Oculus Rift already looked promising before. With Carmack on-board, I now feel that the OR will be THE AWESOME MUST-HAVE GAME GADGET of 2014, or whenever it is released. ---- I'm definitely buying a RIFT when it comes out. And so will tens of thousands of other gaming enthusiasts, methinks!!! 5 thumbs up for this news!!!
... its just a question of how long it takes - how many months or years - for the backdoor's existence to become public knowledge. ---- Once the backdoor is revealed to be there, of course, the whole thing is spun as an "unintentional software/system vulnerability". ---- Nobody ever admits that the backdoor was put where it is very much on purpose, and WITH/FOR a purpose... =) My 2 Cents...
I guess that if you love intercepting & storing people's supposedly _private_ data, then you need more and more data centers to do that. ------ 50 years from now, high school students will be given an assignment to research our current "data interception craze", and those students will have a tough time understanding what happened in 2013. -----
Aren't MIT supposed to be the "good/brilliant guys" in all things tech? I don't understand why they have so much trouble with the Schwartz case... In any case, RIP Aaron Schwartz!
What is the point of 1984, Brave New World, Minority Report and Gattaca if, instead of drawing important lessons from this kind of dystopian work, a bunch of nutty scientists & government do PRECISELY WHAT SCIFI WARNS NOT TO DO... This stuff was meant as a warning about constructing the wrong kind of future, rather than as a manual or blueprint for FUCKING THE FUTURE UP FOR EVERYBODY... News like this just makes me sad. Nuff Said...
MS Outlook/Hotmail/Skype has tens of millions of users in 190+ countries around the world. If MS handed ALL OF THAT PRIVATE INFO to the NSA while pretending NOT TO DO PRECISELY THAT, this is the beginning of the end for MS in this market segment. I've had a Hotmail account for over a decade, and I'm seriously pissed that MS made my private emails accessible to the NSA. ---- I hope that Microsoft gets fucked forwards, backwards and sideways for doing this by its loyal customers. I sure as hell won't be using Hotmail/Outlook for anything confidential anymore. ---- To Microsoft's executives: You are a bunch of reckless, lying, cheating, incompetent assworms pretending to be human beings. I hope you lying, backstabbing fucksticks get 20+ year jail sentences for what you have done to innocent users of your email products.
I agree with you, and would like to add another vector to your argument >>> Many of us tech-savvy electronics users strongly suspect that virtually ALL electronic gizmos you can buy contain a hidden hardware or software "backdoor": Everything from mobile phones to tablet computers to smart TVs to business laptops can thus be remotely accessed and spied on with ease by governments interested in doing so. ------ This suspicion (of backdoors built into all electronics) is yet another case where you quickly get accused of being a "Tinfoil Hatter". Until, that is, someone like Snowden leaks new proof that this is actually true: That all electronics makers have secret agreements with various governments to always put a concealed "backdoor" into the gizmos they manufacture and sell to us. ------- I personally believe that this will be the next "big revelation" in terms of privacy - that electronics makers build concealed backdoors into virtually all popular products they sell.
As I am typing this, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are hanging out at UFO-related sites. Some believe firmly in the existence of UFOs. Others are more sceptical but fascinated nevertheless. There are millions of people who would LOVE to find out "what the truth on UFOs/ETs is". ------- Except that no government with the necessary facts/knowledge ever comes forward and says "Yes, there genuinely are UFOs visiting earth" or "Sorry to disappoint, but none of the UFO sightings on record have anything to do with genuine UFOs/ETs". ------- It doesn't matter that the UK now wants to "hunt for other life in the universe". As long as nobody steps forward and gives people the straight dope on UFOs/ETs, a tech project like this is pointless. ---- I sometimes wonder: How can it be THIS DIFFICULT for a government to address ordinary people and give them REAL FACTS on UFOs? A simple YES or NO answer would suffice - are there real UFOs? YES or NO? ------ My 2 Cents
DRM is some suits in the corporate world trying to make ordinary people submit to their every demand: We control what you consume, when, how, and for how much. And we use DRM to ensure that you stick to the rules. ------ Anything positive about DRM? Sadly, no.
