... if German lawmakers ran the game industry? War games are war games because that's what's cool. What kind of boring stuff would Germany rather have its citizens play? Diplomacy games? Peacekeeping games? How about SimBlowhard, the true-to-life foreign relations sim, replete with advanced spin-doctor AI?
Any moment now they're going to put up a see-I-told-you-so article citing the SCO case as "irrefutable proof" that Linux hackers are intellectual property thieves, and touting Windows 2000 for "real" enterprise server use.
That is, of course, once they fix the Microsoft database which drives their site...
I daresay that with the exception of certain niche application markets (games come to mind), software hasn't really gotten better as a result of the proprietary software development model. What happens is, a certain application gets about as good as it's going to for its particular problem domain. Word gets as useful as it's going to get for about 95% of the users, and then it "jumps the shark" -- becomes more bloated, cumbersome, and expensive to use, but Microsoft marketing promises new features and "enhancements" with little to no useful value, to keep everyone upgrading, and what's worse, switches the interface around every few releases or so, confusing the heck out of users.
Lest you think I'm picking on Microsoft here, other major software vendors, such as Adobe, Autodesk (another C-Dilla offender), and probably even Intuit, practice the same techniques. It's not about making better software, it's about making money. That's why you have a software business.
Garnet Hertz is a lecturer at the University of Regina Department of Media Production & Studies, and is artist-in-residence at Soil Digital Media Suite, Regina, Canada. Hertz's current work involves the development of embedded webservers on miniature pill-sized microprocessors, and analysis of these objects in the framework of physical computing and the history of human-created semi-living beings: the golem, robot, cyborg, genetically modified organisms and the Romantic-Era experiments of Luigi Galvani. These computers - implanted into the preserved bodies of animal specimens - produce physically reactive cybernetic beings caught in a state of attempted re-animation.
This is what happens when you read too much Gibson. The idea that a fly corpse with a Webserver chip and two LED's stuck in it is a "cybernetic being in a state of attempted reanimation" is ludicrous, since the system would behave exactly the same without the fly corpse. It ain't exactly Deadly Friend.
In court cases, I think it was the napster rulings, judges have ruled that P2P filesharing constitutes "commercial" copyright infringement. So there's your answer. P2P is a crime. Do it and go to jail.
This shouldn't be really under "Your Rights Online" because when it comes to P2P of copyrighted material, you have no rights; you are a criminal.
See, YOU pay Microsoft FIRST, THEN they give you the siggy. That's the way business is done in the console world. Hope you've got $500,000 or however much it costs.
Sonic... and Rez. Holy smokes, if you don't have a copy of Rez, you need to get on eBay or Amazon and snag one before they're all gone.
Anyhoo... it's kind of ironic since Sega made a Japan-only DC game called Segagaga, an RPG set in the near future. Sega is nearly out of business, and in a last-ditch effort to save the company hires some cartoony anime kids to upper management positions. You wander around the city fighting monsters, and after you defeat certain ones, you get to hire them! Of course you have to negotiate salary terms...
Of course this was the platform that gave us "ChuChu Rocket" and "Bomber Hehhe"... god I love Sega...
Despite the name, Extreme Programming is not a bunch of guys shredding down Mount Snow, chugging Mountain Dew, and simultaneously punching Java code into their hiptops. It's a methodology of making damn sure you know what your customer wants, an making damn sure your program satisfies those requirements.
I don't know a lot about it myself, but in certain domains it tends to produce good results.
I read Neuromancer not too long ago. It was crap. Gibson's prose is pretentious and obfuscatory, seemingly crafted to sound "gritty" but more likely written so as to hide the fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
If Neuromancer gave us one good thing, it was Neal Stephenson's surprisingly well-crafted response, Snow Crash.
Remember, you don't actually have to tell anyone who or what Gabbo is, you just say "GABBO!" and flash the words on the screen, leaving everyone to wonder, and when Gabbo finally makes his appearance, boom! Instant audience. Krusty doesn't stand a chance.
Well,.NET is the same way..NET is a sort of vague, nebulous... thing that nobody truly understands, but everybody is supposed to want to be a part of. Is it a framework, a runtime, Web services, what? Well, the truth is... it's all of that, and much much more. It is more certain things than others depending on the marketing angle of the day, but whatever it is, it is set to become the dominant computing paradigm of the new millennium!!! *dramatic, victorious music*
Remember Space Channel 5? That game was vaguely the plot of Max Headroom retrofitted onto a 60's-kitsch sci fi dance theme. Sega also heavily promoted Ulala, the game's all-singing, all-dancing, all-CG main character, and had her appear on the MTV music awards.
