If you buy an operating system knowing full well that you cannot repair any faults you may find in it, nor adapt it to meet your specific requirements then, not to put too fine a point on it, you're an idiot.
OSX?
It's pretty easy to adapt an operating system to meet your needs without source. You don't want to go around forking things every time you need a design tweaked. 99.99% of users will never edit anything. And the ones that do will suddenly find themselves with a maintenence headache.
I'm actually rather fond of Sky OS. The interface is great, and the OS hasn't acquired the kruft of a mainstream OS like Windows, Linux, or OSX.
That having been said, it doesn't run on a lot of hardware, and it doesn't run a lot of applications. Their best bet is either selling it En masse to computer manufacturers as an alternative to linux, or putting it on well-designed hardware as an elite os. Maybe work their way in with specialized hardware makers, like Car manufacturers, to build up a following.
I'd also recommend pre-loading it on USB thumb drives, for those who can boot from a USB thumb, to help people get experience with the OS.
Belguim exchanges a lot of documents with a lot of other countries. If Microsoft chooses not to support ODF format in Word, they're ensuring that a certain percentage of their customers MUST install Word Perfect or Open Office, which makes it easier for others to switch. If they do support ODF in Word, they make it easier for other countries to insist on ODF.
Basically the choice becomes, do you lose your market or your lock-in? You can lose a competitive advantage, or you can lose everything.
My gut says that MS will intentionally create ODF support that is so buggy nobody will want to use it.
a seemingly unstoppable horde of alien scum--that's what I want in a game.
That's a pretty good description of the players on Gamespy.
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.
In the 10 years since Quake, you've had engaging story elements added by the likes of Half Life, high player interaction with plot in Deus Ex, an MMPOFPS Planetside, the FPSRTS Savage, The whole counterstrike phenomenon, Goldeneye, an FPS platformer in Metroid... There have been a lot of great FPS games released in the 10 years since quake. To say that there was quake and then there was nothing ignores huge swaths of game development.
You don't want smart monsters and you don't want random level generation. Trust me. Or don't. Smart monsters hide out of your cone of vision, and bury an axe in your back when you turn around. Smart monsters headshot you through the wall. Smart monsters are those 13-year-old fu$%ers who camp spawn points with sniper rifles. Random level generation, on the other hand, A: is very difficult to do, B: is very difficult for AI's to navigate, and C: the player loses the ability to "learn" an area, which is one of the most satisfying parts of playing an FPS game.
The latest Dooms and Quakes are exactly like the old Dooms and Quakes because they're bloody sequals. Branch out a little, and you'll find all sorts of original fps games in the world.
they don't stand behind those claims. It would thus be inappropriate to trust any of them with important data.
There are varying degrees of important. Really important data should be redundantly protected at dozens of remote call centers on multiple continents linked by non-internet direct lines, all under your control. Slightly less important data can be protected under the wing of a large outsourcing corporation like IBM, with the guarantees and penalties you mention spelled out in detail, at the cost of several dollars per megabyte per month.
What are in this article are consumer grade data backup. Like any consumer grade service it comes with nothing more than a gentleman's guarantee. But on the other hand, it's damned cheap compared to a really secure solution (which most people are priced out of anyway).
But the protection they provide is pretty good. Let's assume your computer dies. Let's assume that your system, and these online storage people, will die every 5 years. The chance of them dying on the same week as eachother, without warning, is about 1 in 260.
A friend of mine was dilligent about backing up all of her data. She kept a comptuer and USB drive. She never left the USB drive plugged in, in case a faulty power supply sent a spike down the line. She dilligently backed everything up every week. She followed all of the prescriptions.
Then someone broke into her apartment and stole both her computer and the USB drive sitting next to it.
I often think of that, when I think of the backup hard drive I keep in my computer case.
I have about 20 GB of photos that I'd like to backup. Nobody really cares about them except for me and a few family members. None of them are private. They have value to nobody but me.
But they have a great deal of value to me. They could be on a public server and it wouldn't matter. They just need to be available to me.
Security isn't always about keeping other people out.
Right, but it was a parking lot, which is not public space. It's private property. Hence the store had the law on their side when they hid behind their desk and asked the police to ask the guy to leave. And when he comes back, he's violating trespass law. He also appears at that point to be violating the law about network access, as they specifically asked him not to connect to their network, and he specifically and with intent did.
