Just got a battlefield ad when I came to the page =)
Anyways, if EA wants to open their own store ala Steam I wish them all the luck in the world, but I would seriously hope that EA and Valve would allow their games to be inter-sold on the other platforms. I for one don't give a rats butt about Origin, I'd miss EA games from steam. Vice versa, if I was an Origin fan, I'd hate not seeing Steam / SteamPowered games being sold through the service. Ditto for Games for windows.
Maybe what this really needs in the end is a great big cross industry standard for this sort of inter-operability. The worst thing that happened to the PC markets (besides the console resurgence of course) was the fact that every developer went off and wrote everything new and incompatible, etc.. because they refuse to work together. Hate MS I do, but at least they tried to have a standard for gaming systems development on PC's. Of course it was their standard for their OS only, but at least it was something.
At least here in Canada, salaries/wages are taken off the revenues before they calculate the tax. If you've formed a corporation as an indie developer you can (as the corporation) write off the salary as a cost of doing business, but don't get ahead of yourself. You as the individual working for your own company still pays personal taxes on all gains, so in the end do you really win more than just being a sole proprietorship? That depends on a ton of variables.
"But largely because of deferred revenue, deductions for executive stock options and a variety of accounting requirements, the company officially reports a net loss for the period. And the company reports that it paid out $98 million in cash for taxes worldwide in those years. "
These are all standard tax aversion (not evasion) ways of knocking back revenues that any company can exercise. Deferred revenue is especially beneficial to corporations who's revenues are cyclical.
"Several tax experts noted that one of the companyâ(TM)s biggest tax advantages is a tool available to all companies, a deduction related to the stock gains on options exercised by its executives. (Tax practitioners also said that the companyâ(TM)s losses, under generally accepted accounting principles, provided the most meaningful picture and reflected the standard approach used by other companies.)"
This basically means I am issued say 100k options by my company. Those shares are valued at $1 today. When the I actually converts that option into a real share, the price will always be $1. Lets say after 5 years I decide to convert my shares into real ones. I pay my employer $100k for the conversion. Lets assume that in those 5 years, the shares have gone from $1 to $5. In that case, the value of those shares are worth $500k street value. The corporation is in essence eating the $400k difference and declaring it as a loss on their books because if they sold that same option today, they'd make 5x the money on the open market. Now why corporations issues options to begin with and when they're allowed to declare them as losses (for tax purposes) can be considered as something that people may want to look into, but the basic concept of how it works really is sane.
One last side note, they specifically listed this tax dodge as an executive thing, but any employee in the company (or not even employees) can be issued options for various reasons. Its pretty much the life blood of a lot of start-ups who can't actually support paying their staff what they're worth. I've known friends who worked at EA in the past (poor them), and they'd issue options to developers, heck maybe everyone in the company if they wanted.
1. Raii gives you the -ability- to reclaim resources after a fault, and that's something Java's had since 1.0. The new IO construct just means that IO resources are AUTOMATICALLY reclaimed when problems occur. The meaning is simply that dev's don't have to worry about it
2. If you mean writing a hell of a lot of useless boiler plate and trouble laden code to deal with things that devs are isolated from in Java, then yes. Flip this around. C++ is fixing problems through language, libraries, etc.. that Java has long been able to do safely for years
What the heck does a structure have to do with protesting? I drove by the ugly little shanty village many times over the years and I'm not surprised the the user rich of the area wanted to get them out of there. I'd say if anything, they make Vancouver city and themselves look like a bunch of idiots, not the Chinese officials living in palatial mansions.
Their message was voiced and voiced and voiced and nothing was solved. I don't consider protest a profession, but more of a societal motivator. If nothing moves then its just a bunch of people yelling into the wind.
Its hard to lock competing services out of a wide open eco-sytem. Take the code and write your own Android-compatible device and add all the completion you like. Isn't Bing a prominent player in one of the manufacturer's phones aout of the box? You seems really closed and bullyish to me.
