well, if one actually reads the article, it indicates that it doesn't contain your medical history, rather just a personal upc code which is tied to a database...
The fundamental potential for abuse is that since some institution now has a unique ID linked to you, somebody with access to the back-end databases will be able to know as much as the databases recorded.
everything can be abused with the right (wrong?) mindset. In this case, however, one must weigh the potential good against the possible abuse. In the past 5 years, I've moved 3 times, and have had 4 different primary care physicians. If I wanted to get all of my medical history complete and uptodate with my current doctor, I'd have a lot of work to do (and this doesn't include all the specialist consults I have had). Some sort of national medical database would alleviate this problem. I think the good here far outweighs the potential negatives of a few devious individuals who can now see that I had an ulcer in '97...
everyone can read my info, and now I have to worry about my health info being scanned by everyone with any remote interest in it.
well, seeing as how the chip only has a unique number on it that is tied to a medical database, I doubt that just anyone can find out your medical history. the chance of any company being able to scan you and getting your medical history is exactly the same as said company doing a background check on you and coming up with your medical history. (they're either going to have access to the medical database, or they won't have access) the chip would just speed up the process.
It would really be nice if Nintendo made an effort to push their cool-toy technology on their developers. You give the example of the GBA, Gamecube link-up. Nintendo should make a serious effort to start implementing this in as many games as possible. I just bought Madden. That and most other sports games are just begging for the GBA to be used as your own secret playbook. Obviously connectivity wasn't included because it's cheaper for EA to just port the PS2 version as is (removing stuff if necessary) than to add additional feature. However, if nintendo lent out a couple programmers to EA to add this feature at minimal cost, I think that would really enhance the 'Cube as a very cool gaming system.
exactly. and perhaps they shouldn't be accepting ad revenue directly or indirectly from companies they review. (the current ad i get when loading the homepage is an MSI motherboard based on nVidia's nforce3, which interestingly quotes an Anandtech review in it.)
but this is internet journalism, where ethical rules don't seem to apply...
again, it boils down to sites wanting to be first, even if first means 1 minute after midnight when the NDA expires.
The whole idea that we need a pre-release review is stupid. Every top of the line video card and CPU is going to be slower than the next top of the line product within a few months of release. That's practically a given. (so a pre-release review on a not-yet-ready for ready for primetime product is just going to qualitatively confirm this.) And its also a given that software is continually tweaked up until release, and even after release. So, if the review sites really wanted to do a service to their readers (rather than a service to their advertisers and their own pockets), they would wait until the product is finalized, and the shipping drivers are locked. Even if this means waiting until the product is shipping.
And why are they even reviewing products in beta-test stage (as pointed out in the 2nd paragraph)? Particularly in a quantative sense. It's absolutely fine to review the beta for World of Warcraft and say "generally, its loads of fun". But it's no where near fine to review nVidia's beta BFGPU and say it's 4.36x faster than ATIs Wonderblunder. That's just shoddy reporting of test results that are going to change depending on which beta version they're using.
The 4 points that they list in the article are fairly obvious. 1) We shouldn't rush a review because they tell us to. 2) we shouldn't review stuff that isn't finished. 3) we shouldn't review stuff that isn't going to be available for several months. 4) we (the collective review site community) shouldn't whore ourselves to all put out first day reviews simultaneously.
While it's nice that they spell it out, why haven't they been practicing this since day 1? Where is the mea cupla? Nice plain English that says "We chose to be a PR machine for nVidia/ATI and have released shoddy reviews in the past. We're sorry and this is how we're making it up to you..." The whole article pawns responsibiilty for the problem off to the manufacturers, in essence saying they are forcing review sites to publish reviews quickly. No, they aren't. Its the review sites who have become too accustomed to nVidia/ATI's nipple too actually adhere to some sort of journalistic principle that are to blame.
If the fear of not being first trumps being right, then perhaps these websites shouldn't be in the review business to begin with.
Tom's were the people putting the reviews out early using buggy drivers. They're the only ones to blame.
