My own theory is that the whole "personalized ads" concept is bullshit, at least when it's taken as far as it is now.
Someone who knows me EXACTLY (which seems to be what they're trying to do) would recommend to me pretty much just the things I already buy, and would buy anyways. I don't think I've *ever* clicked on an ad and bought what they were selling. Even if they could read my mind, all they would really be doing is giving me the link I'd be clicking on in a few seconds *anyways*.
In fact, it seems to do the exact opposite. I bought an SSD recently, and ever since my GMail has been showing nothing but ads for SSDs. Way to completely miss your chance - I probably won't need another for months, at the earliest. Or when I bought a laptop, for the next few weeks it was showing ads for Alienware laptops.
And then sometimes it gets things just completely, absolutely wrong. I swear that at one point, my Droid was *convinced* that I was a gay black man with AIDS. Wrong on all counts save that yes, I am male. I don't even know how it came up with that - there is literally nothing I've done that would support that idea. Needless to say, the "gay thug dating" and "HIV testing" ads had a zero chance of getting money from me (although it did get quite a few laughs).
So maybe the problem is that the entire framework of economic/advertising theories they're working on are *wrong*. Like when all the physicists' theories about the luminiferous ether had to be thrown out when it was demonstrated that no such thing existed. I would not be surprised if, decades from now, we look back at all this tracking and personalized advertising the way we currently look back at the "radiation" fad of the 50's - a lot of really bad ideas that we now know are completely wrong.
Well I thought it stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift.
Maybe I'm just too young for the Eight Megabytes one to make sense. I just can't think of 8MB as "too big to fit in RAM" - I think I've hit 8GB before with some programs.
Like I said, that's only what I've heard. I don't speak Arabic, and was in no place to confirm the information. And since I can't even remember the source, I did not even present it as "factual", only "what I have heard".
If your collective bosses don't know what project management is, *they* shouldn't be managing anyone. That's one of the main things managers *do*.
If they're asking you to take a different job, it's because they believe the value you'll add at the new position is greater than the value you'll add at your current location. Usually this is due to the new position being *more* important - the only time it should be less is if they consider you a *negative* asset and are trying to limit the damage you do.
So either they're a bunch of cheapskates who don't want to pay you what you're worth, or they think you suck and everything you touch turns to shit. Either way, you should be offended.
While 666 is considered "evil" and "bad" in most Western (read: Christian) cultures, that does not apply elsewhere. Notably in Arabic-speaking countries: 6 is considered lucky, especially in combinations (one particularly wealthy Qatari spent millions on the phone number 666-6666). I have heard this is because, in Arabic, 6 is "ellah", which has obvious similarities to "Allah".
Same with the Chinese - 6 is considered lucky, and 666 has no particular meaning. And in Jewish numerology, six is associated with God - exactly the opposite of what you intend.
Unless you're suggesting that neither the Arabs, nor the Chinese, engage in censorship...
Lowering the height seems reasonable. If someone has a high fence or hedge or such, they obviously consider the area behind it "private" and wish it to stay that way. But doing so will not significantly worsen the Street View images.
Likewise, blurring out sensitive areas is also logical. I think they're going a bit too far, personally - retirement homes? - but it's still not unreasonable. I can disagree with the extent of that decision while still recognizing that it was a logically-defensible and rational decision.
Advising communities in advance is also reasonable, if defined reasonably. Obviously, demanding Google go door-to-door six months ahead of time and personally notify every single person is unreasonable, but if it's just "mail them a letter stating the days and approximate times you expect to go by" or "put a notice in the local newspaper", it's fine. I doubt many people will care, but it will placate the few who have concerns.
Heckler und Koch GmbH and Rheinmetal AG have licensed factories in Iran. Iranian factories are cranking out G3s, MP5s, MG3s, all legally and for export. Not to mention the various Chinese/Russian small arms they manufacture (couldn't find out whether those were licensed or not).
I think that, before they ban software companies from doing business in Iran, they should maybe think about banning the firearm companies. Just a thought.
Imagine if everything had gone according to plan. They've gotten all the data they need, and have not been detected. They issue a self-destruct order, and bam. Nobody will ever know they were even there.
