Chet and Erik of Old Man Murray fame have been picked up by Valve Software to write for their upcoming game, Portal. Should be interesting to see if they can make a game as funny as OMM used to be.
This is what's wrong with news coverage today. Actual journalists would take a press release from an industry group proclaiming a specific day as the biggest online shopping day of the year (complete with headline-friendly name, "Cyber Monday") and look into whether the release's claims are true or not. The journalists we have just take it as gospel and pass it along (with a few brave exceptions). Beyond pathetic.
Many a days in Pre-Calculus I spent correcting the teacher when she did a problem wrong, or going up to the board and solving the problem when she got so tired of my correcting her all the time.
True story: when I was a sophomore in HS, our history unit for the year was ancient history. When we got to Alexander the Great, my teacher announced that he was from a country called "Macedon". Which was true, except she pronounced it "MACK-edon".
I tried several times to convince her that it was actually pronounced "MASS-edon", to no avail. So we got to spend a month discussing the exploits of the MACK-edonians.
I think you've got it backwards. That skit ("Lazy Sunday") was originally made by Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg for SNL. After it aired it became an online hit. In other words, Samberg was an SNL "featured player" already when he made "Lazy Sunday".
It's even worse than you think:-) The 3DO cost $700 in 1993 dollars. When you adjust for inflation, you find out that in today's money it'd cost nearly $1,000!
This is all well and good, but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop.
GameTap is exactly what you are looking for: 700+ classic games (including not just DOS/Windows goodies, but console games as well), playable on demand, $7/month.
Hospitals and life-support systems seem to come up really often when validation scenarios like this are discussed, yet, I have never, EVER heard of a patient dying because Windows crashed.
What, you expect the dead patients to tell you all about it? They're DEAD!
If you're curious, why limit the inquiry to just open source projects? Surely you'd be concerned if the primary developer of a commercial product you depend on was arrested on the same charge, right?
This actually brings up one of the strongest points in favor of open source -- even if Hans Reiser never walks free again, if there's enough people who find value in his work they can pick it up themselves and continue moving it forward. If ReiserFS was a commercial product, that wouldn't be possible.
the point that was COMPLETELY MISSED that was in the article, was that the "IE Reset" function actually worked, sans Yahoo.
If Yahoo has already figured out a way to defeat the "IE Reset" function, isn't it logical to expect that within a year of IE7/Vista's release, this knowledge will be common to all spyware/malware authors?
A function like "reset browser settings" either works, or it doesn't. There is no middle ground. If there is a way to get it to do anything other than roll back all changes, it doesn't work.
Do you think an average spy's day is like a James Bond film? Or do you think they spend most of their day sitting in a car drinking cold coffee whilst listening through hours and hours of dull domestic telephone calls?
Maybe for foreign spies. American spies get to spend their days swooping anyone who looks at them funny off to secret Eastern European prisons, where they get to water-board and generally beat the phrack out of them. None of that dull procedural stuff for us!
Gabe Rivera of Memeorandum.com: "I didn't bother with databases because I didn't need the added complexity... I maintain the full text and metadata for thousands of articles and blog posts in core. Tech.memeorandum occupies about 600M of core. Not huge." [full story]
Mark Fletcher of Bloglines: "[T]raditional database systems were not appropriate (or at least the best fit) for large parts of our system." [full story]
Greg Linden of Findory: "We make thousands of random accesses to this read-only data on each page serve; Berkeley DB offers the performance necessary to be able to still serve our personalized pages rapidly under this load." [full story]
The "databases cause more problems than they solve" sentiment was so pronounced in O'Reilly's interviews that he took the question to Brian Aker of MySQL for rebuttal, but ended up concluding that
I didn't hear that flat files don't scale. What I heard is that some very big sites are saying that traditional databases don't scale, and that the evolution isn't from flat files to SQL databases, but from flat files to sophisticated custom file systems. Brian acknowledges that SQL vendors haven't solved the problem, but doesn't seem to think that anyone else has either.
"Hot" is a personality trait? I thought it was a set of physical features dictated by genetics.
He said "hot" as in "hot-blooded", i.e. quick to temper, not "hot" as in "physically attractive". Being "hot-blooded" is indeed a personality trait and has nothing to do with physical features.
