Yeah, except this isn't the micropayment model. I really don't have a problem with Slash starting to accept more serious ads. As Taco points out, and any of us who have to deal with it know, this is what advertisers want. And, actually, if Slash keeps the same general type of ads, I find that most of the ads here are for things I like. And ads for services I use somehow bother me less than ads for NEW ONLINE CASINO!
But this isn't the micropayment model. The micropayment would have them keeping accounts and charging some decimal dust every time we hit a page.
Instead they are taking the money in chunks. As Taco correctly states, that is the subscription model, a different yet similar beast.
Best of luck to them making loot. Slash is a good thing and I am the last person who has a problem with them getting some treasure.
and everything to do with DoCoMo. They made i-Mode just for this stuff. That is why I cringe when people (if I remember Taco's quote correctly) describe the Japanese as "light-years ahead of us in cell phones."
I did some work on this stuff a while back, and the outline of their system is here.
The really fun part is that what I was involved with was making the information about how this worked clear to American executives at telcoms. I doubt we have long to wait till this great tech comes to a continent near us.
Denying software and business process patents, which were until the last few years considered unpatentable topics, would solve about 80% of the really retarded patent problems we keep seeing.
But if you hold to the existing justification that patents make sense to spur costly research and development by giving a solid financial incentive to do the work, then you need to provide a longer period. The reason is development time.
In order to keep someone else from jumping on your work, you pretty much need to get a patent out there as soon as you possibly can. This is very often 24+ months before you are actually going to have a working product in the supply chain with the wind behind you. Now if you have a large R&D budget behind you in the hundreds of millions, you can't reasonably expect to get that back in three years unless you have invented the cure for cancer.
Well, you have first mover advantage you say. But three years is a short period of time to really establish a killer brand advantge. Particularly when all of your competitors after the first year have started leaking how killer and cheap their stuff is going to be in just two short years when they can put it on the shelf without paying you for your patent. I am not saying that killer brands haven't been established in that timeframe, but that's a way short window.
There is probably a good argument to be made to lower the 17 year from issue term of patents for those of us who think that patent law has gotten a little out of hand of late, but if you want to keep patents at all, five years doesn't do much to serve the supposed purpose of patenting.
This is going to come across as a troll to some people, but does anyone know anyone who is using any flavor of *nix or BeOS for professional music work? I am not slamming this particular product or the idea of doing this, but every professional music person I know is on a Mac and starts foaming at the suggestion that other platforms even exist.
It strikes me as odd to make the product for Linux and BeOS first, and then port to Mac, as the article says. Does anyone know of a huge underground of Linux using pro DJ's I have have somehow missed?
Re:Mental Illness and the media.
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
First, the movie showed that he was on meds and when he wasn't wandered around Princeton suffering from delusions.
Secondly, lots of people do "fight back". Many people don't have to live the rest of their lives over medicated and with marginal living skills due to mental illness, just like many people can rehab from other critical illnesses. It depends on the severity of the disease and the quality of care. I deal everyday with a number of diagnosed schitozphrenics (including myself) who have "fought back". Many of these people, including myself, have achieved college degrees and live as perfectly productive members of society.
What seems unfortunate to me is a system that all to frequently throws massive amounts of medication at a problem and doesn't spend enough time on intensive cognitive therapy to help the individuals who can return to society to live productive and high quality lives. Instead, many of these individuals end up socialized to institutions and heavy doses of mind altering drugs.
There are people who have more severe problems than others. Just like some people will have operable cancer and some people will die from it.
But a diagnosis of paranoid schitzophrenic isn't a life sentence for many people. I don't see a problem with a movie, even if it is obviously a fictionalized and sugar coated account, that shows that some people can learn to work around their problem and be productive memebers of society.
Actually, this is one of my favorite things about slashes habit of reviewing classic science fiction. Yeah, this book was new in the 70's, but the publisher doesn't make an effort to promote a book that old and there are a couple of generations now of people who might not have run into this book. And a lot of people reading here might love this work.
98% of science fiction is badly written, derivative crap. But that other 2% is why I read it. And Forever War is one of the best in the field. It does a service to newer science fiction readers to promote a genre classic like this one.
Great call. Brunner's work is often overlooked, and was a strong influence on Gibson's stuff, which obviously has influenced at least our terminology about technology.
