Progress bars are there to let you know something is happening, and indicate how long you can expect to wait, not to make it be/feel/seem faster/more fun.
Not quite. Several studies have shown that they have the latter effect on most users.
Microsoft pulled a fast one with IE's progress bar to, successfully in many cases, con people into thinking IE was faster than the competition at downloading data (in circumstances where in fact the network was the main bottleneck and choice of browser made no difference). IE's progress bar can slowly nudge up to about 40% before the first byte of data has been received where other browsers will not have it move until data actually starts arriving. Back in the day, and still now when using slow high-latency connections, this made quite a difference to the way people who knew-no-better perceived the speed of IE.
If you have access to a web server you can test this easily: just make a script that returns nothing for 30 seconds then drops in a block of data, and request that script in IE and a selection of other browsers. Assuming the data returned is simple enough that there are no significant rendering performance differences to consider you'll see IE's progress bar claim to start receiving data almost immediately (but slowly) but they will all pick up the full response in the same amount of time.
MS are not the only ones to realize the power of nudging the users perception with a little on-screen deception - you'll find many other examples and similar techniques if you look closely enough at what programs are actually doing. The animated progress bars for file operations found in many OSs (certainly in Windows since Vista and recent Ubuntu builds), which flash or animate unnecessarily in the direction the bar is growing in, have been shown to distort the average person's impression of how fast things are actually happening, as another example.
since it isn't the same format as operating systems use.
Until someone knocks together a 3rd party font renderer for Windows and an extension to existing open source ones for Linux (the latter being particularly easy I suspect, as this format adds little apart from compression from what I can see so a layer to convert the blob before passing it to the existing renderer should be relatively trivial to write).
What's "apparent performance"? It's either faster or it's not.
You have obviously never worked in UI design! (though in this area I don't know who/what they would be trying to fool or how they would be trying to fool them/it so your response is probably quite right)
I don't hold the Hitler Youth thing against most of the Hitler Youth, old Ratty included. My impression is that if you lived in certain areas and were of the right age at the time you either joined or you and your family were ostracised, bullied to buggery, or worse. So lets be reasonable go a little easy on that one.
No, let's not. That's the first step on the "I was only obeying orders" slope (at the end of which the only guilty person was Hitler himself). This was chucked out as an excuse at the Nuremberg trials.
There is a difference between a fully developed adult following an inhumane order, and a 14 year old child (the age Ratty was at the time he was said to have been enlisted in the movement, it is documented that many were recruited at 12 and suspected that some "joined" earlier than that in the final months before Berlin fell) doing the same. In my opinion anyway. Where to draw the line is difficult though as some mature much faster than others so could be expected to be able to make a reasoned moral judgement at an earlier age. Conversely some mature (both mentally in general and morally more specifically) more slowly than others. I know things are very different and more complicated in a time of war (the situation forces one to grow up faster in order to cope, and the amount of propaganda forced upon the kids needs to be taken into account) but today I wouldn't trust most 18 year olds to take responsibility for a life-or-death moral choice.
At that time, I was programming a network game about trucks, and when when replaying a demo on the network, the players desynchronized after a few minutes.
Could you not have just been hitting the expected accuracy problems inherent with representing floating point decimal numbers in binary, as noted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_problems (and many other places)? Where accurate representation (and calculations agreeing when performed different ways around that in theory should be commutative so give the same result) are needed for non-integer numbers then scaled integers are usually a better choice (and often more efficient too).
Though wasn't the issue in case of Pentium FDIV bug specifically that Intel didn't publish the errata or...any other information after Intel researchers discovered the error? It took one independent one, to whom Intel didn't even respond initially...
I could be remembering wrongly, as much time has passed and I'm not in a position to spend time double checking right now, but I have the impression that the delay in acknowledging the problem was mainly due to being very slow to verify and analyse it and not wanting to acknowledge it until the analysis was complete. While failing to acknowledge the issue in a timely manner was bad, it was more due to slowness/stupidity than actively trying to cover it up. That is part of it being a PR issue as much as anything else - what might looked as being thorough, or simply being too slow, to those that have some understanding of the inner workings of a big slow behemoth like Intel instead looked like deliberate evasion to the wider public.
