I'm calling BS on this. I use Google to search for what I want on Amazon because 99% of the time Google takes me to what I actually want. Their personalised recommendation system is good, but their search is utter fail.
There is a debt collection agency that called the emergency line to our elevator about once every two days (my desk is near the elevator). They did give us the option to press 1 to talk to an associate, but it was an emergency phone. You could only pick it up, and press the single button to call the fire department.
Finally one day the robo dialer left a call back number, I called back, but unfortunately they had no idea how to make the calls stop since I couldn't give them the name of the person they were trying to collect on, and they couldn't look the number up unless I was calling back from the emergency phone.
They still call about once every two days. If I can get $500
Came here to say exactly this. Just bought a Toshiba Thrive off the egg because it was (after a promotion) about $70 less than I could get it for anywhere else. They will be fine.
Yeah, this is pretty standard over hyped fare here. It could as well be, "Worlds best stem cell doctor decides to live in Switzerland." I bet he's rich over there too.
Basically the US has the best medical industry because we pay through the nose for it, and (in general) the best surgeons from around the world can make a killing by living in the states. Doesn't mean that you won't find outstanding doctors that decide, hey living in Europe is more cool than a third BMW.
I RTFA. I still don't know what it was that I saw. Maybe if the author knew how to type he'd be able to get a coherent thought down before rambling on like a vagrant on amphetamines.
I actually learned how to do this when I broke my right hand years ago. At my best I was able to hit about 25 words/minute, so no speed records were broken, but to this day it helps me drink coffee and code at the same time, or use a mouse. Once you master how to do it you can seamlessly move between typing styles depending on what you need.
It's also been a horrible habit as it caused me to put my coffee down next to my mouse numerous times. Learn to single hand type with your right hand or get a track ball.
No offense, but I'm typing this on the $350 15" Acer laptop with an E-350 (zacate fusion processor). I played portal 2, start to finish, on this thing at medium settings. It gets about 6 hours of battery life out of light web browsing. Intel may be killing AMD on the low end, but based on my comparison to a $600 HP probook with an i3-2ksomething, it's indistinguishable at web browsing and word processing, and the i3 just fails any time you try to run a game.
Not saying that the sandybridge i3 isn't a better number cruncher, it's just that for real people usage AMD is curb stomping Intel. I can only assume that marketing alone is the only reason Intel is selling anything under $900.
It's all about how much I have to pay to sit on the couch and quick check my email during a commercial, without having to lug out my 15" laptop. For me that'd be about $100 to $150. When I saw that the iPad was doing well at a $500+ price point I just assumed that it was half apple rep pushing the price up higher, and half me being a big cheapskate. Then the whole TouchPad thing happened and we got a whole bunch of good data. Here's what we can learn:
1. At $99 people will fight for your tablets. I saw two people here ditch work and race to the local Meijers when they heard that there might be one or two left there (there wasn't).
2. By checking scalpers prices, I can deduce that about $235 (16 gig), and $250 (32 gig) is where people stop buying them on impulse.
3. Your 'casual' market doesn't give a flying rip about apps. They'll use it if it's there, but that's not why they're buying tablets.
Two paragraphs down... "These aren't exact quotes, but I did my best to paraphrase the gist of what he was saying."
So not straight from the horses mouth. It's what Andy Carvin thinks a Schmidt meant when he answered a question at a TV conference. We have no hard facts and Andy didn't see fit to let us know what question he asked or what an exact quote for the answer was.
That said, if google wants to build a social network for real people, it's up to them. I can't find fault with them for that. However I think many people can find fault with google for not putting something out there in plain text that says, "If you're not a real person, this is not a service for you." I'm guessing that 99% of people would find that warning label about as useful as a warning not to use the product as a suppository, but I guess that 1% really needs to be told.
I remember reading (cant find source) that some of the big wigs at Nintendo told their stock holders that the hardware was done, but they wanted to hold off the release of the 3DS till they had an impressive line up of launch titles. Stockholders wanted a quick pay day from the successor to the system that printed money, and forced it out early.
