The lipstick remark was blown way out of proportion by the McCain camp. No idea what's up with that. Obama was clearly using it in reference to McCain plans on the economy, Palin wasn't even part of the conversation. And heck, McCain used the exact same phrase in reference to Hillary Clinton's plans back in the primary season.
I'm no fan of the truth stretching on either side of the isle. But the McCain response to the lipstick remark was more of a "WTF?" moment then anything else.
Keep in mind though, this is white-bread Wisconsin. A few anecdotes for ya.
Over a decade ago I was in boot camp in San Diego. We had one guy in our platoon who didn't pull his own weight. He was lazy, lacked motivation, and was about as bright as a door stop. Field days in particular, he would sit on his foot locker while everyone else was working. One morning, another recruit, fed up with the guy's lack of effort called him a porch monkey and told him to get off his ass. Being from white-bread Wisconsin, I just assumed he was calling the guy lazy, I mean, we have people who sit around on their porches sucking up unemployment insurance and welfare in Wisconsin, and in the town I grew up in, where we had 4 black families out of a pop of 7k, the vast majority of the 'porch monkeys' were most definitely white. I was a little surprised to see the recruit who said it get raked over the coals for it by the DI's.
Just two weeks ago, some republican senator referred to the Obamas as "Uppity". That's another term, being from white-bread Wisconsin, I was familiar with. It's used to describe someone who is behaving not of their social/economic class. It's crass and rude, but I had never heard of it being referred to as a racially charged word. But apparently, it is. Who knew?
I've traveled around the world, and at every stop there are differences in language, social interactions, and social expectations. What is clearly a racial term to one person can be just another insult to a different person. So while I haven't read the TFA or websites, bear in mind that not everyone has the same experiences as you.
The same chip is used in both the on board laptop and PCI cards. Laptops have just been more likely to fail due to their nature of having crap for ventilation and low air volume.
I had an nVidia 8800GT card fail prematurely early this summer. I was pleased with its performance, other than the failure, so I picked up the newer version of the same card, from a different manufacturer. Unfortunately that was the middle of June:(
So odds are high that this card is going to die early too. And of course I don't have receipts for either card at this point, but if there's a chance at recouping some of my investment, I'd sign up.
I have a motorola razor, and although I'm not a huge fan of the address book functionality, the keys are an etced tin plate with a ruber ridge seperated them and the '5' key has a raise bump. The volume control is a large easy to find button on the side of the phone that can be pushed up or down to adjust the phone's volume. It can also take voice commands (voice button is also an easy to find button on the opposite side as the volume button). Battery life seems pretty solid on it. I toss it on the charger every couple of days and it holds up for hour long calls with out an issue.
Anyway, as a non-blind person, it's not my favorite phone. but if you don't have to look at the address book, it might be just fine:)
Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
Under the express direction of Hillary Clinton. The instructions were to not vet her if she wouldn't be chosen. Basically, she didn't want to have to deal with the hassle of vetting if she wasn't going to get the spot. It's her prerogative, if she didn't want to be vetted, it's not something to hold against Obama.
Just kidding, I don't believe in the 2cd Amendment.
Funny, I must have missed that part. I remember the part where he said 'we must find a way to protect your guns while we keep AK-47's off of the streets' and 'gun control means significantly different things from (some rural location) to (some metropolitan location)'. Both of those are approximate paraphrases, not exact quotes.
I'm not a gun nut, and I'm not an anti-gun nut. I grew up with riffles, a shot gun, and a pair of pistols in the house. I field qual'ed sharp shooter and expert (twice) in my military service, and if I still lived out in the country I would likely still have a number of weapons on my property.
That said, there is an excess of gun crime in the country. Making more guns illegal will not reduce the number of gun crimes in the US. But more strongly enforcing the existing gun laws will. Taking resources off of the "War on Drugs" and putting them into a "War on illegal guns" would not only likely have an impact on illegal gun distribution, but also on population issues in prisons. Look at the number of people we have to support in prison for drug charges compared to gun related charges. We're just pissing tax money down the drain because some idiot got busted selling off joints to consenting adults... bah.
