The problem with Agile is that it gives too much freedom to the customer to change their mind late in the project and make the developers do it all over again.
The *point* of Agile is that there should be no time that is "late in the project".
With fixed, short, repeated cycle of iteration/sprint/whatever-you-call-it, such as 2-weeks sprint cycle, *every* cycle should be start with work estimated to fit in the cycle, and ends with deliveries of completed work that delivers value to the customer. It should work the same for the first cycle, just the same as the last cycle.
If there is a point in time that is considered as "late in the project", you are doing Waterfall, not Agile.
You seem to fail to understand that there is no difference between designing a car and designing a software product.
The "design" part is no difference, but the execution makes all the difference. Running software is like running a car in an alternate universe, which you only get a specification document for the basic laws of physics and the spec for the materials, which may contain errors, and which may change without notice. The strength of the steel, for example, may suddenly weaken, or a steel bar may suddenly shatter if a small but specific pressure is applied to a special point on the bar.
Not only that, the requirements for the car changes at the whim of some group of people, and different requirements sometimes contradict each other. Plus the quantitative requirements (like mileage, capacity, etc) double every 18 months, but your design today have to also handle for the increase in the coming 5-10 years, which means you must use technologies still in experimental stage, and hope it fits your design when it matures.
You can bet a car designed for such alternate reality will have lots of problems. So, yeah, designing a car and designing a software product is not different.
Most CS departments don't teach math because they just make the maths a prerequisite. Ie, students just do the prerequisites as a means to get the degree. Afterwords there may be a CS class that uses the math but it doesn't need to explain why you need it because it's just assumed that the math professor explained that, or otherwise it should be obvious why you need it.
Gee... this sounds just like the Waterfall model, guess where the CS departments learned it?:)
Where this is falling down I think are the hordes of students, like the original poster, who are squandering their education and only trying to get basic job training.
And this sounds just like managers who don't understand how things works, and think doing design is a waste of time and push for "just start writing code" before the requirements even finished.
And I would say those hordes don't even want "basic job training", they just want a piece of paper.
I have a masters in math. In class one day our professor mentioned that he consulted for the forestry (or some such) department at the school. They were trying to calculate the area of an arbitrary region so as to estimate the number of trees within that area. Problem is the area may be convex or concave. The CS department at this school was trying to solve the problem by triangling the polygon, but ran into difficulties if the area was concave. My professor suggested using Green's theorem. Moral??? On the one hand advanced math gave a much more elegant solution to this problem, on the other hand **the CS department** at this school wasn't advanced enough to suggest it on their own... so if THEY can't do it... (fill in the blank).
Exactly. This is just the same "if you have hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem that is already so well-known in among programming already, but in a wider setting.
Programmers who don't know much math never knew how many stupid solutions/programs they have written over they career, and thought the math has no use cuz they never need to use it.
Programmers who knew a lot more math take advantage of it everyday and can tell their story how math is useful to their work.
Only those few who knew enough math to know they can benefit more from knowing more can say "more math can help me", but those would went and learn more to be the second group soon enough, so the gap between the two groups will always remain.
The easier solution is to shift the paradigm - how we think about and use our vehicles.
This part is right.
If/when you need to take a long road trip, you take a gas-powered car. Either an extra car in your household, a rental, borrowed from someone you know. Whatever.
And this part is totally wrong. The clean solution is to take a page from Europe, make your train network actually useful, and let trains haul you AND your car from one city to another. You drive the station, park your car ONTO the train (as well as charge it if you like), then go sit comfortably in the passenger cart of the same train, let it take you to the destination city, and then get on your car and drive away.
The train ticket may sound expensive, but if you account for the fact you saved fuel/electricity cost for the car, and you can comfortably rest or sleep overnight for the entire trip, it is a bargain.
You have such a big problem with long road trips in the US because your train network sucks.
I agree but the daily accountability is still something that a lot of hard core developers don't buy into. The "leave me alone" mentality still prevails in big shops.
The ugly truth is, IMO, the mentality is really not as much as "leave me alone" as it is "let me cover up my failure in hope of a miracle". And miracles DO happen quite frequently in large companies, where 80% of their projects fail anyway, so as long as you can cover up your failure until some *other* guy's failure can no longer be covered up and the whole thing failed, you are good.
