From the end user perspective, this has the same net effect as opening up exactly one more top level domain: the blank TLD. It just happens to be a way more expensive TLD than any of the other ones, and has a higher chance of coercing companies into registering it. It does not add any new functionality that I can think of (NPR interviewed some asshat this morning talking about how Canon would hypothetically be able to open.canon domains and have cameras automatically upload pictures as they are taken, as if they couldn't already do that with subdomains and existing technology).
Really what aggravates me on a personal level is the support calls I am going to start getting. I work at a small ISP, and while I am largely higher tier support, I still sometimes end up being the first point of contact for customers calling in when tier 1 support gets overloaded. I just shudder at the thought of trying to explain to one of my 85 year old customers, who just finally figured out what a URL looks like that no, "msn" is actually a real address now. The normal TLDs are useful for triggering pattern recognition. In that sense this is actually making the internet harder for anybody who is not technologically savvy to learn.
Not to mention, I just can't wait to see what all of the tools on the internet that automatically convert URLs into hyperlinks do.
Any organization of any size needs to use technology to maintain any sort of competitive advantage. You can't win the game with filing cabinets and hand-written memos anymore. Given that, you need somebody from your technical department high enough up to collaborate as a peer with other people making organization level decisions, or else you end up with what every other IT employee on this page is complaining about: people making decisions about their IT infrastructure that have absolutely no understanding of the viability or cost of any of the decisions they are making. You are exactly the PHB that drives us up the walls. You get mad because we tell you no or don't do what you want and you think it is because we want to run our own little feifdom in our department. We get mad because you think that your MBA gives you the background necessary to decide what is good for the technical side of your company even though you don't know your ass from an RJ45 jack.
If your IT department is a bunch of yes men that always ask "How high?", you are probably burning through an insane amount of capital having them waste time on projects with rewards minimal compared to time/money investment, and you are also not getting any benefit from your IT pro-actively suggesting projects that would have a wonderful ROI.
If you are running your IT workers like plumbers, it would most likely be in your company's best interest to let you go.
Ah, the perpetual excuse for developers that want to start selling their game but don't have the gonads to accept criticism of it. Let's all pretend that taking in tens of millions of dollars selling a product largely on promises of future feature updates implies absolutely no obligation to your paying customers as long as you slap the word "beta" on it.
How about instead of new features, we get bug fixes so the game isn't shitty. Notch's QA process is literally letting people on IRC mess with it for a couple of hours and then he rolls it to live. His code base is also a pile of crap, so we get awesome (wiki adjusted) patch notes like this:
Bug Fixes:
Fixed new item duplication bug
New Bugs:
The item duplication bug was not actually fixed; items placed in a furnace can still be taken out of a furnace and duplicated infinitely by right-clicking (although it appears the newly duplicated item will not function). Also, bug with cloned items being picked up after death wasn't fixed too.
When using a furnace and placing items into it, as soon as it's activated all items minus 1 are ejected and must be placed back in the furnace in order to use it.
Lighting is not always updated when digging new holes/tunnels, placing torches or setting blocks on fire (in both nether & normal world).
Tall grass can grow on dirt with no grass on it.
Shift-clicking something into a full chest from inventory or from chest into full inventory crashes the client.
It is now impossible to row a boat in 1 block deep water.
Sometimes (tested while in a boat on water, and when floating in water) while viewing a map the game will switch to a "saving chunks screen" then end on a black screen.
When quitting game the "Saving Chunks" progress bar does not appear sometimes.
When loading a world and standing in a cave less than 4 blocks high, the player gets some initial damage (at least the damage sound appears).
"Out of memory" error. Often appears after the "blocks don't disappear" bug.
The following bugs only occur in new chunks generated in 1.6.2:
Some chunks don't get dark at night (and vice versa; some chunks stay dark during the day).
The textures don't load on some chunks (The blocks are present but with transparent textures).
Some blocks don't disappear after being broken; it appears as if the block is still there, but can be passed through.
Every time we get any sort of content update, we quit playing for a week as Notch puts out a few several new minor version updates to get the game to only have slightly more bugs than it had before the update, and then he gets bored and moves on to slowly working on another content update and mostly posting on his Twitter account about what video games he is playing all day and his experiences flying around the world on private jets and hanging out at the Playboy mansion.
Meanwhile, they announce two new versions of the game on two new platforms and those of us who put forth money to support an indie developer in return for future updates wonder how we got duped out of our money.
So you'll have to forgive me if I find it hard to contain my enthusiasm for the "Adventure update."
