You are currently 100% correct. Currently, the power brokers in the world speak English. I do not expect that 'standard' to be maintained indefinitely. As the other poster points out, the global economy is undergoing a massive shift in wealth. Eventually, English will be considered an archaic language much like Latin is today.
probably within the last decade at least...
on
Giant Sub-Woofer
·
· Score: 1
Hey---- Check the big-screen tv. In the seventies, I think people were maxing out with like maybe 19 or 26" tv sets.
A lot of older technology like tube amps and turntables still are the audiophile's best friend. These guys are using tube amps, but CD technology..
I was posting using assumptions off the top of my head, but checking around, it looks like Mandarin
is spoken by twice as many people as English. Hell, Hindi almost matches English.
Please note that you typed your entire message in English. This is not the majority language used on the globe. It is a minority language compared to Mandarin Chinese. But you used it because it is familiar to you and your intended audience.
However, others on the globe may argue that you should have typed it in Mandarin Chinese because English, as a standard, is not as widely used as Chinese.
I'll be serious for a moment, though. You conclude your message saying that WMA wins out because it's so widely used. You do not suggest that a DRM standard be judged on how good it is. This philosophy supports stagnation and hinders innovation.
I agree with everything you've said here. We're both just speculating on consumer whims, though, so nothing is certain.
I do think you're right about consumers rejecting the rented use of a physical object they posess. But I think there are other levels where DiVX is an accurate analogy.
DIVX sucked because it didn't really give consumers a value-add that they cared about. It was a DVD player that benefitted movie studios, but the argument for benefitting consumers was weak. In the case of Janus, I also think people are going to look at it as "Sounds good for the RIAA, but what about me?"
DIVX also sucked because you had to have your DVD player connected to a phone line. This isn't convenient in a lot of people's homes. This portable WMP implementation is also going to require some kind of periodic tethering so the player will know if the subscription to the music is still valid. Not only that, you better maintain an ongoing internet account, because that's gonna be neccessary for validation, as well.
And finally, although production costs were greater for this retarded beast, DIVX players were sold at a loss because they still had to match prices with regular DVD players. The retailers and the manufacturers were in alliance on a gamble that they'd share the proceeds from the content rentals. In this Janus model, there is no incentive for the portable hardware vendors to incurr the additional production costs of adding Janus support. I suspect Microsoft is trying to convince them that this is the future of digital music and they better get with the program or their products will wither on store shelves. Fortunately, I think the hardware vendors will look to the consumer to see what they want in their portable players.
Considering that thousands of people download digital video files that were sourced by someone sitting in a movie theater with a camera, it looks like there is a strong segment of the population that is satisfied with imperfect reproductions of copyrighted materials.
Unless you're doing something which directly benefits from 64 bitness on a PPC CPU, you'll be better off with a 32 bit binary.
You, sir, probably don't think Americans need large SUV's to shuttle their groceries from the store to home. You probably think a ford Excursion or Cadillac Escalade is overkill for the commute to work. Well, we've got hundreds of thousands of americans who will gladly tell you that they don't want any of this non-sense. They're too busy changing the environment.
This could help people on the train or in a crowded cafeteria or what not easily share music without the fear of the RIAA. This would avoid the problem of traceable IP addresses, etc.
In fact, this could really enable certain bars or coffee shops to become pirate dens where people show up and exchange illicit data without such a bandwidth bottleneck as the ISP. It would help to create a browseable P2P app for such a use....
THis is a ridiculous 'ask slashdot' question. After the first crisis, the organization will figure out who needs cellphones or pagers provided by the company.
What's going to be the next 'ask slashdot'?
The company wants to take my red stapler. What should I do?!?!?
I agree with you. Just to continue on this off-topic, though, I'd like to point out that the reason why kids can't legally smoke is because they can't vote. Our leaders recognize that tobacco use is an extreme blight on the healthcare system and would ban it if it weren't for all the voting tobacco addicts. The insurance industry wields immense lobbying power and is responsible for product safety laws passed requiring helmets on motorcycles, seatbelts and toddler carseats in automobiles, and prohibiting smoking in the workplace. Tobacco isn't a personal freedom issue. It's a public safety issue. Anytime a product hits the market with even just a few deaths related to its use, the govt. gets all up in their shit. Look at Halloween costumes and the federal laws regulating what materials they can be made out of and how visible they are in the dark.
Cigarrettes are the ONLY product sold in America that will kill the user if used correctly.
