Steam is ok with installing games to different drives now. You can just cut n' paste the game over to the Steam folder on the SSD, restart Steam, and it'll recognize it just fine. I don't imagine you'd play a different 6-12 games everytime you sit down, so the few seconds it takes to swap locations will probably make up for itself in saved loading times pretty quick.
I bought Win 8 because I needed a legit license for a new PC. I could buy windows 8 for only $15 since I already had win7 on the wife's laptop.
It's been almost 3 weeks, after the initial gripe period with the UI and adjusting settings/layout on some stuff, I'm ok with it now. Probably because it's largely the same as Windows 7. I miss having gadgets on the second monitor for time and performance monitoring though. I never really used the start menu, so I don't care that it's been replaced. There's been a handful of tiny conveniences: 1) I like the picture log-in, saves typing time 2) SSD settings automatically adjusted for. 3) Built-in ISO mount 4) Task Manager is much more useful now. 5) The new menu that pops up when you right-click the start menu is a nice quick link to the control panel items I'd use the most.
Individually or in the aggregate, these conveniences don't form a good argument for upgrading to Windows 8. But if you don't have a windows license and you need one, it might as well be Windows 8, unless you used the start menu often.
Income for financial reporting and income for tax purposes are defined differently, and can result in very large difference.
Financial reporting follows GAAP in the US, while tax filings follow the IRC definitions.
Also, the stock market doesn't always care about net income. Because of silly accounting contrivances, financial analysts tend to back those accounting adjustments out to come up with their own measurement metrics, or even just work from the cash flow statement since that will blow past accounting nonsense and get right to the reality of how the company is doing in terms of cash-in/cash-out during the year.
There are a lot of differences between book income and tax income, and each of those differences were put into place for what was deemed to be a "good reason" at the time. For example, certain kinds of asset exchanges getting recognized in accounting, but not in tax because you can end up taxing people who haven't gotten any cash in the exchange, and would be forced to liquidate holdings in a bad market just to pay taxes. Or accounting (with some exception) pegging asset expenses to the concept of "useful lives" which is just an approximation specific to each company, but tax just lays out specified asset life categories, and recognizes annual expenses faster, so that companies can recognize their expenses up front and pay less taxes as a result, because legislators want to reward companies that invest and buy assets, by allowing them to take the expense on those assets earlier and pay less tax.
I wanted SATA3 ports to take advantage of the high transfer speeds. Getting that speed was the main point of buying the SSD in the first place. I could have bought the SATA3 controller, but it would just been a stopgap measure that would leave me with an obsolete part when I have to upgrade the CPU soon. It would have shortly become the next bottleneck (It was just a 3.4ghz core2duo) so it made sense to just roll the upgrades together. Most of the parts besides the gfx card were about 4 years old or so by this point.
OP is right on the money. The difference between Console vs. PC has nothing to do with hardware or software, and everything to do with control.
The bottom line is that all of the hardware and software in these categories have changed, and are going to continue to change. The fundamental difference is who gets to choose the direction of those changes. Under a vendor-controlled environment, there is one-size-fits-all convenience, and clarity in design for developers. Under PC environments, you have freedom to install/remove/modify, and numerous vendors vying for the acceptance of the users. Both carry their own upsides and downsides, and there will be situations where the lines will blur, but the controversy will go on, and will boil down to "who should have control?"
I find consoles and PC both have unique experiences or games that are better experienced on a particular platform, so I just bought all 3 consoles in addition to my PC so I can enjoy all of the updates.
Yet I still find value in what Valve is doing here. I've recently updated my PC hardware. This process entailed the following:
1) BF3 takes 20-30minutes to load. That means a match is nearly over by the time I get in. This is likely a bug, but ultimately it means that I need loading to go faster to play with my friends. So I want to buy an SSD. 2) I don't have a motherboard that supports an SSD. So I need a new motherboard 3) I don't have a CPU that'd work on a new motherboard, so that means a new CPU. Ditto with my RAM, so I need to upgrade that too. 4) So I have to research the CPU, RAM, and Motherboard for the best bang-for-buck hardware. This part has actually gotten FAR easier, since Tomshardware has ongoing recommended parts guides with multiple budget tiers. 5) Installing a motherboard should be simple, except due to the extreme growth in size of modern GPUs, and a change in location of one of the power sockets, I can't stretch a power cable over the GPU and into the socket located as far away as possible from my PSU as possible. I have to disconnect everything and strip out plates and fans from the case just to gain an extra millimeter of space to plug the damn motherboard in. 6) This causes the sound card to die. The extreme proximity of the power cable to the sound card causes too much interference and I have to remove it and go with on-board sound. 5) Once installing these, I find that IDE cables are not supported by my motherboard, only SATA, so my dvd-drive is now obsolete. My driver disc is also useless now as a result, so I have to manually locate and load 6 driver packs, in a specific order, to ensure stability. 6) After black-friday deals, I got my SSD, as well as a replacement DVD-drive that uses SATA cables. 7) When I begin install these, though I have plenty of SATA cables find that my power supply only has 4 power cables for SATA drives, and 3 are already occupied by HDDs, so after adding my SSD I still don't have a dvd drive. 8) I rarely find that after-market computer cases need upgrades for compatibility, but apparently my Antec P90 case does not have drive bays that support the tiny dimensions of the SSD, even using the tray-mount that was supposed to help fit it into a 3.5 bay. The case uses gel mounts with special long screws that help reduce vibration noise, so I don't even have screws for the SSD either. Ultimately I just remove two screws from other harddrives, and put them into the front 2 screw holes so that the SSD is left flopping around loose in the back. Luckily there's no mechanical components and I don't anticipate moving the case around so I left the issue alone rather than buy a new case. Eventually I'll upgrade the case and PSU, and the obsolete parts can be made into an HTPC.
