Check out the bit under How We Work: (from the memo)
Each major initiative will have a champion who will be a direct report to me or one of my direct reports. The champion will organize to drive a cross-company team for success, but my whole staff will have commitment to the initiative’s success.
Bringing the word champion to the table seems like a noble and heroic undertaking, but listen to the undercurrent. It says each champion will be "a direct report to [Ballmer] or one of [his] direct reports." Hrm... is there an historical precedent for such a caste? I think so, and their uniforms had pairs of matching letters; I believe it's the letter just after "R" and just before "T". (and depicted in the 1970's Detroit Arena Costumed Rock Band fashion)
Now note the second statement, how these champions will "organize to drive a cross-company team for success," but he also makes a point of informing how "[Ballmer's] whole staff will have commitment to the initiative's success." Is the parallel getting through yet? This is moving from an inefficient dog-eat-dog tribal model--as Ballmer previously molded MSFT in the early millenium--into a clear model of Gestapo fascism. It's lovely how this "initiative" is not named at all; might it be called "The Final Solution" at some point? (If you haven't grasped the insinuation by now, then I can't help you any further without degrading this into a trite labeling of a particular historical world figure that has vilified so many in the past decade.)
And before anyone pulls out the "welcome to corporate culture" card, just be clear that this is MSFT, or an equivalent to the population of a small first-world nation we're talking about here. The gravitas is a bit greater than some tri-state, regional or even continental US conglomerate. The scope of this one corporation is like a moderate-sized government with world-wide reach, and one which reasonably and in all practical sense can (and does) have a major influence on world affairs. This isn't just name-calling here.
Later in that paragraph:
Our focus on high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads — also will get top-level championship.
If you get the implications of the former passage, then this one should chill you to the bone. Great, just what we need... a 'champion' for "serious fun" and "information assurance."
I have tried a bunch of ways. Trained the 'expert' users in the area on how to put in a better ticket.
The fact that you need 'expert' users to effectively utilize the bug system says less about your users and more about your system.
[...] users will use what method is easiest to them
Indubitably, so why aren't your methods getting any easier? Ah! Maybe you haven't tried everything after all!
If they're calling someone they know, then why else do they have that number? (same goes for direct email)
Why is that capture address visible at all?
Uncivil behavior between employees is a matter for HR, don'cha think?
Email chains, tickets, log files... you're gonna have to sift through some crap at some point, right?
Who doesn't complain to coworkers?
Now, doing nothing is the worst offense, but only because the user feels like she has no viable options.
What sort of ticketing system allows "call me" as a sufficient description? If anything, that's a clear "cry for help" about your ticketing system.
So, what you're saying is that the users don't make your job any easier, and in return, you're going to make your workflow less accessible and make their job even harder? I'm feeling sorry for someone in this story, and it isn't you.
Users do not work for you. When they do post bug reports, it is most likely in frustration.
I think the point is more: Why are your users not working for you?
As for the bit about frustration, that's more of an overall issue. That's a bug in the human system; not the user, the whole organization.
If users had an approachable, understandable and friendly way to report bugs, there wouldn't be such stress. The frustration comes from the expectation of how a bug report (or opening a ticket, or calling IT, etc) will play out. Often, for them, it's an exercise in futility and exasperation, dealing in a great many things that they don't understand and, more to the point, don't care to understand.
If the process wasn't so confusing or demeaning, it wouldn't be considered as a "last resort" for so many users.
I have some users that love translating text errors into numeric error themselves. Any time a page doesn't load, it's a 404. So that's what they report. "I'm trying to connect to thisdomaindoesntexist.com and I'm getting a 404."
Hell, we could recount "worst user" stories all day long. This does point to a typical social phenomenon; perceived competence.
The user in question probably just wants to be seen as more-competent, so they remember a time when they spoke to someone knowledgeable. It may have been the Geek Squad guy or a Desktop Support person, it doesn't really matter. Back then, they were told that the "page not available" paragraph that appears when they expected to see ReadNewsAllDay.com was sometimes called a "404", because that's what machines called the error. (not that the HTTP error table is all that accurate in the first place)
That impression, when you combine it with the syndrome of brow-beater IT personnel, makes for a false association. The user then thinks, "So an error in my browser is called a '404' by the pros. I don't want to be talked-down to, so I'm going to use it the next time I call them and they might relate to me like I'm a human!"
Brilliant, right?
So, who carries the blame? I say it's a systemic problem, not a causational relationship.
Blame the user?
It's not his fault, nobody explained the actual significance of '404' to him, they just gave him a connection to it.
Blame the sales geek?
Not really his fault either, because his job is to make the technology more 'shiny' and less 'scary' --just doing his job.
Blame the browser source?
How can we? They caved to pressures from thousands of users to make errors "more understandable" and so the numbers were replaced with friendly paragraphs of hit-and-miss suggestions.
Blame the brow-beating IT professionals?
Can you really blame those guys after dealing with all of those ignorant, demanding and thankless users?
Blame the makers of HTTP?
Y'know... maybe we can!
What can we take away from this?
Here's one thing; technology has its deepest roots in obscure, cryptic and sometimes senseless nomenclature. The numbers, codes, acronyms and techniques being used were once so mystifying to the average person, it was almost like magic to them. As technology keeps evolving, it also keeps becoming more accessible to Joe Q User. However, some of the older technology has nigh-immortal longevity and persists it's often non-sensical origins of coded gobbletygook, (e.g., http) and--like an ancient language--requires an interpreter.
The challenge then presents itself; being an interpreter without the implication that you are imparting actual, workable knowledge. Good luck.
Technically correct... or in other words: Yes, but south is also to your left, as well as in front of you, to your right and behind you.
To "go east" from the North Pole, you would, literally, turn to your left. When you stop turning, you've arrived at your 'eastern' destination. It's not like there's an Eastern Pole and the North Pole is drifting towards it.
TFS is more confusing than enlightening, especially with these egregious references to cardinal directions that cannot possibly apply to a polar-zero coordinate. Have we lost our way so completely that we cannot remember how to manage these simple paradoxes? (HINT: Longitude)
At the North Pole, when you take one step in any direction, it's a southward direction. Same goes, but vice-versa, for the South Pole.
The biggest difference is that you will still be able to stand on the South Pole in twenty years.
Oh no... not what you think. All of the opinions about the trailer (movie.trailer != movie), the rants about Card's personal views, the woe and despair over how bad everything is and the doom of sci-fi... 100% conjecture, categorically unprovable.
What this thread does prove is how pivotal and evocative Ender's Game, as a work of literature, is and will continue to be for the science fiction genre. This thread would not be so controversial if this wasn't already true.
I read the novel right after HS graduation. (yeah, go fig'... I'm a "seven digit"... how did that happen!?) There's more strong opinions here than there were at the NRA conference-nay-coronation-ceremony, and in the same light, the same tones are struck about the same old flawed arguments. Despite that, or rather because of it, this is clearly one of the greatest works in all of science fiction!
I'm going to see it, and pay to do so—in theaters and in 3D—not because I think the trailer depicts a good movie, but because I don't believe that a trailer is always an accurate synopsis of the film. (e.g., remember the Matrix trailer? How about any of the M. Night Shyamalan works? Those didn't reveal the entire plot, either.) Just because we know how it ends doesn't mean we know how the movie gets there.
