Re:Offline games require online reporting = BOGUS
on
Steam Users Steamed
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· Score: 1
Disable network traffick or unplug your network cable, log in to steam. It should allow you to log in using "offline mode". Sometimes it takes a minute. Then re-enable network traffic and launch your SP game of choice.
In the unicycling world there is a contraption known as a "BC Wheel" (sometimes called "The Impossible Wheel"). It got its name from the famed BC comic mode of transportation. Basically its a wheel with pegs or platforms that stick out from a freewheeling axle. The idea is that you roll it, jump on, and try to maintain balance.
While it may look "impossible" to people who have never learned how to ride it , BC wheels are actually quite ridable with a few weeks of practice and many in the Unicycling underground (yes this is for real! - check out this video) can do all sorts of tricks on it like jumping from wheel to wheel and riding it on trails.
Meh. From a practical standpoint you are probably right, but attacking White Hats for finding open vulnerabilities is rather daft. It is the company's responsibility to make a secure product, not everyone else's responsibility to ignore vulnerabilities.
Poor security schemes deserve to be cracked, and the companies that support them ought to lose business accordingly. I don't support car theft, but the company that produces these chips are the real theives - recieving payment for security that they don't provide.
While in the short term White Hat hacking may be detrimental to security, in the long run it is a driving force behind innovation.
Civ 3, Civ 2, Civ 1, and all the Alpha Centauri titles are basically the exact same game. There are small changes, tweaks, graphical updates etc, but when it comes down to it they all have nearly the same gameplay.
Civ was such an amazing, addictive, and replayable game to begin with that everytime they release a new Civ everyone starts playing it again, remembers how good the game style is, and likes the new version. However, I'm not convinced that buying and playing Civ X is a significantly different or better experience than just picking up Civ 2 off the shelf, dusting it off, and playing it again.
Take management lessons from Captain Picard. Seriously!
-Picard understood the strengths and weaknesses of all of his team members, and delegated tasks appropriately.
Engineering difficulties? Have Geordi take care of it. Ship morale low? Get counselor Troi on it. Unknown problem affecting ships computers? Have Data try to figure it out.
-Picard knew enough about everything on his ship (science, engineering, etc) to understand reports and make solid decisions, but he didn't try to do everything himself.
-Picard does his homework.
When the Enterprise is scheduled to cross through alien space, he reads up on their laws, customs, and politics so that he has a basis for making good command decisions and getting the most out of negotiations.
-Picard asks for suggestions and input from his team members, but isn't afraid stick to his guns when necessary (even if most of the crew disagrees with him).
-Picard stands up for his team members.
Paranoid starfleet admirals interrogating crewmembers without cause? Aliens trying to execute Wesley? Starfleet scientist trying to disassemble Data? Hell no! Picard won't stand for it.
If only more managers took lessons from Captain Picard...
It is true that it would be silly to use quantum to predict things on the scale of a baseball, as noted in my origional post. Thats not the point. The point is that QM is more general. Call me a stickler, but the definition of generality does not include usefulness or practicality.
The same thing applies to relativity by the way. The equations of relativity hold true for all velocities, and it just so happens that at the special case of small velocities (like we see in everyday life), you can approximate the more general equations of special relativity with the simpler equations of newtonian physics.
Your definitions of special case and general case are disturbing. A general case theory applies to a large category of things. A special case theory is an approximation to the general case that applies to a smaller subset of things. Often it is easier to use in computations.
The theories of Quantum and Relativity are not special case. They are general and could apply to objects on any scale - the average conditions around the universe are the special case! If you had an impossibly powerful computer you could run a simulation of a bat hitting a baseball down to the level of QM and it would be accurate. With current computing technology it would take longer than the expected life of the universe, but it would be very slightly more accurate than the special case approximation provided by Newton. On the other hand, you could not take newtonian physics and apply it to subatomic particles and get anything resembling what is observed.
You are making the assumption that we have a purpose. There is no evidence indicating that might be the case, and in fact it is not at all necessary.
Uhm, you just proved his point... Science can neither prove nor disprove whether we have a purpose, and thus that sort of question lies in the realm of religion.
Although it isn't very clear from TA, I imagine that the majority of the 9 year sentence was simply for attempted credit card fraud. Cracking was just the method, not the main crime.
Certainly those sorts of things should be dealt with on a case by case basis, but overall I've found that difficult-to-understand writing (where you have to read it twice, for instance) is usually due to the writer having a poor grasp on the underlying material rather than having a poor grasp on grammar.
