in the sense that most kids can't hold an iPad for extended durations of time.
Maybe that's not such a negative.
I wouldn't advise permitting extended duration play of a repetitive basic 'mindless' game like cut-the-rope or angry birds, more than perhaps 30 minutes a day, in the first place. As a young person doing nothing useful for extended periods of time is not ideal, and the continuous watching of a screen and repetitive motions can be harmful.
The exception would be mentally engaging games which are not physically engaging, social games, difficult games that require developing advanced strategy, quick thinking, and problem solving abilities, to resolve challenging situations, rather than a game with a physical challenge of "getting aright input pattern on the screen for X to happen", and reacting to realtime events.
e.g. Advanced Puzzle games, primarily educational games, RPGs, advanced strategy (e.g. Go, Chess, Civilization); those games that actually require a lot of thought to play successfully should be allowed for extended period of time, and generally won't require holding the i-device; it can be placed on a table.
Recreational web surfing, platformers, shooters, hack-n-slash, angry birds...
access duration of all those "simple" relatively non-strategic games should be limited
to short durations in the first place.
Teach your kids that old games are often better than modern ones: get a Sega Dreamcast and pirate to your heart's content,
But get a Wii, and you can have the best of both worlds....
thanks to the ability to buy digital downloads of "old games" through Nintendo's online store, and play them on the platform
through the Virtual console; NES / SNES / N64 / Gamecube emulation.
Without giving up the ability to also experience some more recent titles.
The experience can be as entertaining as the PS3; fresh different content is available, and the platform total cost is lower.
Your kids probably want an iPad, a WII-U or an iPod Touch if surveys are anything to go by
Only because of advertising. Engage your kids, get them finding out more details rather than just the rosy picture in the
latest expensive ads, and they may reach a different conclusion that they will be happier with (Or not....
The Wii-U and iPad 4th gen are pretty highly compelling game platforms; I don't believe the same could be said about the iPod Touch).
Use it as an opportunity to teach valuable shopping, reasoning, and persusasion skills.
Research each console, titles for each console, and options; find pluses and minuses.
Ask the 3 kids to make "Features/Advantages" and "Disadvantages" lists for each console,
each one to pick the console they find most compelling, and tell the story.
If there's a disagreement have a discussion, and requirement for the kids to persuade each other/
come to unanimous agreement on which console they want.
Then take your kids' opinions under advisement, in making your final decision....
The author didn't post requesting opinions on parenting; and whether getting a console was a good idea or not,
he already determined that's what he wants to do. He just asked what the best choice of console was.
But of course - in a body shop you don't want experience, as your product is billable time, not results.
Naw.... certain jobs have a certain number of hours that are billed, if the technician finishes it 50% faster,
the full standard price for the job will still be billed; if you have more experience and can do the jobs faster, that means
you do more jobs for the same number of hours of wages, which equals more profit for the company....
Find something else to sell. Possibly the use of on-site 'screening rooms' with equipment, that customers can use
to watch a movie they just rented with friends, or make the DVD a free gift, when spending $30 to rent a room --
make the money on selling drinks and popcorn.
Switch to selling books, posters, art.
Find a legal way to provide a "digital" version for the rental period.
It all boils down to: begin developing and executing a backup plan immediately,
get into other business besides DVD rental, plan carefully but move post haste into other
businesses that are similar that you can execute, that are more long for this world than DVD rentals.
bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby
I will... if the system already needs a rewrite, and the existing version has been written in PHP spaghetti code,
with files containing document presentation mixed with all the business logic through and through, use of shell_exec
and other shell commands with form-supplied params to accomplish work, and random SQL statements embedded in each.PHP file, including user data in the query, without use of
prepared statements, bindparams, all over the place, etc....
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it.
What gives you that idea?
You assume IT has the same role in every organization? Bad assumption.
it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
When the office administrator is given a fixed budget for the purchase of post-it paper, the admin might impose a limit on the number of post-its each department has access to.
Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee?
If management tells the cafeteria people to reduce their food costs, by reducing their budget, the cafeteria/food department may do just that.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.
That has to be TB, even then, shoot, I'll store a couple TB for someone for 3 grand each.
Will you still be willing to do that, when they inform, they need you to manage backup of the data, and meet a performance
SLA at all times (even in case of hardware failure); and that a defined transfer rate has to be achieved, no matter
how many requests per second to read and write to/from that dataset, E.g. all I/O requests have to succeed, and the delay
must be kept under 50ms, and the storage must be performant even at 20,000 requested IOPS at 64KB requests of any
arbitrary access pattern with queue depth of 128?
