Hmmm. Is it possible that taking 11 years to (maybe) get a Bachelors is "special needs"? Why am I wasting my time with someone so obviously lacking potential?
Oh, because I'm actually a human who understands that not everyone is perfect. I have *more* compassion for people who were born with a disability that limits them than I do for someone with a self inflicted failure rate through.
...is why we use GAIM to communicate in our company. (Well, except the garbage file transfers.) We have a Jabber server that supports encryption and use that for all of our in-house messaging. This is important as we are a geographically distributed team, we need a secure, reliable chat mechanism to collaborate quickly and easily on code. We don't want or need all the garbage that comes with of IMs, and the fact we can link to other services in GAIM makes it our one stop shopping solution for IMs when we *do* need to talk to someone with a more mainsteam IM.
Of course, we are professional developers who don't need to send flash animations, pictures or even more than the basic:):( smiles. But for a corporate solution, GAIM + Jabber makes a lot of sense and I would hate to see it become the playground that MSN has become.
What percentage of kids are you including in your "special needs"? Downs syndrome and similar or are we talking about underachievers too? Who makes the determination on who gets and education and who is relegated to an institution? You? Perhaps we should parade all children past you for your stamp of approval before being allowed access to the public school system... that should cut down spending quite a bit.
Somehow I see the idea of forced institutionalization of anyone who doesn't meet your standards to increase the amount of money available for those who do... interesting. Where does the money for the prison you will construct for these children come from? Why probably from the smart kids. That's no good.
Here's a suggestion, lets shove a gun upside the head of any child who doesn't meet your approval for the public school system and just fix in once and for all. Is *that* your private utopian vision? If so, what makes you think you meet *my* approval, and what would that mean if you were presented for review in front of *my* commission for fitness as a human. Perhaps *my* requirement is that a person have some shred of respect and compassion for people other then himself.
As someone who consults on the software side for insurance companies I can tell you why "spreading risk" is diminishing. The original intent was to take the "pool" of insureds and insure everyone based on the risks present in the pool. However, if I'm selling insurance based on the "pool" price and my competitor becomes selective (say, not insuring those who smoke) the competitor's pool risk rate is lower than mine and he can either sell at the same price and make more profits or he can sell lower.
Now, the real profit in insurance is in the long term investments that the premiums are placed in, so they will sell at a lower price to gain more premium dollars to invest. (Free market selection by the consumer ensures the consumer will look to the lower cost options available.) We (the consumers) have accepted the fact that smokers and drinkers are going to be harder to insure. These are "lifestyle" choices. Likewise, I pay extra for my rock climbing: that fall outside the "norm". (I had to admit to it though because otherwise if I fell to my death they would have cause to not pay on my life insurance). People don't seem to mind dividing the risk pool on items that are *within the control* of the insured.
What has become offensive to even some *within* the insurance industry is the idea of dividing the risk pool on "uncontrolled" factors. There is a reason why they ask about your family history of disease: it is to partition on your genetic probability for specific diseases. Where the gene testing takes things further is simply increasing the accuracy of those risk assessments and adding new assessments that were impossible before.
Unfortunately, without state run insurance or strong regulations you end up with a competitive environment that selects for those companies that are "managing the risk pool" they accept. Fair it isn't (if your idea of insurance was based on the risk pool spreading costs) but it is the profitable way to go. I have written neural nets that take the risk pool and assess a new application based on the prior risks that were insured by the company. Some interesting trends came out of doing so: you end up doing ethnic discrimination as it turns out there are strong links between race and risk rates for some diseases. Eventually the idea of risk pools will be fully replaced with personal risk rates assuming no regulation to prevent it. (This is already true in the corporate insurance world where there are "uninsurable" companies and no law requires they be insurable for some types of insurance).
Whatever the fair use status of Google's work, they have given everyone the option to opt out. I'm sure the lawsuit represents "opting out" and so those works have been pulled. When everyone *except* the Author's Guild works are represented in the index, I suspect some members of the guild will reconsider why they are members. I don't see Google knuckling under to extortionist tactics when most of the industry seems to understand that they stand to profit from having works accessible (even if a few others have grumbled a bit).
There was an earlier comment about an author who was objecting to the idea that a screen reader could allow the blind to access an e-book. The idea that he had total control over his work trumped any moral objections to preventing the blind from accessing a work as well as any argument that showed he stood to profit *more* from allowing that market to exist. For him, it was control first and last. The author's guild is in the same mindset... in both cases they stand to lose customers by stubbornly adhering to their rights. So let them opt out and call it a day, as only those who do opt out stand to lose.
While I agree that the AJAX term has become abused, the reason for the attractiveness of such applications goes beyond server-push. For me the magic comes from zero installation. While I'm doubtful about spreadsheets and word processors (at this point in time), there are many applications where "just existing" as a resource that can be used is a great thing.
It goes farther than the install issue though: it is the maintenance issue that really makes this work for me. No need to wonder if all the machines were updated with the proper DLLs, data sources and version of the code. But most of all, rolling out an update is as simple as updating the web with the new functionality. Bug fixes are instantly deployed to everyone in the organization. As an added bonus, users can't squirrel away data where you can't easily back it up (it's all in your database which is backed up to your schedule, whether the client machine is online or not).
Right now I see no reason to create ERP type systems that have client side requirements beyond a browser. Yes, there are still some UI issues that are not perfect, but the use of AJAX (as in real background data transfers) has removed almost all of my prior complaints about doing software this way. Gone are the massive load times (you can expand data as needed with small loads), bulk save problems (just save what changed) and application compatibility problems.
