I'm not sure you could call it "Blizzard's mistake." It's not like they invented achievements or anything.
And also, as a person who mostly only plays single-player and some comp-stomps with some friends, I don't recall Blizzard ever 'forcing' it on me that my score was less than somebody else's. Perhaps I've not looked hard enough, but I don't remember seeing even a single-player ladder. And even if it existed, I don't know how that is forced on you any more than any other achievement system. If you go looking for it, it's there.
Saying "war is bad" is like saying "guns are bad."
No, saying "murder is bad" is like saying "war is bad". Saying "canons are bad" would be like saying "guns are bad".
war is bad, and you're a piece of shit for disagreeing, for replying with a broken metaphor, for pulling a godwin...
You yell because I use a 'broken metaphor' while you personally insult me. First of all, that was an analogy, not a metaphor.
And for the record, the analogy is not broken. Guns and War both are horrible things that are somewhat checked by their very existence. Wars end wars. Guns protect you from other guns. Would it be better if neither of them existed? Yes. Are they inherently bad? No.
Just because you lacked the mental capacity to understand my point does not give you free reign to insult. Unless you really are just a troll, in which case I was wasting my time anyway.
5GHz means cycling every 0.2 nanoseconds. In 0.2 nanoseconds, light travels about 6cm. We're already pretty close to the limit for keeping processing synchronised over a large blob of silicon without using methods more cunning than just saying "feh, doesn't matter, light is fast"
That only matters if you're transferring every bit of information from one end of the case to the other. This is why we bundle up packets of info and feed it all to the CPU's cache to let it chew on it. And when's the last time you saw a CPU bigger than 6cm? (BTW, the CPU in your computer case right now is about 80% heat spreading material. The actual size of the chip itself is pretty small.)
This is also not taking into account extra pipes. Your fancy graphics card doesn't just have 1 input pin and 1 output pin. More pins means it can get more info into its cache faster.
War is bad. THIS SHOULDN'T BE CONTROVERSIAL, fuck.
Saying "war is bad" is like saying "guns are bad."
Not to Godwin this, but it was indeed bad when Hitler started being an ass and going to war with others (not to mention that whole holocaust thing). I'm not so sure I can agree it was bad for the nations that opposed him to band together and go to war to stop him. Thought about it this way, both guns and war are tools. How they are used is what matters.
War exists. Guns exist. You can't un-invent either of them.
By the way, I'm not saying I really agree with the current war(s); I'm just saying your black and white world you think we live in doesn't exist.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I can say why I do it.
Where I live, I only had two options for cell service- Verizon and Alltel. If you recall, Verizon bought out Alltel, so now my only option is Verizon. Until Sprint and AT&T get off their butts and add some towers in my area, (I live in a city with 160,000+ population and AT&T still doesn't even have 3G here) I have little choice.
So, if I want decent reception, it's Verizon or nothing. And since that's the case why wouldn't I save some money on my cell phone?
Perhaps they will eventually do the math and figure out that the phones that are rootable are bought more, and then they will start offering that as a feature.
More than likely they will just keep thinking it was the styling or the market conditions or the marketing campaign and keep right on going as normal.
The 'coverage war' between Verizon and AT&T is the first semi-competitive behavior I've seen from the mobile carriers in a long time. Still, they both have nearly identical (if not totally equal) price points, so its moot.
Still, the phones I can get on a certain carrier is part of their service. I could go with one of those cheap carriers around here and pay only $40 for unlimited data and more minutes than I'll ever use. But they don't have any good smart phones, so I stay with Verizon for now.
Google tried to sell you one, none of you cheap bastards bought one.
I think you have it all wrong.
The Nexus One only was available for T-Mobile (not exactly the biggest carrier state-side) and AT&T, which was going up against the extremely popular iDevices.
Lack of consumer demand didn't kill the device- the boardroom politics did. Why does AT&T love the iPhone? It's surely not the infrastructure problems they gained with the mass of users all wanting to watch videos of dogs skateboarding on Youtube. It's the fact that they have a highly desirable device that you can only get on their network. Even if AT&T wasn't already a household name, they are now attached to a device that is. That's big.
Compare this to the N1. Google comes to Verizon and wants to sell them on a new smartphone that they will have zero control over and is not going to win them any new customers at all, because it will exist on all carriers. Why would Verizon take the time and energy to get the handset working on their system for no gain, when they can work with Motorola and create a snazzy new Droid that, just like AT&T's iPhone, will only exist on their network thus attracting new customers. Not only that, but accepting Google's new phone would possibly hurt their relationship with their other business partners- I'm sure that there were some heated discussions between Verizon and Motorola's bigwigs when the N1 was first announced, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some bad blood between them and Google seeing how Google worked with them on the original Droid right before announcing their own super phone.
