British/Australian journalists might be a bit more flexible with the language. You can say 'Nato' and 'Nasa'. They've practically become words in their own right. This isn't the case for DDoS and PC though. You can't pronounce them as anything other than initialisms, which is exactly what they are. It's only an acronym if it forms a word. KGB, CIA, KFC - initialisms. LASER, SCUBA, SeAL - acronyms.
And then Muhammad later went to war with the Jewish tribes with which he had previously formed political bonds, because they had violated the agreement, and with Christians because they refused to respect his religious choice.
I'm no Muslim, in fact I'm an atheist and think the whole business of organised religion has been proven by history to be dangerous beyond compare, but I don't think it's fair to say that the Muslims in these countries are betraying the word of Muhammad just because those were his initial stances.
But by the same token I think it's important that Muslims recognise Muhammad's openness. He fought with the Jews and Christians that were around him and ridiculing/betraying him; not with Judaism and Christianity as a whole. I think the Imams have a lot to answer for, and so do our own leaders. No one is innocent here except those who are being fooled by those who would deny them knowledge, and thus dream themselves their masters.
Wouldn't it only be fraud if you paid and received the service for which you paid just to keep the service and take your money back?
That's one type of fraud. There are many others. Example: I work for a technology exchange company in the UK, and if one of our outlets has a customer sell something to us and sign for it, but using someone else's account, the customer is committing an act of fraud.
Microsoft is the one to blame for letting the PC games industry come to this sorry state with their pointless and incompetent foray into the console market with the Xbox fiasco.
If I change my name via deedpoll, I'm not 'spoofing' everyone I meet from then on into referring to me with a name that isn't mine. That is my name. If I change my name and then change it back, or simply cut out the actual changing of the name and just introduce myself with a different name for a week, I've spoofed them into thinking my name is something that it isn't.
Technologically I don't think there's a difference. If you consider intent, then you can draw a small, pretty inconsequential difference.
At yesterday's E3 announcement from Microsoft, the autumn update for the 360 was unveiled. One of the new features is the optional ability to install your games to the hard drive for fast loading times and no disc switching (if it's a multiple-disc game). You still need to insert the primary disc for the game, to prove you own it, but once it's verified the disc is in the drive it won't spin it up at all and will just read from the disk.
The 360 Elite comes with a 120GB drive. I presume (read: hope) Premium and Core consoles can be fitted with this drive too.
Depends entirely on the application domain. Business systems often need updating because the business environment changes. New regulations or a change in the business process forced by external factors mandate updated software or hacked-out ways of using the old software to fulfil the new needs where possible. These sorts of half-measures are performed because there's no one around to update the code, or the business is too afraid to update the system. It's why you see banks running old-as-arse systems... not just because they still work, but because they're too afraid to update the system because, for a bank, failure can be catastrophic.
I perceive the real problem in perpetuating these half-measures and out-of-software hackarounds to be a combination of stuck-in-the-mud 'we're safe if we don't try to change anything' thinking, and a lack of software engineers skilled in difficult, critical concepts like migration. A business will never migrate its system if it's too scared to and if there's no one around to make sure the process goes smoothly then you end up in that position forever.
(Note: I'm just a Software Engineering student, graduating this year. If anyone with copious amounts of practical experience in this area can correct or enlighten me, please do. The last thing I want to do is spread misinformation simply because I've misinterpreted/forgotten something, or haven't realised/seen something.)
Yeah I had to do a double-take on that one. Why on Earth would you post a description of the house and its position relative to a landmark in story about the inhabitant having lots of valuable stuff stolen? That's like a big "Try it yourself" invitation to any criminals smarter than the guys who got caught.
Journalist who wrote that needs to think about what he's writing.
There goes at least one sale of Spore that has been officially lost.
I'm never going to buy any game that require me to connect to the home office unless it is a network game and that's what I'm using it for. The stupidity in this requirement for a single player off-line game is unbelievable...I guess I'm not really as shocked as I pretend, but I'm horribly disappointed. Screw Spore. So say we all.
I'm not going to pay money for a game that I won't be able to play if my Internet connection goes down for an extended period of time for any of a multitude of reasons, or I move house and am without an Internet connection for a while.
This technology could be truly brilliant for people who can't use their hands to interact with their machines.
One of the guys I play EVE-Online with is wheel-chair bound and can't use his hands. He interacts with his computer using voice-commands, such as "Mouse Grid" to pop up a nine-square grid on the screen. He then recruisively selects grids by giving its number, and it splits into a grid of nine smaller squares. He repeats this until he gets a grid on what he wants to click on, and says "Mouse Grid". This all means he can't do anything as quick as other players, precluding him from fast-paced activities such as combat.
