I want to be snarky and point out that Zonk obviously has no idea how other games are designed, but I think he pretty much nails why games publishers make bad decisions about what they publish. Those looking to play something other than a massively single-player game such as WoW might want to look at games such as Eve Online.
I know that over here in Europe we have different attitudes to sex, but not quite so much that've multiplied the population of the earth by a factor of 75 overnight. I mean really, if there were 450 billion of us those rules on data retention might be seen as unworkable even by politicians.
I'm not saying that I agree with the theory, but I would like to approach it with an open mind.
The basis behind the theory is that you can have a catalysed chemical reaction that can reduce the radius of an electron's orbit below the orbital radius of the ground state, and in doing so liberate the energy through non-radiative methods. The energy released depends upon the orbital radius, and is an integer multiple of the energy required to separate an electron and proton from hydrogen in its ground state. (13.6eV), liberating far more energy than would normally be available through simple burning.
The model for this relies upon an interpretation of classical quantum theory namely that an electron is not a point particle and a wave, but instead a 2D rotating current that when bound to a proton is distorted via electromagnetic forces into a orbiting spherical surface. Quite a neat idea, and one that explains a number of observable phenomena,
In fact, one of the theory's listed consequences (Mills has published peer-reviewed papers in many journals on a number of implications) is that indeed much of the universe consists of matter that has undergone such a change and exists not in the ground state, but in a state that we would not curently think to look for. Perhaps 90% of the mass of the universe may exist in this state. Because science doesn't know what it is yet, it's labelled "dark matter".
Muon-catalysed fusion would be great if it were'nt for the decay rate and the huge energy cost of muon production. If only we had a large, free source of energy provided by fusion...
Newton was an alchemist. Einstein a patent clerk. Are you really going to try to judge the feasibility of something based on the prior career of the person proposing it?
Also, the 1000 times figure seems to be giving you some problems. That figure is compared to the energy liberated by traditional combustion of hydrogen to provide thermal energy, which is a truly pathetic amount of energy. It pales into significance when compared to the most prevalent method of obtaining thermal energy from hydrogen in the universe, namely nuclear fusion.
Finally, the slashdot editor, not the anonymous poster, points out that Mills's theory would disprove quantum mechanics if found to be true, which indeed it would. But then, it would harldy be the first time a widely-accepted scientific theory was proven false.
Actually you could just click the link to the PDF file on the Black Light website that provides the list of 65 published papers. That's what peer review means: a paper has been reviewed by scientific peers as a requisite for publication. It doesn't mean that somebody else has published their own research that directly correlates to your own.
Do you really advocate confiscation of personal property over treating people like adults and requesting that they turn their phones off?
To what extent should social policies override personal freedom and property rights?
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is about private property and what a theatre is legally empowered to do, it's about an industry that shows increasing contempt towards its own customers - to the point of making an assumption of criminal behaviour.
More importantly, it's about how that industry is chasing a futile technological solution to a widespread sociological problem.
1. Release films worldwide at the same time. 2. Stop policing movie theatres with security guards and confiscating mobile phones as potential "recording equipment" and creating customer antipathy. 3. Release films to DVD within a month of their theatre release. 4. Stop putting region coding and anti-copying measures on DVDs.
And finally, the most important:
5. Stop your own employees from stealing and duplicating your films and selling them to criminal organisations for mass duplication.
I actually have a direct example of prior art that pre-dates this patent by over 2 years. Back in 1999, whilst working with Broadvision in both the UK and US, I was involved in a number of projects that implemented the exact method described in the patent.
Getting this absurd patent overthrown would be absolute child's play for anyone familiar with mapping taxonomy systems to observation logging and user ratings, which were common practice for anyone using systems such as Broadvision back in the late 90s.
As a long-suffering commuter, this news is really astounding. The London-Brighton express can reach 100MPH!
Of course, the speed of the train is pretty much irrelevant if you put the hotspot on the train, which is what GNER have been doing with their long-distance services for the last two years.
... of everyone who decides not to see his movie based on a review by an obsessive that they saw linked on Slashdot.
All those brain cells desperately signalling to each other, and yet the best that slashdot can come up with is an enormous echo chamber of uninformed opinions repeated from a single source.
This nonsense makes Vogon poetry look like Shakespeare.
Personally, I don't mind Google's services being labelled as beta. That's great, it gives them tiem to iron out bugs whilst being sure that nobody mistakes them for final, finished products.
The problem arises when people shipping software release a product that isn't final. Most software companies do it. Many games are barely of beta quality. It used to be that it was rare for a product to require a patch. Now many software products that I buy require a patch to even work at all.
