No really. The television news services are really only interested in whose been raped/killed/imprisoned, and when it comes to foreign affairs, they show the nasty stuff more than anything.
if ten people out of thousands in a protest start to fight, or do something like break windows, *thats* what they show, and they call everyone there anarchists. Honestly, it makes me sick.
- Obligatory note that broadband in the UK is even worse.
Rubbish. I pay £12 for an unlimited 8mb connection. Really unlimited, we have caned it for three years now, sometimes over 200Gb a month, and its been fine.
Yes, but those are *new* games. We've already seen Quake like 15 times. We don't need more Quake, but if you're going to make more Quake, you have to make it *damned* good to compete against all the other Quake out there. (Much if which is also free, in the sense that matters.)
This is a viewpoint I hadn't considered. I saw this and thought initially of the great programming experience the people involved would be having, not of the lack of originality.
Why should it try and compete? They don't have the money, true, but so what?
Did the people who wrote Narbaculer Drop have much money? Nope, did they create an awesome game that got picked up and remade as a hugely succesful commercial product? Yep.
Tried World of Goo yet? That was low budget, almost certainly less graphically pretty than would have been the case if they'd had more cash, but the game is a commercial success.
Good graphics and funding won't create good ideas. For that you need a passion for the subject, artistic ability and lots of experience with games in general.
Possibly the guys writing it may be getting more out of the experience then the people who play it, but thats because they are also getting exactly the skillset that would put them in a good position to apply for positions at games development companies.
I find a lot of younger players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor. Its hard getting past that. My son has managed it, but only because he was trying to 'get' why I still play games that were written before he was born.
The simplest answer it "don't like something in a project? Join the project and improve it". Alas this isn't usually what happens, because for every person with the skills, there are a thousand with loud ideas and critisism but no actual ability. Trying to clear the cruft from the mass of potential project members is a problem that can make you just reject everyone.
I know, I had the same problem. After receiving a huge amount of offers to assist in my project, I only found one person with the right attitude and skill. Most came in with grand plans, and then disappeared before doing anything more than taking up my time with emails.
Alan Moore's Judge Dredd was a major part of my staple fiction diet during my youth. Those stories were dark, amusing, insightful, prophetic, and downright nasty and callous in places.
All in all excellent stuff, with some stories that still make me dig out my collection. Yup, still got every one up in my loft, as bought from the newsagent each week as they came out.
Never read Watchment though, to be honest I hadn't heard of it till this movie. My main fascination is SF pulp from the fifties and sixties though, so I kind of hang out elsewhere in the SF biosphere.
How does it compare to Judge Dredd? (anyone who thinks I mean that godawful film needn't reply..)
this is primarily used to see who is in the building if there is a fire, so I'm not really sure that the "OMG, BIG BROTHER!1!!!!1!!" spin is warranted.
Especially since they have not exactly kept it quiet.
Any system to be used in the event of a fire *cannot* be optional, or under the control of those subjected to it. Thats a fact, one learned the hard way in the past, that cannot be argued. Give people the option of not doing something, and they won't, at least not always, because 'nothings going to happen'.
Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.
Most likely it was someone who looked at the amount of physical registers needed for the current system, thought an electronical system would be cheaper/more efficient, and it got pushed through. I agree with the fire safety side,. Its a shame that people will likely need to die in fire even to start an 'urgent review' of the system if it gets widely adopted.
Whenever I read of things like this I'm always reminded of the university office of a lecturer whose research speciality was issues around the paperless office. Her room was so full of piles of papers, boxes of papers, books and other processed tree junk that she only had around a third of her desk available for her laptop. She also had *really* nice legs, but thats off message somewhat..
The issue is not whether to legitimise it, the issue is whether the industry trying to kill the second hand market will succeed in getting enough corporate mindshare to have it thought of as a bad thing.
Every major high street game pc/console game retailer I have seen has a secondhand section. Amazon sell used books too, another practice that printed word distributers tried to kill off (a bizarre strategy in itself).
This limited activation DRM thing is part of the idea that secondhand game sales can be prevented, but it still doesn't work. All it means is those games become useless to someone in the habit of selling off their used games to buy new ones (I used to), so they tend not to purchase them new either.
What if people make software like "Hello World v5" or "My First For Loop v2.1" just for the tax credit?
