I'm sure there is a reason why [using RTF] that's impractical, and maybe even a good one which doesn't involve Microsoft poisoning the IT world. But what would it be?
From wikipedia:
The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange.
Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification and portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used. RTF specifications are changed and published with major Microsoft Word and Office versions.
Right now Netflix is getting to benefit at the expense of ISPs. [...] My issue here is that Netflix is not a good champion to use to make the case for ISPs being tightfisted when it comes to circuit maintenance.
If the ISP cannot transfer me the traffic that I am paying them to transfer me, then they need to upgrade their circuits.
If they legitimately cannot afford to do that, then they need to charge me more money.
But if they cannot afford to do that, why is their investment news a string of "profits up 40% in 2013, ARPU up 9.4%, 14.7% year over year increase in FIOS revenues, 78c EPS 2013 vs 64c EPS in 2012,... etc...
Imagine if your neighbor turned his house / apartment into a concert venue because there were not any ordinances to prevent it. All day long, you could not find a place to park, could not have guests over because they could not park, suffered brown and black outs because the music equipment kept blowing out the local transformers, etc. How would you handle that?
My neighbor and I both subscribe to Verizon to provide "parking and electricity" in this situation. So if Verizon can't provide "parking and electricity" to me per our agreement, because my "neighbor" is using too much, then Verizon needs to build more parking and provide more electricity. If they have to charge me and my neighbors more, so be it... but see above regarding large increases in revenues and profits... it seems Verizon is simply failing to upgrade our electricity and parking and pocketing the money we paid them to do that instead.
I have one although I don't know of anyone else with one, but have seen countless on display as working demos in stores; and I know millions have been sold, even if it is not the success the Wii was it is widely and readily available, and lots of people have them.
or copy of vista in use.
I have seen dozens if not hundreds. I have an older laptop in the house that still has vista, that I can't justify spending money on to upgrade to 7 or 8; and there is a workstations at work with Vista Business in use by the admin department. It runs their Navision, office 2010, and corporate OrderEntry systems just fine and there's no good reason to upgrade it yet.
Not saying my iphone is invulnerable, but my almost 4 year old iphone4 still gets patches.
The iphone 3GS was discontinued in september 2012 (as in up until sep 2012 people were still buying them new on 2 year contracts usually "free") and it isn't supported with ios7 released in september 2013 one year later.
Don't get me wrong, Apple is by far one of the best phone manufacturers out there for longevity of software updates for phones, but even they drop support on users who would still be under contract, only 1 year in.
As for android... that's not really an android vs ios thing, that Apple vs Samsung etc. There is nothing preventing a good Android manufacturer to provide patch longevity, and some phones have been well supported by some manufacturers.
But sure, again, I readily concede that a lot of android manufacturers have really dropped the ball there.
On the other hand, apple supports like 2 skus at a time. Android collectively covers dozens of skus available at any given time, all over the feature and price map and I prefer having that range of choices, even if some of the choices are crap.
This is incorrect. They lost mostly casual infrequent players. The multi-boxing alt players raised the biggest stink because they were heavy players, heavily invested, and their little hobby got a lot more expensive on them overnight, but the 'silent majority' that left were the more casual players.
If you have 67 customers @ $16/month you make $1072
Slightly better than break even, but at the cost of marketshare in an business where "critical mass" is crucial to growth and sustainability.
AND you have less overhead.
Again, incorrect. As they lost mostly casual infrequent players they lost the group of users that weren't really costing them anything in the first place. They lost the people who were playing once or twice a week for a couple hours.
The 'hardcore' crowd sucked it up, they were getting a 100 to 200 and beyond hours per month of entertainment so even at $15 per month, even for $15 per month for a couple accounts it was still good value. But the casuals dropped like flies. And new players similarly dropped the game.
And you needed those casuals playing, they formed up the feeder guilds that provided new players someone to play with and learn the ropes until they were ready move to the raiding guilds.
Also, a lot of those users eventually came back at the higher rate.
But most didn't, and a lot of people who'd have joined at $10 didn't join. And as you said, the price jump set the standard for the industry, and a lot of people who were playing 2 or 3 MMOs cut a title as a result.
Plus SOE wanted $30+ bucks for a new expansion every 3 months, adding effectively $5+ / month to play since most expansions were nearly indispensible -- between the new convenience features they added, and the fact that it was usually tough to find anyone to play with outside the latest expansion zones the vast majority of players kept up with expansions, even the casuals.
Not only that, but they set the standard for all their future MMOs and in fact, the industry in general settled on that rate.
And now they are nearly all Free 2 Play with premium tiers, which is what they should have done back then. (Although SOEs Free2Play restrictions even today border on asinine -- why can't you move the XP / AA slider on a silver account in EQ2? At least they finally removed item unlockers and "frequent upgrade reminders" but they still haven't got the 'mix' right in my opinion.
