It's worth watching. Not because it is fun to hate on the movies (at least not that alone) but because RedLetterMedia actually manages to explain it from a film critique perspective. He isn't a nerd ranting about mistreatment of their favorite character, he is ranting about a film in a genre which failed as a film, then carefully presenting How and Why it failed.
The manner in which he presents his critiques is just icing on the pizza roll.
I don't mind so long as it's possible to earn the awards through play.
I mind. The problem is that it isn't the same as "Pay $5, save 4 hours." It tends to be more along the line of "Pay $5, save 400 hours."
The term "you can earn it through play if you don't want to play" is a copout by the developer in order to justify a rather nasty mechanism.
You will end up with situations like WoW, where database changes which are nothing more than a few lines in a script are being charged at $20-30. (Server transfers being a big abuse) Due to the number of timesinks involved in the game, you could easily see $20 being charged for 2000 hours of playtime depending on how much was invested in the character.
A far bigger problem in my opinion, is that it breaks immersion and adds a feeling of encroachment. For actual gameplay expansion I don't mind paying (as long as it's expansion, and not simply turning on content which was already developed when I first bought the game), but charging for simple things which make the game more fun and require a trivial amount of coding, it feels like the walls are closing in.
That anecdote is over a decade old. You know nothing about the state of Macintosh and Apple and why everybody cares about them NOW if that was your last experience.
That anecdote was chosen primarily because it reflected the time just before Apple instituted a MAJOR change to their operating system and products. It reflected the time just before the iPod was released (and one maybe two years into it). Did you ever wonder why they had to shift so much?
I posted the anecdote because I had direct face to face interaction with hundreds if not thousands of users per day. Users who were intelligent enough to be able to handle being introduced to a new Operating System but for a variety of reasons did not. I used macs daily, and I still do. But today's environment isn't important when discussing reasons why microsoft programs rose to dominate the market.
No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
'Not necessarily' is what we are worried about. How much 'priority' are they willing to sell?
But seriously though, it's just a slow day at work:/
To be fair, I thought the same thing, until I remembered when I was getting angry at everyone calling MP3 players iPods and regular web served audio recordings as Podcasts.
On a related note, ever notice how each company or organization will use a different term for a Powerpoint Presentation?
Slides Charts Foils etc.
I've seen debates on THAT! One of those things you never notice until someone points it out to you. Then you can never unsee it!
There's no written rule saying it can't be used to describe all software, but it pisses me off in the same way it pisses me off when someone says "put it on the floor" when they're standing in the middle of a forest, or call a truck a "car"
You must be angry a significant portion of the time if trivial things like that set you off. You are using the English language, it's a very flexibile language that allows for a wide variety of 'errors' while still conveying the intended message.
Restated:
You must be fuming a bunch if you make mountains out of molehills. English puts up with a lot of meddling. It can be bungled up and still convey the same meaning.
That wasn't because of vendor lockin. That was because no sites worked in any other browser except IE on a Windows computer.
In our labs, we had a serious issue in dealing with mobile profiles on the MacOS of the time. (8 or 9?)
Early on, the mechanism for your profile was a floppy disk you would carry around with you. Later it was 'partially' fixed and a tool was provided to access network storage with just a click and a login prompt. But an automated solution didn't seem to come about until OSX.
(I might be confusing OS versions there, I just remember earlier versions didn't play well in the networked environment)
Pro tip: Don't use compatibility with a proprietary format as your argument against lock-in as being a factor.
Pro tip: Don't blame compatibility for open software's piss poor track record in usability from a Human Factors standpoint. Especially when I didn't explicitly mention compatibility.
Pro example 2: GIMP. Another bit of software that has LONG been hobbled by poor design from a HMI perspective.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's easy (that's why I haven't tried to help), but don't fall into the trap of blaming someone else (Microsoft) for putting out a product that is easier to use and then act surprised when people prefer Microsoft's product.
It's hard to pass a levy on people who don't live in your town. Unless you issue speeding tickets to all passing through. Otherwise, if you just charge a fee for driving through, you'll just divert traffic to nearby routes, if you even have the legal authority to charge such a fee.