The thing that I object to is paying to be a tester for a software company. The pressure of yearly release cycles and marketing schedules overrides any concerns that developers and testers might have about the stage of development.
Over here in the UK we have laws about consumer goods being reasonably fit for purpose. Most other countries probably have them too. When you buy a product and it's not fit for purpose, don't just wait for a patch, take it back to the retailer and demand a refund.
Of course, they might try to prevent you from exercising your statutory rights by claiming that the click-wrap license prevents you from returning the goods. This is normally incorrect. Again, most countries have laws that state your contract for sale of goods with a retailer cannot be modified later by the terms of a license that you can't see until after the sale.
In summary, consumers need to stop accepting bad products. Bitterly complaining about the quality of software is meaningless if you keep buying bad products.
First up, the group of bloggers that worked out that Jeff Gannon is a pseudonym deserve praise. Had he been fired for anything related to his activities as a White House plant, or because of the massive breach of White House security that his daily presence represented, then Bloggers should indeed be celebrating something great.
However, bloggers should not be celebrating. Rather than demonstrate any sense of morals, or display anything approaching professional levels of conduct, the bloggers involved went for the cheap kill. They got him fired for being gay.
What a person does in his private life is private business, and the right to privacy is one that bloggers of all people should respect. By ignoring this right, and indeed persecuting somebody because of their private activities, these bloggers are stepping over a dangerous line.
Some might call it tabloid journalism; it's the sign of a mob mentality. Pursuit of a goal through any means necessary - even the public exposure and humiliation of having a sexual preference cost somebody their job - that's nothing to be proud of.
Some advice to bloggers: think about what you do in your private life. Think about whether you want everyone with a web browser finding out about it.
First off, I should point out that I'm the guy who was interviewed by Demos for the report, and also the same Seb Potter that the nice people at the BBC interviewed for their piece. Please excuse any rambling in the article, I was interviewed very early in the morning, before coffee, on the day after the wedding of two close friends, and my brain was most definitely not fully engaged.
The first thing that I notice on here is a lot of detracting comments from people who haven't read the full report, but are just going on the headline. I'm not particularly surprised, as, of the several members of the press that interviewed me, only the BBC actually wanted to try to present the story in a positive light. Others just wanted to regurgitate the press release and get some nerdy quotes about not having a social life, for which I was happy to disappoint. No member of the press that I spoke to had actually read the port as far as I could tell.
Strangely, nobody wanted to publish my photo, because I don't look at all like the stereotypical image of a trainspotting nerd. I feel sorry for the other 5 people who were put forward by Demo as being examples of what Demos calls the "Pro/Amateur" economy, as the press ignored them completely.
So guys, remember that when you're pressing that submit button, you might be coming off as no more intelligent than a tabloid journalist.
I'm pretty encouraged by the report and what Demos are doing with it. For those who don't know the background, Demos is a think-tank organisation that provides policy advice to the british government. In this case, their advice has been obscured behind a knee-jerk press reaction, a reaction that I especially wouldn't have expected from the audience that the report praises.
You might need to know who I am, that I have the nerve to represent the community in this way. Well, I'm a 27 year old programmer from England. I've held a series of successively senior roles in several companies over the last 8 year, that has led to my current position as the Technical Director a company called Getfrank (http://www.getfrank.com/. Along the way I helped get Battle.Net started in Europe when I worked for Sierra/Vivendi running their online presence back in the 90s.
6 years ago, almost to the week, I was one of a handful of people that started an online community called evolt (http://evolt.org/). Actually, the wedding I was at this weekend was for 2 of the most prominent members of that community. I'm about to dump most of my time over the next couple of weeks to work on a complete rebuild of the technical architecture behind the community.
About 2 years ago I started working with the Plone project http://plone.org/, and became a core developer through working myself silly helping to get the 2.0 release out of the door. I don't get to contribute to the community as much as I would like at the moment, but that's mainly because everyone there is pretty damned good at what they do.
I have a steady girlfriend, but then, so do nearly all of my geeky friends, except the married ones. I have a social life that can best be characterised as amplified. I code about 50 hours a week at work for clients (on OSS projects), and about 30 hours a week for fun (on whatever the hell I like, but mostly little Torque Engine-based games for fun).
The point about the Pro/Amateur thing isn't people making a living out of their hobbies, it's mostly about motivation, and the availability of expertise and knowledge outside of the traditional bounds of "professions". In fact, it's one of the first indicators that many sections of the economy are noticing a move back away from the protestant work ethic, and back towards concepts of social responsibility and pride in self-directed achievement.
