That was a fantastic response from Maddog, but personal charity is not what OpenBSD/OpenSSH needs. It needs a patron for whom a regular $300 is not even pocket change.
Google, you know this is a worthy cause. Do the right thing.
Guild Wars can give you the best of both online and offline gaming. Just you and your GF (plus AI henchmen) as you don't want other players to intrude on the two of you, no subscription fees, and none of the griefing you get in other MMOGs.
Plus, a huge and wonderfully detailed world for the two of you to explore and to battle against, with no xp grinding, nor any of the other traditional MMOG timesinks that make some other popular worlds so tedious. The time saved can then be used... on other things.:P
While it's easy to get drawn into the launch timing hype (exactly as Sony wants), some random business analyst's reaction interests me a lot less than would any techie reaction. There's this severely cutting edge bit of hardware heading our way, but virtually no technical comment about it.
This isn't through lack of raw data. The Cell is very well documented, and the graphics community seems to know what the RSX is going to be about. That should be enough for reams of technical comment, especially about how to bridge the gap from previous games architectures to the new one.
Furthermore, Kutaragi's many comments about delivering Linux on the PS3 should be fueling a vast amount of technical discussion, both factual and speculative. Arnd Bergmann's work on running Linux on IBM's Cell blades would be expected to provide a good basis for it, if we assume that Sony/IBM cooperation extends to the Linux port. Do we know whether it does?
What access is Linux likely to have into the high-powered backend hardware? BlueRay functionality will no doubt be tied up in chains, but presumably Linux will still be able to read ordinary CD and DVD media from the device, and play community-developed games, including online ones. And I'm sure I'm not the only one looking forward to running open media players and recorders on the console -- is the MythTV community talking about the console yet, for example?
Let's have less business analysis and more technical commentary!:-)
One of the lessons in this story is that any organization involved in investigative reporting needs to keep its data systems under heavy cryptographic lock and key. Quite separate from any possible legal wrongdoing on the part of one or more of their reporters, all their other stories and investigations are now severely comprimised by the seizure, as others have pointed out. Their whole business could be at risk because of the ease with which computer equipment can be taken away.
This inevitably brings to mind today's story about Amazon's new storage service. If Lancaster Intelligencer Journal had stored their encrypted records and work files on such a storage service, would Amazon (or Google etc) have got raided and their computers taken away?
Obviously not (I think), but where does the boundary between yes and no actually lie? What if LIJ stored their encrypted data at some small 3rd party outfit?
This whole area is likely to become a tangled quagmire, as well as sadly a legal goldmine.
>> How could anyone have predicted this turn of events!?
You're right, it wasn't hard to see this coming. Even I predicted it, despite having a rather cloudy crystal ball, so it must have been pretty obvious.
What we're seeing here is the PS3's technological success being killed off by Sony's new overlords --- the lawyers waving the mighty banner of the company's new religion, content protection.
Whether the PS3 will still succeed despite Xbox 360 and maybe the Revolution getting a competition-free run for one or two years is anybody's guess (this won't be the last postponement). But it's sad, anyway.
In 1-1/2 year's time, MS will have Xbox 360/2 in the wings, upgraded to PS3's spec or beyond. What then of your solidly content-protected platform, Sony lawyers?
"Total freedom" ends whether that of others begins
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No discussion about freedom can proceed sensibly without the fundamental premise that if two people have the same freedom (regardless of the details) then the freedom of one ends where the freedom of another begins, and viceversa.
In other words, "total freedom" has inherent boundaries, which are the equal freedoms of others who possess the same freedom.
Saying that "total freedom" goes further and has no boundaries is either blinkered or just playing with words, because it denies that your concept of freedom is applicable to anyone else. It's not a logically consistent position.
Your position fell down simply because it does not respect the equivalence boundary.
Many people have suggested that Dell are maintaining a low-key Linux offering because otherwise it would cost them a lot of money in after-sales support. This really isn't so, the cost of support can be extremely small and still provide a very effective level of service.
Dell would need to do only two things, at minimum cost:
Install a bog-standard release from one of the Linux big boys, like RedHat or SuSE. And, very very importantly, DO NOT CUSTOMIZE IT. At most, supply loadable binary modules for any hardware that isn't standard, and that's all.
Provide server space on one of their boxes for an official but community-run wiki, and keep it well fed with PDFs and specs and other raw data. Place a nice prominent link to RedHat/SuSE/whichever on the front page.