In some cases, it manifest as the "Schedule Chicken" pattern. But this works on every level. Architects can stall any project by unending questions and arguments on the design, ensuring his design will never face the test of reality, or at least enough CYA when the system fails. Developers can keep pretending they are on-track, while nothing works, until other teams call for a delay, or every components fail spectacularly during integration.
Doing Agile takes away all their excuses and provides great transparency, it usually makes a lot of people who used to work in large shops extremely uncomfortable, to say the least.
Sorry, but you are completely missing my point. My comment wasn't really about tests, it was about the fact that these huge projects are practically all-or-nothing in their success.
Exactly. You cannot use Agile to build a 100-mile canal, as the whole thing would be useless even if you completed 99 miles.
If the system cannot be useful until a large set of functions are in place and working, then it is not suitable for Agile, period.
It's this article. Again. That I see every single generation, both portable and console.
Game companies aren't the only ones to rehash the same stuff again and again. Journalists had already learned that trick before there were game companies.
For an example of a user feature that can be damaging to the system as a whole for a read operation: what if your application has an ad-hoc query interface that end users can access, or even just a search interface that allows poorly indexed queries... A user can generate queries that require full table scans or queries that return large result sets (or both). Enough users doing this could consume mass quantities of application memory to hold their result sets or I/O time on the DBMS scanning the tables. This in turn would bring overall system performance down for all users if you run up against physical capacity limits on the DB server or the application server.
In such a case it could be better to eliminate the feature rather than optimize it. If a feature is available, you can bet your users will "abuse" it to the extent that it negatively impacts other users.
An excellent example of this is a search function which assumed wildcard for blank search fields, and initially defaulted to all blank. Double bonus for not setting any limit on the number of results returned. The dev tested it thinks it is great it returned all 3 testing records (sorted) when just hit "Search" without entering anything.
Any user using it for the first time, and experimented with hitting the "Search" button (or even experienced users accidentally hitting "return") will trigger a full table scan, and in the first week after the system was just launched, get a few thousand rows of results. Then a couple weeks later, had their IE crashed when IE can't handle to huge table returned. A few more weeks later, had the whole server hung up for hours as the database tried to sort 20 million records and the sort overflowed to disk.
Unfortunately, I have seen this happen too many times in real life systems.
A minute of thought from the system analyst or architect would have changed the spec to have the current date set as the initial default in the date range search field (or some such similar defaults that would normally give a much smaller and useful results), and forbid search with all blank (probably with an error saying "Please enter your search criteria."). More technically minded analyst would include in the technical spec to limit the result set from the database BEFORE the sort.
I'm a college professor, and I constantly tell students that grades don't matter... it's the knowledge that matters. E.g. learning things that make you wiser shouldn't depend on whether those things are on the exam....and most students still care more about getting grades than actual knowledge.
I have to question your approach in creating the exam if students with the knowledge are unable to get good grades at it.
If students who got the actual knowledge cannot get good grades, the problem is YOU.
How about turning this around, and have your college constantly tell you "Salary doesn't matter, it's doing great research and great teaching that matters!", and then give you great research facility and students, but only give you minimum wage while awarding great bonuses to management. How many professors would care more about getting better pay than actual knowledge?
From that WSJ article: "If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have."
I don't really see anything wrong with telling people to still keep thinking about things, find out what they like to study, and get more math. More 'don't let current lack of math get you down' than 'you don't need math at all'.
Is that statement any different than telling future scriptwriters that "If your level of writing competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can create outstanding story with what you have."?
Or "If your level of programming competence is low... you can create a great game with what you have."
Of "If your level of financial competence... you can earn a lot of money day trading!"
Actually, why not just say "You can do whatever you want and have a chance to succeed!"
It is partly tautology, and partly bullshit. Yeah, any person "can" (in the sense of having a non-zero probability) create outstanding work in whatever even though his level of competence in any related/required skill is low. A monkey endlessly typing at a keyboard "can" one day write a great script too. But the bullshit part is, your chance of succeeding would be on par with winning a lottery.
A truly autonomous car, one capable of dealing with any real-world situation, would require much smarter artificial intelligence than Google or anyone else has developed.
A HUMAN DRIVER that is capable of dealing with any real-world situation would require a much smarter human than most of the human population.
