What's the benefit ? Almost every Canadian has some access to the internet, why bother with 3rd party service providers when we could own the thing outright. Socialization isn't about letting the government ruin everything it touches, it's about people owning shared assets that benefit everyone.
They might not run the problems "so well and profitable", but come on: the bar is so ridiculously low with Rogers and Bell that even a crack team of federal manatees could do a better job - in fact, taking the profit motive out of it would allow us to focus on modernization, like maybe nationwide IPTV and VoIP. Ditch the old analog cable bands and you suddenly have several gigabits/sec of IP bandwidth available on the loop, without even having to bury new fibre.
The internet has become a fundamental part of modern life, it should be treated as such. We have socialized utilities like water and hydro, why not socialized internet ? Since we're already shooting for "100% penetration" (that's what she said), we're all paying into some service anyway - why not pay it all into one big non-profit pool rather than piss 3/4 of it away to some foreign investors' swiss bank accounts ?
I'm assuming Dell and HP will handle it through their usual warranty process, i.e. when customers call to complain their PC has died. Alternately, they might still be working on an official announcement of their own. A recall isn't something you launch on a whim.
What's the big appeal of Sandy Bridge anyway ? I still haven't figured out where it fits in the market... mind you, I type this on my dual nehalem, which is still king of the mountain after a year, so I really don't get what the fuss is about. Is Sandy Bridge significantly faster than the original i3/i5 cop-outs ? Or is this a mythical "bang for the buck" platform where everything costs twice as much as AMD ?
I've been building a lot of systems, and Intel dominates the high end, but in my view they haven't sold a decent value processor since the E2xx0 Core 2's. In the desktop market there's really just 3 segments that matter: sub-$500, 500 to 1000, and balls-to-the-wall nutjobs like myself, and AMD has the bottom two tiers in a fierce headlock.
It's a lot easier to find tens of thousands of stupid people to form a "political" party, than fill a courtroom with intelligent and non-corrupt lawmakers.
Not quite... Stanford's SRI invented the mouse, led by Douglas Engelbart. His department's funding was severely cut after the Vietnam war, which opened the door for Xerox to poach many of Engelbart's staff, bringing their fancy tech along with them to PARC. Xerox made it popular, and Apple made it famous, but SRI came up with the idea in the first place.
The only thing Apple does "different" is they don't go after the bargain bottom. They recognized that resistive touchscreens were shit, so they used a capacitive screen on the iPhone. They saw that USB 1.0 was shit, so they promoted Firewire. Apple's gear costs a lot more than common PC gear, but they have cultivated a clientele that is willing and able to spend that kind of money.
There is a ton of cool hardware out there, but much of it is beyond the budget of most PC buyers. As a current example, (flash) SSDs are just starting to enter the mainstream, yet hardcore geeks like myself have had them since the 90's. They cost a mint back then, but that was the price of admission to be on the bleeding edge of tech.
What do science majors do, anyway ? Does that diploma turn you into a plug-and-play worker, or do it merely provide baseline knowledge that will ease the adaptation to real life scenarios and challenges ?
Sure, I picked up a few things in school. None of them were directly applicable to job duties, because I did very little "work" in school. It's one thing to know the theory of something, it's a wholly different beast to apply that knowledge to a concrete purpose. Every college-fresh recruit goes through the same faceplant cycle:
Day 1: Cocky, thinks he knows everything, bites off more than he can chew Day 2: Work continues quickly and silently. Day 3: More work, no update, says everything is peachy. Day 4: PM butts in, asks for a demo. Finds out the newbie completely missed the mark, needs to start over. Day 5: Panic and fear set in. Kid realises he knows nothing about real business, gets paired with a senior for "corrective retraining". Day 43: Kid finally gets the whole picture. Work quality and dedication skyrocket. Company hires a new college grad and the cycle begins anew.
The human factor IS the problem. We have clearly defined needs, and clearly defined products and services to fill those needs. This complicated corporate tango is useless fluff born of the nihilism of american imagineering. Someone thought "Hey I'm a great bullshitter" and created a job for themselves, which was then copied by others ad nauseam.
Schmoozers, which I define as people whose job consists of sweet-talking potential clients and business partners into lopsided contracts, are not adding any value to the product being traded, nor are they facilitating the deal. They are a special case of middlemen, where the greater the fraud, the larger their bonus. If they weren't sleazy crooks, we wouldn't be calling them schmoozers now, would we ?
As badly as I'll get downvoted for this, I'd say The Social Network will win because of its portrayal of a wealthy jew. Hollywood is wholly owned by jewish americans, and they keep it tight, because, well, that's how they got so powerful in the first place. Why change a winning strategy ?
