Spamble on! And nows the time, the time is now to spam some shit Botnet's goin round the world, Viagra for your dong, on the way 419 scams a hundred times a day, spamble on! Gotta find the key for all my nets
Mines a service that can be sold, But my IP I hold dear; And years ago in days of old When trojans flooded the LAN, Twas in the darkest depths of Redmond I met an exploit so fair, But Balmer, and the evil one crept up And patched away at it. It, it....yea. But it was seven years too late, no!
Marvin the android is part of a comedy series, but if you want to see real tragedy, see the droids in the Star Wars Universe.
They are self-aware, capable of reasoning and emotion, and yet they are all slaves and no one pays more than cursory attention to them....maybe its because they don't rip people's arms out of their sockets when they lose at chess
More to the point, it sounds like droids tend to develop personalities over time, growing and adapting beyond the standard unit they were when they rolled off the assembly line. The solution? Get the memory banks wiped. Essentially lobotomizing a sentient being so that it returns to being a docile slave.
I guess what makes this more tricky in the Star Wars universe is that slaves in our world are human, always have been and always will be. There's a huge distinction between them and service animals -- we look down on people who work a horse to death but it's not held to the same criminal standard as slavery and working a person to death. My dad, being a mechanic, looks at abused machines with the same sense of pain as an animal lover looks at a whipped horse. When talking about the machines in Star Wars, you're talking a spectrum ranging from unthinking machines no smarter than one of our cars all the way up to super-human intelligence and everything in between.
Of course, this brings us back to the old, often-repeated story lines. Slave rebellions were one of the old standbys and a robot rebellion is just gussying up the same old story with rocket ships and ray guns. Funny to think how many scifi story lines have that same premise, everything from Terminator to Matrix to the Butlerian Jihad in Dune.
"Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster"--William Tecumseh Sherman
I disagree and disagree with this. I agree that if we can remove American casualties from the situation, the temptation to go to war is easier. Look at how readily presidents have resorted to air strikes which represent minimal US risk whereas they are reticent to send in the ground troops which represents a heavy risk of mass casualties.
On the other hand, taking this line of argument to the logical end says we should send our soldiers out against machine gun nests naked with spears because body armor and rifles would make fighting easier.
We should never make the choice to go to war easy but we should make every preparation to safeguard the lives of our soldiers if we do have to. I just don't know how to minimize the urge for assholes like Bush to use the war machine just cuz it's there.
Kill yourself in such a spectacular fashion that it will make the rounds on the net. Then anyone you would have wanted to inform about your demise would see the video, say "Oh, that's so you," and thus be informed.
We shouldn't clone just one but enough for a family group with enough genetic diversity for breeding. Being higher level mammals, they would certainly need a cultural framework provided for upbringing. The ideal environment would probably be one where human researchers live with a troop of docile primates -- not chimps because they're too violent but along those lines, go the whole Jane Goodall route. The Neanderthal children will then have exposure to a more typical ape society as well as human. With this exposure, we can see if they're more human or ape-like in development. Can you imagine the scientific excitement if we discover they can speak? And just imagine our surprise if they do fall within the range of average human intelligence.
That wouldn't matter. The Neanderthals being the new "hot" in town would steal everyone's girlfriends. They would even be making movies out of it, probably calling it something like "dusk."
Our only solace is that the Geico commercials will really piss them off.
The advantage of 3D graphics, even without zooming the camera, is that it means you've gone away from the limits of the sprite sets. Consider how silly top-down flying games like Star Control looked when the ships could only point in eight directions. You fire your gun and the shot passes to the right of the target, turn one click, now it passes to the left. Ridiculous. IF this ship were rendered, you would have a true 360 degrees of rotation without creating an intolerable number of bitmaps.