No piece of cinematographic work can be measured by how it ends, for it is the journey that entertains. Anyone who claims that their judgement is certainty is only upholding the theory of self-fulfilling prophecies. Plain and simple; you don't know until you've seen the whole thing.
As for Mr. Card's personal views, I may not agree with them, but I will defend to the death his right to have a different viewpoint. In the meantime, if he can continue to create and imagine deep characters and interesting plots, then I will continue to appreciate his work. Doing so does not–in any way–validate Mr. Card's personal views, saying "I agree with Mr. Card's views," does.
In the same sense, paying to see Tom Cruise in Oblivion is not supporting Scientology in any way. I just happen to believe that The Last Samurai was the absolute last movie wherein Mr. Cruise played a believable character. Also, I'm not going to pay to see another movie with Morgan Freeman having to explain everything to a clueless protagonist; although I do love Morgan Freeman as an actor... and titty sprinkles.
Yes, it's true that a human riding a bicycle has elevated heart-rate and respiration, therefore producing higher levels of CO2, when compared to another human sitting in a driver's seat.
Classic bait-and-switch, we're not supposed to think of the car as a CO2 producer (or CO producer, or O3 producer, or NO2 producer, etc) but simply take it as rote that bicycles are contributing to the demise of the global climate.
It seems that Orcutt believes that cars run on magical dinosaur blood and not the oxidation process of a dense hydrocarbon. Q.E.D. Prima facie!
What happened with OP was, technically, an exception-handling bug. The exception was that some condition of the next event wasn't satisfied, and did so with time-sensitive language on the screen. That's not a poor progress bar, that's just negligent coding.
Kudos for pointing out the difference with the Progress Bar and Time Estimation. A good example for both? wget
A properly crafted Progress Bar is not hard to do: Amalgamate the task at hand into a number of homogeneous units and express those in the graphic bar as [ units.done / units.total ] and you'll be fine. Where most fail at this is in keeping the units consistent and/or appropriate. A classic fallacy is one of file-count vs. byte-count, but the most egregious of those failures is a total-units value that dynamically updates. (vis-a-vis, the "dancing left and right" progress bar)
OTOH, there's Time Estimation, which is a far more fickle beast, especially when applied to ISP throughput. This requires more of an understanding of statistics and averages, where the algorithm is actively measuring units of time as well as units of data. A classic approach is to simply calculate the mean throughput and apply it to the bytes remaining to get the ETA, but this quickly falls short when the connection hangs or if the algorithm is relying on throughput statistics to ratchet the loop. The best—and most frugal—implementations of Time Estimation have used a timed loop with throughput calculated on a rolling average from a fixed number of samples. Again, the most common errors here are; using incorrect units; using an unreliable source for rate and/or throughput; using too small of a sample base before starting prediction trends, and the icing on the cake; mistaking a partially completed task as an accurate measurement of throughput in the sum prediction. (Back in the days of 56k dialup, I would resume d/c downloads all the time, and the download managers were regularly telling me that the 10MB chunk I already have somehow sped up the process to twice—or even ten times—the highest possible speed of my dialup connection. el. oh. el.)
Now, all of this goes "out the Windows(tm)" if you happen to be at Microsoft any time in the past fifteen years. Their idea of a "progress bar" seems to be just a mechanism to make the user sit and do nothing for a number of minutes at a time. The progress bars they typically have made are either (A) simple timer animations that masquerade as a progress bar [see: browsing the network] or (B) the obsequious progress bars from Win98, that fill up to 100% and stay there for another two minutes before actually triggering the next process.
Thankfully, someone in the Win8 file manager team actually got the memo, as you can see here.
So, there's really no mystery. The "how to" of making an accurate progress bar or time estimation algorithm is really quite well established. The real question is, how to convince software developers to implement one?
That said, I just wholeheartedly believedFarhad Manjoo's highly opinionated review of the Surface, and I don't think[sic]... here's the stuff that the guy said... namely that the Surface is a sluggish, buggy faux-pc that also isn't any better for "real work" than the iPad. In particular, MS Office on the Surface sux because apparently it's cool to both hate on MSFT and misspell things here. Pity.
I think I'd rather have that space for having photos, music, movies and documents available at all times rather than simply hope that it will work for disaster recovery. Should anyone really be dependent on cloud storage to initiate disaster recovery? Is that really such a good idea?
I find it interesting that any comments on that "pre-release" article (that didn't even test an actual Surface device) are hidden and have been closed. "Semi-accurate" indeed.
The pure anti-MSFT sentiment is palpable and equally as misleading as the article claims MSFT to be; I'd call it a fountain of non-information.
Leaving 10GB for patching -- Updates are not as cumulative with Win RT, so that figure is pure hyperbole
Nightly scheduled updates -- Handled via Windows Update over Wi-Fi and automatically when you 'sleep' your device.
A Virus Scanner -- irrelevant; Win RT comes with Security Essentials installed and activated (firewall+antivirus+monitoring) eliminating any need for 3rd-party packages.
Regular de-fragmentation of the disk -- yes, automatically (see Updates above)
Turn off unnecessary services like the "Print Spooler" -- I invite you to please point those out in Windows RT and provide the quantified advantage of doing so
Periodically clear on the systems logs to reduce the amount of used diskspace -- again, please point those out in RT and state those numbers
Link your tablet to MS Live account -- it's now referred to as a Microsoft Account, but can be inclusive of former services under MS Live. These services ensure consistent appearance, user-preferences and cloud storage access, which are all the more important with a mobile device.
REMEMBER, TABLETS ARE LOW MAINTENANCE! (compared to PC's)
Indeed!
With Love,
Microsoft
PS: You really did not think things would change THAT much!
Obviously, you didn't, but they really have. (FTFY)
I'm having a hard time figuring out which group looks the most asinine in this event; TSA, Delta Airlines® or the NTFA?
From what we know in the article, I'm leaning towards NFTA getting the "ass hat" award. They weren't happy enough to trust the TSA screening or assume an unbiased stance on why Delta kicked him off the flight. (Keep in mind, if the Delta staff didn't have such a problem, he would have been flown to his destination.) No, that wasn't good enough for the high-falutin' NFTA; they had to keep pesterin' him.
The audacious measures that people go through, when they're only answering to the voices in their heads. The risks and threats that these "officers" were addressing were completely and purely imaginary. None of them seemed to be satisfied with reality; they just had to go the panic route and persecute someone who was just trying to make a point.
Is this going to spear-head the next attack on the 1st Amendment?
In all, the TSA didn't prove to be the cause... or were they? Did they call Delta about this passenger before the flight boarded? Did they call NFTA to alert them of this "threat"? Consider this; I visit a shop and the owner is present with two attack dogs. If I crack a joke that the owner doesn't find funny, he may ask me to leave. If I leave, it should be clear that I'm cooperating with the owner's wishes. Now, if the dogs attack me as I'm leaving the store... do I blame the dogs?
Indeed, re-inventing the wheel isn't the hallmark of a quality leader, IMHO.
In fact, it points in a very different direction.
Why does a '90210' kid have a phone with a custom shell? (not a snap-on case, but actually custom-made OEM casing) I'll tell you why; to set them apart, make them feel like they're important and part of an exclusive group.
