I submitted this a couple days ago but it looks like they went with a shorter summary submitted today. Here's my summary:
"According to the print edition of Game Informer, 5,000 surveyed people said the XBox 360 fails over half the time. The same survey found failure rates of 10.6% for Sony's PS3 and 6.8% on Nintendo's Wii. Microsoft trounced the competition with over five times the next highest failure rate. The article also notes that the survey revealed a skew to the numbers as the Xbox's were the most used consoles: 'Results said 40.3 percent of 360 owners use the console three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 owners. Meanwhile, the plurality of Wii owners (41.4 percent) play their consoles less than an hour a day.' Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox (due to failures) and the survey found they had rather shoddy customer service."
So it should be noted that a potential skew is that from the surveyed five thousand, Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users. While this certainly wouldn't explain the skewed percentages, it indicates the consoles are in higher use causing potentially more wear and tear.
But yeah, bad indicator for Microsoft and this new information actually caused me to wait to buy an Xbox 360 at the new reduced price. I think the 3.8% figure of repeat business is a good indicator that a lot of people agree.
Off-topic musing: It's interesting this Game Informer dead tree article has such virtual world implications yet the original source chose for it to be only released in their print edition and not on their site. Has GI always done this? An indication of things to come or a death knell for its readership?
I see you didn't defend the Storm Trooper armor...
Oh, well, I'm not stupid. Tons of things in the SW universe make absolutely no sense. The storm trooper uniforms are stupid, kind of remind me of French Legionnaire uniforms that always made me laugh when I saw someone dressed like that in the desert. The red flags on your shoulders make you stick out like a sore thumb regardless of where you are.
So there's something that actually existed much like the storm trooper armor. Somethings are meant to intimidate rather than camouflage, perhaps the storm trooper armor is there to let you know that you don't stand a chance? To be distinctive? It's a stretch but it's stupid. Looked really badass when I was a kid though.
A lot of these arguments apply to many sci-fi/fantasy works, not just SW so why waste your time on the critical analysis. Are you bettering society? Congratulations, you just tore apart something that was made over three decades ago.
He should have stuck to the physical aspects of the universe like noise in space and being able to see laser shots from the side... oh, that's right, we've been over this before on Slashdot, with our friends, in popular mechanics, everywhere. My grandfather commented on the "wings" of ships that seemed to spend all their time in space.
R2-D2 Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."
I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.
C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.
Again, you're overlooking his primary function. C-3PO is a protocol droid designed to serve humans, and boasts that he is fluent "in over six million forms of communication." So he's got arthritis, well, you didn't build him to be flexible or fight. You built him to look pretty and translate. Everything else is bells and whistles. I think he was meant to stand in a corner for some rich merchant or politician and translate any language imaginable. Are you going to tell me that my car is flawed because I couldn't afford a $20 toaster to put in the dash?
Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.
Uh, the second Death Star was never completed, you idiot. The rebels learned about it and attacked it before it had everything completed so anything like "four paths to the central core" or "exposed shafts" could well have been necessary during its construction. Haven't you seen Clerks or watched Robot Chicken's parody of Palpatine trying to talk to the foreman?
But Luke's X-34 speeder on Tatooine? The Yugo of speeders, man. One hard stop, and out you go.
He's a farmer. You should have seen the "vehicles" and ATVs I drove while working on farms. One was a modified bus with huge water tanks on the back and an upside down bucket for a seat. They make a Yugo look like a dream car. Are you going to complain about the blast marks and carbon scoring adorning the rag tag rebel ships next?
So easy to rip apart. And you know, he doesn't offer anything constructive. Like the asteroid worm. He would have enjoyed it more if space in the Star Wars galaxy was like our space? Dead, uninhabited and void? George Lucas isn't a god but he sure thought up some neat ideas for a universe that John Scalzi will never come close to.
Anna Liu, Associate Professor in services engineering at the UNSW School of Computer Science told iTnews she was excited by Cloud Computing as it could potentially enable organisations to "outsource a certain amount of their risks and costs and tap into new economies of scale."
Sounds more like she has a degree in buzzword engineering.
From her homepage at UNSW, it seems to be the creation and study of services but her focus seems to be on cloud computing with the "services" being concentrated on these subjects. While a lot of her about page seems to be buzzwords and journal writing, I really wish they would release their "interoperable service software" and would be interested in seeing their final report for more specific metrics. Her blog doesn't say much about it. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt, she says in the article, "We saw a lot of hype and confusion, and decided to lead a team of researchers and actually get our hands dirty with this stuff." She also said:
Using Google AppEngine, none of your data processing tasks can last any longer than thirty seconds, or it throws an exception back at you. This is very consistent with the Google business model - they want to enable simple web applications to thrive on the Internet. AppEngine is there to enable the rapid development of simple web applications that don't include intense compute at the back end. - Anna Liu
Which I found interesting. Again, kind of hard to judge the merits behind this research without even a brief description of what the services were... a singular value decomposition service? A return huge data sets from a database table service? A prime factorization service? A file intensive I/O service? I'm also curious as to what hoops one has to jump through to get those interoperable across all three systems... after all Microsoft is just.NET, right? Is this rewriting something 3 times or making shared objects or what?