Letting your kid outside to play with his friends is un-workable in dangerous, urban environments.
Well, "dangerous, urban environments" are not exactly new. There have been dense, urban, industrialized slums in existence since the early 1800s, and kids have found ways to play in them -- they've even spawned their own games suitable for play in tight spaces, such as stickball in New York City. And plenty of ghetto kids in Europe and South America are avid players of football/soccer. So if there really is a decline in outdoor play among children, it's doubtful that the cause is due to the rise of urbanized environments.
Seth Godin, author of several books on the Internet, including Small Is the New Big, says Mozilla needs to incorporate tools like tagging or building tools like a link to eBay's Skype calling service that will help keep friends connected.
Is Seth unfamiliar with Flock, I wonder? It's exactly what he's asking for. And I haven't exactly noticed it threatening to swamp Firefox in terms of popularity (though in fairness it hasn't reached 1.0 yet -- but I really doubt it will blow FF away even then, except maybe among some niche audiences).
I think the problems all started when they spun off palm-source, which is now in a death-spiral and still trying to sell products which belong in the 1990s.
Seriously. Palm has been in a sinkhole for many years now. Consider that last year, Palm paid PalmSource -- a company that it spun off from itself -- $30 million just for the right to use the name "Palm" again! (They'd rebranded themselves as "PalmOne" during the spinoff process, and split the rights to the "Palm Inc." name with PalmSource.)
Palm Inc. will someday be a case study for MBAs on how to take something great and drive it right into the ground.
The only problem with your description is that Call of Duty games are not published by EA; they're published by Activision. So maybe you should be griping about them and not EA.
There's nothing hip or cool aboug having some music device from a giant corporation.
So right! Thank god Apple is a worker-owned co-op building computers out of hemp on an organic farm and not a giant corporation that uses Chinese slave labor to build iPods... that would be totally uncool.
Do you have any data that shows that Mono deployment in the enterprise is increasing, relative to java deployment?
Well, it's not particularly scientific and it speaks more to.NET in general than to Mono specifically, but if you believe Tim O'Reilly's book sales data C#/.NET passed Java in popularity/interest over the last year, and is still growing strong (C# sales up 68%, general.NET book sales up 125%; Java book sales are down 6% over the same period).
Of course one could always argue that more.NET books sell because.NET is harder to learn... but having dipped my toe in the Java waters a few times, I find that hard to believe:-)
well, again, this was just my observation of the status of world events...
Fair enough. I'm hardly an expert myself. I just think that if our policy is to tell the world "we're gonna get your country blown up so we don't have to get our country blown up", we shouldn't be surprised when there aren't many takers...
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Chet and Erik of Old Man Murray fame have been picked up by Valve Software to write for their upcoming game, Portal. Should be interesting to see if they can make a game as funny as OMM used to be.
This is what's wrong with news coverage today. Actual journalists would take a press release from an industry group proclaiming a specific day as the biggest online shopping day of the year (complete with headline-friendly name, "Cyber Monday") and look into whether the release's claims are true or not. The journalists we have just take it as gospel and pass it along (with a few brave exceptions). Beyond pathetic.
True story: when I was a sophomore in HS, our history unit for the year was ancient history. When we got to Alexander the Great, my teacher announced that he was from a country called "Macedon". Which was true, except she pronounced it "MACK-edon".
I tried several times to convince her that it was actually pronounced "MASS-edon", to no avail. So we got to spend a month discussing the exploits of the MACK-edonians.
just another proud product of the public schools
Video game store to receive shipment of video games! Film at 11!
I think you've got it backwards. That skit ("Lazy Sunday") was originally made by Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg for SNL. After it aired it became an online hit. In other words, Samberg was an SNL "featured player" already when he made "Lazy Sunday".
It's even worse than you think :-) The 3DO cost $700 in 1993 dollars. When you adjust for inflation, you find out that in today's money it'd cost nearly $1,000!
That makes a PS3 look practically affordable ;-)
Microsoft is a monopoly. Mozilla is not.
GameTap is exactly what you are looking for: 700+ classic games (including not just DOS/Windows goodies, but console games as well), playable on demand, $7/month.