So... why would the 'Rominee' have a special "VP App" made, when all it really does is send and receive messages like a boatload of other vetted wares? Same reasons, I betcha. Does that sound *united* to you?
Dunno how the reviews look on the AppStore® side, but the Android Play Store listing for "Mitt's VP" is- blo. wing. up. Astroturf and flames make for one especially polished turd, apparently. Caveat emptor! The 'droid version is roughly 12MB, requires registration (or FB link) and has to run in the background. It must be loaded there, patiently waiting for the announcement to come and <sarcasm>couldn't possibly be steering a metric crap-ton of ads in your direction</sarcasm>.
Here's the questions I'd have for him: Why did you have a special app made, rather than use existing social communication apps? Why not use a hash-tag, a Facebook page or some other medium that's readily available? What makes the existing infrastructure so un-worthy that you have to make a somewhat insignificant-, yet very public decision through an exclusive channel? Does your campaign value this style of "exclusive membership" over public transparency? And how would that be reflected in your as-of-yet-imaginary administration?
The last questions, I put to the reader: Why would you vote for a guy that behaves and speaks as if <pointing@>you</pointing@> don't matter? How much would it take for you to vote against such a candidate, (i.e., voting for someone else) just to make sure he doesn't win? How much exclusion would you be willing to tolerate from your government?
I don't often respond to AC's, but when I do, I prefer to usurp AC's point.
Fashion... that's a good idea. I like that.
No, really... it makes more sense than other allegories. Think about it, people buy clothes; some for function, some for style. People buy software; some for sheer functionality (Linux packages, some PC offerings) and others for more stylish flair. (most Mac software, also some PC offerings but Adobe comes to mind the most)
Every new season, it seems there's a new fashion. Designers and textile plants keep striving to stay on the cutting edge. Every so often, it seems that some software bundle is being upgraded. However, developers aren't always striving to stay ahead, but only to be different enough to keep from being sued. Starting to see the similarities now?
And by the by... clothing may not be patented, but zippers are... so are snaps... even cuff-links. Still, point taken. These patents do nothing to protect the design of clothes that
feature them nor prevent others from innovatingtheir ownfasteners, they simply prevent others from manufacturing the exact-same fastener mechanism.
So, why would the software business model suffer if there were no patents? Frankly, I don't think it would because it--and every user bound by their efforts--suffers for it now. It would remove this bass-ackward economy of patent litigation and infringement maneuvering, a sub-economy that should (IMHO) be outlawed by the UN. Competition without the fear of patent mongers would foster innovation at a faster pace and drive the larger firms to keep up with the smaller, agile indie developers. They pound their files in an earnest display of defending their innovation, when the line between true innovation and simple tropes or conventions becomes increasingly thinner. In fashion, you can tell when it's a knock-off... so guess what? We can tell when an app is a knock-off of a more popular app, too! Ultimately, it comes down to the label; whether it's sewed into the hem or printed on the CD.
So, it begs the question of why this patent system still exists? It's easy, really. The largest developers and the largest stakeholders in tech are so afraid of having to rapidly react to competitors that they move their legal teams instead. They know a dedicated partnership or legal firm is going to move much faster than it would take to compete with actual innovation. They can fire off a C&D faster than a gold CD.
We hear this rallying cry from the behemoths, "too big to fail," when it should be, "too ponderously slow to compete." (Hello, Mr. Ballmer)
IANAL, but let the litigation fall back to where it belongs; contract law. Every EULA has a clause about reverse-engineering or hacking the software. If there's an infringement, then let it be covered by that clause. Let the so-called "patents" (e.g., a 'right-click' or context menu, a vertical scrollbar without calling it a 'vertical scrollbar', et al) be diminished to a more-fitting role; as fashions past.
The burden of proof with software should be a simple test: Is it ripping-off an original? True, that would have to be coined in legal terms that must take about five pages to be fully
Parent makes an excellent point, regardless of the veracity of the work. (I'm not questioning it, but remember this is/.)
Regardless of the exact science, the point is that grand "geoengineering" plans should be considered very, very carefully. If the plan is to create a carbon-sink, what else might be displaced by this process? It's the classic sci-fi disaster-movie premise; mankind makes grandiose plans to make things better, but the near-sighted application of insanely powerful technology comes back to bite him in the ass. Have we learned nothing?
I mean, humans are largely carbon-based protein chains anyway... should we really be sending our own building-blocks to the bottom of the ocean? Is carbon really such a culprit that sending it somewhere so inaccessible is a plausible solution? As parent suggests, such drastic displacement of a specific element can have far-reaching effects, some of which make Climate Change look like a minor sunburn in comparison.
With so much controversy over Climate Change, Warming Trends and the so-called 'carbon footprint' that so many have painted-up to be the villain, should we be doing anything this drastic?
My answer; no. What about methane?...ozone?...the diminishing resource of trees to recycle and filter out CO2 in the first place? Looks like humanity is up to its old tricks; the inept manipulate the insecure to direct the incompetent into doing the impossible for implausible reasons.
I, for one, welcome the chance to volunteer for off-world exploration.
I am a Denver resident. I've seen my last three movies at that very theater. This act has chilled us all to the bone. It's like Columbine, but without any parents to blame. The suspect was a post-grad working on his doctorate; in fact, he was in the process of dropping out.
TP quotes one news article, but that news correspondent made an incorrect assumption. Those doors are steel construction with 1/4" thick bang-plates; you can't simply kick them in.
The gunman did not "sneak in"... he sneaked outafter buying a ticket! His white car was parked strategically by those exit doors at the back of the building. He propped those doors open on his way out and geared-up for a few minutes before going back in through the same door. He basically used the same loophole that employees use to get high during a shift. (Plz... that's not a generalization; I'm sure most cinema-trons are hard working and honest.)
So, for anyone that's going to say that theater rules or municipal code would have prevented it, you're full of it. This may have been prevented with better building security at the exits, more attentive staff (or just more staff for an important midnight event) or even a person that notices this douchebag propping open a one-way exit and just closes the door behind him. At least then, the gunman would have had to walk around the building or drive his car fully-armed and quite obvious. The police response that night was so quick because they were already at the mall to help direct the increased traffic. If his route back into the theater was blocked, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to stun with gas or have his "fish in a barrel" target range. Sure, it wouldn't have stopped him from making trouble, but it very well could have prevented a massacre of this scale.
One thing has been made very clear; there is no legislation or body of intelligence that prevented James Holmes from owning, loading and carrying a devastating firearm into a crowded theater. Up until he started shooting people, James Holmes did everything by the book. That's the scariest part of all. How many states ban assault weapons? Care to guess? Just five. How many limit or regulate the sale of assault weapons? Three. What does that leave us, Mr. Wizard? That leaves us with forty-two states that don't do anything about the sale of assault weapons.
You guessed it. Colorado is one of those forty-two states.
A massacre has never happened simply because we were missing a specific law. An armed victim is still a victim. A massacre cannot be prevented by passive technological security measures or even active security screening, for those are simply patterns and obstacles to a persistent attacker.
A massacre happens because the attacker knows that people just don't give a damn.