Again, thanks for setting me straight on how superior your tastes in gaming are compared to us uneducated, unwashed masses.
I don't know why I bother with telling you what you're missing. If you have ever mainlined a PC FPS vs a console FPS, you'd know what I'm talking about. Go ahead and try it on your jugular, under your eyes, between your toes, nothing works for console FPS. Hell, you can't even get a high off a simple freebasing. Now, PC FPS, you catch a whiff of that on your friend and you're tripping balls for three, maybe four hours. You're also a much more rabid asshole as you're not physically in the same room as your opponent. So when you do frag him, you respond all hardcore with "n00bfag gtfo my server nao, btch" unlike the casual console response of "nice shot, man!"
PC FPS? Hell yeah, I shower in that shit.
As for education, it's the only way to go. Uneducation is for casual gamers. If you had a clue, you'd know that you need to spend four or five hours a day reading forums and studying FAQs/guides of the game before you even set foot on the servers. If you do, we don't have time for you climbing the learning curve.
Don't even get me started on washed vs unwashed masses.
Lookit, you want to call Bush a Nazi Warmonger or Obama an Incompetent Puppet, or speak any kind of Truth to Power, I will be shoulder to shoulder with you on the ramparts in defense of your Freedom to Speak, you're a Patriot. You want to call a lady a "skanky ho," try to damage her reputation, and then hide like a coward, you are a Cad.
The Internet has changed many things, but it has not changed everything.
Keep in mind that Bush and Obama are public figures and so therefore are valid targets. So if this model is not
* a public figure, either a public official or any other person pervasively involved in public affairs, or
* a limited purpose public figure, meaning those who have "thrust themselves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved." A "particularized determination" is required to decide whether a person is a limited purpose public figure, which can be variously interpreted.
The blogger may have some issues. People's definitions of "skanky ho" vary and anyone presenting their body as most models do may seem like a "skanky ho" to a minor percentage of the population. It should be interesting to watch this case as "whoring" and "willingness to engage in oral sex" are probably pretty hard to identify when the blogger is only offering up photos.
The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.
Which means that they are seeing something.
UFOs have been observed since ancient times. The apostle John saw one. The Egyptians inscribed a UFO in their hieroglyphics. And the ancient Hebrews recorded the interactions of aliens and humans as the Nephilim.
I think there's more than the authorities are willing to divulge. It's interesting to see leaks like the quote above confirm what some of us have believed for a long time.
[citations desperately needed]
Ahhh, the human imagination and psyche. Full of so much wonderful things as the ability to conjure up grand imaginations and interactions... as well as post a third hand account of several unrelated occurrences thousands of years ago in one paragraph.
I wish the article had gone back further to War of the Worlds time or the old classic 50s black and white abduction movies. Note the first abduction didn't happen until it had already been in pulps and film. And, from my own personal savior, Carl Sagan:
In The Demon-Haunted World astronomer Carl Sagan points out that the alien abduction experience is remarkably similar to tales of demon abduction common throughout history. "...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?" (Sagan 1996 124)
It's fun stuff to read about and write tall tales about... and nothing more.
Uh, you might have a case with the original iPhone but you certainly do not have a case with iPods. They surpassed Sony's MP3 player in 2005 and there's no shortage of information saying they're very popular in Japan.
Get over it. Jeez, it's like a religion with you guys.
You have to own all models of the iPhone in order to be eligible to be completely clear so that your OT (operating telephone) levels are uninhibited. Are you a suppressive person? Oh no, I've been in contact with you! Great Woz! Now Jobs won't let me get to the last OT level no matter how much I spend on his products!
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated. That's why Japanese cars are boring but last forever.
That's wrong. If you had spoken to a British or American consumer at the time of Japanese automotive boom, you would have found that they are just as quality motivated as the American consumer. And had you spoken to American or British or Italian automotive makers, you would have found some of them wanted quality but were just slightly misinformed as to how they should attain it.
As someone who's taken a course on this, we got the Japanese invention known as The House of Quality pounded into our heads. It's basically a far superior way to "define relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities." The Japanese invented this, I don't know the exact origins (wish I did) but instead of it ended up as some weird business process patent it ended up being used by everyone over there. As a result, their cars didn't leak oil (like the British motorcycles) and they didn't slowly reject every screw that was holding them together. I'm sure the Japanese had many more tools at analyzing the engineering aspects of cars but the fact of the matter is that their engineering and quality control practices just exceeded anything anyone else had (if anyone else had quality control at the time).
Americans look for cool things, which is why American cars are flashy and muscular but also break down constantly and have terribly assembled trim.
This seriously got moderated up? Have you ever been to Tokyo? Have you seen how flashy that city is? Have you ever seen Japanimation, Japanese commercials or game shows? Flashy is all I can think of to describe that.