The problem Intel had with the FDIV bug was one of PR. The Pentium range was the first CPU family to be directly marketed to the general public in a big way.
While anyone with knowledge of the chip design and production processes understood that such bugs are not particularly uncommon (many much simpler chips have well documented errata and workarounds for unintentional behaviour, like the 286's "gate A20" bug that actually turned out to be useful) the general public and the popular press had no such understanding so were very surprised - they assumed that all CPUs were (or should be) completely 100% perfect and therefore taking issue with what they saw as being sold defective goods.
Before the first generation Pentium FDIV issue, such relatively minor problems were dealt with by the error, including any extra side-effects and possible workarounds, being documented, those errata being sent to the chip makers customers and relevant software developers, and things would get patched up without the general public ever being aware there was an issue in the first place aside perhaps from a small number of users who by shear chance were noticeably affected by the one-in-a-few-billion problem before their software was patched (those people would be given replacement chips and/or other recompense). A costly replacement program simply wouldn't have been needed in this case.
1. While true, I'm not sure quite relevant. For a start dying for your faith as an adult is a bit different from being expected to do so as a youngster. And (straying off topic for a moment) personally I don't really see the difference between the actions: both are motivated by fear. Much as those dead Catholics will claim their actions were due to faith, I'm convinced (particularly given Catholicism is one of the more fire-and-brimstone enthused Christian sects) that there actions were motivated instead by fear (fear of God, or his compatriots down below) not faith.
2. I almost agree there, but I would say being an accomplice is quite the same as taking the action. My main argument about the position of the poster I was replying to is that by arguing that way you play into the hands of the Vatican's supports as they can just attack the argument (in the same way I did) instead of showing themselves up by admitting or attacking the truth. Holding back a bit can be more powerful than letting rip.
The Catholic Church lost their moral authority a long time ago. The Pope has a lot of nerve doing a moral statement about the Internet while being a former Hilter Youth and a pedophile.
Please people, let us not drop to their standards of rhetoric filled, evidence lacking, accusatory ranting. Please take shots at the Pope for the many things that are valid to take shots at him for and not just rail randomly with repeats of less defensible sentiments.
I don't hold the Hitler Youth thing against most of the Hitler Youth, old Ratty included. My impression is that if you lived in certain areas and were of the right age at the time you either joined or you and your family were ostracised, bullied to buggery, or worse. So lets be reasonable go a little easy on that one.
There is no evidence that he himself is a pedophile. If you throw that accusation around with not good evidence you look no better than any other ranting nutter (such as his holy nutness himself). There is from what I've read plenty of good evidence that he has in the past been very influential in certain cover ups (or been very very blind and stupid while they went on around him) - there are more than enough shots we can take pertaining to that evidence without needing to resort to less substantiated rhetoric.
You can make the Cult of the Vatican look foolish (or, in fact, criminal) without stooping to their level. Please prove you are better than they by doing so.
NOTE: I have nothing against Christians with a Catholic upbringing in general, much as I may pity them. My problem is with the Catholic hierarchy (from local clergy right to the top) and it is these officials (those that have done wrong, those that have protected those that have done wrong, and those that have sat idly by and allowed wrong to be done and covered up, and those who despite all the evidence are not actively doing anything to try right the situation by getting the truth released) which I refer to as "the Cult of the Vatican". I appreciate that "the Cult of the Vatican" may be a phrase that could cause offence to those officials and I would like to point out, for the avoidance of doubt, that any such offence caused is entirely 100% intentional.
Yes, this is all about anonymous postings, but surely anyone can make up an identity online?
I guess the reasoning (such that there is any) here would be that by deliberately creating a false identity the poster is circumventing any information storing the service provider has which would be another offence. With anonymous posting the user is simply using a facility that is open to them.
To my mind, and presumably many others this makes no difference - or at least no difference with respect to Google's culpability - but this judge disagrees.