Just take a step back for a moment, the fact that Google is being probed is a good thing for them and everyone else. If the probes find truly anti-competitive behaviour (which I seriously doubt based on public info) Google can correct their behaviour and hopefully learn some valuable lessons about good will. The fact that their probed at all means that Google's 'made it' to the big leagues where their services are moving from very nice to have to near essential for many. Of course if Google escapes all probes mostly unscathed, it'll re-enforce the mantra of "Do no Evil" for those afraid that they've been slipping too much into the corporate machine.
So your ultimate solution is what now? I mean the sun causes cancer, but unfortunately for everyone, its essential to live. Why is this relevant? Well, if standardized testing and general schooling is so bad, what do you presume we replace it with? Rich people could get personal tutoring by experts in fields that they find meaningful. The rest of us should just learn the job our parents taught us because we get really really good at that one thing. Globalization would die because hell, if you can't generally gauge the performance of someone from half way around the world, why would I want to hire them? There are dozens of situations where the lack of standard testing would cause the end of the known world, but I'll save my breath.
If your teacher friend thinks that standardized testing is so broken, then they should get off their asses and come up with something better. I think you'll find a large track record of people trying to make changes here or there in order to make things better, and I can't see why your friend couldn't do the same.
Coming from a legacy modernization project, just because people wrote programs 10, 20, 30 years ago doesn't mean that the code was good, or that the developers knew what they were doing. One would hope that decades of development experience would teach a well rounded set of skills and often it does.
To sum up, a 5 year out of school brat learning technology X is any less capable than a 5 year out of school brat learning technology Y in the 80's/90's.
Its news because when someone notable decided to criticize the crappy unholy mess that was CUPS administration, something actually got done about it. Now adays CUPS is still not perfect, but leaps and bounds better than the heaping pile (UI wise) than it was in years past.
Well, every manufacturer gets a huge block of MAC's and should be releasing them uniquely, so if you ever get collisions it likely that you're:
1. A device manufacturer who's business among other things is to assign the MAC addresses of devices you produce 2. Have a habbit of changing MAC addresses for some bazaar reason 3. Using certain flavors of failover where the NIC's are paired on MAC level
They did, but after they started to run streetview, they also began (at some point thereafter?) Wifi access point analysis as well. I'd imagine by this point they've completely supplanted their prior skyhook feeds.
I think the appropriate words are 'work in progress' to describe a lot of the facets currently available through G+.. here's hoping the have the time and effort to really push em out sooner than later.
Huh? I read a few lines down the first link and the guy was able to have his gmail account unlocked without needing to talk to a real person. What's the issue again?
Going through the release notes, there really are a ton of neat and cool features going into the language. I hope that Eclipse will be ready for me to start playing around with some of the ones that are more IDE centric are supported!
For those that have technical understanding of this works, lets use Occam's razor to describe the scenario:
Premise: Google went around and collected a ton of open wireless data in order to build a comprehensive list of wireless access point data in order to disable their dependence on a competing service known as skyhook. This is a good investment for Google since they were driving around anyways as a function of capturing Google street view data for said areas.
Along with their scanning for fixed access points, they performed full raw dumps of the data captured out of the air (most likely) using a piece COTS who's purpose was to capture data. The result was that all available data which includes at least in part: unencrypted communications messages, all transmitting MAC addresses, and possibly IP address of said MAC addresses.
Just to note the reality of this from a well educated observer: I'll put good money on at least 90% of all the captured IP addresses being behind NAT's, and that 99.9999% of all MAC addresses captured have never been detected or tracked by Google in any way (The remainder being form their own corp computers).
Scenario 1: Google was trying to scrape all of this absoltutely useless data because they have higgs bozon based tracking hardware that hunt down computers by their MAC address and continually track their locations in real time making any hope of you being anonymous impossible
Scenario 2: Their scanner was set too aggresive in the capture modes and only after scanning through the data did some developer (who may not have even setup the scanner) start reading through the traces and go, um, oops.
Scenario 2: Their scanner was set too aggresive in the capture modes by a developer just in case there was a better way of applying the wifi triangulation algorithm with more data later on. Said developer may have not appreciated the privacy can of worms as a result.