Dude, it was only a few weeks ago that we saw very prominent hosting firms along the US east coast, including some major ones in NYC, get absolutely fucked up... It turns out that they're just as vulnerable as hosting stuff yourself.
You've made quite a logical leap there. Yes there are still large-scale disaster conditions under which a commercial hosting provider may still experience downtime.
That doesn't mean, that such a situation is just likely to happen as hosting yourself. Such high-intensity disasters are extremely rare in most areas.
And you can also choose what datacenter you locate your hosting at -- east coast is not necessarily optimal; further inland, outside of Earthquake, Tornado, Volcano territory may be a safer bet.
Backup generators might have a chance of failing if the fuel is made available by a disaster; or flooding occurs, and the facility was not equipped appropriately.
At a well-run commercial datacenter, these incidents are few and far between, or never occur.
You might also note that in case of a massive earthquake, volcano, tsnuami, or other massive disaster, commercial datacenters may be impacted as well.
Residential power outages, blackouts, brownouts are much more common; most residences get them a few times a year, in some cases there may be temporary multi-hour outages scheduled by the electric company to perform line maintenance. Damage or outage to unprotected circuits (single fiber path) is more common.
Having backup power system is expected to save 7 to 8 hours of average downtime per year; with a potential of saving much more downtime, in case of common weather events, solar flares, or blackouts caused by other reasons.
Having backup network links is expected to save a few hours a year in minor failure network downtime, and potentially 18 to 24 hours of network downtime every few years, based on the expectation of catastrophic underground damage to a pull of fiber.
If the amount of revenue and customer loss estimated by approximately that number of downtime hours per year exceeds the cost of
commercial hosting, then there is no case for avoiding professional hosting.
Roughly 10mbps to myself, as opposed to my 756kbps home speeds and no guarantee my IP won't change. Throw me a fiber uplink and i'll internalize all my web services.
I suppose that works for a personal website.
For anything meant to earn money -- think about the issue of security: protection against power loss, multiple redundant uplinks, Enterprise level hardware such as RAID, with trained techs on location, spare servers and other parts on hand, to help address hardware problems or other issues and minimize downtime;
business so not directly tied to the fate of your residential location, at the mercy of some thoughtless neighbor with a shovel accidentally hitting your fiber uplink.....
Ask the game companies who used to do MMORPGs with validation and anti-cheating in the client how well that works.
The difference between MMORPG cheating and content provider fraud; is the recourse against MMORPG cheaters is banning them from the game, which they can evade later by purchasing a new copy of the game.
And the recourse against content provider cheaters is they lose their ad partnership,
and possibly go to jail for fraud.
What the udev guys are suggesting is that in the "module init" stage (where modules are loaded into the kernel) the module should not block waiting for firmware (because there may not be a filesystem yet). Rather the firmware should be loaded at "device open" time.
This is actually a reasonable request.
It's not unreasonable at all... the module_init contract, SHOULD have said not to block.
Either the contract is miswritten, or the drivers were disobeying it. Either way, it should be fixed.
And users should stick with the prior version of UDEV for production use, until the drivers are fixed to be compatible with the new version.
That gets complicated. If you're not serving the ads from your server you have to trust the people who run the website. All the fancy click counting will go away, which the advertisers will hate.
The Ad networks will supply backend code; e.g. a compiled java bean; an IonCube encoded.PHP file, etc.
To be included into the site to serve the ad and to process clicks.
The magic fancy click counting will be stuffed into code supplied by the advertiser, and consist of a local script that ultimately packages up the data and ships it back to the ad network.
This is why I place ads on the main page of my websites and you can only view content from the popups.
There is another strategy too... render your site and all its ads using a single keepalive connection over SSL; so this device cannot intercept and remove page elements.
Also, don't provide an obvious pattern that can be used to programmatically detect what page elements are ads.
Vary your page coding frequently, so man-made filters will break frequently
The one and only state who could cut itself off would be California... and that would only last until the electricity and water get shut off from the surrounding states.
Shutting off the water to California, would be tantamount to mass murder.
Free trade with developing countries is a horrendously bad idea for this reason. Tarriffs can be a mitigating factor - to a point, of course.
