i rtfa and it didn't explain what these two play types were. at a guess, veterans are players who know exactly how to very quickly kill all NPC's and pacifists prefer to sneak past enemies (presumably looking for story progression more than combat).
i think this could be interesting as it would mean that various branches of game dev could all get an equal input and the player would define which aspects they get into more. obviously their goal is to increase player satisfaction and thereby recommendation sales (which are probably the most important if the impact of p2p downloading on music and video purchases is indicating). i personally HATE puzzles that aren't reasonably simple and present upfront as puzzles. the physics puzzles of hl2 were fine with me but i used walkthroughs on penumbra and tlj games because i am not good at puzzles.
i hadn't played much computer games for years between my late teens and late twenties, and what got me back into it was storyline - half life 2 has such a rich storyline, even if it is inane the acting is so well done. i suppose my early style was 'runner' as i just wanted to advance as quickly as possible to the next story element. then after a while i got to know how to play it better and not many incidents of dying and i started noticing side-tracks and objects and methods i hadn't tried before.
overall i think a more intelligent adaptation of the game would provide a deeper variation than weapon lethality, accuracy and the enemy's converse functions. replaying, for example, one wants ways to advance cutscenes faster, that would be something that a system like that could manage, to choose more curt versions of a dialogue sequence and determine triggers to advance and so forth. making enemies more alert or less alert to your presence in-game too, would require this kind of analysis, this would raise the challenge level for veteran players who would have to increase their response rate and vary tactics against npc's that are prepared sooner and move in more advanced tactical manouvres, varying between a bunch of idiotic disconnected enemies up to enemies that call each other over to attempt to fix and flank you.
one could go on and on. but overall this idea of games adapting play style to suit the player is going to mean more people like playing games, if this leads to a more fluid and individualised game experience this is a good thing because it also means if you want to try a different approach the game world responds differently to you and creates a different experience. it's a break from the ye olde railroad plot pathway and it can only make gaming better.
I have a geek friend, she's more of a punk freak geek but still, geeky, and she and her WoW addict man have got the same basic issues as your average non-geek couple. I suspect those books you are reading are equally applicable just substitute your relevant geek interests and geek social networks and it should all be much the same (assuming the books are not just pop psychology twaddle).
well, my mother has been using ubuntu now for almost two years and apart from having to tinker with the console to configure a pinnacle remote i mistakenly thought was ootb supported and the odd weird hardware problem even *i* haven't had to use the console on that box. it also has vista installed on a second drive but apart from some weird intermittent problems with the ubuntu boot drive (can't tell if it is controller, cabling or the drive - drive not ready errors), she prefers to use the ubuntu system. even the media centre - is nowhere near as good as mythtv.
windows 7 is a catch-up 'me too' release that vista would have been except they took an eternity to decide that winfs wasn't going to happen and neglected the actual usability side of the interface upgrade. under the hood things have not changed that much, vista drivers work perfectly (and many xp as with vista).
the new taskbar is something that i personally have been wishing for for the most part since windows 95 came out (why can't launchers and window tabs be unified?) and imho the thing works more efficiently than the Dock, just not quite so stupidly pretty. still no options for personalising the look of the windows and taskbar, apart from the novelty of the taskbar most users aren't going to notice much difference and those who upgraded to vista will be reluctant to get 7, and i suspect that the xp hold-outs won't be that interested in upgrading either because it's just not a big enough improvement.
one has to suspect that microsoft's software development architecture is laden down with all sorts of nasty bureaucracy, it's the only possible explanation for how the biggest selling and most profitable operating system is not leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else.
well they are in the business of promoting a particular view, and i don't think they are nearly as batsh*t crazy as peta.
and i am particularly interested to see chlorinated, brominated and fluorinated hydrocarbons all banned as there is very good reason to suspect them of being involved in damaging reproduction, causing cancer, and disrupting human and many animal endocrine systems. the evidence is mounting and i doubt that these chemicals will be legal to use in any commercial product within 20 years.
i bought these games on steam, i think i paid the same. good games but i found it incredibly frustrating the lack of object highlighting as you would in some places have to scan your mouse around to find objects of interest, as, not *everything* would be interactive.