What would you think is more likely? Hint: It isn't #1
I'd say its all relative. I'm a movie guy who loves movies, and having the ability to plunk one in at any time I feel like is important to me. For music, all I really care about is that there's a body of music that I generally like to tap from. It really doesn't matter about one specific song from one specific artist as much as the ability to consume the silence. You also seem to shrug off the fact that most pop-type artists have a very low shelf life. In order for that to be true, most people will only 'use' a song for a very short time and move on, much like your attitude toward movies.
Ultimately what this cones down to is that everyone values content in wildly varying degrees, and trying to pidgeon hole everyone into the same mold is not possible/practical.
The pic/video is just uploaded, but you actively have to take the step of sharing it with others explicitly. It won't just be uploaded and marked public or something equally horrific.
I agree that Facebook has some serious reasons to be nervous about their value, but I don't think the stink has truly set in with investment circles yet.
I would say that MySpace was bought somewhat after its swan song because of perception and indomitably. Facebook hasn't even reached the peak of its success yet, though I can start to see the tip of the mountain myself.
I could make the same stability claims about most internet driven businesses. Google's strong now, but who says they couldn't be shown up by any number of up-starts? Its happened before, and it can happen again. Google's plus is that they're actually trying to diversify. Having dozens of unique and compelling properties makes it hard for someone to come in and replace lock-stock.
PON (Passive Optical Network) is being rolled out here (in Canada) very slowly for new sub-divisions and a few niche clientèle, but its a far far journey to replace millions existing installations with fibre solutions that still today end up being terminated KM down the road at central offices. At least PON has the advantage that: 1. It can mux at least a few customers along a single fibre 2. Its purely passive, so there's no need to actually power the mux/demux in the field
I think the ultimate solution will hopefully be something like in-field fibre DLC's with 'cables' of fibre strands being fed back to the CO's
Copper is the analogy for Analog signal communications unless you want to move forward on your tie raid some more thanks?
Working with a non-major telco / telco project directly related to this area, I think a 7 year sunset is absolutely untenable. There is so much time and money invested in to the physical switches themselves that companies aren't just going to up and throw them away because the gov wants a modern Telco network. Set a reasonable sunset to allow for the capital expenditures depreciate and have them buy into future-proof 'industry standard' technologies once they materialize.
PS: PSTN is the back-haul lines that inter-connect all the telcos together and not the end user experience, so a switch to a new standard wouldn't be such a big deal if (once again the rub) if it wasn't for the cost of switching equipment that's currently in place and incompatible with said services.
for my invite.. snooze. My coworker has friends in Google and he got his, but even he can't invite me to try it out. Any service that people can't use is useless.. tyvm.
So what your saying is that the iPod is for the unwashed masses that are too ignorant to use PC's? Yikes, don't be the marketing guy for a global computer company, please.
Oh, and please please list these successful verticals you talk about because I really want to know. I say the Apple iPod commercial showing how doctors and musicians, and xyz used the ipad and I laughed out out at how ridiculous it and the 'apps' they presented were. The idea that an Ipad would ever supplant a laptop or the such for someone working in finance is laughable. The only one that was truly believable was the kids play book thing which I'll agree is a meaningful vertical for tablets (children's play toy).
Nah, DOS may have been used by companies, but it couldn't hold a candle to UNIX in the earlier days of 'personal computers'. DOS was the cheaper equivalent to MAC computers of the day and they won based on cost, volume, and the number of applications it supported and one could say they definitely didn't win because they looked better than MAC computers. I don't think any direct comparisons between then and now can be drawn definitively. If this plays out just as the PC wars did, then Apple will see an early market advantage evaporate as volumes increase and the early adopters become irrelevant because of commodity players.
Oh, and just as Java took over the corporate world, I see Java taking over mobile (again) for the same reason. Once we start getting 500+mhz dual core processors on our phones, will we really care that they're compiled into Java / ObjectiveC / C? (Games markedly exempt which is still the case on PC games today).
