If your game mechanic is boring it will be boring running the Crysis engine or the DOOM 1 engine *but* you will sell a lot more unit using the crysis engine. People like good looking shiny stuff even if it's boring, limited or even stupid. For examples, see ipod (-1 flamebait); Paris hilton; Windows (+1 Insightful), Dubai and others.
If you have a good game, good graphics will still attract even more customers.
The main problem with hackers is that once they figured out the solution to the puzzle they tend to lose interest in the subject and aren't always quite apt to deliver finished product. People with less curious tends to be less prone to boredom and better suited to finish task.
I like hackers, self-taught, cowboy or whatever's the name of the month who works for me. They have a tendency to get things done (not related to inbox management bs). Presented with a problem I know they'll come up with a solution, unorthodox maybe but one that works. You can always be amazed at how many different technology a good hacker can understand and use and sometime people like that are key to get a project running. Think someone who can interface between the network team, the dba's, the software people and the PMs using their own language and most of the time with more knowledge in their subject matter than them. The problem with them is that most of them are indifferent to processes and quite bad a polishing their work.
Non-hackers I need too; people with maybe a far less encompassing knowledge but usually a deeper knowledge in more specific fields; resulting in less ability to come up with original ideas; but the ability to follow through a spec and the tedium of finishing a job -as it was requested- to write decent documentation and to follow a process. With just hackers we would release revolutionary product that just don't work; without them we'd probably still be using VB6 and cgi in perl. I need people who care about the intensity of the gradient of the save button on the settings window. I need someone who can sits and update the spec sheet without trying to develop a software to update the spec sheet for him. I need someone who checks the result of the batch job. Yeah boring but seriously it's crucial.
I see the "hackers" are a special ops force; good when you need to be fast and ruthless; not good when you need to to be in line with international laws and the geneva convention.
Now please everyone note that I by no mean want to convey the message that non-hacker aren't good programmers; it's in my opinion a matter of mentality in the way they approach a job not a depiction of skills.
Oh yes the "unskippable" bits. I bought a DVD for the first time in months last week and I almost threw my dvd player out the window after 10 long minutes of FBI warning in twenty languages and three force-fed trailers for completely unrelated shit.
Not mod point so I'll just agree with you here.
My cable provider used to have a video on demand service. Movie were cheap -- few dollars-- and put on my monthly bill, streaming began within 10 seconds of ordering the movie and could be restarted anytime for 24 hours. I watched (and paid for) all the twenty movies that I cared for over a couple of month. Then what? The service was rarely updated with new movies because the provider could not secure distribution rights and new movie where usually direct-to-dvd-sale-bin kind of crap that I would not even have watched for free.
My plea to those idiots is the following:
Let me pay for the movie: Give me a way to get the movie for what it's worth; Right now you're getting nothing from me. Take 5 bucks and be happy. I'm pretty sure that's close from what you get in your distribution chain.
Give me a way that is convenient; simple and as efficient a TPB. Your site can even do better with proper category, trailers, no duplicate, guaranteed quality, subtitles, user review (yes bad review too), suggestions from you to me and from me to my friends. Make a facebook app and get hundred of thousands of teenager posting "must sees" on their friends walls and watch the cash pour-in.
Don't try to lock me in your crappy player, I use VLC period. I don't care that you're scared I might copy it. I am already copying it so that I can avoid the restriction you add on your player.
Let me watch on my TV through the tv-out of my computer; or on my projector; or on a PMP of my choosing. See above.
And finally don't bug me if I live in the US, Canada, France or Zimbabwe. I can already get your content for free before it's even on your site; or your theater even. What's the point of trying to reduce artificially your potential customer base? Market segmentation my a**; I can buy all your movies in a chinese market before the first batch of DVD hit any store in the US. Seriously once again I'm giving five bucks to a guy in the street because you're too snob to take them. We've been force fed globalization by the mega-corp worldwide and I find it perfectly fair that the small people get to benefit from it.
Every use of flash is an abuse.
Since I'm using flashblock every site that requires flash is broken for me (and I enjoy that). Particularly the clever one who use 1x1 flash in a hidden div to do whatever the hell it is they need a 1x1 flash for.
