I think the anonymous coward may have been trolling with the unconditional statement, but there is a valid (if expensive) point there and I would suggest a different (additional?) compromise: if you really want that 'complete understanding' for a brand new problem, write your own prototypes from scratch. Then choose and reuse a mature, complete solution (or write your own only as a last resort).
Wrapping an existing solution in your own APIs rarely teaches you much about the underlying problem - it helps in a lot of other ways, including experimenting / investigating solutions to reuse. But I think it misses the 'complete understanding' point.
Writing a solution from scratch (even a bad / hacky solution) does give you a much better understanding which is extremely valuable for you - that's why we do that for the classic problems all the time in college, after all. Of course, no one should be writing their own C++ string class these days, but if you wrote your own string class *once*, it helps you to understand the implications when you use the STL or something else.
But unless you are an academic, that's normally not what you are being paid for: you have a project to complete, and a specific problem to solve in the best possible way. Reusing a mature, tested solution is almost always simply in the best interest of the project - even if you do not learn as much as you would by writing your own.
On the other hand, if the problem is different and tractable enough, hacking your own prototype from scratch can give you better understanding that is applicable to any 'real solution' you adopt - and if kept simple enough, can be used for unit-tests, benchmarks or other purposes.
It's a matter of time and resources, but often enough prototyping your own wheel is well worth the investment - just use it as a tool to choose and apply the best solution for problems that are not well understood. Not as an excuse to risk the quality or cost of your project for the sake of pet projects and personal pride (which is often enough where NIH leads to).
I don't think even Google has a *private game console for each engineer*. For good reasons, all companies I know of use rec areas, and communal games, for these things.
Seriously, I'd have to agree it sounds like a bad idea. As fun as it sounds, I couldn't help but see it as a waste of the company's money. Even if everyone has good self-discipline and no one spends half their time playing instead of working - there is no good reason to think this will increase productivity commesurate to the cost and risks:
- 1+ Consoles on a COMMUNAL area (usually Good Idea): it acts as a nerd watercooler / smoking room. People take breaks, relax, chat and play games together. Increases morale and helps team building with a (relatively) cheap, *flat* cost. Also tends to self-regulate by social pressure: the guy who plays games all day instead of working will be noticeable to his peers (who would be picking up the slack if he goes on).
- 1 Console FOR EACH Team member (Bad Idea): people take breaks and play games by themselves - or with their usual online group. Increases morale, but at a relatively high cost *per head* - that adds up over time. You'd also need monitoring, hardware setup per office, etc. so this is part of your 'new team member' logistical overhead. Perhaps more important, you don't get any of the expected side benefits: no team-building, because team members don't need to interact with each other if they have their own console online. And the one guy who does play games all day instead of working is not obvious to his peers - until it is too late to prevent the damage (or worst case, repair it).
So best case, this may be a way to buy individual worked morale - at a higher cost and the risk of reducing your team's interactions outside work meetings. It begs the question of whether this is the most efficient way to buy that morale.
Worst case - just a couple incidents of privilege abuse by one employee could erase whatever morale and productivity gains this approach had - and if you need to take the consoles away due to cost-reductions / abuse, the morale will be even worse than before.
E.g.: Having your boss "take away your console" because "Billy didn't finish his hom...ehem... *work*" sounds profoundly demotivating - it reduces the employee to the status of a grounded teenager, on the company's eyes, and their own.
The problem is that people are not really sure the "owner" and the "website voluntarily giving it away" are the same thing. Nor should they be - illegal download sites can misrepresent themselves.
Seriously, would we be mocking them if they refused to click a link to "Get a Free US$10K credit line from Joe's Bank - just enter personal information here!" at joezsite.org? Or if they were reluctant about helping a certain nephew of a general in Nigeria who's having tough times but would be happy to pay back thousand-fold of 'a small, perfectly legal gift'?
People depend mostly on trust of the other parties to make sure everything is kosher - and on context and past experience to develop that trust.
Most people are neither legal nor technological experts. As techies we often tend to assume people have all of the same context they would have to make an informed decision - and that if they don't, they should blindly trust the techie's advice because it is so obvious and 'they can't be that dumb'. That attitude is neither fair nor productive.
The only reason we really trust that download link in OpenOffice.org, is because we have the context. We know what OpenOffice itself is and where it came from - or failing that, we know how to find out. We know how open source works and can judge similar projects based on that experience - we can double-check something suspect against trusted sources, compare characteristics, and at worst we can see and compile the source ourselves.
