Additionally if you don't get a response there... contact your State Attorney General. Mail a physical letter to him/her stating your problem. You'll get some quick results. If you work at a prominent company in your state or belong to any other organization that would push you to the top of the pile, get some letterhead to put it on. If you don't work somewhere, go 'borrow' some letterhead from a bank or law firm. If you have an attorney already for any reason.. have them write the letter on your behalf... even quicker results (unless your attorney has somehow wronged the AG;-p)
I happen to be one of the few people in the world who can not have my vision corrected with some sort of surgery. I have terrible astigmatism and kerataconus (coning of cornea) in one eye. Even with contacts I can only get 20/35 in the 'good' eye and 20/30 in the 'bad' eye (with a $400 space age hybrid lens;-p ). I can't even wear glasses as the distortion is too strong around the periphery and causes me nausea...
So yeah... it's not a huge constraint on the general populace and a pretty good indication that there is some Fscked up stuff going on with someone's vision if they can't get it corrected to 20/20.
That being said, there is a new stem cell therapy coming out for those with kerataconus that can correct it in lab rats and should be going to human trials soon.... I'm still not yet 30 so maybe if I get a degree in engineering and modern technology/medicine catches up with me... I could still be an astronaut... or I could just pay a couple million and go up anyways;-p maybe a couple hundred thousand in a few decades?
Or alternately as smart as the neurons in the human brain. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see this technique applied to nanobots to create an artificial brain as good as a real brain at storing, retrieving and making decisions based on some very simple rules and typical sensory input.
For low needs users I think you're correct. I'm considering buying an iPhone for my wife as her primary digital device (it's not a PC so I won't call it one). It will provide her with 99% of what she needs to be able to do. She can email, browse the web, maintain contacts and calendar, write documents either via email or an online tool, store photos, play music, watch videos and of course with web access she can do all the things out there that are provided by the web.
The cost is going to continue to come down for these devices and I'm betting that Apple will continue to provide the best experience available. They'll add in fun little games, more of the iLife suite when it makes sense and generally turn it into a 1st rate mobile applications platform. She doesn't need a home PC, she doesn't want to carry around a laptop and she doesn't care if it can't do a thousand other things....
SO for the price of a low-end PC you get all the things a typical user wants to do with a low-end PC AND it fits in your pocket and doubles as a phone.
Have you tried any of Apple's software (besides iTunes)... as in Logic, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Keynote?
Add in Spotlight which is THE best desktop search available, as in it can index and find results in every document and database on your system. This includes emails, contacts, calendar items, web bookmarks, ftp bookmarks, word docs, pdfs, video meta data, music meta data, any number of SQLLite based apps, Quickbooks, etc and categorize based on that criteria + 20 more keywords/timestamps/device locations/regular expression/language/character encoding/etc
Now save that search as a smart folder and rather than saving your file some place special, just attach a keyword to it by using the Get Info dialogue (client name, project name, etc.) and stick it in your documents drop box.
Admit it, you've never tried a Mac so you don't know what you're talking about.
Mac's have hundreds more utilities like Spotlight that beat Windows and Linux on every criteria.... oh and you can access nearly all applications via a CLI prompt, which also means you can script them using bash or your favorite scripting language (PERL, Applescript, Ruby, Python, PHP) and create aliases to those scripts for quick access, heck with XCode you could even create a quick 'n dirty GUI for all of them in under an hour or make a Widget for them in about the same time and share it with the rest of us.
Sounds like he just needs to find new friends.... the ones he has can't seem to bother to stop by and let him know what's going on, they obviously don't value his company enough to go beyond whatever is most convenient... some friends those are.
High School Musical TV show (surely based on some Shakespeare somewhere and certainly drawing upon people initially trained on HS Drama curriculum) probably put several hundred million dollars into the economy just last month.
Additionally the economic input of all the actors/actresses who would not have become celebrities if not for HS Drama... now you're talking Billions.... all thanks to A Mid-Summer's Night Dream and Othello (nobody does Romeo & Juliet in HS anymore, that's a Junior HS play).
So allay your suspicions and embrace the fact that Shakespeare is responsible for at least 5% of the US GDP alone;-p Add in Mozart on the music side of things and we're looking at 15 - 20 percent of the entertainment industry revenue (as a result of classical training in their field).
