Yeah, I have a Mac. A powerbook. I use an HP laptop for everything though, the Mac is mostly just for when I feel like playing.
The buzz on the street is not going to convert me. I see how slick the interface is, I have a lot of software for it (have spent about $4k on it in the last year, actually). I see all the little apps that are out there, things like Quicksilver, and yeah, they do some cool stuff. And yes, the BSD terminal is a little better than cygwin once you understand where they put all the stuff.
The reason I will never switch is simple: I had to support Power PC macs running the computer lab in college. Those POS machines were nearly impossible to operate reliably for over 6 months. Hearing Extents B Tree still gives me the willies. Man, my frist girlfriend was only interested in me becuase I saved a couple papers for her and knew how to keep the things running. I used to tell people the machines were dead when they weren't just so I could keep it. The sad thing is, by that point, people beleived me without a question, and I graduated with about 40 Power PCs stashed in my pad. Made a table out of them, was more useful that trying to use them for computing.
Apple may have gotten something right for the moment, but I still think they are just a bunch of design junkies who take quality seriously only when they have to. Between the original generation of iPods that only lasted 12 months and the friggin power macs, you are dealing with a company that has sold way too much crap that people believed was gold. With Microsoft, their stuff is crap too, but at least a) there are a lot of people who know what the crap parts are and can tell you and b) people aren't deluded about it being anything more than a crap machine, like they are with a Mac. I will give it another decade before I come to rely on one of those things for anything more than resting my drink on it, I don't believe this nonsense about them making better machines will last.
So, here's the kicker. Every time I say anything about how much garbage Apple has pushed over the years, the Slashdot Mac Mafia teams up to mod me down. Go ahead, just more proof of my point that Mac's perceived excellence is based on something besides operability.
M
Wisdom of the crowds? Mentality of the mob? What's the difference?
Education happens when people learn, and people can learn in a variety of ways that do not involve sitting in a chair with your fellow students. There have been online telecourses for a while now, and video courses for much longer (I took a physics class in college where all the lessons were on a cable channel). To say that Second Life is a game and that's not a forum where education can occur really pigeonholes Second Life and ignores one of the key ways people learn - interacting and building relationships.
Now, if they were talking about Galaga, I would be right there with you. But this is a game where you enter carefully designed virtual environments. The way to win, if you need to think of it that way, is by building relationships with others in non-linear scenarios, where there is no start and end point - you are talking with other people and it's really only as much fun as the other people around you. The game is fully of social networking tools like buddy lists and groups, and there are numerous ways to communicate including IM and local area chat. So, to be clear, you can think of it as a game, but this is more like a 3D communications tool.
Look at the places which have emplolyed Second Life as a tool for the classroom and you get my point. The adjunct campus of Harvard's Law School uses Second Life as an alternative to going into the classroom. You can still 'talk' (chat) with people in a forum where there is a projector, other students asking questions, etc. No one is running around with guns in an FPS, this is an exchange of knowledge. You can download a transcript of what was said (your notes) for future review, and this is really a way of building trust. You know what your others have said, who knows what they are talking about, and have a record of other people's thoughts you can refer to at any time. In some ways, this is better than being in a classroom and recording the lecture. There are other places doing this under different disciplines, but the model is the same - people are there for a reason which is not to play games, they have the opportunity to carry on a dialogue about the subject and high trust relationships are built between the participants.
As a closet philologist, I have to point the Socratic Dialogue here and say that learning groups such as this have more to do with the original 'high impact' style of learning that what most classrooms do here today. If you consider the fact that so many university courses are taught in lecture halls with hundreds of people and no chance to interact with the professor, people in SL probably have an advantage over others in these kinds of settings. Having someone show you what they are talking about and giving you the ability to ask questions is so much more effective than being subjected to straight lectures in crowded rooms it's not even funny. On a sim, you can fit maybe 40 people, so there are guaranteed limits to class size that a lot of people find more appealling.
The point: SL is not a game like Unreal, Galaga, Mario Bros, or most of the other things we think about when we are saying the word. It has an environment that is totally geared to the exchange of knowledge and, based on the current realities of the university system, may be more effective in promoting learning than other some traditional alternatives that exist today. There is no reason why it should be categorically dismissed as an educational tool except the preconception that game -> playtime. It has its uses, just like any other tool, and educators can get results based on the way it is implemented and the effectiveness of the instructor. In some varieties of courses, I am certian there are limitations to how effective it can be, but I fail to see how it impedes learning.
