I did some investigation into DS homebrew and took some notes on the information I could find. Could anyone with DS homebrew experience verify that I am on the right track and/or suggest better ways to go?
Notes:
"Basically, the way home homebrew and ROMS work is that you have to put something in the DS game slot at top to redirect execution to the CF or SD card adapter that carries the SD or CF memory card and various software in the GBA slot at bottom. Max Media Launcher, which goes in the DS game slot, seems to have a very good success rate at booting ROMs and homebrew when combined with the M3 SD X (what about the M3 CF X?).
Other products exist to redirect execution that fit in the DS game slot at the top, although ones like PassKey require that you fit a game into the device and then the conjoined entity into the DS game slot. You can also use wifi to do this (or potentially serve up applications), but you need a wireless access point with a certain chipset to do this (does the USB Wifi Max router enable this?). You can also flash the firmware on the DS, but this option seems complex for little gain when you can just put in the Max Media Launcher, plus I believe it voids the warranty."
Article summary: Rich yuppy buys overly expensive kayak because it is "fast" and "looks like a ferrari", although he is unable to explain why, from a technical perspective, it is any better than a regular kayak. He almost exclusively talks about his little vignette of crossing the Long Island Sound in it, pandering on about how he was buying the $5000 kayak so he could get sponsors to give $500 or so to "needy children" for his little cross bay adventure. He gives props to his friends, who will no doubt be tickled to be in BusinessWeek.
Before you mod troll, read article and you will see it is completely devoid of any technical or scientific interest. Slashdot's slogan is "stuff that matters". This stuff does not.
This interview is worth reading if you are interested in Eve Online, though the interviewer asks a lot of easy questions. Some of the frontiers that Eve has arrived at are no longer virtual or strictly game related.
One question that the interviewer should have asked, since CCP was being candid about its revenue sharing with the Chinese licensee, is to what degree it will cooperate with the Chinese government on requests for user data a la the Yahoo! China fiasco? CCP seems to be adopting the policy of many other technology businesses by saying that the local licensee company is the one following Chinese laws.
This is, of course, a complete dodge of the pertinent question since there is a revenue sharing agreement and it's essentially required in China to have a local licensee because of restrictions on foreign ownership. In many instances, it's akin to saying, since I incorporated my business, I am no longer ethically responsible for the actions taken by my corporation with my consent.
The greater specter raised, and this is not a situation unique to CCP, is how willing will CCP be to provide information to the Chinese government from the *non-China* server? People may initially scoff at this and claim no Western company would do this on principle, but consider two points:
1. The Chinese government now has leverage on CCP as it could simply shut down the local licensee, or nationalize it, or keep it running and simply stop sending the agreed revenue stream to CCP. What would the impact be of the threat of this, especially if the Chinese operation is providing a lot of revenue? 2. That Western companies are willing to reveal any information, as admitted to the United States Congress, at all brings into question the ease of batting this concern aside by claiming that principle prevents.
I think it is clear that the Chinese government would be very interested indeed in chat and mail logs and corp/guild members of someone they suspect is a member of, say, Falun Gong on any of the systems, and, since everyone who signs up to play divulges their real name and address, this becomes more than a virtual concern.
Fantastic post. Someone who actually did research and tried to figure out the system rather than holding forth with an opinion based on... opinion.
I think you are onto something with Prime encouragement as that's the first thought I had when hearing about this ("Hmm, well, this would work pretty well if I had Prime"). I would be interested to hear from people who do have Prime, but I sort of think that once you had Prime, you would order just about anything you could order from Amazon from Amazon rather than someone else. Sure, you can save a few dollars here and there buying from other vendors, but when you factor in hassle and shipping costs as compared to Prime, you won't be saving very much.
Is this a good thing? Well, I'm generally against monocultures, but, it sounds pretty convenient. The only danger becomes if Amazon uses this to run the competition down and then raise prices. Their pricing as related to the competition essentially raises or lowers the value of your Prime membership, which is already sunk cost to you.
The article overstates it's argument with the hyberloic asssertion that griefing constitutes a "social disease." One gamer's griefing is another gamer's villainous role play.
I do not have much experience with MMORPGs, but from playing Eve Online a bit, I have to wonder sometimes where the "disease" really lies. Do the pirates who go around blowing up miners and new players in low security space have a "social disease"? What about the miners who spend endless hours obsessively and repetitively dragging the same icons from one window to another in complete safety in the high security systems? Does that qualify as a "social disease?
More importantly, since I suspect that "anti-grefing" initiatives put the power in the hands of the latter type, do we really want them making virtual worlds "safe"? It sounds like a script for taking the real world writ small into virtual worlds, creating endless bureaucracy and oppressive governance.
