And the moment one of those previously partying people messes up, the HR person who hired them will take the blame. "Why didn't you vet this person? Didn't you realize that they 'had a history' of this sort of thing?"
Of course, I don't think it should be this way. But the larger the organization, the harder it will be to get sanity around the org's hiring practices.
I worked at a video game developer once who had biometric finger scanners to clock in and out, but required you to type in your employee number first.
"If it has my fingerprint, shouldn't it know my employee number?"
So I started playing with it. I started with the same finger on the same hand. It took it. Then a different finger on the same hand. Yup. It took a different finger on a different hand. And then we got creative.
In fact, we finally found the limit of the system. It took a warm hot dog pressed up against the fingerprint scanner, but not a cold one. A lot of my faith in fingerprint biometrics was shattered then and there. I since dated someone who had a fingerprint scanner on her computer, though that only seemed to let me trough wrongly some of the time.
Another thing we learned? Co-workers don't appreciate it when you lick the thumb scanner that everyone has to clock in with.
Having had a friend who lost most of her family in a great purge after the last Iranian revolution, this doesn't at all seem paranoid to me. She and her entire family here are still afraid to speak up, for sake of the lives of the family members she still had back in Iran.
This is not a question about making more accessible tools for game developers. This is about turns the entire console game development economic model on end.
Of Course Nintendo is trying to "lock out" developers as the French court suggested. Console manufacturers survive by being the gatekeepers between developers and the public. In other words Nintendo (and Sony and Microsoft) make their money by taking a cut of each game sold. What do they do with this money? Well...
1. Raw promotion of the console and the games. 2. Fund experimental games that fill niches in the console market. Sony is legendary for this. Nintendo too, except they seem to make tons of money off their experimental games. 3. Reduce the initial cost of the system, as a lower barrier to entry. 4. Fund the proper development tools that developers get. 5. Fund console development. 6. I believe a cut also goes to IBM, nVidia, and other chip developers to cover their costs.
The thing is, people *have* tried making consoles the "Windows Way," where anyone could develop for it. They're all dead, and only the most die-hard have even heard of them. Why? Because they were bloody expensive, the console makers didn't have enough money to properly develop the hardware, there wasn't a developer toolchain of which to speak, and nobody had the 100m in promotion that any new console launch requires.
If you want a console developed in a totally open fashion, buy a desktop PC with TV out. Is that too expensive / don't want to deal with the troubles of hardware compatibility, etc? Well, that's just some of the hassles that an open console would have. I'm not saying that the current totally locked down model is the right way to go (Apple is currently experimenting with something inbetween with the app store). But that the market has spoken, and consoles with a monolithic vision holder are doing rather well compared to the alternatives.
Activision was the first group of game developers to think of making and selling games for a system created by someone else. Atari hadn't put any protections on the console. Hence, Activision (and everyone and their uncle) could sell games for the Atari 2600 with impunity, and the market was flooded with crap.
Tengen (a division of Atari) tried this with the NES. However, Nintendo *had* put protections on the lockout chip. Tengen acquired a schematic of the chip under false pretenses, and released their games bypassing the lockout chip. Nintendo sued, and it was settled out of court without precedent being set.
Accolade tried this with the Genesis. That one, Accolade one, on the strength that they had properly reverse-engineered the lockout protection, and that reverse-engineering for interoperability was legal.
Then came the DMCA, which was a monkey's attempt to understand the internet, and makes basically everything illegal. But you get the idea. Basically, the courts *had* been ruling that any software company can put out for any system, so long as their software didn't break any laws or patents to do so. However, software these days is intricate enough (and the cryptography strong enough) that no company large enough is willing to do so. Also, they would lose marketing / favor with the console makers, who retain a lot of promotional and other sway.
Note: I haven't used this particular one, so I can't vouch for it. But I have used others, which had a moderately easy setup and a ridiculously large amount of ink. And no, there was no messing about with messy refills and leaky tanks of ink.
Could you lay nets in the sea, and essentially wait for ships to come by and become stranded? 45 minutes is long enough to escape, but is it long enough for rescue vessels to arrive? And even if they do, so what? The pirates have the ship.