So the question isn't in the popularity of the xbox, it's the profitability.
Short term profitability vs long term sustainability. Giving up some profit today to make more over the course of the games life cycle is worth it. That 30% of the accounts they lost stopped buying expansions, stopped introducing new players (some of which would have become core players) etc.
Trust me it wasn't mostly 'alts'. They were just the loudest group of complainers that STAYED.
HL2 didn't revolutionize shit. HL did. HL2 was hyped to no end, but it was a generic, boring shooter.
Yes, thank you, yes.
It was worse than that. I was 1/3rd of the way through the game before I realized... this was the actual game.
You get off the train, and you escape, and you need to get to someone... and you are going to teleport and it doesn't work, so you have to get there 'manually' and I sort of thought this "get there" step was a prologue and the game would actually "start" when I got there...and it just keeps going and going and going. It was also extremely linear.
The bridge level was pretty breath taking though.
It wasn't a bad game at all, and the "story telling" involving in game characters talking instead of cut scenes was certainly novel and interesting in its way, although the decision not to give the character a voice and the fact that he doesn't participate in any conversation including the ones he's ostensibly the central figure in doesn't really do much for the immersion.
The more rhetorical exposition of the story by the 'characters' in both portal and portal 2 I thought worked a LOT better than HL2 for the most part. GlaDOS didn't care what you had to say so the silence was less jarring.
The story was Doom. This is not a con.
Agreed. And Serious Sam BFE was likewise devoid of story and did not suffer for it. Duke Nukem Forever, too, I actually quite enjoyed and really just found how deep they dipped into the toilet humor to be regrettable... well that and the dream sequence level.
I thought it was alive until the end of episode 3, I seem to recall it still being around after episode 1 or 2 at least, and that makes the quest to avenge it the 'expansion' episode 4 "Thy Flesh Consumed"... or perhaps Doom 2
I'm tech literate and I still have to remind myself that 690 / 750 whatever is NEWER than the 8800.
And I've been on the treadmill long enough that I sort of did a double take when the numbers started wrapping around; my first geforce was a geforce 256, so i chuckle at the 250 in my HTPC upstairs.
Actually, I was wrong. There are actually leagues in America which only allow Asians to join
I didn't know that either. Thanks.
and there was an attempt at a white one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-American_Basketball_Alliance_(2010)).
I do vaguely recall that... and that it was a fiasco.
And I guess that's the rub, I am white, so I DO see the political situation surrounding anything white.
I suppose the league I'd create would be for anyone, white or black or asian of average height or less who can't dunk or palm a basketball;) I really have nothing against black people; nor do I begrudge people are taller, faster, or significantly better at basketball than I am.
I just enjoy playing a game of competitive basketball. But with people similar to myself in terms of skill and physical ability. I wouldn't enjoy playing competitively in the NBA... just as I wouldn't enjoy playing competitively against my son's grade 3 class.
I just find it interesting that women are granted a 'tier' so they don't have to compete with the top tier without question because they are "physically incapable of being competitive", while people like myself who are equally "physically incapable of being competive" with the top tier have no such outlet.
I also find it vaguely interesting that there is a group of men out there who would be a very competitive match for the women's tier, yet they are ineligble to compete against those women or get an olympic medal effectively precisely because they are men. Why do we celebrate one group of 'physically less capable at X by virtue of there genes' yet ignore another group that are just as "physicially less capable at X" due to their genes?
Transgender and intersexed individuals must be a nightmare; and in some respects renders the whole thing kind of arbitrary.
I'm not really bent out of shape over it... I really couldn't care less about the olympics, and this is really just one of the many reasons why. Winning the genetic gene pool lottery + being in the right place and time + funding + hard work isn't really something to celebrate. And that's before even getting to Olympic commitee, corporate, and judging corruption.
Thus being decreed the best in the world at something is pretty unrelated to personal effort. They all tried hard, and I don't buy that the winner just tried harder than anyone else so that leaves one of the other factors... none of which is worth celebrating.
Do they actively discriminate against African men? Or are they just basketball leagues, that happen to be primarily asian because there isn't a signficant local black popuation looking to participate?
"There are no professional Asian teams in America because no one would pay to see that."
Lol, maybe. Maybe not. Certainly it wouldn't be as popular as the NBA though. The womens NBA or whatever its called is a fraction of the value of the mens franchise as well. And perhaps an asian one would lack enough value to fill stadiums or get air time on TV, but if inner city asian people want to play competitive basketball in america we agree they should theoretically be allowed to build a court and form a league to play on it right?
I mean other than the fact that they'd be blown to legal oblivion the minute they turn away a black man.
