In my opinion, the internet is way better and safer than alcohol and drugs any day.
Addiction is where any behavior begins to affect how you live your life. I'm addicted to breathing, eating and sleeping, but I can live a normal life doing all of these things. It's when you do something to such an extent that it significantly harms your way of life. I've known people who by most measures were alcoholics. They drank all the time, waking up with a screwdriver, etc. But in the end, they functioned fine in their daily lives. Never lost a job, beat their kids, etc. They just drank a lot.
The same goes for Internet addiction. It's not being on the Internet a lot that's bad. It's when other things suffer for it. When you don't eat, don't sleep, don't socialize, etc, then it's a problem. And ultimately you have to decide if it's a problem for you. I'm on-line a lot myself. I work on-line, I go home, and maybe spend 2 or 3 hours on the average night not on-line, then I'm back on-line again. But in the end, I'm married, I get out and socialize with friends, I eat, I sleep, etc.
As for "healthier". Well sitting in one place all the time, eating junk food and pumping yourself with caffiene is probably not much better for you than drinking a lot, smoking, or doing harder drugs. Arguably more people kill themselves with Internet addiction than say marijuana. I've never heard of somebody dying after a four day streak of getting stoned.
Actually I had considered that approach except for the issues of budget for a class. It's not like the average CS class has a pile of money lying around for licensing:).
This actually makes some sense depending on how you approach it. While CS courses taught a lot about design and structure of programs they put zero emphasis on the real world of writing software. There was no discussion of requirements gathering, documentation, etc. There definitely wasn't a discussion of software licensing practices.
I would argue though that there's an excellent overlap between CS curriculum and discussions of licensing, OSS, etc. What I imagine is two class projects. In one project they have to write everything themselves, mimicking proprietary software development. Then in the second project they will be able to use any OSS resources available to them. What would be ideal is to overlap this with a business class, showing how the choices had an influence on time to market and the marketability of the product.
This would put the leverage even further into the hands of the big players. A small time inventor who does not posess the capital to develop the technology fully would get screwed by the big players who could.
Another thought I had would be to base patent royalties on sunk costs. That is, if it takes you one million to develop a technology, you can license it to recoup one million plus some percentage to make a profit incentive. But make this fixed. So, once your patent has recouped it's designated amount it becomes royalty free instantly. How you achieve the repayment would be a matter of your own devising. You could sue a company for that million plus attorney's fees or you could license to one million people for one dollar.
The thing is the patent climate has shifted a lot in the last few years. Traditionally most patents were being developed by big industry players and there was a kind of mutually assured destruction involved. That is, IBM never sued Microsoft because Microsoft could sue them right back. They make deals to use eachothers patents and thus the industry heavyweights get to control the industry. Small time players get shut out because they don't have the leverage of their own patent portfolios and don't have the money to license them.
In recent years though there have been a lot of people building patent portfolios as a business in itself. They don't put money into R&D and product development, they just have lawyers who are there to do nothing but enforce patents. No matter how many patents Microsoft has, they have no leverage against a company that doesn't produce anything. Given the rather low standards the patent office has held for innovation is software patents there are tons of ways Microsoft can get in trouble without knowing it.
The big problem this poses for Microsoft is that it's an unmeasureable risk. They don't know at any given time how many patents they might be violating and how much the damages are that they might be liable for because of them. With many of the patents they can settle quickly for relatively minimal license fees. But if some people want to play hardball for a big settlement there's little MS can do about it.
In the long run this problem is only going to get worse for them. There are a lot of people who recognize this as a viable business model. The risk is somewhat high, but the reward is huge if it works out. While any one of these may be small change to Microsoft, they can add up pretty quickly and put product releases at risk. With new software releases comign every couple of years but patents lasting almost 20 years, the pool of potentially violatable patents will only grow.
They weren't getting any notable contributions from the community so they don't lose anything there. On the other hand, if they can eliminate their competition they can make more money, hire more developers, etc.
It's not a loophole, but it's quite clear that it's not what they thought they were getting into. Ultimately the benefit of the GPL to a business is being able to share the development cost. IBM is only paying for a portion of Linux as is RedHat, etc. Thus their ultimate cost is lower for the product they deliver.
