Why do I want to drive a Prius in Gran Turismo? I play Gran Turismo so I can drive S4s and Ruf CTR-2s, not cars my mom would own.
D'oh! Perhaps the Toyota dealerships trying to sell Priuses to people interested in buying a car should have taken this into consideration!
I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when hordes of non-Prius-buying gamers fail to flock to the simulators sitting on their showroom floors! Ha-hah!
Huh. This guy's justification of "old people don't play video games" is interesting. First, he states that old people do, in fact, play video games. Then, he draws a line between games like Bridge and Bejeweled and games like KOTOR and Halo. Then, he asserts that because Grandma doesn't go for fast multiplayer action in Halo, old people don't really play video games. The implication being that Bridge and Bejeweled, while video games, aren't really video games, because they're not "mainstream".
Mainstream(adj.) Representing the prevalent attitudes, values, and practices of a society or group
If anything, games like Bejeweled are more mainstream than your Super Console Kill Kill Hit Of The Week 2. Gamers who play Halo are likely to be young, male, and hardcore. Gamers who play Bejeweled cover the entire spectrum of old, young, male, female, hardcore and casual. Tetris has universal appeal. I regularly get mail from grandparents telling me how nice it is that they can play my game with their grandchildren and have a great time at it. That is mainstream, not the cutting-edge stuff that we (a group largely comprised of young men) think of as mainstream.
Old people play video games. Old people play lots of video games. Old people do not generally play the niche games that are designed for and targeted at young, male, hardcore gamers.
I'm not suggesting that Intel would lose 12% of their revenue. Yes, Intel does more than sell chips, but their stakes are nonetheless high in this matter.
Yes, I understand that there are nuances of financial reports that are beyond my comprehension. Somehow, though, I don't think this shortcoming invalidates my point. Are you suggesting that China moving from Intel chips to their own local fabs wouldn't be a significant blow to Intel's business?
If you dig a bit deeper into Intel's financials, you'll find that China represents a huge chunk of Intel's growth since 2000--while their total revenue has dropped from 33.7 billion to 26.7 billion, revenue from China has increased from 2.15 billion to 3.2 billion.
In 2000, China was about 6.3% of Intel's total revenue. Today, it's nearly double that. If China's plans succeed, Intel loses both a sizeable chunk of their revenue and one of their biggest growth markets.
Sorry, did I say 'one of their biggest growth markets'? I meant 'biggest'.
The head of the world's largest semiconductor company said efforts to use local standards to protect and nurture local technology companies had been tried before and produced only short-term results.
Heh.
Heh-heh.
So, Mr. Barrett, was the last time this sort of thing has been tried in a locale of 1.2 billion people?
Basically, Intel is scared. If this takes off, Intel will suffer dearly in a market that currently generates 3.2 billion dollars of revenue for them. Roughly 12% of their total revenue comes from China alone.
You'll forgive me, Mr. Barrett, if I have trouble keeping a straight face.
This proposal isn't the simplest, and probably not the most elegant, but unlike the others it will work without cheating the public. I hope the people building these compulsory licensing systems see the value in that.
Excellent! The RIAA and MPAA will finally have the technological means to realize their ultimate goal--standing up for the rights of the little guy!
Am I the only person who would rather deal with a couple of cables than have to feed batteries to my keyboard and mouse every couple of months?
No, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who'd like to minimize the amount of cabling I need to juggle when I move my PowerBook between work and home...
Or is this just more of the same: "don't use your cell phone on the plane, use the convinient onboard phones we've installed, or the terrorists win (because it cuts into the bottom line)"?
Could be that part of their reasoning stems from consideration of the other poor schmucks stuck in the airplane with the idiot who doesn't understand the quirks of passing through cells at 600 mph and 30,000 feet...