When your Linux isn't customized, everything in the original distro applies, so customers would be served perfectly adequately by generic documentation on the net.
And the community is more than happy to run its own support sites, especially when they are friendly wikis that are easy to update and the server is paid for by a patron.
Well since nobody seems to have patented reading between the lines and empty speculation yet (:P), I'll try to answer your question.
This is how I interpret what's been happening with the PS3, especially in the last couple of weeks:
IBM, Toshiba, and Kutaragi's part of Sony have a great, world-beating idea ---> Develop truly revolutionary hardware, and guarantee its success by riding on the back of a huge games catalogue (PS2), terrific hardware expertise (IBM and nVidia), superb mass-market manufacturing capability (Sony and Toshiba), and collosal free expert manpower (FOSS developers, as preached by IBM and Kutaragi, who wants Linux on every PS3 hard disk).
Then the various Sony entertainment divisions woke up and realized that the open vision would not lock down content. They control Sony entirely now (because that's become Sony's main profit stream, remarkably), so that was the end of Plan A.
Since there never was a Plan B, Kutaragi and the whole Cell/PS3 project are now on effective hold, while the lawyers fight it out with the techs and manufacturing. The rumours of PS3 being delayed until 2007 are definitely possible, since nobody knows if this impass can ever be resolved before Sony management realize that it's cost them the lead over Microsoft.
Although this is pure speculation, it fits the evidence remarkably well.:-(
That article may well be a "learning experience" for the author, but it's not a valid criticism of WoW. WoW was designed to be as it is, namely a very traditional MMO with all the normal grouping issues and guild orientations, its inevitable time sinking, and all the other problems that go with the territory.
It summarizes quite simply: for that person, WoW is the wrong game.
But that isn't a valid condemnation of WoW. He simply chose wrongly.
If you want to remain in the MMO genre but don't want any time sinks, and you want your personal skill to matter rather than time invested, and you want to be able to solo a lot of the time rather than suffer the incompetence of other people, and you don't want ridiculous mass guild raids in which you are just a cog in a machine, and you don't want the 101 other ills of traditional MMOs like EverQuest.... simple, Guild Wars was made for you. It does that by design, very clever indeed.
But don't complain about WoW not being adequate. Horses for courses.
1984 is creeping up on us from every corner of the planet. Australia isn't particularly special.
In the UK, we're well on our way to being followed in our every move, our freedoms being "allowed" only if we carry the necessary papers, checked, validated and scanned in everything we do, and so on.
What it comes down to is this: politicians everywhere are scum. They don't work towards a better and freer life for ordinary people, but purely for their own self-aggrandizement and political power. And since it seems that they can achieve nothing without creating new laws, the public is continually being imprisoned within ever thicker legal walls and shackled with ever tighter legal chains.
"The Fight Against Terrorism" is of course used as the current excuse. In reality, the actual daily terror here is coming from the politicians and the police. Nobody worries on a daily basis about a true whacko blowing up the underground (because the likelihood is low), but everyone worries about being jumped on by a dozen police officers on the grounds of "looking suuspicious". God, that must be easy work for the police, looking for people with shifty eyes. And I really pity the poor blokes with beards, or those who look slightly middle-eastern... clearly candidates for terrorist recruitment in the eyes of the police here.
I don't think that this is going to change any time soon. You know why? Because people are dumb, and watch too much TV, and believe the messages that the politicians and media are feeding them.
>> As it is, though, your stated goals really don't seem to add up.
I agree entirely with your reply here. The poster's statement (below) is frankly ludicrous:
>> Sadly, the programming language cannot be changed due to reasons of efficiency and availability of core libraries.
Well in that case, sadly, the inherent unreliability of the programming language and core libraries cannot be changed either. Efficiency is the *primary* inverse determinant of reliability.
This is ENGINEERING we're talking about here, ie. a practical discipline that's all about making tradeoffs in one area in order to reap benefits in another. He's not willing to make any key tradeoffs, so he's not going to gain what benefits he seeks either.
>> In Russia we are having one of the COLDEST winters in history!
It's only the planetary average temperature that will increase with global warming, and not by a lot.
In contrast, local temperatures will both increase and decrease in a far more complicated pattern across the world, and by comparatively large amounts. Although simulations vary quite a lot in their predictions, the areas of major change are quite clear.
