As expected on Slashdot, not only the submitter, but also the/. editor didn't bother to read TFA. One segment might tip you off:
Ankit Agarwal, founder and CEO of Micello
This is a separate company called Micello with a separate product. They may be counting on Google to buy them, but their only current relation to Google Maps is that they mention Google's product in the description of their own product, and that the article title contains the words "Google Maps".
At least FPSes have went the opposite direction. I enjoyed Quake2 far more than I enjoyed even the demo of Far Cry. I fear to even try some of the newer FPSes than that. The last one I saw and played that really intrigued me was Half Life 2. I see the video game industry as a dying, struggling child trying to fight its way to the heart of a player. Maybe I'm just a nostalgic geek who can't judge what common man wants, still, the neat looking graphics seem to be a "requisite" for success... yet it doesn't make today's games better than the ones from 10-15 years ago..
A few weeks ago the company I'm at has released an adventure game. Looks nice, feels nice, has a nice tempo, nice music. I have my complaints about what we could have spent more time on and such, but overall I think the game is nice. Then some people come up and complain we designed the characters using Poser, that we were unimaginative, that our too great realism (which isn't that enormous) has made the game fscked up, that the game has too much dialogue, etc. Worst of all, they complain about characters and voiceovers. Our previous game featured crappy characters, and had no voiceovers -- they complained about that as well. From "wow - you couldn't pay for motion capture" to "wow - you made characters in Poser". And the overall response to first, "worse" game was much better than for this new one!
Game industry may "know" its players too well, and may have too much "experience". Publishers get to decide that for some arbitrary reason, the market won't eat up your game. At the same time, players want realism, then complain about lack of style. Perhaps it's time that we STOP listening to players, make the game as we desire, and have publishers that'll actually shut up and just release the game.
Or else, we'll concentrate on making our island beautiful, on satisfying expert gamers who are likely to purchase high-end graphics cards and tailor the difficulty to them. And we'll keep forgetting that there are other gamers with good graphics cards who are not experts and just want to play the game quickly. Players forget that designers are people, and that they might just want to try and enjoy the game as is, with friendly complaining instead of trolling.
I'd also like to point out that situation was somewhat unique. Despite "dictator" being Croatian, most higher functions in companies and in state service were held by Serbs, and even the "dictator" was not exactly comparable to the likes of Kim Jong Il, Ceausescu et al. Or so my parents tell me.
This is precisely what Vista and Win7 do. If you download an executable, it will have a flag set in file meta-information that basically indicates that the source was network... when you run it, the OS will warn you and ask to confirm.
....snip.....
Meanwhile, no other desktop OS that I know of does anything similar,.....snip.....
MacOS X, at least when you use Safari, is also flagging content downloaded from the network.
I think your bigger problem is that 1) you're spoiled by speed:-) 2) you use Firefox as your primary browser.
Whenever I use Firefox I feel the cruft behind Gecko. It's much faster with 3.5, but still horrible compared to Chrome and Opera. That's my personal feeling, at least. With Chrome and Opera I start seeing content almost immediately after starting to load the page.
During last several months I haven't seen a single ad that plays a sound by default. There are "Hit 5 iPhones" ads around, but I ignore them. I understand people who turn off ads, but I don't understand their constant need to emphasize that they're users of adblocking software, especially since ads are what gets them so much free content. (Not that I understand how, since I've earned $3.70 since December via ads.)
I have this fascinating ability that adblock users apparently lack: it's called "Ignore Irrelevance". You see, while those ads may be there... I don't really see them. They are there if I concentrate hard enough to notice them... but otherwise, they're not really there.
Probably explains how I can surf without adblock.
And, oh yeah, I occasionally like to support the site I'm visiting when I notice something actually interesting.
I think nothing is an excuse for violating people's rights. Working for more than eight hours a day is a torture. Unless you're a worker bee, of course, but eight is a nice round number for most of us who aren't.
There are various techniques to induce obedience and get people to reduce their demands for rights. Most of them involve a crisis or a war. While I can't point fingers, this whole recession thing seems to have an artificial cause. Oil prices going up and then dropping in such a strange way they did? And people then suddenly accepting the "harsh" "reality"? Hm. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Programmers in small companies, as well as architects and core team may be indispensable. Let's call them Developers; they are key to the product.
