I believe Microsoft has actually done a good job with this. First, Windows includes a prominently placed "Windows Update" menu item, which most users will click on just by accident often enough to be useful. Second, they're training users to update the OS by including "cool" updates like Microsoft Messenger and Media Player alongside more mundane updates. Finally, one of the most prominent updates is the Critical Update Notification program, which should help even non-proactive users get the base updates they really need. Hopefully, all this handholding will rub off enough for people to begin to realize that software needs to be maintained regularly, like changing the oil in your car.
And just what's the difference between this and downloading an IE patch? Mozilla is FUBAR--poor architectural choices have made it nearly impossible to fix in any reasonable amount of time without a high cruft factor.
The problem with this is that manufacturers usually have very poor support for multiple Windows versions or configurations. Remember not long ago when it was difficult to find hardware that worked on NT because vendors didn't write drivers for it? Unfortunately, good driver support is seldom one of the things one can discern before buying a product.
The real issue here with Microsoft giving up on supporting Bluetooth out of the gate is that we lose the one advantage that Microsoft gives us--making de facto support a force for standardization. Left to themselves, vendors are likely to come up with all sorts of imcompatible implementations (as they've already done). However, if Microsoft provides the de facto standard implementation, every vendor will write to that "standard". Microsoft's support could mean the difference between quick and slow adoption of Bluetooth, or even adoption altogether.
You have to be kidding. This sounds akin to pro-life fanatics lauding the killing of abortion clinic doctors.
I find it sad that you apparently think spam so evil that you were willing to forfeit all of your personal ethics to combat it. Regardless of any justifiction that you were working for the "greater good", you were deeply wrong to give anyone
access to the company systems you were trusted with. Not only that, but you were incredibly stupid, as you would've been legally responsible for the incident, and you could've gotten your friend in trouble or been easily caught yourself. If you wanted to do something about the problem and keep your dignity, you should've resigned.
It sounds to me that you and your unscrupulous, spam-happy company were perfectly suited for each other. I hope you grow up and get a little more sense. The fight against unscrupulous spammers doesn't need help from equally unscrupulous, fanatical idiots.
Actually, you're operating with an ignorance of the actual origin of the term "Science Fiction". What you don't realize is that that term is incorrect. Earlier this century, the acronym "SF", which actually stands for "Speculative Fiction", was widely mistaken to be "Science Fiction" because of the typical subject matter of most speculative fiction works. Therefore, "Science Fiction" is a misnomer for "Speculative Fiction", which encompasses may genres of fiction, not just tech-heavy space opera. Correcting for that mistake, Dune and Star Wars are SF.
What a load of sterotypical, contrarian Slashdot crap. How do you know they haven't done testing? Sony's i-Glasses have an auto shutoff feature so that you are forced to take a break after a certain amount of time. Obviously, they've thought about the impact to consumers--are they the only ones? What about all the manufacturers of the displays? You think their engineers haven't designed them around the limits of the human eye, much less used these things for extended periods themselves?
My God, man, corporations are practically defined as incredibly greedy, wholly self-interested entites. Do you think they aren't going to do something to make sure they don't get their asses sued before releasing a product?
Nobody knows what the long term effects of wearing a tiny screen a few inches away from your eye might be, and nobody has bothered to find out.
<ot>Damn cracked-out moderators will mod anything up on a Friday night. Why does self-serving, contrarian criticism of a Slashdot article so frequently make someone "insightful"?</ot>
You're forgetting the possibility of out of band indexing, such as a web page with keys for song titles, or even tools that automatically munge your MP3 names to something unintelligible and then write an index file named with an.mp3 suffix.
Not only this, but the inability to download binary patches is a serious flaw in making Linux an OS suitable for the desktop. If anyone out there is serious about making Linux a competitor to Windows, BeOS, or OS X, an incompatible morass of update mechanisms requiring compilation of source is a major problem.
In addition to the obvious necessity of keeping some things obscured as you've mentioned, what gets me is that not a single person here would realistically advocate that games like Quake be GPL'd instead of sold.
Why? Because the latest, greatest kick-ass game obviously takes a shitload of resources and time to write. If they gave the game away, what are the chances anyone would pay the developers for the next 2-3 years to write the next cool game?