"Hey, Bob!...Yeah, good...good. Yeah, I'm on an airplane right now!...Yeah! Cool, huh?...Yeah! Can you--hello? Hello? You still there, Bob? Hello? *grumble, dial* Hey, Bob. Me again...Yeah, musta kicked me off or something. I dunno, stupid Verizon says this is a coverage area...Yeah, me too, they--hello? Dammit! Hello? *dial dial dial* Hey. Yeah, I dunno what the hell's up with that. Probably some stupid jammer the airlines use to force you to use those stupid expensive air phones...I know!...I know!...I know!...And it's like, he-llooo, how stupid do you think I--hello? Bob? Hello? DAMMIT! *dial dial dial*
You are aware, Congress, that you can't legislate the advace of technology right?
It wasn't Congress, but I seem to recall a President in recent history who declared that we'd put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The fact that we hadn't yet invented the Lunar Lander didn't do much to dissuade him. It would be disingenuous to suggest that many of the technological leaps made in the years that followed would have come about without the chief executive's impetus driving them.
True, Congress can't say, "invent Spiffy Technology X, now!" Congress can say, "This is what you're going to do. Figure out how to do it!"
Surprisingly many people have absolutely wrong ideas about Web Services. I think that the hype and perceived simplicity of everything having to do with the Web are to blame. Well, that, and the wide-spread 'confidence through ignorance' among us.
Y'know, Web Services may--may--be an absolutely wonderful thing, but this review has done slightly less than nothing to convince me otherwise. I'll readily admit that I look askance at Web Services because all I read or hear about them comes from four-color glossies loaded with as many new acronyms as hyperbolic business-speak. I will admit that I know next to nothing about these services from the technical standpoint, and I will further acknowledge that if I were to read these books, I could very well be won over by them.
That said, this review did absolutely nothing to make me want to pick these books up. The main body of your review consists of bulleted list of acronyms that does little more than define them by using other, more commonly recognized acronyms. You then go on to tell us that it's a good book without giving us any reasons beyond a nebulous "the author dedicates enormous effort to showing intricate but very relevant technical details without obscuring the big picture". Well, gosh, that sums up just about any technical manual worth it's salt, man! What makes this one special? What about this book is going to fix the "wrong ideas" I have about Web Services?
You talk about how the book contains no hype (I do hope you appreciate the irony of ending that sentence with an exclamation point, by the way.) You then close the review with "Judging by the hype and money being spent on it by the leading powerhouses, it is going to be very prolific and important technology in the near future." If you're trying to correct misconceptions about Web Services, I can only assume that you want more and more technical people to view Web Services as the Fad-Of-The-Week for PHB's worldwide and not a useful, powerful technology.
This isn't a review, it's an outline of the book, and a rambling one, at that. Tell us what makes it a good book, dammit! Tell us why we're wrong about Web Services being little more than marketing fluff and flashy buzzwords!
I don't disagree with that, but there are a whole let of jobs out there that are very, very specific in what they're looking for, and unless you've got it, you don't stand a chance of getting the position, no matter how good you are. There may well be thousands of jobs out there, but the subset of jobs that you'll have a shot at getting is very, very small--at one point during my own hunt last year, I was lucky to find one or two jobs a week -nationwide- where I filled all of the employer's requirements. True, they'll often bend on the definition of "required", but it's daunting nonetheless.
If you design software for IBM and they fire you, what do you do? You go to one of the 1000s of other firms that employ software engineers.
You're either joking, trolling, or have never tried to find a job outside of college job fairs.
"So, Mr. Smith, please tell me a little bit about your programming experience."
"Well, I've written high-performance database software for AS/400 systems for about six years now..."
"Any Java experience? How about Vantive?"
"I haven't used Java or Vantive, but I assure you, I'm an extremely skilled computer engineer..."
"You clearly are, but we're looking specifically for Java developers with some Vantive experience. We'll keep your resume on file for a few months and give you a call if anything turns up, though. Thanks for coming in!"
Yeah, we're not infected, but we still have to deal with all the nitwit "BIG SCARY SYSADMIN MESSAGE: YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH SoBig.F! YOU SENT THIS TO OUR SERVER!" messages that are still streaming in.
