As an example, I am a Game Programmer that doesn't play video games, I just don't have time. I just bought a PlayStation 3 last week for the blu-ray, and it is the first gaming machine I've owned since the SNES.
I'm not saying the developers weren't in on it, I'm just saying the artists at my company could rip off the most famous games ever made and I probably wouldn't know about it.
Why can't you? The board in the article that controls the lock uses USB to connect to a PC. You can also get an adapter to interface your bluetooth device with you PC. Then, all you you need is a simple interface program that makes the two talk. Maybe not as simple as I'm describing, but possible.
About a year ago I designed a lock that uses an electric door strike like the one in the article, an AMX 8-button keypad and control system. I wrote a program that uses a custom random number generator to create a unique code based on the date and time period of the day. (e.g 1600-1800 hours) I then wrote a java app to place on my cell phone that, once a password is entered, will display the sequence needed to unlock the door. So, the only way to break it would be to have my phone and my password (or of course my algorithm). This method could easily be applied to this multi-colored pad as well.
The project was actually just a fun one and the door is regularly secured by alternate locking as well, but it is kind of cool.
BTW, the equipment I used is very expensive and I only used it because I used to work in the A/V industry and got it all for free. Not to mention, as a programmer with virtually no circuit design experience it was fairly easy to create.
This is news because Popular Mechanics, a very widely read and distributed magazine, has published a how to guide to get everyone's favorite OS (not mine) onto a piece of hardware that by all intents and purposes it was not specifically designed for.
If nothing else, this should excite all of the Linux fanatics that a major publication is advocating and possibly enlightening people to a new way to use their beloved OS.
BTW, I don't mean to sound like I'm anti-Linux, it's just not, in my humble opinion, mature enough for the general marketplace yet. And please don't flame me for that opinion.
Well, regardless of the ignorant ranting about the viability of a service such as this, I must say that I find it very cool, and for me, very timely. Last night I heard a track on the local NPR station here in Austin from an artist I had never heard before, Tim O'Brien. Because Lala allowed me to listen to every track on each of the two albums it had from him for free, I was able to make the decision to purchase one of them.
So, while I may not ever use this service exactly as it was intended, for renting songs, I will come back and listen to albums I may be interested in and possibly purchase them through the service.
I think you are misunderstanding what philosophy actually is. Philosophy is a question, not an answer. So far it appears that you believe your ideas about the nature of the universe to be wholly correct without accepting the fact that a complete answer will never be found through philosophy, only more questions.
If you are looking for an answer, switch to science.
the search and rescue team was telling everyone that Fossett wasn't getting special treatment, that anyone lost in the desert would get the same treatment. And I think we all know how factual that statement is.
The quality of stories on/. has been down for the past few years.
Things I hate about/.(No particular order)
1. Goddam CSS design
2. dupes
3. slashadvertisement
4. bad summaries
5. lazy editors And yet here you are.
Are you an American? Are you interpreting those figures as dollars? I only asked because based on those numbers the average programmer in the U.S. is making $83,912 with a high end of about $129,400. If you know Game Developers in the U.S. that are making way more than that, you need to tell me where I can send my resume.
You can buy a decent used piano, or a nice guitar, for the price of all that stuff. Want music? Go play some. I tried that once but the guitar I bought was all messed up. It had all these strings where the buttons were supposed to be.
These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. Critical thinking come naturally to humans? I don't think you've met my boss.
Stupid, they totally don't get their own markets. I'm curious, why do you believe that you are their core market? Out of all the music styles pervade through this country, why would you assume that the majority of the people in America only listen to Country and Christian Rock?
I actually heard something like that this morning on the way to work; they censored out the word bullshit in a song. At first, I was equally offended, but then I realized the reasoning behind it. There are plenty of stations on the service that are uncensored, Alt-Nation for example let's their users record 'Fuck You' messages to people and then plays them on the air, but the service needs to have some radio stations that are safe to play in commercial environments such as office buildings or restaurants.
Personally, I don't see a problem with this as commercial applications are probably important to their business model, albeit a much smaller portion.
