The guy has a good idea, but doesn't understand what to watch for in an EULA. Things like indemnification clauses, limitation of liability, waiving of consumer law rights, requirements to arbitrate in some place favorable to the vendor, and similar clauses need to be flagged. It's worth looking at those. Even within Microsoft's products, the clauses differ considerably. Their products aimed at business tend to have considerably more reasonable terms than the consumer products.
Look up "RC Patrol" on Wikitruth. It's funny, and they have some good points. RC patrollers are the Junior Woodchucks of Wikipedia. But really, Wikitruth is tiny. If you ask for "Random article", you'll see the same articles coming up within a few tries.
A big problem with Wikipedia itself is that fixing vandalism and keeping out junk is incredibly labor-intensive. It takes a large, active volunteer staff to clean up the junk, and the cleanup backlog is increasing.
Much of the junk is fancruft; articles bands, albums, movies, and games. Most of that stuff is in databases elsewhere, and in better forms. For movie info, go to IMDB, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the wrong tool for database-like material; all those album to song to band to performer links have to be updated manually, and many of the links are missing or inconsistent. This is a job for a database, not people.
Of the "million articles", a sizable fraction fall into those categories. Games generate vast numbers of entries; there are individual Wikipedia articles for each and every Pokemon character from #1 to #386. Just about every character, location, and object in Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] has an article. Most of them start life badly formatted and without verifiable information, again increasing the cleanup backlog. Really, in any given day, very few new articles about serious subjects are added to Wikipedia.
On serious subjects, the problem is length and lack of coherency. Someone writes something reasonable, others add to it, with or without enough knowledge to do so, and over time the article becomes long and repetitive. On subjects where books can be, and have been, written, this is a real problem.
It's amazing that the Wikipedia process works as well as it does.
The big deal with token ring was that the network would remain stable under 100% load. Classic 10mbps ethernet with hubs would start experiencing trouble around 60% load and collapse by the time load reached 90%. If you had a big, flat network it just plain wouldn't work.
In theory, Ethernet on coax should be stable under heavy load. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn't, due to defective design of some widely used interface chips.
Here's the actual story.
See this note by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC
The worst device was the SEEQ 8003 chip, found in some Cisco and SGI devices. Due to an error in the design of its hardware state machine, it would turn on its transmitter for a few nanoseconds in the middle of an interframe gap. This noise caused other machines on the LAN to restart their interframe gap timers and ignore the next packet, if it followed closely enough. This happened even if the SEEQ chip was neither the sender or the receiver of the packets involved. So as soon as you plugged one of these things into a LAN, throughput went down, even if it wasn't doing anything. A network analyzer wouldn't even see the false collision; this was at too low a level.
This was tough to find. Wes Irish worked on the problem by arranging for both ends of Xerox PARC's main coax LAN to terminate in one office. Then he hooked up a LeCroy digital oscilloscope to both ends. Then he tapped into a machine with an Ethernet controller to bring out a signal when the problem was detected and trigger the oscilloscope. Then, when the problem occured, he had a copy of the entire packet as an analog waveform stored in the scope. This could then be printed with a thermal printer and gone over by hand.
Because he had the same signal from both ends of the wire, the wierd SEEQ interference mentioned above appeared time-shifted due to speed of light lag, making it clear that the interference was from a different node than the one that was supposed to be sending. You could measure the time shift and figure out from where on the cable the noise was being inserted. Which he did.
It took some convincing to get manufacturers to admit there was a problem. It helped that Wes was at Xerox PARC, where Ethernet was born. I went up there to see his work, and once I saw the waveforms, I was convinced. There was much faxing of waveform printouts for a few months, and some vendors were rather unhappy, but the problem got fixed.
If the art in the game is that good, it's OK. If not, it's false advertising.
There's no technical reason for the game art not to be as good as the box art. Today's graphics cards can do the job. Game reviews should downgrade games where the game art is worse than the box art, because there just isn't an excuse for that any more.
In the beginning, we had banner ads, and advertisers paid for "impressions". Then we had banner ad glut, nobody looked at the banners, and the bottom fell out of banner ads.
Then we had click-through, and advertisers paid for "clicks". Now we have "click glut", very few clicks lead to a sale, and the bottom is falling out of "clicks".
What we're going to end up with is something where advertisers only pay for actual sales. This creates accounting problems, but Yahoo Store and parts of the porno industry already have it working.
The main thing keeping the click trade going is Google. When the day comes that Google stops paying affiliates for clicks, others will follow and the domain spam industry will fall apart. This will probably happen right after Google gets a payment system in place.
A band, "Hollywood Undead", has apparently made itself famous by promoting itself on Myspace. They have three million hits in Google. And some of them aren't even from Myspace.