However, in large corporations (those who, from my observations, care about their employees much less) most programmers are much more easily replaceable, too. Let's call them Programmers.
Developers know the ins-and-outs of the product, they know exactly where to put the next piece of the puzzle. But sometimes (or often?) you deal with Programmers; they may privately be excellent designers, but at work they still do just the dirty work. They create simple modules designed by the Architect, with suggestions from the Developers.
Those Programmers are certainly easily replaceable. What about Developers? Developers are most certainly capable of quickly learning their way around, or else the product would end up nowhere. Lay off a Programmer -- you lose someone you can replace with a fresh-out-of-college guy. Lay off a Developer -- you lose someone you can replace with another developer... who will relatively quickly find his way around, but will accept an authority figure much better than the one you laid off.
Soon the new Developer can be bossed around quite easily, Initech style.
In other words, a bit more difficult to handle than with regular workers, but still quite practicable. Especially when the Manager in the big corporation has no idea why it's such a big deal to lay off the Developer.
Communism is not perfect, and I like free market economy. But some things need to be said "NO" to.
You: "I want to work for 10 hours!"
Boss: "Oh, everyone! He can work for 10 hours, that means you can work for 10 hours!"
or:
Boss: "Look, that Other Company makes employees work 12 hours a day! That means we can do that too!"
Worker: "But, that's not fair..."
Boss: "Law doesn't agree!"
Some things need to be mandated through legislation. Is maximum work hours something to be mandated? I don't know, it depends on situation. If bosses don't abuse their power, then sure, sometimes I'd love to be able to work extended hours. But if you live in 19th century and you're a coal miner or a factory worker...
Actually, they're meant to make OTHERS think what they're doing. Punishing as in 'Look, everyone, we punished them, but if you do that, we would punish you!'
The same as with jail for murder. It helps noone but the society: 'Look, if you kill, you go to jail! Wanna risk? Think again!'
You sound like you believe that patents should really work like US patents work.
See, I believe in real usable patents, based on physical inventions, such as Tesla's remote controlled boat patent. In fact, as long as something's implemented in practice, is viable in the long term, does not appear to stifle further research in related areas, and isn't obvious and generic -- it's a valid patent to me.
If a patent satisfies the aforementioned, doesn't it have an intrinsic value in itself? Doesn't it then describe several physical products implementing the method? Isn't it then truly worth more than copyright?
The fact that there are today more theoretical patents designed to stifle innovation and to create money for non-working businesses and lazy parties doesn't mean all patents are worth less.
Now, if we were to consider the imaginary property in the same way grandparent considers it, then neither copyright nor patents have much value: they are both knowledge, easily reproducible among those that are capable of consuming it (be it machines or humans). A human can transfer knowledge easily to his/her peer, another human. Patents prevent exploitation of knowledge for a limited time period, while increasing sum of human knowledge by allowing easier transfer between parties. Similar is with copyright. For a limited time, prevent transfer of content from device to device (be it via stream of electrons, via a copy of a physical medium, or some other way) while increasing total sum of content.
What happens today is that with both copyright and patents, there is exploitation of the rights by the "content" authors. Our national or supranational patent offices are being filled with spam and junk, making it hard to find and examine actually useful content. Length of protection stifles my desire to even examine patents, for by the time I read them in order to use them, they are far outdated and useless.
Doesn't similar thing happen with copyright-protected content? We have so much content on the web that we need Google to go through it and attempt to rank the good content well, while detecting spam. We need an enormous spam-filtering company that Google really is in order to be able to find any real knowledge. By the time copyright expires, I am mostly no longer interested in obtaining the content. How much content a regular human wants from 95 years ago? How much content a regular human wants to REMIX from death+95 years ago? Only a few masterpieces!
I am not even sure if I am allowed to use NASA's recordings of landing on the Moon inside my works. Are they public domain? I will go now and check, but I am not sure.
