On the back of all my credit cards, where the signature is supposed to be, I have written, "Ask For ID". Most of the time they don't, but I've found this to be a good measure in case your cards get lost of stolen.
To those ranting about "Microsoft's Rights", let me remind you:
Monopolies are bad because, once established, the alternative sources of competition are crushed. After that is accomplished, the monopolists can do whatever they want.
This is what we have with Microsoft. The government, in an ideal scenario, exists to provide security to the populace, not monopolist corporations, which explains the EU's position on the issue. If you trust corporations, who are entities created with most of the rights of humans, and none of the ethical responsibilities, to better serve the public, you're extremely naive. While there are still are some, we should rally behind forces at work which are seeking to protect the populace against monopolies that seek to stifle competition and innovation.
Saying that hiding the source for an Operating System from the general public robs them of learning is like saying keeping Quantum Physics textbooks away from six year olds robs them of learning.
Worst analogy ever, and inaccurate.
I am a successful software engineer. I started my interest in computers primarily on a system called CDC Plato, and later on the TRS-80, both which had the development environment available and integrated into the OS by default, not unlike most Linux installations. The convenience of being able to tinker with software in varying degrees of involvement without having to acquire extra, expensive tools and exponentially larger learning curves made all the difference.
I really feel sorry for kids today trying to learn programming. There are no IDEs conveniently available within Windows by default. At best, one can hope to master the user interface of a particular version of some proprietary software -- all of which is subject to instant obsoletion upon release of a subsequent version.
Remember when MIT was all about mathematics, science and engineering rather than a international public policy think-tank?
No I don't. MIT has always been influential in areas of policy, especially as it relates to technology, science, linguistics, media, etc. If MIT wasn't a great source of knowledge, nobody would care what they think.
I don't disagree with you, but as I said, which apparently escaped you, I think the government's priorities are screwed up. There are a lot worse transgressions going on that cause more damage than a small time internet scammer who probably didn't con more than a few dozen people.
I use Eudora 5.1 - I have every e-mail since 1995 at my disposal. It works very well. Upgrading doesn't hose mailboxes; you can move the entire subdirectory to a new machine and it works perfectly. I can't say much for the newer versions of Eudora. Version 6.2.1 seems to have some bugs in it, but if you can get earlier releases of this software, it's excellent.
After watching the great documentary The Corporation, all of this makes sense, since the government basically has given corporations all the rights of humans, but none of the responsibility or accountability. So Microsoft can blatantly spit in the face of court subpoenas and suffer virtually no consequences. Sad, but welcome to the 21st corporate-centric century.
I'd call it "moronware". It's designed to troll for idiot users who believe everything they see and fall for stupid schemes. We can lump the Nigerians into this category too, with their stupid cashier's check and phony inheiritence schemes.
I've said before, I really have less of a problem with these types of unscrupulous operations. They're like financial darwinism, and anyone stupid enough to fall for them deserves to be separated from their money.
Ironically, there are lots of other schemes that defraud the populace that are based on deception that are protected by the government. I look at this crackdown as the government protecting idiots from small-time operators so that big corporations can continue to prey on them.
Wake me up when the FTC starts cracking down on the overwhelming deceptive ad practices of all the major U.S. corporations.
Contests are always a good idea to solicit personal information from users. HOWEVER, be warned, I've had a lot of clients offer sign-up-giveaways and end up getting form-spammed by overzealous obsessive-compulsive-contest-enterers using Java-based tools to hammer contest entry forms. Make sure if you do any kind of promotion to collect information, outline terms that prohibit people from sending multiple submissions and keep your eyes open for these annoying pests. I think there are web sites out there that link to the contest forms and cause a plague of annoying people to bombard your forms.
If you are operating the web site as a commercial venture, you should already know your audience demographic or else you're woefully inadequate in terms of business planning.
Your demographic will be the demographic you target.
