"The new Therapist Class was simply too powerful. We had no idea that these new powers like 'chat', 'counsel', and 'a/s/l' were so dangerous. This goes beyond normal player killing behaviors to final death where players actually have their accounts deactivated. Worse yet, it appears as if the player has deleted their own accounts which makes it very hard to uncover the bug. We have taken major steps such at removing the Couch item and the entire Freudian skill tree. Players who were affected have had their accounts automatically reactivated with a free years subscription and a personal account representative has been sent to their homes to help them get back online."
Since source code changes rapidly, new version may be eligible to new copyright status. Let's assume you adopted a 5 year copyright plan. What you are basically saying is that what I have created today will be public domain in 5 years, but the thing that I created based on the same code in 3 years from now will not be public domain for 8 years hence. This "rolling copyright" is exactly what's needed. It gives time for people to enjoy their advantage of creation while allowing the public the rights it should never have lost in the first place.
It's a lead balloon because no one who could enact it will touch it, but it does make sense.
Obviously people who make illegal copies of software, music, and other copyrighted works didn't spend money on them. So what did they spend the money on?
With Senators spouting that so called 'piracy' has cost X amount of money and taxes, one would assume this money unspent on these pirated items was hoarded. In reality this money is spent on other things. It's spent on foot or rent or cars. Durable goods. Things that can't be copied for (near) zero cost. One might almost assume that durable good manufacturers should be strongly against copyright, as it reduces the amount of money spent on their goods.
The logic that assumes people who pirate would spontaneously create the wealth required to purchase the items they pirate is one of the great fallacies of the anti-pirate side of the argument. Those "lost" tax dollars are actually collect when the person buys a bicycle or pack of Magic cards. No tax dollars are lost because the money was actually taxed on a different sale. The money could not be spent twice, and hence would not be taxed twice.
Logic this flawed only makes the argument against piracy flawed.
This, of course, says nothing about the fact that almost all copyright is an attempt to retrofit property rights on to information. Information is the result of a [i]service[/i]. The result is not property and should treated differently in legal terms.
Your computer programming ability will only marginally change should you learn FORTRAN. Your time is better spent on it's children that copied and made better it's functional properties.
However LISP will expand you programming experience and should be taught at some point after C++ or PHP and before Python. This would have a profound impact on the way you program.
The Wii controller is what allows it to be casual. Casual gamers do not want a controller with more than 2 buttons and 1 directional controller. Look at the PSP or X-Box controller and it's simply not casual. Game controllers for casual gamers should be no more complicated than the controls for driving a car. Anything beyond that is too much to learn and casual gamers aren't about steep learning curves.
Unless X-Box and PSP come out with simplified controllers (like the Guitars in Guitar Hero) then you wont see casual gamers moving over even if the games are simplified.
Madden-ing
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 2, Informative
He seems to have missed the very heart of Madden, which was Bethesda Soft's Gridiron. Most people are unaware that the original engine for Madden was bought and it's extremely hard to find the original Gridiron on any abandon ware sites because of this. The heart of Gridiron was it's inertial engine. Players were represented as dots and accelerated at a speed based on of their Speed stat (one of two stats, the other being Strength). You could create you own plays with a way-point system and a flexible set of commands like run-block-right or call from the pre-set plays in the game. The entire game was revolutionary, but is sadly lost to the legacy of it's licensing.
I disagree with the term "web designer". That term leaves no term for the artist who creates the mock-up. You're calling them, nebulously, Design Technologist, but these people spend 90% of their time in front of photoshop/gimp. I've never heard the term Design Technologist before.
See my post below for a different take on the division of web labour.
Long gone is the singular Webmaster. His/her job has been broken into these pieces:
System Administrator: Installs and maintains web servers and associated technology back-end infrastructures like PHP upgrades.
Network Administrator: Installs and maintains networking infrastructure including firewalls, proxies, network caches.
Information Architect: Creates informational structures to help put data into understandable and manageable segments. Often creates wireframes for page layout.
Web Designer (Artist): Creative talent that produces graphical content that fit wireframes or other criteria for use on websites.
Web Editor (Writer): Creative talent that produces textual content that fits structured segments or other crieria for use on a website.
Usability Expert: Examines and adjusts wireframes and content to fit best practices for user experience.
Back-End Web Developer: Programmer responsible for creating functionality that assists the display of content on a website. Often responsible for CMS and/or Database integration through to the site.
