If X really is so fan-fucking-tastic, and GNOME, KDE or E trash it, then these major distrobutions that everyone's using really outta get their act together. I mean, the only X tweaking trick I know of is to renice X, which isn't something a desktop user should have to worry about/use.
Linux has only failed if Linus measures success through sales, overall market, or other commericial meters. The fact that he doesn't own his own Linux company supports my hypothesis, that commercial success is not a goal of Linus's. If his desire was to build an operating system, and to learn how modern ones work, then there is no question that he has overwhelmingly succeeded.
That the operating system has become a concern for the monopolists, deployed in markets worldwide, and has a community capable of taking down arbitrary web servers (although one might argue that/. has outgrown its heritage), on so small a budget says something. There are other Operating Systems out there, many Open Source, many not. But we're not talking today about them. And why not? Because linux matters in some way that these others do not, despite the failure (perhaps failure is an inappropriate word here) of the market to adapt Linux. Clearly commercial success is not all that matters.
Even if Linux has failed as a competitor to MSOS, its existance has put the market on alert, and rexamined its own focus. This in part drives MS to examine and secure the software it buys and then resells to the world. In the meantime, Linux has not died, nor has BSD, nor QNX. They have not failed yet. But they're all in ill health.
I think the judge's ruling was fair. Judges should maintain a stoic posture. They should not rule on laws simply because the judge does not like it. Instead they focus on whether or not the action was legal. In this case, it was outside of the jurisdiction Congress had authorized. This is part of the checks and balances system; the courts must be careful not to set a precedent to allow outstepping boundaries, even if popular support and legislatures are behind it.
The bottom line is that this was a bill that needed to happen in order to give the originating commission authority to maintain the DNC list. If I was the judge I would not feel bitch slapped by "the Government," as you suggest.
Even the free speech argument is somewhat invalid. Under the bill, people put their names on a list, and say that they don't want to hear commercial speech. Free speech is guarenteed, but there's never a guarentee that anyone wants to hear it.
If targeted, agreed and warranted systems worked, I would expect that they would have tried and adopted it by now. But there's things that work against the method. First, market research is expensive. Finding out who likes what takes more than a simple survey. Second, market research can be wrong, even after doing complex analysis of purchase histories and other correlation studies. Third, targeted personal selling to interested parties is overkill. Calling someone up who wants your product could certainly work, but so would sending a catalogue, or a flyer, or a post card. Not to mention the chance that they've allready purchased some of the wares you're selling elsewhere.
Not to mention that it will cost jobs. Even if the above factors are outweighed by the potential targeted selling gain and telemarketers make more money, there will be less calls to make. In rural areas, its sad to say that these call centers can be one of the biggest single employers in the area. You'll notice that two of the representatives from Utah voted against it. I think that telemarketing accounts for a decent number of jobs and revenue for them.
You want to run ICQ and rcon and all your fancy stuff in addition that makes owning a computer worthwhile in the background. Rebooting may be fast in NT, but hardware detection takes a long time, when it works. Including drivers for every interface can get expensive spacewise.
That happen to be plastered everywhere. In fact, they had Metroid fusion on demo for a long, long time. Nintendo really needs to get its act together on the demo disc thing. If GBA downloadable demos on promotional discs had been available from the start, there would probably have been a stronger corrolation between GC and GBA owners.
how about instead of "don't like" you use the phrase "crashes to desktop" or "refuses to install" or "causes my computer to reboot after ten minutes of play"?
The legends of UNIX hold that original version was put together hastily (the filesystem was designed overnight), and for the express purposes of playing spacewar. How much of that is true and how much comes from lying MUTLICS sympathists, I'll never know. But only with time has UNIX become something worthwhile. Perhaps the award is for being the first decent example of an iterative development cycle?
I have a professor that is in the process of writing his own book for introduction to programming class. I didn't think that it was terribly enlightening, and focused on some GUI toys early on, but he appears to have remodelled the book some, perhaps in response to these sorts of complaints. We used it in our class for a couple of years, but it appears that they've moved on. Some of the other students really enjoyed it though, and it makes a handy reference.
What I do like about the book is that the book doesn't focus on the java libraries. No fussing about the difference between a HashMap and HashSet, or what Runnable means.
Since we're not using it right now, you'd probably be an easy sell as a royalty free test market. Shoot off an email to him if you think the book is workable.
