"...why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?"
Because it's a cheap, easy, and very scalable way to get fast downloads. I'd rather pay for less a company to provide content via Bittorrent than pay more so that they can build and maintain and infrastructure capable of hosting a huge number of http or ftp connections.
On a related note, most internet users aren't crazed slashdotters who obsess over their upstreams.
Apple releasing a nifty multi-function mouse is pretty cool, but what really matters is whether or not this becomes the standard Apple mouse. If Apple just keeps shipping single button mice with systems, all Apple has done is license a few different mouse design patents and wrap them up in a touchpad, but if Apple standardizes on this thing it will be even easier for PC users to make a quick transition to OS X without buying an extra mouse to go with their new Apple machines.
Anyone who has been playing online games for any length of time knows that Xbox live isn't the only place where this is a problem. You're just as likely to get cursed at, called faggot/nigger/spic/etc., or stomped down by cheaters in any online PC game. Xbox live is just worse because so many games default to broadcasting the voices of other players, which is one of the worst design decisions a game manufacturer can make.
This is one area where MMORPGs shine. Because the servers often track the last few lines of a player's chat, players who prattle on like this too often tend to get complained about so often that they simply get banned. It's also nice to be able to permanently/ignore people with little effort.
IMHO the problem with the sidescrollers you mentioned is that they're designed for hard-core 2D gamers, that is, they're extremely long, and generally involve some sort of annoying, counterintuitive puzzle which for players who don't want to look it up online or in a hint book becomes a brick wall. When I play these games (And the same goes for many of the side/overhead-scrolling 3d console games that pop up now and them) I often get the feeling that the developers are still trapped in the 1980s mindset of "the player is my adversary," and that mindset leads to games that become tedious and boring after a while.
What I really want to see is an infusion of shorter, more casual side scrollers, or the longer ones made a lot easier. Something similar to Nintendo's reissues of the old Mario games - by adding the save points they really brought back something fun without the 2d hardcore grinding that often pushes me away.
How long until a bunch of troops are being ripped apart in the press for rigging one of these to fire continuously and cause burns, or take turns firing multiple units to achieve a constant stream of microwaves? The problem with non-lethal weapons is that the people who use them like to kill people, and always find ways. Police and soldiers have abused and killed people with stun guns, tasers, even shot people in the head with gas grenades; giving trained killers a microwave cannon and assuming that they won't do something odious with it is moronic.
I've been waiting for Apple to do this for years-although I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't rather Apple go with AMD. Now if we can just get Job's head out of his ass on the one-button-mouse issue I'll be happy!
No, but they do make for some very nice visuals that have a far lesser impact on performance than trying to model everything with polygons does. World of Warcraft is a great example - slash the polygon budget, let textures and GPU tricks do a lot of the work, and the developers can spend a whole lot more time building an immersive game than they can when they're trying to model detailed scenery. This should work especially well in a racing game, because the scenery is incidental and the player isn't too likely to notice shadows that don't move.
You have it right on the nose. With all due respect to the tremendous individuals that comprise the team of astronauts, anyone who gets on that thing after a window just falls off on its own is a moron.
The worst moments of my public education stemmed from incompetent old teachers who were next-to-imposible to get rid of because they had tenure. Some of the best teachers I had lost their jobs during budget cuts because they were young, and the teacher's union protected the old failures who had tenure and thus were unnacountable for their incompetence.
At this point I do all of my shopping through New Egg, Amazon, and CDW simply because I can trust them. I've use Pricewatch, Ebay, Froogle, and others to buy stuff cheap in the past, and over half the time the items I recieved were broken/damaged, and the hassle of getting the stuff replaced (when the vendors will do it) is a huge pain. It also doesn't help that, when ordering from those tiny mom-and-pop vendors that the search engines turn up, the shipping charges are often outrageous, and more than one I have tried to buy something advertised with "free shipping" and then at the checkout only been able to select a much more expensive option.