Slashdot Mirror
Just got a battlefield ad when I came to the page =)
Anyways, if EA wants to open their own store ala Steam I wish them all the luck in the world, but I would seriously hope that EA and Valve would allow their games to be inter-sold on the other platforms. I for one don't give a rats butt about Origin, I'd miss EA games from steam. Vice versa, if I was an Origin fan, I'd hate not seeing Steam / SteamPowered games being sold through the service. Ditto for Games for windows.
Maybe what this really needs in the end is a great big cross industry standard for this sort of inter-operability. The worst thing that happened to the PC markets (besides the console resurgence of course) was the fact that every developer went off and wrote everything new and incompatible, etc.. because they refuse to work together. Hate MS I do, but at least they tried to have a standard for gaming systems development on PC's. Of course it was their standard for their OS only, but at least it was something.
http://www.archive.org/about/dmca.php
At least here in Canada, salaries/wages are taken off the revenues before they calculate the tax. If you've formed a corporation as an indie developer you can (as the corporation) write off the salary as a cost of doing business, but don't get ahead of yourself. You as the individual working for your own company still pays personal taxes on all gains, so in the end do you really win more than just being a sole proprietorship? That depends on a ton of variables.
"But largely because of deferred revenue, deductions for
executive stock options and a variety of accounting requirements, the company officially reports a net loss for the period. And the company reports that it paid out $98 million in cash for taxes worldwide in those years. "
These are all standard tax aversion (not evasion) ways of knocking back revenues that any company can exercise. Deferred revenue is especially beneficial to corporations who's revenues are cyclical.
"Several tax experts noted that one of the companyâ(TM)s biggest tax advantages is a tool available to all companies, a deduction related to the stock gains on options exercised by its executives. (Tax practitioners also said that the companyâ(TM)s losses, under generally accepted accounting principles, provided the most meaningful picture and reflected the standard approach used by other companies.)"
This basically means I am issued say 100k options by my company. Those shares are valued at $1 today. When the I actually converts that option into a real share, the price will always be $1. Lets say after 5 years I decide to convert my shares into real ones. I pay my employer $100k for the conversion. Lets assume that in those 5 years, the shares have gone from $1 to $5. In that case, the value of those shares are worth $500k street value. The corporation is in essence eating the $400k difference and declaring it as a loss on their books because if they sold that same option today, they'd make 5x the money on the open market. Now why corporations issues options to begin with and when they're allowed to declare them as losses (for tax purposes) can be considered as something that people may want to look into, but the basic concept of how it works really is sane.
One last side note, they specifically listed this tax dodge as an executive thing, but any employee in the company (or not even employees) can be issued options for various reasons. Its pretty much the life blood of a lot of start-ups who can't actually support paying their staff what they're worth. I've known friends who worked at EA in the past (poor them), and they'd issue options to developers, heck maybe everyone in the company if they wanted.
Thanks for the object lesson dick.
1. Raii gives you the -ability- to reclaim resources after a fault, and that's something Java's had since 1.0. The new IO construct just means that IO resources are AUTOMATICALLY reclaimed when problems occur. The meaning is simply that dev's don't have to worry about it
2. If you mean writing a hell of a lot of useless boiler plate and trouble laden code to deal with things that devs are isolated from in Java, then yes. Flip this around. C++ is fixing problems through language, libraries, etc.. that Java has long been able to do safely for years
What the heck does a structure have to do with protesting? I drove by the ugly little shanty village many times over the years and I'm not surprised the the user rich of the area wanted to get them out of there. I'd say if anything, they make Vancouver city and themselves look like a bunch of idiots, not the Chinese officials living in palatial mansions.
Their message was voiced and voiced and voiced and nothing was solved. I don't consider protest a profession, but more of a societal motivator. If nothing moves then its just a bunch of people yelling into the wind.
Its hard to lock competing services out of a wide open eco-sytem. Take the code and write your own Android-compatible device and add all the completion you like. Isn't Bing a prominent player in one of the manufacturer's phones aout of the box? You seems really closed and bullyish to me.
