I think this is less about MTV and more about Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They've already expressed a pro-P2P stance, and considering the nature of their show, this move fits in quite nicely with their "libertarian" attitude.
You, sir, need to have a serious conversation with a 7 year old. Today's kids are a whole lot dumber and more ignorant than we were. Don't underestimate the social damage of political correctness.
There's no technical reason why that wouldn't be possible. You just need the individual devices to have a common data port, link those up to a compositing processor and off you go. If the gadgets don't have data ports, then you hem and haw at the manufacturer until they add one.
There are a lot of "futuristic" things we can do today, people just don't want to pay for them.
That has less to do with the limb and more to do with the nervous system.
If we could plug the artificial limbs into the right nerves (and have it all calibrated), theoretically the new limb would be a drop-in replacement and Kenny could run like a cyborg the next day.
I love how whiney little "experts" pick on Google, when their gripes apply to every online storage system ever.
I use my (leased) servers spread out all over the world for backup storage. That's right, there are copies of my data in 3 different places (plus the original at home). The archives are encrypted, but theoretically someone could boot one of my boxes into single-user, copy a file and try real hard with rainbow tables until they crack it. My life is boring as hell so the likelihood of that happening are nil, but it's feasible.
I could store those files anywhere else... Google, Amazon, or any of the stupid little ad-supported file hosts. Hell I could post the dumb thing on The Pirate Bay, label it as geek pron and let it float in P2P until I need it back. The end result is the same: my files can be accessed by third parties, and I'm not the least bit worried about it. I've taken the necessary steps to keep random idiots out of there by using fairly strong encryption, but a motivated hacker will always end up getting whatever he/she/it wants.
There is no absolute privacy, only relative privacy. The security of a piece of information is directly related to how valuable it is to how many people. Encryption will raise the bar, but the data is never ever 100% safe. Once you accept that fact, you stop worrying about it so much.
Let's suppose for a moment that whatever was on that hard drive would prove him guilty of all charges; the penalty for that would be severe, like a stiff fine and jail time.
Now let's suppose he did a good job of destroying all the evidence, now he can only be tried for destroying evidence, which is pretty bad, but perhaps not as bad as whatever it is he actually did.
If you were wanted for heinous crimes against humanity (I don't know uhh... biological warfare!), and the only person with any proof winds up dead at your hands, you just need to defend yourself against the murder charge.
Having done all sorts of web work for years, I think I've succeeded. This cracks people up (or pisses them off), but I can spend a week putting a site together, and still not have a clue what the damned thing is about. "You know that page about shipping info?" No, I don't. What's the file name ?
Of course, I'm also the kind of guy who can work on pr0n without getting aroused at all (nor disgusted, for that matter). Money is money.
Seriously though, Geek Squad attracts the low-end techies... guys who would be advertising $20/hr onsite in the classifieds otherwise. You pay a low-end techie, you get low-end work.
I can clean spyware too, but I charge a lot more than the $59.99 you'll pay for the Geek Squad because I don't like doing that crap. I can install a hard drive or video card too, but my minimum charge is $60 because I'll take the time to route the cables out of sight to ensure proper airflow. I even charge $150 for an OS install, but you do end up with a fully tweaked and customized version of Windows with its own recovery partition, so you don't have to pay for it again the next time your teenager fries your system with spyware.
You can't really compare my attentive service to the 13$/hr guys, and many people don't care for the luxury service. Joe Blow won't benefit from my expertise, and I'm fine with that. A lot of people drink cheap beer and I'm fine with that too, but I drink the good stuff because that's what I prefer. Some folks prefer quality, and they're happy to pay for it.
That is why your private mp3 collection will always dwarf online stores. Just don't tell the RIAA.
What is your first instinct when you want to find an old favorite ? Do you hop on iTunes or is it Limewire ? For me, it's Limewire (or whatever P2P app is in fashion). P2P is notorious for finding those obscure titles, and let's be honest: yesterday's cheese is still better than today's cheese. If the labels would clue in and start selling those old junkers, I'd be a whole lot happier with a high-quality store-bought version than the tinny one some file sharer recorded off the radio.
The thing is, the music industry is purely obsessed with control. It's not even about money anymore, it's about power. Kiss my ass, suck my dick, buy my artist, and fuck you if you don't like it. That's all that matters to them.