The NYPD doesn't give a DAMN what installing cameras everywhere will do to people's privacy. NYPD has one mission and one mission alone: To protect the capitalist businesses in NYC from attack, most importantly of all Wall Street. You thought you could live in NYC with some anonimity in public places? Well, you simply thought wrong. NYPD will do anything to protect businesses in NYC. But protecting YOUR PRIVACY? That's simply not part of the NYPD's mission. NYPD exists to protect the big capitalist cahunas, and not YOU, the common man. If you live in NYC, expect thousands of new CCTV cameras to be installed in the next 6 - 12 months. And yes, all those cameras will be wired into a central NYPD command post, where realtime face recognition algorithms will allow Bloomberg & Friends to track your whereabouts in NYC 24/7. ---- Sorry to be so negative, but this is what NYPD's mission is - to protect large businesses in NYC from attack. Yes, you will loose your privacy because of this. And NO, nothing you do - protest, write letters, collect signatures, sue the city - will prevent those 2,000 - 5,000 new CCTV cameras from being installed. ----- So this is pretty much it for New York City. As if NYC wasn't a nasty, dirty, crowded, expensive place to live in before, the CCTV will make it EVEN WORSE than before. Good luck to New Yorkers. Once those CCTV cameras are in place, nothing will make the NYC bureaucrats take those cameras down again. ---- On some level it doesn't matter. New York has little to offer over other large cities in the world that are still - for the time being - relatively free.
Around 10 years ago, there were some promising Web3D technologies around. VRML was easy to create VR walkthroughs with. But there was no unified VRML browser plugin - there were multiple plugins, each with its own quirks - and it was hard to create meaningful interaction with it. Shockwave3D was introduced with Macromedia Director 8.5. It was great for creating Web3D applications. It failed on 3 counts though. 1) It had no 3D creation UI whatsoever. Everything had to be scripted by hand with Lingo code, which made it a "programmers only" 3D solution. 2) The Flash crowd put a lot of pressure on Macromedia not to develop Shockwave3D further, and to instead put a 3D engine into the Flash plugin. 3) After Adobe bought Macromedia, nobody updated the DirectX 7/OpenGL based Shockwave3D engine for several years. The engine fell behind the state-of-the-art in graphics quality, and the handful of people who were capable of using Shockwave3D stopped developing web3D apps with it. --- Then there is the sorry story of Virtools 3D, now owned by Dassault Systems. Virtools had a great 3D engine, coupled with a visual-programming paradigm that was as easy to program with as connecting visual flowchart elements with lines. Virtools failed terribly in the market because the ahead-of-their-time French company that created it insisted on pricing Virtools at 25,000 Dollars a seat or thereabouts. That was so expensive that Virtools never attracted more than a handful of users, even though it featured a powerful & easy to use toolset. ----- One more case. Quest3D combined a great-looking, web-capable 3D engine with a visual programming paradigm. But Quest3D's connect-the-nodes programming paradigm was not intuitive at all. Even though it was cheaper than Virtools, the idiosyncratic, and some would say eccentric - way you had to program Quest3D caused it to fail. ------ To sum it up in a few words, the companies that WERE capable of creating Web3D authoring tools in the early 2000s made mistake after mistake, eventually causing Web3D to fail completely. Shockwave3D had no GUI for 3D work. VRML was too simple, no good for anything more than interactive walkthroughs. Virtools was great, but cost as much as a fricking car to buy. Quest3D failed on the user-friendliness front. Flash never got a usable 3D engine integrated. ---- Basically, Web3D had lots of potential as far back as 10 years ago. But the lack of user-friendly or affordable tools caused Web3D to fail. ----- Today there are powerful and easy to use 3D engines like Unity for web development. But it took way too long for it to arrive, and the Web3D market went flat - as in "flat coke" - during the years that passed without any progress being made on the Web3D tech-front. ------- Web3D may eventually come back because of another trend, and that is "Augmented Reality". But nobody knows that for certain.
Google logs the private search data of billions of people across the world, and voluntarily pipes all of it to various 3 letter agencies in the U.S. ---- Google has no understanding of what privacy is, had not had an understanding of what privacy is, and will likely never have an understanding of what privacy. ----- Google is a spying machine disguised as a useful search engine. Period. ----- None of what they are doing on their app store is thus terribly surprising. Google suxxors at protecting your privacy. Something we all have to live with (... and the reason I personally don't use Google's services anymore).
