I'm sorry, but it is worth getting up in arms with TiVo about, because what's to stop a broadcaster from slapping that flag deliberately on anything they want to, even if they aren't doing it yet? This bug proves the possibility.
With a market value of $16B, that's a much bigger purchase than Siebel. Oracle's market value is only $66B. That's definitely a stretch to try to purchase CA right now. Better to let CA's value slip over the next few years before buying them.
Oh sure, you're safe as long as your super smart garbage disposal hasn't used it's rotary blades to pull, splice, and respin your house electical wiring to reroute power around the off switch. What are you going to do, double check your home wiring every time you get a clog? C'mon, just stick your hand in, I assure you, it's just a clog. Bwah hah hah hah!
I'm pretty sure the US has all of the above except for Maori. Off the top of my head:
Deadly Spiders - brown recluse, black widow, though actual deaths are unlikely. Loss of limbs due to gangrene is a more common outcome, and a lot of pain is more common yet.
Deadly Snakes - assorted rattlesnakes, and others. these are likely to cause more damage if you get bit, but bites are much easier to avoid.
Deadly Sharks - we get shark deaths/bites occassionally, though you're much more likely to die by lightning strike.
which indicates maori are the natives of new zealand. I'm unclear on how natives of new zealand would be more likely to kill you in australia than the US. Are there a lot of murderous emigrees?
If you lived far enough north (this was Michigan) there were hold out businesses that would store massive warehouses full of ice essentially gathered for free during the winter. You could get enough ice for an ice cooled freezer for a couple of dollars a month. An electric fridge ran something like $3-4 / month in electricity at that time, plus the upfront cost of buying the electric fridge. So sufficiently poor people stuck with ice for a lot longer in that area.
I still think this is pretty straightforward: where do the models, textures, and code necessary to reveal unrated content come from?
If your game provides any one of these 3 things, and you don't tell the ESRB about it, you should be considered in violation of your ESRB rating contract, and face the full penalties it provides.
If, for reasons of ease, you wish to include non-player visible content in your game (and there are indeed many good reasons to do so), then you provide a viewer to the ESRB so that content can be included in the rating. This shouldn't be hard, as you must have had a viewer for that content during the development process (I've certainly never seen a game company that couldn't provide such a viewer given a day's work at most).
I think these requirements are entirely reasonable: imagine if Disney included some hidden porn animations on its childrens dvds, and all it took was a few button presses on the remote to unlock it.
Very few, indeed, though its not just instruction fetch, but execution that is the bounding case. If you're executing in cache, you can plow through a lot more instructions than if your working set includes the memory subsystem.
No, but I knew poor people. The switch to electric refrigeration required buying new refrigerators. There were still people getting home ice delivery in the 70s. By the 80s, probably not.
1) Carve one copy of the ascii table in metal (choosing metal as less brittle than stone).
2) Store the description of the file format in english ascii, and give it a unique identifier, also in english-ascii.
3) Store the files as whatever binary you want, alongside a pointer to #2. The pointer should be english-ascii as well.
If you're real paranoid, you store a copy of webster's english dictionary on metal (only a few thousand metal pages to print, should be pretty low cost), and you store another copy of the same dictionary digitally as the first file in the archive.
You store your digital archive on the 3 most popular digital media available at any given time, and you store 3 or more copies on each media as your level of paranoia requires. When the popular media change, you perform a conversion to the more popular media.
This stuff is not rocket science, but it does take money, which is really all NASA lacked, or they would have done the same thing. It wasn't that they didn't see the problem coming, nor that it was impossible to move their data to a new media before the old one expired, but that they couldn't afford to do it. My Dad worked for JPL, their major subcontractor on many of the science missions, and he and others were certainly aware of the issues, and had proposed solutions to these problems, but there wasn't enough funding.
I was aware of ice shipping. I'm just barely old enough to have actually seen someone get home ice delivery instead of electric refrigeration. My attempt at humor was really targetted more at the cost of such an enterprise, particularly when considering the poorest parts of the third world.