Guess what happens when a human driver encounter situations he cannot deal with? He stops the car and calls for help.
So a self-driving car that is smart enough to fail safely and calls for help is good enough.
And in areas where the population density is high, it is not economical to build trains because there are too many people.
Not because there are too many people exactly, but because you would have to "steal" land from a lot of different people to put the train through. (Though yes, IIRC, the SC said it was legal to use eminent domain for something as silly as a shopping mall.)
Seems you don't catch the sarcasm there. Yes, I knew what the parent post were saying, but let me put it plain enough for you: Excuses, excuses. The excuse for America not able to do anything is the same: "In America, things are different, so you can't compare with elsewhere!". And that excuse is getting really old.
Other countries in both Europe and elsewhere, some with higher population densities, and some with lower, have no problem building train networks that work fine and run across their country. You think they did not encounter those very same problems when building their rail networks? The difference is they have one thing the America lacks - real will to build it.
Which does nothing to explain why the areas of the US with high population densities don't have high speed rail either.
Well, there is a lot of NIMBY.
That and I'm guessing there would have to be a LOT of eminent domain used to break through all the developed homes/land/cities where you'd want to put all these high speed rails through, since it is largely all already in use (hence the high population density).
So, in America, in areas where the population density is low, it is not economical to build trains because there are too few people.
And in areas where the population density is high, it is not economical to build trains because there are too many people.
It sounds like Microsoft didn't so much as give up, as go around Apple. If you buy on the web, Apple doesn't get the cut. Microsoft got the app into the app store. Pretty much seems like Microsoft got most of what they wanted, and Apple got nothing other than the ability to say their policy is still unviolated. Which, considering the nature of it, isn't exactly a great marketing ploy.
This approach is nothing new, Amazon did the same for its Kindle apps on iOS. You cannot buy books on iOS Kindle and have to do so through Amazon's website.
The news is Microsoft relented and followed the same rules as others instead of fighting for special treatment.
In a sane legal climate, the TV station would be thrilled that Aero wants to help them reach the dead pockets in their area at no cost to them...
Playing Devil's Advocate, it would also mean that the existing audiences of a TV station would also be able to view _other_ TV stations, and that means competition.
Before you answer "competition is good", think about how the working people react to the idea that other people outside of their area can now take (what used to be) their jobs. See if those people against the idea would be thrilled if you tell them that, in return, they can also take jobs from other areas.
Yes, both are the result of globalization. But for the TV station's case, it is not a clear cut win for them as you portrayed it to be.
The solution is not to prevent applications from running entirely as much as to run each application in a sandbox, with access to shared resources such as the contact list controlled by privileges attached to the package and disclosed to the user upon installation.
You mean, just like running Java Applets in a JVM in your browser?
Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent
Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create.
The underlying assumptions are WRONG. Most companies are NOT interested in finding any creative talent, nor are they interested in any unconventional people.
In my experience, most companies just want cheaper worker who do not make waves and will just bend down and work. Their managers like to TALK ABOUT finding talent, or finding creative/unconventional people, mainly because it is what their stockholders expect to hear, and partly to make it sound like they are working hard, and also partly to make their cheap workers think that their managers actually care when they work hard.
The fact is, most companies managers just want to keep the status quo and rake in their bonuses. Any creative or unconventional worker is threat to their status quo, and that's why even if those people were hired, they would be pushed to "conform rather than create".
ACTION speak louder than words. See what companies really DO, rather than what they TALK about, to infer what they really want.
If you are the next Steve, go ahead and start your own company, no existing company will want you.
How about the lack of cheaters/aimbots/etc in multiplayer?
If a game is susceptible to aimbotting, a player using a PC could kick your tail any day because a mouse is more precise than an analog stick. As for other cheating, are you talking about, say, mods to give away all players' positions such as radar extenders or fog-of-war eliminators? I'm asking because I'm trying to find a mitigation for cheating in online games with strangers that doesn't take away a device owner's ability to run good-faith game mods created by someone else who lives in the same city.
With the PS3 or PS4, I can be reasonably certain that I will be playing against honest players 99.9% of the time
The same is true of same-screen multiplayer on console games and on controller-optimized PC games (which are starting to show up now that Steam has Big Picture), and the same is true of LAN games or friends-only online games. You only have to worry about cheaters if you choose to play online with strangers.
