They buy the whole of the NFL, NHL, or whatever else they've bought out the licenses to... Then they complain about how much it costs to make a game. According to the article, it's big teams that drive the cost up. I have a hard time believing that engineering costs even hold a candle to what it takes to keep competitors from putting your John Elways and Wayne Gretzkys into a game. That the quotes in the article would come from an EA GM sounds ludicrous to me. I don't even play EA games anymore unless it is unavoidable. If they keep buying the World, it soon will be.
I have used F-Script to write tests for my applications for quite some time. In fact, pretty much everything I write has an F-Script console built into it when DEBUG is on. Naturally, OCUnit is nice for built-in unit test, but I really like being able to write an impromptu test into the F-Script console real quick to exercise some newly written or changed code. My clients often do not give me much time for writing enough built-in tests, so F-Script helps me pick up the slack with convenient, live testing. On the bad side, with F-Script, you are relegated to writing non-portable tests with odd, SmallTalky syntax, but for me it is an acceptable compromise for such a good, free (as in beer), on-the-fly testing tool. I don't remember having thanked Philippe for making it available. Thanks, Philippe!
In a bid to keep itself afloat, Enron hatched an interesting scheme; get a bill in California passed that deregulates energy, then create a market. I remember this state bill -- it was couched as a measure that would supposedly "give consumers choice", and "lower energy prices because of competition". Naturally, it passed, then the fun began. Enron's ethically bereft traders would "buy" a bunch of power when all the generators were at capacity, call up a generator and tell them to shut down (creating a shortage), then "sell" California the power at 10 times the price. If I recall correctly, before they went belly up, they were trying to figure out how to do the same thing with bandwidth. Can you imagine bandwidth "brownouts" brought about by artificial "shortages". Lovely.
I think it would be more difficult for telcos to pull something like this off because they would have to conspire to do it. Right now, the 'net is in a rather unmanaged, unregulated state. Beware of laws that claim to regulate or even deregulate it (even in a seemingly beneficial way), and watch for any association between the carriers. I must emphasize that first warning, netizens -- beware ANY legislation. No law is going to improve a bandwidth consumer's position at this point. Telcos cannot create a "fast lane", only slow down all the "lanes" but one to create a market. Don't give them an inch, or they will take a mile.
I am having a hard time believing that a body who puts personal information about themselves and their friends online would expect any privacy. A MySpace user has no privacy -- both the site's privacy policy and common sense should show us this. The "Web 2.0" (this is retarded moniker, btw) is not going to take privacy from the rest of us any more than the "Web 1.0" (sigh) did. Loss of privacy is not really what TFA was about -- just a little submitter fear-mongering.
What this article is about, mainly, is the business model these places make with your information. This part I believe. I am sure there is money there, but I don't think that this sort of data is going to be the marketing panacea that the submitter seems to indicate. For data from so many people to be effective for marketing, the company has to have an automated system for analyzing each user's data algorithmically. Scanning text for keywords does not necessarily tell an algorithm what a user would be willing to buy. If I could write such a thing, I would be a billionaire. Until then, marketing companies are going to use the same old, inelegant, brute force techniques to get their spam into our mailboxes.
Hell, I have had a site with a blog, photos, and even a list of favorite links, and I still get spam that makes no sense nearly 100% of the time. I do not yet see how this version 2.0 of the Web is going to change that.
I modded this up because I, despite being a California resident, did not know anything at all about consumer-level credit freezing. After some digging, I found that any resident of CA, NV, CO, LA, ME, NC, CT, and identity theft victims from some other states my freeze their files. I think this is great, but I was diappointed to find that there is a significant amount of paperwork and a fee that must be submitted to each credit agency!
This means that you have to submit paperwork and pay a fee to TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax in order to get some protection. I don't think this is either fair or adequate. The problem is that creditors require no express authorization in order to make an inquiry or open a new account on your behalf. Perhaps if we stopped using retarded social security numbers for everything, we wouldn't have these sorts of problems, but what sort of system for authorization could we use instead?
It just seems to me like we are trying to legislate the wrong thing. If a good system for authentication is in place, then the fact that your personal information has made it into the wild would not matter so much.
I have worked and played on Macs since the Mac SE. I had an SE, IIci, IIcx, Quadra A/V, 9500, G3, G4, iMac, iMac G4, iBook, 2 Powerbooks, and am currently using a Dual G5. I have three generations of iPods; perhaps there is some hardware I missed somewhere. At any rate, I have never used Apple's support aparatus. Ever. No DOA units, no failures, no substantial data loss -- just plenty of wonky software, but no disastrous problems. I read the support forums, and I see lots of problems -- perhaps I have been very lucky. Apple is not without their problems, and as a software developer, I do see a lot of them, but the performance of the hardware and software I have purchased from them speaks for itself. It's great stuff.