If the people at Harvard use it for their law school, how are employers going to have anything to say? Maybe they will be impressed to see someone taking advantage of technology to get a better education. FWIW, I have been out of college for almost 10 years, held some fairly important positions inside and outside of IT, and no one has ever questioned whether that physics course I took was in a classroom or on TV.
In politics, this is called earned media. It is what happens when a story gets into the news, and it is gold for political candidates.
For an offbeat cartoon with a cult following, this is more like platinum. EVERYONE I know now knows about ATHF and their impressions are mostly favorable (i.e. they get the absurdity of it all). What I am afraid of is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle effect, where the rise in popularity is accompanied by huge commercial tie ins and merchandising which ultimately reduces the quality of the core product.
Of course, I would never use the word quality when discussing ATHF, but you know what I mean. Someday ATHF could be on the afternoon cartoons in a form that is more acceptable to kids and soccer mom's, since that is where the dollars are.
If you used company property (i.e. email, fax, IM over the company network) to find a new job, and your old boss happens to be diabolically evil, he may have grounds to sue. That's the only thing I can come up with, this sounds crazy.
A new version of Doom? How closely is it going to resemble Doom III? Will there be light in this one? How about patches, will I at least be able to get my duct tape in this one? Who is involved, is Carmack going to be on this one?
Oh wait, we are talking about wired peripherals. Seriously, human factors engineering has to give way to functional design at some point. The fact that a whole machine can be put into a single box means nothing to me. I am all about the power of putting together your own machine and seeing it blaze new trails in FPS, read writes and FSB speeds. It could come in 50 individually housed components for all I care, just give me monstrous speed and I am satisfied.
This thread is about peripherals in general. As much as I like being able to sync my Sidekick with my laptop without needing a cable, this is a non-factor in purchasing decisions for me. I would trade all the wireless access for a faster GPU any day and know a lot of people who would too.
I happen to be one of those people who owns a startup. My company doesn't have the money to pay phenonmenal salaries, but we make sure people are taken care of. The best advice I have for anyone coming into a situation: love what you do and make sure your work is meaningful.
A startup is a risk no matter how you cut it. You and everyone else is involved in a project which may or may not take off someday, and your financial compensation is directly tied to the success of the organization. Your challenge is really to find ways to mitigate your risk, you can look at the management, the people you are going to work with, the product, the business model, etc. If these are all good, you have taken care of 90% of the risk already.
But the one thing that most directly affects whether or not you are going to see a return for all your efforts is whether or not you care about what you are doing. I can't say it enough, I have had people work for me who want to check out at the end of the day, and I have had people work for me who call at 3am for help on a problem. The fact is, both of these individuals bring expertise and competence with them that allows the company to operate, but the concentration of value in the latter is what allows us to expand and improves our reputation in the business community (clients can see it). If I didn't have people working for me who really care about what we do, we would be far behind where we are now.
It's all in what you mean when you are using the word philosophy. If you take a classic definition of the word, as referring to aesthetic, ethics, and metaphysics, there is absolutely a role for philosophy in computer science cirriculums.
Aesthetics is the study of what is beautiful and is expressed in the tech industry through studies in usability and human factors engineering. There are numerous applications which can be used to automatically determine colors pleasing to the eye. Facial recognition systems can identify combinations of human traits which would be recognized as the most beautiful (although this is not an innate apprehension of beauty, just an understanding of what is commonly perceived as beautiful).
Ethics is the study of good and evil. Ethics has been applied to computer science fictionally (such as in the case of Asimov's rules for robot behavior) and literally in the consideration of applications for technology. For instance, what are the ethical implications for systems used to track the behavior of large numbers of people? Is it right to use technology to prolong the lives of people past the cessation of brain activity? These are the kinds of questions which apply here.
Metaphysics is the study of the rules underlying the universe, and it's original expression is in what we now know simply as physics. It's the study of existance, ontological meaning, categorization, perception, and to some extent what we mean when we say God. Consider the idea that the ontological meaning of the word chair applies to many things which vary so widely they don't really look like one another but everyone recognizes them to be examples of what a chair is and you have a good idea on where to start. Tagging systems, taxonomies, many of the forms of online social networking and personalization are based around ontological rules defined thousands of years ago.
