It came down to the votes. This required voter approval and it was rejected, it ended all chances of it ever happening.
I think the point is that a government body had to threaten to do it themselves before a for-profit company would come in and provide the service. And its not like we are in the middle of nowhere, 50miles outside of Chicago, 5miles outside of Naperville and with a populate of 100k+ for the three cities combined.
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
Aim for 256MB? Are you still living in 2001? I just replaced my 1.6ghz/256MB laptop with a netbook with a similar speed processor but 1GB of RAM. That laptop could barely get by with that much RAM. Firefox could only handle maybe 4 pages at a time and if one was loading video it would go to a crawl. My netbook has no issues, both were running Windows Home. A lesson for Windows Engineers, don't aim for 256MB.
Which is why I don't see it ever happening. After all, once our Fearless Leader has sunk us even deeper into debt (remember that Medicare will be broke in 8 years, Social Security a few after that, and our national debt will be over $12 trillion and climbing) nobody, not no where, not no how (to paraphrase the Cowardly Lion) will be able to afford it.
Fearless Leader? Dont blame the leaders, blame the damn voters for putting men and women back into office year after year. We have a senators that do nothing but protect their job because there 60+ years of age and would have nothing to do after being pushed out, there job is no longer to serve the people but to protect their own jobs, but we continue to vote them back in despite some of the crazy stuff they propose. Look at McCains last bill for example, a senator that admits to not using a computer, yet is fully qualified appearantly to submit a bill that would severely hinder Internet access.
We had a president for 8 years that had maybe one achievement and that was standing up after 9/11, but except for that everything his administration attempted has cost us ten times as much as it was proposed and without much benefit. The Afghan/Iraq war have cost us billions and except for a little improved security and several eggs to the face in the international community. It will return nothing else on the investment. We were better off investing that back into our own country, maybe into those out-dated levees in New Orleans?
We blame our politicians but the real blame is the damn voters. Voters who vote solely political lines instead of the issues and what a politician has done over of the years. Voters who voted the same people in, election after election despite what the politician did over his past terms, they keep voting the same way cause they voted them in the last election. This is why I lost faith in the system, we have large groups of people who will vote one way or another based on rather a politician is simply Democrat or Republican.
The responsibility of this complete mess we are in, lies with the voters and no one else. Use the politicians as a scapegoat all you want but we put them there in the first place.
I used to live in a Tri-City area outside of Chicago. The three towns were going to go in on a municipal internet system that would have provided TV, Phone, Internet, over fiber-optic.
Comcast did a massive advertisement campaign against the system and how if it failed we would foot the bill. They also had techncians out for three weeks straight installing new lines across the town. When it came to vote in my city of the three city's it failed 6000 votes to like 7500 votes, the funny part is, if the 6000 people who voted yes bought into the system and the system lasted for 5 years it would have paid itself and would have become self-sustaining.
Customer complained about feature "x", we evaluated feature "x", we concluded the customer was correct and we corrected feature "x" to customers suggestion.
I love tech news but at least once a day there is something outside the technology world that is posted on Slashdot and seeing the opinion of the Slashdot is always intriguing. Unlike Digg/Reddit where a simple post of "YES WE CAN" will get up voted to the top spot on the comments section.
I wont say this will kill the DS but, when the Dreamcast was around and after a few people figured out how to run debug mode the Dreamcast began its down fall. It was so easy to pirate a game, all you needed was the Dreamcast boot disk which was found everywhere online, and a BIN file for the game which could be downloaded easily, the worst part was if you were on dial-up or not cause this was 1999/2000 and broadband wasn't readily available.
Hell, eventually they managed to make all pirated game self-loading and because the Dreamcast used a proprietary disk format that could hold more then 750mb, some people managed to remove content from the game to fit it on a regular CD. Thus making the GD-Rom's piracy measure of going past the 750mb useless.
I read a post-mortem article from one of the leads at SEGA after support was dropped. They took a gamble with the Dreamcast and knew they had to reach a certain number of units sold both in games and in systems to be able to compete with the Playstation 2. They never officially blamed piracy but they said it definitely hurt them, especially in the last six months before the PS2 arrived.
In my opinion the arrival of the PS2 didn't kill the Dreamcast, piracy did.