Just take a step back for a moment, the fact that Google is being probed is a good thing for them and everyone else. If the probes find truly anti-competitive behaviour (which I seriously doubt based on public info) Google can correct their behaviour and hopefully learn some valuable lessons about good will. The fact that their probed at all means that Google's 'made it' to the big leagues where their services are moving from very nice to have to near essential for many. Of course if Google escapes all probes mostly unscathed, it'll re-enforce the mantra of "Do no Evil" for those afraid that they've been slipping too much into the corporate machine.
So your ultimate solution is what now? I mean the sun causes cancer, but unfortunately for everyone, its essential to live. Why is this relevant? Well, if standardized testing and general schooling is so bad, what do you presume we replace it with? Rich people could get personal tutoring by experts in fields that they find meaningful. The rest of us should just learn the job our parents taught us because we get really really good at that one thing. Globalization would die because hell, if you can't generally gauge the performance of someone from half way around the world, why would I want to hire them? There are dozens of situations where the lack of standard testing would cause the end of the known world, but I'll save my breath.
If your teacher friend thinks that standardized testing is so broken, then they should get off their asses and come up with something better. I think you'll find a large track record of people trying to make changes here or there in order to make things better, and I can't see why your friend couldn't do the same.
Coming from a legacy modernization project, just because people wrote programs 10, 20, 30 years ago doesn't mean that the code was good, or that the developers knew what they were doing. One would hope that decades of development experience would teach a well rounded set of skills and often it does.
To sum up, a 5 year out of school brat learning technology X is any less capable than a 5 year out of school brat learning technology Y in the 80's/90's.
Its news because when someone notable decided to criticize the crappy unholy mess that was CUPS administration, something actually got done about it. Now adays CUPS is still not perfect, but leaps and bounds better than the heaping pile (UI wise) than it was in years past.
I'm just glad that someone agrees with me. I don't see the ship steering in the other direction now, but one can hope...
Well, every manufacturer gets a huge block of MAC's and should be releasing them uniquely, so if you ever get collisions it likely that you're:
1. A device manufacturer who's business among other things is to assign the MAC addresses of devices you produce
2. Have a habbit of changing MAC addresses for some bazaar reason
3. Using certain flavors of failover where the NIC's are paired on MAC level
They did, but after they started to run streetview, they also began (at some point thereafter?) Wifi access point analysis as well. I'd imagine by this point they've completely supplanted their prior skyhook feeds.
I think the appropriate words are 'work in progress' to describe a lot of the facets currently available through G+.. here's hoping the have the time and effort to really push em out sooner than later.
Huh? I read a few lines down the first link and the guy was able to have his gmail account unlocked without needing to talk to a real person. What's the issue again?
Going through the release notes, there really are a ton of neat and cool features going into the language. I hope that Eclipse will be ready for me to start playing around with some of the ones that are more IDE centric are supported!
For those that have technical understanding of this works, lets use Occam's razor to describe the scenario:
Premise:
Google went around and collected a ton of open wireless data in order to build a comprehensive list of wireless access point data in order to disable their dependence on a competing service known as skyhook. This is a good investment for Google since they were driving around anyways as a function of capturing Google street view data for said areas.
Along with their scanning for fixed access points, they performed full raw dumps of the data captured out of the air (most likely) using a piece COTS who's purpose was to capture data. The result was that all available data which includes at least in part: unencrypted communications messages, all transmitting MAC addresses, and possibly IP address of said MAC addresses.
Just to note the reality of this from a well educated observer: I'll put good money on at least 90% of all the captured IP addresses being behind NAT's, and that 99.9999% of all MAC addresses captured have never been detected or tracked by Google in any way (The remainder being form their own corp computers).
Scenario 1: Google was trying to scrape all of this absoltutely useless data because they have higgs bozon based tracking hardware that hunt down computers by their MAC address and continually track their locations in real time making any hope of you being anonymous impossible
Scenario 2: Their scanner was set too aggresive in the capture modes and only after scanning through the data did some developer (who may not have even setup the scanner) start reading through the traces and go, um, oops.
Scenario 2: Their scanner was set too aggresive in the capture modes by a developer just in case there was a better way of applying the wifi triangulation algorithm with more data later on. Said developer may have not appreciated the privacy can of worms as a result.