What I wouldn't give for a shiny little app that identifies these and autoresponds to the postmaster and abuse addresses with "I'm on a Mac, you insufferable bint. You're a sysadmin, for god's sake. You should know that SoBig.F spoofs the FROM: line. I am not infected with this virus, you are dumb, and I have notified your superiors that you have absolutely no clue as to how to run a mail server and that you should be fired. I hear the U.S. Army is hiring."
SoBig.F appears to be a Trojan with some worm-like qualities. Of course, in the world of Microsoft mail exploits, the lines are blurred, but a worm is generally not a user-launched process.
Pedantic, I know, but worms are a special interest of mine, and they generally take a fair bit more skill to create than your average Trojan horse.
I've got a bunch of un-munged addresses floating out there (a lot of my visitors aren't all that tech saavy) all pointing to one box. It's been hitting me since about 8:00 AM EST.
Fortunately, I use Mail.app, so I can still check my mail with impunity.
There's a spam/address verificiation message I saw that other day that was pretty clever, though. Some spammers sent a reasonably official-looking letter with Citibank headers, layout, and images telling people to click a link to view and accept a new ToS, or their checking account would be suspended. The link looked something like this:
So they were logging you in as user www.citibank.com to server 127.0.0.1 (changed, obviously) and sending your email address to a verification script. Damn clever.
The Free Software Foundation's FTP site at ftp.gnu.org has been "compromised", and they don't seem to have full backups.
Unbelievable. And I'm supposed to trust their methods and products with my enterprise?
So true. Pray that this story doesn't work it's way into the twisted editorial world of your PHB's trade rags.
"Bob, it says here that these Linux people didn't even have backups for their mission critical servers, and that they had to "go begging to their users" to rebuild the system after they got hacked! Is this the same Linux you want to use as our web server?"
I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity?
Ever wondered why so many people quit smoking? It's not all about saving money, ya know.
Now, if you live somewhere where the life expectancy is 35-40 years, why not keep smoking if you can afford the cost? It's not like you're going to last long enough to die of cancer, and you probably enjoy smoking a fair amount...
Sorry, but I am not going to suddenly have a love-fest with all those bastards who STOLE MY JOB just because they are running linux. Petty? Yes... Immature? yes... I'm Bitter?.. YEP!... But -- fuck 'em, the bastards.
+0, Meh. Welcome to the flip side of the globalization that brings you cheap and plentiful consumer goods.
In any case, I think you're confusing the concept of " bastard Indians stole my job" with "motherfscking greedy employers decided to screw working Americans in order to add a few pennies to the bottom line". Why attack the pawns when the king is in plain view?
Slashdot Mirror
...and here I was afraid to click the link, thinking it would be the Goatse guy...
D'oh! Perhaps the Toyota dealerships trying to sell Priuses to people interested in buying a car should have taken this into consideration!
I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when hordes of non-Prius-buying gamers fail to flock to the simulators sitting on their showroom floors! Ha-hah!
Mainstream (adj.) Representing the prevalent attitudes, values, and practices of a society or group
If anything, games like Bejeweled are more mainstream than your Super Console Kill Kill Hit Of The Week 2. Gamers who play Halo are likely to be young, male, and hardcore. Gamers who play Bejeweled cover the entire spectrum of old, young, male, female, hardcore and casual. Tetris has universal appeal. I regularly get mail from grandparents telling me how nice it is that they can play my game with their grandchildren and have a great time at it. That is mainstream, not the cutting-edge stuff that we (a group largely comprised of young men) think of as mainstream.
Old people play video games. Old people play lots of video games. Old people do not generally play the niche games that are designed for and targeted at young, male, hardcore gamers.
Yes, I understand that there are nuances of financial reports that are beyond my comprehension. Somehow, though, I don't think this shortcoming invalidates my point. Are you suggesting that China moving from Intel chips to their own local fabs wouldn't be a significant blow to Intel's business?
If you dig a bit deeper into Intel's financials, you'll find that China represents a huge chunk of Intel's growth since 2000--while their total revenue has dropped from 33.7 billion to 26.7 billion, revenue from China has increased from 2.15 billion to 3.2 billion.
In 2000, China was about 6.3% of Intel's total revenue. Today, it's nearly double that. If China's plans succeed, Intel loses both a sizeable chunk of their revenue and one of their biggest growth markets.