I don't think the crappy article gets this across at all, but it's probably the submitter's fault for hyping the article to be about why people love Apple so much. I would say that Apple's loud headphone solution may be commendable, but I wouldn't really know because I am smart enough not to blast my ears out with the thing and never needed to call them about it!
Fanboy? I guess so. And it's deserved. I am a conspicuous consumer, cynic, and generally hard to please. Getting me to be a fanboy is quite an achievement on Apple's part. All they had to do was make products that don't suck.
I enjoy the level scaling, but it gave me quite a shock at first. I realized quickly that I was leveling too fast without sharpening my toon's combat-related skills. To avoid scaling problems, only level up when you have seen gains in those skills. Just because it says you can level up does not mean that you should go ahead and do it. Usually, I resist the urge to rest my toon until I have seen significant gains in the skills that will allow it to complete with the leveled-up critters out there. As long as I level up in a balanced fashion, most of the fights stay challanging regardless of my level. I have enjoyed the scaling so far, but it is drastically different from the way Morrowind worked. IMO, that is a good thing because in that game, my toons were demingods before too long and the game became boring.
The above reply seems to confuse the issues of ABI (which is what I was talking about) and code container format (which your reply seemed to be talking about). When C++ is used for loadable code libraries, getting your tools and interfaces set up right is a little more tricky. Changing the capabilities of the SDK without breaking compatibility is even more tricky. Where I was going to go was that with Objective-C, you do not have the same problem, but I didn't even start because Adobe probably can't do that, as they are cross-platform SDKs.:)
Perhaps you missed the point of why I would criticize Adobe for using CodeWarrior. It has nothing to do with the container format. When Adobe released Creative Suite 2 last year, they moved from CFM to Mach-O, but they were still using the same old tool... CodeWarrrior (a bad tool for creating native Mac OS X apps, IMO). Had they moved back then, we would probably have Intel builds of Creative Suite in short order.
I am sure there were good reasons for Adobe to have done things this way, but... Now not only will we have to move our plugins to XCode, but we will also have to move them to Intel afterwards, and we can't do diddly until we get their new SDKs. Foo!
I work on plugins for Adobe's applications occasionally, and let me say that the [apparent] "maybe in 2007" statement from Adobe is not a big surprise to me. The applications in their creative suite and plugin software development kits rely on CodeWarrior, which is [effectively] a dead product. AFAIK, it could never support development of universal binaries, and I would speculate that they have known this for a while.
Adobe's plugin Software Development Kits (SDKs) are based on C++ object models, which will mean that plugins and their host applications will need to be built with the same tools for everything to work. To move on, I think Adobe is going to have to move all their products and SDKs to XCode (gcc), and though I do not work for Adobe, I would wager that it will be a fairly tough job. IMO, Q2 or Q3 2007 seems a fairly realistic goal.
The problems the Intel transition will pose for both Adobe and the third-party plugin developers will be daunting. Quark and its associates have similar troubles, but I have personally seen some decent progress on the Quark side, though I think NDA prevents me from saying anything specific. Though I have seen little progress from Adobe as yet, I am confident they will deliver.
Adobe has a lot of work ahead of them, so I would encourage users of Adobe's creative apps to be patient, and realize how much work Adobe has ahead of them and that it involves more than just moving the applications to Intel. SDKs often offer as many if not more challenges than their host applications. I will part with a criticism: Everybody has known that CodeWarrior is dead for a long time. I think Adobe should have started putting more resources into jumping ship right when the writing went on the wall. Now we are all going to have to wait a while because Adobe was so shiftless about getting off the dead branch.
I see a lot of comments in this thread about coding practices and the like. That is fine, but I think you would do well to think about practices that matter more. You have indicated that your environment really doesn't offer much of an IT infrastructure, which means that you will more than likely play an appreciable role in many of the following processes: requirements management, quality, change management, project management. There may be many instances of your behavior causing projects to succeed or fail, and they will have nothing to do with whether your people are commenting their code.
If you can, put together a process that specifies how all of you can define a product, start a project (get a suit to sign off on it too), deal with changes in requirements without tanking the project, assure quality, and ship. The code will take care of itself because it is the only thing you will have a decent amount of control over. Everything else is cross-functional, which adds a great deal of difficulty -- hence the need for policy.
Just remember the "ship" part. Don't get stuck too long in defining a process because none exist which are universally indicated, completely effective, or free from ruinous meddling and circumvention. Worry more about what can keep you from shipping and try to set a policy that will prevent those things.
And most of all, watch your cornhole -- technical leads are sh*t magnets.
Make engineers study ethics? I have seen a lot of ethical foibles in my profession, and they have *all* originated from executives. Why not make them take the damned course instead?