Re:Still dunno why all the fuss about blogs...
on
Republic.com 2.0
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· Score: 1
He obviously wants to monetize it now, not at some undeterminable time in the future when Google Adsense decides to pay him for the traffic generated (or whatever form of statistics based ROI he may be able to use). Physical goods (even licensed ones) are still better at generating income than virtual product (clicks/views/hits/unique visitors)
You may be right but consider that in an award like this it would be more about the premise, storyline and what the game as a work of creative fiction has contributed to the genre, rather than about it's gameplay. Many of the winning books and short stories are not exactly reader friendly to the masses (though it's a plus if they are) and are awarded based on these merits... otherwise you'd be seeing the latest Harry Potter in there every year as a nominee.
Essentially there are a lot more formats available for Sci-Fi/Fantasy creative works than there used to be. Let's give those people awards for their contributions.
Anyone for a game of Tetris? I'm betting it's Stonebraker's favorite as the goal of each stage is to rack up points by using columns to build and destroy rows....hehehehe
For a big project that has time budgeted for this sort of thing, you could adapt any number of spell checking text editors which accept custom dictionaries that can have words added on the fly. The only requirement would be that it could read a plain text file without needing to convert it to some other format first. On OS X I use BBEdit for this type of thing.
In general the idea is to create a custom dictionary with your known set of function names, variables, etc. and have your QC team add new ones as they are doing the check each day. It would probably help to start with a library pre-populated with words of your chosen programming language of course.
Just to be contrary, only fundamentalists say that the Bible is the Word of God as He intended it.
All the rest of the Christians know that it is a compilation of translations of verbal recitations of the Word of God as heard by man. Especially the Old Testament. It's a thousand years older than the New Testament... and has multiple versions of the same stories right there in the text.
I think you need to try doing that with about 10 Hi-Def film cameras at different angles while moving them on a track and pivoting them to follow the action of a car race scene. Then triple that up to include 2 extra cameras per shot focused on the middle and far backgrounds (still with depth of field) so you can later re-composite them and get the effect of having old-school animation cells layered on top of one another - that might be close.
It doesn't sound like he claims to know more... he just claims to know more *important* things, as related to his job. This is often the case for people who don't go to school and aren't forced to learn the Curriculum... they learn what they need to learn on-the-job and this knowledge is vastly more important than 99% of the knowledge given to college/university students, excepting those who go into research or bleeding-edge development in their field.
I happen to understand this guy because I'm just like him, except in a different field. I like to call myself a Master Craftsman.... it's old school, I learned the best information from a variety of mentors, they didn't have to be the best they just had to have one thing they did well... which I learned and added to my list of skills, then I moved on to another and learned their skills and so on. Now I'm an interactive director with a team of people at my disposal, all of whom I get to cherry pick for skills;-p then there's always upper management to be looked at...
Too many college/university grads think that they've learned all they need when they leave school, when really they've just been given a dictionary for their field from 10 years ago and have done a few experiments to prove they can use it. They know the lingo and they know roughly what the general idea is... but put them in a real world scenario and they just don't know how to start working the solution. Add to this that few learn organizational skills in school and have no knowledge of the industry they are really working in (hint: it's not CS or EE or any of those degrees, it's Automotive, Bio-Tech, Business Solutions, Hotel Management, Health Care or some other industry that just uses software as a tool to do the real work that makes them money).
SO for me, a college degree doesn't mean anything. It's just one example of your work history... you could have received the same experience in any number of institutions; corporate, entrepreneurial, military, academic... I don't really care which as long as you learned what I need you to be able to do, at 80% efficiency.
Hey buddy... you always have a choice. You want to build your own hardware? Go for it. You want to build your own operating system? Go for it. You want to listen to music in FLAC? Go for it. It's not Apple's responsibility to provide you with any of those things. Nor is it any corporations responsibility to provide you with what you WANT.
Apple doesn't try to deceive you into thinking that you can buy OS X and run it on non-Apple hardware. They put the specs right there on the box. Same thing with the iPod. You know what formats it supports.
What's next? You buy a toaster and a copy of OS X and then complain that your brand new toaster won't run the operating system?
