Back in 'the day', Bill Joy said "Operating systems are like underwear - Nobody really wants to look at them." This was true until Linux started getting attention, and MS turned their efforts to becoming a 10-ton monster by selling OSes. Since then, the word OS has morphed into meaning a feature-rich (feature-laden?) bundles of applications along with the software infrastructure required to run them. (Whereas formally the OS is really just the infrastructure itself.)
Now we're talking about kernels. NOBODY other than developers and support folks should need to care about their kernel. In fact, most people don't know what a kernel actually is, and that's OK. In fact, it's even good--it's pointless knowledge for end users.
I'm not one to support MS, but not blathering on about the kernel in end-user release notes is the right thing to do.
1) Their release claims the "...group intends to expel Scientology from the Internet." Not necessarily the same as destroying them. 2) Scientology is not a religion--they're a cult with a known history of overt mind control, abuse, character assassination, and even killing. Such organisations don't warrant freedom of speech, other than to defend their actions in court.
I can "understand" that people don't want that sort of protest everywhere, but face it--this is exactly what defines free speech. The proper answer isn't to segregate and relegate such lunatics, it's to challenge them (peacefully), and exercise your OWN right to free speech.
Over the years, I've talked to Jim about a number of issues. When he was a member of the Conservative opposition party, he took the time to respond to my concerns and seriously considered my objections to party policy or his vote on certain issues.
However, since the Conservatives took office and he was appointed a ministerial chair, he has changed drastically. The responses I get from him now tend to be generic form replies. I sent him a letter about the proposed idiotic 'camcorders in theatres' anti-piracy legislation. I got a form reply saying that he'd forward my concerns on to the minister responsible (Bev Oda, I believe). Seven months later, LONG after the legislation passed, I got a personal reply from Jim, pointing out how goofs with camcorders were destroying the Canadian movie industry, and that we have become a haven for pirates because of our lack of legislation (which of course was the Liberal's fault), etc., etc., etc.. Basically, it was a complete and abject capitulation to the MPAA/CMPDA. Coincidentally, the bill was introduced a week after Arnie had come visiting the province.
I'm totally disgusted with Jim. He's turned into a complete sell-out to industry and greed. He no longer represents his constituents, he no longer cares what's best for his riding or the country, he merely does what his bosses (governmental or industrial) tell him. Worse, he's a complete hypocrite.
So here is my message to the honourable Jim Prentice, MP for Calgary Centre North and federal minister of industry: You are no longer wanted. Get your lying, festering, useless carcass out of government and go back to your family. Maybe they can beat some sense back into you.
Iron Mountain is possibly the most antiquated, ass-backwards, idiotic, incompetent company on the planet. In 2006, they were quite excited because they were about to move away from a program that ran on DOS 3.3, and required hand-entry of tape and company IDs...THREE TIMES per tape! They can get away with this because they're the only game in town.
They should be held responsible for ten times the amount of credit card fraud that they could possibly be implicated in over the past two years. That should be enough to bankrupt them.
Agreed, although I might suggest that the heyday of idiotic copy protection schemes was earlier than the '90s. Stupid dark-red on light-red codes to enter into a program, decoding wheels, hardware dongles, and other such things were the bane of computing in the 8-bit days of Atari, Apple and Commodore.
Something else that most companies eventually figured out, especially producers of commercial software (your AutoCAD example is an excellent one) is that the people who pirate their software are not going to pay for it. If someone is playing with AutoCAD in their basement, drawing up plans for a computer desk, there's no way they're going to spend $600 for it. If they can't get it for free, they'll use something else. As soon as someone decides to publish a drawing or manufacture a product drawn in AutoCAD, they are DEFINITELY going to be buying a license, because they've just become a valid profit-making target of piracy.
Groups like the BSA do their best to confuse the issue, by claiming that every copy of software in use that wasn't paid for is a copy of software that WOULD have been paid for if piracy were stopped. In fact, it's a copy that wouldn't be used at all--no real financial gain for the companies.
And as you point out with your '1000 papercuts' comment, the software companies know this. They could stop almost all piracy by going after the shops that actually burn, print, and bundle copies of Vista with forged activation keys that sell for $20. They could also continue going after end-user piracy, but concentrate their efforts in areas where it's a problem. Instead, they go after the markets (North America, western Europe) which have the highest compliance in the world, but also where they're likely to get some profit for persecuting piracy. Most importantly, they're fighting in a market where rigorous enforcement won't just turn people away from their product--they don't want to lose their market share, paid for or not.
