Wait, you don't get more than 30 minutes of PE in school AND you don't learn an instrument? What do you do? How come your test scores aren't better?

1. I never said OBD/PCM was the *only* tool to use. I just said it was exceedingly useful... and it is. 2. What do field reprogrammable maps have to do with diagnostic error codes? It basically means you can "overclock" your cars engine... nothing else. It has nothing to do with diagnostics. 3. Cars *DO* self adjust. Most cars store and use performance data from the last 5,000 miles. The dealership is not reprogramming your PCM for high altitude driving. They are clearing the data the PCM has from low altitude, the PCM then gathers and uses high-altitude data. You can accomplish the same thing by disconnecting your battery for an hour. Any mechanic worth a d*mn knows this. 4. I will readily admit that there are some OBD codes that are voodoo but they do get cracked. It's a computer... hack it. I'm not trying to be a jack*ss... I have friends in the automotive industry... most don't. I'm just trying to say there's a solution there... we just need to improve it.

Not that I care which OS you us, but since when is Old == Bad ?

If you really want to spin it, you could equally say that the version in OpenSolaris is newer and therefore unstable and untested, so FreeBSD would be a better choice.

Yeah, it took about 15 minutes for kids to start slacking off and just shaking the thing for the last 5 minutes. You would think the gym teacher would have realized that every class a couple kids were running marathons in 60 minutes every single day, but he didn't and I guess that's why he's a gym teacher.

If the parents are that worried, they should get their kid a treadmill test. Of course there's a lot of things far more likely to cause death that we do nothing at all about.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Obama is the savior of this country by any means. I just think it is fair to pass judgment after he has failed. I am aware of the projections though. Not pretty to say the least. It definitely looks like we are in for change, just not the change he promised. The saddest part of all of it for me is that the person I want to see elected would be laughed at.

While we obviously won't have the real numbers for a while, the Whitehouse's own budget projection has just over 9 trillion being added to the debt over the next 10 years. So I'd say a large increase to the national debt during the Obama years is pretty likely.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/08/25/Mid-SessionReview/

    I liked your IT analogy, but let me add personal experience to it. I've had MCSE's call me (primary a Linux and Cisco guy) to help them fix their Microsoft problems. I look at the problem as the problem, not as "What should I click to fix it."

    I've had a lot of people ask me about problems on their cars. One recent one was a BMW. The owner was quoted $1,200 in repairs. I went over the quote, and the list of the customers complaints, and came up with a $250 quote to completely rebuild the part of the car that the dealer had quoted $1,200 for. I then dismissed everything in the quote. As the owner was told "This is essential to do today. Your car isn't safe to drive." My diagnosis was fair. "You have about a year before this becomes a problem. Bring it to me in 6 months and I'll fix those items. My estimate is approx $250, which may change a little if the parts prices change." I then proceeded to do about $200 worth of work for other items that were actually problems that weren't even addressed by the dealer quote.

    I couldn't fix the airbag light, because I don't have the tool to diagnose the airbag computer. The dealer refused to address it also.

    I've been working on cars since I was a kid, and know an awful lot by working on various vehicles for friends and family over the years. I've probably taken over $100k worth of work away from big shops, just because I can do it, and do it right. I don't recall any vehicle ever being brought back to me with the same problem repeated. Then again, I take the time to ensure the problem is fixed, rather than just replacing a few parts, and handing it back. It may take me an extra hour to ensure the problem is resolved, but it's worth it for the people who I do repairs for. Big shops simply don't care as much, and they get extra hours of work for the return visit.

Is there a precedent for this, or wishful thinking?

There's no equivalent in terms of installing drivers, because windows drivers are consistent and simple to install.

I learned that nerve, fat, and muscle cells didn't change in number during life*. Seems that's not true about neurons. Apparently also not true about fat cells ("If excess weight is gained as an adult, fat cells increase in size about fourfold before dividing and increasing the absolute number of fat cells present.") Anyone know the scoop on muscle cells?

* - Supposedly weight gain was due to the individual adipocytes getting larger, like a microcosmic obesity. And strength gain was due to more actin and myocin in each myocyte, like a micrcosmic bodybuilder.

Almost. Certainly if I had had the courage, then I would have tried that myself. However, the local mechanic actually warned me not to try it myself and said that modern Honda keys have pretty tight tolerances.