These types of associations exist in other practices, and they usually end up hurting the members because there will always be lowballing bastards ready to do a poor-quality job, and clients usually don't know any better. The sweet spot is usually in the middle, higher than the cheap morons, but lower than the pros.
This calls for an anecdote:) A while back, I was working for a pretty big computer supplier, and the boss was sharp as a tack. We had three basic power supplies: a cheap one, a decent no-name and a quality brand-name . The cheap one cost us $5.00, the no-name $15, and the fancy one about $60, yet we sold them at $40, $80 and $100 respectively. Being a naive, un-greedy Canadian, this seemed odd as my instinct at the time was to price things relative to cost, like maybe $10, $30 and $85. Note the biggest difference is in the mid-range prices. I priced it $50 cheaper than the other guy, and even my mid-range was lower than his cheapie.
His logic was sound: only gamers will buy the top-end unit, and contractors will buy the cheapest one. Everyone else will buy the mid-range unit, so make it the most profitable of the bunch. Even though the Antec (with the better warranty) is just $20 more, very few people would go for it. In Canada at least, $20 is the the mental dotted line for most people. Below 20 they don't flinch, but above 20 they think long and hard about their choice. It's kinda weird how currency denominations affect people's spending habits!
It did mean that his high-end stock wouldn't move much, but that's okay because he didn't really care about that clientele, they are few and far-between. Unfortunately for me, even though I got stuff at cost, it didn't benefit me much at all because I've always been a high-end kind of guy. Even on a budget machine I splurge on the power supply; nothing sucks worse than blowing up $300 worth of motherboard, ram and hard drives because you tried to save $20 on a cheap power supply. Well, nothing except blowing up $1500 worth of gear on a cheap power supply. That would be a damned shame!
I actually find the 20 mil number quite conservative. 20$ per zombie is low, a bot using up 100% CPU eats up a lot of electricity, causes extra thermal stress on the components (thus more failures), and a heck of a lot of wasted money on cleaning the thing out, especially when the Geek Squad is involved.
If the game were any better, they would have tried harder to come up with a better name than "Kane and Lynch".
Even "Jim Bob and Billy-Ray" would have at least been catchier and more memorable. You know your ship has sunk when even the marketing droids fail to get excited.
iTunes sales are hardly any better than CDs, from a business perspective, because the money still goes to the wrong pockets. Indie outfits like Magnatune are better, but they're several orders of magnitude smaller than iTunes.
The day Magnatune (or any other artist-centric site) beats iTunes, then we'll talk.
The man may well be a Javascript guru, but that skill doesn't carry over into HTML at all. Me, I wish we could grow out of HTML entirely and shrug off all this lame legacy support. As a visually-oriented kind of guy, I'd openly welcome something like PDF. Just because the Unix crowd sucks at GUI design doesn't mean the whole world should suffer text-driven interfaces for eternity.
Right now, we rely on so many ugly Javascript and CSS tricks to make pages appear the way we want, it often starts looking like a client-side rendering layer built on-top of HTML itself. Things people have relied on for years in graphic and UI design like dynamically resizeable layouts, sub-pixel-perfect font sizing and alignment, transparency and a whole bunch of other common techniques are a royal nightmare to implement in HTML. I do this crap for a living and I still curse at CSS on a daily basis with its stupid moments and browser incompatibilities.
If we had a graphically-oriented delivery method, we could agree on strict rendering expectations for browsers to meet. They could then differentiate based on actual features instead of rendering accuracy (because I'm sick and tired of hearing about Opera!)
Sure, but a zip file on a web site won't get them beer, coke and groupies. That tip jar won't buy them a new tour van either.
I hate the record industry with a passion, but even I have to admit that if they go tits up, it will affect a huge swath of the entertainment industry. Who's going to sell out stadiums ? Who's going to book festivals ? Who's going to front the cash for up-and-comers to pay for studio time ? The RIAA bastards are to musicians what banks are to homeowners. They're both dirty cheating skimming enterprises, but they offer regretfully needed services, all because money is the world's #1 problem.
