The controllers are a barrier to entry to the genre to begin with, but after that you already have them so they don't enter into the equation. Personally, I don't like that they charge full new game prices (40 or 50 bucks a pop without the controllers) for new versions of the games when those new versions are essentially the exact same game with some new songs. I don't know how much more innovative they can get with the gameplay aspect, but charging a bunch of money for what should be an add-on pack just seems like they're milking the franchise for all it's worth, which can be a turnoff to consumers.
No one should be surprised, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal. What you have here is an entire industry (PC Repair) that apparently specializes in ripping off its customers and preying on their ignorance. Is it okay if my mechanic rips me off because I don't know how to overhaul my own engine? Or if my accountant steals my identity because I don't have the time or the inclination to decipher the tax code?
Sure, you and I might know how to fix computers because computers fascinate us and we like to learn how they work. The average person, though, sees their computer as a tool, and doesn't care to know how to fix it. They call a PC Repairman to fix their computer when it acts up, just like they take the car to a mechanic when it won't start or call a plumber when there's water dripping from the ceiling. Yes, there are practitioners in all of these professions that specialize in ripping people off, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable behavior.
Re:Postal addresses identify houses!I
on
P.I.I. In the Sky
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Dynamic allocation of IPs is only a valid argument against them being personally identifiable if ISPs don't keep records of who had what IP at what time. However, we know very well that ISPs do indeed keep these records, and are generally more than willing to hand them over to pretty much anyone who asks for them.
So, even with dynamic IPs, if you know the time and date when an activity took place, you can effectively tell who was responsible given the IP and the cooperation of the ISP, neither of which is particularly difficult to get.
First, advertising it at first as a $100 laptop was a mistake...it's stupid to announce a price before you figure out what your cost structure is going to look like.
Second, and more importantly, the distribution plan was flawed. Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government. Most charitable organizations learned decades ago that trying to get corrupt governments interested in doing something for the interest of their poorest citizens is a recipe for failure.
What they should have done is sold these things to charities that already work in these areas and have knowledge of the difficulties involved and would know where the greatest need is. They should have been dumping these things on charities as fast as they could take them, but instead they were busy trying to get these governments to distribute them, thereby assuring they were only going to be going to countries with relatively stable governments with experience delivering large-scale deployments of things like electrical power to their residents. This means the people that would get them were the ones least likely to benefit.
Third, they didn't do enough to get the American public interested in the project...sure, there were a bunch of stories in tech rags about how cool this was going to be and how no one could get them unless they were a poor person in a third world country, but that was it. This meant the people most likely to have the spare cash to donate to this cause didn't know enough about it, and never had a chance to get their hands on one except through the short-lived "buy one, get one" program.
The Internet is fast becoming what electrical power was 50 years ago: It separates the people who are able to participate in the global economy from those who can't. The so-called "digital divide" has been largely closed in this country, but it remains a huge problem globally. The OLPC program is and has been a great idea with a piss-poor implementation plan.
The biggest difference I can see between now and 40 years ago is the number of kids who won't stay off my damn lawn. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
That's why the review process would actually look at the app and make sure it really needed what it said it needed. An additional idea to counteract what you're talking about is to review the app to make sure any personal information it uses it only used during the execution of the app, and is not logged or sent anywhere. Of course, implementing a review process like this would require effort on the part of Facebook, so it will probably never happen.
I agree, but on the other hand it's foolish for Facebook to have taken such a lazy approach to apps. What they should have done (and should do) is allow a developer of an App to determine what information from a user's profile they actually need for their app to operate, and allow that app access to only that information. Further, instead of the blanket "allow this app to see everything about you" screen, they should tell you precisely what information that particular app is asking for (and will be allowed to see), and let the user choose whether or not that particular information is something they're willing to share. Most people will just blindly click through anyway just like they do now, but at least if the information to be shared is clearly spelled out, there's a chance someone will think twice before clicking, and at the very least they'll be more informed of what they're actually giving out.
In addition, they should review apps (not sure if they do this now or not, if they do their criteria are laughable) before allowing them on to the site...and part of their review of an app should include whether or not the app is asking for more information than it actually needs.