Yes indeed they do, but again that is missing the point.
Just think about this the next time you read an email with grammatical mistakes - are your judgements of the email sender simply based on how hard it was to understand the email, or are they also based on grammatical mistakes that didn't detract from your understanding?
1) So the recipient doesn't have to spend 20 seconds trying to work out what your meant, or wasting both his and your time by replying asking for a clarification.
Ok, fine. That may be a valid reason to check your grammar if its atrocious, but most grammatical mistakes are small ones that you instantly understand and correct for while reading. See what I mean?;)
2) So people don't think you're a moron. 3) So people outside the company don't think you're all morons (if the message is forwarded, as often happens, sometimes inadvertently).
Both of these options focus on YOU rather than the person who is reading the email. That is missing the issue. When YOU writez0r teh bad grammer, OTHER PEOPLE think YOU are a moron. But when those OTHER PEOPLE judge you based on your grammar, they are doing so primarily based on how much your grammar differed from social norms rather than how difficult it was for them to understand what you were saying.
My point is that the judgement passed by the OTHER PEOPLE on YOU is unreasonable.
The fact that you, someone with no knowledge of the situation, were able to do that rewrite suggests that the email was indeed "readable" despite its poor gramatical construction.
Sloppy writing implies carelessness at best, ineptitude at worst.
What exactly are you alledging here? If the employee is inept, he/she should be fired. There are more effective means of testing ineptitude than evaluating email transcripts.
On the other hand, if the intended recipient is "careless", and by "careless" you really mean lazy or too busy to write in complete sentences, but the intended recipient still understands the message then who cares?
It's not okay to write badly in a business setting;
And why not? If you get the point across to your coworkers, why should you waste an extra 20 seconds checking your grammar? Sure, its only 20 seconds, but the only point in editing your message is to conform to implied social norms - an objective that has nothing to do with getting the job done. Thankfully those silly social norms have not yet been applied to emails yet.
at least not in inter-business communication.
Ok, you may have a point here. Inter-business commuication is on a different playing field where making your company look good is an additional factor beyond just "getting the job done".
As evidence the article cites the following quote: "I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."
The reason why that message seems so "incomprehensible" is not because of the poor writing but rather because we, the not-intended readers, do not have knowledge of the systems discussed in the email.
Actually the quote looks like it would be quite understandable if I knew (1) what the status reports were, (2) what the Barry file is (3) who Murray is (4) what "information" they provided (5) the details of the technobable at the end of the email. Clearly all of these are things the intended recipient would already know.
I could write an email about an advanced physics topic using perfect grammar and spelling and it would be no more comprehensible to the average reader than this email.
If that is the worst they can come up with than corporate America is in good shape.
I wrote this in another topic earlier today, but it applies here so I will quote myself: "The bottom line is whether or not your target audience understands what you are trying to say - style be damned. The emphasis on correct spelling and grammar is not emphasized because it has immense value to society, but rather because it is a popular status symbol."
Perfect grammar, spelling, etc. is not nearly as important to communication as schools would have you believe. The bottom line is whether or not your target audience understands what you are trying to say - style be damned. The emphasis on correct spelling and grammar is not emphasized because it has immense value to society, but rather because it is a popular status symbol.
I've heard that it takes Valve 1 man-month of work to make one of their maps start to finish. This includes all the art, layout, textures, models, level design, etc. On that count, no $5000 is really low for a professional quality map.
On the other hand, there are many ametur mappers who can and do create professional quality maps for fun and would be more than happy to recieve some money in return.
Actually the biggest motivator for many people, myself included, (yes, I am a mapper entering this contest) is the opportunity for one of their maps to be officially included in the game since this guarantees it will get massive playtime. As it is now custom maps (excluding the 10kb box levels like killbox and iceworld) don't get played very much, and it kind of sucks to spend months perfecting a map only to have it played once a week on a few custom map servers.
It's already happened. Look at Counterstrike - that was "made in a basement", and its already orders of magnitude more popular than any other multiplayer FPS.
I'm saving my money for a 40+ GB solid state mp3 player that is small, robust, has 20+ hours of battery life and costs less than $100. Until then my trusty old CD player will do just fine.
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Disable network traffick or unplug your network cable, log in to steam. It should allow you to log in using "offline mode". Sometimes it takes a minute. Then re-enable network traffic and launch your SP game of choice.