Every time Google adjust the rankings to account for the current crop of deceptive SEO techniques, people think up new deceptive SEO techniques. It is a moving target and Google can't move too fast without thinking as they risk disrupting unaffected parts of the algorithm resulting in reducing its effectiveness when presented with genuine links.
Also Google may be the biggest name in town but they are not the only big name by a long shot. an SEO technique is not completely invalidated until such time as all popular engines have a away to discount it.
And the summary (didn't RTFA, sorry) doesn't state that the techniques were proven to be working, just that this is what people are trying.
Sitting developers opposite each other is fine, as long as I'm no longer opposite the one who interrupts and takes "hang on a minute" said fourth time as meaning "no I'm really not trying to concentrate on something at the moment, please keep waffling on at me about the silly problem any idiot could fix instead of listening to my request that you wait just one bloody minute". Not that I'm bitter or anything.
He could just buy a massive 96dpi screen, or collection of screens if you can get some with bevels small enough not to bother him, and sit further away.
Zoom function? Just bring the object closer to the eyes.
I was meaning support for new problems that were not around when the game was first released. Issues with newer hardware (timing code that gets confused if something takes a much shorter time than was thought reasonable back then) and operating systems (will it run OK on XP? will users need instructions to run it in compatibility mode or as an admin?)
As an old game that someone just decides to pick up one day this is not an issue - the user should know to expect problems here or there in some cases. But as a newly re-released game as an way to perhaps encourage people to buy the new addition to the series the publisher needs to be sure it will work on modern OSs, that any instructions needed to get it running on modern kit are present, and so on. If the "episode 2" you released for free to draw people in fails in some way that annoys the player then the chance of them buying the shiny new "episode 4" will be reduced, not improved.
People will have higher expectations of a re-released-as-a-demo product than they would were it just picked it up from their cupboard, or picked it up 2nd-hand, after some years. If Joe McNoTechie has the game refuse to run he'll either expect someone to help him fix it or he'll just walk away from the range.
Not a bad idea, though there is one flaw that immediately springs to mind that might put off the publishers: if they are officially releasing the earlier version then people will expect support. OK, so they should support the old version anyway as it is no doubt on sale still somewhere but they probably don't. And you might argue that people shouldn't expect the same support for an old freebie that hey get if they purchase a new title, but if the old game fails to work on some combinations of new hardware and a support structure is not there it may leave a bad taste in the mouth of the affected users (and result in bad online reviews), potentially reducing sales of the new game rather than improving them.
FWIW I think you are right, the benefits would outway that problem, but you'd have to convince the publisher's management not me!
Of course they'll also need to factor in the possible problem of people being entertained enough with the old version that they obtained legally for free, to the point where they don't need to bother buying the new one at all...
It is not always the case that Debian is far behind though. Current Debian/Stable (Lenny) is more up-to-date in some areas than current Ubuntu/LTS (8.04). Not as far ahead as release dates might suggest (as Ubuntu releases tend to be closer to Debian/Testing and Debian/Stable at point of release) but still ahead.
Full marks to them, by the way, for getting out ahead of this issue. If this were a proprietary OS, we'd likely have to wait for the first Service Pack before this issue was addressed. (And of course, it wouldn't be documented except for numerous blog and forum posts peppered across the Web.)
Full agreement there. Even certain other players in the Linux market might be less "good" in this respect. While Debian's mailing lists can be a brutal place to exist if you are neither omnipotent nor immortal (or at least flameproof), both their core contributors and the Ubuntu equivalents seem to attribute openness the value it deserves more than most do.
The length of security patch support on the LTS releases is quite attractive for servers that don't need to be bleeding edge.
Not compared to Debian.
Where I don't have Ubuntu running I have Debian, but while Debian/Stable is arguably more stable than Ubuntu LTS and often more up-to-date releases do drop out of security support sooner than Ubuntu/LTS releases.
