Estimate how long it will take you to find another job. If you're the optimistic type, double it to get to a real number. Have them cover the difference between your salary and unemployment for that length of time. Have them continue to cover your medical insurance for that length of time. Hopefully you've got other severance coming your way too... just remember that certain severance packages require them to let you go.
Otherwise, look for another job today. They're laying you off, man. There is no fanfare, they're not crying a river. You're not keeping the red stapler. The company's life will go on. Mainstream corporations, even moderate sized ones, can be quite soul less.
On the other hand, if you stick around, you can pick up a whole lot of supplies. Need about a dozen monitors?
It gets worse. Notice how the diagram assumes that the fulcrum of the cow is the opposite leg? This assumes a 100% rigid body cow. How rigid is a cow if it isn't expecting to be knocked over? If the cow's legs provided full vertical support but no angular rigity, a slight breeze would blow that parallelogram over.
In essence, they've shown the theoretical maximum force required to tip a cow.
And, of course, she doesn't try to tip any cows herself. It seems a bit irresponsible to prove that it can't be done mathematically, without checking your work yourself.
Not necessarily relevant to the findings of the article, but notice in the diagram where the center of mass is located?
If we're going back to origins, there have been experiments which have reproduced simple amino acids by simulating the conditions on earth around the time which life evolved...
I should have specified that this doesn't necessarily make for emperical evidence, just that it is plausable within the framework. In other words, the origins of life might be explained through evolutionary procedures. But evolution is a theory about the procedural development of life, and not the origin of it.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation for the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes... Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
That's not fundamentalism, that's inherent in the nature of science. Natural causes are those which can be theorized about, tested, get results back from, etc.
If we could take batches of people who were on their deathbeds and who had lived similar lives, had half of them shoot a puppy, and observe whether they went to heaven or hell, then heaven and hell would fall within the realm of science. But we can't, and heaven and hell remains pure speculation. We have no emperical evidence one way or the other.
Study the evidence of evolution yourself, not just the arguments. Evolution is extremely good at explaining many natural phenomenon, in the same way that Newton's theories were extremely good at explaining natural phenomenon. Neither did so perfectly at the extremities, but did so along the observable ranges of the time. Already the theory of a smooth evolution has given way to a theory of faster mutations and periods of, for lack of a better term, genetic unrest. And let's be fair, those "flaws" are more conceptual rather than flatly contradicted by hard data. You don't have, say, siberian housecats suddenly appearing in the triassic period.
If we're going back to origins, there have been experiments which have reproduced simple amino acids by simulating the conditions on earth around the time which life evolved. And this was in a lab over a short period of time. Given a lab the size of the planet, 10 million years for the experiment to run, and the anthropromorphic principle (i.e. millions of planets, only one of which has to produce life), and the odds are greatly in favor of some form of self-replicating molecular chain occuring and coming to dominate the oceans. Like a computer virus, you only need one. And like a virus, it doesn't need to be as complicated as a full-on cellular or multicellular organism.
Why is deprecated evidence for evolution spoon-fed to children alongside real, valid results? Why do we tolerate this? (Granted, we are finally starting to fix this one.) When honest questioners (Christians or not!) raise valid issues, they are not answered but instead accused of being creationists. Why do we tolerate this? In my high school physics class my teacher read aloud Bertrand Russell's essay, Why I am not a Christian. Why do we tolerate this?
Why was I forced to sing "If you want to get to heaven I'll tell you how: just keep that hand on the gospel plow" in elementary school? Why are Freud's theories still being taught, despite being laughably depreciated? Why are students banned from wearing t-shirts with slogans like "pepsi sucks?" Because public school education in the country is arbitrary and sucks, and has for many years. Why do we tolerate that?
Nearly all of my students say that they are explicitly taught, or are pressured to accept (there's that ridicule thing again), that evolution contradicts religion -- and since evolution has been proven over and over again to be correct, religion must be incorrect. This is hardly separation of church and state, now is it? Consider, if evolution were not the favorite weapon against Christianity, there might be much less of this mouth-frothing resistance to it.
Not to be too explicit here, but the world is not flat, it is not 7,000 years old, Adam and Eve did not frolic with the dinosaurs. Evidence flatly contradicts all of those things. And where evidence contradicts faith in naturalistic matters, evidence inherently wins. It's not a weapon against Christianity any more than Darwinian evolution was a weapon against Dodo birds, or lightning was a weapon against the churches that didn't believe in Franklin's lightning rod.
allow science students in public schools to hear materials critical of evolution in biology classes.