however, given a walkthrough i got to enjoy the very scary events of one of the games but i have to say that solving a puzzle is one thing, but not being able to find the pieces is quite another. i have played dreamfall, and that game is mostly puzzle with a bit of fun scary action in it, it's more playable.
but whinges aside. kudos for porting the game to linux. imho, game engines are probably not that hard to port from one platform to another, given the use of opengl. getting the management to see the worth of it is quite another. hopefully this will change in time. games that use opengl are also readily ported to mac. with the rapid uptake of ipods and iphones i suspect that the rate of new buyers of macs will slowly escalate, and this should bring more game engines onto opengl and thus increase the chances of other operating systems getting them too.
and then finally, almost anything will actually be available in mostly the same state almost anywhere. wouldn't that be lovely.
being that we already know intel graphics works out of the box with any moderately recent x server, i can't see how anything else is not going to work, the bluetooth (a very nice addition) is probably the same as the dongle asus sells, which i've personally configured and used with linux. the only issue might be the touchscreen driver. i'm sure we won't have to wait long for someone to sus this one out for us... and fix it if it's not working.
i personally would probably try and slap a cut down vista on it, but i'm a bit crazy like that. 16gb ssd is definitely big enough.
given a memory upgrade i think this machine would be pretty sweet all in all. i used to own an eee pc 901 and i imagine that this one will definitely be an improvement - and i didn't find the speed of my 901 an unacceptable tradeoff for being able to hold the laptop in one hand with ease.
i don't understand why this whinge about it not playing high def content... it's not a high def display, it's only just slightly larger than standard definition pal DVD resolution. if it can play those ok who cares about whether it can render and then scale down content bigger than it is capable of displaying. this is an area where the gigabyte m912 would be superior, having a higher resolution 1280x800 display and a gruntier processor. but those kinds of extras are where your extra 200-300 dollars goes on the 912 (if you can get one).
i also see this as being a hot seller for children. it has an SSD, it's cheap but decent build quality, and a touchscreen with stylus. kids would love to scribble on that screen i'm sure, and the keyboard size would be ideal.
i thought i should clarify about the 'special voice' i refer to, it's not that brrraaao sound, although a neighbour's cat i noticed doing that, and it resembles the call female cats do when they are on heat, which can often closely resemble a baby crying, it's a sound that's more akin to the sound of a bell being struck, a very rich resonant sound. that's the only cat miao wanting attention that i've ever found compelling, the other kind of miao is just cute and doesn't seem demanding at all.
i noticed years ago my cat used to put on this special voice that seemed to elicit some kind of unconscious reaction in me. second time around at cat owning the little wench has tried it once or twice but i'm immune to it, the first cat overdid it and it stopped working for him.
when i first read this article i thought it was talking about the 'chirping' that cats do when they are extra happy purring, or maybe something a female cat a friend of mine has does a lot, these quiet, semi-pur semi-miao chirpy noises.
cats are more intelligent than many of their owners, and the fact that the cats are able to manipulate their owners just proves it. my cat doesn't manipulate me though. i eventually see through her little ploys. except the one that makes me like having her around of course.
they should just quit offering unlimited data plans unless they can actually offer unlimited data. unlimited dialup is easy to provide for, as in a whole month a user can get at best theoretically about 12gb if they are continuously downloading at full speed.
the real problem is the marketing people are defining service options that the networks are not capable of supporting. some services are making a profit to support other services that aren't, which is fine in, for example, pre-packaged computer bundles, but because with internet service this affects everyone, this is the end result - isp's don't have the ability to provide the level of service they advertise so they must resort to throttling, which is of course done arbitrarily to certain kinds of traffic as they are the biggest bandwidth users, rather than doing it generally.
if isp's just didn't spend so much time trying to hook those high bandwidth users up and made the prices of service to them higher, then the isp's could spend more money enhancing their bandwidth capacity instead of ending up having to explain why and what traffic they are shaping to keep use within the parameters of their networks.
