"Unnecessary stealth"? If you don't like stealth then you might list it as an annoyance, but it's not a cliche. That's like saying running is a cliche. And the "hero's town gets destroyed" isn't a game cliche, it's just a frequently-used plot device. For there to be drama, there needs to be conflict. In RPGs in which this conflict is between good and evil, what better way to reflect that than the villain destroying the hero's family and friends?
You know what's the #1 cliche for video game websites? Lists.
Why do I get the feeling Slashdot's main business now is funneling traffic to 5-10 sites, including that Roland guy, 1up.com, and John C. Dvorak?
This is bullshit. If they were concerned with "getting stories out quickly" then they wouldn't schedule stories for publication n hours in the future. Someone like Zonk hits the yes/no button maybe 5 times a day to schedule the day's stories so they come out over the course of the day rather than all at once, to keep people checking back, and generate more impressions.
So, since articles are scheduled hours in advance, the excuse that it's done for our benefit (so that we see the story asap) is total BS.
At many larger colleges there tends to be a rumor or story that the movie Animal House was based on that school or even a particular frat at that school. I've heard from 4 of 5 different people who attended college all over the country that THEIR school was the basis for the movie. This was amusing because my college, Dartmouth, was the "real" basis for the movie, as the author, Chris Miller '63, has said.
I don't know if this counts as an "urban legend" or just a bunch of people being wrong.
The websites that have porn subscriptions tend not to have illegal child porn on them. They're pretty strict about it as they are frequently American companies that don't want to get busted, and there's enough money in doing it legit. I don't see what the "legal" porn has to do with child porn at all.
This is like putting a tax on Tylenol to help fight the cocaine trade.
For the past 5-10 years we've seen an onslaught of abuse of the patent system, with companies patenting technologies and methodologies that are blatantly obvious even to people with basic understanding of the field. Nobody patented "one click shopping" before Amazon because it was so obvious that it didn't appear to need patenting. Amazon recently received a patent for "reminding customers," for god's sake. Patenting RSS advertisements is an obscene abuse of the system, and Google should be ashamed.
There is a serious problem with the USPTO, and that problem seems to be its employees. It doesn't seem like they have the means or desire to hire competent people to review these patents, and if they aren't going to do it then the only recourse is to change the nature of the patents themselves, which Congress can do. Now, getting Congress to do something that would benefit the populace at the expense of corporate greed is another matter.
Google would do well to remember the old adage that goes something like, "If you save a million lives and fuck one sheep, people remember you as a sheep fucker." No matter how much goodwill they've earned through "not being evil," it's going to take very little to negate it all, and it looks like the turning may have begun.
Patents today should last for no more than 5 years, and copyright for no more than 75 years. That stuff about basing copyright on the date the creator dies is bullshit now that corporations frequently own the copyrights. The technologies have changed, the laws have not.
AN OPEN LETTER FROM JEFF BEZOS ON THE
SUBJECT OF PATENTS
I've received several hundred e-mail messages on the subject of our 1-Click
ordering patent. Ninety-nine percent of them were polite and helpful. To the
other one percent -- thanks for the passion and color!
Before I go on, I'd like to thank Tim O'Reilly. Tim and I have had three long
conversations about this issue, and they've been incredibly helpful to me as
I've tried to clarify in my mind what is the right thing to do. I had previously
known Tim as the publisher of the successful and excellent O'Reilly technical
books. He off-handedly proved his narrative and editing skills when he took what
was our first rambling hour-long conversation and somehow made sense of it all
in a posting on his site. My thinking on the topic of business method and
software patents has been strongly influenced by Tim's observations, and
especially his ability to ask excellent questions. I also read the first four
hundred or so responses to Tim's summary of our conversation -- these too were
helpful.
Now, while we've gotten substantially less e-mail on this issue than we have
over several other lightning-rod issues in the past, I've spent a lot more time
thinking about this one. Why? Because the more I thought about it, the more
important I came to realize this issue is. I now believe it's possible that the
current rules governing business method and software patents could end up
harming all of us -- including Amazon.com and its many shareholders, the folks
to whom I have a strong responsibility, not only ethical, but legal and
fiduciary as well.
Despite the call from many thoughtful folks for us to give up our patents
unilaterally, I don't believe it would be right for us to do so. This is my
belief even though the vast majority of our competitive advantage will continue
to come not from patents, but from raising the bar on things like service,
price, and selection -- and we will continue to raise that bar. We will
also continue to be careful in how we use our patents. Unlike with trademark
law, where you must continuously enforce your trademark or risk losing it,
patent law allows you to enforce a patent on a case-by-case basis, only when
there are important business reasons for doing so.