"So I think we do need different categories. If there are white men who want to be basketball players or runners, and there is interest from the public to watch this, then they should form a league."
As above. Until they are blown to legal oblivion for rejecting a black jamaican from their league. And really the publics interest is irrelevant, so what if its not on TSN or ESPN or whatever. There are LOTS of people who want to play sports competitively with others who are like in skill and physical ability. And it seems odd that society sanctions "womens only" as a valid acceptable way to let one group exclude people who are 'better then them" from playing against them, but "white sprinters" or "asian basketball players" would not dare to even imagine creating an exclusive league for fear of being labelled rascist and whatnot.
People who want to take advantage of this and disrupt the ISP's network, can
No. Just no. Just as you are not allowed to disrupt the landline telephone network.
The telephone company is free to monitor all sorts of performance metrics about its landline operations to ensure smooth functioning. And it is free to disconnect any connection that attempting to disrupt the network.
So your web proxy, E-mail relay and Web Servers are out but your routers and switches are in.
Again not sure why. I do not want the ISP liable for the contents of my email messages, nor do I want them inspecting them out of some fear that they will be held liable. That is as it should be. If I get a death threat by email, I don't sue my ISP, nor should I be able to sue them, simply for delivering it.
And excluding web proxy's is foolish since MANY ISPs run web proxies for performance reasons... no point in having 10 million people download the same file from microsoft.com when the isp can download it once, cache it, and serve it.
And again, I do not want the ISP to be in any way liable for the contents of the proxy. If someone downloads illegal child porn I don't want the ISP sued into oblivion for caching it in their proxy, nor do I want the ISP inspecting and judging my traffic to ensure nothing they don't want to be held account for ending up in their caches.
Frankly I want the ISP absolved of all liabilty for that stuff, and at the same time actively prevented from trying to mess with it for any reason except to improve performance, and mitigate active disruption. Note that "Illegal traffic" is orthogonal to "disruptive traffic" just like death threat phone calls, which are illegal, but are not disruptive to the network.
There is not a single sport that I know of that women and men actually compete at the same level at.
This sort of opens the can of worms that there is not a single sport I know of that any two substantially different groups compete at the same level.
" the NBA in 2011 was composed of 78 percent black players, 17 percent whites, four percent Latinos, and one percent Asian"
If women were in the NBA instead of having a separate league what do you think the percentage would be? Surely not less than 1% ?
So perhaps instead of (or inaddition to) a womens NBA we should have a latino and asian NBA? Maybe even whites should have their own NBA... 17% is pretty low. And olympic gold medals for each as well.
So... women shouldn't be in direct competition with men since only a tiny fraction of them can compete in a given sport at the same level... ok... so why don't we have a summer olympic medal for 'asian basketball'?
Yeah I botched the riddle. It doesn't really matter though, since the frog is dead and the whole situation boils down to a completely random choice, which was the point.
You are in a room, the exit by which you came in is blocked, and the roof is slowly closing down on you. You cannot leave the way you came, and you cannot stay here. The far wall has two doors on it. In between the doors is a table with a frog on it. A sign above the frog says this:
"One door leads to certain destruction, the other to Riches and Power. You can ask the frog one question, but it will always lie."
You look at the frog, with a smirk, you know this riddle and how to solve it, but your face falls. The frog has been dead for some time. Someone should have fed it it from time to time. In any case, it won't be answering any questions today.
I am not the person you are responding to, but for my part:
At this stage I have no real gripe at all and would have opted into this without hesitation, had it been disclosed. (I also understand that disclosing it mitigates its effectiveness as the cheat makers will now all switch to ip based lookups, or rotating dns names etc to make detection more difficult, however, as this cat and mouse game between valve and cheaters is being waged on MY computer I still feel I should have some idea what is going on.)
That said, I do find it... somewhat disturbing that they took the liberty they did. The fact that they didn't abuse it still raises the issue that they could have.
When the next shoe drops will it be revealed that some anti-cheat / anti-virus / anti-malware software is quietly reading my bank statements when I view them online automatically for evidence of cheating / infection / whatever.
And it raises the point yet again just how little we collectively realize what applications are doing with data on our system, how desperately we need to figure out how to mainstream sandboxing / selinux type permissions / application partitioning etc in a way that makes it both easy and reliable, and how much information even the host operating system leaks about us to other applications.
And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less.
You don't care who they spy on or why? So if the Vice President wants to buy a home in the Bahamas, he should have the NSA dig up dirt on the current owners to try and lower the price?
I mean... its spying on a foreigner so... okey dokey right? That's what the american public are funding the NSA for... better prices on realestate for VIPs!
Hell no. That's not what the NSA is for. Its to secure our intelligence against foreign spies, and to identify and provide intelligence on threats to national security. The vice president overspending on bahamian real-estate is not a threat to national security.