It's really useful when dealing with vendor finger-pointing to have the capability to get both vendors on the line and connect them with each other. That tends to cut down on the finger pointing.
They hate that. But it gets results.
Especially when you say "This call is being recorded for quality control purposes".
These are kiosk systems. Why are they running any general-purpose Microsoft services?
If they insist on running Microsoft software on kiosks, they should be running XP Embedded, where you only configure in the stuff you need, not the kitchen-sink approach Microsoft uses in their desktop distros.
Read the subpoena. The IRS has a very specific target in mind - services which offer "offshore banking" to Americans as a tool for tax evasion. Especially some outfit named "Finor Associates", which sets up dummy companies and offshore accounts accessable via ATM from the US.
Finor Associates has an entertaining product list. Highlights.
"Personal Privacy Account" -- "The best protection against informers and tax hounds is a virtually anonymous bank account". $1000 account setup fee, $500/year ongoing fee, 1.5% transaction fee. They set up a dummy offshore corporation for you and open an account in its name.
"Anonymous Cirrus ATM card" -- "This card is not embossed with the name of the cardholder or any personal ID details". "Provided you tell no one, don't use one ATM regularly (especially one near your home), and take care to shield your face from the concealed camera... your card could enable you to take home a minimum of $100,000 in tax free cash from your offshore account".
"Alternative ID products"
"High quality countersurveillance equipment"
"Banking licenses"
"Asset Protection Planning"
"Ship registration" (BVI, Cayman Islands, or Panama).
It's a full-service money laundering operation.
The IRS ought to be investigating those guys.
IGDA used to be the "Independent Game Developers Association". It's not a trade union; it's the association for people who want to break into the industry.
The description of this thing as a "forcefield" seems to come from this Fox News clip (big SWF file.)". It's not. It's an active defense system that shoots small rockets back at incoming weapons. Exactly what it shoots back is not being revealed. UPI has a better article.
That Escapist article is all fluff. It's even worse than Tired. This is just a clueless blogger with a good layout program.
Useful article on what's wrong with game development appear in Game Developer regularly, in the "postmortem" section. Those are worth reading. This is not.
The early burnout problem is a major issue at Electronic Arts. But they're not even in compliance with California labor law, and there's a class action on their unlawful nonpayment of overtime. That one (for artists) has been settled, with EA paying $15 million, and two other cases are pending. That's real news. This article isn't.
True, this is more like "they finally got that thing working"? The ABL dates back to the 1980s. These things are starting to look useful, though, now that everybody is throwing low-rent rockets around battlefields. This provides a way to thin them out, without using an expensive Patriot to take out a cheap rocket. The smaller model in the C-130 is likely to be more useful than the big one in the 747.
Read the Wall Street Journal for guidance on how to talk about business. The Journal covers most aspects of business, yet there's very little "corporate speak". If you follow their style, you'll come across well to upper management, all of whom, unless totally incompetent, read it daily.
For that strategy, it's not Google. Virgin.
on
Google's DNA
·
· Score: 1
Virgin is the leader with that strategy. Branson has put Virgin into a strange range of businesses. Starting from music, he's expanded into soft drinks (Virgin Cola), air travel (Virgin Atlantic), space travel (Virgin Galactic), railroads (Virgin Trains), cell phones (Virgin Mobile), wine (Virgin Wine), publishing (Virgin Books), Internet services (Virgin.net), and lending (Virgin Money).
Because SF is a walking city, with 13,000 homeless people and more low-end crooks. In SJ, you need a car. Trying to rob someone in a mall and running away on foot just isn't going to work.
California doesn't allow concealed carry much. There are about 42,000 concealed carry permits in California, and most of them are people who actually need a gun as a working tool, like couriers, private investigators, and such.
San Francisco's problem is that the police deparment is ineptly managed and the cops' union has too much power. Internal discipline and management are weak. SF needs someone like Brandon, but he's busy trying to fix the LAPD, after fixing the NYPD.
The real reason for laptop theft is that there's not much else portable to steal any more. Used TVs? Forget it. Used computers? Can't give them away. Jewelry? Crooks can't tell a diamond from a cubic zircon. Watches? A joke. Cash? Nobody carries that much since ATMs came in. Credit cards? Hard to fence. Cars? Anti-theft systems now smarter than low-end crooks. Stealing from stores? All have cameras now. Banks? Forget it.
It's a tough time for the low end of the criminal class.
This article from the SJ Mercury, Silicon Valley's newspaper, has a more realistic take on the situation. Hiring for top level people is up. ``We're definitely still hiring. Especially algorithmic search. If you know anyone looking, tell them we're hiring.'' -- Yahoo recruiter.