there is many factors related to how network applications are written, how various tcp/ip stacks schedule, how effective QoS systems are, and how widely deployed they are, but there is one guaranteed way to ensure networks aren't bogged down by bulk traffic and streaming users - always keep traffic levels below about half of capacity. the line might be rated to transport data at a certain speed but when you fill that pipe past a certain point you wind up with a great deal of turbulence which leads to latency issues.
it's a bit similar to mastering levels in audio engineering - sure, you may have 120 dB of resolution in your recording medium, but the closer you get to filling all that space the less headroom you have for periodic spikes, which has lead in the commercial music engineering to more use of dynamic range compression, which produces a much 'duller' sound with less dynamics (some even say that this compressed dynamics leads to fatigue in the listener) - this problem never happened in cinema sound engineering because someone set a standard for how many dB average power should be targetted in a mix. Similarly, if the network provision industry would set a standard of aiming at around 50-60% utilisation average and accordingly adjusted planning for bandwidth upgrades and market penetration none of this would be a problem.
beancounters see the network capacity specification and expect that they can run the network at that level without any problems. But of course beancounters also rate the potential of a resource according to a percentage of customer turnover below a certain level, meaning they can cheapskate to some degree and of course being that businesses care more about the bottom line than good service, this is the sort of issue that cannot be solved by anything other than legislation.
i believe network neutrality as a concept misses the real point at issue here, which is simply businesses squeezing more money out of their lines than it is possible in real practise to allow, and pushing this limit just short of messing up the whole network. throttling bittorrent and streaming video is all about trying to hold back the flood of bandwidth demand so they can put off the upgrades for longer.
there would not be a problem if they just didn't provide more bandwidth on the local loop than can be carried through the peering connections.
i admit i haven't been observing pc part lifespan for that long but i still see old 486 machines clunking along fine when 5 year old machines and more recent parts are having noticably higher failure rates. i mean, computers built in the mid 80s still run great but anything much newer than around 97 doesn't last more than 5 years. if there is issues with quality control on the soldering that would explain it. back in the olden days most components weren't surface mount either, every ic on a board was socketed if it had much more than 20 pins which is an obvious way to resolve the heat issue for delicate semiconductors.
perhaps socketing will be looked at again now, i don't know about anyone else but it seems to me that modern digital circuitry is not as reliable as it used to be, even accounting for the greater complexity involved. efforts being made to reduce the power draw of the circuits is also important as less electrons means less heat and less risk of stress to delicate solder joints through oxidation and whatnot.
i live in australia and the reason why texting is more popular here is because the mobile phone rates are outrageous. i don't know what the true story is but i've heard that it costs less to roll out mobile phone networks than wired ones, yet the mobile nets cost way more than any difference i could see as being reasonable. it's just starting to get better now, but the stupid phone carriers don't realise they'd sell it just as well by dropping the per-minute rate rather than having these complicated stupid 'bonuses'
some cables come with retainer clips. the sockets on the drives and motherboards have bits to connect with them. also, if you are referring to e-sata, those are a similar kind of connector as hdmi and ipod docks, and they have retainers.
the only problem there is that the only person with access to such an object works for the company. it speaks about the culture of the company and their security.
I've never understood why it isn't simple - if you make money off it, it's piracy, unless you negotiate a distribution license. Everything else is fair use. This breaks down a little bit in the context of sites like youtube or showing them on a television show. Thinking it through, I think that such a form of distribution is actually advertising and the copyright holders should leave them alone because it's advertising that reaches fans directly, the people who they are marketing to, right?
there is a possibility that the tsunami was caused by man, if you just google 'tsunami bomb' you'll find that such devices have been in development for quite some time. while i don't discount the theory that it was a purely natural event, it is equally possible it was a successful experiment in the use of triggering natural disasters for military purposes. the tectonic plates between india and indonesia are extremely volatile and it probably wouldn't have taken much to make it violently move so as to cause what we saw happen. i don't know really, but just to point out that humans may have had a direct influence and certainly, indirectly, the region is vulnerable to this kind of event and building so close to the shore in a tsunami-prone region is a major factor in the fatalaties that occurred.