We techies may well be open to online delivery, but the other 98% of the world is not. That's why Wal-Mart still makes gobs of money and will continue to do so for many years to come. People just aren't psychologically and emotionally ready to grow out of the brick-and-mortar system yet.
The first impression I got from this guy is that he doesn't get HTML at all. He doesn't understand it's purpose, it's reason for being, and most importantly: he doesn't understand how the pros use it.
My suggestion to Mr Crockford: go back to HTML 2.0
I wish this "brilliant" marketing gurus would take a bullet to the head. If I'm in the market for a phone, I don't want a game with it. Whack 300$ off the phone and give me a cheap phone instead. All these tie-ins just drive costs up for no good reason.
I sure as hell wouldn't pick a more costly phone just because it comes with free anything. I'd pick the best non-bundled deal and buy the damn Wii on my own, and end up saving a crapload of money in the end.
One thing that boggles me in my city is all the arabic restaurants have these long-distance calling card freebies for delivery orders. Well I'm sorry, but I already have a calling plan on my phone, and I don't have any friends in the middle east anyway. Keep your dumb $20 card and deduct the 1.50$ it cost you from my order, kthxbye.
Bundles are fine if they're "on-topic", like a console with games, or free baklava with my shawarma. Anything else is just mental landfill.
How in the hell can anyone see invisible things ? If a passive eavesdropper is quietly capturing all packets without sending anything, you can't monitor them. It's not like there's an electrical connection to the host that you can monitor for power dips.
A more effective solution, which has been employed by every ignorant security "expert" in the world is to claim that all wireless networks are insecure. Yes, Duh! Next question.
To a certain extent, all networks are vulnerable whether they're carried in the aether or forced down optic cabling. That's why we have passwords, encryption and a whole buffet of software-based security paradigms. Assuming someone is friendly just because they share physical environment with you is a very flawed concept. Any half-breed can plug into your switch or wander within your antenna's range.
Yep, I'll admit it, we want a Wii too, largely because it's the only console my s.o. has any hope of enjoying. There are none available anywhere, though as the article mentioned, there's no shortage of supply. I think there's an artificial shortage, and we have a bunch of scum-sucking bastards to thank for it.
I strongly believe that one of the main reasons they're sold out is because there are a growing number of hoarders. They did it with the Xbox 360 way back when, and they've been doing it with the Wii since it was released. These past few weeks, I've been seeing more of this behavior. Now the scalpers are on Guitar Hero 3. I'm sure if there are any other popular items, they'll buy them out too.
I remember a while back, a particularly smug jerk posted a picture of about 30 Wiis stacked in his apartment, and was selling them at a hefty premium. Unsurprisingly, I also heard someone broke into his home, beat the shit out of him and made off with the consoles. I derived great enjoyment from the story, but it still meant there was one guy with at least 29 more Wiis than he actually wanted.
Maybe I'm a little too Canadian for my own good, but I consider this sort of behavior quite detestable. Even worse are the people buying from these profiteers, as they're just reinforcing this anti-social behaviour. Take away a scalper's profit, and these jerkoffs will find something else to do like peddling native cigarettes or some other redneck hobby.
Probably because the great majority of technical writers are not programmers. It's far easier to copy/paste code snippets on the web (preferably non-working), put in a few paragraphs of endless philosophical babble in-between and charge $80 for a thick heavy stack of ignorance.
I find the concept of a "cookbook" rather pointless. When you read a culinary cookbook, you're reading an instruction sheet to make a particular dish; more importantly, you're not learning the fine art of cooking. Similarly, a programming cookbook doesn't make you a better programmer, it just gives you a ready-made solution that unfortunately doesn't compile half the time. If a problem is so common that you would buy a book for it, it probably belongs in a shared library.
Can't silicon be recycled ? Consumerism is driven by cheap, short-lived junk that's promptly replaced by more cheap junk. If we can't make these built-to-break gadgets recyclable, we're headed for a brick wall.
Slashdot Mirror
The secret is out: Leopard is really just Vista with a new skin! That would explain all the crashing and weirdness.
Seriously, 10.5 has got to be the clumsiest OSX release ever. It introduced a ton of problems.
I think this is less about MTV and more about Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They've already expressed a pro-P2P stance, and considering the nature of their show, this move fits in quite nicely with their "libertarian" attitude.