As a PC gamer I just take these annoyances in stride because this process has been worse in the past, and I know what the payoff is like. But for the wider market, it's a big obstacle in the user experience. Many people just buy pre-packaged dell PCs to spare themselves the hassle (and ge
The Mona Lisa is not highly regarded because it is detailed. There are many similarly detailed paintings, and many far more detailed paintings. A high-resolution photograph of a sitting woman would be far far more detailed than any of those paintings. That's not what adds value.
There comes a point of diminishing returns where increasing levels of realism adds less to the experience. Artistic touches go a long way in defining a distinctive and memorable look for a game. Battlefield 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare ___, Medal of Honor, they are all working off the same modern-day source material and have only minor visual details to distinguish one from another. Kane & Lynch 2 : Dog Days, which had terrible reviews (deservingly so), and Splinter cell: Conviction are two other games also set in the modern day but have taken effort to add stylistic touches. KL2: DD for all of it's flaws implemented a distinctive "caught-on-camera" perspective throughout the game, as though the viewer was watching the protagonists by chasing them with a camcorder, shaking as they run, static distortion in the camera when explosions go off, and film bleeding effects for emphasis on the sleazy scraped-from-the gutter atmosphere they sought to achieve. They put thought into the game's visuals, not just time. Splintercell conviction projects objectives, text, and video of events happening elsewhere onto surfaces in the world that the protagonist moves through the environment, and mapped the timing and positioning of each of these to coincide with the player's likely orientation and pacing through that environment. Both games identified a theme to differentiate themselves, even if they only wanted a subtle touch, and made efforts to maintain thematic consistency throughout the game. This is very different than a simplistic dogged adherence to replicating what already exists in the real-world.
Stepping outside of the realm of modern-day game settings. Katamari Damacy or Okami has a tiny fraction of the budget spent on graphics that these other games do. But both have a far more memorable visual experience. One glance at a screenshot of these games and there's no mistaking what you're looking at. I'd rate the visuals of these 2 games above all others mentioned here, despite less technically complex.
Unless the deadline for action is so short that there is no time for feedback, not listening to others is almost always a sign of arrogance. I can't think of any other case where it wouldn't be a sign of arrogance, but I qualify that statement because I accept the possibility that I haven't thought of every case.
Unless someone is perfect, not only effective in their execution, but with maximal theoretical efficiency, then hearing the considerations of others allows them to reflect on the problem from additional perspectives. They can still choose to do what they had planned on doing all along; listening to others doesn't take away this option.
I already finished SR3 on console after paying full retail price. I'd bought the bundle for $10 just to play SR3 again on the PC using Steam (already have the other games on there that I plan on playing)
I like Steam. I want it on every game I own because it adds value. But what I really love is how far down they've pushed prices on older games. Before Steam, game publishers did not know how to make money on their existing games which they refused to discount, possibly because they couldn't even get old discounted games onto store shelves. As ridiculous as it sounds, before Steam, they just resigned all that money to used game trading. Steam was the impetus that changed the PC gaming market pricing. Some publishers are hold-outs that refuse to give good discounts, but most are playing along because they're raking in money on games that weren't generating revenue anyway.
Because many of the benefits of technology are plain to see, and continue to be heavily explored by many. Technology solves problems, sometimes problems we didn't even know we had at the time.
In fact, this is so widely known and obvious that the author took a moment to consider the other side, and explore negative impacts of technology, because there is a greater likelihood of finding interesting or insightful points to discuss on the road less traveled.
It's hardly a foolish thing to look at threats from technology. Perhaps the answer will be that the corrective response needed will be minimal, perhaps the threat is not significant at all. But to avoid even the idea of looking of negative impacts from technology would be foolish indeed.
To be fair, "social" used in this context (drawing distinctions between fiscal and social issues) typically refers to controversial social issues that hinge on moral arguments like gay marriage, abortion, assisted suicide, etc. In other words, subjects where the financial component is less important or not at all important.
Taking care of the homeless would fall under fiscal issues in this context since the problem isn't "Do we prefer homeless people to live or to die?" but rather, "Can we afford to pay to keep them alive?".
