Latency is more important to me than bandwidth. That is my perspective as a gamer. My provider doubled bandwidth half a year ago and I did not even realize it until I called them to compare my current service cost to cable. (At which point they told me I could have my current service for half the cost--bastards!)
I agree with most that say the applications and content drive bandwidth and the reverse is true, because availability of disgusting quantities of bandwidth can allow people to do things they would not have otherwise even contemplated. A game today may weigh in at 4GB, whereas the games of yesterday weighed in at 64K! For the standard consumer, imagine and sound content has been somewhat static for a while because for quite a long time 1600x1200 has been the realistic cap on most images (this discounts special science and business sectors like GIS and NASA, but those things are more often printed, or at least they were when I was involved with them).
Video everywhere will get you up a bit higher on the bandwidth need, but how much more resolution do we need than 1600x1200? I like the games of today very well, but I enjoyed some of those older games more and they came on floppy disks--remember those?
I do not need more bandwidth for browsing the web or playing games or reading mail or receiving instant messages or using internet telephony. But market factors and what most people want will probably drive bigger and better as it always has. Will we have 1TB games in 10 years with screen resolutions of 3200x2400? Will we just have to have real-time video communication at that level? What about real-time high-definition multi-angle live pr0n performances streamed on-demand to my digital lair?
Oh, goody. It's more real than real! Too bad my eyes and ears cannot tell.
Technology increases our efficiency easily in the areas of necessity. Most other technologies are there just to keep away the boredom. "oooh, wow! (5 seconds later) Damn, I'm bored. (looks around) Oooh, wow!" When the techno-gadgets start coming, the unsettling feeling of emptiness starts to set in...must go find new gadet.
Yes, internet is becoming a public utility. It's like saying that the phone is an addictive device. I suppose it could be. So could anything whether it's a technology or not. Are you addicted to a juicer? A blender? Are you addicted to a hammer (maybe you're a carpenter and can't live without one). Not a very insightful article.
I read a lot of books. Guess that's a technology since it requires a printing press. Guess I'm an addict.
There is NOTHING wrong with George W. Bush using his religion to decide politics. He was upfront about it, he admits it if you ask him, and he did nothing untoward to make the voters -- most of which, btw, are still Christian -- think that he would draw a line between his religion and his job.
The fact that a man kills another man in plain sight and admits it does not exculpate him. Plenty of evil is done in an upfront fashion. There is nothing wrong with making executive orders a religious decision? Let's ask a founding father of our nation.
Thomas Jefferson:
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
Now follow me here. George Bush goes to the Middle East and says in an upfront way: "I started this war and I will finish this war because God told me to do it." George Bush is a Christian. For that matter, more generally, he is a member of a religious denomination that believes in God.
Now let me ask you, "Do you pay taxes voluntarily?" No, you do not. You are compelled to pay taxes. (Indeed this line of reasoning could be used in a court to try to establish that it would be unlawful to be forced to pay taxes because of the following conclusion that I will make.)
Your tax dollars paid for the Gulf War, and they are paying for the war in Iraq right now. You have been compelled to furnish contributions of money for a war that was started by George Bush because it is his opinion that God told him to do it. In other words, George Bush as the leader of the executive branch made a legal (law) declaration that establishes a legal endorsement of his particular religious beliefs.
First Ammendment of the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There it is. If your particular religion is not his--perhaps you do not believe in God at all, not only has he done something unconstitutional, but he has done something which one of the founding fathers of our nation explicitly state was tyrannical. He is forcing you to make a monetary endorsement of his religious beliefs.
I'm not cruising for a bruising here, so I will just say that this particular line of thought might give one pause to think that maybe something is a bit wrong. I can tell you for certain that if he put the words he said to those Middle Eastern leaders in the declaration of war, the judicial branch would be going nuts.
Python, Ruby, or Perl (PHP, etc.)