A manager does not have to innovate very often - a so-called "cash cow product" may do fine in the market, and remain a profitable sell for years, without anything substantial being changed about the product. If and when something needs to be changed - when the product is about to enter the decline phase of its lifecycle - there are people you can hire with cash, whose job it is to figure out any changes/improvements to the product. The manager will not do this work personally - he/she will delegate the task to people trained to perform just that function. The most a manager will do is to apply some common sense thinking as to whether the "new product" is going to be a big seller or not. ---- Your average entrepreneur on the other hand has to develop an idea from absolute infancy to marketable maturity. That takes a lot of brainpower, and especially so if there is little or no money at the inception for specialists to be hired with. In many cases, the entrepreneur will perform 3, 4, 5 different roles in the development of the product. Inventor. Prototyper. Tester. Strategist. Of course doing all that stuff yourself will keep both of your brain lobes busy. Unlike the manager, there is nobody to delegate vital tasks to, and you have to wear many hats at the same time. The manager, on the other hand, has many people he/she can delegate vital tasks to. He/she merely has to pick the right people and assign them the right tasks to get a good result. With the entrepreneur, a lot will fail or succeed based on how well the entrepreneur handles multiple active roles without failing in one or more of them. Thus the entrepreneur has a higher and more diverse cognitive load than the manager. That makes sense, doesn't it?
The brilliant thing about Braben's original ELITE was that he managed to squeeze a huge, open, varied, explorable 3D universe into 32/48/64 Kb of RAM on early 8-bit computers. He also had to publish the game himself - the big game publishers of the time wanted ELITE to have "waves of enemies, short levels, collectable powerups, 3 player lives", because that was the formula popular side-scrolling space games like R-TYPE used. Braben refused to do that - it flew in the face of the 3D space sim he was building - and thus ELITE became the first space game to feature realtime 3D wireframe graphics and break the "R-TYPE" space-game formula.
Many people consider David Braben to be something of a gamedesign pioneer and genius. If Braben hasn't lost his touch, the new ELITE: DANGEROUS should wind up being a seriously impressive Space Trading/Exploration/Combat game. ---- For those who prefer action to trading and exploration, there is always "Star Citizen", a Wing Commander sequel made by Chris Roberts. That game will feature high-end CryEngine 3 graphics, and will be all about space combat.
Not only does nobody know what kind of changes this genetically altered Salmon will affect in the ecosystem and food chain it is released into; We also won't know for sure, for maybe a decade or two, what eating this genetically modified FrankenSalmon will or won't do to a person's health. What if people eating this GM Fish suddenly start getting weird cancers and tumors in their bowels or elsewhere 10 years down the line? Who will be held accountable for this? And what if it takes years and years and dozens of cases before it can be demonstrated, conclusively, that this GM Fish causes the cancer? ---- I think that this whole thing smacks of putting profits before public health. Precisely _what_ is so wrong with regular Salmon that the world needs a FrankenSalmon that grows at twice the rate of the natural design? ----- What happens when eating this GM Fish starts killing people or making them sick? Will the "manufacturer" delve into the ecosystem and try to "recall" tens of thousands of GM Fish by catching them before someone eats them? ------ Some people will disagree with me, but the whole thing strikes me as an "extreme exercise in stupid", and "an accident waiting to happen". There is no way I would eat this FrankenSalmon, or let my kids eat it. Regular Salmon does just fine for me, thank you! ------
... America wakes up to the fact that measures like intrusive TSA screenings are all about keeping the ordinary American scared of "bad guys", and not about improving security tangibly. There are many countries around the world that don't have the equivalent of the "TSA", yet manage to get through year after year without a major incident. Americans, however, are not supposed to wake up, ever. That's what you get when a handful of ill intentioned lobbyists and gatekeepers control virtually the entire media, most large corporations, and a lot of the government decisions and lawmaking in a country.
The Cycles renderer in Blender 2.65 is coming along nicely. One can set it to render a viewport in realtime, which is cool. You make changes to your 3D scene, and Cycles will render them almost in realtime. That said, Blender still has a crappy, annoying, confusing UI that should be re-engineered from scratch. Blender has so much potential, but the commercial 3D apps trump it in terms of ease-of-use and good UI design. So Blender foundation... bite the bullet already and please give Blender a much needed UI redesign. I promise you that the number of Blender users will quadruple, or maybe octuple if the UI is redesigned to be more user friendly. My 2 Cents.