This is not at issue here. You can have all of the material critial of evolution you want in any biology class anywhere in the United States. Criticism is a fundamental part of the scientific process. What you can't do is then turn around and say "because we don't have a good explanation, God did it."
There is nothing wrong with scientifically saying "your explanation is flawed," "that theory doesn't explain all phenomenon," or even "we don't know." But there is a problem, to quote Asimov, with saying that "Dragons must be pushing the moons."
I have to say, I'm with you on this one, in theory. I really hate the irrelevancies of modern advertising. I would rather be shown a flood of ads for things I might be interested in (and preferably might not know about) in place of the flood of ads for "punch the monkey and win a years supply of Vioxx." Plus if the ads are twice as valuable to the advertiser, they can use half as many (yeah, right).
That having been said, it is the database about me which is a bit creepy. But, as huge databases about me already exist I can't complain too much. I've always said that if we had perfect transparency, everyone's "freakish oddities" would seem normal.
On the one hand, we desperately need more clean fuel supplies. You don't want to ruin your home, especially if it is the only home your entire species has.
That having been said, he's making trend estimations to 2050. 2050. That's 45 years off. People aren't particularly good at figuring out what will happen in 10 years, let alone in 45. By 2050 the world will look as different as it did in 1950, arguably moreso. Will we have simple, efficient hydrogen for power storage? Will we finally have cracked the nuclear fusion code? Will meltdown-proof nuclear fission reactors come to power the world? Will many completely unexpected things come to pass?
I live next to an experiment in solar panels. It's an array on top of a local strip mall, running it's entire length. It is also invisible from the ground, and rather robust considering the winters here. It has also produced enough power that it would have paid for itself repeatedly.
Right now an average citizen can make an investment in solar technology, and can buy something which costs them the same as buying power over the wires, but which is also completely clean. But they don't. Businesses with large surface areas can buy something which costs them significantly LESS than buying power over the wires, and which is completly clean, but they don't. This sounds like a failure of advertising rather than a failure of technology. At this point, we really just need to get the word out.
And who knows. Maybe Solar won't be the breakthrough that gets us a few more pollution-free years, in the same way that the gas-driven car saved us from the massive crisis of horse poo which was coating every major city in the world. Maybe it will be something unexpected. Thermal? Kinetic? Something that runs by consuming greenhouse gasses?
We definitely need more research dollars. But I'm not convinced that focusing them all down on Solar is the right way to go.
understand that most of the world really doesn't give a lama's ass about where who and why you are.
Unfortunately, most of the world wouldn't think twice about destroying you if it thought you were doing somthing suspicious.
Guilty or innocent, why take that risk? We did track you in a cafe with a known terrorist, and you then did proceed to a known terrorist used bookstore. We should take you into Gitmo now, to protect the innocent. The fears of the many outweigh the rights of the few.
Of course, this being a passport, it is more likely that foreign governments would be tracking everyone. I don't know which is more scary.
If you know we hate the layout, why don't you change it?
I love the escapist. It is constantly full of interesting, relevant articles. But currently when I open the site the left 1/5th of the cover page is cut off completely, and the right 1/5th is visible when only when scrolling to the right. It only displays properly in PDF. And even then the text is pretty small.
With your structured use of headers, background images, etc, you could create a great online magazine with a similarly high degree of polish. As it stands, you create a great PDF magazine, and a pretty bad online experience. Do you have any stats on the main way your content is read?
MIT is an interesting institution. People think it does everything from low level compiler optimizations, to multi-terrabyte optical network multiplexing, and accelerated particle small galaxy creation. And some of that is certainly true. But everyone I know at MIT is working on things like displays that track your eyes and project the correct image onto your cornea to create 3D. Or social networking software that has pervasive independent intelligence to optimize a person's life. Or carbonated ice cream.
Ultimately, MIT leaves normal computer science programs to do their "we make code faster" thing, and creating amazingly technical feats of oddly comprehensible geekery. Some friends are trying to create the worlds highest-bandwidth network by catapulting a ball full of terrabyte network drives over the Charles River from BU to MIT. Others have used their time in the MIT media lab to synthesize and create music generation programs. There is even a full lego lab.
MIT is just perfect if you need a story right away. Just look at some of what they do. Sure, some of it is hardcore geekery, but basically all of it is accessable. It is a bottomless fountain of weird, original ideas that make people think about things in different ways. UCSD has a nice computer program, but the volume of MIT stories is proportional to the volume of weird, interesting stuff the school generates.