Front-End Web Developer:This is what you wanted, hence longer description. Takes graphic content, usability widgets, back-end functionality, textual content and creates layouts using (X|D)HTML, Javascript, back-end code snippets, CSS, CMS template scripts. These layouts fit into certain strict parameters regarding SEO, size optimization (both image and code), speed of loading, cross browser compatibility, limitations of layout markup and specifications of back-end delivery of data. Lacking any of the above positions (and the one below), this person is often tasked with doing whatever is missing from the classic "Webmaster" position.
I just couldn't get the really javascript heavy webpage I wanted to load to come up. It was ridiculously slow. I tried tons of treaking to FF and installed Opera which ran a little faster but still glacial. I was about to send the thing back when I found someone doing daily builds of Chrome (Chromium) and downloaded a version. THAT worked great. Faster than my home machine (iMac/FF), in fact.
So it may also be the software on these netbooks just isn't ready for such lightweight processors.
Since everyone is picking up the same boiler plate stories from the AP and putting practically NO spin on them at all, I would be happy to see the AP disappear. "Reporters" are literally sitting on the AP wire for a new story so they can jump it and post it as their own story.
I have CC pictures up on Flickr and one was used in an AP story about, of all things, Obama's old pool table. The picture I took was of my grandmother's pool table, but it was free (with attribution) so it ran... and ran... and ran... I stopped ego surfing for it awhile ago but there were double digit "news" sources using the image on the web.
Forget that it wasn't a picture of Obama's pool table. Forget that a story about auctioning a pool table hardly counts as news. Think of the fact that each of these news outlets were basically copy/pasting the same story over and over.
You're getting one view of a story from the mainstream and it's usually the AP version. The sooner we lose this single new filter the sooner we may get a variety of reporters take on a story.
It was indeed a Perl joke and it's been too long since I've programmed in it to remember that $_ was the correct sintax. I mean syntax. I guess I'm still in the category of "Perl nubs".
Seriously. I thought all financial institutions had given up on using Perl for their back-end systems. One misplaced _$ and suddenly everyone is swimming in money.
Next time use a strict typing language like Haskell.
"A memorandum published by the DoD in March 1982 declared that the adoption of TCP/IP as the DoD standard host-to-host protocol was mandatory and would provide for "host-to-host connectivity across network or subnetwork boundaries."
Military requirements for interoperability, security,
reliability and [b]survability[/b] are sufficiently pressing to
have justified the development and adoption of TCP and IP in
the absence of satisfactory nongovernment protocol
standards."
"...will feature a "cloud" service stacked with Amiga (!) games"
I'd buy this console if I could just play SpeedBall one last time with a joystick that would leave those painful blisters right in the center of my palm as I crushed and smashed my spiked fisted way to the goal and scored to the cheers of the corporate crowds.
Actually it leads you to a bad place. I have no problem recognizing the mistake of mislabeling the results of a service as an object. Where you suggest that "Walmart can make their own copies of music and sell it", I say Walmart can pay an artist to create new work which they can then sell. The act of creation does no imply ownership, but authenticity has value. Anyone could re-make a song (it happens all the time) but the original author oft does a better job of playing it.
There's actual freedom from lack of copyright. Think of all the amazing works that will never be created because the perfect song, image, text was held back from use by laws.
Your assumption is that the current system where people are paid through middlemen after the fact is the best system. Drop the publishers and now you have direct access to audiences who are still willing to pay for things they like. It was a requirement in the past for distribution but with functionally infinite replication and near ubiquitous distribution for digital information the only missing piece is marketing.
Pay me to write and I wont need everyone to pay to read. Pay me to sing and I wont need everyone to pay to hear me. Pay me to code and I wont need everyone to pay to use my program.
Trust me when I tell you that artists actually want the masses to get their messages, and that while money is nice few artist get rich. Pay up front for the new song/book/application and it's called patronage.
Slashdot Mirror
WoW Patch Announcement:
"The new Therapist Class was simply too powerful. We had no idea that these new powers like 'chat', 'counsel', and 'a/s/l' were so dangerous. This goes beyond normal player killing behaviors to final death where players actually have their accounts deactivated. Worse yet, it appears as if the player has deleted their own accounts which makes it very hard to uncover the bug. We have taken major steps such at removing the Couch item and the entire Freudian skill tree. Players who were affected have had their accounts automatically reactivated with a free years subscription and a personal account representative has been sent to their homes to help them get back online."