The execution seems a bit cowardly of the store employees, but things basically seem in order here. If things are really in order, the man should recieve a small fine + time served + an order not to return to the store again, and that should be that.
When deputies told Smith to knock it off, he came back and is now charged with theft of services.
My impression is that 1. the coffee shop jumped the gun and called the police. 2. the police came and relayed the message to the guy to stop or leave. 3. he left. 4. he came back. 5. he got arrested.
I think the 5-0 did basically the right thing here. He was on private property when using the unsecured network (their parking lot) so they had the right to ask him to leave. He left. He came back. Never come back when the police ask you to leave. They hate that.
And by "knock it off," I'm assuming the police told him that the store didn't want him on their network. Usually I believe that if you don't want people on your wireless network, put up a password. But in this case if you ask someone directly not to connect, and they connect anyway with intent, that seems sufficient to be considered a violation. The violation happened, of course, when he came back, not for the 3 months prior. Let's hope the judge is sharp enough to make that distinction.
I've canceled AOL accounts on three different occasions now. The first two times the customer service representative was courteous, eager to help, and made four attempts to re-direct my canceling activities. The third cancelation account I started by appologizing to the person on the other end of the phone because I knew that this was unfairly going to be counted against them on their record, but I really just called up to cancel. Got a cancellation right away.
All of the times never went through more than about 30 seconds - a minute of hassle. This guy really got a winner. And while it is definitely the logical result of AOL's "punish the customer service people" policy, it doesn't seem quite representative.
Government intervention could do the same for data services, but the big boys don't want that. They want to be able to charge companies for preferential access to their customers while simultaneously locking their customers into their service by limiting competition in the marketplace, through distance limitations (only servicing the customers they can cover at a minimal expense), through not providing DSL service on all of their COs or cable modem service in all their served cities, and through trying to block CLECs from being able to provide data services on their lines.
Let's not forget that data services aren't just "verizon carries packets from Google's server to your door." It's really "Verizon carries a request from your computer to a different provider with exchange data agreements, who then carries a response back to Verizon and to the customer." The data may pass through three or more different hands before reaching the customer.
What would happen if MCI suddenly decided that to protect it's own phone offerings it was going to throttle all VoiP packets? Or if UUNET decided to throttle the bandwidth of anything that goes to a competitor of it's home broadband offerings? One could easily a situation where anyone who isn't in a provider's "family" has their service cut down. Sure you can get to Google Videos, but it runs 1/2 has fast as You Tube because they're not on Verizon brand server farms, where Americans turn for reliable, fast, unencumbered hosting. On RoadRunner DSL? Why not get AGIS brand DSL in your area? It runs 50% faster on all data that touches the AGIS backbone network. And you, of course, don't have any control over when that might happen. You may not get internet access from them, the server on the other side may not be getting internet access from them, but they're somewhere in the middle and can guarantee that your packet won't arrive in a timely manner.
Do you actually know someone who wants to use their computer to videochat at the same time they're talking to someone and IMing a third while downloading something?
I've actually video chatted with one person while IMing a second and downloading something. And I'm not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
It's an easy usage pattern to fall into. You have a camera plugged in, someone wants to chat from a 'net cafe overseas (which frequently have IM cameras). You have a friend who is making fliers for an event, and wants to show it to you. Done. A video chat, an IM, and a download going.
If you want to see something really pointlessly cool, check out Scribis in SkyOS. Not only can you chat, you can send video links as live playback.
No offence to the parent poster, but amalgamation analysis like this always lead to inflamatory numbers. Sure, 500,000 people playing an Xbox 360 leads to 725 turbines. And if 500,000 people worked for a day at minimum wage and donated that money to hunger prevention, Sally Struthers could feed and educate a hundred thousand kids for a year. If 500,000 houses switched to flourescent bulbs, we could save 40 million dollars a year. The debt load on 500,000 people is about 60 billion dollars. If 500,000 people cut out 1/4th of their trash load, we could save 200 million pounds of trash per year.
725 turbines? Thats a pretty small environmental impact for a group that big.
