A lot of the reason is the cost. Too many people have been burned spending $50 on a game that either sucked balls or was beatable in a few days. Game rentals are a really nice solution to this dilemma, but that doesn't help with sales.
When it comes right down to it, I don't care if a game's a sequel or not, just that it's entertaining for a month or so of casual play.
I freakin hear ya man. In this day and age of class action lawsuits and lawyers aplently, I hardly see blue collar workers as being the exploitable saps they were in the early 1900's when unions first started forming. All it takes is one abused worker to get the ball rolling and any company that's truly exploiting its workers is FUCKED.
Modern unions just make the workers lazy and hard to deal with. They're an excuse for lethargic douchebags to get regular raises without putting in any effort. And people wonder why we're shipping our jobs overseas.
Don't judge the bulk of America by your experiences with those Orange County douchebags. Pretty much every Californian north of San Diego and south of San Franscisco is an arrogant, self-centered, self-righteous prick. We're getting an awful lot of them moving to Denver. The more of them I meet, the more I like my guns.
From 1998-2001, the very day I activated my resume on Monster, I'd have 3-4 job offers rolling in. (usually somewhere I didn't want to go, but still)
I was never more than a week out of work, even if it was just contract stuff. And even without a degree, I made serious bank towards the end.
Fast forward to 2003, I've been in school for 18 months getting myself ready for med school, and I out of the blue realize that my resume on Monster has been active since my last layoff in 2001. My credentials, while not top of the line, were of a skill set that most major companies can use. (solaris, linux, windows admin, extensive security experience with firewalls, ids, and email servers, good network hardware skills, even knew my way around IOS well enough to handle a moderate sized network) Nothing for a year...not that I was looking.
Looking through it now, I often check science jobs for something to do in the summer. Here in Denver, there's a good amount of biotech and chemical companies, but I'll be damned if there's more than 3 postings a week on Monster in that category, which are usually just from headhunters anyway.
Perhaps THAT is some indication how many companies actually use job boards. They're back to the old standards...headhunters, word of mouth, and the local paper.
Sadly, you can learn a lot more by buying cheap equipment of your own and tinkering than you can in 2 years at a community college. During my tech stint, I went from tinkering on PCs to running network security (firewalls, ids, etc) for a couple different companies. The upside was I learned everything on my own time by spending a lot of my time and money during my lackey years on equipment to screw around with. (switches, old routers, various windows and linux servers, even some old sparcs and SGIs)
The downside was, when the market went to the shitter and everyone and their dog were looking for a job, my lack of a degree kept me from getting anywhere.
My advice to you...stick it out in the CC, then try and get into a 2+2 program with a 4 year college to finish off a bachelors in Info. Tech. or something similar. Learn most of your real world skills on your own. Use the degree to get a foot in the door.
Most colas has phosphoric acid added to them. Additionally, carbon dioxide dissolved in water becomes carbonic acid. You have two potential sources of acidic hydrogen.
While the urban legend about dissolving a tooth in a glass of Coke overnight is false (check out snopes), it cetainly is acidic enough that long term drinking WILL cause excessing tooth decay.
That's assuming the catalase (the enzyme responsible for converting the peroxide into O2 and water) can survive the acidic environment. Most protiens can't thrive in a pH that low....it screws up the hydrogen bonding resposible for the folding that gives it the characteristic shape of its function.
Not quite. pH is a scale for dilute acids and bases. 1M HCl would have a pH of 0. I've gotten 1M on my hands before...it's not that bad. Concentrated HCl is in the negatives as far as the pH scale goes. (pH=-log[H+]) The H+ concentration would be the same as the acid concentration, in this case 13M. -log(13)=-1.11
Well, why are people complaining about cell phone use in restaurants then? Or walking down the street?
Some people just want to complain. They'd bitch about something else if it wasn't cell phone use. As long as the conversation isn't any louder than a normal one and the ringtones aren't irritating, most reasonable people have no problem with this.
No, you don't. Maybe you think you do, but you don't. A cell phone next to your mouth needs no more volume to talk to than you would use for a normal conversation.
Every cell phone I've ever owned has not transmitted a soft-talking voice well unless my reception meter is at full. I try to be quiet when I talk on the phone because I don't want to bother anyone else if I'm in a place where loud talking is not appropriate...this doesn't work well when I have medium-to-poor reception. I'd sure like to know what brand of phone you have that you can speak softly into and still be heard.
On a more personal level, I wish folks would learn that personal interaction should take priority over your fucking phone. If I'm standing there having a conversation with someone and their phone rings, I get pissed when they hold up a finger to shush me so they can answer it and blab about last night's game with someone they're going to be seeing in a couple hours anyway. It's rude. I can understand emergencies, but some people will cut off human interaction and jump to answer their phone the second it rings. Those are the people that anti-cellphone activists are annoyed by.