Northern Europe seems quite likely to suffer the largest downward changes, because an early consequence of the melting of the Greenland glaciers and surrounding ice shelves will be that the "Atlantic Conveyor" (a closed circuit of ocean currents) will grind to a halt. The Gulf Stream is already slowing, and there is absolutely no way to reverse this trend. The inevitable result will be that the quite warm climate in the coastal European countries up at around 50-60 degrees North will plunge towards the deep continental average... the balmy UK winters will start to look more like those of Siberia.
Likewise, the equatorial hot spots are expected to rise in temperature by a lot more than the planetary average, with quite appalling consequences for their populations. Anyone who thinks that "2 degrees of global warming" will be barely noticeable in Africa is confusing "global" with "local".
They are making it sound like checking for these things before systems go into production is a new concept.
You make it sound like hyperbole in marketting is something outrageous and previously unheard of.
It's a company, fer crissake. If it were an academic research group making out that they had invented a new concept, then that would be different and your criticism would be more valid.
If their product has no technical novelty, then your remarks should be directed at Slasdot editors for accepting it as News For Nerds. The company seems to be offering another competing product in this market. And that surely is A Good Thing.
>> NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence.
That's the bit that annoyed me most.
The very idea that non-technical management can override or disregard technical advice provided by professionals in their specialist technical area is a complete travesty.
And imposing a flawed managerial direction by applying social pressures (bullying/bamboozling) to brush dissenters under the carpet just made it worse. All highly unprofessional.
I know that it's the way that business works these days, with the management thinking that it is somehow "above" the technical people who deal with the technology on which the enterprise is founded, but it's an insane model in a world that is becoming ever more technical every day.
As non-technical management becomes ever more clueless about technical issues with each passing day of technical progress, businesses who don't accept overriding technical direction at management level are treading the path towards having their own "Challanger disasters". It's a misguided approach.
There's nothing inherently unethical about booth babes. It's their chosen profession and they're being paid for their looks and their "marketting skills", ie. bringing the customers to the stand. It takes a lot of effort to stay looking that way, and courage to do it.
Where is might be said to be on shakey ground is if both sexes aren't fairly represented, because then the do-gooders start talking about "objectifying women". Bring on the booth hunks, too... I'm sure it won't be just the girls who check out their assets.
Post up directional signs for "Booth Babes here" and "Booth Hunks there" and increase the merriment and general fun by clearly laughing at ourselves for doing it.
After suffering the trials and tribulations of pickup groups in various MMOGs for some years now, I've finally found a solution that avoids the problems of pickup groups entirely: henchmen in Guild Wars:
Henchies don't leave in the middle of battle because Mum's called them for supper.
Henchies don't rush ahead and agro half the zone when the rest of the team isn't ready.
Henchies use strategy and tactics, and of course it's 100% compatible with your own strategy and tactics.
Henchies obey your unquestioned authority, and conversely, if anyone dies then you carry the full responsibility. It's refreshing that you can only blame yourself if things go wrong, and it makes success very rewarding.
Henchies do not give you the verbal crap that spews out of the mouths of 11 year olds and makes online multiplayer gaming so tedious.
Henchies of the various classes are always available, and will happily fill in for missing professions within player teams.
Henchies provide terrific support for "soloing" in the sense that no other players need be involved. Casual MMO-type gaming is at last possible.
Henchmen are a wonderful answer to the many problems of building and playing with teams in MMOGs. It's sad to see that DDO doesn't provide their own version of GW's henchies, and therefore suffers all the old problems that player teams bring with them.
Not at all. Their research examines quite a large range of characteristics of the particles and of the rainfall, and even presents some controls. It's not as tight as some nor, as sloppy as others, but falls well within the mean of the scientific method.
The fact that one particular type of test was not performed by them does not make this a stupid paper --- it just leaves that analysis for some other team to perform. Indeed, they seem to have covered a collosal amount of ground for a single research group already.
Their Discussion section is not part of their scientific findings, but merely provides room for discussion. Non-DNA-based "life" from outer space is a *possible* handwaving interpretation at best, but since no other interpretation matches both the microscopic visual structure and the chemical composition and the rain-distribution pattern simultaneously, it's the best we have at this stage.
>> Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose!
Go right ahead and do it yourself, or communicate with them about it. But who said that ET life would employ cellulose anyway? That notwithstanding, it would be a useful test to perform anyway, as it would help discount other possibilities.
Their earlier non-peer-reviewed papers might have been worth your label of "stupid" (meaning non-scientific) in part, but this one is quite factual in all its research sections.
If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD?
Clearly the linked article was just a hits generator, totally lacking in substance.
