Not to mention lack of knowledge or care. I posted in another story how my parents pay land tax for local schools, yet someone in town who doesn't pay land tax (because they rent, etc.) will vote for a levy to gain school funds because it sounds like a good thing to them. It's not coming out of their pocket.
Now there is some screwed up scheme where the state takes the property taxes that would go to schools normally and then gives it back at the end of the year in order to redistribute it to poorer districts where people moved away from for various reasons.
I have parents who are land-owners (roughly 350 acres, mostly farmland being farmed by "hired" farmers, but a good portion of woodland) and this type of policy really irks me. The reason being: My parents pay more land taxes than anyone living in towns nearby. Now, they do get a healthy check from the farmers each season but it's enough to cover taxes, and the mortgages. I'd be pissed if I was giving that much money to the state who was then giving it someone else. Especially someone most likely living in town who probably doesn't own the land they live on and aren't paying taxes... but they'll vote for the levy every time.
So what are they supposed to do to make a profit on this land? Plow under the woodland and make more farmland? That's not going to happen.
I've always had a bad taste in my mouth about land taxed school funding growing up with this injustice over my family's head.
EQ was my first. I spent years in the world and it never got old. The classes all had purpose, the spells all didn't. (minor illusion was the best, right next to the mages ability to summon things for their pets and fireworks.) Night was actually dark, you could see what a mob was carrying, drive by buffs were the best present anyone could offer...
Not to mention, EQ had dungeons worth going into. They were not easy to get into, nor easy to get out of. As much as everyone hated trains, everyone knew to get out of the way when they were coming. (And there was a way out. Not all the dungeons were linear roller coaster rides with only one path.)
In the early days of EQ, Fine Steel was where it was at. You were lucky to get Combine stuff. There's just so much that I remember about EQ and so much I forget about all these other MMOs that keep popping up.
Oh, and Faction! Being able to align with the gnolls and visit their merchant. It was a minor victory to be sure, but it was an option.
So much of that game was memorable. You will probably say it was because it was my first MMO, but it was more than that though. It was more than any one single player RPG ever was.
You mean besides the grinding of strange looking beasts outside of town for hours on end?
That's all I remember of FFXI. Well, that and having to live in the auction house, buy all kinds of crap for your mostly useless apartment instance where you sit around for hours on end "synthesizing" stuff. I won't even get into the the fact that it's written around the console controls which makes playing on the PC mind numbing at times, but oh... it does have the standard go kill 300 of those things that look like crocodiles quests. On top of that, it's your typical zero fun until X level when they give you something that should have been in the game from level 1. Yeah, I played it. I believe I got to around level 20 or so before I got so mind numbingly bored with the repetitiveness of it all.
I certainly hope they do better with The Wheel of Time MMOs & don't dish me another buggy clone like Lord of the Rings or Warhammer
You can hope all you like, but it's not going to happen. I'm firmly under the belief that all MMOs for the near future will be cookie cutter clones of each other. They will all attempt to drag out the game for as long as possible with needless time sinks, poor stories, even worse level curves, maps made for the quick jaunt in and out, porting all over the land, and prefab classes with prefab progression.
Hate to be a cynic... but it's what I've seen going through 20 (or more) different MMOs looking for one that's different. So far it's been a waste of time and money. I'd be very surprised to see one in the near future that actually tries to break the common mold.
I agree with you, but look how poorly Voyager did... Granted, I loved watching all the episodes after it was canceled, but when it was originally aired, it wasn't ST. The Defiant was a ship I was more interested in.
But the pilots aren't given the ability to take off to another country to trade iron while they are being trained either...
So, this is where I hit the wall of stupidity. The skills are time based to make them take longer, to make you keep feeding them money. That's the ONLY reason for a time/skill based system like this. It's an artificial barrier to keep "power gamers" from out pacing the developers.
But I don't use Word as a power user. In fact, I might open it twice a year. Hunting down options in the ribbon is not my idea of usable. However, if the menu items are all laid out for easy browsing in categories that make them easy to locate... it's a win in my book for usability.
I also turn off the stupid feature of "personalized" menus in everything for just this reason. I like seeing all the options available instead of being spoon fed a short list that are most common.
Also, efficiency is load times as well. If it has to load in more crap to render some menus instead of just putting them on the screen, then it's eating more memory, taking longer to load, and generally being inefficient.
Mainly Calc. I would open it on occasion for quick math. That's all I used it for, that's all I need it to do. It doesn't need to be bulky or complicated. If I wanted more, I always had Calc2. The same with Paint. It's small, quick and dirty. I use Paint.NET for "more complex" stuff and I thought I read that notepad would be "ribbon-ified"... I'd likely replace with with Notepad2 or Notepad++ anyway.