Look, this is not controversial. I get that there's this collective "awwwww..." about not getting any sneak-peeks into 48-fps 3-D. Bi-ig de-eal. I grew up in the 80's, enduring both bi-axial (grey glasses, crappy 3D effect) and bi-chromatic (red/green or fuchsia/teal glasses, really crappy 3D effect) movies. The biggest revolution in 3D technology has been the digital projector. Sharper images, sub-conscious mechanisms like "triple flash" and snappier frame-transitions are what we have to thank for Avatar, Toy Story 3, TRON:Legacy and other blockbuster hits in the cinema. The biggest problem with those? Even those snappy and sharper images were displaying at under 48fps frame-rate thanks to sub-par projection booths. The RealD and IMAX-3D technologies already account for 48fps rates, but it's the aging projectors that can't handle it.
Peter Jackson is collaborating on bringing yet-another-iconic tale to the screen but only pushing the 3-D technology from the production end. Distributors and Blu-Ray publishers are worried about this because it will make their products look like Jaws 3 or worse on old equipment. (Anyone? Bad 3-D shark 'splosion with eyeballs shooting through the water? Gosh, you're all just a bunch of kids.) Cinema chains are sweating it because now they have to uphold the specific 48fps standard for the year's most-anticipated holiday-season blockbuster.
I, for one, welcome our higher-framerate 3-D overlords, but I ain't paying twenty bucks for snacks.
Took long enough to finally address the question raised by TFA, but then again, this is/. after all.
The long answer starts something like this:
The now controversial label of "Global Warming" (lately modified to the politically correct term, "Climate Change") is not saying, "it's gonna get hotter," or even, "it's gonna get hotter and colder." What Climate Change means is that the global climate now contains more energy than has ever been recorded. This not only spells bad news for the Almanac, but it means that weather is now weather^2. More thermal energy means that weather patterns are more energetic than ever. The global dynamics of weather patterns all seek equilibrium, but the greater amount of energy in the equation creates the more energetic patterns in the process of obtaining that equilibrium. As a side-effect, basic high and low temperatures are more extreme. Other side effects include, but are not limited to increases in: wind speed, energetic discharge (lightning), precipitation volume, precipitation duration, extents of upper atmospheric moisture currents, relative size and force of atmospheric disturbances, and so on... What this means to our infrastructure can be summed up in three words, "time to go". The combination of greater climatic extremes and sheer aging materials adds up to a mounting cataclysm of decay.
I apologize for the lack of citations in this post, largely due to the sheer volume of "It's bunk! You're bunk! I de-bunk your bunk! Bunk you!" and other noise regarding this complex-yet-positively-simple matter. The world is changing, and not for the better. The people of Earth seem to be content with bickering over who gets the blame, who places the blame and who appointed these people to say who gets the blame in the first place. Meanwhile, sea walls are being battered, towns and even cities are continuously bombarded by forces we cannot predict and the people we relied on to make these things work in the first place are locked in such ferocious browbeating with each other that the impending doom is being thoroughly ignored.
Anyone who says that Climate Change violates any law of thermodynamics has clearly mucked up the equation; absorption rates for land and water are drastically understated, not to mention the surprisingly significant impact of ice melt. The atmosphere is not the heat sink, the land and water are; the air is reflecting heat energy back at the Earth, the air is not absorbing it. It's a different property altogether. None of these arguments really acknowledge diurnal thermodynamic forces or localized dynamics anyway, making them inherently flawed. They all over-simplify the factors and call it science... or is that what we've come to call "science" nowadays?
So, can our roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, buildings and technology take it for much longer? We shall see.
IIRC, the "First Law of Robotics" is how the robot, "shall not perform any action that would cause harm to a human."
So... what actions are we talking about here? Vibrating? Playing tawdry ringtones? Playing music too loud? That's about all the "actions" that can be performed by even the fanciest smartphone. (i.e., out of the box) Everything else entails the relay of information from somewhere or something else; it's more of an information portal than a robot, if you... y'know... think about it. That information didn't come from the phone, it came from a server. Implementing all three Robotics Laws on the phone wouldn't even change that one whit. If you say that a Galaxy Nexus or an iPhone could be made into a robot... sure, but that's true of any computer ever made. It is not, itself, a robot in any way, shape or form.
So, @OP: Yes, please do implement the first law of robotics. Now, go find yourself an actual robot that is capable of performing actions potentially harmful to humans. A Roomba® could very well give me sore toes after a botched pedicure attempt. Are you saying devices should be inherently safe, that it should be designed-in as well as built-in for safety? Then you're not implementing laws on devices, you're implementing laws on manufacturers, developers, distributors and service-providers. Good luck with that.
Here's a cause worthy of legend; go implement the First Law of Robotics (just the first one, for starters) on military drones. See how that works out for ya.
Indeed. Shades of many predicted futures are unfolding before us. What's important is the future that we strive towards.
Television Advertising is an aging enterprise; we can see the wrinkles, hear the joints make disappointed sounds and smell the death in the air. Advertising Production continues to be vibrant and fresh at the forefront, but also dated and tiresome at the rear. Advertising commerce and leadership is even more atrocious; gaudy incentive-based models and over-wrought statistics models that snuff any possible gains from consumer feedback by dissecting them until the results are almost completely irrelevant. It's a most appalling beast.
In the U.K. and around Europe, the model is to provide a block of advertisements at the start of a time-slot, then play the show in its entirety. This is better in two ways; the story is told uninterrupted, and one avoids the gross repetition of ads that bombard us about the most trivial of purchasing opportunities. (see above about the "least of competitive differences" for some good examples) Speaking of repetition, it seems that nowadays it's not uncommon to see the same ad twice in a row. Are they also trying to drive us insane with dejá vu?
So, maybe our new DVR culture could take a page from that get-it-over-with-firstly model. Dish® has taken the extreme stance of, "our technology, our customers, our rules" and they're welcome to pursue that suicidal path. (Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!) Here however, is a possible compromise; use this revolutionary technology to re-structure advertising. (vs. eliminating it)
Here's how that would look: Say you've just recorded the latest Big Bang Theory and are about to watch from disk. The prompt on the screen says, "Would you like to group all ads before watching the show? This will eliminate ads during the program." The magic lies in the grouping; heuristics have determined which ads are duplicate, which are longest and which are shortest, which are local and which are national-feed, etc. It then proceeds to present the ads in rapid-fire fashion (to which we are accustomed) in a specific sorting order, such as national-then-local, or longest-to-shortest, or some other scheme. (configurable, perhaps?) Add to that, when the ads are complete, the DVR announces the beginning of the program with a signature tone and a short pause, which may be skipped if you're sitting right there.
In this way, the DVR finally stops resembling its linear-tape predecessors and truly emerges as an indispensable tool of the Digital Age... and without burning the ecosystem that spawned it. If left unchecked, techniques such as DVR Proofing vis-a-vis storyline-integration advertising, (where you have to watch the ad because it is actually part of the story/episode) contextual advertising and addressable advertising become not only necessary evils, but the norm.
Dr. Sagan was most insightful about one thing above all; the most advertising money is thrown at the least of competitive differences. (e.g., light beer, chewing gum, fast food, automobile dealerships, etc)
The American viewing audience is no longer taken-in by commercials. There's nothing "magic" about TV any more. We know that advertising is meant to deceive, persuade and ultimately to control our consumer buying potential. This is being taught in early education under Social Sciences; ergo, the adults today knew better long before they had a consumer vote. We're not the brightest bulb, but neither are we that easy to fool.
