Lots of multiplayer games use a central server and require you to update your client to the latest version before you can play with others. Some of these are to close exploits, some are general game balance, but basically all of them are because the game creators think it will be a positive change. And these are usually required updates because the game code uses tricks to keep in sync with eachother, and the biggest simplification is to assume that everyone is on the same version of the code.
SWG was an extreme change, but it is also an extreme example. You're not promised online games will continue any more than you are promised your cable company will stay in business even though you just payed a 100 dollar installation fee. And SWG was total crap. It still needs a lot of work, but it's far more accessable and fun now and is a better base to build off of in the future.
3D Jar Jar Binks automatically downloaded to your DVD player? Let's not go off of the deep end. "This telephone thing here signifies the end of all civilization, as instead of going out and seeing their family in person people will be stuck on this little box in their room all day." You can take any piece of technology, extend it out into "what might be" many years down the road, and rally against it. Lucas isn't going to add a 3D Jar Jar binks and give it to you automatically. He's going to add a 3D Jar Jar Binks and sell it to you again. Apple might cut back on your available functionality, but then you have a legitimate lawsuit against them.
If we don't get a realistic perspective on what the rules of DRM should be, somebody else gets to figure out what they are.
Let's not forget... to get a system that can do High Definition normal mapped individual scales on every creature in the game, you may have to pay 100% more... but I can assure you to create that art asset cost a lot more than 100%+
Which means that Nintendo can launch twice as many games on the same overall budget... to find out which ones stick. Brain Training was one of Nintendo's cheapest games to make, but it has sold tens of millions of copies as well as millions of DS's.
Graphics were a bottleneck in gaming for a long time. You couldn't even get more than three sprites in a walk cycle on some of the old systems. On the PS2, you could do a full 3D walk cycle with inverse kinematics foot positioning adjusted for different skeletal systems. Graphics are about as good as they need to be at the moment, and other needs have arisen.
For one, the controller is getting bad. Sure, we've got sholder buttons (courtesy of Nintendo), a diamond face button pad (Nintendo), analog control sticks (Nintendo), and analog buttons (Sony), but the thing is so unweildy and in need of streamlining. We're interfacing with the most hyperrealistic worlds ever created using functionally the same controllers we've had since the late 70's, though with more buttons. Even then, we're talking about LOW TECH in the late 70's.
Another area ripe for development is Physics. Sure, you can skid cars now, and occasionally you can knock bottles over, but can you punch holes into walls? Does your character tip back further based on the weight of the item they're carrying? Can you aim your gun at the floor and skip a bullet off of it in Metal Gear Solid? Do we even have hair that gets close to sitting on people's shoulders, rather than hovering six inches above it?
And finally, we need more advancement in art techniques. Sure, our art pipelines have been serviced well by the support industry of middleware providers, but it still feels like we're limited artistically and by production method from really unleashing the power of the end systems. Can we work on creating art assets in-game? Texture these things under changing lighting conditions? Near other relevant textures from the game? Can we extrude a 2d concept sketch automatically into the starting basis for the 3D models in the scene?
There is a lot of work to be done. But for now, the graphics of a system aren't really the bottleneck to the next generation of power.
Maybe he likes to think before he acts, maybe even consult a lawyer or two. Do the stockholders really want a CEO who shoots from the hip? Especially on issues as important as this? We're talking about a multi-million dollar company here that is front page news. The decisions are big, maybe big enough to make or break the company. I'd take a week or three to think if I were making decisions on that scale.
I've been bitten by CEO's shooting from the hip before, so I completely understand that concern. However, the CEO is looked to for leadership in times of crisis. Arguably, leadership is the primary role of the CEO. This one let things stew and flounder for weeks. Two days is a reasonable timeframe to compose a well thought-out, well-informed response. Three weeks is not helpful in a leader.
Sometimes you do need to act quickly to stem off negative press and recover from disasters. He did not.
Second, he took no questions, choosing instead to let an investigative attorney who works for him, do the talking.