I don't know if anybody else has noticed, but all sorts of things these days are moving to, ahem, "the Cloud", without anybody asking for such functionality. Many PC games won't work without a "Cloud Client" anymore. Steam. Origin. UPlay. Take your pick. The gaming Cloud Clients even warns you that "your save games are out of sync with the cloud" because, um, you played the last 2 sessions without, er, actually going online to do it. ---- Then there is the creative software from Adobe, Autodesk and others. DCC software is the official term for these. Digital Content Creation software. These gentlemen, too, are trying to nudge their tens of thousands strong userbase into "the Cloud", and none to subtly. It is even rumored that future releases of Adobe, Autodesk and similar DCC software won't work without "connecting to the Cloud" to run these apps at all. This is even though nobody asked for this kind of functionality. What does all that mean in English? Somebody rather powerful somewhere is pressuring Adobe, Autodesk and similar big players to create "digital backdoors" into their DCC software. So the next time you want to create a viral video that is maybe protesting political some injustice somewhere, the "Cloud" knows in advance what kind of video you are working on. ------ To cut the crap, this is all about Top-Down Control. The powers that be don't want you to work offline anymore, without them being able to check what you are doing. This may be harmless when gaming is concerned - who really cares what you are doing in game space, right? But when it comes to working with professional DCC tools - CAD tools, CG tools, Video, Print, Web design tools - the Cloud actually knows who is working on what where and for what reason with great granularity. Whatever confidentially working OFFLINE once gave you - the big players now want to take that confidentiality away. They want to know what you are "cooking" on a computer somewhere. Whether you are designing a Sports Car, or creating a website for a political pressure group, or creating a Youtube Video decrying certain injustices. ----- In all these activities, the Cloud is one step ahead of you, potentially beaming your most confidential data to a Mothership somewhere (a little bird told me that the "Mothership" may be a 2 Billion Dollar custom-built data center in the Cornbelt of the United States of A.). ------- All this stuff is about a small, self-anointed Elite of MBAs trying to bend the common man to their will. They want to know what you are doing with the software they supply - which you pay for - and they don't want you to have any say in how or when this happens. That's what the Cloud is all about. Trust us with your data. Trust us with your digital designs. Trust us with intimate things you maybe wouldn't even tell your best friend or spouse about. -------- The whole Cloud Computing paradigm reeks of EVIL. Probably because the people pushing it are, well, a wee bit evil and exploitative in character.
I'm guessing that the hardest part of the job is writing code that does not crash, possibly leaving elevator riders stranded between floors, or going up when they want to go down. Over the years Otis must have developed a pretty good elevator usage simulator that plays through millions of possible elevator use scenarios, and tries to find one that either crashes or confuses the system. If yes, the developers responsible for that "possibility simulator" should have been named in the article alongside "The Elevator Algorithm Lady". They should have gotten some credit where credit is due...
Iran's press service was probably given instructions to report on a new VTOL drone, without having been given actual images of said drone. So the press agency went online, found a drone image it liked, photoshopped out some wind turbines in the image, and ran the story that way... The "digital deed" in question may even be the handywork of a young intern at Iran's press agency, told to illustrate a story for which no real images exist. ---- Either way, I don't see why this is "big news" in any way. Its not as if the U.S. releases pictures of all its new military toys. Like the mysterious stealth chopper that crashed during the Abbottabad raid...
Its funny that just a few years back, the very first digital 1080P HD film cameras used by George Lucas and others cost well over 100,000 Dollars a piece to buy - without any (just as expensive) lenses included in that price. Now a cheap 25 Dollar addon to Raspberry Pi can do 1080P video capture. My my, how quickly technology advances these days...
I own a Samsung smartphone, tablet computer and laptop. Each product was well priced, well designed and quality built and works flawlessly so far. I've had zero issues with any of these products. So yes, I appreciate the quality Samsung brings to the market. Does that make me a fanboy? Hardly.
... when, instead of competing fairly and squarely with Samsung, they decided to drag Samsung's Galaxy products through the courts and get their sales banned in several different territories, including several European countries. Samsung's products are well priced, well designed, well manufactured and ooze a sense of "quality" overall, while Apple is more of an "electronics fashion brand" in its marketing approach, catering to i-fanboys and i-fangirls who'll buy anyhing branded "Apple". ------ Face it, Apple: You cannot compete with a behemoth like Samsung by trying to twist the courts/the law to your advantage. Put some proper innovation on the market before Samsung, which makes seriously good products, rolls right over you... Good luck to you, because Samsung are seriously good at product design...
