...it's one of their more lacklustre tunes; a somewhat uninspired and derivative Beatles-style song. That statement suggests that Oasis wrote songs that *weren't* uninspired and derivative of the Beatles. Perhaps you separate the Beatles rip-offs from the solo Lennon rip-offs?
First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
Wait, let me get this straight - you pay your IT staff for overtime and weekends? Please, tell me more of this mythical place where personal time is not defined as what is left over when work is finished.
You hit it on the head. If everything runs smoothly, you may feel satisfied because you know you're doing your job and doing it well. Unfortunately, in most cases management isn't going to pay attention to the fact that things are running without a hiccup. It's only when there is a fire and it is put out that there is any recognition of a job well done.
If you upgrade the network from 10Mb to 100Mb (or, I suppose, 100Mb to 1Gb) without a hitch, nobody notices. If there's downtime, dropped connections, etc, the issue is immediately high profile and someone gets to be the hero that fixes it. Often there is more than enough CYA applied throughout the process that nobody gets blamed.
Employees are conditioned to associate firefighting with praise. I've seen people build up raging 5-alarm fires out of a spark because either they're brainwashed into to thinking that it is supposed to work that way, or they know that there will be no pat on the back unless the issue gets the CEO's attention. Where is the reward in fixing something in 5 minutes by yourself when you and your peers can spend all night and weekend thrashing about just to get a nice 'Thank you' email from some upper-management PHB-type?
It wasn't that long ago that being identified as a "Communist" was enough to be accused of treason and brought before a Congressional inquest. It's nice to think that nobody will care how you vote, but once your voting record is public there are all sorts of people who wouldn't think twice about using it in judgements. It isn't that much of a leap to imagine being denied work or fired because you didn't vote with the PHB.
See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Committee_on_Un -American_Activities and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy for historical reference. There is already a fair portion of the public who thinks secret wire-taps are okay for catching "terrorists" - is it that much further to extend this to investigating people who vote for medical marijuana (drug users!) or assisted suicide (serial killers!)? Or those who voted for Keith Ellison (D-MN), that new muslim representative who surely has ties to the terrorists - he even insisted on using the Quran at his swearing-in!
I think you over-estimate how much people "actively" don't want these things. I'm sure plenty of people don't like them, but are people really going to get involved?
The "scandal" around the 2000 election opened the door - "hanging chads", people whinging that they were confused and *might* have voted for someone by accident because the inanimate ballots are to blame, overseas armed forces ballots getting lost, state attorney generals getting involved, the supreme court deciding the election, etc. The general public just doesn't care, not enough to get off the La-Z-Boy and complain to a public official who isn't going to do anything anyway. Maybe if one of these electronic voting machines kidnapped a child, or slid down an icy hill and hit a dozen cars - maybe then the general public might care for a minute or two.
It must be Friday - I'm feeling especially cynical today. Scotty, more power to the sarcasm dampeners!
As I said, we are starting to see the PS3 fail in the USA (my prediction is that they need to get a few REALLY good games out for it soon or they are in trouble). That's it right there. I can afford to drop $600 for a PS3, but there aren't any games that I want to play. I bought a PSX for FF:VII and later a PS2 for FF:X. Both purchases came well after the launch, and since then I pick up at least one new game every month or two.
I seem to recall the same doom and gloom around the PS2 launch - no good games, hardware issues, etc. Its *way* too early to predict the end of the PS3, but if they don't have a killer, must-buy game to drive console sales in the next 6 months or so, it probably won't be too pretty for Sony.
Frankly, I'm leaning towards a Wii right now for the new Zelda and whatever new Metroid titles eventually come out.
Something I have learned from working first hand with Indians - the head shake and head nod can have many different meanings depending on the context. It's not unusual for one of my co-workers to vigorously shake his head, something Americans recognize as 'no', when in perfect agreement with what is being said. Likewise, a nod - which typically means 'yes' - may be no more than an acknowledgement that you are being heard with no bearing on agreement or understanding. My absolute favorite is the sideways nod, combining both a head shake and a nod into a fluid, circular motion.