Cheat code has a specific meaning in the industry. It's a series of key presses that causes the application to go down a non-standard code path. Neither of your examples would qualify, as the first would be considered a hack (changing color registers in a way unknown to the application), and the second would be considered normal game behavior (assuming you are allowed to move your characters to those positions in the normal game, and if not, you would simply document that there is a cheat code that allows you to rearrange the positions of the game objects).
The ESRB really wants very simple information:
1) are there hidden nudie pictures being shipped with the product 2) are there hidden sex animations being shipped with the product
Note that the GTA game causing this whole issue would have failed both of these.
Game companies shouldn't need to hire any new testers. Instead, this will all be taken care of contractually. The coders and artists will sign contracts promising under penalty of $$$ and firing not to include such content. The development house will promise under penalty of $$$ not to include such content to the publisher. The publisher will promise under penalty of $$$ and publicity nightmare to the ESRB that they have not included any undocumented content. When the shit hits the fan, the ESRB will say: the publisher lied to us, but now they have to pay up and fix things. The publisher will say they were hoodwinked by the dev house, will fine them, and maybe not publish any more games by them. The dev house will fine and fire the offending devs or artists, and promise to be good in the future.
Assuming you weren't trying to be funny as you were moderated, in 64bit land you can run your 32-bit applications in a more protected way, which can if nothing else, help to increase system stability.
Games need a couple of things that 64bit can provide:
64bit operations - there are a lot of places where you can make use of 64 bit vs 32 bit integers to reduce (halve) the number of instructions you execute. This assumes that your performance is instruction bounded rather than memory bounded, which is sometimes the case.
easier handling of 64bit color formats without conversions
massive memory - games will happily use as much memory as you have, peddling of course to some least common denominator. But if everybody could upgrade their gaming PC's to a terabyte of ram next year for $100, I'll guarantee you there will be games that use that much ram (and use it to great effect) the year after.
An efficient modern refrigerator can be run on less than ten gerbilpower easily enough. Of course, you probably need a team of a hundred gerbils to let them get enough rest, sleep, eating time.
Actually, in fairness to the technique, the difference is that moving a copper coil requires a whole lot more energy than moving some air. There's a big difference in mass there. Seriously, if you can spin a copper coil at a million rpm easily, you've got yourself a pretty nifty invention.
I bet you just didn't get to know them well enough. We used to have 4th of july barbecues together and I thought they were both pretty cool guys. They'd always bring more beer than they drank.
Actually, you'd want to be fairly careful to make sure that your recorded spiel does not contain the word yes, or any equivalents. Otherwise, you run the risk of:
That's interesting. I followed up on the FTC website. It does say in one place that it does not cover business to business calls, but does not say you can't register a business phone or that there is any penalty for doing so. I guess my assumption would be that based on that telemarketers are allowed to call anyone with a business listing, regardless of the DNC list. So DNC registration isn't penalized, just ineffective for businesses.
The solution for a small business (such as the OP) would seem to be to move to a cellular / CWT plan for your business phone needs (up to the point where you need to install a PBX to save on the number of outgoing lines. I know a lot of small businesses that do this, and other than the potential risk involved with changing phone numbers, I can't imagine why more small business don't do this).
To some extent, more is better, because it increases the chance you'll get a picture that interests you. Or imagine taking 100 shots of the big group photo instead of one or two, and see what that does to the odds that one of them has no one blinking, and/or everyone you care about smiling. Etc. There are a lot of places where statistics matter in photography, and anywhere they do, more shots means better quality.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but it is worth getting up in arms with TiVo about, because what's to stop a broadcaster from slapping that flag deliberately on anything they want to, even if they aren't doing it yet? This bug proves the possibility.
With a market value of $16B, that's a much bigger purchase than Siebel. Oracle's market value is only $66B. That's definitely a stretch to try to purchase CA right now. Better to let CA's value slip over the next few years before buying them.