He hired a pro to do the job right. I'll bet he hires a geek to run his IT dept, and an accountant to do his bookkeeping. Probably even has a professional janitorial staff clean his office. One of the primary rsponsibilities of management is to find good people and then delegate.
True, but we're talking about a point of public perception. He definitely should have hired someone to prep him and train him about the responses to questions which may arise. But when people are questioning your integrity and your leadership, in the eyes of the public to delegate answers is to admit you are not to be trusted.
When you have an employee who is doing things that - in your opinion as managment - hurt the company, it is your obligation to the stockholders to find out who it is and stop them. Whether they be leakers, thieves, whatever, the CEO is responsible to the shareholders. Had nothing been done to stop leakers, and had that course of action turned out badly, then he looks even worse.
As much as the legal investigations are hurting it now? The idea of discovering leakers isn't a bad things, but sicking external private investigators on journalists is going to get your company in hot water.
And as I'm sure other posters have or will point out, the best thing management could have done to plug the leaks at HP is to stop running a sinking ship. Start treating your employees as talent rather than resources, stop outsourcing everything to the lowest bidder, encourage the culture of knowledge and exploration that HP was known for, pull back on executive salaries whenever a round of layoffs occur, and get back to making great products rather than stamping your name on something designed and built by the lowest bidders.
Google maintains an opt-out policy for both its Google News and Google Print services, saying any publisher can withdraw its content simply by asking.
So that's two routes the publishers could have taken to achieve the same thing.
It seems like the issue is that publishers want to remain in Google, they just want to find ways to get paid for it. They're looking for a third option between "Play by google's rules" and "take our content and go home."
On the other hand, I was under the strong impression that "indexing" a site is completely legal, as you're not violating any 1.copyright or 2.trademark laws, and that really the issue is whether the reproduced blurb about the page exceeds fair use.
Being a content creator myself, I do think that content creators should be compensated for their works. But there is fair compensation, and there is misunderstanding the technology and trying to pass restrictive laws to get all that you can grab. Thankfully, this seems to be somewhere in the middle.
For a fun exercise, try sending an HTML e-mail to the US Congress with an image of child pornography embedded. Bonus points if you're not a US citizen.
By simply having checked their mail that day, every member of congress will have violated the law about recieving and posessing. Under the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that subjects all of congress to a MANDATORY minimum sentence of 15 years.
That, at least, would do a great deal of good for the country.
I know lots of people who use Alerts, Blogger, Desktop, Images, Maps, News, Toolbar, Gmail, Mobile, SMS, and Froogle. Lots of people at my company have desktop installed to facilitate searching e-mails, SMS is great when you're lost in a big city and need directions, Maps is a hell of a lot more usable than MapQuest, doing image searches is pretty common, GMail is ubiquitous now...
I don't know about your usage patterns, but there is a lot of traffic going to a lot of google services. If you want to define "King of the Hill," I'd hazard a guess that Google's on top in GMail, Image searches, automated alerts, SMS directions, Maps, and System Toolbars. And more importantly, a lot of this traffic is data collection to drive better search results, like the pilot free-wifi in the bay area.
I'll let others argue the loaded "innovation" monkier, but remember before Microsoft started spouting that word every other second it actually meant "did something similar to something else, but with a little twist."
Remember, Google requires their employees to spend one day a week on a pet project. A lot of things like Google Earth and Picasa come from these. Some of these have tremendous data value, like Orkut and Google Desktop. Some, like Picasa, may someday have tremendous data value but don't currently. But they're only hitting 1/5th of the engineer's time.
Valuable Google Assets: Alerts, Blogger, Desktop, Directory (DMOZ), Images, Maps, News, Toolbar, Web Search, Gmail, Mobile, SMS Could be Valuable: Book Search, Catalogs, Checkout, Finance, Froogle, Local, Scholar, Video, Calendar, Groups, Talk, Translate Silly, fun, useless to them: Earth, Picasa, SketchUp,
In the labs: Google Trends, Music Trends, Visually Impaired Search, Notebook, Mars, Page Creator, Public Transportation Maps, RSS Reader, Web Accelerator, Taxi Finder, Suggest, Froogle Mobile, Sets.