And for the love of God, instead of making every stupid little quiz a separate app, Facebook should maintain its own in-house developed "quiz app" and allow random idiots to submit quizzes to it. I'm tired of having to block every stupid quiz individually because they're all individual apps. This would also have the side effect of not needing to give all of your information to a random 14 year old so you can find out which Teletubby you are...your information would only be shared by the developer of the Quiz App (Facebook itself). Of course, this would only work in conjunction with the review process mentioned above, as any other quiz apps would be rejected by the review and the developers pointed to the Facebook Quiz App.
Facebook strikes me as a company with a lackadaisical approach to privacy and a generally lazy approach to the design and implementation of site features. It angers me that the site could be so much better than it is if someone at that company gave a damn about these things.
I don't understand why the contributor of this story is so skeptical of it...it seems all we would need to do is hook the scientists up to an fMRI and we'd know for sure if they were lying about the study!
Movie and music piracy CAUSED the recession! Video game piracy is now contributing, and soon the entire economy will collapse and we'll all be reduced to cannibalism to survive and it's all YOUR fault, you filthy pirate! This is precisely why Congress needs to pass strong anti-piracy legislation, to include death as a punishment for severe cases and the chopping off of thumbs for less severe (5 or fewer minutes of copyrighted material stolen) cases.
Sure, you might not consider piracy to be that big of a deal, but you'll change your tune when you're sitting around the burnt out husk of your home surrounded by a post-apocalyptic hellscape, stomach rumbling like crazy because you finished off the last of Aunt Sally 3 days ago and the rest of the family was eaten by a roving band of zombie werewolves. Maybe then you'll recognize the error of your ways...but I doubt it.
Re:Sounds cool but
on
Hello World!
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not sure I agree with Python either, but popularity of the language shouldn't really enter into the equation at this stage. What you want is a language that will be easy enough for them to pick up without being overly frustrated but powerful enough to allow them to create programs that actually do something useful. The purpose is to try and spur interest in programming, not train them for a job.
The first language I did any programming in was Applesoft Basic, because the household computer happened to be an Apple IIgs, and it was included. After that, I was taught Pascal in high school. After that, I learned Fortran 77. Now, I do a fair amount of development work, but don't use any of those languages. And yet, learning them was not a waste of time, and in fact taught me a lot of concepts that made me a better programmer down the road with other languages.
Of course, my experience with Fortran also gave me a deep abiding hatred for languages that enforce indentation, which may be one of the reasons I never picked up Python.
Well then, the solution is for MS to push these updates through a virus spread through an advertisement for American Idol...they'll have the updates widely deployed in a matter of seconds.
It's certainly possible, and there are several ways to do it. They could cripple their resolver so any DNS requests for google.com would mysteriously fail. They could screw with the TCP stack to make requests to Google's IP block fail. There are other ways too, those are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head. Getting these changes out to a large percentage of Windows users is simple, since most either have automatic updates turned on, or install updates manually without really digging in to what they do.
You are right though, that MS would never do such a thing. It would utterly ruin their reputation as a company (especially among businesses), and expose them to massive legal liabilities, and they would gain nothing of any use from it.
Google's Chrome is not in a position to compete directly with Windows, and as of now it isn't trying to. I think if Google ever does decide to go after Windows directly, they'll find that a real full-featured modern operating system (not just a glorified web browser) is a lot more difficult to create than they think. Even if they pulled it off, breaking into an OS market dominated by a single player with a huge entrenched base of applications is hard, and even Google may find it more trouble than it's worth. Google may seem huge and unstoppable, but even they have their limits.
Yes, but look on the bright side: With the LHC being in Europe instead of here, we'll have a few extra nanoseconds to react before we're swallowed up by the resulting black hole.
It's in quotes because the person in the article (the CEO of a competing company) is trying to imply that crowdsourcing is inherently inferior to whatever his stuff does. You can almost see him sneering as he says it. Quotes like that are used to denote derision and sarcasm, such as: This 'article' really shows what passes for 'journalism' these days.
The only possible reason is personal nostalgia. I can understand resurrecting computers that meant something significant in the history of computing like an original Apple II, or a TRS-80 or something of that nature. However, the machine he's talking about is not particularly historically interesting other than in his own personal life. So he can resurrect it for his own personal nostalgia, that's fine, but he shouldn't expect anyone to be impressed if he wants to show it to people later on or anything.
Actually trying to use the machine is not likely to make him happy, either. When I've messed around with older nostalgic machines from my childhood, it was cool for the first 10 minutes until the nostalgia wore off and I started to see how painfully slow and primitive they are. These things were great in their time, but they don't age well.