I have learned to ask for more than just a simple acknowledgement when giving direction. Asking to have instructions repeated back to me tends to have much better results in the end rather than just accepting a nod or a quietly whispered 'Yes yes'.
This isn't just for the Indians, though. There are plenty of native speakers with only a marginal grasp of the English language that somehow manage to acquire degrees and credentials far above their actual credentials.
XBox live, sure. ASP, ok. Powerpoint, I suppose. But honestly, DirectX? OpenGL was formally introduced in the early 90's, well before Windows 95 and the first DirectX. There wasn't anything really innovative in DirectX except it was available for Windows. Optical mice? Hello? I was using these on Sun workstations in the late 80's/early 90's. A quick google/wiki search pins the first optical mice around 1980. Sun had a laser optical mouse around 1998. The microsoft optical mouse didn't come out until 1999.
It's not just that. To extend the analogy, it's like charging a guy who is suggesting that people looking to buy a house in the neighborhood check out the local crack house because he has noticed a lot of traffic through it.
A better way to do a MythTV PVR on an ITX is to make the "set top" box a front-end only with TV-out connected to your TV. Plug the cable into a noisy server with disk/etc in another room and have it handle all the recording/archiving duties. You could then eliminate the HD from the ITX box and run a LiveCD setup like KnoppMyth.
At home I use a laptop as a frontend to stream live/recorded TV anywhere in the house via 802.11g, which works great for everything except "perfect" quality DVD rips.
1. Purchase iPod for $400.00 2. Purchase 11,800 songs from iTunes for $11,682.00 3. Sell on eBay for $799.00... 4. Profi...err, wait, loss of $11,283.00
Pure genius! Where do I send my investment money?
Economics aside, don't forget that the Fairplay-restricted iTMS music is tied to the machine that the song was purchased on and you'd probably have issues syncing the iPod.
That used to be true, but not so much any more. Half-life 2? About 12 hours. Doom 3? About the same. Adventure games? Maybe 20, and almost no replay value unless you wait a couple years or have a short memory. I used to get months of entertainment from games back when I was in school and had the option of spending 4 or 5 hours at a time gaming. Now I get in an average of less than an hour a day and count playing time in weeks, or in some cases only days.
Note that I'm not considering mods and other 'fan-made' content in these figures. If a company sells me a game for $50+, I'm expecting value to come from the company and not a talented group of fans with lots of time to spare. Honestly, would you spend full price ($8.50+ depending on location) for a movie that was 30 minutes long and an hour for the audience to ad-lib the ending? Would you buy a book with 200 blank pages at the end for you to write your own chapters?
Whatever happened to the days of throwing a hammer at big blue (the "80%" market share at the time) or "thinking different"? Seems that Jobs is quick to flip when he finds himself in a position of power instead of the small-time player (pun not intended).
To the consumer, the underlying problem is still there. Whether it's iDRM or M$DRM, I still have to jump through hoops to get anything approaching fair use out of the music I buy.
Problem is that EXT2/EXT3 don't do online resizing. I see there are kernel and e2fsprogs patches to support it, but I keep seeing 'Make sure you have a very good backup' in the notes. Reiserfs, at least, does online grow very nicely.
Sucks to find out your ext3/usr is a pinch too small for the new OOo 2.0 build you just did and have to kill off just about everything (or reboot into single) just to unmount/usr.
In my experience, the fraud alert doesn't do anything.
My wife's wallet was stolen, containing a credit card, our debit card, and her driver's license. We cancelled/re-issued the cards and she had her DL# changed. We called experian, equifax, and transunion to have a fraud alert set on our credit reports.
A few days later we got letters from all three indicating the fraud alert was set. According to the letters, we shouldn't be receiving any pre-approved credit offers in the mail for 90 days. Any query against our credit report would return a fraud alert. We also signed up for a service offered by our bank to receive notification on any activity against our credit report.
Unfortunately, we continued to receive those damn credit card offers, often "pre-approved" , every Tuesday non-stop. We opened an account with Home Depot about a month later and there wasn't any mention of a fraud alert. We also never received any notification of any activity against our credit report, not the inquiry that HD should have run, nor the appearance of a new trade line. We cancelled the credit report monitoring service and got our money back.
