Public transport is great, if the route and schedule happens to fit your needs. But for most people, it provides transportation from a place you are not, to a place you don't want to go, at a time that does not suit you, making unnecessary stops along the way, and charging too high a price.
The subway is pretty good because it runs so frequently. But for any other modes of public transport, it's the connections that kill its usefulness. Nothing like taking the tram, the train, and two subway lines to find that your bus just left, and the next one isn't due for an hour (which is what the route to my first job was like). Even here in the Netherlands, with a dense and heavily subsidised public transport network, and a stagnant neglected and busy road network, the car still often wins in terms of speed and convenience.
You mean, with open source systems people can have the zero day exploits for free? Yay...
But jokes aside, you can bet that once housewives and average Joes start running Linux, it will be worthwhile to develop such exploits, and you will start seeing them.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
If you are referring to the News, I actually find the commercial channels to be much more objective. They are a bit less informative and sometimes a bit sensationalist, but the news they present is virtually bias-free. The state-sponsored news service is very biased, particularly in deciding what stories to hide an dwhat stories to run. This was rather apparent in the months before the recent elections. Stories that could hurt certain parties were studiously ignored, and other news items where overdone. Some "scoops" were months or even years old; they just sat on them until an opportune moment, then they were presented as news when it could do the most damage to certain other parties.
But don't take my word for it. Ask the editor-in-chief of the state-run NOS news service, who admitted freely that most of his people were biased toward a certain side of the political spectrum, and that it affected the news as well. He didn't think it much of an issue.
I am referring not to a classification of media, but to a classification of application, which already exists. Royalties are different for consumer CDs, radio plays, music played in bars, cover versions for karaoke or elevator muzac, etc. This is the same song being used in different ways, under different royalty schemes. Why not an additional schedule for ringtones, which are arguably a whole new application of recorded music?
Of course the question is what the RIAA is really after. Do they want different royalties for all digital media? And what does "lower royalties" mean? Is it the $ amount or the ratio of royalties against revenues for the producer? If anything, lower distribution costs should mean the percentage of the proceeds given to the artists should go up, not down. But this article is too vague to start bashing the RIAA over the head with, much as I'd like to.
Technology has made it easier for the distribution of media. Its them who should be getting lesser 'royalties' for each copy sold, not the artists.
I don't know... I despise the RIAA as much as the next guy, but doesn't it make sense to pay less royalties for a song used as a ringtone, compared to what you'd pay for the full quality version meant to be listened to? On the other hand... the last thing we need is ringtones becoming cheaper.
I couldn't really tell from the article what the RIAA intends exactly. Maybe the article was deliberately vague; it being rather biased.
Thanks for the Kiva link, very interesting. I think that that's where my charity euros will be going next.
As for getting financial aid from IT firms, I'd think that is very difficult. Firms will probably be either to small to deal much with charity, or too large to want to deal with small projects looking for $1000 in funding. But they might be sympathetic to employee initiatives.
The firm I work for allows employees to donate work time to certain charitable projects or they will help with charity drives. For example, one person got permission to auction off a closed project's equipment that was still in good nick, and give the proceeds to a good cause. In another example, the company matched employee donations to a charity drive dollar for dollar. Perhaps the OP can get help from family or friends working for tech firms (or any firm, really) to raise money for his project. If you just need a couple 1000, things like these might be the ticket. And another bonus, this way you'll get your friends personally involved in your charity. Much better than just giving to some anonymous huge charity firm.
... and for one simple reason: the name. As one hip youngster pointed out to me, the name "HD-DVD" definitely lacks a cool factor. And it's such an ungainly mouthful: "Aich Dee Dee Vee Dee", yech. Nopes, "Blu-ray" rolls off the tongue much nicer.
Seriously, if there is no huge gap between the two systems in terms of available titles or choice of equipment, then Sony might just win on simething as silly as the name alone.
Your example just goes to show that normal people do see email as reliable enough for important missives. And they are right; it gets to where it should be most of the time. Just like regular mail, by the way. They normally are both good enough for all but the most important messages.