Ropes and Golf Balls? That sounds like something which could be widely found in Somalia, no firing required. The sea is huge, and such a net would need to be ridiculously large to ensnare anyone. But the concept of ensnaring engines sounds like a useful tool to a pirate.
True. But Linux really does have 2 that the average user will encounter... Gnome and KDE. Of these, neither has as big a difference as KDE and, say, Afterstep, or WM2, or any number of other good alternatives.
I've said it before: You talk like Windows(TM) and Mac OS (TM) are these wonderful things because they're monoliths. But we've learned from monoliths and their creators that there is no "clarity" in that direction, only broken promises. One size doesn't fit all. The new landscape of devices and interfaces will give you clarity and specificity in exchange for your old monolith. If you won't trade it in, prepare to be left in the dust.
But there is a limit to the positive side of variation. Spoken languages, for example... Each language interprets the world differently, and is faster or slower at communicating different ideas. Yet as a culture, we're moving towards universal bilinguality: Native Language and English. The more complex a system becomes, and the more need for interunderstanding between people, the greater the value in less options.
Quite frankly, Windows, MacOS, and 95% of all Linux desktops are the same damned thing, just implemented with different degrees of skill, success, supporting architecture, and completeness. The real alternative to Gnome is not KDE or Enlightnment, it's the frickin' command line.
And my original point had nothing to do with the proliferation of multiple Linux desktops, but the challenges inherent in explaining the landscape to potential converts. And now, finding a way of communicating that KDE isn't a desktop. KDE is now a branding of something that could be one of a few Linux desktops, or a Linux application suite on a different Linux desktop, or an application suite on a different operating system entirely.
If most users like these even spent half the time they spend on facebook, etc, instead learning how to operate their computers, they'd be in a much better place.
So you'd rather people stopped using their computers in order to learn to use their computers? Some people just want to put a nail into a wall to keep up a framed picture of the old Elvis. Both their lack of knowledge of internationally accepted and legally approved construction techniques for residential dwellings, and their tasteless choice in home decor, is irrelevant.
Great! Now Linux will still have two major competing desktops. But now one of them could be one of several separate versions, or some applications on a different desktop, or a version of Windows running Koffice. Thanks, clarity committee!
[ ] You already have a cellphone, which does all of the above. By having a watch, you're not replacing complexity, you're adding to it. I.E. you still have to worry about your phone getting wet, only now you also have to worry about breaking something on your wrist.
I work with musicians professionally, who are all obsessed with getting the best sound possible. When they talk, it's all about who can they get to add a solo, or adding limiters to bring the vocal clarity up in the mix, or nifty new instruments they're playing with. I don't think I've ever heard of one of them talking about getting new cabling, or speakers (other than their guitar amp), or a lot of the things that audiophiles obsess over. No sound is "bad," it's just for when you want that specific tone.
If art patrons loved art the way audiophiles love music they'd sit around all day and do nothing but polish the glass in the frame until it was 99.999% clear, always commenting on how "crisp" and "clear" the paint looked under the glass. They'd never actually getting out to a museum and really looking at paintings.
Or you say you'll take the million, wait until all of your competitors have dropped off of Google, and enjoy the hits rolling in for much less than you otherwise would have had to pay.
I seriously hope that you're kidding. Sadly most of us could store our passwords in a zip file on our webservers, and nobody would care enough to bother downloading it. My FTP server has prompted people with the login password for years, yet there has not been an unauthorized access yet (despite tens of thousands of automated break-in attempts). Even when talking about high-profile targets, people seem to either get lucky, guess passwords, or sniff them. The idea of trying to break into your office and look for stickies on the monitor is a bit silly for 99.99% of users. Ultimately, you're just going to get your credit card numbers skimmed when one of your merchants downloads a copy of Office from a torrent site anyway.
If you really want something secure but useable, create a system of password generation, based on the site that you're visiting. Take the site name with something else (say, e...2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775), munge them together, and off you go. Say that you're at bankofamerica.com. Password could equal 5 down and 5 back from the end... acire... 27182.... 2a7c1i8r2e. As a password, it's completely unguessable, and it doesn't translate well between sites. But since you know the system used to create the password (some pre-memorized sequence of numbers, and the name itself), you're generating unique passwords that don't cross sites, but that you can create on demand instead of memorizing.