Maybe it was cheaper to dump a lot of people out into the world, and buy back only the successful products.
Oh sure, you're safe as long as your super smart garbage disposal hasn't used it's rotary blades to pull, splice, and respin your house electical wiring to reroute power around the off switch. What are you going to do, double check your home wiring every time you get a clog? C'mon, just stick your hand in, I assure you, it's just a clog. Bwah hah hah hah!
I'm pretty sure the US has all of the above except for Maori. Off the top of my head:
e nt=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&oi=def more&q=define:Maori
Deadly Spiders - brown recluse, black widow, though actual deaths are unlikely. Loss of limbs due to gangrene is a more common outcome, and a lot of pain is more common yet.
Deadly Snakes - assorted rattlesnakes, and others. these are likely to cause more damage if you get bit, but bites are much easier to avoid.
Deadly Sharks - we get shark deaths/bites occassionally, though you're much more likely to die by lightning strike.
So now lets find out what a maori is
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&hs=kMG&lr=&cli
which indicates maori are the natives of new zealand. I'm unclear on how natives of new zealand would be more likely to kill you in australia than the US. Are there a lot of murderous emigrees?
If you lived far enough north (this was Michigan) there were hold out businesses that would store massive warehouses full of ice essentially gathered for free during the winter. You could get enough ice for an ice cooled freezer for a couple of dollars a month. An electric fridge ran something like $3-4 / month in electricity at that time, plus the upfront cost of buying the electric fridge. So sufficiently poor people stuck with ice for a lot longer in that area.
I have to agree with other posters here ... it's Linus who appears to have the least emotional maturity among the posters on that thread.
I still think this is pretty straightforward: where do the models, textures, and code necessary to reveal unrated content come from?
If your game provides any one of these 3 things, and you don't tell the ESRB about it, you should be considered in violation of your ESRB rating contract, and face the full penalties it provides.
If, for reasons of ease, you wish to include non-player visible content in your game (and there are indeed many good reasons to do so), then you provide a viewer to the ESRB so that content can be included in the rating. This shouldn't be hard, as you must have had a viewer for that content during the development process (I've certainly never seen a game company that couldn't provide such a viewer given a day's work at most).
I think these requirements are entirely reasonable: imagine if Disney included some hidden porn animations on its childrens dvds, and all it took was a few button presses on the remote to unlock it.
Very few, indeed, though its not just instruction fetch, but execution that is the bounding case. If you're executing in cache, you can plow through a lot more instructions than if your working set includes the memory subsystem.
No, but I knew poor people. The switch to electric refrigeration required buying new refrigerators. There were still people getting home ice delivery in the 70s. By the 80s, probably not.
your sig link is out of date
Let me see if I can save them some work:
1) Carve one copy of the ascii table in metal (choosing metal as less brittle than stone).
2) Store the description of the file format in english ascii, and give it a unique identifier, also in english-ascii.
3) Store the files as whatever binary you want, alongside a pointer to #2. The pointer should be english-ascii as well.
If you're real paranoid, you store a copy of webster's english dictionary on metal (only a few thousand metal pages to print, should be pretty low cost), and you store another copy of the same dictionary digitally as the first file in the archive.
You store your digital archive on the 3 most popular digital media available at any given time, and you store 3 or more copies on each media as your level of paranoia requires. When the popular media change, you perform a conversion to the more popular media.
This stuff is not rocket science, but it does take money, which is really all NASA lacked, or they would have done the same thing. It wasn't that they didn't see the problem coming, nor that it was impossible to move their data to a new media before the old one expired, but that they couldn't afford to do it. My Dad worked for JPL, their major subcontractor on many of the science missions, and he and others were certainly aware of the issues, and had proposed solutions to these problems, but there wasn't enough funding.
I was aware of ice shipping. I'm just barely old enough to have actually seen someone get home ice delivery instead of electric refrigeration. My attempt at humor was really targetted more at the cost of such an enterprise, particularly when considering the poorest parts of the third world.