Wrong. The RIAA was a way of getting new artists into the mass market. The RIAA would offer to help you reach that mass market under certain contractual means. Of course over time the music industry changed and it became very easy for anyone to reach mass market (iTunes, Myspace, Internet, etc). This is actually when the RIAA became very evil(suing people left and right) because they lost control, instead of having fair contractual agreements they basically stole everything from the artist and in return he or she had a shot at the spotlight which could lead to their own revenue streams outside of their record sales such as endorsements or other product lines. The RIAA was not always evil. Just like Microsoft wasn't or Apple. When you cut into someones bottom line they will fight back and they will change their behavior to become more aggressive. Its business, every company does it to survive, be it right or wrong.
As for the pharmaceutical industry. The big names offer a means for the smaller guy to get into the market. And in return the pharmaceutical pays off the smaller guy for his or her patented drug. The pharmaceutical company gets to make their profit selling the drug (after they go through the millions of dollars getting it approved and marketed to doctors) and the researcher gets paid off for their work. Both parties are happy and both go on their separate paths. Heck, the big pharmaceutical company might come back to the researcher for assistance in improving the drug or creating a new variant once the patent expires.
The stunts are part of their public image. It's not stupidity. People who are otherwise unbiased are likely to find their positive, humorous attitude more appealing than the strict suit-only approach of their opponents. They are, most likely, very well aware of what they're doing.
And look at how well that did for them. They had two options, they could have worked with these industries and tried to make a deal with them or they could have fought the system. They decided to fight the system but they fought the system like children and were treated like children by the system.
And as a sidenote I always found it funny that people defended them by saying it hosted legimate material which is true, but the site itself is called, "The PIRATE Bay" and the majority of the top 100 was pirated material.
Rumors have been going around about the Starcraft 2 Beta. Will there be a beta and if so when will it open to those that opted into the Beta through BNET 2.0?
This morning as I started to see news feeds coming in that the price was being dropped to $300, a reasonable price for somethign that primarily would be used a blu-ray player. I was willing to purchase since there were some other areas I could explore in the system, including installing outside operating systems. The fact that this was something I could do with the system and now the fact that Sony can retroactively remove it, is not worth my time or my money.
The question is really if this is a vaccine or therapeutic vaccine, I couldn't find that in the article. The difference being a regular vaccine will prevent the virus from infecting you while a therapeutic will either prevent the virus from spreading in your body but you might still be a carrier or eradicate the virus from you completely thus destroying it.
Just a side note since a lot of discussion on HIV and AIDS. HIV is the virus, the virus attacks the immune system destroying your white blood cells, when your white blood cell count falls below a certain amount per 1mm of blood or some measurement you have AIDS or auto-immune deficiency syndrome caused by HIV.
The virus wont kill you, what will kill you in the end is a basic infection that your body cant handle, even the common cold.
Wasn't the core income of iD software from developing game engines and licensing them to other companies?
I might be wrong but the last major engine they built and sold was the one for Doom 3, and I don't remember many games that used that engine after that except Quake 4? And that title was repackaged garbage.
Valve on the other hand...well they haven't made a many mistakes, they built a complete distribution system that is the best around by far, they release amazing development tools for their games, and they still release new content for older games like Team Fortress 2 and that was released back in October of 2007, might I add they just released the source files for their official TF2 maps allowing anyone to view how they made them.
iD software has gone stale, they stuck with what worked for them, being the leading developer of game engines and graphics, and that worked when they were the only competitor back in 1993(Doom), 1996(Quake), 1997(Quake 2), and 1999(Quake 3), no game engines could compete with those. The biggest competitor between 1997 and 1999 was the Lithtech engine or the original Unreal, and post 1999, Lithtech didn't power much, and the Unreal was just beginning to shape up to what it has turned into today.
Now in 2009 we have the Unreal Engines which are cross platform compatible and easy to develop for, the Source Engine which anyone can mod with the help of the Valve SDK's, multiple open-source engines, and enough tools, online knowledge, and resources for a company to develop their own engine if they want to go down that path. The Doom 3 Engine is not as appealing, iD was the leader because there was no one else to go to for a quick pre-built game engine, today that isnt true.
I don't think iD software is in financial trouble but they definitely don't have the income like they used to have.
They had Battlebots on Comedy Central for a few years. In all honesty it was pretty boring and they cut Upright Citizens Brigade because of it.
The robots would fail after one or two hits. There was never really any massive destruction of the robots since when someone lost they wouldn't destroy the other robot out of respect or something.
Grant from Mythbusters, I think won the competition in the end, built a robot like the one in the videos from the article, would go really fast, slide under the competitor and flip it around.