Bottom line, using the fraud alert didn't really do anything, positive or negative. I expected to get a request for some additional ID from the CSR at Home Depot, but instead she just said "You've been approved" after a couple of minutes and handed me my temporary credit info.
The study cited sure doesn't make me feel more secure. The hack who ends up with 500K customer records may not be able to or even want to do anything with that info. If he's smart, though, the list is broken into smaller chunks and sold off. Repeat this a few times and you have a lot of thieves with a lot of small sets of info. There was a big scam locally where old DMV records were being found on CDs in possession of ID thieves. Digital data is incredibly easy to duplicate and distribute. If 500,000 IDs are stolen and "only 100" are used by an individual thief, the odds are 1 in 5000 that your information gets used. Does this make you feel any more secure? Are those odds low enough that you don't want to be notified when a breach occurs? If that same set of information is shared by 10 thieves, the odds "improve" to 1 in 500.
If there is any chance that my personal, private information is in the hands of even one unauthorized person, I want to know about it. There are precautions I can take to safeguard my identity before any fraud occurs, and it's a lot easier to deal with *before* it happens. Once your information is stolen and used, it can take *years* to rebuild.
The "sequel" tag is deceptive. In most cases, it's used just to piggyback on the success of a previous title. I wouldn't call Civ 2, 3, or 4 sequels so much as "iterations". There's no ongoing storyline or plot between the titles. Same goes for sports games - Madden '06 is Madden '05 with a few tweaks and newer player rosters. The Final Fantasy series typically introduces new gameplay dynamics with each title, but sets them in totally different game worlds (at least until FFX-2). To me, the sequel tag indicates some sort of storyline continuity between the games, even if the gameplay isn't exactly the same.
By that definition, real sequels are a lot less common than iterations. Quake 4 and Doom 3 have a at least a passing relationship with previous games in the series, though in both cases I don't think the storyline continuity is a major selling point. Even Knights of the Old Republic II only pays lip service to the previous game. The Myst series, on the other hand, is very closely tied together, especially in the later games in the series where the events of previous games are tightly woven into the storylines.
It's all about marketing and sales. Publishers won't to release "Final Quest XII" if has so much tie-in to previous titles that it isn't accessible to someone new to the series. Even the hallowed Ultima series, which was very tight between 4 - 6, seemed to distance itself between titles towards the end, both in gameplay and storyline continuity.
Bottom line? I think "iterations" have more potential draw (Ooh, I liked NFL '05, and '06 is going to have *insert new favorite player here*!) and more potential drawbacks (Bleah, NFL '05 wasn't any better than '04, why would I buy '06?). Genuine sequels have to toe the line between too much continuity (scare away new customers) and not enough (turn off the loyal customers of the series). If that balance isn't just right, the sequel flops. All the publishers (_publishers_, not developers) really care about is what is going to sell, and iterative series are much safer investments. But maybe, just maybe, the general game-buying public might be starintg wise up to the fact that they've just bought the same thing for the 4th or 5th year in a row and realize it's time to start demanding more.
Nah, who am I kidding? Recent sales charts are all stacked with the latest Sims, Madden, Quake, Doom, and Battlefield titles and add-ons. Hell, I just picked up Sly 3 for PS2 and will probably pick up Dragon Quest VIII this weekend and FFXII whenever it comes out, too.
Budget/Most Expensive Myth/Explosions!
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Love the show - it's spawned some serious fights with my wife over control of the TV at 9PM on Wednesdays (stupid "Lost" ending up in the same slot!). You guys have just about every geek's dream job - everything from mangling crash test dummies to driving a police cruiser by remote.
From watching the show, it looks like you've got a relatively tight budget on a lot of the myths you bust. Lots of the gear is picked up from junkyards, donated, or just lying around the warehouse. What was the most expensive myth to bust? What's the single most expensive piece of equipment you've had to buy while busting a myth?