Uhhh.. I don't think so. Indian benefits from a high-quality educational system and an extremely low cost of living due to the squalid living conditions experienced by the overwhelming majority of the population. The Philippines only benefits from the latter part of that equation.
Reminds me of the Dilbert where the engineers are trying to one-up each other talking about previous years of assembly programming. One guy finally says, "Well back in my day, we had to program using ones and zeros. And sometimes we didn't even have ones!"
Actually, gun manufacturers are constantly defending themselves in court against liability suits. The gun lobby has succesfully lobbied to get a bunch of states to pass laws protecting them from wrongful death lawsuits.
Since 1998, at least 33 municipalities, counties and states have sued gun makers, many claiming that manufacturers, through irresponsible marketing, allowed weapons to reach criminals. None of the suits has resulted in a manufacturer or distributor paying any damages.
While you don't think the gun manufacturers are responsible, there are many relatives of gun violence victims who think they are for a variety of reasons. It isn't as simple as, "Well, the gun manufactuerer didn't pull the trigger." Cases like these can focus on business practices that allowed a gun manufacturer to sell restricted weapons through certain channels to effectively circumvent restrictions.
I'm glad you mentioned Kodak's Super 8 offerings. Sadly, that format is entirely dependent on Kodak's continued existence for its own existence. There are no other Super 8 film vendors.
I agree with the AC post below. There's no reason for Kodak to market super 8 film cameras now. Their business model is basically, "There's a bunch of free razors laying around on the ground, we'll sell the blades." Not to mention, there are several very high end Super 8 cameras in production today- Beaulieu is the king. There are also cameras being made in Russia. Kodak has already decided to pull out of the camera business anyway, so jumping into the movie camera business would contradict that strategy.
What would be damn cool for Kodak to innovate, though, would be a cheap AVID-like system for scanning Super-8 film and editing non-linear. Or maybe even a means of transferring digital video to film cheaply. I guess either of these two developments would have to compete with the free plugins available for iMovie that make DV look like old super 8 film.
I once applied for a job at Visa. Believe it or not, they're using flat files and some very extreme hardware to run sed and awk scripts. That was all! I couldn't believe it. I felt like I had been allowed in to see the heart of a very large beast and it was in fact a couple of double 'A' batteries.
The grandparent poster already said the "
only thing Mac does right" is keep its binaries and config files all in the same folder. You're producing much confusion for followers of this thread by describing other seemingly inspired aspects of the Mac OS X architecture. Are we to question the credentials of the grandparent poster, author of the mysteriously un-named piece of un-released software?
Holy crap. Get serious and look at the real-world complaints of outsourcing jobs to India. Why did Dell
pull its call centers back to the US for corporate customers?
"Some U.S. customers have complained that the Indian technical-support representatives are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents and scripted responses."
Yes, theoretically, Indians speak proper English. For many it is only their second or third language. But their cultural twist on English gives it some real quirks. Often this is in word choice and awkward sentence structure. For instance, I remember the installer for Oracle 8.0.3 including a phrase that had to have been crafted by an Indian-- it said something about "if blah..blah... then updation cannot occur." I really wondered how that got into a full-on release...
I think you know a lot about this stuff. I think you know more about it than I do from the programming perspective. Everything you've said here is well-thought out and sounds based in your own experience with programming. I haven't programmed a big multi-player game, so in many ways, I'm talking out of my ass.
Like you said, I'm the guy with the hammer who wants everything to be a nail. I know databases. I also know architecture. It seems to me, though, that file locking could get very messy when there are several thousand potential clients. Let's say, for example, there's a guild of some kind who is trying to screw with the game. If there's a file lock occurring on the file storing character data everytime a client finishes their session, this guild could have its members repeatedly connect and disconnect to tie up the server so other people can't connect or disconnect. Then as the system gets bogged down in terms of accessing this file, as other players finish and want to quit the game, their clients have to wait for the congestion on that file to die down before their client is allowed to quit. And if they force a quit, changes to their character might go un-saved and then they might be able to reconnect and get a read on the old version of the file.
Obviously, programmers can do their best to manage scenarios like this with a queue and caches stored in memory. But the thing that I think it really comes down to is when you said, "It's more work, yes." These game studios aren't the best-funded operations in the software world. They can't afford "more work." On the plus side, some of the best programmers in the world are attracted to work at game companies, so they can perform wonders for little money and low headcount on their teams. So yes, you can use managed objects, etc. But it ends up being a lot of overhead for the developers, I think. And when a new guy comes onboard, there's a lot for that person to figure out when the game data is stored in a roll-your-own system.