How about if you buy Mac and a couple of PS3 games? Will you complain that you can't run the games on your Mac?
As a person who uses Apple products... I'd gladly purchase a non-Apple product if I could find one which was worth my money. I've tried buying other brands, non-brands, etc. and always end up with buyer's remorse... Apple just makes good products.
Regarding TFA... AT&T is free to do what they want with their products, though I don't understand why they'd choose this option. iPhone is a consumer product, Blackberry is a Business User product. They are targeted at two separate and distinct markets. Who cares if they have different features, it's expected.
With a watermarked signature or a portion of it or if the file has something which looks to be watermarked at some point in the past... it can be identified as such. This means that an ISP, Google/YouTube, and P2P applications can be held accountable for NOT filtering these files out of the network.
With DRM they would only be able to do so if they also knew the encryption key, which would put it in the hands of too many and defeat it's purpose.
With a watermark signature they (RIAA/artists/whoever) can publish their watermark which means that those who can filter it will have to or be held liable when files are found on their networks. This avoids placing blame on individuals for uploading to the network but protects the interests of the copyright holders as well.
Additionally ripping programs could be required to put in their own watermark including the serial number associated with the purchaser. These means that ALL publisher's (including individuals) using commercial encoding software would fingerprint their output files. This could also be a requirement for using various encoding algorithms as part of the license agreement.
Once this happens all files traded online will require a watermark whether from an individual or from a corporation, otherwise they will be filtered out as Spam/Virus/Contraband.
You can trade anonymous files anonymously, but not on a public network using the combined resources of public and private utilities. If you want to do so you'll need to do it on a private network or offline.
Well that's my prediction anyways. Let's see how it plays out.
It's not just extortion/racketeering... they are 'banning together' so it's really Conspiracy as well... and they should put under serious investigation for this. Maybe that will scare them into behaving themselves.
yeah but if his boss is a guy and about 5-6 years older, it will work like a charm! I know, I'm that boss... and if one of my guys came back with that response I'd definitely forget all about my tantrum and start rapping about cartoons from the 80s, Thundercats would be next;-p
I don't want to be a ludite, but on 9 sites times out of 10 that require those technologies, there is very little benefit for the user. But see the parent is being a ludite.
I and many like me won't even stay on a website that lacks those technologies... it's a sign that the company doesn't care about it's users... ie: they're being cheap and won't invest the time to make their site easy to use. If i wanted to input data manually I'd just write it down and mail it... it's much faster for most people than having to learn how to use some ancient (in internet time) interface that needs me to think through the whole process (do I check this first, how many can I check, radio button what, I have to enter it in which format).
Forms and other tools should be smart... they should anticipate what I'm attempting to do based on my previous selections and narrow my options until I'm finished... not present me with every option and then wait until I've submitted to tell me that I made the 'wrong' choice or put in data in the 'wrong' format.
If it requires javascript to make forms smart then that's what it takes.
Really it is the browser makers and html specs that are to blame of course. Javascript should be a testing ground for beta tools that should then be incorporated into a spec when they prove their usefulness.
There should be form validation built in to the browser. There should be a menu tag (I here it will come in html5 now) that doesn't need external javascript to work. There should be an input type='date' that automatically includes a date picker (which isn't a 'slick' interface, unless you go back to 2004... it's now a standard expected interface, typically only amateur websites don't include one).
Yes... lets' disable PHP, JSP, Ruby, Python, ASP and all those other evil scripting languages. OH you meant Browser Scripting languages?
OK then, let's disable multi-level menus, client side form validation, any sort of calculator, date pickers, multi-dimensional form inputs (where one choice branches the rest of the form), tree-menus, AJAX (which does have it's uses), font-size controllers, style switchers and all the other UI elements that make web sites even remotely usable.
Let's just do away with Gmail and all other Google apps, Netvibes and all other personal portals, any instant feedback you might get on a social site, no more firehose for/. and any number of useful tools out there that need client side scripting to even be feasible.
