slyn

Its a hobby. I think some people get sucked in and take it too far, but I also think the vast majority don't. I'm just offering a perspective from the "don't" category.

I don't know anyone personally who has say, gotten a job or learned a new tangible life skill from playing.

I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It has also made it easier for me to connect with RL friends as well. Half the reason I started playing was so I would have a way to play with some longtime RL friends while they were living at U of I in champaign and urbana.

Intangibly I feel like I have learned a lot about how to communicate with people, particularly from a leadership position. Since communication over text or in ventrilo doesn't have all the physical queues of face to face interaction, you learn to speak with more clarity and precision as time goes on. I feel like it would be pretty easy to be a successful manager of some non-technical sector of work like retail based solely on what I've learned from being an officer in WoW now as well as being an officer in Runescape back when I was like 13-14.

Edit: PS. I forgot a big intangible: I've had a lot of fun playing over the past couple years.

In the guild I'm in now and a guild I was in in the past I see both: players who are quite literally on welfare or unemployment and just play WoW and other games all day (colloquially "living the dream", mostly tongue-in-cheek), while others have what I would consider successful lives. One of our best priests works as some sort of company programmer or server maintainer/admin. Our best healing druid entered his first bodybuilding contest sometime in September of this year and plans on doing another next August iirc. Our guild/raid leader has an office 9-5 selling toys to retailers or something like that. Lots are in college, myself included. An old guild officer of mine was a Googler. A decent amount have wives/kids/gfs/main squeezes. etc.

I think the best argument of the post is the social obligations point. There are definitely some people who do "no-life" for the guild and such, but again, I think this is a some do some don't thing (as well as being limited to basically people in guild leadership situations). For every guild leader or officer I know who hasn't left a dead-end guild because of a feeling of obligations to the guild, I probably know twice as many officers who did left anyways, and 3-4x as many raiders who did as well. Anecdotally speaking, I left a guild where I was probably next in line to be guild/raid lead for a much better one, and am now debating doing some sort of ESL teach/travel program next year despite having been an officer in my new guild for roughly 6 months now.

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To the newest generations email is an antiquated technology that has no real use among their peers. Eventually they might get some email address for college/professional use, but that's practically akin to a fresh college grad now getting a fax machine because "its what we use at the office".

Not shocking.

Edit: Unless by "the scariest thing" you mean the idea of xyz@facebook.com becoming the default for the >17 crowd, in which case, disregard my nonsense.

They are two products serving two populations, and it seems unlikely that their timelines will converge anytime soon. However, "not converging" doesn't translate to not sharing. There are obviously some things iOS that would be at the least nice to have in Mac OS (the app store being the one of discussion now), just as there are things in Mac OS that would be (or already have been scooped and are already) nice to have in iOS.

Hell yes. I play WoW in a moderately successful raiding guild (very roughly rank #250 worldwide), so a lot of the people that I play with played various MMOs and other various competitive games over the years, but they all act like I'm crazy when I bring up Runescape as a game that did some things right.

I played RS for a year or so when I was 15 (feels forever ago now, just turned 21). The game is totally different now than it used to be, but at the time the risk/reward aspects of RS Pking, dueling, and full scale clan wars made the game amazingly fun at the time. Now don't get me wrong, in retrospect the game was bad. Lots of the good things about the game came out of the player community, lots of the good things about the game were later nerfed or removed altogether, and last but certainly not least the gameplay itself was awful. Despite all this the risk aspect of dueling someone for a million gold or a rare item, or pking someone in the wilderness and taking their armor, or to encounter a 10-15 person group while roving as a 30 person clan in the deep wilderness and then finding out they were luring to another 30+ people just a little bit away was epic and a ton of fun.

WoW isn't really much better. The general gameplay in WoW is actually good and PvE in WoW can be really excellent, but there is no risk in anything, class balance is always a touchy subject , server communities are generally not big or if they are big they are usually horribly imbalanced to one faction, game lag is a problem when that ugly first M in MMO rears its head (for certain definitions of massive, 200 players in combat in the same place is near server crashing in WoW), and million other things are wrong with the game.

Long comment long, suffice it to say the "real" aspects of Eve are probably the most intriguing aspect of the game to me.