UCI, my alma matter, has a good Comp Sci program too. But in my 5 (Ok, ok. 5 and 1/2) years there, I never once saw a wearable computing fashion show, let alone one that contained self-inflating clothing, mood rings that exchanged genetic material with other people's mood rings, jackets that were happy when touched, etc. And MIT has enough material to do odd, amazing stuff like this every week.
And yes, they're buried in work the whole time. Don't expect to see your MIT friends very often. But what they do is more often than not quite fun and easy to write stories about.
Oh, and it is convieniently next to Harvard. And the W3C is there. And it is next to Harvard. And Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee, Edward Lorenz, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Stallman are there, amongst other great interview sources. Did I mention Harvard?
Lots of people have done this type of analysis, and it is quite valuable. That doesn't mean that the subject matter is without merit, however. EVERY Simpsons episode has followed roughly the same structure for ten years, and it still captivates audiences. Ever notice that the first 5 minutes have nothing to do with the next 25? Yup, that's the one.
Someone is going to mod me up for saying this, then mod me down for being obvious, but read The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It goes into painstaking detail about the idealized hero story, and yet the structure fits tons of popular and historical media such as Terminator 2, Heart of Darkness, Cowboy Bebop, Tarzan, Blade, Odysseus, the new testament in the Bible, etc, etc.
There are several other structures out there, and nearly infinite variants, but if you look at media with a critical eye you will find that all good films, books, shows, and games fall into set patterns of challenges, setbacks, losses, and eventual triumph (or not). If I may be so bold, most truly great pieces of media aren't made by artists, but by craftsmen. An artist explores their feelings as they create, producing something which is generally more intellectually engaging than emotionally so. A craftsman knows every tool of their trade, and hones their skills, tricks, and abilities towards controlling the viewer's reaction. Spielberg is a master craftsman. Vonnegut is a craftsman. Even in artistic pieces like Y Tu Mama Tambien, the craftsmanship is present and in the forefront.
I say this because too many people try to create media from the heart, without realizing that you really need to engage your head thoroughly in order to focus on how to effect the heart of your audience. These people are master magicians: they conjure up images and emotions using smoke and mirrors. And like master magicians, they have to know the routines, and know how to work the routines so that they don't seem like routines. Part of the magic is taking something that was slaved over for years, with every detail hashed out and revised in painstaking detail, and making it look completley natural and unintended.
But there is magic, there is structure. And if you want to become a magician, you need to give up the magic and learn how it is done.
"Hello. What's happening? We need to talk about your TPM protections. Yeah. The coverbit. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it. Yeah. Uh, did you get that memo? Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. The problem is, I just forgot on this one architecture. And I've already taken care of it so it's not even a problem anymore. Yeah. It's just that we're setting the coverbit on all the TPM protections *before* they go out now. So if you could just remember to do that from now on, that'd be great. All right!"
From a High Level, to convince people to switch systems, you have to offer them something an order of magnitude better than the system they are invested in without giving up any substantial functionality. This means:
The computer should do exactly what the user wants, whenever the user wants, without the user having to think about it. This means extensive end-user testing and brutal simplification. The user should never see anything unrelated to exactly what they want to do. The folder heirarchy they see on the drive should ONLY contain things relevant to their activities. They should be able to re-arrange everything on their disk and still have it all work. They should never have to edit a config file. They should have to wade through "interface spam" of a million options which one in a million users will ever actually use. And yes, this means extensive high level architecting of everything that goes into the system, something OSS isn't traditionally good at doing.
The computer sould be able to replace legacy systems. That means being MS Office compatible, not a small feat. Not just word, but scheduling, and Excel macros must be readable in the new system.
The computer still needs a killer application or usage that makes everone want to switch to it. Apt-Get is pretty killer for me, but command line functionality will never reach the average desktop user. What else can the nature of Open Source provide? How can we use dynamic re-compilation to do something amazing that retail software can't provide?
No offence, but Linux as a desktop OS is still pretty hacky. There are a million unnecessary (to me) files hanging around when I'm just trying to do something, dozens of different ways to try to do something but four or five of which will work, command line still being integral to anything fun on the system (and even some baseline functionality), etc. My feeling is that the current state of Linux isn't the way to get there, any more than Dos should be the way to get to Windows. Perhaps it is time to throw our collective weight behind SkyOS, Zeta, or another upcoming Desktop-oriented OS, and refocus Linux on being the kick-ass server OS we all know it to be.