Now, as for why they're doing it now, there's another reason. I imagine the target has figured out they're infected. But maybe they don't know every computer that was infected. And if the virus has self-destructed, they may never know for sure which machines were hit. Even if they actually *did* ID every machine, the fact that the creators did this may make them think they missed some.
Trust me - schools can make chemistry mind-numbingly dull.
I'm a bit of a chemistry geed - not much, but I do read a handful of chemistry blogs on occasion, and I can keep up more often than not. (Recommendation - "In The Pipeline", read the "Things I Won't Work With" category, for all the stuff that makes even a veteran chemist run for cover. Hilarious read.)
But my college chem classes? Literally the first time a class has been just so impossible to care about that I failed it. I think we ran *maybe* one reaction a semester, and it was usually something on the level of "mix a (weak) acid and a (weak) base, determine what salt results". Or pointing a Geiger counter at a sample so old that it was barely above background radiation.
No other class was that dull. Ever. Even my later "introduction to programming" class (aka Pseudocode 101) was more interesting, if only because I could go above-and-beyond and show off by turning in my assignments in x86-64 assembly or LISP. But Chem II? The one time I did, walking through the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon reaction-by-reaction, from the chemical explosives to the fusion reactions to the neutrons bombarding the uranium in the case. And I got an F because my pictures weren't pretty enough.
We're already hearing about "local clouds" - essentially building a small-scale cloud for your own large company. So, say, Hewlett-Packard could, instead of renting cloud space, could build a small "cloud" just for themselves.
Once that becomes relatively common, someone will come up with the "personal cloud" - a small home server, that "does" "everything" "the cloud" "does". I actually expect IPv6 may help with this - if you can access "your" cloud from anywhere, what advantage does "the" cloud have?
And then, once that becomes common for nerds and the tech-savvy wealthy, someone will decide to do it in software instead of a dedicated hardware appliance. I expect they shall call it a "desktop cloud".
Even NASA's methods aren't 100% bug-free. They're probably some large number of nines - 99.99999% bug-free, maybe - but just as 100% uptime is impossible, so is zero-bug status.
And NASA's methods are *crazy*. Take one program. Run it on three different computers, connected by a simple voting circuit. That way, if there's a transient hardware error, it has to affect two of them simultaneously.
Now take the specs for that program, and hand them to three different teams. Do not allow them to share code, or even really communicate with each other. Run all three implementations on the above separate computers, so that any bug has to be present in multiple implementations in order to affect anything.
Now take the whole system, and spend about ten times as long in testing as you do in production usage. Have the code audited line-by-line by experts.
And even after all that, you can still have bugs in the specifications. Say, one module outputting in metric when it's passing data to a module that reads in imperial.
Ah, that's exactly what I was going to guess. Anytime I see a figure with far more significant digits than it ought to, I suspect a unit conversion done improperly.
To be perfectly honest, Cliff Bleszinski seems more like Epic's "public face". He may not have started the company, but he's definitely the guy the gaming media prefers to talk to.
Don't get me wrong - Sweeny's an awesome programmer, deserves far more credit than he's given, but he seems too media-shy to be *the* Epic guy.
Please direct rants at the right people. Mr. Carmack is a programmer. He programs. He is not a producer, director, design lead, art lead, or really anyone who would be responsible for either the game being fun/not fun, or for business decisions regarding on-disc DLC.
If the game were to crash, or to run poorly, or to have obvious code-related glitches, then by all means, blame Carmack. But from what I've heard, that's not what the problem is. The game runs fine, even has some quite remarkable technical features (he streams textures directly from disc into video memory via DMA), but it's just not fun or interesting to play. You don't blame the writers for bad special effects, you don't blame the level designers for terrible voiceacting, and you don't blame the engine programmer for the game not being fun to play.
As an aside, I find it quite interesting that id's public face is essentially their lead programmer. Most companies, it's a game designer, or a writer, or in some cases an artist (or often some combination of the above - game developers wear many hats). I know of no other "public face" who is purely, or even principally, a programmer.
