An entire movie about people who make their cars faster through blacklight technology, strategic decal placement, random kanji, and oversized spoilers. I heard they even tried to give it a plot.
"We need this job done, and there's only one man who can do it."
"Uhh...the guy who just sank $40k into his Hyundai Accent?"
"Precisely."
Seriously. MMORPGs, GTA3, Garage Games (a cheap, modern, commercial-grade heavy-duty 3D + networking engine for indie developers), the mod/TC scene (still quite recent in the history of video games,) integrated media games like.hack (not the best job, but a novel way of making a game, nonetheless,) impressive advances in underlying code (example: load times in Jak and Daxter,) cel shading (Sly Cooper, Wind Waker) -- There's a great deal of innovation out there. There's only so much laurel-sitting you can do in the gaming industry--unless you can continue to build off previous successes, you'll pretty quickly slip into obscurity/irrelevance/mockery until you prove yourself again.
Add to that a strong hobbyist community, an increasingly useful toolset, and you've got an environment where lots of different people and groups can innovate. You don't need to be a megacorp to make a fun or innovative game--innovation can be as simple as Tetris.
Just because the gaming industry is becoming more and more corporate doesn't mean that there's no space for a) innovation or b) indie shops/hobbyists. What more people need to realize is that you can make a Simple, fun game (shameless self-plug*) on your own time, so long as you're willing to accept your limitations. Just because you can't go toe-to-toe with EA or Rockstar doesn't mean that you can't make games or innovate...
* Disclaimer: Nothing about above game is particularly innovative, except, perhaps, the garden gnomes.
In my scenario, Jane feels threatened--she arms the device. In your scenario, Jane feels threatened--she grabs her mace, maybe even she flips the safety cover off the trigger.
Herein, I think, lies the difference in our perceptions of "active" and "passive". Once Jane actually squeezes the charge button on her jacket, she's activated it. She is being attacked, and she is striking anything that actually touches her coat. It is analagous to pulling the trigger on the mace. She is being attacked, and she is striking anything that the chemical spray hits. There's an opportunity for unintentional targeting in both cases. Simply because the jacket's active range is "touching the jacket" doesn't mean that it's passive. The jacket needs to be actively and consciously used; as such, any unintended "bumping into" isn't a passive attack so much as it is bad aim. Arming the jacket by inserting and turning the key in the sleeve is analagous to flipping the lid on your mace and placing your thumb on the trigger. Jane's jacket has a safety and a trigger, and if she's actively triggering her jacket, I see that as being no different than actually spraying mace.
The idea of being threatened in a confined, populated space is a bit of a contrived scenario, too. You're far, far less likely to get assaulted, mugged, or raped in a confined space with a bunch of other people in it than if you were in a space with comparatively few (or no) bystanders. Your biggest threat on a crowded bus is a pickpocket, and they have absolutely no desire to confront their targets.
Re:Do we really want this?
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Jim, not an attacker, unseen to Jane, comes into accidental contact with her because of the realities of the enclosed area, be it a subway car, elevator or whatever. Bang, jacket discharges, even though Jane did not intend it. That's passive...I don't know of another personal protection device subject to passive deployment while operating as designed.
So Jim gets a nasty shock. He's completely unharmed; it smarts, but doesn't injure him in any way. Within seconds, the effect is but a memory, albeit an unpleasant one. Remember, this thing is powered by a freakin' nine-volt battery and is designed to deter, not injure, debilitate, or kill.
Sure, you can add in the "Ol' Jim as old man with weak ticker on a pacemaker" variable, but the scenario quickly goes from being practical concern to contrived exception. Bump into Ol' Jim and knock him over, you'd break his hip and give him a heart attack, anyhow. Hell, even just microwaving a burrito would do him in.
Consider mace and pepper spray. Jane's in an enclosed space. Feels threatened. Sees threatening man; sprays him with mace. Jim, Jill, Janet, Joe, the Johnsons, Jasmine, Jerry, Jarvis, and Jack all get a nice, healthy lungful of mace, as they're sharing the same confined space. Eyes water, throats burn, people start screaming. Effects last for quite a while--an eternity if your eyes are on fire and you feel like you can't breathe. Panic ensues, people stampede, people get hurt. People have even been killed in very similar scenarios.
I'd much rather be in a subway car with ten jumpy, nervous women wearing active, crackling shock jackets than in a subway car with one jumpy, nervous person brandishing a can of mace or pepper spray. You may feel otherwise.
Intention is the key here. The device is discharged in a passive manner, as I understand it. That merits some discussion.
