Smith said the principles largely come from things Microsoft picked up in the consent decree the software giant signed in settling its landmark antitrust battle with the federal government, but that more recent developments led to the crafting of some of the other principles.
Am I the only person who saw this?
Translation: We had to make some changes to keep from getting hit by more massive lawsuits, and then thanks to the EU ruling we had to make yet more changes. But we're going to act like it was voluntary because it looks better.
Where in there is "we've figured out some things that customers want and we're going to provide them"? No, this is all "let's keep from being sued again".
I, personally, buy a camera with the goal of taking good-quality pictures. I buy a memory card with the goal of storing a lot of stuff. I will admit that transfer speed is on the priority list . . . it's just not very high on the priority list. So this isn't anything like "buying a Ferrari and putting normal gas in it". This is more like "buying a Ferrari and eating a McDonald's burger in it". It doesn't have much effect on what you bought the item primarily for.
(I mean, unless you get secret sauce on the seats. I think the analogy's broken down now, though.)
I almost always agree with this. I have the Three-Game Rule. Once there are three games I really want for a system, I buy it.
It's looking like the Wii is going to have three games on launch day that I really want, though - so, if I get the option, I think it might be the first console I've ever pre-ordered. I've got to admit, I'm excited about that one.
The difference is whether you consider each application to be its own layer, and not homogenous with other applications, or whether you consider each window to be its own layer, possibly interlacing different applications.
I personally prefer the window-layer approach, so I'd agree that this is not the desired behavior, but I don't know what the public in general would expect. In any case, don't expect to get a bunch of replies agreeing with you - as I write this you've already got one person disagreeing. What you have here isn't a Correct Semantics question. It's a Preferred Semantics question.
Possible solution: pay for a nice fat ADSL line and stream the video, in realtime, to a server located in a different state.
"Sorry dude, your pictures are in Texas by now. Put the gun down and walk out and we won't prosecute, but you could nuke the entire block and you wouldn't get rid of that footage."
Or just claim you've done that. Might work, might not.
Using procexp, the program that you suggest, tells me that my computer is currently using 7% of its CPU.
3% of that is Winamp, which I did not bother to pause. 1% of that is VNC, which I am running in the background. 2% is "System" - I don't know what this consists of, but considering that I have three windows updating frequently, I don't mind too much. 1% appears to be getting lost in rounding error. Note that this is an Intel system which predates hyperthreading. It is not exactly a powerhouse.
I suggest fixing your computer - whatever's wrong with it, it's not Windows's fault.
I'm not arguing that at all:) It's also easy to make a game so hard that it's not fun. Or make unlockables so slow that nobody wants to get them. Or make them either too important (things you *must* realistically accomplish to continue the game, but that are considered "optional") or not important enough ("hey, look, you just completed the hardest puzzle in the game! Here's a little red bow in your character's hair. Yay! The rest of the game is still exactly like it was when you bought it.")
But that's game balance - not game design. My claim is that a feeling of progress is vital for most games, and unlockables of one kind or another are one way to give a feeling of progress. Everything past that is just how to implement and balance it.
This demonstrates brilliantly that most people don't actually know what they want.
Games could include everything from step 1. But then there's no sense of accomplishment. There's no sense of "oh man, I'm about to unlock/progress/complete". It's just a bunch of puzzles that you can ignore if you like. I've seen games released like this. They're not fun. Nobody plays them.
Even the games he mentioned - Battlefield 2 and GTA - have a sense of progression. In Battlefield 2 you can get better at the game and better at defeating people - since it's competitive, this drive is a lot stronger than in singleplayer games. Not only that, but the game *does* let you unlock "new weapons" if you play enough. In GTA, completing missions occasionally unlocks new cars and abilities. In the latest GTA there's even "skill levels" that you gain through repeating actions!
If he wants everything to be accessible, he should look for cheat codes or trainers. They exist for practically every game out there. But he'll be bored.