The locksmith used a device that looked like two vices that could be stretched apart with a lever.

I'm sure that some of the more handy slashdotters could have fixed it themselves, but I'm not so good with that stuff... which is why I went to the dealer in the first place. I thought they would either straighten it or charge me $20 for a new key and then punch in some code tied to the VIN number... I guess they need a bigger markup, though.

That was certainly a positive review. Overly positive in my opinion. This game is extremely shallow in terms of content and the questionable mechanics. There's actually a lot less decent character designs (unless you are making furries or robots), the power choices are narrow and repetitive and the gameplay often revolves down to using 3 powers (end builder, single target, AoE) for 40 levels. At which point you discover the end game has only been pencilled in. I mean it's not that bad, though the developers are doing there best to nerf it into the ground because they did little balancing during beta, and you can have some fun playing through it. But it's nothing special and actually less interesting in terms of gameplay than CoH (which at least nailed grouping with it's scaling instances, enough rewards to make it desirable and the MA).

This was what I wrote for a MMO gaming site to try and collect my thoughts after beta.

The champions NDA has just come down a week before the game is released. I quite liked City of Heroes, an older superhero MMO, so I applied and got into beta and have been playing it for a while. Sadly it's just not that great a game, IMO obviously. And some of the reasons for saying so are because the design made some questionable decisions, like:

1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.

In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance). These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution later.

The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...

2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.

It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working. When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken, and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.

However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence. Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process. Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may have been that there was deep design work going on but the feeling was very much of a rudderless ship left to drift.

As an example the beta community was fairly unified (barring the inevitable fangirls trying to become the developers best friends) in strongly disliking the limit of having less than 7 powers hot keys. The precise number varied a little as some of the 7 slots were at times used for passives or required utilities but the end result was a very small number of powers. This led to heavily repetitive combat and the bizarre situation where you'd get powers due to levelling but be unable to actually gain anything from them due to not having any slots to put them in. This was almost certainly a result of the games console goals despite some impressive smoke-screening from the developers where they suggested it was due to university studies on the limits of memory. The valid argument that the study related to memorizing abstract information (phone numbers I believe) and that more importantly their customers are used to having larger numbers of active hot keys were ignored for months. Some people were even banned for being too agressive in demanding an answer. Eventually the developers promised to explain why a small number of hot keys made for better gaming. This never occurred and shortly before release they doubled the number of hotkeys in addition to moving some powers into passive slots. However all the powers were designed on the basis of having a very small number of active powers so this last minute change also had negative gameplay interactions.

There were quite a lot of bizarre gameplay decisions that really gave the feeling they were making it up as they went. For example in order to meet their "no downtime" goal they introduced an endurance pool that started largely empty and was filled by using a trivial damage attack (different by power set) to fill it before you could use your larger attacks. This added nothing to gameplay because you had no tactical options, if you had power you would never use your power building attack since it was very weak. If you did not have power you could do nothing but use the power building attack. The end result is it did not add any tactical depth because there was no choice and it removed the ability to do things like alpha strikes or resource management and destroyed the flow of combat. This system was modified in the last weeks of beta so that the power bar started full (enabling alpha strikes) but would empty faster.

The powers themselves were another issue. Because of the small number of hot keys each power set (eg. fire, single blade) had to cover all the basics but gained little from duplication. Thus each power set would have an end builder, a ranged single target attack, an AoE and then maybe some minor variations such as a charge up single target attack or a cone AoE. Almost all of the powers were about doing damage probably to support the "action-RPG" design goal. The end result however is that a lot of the power sets felt very similar in play. Zapping things with lightning, fire, force, bullets and such was ultimately all about a difference in special effects and minor game mechanics. And given their goal of total customisation people were free to cherry pick the best powers for each need reducing gameplay variety even more. The first problem was never fixed, the power list is actually far more limited than the number of powers might lead you to believe. The second was solved by making powers interact such that you were heavily encouraged to focus on one power set. For example a gun use power that made all gun use powers half energy cost but all other powers double cost.