As reliable as upgrading Debian is (I've bumped many machines Woody->Sarge, Sarge->Etch, Etch->Lenny and so on with no serious problems and the only minor ones being my responsibility) a remote full distro update (kernel + libc + everything else) is still something I'd prefer to do less often if possible and Ubuntu's extended support period increases the chance that a machine will be decommissioned and brought in for rebuild/repurposing before it is needed at all.
So on physical machines that not usually local to me I generally go for Ubuntu/LTS. For servers that are local (so can I can get to a physical console if there is a nasty issue) or need to be a little more up-to-date usually Debian/Stable. For the desktop/portable, usually a recent Ubuntu. Both are good distributions and even these days very similar from a server PoV (I've not used Debian on a desktop/laptop for a while, they may have diverged more in that arena) so the choice comes down to where we are in release cycles, how up-to-date the machine needs to be in terns of package versions, and how remote a location the machine is going to live in.
9.10 works like a charm on my netbook, and I have 8.04 (the last LTS release) running on a few servers. The length of security patch support on the LTS releases is quite attractive for servers that don't need to be bleeding edge.
I was about to say, I pay $2 to $4 a bag for that stuff to put on my blueberries, blackberries, etc. Better yet: use human waste for lawns, fields and golf courses.
You do know that human waste should be labelled "biohazard", don't you?
This is an area I'd like to see some hard research on. I've heard both sides in their pure form ("human waste could be put to use" and "it is a bio-hazard") and slightly more refined ("if properly treated it is a valuable compost material" and "it costs so much, financially and in raw materials directly or otherwise, that the planet is better off if we dispose of it carefully and let nature take its course over 10s/100s/+ of years" but I don't think I've ever seen a proper impartial comparative study of the options.
Caveat: my knowledge in the area in the past decade-or-so doesn't extend much beyond what I learned in GCSE and A level schooling (my degree level learning and life experience since being of a less natural and/or more abstract bent) and being a regular-but-not-always-avid reader of New Scientist, so I may have missed or accidentally skipped over news of some important research in the area.
"200 gigabytes/year for audio" is practical now
on
Life Recorder
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"200 gigabytes/year for audio" is not "still a few generations off" unless you particularly need the device to keep data locally for long periods.
200Gbyte/year is just over half a Gig per day. You could store nearly a fortnight on an 8Gb microsd card (which are not expensive and are very small even with the required read/write interface (see http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.25557 for a small one, and this device would not need the physical USB interface so could easily be made smaller)). As long as you switched card or otherwise offloaded the data to other storage in that time your 24/7 recording is good to go - battery life would be much more of a problem than storage.
I can imagine such a device being easy to produced right now. Maybe not as small as a little lapel badge, but certainly "StarTrek TNG broach-like communicator" size or smaller. All you need is a microphone, the card reader, a small processor for compressing the incoming data, and a battery. Battery life would be the big problem, but with advances in processor tech (doing more with less power), battery tech, and the potential in the near future for trickle charging from reclaimed energy (there are a number of research groups showing promising work around gaining power from human movement via devices inlaid in clothes or, for applications such a pace-makers, installed internally) I expect the device you describe is practical in the very near future if it isn't already now.
Heck, I could set my MP3 player to voice record and leave it in my pocket all day. Call that version 1.0, and work on miniaturisation and the interface to non-local storage.
I know that was the only part that shocked me - $10 seems like such a tiny amount, it's like the authors are betting most people will just do it instead of invesitgating.
That and depending on where the scammers are based that $10 may be worth a lot more than $10 would buy where you are. An amount small enough that the victims don't care enough not to pay but large enough to be worth something at the perp's end doesn't make bad sense.
Of course, what is to say that it will stop there? Once they have the $10 maybe a new page will go up with a little more detail possibly including the fact that they paid money to try keep it all quiet and a demand for $100. Once you've got someone willing to pay, and has paid, to keep something quiet you can probably sting them for quite a bit more.
I see pictures. I see many pictures. All contain images of smiling, happy workers, joyously engaging in their labor. What is problem?