This is no different than writing commercial software; in fact, it's even less useful in any practical sense. It's OK to pay for cool software, but not software that does something less flashy?
When's the last time you heard someone bitch about shelling out $50 bucks for a new game (that runs on Windows, no less) that didn't directly relate to the ability of the person to comfortably pay for the game? Never.
Besides, given ESR's wacko fondness for guns, you think he's not out there playing Quake? I'd even bet RMS was that bitch that fragged you last weekend...
Personally, I can't wait for an earlier Star Trek series, when Starfleet uniforms for women were those really short miniskirts instead of those horrible Deanna Troi jumpsuits.
"I think Microsoft is trying to paint the open-source community as being fascist; that all software have has to be free, or none of it can be," said Behlendorf, whose company helps businesses run their own open-source projects.
Unfortunately, thanks to RMS and Eric Raymond, Microsoft may very well succeed in painting this picture.
Like any revolutionary movement coming to maturity, the open source community needs to continue to distance itself from the radical zealots if it ever hopes to make serious inroads against companies like Microsoft and the mindshare they control.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with these two, having them on our side is a liability that must be overcome in order to get people past their political and personal biases against open source.
Think about it, open source does inhibit innovation--at least if you take the word literally:
to propose or implement a new method, approach, idea, or the like
Instead of everyone coming up with their own incompatible or closed solution, people can freely build on the work of others. This is less innovation in a narrow view, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
Given the mess of incompatible systems, architectures, desktop environments, what have you, less innovation can be a good thing because it focuses effort where it's needed. Imagine what Linux would be like if Microsoft put as much money (not code!) into it as they do into Windows.
If I drop a pencil off of my desk and then pick it up, does that violate the laws of thermodynamics?
This "system" (as you inexplicably quote) is not even remotely a perpetual motion machine. How does putting something back the way it was violate the laws of thermodynamics? You still have to add energy in the process.
They're merely taking advantage of an otherwise unusable source of energy--the sun--to break the chemical bonds.
Re:Fewer game developers == better games == good
on
Gaming Crash up Ahead
·
· Score: 1
So what you're saying is that you want a game that is:
Cheap
Short
Easy
Where is the challenge?
I didn't say easy or short. I did say shorter. I play all my games on the most difficult level. That adds at least 1/2 again the amount of time it takes to finish a game. I don't want easy, I just want a game that I can see the end of, and then come back for more if I like it.
The market wouldn't make money on games that are comprehensive, long, challenging if they weren't considered popular by the user base. Having less game developers in the market is definatly not the means of getting more innovative games out there. I mean really, game development is a small tight knit community and isn't something any idiot can get into (unlike web-development), it is a very "clicky" industry. Less developers only means that less ideas will get a venue, therefore less choice. Just look at the early 80's (which in contrast to now had very few game programmers), most games were clones of a select few 'great' games.
Realize that people buy games because of the subject matter and/or graphics, not because the games are long. They are only offered ridiculously short or ridiculously long games in today's market. If the publishers didn't need to justify charging increasingly more for each game because of overhead, we wouldn't see this kind of bloat.
Having less overhead in the game market is absolutely the way to get more innovative games out there. More genuinely talented people can break in, and there is less reason to keep the sub-average developer or designer employed. Today's games are hampered by the fact that the finite resources of the market (good programmers, good designers, shelf space, patrons, publishers) are stretched thinly across too many games, most of which suck, and which take years to bring to market. I'd rather see a great development house turn out a game a year than wait 2-3 years to find out a game sucks, or is good but bloated because of all the excessive crap they added. Diablo II would've been a great game minus one act. The development of 1/4 of the game delayed its release and tied up its developers for how many months?
And, isn't it a better business model to spend a shorter amount of time developing a game that might be a hit and which you can follow up on quickly than spend 2-3 years only to find out that the game is a complete flop (Daikatana anyone)? Better to find out if the game is popular before spending years developing it.
From all that I've heard, one the biggest growth areas for Linux is the embedded market. Clearly, information appliances like TiVo have used Linux with great success, but how long will/can this last?
Multimedia is only going to be more and more integral to everyday information appliances (not just stereo components and PVRs). What answer does Linux have to this with its mishmash of incompatible multimedia technologies?