If I care for your flash content I'll make the extra effort to click on the "play" button. There is just no way anyone will decide when a clever flash animated menu will run and hog my browser. If your site requires so much flash that I have to click ten different flash element to get basic navigation (<a href= damnit!!) it's usually a sure indication the site suck and the content in on par with the web designer mad skillz.
So far the only decent use of flash I've seen are video and some games. flashy ads and flash 'app' with their non-selectable text, non-standard navigation scheme and crappy load time makes me want to flail the website owner.
And that's too bad because Flex could be a great platform if the compiler was not so slow you want to kill someone every time you're launching your project.
HTML5? sure! bring it on! If it's going to be the new flash I just hope I can block it.
Also, the fact that this patient had a vested interest in making the diagnosis means that she would have examined the slide thoroughly.
(Doctor) Richard Cavell
Why calling it a witch hunt? Police force and army should gear up and have some kind of internet swat team as more and more crimes are committed online.
I don't see why sometime a team of "security researcher", white hat or iSwat (however you want to call them) working under a police mandate couldn't be allowed to "raid" a computer, place rootkits, keyloggers and whatnot if they have the proper warrant. Just like they could bug your phone or search your house, car, financial records with again the proper warrant. Just because it's the internet doesn't mean it has to be out of the scope of law enforcement.
It all comes back to what the job is about. Update some article in a CMS? need to know h1 to h3 and have notion of what p.highlight { color: blue; } is going to do. Need to do the next fancy ajason enhanced 3D online version of outlook? Then you need a software engineer who knows HTML and much more.
--
Ajason for when your Asynchronous Javascript doesn't care about XML...;)
It depends. Try to make it a little bit clear in the job description.
Web Developper:
You will be responsible for implementing new features, updating and maintaining our website. Required skills:HTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP/perl/whatever, MySQL.
or
Secretary?:
You will be responsible for publishing content in our website content management system, formatting of the articles may require writing HTML or CSS code. (As does posting a comment on slashdot)
From what i read of the article the solution to make the link smaller is to add an HTTP header that points to another page on your site with a smaller URL which sends a 301 redirect HTTP header pointing to the page with the long URL...
I guess I'm just stupid but can't you just make your URL shorter in the first place?
Don't people just copy paste any URL from their address bar? How's a fancy HTTP header is going to help that? me not getting it.:)
this blurb reads like researcher have been ignoring cell-to-cell contamination for the last 20 years and only tried to get a cure for "free virus" to cell contamination. I hope it's not what actually happened that would be sad. Nice video though.
The truth is she's a very smart serial killer who managed to get herself hired at the coton swab factory with the sole intention of contaminating them with her DNA so that if caught she could use it to get any trial against her dismissed... brilliant!
I really can't why this is a new "internet" issue. Judge can confiscate anything they want including cellphone, blackberry, ipod and they can sequestrate the jurors if they think it's necessary.
And before everyone had a browser on his phone jurors could still do some research from home or get some biased information on TV/newspaper/friends/spouse opinion/co-workers...
Just because someone added the words "mobile internet", "google" or "2.0" doesn't make it a new problem.:)
Really? I didn't know that steam powered cassette based answerphones would let you listen in on a voicemail to your home line even though you were in the office. Like they always say...you learn something new every day.
I kinda remember my parents carrying around a tone generator they would use to control the answering machine at home while in the office. That was in the 80's though.
Here in the middle-east countries known as the GCC (Gulf cooperation council) the status is mostly forbidden if it's cross border with slight variation from country to country. Bahrain being the most open (also to prostitution, boozing and pork sandwidch but that's another story).
In the UAE (Abu dhabi, Dubai) it's ok inside the country. For example a company wishing to connect it's branches on one IP network. Using skype/sip to call outside the country is forbidden as it requires a telco license, which is a state monopoly. They've tried to multiple time to block skype and for a while they were filtering non-encrypted SIP INVITE packet.
But since they let VPN and SSL+SIP go through everyone still does it and I work with many companies who have their own cross border VoIP network. I myself sometime use SIP trunk provider from canada or europe to reduce my cost.
There is no way to get a SIP trunk inside those countries, and you're happy is you can even get a DSS1 PRI and not some backward CAS line.
It all boils down to telco's (that's the state for you) being scared shitless of the loss in revenue and more importantly *control* that they have no idea what to do and how to go about it.