You, sir, need to have a serious conversation with a 7 year old. Today's kids are a whole lot dumber and more ignorant than we were. Don't underestimate the social damage of political correctness.
Would they have asked her to resign if she had criticized evolution instead of ID ?
That right there is the only defense she needs in court.
There's no technical reason why that wouldn't be possible. You just need the individual devices to have a common data port, link those up to a compositing processor and off you go. If the gadgets don't have data ports, then you hem and haw at the manufacturer until they add one.
There are a lot of "futuristic" things we can do today, people just don't want to pay for them.
That has less to do with the limb and more to do with the nervous system.
If we could plug the artificial limbs into the right nerves (and have it all calibrated), theoretically the new limb would be a drop-in replacement and Kenny could run like a cyborg the next day.
I love how whiney little "experts" pick on Google, when their gripes apply to every online storage system ever.
I use my (leased) servers spread out all over the world for backup storage. That's right, there are copies of my data in 3 different places (plus the original at home). The archives are encrypted, but theoretically someone could boot one of my boxes into single-user, copy a file and try real hard with rainbow tables until they crack it. My life is boring as hell so the likelihood of that happening are nil, but it's feasible.
I could store those files anywhere else... Google, Amazon, or any of the stupid little ad-supported file hosts. Hell I could post the dumb thing on The Pirate Bay, label it as geek pron and let it float in P2P until I need it back. The end result is the same: my files can be accessed by third parties, and I'm not the least bit worried about it. I've taken the necessary steps to keep random idiots out of there by using fairly strong encryption, but a motivated hacker will always end up getting whatever he/she/it wants.
There is no absolute privacy, only relative privacy. The security of a piece of information is directly related to how valuable it is to how many people. Encryption will raise the bar, but the data is never ever 100% safe. Once you accept that fact, you stop worrying about it so much.
Rilly ? Me too! Maybe God and I are related... I love torturing weak minds over the weekend!
Let's suppose for a moment that whatever was on that hard drive would prove him guilty of all charges; the penalty for that would be severe, like a stiff fine and jail time.
Now let's suppose he did a good job of destroying all the evidence, now he can only be tried for destroying evidence, which is pretty bad, but perhaps not as bad as whatever it is he actually did.
If you were wanted for heinous crimes against humanity (I don't know uhh... biological warfare!), and the only person with any proof winds up dead at your hands, you just need to defend yourself against the murder charge.
Having done all sorts of web work for years, I think I've succeeded. This cracks people up (or pisses them off), but I can spend a week putting a site together, and still not have a clue what the damned thing is about. "You know that page about shipping info?" No, I don't. What's the file name ?
Of course, I'm also the kind of guy who can work on pr0n without getting aroused at all (nor disgusted, for that matter). Money is money.
But I am smarter than Low Tech Bob!
Seriously though, Geek Squad attracts the low-end techies... guys who would be advertising $20/hr onsite in the classifieds otherwise. You pay a low-end techie, you get low-end work.
I can clean spyware too, but I charge a lot more than the $59.99 you'll pay for the Geek Squad because I don't like doing that crap. I can install a hard drive or video card too, but my minimum charge is $60 because I'll take the time to route the cables out of sight to ensure proper airflow. I even charge $150 for an OS install, but you do end up with a fully tweaked and customized version of Windows with its own recovery partition, so you don't have to pay for it again the next time your teenager fries your system with spyware.
You can't really compare my attentive service to the 13$/hr guys, and many people don't care for the luxury service. Joe Blow won't benefit from my expertise, and I'm fine with that. A lot of people drink cheap beer and I'm fine with that too, but I drink the good stuff because that's what I prefer. Some folks prefer quality, and they're happy to pay for it.
That is why your private mp3 collection will always dwarf online stores. Just don't tell the RIAA.
What is your first instinct when you want to find an old favorite ? Do you hop on iTunes or is it Limewire ? For me, it's Limewire (or whatever P2P app is in fashion). P2P is notorious for finding those obscure titles, and let's be honest: yesterday's cheese is still better than today's cheese. If the labels would clue in and start selling those old junkers, I'd be a whole lot happier with a high-quality store-bought version than the tinny one some file sharer recorded off the radio.