OTOH, If you're slapping up a goofy web site and you're getting more traffic than you expected, the HTTP_REFERER is usually the best place to look to find out who is visiting your site and why. If you see a lot of links coming from another web site, contact their webmaster and see if he has more of a clue than you as to the demographic of his users.
that after ~4 years of college you still don't know what the hell you want to do that you need to ask people here... In virtually every industry you can find people who have weird degrees that don't seem to jive with their present area of specialization. These are people that are exceptionally good at and passionate about what they do, and their degree doesn't ultimately make a difference. If you haven't figured this out, I might suggest going for a masters in Philosophy.
Well, WW2 games where you play an American killing Germans sell pretty well in Germany, too. Well, except for those depicting swastikas, of course.
Comparing American to European markets is apples and oranges. There are a lot of things that are sold in Europe and a lot of European, more liberal media imagery, that would meet with freak-out-Christian-protest-groups in America.
However if you disagree and think there's no difference, how long before we get to play the Alabama KKK version of GTO? Or Flight Simulator - Saudi Arabian Attack On NYC? How about a game where someone tries to poison the country's water supply? See if any of those concepts would ever get off the ground regardless of how good the game might be. They'd be shut down, using the exact same reasons that people today cite for existing media having a negative influence... psycho nutjobs or not.
You mean like the tampon commercials that make me immediately rush out and buy a box, just in time to get back and see the car commercial? These days I never seem to get to watch any TV shows, and I'm always so in debt!
That's a crappy example to make your point, but it does illustrate my point. I didn't suggest that watching a tampon commercial would make you go out and buy tampons, BUT if you saw a scene of a guy going out and buying tampons enough, you'd be desensitized to the potential embrassment some might have over such an act, and in that case if your girlfriend (I know, wrong web site to make such an assumption) asked you to get her some tampons, you might be more inclined to do so. This is all a result of the influence of the media you're exposed to. It is not always expressed in shallow, predictable, overtly obvious patterns.
Aside from the argument of whether that would be any fun, consider the somewhat recent WWII game where you play the Americans, killing Japanese soldiers. It was released in Japan, and met considerable success considering that they still played as Americans killing Japanese soldiers.
This is probably because the Japanese aren't as ideologically polarized as Americans. There are actually many Japanese games which have anti-American themes that are not sold in America, because Americans would have a stupid hissy fit. Remember, this is a country that *freaks out* if they see their flag on fire. There's a Konami game called Parodius which was put out for the Super Nintendo - a great game, but not available in the states because it made fun of American culture and the Japanese knew that hyper-sensitive Americans wouldn't like being made fun of by foreigners.
What about MS Flight Simulator? I hear the game was updated in the wake of the 911 tragedy to be more "sensitive" to certain issues.
Double standards... all of 'em. If you don't see it, ironically, this is the result of the brainwashing you've succumbed to via the media.
I'm reminded of one of Chris Rock's comedy routines where he talks about a guy who lives with a woman who smokes crack. He says, "If you don't smoke crack, YOU WILL." citing the inevitability of people influencing each other, one way or the other.
I tend to agree. People who argue against violence in games and the media influencing people only look at the issue from a shallow, instant-cause-and-effect-or-else-nothing perspective. Yes, if you watch someone shoot someone on TV, that doesn't mean that you will go out and shoot someone. Nor does it mean that if you see someone purchasing a big Dodge pickup truck, you are going to head out later that day and buy yourself a big Dodge pickup truck.
HOWEVER, to deny that these images do not transmit subtle (or not-so-subtle) messages which ultimately, either consciously or subconsciously affect our perspective, is naive and foolish.
They do, otherwise commercials would be useless. Just like advertising seeks to change peoples' perspectives on products and services, games, television and other media also alter what people think of things. In commercials, you only see the positive side of consumption; in television and video games, you also tend to only see one, seemingly clinical and detached version of violence -- which inevitably will serve to convince people in minute segments, that such violence isn't as abhorrent as society's moral structure may dictate.
Ask yourself, if a video game where one goes on a killing spree in a police precint can be defended by the status quo as being innocuous, would they feel the same way about a game where you play the Germans exterminating jews in WWII? They're both morally reprehensible, but you can bet that many more people would argue such imagery would be deterimental towards peoples' moral judgement. What's the difference? The difference depends upon who you offend and how, but in essence the same argument applies to all media and to deny that it only applies in select areas is ridiculous.