Both good content and good patents have intrinsic market value. Bad content and bad patents have negative market value: actually using them would just incur losses. The only difference is what reasons we have for demanding copyright reform. Copyright reform is needed to expand who is allowed to reuse content. Patent reform is needed to bring the concept of patentable "thing" back to the state of patentable device or component. I even go as far to say there should be valid software patents, but that a line needs to be drawn.
Tried using VMware Server when something broke immediately after 2.6.18? I've had 2.6.18 for few more months on my machine just because VMware guys didn't ship updated kernel module after that version.
Now, this was VMware, and it's not so important. But what happens when new kernel comes out and breaks ATI's drivers, with their 3-month-release-schedule (there's was an article on/. some time ago about that)? I've seen my pals quite broken down by the effort to get laptop to work after new kernel or X11 update broke their Radeon's drivers.
He's talking about that kind of ABI. I can still play old Alpha Centauri port, but that ABI is not what hardware manufacturers want.
And this is where I tell you to go read it, because despite the post being somewhat inflammatory, the guy's got a point and if he's really a retailer, it shows what's it like from their perspective. Go and read it.
anyway you can make your own opensource phone, just get a 30 dollar mobile module board, build your own mini linux/arm controller board, and use an existing older crappy phone for a case/lcd module.
I'm interesting in how to do this. Can you provide any links to where to buy the mentioned module board, and perhaps point to existing homebrew devices that use these modules?
I think your wrong, or just being overly pedantic.
(and a quick Googleing)
*cough cough* say what?
"Your" and "you're" used improperly annoys even non-native speakers like me. Just like using "Googleing" (69,700) instead of usual "googling" (4,250,00). Reading that makes me want to dig my eyes out. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Unrelated to Google!
As expected on Slashdot, not only the submitter, but also the /. editor didn't bother to read TFA. One segment might tip you off:
This is a separate company called Micello with a separate product. They may be counting on Google to buy them, but their only current relation to Google Maps is that they mention Google's product in the description of their own product, and that the article title contains the words "Google Maps".
Post apocalypse, however...
1) Google Account login is required
2) There are rating buttons for "usefulness" - "yes" and "no".
At least FPSes have went the opposite direction. I enjoyed Quake2 far more than I enjoyed even the demo of Far Cry. I fear to even try some of the newer FPSes than that. The last one I saw and played that really intrigued me was Half Life 2. I see the video game industry as a dying, struggling child trying to fight its way to the heart of a player. Maybe I'm just a nostalgic geek who can't judge what common man wants, still, the neat looking graphics seem to be a "requisite" for success ... yet it doesn't make today's games better than the ones from 10-15 years ago..
A few weeks ago the company I'm at has released an adventure game. Looks nice, feels nice, has a nice tempo, nice music. I have my complaints about what we could have spent more time on and such, but overall I think the game is nice. Then some people come up and complain we designed the characters using Poser, that we were unimaginative, that our too great realism (which isn't that enormous) has made the game fscked up, that the game has too much dialogue, etc. Worst of all, they complain about characters and voiceovers. Our previous game featured crappy characters, and had no voiceovers -- they complained about that as well. From "wow - you couldn't pay for motion capture" to "wow - you made characters in Poser". And the overall response to first, "worse" game was much better than for this new one!
Game industry may "know" its players too well, and may have too much "experience". Publishers get to decide that for some arbitrary reason, the market won't eat up your game. At the same time, players want realism, then complain about lack of style. Perhaps it's time that we STOP listening to players, make the game as we desire, and have publishers that'll actually shut up and just release the game.
Or else, we'll concentrate on making our island beautiful, on satisfying expert gamers who are likely to purchase high-end graphics cards and tailor the difficulty to them. And we'll keep forgetting that there are other gamers with good graphics cards who are not experts and just want to play the game quickly. Players forget that designers are people, and that they might just want to try and enjoy the game as is, with friendly complaining instead of trolling.
Say what? You've been living under a rock for five years? Why would anyone do that? ... Oh. Ok. Whatever. Still seems stupid to me.
IMHO, "Soyuzi" feels most natural. That's the Slavic plural.