While MS doesn't publish the costs, hosting a game on Xbox Live is not free to the developer... not by a long shot. Think MS doesn't take a cut of every online transaction, or a cost for every MB of bandwidth? Likewise, most developers have a server center of some sort. A full farm isn't necessary for most console games, and by not going through live you can do some of the networking peer-to-peer, saving further bandwidth and resources.
Don't get me wrong, I do like Xbox Live. I like the unified logon / communications idea. I don't think Live is totally necessary, but I like to see what MS can do with it. I'm also excited as a developer to see how hard / easy integration will be. Judging by what I've seen in public, the 360 appears to do everything Live related through separate, easy, drop-in apps... the way it should be done.
On the other hand, online console penetration is at 10%. So while it is a nice feature, it's a feature that 90% of your audience currently doesn't use. Microsoft wants to blaze that trail, and more power to them. But recognize that while their Live 360 stuff has recieved a lot of attention from the company, they're releasing without a single amazing must-have title. Sony, hopefully, is taking this time to focus on getting some killer titles ready out of the door. Sony is taking some of the saved resources and pushing to Blu-Ray with it. We'll see which approach is better... Sony going down the proven console road or Microsoft going down the, well, centralized Microsoft control model. Or Nintendo doing that weird Nintendo thing.
As another poster pointed out, Silver accounts don't let you play games online... Functionally all that allows you to do is buy content.
The Xbox 360 seems like the first Japan-style worldwide launch: Out of the gate early with few supporting games. Japanese consumers are notoriously technophilic, and in the past have bought systems on the promise of future titles and little else. US consumers have appeared the opposite: punishing the N64 for releasing with just 3 titles (even if one was one of the greatest games ever), and the Saturn for a similarly non-stellar launch.
Both were going up against competition, though, and that is where the key lies. If Microsoft knows the battle is ahead, as they are waiting for the PS3 to launch Halo 3. For now, they seem contented to launch with what appear to be underwhelming but nice games, and get a few buys before digging in their heels for the PS3 and Revolution launches. Once great games start being sold, we'll have a real battle on our hands. Expect to see blood in Christmas 2006 and 2007. This? This is just the pre-show.
In my day we used Symantec GreatWorks. It fit on a floppy disk and only took up 4 MB of RAM. Of course, that was all the RAM we had back then, and roughly 1/20th of your hard drive. And it even had Kermit. Can MS Office do Kermit?
A modern equivalent would take up 1 GB of RAM and about 4 GB of Hard Disk Space. And it still probably wouldn't do Kermit.
Your mother in law paid cash for a copy of MS Office, yet is still using Dial-Up AOL? A standard-edition copy will fund the difference between AOL and a real internet connection for two years. Save some cash with VOIP and it pays for itself.
Honestly, though, a real connection is worth the cash. 80MB is not that large... OO would be best served by looking into the other problems it has. After all, your mother in law did get the download fully, but she didn't like it. Let's work on making her like it.
"The publisher wants Multiplayer. Online. The ship date can't slip."
"The design isn't finished, and the art won't be ready until next month. Could you code up the interface this week?"
"Just make the code do whatever it is that it's supposed to do."
"How hard could adding a story be?"
"Don't worry, we won't crunch for long this time."
"At the publisher's behest, we're going to have a focus test. With the publisher's kids."
"Of course I put it in. That was a full system re-write. Besides, we have at least a day before E3."
"We have a milestone due later today, so I finally got around to creating those task lists."
"The president thinks we don't need a lead artist."
"There is an e-mail virus going around today. If you're reading this, your e-mail client is open and you're probably infected. Yank your ethernet cable now!"
it's in their best interest to beat down this new method of content distribution for TV.
I wish media executives could see that iTunes is their white knight. Right now there is a company successfully convincing people to PAY for something they can not only download for free, but that they can get on the airwaves for free. That's an amazing accomplishment.
Slashdot Mirror
You are under arrest for the copyslaughter of [insert artist name/software title here].
They're arresting producers now?
Estimate how long it will take you to find another job. If you're the optimistic type, double it to get to a real number. Have them cover the difference between your salary and unemployment for that length of time. Have them continue to cover your medical insurance for that length of time. Hopefully you've got other severance coming your way too... just remember that certain severance packages require them to let you go.
