I think he was just trying to be punny. If someone is dumb enough to not know the difference between North and South Korea, I doubt they'll know where Seoul is, or even that it exists.
Actually, if that demo is indicative of the game as a whole, then it makes a very good argument as to why the 3D graphics were so vital to the original portal game. The original portal is far more playable, and its 3D nature allows for far more interesting puzzles. The text game is, while an interesting exercise in what's possible with antiquated graphics, appears to be a far inferior game. Just the way it handles moving the scenery around while keeping the player upright would give me a headache in about 10 seconds.
A Windows machine being run by someone who cares about security and updates it regularly won't end up in a botnet either, so I'm not sure what your point is.
It's not necessarily Sun that leaked it. Hardware manufacturers (and software houses, for that matter) routinely show large customers their roadmaps under NDA. It's entirely possible some less than scrupulous employee of one of their big customers leaked it, in violation of their NDA.
Network television is supported by advertising alone, and their costs are far, far higher than the cost to run a social networking site. Yes, advertising revenue online is peanuts compared to TV advertising revenue, but the costs are also peanuts in comparison. On the other hand, the reason online sites are always looking for new ways to insert advertising in the user experience is because, although they might make enough to be profitable, they still aren't raking in "buy your own country" money.
Allow people to pay money to deliver electrical shocks to celebrities every time they "tweet" something stupid. They could make millions in a matter of minutes.
HR3200 considered by a software designer with no concept of how legislation works, aka: how to get my rant about HR3200 posted on Slashdot by superficially comparing it to software.
Okay, maybe that title is too long, but at least it's more accurate.
The bulk of the article is concerned with how HR3200 is an unmanageable mess because it's really really long and makes reference to lots of other laws. Well, surprisingly enough, this is how just about every other piece of legislation ever looks. Laws are not written in, and do not exist in, a vacuum. There is a tremendous body of legislation that already exists. New legislation has to modify parts of that existing legislation, while keeping other parts, deleting still other parts, and ignoring completely other parts that aren't relevant to the new law. It's sort of like revision control in software, except instead of having a bunch of diff files in the background and having the new law be the final combined output, the new law is basically a diff file itself, which in turn modifies earlier diff files, which may themselves modify earlier diff files, and so on. The entire revision history is kept in the legislation itself, basically.
HR3200 is very long and complex because it's seeking to overhaul a very large and very complex system with a vast number of laws already written about it. HR3200 has to modify a number of these existing laws in order to do what it aims to do. Frankly, I'd be worried if it came in at much LESS than 1000 pages, given the scope of what it is trying to do and the vast amount of legislation that's already been written regarding health care. The relevant government agencies have plenty of lawyers and other experts whose job it is to make sure the legislation is understood and implemented as written.
Basically, this whole article is an excuse to drive page hits to this guy's blog, and to Slashdot, by trying to come up with some excuse to get huge argument started about health care on a technology site.
The police investigated a complaint involving someone walking around outside an office building with what appeared to be an assault rifle. Would you rather they had told the caller it was probably just a replica, and hung up? How were they to know it was an employee with a fake gun rather than, say, someone on his way to massacre the occupants of the building, without going over and investigating?
Old fashioned good parenting. At dinner time, I'd make a game of learning, with Q&A, and they loved it. It's taking the time to answer your kids' questions and satisfy their innate curiosity, rather than stifling it like the public school system does. A walk in the park CAN be a learning experience.
You know what old-fashioned good parenting is? Doing all that stuff you just said AND making sure your kid goes to school, helping him with his homework from school, and making sure getting a good education (including school) is an important value instilled on him from the very beginning.
The public schools just about everywhere are just fine at teaching the basic skills that serve as a foundation for higher education (reading, writing, arithmetic, the sciences, etc), but they simply don't have the resources or the time to give each child the individualized attention they need to make sure they truly understand what's being taught. This is why ultimately your child's success in school is up to you as a parent. You need to constantly reinforce the importance of school, and you need to be ready willing and able to help and encourage them when they're not in school.