The fact that these are being extended out to more traditional "desktop" applications, even if they are not perfect yet, shows how mature the web client environment has become. I'm not going to throw office out, but I *am* excited by really cool looking JavaScript applications when you can reduce your support call load to nearly zero in regards to the classic DLL hell situations and completely removing the possibility of down-level applications. (The latter idea comes in real handy when your application is deployed to over a thousand companies.) The downside is that we have to be *real* careful to maintain true five nines availability... which means more backed hardware and work.
At the end of the day, this simply takes what was good about web applications (centralized administration with strong availability guarantees, shades of the mainframe era...) and eliminates what was bad about them (really poor, non interactive user interfaces). If that means that word processing documents will incrementally appear on a server so I don't have to worry about users destroying their own work (and we can keep a weeks worth of incremental revisions for recovery)... I might even look at the word processing.
There is a big difference between rewriting because you feel like it, and rewriting because the universe has changed. There may be some fields where the specifications are nailed down enough that you can design the entire application, but let me lead you through a real world application that I was and still am involved with.
In the beginning, the application was a small Microsoft Access database with a handful of users. It was created by someone with only a passing knowledge of third normal form and some hideous design decisions. I was hired to make it usable, which I did by normalizing the data structures and rewriting the most offensive user interface components. This application was used and exteneded continuously for a few years before the corporate owner of the application realized that what we were doing could be useful to others, and so the program was ported to a Web Application using ASP.
Clearly, not much can be salvaged between Access Basic and ASP for the UI, so that was completely rewritten, but the underlying data structures were shared between the two (as were queries, report layouts and such). The database was migranted to SQL server for both front ends. Once it was online it was discovered that some of the requirements for the online users were different from the local users, so many modifications were made over time to improve the experience for the online users. This was successful, so instead of just serving other companies which played the same role in the industry as the original company, other industry players in other roles wanted to participate as well.
So we added interfaces, functions and data structures to the web app to support the other industry players (in the end we ended up with six levels of the industry interacting in our system). Quite clearly we had overloaded our original design, so from time to time we would reconstruct portions of our system to be more flexible and support a more realistic world view. However, development deadlines and ever increasing demands for features caused some cruft to remain. Sometimes modules had to be rewritten to support the new requirements (as you can imagine, a commissioning system designed for the lowest tiers of and industry broke when extended to all the layers that existed).
That brings us to the current day. We are rewriting the application, piece by piece, in ASP.NET/C# using many best practices which were difficult to implement is VBScript (an accursed language if there ever was one). The users have no idea which portions have been rewritten as many of the changes have been in the creation of business objects that improve the testability, scalability, and maintainability of the code. (I still have nightmares about COM objects and IIS lockdown thereof...)
The point is, we had no idea that this project would balloon from a simple Access database to an industry access point where thousands of companies interoperate each day. To say "design up front" when dealing with the real world is nonsense: design for flexibility is a great idea but breaks down when you go from a 20 hour hack job database to a multi-tier enterprise system.
No, the real answer is to iterate. Iterate fast and furious, learning where you need to go next and then doing it. Anyone with a rule on "don't rewrite" in our situation would be trying to bolt thousands of hits per minute on top of Access, and that is just stupid. Anyone who tried to design for our current situation would have failed to deliver in 20 hours the original product and would have been canceled without completing the first phase. (Additionally, I suspect any design that disconnected from real world experience.)
The business world doesn't sit around for pronouncements on high of the "correct" solution. More than once we have had to rewrite portions of our code as laws changed or we brought alien players into our system. (Like lawyers, who have a special access form to review information in some situations). We do a lot of data driven components that can be changed e
Sands of Time, yes that was good... followed by a sucky sequel cashin on the "goth look".
Half Life 2 I have refused to purchase due to steam, so I can't speak to that. (My computer is used for both gaming and my daily development: anything that looks and smells like spyware can bugger off.)
Rockstar has one meme: push the limits of what is socially acceptable. I will grant the GTA series is good, but they haven't moved *since* that idea.
And what is the jingoism/STFU comment all about? Did I deserve that swipe? I have played all of the games you mention except HL2. That means you can attack me personally? The rest of your comment was coherent, then you just start swearing and name calling??? Wisky Tango Foxtrot.
I understand your point, but to operate any complex device or system *some* knowledge transfer has to happen. JavaScript surely isn't relevant to most people's daily life, but your example on sending "large" documents... how do they learn what that means if they can't tell the difference between kilo, mega and giga? Perhaps e-mail clients shouldn't *allow* the attempt in the first place, but I don't know of any way to limit the size of the files that the user *tries* to attach. (I do know how to get the server to reject such messages on send, but that's a server configuration, not a client side feature).
Meanwhile, when the message is rejected by the server, the user will be presented with a cryptic non-delivery message.
The problem isn't the users (as much as I feel like it is some days...) but the user interfaces and software still are not idiot proof. Until we have a system where "send file->mail recipient" determines the proper pathway for the user (instead of just pulling the default e-mail client) these problems will continue.
I thought at first that the story summary was a bit harsh, but it is pretty clear that Marketing neutered the answers and produced a press release instead of an interview. I commend/. for following through with the promise to publish even though the answers were so sycophantic that it made me wince more than once. I guess that's what happens when you have millions of subscribers: you can't say anything even mildly interesting for fear of creating a target for discontent.