What software has done, music is trying to do: Make both piracy and fighting piracy profit centres, without hurting the penetration (and profit) of the product in the first place. In actual fact, the basic business model is failing, so they're having a hard time making a profit from legal sales OR piracy, and are trying to push anti-piracy as a profit generator because it's soon going to be all they have left.
Unfashionable as it may be, I went and read the article. The/. entry doesn't make it clear, but they are in fact talking about video games. (This makes Zonk's question of "What was your first experience with gaming? d20s on a kitchen table?" totally irrelevant.)
So mine was probably older than almost anyone's here: Billiards on a 6" oscilloscope screen, hooked up to a Nicolet NIC-80 computer, programmed by paper tape.:-) We also had pong (or something like) on that system. About the same time, we also had lunar lander, printed out to a teletype. Can't remember what the computer was, though.
After that, my grandparents were quick to buy the very first home Pong system. Endless hours of fun there. By the time Space Invaders hit the arcade, my brother and I were 'seasoned gamers' indeed.
But still, it's billiards on that little 'scope display that I remember the most. That and Triple Action pinball.
The industry should release material that is free of copy-protection and DRM in general, and factor copyright infringement (i.e. so-called "piracy") into their prices. The credit card companies lose millions (billions?) a year to fraud, but they stay in business by making enough profit to justify the risk.
If the media doesn't like that model, then they can just close up shop, and quit producing any content. I'm sure that the artists will find a way of making themselves heard, if that's what they want.
In other words, the problem is that the industry would rather penalise all users than factor in the cost of abuse, like they should. They want to eliminate reasonable risk from their profit model.
Learning more languages is good, and the lower-level, the better in many ways. If you never write code professionally in C, it's still worth knowing. Likewise for Pascal and Assembler (!!!). The real key with more languages is that they eventually fade into different syntaxes and structures, and you cn concentrate on developing the ideas in the language du jour, without worrying about the language itself.
Learn more math. Learn to develop algorithms. LEARN TO TROUBLESHOOT!!! This last is one of the two fundamental concepts that everyone on the planet should know, in their own appropriate context. (incidentally, the other one is quantitative analysis.)
Learn how binary devices work. Build a digital display out of seven-segment LEDs and NAND gates. Write a final-year paper comparing the success of various network protocols, and what makes a good protocol tick. (Actually, that's a neat idea. Hmmm...)
Carr's "infamous" HBR article in 2003 made it appear that he's either an idiot, or someone just looking to get attention however he can. Furthermore, the five years that have passed since that article have proved him WRONG. Not just slightly off, but flat-out wrong in nearly every prediction he made.
The more I read this stuff, the more I realise that it's all terribly ironic that all of the opposing factions are fighting for the same thing.
The ESRB, flawed as it is, is trying to provide information for consumers to make decisions. Two interesting quotes from their website:
"ESRB ratings are an excellent source for guidance and information about game content, but we also encourage parents to go beyond the ratings and do their own research about the games they or their children are considering for purchase or rental."
"While the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce its ratings at the retail level, it does work closely with retailers and game centers to display information that explains to customers how the rating system works."
The goofballs at NIMF may be going about things the wrong way, but they honestly do seem to believe that they're protecting children. By making decisions for parents, they are implicitly informing them. (Compare this to the movie industry: If a parent sees that a movie is rated NC-17, they don't have to make any decisions about whether it's appropriate for their 10-year-old, because the kid won't be able to get into it anyways.)
The good folks at Gamerdad are trying to avoid the protectionist attitudes of NIMF and the studied neutrality of the ESRB, and examine the content of games in context with regards to kids. They also are more than happy to enjoy adult games as adults, while keeping them away from their own kids (and letting you make your own decisions with your own kids). This is really how a maturity rating should work.
Finally, I'm sick of reading that most parents suck for not being the sole voice of responsiblity their kids' lives. YES, parents need to make these decisions. YES some parents neglect that field, and some of them (certainly not all!) do so because they don't care. However, most parents want what's right for their kids as well. ESRB ratings should be used as an indicator for the parents on what to look for. If some parents rely too havily on the ratings (or the comments from NIMF or gamerdad, or their kids' word, or...) part of it may be because they're not aware of the potential for video games. Consider someone in their early 40s, with a ten-year-old kid. It's entirely possible that the last video games they played were before the Commodore 64 hit the shelves. In order to make informed decisions about video games, they need to know that video games have evolved to the point where informed decisions need to be made, and they're worried about their kids making friends, not taking candy from strangers, avoiding street drugs, school, etc., etc., etc..