QA never was the only way in, and it still isn't the only way in. In my experience, though, it helps a lot.
What you learn in technical school won't give you real experience with game development. There are a million things it won't teach you. They don't teach you when to leave something broken "for now." They don't teach you the utility of having everyone in your company observe focus tests. They don't teach you that sometimes the best design of one thing has to lose so that another feature which is important can survive. And, of course, a million other details about game development from when it is okay to telecommute an artist into a meeting to how
And, sadly, from what little I've seen they really don't let you get into the minutae of a game. Like when you push a button, does the button trigger on button down or button up? Does the animate-off occur after the button-down or during? Should the animate off take two seconds or one.
QA gets you exposure to all of that. You come out of a (in-house) QA gig basically knowing how to make a game. If you later come back as an artist, you're suddenly a more valuable candidate because you don't have to be told everything. You know the art resource is going to change a couple of times, so as not to polish too much for stand-in stuff. You know which parts of direction are essential to follow and which parts are suggestions. You know to keep an eye on milestones, and always buffer in an extra bug-fixing day or two before one.
Given the option between spending a year as QA and spending a year as a Programmer on a game, be a programmer. If you're going to be an artist, be an artist. But if you're still in college, or didn't graduate from MIT, get in through QA. It looks great on your resume to say that you spent a summer working along side a real team of developers, proving that you're not some random fuckup who is going to burn out in four weeks.
Of course, this is all QA for small companies that have their own QA staff. Don't work remotely at a publisher if you can avoid it. You won't learn much there.
One of the major keys is that the three laws of robotics require situational awareness and knowledge of results of action far in excess of what your roomba is capable of. This industrial robot was basically following an electrical circuit diagram. Not only could it not see the human, if it could it wouldn't have any concept that pushing said human into another machine would result in the death of that human. Basically, the machine was running javascript, and had absolutely no knowledge of biology, chemistry, the activities of other machines, or anything else, really.
The three laws of robotics are fine and dandy, but you can damn well believe that Thou Shalt Not Kill is already implemented to the best of the creator's ability, which in this case wasn't that great.
A successful person once told me that successful people generally call a spade a spade. You don't bullshit, you don't dance, you don't pretend to be something you're not. You assert that you are who you are, and that you have the power to pull off being who you are. And anyone who doesn't like who you are can go screw.
Now they didn't adequately prove the causal connection, but the fact remains that successful people generally don't hide. They keep their lives, in that way, simple, so that they can accomplish more. They exhude confidence and composure. And part of that is not pretending to be something they're not. They unappologetically say they haven't the slightest clue about computers, or banking, or whatever isn't their field. They just get stuff done, as themselves, without worrying about what people will think.
That seems like a pretty nice way to live. And if you lose a client here and there because they don't want a liberal activist building their computer system or running their carpet cleaning business, so what? They didn't deserve your work anyway.
I was actually thinking the same thing. Functionally speaking, those who turn to evil out of greed and feel bad about it tend to be the most extremely methodically evil people.
It's sort of like the people who are extremely heterosexual because they can't deal with being a bit gay. I'd much rather have a money manager who is extremely greedy because he can't deal with being a little communist.
The basic difference is that, on DreamCast, you only need to burn the homebrewed software you need, put it into the DC, and it just-works(tm). Any stock machine is designed in a such way that you can boot anything you want on them. (Maybe it was initially designed so, to enable e-zines to ship CD with their issues.
Personally, I thought the Atari Jaguar's went out in style (unlike the rest of it's lifecycle). At the pushing of several developers who had games in development but no remaining company to license through, Hasbro Interactive, who had acquired the rights, simply let them go. Now anyone who is so inclined can make games for the Jaguar and release them commercially. It's really too bad that such a thing didn't happen with the Saturn or PS1, as you'd see some amazing homebrew games out there. Hasbro Interactive gets lots of points for giving the system back to a tiny community of diehard fans.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy an operating system knowing full well that you cannot repair any faults you may find in it, nor adapt it to meet your specific requirements then, not to put too fine a point on it, you're an idiot.
OSX?
It's pretty easy to adapt an operating system to meet your needs without source. You don't want to go around forking things every time you need a design tweaked. 99.99% of users will never edit anything. And the ones that do will suddenly find themselves with a maintenence headache.