A 100,000:1 contrast ratio doesn't do you any good when you can't even see anything in sunlight. OLED may give a great contrast ratio, but any direct light (ex: being outside during the day, a common usage senario) means that you can't see anything anyways.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...

TL;DR: The review is still favorable, just with more meat to back it up.

I hate to generalize and single out a group, but of the people I know I feel like the only people who didn't understand that facebook had very little privacy were the older parents and family and such who all joined after they saw all their kids doing it.

"There are two types of people, those who give excuses, and those who solve problems."

About a year or so ago I was working at my dad's small law office when he inadvertently dropped this gem on me.

My dad is what I like to call a "financial lawyer", as he focuses mostly in bankruptcy, IRS problems, tax stuff, real estate business, litigation, and other random personal or business fiscal matters (for example, he recently took on a case to sell a whole business). He's been running his business now for a little more than 20 years, and for a while after college he worked at the IRS and a few other office jobs, so he more than knows his way around the bureaucracy of working with the government and other large institutions, but it was the way he so deftly displayed this that made it so impressive to me at the time.

So some person wanted to buy or sell a house using him as their representation, and as part of doing this you need to get a form called something along the lines of an "Anti-Predatory Lending Agreement" that you get by mailing or faxing some form to some office where it is somehow approved, and once you have that you can move on with the process of closing. We faxed in our part of getting this done 3-4 weeks in advance even though it is only supposed to take 3-5 business days to get it back approved (assuming everything is in order). About 2 weeks later we still hadn't gotten this form back, so we called in to get the status of the document, and they had us fax it again labeled urgent this time. Another week passed and we still hadn't gotten the document back, so we checked in a second time, sent one more, and another few business days passed without receiving anything. At this point the deadline requiring the document was looming in just a few days, so I called again checking on its status, and basically got nothing.

I reported back to my father to tell him the bad news, then took as seat at the other desk in his room to work on some letters. He sat for a few minutes brewing and quietly mulling over the situation before calling up the office to try and take care of the situation, and after a few minutes got in touch with the person who was supposed to be handling our file. This is how the conversation panned out (with liberties taken assuming what specifically was said on the other side of the phone):

[introductory banter]

Dad Lawyer: So ok, how is this predatory lending agreement coming along? Office Guy: Well we've had a busy week but we should be able to have it to you in a few days. DL: A few more days? We need this agreement like _tomorrow_ or we will have to postpone the closing. OG: Well Sir, it takes around 3 to 5 business days for us to process the forms before we can get them back to you... DL: 3 to 5 days? We sent it the First time more than 2 weeks ago. OG: Hmmm... sometimes forms get misplaced or lost altogether,... DL: Yes, and then we sent our Second form early last week, and our Third form early this week. This is getting ridiculous! OG: ... I'm not sure what I can do to help you Sir...

// At this point, something clicked to my dad and somehow through his experiences in the past he got it. Without raising his voice, his tone changed from exasperation to what I can only fully describe as his "alpha male" voice: a calm, controlled forcefulness.

DL: I see... Listen, I know you don't do too much around your office, but right now that isn't really working out for me very well. I know theres a guy at your office who actually Does work, because theres a guy at every office who actually Does work. What I need you to do is connect me to that guy, because otherwise this just isn't going to get done.

!!! I had barely been listening up to that point, but when his tone changed and I heard that, I basically did a full about-face out of surprise. Pretty sure the guy on the other line was just as shocked as I was and tried to muster a response, but my dad didn't have any of it and just asked to talk to "that guy". I expected he would be put through to a manager or supervisor who would then take care of the situation, but as it turns out he actually just got put through to "that guy", and no more than 3 or so hours later one of his secretaries walked into his office and handed him the lending agreement. He turned around to me grinning like a madman and I couldn't help but laugh, the situation seemed too unreal, but I learned that day (though I may not be able to pull it off quite like he did) that it just isn't worth bothering working with the excusers. If you need to rely on people to get stuff done for you, make sure you have people who actually get stuff done.

The guy does it in this video, pretty sure it was in a comment on HN a while back.

Hopefully its the start of a continuing trend and not just a temporary thing.

"With its release, Valve will include native Mac OS X, OpenGL versions of Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Portal, and the entire Half-Life series. Portal 2, due by the end of 2010, will be simultaneously released on both the Windows and Mac versions of Steam."