Bottom line in defense of flawed parents: raising a kid is different now than it was when we were raised, to the point that you can't always see where the new risks are coming from. More tools and more information is an asset, not a 'crutch for shitty parents who don't care.'
(Random aside: This also applies to 'netnanny' style blocking software. My son is being raised to use the internet responsibly, and until he's older, not without one of us being present. That doesn't change the fact that I ALSO am going to install blocking software, maintain and review firewall logs, and bring up any issues that occur. It's called defense-in-depth, and it works.)
First of all, you're exactly right. I've never understood why we think that the 'maturity level' of an entire game (or for that matter, movie) could be summed up in half a dozen stock words.
Ironically, the 'report card' is a perfect example of the same thing. Do eight letters sum up the entire state of the gaming industry's rating and controls system? I kind of doubt it.
But hey--a big M on a box is much easier to make a decision on than actually having to read a sentence or two!
"So when will all the unsolicited junk from the large companies be defined as spam and spyware and malware?"
Simple. When I'm forced to pay to recieve it, even when I don't want it.
If AOL pays to manufacture and distribute their crap, then it's not spam. If it comes postage due with no means of refusal, then it's spam; and just like spam, it's THEFT at that point.
As it is, it's just junk. Appalling waste of resources and materials, but not spam.
it seems like all these companies have forgotten that their users are the source of their income."
Nope.
Advertising is the source of their income. Eventually the advertisers might stop paying for ad space if nobody is watching it, but that's not quite so straightforward.
"What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?"
None. I don't care about FOSS. I honestly don't care for the most part where my software comes from, as long as it does the job. If it's free and closed, then I'll use it. If it's free and open, I'll use it. If it's commercial and reasonably priced, I'll buy it and use it.
It really is amazing how much good software is being ignored by zealots because it doesn't fit their life's philosophy. Fine for them, but I'd rather use the tools that work the best for my needs.
Over the years, we've disagreed on many things, not the least of which is whether you should morally be able to enter a field late and badly, and still take over.
Now I hear that you want to do the same with the OLPC project, and Microsoft, I have a suggestion for you.
Fuck off.
Seriously. I'm sick of you, I'm sick of your attitude, I'm sick of your superiority complex. If the universe suddenly switched directions and you actually provided the best solution in a timely manner, I STILL wouldn't choose it.
So really, Microsoft. Fuck off. Nobody wants you hanging around anymore.
You can call it an 'open concept' office, you can call it 'hot-desking,' but at the end of the day it's a way of providing less space and less infrastructure per person. The companies toying with it are 'trying it out' not to see if it helps productivity, but to see if they can get away with it without causing their workers to revolt.
mp3 when done carefully is pretty good. With typical $50 headphones, a careful encoding at 192kB/sec is difficult to hear. At 320kB/sec, it's almost impossible with my AKG studio monitors (several hundred bucks worth of headphones) to distinguish between the mp3 and the original.
Are there better lossless formats out there? Hell yeah--but there are worse ones as well; and mp3 doesn't support DRM which is a good thing compared to some.
You also toss out, "CD-quality, which isn't perfect either." BOLLOCKS!!! I am sick and tired of hearing people rag on CD quality because CDs are poorly mastered.
A properly created CD is audibly indistinguishable from the finest studio two-track master. The noise floor is lower than the audibility threshold, and the rare (like 1/10 000) person who can hear above 22kHz will have lost that ability by the time they start school. If you're old enough to post on/., you'd be VERY lucky to detect anything above 18kHz.
CD's limits are pretty short, but done properly it is audibly transparent--period.
Ultimately, quality _is_ expensive, and dangerous. Paying more won't necessarily get you a good script, for instance. If some writer comes up with a brilliant screenplay, it will go through the lawyers first to avoid liability. Then the producers and directors will muck around with it, making sure that it has the requisite amount of action/sex/emotion vs. the actual dialogue. About that time, they'll generally gut anything that's ambiguous or subtle enough to be taken the wrong way. Then it comes time for casting: Who's hot right now? Is this going to be a summer blockbuster, a holiday feel-good film, or...?
The script is treated poorly because it's the least important part of making a typical movie, and a thousand times less important for a TV show. To make the script relevant (and therefore make the quality important), you need to revamp the whole structure.
You say:
"When it comes to TV shows, networks don't see fans storming the gates when idiot knock-off comedy #3 goes off the air but they'll see the geeklerian jihad when a Futurama or Firefly gets canned. It's the quality that creates the rabid fans."