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Oculus Rift already looked promising before. With Carmack on-board, I now feel that the OR will be THE AWESOME MUST-HAVE GAME GADGET of 2014, or whenever it is released. ---- I'm definitely buying a RIFT when it comes out. And so will tens of thousands of other gaming enthusiasts, methinks!!! 5 thumbs up for this news!!!
... its just a question of how long it takes - how many months or years - for the backdoor's existence to become public knowledge. ---- Once the backdoor is revealed to be there, of course, the whole thing is spun as an "unintentional software/system vulnerability". ---- Nobody ever admits that the backdoor was put where it is very much on purpose, and WITH/FOR a purpose... =) My 2 Cents...
>>> His failure to control this situation will be his legacy. - - I believe so too... unfortunately...=(
I guess that if you love intercepting & storing people's supposedly _private_ data, then you need more and more data centers to do that. ------ 50 years from now, high school students will be given an assignment to research our current "data interception craze", and those students will have a tough time understanding what happened in 2013. -----
Aren't MIT supposed to be the "good/brilliant guys" in all things tech? I don't understand why they have so much trouble with the Schwartz case... In any case, RIP Aaron Schwartz!
What is the point of 1984, Brave New World, Minority Report and Gattaca if, instead of drawing important lessons from this kind of dystopian work, a bunch of nutty scientists & government do PRECISELY WHAT SCIFI WARNS NOT TO DO... This stuff was meant as a warning about constructing the wrong kind of future, rather than as a manual or blueprint for FUCKING THE FUTURE UP FOR EVERYBODY... News like this just makes me sad. Nuff Said...
MS Outlook/Hotmail/Skype has tens of millions of users in 190+ countries around the world. If MS handed ALL OF THAT PRIVATE INFO to the NSA while pretending NOT TO DO PRECISELY THAT, this is the beginning of the end for MS in this market segment. I've had a Hotmail account for over a decade, and I'm seriously pissed that MS made my private emails accessible to the NSA. ---- I hope that Microsoft gets fucked forwards, backwards and sideways for doing this by its loyal customers. I sure as hell won't be using Hotmail/Outlook for anything confidential anymore. ---- To Microsoft's executives: You are a bunch of reckless, lying, cheating, incompetent assworms pretending to be human beings. I hope you lying, backstabbing fucksticks get 20+ year jail sentences for what you have done to innocent users of your email products.
I agree with you, and would like to add another vector to your argument >>> Many of us tech-savvy electronics users strongly suspect that virtually ALL electronic gizmos you can buy contain a hidden hardware or software "backdoor": Everything from mobile phones to tablet computers to smart TVs to business laptops can thus be remotely accessed and spied on with ease by governments interested in doing so. ------ This suspicion (of backdoors built into all electronics) is yet another case where you quickly get accused of being a "Tinfoil Hatter". Until, that is, someone like Snowden leaks new proof that this is actually true: That all electronics makers have secret agreements with various governments to always put a concealed "backdoor" into the gizmos they manufacture and sell to us. ------- I personally believe that this will be the next "big revelation" in terms of privacy - that electronics makers build concealed backdoors into virtually all popular products they sell.
As I am typing this, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are hanging out at UFO-related sites. Some believe firmly in the existence of UFOs. Others are more sceptical but fascinated nevertheless. There are millions of people who would LOVE to find out "what the truth on UFOs/ETs is". ------- Except that no government with the necessary facts/knowledge ever comes forward and says "Yes, there genuinely are UFOs visiting earth" or "Sorry to disappoint, but none of the UFO sightings on record have anything to do with genuine UFOs/ETs". ------- It doesn't matter that the UK now wants to "hunt for other life in the universe". As long as nobody steps forward and gives people the straight dope on UFOs/ETs, a tech project like this is pointless. ---- I sometimes wonder: How can it be THIS DIFFICULT for a government to address ordinary people and give them REAL FACTS on UFOs? A simple YES or NO answer would suffice - are there real UFOs? YES or NO? ------ My 2 Cents
DRM is some suits in the corporate world trying to make ordinary people submit to their every demand: We control what you consume, when, how, and for how much. And we use DRM to ensure that you stick to the rules. ------ Anything positive about DRM? Sadly, no.
