Except that a wholesale lowering of the cost of living is generally referred to as deflation. Deflation can be a huge problem, because once deflation starts it risks setting up a deflationary spiral which will continue to weaken the economy until something finally shakes it loose.
As part of the first expansion (Forged Alliance) the developers reworked the economy (by reducing the energy efficiency of mass fabricators) and reduced the effectiveness of assisting (now it's barely worth doing) to prevent that late game exponential growth without actually taking up more land area.
Yes, if your enemy can expand his base to cover large swaths of the the map, then their production will be ridiculous, but no longer are they continuously growing their economy without taking up more space.
It supports rsync, ssh, tar, and SMB. Performs pooling which reduces the number of stored files. Only issue is it uses the local account password file, so you'd have to set up an account for each user you wanted to give direct access too.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Except the link you refered to the following 3 references:
1) The type 45, which I believe is a British Ship
2) The F-22, which I don't believe runs Windows, but did have the reported date line problem
3) The Yorktown, which is a test bed system for a new system. Which hardly qualifies as 'A good chunk of Command and Control.
To all of you saying 'NSI is a bunch of crooks', I have a question: How long does the domain lock remain? Checking one or two of the posts from earlier replies, I found that several of them are now available (whois via a non-nsi site shows no registration).
Could this be that they're attempting to put a temporary lock on a domain name, so you don't go to whois, be told it's available, and then finish the paperwork, and find out the domain name is gone?
Yes, if they're holding it more than an hour or so, then yes, their actions are reprehensible. Otherwise, they're using the equivalent of a lock to say 'Hey, someone at my site is interested in this, noo ne else can use it for an hour'.
Ah, but see, it's the use of the WTO's treaty provisions which the US is using to force many other nations to adopt DMCA-like legislation. If the US starts saying 'I don't have to pay attention to the WTO', they risk other countries doing the same, and ignoring the provisions the home grown lobbyists want.
Ah, but see, you're not doing much better than they did.
You were pulled over by some unethical cops for driving what they considered a suspicious looking vehicle. This was probably based on the idea that either 1) You're young and driving a crappy car, and likely to have drugs or 2) You're driving a crappy car, and hence must have something that they can write you up for. They basically assumed the worst based on what they could see.
Now, of course, every cop you meet has been colored by those events, and you assume the worst based on those events. Again, assuming that someone you've never interacted with behaves in line with your past interactions.
What those cops did was wrong. But I know very few people who have lots of good interactions with cops. Is it because cops are inherently bad, or is it because most people only interract with cops in already stressful situations? And therefore most peoples memories of the events are not pleasant ones.
So, their solution involves breaking the standard so one type of player can't read it? While
doing it in a way that some other players can still read it (maybe)? Well, that's just so
brilliant. I mean, why would we want to have standards, why wouldn't we just have everyone
come up with their own way of creating these video discs?
The reason for a standard format is so that anyone can make a player, or perform an encoding that
they KNOW will work. Companies rarely want to create multiple copies of their video to different
specifications, because they want to be able to reach as wide an audience as possible. Creating
a modified format that can only be reached by a subset of your audience is a really good way to fail.
Plus, according to the article, since the DVD still has the chapter info (for the non-PC players),
it's not that hard to write a program to obtain that data. Which means you've deviated from the standard
for little reason, as pirates will bypass it, and even non-pirate software will probably eventually
bypass it, since the information is still encoded on the disc. Which means that suckers who pay them for their 'system' are just throwing cash away.
Come to think of it, I wish I could come up with a buisness plan to get people to give me money for a product that cannot work.
The ESRB's ability to fine people will probably be bound as part of the agreement that occurs when you submit a game for review. Alternitavely, if the game later gets fined, and for some reason they don't feel they have to pay, the ESRB can revoke their right to use the ESRB rating symbols (which are trademarked).
The real reason that the ESRB has to do this is because they are afraid that bad publisher decisions will result in the public losing faith in the ESRB. That's why they're trying to show that they will enforce their decisions, through fines and possible revokation of the right to use the ESRB system.
For the record, the furor over Hot Coffee was rediculous and perpetrated by people who don't know better. However, that's not how a lot of the public feels about it, and hence, the ESRB has to react to the public's opinion.
Actually, the name 'Final Fantasy' is because it was expected to be the last thing Hironobu Sakaguchi would be creating before retirement, as well as possible Square's final game.