In any case, it made the very dumb assumption that operating systems are somehow set in stone. They're not, and while we cannot predict MS's plans for the future, we can certainly guarantee that Linux and the BSDs will evolve in whatever way their communities want.
And that includes handling the streaming world with max efficiency.
I'm taking the interview with a pinch of salt, as advised.
However, there is a general principle worth noting here which the article illustrates very well regardless of the veracity of the interview. A game designer who doesn't speak the language of the developers cannot possibly control the product being developed without creating a static definition of some kind.
This definition doesn't necessarily have to be a document (for example, for defining quests it could be through a simple interactive state machine app), but it has to be something concrete and stable which the developers can chew around. The reason for this is simple. The chewing around bridges the communications gap to the tech-illiterate designer, creating another layer of definition (an interpretation) as to what is really being requested. The developers then work to this extended definition.
That the designer allegedly wanted to write nothing down and also suffered memory loss of what he requested is so totally ridiculous that it sounds like a fabrication to me. After all, people can always take notes in meetings with which to substantiate their work, and there's a great little gizmo called a dictaphone which is hard to refute. So, something doesn't smell right there.
That said, it was the role of the lead developer or team leader to create the actual dev spec for his team to implement, taking it back to the designer for approval before any system building is begun. If the designer refuses to sign it off or cooperate in refining it "because this must not be written down", fine, nothing gets done.
You can't make something if you don't know what it is you are supposed to be making.
Message to Microsoft, and to the content providers:
1) Our PC hardware is our private property, fully bought and paid for by us. Our PCs are not just a rented delivery platform which can rightly be controlled by you.
2) The operating system that we run on our PC hardware has the purpose of making our hardware do whatever *WE* want *OUR* hardware to do, and not merely what *YOU* would like *OUR* hardware to do.
If you want a fully controlled delivery platform doing whatever you desire and no more, then set up a subsidized leasing business and we'll rent the content delivery platform from you, at a cost far below the cost of private PC purchase.
In the meantime, our hardware is ours to do with as we please.
>> Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots.
Your experience of Customer Service departments clearly does not match my own. The following memory will live with me forever:
Me:Here, I'll demonstrate your service fault to you. Please telnet to your site on port 80 first.
Verisign Customer Service:What is telnet?
This kind of CS problem is actually not very surprising. The front desk Customer Service staff for any large business have to be the cheapest of the cheap because manpower doesn't scale and is a collosal business expense. It follows that the people are often rather poorly skilled, perhaps given only a few days training in which they learn by rote rather than acquire real understanding.
So bring on the expert system AIs for Customer Service quickly please!! This is the ideal application.
Yes indeed, the Guild Wars "Xmas" changes (called "Wintersday" in the game) are very extensive, with many different zones affected by snow cover and massive festive decorations, quests, games and special consumables, and with all loot tables everywhere featuring extra drops for crafting candy cane weapons.
Loads of fun goodies are available too of course, including items that provide a strong in-game boost outside of the festivities. For example, whacky snowmen golems that you can hire as henchmen for your team and which are stronger than regular henchies. And candy canes which you can double-click to wipe out your Death Penalty after dying --- uber!!!
The battle between Grenth and Dwayna will involve PvP using the candy cane weapons that we've been working all week to obtain. We won't know the details of this until Wintersday itself, but GW has such an impressive skills-based PvP system (levels almost don't matter, only how good you are at using the hundreds of skills in each of your two professions) that it's bound to be terrific.
Very impressive work by ArenaNet/NCsoft, and not a bug in sight despite the collosal makeover. (I have no connection with them, other than as a satisfied player.)
perhaps the day is coming when they will openly and consistently offer Linux on their desktop machines
Well, in case Dell is listening, I am one customer for a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed (the model that has nVidia graphics, as ATI is totally hopeless with OpenGL).
I always install my own Linux systems on desktops, but laptops are somewhat different to desktops in that they often have custom features that aren't covered well (or at all) by standard Linux distros.
A Dell Linux-based laptop with all its hardware features supported would be a very welcome product.
Compare this against the current state of affairs, where humanity is segmented into fundamentalist religious factions at war with each other, rapacious and/or clueless politicians bringing in 1984, big business cartels treating the citizenry as cattle, lawyers oiling the wheels of all the "legal" malevolance, plus an underbelly of simple criminals who care not about what they do to their neighbour. Yes, robot companions will become infinitely preferable to people, on average.