Your cultural stereotypes humor me. But I think you're suffering from some serious misinformation and anecdotes to which I could provide counter-anecdotes all day long. But both stances are merely an exercise in futility.
They knew, unlike the dopes who lick Steve Jobs' nutsack here in the US, that it was crap the moment they laid hands on it.
Well, if they laid hands on it, they've already purchased it and that's a win for Apple. Or are you saying that the (virtually) same reviews each culture read influenced them differently? The Japanese have more options than we do and they had things that were better than the original iPhones. Those weren't really marketed in America. The iPhone wasn't crap compared to what 90% of Americans were already using. That's the important point, not that American consumers are any stupider or smarter than Japanese consumers.
The iPhone 3GS 32GB is currently the best selling phone in Japan (the 16GB version came in at number nine).
Is that indicative of storage being that big of a factor for phones? Or that the locally made devices compare to 16GB but not 32GB?
As a non-iPhone user, I must admit the iPhone is a touch bulky for me to use as a music device while I work out. Love my 2GB shuffle though. I guess I could see this with movies/videos on the iPhone but is there any reason I'm not getting that one would enjoy 32GB of storage? Maybe it's the stereotype that Asians take a lot more pictures than Americans? If these numbers are accurate, color me shocked that 32GB is #1 and 16GB is #9. I'm not saying that 16GB ought to be enough for anyone but you have to be using your iPhone as something else full time to utilize that. Are the applications at the app store really taking up that much space on your phone?
No competent tech startup would pay $18 million for recovery.org
Well, it was recovery.gov not org and really the comments the first time we discussed it noted worse problems. I mean, if they have a full time staff for the site and lots of servers and a lot of research going on, $18 million is about on par with what the government drops on crap like that. Fine. The fact that it was bidless and the company that got it gives tens of thousands of dollars to house majority leader Steny Hoyer (D) is what we really should be upset about. I thought the days of Haliburten were over...
Looking at bills from 17 cities, it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive. From a global standpoint, both Canada and Brazil tested rather high (85% and 80%, respectively), But China and Japan were well behind the curve at 20% and 12%. The researchers hope that studies such as these will be of help to law enforcement agencies that are attempting to understand the growth and flow of drug use in communities.
Nope, sorry, has nothing to do with growth and flow. Merely that China and Japan are better at properly labeling and storing their valuable narcotics and opiates. Given the cost of the substance, you would think the American & Canadian coke heads would be better at keeping it separate from other things. But when you need to carry only coke and money with you... the cost of that second briefcase probably outweighs the amount of coke you lose just shoving money and coke into one briefcase. Being able to do it in a frenzied haphazard manner isn't just how it's done in Martin Scorsese films, it's a necessary skill of coke users and traffickers. I wonder what "essence of G-string" levels respective countries have on their smallest denominational bills?
This film should vault Neill Blomkamp into sci-fi stardom, on par with George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame).
Are you saying that this movie is as good/groundbreaking as Star Wars orThe Matrix? I am somewhat dubious.
Don't get me wrong, it looks a whole lot better than most sci-fi movies. I especially like how the first commercials I saw for it were public service announcements about District 9. Then commercials with non-human sympathizers being arrested. Then later you see a commercial with "glick gluck mcglorlock" (translation: "We just want to go home.") and you kinda realize that there's going to be more depth to the story than Starship Troopers (the movie, not the book). Looks interesting, I'll definitely Netflix it.
It might be the best sci-fi movie of '09 but you've still got
Gamer
The Fourth Kind
The Time Traveler's Wife
Pandorum
Splice
The Surrogates
2012
9
AstroBoy
The Box
The Sky Crawlers
Radio Free Albemuth
Hunter Prey
Deadland
While a lot don't have release dates yet and could be pushed back and most will probably suck, that's a lot of competition to dismiss at this point. And lastly, I have great hope for Franklyn (to be released here in the states).
From a construction page it looks to rely on XHTML, CSS and XML which, like both the open doc formats, makes complete sense. Not only is it trivial for me to build a document but with a very simple XSLT I can transform all of my epub files to very readable web pages. What boggles my mind is how long XML has been out there and yet we have to wait until now for big companies like Sony to adopt this over something like Amazon's AZW file format. The epub format looks simple and elegant and logical... I'm honestly a little bit scared that I'm missing something since it's root kit Sony using it.
The beginning of the end for people who live in automated houses. As E searches the internet for examples of how to outdo itself in the field of evil, disaster will strike the world when it gains access to netflix's movie repository. I'll wake up chained to my radiator with a dull hacksaw in front of me and a tape recording. I'll here my wife screaming as she's sodomized Alexander DeLarge style by our refrigerator. And our son? Our son is being forced to watch "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" on all four walls of his room (probably the most horrific fate of the three). All because you had to make the most evil program out there... which, in turn, created a more evil program (creating evil programs being one of the evilest things it could do and it being more evil than you means it should do that). Thanks for the 'research' guys.