However, its immense popularity created sequels, and the rest is history.
I used to participate in the project while I was in college.
They use a distributed Lucas-Lehmer Test. This takes days to weeks depending on the computer. However, given the possibily of either implementation bugs or some sort of minor rounding error in the vast amounts of floating point operations being performed (and since it's iterative, if an error occurs early in the run, it could propagate to something large by the end), they do independant verification on any number that's found.
In addition, if you have slower computers, you can elect (or will be assigned) factoring work, which is simply to do first-pass factoring (again, up to a limit to reduce the number of things that have to be tested) on numbers. Any number you can't find a factor for will be flagged as 'factored', and will eventually be scheduled for a LL test.
As far as I know, they're only dropping the patent counter claims, not any of the other counter-claims (Lanham Act, Unfair practicies, Copyright Violation, Breach of Contract).
SCO is trying to assert that the patent counter-claims will require even more discovery, and IBM has decided that they can put the screws to SCO without using them, and is dropping them in an attempt to get this over with.
Elizabeth Boukis, spokeswoman for Sony Electronics, says the work is speculative. "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
Now, IF they had made something like this. Or IF they had performed some preliminary experimentaiton, then I wouldn't have a problem with this patent. As it is though, they've simply patenteted using ultrasound to generate neural impulses. Of course, the devil and the difficulty in such an invention is in the details (getting SPECIFIC sensory input), and not in the general concept.
As it is, you couldn't use this invention to recreate it (remember, the point of a patent is to allow someone sufficient 'skilled in the art' to understand the invention so they could build one). So why was this patented?
Having said that, I see that most people on slashdot want to get rid of software patents, but what I'm wondering is, why only software?
I believe that the problem is not software vs. non-software patents, but the general quailty of software patents vs. the quality of non-software patents. It's not that software shouldn't be patentable, but that a great deal of the worst offenders are not patents on specific inventions, but entire ideas. In some cases, they're patenting the problem, instead of the solution.
One example is from the FFII wewbsite: A patent on trapping viruses. After a brief glance through the description and the abstract, it seems reasonable. Except when we look at the claims, this patent attempts to claim all virtual environments used to capture viruses. If you were asked to implement this 'invention', the patent wouldn't help much, as the difficulty of the implmentation is in figuring out how to make it work, and this patent is more of an overall design.
Examples could be given for good and not-to-broad software patents, but the general feeling is SW patents are usually too broad and too easily infringed. While not allowing any SW patents might be a bit extreme, but it's better than letting them in now and letting them to cause further harm to the software industry.
To be fair to planetside, this game has probably one of the BEST PvP systems, because it was designed to be only PvP.
Simply put, the only difference between a 3rd level character (which is 5 minutes after you start, if you do the training) and a 20th level character was the amount of things you could do. The 3rd level character could use the heaviest infantry weapons, or an AA weapon, or the battle armor suits. At that low level, you can only really do one or two of the different things, but you could do them.
The 20th level had access to the same abilities, except they had the ability to use all of them. For example, they could have a loadout with the heavy infantry gun, and an Anti Vehicle gun. But the bullets from the 20th level player did the same amount of damage as the 3rd level player, and they took the same amount of damage too.
But, overall, the casual player would have the ability to play the game from nearly the instant they started.
So to recap: We don't like MPAA, so their DRM is bad. We like Valve, so their DRM is good.
The real problem that I have with this vs. steam is that I don't believe this DVD indicated that you needed an internet connection and a downloaded license to view it.
IIRC, Half Life 2 did say you needed an Internet Connection + a Steam account to play on the packaging. That's the difference.
Now, if you don't like the HL2 registration system, at least you can choose to reject it by reading the box.
Actually, I've notice Ogg poping up in several other games, most notably City of Heroes. If you decompress the data files, you find all of the audio files are stored in Ogg format.
I was pleasantly suprised. It does make sense tho, since using mp3's in a product costs money, but Ogg is free.
I didn't read the IE problem, but the problems in the others are twofold
1) Inactive tabs can execute javascript dialogs. This can result in a malicious link which, if opened in another tab, brings up the real citibank (or other trusted site) page, but brings up a javascript dialog which is actually part of the malicious page.
2) Inactive tabs can also force focus on form fields back to themselves. This can result in using the real website, but capturing all of your keypresses on the (supposedly) trusted login form.