Too many parents today are dumping their kids off on the schools, doing nothing to promote education or learning during the times the kids are not in school, and just expecting that the school system will somehow be able to turn their neglected children into Rhodes scholars. Then, when that doesn't happen, they blame the school system.
My kids attend a public school that serves kids from all economic and social backgrounds. They do very well in school because we maintain clear communication with their teachers, we make sure they do homework every single day, we help them with what they don't understand, and we attend any and all parent-teacher conferences available to us. Meanwhile, the kids whose parents just dump them off every day, never talk to the teacher, never ask about their homework, and don't seem to care if their kids are educated or not, struggle. Then, when the kid comes home with poor grades, they blame the teacher and the school, despite the fact that the teacher may have been begging them to come in and talk about their child for months and months, and they never showed up.
We already do plenty (some would say too much) to try and hold schools accountable for student performance. It's time to start holding parents accountable too.
Back before then, the Internet was primarily a community of academics, or at least college students. The overall level of discourse tended to be more intelligent. Yes, there were idiots and flamewars and whatnot, but the signal to noise ratio was much higher.
On the other hand, of course, the IT industry that employs me would not be nearly as large or lucrative if the Internet had remained the comparatively small network limited mostly to academia that it was back then.
It's a bit of an exaggeration to say it's been ALL downhill, of course, but there was definitely a certain something that's been lost forever.
I don't recall ever saying it was deliberate, and I'm not offering any opinion as to whether it's good or bad. I'm merely trying to show how it affects the merger.
The government comes into play because they're taking an enormously long time to approve the merger. This allows IBM and its ilk more time than they normally would have to poach customers before Oracle can step in and engage in concrete action to stop the bleeding. So, the government delays do play a role. Yes, Oracle could try (and has tried) to reassure everyone that it will be business as usual with the hardware segment, but until they're able to actually take control of that segment and do something concrete to convince people, the uncertainty remains. Where uncertainty exists, other companies can come in and exploit it.
As for the talent leaving, that happens in any merger because, once again, people hate uncertainty. If someone is facing a lot of uncertainty in his job, and has the ability to go elsewhere, he will probably do so. Ironically, the people most likely to move on are often the ones that would have been the most likely to be kept by the new company anyway, since they tend to be the top talent.
I had already been on the Internet for 5 years by the time the Web happened. I first got on the Internet the summer before my freshman year of high school. I was in no way connected to the military, nor were any of the many many people I interacted with on the Internet at that time.
In fact, if you ask people who were around at that time, most would say the DEATH of the Internet started in 1993, when AOL hooked up to it. It's been all downhill since then. Well, except the quality of the porn has gotten a lot better, and it's a lot easier to find and quicker to download. But other than that, yeah, all downhill.
What the hell does that have to do with the post you replied to? Are you trying to say broadband used to be a euphemism for Rob Malda's penis or something?
There was undeniably a lot of hyperbole, but I would argue at least some of that was necessary to get the powers that be to pay attention and actually commit to solving the problem. After billions of dollars and countless man hours, we managed to largely avert the problem. So, rather than going around telling everyone that Y2K was a hoax, it would be much more accurate to go around congratulating all of the thousands of programmers who worked around the clock for more than a year to make sure Y2K didn't live up to the hype.
You're thinking too short-term. All they need is another.21 Gigawatts and they can travel to the future and steal the plans for the perpetual motion machines that almost certainly will have been invented by then, and all our energy problems will be solved!
It's not necessarily that I do or don't want anyone to know what I'm doing, it's that I have this overwhelming feeling that nobody gives a shit. I've tried twitter, and I will "tweet" maybe once or twice a month, but even at that pace I pretty much assume that no one cares about what I decide to tweet about and I'm essentially just wasting time shouting into the ether. So, I mostly stick to the occasional humorous (to me, anyway) comment, and don't bother with the day to day details of my life.
It seems to me that people who regularly tweet about every little thing have some sort of deep-seated need for constant validation from the outside world. They post personal details in order to evoke some kind of response just to show that someone, somewhere is paying attention to them. I find that sort of mentality kind of sad, but apparently it's a lot more common than I would have thought.