So it's not really about 'downloading' itself - it is about 'downloading from a random website I never heard about - which claims to give for free something that I see sold in the stores for a lot of money... and it's legal because of some random law or acronym I never heard about says so?'. For normal people, "you can see the source!" and "it's GPL!" is utterly meaningless - and that argument quickly degenerates into GTAIV-parody material. Normal people have no reason to trust the usual 'corporate sponsors' any more than the random.com link in the first place as a way to measure credibility (who is Sun? who is this MySQL?). They need to learn who these new third-parties are and what they want before they trust it - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm sure you have other reasons to dislike it - but that sounds like a design mistake that has little to do with the 'registry-like' interface.
I've seen the same 'feature' (commit on-change) on a lot of other naive user interfaces for remote database storage - web forms, spreadsheets, desktop clients... Typically the product of good intentions, and very optimistic assumptions about the usage.
There's nothing magical about a 'registry-like' tree that makes explicit batch updates impossible - or on other interfaces that make them auto-magically implemented.
Unless your 'user interface' is to force the user to type a SQL update statement - then you can't go wrong on that (the user, on the other hand...).
I thought the idea of "Secure languages" was being able to PROVE there were no security bugs on your software because it was correct (if you're willing to pay the price in development time, of course).
From that point of view, one of the big appeals of Java and other VM languages was precisely that software could potentially be 'provably secure' up to some level (typically with subsets / extensions of the language providing more or less comfortable definitions of 'secure'). Strong static typing and no pointer arithmetic means a duck will not turn into a dog on you - so you can trust strong pre/post conditions to a greater extent.
Provability of correctness is an objective statement. That doesn't make software magically secure - but it means it is *possible*, with enough work, to *prove* that *the part of the software you wrote* implements the security of your design *correctly*. You're still vulnerable to design gaps, and security bugs in any reused libraries / runtime - but that narrow proof of security still eliminates whole categories of end-of-the-world-scenarios from your list.
Making security bugs 'easier to avoid' - like other 'bug preventing language features' - is a much more subjective claim (how do you define a 'security bug' for such a claim anyway?), and is what can backfire into non-sensical assumptions. They're typically a net gain int he hands of an informed developer, but naive programmers can be misled that because a very specific type of security bug X 'cannot happen' in the language, 'security' is taken care of.
1) Profit-wise, remarkably stupid.
The whole point of broadcasting a murder-sex-mayhem is because it entices more viewers to watch it in the first place. Its main benefit is on the hook / advertising. What's the point of mislabeling it as "wholesame family entertainment?
If the latter attracted more viewers, that's what you would have produced in the first place - so you're getting less viewers for your money, and then you're angering the viewers you do get because a *big* common reason they're watching "wholesome" content anyway is to avoid the murderfest.
Accurate tagging is simply in the best selfish interests of media producers - it means more viewers, more reuse of old TV content (look at all this 'wholesome' content from the 50s!), and less angry people picketing outside their offices.
Perhaps more importantly than any of that, it means more targeted advertising.
2) Boycotted, if not sued, in ~3 secs by large masses of annoyed people (mostly parents, but others as well) of all political / cultural stands.
It's one thing to show material that some X people might consider offensive - you're at worst going to offend X. It's another thing to pull the national broadcast equivalent of a goatse.cx link. You'll offend everyone who fears being offended (which is a lot more than X).
Using this for home theater projection would be utterly idiotic. There is no shortage and cheap projectors that already do a better job for a permanent or semi-permanent instalation.
Although the price is surprisingly cheap, I doubt the video quality will be any surprise for that price. That's just not what these kinds of products are about.
This is about presentation hardware for mobile professionals - salesmen, marketing, that kind of thing. Being able to make a last-minute presentation/sales-pitch when you don't have the luxury of real A/V equipment at the location... without having to lug a 10-pound lamp around.
Buying the game for the story doesn't mean you're buying because of the tie-in.
I'd also buy adventure / rpg games for the story - but what I'm looking for is primarily a GOOD story. Which is sorely lacking in franchise games (or games in general).
Most of the LucasArts games you describe were top-notch because they had great stories - not really great or innovative "gameplay" (except for X-Wing / Tie Fighter - that was gameplay).
Storytelling was the strength of LucasArts, for obvious reasons. There's no "problem" with that, since stories ARE a vital part of entertainment for some of us.
E.g.: Deus Ex is still one of my favorite games - it was an 'ok' FPS, but it has a great story and narrative quality. KOTOR had similar virtues / flaws mix in its genre, and more recently and to a lesser degree, so did Mass Effect.
The "problem" you describe is with crappy games with no redeeming quality - no gameplay, no story, no primary entertainment factor.