The NYPD doesn't give a DAMN what installing cameras everywhere will do to people's privacy. NYPD has one mission and one mission alone: To protect the capitalist businesses in NYC from attack, most importantly of all Wall Street. You thought you could live in NYC with some anonimity in public places? Well, you simply thought wrong. NYPD will do anything to protect businesses in NYC. But protecting YOUR PRIVACY? That's simply not part of the NYPD's mission. NYPD exists to protect the big capitalist cahunas, and not YOU, the common man. If you live in NYC, expect thousands of new CCTV cameras to be installed in the next 6 - 12 months. And yes, all those cameras will be wired into a central NYPD command post, where realtime face recognition algorithms will allow Bloomberg & Friends to track your whereabouts in NYC 24/7. ---- Sorry to be so negative, but this is what NYPD's mission is - to protect large businesses in NYC from attack. Yes, you will loose your privacy because of this. And NO, nothing you do - protest, write letters, collect signatures, sue the city - will prevent those 2,000 - 5,000 new CCTV cameras from being installed. ----- So this is pretty much it for New York City. As if NYC wasn't a nasty, dirty, crowded, expensive place to live in before, the CCTV will make it EVEN WORSE than before. Good luck to New Yorkers. Once those CCTV cameras are in place, nothing will make the NYC bureaucrats take those cameras down again. ---- On some level it doesn't matter. New York has little to offer over other large cities in the world that are still - for the time being - relatively free.
Around 10 years ago, there were some promising Web3D technologies around. VRML was easy to create VR walkthroughs with. But there was no unified VRML browser plugin - there were multiple plugins, each with its own quirks - and it was hard to create meaningful interaction with it. Shockwave3D was introduced with Macromedia Director 8.5. It was great for creating Web3D applications. It failed on 3 counts though. 1) It had no 3D creation UI whatsoever. Everything had to be scripted by hand with Lingo code, which made it a "programmers only" 3D solution. 2) The Flash crowd put a lot of pressure on Macromedia not to develop Shockwave3D further, and to instead put a 3D engine into the Flash plugin. 3) After Adobe bought Macromedia, nobody updated the DirectX 7/OpenGL based Shockwave3D engine for several years. The engine fell behind the state-of-the-art in graphics quality, and the handful of people who were capable of using Shockwave3D stopped developing web3D apps with it. --- Then there is the sorry story of Virtools 3D, now owned by Dassault Systems. Virtools had a great 3D engine, coupled with a visual-programming paradigm that was as easy to program with as connecting visual flowchart elements with lines. Virtools failed terribly in the market because the ahead-of-their-time French company that created it insisted on pricing Virtools at 25,000 Dollars a seat or thereabouts. That was so expensive that Virtools never attracted more than a handful of users, even though it featured a powerful & easy to use toolset. ----- One more case. Quest3D combined a great-looking, web-capable 3D engine with a visual programming paradigm. But Quest3D's connect-the-nodes programming paradigm was not intuitive at all. Even though it was cheaper than Virtools, the idiosyncratic, and some would say eccentric - way you had to program Quest3D caused it to fail. ------ To sum it up in a few words, the companies that WERE capable of creating Web3D authoring tools in the early 2000s made mistake after mistake, eventually causing Web3D to fail completely. Shockwave3D had no GUI for 3D work. VRML was too simple, no good for anything more than interactive walkthroughs. Virtools was great, but cost as much as a fricking car to buy. Quest3D failed on the user-friendliness front. Flash never got a usable 3D engine integrated. ---- Basically, Web3D had lots of potential as far back as 10 years ago. But the lack of user-friendly or affordable tools caused Web3D to fail. ----- Today there are powerful and easy to use 3D engines like Unity for web development. But it took way too long for it to arrive, and the Web3D market went flat - as in "flat coke" - during the years that passed without any progress being made on the Web3D tech-front. ------- Web3D may eventually come back because of another trend, and that is "Augmented Reality". But nobody knows that for certain.
Google logs the private search data of billions of people across the world, and voluntarily pipes all of it to various 3 letter agencies in the U.S. ---- Google has no understanding of what privacy is, had not had an understanding of what privacy is, and will likely never have an understanding of what privacy. ----- Google is a spying machine disguised as a useful search engine. Period. ----- None of what they are doing on their app store is thus terribly surprising. Google suxxors at protecting your privacy. Something we all have to live with (... and the reason I personally don't use Google's services anymore).