Here's the real trick: More people casually tune into idiot knock-off comedy #3 than do Futurama or Firefly. Shit shows MAKE MORE MONEY, and cost less to produce as a bonus. Even better, here's the REAL trick, behind the trick: The only reason to make TV shows is to get people to watch commercials. That's it. Rabid fans of good shows are (a) a tiny minority, and (b) generally less likely to watch commercials than apathetic viewers. Making really good, riveting, thoughtful, smart TV shows will make people get up during the commercials to take a break.
What made more money: Brazil or Independence Day? Amelie or While You Were Sleeping? Which version of I, Robot would have made more money: The original screenplay that Harlan Ellison wrote, or the Will Smith blockbuster they made?
Now onto the gaming world. Similar issues, although so far mostly without the in-game ads that TV thrives on. Write a good script. Now you need to change the game so that the storyline plays out fully, without railroading the player. Since the game is now dependent on the storyline, you need better voice acting. Every aspect of the game becomes more intimately linked to the other aspects, and any one of them can bring the whole thing crashing down. If you make a game with a loose plot, then any one of bad voice acting, weak storyline, or railroading won't bring down the game. Of course throw them all at a game, and it'll stink; but this is where games match TV shows and movies: TIGHT PLOTS DEMAND MORE OF THE OTHER ELEMENTS.
For a computer game review, I thought it was pretty good. Despite the informal tone, he clearly defined what was wrong with it, what was good about it, and who it would appeal to. He _did_ say that there were some interesting and innovative ideas in it, which should add a point or two.
Based on the video review, I'd have expected a 4 or 5/10. He didn't really eviscerate the game (or if that's what the game industry calls evisceration, they're even more apologetic than I thought!), but it sounds like a pretty lousy waste of time.
Well it's a week later, but hopefully you'll come back to this at some point.
What you're describing is a perfectly reasonable backup scheme. However, the fact that it's NAS is irrelevant. When I read the original question, I took it to mean, "I'm going to put all of my live data onto a NAS, and it will inherently be backed up." This is wrong, and dangerous for two reasons--one, there's nothing inherently safer or more reliable about NAS vs direct attached storage. (However, NAS is generally presented as a RAID set of some form, which of course provides a degree of reliability and availability.) The second is that live data isn't a backup--ever.
What you're describing is using a NAS device as a backup medium. Nothing at all wrong with that, but it doesn't make the NAS technology itself the backup system--it's just the medium.
Looking at the flipside of the argument. Tape is a backup medium. Everyone knows that tape=backups. However, back in the day we had HSM (Hierarchal Storage Management) systems, where data would be migrated automatically from fast disk to slow disk to tape in the robot to tape in storage racks. In this case, the tape was NOT used for backups--the living copy of the data might be on disk or tape at any given time, but regardless of the medium, it was the online copy (and therefore not a backup).
"If there's two copies of something and one of them is only used for archival/recovery purposes (i.e. if your daily use copy gets lost/deleted/destroyed), I'm afraid I'm going to have to say that one is a backup copy no matter what type of storage it resides on."
Absolutely completely 100% right. I never intended to suggest anything else, only that moving your live (online, active, writable, etc.) data from local disk to NAS (presumably RAIDed) doesn't somehow magically make it backed up.
I've just seen far far FAR too many people say that their backup strategy is RAID.
I can't believe I have to mention this AGAIN, but every time there's a discussion of home-RAID systems, 90% of/. jumps to the wrong conclusion.
Let me state something VERY VERY CLEARLY here:
RAID is not backup. NAS is not backup. SAN is not backup. Snapshotting is not backup. Backup is backup.
A "backup" means A COMPLETE COPIES OF FILES STORED OFFLINE.
RAID is a way of providing data availability and reliability. It doesn't provide backups. SAN and NAS are various frameworks for presenting the data in a storage system (generally RAID, but not necessarily) to an environment. It doesn't provide backups either. Backups consist of making COMPLETE COPIES (and yes that includes incrementals--ultimately, with a base copy plus incrementals, you have a complete copy) of files, STORED OFFLINE. Snapshots provide copies of files (and the smart snapshot systems do provide complete copies), but they're still online copies of the data. They will let you recover files to a point-in-time, but if your storage array goes T.U. for some horrible reason, you're still screwed.
RAID is fantastic for keeping your online data from being destroyed or taken offline due to hardware failures. SAN/NAS is great for making data available to a networked environment. However, if you want backups of your files, then back up your files--don't use RAID (and SAN/NAS on top of it) as a backup scheme, because it ain't.
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Honestly, the user SHOULDN'T care!
