In my experience, they WERE almost always caused by buggy device drivers, and Windows' poor handling of buggy device drivers, rather than the hardware.
Windows' handling of device driver failures has greatly improved over time, so now when a (for example) display driver has a shit-fit, Windows can successfully recover, rather than just barfing a blue screen, so maybe NOW your point is more valid, but it certainly wasn't prior to the introduction of Windows Driver Foundation.
Next, the whole RCI balance mechanic has been the core of SimCity forever, and that's completely gone. Residential areas are supposed to need Commercial areas so people have a place to buy things (or work). Commercial needs shoppers, workers, and goods. Industry provides jobs for residents and goods for Commerce. They broke all of that, because sims, it seems, can live on love. All they need to not move out of their homes is "happiness," which can be obtained from shopping (commerce) but can also be obtained from city parks. So people have made 400k+ population cities that are absolutely nothing but residential high rises and parks. The people have no jobs and no money and no food, but they can still live in gleaming skyscrapers because I guess they're urban foraging in the parks.
Sounds like they were trying to create a game where cities could be genuinely different and still successful and functional. With the strong emphasis on multiplayer and shared maps, a game where people didn't have to follow the same rigid template as everybody else to create a viable city was probably considered a vital feature.
Older SC games really only had a single "optimal" strategy. I think this was what they were trying to avoid.
Unfortunately, it seems that in trying to make it more free-form and less rigid, they inadvertently weakened the "Sim" part of "SimCity".
It's a different game. People used to RCI balance as the core mechanic are going to find it different to what they expected. Whether that's better or worse is probably a matter of opinion.
Personally, I find the stock Samsung roms to be perfectly good. I've rooted my S3 and disabled a lot of the built-in Samsung apps, but apart from that, it's still running the latest official Samsung firmware. It does everything I want, so I see no reason to change for the sake of it. (In other areas/devices I'm an incorrigible modder, so this isn't just apathy, this is the 3rd party roms not being compelling enough to change).
If I still have my S3 in a year or so when Samsung have stopped releasing updates for it, then I *might* consider flashing a 3rd party rom, but by that time I'll probably have upgraded to the Galaxy S4 or S5 or whatever the new hotness is anyway.
So, no it won't affect my decision, and I doubt I'm a unique case in this regard.
Run out of space on your iPhone? Too bad, delete stuff.
Run out of space on your GS3? Shift stuff to the external microSD card. If that gets full, pull the back cover off and swap in another microSD card.
Run out of battery on your iPhone? Too bad, find a power socket to plug your charger into. You brought your charger, right? Hope you weren't planning to go anywhere for the next hour or so!
Run out of battery on your GS3? Pull back cover off, take dead battery out, put charged battery in.
THESE were the features that sold me on the GS3 instead of the iPhone.
Distribute the games on a medium that isn't designed to be easily created with ordinary consumer hardware. Back in the day that meant cartridges. These days it would probably look more like a USB flash drive (or maybe like a memory card), except instead of flash memory inside it would have a ROM chip. The device is designed to read the game software from that medium -- not from a CD, DVD, or hard drive.
There's no way we could go back to that now. Why go to all the cost of producing multi-gigabyte ROM chips when they can pump the games out on BluRay for a few cents per copy, and particularly when the games would still get illegally dumped and distributed anyway! They'd just be going to great expense to put a small bump in the road for the pirates.
In the long term people will figure out how to read and make images of the games that anyone can use in an emulator on a PC -- if you know where to look, you can easily find ROM images and emulators on the internet for all the old eight-bit consoles -- but that only becomes really practical once the console hardware is sufficiently obsolete to be easily emulated, i.e., after you're already selling at least the subsequent generation of console if not the one after that.
You don't have to wait 10+ years if the console was already obsolete when it was released. Case in point: Dolphin was emulating Wii games with a high degree of accuracy and compatibility for a large part of the Wii's active lifespan. Yes, the hardware requirements were a bit steep (though not so much now) to run games perfectly, but it shows how weak the Wii's hardware was (i.e. barely a step beyond the Gamecube) that a very playable emulator was available while Wii games and consoles still sat on store shelves.
Me neither, so I checked out the Wikipedia article and discovered this gem:
HPA can be used by various booting and diagnostic utilities, normally in conjunction with the BIOS. An example of this implementation is the Phoenix FirstBIOS, which uses BEER (Boot Engineering Extension Record) and PARTIES (Protected Area Run Time Interface Extension Services).[3]
Assuming that citation is valid, I have to give props to the Phoenix Technology guys for taking the time to give awesome acronyms to pretty mundane tech.