It just doesn't make sense to go and over complicate such simple tools. Maybe I'm getting old and grumpy.
For comparison, the PC Pro benchmarks complete around 22% more quickly on XP than on Vista, as detailed in my feature "Memory Laid Bare" (issue 169, p122).
Apparently the OS DOES have something to do with it.
You'll have to let me know if I can turn the ribbon off and use it in classic mode or at least copy my old versions into 7. I know there's no way I'm going to avoid it for work, and if I'm going to be forced to use it, I might as well make it work like I want.
This is a new world we live in. We have to know more information about it so we can cater a program specifically to you for fairness and equality. If we don't gather specific information about the events, race, sex, sexual preference and hair color of the persons involved, how are we to make sure they get an equal* resolution.
* equal in used in this context is shorthand for "fair and equal according to the person involved"
This is a new age of statistics. Instead of putting numbers up there that could be misinterpreted, the author has chosen to take the politically correct route and allow the user the decision that best pleases them.
This way you get your message out, and the person on the other side is happy with their decision. It's a win-win!
On the internet, you can go off on a tangent and investigate questions you have. On the TV/Radio, you don't have that many chances to branch your train of thought and must accept what they are saying as if it has basis, then possibly read about it in the paper the next morning to validate/debunk their claims.
It's kind of like dealing with kids. They want candy, toys, and recess all day long. If you promise them that in exchange for work, they'll likely bite.
Give a kid $5 and he'll go buy the most expensive thing he can buy with $5 instead of buying the $3 toy and putting the $2 away for when he gets sick or stops getting allowance.
Obama was the cool Uncle who brought gifts. McCain was the evil Dad who made you go to your room.
I thought Eve you just log in, select your skills then log out for weeks waiting for them to train up.
At least that's my experience with it. I always hated crafting in MMOs and Eve (with it's corporations and focus on money it seems) feels like a huge crafting MMO to me, without crafting.
I played it for a month and a half and originally, I thought I'd go out and adventure. I'd check out all the bases I could. I'd see all the cool systems I wanted to see. Then the reality of space kicked in. Traveling was pretty boring, I couldn't use a ship I acquired from killing some Pirate for weeks (...weeks), and combat was your typical MMO target and shoot. What irked me most about the game though was the lack of ability to drive a spaceship before being trained. I mean... I can go out and buy a car and learn to drive it in a few minutes... at most an hour if it were a REALLY complicated car. Sure you may not be an expert at it, but you CAN drive it. Maybe the future makes all ships so different from each other that it requires special degrees from a major university to teach you how to drive each one. The same applies to weapons, and pretty much everything in the game.
Add that to the fact that you can never "catch up" seems to remove the skill of advancing your character faster/slower than someone else. Oh, and it feels like they already plotted out how much money (real life) it is going to take for anyone to play the game. They know exactly how much time you've invested in the game and how much money you've given them. It just feels like it's "on rails" too much.
If 20 million Americans have poor eyesight, and it turns out that 80% of them are African-American - it makes sense to have programs that hand out recycled glasses in predominantly African-American areas. Doing so does not hurt anyone else.
So what about the neighborhoods that are not getting glasses? What makes them any less special? Why play favorites to a specific neighborhood. I don't understand that thinking. You keep saying this.
But you're foolish to see it that way. If 1% more of African-Americans stay in school this year, it's a huge victory for them, for me, for you, for America. To see it as anything else is really selfish, and immature, and insulting to the idea that we're all in this together, and that we should all wish for each other what we wish for ourselves (ie, Golden Rule, etc.)
If 1% more of every American stay in school this year, it's a huge victory for everybody as well. In fact, I could argue that it's even more of a victory because I didn't discriminate against any one person and more people benefit. I don't understand why you keep trying to pin me as a person that says: "No support for anyone." You keep trying to categorize me as some sort of racist because I think everyone should be treated equal and nobody should be treated any more. I say equal support for everyone and no special treatment based on race. I never said, "No special treatment because they are this specific race." You are trying to twist my words.
Slashdot Mirror
It would have worked if the feds didn't bail out the idiots. They'd be out of business by now.
Not to mention lack of knowledge or care. I posted in another story how my parents pay land tax for local schools, yet someone in town who doesn't pay land tax (because they rent, etc.) will vote for a levy to gain school funds because it sounds like a good thing to them. It's not coming out of their pocket.