I stopped donating to the EFF and let my membership lapse over a year ago because of the EFF's activities on behalf of "file-sharing" networks, websites, etc., whose primary focus is to encourage piracy. By support these groups and individuals, you undermine the credibility of the EFF and associate legitimate internet pioneers with profiteering sleazebags. As long as the EFF continues to support entities that are profiting from blatantly encouraging people to use their networks for piracy, I will not support the EFF, and I will encourage other EFF memebers to discontinue their support as well.
"Personally, while I consume my fair share, I'm still only primarily interested in them from an academic perspective, as resources of human sociability in online space"
Yeah, and I bet you only read playboy for the articles.
This is NOT dumping, this is a loss leader - taking a loss on one item to bring in customers who will buy others.
Dumping is selling massive quantities of a product below cost in an attempt to drive competitors out of business, with the intention of raising prices later.
Sony isn't trying to put anyone else out of business - even if they somehow managed 100% market share with the PSP and Gamecube, Nintendo would still thrive off of it's various IP, trading cards, and game development, and all their other competitors would actually make more money by NOT being in the game with Sony. Sony is also not planning to raise prices later; they'll be lowering prices and offering refined products.
I think in general older games only seem more satisfying because we tend to remember the best parts of the good ones. But when I look back, I remember: -Ungodly frustrating games that could only be beaten with codes or Game Genie, either because they were just too hard (Konami Games) or too long to play in one sitting and had no way to save. -Instability - Stability was a horrible problem with console games, although the Japanese have had it far worse than others due to getting the games first. I had plenty of NES games crash on me (TMNT was the worst) and while it still happens now, it isn't nearly as bad as it was back then. -Really crappy games. Remember all those really horrid licensed games like Bart vs. The Space Mutants?
Overall, while there are still plenty of horrible games, and IMHO, the majority aren't worth $40-$50, the high production costs of twenty-first century games are leading executives to try and protect their companies from big failures.
If you can fit your computers into plastic bubble made of cheap sheeting and duct tape, that is NOT a data center. It would have been easier to do what most small IT shops do - stick the servers in a small office with one of those cheesy little 1.5 ton units and shut the door.
Post again to/. when you're working in a real datacenter.
In my experience DVD-R media is worthless for backups, because the quality of the manufacturing is even worse than CD-R media. Even my expensive TDK disks have failed after six months. I don't know what to recommend besides DLT, but stay the hell away from DVD!
"Humanity would get lots and lots of cheap, free-floating, scalable, designer settlements in interesting, useful orbits."
Yeah, that would work really well assuming that one doesn't mind dying a few years later when the body can barely function due to the aprophy muscles undergo in extremely low gravity. Even if it turns out that humans can survive extreme periods of zero gravity, they would never be able to leave the low gravity environment. Sounds pretty crappy to me.
Terraforming is one of those cool ideas that's just going to take a while, sort of like virtual reality and fusion power. But eventually we'll get to the point where we can send out an army of self-replicating robots to do the work, and then colonize the planet a little later. It might seem a lot less interesting than the bullshit magic probes of Star Trek, but it sure as hell isn't hubris.
I think OpenBSD is pretty neat, but honestly, it's pretty crappy too. Unless you feel like doing a lot of research and compiling on your own, OpenBSD is almost worthless as anything more than the OS for low-end servers running open-source daemon software. If you're really not doing much it can also serve as a decent administrative terminal for other *nix boxes, but OS X or even Windows running Putty is a better choice.
I'm not defending Linux here, I just think it's nonsense for Theo to pretend that just because his extremely limited OS can run free software on shit hardware most people would throw away and be virtually ownage-proof in a default configuration does NOT make it a good operating system for the vast majority of computer users.
Slashdot Mirror
World of Warcraft IS World of Diablo. It's just a big persistent world with the Diablo play style adapted to a standard 3D MUD.
"...why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?"
Because it's a cheap, easy, and very scalable way to get fast downloads. I'd rather pay for less a company to provide content via Bittorrent than pay more so that they can build and maintain and infrastructure capable of hosting a huge number of http or ftp connections.