Hey, at least, where's there is power to be had, you can always play the game to get that power... so you can grief people with it.
Interesting; thank you for the information. It always seems a gray area to me about whether store shelves are stocked with:
1. Inventory bought and paid for by the store owner, not returnable except under special conditions such as defective). 2. Inventory perhaps tacitly bought and paid for by the store owner, but because of expected returns, actually owned by the manufacturer who is 'renting' the shelf space, with 'rent' paid by the markup on any units that sell, all remaining units returned to manufacturer and refunded to store owner.
It seems reasonable to say that the store owner can say, "Well your product didn't sell, take it back and I'll have my money back, thanks." It also seems reasonable to for the manufacturer to say, "Well, if you didn't think you could sell that many, you shouldn't have ordered so many. We could have sold it somewhere else, but now we cannot." Maybe it comes down to expertise in the market niche. For a general retail store owner (say, Target), it's hard to know exactly the local demand for any given gizmo of the thousands carried in one store. But if you specialized in something like, I don't know, mountain bike parts, you should be able to anticipate local demand correctly.
You also have the wrinkle of perishable products, like fruits and vegetables at grocery stores, where manufacturers cannot really take them back and try to sell them somewhere else, because they have gone all the way through their shelf life at the first store. Then again, grocers must employ some sort of mixed model, because I believe that many of the end cap displays and such are paid for by manufacturers.
Any additional insight here by anyone with experience in the business welcome.
Question of curiosity: When Sony counts shipped, has Sony been paid for those, or would they have to take them back and credit the distributors if they did not sell?
"Jeff Pulver, the self-described futurist and entrepreneur... says, 'The same DNA that disrupted the telecom industry is well on its way to totally revolutionizing the way the TV, film, and broadcast industry is going to be,' adding that he's now looking for 'the Vonage of Internet video.' And by the way, he regrets leaving the Vonage of Internet calling before it got hot: 'I blew it. I had the juice. I could have done something.'"
"Self-described" futurist and entrepreneur who uses "DNA" unscientifically and totally out of context (maybe self referential?) and the phrase, "I had the juice." Please, people, editorial discretion! Shame on both WSJ and Slashdot for picking up this claptrap.
Call me a troll, but it wastes our (as in readers) time to run stories about people's groundless opinions or plans and this sort of thing just rewards the self-aggrandizers who spread false information, often by opinion stated as fact, seek attention for themselves, and cause many social ills.
I cringe whenever I hear file sharing termed as 'piracy' or, in this case, to the activities of a terrorist group ('Hezbollah'). Allowing this vocabulary to continue wins the argument for the entertainment industry on the power of semantics without any analysis of the facts.
What the entertainment industry and ilk are against is sharing. It is only through their imposition of selfishness and self importance on the ability of others to share that they can make money. Unfortunately, this makes them net negative resources to society because in doing so, they compromise the free flow of information necessary to a technically and culturally advancing civilization. Imagine if they had been around when humans only had oral history as a way to pass information between people and generations. There would be no tape recorders, no CDs, and certainly no computers.
Piracy is when someone actually takes something of value and realizes the value of it themselves. The Hong Kong outfits that take a movie, stamp it on a DVD, and then package and sell it as if were the original are pirates in this sense. It makes sense to have copyright laws preventing this type of activity. However, to use the parlance of the summary," 17 year old kids" are not "Hezbollah". They are not terrorists. They are not pirates. Pirates do not share. They are simply sharing information with each other (and us), which is a virtue we espouse to younger generations. The effort of the entertainment industry to criminalize their behavior is an affront to all of us who share thoughts, ideas, and anything else we choose to share without charge.
Not true. Please review the SSL specification. The domain part of the URL is used to contact the server, the SSL handshake is completed, then the request including the URL path and query string portion is submitted encrypted. There is not difference in protection under SSL whether parameters are passed by query string (GET) or by HTTP headers (POST).
Yes, the anti-virus industry is as rotten as it appears, if not more so. In talking to non-expert computer users who use anti-virus, anti-virus causes more problems than it solves. Anti-viral software with automatic updating is essentially like installing a rootkit on your computer controlled by the anti-virus vendor. With just a little bit of training, and perhaps a different email client than Outlook, as well as using Firefox instead of (or patching) IE, viruses and malware are easily avoided.
Anyone who is serious about security doesn't run anti-virus because it does not fix the root issues of vulnerability.
Thy key is that anti-virus can be sold on fear and, since the average computer user doesn't understand that there is nothing mystical about viruses and their vectors are easily identified, fear sells a product that actually makes your computer less secure and less usable. That said, there are some good free programs out there, like ClamAV and Spybot Search & Destroy to help you as a system administrator check out suspicious files or clean up a mess on a specific case by case basis (the latter only applying to Windows).