Many consumer grade photo printers actually produce pictures with significantly shorter lifespans than their digitally stored copies. There was a great comparison a few months back of 6 different printers/papers/inks that varied greatly in their performance at only 6 months.
Now, if you really want to get long term with it, write the binary value of the image out on paper, or even punched in steal. 10101010101 etc... sure, it'll take a whole lot of time, money, and metal, but you could be sure that all that data is going to be around for a lot longer than 20 years;)
Although, if you're going that route, Microfiche would probably work just as well, along with being cheaper and a lot more compact. It would still leave the person who recovers it the tedious task of recreating the file digitally, but it would last, and you know some undergrad would write get a grant to figure it out and write a thesis on it.
Each edge is 55mm long, or 2.16". So each side is 4.67 square inches. All together it is 10.1 cubic inches, which would be the appropriate measurement for a cube.
I would tend to agree with you, but for one minor problem. Having worked with a number of research docs and having friends who have had similar experiences...
There are idiots with PhD's.
There are idiots doing research.
Most of the docs I know personally are pretty top notch researchers (although the concept of business isn't a strong suit). But many of them have made mistakes, and one smart person making a mistake in front of 10 idiots can result in some really dumb papers.
They could be on to something, but there is a good bit of detail missing from the article that would help to reinforce their opinion. If the lack of that detail is just due to the article author/editor, so bit it, but if that lack of detail is due to the research, then their work was a waste. All in all, the article is a waste. Maybe their published paper is better, I'll have to see if I can track it down.
They do have all the torque if you look at the PEAK figure, however the curve tends to be worse and they often don't rev as high. Therefore you usually get bugger all torque at lower revs, then when you hit the boost you get a huge surge of the twisty stuff, then you've hit the limiter. All within a narrow rev band. Cue lots of changing gear.
I drive a diesel ('06 VW Golf TDI) and I am pleased with it's performance. At 45mpg average, it out performs pretty much every other compact car on the market off the line.
As for the Torque curve, it's perfect for road use. I mean, honestly, how often does anyone see 5k RPMs when driving on the street? The 1.9l TDI pulls strong from 1800 to 4000 RPMs, which is well above what any normal driver is going to be doing and is just fine for spirited driving. Sure, I'd love to cruise around in a Lotus, but running it up to 6000 RPMs just to get off the line in a hurry at every single stop light really sucks.
As for the shifting, again, big deal. VW's new DSG tranny provides the convenience of an automatic with the fuel efficiency of a manual and up shift times that are faster than Lambo's auto shift manual (down shifts are slightly slower, but still far faster than any human).
Poor perception has been a big problem limiting diesel sales in the US. Thanks to the crap that GM produced back in the 70's. Emissions has been another limiting factor. Thanks to the EPA dropping bins 9 and 10 in 2007, even though there was no ULSD fuel on the market yet (needed for more clean burning Diesel technology), there was only 1 model of diesel sold in 2007. Fall of 2007 required all Diesel to be ULSD, so we've got a few more options on the road in 2008, and a bunch more product lines should be coming to market in 2009-2011.
That's actually my style as well. It just works out to be about every two years I have a piece of hardware fail, or my needs change, so I expect to do a replacement/minor upgrade every two years. And Most of the games my wife and I play together take pretty beefcake machines. And while my almost 2 year old machine can handle it fine, her machine (my 4 year old machine) is starting to lag behind.
So 2 years works out to be what I need, when I need it.
The Witcher was supposed to get patched some time soon to fix the load times, might want to check the web site and see if that patch is out yet. It also adds a whole lot of new models to the game, new voice acting, new music, and greatly improves the dialogs.
Year 1, I build a new PC. Although, I already have a nice monitor, a nice case, a large hard drive, an optical drive, and all the other fixings. So all a new PC is, is a CPU, motherboard, memory and graphics card. No need to replace everything else.
Year 2 I upgrade my existing PC. Add a bit of memory, get a larger hard drive, get the latest generation of graphic card. All for a budget well under $500.
Next year I give my now 'old' PC to my wife (mounting all the components into her perfectly fine case) and buy myself a new pile.