I don't think anyone really views commercials as any form of inspiration or as fostering loyalty to a particular brand... it's all just another form of entertainment.
Let's look at it this way; advertising as entertainment. It's fairly natural, and supported by psychology
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the bit under How We Work: (from the memo)
Each major initiative will have a champion who will be a direct report to me or one of my direct reports. The champion will organize to drive a cross-company team for success, but my whole staff will have commitment to the initiative’s success.
Bringing the word champion to the table seems like a noble and heroic undertaking, but listen to the undercurrent. It says each champion will be "a direct report to [Ballmer] or one of [his] direct reports." Hrm... is there an historical precedent for such a caste? I think so, and their uniforms had pairs of matching letters; I believe it's the letter just after "R" and just before "T". (and depicted in the 1970's Detroit Arena Costumed Rock Band fashion)
Now note the second statement, how these champions will "organize to drive a cross-company team for success," but he also makes a point of informing how "[Ballmer's] whole staff will have commitment to the initiative's success." Is the parallel getting through yet? This is moving from an inefficient dog-eat-dog tribal model--as Ballmer previously molded MSFT in the early millenium--into a clear model of Gestapo fascism. It's lovely how this "initiative" is not named at all; might it be called "The Final Solution" at some point? (If you haven't grasped the insinuation by now, then I can't help you any further without degrading this into a trite labeling of a particular historical world figure that has vilified so many in the past decade.)
And before anyone pulls out the "welcome to corporate culture" card, just be clear that this is MSFT, or an equivalent to the population of a small first-world nation we're talking about here. The gravitas is a bit greater than some tri-state, regional or even continental US conglomerate. The scope of this one corporation is like a moderate-sized government with world-wide reach, and one which reasonably and in all practical sense can (and does) have a major influence on world affairs. This isn't just name-calling here.
Later in that paragraph:
Our focus on high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads — also will get top-level championship.
If you get the implications of the former passage, then this one should chill you to the bone. Great, just what we need... a 'champion' for "serious fun" and "information assurance."
That's not how you submit a bug for the /. mod system!
(There, now you're back on-topic.)
I have tried a bunch of ways. Trained the 'expert' users in the area on how to put in a better ticket.
The fact that you need 'expert' users to effectively utilize the bug system says less about your users and more about your system.
[...] users will use what method is easiest to them
Indubitably, so why aren't your methods getting any easier? Ah! Maybe you haven't tried everything after all!
So, what you're saying is that the users don't make your job any easier, and in return, you're going to make your workflow less accessible and make their job even harder? I'm feeling sorry for someone in this story, and it isn't you.
I think what you're trying to say is:
Make something "idiot-proof" and the universe is certain to send along a better idiot. --Rich Cook (paraphrased)
Users do not work for you. When they do post bug reports, it is most likely in frustration.
I think the point is more: Why are your users not working for you?
As for the bit about frustration, that's more of an overall issue. That's a bug in the human system; not the user, the whole organization.
If users had an approachable, understandable and friendly way to report bugs, there wouldn't be such stress. The frustration comes from the expectation of how a bug report (or opening a ticket, or calling IT, etc) will play out. Often, for them, it's an exercise in futility and exasperation, dealing in a great many things that they don't understand and, more to the point, don't care to understand.
If the process wasn't so confusing or demeaning, it wouldn't be considered as a "last resort" for so many users.
This, I like.
I have some users that love translating text errors into numeric error themselves. Any time a page doesn't load, it's a 404. So that's what they report. "I'm trying to connect to thisdomaindoesntexist.com and I'm getting a 404."
Hell, we could recount "worst user" stories all day long. This does point to a typical social phenomenon; perceived competence.
The user in question probably just wants to be seen as more-competent, so they remember a time when they spoke to someone knowledgeable. It may have been the Geek Squad guy or a Desktop Support person, it doesn't really matter. Back then, they were told that the "page not available" paragraph that appears when they expected to see ReadNewsAllDay.com was sometimes called a "404", because that's what machines called the error. (not that the HTTP error table is all that accurate in the first place)
That impression, when you combine it with the syndrome of brow-beater IT personnel, makes for a false association. The user then thinks, "So an error in my browser is called a '404' by the pros. I don't want to be talked-down to, so I'm going to use it the next time I call them and they might relate to me like I'm a human!"
Brilliant, right?
So, who carries the blame?
Blame the user? It's not his fault, nobody explained the actual significance of '404' to him, they just gave him a connection to it. Blame the sales geek? Not really his fault either, because his job is to make the technology more 'shiny' and less 'scary' --just doing his job. Blame the browser source? How can we? They caved to pressures from thousands of users to make errors "more understandable" and so the numbers were replaced with friendly paragraphs of hit-and-miss suggestions. Blame the brow-beating IT professionals? Can you really blame those guys after dealing with all of those ignorant, demanding and thankless users? Blame the makers of HTTP? Y'know... maybe we can!I say it's a systemic problem, not a causational relationship.
What can we take away from this?
Here's one thing; technology has its deepest roots in obscure, cryptic and sometimes senseless nomenclature. The numbers, codes, acronyms and techniques being used were once so mystifying to the average person, it was almost like magic to them. As technology keeps evolving, it also keeps becoming more accessible to Joe Q User. However, some of the older technology has nigh-immortal longevity and persists it's often non-sensical origins of coded gobbletygook, (e.g., http) and--like an ancient language--requires an interpreter.
The challenge then presents itself; being an interpreter without the implication that you are imparting actual, workable knowledge. Good luck.
Technically correct... or in other words: Yes, but south is also to your left, as well as in front of you, to your right and behind you.
To "go east" from the North Pole, you would, literally, turn to your left. When you stop turning, you've arrived at your 'eastern' destination. It's not like there's an Eastern Pole and the North Pole is drifting towards it.
TFS is more confusing than enlightening, especially with these egregious references to cardinal directions that cannot possibly apply to a polar-zero coordinate. Have we lost our way so completely that we cannot remember how to manage these simple paradoxes? (HINT: Longitude)
At the North Pole, when you take one step in any direction, it's a southward direction. Same goes, but vice-versa, for the South Pole.
The biggest difference is that you will still be able to stand on the South Pole in twenty years.
Oh no... not what you think. All of the opinions about the trailer (movie.trailer != movie), the rants about Card's personal views, the woe and despair over how bad everything is and the doom of sci-fi... 100% conjecture, categorically unprovable.
What this thread does prove is how pivotal and evocative Ender's Game, as a work of literature, is and will continue to be for the science fiction genre. This thread would not be so controversial if this wasn't already true.
I read the novel right after HS graduation. (yeah, go fig'... I'm a "seven digit"... how did that happen!?) There's more strong opinions here than there were at the NRA conference-nay-coronation-ceremony, and in the same light, the same tones are struck about the same old flawed arguments. Despite that, or rather because of it, this is clearly one of the greatest works in all of science fiction!
I'm going to see it, and pay to do so—in theaters and in 3D—not because I think the trailer depicts a good movie, but because I don't believe that a trailer is always an accurate synopsis of the film. (e.g., remember the Matrix trailer? How about any of the M. Night Shyamalan works? Those didn't reveal the entire plot, either.) Just because we know how it ends doesn't mean we know how the movie gets there.