Direct manipulation of the vote is not the only means of exploitation. The goal of the Australian vote is to discourage coersion. Imagine a form of fraud the voter took part in. Say a third party is paying people to vote a certain way. Giving people a way to prove they voted one way or the other removes this secrecy. Now you just have to show Big Boss that you voted the right way to collect your 30 bucks.
Kinda makes me wonder how much a vote is worth these days...
I gave a preesntation to my Computers and Society class discussing voting technology, and in part I covered more traditional fraud methods. Chain voting is a method of vote selling exploiting weak ballot accounting for ballots.
The buyer of said votes pays for blank ballots, and offers out prevoted ballots. A selling voter takes the prevoted with them to the polling place, and switches the blank ballot issued to them for the prevoted ballot. They then return to the buyer and collect for their empty ballot. Of course someone has to get out with an empty ballot to start the process, effectively throwing one vote away.
Traditional means of combatting chain voting is to issue the ballot with a tear off serial number. This way you can have a temporary link between the voter and the ballot. With a slip cover that leaves only the tear away number exposed, you can attempt this without losing secrecy. The electronic machine with printout doesn't nessecarily prevent this. The problem I often see with the computer experts is not their zeal to point out and evaluate technical systems, but their inablility to apply lessons learned from the past. Sure, someone could hack in, but an paper trail won't nessecarily prevent more traditional (and probably simpler) vote selling techniques. The problem in the nation the article mentioned could have been prevented by issuing ballots to insert into the printer. Spot checks in the paper ballot can't fix this, since there would have to be some sort of examinable data between the ballot and the voter.
Well its worked pretty damn well so far with WON. If you wanted to play online you needed to authenticate with the WON server. So its really just more of the same, though perhaps less lenient this time around.
There's another solution to the problem. In addition to the "savepoint," there also exists a notion of a continue point. The idea is that if you need to stop playing for a moment, it is simple to save your gamestate, but it retains the element of risk, and avoids the introduction of more loadtimes into the game. Basically, the game allows you to save anywhere and removes your save when you resume. This has existed for a long while in many games. Some of the Dragon Warriors, the Mario sports titles for gameboy, and probably the oldest of titles, nethack.
Of course this does result in some side effects. For starters, the lack of permenant "saves" means that if you die you'll be sent off to the beginning to try again. The Dragon Warrior and Mario games accomodate for this by mixing in save points at places like right before entering a cave, or starting a new tennis match.
What designers need to focus on is what gives the game purpose. As much as I hate those academic cooks who talk about video game narrative, almost every game follows the same structure. Go from level to level, retrying until you find the end of the game. Failure in this situation has nearly zero meaning in this repitition model. I hear the Wing Commander games featured a system like this. Unfortunately, academics never get a warm welcome, in part because they have little experience, in part because they make little attempt to be accessible, and in part because they stray from the people's notion of a game.
The reason that so many people do not finish the games they play is that many games are not good enough to warrant it. Its one thing to sit through 2 hours of a bad movie. Its quite another do so for 40 hours. Another thing to consider is how many games do you rent once and never play again?
Which only serves to strengthen my argument. Given a finite amount of resources, quality and quantity are competitors. Shorter games (not shorter game cycles, mind you) will increase game "completion" rates, not only because the game is shorter, but because it should be better overall. My real doubt about all this is that developers will shorten games without any correlating increase in quality.
Firstly, Old games were easier to make in part because there existed a great abundance of tools that helped reuse. Tiles are one example, but they only the beginning. There's a concept called meta tiling, in which a set of larger objects are built from a group of tiles. Like in Final Fantasy Legend games, all the houses look the same, with different (or no) signs. This way is very simple to describe a town your adventurers visit. These sorts of things haven't yet emerged in 3d gaming.
Every few years we see a large spike in polygons availble for graphics in games, but we haven't seen much to deal with manipulating and creating these increasing amounts of polys. Sure, you've probably seen games for a while now that reuse game assets like trees, but the world geometry is far more complex. Another point to mention is that in the distant past of console gaming, games were designed in an incremental fashion. Megaman game controls got more complex/robust with each new game, and the graphics became further refined, although the same base character design was kept.
The other big outgrowth I see will be smaller games. Those times where buying a game meant 40 hours in a single play through are something of the past. Instead, you'll see shorter single player plots, more multiplayer options, and maybe even games that don't focus on the level progression method (i.e. I'm sorry, the Princess is in another castle!). They say that only 5 percent of game players today complete a game to a developer intended "finish." So clearly a change toward shorter games would be beneficial. It may be that trying to pidgeon hole story telling into game playing is not possible given in the play-cutscene/plot-play game style.