The "rootkit" does indeed do the things you specify, but this does not make it a rootkit, IMO. A rootkit maintains a backdoor for another entity -- one should look at intent as well as behavior when classifying these things. IMO, if there is no backdoor, there is no rootkit, though the software does indeed incorporate many behaviors in the style of a rootkit to achieve its purpose, which is to try to prevent Customers from having direct access to some data. This is isn't even a virus because it does not want to propagate. I am not sure what to call this crap other than a trojan, but I thought rootkit was hyperbole derived of the author's outrage at finding it so hard to detect and remove, which does the otherwise excellent article a disservice.
I tend to think of software more in terms of purpose than behavior, as behavior can be incorrect. Regardless of anyone's disagreement with the way I categorize this software, my comments do not intend to diminish the article's value or the pertinence of Sony's ignorance. It is clear that Sony's executives either have no clue about what their DRM software is doing or do not care -- either way, a change needs to be made.
It is disappointing that the article does indeed call this a rootkit without providing proof. All I see is some DRM shovelware that is surreptitiously installed and hard to remove, which is bad enough without resorting to hyperbole. IMO, the article needs to prove that this software maliciously intercepts communication or opens holes to be able to use that word.
I am not sure that I understand why so many in this forum are so down on the RIAA. It's a bit like blaming the gun when someone gets shot. The RIAA is acting on behalf of the record companies (they're euphemistically called "artists"), so why don't we recognize *them* as the Great Satan here? Make no mistake, recording companies are some of the greediest bastards you will ever see. They steal all the money they can from both you *and* the real artists who perform the music (so much so that artists often end up *owing* record companies after they cut an album). I feel a bit sorry for the RIAA, actually -- well, not really.;)
By ABM treaty, I can only assume he means the SALT II proceedings, which is about nuclear weapons, not weather control. Parent's author does not cite any treaty text. Also, HAARP is a rather straightforward, unclassified HF radio experiment that will not affect weather patterns. The conspiracy theories about HAARP have always been funny -- controlling weather with some static HF antennas connected to a diesel generator -- the weakness of this argument truly boggles the mind.
The article was interesting. Before reading it, I did not know anything about the North Sea Flood or the Deltaworken that came of it. Right away, I noticed that the article takes a rather particular stance on the purpose and value of big projects such as these -- the problem is the sea, and we should invest in project such as these to keep the sea out of habitable land. I think the article would have been a lot more interesting had it included at least a cursory discussion of the fact that while technology like this has a temporary benefit, the problems caused by development in wetlands cannot be permanently solved.
IMO, the real problem with inhabited wetlands is not storm surge, but subsidence, which is what allows storm surge to inundate inhabited land. We populate the wetlands, pumping out the water which would normally bring along with it silt, which accretes, contributing the the land mass that will naturally buffer storm surge. Once inhabited, the land mass gradually subsides (sinks), making vulnerability to flooding worse. I believe that no technology will stop this.
If my opinion is a correct one, there is no prevention of such disasters, only preparedness and remediation. I live in the Los Angeles metro area, and I have the same problem. The best thing I can do is buy property on land out here that the USGS has not identified as prone to liquefaction or heavy shaking and hope for the best. I do not expect my government to build an $8 billion gadget to protect me, because there is no way for sure to know that it will even work!
What I am left wondering is whether or not the people of NO expect to be protected, and would it even be worth it to try. These people live in a dangerous area, just like me, and I think that money spent on disaster education and readiness would probably be well spent, as opposed to wasting billions fighting nature in a losing battle. Our arms are too short to box with God, so perhaps it would be better to spend money on learning to roll with the punches. Based on the chaos and loss of life I saw, I don't think anyone down there was even the least bit prepared. I see the same indolence here in L.A. where I live, and a lot of people are going to die some day because of it.
Let's not confuse people who have choices with people who have none. When you are starving and have no place to go, I don't think moving somewhere else is an option.
Why is Dr Blitzer so discreet? What are you guys hiding? Are you two involved in some sort of torrid affair? You can tell us. Nobody in here but us girls.
There is a lot of very interesting work being done out there, but consider the ramifications of producing energy, in general. Most of the time, when we are releasing energy with an exothermic process, we are changing one thing into something else, using some leftover energy to do work. Fusion really isn't very different.
Let us assume for the sake of argument, that we have implemented a form of nuclear energy production that leaves something relatively harmless behind, such as helium. When this process is put into practice the world over, the effect on our environment could be Very Bad.
No matter how we produce energy, we are doing so at the expense of the environmental balance that made sophisticated life on Earth possible to begin with. We threaten our own existence by producing energy. Perhaps we should be putting more research into ways each and every human can live happily while consuming *less* energy, rather than endeavoring to produce *more*.