I know you mean the in-game command console rather than a game console like the xbox, but not everybody is familiar with the game:)
OTOH, the weapon names were changed to be even less similar to their real life counterparts in the original xbox console port (CS not CS:S). Deagle became Night Hawk etc. Obviously the xbox port lacked a command console so I don't think there's a way to see if they changed the actual item names as well as the UI labels.
1. Move to Scotland. Unless you're rich, in which case move to a tax haven.
2. Use any excuse to get drunk. Waking up in the morning, for example, should be properly celebrated.
3. Occasionally wonder what both sides aren't telling us about the Independence question, then give up and drink more.
4. Use the word "cunt" primarily as punctuation.
There's more to it than that, of course (like pretending to enjoy haggis) but start with the items above and you'll be well on your way.
This is where the popular AV/security companies should have taken notice and met customer demands...rather than trying to bundle all this "value" shit and obtuse flashy menu and window designs.
The reason for this is simple: out of sight, out of mind. Why would you pay for something so transparent you didn't even know it was there?
If your AV software isn't constantly reminding you of the threat of viruses and malware, are you going to take it seriously when it comes to resubscription time?
The companies pushing paid AV software want the user to cough up again when the user gets the "Resubscribe or face the terrible consequences!" message. They want the user to think "Hm, well this thing bugged me constantly with stupid popups and warnings, but it sure did report finding a lot of 'maliciousy-wormy-trojany-malwares' (read: tracking cookies, false positives and other nonsense) and my computer is still kinda working. I guess I'd better pay up.".
The last thing they want the user thinking is "This thing didn't even report a single virus... so either I didn't get any, in which case I don't need it, or it just didn't detect them, in which case I don't want it."
...they bicker all the time, have heated, uncivlized arguments about who is the better coder, what sort of software license works best, their choice of cellphone and whatnot.
If one of them has an Android phone and the other has an iPhone, then you fire the one with the iPhone. No real nerd would put up with Apple's walled garden.
If one of them has a Windows phone, you take him out the back and shoot him before he has a chance to breed. Not that it's likely.
"Balancing your checkbook is to balancing the budget as driving your car to the supermarket is to landing on the moon.” --- Sloan Sabbith, The Newsroom (HBO)
The campaign switch to half-litres in UK pubs is unpopular because the UK pint is 568mL, so the fear is the change would result in a smaller serving with no accompanying reduction in price.
If both the US and the UK converted to half-litres instead of pints for beer, UK drinkers would lose 68mL per glass while US drinkers would gain 27mL per glass.
Yes, these are small differences in quantity, but some people do tend to get unreasonably bent out of shape over stuff like this. Being an avid beer drinker myself, I'm not sure I'd welcome the change. I'm all for the metric system, but beer is always a special case.;)
The very MINUTE a celebrity turns 18 (sometimes even earlier), they're hung on the Daily Mail's wall of shame, often with a headline in the vein of: "Ooh! Look! Celebrity X is all grown up! Here's some hawt pix!!!".
You can practically hear the heavy breathing in articles like this where the young age of the actress is the focus of the article. Seems odd for a newspaper that claims to campaign against the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, right?
Then there's the straight up porn stories. I mean.. wtf?
Just have a scroll down the "FEMAIL" column on the right of any page. The "articles" listed there really say it all.
This approach would not work for the other aspects you listed, but we are talking about schoolyard bullying here, not murder or rape.
As has been pointed out so many times here already, people like yourself are under the impression that bullying is trivial when it's clear that the results can be catastrophic. If an adult did to another person, child or adult, what some bullies do to their peers, they'd be locked up.
Its not as simple as saying that some evil kids are being nasty to some innocent child.
Actually, it is. We criminalize antisocial behaviour in adults. We should do everything in our power to stamp it out in children. Adults have supreme power to stop bullying, but society allows it to continue, and people like you just harp about "giving the victims the tools to blah blah..." while in any situation other than the schoolyard, we'd be talking about fines and jail sentences, and the people blaming the victims would be rightly ostracized.
All I am saying is, you are not doing these kids any favors by telling them they are victims powerless to defend themselves from bullying.
Powerless? I never said that. Victims, yes, but victimhood doesn't automatically imply powerlessness. I agree that the victims should stand up for themselves. I just don't think that's where responsibility should begin and end. The bully is to blame. Always. No exceptions.
I don't think I'm going to convince you, so I'll leave you with your belief that the bullying made you stronger. I'm sure it helps.