Does anything in the article indicate that they actually "hacked" anything? Doesn't it sound at least as feasible as anything that somebody from the inside leaked the source code and there was no network security breach as such at all? I've seen plenty of other things from this group to indicate that they are willing to make their successes out to be more impressive than they were, so it wouldn't really surprise me.
If all goes as planned, Fujisawa SST will start receiving residents in March of 2014 and finish filling up its houses by 2018.
At which point they'll have to redesign from scratch the next village they are templating because all of the technology they are installing now will be "less-efficient older tech."
Realistically, if the data gets sent upstream, then no one would ever buy this. If it is only used locally, then there will likely be quite a lot of buyers.
Realistically, they will use this the same way they do any other tracking: they will tell you about the benefits and just not bother mentioning that they are storing your data "anonymously" someplace when it retrieves information for you. Then people will buy it without even thinking about the privacy connotations.
Why would any data have to be sent upstream?
"Have to be" and "will be" are not the same thing.
It hurts the SNR. I am not even one that normally complains about posted stories, but I can't help but wonder if these articles are somehow a running inside joke about how many paragraphs can get posted about what is essentially/.'s mod and metamod system without anybody breaking character. If I post a 3 page long article about how we could solve some of the internet's problems if we just came up with some hypertext markup language standard and then asked for opinions on it, would you post that, too?
No! Gold has magical powers given to it by the great fairies! Nothing bad can ever happen to our currency if it is backed by the (unbacked by any reality based value) gold standard! Because... uhm... I can impress girls and uhhhh... have limited industrial use for the shiny metal! Surely people will want my heavy shiny bricks when civilization collapses because somehow they will magically help people acquire food!
What is this guy giving to the/. editors to keep getting these useless stories front page'd? Do we really have to be subjected to this guy's "novel" musings over what is essentially a copy of the/. mod system every few weeks?
They were largely able to make a choice previously, though. The choice has now gone away. Unless you assume collusion between manufacturers, the only rational reason is they gain a competitive edge by making glossy screens. This would entail either a decrease in manufacturing cost or an increase in sales. Are glossy screens cheaper?
The reason might be that consumers claim they want matte screens but they go and buy glossy screens. Manufacturers are probably substantially less interested in what these surveys say than what their sales numbers say.
Could also just be typo-age. The actual line actually had info about how it was a free upgrade from 4Gb, so maybe the alleged number of DIMMs carried over from that.
Er, where do you think your Mac parts come from? Apple frequently uses Seagate drives, even! Sometimes to disastrous result!
No, your random crappy anecdotal evidence does not prove that the same parts from the same manufacturers are any higher quality when you put them into an Apple chassis.
I'll come out in the guy's defense, a little. Frequently when you come in that high up the food chain, you have something to prove. Let's say that there was a previous CTO that let something huge to do with security happen on his watch and got canned. Now the new guy has a huge chip on his shoulder to demonstrate how he is rolling out a bunch of new policy to prevent that sort of thing. One of the first things that comes to mind is standardization. The network is easier to support if everything is uniform! So he gets the thumbs up from upper management and rolls out the Windows machines.
Then the iPad comes along and ruins his day. His whole thing when he came in was conformity for ease of management. Can he really flip completely on that now? He's not sure, but the CEO sure as hell doesn't give two shits about any policy, no matter how much he supported it when it was proposed to him, if it keeps him from using his shiny new toy. So Mr. CTO is between a rock and a hard place and decides that his out is to look like he is doing a bunch of work to retain security, since that's what he was brought here for, but then after that give the CEO and his board member friends the go ahead on their new toys. Only he doesn't make it that far and gets canned.
I'm not saying this is what happened, but it seems like a plausible scenario to me. One of the great truths of any corporate environment is that no matter how much of an idiot somebody looks like, and no matter how high up the food chain he is, there is about an even chance that the problem is actually someplace in management above him. This is doubly true in an IT department, where unless you have technical people running your board of directors, you always have some point at which non-technical people are telling a technical guy what to do.
Apple iMac 21.5-inch: 2.7GHz:
2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
1920 x 1080 resolution
4GB (two 2GB) memory
1TB hard drive1
AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 512MB
$1499
HP 200 Quad all-in-one:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-760 quad-core processor [2.8GHz, 1MB L2 + 8MB shared L3 cache]
21.5" screen
1920 x 1080 resolution
Win7 Professional
6GB DDR3-1333MHz SODIMM [2 DIMMs]
1TB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M
$988.99
That was just arbitrarily picking a model and manufacturer after looking for something of a comparable screen size for like 5 minutes. The specs aren't exact, but they are pretty close (The HP has more Ram and a faster processor but a slightly worse video card). It looks to me like the perception that Macs are expensive comes from the fact that Macs are expensive.