Well, no more fiddling with port forwarding to make game servers, video chat or anything else work. No more dealing with public/private IPs, or the whole NAT shitpile.
Oh, and it also makes mandatory certain things like IPsec, and should speed up packet processing by eliminating fragment reassembly (which was also, historically, a common source for security exploits).
Oh, and while every IP belongs to only one device, there's nothing saying every device should have only one IP. You could easily assign more addresses to a single IPv6 host than the entire IPv4 internet *has*. So anyone trying to track visitors based off IPv6 address will be easily fooled by anyone who tries.
5.56x45mm is the specifications for the NATO-standard small-arms ammunition, used by pretty much every modern military assault rifle that isn't a Kalashnikov derivative (and some that are), as well as some police sniper rifles and various civilian rifles.
Actually, the games were probably a pretty easy port. The server logic has been ported for years - there have been Linux dedicated servers pretty much since HL2 came out. All that was really needed was input handling, and a renderer. The Mac port handled the renderer, and at least made sure the input system was able to be ported to a new system easily, not heavily DirectX-dependent.
Most of the difficulty was probably making it run *well*, not making it *run*. As well as porting Steam itself - I know that it does some weird filesystem things that may have been tricky.
I do have to say though, that I probably won't even install Steam on my Linux partition. Judging by my experience with Mac Steam, it's not worth it when I have a Windows partition. Outside Valve itself and the various indie games I have, there were only a handful of Mac-capable games (Assassin's Creed 2, Civilization 5, Psychonauts, Duke Nukem Forever, and the two Penny Arcade games), and half of those would not run on my specific system. And those that did run, tended to run better on Windows, on the same hardware.
This is still a very good piece of news, don't get me wrong, but it's no Half-Life 3 announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
My own theory is that the whole "personalized ads" concept is bullshit, at least when it's taken as far as it is now.
Someone who knows me EXACTLY (which seems to be what they're trying to do) would recommend to me pretty much just the things I already buy, and would buy anyways. I don't think I've *ever* clicked on an ad and bought what they were selling. Even if they could read my mind, all they would really be doing is giving me the link I'd be clicking on in a few seconds *anyways*.
In fact, it seems to do the exact opposite. I bought an SSD recently, and ever since my GMail has been showing nothing but ads for SSDs. Way to completely miss your chance - I probably won't need another for months, at the earliest. Or when I bought a laptop, for the next few weeks it was showing ads for Alienware laptops.
And then sometimes it gets things just completely, absolutely wrong. I swear that at one point, my Droid was *convinced* that I was a gay black man with AIDS. Wrong on all counts save that yes, I am male. I don't even know how it came up with that - there is literally nothing I've done that would support that idea. Needless to say, the "gay thug dating" and "HIV testing" ads had a zero chance of getting money from me (although it did get quite a few laughs).
So maybe the problem is that the entire framework of economic/advertising theories they're working on are *wrong*. Like when all the physicists' theories about the luminiferous ether had to be thrown out when it was demonstrated that no such thing existed. I would not be surprised if, decades from now, we look back at all this tracking and personalized advertising the way we currently look back at the "radiation" fad of the 50's - a lot of really bad ideas that we now know are completely wrong.
Well I thought it stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift.
Maybe I'm just too young for the Eight Megabytes one to make sense. I just can't think of 8MB as "too big to fit in RAM" - I think I've hit 8GB before with some programs.
Like I said, that's only what I've heard. I don't speak Arabic, and was in no place to confirm the information. And since I can't even remember the source, I did not even present it as "factual", only "what I have heard".
If your collective bosses don't know what project management is, *they* shouldn't be managing anyone. That's one of the main things managers *do*.
If they're asking you to take a different job, it's because they believe the value you'll add at the new position is greater than the value you'll add at your current location. Usually this is due to the new position being *more* important - the only time it should be less is if they consider you a *negative* asset and are trying to limit the damage you do.
So either they're a bunch of cheapskates who don't want to pay you what you're worth, or they think you suck and everything you touch turns to shit. Either way, you should be offended.
Bad idea for internationalization.