It would take pretty significant OS improvements to make a casual user like myself want to make another move from Windows 7. I have pretty simple usage on my home desktop, just a few windows at a time, surfing, browsing, and gaming. It's functionally sufficient for my needs., so a new OS would need to just execute better on what I can already do on Windows 7 from the user perspective. I'm not the kind of guy who gets excited about reformatted and setting up his computer again from square one. That is the opposite of what I want to be doing on my computer.
The only things I can imagine that would make me excited about changing to a new OS are fantastically expensive to achieve with nigh-insurmountable obstacles for implementation: 1) A complete and unified overhaul of interface design that would improve usability of the system and ease of organization, that remains intuitive yet fully capable. With all elements accessible by keyboard shortcut combinations, no mouse needed for any action. (Btw, Metro is not this.) 2) Set-it-and-forget-it unification of my desktop, laptop, and smartphone. I want to see anything I do on one device get automatically updated on the other device by the time I am using the other device. I like when programs offer synchronization. I want that to be the norm rather than the exception and it should be as invisible to the user as possible. I can only dream that this is where Microsoft intends to take this their software in the long-term. But I'm dead certain it's not going to include support for my phone. 3) A brand new feature I'd never even known that I wanted before it was introduced. I am not clever enough to imagine such things. I don't want to be a cynic but I really don't expect such things from Microsoft.
"If that's what the law states, then I'm glad the Texas AG is doing his job and upholding it since that the law that the democratically elected legislature passed. Additionally, why should there be unsupervised "observers" standing around a polling place and potentially intimidating voters? There are already plenty of limits to regulate campaigning in and around polling places, and I see no reason why unelected "observers" should be given more access to polling places that legitimately registered voters are."
No question that the Texas AG should do his job of upholding the laws of his state. But as for the rest of the post:
I just want to point out that if voter fraud has been occurring, then having "democratically elected" legislature passing laws to prevent outside observers is not a great argument for why there should be no observation.
With that kind of logic, if the Green party stuffed the ballots at all polling booths to get elected, and passed laws that no one but green party members are allowed to watch for voter fraud in their districts, then the fact that a "democratically elected" legislature passed those laws doesn't mean that "unelected" i.e neutral observers are not needed. It means that neutral observers are more necessary than ever.
SOX isn't keeping you from knowing how much the products you're designing cost. Your management decided for their own reasons that you can't know your project costing information.
From an auditor's perspective, so long as you don't have access rights/authorization allowing you to commit fraud as a sole agent we don't care about you having information on the purchasing process of your project. View-only rights are rarely going to cause separation-of-duties issues.
Wild guess from when I used to work in capital equipment purchasing for a manufacturing company, I suspect that someone in purchasing may want to get volume deals with certain vendors to save overall costs and doesn't want individual project leads to handcuff that negotiation by arguing for another vendors who might quote lower on one deal but higher on others, as opposed to the one vendor is offering consistently good pricing. Basically purchasing wants to have final authority on the purchase without meddling.
"Well, I'm innocent and I've got nothing to hide, so why not just cooperate so they don't give me a hard time about it? I might even be able to help them catch the bad guys."
The advice I've heard in response to the above was this:
If you say, I went grocery shopping at 5pm, are you SURE it was 4pm? It wasn't 3:30pm or 4:30pm? Maybe they had asked your wife where you were that afternoon, and she said that you were picking up the kids from school at 5pm (probably because you went to pick up groceries AND pick up the kids).
Now, the investigator can say that they've got conflicting statements, and that it appears you may be lying about where you've been. They might have had a nothing to go on in this case before, and no excuse to give the judge to get a warrant...on anybody. But now they've interviewed someone and caught them in a lie. Time to get a warrrant and put your ass through the wringer.
Marketing's reply: Through the use of social disruptive crowd-sourced adaptive technology that curates and refines user-generated data like never before. Obviously.
"The doubters have latched onto the idea that Adobe Illustrator â" the premier program for computer graphic artists â" âoerevealsâ evidence of document manipulation in the Obama birth certificate. They note Illustrator reveals nine separate layers of the document, and claim itâ(TM)s âoeproofâ the file has been altered. But thatâ(TM)s not so, says Jean-Claude Tremblay, a leading software trainer and Adobe-certified expert, who has years of experience working with and teaching Adobe Illustrator. âoeYou should not be so suspicious about this,â Tremblay told FoxNews.com, dismissing the allegations. He said the layers cited by doubters are evidence of the use of common, off-the-shelf scanning software â" not evidence of a forgery. âoeI have seen a lot of illustrator documents that come from photos and contain those kind of clippingsâ"and it looks exactly like this,â he said. Tremblay explained that the scanner optical character recognition (OCR) software attempts to translate characters or words in a photograph into text. He said the layers cited by the doubters shows that software at work â" and nothing more. âoeWhen you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesnâ(TM)t look like someone built it from scratch. If someone made a fake it wouldnâ(TM)t look like this,â he said.âoeSome scanning software is trying to separate the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers.â Tremblay also said that during the scanning process, instances where the software was unable to separate text fully from background led to the creation of a separate layer within the document. This could be places where a signature runs over the line of background, or typed characters touch the internal border of the document. âoeI know that you can scan a document from a scanner most of the time it will appear as one piece, but that doesnâ(TM)t mean that thereâ(TM)s no software thatâ(TM)s doing this kind of stuff,â he said, adding that itâ(TM)s really quite common. âoeIâ(TM)d be more afraid itâ(TM)d be fake if it was one in piece. It would be harder to check if itâ(TM)s a good one if itâ(TM)s a fake,â Tremblay said. "
Sadly, the wikipedia summary, which left the details of the story to the imagination was far more compelling than the actual story which was just really goddamned clunky.