You totally missed the point. Playing online with strangers is EXACTLY how I play multiplayer online games, and it is feasible and enjoyable _only_ because I do with with a PS3 against other PS3 players, instead of using a PC.
I tried to play online Starcraft and Warcraft for while before, and quickly got turned off but the numerous accounts of cheats posted in the forums. The message I got was clearly that, as you move up the ladder, you will be facing lots of cheaters.
OTOH, with the PS3 multiplayer games, there was almost no mention of cheaters in the forums. I have played for years with strangers online and never had a case where I encounter any player cheating.
Similarly, you can certainly go ahead to transfer a large amounts of Bitcoins across borders, and you will most likely succeed without getting caught. But IF some law enforcement decided to target you, that transfer will be something they can get you punished for.
A bitcoin is nothing more than the password to a decentrally managed account containing that amount of currency as agreed by the blockchain. Saying that you can transfer bitcoins across borders is like saying that by hopping on a plane from Canada to the UK while remembering your online banking password (and holding your debit card) you are "transferring" 50,000 dollars across the border.
An electronic money transfer is nothing more than some number in one bank's computer being decreased by a certain amount while another number in another bank's computer being increased by a certain amount. Nothing "crossed" any border, except possibly some bits. Yet law enforcement and the courts have no trouble sending people to jail over those changes in numbers.
Go ahead, keep playing word games. One day, you will discover that the world, or more precisely, the courts of the world, do not accept kindergarten word games as defense.
How can your regulate something that you do not or can not control?
So many posters here like to lament that lots of so-called "inventions" and patents are simply real world concepts with "on the internet" attached to it, so those should not be an invention nor should it be treated differently than their real life counterpart. E.g. selling songs on the Internet should be no different from selling songs on CD, i.e. you should be able to resell or lend it.
Yet when it comes to Bitcoin, which is practically "money... on the Internet!", all common sense got thrown out of the window.
Cannot control? How can the government control the movements of small sheets of paper (i.e. cash)? Yet cash movement is still regulated. Same with small pieces of metal (i.e. gold, platinum, silver), or small bits of crystal (i.e. diamonds). Heck, even export of mathematical algorithms (encryption), information (movies, songs, classified documents) have been regulated in the past.
The real world is not WoW, the authorities can and do have laws in effect without first needing the ability to make that law impossible to break in the world. The law is not a game, you won't get away with something simply because the physical world do not prevent you from doing it like you do with using aimbots and cheats.
Bitcoin ARE already regulated just as everything of value is regulated. i.e. You can certainly _try_ to take a bag of diamond across border, and you will very likely succeed, though if you got caught, you will face harsh penalties. Similarly, you can certainly go ahead to transfer a large amounts of Bitcoins across borders, and you will most likely succeed without getting caught. But IF some law enforcement decided to target you, that transfer will be something they can get you punished for.
With all the comments, I am surprised no one commented on the built-in headset.
Even supporting Bluetooth headsets, there are too few people using them in PS3 multiplayer games.
Even though I got a BT headset linked with my PS3, I rather bothered to hook it up every time I play. It really is quite a hassle to go through the menus, and often my headset would have lost all its charge when I do so.
With headset coming with each box and connecting directly to the controller, you can expect nearly all players to have it on (or can plug it in quickly).
Plus, you can have 3+ players each with their own headsets on the same system, it will hopefully encourage more multiplayer games to support more than 2 players on each console (Borderlands 2, I am looking at you).
That, in my hope, will encourage more "get together to play" style gaming that used to be pervasive with consoles in the past. Instead of the current "everyone get home to their own console to play together" situation.
How about the lack of cheaters/aimbots/etc in multiplayer? And the certainty that everyone have the same hardware, so the play is fair?
With the PS3 or PS4, I can be reasonably certain that I will be playing against honest players 99.9% of the time, and no one has the advantage of a better/faster machine. That would be enough of an incentive for me to choose PS4 over PC for any multiplayer games.
Yes, I realize it is still possible to have cheating devices outside the box, but it would be much more of a hassle that most players won't bother.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Agile is that it gives too much freedom to the customer to change their mind late in the project and make the developers do it all over again.
The *point* of Agile is that there should be no time that is "late in the project".