The small number of active powers, similarity in the powers (and strongly DPS focused), holds and heals being nerfed for PvP balance and mob hitpoints being steadily boosted to slow progression and increase challenge led to some very repetitive combat. You'll spend a lot of time alternating between end builder and either AoE or single target damage to grind the opponent down. Mob AI and powers are likewise fairly basic. The much vaunted "run & gun" is largely useless because ducking out of sight simply stops your power regeneration due to the need to have constant line of sight for the attack. Strangely using cover worked better in City of Heroes where you could make the tactical decision to gain some endurance and let powers refresh by running and hiding.

3. Consider the beta a promotional tool

The Champions online beta was frequently labelled as a product "preview" and this felt about right. Despite the importance of balance in making the game enjoyable the beta was run in a very casual fashion. The game was up for very limited periods of time, even in the last weeks of beta only running for 2 sessions a week. Testing was rarely focused to any useful extent. Testing tools like being able to re-pick powers or level up in order to test power builds were absent for the majority of beta and then quickly removed or weakened when introduced. Things like introducing end-game content and then doing a character wipe 2 weeks later ensured that testing was much less useful than it could have been.

In addition the game mechanics were so clearly in flux, and developer communication so poor, that it was very hard to have a baseline to give bugs against. For example the might powerset was felt to be very weak, the passive defences too strong and a huge variety of other obvious imbalances. But without some idea of what the balance goal is meaningful feedback is impossible. It was further discouraged by the developers putting "powers are imbalanced" as a known issue that was in place up throughout beta. In many cases the beta testers could barely determine what the power was supposed to do since the only documentation was algorithmically generated from the power mechanics and generally incomprehensible. Heavy balance changes were put in at the last moment with no opportunity to get feedback or iterate on it. This process of power balancing will almost certainly continue into live.

4. Launch content light and expect to generate it live

This is probably the biggest problem with the game. The game has effectively 5 zones consisting of one city zone and four outdoor areas (desert, snow, forest, underwater). Levelling is done in a wowlike fashion with each zone having a sprinking of points of interest which often badly conflict with one another. Having an alien invasion, snow demons, a canadian uprising and an air disaster all within a kilometer of one another makes the environments feel more like a theme park than real places. Each location will have a number of quests of the traditional kill this, collect those and escort him type. These quests are the only meaningful way to progress as mob XP is very low. There are Warhammer style open quests but these are often imbalanced and the reward for doing them poor which combined with the bad grouping mechanics and shard design (no servers, multiple instances of the zone with quite low populations) means they're frequently laying idle.

In general to get to the level cap you will need to do pretty much all the quests in all the zones. There is some switching between zones, for example the city fills a small segment of levelling between upper and lower desert quests, but you are going to be spending a lot of time in these areas. Any characters after the first can expect to follow pretty much exactly the same path with minimal variation. Nor are the quests interesting enough that they avoid blurring into each other and people just batch processing them.

More seriously the game is missing 20% of the content it was meant to launch with. In theory the max level is actually 50 but the game will launch with the level cap at 40 and release new content soon after release. However this line was used before the development process was extended by 3-4 months which should have been enough time for it to be included. It is more reasonable to assume this content is only in its very early stages and not close to being release ready.

The end-game (well, not really since it's level 40 content) which might bridge this gap and stop bored people cancelling is at a primitive state. It was only introduced in the last weeks of beta and consists of 5 daily solo instances. These instances are featureless maps with a sprinkling of mobs which have clearly been rushed out. Doing 5 of these gives you one additional mission. The rewards from these missions can be used to buy access to one of two group instances or gear / costume rewards. It's almost completely untested and the solo instances are dull, involve a lot of travelling and have minimal challenge.

In addition there's no real reason to bother. In general you'll have all your core powers long before you reach maximum level. These powers can be enhanced with upto 5 points you also get from levelling. So your character is already complete. The end game content offers you gear which due to poor itemisation and stat mechanics is of minimal interest, especially since gear from questing is sufficient. You can also buy new weapon models and vanity cloaks which many players will have very limited interest in (how many cloaks do you need? most people will only want a single weapon model that fits their character image).

Itemisation is weak for a couple of reasons. One of them is the use of algorithmically generated names for both crafted and found drops. A piece of eye-wear (by icon, gear slots are actually generic) called "Energized Torpedoes" does not make you care much about the item. Most items will have a 1-3 stats on them but the influence of stats on the game are so indirect and obscure (and in some cases known to be minimal) its quite hard to care. This pretty much destroys crafting as well other than the ability to make bags.