A lot of mail is misdelivered or just lost. Yet the tax people do not demand that we send in our tax returns by registered mail. And would you be as pissed at the miniseries people if they'd sent you a letter by regular mail and the letter subsequently got lost?
A big part of this "new" idea is replacing intersections with roundabouts. Hardly a new idea; they've been doing this for years all over the Netherlands, with a positive effect on traffic accidents. As of relying on politeness... That might work in lovely small Drachten, where there is lots of community spirit and the community is predominantly (and outspokenly) christian. However here in the city of Rotterdam, we kill people for giving us a funny look. I don't think having traffic safety depend on politeness is a very good idea. If they fully implement this concept in my city, I'll be getting myself an SUV.
Besides, in really busy areas, you'll need traffic lights to regulate flow. In one street I drive through every day, they've put traffic lights on two previousluy unregulated intersections. The result is a markedly better flow of traffic.
This story doesn't really read like one of a poor inventor who had his brainchild taken away by an evil megacorp, without any compensation. Maybe I am doing the man an injustice, but it sounds more like someone who had a good idea, noticed some rich corporation had the same idea and was making millions, and got greedy. I'd say he was entitled to a token license fee for making it to the patent office first.
As TFA says, Sony didn't "invent" the Walkman with new tech; they built it based on an existing design for a portable tape player, using cheap parts to bring down the cost to consumer market levels. They [i]did[/i] develop the lightweight headphones to go with it, a feature that arguably has been rather important in making the device so popular.
I just couldn't be sure if they even knew that "you" is not spelled "u"
I've seen the same from Indian, Malaysian and Chinese IT professionals, and given the level of their English, they must have known that "you" is spelled "y-o-u-".
Some of the Indians I work with get training in dealing with western cultures, i.e. western management style, conflict resolution with Westerners, and English colloquialisms. My guess is that the quality of such trainings vary... some people, always from the same one or two companies, put the oddest colloqualisms in their emails. They are technically correct, but they just look out of place in business communication. Writing "u" instead of "you" is just one of those things.
It sounds to me you first need to get a few simple processes in place: building, reviewing, testing, releasing. This is no rocket science; you can probably come up with a simple, workable process yourself with a few hours effort. The real challenge is getting the rest of the team to follow your rules. You are probably not in a position to force the others to work to procedures, so talk to the other devs and the team leader, put a few ideas on paper, and convince the team leader or PM to implement those ideas together with the team.
I would not go with anything like XP or any other far-reaching methodology. No better way to make your programmers hate you and their jobs is to force them to do things completely different. Instead, once you got the basics right, get a few guys interested in XP (or whatever), ask them to do a pilot, and get them to share their experiences. Once you've shown that it works and you have a few others championing the methodology, convincing the rest will be a lot easier.
How you move the controller also has no bearing on the kind of strike you make. By default, Link sweeps horizontally; for a vertical slice, you must first lock on to a target. And a swing executed while pressing forward on the analog stick results in a stabbing thrust."
That is just really, really disappointing. Actual swordplay would have been fun, and at last it is possible with this kind of controller. Instead we end up with the same boring dice roll kind of fighting, which is probably easier with a regular controller.
Yea, I hate to preempt any of the people who have come up with things like this, but I hope no one tries to patent any of these ideas. It's sort of a process that's implicitly defined by the existence multiresolution image decomposition.
Yeah, well, the purchasing process implicitly defined by the existence of an item for sale, a website entry of that item and a mouse button, didn't stop a certain company to patent a certain process utilising a certain number of mouse click(s).
Have you looked at LCD TVs or computer monitors lately? The only reason I can think of to choose a CRT monitor is outstanding color accuracy (Which I don't need...), or high resolution (personally I much prefer to have 2 lower-res monitors side by side). As for price... TVs are fast coming down in price and computer monitors are already dirt cheap. I paid only slightly more for my new LCD TV (a Sharp) than I did for my last CRT TV, both 28" widescreen ones. Picture sharpness and color quality are similar, and the form factor of the LCD one is obviously superior. There's also less glare.