With this sort of tech, his interaction with the game would be immensely improved. I can't wait for this sort of tech to be around and affordable.
For crying out loud, NOAA has several terabytes of satellite images and weather forecasts I've got a book that says God told him about the flood. It didn't mention satellite imagery.
UK legislation lately has been full of shit that is either uninformed or empty legislation intended to make it look like the government did something about a problem.
The government said, long ago, that they would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". They recently passed one of their supposedly landmark pieces of anti-crime legislation: the Violent Crime Reduction Act. It does nothing but impose further restrictions on the law-abiding while doing nothing to tackle crime. At all. Everything it attempts to combat is already amply combated by existing legislation. One of the chief ways in which it attempts to combat gun crime is to ban the manufacture, sale, and import of Airsoft weapons.
A foaming-at-the-mouth, uninformed anti-gun group (called Mothers Against Guns) lobbied the government to ban these weapons because they think they can be converted to fire real ammunition. They can't; the gun would explode. They're not blank-firers that can be hollowed and repurposed, they're specifically built to take a gearbox. To repurpose an airsoft weapon you would need to have the chassis and internals from the real weapon. But still, the government took their word for it and now airsofters need to obtain a registration with the UK Airsoft Retailers Association (essentially this is a license to airsoft in the same sense that you obtain a license to shoot smallbore rifles, etc.), in order to be allowed to buy airsoft weapons. UKARA have decided that airsofting more than once a month is necessary to obtain registration, which puts me and my buddies shit out of luck because we airsoft once per month, sometimes missing a skirmish.
The whole ball-ache could have been avoided if the government had just known what they were legislating on.
It's not just a jukebox playing a set of music. There's a DJ, who talks to the listeners, and builds a rapport with them, adding variety and features to the show. That's why drivetime radio in the morning and evening is so popular - people like the DJ as well as the music he's playing. There's also the prospect of being introduced to new music you've never heard before.
I DJ (or rather, I present a show, since I'm not spinning decks) on EVE-Radio, a web radio station for the MMO EVE-Online, and I can tell you that's what people like about the radio. It's amplified, in the case of EVE Radio, as the listeners can actually come into the EVE Radio chat channel and talk with the DJ and other listeners, so it's far more communal than you sat at home, or in the car, tuned into your favourite station. Radio as a whole, offers more variety than just sticking in a CD you burned, or playing from your MP3 library. That's what people like about it, and that's what other people don't like about it.
Right on, the blog is more than 10 years old by a long shot, it's just its frame of existence has evolved. By rights you could say world war is little over 90 years old, but the definition of the world has changed a lot in the past millenia. It's a bad analogy, but I think it gets my point across. The only reason to claim blogging is only 10 years old is if you started blogging more than five years ago and want to sound like you were closer to the founding of blogging than if it started in the 80s. I think it would be prudent to keep it to the Internet though, otherwise we could claim syndicated stories in newspapers are early blogs and that's a step too far:)
If I hadn't already posted what you had already said about mod.ber, I would be modding you up informative. Great post.
That'll teach me to, in future, read down the page before I post.
Re:Overinflated self-importance, however...
on
Blogging Is 10 Years Old
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yup. First thing that could be likened to a blog was the usenet group mod.ber, which was a guy's one-man newsgroup which he used as a blog. That was like, mid '80s.
On the topic of the leadership skills that kid is gaining, this is a consideration I've come across recently and that might actually be a very valuable aspect of these computer games, in contrast to the ''they're turning your brain to mush!'' hyperbolae. My EVE-Online alliance has a 14-year old (well, he was fifteen the other week) pilot, and he is one of our fleet-commanders. While not as mature as those older than him, he is a great leader with a cool and level head, and I think his experience here is going to value him greatly when he is older, whether he is managing in business or joins the military.
EVE-Online uses what I consider a really nice system for skills and classes. Although there is really no concrete 'class' system, your character creation involves you choosing paths through race, education establishment, and specialisation. Each of those choices determines the skills you start out with and their levels, and also your attributes. Attributes are Memory, Intelligence, Charisma, Perception, and Willpower, and each skill has one of these as a primary and secondary attribute. The higher your Perception and Willpower, for example, the quicker your skills that are based in those attributes (such as the ship-piloting skills) will train. Your attributes can be increased by training the relevant skills in the Learning area.
As a result, you're never locked into a set of skills, but you're encouraged to pursue skills you will be able to train more quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Such as Prague's Franz Kafka International Airport
Daniel Jackson.
British/Australian journalists might be a bit more flexible with the language. You can say 'Nato' and 'Nasa'. They've practically become words in their own right. This isn't the case for DDoS and PC though. You can't pronounce them as anything other than initialisms, which is exactly what they are. It's only an acronym if it forms a word. KGB, CIA, KFC - initialisms. LASER, SCUBA, SeAL - acronyms.