Why is it the responsibility of other people to pay for a town they don't live in?
I do hope the police officer involved does have disciplinary action.
Who would decide to apply that disciplinary action? The police.
They have already stated that they feel the officer did nothing wrong, even going so far as to imply that they would do it again. Hope usually implies a chance it could happen.
I can't imagine a legit coin dealer / jeweler buying a couple ingots that have been carefully defaced in that way. Admittedly it would make the cops job much harder.
Unless you are going to try and source the gold through measuring radiation or minor trace elements (Which is not cheap or easy), gold bars are gold bars.
I have/had a couple ingots that I made from melting down old bits of broken jewelry. Twisted necklaces, broken settings, old dead water damaged watches, basic wedding bands.
Hire a trusted company to perform an analysis on the content, and you can find a buyer.
We did the same thing with Lead, and Aluminum. Though in general Lead and Aluminum people will simply purchase on your word as they are fairly obvious. The only things like lead and aluminum are much more expensive metals.
With the amount of crap that people throw away, I'm tempted to go back into the junk business. You just have to build up a network of scrap buyers, keep track of the market, and know which auction houses to go to when.
A large yard is helpful, since you can store stuff until your preferred time to sell it. It's weird how seasonal furniture is.
MSFT would be even more irrelevant than they are already becoming if it weren't for vendor lock-in.
Seriously, where would they be?
In late 90s and early 2000s I managed a university's student computer labs. These weren't some podunk labs with 2 or 3 machines but entire buildings sometimes with 100-200 Windowsmachines and another 30% of them were Macintosh machines. (There were a few linux labs and when I left, we had 2 linux machines per lab)
If you knew the troubles we had getting the students to even use the Macs just for checking email, it could be a lesson in salesmanship. As it was, even when the windows machines were at 100% usage, you would see a long line stretching PAST the Macs while people waited for the windows machines. Hell, I'd see people more likely to use the Linux machines than Macs.
Microsoft may abuse its position through vendor lockin, but to get TO that position it was doing something right. Even now... last night my wife finally convinced me to install Microsoft Office because the slide software for OpenOffice was causing her so many issues.
It's easy to blame Microsoft's dominance on lockin and unfair practices, but that alone isn't why they are the top dog.
Hydro is a fixed resource that _will_ be used up at the end of the year (so to speak, obviously some years you end up with full reservoirs).
When you use an extra kwh there is not magically more water running down the hill.
Your incremental power comes mostly from coal, same as everybody else.
It doesn't matter where you live.
Actually it does matter. As part of an experiment I built a cistern at the top of my hill. During the day, solar panels would power my home. Batteries were minimal and just used for basic leveling. During periods of overgeneration it would power a pump which would send water up the hill into my cistern. In the evenings, rather than rely only on my batteries for power, if it would drop low (20% or so to avoid deep cycling my batteries), the cistern would open and water would flow down the hill into a lower receiving cistern. At the lower cistern, I had a hydro-electric generator which would then provide power via the flowing water.
I didn't have to pump that often either, as the upper cistern was filled from runoff from the mountain (it was a rainy area) and my field, even though a 10% incline often had marshy areas or puddles.
So basically what I had built was a hybrid system. Solar/Hydro-electric. The cistern was essentially a battery which was 'charged' by the system pumping water up the hill from excess solar power. It was supplimented by standard runoff.
Perhaps on a large scale, this wouldn't work, but I've always been an advocate for checking our population growth so that we can each live in mostly sustainable ways.
Would a forest over a long period of time simply be neutral? Or is it possible that we could enter a state in which the biomass is built up to a level in which it is 'sandwiched' down and carbon is 'caught'.
I mean, that's how the oil fields got there in the first place right?
Of course, I think that's the same problem with these timescales.
Short Term (50 yrs): Trees capture carbon! Mid-term (150-300 yrs): most of the carbon is released as biomass decays! Epic Long Term(1000-100 million years): 0.001% of the carbon each year is permanently trapped in the lower layers of the biomass, eventually becoming shale/slate/oil/gas. Over 100 million years, this is a lot of carbon. But in 100 million years, we won't even be the same species.