The system then launched with no games. And gamers, well as much as we like cool new hardware, we actually seem to like games more. No games? No sale. Sorry, that's just how it works. Now the 3DS isn't selling well and there's this sentiment that it won't sell well in the future and everyone (stockholders) is all up in a panic. Actual gamers? Well when that must play game comes out around Christmas then I'll jump, till then... why?
I'm not convinced that iPhones are killing the dedicated hand held market. Maybe diluting it a bit, but nothing like the scare tactics that we're seeing. You're not going to find a game with depth on your iDevice or android that you will with a 3DS or a Vita. If only for the reason that even last gen portable games often went over a gig in size (UMD discs could hold 1.9 gig on them). Your iPhone would be able to realistically hold about 5 games of psp quality before you'd have to delete the old ones to make room for the new. When you start looking at the vita, you're looking at 6 to 8 gig per game. You'd fit one? Maybe two games on your phone?
Better Solution: Have a [real_name] gmail account and a [internet_name] gmail account. Set up mail forwarding and tagging from your internet account to your real account.
But oh no! My Internet self can't have a Google+ or Facebook account. That's not the point of Google+ or Facebook. Those parts of the internet are designated real people zones. That is what they are there for. You have the entire rest of the internet to play with, now make your internet self leave that corner alone.
Seriously, grown adults wailing and bawling about what amounts to their own ineptitude.
As a dev that is taking c# to the bank every week I can say that I have never seen a productivity boost like the day and a half I hunkered down and actually figured out linq and how to use lambda expressions with linq. Nothing even comes close.
Oracle really needs to take a break from milking to feed some major improvements into Java including core support for lambda (which iirc is 'coming soon') and a linq equivalent,
I wouldn't say windows 7 went fully this direction. Red X still means close, and in the task bar/doc if a program is running it's highlighted. They just took the good things from the doc experience (punch big button to do stuff) and merged it in with the task bar.
Not a security expert here, but this is how I think the trick is done.
Breif on public private key encryption, skip at your leisure... Most ssl connections are using a form of public private key encryption (I think). When your ssl connection requests a cert from a web page (example ibm.com), your browser pulls a copy of ibm.coms public key, encrypts the traffic, and sends it on it's way. The only one that can then decrypt the transmission would be someone that possesses the private ibm.com key.
The idea behind this new wireless is that when your computer requests access to a public open network, that network can say, "Ok, send me all your data encrypted with the public key from trustyCo.com". From there you'd need access to the private key for trustyCo.com to read anything you send out. Presumably then, the only one able to read your data would be trustyCo, and it would be up to them to decrypt your traffic and send it out to the internets. The actual point isn't that it protects you by encrypting your traffic though, the point is in that the only one you can communicate with is TrustyCo, not every random script kiddie with firesheep installed sitting within 150 ft of you.
It's probably more complex than that, as I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take a team of IBM nerds years of development to do it if it were that simple, but the basic principal probably holds true.
The "Mostly brown and grey" argument always bothered me, so I'd like you to run a one man experiment for me. Stop reading and look around you. Count the instances of grey, and browns around you. When you get back compare with my results.
I sit at a wood desk (brown) with a hutch that has grey tack board. The walls are beige (grey and brown mixed), the carpet here is brown and beige patterned. There is wood coloured (brown) trim on the walls. My keyboard and monitor are black, so there's a difference, but not towards the direction of adding colour.
Now I want you to compare your results, and imagine how a developer at ID software, perpetually locked in their cubicle, would do. Think on that.
Now consider: Id is based in Mesquite, Texas. I'm not familiar with Mesquite personally, but the last time I drove through Texas even the grass was brown. When the creative talent at Id are allowed to leave their brown and grey boxes, they walk outside to a world where grass is also brown and the concrete is grey. It being Texas I'm sure that there is a high probability for guns and ammo crates to be found littered around the landscape.
You see it's not that they lack the creative talent to do colour. It's that after years of being locked in a brown and grey cube, with only brief access to a brown and grey world outside, it's the only two colours they can comprehend. It's a disability, and making fun of them for it is intolerance.