Then there's the explosions. Things go boom a lot on the show. What's the biggest yield explosion you've ever detonated - I'm thinking of the cement truck that disintegrated in one particular episode, but there was also the critter in the drain pipe, the explosions in the pressurized airliner, the log cannon, the methane in the honey bucket...
Current games don't run any faster on multiple cores than on single cores because these games are (for the most part) single-threaded. This isn't because they can't be, though - it's because the average home system is just a single core. It's a much more sophisticated problem to develop a threaded application, and the added development and QA expense isn't going to be worth it until there are a lot of multi-cored systems in use.
Most games do have a lot of potential for taking advantage of multiple cores. Take advantage of the extra core to run another thread with a more sophisticated AI in your shooter, add more background NPC scripting to your RPG, or develop an über-realistic physics engine.
As soon as multiple core systems start getting penetration within the consumer market, expect to see games take advantage of it. CPU speeds aren't increasing as fast as they have been in recent years. Software won't be able depend on running faster - it'll have to starting doing more things concurrently.
"Tickets can be returned to the point of purchase for a refund which includes the full value of the ticket, plus fees with the exception of the one-time handling charge. The handling/convenience fee averages about $4.50 per ticket ORDER, not per ticket. So if someone bought 10 tickets, that one-time charge of $4.50 is levied once, not 10 times. That money is used (in part) by the ticket provider to pay for postage, envelopes, etc. and that is why it is not refundable."
It's Ticketmaster who has the scam, not the event organizers. It amazes me they still get away with charging per ticket 'convenience' charges for each ticket order online and delivered via email - all tickets come in one PDF!
IMO, it's only a 'convenience' charge if it's an option that actually buys me some 'convenience'. When was the last time you could waive the 'convenience' charge and purchase a ticket inconveniently? I've been charged a 'convenience' charge when buying tickets at the box office - how much more inconvenient can it get?!
Carbon fiber is used a lot in cycling parts exactly because it is very strong and light. However, as soon as the fiber weave is compromised... *SPROING*! I was behind a guy when his fiber seatpost blew. It looked quite painful.
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...it's one of their more lacklustre tunes; a somewhat uninspired and derivative Beatles-style song. That statement suggests that Oasis wrote songs that *weren't* uninspired and derivative of the Beatles. Perhaps you separate the Beatles rip-offs from the solo Lennon rip-offs?First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
Wait, let me get this straight - you pay your IT staff for overtime and weekends? Please, tell me more of this mythical place where personal time is not defined as what is left over when work is finished.
You hit it on the head. If everything runs smoothly, you may feel satisfied because you know you're doing your job and doing it well. Unfortunately, in most cases management isn't going to pay attention to the fact that things are running without a hiccup. It's only when there is a fire and it is put out that there is any recognition of a job well done.
If you upgrade the network from 10Mb to 100Mb (or, I suppose, 100Mb to 1Gb) without a hitch, nobody notices. If there's downtime, dropped connections, etc, the issue is immediately high profile and someone gets to be the hero that fixes it. Often there is more than enough CYA applied throughout the process that nobody gets blamed.
Employees are conditioned to associate firefighting with praise. I've seen people build up raging 5-alarm fires out of a spark because either they're brainwashed into to thinking that it is supposed to work that way, or they know that there will be no pat on the back unless the issue gets the CEO's attention. Where is the reward in fixing something in 5 minutes by yourself when you and your peers can spend all night and weekend thrashing about just to get a nice 'Thank you' email from some upper-management PHB-type?
It wasn't that long ago that being identified as a "Communist" was enough to be accused of treason and brought before a Congressional inquest. It's nice to think that nobody will care how you vote, but once your voting record is public there are all sorts of people who wouldn't think twice about using it in judgements. It isn't that much of a leap to imagine being denied work or fired because you didn't vote with the PHB.
n -American_Activities and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy for historical reference. There is already a fair portion of the public who thinks secret wire-taps are okay for catching "terrorists" - is it that much further to extend this to investigating people who vote for medical marijuana (drug users!) or assisted suicide (serial killers!)? Or those who voted for Keith Ellison (D-MN), that new muslim representative who surely has ties to the terrorists - he even insisted on using the Quran at his swearing-in!