There was a time I thought Romero was interesting: before I actually learned anything about him and just knew he was part of ID. Talk about letting a little success go to your head... he's like a warning label for the entire concept of ego overtaking your rational thought processes.
Was any testing of SLI vs non SLI mode done? The tests I have seen really don't show the performance boost that SLI's added cost would seem to warrant. (The results I have seen are about a 25% speed increase for the SLI mode vs single card.)
Frankly, I have grown tired of the constant quest for minor speed increases and find myself playing more and more on consoles and less with "driver of the week" PC games. (Revoke my geek badge if you want). Consoles have eye-sandpaper graphics compared to a high end PC, but it's nice to spend a fraction of what you would spend on a single video card and have a complete system that you can just plop down in front of and it just works.
While the emotionally unstable RPG player comment was amusing, the reality is that we react emotionally to stories. RPGs usually provide more story content (character development, background information about the world, complex interactions between the characters) than other games, so it makes sense that RPGs would be among the first games to elicit emotional responses.
A simulated aircraft crashing at the runway doesn't have the same emotional charge without story: it is just an event in a sterile world. If on the other hand prior to takeoff we had cut-scenes showing a pilot, spouse and children boarding the plane to make a trip that was important to them, then the same crash in the same game environment might have more emotional impact. The more "connected" the player was to their story, the bigger the impact.
Other types of games can deliver story, sometimes simply through the environment (a burned out village, an isolated shoreline surrounded by jagged cliffs, etc). In some ways this is more effective for more interactive games because interactive environments tend to pull the player out of the emotional impact when the player can interact in ways unsuited to the emotion of the scene. Half life, for example: the scientists you meet throughout was a ground breaking "in game engine" way to experience the progression of the story. Assuming you listened, didn't shoot things while they talked, etc. RPGs tend to avoid that problem by literally tearing the control out of the users hands, although some more recent games have made good progress at interactive storytelling methods that don't feel so abrubt.
No... competition kills another business. Assuming they actually die off, which seems doubtful here.
Open source is a very simple proposition: it provides the "base" level of functionality that commercial vendors must excel beyond to be worthwhile to the software ecosystem. It represents a level of functionality that, due to the darn near zero replication cost of bits, is simply part of the infrastructure we can take for granted. As such, it represents the ultimate expression of "commodity" goods.
In my use of open source, I find that being able to build on such an infrastructure has opened my options with clients. Those who want or need the perks that commercial software offers pay a little bit more for the ability to build upon commercial offerings. For those clients who are looking at doing baseline activities that require functionality already available in open source products, I can do more for them by applying what would be licensing fees to development costs. That means functionality can be customized for the client, often for less than the cost of a un-configured commercial offering.
I don't weep when a company builds its business on a bedrock of sand in other industries, so why should I weep when a business thinks that providing functionality that is widely considered "solved infrastructure that is available for free" can't make the grade in the software industry? Either they provide something worth registering for (and many Opera users apparently found that), find alternate revenue sources (they seem to have done that both via licensing and advertising) or they watch as the baseline infrastructure consumes the basis of their existence.
Open source is capitalism applied to a near zero replication cost product that also happens to have easy distribution of the fixed costs. Nothing more, nothing less. The attached philosophies are simply smoke and mirrors of the idealists that are attracted to the core truth of near zero replication cost and distribution of fixed costs but then have attached their own *meaning* to those facts.
Intelligence is *not* remembering phone numbers. Intelligence is the application of ideas to solve problems. Having a strong memory can be helpful in some tasks (and certainly an amount of working store is a minimum requirement) but memorizing long chains of random data is pointless. Seeing patterns in *seemingly* random data, perhaps that requires a larger working store, but it also seems like a great place to apply computation.
I don't see the downside of the Internet, instant communication, computational power etc as far as intelligence goes. The example they give of a financial analysis: the modern analyst uses computers to build models and compute massive numbers of "what if" possibilities. The old analyst would be force to spend an immense amount of time and effort to compute one of these.
Likewise, I have on tap an immense number of resources on administrative tips and such. I could keep it all in my head, but why when I can search for solutions, bookmark them and document the least amount to be able to do it all again in the future?
I found this interesting because it looks like an idea I threw out there long ago: a light gun with a built in joystick for the thumb of your left hand where it supports the gun. This would have allowed the light gun to be used for natural aim while navigating environments with the thumb in an intuitive manner.
This takes the idea and makes it more flexible (and more palatable to the anti-toy-gun parents out there). The fundamentals are exactly as I proposed, even if the physical form is quite different. Should have patented that idea I guess:)
The fact it looks like a "remote control" actually may make it less threatening to non gamers, especially if coupled with games that don't require twitch reflexes. Considering this is the company that came out with Animal Crossings, I can see similar games opening up an interesting market. The idea that it spins ninety degrees and becomes a "classic gaming controller" opens another market. The obvious use in first person style games maintains an opening for the classic market.
If done correctly, Nintendo may bring a larger audience to the table and really tap into those markets that are not well served by the other big consoles. The big concern is how well it will work in more conventional gaming situations. From the descriptions it works quite well and frankly doesn't sound *that* different from an input viewpoint for portability of games *to* the system: it is a fancy analog stick. If it works better than the dual stick inputs for first person games it might even quell the "hard core and insecure about themselves" group that has traditionally slammed Nintendo for being for kids and rejected the system even when games like RE4 came out. Frankly, nearly anything works better than the dual stick inputs on the consoles (yeah, I have learned to cope, but it sucks compared to mouse and WASD) so there is some hope there.