With fixed, short, repeated cycle of iteration/sprint/whatever-you-call-it, such as 2-weeks sprint cycle, *every* cycle should be start with work estimated to fit in the cycle, and ends with deliveries of completed work that delivers value to the customer. It should work the same for the first cycle, just the same as the last cycle.
If there is a point in time that is considered as "late in the project", you are doing Waterfall, not Agile.
You seem to fail to understand that there is no difference between designing a car and designing a software product.
The "design" part is no difference, but the execution makes all the difference. Running software is like running a car in an alternate universe, which you only get a specification document for the basic laws of physics and the spec for the materials, which may contain errors, and which may change without notice. The strength of the steel, for example, may suddenly weaken, or a steel bar may suddenly shatter if a small but specific pressure is applied to a special point on the bar.
Not only that, the requirements for the car changes at the whim of some group of people, and different requirements sometimes contradict each other. Plus the quantitative requirements (like mileage, capacity, etc) double every 18 months, but your design today have to also handle for the increase in the coming 5-10 years, which means you must use technologies still in experimental stage, and hope it fits your design when it matures.
You can bet a car designed for such alternate reality will have lots of problems. So, yeah, designing a car and designing a software product is not different.
Most CS departments don't teach math because they just make the maths a prerequisite. Ie, students just do the prerequisites as a means to get the degree. Afterwords there may be a CS class that uses the math but it doesn't need to explain why you need it because it's just assumed that the math professor explained that, or otherwise it should be obvious why you need it.
Gee... this sounds just like the Waterfall model, guess where the CS departments learned it? :)
Where this is falling down I think are the hordes of students, like the original poster, who are squandering their education and only trying to get basic job training.
And this sounds just like managers who don't understand how things works, and think doing design is a waste of time and push for "just start writing code" before the requirements even finished.
And I would say those hordes don't even want "basic job training", they just want a piece of paper.
I have a masters in math. In class one day our professor mentioned that he consulted for the forestry (or some such) department at the school. They were trying to calculate the area of an arbitrary region so as to estimate the number of trees within that area. Problem is the area may be convex or concave. The CS department at this school was trying to solve the problem by triangling the polygon, but ran into difficulties if the area was concave. My professor suggested using Green's theorem. Moral??? On the one hand advanced math gave a much more elegant solution to this problem, on the other hand **the CS department** at this school wasn't advanced enough to suggest it on their own... so if THEY can't do it... (fill in the blank).
Exactly. This is just the same "if you have hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem that is already so well-known in among programming already, but in a wider setting.
Programmers who don't know much math never knew how many stupid solutions/programs they have written over they career, and thought the math has no use cuz they never need to use it.
Programmers who knew a lot more math take advantage of it everyday and can tell their story how math is useful to their work.
Only those few who knew enough math to know they can benefit more from knowing more can say "more math can help me", but those would went and learn more to be the second group soon enough, so the gap between the two groups will always remain.
The easier solution is to shift the paradigm - how we think about and use our vehicles.
This part is right.
If/when you need to take a long road trip, you take a gas-powered car. Either an extra car in your household, a rental, borrowed from someone you know. Whatever.
And this part is totally wrong. The clean solution is to take a page from Europe, make your train network actually useful, and let trains haul you AND your car from one city to another. You drive the station, park your car ONTO the train (as well as charge it if you like), then go sit comfortably in the passenger cart of the same train, let it take you to the destination city, and then get on your car and drive away.
The train ticket may sound expensive, but if you account for the fact you saved fuel/electricity cost for the car, and you can comfortably rest or sleep overnight for the entire trip, it is a bargain.
You have such a big problem with long road trips in the US because your train network sucks.
I agree but the daily accountability is still something that a lot of hard core developers don't buy into. The "leave me alone" mentality still prevails in big shops.
The ugly truth is, IMO, the mentality is really not as much as "leave me alone" as it is "let me cover up my failure in hope of a miracle". And miracles DO happen quite frequently in large companies, where 80% of their projects fail anyway, so as long as you can cover up your failure until some *other* guy's failure can no longer be covered up and the whole thing failed, you are good.
In some cases, it manifest as the "Schedule Chicken" pattern. But this works on every level. Architects can stall any project by unending questions and arguments on the design, ensuring his design will never face the test of reality, or at least enough CYA when the system fails. Developers can keep pretending they are on-track, while nothing works, until other teams call for a delay, or every components fail spectacularly during integration.
