Dead-tree newspapers are dying for one simple reason: All the news anyone could ever want is available for free on the internet. Just a Google search away. The whole idea that a newspaper can survive by catering to the "community" (either in real-life or online) is stupid. It's something to make the investors/owners feel better as their doom inevitably approaches.
I've thought about it a lot, and I don't think there is any workable "defense" against free news sites. The newspapers are all going to die, or at the very least, shrink radically. Even if they start really producing some great, exclusive content, it isn't going to help for long, and it isn't going to help them regain their fortunes.
The 2.4GHz (and higher) frequencies simply can't penetrate through walls and stuff well enough.
But wasn't one of the goals of moving to digital broadcast television to free up some of those nice low UHF and VHF frequences? Hell, even just getting down to 900MHz would be huge, and once you get down in to the regular VHF frequencies, you can push the signal through damn near anything.
I agree. And what exactly would they be "doing for humanity" that remotely-controller/pre-programmed machines couldn't do?
There isn't much on Mars. Maybe there is some stuff to mine, but you don't need people for that. I suppose it could be terraformed, too, but again, you don't need people for that. As a test of our ability to send people to other planets, it isn't that great, either. We KNOW how to keep them alive. It's not hard, it's just expensive and time-consuming.
There is no such thing as "guaranteed" bandwidth on the internet. ALL bandwidth is shared, somewhere.
Your ISP does NOT have 40 megabits of bandwidth for every user. Do you know how much you would be paying if they did? Your connection would be hundres of dollars a month, not $60 or less.
If you want to bitch about the price of bandwidth, bitch to the big telcos that own most of the fiber in the US, and charge exorbitant fees to use it.
"It sounds like a deal to me for $29, especially reclaiming 7G of hard drive space."
You really care about 7GB of hard drive space? That is literally 70 CENTS worth of hard drive space. With today's hard drive sizes and prices, you shouldn't even be worried about the size of any given piece of data until it's up into the hundreds of gigabytes range.
Look, when I was 12 (in 1984), I though the first 2 books were funny. The third wasn't. The fourth was terrible. I didn't bother with the rest.
And you know what? Not even the first 2 books are funny anymore. They haven't held up. At the time of their publication, they were fairly ground-breaking, but that style of humor just hasn't aged well at all (which tends to happen to all kinds of humor). It's juvenile and obvious, really. Nothing wrong with that, but it means the books have a shelf-life, and the HHGTTG books are about 20 years past their expiration date. They are cultural artifacts, not "classics".
Sleeping less doesn't increase your odds/ability to reproduce (at least, not significantly).
There is a mistaken idea about natural selection that it will always take any traits that are objectively "good". It doesn't. Only traits that can improve/reduce your ability to reproduce are affected. Any traits that don't affect the ability to reproduce tend to stick around forever, regardless of their perceived advantage/disadvantage.
The thing is, you won't ever get FILTHY RICH without the promotional muscle of the big labels. THAT is the carrot that the labels use to get artists to agree to ridiculous contracts. And almost all of them DO agree to those contracts.
Very few artists are going to be willing to give up the chance to be millionaires. The catch is, of course, that if you don't become a HUGE SUPERSTAR, you aren't going to be a millionaire, and in fact you'll probably end up far worse off than if you signed with a smaller label or simply did self-promotion.
It's greed all-around. Don't pretend that the so-called "artists" are blameless in all of this. They aren't being forced into anything.
You need an IDS/IPS system like a Fortigate or ASA that scans all incoming/outgoing packets for viruses/spyware/whatever, and blocks them before they get to the computer (as well as performing standard firewall duties like NAT and traffic filtering). You need Websense Express (or something similar) to block access to malicious websites (and inappropriate websites, which are often malicious anyway). You need to take away the Local Administrator rights from every user on the network, and use Group Policy to a) lock down Internet Explorer, and b) prevent them from installing any software and c)making any system changes.
This is all easy to do. Why aren't you doing it? For a small office, it wouldn't even be expensive.
Now that we have CPUs with literally more cores than we know what to do with, it makes sense to use those cores for graphics processing. I think that within a few years, we'll start seeing games that don't require a high-end graphics card- they'll just use a couple of the cores on your CPU. It makes sense, and is actually a good thing. Fewer discrete chips is better, as far as power consumption and heat, ease-of-programming and compatibility are concerned.