My speculation is that, in the immediate term, they will close down the Sirius studios and just pipe XM content to both platforms And this, in my opinion, will be the death of the company as a whole. XM and Sirius are incompatible on more than just the technical side. They are also incompatible on the content side. I was an XM subscriber for 4 years before I bought a new car with Sirius built in. The difference was night and day. To me, XM felt like there was a giant facility in a cave somewhere that had several hundred CD changers on shuffle. Sirius on the other hand felt more like radio should be, DJs that actually knew about the music they were playing and weren't forced to spend half of their broadcast pandering to their commercial overlords.
Let's also not forget that Clear Channel is a major investor in XM, and they are to radio what Wal-Mart is to neighborhood shopping. I can guarantee if the XM content begins to infringe on my Sirius content they will lose at least one subscriber, and I can imagine more doing the same.
The last things on NBC I watched was Hero's and the Knight Rider Movie. Both of them felt very funny like i was watching 4 minutes of show and 4 minutes of commercials. Wow, you got more out of it than I did. The whole time I was watching that Knight Rider "movie" I kept thinking that the entire thing was just one big car commercial.
Is there only ONE guy that develops the software for the slots? No, there isn't, which I'm sure is obvious and why you asked in the first place. I am an engine programmer for a casino gaming company. We have several different frameworks for various jurisdictions (you wouldn't believe the hoops we have to jump through for certain states regulatory requirements), and everyone on the framework team has their hands in at least parts of all of them. This would make it virtually impossible to hide malicious code in our systems, even if it was well done.
Even if I was a 1-person programming powerhouse developing all of the code by myself, there are several other factors which would make it nearly impossible.
1) All of our games go through a rigorous testing process. This testing is much more than is done on actual video games due to the fact that simple errors could be the difference between a player correctly being payed out $100 and incorrectly being paid out $1,000,000. And yes, this has happened
2) After we have done all of this rigorous testing, we submit both the completed game and all of our source code to be certified and re-tested by an independent firm
This is an example of how things currently work today. 10-15 years ago however, there were not nearly the regulation on video slot machines that exist today, nor the sophistication with the development of them. Given the state of some of our earlier frameworks in our code archives, I could imagine how something like this might have happened.
Not to mention that many (independent)developers will probably offer their apps as open source, which will allow you to compile and load them onto your own phone via the SDK. And even forgetting about that for the moment, there will be a hacked App loader developed within the first week of the June firmware's release anyways.
One week of a drug induced depression is not clinical chronic depression. This would be like saying, I spent one week living on bread and water, and I now totally understand what its like to be living in a 3rd world country and starving every day. It was not my intention to imply that I knew what it was like to live with chronic depression, and as such I may have mis-spoke. I was simply trying to convey my realization that clinical depression is not merely something you can will away, as I had previously thought to be the case.
And not that it has much relevance to your comment, but I did this every month for 14 months, not just one week.
It's funny, I used to be among the camp of people that would say "just make yourself be happy". For me it was really that simple. Anytime I was in a bad mood I could just will myself out of it and simply could not understand other people that couldn't.
That was of course until I started taking steroids, no not the shoot 'em in your ass and get big kind, the prescription kind. Now a normal dose for this drug is 5-10mg usually given for skin problems and sometimes for asthma. The bottle specifically states that you should not suddenly stop taking this medication and there needs to be a weening period to help you get off of this drug. The dose I was given was 120mg that I was instructed to start on the first day of the month, take for 5 days and then stop altogether. The goal was to try to make my immune system recover from months of intensive chemotherapy. After the second day of taking this medication, my mood could only be described as extremely optimistic about everything and a view that I was, for the most part, wholly invincible. This feeling lasted until the sixth day at which point I had stopped taking the drug and started to feel like the world was literally crumbling around me. I would see a commercial on TV and start to cry when I realized that I do sometimes get that 'Not so fresh feeling'. It was ridiculous. At one point I got into an argument with an old friend who did not know what I had been going through, and for a moment considered jumping 3 stories to my death so she could see how much she hurt me.