Of course, if you mean philosophy as conformance to a single agenda or set of ideas about computer science, that has no place in the world. There are simply too many options and opportunities out there for rigid dictums about the nature of science for this to apply.
Leave it to World Net Daily to assign a political agenda to the actions of Google. Reality really does seem to have a liberal bias.
The content of the articles aside, one has to wonder why an site that is unabashedly slanted towards political commentary can really be considered news in the first place. There is a big difference between political analysis of world events (i.e. what one party is doing, what is going on with legislation, etc.) and political commentary (diatribes about various organized groups, short fictions about the way the world works, etc.). WND comes down in the later camp, it always has, and the fact they were ever included in a 'News' aggregator is troublesome.
I mean, isn't there a line somewhere, where information stops being news and starts being propaganda? I always thought it had something to do with whether or not a story is a recitation of facts or someone's personal opinion. There seems to be some confusion between objectivity and fairness these days, where a plurality of viewpoints (slanted in one direction or the other) is considered a substitute for faithfulness to events in themselves.
I spent 8 years after college working as one of those highly paid IT contractors. My basic role has always been Web development, and the kinds of jobs I worked were dissatisfying for a number of reasons. First off, as anyone who has worked in government IT consulting knows, contractors are lower than the sweat in the armpit of the janitor in the eyes of 90% of government employees (especially political appointees). They don't trust you, everyone has an agenda separate from the organizational mission, and they resent the fact you make as much of 2 or 3 of them. Secondly, this type of position does not really lend itself to advancement. The majority of IT contractors just do what they are good at and never try to work themselves into an organizational role within the companies they work for. Thus, companies themselves sort of treat IT as its own animal, and there is typically no heirarchy above manager for contractors.
Regardless, the lack of opportunity and the general working conditions really did not appeal to me. In January of last year, after a post-Christmas layoff, I started my own company and look at the world in an entirely different way. The salary has not always been there (nor has the revenue, it is not easy to start a business), but I am making more than enough to make ends meet and have not missed any meals.
The most rewarding part of this is that I have a genuine interest in the work we do. I am not building some crap accounting application for unappreciative people with no vested interest in the project anymore. I get to talk to decision makers, write proposals that are realistic, intelligent and actually serve a purpose in the real world, and generally have a lot more control over things that limited me in the IT consulting world.
How sad is it that we have all these video games, portraying violent and reckless behavior in a realistic setting, and people are going out repeating the acts they see in the games? I'm confident that, were we to remove all video games which could possibly influence people's actions in any way, we could eliminate things like crime, insane recklessness, and war. I am certain there are statistics that show a causal relationship between an increase in car accidents and the release of 'Need for Speed'.
If you consider what else goes on in video games besides just shooting police officers, driving like an epileptic having a grand mal seizure with the gas pedal glued down, or all this rock music playing in the background of said games, the picture becomes a lot more frightening. Consider Tetris, where you stack boxes only to make them go away. The artificial reduction in inventory so graphically displayed and used as a form of amusement has to be terrifying to warehouse owners worldwide. Imagine the impressions left on young people playing that game who will someday grow up to be forklift operators. There is no greater threat to a country's GNP than a game that glorifies stacking things with the intention of destroying them.
For a better example, consider the game Doom. You are put in a world where all the lights are turned off, given a wide array of guns, and told to shoot anything that does not look like you. It is only a matter of time before kids across America start turning the lights off in their homes to conserve electricity, which directly impacts the number of kilowatt hours sold by utility companies. Not to mention the fact that shooting things that don't look like you with massive weapons is a poor way for people to socialize. It's games like this that lead to the rise in rampant xenophobia in the midwest, and prevent people from different backgrounds from achieving common goals and working towards a better world.
The game that most frightens me, with it's emersive environments, realistic use of weaponry, and insanely graphic fight sequences is one we have all learned to fear. Gauntlet. As soon as I hear 'Red Warrior needs food badly', I know that my 12 year old is headed to the nearest refrigerator to eat a massive plate of ham. The fact that he is 4 foot 2 and weighs 340 lbs is a direct consequence of playing this game filled with subliminal references to consuming massive amounts of nourishment in the pursuit of endlessly regenerating imps, trolls, things with gas masks and ghosts. When I hear 'That was a heroic effort', the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I know this means the kid is not going to leave the front of that television for at least another 2 hours. There is no force on Earth capable of preventing kids from playing these games endlessly, and someone needs to stand up and do something about it.