Back in 'the day', Bill Joy said "Operating systems are like underwear - Nobody really wants to look at them." This was true until Linux started getting attention, and MS turned their efforts to becoming a 10-ton monster by selling OSes. Since then, the word OS has morphed into meaning a feature-rich (feature-laden?) bundles of applications along with the software infrastructure required to run them. (Whereas formally the OS is really just the infrastructure itself.)
Now we're talking about kernels. NOBODY other than developers and support folks should need to care about their kernel. In fact, most people don't know what a kernel actually is, and that's OK. In fact, it's even good--it's pointless knowledge for end users.
I'm not one to support MS, but not blathering on about the kernel in end-user release notes is the right thing to do.
Well to be clear...
1) Their release claims the "...group intends to expel Scientology from the Internet." Not necessarily the same as destroying them.
2) Scientology is not a religion--they're a cult with a known history of overt mind control, abuse, character assassination, and even killing. Such organisations don't warrant freedom of speech, other than to defend their actions in court.
Oog. "Canada can't ever meet Kyoto standards, even if we shut down the entire country forever." You have my sympathy.
I can "understand" that people don't want that sort of protest everywhere, but face it--this is exactly what defines free speech. The proper answer isn't to segregate and relegate such lunatics, it's to challenge them (peacefully), and exercise your OWN right to free speech.
Over the years, I've talked to Jim about a number of issues. When he was a member of the Conservative opposition party, he took the time to respond to my concerns and seriously considered my objections to party policy or his vote on certain issues.
However, since the Conservatives took office and he was appointed a ministerial chair, he has changed drastically. The responses I get from him now tend to be generic form replies. I sent him a letter about the proposed idiotic 'camcorders in theatres' anti-piracy legislation. I got a form reply saying that he'd forward my concerns on to the minister responsible (Bev Oda, I believe). Seven months later, LONG after the legislation passed, I got a personal reply from Jim, pointing out how goofs with camcorders were destroying the Canadian movie industry, and that we have become a haven for pirates because of our lack of legislation (which of course was the Liberal's fault), etc., etc., etc.. Basically, it was a complete and abject capitulation to the MPAA/CMPDA. Coincidentally, the bill was introduced a week after Arnie had come visiting the province.
I'm totally disgusted with Jim. He's turned into a complete sell-out to industry and greed. He no longer represents his constituents, he no longer cares what's best for his riding or the country, he merely does what his bosses (governmental or industrial) tell him. Worse, he's a complete hypocrite.
So here is my message to the honourable Jim Prentice, MP for Calgary Centre North and federal minister of industry: You are no longer wanted. Get your lying, festering, useless carcass out of government and go back to your family. Maybe they can beat some sense back into you.
Iron Mountain is possibly the most antiquated, ass-backwards, idiotic, incompetent company on the planet. In 2006, they were quite excited because they were about to move away from a program that ran on DOS 3.3, and required hand-entry of tape and company IDs...THREE TIMES per tape! They can get away with this because they're the only game in town.
They should be held responsible for ten times the amount of credit card fraud that they could possibly be implicated in over the past two years. That should be enough to bankrupt them.
Agreed, although I might suggest that the heyday of idiotic copy protection schemes was earlier than the '90s. Stupid dark-red on light-red codes to enter into a program, decoding wheels, hardware dongles, and other such things were the bane of computing in the 8-bit days of Atari, Apple and Commodore.
Something else that most companies eventually figured out, especially producers of commercial software (your AutoCAD example is an excellent one) is that the people who pirate their software are not going to pay for it. If someone is playing with AutoCAD in their basement, drawing up plans for a computer desk, there's no way they're going to spend $600 for it. If they can't get it for free, they'll use something else. As soon as someone decides to publish a drawing or manufacture a product drawn in AutoCAD, they are DEFINITELY going to be buying a license, because they've just become a valid profit-making target of piracy.
Groups like the BSA do their best to confuse the issue, by claiming that every copy of software in use that wasn't paid for is a copy of software that WOULD have been paid for if piracy were stopped. In fact, it's a copy that wouldn't be used at all--no real financial gain for the companies.
And as you point out with your '1000 papercuts' comment, the software companies know this. They could stop almost all piracy by going after the shops that actually burn, print, and bundle copies of Vista with forged activation keys that sell for $20. They could also continue going after end-user piracy, but concentrate their efforts in areas where it's a problem. Instead, they go after the markets (North America, western Europe) which have the highest compliance in the world, but also where they're likely to get some profit for persecuting piracy. Most importantly, they're fighting in a market where rigorous enforcement won't just turn people away from their product--they don't want to lose their market share, paid for or not.