The problem is that just out of shot is a manager who has just told them that if they don't look happy for the photos they, and anyone from their family/friends, will be sacked and never again employed by that factory or any other that the owner has connections to the owners of.
Slashdot Mirror
Progress bars are there to let you know something is happening, and indicate how long you can expect to wait, not to make it be/feel/seem faster/more fun.
Not quite. Several studies have shown that they have the latter effect on most users.
Microsoft pulled a fast one with IE's progress bar to, successfully in many cases, con people into thinking IE was faster than the competition at downloading data (in circumstances where in fact the network was the main bottleneck and choice of browser made no difference). IE's progress bar can slowly nudge up to about 40% before the first byte of data has been received where other browsers will not have it move until data actually starts arriving. Back in the day, and still now when using slow high-latency connections, this made quite a difference to the way people who knew-no-better perceived the speed of IE.
If you have access to a web server you can test this easily: just make a script that returns nothing for 30 seconds then drops in a block of data, and request that script in IE and a selection of other browsers. Assuming the data returned is simple enough that there are no significant rendering performance differences to consider you'll see IE's progress bar claim to start receiving data almost immediately (but slowly) but they will all pick up the full response in the same amount of time.
MS are not the only ones to realize the power of nudging the users perception with a little on-screen deception - you'll find many other examples and similar techniques if you look closely enough at what programs are actually doing. The animated progress bars for file operations found in many OSs (certainly in Windows since Vista and recent Ubuntu builds), which flash or animate unnecessarily in the direction the bar is growing in, have been shown to distort the average person's impression of how fast things are actually happening, as another example.
since it isn't the same format as operating systems use.
Until someone knocks together a 3rd party font renderer for Windows and an extension to existing open source ones for Linux (the latter being particularly easy I suspect, as this format adds little apart from compression from what I can see so a layer to convert the blob before passing it to the existing renderer should be relatively trivial to write).
What's "apparent performance"? It's either faster or it's not.
You have obviously never worked in UI design! (though in this area I don't know who/what they would be trying to fool or how they would be trying to fool them/it so your response is probably quite right)
NASA: Close encounters of the thud kind.
No, let's not. That's the first step on the "I was only obeying orders" slope (at the end of which the only guilty person was Hitler himself). This was chucked out as an excuse at the Nuremberg trials.
There is a difference between a fully developed adult following an inhumane order, and a 14 year old child (the age Ratty was at the time he was said to have been enlisted in the movement, it is documented that many were recruited at 12 and suspected that some "joined" earlier than that in the final months before Berlin fell) doing the same. In my opinion anyway. Where to draw the line is difficult though as some mature much faster than others so could be expected to be able to make a reasoned moral judgement at an earlier age. Conversely some mature (both mentally in general and morally more specifically) more slowly than others. I know things are very different and more complicated in a time of war (the situation forces one to grow up faster in order to cope, and the amount of propaganda forced upon the kids needs to be taken into account) but today I wouldn't trust most 18 year olds to take responsibility for a life-or-death moral choice.
One-in-a-few-billion problem ?
At that time, I was programming a network game about trucks, and when when replaying a demo on the network, the players desynchronized after a few minutes.
Could you not have just been hitting the expected accuracy problems inherent with representing floating point decimal numbers in binary, as noted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_problems (and many other places)? Where accurate representation (and calculations agreeing when performed different ways around that in theory should be commutative so give the same result) are needed for non-integer numbers then scaled integers are usually a better choice (and often more efficient too).
Though wasn't the issue in case of Pentium FDIV bug specifically that Intel didn't publish the errata or...any other information after Intel researchers discovered the error? It took one independent one, to whom Intel didn't even respond initially...
I could be remembering wrongly, as much time has passed and I'm not in a position to spend time double checking right now, but I have the impression that the delay in acknowledging the problem was mainly due to being very slow to verify and analyse it and not wanting to acknowledge it until the analysis was complete. While failing to acknowledge the issue in a timely manner was bad, it was more due to slowness/stupidity than actively trying to cover it up. That is part of it being a PR issue as much as anything else - what might looked as being thorough, or simply being too slow, to those that have some understanding of the inner workings of a big slow behemoth like Intel instead looked like deliberate evasion to the wider public.