Since source code changes rapidly, new version may be eligible to new copyright status. Let's assume you adopted a 5 year copyright plan. What you are basically saying is that what I have created today will be public domain in 5 years, but the thing that I created based on the same code in 3 years from now will not be public domain for 8 years hence. This "rolling copyright" is exactly what's needed. It gives time for people to enjoy their advantage of creation while allowing the public the rights it should never have lost in the first place.
It's a lead balloon because no one who could enact it will touch it, but it does make sense.
Take these two questions:
A. Do you have a plan to move to Windows 7?
B. Do you plan to move to Windows 7?
Obviously A B by a substantial margin. The question isn't a fair assessment.
Obviously people who make illegal copies of software, music, and other copyrighted works didn't spend money on them. So what did they spend the money on?
With Senators spouting that so called 'piracy' has cost X amount of money and taxes, one would assume this money unspent on these pirated items was hoarded. In reality this money is spent on other things. It's spent on foot or rent or cars. Durable goods. Things that can't be copied for (near) zero cost. One might almost assume that durable good manufacturers should be strongly against copyright, as it reduces the amount of money spent on their goods.
The logic that assumes people who pirate would spontaneously create the wealth required to purchase the items they pirate is one of the great fallacies of the anti-pirate side of the argument. Those "lost" tax dollars are actually collect when the person buys a bicycle or pack of Magic cards. No tax dollars are lost because the money was actually taxed on a different sale. The money could not be spent twice, and hence would not be taxed twice.
Logic this flawed only makes the argument against piracy flawed.
This, of course, says nothing about the fact that almost all copyright is an attempt to retrofit property rights on to information. Information is the result of a [i]service[/i]. The result is not property and should treated differently in legal terms.
Your computer programming ability will only marginally change should you learn FORTRAN. Your time is better spent on it's children that copied and made better it's functional properties.
However LISP will expand you programming experience and should be taught at some point after C++ or PHP and before Python. This would have a profound impact on the way you program.
The Wii controller is what allows it to be casual. Casual gamers do not want a controller with more than 2 buttons and 1 directional controller. Look at the PSP or X-Box controller and it's simply not casual. Game controllers for casual gamers should be no more complicated than the controls for driving a car. Anything beyond that is too much to learn and casual gamers aren't about steep learning curves.
Unless X-Box and PSP come out with simplified controllers (like the Guitars in Guitar Hero) then you wont see casual gamers moving over even if the games are simplified.
He seems to have missed the very heart of Madden, which was Bethesda Soft's Gridiron. Most people are unaware that the original engine for Madden was bought and it's extremely hard to find the original Gridiron on any abandon ware sites because of this. The heart of Gridiron was it's inertial engine. Players were represented as dots and accelerated at a speed based on of their Speed stat (one of two stats, the other being Strength). You could create you own plays with a way-point system and a flexible set of commands like run-block-right or call from the pre-set plays in the game. The entire game was revolutionary, but is sadly lost to the legacy of it's licensing.
Oh wait. I can't because of copyright. Man, this made so much more sense when there were printing presses.
But it wont open in Excel. Something about function problems.
No, I just want to be done with it.
I disagree with the term "web designer". That term leaves no term for the artist who creates the mock-up. You're calling them, nebulously, Design Technologist, but these people spend 90% of their time in front of photoshop/gimp. I've never heard the term Design Technologist before.
See my post below for a different take on the division of web labour.
Long gone is the singular Webmaster. His/her job has been broken into these pieces:
System Administrator:
Installs and maintains web servers and associated technology back-end infrastructures like PHP upgrades.
Network Administrator:
Installs and maintains networking infrastructure including firewalls, proxies, network caches.
Information Architect:
Creates informational structures to help put data into understandable and manageable segments. Often creates wireframes for page layout.
Web Designer (Artist):
Creative talent that produces graphical content that fit wireframes or other criteria for use on websites.
Web Editor (Writer):
Creative talent that produces textual content that fits structured segments or other crieria for use on a website.
Usability Expert:
Examines and adjusts wireframes and content to fit best practices for user experience.
Back-End Web Developer:
Programmer responsible for creating functionality that assists the display of content on a website. Often responsible for CMS and/or Database integration through to the site.
Front-End Web Developer: This is what you wanted, hence longer description.
Takes graphic content, usability widgets, back-end functionality, textual content and creates layouts using (X|D)HTML, Javascript, back-end code snippets, CSS, CMS template scripts. These layouts fit into certain strict parameters regarding SEO, size optimization (both image and code), speed of loading, cross browser compatibility, limitations of layout markup and specifications of back-end delivery of data. Lacking any of the above positions (and the one below), this person is often tasked with doing whatever is missing from the classic "Webmaster" position.