Gibson even went so far as to reuse lines from Brunner's work in his own, to give homage.
I have worked on large web sites where my teams were almost all cross-functional, dual-reports with other departments and on teams where I had direct control of all my assets. Both can work, but the problems are a little different on each side.
When working on cross functional teams, the key is politics and bridge building. Find someone in each key department who is going to be fully reponsible for your contact and work within that department. This sounds self-evident, but I have been places where random PR people seem to take whatever parts of various web projects that interest them. This doesn't work.
Once you have a single point of contact, constantly keep that person's manager in the loop on projects and goals for web efforts. Give them some mindshare in your projects. Get them vested in what you are accomplishing for them. Also carve out very defined work boundaries and proceedures for the duties of your contact person.
Next, when something works, make sure you slather praise though the organization that hits the managers of your cross-reports. You team will get its due because the stuff is obviously up on the web site. Make all your praise to the people you need to keep happy to keep getting work from your cross-departmental memebers.
I have found this to work in organizations with the right culture. The thing is that with cross-departmental teams, the majority of your job becomes consensus building and coordination. I have had this eat up almost all the time I would rather be using on real work. But it is the nature of the buisness.
In a perfect world, I want my own team, broken into servers, content production and coding support. In my experience this produces more consistency and quality in my team's projects and tends to ensure more uptime.
But the problem here is that a smaller number of managers have a vested interest in the success of the web team. This can hurt in budget fights. And the budget fights WILL come.
The other problem here is on the content side. Coming from a content background to start out, I always want direct control of my content folk. But a couple of dedicated content people, while frequently better and more professional content producers, aren't as close to some of the things going on in a large organization and things that could or should be in the content pipeline can get overlooked that way.
I know this is unfortnately just a post dealing with the edges of the ugly politics, but in larger organizations, most of the reality of leading web dev teams seems to come down to dealing with the political issues that are instrumental to being able to get the work done. A sad thing. Maybe I have just had bad luck selecting jobs.
This is BS. I am a vet and there is no such thing in military recruitment as "no way out" until you get sworn, period.
And, while it is more difficult, there is pretty much a way out of some kind at any point unless you are in a combat zone somewhere. It can actually be somewhat difficult to stay in the military if you don't have a penchant for following some very demanding and annoying rules.
PC gaming was Electronic Games Magazine, with Arnie Katz, Joyce Worley and Bill Kunkel as the main editorial team. EG ran for a while in the very early 80's and died during the first major games industry pullback in the mid-80's.
Ever hardworking, Arnie, Joyce and Bill then started doing, of all things, big time wrestling magazines for a while, and ended up replacing the editorial team at Frozen Foods Weekly. Not exactly a dream gig, but all the frozen food they could eat, I guess.
After the games industry recovered at the end of the decade, Barry Friedman negotiated a deal for them with Decker-Sendai publications and EG came back to life for a few years. While never as big as CGW, the magazine did respectably well and was generally good in coverage.
Near the end of the 90's, for various reasons including a number of projects being pursued by the partners, the magazine went away, being briefly renamed Fusion and then turning to dust.
And while I don't know it for a fact, I seem to think that Byte would be the first computer magazine in print. At least, it is the first one I can ever remember reading, and by far the best of its generation.
Nope, iMode is C-HTML a restricted subset of html. However, it does add a couple of cool features, like the PhoneTo function, that allows a link to dial a phone number. Which it would appear is part of the problem they are having right now.
Yeah, iMode does some cool stuff. Most importantly it is WAY up there as the number one tool of privacy invasion in the world.
Lately I have had reason to be working with some DoCoMo information and it is scary. These phones track what you look at on-line, everything you buy and, with their nifty new multiple cell base triangulation automation, they keep track of where you are when you use your phone to surf or buy something.
And, unlike most annoying tracking and information compilation efforts we are subjected to constantly, this one is directly linked to you personally, not just to a demographic segment. DoCoMo keeps all of your personal information combined with your demographics in the sections of their server system called D-MAX and U-MAX.
DoCoMo touts all this as the birth of true one to one marketing and says that part of the beauty of this is that a great deal of information can be collected without the users knowledge.
They might be light years ahead of us in cell phone technology, but they are also light years ahead of us in marketing driven privacy invasion. And it is only going to get worse with the next generation of IMT-2000 phones, some of which will have GPS to nail down your location even further.