There is intriguing evidence available today that suggests that the comings and goings of living beings on Earth regularly brings about disastrous changes in climate, triggered by release and re-uptake of CO2, methane, and the like. Whether we are accelerating this natural process with our energy production is a subject about which there is much debate, but learning how we can require less energy to live certainly wouldn't hurt!
The parent comment sounds similar to a lot of other myopic things people have said that turned out to be wrong, (i.e.: We can't fly, the world is flat, the sound barrier can't be broken, etc). Nobody remembers the names of the idiots who said these things.
If there is anything an education in science has taught me, it is that we humans have a pretty tentative grip on how things work, and there sure is a lot that we have to learn. Speaking of the strong nuclear force as though it were some insurmountable obstacle is ignorant.
Today's insoluble riddle will be tomorrow's household appliance.
on mokusatsu and weapons that make peace (sort of)
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60 Years Since Hiroshima
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were likely caused by communication problems, nothing more. When approached with proposals for surrender, Japan's leadership replied with "mokusatsu" -- a typically Japanese response when confronted with an unappealing offer -- "I hear you, but I choose to say nothing". The purpose of this sort of communication is to respond to an offensive offer respectfully whilst saving face, and it usually elicits a better offer. Of course, Americans don't understand that sort of crap, so along came a typically American response -- really bad sunburn for tens of thousands of Japanese. Had these two countries appointed some better diplomats, perhaps it would never have happened. But who cares about diplomacy when you've already decided you are going to annihilate one another?
20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, I have always wondered what would have occurred had we never dropped the bombs. It would be hard for me to believe that the Japanese would ever have surrendered otherwise. At the time, it was seen as a fate worse than death (the "unendurable"), and they were teaching women and children in just about every prefecture to fight with bamboo spears. This seems like determination that could only be broken by a weapon so powerful, awe-inspiring, and magical as an atomic bomb would seem in 1945.
Move beyond the war with Japan's rather explosive resolution and you have more to speculate about that leads back to it. Without our demonstration of the power of atomic weapons in Asia, would the U.S. and Soviets really not have blown the shit out of each other during the cold war? It seems to me that deterrence only works when there has been a demonstration of the consequences of unchecked aggression. This may be reductio ad absurdum, but I did not start caring about my parking tickets until I got a boot [clamp] on my car. The atomic bomb's use brought the power of nuclear weapons out of the abstract, and I for one am very thankful for the success of nuclear weapons today. They have put an end to war between developed nations, leaving our leaders to their inane intrigues and bullying (at least it's not World War III).
This fact leads me to a paradox that I find interesting. Targeting non combatants with nuclear weapons was definitely the wrong thing to do. It is terrorism. But in this case, considering all that could have been, I feel that it was right to do the wrong thing, even if for the wrong reasons.
Ah, physics submissions are always trollbait
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Nuclear Fuel How-To
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· Score: 1
And Lo, the academic Trolls did come forth to criticize the article's lack of depth, and there was much gnashing of teeth.
This article does exactly what it says. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to a presentation I had to give for my high school AP physics classmates in 1988, though I seem to remember focusing on how breeder reactors actually work. In any case, I thought the article was a good one, and most of the criticism of the/. elitists in here is both laughable and lamentable.
I don't understand why this has been modded up. Okay, let's say you find a solution that allows you to get a message that your servers are down while you are fishing for salmon in the Yukon. What the hell are you going to do about it? Worry yourself to death? If you can't even call anyone or access your servers while you are out of pocket, what is the point of knowing there is a problem?
Before I wrap up, I wanted to tell you about this totally sweet thing I found on teh interwebs. You can put stuff into it, and it finds stuff like what you put in!. How cool is that?!!!111!shift-one
I am a computer scientist, so I would consider many of those you so scornfully denigrate with your remarks my potential customers, so my perspective makes it fairly difficult for me to understand why you feel they are justified. Your lamentation of everyone's lack of "computer know-how" is akin to a car aficionado complaining about the average Joe's ignorance of the inner workings of the machine he drives to work every day. Most everyday things are designed to be easily used, without intimate knowledge of their operation. A notable exception to this postulate is the Computer and the Software that allows it to accomplish tasks. I believe we still find ourselves in the Dark Ages of the software era, and our use of underdeveloped Philosophies and Practices is the reason everyday people are having so much difficulty with their computers. In short, don't blame the users -- blame me. Were engineers to build cars like we create software, driving to work would be a feat so dangerous that few would attempt it.
Hyperbole aside, I have heard attitudes like those in your post many times before, but I find amount of mod points this rant has garnered alarming. When you are smart, people need your help, not your scorn.
I will never use AIM or any similar technology for business as long as conversations are still carried in-the-clear. I try not to ever chat for any reason without public key crypto because you do not have to be specifically targeted for your conversations to be recorded. I could not find any information as to whether or not the consortium responsible for this "new technology" had plans to do this. Anyone have any information?