The final thing to consider is that raising prices may not nessecarily increase profits. It might be that a lower price would result in a far greater amount of sales.
Microsoft writing their own software. Most of the software they put on the market is purchased. The only commercial code is "glue" to the various pieces of technology they've bought.
So should I use Quake to benchmark? Its popular and many people allready use it as their gauge of performance. But there was also mention of drivers that recognize the executable itself and tweak operations. These tweaks won't apply when I say, play Half-Life, when I should expect some sort of correlation in performance between the two.
Everything that made RARE worth what it is has gone. Much of the talent behind Goldeneye has left to form a studio of their own. Their product was time splitters and timesplitters 2. I'm not sure how much longer the Stamper Brothers will remain with RARE, as I believe that MS bought some assets from them. I haven't seen anything nearly as original as Blast Corps from RARE in a long long time. I'd say its Microsoft's loss, but really I think the video game player has lost a quality game source as well.
Again developers blame publishers for cowtowing to public demand, for trying to put a title into the increasingly jaded video game consumer's head, for spending more on a liscence than on development of the game itself. But how many developers refuse money made from the practices that put them in the black? How many even think about an advertising schedule during initial negotiations?
On a related note, how many times does the management of a development company have to sign on to unrealistic milestone charts before they admit they don't know how to plan these things, and start addressing the problem of delay?
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If X really is so fan-fucking-tastic, and GNOME, KDE or E trash it, then these major distrobutions that everyone's using really outta get their act together. I mean, the only X tweaking trick I know of is to renice X, which isn't something a desktop user should have to worry about/use.
Linux has only failed if Linus measures success through sales, overall market, or other commericial meters. The fact that he doesn't own his own Linux company supports my hypothesis, that commercial success is not a goal of Linus's. If his desire was to build an operating system, and to learn how modern ones work, then there is no question that he has overwhelmingly succeeded.
/. has outgrown its heritage), on so small a budget says something. There are other Operating Systems out there, many Open Source, many not. But we're not talking today about them. And why not? Because linux matters in some way that these others do not, despite the failure (perhaps failure is an inappropriate word here) of the market to adapt Linux. Clearly commercial success is not all that matters.
That the operating system has become a concern for the monopolists, deployed in markets worldwide, and has a community capable of taking down arbitrary web servers (although one might argue that
Even if Linux has failed as a competitor to MSOS, its existance has put the market on alert, and rexamined its own focus. This in part drives MS to examine and secure the software it buys and then resells to the world. In the meantime, Linux has not died, nor has BSD, nor QNX. They have not failed yet. But they're all in ill health.
I think the judge's ruling was fair. Judges should maintain a stoic posture. They should not rule on laws simply because the judge does not like it. Instead they focus on whether or not the action was legal. In this case, it was outside of the jurisdiction Congress had authorized. This is part of the checks and balances system; the courts must be careful not to set a precedent to allow outstepping boundaries, even if popular support and legislatures are behind it.
The bottom line is that this was a bill that needed to happen in order to give the originating commission authority to maintain the DNC list. If I was the judge I would not feel bitch slapped by "the Government," as you suggest.
Even the free speech argument is somewhat invalid. Under the bill, people put their names on a list, and say that they don't want to hear commercial speech. Free speech is guarenteed, but there's never a guarentee that anyone wants to hear it.
If targeted, agreed and warranted systems worked, I would expect that they would have tried and adopted it by now. But there's things that work against the method. First, market research is expensive. Finding out who likes what takes more than a simple survey. Second, market research can be wrong, even after doing complex analysis of purchase histories and other correlation studies. Third, targeted personal selling to interested parties is overkill. Calling someone up who wants your product could certainly work, but so would sending a catalogue, or a flyer, or a post card. Not to mention the chance that they've allready purchased some of the wares you're selling elsewhere.
Not to mention that it will cost jobs. Even if the above factors are outweighed by the potential targeted selling gain and telemarketers make more money, there will be less calls to make. In rural areas, its sad to say that these call centers can be one of the biggest single employers in the area. You'll notice that two of the representatives from Utah voted against it. I think that telemarketing accounts for a decent number of jobs and revenue for them.