What software has done, music is trying to do: Make both piracy and fighting piracy profit centres, without hurting the penetration (and profit) of the product in the first place. In actual fact, the basic business model is failing, so they're having a hard time making a profit from legal sales OR piracy, and are trying to push anti-piracy as a profit generator because it's soon going to be all they have left.
Unfashionable as it may be, I went and read the article. The /. entry doesn't make it clear, but they are in fact talking about video games. (This makes Zonk's question of "What was your first experience with gaming? d20s on a kitchen table?" totally irrelevant.)
:-) We also had pong (or something like) on that system. About the same time, we also had lunar lander, printed out to a teletype. Can't remember what the computer was, though.
So mine was probably older than almost anyone's here: Billiards on a 6" oscilloscope screen, hooked up to a Nicolet NIC-80 computer, programmed by paper tape.
After that, my grandparents were quick to buy the very first home Pong system. Endless hours of fun there. By the time Space Invaders hit the arcade, my brother and I were 'seasoned gamers' indeed.
But still, it's billiards on that little 'scope display that I remember the most. That and Triple Action pinball.
The industry should release material that is free of copy-protection and DRM in general, and factor copyright infringement (i.e. so-called "piracy") into their prices. The credit card companies lose millions (billions?) a year to fraud, but they stay in business by making enough profit to justify the risk.
If the media doesn't like that model, then they can just close up shop, and quit producing any content. I'm sure that the artists will find a way of making themselves heard, if that's what they want.
In other words, the problem is that the industry would rather penalise all users than factor in the cost of abuse, like they should. They want to eliminate reasonable risk from their profit model.
Learning more languages is good, and the lower-level, the better in many ways. If you never write code professionally in C, it's still worth knowing. Likewise for Pascal and Assembler (!!!). The real key with more languages is that they eventually fade into different syntaxes and structures, and you cn concentrate on developing the ideas in the language du jour, without worrying about the language itself.
Learn more math. Learn to develop algorithms. LEARN TO TROUBLESHOOT!!! This last is one of the two fundamental concepts that everyone on the planet should know, in their own appropriate context. (incidentally, the other one is quantitative analysis.)
Learn how binary devices work. Build a digital display out of seven-segment LEDs and NAND gates. Write a final-year paper comparing the success of various network protocols, and what makes a good protocol tick. (Actually, that's a neat idea. Hmmm...)
Carr's "infamous" HBR article in 2003 made it appear that he's either an idiot, or someone just looking to get attention however he can. Furthermore, the five years that have passed since that article have proved him WRONG. Not just slightly off, but flat-out wrong in nearly every prediction he made.
Why are we bothering to listen to this idiot now?
The more I read this stuff, the more I realise that it's all terribly ironic that all of the opposing factions are fighting for the same thing.
The ESRB, flawed as it is, is trying to provide information for consumers to make decisions. Two interesting quotes from their website:
"ESRB ratings are an excellent source for guidance and information about game content, but we also encourage parents to go beyond the ratings and do their own research about the games they or their children are considering for purchase or rental."
"While the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce its ratings at the retail level, it does work closely with retailers and game centers to display information that explains to customers how the rating system works."
The goofballs at NIMF may be going about things the wrong way, but they honestly do seem to believe that they're protecting children. By making decisions for parents, they are implicitly informing them. (Compare this to the movie industry: If a parent sees that a movie is rated NC-17, they don't have to make any decisions about whether it's appropriate for their 10-year-old, because the kid won't be able to get into it anyways.)
The good folks at Gamerdad are trying to avoid the protectionist attitudes of NIMF and the studied neutrality of the ESRB, and examine the content of games in context with regards to kids. They also are more than happy to enjoy adult games as adults, while keeping them away from their own kids (and letting you make your own decisions with your own kids). This is really how a maturity rating should work.
Finally, I'm sick of reading that most parents suck for not being the sole voice of responsiblity their kids' lives. YES, parents need to make these decisions. YES some parents neglect that field, and some of them (certainly not all!) do so because they don't care. However, most parents want what's right for their kids as well. ESRB ratings should be used as an indicator for the parents on what to look for. If some parents rely too havily on the ratings (or the comments from NIMF or gamerdad, or their kids' word, or...) part of it may be because they're not aware of the potential for video games. Consider someone in their early 40s, with a ten-year-old kid. It's entirely possible that the last video games they played were before the Commodore 64 hit the shelves. In order to make informed decisions about video games, they need to know that video games have evolved to the point where informed decisions need to be made, and they're worried about their kids making friends, not taking candy from strangers, avoiding street drugs, school, etc., etc., etc..
Bottom line in defense of flawed parents: raising a kid is different now than it was when we were raised, to the point that you can't always see where the new risks are coming from. More tools and more information is an asset, not a 'crutch for shitty parents who don't care.'