It's clear here that there's no sharing of the work here. They do all the work and get little benefit. What's interesting about this though is what happens to the previous Nessus release. You've got these companies out there that are using it, so they have a vested interest in maintaining their release. So, they may end up developing the community around the previous release that Nessus proper never managed to do.
Keep in mind that the GPL is assigning a license, not the copyright itself. The original copyright owner on any copyright code can assign a new license to the code at any time. So long as all code that was contributed has had it's copyright assigned to them, they can do what they want. Otherwise they'd either have to obtain copyrights to that code now or gut that code from the product.
A disc that the average consumer will have little use for and hackers will likely turn into a brilliant way to build their collection of DivX files on the cheap. Thanks Microsoft!
ITunes is doing a lot to keep the money rolling in. While they may not make as much per track I guarantee that the labels are overall selling more music per listener through ITunes than they do through physical CD's. It's much better suited to impulse buys and it's less noticeable when you buy a lot of music because the bill doesn't show up til the end of the month.
ITunes provides a viable way to get music quickly the moment you want it and it gives you a way to do it that insures the music industry gets paid. If they cut off the air supply to Itunes, all of that file swapping that happened before is going to go up exponentially. So rather than diverting those users back to physical CD's, they will simply lose them as customers all together.
Frankly if Apple's smart they could probably play such a stand off against the labels quite well. Think about the average person's perception of IPod, ITunes and Apple versus their perception of the average music label. Apple can go direct to artists and bypass labels all together. Sure a lot of artists will have contracts that keep them locked into the existing labels, but with people already hooked into ITunes it will be easier to convert people to newer less well known arists.
So please labels, make a stand so we can finally flush you.
Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula.
There's a lot of good reasons why this hasn't taken off. While Apple might be able to get a nicer than average player, they will have a few snags:
1) The existence of MP3 players was preceeded by a number of people having collections of digital music and a need for a way to play them.
2) It's relatively trivial to rip a CD. It's not exactly legal to rip a DVD, and downloadable video is till in it's infancy and has all kinds of DRM issues.
3) In a person's average day, how often do they have an opportunity to watch video on a portable device where there's no better means to do it. That is, in most situations, I could play video on my TV, my desktop, or my laptop with superior quality and no noticeable sacrifice of convenience.
Have you ever tried to put a DVD on your computer. Beyond the fact, that you're violating the DMCA, it takes hours to pull the data off the DVD and then re-encode it in a compressed format. You'd better have a good reason to go through that hassle, and frankly most people don't.
Now if video was built into a device that you already had, it might make sense. But I just don't see any good reason to buy a portable video device for it's own sake.
How quickly and effectively were the Mozilla/Firefox vulnerabilities patched in comparison to IE?
While this is important in the grand scheme of things, ultimately, the more often vulnerabilities come out, the less likely it is that everybody is going to stay up to date consistently. Lest we forget, most attacks are exploiting publicly known and well understood software flaws. Many attackers are simply using the lists of critical bugs as specifications for their next attack.
Having said that, I think this is less a reflection on the code for Firefox and more about the development status of the two browsers. Firefox is still actively developed, getting new features on a routine basis. Invariably as new features are added, new bugs will be made and old bugs will be discovered. With IE, it is purely maintenance mode right now. The only updates it receives are bug fixes. So invariably there are less bugs to find over time if you aren't adding them with new code.
Symantec isn't shilling for Microsoft, they are just drawing a rather short sighted conclusion based on the the statistics they have. It doesn't say anything about longer term trends for the browsers, nor does it suggest anything about the innate security of their development methodologies.
One way to solve this is to put the side monitors at at a sharper angle relative to the main monitor. My seconday display (only have one) is probably at about a 20-30 degre angle towards me. If I try to look at the monitor without moving my head I really have to strain, so naturally I just turn my head a little.
It seems like this leads to a good idea for Rock Star Games to make some extra cash on their next release. Make two versions of the next GTA. One that is the standard mature rating, then make an explicity version and charge a bit more for it.
Frankly I'm tired of all the games and movies being targeted at this teen audience. They have enough token filth to titilate the kiddies but they are obviously tailored specifically to offend in specific controlled ways. I'd like to see some games out there that are free of that. This isn't to say I want pr0n games, there's plenty of pr0n on the Internet. But rather I want to see game creators have a free hand to make content that's appropriate to their narrative, not nerfed to open it up to a greater audience.