Great, thank you. All this time I thought I had seen the wrong movie, while everyone I know raved about it, I thought it was just a whole lot of flashy nonsense, barely strung together by screenwriters who clearly didn't understand the subject matter they were trying to present.
I'm quite convinced there's an official step in screenwriting titled "Let's make up a bunch of random bullshit. People think weird nonsense is cool"
I wasn't trolling, and I did not know about the Fender add-on, but in my mind it's still a half-assed solution. We don't need a new guitar, there are thousands of real guitars out there, and the current consoles have more than enough processing power to do the audio-to-MIDI conversion in software without impacting the game's performance.
It sounds like RB3's Pro mode already goes a long way toward the goal, so all we really need is an audio input, and a plugin to do the MIDI conversion... and while we're at it, a PC version because really, any modern PC already provides all the hardware and connectivity required for a music game. Worst case, you'll need an inexpensive "red box" to convert the guitar's impedance to something suitable for line input.
I'm thinking more about hobbyist musicians, i.e. everyone I know. We already have guitars, basses, e-drums and microphones... why not have a game that can make use of all these cool toys rather than requiring a substantial investment in cheap imitations ? Do I really want to spend $500 on a cheap RB3-branded guitar, plastic drums and a pair of dollar-store mics, when I already own two Warlocks, an 8-piece MIDI drum kit, and a decent array of studio-quality condenser mics ? How about NO! But I'd gladly drop $129 on a hypothetical Rock Band 4 that can turn these objects of frustrating obsession into OCD-satisfying playthings.
Probably not, but that doesn't prevent him from steering the gov't even further into corporatism, on behalf of his old "pals" who haven't stopped their regular deposits into his retirement account.
Degrees nowadays give people a false sense of confidence. The few who actually care to learn are not concerned with the piece of paper or the time and money wasted on getting one. If you have a mental pulse at all, the first thing you learn after graduating is that you know nothing. If you've acquired any meta skills from your schooling, perhaps time management, language/writing and budgeting, you're already farther ahead than 90% of your "peers". That stuff your read in textbooks and off the whiteboard, that was just filler. The real cramming starts the day you get a job in your field (or create one).
To many of us "good coders", your first paragraph embodies everything that is wrong with the current system. The sales guy is nothing without a strong production team to materialize his bullet lists. If the good coder is producing "a few times his salary" in profit, that coder is severely underpaid.
If your goal is to have a stable business with sustainable growth and loyal employees, the co-op model is the way to go. Don't use the staff as worker bees that make the boss wealthy, treat them as partners that work together to make everyone's jobs and lives better. This narcissistic obsession with sales and profit margins is what put us in this lopsided economy in the first place. The sales guys got rich quick, while the people who actually create value are stuck in their cubicles for eternity.
Schmoozers are their own pricey little bubble. The only reason you need schmoozers is to connect with other schmoozers. If we all chopped the schmooze department off the balance books, we could get back to doing real business deals without all the pomp and fluff.
Tell that to the old fogeys making $150/hr fixing old COBOL apps.
Meanwhile, here I am making a meager $30/hr on sporadic PHP gigs. Old farts have it easy, they just need to master networking/marketing to find those high-paying gigs. The same is true of any contractor.
Judging by the video, Capcom's game looks like as much a rip-off of Splosion Man as of Sonic the Hedgehog.
If this is the product of the wholly-owned subsidiary that used to be called Cosmic Infinity, then I'm not surprised. There were a shithole back when they were independent, cranking out such shovelware classics as "Who wants to be a millionaire", which was little more than "You don't know Jack" 's Java engine with a different set of questions. That shop was an embarassment to the Canadian tech industry, and for Capcom to buy them up, well that just shows how little they care about the mobile segment.
For Twisted Pixel, this is not worth suing, because if push came to shove, Capcom will simply disown the studio and there will be nothing to go after. This is partially why big game houses farm out the shady/underdeveloped titles to subsidiaries: limited liability.
This is real cute, but what I really want, and I'm not alone in this, is SOFTWARE that incorporates guitar lessons into a game. Have it process the audio input and evaluate my performance in real-time, like a guitar prof would do. I don't want the instrument to be dumbed down to a 5 input game controller, I want the game to get smarter so I can learn with that abstract carrot dangling on my screen, in the form of a high score.
Don't waste your time (and hair). Just get a small $250 ION nettop and install XBMC. It is the bees knees. If you're lazy you can google for "xbmcfreak", the guy releases customized LiveCDs that take most of the hassle out of installing it.