*groan* Did this article occur before or after "Crackpot Discovers Indiana Jones in Atlantis Battling Dinosaurs Originally Bred in Captivity By UFOs From Outer Space?" I'm not disparaging the science at hand, but could we get better source material? Please? Anyone?
Ethics and morality aside, which are being much discussed in other topics, what problem does embedded RFIDs really solve here? RFIDs are extremely low distance information responders. They would not let anyone track down someone to their location. This means that RFIDs embedded in migrant workers serves no purpose besides embedding 'papers' on them, which they could remove just as they could lose papers, though it is probably in their best interest if legitimate to keep their papers on them.
Therefore, all this does is attempt to solve an already solved simple problem (identification papers) in an overly complex and expensive way.
Also, people do not seem to understand the difference between GPS, active transponders, and RFID. Embarrassingly, even IBM doesn't have a clue even though it wants to sell RFID solutions. I cite a commercial where a truck is notified it is off course in the middle of a desert as an advertisement for RFID solutions.
Just a quick note that yes, this would protect the query string parameters that make up the search, but the ISPs could still technically log your DNS queries and destination IP address of any request packets, so they would know the domains and IPs you visited, if not that particular locations on those domains.
"Dude, the government did procecute them, and the RAM companies have already admitted guilt in price-fixing."
Sure, but not in this particular instance. Please look up "Commutation of Conditionals" or the "Fallacy of the Consequent" for why your argument has run off track. You are stating that the companies have been found guilty of price fixing in some instances, therefore they are guilty of price fixing in this instance, which does not logically hold.
"The companies worked together to improve prices on a competing type of memory chip in order to discourage computer makers like Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Gateway (GTW), and others from adopting a type of memory known as Direct Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory (RDRAM) in their computers, and instead favor a competing type of memory chip known as Double Data Rate DRAM (DDR-DRAM)."
If RAMBUS wants to push this one, they have to reveal something beyond Micron et al attempting to lower prices for consumers across the board. If they could prove that their alternative had the same cost basis and Micron et all lowered prices solely to drive them out of business so they could all then simultaneously raise prices back up, and in fact did so, then they would have something, but it doesn't not sound like they had a cheaper solution or that Micron et al were losing money to drive them out of business to raise prices back up. Collusion is not illegal if it works in favor of consumers. I think a lot of people fail to realize that antirust laws and the like exist to protect consumers, not protect businesses from competition (which is why a government entity is the one who generally prosecutes antitrust cases "for the people").
Although Mr. Sink makes good points about the need to ship products with a certain level of minor bugs and do a constant analysis of priorities to continually improve a product, which may lead some minor bugs always open, original architecture design has a big impact on the ability to fix bugs.
For example, Mr. Sink's two bugs that he cited show two things:
1. Improper design of the business logic to database connection by locking themselves into a closed-source, expensive, proprietary database system and using proprietary extensions offered by such. 2. Developing and testing for only one platform.
If originally they had designed their architecture to not rely so heavily on internal mechanisms of SQL Server and kept in mind that they might want to make a change at some point, the evaluation of whether to fix the first bug he cited would be quite different. If they had spent just a little time upfront thinking and testing cross-platform development design, the line endings bug would be a non-issue and overall code quality would probably improve.
Therefore, his analysis of bug prioritization makes sense once you get to the shipping stage. However, it is not an excuse for shoddy design, which causes some bugs to not be fixed because of the high level of cost and risk it would now take because of that poor design. An indication of the overall quality of a codebase is how easily bugs can be fixed. Given enough time, the market (in non-monopolistic product niches) will sort out those that can fix their bugs because of good design from those who cannot.
You used your grandmother's memory to dismiss the idea in general, but were the warnings of your grandmother's time correct? There is some evidence that people are, in general, less literate then they were a century ago before radio, television, and now video games.
From Wikipedia (caveats as to quality, requires more research, but raises possibility the following is true):
"In New England, the literacy rate was over 50 percent during the first half of the 17th century, and it rose to 70 percent by 1710. By the time of the American Revolution, it was around 90 percent. This is seen by some as a side effect of the Puritan belief in the importance of Bible reading. "
"In the United States, one in seven people (more than 40 million people) can barely read a job offer or utility bill, which arguably makes them functionally illiterate in a developed country such as the US. In 2003, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this "below basic" level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED.... Literacy among college graduates declined between 1992 and 2003, with less than one-third of all graduates at the highest "proficient" level in 2003, and less than half of all graduates with advanced degrees at this level."
I'm not saying that video games are in any way unique in terms of having a possible impact on the decline of literacy, if such a decline is indeed happening. However, literacy decline is important to a functioning country as a paucity of literacy and comprehension could have a direct impact on politics, susceptibility to marketing, and a general inability to skeptically parse written and oral arguments. The current quality of journalism and punditry in national politics in the U.S indicates that this could well be the case and declining literacy is having a real, negative impact.