If you're not buying that how about buying reading lessons.
He's saying that getting cheap crappy hardware that failed all the time forced them to write software with a high tolerance for failure. A little between the lines and he's saying that if they didn't go through the hardship of failing hardware they would've never written something that could fail over to other machines. I can imagine that a system that fails over to a new server quickly would also be highly scalable with a little tweaking.
That 'dumb decision' to not invest in reliable hardware indirectly helped them build a highly scalable search system that became their whole companies foundation. Over management and strict adherence to known process would have produced a Google search that would've required a massive rewrite to their (at the time only) product right when they were getting off the ground.
TLDR: If you're big enough to hire a consultant that tells you to, "Think outside the box", you're probably too big to think outside the box.
I'd like to present the AAA title Portal. The game took an average of 3 to 4 hours to complete and was initially sold at retail for $20. Your argument has already been made and proven correct almost 4 years ago.
Granted all the games can't fit into this time frame, but truth be told, devs should be telling a story and ending the game when the story is done. Strip out all the padding, but sell it for a reasonable amount.
I got a nice 4 bedroom 3 bath on 1.25 acres with a stream running through the back yard here in west Michigan for less than last year. When the apocalypse hits I've got drinking water, a nice garden for veggies, and an apple tree to lure deer to into bow and arrow range. Also the day I get to kill the woodchucks that keep eating my watermelons will be a happy day for me.
All this and I've got 2 grocery stores, a strip mall and an IMax movie theatre within walking distance. What now inner city folk.
Chances are there was a group of lawyers that sat around in an overly expensive office and drafted (read, photocopied) paperwork for six figure salaries. They then found a website that threatened to do everything they did for free. Now having lots of free time they decide to actually use their education and sue their competition out of existence.
Lesson: Never automate a lawyers or a congressman job. You can automate and outsource the entire rest of the country, but if you even look wrong at those professions you will be sued out of existence.
Re:Being Slashdot this will mean...
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm torn by your comment. In one sense I quit using Gawker all together when they applied their new redesign (because it broke if obscene amounts of javascript wasn't enabled). So it's not like a bad design hasn't made me quit a site...
However they changed a white bar to a black bar. WTF people. Based on a lot of reactions a sane man would assume that they murdered your cat in front of your children. Breathe.
This will be a terribly controversial statement, but TF2 on linux plays like proof that linux has hidden costs.
My old 2.6 ghz dual core with a GTX260 could run at about 45-60fps@1080p under windows with everything maxed. Same machine under ubuntu and I was getting wild fluctuation between 5 and 40fps (also at 1080p) with the graphics turned down. I hear some people with monstrous machines can get it to run at a consistent 60 under linux, but you're going to pay through the nose to get hardware that can do it.
That said if you have the hardware already you're probably fine. Also this personal anecdote was from before they made a mac version of the game, so things might have changed since then.
Notes to all your examples: Miniguns: You get a full second audible warning every time before either of these weapons can fire. Flamethrowers: You can't tell from a distance, but they also can't hit you from anywhere but right on top of you. If they're close enough to be a threat you're close enough to know. Needleguns: Needles from both guns function the same 95% of the time. The times when there are differences (crits) the needles glow huge team colored auras. The differences are moot till there is a visual distinction.
I'm backing parent up here. The game is designed so that the more different the weapon the more different their profiles get. It still holds true.
I'd have to disagree with all of your points. My personal preference leans to a Spy played with the default invisibility watch default knife and the ambassador. I find Dead Ringer Spys are effective if you're looking to build up a good kill death ratio, but for actually accomplishing objectives and helping your team out the default set is better. As for the Pyro, I still prefer the degreaser/flare gun/axestinguisher combo for general purpose, but occasionally go backburner/shotgun/powerjack if I'm attempting to be sneaky.
As it stands there may be a few weapons that are always better than others, but 99% of the time that's not true, and it's especially not true of the default weapons you get.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm calling BS on this. I use Google to search for what I want on Amazon because 99% of the time Google takes me to what I actually want. Their personalised recommendation system is good, but their search is utter fail.