Now there is some screwed up scheme where the state takes the property taxes that would go to schools normally and then gives it back at the end of the year in order to redistribute it to poorer districts where people moved away from for various reasons.
I have parents who are land-owners (roughly 350 acres, mostly farmland being farmed by "hired" farmers, but a good portion of woodland) and this type of policy really irks me. The reason being: My parents pay more land taxes than anyone living in towns nearby. Now, they do get a healthy check from the farmers each season but it's enough to cover taxes, and the mortgages. I'd be pissed if I was giving that much money to the state who was then giving it someone else. Especially someone most likely living in town who probably doesn't own the land they live on and aren't paying taxes... but they'll vote for the levy every time.
So what are they supposed to do to make a profit on this land? Plow under the woodland and make more farmland? That's not going to happen.
I've always had a bad taste in my mouth about land taxed school funding growing up with this injustice over my family's head.
Sarcasm? On the Internet?
EQ was my first. I spent years in the world and it never got old. The classes all had purpose, the spells all didn't. (minor illusion was the best, right next to the mages ability to summon things for their pets and fireworks.) Night was actually dark, you could see what a mob was carrying, drive by buffs were the best present anyone could offer...
Not to mention, EQ had dungeons worth going into. They were not easy to get into, nor easy to get out of. As much as everyone hated trains, everyone knew to get out of the way when they were coming. (And there was a way out. Not all the dungeons were linear roller coaster rides with only one path.)
In the early days of EQ, Fine Steel was where it was at. You were lucky to get Combine stuff. There's just so much that I remember about EQ and so much I forget about all these other MMOs that keep popping up.
Oh, and Faction! Being able to align with the gnolls and visit their merchant. It was a minor victory to be sure, but it was an option.
So much of that game was memorable. You will probably say it was because it was my first MMO, but it was more than that though. It was more than any one single player RPG ever was.
You mean besides the grinding of strange looking beasts outside of town for hours on end?
That's all I remember of FFXI. Well, that and having to live in the auction house, buy all kinds of crap for your mostly useless apartment instance where you sit around for hours on end "synthesizing" stuff. I won't even get into the the fact that it's written around the console controls which makes playing on the PC mind numbing at times, but oh... it does have the standard go kill 300 of those things that look like crocodiles quests. On top of that, it's your typical zero fun until X level when they give you something that should have been in the game from level 1. Yeah, I played it. I believe I got to around level 20 or so before I got so mind numbingly bored with the repetitiveness of it all.
I certainly hope they do better with The Wheel of Time MMOs & don't dish me another buggy clone like Lord of the Rings or Warhammer
You can hope all you like, but it's not going to happen. I'm firmly under the belief that all MMOs for the near future will be cookie cutter clones of each other. They will all attempt to drag out the game for as long as possible with needless time sinks, poor stories, even worse level curves, maps made for the quick jaunt in and out, porting all over the land, and prefab classes with prefab progression.
Hate to be a cynic... but it's what I've seen going through 20 (or more) different MMOs looking for one that's different. So far it's been a waste of time and money. I'd be very surprised to see one in the near future that actually tries to break the common mold.
I agree with you, but look how poorly Voyager did... Granted, I loved watching all the episodes after it was canceled, but when it was originally aired, it wasn't ST. The Defiant was a ship I was more interested in.
But the pilots aren't given the ability to take off to another country to trade iron while they are being trained either...
So, this is where I hit the wall of stupidity. The skills are time based to make them take longer, to make you keep feeding them money. That's the ONLY reason for a time/skill based system like this. It's an artificial barrier to keep "power gamers" from out pacing the developers.
But I don't use Word as a power user. In fact, I might open it twice a year. Hunting down options in the ribbon is not my idea of usable. However, if the menu items are all laid out for easy browsing in categories that make them easy to locate... it's a win in my book for usability.
I also turn off the stupid feature of "personalized" menus in everything for just this reason. I like seeing all the options available instead of being spoon fed a short list that are most common.
Also, efficiency is load times as well. If it has to load in more crap to render some menus instead of just putting them on the screen, then it's eating more memory, taking longer to load, and generally being inefficient.
Mainly Calc. I would open it on occasion for quick math. That's all I used it for, that's all I need it to do. It doesn't need to be bulky or complicated. If I wanted more, I always had Calc2. The same with Paint. It's small, quick and dirty. I use Paint.NET for "more complex" stuff and I thought I read that notepad would be "ribbon-ified"... I'd likely replace with with Notepad2 or Notepad++ anyway.
It just doesn't make sense to go and over complicate such simple tools. Maybe I'm getting old and grumpy.