Also, while the pickings for CRT computer monitors are becoming rather slim, there is still plenty of choice in CRT widescreen TVs, with new models being introduced all the time. Probably due to the somewhat higher price of LCD TVs, CRT ones are still a popular choice.
As fasr as I am concerned, CRT is ready to go the way of the Dodo.
It took 5 days for comment spammers to find an open site and start abusing it, and once they find something that has worked once they just dont stop. And that's even before you consider the malicious idiots who aren't exactly spammers but just twist and distort and abuse other posters - how do you deal with them exactly?
I propose door-to-door moderation of these characters...
I've worked for a bit in an environment like this, and it does seem to work quite well. But you'll probably want to add a few smallish closed rooms as well, that can be used for meetings or for when just a few people in the "pit" want to have a chat about the weather without disturbng the others. Add a fixed line phone to the room that is comfortable to use and has speakerphone capability, so people can go there for private phone conversations or when they have to use the speakerphone. (Personally, I think that planning a conference call on speakerphone in an open-plan office should be a capital offence).
There is nothing in WoW that even closely relates to Cheers. It is more like a microcosm of real life, right down to the fact that you have materialism is the dominating force in keeping people's noses to the grindstone.
There are other MMORPGs than just WoW.
I played Ultima Online for a good while (hence my nick). I'd say that UO itself isn't a 3rd place, but it has lots of 3rd places in it. Some in the form of a virtual version of a real 3rd place such as a bar; in other cases it might be a guildhouse where you'd drop in, meet some friends and then set off on an outing together.
The "neutral ground" aspect definitely holds; there were plenty of MMORPG players just hanging out or poking around a bit, even in WoW. A lot depends on where in the game world you go... just as in real life. If you go to a gym and just park your beer belly at the juice bar and order snacks and booze, expect to be called some real life equivalent of "noob". Conversation may not be the main activity in WoW, but in some areas in UO (And various other games) it most definitely was.
The leveler argument is totally incorrect: imagine if someone mentioned they were gay on public chat in WoW. I doubt they would be warmly received.
Same holds true for a real life bar. The "leveler" aspect does not mean a total absence of status and mores; it means that those in the 3rd place are (mostly) separate from those the outside world. The point is that a priori acceptance in the 3rd place does not depend on the status in the outside world. Gays, rich folk, religious nuts, they are all equally welcome in most bars... but the regulars might turn a cold shoulder if you openly come out of the closet, brag about your wealth all the time, or start to proselytise.
If you watch the video of the university guys explaining the hack, you'll see a good closeup of the lock. The lock looks like a real cheapy one; something you'd find on one of those floppy disk / CD storage boxes, or the kind they put on suitcases. I betya the keys for those boxes/suitcase will open this lock as well, with a little jiggling. Hell, these locks can be opened with 2 paper clips.
Thus, for his new company, Wideload, Seropian chose to use a small core group, one that would be employed the entire time. Once they design a game on paper, they'll prototype the game, and do pre-production work on it. Then, when they have the funding to put it into production, Wideload will staff up with independent contractors (some work on-site, but most remotely). For the last third of the project, the original core will do all the post-production where they play test and tune the game.
So basically they outsource rather than employ developers. I can well imagine that when they have a few projects in the pipeline (which is what Seropian is after), they'll get together and say: "gee, we got so much going that we could hire two artists, a sound guy and 3 coders, and keep them busy full time. Be a hell of a lot cheaper...". A few years down the line, after having a few bad experiences with some offsite contractors, and being frustrated by increased and more difficult management effort, they'll probably run most of their stuff in house again.
I've seen it happen a few times in business software shops, and I'm not sure why games would be any different.
Some advice Bruce Schneider once gave: there is nothing so terribly wrong with writing your password down on a piece of paper and putting it into your wallet. Your wallet is a security mechanism that you already use, and you are very practiced at keeping it secure.