There is a debt collection agency that called the emergency line to our elevator about once every two days (my desk is near the elevator). They did give us the option to press 1 to talk to an associate, but it was an emergency phone. You could only pick it up, and press the single button to call the fire department.
Finally one day the robo dialer left a call back number, I called back, but unfortunately they had no idea how to make the calls stop since I couldn't give them the name of the person they were trying to collect on, and they couldn't look the number up unless I was calling back from the emergency phone.
They still call about once every two days. If I can get $500
Came here to say exactly this. Just bought a Toshiba Thrive off the egg because it was (after a promotion) about $70 less than I could get it for anywhere else. They will be fine.
Yeah, this is pretty standard over hyped fare here. It could as well be, "Worlds best stem cell doctor decides to live in Switzerland." I bet he's rich over there too.
Basically the US has the best medical industry because we pay through the nose for it, and (in general) the best surgeons from around the world can make a killing by living in the states. Doesn't mean that you won't find outstanding doctors that decide, hey living in Europe is more cool than a third BMW.
I RTFA. I still don't know what it was that I saw. Maybe if the author knew how to type he'd be able to get a coherent thought down before rambling on like a vagrant on amphetamines.
I actually learned how to do this when I broke my right hand years ago. At my best I was able to hit about 25 words/minute, so no speed records were broken, but to this day it helps me drink coffee and code at the same time, or use a mouse. Once you master how to do it you can seamlessly move between typing styles depending on what you need.
It's also been a horrible habit as it caused me to put my coffee down next to my mouse numerous times. Learn to single hand type with your right hand or get a track ball.
No offense, but I'm typing this on the $350 15" Acer laptop with an E-350 (zacate fusion processor). I played portal 2, start to finish, on this thing at medium settings. It gets about 6 hours of battery life out of light web browsing. Intel may be killing AMD on the low end, but based on my comparison to a $600 HP probook with an i3-2ksomething, it's indistinguishable at web browsing and word processing, and the i3 just fails any time you try to run a game.
Not saying that the sandybridge i3 isn't a better number cruncher, it's just that for real people usage AMD is curb stomping Intel. I can only assume that marketing alone is the only reason Intel is selling anything under $900.
It's all about how much I have to pay to sit on the couch and quick check my email during a commercial, without having to lug out my 15" laptop. For me that'd be about $100 to $150. When I saw that the iPad was doing well at a $500+ price point I just assumed that it was half apple rep pushing the price up higher, and half me being a big cheapskate. Then the whole TouchPad thing happened and we got a whole bunch of good data. Here's what we can learn:
1. At $99 people will fight for your tablets. I saw two people here ditch work and race to the local Meijers when they heard that there might be one or two left there (there wasn't).
2. By checking scalpers prices, I can deduce that about $235 (16 gig), and $250 (32 gig) is where people stop buying them on impulse.
3. Your 'casual' market doesn't give a flying rip about apps. They'll use it if it's there, but that's not why they're buying tablets.
Two paragraphs down... "These aren't exact quotes, but I did my best to paraphrase the gist of what he was saying."
So not straight from the horses mouth. It's what Andy Carvin thinks a Schmidt meant when he answered a question at a TV conference. We have no hard facts and Andy didn't see fit to let us know what question he asked or what an exact quote for the answer was.
That said, if google wants to build a social network for real people, it's up to them. I can't find fault with them for that. However I think many people can find fault with google for not putting something out there in plain text that says, "If you're not a real person, this is not a service for you." I'm guessing that 99% of people would find that warning label about as useful as a warning not to use the product as a suppository, but I guess that 1% really needs to be told.
I remember reading (cant find source) that some of the big wigs at Nintendo told their stock holders that the hardware was done, but they wanted to hold off the release of the 3DS till they had an impressive line up of launch titles. Stockholders wanted a quick pay day from the successor to the system that printed money, and forced it out early.