B. Robots do the Skynet or War Games thing and try to exterminate or dominate us.
This would undoubtedly unite us again, much like an alien invasion would do, because it's in the nature of humanity to unite against an external threat --- it's been happening throughout the ages, against attacks on one's country. So, at least there would be a silver lining for humanity amid the War Against The Machines or equivalent, until it's over one way or another.
C. The Culture scenario from Iain M. Banks' novels, ie. machine intelligence and capability becomes so incomprehensibly greater than our own that Man and all other creatures in the galaxy become their very well looked after pets.
Banks' scenario is good whichever you look at it: either mankind is happy as a pampered pet and wishes to remain so, or else mankind absorbs the technology of AI into itself and becomes one with it in order to remain the dominant species on the planet. The latter is Ray Kurzweil's expected future, as described in The Age of Spiritual Machines.
So, I see only good from the coming of the robot, regardless of its level of machine intelligence and the goals it develops for itself, if any.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a fantastic response from Maddog, but personal charity is not what OpenBSD/OpenSSH needs. It needs a patron for whom a regular $300 is not even pocket change.
Google, you know this is a worthy cause. Do the right thing.
Guild Wars can give you the best of both online and offline gaming. Just you and your GF (plus AI henchmen) as you don't want other players to intrude on the two of you, no subscription fees, and none of the griefing you get in other MMOGs.
... on other things. :P
Plus, a huge and wonderfully detailed world for the two of you to explore and to battle against, with no xp grinding, nor any of the other traditional MMOG timesinks that make some other popular worlds so tedious. The time saved can then be used
Recommended.
While it's easy to get drawn into the launch timing hype (exactly as Sony wants), some random business analyst's reaction interests me a lot less than would any techie reaction. There's this severely cutting edge bit of hardware heading our way, but virtually no technical comment about it.
:-)
This isn't through lack of raw data. The Cell is very well documented, and the graphics community seems to know what the RSX is going to be about. That should be enough for reams of technical comment, especially about how to bridge the gap from previous games architectures to the new one.
Furthermore, Kutaragi's many comments about delivering Linux on the PS3 should be fueling a vast amount of technical discussion, both factual and speculative. Arnd Bergmann's work on running Linux on IBM's Cell blades would be expected to provide a good basis for it, if we assume that Sony/IBM cooperation extends to the Linux port. Do we know whether it does?
What access is Linux likely to have into the high-powered backend hardware? BlueRay functionality will no doubt be tied up in chains, but presumably Linux will still be able to read ordinary CD and DVD media from the device, and play community-developed games, including online ones. And I'm sure I'm not the only one looking forward to running open media players and recorders on the console -- is the MythTV community talking about the console yet, for example?
Let's have less business analysis and more technical commentary!
One of the lessons in this story is that any organization involved in investigative reporting needs to keep its data systems under heavy cryptographic lock and key. Quite separate from any possible legal wrongdoing on the part of one or more of their reporters, all their other stories and investigations are now severely comprimised by the seizure, as others have pointed out. Their whole business could be at risk because of the ease with which computer equipment can be taken away.
This inevitably brings to mind today's story about Amazon's new storage service. If Lancaster Intelligencer Journal had stored their encrypted records and work files on such a storage service, would Amazon (or Google etc) have got raided and their computers taken away?
Obviously not (I think), but where does the boundary between yes and no actually lie? What if LIJ stored their encrypted data at some small 3rd party outfit?
This whole area is likely to become a tangled quagmire, as well as sadly a legal goldmine.
>> How could anyone have predicted this turn of events!?
You're right, it wasn't hard to see this coming. Even I predicted it, despite having a rather cloudy crystal ball, so it must have been pretty obvious.
What we're seeing here is the PS3's technological success being killed off by Sony's new overlords --- the lawyers waving the mighty banner of the company's new religion, content protection.
Whether the PS3 will still succeed despite Xbox 360 and maybe the Revolution getting a competition-free run for one or two years is anybody's guess (this won't be the last postponement). But it's sad, anyway.
In 1-1/2 year's time, MS will have Xbox 360/2 in the wings, upgraded to PS3's spec or beyond. What then of your solidly content-protected platform, Sony lawyers?
No discussion about freedom can proceed sensibly without the fundamental premise that if two people have the same freedom (regardless of the details) then the freedom of one ends where the freedom of another begins, and viceversa.
In other words, "total freedom" has inherent boundaries, which are the equal freedoms of others who possess the same freedom.
Saying that "total freedom" goes further and has no boundaries is either blinkered or just playing with words, because it denies that your concept of freedom is applicable to anyone else. It's not a logically consistent position.
