Greed eventually kills all companies. It's the same old story:
1. Look, we could make much more money by locking customers into our product! 2. Uh oh, profits are not increasing for some reason. Increase prices! More lock-in! 3. Damn, we've driven away all our customers. No more profit.
And if the company somehow manages to linger on:
4. Surely that was not our fault. Buy more legislators! Find someone to sue!
Games have improved tremendously in this respect over the last few years. Using the narrative context more so it's not just a collection of spoken phrases cut-and-paste together would help a lot. But you know, there's some even more basic problems remain:
1) Use the same actor for the same character. Always. If you need to re-record or add more dialogue, and your original actor isn't available, then live without or re-record everything.
2) Record the sound in the same place, or use a standard background sound. It is disconcerting when the recording quality and background noise changes between sentences.
3) Tell your voice actors not to replicate the errors in the text. Convince them they are voice actors, not just fleshy text-to-speech translators.
4) If your voice actors attempt to mimic strong accents of any form, beat them.
It's valuable. Why you would give away your social networking data to Facebook, Twitter, or Google for free?
Actually you don't give it for free---you in fact pay them for the privilege of giving them that info (indirectly, via ads). Presumably you get something in return though.
I do agree with you on the value; personal information is a commodity, and as a commodity that is inherently mine, if you want it you should have to get my consent.
A software-licensing scheme seems like the perfect solution for personal information: you only lease my information; that doesn't give you the right to resell it, you may only use it as I explicitly direct, and I can withdraw your permissions at any time for any reason.
I wouldn't throw stones at the USPTO for being lazy when you can't even be bothered to read the patent claims.
And having read it I would lob boulders, not stones. One of the most important criteria is supposed to be "not obvious to someone else well-versed in the art". This fails. Almost every software patent fails that test.
I know everyone likes to assume that Microsoft is being evil here, but wouldn't the more realistic assumption be that they were just being incompetent?
Probably. But since incompetence is the plausible deniability of evil it's sometimes hard to tell.
They might want to choose another image---the command entry area in the image of emacs on the linked page has an error in it: "(s-print) is undefined".
So what if they showed extremely faint or differently coloured interiors? Would it still be useless? If the image was gradually filled in, is there a point at which it becomes useless?
That's not uncommon at all. In fact there is a whole method for calculating it. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy or collusion or 'price fixing' for 2 similar products to have the same price point.
Quite true. The situation for the consumer, however, is the same. And really, even if they aren't agreeing on a price, if a group colludes on an algorithm to set the price then they still collude.
Now, show me only one of these tools that actually works...:)
And there's the solution, and also another problem. It is highly likely that like most government projects this is pure pork, with pretty much no chance of being successful by any objective measure. There are technical reasons why it doesn't work (and no, I don't think the NSA or MI666 has super-secret technology way ahead of current research), and there are statistical---with perhaps only 10^-5% or less of your population of any real interest an error rate of any significance at all means almost every reported result is a false-positive.
What is much more worrying is how all this pork will be justified. You can't have "security" measures without demonstrated need, at least not indefinitely----at some point some poor shmucks will have to be accused/arrested/? to demonstrate that the system is working. That's important for whichever politicians authorized it to save face, and for the continued flow of money into the pockets of whoever builds it. The real threat here is not the fact that you may be caught for something you are doing, but the vastly more likely scenario where you are sacrificed as a way of showing the system works.
An expensive, fragile, high-tech gadget is dumped into the public space and ends up broken? I'm shocked.
I wonder how the argument for these went:
1. Do you suppose the automatic door-opening could possibly fail or be defeated? No, our technology is foolproof.
2. Do you suppose people may clog it up in a variety of artful ways? No, why would anyone purposefully mess up a public bathroom?
3. Do you suppose it may become a way-station for illegal acts that requires around 15min of privacy? No, all illegal acts require very long times and abundant space.