And then Muhammad later went to war with the Jewish tribes with which he had previously formed political bonds, because they had violated the agreement, and with Christians because they refused to respect his religious choice.
I'm no Muslim, in fact I'm an atheist and think the whole business of organised religion has been proven by history to be dangerous beyond compare, but I don't think it's fair to say that the Muslims in these countries are betraying the word of Muhammad just because those were his initial stances.
But by the same token I think it's important that Muslims recognise Muhammad's openness. He fought with the Jews and Christians that were around him and ridiculing/betraying him; not with Judaism and Christianity as a whole. I think the Imams have a lot to answer for, and so do our own leaders. No one is innocent here except those who are being fooled by those who would deny them knowledge, and thus dream themselves their masters.
Sweet. Then we can give Cesc Fabregas an 'I failed the Turing Test' shirt.
Wouldn't it only be fraud if you paid and received the service for which you paid just to keep the service and take your money back?
That's one type of fraud. There are many others. Example: I work for a technology exchange company in the UK, and if one of our outlets has a customer sell something to us and sign for it, but using someone else's account, the customer is committing an act of fraud.
Microsoft is the one to blame for letting the PC games industry come to this sorry state with their pointless and incompetent foray into the console market with the Xbox fiasco.
...whut?
If I change my name via deedpoll, I'm not 'spoofing' everyone I meet from then on into referring to me with a name that isn't mine. That is my name. If I change my name and then change it back, or simply cut out the actual changing of the name and just introduce myself with a different name for a week, I've spoofed them into thinking my name is something that it isn't.
Technologically I don't think there's a difference. If you consider intent, then you can draw a small, pretty inconsequential difference.
At yesterday's E3 announcement from Microsoft, the autumn update for the 360 was unveiled. One of the new features is the optional ability to install your games to the hard drive for fast loading times and no disc switching (if it's a multiple-disc game). You still need to insert the primary disc for the game, to prove you own it, but once it's verified the disc is in the drive it won't spin it up at all and will just read from the disk.
The 360 Elite comes with a 120GB drive. I presume (read: hope) Premium and Core consoles can be fitted with this drive too.
Depends entirely on the application domain. Business systems often need updating because the business environment changes. New regulations or a change in the business process forced by external factors mandate updated software or hacked-out ways of using the old software to fulfil the new needs where possible. These sorts of half-measures are performed because there's no one around to update the code, or the business is too afraid to update the system. It's why you see banks running old-as-arse systems... not just because they still work, but because they're too afraid to update the system because, for a bank, failure can be catastrophic.
I perceive the real problem in perpetuating these half-measures and out-of-software hackarounds to be a combination of stuck-in-the-mud 'we're safe if we don't try to change anything' thinking, and a lack of software engineers skilled in difficult, critical concepts like migration. A business will never migrate its system if it's too scared to and if there's no one around to make sure the process goes smoothly then you end up in that position forever.
(Note: I'm just a Software Engineering student, graduating this year. If anyone with copious amounts of practical experience in this area can correct or enlighten me, please do. The last thing I want to do is spread misinformation simply because I've misinterpreted/forgotten something, or haven't realised/seen something.)
It's not Back to My Mac that costs $99 a year, it's .Mac, which contains Back to My Mac.
Yeah I had to do a double-take on that one. Why on Earth would you post a description of the house and its position relative to a landmark in story about the inhabitant having lots of valuable stuff stolen? That's like a big "Try it yourself" invitation to any criminals smarter than the guys who got caught.
Journalist who wrote that needs to think about what he's writing.
I'm never going to buy any game that require me to connect to the home office unless it is a network game and that's what I'm using it for. The stupidity in this requirement for a single player off-line game is unbelievable...I guess I'm not really as shocked as I pretend, but I'm horribly disappointed. Screw Spore. So say we all.
I'm not going to pay money for a game that I won't be able to play if my Internet connection goes down for an extended period of time for any of a multitude of reasons, or I move house and am without an Internet connection for a while.
This DRM shit is getting out of hand.
This technology could be truly brilliant for people who can't use their hands to interact with their machines.
One of the guys I play EVE-Online with is wheel-chair bound and can't use his hands. He interacts with his computer using voice-commands, such as "Mouse Grid" to pop up a nine-square grid on the screen. He then recruisively selects grids by giving its number, and it splits into a grid of nine smaller squares. He repeats this until he gets a grid on what he wants to click on, and says "Mouse Grid". This all means he can't do anything as quick as other players, precluding him from fast-paced activities such as combat.
With this sort of tech, his interaction with the game would be immensely improved. I can't wait for this sort of tech to be around and affordable.
