I would wonder whether the designer has considered simply talking to the boss and explaining the impact in terms of dollars and hour?. If his boss does not try to correct his sons behaviour, then I would consider the throttling approach and then what other job opportunities there are. If this continual behaviour results in you wanting to leave the company, then you shouldn't really be worried about being getting fired for bringing the issue up with your boss.
One approach is to get all 'special installs' signed off by the person's manager. The 'special install' would be assigned a dollar and time amount, which would be taken out of their department and contributed to your budget. This way the managers are the ones who are seeing the impact and get to decided whether the application is important enough to warrant the expenditure.
In another company I have worked for we have a list of self-install software that users can install. They are budgeted, but not supported. On doing so they recognise they get no support for these applications.
From the sample frames in the article, H264 provides a better quality at less bit-rate, which can make a huge difference to a site such as YouTube, which wants to provide high quality visual users want, while reducing bandwidth.
I'd imagine container formats have far fewer patent issues to worry about compared to compression algorithms.
Indeed. Technically there is nothing stopping you from having MPEG4/Theora beyond the playback applications.
Dirac was one codec that seemed to show some promise, from the BBC, but I don't know how much of a decent candidate it is and how much push it is being given?
I will say that it's reassuring that the Infinity Ward team was ready to move past Modern Warfare 2...they are obviously a talented group of people, and it would be nice to see them put together another high budget title that has nothing to do with Call of Duty.
The only way to get out of a franchise is to jump ship and create a new company. You are essentially taking a risk that the current company won't. The other thing is only create a new game engine if you have the time talent and a real need. Too many game companies have been hurt by putting too much effort into a new game engine, when they had neither the talent or the cash do to so.
Reading the documentation on Go, really makes me wonder why I would want to use this instead of a language such as Java? One of the arguments is that it is 'loosely typed', which IMHO is not necessarily an advantage in large projects, since in a large project I want to be sure that the compiler catches the obvious mistakes, and not wait until runtime. I already used a loosely typed OO language called Smalltalk and if the documentation wasn't good, then you had to work hard to find out what object the method was expecting.
If the goal is really to compete with the like of Javascript (JS), then I can appreciate the need for an alternative, but given how entrenched JS is, I see this as an uphill struggle.
New languages, really need to prove themselves as addressing a real problem, otherwise its just another way of fragmenting the expertise in the field.
Powered by Mana huh? I did a quick web search, and have been unable to find any reliable source of Mana, I even tried to see of there were any Mana fuel cells. I find some sites referring to Mana, but they all offered incompatible solutions. Maybe the iPad is powered by Steve's RDF, though I am not sure that it can be considered a class off magic? Maybe its uses Quantum power, so it is simultaneously flat and charged at the same time. Hmm, I think I need to patent such a device, though its possible that the Arctic already provides the necessary conditions.
As long as you keep your website standards compliant there should be no issue. It should also be noted that while all these browsers share the same renderer, they don't all use the same Javascript engine. One thing that may help is that webkit is open source.
A good web developer should always make sure that their site renders on multiple browsers with different renders.
Beyond the W3C HTML validator are then any other cross platform tool that will test a website for standards compliance?
I reached the same conclusion as you did, but what does this mean for media in general? Should they be blanking out the faces of every person in the background or asking everyone in the audience of a sports crowd whether it is okay to air the football match, for fear of showing this person on TV?
While I can appreciate privacy laws, there are some realistic bounds.
So if Confiker owns Windows boxen it's because Windows is awful and shoddy. But if CN owns Linux boxen it's because they are "misconfigured". Grow up,/.
What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
Chances are they might have already left. Now you are left with people who just need to keep the system going and don't dare do anything to break it.
If you read the article he doesn't dispute that it can't be done, its just that a lot of sites would need to be redone. Think of this as IE6 only sites being made to work with other browsers. If you are going to put the effort into redoing your website for accessibility, why not simply move onto HTML 5? Its begs the question of which is worse: broken technology or absent technology?
One difference I've noticed is people who are good at math tend to look at algebra in terms of pictures, or abstract chunks, whereas people who are not just get confused.
