Re:Firefox has very serious problems.
on
Firefox Secrets
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"If you're viewing a page with a lot of pictures, where do you think the bitmaps are stored? A single 1024x768x32-bit image takes 3MB. If you load a page with 100 large images, of course the browser will need >300MB."
I love Firefox, but this is a ridiculous comment. Firefox will regularly consume 200-400mb on my machine even when I'm viewing pages that have at most 1 or 2 small 20-30k images.
There seems to be a very large overhead with each tab.
I'm not complaining per se, as I think Firefox is the best browser out there hands-down for doing the sort of extensive research that the original poster mentioned, but the downside is that it is every bit as big a resource hog as IE.
Bottom line -- the Myth Buster show simply sucks. As this poster points out, they rarely do any genuine busting of myths (which is not to say there's validity to the stuff they try to bust, but their methods are ridiculous).
"My dad and I bought an LP of Frank Sinatra at E.J. Korvette in the 60's for $1.57 and now the last time I saw the same recordings, from the same record on CD, was $13.95."
Music is overprice, but this comparison of the non-real dollar price of an album over a 30 year period is just stupid.
"Those who didn't like having their play experience ruined by someone who randomly PKd (ask someone on WoW's PvP servers how easy it is to grind out levels when you're getting ganked in teh wetlands or barrens."
If someone gets ganked in Wetlands on a PVP server, they have not had their experience ruined. That's the frigging point of a PVP server. Re-roll on PVE server and problem goes away completely.
I don't get this approach at all. Everytime I read about this game its all about grouping, grouping, and more grouping. On WoW, I usually group with my wife, and occasioally with guildies. But grouping in PUGs is a complete waste of time. But this game will force me to do this if I want to get anywhere and none of my friends/guildies are online? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Um, isn't that precisely the point of doing product placement? You then end up watching a pleasant 44 minute or whatever commercial. If done correctly, it doesn't have to come across as a commercial (and if it does, people will tune out).
"A Professor of religion at University of Kansas has resigned from his position at the university because of his anti-creationism views"
Um, no...he just resigned as chair. He is still a professor at the university, though probably not for long if the "beating" turns out to be a hoax as seems increasingly likely.
Slashdot is typically even worse than Wikipedia for accuracy, and this story exemplifies that.
As the story makes clear, in European countries like Germany that have low t-com investment, the problem is that the government actually owns significant portions of the telecom operators and so the regulatory agencies, while nominally independent, have a huge conflict of interest and the state has an interest in intervening to act in the interest of said companies.
"The report, which examined 16 countries, found that most regulators appear to be independent of the incumbent and the government. However, it concludes that state ownership in the incumbent, which occurs in Belgium, Germany, Greece, France and Portugal, presents a potential conflict of interest. Germany was singled out as a country where political interference in the regulatory environment is a concern."
Bottom line is that LEGO has for years ignored the desires of its customers. Look at its brick business. It lost tons of money on licensed products over the years (the licensing fees pretty much eat up all the profit), so what is it doing to get out of its financial problems -- its buying more licenses. Recently it acquired Batman and Nickelodean licenses (already announced plans for Spongebob and Avatar sets -- ugh). The letter about the color change shows just how clueless they are and how little they actually try to gauge the opinion of their heaviest customers and biggest fans:
Most companies would kill to have the sort of online communities organized around their product that LEGO has. Instead, LEGO pretty much ignores them when its not threatening them over the proper way to use the term LEGO to avoid infringing its trademark.
In fact his point is completely taken out of context. Sherman is not saying this is a good thing. Rather he's saying that other programs have caused similar problems, and that he doubts those companies have taken action as quickly as Sony has.
That's a debatable point, but nowhere does he say he approves of what Sony did. In fact he makes it clear that he thinks Sony made a mistake,
"They have apologized for their mistake, ceased manufacture of CDs with that technology,and pulled CDs with that technology from store shelves. Seems very responsible to me."
No, it's not at all. You'll note the original troll posting included bunny hopping in FPS. That is not exploiting a bug in any way. Yes, it is annoying if you can't do it very well, and yes some online leagues do ban it, but there is nothing cheating or hacking about it. It is simply a method of exploiting the constraints of the game itself.
It is kind of like the first time a team in the NFL decided to fake a spiked pass. The NFL changed the rules after that season to make a fake spiked pass an illegal play, but it was completely legal for that season and it was an excellent example of someone exploiting a ruleset for an unintended outcome.
Or just like the first people who discovered rocket jumping in Quake, which had never been intended but as a consequence of the ruleset of that game.
By 3 times of course you mean you don't know what you're talking about.