It's called a Faraday cage. Metal grating with grates smaller than the wavelength that corresponds to the cellular frequency. Unfortunately, if you block cell communications, you're blocking everything with a larger wavelegth/lower frequency. I'm a firm believer that this should be done with places like movie theaters or areas where cell signals can muck up equipment. (as long as you post warning signs so that anyone who might be on-call for something can choose not to go)
I'd give ALL of my movie watching business to the first theater to install a Faraday cage.
Re:I don't get it
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, it's not just that people have loud conversations on their phones. It's not that we can't hear only one side of the conversation. (yeah I really care what your wife is telling you to get from the grocery store)
It's that they have them in places where they wouldn't have a loud conversation with another person at all...very inappropriate places. And the ringtones, goddam the fucking annoying ringtones that are constantly going off in any venue where silence and attention are expected. (a lecture for instance) With another person, you can talk quietly and not disturb what's going on around you. You HAVE to talk at at LEAST a moderate level on cell phones, often louder than that.
He didn't say it was impossible, though. He just said no one would ever need it.
Besides, there's a huge margin between making some advances in semiconductor technology to increase memory and making the kind of advances in software design, neuroscience, AND hardware to develop a human-functional android.
I don't contend it's impossible, but I don't believe we'll see it in our lifetime.
When I was a a tech for Global Crossing, we had text pagers that any servers we were responsible for would send error messages to. Most people kept them on vibrate as the beep was really annoying. I was on the security team, so the IDS also paged me when a certain threshold of suspicious activity was received.
Anyway, if a meeting dragged on for too long and seemed useless, I'd pick up my pager, look all freaked out, and hurry out of the room. This trick caught on with most of the admins. Management thought we were so dedicated to our network.
Basically reinforncing the fact that they don't care if it gets shared among users (that's free promotion) but if other companies are trying to make money on content that the first company paid to have produced, that's when the lawyers come out to play.
Sounds fair enough to me. It's akin to a new band duplicating a CD of an old band then slapping their name on it and selling it. Even hating the RIAA as much as I do, I see this sort of copyright violation as wrong. (in fact, THAT is exactly why copyright was created)
I went to RIT in the early 90s. They used to have an Information Technology degree program that focused on networking and corporate IT models...not sure if it still exists or not.
It does indeed have a shortage of women, though...it was even worse than 2:1 when I went. A few hot deaf chicks though.
I don't know where YOU live, but RNAs around here are getting $25-30/hr. Even nursing assistants are making a living wage, and they only had to go to school for a year.
Here's a tragedy for you...my girlfriend is a supervisor in charge of like 30 staff and 200 homeless people at the biggest homeless shelter in Denver. She has a master's degree and is working on a 2nd one. She has 10 years experience in human services. She does more in one day to help people in need than most people do their whole lives. Her salary? 25k a year.
Colleges are even starting to lower their standards. I remember taking organic chemistry and meeting people who didn't understand the concept of limiting reagents and didn't know how to titrate. Mind you, an entire year of general chemistry and a laboratory is required to enroll in organic. I have no idea how these people passed gen. chem.
Naw, these bitches are just spoiled because of the money they or their friends made in the 90s.
We live in Denver, CO...middle of the road as far as expense goes. It's not as bad as NYC, but it's not cheap either. We live on about 30k USD a year and we live in a decent neighborhood and have nice amenities like cars and broadband internet. We're not saving up any money, but we're not living in squalor.
Unless you're in one about 5 high-cost urban areas (San francisco, Los Angeles, NYC, Chicago, Washington DC) then you can like just fine on the salaries that are being paid.
What exactly do you think your C compiler is written in? How about very good portions of the Linux kernel?
You don't need low level programming languages for every application, or even MANY applications, but understanding machine code is the difference between a trained monkey and a Computer Scientist.
Your farming analogy blows, by the way. A more apt analogy would be Farmer Brown doesn't know shit about botany or genetics, he just buys the seeds Monsanto tells him to and plants them the way his "paw" taught him. Farmer Jones however understands botany and plant physiology as well as a bit of meterology. He understands how plants work, what fertilizers to use and in which conditions to use them, and when to change his planting times/methods. Farmer Brown will have a harder time adapting to conditions outside his skill-set. Farmer Jones is less likely to run across conditions he can't handle.
Besides, understanding how the machine interacts with the software goes well beyond writing assembly code.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the reason is the cost. Too many people have been burned spending $50 on a game that either sucked balls or was beatable in a few days. Game rentals are a really nice solution to this dilemma, but that doesn't help with sales.
