Not connected with CES but related is the fact the Chinese government has declared its intention to force all digital phone makers to use a standard USB connector from the charger. That would mean that a single charger would do for all of your devices and would save an immense amount of wastage and frustration.
Good call, I hope to finally ditch those dozens of different chargers in a couple of years.
Ok , thats hardly a reason for not using it but I suspect its perhaps one reason why people are relunctant to try it. Half a line of hex is not user friendly.
When was the last time you used an IP address instead of a domain name? The only thing I could think of was setting up my DSL modem a year ago, but I'm not a network admin.
The reason why nearly nobody is using IPv6 is because it doesn't offer any direct benefit to those who need to deploy it.
Chernobyl was not trivial in the general sense of the world, but considering that it was essentially a practical worst case for design, administration, and maintainence and was built by a country that couldn't even make simple machinery work more than one time in three as a worst case benchmark it's remarkably benign.
Considering the western world is now dependent on Soyuz rockets (designed in the 60's) for reaching the ISS, this is a bit harsh.
The russians know their stuff, there probably was some PHB that forced a russian Dilbert to outsource building the reactor-rods to southern Elbonia (who cares if they're cardboard, what could possibly go wrong?).
I can understand phishing for bank and paypal logins, but this seems like a lot of effort to achieve very little.
It depends on the numbers. Phishers gathering twitter logins might be able to sell them at a profit to groups wanting to spam users, trick them into installing malware, or try to use the same username/password combinations against webmail or even paypal accounts. At least the value of a twitter account is much higher than that of a simple email address as you've got people who trust the twit and you've got a password for that account, which might be the same for other accounts.
The phishers would obviously first try to obtain as many logins as possible, as the value of a twitter account is far less than that of a paypal account, but don't forget that phishers target vast numbers of accounts. At those volumes, they have enough ways to profit from their bounty (more than with only the email address of the twit).
I feel dirty, I nearly want to support the phishers if it means I never have to hear about twitter again.
Currently, the revenue is about 20% more than what I have to pay for the servers. However, if 50% of my users would block ads or simply not click on them, I would have to shut down my websites.
A very pessimistic conclusion. If you get enough pageviews (and you really have 200k users) there ought to be plenty of companies you can strike a deal with directly ($250 is peanuts for a large site). If you host the ads locally, there is a very small chance those ads will be automatically blocked with adblock plus.
Remember: with adsense you are only getting a small slice of the pie. If you have a large userbase try to scale up using companies that you know your userbase will be interested in. This way you know what kinds of ads you get on your site and both sides get a better deal. Cut out the middleman (even if it is the big G).
The best way is to make the intersection designs controlled by insurance companies. It is in their best interest not to ever pay out, so the interesections that they can reduce accidents in will be made as safe as possible.
The easiest way for them would be to simply keep the lights red at all times. It would be as safe as possible.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but I've always wondered why they don't make giant LEDs that can replace ordinary light bulbs.
Like the comments below note, they already do make these as a cluster of LEDs (although not one single giant LED. I suspect the output would be enormous). I've already been replacing normal and halogen lights in my home with LEDs. They're about 3x the price of halogens and at least 10x the price of a normal light bulb, but the price will come down soon enough and they are very efficient.
You can get them in various types, I try to buy ones that give a softer light than halogens.
Naturally, you have to draw the line between religion and philosophies somewhere. Buddhism, Taoism and some of the other 'religions' mentioned fall in this area. Personally I define 'religions' as beliefs that require you to believe in fairytails.
I really hope that over 200 years humanity will look back at religion in the same way most of us now look at L. Ron Hubbert's sect or like an adult looking in amazement at the imagination of a child.
There is very probably no God. Now finish your supper and go to bed.
Credit is needed in a system where you are able to make purchases in certain items. The problem is when people over leverage themselves.
And that is exactly what happened. Both businesses and consumers were overleveraged, the realestate bubble burst and the whole cardhouse came crashing down.
Personally I don't see why you would need credit to buy a car though. If you don't have the cash don't buy a new car, get a second-hand one. Cars are a worthless investment, especially new ones. My rule of thumb is to only use credit if you are making an investment that has a very good chance of at least keeping its value.