From the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Report on the Ames case:
"Four days later Ames returned to finish the polygraph examination. On that day, with a different polygrapher, Ames answered all questions without any deceptive response, including the question regarding unreported contacts with a foreign national. The reaction that had occurred on the previous test was not present, according to the examiner. In fact, the examiner noted that Ames's overall level of responsiveness was down considerably from the prior test. No additional polygraph questions were asked about Ames's finances. The polygrapher concluded the test, dismissed Ames and wrote the polygraph report indicating Ames had passed the test. However, in file notes, the first examiner commented, "I don't think he is a spy, but I am not 100% convinced because of the money situation." CIA officials have recently stated that, in retrospect, the security background check on Ames should have preceded the polygraph and the polygraph examination should have been conducted after taking the results of the investigation into account."
Yes, he could have made it longer, but probably would have made even less sense than it does now. Searls never seems to be able to write anything that is easily understandable except by the small group of people who think just like he does. Sorry, but one comment in a single article by an SBC flak does not the end of the Internet make.
Why is this ad here for these two companies? I could see a news item/analysis of the state of the RPG "industry" but wtf with a simple listing of product lines from just two companies?
And what does the attendance at GenCon have to do with how well sales are likely to be (especially given the huge number of cons people have to choose from, attendance and any given con in any given year would seem to be dependent on a number of factors other than the strength of the RPG industry for that year).
Anyway, I long ago stopped playing tabletop RPGs though I do still tend to collect some of them (especially the Eden Studios stuff).
What I've noticed is that the amount of product and support for RPGs has dwindled at my local comic book stores over the last decade (and that's pretty much the only place to get RPG books other than the Barnes and Noble which carries a number of WOTC books). Most of the space that would have been devoted to RPGs is devoted to CCGs and the collectable miniatures games. What RPG space is 80% WOTC with a little bit left over for the Vampire stuff.
There are actually a lot of very cool RPG books and systems, but for the most part the industry seems to have gone from small to miniscule once you get past WOTC and White Wolf.
MMORPGs like WoW will only further that death spiral along.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 1
"On the other hand, I can log on to WoW and play two hours a night after the kids are asleep."
You actually have the self-control to stop at two hours? I'm impressed. Every time I log in for "two hours" I look up 5 hours later and realize I have to got work tomorrow.
The woman appears to be quite the alarmist. For example, she falsely states that pressure treated wood is not safe since it is treated with, among other things, arsenic. Such wood is safe if handled properly.
On the other hand, she doesn't say anything on there that is immediately libelous as most of it is "i saw this happening the other day at the site."
I've always wondered what the internal culture is in companies that leads them to launch suits like this, as they almost always backfire even if they are won. The McDonald's lawsuit against a couple of people distributing anti-McDonald's pamphlets, for example, certainly led to much more anti-McDonald's media coverage than a couple of nutty activists could ever have managed on their own.
The article is quite clear that owning is very different from simply possessing a copy. Just because I have a copy of CIV IV does not necessarily mean I own the it under the definition used by the court here.
Actually, you're wrong...if you bought Dell and Apple a decade ago, you did much better with your Dell stock compared to Apple.
Both stocks were excellent long-term buys, however.
Re:Before you bash Blizzard's customer service...!
on
Blizzcon Writeup
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· Score: 1
Nonsense. Their customer support sucks.
You could just do a "Very few peple understand how hard it is to provide good custmoer supoprt service for [fill in the blank.]"
Sorry, but could care less. I purchase a product that promises a certain level of support, and I don't want to hear whining about how difficult it is to provide that support.
Besides, Blizzard doesn't provide any support...how hard can that be?
This will simply be used by the creationists to validate their favorite meme that mainstream Darwinists irrationally refused to consider other points of view.
They'll be able to say, "look, they're so scared of other views they won't even allow us to use their own writings."
Leave it to the AAAS to come forth with such a brain-dead stupid maneuver. You except coypright threats directed at critics from the Scientologists. It's a sad day to see legitimate scientists going down that route as well.
Thank you for proving my point. For some liberals, the focus on anti-abortion extremism is so myopic that the first reaction to animal rights terrorism is "but what about abortion clinic violence?" as if one cannot be opposed to both.
This is like Sen. Patrick Leahy's assertion that hearings on animal rights terrorism were pointless and no one really cares about animal rights terrorism.
Now, of course, you have bio companies who cannot get listed on NYSE because the NYSE is scared of animalr rights extremists.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL. Best troll I've read in a long time.
"If you're viewing a page with a lot of pictures, where do you think the bitmaps are stored? A single 1024x768x32-bit image takes 3MB. If you load a page with 100 large images, of course the browser will need >300MB."