No, the N1 experiment never even got off the runway. It was an experiment to see if a device catering directly to geeks (who else would pay an extra $300 for an unlocked phone?) would have enough marketing power to sustain itself, and of course forcing carriers to open up a bit. It sadly failed on both accounts.
I guess I thought that whole lawsuit was mostly about the hardware of capacitive touchscreens- I didn't realize there were like 13 patents listed in the lawsuit.
And while many were hardware patents, you are right in that some were entirely software.
I haven't seen any patent lawsuits in recent memory for smartphone software.
I have seen lots of patent lawsuits in recent memory for smartphone hardware. And somehow, I don't see Microsoft coming to your rescue when Apple sues you for abusing a touch screen patent, or NTP sues you because you use the wrong chip in you phone.
Why not be on both? There's no reason why Google should have a monopoly for selling Android applications.
They don't have a monopoly.
There's already the gameloft store for games (that doesn't ever work) and that Mikandy store for porn apps which I haven't tried but probably has similar problems. There are probably a few others I haven't heard about, too.
Not to mention that anybody can just host the.apk file on a website for people to download on their phone. A few OSS apps that I use do exactly this. The whole web is their marketplace!
I don't see the big deal with this. Android gives you infinitely more information about what an app is going to do than anything on the PC.
On my phone, I'll at least know if the app is going to look at my location, contacts, etc. and can make the choice to install it or not.
On my PC, all I know is that I'm downloading some binary data that could do anything it wanted.
It's not that hard. If you download a game that wants access to your contact data and full internet access, don't install it. Yes, even if the game looks really, really, cool. You may claim that Google is the devil here because they allowed devs to have the possibility of accessing my data, but I claim that they're good for giving devs the option. If I want to write an app for my own phone to organize my contact list by area code, I can do that.
This is the same reason why I'm still running a version of Pandora from nearly a year ago, along with a couple other apps. I still get the annoying notification about having 3 updates ready to install, but I feel it's a small price to pay.
And today's kids that are growing up using services like Steam or DRM-laden music services will be used to it by the time it gets worse. Hell, the majority of the software I'm using right now, and the OS it's running on, are not and cannot be 'owned' by me, never mind if I bought it. We've already had instances of Amazon removing books from Kindles, and I would not be surprised if at some point soon Microsoft decides to remote-kill an OS in the future if you don't update it to a new version. "It's for your own good, and the good of the others on the internet" they will say.
...and yet, it is dramatically better than Windows'. Are you a troll? I don't see how else you could possibly believe that Windows is more secure than Linux.
I think it depends on what one means when they say "more secure". Is it the actual amount of security vulnerabilities in a system, or is it the likelyhood that they will be used, or is it the speed that vulnerabilities are fixed, or is it one of the many other questions one could fixate on? Or maybe all of the above?
Do I think Linux is more 'secure' than Windows? Yes. Do I think that, if some 'leet haxor' wanted to 'pwn my box' (and unlike most people that say that actually had the skills to pull it off) that he could? Yes. Of course one could state that no matter what OS was in question.
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you reviewed the the new source of an update to your linux system before compiling it yourself? If not, how do you know somebody didn't sneak some vulnerable and/or malicious code in there?
Point is- All OSes are insecure, even your pet one. Trying to figure out the one that is most secure is impossible to pin down because of semantics and statistical variables. It's not really worth ranting about.
I think there is a fallacy in your argument. Nearly all cars have trunks, and as you said, all of them are locked by default.
No computers to my knowledge come pre-installed with encryption software, and even if they did it takes intent to use it. Basically, a locked trunk is not rare, but an encrypted file is.
A more apt analogy would be a hardened safe in the back seat or trunk of your car. If it's seen, it will probably arise some suspicion- at least enough for the cop in a traffic stop to ask you what's in it.
For better or worse, suspicion is earned when you do something out of the ordinary. A safe in the car, an encrypted HD, being more nervous around a cop than expected, etc. All of those have fairly legal and/or mundane possible explanations, but will still likely get you detained.
IANAL, so I don't know those various reasons would stand up in court. But I do know there seem to be plenty of loopholes and other reasons they could give the judge after having plenty of time to think about it after the search has been conducted.