But even these days I'd have more faith in LucasArts' storytelling prowess than their game design skills. That just means I'm more likely to buy their game, since I care mostly about the story, than an FPS / action game fan, who's more concerned about the gameplay.
For both of those titles, Halo kiddies would "get it", they'd just wouldn't like them - just like any other adventure / RPG games.
"Sure, that's nice... but those types of games are slow and boring..."
Those games were innovative in many ways (content, mostly) - but their gameplay mechanics were pretty conventional.
"Sins of a Solar Empire" is probably a better example - the change is subtle enough that it can take you completely by surprise if you keep expecting an RTS, or an empire-building game like Galciv... and it's only really fun when you "get" it is neither and stop trying to play like it was Homeworld.
Personally, I think the freedom to telecommute as needed is indeed a major productivity boom - the person telecommuting (and only that person) can and should balance whichever way is more productive for the task at hand.
But I'm skeptical of absolute claims of greater efficiency - or of attempts to prescribe X days per week, or to use it as a way to save office space, for that matter.
Efficiency depends a lot on too many factors that are context-dependent: the exact work that you're doing, the work environment, technical reasons, etc.
Sometimes you're lucky and you have a good chunk of uninterrupted, isolated work to finish - and indeed you can be much more productive. But other times, there is a bunch of communication that needs to happen to enable the real work, and human presence just makes a thousand things easier (and faster). Remote communication also can limit your awareness of other people's work, which will affect you one way or the other. And sometimes you just need to access resources which are a hassle to get to through a VPN.
So far I prefer to telecommute about 1.5 days a week on average for the same reasons: I could get a lot of stuff done uninterrupted, and it balances out well enough.
I do understand the parent post's issue, though - I get as easily distracted as anyone at home. But just separating a 'working environment' tends to do wonders for that.
Humans are creatures of habit, so we tend to associate environments with their most common activities and mind-frames.
I've found just getting out of the house and working from a cafe or anywhere with net access does wonders for focus, because my home is most linked by habit to free time. For some people it is just the opposite.
Yes, some conservative pundits, as well as some left-wing radicals, are so over-the-top that they essentially The Daily Show the success it is, by providing its best material for free.
But some people fail to distinguish between those extremists and conservatives in general, which further polarizes everyone. It just makes people feel better if they believe everyone that disagrees with them is an idiot.
To Stewart's and Colbert's credit, it is not their role to take themselves seriously, and they have been very vocal about what a monumentally bad idea it is to take their shows too seriously.
I seriously doubt that, given the choice, "clean leagues" would become the most popular by any means.
The whole reason doping is a problem is that sports have become a show business, its about winning and spectacle.
Given the choice, I'd expect no-restraints leagues to be far more popular because they'll have the most spectacular performances - and because that's where the money would be (both for athlete profit, and advertising).
"Clean leagues" would be the equivalent of "ethical mutual funds" - they'd attract / split a surprisingly large chunk of the public, and they would positively influence everybody else. But their performances would be less obviously extraordinary, and they wouldn't have the deep pharma sponsorship pockets to convince everyone otherwise. Their public would just be different.
You're right that means 'clean players' would feel compelled to move to the 'doper league' - that's actually what I think would make it work. Why risk angering your fans and losing sponsorships by cheating on the 'clean league', when you can have it easier, and make a lot more money, with a pharma sponsorship elsewhere? If they're the type of athlete where this argument is tempting - then it's probably a good idea for them to move on.
I guess the difference is that you seem to have faith the public cares about "the very essence of athletics", but think the players would be compelled to betray their principles.
I think the opposite is much more realistic: most of the public could care less about the essence of athletics. They want a good show, competition, and a vent to tribal pride. Athletes, on the other hand, have already dedicated their lives to the sport. If they have a choice as to the rules they commit to, and a sense of a level playing field, I'd expect they would honor them (or move openly to a different set of rules if they want to).
We do agree 100% that none of this is good for the athletes. They're the big losers either way. But the argument made is that this would at least be safer than having people medicate themselves without medical supervision, which they're already doing.
That could be a good argument for removing the bans too.
If it becomes a matter of choice, "clean" athletes and teams get a market differentiator they can use to get better sponsorships and fans - while doped athletes would not risk the health hazards of an illegal practice.
If that were to happen, I'd actually expect "clean" leagues to pop up, perhaps splitting the spectators more interested in sports than hyper-competitiveness.
Of course, I'd also expect drug manufacturers to massively sponsor the doping and use it as a testing ground for new tech, much as equipment manufacturers do right now. This wouldn't benefit the athletes themselves - but it would provide a strong motivation for open-ness vs secrecy - and others would benefit from the research.
There would be a lot of complications, but I can see why many think it would be better than the status quo.