You're correct, but that's the same problem any other form of comedy has. The same joke just gets tired. Sitcoms aren't immune to this. It's not really any harder in games, besides the fact that you maybe need more of it because the game is longer. On the other hand, you've also got a year or two to write it. Win some, lose some.
There *are* funny games. Psychonauts comes to mind.
In a year or so I'm going to be in a position to hire people. And yeah, I'm going to look at their blogs if I can find them. I might object to people talking about how they plan to fuck up every job they have, or chatting amiably about how much money they stole from their last employer, and so on and so forth.
But assuming they're not an obvious asshole, I'd actually *prefer* employees who have a sense of fun and a life. I'd rather see a blog talking, side-by-side, about work and home life and parties - or even just home life and parties - than one chronicling the minute details of work.
Maybe I'm unique in wanting employees that are interesting smart skilled people, but if you immediately throw out everyone who's interesting, you end up with a company full of boring people. And that's not the company I want to work at. Or run.
So, yeah. Posting those party pics might mean you can't work in middle management at Wal-Mart. And if that's a serious problem for you, then . . . I guess maybe you shouldn't post the party pics. But there are companies out there that don't care so much.
"If we were to charge Google for their traffic, it wouldn't amount to anything"
Not if you charged them a *whole lot*. They're not talking about charging a reasonable fee per gigabyte. They're talking about charging hundreds or thousands of times more than a reasonable fee per gigabyte.
"Let's see. Google gets clicks on search results. And some of these clicks are worth as much as twenty dollars! And your average page of search results is 50k large. So that comes out to . . . almost half a million dollars per gigabyte! We'll charge them a hundred thousand per gigabyte. It's a great deal for them!"
I'm not *entirely* sure I agree with that - their job is to enforce the law by prosecuting criminals, yes, and so I'd expect them to be making noise about laws that would make their job easier. Nobody's going to do that for them. If there's a simple easy law that can be passed to make the DoJ's job easier, without any bad side effects, I'd want the DoJ to be trying to get it accepted.
Not that this *is* that law, note. Just that I can see a way they could lobby and be justified.
This has actually been done for a *long* time with automotive parts - see Core Charge. Usually you can "break even" on this by returning your old broken part at the same time as you buy the new one.
(Note that partially this exists because "broken" car parts can be easily refurbished and resold, so they really are buying a moderately-defective part back from you. I'm not sure how true that is with computers.)
Your "solution" isn't a solution. If I say "man, cars pollute a lot:(" and you say "well that's easy, just quit your job and stay home!", you haven't solved the problem, you're just babbling.
Figure out the most effective way of accomplishing what you want to accomplish, and do that.
Sometimes this will be college. Sometimes it won't be. Sometimes you'll get partway through college and realize it's no longer the best way to spend your time and money.
I've dropped out of college twice. The first because I wanted to do something useful. I went back to finish my degree and lasted one semester - it was not worth the time or money. Now I work at Google and put together plans to start my own game company.
Would a college degree help? Possibly. I won't argue that. Would a college degree help enough to justify the thousands of dollars of money and years of time? No fucking way.
This is my road. It's not for everyone. If you want to go into academia, stay in college. If you want to go into physics research, or biotech, stay in college. But for a lot of other things, it might not be the best move.
My advice to smart people: Think about it seriously and make a decision based on your own situation. You're smart, right? You should be able to do this.
Transfer speed should increase as the square root of the platter density, since platter density is area and reading is linear. So this drive should be about 22% faster, in terms of maximum sustained transfer rate, than a 500gb drive. 22% isn't enough to justify (or not justify) another cache doubling, so let's do some interpolation. The last generation of drives - the 200gb or so generation - tended to have 8mb. The newest 500gb generation have 16mb. If we assume that the 200gb/8mb drives were the "correct" amount, we find that the 500gb/16mb drives were overcached (albeit by only around 3mb), and these are correct again.
They're becoming IO-bound far faster than cache-bound. It takes literally hours to read an entire 500gb hard drive at this point. The cache, on the other hand, is staying roughly on par with the IO speed, which seems like a more natural combination.