Sure, I'm not going bleeding edge with my stuff. But I just priced out a new PC for this fall. A Core 2 Duo @ 3ghz, 2Gigs of 1200 memory, new mobo, and an NVidia 8800GT. With tax and shipping it comes in right at $500, and will be more than enough machine to handle the next generation of games. Although I think I'll try to hold out just a hair longer for one last price cut on the Core 2 Duo chip. But the Wife's machine is going to need an upgrade for the next set of titles coming out.
In my high school, Preppies were usually middle to upper class family kids who's parents had gone to college and were expecting to get accepted to a college based on little more than their average grades, extra circular activities, and mediocrim of motivation. They were white, their parents had money, and they felt they were entitled to a college education. Not to say that they were hateful racists, but they had the expectations that white kids with >C averages all got to go to college. That feeling of entitlement definitely made for some tension between them and the less financially well off students, those who's parents had not graduated from college, and those of us who were heading for the military.
The students you described, we had as well, but they were usually labeled as geeks and brainy kids. Socially, they didn't have the tension with the preppies that others did, but they weren't exactly invited out for reindeer games.
There were exceptions to all social classes in high school, heck there were even a couple of jocks who were actually good guys. But by and large, the preppies of my experience were the ones most likely to consider themselves 'above' the others as part of their entitled position in society.
It's a great idea and all, but you and what market segment are going to buy hundreds of thousands of those chips to offset to R&D and production costs? The existing x86 architecture is universally supported. Many other better architectures have died on the side of the road because they couldn't get a market segment large enough to support their costs.
The vertical hard sail is actually a wing, just like an airplane wing, there is a high pressure side and low pressure side when air flows around it. I would imagine the most challenging part of the drive is jump form going slower than the wind, where the sail is presumably acting like a sail, to going faster than the wind, where the sail acts as a wing.
Bah, who am I kidding, they're just going to pull it behind a truck until they get it up to above wind speed. They're only looking for the big number at the peek, not how they got there.
The title of the story is wrong. The problem isn't Archiving history, the problem is Achieving history.
Shadowbane is one of the few games that really had an opportunity in this arena. I was in the beta for it long long ago, and if it hadn't had such a huge glut of bugs and horrendous launch, it really would have had a chance.
There can not be a history in WoW because nothing ever changes. Sure, there are occasionally 1-time events. The opening of AQ 40, or the Scourge invasion, but honestly, these 1 time events aren't a history, they are just a 1-time thing that you either got to see or didn't. For the vast majority of players, there is no imapact they can have on the world at all. They've killed hundreds of thousands of radiated gnomes, but Gnomerangan will always be inhabited by more of them. They've slaughtered Illidan over and over and over, yet he'll pop right back up again after the next weekly reset.
That's one of the big reasons why Warhammer online has a nice draw to it, there is a story that can be told, a battle between rivals where the map changes. An on going fight where every player is making a difference as to where the battle is being fought.
The down side though, is that it is a PvP game, which is a turn off to a lot of people. If it were possible to design a PvE MMO such that there was a progression over time in driving the borders of your empire forward (or retreating!) was possible, the effects could be huge. As players level they delve deeper into the un-civilized lands to find more challenging enemies, but as they slaughter more enemies, the enemies they face retreat, increasing the land mass of the empire, and pushing the battle lines out. Imagine riding through a farmers field on your steed and saying to a newer player, "When I was your age, this place was goblin country, we spent weeks clearing them out and months more patrolling before these farmers took hold here."
Slashdot Mirror
The lipstick remark was blown way out of proportion by the McCain camp. No idea what's up with that. Obama was clearly using it in reference to McCain plans on the economy, Palin wasn't even part of the conversation. And heck, McCain used the exact same phrase in reference to Hillary Clinton's plans back in the primary season.
I'm no fan of the truth stretching on either side of the isle. But the McCain response to the lipstick remark was more of a "WTF?" moment then anything else.
-Rick
Keep in mind though, this is white-bread Wisconsin. A few anecdotes for ya.