If you have only Java and C# as choices, it will likely make no difference. Whenever you hit the job market there will be a bunch of legacy stuff in both, though more in Java due to its age. If you are targetting a job with a smaller newer company, 5 years from now, I am guessing--just guessing, mind you--that the three languages listed above are going to be stronger players.
I dunno what the problem is. I eat vegetables, an occasional piece of fruit, a bit of chopped meat in a salad or soup once a week and then rice or sugar-free bread for carbohydrates. Sometimes a piece of cheese, good stuff like fresh mozzarella, or some soy stuff. I've been the same body fat ratio for my entire adult life (15 years). There's virtually no preservatives or crap in what I eat. I can get what I need from most any grocery store, and my last bloodwork came back from the doctor with everything optimal.
Probably helps that I've been practicing Tai Chi for years, but point is, it's not even difficult to find good food in mainstream areas. The problem is people are generally uneducated or completely undisciplined about placing their long-term health and well-being above the short-term return of "Oooooh, yummy num-nums!"
It's easier to blame lack of supply than it is to take responsibility for becoming educated about nutrition, eating correctly, and exercising regularly. Hence we have a ton of lardasses running around the U.S. On the other hand, there are a lot of beautiful fit healthy people, too. Which kind do you want to be? It's that simple.
The President needs the extension because it is the Patriot Act on which many of his executive orders stand. Specifically, that Act provides mechanisms to bypass the checks and balances upon which our nation is founded. Executive ordered wiretaps without judicial oversight in situations where the executive branch considers it "necessary" would be one of those bypasses since decisions are made and action is taken entirely within one branch of the government.
Then again, Bush is in the Middle East with our troops because, as he told them, "God told me to come here and set things right." That's right, he said he is setting political policy and sending our children to war because of a religious agenda. Also, quite amazingly, God talks directly to him. I imagine that conversation went a bit like this:
George. George I need you to send the son's and daughter's of your nation to die. I know I said all that Commandment business about not killing, but I'm in an Old Testament mood right now, George. You need to make things right over there. There's evil, George. You know just what to do. Stamp out evil wherever you find it, because George, I'm giving you a mandate, and my word supercedes all authority--including the authority of your nation's legislative and judicial branches. Do what must be done.
There's another basic tenet of our nation's Constituation falling by the wayside: separation of church and state.
...and we don't want to have to memorize combinations and press down on keys instantly to obtain the desired signal.
Musicians do, however, to great effect.
The whole "new keyboard" thing comes up again and again. That's because since the 1880's the "new keyboard" thing has died a horrible death again and again at the hands of the established Qwerty convention that is used by almost every person on the planet that types a language that is written with an alphabet.
The non-invasive low-key text approach of their adds was what was good about them. Now you'll have a mixed hodgepodge ("Oh, look! A bright blue square next to a bright red square!") of flashy "pay attention to me" shit. The exact type of shit that Google did not have in the past and that was so tolerable to those of us that prefer to go looking on a page for what we want rather to have it trying to rip our eyeballs out of our head.
Dumbest but most predictable change to get in bed with big money move for Google yet. This is the first time I've ever bashed Google. A big company is like a cancer. At a certain point it must grow to survive and that is when the beautiful things begin to die.
"Can we have animated images in our ads, please? Just really tiny ones...we'll pay you 20 billion dollars...please?"
Agreed. 90% of my PC time is spent on MMOGs. I would buy a console in a second and throw my gaming PC away if solid MMOGs existed on consoles. Final Fantasy is a solid game, but my interest is broader. Therefore, I spend about $2000 every 3 years to upgrade or build a PC. I earn enough to be able to do it, but I am not particularly happy that I have to spend $1500 more than a console would cost.
I have to think that both Microsoft and Sony are eyeing the subscriber revenue of the MMOG space. What I suspect is that Microsoft would very much like Blizzard to continue their console work on Ghost and their PC work on WoW and bring a Diablo or Starcraft MMOG to market on the next generation Xbox. Sony could enter the market from many directions, but I am skeptical that the Everquest line would be it.