I'm happy to have my memory corrected if needed!
The problem Intel had with the FDIV bug was one of PR. The Pentium range was the first CPU family to be directly marketed to the general public in a big way.
While anyone with knowledge of the chip design and production processes understood that such bugs are not particularly uncommon (many much simpler chips have well documented errata and workarounds for unintentional behaviour, like the 286's "gate A20" bug that actually turned out to be useful) the general public and the popular press had no such understanding so were very surprised - they assumed that all CPUs were (or should be) completely 100% perfect and therefore taking issue with what they saw as being sold defective goods.
Before the first generation Pentium FDIV issue, such relatively minor problems were dealt with by the error, including any extra side-effects and possible workarounds, being documented, those errata being sent to the chip makers customers and relevant software developers, and things would get patched up without the general public ever being aware there was an issue in the first place aside perhaps from a small number of users who by shear chance were noticeably affected by the one-in-a-few-billion problem before their software was patched (those people would be given replacement chips and/or other recompense). A costly replacement program simply wouldn't have been needed in this case.
1. While true, I'm not sure quite relevant. For a start dying for your faith as an adult is a bit different from being expected to do so as a youngster. And (straying off topic for a moment) personally I don't really see the difference between the actions: both are motivated by fear. Much as those dead Catholics will claim their actions were due to faith, I'm convinced (particularly given Catholicism is one of the more fire-and-brimstone enthused Christian sects) that there actions were motivated instead by fear (fear of God, or his compatriots down below) not faith.
2. I almost agree there, but I would say being an accomplice is quite the same as taking the action. My main argument about the position of the poster I was replying to is that by arguing that way you play into the hands of the Vatican's supports as they can just attack the argument (in the same way I did) instead of showing themselves up by admitting or attacking the truth. Holding back a bit can be more powerful than letting rip.
The Catholic Church lost their moral authority a long time ago. The Pope has a lot of nerve doing a moral statement about the Internet while being a former Hilter Youth and a pedophile.
Please people, let us not drop to their standards of rhetoric filled, evidence lacking, accusatory ranting. Please take shots at the Pope for the many things that are valid to take shots at him for and not just rail randomly with repeats of less defensible sentiments.
I don't hold the Hitler Youth thing against most of the Hitler Youth, old Ratty included. My impression is that if you lived in certain areas and were of the right age at the time you either joined or you and your family were ostracised, bullied to buggery, or worse. So lets be reasonable go a little easy on that one.
There is no evidence that he himself is a pedophile. If you throw that accusation around with not good evidence you look no better than any other ranting nutter (such as his holy nutness himself). There is from what I've read plenty of good evidence that he has in the past been very influential in certain cover ups (or been very very blind and stupid while they went on around him) - there are more than enough shots we can take pertaining to that evidence without needing to resort to less substantiated rhetoric.
You can make the Cult of the Vatican look foolish (or, in fact, criminal) without stooping to their level. Please prove you are better than they by doing so.
NOTE: I have nothing against Christians with a Catholic upbringing in general, much as I may pity them. My problem is with the Catholic hierarchy (from local clergy right to the top) and it is these officials (those that have done wrong, those that have protected those that have done wrong, and those that have sat idly by and allowed wrong to be done and covered up, and those who despite all the evidence are not actively doing anything to try right the situation by getting the truth released) which I refer to as "the Cult of the Vatican". I appreciate that "the Cult of the Vatican" may be a phrase that could cause offence to those officials and I would like to point out, for the avoidance of doubt, that any such offence caused is entirely 100% intentional.
Yes, this is all about anonymous postings, but surely anyone can make up an identity online?
I guess the reasoning (such that there is any) here would be that by deliberately creating a false identity the poster is circumventing any information storing the service provider has which would be another offence. With anonymous posting the user is simply using a facility that is open to them.