No DRM, no transcoding, and it will play 1080p H.264 with ease thanks to the onboard GPU. Share your movies over SMB, FTP, NFS, HTTP, whatever. Way easier than trying to coax your PS3 into doing piratey things.
Yes. There is no good reason to support the barely-spec bottom rung devices. Chinese chop shops are free to release their filth upon the world, but that doesn't mean discerning customers and developers are forced to support them.
The mere fact that you can even buy an Android phone with a *capacitive* touch screen is an absolute mockery of the industry, when the primary competition has made multi-touch resistive touch screens the de-facto standard for YEARS. Combine that with a processor that can't even render the static home screens without lagging, and the result is a device that does not deserve to be called a smartphone in today's market. These cheap phones make the 8-year-old Palm Treo look futuristic.
If developers can exert enough influence to drive these inferior devices out of the market, or at least relegate them to the unadvertised "freebie phone" segment, I'm all for it. The iPhone, good Androids, and the Palm of yesteryear, have all shown that apps are the driving force behind any mobile platform. The hardware should be specced to support the apps, not the other way around.
Have we not learned anything from the desktop ? In 2011, as an app developer, you shouldn't be optimizing for any specific GPU. The platform's graphics API should be optimizing for whatever hardware it supports. New device ? New drivers! If Samsung's PowerVR implementation makes such a big difference, then we will see other hardware designs adopt the PowerVR. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time. Media-minded people will favour devices with faster GPUs, just like we do with PCs.
I'm only tangentially exposed to Android, but what I've seen so far is an already inconsistent hardware panorama. It seems no two manufacturers support the same version of Android, which leads to situations like today where the Samsung Galaxy S is leaps and bounds above all others. Adding proper GPU support will only widen that gap. As consumers, we benefit from developments that embarass the shitty manufacturers and goad them into releasing better hardware for the money.
And on a more lateral-thinking level, if you're a fan of Android, you want them to pull together and release something that can adequately compete with iOS and Windows Phone 7. Allowing mediocre hardware manufacturers to completely undermine the OS design is not the way to beat Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
the exploit breaks, but we don't have a good sense if the sandbox was able to contain it
Plain English Translation: We have no idea how our own code even works, but hey we dodged this one, HIGH FIVE!
What's the benefit ? Almost every Canadian has some access to the internet, why bother with 3rd party service providers when we could own the thing outright. Socialization isn't about letting the government ruin everything it touches, it's about people owning shared assets that benefit everyone.
They might not run the problems "so well and profitable", but come on: the bar is so ridiculously low with Rogers and Bell that even a crack team of federal manatees could do a better job - in fact, taking the profit motive out of it would allow us to focus on modernization, like maybe nationwide IPTV and VoIP. Ditch the old analog cable bands and you suddenly have several gigabits/sec of IP bandwidth available on the loop, without even having to bury new fibre.
The internet has become a fundamental part of modern life, it should be treated as such. We have socialized utilities like water and hydro, why not socialized internet ? Since we're already shooting for "100% penetration" (that's what she said), we're all paying into some service anyway - why not pay it all into one big non-profit pool rather than piss 3/4 of it away to some foreign investors' swiss bank accounts ?
I'm assuming Dell and HP will handle it through their usual warranty process, i.e. when customers call to complain their PC has died. Alternately, they might still be working on an official announcement of their own. A recall isn't something you launch on a whim.
What's the big appeal of Sandy Bridge anyway ? I still haven't figured out where it fits in the market... mind you, I type this on my dual nehalem, which is still king of the mountain after a year, so I really don't get what the fuss is about. Is Sandy Bridge significantly faster than the original i3/i5 cop-outs ? Or is this a mythical "bang for the buck" platform where everything costs twice as much as AMD ?
I've been building a lot of systems, and Intel dominates the high end, but in my view they haven't sold a decent value processor since the E2xx0 Core 2's. In the desktop market there's really just 3 segments that matter: sub-$500, 500 to 1000, and balls-to-the-wall nutjobs like myself, and AMD has the bottom two tiers in a fierce headlock.
It's a lot easier to find tens of thousands of stupid people to form a "political" party, than fill a courtroom with intelligent and non-corrupt lawmakers.
Not quite... Stanford's SRI invented the mouse, led by Douglas Engelbart. His department's funding was severely cut after the Vietnam war, which opened the door for Xerox to poach many of Engelbart's staff, bringing their fancy tech along with them to PARC. Xerox made it popular, and Apple made it famous, but SRI came up with the idea in the first place.