A manager does not have to innovate very often - a so-called "cash cow product" may do fine in the market, and remain a profitable sell for years, without anything substantial being changed about the product. If and when something needs to be changed - when the product is about to enter the decline phase of its lifecycle - there are people you can hire with cash, whose job it is to figure out any changes/improvements to the product. The manager will not do this work personally - he/she will delegate the task to people trained to perform just that function. The most a manager will do is to apply some common sense thinking as to whether the "new product" is going to be a big seller or not. ---- Your average entrepreneur on the other hand has to develop an idea from absolute infancy to marketable maturity. That takes a lot of brainpower, and especially so if there is little or no money at the inception for specialists to be hired with. In many cases, the entrepreneur will perform 3, 4, 5 different roles in the development of the product. Inventor. Prototyper. Tester. Strategist. Of course doing all that stuff yourself will keep both of your brain lobes busy. Unlike the manager, there is nobody to delegate vital tasks to, and you have to wear many hats at the same time. The manager, on the other hand, has many people he/she can delegate vital tasks to. He/she merely has to pick the right people and assign them the right tasks to get a good result. With the entrepreneur, a lot will fail or succeed based on how well the entrepreneur handles multiple active roles without failing in one or more of them. Thus the entrepreneur has a higher and more diverse cognitive load than the manager. That makes sense, doesn't it?
The brilliant thing about Braben's original ELITE was that he managed to squeeze a huge, open, varied, explorable 3D universe into 32/48/64 Kb of RAM on early 8-bit computers. He also had to publish the game himself - the big game publishers of the time wanted ELITE to have "waves of enemies, short levels, collectable powerups, 3 player lives", because that was the formula popular side-scrolling space games like R-TYPE used. Braben refused to do that - it flew in the face of the 3D space sim he was building - and thus ELITE became the first space game to feature realtime 3D wireframe graphics and break the "R-TYPE" space-game formula. Many people consider David Braben to be something of a gamedesign pioneer and genius. If Braben hasn't lost his touch, the new ELITE: DANGEROUS should wind up being a seriously impressive Space Trading/Exploration/Combat game. ---- For those who prefer action to trading and exploration, there is always "Star Citizen", a Wing Commander sequel made by Chris Roberts. That game will feature high-end CryEngine 3 graphics, and will be all about space combat.
Not only does nobody know what kind of changes this genetically altered Salmon will affect in the ecosystem and food chain it is released into; We also won't know for sure, for maybe a decade or two, what eating this genetically modified FrankenSalmon will or won't do to a person's health. What if people eating this GM Fish suddenly start getting weird cancers and tumors in their bowels or elsewhere 10 years down the line? Who will be held accountable for this? And what if it takes years and years and dozens of cases before it can be demonstrated, conclusively, that this GM Fish causes the cancer? ---- I think that this whole thing smacks of putting profits before public health. Precisely _what_ is so wrong with regular Salmon that the world needs a FrankenSalmon that grows at twice the rate of the natural design? ----- What happens when eating this GM Fish starts killing people or making them sick? Will the "manufacturer" delve into the ecosystem and try to "recall" tens of thousands of GM Fish by catching them before someone eats them? ------ Some people will disagree with me, but the whole thing strikes me as an "extreme exercise in stupid", and "an accident waiting to happen". There is no way I would eat this FrankenSalmon, or let my kids eat it. Regular Salmon does just fine for me, thank you! ------
... America wakes up to the fact that measures like intrusive TSA screenings are all about keeping the ordinary American scared of "bad guys", and not about improving security tangibly. There are many countries around the world that don't have the equivalent of the "TSA", yet manage to get through year after year without a major incident. Americans, however, are not supposed to wake up, ever. That's what you get when a handful of ill intentioned lobbyists and gatekeepers control virtually the entire media, most large corporations, and a lot of the government decisions and lawmaking in a country.
The Cycles renderer in Blender 2.65 is coming along nicely. One can set it to render a viewport in realtime, which is cool. You make changes to your 3D scene, and Cycles will render them almost in realtime. That said, Blender still has a crappy, annoying, confusing UI that should be re-engineered from scratch. Blender has so much potential, but the commercial 3D apps trump it in terms of ease-of-use and good UI design. So Blender foundation... bite the bullet already and please give Blender a much needed UI redesign. I promise you that the number of Blender users will quadruple, or maybe octuple if the UI is redesigned to be more user friendly. My 2 Cents.
...cheese has been eating humans since 1917!!!