With the possible exception of Mars, that seems pretty interconnected. Some of the silliest ideas, like Google Maps, gMail, the Google Toolbar, etc have become standard usage now. Even the silly ones, like Google Earth, were part of their push to create 3D maps of all major US cities, which would have been a valuable resource if they could have pulled it off.
They're like the Bell Labs of the 'net. Lot of pure research, some of which is or might be stupidly profitable. But we'll all reap rewards in the end.
The point is that most OSX users run as admin by default, which is what the system creates for them. It's not because they're lazy, it's because you buy a Macintosh so that you don't have to deal with the tedious details of computing. You just do it, and it just works.
But, again, you're running as Admin by default in OSX. THAT seems to be the major issue.
There are lots of situations where you would want high power in short bursts.
Coming to mind:
Camera Flashes Quick Robotic Movements Stun Guns Short Burst Radio Transmissions Most applications that involve hydrolics Cutting Lasers Ignition Sparks (stoves, cigarettes, cars, etc)
And in high-drain circumstances, the batteries would behave better overall. Standard alkalines waste a lot of capacity when trying to satisfy high-drain situations.
The form factor seems more interesting, however. As thin as a transparency sheet? That's small enough to be built into the skin of a cellphone, or the shell of a car.
It's not the grand solution we've all been waiting for, but it's a good evolution in an otherwise stagnant area.
The controllers are comparable to controllers on the market.
Except that they cost almost twice as much, oh and they are also not compatible with all the games on the console, so you have to get additional classic controllers to play all the games the console has to offer.
Xbox 360 wireless controllers are 50, and there is a good bit more tech in the Wii controller. That makes them 20% more expensive. Where are you getting the 2x figure from?
I agree that the classic controller thing is weird / silly, but how else would you emulate 6 different consoles that have a very different control setup?
Why be aggrivated? None of your points seem like particular deal breakers.
The sports thing isn't a bundle. It doesn't raise their per-item cost any to include a game they've sunk the development costs into. They're just returning (for better or worse) to the old days when standard operating procedure was to throw in something for the player to do with the console. They said they were going to launch "under 250," which almost always means 249.99. Now they're at a 250 launch point, and they threw in a 50c piece of plastic to make it that much more attractive. If they didn't include the disk, they wouldn't save any hardware costs they'd just be giving less to the players.
As for the 250 dollars vs 250 Euros... you should realize by now that's standard operating procedure. Apple does it, IBM does it. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's pretty much always done. Look at it this way: that's more expensive for you because your economy is not in the crapper. Doesn't that make you feel better? If nothing else distribution is more expensive in Europe due to the stronger Euro. The Yen has been falling across the board. Usually Japanese consumers get the most expensive system due to exchange issues, but this time it's the Europeans.
60 dollars for a controller is steep, but a wireless Xbox 360 controller is 50 bucks. Add in motion sensing for 10 and you're there. For a full system with 2 controllers, that puts the Wii at 310, and the X360 at 450. It narrows the gap as a percentage of full system cost, but the Wii is still clearly cheaper.
40 dollars for a 64 MB memory card on the 360? That's gouging.
And maybe they should have released the bare system without the game as a sign that they're keeping everything as cheap as possible, even though it would be at the same price point. The perception of value is more important than actual value in consumer transactions.
I have yet to see a single company pissing so many people off in such a short period of time
From a security point of view, they're the same problem. But from a *fixing* point of view, exploits are a lot more problematic. If the functionality if the application is causing the problem, then by definition fixing the security flaw will entail altering the functionality. Suddenly, your PDF-based form scripts won't work any more. A simple buffer overflow will cause headaches to the developer, but an exploit will cause headaches to the developer and a portion of your most devoted users.
I think he's defining a vulnerability to be a piece of poorly written code, like an input buffer that's vulnerable to an overflow. Or a URL parser that's vulnerable to a carefully formatted string. The code in that case is not behaving as intended.