Of course, it also allows MS to have a sneaky look at the competition.....
Sure. Because if there is anything open source projects are about, it is secrecy and control of information...
It's not like open source software is... I don't know, *open*, during its development.
Re:Business types who refuse to listen to techies.
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The Pragmatic CSO
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Yes you do!
*Unless* you work on a software / IT company, only then does this argument even apply.
Most IT shops exist in corporations that have a different core business.
Fundamentally, what the CEO needs to understand is the core business of the company - if that happens to be technology, then great, but if they're making widgets then his expertise and time spent better be on the industry and market of widgets - not on IT.
I'd be most interested in some examples of this 'disconnect' you talk about - how it is not tolerated in other industries.
Re:Business types who refuse to listen to techies.
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The Pragmatic CSO
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· Score: 1
That's a bad analogy for two reasons:
- Most companies are not IT/Software companies - they have IT departments and CIO/CSOs as part of their corporate infrastructure.
For most cases, that's like demanding from the hospital administrator an understanding of the details of the cafeteria food production.
- That aside, health administrators may be a particularly bad example because they can be from a business background (so apparently we do tolerate it) - and because medicine leads to high degrees of specialization.
Demanding from your hospital head to understand the technical details when most fields require 10+ years of specialization is not only challenging - it may be a supremely bad idea. As in the 'provides opportunity for second-guessing and bad judgements based on overestimating an incomplete education' kind of bad idea.
Re:Business types who refuse to listen to techies.
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· Score: 1
Their business also depends to a varying degree on accounting, human resources, legal departments, and janitorial services.
For most businesses, all of the above have a longer history as indispensable resources - and for most businesses, any of the above is far more indispensable.
Yet you wouldn't expect a CEO has to understand the technical details of the legal cases, recruitment processes, or cleaning supplies - *unless* that happens to be the core business of the company.
Taking care of the technical details is *our job* as techies. Our discipline is not unique on that regard - although sometimes it seems like the sense of self-importance is.
An unplanned loss of worldwide electricity a couple million? Seriously?
I'd think a couple of million would be a good estimate for a single country - say, England-size - if they react promptly and they're lucky.
Billions may be a stretch, but that's still closer to the order of magnitude from a year-long loss of electrical power.
Most nations are just not self-sufficient in terms of food production.
Heck, most large cities would starve rather quickly without imported foodstuff - food production is far from local, and the panic would compound the crisis even more, since practically all our emergency measures are dependant on electrical power (transporting aid, supplies, etc. assumes the source of aid has at least normal infrastructure) - and that communication lines are available to request and send help in the first place.
Of course humanity would soldier on and survive - but you could say the same of a nuclear war.
Better ad targeting leads to higher prices per ad.
This is already true today and has been true for a long time (always?) - content providers can sell ads for a higher value if they target a specific demographic which is more likely to spend.
Spending twice the ad budget on three times the ad-views to get your 1% of *potentially* maybe perhaps buy something some day is not efficient.
Advertisers would be very happier to spend the same money on more willing consumers wherever possible.
As an exclusive P2P solution, that would be the case.
But what would really be interesting is seeing this complemented with other distribution schemes - even if it were just a matter of allocating guaranteed peers dynamically.
I could see this lowering the barrier of entry for scalable on demand video (as in iptv, not video blogs) - which can make things really interesting.
It would allow a startup content provider to stream, and scale, to a very large audience without breaking the bank... and - given decent competition - ensuring adequate service for unpopular content in your catalogue would be good for business, if not plain necessary.
Are we seriously talking about the inefficiency of DHTML rendering as a rationale for long-term demand for multicore CPUs?
At some point, rich web-app CSS rendering will become more efficient or die in favor of better web-app technologies - there are already a few out there.
I find it hard to believe that if that is a big enough problem it couldn't be 'fixed' faster (and cheaper) than the fundamental hardware and software changes required by the thousand-core model.
Code analysis, compilation, etc. are good cases for usage of those cores on CPU-bound tasks... but they're all professional workstation tasks.
I have no doubt I could put more cores to use on my professional workstation - if only by making it painless to run independent compilations and automated tests in the background while I work on something else on the IDE.
But when I go home and most of my tasks consist on interwebs browsing, email, or watching dvds, I can't find a use for all those cores that easily. Gaming and encoding/decoding are the only good candidates - i.e.: tasks well targeted by specialized video hardware.
It's been a while since workstations and PC hardware markets merged - depending on the costs of the new hardware, this might encourage that divide again.