Well, 59 million of us tried to get rid of him after four years while another 62 million kept him in. So lets not generalize my entire country into agreeing with him.
Technically bandwidth was an issue. If the cable company cant properly utilize the entire bandwidth of a cable line then that's the bottle neck for the service.
I remember SEGA channel it would take 10minutes to pull a 4mb file.
Here is the thing about the advertising and no piracy protection.
Demigod is a DOTA clone which was originally a Warcraft 3 map that is still widely played today and will more then likely be ported to Starcraft 2 if possible. So Demigod is competing against a game that already has a wide install base and is already cheap and will compete against a new game that will sell like bananers.
Secondly, there is another game called League of Legends which is in the same style of Demigod that is coming out and is currently in BETA. From what I have been told about those in the BETA. Everything that is broken in Demigod is fixed in League of Legends. Remember, first impressions go a long way, many games start like crap and gain momentum but it takes a lot to pull people back into it. Unreal Tournament 3 is a very good example.
My opinion is that Demigod was released early to get a head start on League of Legends, and it has no piracy protection to help compete against the already installed and well tested Warcraft 3 DOTA map.
The machines that protect democracy include jet fighters, naval warcraft, guns, rockets, bombs ---- and voting machines.
The US Government wouldn't buy a any of those other things without a massive effort to make sure they were secure, why not voting machines as well? If you can compromise those, the rest are easy.
Because the people that are elected in office are the same people voted in by those machines.
No to be a troll or anything but they haven't fixed multiplayer. They've released several patches over the past few weeks that have fixed issues but they tend to introduce more problems then fix.
The game is good and I enjoy it a lot, but my god every time my friends and I decide to play we debate on rather we want to deal with all the connection issues. You spend more time waiting to get into a game lobby then playing the actual game.
Like I said the game is good, and it has its share of issues even outside of multiplayer but to say its fixed is long from the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
It came down to the votes. This required voter approval and it was rejected, it ended all chances of it ever happening.
I think the point is that a government body had to threaten to do it themselves before a for-profit company would come in and provide the service. And its not like we are in the middle of nowhere, 50miles outside of Chicago, 5miles outside of Naperville and with a populate of 100k+ for the three cities combined.
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
Aim for 256MB? Are you still living in 2001? I just replaced my 1.6ghz/256MB laptop with a netbook with a similar speed processor but 1GB of RAM. That laptop could barely get by with that much RAM. Firefox could only handle maybe 4 pages at a time and if one was loading video it would go to a crawl. My netbook has no issues, both were running Windows Home. A lesson for Windows Engineers, don't aim for 256MB.
Which is why I don't see it ever happening. After all, once our Fearless Leader has sunk us even deeper into debt (remember that Medicare will be broke in 8 years, Social Security a few after that, and our national debt will be over $12 trillion and climbing) nobody, not no where, not no how (to paraphrase the Cowardly Lion) will be able to afford it.
Fearless Leader? Dont blame the leaders, blame the damn voters for putting men and women back into office year after year. We have a senators that do nothing but protect their job because there 60+ years of age and would have nothing to do after being pushed out, there job is no longer to serve the people but to protect their own jobs, but we continue to vote them back in despite some of the crazy stuff they propose. Look at McCains last bill for example, a senator that admits to not using a computer, yet is fully qualified appearantly to submit a bill that would severely hinder Internet access.
We had a president for 8 years that had maybe one achievement and that was standing up after 9/11, but except for that everything his administration attempted has cost us ten times as much as it was proposed and without much benefit. The Afghan/Iraq war have cost us billions and except for a little improved security and several eggs to the face in the international community. It will return nothing else on the investment. We were better off investing that back into our own country, maybe into those out-dated levees in New Orleans?
We blame our politicians but the real blame is the damn voters. Voters who vote solely political lines instead of the issues and what a politician has done over of the years. Voters who voted the same people in, election after election despite what the politician did over his past terms, they keep voting the same way cause they voted them in the last election. This is why I lost faith in the system, we have large groups of people who will vote one way or another based on rather a politician is simply Democrat or Republican.
The responsibility of this complete mess we are in, lies with the voters and no one else. Use the politicians as a scapegoat all you want but we put them there in the first place.
I used to live in a Tri-City area outside of Chicago. The three towns were going to go in on a municipal internet system that would have provided TV, Phone, Internet, over fiber-optic.