Otherwise, look for another job today. They're laying you off, man. There is no fanfare, they're not crying a river. You're not keeping the red stapler. The company's life will go on. Mainstream corporations, even moderate sized ones, can be quite soul less.
On the other hand, if you stick around, you can pick up a whole lot of supplies. Need about a dozen monitors?
So if terrorist hackers are trying to figure out who to approach/bribe/attack... it's these guys?
They've already sold a DRM system to Sony.
And "leaving no trace of its activities"... this I gotta see.
No, you wouldn't.
It gets worse. Notice how the diagram assumes that the fulcrum of the cow is the opposite leg? This assumes a 100% rigid body cow. How rigid is a cow if it isn't expecting to be knocked over? If the cow's legs provided full vertical support but no angular rigity, a slight breeze would blow that parallelogram over.
In essence, they've shown the theoretical maximum force required to tip a cow.
And, of course, she doesn't try to tip any cows herself. It seems a bit irresponsible to prove that it can't be done mathematically, without checking your work yourself.
Not necessarily relevant to the findings of the article, but notice in the diagram where the center of mass is located?
If we're going back to origins, there have been experiments which have reproduced simple amino acids by simulating the conditions on earth around the time which life evolved...
I should have specified that this doesn't necessarily make for emperical evidence, just that it is plausable within the framework. In other words, the origins of life might be explained through evolutionary procedures. But evolution is a theory about the procedural development of life, and not the origin of it.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation for the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes ... Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
That's not fundamentalism, that's inherent in the nature of science. Natural causes are those which can be theorized about, tested, get results back from, etc.
If we could take batches of people who were on their deathbeds and who had lived similar lives, had half of them shoot a puppy, and observe whether they went to heaven or hell, then heaven and hell would fall within the realm of science. But we can't, and heaven and hell remains pure speculation. We have no emperical evidence one way or the other.
Study the evidence of evolution yourself, not just the arguments. Evolution is extremely good at explaining many natural phenomenon, in the same way that Newton's theories were extremely good at explaining natural phenomenon. Neither did so perfectly at the extremities, but did so along the observable ranges of the time. Already the theory of a smooth evolution has given way to a theory of faster mutations and periods of, for lack of a better term, genetic unrest. And let's be fair, those "flaws" are more conceptual rather than flatly contradicted by hard data. You don't have, say, siberian housecats suddenly appearing in the triassic period.
If we're going back to origins, there have been experiments which have reproduced simple amino acids by simulating the conditions on earth around the time which life evolved. And this was in a lab over a short period of time. Given a lab the size of the planet, 10 million years for the experiment to run, and the anthropromorphic principle (i.e. millions of planets, only one of which has to produce life), and the odds are greatly in favor of some form of self-replicating molecular chain occuring and coming to dominate the oceans. Like a computer virus, you only need one. And like a virus, it doesn't need to be as complicated as a full-on cellular or multicellular organism.
Why is deprecated evidence for evolution spoon-fed to children alongside real, valid results? Why do we tolerate this? (Granted, we are finally starting to fix this one.)
When honest questioners (Christians or not!) raise valid issues, they are not answered but instead accused of being creationists. Why do we tolerate this?
In my high school physics class my teacher read aloud Bertrand Russell's essay, Why I am not a Christian. Why do we tolerate this?
Why was I forced to sing "If you want to get to heaven I'll tell you how: just keep that hand on the gospel plow" in elementary school? Why are Freud's theories still being taught, despite being laughably depreciated? Why are students banned from wearing t-shirts with slogans like "pepsi sucks?" Because public school education in the country is arbitrary and sucks, and has for many years. Why do we tolerate that?
Nearly all of my students say that they are explicitly taught, or are pressured to accept (there's that ridicule thing again), that evolution contradicts religion -- and since evolution has been proven over and over again to be correct, religion must be incorrect. This is hardly separation of church and state, now is it? Consider, if evolution were not the favorite weapon against Christianity, there might be much less of this mouth-frothing resistance to it.
Not to be too explicit here, but the world is not flat, it is not 7,000 years old, Adam and Eve did not frolic with the dinosaurs. Evidence flatly contradicts all of those things. And where evidence contradicts faith in naturalistic matters, evidence inherently wins. It's not a weapon against Christianity any more than Darwinian evolution was a weapon against Dodo birds, or lightning was a weapon against the churches that didn't believe in Franklin's lightning rod.
They should teach the new map of the US.
allow science students in public schools to hear materials critical of evolution in biology classes.