An exploit would be more along the lines of the old outlook viruses. Outlook used to allow arbitrary scripts to be run on mail loading, and messages to be sent to an entire address book. Combine these two, and you have an exploit. It's behaving completely as intended, but they never expected someone to use the features like that.
The PDF reader is behaving as intended, though nobody expected the intended behavior to add up to that.
Maybe. But as far as we know Nintendo has never sold a system at a loss. They generally optimize during the design phase to keep manufacturing costs low. The also license external IP to recieve a cut of hardware and software profits rather than hardware cost (see the Nvidia / Microsoft fight), thus effectively spreading risk around their partners.
Note that this way they don't need to be #1 to be profitable, and that it's actually difficult to lose their shirts.
So while Nintendo might have been willing to sell the systems at a loss if necessary, the plan all along has probably been to keep costs down and sell it affordably / profitably. Just look at the specs.
I know there are a lot of illegal uses for YouTube. But it seems like unlike a lot of P2P apps, the non-infringing uses are substantial. If YouTube could successfully filter out all of the illegal content, it would still have a lot of uses
The analogy you're looking for is "What if Microsoft was bundling FireFox with Windows?" The goal of both the record companies and the Mozilla people is higher distribution as a means to higher sales (in one case albums, in the other google searches). YouTube helps achieve that goal.
What it doesn't take into account, is that Music Videos themselves have become a valuable property. The advertising has become the message. So now not only do they want the advertising for the album to get out, but they want to control and make money on how the advertising is distributed.
Unfortunately, if you're dealing with large crowds, it's usually a lot easier to use force than to try and solve the situation in a peaceful manner.
Or you erect walls to keep things from moving on, and let the riot burn itself out. Sure, you might have a few hundred thousand in property damage. But that's a lot cheaper than one or two lives.
I still advocate the use of controlled, strategic force necessary for crowd control. But non-lethal "harmless" weapons seem to encourage panicked, reactionary use. Perhaps as people realize that non-lethal weapons can kill rather well, their usage will become rarer and carry more weight.
Could you heat blood at the skin enough to re-enter the circulation system and transfer that heat elsewhere? Could you heat blood in that spot enough to reach a boil? What if the protester has a transdermal implant? Aren't microwaves supposed to give you cancer? Could you heat a blood vessle, say... behind the ear... enough to cause an aneurysm? What about the spine?
Nothing is non-lethal. Victoria Snelgrove here in Boston took a non-lethal pepper ball to the eye, killing her rather badly. For exactly the same reason that EMT's tell you not to bridge electricity across your heart, tazers sometimes stop them from beating. Beanbags kill by internal bleeding. Pepper spray has been known to cause respiratory failure.
That's not to say that we shouldn't keep looking for better and better ways to inflict pain without feeling moral reprocussions about it. But that is to say that every "non-lethal" weapon will kill somebody somewhere.
An analogy I give to people on this issue
on
Hacking the Governator
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Think of your webserver as a publicist working in your stead. That publicist should know what is public and what is private. If someone goes to your publicist and asks for information, and your publicist gives it to them willingly, then YOU have implicitly given permission for that transaction to take place. Your publicist is your proxy. If the person who is recieving the information shouldn't be getting it, the fault lies with you for not giving your publicist the training they need to do their job.
On the other hand, if someone goes up and lies to the publicist or attempts to confuse them, they are in the wrong. Your publicist shouldn't be an idiot about it, of course, and shouldn't turn over your medical history to someone claiming to be your lost half-brother's dentist. But the fault does lie with the person making the request under false pretenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of multiplayer games use a central server and require you to update your client to the latest version before you can play with others. Some of these are to close exploits, some are general game balance, but basically all of them are because the game creators think it will be a positive change. And these are usually required updates because the game code uses tricks to keep in sync with eachother, and the biggest simplification is to assume that everyone is on the same version of the code.
SWG was an extreme change, but it is also an extreme example. You're not promised online games will continue any more than you are promised your cable company will stay in business even though you just payed a 100 dollar installation fee. And SWG was total crap. It still needs a lot of work, but it's far more accessable and fun now and is a better base to build off of in the future.