The game is adorable, clever, and quite fun. Unfortunately its "simon says" gameplay is a little too simplistic for today's Resident Evil and GTA loving crowd, so it did not sell well, and Sega's big Ulala marketing blitz flopped. I bet there are toy stores in my area still trying to dump their excess Space Channel 5 inventory...
I can't help but be reminded of the Law Offices of Mark E. Salomone & Morelli, who run canned ads during daytime talk shows like Ricki Lake. I saw the exact same ads for a different law firm in NYC; it seems that they are using canned ads, with a convenient cut away from the face of the person saying the law firm's name as he announces it to the stunned evil insurance company guy, so the different firm names can be edited in. I guess they're doing this nationwide.
Microsoft Windows will remain the most popular operating system in the world, whether you like it or not.
Proprietary, patented video codecs will remain the "de facto" standard, whether you like it or not.
The open source movement is so often full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Open source technologies are not driven by the impetus to make money, the way proprietary technologies are. Thus they will be pushed to the fringes by aggressive, profit-minded corporations who are willing to pony up for the marketing, research and development, partnerships with movie companies, etc. it takes to become accepted.
The problem with Windows is, it is THE standard. You cannot write an article like this because of the underlying assumption behind interface design. When considering human interface factors while writing software, the question "Is it easy to use?" is equivalent to "Does it work exactly the same way as in Windows, or another Microsoft program?"
Everybody knows Windows from an interface standpoint. It has filtered into our collective subconscious, a part of the lore of our technological society. Therefore, being "easy to use" and being "geared to the average user" is a function of similarity to the Windows environment.
The piece satirizes Linux-on-the-desktop articles which nearly always work by comparing Linux's interface to that of Windows. If you were to write such a piece about Windows, what would you compare it to? The Mac? Feh.
Slashdot Mirror
I read a Dr. Dobb's article which said basically that plain-text programming languages were dead and this was the Wave of the Future.
... if German lawmakers ran the game industry? War games are war games because that's what's cool. What kind of boring stuff would Germany rather have its citizens play? Diplomacy games? Peacekeeping games? How about SimBlowhard, the true-to-life foreign relations sim, replete with advanced spin-doctor AI?
Watch the environmentalists whinge about how all our use of fossil fuels is contributing to solar warming.
I think Al Gore has a new plank for 2004...
Any moment now they're going to put up a see-I-told-you-so article citing the SCO case as "irrefutable proof" that Linux hackers are intellectual property thieves, and touting Windows 2000 for "real" enterprise server use.
That is, of course, once they fix the Microsoft database which drives their site...
They say that those who do not understand LISP are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Tcl stands as starkly illustrative of this principle.
I daresay that with the exception of certain niche application markets (games come to mind), software hasn't really gotten better as a result of the proprietary software development model. What happens is, a certain application gets about as good as it's going to for its particular problem domain. Word gets as useful as it's going to get for about 95% of the users, and then it "jumps the shark" -- becomes more bloated, cumbersome, and expensive to use, but Microsoft marketing promises new features and "enhancements" with little to no useful value, to keep everyone upgrading, and what's worse, switches the interface around every few releases or so, confusing the heck out of users.
Lest you think I'm picking on Microsoft here, other major software vendors, such as Adobe, Autodesk (another C-Dilla offender), and probably even Intuit, practice the same techniques. It's not about making better software, it's about making money. That's why you have a software business.
Now 2 the Ranting Gryphon can come to us in high-def, color-corrected video. Looking forward to all that bandwidth going right down the crapper.
Actually "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't" is a driving philosophy behind a lot of stupid things getting done.
This is what happens when you read too much Gibson. The idea that a fly corpse with a Webserver chip and two LED's stuck in it is a "cybernetic being in a state of attempted reanimation" is ludicrous, since the system would behave exactly the same without the fly corpse. It ain't exactly Deadly Friend
It's worth noting that among this artist's other works are screenshots of his cluttered Mac desktop, used as a "visual medium" for artistic expression.
In court cases, I think it was the napster rulings, judges have ruled that P2P filesharing constitutes "commercial" copyright infringement. So there's your answer. P2P is a crime. Do it and go to jail.
This shouldn't be really under "Your Rights Online" because when it comes to P2P of copyrighted material, you have no rights; you are a criminal.
That thing about cooperation sometimes being necessary in competition... isn't that one of John Nash's discoveries? I forgot.
See, YOU pay Microsoft FIRST, THEN they give you the siggy. That's the way business is done in the console world. Hope you've got $500,000 or however much it costs.