This is not at issue here. You can have all of the material critial of evolution you want in any biology class anywhere in the United States. Criticism is a fundamental part of the scientific process. What you can't do is then turn around and say "because we don't have a good explanation, God did it."
There is nothing wrong with scientifically saying "your explanation is flawed," "that theory doesn't explain all phenomenon," or even "we don't know." But there is a problem, to quote Asimov, with saying that "Dragons must be pushing the moons."
What if it just made them impotent? That way within a generation we would be out of smokers.
. . . It already does that? And yet people still smoke? Man, I need to be Evil. Evil is clearly the greater power.
I have to say, I'm with you on this one, in theory. I really hate the irrelevancies of modern advertising. I would rather be shown a flood of ads for things I might be interested in (and preferably might not know about) in place of the flood of ads for "punch the monkey and win a years supply of Vioxx." Plus if the ads are twice as valuable to the advertiser, they can use half as many (yeah, right).
That having been said, it is the database about me which is a bit creepy. But, as huge databases about me already exist I can't complain too much. I've always said that if we had perfect transparency, everyone's "freakish oddities" would seem normal.
On the one hand, we desperately need more clean fuel supplies. You don't want to ruin your home, especially if it is the only home your entire species has.
That having been said, he's making trend estimations to 2050. 2050. That's 45 years off. People aren't particularly good at figuring out what will happen in 10 years, let alone in 45. By 2050 the world will look as different as it did in 1950, arguably moreso. Will we have simple, efficient hydrogen for power storage? Will we finally have cracked the nuclear fusion code? Will meltdown-proof nuclear fission reactors come to power the world? Will many completely unexpected things come to pass?
I live next to an experiment in solar panels. It's an array on top of a local strip mall, running it's entire length. It is also invisible from the ground, and rather robust considering the winters here. It has also produced enough power that it would have paid for itself repeatedly.
Right now an average citizen can make an investment in solar technology, and can buy something which costs them the same as buying power over the wires, but which is also completely clean. But they don't. Businesses with large surface areas can buy something which costs them significantly LESS than buying power over the wires, and which is completly clean, but they don't. This sounds like a failure of advertising rather than a failure of technology. At this point, we really just need to get the word out.
And who knows. Maybe Solar won't be the breakthrough that gets us a few more pollution-free years, in the same way that the gas-driven car saved us from the massive crisis of horse poo which was coating every major city in the world. Maybe it will be something unexpected. Thermal? Kinetic? Something that runs by consuming greenhouse gasses?
We definitely need more research dollars. But I'm not convinced that focusing them all down on Solar is the right way to go.
That monitor (of two) is at 1024x768. But I have a sidebar tool palette that I use, which reduces the effective width 200 pixels.
understand that most of the world really doesn't give a lama's ass about where who and why you are.
Unfortunately, most of the world wouldn't think twice about destroying you if it thought you were doing somthing suspicious.
Guilty or innocent, why take that risk? We did track you in a cafe with a known terrorist, and you then did proceed to a known terrorist used bookstore. We should take you into Gitmo now, to protect the innocent. The fears of the many outweigh the rights of the few.
Of course, this being a passport, it is more likely that foreign governments would be tracking everyone. I don't know which is more scary.
If you know we hate the layout, why don't you change it?
I love the escapist. It is constantly full of interesting, relevant articles. But currently when I open the site the left 1/5th of the cover page is cut off completely, and the right 1/5th is visible when only when scrolling to the right. It only displays properly in PDF. And even then the text is pretty small.
With your structured use of headers, background images, etc, you could create a great online magazine with a similarly high degree of polish. As it stands, you create a great PDF magazine, and a pretty bad online experience. Do you have any stats on the main way your content is read?
MIT is an interesting institution. People think it does everything from low level compiler optimizations, to multi-terrabyte optical network multiplexing, and accelerated particle small galaxy creation. And some of that is certainly true. But everyone I know at MIT is working on things like displays that track your eyes and project the correct image onto your cornea to create 3D. Or social networking software that has pervasive independent intelligence to optimize a person's life. Or carbonated ice cream.
Ultimately, MIT leaves normal computer science programs to do their "we make code faster" thing, and creating amazingly technical feats of oddly comprehensible geekery. Some friends are trying to create the worlds highest-bandwidth network by catapulting a ball full of terrabyte network drives over the Charles River from BU to MIT. Others have used their time in the MIT media lab to synthesize and create music generation programs. There is even a full lego lab.