Most other country are the same, with Saudi not having the infrastructure to cope with that technology anyway. It's not blocked. It's just the latency is so bad it's going to be mostly useless. You could go for a dish but it's not really discreet.
Bahrain is the one exception, along with Jordan and possibly Yemen. Bahrain is strapped for cash (no real oil, little gas, small island.. etc) that they just allow everything and anything that may attract some businesses and turn a blind eye to the rest. We do call this place sin-city around here. Jordan has always been the most progressive ME country and a favored US partner, they need business and will do what's needed to accommodate. I suspect Jordanian actually have a clue what they are doing which does seem so obvious in Bahrain.
The French government did that. It's called "35h week". It was supposed to make everyone happy and create tons of job. It was not really respected by any small to medium size company who obviously were already silently expecting 40 to 50+ hours of their employees. It worked fine for government employees who were not doing 40hours worth of work in the first place.
All in all and despite the fact that I liked the concept I have to admit it was a failure job creation wise.
A whole distribution for something that they could probably have done with a couple of deb and a meta package?
And they even made one with MySpace application instead of Google.
Do I need a third pc if I want to poke someone on Facebook?
A lot of people a ready to contribute to a cause they care for.
There was a link on reddit the other day that led to giyus.org which distribute a "community organizing" tool called "Megaphone" which apparently is used to point the community towards pro or anti jewish/israeli articles so that this community can react. I assume by spamming blog or creating a sort of slashdot effect.
This blogger (http://futurenewstoday.blogspot.com/2009/01/israeligirl-violates-digg-tos.html) says that they are using it to artificially increase rankings or submission pro-israeli on sites like digg and reddit.
I don't think it can be considered a botnet in the sense that the software doesn't seem to act on its own. Although I don't know for sure because I didn't want to take the risk to install it. If they really have the nearly 40K users they pretend they surely have the capacity to some damages:)
All consideration of whether you agree more with Israeli or Palestinian aside, it is not my point.
I just think it's a very astute concept. Apparently the pro-Israeli camps took a page from the russian mob and got a headstart but I would bet that the first one to start an open-source "botnet" project that people can use to rally their own community whether they are mujaheddin or PETA fan will become quite famous. If only I had more time on my hand...
Distribute your open botnet with some basic plugins such as diggburry.py and wordpress-comment.py and it will be a lot of fun.;)
Slashdot Mirror
If your game mechanic is boring it will be boring running the Crysis engine or the DOOM 1 engine *but* you will sell a lot more unit using the crysis engine. People like good looking shiny stuff even if it's boring, limited or even stupid. For examples, see ipod (-1 flamebait); Paris hilton; Windows (+1 Insightful), Dubai and others. If you have a good game, good graphics will still attract even more customers.
The main problem with hackers is that once they figured out the solution to the puzzle they tend to lose interest in the subject and aren't always quite apt to deliver finished product. People with less curious tends to be less prone to boredom and better suited to finish task.
I like hackers, self-taught, cowboy or whatever's the name of the month who works for me. They have a tendency to get things done (not related to inbox management bs). Presented with a problem I know they'll come up with a solution, unorthodox maybe but one that works. You can always be amazed at how many different technology a good hacker can understand and use and sometime people like that are key to get a project running. Think someone who can interface between the network team, the dba's, the software people and the PMs using their own language and most of the time with more knowledge in their subject matter than them. The problem with them is that most of them are indifferent to processes and quite bad a polishing their work.
Non-hackers I need too; people with maybe a far less encompassing knowledge but usually a deeper knowledge in more specific fields; resulting in less ability to come up with original ideas; but the ability to follow through a spec and the tedium of finishing a job -as it was requested- to write decent documentation and to follow a process. With just hackers we would release revolutionary product that just don't work; without them we'd probably still be using VB6 and cgi in perl. I need people who care about the intensity of the gradient of the save button on the settings window. I need someone who can sits and update the spec sheet without trying to develop a software to update the spec sheet for him. I need someone who checks the result of the batch job. Yeah boring but seriously it's crucial.
I see the "hackers" are a special ops force; good when you need to be fast and ruthless; not good when you need to to be in line with international laws and the geneva convention.