It's all small steps, and getting a report like this published and noticed in the press is just the first tiny step towards change, but it's definitely going to be an interesting journey.
Reading this article I'm surprised that The Guardian (very respected UK daily newspaper) have missed one of the more important aspects of the BBC (must highly respected news broadcaster in the world) buying Google search keywords related to the Hutton inquiry. This action will cause the BBC to appear as a link on any website mentioning the Hutton inquiry that uses Google advertising banners on its pages, not just on Google search results pages.
In taking this action, the BBC will be inexorably linked with the Hutton inquiry as a source of information, rather than having an major role in the events that have led to it.
I would also question the use of the phrases "buying up all internet search terms relating to the inquiry" and "anyone searching for "Hutton inquiry" or "Hutton report" on... Google is automatically directed to a paid-for link to BBC Online's own news coverage of the inquiry."
The first of these phrases implies the BBC is attempting to prevent others from using these keywords by buying Google's entire stock. This is obviously false, as anybody can buy Google's keywords and there is an unlimited supply.
The second of these phrases states that uses will atuomatically be directed to the BBC Online site when searching for 'Hutton enquiry'. This is blatantly false. Instead, a link to the BBC Online coverage will be displayed amongst a separate list of clearly demarcated sponsored links.
Buying advertising to negate the effect of negative crticism is a well-established business practice for which The Guardian (and indeed all other media which provide advertising facilities) have long served as a platform for.
What's far worse than the implied misdirection by the BBC in The Guardian's article is the blantant misreporting of opinion as fact in the Slashdot headline. Stating that the BBC is 'complicit' in the death of Dr Kelly is factually incorrect, not to mention libellous in the extreme.
I think you totally misunderstand Moore's Law. It doesn't state that the speed of processors will double every 18 months (which is a very common misconception). In fact, it states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a die will double every 18 months.
This still holds true.
Your point about speed is an important one, because you're talking about raw clock cycles of the CPU, rather than taking into account the overall processing efficiency and power consumption of the processor. For example, everyone criticises the lower clock speeds of Athlon processors, thinking that an Athlon 3200+ with it's 2.09GHz clock is slower that a 3.06GHz P4, when in reality the two systems are of roughly equivalent performance due to the differing processing pipelines implemented by AMD, as well as some smart decisions to bring a 512KB L2 cache to the party.
Looking at power consumption and heat dissipation (being the bigger problem, as heat is a direct result of the conductive ineffeciency of the medium), then Moore's law is the limiting factor. As the size of components is gradually reduced, the clock frequency can gradually be increased, and heat dissipation decreases. Reducing component size without increases clock speeds results in a fall-off in heat dissipation, and this is a balance that must be struck in the market struggle for faster computing. The limiting factors in computer speeds are the switching speeds of clock regulator circuits, and the distrance that a signal must travel through a circuit. In a system where cycles are measured in ten-billionths of a second, simply reducing the length of a circuit can have an enormous impact upon the clock frequency used for a system.
The problem with such reductions in scale is that, with traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes, eventually Moore's law will push against the limits of the physical processes involved, with current bleed across neighbouring wires, and the electrical resistance of increasingly thinner wires becoming real problems. Fortunately, the properties of nano-scale carbon wire suggest that radically new techniques available in the next decade will continue to allow the application of Moore's law for some time to come.
With Verisign's new VoteFinder(tm) service, those lost votes will form an entirely novel revenue stream. Lost votes are compared tho candidates that Verisign estimates the electorate wanted to vote for, and offered for sale through Verisign's 100% secure systems.
Such a system will have an enormous impact on the democratic system, as previously disenfranchised Americans can now participate electronically in the world's greatest farce.
Really, a pointless question. So NWN took me about two months to complete, Freelancer took about 2 weeks, GTA3 took the best part of three months.
Yeah, playing about the same amount per day.
The thing is, these are all big, reasonably open games that still have a definite plot to follow and goals to accomplish. You can keep playing each one after you're finished and discover vast new parts of the game you didn't even notice first time around.
That's the problem, because for me the subjective "length" of the game is going to differ vastly from your subjective "length". UT2k3 is about 4 hours of gameplay on "adept", but several days on "godlike". For another person you could triple those lengths or more, and for yet another person you could reduce them. (But not by too much, I hope:)
Here's the question you should ask, because it's a much better question and one that truly holds more value for the gaming industry as a whole:
"Are computer games worth their value, territory by territory, genre by genre?"
Once you figure out that a GameCube title in America costs about USD 40 (GBP 26, JPY 450), but in the UK it's GBP 40 (USD 60, or JPY 700), and in Japan it's JPY 250 or less (about USD 20, or GBP 16), then you can work out if you're really getting good value for your money.