I also think you get a lot of mileage from having a real RDBMS when it comes to backups. With Oracle ( I don't know much about Berkeley DB), you can run hot backups. Try that with a flat-file system and a game you can't afford to shut down even for 10 minutes. If you're starting to develop a game that you want to pitch to a publisher like EA, they're going to take you very seriously if you've got this kind of stuff in your game engine.
I don't know how content is added or modified in a real MMORPG, but I'd think a real easy way is to give your production (content) team an easy web-based interface where they could type in item descriptions and have pull-down menus for the attributes or whatever. They could also upload graphics, etc. This scales very well for a large team adding thousands of items, descriptions, etc. Obviously, this web-based interface would easily tie into a DB and then the game would leverage those items. Maybe you could do all this using XML and some CGI scripts. I don't know, though, because I'm the guy with the hammer!
I would love to tell you the name of the game my friends are working on, but they're all good guys and I don't want their company to get ticked-off that I'm badmouthing their architecture. That's the problem of using a slashdot nick that's your real name.
66 books?!? Oh man. That's a lot to read. I prefer to watch the star trek movies and think about the origins of humankind. Like maybe we're a probe designed by a superior life form far away. A long time ago they shot a bunch of seeds throughout the universe randomly. The seeds are programmed to create life in a hospitable climate. After the life develops to a certain point, it will figure out space travel and eventually find its way back to the creators. When it arrives at the creators, they are holding books titled "To serve man." Yeah, it's a cook book. They come back here, eat us all, then colonize our planet. It seems that their civilization was run by a government unwilling to admit that their own industries were destroying their environment until it was too late to reverse the process. Now they can only continue to survive by taking over and consuming other planets with hospitable climates.
Whatever you do in this model, for christ's sake start with a real RDBMS. I know a couple people who work at an Austin-area MMORPG studio (not EA's Ultima-- that Austin office was shut down last week) and their developers have decided to go with flat files for storing all the data. This is just out of half-assed design specs from day one. Now, the game is several years released and it'd be too much work to re-write code to pull all their flat-file rewrites and have it do proper DB transfers.
Can you possibly imagine the race conditions that exist in this model? Scalability? Forget it.
Off the top of my head, I'd say go Oracle if it's a real commercial product. If not, PostgreSQL. mySQL isn't advanced enough yet to be trusted with storing a seventh-level mage's cloak of invisibility.
typical clueless journalist
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You can tell by reading the article that they didn't assign their best technical writer to this job.
I started giggling when I read this section:
"A dedicated virtual private network (VPN) connects the various research labs, room-to-room, and the data in transit is encrypted so it's possible to send specimens from one side of the world to the other without the risk of spreading infection."
Uhhh... The VPN just ensures nobody is spying on their communication. This makes it sound like the virus could escape out of transit like a prisoner jumping out of a paddy wagon. Not bloody likely!
There's been a hack out for a while where you can remove the DVD drive from certain models of APEX DVD players and replace it with a hard drive full of SVCD movies. With a 250 gig HD, you should be able to fit a couple hundred movies on there.
The caveats are that you have to swap the hard drive in and out of your computer to add more movies, etc. But the plus side is that it's a pretty easy hack and you get a real remote control, nice form-factor, etc. without having a noisy, hot computer in your living room to serve movies.
I think that description of the hack talks about adding a seperate power supply, but I've heard if you don't keep the DVD player in there and only put a hard drive in, you can get by on the original power supply...
Yeah, SVCD is a little rougher than DVD, but it's approximate to VHS. Perhaps better if you consider degradation after multiple viewings. And it's totally random access when you have all your movies on one hard drive in an APEX dvd player.
So, this doesn't truly address the interest of the original post, but it is a related solution I thought I'd throw on the table for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
This could help people on the train or in a crowded cafeteria or what not easily share music without the fear of the RIAA. This would avoid the problem of traceable IP addresses, etc.
In fact, this could really enable certain bars or coffee shops to become pirate dens where people show up and exchange illicit data without such a bandwidth bottleneck as the ISP. It would help to create a browseable P2P app for such a use....
Yeah, SVCD is a little rougher than DVD, but it's approximate to VHS. Perhaps better if you consider degradation after multiple viewings. And it's totally random access when you have all your movies on one hard drive in an APEX dvd player. So, this doesn't truly address the interest of the original post, but it is a related solution I thought I'd throw on the table for everyone.