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I think the anonymous coward may have been trolling with the unconditional statement, but there is a valid (if expensive) point there and I would suggest a different (additional?) compromise: if you really want that 'complete understanding' for a brand new problem, write your own prototypes from scratch. Then choose and reuse a mature, complete solution (or write your own only as a last resort).
Wrapping an existing solution in your own APIs rarely teaches you much about the underlying problem - it helps in a lot of other ways, including experimenting / investigating solutions to reuse. But I think it misses the 'complete understanding' point.
Writing a solution from scratch (even a bad / hacky solution) does give you a much better understanding which is extremely valuable for you - that's why we do that for the classic problems all the time in college, after all. Of course, no one should be writing their own C++ string class these days, but if you wrote your own string class *once*, it helps you to understand the implications when you use the STL or something else.
But unless you are an academic, that's normally not what you are being paid for: you have a project to complete, and a specific problem to solve in the best possible way. Reusing a mature, tested solution is almost always simply in the best interest of the project - even if you do not learn as much as you would by writing your own.
On the other hand, if the problem is different and tractable enough, hacking your own prototype from scratch can give you better understanding that is applicable to any 'real solution' you adopt - and if kept simple enough, can be used for unit-tests, benchmarks or other purposes.
It's a matter of time and resources, but often enough prototyping your own wheel is well worth the investment - just use it as a tool to choose and apply the best solution for problems that are not well understood. Not as an excuse to risk the quality or cost of your project for the sake of pet projects and personal pride (which is often enough where NIH leads to).
I don't think even Google has a *private game console for each engineer*. For good reasons, all companies I know of use rec areas, and communal games, for these things.
Seriously, I'd have to agree it sounds like a bad idea. As fun as it sounds, I couldn't help but see it as a waste of the company's money. Even if everyone has good self-discipline and no one spends half their time playing instead of working - there is no good reason to think this will increase productivity commesurate to the cost and risks:
- 1+ Consoles on a COMMUNAL area (usually Good Idea): it acts as a nerd watercooler / smoking room. People take breaks, relax, chat and play games together. Increases morale and helps team building with a (relatively) cheap, *flat* cost.
Also tends to self-regulate by social pressure: the guy who plays games all day instead of working will be noticeable to his peers (who would be picking up the slack if he goes on).
- 1 Console FOR EACH Team member (Bad Idea): people take breaks and play games by themselves - or with their usual online group. Increases morale, but at a relatively high cost *per head* - that adds up over time. You'd also need monitoring, hardware setup per office, etc. so this is part of your 'new team member' logistical overhead.
Perhaps more important, you don't get any of the expected side benefits: no team-building, because team members don't need to interact with each other if they have their own console online. And the one guy who does play games all day instead of working is not obvious to his peers - until it is too late to prevent the damage (or worst case, repair it).
So best case, this may be a way to buy individual worked morale - at a higher cost and the risk of reducing your team's interactions outside work meetings. It begs the question of whether this is the most efficient way to buy that morale.
Worst case - just a couple incidents of privilege abuse by one employee could erase whatever morale and productivity gains this approach had - and if you need to take the consoles away due to cost-reductions / abuse, the morale will be even worse than before.
E.g.: Having your boss "take away your console" because "Billy didn't finish his hom...ehem... *work*" sounds profoundly demotivating - it reduces the employee to the status of a grounded teenager, on the company's eyes, and their own.
The problem is that people are not really sure the "owner" and the "website voluntarily giving it away" are the same thing. Nor should they be - illegal download sites can misrepresent themselves.
Seriously, would we be mocking them if they refused to click a link to "Get a Free US$10K credit line from Joe's Bank - just enter personal information here!" at joezsite.org? Or if they were reluctant about helping a certain nephew of a general in Nigeria who's having tough times but would be happy to pay back thousand-fold of 'a small, perfectly legal gift'?
People depend mostly on trust of the other parties to make sure everything is kosher - and on context and past experience to develop that trust.
Most people are neither legal nor technological experts. As techies we often tend to assume people have all of the same context they would have to make an informed decision - and that if they don't, they should blindly trust the techie's advice because it is so obvious and 'they can't be that dumb'. That attitude is neither fair nor productive.
The only reason we really trust that download link in OpenOffice.org, is because we have the context. We know what OpenOffice itself is and where it came from - or failing that, we know how to find out. We know how open source works and can judge similar projects based on that experience - we can double-check something suspect against trusted sources, compare characteristics, and at worst we can see and compile the source ourselves.