This is a lot of speculation, but it's an important issue deserving additional research that should not be dismissed just because it implicates video games. Language is central to the ability for a society to operate and anything that affects literacy affects a whole lot more than book reading. It's also not just about wether someone can read, but how well they comprehend complex arguments.
You are right, I went too far in saying it was a 'thin abstraction layer'. Obviously it offers the things you cited, which C++ does not, and is completely interpreted, etc. I meant more that it is closer, or perhaps, more accessible, to C/C++ in the sense that you can create Ruby C/C++ extensions, as well as embed the Ruby interpreter into your C/C++ application. Also, the organization of libraries, method names, comments, and certain operators give a much more C/C++ feel to it than, say, a Java feel, though that's obviously subjective.
As for execution speed in response to another poster, the vast majority of performance problems in software generally are merely the demons of premature optimization imagination. The few true performance problems any given application actually ever realizes generally fall into either a well known pattern or are going to require some near-assembly code to be truly efficient. That's why I don't worry about scalability so much. Yes, Ruby is definitely slower than a compiled language, but, if I ever need the performance in a key area, I know I can just fall back to a compiled extension. The amount of time Ruby development saves makes up for the performance hit, allowing serious energies to be applied only to demonstrated issues.
AJAX is based on technologies with extremely poor design and implementation, such as browsers, JavaScript, and HTML (poorly designed for this application, perfectly ok for marking up documents). Rails takes lessons learned from a decade of server-side Web development, as well as the catastrophe that has become J2EE through over-engineering, and simplifies it to the essential mechanisms. Built on top of Ruby, which is itself a pretty thin simplification wrapper over C++, it combines the simplification of Web site development best practices (MVC, proper tiers, etc.) with the power of an high level development language overlaid directly on top of a low level near-assembly language, with the ability to perforate the abstraction layer (first through modifying Rails source in Ruby, then through C extensions) if needed for performance or other reasons.
Short, brutal version: AJAX built on crap by script kiddies, Rails on bedrock by software engineers.
Maybe you mean like Qualcomm undervalued at $1000 per share? Please do not equate quantitative analysis with big thinking. These is just people spouting off their opinion. The way the statistics work, you could get as good thinking walking down the street asking people randomly.
Developers of the majority of free and open source software do not generally make their software accessible to the end user because most free and open software consists of libraries and platforms intended for other developers of both free and commercial software. The task falls to successive generations of developers to build applications for end users on top of these libraries and platforms. Other than those libraries licensed under the GPL, both commercial and free software and services benefit directly from free and open source software.
Vast numbers of both commercial and free Web sites run on Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, Ruby on Rails, and other free and open source software. The most advanced and user-friendly operating system, Mac OS, runs on top of a free and open source BSD subsystem. I do not think it appropriate to measure the success and contribution of free and open source software to the end user on the basis of free and open source client application installations alone.
For those free and open source applications that end users could use directly, you must understand the development process to in turn understand why most free and open software does not have simple ergonomic interfaces. Finishing off the final presentation details that would simplify the interface and make it an enjoyable experience for the end user can take as long or longer than all the other development put into the application. Putting the final touches on a user interface consists of very difficult and tedious work that will not appeal to many programmers who want to focus on the algorithms and big logical challenges in the guts of the program. To do it well also requires some creative resources and not many free creative resources exist.
On the issue of simplicity over complexity, all software would benefit from careful attention to making things as simple as possible. I do not think free and open source software has a monopoly on overly complex interfaces. The vast of majority of both commercial and open applications would benefit from user interface simplification. If free and open source software is not free because of the cost of complexity, most commercial software by comparison merely adds a surcharge on top of the cost of the complexity.
I think it's because these sorts of things fall under the following catch-all that a more technically proficient crowd innately understands, even if not sure of the exact reason (which I put in another post):
Your invention/analysis uses science/technology in an unscientific/non-technical/inappropriate way to prove something trivial/meaningless/completely wrong.
People use the keyword 'love' more around Valentine's Day? Brilliant! Of course they do. Valentine's day comes with huge amounts of social programming for these keywords - just look at the massive amounts of marketing and cultural buildup. But making the determination that bloggers are therefore more 'flirty' - that's a completely arbitrary jump in logic. Next up, the keyword "Santa" is more common on blogs around Christmas and that means bloggers are feeling more generous. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I did some investigation into DS homebrew and took some notes on the information I could find. Could anyone with DS homebrew experience verify that I am on the right track and/or suggest better ways to go?