The thing is, the music industry is purely obsessed with control. It's not even about money anymore, it's about power. Kiss my ass, suck my dick, buy my artist, and fuck you if you don't like it. That's all that matters to them.
These types of associations exist in other practices, and they usually end up hurting the members because there will always be lowballing bastards ready to do a poor-quality job, and clients usually don't know any better. The sweet spot is usually in the middle, higher than the cheap morons, but lower than the pros.
:) A while back, I was working for a pretty big computer supplier, and the boss was sharp as a tack. We had three basic power supplies: a cheap one, a decent no-name and a quality brand-name . The cheap one cost us $5.00, the no-name $15, and the fancy one about $60, yet we sold them at $40, $80 and $100 respectively. Being a naive, un-greedy Canadian, this seemed odd as my instinct at the time was to price things relative to cost, like maybe $10, $30 and $85. Note the biggest difference is in the mid-range prices. I priced it $50 cheaper than the other guy, and even my mid-range was lower than his cheapie.
This calls for an anecdote
His logic was sound: only gamers will buy the top-end unit, and contractors will buy the cheapest one. Everyone else will buy the mid-range unit, so make it the most profitable of the bunch. Even though the Antec (with the better warranty) is just $20 more, very few people would go for it. In Canada at least, $20 is the the mental dotted line for most people. Below 20 they don't flinch, but above 20 they think long and hard about their choice. It's kinda weird how currency denominations affect people's spending habits!
It did mean that his high-end stock wouldn't move much, but that's okay because he didn't really care about that clientele, they are few and far-between. Unfortunately for me, even though I got stuff at cost, it didn't benefit me much at all because I've always been a high-end kind of guy. Even on a budget machine I splurge on the power supply; nothing sucks worse than blowing up $300 worth of motherboard, ram and hard drives because you tried to save $20 on a cheap power supply. Well, nothing except blowing up $1500 worth of gear on a cheap power supply. That would be a damned shame!
That's funny. I live in downtown Ottawa and I've been calling EVERYWHERE to find one all week.
:)
Two weeks ago, even the stupid Shoppers Drug Mart had them... today zilch.
Could I possibly borrow your flux capacitor ?
*sprays water on mods* Bad mod, no donut!
This should be rated "+1 Sad but True"
I actually find the 20 mil number quite conservative. 20$ per zombie is low, a bot using up 100% CPU eats up a lot of electricity, causes extra thermal stress on the components (thus more failures), and a heck of a lot of wasted money on cleaning the thing out, especially when the Geek Squad is involved.
If the game were any better, they would have tried harder to come up with a better name than "Kane and Lynch".
Even "Jim Bob and Billy-Ray" would have at least been catchier and more memorable. You know your ship has sunk when even the marketing droids fail to get excited.
iTunes sales are hardly any better than CDs, from a business perspective, because the money still goes to the wrong pockets. Indie outfits like Magnatune are better, but they're several orders of magnitude smaller than iTunes.
The day Magnatune (or any other artist-centric site) beats iTunes, then we'll talk.
The man may well be a Javascript guru, but that skill doesn't carry over into HTML at all. Me, I wish we could grow out of HTML entirely and shrug off all this lame legacy support. As a visually-oriented kind of guy, I'd openly welcome something like PDF. Just because the Unix crowd sucks at GUI design doesn't mean the whole world should suffer text-driven interfaces for eternity.
Right now, we rely on so many ugly Javascript and CSS tricks to make pages appear the way we want, it often starts looking like a client-side rendering layer built on-top of HTML itself. Things people have relied on for years in graphic and UI design like dynamically resizeable layouts, sub-pixel-perfect font sizing and alignment, transparency and a whole bunch of other common techniques are a royal nightmare to implement in HTML. I do this crap for a living and I still curse at CSS on a daily basis with its stupid moments and browser incompatibilities.
If we had a graphically-oriented delivery method, we could agree on strict rendering expectations for browsers to meet. They could then differentiate based on actual features instead of rendering accuracy (because I'm sick and tired of hearing about Opera!)
Sure, but a zip file on a web site won't get them beer, coke and groupies. That tip jar won't buy them a new tour van either.