In those cases I imagine they are naturals, but at the same time I wonder whether those techniques could be taught? Too often we concentrate on trying to get the right answer and not enough credit is given on the thought process we used. Because of this people are scared of getting things wrong and that fear leads to a fear of trying. Maybe some basic building blocks were left out in the teaching or a different mind set needs to be shown tricks and encouraged to play the numbers. Making a game out of it would probably make it more fun and attractive.
I am not saying that I know the solution, but I am saying that we need think of what is scaring people from maths and addressing those issues the best we can. We can't solve every issue, but we can try to increase the hit count.
Even though I am not the best person at maths, one thing that helped me is understanding where some of the concepts were coming from (think philosophy of maths) and what is the general end goal that created the method. People like stories, see if a story can help in the teaching.
Solutions like this are often used to prevent someone clocking-in for you. I used this type of solution at a sports club which used to go to, where you would enter your member number followed by you finger print. Chances are this is another closed system, so it the finger prints probably won't get much further than the database.
My impression, through my own experience and people I have spoken to, is that maths is hard to learn because it is generally abstract. For example I get the general feeling that more people pass calculus when they are given an application that help provide a visual context to the skill, such as physics. This is probably the same reason why computers sometimes detract people from using them. The only difference is that we spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to make computers easy, though I am not sure the same can be said about mathematics.
Having sat through a number of maths classes, and lectures, I find that the people teaching the subject, often fail to appreciate that what they find easy is not necessarily the case for others. This means they don't show the necessary steps or fail to find techniques to facilitate the understanding. Sometimes its almost as if they want to make maths hard to learn. Of course people end up get anxious since they end up feeling stupid.
Although we talk about car analogies here, in order to make things easy to understand to the, I find the same can benefit maths. By trying to understand what the skill set of your audience is and adapting the teaching helps. For example the 'sum' sign looks hard until (if amongst computer people) you explain its just a 'for each' with addition and the 'pi' sign is a 'for each' with multiplication. In certain cases it is equivalent to the linguistic differences between English and Chinese, in that they both can talk about the same thing, but the way in which they do so is not the same.
I have an R4 which I use to load my own code to the DS. I never used it to play pirated ROMs. The R4 does have legitimate uses as a development tool.
From my experience you are probably amongst the exceptions. I always find it odd that while the DS is one of the biggest selling consoles and ranks high in sales charts, its games don't - I don't whether this is due to the impact of the R4 or some other factor that I am not taking into consideration.
It would be nice to see lower priced games for the DS, especially a good number of them seem to have had the same development effort as some of the games for the iPod Touch.
I can see that you must be young enough never to have used the search engines you list, if you suggest that you would have been able to find anything useful.
Well the results were there, somewhere between all the adverts.
The Western World has never been happy with China's repressing it's people but there is little that can be done about it (doesn't mean we shouldn't try). Australia on the other hand is "One of us" so the western nations are seeing one of their own going bad.
It also makes it harder for us to push our point of view when we are caught doing the same. It also makes it harder for us to prove we are somehow 'better' with social liberties.
Australia = elected government. China = military dictatorship.
That's probably about right. Since Australia prides itself as a democracy it is open to opposing opinion and the will of the people. There is always a problem when a democracy is hindered by extremist agendas, whether its is religious, political or of some other form. China has one party who pretty much do as they wish, and in going into the country companies know that it is the case and therefore have to accept the law of the land. It is up to the people of the nation who should decide the future of their own country, not foreign nationals or corporations - I realise this is not realistic in all cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I can imagine all the members of parliament singing that famous Chritsmas hit single by Rage against the Machine... but probably they didn't.
They had considered it, but then realised the European equivalent of the RIAA would want to charge license fees ;)
Now they know better.
This is the best possible thing that could have happened to them.
You would hope. Sometimes its just like a drug user trying to understand what the drug is doing to them, and claiming the pusher is innocent.
I would wonder whether the designer has considered simply talking to the boss and explaining the impact in terms of dollars and hour?. If his boss does not try to correct his sons behaviour, then I would consider the throttling approach and then what other job opportunities there are. If this continual behaviour results in you wanting to leave the company, then you shouldn't really be worried about being getting fired for bringing the issue up with your boss.