The internet and communications in general are channels for interstate commerce and interstate communication... should be managed by a federal agency. It would be like a state banning cities from building roads that link up to the interstate highway system in favor of only allowing private companies to build toll roads to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally if you don't get a response there... contact your State Attorney General. Mail a physical letter to him/her stating your problem. You'll get some quick results. If you work at a prominent company in your state or belong to any other organization that would push you to the top of the pile, get some letterhead to put it on. If you don't work somewhere, go 'borrow' some letterhead from a bank or law firm. If you have an attorney already for any reason.. have them write the letter on your behalf... even quicker results (unless your attorney has somehow wronged the AG ;-p)
I happen to be one of the few people in the world who can not have my vision corrected with some sort of surgery. I have terrible astigmatism and kerataconus (coning of cornea) in one eye. Even with contacts I can only get 20/35 in the 'good' eye and 20/30 in the 'bad' eye (with a $400 space age hybrid lens ;-p ). I can't even wear glasses as the distortion is too strong around the periphery and causes me nausea...
;-p maybe a couple hundred thousand in a few decades?
So yeah... it's not a huge constraint on the general populace and a pretty good indication that there is some Fscked up stuff going on with someone's vision if they can't get it corrected to 20/20.
That being said, there is a new stem cell therapy coming out for those with kerataconus that can correct it in lab rats and should be going to human trials soon.... I'm still not yet 30 so maybe if I get a degree in engineering and modern technology/medicine catches up with me... I could still be an astronaut... or I could just pay a couple million and go up anyways
Or alternately as smart as the neurons in the human brain. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see this technique applied to nanobots to create an artificial brain as good as a real brain at storing, retrieving and making decisions based on some very simple rules and typical sensory input.
For low needs users I think you're correct. I'm considering buying an iPhone for my wife as her primary digital device (it's not a PC so I won't call it one). It will provide her with 99% of what she needs to be able to do. She can email, browse the web, maintain contacts and calendar, write documents either via email or an online tool, store photos, play music, watch videos and of course with web access she can do all the things out there that are provided by the web.
The cost is going to continue to come down for these devices and I'm betting that Apple will continue to provide the best experience available. They'll add in fun little games, more of the iLife suite when it makes sense and generally turn it into a 1st rate mobile applications platform. She doesn't need a home PC, she doesn't want to carry around a laptop and she doesn't care if it can't do a thousand other things....
SO for the price of a low-end PC you get all the things a typical user wants to do with a low-end PC AND it fits in your pocket and doubles as a phone.
Have you tried any of Apple's software (besides iTunes)... as in Logic, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Keynote?
Add in Spotlight which is THE best desktop search available, as in it can index and find results in every document and database on your system. This includes emails, contacts, calendar items, web bookmarks, ftp bookmarks, word docs, pdfs, video meta data, music meta data, any number of SQLLite based apps, Quickbooks, etc and categorize based on that criteria + 20 more keywords/timestamps/device locations/regular expression/language/character encoding/etc
Now save that search as a smart folder and rather than saving your file some place special, just attach a keyword to it by using the Get Info dialogue (client name, project name, etc.) and stick it in your documents drop box.
Admit it, you've never tried a Mac so you don't know what you're talking about.
Mac's have hundreds more utilities like Spotlight that beat Windows and Linux on every criteria.... oh and you can access nearly all applications via a CLI prompt, which also means you can script them using bash or your favorite scripting language (PERL, Applescript, Ruby, Python, PHP) and create aliases to those scripts for quick access, heck with XCode you could even create a quick 'n dirty GUI for all of them in under an hour or make a Widget for them in about the same time and share it with the rest of us.
Sounds like he just needs to find new friends.... the ones he has can't seem to bother to stop by and let him know what's going on, they obviously don't value his company enough to go beyond whatever is most convenient... some friends those are.
High School Musical TV show (surely based on some Shakespeare somewhere and certainly drawing upon people initially trained on HS Drama curriculum) probably put several hundred million dollars into the economy just last month.
;-p Add in Mozart on the music side of things and we're looking at 15 - 20 percent of the entertainment industry revenue (as a result of classical training in their field).
Additionally the economic input of all the actors/actresses who would not have become celebrities if not for HS Drama... now you're talking Billions.... all thanks to A Mid-Summer's Night Dream and Othello (nobody does Romeo & Juliet in HS anymore, that's a Junior HS play).