Neither is the out come of Samsung v Apple. Nor do we need them conduncting espionage against Volkswagon to benefit Ford. NNeither is the out come of an Indonesian legal case involving trade tarrifs.
However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.
Convict him of what exactly? Telling the American public that the National Secuirty and signals intelligence apparatus was busy involved in Indonesian prawn disputes and that without continued funding increases its prawn dispute monitoring operations might be compromised?
Even if what the NSA was doing was technically legal, its representative of an egregious waste the of public's trust, and public's resources.
This isn't what we fund the NSA for. This is not its mission.
), this is about the registrar being notified of a possible copyright violation
Since when are registrars ever at all responsible for content? They're registrars. Their function is to record that you own the domain name, and to record the authoritative dns servers for the zone. That's pretty much all a registrar is.
Most of them these days will also host your dns zone file for you. (And thus provide you with the authoritative dns servers instead of merely point at them.)
A "full service" registrar may also host your actual site, but that is no longer under the hat "registrar" now they are your "web host", and that's a whole other ball game. I have no real issue with a webhost potentially being responsible for not taking a web SITE offline in egregious circumstances.*
But to expect a registrar to suspend a DOMAIN? That's absurd, and a whole other ball game.**
* but even for a webhost to take down a site, I'd like to see a court order; unless there is actual obvious and measurable harm -- e.g. its clearly a phishing site, or hosting malware, etc. And now, mere, "Copyright infringement" doesn't rise to that threshold.
** and under no circumstances should a registrar suspend a DOMAIN without a court order, EVER.
So what happened here? Are they wearing a web host hat? Or a registrar hat? or both hats? Because those are two very different hats.
I'll be honest in that not watching the olympics isn't causing me any loss of sleep. I might have looked at some of it if I'd had trivial access, but i don't care enough to jump through hoops to get access.
I'm not generally into sports, and have been thoroughly turned increasingly more against the olympics each cycle due to the rampant and ever increasing levels of corruption, hypocrisy, and greed on display.
I'm in the camp that would see this particular publicly funded wealth transfer from governments to corporations stop entirely.
I say cat, you the reader know roughly what I'm talking about.
Right. A unix command utility that concatenates its inputs as its output.
I didn't have to describe a small furry 4 legged animal.
oooooooh.... riiiiiight. in all seriousness, if i saw the word cat without context in nearly any setting I'd have been right with you on a furry critter... but here on/. especially given you'd mentioned the CLI and GUI, well, my brain was primed up for the other cat.
What difference does it make if you pay for cable for 1 month or an internet olympics subscription fee.
Well, I'd be on the hook for a $125 cable connection fee, unless I signed up for a 2 year contract... so there's that... and I'd have to wait for a tech to show up at the house to do the connection too.
I'm not sure they'd let me "sign up for cable" and not actually go to the bother of having it installed; even if only planned on using the subscription as a key to access something else over the internet.
I think the issue is that in 2014 we should have an option to get the content LEGALLY that doesn't entail paying for a complete cable package that we don't otherwise want simply for some coverage of a single sporting event.
Yes, useless, but not because of the beta, but because of all of the AC spam about the beta.
That is rather the point of a true protest. True protestors get in the way and make their presence felt. They don't sit in some free speech zone behind the building where they can be conveniently ignored. That's not protesting.
The irony is that all of that added traffic has increased ad revenue, so instead of hurting Dice, it's helped them.
They've spent a lot of money on the changes and aren't going to flush that effort down the drain.
Again says nobody whos ever worked on software ever. Flushing failed projects down the drain is expected. A large percentage of projects are flushed down the drain. Beta might be salvagable, with a lot of rework... but it might be better to start from scratch. It often is.
Briefly spike of interest sure. But only a halfwit would think it would bring in new users long term with such caustic low value comments drowning out all signal day after day.
ps. slashdot doesn't moderate itself and never has and prides itself on being unmoderated. If it was moderated, this whole flame thing would have never of happened.
If it was moderated this whole/. site being a phenomena might never have happened. Some of us would attribute the unique qualities of/. as being relevant to its success. If you want to "what-if" some key property of/. away you likely gamble on/. never being more than just another also-ran unremarkable news aggregator.
Finally, IIRC, CmdrTaco used to talk about the amount of work keeping slashdot going. It doesn't just happen.
Its also not some herculean task that only Dice holdings could ever possibly manage.
If you think it could be done for a pittance, I challenge you to go do it.
A relative pittance. Its a text only forum for christsake not youtube. Yes its still going to need servers and bandwidth and maintenance, but its 2014 and its primarily a text site.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure there is a reason why [using RTF] that's impractical, and maybe even a good one which doesn't involve Microsoft poisoning the IT world. But what would it be?
From wikipedia:
The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange.
Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification and portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used. RTF specifications are changed and published with major Microsoft Word and Office versions.
So its better than OOXML how?
Right now Netflix is getting to benefit at the expense of ISPs. [...] My issue here is that Netflix is not a good champion to use to make the case for ISPs being tightfisted when it comes to circuit maintenance.
If the ISP cannot transfer me the traffic that I am paying them to transfer me, then they need to upgrade their circuits.
If they legitimately cannot afford to do that, then they need to charge me more money.
But if they cannot afford to do that, why is their investment news a string of "profits up 40% in 2013, ARPU up 9.4%, 14.7% year over year increase in FIOS revenues, 78c EPS 2013 vs 64c EPS in 2012, ... etc...
Imagine if your neighbor turned his house / apartment into a concert venue because there were not any ordinances to prevent it. All day long, you could not find a place to park, could not have guests over because they could not park, suffered brown and black outs because the music equipment kept blowing out the local transformers, etc. How would you handle that?
My neighbor and I both subscribe to Verizon to provide "parking and electricity" in this situation. So if Verizon can't provide
"parking and electricity" to me per our agreement, because my "neighbor" is using too much, then Verizon needs to build more parking and provide more electricity. If they have to charge me and my neighbors more, so be it... but see above regarding large increases in revenues and profits... it seems Verizon is simply failing to upgrade our electricity and parking and pocketing the money we paid them to do that instead.
I have seen 2 OR in use in real life
I've never even seen one physically, anywhere.
I have yet to see a single WiiU
I have one although I don't know of anyone else with one, but have seen countless on display as working demos in stores; and I know millions have been sold, even if it is not the success the Wii was it is widely and readily available, and lots of people have them.
or copy of vista in use.
I have seen dozens if not hundreds. I have an older laptop in the house that still has vista, that I can't justify spending money on to upgrade to 7 or 8; and there is a workstations at work with Vista Business in use by the admin department. It runs their Navision, office 2010, and corporate OrderEntry systems just fine and there's no good reason to upgrade it yet.
Not saying my iphone is invulnerable, but my almost 4 year old iphone4 still gets patches.
The iphone 3GS was discontinued in september 2012 (as in up until sep 2012 people were still buying them new on 2 year contracts usually "free") and it isn't supported with ios7 released in september 2013 one year later.
Don't get me wrong, Apple is by far one of the best phone manufacturers out there for longevity of software updates for phones, but even they drop support on users who would still be under contract, only 1 year in.
As for android... that's not really an android vs ios thing, that Apple vs Samsung etc. There is nothing preventing a good Android manufacturer to provide patch longevity, and some phones have been well supported by some manufacturers.
But sure, again, I readily concede that a lot of android manufacturers have really dropped the ball there.
On the other hand, apple supports like 2 skus at a time. Android collectively covers dozens of skus available at any given time, all over the feature and price map and I prefer having that range of choices, even if some of the choices are crap.
(mostly alt accounts)
This is incorrect. They lost mostly casual infrequent players. The multi-boxing alt players raised the biggest stink because they were heavy players, heavily invested, and their little hobby got a lot more expensive on them overnight, but the 'silent majority' that left were the more casual players.
If you have 67 customers @ $16/month you make $1072
Slightly better than break even, but at the cost of marketshare in an business where "critical mass" is crucial to growth and sustainability.
AND you have less overhead.
Again, incorrect. As they lost mostly casual infrequent players they lost the group of users that weren't really costing them anything in the first place. They lost the people who were playing once or twice a week for a couple hours.
The 'hardcore' crowd sucked it up, they were getting a 100 to 200 and beyond hours per month of entertainment so even at $15 per month, even for $15 per month for a couple accounts it was still good value. But the casuals dropped like flies. And new players similarly dropped the game.
And you needed those casuals playing, they formed up the feeder guilds that provided new players someone to play with and learn the ropes until they were ready move to the raiding guilds.
Also, a lot of those users eventually came back at the higher rate.
But most didn't, and a lot of people who'd have joined at $10 didn't join. And as you said, the price jump set the standard for the industry, and a lot of people who were playing 2 or 3 MMOs cut a title as a result.
Plus SOE wanted $30+ bucks for a new expansion every 3 months, adding effectively $5+ / month to play since most expansions were nearly indispensible -- between the new convenience features they added, and the fact that it was usually tough to find anyone to play with outside the latest expansion zones the vast majority of players kept up with expansions, even the casuals.
Not only that, but they set the standard for all their future MMOs and in fact, the industry in general settled on that rate.
And now they are nearly all Free 2 Play with premium tiers, which is what they should have done back then. (Although SOEs Free2Play restrictions even today border on asinine -- why can't you move the XP / AA slider on a silver account in EQ2? At least they finally removed item unlockers and "frequent upgrade reminders" but they still haven't got the 'mix' right in my opinion.