I think the 300 year timeframe is probably the best one to look at. 30 years is too short, and 10,000 years means Yellowstone erupted or a meteor hit us and THAT's going to really alter our atmosphere.
You know, as long as we are discussing timeframes;)
You said that no one can do anything against the wishes of another
Perhaps we are discussing two different points in which the English language is insufficient to differentiate. I'll try to word this carefully.
The concept of a monopoly of violence doesn't deal with some omnipotent ability to prevent someone from taking an action, such a thing would be impossible. It deals with the concept of describing a state/government/authority based on its ability to delegate violence.
It is possible for things to be performed without violence, but any attempt to exert authority requires eventually requires a threat of violence in the case of non-compliance.
Please do not think that this is a call FOR violence, this is simply a philosophical point. The inability to apply violence implies a lack of power over a particular area, it does not imply that there is power, but one lacking of a will/capability to apply violence.
I'm glad they found this type of cyclic activity. The sooner we find complex life off-Earth the better.
Until you find out that the life is actually biological contaminants that hitched a ride on the Soviet Mars-2 probe. Here on Earth bacteria reproduce every 30 minutes or so (sometimes less) Imagine if the bacteria on Mars only reproduced at half that rate due to less than ideal conditions. 38 years, exponential growth rate.
Slow down their reproduction to just once an hour, you would have 2^333108 bacteria on Mars after 38 years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth watching. Not because it is fun to hate on the movies (at least not that alone) but because RedLetterMedia actually manages to explain it from a film critique perspective. He isn't a nerd ranting about mistreatment of their favorite character, he is ranting about a film in a genre which failed as a film, then carefully presenting How and Why it failed.
The manner in which he presents his critiques is just icing on the pizza roll.
Can anything that someone goes to so much effort to critique truly have failed?
How many Vietnam War documentaries and policy critiques are there?
And with regard to a story, yes, something can be very popular and still fail to tell a good story.
I don't mind so long as it's possible to earn the awards through play.
I mind. The problem is that it isn't the same as "Pay $5, save 4 hours." It tends to be more along the line of "Pay $5, save 400 hours."
The term "you can earn it through play if you don't want to play" is a copout by the developer in order to justify a rather nasty mechanism.
You will end up with situations like WoW, where database changes which are nothing more than a few lines in a script are being charged at $20-30. (Server transfers being a big abuse) Due to the number of timesinks involved in the game, you could easily see $20 being charged for 2000 hours of playtime depending on how much was invested in the character.
A far bigger problem in my opinion, is that it breaks immersion and adds a feeling of encroachment. For actual gameplay expansion I don't mind paying (as long as it's expansion, and not simply turning on content which was already developed when I first bought the game), but charging for simple things which make the game more fun and require a trivial amount of coding, it feels like the walls are closing in.
That anecdote is over a decade old. You know nothing about the state of Macintosh and Apple and why everybody cares about them NOW if that was your last experience.
That anecdote was chosen primarily because it reflected the time just before Apple instituted a MAJOR change to their operating system and products. It reflected the time just before the iPod was released (and one maybe two years into it). Did you ever wonder why they had to shift so much?
I posted the anecdote because I had direct face to face interaction with hundreds if not thousands of users per day. Users who were intelligent enough to be able to handle being introduced to a new Operating System but for a variety of reasons did not. I used macs daily, and I still do. But today's environment isn't important when discussing reasons why microsoft programs rose to dominate the market.
No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
'Not necessarily' is what we are worried about. How much 'priority' are they willing to sell?
AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
But seriously though, it's just a slow day at work :/
To be fair, I thought the same thing, until I remembered when I was getting angry at everyone calling MP3 players iPods and regular web served audio recordings as Podcasts.
On a related note, ever notice how each company or organization will use a different term for a Powerpoint Presentation?
Slides
Charts
Foils
etc.
I've seen debates on THAT! One of those things you never notice until someone points it out to you. Then you can never unsee it!