And for those who aren't aware, which I imagine is damned few in this venue, the underlying technology in the i502 series on is Java. This allows lots of cool stuff to be downloaded into your phone, but I guess they haven't worked out all the security kinks yet. Too bad to hear about that, since warts and all I like Java.
As a writer and editor for many game industry publications, you have a point.
Yes, the print games publications, and many of the sites associated with them, work on beta copy. It is the only way to remain competitive in a world starved for gaming information. As a result, we tend to ignore some of the simple install problems, or mention them in passing, simply because we are told this problem will be fixed by release, and the VAST majority of the time it is.
Further, we get jaded because those of us in the industry get better tech support than the average gamer. You get on the phone and call your PR contact with the company and say you are having a problem and it is stopping you from finishing your preview for Happy Puppy or CGW...well, you can imagine that they don't send your call to the lowest man on the help desk.
At the same time, there isn't a hell of a lot that you can do to avoid some of this. If we don't go to press as soon as our competition, we don't have a publication. That simple. No one wants to read a review two months after the game is on the shelves. And with print magazines, if you always waited for boxed copy, that is just what would happen. So there is a certain amount of trust involved between the game company and the reviewer.
However, what does happen, if you are an ethical editor, which most are, is that you remember if a flack lied to you about a problem being fixed before release. And the next time you hear that, you make sure that you state very strongly in your copy that you had a problem with the game from a technical perspective. Provide fair warning to the potential buyer.
However, your statement that you wouldn't be in business any more if you printed bad reviews simply isn't true in my experience. I panned more Take 2 games in a row than I can count, just to pick one company. If you are good sized pub or site, they can't really mark you off the list.
And the idea that the game companies don't care about shipping product with this kind of problem because of the return situation is on crack. Yes, pre release publicity drives some game sales in the first few days. However, word of mouth sells a tremendous number of games. The majority. Word gets out a game doesn't work or play well, and reviews or no reviews, the company takes a bath.
I understand that there are problems with the review and editorial process in gaming, no doubt, but the solutions aren't as simple as they appear to some people. And the idea that reviewers don't call a bad game because they will be "cut off" is prevailent and bogus.
jpw
My girlfriend has recently started a serious weight-loss fitness program using the EAS Body for Life challenge as a template. In five weeks of drinking 3+ myoplex supplements a day and working out in the gym at least 1 hour a day, she has lost 20 lbs. and 3% of her total body fat.
This is at a cost of $2.10 per unit for the supplements, a loss of an hour a day at her console ($50-100 depending on the person) and nothing for her gym membership provided by her primary employer. This brings her weekly program cost to over $400.
In response, I have been using large amounts of methamphetimines. An eighth of an ounce a week costs around $300 in any large metro on the west coast. I have lost 25 lbs. in the same time.
My costs are 1 hour a week to score; $300 for the supplement; a GAIN of 3 working hours a day; and a loss of approximately 1 hour a day looking for the bugging devices I am convinced the government, friends, family and coworkers have started putting in my keyboard, clothes, and lighting fixtures. This brings my weekly program cost to a gain of $400 a week, which I place into my fund for eventual rehab, making my adjusted total cost zero.
Let's recap:
Body for Life Program: -400
Meth addiction: 0
Okay, in one paragraph you bemoan the fact that CS majors don't have to show proficency to get in, and in another you are saying the school should default to the most friendly desktop environment available to make up for people who can't figure out how to configure their accounts. Maybe these aren't in direct opposition, but they sure do look funny in the same post.
Depending on the CS philosopy at RIT, the idea of teaching C first because it is easier to learn basic computing concepts in proceedural languages is flawed. I have created course materials and taught people to program and found no real difference in learning basic concepts of console IO and simple control flow statements from an OO perspective. Hello World is still Hello World, in Java or in C. And I have yet to see a situation where if you are learning from scratch you don't have to take a lot for granted that you are going to learn the full implications of later on.
This is sidestepping the issue of whether CS programs in general tend to rely too much on OO concepts when at least a goodly amount of attention should be paid to the proceedural approaches that tend to dominate when you are near the metal, working with legacy systems, or just need to get a quick piece of glue up on your system.