May 12th! Between steam for OS X, SC2, and eventually WoW: Cataclysm, I'm not going to be getting anything done this summer. =(

I'm pretty new to the game but I'm starting to get the hang of it, if anyone wants to skirmish or give me some tips my id is corohd.warpath

Fake edit: Found it, he details it first in a post here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=299... And then it gets its own discussion here http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1458230/Woz-Cites-Sc...

See this: http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifyin...

I imagine gender and DoB factor in heavily to something like a recommendation engine, and I'm sure zip code would come into play when trying to get those last couple percent as is the case with the Netflix prizes.

We got my dad one of the original Eee PCs (Eee 901?) from when they first came out because he wanted a small computer he could wander around the house with, and at the time it was basically the only netbook on the market. It has aged fine to do what he wants it for, but it has always been a pain to get it to connect to our wireless network. Usually it connects on startup, but when it doesn't it basically stops working until one of us re-enters our hotspot name and password after turning the wifi card on and off.

Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone and get them both something better with just one device. I'd definately want to test out the hardware myself though to see if it meets "can my parents learn to use this?" first impression.

Them being in the tablet gives hope that these IPS panels will eventually end up in the Macbook, MBAir, and MBPro.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/psychology-we...

Read the "The Effects of Slow Download Times" section. Those miniscule effects add up big over time, and lead to better overall satisfaction of the service. The link specifically refers to various web services, but I would be extremely surprised if there was not a similar effect in relation between satisfaction and general speediness (UI snappiness, JS/HTML/etc rendering speed) of various browsers.

Thats not to say that speed is the only reason to choose a browser, but it likely has more of an effect on how you use your browser (and therefore how you use the internet) than you would be able to consciously discern.

?

In the past couple years they created a cross platform multi-vendor open standard for GPU computing, they took a big risk by launching the iPhone without support for flash and have continued to be basically the only major company giving adobe any pressure to improve its shit-tastic platform, they have (granted extremely slowly) improved their iPhone development program from basically non-existant to acceptable in a sadistic way (and if the trend continues it might actually be good within a year or two), they mostly got rid of DRM from iTunes, and most recently they opened up their SDK for making the iTunes LP things (which will likely be of importance when (if ever) the iTablet/iSlate comes out).

The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X. I would consider these to be more of an issue if Apple preemptively put a stop to #2 through activation checks or some WGA-esque program, but they don't. As long as you aren't going around selling preinstalled copies of OS X on non-Apple hardware, Apple could seemingly care less.

Microsoft in recent history hasn't been bad either, they still have WGA, and there was the whole OOXML thing, but other than those two things I can't think of anything they have done that has caused an e-uproar. Personally I would put the two (Apple and MS) roughly equal to each other in terms of Evil.

Check out his entire youtube channel, it is full of interesting software/hardware hacks.

Though more entertaining than educational, I know the difference between my boot from my bonnet thanks to that show, as well as what a saloon, spanner, pillock and many other british-english mannerisms mean.

This is exactly why I choose to avoid the whole global warming climate debate thing. It is so hard to find any sort of unbiased information because everyone who talks about it has an agenda and forces it in your face. An Inconvenient Truth was actually gag worthy, an hour and fifteen minutes of Al Gore masturbating his ego over his crusade, five minutes of ridiculous cartoons, and maybe fifteen minutes of actual statistics. Obviously a station like Fox News or a talking head like Sean Hannity is going to push a right wing viewpoint to the death, so there is really no point bringing them up in any serious debate about basically anything. Even this posting, I just have a hard time taking this particular blog seriously given the "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal", as the description, whether it is intended to be humorous or not.

The whole global warming debate is not as clear cut (if you can call it that) as something like stem cell research where the issue was basically science vs morality/religion. Both sides have their own statistics, both sides try their hardest to refute the other sides' science, and even the people who actually agree with each other that there is global warming often have different opinions on what can actually be done (if anything) to fix the problem. When something like the climate-gate situation becomes public, it makes it even harder to actually take any of the science seriously, because one can only assume that the studies, experiments, and modeling is being done with the intention of proving one side right or wrong, which will undoubtedly lead to all sorts of unintended cognitive bias.