To my mind, and presumably many others this makes no difference - or at least no difference with respect to Google's culpability - but this judge disagrees.
Every time Google adjust the rankings to account for the current crop of deceptive SEO techniques, people think up new deceptive SEO techniques. It is a moving target and Google can't move too fast without thinking as they risk disrupting unaffected parts of the algorithm resulting in reducing its effectiveness when presented with genuine links.
Also Google may be the biggest name in town but they are not the only big name by a long shot. an SEO technique is not completely invalidated until such time as all popular engines have a away to discount it.
And the summary (didn't RTFA, sorry) doesn't state that the techniques were proven to be working, just that this is what people are trying.
No, but you can just download a new version of the CD.
Sitting developers opposite each other is fine, as long as I'm no longer opposite the one who interrupts and takes "hang on a minute" said fourth time as meaning "no I'm really not trying to concentrate on something at the moment, please keep waffling on at me about the silly problem any idiot could fix instead of listening to my request that you wait just one bloody minute". Not that I'm bitter or anything.
He could just buy a massive 96dpi screen, or collection of screens if you can get some with bevels small enough not to bother him, and sit further away.
Zoom function? Just bring the object closer to the eyes.
I was meaning support for new problems that were not around when the game was first released. Issues with newer hardware (timing code that gets confused if something takes a much shorter time than was thought reasonable back then) and operating systems (will it run OK on XP? will users need instructions to run it in compatibility mode or as an admin?)
As an old game that someone just decides to pick up one day this is not an issue - the user should know to expect problems here or there in some cases. But as a newly re-released game as an way to perhaps encourage people to buy the new addition to the series the publisher needs to be sure it will work on modern OSs, that any instructions needed to get it running on modern kit are present, and so on. If the "episode 2" you released for free to draw people in fails in some way that annoys the player then the chance of them buying the shiny new "episode 4" will be reduced, not improved.
People will have higher expectations of a re-released-as-a-demo product than they would were it just picked it up from their cupboard, or picked it up 2nd-hand, after some years. If Joe McNoTechie has the game refuse to run he'll either expect someone to help him fix it or he'll just walk away from the range.
Not a bad idea, though there is one flaw that immediately springs to mind that might put off the publishers: if they are officially releasing the earlier version then people will expect support. OK, so they should support the old version anyway as it is no doubt on sale still somewhere but they probably don't. And you might argue that people shouldn't expect the same support for an old freebie that hey get if they purchase a new title, but if the old game fails to work on some combinations of new hardware and a support structure is not there it may leave a bad taste in the mouth of the affected users (and result in bad online reviews), potentially reducing sales of the new game rather than improving them.
FWIW I think you are right, the benefits would outway that problem, but you'd have to convince the publisher's management not me!
Of course they'll also need to factor in the possible problem of people being entertained enough with the old version that they obtained legally for free, to the point where they don't need to bother buying the new one at all...
It is not always the case that Debian is far behind though. Current Debian/Stable (Lenny) is more up-to-date in some areas than current Ubuntu/LTS (8.04). Not as far ahead as release dates might suggest (as Ubuntu releases tend to be closer to Debian/Testing and Debian/Stable at point of release) but still ahead.
Full marks to them, by the way, for getting out ahead of this issue. If this were a proprietary OS, we'd likely have to wait for the first Service Pack before this issue was addressed. (And of course, it wouldn't be documented except for numerous blog and forum posts peppered across the Web.)
Full agreement there. Even certain other players in the Linux market might be less "good" in this respect. While Debian's mailing lists can be a brutal place to exist if you are neither omnipotent nor immortal (or at least flameproof), both their core contributors and the Ubuntu equivalents seem to attribute openness the value it deserves more than most do.
The length of security patch support on the LTS releases is quite attractive for servers that don't need to be bleeding edge.
Not compared to Debian.
Where I don't have Ubuntu running I have Debian, but while Debian/Stable is arguably more stable than Ubuntu LTS and often more up-to-date releases do drop out of security support sooner than Ubuntu/LTS releases.