And don't tell me it requires LOC counts or a certain team size or number of downloads or user base. Because I'm sure that people wanting a tax credit wouldn't mind teaming up...
I doubt that. More likely they intend to make its detection and negation easier.
After all, the best language man can devise can only work as well as the coders who utilise it. If they are forced to cut corners in order to meet deadlines, errors will creep in, and we all know the urge to be first to profit is a prime reason for such things.
When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.
However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.
Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high. This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.
As far as "new programmers" go, I would say (i) if they can't easily get through the included Emacs tutorial, programming is probably not going to work out for them (ii) they should not start off in Emacs anyway. Emacs solves a lot of problems but until you've written your first big program you're unlikely to have much appreciation for its features.
I get where you're coming from but when I was a post grad teaching first year students my experience was that that they found Emacs to be uncomfortable and used it only when the tutorial sheets required them too. Most of the time the dominant linux text editor in use by students I taught was kwrite.
In fact, I have basically no respect for those who discount it.
You probably can code circles around me. But in the end, the customer or user only sees the interface.
Actually you've hit on a major problem of programers that we don't like to talk about (well, except me, obviously..). The thing is, GUI design is a complex art, one that takes a long time to learn to do well, so its hard to be good both at visual interfaces and the often very complex code that they control.
I know this from my own work. I'm a pretty good coder (gosh, how modest of me). I can write code to just about anything, and charge a pretty penny to do so, but my ability to code a user interface is rather poor. Sure I know all the theory, but there's something extra you need, that 'eye for the visually pleasing' thats hard to cultivate unless user interfaces are what you do all the time.
I've used plenty of applications where the guy who wrote the backend code also coded the gui, and as a rule the gui is somewhat lacking. This is't just restricted to single coder projects, it also occurs when a project is full of able back end coders, and they build the gui to suit their own level of ability to use the code.
You can see this if you use Emacs. Nice though that software is in features, the interface is godawful, and actively prevents anyone new to computer usage or programing from using it.
Why help support a company that treats you like a filthy criminal ? In your position I would simply download the torrent and be done with it.
Because I want the audibooks writer and performer to get paid for my enjoyment of their shared work. Its as simple as that. Everything else is just people trying to shove their agendas down my throat.
Audible have already cornered the market in DRM encumbered audiobooks. I've been a regular customer of theirs for years, buying dozens of titles. Yet I have not a single drm file in my collection, thanks to those nice people who packaged up the 'how to strip Audible DRM' set and stuck it on piratebay that is.
I'd prefer if they had no DRM to start with, but for the moment they have lots of titles I want, so I just pipe the downloaded files through the stripping process and discard their drm. It takes all of 20 minutes usually.
If however they changed their DRM to make it harder to crack, I would cancel my account that day and never go back.
It should be obvious by now that proprietary, off-the-shelf, software is on its way out. Off-the-shelf software only amounts for around 10% of the total software production
Um, what? proprietary software is nowhere near being on its last elbows my friend. Ok the old model of sale of software as a product is getting, well, old, and software as a service is taking off.
Open source is suited for that, but companies providing such services are managing quite well with proprietary code too. I know of several that mix open source and closed source in their product quite happily. Its not a problem, provided no licence terms are broken, and to be frank its not hard to manage that.
As for Microsoft? Anyone who thinks they'll just say 'oh, we lost, time to pack up and go home' is out of their tiny mind. A company with a turnover and product range like theirs isn't going away any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
No really. The television news services are really only interested in whose been raped/killed/imprisoned, and when it comes to foreign affairs, they show the nasty stuff more than anything.
if ten people out of thousands in a protest start to fight, or do something like break windows, *thats* what they show, and they call everyone there anarchists. Honestly, it makes me sick.
My last Employer actually expected me to write code in the morning! We are talking pre 10am here. I still have nightmares...
I agee completelly with your sentiment. (This post was brought to you by the new iPod shuffle).
- Obligatory note that broadband in the UK is even worse.
Rubbish. I pay £12 for an unlimited 8mb connection. Really unlimited, we have caned it for three years now, sometimes over 200Gb a month, and its been fine.
I use Gmail, so the spam I get is nicely packed into the spam folder.
I don't just clear it though. An amusing minute can be had reading the subject lines they come up with before hitting the delete button.