I think you're going to have to re-evaluate what an "honest job" is here shortly. We are quickly approaching a time where nearly everything will be automated- robots will make and serve your fast-food. Order for goods placed online will be packed and shipped by robots. Farms as we know them will cease to exist to be replaced by mega-plantations that output way more food.
Eventually, entertainment will be one of the few jobs left to us.
I'm not going to argue that the outmoded business that was based solely on a physical product need to reinvent themselves, but I still don't see a better idea in your reply.
Forget all the CEOs and semi-useless middle management that populate most of the publishing industry. If you freely allow bits to be copied, how are the authors going to get paid?
Yes, hopefully authors will someday realize that ebooks allow them to cut out the middle man. Humorously, Sony is kind of cutting their own throat here. The only thing holding back authors from selling their own goods at their own rates to everybody are the limited popularity of ebooks. Once most people have an ebook reader and the dead-tree book becomes a thing of the past, publishers will be screwed. All the benefits and services they have provided over the years will become moot- printing, shipping, getting stores to put them on the shelves, etc. The authors only have to realize that the tables have turned.
We're already seeing this happen in the music biz- all because of the ipod. The Kindle is ebook's ipod, and the change is coming.
I'm guessing the authors already make a living off less than that.
But to answer your question, they sell it for the same cost out of plain greed. Consumers have already been conditioned to shelling out $8 US for a paperback book (nevermind the insane cost of a hardcover) so why shouldn't they expect consumers will keep right on doing it when in electronic form?
My great worry is that all the extra profit is going straight to the top, instead of the authors for which I feel it rightfully belongs. Hopefully when ebooks become more popular, authors will realize they no longer need publishers for all the things they used to handle for them- the intricate printing process, shipping it and negotiating space on store shelves, marketing, etc. When this happens (and I feel it's already begun) I believe we will see cheaper books by authors who are paid more in line with what they deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
Begone, Specter of Defeat!
I'm not sure you could call it "Blizzard's mistake." It's not like they invented achievements or anything.
And also, as a person who mostly only plays single-player and some comp-stomps with some friends, I don't recall Blizzard ever 'forcing' it on me that my score was less than somebody else's. Perhaps I've not looked hard enough, but I don't remember seeing even a single-player ladder. And even if it existed, I don't know how that is forced on you any more than any other achievement system. If you go looking for it, it's there.
Saying "war is bad" is like saying "guns are bad."
No, saying "murder is bad" is like saying "war is bad".
Saying "canons are bad" would be like saying "guns are bad".
war is bad, and you're a piece of shit for disagreeing, for replying with a broken metaphor, for pulling a godwin...
You yell because I use a 'broken metaphor' while you personally insult me. First of all, that was an analogy, not a metaphor.
And for the record, the analogy is not broken. Guns and War both are horrible things that are somewhat checked by their very existence. Wars end wars. Guns protect you from other guns. Would it be better if neither of them existed? Yes. Are they inherently bad? No.
Just because you lacked the mental capacity to understand my point does not give you free reign to insult. Unless you really are just a troll, in which case I was wasting my time anyway.
5GHz means cycling every 0.2 nanoseconds. In 0.2 nanoseconds, light travels about 6cm. We're already pretty close to the limit for keeping processing synchronised over a large blob of silicon without using methods more cunning than just saying "feh, doesn't matter, light is fast"
That only matters if you're transferring every bit of information from one end of the case to the other. This is why we bundle up packets of info and feed it all to the CPU's cache to let it chew on it. And when's the last time you saw a CPU bigger than 6cm? (BTW, the CPU in your computer case right now is about 80% heat spreading material. The actual size of the chip itself is pretty small.)
This is also not taking into account extra pipes. Your fancy graphics card doesn't just have 1 input pin and 1 output pin. More pins means it can get more info into its cache faster.
My characters always had the Bloody Mess perk. There was never enough of a corpse left to write on.
War is bad. THIS SHOULDN'T BE CONTROVERSIAL, fuck.
Saying "war is bad" is like saying "guns are bad."
Not to Godwin this, but it was indeed bad when Hitler started being an ass and going to war with others (not to mention that whole holocaust thing). I'm not so sure I can agree it was bad for the nations that opposed him to band together and go to war to stop him. Thought about it this way, both guns and war are tools. How they are used is what matters.
War exists. Guns exist. You can't un-invent either of them.
By the way, I'm not saying I really agree with the current war(s); I'm just saying your black and white world you think we live in doesn't exist.
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I can say why I do it.