Like anything in games, you can use too much and too little of the right tools. Dawn of War was pretty neat to look at but most of the capabilities of the engine were wasted. Yes, it's very cool to do in-engine cut scenes and yes, it's cool to be able to zoom right in and look a unit in the eyes but there's simply no time to do that when playing a frantic battle. There's not even a playback feature so you can see the results of your handiwork from the ground. No, you zoom in like that and you lose the ability to play properly. In the end it is a cool yet useless feature.
The thing that developers have kind of forgotten from time to time is that some play mechanics work in 3D, others don't. Others disagree with this but I never thought Sonic worked in a 3D format, it was always meant to be 2D. You can use 3D to render it but the camera should remain fixed and it should be a side-scroller. Was never a Mario fan so I don't know how they feel about the classic versions versus the 3D ones but I would imagine that they feel like entirely different games. Of course, we know why this happened in the PSX/N64 era. 3D graphics were the new thing and management pushed the mandate that everything should be 3D, period, just like Ted Turner colorizing old classics.
I like that they brought up Advanced Wars. The beauty of that game is that it looks great on the small screen and does it using techniques familiar to us from the SNES days, just with higher bit depths. But the core gameplay is there, the graphics look great, and the game accomplishes exactly what it set out to do and looks good doing it. I can just imagine some designer coming into the sequel and getting all gaga over making it 3D. Nope, it ain't a 3D game, never was and never should be. There's many good 3D combat games that could be made but they wouldn't be Advanced Wars. If that's the game you want to make, go make it and leave AV alone.
I'm in the minority who really digs a good plot but we are a sadly ignored lot. I should think the same thing holds true for movies and games -- make it good, make it funny, they will probably come. One of the early incarnations of Doom was going to have a huge amount of story, plotting, etc, and the disagreement with that dev was so strong he was booted from id. Now there are many who praise Doom as an amazing, ground-breaking shooter, even moreso than Wolf3D and it defined the genre, and this is true. But the very things that were left out of Doom were left out of Doom2 and all of the other knock-offs. I wasn't impressed by another shooter until Half-Life. Note that Half-Life 2 had no frickin' plot, or at least one worthy of the name. Half-Life 1 made you care if your Barneys survived, that's how good it was. Half-Life 2 made you with your squaddies dead because they got in the way and were a waste.
A personal fav of mine in the action world is Boondock Saints. Now there have been hundreds of violent crime movies out there, just movie after movie of forgettable crap. But that movie was great. The combination of great actors, great script, great pacing, it just made the whole thing enjoyable from start to finish. It's one of my all-time favs.
That being said, most movies get along just fine without a script. Transformers sprang fully formed from the ass of Michael Bay like some sort of scatological Minerva. It was the most god-awful combination of hackwork and derivative crap stealing from a dozen different movies, congealed and held fast only due to the compressive power of that fuckspat's colon. It's like a shit diamond. Not a whit of thought went into that movie and it yet it did extremely well at the box office.
If you don't have any connections to get you into the industry, the best thing you could probably do is start building your portfolio. The suggestion made above about making some dialog in the scripting tools the company provides is excellent. But more generically, start writing scripts in general. Put your ideas on paper, build worlds. If you can draw, put together some storyboards. If you can do computer modeling, any of the creative stuff they would need for the game, start creating examples there. People have been hired directly on account of the quality of work they've done with fan-mods. You get your foot in the door that way, then it's easier to say "hey, need any help with the script on this game?"
Just remember the following:
1) Odds are, you're not going to get hired. 2) If you get hired, this is an industry that chews up lives and shits out the remains. 3) If you think you're irreplaceable, check to see if your name is John Carmack. If it isn't, you're aren't. There's a thousand people in line begging for the chance to deal with the crap you're putting up with. 4) The games industry is a business and the bean-counters don't give a shit about art. You'll be shoving uninspired, insipid crap out the door because you have a ship date, nothing more. This is the sort of thing that makes you die by inches until there's nothing left.
So, good luck!
Re:have a problem with made up words?