While 666 is considered "evil" and "bad" in most Western (read: Christian) cultures, that does not apply elsewhere. Notably in Arabic-speaking countries: 6 is considered lucky, especially in combinations (one particularly wealthy Qatari spent millions on the phone number 666-6666). I have heard this is because, in Arabic, 6 is "ellah", which has obvious similarities to "Allah".
Same with the Chinese - 6 is considered lucky, and 666 has no particular meaning. And in Jewish numerology, six is associated with God - exactly the opposite of what you intend.
Unless you're suggesting that neither the Arabs, nor the Chinese, engage in censorship...
Lowering the height seems reasonable. If someone has a high fence or hedge or such, they obviously consider the area behind it "private" and wish it to stay that way. But doing so will not significantly worsen the Street View images.
Likewise, blurring out sensitive areas is also logical. I think they're going a bit too far, personally - retirement homes? - but it's still not unreasonable. I can disagree with the extent of that decision while still recognizing that it was a logically-defensible and rational decision.
Advising communities in advance is also reasonable, if defined reasonably. Obviously, demanding Google go door-to-door six months ahead of time and personally notify every single person is unreasonable, but if it's just "mail them a letter stating the days and approximate times you expect to go by" or "put a notice in the local newspaper", it's fine. I doubt many people will care, but it will placate the few who have concerns.
How about we throw electrons at the morons who came up with this idea? At, say, ten thousand volts.
Possibly?
Wouldn't a better idea be just *not* *electing* baby-eaters to Parliament?
You know what's more interesting?
Heckler und Koch GmbH and Rheinmetal AG have licensed factories in Iran. Iranian factories are cranking out G3s, MP5s, MG3s, all legally and for export. Not to mention the various Chinese/Russian small arms they manufacture (couldn't find out whether those were licensed or not).
I think that, before they ban software companies from doing business in Iran, they should maybe think about banning the firearm companies. Just a thought.
Imagine if everything had gone according to plan. They've gotten all the data they need, and have not been detected. They issue a self-destruct order, and bam. Nobody will ever know they were even there.
Now, as for why they're doing it now, there's another reason. I imagine the target has figured out they're infected. But maybe they don't know every computer that was infected. And if the virus has self-destructed, they may never know for sure which machines were hit. Even if they actually *did* ID every machine, the fact that the creators did this may make them think they missed some.
Trust me - schools can make chemistry mind-numbingly dull.
I'm a bit of a chemistry geed - not much, but I do read a handful of chemistry blogs on occasion, and I can keep up more often than not. (Recommendation - "In The Pipeline", read the "Things I Won't Work With" category, for all the stuff that makes even a veteran chemist run for cover. Hilarious read.)
But my college chem classes? Literally the first time a class has been just so impossible to care about that I failed it. I think we ran *maybe* one reaction a semester, and it was usually something on the level of "mix a (weak) acid and a (weak) base, determine what salt results". Or pointing a Geiger counter at a sample so old that it was barely above background radiation.
No other class was that dull. Ever. Even my later "introduction to programming" class (aka Pseudocode 101) was more interesting, if only because I could go above-and-beyond and show off by turning in my assignments in x86-64 assembly or LISP. But Chem II? The one time I did, walking through the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon reaction-by-reaction, from the chemical explosives to the fusion reactions to the neutrons bombarding the uranium in the case. And I got an F because my pictures weren't pretty enough.
A big enough failure guarantees your place in history.
You remember the Ford Pinto? The Hindenburg? The Titanic?
Do you at least remember the Alamo?
Failures, every one of them, but remembered!
I dunno...
We're already hearing about "local clouds" - essentially building a small-scale cloud for your own large company. So, say, Hewlett-Packard could, instead of renting cloud space, could build a small "cloud" just for themselves.
Once that becomes relatively common, someone will come up with the "personal cloud" - a small home server, that "does" "everything" "the cloud" "does". I actually expect IPv6 may help with this - if you can access "your" cloud from anywhere, what advantage does "the" cloud have?
And then, once that becomes common for nerds and the tech-savvy wealthy, someone will decide to do it in software instead of a dedicated hardware appliance. I expect they shall call it a "desktop cloud".
And then the loop begins AGAIN!