And as for your teachers not knowing the answers to problems, this is not an artifact of your program, it is how the world works, in my experience. Be it a job situation or a learning situation, I have always found there are a few people who are really cutting edge on the harder problems and concepts, and a lot more people who are adequate to their position. This problem is more pronounced in rapidly moving fields like CS and less pronounced in slow moving fields like some humanities.
Slashdot Mirror
"...Slashdot, the bastion of free software..."
To point out the obvious, free as in speech.
(yeah, whoring for karma...)
Yeah, except this isn't the micropayment model. I really don't have a problem with Slash starting to accept more serious ads. As Taco points out, and any of us who have to deal with it know, this is what advertisers want. And, actually, if Slash keeps the same general type of ads, I find that most of the ads here are for things I like. And ads for services I use somehow bother me less than ads for NEW ONLINE CASINO!
But this isn't the micropayment model. The micropayment would have them keeping accounts and charging some decimal dust every time we hit a page.
Instead they are taking the money in chunks. As Taco correctly states, that is the subscription model, a different yet similar beast.
Best of luck to them making loot. Slash is a good thing and I am the last person who has a problem with them getting some treasure.
and everything to do with DoCoMo. They made i-Mode just for this stuff. That is why I cringe when people (if I remember Taco's quote correctly) describe the Japanese as "light-years ahead of us in cell phones."
I did some work on this stuff a while back, and the outline of their system is here.
The really fun part is that what I was involved with was making the information about how this worked clear to American executives at telcoms. I doubt we have long to wait till this great tech comes to a continent near us.
>there's some, I dunno, 50,000 users on slashdot?
Obviously you have never had your site slashdotted.
Denying software and business process patents, which were until the last few years considered unpatentable topics, would solve about 80% of the really retarded patent problems we keep seeing.
But if you hold to the existing justification that patents make sense to spur costly research and development by giving a solid financial incentive to do the work, then you need to provide a longer period. The reason is development time.
In order to keep someone else from jumping on your work, you pretty much need to get a patent out there as soon as you possibly can. This is very often 24+ months before you are actually going to have a working product in the supply chain with the wind behind you. Now if you have a large R&D budget behind you in the hundreds of millions, you can't reasonably expect to get that back in three years unless you have invented the cure for cancer.
Well, you have first mover advantage you say. But three years is a short period of time to really establish a killer brand advantge. Particularly when all of your competitors after the first year have started leaking how killer and cheap their stuff is going to be in just two short years when they can put it on the shelf without paying you for your patent. I am not saying that killer brands haven't been established in that timeframe, but that's a way short window.
There is probably a good argument to be made to lower the 17 year from issue term of patents for those of us who think that patent law has gotten a little out of hand of late, but if you want to keep patents at all, five years doesn't do much to serve the supposed purpose of patenting.
This is going to come across as a troll to some people, but does anyone know anyone who is using any flavor of *nix or BeOS for professional music work? I am not slamming this particular product or the idea of doing this, but every professional music person I know is on a Mac and starts foaming at the suggestion that other platforms even exist.
It strikes me as odd to make the product for Linux and BeOS first, and then port to Mac, as the article says. Does anyone know of a huge underground of Linux using pro DJ's I have have somehow missed?
First, the movie showed that he was on meds and when he wasn't wandered around Princeton suffering from delusions.
Secondly, lots of people do "fight back". Many people don't have to live the rest of their lives over medicated and with marginal living skills due to mental illness, just like many people can rehab from other critical illnesses. It depends on the severity of the disease and the quality of care. I deal everyday with a number of diagnosed schitozphrenics (including myself) who have "fought back". Many of these people, including myself, have achieved college degrees and live as perfectly productive members of society.
What seems unfortunate to me is a system that all to frequently throws massive amounts of medication at a problem and doesn't spend enough time on intensive cognitive therapy to help the individuals who can return to society to live productive and high quality lives. Instead, many of these individuals end up socialized to institutions and heavy doses of mind altering drugs.
There are people who have more severe problems than others. Just like some people will have operable cancer and some people will die from it.
But a diagnosis of paranoid schitzophrenic isn't a life sentence for many people. I don't see a problem with a movie, even if it is obviously a fictionalized and sugar coated account, that shows that some people can learn to work around their problem and be productive memebers of society.