I'm sorry, could you please clarify? I'm not even sure which tinfoil hat conspiracy you are trying to advance with your incredibly obtuse accusation, other than that you want people to have an icky feeling about the bailout but you aren't clever enough to come up with even a real sounding reason.
Giving out a few freebies to shut up the leaders of a boycott group on Steam seems the direct opposite of a pro-consumer move. And yes, Valve was eventually forgiven by the community at large, but that was exactly my point: somehow they get away with anti-consumer behavior and get a free pass from their fan base. Survival was a throwaway mode that required creating next to 0 new assets for the game as it used pieces of maps already in existence. Sacrifice only came out after there were huge protests with regard to L4D2, so there is no guarantee it would have happened if nobody had said anything. Crash course is really the only post-release content that I would say truly counts, and I don't think it is unreasonable to say that even if you count all of the post-release support, it seems weak when Valve very specifically made a big deal out of post-release support as a selling point for the game. Additionally, splitting the player base so they could better monetize could hardly be construed as anything but negative for the player. I take the conversion of the L4D1 campaigns to L4D2 as an implicit admission that the game only ever should have been at most an expansion.
TF2 hats really do give you advantages over non-paying players. Yes, you can technically get all of the hats in-game, but as random drops selected from a huge pool with a low drop rate. But getting the specific bonus you want is like hoping to win a raffle. It's like saying that paying to win a random drawing doesn't give you an unfair advantage because everybody can eventually win if they play enough times. Again, it isn't actually a huge deal and a lot better than a lot of other game companies have done. If they hadn't come out and put down other game companies for having paid DLC, it wouldn't have been an issue at all, but given that Portal 2 launched with paid DLC, it seems like a real possibility that it will start being a regular part of Valve games, so we've all gotten to watch Valve flip from "we don't do paid DLC because we do post-release support for free to make people like us more" to "hey wait a minute, in-game shops let us monetize better than we thought they would, nevermind" in the case of just a couple years.
Slashdot Mirror
From the end user perspective, this has the same net effect as opening up exactly one more top level domain: the blank TLD. It just happens to be a way more expensive TLD than any of the other ones, and has a higher chance of coercing companies into registering it. It does not add any new functionality that I can think of (NPR interviewed some asshat this morning talking about how Canon would hypothetically be able to open .canon domains and have cameras automatically upload pictures as they are taken, as if they couldn't already do that with subdomains and existing technology).
Really what aggravates me on a personal level is the support calls I am going to start getting. I work at a small ISP, and while I am largely higher tier support, I still sometimes end up being the first point of contact for customers calling in when tier 1 support gets overloaded. I just shudder at the thought of trying to explain to one of my 85 year old customers, who just finally figured out what a URL looks like that no, "msn" is actually a real address now. The normal TLDs are useful for triggering pattern recognition. In that sense this is actually making the internet harder for anybody who is not technologically savvy to learn.
Not to mention, I just can't wait to see what all of the tools on the internet that automatically convert URLs into hyperlinks do.
No.
Any organization of any size needs to use technology to maintain any sort of competitive advantage. You can't win the game with filing cabinets and hand-written memos anymore. Given that, you need somebody from your technical department high enough up to collaborate as a peer with other people making organization level decisions, or else you end up with what every other IT employee on this page is complaining about: people making decisions about their IT infrastructure that have absolutely no understanding of the viability or cost of any of the decisions they are making. You are exactly the PHB that drives us up the walls. You get mad because we tell you no or don't do what you want and you think it is because we want to run our own little feifdom in our department. We get mad because you think that your MBA gives you the background necessary to decide what is good for the technical side of your company even though you don't know your ass from an RJ45 jack.
If your IT department is a bunch of yes men that always ask "How high?", you are probably burning through an insane amount of capital having them waste time on projects with rewards minimal compared to time/money investment, and you are also not getting any benefit from your IT pro-actively suggesting projects that would have a wonderful ROI.
If you are running your IT workers like plumbers, it would most likely be in your company's best interest to let you go.
See you tomorrow.
Why just a few minutes ago I did it to mine. By unplugging the ethernet cable.
Ah, the perpetual excuse for developers that want to start selling their game but don't have the gonads to accept criticism of it. Let's all pretend that taking in tens of millions of dollars selling a product largely on promises of future feature updates implies absolutely no obligation to your paying customers as long as you slap the word "beta" on it.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed new item duplication bug
New Bugs:
The item duplication bug was not actually fixed; items placed in a furnace can still be taken out of a furnace and duplicated infinitely by right-clicking (although it
appears the newly duplicated item will not function). Also, bug with cloned items being picked up after death wasn't fixed too.