Well, that explains it, then. You don't understand it. You don't understand it at all.
The device only charges after 1) unlocking it and 2) squeezing the activation button (one at either wrist).
There's nothing passive about it. There's no accidentally bumping into people and shocking the hell out of them. Women won't be walking around the city bristling with electric energy. It's completely triggered by the wearer.
I invite you to read both the article and the plethora of highly-scored posts in this discussion that all point out this same fact.
What happens to mens rea (malicious intent)? How does one assert that merely touching someone is an act for which you can cause physical harm?
Oh, come on. What's to stop anybody from doing anything with malicious intent?
I mean, what's to stop some man on the subway from just reaching over and grabbing a woman's breasts? That's merely touching someone, and it doesn't even cause physical harm.
Is it really that much of a stretch of the imagination to envision a scenario where a zap-happy sociopath would be charged with assault?
Heh. I've been conditioned to the point where nasty hopsy smell = tasty beer in the not too distant future, so it's a good kinda nasty smell to me. Pavlov would be proud.
Brewing beer is an excuse to make your apartment smell horrible, making soap is an excuse to see how quickly various household items dissolve when exposed to lye, and metalsmithing is an excuse to pretend that you're Sauron.
OK, but......Apple knows laptops are the only growth area in PC sales right now, and what better way to capture customers than some ass-kickin' new laptops?
No offense, but ye gads! The 12" and 17" PowerBooks aren't even half a year old, and they're still pretty much universally recognised as some of the ass-kickingest laptops ever.
...how much further up the proverbial ass do you want the proverbial boot to go?
Moreover, why spend time and money trying to push something consumers aren't interested in just so you can say you improved one area of your sales? It's the overall sales picture that matters, and giving consumers what they want is the best way to maximize that.
That's the beauty of marketing. If you're good at it, consumers will be interested in exactly what you want them to be interested in; if the product is actually good, then it's that much easier. Apple wins on both counts. Besides, they've been pushing laptops big time for a while now. That momentum is gonna run out at some point. Desktops need to be there to pick up the slack. (Got your iBook/PowerBook? Got your iPod? Great--now you need a Power Mac with Airport wireless to act as your home media hub!)
Of the handfull of people I know who are looking for a new machine right now, it's either for a laptop or a gaming rig, and while a new Mac is suitable for gaming, it won't make a good choice as a gaming oriented purchase. The laptop lookers I know are very open to the idea of buying a Powerbook.
...so buy the Powerbook! It's arguably the best mobile computing solution on the market today, and it's still a very fresh line. Games are good and all, but they're clearly not the spearhead of Steve's vision right now--music is. In any case, the state of development for Mac Games is such that catering to the gamers is a risk-fraught, low return gamble, at best. Until the software base is there to make Macs a truly attractive choice for a hardcore gamer, it's a strategy that just won't pay off. I know, it's a classic Catch-22, but them's the breaks.
I was gearing up to buy a Mac -- a 17" iMac or a 12" PowerBook, but with new chips on the horizon I think I'll hold off for a few months.
I'd be surprised if the nextgen chip landed in a portable right off the line. Apple's Power Mac line has been, well, pretty stagnant lately; a new chip is the perfect way to boost this line.
In any case, putting a brand new and untested chip into a laptop environment is risky. They'll roll 'em out in nice, big towers, where heat dissipation is easier to handle and hardware doesn't need to be custom-crafted to fit inside a hella-small space. Once they're comforatble with the quirks of the chip in Real World settings, they'll start working them into laptops.
So, in other words, don't hold your breath for a PPC 970 laptop in the next round or two of Mac hardware, for both product line freshening and technical reasons.
911? IIRC, that's that newfangled emergency number. You know, for emergencies. Like heart attacks and SARS.
SARS. Indeed.
Operator: "911, please state your emergency." Caller: "(garbled) please help! There's (garbled) with SARS, and (garbled) me! Operator: "Ma'am, you need to calm down. Please repeat what you just said." Caller: "There's a MAN with SARS, and he's coming towards--oh, Jesus God--" Operator: "All right, ma'am, you need to tell me where you are right now. Is he threatening you with the SARS?" Caller (whispering): "He's right there...I don't know if he can--oh, no, no, NO! GO AWAY! PLEASE! DON'T--" Operator: "Ma'am? Ma'am? We've traced your location, and a unit is on the way. We need you to stay right where you are. Ma'am?"
...he had chained up his ^unique motorized two wheel walking machine. Ballentine indicated that he was the only one to have the machine in South Puget Sound.
