You forgot to point out that moving out of the way will often let the speeder travel on down the road and be at higher risk for a ticket then if they were following you at the speed limit...
This is why I don't understand people that drive in the left lane on the highway. Don't try to be a cop and slow down traffic. Let it flow by you and let the taxes you pay be put to work. (Even though I'd much rather have my taxes go toward detectives solving crimes instead of patrols punishing law biding citizens for driving a few miles over... but I don't seem to have control over my money after it's taken from me.)
Perhaps you could explain this thought to me? What is it about a car that makes you think this? Also, I'd like to find out why people feel the need to scream out their windows that they feel I'm gay for driving it but when I'm stopped at lights or other locations people think the car looks awesome.
For the record, I drive an 08 Deep Blue hard top MX5 and it's a damn fine sports car. I decided on it over the other two seat sports cars in the general pricing area of $30K US (including a used Nissan 350Z, a Solstice/Sky, and a used Z3) and I found it to be the best deal for the money with the least amount of cheap plastic dash pieces.
Try driving an '08 MX5 Miata. I get all kinds of mixed responses. People that tell me it's a nice looking car when I stop at places (like the gas station, drive through, or the cop that pulled me over for not having a front plate, etc.) and people that feel the need to scream out their window that I'm some kind of "faggot" or "homo" for driving it while they speed off or pass by. I'm not sure what exactly inspires them to do so, but the record is currently 10 compliments vs. 3 people with some kind of brain trauma.
I think it's a credit to Linux. If so many different distributions can run under the same roof so easily without too much of a headache, it means that migrating your office to another distribution can be done over a long term instead of a steep upgrade hill. You can maintain the leading edge software in whichever distribution shines at the time and know that you should be able to migrate into the next big thing fairly easily.
Maybe they just create little sandboxes for every application that runs. If it needs one of these system files, a copy is distributed into a nice little cloned folder tree. You could then calculate the space required by this application by the size of it's sandbox. Let the user know that their application is taking up gigs of drive space and complain to the company. Each app has it's own little fake environment (created at the time it was requested, registry and all) that it can screw up and the only failure would be the application itself.
That excuse of making it purposefully difficult leads me to believe that MS truly WAS NOT done with Vista, they needed to get something on the market and decided to use it as a scapegoat and monetary income for development time and beta testing for Win 7.
You can't really be vague about a file. If I want to gain access to a system file, I pretty much have to do it by name. Also, Windows is blocking it for some reason. Why does that reason have to be hidden? "Oh, I see you have peon user rights, but you need power user rights to gain access to c:\winnt\notepad.exe"
"______ program needs access to a restricted part of the registry to be able to read/write data. Cancel/Allow? (Click here to more details on the requested operation) >> someapp.exe is trying to request access to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProductKey"
And while we are on it... you should at least be able to specify conditional allowance. (Cancel | Allow This | Allow All)
So what IS it blocking access to? The manager application? A specific file? A folder you don't have native rights to? How could an educated technician change his PC configuration to remove this prompt when "managing" your PC? Maybe he/she would like to advance their rights just enough to be able to shutdown a service without having to authorize it every time. Why do they have to disable the UAC entirely if they only want to disable it for this purpose? What if they wanted to do something silly like defragment a drive from the manage screen but wanted to still be warned if something tries to install device drivers or CDROM rootkit drivers.
Call it pure lazy, but even I just snubbed off a certified letter recently because it was far more trouble to drive to the post office to accept it. If they would have just left it in my mailbox, I would have been far more likely to actually read it.
The purpose of (strong) artificial intelligence isn't to trick humans somehow, it is to figure out how our mind works. What is the algorithm that powers the human brain? No one knows.
We have to know the algorithm... otherwise we wouldn't work. We just can't see it. It's closed source and we are trying to reverse engineer it.