When using a furnace and placing items into it, as soon as it's activated all items minus 1 are ejected and must be placed back in the furnace in order to use it.
Lighting is not always updated when digging new holes/tunnels, placing torches or setting blocks on fire (in both nether & normal world).
Tall grass can grow on dirt with no grass on it.
Shift-clicking something into a full chest from inventory or from chest into full inventory crashes the client.
It is now impossible to row a boat in 1 block deep water.
Sometimes (tested while in a boat on water, and when floating in water) while viewing a map the game will switch to a "saving chunks screen" then end on a black
screen.
When quitting game the "Saving Chunks" progress bar does not appear sometimes.
When loading a world and standing in a cave less than 4 blocks high, the player gets some initial damage (at least the damage sound appears).
"Out of memory" error. Often appears after the "blocks don't disappear" bug.
The following bugs only occur in new chunks generated in 1.6.2:
Some chunks don't get dark at night (and vice versa; some chunks stay dark during the day).
The textures don't load on some chunks (The blocks are present but with transparent textures).
Some blocks don't disappear after being broken; it appears as if the block is still there, but can be passed through.
Every time we get any sort of content update, we quit playing for a week as Notch puts out a few several new minor version updates to get the game to only have slightly more bugs than it had before the update, and then he gets bored and moves on to slowly working on another content update and mostly posting on his Twitter account about what video games he is playing all day and his experiences flying around the world on private jets and hanging out at the Playboy mansion.
Meanwhile, they announce two new versions of the game on two new platforms and those of us who put forth money to support an indie developer in return for future updates wonder how we got duped out of our money.
So you'll have to forgive me if I find it hard to contain my enthusiasm for the "Adventure update."
Does anything in the article indicate that they actually "hacked" anything? Doesn't it sound at least as feasible as anything that somebody from the inside leaked the source code and there was no network security breach as such at all? I've seen plenty of other things from this group to indicate that they are willing to make their successes out to be more impressive than they were, so it wouldn't really surprise me.
He also likes Instantly murdering people because they touched His toy that got jostled by oxen and looked like it might fall (1 Chronicles 13:9, 13:10). Let's keep playing, I've got plenty more.
Either usage is acceptable.
If all goes as planned, Fujisawa SST will start receiving residents in March of 2014 and finish filling up its houses by 2018.
At which point they'll have to redesign from scratch the next village they are templating because all of the technology they are installing now will be "less-efficient older tech."
Realistically, if the data gets sent upstream, then no one would ever buy this. If it is only used locally, then there will likely be quite a lot of buyers.
Realistically, they will use this the same way they do any other tracking: they will tell you about the benefits and just not bother mentioning that they are storing your data "anonymously" someplace when it retrieves information for you. Then people will buy it without even thinking about the privacy connotations.
Why would any data have to be sent upstream?
"Have to be" and "will be" are not the same thing.
It hurts the SNR. I am not even one that normally complains about posted stories, but I can't help but wonder if these articles are somehow a running inside joke about how many paragraphs can get posted about what is essentially /.'s mod and metamod system without anybody breaking character. If I post a 3 page long article about how we could solve some of the internet's problems if we just came up with some hypertext markup language standard and then asked for opinions on it, would you post that, too?
No! Gold has magical powers given to it by the great fairies! Nothing bad can ever happen to our currency if it is backed by the (unbacked by any reality based value) gold standard! Because... uhm... I can impress girls and uhhhh... have limited industrial use for the shiny metal! Surely people will want my heavy shiny bricks when civilization collapses because somehow they will magically help people acquire food!
What is this guy giving to the /. editors to keep getting these useless stories front page'd? Do we really have to be subjected to this guy's "novel" musings over what is essentially a copy of the /. mod system every few weeks?
They were largely able to make a choice previously, though. The choice has now gone away. Unless you assume collusion between manufacturers, the only rational reason is they gain a competitive edge by making glossy screens. This would entail either a decrease in manufacturing cost or an increase in sales. Are glossy screens cheaper?
The reason might be that consumers claim they want matte screens but they go and buy glossy screens. Manufacturers are probably substantially less interested in what these surveys say than what their sales numbers say.
Could also just be typo-age. The actual line actually had info about how it was a free upgrade from 4Gb, so maybe the alleged number of DIMMs carried over from that.
Er, where do you think your Mac parts come from? Apple frequently uses Seagate drives, even! Sometimes to disastrous result!
No, your random crappy anecdotal evidence does not prove that the same parts from the same manufacturers are any higher quality when you put them into an Apple chassis.