98% of science fiction is badly written, derivative crap. But that other 2% is why I read it. And Forever War is one of the best in the field. It does a service to newer science fiction readers to promote a genre classic like this one.
This would be a lot cooler if it were Nov. 28 in that dateline and not Sept. 28.
Great call. Brunner's work is often overlooked, and was a strong influence on Gibson's stuff, which obviously has influenced at least our terminology about technology.
Gibson even went so far as to reuse lines from Brunner's work in his own, to give homage.
I have worked on large web sites where my teams were almost all cross-functional, dual-reports with other departments and on teams where I had direct control of all my assets. Both can work, but the problems are a little different on each side.
When working on cross functional teams, the key is politics and bridge building. Find someone in each key department who is going to be fully reponsible for your contact and work within that department. This sounds self-evident, but I have been places where random PR people seem to take whatever parts of various web projects that interest them. This doesn't work.
Once you have a single point of contact, constantly keep that person's manager in the loop on projects and goals for web efforts. Give them some mindshare in your projects. Get them vested in what you are accomplishing for them. Also carve out very defined work boundaries and proceedures for the duties of your contact person.
Next, when something works, make sure you slather praise though the organization that hits the managers of your cross-reports. You team will get its due because the stuff is obviously up on the web site. Make all your praise to the people you need to keep happy to keep getting work from your cross-departmental memebers.
I have found this to work in organizations with the right culture. The thing is that with cross-departmental teams, the majority of your job becomes consensus building and coordination. I have had this eat up almost all the time I would rather be using on real work. But it is the nature of the buisness.
In a perfect world, I want my own team, broken into servers, content production and coding support. In my experience this produces more consistency and quality in my team's projects and tends to ensure more uptime.
But the problem here is that a smaller number of managers have a vested interest in the success of the web team. This can hurt in budget fights. And the budget fights WILL come.
The other problem here is on the content side. Coming from a content background to start out, I always want direct control of my content folk. But a couple of dedicated content people, while frequently better and more professional content producers, aren't as close to some of the things going on in a large organization and things that could or should be in the content pipeline can get overlooked that way.
I know this is unfortnately just a post dealing with the edges of the ugly politics, but in larger organizations, most of the reality of leading web dev teams seems to come down to dealing with the political issues that are instrumental to being able to get the work done. A sad thing. Maybe I have just had bad luck selecting jobs.
And, while it is more difficult, there is pretty much a way out of some kind at any point unless you are in a combat zone somewhere. It can actually be somewhat difficult to stay in the military if you don't have a penchant for following some very demanding and annoying rules.
Ever hardworking, Arnie, Joyce and Bill then started doing, of all things, big time wrestling magazines for a while, and ended up replacing the editorial team at Frozen Foods Weekly. Not exactly a dream gig, but all the frozen food they could eat, I guess.
After the games industry recovered at the end of the decade, Barry Friedman negotiated a deal for them with Decker-Sendai publications and EG came back to life for a few years. While never as big as CGW, the magazine did respectably well and was generally good in coverage.
Near the end of the 90's, for various reasons including a number of projects being pursued by the partners, the magazine went away, being briefly renamed Fusion and then turning to dust.
And while I don't know it for a fact, I seem to think that Byte would be the first computer magazine in print. At least, it is the first one I can ever remember reading, and by far the best of its generation.
Nope, iMode is C-HTML a restricted subset of html. However, it does add a couple of cool features, like the PhoneTo function, that allows a link to dial a phone number. Which it would appear is part of the problem they are having right now.
Lately I have had reason to be working with some DoCoMo information and it is scary. These phones track what you look at on-line, everything you buy and, with their nifty new multiple cell base triangulation automation, they keep track of where you are when you use your phone to surf or buy something.
And, unlike most annoying tracking and information compilation efforts we are subjected to constantly, this one is directly linked to you personally, not just to a demographic segment. DoCoMo keeps all of your personal information combined with your demographics in the sections of their server system called D-MAX and U-MAX.
DoCoMo touts all this as the birth of true one to one marketing and says that part of the beauty of this is that a great deal of information can be collected without the users knowledge.
They might be light years ahead of us in cell phone technology, but they are also light years ahead of us in marketing driven privacy invasion. And it is only going to get worse with the next generation of IMT-2000 phones, some of which will have GPS to nail down your location even further.