Paper left in a wallet tends to become crumbly and perhaps ultimately unreadable. That's why people tend to keep such bits of paper in their desk drawer rather than their wallet. Or (especially if they have to remember multiple passwords) in a Word document protected by a silly password. Of course, passwords for "functional" accounts that are shared between users are recorded in a different favorite place: the office whiteboard.
To improve security and make the users happy at the same time, this is what we are currently doing:
1) Enforce "good" passwords but do not let them expire (do lock it out upon 3 incorrect passwords). Instead, notifying the user of his last login time and last workstation used.
2) Look for Single Sign-on solutions. Some applications can leave user authentication up to the OS: being logged in to Windows NT (for instance) is good enough for the application to trust that you are you. If you are writing an application that requires controlled access, consider implementing SSO.
3) If you cannot get around the fact that users will have to deal with multiple password, consider a Password Vaulting solution. Basically this is nothing more than a bit of client-side code that remembers passwords as they are entered once, and then enters them automatically the next time you come across the same login window. Sounds crummy, but there are a few secure enterprise-level password vault applications that store passwords centrally and encrypted.
4) Use sudo or kerberos or similar for functional accounts.
I know they did that to fix the "Windows takes to long to boot" problem by loading "unnecessary" things after the interface is displayed.
Actually I think XP's slow boot is due to the fact that all those things try to load simultaneously, with some serious hard disk thrashing. If loading 30 apps one after another takes 3 seconds, loading them all at once might easily take 30 seconds or more.
To me this is scarier than any MS monolopy. With MS I have alternatives. I have no other choice for highspeed other than RoadRunner.
That's the whole point. The Telcos claim that the government has no business telling them how to price their products, but if such a company has a monopoly in a certain area, and if said company is abusing that monopoly, then regulating, overseeing and intervening is exactly what the government should be doing. Especially if the company has their monopoly partly because of government help, as is often the case with telcos.
If people actually had a choice in providers, there would be no way they could get away with this. Google, Amazon and eBay would refuse to pay, and consumers would not put up with the reduced service, and switch.
Slashdot Mirror
Public transport is great, if the route and schedule happens to fit your needs. But for most people, it provides transportation from a place you are not, to a place you don't want to go, at a time that does not suit you, making unnecessary stops along the way, and charging too high a price.
The subway is pretty good because it runs so frequently. But for any other modes of public transport, it's the connections that kill its usefulness. Nothing like taking the tram, the train, and two subway lines to find that your bus just left, and the next one isn't due for an hour (which is what the route to my first job was like). Even here in the Netherlands, with a dense and heavily subsidised public transport network, and a stagnant neglected and busy road network, the car still often wins in terms of speed and convenience.
But I have an even better one. How about I give you the finger...
... and you give me my phone call.
Oh wait.
You mean, with open source systems people can have the zero day exploits for free? Yay...
But jokes aside, you can bet that once housewives and average Joes start running Linux, it will be worthwhile to develop such exploits, and you will start seeing them.
But don't take my word for it. Ask the editor-in-chief of the state-run NOS news service, who admitted freely that most of his people were biased toward a certain side of the political spectrum, and that it affected the news as well. He didn't think it much of an issue.
I am referring not to a classification of media, but to a classification of application, which already exists. Royalties are different for consumer CDs, radio plays, music played in bars, cover versions for karaoke or elevator muzac, etc. This is the same song being used in different ways, under different royalty schemes. Why not an additional schedule for ringtones, which are arguably a whole new application of recorded music?
Of course the question is what the RIAA is really after. Do they want different royalties for all digital media? And what does "lower royalties" mean? Is it the $ amount or the ratio of royalties against revenues for the producer? If anything, lower distribution costs should mean the percentage of the proceeds given to the artists should go up, not down. But this article is too vague to start bashing the RIAA over the head with, much as I'd like to.