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They buy the whole of the NFL, NHL, or whatever else they've bought out the licenses to... Then they complain about how much it costs to make a game. According to the article, it's big teams that drive the cost up. I have a hard time believing that engineering costs even hold a candle to what it takes to keep competitors from putting your John Elways and Wayne Gretzkys into a game. That the quotes in the article would come from an EA GM sounds ludicrous to me. I don't even play EA games anymore unless it is unavoidable. If they keep buying the World, it soon will be.
I have used F-Script to write tests for my applications for quite some time. In fact, pretty much everything I write has an F-Script console built into it when DEBUG is on. Naturally, OCUnit is nice for built-in unit test, but I really like being able to write an impromptu test into the F-Script console real quick to exercise some newly written or changed code. My clients often do not give me much time for writing enough built-in tests, so F-Script helps me pick up the slack with convenient, live testing. On the bad side, with F-Script, you are relegated to writing non-portable tests with odd, SmallTalky syntax, but for me it is an acceptable compromise for such a good, free (as in beer), on-the-fly testing tool. I don't remember having thanked Philippe for making it available. Thanks, Philippe!
In a bid to keep itself afloat, Enron hatched an interesting scheme; get a bill in California passed that deregulates energy, then create a market. I remember this state bill -- it was couched as a measure that would supposedly "give consumers choice", and "lower energy prices because of competition". Naturally, it passed, then the fun began. Enron's ethically bereft traders would "buy" a bunch of power when all the generators were at capacity, call up a generator and tell them to shut down (creating a shortage), then "sell" California the power at 10 times the price. If I recall correctly, before they went belly up, they were trying to figure out how to do the same thing with bandwidth. Can you imagine bandwidth "brownouts" brought about by artificial "shortages". Lovely.
I think it would be more difficult for telcos to pull something like this off because they would have to conspire to do it. Right now, the 'net is in a rather unmanaged, unregulated state. Beware of laws that claim to regulate or even deregulate it (even in a seemingly beneficial way), and watch for any association between the carriers. I must emphasize that first warning, netizens -- beware ANY legislation. No law is going to improve a bandwidth consumer's position at this point. Telcos cannot create a "fast lane", only slow down all the "lanes" but one to create a market. Don't give them an inch, or they will take a mile.
I am having a hard time believing that a body who puts personal information about themselves and their friends online would expect any privacy. A MySpace user has no privacy -- both the site's privacy policy and common sense should show us this. The "Web 2.0" (this is retarded moniker, btw) is not going to take privacy from the rest of us any more than the "Web 1.0" (sigh) did. Loss of privacy is not really what TFA was about -- just a little submitter fear-mongering.
What this article is about, mainly, is the business model these places make with your information. This part I believe. I am sure there is money there, but I don't think that this sort of data is going to be the marketing panacea that the submitter seems to indicate. For data from so many people to be effective for marketing, the company has to have an automated system for analyzing each user's data algorithmically. Scanning text for keywords does not necessarily tell an algorithm what a user would be willing to buy. If I could write such a thing, I would be a billionaire. Until then, marketing companies are going to use the same old, inelegant, brute force techniques to get their spam into our mailboxes.
Hell, I have had a site with a blog, photos, and even a list of favorite links, and I still get spam that makes no sense nearly 100% of the time. I do not yet see how this version 2.0 of the Web is going to change that.
I modded this up because I, despite being a California resident, did not know anything at all about consumer-level credit freezing. After some digging, I found that any resident of CA, NV, CO, LA, ME, NC, CT, and identity theft victims from some other states my freeze their files. I think this is great, but I was diappointed to find that there is a significant amount of paperwork and a fee that must be submitted to each credit agency!
This means that you have to submit paperwork and pay a fee to TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax in order to get some protection. I don't think this is either fair or adequate. The problem is that creditors require no express authorization in order to make an inquiry or open a new account on your behalf. Perhaps if we stopped using retarded social security numbers for everything, we wouldn't have these sorts of problems, but what sort of system for authorization could we use instead?
It just seems to me like we are trying to legislate the wrong thing. If a good system for authentication is in place, then the fact that your personal information has made it into the wild would not matter so much.
I have worked and played on Macs since the Mac SE. I had an SE, IIci, IIcx, Quadra A/V, 9500, G3, G4, iMac, iMac G4, iBook, 2 Powerbooks, and am currently using a Dual G5. I have three generations of iPods; perhaps there is some hardware I missed somewhere. At any rate, I have never used Apple's support aparatus. Ever. No DOA units, no failures, no substantial data loss -- just plenty of wonky software, but no disastrous problems. I read the support forums, and I see lots of problems -- perhaps I have been very lucky. Apple is not without their problems, and as a software developer, I do see a lot of them, but the performance of the hardware and software I have purchased from them speaks for itself. It's great stuff.