Since the machine is so generic and non-interesting, he may have a harder time finding any sort of enthusiast group for it, but the Internet is vast, so who knows what he could find if he spent enough time digging.
I agree. Wireless made sense when we had to reach back and plug our mice and keyboards into the back of the computer and deal with the cramped space and dust every time we needed to unplug it or plug it back in, not to mention the danger of bent pins trying to plug it in blind. These days, with USB being ubiquitous, and just about every computer having multiple USB ports on the front and the back, it doesn't make as much sense.
Just because it accepts mouse input doesn't mean you should use a mouse with it. Someone properly versed in vi is going to be a lot more efficient with the keyboard than any mouse user could ever be.
I had a Kensington wireless mouse that you could charge while you were using it through a simple USB cable. I thought it was great because I didn't have to worry about putting it in some silly dock and wait every time I forgot to charge it and it went dead on me.
Of course, it didn't take long before I just started using it plugged in all the time, giving me an overly expensive wired mouse.
I do all my programming by floating through a giant VR simulation of the computer's memory with various bits of code randomly located in countless giant towers. I don't see why you would need a "mouse" for such a thing.
Sure, but when people aren't being paid for the job, their only motivation to do the job is to make sure it gets tilted toward their bias. A guy in the article also brings up a pretty good point that it's silly for the government to ask people to work for free to distribute money that's designed in part to create paying jobs.
There are levels of bias. If you want people to wallow through pages and pages of grant applications for free, the only people who will volunteer will be the ones that have a vested interest in making sure certain applications are accepted or rejected. There are only three types of people who I can think of that would be interested in doing this:
1.) Industry insiders who want to make sure their grants are accepted or their competitors' are rejected.
2.) Crusaders trying to bend the process to whatever their particular ideology is.
3.) Unemployable losers with nothing better to do.
I can't see how letting any of these groups participate would result in good results. We're talking about billions of dollars here...surely the government could toss in a couple hundred thousand to pay people to do the job.
Slashdot Mirror
The controllers are a barrier to entry to the genre to begin with, but after that you already have them so they don't enter into the equation. Personally, I don't like that they charge full new game prices (40 or 50 bucks a pop without the controllers) for new versions of the games when those new versions are essentially the exact same game with some new songs. I don't know how much more innovative they can get with the gameplay aspect, but charging a bunch of money for what should be an add-on pack just seems like they're milking the franchise for all it's worth, which can be a turnoff to consumers.
No one should be surprised, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal. What you have here is an entire industry (PC Repair) that apparently specializes in ripping off its customers and preying on their ignorance. Is it okay if my mechanic rips me off because I don't know how to overhaul my own engine? Or if my accountant steals my identity because I don't have the time or the inclination to decipher the tax code? Sure, you and I might know how to fix computers because computers fascinate us and we like to learn how they work. The average person, though, sees their computer as a tool, and doesn't care to know how to fix it. They call a PC Repairman to fix their computer when it acts up, just like they take the car to a mechanic when it won't start or call a plumber when there's water dripping from the ceiling. Yes, there are practitioners in all of these professions that specialize in ripping people off, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable behavior.
Dynamic allocation of IPs is only a valid argument against them being personally identifiable if ISPs don't keep records of who had what IP at what time. However, we know very well that ISPs do indeed keep these records, and are generally more than willing to hand them over to pretty much anyone who asks for them.
So, even with dynamic IPs, if you know the time and date when an activity took place, you can effectively tell who was responsible given the IP and the cooperation of the ISP, neither of which is particularly difficult to get.
First, advertising it at first as a $100 laptop was a mistake...it's stupid to announce a price before you figure out what your cost structure is going to look like.
Second, and more importantly, the distribution plan was flawed. Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government. Most charitable organizations learned decades ago that trying to get corrupt governments interested in doing something for the interest of their poorest citizens is a recipe for failure.
What they should have done is sold these things to charities that already work in these areas and have knowledge of the difficulties involved and would know where the greatest need is. They should have been dumping these things on charities as fast as they could take them, but instead they were busy trying to get these governments to distribute them, thereby assuring they were only going to be going to countries with relatively stable governments with experience delivering large-scale deployments of things like electrical power to their residents. This means the people that would get them were the ones least likely to benefit.