The system then launched with no games. And gamers, well as much as we like cool new hardware, we actually seem to like games more. No games? No sale. Sorry, that's just how it works. Now the 3DS isn't selling well and there's this sentiment that it won't sell well in the future and everyone (stockholders) is all up in a panic. Actual gamers? Well when that must play game comes out around Christmas then I'll jump, till then... why?
I'm not convinced that iPhones are killing the dedicated hand held market. Maybe diluting it a bit, but nothing like the scare tactics that we're seeing. You're not going to find a game with depth on your iDevice or android that you will with a 3DS or a Vita. If only for the reason that even last gen portable games often went over a gig in size (UMD discs could hold 1.9 gig on them). Your iPhone would be able to realistically hold about 5 games of psp quality before you'd have to delete the old ones to make room for the new. When you start looking at the vita, you're looking at 6 to 8 gig per game. You'd fit one? Maybe two games on your phone?
This is all over inflated.
Better Solution: Have a [real_name] gmail account and a [internet_name] gmail account. Set up mail forwarding and tagging from your internet account to your real account.
But oh no! My Internet self can't have a Google+ or Facebook account. That's not the point of Google+ or Facebook. Those parts of the internet are designated real people zones. That is what they are there for. You have the entire rest of the internet to play with, now make your internet self leave that corner alone.
Seriously, grown adults wailing and bawling about what amounts to their own ineptitude.
As a dev that is taking c# to the bank every week I can say that I have never seen a productivity boost like the day and a half I hunkered down and actually figured out linq and how to use lambda expressions with linq. Nothing even comes close.
Oracle really needs to take a break from milking to feed some major improvements into Java including core support for lambda (which iirc is 'coming soon') and a linq equivalent,
I wouldn't say windows 7 went fully this direction. Red X still means close, and in the task bar/doc if a program is running it's highlighted. They just took the good things from the doc experience (punch big button to do stuff) and merged it in with the task bar.
Not a security expert here, but this is how I think the trick is done.
Breif on public private key encryption, skip at your leisure... Most ssl connections are using a form of public private key encryption (I think). When your ssl connection requests a cert from a web page (example ibm.com), your browser pulls a copy of ibm.coms public key, encrypts the traffic, and sends it on it's way. The only one that can then decrypt the transmission would be someone that possesses the private ibm.com key.
The idea behind this new wireless is that when your computer requests access to a public open network, that network can say, "Ok, send me all your data encrypted with the public key from trustyCo.com". From there you'd need access to the private key for trustyCo.com to read anything you send out. Presumably then, the only one able to read your data would be trustyCo, and it would be up to them to decrypt your traffic and send it out to the internets. The actual point isn't that it protects you by encrypting your traffic though, the point is in that the only one you can communicate with is TrustyCo, not every random script kiddie with firesheep installed sitting within 150 ft of you.
It's probably more complex than that, as I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take a team of IBM nerds years of development to do it if it were that simple, but the basic principal probably holds true.
The "Mostly brown and grey" argument always bothered me, so I'd like you to run a one man experiment for me. Stop reading and look around you. Count the instances of grey, and browns around you. When you get back compare with my results.
I sit at a wood desk (brown) with a hutch that has grey tack board. The walls are beige (grey and brown mixed), the carpet here is brown and beige patterned. There is wood coloured (brown) trim on the walls. My keyboard and monitor are black, so there's a difference, but not towards the direction of adding colour.
Now I want you to compare your results, and imagine how a developer at ID software, perpetually locked in their cubicle, would do. Think on that.
Now consider: Id is based in Mesquite, Texas. I'm not familiar with Mesquite personally, but the last time I drove through Texas even the grass was brown. When the creative talent at Id are allowed to leave their brown and grey boxes, they walk outside to a world where grass is also brown and the concrete is grey. It being Texas I'm sure that there is a high probability for guns and ammo crates to be found littered around the landscape.
You see it's not that they lack the creative talent to do colour. It's that after years of being locked in a brown and grey cube, with only brief access to a brown and grey world outside, it's the only two colours they can comprehend. It's a disability, and making fun of them for it is intolerance.
You intolerant jerk.
If you're not buying that how about buying reading lessons.