3D Jar Jar Binks automatically downloaded to your DVD player? Let's not go off of the deep end. "This telephone thing here signifies the end of all civilization, as instead of going out and seeing their family in person people will be stuck on this little box in their room all day." You can take any piece of technology, extend it out into "what might be" many years down the road, and rally against it. Lucas isn't going to add a 3D Jar Jar binks and give it to you automatically. He's going to add a 3D Jar Jar Binks and sell it to you again. Apple might cut back on your available functionality, but then you have a legitimate lawsuit against them.
If we don't get a realistic perspective on what the rules of DRM should be, somebody else gets to figure out what they are.
Let's not forget... to get a system that can do High Definition normal mapped individual scales on every creature in the game, you may have to pay 100% more... but I can assure you to create that art asset cost a lot more than 100%+
Which means that Nintendo can launch twice as many games on the same overall budget... to find out which ones stick. Brain Training was one of Nintendo's cheapest games to make, but it has sold tens of millions of copies as well as millions of DS's.
Graphics were a bottleneck in gaming for a long time. You couldn't even get more than three sprites in a walk cycle on some of the old systems. On the PS2, you could do a full 3D walk cycle with inverse kinematics foot positioning adjusted for different skeletal systems. Graphics are about as good as they need to be at the moment, and other needs have arisen.
For one, the controller is getting bad. Sure, we've got sholder buttons (courtesy of Nintendo), a diamond face button pad (Nintendo), analog control sticks (Nintendo), and analog buttons (Sony), but the thing is so unweildy and in need of streamlining. We're interfacing with the most hyperrealistic worlds ever created using functionally the same controllers we've had since the late 70's, though with more buttons. Even then, we're talking about LOW TECH in the late 70's.
Another area ripe for development is Physics. Sure, you can skid cars now, and occasionally you can knock bottles over, but can you punch holes into walls? Does your character tip back further based on the weight of the item they're carrying? Can you aim your gun at the floor and skip a bullet off of it in Metal Gear Solid? Do we even have hair that gets close to sitting on people's shoulders, rather than hovering six inches above it?
And finally, we need more advancement in art techniques. Sure, our art pipelines have been serviced well by the support industry of middleware providers, but it still feels like we're limited artistically and by production method from really unleashing the power of the end systems. Can we work on creating art assets in-game? Texture these things under changing lighting conditions? Near other relevant textures from the game? Can we extrude a 2d concept sketch automatically into the starting basis for the 3D models in the scene?
There is a lot of work to be done. But for now, the graphics of a system aren't really the bottleneck to the next generation of power.
Maybe he likes to think before he acts, maybe even consult a lawyer or two. Do the stockholders really want a CEO who shoots from the hip? Especially on issues as important as this? We're talking about a multi-million dollar company here that is front page news. The decisions are big, maybe big enough to make or break the company. I'd take a week or three to think if I were making decisions on that scale.
I've been bitten by CEO's shooting from the hip before, so I completely understand that concern. However, the CEO is looked to for leadership in times of crisis. Arguably, leadership is the primary role of the CEO. This one let things stew and flounder for weeks. Two days is a reasonable timeframe to compose a well thought-out, well-informed response. Three weeks is not helpful in a leader.
Sometimes you do need to act quickly to stem off negative press and recover from disasters. He did not.
Second, he took no questions, choosing instead to let an investigative attorney who works for him, do the talking.
He hired a pro to do the job right. I'll bet he hires a geek to run his IT dept, and an accountant to do his bookkeeping. Probably even has a professional janitorial staff clean his office. One of the primary rsponsibilities of management is to find good people and then delegate.
True, but we're talking about a point of public perception. He definitely should have hired someone to prep him and train him about the responses to questions which may arise. But when people are questioning your integrity and your leadership, in the eyes of the public to delegate answers is to admit you are not to be trusted.
When you have an employee who is doing things that - in your opinion as managment - hurt the company, it is your obligation to the stockholders to find out who it is and stop them. Whether they be leakers, thieves, whatever, the CEO is responsible to the shareholders. Had nothing been done to stop leakers, and had that course of action turned out badly, then he looks even worse.