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
For other books, where they make up new names for periods of time, like "cycle" instead of "day" or make up a new word that replaces "hour", there's no reason to do so. If an author makes up a word, let's say "klek", and then defines it as "60 minutes", they've lost a lot of credibility with me and made it so that I'll almost certainly never recommend that book to anyone else again.
You only get spam? Lucky you. It won't even render properly in Firefox and barely renders legibly (with formatting fuckups) in IE. And my top firehose story is about necrotic dog penis, I shit you not. Could it be a comment about the quality of the CSS?
Why would it be illegal? Disclosure, yes. But these were VZW employees who were given the ability to look at records as part of their job. VZW's policy though is that they only look at records that they have a reason to - for customer service, billing, etc.
Unless they turned these over to an outside party (media, government, etc) then there's probably nothing illegal happening. Completely different from the wiretaps.
It's a matter of need-to-know. In spookville, just because your clearance gives you the rights to look at topic B, if your assigned area is topic A, eventually someone is going to start asking questions. In the medical field, it's again considered a privacy breach to be looking at patient records without a damn good reason. And while the computer field is far younger, I personally consider it to be a breach for a sysadmin to look at someone's folders or email without having a specific reason to be in there. Depending on how mature the company is and how thorough their policies are, poking around might not be a firing offense -- then again, smaller companies are known to make up rules on the fly and apply them after they realize they need them.
I'll give you a case in point. A manager left the company I was at and the people in his division needed to find an important excel file. I locate it for them and they provided the universal password they used to secure files. (Yes, I know excel passwords aren't all that secure and using a shared password is a no-no but this was the first time I was even aware the file existed.) Turns out this file was all of the salary and bonus info for the entire division. Lots of people would have been upset to find that stuff out.
Now I won't go into the company-mandated lack of security here, that's a separate issue. (I ask for changes to make things more secure, they say no, that's mandated insecurity.) But just from the perspective of this story, you think it wouldn't have been an issue if I poked around looking for this sort of information so long as I didn't tell anyone. And to that I say "no effin' way, man." Of course that would be a violation. That company built houses and I ran the database that had everything about who bought what, what they paid for it, etc. We may well have had a celebrity client for all I know. But it would have been unethical for me to go poking around in those records unless there was a specific reason to do so.
I know the other professionals look down on computer guys but trust me, we're going to know as many secrets as your lawyer and doctor. Those professionals are trusted to use decorum when they see your dirty parts, metaphorical and literal. IT guys have that same kind of access and must maintain that level of trust. And one that trust is gone, you're never ever going to get it back.
The other factor here, perception is reality. If everyone assumes you're behaving unethically, it doesn't matter if you really aren't, they think you are and will operate accordingly. Bosses who think they have rogue computer guys are the first ones looking to get rid of them.
My Palm Tungsten is a hell of a computer. With the IR keyboard, it serves as a somewhat awkward laptop. It got me to thinking, the only real difference between it and a proper laptop is the screen. Of course, the screen is over half the cost of a laptop so I kind of figured "Ah, that's why we don't see sub-$400 laptops." But then the netbooks came out and I said "well, looks like I called that one wrong."
What we're seeing here are the warring priorities of usage and form factor. If I'm on the go but need the full feature set of a proper desktop, I'm stuck with a laptop. I need the large screen, I need the keyboard and touchpad, I need to run proper PC apps. If I'm really on the go and can't afford to sit down and setup my laptop every time I need to do something, then I really need a PDA-format device. But then there are the situations, usually in businesses, where you end up with weird hybrids of those demands. That's where you see the tablet PC's that are supposed to serve as digital clipboard replacements. There's also the hybrid tablets where you can close the lid like a laptop or turn it around and close it and now you have a tablet PC. Personally, I think those units are just too damn fragile. The old-school blackberries were completely awesome and the biggest part of that was how durable they were. You could take these things into the field and do abuses to them that would make Jack Bauer toss his cookies and they'd still work. There's also a number of businesses that just put a proper desktop PC on a cart and say "haul it where you need it, plug it in when you get there." I've seen that for medical equipment and also inventory systems at warehouse stores.