I love Firefox, but this is a ridiculous comment. Firefox will regularly consume 200-400mb on my machine even when I'm viewing pages that have at most 1 or 2 small 20-30k images.
There seems to be a very large overhead with each tab.
I'm not complaining per se, as I think Firefox is the best browser out there hands-down for doing the sort of extensive research that the original poster mentioned, but the downside is that it is every bit as big a resource hog as IE.
Bottom line -- the Myth Buster show simply sucks. As this poster points out, they rarely do any genuine busting of myths (which is not to say there's validity to the stuff they try to bust, but their methods are ridiculous).
"My dad and I bought an LP of Frank Sinatra at E.J. Korvette in the 60's for $1.57 and now the last time I saw the same recordings, from the same record on CD, was $13.95."
Music is overprice, but this comparison of the non-real dollar price of an album over a 30 year period is just stupid.
"My questions to the slashdot community: are organizations like Google redefining the law of demand and answer?"
Anyone have any idea what the "law of demand and answer" is? Wow, a completely nonsensical slashdot summary -- must be Thursday.
"Those who didn't like having their play experience ruined by someone who randomly PKd (ask someone on WoW's PvP servers how easy it is to grind out levels when you're getting ganked in teh wetlands or barrens."
If someone gets ganked in Wetlands on a PVP server, they have not had their experience ruined. That's the frigging point of a PVP server. Re-roll on PVE server and problem goes away completely.
I don't get this approach at all. Everytime I read about this game its all about grouping, grouping, and more grouping. On WoW, I usually group with my wife, and occasioally with guildies. But grouping in PUGs is a complete waste of time. But this game will force me to do this if I want to get anywhere and none of my friends/guildies are online? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Um, isn't that precisely the point of doing product placement? You then end up watching a pleasant 44 minute or whatever commercial. If done correctly, it doesn't have to come across as a commercial (and if it does, people will tune out).
"A Professor of religion at University of Kansas has resigned from his position at the university because of his anti-creationism views"
Um, no...he just resigned as chair. He is still a professor at the university, though probably not for long if the "beating" turns out to be a hoax as seems increasingly likely.
Slashdot is typically even worse than Wikipedia for accuracy, and this story exemplifies that.
As the story makes clear, in European countries like Germany that have low t-com investment, the problem is that the government actually owns significant portions of the telecom operators and so the regulatory agencies, while nominally independent, have a huge conflict of interest and the state has an interest in intervening to act in the interest of said companies.
"The report, which examined 16 countries, found that most regulators appear to be independent of the incumbent and the government. However, it concludes that state ownership in the incumbent, which occurs in Belgium, Germany, Greece, France and Portugal, presents a potential conflict of interest. Germany was singled out as a country where political interference in the regulatory environment is a concern."
Bottom line is that LEGO has for years ignored the desires of its customers. Look at its brick business. It lost tons of money on licensed products over the years (the licensing fees pretty much eat up all the profit), so what is it doing to get out of its financial problems -- its buying more licenses. Recently it acquired Batman and Nickelodean licenses (already announced plans for Spongebob and Avatar sets -- ugh). The letter about the color change shows just how clueless they are and how little they actually try to gauge the opinion of their heaviest customers and biggest fans:
3 .htm
http://f24.parsimony.net/forum61776/messages/9746
Most companies would kill to have the sort of online communities organized around their product that LEGO has. Instead, LEGO pretty much ignores them when its not threatening them over the proper way to use the term LEGO to avoid infringing its trademark.
In fact his point is completely taken out of context. Sherman is not saying this is a good thing. Rather he's saying that other programs have caused similar problems, and that he doubts those companies have taken action as quickly as Sony has.
That's a debatable point, but nowhere does he say he approves of what Sony did. In fact he makes it clear that he thinks Sony made a mistake,
"They have apologized for their mistake, ceased manufacture of CDs with that technology,and pulled CDs with that technology from store shelves. Seems very responsible to me."
No, it's not at all. You'll note the original troll posting included bunny hopping in FPS. That is not exploiting a bug in any way. Yes, it is annoying if you can't do it very well, and yes some online leagues do ban it, but there is nothing cheating or hacking about it. It is simply a method of exploiting the constraints of the game itself.
It is kind of like the first time a team in the NFL decided to fake a spiked pass. The NFL changed the rules after that season to make a fake spiked pass an illegal play, but it was completely legal for that season and it was an excellent example of someone exploiting a ruleset for an unintended outcome.
Or just like the first people who discovered rocket jumping in Quake, which had never been intended but as a consequence of the ruleset of that game.