I'll come out in the guy's defense, a little. Frequently when you come in that high up the food chain, you have something to prove. Let's say that there was a previous CTO that let something huge to do with security happen on his watch and got canned. Now the new guy has a huge chip on his shoulder to demonstrate how he is rolling out a bunch of new policy to prevent that sort of thing. One of the first things that comes to mind is standardization. The network is easier to support if everything is uniform! So he gets the thumbs up from upper management and rolls out the Windows machines.
Then the iPad comes along and ruins his day. His whole thing when he came in was conformity for ease of management. Can he really flip completely on that now? He's not sure, but the CEO sure as hell doesn't give two shits about any policy, no matter how much he supported it when it was proposed to him, if it keeps him from using his shiny new toy. So Mr. CTO is between a rock and a hard place and decides that his out is to look like he is doing a bunch of work to retain security, since that's what he was brought here for, but then after that give the CEO and his board member friends the go ahead on their new toys. Only he doesn't make it that far and gets canned.
I'm not saying this is what happened, but it seems like a plausible scenario to me. One of the great truths of any corporate environment is that no matter how much of an idiot somebody looks like, and no matter how high up the food chain he is, there is about an even chance that the problem is actually someplace in management above him. This is doubly true in an IT department, where unless you have technical people running your board of directors, you always have some point at which non-technical people are telling a technical guy what to do.
Seriously, look around sometime and try it.
I'll bite.
Apple iMac 21.5-inch: 2.7GHz:
2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
1920 x 1080 resolution
4GB (two 2GB) memory
1TB hard drive1
AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 512MB
$1499
HP 200 Quad all-in-one:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-760 quad-core processor [2.8GHz, 1MB L2 + 8MB shared L3 cache]
21.5" screen
1920 x 1080 resolution
Win7 Professional
6GB DDR3-1333MHz SODIMM [2 DIMMs]
1TB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M
$988.99
That was just arbitrarily picking a model and manufacturer after looking for something of a comparable screen size for like 5 minutes. The specs aren't exact, but they are pretty close (The HP has more Ram and a faster processor but a slightly worse video card). It looks to me like the perception that Macs are expensive comes from the fact that Macs are expensive.
Car accidents?
I'm sorry, could you please clarify? I'm not even sure which tinfoil hat conspiracy you are trying to advance with your incredibly obtuse accusation, other than that you want people to have an icky feeling about the bailout but you aren't clever enough to come up with even a real sounding reason.
Giving out a few freebies to shut up the leaders of a boycott group on Steam seems the direct opposite of a pro-consumer move. And yes, Valve was eventually forgiven by the community at large, but that was exactly my point: somehow they get away with anti-consumer behavior and get a free pass from their fan base. Survival was a throwaway mode that required creating next to 0 new assets for the game as it used pieces of maps already in existence. Sacrifice only came out after there were huge protests with regard to L4D2, so there is no guarantee it would have happened if nobody had said anything. Crash course is really the only post-release content that I would say truly counts, and I don't think it is unreasonable to say that even if you count all of the post-release support, it seems weak when Valve very specifically made a big deal out of post-release support as a selling point for the game. Additionally, splitting the player base so they could better monetize could hardly be construed as anything but negative for the player. I take the conversion of the L4D1 campaigns to L4D2 as an implicit admission that the game only ever should have been at most an expansion.
TF2 hats really do give you advantages over non-paying players. Yes, you can technically get all of the hats in-game, but as random drops selected from a huge pool with a low drop rate. But getting the specific bonus you want is like hoping to win a raffle. It's like saying that paying to win a random drawing doesn't give you an unfair advantage because everybody can eventually win if they play enough times. Again, it isn't actually a huge deal and a lot better than a lot of other game companies have done. If they hadn't come out and put down other game companies for having paid DLC, it wouldn't have been an issue at all, but given that Portal 2 launched with paid DLC, it seems like a real possibility that it will start being a regular part of Valve games, so we've all gotten to watch Valve flip from "we don't do paid DLC because we do post-release support for free to make people like us more" to "hey wait a minute, in-game shops let us monetize better than we thought they would, nevermind" in the case of just a couple years.
However, thus far the track record is in Valve's favor.
Except when they do things like release L4D with an indication of post-release content, then release a sequel that is really at best an expansion with a such a timeline that indicates they moved everyone off of L4D1 content as soon as it shipped? Or being vocally against paid DLC only now they have it? I don't know what Valve did to convince so many people to have such a huge blind spot when it comes to any of their anti-consumer behavior. It isn't that they are worse than anybody else for it, and they are definitely better than many, but they've already proven repeatedly that they their customers do not necessarily come first.
Malware probably isn't going to make a hardware mod to your floppy drive.