Your position fell down simply because it does not respect the equivalence boundary.
Dell would need to do only two things, at minimum cost:
When your Linux isn't customized, everything in the original distro applies, so customers would be served perfectly adequately by generic documentation on the net.
And the community is more than happy to run its own support sites, especially when they are friendly wikis that are easy to update and the server is paid for by a patron.
Well since nobody seems to have patented reading between the lines and empty speculation yet (:P), I'll try to answer your question.
This is how I interpret what's been happening with the PS3, especially in the last couple of weeks:
Although this is pure speculation, it fits the evidence remarkably well.
That article may well be a "learning experience" for the author, but it's not a valid criticism of WoW. WoW was designed to be as it is, namely a very traditional MMO with all the normal grouping issues and guild orientations, its inevitable time sinking, and all the other problems that go with the territory.
.... simple, Guild Wars was made for you. It does that by design, very clever indeed.
It summarizes quite simply: for that person, WoW is the wrong game.
But that isn't a valid condemnation of WoW. He simply chose wrongly.
If you want to remain in the MMO genre but don't want any time sinks, and you want your personal skill to matter rather than time invested, and you want to be able to solo a lot of the time rather than suffer the incompetence of other people, and you don't want ridiculous mass guild raids in which you are just a cog in a machine, and you don't want the 101 other ills of traditional MMOs like EverQuest
But don't complain about WoW not being adequate. Horses for courses.
1984 is creeping up on us from every corner of the planet. Australia isn't particularly special.
... clearly candidates for terrorist recruitment in the eyes of the police here.
In the UK, we're well on our way to being followed in our every move, our freedoms being "allowed" only if we carry the necessary papers, checked, validated and scanned in everything we do, and so on.
What it comes down to is this: politicians everywhere are scum. They don't work towards a better and freer life for ordinary people, but purely for their own self-aggrandizement and political power. And since it seems that they can achieve nothing without creating new laws, the public is continually being imprisoned within ever thicker legal walls and shackled with ever tighter legal chains.
"The Fight Against Terrorism" is of course used as the current excuse. In reality, the actual daily terror here is coming from the politicians and the police. Nobody worries on a daily basis about a true whacko blowing up the underground (because the likelihood is low), but everyone worries about being jumped on by a dozen police officers on the grounds of "looking suuspicious". God, that must be easy work for the police, looking for people with shifty eyes. And I really pity the poor blokes with beards, or those who look slightly middle-eastern
I don't think that this is going to change any time soon. You know why? Because people are dumb, and watch too much TV, and believe the messages that the politicians and media are feeding them.
It's sad times indeed.
>> As it is, though, your stated goals really don't seem to add up.
I agree entirely with your reply here. The poster's statement (below) is frankly ludicrous:
>> Sadly, the programming language cannot be changed due to reasons of efficiency and availability of core libraries.
Well in that case, sadly, the inherent unreliability of the programming language and core libraries cannot be changed either. Efficiency is the *primary* inverse determinant of reliability.
This is ENGINEERING we're talking about here, ie. a practical discipline that's all about making tradeoffs in one area in order to reap benefits in another. He's not willing to make any key tradeoffs, so he's not going to gain what benefits he seeks either.
>> In Russia we are having one of the COLDEST winters in history!
... the balmy UK winters will start to look more like those of Siberia.
It's only the planetary average temperature that will increase with global warming, and not by a lot.
In contrast, local temperatures will both increase and decrease in a far more complicated pattern across the world, and by comparatively large amounts. Although simulations vary quite a lot in their predictions, the areas of major change are quite clear.
Northern Europe seems quite likely to suffer the largest downward changes, because an early consequence of the melting of the Greenland glaciers and surrounding ice shelves will be that the "Atlantic Conveyor" (a closed circuit of ocean currents) will grind to a halt. The Gulf Stream is already slowing, and there is absolutely no way to reverse this trend. The inevitable result will be that the quite warm climate in the coastal European countries up at around 50-60 degrees North will plunge towards the deep continental average
Likewise, the equatorial hot spots are expected to rise in temperature by a lot more than the planetary average, with quite appalling consequences for their populations. Anyone who thinks that "2 degrees of global warming" will be barely noticeable in Africa is confusing "global" with "local".
They are making it sound like checking for these things before systems go into production is a new concept.
You make it sound like hyperbole in marketting is something outrageous and previously unheard of.