I'm actually rather fond of Sky OS. The interface is great, and the OS hasn't acquired the kruft of a mainstream OS like Windows, Linux, or OSX.
That having been said, it doesn't run on a lot of hardware, and it doesn't run a lot of applications. Their best bet is either selling it En masse to computer manufacturers as an alternative to linux, or putting it on well-designed hardware as an elite os. Maybe work their way in with specialized hardware makers, like Car manufacturers, to build up a following.
I'd also recommend pre-loading it on USB thumb drives, for those who can boot from a USB thumb, to help people get experience with the OS.
In fact, I would guess that is the approach that MS is using for the open XML.
You don't have to guess: that's what they've said they're doing.
Belguim exchanges a lot of documents with a lot of other countries. If Microsoft chooses not to support ODF format in Word, they're ensuring that a certain percentage of their customers MUST install Word Perfect or Open Office, which makes it easier for others to switch. If they do support ODF in Word, they make it easier for other countries to insist on ODF.
Basically the choice becomes, do you lose your market or your lock-in? You can lose a competitive advantage, or you can lose everything.
My gut says that MS will intentionally create ODF support that is so buggy nobody will want to use it.
Don't you know who our President is?
A working class man who started out with nothing in life but two strong hands and a brain, and now has to make due with just the hands.
What a charmingly strange thing to say.
a seemingly unstoppable horde of alien scum--that's what I want in a game.
That's a pretty good description of the players on Gamespy.
The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.
You mean, something with the visuals like This?
In the 10 years since Quake, you've had engaging story elements added by the likes of Half Life, high player interaction with plot in Deus Ex, an MMPOFPS Planetside, the FPSRTS Savage, The whole counterstrike phenomenon, Goldeneye, an FPS platformer in Metroid... There have been a lot of great FPS games released in the 10 years since quake. To say that there was quake and then there was nothing ignores huge swaths of game development.
You don't want smart monsters and you don't want random level generation. Trust me. Or don't. Smart monsters hide out of your cone of vision, and bury an axe in your back when you turn around. Smart monsters headshot you through the wall. Smart monsters are those 13-year-old fu$%ers who camp spawn points with sniper rifles. Random level generation, on the other hand, A: is very difficult to do, B: is very difficult for AI's to navigate, and C: the player loses the ability to "learn" an area, which is one of the most satisfying parts of playing an FPS game.
The latest Dooms and Quakes are exactly like the old Dooms and Quakes because they're bloody sequals. Branch out a little, and you'll find all sorts of original fps games in the world.
they don't stand behind those claims. It would thus be inappropriate to trust any of them with important data.
There are varying degrees of important. Really important data should be redundantly protected at dozens of remote call centers on multiple continents linked by non-internet direct lines, all under your control. Slightly less important data can be protected under the wing of a large outsourcing corporation like IBM, with the guarantees and penalties you mention spelled out in detail, at the cost of several dollars per megabyte per month.
What are in this article are consumer grade data backup. Like any consumer grade service it comes with nothing more than a gentleman's guarantee. But on the other hand, it's damned cheap compared to a really secure solution (which most people are priced out of anyway).
But the protection they provide is pretty good. Let's assume your computer dies. Let's assume that your system, and these online storage people, will die every 5 years. The chance of them dying on the same week as eachother, without warning, is about 1 in 260.
That's good enough odds for most people.
A friend of mine was dilligent about backing up all of her data. She kept a comptuer and USB drive. She never left the USB drive plugged in, in case a faulty power supply sent a spike down the line. She dilligently backed everything up every week. She followed all of the prescriptions.
Then someone broke into her apartment and stole both her computer and the USB drive sitting next to it.
I often think of that, when I think of the backup hard drive I keep in my computer case.
I have about 20 GB of photos that I'd like to backup. Nobody really cares about them except for me and a few family members. None of them are private. They have value to nobody but me.
But they have a great deal of value to me. They could be on a public server and it wouldn't matter. They just need to be available to me.
Security isn't always about keeping other people out.
Right, but it was a parking lot, which is not public space. It's private property. Hence the store had the law on their side when they hid behind their desk and asked the police to ask the guy to leave. And when he comes back, he's violating trespass law. He also appears at that point to be violating the law about network access, as they specifically asked him not to connect to their network, and he specifically and with intent did.