Now please everyone note that I by no mean want to convey the message that non-hacker aren't good programmers; it's in my opinion a matter of mentality in the way they approach a job not a depiction of skills.
Oh yes the "unskippable" bits. I bought a DVD for the first time in months last week and I almost threw my dvd player out the window after 10 long minutes of FBI warning in twenty languages and three force-fed trailers for completely unrelated shit.
My cable provider used to have a video on demand service. Movie were cheap -- few dollars-- and put on my monthly bill, streaming began within 10 seconds of ordering the movie and could be restarted anytime for 24 hours. I watched (and paid for) all the twenty movies that I cared for over a couple of month. Then what? The service was rarely updated with new movies because the provider could not secure distribution rights and new movie where usually direct-to-dvd-sale-bin kind of crap that I would not even have watched for free.
My plea to those idiots is the following:
Marketing failure. You should have released SQLLiteAdm before trying to get ./ed :)
Every use of flash is an abuse. Since I'm using flashblock every site that requires flash is broken for me (and I enjoy that). Particularly the clever one who use 1x1 flash in a hidden div to do whatever the hell it is they need a 1x1 flash for.
If I care for your flash content I'll make the extra effort to click on the "play" button. There is just no way anyone will decide when a clever flash animated menu will run and hog my browser. If your site requires so much flash that I have to click ten different flash element to get basic navigation (<a href= damnit!!) it's usually a sure indication the site suck and the content in on par with the web designer mad skillz.
So far the only decent use of flash I've seen are video and some games. flashy ads and flash 'app' with their non-selectable text, non-standard navigation scheme and crappy load time makes me want to flail the website owner.
And that's too bad because Flex could be a great platform if the compiler was not so slow you want to kill someone every time you're launching your project.
HTML5? sure! bring it on! If it's going to be the new flash I just hope I can block it.
Profession / Mean Wage
Physician (MD/DO) $155,150
Dentist $147,010
Pharmacist $98,960
Seems enough to me to do a thorough job.
source: http://www.studentdoctor.net/2009/02/students-realistic-about-salary-expectations/
Also, the fact that this patient had a vested interest in making the diagnosis means that she would have examined the slide thoroughly. (Doctor) Richard Cavell
That's what I would expect from my doctors!!!
Why calling it a witch hunt? Police force and army should gear up and have some kind of internet swat team as more and more crimes are committed online. I don't see why sometime a team of "security researcher", white hat or iSwat (however you want to call them) working under a police mandate couldn't be allowed to "raid" a computer, place rootkits, keyloggers and whatnot if they have the proper warrant. Just like they could bug your phone or search your house, car, financial records with again the proper warrant. Just because it's the internet doesn't mean it has to be out of the scope of law enforcement.
It all comes back to what the job is about. Update some article in a CMS? need to know h1 to h3 and have notion of what p.highlight { color: blue; } is going to do. Need to do the next fancy ajason enhanced 3D online version of outlook? Then you need a software engineer who knows HTML and much more. ;)
--
Ajason for when your Asynchronous Javascript doesn't care about XML...
It depends. Try to make it a little bit clear in the job description.
Web Developper: You will be responsible for implementing new features, updating and maintaining our website. Required skills:HTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP/perl/whatever, MySQL.
or
Secretary?: You will be responsible for publishing content in our website content management system, formatting of the articles may require writing HTML or CSS code. (As does posting a comment on slashdot)
From what i read of the article the solution to make the link smaller is to add an HTTP header that points to another page on your site with a smaller URL which sends a 301 redirect HTTP header pointing to the page with the long URL...
:)
I guess I'm just stupid but can't you just make your URL shorter in the first place?
Don't people just copy paste any URL from their address bar? How's a fancy HTTP header is going to help that? me not getting it.
too bad "it just had to be genuine"... :)
this blurb reads like researcher have been ignoring cell-to-cell contamination for the last 20 years and only tried to get a cure for "free virus" to cell contamination. I hope it's not what actually happened that would be sad. Nice video though.
So should we consider government funded grants for free porn site since they reduce the incentive for people to work for their porn?
The truth is she's a very smart serial killer who managed to get herself hired at the coton swab factory with the sole intention of contaminating them with her DNA so that if caught she could use it to get any trial against her dismissed... brilliant!
