common sense to do backups on such a critical syst...oh, wait, nevermind.
I should imagine there's some sort of tv card or similar that will do it although generally it's the speed of the hard drive that takes the strain, not the cpu. An external dvd recorded would if you had it linked to the tv too.
Fraps is most probably designed for software > hard drive writing.
I know that fark-rausch have created such a thing, particularly fr-025 which I *think* has a computer generated voice which sounds pretty good. I'm 99% sure there's a 64k demo with a computer generated yet surprisingly realistic voice but I can't remember which it is.
In the case of red vs blue, the voice is overlayed but with the vast amount of different sounds/voices etc written into games, movies, tv programs etc. these days, and with the power of sound editing software I shouldn't think it too hard to manipulate and accurately time the exact sound you're after.
you bastard I thought I had the first 'long-ass reply' post:P
Vaguely off-topic drifting back to on-topic reply
on
Best Tools for Machinima?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Now that Sims 2 is here with its video-recording feature (and the promise of more contemporary realism in the expansion packs)
The sims? Realism? You're kidding right?
We're talking here about simulated "people" who will quite happily beat the crap out of someone one second and talk about the weather to them the next. "people" who will moan and whinge when the bathroom is in use when there are three other free ones in the house. "people" who will happily stuff their faces whilst their kid is crying it's eyes out after shattin itself. "people" who, when they see a fire, go as close to it as they can manage and burn themselves to death instead of calling the fire brigade as any sensible person would do. "people" who play *exactly* the same game of chess every time (technical limitations, I know)
The actual actions they do are vaguely convincing but overall the sims is *not* realistic!
You were right though, it does have a video recording dooby which the strangerhood has used and with some fiddly work you could create a story.
To create any movie you'd need to know what the engine(s) can do inside and out, and if you're using existing characters, you'd need to know their capabilities inside and out too. So to answer, I think anyone could create something half decent but you're looking at a lot of studying and some very careful planning to get it just right.
Oh, just as a complete sidenote and to make this post as worthwhile (debatably) as possible, for anyone who's interested fraps lets you record pretty much anything happening on your screen such as games etc. so you're not limited to in-game recording to capture footage.
EA should be praised for offering jobs to people without much industry experience. By slaving them out? Sure you could look at it one way and say they're doing a good deed, but then you read the methods they're using and it's more than obvious they're just milking these employees for everything they can and spitting em out at the end without so much as a thanks. Sadly, that's the way of a lot of modern business but it doesn't make it right.
Re:Devil's Advocate
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 2, Informative
The whole problem surrounding these EA stories isn't so much that the staff are working longer hours, it's that they do so under an assumed "or else" and they aren't paid for it.
I doubt that many people could say the end result wasn't worth the effort and I agree sometimes you need to pull in some extra hours. We all get those bastard problems that seem unsolvable, but there's a difference between getting a few staff to iron out a bug, and getting the entire team to work bonusless 80+ hour weeks and at the end giving them a kick up the arse as gratitude.
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
I partly agree but you have to remember that it's a car racing game where you frequently top 100/150mph, you hardly have time to concentrate on the ads, although yes there are a lot of them.
I suspect it's more that the coders were keen to make a good job of it for whatever reason, and the ads were put in under order.
I'd certainly agree with that. The 7 sims expansions were practically the same code but slightly modified for whatever the theme was. NFSU 2 is, practically the same undercode only expanded some. Hardly a rewrite. I don't know anything about the sports games but I should imagine they're pretty similar to the predecessor. And everything sells at new-game price. It's a clever business model simply because it seems to work. And it's the poor bastards they slav... er, hire that have to repeat this crap.
The worst bit is because they have high staff rotation, the new peeps coming in have to learn all the old code, I suspect if they kept staff on longer it would take a lot less time to produce new expansions/upgrades. It's a pity management don't have common sense like that
If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices. Why's that then, are they short on cash?
When will people learn that the globally competitive environment isn't going to provide them the cushy existence for little work that their grandparents got. Get over it. Learn to compete and quit whining. Yes but there's a difference between perhaps asking an hour or two here and there, and, if the stories are to be believed, asking for 80+ hour weeks for several weeks on end with no overtime pay.
Actually it was ST:V that beat.. or rather reached the warp 10 record, although if you read some accounts the older series used to talk about a different scale which went up to warp 13
A few replies have said that hundreds of people would kill to work at EA... so instead of working their workers into the ground why don't EA hire some of them. It's not they haven't got the money.
Possibly, but the comments are varying between "you can do VOIP already, and BT is shit", so if that was the plan (and yes, I've seen the joke) then it's gonna backfire. Nerds know what they're talking about, hired people on tv adverts don't
Multimedia PC with 700MHz processor or faster 256-color VGA or higher resolution graphics card
If there's anyone these days using a 16 colour display for general pc and net usage, they should be shot... exactly, everyone has.. which kinda makes you wonder, why put in such a stupid line
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares if it's an advert?
If it interests you then you'd read it whether it was or not, and if it doesn't interest you then you just have to do the mammoth task of scrolling past it.
That's what I thought from the start. I mean all they do is count. Kinda like, I dunno, say, a calculator. You don't see the headline "calculators recalled due to 32,768 bug" do you
You'd think after seeing that 10000 ips all logged in with the same username and all happened to have slashdot as the referer that they might take the initiative of deleting the accounts.. unless they dno't mind in which case why is the site reg-only to start with.
Yeah like they'd get away with that! Oh, hang on a minute...