I also strongly doubt whether our giving up our patents would really, in the
end, provide much of a stepping stone to solving the bigger problem.
But I do think we can help. As a company with some high-profile software
patents, we're in a credible position to call for meaningful (perhaps even
radical) patent reform. In fact, we may be uniquely positioned to do this.
Much (much, much, much) remains to be worked out, but here's an outline of
what I have in mind:
1. That the patent laws should recognize that business method and software
patents are fundamentally different than other kinds of patents.
2. That business method and software patents should have a much
shorter lifespan than the current 17 years -- I would propose 3 to 5 years. This
isn't like drug companies, which need long patent windows because of clinical
testing, or like complicated physical processes, where you might have to tool up
and build factories. Especially in the age of the Internet, a good software
innovation can catch a lot of wind in 3 or 5 years.
3. That when the law changes, this new lifespan should take effect
retroactively so that we don't have to wait 17 years for the current patents to
enter the public domain.
4. That for business method and software patents there be a short (maybe 1
month?) public comment period before the patent number is issued. This
would give the Internet community the opportunity to provide prior art
references to the patent examiners at a time when it could really help. (Thanks
to my friend Brewster Kahle for this suggestion.)
Since the TCP/IP stack is only as good as the operating system it's attached to, why don't we come right out and determine, once and for all, the best operating system ever created? I think this will be a grand, insightful discussion, completely devoid of flames.
There is (or at least, was) a $3/month AOL plan that only gave access to webmail. I don't see it advertised anywhere, so you may have to call them to find out if it's still offered. You'd probably have to threaten to cancel to get them to admit it exists.
Costco's CEO charts his own course with high wages and low prices
Bid to gain worker and customer loyalty is paying off
Monday, July 25, 2005
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jim Sinegal, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's fifth-largest retailer, had all the enthusiasm of an 8-year- old in a candy store as he tore open the container of one of his favorite new products: granola snack mix. "You got to try this; it's delicious," he said. "And just $9.99 for 38 ounces."
About 60 feet away, inside Costco's cavernous warehouse store here in the company's hometown store in Issaquah, Sinegal became positively exuberant about the 87-inch-long Natuzzi brown leather sofas. "This is just $799.99," he said. "It's terrific quality. Most other places you'd have to pay $1,500, even $2,000."
But the piece de resistance, the item he most wanted to crow about, was Costco's private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts. "Look, these are just $12.99," he said, while lifting a crisp blue button-down. "At Nordstrom or Macy's, this is a $45, $50 shirt."
Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers -- and epitomize why some retail analysts say Sinegal just might be the United States' shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.
But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers, but also to its workers.
Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco, "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."
Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like the fact that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."
He also dismisses calls to increase Costco's product markups. Sinegal, who has been in the retailing business for more than a half-century, said heeding Wall Street's advice to raise some prices would bring Costco's downfall.
"When I started, Sears, Roebuck was the Costco of the country, but they allowed someone else to come in under them," he said. "We don't want to be one of the casualties. We don't want to turn around and say, 'We got so fancy we've raised our prices,' and all of a sudden a new competitor comes in and beats our prices."
At Costco, one of Sinegal's cardinal rules is that no branded item can be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.
"They could probably get more money for a lot of items they sell," said Ed Weller, a retailing analyst at ThinkEquity.
But Sinegal warned that if Costco increased markups to 16 percent or 18 percent, the company might slip down a dangerous slope and lose discipline in minimizing costs and prices.
Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation. "On Wall Street, they're in the business of making money between now and next Thursday," he said. "I don't say that with any bitterness, but we can't take that view. We want to build
What's with this onslaught of "there's not enough female programmers" or "I don't like the portrayal of women in video games" stories? Why is it "important" that we have more women programmers? I have no problem with it either way, as people should be judged based on performance, but if programming doesn't interest women, why is that being portrayed as some sort of failure by the industry? I've said it before and I'll say it again: men and women are different, they have different abilities, inclinations, emotions, brains and bodies.
I find it hard to believe that many (or probably any) women decided against a career in programming because of scantily clad or anatomically-exaggerated female characters in games. People who program tend to do so because they like to program. There are hudreds, if not thousands, of programming roles that have no interaction with large-breasted female pixel-models. Even within a given game, there's so much to do besides render the models that this entire line of reasoning is just asinine. If you don't like the products your company makes, work somewhere else.
As for nudity in games: every information medium ever created was promptly appropriated for pornography. Considering sex is among the most important issues for people everywhere, since about... forever, I don't see why this is surprising or shocking.