4. Isn't it expensive to buy/install? Don't worry, people excrete almost continually, the money will just pour in.
5. Won't it be expensive to maintain? No, modern technology maintains itself.
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
1. Check yourself in electronically - print out your boarding pass at home. That bypasses 30 minutes, easy.
Works great, sometimes. First time I tried that my printer just wouldn't print it. I've solved that since, but for some reason I keep forgetting to bring my printer with me so i can print out the return boarding pass too.
2. Check your baggage AT THE CURB. Pretty much every major airport in the US will let you check your baggage at the curb. Yes, it costs an extra $3 per bag to do so, but that saves another 15 minutes.
Better: if you want your luggage to arrive with you, don't check anything. Travel light.
3. No metal in your pockets, no liquids in your bag. Yes, you can survive without that bottle of water for 10 minutes.
And don't wear shoes, be careful to not bring anything with wires in your luggage. Don't bring a laptop.
4. Always choose the security lane with the fewest number of families and old folks. Even if it's longer, you'll get through faster.
Similar observations work in grocery store lines, as neatly summarized by Apu in one Simpsons episode. But in an airport there are forces actively working against you---if you try and get through quickly, then you become of interest, and must therefore be slowed.
I don't see why it would have to only be a toy for criminals. A small group of people could stand in a circle around it and take turns yelling to see how fast they can get the camera to spin. Slap on some ipods, and you've got a new sensation.
Maybe, but they are also then smart enough to recognize that more resources and effort are being spent on people who do not produce at the same rate or with the same quality.
Most/all of the brighter students are hooked on the reward system. Take it away and, well, you've taken away the reward for doing well.
So it's not really random... A pattern must come out after a while.
It's not the pattern, it's the response. Since they've revealed that they will (re)direct resources to apparent sources of potential trouble, it's quite trivial for a group to have one or more members create trouble, leaving resources reduced in other areas. I believe this technique has been commodified by Hollywood through the phrase "look over there!".
The real problem might be false negatives: memory containing garbage not getting freed due to something appearing to point at it, without actually being a pointer?
In theory yes, but in practice not very much; conservative gc works very well in most cases. The main drawbacks are:
No guarantee that any given bit of memory is collected. As mentioned in practice it's not typically much of an issue, but if you're developing a critical application riding close to the memory limit this may be a concern.
Memory fragmentation can be a problem for some long running programs.
E.g., the greek omicron looks pretty much exactly like an "o". Someone could jolly well have you think you're going to "www.mozilla.com" when it's actually written with an omicron and is, in fact, a completely different site.
Which sort of suggests the solution. Instead of associating each language with its own set of characters, there should be one master set of characters and each language chooses the set of letters it needs. Thus an 'o' really is an omicron.
That would still leave characters that are subtly different, and the unpleasant question of trying to decide when and what difference is sufficient or not to warrant a new character. But an option to warn you when your url contains characters not in your default alphabet seems like a pretty trivial solution either way.
Hello to you, sir! I think you ought to read this:
Slippery Slope
I dunno...if i read your link i'll have to read other people's links, and then the links from those pages; eventually i'll have to read everything on the internet, and i just don't have time.
There is no such thing as a definitive list. Genre is fluid, and incorporates feedback; as soon as you think of a genre someone else has thought of how to combine and/or distort that genre to create a new genre.
I offer you the following theorem:
Any genre-based categorization of computer games will either be too generic or too specific to be useful.
Because when a company's losing market share, it's obviously because they're doing too much marketing...
Indeed. It always puzzles me that a company's first reaction to reduced profits is to generate demoralize staff and generate ill-will through mass firings.
To make an analogy, if you start suffering from hypothermia your body starts sacrificing limbs to save the core. This allows you to live just a little bit longer. But this is a near-sighted strategy---having functional limbs seems to me more important for long-term survival than hoping the extra few minutes you live will be sufficient for the weather to turn...