If you look at the patents that Blackboard has, they basically make it *impossible* to have any kind of "intranet" site at an educational institution. Everything (almost literally everything) that you would want to have/do on a school's intranet, Blackboard has a patent for.
It's fucking ridiculous, and if their patents are invalidated, everyone in the education industry will RUN AWAY from their product, which sucks.
Uh, self-signed certificates shouldn't be trusted. Not on a public website.
On an intranet, they're acceptable, but you should be adding your own server as a CA on every client machines, so that people don't get the warning. Even then, hell, pay and get a certificate from one of the big CAs and be done with it. Saves hassle, and it's cheap.
That big scary page that Firefox shows you is EXACTLY what every browser should show you. Self-signed certificates are NOT OKAY for production/public use. Encryption is more or less worthless without proof-of-identity. Now, if you want to argue about how the the big CAs don't require much in the way of proof anymore, I'll agree with you.
Game development is HARD. It's definitely in the "deep-end" of computer programming. You better know some serious math, too.
What I'm saying is, most of the game developers who have jobs doing it have been doing it "for fun" since they were kids. It takes YEARS of work/experimentation/dedication to develop the skills to write a modern game.
If you are planning just to learn some programming and get a job in the game industry, don't be surprised if you get are stuck in entry-level positions for a LONG time. You aren't going to be game programming, per se. You're going to be debugging the installer for the game, stuff like that.
Why on earth are you using that piece of shit, when Vista has a better firewall built-in?
All of your problems would go away if you ditched ZoneAlarm. You simply CANNOT use ZoneAlarm on your computer and expect it to work correctly. Seriously, get rid of it.
The problem with line-item veto, or any kind of system that tries to minimize the practice of "sneaking things into" a bill, is that the party in power (majority party) can simply choose to remove any part of the bill they don't like, or ADD whatever they want to any bill, confident that they will be able to pass it.
Basically, you have to be careful about any kind of legislative system that does to much to increase the power of the majority. The current system makes sure that EVERY bill is a compromise on multiple issues. Yeah, that means that most bills have all kinds of ridiculous things attached that we could probably live without, but it some of those attachments are GOOD, but would never manage to get passed if they weren't part of some larger bill with wide support.
Hardware has advanced to the point that we don't care about performance all that much.
What is more of a concern is how easy it is to write software, and how easy it is to maintain that software, and how easy it is to port that software to other architectures. Efficiency of code generally means efficient use of a single architecture. That's fine, but for code that has to last a long time (i.e., anything besides games), you want it to be written in a nice, easy-to-change way that can be moved around to different platforms for the next 20 years.
You don't *honestly* think that you're going to get WiMAX coverage everywhere you go, do you? WiMAX isn't magic. It has most of the same limitations that regular 802.11 b/g has. It's an *improvement*, but you still aren't going to get good signal inside of most public buildings.
I think there is a market for a *really cheap* console, but really cheap is sub-$100. Probably sub-$75.
$200? For this? Didn't the Gamecube, which is VASTLY more powerful, sell for $99? Yes. It did. NO ONE is going to pay $200 for this piece of shit.
Which raises the question, why don't we have cheap Gamecube-level consoles? Or even Playstation/N64-level consoles? It would seem like you could build something like that for $50 or so. That would probably sell pretty well, if the games maxed out at $15.
The only answer is to encrypt the data. Nothing else could POSSIBLY keep someone from getting at your data if they have physical access to your hardware.
The PSP was/is *truly* a "portable Playstation". Which is neat, technically, but the games just don't lend themselves to a portable gaming system.
The DS is probably the single greatest portable gaming hardware so far. The touch screen is just the perfect input devices for the kind of goofy, simple, easy-to-play games that most people want on a system that they'll likely only play for 20 minutes at a time. Basically, the DS has lots of games that appeal to the casual player. Much like the Wii.
You have to almost feel bad for Sony. If the PSP had come out at the same time as the Gameboy Advance, it probably would've done a lot better. Maybe even dominated the market. But then Nintendo came and changed the rules with the DS, and the PSP just seems like more of the same. Again, reminds me of the Wii.
