You don't have to have your stuff on their subscription services. It is up to the author (or publisher, whoever controls the copyright). You can have all, some or none of your stuff on their subscription services. However, many choose to have stuff on subscription because it helps people discover your stuff, and while you may not make a lot per view/listen, you make some and it can add up.

Pay per page view actually makes sense, as it helps reward authors that release stuff worth reading. If you do pay per book, then someone can release a book that look interesting, but has no substance. However if people have started reading, well they got their money, and they are done. With page views counting, then it is the stuff that is quality that people read to the end that gets rewarded.

It's the whole Shannon-Hartley theorem. The data rate you can get is limited by the frequency range and SNR you have. Well with stuff over the air the SNR is fixed by transmission power (which needs to be kept low to keep battery life up) and background noise. Frequency range is licensed since not all frequencies are created equal and everyone wants a piece. So the throughput you can get is limited. You can't do like with a wire and just add more wires, in a given area everyone has the same bandwidth to share.

So, you have to play nice. "Just increase the bandwidth" isn't a possibility. They can't magic around the laws of physics. What that means is if people play nice, and use their mobile bandwidth only as needed, it can be fast for everyone. However if people want to try and use it 24/7 and slam it, the speed will suck.

So one way or another, you have to keep people from using too much. I agree that total use isn't the best way, but it is one of the easiest to meter and understand, hence it gets used. Regardless of what method is used, something has to be. Otherwise you are going to have poor wireless speeds and nothing can be done to improve it.

My sister and her boyfriend live in London and they love the city, but don't really like living there. Both make reasonable money, but a massive chunk of it goes to pay for their housing which is not great. They are hoping to be able to move farther away which will be a pain commute wise, but allow them to live some place nicer that doesn't eat up most of their cash.

Master reel-to-reel tape was fucking expensive. So small time bands didn't keep the masters, or intermediate multi-track recordings. They instead reused tape that had already been used, and was then used again.

Even these days, plenty of time master recordings aren't kept. For professional productions they usually are but for others stuff often not. At work I do recordings some times and they are AVCHD recorded to internal flash in the camera. That gets erased and reused of course. When I dump the data, I keep it long enough to edit down the video and make sure the result is good, then purge it. It is too large to be worth keeping around. We could buy storage for it, but we don't.

Anyone with a bit of sense understands the difference. The reason the US can indict these FIFA officials is because they made the mistake of committing financial crimes that involved the US in some way. Either using US banks, or with US citizens/companies, or in the US. That makes it something the US can prosecute for, and obviously Interpol agrees.

Investigating the US space program. Ummm, well I mean you can "investigate" in terms of "Collect whatever evidence you can get your hands on and release a report," but that's all. No criminal case can be brought for anything since it is all in the US. They can't declare jurisdiction, the US would never agree (nor would international law) and the US has a big enough army that they can make that decision.

The limitation of the consumer nVidia cards is double precision floating point. He may not need that. There are plenty of problems that need only single precision math, the extra precision is wasted. In that case, you don't see much benefit going to the pro cards, certainly not enough to justify the price.

They created new rules very recently about reddit being a "safe space". This is something that is, of course, extremely vague. What the hell is a "safe space"?

So suddenly some long time subreddits are getting banned for violating that. They are all shitty splaces, but then other shitty places seem to get left alone. As such people are rightly saying "What the fuck?"

Basically the rule is an arbitrary one. They are saying "We can ban you if you say things we don't like." Now its their site, they can do that if they wish, of course, but that is why users are reacting so negatively. It isn't a clear rule that is being consistently applied, rather it is deliberately vague and being targeted in a scattershot fashion.

"Oh look at me, I'm so awesome, I don't need that high end technology! I'm just so great and productive that this old stuff is excellent!"

The reason I say that is because I've always seen it on Slashdot. Many people here seem to take pride in using old systems. Even back in the P2 days when a brand new system was still "slow" for a lot of things you'd have people humblebraging on how they were using a 486 and it was fine.

While I'll certainly agree that machines have WAY more life these days (a 5 year old machine is perfectly serviceable at work for most things) it has always been something I've observed on Slashdot. Rather than a bunch of people bragging on the high end hardware they have, as you tend to see on gaming forums, you have a bunch of people bragging on the low end hardware they have.