And for those who aren't aware, which I imagine is damned few in this venue, the underlying technology in the i502 series on is Java. This allows lots of cool stuff to be downloaded into your phone, but I guess they haven't worked out all the security kinks yet. Too bad to hear about that, since warts and all I like Java.
As a writer and editor for many game industry publications, you have a point. Yes, the print games publications, and many of the sites associated with them, work on beta copy. It is the only way to remain competitive in a world starved for gaming information. As a result, we tend to ignore some of the simple install problems, or mention them in passing, simply because we are told this problem will be fixed by release, and the VAST majority of the time it is. Further, we get jaded because those of us in the industry get better tech support than the average gamer. You get on the phone and call your PR contact with the company and say you are having a problem and it is stopping you from finishing your preview for Happy Puppy or CGW...well, you can imagine that they don't send your call to the lowest man on the help desk. At the same time, there isn't a hell of a lot that you can do to avoid some of this. If we don't go to press as soon as our competition, we don't have a publication. That simple. No one wants to read a review two months after the game is on the shelves. And with print magazines, if you always waited for boxed copy, that is just what would happen. So there is a certain amount of trust involved between the game company and the reviewer. However, what does happen, if you are an ethical editor, which most are, is that you remember if a flack lied to you about a problem being fixed before release. And the next time you hear that, you make sure that you state very strongly in your copy that you had a problem with the game from a technical perspective. Provide fair warning to the potential buyer. However, your statement that you wouldn't be in business any more if you printed bad reviews simply isn't true in my experience. I panned more Take 2 games in a row than I can count, just to pick one company. If you are good sized pub or site, they can't really mark you off the list. And the idea that the game companies don't care about shipping product with this kind of problem because of the return situation is on crack. Yes, pre release publicity drives some game sales in the first few days. However, word of mouth sells a tremendous number of games. The majority. Word gets out a game doesn't work or play well, and reviews or no reviews, the company takes a bath. I understand that there are problems with the review and editorial process in gaming, no doubt, but the solutions aren't as simple as they appear to some people. And the idea that reviewers don't call a bad game because they will be "cut off" is prevailent and bogus. jpw
This is at a cost of $2.10 per unit for the supplements, a loss of an hour a day at her console ($50-100 depending on the person) and nothing for her gym membership provided by her primary employer. This brings her weekly program cost to over $400.
In response, I have been using large amounts of methamphetimines. An eighth of an ounce a week costs around $300 in any large metro on the west coast. I have lost 25 lbs. in the same time.
My costs are 1 hour a week to score; $300 for the supplement; a GAIN of 3 working hours a day; and a loss of approximately 1 hour a day looking for the bugging devices I am convinced the government, friends, family and coworkers have started putting in my keyboard, clothes, and lighting fixtures. This brings my weekly program cost to a gain of $400 a week, which I place into my fund for eventual rehab, making my adjusted total cost zero.
Let's recap: Body for Life Program: -400 Meth addiction: 0
The choice is obvious.
Okay, in one paragraph you bemoan the fact that CS majors don't have to show proficency to get in, and in another you are saying the school should default to the most friendly desktop environment available to make up for people who can't figure out how to configure their accounts. Maybe these aren't in direct opposition, but they sure do look funny in the same post.
Depending on the CS philosopy at RIT, the idea of teaching C first because it is easier to learn basic computing concepts in proceedural languages is flawed. I have created course materials and taught people to program and found no real difference in learning basic concepts of console IO and simple control flow statements from an OO perspective. Hello World is still Hello World, in Java or in C. And I have yet to see a situation where if you are learning from scratch you don't have to take a lot for granted that you are going to learn the full implications of later on.
This is sidestepping the issue of whether CS programs in general tend to rely too much on OO concepts when at least a goodly amount of attention should be paid to the proceedural approaches that tend to dominate when you are near the metal, working with legacy systems, or just need to get a quick piece of glue up on your system.
And as for your teachers not knowing the answers to problems, this is not an artifact of your program, it is how the world works, in my experience. Be it a job situation or a learning situation, I have always found there are a few people who are really cutting edge on the harder problems and concepts, and a lot more people who are adequate to their position. This problem is more pronounced in rapidly moving fields like CS and less pronounced in slow moving fields like some humanities.