If you ask me, the notion of "working from home" is basically a half-way approach towards separating yourself from your employer/employment in the traditional sense. While there are some who do this for practical/logistical reasons, many more people seem to be enamoured with the idea of being their own boss, and working from home is another step in that direction.
If you're thinking like that, then working from home is a good test to see if you have the discipline needed to run your own business without taking much of the risk.
But be aware that not everyone is capable of running their own venture, nor working productively when they're not supervised. You may or may not be one of these types of people that can benefit from such an environment.
Personally, I think that working from home should basically be phased into sub-contracting, because that's basically the direction in which people are going, and it makes more sense. If you employ someone, you need to be able to control them and regulate their time and productivity. Telecommuting is more like sub-contracting, where people are paid for their productivity and not the amount of time they're punched in. The half-way idea of employees "telecommuting" in my opinion is a bad idea for the employer. It's better for them to just cut the person loose and subcontract with them. In these cases the employee can usually have his cake and eat it too.. make more money, be autonomous, and have more control over his time. However, it may not be as "secure", but in reality, job security is a farce anyway.
Good sci-fi requires that one think ahead and imagine the future. The problem is our society now is so obsessed with present-day instant gratification that the concept of imagining a different world tomorrow is almost alien (no pun intended).
How many people look up at the stars anymore? How many people can even see the stars from big city lights? I think one reason why we have crappy sci-fi now is that it's not really science fiction; it's formulaic plot lines designed to distract someone in between ads for shampoo, pickup trucks, and diet pills.
You want to see good science fiction? Turn off your stupid tv and go out and look at the night sky away from the city; your imagination will be more entertaining than a thousand mediocre tv shows.
Did it ocurr to you that Google has been public since it made invites available? It's a brilliant scheme to offer invites mainly via referrals. This allows Google to build a huge "degree of separation" database between people and use it for data mining. When Google knows who your friends are, and who their friends are, this becomes an extremely powerful markting and research tool.
If you look back at the evolution of most tech companies they all follow the same pattern: come out with an innovative product, a little success; come out with an open-standard-oriented product, major success; after producing an open standard oriented product, the company becomes greedy and starts to produce more proprietary crap, which forces their customers to choose sides; inevitably the company gets lazy because their customers are tired of the mafia marketing and continually inferior products. Until someone else comes along with something new that's open-standard-oriented enough to allow them to migrate away from company A.
A lot of this ironically, has to do with one organization with an exaggerated membership, that peddles smut on their own web site that systemmatically harasses the FCC over these issues. The goofy, right wing, Parents Television Council, whose leadership seem to primarily sit around all day and watch/document every sleazy media moment they can get their sweaty eyeballs on.
I agree that the blogging community does seen focused on random factoids, but this is an element of the new media, which uses technology to assemble and organize all these random bits. Maybe with analog library technology, it was imperative to be much more focused, but computers make it easy to compile small chunks of information from disparate sources efficiently. We see systems like Wikipedia which are designed to turn this otherwise noise-filled data into even more comprehensive and well-rounded references.
Beyond this, bloggers and independent online entities are fast becoming the new media, challenging the traditional institutions that have controlled the nature of how and what information people can access. These new systems have new ways of doing things. The fact that an obsolete librarian doesn't appreciate this is validation of the new movement's usefulness and innovative approach. Some sites are even keeping track of the inroads bloggers are making in changing the way information is distributed. Welcome to the new world, new media.
C'mon... this guy is looking for a distraction. I can appreciate the importance of having a healthy environment but I don't think that's what this guy is looking for. If he wants to "pimp" his workspace, he has other motives in mind, having to do with impressing other people moreso than improving his own productivity.
Onslaught is a great example of what I'm talking about. Most players spawn and go on a 12-second kamakazi run. The only strategy for the most part involves running like a maniac in a chaotic pattern. That's not my idea of strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
On the back of all my credit cards, where the signature is supposed to be, I have written, "Ask For ID". Most of the time they don't, but I've found this to be a good measure in case your cards get lost of stolen.