I'd also like to point out that situation was somewhat unique. Despite "dictator" being Croatian, most higher functions in companies and in state service were held by Serbs, and even the "dictator" was not exactly comparable to the likes of Kim Jong Il, Ceausescu et al. Or so my parents tell me.
This is precisely what Vista and Win7 do. If you download an executable, it will have a flag set in file meta-information that basically indicates that the source was network... when you run it, the OS will warn you and ask to confirm.
....snip.....
Meanwhile, no other desktop OS that I know of does anything similar, .....snip.....
MacOS X, at least when you use Safari, is also flagging content downloaded from the network.
In the same way you want to differ between bugs :-)
And we don't even have to spend time and effort - they already do it themselves! Question is, how do we differ them from the common businessman?
Haven't had a problem in last 6 months. But I don't use Firefox for last few months either.
I think your bigger problem is that 1) you're spoiled by speed :-) 2) you use Firefox as your primary browser.
Whenever I use Firefox I feel the cruft behind Gecko. It's much faster with 3.5, but still horrible compared to Chrome and Opera. That's my personal feeling, at least. With Chrome and Opera I start seeing content almost immediately after starting to load the page.
During last several months I haven't seen a single ad that plays a sound by default. There are "Hit 5 iPhones" ads around, but I ignore them. I understand people who turn off ads, but I don't understand their constant need to emphasize that they're users of adblocking software, especially since ads are what gets them so much free content. (Not that I understand how, since I've earned $3.70 since December via ads.)
I have this fascinating ability that adblock users apparently lack: it's called "Ignore Irrelevance". You see, while those ads may be there ... I don't really see them. They are there if I concentrate hard enough to notice them ... but otherwise, they're not really there.
Probably explains how I can surf without adblock.
And, oh yeah, I occasionally like to support the site I'm visiting when I notice something actually interesting.
I think nothing is an excuse for violating people's rights. Working for more than eight hours a day is a torture. Unless you're a worker bee, of course, but eight is a nice round number for most of us who aren't.
There are various techniques to induce obedience and get people to reduce their demands for rights. Most of them involve a crisis or a war. While I can't point fingers, this whole recession thing seems to have an artificial cause. Oil prices going up and then dropping in such a strange way they did? And people then suddenly accepting the "harsh" "reality"? Hm. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Programmers in small companies, as well as architects and core team may be indispensable. Let's call them Developers; they are key to the product.
However, in large corporations (those who, from my observations, care about their employees much less) most programmers are much more easily replaceable, too. Let's call them Programmers.
Developers know the ins-and-outs of the product, they know exactly where to put the next piece of the puzzle. But sometimes (or often?) you deal with Programmers; they may privately be excellent designers, but at work they still do just the dirty work. They create simple modules designed by the Architect, with suggestions from the Developers.
Those Programmers are certainly easily replaceable. What about Developers? Developers are most certainly capable of quickly learning their way around, or else the product would end up nowhere. Lay off a Programmer -- you lose someone you can replace with a fresh-out-of-college guy. Lay off a Developer -- you lose someone you can replace with another developer... who will relatively quickly find his way around, but will accept an authority figure much better than the one you laid off.
Soon the new Developer can be bossed around quite easily, Initech style.
In other words, a bit more difficult to handle than with regular workers, but still quite practicable. Especially when the Manager in the big corporation has no idea why it's such a big deal to lay off the Developer.
Communism is not perfect, and I like free market economy. But some things need to be said "NO" to.
You: "I want to work for 10 hours!"
Boss: "Oh, everyone! He can work for 10 hours, that means you can work for 10 hours!"
or:
Boss: "Look, that Other Company makes employees work 12 hours a day! That means we can do that too!"
Worker: "But, that's not fair..."
Boss: "Law doesn't agree!"
Some things need to be mandated through legislation. Is maximum work hours something to be mandated? I don't know, it depends on situation. If bosses don't abuse their power, then sure, sometimes I'd love to be able to work extended hours. But if you live in 19th century and you're a coal miner or a factory worker...
Would you allow child labor?
Actually, they're meant to make OTHERS think what they're doing. Punishing as in 'Look, everyone, we punished them, but if you do that, we would punish you!'