In short people will game the quest system for rapid progression. They can't slow it down much because there's no content to support a longer levelling curve. This will quickly lead them into an end-game which has little interest, challenge or reward.

5. Launch with bad design decisions because you were rushed.

This is sort of the catch-all section. But it also reflects that beta feedback is pretty useless if the developers barely have time to glue the bits together and make the game minimally saleable. There has to be time for the "is this fun?" test before you release it and it seems a lot of games companies just don't feel they have the time for that. Anyway, some smaller results of that.

• Trying to balance PvP and PvE with the same ruleset. That just doesn't work. Blizzard are still failing for this reason and most companies can't afford to waste that much energy. For that matter don't expect PvP to make up for having no end game content unless your game does something really special in the PvP context.
• Remove release content to stock an in-game store when your game is already content-lite. Buying the box should be the price payed for the content developed at that point.
• Make a character creator which uses 3D objects extensively but has very poor texture usage. So the furries and robot fetishists like it (especially since everything can be made shiny) but trying to make a traditional super hero is very limited. And the 3D models are pretty crude.
• Low detail models. Many of the objects in this game are really basic. For example the jet used for transport or ships in the harbor are just simple geometric shapes. The wolves in alaska are almost painfully bad with their fur chipped out of fresh plastic. This combines with generally bad animation (watching an NPC talk looks like someone in the throes of a facial spasm).
• Highly derivative environment. From monster island being directly ripped off from the island of Dr. Moreau, underwater environment from various atlantis stories and city gangs ripped off from clockwork orange. It just feels really lazy and excessive. The champions lore clearly only gave them a bunch of uninteresting heroes to use as quest hubs... though foxbat comes close to having an actual presence, even if it is hugely geeky and comic-relief.
• An entirely underwater zone. It always sounds like a good idea, it inevitably isn't.
• The much vaunted nemesis system is extremely basic. Design the appearance of the boss, a text and power set and then have random ambushes by his minions and a couple of missions with that design applied to the mission boss. End result is not much different from running normal missions.
• The unity system, barely in place at the end of beta, is meant to be the end-game content. However in practice it's an awe inspiring piece of grind. Half hearted daily quests leading to two high level instances. And you'd have to run the same content for somewhere between 3 months and 1.5 years to gear yourself up.

While HD FM does allow more programming per transmitter, each station still has the same licensed channel bandwidth/spacing so no frequencies are freed up.
The stations can divide up the frequency among a number of ways. As defined by iBiquity these channels could be sub-divided into CD-quality (100 kbit/s), FM-quality (25-50 kbit/s), AM-quality (12 kbit/s), or Talk-quality (5 kbit/s) channels. Alternatively, they could broadcast one single channel at 300 kbit/s.

Even if some people agree that HD-FM can sound good, it's lossy compression. At its' best it'll never reach CD quality. CD's don't use data compression.
To be fair, the lowest quality I generally listen to is about 200Kbit/s, and I'd call it "CD quality" to the point that the differences in matering on the source material are far more signifigant than the bitrate differences.

300Kbit/s, I would challenge most anyone to identify in blind tests... though I readily admit that would be mono on HD-Radio.

You claim CD-quality, just what are the sampling and data rates for "HD" radio??? Max data rate for a single FM station broadcasting HD under the current spec is 300Kbit/s, which is higher than Amazon's MP3 downloads.

Consumers are supposed to buy new equipment to save the broadcasters energy?
I suppose I *could* make an argument to that effect, but I've certainly not said so. It is an advantage, though perhaps not directly to the consumers.

The digital advantage for operation at lower power levels frequently doesn't work in practice. Just look at all the people having trouble getting DTV reception in areas that supposedly have usable signal levels.
As someone getting better DTV than analog signals, mileage apparently varies.

As Wikipedia has me understand, the current power output is 1% of analog? If there's a signal problem, perhaps 10% would solve it (speculating).

I'm not advocating HD, nor reproaching it. I'm merely correcting incorrect or unfair comments regarding it.

"Worse when you payed out the ass for 'certified mechanics' to begin with."

Passing a cert test for cars isn't terribly difficult, but then neither is passing the AMT test
to perform work on aircraft. :P
                                                                  Tests don't make a mechanic.