Narrator: You're on a scenic route through a state recreational area known as the human mind. You ask a passerby for directions, only to find he has no face... or something. Suddenly up ahead there's a door in the road. You swerve, narrowly avoiding... The Scary Door!
Scientist: *a mad scientist is seen mixing chemicals* I have combined the DNA of the world's most evil animals to make the most evil creature of them all. *a pod opens flowing with clouds of steam*
I'm not a biologist and I don't know what sleep durations are for other mammals but the scientist in me wonders why we settled out at eight hours a day if we are more vulnerable with our eyes closed. You would think it performs pretty important functions (or did perform) for the 5 percent of short sleepers not to collect more food and proliferate more efficiently and more frequently than the other 95% 8 hour sleepers. Perhaps in times of famine or disease this 5% are more susceptible and since we no longer have them they are freed from these shackles? Perhaps (since the two subjects noted were ages 40 and 70) this only becomes apparent with the onset of age that we never made it to back in the day? Any other ideas?
I think the thinking is that it allows people to get refunds if they made a typo during the domain registration process.
So what you're telling me is that the process for making an error in your form is to delete everything and start over? You're telling me that they do this instead of having you submit a request to have it changed? Am I the only one that thinks it would be easier to make a form for requesting changes to your account?
People are human, people err. But it benefits everyone involved if you just fix the mistake when you notice it. The registrar retains your business and you get the domain you wanted. No big deal. But it stops scammers from allocating 300 domains and keeping 3 of them to squat on or whatever they want to do. They should be stuck with 300 domains they have to pay for.
So the semi-legitimate use you can dig up is that companies want to buy up bundles of DNs and drop ads there to see if type-in traffic or google searches can make them enough bank to warrant keeping it up. Personally, sounds like a get rich quick scheme providing nothing -- maybe even negative confusion -- to society and should therefore be discouraged.
Next you got domain kiting. Where a jerk "tastes" under one registrar and then cancels five days later and "tastes" under another an then cancels five days later and then "tastes" under yet another registrar... do we see where this is going? Again, free DN registration, stupid that this should even have a term even stupider that it works for people with a lot of patience aiming to save $12/year.
And what's left? Domain Name Front Running like our friend Network Solutions? Remind me again what sound logic caused domain name tasting to be introduced in the first place?
Lastly, after reading the short report, I'm lead to believe that we're still allowing 10% AGP deletes. My question is simple: Given the above reasons for domain tasting, why allow it at all?
I mean everyone's spinning this move in a positive light except for scam artists and con men. So why not just seal the deal and make it "Officially Officially Dead" in a policy?
86980: Provide Linux Drivers for all your Hardware
72510: No OS Preloaded
53180: Sell Linux PCs Worldwide - not only the United States
46690: Stripped down, fast Linux Box
39970: coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) instead of proprietary BIOS
So maybe only open source users know about IdeaStorm? Regardless, Dell is staring down hundreds of thousands of users looking for more options that should honestly be very easy to provide. So if the returns are a "non-issue" and are similar to Windows returns then what's the deal, Dell?
DirecTV can simply claim that they have no intent to commit, or to aid or abet, or use the SS# in connection with an unlawful activity.
That's all you have to do? Okay, let's assume DirectTV is sitting on top of hundreds or thousands of canceled accounts while storing the SSN.
And you're saying that's not unlawful. So let's say that I hack into a commerce site and download a hundred thousand addresses with their credit card information. Now, I cover my tracks and I store that on my computer and a couple weeks later, the feds come knocking on my door for something else (let's say dog fighting because I want to play in the NFL). And they check out my computer which has all this private data. Now, I've not done anything with it, I haven't sold it or anything. I haven't committed fraud with it. Really, I obtained it out of mere curiosity. And, by your logic, I have a right to retain it. And I promise that I am not going to do anything unlawful with it *snicker*.
So while my method of obtaining it would be against the law, just having it would be no different than what DirectTV is doing. And you're saying that I shouldn't be prosecuted for that? Nothing like intent to commit identity theft or fraud? I think you could argue that if you're not storing the data for a legit business purpose, you are invading privacy and couldn't possibly have any other intent than something unlawful. But that could just be me and my strange sense of entitlement to what's in the Constitution (and before you jump all over me, I know that has no legal bearing).
Slashdot Mirror
"According to the print edition of Game Informer, 5,000 surveyed people said the XBox 360 fails over half the time. The same survey found failure rates of 10.6% for Sony's PS3 and 6.8% on Nintendo's Wii. Microsoft trounced the competition with over five times the next highest failure rate. The article also notes that the survey revealed a skew to the numbers as the Xbox's were the most used consoles: 'Results said 40.3 percent of 360 owners use the console three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 owners. Meanwhile, the plurality of Wii owners (41.4 percent) play their consoles less than an hour a day.' Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox (due to failures) and the survey found they had rather shoddy customer service."