Slashdot Mirror
Greed eventually kills all companies. It's the same old story:
1. Look, we could make much more money by locking customers into our product!
2. Uh oh, profits are not increasing for some reason. Increase prices! More lock-in!
3. Damn, we've driven away all our customers. No more profit.
And if the company somehow manages to linger on:
4. Surely that was not our fault. Buy more legislators! Find someone to sue!
Games have improved tremendously in this respect over the last few years. Using the narrative context more so it's not just a collection of spoken phrases cut-and-paste together would help a lot. But you know, there's some even more basic problems remain:
1) Use the same actor for the same character. Always. If you need to re-record or add more dialogue, and your original actor isn't available, then live without or re-record everything.
2) Record the sound in the same place, or use a standard background sound. It is disconcerting when the recording quality and background noise changes between sentences.
3) Tell your voice actors not to replicate the errors in the text. Convince them they are voice actors, not just fleshy text-to-speech translators.
4) If your voice actors attempt to mimic strong accents of any form, beat them.
It's valuable. Why you would give away your social networking data to Facebook, Twitter, or Google for free?
Actually you don't give it for free---you in fact pay them for the privilege of giving them that info (indirectly, via ads). Presumably you get something in return though.
I do agree with you on the value; personal information is a commodity, and as a commodity that is inherently mine, if you want it you should have to get my consent.
A software-licensing scheme seems like the perfect solution for personal information: you only lease my information; that doesn't give you the right to resell it, you may only use it as I explicitly direct, and I can withdraw your permissions at any time for any reason.
I wouldn't throw stones at the USPTO for being lazy when you can't even be bothered to read the patent claims.
And having read it I would lob boulders, not stones. One of the most important criteria is supposed to be "not obvious to someone else well-versed in the art". This fails. Almost every software patent fails that test.
I know everyone likes to assume that Microsoft is being evil here, but wouldn't the more realistic assumption be that they were just being incompetent?
Probably. But since incompetence is the plausible deniability of evil it's sometimes hard to tell.
They might want to choose another image---the command entry area in the image of emacs on the linked page has an error in it: "(s-print) is undefined".
So what if they showed extremely faint or differently coloured interiors? Would it still be useless? If the image was gradually filled in, is there a point at which it becomes useless?
It could still be a science if they tried.
That's not uncommon at all. In fact there is a whole method for calculating it.
There doesn't need to be a conspiracy or collusion or 'price fixing' for 2 similar products to have the same price point.
Quite true. The situation for the consumer, however, is the same. And really, even if they aren't agreeing on a price, if a group colludes on an algorithm to set the price then they still collude.
*I don't see how a person carrying pot can bring down a plane, but apprently it's already possible with nail scissors, so who knows.
Apparently it can also be done with 31oz of water or toothpaste. They really need to build sturdier airplanes.
Now, show me only one of these tools that actually works... :)
And there's the solution, and also another problem. It is highly likely that like most government projects this is pure pork, with pretty much no chance of being successful by any objective measure. There are technical reasons why it doesn't work (and no, I don't think the NSA or MI666 has super-secret technology way ahead of current research), and there are statistical---with perhaps only 10^-5% or less of your population of any real interest an error rate of any significance at all means almost every reported result is a false-positive.
What is much more worrying is how all this pork will be justified. You can't have "security" measures without demonstrated need, at least not indefinitely----at some point some poor shmucks will have to be accused/arrested/? to demonstrate that the system is working. That's important for whichever politicians authorized it to save face, and for the continued flow of money into the pockets of whoever builds it. The real threat here is not the fact that you may be caught for something you are doing, but the vastly more likely scenario where you are sacrificed as a way of showing the system works.
An expensive, fragile, high-tech gadget is dumped into the public space and ends up broken? I'm shocked.
I wonder how the argument for these went:
1. Do you suppose the automatic door-opening could possibly fail or be defeated? No, our technology is foolproof.
2. Do you suppose people may clog it up in a variety of artful ways? No, why would anyone purposefully mess up a public bathroom?
3. Do you suppose it may become a way-station for illegal acts that requires around 15min of privacy? No, all illegal acts require very long times and abundant space.
4. Isn't it expensive to buy/install? Don't worry, people excrete almost continually, the money will just pour in.
5. Won't it be expensive to maintain? No, modern technology maintains itself.
1. Check yourself in electronically - print out your boarding pass at home. That bypasses 30 minutes, easy.
Works great, sometimes. First time I tried that my printer just wouldn't print it. I've solved that since, but for some reason I keep forgetting to bring my printer with me so i can print out the return boarding pass too.