In the unicycling world there is a contraption known as a "BC Wheel" (sometimes called "The Impossible Wheel"). It got its name from the famed BC comic mode of transportation. Basically its a wheel with pegs or platforms that stick out from a freewheeling axle. The idea is that you roll it, jump on, and try to maintain balance.
While it may look "impossible" to people who have never learned how to ride it , BC wheels are actually quite ridable with a few weeks of practice and many in the Unicycling underground (yes this is for real! - check out this video) can do all sorts of tricks on it like jumping from wheel to wheel and riding it on trails.
Meh. From a practical standpoint you are probably right, but attacking White Hats for finding open vulnerabilities is rather daft. It is the company's responsibility to make a secure product, not everyone else's responsibility to ignore vulnerabilities.
They forget that Apple has SET THE STANDARD for sensible DRM that is reasonable for the consumer.
Sensible DRM? There is no such thing.
Poor security schemes deserve to be cracked, and the companies that support them ought to lose business accordingly. I don't support car theft, but the company that produces these chips are the real theives - recieving payment for security that they don't provide.
While in the short term White Hat hacking may be detrimental to security, in the long run it is a driving force behind innovation.
An ad-serving browser or desktop is ad-ware and should be treated as such. Period.
That said, I doubt google would do something that foolish.
Civ 3, Civ 2, Civ 1, and all the Alpha Centauri titles are basically the exact same game. There are small changes, tweaks, graphical updates etc, but when it comes down to it they all have nearly the same gameplay.
Civ was such an amazing, addictive, and replayable game to begin with that everytime they release a new Civ everyone starts playing it again, remembers how good the game style is, and likes the new version. However, I'm not convinced that buying and playing Civ X is a significantly different or better experience than just picking up Civ 2 off the shelf, dusting it off, and playing it again.
Take management lessons from Captain Picard. Seriously!
-Picard understood the strengths and weaknesses of all of his team members, and delegated tasks appropriately.
Engineering difficulties? Have Geordi take care of it. Ship morale low? Get counselor Troi on it. Unknown problem affecting ships computers? Have Data try to figure it out.
-Picard knew enough about everything on his ship (science, engineering, etc) to understand reports and make solid decisions, but he didn't try to do everything himself.
-Picard does his homework.
When the Enterprise is scheduled to cross through alien space, he reads up on their laws, customs, and politics so that he has a basis for making good command decisions and getting the most out of negotiations.
-Picard asks for suggestions and input from his team members, but isn't afraid stick to his guns when necessary (even if most of the crew disagrees with him).
-Picard stands up for his team members.
Paranoid starfleet admirals interrogating crewmembers without cause? Aliens trying to execute Wesley? Starfleet scientist trying to disassemble Data? Hell no! Picard won't stand for it.
If only more managers took lessons from Captain Picard...
It is true that it would be silly to use quantum to predict things on the scale of a baseball, as noted in my origional post. Thats not the point. The point is that QM is more general. Call me a stickler, but the definition of generality does not include usefulness or practicality.
The same thing applies to relativity by the way. The equations of relativity hold true for all velocities, and it just so happens that at the special case of small velocities (like we see in everyday life), you can approximate the more general equations of special relativity with the simpler equations of newtonian physics.
Your definitions of special case and general case are disturbing. A general case theory applies to a large category of things. A special case theory is an approximation to the general case that applies to a smaller subset of things. Often it is easier to use in computations.
The theories of Quantum and Relativity are not special case. They are general and could apply to objects on any scale - the average conditions around the universe are the special case! If you had an impossibly powerful computer you could run a simulation of a bat hitting a baseball down to the level of QM and it would be accurate. With current computing technology it would take longer than the expected life of the universe, but it would be very slightly more accurate than the special case approximation provided by Newton. On the other hand, you could not take newtonian physics and apply it to subatomic particles and get anything resembling what is observed.
You are making the assumption that we have a purpose. There is no evidence indicating that might be the case, and in fact it is not at all necessary.
Uhm, you just proved his point... Science can neither prove nor disprove whether we have a purpose, and thus that sort of question lies in the realm of religion.
Many houses in hard-to-reach places power themselves with wind/solar and gas as a backup. Commuication through sattelite.
Although it isn't very clear from TA, I imagine that the majority of the 9 year sentence was simply for attempted credit card fraud. Cracking was just the method, not the main crime.