I couldn't really tell from the article what the RIAA intends exactly. Maybe the article was deliberately vague; it being rather biased.
Thanks for the Kiva link, very interesting. I think that that's where my charity euros will be going next.
As for getting financial aid from IT firms, I'd think that is very difficult. Firms will probably be either to small to deal much with charity, or too large to want to deal with small projects looking for $1000 in funding. But they might be sympathetic to employee initiatives.
The firm I work for allows employees to donate work time to certain charitable projects or they will help with charity drives. For example, one person got permission to auction off a closed project's equipment that was still in good nick, and give the proceeds to a good cause. In another example, the company matched employee donations to a charity drive dollar for dollar. Perhaps the OP can get help from family or friends working for tech firms (or any firm, really) to raise money for his project. If you just need a couple 1000, things like these might be the ticket. And another bonus, this way you'll get your friends personally involved in your charity. Much better than just giving to some anonymous huge charity firm.
... and for one simple reason: the name. As one hip youngster pointed out to me, the name "HD-DVD" definitely lacks a cool factor. And it's such an ungainly mouthful: "Aich Dee Dee Vee Dee", yech. Nopes, "Blu-ray" rolls off the tongue much nicer.
Seriously, if there is no huge gap between the two systems in terms of available titles or choice of equipment, then Sony might just win on simething as silly as the name alone.
Your example just goes to show that normal people do see email as reliable enough for important missives. And they are right; it gets to where it should be most of the time. Just like regular mail, by the way. They normally are both good enough for all but the most important messages.
A lot of mail is misdelivered or just lost. Yet the tax people do not demand that we send in our tax returns by registered mail. And would you be as pissed at the miniseries people if they'd sent you a letter by regular mail and the letter subsequently got lost?
Try modding these messages down next time, and you might get less of them...
A big part of this "new" idea is replacing intersections with roundabouts. Hardly a new idea; they've been doing this for years all over the Netherlands, with a positive effect on traffic accidents. As of relying on politeness... That might work in lovely small Drachten, where there is lots of community spirit and the community is predominantly (and outspokenly) christian. However here in the city of Rotterdam, we kill people for giving us a funny look. I don't think having traffic safety depend on politeness is a very good idea. If they fully implement this concept in my city, I'll be getting myself an SUV.
Besides, in really busy areas, you'll need traffic lights to regulate flow. In one street I drive through every day, they've put traffic lights on two previousluy unregulated intersections. The result is a markedly better flow of traffic.
This story doesn't really read like one of a poor inventor who had his brainchild taken away by an evil megacorp, without any compensation. Maybe I am doing the man an injustice, but it sounds more like someone who had a good idea, noticed some rich corporation had the same idea and was making millions, and got greedy. I'd say he was entitled to a token license fee for making it to the patent office first.
As TFA says, Sony didn't "invent" the Walkman with new tech; they built it based on an existing design for a portable tape player, using cheap parts to bring down the cost to consumer market levels. They [i]did[/i] develop the lightweight headphones to go with it, a feature that arguably has been rather important in making the device so popular.
Some of the Indians I work with get training in dealing with western cultures, i.e. western management style, conflict resolution with Westerners, and English colloquialisms. My guess is that the quality of such trainings vary... some people, always from the same one or two companies, put the oddest colloqualisms in their emails. They are technically correct, but they just look out of place in business communication. Writing "u" instead of "you" is just one of those things.
It sounds to me you first need to get a few simple processes in place: building, reviewing, testing, releasing. This is no rocket science; you can probably come up with a simple, workable process yourself with a few hours effort. The real challenge is getting the rest of the team to follow your rules. You are probably not in a position to force the others to work to procedures, so talk to the other devs and the team leader, put a few ideas on paper, and convince the team leader or PM to implement those ideas together with the team.
I would not go with anything like XP or any other far-reaching methodology. No better way to make your programmers hate you and their jobs is to force them to do things completely different. Instead, once you got the basics right, get a few guys interested in XP (or whatever), ask them to do a pilot, and get them to share their experiences. Once you've shown that it works and you have a few others championing the methodology, convincing the rest will be a lot easier.