To those ranting about "Microsoft's Rights", let me remind you:
Monopolies are bad because, once established, the alternative sources of competition are crushed. After that is accomplished, the monopolists can do whatever they want.
This is what we have with Microsoft. The government, in an ideal scenario, exists to provide security to the populace, not monopolist corporations, which explains the EU's position on the issue. If you trust corporations, who are entities created with most of the rights of humans, and none of the ethical responsibilities, to better serve the public, you're extremely naive. While there are still are some, we should rally behind forces at work which are seeking to protect the populace against monopolies that seek to stifle competition and innovation.
Saying that hiding the source for an Operating System from the general public robs them of learning is like saying keeping Quantum Physics textbooks away from six year olds robs them of learning.
Worst analogy ever, and inaccurate.
I am a successful software engineer. I started my interest in computers primarily on a system called CDC Plato, and later on the TRS-80, both which had the development environment available and integrated into the OS by default, not unlike most Linux installations. The convenience of being able to tinker with software in varying degrees of involvement without having to acquire extra, expensive tools and exponentially larger learning curves made all the difference.
I really feel sorry for kids today trying to learn programming. There are no IDEs conveniently available within Windows by default. At best, one can hope to master the user interface of a particular version of some proprietary software -- all of which is subject to instant obsoletion upon release of a subsequent version.
Remember when MIT was all about mathematics, science and engineering rather than a international public policy think-tank?
No I don't. MIT has always been influential in areas of policy, especially as it relates to technology, science, linguistics, media, etc. If MIT wasn't a great source of knowledge, nobody would care what they think.
Fortunately, judging by their work so far, I'd say that the Google developers are more intelligent than the author of this article.
Well, er, her name appears to be "Molly Wood". I'd agree with you.
I don't disagree with you, but as I said, which apparently escaped you, I think the government's priorities are screwed up. There are a lot worse transgressions going on that cause more damage than a small time internet scammer who probably didn't con more than a few dozen people.
I use Eudora 5.1 - I have every e-mail since 1995 at my disposal. It works very well. Upgrading doesn't hose mailboxes; you can move the entire subdirectory to a new machine and it works perfectly. I can't say much for the newer versions of Eudora. Version 6.2.1 seems to have some bugs in it, but if you can get earlier releases of this software, it's excellent.
After watching the great documentary The Corporation, all of this makes sense, since the government basically has given corporations all the rights of humans, but none of the responsibility or accountability. So Microsoft can blatantly spit in the face of court subpoenas and suffer virtually no consequences. Sad, but welcome to the 21st corporate-centric century.
I'd call it "moronware". It's designed to troll for idiot users who believe everything they see and fall for stupid schemes. We can lump the Nigerians into this category too, with their stupid cashier's check and phony inheiritence schemes.
I've said before, I really have less of a problem with these types of unscrupulous operations. They're like financial darwinism, and anyone stupid enough to fall for them deserves to be separated from their money.
Ironically, there are lots of other schemes that defraud the populace that are based on deception that are protected by the government. I look at this crackdown as the government protecting idiots from small-time operators so that big corporations can continue to prey on them.
Wake me up when the FTC starts cracking down on the overwhelming deceptive ad practices of all the major U.S. corporations.
Contests are always a good idea to solicit personal information from users. HOWEVER, be warned, I've had a lot of clients offer sign-up-giveaways and end up getting form-spammed by overzealous obsessive-compulsive-contest-enterers using Java-based tools to hammer contest entry forms. Make sure if you do any kind of promotion to collect information, outline terms that prohibit people from sending multiple submissions and keep your eyes open for these annoying pests. I think there are web sites out there that link to the contest forms and cause a plague of annoying people to bombard your forms.
If you are operating the web site as a commercial venture, you should already know your audience demographic or else you're woefully inadequate in terms of business planning.
Your demographic will be the demographic you target.
OTOH, If you're slapping up a goofy web site and you're getting more traffic than you expected, the HTTP_REFERER is usually the best place to look to find out who is visiting your site and why. If you see a lot of links coming from another web site, contact their webmaster and see if he has more of a clue than you as to the demographic of his users.