Yes, but those are *new* games. We've already seen Quake like 15 times. We don't need more Quake, but if you're going to make more Quake, you have to make it *damned* good to compete against all the other Quake out there. (Much if which is also free, in the sense that matters.)
This is a viewpoint I hadn't considered. I saw this and thought initially of the great programming experience the people involved would be having, not of the lack of originality.
Why should it try and compete? They don't have the money, true, but so what?
Did the people who wrote Narbaculer Drop have much money? Nope, did they create an awesome game that got picked up and remade as a hugely succesful commercial product? Yep.
Tried World of Goo yet? That was low budget, almost certainly less graphically pretty than would have been the case if they'd had more cash, but the game is a commercial success.
Good graphics and funding won't create good ideas. For that you need a passion for the subject, artistic ability and lots of experience with games in general.
Possibly the guys writing it may be getting more out of the experience then the people who play it, but thats because they are also getting exactly the skillset that would put them in a good position to apply for positions at games development companies.
I find a lot of younger players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor. Its hard getting past that. My son has managed it, but only because he was trying to 'get' why I still play games that were written before he was born.
The simplest answer it "don't like something in a project? Join the project and improve it". Alas this isn't usually what happens, because for every person with the skills, there are a thousand with loud ideas and critisism but no actual ability. Trying to clear the cruft from the mass of potential project members is a problem that can make you just reject everyone.
I know, I had the same problem. After receiving a huge amount of offers to assist in my project, I only found one person with the right attitude and skill. Most came in with grand plans, and then disappeared before doing anything more than taking up my time with emails.
It might be easier if you ask them who paid BEFORE they are swinging from the rope. Unless you plan on hanging them by their ankles.
Unless the names or the people who paid were 'grnfrgleArghhhBurble' or 'snap'.
He co-wrote it. I have the comics here.
Alan Moore's Judge Dredd was a major part of my staple fiction diet during my youth. Those stories were dark, amusing, insightful, prophetic, and downright nasty and callous in places.
All in all excellent stuff, with some stories that still make me dig out my collection.
Yup, still got every one up in my loft, as bought from the newsagent each week as they came out.
Never read Watchment though, to be honest I hadn't heard of it till this movie. My main fascination is SF pulp from the fifties and sixties though, so I kind of hang out elsewhere in the SF biosphere.
How does it compare to Judge Dredd? (anyone who thinks I mean that godawful film needn't reply..)
this is primarily used to see who is in the building if there is a fire, so I'm not really sure that the "OMG, BIG BROTHER!1!!!!1!!" spin is warranted.
Especially since they have not exactly kept it quiet.
Any system to be used in the event of a fire *cannot* be optional, or under the control of those subjected to it. Thats a fact, one learned the hard way in the past, that cannot be argued. Give people the option of not doing something, and they won't, at least not always, because 'nothings going to happen'.
Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.
Most likely it was someone who looked at the amount of physical registers needed for the current system, thought an electronical system would be cheaper/more efficient, and it got pushed through. I agree with the fire safety side,. Its a shame that people will likely need to die in fire even to start an 'urgent review' of the system if it gets widely adopted.
Whenever I read of things like this I'm always reminded of the university office of a lecturer whose research speciality was issues around the paperless office. Her room was so full of piles of papers, boxes of papers, books and other processed tree junk that she only had around a third of her desk available for her laptop. She also had *really* nice legs, but thats off message somewhat..
The issue is not whether to legitimise it, the issue is whether the industry trying to kill the second hand market will succeed in getting enough corporate mindshare to have it thought of as a bad thing.
Every major high street game pc/console game retailer I have seen has a secondhand section.
Amazon sell used books too, another practice that printed word distributers tried to kill off (a bizarre strategy in itself).
This limited activation DRM thing is part of the idea that secondhand game sales can be prevented, but it still doesn't work. All it means is those games become useless to someone in the habit of selling off their used games to buy new ones (I used to), so they tend not to purchase them new either.
What if people make software like "Hello World v5" or "My First For Loop v2.1" just for the tax credit?
And don't tell me it requires LOC counts or a certain team size or number of downloads or user base. Because I'm sure that people wanting a tax credit wouldn't mind teaming up...
Did you actually read my post?
The idea sounds excellent in principle, but how do you tell a true open source developer apart from a poser looking to abuse this program?
Release history on a well known open source project hosting site, Sourceforge, Google Code, places like that, or a large easily verifiable team.