Nvidia and ATI are all about getting as much free publicity as possible. If slipping a card to Tom's gets a pre-release review that breathlessly points out how it gets 3.5 fps more at 1600x with FSAA turned on, the manufactorer's are going to do it. You can't really fault them for trying to one up the competition.
However, the article seems like TH are blaming the manufacturer's for this. Take this quote for example: "Maybe everyone has lost sight of the fact that all the analysis that is done is supposed to serve the consumer, the interested reader and to help them make informed decisions." The only people who seem to have forgotten this are the reviewers at TH and other sites that push to get their exclusive first reviews out before the product or any other website beats them to it.
And then, there's this doozy in the opening paragraph: "It's always the same, with no time to do thorough testing, constant last minute changes, and a rush to print. If we were cynical, we'd have to think that the companies involved do not want us to have time to do thorough testing." Are the companies actually giving them the cards and saying "you have 40 minutes to post a review?", or is it more likely TH is given the card (maybe around the same time a competing site is given a card), and TH is just being quick and sloppy to get the first review out?
No one is forcing them to publish reviews of products they've hardly tested except themselves. While it's good that they seem to recognize the symptom (shoddy reviews), it's be nice if they recognized the underlying problem (they want to be first to benchmark) rather than pawn it off on the manufacturers (who are just out to get free publicity).
you still have complete control over your computer. what you don't have complete control over is the document that google is providing.
museums often restrict one's ability to take photographs (and not always because of the photosensitive nature of the art). While this isn't a perfect analogy, both google and the museum are providing a service and you should abide by their rules. No one is forcing you to use google's book scanning service.
back in the day Valve signs with Sierra and agrees to certain things, namely Sierra as distributor and giving Sierra some intellectual property stake in the game. Couple years later, Valve then plays hardball with Sierra and gets the IP back (so now they can make HL action figures and rake in the bucks like Lucas), but they are still under contract to produce games, however they can now distribute some stuff online. At some point Vivendi buys Sierra, and begins distributing games to cyber cafe without compensating Valve. Valve sues, then gets counter sued by Vivendi/Sierra claiming they lied about Steam and its capabilities.
So, what I can't figure out is whatever happened to powerplay?
Actually, given how much of a nonstarter powerplay was, I'd imagine if I were Valve, I'd downplay my plans with Steam as well. As much as I love the game, the company doesn't really have much of a track record with anything not directly related to HL...
fact is, though, this is a big step in the right direction. To successfully predict a quake, you need location, magnitude and time. They've got location down and time vaguely constrained (article doesn't state time effect, other than a quake in this location within 10 years) and a lower limit on magnitude (at least 5). That's better than nothing. and certainly something to use as a starting point for future modelling efforts.
It really is an honor for a University to have a Nobel Laureate in their staff, and UC Irvine just got one. =]
Actually, UC Irvine got their first 2 nobel laureates 9 year ago, in 1995. Both Sherwood Roland and Frederick Reines received awards that year. Subsequently, the Physical sciences I and II buildings were renamed Roland Hall and Reines Hall. Best part of winning the award, though, were the 2 parking spaces with signs reading "Parking reserved for Nobel Laureate".
and I must say, it is a lot of fun. At first, the idea of smacking bongos in tune with the TV seemed childish, but once you get over the whole "do I look like an idiot to my wife?" factor, it's a whole new game. Smacking those little plastic bongos, clapping, waving your hands like you're a some sort of drumming superstar.
One of biggest downside to the game, is that it can be difficult to hear the actual game if you're really hitting the drums. There's a bunch of different drum sounds you can eventually select from, and you really have to turn the TV up to hear them over your own smacking and clapping. That, and I'm sure my neighbors are getting tired of me with my barking dogs drum set playing We Will Rock You for the tenth time in a row.