Certainly those sorts of things should be dealt with on a case by case basis, but overall I've found that difficult-to-understand writing (where you have to read it twice, for instance) is usually due to the writer having a poor grasp on the underlying material rather than having a poor grasp on grammar.
Yes indeed they do, but again that is missing the point.
Just think about this the next time you read an email with grammatical mistakes - are your judgements of the email sender simply based on how hard it was to understand the email, or are they also based on grammatical mistakes that didn't detract from your understanding?
1) So the recipient doesn't have to spend 20 seconds trying to work out what your meant, or wasting both his and your time by replying asking for a clarification.
;)
Ok, fine. That may be a valid reason to check your grammar if its atrocious, but most grammatical mistakes are small ones that you instantly understand and correct for while reading. See what I mean?
2) So people don't think you're a moron.
3) So people outside the company don't think you're all morons (if the message is forwarded, as often happens, sometimes inadvertently).
Both of these options focus on YOU rather than the person who is reading the email. That is missing the issue. When YOU writez0r teh bad grammer, OTHER PEOPLE think YOU are a moron. But when those OTHER PEOPLE judge you based on your grammar, they are doing so primarily based on how much your grammar differed from social norms rather than how difficult it was for them to understand what you were saying.
My point is that the judgement passed by the OTHER PEOPLE on YOU is unreasonable.
The fact that you, someone with no knowledge of the situation, were able to do that rewrite suggests that the email was indeed "readable" despite its poor gramatical construction.
Sloppy writing implies carelessness at best, ineptitude at worst.
What exactly are you alledging here? If the employee is inept, he/she should be fired. There are more effective means of testing ineptitude than evaluating email transcripts.
On the other hand, if the intended recipient is "careless", and by "careless" you really mean lazy or too busy to write in complete sentences, but the intended recipient still understands the message then who cares?
It's not okay to write badly in a business setting;
And why not? If you get the point across to your coworkers, why should you waste an extra 20 seconds checking your grammar? Sure, its only 20 seconds, but the only point in editing your message is to conform to implied social norms - an objective that has nothing to do with getting the job done. Thankfully those silly social norms have not yet been applied to emails yet.
at least not in inter-business communication.
Ok, you may have a point here. Inter-business commuication is on a different playing field where making your company look good is an additional factor beyond just "getting the job done".
As evidence the article cites the following quote: ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."
"I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information
The reason why that message seems so "incomprehensible" is not because of the poor writing but rather because we, the not-intended readers, do not have knowledge of the systems discussed in the email.
Actually the quote looks like it would be quite understandable if I knew
(1) what the status reports were,
(2) what the Barry file is
(3) who Murray is
(4) what "information" they provided
(5) the details of the technobable at the end of the email.
Clearly all of these are things the intended recipient would already know.
I could write an email about an advanced physics topic using perfect grammar and spelling and it would be no more comprehensible to the average reader than this email.
If that is the worst they can come up with than corporate America is in good shape.
I wrote this in another topic earlier today, but it applies here so I will quote myself:
"The bottom line is whether or not your target audience understands what you are trying to say - style be damned. The emphasis on correct spelling and grammar is not emphasized because it has immense value to society, but rather because it is a popular status symbol."
Perfect grammar, spelling, etc. is not nearly as important to communication as schools would have you believe. The bottom line is whether or not your target audience understands what you are trying to say - style be damned. The emphasis on correct spelling and grammar is not emphasized because it has immense value to society, but rather because it is a popular status symbol.
I've heard that it takes Valve 1 man-month of work to make one of their maps start to finish. This includes all the art, layout, textures, models, level design, etc. On that count, no $5000 is really low for a professional quality map.
On the other hand, there are many ametur mappers who can and do create professional quality maps for fun and would be more than happy to recieve some money in return.
Actually the biggest motivator for many people, myself included, (yes, I am a mapper entering this contest) is the opportunity for one of their maps to be officially included in the game since this guarantees it will get massive playtime. As it is now custom maps (excluding the 10kb box levels like killbox and iceworld) don't get played very much, and it kind of sucks to spend months perfecting a map only to have it played once a week on a few custom map servers.
Not only that, but when he beat the record for largest winnings in a day he did it with exactly $75,000.
It's already happened. Look at Counterstrike - that was "made in a basement", and its already orders of magnitude more popular than any other multiplayer FPS.
I'm saving my money for a 40+ GB solid state mp3 player that is small, robust, has 20+ hours of battery life and costs less than $100. Until then my trusty old CD player will do just fine.