...where the word "unique" was crammed above the flow of the rest of the text as an afterthought.
Good grief. Can't ya just see the owner having a hissy fit over how amazingly special he and his Segway are, and how this is no ordinary theft, and the cop wedging the "unique" commentary in there just to shup him up?
That said, I'm intrigued by this concept of a two-wheeled walking machine. Pair it with a two-legged rolling machine, and you've got yourself some serious innovation!
To me, it seems the main reason of "banning cars" is to make the environment cleaner.
...consider that no cars = greatly increased public safety. Consider, too, that having that no cars would encourage diverse, "fun" neighborhoods--residences and businesses intermingled, instead of huge, dull blocks of houses. Things like neighborhood markets and restaurants would make a real comeback. And of course, there's always the very real health benefit of that much more walking on a daily basis...
Unfortunatly, the 'I cost them more money in support' argument doesn't wash. Accountants split money into different 'buckets'. Revenue comes in, and is devided into capital, Operations and Maintance, and Profit. (I'm over simplifying).
To the accountants, someone being on hold for 6 hours, and wasting 1 hour of 4 employees time isn't 'wasting' more money than the revenue from purchasing the product. It's just averaged in with all those people who DIDN'T call intuit, and just used TurboTax on one computer (like me (i bought it before I heard of the DRM games)).
...and as history has been demonstrating in the past few years, all a good accountant needs to do is create enough "buckets" that money magically materializes exactly where you need it. I can slice my pie however I want, but it's not going to get any bigger because of it.
Simply because the net result of all customers is averaged doesn't mean that the argument is a "wash"; if anything, the accounting procedures used to hide and dismiss such strategic failures deserve that title. The fact remains that Intuit lost more money than they made from my relative. Of course that one person is not going to make or break the company's bottom line, but when you get increasing numbers of frustrated customers tying up your support lines, you're going to lose money both in paying for more support and in lost future sales. If you don't adjust your O&M budget to support additional tech support to cover the heavier volume, you're going to pay for it when that many more people share their horror stories of "I was on hold for two hours, and the jerk on the other end was useless!" with their friends.
I have no question that the accounting community possesses the means and ingenuity to mitigate the percieved effect of this sort of thing, but it's simply not true that clever math eliminates the effect that this has on a company's bottom line.
"...well yeah, Bill, I really like the new TivoCop Recorders they issued us, but I swear mine thinks I'm racist or somthing--you should see what it puts in my "Favorite Citations" list..."
I'm shocked that the so called backlash has caused Intuit to do this. It flies in the face of yesterday's earnings [link]. According to the news Intuit sales on its tax preparation software increased dramatically over the same period last year. My assumtion being that the copy protection was indeed effective and caused many more people than usual to fork out their $14~$35.
...but what of increased costs, monetary and otherwise? Consider all the horror stories of tech support--monetarily, they probably spent a good chunk of cash providing support for people who had DRM problems (of which there were quite a few.) Additionally, they've taken a measurable PR hit--that equates into a bleaker sales outlook as people stop buying their product.
A relative of mine spent several hours ping-ponging through their tech support line, only to give up in frustration. She cost them a good deal more than what she paid them--she tied up a good four employee-hours' worth of work, swore to never buy TurboTax again, and has talked to other people about her experience. All in all, TurboTax has taken a loss on selling their product to her.
J2EE 1.4 is around the corner and has a whole slew of webservices related protocol made native including SOAP, WSDL, JAX:RPC. This would be outdated in no time
...just remember that you'll need to be able to support things like IRRW, SWIP-3, Turbo ND, and ARD(i) just as soon as the marketing machine can crank 'em out--and they won't be in J2EE 1.4!
J2EE 1.4 is gonna be great, sure, but there's an entire universe of coding fads yet to be discovered, and your boss will be clamoring for you to stay ahead of the game. J2EE 1.4 will probably be as relevant as soda-cracker punch cards by the week before it's release--mark my words...
Slashdot Mirror
"WHAT?!? Where are my Sims?!?"
"Um...woops?"
I'm evil.
Not to mention dead.
Heh. Evil and dead, for running a Gentoo LiveCD on a GF's Mac.
Something about an Army of Dorkness seems appropriate here...
Wah-Lah^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Walla^H^H^H^H^H Viola^H^H^H^H^H Voilà! Instant CUPS book!
It's all a ploy to give him an unfair advantage over GNU Chess!
An entire movie about people who make their cars faster through blacklight technology, strategic decal placement, random kanji, and oversized spoilers. I heard they even tried to give it a plot.
"We need this job done, and there's only one man who can do it."