Oh, I live in England. Yeah, it sucks to be a gamer here, when we have to wait 6 months or more for titles that get released in the US or Japan first.)
Oh, anyone know why a great FPS is more expensive than a good RPG, when the RPG content generally stretches further (for me at least) than the content of an FPS? No, me neither.
I used to work with Toyota UK, and in the rather lavish reception of their enormous new offices, they have had a continuously running demo of GT3 for about the last 2 years.
Quite impressive, I might add, as it's running over 9 linked 42-inch plasma screens.
The marketing department there absolutely loved GT3, and would often show off to customers, dealers, etc., by playing any one of a number of (really well driven) replays that they had saved.
Well, looking at the NASA NEO page (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2003qq47.html) shows the actual probability of 2003 QQ47 impacting the Earth in 2014 is 1 in 1.754 million, the highest isolated probability. The BBC's figure of 1 in 909000 is the cumulative probability of the asteroid impacting the Earth in the next century.
2003 QQ47 only merits a 1 on the Torino scale. That's the same rating given to random events. For anyone to get upset, you'd be looking for at least a 3 (out of 10) which is a 1% chance of a collision and some regional destruction. Compare this to a 10, which is guaranteed collision and global climatic catastrophe. A 10 event on the Torino scale happens every thousand centuries or so.
Journalists really ought to at least try and understand their subject matter before committing their thoughts to be distributed to the general public. They have a duty of responsibility to ensure that data of limited significance is not represented as some twisted interpretation of a coming apocalypse.
Note how the story doesn't mention the asteroid actually missing us. It notes that the probability of it hitting us is a little under 1:900000, based on current data.
Now, that doesn't mean the asteroid will hit us, and it doesn't mean it won't. It means that we don't know yet.
Still, the chances of this wiping out most of a continent are better than the chances of you winning the lottery. There, feel better yet?
Check out Apache's numbers. That would be about the same percentage as servers compromised, assuming the vast majority of Apache sites are running on Linux servers.
Now let's look at which web server runs most virtual hosting environments.
That would be apache again.
So, considering that compromising a single apache host could count for defacements of *thousands* of sites, is anyone still surprised about the numbers?
What kind of desktop environment called "Project Mad Hatter" is going to be taken seriously by a CIO?
I spend a lot of time with corporate management trying to convince them to make the move towards open-source software, and one of the biggest stumbling blocks is when a serious piece of software has a ridiculous name.
Me: Well, this a multi-user enterprise desktop, with groupware, task-management, exchange-server integration, a full office-suite compatible with MS Office. The great part is that it's going to save you more than 90% in terms of TCO over Micrsoft Windows and Office.
CIO: Great, what's it called?
Me: erm... *mumbles* Mad Hatter...
CIO: (hilarious laughter)
Me:...
CIO: No, really. What's it called?
Now, You can get away with it for programming languages, and for some way-out software (though trying to sell a creative director on The Gimp is always tricky), but when you're gunning for the enterprise desktop, wacky names just aren't helpful.
Please, for the sake of those of us actually trying to raise awareness of the Open Source Community, try to bear this scenario in mind.
As a puppet for SCO's marketing department, Mark Heise isn't the best choice, but I'll give hime one thing, he's a canny lawyer, and Lisa Bowman is an appalling journalist.
The real meat of the CNet article can be found at the bottom, and I'm shocked that it slipped under slashdot's collective radar.
Bowman: Are we going to see people come out and support the company in statements or legal filings?
Heise: [...] There haven't been any amicus briefs yet. It certainly wouldn't surprise me because a lot of issues in this case have applications outside of this narrow area.
Next question Heise answers, he's not talking about IT anymore, it's about Copyrights, and the Motion Picture Industry.
Heise: We're talking about copyright and how, in the Internet age, people are able to take protected material and have free access to it and make it accessible to millions of people at the flick of a switch. That's something that was unheard of in the past.
Does that argument sound familiar? It should do, because it's the party line that the MPAA and the RIAA have been offering as a defence of their anti-consumer actions for the past few years.
There are going to be entertainment industry executives following this case closely, because it already rings bells with their perceived struggle against 'intellectual property theft'.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the RIAA and MPAA filing anicus curae briefs on behalf of SCO, and I think Heise's interview is nothing more than a fishing trip to garner heavyweight support.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to be snarky and point out that Zonk obviously has no idea how other games are designed, but I think he pretty much nails why games publishers make bad decisions about what they publish. Those looking to play something other than a massively single-player game such as WoW might want to look at games such as Eve Online.