Comcast did a massive advertisement campaign against the system and how if it failed we would foot the bill. They also had techncians out for three weeks straight installing new lines across the town. When it came to vote in my city of the three city's it failed 6000 votes to like 7500 votes, the funny part is, if the 6000 people who voted yes bought into the system and the system lasted for 5 years it would have paid itself and would have become self-sustaining.
You would pay more to fully utilize the expensive player and expensive tv if you had them. As someone who owns the setup, I will not go back to DVD.
Customer complained about feature "x", we evaluated feature "x", we concluded the customer was correct and we corrected feature "x" to customers suggestion.
Customer Support 101
Wrong.
I love tech news but at least once a day there is something outside the technology world that is posted on Slashdot and seeing the opinion of the Slashdot is always intriguing. Unlike Digg/Reddit where a simple post of "YES WE CAN" will get up voted to the top spot on the comments section.
Man, that was funny when you were 6, not 20 or 30 years later.
But at 40 and 50 years later its pure comedy once again.
I wont say this will kill the DS but, when the Dreamcast was around and after a few people figured out how to run debug mode the Dreamcast began its down fall. It was so easy to pirate a game, all you needed was the Dreamcast boot disk which was found everywhere online, and a BIN file for the game which could be downloaded easily, the worst part was if you were on dial-up or not cause this was 1999/2000 and broadband wasn't readily available.
Hell, eventually they managed to make all pirated game self-loading and because the Dreamcast used a proprietary disk format that could hold more then 750mb, some people managed to remove content from the game to fit it on a regular CD. Thus making the GD-Rom's piracy measure of going past the 750mb useless.
I read a post-mortem article from one of the leads at SEGA after support was dropped. They took a gamble with the Dreamcast and knew they had to reach a certain number of units sold both in games and in systems to be able to compete with the Playstation 2. They never officially blamed piracy but they said it definitely hurt them, especially in the last six months before the PS2 arrived.
In my opinion the arrival of the PS2 didn't kill the Dreamcast, piracy did.
Wrong. The RIAA was a way of getting new artists into the mass market. The RIAA would offer to help you reach that mass market under certain contractual means. Of course over time the music industry changed and it became very easy for anyone to reach mass market (iTunes, Myspace, Internet, etc). This is actually when the RIAA became very evil(suing people left and right) because they lost control, instead of having fair contractual agreements they basically stole everything from the artist and in return he or she had a shot at the spotlight which could lead to their own revenue streams outside of their record sales such as endorsements or other product lines. The RIAA was not always evil. Just like Microsoft wasn't or Apple. When you cut into someones bottom line they will fight back and they will change their behavior to become more aggressive. Its business, every company does it to survive, be it right or wrong.
As for the pharmaceutical industry. The big names offer a means for the smaller guy to get into the market. And in return the pharmaceutical pays off the smaller guy for his or her patented drug. The pharmaceutical company gets to make their profit selling the drug (after they go through the millions of dollars getting it approved and marketed to doctors) and the researcher gets paid off for their work. Both parties are happy and both go on their separate paths. Heck, the big pharmaceutical company might come back to the researcher for assistance in improving the drug or creating a new variant once the patent expires.
The stunts are part of their public image. It's not stupidity. People who are otherwise unbiased are likely to find their positive, humorous attitude more appealing than the strict suit-only approach of their opponents. They are, most likely, very well aware of what they're doing.
And look at how well that did for them. They had two options, they could have worked with these industries and tried to make a deal with them or they could have fought the system. They decided to fight the system but they fought the system like children and were treated like children by the system.
And as a sidenote I always found it funny that people defended them by saying it hosted legimate material which is true, but the site itself is called, "The PIRATE Bay" and the majority of the top 100 was pirated material.
Rumors have been going around about the Starcraft 2 Beta. Will there be a beta and if so when will it open to those that opted into the Beta through BNET 2.0?
They lost my purchase.
This morning as I started to see news feeds coming in that the price was being dropped to $300, a reasonable price for somethign that primarily would be used a blu-ray player. I was willing to purchase since there were some other areas I could explore in the system, including installing outside operating systems. The fact that this was something I could do with the system and now the fact that Sony can retroactively remove it, is not worth my time or my money.
I have heard of these giant spiders breaking apart like glass but yet to see any documented footage of it happening.
The question is really if this is a vaccine or therapeutic vaccine, I couldn't find that in the article. The difference being a regular vaccine will prevent the virus from infecting you while a therapeutic will either prevent the virus from spreading in your body but you might still be a carrier or eradicate the virus from you completely thus destroying it.