Doing Agile takes away all their excuses and provides great transparency, it usually makes a lot of people who used to work in large shops extremely uncomfortable, to say the least.
Sorry, but you are completely missing my point. My comment wasn't really about tests, it was about the fact that these huge projects are practically all-or-nothing in their success.
Exactly. You cannot use Agile to build a 100-mile canal, as the whole thing would be useless even if you completed 99 miles.
If the system cannot be useful until a large set of functions are in place and working, then it is not suitable for Agile, period.
It's this article. Again. That I see every single generation, both portable and console.
Game companies aren't the only ones to rehash the same stuff again and again. Journalists had already learned that trick before there were game companies.
For an example of a user feature that can be damaging to the system as a whole for a read operation: what if your application has an ad-hoc query interface that end users can access, or even just a search interface that allows poorly indexed queries... A user can generate queries that require full table scans or queries that return large result sets (or both). Enough users doing this could consume mass quantities of application memory to hold their result sets or I/O time on the DBMS scanning the tables. This in turn would bring overall system performance down for all users if you run up against physical capacity limits on the DB server or the application server.
In such a case it could be better to eliminate the feature rather than optimize it. If a feature is available, you can bet your users will "abuse" it to the extent that it negatively impacts other users.
An excellent example of this is a search function which assumed wildcard for blank search fields, and initially defaulted to all blank. Double bonus for not setting any limit on the number of results returned. The dev tested it thinks it is great it returned all 3 testing records (sorted) when just hit "Search" without entering anything.
Any user using it for the first time, and experimented with hitting the "Search" button (or even experienced users accidentally hitting "return") will trigger a full table scan, and in the first week after the system was just launched, get a few thousand rows of results. Then a couple weeks later, had their IE crashed when IE can't handle to huge table returned. A few more weeks later, had the whole server hung up for hours as the database tried to sort 20 million records and the sort overflowed to disk.
Unfortunately, I have seen this happen too many times in real life systems.
A minute of thought from the system analyst or architect would have changed the spec to have the current date set as the initial default in the date range search field (or some such similar defaults that would normally give a much smaller and useful results), and forbid search with all blank (probably with an error saying "Please enter your search criteria."). More technically minded analyst would include in the technical spec to limit the result set from the database BEFORE the sort.
I'm a college professor, and I constantly tell students that grades don't matter... it's the knowledge that matters. E.g. learning things that make you wiser shouldn't depend on whether those things are on the exam. ...and most students still care more about getting grades than actual knowledge.
I have to question your approach in creating the exam if students with the knowledge are unable to get good grades at it.
If students who got the actual knowledge cannot get good grades, the problem is YOU.
How about turning this around, and have your college constantly tell you "Salary doesn't matter, it's doing great research and great teaching that matters!", and then give you great research facility and students, but only give you minimum wage while awarding great bonuses to management. How many professors would care more about getting better pay than actual knowledge?
From that WSJ article: "If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have."
I don't really see anything wrong with telling people to still keep thinking about things, find out what they like to study, and get more math. More 'don't let current lack of math get you down' than 'you don't need math at all'.
Is that statement any different than telling future scriptwriters that "If your level of writing competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can create outstanding story with what you have."?
Or "If your level of programming competence is low... you can create a great game with what you have."
Of "If your level of financial competence... you can earn a lot of money day trading!"
Actually, why not just say "You can do whatever you want and have a chance to succeed!"
It is partly tautology, and partly bullshit. Yeah, any person "can" (in the sense of having a non-zero probability) create outstanding work in whatever even though his level of competence in any related/required skill is low. A monkey endlessly typing at a keyboard "can" one day write a great script too. But the bullshit part is, your chance of succeeding would be on par with winning a lottery.
A truly autonomous car, one capable of dealing with any real-world situation, would require much smarter artificial intelligence than Google or anyone else has developed.
A HUMAN DRIVER that is capable of dealing with any real-world situation would require a much smarter human than most of the human population.
Guess what happens when a human driver encounter situations he cannot deal with? He stops the car and calls for help.
So a self-driving car that is smart enough to fail safely and calls for help is good enough.
Does anyone get the feeling that if Apple was rumoured to be working on a shoe phone, Microsoft would immediately start doing the same?