Song selection, for the post-alternative 30 year old is mixed. There's a few classic rock songs that are fun to drum with, and a bunch of modern alternative. But about half is kids/weird pop/nintendo tunes that i'm not really familiar with and don't have any real concept of how the beat fits in with the song.
bathroom it the worse place for it though. i had a roommate in college who had a cat; the box was in our bathroom. whenever i'd get out of the shower, i'd step on those little clay pellets that the cat would invariably fling all over the floor. and being clayey pellets, they'd stick to my feet and be fairly unpleasant.
man i hated that apartment. (although the roommate who might have been using my deodorant and comb was worse)
I don't see how the 2 issues contradict each other. Both viewpoints seem to adhere to the idea of separation of church and state. With regards to abortion, the ACLU believes the legality of abortion should not be threatened by an individual or groups religious beliefes interefering with the state's law making decisions. The same argument holds for the school voucher issue, just in reverse. The state's law making abilities should not favor a religious belief.
They're both consistent. Keep religion out of public legislation, whether it's laws that potentially support a religion (school vouchers) or laws that run afoul of some people's religious sensibilities (abortion.)
TFC was actually a first-party mod that Valve released in an apology to the fans who bought the game in anticipation of Half-Life: Fortress. just about everything else, though, was third party.
and the game did ship with vanilla deathmatch. which was decent fun but nothing to write home about.
standard edition: what exactly do they put on 6 cds?
you've got an engine CD, a content cd and a content cd for CS:S. what do you need the other 3 cds for? the gold steam package looks like it might require a few more CDs (day of defeat, HL1, all HL mods), but most of that stuff doesn't seem to be in the retail box.
That is unless you're in India and work for two dollars a day. Then you're okay.
actually, the Indian's got the axe some time ago. Earthlink now outsources customer suport to the Phillipines. they're leading the pack on this trend...
didn't the new version of IE that installs with SP2 come with a popup blocker and other advances? sure they don't have all the other nice things that one can get in firefox, but they're not entirely sitting on their behinds...
one could look at it that way, or one could look at is as a mistake (engineers releasing product before lawyers had added their input?).
Recall that WMP 9 was probably MS's first instance where they started to make people's privacy important. During install, there is an explicit privacy step you have to go through, checking a number of boxes on whether to allow net connections to search for things, whether to use your media player's unique id, etc. And it wasn't set up like Real and all their hidden check boxes visible if you only scroll down. Very much visible and meant to be taken seriously. There's a very clear and visible "Privacy" tab in the options menu.
No doubt this article will convince a bunch of clueless wannabe's that they MUST piss away $1000 in hardware over the next week else they won't be playing Doom 3.
Actually, they post framerates for the recommended low end system that seem perfectly respectable (i.e., hovering around the 20-30 range) for an ancient system. I'm running a athlon 2100+ with a GeForce4 TI card and I'm not about to upgrade cause of this game.
(now when HL2 comes out and I've got 2 pieces of eyecandy that are droolworthy, I might think about some sort of upgrade...)
I second this complaint. As I recall, one of the recent Blizzard games (fairly sure it has to be Warcraft 3, but it might have been Diablo 2) required admin rights in order to play online through battle.net. Took me a while to figure out why online wasn't working for me, until I switched to admin account, and then voila. I complained in their forums about this (with the predictable response from other players, "why don't you just switch your setting?"); few patches later Blizzard made the game playable with normal user setting. So, it's good that some companies get it, althought it would have been nice if they had gotten it from the start.
Re:I think is was said somewhere else...
on
P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 1
Tell those who can fix it/do something about it, and no one else.
he has done this, at least the first part. Click the why this site exists link and read the story behind it. Guy finds military documets on P2P. contacts a bunch of military installations and gets 0 response.
at this point what should the guy do? the people who should be concerned are ignoring him. So the one way to get attention when no one is listening is to scream at the top of your lungs (i.e., put up a website with sanitized versions of stuff that shouldn't be on p2p) and force them to take action through embarassment.
The interesting thing about radio and Clear Channel owning everything is that they're now realizing that it doesn't work. People are not listening to the radio anymore, and in an effort to lure listeners back, Clear Channel is cutting commerical time down. There's an interesting discussion of that, and it's rammifications here. The bottom line being that while these megacorps may own everything they can't keep shoveling crap down the consumers throats forever, otherwise the market adapts and makes them obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a concern if it holds my medical history
well, if one actually reads the article, it indicates that it doesn't contain your medical history, rather just a personal upc code which is tied to a database...