It kept on repeating itself about how cold the equations are. Yes the point needs to be made, but only to the extent necessary to proceed with the story. Within the low margins of a short-story, the extra weight of this redundant writing brought the result crashing into mediocrity.
I wanted to care about the girl before she died, but the attempts to paint a human face on the tragedy fell flat for me, she just robotically waxed philosophical, rued her predicament slightly, and resigned to her death. No emotion in what should be an extremely emotional scene, for the purposes of contrasting against the coldness of those equations.
To elaborate, I've considered the possibility that, in response to an event, the market's ability to "value" that event takes place as a result of a series of transactions from all participants. For example, a 10 cent stock having a negative press release, and thus a participant wants to sell for 5 cents, and someone else takes that deal, pushing the market price down to 5 cents, while another thinks 5 cents is too low and is willing to buy for 7 cents. pushing it back up, then the first participant changes his mind and buys for 6 cents... Eventually the market settles on a revised price by closing time which has accounted for the "value" of the negative implications of that press release. Thus flash transactions between seconds help find that revised price faster, and the ability of many people to determine appropriate pricing is a valuable thing since it moves capital towards deserving investments which have valuable productivity and society as a whole sees higher productivity and potentially the related benefits.
But if everyone puts in their guess at 00:00:00, then has to wait until 00:00:01, they will still have all of the relevant positions of market players (the only information that has changed) and can factor that into their 00:00:02 positions. Ultimately, all of those would-be flash transactors will just have to accept the 1-sec interval results as the average of information gained from all the thousands of millisecond transactions that would have taken place right? Basically, I don't think millisecond guesses are any faster than 1-second guesses at finding the true value of an investment. It just takes true analysis out of the picture and brings in the potential for flash-crashes from unsupervised automated trading.
But I'm just a layman here, I'd like someone with more insight or experience to help me make sense of this.
A common defense of flash-trading is that it provides market liquidity in that it provides counterparties to the desired transactions of the rest of the market.
But I've yet to see someone discuss how the added-value of millisecond liquidity is substantially superior to having exchanges post transactions in 1-sec. intervals to discourage millisecond arbitrage during which no new events have occured and no new market analysis has taken place, only speculation and playing the system against proper investors? Can someone illuminate me on this point?
I don't see how the post above can be modded +5 insightful, it is literally the opposite of insightful:
The grandparent post Pubstar is responding to: "Insisting that you'll just follow your own code instead of the law works great as long as you have the "right" morals. Funny thing about that, everyone seems to think their morals are the right ones.
Maybe I think it's immoral for my daughter to have a kid out of wedlock, so I kill her and her boyfriend as an honor killing. After all, it's my morality, and how dare your laws condemn it? Maybe I think abortions are immoral, so I won't let my employees have them, and how dare the law say otherwise? Maybe I think it's moral to drive drunk so long as I'm super-duper careful. How dare you take away my right to drive? Maybe I think it's moral to lynch murderers, and whoops, turns out that guy was innocent. How dare you make me follow your "due process"? Maybe I see no problems with dumping toxic waste in your water supply. How dare you fine me for it?"
Grandparent poster is illustrating the mindset of the misguided as an example of how a society without law enforcement and only individual moral judgement can lead to chaos. The Grandparent does not actually believe in these things, but is pointing out a series of hypothetical stances that other people may use in their individual moral judgement to do terrible things.
Thus, the parent poster above, responding to the grandparent poster has completely and totally missed the point and is flat-out NOT insightful.
Quoting the parent poster: "At this point, I stopped reading. Actually, I should have stopped reading at the above example."
I think you should have kept reading, otherwise you might have realized your mistake.
Indeed, asian family, stayed in my parent's house paying low rent. My wife-to-be even moved in for a few months near the end until we had finally saved up enough to buy a house and my parents gifted my rent payments back as an additional down payment on the house.
Rent paid within the family stays inside the family. Rent paid outside the family is just gone. With money as tight as it is for young folks in this economy, keeping the family together can help save the family money.
Slashdot Mirror
This lady figured out how to make your own apple cables, apparently it's pretty simple:
"Reverse-engineering Apple's secret charging methods"
http://vimeo.com/13835359
But even if you can make your own, I think the licensing issues prevent the possibility of selling them.