This is a good argument for the need for open source election software. Another factor besides transparency is the need for peer review. Well designed software should be able to withstand some level of scrutiny from outside developers, and no set of code should be more well designed than that which is responsible for tabulating the record concerning the orderly transfer of power.
The problem is that Diebold is claiming the schema is proprietary, not the records. Which is odd because the schema has been published publicly in a number of forums and there are a lot of people who could describe it to you column for column.
This begs the question, what methods were used to access the data provided? Diebold is claiming the reports on the data stored in the system are all anyone is entitled to. I am assuming, since views are part of an Access database, they are claiming these are protected as well.
What is really so vexing about this decision is the fact the schema has been public for some time now. It's fairly easy to get your hands on a copy. I believe it was Avi Rubin who first described the nature of the schema and how it works, he's a Johns Hopkins professor and is widely followed.
I'm telling you, most federal 'cybersecurity' contracts go towards hardening infrastructure and the vast majority of that is spent on pen testing at outrageous rates. Like, at rates where you would think Ed Skoulkis and Jay Beale were working on the projects. At least 16% of a fully funded agency's budget is spent on IT and increasingly large portions of that are spent on open-ended security contracts that revolve around consultants who primarily spend their time off site running Nessus scans.
Does it make anything more secure? Dunno, have mixed opinions about that. Dept. of the Interior and EPA can't seem to get themselves straight no matter how much they spend. Other agencies have their faults as well, and they tend to persist no matter how much money is spent. I know of a couple of success stories, but thought the work being done was mostly to appease the OIG and not really to prevent intrusions.
It's great that there are people out there who can run a report that tells me to upgrade sendmail, but there are a LOT of people in the middle selling this stuff to the government.
No, there is no threat posed by cyberterrorism. It's just a way to make the federal government feel justified in paying CISSPs $1000 an hour for pen testing. Yes, there are people on contracts like this.
Yes, this does mean the end of Fireworks and Freehand. Neither have ever been the "professional's choice", meaning Adobe has to justify it's investment in the whole CS2 line over the last several years.
But consumers should benefit from integrated products nonetheless. Let us remember the big interface lawsuits of just a few years ago between these companies. Adobe sued MM over the fact you could configure your interface with floating palettes to look like just like their products, and MM was forced to come up with the whole dockable palettes thing.
what I imagine is going to occur, and what I have held off purchasing the latest MM studio for, is this:
1) Freehand goes away completely, it's already too much like Illustrator to survive.
2) Fireworks gets rebranded as an Illustrator lite, and some of it's rasterization features are taken away. It's made into a lightweight production tool for Flash and Web graphics and given all sorts of hooks into Illustrator.
No one said the rules are secret, but they are innane. It would be nice if there was a means to challenge the rules and make something better happen, but there clearly is not and maybe that's part of what Taco is talking about.
I really doubt there was any effort to annoy someone, it's just that someone took notice of the fact this name was non-compliant and did something about it. I, for one, would like to get my hands on Blizzard's name nazi and let them know what I think of their stupid rules.
Um... I was unaware Slashdot was a moderated forum sticking strictly to a set of germane topics. If Taco wants to publish complaints about an in-game problem, it's his forum and if you don't like it go read Digg, Technocrat, or Kuro5hin.
I had the exact same thing happen to me, I ran into the same bureaucracy trying to fix the problem, and it made me feel exactly the same way. While Taco's article is written from a personal perspective, this is more than just some cheap blog post. There is a faceless bittwiddler from Blizzard out there giving people a hard time for using names they have used everywhere else, and no way to reign him in.
CapnMike was my name before they forced me to change it. Like you, various bits of data associated with my account vanished. Unlike you, I quit, and do not plan to return (which is a shame, because the game was kinda cool).
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, no one tops Tommy Iomi. Even if I am misspelling his name, he put Rhandy Rhodes into the dirt.
M
Yeah, I have a Mac. A powerbook. I use an HP laptop for everything though, the Mac is mostly just for when I feel like playing.
The buzz on the street is not going to convert me. I see how slick the interface is, I have a lot of software for it (have spent about $4k on it in the last year, actually). I see all the little apps that are out there, things like Quicksilver, and yeah, they do some cool stuff. And yes, the BSD terminal is a little better than cygwin once you understand where they put all the stuff.