Parent is right about the PC being on the leading edge of performance. The PC is still driving the market and it is a matter of cost and economy of scale. Console makers already take a significant loss on hardware that they expect to recoup on game sales, so it is bad business for them to come to the market with leading edge components that cost 80% more. In the PC market, there is a niche for people that will pay a huge premium for their 1600x1200 60FPS All-Widgets-On Fear experience, but the console market is still pretty much a single-unit-for-all-consumers one. You cannot market a single unit priced for the that niche.
What that means is that the MMOG people would have to be very incentivized to move to a console platform and work out input and performance issues. They would be agreeing to build a game that will not look as good as what they could do on a PC. But in a market that is often driven by glitz, it is not an easy sell to say, "We want you to build this game on the console even though it will not look as good as the competing titles in the PC market." Then again, for a company with MMOG and console experience like Blizzard, that may be more of an advantage than a disadvantage. It is probably something they are positioning themselves for, because I think we can safely say that if they bring their MMOG and console experience onto the field, a million customer MMOG touchdown is likely. Not just yet, but likely in a few years.
If you want a deep and objective assessment, I would recommend not asking the community what they want to see. It's what your PhD candidate friend sees (independent of the community that produces the product) that is so critically important to improving the product.
Sensationalist tripe that ignores myriad economic and technological factors. If they want a browser they can fork Mozilla. An acquisition like this is about braintrust.
A primary purpose of an operating system is device management. A browser does that in a very limited sense, and it is entirely unsuited to many other operating system tasks. Google would not try to buy an OS this way; they would extend Linux.
If IE cannot run the services the Google offers, what percentage of the associated revenue would be lost? Exactly.
Technically and economically stupid commentary. The supposed acquisition is about people.
I'm not so sure. The last time I walked by that "special" briefcase in my closet, I swear I heard it whispering "Detonate me..."
With all the terrorism in the world today I feel I better say that was a joke or the mysterious black sedan may show up at my door...which will be so much easier with TPM in place...
Being hauled away to a "special" place for making a joke on/. wouldn't be evil would it? Nah... That's why need TPM.
Privacy does equal freedom in a world where the powerful seek only the semblance of freedom for the masses. Privacy is the equalizing power that prevents the unethical from taking your freedom when they see fit. A person that knows your life intimately can destroy it by manipulating public opinion and preying on any weakness that is revealed by their knowledge of you.
People know this very well. Consider any situation where you spoke with a person and intentionally omitted a piece of information that came to mind during the discussion. You are protecting your freedom by giving the person less access to less of you and thus reducing their ability to know and control you.
The two words are different, but they are intimately related. Privacy is a freedom, but it is not the only freedom.
Plenty of people in the gaming community explored WoW for a while and are no longer playing. I am one of those people and most of the gamers I play with in other games have also explored what WoW had to offer. For various reasons, WoW was not where they wanted to spend time.
I typically play for content, so I stay long enough to cap a character out content-wise (if I like the game in the first place), and then I either hibernate until a significant content update or I move on. That's just me, though. Guild Wars is slightly different because it is more like an FPS for me, in that I periodically pop on for a few hours of guild combat just as I do with Fear.
As far as your question about why you should try something else. Are you at the Flowers, Diamond Ring, or Gold Band stage of your relationship with WoW? You decide when to stop playing the field, and it is probably best if you listen to your own feelings on the matter. I'd be more interested in why you are even considering a different game and what that says about your gaming goals. I think you might have a bit of a "grass is greener" going on there, but there is nothing wrong with that in the Flowers stage.
Why not just continue playing WoW, and then spend a portion of your time exploring DDO or whatever else interests you? In a month or less, you will probably have your own good reasons for preferring one or the other.
"Music sales aren't what they should be."