Read one post up:
For comparison, the PC Pro benchmarks complete around 22% more quickly on XP than on Vista, as detailed in my feature "Memory Laid Bare" (issue 169, p122).
Apparently the OS DOES have something to do with it.
But if you have the capability to allow it to run and still have resources left over for doing other things... wouldn't that be beneficial?
Or do we still only do one thing at a time?
You'll have to let me know if I can turn the ribbon off and use it in classic mode or at least copy my old versions into 7. I know there's no way I'm going to avoid it for work, and if I'm going to be forced to use it, I might as well make it work like I want.
This is a new world we live in. We have to know more information about it so we can cater a program specifically to you for fairness and equality. If we don't gather specific information about the events, race, sex, sexual preference and hair color of the persons involved, how are we to make sure they get an equal* resolution.
* equal in used in this context is shorthand for "fair and equal according to the person involved"
(there goes my Karma...)
This is a new age of statistics. Instead of putting numbers up there that could be misinterpreted, the author has chosen to take the politically correct route and allow the user the decision that best pleases them.
This way you get your message out, and the person on the other side is happy with their decision. It's a win-win!
There's a really cool little "real time" regex analyzer written in Flex: (if you're not one of them scared to death by Flash content)
http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
Maybe you can monkey your way into "regexing" the a out of apple :p
On the internet, you can go off on a tangent and investigate questions you have. On the TV/Radio, you don't have that many chances to branch your train of thought and must accept what they are saying as if it has basis, then possibly read about it in the paper the next morning to validate/debunk their claims.
"Nerds" are not wholly unaffected by government. It's unfortunate, but true.
It's kind of like dealing with kids. They want candy, toys, and recess all day long. If you promise them that in exchange for work, they'll likely bite.
Give a kid $5 and he'll go buy the most expensive thing he can buy with $5 instead of buying the $3 toy and putting the $2 away for when he gets sick or stops getting allowance.
Obama was the cool Uncle who brought gifts. McCain was the evil Dad who made you go to your room.
I thought Eve you just log in, select your skills then log out for weeks waiting for them to train up.
At least that's my experience with it. I always hated crafting in MMOs and Eve (with it's corporations and focus on money it seems) feels like a huge crafting MMO to me, without crafting.
I played it for a month and a half and originally, I thought I'd go out and adventure. I'd check out all the bases I could. I'd see all the cool systems I wanted to see. Then the reality of space kicked in. Traveling was pretty boring, I couldn't use a ship I acquired from killing some Pirate for weeks (...weeks), and combat was your typical MMO target and shoot. What irked me most about the game though was the lack of ability to drive a spaceship before being trained. I mean... I can go out and buy a car and learn to drive it in a few minutes... at most an hour if it were a REALLY complicated car. Sure you may not be an expert at it, but you CAN drive it. Maybe the future makes all ships so different from each other that it requires special degrees from a major university to teach you how to drive each one. The same applies to weapons, and pretty much everything in the game.
Add that to the fact that you can never "catch up" seems to remove the skill of advancing your character faster/slower than someone else. Oh, and it feels like they already plotted out how much money (real life) it is going to take for anyone to play the game. They know exactly how much time you've invested in the game and how much money you've given them. It just feels like it's "on rails" too much.
I can't watch the video right now, so I'm assuming the graph is processor utilization?
Could it possibly be because the AMD processor is running some kind of instruction translation, communication layer, or something like that?
Nobody ever said it was an Earth Year.
But it's apparently worth your time to post and come back to check for responses.
If 20 million Americans have poor eyesight, and it turns out that 80% of them are African-American - it makes sense to have programs that hand out recycled glasses in predominantly African-American areas. Doing so does not hurt anyone else.
So what about the neighborhoods that are not getting glasses? What makes them any less special? Why play favorites to a specific neighborhood. I don't understand that thinking. You keep saying this.
But you're foolish to see it that way. If 1% more of African-Americans stay in school this year, it's a huge victory for them, for me, for you, for America. To see it as anything else is really selfish, and immature, and insulting to the idea that we're all in this together, and that we should all wish for each other what we wish for ourselves (ie, Golden Rule, etc.)
If 1% more of every American stay in school this year, it's a huge victory for everybody as well. In fact, I could argue that it's even more of a victory because I didn't discriminate against any one person and more people benefit. I don't understand why you keep trying to pin me as a person that says: "No support for anyone." You keep trying to categorize me as some sort of racist because I think everyone should be treated equal and nobody should be treated any more. I say equal support for everyone and no special treatment based on race. I never said, "No special treatment because they are this specific race." You are trying to twist my words.