Might I suggest "athlete?"
You want to run ICQ and rcon and all your fancy stuff in addition that makes owning a computer worthwhile in the background. Rebooting may be fast in NT, but hardware detection takes a long time, when it works. Including drivers for every interface can get expensive spacewise.
Would probably be enough to trigger a zerg rush panic attack, thanks to good old StarCraft.
That happen to be plastered everywhere. In fact, they had Metroid fusion on demo for a long, long time. Nintendo really needs to get its act together on the demo disc thing. If GBA downloadable demos on promotional discs had been available from the start, there would probably have been a stronger corrolation between GC and GBA owners.
how about instead of "don't like" you use the phrase "crashes to desktop" or "refuses to install" or "causes my computer to reboot after ten minutes of play"?
Probably because the lingering ghosts of Operating Systems past have left the public eye. UNIX wasn't always considered the big-iron behemoth it is today. There was a time when people percieved UNIX in the same way the typical slashdotter views MS Windows today. "The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."
The legends of UNIX hold that original version was put together hastily (the filesystem was designed overnight), and for the express purposes of playing spacewar. How much of that is true and how much comes from lying MUTLICS sympathists, I'll never know. But only with time has UNIX become something worthwhile. Perhaps the award is for being the first decent example of an iterative development cycle?
After all, GNU is Not Unix.
It didn't really feature any random generation of levels.
I have a professor that is in the process of writing his own book for introduction to programming class. I didn't think that it was terribly enlightening, and focused on some GUI toys early on, but he appears to have remodelled the book some, perhaps in response to these sorts of complaints. We used it in our class for a couple of years, but it appears that they've moved on. Some of the other students really enjoyed it though, and it makes a handy reference.
What I do like about the book is that the book doesn't focus on the java libraries. No fussing about the difference between a HashMap and HashSet, or what Runnable means.
Since we're not using it right now, you'd probably be an easy sell as a royalty free test market. Shoot off an email to him if you think the book is workable.
Direct manipulation of the vote is not the only means of exploitation. The goal of the Australian vote is to discourage coersion. Imagine a form of fraud the voter took part in. Say a third party is paying people to vote a certain way. Giving people a way to prove they voted one way or the other removes this secrecy. Now you just have to show Big Boss that you voted the right way to collect your 30 bucks.
Kinda makes me wonder how much a vote is worth these days...
I gave a preesntation to my Computers and Society class discussing voting technology, and in part I covered more traditional fraud methods. Chain voting is a method of vote selling exploiting weak ballot accounting for ballots.
The buyer of said votes pays for blank ballots, and offers out prevoted ballots. A selling voter takes the prevoted with them to the polling place, and switches the blank ballot issued to them for the prevoted ballot. They then return to the buyer and collect for their empty ballot. Of course someone has to get out with an empty ballot to start the process, effectively throwing one vote away.
Traditional means of combatting chain voting is to issue the ballot with a tear off serial number. This way you can have a temporary link between the voter and the ballot. With a slip cover that leaves only the tear away number exposed, you can attempt this without losing secrecy. The electronic machine with printout doesn't nessecarily prevent this. The problem I often see with the computer experts is not their zeal to point out and evaluate technical systems, but their inablility to apply lessons learned from the past. Sure, someone could hack in, but an paper trail won't nessecarily prevent more traditional (and probably simpler) vote selling techniques. The problem in the nation the article mentioned could have been prevented by issuing ballots to insert into the printer. Spot checks in the paper ballot can't fix this, since there would have to be some sort of examinable data between the ballot and the voter.
The most famous geek is clearly Zero Cool. He's the guy who took down the NY powergrid at the age of 12, and fined a ludicrous dollar amount.
Kinda odd, that a kid is forced to pay a buttload for a failure, but in reality the power companies fuck it up themselves and nobody's sueing (yet).
Well its worked pretty damn well so far with WON. If you wanted to play online you needed to authenticate with the WON server. So its really just more of the same, though perhaps less lenient this time around.
There's another solution to the problem. In addition to the "savepoint," there also exists a notion of a continue point. The idea is that if you need to stop playing for a moment, it is simple to save your gamestate, but it retains the element of risk, and avoids the introduction of more loadtimes into the game. Basically, the game allows you to save anywhere and removes your save when you resume. This has existed for a long while in many games. Some of the Dragon Warriors, the Mario sports titles for gameboy, and probably the oldest of titles, nethack.