Notes:
"Basically, the way home homebrew and ROMS work is that you have to put something in the DS game slot at top to redirect execution to the CF or SD card adapter that carries the SD or CF memory card and various software in the GBA slot at bottom. Max Media Launcher, which goes in the DS game slot, seems to have a very good success rate at booting ROMs and homebrew when combined with the M3 SD X (what about the M3 CF X?).
Other products exist to redirect execution that fit in the DS game slot at the top, although ones like PassKey require that you fit a game into the device and then the conjoined entity into the DS game slot. You can also use wifi to do this (or potentially serve up applications), but you need a wireless access point with a certain chipset to do this (does the USB Wifi Max router enable this?). You can also flash the firmware on the DS, but this option seems complex for little gain when you can just put in the Max Media Launcher, plus I believe it voids the warranty."
Sources:
http://www.iso420.com/nds/dmax/
http://www.iso420.com/nds/m3sdx/
Article summary: Rich yuppy buys overly expensive kayak because it is "fast" and "looks like a ferrari", although he is unable to explain why, from a technical perspective, it is any better than a regular kayak. He almost exclusively talks about his little vignette of crossing the Long Island Sound in it, pandering on about how he was buying the $5000 kayak so he could get sponsors to give $500 or so to "needy children" for his little cross bay adventure. He gives props to his friends, who will no doubt be tickled to be in BusinessWeek.
Before you mod troll, read article and you will see it is completely devoid of any technical or scientific interest. Slashdot's slogan is "stuff that matters". This stuff does not.
This interview is worth reading if you are interested in Eve Online, though the interviewer asks a lot of easy questions. Some of the frontiers that Eve has arrived at are no longer virtual or strictly game related.
One question that the interviewer should have asked, since CCP was being candid about its revenue sharing with the Chinese licensee, is to what degree it will cooperate with the Chinese government on requests for user data a la the Yahoo! China fiasco? CCP seems to be adopting the policy of many other technology businesses by saying that the local licensee company is the one following Chinese laws.
This is, of course, a complete dodge of the pertinent question since there is a revenue sharing agreement and it's essentially required in China to have a local licensee because of restrictions on foreign ownership. In many instances, it's akin to saying, since I incorporated my business, I am no longer ethically responsible for the actions taken by my corporation with my consent.
The greater specter raised, and this is not a situation unique to CCP, is how willing will CCP be to provide information to the Chinese government from the *non-China* server? People may initially scoff at this and claim no Western company would do this on principle, but consider two points:
1. The Chinese government now has leverage on CCP as it could simply shut down the local licensee, or nationalize it, or keep it running and simply stop sending the agreed revenue stream to CCP. What would the impact be of the threat of this, especially if the Chinese operation is providing a lot of revenue?
2. That Western companies are willing to reveal any information, as admitted to the United States Congress, at all brings into question the ease of batting this concern aside by claiming that principle prevents.
I think it is clear that the Chinese government would be very interested indeed in chat and mail logs and corp/guild members of someone they suspect is a member of, say, Falun Gong on any of the systems, and, since everyone who signs up to play divulges their real name and address, this becomes more than a virtual concern.
Fantastic post. Someone who actually did research and tried to figure out the system rather than holding forth with an opinion based on... opinion.
I think you are onto something with Prime encouragement as that's the first thought I had when hearing about this ("Hmm, well, this would work pretty well if I had Prime"). I would be interested to hear from people who do have Prime, but I sort of think that once you had Prime, you would order just about anything you could order from Amazon from Amazon rather than someone else. Sure, you can save a few dollars here and there buying from other vendors, but when you factor in hassle and shipping costs as compared to Prime, you won't be saving very much.
Is this a good thing? Well, I'm generally against monocultures, but, it sounds pretty convenient. The only danger becomes if Amazon uses this to run the competition down and then raise prices. Their pricing as related to the competition essentially raises or lowers the value of your Prime membership, which is already sunk cost to you.
The article overstates it's argument with the hyberloic asssertion that griefing constitutes a "social disease." One gamer's griefing is another gamer's villainous role play.
I do not have much experience with MMORPGs, but from playing Eve Online a bit, I have to wonder sometimes where the "disease" really lies. Do the pirates who go around blowing up miners and new players in low security space have a "social disease"? What about the miners who spend endless hours obsessively and repetitively dragging the same icons from one window to another in complete safety in the high security systems? Does that qualify as a "social disease?
More importantly, since I suspect that "anti-grefing" initiatives put the power in the hands of the latter type, do we really want them making virtual worlds "safe"? It sounds like a script for taking the real world writ small into virtual worlds, creating endless bureaucracy and oppressive governance.
Hey, at least, where's there is power to be had, you can always play the game to get that power... so you can grief people with it.