To me, this article indicates exactly why operating systems like BeOS will continue to make inroads into the embedded market, while Linux is in serious danger of losing out. Be is designed and marketed as a "multimedia OS", and uses like this allow it to really shine. How long before the built-in features of BeOS are more than anyone doing it from scratch in Linux will want to compete against? Isn't it already that way?
My feeling is that the multimedia capabilities in BeOS will eventually obviate the need for Linux's primary strength in the embedded market--the availability of source code. If an OEM-ready platform already has support for all the stuff you'd want to hack into Linux, is small and cheap enough, why NOT use it? Isn't the whole reason TiVo used Linux so they could add in all the multimedia stuff they needed that Linux didn't provide? (And don't tell me they did it for philosophical reasons. OEMs want results, not dogma.)
If Linux wants to compete in this space, it needs focus, which seems to be the one thing it doesn't (yet) offer.
Am I the only one who feels like games today (console and PC) are either half-finished crap, or far too ambitious? I don't know how many games I haven't finished because the developement house decided to make them 20+ hours longer than is feasible for an adult gamer to finish. Sure, a game that takes 60-200 hours to finish (Baldur's Gate II) is great for the high-school kidees with nothing better to do, but as someone who works 70+ hours/week in the tech industry, who has time for that?
A crash would be welcome in my opinion because game developers could get back to realistic goals for their games. Rather than have everyone try to create from scratch a winning game design and cutting edge graphics, why not give gamers who like a game more chances to enjoy it? The good games would stick around longer, the bad ones would go away quicker. I look back fondly on the days of the endless Ultima sequels--a good game, same basic winning concept, with tweaks and updates coming at a just the right pace. Even the best franchises today like Resident Evil are under pressure to create huge games. Code Veronica is something like 4 CDs that'll likely never make it into my Dreamcast's drive.
How about a game that takes 40 hours to finish, and is followed up shortly by several installments? Why not use the same game engine for more than one release? Rather than one huge 200+ hour Baldur's Gate release of which I'll never even reach the climax of the story, I want several seperate campaigns of reasonable size. It sucks paying $59.95 for a game that you don't even know you'll finish, much less like. Reasonable goals in game development would lead to games built on reasonable budgets, within reasonable time limits (not 18+ months), and which cost less per installment when released. I'd rather pay $20 a pop for several installments of something good than $50 up front for crap.
Looking Glass Studios is a prime example of the kinds of casualties that occur when the gaming industry moves at breakneck speed. They developed a hugely innovative game (Thief: The Dark Project), but 18 months later are belly up. The good guys can't keep up because the idiots making crap games out there suck up all the money, resources, and mindshare with their promises of the latest and greatest. 9 times out of 10 though, they release some crappy Quake derivative. In the meantime, the guys trying to make good games can't because they're under constant pressure to keep up.
Let 'em all crash and burn. Then only better games will get made, and publishers will have less incentive to push for the unrealistic goals games today try to reach.
This has got to be a load. How many meteors end up as meteoroids per day? As far as I know, there's never been any confirmed human death by meteoroid. Why would a mere 74 satellites pose such a threat when no one in recorded history has been provably killed by anything falling from space?
First, let me say that I'm no fan of the RIAA or MPAA, and would side with most/. readers on recent copyright & IP issues involving these groups.
But isn't it interesting that one of the first things to come out of everyone's mouth here is a comment indicating how easy this device will make DVD/HDTV/video piracy, plus discussions of how much of someone else's copyrighted material will fit on certain media?
Is it any wonder that the RIAA or MPAA suffer from paranoid psychosis?/.'ers go to awfully great lengths to oppose the RIAA's position, dogmatically insisting that piracy is a minimal drain in their overall business. But, when the RIAA comes and reads this article on Slashdot (which I'm sure they now track religiously), what do they see?
Furthermore, how many/.'ers complain that these groups shouldn't be afraid of piracy while they swap copyrighted materials themselves? How many of them would have a problem burning a DVD-RAM of an HDTV broadcast for their buddies? Do their buddies then go and do it for another friend, ad infinitum?