Third, they didn't do enough to get the American public interested in the project...sure, there were a bunch of stories in tech rags about how cool this was going to be and how no one could get them unless they were a poor person in a third world country, but that was it. This meant the people most likely to have the spare cash to donate to this cause didn't know enough about it, and never had a chance to get their hands on one except through the short-lived "buy one, get one" program.
The Internet is fast becoming what electrical power was 50 years ago: It separates the people who are able to participate in the global economy from those who can't. The so-called "digital divide" has been largely closed in this country, but it remains a huge problem globally. The OLPC program is and has been a great idea with a piss-poor implementation plan.
The biggest difference I can see between now and 40 years ago is the number of kids who won't stay off my damn lawn. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
That's why the review process would actually look at the app and make sure it really needed what it said it needed. An additional idea to counteract what you're talking about is to review the app to make sure any personal information it uses it only used during the execution of the app, and is not logged or sent anywhere. Of course, implementing a review process like this would require effort on the part of Facebook, so it will probably never happen.
Hey now, Napster converted to a pay model and it worked great for them!
I agree, but on the other hand it's foolish for Facebook to have taken such a lazy approach to apps. What they should have done (and should do) is allow a developer of an App to determine what information from a user's profile they actually need for their app to operate, and allow that app access to only that information. Further, instead of the blanket "allow this app to see everything about you" screen, they should tell you precisely what information that particular app is asking for (and will be allowed to see), and let the user choose whether or not that particular information is something they're willing to share. Most people will just blindly click through anyway just like they do now, but at least if the information to be shared is clearly spelled out, there's a chance someone will think twice before clicking, and at the very least they'll be more informed of what they're actually giving out.
In addition, they should review apps (not sure if they do this now or not, if they do their criteria are laughable) before allowing them on to the site...and part of their review of an app should include whether or not the app is asking for more information than it actually needs.
And for the love of God, instead of making every stupid little quiz a separate app, Facebook should maintain its own in-house developed "quiz app" and allow random idiots to submit quizzes to it. I'm tired of having to block every stupid quiz individually because they're all individual apps. This would also have the side effect of not needing to give all of your information to a random 14 year old so you can find out which Teletubby you are...your information would only be shared by the developer of the Quiz App (Facebook itself). Of course, this would only work in conjunction with the review process mentioned above, as any other quiz apps would be rejected by the review and the developers pointed to the Facebook Quiz App.
Facebook strikes me as a company with a lackadaisical approach to privacy and a generally lazy approach to the design and implementation of site features. It angers me that the site could be so much better than it is if someone at that company gave a damn about these things.
It was supposed to be a joke...I'm not sure what the moderators are smoking.
I don't understand why the contributor of this story is so skeptical of it...it seems all we would need to do is hook the scientists up to an fMRI and we'd know for sure if they were lying about the study!
Movie and music piracy CAUSED the recession! Video game piracy is now contributing, and soon the entire economy will collapse and we'll all be reduced to cannibalism to survive and it's all YOUR fault, you filthy pirate! This is precisely why Congress needs to pass strong anti-piracy legislation, to include death as a punishment for severe cases and the chopping off of thumbs for less severe (5 or fewer minutes of copyrighted material stolen) cases.
Sure, you might not consider piracy to be that big of a deal, but you'll change your tune when you're sitting around the burnt out husk of your home surrounded by a post-apocalyptic hellscape, stomach rumbling like crazy because you finished off the last of Aunt Sally 3 days ago and the rest of the family was eaten by a roving band of zombie werewolves. Maybe then you'll recognize the error of your ways...but I doubt it.
I'm not sure I agree with Python either, but popularity of the language shouldn't really enter into the equation at this stage. What you want is a language that will be easy enough for them to pick up without being overly frustrated but powerful enough to allow them to create programs that actually do something useful. The purpose is to try and spur interest in programming, not train them for a job.
The first language I did any programming in was Applesoft Basic, because the household computer happened to be an Apple IIgs, and it was included. After that, I was taught Pascal in high school. After that, I learned Fortran 77. Now, I do a fair amount of development work, but don't use any of those languages. And yet, learning them was not a waste of time, and in fact taught me a lot of concepts that made me a better programmer down the road with other languages.
Of course, my experience with Fortran also gave me a deep abiding hatred for languages that enforce indentation, which may be one of the reasons I never picked up Python.
Well then, the solution is for MS to push these updates through a virus spread through an advertisement for American Idol...they'll have the updates widely deployed in a matter of seconds.