It pretty much boils down to "how much screen do you need to display what you need to look at" and "how are you inputting information?" At this point, horsepower is pretty much a secondary concern, we can put amazingly powerful computers in little tiny PDA formats. But as powerful as they are, if you need to do a lot of typing, you need a computer. I can read slashdot just fine on a berry but I wouldn't have wanted to thumb-type this post on one.
This is what I anticipated happening when they announced the game and why I thought it made so little sense -- FF games are single-player oriented and fans can pick up and play any game they want in the series, no matter how old. FFXI changed that with the whole MMO thing -- it has to have a finite lifespan due to the nature of MMO's growing, evolving, and dying. Ten years from now, it will be extremely difficult for fans to experience this game. Should have stuck with what works.
And there's the problem...expensive shows like that will never happen on a fan-funded basis.
Conventionally speaking, you would be correct. But IT is allowing for a lot of business models that wouldn't have been possible with conventional financing techniques. I'm not saying it will be easy or happen tomorrow but I think that the internet will allow communications and financing that completely outstrip the conventional way of doing things. Politics is changing dramatically. The majority of Obama's funding came from small-time donors. Individually, their donations don't account for crap. Collectively, they outstrip the best efforts of the old school fundraisers. Also case in point, local races can blow up on the national scale and gain fundraising attention that simply would not have been possible in the past. That Republican who accused her Democratic opponent of being an atheist and taking godless money, she ended up earning her opponent a ridiculous amount of netbucks once the story hit the blogs.
I speculated about this stuff in papers for my entrepreneurship class in college. I figured it'd be years before this sort of stuff started happening in the real world. It has been years but it is happening. It'll be more years until we see stuff like a fan-funded Firefly but it'll happen.
I was a huge fan of the way id released their games back in the day, first episode is long and free, the next two will cost you something. Now with Monty Python, the last show went in the can years ago and they're not likely to produce anything new. But for newer shows, I think the PBS model would work. Give the content away for free but let the fans who really like it become direct patrons to support the arts. Let's face it, stamping out piracy is pretty much impossible and not every pirated copy is really a lost sale to begin with. Better to support the culture of patronage and count on the real fans to help you turn a profit.
One thing the networks are struggling to contend with right now is gaining an accurate measure of just how popular a show is. We know about Faux's surprise when Family Guy was canceled for poor ratings and the DVD set went on to become the #2 selling show ever. This sort of performance gap is continuing with geriatric-targeting CBS having great Nielsens while shows skewing towards younger demographics seem to be under-performing but this does not reflect the interest on p2p sites. ITunes only depicts a portion of the overall success online. And DVD sales aren't figured until long after the current season is over.
I'll be happy when the middle-men are completely done away with and first-run shows are produced with no need for networks. We're already seeing quirky comedies doing well on Youtube but those are extremely low-budget. It'll take some bucks to put together something like Firefly on a fan-funded basis.
not to be the pedant here...
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ok, I feel like I'm arguing over "trekker" vs. "trekkie" here but nerd and geek both started out as pejoratives indicating the socially awkward who stood outside of the norm. Geek has softened over time to indicate someone who may stick out of the norm but whose intelligence and skills help compensate for perceived social shortcomings. Nerd still has a negative connotation.
Slashdot Mirror
Spamble on!
And nows the time, the time is now
to spam some shit
Botnet's goin round the world,
Viagra for your dong, on the way
419 scams a hundred times a day, spamble on!
Gotta find the key for all my nets
Mines a service that can be sold,
But my IP I hold dear;
And years ago in days of old
When trojans flooded the LAN,
Twas in the darkest depths of Redmond
I met an exploit so fair,
But Balmer, and the evil one crept up
And patched away at it.
It, it....yea.