The reason I will never switch is simple: I had to support Power PC macs running the computer lab in college. Those POS machines were nearly impossible to operate reliably for over 6 months. Hearing Extents B Tree still gives me the willies. Man, my frist girlfriend was only interested in me becuase I saved a couple papers for her and knew how to keep the things running. I used to tell people the machines were dead when they weren't just so I could keep it. The sad thing is, by that point, people beleived me without a question, and I graduated with about 40 Power PCs stashed in my pad. Made a table out of them, was more useful that trying to use them for computing.
Apple may have gotten something right for the moment, but I still think they are just a bunch of design junkies who take quality seriously only when they have to. Between the original generation of iPods that only lasted 12 months and the friggin power macs, you are dealing with a company that has sold way too much crap that people believed was gold. With Microsoft, their stuff is crap too, but at least a) there are a lot of people who know what the crap parts are and can tell you and b) people aren't deluded about it being anything more than a crap machine, like they are with a Mac. I will give it another decade before I come to rely on one of those things for anything more than resting my drink on it, I don't believe this nonsense about them making better machines will last.
So, here's the kicker. Every time I say anything about how much garbage Apple has pushed over the years, the Slashdot Mac Mafia teams up to mod me down. Go ahead, just more proof of my point that Mac's perceived excellence is based on something besides operability.
M
Wisdom of the crowds? Mentality of the mob? What's the difference?
I disagree.
Education happens when people learn, and people can learn in a variety of ways that do not involve sitting in a chair with your fellow students. There have been online telecourses for a while now, and video courses for much longer (I took a physics class in college where all the lessons were on a cable channel). To say that Second Life is a game and that's not a forum where education can occur really pigeonholes Second Life and ignores one of the key ways people learn - interacting and building relationships.
Now, if they were talking about Galaga, I would be right there with you. But this is a game where you enter carefully designed virtual environments. The way to win, if you need to think of it that way, is by building relationships with others in non-linear scenarios, where there is no start and end point - you are talking with other people and it's really only as much fun as the other people around you. The game is fully of social networking tools like buddy lists and groups, and there are numerous ways to communicate including IM and local area chat. So, to be clear, you can think of it as a game, but this is more like a 3D communications tool.
Look at the places which have emplolyed Second Life as a tool for the classroom and you get my point. The adjunct campus of Harvard's Law School uses Second Life as an alternative to going into the classroom. You can still 'talk' (chat) with people in a forum where there is a projector, other students asking questions, etc. No one is running around with guns in an FPS, this is an exchange of knowledge. You can download a transcript of what was said (your notes) for future review, and this is really a way of building trust. You know what your others have said, who knows what they are talking about, and have a record of other people's thoughts you can refer to at any time. In some ways, this is better than being in a classroom and recording the lecture. There are other places doing this under different disciplines, but the model is the same - people are there for a reason which is not to play games, they have the opportunity to carry on a dialogue about the subject and high trust relationships are built between the participants.
As a closet philologist, I have to point the Socratic Dialogue here and say that learning groups such as this have more to do with the original 'high impact' style of learning that what most classrooms do here today. If you consider the fact that so many university courses are taught in lecture halls with hundreds of people and no chance to interact with the professor, people in SL probably have an advantage over others in these kinds of settings. Having someone show you what they are talking about and giving you the ability to ask questions is so much more effective than being subjected to straight lectures in crowded rooms it's not even funny. On a sim, you can fit maybe 40 people, so there are guaranteed limits to class size that a lot of people find more appealling.
The point: SL is not a game like Unreal, Galaga, Mario Bros, or most of the other things we think about when we are saying the word. It has an environment that is totally geared to the exchange of knowledge and, based on the current realities of the university system, may be more effective in promoting learning than other some traditional alternatives that exist today. There is no reason why it should be categorically dismissed as an educational tool except the preconception that game -> playtime. It has its uses, just like any other tool, and educators can get results based on the way it is implemented and the effectiveness of the instructor. In some varieties of courses, I am certian there are limitations to how effective it can be, but I fail to see how it impedes learning.