The thing is, Sony can afford to lose more on the PS3 because they have more ways to make up for it.
First of all, with Cell, it's a multipurpose processor they intend to use in many other devices. So the overall sunk cost of development is going to be spread out accross many devices.
Second of all, in addition to the licensing revenue from games they will be getting licensing revenue on Bluray. If the PS3 allows them to dominate the HD format war, then they'll have some exclusivity there and be guaranteed a higher revenue stream over the long haul.
Third, by pushing the whole HD angle, Sony also positions themselves to sell more TV's, etc.
So in the end, I think Sony's got a fair amount of wiggle room here. Having said that, a lot of the PS3 is a big gamble for them. If they have any problems with delivering on their promises, they are going to take it in the teeth.
There was one friend of mine who simply put an X through everything instead of his name. Honestly it was probably far more secure because it at least gave the cashiers a WTF moment.
But this all does bring me to a question I've had: what's the point of that number on the back of the card? I mean it's just one more piece of information, sure, but it's not any harder to obtain than the card number and expiration date.
Here's the thing. The PS3 is going to be hitting the streets at the $300-350 mark with Bluray inside. People will buy the PS3 because it's the PS3. There's will be several million units out in people's homes within weeks of release. They won't conciously decide to get a high def video player, it will just come with it.
On the other hand, to buy an HD-DVD player, as a stand alone device, you'd have to have a specific reason to buy just that. It'll only play discs, not record them, so you'd need a selection of movies available. But how many movies are there really going to be in 6 months or even a year down the line? Think about how long it took from the first DVD's hitting the shelves to really becoming mainstream. This is going to take far longer because most people don't have the TV's necessary to make use of the players.
On the other hand, PS3 owners will just have an HD player sitting right there, just waiting. They buy the device to play the games, and then down the road it turns out they can play movies too.
If you were a hollywood studio and you wanted to choose to back a format and one of the formats was going to be guaranteed to be in millions of homes within a year and the other was a roll of the dice, which would you choose?
They introduce DRM onto millions of devices that they know people are going to buy. How's that a misstep from their perspective.
Frankly it's a brilliant move by Sony. While HD-DVD is still trying to get off the ground there will be millions of Blu-ray players. Then Sony will be selling Blu-ray movies, and they'll leverage their market dominance to get other manufacturers to back their format. They'll make up that $100/PS3 in spades when they license the Blu-ray technology to everybody else.
The history of such things is that people won't buy a technology that makes things too complicated. But hell, nobody's buying PS3's for blu-ray, it's just coming with it. So they'll use it, because it's there. Game. Set. Match.
I keep seeing this complaint about games. That we're evolving the technology, but the overall creativity of games is diminishing. So I ask, what exactly are people expecting, creatively that they are not getting now?
I've personally been playing the same game for two years now with little change. I've not picked up Half Life 2 or Battlefield 2 because, frankly, there's nothing that new. I've been playing PlanetSide, and what it lacks in an uber cool graphics engine, it makes up for in large battle tactics that do not happen in any other game.
So that's what I want to see, more games that blend strategy and first person combat in large persistent environments. What do you want to see?
Of course the systems failed because there's no money to be made in building the kind of redundancy into the system that's necessary to keep running. It would be possible to build a hurricane resistent communications network but you'd have to pay a lot of money to do that. When you are competing for subscribers, they aren't going to pay significant more for "works during a hurricane" promotions.
For these providers it's easier to build a fair weather network and then handle the repair of those networks through insurance. In fact, it's probably a benefit to them because they'll be able replace aging equipment with new gear paid for by their insurance policy.
I honestly think the threat to Apple is minimal. The patent is questionable enough that Creative isn't going to be really abusive with it. They'll ask for their quarter ounce of flesh and be done with it.
The thing that's really bad about the way patents are going is how it ends up affecting the consumer. Let's consider for a moment if Apple wasn't a big corporation, but rather some little shop that found a big hit device. All of these companies, rather than trying to get a piece of the action could very well try to leverage legal action to get them off the market or otherwise take them over.