Free Trade could be a good idea, if a condition for a country to participate is, that they have to have
legally protected workers' unions, worker safety protection regulation, minimum wage laws, and an enforcement body whose
effectiveness is validated through unbiased 3rd party auditing
All they need to do is figure out how Autohop works, and then redesign their advertisements so that they defeat feature. Some are based on volume detection... all the network would need to do to defeat that is have the commercials at the same volume level as the programming
There is another option..... attempt to trick Autohop into thinking parts of the programming are commercials,
so that they wind up skipping highly noticeable chunks of actual programming.
People will be less inclined to use the feature, if it results in them missing important parts of the show.
And also, the Betamax ruling says we are allowed to record shows for later viewing.
That was before DRM, the DMCA, Macrovision technology, and the broadcast flag.
Content providers can prevent recording and manipulation of their content, by encrypting it,
and leveraging contractual relationships with cable and sat companies to require content by
delivered DRM protected to certain hardware that meets certain security requirements
such as HDCP and doesn't have specific capabilities
(such as analog content export, and commercial skip).
"If you pass seatbelt laws, the premiums can go down. If you pass Daytime-running lights the rates may go down. If you have airbags the rates will go *way* down."
Legislators were persuaded of the need; passed the laws, and then the laws did not have the intended effect of fewer deaths/injuries due to vehicle accidents.
Anti cell-phone laws won't either.
The idiot factor cannot be overcome by passing new laws.
The idiots have seatbelts now, so they survive to get into more accidents, and people tend to drive less cautiously, because the
seatbelt and bags gives them a feeling of comfort; like "No big deal if I crash; the safety features will protect me, and insurance
will take care of the cost".
Slashdot Mirror
in the sense that most kids can't hold an iPad for extended durations of time.
Maybe that's not such a negative. I wouldn't advise permitting extended duration play of a repetitive basic 'mindless' game like cut-the-rope or angry birds, more than perhaps 30 minutes a day, in the first place. As a young person doing nothing useful for extended periods of time is not ideal, and the continuous watching of a screen and repetitive motions can be harmful.
The exception would be mentally engaging games which are not physically engaging, social games, difficult games that require developing advanced strategy, quick thinking, and problem solving abilities, to resolve challenging situations, rather than a game with a physical challenge of "getting aright input pattern on the screen for X to happen", and reacting to realtime events.
e.g. Advanced Puzzle games, primarily educational games, RPGs, advanced strategy (e.g. Go, Chess, Civilization); those games that actually require a lot of thought to play successfully should be allowed for extended period of time, and generally won't require holding the i-device; it can be placed on a table.
Recreational web surfing, platformers, shooters, hack-n-slash, angry birds... access duration of all those "simple" relatively non-strategic games should be limited to short durations in the first place.
Teach your kids that old games are often better than modern ones: get a Sega Dreamcast and pirate to your heart's content,
But get a Wii, and you can have the best of both worlds.... thanks to the ability to buy digital downloads of "old games" through Nintendo's online store, and play them on the platform through the Virtual console; NES / SNES / N64 / Gamecube emulation.
Without giving up the ability to also experience some more recent titles.
The experience can be as entertaining as the PS3; fresh different content is available, and the platform total cost is lower.
Your kids probably want an iPad, a WII-U or an iPod Touch if surveys are anything to go by
Only because of advertising. Engage your kids, get them finding out more details rather than just the rosy picture in the latest expensive ads, and they may reach a different conclusion that they will be happier with (Or not.... The Wii-U and iPad 4th gen are pretty highly compelling game platforms; I don't believe the same could be said about the iPod Touch).
Use it as an opportunity to teach valuable shopping, reasoning, and persusasion skills.
Research each console, titles for each console, and options; find pluses and minuses.
Ask the 3 kids to make "Features/Advantages" and "Disadvantages" lists for each console, each one to pick the console they find most compelling, and tell the story.
If there's a disagreement have a discussion, and requirement for the kids to persuade each other/ come to unanimous agreement on which console they want.
Then take your kids' opinions under advisement, in making your final decision....
The author didn't post requesting opinions on parenting; and whether getting a console was a good idea or not, he already determined that's what he wants to do. He just asked what the best choice of console was.
But of course - in a body shop you don't want experience, as your product is billable time, not results.
Naw.... certain jobs have a certain number of hours that are billed, if the technician finishes it 50% faster, the full standard price for the job will still be billed; if you have more experience and can do the jobs faster, that means you do more jobs for the same number of hours of wages, which equals more profit for the company....