It's certainly possible, and there are several ways to do it. They could cripple their resolver so any DNS requests for google.com would mysteriously fail. They could screw with the TCP stack to make requests to Google's IP block fail. There are other ways too, those are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head. Getting these changes out to a large percentage of Windows users is simple, since most either have automatic updates turned on, or install updates manually without really digging in to what they do.
You are right though, that MS would never do such a thing. It would utterly ruin their reputation as a company (especially among businesses), and expose them to massive legal liabilities, and they would gain nothing of any use from it.
Google's Chrome is not in a position to compete directly with Windows, and as of now it isn't trying to. I think if Google ever does decide to go after Windows directly, they'll find that a real full-featured modern operating system (not just a glorified web browser) is a lot more difficult to create than they think. Even if they pulled it off, breaking into an OS market dominated by a single player with a huge entrenched base of applications is hard, and even Google may find it more trouble than it's worth. Google may seem huge and unstoppable, but even they have their limits.
"...got himself a brand new iPhone 9, and be playing Halo 17 ..."
And he'll be wishing he had enough money to buy the new "iPhone-X", so he could play the newest "Duke Nukem Forever v.3.0" on it.
Surely you mean "Duke Nukem Forever v0.1alpha, right? Even then, it's rather a stretch.
Yes, but look on the bright side: With the LHC being in Europe instead of here, we'll have a few extra nanoseconds to react before we're swallowed up by the resulting black hole.
It's in quotes because the person in the article (the CEO of a competing company) is trying to imply that crowdsourcing is inherently inferior to whatever his stuff does. You can almost see him sneering as he says it. Quotes like that are used to denote derision and sarcasm, such as: This 'article' really shows what passes for 'journalism' these days.
The only possible reason is personal nostalgia. I can understand resurrecting computers that meant something significant in the history of computing like an original Apple II, or a TRS-80 or something of that nature. However, the machine he's talking about is not particularly historically interesting other than in his own personal life. So he can resurrect it for his own personal nostalgia, that's fine, but he shouldn't expect anyone to be impressed if he wants to show it to people later on or anything.
Actually trying to use the machine is not likely to make him happy, either. When I've messed around with older nostalgic machines from my childhood, it was cool for the first 10 minutes until the nostalgia wore off and I started to see how painfully slow and primitive they are. These things were great in their time, but they don't age well.
Since the machine is so generic and non-interesting, he may have a harder time finding any sort of enthusiast group for it, but the Internet is vast, so who knows what he could find if he spent enough time digging.
I agree. Wireless made sense when we had to reach back and plug our mice and keyboards into the back of the computer and deal with the cramped space and dust every time we needed to unplug it or plug it back in, not to mention the danger of bent pins trying to plug it in blind. These days, with USB being ubiquitous, and just about every computer having multiple USB ports on the front and the back, it doesn't make as much sense.
Just because it accepts mouse input doesn't mean you should use a mouse with it. Someone properly versed in vi is going to be a lot more efficient with the keyboard than any mouse user could ever be.
I had a Kensington wireless mouse that you could charge while you were using it through a simple USB cable. I thought it was great because I didn't have to worry about putting it in some silly dock and wait every time I forgot to charge it and it went dead on me.
Of course, it didn't take long before I just started using it plugged in all the time, giving me an overly expensive wired mouse.
I do all my programming by floating through a giant VR simulation of the computer's memory with various bits of code randomly located in countless giant towers. I don't see why you would need a "mouse" for such a thing.
Sure, but when people aren't being paid for the job, their only motivation to do the job is to make sure it gets tilted toward their bias. A guy in the article also brings up a pretty good point that it's silly for the government to ask people to work for free to distribute money that's designed in part to create paying jobs.
There are levels of bias. If you want people to wallow through pages and pages of grant applications for free, the only people who will volunteer will be the ones that have a vested interest in making sure certain applications are accepted or rejected. There are only three types of people who I can think of that would be interested in doing this:
1.) Industry insiders who want to make sure their grants are accepted or their competitors' are rejected.
2.) Crusaders trying to bend the process to whatever their particular ideology is.
3.) Unemployable losers with nothing better to do.
I can't see how letting any of these groups participate would result in good results. We're talking about billions of dollars here...surely the government could toss in a couple hundred thousand to pay people to do the job.
No, I just have a really low opinion of the value of my time.