When it comes right down to it, I don't care if a game's a sequel or not, just that it's entertaining for a month or so of casual play.
I freakin hear ya man. In this day and age of class action lawsuits and lawyers aplently, I hardly see blue collar workers as being the exploitable saps they were in the early 1900's when unions first started forming. All it takes is one abused worker to get the ball rolling and any company that's truly exploiting its workers is FUCKED.
Modern unions just make the workers lazy and hard to deal with. They're an excuse for lethargic douchebags to get regular raises without putting in any effort. And people wonder why we're shipping our jobs overseas.
Don't judge the bulk of America by your experiences with those Orange County douchebags. Pretty much every Californian north of San Diego and south of San Franscisco is an arrogant, self-centered, self-righteous prick. We're getting an awful lot of them moving to Denver. The more of them I meet, the more I like my guns.
Yeah, because the winners that play M:TG at the local card store with 8 year olds are real social role models.
Too bad Deus Ex 2 was worse than Daikatana.
If they screw up Thief 3, I am never buying an Ion Storm product again.
notepad = text editor
wordpad = word processor
text editor != word processor.
Do you understand the distinction?
From 1998-2001, the very day I activated my resume on Monster, I'd have 3-4 job offers rolling in. (usually somewhere I didn't want to go, but still)
I was never more than a week out of work, even if it was just contract stuff. And even without a degree, I made serious bank towards the end.
Fast forward to 2003, I've been in school for 18 months getting myself ready for med school, and I out of the blue realize that my resume on Monster has been active since my last layoff in 2001. My credentials, while not top of the line, were of a skill set that most major companies can use. (solaris, linux, windows admin, extensive security experience with firewalls, ids, and email servers, good network hardware skills, even knew my way around IOS well enough to handle a moderate sized network) Nothing for a year...not that I was looking.
Looking through it now, I often check science jobs for something to do in the summer. Here in Denver, there's a good amount of biotech and chemical companies, but I'll be damned if there's more than 3 postings a week on Monster in that category, which are usually just from headhunters anyway.
Perhaps THAT is some indication how many companies
actually use job boards. They're back to the old standards...headhunters, word of mouth, and the local paper.
Sadly, you can learn a lot more by buying cheap equipment of your own and tinkering than you can in 2 years at a community college. During my tech stint, I went from tinkering on PCs to running network security (firewalls, ids, etc) for a couple different companies. The upside was I learned everything on my own time by spending a lot of my time and money during my lackey years on equipment to screw around with. (switches, old routers, various windows and linux servers, even some old sparcs and SGIs)
The downside was, when the market went to the shitter and everyone and their dog were looking for a job, my lack of a degree kept me from getting anywhere.
My advice to you...stick it out in the CC, then try and get into a 2+2 program with a 4 year college to finish off a bachelors in Info. Tech. or something similar. Learn most of your real world skills on your own. Use the degree to get a foot in the door.
Most colas has phosphoric acid added to them. Additionally, carbon dioxide dissolved in water becomes carbonic acid. You have two potential sources of acidic hydrogen.
While the urban legend about dissolving a tooth in a glass of Coke overnight is false (check out snopes), it cetainly is acidic enough that long term drinking WILL cause excessing tooth decay.
That's assuming the catalase (the enzyme responsible for converting the peroxide into O2 and water) can survive the acidic environment. Most protiens can't thrive in a pH that low....it screws up the hydrogen bonding resposible for the folding that gives it the characteristic shape of its function.
Not quite. pH is a scale for dilute acids and bases. 1M HCl would have a pH of 0. I've gotten 1M on my hands before...it's not that bad. Concentrated HCl is in the negatives as far as the pH scale goes. (pH=-log[H+]) The H+ concentration would be the same as the acid concentration, in this case 13M. -log(13)=-1.11
Well, why are people complaining about cell phone use in restaurants then? Or walking down the street?
Some people just want to complain. They'd bitch about something else if it wasn't cell phone use. As long as the conversation isn't any louder than a normal one and the ringtones aren't irritating, most reasonable people have no problem with this.
No, you don't. Maybe you think you do, but you don't. A cell phone next to your mouth needs no more volume to talk to than you would use for a normal conversation.
Every cell phone I've ever owned has not transmitted a soft-talking voice well unless my reception meter is at full. I try to be quiet when I talk on the phone because I don't want to bother anyone else if I'm in a place where loud talking is not appropriate...this doesn't work well when I have medium-to-poor reception. I'd sure like to know what brand of phone you have that you can speak softly into and still be heard.
On a more personal level, I wish folks would learn that personal interaction should take priority over your fucking phone. If I'm standing there having a conversation with someone and their phone rings, I get pissed when they hold up a finger to shush me so they can answer it and blab about last night's game with someone they're going to be seeing in a couple hours anyway. It's rude. I can understand emergencies, but some people will cut off human interaction and jump to answer their phone the second it rings. Those are the people that anti-cellphone activists are annoyed by.