See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Committee_on_U
I think you over-estimate how much people "actively" don't want these things. I'm sure plenty of people don't like them, but are people really going to get involved?
The "scandal" around the 2000 election opened the door - "hanging chads", people whinging that they were confused and *might* have voted for someone by accident because the inanimate ballots are to blame, overseas armed forces ballots getting lost, state attorney generals getting involved, the supreme court deciding the election, etc. The general public just doesn't care, not enough to get off the La-Z-Boy and complain to a public official who isn't going to do anything anyway. Maybe if one of these electronic voting machines kidnapped a child, or slid down an icy hill and hit a dozen cars - maybe then the general public might care for a minute or two.
It must be Friday - I'm feeling especially cynical today. Scotty, more power to the sarcasm dampeners!
I seem to recall the same doom and gloom around the PS2 launch - no good games, hardware issues, etc. Its *way* too early to predict the end of the PS3, but if they don't have a killer, must-buy game to drive console sales in the next 6 months or so, it probably won't be too pretty for Sony.
Frankly, I'm leaning towards a Wii right now for the new Zelda and whatever new Metroid titles eventually come out.
Something I have learned from working first hand with Indians - the head shake and head nod can have many different meanings depending on the context. It's not unusual for one of my co-workers to vigorously shake his head, something Americans recognize as 'no', when in perfect agreement with what is being said. Likewise, a nod - which typically means 'yes' - may be no more than an acknowledgement that you are being heard with no bearing on agreement or understanding. My absolute favorite is the sideways nod, combining both a head shake and a nod into a fluid, circular motion.
I have learned to ask for more than just a simple acknowledgement when giving direction. Asking to have instructions repeated back to me tends to have much better results in the end rather than just accepting a nod or a quietly whispered 'Yes yes'.
This isn't just for the Indians, though. There are plenty of native speakers with only a marginal grasp of the English language that somehow manage to acquire degrees and credentials far above their actual credentials.
XBox live, sure. ASP, ok. Powerpoint, I suppose. But honestly, DirectX? OpenGL was formally introduced in the early 90's, well before Windows 95 and the first DirectX. There wasn't anything really innovative in DirectX except it was available for Windows. Optical mice? Hello? I was using these on Sun workstations in the late 80's/early 90's. A quick google/wiki search pins the first optical mice around 1980. Sun had a laser optical mouse around 1998. The microsoft optical mouse didn't come out until 1999.
I'd suggest modding the parent funny, but it's probably more informative or insightful. That, my friends, is a sad thing.
It's not just that. To extend the analogy, it's like charging a guy who is suggesting that people looking to buy a house in the neighborhood check out the local crack house because he has noticed a lot of traffic through it.
A better way to do a MythTV PVR on an ITX is to make the "set top" box a front-end only with TV-out connected to your TV. Plug the cable into a noisy server with disk/etc in another room and have it handle all the recording/archiving duties. You could then eliminate the HD from the ITX box and run a LiveCD setup like KnoppMyth.
At home I use a laptop as a frontend to stream live/recorded TV anywhere in the house via 802.11g, which works great for everything except "perfect" quality DVD rips.
Let me get this straight:
...
1. Purchase iPod for $400.00
2. Purchase 11,800 songs from iTunes for $11,682.00
3. Sell on eBay for $799.00
4. Profi...err, wait, loss of $11,283.00
Pure genius! Where do I send my investment money?
Economics aside, don't forget that the Fairplay-restricted iTMS music is tied to the machine that the song was purchased on and you'd probably have issues syncing the iPod.
That used to be true, but not so much any more. Half-life 2? About 12 hours. Doom 3? About the same. Adventure games? Maybe 20, and almost no replay value unless you wait a couple years or have a short memory. I used to get months of entertainment from games back when I was in school and had the option of spending 4 or 5 hours at a time gaming. Now I get in an average of less than an hour a day and count playing time in weeks, or in some cases only days.