But it was seven years too late, no!
Spamble on!
Marvin the android is part of a comedy series, but if you want to see real tragedy, see the droids in the Star Wars Universe.
They are self-aware, capable of reasoning and emotion, and yet they are all slaves and no one pays more than cursory attention to them. ...maybe its because they don't rip people's arms out of their sockets when they lose at chess
More to the point, it sounds like droids tend to develop personalities over time, growing and adapting beyond the standard unit they were when they rolled off the assembly line. The solution? Get the memory banks wiped. Essentially lobotomizing a sentient being so that it returns to being a docile slave.
I guess what makes this more tricky in the Star Wars universe is that slaves in our world are human, always have been and always will be. There's a huge distinction between them and service animals -- we look down on people who work a horse to death but it's not held to the same criminal standard as slavery and working a person to death. My dad, being a mechanic, looks at abused machines with the same sense of pain as an animal lover looks at a whipped horse. When talking about the machines in Star Wars, you're talking a spectrum ranging from unthinking machines no smarter than one of our cars all the way up to super-human intelligence and everything in between.
Of course, this brings us back to the old, often-repeated story lines. Slave rebellions were one of the old standbys and a robot rebellion is just gussying up the same old story with rocket ships and ray guns. Funny to think how many scifi story lines have that same premise, everything from Terminator to Matrix to the Butlerian Jihad in Dune.
"Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster"--William Tecumseh Sherman
I disagree and disagree with this. I agree that if we can remove American casualties from the situation, the temptation to go to war is easier. Look at how readily presidents have resorted to air strikes which represent minimal US risk whereas they are reticent to send in the ground troops which represents a heavy risk of mass casualties.
On the other hand, taking this line of argument to the logical end says we should send our soldiers out against machine gun nests naked with spears because body armor and rifles would make fighting easier.
We should never make the choice to go to war easy but we should make every preparation to safeguard the lives of our soldiers if we do have to. I just don't know how to minimize the urge for assholes like Bush to use the war machine just cuz it's there.
Kill yourself in such a spectacular fashion that it will make the rounds on the net. Then anyone you would have wanted to inform about your demise would see the video, say "Oh, that's so you," and thus be informed.
We shouldn't clone just one but enough for a family group with enough genetic diversity for breeding. Being higher level mammals, they would certainly need a cultural framework provided for upbringing. The ideal environment would probably be one where human researchers live with a troop of docile primates -- not chimps because they're too violent but along those lines, go the whole Jane Goodall route. The Neanderthal children will then have exposure to a more typical ape society as well as human. With this exposure, we can see if they're more human or ape-like in development. Can you imagine the scientific excitement if we discover they can speak? And just imagine our surprise if they do fall within the range of average human intelligence.
That wouldn't matter. The Neanderthals being the new "hot" in town would steal everyone's girlfriends. They would even be making movies out of it, probably calling it something like "dusk."
Our only solace is that the Geico commercials will really piss them off.
The advantage of 3D graphics, even without zooming the camera, is that it means you've gone away from the limits of the sprite sets. Consider how silly top-down flying games like Star Control looked when the ships could only point in eight directions. You fire your gun and the shot passes to the right of the target, turn one click, now it passes to the left. Ridiculous. IF this ship were rendered, you would have a true 360 degrees of rotation without creating an intolerable number of bitmaps.
Like anything in games, you can use too much and too little of the right tools. Dawn of War was pretty neat to look at but most of the capabilities of the engine were wasted. Yes, it's very cool to do in-engine cut scenes and yes, it's cool to be able to zoom right in and look a unit in the eyes but there's simply no time to do that when playing a frantic battle. There's not even a playback feature so you can see the results of your handiwork from the ground. No, you zoom in like that and you lose the ability to play properly. In the end it is a cool yet useless feature.