I know that over here in Europe we have different attitudes to sex, but not quite so much that've multiplied the population of the earth by a factor of 75 overnight. I mean really, if there were 450 billion of us those rules on data retention might be seen as unworkable even by politicians.
I'm not saying that I agree with the theory, but I would like to approach it with an open mind.
The basis behind the theory is that you can have a catalysed chemical reaction that can reduce the radius of an electron's orbit below the orbital radius of the ground state, and in doing so liberate the energy through non-radiative methods. The energy released depends upon the orbital radius, and is an integer multiple of the energy required to separate an electron and proton from hydrogen in its ground state. (13.6eV), liberating far more energy than would normally be available through simple burning.
The model for this relies upon an interpretation of classical quantum theory namely that an electron is not a point particle and a wave, but instead a 2D rotating current that when bound to a proton is distorted via electromagnetic forces into a orbiting spherical surface. Quite a neat idea, and one that explains a number of observable phenomena,
In fact, one of the theory's listed consequences (Mills has published peer-reviewed papers in many journals on a number of implications) is that indeed much of the universe consists of matter that has undergone such a change and exists not in the ground state, but in a state that we would not curently think to look for. Perhaps 90% of the mass of the universe may exist in this state. Because science doesn't know what it is yet, it's labelled "dark matter".
Muon-catalysed fusion would be great if it were'nt for the decay rate and the huge energy cost of muon production. If only we had a large, free source of energy provided by fusion...
Newton was an alchemist. Einstein a patent clerk. Are you really going to try to judge the feasibility of something based on the prior career of the person proposing it?
Also, the 1000 times figure seems to be giving you some problems. That figure is compared to the energy liberated by traditional combustion of hydrogen to provide thermal energy, which is a truly pathetic amount of energy. It pales into significance when compared to the most prevalent method of obtaining thermal energy from hydrogen in the universe, namely nuclear fusion.
Finally, the slashdot editor, not the anonymous poster, points out that Mills's theory would disprove quantum mechanics if found to be true, which indeed it would. But then, it would harldy be the first time a widely-accepted scientific theory was proven false.
Actually you could just click the link to the PDF file on the Black Light website that provides the list of 65 published papers. That's what peer review means: a paper has been reviewed by scientific peers as a requisite for publication. It doesn't mean that somebody else has published their own research that directly correlates to your own.
Do you really advocate confiscation of personal property over treating people like adults and requesting that they turn their phones off?
To what extent should social policies override personal freedom and property rights?
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is about private property and what a theatre is legally empowered to do, it's about an industry that shows increasing contempt towards its own customers - to the point of making an assumption of criminal behaviour.
More importantly, it's about how that industry is chasing a futile technological solution to a widespread sociological problem.
A simple guide for movie executives.
1. Release films worldwide at the same time.
2. Stop policing movie theatres with security guards and confiscating mobile phones as potential "recording equipment" and creating customer antipathy.
3. Release films to DVD within a month of their theatre release.
4. Stop putting region coding and anti-copying measures on DVDs.
And finally, the most important:
5. Stop your own employees from stealing and duplicating your films and selling them to criminal organisations for mass duplication.
I actually have a direct example of prior art that pre-dates this patent by over 2 years. Back in 1999, whilst working with Broadvision in both the UK and US, I was involved in a number of projects that implemented the exact method described in the patent.
Getting this absurd patent overthrown would be absolute child's play for anyone familiar with mapping taxonomy systems to observation logging and user ratings, which were common practice for anyone using systems such as Broadvision back in the late 90s.
As a long-suffering commuter, this news is really astounding. The London-Brighton express can reach 100MPH!
Of course, the speed of the train is pretty much irrelevant if you put the hotspot on the train, which is what GNER have been doing with their long-distance services for the last two years.
But who am I to quibble?
... of everyone who decides not to see his movie based on a review by an obsessive that they saw linked on Slashdot.
All those brain cells desperately signalling to each other, and yet the best that slashdot can come up with is an enormous echo chamber of uninformed opinions repeated from a single source.
This nonsense makes Vogon poetry look like Shakespeare.
Personally, I don't mind Google's services being labelled as beta. That's great, it gives them tiem to iron out bugs whilst being sure that nobody mistakes them for final, finished products.
The problem arises when people shipping software release a product that isn't final. Most software companies do it. Many games are barely of beta quality. It used to be that it was rare for a product to require a patch. Now many software products that I buy require a patch to even work at all.