The execution seems a bit cowardly of the store employees, but things basically seem in order here. If things are really in order, the man should recieve a small fine + time served + an order not to return to the store again, and that should be that.
When deputies told Smith to knock it off, he came back and is now charged with theft of services.
My impression is that
1. the coffee shop jumped the gun and called the police.
2. the police came and relayed the message to the guy to stop or leave.
3. he left.
4. he came back.
5. he got arrested.
I think the 5-0 did basically the right thing here. He was on private property when using the unsecured network (their parking lot) so they had the right to ask him to leave. He left. He came back. Never come back when the police ask you to leave. They hate that.
And by "knock it off," I'm assuming the police told him that the store didn't want him on their network. Usually I believe that if you don't want people on your wireless network, put up a password. But in this case if you ask someone directly not to connect, and they connect anyway with intent, that seems sufficient to be considered a violation. The violation happened, of course, when he came back, not for the 3 months prior. Let's hope the judge is sharp enough to make that distinction.
I've canceled AOL accounts on three different occasions now. The first two times the customer service representative was courteous, eager to help, and made four attempts to re-direct my canceling activities. The third cancelation account I started by appologizing to the person on the other end of the phone because I knew that this was unfairly going to be counted against them on their record, but I really just called up to cancel. Got a cancellation right away.
All of the times never went through more than about 30 seconds - a minute of hassle. This guy really got a winner. And while it is definitely the logical result of AOL's "punish the customer service people" policy, it doesn't seem quite representative.
Government intervention could do the same for data services, but the big boys don't want that. They want to be able to charge companies for preferential access to their customers while simultaneously locking their customers into their service by limiting competition in the marketplace, through distance limitations (only servicing the customers they can cover at a minimal expense), through not providing DSL service on all of their COs or cable modem service in all their served cities, and through trying to block CLECs from being able to provide data services on their lines.
Let's not forget that data services aren't just "verizon carries packets from Google's server to your door." It's really "Verizon carries a request from your computer to a different provider with exchange data agreements, who then carries a response back to Verizon and to the customer." The data may pass through three or more different hands before reaching the customer.
What would happen if MCI suddenly decided that to protect it's own phone offerings it was going to throttle all VoiP packets? Or if UUNET decided to throttle the bandwidth of anything that goes to a competitor of it's home broadband offerings? One could easily a situation where anyone who isn't in a provider's "family" has their service cut down. Sure you can get to Google Videos, but it runs 1/2 has fast as You Tube because they're not on Verizon brand server farms, where Americans turn for reliable, fast, unencumbered hosting. On RoadRunner DSL? Why not get AGIS brand DSL in your area? It runs 50% faster on all data that touches the AGIS backbone network. And you, of course, don't have any control over when that might happen. You may not get internet access from them, the server on the other side may not be getting internet access from them, but they're somewhere in the middle and can guarantee that your packet won't arrive in a timely manner.
Do you actually know someone who wants to use their computer to videochat at the same time they're talking to someone and IMing a third while downloading something?
I've actually video chatted with one person while IMing a second and downloading something. And I'm not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
It's an easy usage pattern to fall into. You have a camera plugged in, someone wants to chat from a 'net cafe overseas (which frequently have IM cameras). You have a friend who is making fliers for an event, and wants to show it to you. Done. A video chat, an IM, and a download going.
If you want to see something really pointlessly cool, check out Scribis in SkyOS. Not only can you chat, you can send video links as live playback.
No offence to the parent poster, but amalgamation analysis like this always lead to inflamatory numbers. Sure, 500,000 people playing an Xbox 360 leads to 725 turbines. And if 500,000 people worked for a day at minimum wage and donated that money to hunger prevention, Sally Struthers could feed and educate a hundred thousand kids for a year. If 500,000 houses switched to flourescent bulbs, we could save 40 million dollars a year. The debt load on 500,000 people is about 60 billion dollars. If 500,000 people cut out 1/4th of their trash load, we could save 200 million pounds of trash per year.
725 turbines? Thats a pretty small environmental impact for a group that big.
launched a new form of drone aircraft to patrol the skies above Los Angeles
Drones following Drones. Kafka would be proud.