But below the top level, companies are laying people off.
The dumb thing is using the social security number as a password. SSANs shouldn't be secret.
What we need is a law that says that any organization that uses a SSAN as a password does so entirely at its own risk and thereafter cannot take any action whatsoever which would be financially adverse to the holder of the SSAN.
Many candidates don't understand what a race condition is or why long x; Thread 1: x = -1; Thread 2: x = 2; is a race-condition but Thread 1: x = 1; Thread 2: x = 2; isn't a race-condition on 32bit architecture with 64bit longs.
I wouldn't hire someone who wrote code that relied on that, unless maybe they were writing deeply embedded signal processing code on a DSP, they absolutely needed the performance, they had a big comment explaining what was going on, and they'd used a timing analyzer to demonstrate they really needed to do it.
Sony's founder, Akio Morita, died in 1999, and the company seems to have been running on empty since then. The current president, Howard Stringer, was hired from CBS. He was really a newsman; he used to produce CBS Reports. He has nine Emmy awards. But he probably shouldn't be running a consumer electronics company. Sony Pictures, maybe.
There's no shortage. Employers just aren't paying enough. If they pay more, supply will increase. No problem.
I know some really good young people in the field, both with CS degrees from Stanford. One is running a hedge fund. One is going to work for a derivatives firm in NYC. And they're both making tons of money. When IBM is willing to match what they're making, they can get people like that.
Most of the "get more women into the field" noise comes from employers wanting to cut costs by paying women less.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy has a good idea, but doesn't understand what to watch for in an EULA. Things like indemnification clauses, limitation of liability, waiving of consumer law rights, requirements to arbitrate in some place favorable to the vendor, and similar clauses need to be flagged. It's worth looking at those. Even within Microsoft's products, the clauses differ considerably. Their products aimed at business tend to have considerably more reasonable terms than the consumer products.
A big problem with Wikipedia itself is that fixing vandalism and keeping out junk is incredibly labor-intensive. It takes a large, active volunteer staff to clean up the junk, and the cleanup backlog is increasing.
Much of the junk is fancruft; articles bands, albums, movies, and games. Most of that stuff is in databases elsewhere, and in better forms. For movie info, go to IMDB, not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the wrong tool for database-like material; all those album to song to band to performer links have to be updated manually, and many of the links are missing or inconsistent. This is a job for a database, not people.
Of the "million articles", a sizable fraction fall into those categories. Games generate vast numbers of entries; there are individual Wikipedia articles for each and every Pokemon character from #1 to #386. Just about every character, location, and object in Star [Wars|Trek|Gate] has an article. Most of them start life badly formatted and without verifiable information, again increasing the cleanup backlog. Really, in any given day, very few new articles about serious subjects are added to Wikipedia.
On serious subjects, the problem is length and lack of coherency. Someone writes something reasonable, others add to it, with or without enough knowledge to do so, and over time the article becomes long and repetitive. On subjects where books can be, and have been, written, this is a real problem.
It's amazing that the Wikipedia process works as well as it does.
In theory, Ethernet on coax should be stable under heavy load. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn't, due to defective design of some widely used interface chips. Here's the actual story. See this note by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC
The worst device was the SEEQ 8003 chip, found in some Cisco and SGI devices. Due to an error in the design of its hardware state machine, it would turn on its transmitter for a few nanoseconds in the middle of an interframe gap. This noise caused other machines on the LAN to restart their interframe gap timers and ignore the next packet, if it followed closely enough. This happened even if the SEEQ chip was neither the sender or the receiver of the packets involved. So as soon as you plugged one of these things into a LAN, throughput went down, even if it wasn't doing anything. A network analyzer wouldn't even see the false collision; this was at too low a level.
This was tough to find. Wes Irish worked on the problem by arranging for both ends of Xerox PARC's main coax LAN to terminate in one office. Then he hooked up a LeCroy digital oscilloscope to both ends. Then he tapped into a machine with an Ethernet controller to bring out a signal when the problem was detected and trigger the oscilloscope. Then, when the problem occured, he had a copy of the entire packet as an analog waveform stored in the scope. This could then be printed with a thermal printer and gone over by hand.
Because he had the same signal from both ends of the wire, the wierd SEEQ interference mentioned above appeared time-shifted due to speed of light lag, making it clear that the interference was from a different node than the one that was supposed to be sending. You could measure the time shift and figure out from where on the cable the noise was being inserted. Which he did.
It took some convincing to get manufacturers to admit there was a problem. It helped that Wes was at Xerox PARC, where Ethernet was born. I went up there to see his work, and once I saw the waveforms, I was convinced. There was much faxing of waveform printouts for a few months, and some vendors were rather unhappy, but the problem got fixed.