Using that same scenario some entrepreuneur may not even try to develop the item because of the cost of managing all the legalities of it. They'll try to get whatever patents they can which costs money, and then in the end they'll still be at the mercy of these companies with obscure patents on terribly obvious things. Once again, the consumer loses.
But even when you look at this specific case, what happens? Apple gets charged more money in licensing so they pass it straight on to the consumer. Did Creative's efforts provide any useful knowledge to Apple in their development work? No. Did creative have to spend any effort researching this interface? No. All they did was pay some legal fees and make a cash cow out nothing.
So for every technology there's all these dumb obvious patents which add on to the price. It either costs money to license or costs money to fight it in court, and in the end it means each device just costs more than it should have.
I have no objection to patents of legitimate inventions. Creating new ways of doing things that are truly innovative and different is worth incenting through patents. But these endless foolishly obvious patents is just hurting our economy.
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
To be totally frank, that position seems quite dumb. If somebody has certifications but doesn't have credible work experience to back up the certification, fine. But I know that personally I put my JDK certification on my resume because I've got it, so why not. I didn't go out of my way to get it, just got it for free when I was working for a company.
No employer is willing to pay me to get a certification in something I already know
This is not always true. Larger corporations will do this and consulting businesses will also do this because it shows the expertise of their people. I've also seen situations where an employer will reimburse an employee for certifications if they pass the tests.
Finally, keep in mind that not all certifications are created equal. I knew a guy who passed the original MCSE exam without ever having touched a Windows NT system. But if you compare that joke to the hurdles you have to go through to become a CCIE, they are worlds apart.
A certification is just like a University degree. It's meaning is tied entirely to what's behind it. I can get a doctorate in just about anything if I write a check to some company in Mexico. Does it mean anything? No. Just like some certifications don't.
Similarly, a university degree is a helpful start, but in the end, it's your job experience that will do the most for you in the end. I rather doubt that anybody looks at my resume with 8 years of Java programming experience and wonders how I did in school. I also rather doubt they care about my Sun Java Certification.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion, the internet is way better and safer than alcohol and drugs any day.
Addiction is where any behavior begins to affect how you live your life. I'm addicted to breathing, eating and sleeping, but I can live a normal life doing all of these things. It's when you do something to such an extent that it significantly harms your way of life. I've known people who by most measures were alcoholics. They drank all the time, waking up with a screwdriver, etc. But in the end, they functioned fine in their daily lives. Never lost a job, beat their kids, etc. They just drank a lot.
The same goes for Internet addiction. It's not being on the Internet a lot that's bad. It's when other things suffer for it. When you don't eat, don't sleep, don't socialize, etc, then it's a problem. And ultimately you have to decide if it's a problem for you. I'm on-line a lot myself. I work on-line, I go home, and maybe spend 2 or 3 hours on the average night not on-line, then I'm back on-line again. But in the end, I'm married, I get out and socialize with friends, I eat, I sleep, etc.
As for "healthier". Well sitting in one place all the time, eating junk food and pumping yourself with caffiene is probably not much better for you than drinking a lot, smoking, or doing harder drugs. Arguably more people kill themselves with Internet addiction than say marijuana. I've never heard of somebody dying after a four day streak of getting stoned.
Actually I had considered that approach except for the issues of budget for a class. It's not like the average CS class has a pile of money lying around for licensing :).
This actually makes some sense depending on how you approach it. While CS courses taught a lot about design and structure of programs they put zero emphasis on the real world of writing software. There was no discussion of requirements gathering, documentation, etc. There definitely wasn't a discussion of software licensing practices.
I would argue though that there's an excellent overlap between CS curriculum and discussions of licensing, OSS, etc. What I imagine is two class projects. In one project they have to write everything themselves, mimicking proprietary software development. Then in the second project they will be able to use any OSS resources available to them. What would be ideal is to overlap this with a business class, showing how the choices had an influence on time to market and the marketability of the product.
This would put the leverage even further into the hands of the big players. A small time inventor who does not posess the capital to develop the technology fully would get screwed by the big players who could.
Another thought I had would be to base patent royalties on sunk costs. That is, if it takes you one million to develop a technology, you can license it to recoup one million plus some percentage to make a profit incentive. But make this fixed. So, once your patent has recouped it's designated amount it becomes royalty free instantly. How you achieve the repayment would be a matter of your own devising. You could sue a company for that million plus attorney's fees or you could license to one million people for one dollar.