I don't get it, if you're trying to compliment the editors on the fact that only half the articles are dupes these days, rather than the more historically typical 75 or 80%, why do you seem so angry about it?
But if we encourage them to go outside, they'll end up on your lawn, and then where will you be?
Texting is a key component to being sociable these days among young people. Social skills are developed and used through texting just as they were over the phone in our generation and over at the soda fountain or wherever the hell they went in our grandparents' generation. The old ways may be best for us because it's what we're used to, but expecting the kids today to socialize in the same way we did is just as silly as our grandparents expecting us to follow some elaborate courtship ritual involving handkerchiefs and whatnot like they did.
As long as the kids are only permitted to text certain trusted people (close family members, for example) and have limits set on their time, just like we had limits set on our phone time, I don't see any issue.
Just wait until Spider Man 4, in which Peter Parker is involved in a love triangle with Hannah Montana and Nick Jonas. Will Nick and Peter be able to work out their differences through song and dance numbers before the big prom? Or will their constant bickering cause Hannah Montana to fall into the arms of the local bad boy, Wolverine? And if she does, will she learn the error of her ways before he tries to kiss her before they're even married at Tony Stark's big alcohol-free party? And will Zac Efron be able to save her and teach her that the only way to true happiness is dating nice boys, abstinence, and wearing knee-length or longer skirts?
Marketing is not just needed to polish turds, it's needed to get people to buy the good stuff too. In video games, or most other markets, there's a ton of competition. Without marketing, your product gets buried under the pile and no one ever sees it. Sure, you might sell a few copies to your friends, and they might get a couple of their friends to buy it, but that's it. Maybe if you're really really lucky it will go viral, but you're not going to spend tens of millions of dollars developing a game and just hope it will go viral on its own.
Marketing is more than just booth babes and TV commercials. Something as simple as where a product is on the shelf (eye level versus toward the ground, for example), or where your displays are in the store (in the back? at the entrance? How big are they?) is marketing, and it all costs money to do. The news doing a story on lines stretching out the door for the newest game release was probably prompted by a call from marketing. Tech news sites and TV shows featuring documentaries or segments about the "breakthrough" technology your game uses are all part of the marketing effort. Hell, even the guy behind the counter telling you it's a good game (or even the other "shopper" mentioning it in passing) may well be part of the marketing machine.
To claim that your household brands, especially Coke or Pepsi, get by without marketing is silly. Yes, Heinz may not spend as much on visible marketing, but they do pay for prime shelf space at your local store, and they've spent decades honing their image as a superior brand. None of that happened by accident, it was all marketing. The fact that you may not even realize you were being marketed to, and yet still have a preference for their brand, is part of what makes their campaigns so brilliant. Even word of mouth advertising can be primed by a good marketing department. And, of course, both Coke and Pepsi spend ungodly amounts of money making sure their logos are plastered all over just about everything you see. Coca Cola alone spends more than $1 billion annually on marketing.
A lot of people make the mistake of equating marketing with advertising, and in reality it's much, much more than that.
When was the last time you saw a major naval battle between surface ships, particularly battleships? It doesn't happen anymore because submarines and aircraft carriers made it obsolete. When was the last time you saw two armies face each other across a field in two long lines and start firing at each other? Not since the invention of the rifled barrel made that tactic obsolete. Similarly, in theory better smart missile and radar technology will eventually make dogfighting obsolete.
Trench warfare was once the future of warfare. Standing in a line firing muskets at each other was once the height of battle tactics. Weapons and tactics become obsolete in warfare all the time. Virtually every war is fought differently than the previous ones. So, while people may be wrong about any particular thing becoming the "future of warfare", they're very often right about tactics and weapons becoming obsolete. If you hold on to old and outmoded battle tactics and weapons and prepare for the next war as if it will be fought like the last one, you get run over.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he was just trying to be punny. If someone is dumb enough to not know the difference between North and South Korea, I doubt they'll know where Seoul is, or even that it exists.