The same as with jail for murder. It helps noone but the society: 'Look, if you kill, you go to jail! Wanna risk? Think again!'
You sound like you believe that patents should really work like US patents work.
See, I believe in real usable patents, based on physical inventions, such as Tesla's remote controlled boat patent. In fact, as long as something's implemented in practice, is viable in the long term, does not appear to stifle further research in related areas, and isn't obvious and generic -- it's a valid patent to me.
If a patent satisfies the aforementioned, doesn't it have an intrinsic value in itself? Doesn't it then describe several physical products implementing the method? Isn't it then truly worth more than copyright?
The fact that there are today more theoretical patents designed to stifle innovation and to create money for non-working businesses and lazy parties doesn't mean all patents are worth less.
Now, if we were to consider the imaginary property in the same way grandparent considers it, then neither copyright nor patents have much value: they are both knowledge, easily reproducible among those that are capable of consuming it (be it machines or humans). A human can transfer knowledge easily to his/her peer, another human. Patents prevent exploitation of knowledge for a limited time period, while increasing sum of human knowledge by allowing easier transfer between parties. Similar is with copyright. For a limited time, prevent transfer of content from device to device (be it via stream of electrons, via a copy of a physical medium, or some other way) while increasing total sum of content.
What happens today is that with both copyright and patents, there is exploitation of the rights by the "content" authors. Our national or supranational patent offices are being filled with spam and junk, making it hard to find and examine actually useful content. Length of protection stifles my desire to even examine patents, for by the time I read them in order to use them, they are far outdated and useless.
Doesn't similar thing happen with copyright-protected content? We have so much content on the web that we need Google to go through it and attempt to rank the good content well, while detecting spam. We need an enormous spam-filtering company that Google really is in order to be able to find any real knowledge. By the time copyright expires, I am mostly no longer interested in obtaining the content. How much content a regular human wants from 95 years ago? How much content a regular human wants to REMIX from death+95 years ago? Only a few masterpieces!
I am not even sure if I am allowed to use NASA's recordings of landing on the Moon inside my works. Are they public domain? I will go now and check, but I am not sure.
Both good content and good patents have intrinsic market value. Bad content and bad patents have negative market value: actually using them would just incur losses. The only difference is what reasons we have for demanding copyright reform. Copyright reform is needed to expand who is allowed to reuse content. Patent reform is needed to bring the concept of patentable "thing" back to the state of patentable device or component. I even go as far to say there should be valid software patents, but that a line needs to be drawn.
My 61.2820199 Russian rubles.
Tried using VMware Server when something broke immediately after 2.6.18? I've had 2.6.18 for few more months on my machine just because VMware guys didn't ship updated kernel module after that version.
Now, this was VMware, and it's not so important. But what happens when new kernel comes out and breaks ATI's drivers, with their 3-month-release-schedule (there's was an article on /. some time ago about that)? I've seen my pals quite broken down by the effort to get laptop to work after new kernel or X11 update broke their Radeon's drivers.
He's talking about that kind of ABI. I can still play old Alpha Centauri port, but that ABI is not what hardware manufacturers want.
And this is where I tell you to go read it, because despite the post being somewhat inflammatory, the guy's got a point and if he's really a retailer, it shows what's it like from their perspective. Go and read it.
anyway you can make your own opensource phone, just get a 30 dollar mobile module board,
build your own mini linux/arm controller board, and use an existing older crappy phone for a case/lcd module.
I'm interesting in how to do this. Can you provide any links to where to buy the mentioned module board, and perhaps point to existing homebrew devices that use these modules?
No idea why that ended up as posted by AC. I'm logged in and the checkbox wasn't supposed to be checked.
"ya'll'll" should then mean "you will all", right? He got it almost right :-)
I think your wrong, or just being overly pedantic.
(and a quick Googleing)
*cough cough* say what?
"Your" and "you're" used improperly annoys even non-native speakers like me. Just like using "Googleing" (69,700) instead of usual "googling" (4,250,00). Reading that makes me want to dig my eyes out. Thanks.