Homes on the other hand... oh wait, never mind...
(but seriously, even in this market a house will still have considerable value after 10 years, where a car will be close to worthless)
Okay. But it's important to note that Bill Clinton didn't get an absolute majority of the popular vote either. In fact, Barack Obama is the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win a majority of the popular vote.
[citation needed]?
I'm not sure where you got this. I'm but a stupid euro, yet a quick search shows that Bush was the first elected US president to lose the popular vote since 1888.
If my country had a president who got half a million votes less than the other guy we'd be up in arms.
Personally though I can't help but think there is room for more interesting, more complex team-based puzzles in games, but I guess games like WoW particularly have to satisfy the lowest common denominator.
The problem with puzzle quests in MUDs or MMO's is that it becomes very tempting to simply follow the walkthrough of someone who went before you.
With adventure games the reward for completing the adventure is the knowledge that you completed the adventure without needing help. If you offer a benefit as a reward, that benefit becomes more important for many people. Thus, people will cheat simply to get the reward sooner. Which means you get left behind on the MMO treadmill if you want to do it on your own, giving you a disadvantage to those who look up the puzzle and get back to grinding boars.
There is a reason why MMO quests are so simple. The more complicated they become, the larger the advantage becomes to those who look up the solution. I think only randomly generating puzzles will lead to a more challenging MMO game.
They will release all the source code for the client, server, and tools. They will continue to host the data on their own servers.
So, I'm guessing they won't open source their data/models/resources?
This is a good initiative, like id releasing their engines, and who knows what will come from it. However what would really be interesting is if the resources to a game like this were open sourced as well.
I've been fooling around with a game of my own, and although there are plenty of open source engines there are very few collections of open source resources (3D/2D/sfx) available to help bootstrap my own. I have a couple I'm using atm, but does anyone know of any others, preferably GPL/CC-SA licensed?
Yeah yeah, I know, stop whining and go back to blender.
Strangely they include stuff like vBulletin, which, while open source software, is not free software. Neither beer nor speech.
vB isn't open source by any common definition. Google Analytics and a few other products on the list also aren't open source. TFA speaks about Open Source and "Lower Cost Alternatives", but the slashdot headline fails to make this distinction.
It is good to see companies sporting the term 'open source' (SugarCRM) switch to actual open source licenses, but the suggestion that vB or GA are open source in any way is misleading.
I've been playing first Savage and now Savage 2 every now and then, great for a quick battle.
You have to compare Savage 2 to the original Savage, and although the graphics have gotten much better the gameplay hasn't changed a lot. Which is good in a way, but the additions are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The original Savage however was truly original, as this combination of RTS and FPS hadn't been done before. It makes you think how the combination of game genres could lead to other original enjoyable games.
Now the media is calling it an "outbreak" and a "scourge" and bemoaning the morals of the young people, blah blah blah.
Don't you love these kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies?
One or two kids get busted with X. Media hypes X to be very dangerous. The rest of the kids learn about X via the media and try it themselves: if it's dangerous and you try it, that's a '+1 Social Misfit'.
Naturally the hype dies after a week or two, after which you have a few thousand more young addicts. Who to blame, who to blame...
if you quote a binding fixed price, people will increase the scope over, and over, and over, and won't pay you until you've done way beyond what the initial contract states.
Or you just show that the additional bells-n-whistles aren't in the contract you agreed upon (you did agree on a contract, right?) and tell them you would be more than happy to work on said features after the initial project has been completed.
I've done many fixed-price projects, they're a great way to limit both your time and gain the trust of the client. Would you let a mechanic you don't even know fix your car without agreeing on a price beforehand? What if it took him twice as long for thrice the cost? That's no way to do business.
Doing the billing per hour is fine if you've gained the trust of the client and the amount of time spent is limited (maintenance, support). However this doesn't mean you can throw contracts out of the window. Contracts work both ways and force you to plan multiple projects accurately. Adding additional features is fine and all, but not if other clients are waiting.