I like the big N... it is a company that produces games that are fun for parties and families. They still understand that a game should be fun first and then comes the chrome, but the developers have really left them by the wayside this go around. Hopefully they will couple this kind of innovation with a more aggressive use of third parties to round out the library.
As an aside, I should point out that I own the Cube, two PS2s and an X-Box, along with my PC game collection: I'm aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and library. Nintendo is a company that I have the most *fondness* for (and anyone who complains about games reaching the point of sameness needs to at least recognize that they are doing there best to avoid that fate), Sony the company I have the most games from and the X-Box is my "co-op gaming Saturday" system. Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike is ready and waiting. My PC is for RTS and other games that elude the console input scheme.
An interesting point, but apparently the apps that were recompiled are not doing a great job at doing so. A game would seem to be an excellent candidate for register usage of this nature (they have tight inner loops and more registers means less memory access). Yet, that did not appear to be the result in the case of Far Cry.
Is it possible that diminishing returns is kicking in on the register set size, or simply bad compilers (or use thereof)?
We are now seeing the kinds of corporate sponsorships necessary to back these players so they can train and compete at the highest level worldwide
But there the kind of public interest that makes such sponsorships worthwhile? Obviously sponsors of the contests get great visibility with an important customer base. The lack of coverage these events suffer from (except in South Korea) seems to preclude any real marketing impact for individual competitors, except perhaps using first place winner's endorsement in conventional advertising saying.
People sponsor racecars because even if the car isn't first, if it is in the race people see the primary sponsorship. Of course when they teams win, they use that fact in conventional advertising as well, but small time racers can be sponsored by small companies in local circuits exactly because that visibility of sponsorship can affect people in the exact community where the business is.
Small time game players are not seen in local events that are accessible to the public at large. Large events like these only can attract large companies as sponsors, which would seem to indicate a lot of the players will go without such sponsorships. Not that sponsorships are as necessary as they are in auto racing...
The good this article tells us is that the 64 bit OS doesn't cause any significant loss of performance for the 32 bit applications that will function under it. On the other hand, the only 64 bit to 32 bit comparisons they have also show almost no differences. I think this is the most telling:
The good news is that 32-bit Far Cry (as of the 1.31 patch) runs fine under Windows 64-bit mode, with very little performance penalty. When we move to the base 64-bit version, we pick up a couple of frames per second at 1280x1024, but we defy anyone to actually notice the difference between 79.5 and 82 fps.
The good news is that the enhanced version still clocks in at 80 fps. This bodes well for 64-bit gaming, as game developers can add substantial new content and detail without sacrificing performance.
Desktop applications (even games) don't need the one thing that 64 bit computing really excels at: massive addressing space. A database server that is compiled to 64 bit code will have access to much more RAM, and thus have much better performance if RAM bound (which many DBs are). Meanwhile for POV-Ray the fastest result of 383 seconds was the 32bit application on 64 OS!
I think that it is safe to hold off on 64 bit for your personal desktop until a larger share of applications are compiled with 64 bit optimizations, but unlike the 16 -> 32 bit shift, I suspect the results will be underwhelming except for extremely memory consuming applications.
I was very disappointed with the "choose something else and no you can't have a complete package" division of Universal. I use the universal subscription to prototype solutions so I can sell my custom programming and system configurations combined with their servers. Being able to set up Microsoft products onsite for test purposes has been a huge thing and helps me move forward with few skeptical customers. But more importantly, it has helped me move more of *their* product because my demonstrations show in a concrete way what benefits specific combinations of server products have.
So now I have to decide if an extra grand a year is worth a downgraded subscription or if I just work more on the open source side of the fence (as I provide both types of solutions, depending on need and capabilities: there is little need for Exchange in a five person company, for example... a bare bones LAMP box can host e-mail and web solutions quite fine).
I thought it was "developers, developers, developers" because they realized that the mistake that Apple made back in the day was a lack of inexpensive development tools which deterred developers, whereas during that era Microsoft made NT development tools quite accessible. As I matured as a developer, Universal because a great "expensive but reasonable for what I get" product. The new product mix makes it clear they are targeting "enterprise" developers and attempting to drive small time custom programmers off.
So I read the article, and all I find is a diatribe by an apparent madman. Why are we taking user interface design from a person who tries to send "rotated and cropped" pictures to blind musicians? I thought at first it was an attempt at irony, but apparently it is just part of the stream of consciousness that produced misused angle quotes, improper grammatical constructs and just plain odd statements.
Examine his (central) point about corners, for example. Yes, corners *can* be hit easily with the mouse. Isn't that a long way to travel to achieve ones goals? His point about scrolling with the spacebar press is on target (and a feature I appreciated), but then he goes on a tangent about the biggest key on the keyboard producing "nothingness". Considering that each and every word must be separated from each and every other word with "nothingness", I fail to see where its place of honor is diminished by the lack of pixels being illuminated by its use.
Crying shame too: usability *is* important and should be a central consideration. Sadly, I don't think this guy is the one to much of that consideration. Maybe once he grasps the utilization of natural language a bit more, I would consider his ideas on more natural interfaces.
I'm a geek who does administration and programming in Windows and Linux realms, am fairly aware of my acronym soup and yet this left me, um, cold. For those who don't feel like doing the research:
MPI: Message Passing Interface, a standard for parallel processing environment message passing. MPI-2: Extended version of MPI. MPI-IO: Parallel input/output extensions for MPI, included in MPI-2 ROMIO: An implementation of these extensions. CFD: Computational Fluid Dynamics (a good candidate for parallel processing, thus the interest in the above).
