I'm kind of surprised that GTA 3,VC &SA didn't get AO ratings anyway. I'd think brutal violence would be worth a higher rating than a little sex scene...but some people have f*cked up moral priorities...
Agreed. Especially as the screenshots of the hack show the participants fully clothed. Extremely juvenile, not particularly erotic, and overall pretty silly.
People, people... let's not forget that this is happening in the country where the showing of Ms. Jackson's nipple for about half a second on public TV made everybody scream bloody murder. I mean... we all know that seeing a nipple will make all our kids go out and have unprotected sex, right?
If showing a single nipple is worse than hours and hours and hours of violence on TV, imagine what a cartoonish sex scene is worse than...
How about using the drive to insert floppies in order to be able to install a driver from a manufacturer who still needs to find out about the existence of cdroms?
I can't even imagine that could be happening... I have see so much abuse of the general idea that "users have huge hard drives nowadays". Just last week, I had to reinstall WinXP Pro at work (major HD crash), and had to download the driver for the network card (that's kind of funny, since you need a network connection to download...). Obviously, I had to do it on another computer, then transfer it in some way. The network driver is 4 megabytes large! A friggin' network driver! Can't fit that on one floppy, doesn't even fit on 2 floppies.
No manufacturer / software maker cares about making things small anymore, because "big hard drives are so cheap nowadays, we can just assume the user has one big enough".
Right... because when you're 17, you're not prepared to see polygons have sex, but the minute you turn 18, everything changes, right?
The M (Mature) and AO (Adult-only) rating is the worst I've ever seen... waaaayy too fine-grained. What the hell happens between your 17th and 18th birthday that make you all so much more mature?
No one even knows what the new nintendo is called except for thepeople who follow e3. Lots of people know about the XBox 360 and PS3
Hard to say which strategy is the best though. When Nintendo announces the Revolution next year, it'll be "oh so new and shiny" while the PS3 will already be "last year's news" by then.
I hope EA gets totally burned by this and the games industry learns a lesson about sacrificing quality to hit a release date.
Maybe some people did already learn that lesson. I mean... Duke Nukem Forever... they totally sacrificed the release date, hopefully to get the quality... Now, just imagine the amount of quality you'll get;-)
Maybe not, but it just proves Nintendo's point. So long before the launch of the next-gen consoles, there's no point in hyping features that won't make it in (Longhorn anyone?).
Lots of people complained that Nintendo didn't reveal anything about the Revolution at the E3, and that it would lose the console war because the PS3 and the Xbox360 have so many cool features... Well guess what, not only did Sony just get one less cool feature, but they also just got bad publicity.
Did you really expect to see everything they bragged about at the E3 actually become reality?
So hmm.. this is all assuming you are an English typer right?:o)
God I'm glad to see I'm not the only one see this as a problem. I spend my days (at work and as a hobby) in front of a keyboard, typing away. People tell me I shouldn't stick with a qwerty keyboard and switch to dvorak since it is "highly-optimized" for typing. However, those people don't seem to realize that:
Dvorak is optimized for the English language only.
There are a whole lot of people outside of the US that type things in other languages than English.
Programmers don't need fast access to vowels, they need fast access to colons, semi-colons, parenthesis, brackets, etc.
Most of the pain is not due to where the letters are on the keyboard, but because the keyboard is flat.
So people complain that qwerty is a bad standard, and they want to have a new standard that is inappropriate for a majority of people (for those of you who don't realize yet, even though English is the most used language on the net, it is still used by only a minority of users. And that's only for internet users, the "real world" has much more non-internet non-English people).
Why should the whole world suffer a standard that promotes the American way?
Some nice guy has an open AP at the pool in my community, so you can 'work' from the pool.
How do you know he lets you use it on purpose, and he's not just someone who doesn't know how to secure his connection? Did he tell you? Did you ask him?
If you can see you're neighbor's wireless router from your living room PC, how about knocking on his door and actually ask him if he's sharing his connection as a favor? I guess that would be one way to differentiate between nice people and stupid people, right?
What if I'm at a restaurant, and I leave my wallet on the table while I'm using the restroom... am I letting you have access to my credit cards or am I too stupid to conceal my wallet? How can you differentiate? You can't, so you'd just take my wallet without asking?
It's a sad state of affairs when a fourth generation release of probably the best supported Linux distro available can only gain a 6 out of 10 rating.