TA is certainly lacking on info so we don't know a lot about these PCs.
My guess would be that the 60k would actually just be drones. I mean, it seems daft that each would contain individual information. On that basis, a) the 7 may have been feeding them and a simple reinstall from one backup (as we've both said, as if) should be able to fix one office at a time and b) just reboot the 60k and they'll reconnect to the leaders... if they had been restored that is.
Dunno, not enough info given, but I find it too unlikely that 60000 down means 60000 seperate repair jobs.
Oh, nevermind, I just got it. They somehow pushed the upgrade to 60,000. My mistake.. and theirs too
or have I missed something?
I can imagine it now
Intern: "Sir, Microsoft have bought out Windows XP Service Pack 2. It's had numerous bug reports of dying pcs and software not working anymore. THIS is the time to upgrade to Windows XP, then upgrade to SP2 because windowsupdate won't stop bugging the hell out of us until we do!"
Boss: "You mean we could cock something up, and it might not even be our fault for a change?! Lets pay someone vast amounts of money to do it!"
The Gaurdian reports it was a week long outage. Now, I may be completely wrong here, but surely all they had to do was restore those pcs back to their previous Windows 2000 state using the daily backups they do... I mean, it's only common sense to do backups on such a critical syst...oh, wait, nevermind.
</cynical>
ooooh thanks for that. I should probably have looked that up. Still, I got a nice rant about the sims in.
Fraps is most probably designed for software > hard drive writing.
so, yes there is but I know little about it
In the case of red vs blue, the voice is overlayed but with the vast amount of different sounds/voices etc written into games, movies, tv programs etc. these days, and with the power of sound editing software I shouldn't think it too hard to manipulate and accurately time the exact sound you're after.
you bastard I thought I had the first 'long-ass reply' post :P
The sims? Realism? You're kidding right?
We're talking here about simulated "people" who will quite happily beat the crap out of someone one second and talk about the weather to them the next. "people" who will moan and whinge when the bathroom is in use when there are three other free ones in the house. "people" who will happily stuff their faces whilst their kid is crying it's eyes out after shattin itself. "people" who, when they see a fire, go as close to it as they can manage and burn themselves to death instead of calling the fire brigade as any sensible person would do. "people" who play *exactly* the same game of chess every time (technical limitations, I know)
The actual actions they do are vaguely convincing but overall the sims is *not* realistic!
You were right though, it does have a video recording dooby which the strangerhood has used and with some fiddly work you could create a story.
To create any movie you'd need to know what the engine(s) can do inside and out, and if you're using existing characters, you'd need to know their capabilities inside and out too. So to answer, I think anyone could create something half decent but you're looking at a lot of studying and some very careful planning to get it just right.
Oh, just as a complete sidenote and to make this post as worthwhile (debatably) as possible, for anyone who's interested fraps lets you record pretty much anything happening on your screen such as games etc. so you're not limited to in-game recording to capture footage.
EA should be praised for offering jobs to people without much industry experience.
By slaving them out? Sure you could look at it one way and say they're doing a good deed, but then you read the methods they're using and it's more than obvious they're just milking these employees for everything they can and spitting em out at the end without so much as a thanks. Sadly, that's the way of a lot of modern business but it doesn't make it right.
I doubt that many people could say the end result wasn't worth the effort and I agree sometimes you need to pull in some extra hours. We all get those bastard problems that seem unsolvable, but there's a difference between getting a few staff to iron out a bug, and getting the entire team to work bonusless 80+ hour weeks and at the end giving them a kick up the arse as gratitude.
I suspect it's more that the coders were keen to make a good job of it for whatever reason, and the ads were put in under order.
I'd certainly agree with that. The 7 sims expansions were practically the same code but slightly modified for whatever the theme was. NFSU 2 is, practically the same undercode only expanded some. Hardly a rewrite. I don't know anything about the sports games but I should imagine they're pretty similar to the predecessor. And everything sells at new-game price. It's a clever business model simply because it seems to work. And it's the poor bastards they slav... er, hire that have to repeat this crap.
The worst bit is because they have high staff rotation, the new peeps coming in have to learn all the old code, I suspect if they kept staff on longer it would take a lot less time to produce new expansions/upgrades. It's a pity management don't have common sense like that
Why's that then, are they short on cash?
When will people learn that the globally competitive environment isn't going to provide them the cushy existence for little work that their grandparents got. Get over it. Learn to compete and quit whining.
Yes but there's a difference between perhaps asking an hour or two here and there, and, if the stories are to be believed, asking for 80+ hour weeks for several weeks on end with no overtime pay.
"fuck a frog"
"I don't think that's biologically possible"
"Fuck anton"
"I don't think he'd like that"
Who says the spectrum games writers don't have a sense of humour
Actually it was ST:V that beat.. or rather reached the warp 10 record, although if you read some accounts the older series used to talk about a different scale which went up to warp 13
A few replies have said that hundreds of people would kill to work at EA... so instead of working their workers into the ground why don't EA hire some of them. It's not they haven't got the money.
LMAO.. oh if only I had mod points
Possibly, but the comments are varying between "you can do VOIP already, and BT is shit", so if that was the plan (and yes, I've seen the joke) then it's gonna backfire. Nerds know what they're talking about, hired people on tv adverts don't
Multimedia PC with 700MHz processor or faster
256-color VGA or higher resolution graphics card
If there's anyone these days using a 16 colour display for general pc and net usage, they should be shot... exactly, everyone has.. which kinda makes you wonder, why put in such a stupid line