So it should be noted that a potential skew is that from the surveyed five thousand, Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users. While this certainly wouldn't explain the skewed percentages, it indicates the consoles are in higher use causing potentially more wear and tear.
But yeah, bad indicator for Microsoft and this new information actually caused me to wait to buy an Xbox 360 at the new reduced price. I think the 3.8% figure of repeat business is a good indicator that a lot of people agree.
Off-topic musing: It's interesting this Game Informer dead tree article has such virtual world implications yet the original source chose for it to be only released in their print edition and not on their site. Has GI always done this? An indication of things to come or a death knell for its readership?
I see you didn't defend the Storm Trooper armor...
Oh, well, I'm not stupid. Tons of things in the SW universe make absolutely no sense. The storm trooper uniforms are stupid, kind of remind me of French Legionnaire uniforms that always made me laugh when I saw someone dressed like that in the desert. The red flags on your shoulders make you stick out like a sore thumb regardless of where you are.
... oh, that's right, we've been over this before on Slashdot, with our friends, in popular mechanics, everywhere. My grandfather commented on the "wings" of ships that seemed to spend all their time in space.
So there's something that actually existed much like the storm trooper armor. Somethings are meant to intimidate rather than camouflage, perhaps the storm trooper armor is there to let you know that you don't stand a chance? To be distinctive? It's a stretch but it's stupid. Looked really badass when I was a kid though.
A lot of these arguments apply to many sci-fi/fantasy works, not just SW so why waste your time on the critical analysis. Are you bettering society? Congratulations, you just tore apart something that was made over three decades ago.
He should have stuck to the physical aspects of the universe like noise in space and being able to see laser shots from the side
R2-D2
Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."
I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.
C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.
Again, you're overlooking his primary function. C-3PO is a protocol droid designed to serve humans, and boasts that he is fluent "in over six million forms of communication." So he's got arthritis, well, you didn't build him to be flexible or fight. You built him to look pretty and translate. Everything else is bells and whistles. I think he was meant to stand in a corner for some rich merchant or politician and translate any language imaginable. Are you going to tell me that my car is flawed because I couldn't afford a $20 toaster to put in the dash?
Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.
Uh, the second Death Star was never completed, you idiot. The rebels learned about it and attacked it before it had everything completed so anything like "four paths to the central core" or "exposed shafts" could well have been necessary during its construction. Haven't you seen Clerks or watched Robot Chicken's parody of Palpatine trying to talk to the foreman?
But Luke's X-34 speeder on Tatooine? The Yugo of speeders, man. One hard stop, and out you go.
He's a farmer. You should have seen the "vehicles" and ATVs I drove while working on farms. One was a modified bus with huge water tanks on the back and an upside down bucket for a seat. They make a Yugo look like a dream car. Are you going to complain about the blast marks and carbon scoring adorning the rag tag rebel ships next?
So easy to rip apart. And you know, he doesn't offer anything constructive. Like the asteroid worm. He would have enjoyed it more if space in the Star Wars galaxy was like our space? Dead, uninhabited and void? George Lucas isn't a god but he sure thought up some neat ideas for a universe that John Scalzi will never come close to.
Anna Liu, Associate Professor in services engineering at the UNSW School of Computer Science told iTnews she was excited by Cloud Computing as it could potentially enable organisations to "outsource a certain amount of their risks and costs and tap into new economies of scale."
Sounds more like she has a degree in buzzword engineering.
From her homepage at UNSW, it seems to be the creation and study of services but her focus seems to be on cloud computing with the "services" being concentrated on these subjects. While a lot of her about page seems to be buzzwords and journal writing, I really wish they would release their "interoperable service software" and would be interested in seeing their final report for more specific metrics. Her blog doesn't say much about it. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt, she says in the article, "We saw a lot of hype and confusion, and decided to lead a team of researchers and actually get our hands dirty with this stuff." She also said:
Using Google AppEngine, none of your data processing tasks can last any longer than thirty seconds, or it throws an exception back at you. This is very consistent with the Google business model - they want to enable simple web applications to thrive on the Internet. AppEngine is there to enable the rapid development of simple web applications that don't include intense compute at the back end. - Anna Liu
Which I found interesting. Again, kind of hard to judge the merits behind this research without even a brief description of what the services were ... a singular value decomposition service? A return huge data sets from a database table service? A prime factorization service? A file intensive I/O service? I'm also curious as to what hoops one has to jump through to get those interoperable across all three systems ... after all Microsoft is just .NET, right? Is this rewriting something 3 times or making shared objects or what?
Again, thanks for setting me straight on how superior your tastes in gaming are compared to us uneducated, unwashed masses.
I don't know why I bother with telling you what you're missing. If you have ever mainlined a PC FPS vs a console FPS, you'd know what I'm talking about. Go ahead and try it on your jugular, under your eyes, between your toes, nothing works for console FPS. Hell, you can't even get a high off a simple freebasing. Now, PC FPS, you catch a whiff of that on your friend and you're tripping balls for three, maybe four hours. You're also a much more rabid asshole as you're not physically in the same room as your opponent. So when you do frag him, you respond all hardcore with "n00bfag gtfo my server nao, btch" unlike the casual console response of "nice shot, man!"