From a cursory examination of the texts you don't actually have to pay for, Izzy's ideas amount to "just don't give 'em the satisfaction", which in my experience does not work at all.
I'm also instantly skeptical of the fact that this program is a commercial enterprise, but perhaps that's common in the US. I dunno.
But hey, if it works for a few kids then it's better than nothing... at least he admits in the text that his methods won't actually stop all bullying.
Today, I do not blame the people who bullied me because I accept that seeking to establish your social rank in the pack this is a natural part of the social dynamics of humans ( as well as other social mammals ).
You don't blame them because they were just doing what animals do? You think so highly of your new friends!
Ridiculous comparisons to other social mammals aside, your post reeks of Stockholm Syndrome. The rationalization you mention in your post is alive and well in your own comments. To me, it looks like you've fabricated this framework of acceptance after the fact as a way to rationalize what happened to you.
Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping bullying.
The problem is, when you replace the word "bullying" in that sentence with other "ugly aspects" of human nature, it begins to unravel.
Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping emotional abuse.
Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping physical assault.
Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping sexual assault.
Accepting it, and acting accordingly is the most efficient way of stopping murder.
You really believe that? You believe that if a bully "smells your fear" that gives them carte blanche to attack? That the person being bullied is culpable because they didn't react with the secret "anti-bullying" dance?
You're wrong. Life isn't a fucking movie where the underdog protagonist finally uses his intellect/superpower/whatever to embarrass the bully and win the approval of his peers. This is reality, where there will ALWAYS be a weakest kid in the group, and some kids are just fucking bullies for any number of reasons, and no amount of laughing it off or keeping it cool will cause them to stop or switch targets.
So, you're either incredibly stupid or you're just a cunt.
... either that or I've just fallen for a really clever troll.
My plan is to keep XP in a VM for web page testing and to soon get 8 into a VM so that I can use whatever useless version of IE it has for more testing. The only thing that Windows does to me is cause me to write: if($browser.msie){do stupid code;}
I agreed with a lot of what you said, but I think you might actually be pleasantly surprised by IE10. IE is far from useless anymore. They have come a LONG way since the bad old days of IE6.
I mean, you could only tear Firefox out of my cold dead hands... but when I'm forced to use IE9 or IE10, I don't actually mind. It's no longer an abomination.
Slashdot Mirror
An Aussie friend tells me that he and his mates refer to VB as "Vaginal Backwash".
Whether that's better or worse than cat-piss...
I'll just leave this here.
In my experience, they WERE almost always caused by buggy device drivers, and Windows' poor handling of buggy device drivers, rather than the hardware.
Windows' handling of device driver failures has greatly improved over time, so now when a (for example) display driver has a shit-fit, Windows can successfully recover, rather than just barfing a blue screen, so maybe NOW your point is more valid, but it certainly wasn't prior to the introduction of Windows Driver Foundation.
Next, the whole RCI balance mechanic has been the core of SimCity forever, and that's completely gone. Residential areas are supposed to need Commercial areas so people have a place to buy things (or work). Commercial needs shoppers, workers, and goods. Industry provides jobs for residents and goods for Commerce. They broke all of that, because sims, it seems, can live on love. All they need to not move out of their homes is "happiness," which can be obtained from shopping (commerce) but can also be obtained from city parks. So people have made 400k+ population cities that are absolutely nothing but residential high rises and parks. The people have no jobs and no money and no food, but they can still live in gleaming skyscrapers because I guess they're urban foraging in the parks.
Sounds like they were trying to create a game where cities could be genuinely different and still successful and functional. With the strong emphasis on multiplayer and shared maps, a game where people didn't have to follow the same rigid template as everybody else to create a viable city was probably considered a vital feature.
Older SC games really only had a single "optimal" strategy. I think this was what they were trying to avoid.
Unfortunately, it seems that in trying to make it more free-form and less rigid, they inadvertently weakened the "Sim" part of "SimCity".
It's a different game. People used to RCI balance as the core mechanic are going to find it different to what they expected. Whether that's better or worse is probably a matter of opinion.
Personally, I find the stock Samsung roms to be perfectly good. I've rooted my S3 and disabled a lot of the built-in Samsung apps, but apart from that, it's still running the latest official Samsung firmware. It does everything I want, so I see no reason to change for the sake of it. (In other areas/devices I'm an incorrigible modder, so this isn't just apathy, this is the 3rd party roms not being compelling enough to change).
If I still have my S3 in a year or so when Samsung have stopped releasing updates for it, then I *might* consider flashing a 3rd party rom, but by that time I'll probably have upgraded to the Galaxy S4 or S5 or whatever the new hotness is anyway.