It got a 6 out of 10 from one reviewer who wasn't even able to get a DVD working... I mean, I know nothing about that guy, but the simple fact that he couldn't get a DVD working (while I installed FC4 from DVD on 3 different computers, with 3 completely different settings; and I'm also quite sure thousands of other people installed from DVD without any problem), doesn't give him a whole lot of credibility to me.
What he encountered is not a problem with the distribution, it's an anecdote.
There are some weird reasons to let Opera identify itself as Internet Explorer. For instance, years ago, I used to try to check my Hotmail account inside of Opera, and nothing loaded.
... as you mentionned, that was years ago. Is there still a reason for Opera to identify itself as IE? Which sites still feed junk to Opera on purpose?
Your question is old hat in time-travel discussion.
If I went back two years and killed your dog, your present self would suddenly be in a reality where your dog had been dead for two years. Many things might have changed in your life as a result, and you would have no idea that a day earlier your dog was still alive because that 'reality' never happened.
And that is exactly what these quantum physicists say cannot happen.
What I infer from this though, considering the possibility that there could indeed be an infinite amount of parallel universes, is that if you go back in the past to kill my dog, my present dog would not become dead all of a sudden, and I would not warp to a parallel universe either. However, when you wuold be coming back to the future, you will end up in a parallel universe in which my dog is dead.
But then, isn't it strange that those quantum physicians didn't talk about parallel universes?
People expect their OS to have moderate out of the box multimedia functionality. Windows Media player provides that
Oddly enough, I installed Fedora Core 4 yesterday, and it couldn't play any mpeg file out-of-the-box. But then, what I installed was an operating system, not a media player, and I don't expect an operating system to do anything but operate my system. When I wanted to have a media player, I installed a media player (totem-xine).
I do use Thunderbird at work, but may shortly have to switch back to the corporate-standard Outlook 2003 thanks to those missing features. As of today, we no longer co-ordinate using meeting rooms using a pen & paper diary system, for example, so since I don't use Outlook I can't tell who might have them booked, nor can I book them myself.
I for one have the pleasure to be working at a place developing multi-platform software, and the main development platform is Mac, so most managers use Mac. Therefore, the scheduling system is iCal, and even though I'm alternating between Windows and Linux, Sunbird can very well interoperate with iCal. I never used Outlook's calendar function, so I don't know about all the super-tweaked features, but iCal does pretty much everything we need here, and I bet that in a Windows-only company, Sunbird could be just as good. You might want to check it out and tell your managers about it...
United States Population: 295,734,134 (July 2005 est.)
Canada Population: 32,805,041 (July 2005 est.)*
Thats about 10X, fairly significant. The point is that you don't need to count all of them by hand...
You're right... it must take 10 times longer to count because there are 10 times more ballots... you sure wouldn't think about hiring 10 times more people to count the ballots... that wouldn't be a great idea, right?
Accessibility: paper and pencil doesn't work well for the blind or people with certain physical handicaps. A highly touted feature of the electronic machines is that they can use other I/O methods to accomodate these people.
Whatever the method of I/O that is being implemented in any given county, there will be someone that has a handicap that prevents him from using that particular I/O method. You can't implement 1000 methods in a single county.
Multilingual: in places like California, ballots come in many languages. Having a machine that can present the same ballot in a selection of languages simplifies logistical problems of making sure you have the right number of each language at each polling place.
Every country in the world has one or a couple of "official languages". That is because you can't expect every government agency to use every language in the world for everything. In the US, official languages are English, and maybe Spanish too. Make the ballots English/Spanish, it's not much of a clutter. If a voter doesn't understand neither English nor Spanish, how the hell did he become an american citizen?
Complex Ballots: in a general election, there are usually several offices and issues to vote on. Futhermore, which issues you get to vote on depend upon which district/county/municipality you live in. If I want to vote near where I work (a different county than where I live), an electronic ballot machine can present me with the appropriate set of choices. Counting ballots with a single question by hand is easy, but when they get as complicated as they are here in California, the benefits of automation start to look appealing.
The more complex it gets, the more chances you have that someone won't even understand what they're voting for.
If you really insist of voting for every friggin thing on the same day, make 2 ballots, one that says "Who do you want for a president?" and one that asks all the other questions.
Speed: the media wants results faster. (I'm not sure why. It took weeks to sort out the 2000 presidential election, and the news outlets got tons of extra viewership because of it.) Electronic tallies are perceived as faster.
As I mentionned in another post, an election is *not* a TV show. Only in the US would people sacrifice democracy so the media can get their material.
The e-votes can be counted and released to the media shortly after the polls close.
And it is *really* important that the media knows the result shortly after the polls close... because...?