Find something else to sell. Possibly the use of on-site 'screening rooms' with equipment, that customers can use to watch a movie they just rented with friends, or make the DVD a free gift, when spending $30 to rent a room -- make the money on selling drinks and popcorn.
Switch to selling books, posters, art.
Find a legal way to provide a "digital" version for the rental period.
It all boils down to: begin developing and executing a backup plan immediately, get into other business besides DVD rental, plan carefully but move post haste into other businesses that are similar that you can execute, that are more long for this world than DVD rentals.
bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby
I will... if the system already needs a rewrite, and the existing version has been written in PHP spaghetti code, with files containing document presentation mixed with all the business logic through and through, use of shell_exec and other shell commands with form-supplied params to accomplish work, and random SQL statements embedded in each .PHP file, including user data in the query, without use of
prepared statements, bindparams, all over the place, etc....
The role of IT is to take care of the monster, not tame it.
What gives you that idea? You assume IT has the same role in every organization? Bad assumption.
it's like having the office administrator go around making sure people use both sides of the pages in notebooks and that people stop doodling on post-its while taking calls because it's waste.
When the office administrator is given a fixed budget for the purchase of post-it paper, the admin might impose a limit on the number of post-its each department has access to.
Or a company where cafeteria people decided that there is no need to stock both milk and cream for coffee?
If management tells the cafeteria people to reduce their food costs, by reducing their budget, the cafeteria/food department may do just that.
IT should be there to offer training and provide guidance but in the end it's a support function, not a business driver. IT is there to support the sales staff, not school them or patronize them.
Nonsense. IT is there to provide infrastructure for data processing, and efficient data processing is a crucial business driver that can provide competitive advantage.
That means the IT department allocating their IT budget in a manner that maximizes organizational efficiency is to be expected; new productivity-enabling improvements to systems protection against security threats, and provisioning of local storage, over purchase of overpriced disk space on remote web site.
That has to be TB, even then, shoot, I'll store a couple TB for someone for 3 grand each.
Will you still be willing to do that, when they inform, they need you to manage backup of the data, and meet a performance SLA at all times (even in case of hardware failure); and that a defined transfer rate has to be achieved, no matter how many requests per second to read and write to/from that dataset, E.g. all I/O requests have to succeed, and the delay must be kept under 50ms, and the storage must be performant even at 20,000 requested IOPS at 64KB requests of any arbitrary access pattern with queue depth of 128?
Dude, it was only a few weeks ago that we saw very prominent hosting firms along the US east coast, including some major ones in NYC, get absolutely fucked up ... It turns out that they're just as vulnerable as hosting stuff yourself.
You've made quite a logical leap there. Yes there are still large-scale disaster conditions under which a commercial hosting provider may still experience downtime.
That doesn't mean, that such a situation is just likely to happen as hosting yourself. Such high-intensity disasters are extremely rare in most areas. And you can also choose what datacenter you locate your hosting at -- east coast is not necessarily optimal; further inland, outside of Earthquake, Tornado, Volcano territory may be a safer bet.
Backup generators might have a chance of failing if the fuel is made available by a disaster; or flooding occurs, and the facility was not equipped appropriately. At a well-run commercial datacenter, these incidents are few and far between, or never occur.
You might also note that in case of a massive earthquake, volcano, tsnuami, or other massive disaster, commercial datacenters may be impacted as well.
Residential power outages, blackouts, brownouts are much more common; most residences get them a few times a year, in some cases there may be temporary multi-hour outages scheduled by the electric company to perform line maintenance. Damage or outage to unprotected circuits (single fiber path) is more common.
Having backup power system is expected to save 7 to 8 hours of average downtime per year; with a potential of saving much more downtime, in case of common weather events, solar flares, or blackouts caused by other reasons.
Having backup network links is expected to save a few hours a year in minor failure network downtime, and potentially 18 to 24 hours of network downtime every few years, based on the expectation of catastrophic underground damage to a pull of fiber.
If the amount of revenue and customer loss estimated by approximately that number of downtime hours per year exceeds the cost of commercial hosting, then there is no case for avoiding professional hosting.
Roughly 10mbps to myself, as opposed to my 756kbps home speeds and no guarantee my IP won't change. Throw me a fiber uplink and i'll internalize all my web services.
I suppose that works for a personal website. For anything meant to earn money -- think about the issue of security: protection against power loss, multiple redundant uplinks, Enterprise level hardware such as RAID, with trained techs on location, spare servers and other parts on hand, to help address hardware problems or other issues and minimize downtime; business so not directly tied to the fate of your residential location, at the mercy of some thoughtless neighbor with a shovel accidentally hitting your fiber uplink.....