Of course, the fact I had to look them up means I have no idea about implementations, but at least others won't have to wonder what all that was about.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. Is it possible that taking 11 years to (maybe) get a Bachelors is "special needs"? Why am I wasting my time with someone so obviously lacking potential?
Oh, because I'm actually a human who understands that not everyone is perfect. I have *more* compassion for people who were born with a disability that limits them than I do for someone with a self inflicted failure rate through.
...is why we use GAIM to communicate in our company. (Well, except the garbage file transfers.) We have a Jabber server that supports encryption and use that for all of our in-house messaging. This is important as we are a geographically distributed team, we need a secure, reliable chat mechanism to collaborate quickly and easily on code. We don't want or need all the garbage that comes with of IMs, and the fact we can link to other services in GAIM makes it our one stop shopping solution for IMs when we *do* need to talk to someone with a more mainsteam IM.
:) :( smiles. But for a corporate solution, GAIM + Jabber makes a lot of sense and I would hate to see it become the playground that MSN has become.
Of course, we are professional developers who don't need to send flash animations, pictures or even more than the basic
What percentage of kids are you including in your "special needs"? Downs syndrome and similar or are we talking about underachievers too? Who makes the determination on who gets and education and who is relegated to an institution? You? Perhaps we should parade all children past you for your stamp of approval before being allowed access to the public school system... that should cut down spending quite a bit.
Somehow I see the idea of forced institutionalization of anyone who doesn't meet your standards to increase the amount of money available for those who do... interesting. Where does the money for the prison you will construct for these children come from? Why probably from the smart kids. That's no good.
Here's a suggestion, lets shove a gun upside the head of any child who doesn't meet your approval for the public school system and just fix in once and for all. Is *that* your private utopian vision? If so, what makes you think you meet *my* approval, and what would that mean if you were presented for review in front of *my* commission for fitness as a human. Perhaps *my* requirement is that a person have some shred of respect and compassion for people other then himself.
Bang.
As someone who consults on the software side for insurance companies I can tell you why "spreading risk" is diminishing. The original intent was to take the "pool" of insureds and insure everyone based on the risks present in the pool. However, if I'm selling insurance based on the "pool" price and my competitor becomes selective (say, not insuring those who smoke) the competitor's pool risk rate is lower than mine and he can either sell at the same price and make more profits or he can sell lower.
Now, the real profit in insurance is in the long term investments that the premiums are placed in, so they will sell at a lower price to gain more premium dollars to invest. (Free market selection by the consumer ensures the consumer will look to the lower cost options available.) We (the consumers) have accepted the fact that smokers and drinkers are going to be harder to insure. These are "lifestyle" choices. Likewise, I pay extra for my rock climbing: that fall outside the "norm". (I had to admit to it though because otherwise if I fell to my death they would have cause to not pay on my life insurance). People don't seem to mind dividing the risk pool on items that are *within the control* of the insured.
What has become offensive to even some *within* the insurance industry is the idea of dividing the risk pool on "uncontrolled" factors. There is a reason why they ask about your family history of disease: it is to partition on your genetic probability for specific diseases. Where the gene testing takes things further is simply increasing the accuracy of those risk assessments and adding new assessments that were impossible before.
Unfortunately, without state run insurance or strong regulations you end up with a competitive environment that selects for those companies that are "managing the risk pool" they accept. Fair it isn't (if your idea of insurance was based on the risk pool spreading costs) but it is the profitable way to go. I have written neural nets that take the risk pool and assess a new application based on the prior risks that were insured by the company. Some interesting trends came out of doing so: you end up doing ethnic discrimination as it turns out there are strong links between race and risk rates for some diseases. Eventually the idea of risk pools will be fully replaced with personal risk rates assuming no regulation to prevent it. (This is already true in the corporate insurance world where there are "uninsurable" companies and no law requires they be insurable for some types of insurance).
Whatever the fair use status of Google's work, they have given everyone the option to opt out. I'm sure the lawsuit represents "opting out" and so those works have been pulled. When everyone *except* the Author's Guild works are represented in the index, I suspect some members of the guild will reconsider why they are members. I don't see Google knuckling under to extortionist tactics when most of the industry seems to understand that they stand to profit from having works accessible (even if a few others have grumbled a bit).
There was an earlier comment about an author who was objecting to the idea that a screen reader could allow the blind to access an e-book. The idea that he had total control over his work trumped any moral objections to preventing the blind from accessing a work as well as any argument that showed he stood to profit *more* from allowing that market to exist. For him, it was control first and last. The author's guild is in the same mindset... in both cases they stand to lose customers by stubbornly adhering to their rights. So let them opt out and call it a day, as only those who do opt out stand to lose.
While I agree that the AJAX term has become abused, the reason for the attractiveness of such applications goes beyond server-push. For me the magic comes from zero installation. While I'm doubtful about spreadsheets and word processors (at this point in time), there are many applications where "just existing" as a resource that can be used is a great thing.
It goes farther than the install issue though: it is the maintenance issue that really makes this work for me. No need to wonder if all the machines were updated with the proper DLLs, data sources and version of the code. But most of all, rolling out an update is as simple as updating the web with the new functionality. Bug fixes are instantly deployed to everyone in the organization. As an added bonus, users can't squirrel away data where you can't easily back it up (it's all in your database which is backed up to your schedule, whether the client machine is online or not).