RUCenter disallow domains with less than three characters :(
;_;
I tried desudesude.su but someone registered it on Feb 14th
It's suspicious if you're reading it and you don't realise it's your code because you keep thinking "What the hell is this guy doing?"
I don't know what the entry in about:config is in Firefox, but if it's network.prefetch-next then the default value seems to be true.
The Feds are gonna be getting a hell of a lot of false positives.
UK legislation lately has been full of shit that is either uninformed or empty legislation intended to make it look like the government did something about a problem.
The government said, long ago, that they would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". They recently passed one of their supposedly landmark pieces of anti-crime legislation: the Violent Crime Reduction Act. It does nothing but impose further restrictions on the law-abiding while doing nothing to tackle crime. At all. Everything it attempts to combat is already amply combated by existing legislation. One of the chief ways in which it attempts to combat gun crime is to ban the manufacture, sale, and import of Airsoft weapons.
A foaming-at-the-mouth, uninformed anti-gun group (called Mothers Against Guns) lobbied the government to ban these weapons because they think they can be converted to fire real ammunition. They can't; the gun would explode. They're not blank-firers that can be hollowed and repurposed, they're specifically built to take a gearbox. To repurpose an airsoft weapon you would need to have the chassis and internals from the real weapon. But still, the government took their word for it and now airsofters need to obtain a registration with the UK Airsoft Retailers Association (essentially this is a license to airsoft in the same sense that you obtain a license to shoot smallbore rifles, etc.), in order to be allowed to buy airsoft weapons. UKARA have decided that airsofting more than once a month is necessary to obtain registration, which puts me and my buddies shit out of luck because we airsoft once per month, sometimes missing a skirmish.
The whole ball-ache could have been avoided if the government had just known what they were legislating on.
Leaving this country as soon as possible.
The V stands for Versatile, but officially the format is simply "DVD" with no acronymical expansion provided.
So, I suppose HD DVD is correct, but I must admit, I do prefer HDVD.
It's not just a jukebox playing a set of music. There's a DJ, who talks to the listeners, and builds a rapport with them, adding variety and features to the show. That's why drivetime radio in the morning and evening is so popular - people like the DJ as well as the music he's playing. There's also the prospect of being introduced to new music you've never heard before.
I DJ (or rather, I present a show, since I'm not spinning decks) on EVE-Radio, a web radio station for the MMO EVE-Online, and I can tell you that's what people like about the radio. It's amplified, in the case of EVE Radio, as the listeners can actually come into the EVE Radio chat channel and talk with the DJ and other listeners, so it's far more communal than you sat at home, or in the car, tuned into your favourite station. Radio as a whole, offers more variety than just sticking in a CD you burned, or playing from your MP3 library. That's what people like about it, and that's what other people don't like about it.
Right on, the blog is more than 10 years old by a long shot, it's just its frame of existence has evolved. By rights you could say world war is little over 90 years old, but the definition of the world has changed a lot in the past millenia. It's a bad analogy, but I think it gets my point across. The only reason to claim blogging is only 10 years old is if you started blogging more than five years ago and want to sound like you were closer to the founding of blogging than if it started in the 80s. I think it would be prudent to keep it to the Internet though, otherwise we could claim syndicated stories in newspapers are early blogs and that's a step too far :)
If I hadn't already posted what you had already said about mod.ber, I would be modding you up informative. Great post.
That'll teach me to, in future, read down the page before I post.
Yup. First thing that could be likened to a blog was the usenet group mod.ber, which was a guy's one-man newsgroup which he used as a blog. That was like, mid '80s.
On the topic of the leadership skills that kid is gaining, this is a consideration I've come across recently and that might actually be a very valuable aspect of these computer games, in contrast to the ''they're turning your brain to mush!'' hyperbolae. My EVE-Online alliance has a 14-year old (well, he was fifteen the other week) pilot, and he is one of our fleet-commanders. While not as mature as those older than him, he is a great leader with a cool and level head, and I think his experience here is going to value him greatly when he is older, whether he is managing in business or joins the military.
EVE-Online uses what I consider a really nice system for skills and classes. Although there is really no concrete 'class' system, your character creation involves you choosing paths through race, education establishment, and specialisation. Each of those choices determines the skills you start out with and their levels, and also your attributes. Attributes are Memory, Intelligence, Charisma, Perception, and Willpower, and each skill has one of these as a primary and secondary attribute. The higher your Perception and Willpower, for example, the quicker your skills that are based in those attributes (such as the ship-piloting skills) will train. Your attributes can be increased by training the relevant skills in the Learning area.
As a result, you're never locked into a set of skills, but you're encouraged to pursue skills you will be able to train more quickly.