I mean, get a life people... an election is not a TV-Show, you shouldn't compromize democracy for the sake of having news channels be able to get the results as fast as possible.
If canadian election officials can count 13.6 million paper ballots in a matter of hours (human beings, not machines), surely Americans can do it to. Don't go saying there are more people in the US... just assign more people to count the votes.
In the 2004 canadian federal elections, there were 63,859 polling stations, which collected a total of 13,683,570 votes. That's an average of 213 votes per station. With one election official per station, that means that each individual official had to count an average of 213 ballots... pretty easy to do in a matter of minutes... In the US, more electors mean more polling stations mean more election officials that each count about 250 votes... your precious media can still have the results in a matter of minutes.
In other words, if there is ANY way a vote can be tied to a voter, then ppl will not accept that. So, with your system, you have a count - that doesn't match. Now what the f*ck do you do?
Basically... if the electronic voting machine spits out a piece of paper, and the voter puts the piece of paper in a box, and people count those pieces of paper to compare the count with the electronic result... what is the point of having an electronic voting system at all?
I just never understood why the US insisted on electronic voting... We do it with plain pen & paper up here in Canada, and nobody screams "FRAUD" every election...
Sorry AC but I do not underline it to be pretentious or anything, it is just to try to make people understand that, if they payed (of course, I did not payed as much as someone from the US) to get a CS degree, to learn to develop software (notice the difference between that an mere programming), then why TF would I want to spend the rest of my life as a seller or advocate? or service provider?
That is so true. And if everybody became a "service provider", who'd write the new software?
I also am a programmer, and I develop proprietary software for a living. I also develop OSS, but as a hobby.
General users don't seem to understand the tremendous amount of work there is behind every piece of software they use. Therefore, they're not half as grateful as they should be towards the programmers. When people see a street performer doing some music on the corner, they can do a direct link between the enjoyment they're having on the moment and that guy over there, so they're more willing to put money in the hat. When it comes to software, they don't see the programmer(s), it just came "from the Internet", and they are already paying for the Internet (paying the ISP that is), so they feel like the downloaded software is part of the deal they got with their ISP, so very few will think about donating to OSS projects.
As I said, most users (or most people, since just about everybody is a user of some software) just don't know what a programmer does, and they take all their software for granted. It may sound pretentious, but I do wear this T-shirt every now and then to remind people that there are human beings behind every computer program they use every day, that my job is to make their lives somewhat easier, and that they should be grateful for that.
That worked out to $329/second, or about $40 grand by time Slashdot will let you post another comment
More like $400 grand for me... for some reason, I've been experiencing a weird bug lately where I couldn't post a second comment for about 20 minutes, with an error message like "Slow down cowboy! Slashdot requires that you wait 2 minutes before posting another comment. I has been 14 minutes since you last posted a comment."
And now that I posted this, I'm screwed for the next 20 minutes or so... *sigh*
that and one kills people if it gos wrong, and one wastes paper...
well... the printer... 170 pages per minute... that's a whole lot of paper travelling pretty fast... considering how bad a paper cut can be from a slow-moving piece of paper, I wouldn't want to stand in the way of those sheets...
I was working on a development contract when our CEO decided to cut Internet access for all consultants
I used to work at Ubisoft when they provided full internet access to employees... lately, to be coherent with the industry's concept of "let's piss our employees off as much as possible", they decided to completely cut off internet access. I'm not there anymore (left way before they cut), but I still have a couple of friends over there, and we used to MSN a whole lot on boring days (yes, they can have that sometimes...). Now, it's mostly just boring cause they ain't online anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Especially as the screenshots of the hack show the participants fully clothed. Extremely juvenile, not particularly erotic, and overall pretty silly.
People, people... let's not forget that this is happening in the country where the showing of Ms. Jackson's nipple for about half a second on public TV made everybody scream bloody murder. I mean... we all know that seeing a nipple will make all our kids go out and have unprotected sex, right?
If showing a single nipple is worse than hours and hours and hours of violence on TV, imagine what a cartoonish sex scene is worse than...
I can't even imagine that could be happening... I have see so much abuse of the general idea that "users have huge hard drives nowadays". Just last week, I had to reinstall WinXP Pro at work (major HD crash), and had to download the driver for the network card (that's kind of funny, since you need a network connection to download...). Obviously, I had to do it on another computer, then transfer it in some way. The network driver is 4 megabytes large! A friggin' network driver! Can't fit that on one floppy, doesn't even fit on 2 floppies.