Sorry, did I say 'one of their biggest growth markets'? I meant 'biggest'.
Heh.
Heh-heh.
So, Mr. Barrett, was the last time this sort of thing has been tried in a locale of 1.2 billion people?
Basically, Intel is scared. If this takes off, Intel will suffer dearly in a market that currently generates 3.2 billion dollars of revenue for them. Roughly 12% of their total revenue comes from China alone.
You'll forgive me, Mr. Barrett, if I have trouble keeping a straight face.
Not exactly--each time you listen to a song, an incremental amount of what you paid shifts from the seller (the label) to the artist.
Of course, all this does is encourage distributors to carry really shitty music. The better the music they sell, the worse their profits.
This proposal isn't the simplest, and probably not the most elegant, but unlike the others it will work without cheating the public. I hope the people building these compulsory licensing systems see the value in that.
Excellent! The RIAA and MPAA will finally have the technological means to realize their ultimate goal--standing up for the rights of the little guy!
No, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who'd like to minimize the amount of cabling I need to juggle when I move my PowerBook between work and home...
Could be that part of their reasoning stems from consideration of the other poor schmucks stuck in the airplane with the idiot who doesn't understand the quirks of passing through cells at 600 mph and 30,000 feet...
"Hey, Bob!...Yeah, good...good. Yeah, I'm on an airplane right now!...Yeah! Cool, huh?...Yeah! Can you--hello? Hello? You still there, Bob? Hello? *grumble, dial* Hey, Bob. Me again...Yeah, musta kicked me off or something. I dunno, stupid Verizon says this is a coverage area...Yeah, me too, they--hello? Dammit! Hello? *dial dial dial* Hey. Yeah, I dunno what the hell's up with that. Probably some stupid jammer the airlines use to force you to use those stupid expensive air phones...I know!...I know!...I know!...And it's like, he-llooo, how stupid do you think I--hello? Bob? Hello? DAMMIT! *dial dial dial*
It wasn't Congress, but I seem to recall a President in recent history who declared that we'd put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The fact that we hadn't yet invented the Lunar Lander didn't do much to dissuade him. It would be disingenuous to suggest that many of the technological leaps made in the years that followed would have come about without the chief executive's impetus driving them.
True, Congress can't say, "invent Spiffy Technology X, now!" Congress can say, "This is what you're going to do. Figure out how to do it!"
Really? What if the consumer is a construction worker? Or a student?
Or imagine a scenario where they sell two N-Gages--it could be a judge and a construction worker!
I'm still getting about 200-300 "You sent a message with SoBig.F! Patch your computer immediately!" every day.
Trouble is, I'm on a Mac. I couldn't be infected with SoBig.F if I wanted to.*
Further trouble is, SoBig.F spoofs the FROM: field, so these messages invariably go to everybody except the schmuck with the infected box.
So no, these messages hurt far more than they help.
[* Pedant filter: I suppose I could buy Virtual PC or somesuch and install a vulnerable version of Windows. That'd probably do the trick.]
Y'know, Web Services may--may--be an absolutely wonderful thing, but this review has done slightly less than nothing to convince me otherwise. I'll readily admit that I look askance at Web Services because all I read or hear about them comes from four-color glossies loaded with as many new acronyms as hyperbolic business-speak. I will admit that I know next to nothing about these services from the technical standpoint, and I will further acknowledge that if I were to read these books, I could very well be won over by them.
That said, this review did absolutely nothing to make me want to pick these books up. The main body of your review consists of bulleted list of acronyms that does little more than define them by using other, more commonly recognized acronyms. You then go on to tell us that it's a good book without giving us any reasons beyond a nebulous "the author dedicates enormous effort to showing intricate but very relevant technical details without obscuring the big picture". Well, gosh, that sums up just about any technical manual worth it's salt, man! What makes this one special? What about this book is going to fix the "wrong ideas" I have about Web Services?