Out of curiosity, where does unrecognized traffic fall in this spectrum? For example, realtime games, and p2p on nonstandard ports, which are indistinguishable from each other.
(Note that I acknowledge there's no perfect solution to this, but I have seen systems that put "unknown ports" at the bottom, making it unusable for any realtime system that the admins didn't know about.)
Here's a question. What does it cost the IRS if taxpayer data is stolen?
Oh yeah. Squat. Why *should* they care? It's no skin off their back.
If our government wanted to make sure this didn't happen, they'd fine the IRS every time there was a security breach. In fact, they'd fine the IRS just for having bad security. And then things would improve.
'Course, in reality, why would they do that? There's no reason our government would want to hurt the IRS in any way.
Really, what should be happening is the people of America suing the IRS for not guarding our information properly. I wonder how *that* lawsuit would go.
Here's the fundamental issue: If you want someone to behave in a certain way, you have to make it worth their while. Right now the IRS has no incentive for keeping our info safe. Want to change that? Change it at the source.
I almost never do with games. I've found many game manuals contain massive spoilers, even going so far as to layout out all the motivations and goals of the characters. If there's supposed to be a plot twist, I don't want to know about it. I want to play it.
If the game isn't a plotful game (Mario Kart, Smash Bros) I will. And often I will once I've beaten the game. Sometimes I will if I think there's something I'm missing with the controls - but even then I carefully avoid any pages full of game description or character info.
Slashdot Mirror
Smith said the principles largely come from things Microsoft picked up in the consent decree the software giant signed in settling its landmark antitrust battle with the federal government, but that more recent developments led to the crafting of some of the other principles.
Am I the only person who saw this?
Translation: We had to make some changes to keep from getting hit by more massive lawsuits, and then thanks to the EU ruling we had to make yet more changes. But we're going to act like it was voluntary because it looks better.
Where in there is "we've figured out some things that customers want and we're going to provide them"? No, this is all "let's keep from being sued again".
I, personally, buy a camera with the goal of taking good-quality pictures. I buy a memory card with the goal of storing a lot of stuff. I will admit that transfer speed is on the priority list . . . it's just not very high on the priority list. So this isn't anything like "buying a Ferrari and putting normal gas in it". This is more like "buying a Ferrari and eating a McDonald's burger in it". It doesn't have much effect on what you bought the item primarily for.
(I mean, unless you get secret sauce on the seats. I think the analogy's broken down now, though.)
but nobody ever wanted to.
Ever read an opinion column in a newspaper?
Ever listened to someone standing on a crate in a park, lecturing passersby? (Sometimes they're even coherent.)
Ever watched a talk show?
Personally, I think "get a few hundred or thousand people listening to what I think" is actually very high on many people's lists.
Alternatively, for 99 cents at Wal-Mart, you can get an entire bag full of imitation baby tribbles.
(Look for "cotton balls").
I almost always agree with this. I have the Three-Game Rule. Once there are three games I really want for a system, I buy it.
It's looking like the Wii is going to have three games on launch day that I really want, though - so, if I get the option, I think it might be the first console I've ever pre-ordered. I've got to admit, I'm excited about that one.
The difference is whether you consider each application to be its own layer, and not homogenous with other applications, or whether you consider each window to be its own layer, possibly interlacing different applications.
I personally prefer the window-layer approach, so I'd agree that this is not the desired behavior, but I don't know what the public in general would expect. In any case, don't expect to get a bunch of replies agreeing with you - as I write this you've already got one person disagreeing. What you have here isn't a Correct Semantics question. It's a Preferred Semantics question.
Possible solution: pay for a nice fat ADSL line and stream the video, in realtime, to a server located in a different state.
"Sorry dude, your pictures are in Texas by now. Put the gun down and walk out and we won't prosecute, but you could nuke the entire block and you wouldn't get rid of that footage."
