I guess that depends on how you define the term "terrorist." In the past few years that definition has loosened considerably, and refocused a bit at the same time. It seems, for example, that being of Anglo-Saxon descent automatically excludes someone from "terrorist" status. Kind of a racist McCarthyism.
If you put the original starwars movies under the same microscope, it sucks just as much as eps 1 and 2 did. if you look at the movies with a child's eye, then eps 1 and 2 look daaaamn good.
I disagree. I can still watch the original eps 4-6 today and enjoy them. And not for nostalgic reasons either. And while I grant that ep 1 had some cheesy moments and ep 6 was far more happy and fluffy than it should have been, overall the original trilogy was really pretty good.
But I can't say the same for any of the prequels, on any level. The writing, effects, acting, and direction were ALL bad. The vehicle, creature, and background designs were excellent however. And that is Lucas' real talent IMO. If he had been art director and allowed other folks to write and direct the films they likely would have been excellent.
Or at least the current crop of terrorists don't. This is information that would be useful when waging war against the US. ie. In an attempt to cause massive damage and disruption through strategic strikes. One could argue that terrorism has the same goals and in some cases it might, but I don't think that's what interests the current crop of middle-eastern terrorists. To them it's about making bold political and moral statements.
The strike on the WTC was a strike against the symbol of American prosperity. That it caused as much damage as it did was an accident. And I suppose there's some irony in the fact that the WTC was a hub for tourism and international business. The collapse of the towers probably killed as many foreigners as it did US citizens. And as many poor folks as rich ones. The underside of the WTC contained a shopping mall and was a large subway transport hub, after all. Not to mention the daycare service(s) based there, so more than a few small children were killed as well.
But it should be pointed out that the current crop of terrorists have not proven themselves to be nearly as capable as we seem to think they someday will be. The WTC attack was a hack job done by a few fanatics with box cutters. It required no resources and almost no skill to execute. But since 9/11 the government has been mostly talking about organized attacks. BioChem and atomic devices, etc. I won't deny that such things are definately within the reach of some, but this remains pure speculation.
it's about fair use in the country the application was created. Same as a certain other application created in Russia to decrypt eBooks. You may argue that the application damages the community more than it helps the few who want to play these music files on nonsupported devices, but as you say we're all free to not use iTunes (I don't use iTunes and don't intend to).
All of these applications continue to raise the issue of globalization vs. property law, which is a sticky issue that needs to be thought out a bit further. In this respect, things like PlayFair serve to force the issue into discussion, for good or bad.
Since this is time spent out of the office you have no obligation to be available. Same as if you were telecommuting and got a phonecall after business hours--you're free to tell them to call you tomorrow. It's the belief that ease of communications fosters an obligation to be available that causes problems, not the means of communication themselves.
Personally, I'm mostly interested in this because it offers a greater range of entertainment options. You won't miss a single Slashdot story! Play web games. Send stupid "hey I'm in an airplane" email to friends. Play Unreal Tournament online. Listen to a Shoutcast radio station while you write limericks, etc.
Since the battery life in laptops is typically far shorter than the average planeflight I have to wonder how far off this is. Battery life is currently the largest obstacle for me when I try to work in transit, and even in power saving mode the laptop won't last through a typical flight. Is such a thing as AC power even feasible?
AFAIK Rambus is just a design firm with patents on some memory technology. In order to get these products to market, they must have contracted with memory manufacturers to have their chips produced. IANAL, but if I understand correctly, isn't the real issue whether these contracts were violated? Rambus could always have written up a contract with another manufacturer guranteeing certain yield rates and such, thus guranteeing the production volumes they seem to be complaining about. Failing this, I imagine they could have set up a plant of their own (at considerable cost of course).
If it's not in a contract somewhere, weren't these manufacturers within their rights to limit production volumes to a level that they expected the market would consume? Or do these allegations of collusion and such have merit?
and C++/CLI is developing an actual standard. Many people avoid Java because they don't like the language, and Java may never have an open standard. As much as I don't like MS, they're doing a lot right with.NET.