The recommendations are: don't use trusted and untrusted sites at the same time or disable javascript
True, but the fact that in a general question about outsourcing, he simply assumed that it mostly applied to dead-end low skill jobs.
The mere fact that a decent number of high-tech high-skill jobs are going overseas was completely glossed over. What saddend me was that Kerry didn't say anything about it either.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that a wholesale lowering of the cost of living is generally referred to as deflation. Deflation can be a huge problem, because once deflation starts it risks setting up a deflationary spiral which will continue to weaken the economy until something finally shakes it loose.
And if we had been creating software for as long as we've been building buildings, we'd probably be better at software as well.
I do think we need to get better at educating, but I still think we're in the "Learning how to make practical software WELL" phase of the discipline.
As part of the first expansion (Forged Alliance) the developers reworked the economy (by reducing the energy efficiency of mass fabricators) and reduced the effectiveness of assisting (now it's barely worth doing) to prevent that late game exponential growth without actually taking up more land area.
Yes, if your enemy can expand his base to cover large swaths of the the map, then their production will be ridiculous, but no longer are they continuously growing their economy without taking up more space.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_past_the_post#Effect_on_political_parties
It supports rsync, ssh, tar, and SMB. Performs pooling which reduces the number of stored files. Only issue is it uses the local account password file, so you'd have to set up an account for each user you wanted to give direct access too. http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
So my guess is a few big ticket items, and then lots and lots and LOTS of some small item.
Monday, September 8, Wilmington, NC will be the first television market (#135) to make the switch to DTV by shutting off their analog transmitters.
Ah, but the theory is you have a license to use the software, so you can copy it into RAM all you want*
Until you break the license. Then it's copyright infringement time.
* Some restrictions apply, all rights reserved.
1) The type 45, which I believe is a British Ship
2) The F-22, which I don't believe runs Windows, but did have the reported date line problem
3) The Yorktown, which is a test bed system for a new system. Which hardly qualifies as 'A good chunk of Command and Control.
Could this be that they're attempting to put a temporary lock on a domain name, so you don't go to whois, be told it's available, and then finish the paperwork, and find out the domain name is gone?
Yes, if they're holding it more than an hour or so, then yes, their actions are reprehensible. Otherwise, they're using the equivalent of a lock to say 'Hey, someone at my site is interested in this, noo ne else can use it for an hour'.
You were pulled over by some unethical cops for driving what they considered a suspicious looking vehicle. This was probably based on the idea that either 1) You're young and driving a crappy car, and likely to have drugs or 2) You're driving a crappy car, and hence must have something that they can write you up for. They basically assumed the worst based on what they could see.
Now, of course, every cop you meet has been colored by those events, and you assume the worst based on those events. Again, assuming that someone you've never interacted with behaves in line with your past interactions.
What those cops did was wrong. But I know very few people who have lots of good interactions with cops. Is it because cops are inherently bad, or is it because most people only interract with cops in already stressful situations? And therefore most peoples memories of the events are not pleasant ones.
The reason for a standard format is so that anyone can make a player, or perform an encoding that they KNOW will work. Companies rarely want to create multiple copies of their video to different specifications, because they want to be able to reach as wide an audience as possible. Creating a modified format that can only be reached by a subset of your audience is a really good way to fail.
Plus, according to the article, since the DVD still has the chapter info (for the non-PC players), it's not that hard to write a program to obtain that data. Which means you've deviated from the standard for little reason, as pirates will bypass it, and even non-pirate software will probably eventually bypass it, since the information is still encoded on the disc. Which means that suckers who pay them for their 'system' are just throwing cash away.
Come to think of it, I wish I could come up with a buisness plan to get people to give me money for a product that cannot work.
The ESRB's ability to fine people will probably be bound as part of the agreement that occurs when you submit a game for review. Alternitavely, if the game later gets fined, and for some reason they don't feel they have to pay, the ESRB can revoke their right to use the ESRB rating symbols (which are trademarked).
The real reason that the ESRB has to do this is because they are afraid that bad publisher decisions will result in the public losing faith in the ESRB. That's why they're trying to show that they will enforce their decisions, through fines and possible revokation of the right to use the ESRB system.
For the record, the furor over Hot Coffee was rediculous and perpetrated by people who don't know better. However, that's not how a lot of the public feels about it, and hence, the ESRB has to react to the public's opinion.