So the question isn't in the popularity of the xbox, it's the profitability.
Short term profitability vs long term sustainability. Giving up some profit today to make more over the course of the games life cycle is worth it. That 30% of the accounts they lost stopped buying expansions, stopped introducing new players (some of which would have become core players) etc.
Trust me it wasn't mostly 'alts'. They were just the loudest group of complainers that STAYED.
HL2 didn't revolutionize shit. HL did. HL2 was hyped to no end, but it was a generic, boring shooter.
Yes, thank you, yes.
It was worse than that. I was 1/3rd of the way through the game before I realized ... this was the actual game.
You get off the train, and you escape, and you need to get to someone... and you are going to teleport and it doesn't work, so you have to get there 'manually' and I sort of thought this "get there" step was a prologue and the game would actually "start" when I got there...and it just keeps going and going and going. It was also extremely linear.
The bridge level was pretty breath taking though.
It wasn't a bad game at all, and the "story telling" involving in game characters talking instead of cut scenes was certainly novel and interesting in its way, although the decision not to give the character a voice and the fact that he doesn't participate in any conversation including the ones he's ostensibly the central figure in doesn't really do much for the immersion.
The more rhetorical exposition of the story by the 'characters' in both portal and portal 2 I thought worked a LOT better than HL2 for the most part. GlaDOS didn't care what you had to say so the silence was less jarring.
The story was Doom. This is not a con.
Agreed. And Serious Sam BFE was likewise devoid of story and did not suffer for it. Duke Nukem Forever, too, I actually quite enjoyed and really just found how deep they dipped into the toilet humor to be regrettable... well that and the dream sequence level.
. It is a quest to avenge your pet bunny.
I thought it was alive until the end of episode 3, I seem to recall it still being around after episode 1 or 2 at least, and that makes the quest to avenge it the 'expansion' episode 4 "Thy Flesh Consumed"... or perhaps Doom 2
I'm tech literate and I still have to remind myself that 690 / 750 whatever is NEWER than the 8800.
And I've been on the treadmill long enough that I sort of did a double take when the numbers started wrapping around; my first geforce was a geforce 256, so i chuckle at the 250 in my HTPC upstairs.
Actually, I was wrong. There are actually leagues in America which only allow Asians to join
I didn't know that either. Thanks.
and there was an attempt at a white one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-American_Basketball_Alliance_(2010)).
I do vaguely recall that ... and that it was a fiasco.
And I guess that's the rub, I am white, so I DO see the political situation surrounding anything white.
I suppose the league I'd create would be for anyone, white or black or asian of average height or less who can't dunk or palm a basketball ;) I really have nothing against black people; nor do I begrudge people are taller, faster, or significantly better at basketball than I am.
I just enjoy playing a game of competitive basketball. But with people similar to myself in terms of skill and physical ability. I wouldn't enjoy playing competitively in the NBA... just as I wouldn't enjoy playing competitively against my son's grade 3 class.
I just find it interesting that women are granted a 'tier' so they don't have to compete with the top tier without question because they are "physically incapable of being competitive", while people like myself who are equally "physically incapable of being competive" with the top tier have no such outlet.
I also find it vaguely interesting that there is a group of men out there who would be a very competitive match for the women's tier, yet they are ineligble to compete against those women or get an olympic medal effectively precisely because they are men. Why do we celebrate one group of 'physically less capable at X by virtue of there genes' yet ignore another group that are just as "physicially less capable at X" due to their genes?
Transgender and intersexed individuals must be a nightmare; and in some respects renders the whole thing kind of arbitrary.
I'm not really bent out of shape over it... I really couldn't care less about the olympics, and this is really just one of the many reasons why. Winning the genetic gene pool lottery + being in the right place and time + funding + hard work isn't really something to celebrate. And that's before even getting to Olympic commitee, corporate, and judging corruption.
Thus being decreed the best in the world at something is pretty unrelated to personal effort. They all tried hard, and I don't buy that the winner just tried harder than anyone else so that leaves one of the other factors... none of which is worth celebrating.
"They have Asian basketball leagues,"
Do they actively discriminate against African men? Or are they just basketball leagues, that happen to be primarily asian because there isn't a signficant local black popuation looking to participate?
"There are no professional Asian teams in America because no one would pay to see that."
Lol, maybe. Maybe not. Certainly it wouldn't be as popular as the NBA though. The womens NBA or whatever its called is a fraction of the value of the mens franchise as well. And perhaps an asian one would lack enough value to fill stadiums or get air time on TV, but if inner city asian people want to play competitive basketball in america we agree they should theoretically be allowed to build a court and form a league to play on it right?
I mean other than the fact that they'd be blown to legal oblivion the minute they turn away a black man.