My main problem with MS is that I don't buy their vision. I don't want the future they're selling. They also tend to produce vastly overcomplicated solutions to problems, which sometimes makes me wonder how the company manages to continue its growth rate. What I don't want is for competitors to copy MS. I choose competing products over MS stuff because I prefer those differences. Why should I use a poor clone of something I don't like in the first place?
If there's one thing I learned during my time in IT it's that everyone thinks their job needs to be done immediately and they constantly change their minds about what the job should entail. Learning to perceive what people may really want or to be able to ask questions to ascertain this is important, and learning to perceive which jobs are truly important is critical. Being able to accurately estimate how long a task will take you is also very important.
I had one job in R&D where we billed the rest of the company for hours worked. It helped stifle the stupid requests that occur whenever some Tom, Dick, or Harry gets an idea. This obviously isn't feasible in most situations, but the underlying idea generally is. As in any business job, people skills are indispensible for avoiding wasted work.
Am I the only one thinking of Shield Belts? I wonder if this tech will inspire the creation of new weapons.
And I can only imagine what would happen if you made a flexible weapon such as a bullwhip out of this stuff. Does the material only become rigid for penatration type deformation or will any high-velocity change do?
as the rules of engagement seem to preclude social engineering in this case. It's a fixed timeframe of maybe a few days at most. The defenders are all "teams" at the various military academies, all of whom probably never leave the staging area except to eat or sleep until the game is over. And the attacker is required to use an anonymous location in Maryland as their base of operations. Even if travel outside this BoO is allowed for the attackers, agents would have to hop on planes immediately, engineer their way into the academy and get at the teams, then try to glean some information from them or the surrounding location that they didn't already know.
Social engineering would be more suitable for a more open-ended game that didn't have so many constraints, or one that focused on secret keeping and the like rather than on network defense.
Haven't found the legal code to peruse, but I think the writer of the article has made a mistake. It sounds to me like the tax was for dedicated lines between offices rather than wires built into a single establishment. Were this not the case, PBX phone systems which are used by nearly all businesses and schools in the US would be taxed as well, and these systems have been in place forever. If my guess is correct, then individuals and most busineses would be exempt, as it's not common even today for many businesses to have dedicated WAN lines, and these are the same businesses that should already be paying this tax.
According to the NAUI dive tables (http://www.naui.org/table1.htm) The maximum safe dive time at 10 meters is actually a bit over 120 minutes. Dives are rarely longer than 45 minutes mostly because of tank capacity rather than any danger of nitrogen narcosis.
What benefit does sealing the hood provide? With today's autos, if you don't want to open the hood then you don't pull the lever. Simple as that. The difference in this case is that if you NEED to open the hood you're SOL. What does this mean in practical terms? Money for Volvo.
Say I'm driving my shiny new sealed car through the middle of nowhere and my fanbelt breaks. Unable to open the hood to replace it I call road repair service. They arrive with a fanbelt only to discover that my car is sealed and they need a winch to lift off the body, so they tow it to a nearby service station. Unfortunately, that service station is not an authorized Volvo shop and doesn't have the specialized Volvo tools to detach the body. They do some looking and find out that the nearest authorized Volvo repair service is 500 miles down the road. So I pay to have the car towed another 500 miles and pay the mechanics to lift off the body, replace the fanbelt, and reattach the body. Since this is a complex process the job takes four hours (including the wait because they have other jobs being done). At the end of the ordeal I'm out more than a thousand dollars, twelve or more hours of my time, and 500 miles out of the way just to get my fanbelt changed. At the same time, Volvo is guranteed revenue for even the smallest modification to the vehicle they've cleverly marketed at naieve luddites like myself. Sounds like a winner to me.
NT ran on PPC and Alpha back when everything went through an emulation layer. Now that graphics and sound are straight to hardware they're likely going to have some fun restructuring their low-level architecture.