Over a decade ago I was in boot camp in San Diego. We had one guy in our platoon who didn't pull his own weight. He was lazy, lacked motivation, and was about as bright as a door stop. Field days in particular, he would sit on his foot locker while everyone else was working. One morning, another recruit, fed up with the guy's lack of effort called him a porch monkey and told him to get off his ass. Being from white-bread Wisconsin, I just assumed he was calling the guy lazy, I mean, we have people who sit around on their porches sucking up unemployment insurance and welfare in Wisconsin, and in the town I grew up in, where we had 4 black families out of a pop of 7k, the vast majority of the 'porch monkeys' were most definitely white. I was a little surprised to see the recruit who said it get raked over the coals for it by the DI's.
Just two weeks ago, some republican senator referred to the Obamas as "Uppity". That's another term, being from white-bread Wisconsin, I was familiar with. It's used to describe someone who is behaving not of their social/economic class. It's crass and rude, but I had never heard of it being referred to as a racially charged word. But apparently, it is. Who knew?
I've traveled around the world, and at every stop there are differences in language, social interactions, and social expectations. What is clearly a racial term to one person can be just another insult to a different person. So while I haven't read the TFA or websites, bear in mind that not everyone has the same experiences as you.
-Rick
Speaking of which...
What do you call a hockey Mom that preaches 'Abstinence only'? ...
A grandma!
-Rick
You sound like a really smart man. It's a good thing you know what sarcasm is!
-Rick
The tags right now are [+] bug, media, music, windows, haha (tagging beta)
Odd that Apple, iPod, and iTunes aren't tags for a story about a bug in their software?
Vista sucks for not encapsulating the exception, but it sure sounds like the bug is on Apple's side of the issue.
-Rick
The same chip is used in both the on board laptop and PCI cards. Laptops have just been more likely to fail due to their nature of having crap for ventilation and low air volume.
-Rick
Interesting, I think the 8600GT that died was an EVGA, I'll have to see if I still have it laying around.
-Rick
I had an nVidia 8800GT card fail prematurely early this summer. I was pleased with its performance, other than the failure, so I picked up the newer version of the same card, from a different manufacturer. Unfortunately that was the middle of June :(
So odds are high that this card is going to die early too. And of course I don't have receipts for either card at this point, but if there's a chance at recouping some of my investment, I'd sign up.
-Rick
I have a motorola razor, and although I'm not a huge fan of the address book functionality, the keys are an etced tin plate with a ruber ridge seperated them and the '5' key has a raise bump. The volume control is a large easy to find button on the side of the phone that can be pushed up or down to adjust the phone's volume. It can also take voice commands (voice button is also an easy to find button on the opposite side as the volume button). Battery life seems pretty solid on it. I toss it on the charger every couple of days and it holds up for hour long calls with out an issue.
Anyway, as a non-blind person, it's not my favorite phone. but if you don't have to look at the address book, it might be just fine :)
-Rick
$84 each, when purchased in lots of 1000.
You pay $84,000 and you get 1000 processors.
-Rick
Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
Under the express direction of Hillary Clinton. The instructions were to not vet her if she wouldn't be chosen. Basically, she didn't want to have to deal with the hassle of vetting if she wasn't going to get the spot. It's her prerogative, if she didn't want to be vetted, it's not something to hold against Obama.
Just kidding, I don't believe in the 2cd Amendment.
Funny, I must have missed that part. I remember the part where he said 'we must find a way to protect your guns while we keep AK-47's off of the streets' and 'gun control means significantly different things from (some rural location) to (some metropolitan location)'. Both of those are approximate paraphrases, not exact quotes.
I'm not a gun nut, and I'm not an anti-gun nut. I grew up with riffles, a shot gun, and a pair of pistols in the house. I field qual'ed sharp shooter and expert (twice) in my military service, and if I still lived out in the country I would likely still have a number of weapons on my property.
That said, there is an excess of gun crime in the country. Making more guns illegal will not reduce the number of gun crimes in the US. But more strongly enforcing the existing gun laws will. Taking resources off of the "War on Drugs" and putting them into a "War on illegal guns" would not only likely have an impact on illegal gun distribution, but also on population issues in prisons. Look at the number of people we have to support in prison for drug charges compared to gun related charges. We're just pissing tax money down the drain because some idiot got busted selling off joints to consenting adults... bah.