The fundamental potential for abuse is that since some institution now has a unique ID linked to you, somebody with access to the back-end databases will be able to know as much as the databases recorded.
everything can be abused with the right (wrong?) mindset. In this case, however, one must weigh the potential good against the possible abuse. In the past 5 years, I've moved 3 times, and have had 4 different primary care physicians. If I wanted to get all of my medical history complete and uptodate with my current doctor, I'd have a lot of work to do (and this doesn't include all the specialist consults I have had). Some sort of national medical database would alleviate this problem. I think the good here far outweighs the potential negatives of a few devious individuals who can now see that I had an ulcer in '97...
everyone can read my info, and now I have to worry about my health info being scanned by everyone with any remote interest in it.
well, seeing as how the chip only has a unique number on it that is tied to a medical database, I doubt that just anyone can find out your medical history. the chance of any company being able to scan you and getting your medical history is exactly the same as said company doing a background check on you and coming up with your medical history. (they're either going to have access to the medical database, or they won't have access) the chip would just speed up the process.
It would really be nice if Nintendo made an effort to push their cool-toy technology on their developers. You give the example of the GBA, Gamecube link-up. Nintendo should make a serious effort to start implementing this in as many games as possible. I just bought Madden. That and most other sports games are just begging for the GBA to be used as your own secret playbook. Obviously connectivity wasn't included because it's cheaper for EA to just port the PS2 version as is (removing stuff if necessary) than to add additional feature. However, if nintendo lent out a couple programmers to EA to add this feature at minimal cost, I think that would really enhance the 'Cube as a very cool gaming system.
exactly. and perhaps they shouldn't be accepting ad revenue directly or indirectly from companies they review. (the current ad i get when loading the homepage is an MSI motherboard based on nVidia's nforce3, which interestingly quotes an Anandtech review in it.)
but this is internet journalism, where ethical rules don't seem to apply...
again, it boils down to sites wanting to be first, even if first means 1 minute after midnight when the NDA expires.
The whole idea that we need a pre-release review is stupid. Every top of the line video card and CPU is going to be slower than the next top of the line product within a few months of release. That's practically a given. (so a pre-release review on a not-yet-ready for ready for primetime product is just going to qualitatively confirm this.) And its also a given that software is continually tweaked up until release, and even after release. So, if the review sites really wanted to do a service to their readers (rather than a service to their advertisers and their own pockets), they would wait until the product is finalized, and the shipping drivers are locked. Even if this means waiting until the product is shipping.
And why are they even reviewing products in beta-test stage (as pointed out in the 2nd paragraph)? Particularly in a quantative sense. It's absolutely fine to review the beta for World of Warcraft and say "generally, its loads of fun". But it's no where near fine to review nVidia's beta BFGPU and say it's 4.36x faster than ATIs Wonderblunder. That's just shoddy reporting of test results that are going to change depending on which beta version they're using.
The 4 points that they list in the article are fairly obvious. 1) We shouldn't rush a review because they tell us to. 2) we shouldn't review stuff that isn't finished. 3) we shouldn't review stuff that isn't going to be available for several months. 4) we (the collective review site community) shouldn't whore ourselves to all put out first day reviews simultaneously.
While it's nice that they spell it out, why haven't they been practicing this since day 1? Where is the mea cupla? Nice plain English that says "We chose to be a PR machine for nVidia/ATI and have released shoddy reviews in the past. We're sorry and this is how we're making it up to you..." The whole article pawns responsibiilty for the problem off to the manufacturers, in essence saying they are forcing review sites to publish reviews quickly. No, they aren't. Its the review sites who have become too accustomed to nVidia/ATI's nipple too actually adhere to some sort of journalistic principle that are to blame.
If the fear of not being first trumps being right, then perhaps these websites shouldn't be in the review business to begin with.
Tom's were the people putting the reviews out early using buggy drivers. They're the only ones to blame.
Nvidia and ATI are all about getting as much free publicity as possible. If slipping a card to Tom's gets a pre-release review that breathlessly points out how it gets 3.5 fps more at 1600x with FSAA turned on, the manufactorer's are going to do it. You can't really fault them for trying to one up the competition.