It was at that moment that I realized what true depression was. I looked back on the moment a week later after the side effects had dithered and thought about how irrational those thoughts were. At the time when I was having them however, they seemed a perfectly logical solution. Now I realize this is an extreme case brought on by side effects of a powerful drug, but it does represent to me how an unbalancing of chemicals in the brain can greatly affect a persons mood and I will never again jump to the conclusion that a persons depression is not affected by a real problem with their physiology.
With regards to the placebo effects of anti-depressant drugs, I will say that at one point I was prescribed Lexipro by my doctor for what at the time was really situational depression. This drug was certainly no placebo. While it did not make me happier, it had the affect of making me extremely anxious and angry. I developed very violent tendencies over the 2 weeks I was on it. This drug was obviously mis-prescribed by a bad doctor, but it most certainly altered my brain chemistry. My cousin, who is more similar to me that our parents are to each other (sisters), was prescribed the same drug with very similar effects. So there may be some drugs out there prescribed for depression that don't work for a lot of people, and others that have unintended effects, but this may be due more to doctors not understanding the illness of their patients and not understanding the drugs intended uses.
Slashdot Mirror
As an example, I am a Game Programmer that doesn't play video games, I just don't have time. I just bought a PlayStation 3 last week for the blu-ray, and it is the first gaming machine I've owned since the SNES.
I'm not saying the developers weren't in on it, I'm just saying the artists at my company could rip off the most famous games ever made and I probably wouldn't know about it.
Why can't you? The board in the article that controls the lock uses USB to connect to a PC. You can also get an adapter to interface your bluetooth device with you PC. Then, all you you need is a simple interface program that makes the two talk. Maybe not as simple as I'm describing, but possible.
About a year ago I designed a lock that uses an electric door strike like the one in the article, an AMX 8-button keypad and control system. I wrote a program that uses a custom random number generator to create a unique code based on the date and time period of the day. (e.g 1600-1800 hours) I then wrote a java app to place on my cell phone that, once a password is entered, will display the sequence needed to unlock the door. So, the only way to break it would be to have my phone and my password (or of course my algorithm). This method could easily be applied to this multi-colored pad as well.
The project was actually just a fun one and the door is regularly secured by alternate locking as well, but it is kind of cool.
BTW, the equipment I used is very expensive and I only used it because I used to work in the A/V industry and got it all for free. Not to mention, as a programmer with virtually no circuit design experience it was fairly easy to create.
This is news because Popular Mechanics, a very widely read and distributed magazine, has published a how to guide to get everyone's favorite OS (not mine) onto a piece of hardware that by all intents and purposes it was not specifically designed for.
If nothing else, this should excite all of the Linux fanatics that a major publication is advocating and possibly enlightening people to a new way to use their beloved OS.
BTW, I don't mean to sound like I'm anti-Linux, it's just not, in my humble opinion, mature enough for the general marketplace yet. And please don't flame me for that opinion.
Well, regardless of the ignorant ranting about the viability of a service such as this, I must say that I find it very cool, and for me, very timely. Last night I heard a track on the local NPR station here in Austin from an artist I had never heard before, Tim O'Brien. Because Lala allowed me to listen to every track on each of the two albums it had from him for free, I was able to make the decision to purchase one of them.
So, while I may not ever use this service exactly as it was intended, for renting songs, I will come back and listen to albums I may be interested in and possibly purchase them through the service.
Why do I suddenly have the feeling that once this is decoded I'm going to be Rick-rolled?
I think you are misunderstanding what philosophy actually is. Philosophy is a question, not an answer. So far it appears that you believe your ideas about the nature of the universe to be wholly correct without accepting the fact that a complete answer will never be found through philosophy, only more questions.
If you are looking for an answer, switch to science.
Are you an American? Are you interpreting those figures as dollars? I only asked because based on those numbers the average programmer in the U.S. is making $83,912 with a high end of about $129,400. If you know Game Developers in the U.S. that are making way more than that, you need to tell me where I can send my resume.
Or they can plan ahead. Purchase insurance like the rest of us, have a savings plan like the rest of us.