Cheat code has a specific meaning in the industry. It's a series of key presses that causes the application to go down a non-standard code path. Neither of your examples would qualify, as the first would be considered a hack (changing color registers in a way unknown to the application), and the second would be considered normal game behavior (assuming you are allowed to move your characters to those positions in the normal game, and if not, you would simply document that there is a cheat code that allows you to rearrange the positions of the game objects).
The ESRB really wants very simple information:
1) are there hidden nudie pictures being shipped with the product
2) are there hidden sex animations being shipped with the product
Note that the GTA game causing this whole issue would have failed both of these.
Game companies shouldn't need to hire any new testers. Instead, this will all be taken care of contractually. The coders and artists will sign contracts promising under penalty of $$$ and firing not to include such content. The development house will promise under penalty of $$$ not to include such content to the publisher. The publisher will promise under penalty of $$$ and publicity nightmare to the ESRB that they have not included any undocumented content. When the shit hits the fan, the ESRB will say: the publisher lied to us, but now they have to pay up and fix things. The publisher will say they were hoodwinked by the dev house, will fine them, and maybe not publish any more games by them. The dev house will fine and fire the offending devs or artists, and promise to be good in the future.
Problem solved.
Assuming you weren't trying to be funny as you were moderated, in 64bit land you can run your 32-bit applications in a more protected way, which can if nothing else, help to increase system stability.
Games need a couple of things that 64bit can provide:
64bit operations - there are a lot of places where you can make use of 64 bit vs 32 bit integers to reduce (halve) the number of instructions you execute. This assumes that your performance is instruction bounded rather than memory bounded, which is sometimes the case.
easier handling of 64bit color formats without conversions
massive memory - games will happily use as much memory as you have, peddling of course to some least common denominator. But if everybody could upgrade their gaming PC's to a terabyte of ram next year for $100, I'll guarantee you there will be games that use that much ram (and use it to great effect) the year after.
An efficient modern refrigerator can be run on less than ten gerbilpower easily enough. Of course, you probably need a team of a hundred gerbils to let them get enough rest, sleep, eating time.
Actually, in fairness to the technique, the difference is that moving a copper coil requires a whole lot more energy than moving some air. There's a big difference in mass there. Seriously, if you can spin a copper coil at a million rpm easily, you've got yourself a pretty nifty invention.
Fantastic, we'll just pack it in dry ice (to keep it cold) and ship it to third world countries. Problem solved!
I bet you just didn't get to know them well enough. We used to have 4th of july barbecues together and I thought they were both pretty cool guys. They'd always bring more beer than they drank.
Consider how true that is in a country where one 'race' rules over another.
Actually, you'd want to be fairly careful to make sure that your recorded spiel does not contain the word yes, or any equivalents. Otherwise, you run the risk of:
.... Yes
May we bill your credit card?
That sounds really cool!
That's interesting. I followed up on the FTC website. It does say in one place that it does not cover business to business calls, but does not say you can't register a business phone or that there is any penalty for doing so. I guess my assumption would be that based on that telemarketers are allowed to call anyone with a business listing, regardless of the DNC list. So DNC registration isn't penalized, just ineffective for businesses.
The solution for a small business (such as the OP) would seem to be to move to a cellular / CWT plan for your business phone needs (up to the point where you need to install a PBX to save on the number of outgoing lines. I know a lot of small businesses that do this, and other than the potential risk involved with changing phone numbers, I can't imagine why more small business don't do this).
So out of curiosity, why aren't you pursuing your $500/call DNC violation penalty.
I've not had a single telemarketing call since the DNC, and was averaging three per day before it, so for me it has been a great success.
To some extent, more is better, because it increases the chance you'll get a picture that interests you. Or imagine taking 100 shots of the big group photo instead of one or two, and see what that does to the odds that one of them has no one blinking, and/or everyone you care about smiling. Etc. There are a lot of places where statistics matter in photography, and anywhere they do, more shots means better quality.