It's called a Faraday cage. Metal grating with grates smaller than the wavelength that corresponds to the cellular frequency. Unfortunately, if you block cell communications, you're blocking everything with a larger wavelegth/lower frequency. I'm a firm believer that this should be done with places like movie theaters or areas where cell signals can muck up equipment. (as long as you post warning signs so that anyone who might be on-call for something can choose not to go)
I'd give ALL of my movie watching business to the first theater to install a Faraday cage.
No, it's not just that people have loud conversations on their phones. It's not that we can't hear only one side of the conversation. (yeah I really care what your wife is telling you to get from the grocery store)
It's that they have them in places where they wouldn't have a loud conversation with another person at all...very inappropriate places. And the ringtones, goddam the fucking annoying ringtones that are constantly going off in any venue where silence and attention are expected. (a lecture for instance) With another person, you can talk quietly and not disturb what's going on around you. You HAVE to talk at at LEAST a moderate level on cell phones, often louder than that.
defrag your hard drive.
Hooked on Photonics worked for me!
Maybe it's from the oxygen dissolved in the water.
He didn't say it was impossible, though. He just said no one would ever need it.
Besides, there's a huge margin between making some advances in semiconductor technology to increase memory and making the kind of advances in software design, neuroscience, AND hardware to develop a human-functional android.
I don't contend it's impossible, but I don't believe we'll see it in our lifetime.
When I was a a tech for Global Crossing, we had text pagers that any servers we were responsible for would send error messages to. Most people kept them on vibrate as the beep was really annoying. I was on the security team, so the IDS also paged me when a certain threshold of suspicious activity was received.
Anyway, if a meeting dragged on for too long and seemed useless, I'd pick up my pager, look all freaked out, and hurry out of the room. This trick caught on with most of the admins. Management thought we were so dedicated to our network.
Basically reinforncing the fact that they don't care if it gets shared among users (that's free promotion) but if other companies are trying to make money on content that the first company paid to have produced, that's when the lawyers come out to play.
Sounds fair enough to me. It's akin to a new band duplicating a CD of an old band then slapping their name on it and selling it. Even hating the RIAA as much as I do, I see this sort of copyright violation as wrong. (in fact, THAT is exactly why copyright was created)
I went to RIT in the early 90s. They used to have an Information Technology degree program that focused on networking and corporate IT models...not sure if it still exists or not.
It does indeed have a shortage of women, though...it was even worse than 2:1 when I went. A few hot deaf chicks though.
I don't know where YOU live, but RNAs around here are getting $25-30/hr. Even nursing assistants are making a living wage, and they only had to go to school for a year.
Here's a tragedy for you...my girlfriend is a supervisor in charge of like 30 staff and 200 homeless people at the biggest homeless shelter in Denver. She has a master's degree and is working on a 2nd one. She has 10 years experience in human services. She does more in one day to help people in need than most people do their whole lives. Her salary? 25k a year.
Colleges are even starting to lower their standards. I remember taking organic chemistry and meeting people who didn't understand the concept of limiting reagents and didn't know how to titrate. Mind you, an entire year of general chemistry and a laboratory is required to enroll in organic. I have no idea how these people passed gen. chem.
Naw, these bitches are just spoiled because of the money they or their friends made in the 90s.
We live in Denver, CO...middle of the road as far as expense goes. It's not as bad as NYC, but it's not cheap either. We live on about 30k USD a year and we live in a decent neighborhood and have nice amenities like cars and broadband internet. We're not saving up any money, but we're not living in squalor.
Unless you're in one about 5 high-cost urban areas (San francisco, Los Angeles, NYC, Chicago, Washington DC) then you can like just fine on the salaries that are being paid.
Let's leave this assembly crap, and it is crap
What exactly do you think your C compiler is written in? How about very good portions of the Linux kernel?
You don't need low level programming languages for every application, or even MANY applications, but understanding machine code is the difference between a trained monkey and a Computer Scientist.
Your farming analogy blows, by the way. A more apt analogy would be Farmer Brown doesn't know shit about botany or genetics, he just buys the seeds Monsanto tells him to and plants them the way his "paw" taught him. Farmer Jones however understands botany and plant physiology as well as a bit of meterology. He understands how plants work, what fertilizers to use and in which conditions to use them, and when to change his planting times/methods. Farmer Brown will have a harder time adapting to conditions outside his skill-set. Farmer Jones is less likely to run across conditions he can't handle.
Besides, understanding how the machine interacts with the software goes well beyond writing assembly code.