As much as the legal investigations are hurting it now? The idea of discovering leakers isn't a bad things, but sicking external private investigators on journalists is going to get your company in hot water.
And as I'm sure other posters have or will point out, the best thing management could have done to plug the leaks at HP is to stop running a sinking ship. Start treating your employees as talent rather than resources, stop outsourcing everything to the lowest bidder, encourage the culture of knowledge and exploration that HP was known for, pull back on executive salaries whenever a round of layoffs occur, and get back to making great products rather than stamping your name on something designed and built by the lowest bidders.
Google maintains an opt-out policy for both its Google News and Google Print services, saying any publisher can withdraw its content simply by asking.
So that's two routes the publishers could have taken to achieve the same thing.
It seems like the issue is that publishers want to remain in Google, they just want to find ways to get paid for it. They're looking for a third option between "Play by google's rules" and "take our content and go home."
On the other hand, I was under the strong impression that "indexing" a site is completely legal, as you're not violating any 1.copyright or 2.trademark laws, and that really the issue is whether the reproduced blurb about the page exceeds fair use.
Being a content creator myself, I do think that content creators should be compensated for their works. But there is fair compensation, and there is misunderstanding the technology and trying to pass restrictive laws to get all that you can grab. Thankfully, this seems to be somewhere in the middle.
Who developed their game to run at a reasonable framerate at 1080p?
Oh right. Good luck with that then.
For a fun exercise, try sending an HTML e-mail to the US Congress with an image of child pornography embedded. Bonus points if you're not a US citizen.
By simply having checked their mail that day, every member of congress will have violated the law about recieving and posessing. Under the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that subjects all of congress to a MANDATORY minimum sentence of 15 years.
That, at least, would do a great deal of good for the country.
...No one - citizen, politician, or party - benefits from universally shoddy security on electronic voting systems. No one.
Start figuring out who benefits, and you'll start seeing why we have crappy, unsecured voting systems being run by... oh.
...or ticking off journalists enough that they consistently give HP negative press.
I know lots of people who use Alerts, Blogger, Desktop, Images, Maps, News, Toolbar, Gmail, Mobile, SMS, and Froogle. Lots of people at my company have desktop installed to facilitate searching e-mails, SMS is great when you're lost in a big city and need directions, Maps is a hell of a lot more usable than MapQuest, doing image searches is pretty common, GMail is ubiquitous now...
I don't know about your usage patterns, but there is a lot of traffic going to a lot of google services. If you want to define "King of the Hill," I'd hazard a guess that Google's on top in GMail, Image searches, automated alerts, SMS directions, Maps, and System Toolbars. And more importantly, a lot of this traffic is data collection to drive better search results, like the pilot free-wifi in the bay area.
I'll let others argue the loaded "innovation" monkier, but remember before Microsoft started spouting that word every other second it actually meant "did something similar to something else, but with a little twist."
Remember, Google requires their employees to spend one day a week on a pet project. A lot of things like Google Earth and Picasa come from these. Some of these have tremendous data value, like Orkut and Google Desktop. Some, like Picasa, may someday have tremendous data value but don't currently. But they're only hitting 1/5th of the engineer's time.
Valuable Google Assets: Alerts, Blogger, Desktop, Directory (DMOZ), Images, Maps, News, Toolbar, Web Search, Gmail, Mobile, SMS
Could be Valuable: Book Search, Catalogs, Checkout, Finance, Froogle, Local, Scholar, Video, Calendar, Groups, Talk, Translate
Silly, fun, useless to them: Earth, Picasa, SketchUp,
In the labs: Google Trends, Music Trends, Visually Impaired Search, Notebook, Mars, Page Creator, Public Transportation Maps, RSS Reader, Web Accelerator, Taxi Finder, Suggest, Froogle Mobile, Sets.