I don't know if anybody else has noticed, but all sorts of things these days are moving to, ahem, "the Cloud", without anybody asking for such functionality. Many PC games won't work without a "Cloud Client" anymore. Steam. Origin. UPlay. Take your pick. The gaming Cloud Clients even warns you that "your save games are out of sync with the cloud" because, um, you played the last 2 sessions without, er, actually going online to do it. ---- Then there is the creative software from Adobe, Autodesk and others. DCC software is the official term for these. Digital Content Creation software. These gentlemen, too, are trying to nudge their tens of thousands strong userbase into "the Cloud", and none to subtly. It is even rumored that future releases of Adobe, Autodesk and similar DCC software won't work without "connecting to the Cloud" to run these apps at all. This is even though nobody asked for this kind of functionality. What does all that mean in English? Somebody rather powerful somewhere is pressuring Adobe, Autodesk and similar big players to create "digital backdoors" into their DCC software. So the next time you want to create a viral video that is maybe protesting political some injustice somewhere, the "Cloud" knows in advance what kind of video you are working on. ------ To cut the crap, this is all about Top-Down Control. The powers that be don't want you to work offline anymore, without them being able to check what you are doing. This may be harmless when gaming is concerned - who really cares what you are doing in game space, right? But when it comes to working with professional DCC tools - CAD tools, CG tools, Video, Print, Web design tools - the Cloud actually knows who is working on what where and for what reason with great granularity. Whatever confidentially working OFFLINE once gave you - the big players now want to take that confidentiality away. They want to know what you are "cooking" on a computer somewhere. Whether you are designing a Sports Car, or creating a website for a political pressure group, or creating a Youtube Video decrying certain injustices. ----- In all these activities, the Cloud is one step ahead of you, potentially beaming your most confidential data to a Mothership somewhere (a little bird told me that the "Mothership" may be a 2 Billion Dollar custom-built data center in the Cornbelt of the United States of A.). ------- All this stuff is about a small, self-anointed Elite of MBAs trying to bend the common man to their will. They want to know what you are doing with the software they supply - which you pay for - and they don't want you to have any say in how or when this happens. That's what the Cloud is all about. Trust us with your data. Trust us with your digital designs. Trust us with intimate things you maybe wouldn't even tell your best friend or spouse about. -------- The whole Cloud Computing paradigm reeks of EVIL. Probably because the people pushing it are, well, a wee bit evil and exploitative in character.
I'm guessing that the hardest part of the job is writing code that does not crash, possibly leaving elevator riders stranded between floors, or going up when they want to go down. Over the years Otis must have developed a pretty good elevator usage simulator that plays through millions of possible elevator use scenarios, and tries to find one that either crashes or confuses the system. If yes, the developers responsible for that "possibility simulator" should have been named in the article alongside "The Elevator Algorithm Lady". They should have gotten some credit where credit is due...
Iran's press service was probably given instructions to report on a new VTOL drone, without having been given actual images of said drone. So the press agency went online, found a drone image it liked, photoshopped out some wind turbines in the image, and ran the story that way... The "digital deed" in question may even be the handywork of a young intern at Iran's press agency, told to illustrate a story for which no real images exist. ---- Either way, I don't see why this is "big news" in any way. Its not as if the U.S. releases pictures of all its new military toys. Like the mysterious stealth chopper that crashed during the Abbottabad raid...
Its funny that just a few years back, the very first digital 1080P HD film cameras used by George Lucas and others cost well over 100,000 Dollars a piece to buy - without any (just as expensive) lenses included in that price. Now a cheap 25 Dollar addon to Raspberry Pi can do 1080P video capture. My my, how quickly technology advances these days...
I own a Samsung smartphone, tablet computer and laptop. Each product was well priced, well designed and quality built and works flawlessly so far. I've had zero issues with any of these products. So yes, I appreciate the quality Samsung brings to the market. Does that make me a fanboy? Hardly.
... when, instead of competing fairly and squarely with Samsung, they decided to drag Samsung's Galaxy products through the courts and get their sales banned in several different territories, including several European countries. Samsung's products are well priced, well designed, well manufactured and ooze a sense of "quality" overall, while Apple is more of an "electronics fashion brand" in its marketing approach, catering to i-fanboys and i-fangirls who'll buy anyhing branded "Apple". ------ Face it, Apple: You cannot compete with a behemoth like Samsung by trying to twist the courts/the law to your advantage. Put some proper innovation on the market before Samsung, which makes seriously good products, rolls right over you... Good luck to you, because Samsung are seriously good at product design...