Too bad, they missed a good chance to innovate.
Have you looked at LCD TVs or computer monitors lately? The only reason I can think of to choose a CRT monitor is outstanding color accuracy (Which I don't need...), or high resolution (personally I much prefer to have 2 lower-res monitors side by side). As for price... TVs are fast coming down in price and computer monitors are already dirt cheap. I paid only slightly more for my new LCD TV (a Sharp) than I did for my last CRT TV, both 28" widescreen ones. Picture sharpness and color quality are similar, and the form factor of the LCD one is obviously superior. There's also less glare.
Also, while the pickings for CRT computer monitors are becoming rather slim, there is still plenty of choice in CRT widescreen TVs, with new models being introduced all the time. Probably due to the somewhat higher price of LCD TVs, CRT ones are still a popular choice.
As fasr as I am concerned, CRT is ready to go the way of the Dodo.
I've worked for a bit in an environment like this, and it does seem to work quite well. But you'll probably want to add a few smallish closed rooms as well, that can be used for meetings or for when just a few people in the "pit" want to have a chat about the weather without disturbng the others. Add a fixed line phone to the room that is comfortable to use and has speakerphone capability, so people can go there for private phone conversations or when they have to use the speakerphone. (Personally, I think that planning a conference call on speakerphone in an open-plan office should be a capital offence).
I played Ultima Online for a good while (hence my nick). I'd say that UO itself isn't a 3rd place, but it has lots of 3rd places in it. Some in the form of a virtual version of a real 3rd place such as a bar; in other cases it might be a guildhouse where you'd drop in, meet some friends and then set off on an outing together.
The "neutral ground" aspect definitely holds; there were plenty of MMORPG players just hanging out or poking around a bit, even in WoW. A lot depends on where in the game world you go... just as in real life. If you go to a gym and just park your beer belly at the juice bar and order snacks and booze, expect to be called some real life equivalent of "noob". Conversation may not be the main activity in WoW, but in some areas in UO (And various other games) it most definitely was.
Same holds true for a real life bar. The "leveler" aspect does not mean a total absence of status and mores; it means that those in the 3rd place are (mostly) separate from those the outside world. The point is that a priori acceptance in the 3rd place does not depend on the status in the outside world. Gays, rich folk, religious nuts, they are all equally welcome in most bars... but the regulars might turn a cold shoulder if you openly come out of the closet, brag about your wealth all the time, or start to proselytise.
If you watch the video of the university guys explaining the hack, you'll see a good closeup of the lock. The lock looks like a real cheapy one; something you'd find on one of those floppy disk / CD storage boxes, or the kind they put on suitcases. I betya the keys for those boxes/suitcase will open this lock as well, with a little jiggling. Hell, these locks can be opened with 2 paper clips.
I've seen it happen a few times in business software shops, and I'm not sure why games would be any different.
To improve security and make the users happy at the same time, this is what we are currently doing:
1) Enforce "good" passwords but do not let them expire (do lock it out upon 3 incorrect passwords). Instead, notifying the user of his last login time and last workstation used.
2) Look for Single Sign-on solutions. Some applications can leave user authentication up to the OS: being logged in to Windows NT (for instance) is good enough for the application to trust that you are you. If you are writing an application that requires controlled access, consider implementing SSO.
3) If you cannot get around the fact that users will have to deal with multiple password, consider a Password Vaulting solution. Basically this is nothing more than a bit of client-side code that remembers passwords as they are entered once, and then enters them automatically the next time you come across the same login window. Sounds crummy, but there are a few secure enterprise-level password vault applications that store passwords centrally and encrypted.
4) Use sudo or kerberos or similar for functional accounts.
If people actually had a choice in providers, there would be no way they could get away with this. Google, Amazon and eBay would refuse to pay, and consumers would not put up with the reduced service, and switch.