I'm much more interested in what all those Slashdot people have to say, who were outright dismissing any possibility of the device being hacked like this because it doesn't scan just the fingerprint, or is a capacitive scanner, or whatever.
I've wondered this as well. Facebook is one of those companies that can pretty much attract whatever talent they want. Hell, they could probably just outright poach a MySQL engineer or 10 for cheaper than official support.
Such a slow and painful death brought about by a marked lack of new technologies in their final years. For all the apathy and hatred people throw at companies like Microsoft, they survive because they diversify and adapt (some better than others). Companies like Novell and Blackberry just seem to stagnate, while their core product line inevitably becomes too dated to support the bottom line any longer.
The really funny thing about all of this is just how predictable it should be for any technology company. Consumer demand changes pretty much every 1 to 3 years, and if companies aren't updating and innovating during that time, then they will go the way of Novell and Blackberry. Every time.
I couldn't care less about the name or brand. I just want products that work well. In the IT industry, Microsoft's ecosystem fits that bill, even if they are quite expensive. I'd love for someone else to come along and actually offer competitive products, but that has less to do with not liking Microsoft and more to do with simply wanting competition in the market. I'm really excited about a few Linux options but those are years away from being viable for my clients, based on my testing.
Yeah, that struck me as odd as well. He's trying to make it sound like he's actually owning up to his mistakes by acting like all of their woes stem from decisions made a decade ago. The truth is that his poor decisions were basically made non-stop the entire time.
Maybe. My experience is that cell phones tend to break down after a few years of use, either from batteries that can't be replaced or buttons and touchscreens that become less responsive. Not to mention system specs that get outdated.
More importantly, any long term support contract would have to be quite a bit cheaper than the cost of simply getting a new phone in the first place, to make much sense for most people. With many new phones easily available for one or two hundred dollars (with contract of course), that doesn't leave much room for Cyanogen on that front.
If the gameplay isn't fun enough for someone, having the AH available will only burn them out faster because they'll have less to work for. None of the Diablo games have ever had much of an "end-game" or anything. It's like Mario; you play because you enjoy the game, even if it's a bit grindy at times. It's also not like an MMO, where you can at least strut around showing off your gear to random people...
Which doesn't change the fact that most people don't use Linux in the first place, when talking about traditional desktops or laptops (the systems relevant to this discussion). I think it's great that Valve has ported over their small handful of games. I also think it's great that "indie" studios are releasing stuff for Linux right off the bat. I just don't think we'll see any mass shift towards Linux for gamers at the level some people here are hoping for.
Worst-case scenario is pretty much where Windows 8 permanently cripples the PC gaming scene by forcing people to migrate over to consoles or deal with a crappy desktop experience. What it won't do is force them to replace Windows with Linux, partly because even the entry-level Linux distro's all seem to be going the same route as Microsoft with the tablet UI thing.
Best-case scenario is PC gaming limps along for a while, with some migrating over to the new and shiny consoles with fairly cutting edge experiences, until Windows 9 comes out most likely offers a more traditional desktop experience, or the entire industry gaming industry gets on board with the App culture, and starts distribution that way.
It's not at all impossible to track the lives of these people. And you're right that they very well might be going on to do great work that never see's the light of day for most people. Which is exactly what everyone else does. I think his point is that there are lots of smart people doing really great things out there, but the media has an over-fascination with these extreme cases where the kid ultimately ends up like everyone else.
You see it in the high school sports world as well. There will be some article about a 7 foot tall 9th grader who's tearing up the competition and is destined for the NBA and then... nothing. You actually can find out what happened with a little research, and it usually ends up being something like they weren't nearly as good in practice as they were on paper, at the higher levels of the sport. So they go on with life and maybe even play some college basketball, but eventually settle into something completely unrelated, but more realistic.
For what it's worth, I actually enjoyed the remake more than the original. It was closer to the book, and had decent acting and pacing. The original is great in a 'campy-old-school-meathead-actor' kind of way, and for nostalgia, but the actual acting and plot were pretty bad.
Yes, because the process was obviously as simple as swapping out old parts with newer off the shelf parts. They should have instead completely redesigned the hardware and commissioned Intel to build them a custom CPU for, because that would be a really smart and efficient way of doing what they did otherwise.