The thing that I object to is paying to be a tester for a software company. The pressure of yearly release cycles and marketing schedules overrides any concerns that developers and testers might have about the stage of development.
Over here in the UK we have laws about consumer goods being reasonably fit for purpose. Most other countries probably have them too. When you buy a product and it's not fit for purpose, don't just wait for a patch, take it back to the retailer and demand a refund.
Of course, they might try to prevent you from exercising your statutory rights by claiming that the click-wrap license prevents you from returning the goods. This is normally incorrect. Again, most countries have laws that state your contract for sale of goods with a retailer cannot be modified later by the terms of a license that you can't see until after the sale.
In summary, consumers need to stop accepting bad products. Bitterly complaining about the quality of software is meaningless if you keep buying bad products.
First up, the group of bloggers that worked out that Jeff Gannon is a pseudonym deserve praise. Had he been fired for anything related to his activities as a White House plant, or because of the massive breach of White House security that his daily presence represented, then Bloggers should indeed be celebrating something great.
However, bloggers should not be celebrating. Rather than demonstrate any sense of morals, or display anything approaching professional levels of conduct, the bloggers involved went for the cheap kill. They got him fired for being gay.
What a person does in his private life is private business, and the right to privacy is one that bloggers of all people should respect. By ignoring this right, and indeed persecuting somebody because of their private activities, these bloggers are stepping over a dangerous line.
Some might call it tabloid journalism; it's the sign of a mob mentality. Pursuit of a goal through any means necessary - even the public exposure and humiliation of having a sexual preference cost somebody their job - that's nothing to be proud of.
Some advice to bloggers: think about what you do in your private life. Think about whether you want everyone with a web browser finding out about it.
First off, I should point out that I'm the guy who was interviewed by Demos for the report, and also the same Seb Potter that the nice people at the BBC interviewed for their piece. Please excuse any rambling in the article, I was interviewed very early in the morning, before coffee, on the day after the wedding of two close friends, and my brain was most definitely not fully engaged.
The first thing that I notice on here is a lot of detracting comments from people who haven't read the full report, but are just going on the headline. I'm not particularly surprised, as, of the several members of the press that interviewed me, only the BBC actually wanted to try to present the story in a positive light. Others just wanted to regurgitate the press release and get some nerdy quotes about not having a social life, for which I was happy to disappoint. No member of the press that I spoke to had actually read the port as far as I could tell.
Strangely, nobody wanted to publish my photo, because I don't look at all like the stereotypical image of a trainspotting nerd. I feel sorry for the other 5 people who were put forward by Demo as being examples of what Demos calls the "Pro/Amateur" economy, as the press ignored them completely.
So guys, remember that when you're pressing that submit button, you might be coming off as no more intelligent than a tabloid journalist.
I'm pretty encouraged by the report and what Demos are doing with it. For those who don't know the background, Demos is a think-tank organisation that provides policy advice to the british government. In this case, their advice has been obscured behind a knee-jerk press reaction, a reaction that I especially wouldn't have expected from the audience that the report praises.
You might need to know who I am, that I have the nerve to represent the community in this way. Well, I'm a 27 year old programmer from England. I've held a series of successively senior roles in several companies over the last 8 year, that has led to my current position as the Technical Director a company called Getfrank (http://www.getfrank.com/. Along the way I helped get Battle.Net started in Europe when I worked for Sierra/Vivendi running their online presence back in the 90s.
6 years ago, almost to the week, I was one of a handful of people that started an online community called evolt (http://evolt.org/). Actually, the wedding I was at this weekend was for 2 of the most prominent members of that community. I'm about to dump most of my time over the next couple of weeks to work on a complete rebuild of the technical architecture behind the community.
About 2 years ago I started working with the Plone project http://plone.org/, and became a core developer through working myself silly helping to get the 2.0 release out of the door. I don't get to contribute to the community as much as I would like at the moment, but that's mainly because everyone there is pretty damned good at what they do.
I have a steady girlfriend, but then, so do nearly all of my geeky friends, except the married ones. I have a social life that can best be characterised as amplified. I code about 50 hours a week at work for clients (on OSS projects), and about 30 hours a week for fun (on whatever the hell I like, but mostly little Torque Engine-based games for fun).
The point about the Pro/Amateur thing isn't people making a living out of their hobbies, it's mostly about motivation, and the availability of expertise and knowledge outside of the traditional bounds of "professions". In fact, it's one of the first indicators that many sections of the economy are noticing a move back away from the protestant work ethic, and back towards concepts of social responsibility and pride in self-directed achievement.
It's all small steps, and getting a report like this published and noticed in the press is just the first tiny step towards change, but it's definitely going to be an interesting journey.