So, no it won't affect my decision, and I doubt I'm a unique case in this regard.
Run out of space on your iPhone? Too bad, delete stuff.
Run out of space on your GS3? Shift stuff to the external microSD card. If that gets full, pull the back cover off and swap in another microSD card.
Run out of battery on your iPhone? Too bad, find a power socket to plug your charger into. You brought your charger, right? Hope you weren't planning to go anywhere for the next hour or so!
Run out of battery on your GS3? Pull back cover off, take dead battery out, put charged battery in.
THESE were the features that sold me on the GS3 instead of the iPhone.
Distribute the games on a medium that isn't designed to be easily created with ordinary consumer hardware. Back in the day that meant cartridges. These days it would probably look more like a USB flash drive (or maybe like a memory card), except instead of flash memory inside it would have a ROM chip. The device is designed to read the game software from that medium -- not from a CD, DVD, or hard drive.
There's no way we could go back to that now. Why go to all the cost of producing multi-gigabyte ROM chips when they can pump the games out on BluRay for a few cents per copy, and particularly when the games would still get illegally dumped and distributed anyway! They'd just be going to great expense to put a small bump in the road for the pirates.
In the long term people will figure out how to read and make images of the games that anyone can use in an emulator on a PC -- if you know where to look, you can easily find ROM images and emulators on the internet for all the old eight-bit consoles -- but that only becomes really practical once the console hardware is sufficiently obsolete to be easily emulated, i.e., after you're already selling at least the subsequent generation of console if not the one after that.
You don't have to wait 10+ years if the console was already obsolete when it was released. Case in point: Dolphin was emulating Wii games with a high degree of accuracy and compatibility for a large part of the Wii's active lifespan. Yes, the hardware requirements were a bit steep (though not so much now) to run games perfectly, but it shows how weak the Wii's hardware was (i.e. barely a step beyond the Gamecube) that a very playable emulator was available while Wii games and consoles still sat on store shelves.
Me neither, so I checked out the Wikipedia article and discovered this gem:
Assuming that citation is valid, I have to give props to the Phoenix Technology guys for taking the time to give awesome acronyms to pretty mundane tech.
I know you mean the in-game command console rather than a game console like the xbox, but not everybody is familiar with the game :)
OTOH, the weapon names were changed to be even less similar to their real life counterparts in the original xbox console port (CS not CS:S). Deagle became Night Hawk etc. Obviously the xbox port lacked a command console so I don't think there's a way to see if they changed the actual item names as well as the UI labels.
As an actual Scot living near Glasgow, I'd say...
1. Move to Scotland. Unless you're rich, in which case move to a tax haven.
2. Use any excuse to get drunk. Waking up in the morning, for example, should be properly celebrated.
3. Occasionally wonder what both sides aren't telling us about the Independence question, then give up and drink more.
4. Use the word "cunt" primarily as punctuation.
There's more to it than that, of course (like pretending to enjoy haggis) but start with the items above and you'll be well on your way.
Despite what you may think, I'm fairly sure that women are human life.
I'm not sure you can play the game at all.
Sounds a lot like the description of Italy in this BBC article called "Where vegetarianism is an exotic illness".
Right back at ya! Knowing who has had an abortion would enable me to know who not to trade with, who not to vote for, and where not to live.
I can vote with my feet and with my wallet, and my votes go against women.
FTFY.
This is where the popular AV/security companies should have taken notice and met customer demands...rather than trying to bundle all this "value" shit and obtuse flashy menu and window designs.
The reason for this is simple: out of sight, out of mind. Why would you pay for something so transparent you didn't even know it was there?
If your AV software isn't constantly reminding you of the threat of viruses and malware, are you going to take it seriously when it comes to resubscription time?
The companies pushing paid AV software want the user to cough up again when the user gets the "Resubscribe or face the terrible consequences!" message. They want the user to think "Hm, well this thing bugged me constantly with stupid popups and warnings, but it sure did report finding a lot of 'maliciousy-wormy-trojany-malwares' (read: tracking cookies, false positives and other nonsense) and my computer is still kinda working. I guess I'd better pay up.".
The last thing they want the user thinking is "This thing didn't even report a single virus... so either I didn't get any, in which case I don't need it, or it just didn't detect them, in which case I don't want it."
...they bicker all the time, have heated, uncivlized arguments about who is the better coder, what sort of software license works best, their choice of cellphone and whatnot.