However, the article seems like TH are blaming the manufacturer's for this. Take this quote for example: "Maybe everyone has lost sight of the fact that all the analysis that is done is supposed to serve the consumer, the interested reader and to help them make informed decisions." The only people who seem to have forgotten this are the reviewers at TH and other sites that push to get their exclusive first reviews out before the product or any other website beats them to it.
And then, there's this doozy in the opening paragraph: "It's always the same, with no time to do thorough testing, constant last minute changes, and a rush to print. If we were cynical, we'd have to think that the companies involved do not want us to have time to do thorough testing." Are the companies actually giving them the cards and saying "you have 40 minutes to post a review?", or is it more likely TH is given the card (maybe around the same time a competing site is given a card), and TH is just being quick and sloppy to get the first review out?
No one is forcing them to publish reviews of products they've hardly tested except themselves. While it's good that they seem to recognize the symptom (shoddy reviews), it's be nice if they recognized the underlying problem (they want to be first to benchmark) rather than pawn it off on the manufacturers (who are just out to get free publicity).
you still have complete control over your computer. what you don't have complete control over is the document that google is providing.
museums often restrict one's ability to take photographs (and not always because of the photosensitive nature of the art). While this isn't a perfect analogy, both google and the museum are providing a service and you should abide by their rules. No one is forcing you to use google's book scanning service.
lemme see if i've got this straight,
back in the day Valve signs with Sierra and agrees to certain things, namely Sierra as distributor and giving Sierra some intellectual property stake in the game. Couple years later, Valve then plays hardball with Sierra and gets the IP back (so now they can make HL action figures and rake in the bucks like Lucas), but they are still under contract to produce games, however they can now distribute some stuff online. At some point Vivendi buys Sierra, and begins distributing games to cyber cafe without compensating Valve. Valve sues, then gets counter sued by Vivendi/Sierra claiming they lied about Steam and its capabilities.
So, what I can't figure out is whatever happened to powerplay?
Actually, given how much of a nonstarter powerplay was, I'd imagine if I were Valve, I'd downplay my plans with Steam as well. As much as I love the game, the company doesn't really have much of a track record with anything not directly related to HL...
fact is, though, this is a big step in the right direction. To successfully predict a quake, you need location, magnitude and time. They've got location down and time vaguely constrained (article doesn't state time effect, other than a quake in this location within 10 years) and a lower limit on magnitude (at least 5). That's better than nothing. and certainly something to use as a starting point for future modelling efforts.
It really is an honor for a University to have a Nobel Laureate in their staff, and UC Irvine just got one. =]
Actually, UC Irvine got their first 2 nobel laureates 9 year ago, in 1995. Both Sherwood Roland and Frederick Reines received awards that year. Subsequently, the Physical sciences I and II buildings were renamed Roland Hall and Reines Hall. Best part of winning the award, though, were the 2 parking spaces with signs reading "Parking reserved for Nobel Laureate".
and I must say, it is a lot of fun. At first, the idea of smacking bongos in tune with the TV seemed childish, but once you get over the whole "do I look like an idiot to my wife?" factor, it's a whole new game. Smacking those little plastic bongos, clapping, waving your hands like you're a some sort of drumming superstar.
One of biggest downside to the game, is that it can be difficult to hear the actual game if you're really hitting the drums. There's a bunch of different drum sounds you can eventually select from, and you really have to turn the TV up to hear them over your own smacking and clapping. That, and I'm sure my neighbors are getting tired of me with my barking dogs drum set playing We Will Rock You for the tenth time in a row.
Song selection, for the post-alternative 30 year old is mixed. There's a few classic rock songs that are fun to drum with, and a bunch of modern alternative. But about half is kids/weird pop/nintendo tunes that i'm not really familiar with and don't have any real concept of how the beat fits in with the song.
bathroom it the worse place for it though. i had a roommate in college who had a cat; the box was in our bathroom. whenever i'd get out of the shower, i'd step on those little clay pellets that the cat would invariably fling all over the floor. and being clayey pellets, they'd stick to my feet and be fairly unpleasant.
man i hated that apartment. (although the roommate who might have been using my deodorant and comb was worse)
I don't see how the 2 issues contradict each other. Both viewpoints seem to adhere to the idea of separation of church and state. With regards to abortion, the ACLU believes the legality of abortion should not be threatened by an individual or groups religious beliefes interefering with the state's law making decisions. The same argument holds for the school voucher issue, just in reverse. The state's law making abilities should not favor a religious belief.