No piece of cinematographic work can be measured by how it ends, for it is the journey that entertains. Anyone who claims that their judgement is certainty is only upholding the theory of self-fulfilling prophecies. Plain and simple; you don't know until you've seen the whole thing.
As for Mr. Card's personal views, I may not agree with them, but I will defend to the death his right to have a different viewpoint. In the meantime, if he can continue to create and imagine deep characters and interesting plots, then I will continue to appreciate his work. Doing so does not–in any way–validate Mr. Card's personal views, saying "I agree with Mr. Card's views," does.
In the same sense, paying to see Tom Cruise in Oblivion is not supporting Scientology in any way. I just happen to believe that The Last Samurai was the absolute last movie wherein Mr. Cruise played a believable character. Also, I'm not going to pay to see another movie with Morgan Freeman having to explain everything to a clueless protagonist; although I do love Morgan Freeman as an actor... and titty sprinkles.
Or... to take the argument at "face value"...
Yes, it's true that a human riding a bicycle has elevated heart-rate and respiration, therefore producing higher levels of CO2, when compared to another human sitting in a driver's seat.
Classic bait-and-switch, we're not supposed to think of the car as a CO2 producer (or CO producer, or O3 producer, or NO2 producer, etc) but simply take it as rote that bicycles are contributing to the demise of the global climate.
It seems that Orcutt believes that cars run on magical dinosaur blood and not the oxidation process of a dense hydrocarbon. Q.E.D. Prima facie!
What happened with OP was, technically, an exception-handling bug. The exception was that some condition of the next event wasn't satisfied, and did so with time-sensitive language on the screen. That's not a poor progress bar, that's just negligent coding.
Kudos for pointing out the difference with the Progress Bar and Time Estimation. A good example for both? wget
A properly crafted Progress Bar is not hard to do: Amalgamate the task at hand into a number of homogeneous units and express those in the graphic bar as [ units.done / units.total ] and you'll be fine. Where most fail at this is in keeping the units consistent and/or appropriate. A classic fallacy is one of file-count vs. byte-count, but the most egregious of those failures is a total-units value that dynamically updates. (vis-a-vis, the "dancing left and right" progress bar)
OTOH, there's Time Estimation, which is a far more fickle beast, especially when applied to ISP throughput. This requires more of an understanding of statistics and averages, where the algorithm is actively measuring units of time as well as units of data. A classic approach is to simply calculate the mean throughput and apply it to the bytes remaining to get the ETA, but this quickly falls short when the connection hangs or if the algorithm is relying on throughput statistics to ratchet the loop. The best—and most frugal—implementations of Time Estimation have used a timed loop with throughput calculated on a rolling average from a fixed number of samples. Again, the most common errors here are; using incorrect units; using an unreliable source for rate and/or throughput; using too small of a sample base before starting prediction trends, and the icing on the cake; mistaking a partially completed task as an accurate measurement of throughput in the sum prediction. (Back in the days of 56k dialup, I would resume d/c downloads all the time, and the download managers were regularly telling me that the 10MB chunk I already have somehow sped up the process to twice—or even ten times—the highest possible speed of my dialup connection. el. oh. el.)
Now, all of this goes "out the Windows(tm)" if you happen to be at Microsoft any time in the past fifteen years. Their idea of a "progress bar" seems to be just a mechanism to make the user sit and do nothing for a number of minutes at a time. The progress bars they typically have made are either (A) simple timer animations that masquerade as a progress bar [see: browsing the network] or (B) the obsequious progress bars from Win98, that fill up to 100% and stay there for another two minutes before actually triggering the next process.
Thankfully, someone in the Win8 file manager team actually got the memo, as you can see here.
So, there's really no mystery. The "how to" of making an accurate progress bar or time estimation algorithm is really quite well established. The real question is, how to convince software developers to implement one?
P.S. Units. Units! UNITS!!!
[...]
That said, I just wholeheartedly believed Farhad Manjoo's highly opinionated review of the Surface, and I don't think[sic] ... here's the stuff that the guy said... namely that the Surface is a sluggish, buggy faux-pc that also isn't any better for "real work" than the iPad. In particular, MS Office on the Surface sux because apparently it's cool to both hate on MSFT and misspell things here. Pity.
FTFY
Yes, indeed. It is a pity.
How about 7GB of cloud storage; free? That comes with a Microsoft Account.
I think I'd rather have that space for having photos, music, movies and documents available at all times rather than simply hope that it will work for disaster recovery. Should anyone really be dependent on cloud storage to initiate disaster recovery? Is that really such a good idea?
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/31/microsoft-surface-can-not-compete-against-real-tablet/
I find it interesting that any comments on that "pre-release" article (that didn't even test an actual Surface device) are hidden and have been closed. "Semi-accurate" indeed.
The pure anti-MSFT sentiment is palpable and equally as misleading as the article claims MSFT to be; I'd call it a fountain of non-information.
Other misc recommendations
REMEMBER, TABLETS ARE LOW MAINTENANCE! (compared to PC's)
Indeed!
With Love,
Microsoft
PS: You really did not think things would change THAT much!
Obviously, you didn't, but they really have. (FTFY)
I'm having a hard time figuring out which group looks the most asinine in this event; TSA, Delta Airlines® or the NTFA?
From what we know in the article, I'm leaning towards NFTA getting the "ass hat" award. They weren't happy enough to trust the TSA screening or assume an unbiased stance on why Delta kicked him off the flight. (Keep in mind, if the Delta staff didn't have such a problem, he would have been flown to his destination.) No, that wasn't good enough for the high-falutin' NFTA; they had to keep pesterin' him.
The audacious measures that people go through, when they're only answering to the voices in their heads. The risks and threats that these "officers" were addressing were completely and purely imaginary. None of them seemed to be satisfied with reality; they just had to go the panic route and persecute someone who was just trying to make a point.
Is this going to spear-head the next attack on the 1st Amendment?
In all, the TSA didn't prove to be the cause... or were they? Did they call Delta about this passenger before the flight boarded? Did they call NFTA to alert them of this "threat"? Consider this; I visit a shop and the owner is present with two attack dogs. If I crack a joke that the owner doesn't find funny, he may ask me to leave. If I leave, it should be clear that I'm cooperating with the owner's wishes. Now, if the dogs attack me as I'm leaving the store... do I blame the dogs?
Think about it.
Indeed, re-inventing the wheel isn't the hallmark of a quality leader, IMHO.
In fact, it points in a very different direction.
Why does a '90210' kid have a phone with a custom shell? (not a snap-on case, but actually custom-made OEM casing) I'll tell you why; to set them apart, make them feel like they're important and part of an exclusive group.
So... why would the 'Rominee' have a special "VP App" made, when all it really does is send and receive messages like a boatload of other vetted wares? Same reasons, I betcha. Does that sound *united* to you?
Dunno how the reviews look on the AppStore® side, but the Android Play Store listing for "Mitt's VP" is- blo. wing. up. Astroturf and flames make for one especially polished turd, apparently. Caveat emptor! The 'droid version is roughly 12MB, requires registration (or FB link) and has to run in the background. It must be loaded there, patiently waiting for the announcement to come and <sarcasm>couldn't possibly be steering a metric crap-ton of ads in your direction</sarcasm>.