Steam is ok with installing games to different drives now. You can just cut n' paste the game over to the Steam folder on the SSD, restart Steam, and it'll recognize it just fine. I don't imagine you'd play a different 6-12 games everytime you sit down, so the few seconds it takes to swap locations will probably make up for itself in saved loading times pretty quick.
I bought Win 8 because I needed a legit license for a new PC. I could buy windows 8 for only $15 since I already had win7 on the wife's laptop.
It's been almost 3 weeks, after the initial gripe period with the UI and adjusting settings/layout on some stuff, I'm ok with it now. Probably because it's largely the same as Windows 7. I miss having gadgets on the second monitor for time and performance monitoring though. I never really used the start menu, so I don't care that it's been replaced. There's been a handful of tiny conveniences:
1) I like the picture log-in, saves typing time
2) SSD settings automatically adjusted for.
3) Built-in ISO mount
4) Task Manager is much more useful now.
5) The new menu that pops up when you right-click the start menu is a nice quick link to the control panel items I'd use the most.
Individually or in the aggregate, these conveniences don't form a good argument for upgrading to Windows 8. But if you don't have a windows license and you need one, it might as well be Windows 8, unless you used the start menu often.
Income for financial reporting and income for tax purposes are defined differently, and can result in very large difference.
Financial reporting follows GAAP in the US, while tax filings follow the IRC definitions.
Also, the stock market doesn't always care about net income. Because of silly accounting contrivances, financial analysts tend to back those accounting adjustments out to come up with their own measurement metrics, or even just work from the cash flow statement since that will blow past accounting nonsense and get right to the reality of how the company is doing in terms of cash-in/cash-out during the year.
There are a lot of differences between book income and tax income, and each of those differences were put into place for what was deemed to be a "good reason" at the time. For example, certain kinds of asset exchanges getting recognized in accounting, but not in tax because you can end up taxing people who haven't gotten any cash in the exchange, and would be forced to liquidate holdings in a bad market just to pay taxes. Or accounting (with some exception) pegging asset expenses to the concept of "useful lives" which is just an approximation specific to each company, but tax just lays out specified asset life categories, and recognizes annual expenses faster, so that companies can recognize their expenses up front and pay less taxes as a result, because legislators want to reward companies that invest and buy assets, by allowing them to take the expense on those assets earlier and pay less tax.
IAACPA
I wanted SATA3 ports to take advantage of the high transfer speeds. Getting that speed was the main point of buying the SSD in the first place. I could have bought the SATA3 controller, but it would just been a stopgap measure that would leave me with an obsolete part when I have to upgrade the CPU soon. It would have shortly become the next bottleneck (It was just a 3.4ghz core2duo) so it made sense to just roll the upgrades together. Most of the parts besides the gfx card were about 4 years old or so by this point.
OP is right on the money. The difference between Console vs. PC has nothing to do with hardware or software, and everything to do with control.
The bottom line is that all of the hardware and software in these categories have changed, and are going to continue to change. The fundamental difference is who gets to choose the direction of those changes. Under a vendor-controlled environment, there is one-size-fits-all convenience, and clarity in design for developers. Under PC environments, you have freedom to install/remove/modify, and numerous vendors vying for the acceptance of the users. Both carry their own upsides and downsides, and there will be situations where the lines will blur, but the controversy will go on, and will boil down to "who should have control?"
I find consoles and PC both have unique experiences or games that are better experienced on a particular platform, so I just bought all 3 consoles in addition to my PC so I can enjoy all of the updates.
Yet I still find value in what Valve is doing here. I've recently updated my PC hardware. This process entailed the following:
1) BF3 takes 20-30minutes to load. That means a match is nearly over by the time I get in. This is likely a bug, but ultimately it means that I need loading to go faster to play with my friends. So I want to buy an SSD.
2) I don't have a motherboard that supports an SSD. So I need a new motherboard
3) I don't have a CPU that'd work on a new motherboard, so that means a new CPU. Ditto with my RAM, so I need to upgrade that too.
4) So I have to research the CPU, RAM, and Motherboard for the best bang-for-buck hardware. This part has actually gotten FAR easier, since Tomshardware has ongoing recommended parts guides with multiple budget tiers.
5) Installing a motherboard should be simple, except due to the extreme growth in size of modern GPUs, and a change in location of one of the power sockets, I can't stretch a power cable over the GPU and into the socket located as far away as possible from my PSU as possible. I have to disconnect everything and strip out plates and fans from the case just to gain an extra millimeter of space to plug the damn motherboard in.
6) This causes the sound card to die. The extreme proximity of the power cable to the sound card causes too much interference and I have to remove it and go with on-board sound.
5) Once installing these, I find that IDE cables are not supported by my motherboard, only SATA, so my dvd-drive is now obsolete. My driver disc is also useless now as a result, so I have to manually locate and load 6 driver packs, in a specific order, to ensure stability.
6) After black-friday deals, I got my SSD, as well as a replacement DVD-drive that uses SATA cables.