The thing is the patent climate has shifted a lot in the last few years. Traditionally most patents were being developed by big industry players and there was a kind of mutually assured destruction involved. That is, IBM never sued Microsoft because Microsoft could sue them right back. They make deals to use eachothers patents and thus the industry heavyweights get to control the industry. Small time players get shut out because they don't have the leverage of their own patent portfolios and don't have the money to license them.
In recent years though there have been a lot of people building patent portfolios as a business in itself. They don't put money into R&D and product development, they just have lawyers who are there to do nothing but enforce patents. No matter how many patents Microsoft has, they have no leverage against a company that doesn't produce anything. Given the rather low standards the patent office has held for innovation is software patents there are tons of ways Microsoft can get in trouble without knowing it.
The big problem this poses for Microsoft is that it's an unmeasureable risk. They don't know at any given time how many patents they might be violating and how much the damages are that they might be liable for because of them. With many of the patents they can settle quickly for relatively minimal license fees. But if some people want to play hardball for a big settlement there's little MS can do about it.
In the long run this problem is only going to get worse for them. There are a lot of people who recognize this as a viable business model. The risk is somewhat high, but the reward is huge if it works out. While any one of these may be small change to Microsoft, they can add up pretty quickly and put product releases at risk. With new software releases comign every couple of years but patents lasting almost 20 years, the pool of potentially violatable patents will only grow.
They weren't getting any notable contributions from the community so they don't lose anything there. On the other hand, if they can eliminate their competition they can make more money, hire more developers, etc.
It's not a loophole, but it's quite clear that it's not what they thought they were getting into. Ultimately the benefit of the GPL to a business is being able to share the development cost. IBM is only paying for a portion of Linux as is RedHat, etc. Thus their ultimate cost is lower for the product they deliver.
It's clear here that there's no sharing of the work here. They do all the work and get little benefit. What's interesting about this though is what happens to the previous Nessus release. You've got these companies out there that are using it, so they have a vested interest in maintaining their release. So, they may end up developing the community around the previous release that Nessus proper never managed to do.
Keep in mind that the GPL is assigning a license, not the copyright itself. The original copyright owner on any copyright code can assign a new license to the code at any time. So long as all code that was contributed has had it's copyright assigned to them, they can do what they want. Otherwise they'd either have to obtain copyrights to that code now or gut that code from the product.
A disc that the average consumer will have little use for and hackers will likely turn into a brilliant way to build their collection of DivX files on the cheap. Thanks Microsoft!
ITunes is doing a lot to keep the money rolling in. While they may not make as much per track I guarantee that the labels are overall selling more music per listener through ITunes than they do through physical CD's. It's much better suited to impulse buys and it's less noticeable when you buy a lot of music because the bill doesn't show up til the end of the month.
ITunes provides a viable way to get music quickly the moment you want it and it gives you a way to do it that insures the music industry gets paid. If they cut off the air supply to Itunes, all of that file swapping that happened before is going to go up exponentially. So rather than diverting those users back to physical CD's, they will simply lose them as customers all together.
Frankly if Apple's smart they could probably play such a stand off against the labels quite well. Think about the average person's perception of IPod, ITunes and Apple versus their perception of the average music label. Apple can go direct to artists and bypass labels all together. Sure a lot of artists will have contracts that keep them locked into the existing labels, but with people already hooked into ITunes it will be easier to convert people to newer less well known arists.
So please labels, make a stand so we can finally flush you.
Everyone and their dog... I don't want a dog to admin my server :)
Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula.
There's a lot of good reasons why this hasn't taken off. While Apple might be able to get a nicer than average player, they will have a few snags:
1) The existence of MP3 players was preceeded by a number of people having collections of digital music and a need for a way to play them.
2) It's relatively trivial to rip a CD. It's not exactly legal to rip a DVD, and downloadable video is till in it's infancy and has all kinds of DRM issues.
3) In a person's average day, how often do they have an opportunity to watch video on a portable device where there's no better means to do it. That is, in most situations, I could play video on my TV, my desktop, or my laptop with superior quality and no noticeable sacrifice of convenience.