Where I live, I only had two options for cell service- Verizon and Alltel. If you recall, Verizon bought out Alltel, so now my only option is Verizon. Until Sprint and AT&T get off their butts and add some towers in my area, (I live in a city with 160,000+ population and AT&T still doesn't even have 3G here) I have little choice.
So, if I want decent reception, it's Verizon or nothing. And since that's the case why wouldn't I save some money on my cell phone?
Perhaps they will eventually do the math and figure out that the phones that are rootable are bought more, and then they will start offering that as a feature.
More than likely they will just keep thinking it was the styling or the market conditions or the marketing campaign and keep right on going as normal.
The 'coverage war' between Verizon and AT&T is the first semi-competitive behavior I've seen from the mobile carriers in a long time. Still, they both have nearly identical (if not totally equal) price points, so its moot.
Still, the phones I can get on a certain carrier is part of their service. I could go with one of those cheap carriers around here and pay only $40 for unlimited data and more minutes than I'll ever use. But they don't have any good smart phones, so I stay with Verizon for now.
Google tried to sell you one, none of you cheap bastards bought one.
I think you have it all wrong.
The Nexus One only was available for T-Mobile (not exactly the biggest carrier state-side) and AT&T, which was going up against the extremely popular iDevices.
Lack of consumer demand didn't kill the device- the boardroom politics did. Why does AT&T love the iPhone? It's surely not the infrastructure problems they gained with the mass of users all wanting to watch videos of dogs skateboarding on Youtube. It's the fact that they have a highly desirable device that you can only get on their network. Even if AT&T wasn't already a household name, they are now attached to a device that is. That's big.
Compare this to the N1. Google comes to Verizon and wants to sell them on a new smartphone that they will have zero control over and is not going to win them any new customers at all, because it will exist on all carriers. Why would Verizon take the time and energy to get the handset working on their system for no gain, when they can work with Motorola and create a snazzy new Droid that, just like AT&T's iPhone, will only exist on their network thus attracting new customers. Not only that, but accepting Google's new phone would possibly hurt their relationship with their other business partners- I'm sure that there were some heated discussions between Verizon and Motorola's bigwigs when the N1 was first announced, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some bad blood between them and Google seeing how Google worked with them on the original Droid right before announcing their own super phone.
No, the N1 experiment never even got off the runway. It was an experiment to see if a device catering directly to geeks (who else would pay an extra $300 for an unlocked phone?) would have enough marketing power to sustain itself, and of course forcing carriers to open up a bit. It sadly failed on both accounts.
I guess I thought that whole lawsuit was mostly about the hardware of capacitive touchscreens- I didn't realize there were like 13 patents listed in the lawsuit.
And while many were hardware patents, you are right in that some were entirely software.
I haven't seen any patent lawsuits in recent memory for smartphone software.
I have seen lots of patent lawsuits in recent memory for smartphone hardware. And somehow, I don't see Microsoft coming to your rescue when Apple sues you for abusing a touch screen patent, or NTP sues you because you use the wrong chip in you phone.
Why not be on both? There's no reason why Google should have a monopoly for selling Android applications.
They don't have a monopoly.
There's already the gameloft store for games (that doesn't ever work) and that Mikandy store for porn apps which I haven't tried but probably has similar problems. There are probably a few others I haven't heard about, too.
Not to mention that anybody can just host the .apk file on a website for people to download on their phone. A few OSS apps that I use do exactly this. The whole web is their marketplace!
Location isn't a big deal to me.
My name, phone number, contact list, call history, and text messages ARE.
I don't see the big deal with this. Android gives you infinitely more information about what an app is going to do than anything on the PC.
On my phone, I'll at least know if the app is going to look at my location, contacts, etc. and can make the choice to install it or not.
On my PC, all I know is that I'm downloading some binary data that could do anything it wanted.
It's not that hard. If you download a game that wants access to your contact data and full internet access, don't install it. Yes, even if the game looks really, really, cool. You may claim that Google is the devil here because they allowed devs to have the possibility of accessing my data, but I claim that they're good for giving devs the option. If I want to write an app for my own phone to organize my contact list by area code, I can do that.
This is the same reason why I'm still running a version of Pandora from nearly a year ago, along with a couple other apps. I still get the annoying notification about having 3 updates ready to install, but I feel it's a small price to pay.
He's closer to being right than you might think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_reflector
It's mostly because the building isn't angled at the sun and isn't a perfect parabolic curve that the hotspot moves around.