Interesting; thank you for the information. It always seems a gray area to me about whether store shelves are stocked with:
1. Inventory bought and paid for by the store owner, not returnable except under special conditions such as defective).
2. Inventory perhaps tacitly bought and paid for by the store owner, but because of expected returns, actually owned by the manufacturer who is 'renting' the shelf space, with 'rent' paid by the markup on any units that sell, all remaining units returned to manufacturer and refunded to store owner.
It seems reasonable to say that the store owner can say, "Well your product didn't sell, take it back and I'll have my money back, thanks." It also seems reasonable to for the manufacturer to say, "Well, if you didn't think you could sell that many, you shouldn't have ordered so many. We could have sold it somewhere else, but now we cannot." Maybe it comes down to expertise in the market niche. For a general retail store owner (say, Target), it's hard to know exactly the local demand for any given gizmo of the thousands carried in one store. But if you specialized in something like, I don't know, mountain bike parts, you should be able to anticipate local demand correctly.
You also have the wrinkle of perishable products, like fruits and vegetables at grocery stores, where manufacturers cannot really take them back and try to sell them somewhere else, because they have gone all the way through their shelf life at the first store. Then again, grocers must employ some sort of mixed model, because I believe that many of the end cap displays and such are paid for by manufacturers.
Any additional insight here by anyone with experience in the business welcome.
"It is difficult to pinpoint the number of such contracts because many of them are classified,"
If a contract is classified, who gets to bid on it? Just the big defense agency companies? Where's the oversight?
Question of curiosity: When Sony counts shipped, has Sony been paid for those, or would they have to take them back and credit the distributors if they did not sell?
"Jeff Pulver, the self-described futurist and entrepreneur... says, 'The same DNA that disrupted the telecom industry is well on its way to totally revolutionizing the way the TV, film, and broadcast industry is going to be,' adding that he's now looking for 'the Vonage of Internet video.' And by the way, he regrets leaving the Vonage of Internet calling before it got hot: 'I blew it. I had the juice. I could have done something.'"
"Self-described" futurist and entrepreneur who uses "DNA" unscientifically and totally out of context (maybe self referential?) and the phrase, "I had the juice." Please, people, editorial discretion! Shame on both WSJ and Slashdot for picking up this claptrap.
Call me a troll, but it wastes our (as in readers) time to run stories about people's groundless opinions or plans and this sort of thing just rewards the self-aggrandizers who spread false information, often by opinion stated as fact, seek attention for themselves, and cause many social ills.
I cringe whenever I hear file sharing termed as 'piracy' or, in this case, to the activities of a terrorist group ('Hezbollah'). Allowing this vocabulary to continue wins the argument for the entertainment industry on the power of semantics without any analysis of the facts.
What the entertainment industry and ilk are against is sharing. It is only through their imposition of selfishness and self importance on the ability of others to share that they can make money. Unfortunately, this makes them net negative resources to society because in doing so, they compromise the free flow of information necessary to a technically and culturally advancing civilization. Imagine if they had been around when humans only had oral history as a way to pass information between people and generations. There would be no tape recorders, no CDs, and certainly no computers.
Piracy is when someone actually takes something of value and realizes the value of it themselves. The Hong Kong outfits that take a movie, stamp it on a DVD, and then package and sell it as if were the original are pirates in this sense. It makes sense to have copyright laws preventing this type of activity. However, to use the parlance of the summary," 17 year old kids" are not "Hezbollah". They are not terrorists. They are not pirates. Pirates do not share. They are simply sharing information with each other (and us), which is a virtue we espouse to younger generations. The effort of the entertainment industry to criminalize their behavior is an affront to all of us who share thoughts, ideas, and anything else we choose to share without charge.
Not true. Please review the SSL specification. The domain part of the URL is used to contact the server, the SSL handshake is completed, then the request including the URL path and query string portion is submitted encrypted. There is not difference in protection under SSL whether parameters are passed by query string (GET) or by HTTP headers (POST).
Yes, the anti-virus industry is as rotten as it appears, if not more so. In talking to non-expert computer users who use anti-virus, anti-virus causes more problems than it solves. Anti-viral software with automatic updating is essentially like installing a rootkit on your computer controlled by the anti-virus vendor. With just a little bit of training, and perhaps a different email client than Outlook, as well as using Firefox instead of (or patching) IE, viruses and malware are easily avoided.
Anyone who is serious about security doesn't run anti-virus because it does not fix the root issues of vulnerability.
Thy key is that anti-virus can be sold on fear and, since the average computer user doesn't understand that there is nothing mystical about viruses and their vectors are easily identified, fear sells a product that actually makes your computer less secure and less usable. That said, there are some good free programs out there, like ClamAV and Spybot Search & Destroy to help you as a system administrator check out suspicious files or clean up a mess on a specific case by case basis (the latter only applying to Windows).