A game like GTA:SA is targeted at a specific demographic: men over the age of 18. If the game sells well in its target market then it's a success. If people outside the target demo don't like it, it doesn't really matter. The games industry has introduced games targeted at females of several age groups and by and large, they're flops. The reason behind this is pretty simple; see my first paragraph.
The most common use for cookies today is as unique session identifiers on websites. This includes shopping carts on e-commerce sites, and sites like Slashdot. It's just a way to associate information on the user's machine with information on the server's machine. I don't see how it's "intended" for any particular use. Tracking a user's movements within a site seems logical to me, and in many cases doesn't require a cookie. Tracking a user's activities across websites via a cookie set by a company like Doubleclick is another matter.
It just seems like you're getting in a huff because cookies have somehow been "perverted" from their original intended use. I'd suggest that cookies didn't have any "official" intended use, but were created as a way to retain persistent information across a stateless protocol, which is what they do. Whether they're used for good or evil is another matter entirely, just like any technology.
Most Americans just don't seem to care about their rights (and responsibilities) being eroded. The GTA:SA "scandal" dealt with freedom of speech and parental responsibility, neither of which interest the populace.
In the wild, the mother bird feeds the baby bird food that she's already eaten. Human parents should take similar responsibility for the information their children are ingesting. Or to remove a layer of abstraction, parents should simply play the games their children want to play to evaluate them for themselves; or at least watch them being played a couple of times.
Lately I find myself realizing just how much time I spend at work checking out websites. And while some of that time is probably outright "wasted" in terms of productivity, I also find myself thinking about problems as I read some of the news sites. A sort of background process, working at the problem while my foreground process reads Slashdot. It doesn't happen all the time, but when there's some kind of mental blockage, that's when I tend to putz around on the web, and when the blockage is cleared via the background mental processing, I tend to get back to work pretty quickly.
Of course, trying to explain this to someone who has a paper in hand saying you read Slashdot 2 hours a day is a different matter, so I still try to keep my jaunts as short as possible.
In the event it gets fixed, here's how Zonk's post looks as of 14:40 US EST:
jagger writes "a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495. stm">News Corp announced on Monday that it , owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."
I hope they stick to the storyline at least as far as having the monsters being minions of Hell, and not just some random bad guys that happen to live on Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unnecessary stealth"? If you don't like stealth then you might list it as an annoyance, but it's not a cliche. That's like saying running is a cliche. And the "hero's town gets destroyed" isn't a game cliche, it's just a frequently-used plot device. For there to be drama, there needs to be conflict. In RPGs in which this conflict is between good and evil, what better way to reflect that than the villain destroying the hero's family and friends?
You know what's the #1 cliche for video game websites? Lists.
Why do I get the feeling Slashdot's main business now is funneling traffic to 5-10 sites, including that Roland guy, 1up.com, and John C. Dvorak?
This just in - cutting out the middleman can save you money!
With the rate at which this Roland guy submits stories, it would probably be easiest just to make "roland.slashdot.org". I mean, really:
long url
Moderation was apparently broken, and now fixed (I guess?).
This is bullshit. If they were concerned with "getting stories out quickly" then they wouldn't schedule stories for publication n hours in the future. Someone like Zonk hits the yes/no button maybe 5 times a day to schedule the day's stories so they come out over the course of the day rather than all at once, to keep people checking back, and generate more impressions.
So, since articles are scheduled hours in advance, the excuse that it's done for our benefit (so that we see the story asap) is total BS.
At many larger colleges there tends to be a rumor or story that the movie Animal House was based on that school or even a particular frat at that school. I've heard from 4 of 5 different people who attended college all over the country that THEIR school was the basis for the movie. This was amusing because my college, Dartmouth, was the "real" basis for the movie, as the author, Chris Miller '63, has said.
I don't know if this counts as an "urban legend" or just a bunch of people being wrong.
The websites that have porn subscriptions tend not to have illegal child porn on them. They're pretty strict about it as they are frequently American companies that don't want to get busted, and there's enough money in doing it legit. I don't see what the "legal" porn has to do with child porn at all.
This is like putting a tax on Tylenol to help fight the cocaine trade.
For the past 5-10 years we've seen an onslaught of abuse of the patent system, with companies patenting technologies and methodologies that are blatantly obvious even to people with basic understanding of the field. Nobody patented "one click shopping" before Amazon because it was so obvious that it didn't appear to need patenting. Amazon recently received a patent for "reminding customers," for god's sake. Patenting RSS advertisements is an obscene abuse of the system, and Google should be ashamed.