So it's not really about 'downloading' itself - it is about 'downloading from a random website I never heard about - which claims to give for free something that I see sold in the stores for a lot of money... and it's legal because of some random law or acronym I never heard about says so?'. For normal people, "you can see the source!" and "it's GPL!" is utterly meaningless - and that argument quickly degenerates into GTAIV-parody material. Normal people have no reason to trust the usual 'corporate sponsors' any more than the random .com link in the first place as a way to measure credibility (who is Sun? who is this MySQL?). They need to learn who these new third-parties are and what they want before they trust it - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm sure you have other reasons to dislike it - but that sounds like a design mistake that has little to do with the 'registry-like' interface.
I've seen the same 'feature' (commit on-change) on a lot of other naive user interfaces for remote database storage - web forms, spreadsheets, desktop clients... Typically the product of good intentions, and very optimistic assumptions about the usage.
There's nothing magical about a 'registry-like' tree that makes explicit batch updates impossible - or on other interfaces that make them auto-magically implemented.
Unless your 'user interface' is to force the user to type a SQL update statement - then you can't go wrong on that (the user, on the other hand...).
Hmm...
I thought the idea of "Secure languages" was being able to PROVE there were no security bugs on your software because it was correct (if you're willing to pay the price in development time, of course).
At least at first glance, SPARK's claim to 'high security' is on that same line: http://www.praxis-his.com/sparkada/intro.asp
From that point of view, one of the big appeals of Java and other VM languages was precisely that software could potentially be 'provably secure' up to some level (typically with subsets / extensions of the language providing more or less comfortable definitions of 'secure'). Strong static typing and no pointer arithmetic means a duck will not turn into a dog on you - so you can trust strong pre/post conditions to a greater extent.
Provability of correctness is an objective statement. That doesn't make software magically secure - but it means it is *possible*, with enough work, to *prove* that *the part of the software you wrote* implements the security of your design *correctly*. You're still vulnerable to design gaps, and security bugs in any reused libraries / runtime - but that narrow proof of security still eliminates whole categories of end-of-the-world-scenarios from your list.
Making security bugs 'easier to avoid' - like other 'bug preventing language features' - is a much more subjective claim (how do you define a 'security bug' for such a claim anyway?), and is what can backfire into non-sensical assumptions. They're typically a net gain int he hands of an informed developer, but naive programmers can be misled that because a very specific type of security bug X 'cannot happen' in the language, 'security' is taken care of.
Any station that did what you suggest would be:
1) Profit-wise, remarkably stupid.
The whole point of broadcasting a murder-sex-mayhem is because it entices more viewers to watch it in the first place. Its main benefit is on the hook / advertising. What's the point of mislabeling it as "wholesame family entertainment?
If the latter attracted more viewers, that's what you would have produced in the first place - so you're getting less viewers for your money, and then you're angering the viewers you do get because a *big* common reason they're watching "wholesome" content anyway is to avoid the murderfest.
Accurate tagging is simply in the best selfish interests of media producers - it means more viewers, more reuse of old TV content (look at all this 'wholesome' content from the 50s!), and less angry people picketing outside their offices.
Perhaps more importantly than any of that, it means more targeted advertising.
2) Boycotted, if not sued, in ~3 secs by large masses of annoyed people (mostly parents, but others as well) of all political / cultural stands.
It's one thing to show material that some X people might consider offensive - you're at worst going to offend X. It's another thing to pull the national broadcast equivalent of a goatse.cx link. You'll offend everyone who fears being offended (which is a lot more than X).
Using this for home theater projection would be utterly idiotic. There is no shortage and cheap projectors that already do a better job for a permanent or semi-permanent instalation.
Although the price is surprisingly cheap, I doubt the video quality will be any surprise for that price. That's just not what these kinds of products are about.
This is about presentation hardware for mobile professionals - salesmen, marketing, that kind of thing. Being able to make a last-minute presentation/sales-pitch when you don't have the luxury of real A/V equipment at the location... without having to lug a 10-pound lamp around.
I think you may be misreading the parent post.
Buying the game for the story doesn't mean you're buying because of the tie-in.
I'd also buy adventure / rpg games for the story - but what I'm looking for is primarily a GOOD story. Which is sorely lacking in franchise games (or games in general).
Most of the LucasArts games you describe were top-notch because they had great stories - not really great or innovative "gameplay" (except for X-Wing / Tie Fighter - that was gameplay).
Storytelling was the strength of LucasArts, for obvious reasons. There's no "problem" with that, since stories ARE a vital part of entertainment for some of us.
E.g.: Deus Ex is still one of my favorite games - it was an 'ok' FPS, but it has a great story and narrative quality. KOTOR had similar virtues / flaws mix in its genre, and more recently and to a lesser degree, so did Mass Effect.
The "problem" you describe is with crappy games with no redeeming quality - no gameplay, no story, no primary entertainment factor.