Or just accept that nobody really cares, and make a KeePass database on a thumb drive somewhere. Really, the latter is fine for nearly everybody.
Personally, I use a KeePass database which is synced between multiple computers online through DropBox. As long as you're accessing from computers that you own (win/linux/OSX) or online, you should be fine.
There is also an iphone keepass viewer available for online files, including through Drop Box (for the old 1.x format).
Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don't fall far from the C tree.
Perhaps, like Qwerty, our C-based languages have evolved to be "good enough" for programming needs for the foreseeable future. Make objects, make functions, operate between the two.. sure DVORAK might provide 20% faster typing if you work at it for 3 years, but that's not really enough to warrant the switch. We're unlikely to see a jump again of the size from C to C++ before we hit a major structural change. I had thought the web might be that structural change, but that was well absorbed by extending existing ideas.
Personally, I just want to see programming languages that are more programmer fault-tolerant. I can type "pizza" into my phone and have Chuck-E-Cheese offer to bake one while I drive over, but if I accidentally type "plaeyrArray" instead of "playerArray," the whole world is clearly on fire and everyone is going to die. Why can't compilers be more intelligent about the types of errors they encounter in routine usage? For that matter, why are we still defining code chunks via brackets instead of the indentation that's already there?
Condensation! Tents get all drizzly in the morning, what about domes? Scratches! How long before the transparent dome is simply transluscent, or opaque? Shooting Guns! This is *vermont* after all. No rainfall? See the question of condensation.
Of course, after all of this, I really want to see someone try it. Domes like this are long overdue, and living in Massachusetts myself I'd give up rainfall if it meant winters weren't miserable.
Fair catch. But win this one in court and then they just point out that it says nothing about guaranteed rates. Used more then 1Gb? 1Kbyte/sec maximum it is for you then.
Which is still an improvement. Going from outright lying to just being slimy is much better than we've got in the right now. Unlike jolly old england, we don't actually have an agency currently enforcing truth standards in advertisements.
I believe they mean "mature" in the ESRB rating sense, rather than "non-purile" sense.
You'll notice most of the mature games on the wii aren't just crappy games, they're crappy versions of games that are better on other consoles. Dead Space suddenly became an on-rails shooter, while House of the Dead took a graphical hit. Mad World was "Exxxxxtreme!" but probably would have been written off as a boring brawler on any other system. Dead Rising was a near launch title on the 360 years ago, yet it was *much* better then. No More Heroes was a quirky game that deserved more success than it got, but it probably would have been a quirky game that deserved more success than it got on any system out there. GTA: Chinatown was also a shame, and I'm also shocked it sold as poorly as it did.
Resident Evil was also singled out for doing well, but Resident Evil was also a good game. Strangely, Resident Evil did remarkably well on the Game Cube last system generation as well.
If that's true for N, I smell a lawsuit. Neutral had always meant "physically disconnect engine from wheels". Are you absolutely sure you're correct? I wouldn't ever drive a car in which this isn't true.
If you have a drive-by-wire system, "N" inherently means "tell the computer to physically disconnect the engine from the wheels." And if your computer is staying up, that should allow you to engage neutral in more places than you otherwise should, though considering this is a hybrid I doubt engine breaking is a normal concern.
I actually had thought that breaking in a regular car would disengage the engine... until I tried it. Good on Toyota for getting it right with their hybrid, and hopefully this "strange" behavior will become standard.
here isn't a single thing that governments really need that isn't open or can be created for less cost than contracting it to proprietary vendors
How about project management software, 3d rendering tools, Production Ready video editing tools, and automated translation middlewear?
There are definitely needs out there which are non-trivial and which Open Source software hasn't fulfilled. There are a lot that are, and many times better than paid options. But you can't just broadly blanket mandate OSS on principle.
Slashdot Mirror
And the moment one of those previously partying people messes up, the HR person who hired them will take the blame. "Why didn't you vet this person? Didn't you realize that they 'had a history' of this sort of thing?"
Of course, I don't think it should be this way. But the larger the organization, the harder it will be to get sanity around the org's hiring practices.