Re:"soon-to-be Leader of the Free World"
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
·
· Score: 1
As a Dutch citizen I have the perfect freedom to:... - speak my mind
Unless you happen to be critical to Islam. Then you can expect a knife in your back or a bullet in your head (eg. v. Gogh, Fortuijn).
Our government has locked up reporters for failing to disclose their sources and cartoonists for being critical of the government. It's not like the Netherlands is a magical fairy land where everything is perfect. When it comes to freedom of speech, I'd rather live in the US.
CC isn't the GPL, there is no requirement to include the source for a CC piece of work.
Correct, because the CC doesn't make the distinction between binary and source versions of a piece of work. Which makes sense, as it's rather difficult to demand the negatives of a photo made 50 years ago (and you would gain little from doing so).
CC-SA-AT however does come very close to the GPL IMHO. In most cases with data you can modify the 'binary' directly without needing a 'source' version and for many kinds of data you can't even define a separate source version of the work.
It's only when you talk about code that making this distinction makes sense, as you have a binary that isn't easily modifiable without the source it was made from.
You mean something like a CPU cache? I assume you know that every core already has a cache (L1) on multi-core systems, and shares a larger cache (L2) between all cores.
The problem is that on/near-core memory is damn expensive, and your average supercomputing task requires significant amounts of memory. When the bottleneck for high performance computing becomes memory bandwidth instead of interconnect/network bandwidth you have something a lot harder to optimize, so I can understand where the complaint in IEEE comes from.
Perhaps this will lead to CPUs with large L1 caches specifically for supercomputing tasks, who knows...
The possibilities are endless, and here's why, at last, something like MIDI is necessary for this game: you can't use prerecorded parts like other rhythm games, and you need to allow the user to do anything with the notes played, with dynamics, bending, and other touches depending on the instrument.
Having fooled around with Wii Music for a bit myself, I concur that using MIDI was the only choice possible for a game like this.
However, this is no excuse for the poor choice of tracks. I understand that Nintendo wasn't going to shell out megabucks to license a hundred popular songs, but they did hype up Wii Music quite a bit so you have to be able to show something. Like the IGN reviewer, the only track I actually enjoyed was the F-Zero one.
I understand throwing in a few public domain scores to keep costs down, but if you're being cheap on the music (the main selling point of the game for most), don't be surprised if the game falls flat for many. This coupled with the fact that you can't make your own original tracks but only replay existing ones, Wii Music has been a let-down for me.
It was a pretty steep learning curve and since I had a big budget, I figured I could coax some support time out of some of the core developers or at least some of the senior users in the IRC channel. Wrong again. I couldn't make a go of it with anyone.
Define "some support time". Probably they knew that the last 20% would require a serious amount of time and didn't want to get bogged down with you for a mere few consulting hours. Perhaps if you were willing to give a larger slice of the pie and let them put in most of the time, it would have been interesting enough for them.
It's the same for my own projects. Feel free to pick my brain on IRC a few times, but I'm not going through the hassle of one-off consulting for an hour of "support time". If however you drop an interesting and rewarding project in my lap, I'll be able to get it done with time to spare.
But then again, the beauty of open source is that you can hire any (competent) programmer to work on any project.
Slashdot Mirror
A more interesting bit from TFA:
Good call, I hope to finally ditch those dozens of different chargers in a couple of years.
When was the last time you used an IP address instead of a domain name? The only thing I could think of was setting up my DSL modem a year ago, but I'm not a network admin.
The reason why nearly nobody is using IPv6 is because it doesn't offer any direct benefit to those who need to deploy it.
Considering the western world is now dependent on Soyuz rockets (designed in the 60's) for reaching the ISS, this is a bit harsh.
The russians know their stuff, there probably was some PHB that forced a russian Dilbert to outsource building the reactor-rods to southern Elbonia (who cares if they're cardboard, what could possibly go wrong?).
It depends on the numbers. Phishers gathering twitter logins might be able to sell them at a profit to groups wanting to spam users, trick them into installing malware, or try to use the same username/password combinations against webmail or even paypal accounts. At least the value of a twitter account is much higher than that of a simple email address as you've got people who trust the twit and you've got a password for that account, which might be the same for other accounts.