But even these days I'd have more faith in LucasArts' storytelling prowess than their game design skills. That just means I'm more likely to buy their game, since I care mostly about the story, than an FPS / action game fan, who's more concerned about the gameplay.
Is there a way to mod half a post Redundant to itself?
Nonsense.
For both of those titles, Halo kiddies would "get it", they'd just wouldn't like them - just like any other adventure / RPG games.
"Sure, that's nice... but those types of games are slow and boring..."
Those games were innovative in many ways (content, mostly) - but their gameplay mechanics were pretty conventional.
"Sins of a Solar Empire" is probably a better example - the change is subtle enough that it can take you completely by surprise if you keep expecting an RTS, or an empire-building game like Galciv... and it's only really fun when you "get" it is neither and stop trying to play like it was Homeworld.
Personally, I think the freedom to telecommute as needed is indeed a major productivity boom - the person telecommuting (and only that person) can and should balance whichever way is more productive for the task at hand.
But I'm skeptical of absolute claims of greater efficiency - or of attempts to prescribe X days per week, or to use it as a way to save office space, for that matter.
Efficiency depends a lot on too many factors that are context-dependent: the exact work that you're doing, the work environment, technical reasons, etc.
Sometimes you're lucky and you have a good chunk of uninterrupted, isolated work to finish - and indeed you can be much more productive. But other times, there is a bunch of communication that needs to happen to enable the real work, and human presence just makes a thousand things easier (and faster). Remote communication also can limit your awareness of other people's work, which will affect you one way or the other. And sometimes you just need to access resources which are a hassle to get to through a VPN.
So far I prefer to telecommute about 1.5 days a week on average for the same reasons: I could get a lot of stuff done uninterrupted, and it balances out well enough.
I do understand the parent post's issue, though - I get as easily distracted as anyone at home. But just separating a 'working environment' tends to do wonders for that.
Humans are creatures of habit, so we tend to associate environments with their most common activities and mind-frames.
I've found just getting out of the house and working from a cafe or anywhere with net access does wonders for focus, because my home is most linked by habit to free time. For some people it is just the opposite.
I think this just proved the parent's argument, but I'm not sure that was intentional.
This is both correct and irrelevant.
Yes, some conservative pundits, as well as some left-wing radicals, are so over-the-top that they essentially The Daily Show the success it is, by providing its best material for free.
But some people fail to distinguish between those extremists and conservatives in general, which further polarizes everyone. It just makes people feel better if they believe everyone that disagrees with them is an idiot.
To Stewart's and Colbert's credit, it is not their role to take themselves seriously, and they have been very vocal about what a monumentally bad idea it is to take their shows too seriously.
I seriously doubt that, given the choice, "clean leagues" would become the most popular by any means.
The whole reason doping is a problem is that sports have become a show business, its about winning and spectacle.
Given the choice, I'd expect no-restraints leagues to be far more popular because they'll have the most spectacular performances - and because that's where the money would be (both for athlete profit, and advertising).
"Clean leagues" would be the equivalent of "ethical mutual funds" - they'd attract / split a surprisingly large chunk of the public, and they would positively influence everybody else. But their performances would be less obviously extraordinary, and they wouldn't have the deep pharma sponsorship pockets to convince everyone otherwise. Their public would just be different.
You're right that means 'clean players' would feel compelled to move to the 'doper league' - that's actually what I think would make it work.
Why risk angering your fans and losing sponsorships by cheating on the 'clean league', when you can have it easier, and make a lot more money, with a pharma sponsorship elsewhere? If they're the type of athlete where this argument is tempting - then it's probably a good idea for them to move on.
I guess the difference is that you seem to have faith the public cares about "the very essence of athletics", but think the players would be compelled to betray their principles.
I think the opposite is much more realistic: most of the public could care less about the essence of athletics. They want a good show, competition, and a vent to tribal pride. Athletes, on the other hand, have already dedicated their lives to the sport. If they have a choice as to the rules they commit to, and a sense of a level playing field, I'd expect they would honor them (or move openly to a different set of rules if they want to).
We do agree 100% that none of this is good for the athletes. They're the big losers either way.
But the argument made is that this would at least be safer than having people medicate themselves without medical supervision, which they're already doing.
That could be a good argument for removing the bans too.
If it becomes a matter of choice, "clean" athletes and teams get a market differentiator they can use to get better sponsorships and fans - while doped athletes would not risk the health hazards of an illegal practice.
If that were to happen, I'd actually expect "clean" leagues to pop up, perhaps splitting the spectators more interested in sports than hyper-competitiveness.