If one of them has an Android phone and the other has an iPhone, then you fire the one with the iPhone. No real nerd would put up with Apple's walled garden.
If one of them has a Windows phone, you take him out the back and shoot him before he has a chance to breed. Not that it's likely.
"Balancing your checkbook is to balancing the budget as driving your car to the supermarket is to landing on the moon.” --- Sloan Sabbith, The Newsroom (HBO)
The campaign switch to half-litres in UK pubs is unpopular because the UK pint is 568mL, so the fear is the change would result in a smaller serving with no accompanying reduction in price.
If both the US and the UK converted to half-litres instead of pints for beer, UK drinkers would lose 68mL per glass while US drinkers would gain 27mL per glass.
Yes, these are small differences in quantity, but some people do tend to get unreasonably bent out of shape over stuff like this. Being an avid beer drinker myself, I'm not sure I'd welcome the change. I'm all for the metric system, but beer is always a special case. ;)
Nail. Head.
The very MINUTE a celebrity turns 18 (sometimes even earlier), they're hung on the Daily Mail's wall of shame, often with a headline in the vein of: "Ooh! Look! Celebrity X is all grown up! Here's some hawt pix!!!".
You can practically hear the heavy breathing in articles like this where the young age of the actress is the focus of the article. Seems odd for a newspaper that claims to campaign against the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, right?
Then there's the straight up porn stories. I mean.. wtf?
Just have a scroll down the "FEMAIL" column on the right of any page. The "articles" listed there really say it all.
They're hypocritical bastards of the worst kind.
As has been pointed out so many times here already, people like yourself are under the impression that bullying is trivial when it's clear that the results can be catastrophic. If an adult did to another person, child or adult, what some bullies do to their peers, they'd be locked up.
Actually, it is. We criminalize antisocial behaviour in adults. We should do everything in our power to stamp it out in children. Adults have supreme power to stop bullying, but society allows it to continue, and people like you just harp about "giving the victims the tools to blah blah..." while in any situation other than the schoolyard, we'd be talking about fines and jail sentences, and the people blaming the victims would be rightly ostracized.
Powerless? I never said that. Victims, yes, but victimhood doesn't automatically imply powerlessness. I agree that the victims should stand up for themselves. I just don't think that's where responsibility should begin and end. The bully is to blame. Always. No exceptions.
I don't think I'm going to convince you, so I'll leave you with your belief that the bullying made you stronger. I'm sure it helps.
If this turns out to be some organic matter that accidentally made the trip to mars with the rover itself, I'll be very disappointed.
Also, whoever tagged the article with the misspelled "curiousity"... great job.
From a cursory examination of the texts you don't actually have to pay for, Izzy's ideas amount to "just don't give 'em the satisfaction", which in my experience does not work at all.
I'm also instantly skeptical of the fact that this program is a commercial enterprise, but perhaps that's common in the US. I dunno.
But hey, if it works for a few kids then it's better than nothing... at least he admits in the text that his methods won't actually stop all bullying.
You don't blame them because they were just doing what animals do? You think so highly of your new friends!
Ridiculous comparisons to other social mammals aside, your post reeks of Stockholm Syndrome. The rationalization you mention in your post is alive and well in your own comments. To me, it looks like you've fabricated this framework of acceptance after the fact as a way to rationalize what happened to you.
The problem is, when you replace the word "bullying" in that sentence with other "ugly aspects" of human nature, it begins to unravel.
Oh yeah, while we're at it.... self-deprecating humor is when you willingly make fun of yourself. What you're talking about is verbal abuse.
Hope that difference isn't too subtle for you. I suspect it might be.
"Some kids are bully magents" [sic]
You really believe that? You believe that if a bully "smells your fear" that gives them carte blanche to attack? That the person being bullied is culpable because they didn't react with the secret "anti-bullying" dance?
You're wrong. Life isn't a fucking movie where the underdog protagonist finally uses his intellect/superpower/whatever to embarrass the bully and win the approval of his peers. This is reality, where there will ALWAYS be a weakest kid in the group, and some kids are just fucking bullies for any number of reasons, and no amount of laughing it off or keeping it cool will cause them to stop or switch targets.
So, you're either incredibly stupid or you're just a cunt.
... either that or I've just fallen for a really clever troll.
I agreed with a lot of what you said, but I think you might actually be pleasantly surprised by IE10. IE is far from useless anymore. They have come a LONG way since the bad old days of IE6.
I mean, you could only tear Firefox out of my cold dead hands... but when I'm forced to use IE9 or IE10, I don't actually mind. It's no longer an abomination.