One approach is to get all 'special installs' signed off by the person's manager. The 'special install' would be assigned a dollar and time amount, which would be taken out of their department and contributed to your budget. This way the managers are the ones who are seeing the impact and get to decided whether the application is important enough to warrant the expenditure.
In another company I have worked for we have a list of self-install software that users can install. They are budgeted, but not supported. On doing so they recognise they get no support for these applications.
Responding to my own post:
If this article is anything to go by, Dirac seems to perform worse that Theora and Theora appears to perform worse than H264:
http://etill.net/projects/dirac_theora_evaluation/
From the sample frames in the article, H264 provides a better quality at less bit-rate, which can make a huge difference to a site such as YouTube, which wants to provide high quality visual users want, while reducing bandwidth.
I'd imagine container formats have far fewer patent issues to worry about compared to compression algorithms.
Indeed. Technically there is nothing stopping you from having MPEG4/Theora beyond the playback applications.
Dirac was one codec that seemed to show some promise, from the BBC, but I don't know how much of a decent candidate it is and how much push it is being given?
Yes, I do get free health care. I live in Canada.
Don't tease them. They know they want it, but will happily vote against it ;)
What are they cleaning?
The stuff the last Geek Squad employees installed.
I will say that it's reassuring that the Infinity Ward team was ready to move past Modern Warfare 2...they are obviously a talented group of people, and it would be nice to see them put together another high budget title that has nothing to do with Call of Duty.
The only way to get out of a franchise is to jump ship and create a new company. You are essentially taking a risk that the current company won't. The other thing is only create a new game engine if you have the time talent and a real need. Too many game companies have been hurt by putting too much effort into a new game engine, when they had neither the talent or the cash do to so.
Ruby is considered easier than Python? C# is considered easier than Java?
It doesn't really matter when you reason for changing language is more hype based, rather than considering what problem they are really solving.
Reading the documentation on Go, really makes me wonder why I would want to use this instead of a language such as Java? One of the arguments is that it is 'loosely typed', which IMHO is not necessarily an advantage in large projects, since in a large project I want to be sure that the compiler catches the obvious mistakes, and not wait until runtime. I already used a loosely typed OO language called Smalltalk and if the documentation wasn't good, then you had to work hard to find out what object the method was expecting.
If the goal is really to compete with the like of Javascript (JS), then I can appreciate the need for an alternative, but given how entrenched JS is, I see this as an uphill struggle.
New languages, really need to prove themselves as addressing a real problem, otherwise its just another way of fragmenting the expertise in the field.
Powered by Mana huh? I did a quick web search, and have been unable to find any reliable source of Mana, I even tried to see of there were any Mana fuel cells. I find some sites referring to Mana, but they all offered incompatible solutions. Maybe the iPad is powered by Steve's RDF, though I am not sure that it can be considered a class off magic? Maybe its uses Quantum power, so it is simultaneously flat and charged at the same time. Hmm, I think I need to patent such a device, though its possible that the Arctic already provides the necessary conditions.
As long as you keep your website standards compliant there should be no issue. It should also be noted that while all these browsers share the same renderer, they don't all use the same Javascript engine. One thing that may help is that webkit is open source.
A good web developer should always make sure that their site renders on multiple browsers with different renders.
Beyond the W3C HTML validator are then any other cross platform tool that will test a website for standards compliance?
I reached the same conclusion as you did, but what does this mean for media in general? Should they be blanking out the faces of every person in the background or asking everyone in the audience of a sports crowd whether it is okay to air the football match, for fear of showing this person on TV?
While I can appreciate privacy laws, there are some realistic bounds.
So if Confiker owns Windows boxen it's because Windows is awful and shoddy. But if CN owns Linux boxen it's because they are "misconfigured". Grow up, /.
You are obviously new around here.
What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
Chances are they might have already left. Now you are left with people who just need to keep the system going and don't dare do anything to break it.