I really can't why this is a new "internet" issue. Judge can confiscate anything they want including cellphone, blackberry, ipod and they can sequestrate the jurors if they think it's necessary.
:)
And before everyone had a browser on his phone jurors could still do some research from home or get some biased information on TV/newspaper/friends/spouse opinion/co-workers...
Just because someone added the words "mobile internet", "google" or "2.0" doesn't make it a new problem.
With an average of a 50ms response time, Iâ(TM)m going to go ahead and say my 7 mbps Qwest DSL service is working as advertised,
Most likely his provider blows.
Really? I didn't know that steam powered cassette based answerphones would let you listen in on a voicemail to your home line even though you were in the office. Like they always say...you learn something new every day.
I kinda remember my parents carrying around a tone generator they would use to control the answering machine at home while in the office. That was in the 80's though.
Here in the middle-east countries known as the GCC (Gulf cooperation council) the status is mostly forbidden if it's cross border with slight variation from country to country. Bahrain being the most open (also to prostitution, boozing and pork sandwidch but that's another story).
In the UAE (Abu dhabi, Dubai) it's ok inside the country. For example a company wishing to connect it's branches on one IP network. Using skype/sip to call outside the country is forbidden as it requires a telco license, which is a state monopoly. They've tried to multiple time to block skype and for a while they were filtering non-encrypted SIP INVITE packet. But since they let VPN and SSL+SIP go through everyone still does it and I work with many companies who have their own cross border VoIP network. I myself sometime use SIP trunk provider from canada or europe to reduce my cost. There is no way to get a SIP trunk inside those countries, and you're happy is you can even get a DSS1 PRI and not some backward CAS line.
It all boils down to telco's (that's the state for you) being scared shitless of the loss in revenue and more importantly *control* that they have no idea what to do and how to go about it.
Most other country are the same, with Saudi not having the infrastructure to cope with that technology anyway. It's not blocked. It's just the latency is so bad it's going to be mostly useless. You could go for a dish but it's not really discreet.
Bahrain is the one exception, along with Jordan and possibly Yemen. Bahrain is strapped for cash (no real oil, little gas, small island.. etc) that they just allow everything and anything that may attract some businesses and turn a blind eye to the rest. We do call this place sin-city around here. Jordan has always been the most progressive ME country and a favored US partner, they need business and will do what's needed to accommodate. I suspect Jordanian actually have a clue what they are doing which does seem so obvious in Bahrain.
The French government did that. It's called "35h week". It was supposed to make everyone happy and create tons of job. It was not really respected by any small to medium size company who obviously were already silently expecting 40 to 50+ hours of their employees.
It worked fine for government employees who were not doing 40hours worth of work in the first place.
All in all and despite the fact that I liked the concept I have to admit it was a failure job creation wise.
.. for windows 8 expect a git repo :)
A whole distribution for something that they could probably have done with a couple of deb and a meta package?
And they even made one with MySpace application instead of Google.
Do I need a third pc if I want to poke someone on Facebook?
A lot of people a ready to contribute to a cause they care for.
:)
;)
There was a link on reddit the other day that led to giyus.org which distribute a "community organizing" tool called "Megaphone" which apparently is used to point the community towards pro or anti jewish/israeli articles so that this community can react. I assume by spamming blog or creating a sort of slashdot effect.
This blogger (http://futurenewstoday.blogspot.com/2009/01/israeligirl-violates-digg-tos.html) says that they are using it to artificially increase rankings or submission pro-israeli on sites like digg and reddit.
I don't think it can be considered a botnet in the sense that the software doesn't seem to act on its own. Although I don't know for sure because I didn't want to take the risk to install it. If they really have the nearly 40K users they pretend they surely have the capacity to some damages
All consideration of whether you agree more with Israeli or Palestinian aside, it is not my point.
I just think it's a very astute concept. Apparently the pro-Israeli camps took a page from the russian mob and got a headstart but I would bet that the first one to start an open-source "botnet" project that people can use to rally their own community whether they are mujaheddin or PETA fan will become quite famous. If only I had more time on my hand...
Distribute your open botnet with some basic plugins such as diggburry.py and wordpress-comment.py and it will be a lot of fun.