I love my Surface Pro. I have a Galaxy Tab 2 as well, which gets used for lighter stuff like Netflix or Facebook crap, but the Surface Pro is pretty awesome and being something I can *do* stuff on. It's pretty much replaced my Wacom Tablet for various art projects, and I can do a surprising amount of work on it through Google Docs.
Yeah, Win 8 sucks balls, but the hardware is pretty great and the OS is at least only needed for the few seconds it takes to load up a program or browser.
The biggest downside, and the reason I probably wouldn't recommend it to an average person is that the price is way too high. Microsoft really needs to use the Surface as a loss-leader and just take a hit in order to bring it to the market at closer to $600 (for the Pro version). They basically took a hit anyway, without any of the benefits of increasing the adoption rate of Win 8.
And yet the only thing I got out of it is they know how to deflect the truth by minimizing the importance of the accusation. Which is pretty much a standard human characteristic.
I'm less concerned about the school's specifically, and more concerned about the kids that go to the "crappy" ones. We moved a few years ago after walking down the hallway of my daughter's elementary school, and hearing 7 and 8 year-old's talking about blowjobs and getting high after school. I could tell by the way they were talking that they didn't actually understand what they were saying, and instead were probably just repeating stuff they heard from family members or music or something, but the fact that it was even a topic for kids that young at all was enough to immediately withdraw her.
Crappy school's are filled with crappy kids that come from crappy families. There's no way to improve the school itself, when parents aren't doing their job at home. Unfortunately, teachers can't officially talk about that, so they just end up dancing around the subject hoping to get transferred somewhere else. When you put a kid into a private school, you aren't getting a better education as much as you are getting a better social environment that's free from the shitty side-effects of poverty because the kids that go there tend to have more functional home environments.
Hollywood has shown that consumers are more than happy spending money on shitty remakes, crappy ideas, and overblown special effects instead of a good story or acting. The game industry is no different. Just look at the yearly football games, the call of duty annuals, and the absolute lack of RPG's (too much work to do it right) combined with the ever breaking sales records each year when the next is released.
There is no gaming depression coming. Just the swan song of an industry that's chosen capitalism over art and entertainment.
For projects like these, it's less about the programmers and more about the constraints placed upon them, such as deadlines, the shifting moods of bosses, irrational mandates from EA that probably change every week, etc.. I imagine it's like working with a shitload of primadonna's every day.
Risks and costs are fine, but we're talking about a whole other level of money here. Mistakes in this kind of industry are catastrophic, and not something any single corporation can handle without going under. Do you think the Apollo program would have gone past stage 1 after the fire if it wasn't essentially government funded and backed? What kind of board of directors would you need to be able to look at that and not cancel it on the spot? And that's back before OSHA and general work safety issues were around.
Imagine that happening today, and think about how crippling it would be for a company.
Commercial businesses need more than just "potential" profit, especially if they are going to be spending the insane amounts of money that space exploration will demand. There is currently no company that can realistically make something like a moon colony happen, much less a mars colony, because there needs to be some kind of return of investment.
We can't even get a company to successfully trail blaze and revolutionize a source of clean energy to replace fossil fuels, so I don't know how in the world anyone thinks we'll do something even more difficult, expensive, and risky like manned space exploration any time soon.
It's not a lost cause, however. It's just not something that's going to happen until a mars rover unearths a huge diamond deposit, or discovers some martian species capable of picking fruit for cheaper than the Mexicans. THEN, you can bet your ass some company will step up and suddenly have a plan.
There's a big difference between phishing a media outlet employees, and actually hacking into something. I don't see them doing much more than the former.
The only problem I see with this is that a career fair should have some kind of social component to it, and the act of coding is very much solitary. Yeah, you can have teams and discuss what to do, but it will still come down to having someone sit down and write code. Not very exciting for average people, and definitely not a good way to attract them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm much more interested in what all those Slashdot people have to say, who were outright dismissing any possibility of the device being hacked like this because it doesn't scan just the fingerprint, or is a capacitive scanner, or whatever.