There's no written rule saying it can't be used to describe all software, but it pisses me off in the same way it pisses me off when someone says "put it on the floor" when they're standing in the middle of a forest, or call a truck a "car"
You must be angry a significant portion of the time if trivial things like that set you off. You are using the English language, it's a very flexibile language that allows for a wide variety of 'errors' while still conveying the intended message.
Restated:
You must be fuming a bunch if you make mountains out of molehills. English puts up with a lot of meddling. It can be bungled up and still convey the same meaning.
That wasn't because of vendor lockin. That was because no sites worked in any other browser except IE on a Windows computer.
In our labs, we had a serious issue in dealing with mobile profiles on the MacOS of the time. (8 or 9?)
Early on, the mechanism for your profile was a floppy disk you would carry around with you. Later it was 'partially' fixed and a tool was provided to access network storage with just a click and a login prompt. But an automated solution didn't seem to come about until OSX.
(I might be confusing OS versions there, I just remember earlier versions didn't play well in the networked environment)
Pro tip: Don't use compatibility with a proprietary format as your argument against lock-in as being a factor.
Pro tip: Don't blame compatibility for open software's piss poor track record in usability from a Human Factors standpoint. Especially when I didn't explicitly mention compatibility.
Pro example 2: GIMP. Another bit of software that has LONG been hobbled by poor design from a HMI perspective.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's easy (that's why I haven't tried to help), but don't fall into the trap of blaming someone else (Microsoft) for putting out a product that is easier to use and then act surprised when people prefer Microsoft's product.
In this country all fines go to the government's money pot, which removes any incentive to try and make money from them.
Except of course, the incentive for the government to raise revenue from fines...
It's hard to pass a levy on people who don't live in your town.
Unless you issue speeding tickets to all passing through.
Otherwise, if you just charge a fee for driving through, you'll just divert traffic to nearby routes, if you even have the legal authority to charge such a fee.
Why is it the responsibility of other people to pay for a town they don't live in?
I do hope the police officer involved does have disciplinary action.
Who would decide to apply that disciplinary action?
The police.
They have already stated that they feel the officer did nothing wrong, even going so far as to imply that they would do it again. Hope usually implies a chance it could happen.
Many people actually like the walled garden.
That still doesn't make AOL a good product.
I can't imagine a legit coin dealer / jeweler buying a couple ingots that have been carefully defaced in that way. Admittedly it would make the cops job much harder.
Unless you are going to try and source the gold through measuring radiation or minor trace elements (Which is not cheap or easy), gold bars are gold bars.
I have/had a couple ingots that I made from melting down old bits of broken jewelry. Twisted necklaces, broken settings, old dead water damaged watches, basic wedding bands.
Hire a trusted company to perform an analysis on the content, and you can find a buyer.
We did the same thing with Lead, and Aluminum. Though in general Lead and Aluminum people will simply purchase on your word as they are fairly obvious. The only things like lead and aluminum are much more expensive metals.
With the amount of crap that people throw away, I'm tempted to go back into the junk business. You just have to build up a network of scrap buyers, keep track of the market, and know which auction houses to go to when.
A large yard is helpful, since you can store stuff until your preferred time to sell it. It's weird how seasonal furniture is.
Legislation:
Congress hereby establishes the term Decade to refer to a period of time of 100 years.
MSFT would be even more irrelevant than they are already becoming if it weren't for vendor lock-in.
Seriously, where would they be?
In late 90s and early 2000s I managed a university's student computer labs. These weren't some podunk labs with 2 or 3 machines but entire buildings sometimes with 100-200 Windowsmachines and another 30% of them were Macintosh machines. (There were a few linux labs and when I left, we had 2 linux machines per lab)
If you knew the troubles we had getting the students to even use the Macs just for checking email, it could be a lesson in salesmanship. As it was, even when the windows machines were at 100% usage, you would see a long line stretching PAST the Macs while people waited for the windows machines. Hell, I'd see people more likely to use the Linux machines than Macs.
Microsoft may abuse its position through vendor lockin, but to get TO that position it was doing something right. Even now... last night my wife finally convinced me to install Microsoft Office because the slide software for OpenOffice was causing her so many issues.