Have you ever tried to put a DVD on your computer. Beyond the fact, that you're violating the DMCA, it takes hours to pull the data off the DVD and then re-encode it in a compressed format. You'd better have a good reason to go through that hassle, and frankly most people don't.
Now if video was built into a device that you already had, it might make sense. But I just don't see any good reason to buy a portable video device for it's own sake.
How quickly and effectively were the Mozilla/Firefox vulnerabilities patched in comparison to IE?
While this is important in the grand scheme of things, ultimately, the more often vulnerabilities come out, the less likely it is that everybody is going to stay up to date consistently. Lest we forget, most attacks are exploiting publicly known and well understood software flaws. Many attackers are simply using the lists of critical bugs as specifications for their next attack.
Having said that, I think this is less a reflection on the code for Firefox and more about the development status of the two browsers. Firefox is still actively developed, getting new features on a routine basis. Invariably as new features are added, new bugs will be made and old bugs will be discovered. With IE, it is purely maintenance mode right now. The only updates it receives are bug fixes. So invariably there are less bugs to find over time if you aren't adding them with new code.
Symantec isn't shilling for Microsoft, they are just drawing a rather short sighted conclusion based on the the statistics they have. It doesn't say anything about longer term trends for the browsers, nor does it suggest anything about the innate security of their development methodologies.
One way to solve this is to put the side monitors at at a sharper angle relative to the main monitor. My seconday display (only have one) is probably at about a 20-30 degre angle towards me. If I try to look at the monitor without moving my head I really have to strain, so naturally I just turn my head a little.
It seems like this leads to a good idea for Rock Star Games to make some extra cash on their next release. Make two versions of the next GTA. One that is the standard mature rating, then make an explicity version and charge a bit more for it.
Frankly I'm tired of all the games and movies being targeted at this teen audience. They have enough token filth to titilate the kiddies but they are obviously tailored specifically to offend in specific controlled ways. I'd like to see some games out there that are free of that. This isn't to say I want pr0n games, there's plenty of pr0n on the Internet. But rather I want to see game creators have a free hand to make content that's appropriate to their narrative, not nerfed to open it up to a greater audience.
The thing is, Sony can afford to lose more on the PS3 because they have more ways to make up for it.
First of all, with Cell, it's a multipurpose processor they intend to use in many other devices. So the overall sunk cost of development is going to be spread out accross many devices.
Second of all, in addition to the licensing revenue from games they will be getting licensing revenue on Bluray. If the PS3 allows them to dominate the HD format war, then they'll have some exclusivity there and be guaranteed a higher revenue stream over the long haul.
Third, by pushing the whole HD angle, Sony also positions themselves to sell more TV's, etc.
So in the end, I think Sony's got a fair amount of wiggle room here. Having said that, a lot of the PS3 is a big gamble for them. If they have any problems with delivering on their promises, they are going to take it in the teeth.
There was one friend of mine who simply put an X through everything instead of his name. Honestly it was probably far more secure because it at least gave the cashiers a WTF moment.
But this all does bring me to a question I've had: what's the point of that number on the back of the card? I mean it's just one more piece of information, sure, but it's not any harder to obtain than the card number and expiration date.
So what practical benefit does it really offer?
Here's the thing. The PS3 is going to be hitting the streets at the $300-350 mark with Bluray inside. People will buy the PS3 because it's the PS3. There's will be several million units out in people's homes within weeks of release. They won't conciously decide to get a high def video player, it will just come with it.
On the other hand, to buy an HD-DVD player, as a stand alone device, you'd have to have a specific reason to buy just that. It'll only play discs, not record them, so you'd need a selection of movies available. But how many movies are there really going to be in 6 months or even a year down the line? Think about how long it took from the first DVD's hitting the shelves to really becoming mainstream. This is going to take far longer because most people don't have the TV's necessary to make use of the players.
On the other hand, PS3 owners will just have an HD player sitting right there, just waiting. They buy the device to play the games, and then down the road it turns out they can play movies too.
If you were a hollywood studio and you wanted to choose to back a format and one of the formats was going to be guaranteed to be in millions of homes within a year and the other was a roll of the dice, which would you choose?