Actually, if that demo is indicative of the game as a whole, then it makes a very good argument as to why the 3D graphics were so vital to the original portal game. The original portal is far more playable, and its 3D nature allows for far more interesting puzzles. The text game is, while an interesting exercise in what's possible with antiquated graphics, appears to be a far inferior game. Just the way it handles moving the scenery around while keeping the player upright would give me a headache in about 10 seconds.
Damn, Princess Leia has REALLY let herself go...
A Windows machine being run by someone who cares about security and updates it regularly won't end up in a botnet either, so I'm not sure what your point is.
It's not necessarily Sun that leaked it. Hardware manufacturers (and software houses, for that matter) routinely show large customers their roadmaps under NDA. It's entirely possible some less than scrupulous employee of one of their big customers leaked it, in violation of their NDA.
Network television is supported by advertising alone, and their costs are far, far higher than the cost to run a social networking site. Yes, advertising revenue online is peanuts compared to TV advertising revenue, but the costs are also peanuts in comparison. On the other hand, the reason online sites are always looking for new ways to insert advertising in the user experience is because, although they might make enough to be profitable, they still aren't raking in "buy your own country" money.
Allow people to pay money to deliver electrical shocks to celebrities every time they "tweet" something stupid. They could make millions in a matter of minutes.
HR3200 considered by a software designer with no concept of how legislation works, aka: how to get my rant about HR3200 posted on Slashdot by superficially comparing it to software.
Okay, maybe that title is too long, but at least it's more accurate.
The bulk of the article is concerned with how HR3200 is an unmanageable mess because it's really really long and makes reference to lots of other laws. Well, surprisingly enough, this is how just about every other piece of legislation ever looks. Laws are not written in, and do not exist in, a vacuum. There is a tremendous body of legislation that already exists. New legislation has to modify parts of that existing legislation, while keeping other parts, deleting still other parts, and ignoring completely other parts that aren't relevant to the new law. It's sort of like revision control in software, except instead of having a bunch of diff files in the background and having the new law be the final combined output, the new law is basically a diff file itself, which in turn modifies earlier diff files, which may themselves modify earlier diff files, and so on. The entire revision history is kept in the legislation itself, basically.
HR3200 is very long and complex because it's seeking to overhaul a very large and very complex system with a vast number of laws already written about it. HR3200 has to modify a number of these existing laws in order to do what it aims to do. Frankly, I'd be worried if it came in at much LESS than 1000 pages, given the scope of what it is trying to do and the vast amount of legislation that's already been written regarding health care. The relevant government agencies have plenty of lawyers and other experts whose job it is to make sure the legislation is understood and implemented as written.
Basically, this whole article is an excuse to drive page hits to this guy's blog, and to Slashdot, by trying to come up with some excuse to get huge argument started about health care on a technology site.
The police investigated a complaint involving someone walking around outside an office building with what appeared to be an assault rifle. Would you rather they had told the caller it was probably just a replica, and hung up? How were they to know it was an employee with a fake gun rather than, say, someone on his way to massacre the occupants of the building, without going over and investigating?
Oh sure, they think they're REAL clever with their little "recognition" algorithms, but let me just ask you this one:
What happens when the midget convention comes into town, huh? What do you do THEN, smart guy? WHAT DO YOU DO THEN?
Old fashioned good parenting. At dinner time, I'd make a game of learning, with Q&A, and they loved it. It's taking the time to answer your kids' questions and satisfy their innate curiosity, rather than stifling it like the public school system does. A walk in the park CAN be a learning experience.
You know what old-fashioned good parenting is? Doing all that stuff you just said AND making sure your kid goes to school, helping him with his homework from school, and making sure getting a good education (including school) is an important value instilled on him from the very beginning.
The public schools just about everywhere are just fine at teaching the basic skills that serve as a foundation for higher education (reading, writing, arithmetic, the sciences, etc), but they simply don't have the resources or the time to give each child the individualized attention they need to make sure they truly understand what's being taught. This is why ultimately your child's success in school is up to you as a parent. You need to constantly reinforce the importance of school, and you need to be ready willing and able to help and encourage them when they're not in school.