(Random aside: This also applies to 'netnanny' style blocking software. My son is being raised to use the internet responsibly, and until he's older, not without one of us being present. That doesn't change the fact that I ALSO am going to install blocking software, maintain and review firewall logs, and bring up any issues that occur. It's called defense-in-depth, and it works.)
First of all, you're exactly right. I've never understood why we think that the 'maturity level' of an entire game (or for that matter, movie) could be summed up in half a dozen stock words.
Ironically, the 'report card' is a perfect example of the same thing. Do eight letters sum up the entire state of the gaming industry's rating and controls system? I kind of doubt it.
But hey--a big M on a box is much easier to make a decision on than actually having to read a sentence or two!
"So when will all the unsolicited junk from the large companies be defined as spam and spyware and malware?"
Simple. When I'm forced to pay to recieve it, even when I don't want it.
If AOL pays to manufacture and distribute their crap, then it's not spam. If it comes postage due with no means of refusal, then it's spam; and just like spam, it's THEFT at that point.
As it is, it's just junk. Appalling waste of resources and materials, but not spam.
it seems like all these companies have forgotten that their users are the source of their income."
Nope.
Advertising is the source of their income. Eventually the advertisers might stop paying for ad space if nobody is watching it, but that's not quite so straightforward.
"What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?"
None. I don't care about FOSS. I honestly don't care for the most part where my software comes from, as long as it does the job.
If it's free and closed, then I'll use it. If it's free and open, I'll use it. If it's commercial and reasonably priced, I'll buy it and use it.
It really is amazing how much good software is being ignored by zealots because it doesn't fit their life's philosophy. Fine for them, but I'd rather use the tools that work the best for my needs.
laugh track?
Hey folks. Can someone clarify this for me. I didn't know that Yahoo was an ISP at all--just a search engine and portal.
Do they actually provide internet access in the US?
Dear Microsoft;
Over the years, we've disagreed on many things, not the least of which is whether you should morally be able to enter a field late and badly, and still take over.
Now I hear that you want to do the same with the OLPC project, and Microsoft, I have a suggestion for you.
Fuck off.
Seriously. I'm sick of you, I'm sick of your attitude, I'm sick of your superiority complex. If the universe suddenly switched directions and you actually provided the best solution in a timely manner, I STILL wouldn't choose it.
So really, Microsoft. Fuck off. Nobody wants you hanging around anymore.
That's it.
You can call it an 'open concept' office, you can call it 'hot-desking,' but at the end of the day it's a way of providing less space and less infrastructure per person. The companies toying with it are 'trying it out' not to see if it helps productivity, but to see if they can get away with it without causing their workers to revolt.
You're relatively misguided.
/., you'd be VERY lucky to detect anything above 18kHz.
mp3 when done carefully is pretty good. With typical $50 headphones, a careful encoding at 192kB/sec is difficult to hear. At 320kB/sec, it's almost impossible with my AKG studio monitors (several hundred bucks worth of headphones) to distinguish between the mp3 and the original.
Are there better lossless formats out there? Hell yeah--but there are worse ones as well; and mp3 doesn't support DRM which is a good thing compared to some.
You also toss out, "CD-quality, which isn't perfect either." BOLLOCKS!!! I am sick and tired of hearing people rag on CD quality because CDs are poorly mastered.
A properly created CD is audibly indistinguishable from the finest studio two-track master. The noise floor is lower than the audibility threshold, and the rare (like 1/10 000) person who can hear above 22kHz will have lost that ability by the time they start school. If you're old enough to post on
CD's limits are pretty short, but done properly it is audibly transparent--period.
Ultimately, quality _is_ expensive, and dangerous. Paying more won't necessarily get you a good script, for instance. If some writer comes up with a brilliant screenplay, it will go through the lawyers first to avoid liability. Then the producers and directors will muck around with it, making sure that it has the requisite amount of action/sex/emotion vs. the actual dialogue. About that time, they'll generally gut anything that's ambiguous or subtle enough to be taken the wrong way. Then it comes time for casting: Who's hot right now? Is this going to be a summer blockbuster, a holiday feel-good film, or...?
The script is treated poorly because it's the least important part of making a typical movie, and a thousand times less important for a TV show. To make the script relevant (and therefore make the quality important), you need to revamp the whole structure.
You say:
"When it comes to TV shows, networks don't see fans storming the gates when idiot knock-off comedy #3 goes off the air but they'll see the geeklerian jihad when a Futurama or Firefly gets canned. It's the quality that creates the rabid fans."