Ask the game companies who used to do MMORPGs with validation and anti-cheating in the client how well that works.
The difference between MMORPG cheating and content provider fraud; is the recourse against MMORPG cheaters is banning them from the game, which they can evade later by purchasing a new copy of the game.
And the recourse against content provider cheaters is they lose their ad partnership, and possibly go to jail for fraud.
What the udev guys are suggesting is that in the "module init" stage (where modules are loaded into the kernel) the module should not block waiting for firmware (because there may not be a filesystem yet). Rather the firmware should be loaded at "device open" time.
This is actually a reasonable request.
It's not unreasonable at all... the module_init contract, SHOULD have said not to block. Either the contract is miswritten, or the drivers were disobeying it. Either way, it should be fixed.
And users should stick with the prior version of UDEV for production use, until the drivers are fixed to be compatible with the new version.
Are you saying elections are nothing but theatre?
Not really, but I see how that could be possible.
What, with a good number of Obama-friendly precincts recording over 150% of registered voters voting....
It depends on the distinction between "mere aggregation" and "as part of a whole".
It's not mere aggregation; the components of the ADT are complementary, and are integrated.
Wouldn't that prohibit forking? If so, they can't claim it's open source.
Indeed. The actual SDK has a EULA; it's not Open source, even though Android itself is.
That gets complicated. If you're not serving the ads from your server you have to trust the people who run the website. All the fancy click counting will go away, which the advertisers will hate.
The Ad networks will supply backend code; e.g. a compiled java bean; an IonCube encoded .PHP file, etc.
To be included into the site to serve the ad and to process clicks.
The magic fancy click counting will be stuffed into code supplied by the advertiser, and consist of a local script that ultimately packages up the data and ships it back to the ad network.
This is why I place ads on the main page of my websites and you can only view content from the popups.
There is another strategy too... render your site and all its ads using a single keepalive connection over SSL; so this device cannot intercept and remove page elements.
Also, don't provide an obvious pattern that can be used to programmatically detect what page elements are ads.
Vary your page coding frequently, so man-made filters will break frequently
The one and only state who could cut itself off would be California... and that would only last until the electricity and water get shut off from the surrounding states.
Shutting off the water to California, would be tantamount to mass murder.
Free trade with developing countries is a horrendously bad idea for this reason. Tarriffs can be a mitigating factor - to a point, of course.
Free Trade could be a good idea, if a condition for a country to participate is, that they have to have legally protected workers' unions, worker safety protection regulation, minimum wage laws, and an enforcement body whose effectiveness is validated through unbiased 3rd party auditing
All they need to do is figure out how Autohop works, and then redesign their advertisements so that they defeat feature. Some are based on volume detection... all the network would need to do to defeat that is have the commercials at the same volume level as the programming
There is another option..... attempt to trick Autohop into thinking parts of the programming are commercials, so that they wind up skipping highly noticeable chunks of actual programming.
People will be less inclined to use the feature, if it results in them missing important parts of the show.
And also, the Betamax ruling says we are allowed to record shows for later viewing.
That was before DRM, the DMCA, Macrovision technology, and the broadcast flag.
Content providers can prevent recording and manipulation of their content, by encrypting it, and leveraging contractual relationships with cable and sat companies to require content by delivered DRM protected to certain hardware that meets certain security requirements such as HDCP and doesn't have specific capabilities (such as analog content export, and commercial skip).
"If you pass seatbelt laws, the premiums can go down. If you pass Daytime-running lights the rates may go down. If you have airbags the rates will go *way* down."
Legislators were persuaded of the need; passed the laws, and then the laws did not have the intended effect of fewer deaths/injuries due to vehicle accidents.
Anti cell-phone laws won't either. The idiot factor cannot be overcome by passing new laws.
The idiots have seatbelts now, so they survive to get into more accidents, and people tend to drive less cautiously, because the seatbelt and bags gives them a feeling of comfort; like "No big deal if I crash; the safety features will protect me, and insurance will take care of the cost".
Instead of carrying keys around you would carry lockpicks? I think you would have the same issue.
Well, you might carry keys around, and picks as a backup, I suppose.
Picks on hand have a higher utility, because they can help you, no matter what you locked yourself out of -- whether your car, or your house.
Carrying around twice as many keys (an additional key to everything), could get quite bulky, if you have a sufficient number of locks.