Guess I didn't think about it not being a perfect curve and how it would effect the focus from a ways away.
Thanks for being informative. =)
Since the building is basically parabolic, won't the spot stay mostly stationary? I mean, isn't that the whole point of parabolic focusers?
I say install a solar station at the location and let people charge their gadgets off it.
Look around you. It already IS happening.
And today's kids that are growing up using services like Steam or DRM-laden music services will be used to it by the time it gets worse. Hell, the majority of the software I'm using right now, and the OS it's running on, are not and cannot be 'owned' by me, never mind if I bought it. We've already had instances of Amazon removing books from Kindles, and I would not be surprised if at some point soon Microsoft decides to remote-kill an OS in the future if you don't update it to a new version. "It's for your own good, and the good of the others on the internet" they will say.
...and yet, it is dramatically better than Windows'. Are you a troll? I don't see how else you could possibly believe that Windows is more secure than Linux.
I think it depends on what one means when they say "more secure". Is it the actual amount of security vulnerabilities in a system, or is it the likelyhood that they will be used, or is it the speed that vulnerabilities are fixed, or is it one of the many other questions one could fixate on? Or maybe all of the above?
Do I think Linux is more 'secure' than Windows? Yes. Do I think that, if some 'leet haxor' wanted to 'pwn my box' (and unlike most people that say that actually had the skills to pull it off) that he could? Yes. Of course one could state that no matter what OS was in question.
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you reviewed the the new source of an update to your linux system before compiling it yourself? If not, how do you know somebody didn't sneak some vulnerable and/or malicious code in there?
Point is- All OSes are insecure, even your pet one. Trying to figure out the one that is most secure is impossible to pin down because of semantics and statistical variables. It's not really worth ranting about.
I think there is a fallacy in your argument. Nearly all cars have trunks, and as you said, all of them are locked by default.
No computers to my knowledge come pre-installed with encryption software, and even if they did it takes intent to use it. Basically, a locked trunk is not rare, but an encrypted file is.
A more apt analogy would be a hardened safe in the back seat or trunk of your car. If it's seen, it will probably arise some suspicion- at least enough for the cop in a traffic stop to ask you what's in it.
For better or worse, suspicion is earned when you do something out of the ordinary. A safe in the car, an encrypted HD, being more nervous around a cop than expected, etc. All of those have fairly legal and/or mundane possible explanations, but will still likely get you detained.
IANAL, so I don't know those various reasons would stand up in court. But I do know there seem to be plenty of loopholes and other reasons they could give the judge after having plenty of time to think about it after the search has been conducted.
Because the game is lots of fun to play with friends and because this 'alpha' is more stable than some games that are sold in stores?
I think you're going to have to re-evaluate what an "honest job" is here shortly. We are quickly approaching a time where nearly everything will be automated- robots will make and serve your fast-food. Order for goods placed online will be packed and shipped by robots. Farms as we know them will cease to exist to be replaced by mega-plantations that output way more food.
Eventually, entertainment will be one of the few jobs left to us.
I'm not going to argue that the outmoded business that was based solely on a physical product need to reinvent themselves, but I still don't see a better idea in your reply.
Forget all the CEOs and semi-useless middle management that populate most of the publishing industry. If you freely allow bits to be copied, how are the authors going to get paid?
Yes, hopefully authors will someday realize that ebooks allow them to cut out the middle man. Humorously, Sony is kind of cutting their own throat here. The only thing holding back authors from selling their own goods at their own rates to everybody are the limited popularity of ebooks. Once most people have an ebook reader and the dead-tree book becomes a thing of the past, publishers will be screwed. All the benefits and services they have provided over the years will become moot- printing, shipping, getting stores to put them on the shelves, etc. The authors only have to realize that the tables have turned.
We're already seeing this happen in the music biz- all because of the ipod. The Kindle is ebook's ipod, and the change is coming.
I'm guessing the authors already make a living off less than that.
But to answer your question, they sell it for the same cost out of plain greed. Consumers have already been conditioned to shelling out $8 US for a paperback book (nevermind the insane cost of a hardcover) so why shouldn't they expect consumers will keep right on doing it when in electronic form?
My great worry is that all the extra profit is going straight to the top, instead of the authors for which I feel it rightfully belongs. Hopefully when ebooks become more popular, authors will realize they no longer need publishers for all the things they used to handle for them- the intricate printing process, shipping it and negotiating space on store shelves, marketing, etc. When this happens (and I feel it's already begun) I believe we will see cheaper books by authors who are paid more in line with what they deserve.