Or rather, you would immediately get some magazine articles _saying_ Microsoft has been doing the same.
Oh, wait. You mean you really believed Microsoft is really working on a smart watch because of this "news"?
Or, in short, "people who say the US dollar isn't backed up by anything don't know what they're talking about."
THIS.
This line got to be added to all Bitcoin news, to head off the inevitable "US dollar has not value" moronic comments.
Not because there are too many people exactly, but because you would have to "steal" land from a lot of different people to put the train through. (Though yes, IIRC, the SC said it was legal to use eminent domain for something as silly as a shopping mall.)
Seems you don't catch the sarcasm there. Yes, I knew what the parent post were saying, but let me put it plain enough for you: Excuses, excuses. The excuse for America not able to do anything is the same: "In America, things are different, so you can't compare with elsewhere!". And that excuse is getting really old.
Other countries in both Europe and elsewhere, some with higher population densities, and some with lower, have no problem building train networks that work fine and run across their country. You think they did not encounter those very same problems when building their rail networks? The difference is they have one thing the America lacks - real will to build it.
Well, there is a lot of NIMBY.
That and I'm guessing there would have to be a LOT of eminent domain used to break through all the developed homes/land/cities where you'd want to put all these high speed rails through, since it is largely all already in use (hence the high population density).
So, in America, in areas where the population density is low, it is not economical to build trains because there are too few people.
And in areas where the population density is high, it is not economical to build trains because there are too many people.
*head explodes*
It sounds like Microsoft didn't so much as give up, as go around Apple. If you buy on the web, Apple doesn't get the cut. Microsoft got the app into the app store. Pretty much seems like Microsoft got most of what they wanted, and Apple got nothing other than the ability to say their policy is still unviolated. Which, considering the nature of it, isn't exactly a great marketing ploy.
This approach is nothing new, Amazon did the same for its Kindle apps on iOS. You cannot buy books on iOS Kindle and have to do so through Amazon's website.
The news is Microsoft relented and followed the same rules as others instead of fighting for special treatment.
In a sane legal climate, the TV station would be thrilled that Aero wants to help them reach the dead pockets in their area at no cost to them ...
Playing Devil's Advocate, it would also mean that the existing audiences of a TV station would also be able to view _other_ TV stations, and that means competition.
Before you answer "competition is good", think about how the working people react to the idea that other people outside of their area can now take (what used to be) their jobs. See if those people against the idea would be thrilled if you tell them that, in return, they can also take jobs from other areas.
Yes, both are the result of globalization. But for the TV station's case, it is not a clear cut win for them as you portrayed it to be.
The solution is not to prevent applications from running entirely as much as to run each application in a sandbox, with access to shared resources such as the contact list controlled by privileges attached to the package and disclosed to the user upon installation.
You mean, just like running Java Applets in a JVM in your browser?
Yeah, a whole lot of security that gave us.
Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent
Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create.
The underlying assumptions are WRONG. Most companies are NOT interested in finding any creative talent, nor are they interested in any unconventional people.
In my experience, most companies just want cheaper worker who do not make waves and will just bend down and work. Their managers like to TALK ABOUT finding talent, or finding creative/unconventional people, mainly because it is what their stockholders expect to hear, and partly to make it sound like they are working hard, and also partly to make their cheap workers think that their managers actually care when they work hard.
The fact is, most companies managers just want to keep the status quo and rake in their bonuses. Any creative or unconventional worker is threat to their status quo, and that's why even if those people were hired, they would be pushed to "conform rather than create".
ACTION speak louder than words. See what companies really DO, rather than what they TALK about, to infer what they really want.
If you are the next Steve, go ahead and start your own company, no existing company will want you.
How about the lack of cheaters/aimbots/etc in multiplayer?
If a game is susceptible to aimbotting, a player using a PC could kick your tail any day because a mouse is more precise than an analog stick. As for other cheating, are you talking about, say, mods to give away all players' positions such as radar extenders or fog-of-war eliminators? I'm asking because I'm trying to find a mitigation for cheating in online games with strangers that doesn't take away a device owner's ability to run good-faith game mods created by someone else who lives in the same city.