Apparently not ;-)
What, you expect the dead patients to tell you all about it? They're DEAD!
If you're curious, why limit the inquiry to just open source projects? Surely you'd be concerned if the primary developer of a commercial product you depend on was arrested on the same charge, right?
This actually brings up one of the strongest points in favor of open source -- even if Hans Reiser never walks free again, if there's enough people who find value in his work they can pick it up themselves and continue moving it forward. If ReiserFS was a commercial product, that wouldn't be possible.
If Yahoo has already figured out a way to defeat the "IE Reset" function, isn't it logical to expect that within a year of IE7/Vista's release, this knowledge will be common to all spyware/malware authors?
A function like "reset browser settings" either works, or it doesn't. There is no middle ground. If there is a way to get it to do anything other than roll back all changes, it doesn't work.
This can only mean one thing: MySpace users are aging at a faster rate than the rest of us.
We should look into this. Is there something about ugly HTML that increases the human rate of aging? This really demands further study.
Maybe for foreign spies. American spies get to spend their days swooping anyone who looks at them funny off to secret Eastern European prisons, where they get to water-board and generally beat the phrack out of them. None of that dull procedural stuff for us!
U-S-A! U-S-A!
If Rasmus wasn't a god for having invented the Web's most popular scripting language, he'd be a god for his low uid! 740! I bow to you, sir :)
Amazingly this actually seems to be the approach lots of "Web 2.0" companies are taking. See Tim O'Reilly's database war stories series for details.
Some quotes from that series:
The "databases cause more problems than they solve" sentiment was so pronounced in O'Reilly's interviews that he took the question to Brian Aker of MySQL for rebuttal, but ended up concluding that
He said "hot" as in "hot-blooded", i.e. quick to temper, not "hot" as in "physically attractive". Being "hot-blooded" is indeed a personality trait and has nothing to do with physical features.
Well, "dangerous, urban environments" are not exactly new. There have been dense, urban, industrialized slums in existence since the early 1800s, and kids have found ways to play in them -- they've even spawned their own games suitable for play in tight spaces, such as stickball in New York City. And plenty of ghetto kids in Europe and South America are avid players of football/soccer. So if there really is a decline in outdoor play among children, it's doubtful that the cause is due to the rise of urbanized environments.
Often times? Are there times when being mugged and raped turn out to be life altering in the positive sense? ;-)
Is Seth unfamiliar with Flock, I wonder? It's exactly what he's asking for. And I haven't exactly noticed it threatening to swamp Firefox in terms of popularity (though in fairness it hasn't reached 1.0 yet -- but I really doubt it will blow FF away even then, except maybe among some niche audiences).
Extra, extra! This just in! Report from CPU vendor discovers that you should spend more money on your CPU and less on your graphics card!
Shocking, I tells ya. Shocking.
Seriously. Palm has been in a sinkhole for many years now. Consider that last year, Palm paid PalmSource -- a company that it spun off from itself -- $30 million just for the right to use the name "Palm" again! (They'd rebranded themselves as "PalmOne" during the spinoff process, and split the rights to the "Palm Inc." name with PalmSource.)
Palm Inc. will someday be a case study for MBAs on how to take something great and drive it right into the ground.
The only problem with your description is that Call of Duty games are not published by EA; they're published by Activision. So maybe you should be griping about them and not EA.
So right! Thank god Apple is a worker-owned co-op building computers out of hemp on an organic farm and not a giant corporation that uses Chinese slave labor to build iPods... that would be totally uncool.
Well, it's not particularly scientific and it speaks more to .NET in general than to Mono specifically, but if you believe Tim O'Reilly's book sales data C#/.NET passed Java in popularity/interest over the last year, and is still growing strong (C# sales up 68%, general .NET book sales up 125%; Java book sales are down 6% over the same period).
Of course one could always argue that more .NET books sell because .NET is harder to learn... but having dipped my toe in the Java waters a few times, I find that hard to believe :-)
Fair enough. I'm hardly an expert myself. I just think that if our policy is to tell the world "we're gonna get your country blown up so we don't have to get our country blown up", we shouldn't be surprised when there aren't many takers...