Note that I'm not considering mods and other 'fan-made' content in these figures. If a company sells me a game for $50+, I'm expecting value to come from the company and not a talented group of fans with lots of time to spare. Honestly, would you spend full price ($8.50+ depending on location) for a movie that was 30 minutes long and an hour for the audience to ad-lib the ending? Would you buy a book with 200 blank pages at the end for you to write your own chapters?
Whatever happened to the days of throwing a hammer at big blue (the "80%" market share at the time) or "thinking different"? Seems that Jobs is quick to flip when he finds himself in a position of power instead of the small-time player (pun not intended).
To the consumer, the underlying problem is still there. Whether it's iDRM or M$DRM, I still have to jump through hoops to get anything approaching fair use out of the music I buy.
Problem is that EXT2/EXT3 don't do online resizing. I see there are kernel and e2fsprogs patches to support it, but I keep seeing 'Make sure you have a very good backup' in the notes. Reiserfs, at least, does online grow very nicely.
/usr is a pinch too small for the new OOo 2.0 build you just did and have to kill off just about everything (or reboot into single) just to unmount /usr.
Sucks to find out your ext3
In my experience, the fraud alert doesn't do anything.
My wife's wallet was stolen, containing a credit card, our debit card, and her driver's license. We cancelled/re-issued the cards and she had her DL# changed. We called experian, equifax, and transunion to have a fraud alert set on our credit reports.
A few days later we got letters from all three indicating the fraud alert was set. According to the letters, we shouldn't be receiving any pre-approved credit offers in the mail for 90 days. Any query against our credit report would return a fraud alert. We also signed up for a service offered by our bank to receive notification on any activity against our credit report.
Unfortunately, we continued to receive those damn credit card offers, often "pre-approved" , every Tuesday non-stop. We opened an account with Home Depot about a month later and there wasn't any mention of a fraud alert. We also never received any notification of any activity against our credit report, not the inquiry that HD should have run, nor the appearance of a new trade line. We cancelled the credit report monitoring service and got our money back.
Bottom line, using the fraud alert didn't really do anything, positive or negative. I expected to get a request for some additional ID from the CSR at Home Depot, but instead she just said "You've been approved" after a couple of minutes and handed me my temporary credit info.
The study cited sure doesn't make me feel more secure. The hack who ends up with 500K customer records may not be able to or even want to do anything with that info. If he's smart, though, the list is broken into smaller chunks and sold off. Repeat this a few times and you have a lot of thieves with a lot of small sets of info. There was a big scam locally where old DMV records were being found on CDs in possession of ID thieves. Digital data is incredibly easy to duplicate and distribute. If 500,000 IDs are stolen and "only 100" are used by an individual thief, the odds are 1 in 5000 that your information gets used. Does this make you feel any more secure? Are those odds low enough that you don't want to be notified when a breach occurs? If that same set of information is shared by 10 thieves, the odds "improve" to 1 in 500.
If there is any chance that my personal, private information is in the hands of even one unauthorized person, I want to know about it. There are precautions I can take to safeguard my identity before any fraud occurs, and it's a lot easier to deal with *before* it happens. Once your information is stolen and used, it can take *years* to rebuild.
The "sequel" tag is deceptive. In most cases, it's used just to piggyback on the success of a previous title. I wouldn't call Civ 2, 3, or 4 sequels so much as "iterations". There's no ongoing storyline or plot between the titles. Same goes for sports games - Madden '06 is Madden '05 with a few tweaks and newer player rosters. The Final Fantasy series typically introduces new gameplay dynamics with each title, but sets them in totally different game worlds (at least until FFX-2). To me, the sequel tag indicates some sort of storyline continuity between the games, even if the gameplay isn't exactly the same.
By that definition, real sequels are a lot less common than iterations. Quake 4 and Doom 3 have a at least a passing relationship with previous games in the series, though in both cases I don't think the storyline continuity is a major selling point. Even Knights of the Old Republic II only pays lip service to the previous game. The Myst series, on the other hand, is very closely tied together, especially in the later games in the series where the events of previous games are tightly woven into the storylines.