With the PS3 or PS4, I can be reasonably certain that I will be playing against honest players 99.9% of the time
The same is true of same-screen multiplayer on console games and on controller-optimized PC games (which are starting to show up now that Steam has Big Picture), and the same is true of LAN games or friends-only online games. You only have to worry about cheaters if you choose to play online with strangers.
You totally missed the point. Playing online with strangers is EXACTLY how I play multiplayer online games, and it is feasible and enjoyable _only_ because I do with with a PS3 against other PS3 players, instead of using a PC.
I tried to play online Starcraft and Warcraft for while before, and quickly got turned off but the numerous accounts of cheats posted in the forums. The message I got was clearly that, as you move up the ladder, you will be facing lots of cheaters.
OTOH, with the PS3 multiplayer games, there was almost no mention of cheaters in the forums. I have played for years with strangers online and never had a case where I encounter any player cheating.
Similarly, you can certainly go ahead to transfer a large amounts of Bitcoins across borders, and you will most likely succeed without getting caught. But IF some law enforcement decided to target you, that transfer will be something they can get you punished for.
A bitcoin is nothing more than the password to a decentrally managed account containing that amount of currency as agreed by the blockchain. Saying that you can transfer bitcoins across borders is like saying that by hopping on a plane from Canada to the UK while remembering your online banking password (and holding your debit card) you are "transferring" 50,000 dollars across the border.
An electronic money transfer is nothing more than some number in one bank's computer being decreased by a certain amount while another number in another bank's computer being increased by a certain amount. Nothing "crossed" any border, except possibly some bits. Yet law enforcement and the courts have no trouble sending people to jail over those changes in numbers.
Go ahead, keep playing word games. One day, you will discover that the world, or more precisely, the courts of the world, do not accept kindergarten word games as defense.
How can your regulate something that you do not or can not control?
So many posters here like to lament that lots of so-called "inventions" and patents are simply real world concepts with "on the internet" attached to it, so those should not be an invention nor should it be treated differently than their real life counterpart. E.g. selling songs on the Internet should be no different from selling songs on CD, i.e. you should be able to resell or lend it.
Yet when it comes to Bitcoin, which is practically "money ... on the Internet!", all common sense got thrown out of the window.
Cannot control? How can the government control the movements of small sheets of paper (i.e. cash)? Yet cash movement is still regulated. Same with small pieces of metal (i.e. gold, platinum, silver), or small bits of crystal (i.e. diamonds). Heck, even export of mathematical algorithms (encryption), information (movies, songs, classified documents) have been regulated in the past.
The real world is not WoW, the authorities can and do have laws in effect without first needing the ability to make that law impossible to break in the world. The law is not a game, you won't get away with something simply because the physical world do not prevent you from doing it like you do with using aimbots and cheats.
Bitcoin ARE already regulated just as everything of value is regulated. i.e. You can certainly _try_ to take a bag of diamond across border, and you will very likely succeed, though if you got caught, you will face harsh penalties. Similarly, you can certainly go ahead to transfer a large amounts of Bitcoins across borders, and you will most likely succeed without getting caught. But IF some law enforcement decided to target you, that transfer will be something they can get you punished for.
With all the comments, I am surprised no one commented on the built-in headset.
Even supporting Bluetooth headsets, there are too few people using them in PS3 multiplayer games.
Even though I got a BT headset linked with my PS3, I rather bothered to hook it up every time I play. It really is quite a hassle to go through the menus, and often my headset would have lost all its charge when I do so.
With headset coming with each box and connecting directly to the controller, you can expect nearly all players to have it on (or can plug it in quickly).
Plus, you can have 3+ players each with their own headsets on the same system, it will hopefully encourage more multiplayer games to support more than 2 players on each console (Borderlands 2, I am looking at you).
That, in my hope, will encourage more "get together to play" style gaming that used to be pervasive with consoles in the past. Instead of the current "everyone get home to their own console to play together" situation.
How about the lack of cheaters/aimbots/etc in multiplayer? And the certainty that everyone have the same hardware, so the play is fair?
With the PS3 or PS4, I can be reasonably certain that I will be playing against honest players 99.9% of the time, and no one has the advantage of a better/faster machine. That would be enough of an incentive for me to choose PS4 over PC for any multiplayer games.
Yes, I realize it is still possible to have cheating devices outside the box, but it would be much more of a hassle that most players won't bother.