If the people at Harvard use it for their law school, how are employers going to have anything to say? Maybe they will be impressed to see someone taking advantage of technology to get a better education. FWIW, I have been out of college for almost 10 years, held some fairly important positions inside and outside of IT, and no one has ever questioned whether that physics course I took was in a classroom or on TV.
M
Heh. Uncle Ben is back in one of the lastest Spider Man threads, although it looks like he might be someone coming back from the future.
M
In politics, this is called earned media. It is what happens when a story gets into the news, and it is gold for political candidates.
For an offbeat cartoon with a cult following, this is more like platinum. EVERYONE I know now knows about ATHF and their impressions are mostly favorable (i.e. they get the absurdity of it all). What I am afraid of is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle effect, where the rise in popularity is accompanied by huge commercial tie ins and merchandising which ultimately reduces the quality of the core product.
Of course, I would never use the word quality when discussing ATHF, but you know what I mean. Someday ATHF could be on the afternoon cartoons in a form that is more acceptable to kids and soccer mom's, since that is where the dollars are.
M
1) Sell downloadable DVD movies at a loss to American consumers while competing against Apple the 800lbs Gorilla. ...
2)
3) Profit!
M
IANAL.
If you used company property (i.e. email, fax, IM over the company network) to find a new job, and your old boss happens to be diabolically evil, he may have grounds to sue. That's the only thing I can come up with, this sounds crazy.
M
A new version of Doom? How closely is it going to resemble Doom III? Will there be light in this one? How about patches, will I at least be able to get my duct tape in this one? Who is involved, is Carmack going to be on this one?
Oh wait, we are talking about wired peripherals. Seriously, human factors engineering has to give way to functional design at some point. The fact that a whole machine can be put into a single box means nothing to me. I am all about the power of putting together your own machine and seeing it blaze new trails in FPS, read writes and FSB speeds. It could come in 50 individually housed components for all I care, just give me monstrous speed and I am satisfied.
This thread is about peripherals in general. As much as I like being able to sync my Sidekick with my laptop without needing a cable, this is a non-factor in purchasing decisions for me. I would trade all the wireless access for a faster GPU any day and know a lot of people who would too.
M
I happen to be one of those people who owns a startup. My company doesn't have the money to pay phenonmenal salaries, but we make sure people are taken care of. The best advice I have for anyone coming into a situation: love what you do and make sure your work is meaningful.
A startup is a risk no matter how you cut it. You and everyone else is involved in a project which may or may not take off someday, and your financial compensation is directly tied to the success of the organization. Your challenge is really to find ways to mitigate your risk, you can look at the management, the people you are going to work with, the product, the business model, etc. If these are all good, you have taken care of 90% of the risk already.
But the one thing that most directly affects whether or not you are going to see a return for all your efforts is whether or not you care about what you are doing. I can't say it enough, I have had people work for me who want to check out at the end of the day, and I have had people work for me who call at 3am for help on a problem. The fact is, both of these individuals bring expertise and competence with them that allows the company to operate, but the concentration of value in the latter is what allows us to expand and improves our reputation in the business community (clients can see it). If I didn't have people working for me who really care about what we do, we would be far behind where we are now.
M
It's all in what you mean when you are using the word philosophy. If you take a classic definition of the word, as referring to aesthetic, ethics, and metaphysics, there is absolutely a role for philosophy in computer science cirriculums.
Aesthetics is the study of what is beautiful and is expressed in the tech industry through studies in usability and human factors engineering. There are numerous applications which can be used to automatically determine colors pleasing to the eye. Facial recognition systems can identify combinations of human traits which would be recognized as the most beautiful (although this is not an innate apprehension of beauty, just an understanding of what is commonly perceived as beautiful).
Ethics is the study of good and evil. Ethics has been applied to computer science fictionally (such as in the case of Asimov's rules for robot behavior) and literally in the consideration of applications for technology. For instance, what are the ethical implications for systems used to track the behavior of large numbers of people? Is it right to use technology to prolong the lives of people past the cessation of brain activity? These are the kinds of questions which apply here.
Metaphysics is the study of the rules underlying the universe, and it's original expression is in what we now know simply as physics. It's the study of existance, ontological meaning, categorization, perception, and to some extent what we mean when we say God. Consider the idea that the ontological meaning of the word chair applies to many things which vary so widely they don't really look like one another but everyone recognizes them to be examples of what a chair is and you have a good idea on where to start. Tagging systems, taxonomies, many of the forms of online social networking and personalization are based around ontological rules defined thousands of years ago.