I'm not saying that this is either right or wrong--make up your own mind--but, how many of the RIAA & MPAA critics actually think critically about their own actions? Maybe piracy is a bigger problem than/.'ers and others on the "good" side like to admit, simply because they think that any piracy they engage in doesn't matter.
Here's the comparison according to SETI@Home's FAQ:
How does the computing power of Seti@home compare with existing supercomputers?
The most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS and costs $110 million. SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500K so far.
Um, let me remind you that the Nazis were the conservative party. The right wing is by definition more concerned with the strength of the state than it is preserving the rights of the individual.
If Bush is perfectly happy to take away your rights to choose whether to carry your own fetus to term, I'm sure he's not particularly concerned about taking away your rights to privacy.
It makes me sad to think my vote has to be wasted to counteract the vote of a chump like you.
If you want to pick a.com startup that's going to do well (and do well by you), then you have to understand who's behind the company. People in high positions who have been successful in another.coms are more likely to be successful again.
The reality is that the people behind most successful.com startups predominately belong to an inner circle; they generally all know, worked with, or competed against one another at some point in the past. One.com success breeds any number of other startups that all have that much more likelihood of being successful. Research the backgrounds of the company's management. Have they led other startups to success? Have they worked in high positions in other respectable companies? Have they demonstrated industry leadership skills? The more research you do, the more connections between people you will find, and it will become clearer just where your company is likely to be in the food chain.
Also, don't just jump to a company because someone makes an attractive pitch about how much funding the company has gotten, or how great its product is. Ask to see the business plan (you may need to sign an NDA), do research on the intended market, judge the company's success based on your own knowledge of the industry.
If you want to be part of a successful.com startup, you can't let someone else's vision be your guide. You need to be a part of the vision yourself and understand what's going on in the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Microsoft has actually done a good job with this. First, Windows includes a prominently placed "Windows Update" menu item, which most users will click on just by accident often enough to be useful. Second, they're training users to update the OS by including "cool" updates like Microsoft Messenger and Media Player alongside more mundane updates. Finally, one of the most prominent updates is the Critical Update Notification program, which should help even non-proactive users get the base updates they really need. Hopefully, all this handholding will rub off enough for people to begin to realize that software needs to be maintained regularly, like changing the oil in your car.
And just what's the difference between this and downloading an IE patch? Mozilla is FUBAR--poor architectural choices have made it nearly impossible to fix in any reasonable amount of time without a high cruft factor.
The real issue here with Microsoft giving up on supporting Bluetooth out of the gate is that we lose the one advantage that Microsoft gives us--making de facto support a force for standardization. Left to themselves, vendors are likely to come up with all sorts of imcompatible implementations (as they've already done). However, if Microsoft provides the de facto standard implementation, every vendor will write to that "standard". Microsoft's support could mean the difference between quick and slow adoption of Bluetooth, or even adoption altogether.
I find it sad that you apparently think spam so evil that you were willing to forfeit all of your personal ethics to combat it. Regardless of any justifiction that you were working for the "greater good", you were deeply wrong to give anyone access to the company systems you were trusted with. Not only that, but you were incredibly stupid, as you would've been legally responsible for the incident, and you could've gotten your friend in trouble or been easily caught yourself. If you wanted to do something about the problem and keep your dignity, you should've resigned.
It sounds to me that you and your unscrupulous, spam-happy company were perfectly suited for each other. I hope you grow up and get a little more sense. The fight against unscrupulous spammers doesn't need help from equally unscrupulous, fanatical idiots.
Actually, you're operating with an ignorance of the actual origin of the term "Science Fiction". What you don't realize is that that term is incorrect. Earlier this century, the acronym "SF", which actually stands for "Speculative Fiction", was widely mistaken to be "Science Fiction" because of the typical subject matter of most speculative fiction works. Therefore, "Science Fiction" is a misnomer for "Speculative Fiction", which encompasses may genres of fiction, not just tech-heavy space opera. Correcting for that mistake, Dune and Star Wars are SF.
My God, man, corporations are practically defined as incredibly greedy, wholly self-interested entites. Do you think they aren't going to do something to make sure they don't get their asses sued before releasing a product?