Does anyone know of an inline battery backup system that can be used on 12VDC devices like say... Linksys Routers? (Wall AC -> Transformer -> battery -> router) I've been looking for a solution to keep my router online without having to get a UPS to burn energy on conversion and charging DC batteries, then converting it back to AC for the adapter, then back to DC for the router.
Also, I wondered if anyone knew of a DC Power supply for PCs that would run off a (or the same) 12V DC battery array for the same purpose of avoiding AC -> DC -> AC -> DC conversions.
This of course would be for home use. This article (and the proposition of moving servers to DC source) seemed the fitting place to inquire to my IT brothers and sisters. Googling for these types of things can really be a pain! I did find solutions where people use tank batteries to power HAM transmitters though.;)
Yes, they will both be in a struggle to maintain 100% compatibility as well, to a point. As soon as Mono comes out with a new version Microsoft will create a new incompatible version like they have been doing. This is the position MS want to be in. They've somewhat lost the ability to change Win32 because it would break everything. They can create a new version of.NET and just claim you need the new run time. Seriously. Why do we need 6 run time environments (1.0, 1.1, 2, 3, 3.5... and soon 4)? While I am on the subject... if 3.0 is built on 2 with WPF, why isn't it called 2.5 and why isn't 3.5 (3 with LINQ?) called 2.55? I mean, let's give Java it's due. Version 1.6.4 will run all old Java code and.NET 2 won't run 1.1 byte code without the 1.1 libraries.
Wait...what does TV have to do with this? Are you trying to tell me that Hugh Laurie isn't some super smart medical diagnosis guru with a bum leg and drug addiction?
Totally half ass conjecture here, but these galaxies we see that spew light and matter out like giant cosmic "ray-guns"... couldn't these be black holes that we see from the side? I mean, you have a ton of gravitational pull grabbing at all light and matter in the area and throwing it out into space in one direction for light years. Maybe, and this is just a guess, the "black holes" we think we know about are actually this type of phenomena but we are seeing it from a bad angle?
"I hate Flash because it's an insecure resource hog."
That's kind of like saying you have C because it's an insecure resource hog. Flash can be secure and fairly efficient depending on the programmer. As a Flash developer, I see many... many cases of bad code or practice (mainly because Actionscript is so lenient) but that doesn't automatically delegate Flash to the worst programming language in the world.
Frankly, it's quite good at what it does and it surprises me sometimes in how well it handles animated vectorized graphics and other media so well.
Web browsers!? Why should I have to install something that makes me go out of my way to enter a URL and obtain such files when I can just read it on the BBS with my perfectly stable modem terminal? I don't even need a mouse to use it and it's a much more keyboard friendly design!
... and the fact that the content is geared to multiple people and soloing content in EQ is a suicide mission. Grouping, which as you pointed out, is near impossible because everyone that's new to the game will skip by those areas because: a. The loot isn't as good as the expansion levels b. There's nobody to play with c. It doesn't look new
Now, I give in to the fact that I love eye candy just as much as the next guy, so C is just as much my problem as the next guy. I also love (A) getting loot to advance my character, but B is pretty much a deal breaker in every sense. There's no incentive (loot or visual) to risk my experience for such a small reward. The dungeons were designed and populated for a group of people. A solo character would have to visit the dungeon much later in their career and have to suffer with the sub-level loot drops that happen there. Why should someone do this if you can easily get a group in an expansion zone on your high level character and feel like you are actually progressing at something?
I'm not saying that people are wrong or that players cause this to happen. I actually blame the developer for "outdating" their old content so players buy their expansion. I also blame guilds and socialites for having to compete with each other for loot to show off instead of enjoying the game for something other than a pissing contest.
Which brings me to an idea I had years ago. Spawns and mob difficulty should be based on the number of people and/or levels in a given area. This would make old content more appealing for the solo player as they would have a better shot at getting some item that the power gamers spent weeks camping when the game was new (I'm looking at you FBSS!) but every time I mention it, people get all defensive and feel that everyone else must suffer the week long waits they had trying to be "cool".