Of course, if you mean philosophy as conformance to a single agenda or set of ideas about computer science, that has no place in the world. There are simply too many options and opportunities out there for rigid dictums about the nature of science for this to apply.
M
Leave it to World Net Daily to assign a political agenda to the actions of Google. Reality really does seem to have a liberal bias.
The content of the articles aside, one has to wonder why an site that is unabashedly slanted towards political commentary can really be considered news in the first place. There is a big difference between political analysis of world events (i.e. what one party is doing, what is going on with legislation, etc.) and political commentary (diatribes about various organized groups, short fictions about the way the world works, etc.). WND comes down in the later camp, it always has, and the fact they were ever included in a 'News' aggregator is troublesome.
I mean, isn't there a line somewhere, where information stops being news and starts being propaganda? I always thought it had something to do with whether or not a story is a recitation of facts or someone's personal opinion. There seems to be some confusion between objectivity and fairness these days, where a plurality of viewpoints (slanted in one direction or the other) is considered a substitute for faithfulness to events in themselves.
M
Well, Windows could go away. That would make him wrong.
M
I spent 8 years after college working as one of those highly paid IT contractors. My basic role has always been Web development, and the kinds of jobs I worked were dissatisfying for a number of reasons. First off, as anyone who has worked in government IT consulting knows, contractors are lower than the sweat in the armpit of the janitor in the eyes of 90% of government employees (especially political appointees). They don't trust you, everyone has an agenda separate from the organizational mission, and they resent the fact you make as much of 2 or 3 of them. Secondly, this type of position does not really lend itself to advancement. The majority of IT contractors just do what they are good at and never try to work themselves into an organizational role within the companies they work for. Thus, companies themselves sort of treat IT as its own animal, and there is typically no heirarchy above manager for contractors.
Regardless, the lack of opportunity and the general working conditions really did not appeal to me. In January of last year, after a post-Christmas layoff, I started my own company and look at the world in an entirely different way. The salary has not always been there (nor has the revenue, it is not easy to start a business), but I am making more than enough to make ends meet and have not missed any meals.
The most rewarding part of this is that I have a genuine interest in the work we do. I am not building some crap accounting application for unappreciative people with no vested interest in the project anymore. I get to talk to decision makers, write proposals that are realistic, intelligent and actually serve a purpose in the real world, and generally have a lot more control over things that limited me in the IT consulting world.
M
How sad is it that we have all these video games, portraying violent and reckless behavior in a realistic setting, and people are going out repeating the acts they see in the games? I'm confident that, were we to remove all video games which could possibly influence people's actions in any way, we could eliminate things like crime, insane recklessness, and war. I am certain there are statistics that show a causal relationship between an increase in car accidents and the release of 'Need for Speed'.
If you consider what else goes on in video games besides just shooting police officers, driving like an epileptic having a grand mal seizure with the gas pedal glued down, or all this rock music playing in the background of said games, the picture becomes a lot more frightening. Consider Tetris, where you stack boxes only to make them go away. The artificial reduction in inventory so graphically displayed and used as a form of amusement has to be terrifying to warehouse owners worldwide. Imagine the impressions left on young people playing that game who will someday grow up to be forklift operators. There is no greater threat to a country's GNP than a game that glorifies stacking things with the intention of destroying them.
For a better example, consider the game Doom. You are put in a world where all the lights are turned off, given a wide array of guns, and told to shoot anything that does not look like you. It is only a matter of time before kids across America start turning the lights off in their homes to conserve electricity, which directly impacts the number of kilowatt hours sold by utility companies. Not to mention the fact that shooting things that don't look like you with massive weapons is a poor way for people to socialize. It's games like this that lead to the rise in rampant xenophobia in the midwest, and prevent people from different backgrounds from achieving common goals and working towards a better world.
The game that most frightens me, with it's emersive environments, realistic use of weaponry, and insanely graphic fight sequences is one we have all learned to fear. Gauntlet. As soon as I hear 'Red Warrior needs food badly', I know that my 12 year old is headed to the nearest refrigerator to eat a massive plate of ham. The fact that he is 4 foot 2 and weighs 340 lbs is a direct consequence of playing this game filled with subliminal references to consuming massive amounts of nourishment in the pursuit of endlessly regenerating imps, trolls, things with gas masks and ghosts. When I hear 'That was a heroic effort', the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I know this means the kid is not going to leave the front of that television for at least another 2 hours. There is no force on Earth capable of preventing kids from playing these games endlessly, and someone needs to stand up and do something about it.