There is no should in the market. There is what is. It is just retarded when things do not meet some "smart guy's" expectation and then the guy claims the market is wrong and he is right about what should be happening. It's about as unscientific as you can get. At this point all there is is a correlation between iPod sales and reduced music sales, and an extremely weak correlation at that. There are a wealth of other economic factors involved in music sales and few of them are constant right now.
That's a far cry from cause, and some guy's expectation is a far cry from proof.
I was not aware that Frank Zane had a myostatin abnormality, but looking at it from the evolutionary perspective, if my concern is an accurate one, then corresponding genes for cardiovascular and endocrine support would have to exist in those with myostatin errors because that combination of supplementary genes is the only thing that would prevent early death due to system failure.
In other words, I think Frank Zane is a very different situation than selecting random individuals from the population that "want to get big" and giving them an effective myostatin deficiency without the corresponding evolutionary path that Frank Zane had to also receive the genetic changes necessary to balance it.
It is all hypothetical anyway. Can just wait for it to hit the market and see if people die. Of course, I am being cavalier. What I mean is that our superb FDA will very thoroughly test the drug in limited clinical doses for extended periods of time and they will absolutely not compromise in any way whatsoever for financial gain that might be had by way of the amazingly lucrative sports industry.
To some, the English language consists of a vocabulary and a grammar, and the English platform is the body of literature that has been written with the language.
But the English language is itself defined by the conventions and precedents established in the literature that is created with it and accepted by concensus as important. Some people will say that since the vocabulary and grammar is ultimately determined by the body of literature, the body of literature is the real language and the vocabulary and grammar are an abbreviated form used for reference rather than definition.
Liberal arts types typically appreciate this perspective, but it is not well received by a certain category of technical people. I think this is because liberal arts types typically side with the human brain which is very adaptable to changing grammar and vocabulary, whereas the certain category of technical people side with version X.YZ of compiler ABC which is not very adaptable.
Fortunately, technical people usually come around as they get older,:-). Unfortunately, I am not old and I have a graduate degree in a technical field, so I'm just praying for old age so I can understand what I just said. I think it was something like, "There's more than one right way to look at something."
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most that say the applications and content drive bandwidth and the reverse is true, because availability of disgusting quantities of bandwidth can allow people to do things they would not have otherwise even contemplated. A game today may weigh in at 4GB, whereas the games of yesterday weighed in at 64K! For the standard consumer, imagine and sound content has been somewhat static for a while because for quite a long time 1600x1200 has been the realistic cap on most images (this discounts special science and business sectors like GIS and NASA, but those things are more often printed, or at least they were when I was involved with them).
Video everywhere will get you up a bit higher on the bandwidth need, but how much more resolution do we need than 1600x1200? I like the games of today very well, but I enjoyed some of those older games more and they came on floppy disks--remember those?
I do not need more bandwidth for browsing the web or playing games or reading mail or receiving instant messages or using internet telephony. But market factors and what most people want will probably drive bigger and better as it always has. Will we have 1TB games in 10 years with screen resolutions of 3200x2400? Will we just have to have real-time video communication at that level? What about real-time high-definition multi-angle live pr0n performances streamed on-demand to my digital lair?
Oh, goody. It's more real than real! Too bad my eyes and ears cannot tell.
Technology increases our efficiency easily in the areas of necessity. Most other technologies are there just to keep away the boredom. "oooh, wow! (5 seconds later) Damn, I'm bored. (looks around) Oooh, wow!" When the techno-gadgets start coming, the unsettling feeling of emptiness starts to set in...must go find new gadet.
I read a lot of books. Guess that's a technology since it requires a printing press. Guess I'm an addict.
No, that's lack of skill.
Thomas Jefferson:
Now follow me here. George Bush goes to the Middle East and says in an upfront way: "I started this war and I will finish this war because God told me to do it." George Bush is a Christian. For that matter, more generally, he is a member of a religious denomination that believes in God.Now let me ask you, "Do you pay taxes voluntarily?" No, you do not. You are compelled to pay taxes. (Indeed this line of reasoning could be used in a court to try to establish that it would be unlawful to be forced to pay taxes because of the following conclusion that I will make.)