Of course this does result in some side effects. For starters, the lack of permenant "saves" means that if you die you'll be sent off to the beginning to try again. The Dragon Warrior and Mario games accomodate for this by mixing in save points at places like right before entering a cave, or starting a new tennis match.
What designers need to focus on is what gives the game purpose. As much as I hate those academic cooks who talk about video game narrative, almost every game follows the same structure. Go from level to level, retrying until you find the end of the game. Failure in this situation has nearly zero meaning in this repitition model. I hear the Wing Commander games featured a system like this. Unfortunately, academics never get a warm welcome, in part because they have little experience, in part because they make little attempt to be accessible, and in part because they stray from the people's notion of a game.
The only thing seperating the CS department in my univerity from MIT's is a centralized location and promotion. My AI teacher hosts a central sever for several courses he's taught now and in the past, including online lecture recordings (Tegrity requires MS Java, however =( ). While the name William Hsu (and his degree from China) might throw you off, he speaks English very well, and is very knowledgable about a wide variety of information. In fact, the course pages are designed for "distance" learning. Students attending KSU in Salina (as opposed to Manhattan) can enroll and recieve nearly the same experience as a student attending the live lecture like myself. Well, you might miss his adventures trying to get the recording cart working ;)
The reason that so many people do not finish the games they play is that many games are not good enough to warrant it. Its one thing to sit through 2 hours of a bad movie. Its quite another do so for 40 hours. Another thing to consider is how many games do you rent once and never play again?
Which only serves to strengthen my argument. Given a finite amount of resources, quality and quantity are competitors. Shorter games (not shorter game cycles, mind you) will increase game "completion" rates, not only because the game is shorter, but because it should be better overall. My real doubt about all this is that developers will shorten games without any correlating increase in quality.
Firstly, Old games were easier to make in part because there existed a great abundance of tools that helped reuse. Tiles are one example, but they only the beginning. There's a concept called meta tiling, in which a set of larger objects are built from a group of tiles. Like in Final Fantasy Legend games, all the houses look the same, with different (or no) signs. This way is very simple to describe a town your adventurers visit. These sorts of things haven't yet emerged in 3d gaming.
Every few years we see a large spike in polygons availble for graphics in games, but we haven't seen much to deal with manipulating and creating these increasing amounts of polys. Sure, you've probably seen games for a while now that reuse game assets like trees, but the world geometry is far more complex. Another point to mention is that in the distant past of console gaming, games were designed in an incremental fashion. Megaman game controls got more complex/robust with each new game, and the graphics became further refined, although the same base character design was kept.
The other big outgrowth I see will be smaller games. Those times where buying a game meant 40 hours in a single play through are something of the past. Instead, you'll see shorter single player plots, more multiplayer options, and maybe even games that don't focus on the level progression method (i.e. I'm sorry, the Princess is in another castle!). They say that only 5 percent of game players today complete a game to a developer intended "finish." So clearly a change toward shorter games would be beneficial. It may be that trying to pidgeon hole story telling into game playing is not possible given in the play-cutscene/plot-play game style.
The final thing to consider is that raising prices may not nessecarily increase profits. It might be that a lower price would result in a far greater amount of sales.
Microsoft writing their own software. Most of the software they put on the market is purchased. The only commercial code is "glue" to the various pieces of technology they've bought.
So should I use Quake to benchmark? Its popular and many people allready use it as their gauge of performance. But there was also mention of drivers that recognize the executable itself and tweak operations. These tweaks won't apply when I say, play Half-Life, when I should expect some sort of correlation in performance between the two.
Everything that made RARE worth what it is has gone. Much of the talent behind Goldeneye has left to form a studio of their own. Their product was time splitters and timesplitters 2. I'm not sure how much longer the Stamper Brothers will remain with RARE, as I believe that MS bought some assets from them. I haven't seen anything nearly as original as Blast Corps from RARE in a long long time. I'd say its Microsoft's loss, but really I think the video game player has lost a quality game source as well.
Again developers blame publishers for cowtowing to public demand, for trying to put a title into the increasingly jaded video game consumer's head, for spending more on a liscence than on development of the game itself. But how many developers refuse money made from the practices that put them in the black? How many even think about an advertising schedule during initial negotiations?
On a related note, how many times does the management of a development company have to sign on to unrealistic milestone charts before they admit they don't know how to plan these things, and start addressing the problem of delay?