On a related note, most internet users aren't crazed slashdotters who obsess over their upstreams.
Apple releasing a nifty multi-function mouse is pretty cool, but what really matters is whether or not this becomes the standard Apple mouse. If Apple just keeps shipping single button mice with systems, all Apple has done is license a few different mouse design patents and wrap them up in a touchpad, but if Apple standardizes on this thing it will be even easier for PC users to make a quick transition to OS X without buying an extra mouse to go with their new Apple machines.
The time has come for America to stop working with the evil Chinese government! We must refuse to purchase their products, as well as not selling anything to them, so that we do not profit from fascism and oppression! An economic blockade is the perfect way to take down a tyranical, communist government!
Anyone who has been playing online games for any length of time knows that Xbox live isn't the only place where this is a problem. You're just as likely to get cursed at, called faggot/nigger/spic/etc., or stomped down by cheaters in any online PC game. Xbox live is just worse because so many games default to broadcasting the voices of other players, which is one of the worst design decisions a game manufacturer can make.
/ignore people with little effort.
This is one area where MMORPGs shine. Because the servers often track the last few lines of a player's chat, players who prattle on like this too often tend to get complained about so often that they simply get banned. It's also nice to be able to permanently
IMHO the problem with the sidescrollers you mentioned is that they're designed for hard-core 2D gamers, that is, they're extremely long, and generally involve some sort of annoying, counterintuitive puzzle which for players who don't want to look it up online or in a hint book becomes a brick wall. When I play these games (And the same goes for many of the side/overhead-scrolling 3d console games that pop up now and them) I often get the feeling that the developers are still trapped in the 1980s mindset of "the player is my adversary," and that mindset leads to games that become tedious and boring after a while.
What I really want to see is an infusion of shorter, more casual side scrollers, or the longer ones made a lot easier. Something similar to Nintendo's reissues of the old Mario games - by adding the save points they really brought back something fun without the 2d hardcore grinding that often pushes me away.
Because Intel is willing to spend more money to be the ONLY sponsor than AMD can pony up for it to have multiple sponsors.
How long until a bunch of troops are being ripped apart in the press for rigging one of these to fire continuously and cause burns, or take turns firing multiple units to achieve a constant stream of microwaves? The problem with non-lethal weapons is that the people who use them like to kill people, and always find ways. Police and soldiers have abused and killed people with stun guns, tasers, even shot people in the head with gas grenades; giving trained killers a microwave cannon and assuming that they won't do something odious with it is moronic.
TSIA
I've been waiting for Apple to do this for years-although I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't rather Apple go with AMD. Now if we can just get Job's head out of his ass on the one-button-mouse issue I'll be happy!
No, but they do make for some very nice visuals that have a far lesser impact on performance than trying to model everything with polygons does. World of Warcraft is a great example - slash the polygon budget, let textures and GPU tricks do a lot of the work, and the developers can spend a whole lot more time building an immersive game than they can when they're trying to model detailed scenery. This should work especially well in a racing game, because the scenery is incidental and the player isn't too likely to notice shadows that don't move.
You have it right on the nose. With all due respect to the tremendous individuals that comprise the team of astronauts, anyone who gets on that thing after a window just falls off on its own is a moron.
The worst moments of my public education stemmed from incompetent old teachers who were next-to-imposible to get rid of because they had tenure. Some of the best teachers I had lost their jobs during budget cuts because they were young, and the teacher's union protected the old failures who had tenure and thus were unnacountable for their incompetence.
At this point I do all of my shopping through New Egg, Amazon, and CDW simply because I can trust them. I've use Pricewatch, Ebay, Froogle, and others to buy stuff cheap in the past, and over half the time the items I recieved were broken/damaged, and the hassle of getting the stuff replaced (when the vendors will do it) is a huge pain. It also doesn't help that, when ordering from those tiny mom-and-pop vendors that the search engines turn up, the shipping charges are often outrageous, and more than one I have tried to buy something advertised with "free shipping" and then at the checkout only been able to select a much more expensive option.