Right now I see no reason to create ERP type systems that have client side requirements beyond a browser. Yes, there are still some UI issues that are not perfect, but the use of AJAX (as in real background data transfers) has removed almost all of my prior complaints about doing software this way. Gone are the massive load times (you can expand data as needed with small loads), bulk save problems (just save what changed) and application compatibility problems.
The fact that these are being extended out to more traditional "desktop" applications, even if they are not perfect yet, shows how mature the web client environment has become. I'm not going to throw office out, but I *am* excited by really cool looking JavaScript applications when you can reduce your support call load to nearly zero in regards to the classic DLL hell situations and completely removing the possibility of down-level applications. (The latter idea comes in real handy when your application is deployed to over a thousand companies.) The downside is that we have to be *real* careful to maintain true five nines availability... which means more backed hardware and work.
At the end of the day, this simply takes what was good about web applications (centralized administration with strong availability guarantees, shades of the mainframe era...) and eliminates what was bad about them (really poor, non interactive user interfaces). If that means that word processing documents will incrementally appear on a server so I don't have to worry about users destroying their own work (and we can keep a weeks worth of incremental revisions for recovery)... I might even look at the word processing.
There is a big difference between rewriting because you feel like it, and rewriting because the universe has changed. There may be some fields where the specifications are nailed down enough that you can design the entire application, but let me lead you through a real world application that I was and still am involved with.
In the beginning, the application was a small Microsoft Access database with a handful of users. It was created by someone with only a passing knowledge of third normal form and some hideous design decisions. I was hired to make it usable, which I did by normalizing the data structures and rewriting the most offensive user interface components. This application was used and exteneded continuously for a few years before the corporate owner of the application realized that what we were doing could be useful to others, and so the program was ported to a Web Application using ASP.
Clearly, not much can be salvaged between Access Basic and ASP for the UI, so that was completely rewritten, but the underlying data structures were shared between the two (as were queries, report layouts and such). The database was migranted to SQL server for both front ends. Once it was online it was discovered that some of the requirements for the online users were different from the local users, so many modifications were made over time to improve the experience for the online users. This was successful, so instead of just serving other companies which played the same role in the industry as the original company, other industry players in other roles wanted to participate as well.
So we added interfaces, functions and data structures to the web app to support the other industry players (in the end we ended up with six levels of the industry interacting in our system). Quite clearly we had overloaded our original design, so from time to time we would reconstruct portions of our system to be more flexible and support a more realistic world view. However, development deadlines and ever increasing demands for features caused some cruft to remain. Sometimes modules had to be rewritten to support the new requirements (as you can imagine, a commissioning system designed for the lowest tiers of and industry broke when extended to all the layers that existed).
That brings us to the current day. We are rewriting the application, piece by piece, in ASP.NET/C# using many best practices which were difficult to implement is VBScript (an accursed language if there ever was one). The users have no idea which portions have been rewritten as many of the changes have been in the creation of business objects that improve the testability, scalability, and maintainability of the code. (I still have nightmares about COM objects and IIS lockdown thereof...)
The point is, we had no idea that this project would balloon from a simple Access database to an industry access point where thousands of companies interoperate each day. To say "design up front" when dealing with the real world is nonsense: design for flexibility is a great idea but breaks down when you go from a 20 hour hack job database to a multi-tier enterprise system.
No, the real answer is to iterate. Iterate fast and furious, learning where you need to go next and then doing it. Anyone with a rule on "don't rewrite" in our situation would be trying to bolt thousands of hits per minute on top of Access, and that is just stupid. Anyone who tried to design for our current situation would have failed to deliver in 20 hours the original product and would have been canceled without completing the first phase. (Additionally, I suspect any design that disconnected from real world experience.)
The business world doesn't sit around for pronouncements on high of the "correct" solution. More than once we have had to rewrite portions of our code as laws changed or we brought alien players into our system. (Like lawyers, who have a special access form to review information in some situations). We do a lot of data driven components that can be changed e
Sands of Time, yes that was good... followed by a sucky sequel cashin on the "goth look".
Half Life 2 I have refused to purchase due to steam, so I can't speak to that. (My computer is used for both gaming and my daily development: anything that looks and smells like spyware can bugger off.)
Rockstar has one meme: push the limits of what is socially acceptable. I will grant the GTA series is good, but they haven't moved *since* that idea.
And what is the jingoism/STFU comment all about? Did I deserve that swipe? I have played all of the games you mention except HL2. That means you can attack me personally? The rest of your comment was coherent, then you just start swearing and name calling??? Wisky Tango Foxtrot.
Who?
I understand your point, but to operate any complex device or system *some* knowledge transfer has to happen. JavaScript surely isn't relevant to most people's daily life, but your example on sending "large" documents... how do they learn what that means if they can't tell the difference between kilo, mega and giga? Perhaps e-mail clients shouldn't *allow* the attempt in the first place, but I don't know of any way to limit the size of the files that the user *tries* to attach. (I do know how to get the server to reject such messages on send, but that's a server configuration, not a client side feature).
Meanwhile, when the message is rejected by the server, the user will be presented with a cryptic non-delivery message.
The problem isn't the users (as much as I feel like it is some days...) but the user interfaces and software still are not idiot proof. Until we have a system where "send file->mail recipient" determines the proper pathway for the user (instead of just pulling the default e-mail client) these problems will continue.