7) When I begin install these, though I have plenty of SATA cables find that my power supply only has 4 power cables for SATA drives, and 3 are already occupied by HDDs, so after adding my SSD I still don't have a dvd drive.
8) I rarely find that after-market computer cases need upgrades for compatibility, but apparently my Antec P90 case does not have drive bays that support the tiny dimensions of the SSD, even using the tray-mount that was supposed to help fit it into a 3.5 bay. The case uses gel mounts with special long screws that help reduce vibration noise, so I don't even have screws for the SSD either. Ultimately I just remove two screws from other harddrives, and put them into the front 2 screw holes so that the SSD is left flopping around loose in the back. Luckily there's no mechanical components and I don't anticipate moving the case around so I left the issue alone rather than buy a new case. Eventually I'll upgrade the case and PSU, and the obsolete parts can be made into an HTPC.
As a PC gamer I just take these annoyances in stride because this process has been worse in the past, and I know what the payoff is like. But for the wider market, it's a big obstacle in the user experience. Many people just buy pre-packaged dell PCs to spare themselves the hassle (and ge
The Mona Lisa is not highly regarded because it is detailed. There are many similarly detailed paintings, and many far more detailed paintings. A high-resolution photograph of a sitting woman would be far far more detailed than any of those paintings. That's not what adds value.
There comes a point of diminishing returns where increasing levels of realism adds less to the experience. Artistic touches go a long way in defining a distinctive and memorable look for a game. Battlefield 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare ___, Medal of Honor, they are all working off the same modern-day source material and have only minor visual details to distinguish one from another. Kane & Lynch 2 : Dog Days, which had terrible reviews (deservingly so), and Splinter cell: Conviction are two other games also set in the modern day but have taken effort to add stylistic touches. KL2: DD for all of it's flaws implemented a distinctive "caught-on-camera" perspective throughout the game, as though the viewer was watching the protagonists by chasing them with a camcorder, shaking as they run, static distortion in the camera when explosions go off, and film bleeding effects for emphasis on the sleazy scraped-from-the gutter atmosphere they sought to achieve. They put thought into the game's visuals, not just time. Splintercell conviction projects objectives, text, and video of events happening elsewhere onto surfaces in the world that the protagonist moves through the environment, and mapped the timing and positioning of each of these to coincide with the player's likely orientation and pacing through that environment. Both games identified a theme to differentiate themselves, even if they only wanted a subtle touch, and made efforts to maintain thematic consistency throughout the game. This is very different than a simplistic dogged adherence to replicating what already exists in the real-world.
Stepping outside of the realm of modern-day game settings. Katamari Damacy or Okami has a tiny fraction of the budget spent on graphics that these other games do. But both have a far more memorable visual experience. One glance at a screenshot of these games and there's no mistaking what you're looking at. I'd rate the visuals of these 2 games above all others mentioned here, despite less technically complex.
Unless the deadline for action is so short that there is no time for feedback, not listening to others is almost always a sign of arrogance. I can't think of any other case where it wouldn't be a sign of arrogance, but I qualify that statement because I accept the possibility that I haven't thought of every case.
Unless someone is perfect, not only effective in their execution, but with maximal theoretical efficiency, then hearing the considerations of others allows them to reflect on the problem from additional perspectives. They can still choose to do what they had planned on doing all along; listening to others doesn't take away this option.
I already finished SR3 on console after paying full retail price. I'd bought the bundle for $10 just to play SR3 again on the PC using Steam (already have the other games on there that I plan on playing)
I like Steam. I want it on every game I own because it adds value. But what I really love is how far down they've pushed prices on older games. Before Steam, game publishers did not know how to make money on their existing games which they refused to discount, possibly because they couldn't even get old discounted games onto store shelves. As ridiculous as it sounds, before Steam, they just resigned all that money to used game trading. Steam was the impetus that changed the PC gaming market pricing. Some publishers are hold-outs that refuse to give good discounts, but most are playing along because they're raking in money on games that weren't generating revenue anyway.
Because many of the benefits of technology are plain to see, and continue to be heavily explored by many. Technology solves problems, sometimes problems we didn't even know we had at the time.
In fact, this is so widely known and obvious that the author took a moment to consider the other side, and explore negative impacts of technology, because there is a greater likelihood of finding interesting or insightful points to discuss on the road less traveled.
It's hardly a foolish thing to look at threats from technology. Perhaps the answer will be that the corrective response needed will be minimal, perhaps the threat is not significant at all. But to avoid even the idea of looking of negative impacts from technology would be foolish indeed.
To be fair, "social" used in this context (drawing distinctions between fiscal and social issues) typically refers to controversial social issues that hinge on moral arguments like gay marriage, abortion, assisted suicide, etc. In other words, subjects where the financial component is less important or not at all important.
Taking care of the homeless would fall under fiscal issues in this context since the problem isn't "Do we prefer homeless people to live or to die?" but rather, "Can we afford to pay to keep them alive?".