Reading this article I'm surprised that The Guardian (very respected UK daily newspaper) have missed one of the more important aspects of the BBC (must highly respected news broadcaster in the world) buying Google search keywords related to the Hutton inquiry. This action will cause the BBC to appear as a link on any website mentioning the Hutton inquiry that uses Google advertising banners on its pages, not just on Google search results pages.
... Google is automatically directed to a paid-for link to BBC Online's own news coverage of the inquiry."
In taking this action, the BBC will be inexorably linked with the Hutton inquiry as a source of information, rather than having an major role in the events that have led to it.
I would also question the use of the phrases "buying up all internet search terms relating to the inquiry" and "anyone searching for "Hutton inquiry" or "Hutton report" on
The first of these phrases implies the BBC is attempting to prevent others from using these keywords by buying Google's entire stock. This is obviously false, as anybody can buy Google's keywords and there is an unlimited supply.
The second of these phrases states that uses will atuomatically be directed to the BBC Online site when searching for 'Hutton enquiry'. This is blatantly false. Instead, a link to the BBC Online coverage will be displayed amongst a separate list of clearly demarcated sponsored links.
Buying advertising to negate the effect of negative crticism is a well-established business practice for which The Guardian (and indeed all other media which provide advertising facilities) have long served as a platform for.
What's far worse than the implied misdirection by the BBC in The Guardian's article is the blantant misreporting of opinion as fact in the Slashdot headline. Stating that the BBC is 'complicit' in the death of Dr Kelly is factually incorrect, not to mention libellous in the extreme.
Time to reach for the wallets, folks...
I think you totally misunderstand Moore's Law. It doesn't state that the speed of processors will double every 18 months (which is a very common misconception). In fact, it states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a die will double every 18 months.
This still holds true.
Your point about speed is an important one, because you're talking about raw clock cycles of the CPU, rather than taking into account the overall processing efficiency and power consumption of the processor. For example, everyone criticises the lower clock speeds of Athlon processors, thinking that an Athlon 3200+ with it's 2.09GHz clock is slower that a 3.06GHz P4, when in reality the two systems are of roughly equivalent performance due to the differing processing pipelines implemented by AMD, as well as some smart decisions to bring a 512KB L2 cache to the party.
Looking at power consumption and heat dissipation (being the bigger problem, as heat is a direct result of the conductive ineffeciency of the medium), then Moore's law is the limiting factor. As the size of components is gradually reduced, the clock frequency can gradually be increased, and heat dissipation decreases. Reducing component size without increases clock speeds results in a fall-off in heat dissipation, and this is a balance that must be struck in the market struggle for faster computing. The limiting factors in computer speeds are the switching speeds of clock regulator circuits, and the distrance that a signal must travel through a circuit. In a system where cycles are measured in ten-billionths of a second, simply reducing the length of a circuit can have an enormous impact upon the clock frequency used for a system.
The problem with such reductions in scale is that, with traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes, eventually Moore's law will push against the limits of the physical processes involved, with current bleed across neighbouring wires, and the electrical resistance of increasingly thinner wires becoming real problems. Fortunately, the properties of nano-scale carbon wire suggest that radically new techniques available in the next decade will continue to allow the application of Moore's law for some time to come.
>> Nothing lost, nothing gained.
With Verisign's new VoteFinder(tm) service, those lost votes will form an entirely novel revenue stream. Lost votes are compared tho candidates that Verisign estimates the electorate wanted to vote for, and offered for sale through Verisign's 100% secure systems.
Such a system will have an enormous impact on the democratic system, as previously disenfranchised Americans can now participate electronically in the world's greatest farce.
Really, a pointless question. So NWN took me about two months to complete, Freelancer took about 2 weeks, GTA3 took the best part of three months.
:)
Yeah, playing about the same amount per day.
The thing is, these are all big, reasonably open games that still have a definite plot to follow and goals to accomplish. You can keep playing each one after you're finished and discover vast new parts of the game you didn't even notice first time around.
That's the problem, because for me the subjective "length" of the game is going to differ vastly from your subjective "length". UT2k3 is about 4 hours of gameplay on "adept", but several days on "godlike". For another person you could triple those lengths or more, and for yet another person you could reduce them. (But not by too much, I hope
Here's the question you should ask, because it's a much better question and one that truly holds more value for the gaming industry as a whole:
"Are computer games worth their value, territory by territory, genre by genre?"
Once you figure out that a GameCube title in America costs about USD 40 (GBP 26, JPY 450), but in the UK it's GBP 40 (USD 60, or JPY 700), and in Japan it's JPY 250 or less (about USD 20, or GBP 16), then you can work out if you're really getting good value for your money.