That's pretty much what I was getting at. I played EQ1 for YEARS and the only content ever added was Raid and Guild centric content. I sadly jumped from MMO to MMO from that till Warhammer today. It felt as though the adventuring player that might stop to read would be left out of every expansion. Games do that even today (including WoW and EQ2... and yes, I've played them and got sick of the end game.) For the record, End Game is not what I was talking about for "top people". I meant those that some would consider power gamers (and yes, I've been there too...) The people that bitch and complain that their chosen class can't kill X other class and demand nerfs to get their kicks. These people most likely have multiple accounts or are influential in a guild and would leave if they are not kept happy. Of course... since an ass ton of content in MMOs is guild oriented or geared in such a way that you have to do it "for the guild" (more so as the days go on) the fact that this person is now leaving leaves the guild in a sad shape and looking for a replacement or a new game. Now, you have one power gamer who raids a lot and is the center piece of his raid guild. He has the power to pull the plug on his subscription and the sub of at least 6 other people. MMO designers know this. They cater to this crowd and promote this practice. It's the perfect peer pressure marketing. I don't have stats, but I'd guarantee that people in guilds are less likely to dump a game if it's not fun. (Just like someone will stick with a job because it's not looking for another and not getting paid.) Sadly an MMO that took this route was Vanguard. After SOE took it over, the game changed immensely from the original plan. It became more guild centric, with fast travel for raiders to get together easier, and they stopped working on a lot of the content that could have made it unique (instead of an EQ2 clone without zonelines.)
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You forgot to point out that moving out of the way will often let the speeder travel on down the road and be at higher risk for a ticket then if they were following you at the speed limit...
This is why I don't understand people that drive in the left lane on the highway. Don't try to be a cop and slow down traffic. Let it flow by you and let the taxes you pay be put to work. (Even though I'd much rather have my taxes go toward detectives solving crimes instead of patrols punishing law biding citizens for driving a few miles over... but I don't seem to have control over my money after it's taken from me.)
Perhaps you could explain this thought to me? What is it about a car that makes you think this? Also, I'd like to find out why people feel the need to scream out their windows that they feel I'm gay for driving it but when I'm stopped at lights or other locations people think the car looks awesome.
For the record, I drive an 08 Deep Blue hard top MX5 and it's a damn fine sports car. I decided on it over the other two seat sports cars in the general pricing area of $30K US (including a used Nissan 350Z, a Solstice/Sky, and a used Z3) and I found it to be the best deal for the money with the least amount of cheap plastic dash pieces.
Try driving an '08 MX5 Miata. I get all kinds of mixed responses. People that tell me it's a nice looking car when I stop at places (like the gas station, drive through, or the cop that pulled me over for not having a front plate, etc.) and people that feel the need to scream out their window that I'm some kind of "faggot" or "homo" for driving it while they speed off or pass by. I'm not sure what exactly inspires them to do so, but the record is currently 10 compliments vs. 3 people with some kind of brain trauma.
I think it's a credit to Linux. If so many different distributions can run under the same roof so easily without too much of a headache, it means that migrating your office to another distribution can be done over a long term instead of a steep upgrade hill. You can maintain the leading edge software in whichever distribution shines at the time and know that you should be able to migrate into the next big thing fairly easily.
Maybe they just create little sandboxes for every application that runs. If it needs one of these system files, a copy is distributed into a nice little cloned folder tree. You could then calculate the space required by this application by the size of it's sandbox. Let the user know that their application is taking up gigs of drive space and complain to the company. Each app has it's own little fake environment (created at the time it was requested, registry and all) that it can screw up and the only failure would be the application itself.
That excuse of making it purposefully difficult leads me to believe that MS truly WAS NOT done with Vista, they needed to get something on the market and decided to use it as a scapegoat and monetary income for development time and beta testing for Win 7.