MIT is just perfect if you need a story right away. Just look at some of what they do. Sure, some of it is hardcore geekery, but basically all of it is accessable. It is a bottomless fountain of weird, original ideas that make people think about things in different ways. UCSD has a nice computer program, but the volume of MIT stories is proportional to the volume of weird, interesting stuff the school generates.
UCI, my alma matter, has a good Comp Sci program too. But in my 5 (Ok, ok. 5 and 1/2) years there, I never once saw a wearable computing fashion show, let alone one that contained self-inflating clothing, mood rings that exchanged genetic material with other people's mood rings, jackets that were happy when touched, etc. And MIT has enough material to do odd, amazing stuff like this every week.
And yes, they're buried in work the whole time. Don't expect to see your MIT friends very often. But what they do is more often than not quite fun and easy to write stories about.
Oh, and it is convieniently next to Harvard. And the W3C is there. And it is next to Harvard. And Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee, Edward Lorenz, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Stallman are there, amongst other great interview sources. Did I mention Harvard?
Not to break your little heart, but...
Lots of people have done this type of analysis, and it is quite valuable. That doesn't mean that the subject matter is without merit, however. EVERY Simpsons episode has followed roughly the same structure for ten years, and it still captivates audiences. Ever notice that the first 5 minutes have nothing to do with the next 25? Yup, that's the one.
Someone is going to mod me up for saying this, then mod me down for being obvious, but read The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It goes into painstaking detail about the idealized hero story, and yet the structure fits tons of popular and historical media such as Terminator 2, Heart of Darkness, Cowboy Bebop, Tarzan, Blade, Odysseus, the new testament in the Bible, etc, etc.
There are several other structures out there, and nearly infinite variants, but if you look at media with a critical eye you will find that all good films, books, shows, and games fall into set patterns of challenges, setbacks, losses, and eventual triumph (or not). If I may be so bold, most truly great pieces of media aren't made by artists, but by craftsmen. An artist explores their feelings as they create, producing something which is generally more intellectually engaging than emotionally so. A craftsman knows every tool of their trade, and hones their skills, tricks, and abilities towards controlling the viewer's reaction. Spielberg is a master craftsman. Vonnegut is a craftsman. Even in artistic pieces like Y Tu Mama Tambien, the craftsmanship is present and in the forefront.
I say this because too many people try to create media from the heart, without realizing that you really need to engage your head thoroughly in order to focus on how to effect the heart of your audience. These people are master magicians: they conjure up images and emotions using smoke and mirrors. And like master magicians, they have to know the routines, and know how to work the routines so that they don't seem like routines. Part of the magic is taking something that was slaved over for years, with every detail hashed out and revised in painstaking detail, and making it look completley natural and unintended.
But there is magic, there is structure. And if you want to become a magician, you need to give up the magic and learn how it is done.
Oracle CFO Leaves after Four Months of Service.
He must have finally gotten a database up and running.
"Hello. What's happening? We need to talk about your TPM protections.
Yeah. The coverbit. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it.
Yeah. Uh, did you get that memo?
Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. The problem is, I just forgot on this one architecture. And I've already taken care of it so it's not even a problem anymore.
Yeah. It's just that we're setting the coverbit on all the TPM protections *before* they go out now. So if you could just remember to do that from now on, that'd be great. All right!"
From a High Level, to convince people to switch systems, you have to offer them something an order of magnitude better than the system they are invested in without giving up any substantial functionality. This means:
The computer should do exactly what the user wants, whenever the user wants, without the user having to think about it. This means extensive end-user testing and brutal simplification. The user should never see anything unrelated to exactly what they want to do. The folder heirarchy they see on the drive should ONLY contain things relevant to their activities. They should be able to re-arrange everything on their disk and still have it all work. They should never have to edit a config file. They should have to wade through "interface spam" of a million options which one in a million users will ever actually use. And yes, this means extensive high level architecting of everything that goes into the system, something OSS isn't traditionally good at doing.
The computer sould be able to replace legacy systems. That means being MS Office compatible, not a small feat. Not just word, but scheduling, and Excel macros must be readable in the new system.
The computer still needs a killer application or usage that makes everone want to switch to it. Apt-Get is pretty killer for me, but command line functionality will never reach the average desktop user. What else can the nature of Open Source provide? How can we use dynamic re-compilation to do something amazing that retail software can't provide?