And technically, it's possible the XBox2 SDK could be backwards-compatible with the XBox1 SDK, requiring only a recompile to get a game working on the new platform. But while this is possible I also think it will never happen. It makes no economic sense to do so.
I'd guess they made the choice for heat production reasons. The XBox is quite large for a game console and it still has heat problems. Using a smaller, cooler chip would help make this more of a real console. Intel is still having problems with its Prescott processor and is also currently trying to reposition itself with respect to the 64-bit transition. AMD doesn't have a low-heat CPU available either, though they're otherwise better positioned in the marketplace.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, though. Getting Windows to run on a new architecture will likely take more than a new kernel.
This article is very well-written, but it only serves as evidence that the game industry still ignores standard engineering practices. 30 minutes is nothing in terms of build time, especially with a C++ project. And there are some very simple ways to reduce build time that they could be practicing right from the start instead of refactoring halfway through. I'm surprised they didn't establish such practices after their first experience with such horrific development delays.
I will agree that the cost of game developmetn is skyrocketing. The cost of developing an engine alone is more than many game houses can handle and things are not improving. It can't be too long before more third party suppliers spring up who do nothing but build game engines and design tools. In a way it's kind of silly that game houses still have to build most of their stuff from scratch.
but there's always the possibility of civil disobedience. If a large portion of the people simply ignore the new laws, the cost of enforcing them becomes prohibitive. This is why the MPAA has been so careful in their assault on individual file-traders. They are hoping that by making an example of a select few, they can deter others from trading music. They aren't widening their assault because they couldn't afford the legal burden it would incur. Prohibition is a good example of how even governmental force can be derailed quite effectively by civil disobedience.
and wasn't impressed. The interviewer got into work two hours after the interview was supposed to start, and things went downhill from there. If they hadn't paid for my plane ticket I would have left. I still find it surprising that such a well-known game company can be so unpreofessional and remain successful.
Actually, IOCP under Windows is arguably the best multiplexing IO design out there. It trumps most high-end versions of poll that are so popular on the Uni*es. And while this is probably technically kernel code, it does have hooks in the Winsock API.
How did such a snide comment ever get modded up to 5, anyway?
Those old laws can come in handy--the executive branch can selectively enforce them until doomsday.
Cabaret laws made a recent comeback in NYC and in other cities. You know what those are? An establishment needs a permit if people there are going to dance to recorded music. That includes shimmying in the corner because the jukebox is on. From what I've been told, the law in NYC was passed way back in the days of yore to keep a handle on clubs in the disreputable parts of town (ie. Harlem). Nowadays they're being used selectively to shutdown any place the police don't like (much as it was in the old days) which may just be because they didn't get a free drink there one night.
It would be nice if there were a built-in review age on laws that required them to be re-evaluated for applicability. It would probably have to vary based on the type of law, but the shortest period would likely be something like 5 years. To work, the review process would have to be detailed such that a clerk can't just stamp a piece of paper and put it back in a drawer.
The analogy doesn't hold. Rather than a parking ticket, this would be like fining people when their car is stolen.
I imagine there could be some kind of responsible PC owner rules. Owners of compromised systems would be notified and if they failed to address the problem within, say, 30 days then they are fined or perhaps their IP is just knocked off the net. This would likely generate a massive amount of support calls so a dedicted help desk would need to be created, which wouldn't be cheap.
So say I drink way too much coffee and water and go to the bathroom 6 times during the day. I pause to say "hi" to a few folks on the way, so assume 5 minutes a trip or 30 total minutes of pee breaks for the day. Let's further assume that several urgent items were delayed by these trips and those delays reduced the productivity of others waiting on my emails. By your calculations my pee breaks alone could have cost the company well over $1000.
If we further assume that every employee in the company is making similar trips and the company employs 100 people, the total cost could easily exceed $100,000 per day. And that's without even considering the interference patterns created by the timing of bathroom trips, communication dependencies, and resulting backed-up work (no pun intended).