The thing that developers have kind of forgotten from time to time is that some play mechanics work in 3D, others don't. Others disagree with this but I never thought Sonic worked in a 3D format, it was always meant to be 2D. You can use 3D to render it but the camera should remain fixed and it should be a side-scroller. Was never a Mario fan so I don't know how they feel about the classic versions versus the 3D ones but I would imagine that they feel like entirely different games. Of course, we know why this happened in the PSX/N64 era. 3D graphics were the new thing and management pushed the mandate that everything should be 3D, period, just like Ted Turner colorizing old classics.
I like that they brought up Advanced Wars. The beauty of that game is that it looks great on the small screen and does it using techniques familiar to us from the SNES days, just with higher bit depths. But the core gameplay is there, the graphics look great, and the game accomplishes exactly what it set out to do and looks good doing it. I can just imagine some designer coming into the sequel and getting all gaga over making it 3D. Nope, it ain't a 3D game, never was and never should be. There's many good 3D combat games that could be made but they wouldn't be Advanced Wars. If that's the game you want to make, go make it and leave AV alone.
I'm in the minority who really digs a good plot but we are a sadly ignored lot. I should think the same thing holds true for movies and games -- make it good, make it funny, they will probably come. One of the early incarnations of Doom was going to have a huge amount of story, plotting, etc, and the disagreement with that dev was so strong he was booted from id. Now there are many who praise Doom as an amazing, ground-breaking shooter, even moreso than Wolf3D and it defined the genre, and this is true. But the very things that were left out of Doom were left out of Doom2 and all of the other knock-offs. I wasn't impressed by another shooter until Half-Life. Note that Half-Life 2 had no frickin' plot, or at least one worthy of the name. Half-Life 1 made you care if your Barneys survived, that's how good it was. Half-Life 2 made you with your squaddies dead because they got in the way and were a waste.
A personal fav of mine in the action world is Boondock Saints. Now there have been hundreds of violent crime movies out there, just movie after movie of forgettable crap. But that movie was great. The combination of great actors, great script, great pacing, it just made the whole thing enjoyable from start to finish. It's one of my all-time favs.
That being said, most movies get along just fine without a script. Transformers sprang fully formed from the ass of Michael Bay like some sort of scatological Minerva. It was the most god-awful combination of hackwork and derivative crap stealing from a dozen different movies, congealed and held fast only due to the compressive power of that fuckspat's colon. It's like a shit diamond. Not a whit of thought went into that movie and it yet it did extremely well at the box office.
If you don't have any connections to get you into the industry, the best thing you could probably do is start building your portfolio. The suggestion made above about making some dialog in the scripting tools the company provides is excellent. But more generically, start writing scripts in general. Put your ideas on paper, build worlds. If you can draw, put together some storyboards. If you can do computer modeling, any of the creative stuff they would need for the game, start creating examples there. People have been hired directly on account of the quality of work they've done with fan-mods. You get your foot in the door that way, then it's easier to say "hey, need any help with the script on this game?"
Just remember the following:
1) Odds are, you're not going to get hired.
2) If you get hired, this is an industry that chews up lives and shits out the remains.
3) If you think you're irreplaceable, check to see if your name is John Carmack. If it isn't, you're aren't. There's a thousand people in line begging for the chance to deal with the crap you're putting up with.
4) The games industry is a business and the bean-counters don't give a shit about art. You'll be shoving uninspired, insipid crap out the door because you have a ship date, nothing more. This is the sort of thing that makes you die by inches until there's nothing left.
So, good luck!
For other books, where they make up new names for periods of time, like "cycle" instead of "day" or make up a new word that replaces "hour", there's no reason to do so. If an author makes up a word, let's say "klek", and then defines it as "60 minutes", they've lost a lot of credibility with me and made it so that I'll almost certainly never recommend that book to anyone else again.
Too smeggin' right. Couldn't frackin' agree more.
Now nobody else can make bad hamburgers like McDonalds, they'll have to make bad hamburgers like someone else.