i think that what is going on is that the people who want to stay at home are the type of people who tend to be the subjects of the hen-pecks of office politics. the morale goes down because the peckers suddenly don't have anyone to pick on anymore. productivity goes down in the office because the real workers don't like being picked on by the lazy social-oriented types whose primary interest in being in the office is being part of a sordid little pecking order, rather than actually working.
as for managing projects, the true factors powering it is personal interest and talent, nothing to do with this imaginary 'leadership' nonsense. it is an egotistical illusion that humans do anything for anyone but themselves, or that anyone can control anyone else. this is how we are now at this situation where the majority of webservers are running on open-source software, and the fastest growing corporations in the world honour diversity and self-expression. control is an illusion, even on the microcosmic scale of the individual the ego is just an explanation for the unconscious motivations, after the fact.
What I don't get is why the hell did they make a protocol that is not backwards compatible? We'd all be already using IPv6 if IPv4 routers could move the data around. I mean, I may be misunderstanding all this fuss but isn't it just an extension of the number of bits in the address field? Why did the committee developing the standard not *add* the IPv6 headers to the end of the IPv4 headers?
One has to wonder why out of all the standards development in the world, the one which affects the greatest proportion of the population is the most ass-backwardsly designed one. My AMD dual core processor can still run 16 bit and even 8 bit x86 code. Windows XP can still run most old dos software and most old windows software. C++ compilers still understand C code. Why do I need a tunnel to send IPv6 packets through an IPv4 network?
...and even better: it doesn't support partitions over 20gb. i didn't realise this until i tried to format an external 2.5" usb hdd i have and found windows refused to format the whole 37gb partition. so it's ntfs now.
quite seriously, microsofts unco-operative behavior is getting to the point for me now where i'm going to only have a windows partition so i can run steam games and that's it. just as soon as i upgrade my hdd windows stops being my main system. next wednesday!
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i rtfa and it didn't explain what these two play types were. at a guess, veterans are players who know exactly how to very quickly kill all NPC's and pacifists prefer to sneak past enemies (presumably looking for story progression more than combat).
i think this could be interesting as it would mean that various branches of game dev could all get an equal input and the player would define which aspects they get into more. obviously their goal is to increase player satisfaction and thereby recommendation sales (which are probably the most important if the impact of p2p downloading on music and video purchases is indicating). i personally HATE puzzles that aren't reasonably simple and present upfront as puzzles. the physics puzzles of hl2 were fine with me but i used walkthroughs on penumbra and tlj games because i am not good at puzzles.
i hadn't played much computer games for years between my late teens and late twenties, and what got me back into it was storyline - half life 2 has such a rich storyline, even if it is inane the acting is so well done. i suppose my early style was 'runner' as i just wanted to advance as quickly as possible to the next story element. then after a while i got to know how to play it better and not many incidents of dying and i started noticing side-tracks and objects and methods i hadn't tried before.
overall i think a more intelligent adaptation of the game would provide a deeper variation than weapon lethality, accuracy and the enemy's converse functions. replaying, for example, one wants ways to advance cutscenes faster, that would be something that a system like that could manage, to choose more curt versions of a dialogue sequence and determine triggers to advance and so forth. making enemies more alert or less alert to your presence in-game too, would require this kind of analysis, this would raise the challenge level for veteran players who would have to increase their response rate and vary tactics against npc's that are prepared sooner and move in more advanced tactical manouvres, varying between a bunch of idiotic disconnected enemies up to enemies that call each other over to attempt to fix and flank you.
one could go on and on. but overall this idea of games adapting play style to suit the player is going to mean more people like playing games, if this leads to a more fluid and individualised game experience this is a good thing because it also means if you want to try a different approach the game world responds differently to you and creates a different experience. it's a break from the ye olde railroad plot pathway and it can only make gaming better.