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I guess that depends on how you define the term "terrorist." In the past few years that definition has loosened considerably, and refocused a bit at the same time. It seems, for example, that being of Anglo-Saxon descent automatically excludes someone from "terrorist" status. Kind of a racist McCarthyism.
If you put the original starwars movies under the same microscope, it sucks just as much as eps 1 and 2 did. if you look at the movies with a child's eye, then eps 1 and 2 look daaaamn good.
I disagree. I can still watch the original eps 4-6 today and enjoy them. And not for nostalgic reasons either. And while I grant that ep 1 had some cheesy moments and ep 6 was far more happy and fluffy than it should have been, overall the original trilogy was really pretty good.
But I can't say the same for any of the prequels, on any level. The writing, effects, acting, and direction were ALL bad. The vehicle, creature, and background designs were excellent however. And that is Lucas' real talent IMO. If he had been art director and allowed other folks to write and direct the films they likely would have been excellent.
Or at least the current crop of terrorists don't. This is information that would be useful when waging war against the US. ie. In an attempt to cause massive damage and disruption through strategic strikes. One could argue that terrorism has the same goals and in some cases it might, but I don't think that's what interests the current crop of middle-eastern terrorists. To them it's about making bold political and moral statements.
The strike on the WTC was a strike against the symbol of American prosperity. That it caused as much damage as it did was an accident. And I suppose there's some irony in the fact that the WTC was a hub for tourism and international business. The collapse of the towers probably killed as many foreigners as it did US citizens. And as many poor folks as rich ones. The underside of the WTC contained a shopping mall and was a large subway transport hub, after all. Not to mention the daycare service(s) based there, so more than a few small children were killed as well.
But it should be pointed out that the current crop of terrorists have not proven themselves to be nearly as capable as we seem to think they someday will be. The WTC attack was a hack job done by a few fanatics with box cutters. It required no resources and almost no skill to execute. But since 9/11 the government has been mostly talking about organized attacks. BioChem and atomic devices, etc. I won't deny that such things are definately within the reach of some, but this remains pure speculation.
it's about fair use in the country the application was created. Same as a certain other application created in Russia to decrypt eBooks. You may argue that the application damages the community more than it helps the few who want to play these music files on nonsupported devices, but as you say we're all free to not use iTunes (I don't use iTunes and don't intend to).
All of these applications continue to raise the issue of globalization vs. property law, which is a sticky issue that needs to be thought out a bit further. In this respect, things like PlayFair serve to force the issue into discussion, for good or bad.
Since this is time spent out of the office you have no obligation to be available. Same as if you were telecommuting and got a phonecall after business hours--you're free to tell them to call you tomorrow. It's the belief that ease of communications fosters an obligation to be available that causes problems, not the means of communication themselves.
Personally, I'm mostly interested in this because it offers a greater range of entertainment options. You won't miss a single Slashdot story! Play web games. Send stupid "hey I'm in an airplane" email to friends. Play Unreal Tournament online. Listen to a Shoutcast radio station while you write limericks, etc.
Since the battery life in laptops is typically far shorter than the average planeflight I have to wonder how far off this is. Battery life is currently the largest obstacle for me when I try to work in transit, and even in power saving mode the laptop won't last through a typical flight. Is such a thing as AC power even feasible?
AFAIK Rambus is just a design firm with patents on some memory technology. In order to get these products to market, they must have contracted with memory manufacturers to have their chips produced. IANAL, but if I understand correctly, isn't the real issue whether these contracts were violated? Rambus could always have written up a contract with another manufacturer guranteeing certain yield rates and such, thus guranteeing the production volumes they seem to be complaining about. Failing this, I imagine they could have set up a plant of their own (at considerable cost of course).
If it's not in a contract somewhere, weren't these manufacturers within their rights to limit production volumes to a level that they expected the market would consume? Or do these allegations of collusion and such have merit?
and C++/CLI is developing an actual standard. Many people avoid Java because they don't like the language, and Java may never have an open standard. As much as I don't like MS, they're doing a lot right with .NET.