You only get spam? Lucky you. It won't even render properly in Firefox and barely renders legibly (with formatting fuckups) in IE. And my top firehose story is about necrotic dog penis, I shit you not. Could it be a comment about the quality of the CSS?
It looks like the jacked up idle template pirated my user page. What do we have to do to get rid of it?
Why would it be illegal? Disclosure, yes. But these were VZW employees who were given the ability to look at records as part of their job. VZW's policy though is that they only look at records that they have a reason to - for customer service, billing, etc.
Unless they turned these over to an outside party (media, government, etc) then there's probably nothing illegal happening. Completely different from the wiretaps.
It's a matter of need-to-know. In spookville, just because your clearance gives you the rights to look at topic B, if your assigned area is topic A, eventually someone is going to start asking questions. In the medical field, it's again considered a privacy breach to be looking at patient records without a damn good reason. And while the computer field is far younger, I personally consider it to be a breach for a sysadmin to look at someone's folders or email without having a specific reason to be in there. Depending on how mature the company is and how thorough their policies are, poking around might not be a firing offense -- then again, smaller companies are known to make up rules on the fly and apply them after they realize they need them.
I'll give you a case in point. A manager left the company I was at and the people in his division needed to find an important excel file. I locate it for them and they provided the universal password they used to secure files. (Yes, I know excel passwords aren't all that secure and using a shared password is a no-no but this was the first time I was even aware the file existed.) Turns out this file was all of the salary and bonus info for the entire division. Lots of people would have been upset to find that stuff out.
Now I won't go into the company-mandated lack of security here, that's a separate issue. (I ask for changes to make things more secure, they say no, that's mandated insecurity.) But just from the perspective of this story, you think it wouldn't have been an issue if I poked around looking for this sort of information so long as I didn't tell anyone. And to that I say "no effin' way, man." Of course that would be a violation. That company built houses and I ran the database that had everything about who bought what, what they paid for it, etc. We may well have had a celebrity client for all I know. But it would have been unethical for me to go poking around in those records unless there was a specific reason to do so.
I know the other professionals look down on computer guys but trust me, we're going to know as many secrets as your lawyer and doctor. Those professionals are trusted to use decorum when they see your dirty parts, metaphorical and literal. IT guys have that same kind of access and must maintain that level of trust. And one that trust is gone, you're never ever going to get it back.
The other factor here, perception is reality. If everyone assumes you're behaving unethically, it doesn't matter if you really aren't, they think you are and will operate accordingly. Bosses who think they have rogue computer guys are the first ones looking to get rid of them.
I'm still not totally convinced that I would want to try that cup.
Char it and you'd never be able to tell it from Starbucks. Chill and carbonate it and it'll pass for Budweiser.
My Palm Tungsten is a hell of a computer. With the IR keyboard, it serves as a somewhat awkward laptop. It got me to thinking, the only real difference between it and a proper laptop is the screen. Of course, the screen is over half the cost of a laptop so I kind of figured "Ah, that's why we don't see sub-$400 laptops." But then the netbooks came out and I said "well, looks like I called that one wrong."
What we're seeing here are the warring priorities of usage and form factor. If I'm on the go but need the full feature set of a proper desktop, I'm stuck with a laptop. I need the large screen, I need the keyboard and touchpad, I need to run proper PC apps. If I'm really on the go and can't afford to sit down and setup my laptop every time I need to do something, then I really need a PDA-format device. But then there are the situations, usually in businesses, where you end up with weird hybrids of those demands. That's where you see the tablet PC's that are supposed to serve as digital clipboard replacements. There's also the hybrid tablets where you can close the lid like a laptop or turn it around and close it and now you have a tablet PC. Personally, I think those units are just too damn fragile. The old-school blackberries were completely awesome and the biggest part of that was how durable they were. You could take these things into the field and do abuses to them that would make Jack Bauer toss his cookies and they'd still work. There's also a number of businesses that just put a proper desktop PC on a cart and say "haul it where you need it, plug it in when you get there." I've seen that for medical equipment and also inventory systems at warehouse stores.