Of course, I'd also expect drug manufacturers to massively sponsor the doping and use it as a testing ground for new tech, much as equipment manufacturers do right now. This wouldn't benefit the athletes themselves - but it would provide a strong motivation for open-ness vs secrecy - and others would benefit from the research.
There would be a lot of complications, but I can see why many think it would be better than the status quo.
Sure. Because if there is anything open source projects are about, it is secrecy and control of information...
It's not like open source software is... I don't know, *open*, during its development.
Yes you do!
*Unless* you work on a software / IT company, only then does this argument even apply.
Most IT shops exist in corporations that have a different core business.
Fundamentally, what the CEO needs to understand is the core business of the company - if that happens to be technology, then great, but if they're making widgets then his expertise and time spent better be on the industry and market of widgets - not on IT.
I'd be most interested in some examples of this 'disconnect' you talk about - how it is not tolerated in other industries.
That's a bad analogy for two reasons:
- Most companies are not IT/Software companies - they have IT departments and CIO/CSOs as part of their corporate infrastructure.
For most cases, that's like demanding from the hospital administrator an understanding of the details of the cafeteria food production.
- That aside, health administrators may be a particularly bad example because they can be from a business background (so apparently we do tolerate it) - and because medicine leads to high degrees of specialization.
Demanding from your hospital head to understand the technical details when most fields require 10+ years of specialization is not only challenging - it may be a supremely bad idea. As in the 'provides opportunity for second-guessing and bad judgements based on overestimating an incomplete education' kind of bad idea.
Their business also depends to a varying degree on accounting, human resources, legal departments, and janitorial services.
For most businesses, all of the above have a longer history as indispensable resources - and for most businesses, any of the above is far more indispensable.
Yet you wouldn't expect a CEO has to understand the technical details of the legal cases, recruitment processes, or cleaning supplies - *unless* that happens to be the core business of the company.
Taking care of the technical details is *our job* as techies. Our discipline is not unique on that regard - although sometimes it seems like the sense of self-importance is.
An unplanned loss of worldwide electricity a couple million? Seriously?
I'd think a couple of million would be a good estimate for a single country - say, England-size - if they react promptly and they're lucky.
Billions may be a stretch, but that's still closer to the order of magnitude from a year-long loss of electrical power.
Most nations are just not self-sufficient in terms of food production.
Heck, most large cities would starve rather quickly without imported foodstuff - food production is far from local, and the panic would compound the crisis even more, since practically all our emergency measures are dependant on electrical power (transporting aid, supplies, etc. assumes the source of aid has at least normal infrastructure) - and that communication lines are available to request and send help in the first place.
Of course humanity would soldier on and survive - but you could say the same of a nuclear war.
Better ad targeting leads to higher prices per ad.
This is already true today and has been true for a long time (always?) - content providers can sell ads for a higher value if they target a specific demographic which is more likely to spend.
Spending twice the ad budget on three times the ad-views to get your 1% of *potentially* maybe perhaps buy something some day is not efficient.
Advertisers would be very happier to spend the same money on more willing consumers wherever possible.
As an exclusive P2P solution, that would be the case.
But what would really be interesting is seeing this complemented with other distribution schemes - even if it were just a matter of allocating guaranteed peers dynamically.
I could see this lowering the barrier of entry for scalable on demand video (as in iptv, not video blogs) - which can make things really interesting.
It would allow a startup content provider to stream, and scale, to a very large audience without breaking the bank... and - given decent competition - ensuring adequate service for unpopular content in your catalogue would be good for business, if not plain necessary.
Are we seriously talking about the inefficiency of DHTML rendering as a rationale for long-term demand for multicore CPUs?
At some point, rich web-app CSS rendering will become more efficient or die in favor of better web-app technologies - there are already a few out there.
I find it hard to believe that if that is a big enough problem it couldn't be 'fixed' faster (and cheaper) than the fundamental hardware and software changes required by the thousand-core model.
Code analysis, compilation, etc. are good cases for usage of those cores on CPU-bound tasks... but they're all professional workstation tasks.
I have no doubt I could put more cores to use on my professional workstation - if only by making it painless to run independent compilations and automated tests in the background while I work on something else on the IDE.
But when I go home and most of my tasks consist on interwebs browsing, email, or watching dvds, I can't find a use for all those cores that easily. Gaming and encoding/decoding are the only good candidates - i.e.: tasks well targeted by specialized video hardware.
It's been a while since workstations and PC hardware markets merged - depending on the costs of the new hardware, this might encourage that divide again.
I had to google to find out why this was moderated as funny...
There is a real Human Fund... so the suggestion seemed quite sensible at face value.
Can you post an example?