Sonic... and Rez. Holy smokes, if you don't have a copy of Rez, you need to get on eBay or Amazon and snag one before they're all gone.
Anyhoo... it's kind of ironic since Sega made a Japan-only DC game called Segagaga, an RPG set in the near future. Sega is nearly out of business, and in a last-ditch effort to save the company hires some cartoony anime kids to upper management positions. You wander around the city fighting monsters, and after you defeat certain ones, you get to hire them! Of course you have to negotiate salary terms...
Of course this was the platform that gave us "ChuChu Rocket" and "Bomber Hehhe"... god I love Sega...
Despite the name, Extreme Programming is not a bunch of guys shredding down Mount Snow, chugging Mountain Dew, and simultaneously punching Java code into their hiptops. It's a methodology of making damn sure you know what your customer wants, an making damn sure your program satisfies those requirements.
I don't know a lot about it myself, but in certain domains it tends to produce good results.
1) Mozilla will incorporate this behavior into its 1.3 series before Microsoft gets around to it.
2) Microsoft will patent the idea, even though the inventor said "the concept is in the public domain".
3) Prerequisite CowboyNeal option.
I read Neuromancer not too long ago. It was crap. Gibson's prose is pretentious and obfuscatory, seemingly crafted to sound "gritty" but more likely written so as to hide the fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
If Neuromancer gave us one good thing, it was Neal Stephenson's surprisingly well-crafted response, Snow Crash.
Remember, you don't actually have to tell anyone who or what Gabbo is, you just say "GABBO!" and flash the words on the screen, leaving everyone to wonder, and when Gabbo finally makes his appearance, boom! Instant audience. Krusty doesn't stand a chance.
.NET is the same way. .NET is a sort of vague, nebulous... thing that nobody truly understands, but everybody is supposed to want to be a part of. Is it a framework, a runtime, Web services, what? Well, the truth is... it's all of that, and much much more. It is more certain things than others depending on the marketing angle of the day, but whatever it is, it is set to become the dominant computing paradigm of the new millennium!!! *dramatic, victorious music*
Well,
... a memo which says that Sun has standardized on C# and Microsoft .NET.
Remember Space Channel 5? That game was vaguely the plot of Max Headroom retrofitted onto a 60's-kitsch sci fi dance theme. Sega also heavily promoted Ulala, the game's all-singing, all-dancing, all-CG main character, and had her appear on the MTV music awards.
The game is adorable, clever, and quite fun. Unfortunately its "simon says" gameplay is a little too simplistic for today's Resident Evil and GTA loving crowd, so it did not sell well, and Sega's big Ulala marketing blitz flopped. I bet there are toy stores in my area still trying to dump their excess Space Channel 5 inventory...
I can't help but be reminded of the Law Offices of Mark E. Salomone & Morelli, who run canned ads during daytime talk shows like Ricki Lake. I saw the exact same ads for a different law firm in NYC; it seems that they are using canned ads, with a convenient cut away from the face of the person saying the law firm's name as he announces it to the stunned evil insurance company guy, so the different firm names can be edited in. I guess they're doing this nationwide.
Whether you like it or not.
Microsoft Windows will remain the most popular operating system in the world, whether you like it or not.
Proprietary, patented video codecs will remain the "de facto" standard, whether you like it or not.
The open source movement is so often full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Open source technologies are not driven by the impetus to make money, the way proprietary technologies are. Thus they will be pushed to the fringes by aggressive, profit-minded corporations who are willing to pony up for the marketing, research and development, partnerships with movie companies, etc. it takes to become accepted.
That's the American Way.
... in the latest issue of the medical journal Duh.
The problem with Windows is, it is THE standard. You cannot write an article like this because of the underlying assumption behind interface design. When considering human interface factors while writing software, the question "Is it easy to use?" is equivalent to "Does it work exactly the same way as in Windows, or another Microsoft program?"
Everybody knows Windows from an interface standpoint. It has filtered into our collective subconscious, a part of the lore of our technological society. Therefore, being "easy to use" and being "geared to the average user" is a function of similarity to the Windows environment.
The piece satirizes Linux-on-the-desktop articles which nearly always work by comparing Linux's interface to that of Windows. If you were to write such a piece about Windows, what would you compare it to? The Mac? Feh.
Remember when Sony referred to the PS2 as the "Next-Generation PlayStation"? Aren't you glad they changed that name to something similar?
"OK, OK, we'll cave in and put DRM chips in every device we sell, just please, pretty please, don't tell Congress on us!"