Even NASA's methods aren't 100% bug-free. They're probably some large number of nines - 99.99999% bug-free, maybe - but just as 100% uptime is impossible, so is zero-bug status.
And NASA's methods are *crazy*. Take one program. Run it on three different computers, connected by a simple voting circuit. That way, if there's a transient hardware error, it has to affect two of them simultaneously.
Now take the specs for that program, and hand them to three different teams. Do not allow them to share code, or even really communicate with each other. Run all three implementations on the above separate computers, so that any bug has to be present in multiple implementations in order to affect anything.
Now take the whole system, and spend about ten times as long in testing as you do in production usage. Have the code audited line-by-line by experts.
And even after all that, you can still have bugs in the specifications. Say, one module outputting in metric when it's passing data to a module that reads in imperial.
Ah, that's exactly what I was going to guess. Anytime I see a figure with far more significant digits than it ought to, I suspect a unit conversion done improperly.
To be perfectly honest, Cliff Bleszinski seems more like Epic's "public face". He may not have started the company, but he's definitely the guy the gaming media prefers to talk to.
Don't get me wrong - Sweeny's an awesome programmer, deserves far more credit than he's given, but he seems too media-shy to be *the* Epic guy.
Please direct rants at the right people. Mr. Carmack is a programmer. He programs. He is not a producer, director, design lead, art lead, or really anyone who would be responsible for either the game being fun/not fun, or for business decisions regarding on-disc DLC.
If the game were to crash, or to run poorly, or to have obvious code-related glitches, then by all means, blame Carmack. But from what I've heard, that's not what the problem is. The game runs fine, even has some quite remarkable technical features (he streams textures directly from disc into video memory via DMA), but it's just not fun or interesting to play. You don't blame the writers for bad special effects, you don't blame the level designers for terrible voiceacting, and you don't blame the engine programmer for the game not being fun to play.
As an aside, I find it quite interesting that id's public face is essentially their lead programmer. Most companies, it's a game designer, or a writer, or in some cases an artist (or often some combination of the above - game developers wear many hats). I know of no other "public face" who is purely, or even principally, a programmer.
But what if you change your mind?
What out of date garbage are people running out there that will not scan ipV6?
Norton '95.
Well, no more fiddling with port forwarding to make game servers, video chat or anything else work. No more dealing with public/private IPs, or the whole NAT shitpile.
Oh, and it also makes mandatory certain things like IPsec, and should speed up packet processing by eliminating fragment reassembly (which was also, historically, a common source for security exploits).
Oh, and while every IP belongs to only one device, there's nothing saying every device should have only one IP. You could easily assign more addresses to a single IPv6 host than the entire IPv4 internet *has*. So anyone trying to track visitors based off IPv6 address will be easily fooled by anyone who tries.
5.56x45mm is the specifications for the NATO-standard small-arms ammunition, used by pretty much every modern military assault rifle that isn't a Kalashnikov derivative (and some that are), as well as some police sniper rifles and various civilian rifles.
And now I've explained the joke.
Given the choice between the author of the book and the masses I'm inclined to take the side of the author.
Why can't both be right?
Actually, the games were probably a pretty easy port. The server logic has been ported for years - there have been Linux dedicated servers pretty much since HL2 came out. All that was really needed was input handling, and a renderer. The Mac port handled the renderer, and at least made sure the input system was able to be ported to a new system easily, not heavily DirectX-dependent.
Most of the difficulty was probably making it run *well*, not making it *run*. As well as porting Steam itself - I know that it does some weird filesystem things that may have been tricky.
I do have to say though, that I probably won't even install Steam on my Linux partition. Judging by my experience with Mac Steam, it's not worth it when I have a Windows partition. Outside Valve itself and the various indie games I have, there were only a handful of Mac-capable games (Assassin's Creed 2, Civilization 5, Psychonauts, Duke Nukem Forever, and the two Penny Arcade games), and half of those would not run on my specific system. And those that did run, tended to run better on Windows, on the same hardware.
This is still a very good piece of news, don't get me wrong, but it's no Half-Life 3 announcement.
However, anyone who did not expect that comment is obviously brain-dead.