I hate the record industry with a passion, but even I have to admit that if they go tits up, it will affect a huge swath of the entertainment industry. Who's going to sell out stadiums ? Who's going to book festivals ? Who's going to front the cash for up-and-comers to pay for studio time ? The RIAA bastards are to musicians what banks are to homeowners. They're both dirty cheating skimming enterprises, but they offer regretfully needed services, all because money is the world's #1 problem.
We techies may well be open to online delivery, but the other 98% of the world is not. That's why Wal-Mart still makes gobs of money and will continue to do so for many years to come. People just aren't psychologically and emotionally ready to grow out of the brick-and-mortar system yet.
The first impression I got from this guy is that he doesn't get HTML at all. He doesn't understand it's purpose, it's reason for being, and most importantly: he doesn't understand how the pros use it.
My suggestion to Mr Crockford: go back to HTML 2.0
I wish this "brilliant" marketing gurus would take a bullet to the head. If I'm in the market for a phone, I don't want a game with it. Whack 300$ off the phone and give me a cheap phone instead. All these tie-ins just drive costs up for no good reason.
I sure as hell wouldn't pick a more costly phone just because it comes with free anything. I'd pick the best non-bundled deal and buy the damn Wii on my own, and end up saving a crapload of money in the end.
One thing that boggles me in my city is all the arabic restaurants have these long-distance calling card freebies for delivery orders. Well I'm sorry, but I already have a calling plan on my phone, and I don't have any friends in the middle east anyway. Keep your dumb $20 card and deduct the 1.50$ it cost you from my order, kthxbye.
Bundles are fine if they're "on-topic", like a console with games, or free baklava with my shawarma. Anything else is just mental landfill.
How in the hell can anyone see invisible things ? If a passive eavesdropper is quietly capturing all packets without sending anything, you can't monitor them. It's not like there's an electrical connection to the host that you can monitor for power dips.
A more effective solution, which has been employed by every ignorant security "expert" in the world is to claim that all wireless networks are insecure. Yes, Duh! Next question.
To a certain extent, all networks are vulnerable whether they're carried in the aether or forced down optic cabling. That's why we have passwords, encryption and a whole buffet of software-based security paradigms. Assuming someone is friendly just because they share physical environment with you is a very flawed concept. Any half-breed can plug into your switch or wander within your antenna's range.
Yep, I'll admit it, we want a Wii too, largely because it's the only console my s.o. has any hope of enjoying. There are none available anywhere, though as the article mentioned, there's no shortage of supply. I think there's an artificial shortage, and we have a bunch of scum-sucking bastards to thank for it.
I strongly believe that one of the main reasons they're sold out is because there are a growing number of hoarders. They did it with the Xbox 360 way back when, and they've been doing it with the Wii since it was released. These past few weeks, I've been seeing more of this behavior. Now the scalpers are on Guitar Hero 3. I'm sure if there are any other popular items, they'll buy them out too.
I remember a while back, a particularly smug jerk posted a picture of about 30 Wiis stacked in his apartment, and was selling them at a hefty premium. Unsurprisingly, I also heard someone broke into his home, beat the shit out of him and made off with the consoles. I derived great enjoyment from the story, but it still meant there was one guy with at least 29 more Wiis than he actually wanted.
Maybe I'm a little too Canadian for my own good, but I consider this sort of behavior quite detestable. Even worse are the people buying from these profiteers, as they're just reinforcing this anti-social behaviour. Take away a scalper's profit, and these jerkoffs will find something else to do like peddling native cigarettes or some other redneck hobby.
Probably because the great majority of technical writers are not programmers. It's far easier to copy/paste code snippets on the web (preferably non-working), put in a few paragraphs of endless philosophical babble in-between and charge $80 for a thick heavy stack of ignorance.
I find the concept of a "cookbook" rather pointless. When you read a culinary cookbook, you're reading an instruction sheet to make a particular dish; more importantly, you're not learning the fine art of cooking. Similarly, a programming cookbook doesn't make you a better programmer, it just gives you a ready-made solution that unfortunately doesn't compile half the time. If a problem is so common that you would buy a book for it, it probably belongs in a shared library.
Can't silicon be recycled ? Consumerism is driven by cheap, short-lived junk that's promptly replaced by more cheap junk. If we can't make these built-to-break gadgets recyclable, we're headed for a brick wall.