It would take pretty significant OS improvements to make a casual user like myself want to make another move from Windows 7. I have pretty simple usage on my home desktop, just a few windows at a time, surfing, browsing, and gaming. It's functionally sufficient for my needs., so a new OS would need to just execute better on what I can already do on Windows 7 from the user perspective. I'm not the kind of guy who gets excited about reformatted and setting up his computer again from square one. That is the opposite of what I want to be doing on my computer.
The only things I can imagine that would make me excited about changing to a new OS are fantastically expensive to achieve with nigh-insurmountable obstacles for implementation:
1) A complete and unified overhaul of interface design that would improve usability of the system and ease of organization, that remains intuitive yet fully capable. With all elements accessible by keyboard shortcut combinations, no mouse needed for any action. (Btw, Metro is not this.)
2) Set-it-and-forget-it unification of my desktop, laptop, and smartphone. I want to see anything I do on one device get automatically updated on the other device by the time I am using the other device. I like when programs offer synchronization. I want that to be the norm rather than the exception and it should be as invisible to the user as possible. I can only dream that this is where Microsoft intends to take this their software in the long-term. But I'm dead certain it's not going to include support for my phone.
3) A brand new feature I'd never even known that I wanted before it was introduced. I am not clever enough to imagine such things. I don't want to be a cynic but I really don't expect such things from Microsoft.
"If that's what the law states, then I'm glad the Texas AG is doing his job and upholding it since that the law that the democratically elected legislature passed. Additionally, why should there be unsupervised "observers" standing around a polling place and potentially intimidating voters? There are already plenty of limits to regulate campaigning in and around polling places, and I see no reason why unelected "observers" should be given more access to polling places that legitimately registered voters are."
No question that the Texas AG should do his job of upholding the laws of his state. But as for the rest of the post:
I just want to point out that if voter fraud has been occurring, then having "democratically elected" legislature passing laws to prevent outside observers is not a great argument for why there should be no observation.
With that kind of logic, if the Green party stuffed the ballots at all polling booths to get elected, and passed laws that no one but green party members are allowed to watch for voter fraud in their districts, then the fact that a "democratically elected" legislature passed those laws doesn't mean that "unelected" i.e neutral observers are not needed. It means that neutral observers are more necessary than ever.
He was way past the deep end well before that line.
IAPCFA (I am a public company financial auditor).
SOX isn't keeping you from knowing how much the products you're designing cost. Your management decided for their own reasons that you can't know your project costing information.
From an auditor's perspective, so long as you don't have access rights/authorization allowing you to commit fraud as a sole agent we don't care about you having information on the purchasing process of your project. View-only rights are rarely going to cause separation-of-duties issues.
Wild guess from when I used to work in capital equipment purchasing for a manufacturing company, I suspect that someone in purchasing may want to get volume deals with certain vendors to save overall costs and doesn't want individual project leads to handcuff that negotiation by arguing for another vendors who might quote lower on one deal but higher on others, as opposed to the one vendor is offering consistently good pricing. Basically purchasing wants to have final authority on the purchase without meddling.
Most people reading this will think:
"Well, I'm innocent and I've got nothing to hide, so why not just cooperate so they don't give me a hard time about it? I might even be able to help them catch the bad guys."
The advice I've heard in response to the above was this:
If you say, I went grocery shopping at 5pm, are you SURE it was 4pm? It wasn't 3:30pm or 4:30pm? Maybe they had asked your wife where you were that afternoon, and she said that you were picking up the kids from school at 5pm (probably because you went to pick up groceries AND pick up the kids).
Now, the investigator can say that they've got conflicting statements, and that it appears you may be lying about where you've been. They might have had a nothing to go on in this case before, and no excuse to give the judge to get a warrant...on anybody. But now they've interviewed someone and caught them in a lie. Time to get a warrrant and put your ass through the wringer.
Wait, dogs are statistically more likely to kill you than lack of healthcare? Dogs are even above cats?
What?
Marketing's reply: Through the use of social disruptive crowd-sourced adaptive technology that curates and refines user-generated data like never before. Obviously.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/29/expert-says-obamas-birth-certificate-legit/
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/birthcertificate.asp
"The doubters have latched onto the idea that Adobe Illustrator â" the premier program for computer graphic artists â" âoerevealsâ evidence of document manipulation in the Obama birth certificate. They note Illustrator reveals nine separate layers of the document, and claim itâ(TM)s âoeproofâ the file has been altered.
But thatâ(TM)s not so, says Jean-Claude Tremblay, a leading software trainer and Adobe-certified expert, who has years of experience working with and teaching Adobe Illustrator.
âoeYou should not be so suspicious about this,â Tremblay told FoxNews.com, dismissing the allegations.
He said the layers cited by doubters are evidence of the use of common, off-the-shelf scanning software â" not evidence of a forgery. âoeI have seen a lot of illustrator documents that come from photos and contain those kind of clippingsâ"and it looks exactly like this,â he said.
Tremblay explained that the scanner optical character recognition (OCR) software attempts to translate characters or words in a photograph into text. He said the layers cited by the doubters shows that software at work â" and nothing more.