My main problem with MS is that I don't buy their vision. I don't want the future they're selling. They also tend to produce vastly overcomplicated solutions to problems, which sometimes makes me wonder how the company manages to continue its growth rate. What I don't want is for competitors to copy MS. I choose competing products over MS stuff because I prefer those differences. Why should I use a poor clone of something I don't like in the first place?
If there's one thing I learned during my time in IT it's that everyone thinks their job needs to be done immediately and they constantly change their minds about what the job should entail. Learning to perceive what people may really want or to be able to ask questions to ascertain this is important, and learning to perceive which jobs are truly important is critical. Being able to accurately estimate how long a task will take you is also very important.
I had one job in R&D where we billed the rest of the company for hours worked. It helped stifle the stupid requests that occur whenever some Tom, Dick, or Harry gets an idea. This obviously isn't feasible in most situations, but the underlying idea generally is. As in any business job, people skills are indispensible for avoiding wasted work.
Am I the only one thinking of Shield Belts? I wonder if this tech will inspire the creation of new weapons.
And I can only imagine what would happen if you made a flexible weapon such as a bullwhip out of this stuff. Does the material only become rigid for penatration type deformation or will any high-velocity change do?
as the rules of engagement seem to preclude social engineering in this case. It's a fixed timeframe of maybe a few days at most. The defenders are all "teams" at the various military academies, all of whom probably never leave the staging area except to eat or sleep until the game is over. And the attacker is required to use an anonymous location in Maryland as their base of operations. Even if travel outside this BoO is allowed for the attackers, agents would have to hop on planes immediately, engineer their way into the academy and get at the teams, then try to glean some information from them or the surrounding location that they didn't already know.
Social engineering would be more suitable for a more open-ended game that didn't have so many constraints, or one that focused on secret keeping and the like rather than on network defense.
Haven't found the legal code to peruse, but I think the writer of the article has made a mistake. It sounds to me like the tax was for dedicated lines between offices rather than wires built into a single establishment. Were this not the case, PBX phone systems which are used by nearly all businesses and schools in the US would be taxed as well, and these systems have been in place forever. If my guess is correct, then individuals and most busineses would be exempt, as it's not common even today for many businesses to have dedicated WAN lines, and these are the same businesses that should already be paying this tax.
According to the NAUI dive tables (http://www.naui.org/table1.htm) The maximum safe dive time at 10 meters is actually a bit over 120 minutes. Dives are rarely longer than 45 minutes mostly because of tank capacity rather than any danger of nitrogen narcosis.
What benefit does sealing the hood provide? With today's autos, if you don't want to open the hood then you don't pull the lever. Simple as that. The difference in this case is that if you NEED to open the hood you're SOL. What does this mean in practical terms? Money for Volvo.
Say I'm driving my shiny new sealed car through the middle of nowhere and my fanbelt breaks. Unable to open the hood to replace it I call road repair service. They arrive with a fanbelt only to discover that my car is sealed and they need a winch to lift off the body, so they tow it to a nearby service station. Unfortunately, that service station is not an authorized Volvo shop and doesn't have the specialized Volvo tools to detach the body. They do some looking and find out that the nearest authorized Volvo repair service is 500 miles down the road. So I pay to have the car towed another 500 miles and pay the mechanics to lift off the body, replace the fanbelt, and reattach the body. Since this is a complex process the job takes four hours (including the wait because they have other jobs being done). At the end of the ordeal I'm out more than a thousand dollars, twelve or more hours of my time, and 500 miles out of the way just to get my fanbelt changed. At the same time, Volvo is guranteed revenue for even the smallest modification to the vehicle they've cleverly marketed at naieve luddites like myself. Sounds like a winner to me.
NT ran on PPC and Alpha back when everything went through an emulation layer. Now that graphics and sound are straight to hardware they're likely going to have some fun restructuring their low-level architecture.
And technically, it's possible the XBox2 SDK could be backwards-compatible with the XBox1 SDK, requiring only a recompile to get a game working on the new platform. But while this is possible I also think it will never happen. It makes no economic sense to do so.