2. Check your baggage AT THE CURB. Pretty much every major airport in the US will let you check your baggage at the curb. Yes, it costs an extra $3 per bag to do so, but that saves another 15 minutes.
Better: if you want your luggage to arrive with you, don't check anything. Travel light.
3. No metal in your pockets, no liquids in your bag. Yes, you can survive without that bottle of water for 10 minutes.
And don't wear shoes, be careful to not bring anything with wires in your luggage. Don't bring a laptop.
4. Always choose the security lane with the fewest number of families and old folks. Even if it's longer, you'll get through faster.
Similar observations work in grocery store lines, as neatly summarized by Apu in one Simpsons episode. But in an airport there are forces actively working against you---if you try and get through quickly, then you become of interest, and must therefore be slowed.
I don't see why it would have to only be a toy for criminals. A small group of people could stand in a circle around it and take turns yelling to see how fast they can get the camera to spin. Slap on some ipods, and you've got a new sensation.
I foresee big fun.
Grades are relative, they don't have absolute meaning.
giving them high grades is a reward by itself.
Not so. High grades are only meaningful in comparison to low grades.
Maybe, but they are also then smart enough to recognize that more resources and effort are being spent on people who do not produce at the same rate or with the same quality.
Most/all of the brighter students are hooked on the reward system. Take it away and, well, you've taken away the reward for doing well.
Isn't GPS a little overkill for railways? I suppose they may end up anywhere, but mostly they stay on the tracks, which makes them quite easy to find.
So it's not really random... A pattern must come out after a while.
It's not the pattern, it's the response. Since they've revealed that they will (re)direct resources to apparent sources of potential trouble, it's quite trivial for a group to have one or more members create trouble, leaving resources reduced in other areas. I believe this technique has been commodified by Hollywood through the phrase "look over there!".
In theory yes, but in practice not very much; conservative gc works very well in most cases. The main drawbacks are:
E.g., the greek omicron looks pretty much exactly like an "o". Someone could jolly well have you think you're going to "www.mozilla.com" when it's actually written with an omicron and is, in fact, a completely different site.
Which sort of suggests the solution. Instead of associating each language with its own set of characters, there should be one master set of characters and each language chooses the set of letters it needs. Thus an 'o' really is an omicron.
That would still leave characters that are subtly different, and the unpleasant question of trying to decide when and what difference is sufficient or not to warrant a new character. But an option to warn you when your url contains characters not in your default alphabet seems like a pretty trivial solution either way.
Any good book on the relativity of truth will tell you that the word "fact" is itself a fiction.
Is that a fact? I am suprised.
Hello to you, sir! I think you ought to read this:
Slippery Slope
I dunno...if i read your link i'll have to read other people's links, and then the links from those pages; eventually i'll have to read everything on the internet, and i just don't have time.
Why is the new business model to turn products into services?
With a product you pay once. With a service you pay over and over.
Future business models will involve you paying over and over, and also having to become an employee.
Future future business models will involve you paying over and over, being an employee, and requiring your children to do the same.
The future is feudalism.
There is no such thing as a definitive list. Genre is fluid, and incorporates feedback; as soon as you think of a genre someone else has thought of how to combine and/or distort that genre to create a new genre.
I offer you the following theorem:
Any genre-based categorization of computer games will either be too generic or too specific to be useful.
Same thing applies to movies, books, etc.
Because when a company's losing market share, it's obviously because they're doing too much marketing...
Indeed. It always puzzles me that a company's first reaction to reduced profits is to generate demoralize staff and generate ill-will through mass firings.
To make an analogy, if you start suffering from hypothermia your body starts sacrificing limbs to save the core. This allows you to live just a little bit longer. But this is a near-sighted strategy---having functional limbs seems to me more important for long-term survival than hoping the extra few minutes you live will be sufficient for the weather to turn...