âoeWhen you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesnâ(TM)t look like someone built it from scratch. If someone made a fake it wouldnâ(TM)t look like this,â he said.âoeSome scanning software is trying to separate the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers.â
Tremblay also said that during the scanning process, instances where the software was unable to separate text fully from background led to the creation of a separate layer within the document. This could be places where a signature runs over the line of background, or typed characters touch the internal border of the document.
âoeI know that you can scan a document from a scanner most of the time it will appear as one piece, but that doesnâ(TM)t mean that thereâ(TM)s no software thatâ(TM)s doing this kind of stuff,â he said, adding that itâ(TM)s really quite common.
âoeIâ(TM)d be more afraid itâ(TM)d be fake if it was one in piece. It would be harder to check if itâ(TM)s a good one if itâ(TM)s a fake,â Tremblay said.
"
Sadly, the wikipedia summary, which left the details of the story to the imagination was far more compelling than the actual story which was just really goddamned clunky.
It kept on repeating itself about how cold the equations are. Yes the point needs to be made, but only to the extent necessary to proceed with the story. Within the low margins of a short-story, the extra weight of this redundant writing brought the result crashing into mediocrity.
I wanted to care about the girl before she died, but the attempts to paint a human face on the tragedy fell flat for me, she just robotically waxed philosophical, rued her predicament slightly, and resigned to her death. No emotion in what should be an extremely emotional scene, for the purposes of contrasting against the coldness of those equations.
Real Birth Certificate shown here:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/birthcertificate.asp
To elaborate, I've considered the possibility that, in response to an event, the market's ability to "value" that event takes place as a result of a series of transactions from all participants. For example, a 10 cent stock having a negative press release, and thus a participant wants to sell for 5 cents, and someone else takes that deal, pushing the market price down to 5 cents, while another thinks 5 cents is too low and is willing to buy for 7 cents. pushing it back up, then the first participant changes his mind and buys for 6 cents... Eventually the market settles on a revised price by closing time which has accounted for the "value" of the negative implications of that press release. Thus flash transactions between seconds help find that revised price faster, and the ability of many people to determine appropriate pricing is a valuable thing since it moves capital towards deserving investments which have valuable productivity and society as a whole sees higher productivity and potentially the related benefits.
But if everyone puts in their guess at 00:00:00, then has to wait until 00:00:01, they will still have all of the relevant positions of market players (the only information that has changed) and can factor that into their 00:00:02 positions. Ultimately, all of those would-be flash transactors will just have to accept the 1-sec interval results as the average of information gained from all the thousands of millisecond transactions that would have taken place right? Basically, I don't think millisecond guesses are any faster than 1-second guesses at finding the true value of an investment. It just takes true analysis out of the picture and brings in the potential for flash-crashes from unsupervised automated trading.
But I'm just a layman here, I'd like someone with more insight or experience to help me make sense of this.
A common defense of flash-trading is that it provides market liquidity in that it provides counterparties to the desired transactions of the rest of the market.
But I've yet to see someone discuss how the added-value of millisecond liquidity is substantially superior to having exchanges post transactions in 1-sec. intervals to discourage millisecond arbitrage during which no new events have occured and no new market analysis has taken place, only speculation and playing the system against proper investors? Can someone illuminate me on this point?
I don't see how the post above can be modded +5 insightful, it is literally the opposite of insightful:
The grandparent post Pubstar is responding to:
"Insisting that you'll just follow your own code instead of the law works great as long as you have the "right" morals. Funny thing about that, everyone seems to think their morals are the right ones.
Maybe I think it's immoral for my daughter to have a kid out of wedlock, so I kill her and her boyfriend as an honor killing. After all, it's my morality, and how dare your laws condemn it? Maybe I think abortions are immoral, so I won't let my employees have them, and how dare the law say otherwise? Maybe I think it's moral to drive drunk so long as I'm super-duper careful. How dare you take away my right to drive? Maybe I think it's moral to lynch murderers, and whoops, turns out that guy was innocent. How dare you make me follow your "due process"? Maybe I see no problems with dumping toxic waste in your water supply. How dare you fine me for it?"
Grandparent poster is illustrating the mindset of the misguided as an example of how a society without law enforcement and only individual moral judgement can lead to chaos. The Grandparent does not actually believe in these things, but is pointing out a series of hypothetical stances that other people may use in their individual moral judgement to do terrible things.
Thus, the parent poster above, responding to the grandparent poster has completely and totally missed the point and is flat-out NOT insightful.
Quoting the parent poster: "At this point, I stopped reading. Actually, I should have stopped reading at the above example."
I think you should have kept reading, otherwise you might have realized your mistake.
Indeed, asian family, stayed in my parent's house paying low rent. My wife-to-be even moved in for a few months near the end until we had finally saved up enough to buy a house and my parents gifted my rent payments back as an additional down payment on the house.
Rent paid within the family stays inside the family. Rent paid outside the family is just gone. With money as tight as it is for young folks in this economy, keeping the family together can help save the family money.