If you read the article he doesn't dispute that it can't be done, its just that a lot of sites would need to be redone. Think of this as IE6 only sites being made to work with other browsers. If you are going to put the effort into redoing your website for accessibility, why not simply move onto HTML 5? Its begs the question of which is worse: broken technology or absent technology?
One difference I've noticed is people who are good at math tend to look at algebra in terms of pictures, or abstract chunks, whereas people who are not just get confused.
In those cases I imagine they are naturals, but at the same time I wonder whether those techniques could be taught? Too often we concentrate on trying to get the right answer and not enough credit is given on the thought process we used. Because of this people are scared of getting things wrong and that fear leads to a fear of trying. Maybe some basic building blocks were left out in the teaching or a different mind set needs to be shown tricks and encouraged to play the numbers. Making a game out of it would probably make it more fun and attractive.
I am not saying that I know the solution, but I am saying that we need think of what is scaring people from maths and addressing those issues the best we can. We can't solve every issue, but we can try to increase the hit count.
Even though I am not the best person at maths, one thing that helped me is understanding where some of the concepts were coming from (think philosophy of maths) and what is the general end goal that created the method. People like stories, see if a story can help in the teaching.
Solutions like this are often used to prevent someone clocking-in for you. I used this type of solution at a sports club which used to go to, where you would enter your member number followed by you finger print. Chances are this is another closed system, so it the finger prints probably won't get much further than the database.
My impression, through my own experience and people I have spoken to, is that maths is hard to learn because it is generally abstract. For example I get the general feeling that more people pass calculus when they are given an application that help provide a visual context to the skill, such as physics. This is probably the same reason why computers sometimes detract people from using them. The only difference is that we spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to make computers easy, though I am not sure the same can be said about mathematics.
Having sat through a number of maths classes, and lectures, I find that the people teaching the subject, often fail to appreciate that what they find easy is not necessarily the case for others. This means they don't show the necessary steps or fail to find techniques to facilitate the understanding. Sometimes its almost as if they want to make maths hard to learn. Of course people end up get anxious since they end up feeling stupid.
Although we talk about car analogies here, in order to make things easy to understand to the, I find the same can benefit maths. By trying to understand what the skill set of your audience is and adapting the teaching helps. For example the 'sum' sign looks hard until (if amongst computer people) you explain its just a 'for each' with addition and the 'pi' sign is a 'for each' with multiplication. In certain cases it is equivalent to the linguistic differences between English and Chinese, in that they both can talk about the same thing, but the way in which they do so is not the same.
...does that mean WikiMedia will also be classified as kiddie porn in Australia now?
Probably. Just think about it: knowledge porn is just a gateway drug to greater evils ... ;)
I have an R4 which I use to load my own code to the DS. I never used it to play pirated ROMs. The R4 does have legitimate uses as a development tool.
From my experience you are probably amongst the exceptions. I always find it odd that while the DS is one of the biggest selling consoles and ranks high in sales charts, its games don't - I don't whether this is due to the impact of the R4 or some other factor that I am not taking into consideration.
It would be nice to see lower priced games for the DS, especially a good number of them seem to have had the same development effort as some of the games for the iPod Touch.
I can see that you must be young enough never to have used the search engines you list, if you suggest that you would have been able to find anything useful.
Well the results were there, somewhere between all the adverts.
The Western World has never been happy with China's repressing it's people but there is little that can be done about it (doesn't mean we shouldn't try). Australia on the other hand is "One of us" so the western nations are seeing one of their own going bad.
It also makes it harder for us to push our point of view when we are caught doing the same. It also makes it harder for us to prove we are somehow 'better' with social liberties.
Australia = elected government.
China = military dictatorship.
That's probably about right. Since Australia prides itself as a democracy it is open to opposing opinion and the will of the people. There is always a problem when a democracy is hindered by extremist agendas, whether its is religious, political or of some other form. China has one party who pretty much do as they wish, and in going into the country companies know that it is the case and therefore have to accept the law of the land. It is up to the people of the nation who should decide the future of their own country, not foreign nationals or corporations - I realise this is not realistic in all cases.