Or just claim you've done that. Might work, might not.
Using procexp, the program that you suggest, tells me that my computer is currently using 7% of its CPU.
3% of that is Winamp, which I did not bother to pause. 1% of that is VNC, which I am running in the background. 2% is "System" - I don't know what this consists of, but considering that I have three windows updating frequently, I don't mind too much. 1% appears to be getting lost in rounding error. Note that this is an Intel system which predates hyperthreading. It is not exactly a powerhouse.
I suggest fixing your computer - whatever's wrong with it, it's not Windows's fault.
I'm not arguing that at all :) It's also easy to make a game so hard that it's not fun. Or make unlockables so slow that nobody wants to get them. Or make them either too important (things you *must* realistically accomplish to continue the game, but that are considered "optional") or not important enough ("hey, look, you just completed the hardest puzzle in the game! Here's a little red bow in your character's hair. Yay! The rest of the game is still exactly like it was when you bought it.")
But that's game balance - not game design. My claim is that a feeling of progress is vital for most games, and unlockables of one kind or another are one way to give a feeling of progress. Everything past that is just how to implement and balance it.
This demonstrates brilliantly that most people don't actually know what they want.
Games could include everything from step 1. But then there's no sense of accomplishment. There's no sense of "oh man, I'm about to unlock/progress/complete". It's just a bunch of puzzles that you can ignore if you like. I've seen games released like this. They're not fun. Nobody plays them.
Even the games he mentioned - Battlefield 2 and GTA - have a sense of progression. In Battlefield 2 you can get better at the game and better at defeating people - since it's competitive, this drive is a lot stronger than in singleplayer games. Not only that, but the game *does* let you unlock "new weapons" if you play enough. In GTA, completing missions occasionally unlocks new cars and abilities. In the latest GTA there's even "skill levels" that you gain through repeating actions!
If he wants everything to be accessible, he should look for cheat codes or trainers. They exist for practically every game out there. But he'll be bored.
You're correct, but that's the same problem any other form of comedy has. The same joke just gets tired. Sitcoms aren't immune to this. It's not really any harder in games, besides the fact that you maybe need more of it because the game is longer. On the other hand, you've also got a year or two to write it. Win some, lose some.
There *are* funny games. Psychonauts comes to mind.
In a year or so I'm going to be in a position to hire people. And yeah, I'm going to look at their blogs if I can find them. I might object to people talking about how they plan to fuck up every job they have, or chatting amiably about how much money they stole from their last employer, and so on and so forth.
But assuming they're not an obvious asshole, I'd actually *prefer* employees who have a sense of fun and a life. I'd rather see a blog talking, side-by-side, about work and home life and parties - or even just home life and parties - than one chronicling the minute details of work.
Maybe I'm unique in wanting employees that are interesting smart skilled people, but if you immediately throw out everyone who's interesting, you end up with a company full of boring people. And that's not the company I want to work at. Or run.
So, yeah. Posting those party pics might mean you can't work in middle management at Wal-Mart. And if that's a serious problem for you, then . . . I guess maybe you shouldn't post the party pics. But there are companies out there that don't care so much.
unlike that short about the little robot who wakes up in a room on a spaceship
I seem to have missed this one. Any chance you could hunt down a link, if it is that cool? I don't know enough about it to find it on Google.
"Regular federal, state, and local government entities that provide public services are not covered by WARN."
Man, sometimes I love our government.
Fuckfaces.
"If we were to charge Google for their traffic, it wouldn't amount to anything"
Not if you charged them a *whole lot*. They're not talking about charging a reasonable fee per gigabyte. They're talking about charging hundreds or thousands of times more than a reasonable fee per gigabyte.
"Let's see. Google gets clicks on search results. And some of these clicks are worth as much as twenty dollars! And your average page of search results is 50k large. So that comes out to . . . almost half a million dollars per gigabyte! We'll charge them a hundred thousand per gigabyte. It's a great deal for them!"
(Numbers pulled out of my ass.)