I stopped donating to the EFF and let my membership lapse over a year ago because of the EFF's activities on behalf of "file-sharing" networks, websites, etc., whose primary focus is to encourage piracy. By support these groups and individuals, you undermine the credibility of the EFF and associate legitimate internet pioneers with profiteering sleazebags. As long as the EFF continues to support entities that are profiting from blatantly encouraging people to use their networks for piracy, I will not support the EFF, and I will encourage other EFF memebers to discontinue their support as well.
"Personally, while I consume my fair share, I'm still only primarily interested in them from an academic perspective, as resources of human sociability in online space"
Yeah, and I bet you only read playboy for the articles.
This is NOT dumping, this is a loss leader - taking a loss on one item to bring in customers who will buy others.
Dumping is selling massive quantities of a product below cost in an attempt to drive competitors out of business, with the intention of raising prices later.
Sony isn't trying to put anyone else out of business - even if they somehow managed 100% market share with the PSP and Gamecube, Nintendo would still thrive off of it's various IP, trading cards, and game development, and all their other competitors would actually make more money by NOT being in the game with Sony. Sony is also not planning to raise prices later; they'll be lowering prices and offering refined products.
Sun doesn't need Microsoft to do that, they can just toss the appropriate Gnome themes onto SunFreeware.
I think in general older games only seem more satisfying because we tend to remember the best parts of the good ones. But when I look back, I remember:
-Ungodly frustrating games that could only be beaten with codes or Game Genie, either because they were just too hard (Konami Games) or too long to play in one sitting and had no way to save.
-Instability - Stability was a horrible problem with console games, although the Japanese have had it far worse than others due to getting the games first. I had plenty of NES games crash on me (TMNT was the worst) and while it still happens now, it isn't nearly as bad as it was back then.
-Really crappy games. Remember all those really horrid licensed games like Bart vs. The Space Mutants?
Overall, while there are still plenty of horrible games, and IMHO, the majority aren't worth $40-$50, the high production costs of twenty-first century games are leading executives to try and protect their companies from big failures.
Now I understand why www.burqua-sluts.com isn't loading.
Want to know who really reads Wired? Graphic designers looking for cool ideas to steal.
If you can fit your computers into plastic bubble made of cheap sheeting and duct tape, that is NOT a data center. It would have been easier to do what most small IT shops do - stick the servers in a small office with one of those cheesy little 1.5 ton units and shut the door.
/. when you're working in a real datacenter.
Post again to
In my experience DVD-R media is worthless for backups, because the quality of the manufacturing is even worse than CD-R media. Even my expensive TDK disks have failed after six months. I don't know what to recommend besides DLT, but stay the hell away from DVD!
"Humanity would get lots and lots of cheap, free-floating, scalable, designer settlements in interesting, useful orbits."
Yeah, that would work really well assuming that one doesn't mind dying a few years later when the body can barely function due to the aprophy muscles undergo in extremely low gravity. Even if it turns out that humans can survive extreme periods of zero gravity, they would never be able to leave the low gravity environment. Sounds pretty crappy to me.
Terraforming is one of those cool ideas that's just going to take a while, sort of like virtual reality and fusion power. But eventually we'll get to the point where we can send out an army of self-replicating robots to do the work, and then colonize the planet a little later. It might seem a lot less interesting than the bullshit magic probes of Star Trek, but it sure as hell isn't hubris.
I think OpenBSD is pretty neat, but honestly, it's pretty crappy too. Unless you feel like doing a lot of research and compiling on your own, OpenBSD is almost worthless as anything more than the OS for low-end servers running open-source daemon software. If you're really not doing much it can also serve as a decent administrative terminal for other *nix boxes, but OS X or even Windows running Putty is a better choice.
I'm not defending Linux here, I just think it's nonsense for Theo to pretend that just because his extremely limited OS can run free software on shit hardware most people would throw away and be virtually ownage-proof in a default configuration does NOT make it a good operating system for the vast majority of computer users.