I don't think the crappy article gets this across at all, but it's probably the submitter's fault for hyping the article to be about why people love Apple so much. I would say that Apple's loud headphone solution may be commendable, but I wouldn't really know because I am smart enough not to blast my ears out with the thing and never needed to call them about it!
Fanboy? I guess so. And it's deserved. I am a conspicuous consumer, cynic, and generally hard to please. Getting me to be a fanboy is quite an achievement on Apple's part. All they had to do was make products that don't suck.
I enjoy the level scaling, but it gave me quite a shock at first. I realized quickly that I was leveling too fast without sharpening my toon's combat-related skills. To avoid scaling problems, only level up when you have seen gains in those skills. Just because it says you can level up does not mean that you should go ahead and do it. Usually, I resist the urge to rest my toon until I have seen significant gains in the skills that will allow it to complete with the leveled-up critters out there. As long as I level up in a balanced fashion, most of the fights stay challanging regardless of my level. I have enjoyed the scaling so far, but it is drastically different from the way Morrowind worked. IMO, that is a good thing because in that game, my toons were demingods before too long and the game became boring.
The above reply seems to confuse the issues of ABI (which is what I was talking about) and code container format (which your reply seemed to be talking about). When C++ is used for loadable code libraries, getting your tools and interfaces set up right is a little more tricky. Changing the capabilities of the SDK without breaking compatibility is even more tricky. Where I was going to go was that with Objective-C, you do not have the same problem, but I didn't even start because Adobe probably can't do that, as they are cross-platform SDKs. :)
Perhaps you missed the point of why I would criticize Adobe for using CodeWarrior. It has nothing to do with the container format. When Adobe released Creative Suite 2 last year, they moved from CFM to Mach-O, but they were still using the same old tool... CodeWarrrior (a bad tool for creating native Mac OS X apps, IMO). Had they moved back then, we would probably have Intel builds of Creative Suite in short order.
I am sure there were good reasons for Adobe to have done things this way, but... Now not only will we have to move our plugins to XCode, but we will also have to move them to Intel afterwards, and we can't do diddly until we get their new SDKs. Foo!
I work on plugins for Adobe's applications occasionally, and let me say that the [apparent] "maybe in 2007" statement from Adobe is not a big surprise to me. The applications in their creative suite and plugin software development kits rely on CodeWarrior, which is [effectively] a dead product. AFAIK, it could never support development of universal binaries, and I would speculate that they have known this for a while.
Adobe's plugin Software Development Kits (SDKs) are based on C++ object models, which will mean that plugins and their host applications will need to be built with the same tools for everything to work. To move on, I think Adobe is going to have to move all their products and SDKs to XCode (gcc), and though I do not work for Adobe, I would wager that it will be a fairly tough job. IMO, Q2 or Q3 2007 seems a fairly realistic goal.
The problems the Intel transition will pose for both Adobe and the third-party plugin developers will be daunting. Quark and its associates have similar troubles, but I have personally seen some decent progress on the Quark side, though I think NDA prevents me from saying anything specific. Though I have seen little progress from Adobe as yet, I am confident they will deliver.
Adobe has a lot of work ahead of them, so I would encourage users of Adobe's creative apps to be patient, and realize how much work Adobe has ahead of them and that it involves more than just moving the applications to Intel. SDKs often offer as many if not more challenges than their host applications. I will part with a criticism: Everybody has known that CodeWarrior is dead for a long time. I think Adobe should have started putting more resources into jumping ship right when the writing went on the wall. Now we are all going to have to wait a while because Adobe was so shiftless about getting off the dead branch.
I see a lot of comments in this thread about coding practices and the like. That is fine, but I think you would do well to think about practices that matter more. You have indicated that your environment really doesn't offer much of an IT infrastructure, which means that you will more than likely play an appreciable role in many of the following processes: requirements management, quality, change management, project management. There may be many instances of your behavior causing projects to succeed or fail, and they will have nothing to do with whether your people are commenting their code.
If you can, put together a process that specifies how all of you can define a product, start a project (get a suit to sign off on it too), deal with changes in requirements without tanking the project, assure quality, and ship. The code will take care of itself because it is the only thing you will have a decent amount of control over. Everything else is cross-functional, which adds a great deal of difficulty -- hence the need for policy.
Just remember the "ship" part. Don't get stuck too long in defining a process because none exist which are universally indicated, completely effective, or free from ruinous meddling and circumvention. Worry more about what can keep you from shipping and try to set a policy that will prevent those things.
And most of all, watch your cornhole -- technical leads are sh*t magnets.
Make engineers study ethics? I have seen a lot of ethical foibles in my profession, and they have *all* originated from executives. Why not make them take the damned course instead?