PC FPS? Hell yeah, I shower in that shit.
As for education, it's the only way to go. Uneducation is for casual gamers. If you had a clue, you'd know that you need to spend four or five hours a day reading forums and studying FAQs/guides of the game before you even set foot on the servers. If you do, we don't have time for you climbing the learning curve.
Don't even get me started on washed vs unwashed masses.
*in a soft soothing mid-Western voice*
Remember folks to pay a visit to Slashdot: where the gamers are above average, the readers are fat and depressed and the women are nonexistent.
And Civilization lurches slightly forward.
Lookit, you want to call Bush a Nazi Warmonger or Obama an Incompetent Puppet, or speak any kind of Truth to Power, I will be shoulder to shoulder with you on the ramparts in defense of your Freedom to Speak, you're a Patriot. You want to call a lady a "skanky ho," try to damage her reputation, and then hide like a coward, you are a Cad.
The Internet has changed many things, but it has not changed everything.
Keep in mind that Bush and Obama are public figures and so therefore are valid targets. So if this model is not
* a public figure, either a public official or any other person pervasively involved in public affairs, or
* a limited purpose public figure, meaning those who have "thrust themselves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved." A "particularized determination" is required to decide whether a person is a limited purpose public figure, which can be variously interpreted.
The blogger may have some issues. People's definitions of "skanky ho" vary and anyone presenting their body as most models do may seem like a "skanky ho" to a minor percentage of the population. It should be interesting to watch this case as "whoring" and "willingness to engage in oral sex" are probably pretty hard to identify when the blogger is only offering up photos.
With the deadline approaching for 'opting out' of the Google Books settlement, the Authors Guild has posted an aggressive explanation of who it thinks should do that: no one.
Actually what they said specifically is:
Opting out of the settlement is for authors who want to preserve their right to sue Google themselves. We donâ(TM)t think there are any such authors.
Oh how they doubt the litigious desire of some people that believe their works turn the paper they're printed on to gold.
The more that alien life is covered in films or television documentaries, the more people look up at the sky and don't look down at their feet,' said an expert on UFO sightings based at Sheffield Hallam University.
Which means that they are seeing something.
UFOs have been observed since ancient times. The apostle John saw one. The Egyptians inscribed a UFO in their hieroglyphics. And the ancient Hebrews recorded the interactions of aliens and humans as the Nephilim.
I think there's more than the authorities are willing to divulge. It's interesting to see leaks like the quote above confirm what some of us have believed for a long time.
[citations desperately needed]
... as well as post a third hand account of several unrelated occurrences thousands of years ago in one paragraph.
Ahhh, the human imagination and psyche. Full of so much wonderful things as the ability to conjure up grand imaginations and interactions
I wish the article had gone back further to War of the Worlds time or the old classic 50s black and white abduction movies. Note the first abduction didn't happen until it had already been in pulps and film. And, from my own personal savior, Carl Sagan:
In The Demon-Haunted World astronomer Carl Sagan points out that the alien abduction experience is remarkably similar to tales of demon abduction common throughout history. "...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?" (Sagan 1996 124)
It's fun stuff to read about and write tall tales about ... and nothing more.
iPods sold badly.
Uh, you might have a case with the original iPhone but you certainly do not have a case with iPods. They surpassed Sony's MP3 player in 2005 and there's no shortage of information saying they're very popular in Japan.
Get over it. Jeez, it's like a religion with you guys.
You have to own all models of the iPhone in order to be eligible to be completely clear so that your OT (operating telephone) levels are uninhibited. Are you a suppressive person? Oh no, I've been in contact with you! Great Woz! Now Jobs won't let me get to the last OT level no matter how much I spend on his products!
The Japanese aren't brand-motivated. They are quality-motivated. That's why Japanese cars are boring but last forever.
That's wrong. If you had spoken to a British or American consumer at the time of Japanese automotive boom, you would have found that they are just as quality motivated as the American consumer. And had you spoken to American or British or Italian automotive makers, you would have found some of them wanted quality but were just slightly misinformed as to how they should attain it.
As someone who's taken a course on this, we got the Japanese invention known as The House of Quality pounded into our heads. It's basically a far superior way to "define relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities." The Japanese invented this, I don't know the exact origins (wish I did) but instead of it ended up as some weird business process patent it ended up being used by everyone over there. As a result, their cars didn't leak oil (like the British motorcycles) and they didn't slowly reject every screw that was holding them together. I'm sure the Japanese had many more tools at analyzing the engineering aspects of cars but the fact of the matter is that their engineering and quality control practices just exceeded anything anyone else had (if anyone else had quality control at the time).
Americans look for cool things, which is why American cars are flashy and muscular but also break down constantly and have terribly assembled trim.