Sure would be nice to just be able to upgrade your existing PC indefinitely... wouldn't it?
You can't really be vague about a file. If I want to gain access to a system file, I pretty much have to do it by name. Also, Windows is blocking it for some reason. Why does that reason have to be hidden?
"Oh, I see you have peon user rights, but you need power user rights to gain access to c:\winnt\notepad.exe"
"______ program needs access to a restricted part of the registry to be able to read/write data.
Cancel/Allow?
(Click here to more details on the requested operation) >>
someapp.exe is trying to request access to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProductKey"
And while we are on it... you should at least be able to specify conditional allowance. (Cancel | Allow This | Allow All)
So what IS it blocking access to? The manager application? A specific file? A folder you don't have native rights to? How could an educated technician change his PC configuration to remove this prompt when "managing" your PC? Maybe he/she would like to advance their rights just enough to be able to shutdown a service without having to authorize it every time. Why do they have to disable the UAC entirely if they only want to disable it for this purpose? What if they wanted to do something silly like defragment a drive from the manage screen but wanted to still be warned if something tries to install device drivers or CDROM rootkit drivers.
less effort than going to the video rental place.
Call it pure lazy, but even I just snubbed off a certified letter recently because it was far more trouble to drive to the post office to accept it. If they would have just left it in my mailbox, I would have been far more likely to actually read it.
The purpose of (strong) artificial intelligence isn't to trick humans somehow, it is to figure out how our mind works. What is the algorithm that powers the human brain? No one knows.
We have to know the algorithm... otherwise we wouldn't work. We just can't see it. It's closed source and we are trying to reverse engineer it.
I don't think, I just click on links. Yours seems to be broken.
You forgot the branch of trying to explain/use poster stereotypes and the holy car analogy.
Keep them coming. At least as a programmer in a cubicle, I have a better chance at becoming "The One".
Perhaps the wrong place to ask, but:
Does anyone know of an inline battery backup system that can be used on 12VDC devices like say... Linksys Routers? (Wall AC -> Transformer -> battery -> router) I've been looking for a solution to keep my router online without having to get a UPS to burn energy on conversion and charging DC batteries, then converting it back to AC for the adapter, then back to DC for the router.
Also, I wondered if anyone knew of a DC Power supply for PCs that would run off a (or the same) 12V DC battery array for the same purpose of avoiding AC -> DC -> AC -> DC conversions.
This of course would be for home use. This article (and the proposition of moving servers to DC source) seemed the fitting place to inquire to my IT brothers and sisters. Googling for these types of things can really be a pain! I did find solutions where people use tank batteries to power HAM transmitters though. ;)
Damn it, I just got done cleaning up all the venom.
Yes, they will both be in a struggle to maintain 100% compatibility as well, to a point. As soon as Mono comes out with a new version Microsoft will create a new incompatible version like they have been doing. This is the position MS want to be in. They've somewhat lost the ability to change Win32 because it would break everything. They can create a new version of .NET and just claim you need the new run time. Seriously. Why do we need 6 run time environments (1.0, 1.1, 2, 3, 3.5 ... and soon 4)? While I am on the subject... if 3.0 is built on 2 with WPF, why isn't it called 2.5 and why isn't 3.5 (3 with LINQ?) called 2.55? I mean, let's give Java it's due. Version 1.6.4 will run all old Java code and .NET 2 won't run 1.1 byte code without the 1.1 libraries.
Wait...what does TV have to do with this? Are you trying to tell me that Hugh Laurie isn't some super smart medical diagnosis guru with a bum leg and drug addiction?
It's like saying your Ford Focus can rival my Ferrari...(?)
Totally half ass conjecture here, but these galaxies we see that spew light and matter out like giant cosmic "ray-guns"... couldn't these be black holes that we see from the side? I mean, you have a ton of gravitational pull grabbing at all light and matter in the area and throwing it out into space in one direction for light years. Maybe, and this is just a guess, the "black holes" we think we know about are actually this type of phenomena but we are seeing it from a bad angle?