I have a geek friend, she's more of a punk freak geek but still, geeky, and she and her WoW addict man have got the same basic issues as your average non-geek couple. I suspect those books you are reading are equally applicable just substitute your relevant geek interests and geek social networks and it should all be much the same (assuming the books are not just pop psychology twaddle).
well, my mother has been using ubuntu now for almost two years and apart from having to tinker with the console to configure a pinnacle remote i mistakenly thought was ootb supported and the odd weird hardware problem even *i* haven't had to use the console on that box. it also has vista installed on a second drive but apart from some weird intermittent problems with the ubuntu boot drive (can't tell if it is controller, cabling or the drive - drive not ready errors), she prefers to use the ubuntu system. even the media centre - is nowhere near as good as mythtv.
windows 7 is a catch-up 'me too' release that vista would have been except they took an eternity to decide that winfs wasn't going to happen and neglected the actual usability side of the interface upgrade. under the hood things have not changed that much, vista drivers work perfectly (and many xp as with vista).
the new taskbar is something that i personally have been wishing for for the most part since windows 95 came out (why can't launchers and window tabs be unified?) and imho the thing works more efficiently than the Dock, just not quite so stupidly pretty. still no options for personalising the look of the windows and taskbar, apart from the novelty of the taskbar most users aren't going to notice much difference and those who upgraded to vista will be reluctant to get 7, and i suspect that the xp hold-outs won't be that interested in upgrading either because it's just not a big enough improvement.
one has to suspect that microsoft's software development architecture is laden down with all sorts of nasty bureaucracy, it's the only possible explanation for how the biggest selling and most profitable operating system is not leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else.
well they are in the business of promoting a particular view, and i don't think they are nearly as batsh*t crazy as peta.
and i am particularly interested to see chlorinated, brominated and fluorinated hydrocarbons all banned as there is very good reason to suspect them of being involved in damaging reproduction, causing cancer, and disrupting human and many animal endocrine systems. the evidence is mounting and i doubt that these chemicals will be legal to use in any commercial product within 20 years.
that doesn't require rollover to activate? i'm pretty sure you still have to roll over...
i bought these games on steam, i think i paid the same. good games but i found it incredibly frustrating the lack of object highlighting as you would in some places have to scan your mouse around to find objects of interest, as, not *everything* would be interactive.
however, given a walkthrough i got to enjoy the very scary events of one of the games but i have to say that solving a puzzle is one thing, but not being able to find the pieces is quite another. i have played dreamfall, and that game is mostly puzzle with a bit of fun scary action in it, it's more playable.
but whinges aside. kudos for porting the game to linux. imho, game engines are probably not that hard to port from one platform to another, given the use of opengl. getting the management to see the worth of it is quite another. hopefully this will change in time. games that use opengl are also readily ported to mac. with the rapid uptake of ipods and iphones i suspect that the rate of new buyers of macs will slowly escalate, and this should bring more game engines onto opengl and thus increase the chances of other operating systems getting them too.
and then finally, almost anything will actually be available in mostly the same state almost anywhere. wouldn't that be lovely.
being that we already know intel graphics works out of the box with any moderately recent x server, i can't see how anything else is not going to work, the bluetooth (a very nice addition) is probably the same as the dongle asus sells, which i've personally configured and used with linux. the only issue might be the touchscreen driver. i'm sure we won't have to wait long for someone to sus this one out for us... and fix it if it's not working.
i personally would probably try and slap a cut down vista on it, but i'm a bit crazy like that. 16gb ssd is definitely big enough.
given a memory upgrade i think this machine would be pretty sweet all in all. i used to own an eee pc 901 and i imagine that this one will definitely be an improvement - and i didn't find the speed of my 901 an unacceptable tradeoff for being able to hold the laptop in one hand with ease.
i don't understand why this whinge about it not playing high def content... it's not a high def display, it's only just slightly larger than standard definition pal DVD resolution. if it can play those ok who cares about whether it can render and then scale down content bigger than it is capable of displaying. this is an area where the gigabyte m912 would be superior, having a higher resolution 1280x800 display and a gruntier processor. but those kinds of extras are where your extra 200-300 dollars goes on the 912 (if you can get one).
i also see this as being a hot seller for children. it has an SSD, it's cheap but decent build quality, and a touchscreen with stylus. kids would love to scribble on that screen i'm sure, and the keyboard size would be ideal.
lol... yeah it's probably the exact same trick, it's not like scratching nails on a blackboard but it has a similar quality that affects your nerves.
maybe your cat is asking for real food? like, chunks of meat she can tear at?