The "rootkit" does indeed do the things you specify, but this does not make it a rootkit, IMO. A rootkit maintains a backdoor for another entity -- one should look at intent as well as behavior when classifying these things. IMO, if there is no backdoor, there is no rootkit, though the software does indeed incorporate many behaviors in the style of a rootkit to achieve its purpose, which is to try to prevent Customers from having direct access to some data. This is isn't even a virus because it does not want to propagate. I am not sure what to call this crap other than a trojan, but I thought rootkit was hyperbole derived of the author's outrage at finding it so hard to detect and remove, which does the otherwise excellent article a disservice.
I tend to think of software more in terms of purpose than behavior, as behavior can be incorrect. Regardless of anyone's disagreement with the way I categorize this software, my comments do not intend to diminish the article's value or the pertinence of Sony's ignorance. It is clear that Sony's executives either have no clue about what their DRM software is doing or do not care -- either way, a change needs to be made.
It is disappointing that the article does indeed call this a rootkit without providing proof. All I see is some DRM shovelware that is surreptitiously installed and hard to remove, which is bad enough without resorting to hyperbole. IMO, the article needs to prove that this software maliciously intercepts communication or opens holes to be able to use that word.
I am not sure that I understand why so many in this forum are so down on the RIAA. It's a bit like blaming the gun when someone gets shot. The RIAA is acting on behalf of the record companies (they're euphemistically called "artists"), so why don't we recognize *them* as the Great Satan here? Make no mistake, recording companies are some of the greediest bastards you will ever see. They steal all the money they can from both you *and* the real artists who perform the music (so much so that artists often end up *owing* record companies after they cut an album). I feel a bit sorry for the RIAA, actually -- well, not really. ;)
By ABM treaty, I can only assume he means the SALT II proceedings, which is about nuclear weapons, not weather control. Parent's author does not cite any treaty text. Also, HAARP is a rather straightforward, unclassified HF radio experiment that will not affect weather patterns. The conspiracy theories about HAARP have always been funny -- controlling weather with some static HF antennas connected to a diesel generator -- the weakness of this argument truly boggles the mind.
The article was interesting. Before reading it, I did not know anything about the North Sea Flood or the Deltaworken that came of it. Right away, I noticed that the article takes a rather particular stance on the purpose and value of big projects such as these -- the problem is the sea, and we should invest in project such as these to keep the sea out of habitable land. I think the article would have been a lot more interesting had it included at least a cursory discussion of the fact that while technology like this has a temporary benefit, the problems caused by development in wetlands cannot be permanently solved.
IMO, the real problem with inhabited wetlands is not storm surge, but subsidence, which is what allows storm surge to inundate inhabited land. We populate the wetlands, pumping out the water which would normally bring along with it silt, which accretes, contributing the the land mass that will naturally buffer storm surge. Once inhabited, the land mass gradually subsides (sinks), making vulnerability to flooding worse. I believe that no technology will stop this.
If my opinion is a correct one, there is no prevention of such disasters, only preparedness and remediation. I live in the Los Angeles metro area, and I have the same problem. The best thing I can do is buy property on land out here that the USGS has not identified as prone to liquefaction or heavy shaking and hope for the best. I do not expect my government to build an $8 billion gadget to protect me, because there is no way for sure to know that it will even work!
What I am left wondering is whether or not the people of NO expect to be protected, and would it even be worth it to try. These people live in a dangerous area, just like me, and I think that money spent on disaster education and readiness would probably be well spent, as opposed to wasting billions fighting nature in a losing battle. Our arms are too short to box with God, so perhaps it would be better to spend money on learning to roll with the punches. Based on the chaos and loss of life I saw, I don't think anyone down there was even the least bit prepared. I see the same indolence here in L.A. where I live, and a lot of people are going to die some day because of it.
Let's not confuse people who have choices with people who have none. When you are starving and have no place to go, I don't think moving somewhere else is an option.
Why is Dr Blitzer so discreet? What are you guys hiding? Are you two involved in some sort of torrid affair? You can tell us. Nobody in here but us girls.
There is a lot of very interesting work being done out there, but consider the ramifications of producing energy, in general. Most of the time, when we are releasing energy with an exothermic process, we are changing one thing into something else, using some leftover energy to do work. Fusion really isn't very different.
Let us assume for the sake of argument, that we have implemented a form of nuclear energy production that leaves something relatively harmless behind, such as helium. When this process is put into practice the world over, the effect on our environment could be Very Bad.
No matter how we produce energy, we are doing so at the expense of the environmental balance that made sophisticated life on Earth possible to begin with. We threaten our own existence by producing energy. Perhaps we should be putting more research into ways each and every human can live happily while consuming *less* energy, rather than endeavoring to produce *more*.