-Rick
Many consumer grade photo printers actually produce pictures with significantly shorter lifespans than their digitally stored copies. There was a great comparison a few months back of 6 different printers/papers/inks that varied greatly in their performance at only 6 months.
Now, if you really want to get long term with it, write the binary value of the image out on paper, or even punched in steal. 10101010101 etc... sure, it'll take a whole lot of time, money, and metal, but you could be sure that all that data is going to be around for a lot longer than 20 years ;)
Although, if you're going that route, Microfiche would probably work just as well, along with being cheaper and a lot more compact. It would still leave the person who recovers it the tedious task of recreating the file digitally, but it would last, and you know some undergrad would write get a grant to figure it out and write a thesis on it.
-Rick
Each edge is 55mm long, or 2.16". So each side is 4.67 square inches. All together it is 10.1 cubic inches, which would be the appropriate measurement for a cube.
-Rick
I would tend to agree with you, but for one minor problem. Having worked with a number of research docs and having friends who have had similar experiences...
There are idiots with PhD's.
There are idiots doing research.
Most of the docs I know personally are pretty top notch researchers (although the concept of business isn't a strong suit). But many of them have made mistakes, and one smart person making a mistake in front of 10 idiots can result in some really dumb papers.
They could be on to something, but there is a good bit of detail missing from the article that would help to reinforce their opinion. If the lack of that detail is just due to the article author/editor, so bit it, but if that lack of detail is due to the research, then their work was a waste. All in all, the article is a waste. Maybe their published paper is better, I'll have to see if I can track it down.
-Rick
They do have all the torque if you look at the PEAK figure, however the curve tends to be worse and they often don't rev as high. Therefore you usually get bugger all torque at lower revs, then when you hit the boost you get a huge surge of the twisty stuff, then you've hit the limiter. All within a narrow rev band. Cue lots of changing gear.
I drive a diesel ('06 VW Golf TDI) and I am pleased with it's performance. At 45mpg average, it out performs pretty much every other compact car on the market off the line.
As for the Torque curve, it's perfect for road use. I mean, honestly, how often does anyone see 5k RPMs when driving on the street? The 1.9l TDI pulls strong from 1800 to 4000 RPMs, which is well above what any normal driver is going to be doing and is just fine for spirited driving. Sure, I'd love to cruise around in a Lotus, but running it up to 6000 RPMs just to get off the line in a hurry at every single stop light really sucks.
As for the shifting, again, big deal. VW's new DSG tranny provides the convenience of an automatic with the fuel efficiency of a manual and up shift times that are faster than Lambo's auto shift manual (down shifts are slightly slower, but still far faster than any human).
Poor perception has been a big problem limiting diesel sales in the US. Thanks to the crap that GM produced back in the 70's. Emissions has been another limiting factor. Thanks to the EPA dropping bins 9 and 10 in 2007, even though there was no ULSD fuel on the market yet (needed for more clean burning Diesel technology), there was only 1 model of diesel sold in 2007. Fall of 2007 required all Diesel to be ULSD, so we've got a few more options on the road in 2008, and a bunch more product lines should be coming to market in 2009-2011.
-Rick
That's actually my style as well. It just works out to be about every two years I have a piece of hardware fail, or my needs change, so I expect to do a replacement/minor upgrade every two years. And Most of the games my wife and I play together take pretty beefcake machines. And while my almost 2 year old machine can handle it fine, her machine (my 4 year old machine) is starting to lag behind.
So 2 years works out to be what I need, when I need it.
-Rick
After 2 years of being in 'alpha' status with nothing spent on advertising...
hmmm. Imagine that.
-Rick
The Witcher was supposed to get patched some time soon to fix the load times, might want to check the web site and see if that patch is out yet. It also adds a whole lot of new models to the game, new voice acting, new music, and greatly improves the dialogs.
-Rick
More so Reuse!
I usually run a 2 year cycle.
Year 1, I build a new PC. Although, I already have a nice monitor, a nice case, a large hard drive, an optical drive, and all the other fixings. So all a new PC is, is a CPU, motherboard, memory and graphics card. No need to replace everything else.