I thought at first that the story summary was a bit harsh, but it is pretty clear that Marketing neutered the answers and produced a press release instead of an interview. I commend /. for following through with the promise to publish even though the answers were so sycophantic that it made me wince more than once. I guess that's what happens when you have millions of subscribers: you can't say anything even mildly interesting for fear of creating a target for discontent.
There was a time I thought Romero was interesting: before I actually learned anything about him and just knew he was part of ID. Talk about letting a little success go to your head... he's like a warning label for the entire concept of ego overtaking your rational thought processes.
Was any testing of SLI vs non SLI mode done? The tests I have seen really don't show the performance boost that SLI's added cost would seem to warrant. (The results I have seen are about a 25% speed increase for the SLI mode vs single card.)
Frankly, I have grown tired of the constant quest for minor speed increases and find myself playing more and more on consoles and less with "driver of the week" PC games. (Revoke my geek badge if you want). Consoles have eye-sandpaper graphics compared to a high end PC, but it's nice to spend a fraction of what you would spend on a single video card and have a complete system that you can just plop down in front of and it just works.
While the emotionally unstable RPG player comment was amusing, the reality is that we react emotionally to stories. RPGs usually provide more story content (character development, background information about the world, complex interactions between the characters) than other games, so it makes sense that RPGs would be among the first games to elicit emotional responses.
A simulated aircraft crashing at the runway doesn't have the same emotional charge without story: it is just an event in a sterile world. If on the other hand prior to takeoff we had cut-scenes showing a pilot, spouse and children boarding the plane to make a trip that was important to them, then the same crash in the same game environment might have more emotional impact. The more "connected" the player was to their story, the bigger the impact.
Other types of games can deliver story, sometimes simply through the environment (a burned out village, an isolated shoreline surrounded by jagged cliffs, etc). In some ways this is more effective for more interactive games because interactive environments tend to pull the player out of the emotional impact when the player can interact in ways unsuited to the emotion of the scene. Half life, for example: the scientists you meet throughout was a ground breaking "in game engine" way to experience the progression of the story. Assuming you listened, didn't shoot things while they talked, etc. RPGs tend to avoid that problem by literally tearing the control out of the users hands, although some more recent games have made good progress at interactive storytelling methods that don't feel so abrubt.
No... competition kills another business. Assuming they actually die off, which seems doubtful here.
Open source is a very simple proposition: it provides the "base" level of functionality that commercial vendors must excel beyond to be worthwhile to the software ecosystem. It represents a level of functionality that, due to the darn near zero replication cost of bits, is simply part of the infrastructure we can take for granted. As such, it represents the ultimate expression of "commodity" goods.
In my use of open source, I find that being able to build on such an infrastructure has opened my options with clients. Those who want or need the perks that commercial software offers pay a little bit more for the ability to build upon commercial offerings. For those clients who are looking at doing baseline activities that require functionality already available in open source products, I can do more for them by applying what would be licensing fees to development costs. That means functionality can be customized for the client, often for less than the cost of a un-configured commercial offering.
I don't weep when a company builds its business on a bedrock of sand in other industries, so why should I weep when a business thinks that providing functionality that is widely considered "solved infrastructure that is available for free" can't make the grade in the software industry? Either they provide something worth registering for (and many Opera users apparently found that), find alternate revenue sources (they seem to have done that both via licensing and advertising) or they watch as the baseline infrastructure consumes the basis of their existence.
Open source is capitalism applied to a near zero replication cost product that also happens to have easy distribution of the fixed costs. Nothing more, nothing less. The attached philosophies are simply smoke and mirrors of the idealists that are attracted to the core truth of near zero replication cost and distribution of fixed costs but then have attached their own *meaning* to those facts.
Intelligence is *not* remembering phone numbers. Intelligence is the application of ideas to solve problems. Having a strong memory can be helpful in some tasks (and certainly an amount of working store is a minimum requirement) but memorizing long chains of random data is pointless. Seeing patterns in *seemingly* random data, perhaps that requires a larger working store, but it also seems like a great place to apply computation.
I don't see the downside of the Internet, instant communication, computational power etc as far as intelligence goes. The example they give of a financial analysis: the modern analyst uses computers to build models and compute massive numbers of "what if" possibilities. The old analyst would be force to spend an immense amount of time and effort to compute one of these.
Likewise, I have on tap an immense number of resources on administrative tips and such. I could keep it all in my head, but why when I can search for solutions, bookmark them and document the least amount to be able to do it all again in the future?
Actually, I remap to ESDF, but nobody would know what I was talking about :)
I found this interesting because it looks like an idea I threw out there long ago: a light gun with a built in joystick for the thumb of your left hand where it supports the gun. This would have allowed the light gun to be used for natural aim while navigating environments with the thumb in an intuitive manner.
:)
This takes the idea and makes it more flexible (and more palatable to the anti-toy-gun parents out there). The fundamentals are exactly as I proposed, even if the physical form is quite different. Should have patented that idea I guess
The fact it looks like a "remote control" actually may make it less threatening to non gamers, especially if coupled with games that don't require twitch reflexes. Considering this is the company that came out with Animal Crossings, I can see similar games opening up an interesting market. The idea that it spins ninety degrees and becomes a "classic gaming controller" opens another market. The obvious use in first person style games maintains an opening for the classic market.