He's saying that getting cheap crappy hardware that failed all the time forced them to write software with a high tolerance for failure. A little between the lines and he's saying that if they didn't go through the hardship of failing hardware they would've never written something that could fail over to other machines. I can imagine that a system that fails over to a new server quickly would also be highly scalable with a little tweaking.
That 'dumb decision' to not invest in reliable hardware indirectly helped them build a highly scalable search system that became their whole companies foundation. Over management and strict adherence to known process would have produced a Google search that would've required a massive rewrite to their (at the time only) product right when they were getting off the ground.
TLDR: If you're big enough to hire a consultant that tells you to, "Think outside the box", you're probably too big to think outside the box.
I'd like to present the AAA title Portal. The game took an average of 3 to 4 hours to complete and was initially sold at retail for $20. Your argument has already been made and proven correct almost 4 years ago.
Granted all the games can't fit into this time frame, but truth be told, devs should be telling a story and ending the game when the story is done. Strip out all the padding, but sell it for a reasonable amount.
I know right! And Blogger should be named Google Team Enterprise Self Foundation Publishing Ultimate Pro!
If Google had the monopoly on email contacts like Facebook has a monopoly on social contacts then yes.
I got a nice 4 bedroom 3 bath on 1.25 acres with a stream running through the back yard here in west Michigan for less than last year. When the apocalypse hits I've got drinking water, a nice garden for veggies, and an apple tree to lure deer to into bow and arrow range. Also the day I get to kill the woodchucks that keep eating my watermelons will be a happy day for me.
All this and I've got 2 grocery stores, a strip mall and an IMax movie theatre within walking distance. What now inner city folk.
A lawyer got burned is what happened.
Chances are there was a group of lawyers that sat around in an overly expensive office and drafted (read, photocopied) paperwork for six figure salaries. They then found a website that threatened to do everything they did for free. Now having lots of free time they decide to actually use their education and sue their competition out of existence.
Lesson: Never automate a lawyers or a congressman job. You can automate and outsource the entire rest of the country, but if you even look wrong at those professions you will be sued out of existence.
I'm torn by your comment. In one sense I quit using Gawker all together when they applied their new redesign (because it broke if obscene amounts of javascript wasn't enabled). So it's not like a bad design hasn't made me quit a site...
However they changed a white bar to a black bar. WTF people. Based on a lot of reactions a sane man would assume that they murdered your cat in front of your children. Breathe.
This will be a terribly controversial statement, but TF2 on linux plays like proof that linux has hidden costs.
My old 2.6 ghz dual core with a GTX260 could run at about 45-60fps@1080p under windows with everything maxed. Same machine under ubuntu and I was getting wild fluctuation between 5 and 40fps (also at 1080p) with the graphics turned down. I hear some people with monstrous machines can get it to run at a consistent 60 under linux, but you're going to pay through the nose to get hardware that can do it.
That said if you have the hardware already you're probably fine. Also this personal anecdote was from before they made a mac version of the game, so things might have changed since then.
Notes to all your examples:
Miniguns: You get a full second audible warning every time before either of these weapons can fire.
Flamethrowers: You can't tell from a distance, but they also can't hit you from anywhere but right on top of you. If they're close enough to be a threat you're close enough to know.
Needleguns: Needles from both guns function the same 95% of the time. The times when there are differences (crits) the needles glow huge team colored auras. The differences are moot till there is a visual distinction.
I'm backing parent up here. The game is designed so that the more different the weapon the more different their profiles get. It still holds true.
I'd have to disagree with all of your points. My personal preference leans to a Spy played with the default invisibility watch default knife and the ambassador. I find Dead Ringer Spys are effective if you're looking to build up a good kill death ratio, but for actually accomplishing objectives and helping your team out the default set is better. As for the Pyro, I still prefer the degreaser/flare gun/axestinguisher combo for general purpose, but occasionally go backburner/shotgun/powerjack if I'm attempting to be sneaky.
As it stands there may be a few weapons that are always better than others, but 99% of the time that's not true, and it's especially not true of the default weapons you get.