Really? Go ask Thad Starner and all his friends--they've been using them continuously for literally years.<ot>Damn cracked-out moderators will mod anything up on a Friday night. Why does self-serving, contrarian criticism of a Slashdot article so frequently make someone "insightful"?</ot>
You're forgetting the possibility of out of band indexing, such as a web page with keys for song titles, or even tools that automatically munge your MP3 names to something unintelligible and then write an index file named with an .mp3 suffix.
Not only this, but the inability to download binary patches is a serious flaw in making Linux an OS suitable for the desktop. If anyone out there is serious about making Linux a competitor to Windows, BeOS, or OS X, an incompatible morass of update mechanisms requiring compilation of source is a major problem.
Why? Because the latest, greatest kick-ass game obviously takes a shitload of resources and time to write. If they gave the game away, what are the chances anyone would pay the developers for the next 2-3 years to write the next cool game?
This is no different than writing commercial software; in fact, it's even less useful in any practical sense. It's OK to pay for cool software, but not software that does something less flashy?
When's the last time you heard someone bitch about shelling out $50 bucks for a new game (that runs on Windows, no less) that didn't directly relate to the ability of the person to comfortably pay for the game? Never. Besides, given ESR's wacko fondness for guns, you think he's not out there playing Quake? I'd even bet RMS was that bitch that fragged you last weekend...
Personally, I can't wait for an earlier Star Trek series, when Starfleet uniforms for women were those really short miniskirts instead of those horrible Deanna Troi jumpsuits.
Like any revolutionary movement coming to maturity, the open source community needs to continue to distance itself from the radical zealots if it ever hopes to make serious inroads against companies like Microsoft and the mindshare they control.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with these two, having them on our side is a liability that must be overcome in order to get people past their political and personal biases against open source.
Given the mess of incompatible systems, architectures, desktop environments, what have you, less innovation can be a good thing because it focuses effort where it's needed. Imagine what Linux would be like if Microsoft put as much money (not code!) into it as they do into Windows.
This "system" (as you inexplicably quote) is not even remotely a perpetual motion machine. How does putting something back the way it was violate the laws of thermodynamics? You still have to add energy in the process.
They're merely taking advantage of an otherwise unusable source of energy--the sun--to break the chemical bonds.
Having less overhead in the game market is absolutely the way to get more innovative games out there. More genuinely talented people can break in, and there is less reason to keep the sub-average developer or designer employed. Today's games are hampered by the fact that the finite resources of the market (good programmers, good designers, shelf space, patrons, publishers) are stretched thinly across too many games, most of which suck, and which take years to bring to market. I'd rather see a great development house turn out a game a year than wait 2-3 years to find out a game sucks, or is good but bloated because of all the excessive crap they added. Diablo II would've been a great game minus one act. The development of 1/4 of the game delayed its release and tied up its developers for how many months?
And, isn't it a better business model to spend a shorter amount of time developing a game that might be a hit and which you can follow up on quickly than spend 2-3 years only to find out that the game is a complete flop (Daikatana anyone)? Better to find out if the game is popular before spending years developing it.
Multimedia is only going to be more and more integral to everyday information appliances (not just stereo components and PVRs). What answer does Linux have to this with its mishmash of incompatible multimedia technologies?
To me, this article indicates exactly why operating systems like BeOS will continue to make inroads into the embedded market, while Linux is in serious danger of losing out. Be is designed and marketed as a "multimedia OS", and uses like this allow it to really shine. How long before the built-in features of BeOS are more than anyone doing it from scratch in Linux will want to compete against? Isn't it already that way?
My feeling is that the multimedia capabilities in BeOS will eventually obviate the need for Linux's primary strength in the embedded market--the availability of source code. If an OEM-ready platform already has support for all the stuff you'd want to hack into Linux, is small and cheap enough, why NOT use it? Isn't the whole reason TiVo used Linux so they could add in all the multimedia stuff they needed that Linux didn't provide? (And don't tell me they did it for philosophical reasons. OEMs want results, not dogma.)
If Linux wants to compete in this space, it needs focus, which seems to be the one thing it doesn't (yet) offer.