*groan* Did this article occur before or after "Crackpot Discovers Indiana Jones in Atlantis Battling Dinosaurs Originally Bred in Captivity By UFOs From Outer Space?" I'm not disparaging the science at hand, but could we get better source material? Please? Anyone?
Ethics and morality aside, which are being much discussed in other topics, what problem does embedded RFIDs really solve here? RFIDs are extremely low distance information responders. They would not let anyone track down someone to their location. This means that RFIDs embedded in migrant workers serves no purpose besides embedding 'papers' on them, which they could remove just as they could lose papers, though it is probably in their best interest if legitimate to keep their papers on them.
Therefore, all this does is attempt to solve an already solved simple problem (identification papers) in an overly complex and expensive way.
Also, people do not seem to understand the difference between GPS, active transponders, and RFID. Embarrassingly, even IBM doesn't have a clue even though it wants to sell RFID solutions. I cite a commercial where a truck is notified it is off course in the middle of a desert as an advertisement for RFID solutions.
Just a quick note that yes, this would protect the query string parameters that make up the search, but the ISPs could still technically log your DNS queries and destination IP address of any request packets, so they would know the domains and IPs you visited, if not that particular locations on those domains.
"Dude, the government did procecute them, and the RAM companies have already admitted guilt in price-fixing."
Sure, but not in this particular instance. Please look up "Commutation of Conditionals" or the "Fallacy of the Consequent" for why your argument has run off track. You are stating that the companies have been found guilty of price fixing in some instances, therefore they are guilty of price fixing in this instance, which does not logically hold.
Well, I suppose collusion is not always an antirust violation as well, but antiTrust makes more sense given the context. Damn typos.
"The companies worked together to improve prices on a competing type of memory chip in order to discourage computer makers like Dell (DELL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Gateway (GTW), and others from adopting a type of memory known as Direct Rambus Dynamic Random Access Memory (RDRAM) in their computers, and instead favor a competing type of memory chip known as Double Data Rate DRAM (DDR-DRAM)."
If RAMBUS wants to push this one, they have to reveal something beyond Micron et al attempting to lower prices for consumers across the board. If they could prove that their alternative had the same cost basis and Micron et all lowered prices solely to drive them out of business so they could all then simultaneously raise prices back up, and in fact did so, then they would have something, but it doesn't not sound like they had a cheaper solution or that Micron et al were losing money to drive them out of business to raise prices back up. Collusion is not illegal if it works in favor of consumers. I think a lot of people fail to realize that antirust laws and the like exist to protect consumers, not protect businesses from competition (which is why a government entity is the one who generally prosecutes antitrust cases "for the people").
Although Mr. Sink makes good points about the need to ship products with a certain level of minor bugs and do a constant analysis of priorities to continually improve a product, which may lead some minor bugs always open, original architecture design has a big impact on the ability to fix bugs.
For example, Mr. Sink's two bugs that he cited show two things:
1. Improper design of the business logic to database connection by locking themselves into a closed-source, expensive, proprietary database system and using proprietary extensions offered by such.
2. Developing and testing for only one platform.
If originally they had designed their architecture to not rely so heavily on internal mechanisms of SQL Server and kept in mind that they might want to make a change at some point, the evaluation of whether to fix the first bug he cited would be quite different. If they had spent just a little time upfront thinking and testing cross-platform development design, the line endings bug would be a non-issue and overall code quality would probably improve.
Therefore, his analysis of bug prioritization makes sense once you get to the shipping stage. However, it is not an excuse for shoddy design, which causes some bugs to not be fixed because of the high level of cost and risk it would now take because of that poor design. An indication of the overall quality of a codebase is how easily bugs can be fixed. Given enough time, the market (in non-monopolistic product niches) will sort out those that can fix their bugs because of good design from those who cannot.
You used your grandmother's memory to dismiss the idea in general, but were the warnings of your grandmother's time correct? There is some evidence that people are, in general, less literate then they were a century ago before radio, television, and now video games.
... Literacy among college graduates declined between 1992 and 2003, with less than one-third of all graduates at the highest "proficient" level in 2003, and less than half of all graduates with advanced degrees at this level."
From Wikipedia (caveats as to quality, requires more research, but raises possibility the following is true):
"In New England, the literacy rate was over 50 percent during the first half of the 17th century, and it rose to 70 percent by 1710. By the time of the American Revolution, it was around 90 percent. This is seen by some as a side effect of the Puritan belief in the importance of Bible reading. "
"In the United States, one in seven people (more than 40 million people) can barely read a job offer or utility bill, which arguably makes them functionally illiterate in a developed country such as the US. In 2003, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this "below basic" level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED.