This seriously got moderated up? Have you ever been to Tokyo? Have you seen how flashy that city is? Have you ever seen Japanimation, Japanese commercials or game shows? Flashy is all I can think of to describe that.
Your cultural stereotypes humor me. But I think you're suffering from some serious misinformation and anecdotes to which I could provide counter-anecdotes all day long. But both stances are merely an exercise in futility.
They knew, unlike the dopes who lick Steve Jobs' nutsack here in the US, that it was crap the moment they laid hands on it.
Well, if they laid hands on it, they've already purchased it and that's a win for Apple. Or are you saying that the (virtually) same reviews each culture read influenced them differently? The Japanese have more options than we do and they had things that were better than the original iPhones. Those weren't really marketed in America. The iPhone wasn't crap compared to what 90% of Americans were already using. That's the important point, not that American consumers are any stupider or smarter than Japanese consumers.
The iPhone 3GS 32GB is currently the best selling phone in Japan (the 16GB version came in at number nine).
Is that indicative of storage being that big of a factor for phones? Or that the locally made devices compare to 16GB but not 32GB?
As a non-iPhone user, I must admit the iPhone is a touch bulky for me to use as a music device while I work out. Love my 2GB shuffle though. I guess I could see this with movies/videos on the iPhone but is there any reason I'm not getting that one would enjoy 32GB of storage? Maybe it's the stereotype that Asians take a lot more pictures than Americans? If these numbers are accurate, color me shocked that 32GB is #1 and 16GB is #9. I'm not saying that 16GB ought to be enough for anyone but you have to be using your iPhone as something else full time to utilize that. Are the applications at the app store really taking up that much space on your phone?
This is in stark contrast to reports from earlier this year that the Japanese hate the iPhone.
This "hatred" was debunked shortly thereafter:
AppleInsider has posted a great article explaining that Wired's story about Japanese iPhone hate was completely false and has been edited at least twice. The comments in the article were recycled and taken out of context, with those interviewed blogging about the mistakes. The piece then goes on to analyze the iPhone's standing in Japan, as well as some of the major factors working for and against it. At last it points out that the Wall Street Journal tried the same myth of failure just after the phone's launch in Japan, recycled from a myth the year before, pushed by a research company with a possible anti-Apple agenda.
I am very familiar with qi, since the Fourth Edition Scrabble Dictionary made it the most life saving play at the end of the game when fate deals you a Q.
No competent tech startup would pay $18 million for recovery.org
Well, it was recovery.gov not org and really the comments the first time we discussed it noted worse problems. I mean, if they have a full time staff for the site and lots of servers and a lot of research going on, $18 million is about on par with what the government drops on crap like that. Fine. The fact that it was bidless and the company that got it gives tens of thousands of dollars to house majority leader Steny Hoyer (D) is what we really should be upset about. I thought the days of Haliburten were over ...
Looking at bills from 17 cities, it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive. From a global standpoint, both Canada and Brazil tested rather high (85% and 80%, respectively), But China and Japan were well behind the curve at 20% and 12%. The researchers hope that studies such as these will be of help to law enforcement agencies that are attempting to understand the growth and flow of drug use in communities.
Nope, sorry, has nothing to do with growth and flow. Merely that China and Japan are better at properly labeling and storing their valuable narcotics and opiates. Given the cost of the substance, you would think the American & Canadian coke heads would be better at keeping it separate from other things. But when you need to carry only coke and money with you ... the cost of that second briefcase probably outweighs the amount of coke you lose just shoving money and coke into one briefcase. Being able to do it in a frenzied haphazard manner isn't just how it's done in Martin Scorsese films, it's a necessary skill of coke users and traffickers. I wonder what "essence of G-string" levels respective countries have on their smallest denominational bills?
This film should vault Neill Blomkamp into sci-fi stardom, on par with George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame).
Are you saying that this movie is as good/groundbreaking as Star Wars orThe Matrix? I am somewhat dubious.
Don't get me wrong, it looks a whole lot better than most sci-fi movies. I especially like how the first commercials I saw for it were public service announcements about District 9. Then commercials with non-human sympathizers being arrested. Then later you see a commercial with "glick gluck mcglorlock" (translation: "We just want to go home.") and you kinda realize that there's going to be more depth to the story than Starship Troopers (the movie, not the book). Looks interesting, I'll definitely Netflix it.
It might be the best sci-fi movie of '09 but you've still got
While a lot don't have release dates yet and could be pushed back and most will probably suck, that's a lot of competition to dismiss at this point. And lastly, I have great hope for Franklyn (to be released here in the states).
From a construction page it looks to rely on XHTML, CSS and XML which, like both the open doc formats, makes complete sense. Not only is it trivial for me to build a document but with a very simple XSLT I can transform all of my epub files to very readable web pages. What boggles my mind is how long XML has been out there and yet we have to wait until now for big companies like Sony to adopt this over something like Amazon's AZW file format. The epub format looks simple and elegant and logical ... I'm honestly a little bit scared that I'm missing something since it's root kit Sony using it.