A crash would be welcome in my opinion because game developers could get back to realistic goals for their games. Rather than have everyone try to create from scratch a winning game design and cutting edge graphics, why not give gamers who like a game more chances to enjoy it? The good games would stick around longer, the bad ones would go away quicker. I look back fondly on the days of the endless Ultima sequels--a good game, same basic winning concept, with tweaks and updates coming at a just the right pace. Even the best franchises today like Resident Evil are under pressure to create huge games. Code Veronica is something like 4 CDs that'll likely never make it into my Dreamcast's drive.
How about a game that takes 40 hours to finish, and is followed up shortly by several installments? Why not use the same game engine for more than one release? Rather than one huge 200+ hour Baldur's Gate release of which I'll never even reach the climax of the story, I want several seperate campaigns of reasonable size. It sucks paying $59.95 for a game that you don't even know you'll finish, much less like. Reasonable goals in game development would lead to games built on reasonable budgets, within reasonable time limits (not 18+ months), and which cost less per installment when released. I'd rather pay $20 a pop for several installments of something good than $50 up front for crap.
Looking Glass Studios is a prime example of the kinds of casualties that occur when the gaming industry moves at breakneck speed. They developed a hugely innovative game (Thief: The Dark Project), but 18 months later are belly up. The good guys can't keep up because the idiots making crap games out there suck up all the money, resources, and mindshare with their promises of the latest and greatest. 9 times out of 10 though, they release some crappy Quake derivative. In the meantime, the guys trying to make good games can't because they're under constant pressure to keep up.
Let 'em all crash and burn. Then only better games will get made, and publishers will have less incentive to push for the unrealistic goals games today try to reach.
This has got to be a load. How many meteors end up as meteoroids per day? As far as I know, there's never been any confirmed human death by meteoroid. Why would a mere 74 satellites pose such a threat when no one in recorded history has been provably killed by anything falling from space?
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/
Equally nuts, I'd say.
But isn't it interesting that one of the first things to come out of everyone's mouth here is a comment indicating how easy this device will make DVD/HDTV/video piracy, plus discussions of how much of someone else's copyrighted material will fit on certain media?
Is it any wonder that the RIAA or MPAA suffer from paranoid psychosis? /.'ers go to awfully great lengths to oppose the RIAA's position, dogmatically insisting that piracy is a minimal drain in their overall business. But, when the RIAA comes and reads this article on Slashdot (which I'm sure they now track religiously), what do they see?
Furthermore, how many /.'ers complain that these groups shouldn't be afraid of piracy while they swap copyrighted materials themselves? How many of them would have a problem burning a DVD-RAM of an HDTV broadcast for their buddies? Do their buddies then go and do it for another friend, ad infinitum?
I'm not saying that this is either right or wrong--make up your own mind--but, how many of the RIAA & MPAA critics actually think critically about their own actions? Maybe piracy is a bigger problem than /.'ers and others on the "good" side like to admit, simply because they think that any piracy they engage in doesn't matter.
This is extremely relevant to the discussions about alternative voting systems
Assuming a relatively linear distribution in the US, 50% of people in the US are below average intelligence. 50% vote for Bush--coincidence?
How does the computing power of Seti@home compare with existing supercomputers?
The most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS and costs $110 million. SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500K so far.
If Bush is perfectly happy to take away your rights to choose whether to carry your own fetus to term, I'm sure he's not particularly concerned about taking away your rights to privacy.
It makes me sad to think my vote has to be wasted to counteract the vote of a chump like you.
The reality is that the people behind most successful .com startups predominately belong to an inner circle; they generally all know, worked with, or competed against one another at some point in the past. One .com success breeds any number of other startups that all have that much more likelihood of being successful. Research the backgrounds of the company's management. Have they led other startups to success? Have they worked in high positions in other respectable companies? Have they demonstrated industry leadership skills? The more research you do, the more connections between people you will find, and it will become clearer just where your company is likely to be in the food chain.
Also, don't just jump to a company because someone makes an attractive pitch about how much funding the company has gotten, or how great its product is. Ask to see the business plan (you may need to sign an NDA), do research on the intended market, judge the company's success based on your own knowledge of the industry.
If you want to be part of a successful .com startup, you can't let someone else's vision be your guide. You need to be a part of the vision yourself and understand what's going on in the industry.