Yeah, in fact, I am somewhat perplexed by the methods too. For example, I can write some sort of "database" code that has no defects in their terms, but doesn't actually work. In other words, the whole thing is a defect.
A more realistic example would be a function that looks up by index. No null pointers, everything initialized, but it uses the slowest possible algorithm or just skips half of everything and yields incorrect results.
Well I still have to disagree. As a regular attendee of SIGGRAPH, I have to can say with first-hand knowledge that not everything that gets a presentation is all that ground breaking. In fact, most stuff is just incremental improvements. Being the beast of research that graphics is.
I will admit I might have over-stated the case when I said it was all off-the-shelf. And perhaps the awfulness of the movie has colored my opinion too.
Except, of course, the scenes in question had the camera at ground level or even slightly below (those pits made that possible).
The problem with models is that the material that you make things out at full scale have different properties than what you use to make the model out of. And this gives them away very easily.
For structures, it's the apparent weight of things seems oddly off. This is especially evident when things are collapsing as in Isengard. Also the way in which things respond to stress and break apart (or don't). There are parts where wooden structures are being washed away where they have that distinctive "I'm just a model bade out of balsawood" type look to them.
There are also focus issues which belay the intended distances involved.
All of these things give the effect an distinctly less than authentic look at times.
Other scenes the models are amazing, like the staircase in Moria.
I wasn't even aware that T3 brought anything new to special effects stage. They basically used the normal mishmash of off-the-shelf gags. It's horrible that T3 was ever made, but I would have set that opinion aside to judge it on special effects alone... except none of them were in anyway special.
The Matrix 2 invented some new bleeding edge technology, fo sure. The problem was they couldn't find a good plot device to justify using it. But certainly the special effects accomplishments are a milestone even if the movie wasn't. I think Matrix 3 had little new except that they spent a lot more time in the CG department. How many Linux boxes does it take to render a few million sentinals anyway? Not sure it matters, one EMP wipes both out.:)
LORs had some amazing effects. The ingtegration with the story, the cinematography and the directoral style is probably their crowning accomplishment. Not to mention sheer volume. Like Matrix 2, they had to invent some new technology to pull off a "whola lotta something" effect. In this case, not just a whole lot of Agent Smiths, more like a whole lot of orcs and what not. And the impact was considerably greater.
My only beef with LOR effects was the places where it was so plainly obvious you were looking a miniature set. Like Isengard being washed away. Some of the scenes completely failed, slow motion water or not, to look remotely anything other than little models. I'm surprised by this as in other places the miniature effects were outstanding.
But Golem stole the show. That was a masterpiece of special effects. I hope it gets the accolades it deserves. After all, imagine had it turned out like the yellow critter in Lost in Space.
I think the idea that he goes out of his way to piss off customers sounds a bit one-sided.
We use Oracle for our back office / billing systems for our MMPOGs; have for about 10 years or so now. Indeed Oracle has been rather obnoxious to us on two occasions; one when they wanted to audit us (being a pretty small fry compared to their other customers, it was bizzare enough but turned out okay because we were in compliance as usual) and when they refused to negotiate on support fees even though we seldom if ever used it (but wanted it just in case something really bad went on).
I'm not sure, however, that if you totally alienate your customers you'd be doing quite as well as Oracle has.
Personally, I think Oracle's DB products are amazingly stable. We had our billing system running, under constant heavy load, for 3 years straight on an NT box. Only shut it down because we wanted to do some system changes. And even that was optional.
I think their tools are antiques though. SQL Server, as a competing commercial product, is much easier to administrate and so forth.
But, like many things, we have Oracle in house experience. Switching would not really be desireable unless they went nuts on us in some way.
I have yet to read the book, but I think I should to get some insight even if it is pretty one-sided.
Maybe someone with more nerdosity than me can explain this one... why was the ring important?
I understand why Gandlaf could not have eagle'd the ring into Mt. Doom, as mentioned either. But why could Big Bad Red Eye not just forge another ring, or something else of equal or greater power. He did it once.
Was his soul somehow part of the ring after his body was destroyed? Or something like that?
Has anyone read between the lines of the QRIO's feature list? This reads like a good er... bad Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton story...
These robots are designed to interact with you and ask you questions, learning and remembering the things you say and they observe. They are also wirelessly linked to the Internet.
Doesn't take much of a leap fo faith to see them all reporting into the SONY master mainframe. Watching, learning, snooping. Gathering data, intel...
Oh sure, this could be the minor conspiracy: They are doing this to market to us better. "Hmm, boy I'd like a new laptop but I only have $1000 to spend." Robot overhears, reports in... suddenly you get an offer in email (or by the robot itself) for, guess what, a laptop that only cost's $1,200 (hell anyone can come up with antoher two K eh?).
Or maybe, it's going to be the lead element of an invasion force. Japan might still be sore at us for the whole losing WWII and us nuking them (twice) and all.
Someone in the land of the rising sun, somewhere, thought, "We'll lie low, developing our technology and build robots. Oh not to kill... not at first. Just to be their friends. Yes, FRIENDLY robots. Robotos that will be a 'partner', that talks to them, plays with them, encourages them.... yes. And it'll watch and learn and remember. And report. And as they get comfortable, they'll upgrade thir robots to our next version. Soon they won't think about it; no more than buying a better DVD player (which we'll invent too). And then, one night, in their sleep... they'll never know what hit them."
We've run our MMOG's on Linux (Red Hat flavor) for years now (migrated away from IRIX when we use to run on Challenge/Origin 2000s). Linux is amazingly stable, but it took awhile for 2.4 to get that way. It wasn't "out of the box". We need our OS to be up... well always. Five 9s is nice. And Linux goes the distance. Failures tend to be our fault, not its.
On the other hand we also had a heavy-load database running on NT for 3 years non-stop. It came to a stop only when we decided to shut it down to get a clean slate on something (an optional thing). But the fact it had run for 3 years without a glitch was amazing too. Lots of people doubt NT can do that under any serious production stress, but I can attest that it can.
We are anxiously awaiting 2.6 because the scheduling problems in 2.4 show their ugly head very obviously for us. We get by for now, but can already see how 2.6 will make life better. But 2.6.1 will probably be the first we try unless we hear amazing success stories.
I'll give it a chance and all, but take a look on the web site at the "virtual tour" of the bridge of Galactica. I mean how cheap and unconvincing could they have made it? It looks like a really bad TV SciFi set, which implies bad SciFi show.
My favorite is how on the sides of many consoles is the output slot of some hidden printer that seems to be spitting out hardcopy pages into cheap wire baskets. Reminds me of Space 1999 when the big'ol "computer" would issue it's findings by printing out what looked like a reciept that someone character would furrow their brow over and read to the commander.
Still, I can't tell what era this thing is set in. The fake equipment they stuck on the walls range from so-so, smallish monitors that show ship functions to 70s era oscilloscopes, giant 50s era dials and even allegator clip wires and ancient looking telephone patch boards. I'm perplexed!
Nothing looks remotely authentic or real. Maybe clever lighting might help hide the silliness of it. Maybe someone could spring for a 50" plasma screen for the show so that the bridge at least looks 2002-era modern.
Blech!
How in the world can you do a disservice to democracy by highlighting a new voting technqiue that is plauged by insecurity and potential for fraud? In fact, what he is doing more service to democracy than anyone alive.
It's the people who think their jobs are on the line for some questionable calls that are doing democracy a disservice. With all due respect to their opinion, I don't really care if this makes some election official look bad.
Perhaps the professor should be heard and the problems he highlights investigated. A lot of this technical stuff is not all that subjective.
Here's an idea, have Cusomer Reports subject the e-voting machines to their usual array of scrutiny (they'll need experts of course). That sounds fun.:)
Wow... when you start thinking that The Matrix has "real depth" you are in big trouble there. Lilo and Stitch has more real depth than the Matrix. Throw some half-baked psuedo-Biblical bling-bling and enough slam-bam special effects together and I guess you can wow the geekdom elite. And, hell, I loved the Matrix... but "real depth"... please!
Actually lots of things kill people. It can be "easily proven" that cars account for deaths that would not otherwise occur too. Plastic bags carry warnings due to their propencity, however rare, to kill small children.
The NRA, and those who support its notions, believe gun ownership has a positive benefit to our society. Ranging from hunting to self defense and the historical significance we placed on it during our fight for independence (which of course few recall and fewer may think is still relevant).
The issue is if the good of these things out-weighs the bad. I don't mind that debate, but I think people should be careful to frame it that way instead of just "guns kill" because that's annoying simplistic.
Personlly I don't favor easy gun ownership, but I do favor ownership rights in general. I'd prefer there was mandatory certification for ownership (like there is for right-to-carry in my state). For the record, I own two AR15s (competition grade) which I use for match shooting (my fiance' is ex-army, so she gets to continue keeping her marksmanship skills up). I don't hunt (love animers too much to very think of killing one myself) and I keep the weapons safely locked and disabled. So well in fact, they'd be useless for home defense unless the intruder gave me half an hours notice.:)
The interesting thing to me is that the big benefit of the current crop of antivirus programs, like NAV, is that they have this constant feed of updates to stay (nearly) up with the virus arms race. Symantec charges extra for that, and I think they should. I paid the fee gladly and they've keep viruses off my Winders machines purdy gewd.
So the real business model, like the one I rely on at my company, is recuring revenue. That's where the gold is because its multiplicitive with SKU sales. Mmm Mmm good!
End of the day, what Symantec should want people to pass around copies of NAV, but make it so it's only really effective if they keep it up to date through a subscription. I think in this case the subscription is warranted because NAV actually does have to do a substantial amount of work on a continuous basis. You are paying them to be your front lines in an ongoing battle and they, like many of the others, do a good job.
AOL got the model right when they put threw AOL disks out of airplanes for all those years just to get the subs. That model would work for antiviral software and many other things as well.
I'll admit it. I have been a long term supporter of Microsoft products. In particular, I insist on using Windows XP for a lot of things my developers would rather use Linux. Some of this can't be helped, since we produce consumer products for Windows. But on the datacetner side, it's a judgement call.
But don't get me wrong, our big money maker stuff runs on Linux. And always will, I imagine. The power of Linux on the server side is so clear. And the new Kernel, when it's ready, looks like it'll solve the last of the bottleneck issues we've suffered under for so long.
I've adopted the idea that you pick the right tool for the right job. And I've always felt that Linux was awful at being approachable without being a dedicated Linux hacker (in the early days). Then as time went by it becamse more and more accessable. Heck, we even have Lindows now.
What Microsoft didn't expect is that this would ever really happen. But with Linux becoming more and more friendly, it's inherent power is undeinable.
So they are reacting. This new command line is simply a way of building up the server potential of... well... their servers. The whole.NET thing is actually built around a core of very good ideas that, when fully realized, make development for Windows quite a different experience than anything else that has come before. This is a logical extension of that.
The fact is, competition works. Linux is driving Microsoft to actually innovate again! And I imagine that if Windows has a command line that Linux users will be envious of, they will respond in kind.
Patents, of course, will still be the horrible sticky point in all this.:(
In my company I make sure that the developers and artists who want them have two monitors. For pair programming, which we do a lot of, this can help a lot but the two monitor setup is prefered either way. For 3D artists, it really makes a difference; they I must admit they do lose a few man months just fiddeling with the color settings to try and get them both to match EXACTLY.
Now I personally, being all executive and such, have an Apple 24" LCD panel. The adapter makes it work with PeeCees without complaint. I use to use a 24" wide Sony CRT... so heavy it was dangerous to heft. But the Apple LCD is mangificent!
I think there is meret to two monitors because of the maximize option, but I still prefer the seamlessness of the LCD for many things. So naturally, my thought now is... TWO 24" LCD monitors! Someone here help me justify this please!:)
Spam is starting to hurt me a lot worse than I would have ever imagined. It's not the volume of spam I get, which is obscene, but rather the shotgun anti-spam efforts that we somehow get caught in.
About a month ago Earthlink decided we were sending out spam and cut us off. So, despite the fact that we have no relationship at all to spam, we were unable to communicate with any of our customers who use Earthlink. After appealing, they realized the mistake and removed the block. How did it happen? Seems that if an Earthlink customer just accuses you fo spam you can end up on the list. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed at Earthlink and the matter was resolved quickly.
We were blocked by AOL once too. How ironic since we use to be their #1 3rd party content provider back-in-da-day (remember hourly?). They should have know about us. (grin) Fortunately that was resolved too.
Then, of course, today we got hit by SPEWS and that lead to our phone call to Mr. Jared. The poor guy was frazzled, and rightly so. But we had a legit beef...
Our business is entirely web based. We have to deal with a heavy volume of customer feedback, all of which want fast responses. Any hickup and we can get really far behind. But when we get blocked, we're almost helpless. We get an email "Hey, my character got killed by a ravenous bugblaster beast from trall!" And we write back, "Oh my, let me restore your character!" only to have it be filtered out by some shotgun blacklist. They get no response and start flaming us for "not responding". A day or more of this and things get really messy.
You start to feel like you are at the mercy of some so-called "authority" that could not care less about your guilt or innocence. If he or she wants to, they can just take you out. We've participated in opensource, contributed back, done the good netizen thing... yet this real-time blacklist thing hangs over us. We never know when something else like this is going to bite us. And maybe next time there won't be any appeal.:(
I wasn't that familiar with OSI or this Eric guy, but one read of his "open letter" left me feeling like he was, oh say 14 years old or so? I imagine that is not the case, but that was one awfully juvenile post.
If I was an executive at SCO, I'd have a good chuckle at the quality of opposition they face, if Eric is somehow representative.
Or maybe I'm just saying this because I've gone over to the dark side!
I've always held the belief that if science gave us immortality of some sort, that the world's population would be largely unaffected.
If, say, everyone was stuck at 20-something years old in apparent age, I would imagine that death would still be quite likely. 20 somethingers do lots of crazy things... extreme sports, skydiving, rock climbing, whatever. Mix in the very real sense of immortality and most people would just kill themselves off.
I'm always amused when online games, like UO or EQ, suddenly observe something unique and think it is novel.
We've had people living off of GemStone III and DragonRealms for years. We have one individual, who's original occupation was Hollywood Screen Writer, give it up to be a merchant of virtual stuff in GemStone IIII. He makes good six figures doing it.
The guys background in economics has helped me really understand the dynamics of value in the product. Not only does he know the real "street" value of items, but he can predict with uncanny accuracy the change in item values based on rule changes that happen from time to time. Using that knowledge he can min-max real world money making opportunities.
Games like GS and DR have the added advantage that we have so much unique content that it's impossilbe for a graphical game to even touch the plethora of "things" that can be bought and sold. Even our own graphical stuff in the works. This makes for an amazingly diverse market.
So tuned in the economy is this guy that he can detect an exploit or bug before our GMs or automated sensors even notice. If, say, a player found a way to duplicate items and sell them, we find out about it through him first. After all, its in his interest to keep the value of stuff high.
We've also used him to help develop a model for how the economy should work. MMPOGs are, generally speaking, not zero-sum so you cannot make anything that works well by trying to model a real-world economy. You have to make something new and different. But it still has to work for there to be any game play benefit much less real-world cash to be made.
The observation that we, as the providers of the game, have the ability to just ruin the economy at any time is a good one. I've made it myself. I could wipe out some people's livelihoods on a whim. But he has pointed out to me that my economic motivation is in line with his and so that is a rather unlikely thing for me to do. And he's right. I strive to keept he economic aspects of our titles healthy because that promotes the life-time value of the customer (good game = customers stay and pay longer).
Did anyone notice that this thing is sold as an "Appliance" and not as an application? That seems very... odd. There is no indication that this takes any special hardware. Anyone have any idea what the deal is with that?
Also it should be pointed out that anyone can sue anyone else for anything. Winning is another matter, but because it costs a lot ot defend it is often a matter of outspending rather than who's right or wrong in these situations.
I didn't realize their first language wasn't English. Interesting. It just read like someone who has more code skills than grammer/spelling/business skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, in fact, I am somewhat perplexed by the methods too. For example, I can write some sort of "database" code that has no defects in their terms, but doesn't actually work. In other words, the whole thing is a defect.
A more realistic example would be a function that looks up by index. No null pointers, everything initialized, but it uses the slowest possible algorithm or just skips half of everything and yields incorrect results.
I'm not sure how their approach tells us much.
Well I still have to disagree. As a regular attendee of SIGGRAPH, I have to can say with first-hand knowledge that not everything that gets a presentation is all that ground breaking. In fact, most stuff is just incremental improvements. Being the beast of research that graphics is.
I will admit I might have over-stated the case when I said it was all off-the-shelf. And perhaps the awfulness of the movie has colored my opinion too.
Except, of course, the scenes in question had the camera at ground level or even slightly below (those pits made that possible).
The problem with models is that the material that you make things out at full scale have different properties than what you use to make the model out of. And this gives them away very easily.
For structures, it's the apparent weight of things seems oddly off. This is especially evident when things are collapsing as in Isengard. Also the way in which things respond to stress and break apart (or don't). There are parts where wooden structures are being washed away where they have that distinctive "I'm just a model bade out of balsawood" type look to them.
There are also focus issues which belay the intended distances involved.
All of these things give the effect an distinctly less than authentic look at times.
Other scenes the models are amazing, like the staircase in Moria.
I wasn't even aware that T3 brought anything new to special effects stage. They basically used the normal mishmash of off-the-shelf gags. It's horrible that T3 was ever made, but I would have set that opinion aside to judge it on special effects alone... except none of them were in anyway special.
:)
The Matrix 2 invented some new bleeding edge technology, fo sure. The problem was they couldn't find a good plot device to justify using it. But certainly the special effects accomplishments are a milestone even if the movie wasn't. I think Matrix 3 had little new except that they spent a lot more time in the CG department. How many Linux boxes does it take to render a few million sentinals anyway? Not sure it matters, one EMP wipes both out.
LORs had some amazing effects. The ingtegration with the story, the cinematography and the directoral style is probably their crowning accomplishment. Not to mention sheer volume. Like Matrix 2, they had to invent some new technology to pull off a "whola lotta something" effect. In this case, not just a whole lot of Agent Smiths, more like a whole lot of orcs and what not. And the impact was considerably greater.
My only beef with LOR effects was the places where it was so plainly obvious you were looking a miniature set. Like Isengard being washed away. Some of the scenes completely failed, slow motion water or not, to look remotely anything other than little models. I'm surprised by this as in other places the miniature effects were outstanding.
But Golem stole the show. That was a masterpiece of special effects. I hope it gets the accolades it deserves. After all, imagine had it turned out like the yellow critter in Lost in Space.
I think the idea that he goes out of his way to piss off customers sounds a bit one-sided.
We use Oracle for our back office / billing systems for our MMPOGs; have for about 10 years or so now. Indeed Oracle has been rather obnoxious to us on two occasions; one when they wanted to audit us (being a pretty small fry compared to their other customers, it was bizzare enough but turned out okay because we were in compliance as usual) and when they refused to negotiate on support fees even though we seldom if ever used it (but wanted it just in case something really bad went on).
I'm not sure, however, that if you totally alienate your customers you'd be doing quite as well as Oracle has.
Personally, I think Oracle's DB products are amazingly stable. We had our billing system running, under constant heavy load, for 3 years straight on an NT box. Only shut it down because we wanted to do some system changes. And even that was optional.
I think their tools are antiques though. SQL Server, as a competing commercial product, is much easier to administrate and so forth.
But, like many things, we have Oracle in house experience. Switching would not really be desireable unless they went nuts on us in some way.
I have yet to read the book, but I think I should to get some insight even if it is pretty one-sided.
Yeah, actually I was aiming for funny not insightful.
:)
Though I will admit, the idea is a tad creepy.
Maybe someone with more nerdosity than me can explain this one... why was the ring important?
I understand why Gandlaf could not have eagle'd the ring into Mt. Doom, as mentioned either. But why could Big Bad Red Eye not just forge another ring, or something else of equal or greater power. He did it once.
Was his soul somehow part of the ring after his body was destroyed? Or something like that?
Has anyone read between the lines of the QRIO's feature list? This reads like a good er... bad Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton story...
These robots are designed to interact with you and ask you questions, learning and remembering the things you say and they observe. They are also wirelessly linked to the Internet.
Doesn't take much of a leap fo faith to see them all reporting into the SONY master mainframe. Watching, learning, snooping. Gathering data, intel...
Oh sure, this could be the minor conspiracy: They are doing this to market to us better. "Hmm, boy I'd like a new laptop but I only have $1000 to spend." Robot overhears, reports in... suddenly you get an offer in email (or by the robot itself) for, guess what, a laptop that only cost's $1,200 (hell anyone can come up with antoher two K eh?).
Or maybe, it's going to be the lead element of an invasion force. Japan might still be sore at us for the whole losing WWII and us nuking them (twice) and all.
Someone in the land of the rising sun, somewhere, thought, "We'll lie low, developing our technology and build robots. Oh not to kill... not at first. Just to be their friends. Yes, FRIENDLY robots. Robotos that will be a 'partner', that talks to them, plays with them, encourages them.... yes. And it'll watch and learn and remember. And report. And as they get comfortable, they'll upgrade thir robots to our next version. Soon they won't think about it; no more than buying a better DVD player (which we'll invent too). And then, one night, in their sleep... they'll never know what hit them."
FEAR QRIO!
We've run our MMOG's on Linux (Red Hat flavor) for years now (migrated away from IRIX when we use to run on Challenge/Origin 2000s). Linux is amazingly stable, but it took awhile for 2.4 to get that way. It wasn't "out of the box". We need our OS to be up... well always. Five 9s is nice. And Linux goes the distance. Failures tend to be our fault, not its.
On the other hand we also had a heavy-load database running on NT for 3 years non-stop. It came to a stop only when we decided to shut it down to get a clean slate on something (an optional thing). But the fact it had run for 3 years without a glitch was amazing too. Lots of people doubt NT can do that under any serious production stress, but I can attest that it can.
We are anxiously awaiting 2.6 because the scheduling problems in 2.4 show their ugly head very obviously for us. We get by for now, but can already see how 2.6 will make life better. But 2.6.1 will probably be the first we try unless we hear amazing success stories.
I'll give it a chance and all, but take a look on the web site at the "virtual tour" of the bridge of Galactica. I mean how cheap and unconvincing could they have made it? It looks like a really bad TV SciFi set, which implies bad SciFi show. My favorite is how on the sides of many consoles is the output slot of some hidden printer that seems to be spitting out hardcopy pages into cheap wire baskets. Reminds me of Space 1999 when the big'ol "computer" would issue it's findings by printing out what looked like a reciept that someone character would furrow their brow over and read to the commander. Still, I can't tell what era this thing is set in. The fake equipment they stuck on the walls range from so-so, smallish monitors that show ship functions to 70s era oscilloscopes, giant 50s era dials and even allegator clip wires and ancient looking telephone patch boards. I'm perplexed! Nothing looks remotely authentic or real. Maybe clever lighting might help hide the silliness of it. Maybe someone could spring for a 50" plasma screen for the show so that the bridge at least looks 2002-era modern. Blech!
How in the world can you do a disservice to democracy by highlighting a new voting technqiue that is plauged by insecurity and potential for fraud? In fact, what he is doing more service to democracy than anyone alive. It's the people who think their jobs are on the line for some questionable calls that are doing democracy a disservice. With all due respect to their opinion, I don't really care if this makes some election official look bad. Perhaps the professor should be heard and the problems he highlights investigated. A lot of this technical stuff is not all that subjective. Here's an idea, have Cusomer Reports subject the e-voting machines to their usual array of scrutiny (they'll need experts of course). That sounds fun. :)
Wow... when you start thinking that The Matrix has "real depth" you are in big trouble there. Lilo and Stitch has more real depth than the Matrix. Throw some half-baked psuedo-Biblical bling-bling and enough slam-bam special effects together and I guess you can wow the geekdom elite. And, hell, I loved the Matrix... but "real depth"... please!
Actually lots of things kill people. It can be "easily proven" that cars account for deaths that would not otherwise occur too. Plastic bags carry warnings due to their propencity, however rare, to kill small children.
:)
The NRA, and those who support its notions, believe gun ownership has a positive benefit to our society. Ranging from hunting to self defense and the historical significance we placed on it during our fight for independence (which of course few recall and fewer may think is still relevant).
The issue is if the good of these things out-weighs the bad. I don't mind that debate, but I think people should be careful to frame it that way instead of just "guns kill" because that's annoying simplistic.
Personlly I don't favor easy gun ownership, but I do favor ownership rights in general. I'd prefer there was mandatory certification for ownership (like there is for right-to-carry in my state). For the record, I own two AR15s (competition grade) which I use for match shooting (my fiance' is ex-army, so she gets to continue keeping her marksmanship skills up). I don't hunt (love animers too much to very think of killing one myself) and I keep the weapons safely locked and disabled. So well in fact, they'd be useless for home defense unless the intruder gave me half an hours notice.
The interesting thing to me is that the big benefit of the current crop of antivirus programs, like NAV, is that they have this constant feed of updates to stay (nearly) up with the virus arms race. Symantec charges extra for that, and I think they should. I paid the fee gladly and they've keep viruses off my Winders machines purdy gewd.
So the real business model, like the one I rely on at my company, is recuring revenue. That's where the gold is because its multiplicitive with SKU sales. Mmm Mmm good!
End of the day, what Symantec should want people to pass around copies of NAV, but make it so it's only really effective if they keep it up to date through a subscription. I think in this case the subscription is warranted because NAV actually does have to do a substantial amount of work on a continuous basis. You are paying them to be your front lines in an ongoing battle and they, like many of the others, do a good job.
AOL got the model right when they put threw AOL disks out of airplanes for all those years just to get the subs. That model would work for antiviral software and many other things as well.
I'll admit it. I have been a long term supporter of Microsoft products. In particular, I insist on using Windows XP for a lot of things my developers would rather use Linux. Some of this can't be helped, since we produce consumer products for Windows. But on the datacetner side, it's a judgement call.
.NET thing is actually built around a core of very good ideas that, when fully realized, make development for Windows quite a different experience than anything else that has come before. This is a logical extension of that.
:(
But don't get me wrong, our big money maker stuff runs on Linux. And always will, I imagine. The power of Linux on the server side is so clear. And the new Kernel, when it's ready, looks like it'll solve the last of the bottleneck issues we've suffered under for so long.
I've adopted the idea that you pick the right tool for the right job. And I've always felt that Linux was awful at being approachable without being a dedicated Linux hacker (in the early days). Then as time went by it becamse more and more accessable. Heck, we even have Lindows now.
What Microsoft didn't expect is that this would ever really happen. But with Linux becoming more and more friendly, it's inherent power is undeinable.
So they are reacting. This new command line is simply a way of building up the server potential of... well... their servers. The whole
The fact is, competition works. Linux is driving Microsoft to actually innovate again! And I imagine that if Windows has a command line that Linux users will be envious of, they will respond in kind.
Patents, of course, will still be the horrible sticky point in all this.
In my company I make sure that the developers and artists who want them have two monitors. For pair programming, which we do a lot of, this can help a lot but the two monitor setup is prefered either way. For 3D artists, it really makes a difference; they I must admit they do lose a few man months just fiddeling with the color settings to try and get them both to match EXACTLY.
:)
Now I personally, being all executive and such, have an Apple 24" LCD panel. The adapter makes it work with PeeCees without complaint. I use to use a 24" wide Sony CRT... so heavy it was dangerous to heft. But the Apple LCD is mangificent!
I think there is meret to two monitors because of the maximize option, but I still prefer the seamlessness of the LCD for many things. So naturally, my thought now is... TWO 24" LCD monitors! Someone here help me justify this please!
Errata: Ooops, it wasn't SPEWS but Osirusoft that we got listed on.
Spam is starting to hurt me a lot worse than I would have ever imagined. It's not the volume of spam I get, which is obscene, but rather the shotgun anti-spam efforts that we somehow get caught in.
:(
About a month ago Earthlink decided we were sending out spam and cut us off. So, despite the fact that we have no relationship at all to spam, we were unable to communicate with any of our customers who use Earthlink. After appealing, they realized the mistake and removed the block. How did it happen? Seems that if an Earthlink customer just accuses you fo spam you can end up on the list. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed at Earthlink and the matter was resolved quickly.
We were blocked by AOL once too. How ironic since we use to be their #1 3rd party content provider back-in-da-day (remember hourly?). They should have know about us. (grin) Fortunately that was resolved too.
Then, of course, today we got hit by SPEWS and that lead to our phone call to Mr. Jared. The poor guy was frazzled, and rightly so. But we had a legit beef...
Our business is entirely web based. We have to deal with a heavy volume of customer feedback, all of which want fast responses. Any hickup and we can get really far behind. But when we get blocked, we're almost helpless. We get an email "Hey, my character got killed by a ravenous bugblaster beast from trall!" And we write back, "Oh my, let me restore your character!" only to have it be filtered out by some shotgun blacklist. They get no response and start flaming us for "not responding". A day or more of this and things get really messy.
You start to feel like you are at the mercy of some so-called "authority" that could not care less about your guilt or innocence. If he or she wants to, they can just take you out. We've participated in opensource, contributed back, done the good netizen thing... yet this real-time blacklist thing hangs over us. We never know when something else like this is going to bite us. And maybe next time there won't be any appeal.
I wasn't that familiar with OSI or this Eric guy, but one read of his "open letter" left me feeling like he was, oh say 14 years old or so? I imagine that is not the case, but that was one awfully juvenile post.
If I was an executive at SCO, I'd have a good chuckle at the quality of opposition they face, if Eric is somehow representative.
Or maybe I'm just saying this because I've gone over to the dark side!
I've always held the belief that if science gave us immortality of some sort, that the world's population would be largely unaffected.
If, say, everyone was stuck at 20-something years old in apparent age, I would imagine that death would still be quite likely. 20 somethingers do lots of crazy things... extreme sports, skydiving, rock climbing, whatever. Mix in the very real sense of immortality and most people would just kill themselves off.
The whole thing would probably self-balance.
I'm always amused when online games, like UO or EQ, suddenly observe something unique and think it is novel.
We've had people living off of GemStone III and DragonRealms for years. We have one individual, who's original occupation was Hollywood Screen Writer, give it up to be a merchant of virtual stuff in GemStone IIII. He makes good six figures doing it.
The guys background in economics has helped me really understand the dynamics of value in the product. Not only does he know the real "street" value of items, but he can predict with uncanny accuracy the change in item values based on rule changes that happen from time to time. Using that knowledge he can min-max real world money making opportunities.
Games like GS and DR have the added advantage that we have so much unique content that it's impossilbe for a graphical game to even touch the plethora of "things" that can be bought and sold. Even our own graphical stuff in the works. This makes for an amazingly diverse market.
So tuned in the economy is this guy that he can detect an exploit or bug before our GMs or automated sensors even notice. If, say, a player found a way to duplicate items and sell them, we find out about it through him first. After all, its in his interest to keep the value of stuff high.
We've also used him to help develop a model for how the economy should work. MMPOGs are, generally speaking, not zero-sum so you cannot make anything that works well by trying to model a real-world economy. You have to make something new and different. But it still has to work for there to be any game play benefit much less real-world cash to be made.
The observation that we, as the providers of the game, have the ability to just ruin the economy at any time is a good one. I've made it myself. I could wipe out some people's livelihoods on a whim. But he has pointed out to me that my economic motivation is in line with his and so that is a rather unlikely thing for me to do. And he's right. I strive to keept he economic aspects of our titles healthy because that promotes the life-time value of the customer (good game = customers stay and pay longer).
Did anyone notice that this thing is sold as an "Appliance" and not as an application? That seems very... odd. There is no indication that this takes any special hardware. Anyone have any idea what the deal is with that?
Also it should be pointed out that anyone can sue anyone else for anything. Winning is another matter, but because it costs a lot ot defend it is often a matter of outspending rather than who's right or wrong in these situations.
I know... that was the joke my freind. (wonders if he will get that one)
I didn't realize their first language wasn't English. Interesting. It just read like someone who has more code skills than grammer/spelling/business skills.