"I hate Flash because it's an insecure resource hog."
That's kind of like saying you have C because it's an insecure resource hog. Flash can be secure and fairly efficient depending on the programmer. As a Flash developer, I see many... many cases of bad code or practice (mainly because Actionscript is so lenient) but that doesn't automatically delegate Flash to the worst programming language in the world.
Frankly, it's quite good at what it does and it surprises me sometimes in how well it handles animated vectorized graphics and other media so well.
For those interested... Flash has had Accessibility features since version 6 and we are closing in on version 10:
http://www.usability.com.au/resources/flash.cfm
Web browsers!? Why should I have to install something that makes me go out of my way to enter a URL and obtain such files when I can just read it on the BBS with my perfectly stable modem terminal? I don't even need a mouse to use it and it's a much more keyboard friendly design!
Join MY campaign against web browsers!
... and the fact that the content is geared to multiple people and soloing content in EQ is a suicide mission. Grouping, which as you pointed out, is near impossible because everyone that's new to the game will skip by those areas because:
a. The loot isn't as good as the expansion levels
b. There's nobody to play with
c. It doesn't look new
Now, I give in to the fact that I love eye candy just as much as the next guy, so C is just as much my problem as the next guy. I also love (A) getting loot to advance my character, but B is pretty much a deal breaker in every sense. There's no incentive (loot or visual) to risk my experience for such a small reward. The dungeons were designed and populated for a group of people. A solo character would have to visit the dungeon much later in their career and have to suffer with the sub-level loot drops that happen there. Why should someone do this if you can easily get a group in an expansion zone on your high level character and feel like you are actually progressing at something?
I'm not saying that people are wrong or that players cause this to happen. I actually blame the developer for "outdating" their old content so players buy their expansion. I also blame guilds and socialites for having to compete with each other for loot to show off instead of enjoying the game for something other than a pissing contest.
Which brings me to an idea I had years ago. Spawns and mob difficulty should be based on the number of people and/or levels in a given area. This would make old content more appealing for the solo player as they would have a better shot at getting some item that the power gamers spent weeks camping when the game was new (I'm looking at you FBSS!) but every time I mention it, people get all defensive and feel that everyone else must suffer the week long waits they had trying to be "cool".
That's pretty much what I was getting at. I played EQ1 for YEARS and the only content ever added was Raid and Guild centric content. I sadly jumped from MMO to MMO from that till Warhammer today. It felt as though the adventuring player that might stop to read would be left out of every expansion. Games do that even today (including WoW and EQ2... and yes, I've played them and got sick of the end game.) For the record, End Game is not what I was talking about for "top people". I meant those that some would consider power gamers (and yes, I've been there too...) The people that bitch and complain that their chosen class can't kill X other class and demand nerfs to get their kicks. These people most likely have multiple accounts or are influential in a guild and would leave if they are not kept happy. Of course... since an ass ton of content in MMOs is guild oriented or geared in such a way that you have to do it "for the guild" (more so as the days go on) the fact that this person is now leaving leaves the guild in a sad shape and looking for a replacement or a new game. Now, you have one power gamer who raids a lot and is the center piece of his raid guild. He has the power to pull the plug on his subscription and the sub of at least 6 other people. MMO designers know this. They cater to this crowd and promote this practice. It's the perfect peer pressure marketing. I don't have stats, but I'd guarantee that people in guilds are less likely to dump a game if it's not fun. (Just like someone will stick with a job because it's not looking for another and not getting paid.) Sadly an MMO that took this route was Vanguard. After SOE took it over, the game changed immensely from the original plan. It became more guild centric, with fast travel for raiders to get together easier, and they stopped working on a lot of the content that could have made it unique (instead of an EQ2 clone without zonelines.)