True story:
I worked at a video game developer once who had biometric finger scanners to clock in and out, but required you to type in your employee number first.
"If it has my fingerprint, shouldn't it know my employee number?"
So I started playing with it. I started with the same finger on the same hand. It took it. Then a different finger on the same hand. Yup. It took a different finger on a different hand. And then we got creative.
Someone Else's finger? Check. Elbow? Check. Toe? Check. Tongue? Check.
In fact, we finally found the limit of the system. It took a warm hot dog pressed up against the fingerprint scanner, but not a cold one. A lot of my faith in fingerprint biometrics was shattered then and there. I since dated someone who had a fingerprint scanner on her computer, though that only seemed to let me trough wrongly some of the time.
Another thing we learned? Co-workers don't appreciate it when you lick the thumb scanner that everyone has to clock in with.
Having had a friend who lost most of her family in a great purge after the last Iranian revolution, this doesn't at all seem paranoid to me. She and her entire family here are still afraid to speak up, for sake of the lives of the family members she still had back in Iran.
This is not a question about making more accessible tools for game developers. This is about turns the entire console game development economic model on end.
Of Course Nintendo is trying to "lock out" developers as the French court suggested. Console manufacturers survive by being the gatekeepers between developers and the public. In other words Nintendo (and Sony and Microsoft) make their money by taking a cut of each game sold. What do they do with this money? Well...
1. Raw promotion of the console and the games.
2. Fund experimental games that fill niches in the console market. Sony is legendary for this. Nintendo too, except they seem to make tons of money off their experimental games.
3. Reduce the initial cost of the system, as a lower barrier to entry.
4. Fund the proper development tools that developers get.
5. Fund console development.
6. I believe a cut also goes to IBM, nVidia, and other chip developers to cover their costs.
The thing is, people *have* tried making consoles the "Windows Way," where anyone could develop for it. They're all dead, and only the most die-hard have even heard of them. Why? Because they were bloody expensive, the console makers didn't have enough money to properly develop the hardware, there wasn't a developer toolchain of which to speak, and nobody had the 100m in promotion that any new console launch requires.
If you want a console developed in a totally open fashion, buy a desktop PC with TV out. Is that too expensive / don't want to deal with the troubles of hardware compatibility, etc? Well, that's just some of the hassles that an open console would have. I'm not saying that the current totally locked down model is the right way to go (Apple is currently experimenting with something inbetween with the app store). But that the market has spoken, and consoles with a monolithic vision holder are doing rather well compared to the alternatives.
Activision was the first group of game developers to think of making and selling games for a system created by someone else. Atari hadn't put any protections on the console. Hence, Activision (and everyone and their uncle) could sell games for the Atari 2600 with impunity, and the market was flooded with crap.
Tengen (a division of Atari) tried this with the NES. However, Nintendo *had* put protections on the lockout chip. Tengen acquired a schematic of the chip under false pretenses, and released their games bypassing the lockout chip. Nintendo sued, and it was settled out of court without precedent being set.
Accolade tried this with the Genesis. That one, Accolade one, on the strength that they had properly reverse-engineered the lockout protection, and that reverse-engineering for interoperability was legal.
Then came the DMCA, which was a monkey's attempt to understand the internet, and makes basically everything illegal. But you get the idea. Basically, the courts *had* been ruling that any software company can put out for any system, so long as their software didn't break any laws or patents to do so. However, software these days is intricate enough (and the cryptography strong enough) that no company large enough is willing to do so. Also, they would lose marketing / favor with the console makers, who retain a lot of promotional and other sway.
You can get pretty good price on replacement continuous ink systems, which are pretty cheap and easy these days.
http://www.amazon.com/Bulk-Continuous-Ink-System-CIS/dp/B002MGZUHS/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=office-products&qid=1259885902&sr=8-4
Note: I haven't used this particular one, so I can't vouch for it. But I have used others, which had a moderately easy setup and a ridiculously large amount of ink. And no, there was no messing about with messy refills and leaky tanks of ink.
it is little wonder that US is facing a deficit in the small trillions.
To be fair, there is really no such thing as a small trillion.
Could you lay nets in the sea, and essentially wait for ships to come by and become stranded? 45 minutes is long enough to escape, but is it long enough for rescue vessels to arrive? And even if they do, so what? The pirates have the ship.