There is a serious problem with the USPTO, and that problem seems to be its employees. It doesn't seem like they have the means or desire to hire competent people to review these patents, and if they aren't going to do it then the only recourse is to change the nature of the patents themselves, which Congress can do. Now, getting Congress to do something that would benefit the populace at the expense of corporate greed is another matter.
Google would do well to remember the old adage that goes something like, "If you save a million lives and fuck one sheep, people remember you as a sheep fucker." No matter how much goodwill they've earned through "not being evil," it's going to take very little to negate it all, and it looks like the turning may have begun.
Patents today should last for no more than 5 years, and copyright for no more than 75 years. That stuff about basing copyright on the date the creator dies is bullshit now that corporations frequently own the copyrights. The technologies have changed, the laws have not.
BOO to Google on this.
Since the TCP/IP stack is only as good as the operating system it's attached to, why don't we come right out and determine, once and for all, the best operating system ever created? I think this will be a grand, insightful discussion, completely devoid of flames.
There is (or at least, was) a $3/month AOL plan that only gave access to webmail. I don't see it advertised anywhere, so you may have to call them to find out if it's still offered. You'd probably have to threaten to cancel to get them to admit it exists.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00. html
It's okay, your mom still loves you.
This is what we get for handing our children's education over to the government.
As opposed to China, where they've handed everything over to the government?
Microsoft's had TerraServer for years... I think before I'd ever heard of Google.
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
What's with this onslaught of "there's not enough female programmers" or "I don't like the portrayal of women in video games" stories? Why is it "important" that we have more women programmers? I have no problem with it either way, as people should be judged based on performance, but if programming doesn't interest women, why is that being portrayed as some sort of failure by the industry? I've said it before and I'll say it again: men and women are different, they have different abilities, inclinations, emotions, brains and bodies.
I find it hard to believe that many (or probably any) women decided against a career in programming because of scantily clad or anatomically-exaggerated female characters in games. People who program tend to do so because they like to program. There are hudreds, if not thousands, of programming roles that have no interaction with large-breasted female pixel-models. Even within a given game, there's so much to do besides render the models that this entire line of reasoning is just asinine. If you don't like the products your company makes, work somewhere else.
As for nudity in games: every information medium ever created was promptly appropriated for pornography. Considering sex is among the most important issues for people everywhere, since about... forever, I don't see why this is surprising or shocking.
A game like GTA:SA is targeted at a specific demographic: men over the age of 18. If the game sells well in its target market then it's a success. If people outside the target demo don't like it, it doesn't really matter. The games industry has introduced games targeted at females of several age groups and by and large, they're flops. The reason behind this is pretty simple; see my first paragraph.
What's a hampster? You mean hamster?
The most common use for cookies today is as unique session identifiers on websites. This includes shopping carts on e-commerce sites, and sites like Slashdot. It's just a way to associate information on the user's machine with information on the server's machine. I don't see how it's "intended" for any particular use. Tracking a user's movements within a site seems logical to me, and in many cases doesn't require a cookie. Tracking a user's activities across websites via a cookie set by a company like Doubleclick is another matter.
It just seems like you're getting in a huff because cookies have somehow been "perverted" from their original intended use. I'd suggest that cookies didn't have any "official" intended use, but were created as a way to retain persistent information across a stateless protocol, which is what they do. Whether they're used for good or evil is another matter entirely, just like any technology.
Then why isn't user 123.456.789.012 good enough?
Oh, that's easy.
#1: Dialup users without semi-static IP addresses.
#2: AOL's enormous proxies.
Most Americans just don't seem to care about their rights (and responsibilities) being eroded. The GTA:SA "scandal" dealt with freedom of speech and parental responsibility, neither of which interest the populace.
In the wild, the mother bird feeds the baby bird food that she's already eaten. Human parents should take similar responsibility for the information their children are ingesting. Or to remove a layer of abstraction, parents should simply play the games their children want to play to evaluate them for themselves; or at least watch them being played a couple of times.
Lately I find myself realizing just how much time I spend at work checking out websites. And while some of that time is probably outright "wasted" in terms of productivity, I also find myself thinking about problems as I read some of the news sites. A sort of background process, working at the problem while my foreground process reads Slashdot. It doesn't happen all the time, but when there's some kind of mental blockage, that's when I tend to putz around on the web, and when the blockage is cleared via the background mental processing, I tend to get back to work pretty quickly.
Of course, trying to explain this to someone who has a paper in hand saying you read Slashdot 2 hours a day is a different matter, so I still try to keep my jaunts as short as possible.
Good job, Zonk!
Especially considering Win2k went on sale in 1999, making the point even more yawnworthy.
I hope they stick to the storyline at least as far as having the monsters being minions of Hell, and not just some random bad guys that happen to live on Mars.