"Uhh...the guy who just sank $40k into his Hyundai Accent?"
"Precisely."
Add to that a strong hobbyist community, an increasingly useful toolset, and you've got an environment where lots of different people and groups can innovate. You don't need to be a megacorp to make a fun or innovative game--innovation can be as simple as Tetris.
Just because the gaming industry is becoming more and more corporate doesn't mean that there's no space for a) innovation or b) indie shops/hobbyists. What more people need to realize is that you can make a Simple, fun game (shameless self-plug*) on your own time, so long as you're willing to accept your limitations. Just because you can't go toe-to-toe with EA or Rockstar doesn't mean that you can't make games or innovate...
* Disclaimer: Nothing about above game is particularly innovative, except, perhaps, the garden gnomes.
Herein, I think, lies the difference in our perceptions of "active" and "passive". Once Jane actually squeezes the charge button on her jacket, she's activated it. She is being attacked, and she is striking anything that actually touches her coat. It is analagous to pulling the trigger on the mace. She is being attacked, and she is striking anything that the chemical spray hits. There's an opportunity for unintentional targeting in both cases. Simply because the jacket's active range is "touching the jacket" doesn't mean that it's passive. The jacket needs to be actively and consciously used; as such, any unintended "bumping into" isn't a passive attack so much as it is bad aim. Arming the jacket by inserting and turning the key in the sleeve is analagous to flipping the lid on your mace and placing your thumb on the trigger. Jane's jacket has a safety and a trigger, and if she's actively triggering her jacket, I see that as being no different than actually spraying mace.
The idea of being threatened in a confined, populated space is a bit of a contrived scenario, too. You're far, far less likely to get assaulted, mugged, or raped in a confined space with a bunch of other people in it than if you were in a space with comparatively few (or no) bystanders. Your biggest threat on a crowded bus is a pickpocket, and they have absolutely no desire to confront their targets.
So Jim gets a nasty shock. He's completely unharmed; it smarts, but doesn't injure him in any way. Within seconds, the effect is but a memory, albeit an unpleasant one. Remember, this thing is powered by a freakin' nine-volt battery and is designed to deter, not injure, debilitate, or kill.
Sure, you can add in the "Ol' Jim as old man with weak ticker on a pacemaker" variable, but the scenario quickly goes from being practical concern to contrived exception. Bump into Ol' Jim and knock him over, you'd break his hip and give him a heart attack, anyhow. Hell, even just microwaving a burrito would do him in.
Consider mace and pepper spray. Jane's in an enclosed space. Feels threatened. Sees threatening man; sprays him with mace. Jim, Jill, Janet, Joe, the Johnsons, Jasmine, Jerry, Jarvis, and Jack all get a nice, healthy lungful of mace, as they're sharing the same confined space. Eyes water, throats burn, people start screaming. Effects last for quite a while--an eternity if your eyes are on fire and you feel like you can't breathe. Panic ensues, people stampede, people get hurt. People have even been killed in very similar scenarios.
I'd much rather be in a subway car with ten jumpy, nervous women wearing active, crackling shock jackets than in a subway car with one jumpy, nervous person brandishing a can of mace or pepper spray. You may feel otherwise.
Well, that explains it, then. You don't understand it. You don't understand it at all.
The device only charges after 1) unlocking it and 2) squeezing the activation button (one at either wrist).
There's nothing passive about it. There's no accidentally bumping into people and shocking the hell out of them. Women won't be walking around the city bristling with electric energy. It's completely triggered by the wearer.
I invite you to read both the article and the plethora of highly-scored posts in this discussion that all point out this same fact.
Oh, come on. What's to stop anybody from doing anything with malicious intent?
I mean, what's to stop some man on the subway from just reaching over and grabbing a woman's breasts? That's merely touching someone, and it doesn't even cause physical harm.
Is it really that much of a stretch of the imagination to envision a scenario where a zap-happy sociopath would be charged with assault?
My vote is for "C++ ungood".
Heh. I've been conditioned to the point where nasty hopsy smell = tasty beer in the not too distant future, so it's a good kinda nasty smell to me. Pavlov would be proud.
Brewing beer is an excuse to make your apartment smell horrible, making soap is an excuse to see how quickly various household items dissolve when exposed to lye, and metalsmithing is an excuse to pretend that you're Sauron.
No offense, but ye gads! The 12" and 17" PowerBooks aren't even half a year old, and they're still pretty much universally recognised as some of the ass-kickingest laptops ever.