Ropes and Golf Balls? That sounds like something which could be widely found in Somalia, no firing required. The sea is huge, and such a net would need to be ridiculously large to ensnare anyone. But the concept of ensnaring engines sounds like a useful tool to a pirate.
True. But Linux really does have 2 that the average user will encounter... Gnome and KDE. Of these, neither has as big a difference as KDE and, say, Afterstep, or WM2, or any number of other good alternatives.
I've said it before: You talk like Windows(TM) and Mac OS (TM) are these wonderful things because they're monoliths. But we've learned from monoliths and their creators that there is no "clarity" in that direction, only broken promises. One size doesn't fit all. The new landscape of devices and interfaces will give you clarity and specificity in exchange for your old monolith. If you won't trade it in, prepare to be left in the dust.
But there is a limit to the positive side of variation. Spoken languages, for example... Each language interprets the world differently, and is faster or slower at communicating different ideas. Yet as a culture, we're moving towards universal bilinguality: Native Language and English. The more complex a system becomes, and the more need for interunderstanding between people, the greater the value in less options.
Quite frankly, Windows, MacOS, and 95% of all Linux desktops are the same damned thing, just implemented with different degrees of skill, success, supporting architecture, and completeness. The real alternative to Gnome is not KDE or Enlightnment, it's the frickin' command line.
And my original point had nothing to do with the proliferation of multiple Linux desktops, but the challenges inherent in explaining the landscape to potential converts. And now, finding a way of communicating that KDE isn't a desktop. KDE is now a branding of something that could be one of a few Linux desktops, or a Linux application suite on a different Linux desktop, or an application suite on a different operating system entirely.
If most users like these even spent half the time they spend on facebook, etc, instead learning how to operate their computers, they'd be in a much better place.
So you'd rather people stopped using their computers in order to learn to use their computers? Some people just want to put a nail into a wall to keep up a framed picture of the old Elvis. Both their lack of knowledge of internationally accepted and legally approved construction techniques for residential dwellings, and their tasteless choice in home decor, is irrelevant.
http://www.dataliberation.org/
Great! Now Linux will still have two major competing desktops. But now one of them could be one of several separate versions, or some applications on a different desktop, or a version of Windows running Koffice. Thanks, clarity committee!
[ ] You already have a cellphone, which does all of the above. By having a watch, you're not replacing complexity, you're adding to it. I.E. you still have to worry about your phone getting wet, only now you also have to worry about breaking something on your wrist.
I work with musicians professionally, who are all obsessed with getting the best sound possible. When they talk, it's all about who can they get to add a solo, or adding limiters to bring the vocal clarity up in the mix, or nifty new instruments they're playing with. I don't think I've ever heard of one of them talking about getting new cabling, or speakers (other than their guitar amp), or a lot of the things that audiophiles obsess over. No sound is "bad," it's just for when you want that specific tone.
If art patrons loved art the way audiophiles love music they'd sit around all day and do nothing but polish the glass in the frame until it was 99.999% clear, always commenting on how "crisp" and "clear" the paint looked under the glass. They'd never actually getting out to a museum and really looking at paintings.
Or you say you'll take the million, wait until all of your competitors have dropped off of Google, and enjoy the hits rolling in for much less than you otherwise would have had to pay.
If it's simple enough to remember, it's probably simple enough to dictionary attack.
I seriously hope that you're kidding. Sadly most of us could store our passwords in a zip file on our webservers, and nobody would care enough to bother downloading it. My FTP server has prompted people with the login password for years, yet there has not been an unauthorized access yet (despite tens of thousands of automated break-in attempts). Even when talking about high-profile targets, people seem to either get lucky, guess passwords, or sniff them. The idea of trying to break into your office and look for stickies on the monitor is a bit silly for 99.99% of users. Ultimately, you're just going to get your credit card numbers skimmed when one of your merchants downloads a copy of Office from a torrent site anyway.