So allay your suspicions and embrace the fact that Shakespeare is responsible for at least 5% of the US GDP alone
He obviously wants to monetize it now, not at some undeterminable time in the future when Google Adsense decides to pay him for the traffic generated (or whatever form of statistics based ROI he may be able to use). Physical goods (even licensed ones) are still better at generating income than virtual product (clicks/views/hits/unique visitors)
You may be right but consider that in an award like this it would be more about the premise, storyline and what the game as a work of creative fiction has contributed to the genre, rather than about it's gameplay. Many of the winning books and short stories are not exactly reader friendly to the masses (though it's a plus if they are) and are awarded based on these merits... otherwise you'd be seeing the latest Harry Potter in there every year as a nominee.
Hey haven't you watched "The Ice Road"? THe arctic also has several big DeBeers diamond mines!
There should be:
Best Video Game - Console/PC
Best Video Game - Web
Best Machina - Short
Best Machina - Long
Best Interactive - Website
Best Interactive - Microsite
Essentially there are a lot more formats available for Sci-Fi/Fantasy creative works than there used to be. Let's give those people awards for their contributions.
Anyone for a game of Tetris? I'm betting it's Stonebraker's favorite as the goal of each stage is to rack up points by using columns to build and destroy rows....hehehehe
Meant to say: 1 in 300 ?
For a big project that has time budgeted for this sort of thing, you could adapt any number of spell checking text editors which accept custom dictionaries that can have words added on the fly. The only requirement would be that it could read a plain text file without needing to convert it to some other format first. On OS X I use BBEdit for this type of thing.
In general the idea is to create a custom dictionary with your known set of function names, variables, etc. and have your QC team add new ones as they are doing the check each day. It would probably help to start with a library pre-populated with words of your chosen programming language of course.
Just to be contrary, only fundamentalists say that the Bible is the Word of God as He intended it.
All the rest of the Christians know that it is a compilation of translations of verbal recitations of the Word of God as heard by man. Especially the Old Testament. It's a thousand years older than the New Testament... and has multiple versions of the same stories right there in the text.
I think you need to try doing that with about 10 Hi-Def film cameras at different angles while moving them on a track and pivoting them to follow the action of a car race scene. Then triple that up to include 2 extra cameras per shot focused on the middle and far backgrounds (still with depth of field) so you can later re-composite them and get the effect of having old-school animation cells layered on top of one another - that might be close.
It doesn't sound like he claims to know more... he just claims to know more *important* things, as related to his job. This is often the case for people who don't go to school and aren't forced to learn the Curriculum... they learn what they need to learn on-the-job and this knowledge is vastly more important than 99% of the knowledge given to college/university students, excepting those who go into research or bleeding-edge development in their field.
;-p then there's always upper management to be looked at...
I happen to understand this guy because I'm just like him, except in a different field. I like to call myself a Master Craftsman.... it's old school, I learned the best information from a variety of mentors, they didn't have to be the best they just had to have one thing they did well... which I learned and added to my list of skills, then I moved on to another and learned their skills and so on. Now I'm an interactive director with a team of people at my disposal, all of whom I get to cherry pick for skills
Too many college/university grads think that they've learned all they need when they leave school, when really they've just been given a dictionary for their field from 10 years ago and have done a few experiments to prove they can use it. They know the lingo and they know roughly what the general idea is... but put them in a real world scenario and they just don't know how to start working the solution. Add to this that few learn organizational skills in school and have no knowledge of the industry they are really working in (hint: it's not CS or EE or any of those degrees, it's Automotive, Bio-Tech, Business Solutions, Hotel Management, Health Care or some other industry that just uses software as a tool to do the real work that makes them money).
SO for me, a college degree doesn't mean anything. It's just one example of your work history... you could have received the same experience in any number of institutions; corporate, entrepreneurial, military, academic... I don't really care which as long as you learned what I need you to be able to do, at 80% efficiency.
Hey buddy... you always have a choice. You want to build your own hardware? Go for it. You want to build your own operating system? Go for it. You want to listen to music in FLAC? Go for it. It's not Apple's responsibility to provide you with any of those things. Nor is it any corporations responsibility to provide you with what you WANT.
Apple doesn't try to deceive you into thinking that you can buy OS X and run it on non-Apple hardware. They put the specs right there on the box. Same thing with the iPod. You know what formats it supports.