I've wondered this as well. Facebook is one of those companies that can pretty much attract whatever talent they want. Hell, they could probably just outright poach a MySQL engineer or 10 for cheaper than official support.
Any point you were trying to make was wasted with your melodramatic hyperbole at the end there.
Such a slow and painful death brought about by a marked lack of new technologies in their final years. For all the apathy and hatred people throw at companies like Microsoft, they survive because they diversify and adapt (some better than others). Companies like Novell and Blackberry just seem to stagnate, while their core product line inevitably becomes too dated to support the bottom line any longer.
The really funny thing about all of this is just how predictable it should be for any technology company. Consumer demand changes pretty much every 1 to 3 years, and if companies aren't updating and innovating during that time, then they will go the way of Novell and Blackberry. Every time.
I couldn't care less about the name or brand. I just want products that work well. In the IT industry, Microsoft's ecosystem fits that bill, even if they are quite expensive. I'd love for someone else to come along and actually offer competitive products, but that has less to do with not liking Microsoft and more to do with simply wanting competition in the market. I'm really excited about a few Linux options but those are years away from being viable for my clients, based on my testing.
Yeah, that struck me as odd as well. He's trying to make it sound like he's actually owning up to his mistakes by acting like all of their woes stem from decisions made a decade ago. The truth is that his poor decisions were basically made non-stop the entire time.
Maybe. My experience is that cell phones tend to break down after a few years of use, either from batteries that can't be replaced or buttons and touchscreens that become less responsive. Not to mention system specs that get outdated.
More importantly, any long term support contract would have to be quite a bit cheaper than the cost of simply getting a new phone in the first place, to make much sense for most people. With many new phones easily available for one or two hundred dollars (with contract of course), that doesn't leave much room for Cyanogen on that front.
If the gameplay isn't fun enough for someone, having the AH available will only burn them out faster because they'll have less to work for. None of the Diablo games have ever had much of an "end-game" or anything. It's like Mario; you play because you enjoy the game, even if it's a bit grindy at times. It's also not like an MMO, where you can at least strut around showing off your gear to random people...
Which doesn't change the fact that most people don't use Linux in the first place, when talking about traditional desktops or laptops (the systems relevant to this discussion). I think it's great that Valve has ported over their small handful of games. I also think it's great that "indie" studios are releasing stuff for Linux right off the bat. I just don't think we'll see any mass shift towards Linux for gamers at the level some people here are hoping for.
Worst-case scenario is pretty much where Windows 8 permanently cripples the PC gaming scene by forcing people to migrate over to consoles or deal with a crappy desktop experience. What it won't do is force them to replace Windows with Linux, partly because even the entry-level Linux distro's all seem to be going the same route as Microsoft with the tablet UI thing.
Best-case scenario is PC gaming limps along for a while, with some migrating over to the new and shiny consoles with fairly cutting edge experiences, until Windows 9 comes out most likely offers a more traditional desktop experience, or the entire industry gaming industry gets on board with the App culture, and starts distribution that way.
It's not at all impossible to track the lives of these people. And you're right that they very well might be going on to do great work that never see's the light of day for most people. Which is exactly what everyone else does. I think his point is that there are lots of smart people doing really great things out there, but the media has an over-fascination with these extreme cases where the kid ultimately ends up like everyone else.
You see it in the high school sports world as well. There will be some article about a 7 foot tall 9th grader who's tearing up the competition and is destined for the NBA and then... nothing. You actually can find out what happened with a little research, and it usually ends up being something like they weren't nearly as good in practice as they were on paper, at the higher levels of the sport. So they go on with life and maybe even play some college basketball, but eventually settle into something completely unrelated, but more realistic.
I pretty much ignore these kinds of articles. I think they're more about "feel-good journalism" than anything else.
Seems like every few months, for the last 5 years, there's been a new claim that it has left the solar system.
For what it's worth, I actually enjoyed the remake more than the original. It was closer to the book, and had decent acting and pacing. The original is great in a 'campy-old-school-meathead-actor' kind of way, and for nostalgia, but the actual acting and plot were pretty bad.