Your tax dollars paid for the Gulf War, and they are paying for the war in Iraq right now. You have been compelled to furnish contributions of money for a war that was started by George Bush because it is his opinion that God told him to do it. In other words, George Bush as the leader of the executive branch made a legal (law) declaration that establishes a legal endorsement of his particular religious beliefs.
First Ammendment of the Constitution:
There it is. If your particular religion is not his--perhaps you do not believe in God at all, not only has he done something unconstitutional, but he has done something which one of the founding fathers of our nation explicitly state was tyrannical. He is forcing you to make a monetary endorsement of his religious beliefs.I'm not cruising for a bruising here, so I will just say that this particular line of thought might give one pause to think that maybe something is a bit wrong. I can tell you for certain that if he put the words he said to those Middle Eastern leaders in the declaration of war, the judicial branch would be going nuts.
Python, Ruby, or Perl (PHP, etc.) If you have only Java and C# as choices, it will likely make no difference. Whenever you hit the job market there will be a bunch of legacy stuff in both, though more in Java due to its age. If you are targetting a job with a smaller newer company, 5 years from now, I am guessing--just guessing, mind you--that the three languages listed above are going to be stronger players.
I was referring, with some degree of sarcasm, to the "Church of George".
Probably helps that I've been practicing Tai Chi for years, but point is, it's not even difficult to find good food in mainstream areas. The problem is people are generally uneducated or completely undisciplined about placing their long-term health and well-being above the short-term return of "Oooooh, yummy num-nums!"
It's easier to blame lack of supply than it is to take responsibility for becoming educated about nutrition, eating correctly, and exercising regularly. Hence we have a ton of lardasses running around the U.S. On the other hand, there are a lot of beautiful fit healthy people, too. Which kind do you want to be? It's that simple.
Then again, Bush is in the Middle East with our troops because, as he told them, "God told me to come here and set things right." That's right, he said he is setting political policy and sending our children to war because of a religious agenda. Also, quite amazingly, God talks directly to him. I imagine that conversation went a bit like this:
There's another basic tenet of our nation's Constituation falling by the wayside: separation of church and state.
The whole "new keyboard" thing comes up again and again. That's because since the 1880's the "new keyboard" thing has died a horrible death again and again at the hands of the established Qwerty convention that is used by almost every person on the planet that types a language that is written with an alphabet.
Dumbest but most predictable change to get in bed with big money move for Google yet. This is the first time I've ever bashed Google. A big company is like a cancer. At a certain point it must grow to survive and that is when the beautiful things begin to die.
"Can we have animated images in our ads, please? Just really tiny ones...we'll pay you 20 billion dollars...please?"
Will Google be any different?
I have to think that both Microsoft and Sony are eyeing the subscriber revenue of the MMOG space. What I suspect is that Microsoft would very much like Blizzard to continue their console work on Ghost and their PC work on WoW and bring a Diablo or Starcraft MMOG to market on the next generation Xbox. Sony could enter the market from many directions, but I am skeptical that the Everquest line would be it.
Parent is right about the PC being on the leading edge of performance. The PC is still driving the market and it is a matter of cost and economy of scale. Console makers already take a significant loss on hardware that they expect to recoup on game sales, so it is bad business for them to come to the market with leading edge components that cost 80% more. In the PC market, there is a niche for people that will pay a huge premium for their 1600x1200 60FPS All-Widgets-On Fear experience, but the console market is still pretty much a single-unit-for-all-consumers one. You cannot market a single unit priced for the that niche.
What that means is that the MMOG people would have to be very incentivized to move to a console platform and work out input and performance issues. They would be agreeing to build a game that will not look as good as what they could do on a PC. But in a market that is often driven by glitz, it is not an easy sell to say, "We want you to build this game on the console even though it will not look as good as the competing titles in the PC market." Then again, for a company with MMOG and console experience like Blizzard, that may be more of an advantage than a disadvantage. It is probably something they are positioning themselves for, because I think we can safely say that if they bring their MMOG and console experience onto the field, a million customer MMOG touchdown is likely. Not just yet, but likely in a few years.