It's all about marketing and sales. Publishers won't to release "Final Quest XII" if has so much tie-in to previous titles that it isn't accessible to someone new to the series. Even the hallowed Ultima series, which was very tight between 4 - 6, seemed to distance itself between titles towards the end, both in gameplay and storyline continuity.
Bottom line? I think "iterations" have more potential draw (Ooh, I liked NFL '05, and '06 is going to have *insert new favorite player here*!) and more potential drawbacks (Bleah, NFL '05 wasn't any better than '04, why would I buy '06?). Genuine sequels have to toe the line between too much continuity (scare away new customers) and not enough (turn off the loyal customers of the series). If that balance isn't just right, the sequel flops. All the publishers (_publishers_, not developers) really care about is what is going to sell, and iterative series are much safer investments. But maybe, just maybe, the general game-buying public might be starintg wise up to the fact that they've just bought the same thing for the 4th or 5th year in a row and realize it's time to start demanding more.
Nah, who am I kidding? Recent sales charts are all stacked with the latest Sims, Madden, Quake, Doom, and Battlefield titles and add-ons. Hell, I just picked up Sly 3 for PS2 and will probably pick up Dragon Quest VIII this weekend and FFXII whenever it comes out, too.
Love the show - it's spawned some serious fights with my wife over control of the TV at 9PM on Wednesdays (stupid "Lost" ending up in the same slot!). You guys have just about every geek's dream job - everything from mangling crash test dummies to driving a police cruiser by remote.
From watching the show, it looks like you've got a relatively tight budget on a lot of the myths you bust. Lots of the gear is picked up from junkyards, donated, or just lying around the warehouse. What was the most expensive myth to bust? What's the single most expensive piece of equipment you've had to buy while busting a myth?
Then there's the explosions. Things go boom a lot on the show. What's the biggest yield explosion you've ever detonated - I'm thinking of the cement truck that disintegrated in one particular episode, but there was also the critter in the drain pipe, the explosions in the pressurized airliner, the log cannon, the methane in the honey bucket...
Current games don't run any faster on multiple cores than on single cores because these games are (for the most part) single-threaded. This isn't because they can't be, though - it's because the average home system is just a single core. It's a much more sophisticated problem to develop a threaded application, and the added development and QA expense isn't going to be worth it until there are a lot of multi-cored systems in use.
Most games do have a lot of potential for taking advantage of multiple cores. Take advantage of the extra core to run another thread with a more sophisticated AI in your shooter, add more background NPC scripting to your RPG, or develop an über-realistic physics engine.
As soon as multiple core systems start getting penetration within the consumer market, expect to see games take advantage of it. CPU speeds aren't increasing as fast as they have been in recent years. Software won't be able depend on running faster - it'll have to starting doing more things concurrently.
FTFA:
"Tickets can be returned to the point of purchase for a refund which includes the full value of the ticket, plus fees with the exception of the one-time handling charge. The handling/convenience fee averages about $4.50 per ticket ORDER, not per ticket. So if someone bought 10 tickets, that one-time charge of $4.50 is levied once, not 10 times. That money is used (in part) by the ticket provider to pay for postage, envelopes, etc. and that is why it is not refundable."
It's Ticketmaster who has the scam, not the event organizers. It amazes me they still get away with charging per ticket 'convenience' charges for each ticket order online and delivered via email - all tickets come in one PDF!
IMO, it's only a 'convenience' charge if it's an option that actually buys me some 'convenience'. When was the last time you could waive the 'convenience' charge and purchase a ticket inconveniently? I've been charged a 'convenience' charge when buying tickets at the box office - how much more inconvenient can it get?!
Not Microsoft - Office documents use XML, too.
"iPods are people! They're people! Peeeeeeeeeeeee-ople!"
Apologies to Charlton Hest...hey, waitaminute, my bad - no apologies required.
Carbon fiber is used a lot in cycling parts exactly because it is very strong and light. However, as soon as the fiber weave is compromised... *SPROING*! I was behind a guy when his fiber seatpost blew. It looked quite painful.
You can share your homes/neighborhoods and any objects you might create.
;)
That's what I hear, anyway - it's not like I ever played the sims or anything