With the possible exception of Mars, that seems pretty interconnected. Some of the silliest ideas, like Google Maps, gMail, the Google Toolbar, etc have become standard usage now. Even the silly ones, like Google Earth, were part of their push to create 3D maps of all major US cities, which would have been a valuable resource if they could have pulled it off.
They're like the Bell Labs of the 'net. Lot of pure research, some of which is or might be stupidly profitable. But we'll all reap rewards in the end.
Yarr, dude. Yarr.
The point is that most OSX users run as admin by default, which is what the system creates for them. It's not because they're lazy, it's because you buy a Macintosh so that you don't have to deal with the tedious details of computing. You just do it, and it just works.
But, again, you're running as Admin by default in OSX. THAT seems to be the major issue.
There are lots of situations where you would want high power in short bursts.
Coming to mind:
Camera Flashes
Quick Robotic Movements
Stun Guns
Short Burst Radio Transmissions
Most applications that involve hydrolics
Cutting Lasers
Ignition Sparks (stoves, cigarettes, cars, etc)
And in high-drain circumstances, the batteries would behave better overall. Standard alkalines waste a lot of capacity when trying to satisfy high-drain situations.
The form factor seems more interesting, however. As thin as a transparency sheet? That's small enough to be built into the skin of a cellphone, or the shell of a car.
It's not the grand solution we've all been waiting for, but it's a good evolution in an otherwise stagnant area.
Someone has to mention ZeFrank's "I knows me some ugly MySpace" contest. Just listen to that theme song!
o st_3.html7 1406.html7 1806.html
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/p
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/0
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/0
The controllers are comparable to controllers on the market.
Except that they cost almost twice as much, oh and they are also not compatible with all the games on the console, so you have to get additional classic controllers to play all the games the console has to offer.
Xbox 360 wireless controllers are 50, and there is a good bit more tech in the Wii controller. That makes them 20% more expensive. Where are you getting the 2x figure from?
I agree that the classic controller thing is weird / silly, but how else would you emulate 6 different consoles that have a very different control setup?
Why be aggrivated? None of your points seem like particular deal breakers.
The sports thing isn't a bundle. It doesn't raise their per-item cost any to include a game they've sunk the development costs into. They're just returning (for better or worse) to the old days when standard operating procedure was to throw in something for the player to do with the console. They said they were going to launch "under 250," which almost always means 249.99. Now they're at a 250 launch point, and they threw in a 50c piece of plastic to make it that much more attractive. If they didn't include the disk, they wouldn't save any hardware costs they'd just be giving less to the players.
As for the 250 dollars vs 250 Euros... you should realize by now that's standard operating procedure. Apple does it, IBM does it. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's pretty much always done. Look at it this way: that's more expensive for you because your economy is not in the crapper. Doesn't that make you feel better? If nothing else distribution is more expensive in Europe due to the stronger Euro. The Yen has been falling across the board. Usually Japanese consumers get the most expensive system due to exchange issues, but this time it's the Europeans.
60 dollars for a controller is steep, but a wireless Xbox 360 controller is 50 bucks. Add in motion sensing for 10 and you're there. For a full system with 2 controllers, that puts the Wii at 310, and the X360 at 450. It narrows the gap as a percentage of full system cost, but the Wii is still clearly cheaper.
40 dollars for a 64 MB memory card on the 360? That's gouging.
And maybe they should have released the bare system without the game as a sign that they're keeping everything as cheap as possible, even though it would be at the same price point. The perception of value is more important than actual value in consumer transactions.
I have yet to see a single company pissing so many people off in such a short period of time
Are you making a Sony reference here?
From a security point of view, they're the same problem. But from a *fixing* point of view, exploits are a lot more problematic. If the functionality if the application is causing the problem, then by definition fixing the security flaw will entail altering the functionality. Suddenly, your PDF-based form scripts won't work any more. A simple buffer overflow will cause headaches to the developer, but an exploit will cause headaches to the developer and a portion of your most devoted users.
I think he's defining a vulnerability to be a piece of poorly written code, like an input buffer that's vulnerable to an overflow. Or a URL parser that's vulnerable to a carefully formatted string. The code in that case is not behaving as intended.