It's a company, fer crissake. If it were an academic research group making out that they had invented a new concept, then that would be different and your criticism would be more valid.
If their product has no technical novelty, then your remarks should be directed at Slasdot editors for accepting it as News For Nerds. The company seems to be offering another competing product in this market. And that surely is A Good Thing.
>> NASA managers made a bad call for the launch decision, and engineers who had qualms about the O-rings were bullied or bamboozled into acquiescence.
That's the bit that annoyed me most.
The very idea that non-technical management can override or disregard technical advice provided by professionals in their specialist technical area is a complete travesty.
And imposing a flawed managerial direction by applying social pressures (bullying/bamboozling) to brush dissenters under the carpet just made it worse. All highly unprofessional.
I know that it's the way that business works these days, with the management thinking that it is somehow "above" the technical people who deal with the technology on which the enterprise is founded, but it's an insane model in a world that is becoming ever more technical every day.
As non-technical management becomes ever more clueless about technical issues with each passing day of technical progress, businesses who don't accept overriding technical direction at management level are treading the path towards having their own "Challanger disasters". It's a misguided approach.
There's nothing inherently unethical about booth babes. It's their chosen profession and they're being paid for their looks and their "marketting skills", ie. bringing the customers to the stand. It takes a lot of effort to stay looking that way, and courage to do it.
... I'm sure it won't be just the girls who check out their assets.
Where is might be said to be on shakey ground is if both sexes aren't fairly represented, because then the do-gooders start talking about "objectifying women". Bring on the booth hunks, too
Post up directional signs for "Booth Babes here" and "Booth Hunks there" and increase the merriment and general fun by clearly laughing at ourselves for doing it.
Vive la diference!
Option 3) Put more physical servers into the cluster that runs the (virtual) Medivh games server.
... isn't it?
With 4-5 million subscribers, they sure as hell have enough money to be doing the "right thing" and upscaling this particular cluster for the event.
The WoW server system *IS* scalable
Sadly, that's a universal truth.
After suffering the trials and tribulations of pickup groups in various MMOGs for some years now, I've finally found a solution that avoids the problems of pickup groups entirely: henchmen in Guild Wars:
Henchmen are a wonderful answer to the many problems of building and playing with teams in MMOGs. It's sad to see that DDO doesn't provide their own version of GW's henchies, and therefore suffers all the old problems that player teams bring with them.
>> This is a stupid paper.
Not at all. Their research examines quite a large range of characteristics of the particles and of the rainfall, and even presents some controls. It's not as tight as some nor, as sloppy as others, but falls well within the mean of the scientific method.
The fact that one particular type of test was not performed by them does not make this a stupid paper --- it just leaves that analysis for some other team to perform. Indeed, they seem to have covered a collosal amount of ground for a single research group already.
Their Discussion section is not part of their scientific findings, but merely provides room for discussion. Non-DNA-based "life" from outer space is a *possible* handwaving interpretation at best, but since no other interpretation matches both the microscopic visual structure and the chemical composition and the rain-distribution pattern simultaneously, it's the best we have at this stage.
>> Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose!
Go right ahead and do it yourself, or communicate with them about it. But who said that ET life would employ cellulose anyway? That notwithstanding, it would be a useful test to perform anyway, as it would help discount other possibilities.
Their earlier non-peer-reviewed papers might have been worth your label of "stupid" (meaning non-scientific) in part, but this one is quite factual in all its research sections.
If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD?
Clearly the linked article was just a hits generator, totally lacking in substance.
In any case, it made the very dumb assumption that operating systems are somehow set in stone. They're not, and while we cannot predict MS's plans for the future, we can certainly guarantee that Linux and the BSDs will evolve in whatever way their communities want.
And that includes handling the streaming world with max efficiency.
I'm taking the interview with a pinch of salt, as advised.
However, there is a general principle worth noting here which the article illustrates very well regardless of the veracity of the interview. A game designer who doesn't speak the language of the developers cannot possibly control the product being developed without creating a static definition of some kind.
This definition doesn't necessarily have to be a document (for example, for defining quests it could be through a simple interactive state machine app), but it has to be something concrete and stable which the developers can chew around. The reason for this is simple. The chewing around bridges the communications gap to the tech-illiterate designer, creating another layer of definition (an interpretation) as to what is really being requested. The developers then work to this extended definition.
That the designer allegedly wanted to write nothing down and also suffered memory loss of what he requested is so totally ridiculous that it sounds like a fabrication to me. After all, people can always take notes in meetings with which to substantiate their work, and there's a great little gizmo called a dictaphone which is hard to refute. So, something doesn't smell right there.