The phishers would obviously first try to obtain as many logins as possible, as the value of a twitter account is far less than that of a paypal account, but don't forget that phishers target vast numbers of accounts. At those volumes, they have enough ways to profit from their bounty (more than with only the email address of the twit).
I feel dirty, I nearly want to support the phishers if it means I never have to hear about twitter again.
A very pessimistic conclusion. If you get enough pageviews (and you really have 200k users) there ought to be plenty of companies you can strike a deal with directly ($250 is peanuts for a large site). If you host the ads locally, there is a very small chance those ads will be automatically blocked with adblock plus.
Remember: with adsense you are only getting a small slice of the pie. If you have a large userbase try to scale up using companies that you know your userbase will be interested in. This way you know what kinds of ads you get on your site and both sides get a better deal. Cut out the middleman (even if it is the big G).
The easiest way for them would be to simply keep the lights red at all times. It would be as safe as possible.
Oh, you wanted to cross the intersection too?
Sounds like a sucker for air.
(dodges tomatoes)
EXTERMINATE!
Like the comments below note, they already do make these as a cluster of LEDs (although not one single giant LED. I suspect the output would be enormous). I've already been replacing normal and halogen lights in my home with LEDs. They're about 3x the price of halogens and at least 10x the price of a normal light bulb, but the price will come down soon enough and they are very efficient.
You can get them in various types, I try to buy ones that give a softer light than halogens.
Humanism isn't a religion.
Naturally, you have to draw the line between religion and philosophies somewhere. Buddhism, Taoism and some of the other 'religions' mentioned fall in this area. Personally I define 'religions' as beliefs that require you to believe in fairytails.
I really hope that over 200 years humanity will look back at religion in the same way most of us now look at L. Ron Hubbert's sect or like an adult looking in amazement at the imagination of a child.
There is very probably no God. Now finish your supper and go to bed.
And that is exactly what happened. Both businesses and consumers were overleveraged, the realestate bubble burst and the whole cardhouse came crashing down.
Personally I don't see why you would need credit to buy a car though. If you don't have the cash don't buy a new car, get a second-hand one. Cars are a worthless investment, especially new ones. My rule of thumb is to only use credit if you are making an investment that has a very good chance of at least keeping its value.
Homes on the other hand... oh wait, never mind...
(but seriously, even in this market a house will still have considerable value after 10 years, where a car will be close to worthless)
[citation needed]?
I'm not sure where you got this. I'm but a stupid euro, yet a quick search shows that Bush was the first elected US president to lose the popular vote since 1888.
If my country had a president who got half a million votes less than the other guy we'd be up in arms.
The problem with puzzle quests in MUDs or MMO's is that it becomes very tempting to simply follow the walkthrough of someone who went before you.
With adventure games the reward for completing the adventure is the knowledge that you completed the adventure without needing help. If you offer a benefit as a reward, that benefit becomes more important for many people. Thus, people will cheat simply to get the reward sooner. Which means you get left behind on the MMO treadmill if you want to do it on your own, giving you a disadvantage to those who look up the puzzle and get back to grinding boars.
There is a reason why MMO quests are so simple. The more complicated they become, the larger the advantage becomes to those who look up the solution. I think only randomly generating puzzles will lead to a more challenging MMO game.
So, I'm guessing they won't open source their data/models/resources?
This is a good initiative, like id releasing their engines, and who knows what will come from it. However what would really be interesting is if the resources to a game like this were open sourced as well.
I've been fooling around with a game of my own, and although there are plenty of open source engines there are very few collections of open source resources (3D/2D/sfx) available to help bootstrap my own. I have a couple I'm using atm, but does anyone know of any others, preferably GPL/CC-SA licensed?
Yeah yeah, I know, stop whining and go back to blender.
vB isn't open source by any common definition. Google Analytics and a few other products on the list also aren't open source. TFA speaks about Open Source and "Lower Cost Alternatives", but the slashdot headline fails to make this distinction.
It is good to see companies sporting the term 'open source' (SugarCRM) switch to actual open source licenses, but the suggestion that vB or GA are open source in any way is misleading.
I've been playing first Savage and now Savage 2 every now and then, great for a quick battle.