Obviously the tampon commercials are influencing you. You can't stop discussing the issue.
But I get your point ; )
that after ~4 years of college you still don't know what the hell you want to do that you need to ask people here... In virtually every industry you can find people who have weird degrees that don't seem to jive with their present area of specialization. These are people that are exceptionally good at and passionate about what they do, and their degree doesn't ultimately make a difference. If you haven't figured this out, I might suggest going for a masters in Philosophy.
Well, WW2 games where you play an American killing Germans sell pretty well in Germany, too. Well, except for those depicting swastikas, of course.
Comparing American to European markets is apples and oranges. There are a lot of things that are sold in Europe and a lot of European, more liberal media imagery, that would meet with freak-out-Christian-protest-groups in America.
However if you disagree and think there's no difference, how long before we get to play the Alabama KKK version of GTO? Or Flight Simulator - Saudi Arabian Attack On NYC? How about a game where someone tries to poison the country's water supply? See if any of those concepts would ever get off the ground regardless of how good the game might be. They'd be shut down, using the exact same reasons that people today cite for existing media having a negative influence... psycho nutjobs or not.
otherwise commercials would be useless
You mean like the tampon commercials that make me immediately rush out and buy a box, just in time to get back and see the car commercial? These days I never seem to get to watch any TV shows, and I'm always so in debt!
That's a crappy example to make your point, but it does illustrate my point. I didn't suggest that watching a tampon commercial would make you go out and buy tampons, BUT if you saw a scene of a guy going out and buying tampons enough, you'd be desensitized to the potential embrassment some might have over such an act, and in that case if your girlfriend (I know, wrong web site to make such an assumption) asked you to get her some tampons, you might be more inclined to do so. This is all a result of the influence of the media you're exposed to. It is not always expressed in shallow, predictable, overtly obvious patterns.
Aside from the argument of whether that would be any fun, consider the somewhat recent WWII game where you play the Americans, killing Japanese soldiers. It was released in Japan, and met considerable success considering that they still played as Americans killing Japanese soldiers.
This is probably because the Japanese aren't as ideologically polarized as Americans. There are actually many Japanese games which have anti-American themes that are not sold in America, because Americans would have a stupid hissy fit. Remember, this is a country that *freaks out* if they see their flag on fire. There's a Konami game called Parodius which was put out for the Super Nintendo - a great game, but not available in the states because it made fun of American culture and the Japanese knew that hyper-sensitive Americans wouldn't like being made fun of by foreigners.
What about MS Flight Simulator? I hear the game was updated in the wake of the 911 tragedy to be more "sensitive" to certain issues.
Double standards... all of 'em. If you don't see it, ironically, this is the result of the brainwashing you've succumbed to via the media.
I'm reminded of one of Chris Rock's comedy routines where he talks about a guy who lives with a woman who smokes crack. He says, "If you don't smoke crack, YOU WILL." citing the inevitability of people influencing each other, one way or the other.
I tend to agree. People who argue against violence in games and the media influencing people only look at the issue from a shallow, instant-cause-and-effect-or-else-nothing perspective. Yes, if you watch someone shoot someone on TV, that doesn't mean that you will go out and shoot someone. Nor does it mean that if you see someone purchasing a big Dodge pickup truck, you are going to head out later that day and buy yourself a big Dodge pickup truck.
HOWEVER, to deny that these images do not transmit subtle (or not-so-subtle) messages which ultimately, either consciously or subconsciously affect our perspective, is naive and foolish.
They do, otherwise commercials would be useless. Just like advertising seeks to change peoples' perspectives on products and services, games, television and other media also alter what people think of things. In commercials, you only see the positive side of consumption; in television and video games, you also tend to only see one, seemingly clinical and detached version of violence -- which inevitably will serve to convince people in minute segments, that such violence isn't as abhorrent as society's moral structure may dictate.
Ask yourself, if a video game where one goes on a killing spree in a police precint can be defended by the status quo as being innocuous, would they feel the same way about a game where you play the Germans exterminating jews in WWII? They're both morally reprehensible, but you can bet that many more people would argue such imagery would be deterimental towards peoples' moral judgement. What's the difference? The difference depends upon who you offend and how, but in essence the same argument applies to all media and to deny that it only applies in select areas is ridiculous.