I think it's time you got out a little more.
I actually heard something like that this morning on the way to work; they censored out the word bullshit in a song. At first, I was equally offended, but then I realized the reasoning behind it. There are plenty of stations on the service that are uncensored, Alt-Nation for example let's their users record 'Fuck You' messages to people and then plays them on the air, but the service needs to have some radio stations that are safe to play in commercial environments such as office buildings or restaurants.
Personally, I don't see a problem with this as commercial applications are probably important to their business model, albeit a much smaller portion.
Let's also not forget that Clear Channel is a major investor in XM, and they are to radio what Wal-Mart is to neighborhood shopping. I can guarantee if the XM content begins to infringe on my Sirius content they will lose at least one subscriber, and I can imagine more doing the same.
Even if I was a 1-person programming powerhouse developing all of the code by myself, there are several other factors which would make it nearly impossible.
1) All of our games go through a rigorous testing process. This testing is much more than is done on actual video games due to the fact that simple errors could be the difference between a player correctly being payed out $100 and incorrectly being paid out $1,000,000. And yes, this has happened
2) After we have done all of this rigorous testing, we submit both the completed game and all of our source code to be certified and re-tested by an independent firm
This is an example of how things currently work today. 10-15 years ago however, there were not nearly the regulation on video slot machines that exist today, nor the sophistication with the development of them. Given the state of some of our earlier frameworks in our code archives, I could imagine how something like this might have happened.
Is it stupid to make your stream available unencrypted from a publicly available URLYes
Not to mention that many (independent)developers will probably offer their apps as open source, which will allow you to compile and load them onto your own phone via the SDK. And even forgetting about that for the moment, there will be a hacked App loader developed within the first week of the June firmware's release anyways.
And not that it has much relevance to your comment, but I did this every month for 14 months, not just one week.
It's funny, I used to be among the camp of people that would say "just make yourself be happy". For me it was really that simple. Anytime I was in a bad mood I could just will myself out of it and simply could not understand other people that couldn't.
That was of course until I started taking steroids, no not the shoot 'em in your ass and get big kind, the prescription kind. Now a normal dose for this drug is 5-10mg usually given for skin problems and sometimes for asthma. The bottle specifically states that you should not suddenly stop taking this medication and there needs to be a weening period to help you get off of this drug. The dose I was given was 120mg that I was instructed to start on the first day of the month, take for 5 days and then stop altogether. The goal was to try to make my immune system recover from months of intensive chemotherapy. After the second day of taking this medication, my mood could only be described as extremely optimistic about everything and a view that I was, for the most part, wholly invincible. This feeling lasted until the sixth day at which point I had stopped taking the drug and started to feel like the world was literally crumbling around me. I would see a commercial on TV and start to cry when I realized that I do sometimes get that 'Not so fresh feeling'. It was ridiculous. At one point I got into an argument with an old friend who did not know what I had been going through, and for a moment considered jumping 3 stories to my death so she could see how much she hurt me.
It was at that moment that I realized what true depression was. I looked back on the moment a week later after the side effects had dithered and thought about how irrational those thoughts were. At the time when I was having them however, they seemed a perfectly logical solution. Now I realize this is an extreme case brought on by side effects of a powerful drug, but it does represent to me how an unbalancing of chemicals in the brain can greatly affect a persons mood and I will never again jump to the conclusion that a persons depression is not affected by a real problem with their physiology.
With regards to the placebo effects of anti-depressant drugs, I will say that at one point I was prescribed Lexipro by my doctor for what at the time was really situational depression. This drug was certainly no placebo. While it did not make me happier, it had the affect of making me extremely anxious and angry. I developed very violent tendencies over the 2 weeks I was on it. This drug was obviously mis-prescribed by a bad doctor, but it most certainly altered my brain chemistry. My cousin, who is more similar to me that our parents are to each other (sisters), was prescribed the same drug with very similar effects. So there may be some drugs out there prescribed for depression that don't work for a lot of people, and others that have unintended effects, but this may be due more to doctors not understanding the illness of their patients and not understanding the drugs intended uses.