As reliable as upgrading Debian is (I've bumped many machines Woody->Sarge, Sarge->Etch, Etch->Lenny and so on with no serious problems and the only minor ones being my responsibility) a remote full distro update (kernel + libc + everything else) is still something I'd prefer to do less often if possible and Ubuntu's extended support period increases the chance that a machine will be decommissioned and brought in for rebuild/repurposing before it is needed at all.
So on physical machines that not usually local to me I generally go for Ubuntu/LTS. For servers that are local (so can I can get to a physical console if there is a nasty issue) or need to be a little more up-to-date usually Debian/Stable. For the desktop/portable, usually a recent Ubuntu. Both are good distributions and even these days very similar from a server PoV (I've not used Debian on a desktop/laptop for a while, they may have diverged more in that arena) so the choice comes down to where we are in release cycles, how up-to-date the machine needs to be in terns of package versions, and how remote a location the machine is going to live in.
9.10 works like a charm on my netbook, and I have 8.04 (the last LTS release) running on a few servers. The length of security patch support on the LTS releases is quite attractive for servers that don't need to be bleeding edge.
You do know that human waste should be labelled "biohazard", don't you?
This is an area I'd like to see some hard research on. I've heard both sides in their pure form ("human waste could be put to use" and "it is a bio-hazard") and slightly more refined ("if properly treated it is a valuable compost material" and "it costs so much, financially and in raw materials directly or otherwise, that the planet is better off if we dispose of it carefully and let nature take its course over 10s/100s/+ of years" but I don't think I've ever seen a proper impartial comparative study of the options.
Caveat: my knowledge in the area in the past decade-or-so doesn't extend much beyond what I learned in GCSE and A level schooling (my degree level learning and life experience since being of a less natural and/or more abstract bent) and being a regular-but-not-always-avid reader of New Scientist, so I may have missed or accidentally skipped over news of some important research in the area.
"200 gigabytes/year for audio" is not "still a few generations off" unless you particularly need the device to keep data locally for long periods.
200Gbyte/year is just over half a Gig per day. You could store nearly a fortnight on an 8Gb microsd card (which are not expensive and are very small even with the required read/write interface (see http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.25557 for a small one, and this device would not need the physical USB interface so could easily be made smaller)). As long as you switched card or otherwise offloaded the data to other storage in that time your 24/7 recording is good to go - battery life would be much more of a problem than storage.
I can imagine such a device being easy to produced right now. Maybe not as small as a little lapel badge, but certainly "StarTrek TNG broach-like communicator" size or smaller. All you need is a microphone, the card reader, a small processor for compressing the incoming data, and a battery. Battery life would be the big problem, but with advances in processor tech (doing more with less power), battery tech, and the potential in the near future for trickle charging from reclaimed energy (there are a number of research groups showing promising work around gaining power from human movement via devices inlaid in clothes or, for applications such a pace-makers, installed internally) I expect the device you describe is practical in the very near future if it isn't already now.
Heck, I could set my MP3 player to voice record and leave it in my pocket all day. Call that version 1.0, and work on miniaturisation and the interface to non-local storage.
I know that was the only part that shocked me - $10 seems like such a tiny amount, it's like the authors are betting most people will just do it instead of invesitgating.
That and depending on where the scammers are based that $10 may be worth a lot more than $10 would buy where you are. An amount small enough that the victims don't care enough not to pay but large enough to be worth something at the perp's end doesn't make bad sense.
Of course, what is to say that it will stop there? Once they have the $10 maybe a new page will go up with a little more detail possibly including the fact that they paid money to try keep it all quiet and a demand for $100. Once you've got someone willing to pay, and has paid, to keep something quiet you can probably sting them for quite a bit more.
I see pictures. I see many pictures. All contain images of smiling, happy workers, joyously engaging in their labor. What is problem?
The problem is that just out of shot is a manager who has just told them that if they don't look happy for the photos they, and anyone from their family/friends, will be sacked and never again employed by that factory or any other that the owner has connections to the owners of.