The beginning of the end for people who live in automated houses. As E searches the internet for examples of how to outdo itself in the field of evil, disaster will strike the world when it gains access to netflix's movie repository. I'll wake up chained to my radiator with a dull hacksaw in front of me and a tape recording. I'll here my wife screaming as she's sodomized Alexander DeLarge style by our refrigerator. And our son? Our son is being forced to watch "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" on all four walls of his room (probably the most horrific fate of the three). All because you had to make the most evil program out there ... which, in turn, created a more evil program (creating evil programs being one of the evilest things it could do and it being more evil than you means it should do that). Thanks for the 'research' guys.
Narrator: You're on a scenic route through a state recreational area known as the human mind. You ask a passerby for directions, only to find he has no face ... or something. Suddenly up ahead there's a door in the road. You swerve, narrowly avoiding ... The Scary Door!
Scientist: *a mad scientist is seen mixing chemicals* I have combined the DNA of the world's most evil animals to make the most evil creature of them all. *a pod opens flowing with clouds of steam*
Naked Man: *steps out of pod* Turns out it's man!
Anyone with access to the paper know if they analyzed the naturally short sleepers for lack of benefits from sleeping? An immune system deficiency? Metabolism rate? Increased food intake? Accelerated aging? Memory and learning issues? Biomass, muscle & organ development?
I'm not a biologist and I don't know what sleep durations are for other mammals but the scientist in me wonders why we settled out at eight hours a day if we are more vulnerable with our eyes closed. You would think it performs pretty important functions (or did perform) for the 5 percent of short sleepers not to collect more food and proliferate more efficiently and more frequently than the other 95% 8 hour sleepers. Perhaps in times of famine or disease this 5% are more susceptible and since we no longer have them they are freed from these shackles? Perhaps (since the two subjects noted were ages 40 and 70) this only becomes apparent with the onset of age that we never made it to back in the day? Any other ideas?
I think the thinking is that it allows people to get refunds if they made a typo during the domain registration process.
So what you're telling me is that the process for making an error in your form is to delete everything and start over? You're telling me that they do this instead of having you submit a request to have it changed? Am I the only one that thinks it would be easier to make a form for requesting changes to your account?
People are human, people err. But it benefits everyone involved if you just fix the mistake when you notice it. The registrar retains your business and you get the domain you wanted. No big deal. But it stops scammers from allocating 300 domains and keeping 3 of them to squat on or whatever they want to do. They should be stuck with 300 domains they have to pay for.
So the semi-legitimate use you can dig up is that companies want to buy up bundles of DNs and drop ads there to see if type-in traffic or google searches can make them enough bank to warrant keeping it up. Personally, sounds like a get rich quick scheme providing nothing -- maybe even negative confusion -- to society and should therefore be discouraged.
... do we see where this is going? Again, free DN registration, stupid that this should even have a term even stupider that it works for people with a lot of patience aiming to save $12/year.
Next you got domain kiting. Where a jerk "tastes" under one registrar and then cancels five days later and "tastes" under another an then cancels five days later and then "tastes" under yet another registrar
And what's left? Domain Name Front Running like our friend Network Solutions? Remind me again what sound logic caused domain name tasting to be introduced in the first place?
Lastly, after reading the short report, I'm lead to believe that we're still allowing 10% AGP deletes. My question is simple: Given the above reasons for domain tasting, why allow it at all? I mean everyone's spinning this move in a positive light except for scam artists and con men. So why not just seal the deal and make it "Officially Officially Dead" in a policy?
So maybe only open source users know about IdeaStorm? Regardless, Dell is staring down hundreds of thousands of users looking for more options that should honestly be very easy to provide. So if the returns are a "non-issue" and are similar to Windows returns then what's the deal, Dell?
DirecTV can simply claim that they have no intent to commit, or to aid or abet, or use the SS# in connection with an unlawful activity.
That's all you have to do? Okay, let's assume DirectTV is sitting on top of hundreds or thousands of canceled accounts while storing the SSN.
And you're saying that's not unlawful. So let's say that I hack into a commerce site and download a hundred thousand addresses with their credit card information. Now, I cover my tracks and I store that on my computer and a couple weeks later, the feds come knocking on my door for something else (let's say dog fighting because I want to play in the NFL). And they check out my computer which has all this private data. Now, I've not done anything with it, I haven't sold it or anything. I haven't committed fraud with it. Really, I obtained it out of mere curiosity. And, by your logic, I have a right to retain it. And I promise that I am not going to do anything unlawful with it *snicker*.
So while my method of obtaining it would be against the law, just having it would be no different than what DirectTV is doing. And you're saying that I shouldn't be prosecuted for that? Nothing like intent to commit identity theft or fraud? I think you could argue that if you're not storing the data for a legit business purpose, you are invading privacy and couldn't possibly have any other intent than something unlawful. But that could just be me and my strange sense of entitlement to what's in the Constitution (and before you jump all over me, I know that has no legal bearing).