Year 2 I upgrade my existing PC. Add a bit of memory, get a larger hard drive, get the latest generation of graphic card. All for a budget well under $500.
Next year I give my now 'old' PC to my wife (mounting all the components into her perfectly fine case) and buy myself a new pile.
Sure, I'm not going bleeding edge with my stuff. But I just priced out a new PC for this fall. A Core 2 Duo @ 3ghz, 2Gigs of 1200 memory, new mobo, and an NVidia 8800GT. With tax and shipping it comes in right at $500, and will be more than enough machine to handle the next generation of games. Although I think I'll try to hold out just a hair longer for one last price cut on the Core 2 Duo chip. But the Wife's machine is going to need an upgrade for the next set of titles coming out.
-Rick
In my high school, Preppies were usually middle to upper class family kids who's parents had gone to college and were expecting to get accepted to a college based on little more than their average grades, extra circular activities, and mediocrim of motivation. They were white, their parents had money, and they felt they were entitled to a college education. Not to say that they were hateful racists, but they had the expectations that white kids with >C averages all got to go to college. That feeling of entitlement definitely made for some tension between them and the less financially well off students, those who's parents had not graduated from college, and those of us who were heading for the military.
The students you described, we had as well, but they were usually labeled as geeks and brainy kids. Socially, they didn't have the tension with the preppies that others did, but they weren't exactly invited out for reindeer games.
There were exceptions to all social classes in high school, heck there were even a couple of jocks who were actually good guys. But by and large, the preppies of my experience were the ones most likely to consider themselves 'above' the others as part of their entitled position in society.
-Rick
It's a great idea and all, but you and what market segment are going to buy hundreds of thousands of those chips to offset to R&D and production costs? The existing x86 architecture is universally supported. Many other better architectures have died on the side of the road because they couldn't get a market segment large enough to support their costs.
-Rick
To go back to the 2005 /. layout.
The majority of the local population here voted for the current version.
Oddly though, just shy of 2/3rds of /. users didn't vote...
-Rick
The vertical hard sail is actually a wing, just like an airplane wing, there is a high pressure side and low pressure side when air flows around it. I would imagine the most challenging part of the drive is jump form going slower than the wind, where the sail is presumably acting like a sail, to going faster than the wind, where the sail acts as a wing.
Bah, who am I kidding, they're just going to pull it behind a truck until they get it up to above wind speed. They're only looking for the big number at the peek, not how they got there.
-Rick
The title of the story is wrong. The problem isn't Archiving history, the problem is Achieving history.
Shadowbane is one of the few games that really had an opportunity in this arena. I was in the beta for it long long ago, and if it hadn't had such a huge glut of bugs and horrendous launch, it really would have had a chance.
There can not be a history in WoW because nothing ever changes. Sure, there are occasionally 1-time events. The opening of AQ 40, or the Scourge invasion, but honestly, these 1 time events aren't a history, they are just a 1-time thing that you either got to see or didn't. For the vast majority of players, there is no imapact they can have on the world at all. They've killed hundreds of thousands of radiated gnomes, but Gnomerangan will always be inhabited by more of them. They've slaughtered Illidan over and over and over, yet he'll pop right back up again after the next weekly reset.
That's one of the big reasons why Warhammer online has a nice draw to it, there is a story that can be told, a battle between rivals where the map changes. An on going fight where every player is making a difference as to where the battle is being fought.
The down side though, is that it is a PvP game, which is a turn off to a lot of people. If it were possible to design a PvE MMO such that there was a progression over time in driving the borders of your empire forward (or retreating!) was possible, the effects could be huge. As players level they delve deeper into the un-civilized lands to find more challenging enemies, but as they slaughter more enemies, the enemies they face retreat, increasing the land mass of the empire, and pushing the battle lines out. Imagine riding through a farmers field on your steed and saying to a newer player, "When I was your age, this place was goblin country, we spent weeks clearing them out and months more patrolling before these farmers took hold here."
Just a thought.
-Rick
I'm a big fan of the super secrete diary of Legolas. http://www.subreality.com/chimericon/sd02-legolas.htm
-Rick