No offence, but Linux as a desktop OS is still pretty hacky. There are a million unnecessary (to me) files hanging around when I'm just trying to do something, dozens of different ways to try to do something but four or five of which will work, command line still being integral to anything fun on the system (and even some baseline functionality), etc. My feeling is that the current state of Linux isn't the way to get there, any more than Dos should be the way to get to Windows. Perhaps it is time to throw our collective weight behind SkyOS, Zeta, or another upcoming Desktop-oriented OS, and refocus Linux on being the kick-ass server OS we all know it to be.
While MS doesn't publish the costs, hosting a game on Xbox Live is not free to the developer... not by a long shot. Think MS doesn't take a cut of every online transaction, or a cost for every MB of bandwidth? Likewise, most developers have a server center of some sort. A full farm isn't necessary for most console games, and by not going through live you can do some of the networking peer-to-peer, saving further bandwidth and resources.
Don't get me wrong, I do like Xbox Live. I like the unified logon / communications idea. I don't think Live is totally necessary, but I like to see what MS can do with it. I'm also excited as a developer to see how hard / easy integration will be. Judging by what I've seen in public, the 360 appears to do everything Live related through separate, easy, drop-in apps... the way it should be done.
On the other hand, online console penetration is at 10%. So while it is a nice feature, it's a feature that 90% of your audience currently doesn't use. Microsoft wants to blaze that trail, and more power to them. But recognize that while their Live 360 stuff has recieved a lot of attention from the company, they're releasing without a single amazing must-have title. Sony, hopefully, is taking this time to focus on getting some killer titles ready out of the door. Sony is taking some of the saved resources and pushing to Blu-Ray with it. We'll see which approach is better... Sony going down the proven console road or Microsoft going down the, well, centralized Microsoft control model. Or Nintendo doing that weird Nintendo thing.
As another poster pointed out, Silver accounts don't let you play games online... Functionally all that allows you to do is buy content.
Thank you for saying this.
The Xbox 360 seems like the first Japan-style worldwide launch: Out of the gate early with few supporting games. Japanese consumers are notoriously technophilic, and in the past have bought systems on the promise of future titles and little else. US consumers have appeared the opposite: punishing the N64 for releasing with just 3 titles (even if one was one of the greatest games ever), and the Saturn for a similarly non-stellar launch.
Both were going up against competition, though, and that is where the key lies. If Microsoft knows the battle is ahead, as they are waiting for the PS3 to launch Halo 3. For now, they seem contented to launch with what appear to be underwhelming but nice games, and get a few buys before digging in their heels for the PS3 and Revolution launches. Once great games start being sold, we'll have a real battle on our hands. Expect to see blood in Christmas 2006 and 2007. This? This is just the pre-show.
In my day we used Symantec GreatWorks. It fit on a floppy disk and only took up 4 MB of RAM. Of course, that was all the RAM we had back then, and roughly 1/20th of your hard drive. And it even had Kermit. Can MS Office do Kermit?
A modern equivalent would take up 1 GB of RAM and about 4 GB of Hard Disk Space. And it still probably wouldn't do Kermit.
Your mother in law paid cash for a copy of MS Office, yet is still using Dial-Up AOL? A standard-edition copy will fund the difference between AOL and a real internet connection for two years. Save some cash with VOIP and it pays for itself.
If you don't want to download 80 MB, try Ability Office, Abi Word, Atlantis, or the 602 suite.
Honestly, though, a real connection is worth the cash. 80MB is not that large... OO would be best served by looking into the other problems it has. After all, your mother in law did get the download fully, but she didn't like it. Let's work on making her like it.
"The publisher wants Multiplayer. Online. The ship date can't slip."
"The design isn't finished, and the art won't be ready until next month. Could you code up the interface this week?"
"Just make the code do whatever it is that it's supposed to do."
"How hard could adding a story be?"
"Don't worry, we won't crunch for long this time."
"At the publisher's behest, we're going to have a focus test. With the publisher's kids."
"Of course I put it in. That was a full system re-write. Besides, we have at least a day before E3."
"We have a milestone due later today, so I finally got around to creating those task lists."
"The president thinks we don't need a lead artist."
"There is an e-mail virus going around today. If you're reading this, your e-mail client is open and you're probably infected. Yank your ethernet cable now!"
"On this project, we're using all publisher QA."
it's in their best interest to beat down this new method of content distribution for TV.
I wish media executives could see that iTunes is their white knight. Right now there is a company successfully convincing people to PAY for something they can not only download for free, but that they can get on the airwaves for free. That's an amazing accomplishment.