..with TRACTOR beams!!

Wisdom right here.

This right here.

Nothing happens in a company of any size without a business case.

To amplify upon what has already been said, you need to show the financial benefit to the company. You need to justify the cost to acquire the technology and train people on it. You need to quantify the ROI so that management can weigh the cost of the technology versus all of the other costs that they have to cover every year.

A good thing to research is whether or not any of your competitors are using what you want to use. Has your company lost out on any project opportunities due to not having those technologies? Or did your competitors win business because they did have those technologies? If your company is large enough, there is probably a department that already has this information. Where I work, we get a weekly email that details all of the new deals and projects that the competition is involved with.

Businesses like predictable revenue and established business models. It makes planning and forecasting easier. Nobody likes a whiner or someone who focuses on the negative. You will not gain any traction with statements that have themes like like, "SAS is holding us back. SAS "sucks" in comparison to other technologies." Unless you can show the positives of a new technology, and those positives come up with a massive financial upside that justifies the CapEx to acquire them... you will never make any progress towards acquiring them.

I got just the opposite from the PDF.

I thought what they are proposing is that "good" companies will sign their executables with certificates that can be revoked in the future if it turns out that the certificate is being used to sign malware.

This is a big win for transparency. I am glad that Facebook did this and that they are being open about it.

Marketers have known this forever. The media has been manipulating the emotions of the American populace for generations. Through their actions, Facebook is bringing the discussion into the open and making people aware of it. I think that by now, most people are aware of the fact that the "news" is just a propaganda tool used to maintain the narrative of the powers that be.

This is also a big win for personal responsibility. It has now been proven that what we focus on and what we choose to share impacts not only our moods, but the moods of those in our network. The question now becomes, "Will you share positive stories that make people feel good, or negative stories that make them feel bad?" Given control over your own information channel, will you continue to parrot the party line and share mainstream propaganda? Or will you amplify alternate signals?

http://socnetmastermind.blogsp... (ignore the other posts, this is just a place for random, social networking related thoughts)

Linguistic bot fairy tales defeat Baysean filterings none of the times

On a related note, I just received an email from Ubisoft this morning offering 20% off of Watch Dogs. The game has been out for a month.

That is a really interesting PDF. I never would have guessed that the average gamer is 31 years old.

I was thinking about the multi-player server stranglehold while I was typing my post, so it is interesting that you brought it up. I do not know if anything can be done about it. I cannot conceive of any legal way to obligate companies to keep infrastructure online, and as much as it might benefit me, I would be opposed to governmental intervention in the matter.

While we might rant about these subjects on /., I do not see it changing any time soon.. if at all. The studios are multi-billion dollar organizations that have to keep thousands of people working. The only way to do that is to keep the games flowing, and develop various franchises. Games like GTA are more and more like interactive movies. The production costs are huge. The idea of DLC, on one level, is not a bad one. Develop a compelling game world / context and then sell short stories that add life to the context.

The most legitimate gripe that people have relates to quality control issues, especially around launch. The only way I can see to address that, as a consumer, is to refuse to purchase a game until the publisher proves that it is stable. The only way the publishers will ever be compelled to deliver a solid title at launch is if pre-orders cease. It is a Catch 22. The average American psyche is too hung up on having new things, and having them FIRST. With competitive online games, nobody wants to be left behind. The psychology behind the industry is such that change in consumer behavior is highly unlikely.

The only way that the studios will ever get the message is if parents refuse to buy this garbage for their children. Older gamers are a minority of the market. There are plenty of gamers in the 18-30 age bracket who will continue to buy this garbage. The only way out is for parents who game, to make wise choices for their children.

It will take a generation to change things, but it can happen.

I finally learned my lesson, but I am guilty of pre-ordering way too many crap releases from EA. BF4 was the last one I will buy. Between the broken at release model, the DLC, and the rapid release cycle that guarantees a game will be dead 12-18 months after it comes out, I am over it.

I think the best that we, as a community, can hope for is that enough people exercise impulse control and wait to buy the game until the price is reduced once or twice. Doing that would communicate two messages. One, we are tired of buggy beta (at best) releases and refuse to tolerate them. Two, the release prices are way too high and we are not going to pay $60+ for crappy code.

Yes, Win7 x64 Professional. I am using a Samsung 840 (128GB) for the pagefile disk. I have been putting pagefile.sys (and TEMP, TMP) on a separate disk since NT 4.0. I have not run any benchmarks on Windows 7 to see what the improvement is like.

If you are curious about the impact of the pagefile on the OS drive, I would look at disk queue depth and file latency. As long as your queue depth isn't over 2 and your file latency stays in 5-10ms range, you should be fine.

Before I went SSD on the data drive, I was running 7200 SATA drives in RAID1. The write penalty kind of sucked, but having two spindles for reads was nice. The benefit only really showed up during sustained reads, like loading new levels in various games.

To be completely honest, as soon as the system starts hitting the pagefile with any sort of regularity, you need to buy more RAM. Tuning the disk subsystem is not going to get you much benefit. For example with WatchDogs, I started playing it with 6GB of RAM. That was not enough, and the OS was paging at 16MB/s. That was just too much IO, even with a dedicated drive. The drive itself can handle way more than 16MB/s, but the application could not deal with the latency of having to go to disk.

Where did you get the impression that I am not running SSDs?

I was really looking forward to the game and pre-ordered it for PC. My experience has been horrible. I am running an i7-960 (8 cores, 3.20ghz), 12GB of RAM and 2 GeForce 660s in SLI (4GB of total video RAM). I have a dedicated OS drive, a dedicated games drive and a dedicated pagefile drive. By way of background, I run ~1400VMs for a living. The VMs support a number of SaaS applications that are sensitive to transaction latency. I tune applications for performance for a living.

The game runs like crap on my PC, even on medium settings. It reads files from all over the place. It pulls textures out of the temp directory. It pulls data files out of the game directory. Even with over 4GB of FREE (not Available) RAM, it still manages to make the system do a steady 2MB/s of paging.

The game play is horrible. The driving is clunky. The interface scheme was obviously designed for a game pad. The multi-player is embarassing. The net code is crap. With 6 people, there were serious rubber banding issues. That was with a very small slice of the map. It is not like they had to render the entire thing. In a good 50% of the multi-player games I was in, there was at least one invulnerable person. That leads me to believe that the code is obviously pretty easy to exploit.

The game concept was a good one, but the execution was horrible. I have learned my lesson. In this day and age, everything is in beta. Developers are okay with releasing incomplete products and patching them later. I spent my youth couriering warez and getting a free ride. Now that I can afford games, I have been willingly purchasing them to support the studios. I cannot do it anymore. They just release crap products. They are not even worth pirating.

I was more concerned with the Americans who are going to be eating the bananas that, according to the article, are being sent to the States.

File this under donotwant. Unlike most vitamins, A is not water soluble and can build up to toxic levels in the body. Of special importance to Africans is that it also makes the body more susceptible to sun burns.

I was thinking something similar. Now instead of having a bunch of numbers easily accessible to thieves in a compromised POS system, they are simply going to be discarding a bunch of imprints covered in Chinese food waste.