Here's the questions I'd have for him: Why did you have a special app made, rather than use existing social communication apps? Why not use a hash-tag, a Facebook page or some other medium that's readily available? What makes the existing infrastructure so un-worthy that you have to make a somewhat insignificant-, yet very public decision through an exclusive channel? Does your campaign value this style of "exclusive membership" over public transparency? And how would that be reflected in your as-of-yet-imaginary administration?
The last questions, I put to the reader: Why would you vote for a guy that behaves and speaks as if <pointing@>you</pointing@> don't matter? How much would it take for you to vote against such a candidate, (i.e., voting for someone else) just to make sure he doesn't win? How much exclusion would you be willing to tolerate from your government?
I don't often respond to AC's, but when I do, I prefer to usurp AC's point.
Fashion... that's a good idea. I like that.
No, really... it makes more sense than other allegories. Think about it, people buy clothes; some for function, some for style. People buy software; some for sheer functionality (Linux packages, some PC offerings) and others for more stylish flair. (most Mac software, also some PC offerings but Adobe comes to mind the most)
Every new season, it seems there's a new fashion. Designers and textile plants keep striving to stay on the cutting edge. Every so often, it seems that some software bundle is being upgraded. However, developers aren't always striving to stay ahead, but only to be different enough to keep from being sued. Starting to see the similarities now?
And by the by... clothing may not be patented, but zippers are... so are snaps... even cuff-links. Still, point taken. These patents do nothing to protect the design of clothes that feature them nor prevent others from innovating their own fasteners, they simply prevent others from manufacturing the exact-same fastener mechanism.
So, why would the software business model suffer if there were no patents? Frankly, I don't think it would because it--and every user bound by their efforts--suffers for it now. It would remove this bass-ackward economy of patent litigation and infringement maneuvering, a sub-economy that should (IMHO) be outlawed by the UN. Competition without the fear of patent mongers would foster innovation at a faster pace and drive the larger firms to keep up with the smaller, agile indie developers. They pound their files in an earnest display of defending their innovation, when the line between true innovation and simple tropes or conventions becomes increasingly thinner. In fashion, you can tell when it's a knock-off... so guess what? We can tell when an app is a knock-off of a more popular app, too! Ultimately, it comes down to the label; whether it's sewed into the hem or printed on the CD.
So, it begs the question of why this patent system still exists? It's easy, really. The largest developers and the largest stakeholders in tech are so afraid of having to rapidly react to competitors that they move their legal teams instead. They know a dedicated partnership or legal firm is going to move much faster than it would take to compete with actual innovation. They can fire off a C&D faster than a gold CD.
We hear this rallying cry from the behemoths, "too big to fail," when it should be, "too ponderously slow to compete." (Hello, Mr. Ballmer)
IANAL, but let the litigation fall back to where it belongs; contract law. Every EULA has a clause about reverse-engineering or hacking the software. If there's an infringement, then let it be covered by that clause. Let the so-called "patents" (e.g., a 'right-click' or context menu, a vertical scrollbar without calling it a 'vertical scrollbar', et al) be diminished to a more-fitting role; as fashions past.
The burden of proof with software should be a simple test: Is it ripping-off an original? True, that would have to be coined in legal terms that must take about five pages to be fully
Parent makes an excellent point, regardless of the veracity of the work. (I'm not questioning it, but remember this is /.)
Regardless of the exact science, the point is that grand "geoengineering" plans should be considered very, very carefully. If the plan is to create a carbon-sink, what else might be displaced by this process? It's the classic sci-fi disaster-movie premise; mankind makes grandiose plans to make things better, but the near-sighted application of insanely powerful technology comes back to bite him in the ass. Have we learned nothing?
I mean, humans are largely carbon-based protein chains anyway... should we really be sending our own building-blocks to the bottom of the ocean? Is carbon really such a culprit that sending it somewhere so inaccessible is a plausible solution? As parent suggests, such drastic displacement of a specific element can have far-reaching effects, some of which make Climate Change look like a minor sunburn in comparison.
With so much controversy over Climate Change, Warming Trends and the so-called 'carbon footprint' that so many have painted-up to be the villain, should we be doing anything this drastic?
My answer; no. What about methane? ...ozone? ...the diminishing resource of trees to recycle and filter out CO2 in the first place? Looks like humanity is up to its old tricks; the inept manipulate the insecure to direct the incompetent into doing the impossible for implausible reasons.
I, for one, welcome the chance to volunteer for off-world exploration.
I am a Denver resident. I've seen my last three movies at that very theater. This act has chilled us all to the bone. It's like Columbine, but without any parents to blame. The suspect was a post-grad working on his doctorate; in fact, he was in the process of dropping out.
TP quotes one news article, but that news correspondent made an incorrect assumption. Those doors are steel construction with 1/4" thick bang-plates; you can't simply kick them in.
The gunman did not "sneak in"... he sneaked out after buying a ticket! His white car was parked strategically by those exit doors at the back of the building. He propped those doors open on his way out and geared-up for a few minutes before going back in through the same door. He basically used the same loophole that employees use to get high during a shift. (Plz... that's not a generalization; I'm sure most cinema-trons are hard working and honest.)
So, for anyone that's going to say that theater rules or municipal code would have prevented it, you're full of it. This may have been prevented with better building security at the exits, more attentive staff (or just more staff for an important midnight event) or even a person that notices this douchebag propping open a one-way exit and just closes the door behind him. At least then, the gunman would have had to walk around the building or drive his car fully-armed and quite obvious. The police response that night was so quick because they were already at the mall to help direct the increased traffic. If his route back into the theater was blocked, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to stun with gas or have his "fish in a barrel" target range. Sure, it wouldn't have stopped him from making trouble, but it very well could have prevented a massacre of this scale.
One thing has been made very clear; there is no legislation or body of intelligence that prevented James Holmes from owning, loading and carrying a devastating firearm into a crowded theater. Up until he started shooting people, James Holmes did everything by the book. That's the scariest part of all. How many states ban assault weapons? Care to guess? Just five. How many limit or regulate the sale of assault weapons? Three. What does that leave us, Mr. Wizard? That leaves us with forty-two states that don't do anything about the sale of assault weapons.
You guessed it. Colorado is one of those forty-two states.
A massacre has never happened simply because we were missing a specific law. An armed victim is still a victim. A massacre cannot be prevented by passive technological security measures or even active security screening, for those are simply patterns and obstacles to a persistent attacker.
A massacre happens because the attacker knows that people just don't give a damn.
Look, this is not controversial. I get that there's this collective "awwwww..." about not getting any sneak-peeks into 48-fps 3-D. Bi-ig de-eal. I grew up in the 80's, enduring both bi-axial (grey glasses, crappy 3D effect) and bi-chromatic (red/green or fuchsia/teal glasses, really crappy 3D effect) movies. The biggest revolution in 3D technology has been the digital projector. Sharper images, sub-conscious mechanisms like "triple flash" and snappier frame-transitions are what we have to thank for Avatar, Toy Story 3, TRON:Legacy and other blockbuster hits in the cinema. The biggest problem with those? Even those snappy and sharper images were displaying at under 48fps frame-rate thanks to sub-par projection booths. The RealD and IMAX-3D technologies already account for 48fps rates, but it's the aging projectors that can't handle it.