"So I think we do need different categories. If there are white men who want to be basketball players or runners, and there is interest from the public to watch this, then they should form a league."
As above. Until they are blown to legal oblivion for rejecting a black jamaican from their league. And really the publics interest is irrelevant, so what if its not on TSN or ESPN or whatever. There are LOTS of people who want to play sports competitively with others who are like in skill and physical ability. And it seems odd that society sanctions "womens only" as a valid acceptable way to let one group exclude people who are 'better then them" from playing against them, but "white sprinters" or "asian basketball players" would not dare to even imagine creating an exclusive league for fear of being labelled rascist and whatnot.
People who want to take advantage of this and disrupt the ISP's network, can
No. Just no. Just as you are not allowed to disrupt the landline telephone network.
The telephone company is free to monitor all sorts of performance metrics about its landline operations to ensure smooth functioning. And it is free to disconnect any connection that attempting to disrupt the network.
So your web proxy, E-mail relay and Web Servers are out but your routers and switches are in.
Again not sure why. I do not want the ISP liable for the contents of my email messages, nor do I want them inspecting them out of some fear that they will be held liable. That is as it should be. If I get a death threat by email, I don't sue my ISP, nor should I be able to sue them, simply for delivering it.
And excluding web proxy's is foolish since MANY ISPs run web proxies for performance reasons... no point in having 10 million people download the same file from microsoft.com when the isp can download it once, cache it, and serve it.
And again, I do not want the ISP to be in any way liable for the contents of the proxy. If someone downloads illegal child porn I don't want the ISP sued into oblivion for caching it in their proxy, nor do I want the ISP inspecting and judging my traffic to ensure nothing they don't want to be held account for ending up in their caches.
Frankly I want the ISP absolved of all liabilty for that stuff, and at the same time actively prevented from trying to mess with it for any reason except to improve performance, and mitigate active disruption. Note that "Illegal traffic" is orthogonal to "disruptive traffic" just like death threat phone calls, which are illegal, but are not disruptive to the network.
There is not a single sport that I know of that women and men actually compete at the same level at.
This sort of opens the can of worms that there is not a single sport I know of that any two substantially different groups compete at the same level.
" the NBA in 2011 was composed of 78 percent black players, 17 percent whites, four percent Latinos, and one percent Asian"
If women were in the NBA instead of having a separate league what do you think the percentage would be? Surely not less than 1% ?
So perhaps instead of (or inaddition to) a womens NBA we should have a latino and asian NBA? Maybe even whites should have their own NBA... 17% is pretty low. And olympic gold medals for each as well.
So... women shouldn't be in direct competition with men since only a tiny fraction of them can compete in a given sport at the same level... ok... so why don't we have a summer olympic medal for 'asian basketball'?
Really? I know a LOT of iphone users and most of them only pull up Siri when they want to make fun of the answers.
I've only met one person who actually tries to seriously use siri.
Yeah I botched the riddle. It doesn't really matter though, since the frog is dead and the whole situation boils down to a completely random choice, which was the point.
FTL choices remind me of this classic riddle:
This is too often how I feel when I play FTL. :)
High UID, has time to sit around Slashdot and make multiple posts per day but you admin "~6000 Server 2012 boxes"?
Where did he say he was the only one? Single handedly doing it by himself? I didn't see that.
I am not the person you are responding to, but for my part:
At this stage I have no real gripe at all and would have opted into this without hesitation, had it been disclosed. (I also understand that disclosing it mitigates its effectiveness as the cheat makers will now all switch to ip based lookups, or rotating dns names etc to make detection more difficult, however, as this cat and mouse game between valve and cheaters is being waged on MY computer I still feel I should have some idea what is going on.)
That said, I do find it... somewhat disturbing that they took the liberty they did. The fact that they didn't abuse it still raises the issue that they could have.
When the next shoe drops will it be revealed that some anti-cheat / anti-virus / anti-malware software is quietly reading my bank statements when I view them online automatically for evidence of cheating / infection / whatever.
And it raises the point yet again just how little we collectively realize what applications are doing with data on our system, how desperately we need to figure out how to mainstream sandboxing / selinux type permissions / application partitioning etc in a way that makes it both easy and reliable, and how much information even the host operating system leaks about us to other applications.
And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less.
You don't care who they spy on or why? So if the Vice President wants to buy a home in the Bahamas, he should have the NSA dig up dirt on the current owners to try and lower the price?
I mean... its spying on a foreigner so ... okey dokey right? That's what the american public are funding the NSA for... better prices on realestate for VIPs!
Hell no. That's not what the NSA is for. Its to secure our intelligence against foreign spies, and to identify and provide intelligence on threats to national security. The vice president overspending on bahamian real-estate is not a threat to national security.