If you really want something secure but useable, create a system of password generation, based on the site that you're visiting. Take the site name with something else (say, e...2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775), munge them together, and off you go. Say that you're at bankofamerica.com. Password could equal 5 down and 5 back from the end... acire... 27182.... 2a7c1i8r2e. As a password, it's completely unguessable, and it doesn't translate well between sites. But since you know the system used to create the password (some pre-memorized sequence of numbers, and the name itself), you're generating unique passwords that don't cross sites, but that you can create on demand instead of memorizing.
Or just accept that nobody really cares, and make a KeePass database on a thumb drive somewhere. Really, the latter is fine for nearly everybody.
Personally, I use a KeePass database which is synced between multiple computers online through DropBox. As long as you're accessing from computers that you own (win/linux/OSX) or online, you should be fine.
There is also an iphone keepass viewer available for online files, including through Drop Box (for the old 1.x format).
Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don't fall far from the C tree.
Perhaps, like Qwerty, our C-based languages have evolved to be "good enough" for programming needs for the foreseeable future. Make objects, make functions, operate between the two.. sure DVORAK might provide 20% faster typing if you work at it for 3 years, but that's not really enough to warrant the switch. We're unlikely to see a jump again of the size from C to C++ before we hit a major structural change. I had thought the web might be that structural change, but that was well absorbed by extending existing ideas.
Personally, I just want to see programming languages that are more programmer fault-tolerant. I can type "pizza" into my phone and have Chuck-E-Cheese offer to bake one while I drive over, but if I accidentally type "plaeyrArray" instead of "playerArray," the whole world is clearly on fire and everyone is going to die. Why can't compilers be more intelligent about the types of errors they encounter in routine usage? For that matter, why are we still defining code chunks via brackets instead of the indentation that's already there?
Well, what about:
Condensation! Tents get all drizzly in the morning, what about domes?
Scratches! How long before the transparent dome is simply transluscent, or opaque?
Shooting Guns! This is *vermont* after all.
No rainfall? See the question of condensation.
Of course, after all of this, I really want to see someone try it. Domes like this are long overdue, and living in Massachusetts myself I'd give up rainfall if it meant winters weren't miserable.
Fair catch. But win this one in court and then they just point out that it says nothing about guaranteed rates. Used more then 1Gb? 1Kbyte/sec maximum it is for you then.
Which is still an improvement. Going from outright lying to just being slimy is much better than we've got in the right now. Unlike jolly old england, we don't actually have an agency currently enforcing truth standards in advertisements.
I believe they mean "mature" in the ESRB rating sense, rather than "non-purile" sense.
You'll notice most of the mature games on the wii aren't just crappy games, they're crappy versions of games that are better on other consoles. Dead Space suddenly became an on-rails shooter, while House of the Dead took a graphical hit. Mad World was "Exxxxxtreme!" but probably would have been written off as a boring brawler on any other system. Dead Rising was a near launch title on the 360 years ago, yet it was *much* better then. No More Heroes was a quirky game that deserved more success than it got, but it probably would have been a quirky game that deserved more success than it got on any system out there. GTA: Chinatown was also a shame, and I'm also shocked it sold as poorly as it did.
Resident Evil was also singled out for doing well, but Resident Evil was also a good game. Strangely, Resident Evil did remarkably well on the Game Cube last system generation as well.
If that's true for N, I smell a lawsuit. Neutral had always meant "physically disconnect engine from wheels". Are you absolutely sure you're correct? I wouldn't ever drive a car in which this isn't true.
If you have a drive-by-wire system, "N" inherently means "tell the computer to physically disconnect the engine from the wheels." And if your computer is staying up, that should allow you to engage neutral in more places than you otherwise should, though considering this is a hybrid I doubt engine breaking is a normal concern.
I actually had thought that breaking in a regular car would disengage the engine... until I tried it. Good on Toyota for getting it right with their hybrid, and hopefully this "strange" behavior will become standard.
...software written for Macs...
You lost me here. Is there a Wikipedia entry you could point to?
here isn't a single thing that governments really need that isn't open or can be created for less cost than contracting it to proprietary vendors
How about project management software, 3d rendering tools, Production Ready video editing tools, and automated translation middlewear?
There are definitely needs out there which are non-trivial and which Open Source software hasn't fulfilled. There are a lot that are, and many times better than paid options. But you can't just broadly blanket mandate OSS on principle.