If done correctly, Nintendo may bring a larger audience to the table and really tap into those markets that are not well served by the other big consoles. The big concern is how well it will work in more conventional gaming situations. From the descriptions it works quite well and frankly doesn't sound *that* different from an input viewpoint for portability of games *to* the system: it is a fancy analog stick. If it works better than the dual stick inputs for first person games it might even quell the "hard core and insecure about themselves" group that has traditionally slammed Nintendo for being for kids and rejected the system even when games like RE4 came out. Frankly, nearly anything works better than the dual stick inputs on the consoles (yeah, I have learned to cope, but it sucks compared to mouse and WASD) so there is some hope there.
I like the big N... it is a company that produces games that are fun for parties and families. They still understand that a game should be fun first and then comes the chrome, but the developers have really left them by the wayside this go around. Hopefully they will couple this kind of innovation with a more aggressive use of third parties to round out the library.
As an aside, I should point out that I own the Cube, two PS2s and an X-Box, along with my PC game collection: I'm aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and library. Nintendo is a company that I have the most *fondness* for (and anyone who complains about games reaching the point of sameness needs to at least recognize that they are doing there best to avoid that fate), Sony the company I have the most games from and the X-Box is my "co-op gaming Saturday" system. Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike is ready and waiting. My PC is for RTS and other games that elude the console input scheme.
An interesting point, but apparently the apps that were recompiled are not doing a great job at doing so. A game would seem to be an excellent candidate for register usage of this nature (they have tight inner loops and more registers means less memory access). Yet, that did not appear to be the result in the case of Far Cry.
Is it possible that diminishing returns is kicking in on the register set size, or simply bad compilers (or use thereof)?
s/But there/But where/
s/saying.//
I hate why I cut and paste the wrong edit version.
But there the kind of public interest that makes such sponsorships worthwhile? Obviously sponsors of the contests get great visibility with an important customer base. The lack of coverage these events suffer from (except in South Korea) seems to preclude any real marketing impact for individual competitors, except perhaps using first place winner's endorsement in conventional advertising saying.
People sponsor racecars because even if the car isn't first, if it is in the race people see the primary sponsorship. Of course when they teams win, they use that fact in conventional advertising as well, but small time racers can be sponsored by small companies in local circuits exactly because that visibility of sponsorship can affect people in the exact community where the business is.
Small time game players are not seen in local events that are accessible to the public at large. Large events like these only can attract large companies as sponsors, which would seem to indicate a lot of the players will go without such sponsorships. Not that sponsorships are as necessary as they are in auto racing...
Desktop applications (even games) don't need the one thing that 64 bit computing really excels at: massive addressing space. A database server that is compiled to 64 bit code will have access to much more RAM, and thus have much better performance if RAM bound (which many DBs are). Meanwhile for POV-Ray the fastest result of 383 seconds was the 32bit application on 64 OS!
I think that it is safe to hold off on 64 bit for your personal desktop until a larger share of applications are compiled with 64 bit optimizations, but unlike the 16 -> 32 bit shift, I suspect the results will be underwhelming except for extremely memory consuming applications.
I was very disappointed with the "choose something else and no you can't have a complete package" division of Universal. I use the universal subscription to prototype solutions so I can sell my custom programming and system configurations combined with their servers. Being able to set up Microsoft products onsite for test purposes has been a huge thing and helps me move forward with few skeptical customers. But more importantly, it has helped me move more of *their* product because my demonstrations show in a concrete way what benefits specific combinations of server products have.
So now I have to decide if an extra grand a year is worth a downgraded subscription or if I just work more on the open source side of the fence (as I provide both types of solutions, depending on need and capabilities: there is little need for Exchange in a five person company, for example... a bare bones LAMP box can host e-mail and web solutions quite fine).
I thought it was "developers, developers, developers" because they realized that the mistake that Apple made back in the day was a lack of inexpensive development tools which deterred developers, whereas during that era Microsoft made NT development tools quite accessible. As I matured as a developer, Universal because a great "expensive but reasonable for what I get" product. The new product mix makes it clear they are targeting "enterprise" developers and attempting to drive small time custom programmers off.
So I read the article, and all I find is a diatribe by an apparent madman. Why are we taking user interface design from a person who tries to send "rotated and cropped" pictures to blind musicians? I thought at first it was an attempt at irony, but apparently it is just part of the stream of consciousness that produced misused angle quotes, improper grammatical constructs and just plain odd statements.
Examine his (central) point about corners, for example. Yes, corners *can* be hit easily with the mouse. Isn't that a long way to travel to achieve ones goals? His point about scrolling with the spacebar press is on target (and a feature I appreciated), but then he goes on a tangent about the biggest key on the keyboard producing "nothingness". Considering that each and every word must be separated from each and every other word with "nothingness", I fail to see where its place of honor is diminished by the lack of pixels being illuminated by its use.
Crying shame too: usability *is* important and should be a central consideration. Sadly, I don't think this guy is the one to much of that consideration. Maybe once he grasps the utilization of natural language a bit more, I would consider his ideas on more natural interfaces.
I'm a geek who does administration and programming in Windows and Linux realms, am fairly aware of my acronym soup and yet this left me, um, cold. For those who don't feel like doing the research:
MPI: Message Passing Interface, a standard for parallel processing environment message passing.
MPI-2: Extended version of MPI.
MPI-IO: Parallel input/output extensions for MPI, included in MPI-2
ROMIO: An implementation of these extensions.
CFD: Computational Fluid Dynamics (a good candidate for parallel processing, thus the interest in the above).
Of course, the fact I had to look them up means I have no idea about implementations, but at least others won't have to wonder what all that was about.