I'm not saying that video games are in any way unique in terms of having a possible impact on the decline of literacy, if such a decline is indeed happening. However, literacy decline is important to a functioning country as a paucity of literacy and comprehension could have a direct impact on politics, susceptibility to marketing, and a general inability to skeptically parse written and oral arguments. The current quality of journalism and punditry in national politics in the U.S indicates that this could well be the case and declining literacy is having a real, negative impact.
This is a lot of speculation, but it's an important issue deserving additional research that should not be dismissed just because it implicates video games. Language is central to the ability for a society to operate and anything that affects literacy affects a whole lot more than book reading. It's also not just about wether someone can read, but how well they comprehend complex arguments.
You are right, I went too far in saying it was a 'thin abstraction layer'. Obviously it offers the things you cited, which C++ does not, and is completely interpreted, etc. I meant more that it is closer, or perhaps, more accessible, to C/C++ in the sense that you can create Ruby C/C++ extensions, as well as embed the Ruby interpreter into your C/C++ application. Also, the organization of libraries, method names, comments, and certain operators give a much more C/C++ feel to it than, say, a Java feel, though that's obviously subjective.
As for execution speed in response to another poster, the vast majority of performance problems in software generally are merely the demons of premature optimization imagination. The few true performance problems any given application actually ever realizes generally fall into either a well known pattern or are going to require some near-assembly code to be truly efficient. That's why I don't worry about scalability so much. Yes, Ruby is definitely slower than a compiled language, but, if I ever need the performance in a key area, I know I can just fall back to a compiled extension. The amount of time Ruby development saves makes up for the performance hit, allowing serious energies to be applied only to demonstrated issues.
Yes as to hype, no as to technical merit.
AJAX is based on technologies with extremely poor design and implementation, such as browsers, JavaScript, and HTML (poorly designed for this application, perfectly ok for marking up documents). Rails takes lessons learned from a decade of server-side Web development, as well as the catastrophe that has become J2EE through over-engineering, and simplifies it to the essential mechanisms. Built on top of Ruby, which is itself a pretty thin simplification wrapper over C++, it combines the simplification of Web site development best practices (MVC, proper tiers, etc.) with the power of an high level development language overlaid directly on top of a low level near-assembly language, with the ability to perforate the abstraction layer (first through modifying Rails source in Ruby, then through C extensions) if needed for performance or other reasons.
Short, brutal version: AJAX built on crap by script kiddies, Rails on bedrock by software engineers.
Maybe you mean like Qualcomm undervalued at $1000 per share? Please do not equate quantitative analysis with big thinking. These is just people spouting off their opinion. The way the statistics work, you could get as good thinking walking down the street asking people randomly.
Developers of the majority of free and open source software do not generally make their software accessible to the end user because most free and open software consists of libraries and platforms intended for other developers of both free and commercial software. The task falls to successive generations of developers to build applications for end users on top of these libraries and platforms. Other than those libraries licensed under the GPL, both commercial and free software and services benefit directly from free and open source software.
Vast numbers of both commercial and free Web sites run on Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, Ruby on Rails, and other free and open source software. The most advanced and user-friendly operating system, Mac OS, runs on top of a free and open source BSD subsystem. I do not think it appropriate to measure the success and contribution of free and open source software to the end user on the basis of free and open source client application installations alone.
For those free and open source applications that end users could use directly, you must understand the development process to in turn understand why most free and open software does not have simple ergonomic interfaces. Finishing off the final presentation details that would simplify the interface and make it an enjoyable experience for the end user can take as long or longer than all the other development put into the application. Putting the final touches on a user interface consists of very difficult and tedious work that will not appeal to many programmers who want to focus on the algorithms and big logical challenges in the guts of the program. To do it well also requires some creative resources and not many free creative resources exist.
On the issue of simplicity over complexity, all software would benefit from careful attention to making things as simple as possible. I do not think free and open source software has a monopoly on overly complex interfaces. The vast of majority of both commercial and open applications would benefit from user interface simplification. If free and open source software is not free because of the cost of complexity, most commercial software by comparison merely adds a surcharge on top of the cost of the complexity.
I think it's because these sorts of things fall under the following catch-all that a more technically proficient crowd innately understands, even if not sure of the exact reason (which I put in another post):
Your invention/analysis uses science/technology in an unscientific/non-technical/inappropriate way to prove something trivial/meaningless/completely wrong.
People use the keyword 'love' more around Valentine's Day? Brilliant! Of course they do. Valentine's day comes with huge amounts of social programming for these keywords - just look at the massive amounts of marketing and cultural buildup. But making the determination that bloggers are therefore more 'flirty' - that's a completely arbitrary jump in logic. Next up, the keyword "Santa" is more common on blogs around Christmas and that means bloggers are feeling more generous. Etc.