Neither is the out come of Samsung v Apple.
Nor do we need them conduncting espionage against Volkswagon to benefit Ford.
NNeither is the out come of an Indonesian legal case involving trade tarrifs.
However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.
Convict him of what exactly? Telling the American public that the National Secuirty and signals intelligence apparatus was busy involved in Indonesian prawn disputes and that without continued funding increases its prawn dispute monitoring operations might be compromised?
Even if what the NSA was doing was technically legal, its representative of an egregious waste the of public's trust, and public's resources.
This isn't what we fund the NSA for. This is not its mission.
And as a bonus all your content is scanned and censored by microsoft.
), this is about the registrar being notified of a possible copyright violation
Since when are registrars ever at all responsible for content? They're registrars. Their function is to record that you own the domain name, and to record the authoritative dns servers for the zone. That's pretty much all a registrar is.
Most of them these days will also host your dns zone file for you. (And thus provide you with the authoritative dns servers instead of merely point at them.)
A "full service" registrar may also host your actual site, but that is no longer under the hat "registrar" now they are your "web host", and that's a whole other ball game. I have no real issue with a webhost potentially being responsible for not taking a web SITE offline in egregious circumstances.*
But to expect a registrar to suspend a DOMAIN? That's absurd, and a whole other ball game.**
* but even for a webhost to take down a site, I'd like to see a court order; unless there is actual obvious and measurable harm -- e.g. its clearly a phishing site, or hosting malware, etc. And now, mere, "Copyright infringement" doesn't rise to that threshold.
** and under no circumstances should a registrar suspend a DOMAIN without a court order, EVER.
So what happened here? Are they wearing a web host hat? Or a registrar hat? or both hats? Because those are two very different hats.
I'll be honest in that not watching the olympics isn't causing me any loss of sleep. I might have looked at some of it if I'd had trivial access, but i don't care enough to jump through hoops to get access.
I'm not generally into sports, and have been thoroughly turned increasingly more against the olympics each cycle due to the rampant and ever increasing levels of corruption, hypocrisy, and greed on display.
I'm in the camp that would see this particular publicly funded wealth transfer from governments to corporations stop entirely.
I say cat, you the reader know roughly what I'm talking about.
Right. A unix command utility that concatenates its inputs as its output.
I didn't have to describe a small furry 4 legged animal.
oooooooh .... riiiiiight. in all seriousness, if i saw the word cat without context in nearly any setting I'd have been right with you on a furry critter... but here on /. especially given you'd mentioned the CLI and GUI, well, my brain was primed up for the other cat.
What difference does it make if you pay for cable for 1 month or an internet olympics subscription fee.
Well, I'd be on the hook for a $125 cable connection fee, unless I signed up for a 2 year contract... so there's that... and I'd have to wait for a tech to show up at the house to do the connection too.
I'm not sure they'd let me "sign up for cable" and not actually go to the bother of having it installed; even if only planned on using the subscription as a key to access something else over the internet.
And why is it that you are owed free content?
I think the issue is that in 2014 we should have an option to get the content LEGALLY that doesn't entail paying for a complete cable package that we don't otherwise want simply for some coverage of a single sporting event.
Does NBC let you subscribe to the stream? No?
That's the problem. It's not that its not free.
Yes, useless, but not because of the beta, but because of all of the AC spam about the beta.
That is rather the point of a true protest. True protestors get in the way and make their presence felt. They don't sit in some free speech zone behind the building where they can be conveniently ignored. That's not protesting.
The irony is that all of that added traffic has increased ad revenue, so instead of hurting Dice, it's helped them.
They've spent a lot of money on the changes and aren't going to flush that effort down the drain.
Again says nobody whos ever worked on software ever. Flushing failed projects down the drain is expected. A large percentage of projects are flushed down the drain. Beta might be salvagable, with a lot of rework... but it might be better to start from scratch. It often is.
Briefly spike of interest sure. But only a halfwit would think it would bring in new users long term with such caustic low value comments drowning out all signal day after day.
ps. slashdot doesn't moderate itself and never has and prides itself on being unmoderated. If it was moderated, this whole flame thing would have never of happened.
If it was moderated this whole /. site being a phenomena might never have happened. Some of us would attribute the unique qualities of /. as being relevant to its success. If you want to "what-if" some key property of /. away you likely gamble on /. never being more than just another also-ran unremarkable news aggregator.
Finally, IIRC, CmdrTaco used to talk about the amount of work keeping slashdot going. It doesn't just happen.
Its also not some herculean task that only Dice holdings could ever possibly manage.
If you think it could be done for a pittance, I challenge you to go do it.
A relative pittance. Its a text only forum for christsake not youtube. Yes its still going to need servers and bandwidth and maintenance, but its 2014 and its primarily a text site.