If you ask me, the notion of "working from home" is basically a half-way approach towards separating yourself from your employer/employment in the traditional sense. While there are some who do this for practical/logistical reasons, many more people seem to be enamoured with the idea of being their own boss, and working from home is another step in that direction.
If you're thinking like that, then working from home is a good test to see if you have the discipline needed to run your own business without taking much of the risk.
But be aware that not everyone is capable of running their own venture, nor working productively when they're not supervised. You may or may not be one of these types of people that can benefit from such an environment.
Personally, I think that working from home should basically be phased into sub-contracting, because that's basically the direction in which people are going, and it makes more sense. If you employ someone, you need to be able to control them and regulate their time and productivity. Telecommuting is more like sub-contracting, where people are paid for their productivity and not the amount of time they're punched in. The half-way idea of employees "telecommuting" in my opinion is a bad idea for the employer. It's better for them to just cut the person loose and subcontract with them. In these cases the employee can usually have his cake and eat it too.. make more money, be autonomous, and have more control over his time. However, it may not be as "secure", but in reality, job security is a farce anyway.
Good sci-fi requires that one think ahead and imagine the future. The problem is our society now is so obsessed with present-day instant gratification that the concept of imagining a different world tomorrow is almost alien (no pun intended).
How many people look up at the stars anymore? How many people can even see the stars from big city lights? I think one reason why we have crappy sci-fi now is that it's not really science fiction; it's formulaic plot lines designed to distract someone in between ads for shampoo, pickup trucks, and diet pills.
You want to see good science fiction? Turn off your stupid tv and go out and look at the night sky away from the city; your imagination will be more entertaining than a thousand mediocre tv shows.
Did it ocurr to you that Google has been public since it made invites available? It's a brilliant scheme to offer invites mainly via referrals. This allows Google to build a huge "degree of separation" database between people and use it for data mining. When Google knows who your friends are, and who their friends are, this becomes an extremely powerful markting and research tool.
If you look back at the evolution of most tech companies they all follow the same pattern: come out with an innovative product, a little success; come out with an open-standard-oriented product, major success; after producing an open standard oriented product, the company becomes greedy and starts to produce more proprietary crap, which forces their customers to choose sides; inevitably the company gets lazy because their customers are tired of the mafia marketing and continually inferior products. Until someone else comes along with something new that's open-standard-oriented enough to allow them to migrate away from company A.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
A lot of this ironically, has to do with one organization with an exaggerated membership, that peddles smut on their own web site that systemmatically harasses the FCC over these issues. The goofy, right wing, Parents Television Council, whose leadership seem to primarily sit around all day and watch/document every sleazy media moment they can get their sweaty eyeballs on.
I agree that the blogging community does seen focused on random factoids, but this is an element of the new media, which uses technology to assemble and organize all these random bits. Maybe with analog library technology, it was imperative to be much more focused, but computers make it easy to compile small chunks of information from disparate sources efficiently. We see systems like Wikipedia which are designed to turn this otherwise noise-filled data into even more comprehensive and well-rounded references.
Beyond this, bloggers and independent online entities are fast becoming the new media, challenging the traditional institutions that have controlled the nature of how and what information people can access. These new systems have new ways of doing things. The fact that an obsolete librarian doesn't appreciate this is validation of the new movement's usefulness and innovative approach. Some sites are even keeping track of the inroads bloggers are making in changing the way information is distributed. Welcome to the new world, new media.
C'mon... this guy is looking for a distraction. I can appreciate the importance of having a healthy environment but I don't think that's what this guy is looking for. If he wants to "pimp" his workspace, he has other motives in mind, having to do with impressing other people moreso than improving his own productivity.
Onslaught is a great example of what I'm talking about. Most players spawn and go on a 12-second kamakazi run. The only strategy for the most part involves running like a maniac in a chaotic pattern. That's not my idea of strategy.
I'm trying to think of a unique way to keep myself entertained
How about doing the damn job your employer is paying you for? Is that far out or what?