Quality Assurance:
Jerks.
I just couldn't get the really javascript heavy webpage I wanted to load to come up. It was ridiculously slow. I tried tons of treaking to FF and installed Opera which ran a little faster but still glacial. I was about to send the thing back when I found someone doing daily builds of Chrome (Chromium) and downloaded a version. THAT worked great. Faster than my home machine (iMac/FF), in fact.
So it may also be the software on these netbooks just isn't ready for such lightweight processors.
Why would I use:
www.microsoft.com
www.coke.com
www.amazon.com
when you *could* just type in:
microsoft
coke
amazon
Yes! You can actually visit top level domains! Shocking but true!!
Stand back and watch the fireworks.
Since everyone is picking up the same boiler plate stories from the AP and putting practically NO spin on them at all, I would be happy to see the AP disappear. "Reporters" are literally sitting on the AP wire for a new story so they can jump it and post it as their own story.
I have CC pictures up on Flickr and one was used in an AP story about, of all things, Obama's old pool table. The picture I took was of my grandmother's pool table, but it was free (with attribution) so it ran... and ran... and ran... I stopped ego surfing for it awhile ago but there were double digit "news" sources using the image on the web.
Forget that it wasn't a picture of Obama's pool table. Forget that a story about auctioning a pool table hardly counts as news. Think of the fact that each of these news outlets were basically copy/pasting the same story over and over.
You're getting one view of a story from the mainstream and it's usually the AP version. The sooner we lose this single new filter the sooner we may get a variety of reporters take on a story.
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=4&day=25&year=2009&hour=10&min=0&sec=0&p1=179
I think you'd just be pissing off most of Africa and Europe then.
I'd be in favor of letting the white hats take a crack at the infrastructure 4 saturday mornings per year...
Exactly WHOSE "morning"? And whose SATURDAY for that matter. Your morning isn't the same as Italy's or Japan's or ... well you get the idea.
Isn't this called Hentai?
It was indeed a Perl joke and it's been too long since I've programmed in it to remember that $_ was the correct sintax. I mean syntax. I guess I'm still in the category of "Perl nubs".
Seriously. I thought all financial institutions had given up on using Perl for their back-end systems. One misplaced _$ and suddenly everyone is swimming in money.
Next time use a strict typing language like Haskell.
"A memorandum published by the DoD in March 1982 declared
that the adoption of TCP/IP as the DoD standard host-to-host
protocol was mandatory and would provide for "host-to-host
connectivity across network or subnetwork boundaries."
Military requirements for interoperability, security,
reliability and [b]survability[/b] are sufficiently pressing to
have justified the development and adoption of TCP and IP in
the absence of satisfactory nongovernment protocol
standards."
Emphasis mine.
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/tcpdigest_paper.txt
Actually, this is exactly what it's supposed to survive.
"...will feature a "cloud" service stacked with Amiga (!) games"
I'd buy this console if I could just play SpeedBall one last time with a joystick that would leave those painful blisters right in the center of my palm as I crushed and smashed my spiked fisted way to the goal and scored to the cheers of the corporate crowds.
Sigh.
nope. But the other poster cleared this up for me. I hate not being british.
"That idea leads you to a very bad place. "
Actually it leads you to a bad place. I have no problem recognizing the mistake of mislabeling the results of a service as an object. Where you suggest that "Walmart can make their own copies of music and sell it", I say Walmart can pay an artist to create new work which they can then sell. The act of creation does no imply ownership, but authenticity has value. Anyone could re-make a song (it happens all the time) but the original author oft does a better job of playing it.
There's actual freedom from lack of copyright. Think of all the amazing works that will never be created because the perfect song, image, text was held back from use by laws.
Your assumption is that the current system where people are paid through middlemen after the fact is the best system. Drop the publishers and now you have direct access to audiences who are still willing to pay for things they like. It was a requirement in the past for distribution but with functionally infinite replication and near ubiquitous distribution for digital information the only missing piece is marketing.
Pay me to write and I wont need everyone to pay to read.
Pay me to sing and I wont need everyone to pay to hear me.
Pay me to code and I wont need everyone to pay to use my program.
Trust me when I tell you that artists actually want the masses to get their messages, and that while money is nice few artist get rich. Pay up front for the new song/book/application and it's called patronage.