There is intriguing evidence available today that suggests that the comings and goings of living beings on Earth regularly brings about disastrous changes in climate, triggered by release and re-uptake of CO2, methane, and the like. Whether we are accelerating this natural process with our energy production is a subject about which there is much debate, but learning how we can require less energy to live certainly wouldn't hurt!
"Tabletop fusion isn't going to happen"
The parent comment sounds similar to a lot of other myopic things people have said that turned out to be wrong, (i.e.: We can't fly, the world is flat, the sound barrier can't be broken, etc). Nobody remembers the names of the idiots who said these things.
If there is anything an education in science has taught me, it is that we humans have a pretty tentative grip on how things work, and there sure is a lot that we have to learn. Speaking of the strong nuclear force as though it were some insurmountable obstacle is ignorant.
Today's insoluble riddle will be tomorrow's household appliance.
The destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were likely caused by communication problems, nothing more. When approached with proposals for surrender, Japan's leadership replied with "mokusatsu" -- a typically Japanese response when confronted with an unappealing offer -- "I hear you, but I choose to say nothing". The purpose of this sort of communication is to respond to an offensive offer respectfully whilst saving face, and it usually elicits a better offer. Of course, Americans don't understand that sort of crap, so along came a typically American response -- really bad sunburn for tens of thousands of Japanese. Had these two countries appointed some better diplomats, perhaps it would never have happened. But who cares about diplomacy when you've already decided you are going to annihilate one another?
20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, I have always wondered what would have occurred had we never dropped the bombs. It would be hard for me to believe that the Japanese would ever have surrendered otherwise. At the time, it was seen as a fate worse than death (the "unendurable"), and they were teaching women and children in just about every prefecture to fight with bamboo spears. This seems like determination that could only be broken by a weapon so powerful, awe-inspiring, and magical as an atomic bomb would seem in 1945.
Move beyond the war with Japan's rather explosive resolution and you have more to speculate about that leads back to it. Without our demonstration of the power of atomic weapons in Asia, would the U.S. and Soviets really not have blown the shit out of each other during the cold war? It seems to me that deterrence only works when there has been a demonstration of the consequences of unchecked aggression. This may be reductio ad absurdum, but I did not start caring about my parking tickets until I got a boot [clamp] on my car. The atomic bomb's use brought the power of nuclear weapons out of the abstract, and I for one am very thankful for the success of nuclear weapons today. They have put an end to war between developed nations, leaving our leaders to their inane intrigues and bullying (at least it's not World War III).
This fact leads me to a paradox that I find interesting. Targeting non combatants with nuclear weapons was definitely the wrong thing to do. It is terrorism. But in this case, considering all that could have been, I feel that it was right to do the wrong thing, even if for the wrong reasons.
And Lo, the academic Trolls did come forth to criticize the article's lack of depth, and there was much gnashing of teeth.
/. elitists in here is both laughable and lamentable.
This article does exactly what it says. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to a presentation I had to give for my high school AP physics classmates in 1988, though I seem to remember focusing on how breeder reactors actually work. In any case, I thought the article was a good one, and most of the criticism of the
I don't understand why this has been modded up. Okay, let's say you find a solution that allows you to get a message that your servers are down while you are fishing for salmon in the Yukon. What the hell are you going to do about it? Worry yourself to death? If you can't even call anyone or access your servers while you are out of pocket, what is the point of knowing there is a problem?
Before I wrap up, I wanted to tell you about this totally sweet thing I found on teh interwebs. You can put stuff into it, and it finds stuff like what you put in!. How cool is that?!!!111!shift-one
I am a computer scientist, so I would consider many of those you so scornfully denigrate with your remarks my potential customers, so my perspective makes it fairly difficult for me to understand why you feel they are justified. Your lamentation of everyone's lack of "computer know-how" is akin to a car aficionado complaining about the average Joe's ignorance of the inner workings of the machine he drives to work every day. Most everyday things are designed to be easily used, without intimate knowledge of their operation. A notable exception to this postulate is the Computer and the Software that allows it to accomplish tasks. I believe we still find ourselves in the Dark Ages of the software era, and our use of underdeveloped Philosophies and Practices is the reason everyday people are having so much difficulty with their computers. In short, don't blame the users -- blame me. Were engineers to build cars like we create software, driving to work would be a feat so dangerous that few would attempt it.
Hyperbole aside, I have heard attitudes like those in your post many times before, but I find amount of mod points this rant has garnered alarming. When you are smart, people need your help, not your scorn.
I will never use AIM or any similar technology for business as long as conversations are still carried in-the-clear. I try not to ever chat for any reason without public key crypto because you do not have to be specifically targeted for your conversations to be recorded. I could not find any information as to whether or not the consortium responsible for this "new technology" had plans to do this. Anyone have any information?