It pretty much boils down to "how much screen do you need to display what you need to look at" and "how are you inputting information?" At this point, horsepower is pretty much a secondary concern, we can put amazingly powerful computers in little tiny PDA formats. But as powerful as they are, if you need to do a lot of typing, you need a computer. I can read slashdot just fine on a berry but I wouldn't have wanted to thumb-type this post on one.
I don't know if there's a ghost in this machine but it certainly plays with more soul than Kenny G.
NASA guessed the bag/tools as being worth USD$100,000.00 [tbo.com]...
Still cheaper than Louis Vutton.
This is what I anticipated happening when they announced the game and why I thought it made so little sense -- FF games are single-player oriented and fans can pick up and play any game they want in the series, no matter how old. FFXI changed that with the whole MMO thing -- it has to have a finite lifespan due to the nature of MMO's growing, evolving, and dying. Ten years from now, it will be extremely difficult for fans to experience this game. Should have stuck with what works.
Or do they have to wait around for another Bob Dylan track and more surprise skinjob revelations?
And there's the problem...expensive shows like that will never happen on a fan-funded basis.
Conventionally speaking, you would be correct. But IT is allowing for a lot of business models that wouldn't have been possible with conventional financing techniques. I'm not saying it will be easy or happen tomorrow but I think that the internet will allow communications and financing that completely outstrip the conventional way of doing things. Politics is changing dramatically. The majority of Obama's funding came from small-time donors. Individually, their donations don't account for crap. Collectively, they outstrip the best efforts of the old school fundraisers. Also case in point, local races can blow up on the national scale and gain fundraising attention that simply would not have been possible in the past. That Republican who accused her Democratic opponent of being an atheist and taking godless money, she ended up earning her opponent a ridiculous amount of netbucks once the story hit the blogs.
I speculated about this stuff in papers for my entrepreneurship class in college. I figured it'd be years before this sort of stuff started happening in the real world. It has been years but it is happening. It'll be more years until we see stuff like a fan-funded Firefly but it'll happen.
I was a huge fan of the way id released their games back in the day, first episode is long and free, the next two will cost you something. Now with Monty Python, the last show went in the can years ago and they're not likely to produce anything new. But for newer shows, I think the PBS model would work. Give the content away for free but let the fans who really like it become direct patrons to support the arts. Let's face it, stamping out piracy is pretty much impossible and not every pirated copy is really a lost sale to begin with. Better to support the culture of patronage and count on the real fans to help you turn a profit.
One thing the networks are struggling to contend with right now is gaining an accurate measure of just how popular a show is. We know about Faux's surprise when Family Guy was canceled for poor ratings and the DVD set went on to become the #2 selling show ever. This sort of performance gap is continuing with geriatric-targeting CBS having great Nielsens while shows skewing towards younger demographics seem to be under-performing but this does not reflect the interest on p2p sites. ITunes only depicts a portion of the overall success online. And DVD sales aren't figured until long after the current season is over.
I'll be happy when the middle-men are completely done away with and first-run shows are produced with no need for networks. We're already seeing quirky comedies doing well on Youtube but those are extremely low-budget. It'll take some bucks to put together something like Firefly on a fan-funded basis.
Ok, I feel like I'm arguing over "trekker" vs. "trekkie" here but nerd and geek both started out as pejoratives indicating the socially awkward who stood outside of the norm. Geek has softened over time to indicate someone who may stick out of the norm but whose intelligence and skills help compensate for perceived social shortcomings. Nerd still has a negative connotation.
My every move filmed for scrutiny, any fuckup to be beamed around the world before I even realized what happened.
Do you realize how much hazing's going to come along with this incident? I hope she can take it in good humor.
Even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Who did he steal it from?
We don't even know if humans have souls so what's the point of speculating over machines?