QA never was the only way in, and it still isn't the only way in. In my experience, though, it helps a lot.
What you learn in technical school won't give you real experience with game development. There are a million things it won't teach you. They don't teach you when to leave something broken "for now." They don't teach you the utility of having everyone in your company observe focus tests. They don't teach you that sometimes the best design of one thing has to lose so that another feature which is important can survive. And, of course, a million other details about game development from when it is okay to telecommute an artist into a meeting to how
And, sadly, from what little I've seen they really don't let you get into the minutae of a game. Like when you push a button, does the button trigger on button down or button up? Does the animate-off occur after the button-down or during? Should the animate off take two seconds or one.
QA gets you exposure to all of that. You come out of a (in-house) QA gig basically knowing how to make a game. If you later come back as an artist, you're suddenly a more valuable candidate because you don't have to be told everything. You know the art resource is going to change a couple of times, so as not to polish too much for stand-in stuff. You know which parts of direction are essential to follow and which parts are suggestions. You know to keep an eye on milestones, and always buffer in an extra bug-fixing day or two before one.
Given the option between spending a year as QA and spending a year as a Programmer on a game, be a programmer. If you're going to be an artist, be an artist. But if you're still in college, or didn't graduate from MIT, get in through QA. It looks great on your resume to say that you spent a summer working along side a real team of developers, proving that you're not some random fuckup who is going to burn out in four weeks.
Of course, this is all QA for small companies that have their own QA staff. Don't work remotely at a publisher if you can avoid it. You won't learn much there.
What it all boils down to is still the quality of the comments that the users post. Nothing else.
Is there an ironic tag for posting this on Slashdot?
One of the major keys is that the three laws of robotics require situational awareness and knowledge of results of action far in excess of what your roomba is capable of. This industrial robot was basically following an electrical circuit diagram. Not only could it not see the human, if it could it wouldn't have any concept that pushing said human into another machine would result in the death of that human. Basically, the machine was running javascript, and had absolutely no knowledge of biology, chemistry, the activities of other machines, or anything else, really.
The three laws of robotics are fine and dandy, but you can damn well believe that Thou Shalt Not Kill is already implemented to the best of the creator's ability, which in this case wasn't that great.
A successful person once told me that successful people generally call a spade a spade. You don't bullshit, you don't dance, you don't pretend to be something you're not. You assert that you are who you are, and that you have the power to pull off being who you are. And anyone who doesn't like who you are can go screw.
Now they didn't adequately prove the causal connection, but the fact remains that successful people generally don't hide. They keep their lives, in that way, simple, so that they can accomplish more. They exhude confidence and composure. And part of that is not pretending to be something they're not. They unappologetically say they haven't the slightest clue about computers, or banking, or whatever isn't their field. They just get stuff done, as themselves, without worrying about what people will think.
That seems like a pretty nice way to live. And if you lose a client here and there because they don't want a liberal activist building their computer system or running their carpet cleaning business, so what? They didn't deserve your work anyway.
I was actually thinking the same thing. Functionally speaking, those who turn to evil out of greed and feel bad about it tend to be the most extremely methodically evil people.
It's sort of like the people who are extremely heterosexual because they can't deal with being a bit gay. I'd much rather have a money manager who is extremely greedy because he can't deal with being a little communist.
The basic difference is that, on DreamCast, you only need to burn the homebrewed software you need, put it into the DC, and it just-works(tm). Any stock machine is designed in a such way that you can boot anything you want on them. (Maybe it was initially designed so, to enable e-zines to ship CD with their issues.
Bootable multimedia functions for music CD's.
Personally, I thought the Atari Jaguar's went out in style (unlike the rest of it's lifecycle). At the pushing of several developers who had games in development but no remaining company to license through, Hasbro Interactive, who had acquired the rights, simply let them go. Now anyone who is so inclined can make games for the Jaguar and release them commercially. It's really too bad that such a thing didn't happen with the Saturn or PS1, as you'd see some amazing homebrew games out there. Hasbro Interactive gets lots of points for giving the system back to a tiny community of diehard fans.
Lame article, yadda yadda.
Anyone have a link to the lockpicking kit in a working pen? That sounds actually useful.