Yeah, but the last time I checked, North Dakota *was* in the US.
I'm not *entirely* sure I agree with that - their job is to enforce the law by prosecuting criminals, yes, and so I'd expect them to be making noise about laws that would make their job easier. Nobody's going to do that for them. If there's a simple easy law that can be passed to make the DoJ's job easier, without any bad side effects, I'd want the DoJ to be trying to get it accepted.
Not that this *is* that law, note. Just that I can see a way they could lobby and be justified.
This has actually been done for a *long* time with automotive parts - see Core Charge. Usually you can "break even" on this by returning your old broken part at the same time as you buy the new one.
(Note that partially this exists because "broken" car parts can be easily refurbished and resold, so they really are buying a moderately-defective part back from you. I'm not sure how true that is with computers.)
But maybe we want to.
:(" and you say "well that's easy, just quit your job and stay home!", you haven't solved the problem, you're just babbling.
Your "solution" isn't a solution. If I say "man, cars pollute a lot
Figure out the most effective way of accomplishing what you want to accomplish, and do that.
Sometimes this will be college. Sometimes it won't be. Sometimes you'll get partway through college and realize it's no longer the best way to spend your time and money.
I've dropped out of college twice. The first because I wanted to do something useful. I went back to finish my degree and lasted one semester - it was not worth the time or money. Now I work at Google and put together plans to start my own game company.
Would a college degree help? Possibly. I won't argue that. Would a college degree help enough to justify the thousands of dollars of money and years of time? No fucking way.
This is my road. It's not for everyone. If you want to go into academia, stay in college. If you want to go into physics research, or biotech, stay in college. But for a lot of other things, it might not be the best move.
My advice to smart people: Think about it seriously and make a decision based on your own situation. You're smart, right? You should be able to do this.
Transfer speed should increase as the square root of the platter density, since platter density is area and reading is linear. So this drive should be about 22% faster, in terms of maximum sustained transfer rate, than a 500gb drive. 22% isn't enough to justify (or not justify) another cache doubling, so let's do some interpolation. The last generation of drives - the 200gb or so generation - tended to have 8mb. The newest 500gb generation have 16mb. If we assume that the 200gb/8mb drives were the "correct" amount, we find that the 500gb/16mb drives were overcached (albeit by only around 3mb), and these are correct again.
I'd say it's close enough.
They're becoming IO-bound far faster than cache-bound. It takes literally hours to read an entire 500gb hard drive at this point. The cache, on the other hand, is staying roughly on par with the IO speed, which seems like a more natural combination.
Out of curiosity, where does unrecognized traffic fall in this spectrum? For example, realtime games, and p2p on nonstandard ports, which are indistinguishable from each other.
(Note that I acknowledge there's no perfect solution to this, but I have seen systems that put "unknown ports" at the bottom, making it unusable for any realtime system that the admins didn't know about.)
Here's a question. What does it cost the IRS if taxpayer data is stolen?
Oh yeah. Squat. Why *should* they care? It's no skin off their back.
If our government wanted to make sure this didn't happen, they'd fine the IRS every time there was a security breach. In fact, they'd fine the IRS just for having bad security. And then things would improve.
'Course, in reality, why would they do that? There's no reason our government would want to hurt the IRS in any way.
Really, what should be happening is the people of America suing the IRS for not guarding our information properly. I wonder how *that* lawsuit would go.
Here's the fundamental issue: If you want someone to behave in a certain way, you have to make it worth their while. Right now the IRS has no incentive for keeping our info safe. Want to change that? Change it at the source.
I almost never do with games. I've found many game manuals contain massive spoilers, even going so far as to layout out all the motivations and goals of the characters. If there's supposed to be a plot twist, I don't want to know about it. I want to play it.
If the game isn't a plotful game (Mario Kart, Smash Bros) I will. And often I will once I've beaten the game. Sometimes I will if I think there's something I'm missing with the controls - but even then I carefully avoid any pages full of game description or character info.