Too many parents today are dumping their kids off on the schools, doing nothing to promote education or learning during the times the kids are not in school, and just expecting that the school system will somehow be able to turn their neglected children into Rhodes scholars. Then, when that doesn't happen, they blame the school system.
My kids attend a public school that serves kids from all economic and social backgrounds. They do very well in school because we maintain clear communication with their teachers, we make sure they do homework every single day, we help them with what they don't understand, and we attend any and all parent-teacher conferences available to us. Meanwhile, the kids whose parents just dump them off every day, never talk to the teacher, never ask about their homework, and don't seem to care if their kids are educated or not, struggle. Then, when the kid comes home with poor grades, they blame the teacher and the school, despite the fact that the teacher may have been begging them to come in and talk about their child for months and months, and they never showed up.
We already do plenty (some would say too much) to try and hold schools accountable for student performance. It's time to start holding parents accountable too.
Back before then, the Internet was primarily a community of academics, or at least college students. The overall level of discourse tended to be more intelligent. Yes, there were idiots and flamewars and whatnot, but the signal to noise ratio was much higher.
On the other hand, of course, the IT industry that employs me would not be nearly as large or lucrative if the Internet had remained the comparatively small network limited mostly to academia that it was back then.
It's a bit of an exaggeration to say it's been ALL downhill, of course, but there was definitely a certain something that's been lost forever.
I don't recall ever saying it was deliberate, and I'm not offering any opinion as to whether it's good or bad. I'm merely trying to show how it affects the merger.
The government comes into play because they're taking an enormously long time to approve the merger. This allows IBM and its ilk more time than they normally would have to poach customers before Oracle can step in and engage in concrete action to stop the bleeding. So, the government delays do play a role. Yes, Oracle could try (and has tried) to reassure everyone that it will be business as usual with the hardware segment, but until they're able to actually take control of that segment and do something concrete to convince people, the uncertainty remains. Where uncertainty exists, other companies can come in and exploit it.
As for the talent leaving, that happens in any merger because, once again, people hate uncertainty. If someone is facing a lot of uncertainty in his job, and has the ability to go elsewhere, he will probably do so. Ironically, the people most likely to move on are often the ones that would have been the most likely to be kept by the new company anyway, since they tend to be the top talent.
I had already been on the Internet for 5 years by the time the Web happened. I first got on the Internet the summer before my freshman year of high school. I was in no way connected to the military, nor were any of the many many people I interacted with on the Internet at that time.
In fact, if you ask people who were around at that time, most would say the DEATH of the Internet started in 1993, when AOL hooked up to it. It's been all downhill since then. Well, except the quality of the porn has gotten a lot better, and it's a lot easier to find and quicker to download. But other than that, yeah, all downhill.
What the hell does that have to do with the post you replied to? Are you trying to say broadband used to be a euphemism for Rob Malda's penis or something?
There was undeniably a lot of hyperbole, but I would argue at least some of that was necessary to get the powers that be to pay attention and actually commit to solving the problem. After billions of dollars and countless man hours, we managed to largely avert the problem. So, rather than going around telling everyone that Y2K was a hoax, it would be much more accurate to go around congratulating all of the thousands of programmers who worked around the clock for more than a year to make sure Y2K didn't live up to the hype.
You're thinking too short-term. All they need is another .21 Gigawatts and they can travel to the future and steal the plans for the perpetual motion machines that almost certainly will have been invented by then, and all our energy problems will be solved!
It's not necessarily that I do or don't want anyone to know what I'm doing, it's that I have this overwhelming feeling that nobody gives a shit. I've tried twitter, and I will "tweet" maybe once or twice a month, but even at that pace I pretty much assume that no one cares about what I decide to tweet about and I'm essentially just wasting time shouting into the ether. So, I mostly stick to the occasional humorous (to me, anyway) comment, and don't bother with the day to day details of my life.
It seems to me that people who regularly tweet about every little thing have some sort of deep-seated need for constant validation from the outside world. They post personal details in order to evoke some kind of response just to show that someone, somewhere is paying attention to them. I find that sort of mentality kind of sad, but apparently it's a lot more common than I would have thought.