The only thing Apple does "different" is they don't go after the bargain bottom. They recognized that resistive touchscreens were shit, so they used a capacitive screen on the iPhone. They saw that USB 1.0 was shit, so they promoted Firewire. Apple's gear costs a lot more than common PC gear, but they have cultivated a clientele that is willing and able to spend that kind of money.
There is a ton of cool hardware out there, but much of it is beyond the budget of most PC buyers. As a current example, (flash) SSDs are just starting to enter the mainstream, yet hardcore geeks like myself have had them since the 90's. They cost a mint back then, but that was the price of admission to be on the bleeding edge of tech.
What do science majors do, anyway ? Does that diploma turn you into a plug-and-play worker, or do it merely provide baseline knowledge that will ease the adaptation to real life scenarios and challenges ?
Sure, I picked up a few things in school. None of them were directly applicable to job duties, because I did very little "work" in school. It's one thing to know the theory of something, it's a wholly different beast to apply that knowledge to a concrete purpose. Every college-fresh recruit goes through the same faceplant cycle:
Day 1: Cocky, thinks he knows everything, bites off more than he can chew
Day 2: Work continues quickly and silently.
Day 3: More work, no update, says everything is peachy.
Day 4: PM butts in, asks for a demo. Finds out the newbie completely missed the mark, needs to start over.
Day 5: Panic and fear set in. Kid realises he knows nothing about real business, gets paired with a senior for "corrective retraining".
Day 43: Kid finally gets the whole picture. Work quality and dedication skyrocket. Company hires a new college grad and the cycle begins anew.
The human factor IS the problem. We have clearly defined needs, and clearly defined products and services to fill those needs. This complicated corporate tango is useless fluff born of the nihilism of american imagineering. Someone thought "Hey I'm a great bullshitter" and created a job for themselves, which was then copied by others ad nauseam.
Schmoozers, which I define as people whose job consists of sweet-talking potential clients and business partners into lopsided contracts, are not adding any value to the product being traded, nor are they facilitating the deal. They are a special case of middlemen, where the greater the fraud, the larger their bonus. If they weren't sleazy crooks, we wouldn't be calling them schmoozers now, would we ?
As badly as I'll get downvoted for this, I'd say The Social Network will win because of its portrayal of a wealthy jew. Hollywood is wholly owned by jewish americans, and they keep it tight, because, well, that's how they got so powerful in the first place. Why change a winning strategy ?
Great, thank you. All this time I thought I had seen the wrong movie, while everyone I know raved about it, I thought it was just a whole lot of flashy nonsense, barely strung together by screenwriters who clearly didn't understand the subject matter they were trying to present.
I'm quite convinced there's an official step in screenwriting titled "Let's make up a bunch of random bullshit. People think weird nonsense is cool"
I wasn't trolling, and I did not know about the Fender add-on, but in my mind it's still a half-assed solution. We don't need a new guitar, there are thousands of real guitars out there, and the current consoles have more than enough processing power to do the audio-to-MIDI conversion in software without impacting the game's performance.
It sounds like RB3's Pro mode already goes a long way toward the goal, so all we really need is an audio input, and a plugin to do the MIDI conversion... and while we're at it, a PC version because really, any modern PC already provides all the hardware and connectivity required for a music game. Worst case, you'll need an inexpensive "red box" to convert the guitar's impedance to something suitable for line input.
I'm thinking more about hobbyist musicians, i.e. everyone I know. We already have guitars, basses, e-drums and microphones... why not have a game that can make use of all these cool toys rather than requiring a substantial investment in cheap imitations ? Do I really want to spend $500 on a cheap RB3-branded guitar, plastic drums and a pair of dollar-store mics, when I already own two Warlocks, an 8-piece MIDI drum kit, and a decent array of studio-quality condenser mics ? How about NO! But I'd gladly drop $129 on a hypothetical Rock Band 4 that can turn these objects of frustrating obsession into OCD-satisfying playthings.
Fuck the public! They will buy whatever we put in front of them. If they weren't mindless sheeple, they'd be us.
</cynicism>
Probably not, but that doesn't prevent him from steering the gov't even further into corporatism, on behalf of his old "pals" who haven't stopped their regular deposits into his retirement account.
You assume people stop being corrupt greed-mongers when they switch jobs. Funny guy!
Degrees nowadays give people a false sense of confidence. The few who actually care to learn are not concerned with the piece of paper or the time and money wasted on getting one. If you have a mental pulse at all, the first thing you learn after graduating is that you know nothing. If you've acquired any meta skills from your schooling, perhaps time management, language/writing and budgeting, you're already farther ahead than 90% of your "peers". That stuff your read in textbooks and off the whiteboard, that was just filler. The real cramming starts the day you get a job in your field (or create one).