What's next? You buy a toaster and a copy of OS X and then complain that your brand new toaster won't run the operating system?
How about if you buy Mac and a couple of PS3 games? Will you complain that you can't run the games on your Mac?
As a person who uses Apple products... I'd gladly purchase a non-Apple product if I could find one which was worth my money. I've tried buying other brands, non-brands, etc. and always end up with buyer's remorse... Apple just makes good products.
Regarding TFA... AT&T is free to do what they want with their products, though I don't understand why they'd choose this option. iPhone is a consumer product, Blackberry is a Business User product. They are targeted at two separate and distinct markets. Who cares if they have different features, it's expected.
With a watermarked signature or a portion of it or if the file has something which looks to be watermarked at some point in the past... it can be identified as such. This means that an ISP, Google/YouTube, and P2P applications can be held accountable for NOT filtering these files out of the network.
With DRM they would only be able to do so if they also knew the encryption key, which would put it in the hands of too many and defeat it's purpose.
With a watermark signature they (RIAA/artists/whoever) can publish their watermark which means that those who can filter it will have to or be held liable when files are found on their networks. This avoids placing blame on individuals for uploading to the network but protects the interests of the copyright holders as well.
Additionally ripping programs could be required to put in their own watermark including the serial number associated with the purchaser. These means that ALL publisher's (including individuals) using commercial encoding software would fingerprint their output files. This could also be a requirement for using various encoding algorithms as part of the license agreement.
Once this happens all files traded online will require a watermark whether from an individual or from a corporation, otherwise they will be filtered out as Spam/Virus/Contraband.
You can trade anonymous files anonymously, but not on a public network using the combined resources of public and private utilities. If you want to do so you'll need to do it on a private network or offline.
Well that's my prediction anyways. Let's see how it plays out.
It's not just extortion/racketeering... they are 'banning together' so it's really Conspiracy as well... and they should put under serious investigation for this. Maybe that will scare them into behaving themselves.
yeah but if his boss is a guy and about 5-6 years older, it will work like a charm! I know, I'm that boss... and if one of my guys came back with that response I'd definitely forget all about my tantrum and start rapping about cartoons from the 80s, Thundercats would be next ;-p
I and many like me won't even stay on a website that lacks those technologies... it's a sign that the company doesn't care about it's users... ie: they're being cheap and won't invest the time to make their site easy to use. If i wanted to input data manually I'd just write it down and mail it... it's much faster for most people than having to learn how to use some ancient (in internet time) interface that needs me to think through the whole process (do I check this first, how many can I check, radio button what, I have to enter it in which format).
Forms and other tools should be smart... they should anticipate what I'm attempting to do based on my previous selections and narrow my options until I'm finished... not present me with every option and then wait until I've submitted to tell me that I made the 'wrong' choice or put in data in the 'wrong' format.
If it requires javascript to make forms smart then that's what it takes.
Really it is the browser makers and html specs that are to blame of course. Javascript should be a testing ground for beta tools that should then be incorporated into a spec when they prove their usefulness.
There should be form validation built in to the browser. There should be a menu tag (I here it will come in html5 now) that doesn't need external javascript to work. There should be an input type='date' that automatically includes a date picker (which isn't a 'slick' interface, unless you go back to 2004... it's now a standard expected interface, typically only amateur websites don't include one).
Yes... lets' disable PHP, JSP, Ruby, Python, ASP and all those other evil scripting languages. OH you meant Browser Scripting languages?
/. and any number of useful tools out there that need client side scripting to even be feasible.
OK then, let's disable multi-level menus, client side form validation, any sort of calculator, date pickers, multi-dimensional form inputs (where one choice branches the rest of the form), tree-menus, AJAX (which does have it's uses), font-size controllers, style switchers and all the other UI elements that make web sites even remotely usable.
Let's just do away with Gmail and all other Google apps, Netvibes and all other personal portals, any instant feedback you might get on a social site, no more firehose for
Down with scripting, long live dumb content.
The internet and communications in general are channels for interstate commerce and interstate communication... should be managed by a federal agency. It would be like a state banning cities from building roads that link up to the interstate highway system in favor of only allowing private companies to build toll roads to do the same.