This is HP through and through. They acquire a business then ruin it. We used to use a (very expensive) piece of software from a company that HP bought, immediately when HP bought the company (for a hugely overinflated amount too) the customer service turned so awful that we dropped them along with many other customers.
As a researcher in brain computer interfaces (BCI), I have to disagree with the more literal interpretation of your statement that the best games link your brain with pure cerebral responses to gameplay.
Slashdot... it's a lot like Central Park... except PhDs may stop by at any time to painstakingly pick-apart the logical and factual errors in the rant of the crazy homeless guy that's yelling at the pigeons.
Games are not selling because they were overall fucking terrible. Stores lose a ton of money on having merchandise they couldn't sell.
No, stores bought a bunch of fucking terrible games that wouldn't sell, because it was common practice that unsold units could be returned to the manufacturer for refund, so they didn't expect any downside. A ton of sham game companies sprung up over-night, unloaded a ton of merchandise on toy stores, cashed the check, and then closed-up shop before anybody asked about returns.
The stores set themselves up for a failure, and the video game industry was only involved because it was the hot market at the time... kinda like smartphones today.
The last time sharing was the norm, it caused the entire industry to collapse.
It was retailers falling for the stupid scams, that caused the collapse.
Nintendo, as it turns out, were the ones who led the industry's recovery, largely by instituting strict third party licensing. Sid Meier considers the Nintendo "Seal of Quality" one of the three most important innovations in gaming history because of the impact that it had.
Yes, and it was important at the time, when people had very little confidence in the quality of games, games were expensive, and there were no magazines doing reviews, services that allowed gamer rentals, etc., etc.
IMHO, whatever high standards Nintendo may have set in the 80s, were gone in one fell swoop, with the flood of crap games on the PSX.
And PC games never had a central authority, yet they did just fine.
With the Wii they realized they couldn't keep up with the PS and Xbox.
They don't try (at all) to keep up on raw benchmark-type specs. That helps them sell their consoles at a profit instead of a loss. And yet the Wii really caught on, and looked like it was going to take over the world. The pundits were talking non-stop about how genius Nintendo was... until the Kinect and Move were rushed to market in response, and took the wind out of Nintendo's sales.
Instead of trying to get people to buy their consoles for their games they should switch to just making games.
Because that has worked out so incredibly well for Sega over the past decade???
You might as well say that all 3 should pack it in, and just make games for PCs and smartphones/tablets.
As an antidote to that anecdote, in the UK during the same period the completely open Sinclair ZX Spectrum had one of its best game years, along with the completely open Commodore 64. Titles for both machines kept selling well right through the 1980s. Shops stocked games. It may have also been that a full price C64 or Spectrum game was half the price of a full price cartridge game.
Why stick with VMS when you can get the same Dave Cutler design by rotating everything one letter forward, forming the WNT at the core of Windows Server?
And when you want a SpaceX rocket, why not go buy a Tesla car instead?
I am surprised that people still want to use OpenVMS.
OpenVMS is the most mature microkernel OS out there. You can have flaky hardware, flaky drivers, flaky software, and it'll just keep running perfectly, restarting whatever services as need, as often as needed. You can't make it panic.
It also has more advanced clustering than most people believe exists... A server's full state is replicated in real-time, so a hardware failure doesn't even need to be handled by applications, they just think everything has been running for the past decade...
OpenVMS has ridiculous uptimes, over a decade, even on heavily utilized systems. Far longer than anything else out there.
cron. And it turns out, it has an ACM link in the external links, but it does NOT cite an ACM article, properly or otherwise
Yes, it does cite an ACM article from the late 70s, as the inspiration for improved versions of crond, which performed better, and were extended to all system users, not just root as early crond did.
And is the link related to cron? I'm going with no, because it doesn't sound related
That's just your own bias and/or unwillingness to read TFA.
"Robert Brown, reviewing this [ACM] article, [...] created an implementation [...] and this multi-user cron went into use at Purdue in late 1979."
It seems that rather than all those wiki pages citing ACM publications, somebody from ACM has spammed all those articles with unrelated links.
You checked on ONE out of hundreds, completely misunderstood everything about it, and are jumping to a conclusion that requires paranoid conspiracy fantasies.
I can also show a swastika on my U.S.-hosted site and criticize public officials without fear of ridiculously heavy-handed libel/defamation laws. And don't even get me started with the bullshit cultural and language laws in France. It's amazing anything gets done in that country at all.
Oh, I dunno; I've seen any number of sites similar to this one, whose information is mirrored at zillions of locations on the web, including many outside the US. There are historical and cultural reasons for including the symbols at code points 534D and 5350 in Unicode, and I doubt that anyone has ever been prosecuted for installing full Unicode charsets or lookup software on their web sites.
I haven't looked for such pages on French sites, but I'd be surprised if they don't exist (with the text in French rather than English), and I'd also be surprised if the French government has tried to suppress such character codes in the Uncode lookups.
It's possible that such things has happened and I just haven't read about them. Does anyone know of cases of official harrassment for including pages like the above on a web site? For example, has any Islamic or other religious government ever harrassed people for allowing the U+271D char code on a web page?
(And yes, I do have a couple of experimental dictionaries on my own web sites, including one dealing with Chinese characters which includes an entry for the swastika characters. Nobody has even suggested that these glyphs shouldn't be there. Possibly it's because nobody has ever looked at my dictionaries, but still
Here's a quick list of Wikipedia articles which probably cite ACM publications:
As a motorcyclist, I'm deeply excited by driverless cars. It's probable they are much MUCH less likely to SMIDSY me than the typical inattentive phone using car driver.
On a point of pedantry, Concorde was fly by wire. It was the first airliner to be fly by wire (although an analogue system).
The highways (motorways) are actually the safest roads. In the UK only 4% of accidents happen on those roads and they are rarely fatal (while the absolute speeds are high, the impact speeds are often low because it's an impact between two vehicles going in the same direction, and there are safety features of the motorways themselves that try to avoid any accident resulting an a vehicle coming to a sudden stop). The same is likely true in the US.
I've lived in both the US and UK, and I can say that the reason the USA has 13.6 and the UK rate is less than half really is due to US drivers being *a lot worse* than UK drivers. Also there are other factors, such as the lenient treatment of drunk drivers in many US states, leading to people not really being deterred from driving drunk. I saw a lot of people driving obviously drunk in the 6 years I lived in the USA. In the UK, you get done for drunk driving you actually lose your license and have to retake the (very strict) driving test again, and you lose your license for a long period (e.g. 2 years) and a high probability of a prison sentence, and the ban really is a ban, no "you may still drive to your place of work", so there is a very strong deterrent against drunk driving. Second offence and you definitely go to prison as well as have an even lengthier driving ban.
Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated.