between so called 'legitimate software' and botnets these days anyway?
Each is used to collect data that can be analyzed for profit in various ways. Legitimate software, you might argue, provides actual value to the end-user, is not surreptitiously installed and doesn't exploit software vulnerabilities. However, if that's all it takes to be legit, then witness the gobs of commercial software (not to mention greyware) out there that fit the definition of 'legit', but in actuality provide only the thinnest veneer of value behind a EULA so broad that it allows the software vendor to pretty much do as they please across your hard drive and Internet connection.
Won't work because most stockholders don't care enough to vote and even if they did, most shares are owned through proxy via mutual funds so most of the voting rights are in the hands of a few major players anyway.
He will be spending his time at Oculus 100%, which is good, because there's plenty of new ground to break and few are better qualified to drive the software side of things for a new graphics technology than Mr. Carmack.
I had access to a Rift DK for the better part of a month. For what amounts to a smartphone screen mounted inside ski goggles, I was thoroughly impressed and have no doubt that this device offers an early look at the future of hardcore gaming -- I suspect a similar device that allows you to insert your own smartphone in front of a set of lenses could be the eventual template for casual gaming as well.
Among the many tech demos available, I was most impressed with Lunar Lander on the Rift, which was worth hours of fun. The illusion that you are actually there, on the moon maneuvering this vehicle was only slightly diminished by the development kit's limitations:
* lack of positional head tracking -- up, down, left and right work fine, but you can't lean or move your head in any direction as it immediately breaks immersiveness (probably a major contributor to the early nausea that I and others have reported) * awkwardness of the headset, input box & wires * lack of congruent body avatar in virtually all demo software to date * low resolution screen (half of a 1280x800 LCD panel for each eye) contributing to what's known as the screen door effect * various unoptimized latencies (LCD refresh, video card output, head tracking, etc...) * clunky lens adjustments
Over time, continued software and hardware development will mitigate or eliminate many of these problems. I'm looking forward to the 2014 consumer launch which is rumored to have higher resolution and positional tracking. If so, I will definitely be one of the first to line up for it.
Most employees are more or less replaceable, but John Carmack for all intents and purposes *was* iD, at least in the early years when 3D graphics engines were in their infancy. When he announced he was going to be CTO at Oculus, it was obvious that he was really excited about the prospects over there, and was going to be winding things up at iD sooner or later. But he chose not to leave his old company in the lurch, and he transitioned at a pace that didn't screw them over in favor of the new. This is John Carmack exiting graciously.
Why not just buy some land in rural areas, construct a barn looking thing as a decoy (out of a material that's transparent to the instruments within), ship redundant parts across several ports and assemble under the cover of darkness. Difficult and expensive to do without being detected? Maybe, but surely within the realm of possibility for the Russian government...
LeVar Burton played Geordie LaForge on Star Treak -- a character who could not see except by virtue of a digital visor he wore. Now the actor in real life tries something that's also sorta similar -- if you wave your hands, squint your eyes and gesture knowingly. What are the odds! The parallels must have been mindblowing! Life imitating art! The jokes must now write themselves! Queue the Benny Hill music...
still released it that way in spite of the problems. Arrogance is the only logical explanation.
This has been a well documented problem from earlier preview builds and was specifically not fixed in the RTM code because... well because MS seems to think it can make unilaterally bad UI decisions again and again and get away with it.
Try setting your Win8.1 display to 150% on a 1920x1200 monitor. This is exactly where I've used WinXP, WinVista, Win7 and Win8, yet in Win8.1, a random assortment of applications (including many MS utilities and 3rd-party programs) deliver barely readable fuzzy characters. At least in Win8.0, you could set a master switch to tell the OS to disable DPI scaling, but in their infinite wisdom, some group within MS decided that to hell with useability, they're going to simply remove the master switch and force ALL users to disable DPI scaling on an app by app basis, making it bloody well a gargantuan effort to avoid either fuzzy or tiny text.
It's absolutely appalling... About as appalling as MS deciding that Win8.0 users shouldn't be able to boot into desktop mode on a non-touchscreen device and then completely removing the start menu as if giving the middle finger to the existing install base was some kind of magical shortcut back to a dominant market position.
If you're arrogant, but generally make good or at least non-destructive UI decisions, most people will forgive you. When you're arrogant and make butthead UI decisions, well, then you're MS.
They've managed to marry Apple's arrogance with butthead UI decisions.
Disclaimer: I own a top of the line 54" Panasonic plasma set from a couple years ago and enjoy its excellent picture quality.
If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better.
It's the same reason that many folks think they'll prefer shiny laptop screens or speakers that deliver booming lows and super highs. It all seems better in a snap judgment... It's not until you take it home and have to live with it for a few hours that you start to realize that matte screens are easier on the eyes, speakers with more natural frequency response are easier on the ears and that LCD TVs (usually demoed in torch mode) need to be turned down to a more tolerable brightness level (well within the realm of what a plasma can do) during extended viewing sessions.
> Look at how quickly the people followed the orders to cower indoors because of 2 kids.
Really? The "2 kids" in question bombed a public event with improvised explosives, then killed a police officer, hijacked a car and the last one took refuge by hiding in a boat in a local neighborhood. How would the authorities have responded in your magical utopian 'free' country?
Even in the Martha Stewart case, they only got her on obstruction of justice. Hard to say whether Cuban was legit or not, all we know is that the evidence was not strong enough to convict.
The theory seems to be that insider trading is so widespread and difficult to prove that one of the government's strategies is to go after a few high profile 'celebrity' cases as a way to drive awareness among the populace. It probably gets your average Joe to think twice before trading on a tip from an executive friend higher up in the corporate ladder, but I suspect the people who really know what they're doing siphon millions out of the market daily.
I wonder the same sorts of things myself. I sense that a good portion of this 'likes' business is actually a very subtle but sophisticated game of influence deployed by marketers. I suspect a few things are at play when a network encourages 'likes' for a TV show that hasn't aired:
1. It's a form of early market research. 'Likes' are probably as good a metric as any for predicting the size of the initial audience, which in turn helps the network fine tune what they can charge advertisers at the outset. 2. It drives popularity, albeit based on false pretenses: Once the show starts airing, and you hit the site to learn more about it and see all of those 'likes', you'll get a feeling that it's more popular than say a similar show where the network didn't troll for 'likes' prior to its initial air date. This is especially important when the network is trying to influence those of us (e.g. teenagers, pre-teens) who consider popularity to be of significant importance. 3. On social networks, when you 'like' something, it lets your connections know. Getting people to be aware of something is of course half the battle with marketing, not to mention that if you are considered an important influencer among your peers, then you're providing your implicit 'thumbs up'. 4. I suspect there's also a sort of cognitive dissonance play going on. If you 'like' something on Facebook, I suspect you're also more likely to engage with it in the future simply because of that 'like', and irrespective of all other factors.
Disregard above, I misread your comment. Yes, that's a potential problem. I'm guessing that there is some sort of specific engagement required on the part of the company, otherwise I could go around claiming I'm going to buy Chevron and then accuse their execs of insider trading...
Cancel existing orders and don't schedule new company stock trades as soon as you have become an insider either by your own doing or by an external party?
YOU CAN'T TRADE STOCK IN A COMPANY WHEN YOU HAVE PRIVILEGED NON-PUBLIC INFORMATION THAT COULD MATERIALLY AFFECT THE STOCK PRICE IF THE PUBLIC KNEW ABOUT IT. Anyone who works for a public company knows this. You'd think the CEO would have a particular interest in staying on the right side of insider trading laws, but he was sloppy while the Feds were watching and they nabbed him for it. No conspiracy theories needed to explain his utter stupidity.
The reason you can tell the difference between looking outside and your monitor has more to do with your monitor's limited color gamut, dynamic range and contrast ratio than pixel density. Beyond a certain density, you need a much bigger screen to appreciate the extra pixels.
And my eyes can barely make out the width of a pixel as it is. What is it going to do for me if you increase pixel density such that pixel are now a quarter the size they are now? Give us 40" or more, and it might start to get interesting, but then you're constantly bending your neck to read what's on different parts of the screen.
Anyone remember that phone? That's the one where Blackberry (RIM) decided to get in on the touchscreen craze by building a phone that tried to bridge the gap for users who preferred physical keyboards. In response to physical keyboard users who clamored for tactile feedback, they made the whole screen click when you pressed hard enough.
At the time, I thought to myself, "no, you idiots, an entire screen that clicks doesn't provide the same tactile feedback as individually raised keys that click under your fingers. What were you guys thinking when you came up with this partial solution to the wrong problem?"
This time around, I'm thinking to myself (and the Slashdot community), "no, you idiots, adding a start icon to the desktop so that users can get to Metro doesn't address the underlying problem that Metro is not appropriate on non-touchscreen desktop PCs. What were you guys thinking when you came up with this partial solution to the wrong problem?"
If this was a previous generation where AMD was actually still competitive, Titan would have been the high end part, and it would have cost $500 instead of $1000. The part known as GTX 780 would have been a slightly depopulated part capable of 90% the performance for a 20% savings or so and the rest of the line would have fallen under those two. Since AMD is no longer really a threat in the high-end GPU space, Nvidia can literally maintain the MSRPs of the old parts as if the new parts are merely higher performing extensions of the previous generation without any downward pricing pressure on anything.
Well evidently if he's lamenting not going with his gut, he's implying that there *was* a viable path to producing mobile chips and they *chose* not to risk their desktop/server business in pursuit of it.
What this story tells me is that while your gut instinct may or may not be offering you the best path forward, you owe it to yourself as a business leader to figure out why your gut contradicts the data. If all you do is make logical decisions based on easily available data, then you can probably be replaced by a simple algorithm that can make more reliable decisions than you anyway.
In this case, Otellini had data in front of him, but his gut instinct contradicted the data-driven path forward. He ignored it and moved on, convinced that it was safer (?) to be on the side of the data. But the data led him astray. Why?
Because he had partial data, data that was probably focused on previous mobile computing entries and little on Apple's recent design successes, superior user experiences and marketing capabilities. If he'd realized his gut was really signalling that they needed more and different kinds of data, I suspect Intel would have gone down a different path.
Really? The version number thing again? Hasn't that been played out yet? Incidentally, 3.0 is not even close to when they moved to a rapid release cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
between so called 'legitimate software' and botnets these days anyway?
Each is used to collect data that can be analyzed for profit in various ways. Legitimate software, you might argue, provides actual value to the end-user, is not surreptitiously installed and doesn't exploit software vulnerabilities. However, if that's all it takes to be legit, then witness the gobs of commercial software (not to mention greyware) out there that fit the definition of 'legit', but in actuality provide only the thinnest veneer of value behind a EULA so broad that it allows the software vendor to pretty much do as they please across your hard drive and Internet connection.
Won't work because most stockholders don't care enough to vote and even if they did, most shares are owned through proxy via mutual funds so most of the voting rights are in the hands of a few major players anyway.
He will be spending his time at Oculus 100%, which is good, because there's plenty of new ground to break and few are better qualified to drive the software side of things for a new graphics technology than Mr. Carmack.
I had access to a Rift DK for the better part of a month. For what amounts to a smartphone screen mounted inside ski goggles, I was thoroughly impressed and have no doubt that this device offers an early look at the future of hardcore gaming -- I suspect a similar device that allows you to insert your own smartphone in front of a set of lenses could be the eventual template for casual gaming as well.
Among the many tech demos available, I was most impressed with Lunar Lander on the Rift, which was worth hours of fun. The illusion that you are actually there, on the moon maneuvering this vehicle was only slightly diminished by the development kit's limitations:
* lack of positional head tracking -- up, down, left and right work fine, but you can't lean or move your head in any direction as it immediately breaks immersiveness (probably a major contributor to the early nausea that I and others have reported)
* awkwardness of the headset, input box & wires
* lack of congruent body avatar in virtually all demo software to date
* low resolution screen (half of a 1280x800 LCD panel for each eye) contributing to what's known as the screen door effect
* various unoptimized latencies (LCD refresh, video card output, head tracking, etc...)
* clunky lens adjustments
Over time, continued software and hardware development will mitigate or eliminate many of these problems. I'm looking forward to the 2014 consumer launch which is rumored to have higher resolution and positional tracking. If so, I will definitely be one of the first to line up for it.
Most employees are more or less replaceable, but John Carmack for all intents and purposes *was* iD, at least in the early years when 3D graphics engines were in their infancy. When he announced he was going to be CTO at Oculus, it was obvious that he was really excited about the prospects over there, and was going to be winding things up at iD sooner or later. But he chose not to leave his old company in the lurch, and he transitioned at a pace that didn't screw them over in favor of the new. This is John Carmack exiting graciously.
Why not just buy some land in rural areas, construct a barn looking thing as a decoy (out of a material that's transparent to the instruments within), ship redundant parts across several ports and assemble under the cover of darkness. Difficult and expensive to do without being detected? Maybe, but surely within the realm of possibility for the Russian government...
LeVar Burton played Geordie LaForge on Star Treak -- a character who could not see except by virtue of a digital visor he wore. Now the actor in real life tries something that's also sorta similar -- if you wave your hands, squint your eyes and gesture knowingly. What are the odds! The parallels must have been mindblowing! Life imitating art! The jokes must now write themselves! Queue the Benny Hill music...
Um, I think you've reached your metaphor quota for today. Thanks for coming out. Anything of substance to share?
still released it that way in spite of the problems. Arrogance is the only logical explanation.
This has been a well documented problem from earlier preview builds and was specifically not fixed in the RTM code because... well because MS seems to think it can make unilaterally bad UI decisions again and again and get away with it.
Try setting your Win8.1 display to 150% on a 1920x1200 monitor. This is exactly where I've used WinXP, WinVista, Win7 and Win8, yet in Win8.1, a random assortment of applications (including many MS utilities and 3rd-party programs) deliver barely readable fuzzy characters. At least in Win8.0, you could set a master switch to tell the OS to disable DPI scaling, but in their infinite wisdom, some group within MS decided that to hell with useability, they're going to simply remove the master switch and force ALL users to disable DPI scaling on an app by app basis, making it bloody well a gargantuan effort to avoid either fuzzy or tiny text.
It's absolutely appalling... About as appalling as MS deciding that Win8.0 users shouldn't be able to boot into desktop mode on a non-touchscreen device and then completely removing the start menu as if giving the middle finger to the existing install base was some kind of magical shortcut back to a dominant market position.
If you're arrogant, but generally make good or at least non-destructive UI decisions, most people will forgive you. When you're arrogant and make butthead UI decisions, well, then you're MS.
They've managed to marry Apple's arrogance with butthead UI decisions.
Disclaimer: I own a top of the line 54" Panasonic plasma set from a couple years ago and enjoy its excellent picture quality.
If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better.
It's the same reason that many folks think they'll prefer shiny laptop screens or speakers that deliver booming lows and super highs. It all seems better in a snap judgment... It's not until you take it home and have to live with it for a few hours that you start to realize that matte screens are easier on the eyes, speakers with more natural frequency response are easier on the ears and that LCD TVs (usually demoed in torch mode) need to be turned down to a more tolerable brightness level (well within the realm of what a plasma can do) during extended viewing sessions.
> Look at how quickly the people followed the orders to cower indoors because of 2 kids.
Really? The "2 kids" in question bombed a public event with improvised explosives, then killed a police officer, hijacked a car and the last one took refuge by hiding in a boat in a local neighborhood. How would the authorities have responded in your magical utopian 'free' country?
Luke, we're gonna have company.
Even in the Martha Stewart case, they only got her on obstruction of justice. Hard to say whether Cuban was legit or not, all we know is that the evidence was not strong enough to convict.
The theory seems to be that insider trading is so widespread and difficult to prove that one of the government's strategies is to go after a few high profile 'celebrity' cases as a way to drive awareness among the populace. It probably gets your average Joe to think twice before trading on a tip from an executive friend higher up in the corporate ladder, but I suspect the people who really know what they're doing siphon millions out of the market daily.
I wonder the same sorts of things myself. I sense that a good portion of this 'likes' business is actually a very subtle but sophisticated game of influence deployed by marketers. I suspect a few things are at play when a network encourages 'likes' for a TV show that hasn't aired:
1. It's a form of early market research. 'Likes' are probably as good a metric as any for predicting the size of the initial audience, which in turn helps the network fine tune what they can charge advertisers at the outset.
2. It drives popularity, albeit based on false pretenses: Once the show starts airing, and you hit the site to learn more about it and see all of those 'likes', you'll get a feeling that it's more popular than say a similar show where the network didn't troll for 'likes' prior to its initial air date. This is especially important when the network is trying to influence those of us (e.g. teenagers, pre-teens) who consider popularity to be of significant importance.
3. On social networks, when you 'like' something, it lets your connections know. Getting people to be aware of something is of course half the battle with marketing, not to mention that if you are considered an important influencer among your peers, then you're providing your implicit 'thumbs up'.
4. I suspect there's also a sort of cognitive dissonance play going on. If you 'like' something on Facebook, I suspect you're also more likely to engage with it in the future simply because of that 'like', and irrespective of all other factors.
Disregard above, I misread your comment. Yes, that's a potential problem. I'm guessing that there is some sort of specific engagement required on the part of the company, otherwise I could go around claiming I'm going to buy Chevron and then accuse their execs of insider trading...
Cancel existing orders and don't schedule new company stock trades as soon as you have become an insider either by your own doing or by an external party?
YOU CAN'T TRADE STOCK IN A COMPANY WHEN YOU HAVE PRIVILEGED NON-PUBLIC INFORMATION THAT COULD MATERIALLY AFFECT THE STOCK PRICE IF THE PUBLIC KNEW ABOUT IT. Anyone who works for a public company knows this. You'd think the CEO would have a particular interest in staying on the right side of insider trading laws, but he was sloppy while the Feds were watching and they nabbed him for it. No conspiracy theories needed to explain his utter stupidity.
He got 10 years for insider trading. Nice try though.
Why do I get the feeling this whole thing is like a big billionaire's version of SimCity for him? I wonder what "natural" disasters he has in store?
The reason you can tell the difference between looking outside and your monitor has more to do with your monitor's limited color gamut, dynamic range and contrast ratio than pixel density. Beyond a certain density, you need a much bigger screen to appreciate the extra pixels.
And my eyes can barely make out the width of a pixel as it is. What is it going to do for me if you increase pixel density such that pixel are now a quarter the size they are now? Give us 40" or more, and it might start to get interesting, but then you're constantly bending your neck to read what's on different parts of the screen.
Anyone remember that phone? That's the one where Blackberry (RIM) decided to get in on the touchscreen craze by building a phone that tried to bridge the gap for users who preferred physical keyboards. In response to physical keyboard users who clamored for tactile feedback, they made the whole screen click when you pressed hard enough.
At the time, I thought to myself, "no, you idiots, an entire screen that clicks doesn't provide the same tactile feedback as individually raised keys that click under your fingers. What were you guys thinking when you came up with this partial solution to the wrong problem?"
This time around, I'm thinking to myself (and the Slashdot community), "no, you idiots, adding a start icon to the desktop so that users can get to Metro doesn't address the underlying problem that Metro is not appropriate on non-touchscreen desktop PCs. What were you guys thinking when you came up with this partial solution to the wrong problem?"
If this was a previous generation where AMD was actually still competitive, Titan would have been the high end part, and it would have cost $500 instead of $1000. The part known as GTX 780 would have been a slightly depopulated part capable of 90% the performance for a 20% savings or so and the rest of the line would have fallen under those two. Since AMD is no longer really a threat in the high-end GPU space, Nvidia can literally maintain the MSRPs of the old parts as if the new parts are merely higher performing extensions of the previous generation without any downward pricing pressure on anything.
Well evidently if he's lamenting not going with his gut, he's implying that there *was* a viable path to producing mobile chips and they *chose* not to risk their desktop/server business in pursuit of it.
What this story tells me is that while your gut instinct may or may not be offering you the best path forward, you owe it to yourself as a business leader to figure out why your gut contradicts the data. If all you do is make logical decisions based on easily available data, then you can probably be replaced by a simple algorithm that can make more reliable decisions than you anyway.
In this case, Otellini had data in front of him, but his gut instinct contradicted the data-driven path forward. He ignored it and moved on, convinced that it was safer (?) to be on the side of the data. But the data led him astray. Why?
Because he had partial data, data that was probably focused on previous mobile computing entries and little on Apple's recent design successes, superior user experiences and marketing capabilities. If he'd realized his gut was really signalling that they needed more and different kinds of data, I suspect Intel would have gone down a different path.
Really? The version number thing again? Hasn't that been played out yet? Incidentally, 3.0 is not even close to when they moved to a rapid release cycle.