To many of us "good coders", your first paragraph embodies everything that is wrong with the current system. The sales guy is nothing without a strong production team to materialize his bullet lists. If the good coder is producing "a few times his salary" in profit, that coder is severely underpaid.
If your goal is to have a stable business with sustainable growth and loyal employees, the co-op model is the way to go. Don't use the staff as worker bees that make the boss wealthy, treat them as partners that work together to make everyone's jobs and lives better. This narcissistic obsession with sales and profit margins is what put us in this lopsided economy in the first place. The sales guys got rich quick, while the people who actually create value are stuck in their cubicles for eternity.
Schmoozers are their own pricey little bubble. The only reason you need schmoozers is to connect with other schmoozers. If we all chopped the schmooze department off the balance books, we could get back to doing real business deals without all the pomp and fluff.
Tell that to the old fogeys making $150/hr fixing old COBOL apps.
Meanwhile, here I am making a meager $30/hr on sporadic PHP gigs. Old farts have it easy, they just need to master networking/marketing to find those high-paying gigs. The same is true of any contractor.
Judging by the video, Capcom's game looks like as much a rip-off of Splosion Man as of Sonic the Hedgehog.
If this is the product of the wholly-owned subsidiary that used to be called Cosmic Infinity, then I'm not surprised. There were a shithole back when they were independent, cranking out such shovelware classics as "Who wants to be a millionaire", which was little more than "You don't know Jack" 's Java engine with a different set of questions. That shop was an embarassment to the Canadian tech industry, and for Capcom to buy them up, well that just shows how little they care about the mobile segment.
For Twisted Pixel, this is not worth suing, because if push came to shove, Capcom will simply disown the studio and there will be nothing to go after. This is partially why big game houses farm out the shady/underdeveloped titles to subsidiaries: limited liability.
That's ironic, considering your name and sig. Enemy of the music industry, much ?
This is real cute, but what I really want, and I'm not alone in this, is SOFTWARE that incorporates guitar lessons into a game. Have it process the audio input and evaluate my performance in real-time, like a guitar prof would do. I don't want the instrument to be dumbed down to a 5 input game controller, I want the game to get smarter so I can learn with that abstract carrot dangling on my screen, in the form of a high score.
Don't waste your time (and hair). Just get a small $250 ION nettop and install XBMC. It is the bees knees. If you're lazy you can google for "xbmcfreak", the guy releases customized LiveCDs that take most of the hassle out of installing it.
No DRM, no transcoding, and it will play 1080p H.264 with ease thanks to the onboard GPU. Share your movies over SMB, FTP, NFS, HTTP, whatever. Way easier than trying to coax your PS3 into doing piratey things.
Yes. There is no good reason to support the barely-spec bottom rung devices. Chinese chop shops are free to release their filth upon the world, but that doesn't mean discerning customers and developers are forced to support them.
The mere fact that you can even buy an Android phone with a *capacitive* touch screen is an absolute mockery of the industry, when the primary competition has made multi-touch resistive touch screens the de-facto standard for YEARS. Combine that with a processor that can't even render the static home screens without lagging, and the result is a device that does not deserve to be called a smartphone in today's market. These cheap phones make the 8-year-old Palm Treo look futuristic.
If developers can exert enough influence to drive these inferior devices out of the market, or at least relegate them to the unadvertised "freebie phone" segment, I'm all for it. The iPhone, good Androids, and the Palm of yesteryear, have all shown that apps are the driving force behind any mobile platform. The hardware should be specced to support the apps, not the other way around.
Have we not learned anything from the desktop ? In 2011, as an app developer, you shouldn't be optimizing for any specific GPU. The platform's graphics API should be optimizing for whatever hardware it supports. New device ? New drivers! If Samsung's PowerVR implementation makes such a big difference, then we will see other hardware designs adopt the PowerVR. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time. Media-minded people will favour devices with faster GPUs, just like we do with PCs.
I'm only tangentially exposed to Android, but what I've seen so far is an already inconsistent hardware panorama. It seems no two manufacturers support the same version of Android, which leads to situations like today where the Samsung Galaxy S is leaps and bounds above all others. Adding proper GPU support will only widen that gap. As consumers, we benefit from developments that embarass the shitty manufacturers and goad them into releasing better hardware for the money.
And on a more lateral-thinking level, if you're a fan of Android, you want them to pull together and release something that can adequately compete with iOS and Windows Phone 7. Allowing mediocre hardware manufacturers to completely undermine the OS design is not the way to beat Apple.