It's easy to blame Microsoft's dominance on lockin and unfair practices, but that alone isn't why they are the top dog.
You say that as though every action traces back to government.
You say that as if you didn't miss the point.
Bacteria divide into two identical child/sister cells. They are effectively immortal with respect to age.
Under no circumstances should revenue be tied to the enforcement of laws.
I stopped eating meat and dairy and this problem went away.
I started eating Onions, Cabbage, and Beans and now my house is being tapped for biofuels!
Hydro is a fixed resource that _will_ be used up at the end of the year (so to speak, obviously some years you end up with full reservoirs).
When you use an extra kwh there is not magically more water running down the hill.
Your incremental power comes mostly from coal, same as everybody else.
It doesn't matter where you live.
Actually it does matter. As part of an experiment I built a cistern at the top of my hill. During the day, solar panels would power my home. Batteries were minimal and just used for basic leveling. During periods of overgeneration it would power a pump which would send water up the hill into my cistern. In the evenings, rather than rely only on my batteries for power, if it would drop low (20% or so to avoid deep cycling my batteries), the cistern would open and water would flow down the hill into a lower receiving cistern. At the lower cistern, I had a hydro-electric generator which would then provide power via the flowing water.
I didn't have to pump that often either, as the upper cistern was filled from runoff from the mountain (it was a rainy area) and my field, even though a 10% incline often had marshy areas or puddles.
So basically what I had built was a hybrid system. Solar/Hydro-electric. The cistern was essentially a battery which was 'charged' by the system pumping water up the hill from excess solar power. It was supplimented by standard runoff.
Perhaps on a large scale, this wouldn't work, but I've always been an advocate for checking our population growth so that we can each live in mostly sustainable ways.
Would a forest over a long period of time simply be neutral? Or is it possible that we could enter a state in which the biomass is built up to a level in which it is 'sandwiched' down and carbon is 'caught'.
I mean, that's how the oil fields got there in the first place right?
Of course, I think that's the same problem with these timescales.
Short Term (50 yrs): Trees capture carbon!
Mid-term (150-300 yrs): most of the carbon is released as biomass decays!
Epic Long Term(1000-100 million years): 0.001% of the carbon each year is permanently trapped in the lower layers of the biomass, eventually becoming shale/slate/oil/gas. Over 100 million years, this is a lot of carbon. But in 100 million years, we won't even be the same species.
I think the 300 year timeframe is probably the best one to look at. 30 years is too short, and 10,000 years means Yellowstone erupted or a meteor hit us and THAT's going to really alter our atmosphere.
You know, as long as we are discussing timeframes ;)
You said that no one can do anything against the wishes of another
Perhaps we are discussing two different points in which the English language is insufficient to differentiate. I'll try to word this carefully.
The concept of a monopoly of violence doesn't deal with some omnipotent ability to prevent someone from taking an action, such a thing would be impossible. It deals with the concept of describing a state/government/authority based on its ability to delegate violence.
It is possible for things to be performed without violence, but any attempt to exert authority requires eventually requires a threat of violence in the case of non-compliance.
Please do not think that this is a call FOR violence, this is simply a philosophical point. The inability to apply violence implies a lack of power over a particular area, it does not imply that there is power, but one lacking of a will/capability to apply violence.
I'm glad they found this type of cyclic activity. The sooner we find complex life off-Earth the better.
Until you find out that the life is actually biological contaminants that hitched a ride on the Soviet Mars-2 probe. Here on Earth bacteria reproduce every 30 minutes or so (sometimes less) Imagine if the bacteria on Mars only reproduced at half that rate due to less than ideal conditions. 38 years, exponential growth rate.
Slow down their reproduction to just once an hour, you would have 2^333108 bacteria on Mars after 38 years.
Please turn in your /. geek card on the way out. Thanks.
Hey, just because my cell phone isn't Turing-Complete doesn't mean it can't SSH thank you very much.
Besides. I'm a carpentry geek. My math is written on the underside of the cabinets I built ;)