Actually, the name 'Final Fantasy' is because it was expected to be the last thing Hironobu Sakaguchi would be creating before retirement, as well as possible Square's final game. However, its immense popularity created sequels, and the rest is history.
They use a distributed Lucas-Lehmer Test. This takes days to weeks depending on the computer. However, given the possibily of either implementation bugs or some sort of minor rounding error in the vast amounts of floating point operations being performed (and since it's iterative, if an error occurs early in the run, it could propagate to something large by the end), they do independant verification on any number that's found.
In addition, if you have slower computers, you can elect (or will be assigned) factoring work, which is simply to do first-pass factoring (again, up to a limit to reduce the number of things that have to be tested) on numbers. Any number you can't find a factor for will be flagged as 'factored', and will eventually be scheduled for a LL test.
As far as I know, they're only dropping the patent counter claims, not any of the other counter-claims (Lanham Act, Unfair practicies, Copyright Violation, Breach of Contract).
SCO is trying to assert that the patent counter-claims will require even more discovery, and IBM has decided that they can put the screws to SCO without using them, and is dropping them in an attempt to get this over with.
As it is, you couldn't use this invention to recreate it (remember, the point of a patent is to allow someone sufficient 'skilled in the art' to understand the invention so they could build one). So why was this patented?
Having said that, I see that most people on slashdot want to get rid of software patents, but what I'm wondering is, why only software?
I believe that the problem is not software vs. non-software patents, but the general quailty of software patents vs. the quality of non-software patents. It's not that software shouldn't be patentable, but that a great deal of the worst offenders are not patents on specific inventions, but entire ideas. In some cases, they're patenting the problem, instead of the solution.
One example is from the FFII wewbsite: A patent on trapping viruses. After a brief glance through the description and the abstract, it seems reasonable. Except when we look at the claims, this patent attempts to claim all virtual environments used to capture viruses. If you were asked to implement this 'invention', the patent wouldn't help much, as the difficulty of the implmentation is in figuring out how to make it work, and this patent is more of an overall design.
Examples could be given for good and not-to-broad software patents, but the general feeling is SW patents are usually too broad and too easily infringed. While not allowing any SW patents might be a bit extreme, but it's better than letting them in now and letting them to cause further harm to the software industry.
The concept is duplicate, but at the CIO letter was written yesterday, I believe this is more of an update to an ongoing story.
:)
Slashdot has enough actual dupes that we don't need any false positives
To be fair to planetside, this game has probably one of the BEST PvP systems, because it was designed to be only PvP.
Simply put, the only difference between a 3rd level character (which is 5 minutes after you start, if you do the training) and a 20th level character was the amount of things you could do. The 3rd level character could use the heaviest infantry weapons, or an AA weapon, or the battle armor suits. At that low level, you can only really do one or two of the different things, but you could do them.
The 20th level had access to the same abilities, except they had the ability to use all of them. For example, they could have a loadout with the heavy infantry gun, and an Anti Vehicle gun. But the bullets from the 20th level player did the same amount of damage as the 3rd level player, and they took the same amount of damage too.
But, overall, the casual player would have the ability to play the game from nearly the instant they started.
IIRC, Half Life 2 did say you needed an Internet Connection + a Steam account to play on the packaging. That's the difference.
Now, if you don't like the HL2 registration system, at least you can choose to reject it by reading the box.
Actually, I've notice Ogg poping up in several other games, most notably City of Heroes. If you decompress the data files, you find all of the audio files are stored in Ogg format.
I was pleasantly suprised. It does make sense tho, since using mp3's in a product costs money, but Ogg is free.
I didn't read the IE problem, but the problems in the others are twofold
1) Inactive tabs can execute javascript dialogs. This can result in a malicious link which, if opened in another tab, brings up the real citibank (or other trusted site) page, but brings up a javascript dialog which is actually part of the malicious page.
2) Inactive tabs can also force focus on form fields back to themselves. This can result in using the real website, but capturing all of your keypresses on the (supposedly) trusted login form.
The recommendations are: don't use trusted and untrusted sites at the same time or disable javascript
True, but the fact that in a general question about outsourcing, he simply assumed that it mostly applied to dead-end low skill jobs.
The mere fact that a decent number of high-tech high-skill jobs are going overseas was completely glossed over. What saddend me was that Kerry didn't say anything about it either.