They introduce DRM onto millions of devices that they know people are going to buy. How's that a misstep from their perspective.
Frankly it's a brilliant move by Sony. While HD-DVD is still trying to get off the ground there will be millions of Blu-ray players. Then Sony will be selling Blu-ray movies, and they'll leverage their market dominance to get other manufacturers to back their format. They'll make up that $100/PS3 in spades when they license the Blu-ray technology to everybody else.
The history of such things is that people won't buy a technology that makes things too complicated. But hell, nobody's buying PS3's for blu-ray, it's just coming with it. So they'll use it, because it's there. Game. Set. Match.
Yeah Katamari for being such a simple concept is fun and rather addictive.
I keep seeing this complaint about games. That we're evolving the technology, but the overall creativity of games is diminishing. So I ask, what exactly are people expecting, creatively that they are not getting now?
I've personally been playing the same game for two years now with little change. I've not picked up Half Life 2 or Battlefield 2 because, frankly, there's nothing that new. I've been playing PlanetSide, and what it lacks in an uber cool graphics engine, it makes up for in large battle tactics that do not happen in any other game.
So that's what I want to see, more games that blend strategy and first person combat in large persistent environments. What do you want to see?
Of course the systems failed because there's no money to be made in building the kind of redundancy into the system that's necessary to keep running. It would be possible to build a hurricane resistent communications network but you'd have to pay a lot of money to do that. When you are competing for subscribers, they aren't going to pay significant more for "works during a hurricane" promotions.
For these providers it's easier to build a fair weather network and then handle the repair of those networks through insurance. In fact, it's probably a benefit to them because they'll be able replace aging equipment with new gear paid for by their insurance policy.
Precisely my point. It was not designed to be that way, but over time that's what it has evolved into.
I honestly think the threat to Apple is minimal. The patent is questionable enough that Creative isn't going to be really abusive with it. They'll ask for their quarter ounce of flesh and be done with it.
The thing that's really bad about the way patents are going is how it ends up affecting the consumer. Let's consider for a moment if Apple wasn't a big corporation, but rather some little shop that found a big hit device. All of these companies, rather than trying to get a piece of the action could very well try to leverage legal action to get them off the market or otherwise take them over.
Using that same scenario some entrepreuneur may not even try to develop the item because of the cost of managing all the legalities of it. They'll try to get whatever patents they can which costs money, and then in the end they'll still be at the mercy of these companies with obscure patents on terribly obvious things. Once again, the consumer loses.
But even when you look at this specific case, what happens? Apple gets charged more money in licensing so they pass it straight on to the consumer. Did Creative's efforts provide any useful knowledge to Apple in their development work? No. Did creative have to spend any effort researching this interface? No. All they did was pay some legal fees and make a cash cow out nothing.
So for every technology there's all these dumb obvious patents which add on to the price. It either costs money to license or costs money to fight it in court, and in the end it means each device just costs more than it should have.
I have no objection to patents of legitimate inventions. Creating new ways of doing things that are truly innovative and different is worth incenting through patents. But these endless foolishly obvious patents is just hurting our economy.
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
To be totally frank, that position seems quite dumb. If somebody has certifications but doesn't have credible work experience to back up the certification, fine. But I know that personally I put my JDK certification on my resume because I've got it, so why not. I didn't go out of my way to get it, just got it for free when I was working for a company.
No employer is willing to pay me to get a certification in something I already know
This is not always true. Larger corporations will do this and consulting businesses will also do this because it shows the expertise of their people. I've also seen situations where an employer will reimburse an employee for certifications if they pass the tests.
Finally, keep in mind that not all certifications are created equal. I knew a guy who passed the original MCSE exam without ever having touched a Windows NT system. But if you compare that joke to the hurdles you have to go through to become a CCIE, they are worlds apart.
A certification is just like a University degree. It's meaning is tied entirely to what's behind it. I can get a doctorate in just about anything if I write a check to some company in Mexico. Does it mean anything? No. Just like some certifications don't.
Similarly, a university degree is a helpful start, but in the end, it's your job experience that will do the most for you in the end. I rather doubt that anybody looks at my resume with 8 years of Java programming experience and wonders how I did in school. I also rather doubt they care about my Sun Java Certification.