Oh, I live in England. Yeah, it sucks to be a gamer here, when we have to wait 6 months or more for titles that get released in the US or Japan first.)
Oh, anyone know why a great FPS is more expensive than a good RPG, when the RPG content generally stretches further (for me at least) than the content of an FPS? No, me neither.
I used to work with Toyota UK, and in the rather lavish reception of their enormous new offices, they have had a continuously running demo of GT3 for about the last 2 years.
Quite impressive, I might add, as it's running over 9 linked 42-inch plasma screens.
The marketing department there absolutely loved GT3, and would often show off to customers, dealers, etc., by playing any one of a number of (really well driven) replays that they had saved.
The IAB has issued a set of guidelines for the us of DNS wildcards.
Essentially, they say it's a very bad idea, but you can do it with the informed consent of all delegates in your zone.
Well, looking at the NASA NEO page (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2003qq47.html) shows the actual probability of 2003 QQ47 impacting the Earth in 2014 is 1 in 1.754 million, the highest isolated probability. The BBC's figure of 1 in 909000 is the cumulative probability of the asteroid impacting the Earth in the next century.
2003 QQ47 only merits a 1 on the Torino scale. That's the same rating given to random events. For anyone to get upset, you'd be looking for at least a 3 (out of 10) which is a 1% chance of a collision and some regional destruction. Compare this to a 10, which is guaranteed collision and global climatic catastrophe. A 10 event on the Torino scale happens every thousand centuries or so.
Journalists really ought to at least try and understand their subject matter before committing their thoughts to be distributed to the general public. They have a duty of responsibility to ensure that data of limited significance is not represented as some twisted interpretation of a coming apocalypse.
Note how the story doesn't mention the asteroid actually missing us. It notes that the probability of it hitting us is a little under 1:900000, based on current data.
Now, that doesn't mean the asteroid will hit us, and it doesn't mean it won't. It means that we don't know yet.
Still, the chances of this wiping out most of a continent are better than the chances of you winning the lottery. There, feel better yet?
Go here
Check out Apache's numbers. That would be about the same percentage as servers compromised, assuming the vast majority of Apache sites are running on Linux servers.
Now let's look at which web server runs most virtual hosting environments.
That would be apache again.
So, considering that compromising a single apache host could count for defacements of *thousands* of sites, is anyone still surprised about the numbers?
What kind of desktop environment called "Project Mad Hatter" is going to be taken seriously by a CIO?
...
I spend a lot of time with corporate management trying to convince them to make the move towards open-source software, and one of the biggest stumbling blocks is when a serious piece of software has a ridiculous name.
Me: Well, this a multi-user enterprise desktop, with groupware, task-management, exchange-server integration, a full office-suite compatible with MS Office. The great part is that it's going to save you more than 90% in terms of TCO over Micrsoft Windows and Office.
CIO: Great, what's it called?
Me: erm... *mumbles* Mad Hatter...
CIO: (hilarious laughter)
Me:
CIO: No, really. What's it called?
Now, You can get away with it for programming languages, and for some way-out software (though trying to sell a creative director on The Gimp is always tricky), but when you're gunning for the enterprise desktop, wacky names just aren't helpful.
Please, for the sake of those of us actually trying to raise awareness of the Open Source Community, try to bear this scenario in mind.
As a puppet for SCO's marketing department, Mark Heise isn't the best choice, but I'll give hime one thing, he's a canny lawyer, and Lisa Bowman is an appalling journalist.
The real meat of the CNet article can be found at the bottom, and I'm shocked that it slipped under slashdot's collective radar.
Bowman: Are we going to see people come out and support the company in statements or legal filings?
Heise: [...] There haven't been any amicus briefs yet. It certainly wouldn't surprise me because a lot of issues in this case have applications outside of this narrow area.
Next question Heise answers, he's not talking about IT anymore, it's about Copyrights, and the Motion Picture Industry.
Heise: We're talking about copyright and how, in the Internet age, people are able to take protected material and have free access to it and make it accessible to millions of people at the flick of a switch. That's something that was unheard of in the past.
Does that argument sound familiar? It should do, because it's the party line that the MPAA and the RIAA have been offering as a defence of their anti-consumer actions for the past few years.
There are going to be entertainment industry executives following this case closely, because it already rings bells with their perceived struggle against 'intellectual property theft'.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the RIAA and MPAA filing anicus curae briefs on behalf of SCO, and I think Heise's interview is nothing more than a fishing trip to garner heavyweight support.