You talk about how the book contains no hype (I do hope you appreciate the irony of ending that sentence with an exclamation point, by the way.) You then close the review with "Judging by the hype and money being spent on it by the leading powerhouses, it is going to be very prolific and important technology in the near future." If you're trying to correct misconceptions about Web Services, I can only assume that you want more and more technical people to view Web Services as the Fad-Of-The-Week for PHB's worldwide and not a useful, powerful technology.
This isn't a review, it's an outline of the book, and a rambling one, at that. Tell us what makes it a good book, dammit! Tell us why we're wrong about Web Services being little more than marketing fluff and flashy buzzwords!
Ack! Thpppt!
..."WNU's Not a University"?
I don't disagree with that, but there are a whole let of jobs out there that are very, very specific in what they're looking for, and unless you've got it, you don't stand a chance of getting the position, no matter how good you are. There may well be thousands of jobs out there, but the subset of jobs that you'll have a shot at getting is very, very small--at one point during my own hunt last year, I was lucky to find one or two jobs a week -nationwide- where I filled all of the employer's requirements. True, they'll often bend on the definition of "required", but it's daunting nonetheless.
You're either joking, trolling, or have never tried to find a job outside of college job fairs.
"So, Mr. Smith, please tell me a little bit about your programming experience."
"Well, I've written high-performance database software for AS/400 systems for about six years now..."
"Any Java experience? How about Vantive?"
"I haven't used Java or Vantive, but I assure you, I'm an extremely skilled computer engineer..."
"You clearly are, but we're looking specifically for Java developers with some Vantive experience. We'll keep your resume on file for a few months and give you a call if anything turns up, though. Thanks for coming in!"
What I wouldn't give for a shiny little app that identifies these and autoresponds to the postmaster and abuse addresses with "I'm on a Mac, you insufferable bint. You're a sysadmin, for god's sake. You should know that SoBig.F spoofs the FROM: line. I am not infected with this virus, you are dumb, and I have notified your superiors that you have absolutely no clue as to how to run a mail server and that you should be fired. I hear the U.S. Army is hiring."
They could call it iSmackYouUpsideTheHead.
A worm is a program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. While this worm may require user intervention, there exist plenty of worms that do not (the most infamous being the Morris Worm.) A malicious program that masquerades as a legitimate application is a Trojan horse.
SoBig.F appears to be a Trojan with some worm-like qualities. Of course, in the world of Microsoft mail exploits, the lines are blurred, but a worm is generally not a user-launched process.
Pedantic, I know, but worms are a special interest of mine, and they generally take a fair bit more skill to create than your average Trojan horse.
Fortunately, I use Mail.app, so I can still check my mail with impunity.
There's a spam/address verificiation message I saw that other day that was pretty clever, though. Some spammers sent a reasonably official-looking letter with Citibank headers, layout, and images telling people to click a link to view and accept a new ToS, or their checking account would be suspended. The link looked something like this:
http://www.citibank.com:A78F...(random hex crap)...A812@127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/c.pl?user=youraddre ss@yourserver.com
So they were logging you in as user www.citibank.com to server 127.0.0.1 (changed, obviously) and sending your email address to a verification script. Damn clever.
Design your entire home from the ground up and test it for paper-airplane-friendliness!
Unbelievable. And I'm supposed to trust their methods and products with my enterprise?
So true. Pray that this story doesn't work it's way into the twisted editorial world of your PHB's trade rags.
"Bob, it says here that these Linux people didn't even have backups for their mission critical servers, and that they had to "go begging to their users" to rebuild the system after they got hacked! Is this the same Linux you want to use as our web server?"
Ever wondered why so many people quit smoking? It's not all about saving money, ya know.
Now, if you live somewhere where the life expectancy is 35-40 years, why not keep smoking if you can afford the cost? It's not like you're going to last long enough to die of cancer, and you probably enjoy smoking a fair amount...
+0, Meh. Welcome to the flip side of the globalization that brings you cheap and plentiful consumer goods.
In any case, I think you're confusing the concept of " bastard Indians stole my job" with "motherfscking greedy employers decided to screw working Americans in order to add a few pennies to the bottom line". Why attack the pawns when the king is in plain view?