End of ramble.
I do so dislike crashes that cause kernel corruption.
We'll figure out how to put people back in space just as soon as China does it. Coincidence? Hardly.
Programming gets old faster than we do.
If you want a deep and objective assessment, I would recommend not asking the community what they want to see. It's what your PhD candidate friend sees (independent of the community that produces the product) that is so critically important to improving the product.
A primary purpose of an operating system is device management. A browser does that in a very limited sense, and it is entirely unsuited to many other operating system tasks. Google would not try to buy an OS this way; they would extend Linux.
If IE cannot run the services the Google offers, what percentage of the associated revenue would be lost? Exactly.
Technically and economically stupid commentary. The supposed acquisition is about people.
With all the terrorism in the world today I feel I better say that was a joke or the mysterious black sedan may show up at my door...which will be so much easier with TPM in place...
Being hauled away to a "special" place for making a joke on /. wouldn't be evil would it? Nah... That's why need TPM.
People know this very well. Consider any situation where you spoke with a person and intentionally omitted a piece of information that came to mind during the discussion. You are protecting your freedom by giving the person less access to less of you and thus reducing their ability to know and control you.
The two words are different, but they are intimately related. Privacy is a freedom, but it is not the only freedom.
If the paragraph didn't, the wife surely will. :-)
Some analogies should only go so far! I can see it now: narwhalling will soon be all the rage in San Francisco and on gay pr0n sites. :-)
I typically play for content, so I stay long enough to cap a character out content-wise (if I like the game in the first place), and then I either hibernate until a significant content update or I move on. That's just me, though. Guild Wars is slightly different because it is more like an FPS for me, in that I periodically pop on for a few hours of guild combat just as I do with Fear.
As far as your question about why you should try something else. Are you at the Flowers, Diamond Ring, or Gold Band stage of your relationship with WoW? You decide when to stop playing the field, and it is probably best if you listen to your own feelings on the matter. I'd be more interested in why you are even considering a different game and what that says about your gaming goals. I think you might have a bit of a "grass is greener" going on there, but there is nothing wrong with that in the Flowers stage.
Why not just continue playing WoW, and then spend a portion of your time exploring DDO or whatever else interests you? In a month or less, you will probably have your own good reasons for preferring one or the other.
That's a far cry from cause, and some guy's expectation is a far cry from proof.
In other words, I think Frank Zane is a very different situation than selecting random individuals from the population that "want to get big" and giving them an effective myostatin deficiency without the corresponding evolutionary path that Frank Zane had to also receive the genetic changes necessary to balance it.
It is all hypothetical anyway. Can just wait for it to hit the market and see if people die. Of course, I am being cavalier. What I mean is that our superb FDA will very thoroughly test the drug in limited clinical doses for extended periods of time and they will absolutely not compromise in any way whatsoever for financial gain that might be had by way of the amazingly lucrative sports industry.
No, sir. Nothing to worry about there.
But the English language is itself defined by the conventions and precedents established in the literature that is created with it and accepted by concensus as important. Some people will say that since the vocabulary and grammar is ultimately determined by the body of literature, the body of literature is the real language and the vocabulary and grammar are an abbreviated form used for reference rather than definition.
Liberal arts types typically appreciate this perspective, but it is not well received by a certain category of technical people. I think this is because liberal arts types typically side with the human brain which is very adaptable to changing grammar and vocabulary, whereas the certain category of technical people side with version X.YZ of compiler ABC which is not very adaptable.
Fortunately, technical people usually come around as they get older, :-). Unfortunately, I am not old and I have a graduate degree in a technical field, so I'm just praying for old age so I can understand what I just said. I think it was something like, "There's more than one right way to look at something."