No manufacturer / software maker cares about making things small anymore, because "big hard drives are so cheap nowadays, we can just assume the user has one big enough".
Right... because when you're 17, you're not prepared to see polygons have sex, but the minute you turn 18, everything changes, right?
The M (Mature) and AO (Adult-only) rating is the worst I've ever seen... waaaayy too fine-grained. What the hell happens between your 17th and 18th birthday that make you all so much more mature?
Hard to say which strategy is the best though. When Nintendo announces the Revolution next year, it'll be "oh so new and shiny" while the PS3 will already be "last year's news" by then.
Maybe some people did already learn that lesson. I mean... Duke Nukem Forever... they totally sacrificed the release date, hopefully to get the quality... Now, just imagine the amount of quality you'll get ;-)
Lots of people complained that Nintendo didn't reveal anything about the Revolution at the E3, and that it would lose the console war because the PS3 and the Xbox360 have so many cool features... Well guess what, not only did Sony just get one less cool feature, but they also just got bad publicity.
Did you really expect to see everything they bragged about at the E3 actually become reality?
I will only consider a Dvorak test to be objective if it tests not only a large number of words, but also a large number of languages.
The Dvorak layout is biased towards English. Prove me wrong.
God I'm glad to see I'm not the only one see this as a problem. I spend my days (at work and as a hobby) in front of a keyboard, typing away. People tell me I shouldn't stick with a qwerty keyboard and switch to dvorak since it is "highly-optimized" for typing. However, those people don't seem to realize that:
So people complain that qwerty is a bad standard, and they want to have a new standard that is inappropriate for a majority of people (for those of you who don't realize yet, even though English is the most used language on the net, it is still used by only a minority of users. And that's only for internet users, the "real world" has much more non-internet non-English people).
Why should the whole world suffer a standard that promotes the American way?
How do you know he lets you use it on purpose, and he's not just someone who doesn't know how to secure his connection? Did he tell you? Did you ask him?
If you can see you're neighbor's wireless router from your living room PC, how about knocking on his door and actually ask him if he's sharing his connection as a favor? I guess that would be one way to differentiate between nice people and stupid people, right?
What if I'm at a restaurant, and I leave my wallet on the table while I'm using the restroom... am I letting you have access to my credit cards or am I too stupid to conceal my wallet? How can you differentiate? You can't, so you'd just take my wallet without asking?
It got a 6 out of 10 from one reviewer who wasn't even able to get a DVD working... I mean, I know nothing about that guy, but the simple fact that he couldn't get a DVD working (while I installed FC4 from DVD on 3 different computers, with 3 completely different settings; and I'm also quite sure thousands of other people installed from DVD without any problem), doesn't give him a whole lot of credibility to me.
What he encountered is not a problem with the distribution, it's an anecdote.
If I went back two years and killed your dog, your present self would suddenly be in a reality where your dog had been dead for two years. Many things might have changed in your life as a result, and you would have no idea that a day earlier your dog was still alive because that 'reality' never happened.
And that is exactly what these quantum physicists say cannot happen.
What I infer from this though, considering the possibility that there could indeed be an infinite amount of parallel universes, is that if you go back in the past to kill my dog, my present dog would not become dead all of a sudden, and I would not warp to a parallel universe either. However, when you wuold be coming back to the future, you will end up in a parallel universe in which my dog is dead.
But then, isn't it strange that those quantum physicians didn't talk about parallel universes?
Oddly enough, I installed Fedora Core 4 yesterday, and it couldn't play any mpeg file out-of-the-box. But then, what I installed was an operating system, not a media player, and I don't expect an operating system to do anything but operate my system. When I wanted to have a media player, I installed a media player (totem-xine).
I for one have the pleasure to be working at a place developing multi-platform software, and the main development platform is Mac, so most managers use Mac. Therefore, the scheduling system is iCal, and even though I'm alternating between Windows and Linux, Sunbird can very well interoperate with iCal. I never used Outlook's calendar function, so I don't know about all the super-tweaked features, but iCal does pretty much everything we need here, and I bet that in a Windows-only company, Sunbird could be just as good. You might want to check it out and tell your managers about it...
Canada Population: 32,805,041 (July 2005 est.)*
Thats about 10X, fairly significant. The point is that you don't need to count all of them by hand...
You're right... it must take 10 times longer to count because there are 10 times more ballots... you sure wouldn't think about hiring 10 times more people to count the ballots... that wouldn't be a great idea, right?
Whatever the method of I/O that is being implemented in any given county, there will be someone that has a handicap that prevents him from using that particular I/O method. You can't implement 1000 methods in a single county.