M
This is a good argument for the need for open source election software. Another factor besides transparency is the need for peer review. Well designed software should be able to withstand some level of scrutiny from outside developers, and no set of code should be more well designed than that which is responsible for tabulating the record concerning the orderly transfer of power.
M
The problem is that Diebold is claiming the schema is proprietary, not the records. Which is odd because the schema has been published publicly in a number of forums and there are a lot of people who could describe it to you column for column.
This begs the question, what methods were used to access the data provided? Diebold is claiming the reports on the data stored in the system are all anyone is entitled to. I am assuming, since views are part of an Access database, they are claiming these are protected as well.
M
What is really so vexing about this decision is the fact the schema has been public for some time now. It's fairly easy to get your hands on a copy. I believe it was Avi Rubin who first described the nature of the schema and how it works, he's a Johns Hopkins professor and is widely followed.
M
I tell that to women to get laid. So what?
M
I'm telling you, most federal 'cybersecurity' contracts go towards hardening infrastructure and the vast majority of that is spent on pen testing at outrageous rates. Like, at rates where you would think Ed Skoulkis and Jay Beale were working on the projects. At least 16% of a fully funded agency's budget is spent on IT and increasingly large portions of that are spent on open-ended security contracts that revolve around consultants who primarily spend their time off site running Nessus scans.
Does it make anything more secure? Dunno, have mixed opinions about that. Dept. of the Interior and EPA can't seem to get themselves straight no matter how much they spend. Other agencies have their faults as well, and they tend to persist no matter how much money is spent. I know of a couple of success stories, but thought the work being done was mostly to appease the OIG and not really to prevent intrusions.
It's great that there are people out there who can run a report that tells me to upgrade sendmail, but there are a LOT of people in the middle selling this stuff to the government.
M
No, there is no threat posed by cyberterrorism. It's just a way to make the federal government feel justified in paying CISSPs $1000 an hour for pen testing. Yes, there are people on contracts like this.
M
Did anyone notice the desk? What kind of soda cans are those on his desk? I thought they were Hansens, but it does not look like any I have ever seen.
M
Yes, this does mean the end of Fireworks and Freehand. Neither have ever been the "professional's choice", meaning Adobe has to justify it's investment in the whole CS2 line over the last several years.
But consumers should benefit from integrated products nonetheless. Let us remember the big interface lawsuits of just a few years ago between these companies. Adobe sued MM over the fact you could configure your interface with floating palettes to look like just like their products, and MM was forced to come up with the whole dockable palettes thing.
what I imagine is going to occur, and what I have held off purchasing the latest MM studio for, is this:
1) Freehand goes away completely, it's already too much like Illustrator to survive.
2) Fireworks gets rebranded as an Illustrator lite, and some of it's rasterization features are taken away. It's made into a lightweight production tool for Flash and Web graphics and given all sorts of hooks into Illustrator.
3) Dimensions returns as a 3D solution for Flash.
M
No one said the rules are secret, but they are innane. It would be nice if there was a means to challenge the rules and make something better happen, but there clearly is not and maybe that's part of what Taco is talking about.
I really doubt there was any effort to annoy someone, it's just that someone took notice of the fact this name was non-compliant and did something about it. I, for one, would like to get my hands on Blizzard's name nazi and let them know what I think of their stupid rules.
M
Um... I was unaware Slashdot was a moderated forum sticking strictly to a set of germane topics. If Taco wants to publish complaints about an in-game problem, it's his forum and if you don't like it go read Digg, Technocrat, or Kuro5hin.
I had the exact same thing happen to me, I ran into the same bureaucracy trying to fix the problem, and it made me feel exactly the same way. While Taco's article is written from a personal perspective, this is more than just some cheap blog post. There is a faceless bittwiddler from Blizzard out there giving people a hard time for using names they have used everywhere else, and no way to reign him in.
M
CapnMike was my name before they forced me to change it. Like you, various bits of data associated with my account vanished. Unlike you, I quit, and do not plan to return (which is a shame, because the game was kinda cool).
Feeling your pain,
M