So that's why.
There's no technical reason for the game art not to be as good as the box art. Today's graphics cards can do the job. Game reviews should downgrade games where the game art is worse than the box art, because there just isn't an excuse for that any more.
Then we had click-through, and advertisers paid for "clicks". Now we have "click glut", very few clicks lead to a sale, and the bottom is falling out of "clicks".
What we're going to end up with is something where advertisers only pay for actual sales. This creates accounting problems, but Yahoo Store and parts of the porno industry already have it working.
The main thing keeping the click trade going is Google. When the day comes that Google stops paying affiliates for clicks, others will follow and the domain spam industry will fall apart. This will probably happen right after Google gets a payment system in place.
A band, "Hollywood Undead", has apparently made itself famous by promoting itself on Myspace. They have three million hits in Google. And some of them aren't even from Myspace.
They hate that. But it gets results.
Especially when you say "This call is being recorded for quality control purposes".
If they insist on running Microsoft software on kiosks, they should be running XP Embedded, where you only configure in the stuff you need, not the kitchen-sink approach Microsoft uses in their desktop distros.
Finor Associates has an entertaining product list. Highlights.
It's a full-service money laundering operation. The IRS ought to be investigating those guys.
IGDA used to be the "Independent Game Developers Association". It's not a trade union; it's the association for people who want to break into the industry.
The description of this thing as a "forcefield" seems to come from this Fox News clip (big SWF file.)". It's not. It's an active defense system that shoots small rockets back at incoming weapons. Exactly what it shoots back is not being revealed. UPI has a better article.
Useful article on what's wrong with game development appear in Game Developer regularly, in the "postmortem" section. Those are worth reading. This is not.
The early burnout problem is a major issue at Electronic Arts. But they're not even in compliance with California labor law, and there's a class action on their unlawful nonpayment of overtime. That one (for artists) has been settled, with EA paying $15 million, and two other cases are pending. That's real news. This article isn't.
True, this is more like "they finally got that thing working"? The ABL dates back to the 1980s. These things are starting to look useful, though, now that everybody is throwing low-rent rockets around battlefields. This provides a way to thin them out, without using an expensive Patriot to take out a cheap rocket. The smaller model in the C-130 is likely to be more useful than the big one in the 747.
Read the Wall Street Journal for guidance on how to talk about business. The Journal covers most aspects of business, yet there's very little "corporate speak". If you follow their style, you'll come across well to upper management, all of whom, unless totally incompetent, read it daily.
There's an objective standard of market concentration. It was used by the U. S. Department of Justice to enforce antitrust laws until Bush came in.
Amazingly, it's actually working.
Because SF is a walking city, with 13,000 homeless people and more low-end crooks. In SJ, you need a car. Trying to rob someone in a mall and running away on foot just isn't going to work.
San Francisco's problem is that the police deparment is ineptly managed and the cops' union has too much power. Internal discipline and management are weak. SF needs someone like Brandon, but he's busy trying to fix the LAPD, after fixing the NYPD.
The real reason for laptop theft is that there's not much else portable to steal any more. Used TVs? Forget it. Used computers? Can't give them away. Jewelry? Crooks can't tell a diamond from a cubic zircon. Watches? A joke. Cash? Nobody carries that much since ATMs came in. Credit cards? Hard to fence. Cars? Anti-theft systems now smarter than low-end crooks. Stealing from stores? All have cameras now. Banks? Forget it.
It's a tough time for the low end of the criminal class.
But below the top level, companies are laying people off.
What we need is a law that says that any organization that uses a SSAN as a password does so entirely at its own risk and thereafter cannot take any action whatsoever which would be financially adverse to the holder of the SSAN.
The Library of Congress online catalog has more breadth than most of those, and it's not full of fancruft.
If the Shuttle and ISS programs weren't on the verge of collapse, this might be allowable. But NASA needs focus, not marketing.
I wouldn't hire someone who wrote code that relied on that, unless maybe they were writing deeply embedded signal processing code on a DSP, they absolutely needed the performance, they had a big comment explaining what was going on, and they'd used a timing analyzer to demonstrate they really needed to do it.
Sony's founder, Akio Morita, died in 1999, and the company seems to have been running on empty since then. The current president, Howard Stringer, was hired from CBS. He was really a newsman; he used to produce CBS Reports. He has nine Emmy awards. But he probably shouldn't be running a consumer electronics company. Sony Pictures, maybe.
I know some really good young people in the field, both with CS degrees from Stanford. One is running a hedge fund. One is going to work for a derivatives firm in NYC. And they're both making tons of money. When IBM is willing to match what they're making, they can get people like that.
Most of the "get more women into the field" noise comes from employers wanting to cut costs by paying women less.