i thought i should clarify about the 'special voice' i refer to, it's not that brrraaao sound, although a neighbour's cat i noticed doing that, and it resembles the call female cats do when they are on heat, which can often closely resemble a baby crying, it's a sound that's more akin to the sound of a bell being struck, a very rich resonant sound. that's the only cat miao wanting attention that i've ever found compelling, the other kind of miao is just cute and doesn't seem demanding at all.
i noticed years ago my cat used to put on this special voice that seemed to elicit some kind of unconscious reaction in me. second time around at cat owning the little wench has tried it once or twice but i'm immune to it, the first cat overdid it and it stopped working for him.
when i first read this article i thought it was talking about the 'chirping' that cats do when they are extra happy purring, or maybe something a female cat a friend of mine has does a lot, these quiet, semi-pur semi-miao chirpy noises.
cats are more intelligent than many of their owners, and the fact that the cats are able to manipulate their owners just proves it. my cat doesn't manipulate me though. i eventually see through her little ploys. except the one that makes me like having her around of course.
they should just quit offering unlimited data plans unless they can actually offer unlimited data. unlimited dialup is easy to provide for, as in a whole month a user can get at best theoretically about 12gb if they are continuously downloading at full speed.
the real problem is the marketing people are defining service options that the networks are not capable of supporting. some services are making a profit to support other services that aren't, which is fine in, for example, pre-packaged computer bundles, but because with internet service this affects everyone, this is the end result - isp's don't have the ability to provide the level of service they advertise so they must resort to throttling, which is of course done arbitrarily to certain kinds of traffic as they are the biggest bandwidth users, rather than doing it generally.
if isp's just didn't spend so much time trying to hook those high bandwidth users up and made the prices of service to them higher, then the isp's could spend more money enhancing their bandwidth capacity instead of ending up having to explain why and what traffic they are shaping to keep use within the parameters of their networks.
there is many factors related to how network applications are written, how various tcp/ip stacks schedule, how effective QoS systems are, and how widely deployed they are, but there is one guaranteed way to ensure networks aren't bogged down by bulk traffic and streaming users - always keep traffic levels below about half of capacity. the line might be rated to transport data at a certain speed but when you fill that pipe past a certain point you wind up with a great deal of turbulence which leads to latency issues.
it's a bit similar to mastering levels in audio engineering - sure, you may have 120 dB of resolution in your recording medium, but the closer you get to filling all that space the less headroom you have for periodic spikes, which has lead in the commercial music engineering to more use of dynamic range compression, which produces a much 'duller' sound with less dynamics (some even say that this compressed dynamics leads to fatigue in the listener) - this problem never happened in cinema sound engineering because someone set a standard for how many dB average power should be targetted in a mix. Similarly, if the network provision industry would set a standard of aiming at around 50-60% utilisation average and accordingly adjusted planning for bandwidth upgrades and market penetration none of this would be a problem.
beancounters see the network capacity specification and expect that they can run the network at that level without any problems. But of course beancounters also rate the potential of a resource according to a percentage of customer turnover below a certain level, meaning they can cheapskate to some degree and of course being that businesses care more about the bottom line than good service, this is the sort of issue that cannot be solved by anything other than legislation.
i believe network neutrality as a concept misses the real point at issue here, which is simply businesses squeezing more money out of their lines than it is possible in real practise to allow, and pushing this limit just short of messing up the whole network. throttling bittorrent and streaming video is all about trying to hold back the flood of bandwidth demand so they can put off the upgrades for longer.
there would not be a problem if they just didn't provide more bandwidth on the local loop than can be carried through the peering connections.
i admit i haven't been observing pc part lifespan for that long but i still see old 486 machines clunking along fine when 5 year old machines and more recent parts are having noticably higher failure rates. i mean, computers built in the mid 80s still run great but anything much newer than around 97 doesn't last more than 5 years. if there is issues with quality control on the soldering that would explain it. back in the olden days most components weren't surface mount either, every ic on a board was socketed if it had much more than 20 pins which is an obvious way to resolve the heat issue for delicate semiconductors.