Just a side note since a lot of discussion on HIV and AIDS. HIV is the virus, the virus attacks the immune system destroying your white blood cells, when your white blood cell count falls below a certain amount per 1mm of blood or some measurement you have AIDS or auto-immune deficiency syndrome caused by HIV.
The virus wont kill you, what will kill you in the end is a basic infection that your body cant handle, even the common cold.
What the hell are you doing with my money Bill?
Unreal Engine runs on PC(Windows), PS3, and Xbox 360.
Reboot into Windows...are you kidding me? You use what you have to use to get the job done.
Wasn't the core income of iD software from developing game engines and licensing them to other companies?
I might be wrong but the last major engine they built and sold was the one for Doom 3, and I don't remember many games that used that engine after that except Quake 4? And that title was repackaged garbage.
Valve on the other hand...well they haven't made a many mistakes, they built a complete distribution system that is the best around by far, they release amazing development tools for their games, and they still release new content for older games like Team Fortress 2 and that was released back in October of 2007, might I add they just released the source files for their official TF2 maps allowing anyone to view how they made them.
iD software has gone stale, they stuck with what worked for them, being the leading developer of game engines and graphics, and that worked when they were the only competitor back in 1993(Doom), 1996(Quake), 1997(Quake 2), and 1999(Quake 3), no game engines could compete with those. The biggest competitor between 1997 and 1999 was the Lithtech engine or the original Unreal, and post 1999, Lithtech didn't power much, and the Unreal was just beginning to shape up to what it has turned into today.
Now in 2009 we have the Unreal Engines which are cross platform compatible and easy to develop for, the Source Engine which anyone can mod with the help of the Valve SDK's, multiple open-source engines, and enough tools, online knowledge, and resources for a company to develop their own engine if they want to go down that path. The Doom 3 Engine is not as appealing, iD was the leader because there was no one else to go to for a quick pre-built game engine, today that isnt true.
I don't think iD software is in financial trouble but they definitely don't have the income like they used to have.
Whoops, mistake, Grant actually built a robot with a hammer that beat the living crap out of robots, his was actually pretty cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadblow
They had Battlebots on Comedy Central for a few years. In all honesty it was pretty boring and they cut Upright Citizens Brigade because of it.
The robots would fail after one or two hits. There was never really any massive destruction of the robots since when someone lost they wouldn't destroy the other robot out of respect or something.
Grant from Mythbusters, I think won the competition in the end, built a robot like the one in the videos from the article, would go really fast, slide under the competitor and flip it around.
Well, 59 million of us tried to get rid of him after four years while another 62 million kept him in. So lets not generalize my entire country into agreeing with him.
Technically bandwidth was an issue. If the cable company cant properly utilize the entire bandwidth of a cable line then that's the bottle neck for the service.
I remember SEGA channel it would take 10minutes to pull a 4mb file.
Here is the thing about the advertising and no piracy protection.
Demigod is a DOTA clone which was originally a Warcraft 3 map that is still widely played today and will more then likely be ported to Starcraft 2 if possible. So Demigod is competing against a game that already has a wide install base and is already cheap and will compete against a new game that will sell like bananers.
Secondly, there is another game called League of Legends which is in the same style of Demigod that is coming out and is currently in BETA. From what I have been told about those in the BETA. Everything that is broken in Demigod is fixed in League of Legends. Remember, first impressions go a long way, many games start like crap and gain momentum but it takes a lot to pull people back into it. Unreal Tournament 3 is a very good example.
My opinion is that Demigod was released early to get a head start on League of Legends, and it has no piracy protection to help compete against the already installed and well tested Warcraft 3 DOTA map.
The machines that protect democracy include jet fighters, naval warcraft, guns, rockets, bombs ---- and voting machines.
The US Government wouldn't buy a any of those other things without a massive effort to make sure they were secure, why not voting machines as well? If you can compromise those, the rest are easy.
Because the people that are elected in office are the same people voted in by those machines.
No to be a troll or anything but they haven't fixed multiplayer. They've released several patches over the past few weeks that have fixed issues but they tend to introduce more problems then fix.
The game is good and I enjoy it a lot, but my god every time my friends and I decide to play we debate on rather we want to deal with all the connection issues. You spend more time waiting to get into a game lobby then playing the actual game.
Like I said the game is good, and it has its share of issues even outside of multiplayer but to say its fixed is long from the truth.