Here's the real trick: More people casually tune into idiot knock-off comedy #3 than do Futurama or Firefly. Shit shows MAKE MORE MONEY, and cost less to produce as a bonus. Even better, here's the REAL trick, behind the trick: The only reason to make TV shows is to get people to watch commercials. That's it. Rabid fans of good shows are (a) a tiny minority, and (b) generally less likely to watch commercials than apathetic viewers. Making really good, riveting, thoughtful, smart TV shows will make people get up during the commercials to take a break.
What made more money: Brazil or Independence Day? Amelie or While You Were Sleeping?
Which version of I, Robot would have made more money: The original screenplay that Harlan Ellison wrote, or the Will Smith blockbuster they made?
Now onto the gaming world. Similar issues, although so far mostly without the in-game ads that TV thrives on.
Write a good script. Now you need to change the game so that the storyline plays out fully, without railroading the player. Since the game is now dependent on the storyline, you need better voice acting. Every aspect of the game becomes more intimately linked to the other aspects, and any one of them can bring the whole thing crashing down. If you make a game with a loose plot, then any one of bad voice acting, weak storyline, or railroading won't bring down the game. Of course throw them all at a game, and it'll stink; but this is where games match TV shows and movies: TIGHT PLOTS DEMAND MORE OF THE OTHER ELEMENTS.
For a computer game review, I thought it was pretty good. Despite the informal tone, he clearly defined what was wrong with it, what was good about it, and who it would appeal to. He _did_ say that there were some interesting and innovative ideas in it, which should add a point or two.
Based on the video review, I'd have expected a 4 or 5/10. He didn't really eviscerate the game (or if that's what the game industry calls evisceration, they're even more apologetic than I thought!), but it sounds like a pretty lousy waste of time.
Well it's a week later, but hopefully you'll come back to this at some point.
What you're describing is a perfectly reasonable backup scheme. However, the fact that it's NAS is irrelevant. When I read the original question, I took it to mean, "I'm going to put all of my live data onto a NAS, and it will inherently be backed up." This is wrong, and dangerous for two reasons--one, there's nothing inherently safer or more reliable about NAS vs direct attached storage. (However, NAS is generally presented as a RAID set of some form, which of course provides a degree of reliability and availability.) The second is that live data isn't a backup--ever.
What you're describing is using a NAS device as a backup medium. Nothing at all wrong with that, but it doesn't make the NAS technology itself the backup system--it's just the medium.
Looking at the flipside of the argument. Tape is a backup medium. Everyone knows that tape=backups. However, back in the day we had HSM (Hierarchal Storage Management) systems, where data would be migrated automatically from fast disk to slow disk to tape in the robot to tape in storage racks. In this case, the tape was NOT used for backups--the living copy of the data might be on disk or tape at any given time, but regardless of the medium, it was the online copy (and therefore not a backup).
"If there's two copies of something and one of them is only used for archival/recovery purposes (i.e. if your daily use copy gets lost/deleted/destroyed), I'm afraid I'm going to have to say that one is a backup copy no matter what type of storage it resides on."
Absolutely completely 100% right. I never intended to suggest anything else, only that moving your live (online, active, writable, etc.) data from local disk to NAS (presumably RAIDed) doesn't somehow magically make it backed up.
I've just seen far far FAR too many people say that their backup strategy is RAID.
I can't believe I have to mention this AGAIN, but every time there's a discussion of home-RAID systems, 90% of /. jumps to the wrong conclusion.
Let me state something VERY VERY CLEARLY here:
RAID is not backup.
NAS is not backup.
SAN is not backup.
Snapshotting is not backup.
Backup is backup.
A "backup" means A COMPLETE COPIES OF FILES STORED OFFLINE.
RAID is a way of providing data availability and reliability. It doesn't provide backups. SAN and NAS are various frameworks for presenting the data in a storage system (generally RAID, but not necessarily) to an environment. It doesn't provide backups either. Backups consist of making COMPLETE COPIES (and yes that includes incrementals--ultimately, with a base copy plus incrementals, you have a complete copy) of files, STORED OFFLINE. Snapshots provide copies of files (and the smart snapshot systems do provide complete copies), but they're still online copies of the data. They will let you recover files to a point-in-time, but if your storage array goes T.U. for some horrible reason, you're still screwed.
RAID is fantastic for keeping your online data from being destroyed or taken offline due to hardware failures. SAN/NAS is great for making data available to a networked environment. However, if you want backups of your files, then back up your files--don't use RAID (and SAN/NAS on top of it) as a backup scheme, because it ain't.