An exploit would be more along the lines of the old outlook viruses. Outlook used to allow arbitrary scripts to be run on mail loading, and messages to be sent to an entire address book. Combine these two, and you have an exploit. It's behaving completely as intended, but they never expected someone to use the features like that.
The PDF reader is behaving as intended, though nobody expected the intended behavior to add up to that.
Maybe. But as far as we know Nintendo has never sold a system at a loss. They generally optimize during the design phase to keep manufacturing costs low. The also license external IP to recieve a cut of hardware and software profits rather than hardware cost (see the Nvidia / Microsoft fight), thus effectively spreading risk around their partners.
Note that this way they don't need to be #1 to be profitable, and that it's actually difficult to lose their shirts.
So while Nintendo might have been willing to sell the systems at a loss if necessary, the plan all along has probably been to keep costs down and sell it affordably / profitably. Just look at the specs.
Thinking back a month... Things I've watched recently on You Tube:
Trailer for Transformers - Legalish
Transforming Robot Beetle - Legal
Playing With Electricity Video - Legal
Metalocalypse - Not Legal
Ask a Ninja - Legal
Street Running - Legal
ZeFrank talking at a convention - Legal
Some guy blowing the whistle on faulty helicopter design - Legal
Quake 3 Rocket Jump super skillz video - Legal
I know there are a lot of illegal uses for YouTube. But it seems like unlike a lot of P2P apps, the non-infringing uses are substantial. If YouTube could successfully filter out all of the illegal content, it would still have a lot of uses
The analogy you're looking for is "What if Microsoft was bundling FireFox with Windows?" The goal of both the record companies and the Mozilla people is higher distribution as a means to higher sales (in one case albums, in the other google searches). YouTube helps achieve that goal.
What it doesn't take into account, is that Music Videos themselves have become a valuable property. The advertising has become the message. So now not only do they want the advertising for the album to get out, but they want to control and make money on how the advertising is distributed.
Eris / Dischord is pretty cute too.
http://xenaphan.com/Discord.jpg
Good luck making your wife a hot evil midget, though.
Unfortunately, if you're dealing with large crowds, it's usually a lot easier to use force than to try and solve the situation in a peaceful manner.
Or you erect walls to keep things from moving on, and let the riot burn itself out. Sure, you might have a few hundred thousand in property damage. But that's a lot cheaper than one or two lives.
I still advocate the use of controlled, strategic force necessary for crowd control. But non-lethal "harmless" weapons seem to encourage panicked, reactionary use. Perhaps as people realize that non-lethal weapons can kill rather well, their usage will become rarer and carry more weight.
Could you heat blood at the skin enough to re-enter the circulation system and transfer that heat elsewhere? Could you heat blood in that spot enough to reach a boil? What if the protester has a transdermal implant? Aren't microwaves supposed to give you cancer? Could you heat a blood vessle, say... behind the ear... enough to cause an aneurysm? What about the spine?
Nothing is non-lethal. Victoria Snelgrove here in Boston took a non-lethal pepper ball to the eye, killing her rather badly. For exactly the same reason that EMT's tell you not to bridge electricity across your heart, tazers sometimes stop them from beating. Beanbags kill by internal bleeding. Pepper spray has been known to cause respiratory failure.
That's not to say that we shouldn't keep looking for better and better ways to inflict pain without feeling moral reprocussions about it. But that is to say that every "non-lethal" weapon will kill somebody somewhere.
Think of your webserver as a publicist working in your stead. That publicist should know what is public and what is private. If someone goes to your publicist and asks for information, and your publicist gives it to them willingly, then YOU have implicitly given permission for that transaction to take place. Your publicist is your proxy. If the person who is recieving the information shouldn't be getting it, the fault lies with you for not giving your publicist the training they need to do their job.
On the other hand, if someone goes up and lies to the publicist or attempts to confuse them, they are in the wrong. Your publicist shouldn't be an idiot about it, of course, and shouldn't turn over your medical history to someone claiming to be your lost half-brother's dentist. But the fault does lie with the person making the request under false pretenses.