What would you think is more likely? Hint: It isn't #1
Just saw this link: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/VJoZMS8zVqU
I'd say its all relative. I'm a movie guy who loves movies, and having the ability to plunk one in at any time I feel like is important to me. For music, all I really care about is that there's a body of music that I generally like to tap from. It really doesn't matter about one specific song from one specific artist as much as the ability to consume the silence. You also seem to shrug off the fact that most pop-type artists have a very low shelf life. In order for that to be true, most people will only 'use' a song for a very short time and move on, much like your attitude toward movies.
Ultimately what this cones down to is that everyone values content in wildly varying degrees, and trying to pidgeon hole everyone into the same mold is not possible/practical.
The pic/video is just uploaded, but you actively have to take the step of sharing it with others explicitly. It won't just be uploaded and marked public or something equally horrific.
I agree that Facebook has some serious reasons to be nervous about their value, but I don't think the stink has truly set in with investment circles yet.
I would say that MySpace was bought somewhat after its swan song because of perception and indomitably. Facebook hasn't even reached the peak of its success yet, though I can start to see the tip of the mountain myself.
I could make the same stability claims about most internet driven businesses. Google's strong now, but who says they couldn't be shown up by any number of up-starts? Its happened before, and it can happen again. Google's plus is that they're actually trying to diversify. Having dozens of unique and compelling properties makes it hard for someone to come in and replace lock-stock.
PON (Passive Optical Network) is being rolled out here (in Canada) very slowly for new sub-divisions and a few niche clientèle, but its a far far journey to replace millions existing installations with fibre solutions that still today end up being terminated KM down the road at central offices. At least PON has the advantage that:
1. It can mux at least a few customers along a single fibre
2. Its purely passive, so there's no need to actually power the mux/demux in the field
I think the ultimate solution will hopefully be something like in-field fibre DLC's with 'cables' of fibre strands being fed back to the CO's
Copper is the analogy for Analog signal communications unless you want to move forward on your tie raid some more thanks?
Working with a non-major telco / telco project directly related to this area, I think a 7 year sunset is absolutely untenable. There is so much time and money invested in to the physical switches themselves that companies aren't just going to up and throw them away because the gov wants a modern Telco network. Set a reasonable sunset to allow for the capital expenditures depreciate and have them buy into future-proof 'industry standard' technologies once they materialize.
PS: PSTN is the back-haul lines that inter-connect all the telcos together and not the end user experience, so a switch to a new standard wouldn't be such a big deal if (once again the rub) if it wasn't for the cost of switching equipment that's currently in place and incompatible with said services.
for my invite.. snooze. My coworker has friends in Google and he got his, but even he can't invite me to try it out. Any service that people can't use is useless.. tyvm.
So what your saying is that the iPod is for the unwashed masses that are too ignorant to use PC's? Yikes, don't be the marketing guy for a global computer company, please.
Oh, and please please list these successful verticals you talk about because I really want to know. I say the Apple iPod commercial showing how doctors and musicians, and xyz used the ipad and I laughed out out at how ridiculous it and the 'apps' they presented were. The idea that an Ipad would ever supplant a laptop or the such for someone working in finance is laughable. The only one that was truly believable was the kids play book thing which I'll agree is a meaningful vertical for tablets (children's play toy).
Nah, DOS may have been used by companies, but it couldn't hold a candle to UNIX in the earlier days of 'personal computers'. DOS was the cheaper equivalent to MAC computers of the day and they won based on cost, volume, and the number of applications it supported and one could say they definitely didn't win because they looked better than MAC computers. I don't think any direct comparisons between then and now can be drawn definitively. If this plays out just as the PC wars did, then Apple will see an early market advantage evaporate as volumes increase and the early adopters become irrelevant because of commodity players.
Oh, and just as Java took over the corporate world, I see Java taking over mobile (again) for the same reason. Once we start getting 500+mhz dual core processors on our phones, will we really care that they're compiled into Java / ObjectiveC / C? (Games markedly exempt which is still the case on PC games today).