I've not tried GTA 5 yet but the GTA world is generally very limited to do what it does. A great example would be GTA 3 and Vice City. Open world games that ran on PS2 hardware. Amazing... However they did it by tracking very little. Only things in your FOV and relevant to what was happening (quest NPCs, police chasing you) were handled. Everything else was not there. Turn around and then around again, and traffic would be totally different because it was not tracked off screen. Drops/pickups disappear when you go slightly out of range. Most objects couldn't be interacted with past them being damaged, which would fix offscreen.. Stuff like that.

Fallout/Skyrim track quite a bit, some of it in a very permanent fashion. Granted not all of it is in memory or simulated at one time (there are a certain number of grids simulated at once) but it is still pretty complex. You can go in to an area, interact with things, pick them up drop them off move them around, travel far away, come back and they'll be in the same state you left them.

Not saying clever optimization can't fix some thing, but there's limits. Also there are limits to how much time it is worth spending. Say you can engineer a clever system that uses all kinds of hacks and tricks to reduce what is tracked and how it is tracked, and then you optimize the shit out of it to reduce the space it takes... great but how many man-hours did that take? Is it worth it? Time is money in games, and you don't want to spend it on things unless it is needed.

So if projected sales from the older consoles aren't enough to justify the development costs and/or offset the cuts that have to be made, you don't do it.

They were having real, real problems getting the kind of game they wanted in to the very limited memory of the last gen consoles. Cutting down graphics only goes so far, there are just limits to how large a world you can easily have, and how many things you can keep track of at once. They did a lot of creative things to manage that, but it was causing issues and they were reaching their limit.

Some games scale more easily but the big open world types that Bethesda likes do not do as well. Hence it makes sense to target only the current gen stuff.

If you want to university back in the 80s and you STILL haven't repaid your loans, well you are the one who is failing. Not only was university cheaper, and loan terms better, then but you've had like THREE DECADES to pay it back. Student loans are a bitch, and take a long time to pay back for sure. However unless you really fucked up, you can manage it in 30 years.

A good way to tell is with nickle metal hydride rechargables. They have a 1.2v cell voltage. So does a device work with them? Then it'll work on less than 1.3v. Of the things in my house that take batteries, all but one have worked with them. That device, a swifer wetjet, specifically says no rechargables so I haven't tried.

NiMH batters work well in devices including, but not limited to, remotes, wireless microphones, EOTech sights, laser pointers, cordless phones, headphone amplifiers, and wireless mice.

They are different for sure, but that doesn't make them bad. I enjoyed Fallout 3 and I loved New Vegas. Are they the same kind of game as 1 and 2? No, not at all, but they are enjoyable all the same. Not everything needs to be the same all the time, you can have different things in the same universe and it can be fun.

By the same "things can never change" logic, Fallout 1 and 2 were no good because they were different from Wasteland, which was their predecessor (the universe was made because Interplay couldn't get the rights to Wasteland from EA).

Evaluate a game on its own merits. Don't demand that it be just like its predecessors.

I mean you need things like computers, cellphones, beverages, etc in a show. I'm not bothered if those have logos, or if they don't. In fact, it can look more natural and realistic if they do. A Good example is Dell in V for Vendetta. Nothing in your face, the logos on the cop's monitors just aren't covered up. They are just part of the set. When it is done like that, I'm quite happy.

An example of it being done poorly that bothered me was in I Robot, when Will Smith puts on some brand new Converse shoes released in sync with the movie and talks about them. It was very clearly something shoehorned in there, not a fluid part of the script.

It is a good balance between getting a good 3rd, 4th and 5th and not getting too complex. You have to go to 29-TET before you get a better perfect 5th and 41-TET to get a better major 3rd. Gets a little complex musically to represent and deal with all that, not to mention design instruments that can play it back.

So remember that ultimately music is all math, and as such some things do end up being "better" than others musically. I'm not saying we shouldn't have the capabilities to use other scales, I mean computers are more or less unbounded in their capabilities and samplers can microtune to any required setup, but 12-TET has a reason for its prevalence.