Multilingual: in places like California, ballots come in many languages. Having a machine that can present the same ballot in a selection of languages simplifies logistical problems of making sure you have the right number of each language at each polling place.
Every country in the world has one or a couple of "official languages". That is because you can't expect every government agency to use every language in the world for everything. In the US, official languages are English, and maybe Spanish too. Make the ballots English/Spanish, it's not much of a clutter. If a voter doesn't understand neither English nor Spanish, how the hell did he become an american citizen?
Complex Ballots: in a general election, there are usually several offices and issues to vote on. Futhermore, which issues you get to vote on depend upon which district/county/municipality you live in. If I want to vote near where I work (a different county than where I live), an electronic ballot machine can present me with the appropriate set of choices. Counting ballots with a single question by hand is easy, but when they get as complicated as they are here in California, the benefits of automation start to look appealing.
The more complex it gets, the more chances you have that someone won't even understand what they're voting for.
If you really insist of voting for every friggin thing on the same day, make 2 ballots, one that says "Who do you want for a president?" and one that asks all the other questions.
Speed: the media wants results faster. (I'm not sure why. It took weeks to sort out the 2000 presidential election, and the news outlets got tons of extra viewership because of it.) Electronic tallies are perceived as faster.
As I mentionned in another post, an election is *not* a TV show. Only in the US would people sacrifice democracy so the media can get their material.
And it is *really* important that the media knows the result shortly after the polls close... because...?
I mean, get a life people... an election is not a TV-Show, you shouldn't compromize democracy for the sake of having news channels be able to get the results as fast as possible.
If canadian election officials can count 13.6 million paper ballots in a matter of hours (human beings, not machines), surely Americans can do it to. Don't go saying there are more people in the US... just assign more people to count the votes.
In the 2004 canadian federal elections, there were 63,859 polling stations, which collected a total of 13,683,570 votes. That's an average of 213 votes per station. With one election official per station, that means that each individual official had to count an average of 213 ballots... pretty easy to do in a matter of minutes... In the US, more electors mean more polling stations mean more election officials that each count about 250 votes... your precious media can still have the results in a matter of minutes.
Basically... if the electronic voting machine spits out a piece of paper, and the voter puts the piece of paper in a box, and people count those pieces of paper to compare the count with the electronic result... what is the point of having an electronic voting system at all?
I just never understood why the US insisted on electronic voting... We do it with plain pen & paper up here in Canada, and nobody screams "FRAUD" every election...
That is so true. And if everybody became a "service provider", who'd write the new software?
I also am a programmer, and I develop proprietary software for a living. I also develop OSS, but as a hobby.
General users don't seem to understand the tremendous amount of work there is behind every piece of software they use. Therefore, they're not half as grateful as they should be towards the programmers. When people see a street performer doing some music on the corner, they can do a direct link between the enjoyment they're having on the moment and that guy over there, so they're more willing to put money in the hat. When it comes to software, they don't see the programmer(s), it just came "from the Internet", and they are already paying for the Internet (paying the ISP that is), so they feel like the downloaded software is part of the deal they got with their ISP, so very few will think about donating to OSS projects.
As I said, most users (or most people, since just about everybody is a user of some software) just don't know what a programmer does, and they take all their software for granted. It may sound pretentious, but I do wear this T-shirt every now and then to remind people that there are human beings behind every computer program they use every day, that my job is to make their lives somewhat easier, and that they should be grateful for that.
More like $400 grand for me... for some reason, I've been experiencing a weird bug lately where I couldn't post a second comment for about 20 minutes, with an error message like "Slow down cowboy! Slashdot requires that you wait 2 minutes before posting another comment. I has been 14 minutes since you last posted a comment."
And now that I posted this, I'm screwed for the next 20 minutes or so... *sigh*
well... the printer... 170 pages per minute... that's a whole lot of paper travelling pretty fast... considering how bad a paper cut can be from a slow-moving piece of paper, I wouldn't want to stand in the way of those sheets...
Yes, I think I did...
And then again, this wasn't the first time either...
Didn't I see that being posted here like, months ago?
I used to work at Ubisoft when they provided full internet access to employees... lately, to be coherent with the industry's concept of "let's piss our employees off as much as possible", they decided to completely cut off internet access. I'm not there anymore (left way before they cut), but I still have a couple of friends over there, and we used to MSN a whole lot on boring days (yes, they can have that sometimes...). Now, it's mostly just boring cause they ain't online anymore...