Peter Jackson is collaborating on bringing yet-another-iconic tale to the screen but only pushing the 3-D technology from the production end. Distributors and Blu-Ray publishers are worried about this because it will make their products look like Jaws 3 or worse on old equipment. (Anyone? Bad 3-D shark 'splosion with eyeballs shooting through the water? Gosh, you're all just a bunch of kids.) Cinema chains are sweating it because now they have to uphold the specific 48fps standard for the year's most-anticipated holiday-season blockbuster.
I, for one, welcome our higher-framerate 3-D overlords, but I ain't paying twenty bucks for snacks.
No, it's not.
Took long enough to finally address the question raised by TFA, but then again, this is /. after all.
The long answer starts something like this:
The now controversial label of "Global Warming" (lately modified to the politically correct term, "Climate Change") is not saying, "it's gonna get hotter," or even, "it's gonna get hotter and colder." What Climate Change means is that the global climate now contains more energy than has ever been recorded. This not only spells bad news for the Almanac, but it means that weather is now weather^2. More thermal energy means that weather patterns are more energetic than ever. The global dynamics of weather patterns all seek equilibrium, but the greater amount of energy in the equation creates the more energetic patterns in the process of obtaining that equilibrium. As a side-effect, basic high and low temperatures are more extreme. Other side effects include, but are not limited to increases in: wind speed, energetic discharge (lightning), precipitation volume, precipitation duration, extents of upper atmospheric moisture currents, relative size and force of atmospheric disturbances, and so on... What this means to our infrastructure can be summed up in three words, "time to go". The combination of greater climatic extremes and sheer aging materials adds up to a mounting cataclysm of decay.
I apologize for the lack of citations in this post, largely due to the sheer volume of "It's bunk! You're bunk! I de-bunk your bunk! Bunk you!" and other noise regarding this complex-yet-positively-simple matter. The world is changing, and not for the better. The people of Earth seem to be content with bickering over who gets the blame, who places the blame and who appointed these people to say who gets the blame in the first place. Meanwhile, sea walls are being battered, towns and even cities are continuously bombarded by forces we cannot predict and the people we relied on to make these things work in the first place are locked in such ferocious browbeating with each other that the impending doom is being thoroughly ignored.
Anyone who says that Climate Change violates any law of thermodynamics has clearly mucked up the equation; absorption rates for land and water are drastically understated, not to mention the surprisingly significant impact of ice melt. The atmosphere is not the heat sink, the land and water are; the air is reflecting heat energy back at the Earth, the air is not absorbing it. It's a different property altogether. None of these arguments really acknowledge diurnal thermodynamic forces or localized dynamics anyway, making them inherently flawed. They all over-simplify the factors and call it science... or is that what we've come to call "science" nowadays?
So, can our roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, buildings and technology take it for much longer? We shall see.
You got FP and that's what you said? Really!?
Here, try this one:
FIRSTIES!!! <*being arrested b/c it was louder than OP*>
FTFY
Any FP can get modded Funny; try for something more the next time you find yourself there.
Hear, hear!
IIRC, the "First Law of Robotics" is how the robot, "shall not perform any action that would cause harm to a human."
So... what actions are we talking about here? Vibrating? Playing tawdry ringtones? Playing music too loud? That's about all the "actions" that can be performed by even the fanciest smartphone. (i.e., out of the box) Everything else entails the relay of information from somewhere or something else; it's more of an information portal than a robot, if you... y'know... think about it. That information didn't come from the phone, it came from a server. Implementing all three Robotics Laws on the phone wouldn't even change that one whit. If you say that a Galaxy Nexus or an iPhone could be made into a robot... sure, but that's true of any computer ever made. It is not, itself, a robot in any way, shape or form.
So, @OP: Yes, please do implement the first law of robotics. Now, go find yourself an actual robot that is capable of performing actions potentially harmful to humans. A Roomba® could very well give me sore toes after a botched pedicure attempt. Are you saying devices should be inherently safe, that it should be designed-in as well as built-in for safety? Then you're not implementing laws on devices, you're implementing laws on manufacturers, developers, distributors and service-providers. Good luck with that.
Here's a cause worthy of legend; go implement the First Law of Robotics (just the first one, for starters) on military drones. See how that works out for ya.
Indeed. Shades of many predicted futures are unfolding before us. What's important is the future that we strive towards.
Television Advertising is an aging enterprise; we can see the wrinkles, hear the joints make disappointed sounds and smell the death in the air. Advertising Production continues to be vibrant and fresh at the forefront, but also dated and tiresome at the rear. Advertising commerce and leadership is even more atrocious; gaudy incentive-based models and over-wrought statistics models that snuff any possible gains from consumer feedback by dissecting them until the results are almost completely irrelevant. It's a most appalling beast.
In the U.K. and around Europe, the model is to provide a block of advertisements at the start of a time-slot, then play the show in its entirety. This is better in two ways; the story is told uninterrupted, and one avoids the gross repetition of ads that bombard us about the most trivial of purchasing opportunities. (see above about the "least of competitive differences" for some good examples) Speaking of repetition, it seems that nowadays it's not uncommon to see the same ad twice in a row. Are they also trying to drive us insane with dejá vu?
So, maybe our new DVR culture could take a page from that get-it-over-with-firstly model. Dish® has taken the extreme stance of, "our technology, our customers, our rules" and they're welcome to pursue that suicidal path. (Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!) Here however, is a possible compromise; use this revolutionary technology to re-structure advertising. (vs. eliminating it)
Here's how that would look: Say you've just recorded the latest Big Bang Theory and are about to watch from disk. The prompt on the screen says, "Would you like to group all ads before watching the show? This will eliminate ads during the program." The magic lies in the grouping; heuristics have determined which ads are duplicate, which are longest and which are shortest, which are local and which are national-feed, etc. It then proceeds to present the ads in rapid-fire fashion (to which we are accustomed) in a specific sorting order, such as national-then-local, or longest-to-shortest, or some other scheme. (configurable, perhaps?) Add to that, when the ads are complete, the DVR announces the beginning of the program with a signature tone and a short pause, which may be skipped if you're sitting right there.
In this way, the DVR finally stops resembling its linear-tape predecessors and truly emerges as an indispensable tool of the Digital Age... and without burning the ecosystem that spawned it. If left unchecked, techniques such as DVR Proofing vis-a-vis storyline-integration advertising, (where you have to watch the ad because it is actually part of the story/episode) contextual advertising and addressable advertising become not only necessary evils, but the norm.
Dr. Sagan was most insightful about one thing above all; the most advertising money is thrown at the least of competitive differences. (e.g., light beer, chewing gum, fast food, automobile dealerships, etc)
The American viewing audience is no longer taken-in by commercials. There's nothing "magic" about TV any more. We know that advertising is meant to deceive, persuade and ultimately to control our consumer buying potential. This is being taught in early education under Social Sciences; ergo, the adults today knew better long before they had a consumer vote. We're not the brightest bulb, but neither are we that easy to fool.
I don't think anyone really views commercials as any form of inspiration or as fostering loyalty to a particular brand... it's all just another form of entertainment.
Let's look at it this way; advertising as entertainment. It's fairly natural, and supported by psychology