Understanding and exploiting the game to its limits is not "abusing" bugs.
Learn To Play.
By 3 times of course you mean you don't know what you're talking about.
From the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Report on the Ames case:
"Four days later Ames returned to finish the polygraph examination. On that day, with a different polygrapher, Ames answered all questions without any deceptive response, including the question regarding unreported contacts with a foreign national. The reaction that had occurred on the previous test was not present, according to the examiner. In fact, the examiner noted that Ames's overall level of responsiveness was down considerably from the prior test. No additional polygraph questions were asked about Ames's finances. The polygrapher concluded the test, dismissed Ames and wrote the polygraph report indicating Ames had passed the test. However, in file notes, the first examiner commented, "I don't think he is a spy, but I am not 100% convinced because of the money situation." CIA officials have recently stated that, in retrospect, the security background check on Ames should have preceded the polygraph and the polygraph examination should have been conducted after taking the results of the investigation into account."
Yes, he could have made it longer, but probably would have made even less sense than it does now. Searls never seems to be able to write anything that is easily understandable except by the small group of people who think just like he does. Sorry, but one comment in a single article by an SBC flak does not the end of the Internet make.
Why is this ad here for these two companies? I could see a news item/analysis of the state of the RPG "industry" but wtf with a simple listing of product lines from just two companies?
And what does the attendance at GenCon have to do with how well sales are likely to be (especially given the huge number of cons people have to choose from, attendance and any given con in any given year would seem to be dependent on a number of factors other than the strength of the RPG industry for that year).
Anyway, I long ago stopped playing tabletop RPGs though I do still tend to collect some of them (especially the Eden Studios stuff).
What I've noticed is that the amount of product and support for RPGs has dwindled at my local comic book stores over the last decade (and that's pretty much the only place to get RPG books other than the Barnes and Noble which carries a number of WOTC books). Most of the space that would have been devoted to RPGs is devoted to CCGs and the collectable miniatures games. What RPG space is 80% WOTC with a little bit left over for the Vampire stuff.
There are actually a lot of very cool RPG books and systems, but for the most part the industry seems to have gone from small to miniscule once you get past WOTC and White Wolf.
MMORPGs like WoW will only further that death spiral along.
"On the other hand, I can log on to WoW and play two hours a night after the kids are asleep."
You actually have the self-control to stop at two hours? I'm impressed. Every time I log in for "two hours" I look up 5 hours later and realize I have to got work tomorrow.
The woman appears to be quite the alarmist. For example, she falsely states that pressure treated wood is not safe since it is treated with, among other things, arsenic. Such wood is safe if handled properly.
On the other hand, she doesn't say anything on there that is immediately libelous as most of it is "i saw this happening the other day at the site."
I've always wondered what the internal culture is in companies that leads them to launch suits like this, as they almost always backfire even if they are won. The McDonald's lawsuit against a couple of people distributing anti-McDonald's pamphlets, for example, certainly led to much more anti-McDonald's media coverage than a couple of nutty activists could ever have managed on their own.
The article is quite clear that owning is very different from simply possessing a copy. Just because I have a copy of CIV IV does not necessarily mean I own the it under the definition used by the court here.
Because Dean Baker is a far left-winger. Microsoft thinks Open Source is communism. To Baker, its not yet communist enough.
Actually, you're wrong...if you bought Dell and Apple a decade ago, you did much better with your Dell stock compared to Apple.
Both stocks were excellent long-term buys, however.
Nonsense. Their customer support sucks.
You could just do a "Very few peple understand how hard it is to provide good custmoer supoprt service for [fill in the blank.]"
Sorry, but could care less. I purchase a product that promises a certain level of support, and I don't want to hear whining about how difficult it is to provide that support.
Besides, Blizzard doesn't provide any support...how hard can that be?
This is a horrible idea.
This will simply be used by the creationists to validate their favorite meme that mainstream Darwinists irrationally refused to consider other points of view.
They'll be able to say, "look, they're so scared of other views they won't even allow us to use their own writings."
Leave it to the AAAS to come forth with such a brain-dead stupid maneuver. You except coypright threats directed at critics from the Scientologists. It's a sad day to see legitimate scientists going down that route as well.
Thank you for proving my point. For some liberals, the focus on anti-abortion extremism is so myopic that the first reaction to animal rights terrorism is "but what about abortion clinic violence?" as if one cannot be opposed to both.
This is like Sen. Patrick Leahy's assertion that hearings on animal rights terrorism were pointless and no one really cares about animal rights terrorism.
Now, of course, you have bio companies who cannot get listed on NYSE because the NYSE is scared of animalr rights extremists.