perhaps socketing will be looked at again now, i don't know about anyone else but it seems to me that modern digital circuitry is not as reliable as it used to be, even accounting for the greater complexity involved. efforts being made to reduce the power draw of the circuits is also important as less electrons means less heat and less risk of stress to delicate solder joints through oxidation and whatnot.
i live in australia and the reason why texting is more popular here is because the mobile phone rates are outrageous. i don't know what the true story is but i've heard that it costs less to roll out mobile phone networks than wired ones, yet the mobile nets cost way more than any difference i could see as being reasonable. it's just starting to get better now, but the stupid phone carriers don't realise they'd sell it just as well by dropping the per-minute rate rather than having these complicated stupid 'bonuses'
if you watch a bit closer, on minority report they have finger thingers one on the index and one on teh thumb if i remember correctly.
i think a mobile phone could be good for game interfaces but i think it would kinda suck for standard gui's
some cables come with retainer clips. the sockets on the drives and motherboards have bits to connect with them. also, if you are referring to e-sata, those are a similar kind of connector as hdmi and ipod docks, and they have retainers.
the only problem there is that the only person with access to such an object works for the company. it speaks about the culture of the company and their security.
i thought someone had already done this?
I've never understood why it isn't simple - if you make money off it, it's piracy, unless you negotiate a distribution license. Everything else is fair use. This breaks down a little bit in the context of sites like youtube or showing them on a television show. Thinking it through, I think that such a form of distribution is actually advertising and the copyright holders should leave them alone because it's advertising that reaches fans directly, the people who they are marketing to, right?
there is a possibility that the tsunami was caused by man, if you just google 'tsunami bomb' you'll find that such devices have been in development for quite some time. while i don't discount the theory that it was a purely natural event, it is equally possible it was a successful experiment in the use of triggering natural disasters for military purposes. the tectonic plates between india and indonesia are extremely volatile and it probably wouldn't have taken much to make it violently move so as to cause what we saw happen. i don't know really, but just to point out that humans may have had a direct influence and certainly, indirectly, the region is vulnerable to this kind of event and building so close to the shore in a tsunami-prone region is a major factor in the fatalaties that occurred.
i think that what is going on is that the people who want to stay at home are the type of people who tend to be the subjects of the hen-pecks of office politics. the morale goes down because the peckers suddenly don't have anyone to pick on anymore. productivity goes down in the office because the real workers don't like being picked on by the lazy social-oriented types whose primary interest in being in the office is being part of a sordid little pecking order, rather than actually working.
as for managing projects, the true factors powering it is personal interest and talent, nothing to do with this imaginary 'leadership' nonsense. it is an egotistical illusion that humans do anything for anyone but themselves, or that anyone can control anyone else. this is how we are now at this situation where the majority of webservers are running on open-source software, and the fastest growing corporations in the world honour diversity and self-expression. control is an illusion, even on the microcosmic scale of the individual the ego is just an explanation for the unconscious motivations, after the fact.
the #1 programmer excuse for legitimately slacking off i just couldn't resist
What I don't get is why the hell did they make a protocol that is not backwards compatible? We'd all be already using IPv6 if IPv4 routers could move the data around. I mean, I may be misunderstanding all this fuss but isn't it just an extension of the number of bits in the address field? Why did the committee developing the standard not *add* the IPv6 headers to the end of the IPv4 headers?
One has to wonder why out of all the standards development in the world, the one which affects the greatest proportion of the population is the most ass-backwardsly designed one. My AMD dual core processor can still run 16 bit and even 8 bit x86 code. Windows XP can still run most old dos software and most old windows software. C++ compilers still understand C code. Why do I need a tunnel to send IPv6 packets through an IPv4 network?
the place i work at is still refusing to upgrade the systems to windows xp...
...and even better: it doesn't support partitions over 20gb. i didn't realise this until i tried to format an external 2.5" usb hdd i have and found windows refused to format the whole 37gb partition. so it's ntfs now.
quite seriously, microsofts unco-operative behavior is getting to the point for me now where i'm going to only have a windows partition so i can run steam games and that's it. just as soon as i upgrade my hdd windows stops being my main system. next wednesday!
no mention of wavelet compression? what? precisely what purpose does this serve?