And yet we wonder why Kdawson hasn't been reprimanded.
He was reprimanded most severely. That is I mean I think he was. Actually I heard they denied him cake once. Well, someone I know said they read it.
I think.....
I doubt that. More likely they intend to make its detection and negation easier.
After all, the best language man can devise can only work as well as the coders who utilise it. If they are forced to cut corners in order to meet deadlines, errors will creep in, and we all know the urge to be first to profit is a prime reason for such things.
When Europeans first started to exert control over large areas of the Australian coast, they put a stop to the Aboriginal practice of starting bushfires annually. This was done to stop such fires damaging their crops and newly built properties for the most part.
However, this frequent and deliberate starting of bushfires had come into being as a survival strategy. By starting such fires often, the Aboriginies avoided having vast, uncontrollable fires that posed a real danger.
Since that time, bushfires have occurred that are exactly what the aboriginal practice had been designed to avoid, and due to the high density of Australia's coastal regions, the dmaage cost and death toll have been high.
This has been noticed to a greater extent recently because the press are looking for things they can point to as evidence of global warming. This alas is no such thing, its just evidence of man failing to adapt to the requirements of an atypical environment.
As far as "new programmers" go, I would say (i) if they can't easily get through the included Emacs tutorial, programming is probably not going to work out for them (ii) they should not start off in Emacs anyway. Emacs solves a lot of problems but until you've written your first big program you're unlikely to have much appreciation for its features.
I get where you're coming from but when I was a post grad teaching first year students my experience was that that they found Emacs to be uncomfortable and used it only when the tutorial sheets required them too. Most of the time the dominant linux text editor in use by students I taught was kwrite.
In fact, I have basically no respect for those who discount it.
You probably can code circles around me. But in the end, the customer or user only sees the interface.
Actually you've hit on a major problem of programers that we don't like to talk about (well, except me, obviously..). The thing is, GUI design is a complex art, one that takes a long time to learn to do well, so its hard to be good both at visual interfaces and the often very complex code that they control.
I know this from my own work. I'm a pretty good coder (gosh, how modest of me). I can write code to just about anything, and charge a pretty penny to do so, but my ability to code a user interface is rather poor. Sure I know all the theory, but there's something extra you need, that 'eye for the visually pleasing' thats hard to cultivate unless user interfaces are what you do all the time.
I've used plenty of applications where the guy who wrote the backend code also coded the gui, and as a rule the gui is somewhat lacking. This is't just restricted to single coder projects, it also occurs when a project is full of able back end coders, and they build the gui to suit their own level of ability to use the code.
You can see this if you use Emacs. Nice though that software is in features, the interface is godawful, and actively prevents anyone new to computer usage or programing from using it.
Why help support a company that treats you like a filthy criminal ? In your position I would simply download the torrent and be done with it.
Because I want the audibooks writer and performer to get paid for my enjoyment of their shared work. Its as simple as that. Everything else is just people trying to shove their agendas down my throat.
Audible have already cornered the market in DRM encumbered audiobooks. I've been a regular customer of theirs for years, buying dozens of titles. Yet I have not a single drm file in my collection, thanks to those nice people who packaged up the 'how to strip Audible DRM' set and stuck it on piratebay that is.
I'd prefer if they had no DRM to start with, but for the moment they have lots of titles I want, so I just pipe the downloaded files through the stripping process and discard their drm. It takes all of 20 minutes usually.
If however they changed their DRM to make it harder to crack, I would cancel my account that day and never go back.
>Ask him how he picks up women.
He says, "marry me and I'll convince total strangers to send you $4000 worth of flowers."
Look, if it works....
It should be obvious by now that proprietary, off-the-shelf, software is on its way out. Off-the-shelf software only amounts for around 10% of the total software production
Um, what? proprietary software is nowhere near being on its last elbows my friend. Ok the old model of sale of software as a product is getting, well, old, and software as a service is taking off.
Open source is suited for that, but companies providing such services are managing quite well with proprietary code too. I know of several that mix open source and closed source in their product quite happily. Its not a problem, provided no licence terms are broken, and to be frank its not hard to manage that.
As for Microsoft? Anyone who thinks they'll just say 'oh, we lost, time to pack up and go home' is out of their tiny mind. A company with a turnover and product range like theirs isn't going away any time soon.