That said, it was the role of the lead developer or team leader to create the actual dev spec for his team to implement, taking it back to the designer for approval before any system building is begun. If the designer refuses to sign it off or cooperate in refining it "because this must not be written down", fine, nothing gets done.
You can't make something if you don't know what it is you are supposed to be making.
Message to Microsoft, and to the content providers:
1) Our PC hardware is our private property, fully bought and paid for by us. Our PCs are not just a rented delivery platform which can rightly be controlled by you.
2) The operating system that we run on our PC hardware has the purpose of making our hardware do whatever *WE* want *OUR* hardware to do, and not merely what *YOU* would like *OUR* hardware to do.
If you want a fully controlled delivery platform doing whatever you desire and no more, then set up a subsidized leasing business and we'll rent the content delivery platform from you, at a cost far below the cost of private PC purchase.
In the meantime, our hardware is ours to do with as we please.
>> Create a robot to deal with customer service, one of the real jobs that shouldn't be replaced by robots.
Your experience of Customer Service departments clearly does not match my own. The following memory will live with me forever:
Me: Here, I'll demonstrate your service fault to you. Please telnet to your site on port 80 first.
Verisign Customer Service: What is telnet?
This kind of CS problem is actually not very surprising. The front desk Customer Service staff for any large business have to be the cheapest of the cheap because manpower doesn't scale and is a collosal business expense. It follows that the people are often rather poorly skilled, perhaps given only a few days training in which they learn by rote rather than acquire real understanding.
So bring on the expert system AIs for Customer Service quickly please!! This is the ideal application.
Yes indeed, the Guild Wars "Xmas" changes (called "Wintersday" in the game) are very extensive, with many different zones affected by snow cover and massive festive decorations, quests, games and special consumables, and with all loot tables everywhere featuring extra drops for crafting candy cane weapons.
Loads of fun goodies are available too of course, including items that provide a strong in-game boost outside of the festivities. For example, whacky snowmen golems that you can hire as henchmen for your team and which are stronger than regular henchies. And candy canes which you can double-click to wipe out your Death Penalty after dying --- uber!!!
The battle between Grenth and Dwayna will involve PvP using the candy cane weapons that we've been working all week to obtain. We won't know the details of this until Wintersday itself, but GW has such an impressive skills-based PvP system (levels almost don't matter, only how good you are at using the hundreds of skills in each of your two professions) that it's bound to be terrific.
Very impressive work by ArenaNet/NCsoft, and not a bug in sight despite the collosal makeover. (I have no connection with them, other than as a satisfied player.)
perhaps the day is coming when they will openly and consistently offer Linux on their desktop machines
Well, in case Dell is listening, I am one customer for a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed (the model that has nVidia graphics, as ATI is totally hopeless with OpenGL).
I always install my own Linux systems on desktops, but laptops are somewhat different to desktops in that they often have custom features that aren't covered well (or at all) by standard Linux distros.
A Dell Linux-based laptop with all its hardware features supported would be a very welcome product.
Let's take a look at the three common scenarios:
A. Robots remain good and helpful.
Compare this against the current state of affairs, where humanity is segmented into fundamentalist religious factions at war with each other, rapacious and/or clueless politicians bringing in 1984, big business cartels treating the citizenry as cattle, lawyers oiling the wheels of all the "legal" malevolance, plus an underbelly of simple criminals who care not about what they do to their neighbour. Yes, robot companions will become infinitely preferable to people, on average.
B. Robots do the Skynet or War Games thing and try to exterminate or dominate us.
This would undoubtedly unite us again, much like an alien invasion would do, because it's in the nature of humanity to unite against an external threat --- it's been happening throughout the ages, against attacks on one's country. So, at least there would be a silver lining for humanity amid the War Against The Machines or equivalent, until it's over one way or another.
C. The Culture scenario from Iain M. Banks' novels, ie. machine intelligence and capability becomes so incomprehensibly greater than our own that Man and all other creatures in the galaxy become their very well looked after pets.
Banks' scenario is good whichever you look at it: either mankind is happy as a pampered pet and wishes to remain so, or else mankind absorbs the technology of AI into itself and becomes one with it in order to remain the dominant species on the planet. The latter is Ray Kurzweil's expected future, as described in The Age of Spiritual Machines.
So, I see only good from the coming of the robot, regardless of its level of machine intelligence and the goals it develops for itself, if any.