They're both consistent. Keep religion out of public legislation, whether it's laws that potentially support a religion (school vouchers) or laws that run afoul of some people's religious sensibilities (abortion.)
TFC was actually a first-party mod that Valve released in an apology to the fans who bought the game in anticipation of Half-Life: Fortress. just about everything else, though, was third party.
and the game did ship with vanilla deathmatch. which was decent fun but nothing to write home about.
standard edition: what exactly do they put on 6 cds?
you've got an engine CD, a content cd and a content cd for CS:S. what do you need the other 3 cds for? the gold steam package looks like it might require a few more CDs (day of defeat, HL1, all HL mods), but most of that stuff doesn't seem to be in the retail box.
it's not even that. The 1 sentence blurb should read "Governor signed bill forcing stores to explain ESRB rating".
That is unless you're in India and work for two dollars a day. Then you're okay.
actually, the Indian's got the axe some time ago. Earthlink now outsources customer suport to the Phillipines. they're leading the pack on this trend...
didn't the new version of IE that installs with SP2 come with a popup blocker and other advances? sure they don't have all the other nice things that one can get in firefox, but they're not entirely sitting on their behinds...
one could look at it that way, or one could look at is as a mistake (engineers releasing product before lawyers had added their input?).
Recall that WMP 9 was probably MS's first instance where they started to make people's privacy important. During install, there is an explicit privacy step you have to go through, checking a number of boxes on whether to allow net connections to search for things, whether to use your media player's unique id, etc. And it wasn't set up like Real and all their hidden check boxes visible if you only scroll down. Very much visible and meant to be taken seriously. There's a very clear and visible "Privacy" tab in the options menu.
No doubt this article will convince a bunch of clueless wannabe's that they MUST piss away $1000 in hardware over the next week else they won't be playing Doom 3.
Actually, they post framerates for the recommended low end system that seem perfectly respectable (i.e., hovering around the 20-30 range) for an ancient system. I'm running a athlon 2100+ with a GeForce4 TI card and I'm not about to upgrade cause of this game.
(now when HL2 comes out and I've got 2 pieces of eyecandy that are droolworthy, I might think about some sort of upgrade...)
I second this complaint. As I recall, one of the recent Blizzard games (fairly sure it has to be Warcraft 3, but it might have been Diablo 2) required admin rights in order to play online through battle.net. Took me a while to figure out why online wasn't working for me, until I switched to admin account, and then voila. I complained in their forums about this (with the predictable response from other players, "why don't you just switch your setting?"); few patches later Blizzard made the game playable with normal user setting. So, it's good that some companies get it, althought it would have been nice if they had gotten it from the start.
Tell those who can fix it/do something about it, and no one else.
he has done this, at least the first part. Click the why this site exists link and read the story behind it. Guy finds military documets on P2P. contacts a bunch of military installations and gets 0 response.
at this point what should the guy do? the people who should be concerned are ignoring him. So the one way to get attention when no one is listening is to scream at the top of your lungs (i.e., put up a website with sanitized versions of stuff that shouldn't be on p2p) and force them to take action through embarassment.
Is that the story you got? I got a link to Bush Pedals New Program: Mountain Biking. Likewise, the showgirls link immediately adjacent to the Bourne story goes to a story about a guy selling a restaurant.
cleary still in beta...
The interesting thing about radio and Clear Channel owning everything is that they're now realizing that it doesn't work. People are not listening to the radio anymore, and in an effort to lure listeners back, Clear Channel is cutting commerical time down. There's an interesting discussion of that, and it's rammifications here. The bottom line being that while these megacorps may own everything they can't keep shoveling crap down the consumers throats forever, otherwise the market adapts and makes them obsolete.