I'd guess they made the choice for heat production reasons. The XBox is quite large for a game console and it still has heat problems. Using a smaller, cooler chip would help make this more of a real console. Intel is still having problems with its Prescott processor and is also currently trying to reposition itself with respect to the 64-bit transition. AMD doesn't have a low-heat CPU available either, though they're otherwise better positioned in the marketplace.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, though. Getting Windows to run on a new architecture will likely take more than a new kernel.
This article is very well-written, but it only serves as evidence that the game industry still ignores standard engineering practices. 30 minutes is nothing in terms of build time, especially with a C++ project. And there are some very simple ways to reduce build time that they could be practicing right from the start instead of refactoring halfway through. I'm surprised they didn't establish such practices after their first experience with such horrific development delays.
I will agree that the cost of game developmetn is skyrocketing. The cost of developing an engine alone is more than many game houses can handle and things are not improving. It can't be too long before more third party suppliers spring up who do nothing but build game engines and design tools. In a way it's kind of silly that game houses still have to build most of their stuff from scratch.
but there's always the possibility of civil disobedience. If a large portion of the people simply ignore the new laws, the cost of enforcing them becomes prohibitive. This is why the MPAA has been so careful in their assault on individual file-traders. They are hoping that by making an example of a select few, they can deter others from trading music. They aren't widening their assault because they couldn't afford the legal burden it would incur. Prohibition is a good example of how even governmental force can be derailed quite effectively by civil disobedience.
and wasn't impressed. The interviewer got into work two hours after the interview was supposed to start, and things went downhill from there. If they hadn't paid for my plane ticket I would have left. I still find it surprising that such a well-known game company can be so unpreofessional and remain successful.
Actually, IOCP under Windows is arguably the best multiplexing IO design out there. It trumps most high-end versions of poll that are so popular on the Uni*es. And while this is probably technically kernel code, it does have hooks in the Winsock API.
How did such a snide comment ever get modded up to 5, anyway?
Those old laws can come in handy--the executive branch can selectively enforce them until doomsday.
Cabaret laws made a recent comeback in NYC and in other cities. You know what those are? An establishment needs a permit if people there are going to dance to recorded music. That includes shimmying in the corner because the jukebox is on. From what I've been told, the law in NYC was passed way back in the days of yore to keep a handle on clubs in the disreputable parts of town (ie. Harlem). Nowadays they're being used selectively to shutdown any place the police don't like (much as it was in the old days) which may just be because they didn't get a free drink there one night.
It would be nice if there were a built-in review age on laws that required them to be re-evaluated for applicability. It would probably have to vary based on the type of law, but the shortest period would likely be something like 5 years. To work, the review process would have to be detailed such that a clerk can't just stamp a piece of paper and put it back in a drawer.
that auto-plays tapes when they're inserted. Something tells me this suit won't last very long.
Not nearly the beginning. This has been a topic of discussion since the Euro was proposed.
The analogy doesn't hold. Rather than a parking ticket, this would be like fining people when their car is stolen.
I imagine there could be some kind of responsible PC owner rules. Owners of compromised systems would be notified and if they failed to address the problem within, say, 30 days then they are fined or perhaps their IP is just knocked off the net. This would likely generate a massive amount of support calls so a dedicted help desk would need to be created, which wouldn't be cheap.
So say I drink way too much coffee and water and go to the bathroom 6 times during the day. I pause to say "hi" to a few folks on the way, so assume 5 minutes a trip or 30 total minutes of pee breaks for the day. Let's further assume that several urgent items were delayed by these trips and those delays reduced the productivity of others waiting on my emails. By your calculations my pee breaks alone could have cost the company well over $1000.
If we further assume that every employee in the company is making similar trips and the company employs 100 people, the total cost could easily exceed $100,000 per day. And that's without even considering the interference patterns created by the timing of bathroom trips, communication dependencies, and resulting backed-up work (no pun intended).