Moreover, why spend time and money trying to push something consumers aren't interested in just so you can say you improved one area of your sales? It's the overall sales picture that matters, and giving consumers what they want is the best way to maximize that.
That's the beauty of marketing. If you're good at it, consumers will be interested in exactly what you want them to be interested in; if the product is actually good, then it's that much easier. Apple wins on both counts. Besides, they've been pushing laptops big time for a while now. That momentum is gonna run out at some point. Desktops need to be there to pick up the slack. (Got your iBook/PowerBook? Got your iPod? Great--now you need a Power Mac with Airport wireless to act as your home media hub!)
Of the handfull of people I know who are looking for a new machine right now, it's either for a laptop or a gaming rig, and while a new Mac is suitable for gaming, it won't make a good choice as a gaming oriented purchase. The laptop lookers I know are very open to the idea of buying a Powerbook.
I'd be surprised if the nextgen chip landed in a portable right off the line. Apple's Power Mac line has been, well, pretty stagnant lately; a new chip is the perfect way to boost this line.
In any case, putting a brand new and untested chip into a laptop environment is risky. They'll roll 'em out in nice, big towers, where heat dissipation is easier to handle and hardware doesn't need to be custom-crafted to fit inside a hella-small space. Once they're comforatble with the quirks of the chip in Real World settings, they'll start working them into laptops.
So, in other words, don't hold your breath for a PPC 970 laptop in the next round or two of Mac hardware, for both product line freshening and technical reasons.
Mainframe Techies are a dime a dozen--the real challenge is finding competent PDP8/E techies these days!
Plunk your modern so-called "computer whiz" in front of one, and their first reaction is invariably one of the following:
*sniff*
SARS. Indeed.
Operator: "911, please state your emergency."
Caller: "(garbled) please help! There's (garbled) with SARS, and (garbled) me!
Operator: "Ma'am, you need to calm down. Please repeat what you just said."
Caller: "There's a MAN with SARS, and he's coming towards--oh, Jesus God--"
Operator: "All right, ma'am, you need to tell me where you are right now. Is he threatening you with the SARS?"
Caller (whispering): "He's right there...I don't know if he can--oh, no, no, NO! GO AWAY! PLEASE! DON'T--"
Operator: "Ma'am? Ma'am? We've traced your location, and a unit is on the way. We need you to stay right where you are. Ma'am?"
Good grief. Can't ya just see the owner having a hissy fit over how amazingly special he and his Segway are, and how this is no ordinary theft, and the cop wedging the "unique" commentary in there just to shup him up?
That said, I'm intrigued by this concept of a two-wheeled walking machine. Pair it with a two-legged rolling machine, and you've got yourself some serious innovation!
There are no suspects. [Case] closed.
That'd be pretty Orwellian, too...
[clue for the plebes]
...is it "GNASA" now?
To the accountants, someone being on hold for 6 hours, and wasting 1 hour of 4 employees time isn't 'wasting' more money than the revenue from purchasing the product. It's just averaged in with all those people who DIDN'T call intuit, and just used TurboTax on one computer (like me (i bought it before I heard of the DRM games)).
Simply because the net result of all customers is averaged doesn't mean that the argument is a "wash"; if anything, the accounting procedures used to hide and dismiss such strategic failures deserve that title. The fact remains that Intuit lost more money than they made from my relative. Of course that one person is not going to make or break the company's bottom line, but when you get increasing numbers of frustrated customers tying up your support lines, you're going to lose money both in paying for more support and in lost future sales. If you don't adjust your O&M budget to support additional tech support to cover the heavier volume, you're going to pay for it when that many more people share their horror stories of "I was on hold for two hours, and the jerk on the other end was useless!" with their friends.
I have no question that the accounting community possesses the means and ingenuity to mitigate the percieved effect of this sort of thing, but it's simply not true that clever math eliminates the effect that this has on a company's bottom line.
"...well yeah, Bill, I really like the new TivoCop Recorders they issued us, but I swear mine thinks I'm racist or somthing--you should see what it puts in my "Favorite Citations" list..."
A relative of mine spent several hours ping-ponging through their tech support line, only to give up in frustration. She cost them a good deal more than what she paid them--she tied up a good four employee-hours' worth of work, swore to never buy TurboTax again, and has talked to other people about her experience. All in all, TurboTax has taken a loss on selling their product to her.
There are others like her.
J2EE 1.4 is gonna be great, sure, but there's an entire universe of coding fads yet to be discovered, and your boss will be clamoring for you to stay ahead of the game. J2EE 1.4 will probably be as relevant as soda-cracker punch cards by the week before it's release--mark my words...