I don't get it, if you're trying to compliment the editors on the fact that only half the articles are dupes these days, rather than the more historically typical 75 or 80%, why do you seem so angry about it?
But if we encourage them to go outside, they'll end up on your lawn, and then where will you be?
Texting is a key component to being sociable these days among young people. Social skills are developed and used through texting just as they were over the phone in our generation and over at the soda fountain or wherever the hell they went in our grandparents' generation. The old ways may be best for us because it's what we're used to, but expecting the kids today to socialize in the same way we did is just as silly as our grandparents expecting us to follow some elaborate courtship ritual involving handkerchiefs and whatnot like they did.
As long as the kids are only permitted to text certain trusted people (close family members, for example) and have limits set on their time, just like we had limits set on our phone time, I don't see any issue.
Netapp already has boxes that run on Opterons, so probably, but you'd need one of their SEs and a support contract to do it.
Just wait until Spider Man 4, in which Peter Parker is involved in a love triangle with Hannah Montana and Nick Jonas. Will Nick and Peter be able to work out their differences through song and dance numbers before the big prom? Or will their constant bickering cause Hannah Montana to fall into the arms of the local bad boy, Wolverine? And if she does, will she learn the error of her ways before he tries to kiss her before they're even married at Tony Stark's big alcohol-free party? And will Zac Efron be able to save her and teach her that the only way to true happiness is dating nice boys, abstinence, and wearing knee-length or longer skirts?
The possibilities are endless!
Marketing is not just needed to polish turds, it's needed to get people to buy the good stuff too. In video games, or most other markets, there's a ton of competition. Without marketing, your product gets buried under the pile and no one ever sees it. Sure, you might sell a few copies to your friends, and they might get a couple of their friends to buy it, but that's it. Maybe if you're really really lucky it will go viral, but you're not going to spend tens of millions of dollars developing a game and just hope it will go viral on its own.
Marketing is more than just booth babes and TV commercials. Something as simple as where a product is on the shelf (eye level versus toward the ground, for example), or where your displays are in the store (in the back? at the entrance? How big are they?) is marketing, and it all costs money to do. The news doing a story on lines stretching out the door for the newest game release was probably prompted by a call from marketing. Tech news sites and TV shows featuring documentaries or segments about the "breakthrough" technology your game uses are all part of the marketing effort. Hell, even the guy behind the counter telling you it's a good game (or even the other "shopper" mentioning it in passing) may well be part of the marketing machine.
To claim that your household brands, especially Coke or Pepsi, get by without marketing is silly. Yes, Heinz may not spend as much on visible marketing, but they do pay for prime shelf space at your local store, and they've spent decades honing their image as a superior brand. None of that happened by accident, it was all marketing. The fact that you may not even realize you were being marketed to, and yet still have a preference for their brand, is part of what makes their campaigns so brilliant. Even word of mouth advertising can be primed by a good marketing department. And, of course, both Coke and Pepsi spend ungodly amounts of money making sure their logos are plastered all over just about everything you see. Coca Cola alone spends more than $1 billion annually on marketing.
A lot of people make the mistake of equating marketing with advertising, and in reality it's much, much more than that.
When was the last time you saw a major naval battle between surface ships, particularly battleships? It doesn't happen anymore because submarines and aircraft carriers made it obsolete. When was the last time you saw two armies face each other across a field in two long lines and start firing at each other? Not since the invention of the rifled barrel made that tactic obsolete. Similarly, in theory better smart missile and radar technology will eventually make dogfighting obsolete.
Trench warfare was once the future of warfare. Standing in a line firing muskets at each other was once the height of battle tactics. Weapons and tactics become obsolete in warfare all the time. Virtually every war is fought differently than the previous ones. So, while people may be wrong about any particular thing becoming the "future of warfare", they're very often right about tactics and weapons becoming obsolete. If you hold on to old and outmoded battle tactics and weapons and prepare for the next war as if it will be fought like the last one, you get run over.