You have to compare Savage 2 to the original Savage, and although the graphics have gotten much better the gameplay hasn't changed a lot. Which is good in a way, but the additions are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The original Savage however was truly original, as this combination of RTS and FPS hadn't been done before. It makes you think how the combination of game genres could lead to other original enjoyable games.
Don't you love these kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies?
One or two kids get busted with X. Media hypes X to be very dangerous. The rest of the kids learn about X via the media and try it themselves: if it's dangerous and you try it, that's a '+1 Social Misfit'.
Naturally the hype dies after a week or two, after which you have a few thousand more young addicts. Who to blame, who to blame...
Exactly! Mozilla, kill the Gruesome Bar and I might give FF3 another look.
Until then, you can pry FF2 from my cold dead hands.
Or you just show that the additional bells-n-whistles aren't in the contract you agreed upon (you did agree on a contract, right?) and tell them you would be more than happy to work on said features after the initial project has been completed.
I've done many fixed-price projects, they're a great way to limit both your time and gain the trust of the client. Would you let a mechanic you don't even know fix your car without agreeing on a price beforehand? What if it took him twice as long for thrice the cost? That's no way to do business.
Doing the billing per hour is fine if you've gained the trust of the client and the amount of time spent is limited (maintenance, support). However this doesn't mean you can throw contracts out of the window. Contracts work both ways and force you to plan multiple projects accurately. Adding additional features is fine and all, but not if other clients are waiting.
Unless you happen to be critical to Islam. Then you can expect a knife in your back or a bullet in your head (eg. v. Gogh, Fortuijn).
Our government has locked up reporters for failing to disclose their sources and cartoonists for being critical of the government. It's not like the Netherlands is a magical fairy land where everything is perfect. When it comes to freedom of speech, I'd rather live in the US.
Correct, because the CC doesn't make the distinction between binary and source versions of a piece of work. Which makes sense, as it's rather difficult to demand the negatives of a photo made 50 years ago (and you would gain little from doing so).
CC-SA-AT however does come very close to the GPL IMHO. In most cases with data you can modify the 'binary' directly without needing a 'source' version and for many kinds of data you can't even define a separate source version of the work.
It's only when you talk about code that making this distinction makes sense, as you have a binary that isn't easily modifiable without the source it was made from.
I don't know about your OS, but mine distributes processes just fine across multiple cores. Perhaps it's time for you to upgrade from DOS?
You mean something like a CPU cache? I assume you know that every core already has a cache (L1) on multi-core systems, and shares a larger cache (L2) between all cores.
The problem is that on/near-core memory is damn expensive, and your average supercomputing task requires significant amounts of memory. When the bottleneck for high performance computing becomes memory bandwidth instead of interconnect/network bandwidth you have something a lot harder to optimize, so I can understand where the complaint in IEEE comes from.
Perhaps this will lead to CPUs with large L1 caches specifically for supercomputing tasks, who knows...
Having fooled around with Wii Music for a bit myself, I concur that using MIDI was the only choice possible for a game like this.
However, this is no excuse for the poor choice of tracks. I understand that Nintendo wasn't going to shell out megabucks to license a hundred popular songs, but they did hype up Wii Music quite a bit so you have to be able to show something. Like the IGN reviewer, the only track I actually enjoyed was the F-Zero one.
I understand throwing in a few public domain scores to keep costs down, but if you're being cheap on the music (the main selling point of the game for most), don't be surprised if the game falls flat for many. This coupled with the fact that you can't make your own original tracks but only replay existing ones, Wii Music has been a let-down for me.
Define "some support time". Probably they knew that the last 20% would require a serious amount of time and didn't want to get bogged down with you for a mere few consulting hours. Perhaps if you were willing to give a larger slice of the pie and let them put in most of the time, it would have been interesting enough for them.
It's the same for my own projects. Feel free to pick my brain on IRC a few times, but I'm not going through the hassle of one-off consulting for an hour of "support time". If however you drop an interesting and rewarding project in my lap, I'll be able to get it done with time to spare.
But then again, the beauty of open source is that you can hire any (competent) programmer to work on any project.