Yes, because the process was obviously as simple as swapping out old parts with newer off the shelf parts. They should have instead completely redesigned the hardware and commissioned Intel to build them a custom CPU for, because that would be a really smart and efficient way of doing what they did otherwise.
I love my Surface Pro. I have a Galaxy Tab 2 as well, which gets used for lighter stuff like Netflix or Facebook crap, but the Surface Pro is pretty awesome and being something I can *do* stuff on. It's pretty much replaced my Wacom Tablet for various art projects, and I can do a surprising amount of work on it through Google Docs.
Yeah, Win 8 sucks balls, but the hardware is pretty great and the OS is at least only needed for the few seconds it takes to load up a program or browser.
The biggest downside, and the reason I probably wouldn't recommend it to an average person is that the price is way too high. Microsoft really needs to use the Surface as a loss-leader and just take a hit in order to bring it to the market at closer to $600 (for the Pro version). They basically took a hit anyway, without any of the benefits of increasing the adoption rate of Win 8.
And yet the only thing I got out of it is they know how to deflect the truth by minimizing the importance of the accusation. Which is pretty much a standard human characteristic.
I'm less concerned about the school's specifically, and more concerned about the kids that go to the "crappy" ones. We moved a few years ago after walking down the hallway of my daughter's elementary school, and hearing 7 and 8 year-old's talking about blowjobs and getting high after school. I could tell by the way they were talking that they didn't actually understand what they were saying, and instead were probably just repeating stuff they heard from family members or music or something, but the fact that it was even a topic for kids that young at all was enough to immediately withdraw her.
Crappy school's are filled with crappy kids that come from crappy families. There's no way to improve the school itself, when parents aren't doing their job at home. Unfortunately, teachers can't officially talk about that, so they just end up dancing around the subject hoping to get transferred somewhere else. When you put a kid into a private school, you aren't getting a better education as much as you are getting a better social environment that's free from the shitty side-effects of poverty because the kids that go there tend to have more functional home environments.
Which pretty much defeats the whole point of hosting your own email...
Hollywood has shown that consumers are more than happy spending money on shitty remakes, crappy ideas, and overblown special effects instead of a good story or acting. The game industry is no different. Just look at the yearly football games, the call of duty annuals, and the absolute lack of RPG's (too much work to do it right) combined with the ever breaking sales records each year when the next is released.
There is no gaming depression coming. Just the swan song of an industry that's chosen capitalism over art and entertainment.
For projects like these, it's less about the programmers and more about the constraints placed upon them, such as deadlines, the shifting moods of bosses, irrational mandates from EA that probably change every week, etc.. I imagine it's like working with a shitload of primadonna's every day.
Risks and costs are fine, but we're talking about a whole other level of money here. Mistakes in this kind of industry are catastrophic, and not something any single corporation can handle without going under. Do you think the Apollo program would have gone past stage 1 after the fire if it wasn't essentially government funded and backed? What kind of board of directors would you need to be able to look at that and not cancel it on the spot? And that's back before OSHA and general work safety issues were around.
Imagine that happening today, and think about how crippling it would be for a company.
Is there even a working fusion reactor in place yet? If not, the idea is moot.
Commercial businesses need more than just "potential" profit, especially if they are going to be spending the insane amounts of money that space exploration will demand. There is currently no company that can realistically make something like a moon colony happen, much less a mars colony, because there needs to be some kind of return of investment.
We can't even get a company to successfully trail blaze and revolutionize a source of clean energy to replace fossil fuels, so I don't know how in the world anyone thinks we'll do something even more difficult, expensive, and risky like manned space exploration any time soon.
It's not a lost cause, however. It's just not something that's going to happen until a mars rover unearths a huge diamond deposit, or discovers some martian species capable of picking fruit for cheaper than the Mexicans. THEN, you can bet your ass some company will step up and suddenly have a plan.
There's a big difference between phishing a media outlet employees, and actually hacking into something. I don't see them doing much more than the former.
The only problem I see with this is that a career fair should have some kind of social component to it, and the act of coding is very much solitary. Yeah, you can have teams and discuss what to do, but it will still come down to having someone sit down and write code. Not very exciting for average people, and definitely not a good way to attract them.