Keep in mind that I'm no Nintendo fanboy (in fact, I don't even own a Wii or DS, though I have played both quite a bit). You simply can't deny that Nintendo has really hit the market perfectly these last few years.
Actually, an argument could be made that *Vista* was the OS that they rushed, and released too early. Remember how about a year before it was released, they rewrote HUGE chunks of it because it sucked?
Windows 7 is basically "Vista done right" (at least, as right as MS can ever make anything). You should try it. Even the beta version of Windows 7 is pretty nice.
Never mind that Vista is actually pretty good now. Post-SP1 Vista is good. Better than XP in almost every way.
Of course, getting big corporate customers to switch is still going to be tough. XP just works to well, and both Vista and Windows 7 require more powerful hardware. Many companies are happily running on XP systems from 2002, and in a corporate environment, the new versions of Windows don't really offer much. Yeah, the security is VASTLY improved, but what business with a halfway-decent IT department doesn't already have XP locked down like crazy?
MS is 2 or 3 years away from seeing huge sales from their latest OS, I think. By then, everyone will have new hardware that will run the new stuff, and will go ahead and switch away from XP. But not before then.
Your IT people are idiots. That's really all there is to it. All the problems you had are basically a result of them not doing their jobs properly. Pretty typical of IT employees in the "education" sector, unfortunately. If they were any good, they wouldn't be working at a community college.
Slashdot Mirror
Dead-tree newspapers are dying for one simple reason: All the news anyone could ever want is available for free on the internet. Just a Google search away. The whole idea that a newspaper can survive by catering to the "community" (either in real-life or online) is stupid. It's something to make the investors/owners feel better as their doom inevitably approaches.
I've thought about it a lot, and I don't think there is any workable "defense" against free news sites. The newspapers are all going to die, or at the very least, shrink radically. Even if they start really producing some great, exclusive content, it isn't going to help for long, and it isn't going to help them regain their fortunes.
The news world has changed.
The 2.4GHz (and higher) frequencies simply can't penetrate through walls and stuff well enough.
But wasn't one of the goals of moving to digital broadcast television to free up some of those nice low UHF and VHF frequences? Hell, even just getting down to 900MHz would be huge, and once you get down in to the regular VHF frequencies, you can push the signal through damn near anything.
There's an app for that.
I agree. And what exactly would they be "doing for humanity" that remotely-controller/pre-programmed machines couldn't do?
There isn't much on Mars. Maybe there is some stuff to mine, but you don't need people for that. I suppose it could be terraformed, too, but again, you don't need people for that. As a test of our ability to send people to other planets, it isn't that great, either. We KNOW how to keep them alive. It's not hard, it's just expensive and time-consuming.
Send robots.
There is no such thing as "guaranteed" bandwidth on the internet. ALL bandwidth is shared, somewhere.
Your ISP does NOT have 40 megabits of bandwidth for every user. Do you know how much you would be paying if they did? Your connection would be hundres of dollars a month, not $60 or less.
If you want to bitch about the price of bandwidth, bitch to the big telcos that own most of the fiber in the US, and charge exorbitant fees to use it.
You have a Mac notebook, but can't afford $70 to buy a bigger hard drive for it?
"It sounds like a deal to me for $29, especially reclaiming 7G of hard drive space."
You really care about 7GB of hard drive space? That is literally 70 CENTS worth of hard drive space. With today's hard drive sizes and prices, you shouldn't even be worried about the size of any given piece of data until it's up into the hundreds of gigabytes range.
Look, when I was 12 (in 1984), I though the first 2 books were funny. The third wasn't. The fourth was terrible. I didn't bother with the rest.
And you know what? Not even the first 2 books are funny anymore. They haven't held up. At the time of their publication, they were fairly ground-breaking, but that style of humor just hasn't aged well at all (which tends to happen to all kinds of humor). It's juvenile and obvious, really. Nothing wrong with that, but it means the books have a shelf-life, and the HHGTTG books are about 20 years past their expiration date. They are cultural artifacts, not "classics".
So sue me.
Sleeping less doesn't increase your odds/ability to reproduce (at least, not significantly).
There is a mistaken idea about natural selection that it will always take any traits that are objectively "good". It doesn't. Only traits that can improve/reduce your ability to reproduce are affected. Any traits that don't affect the ability to reproduce tend to stick around forever, regardless of their perceived advantage/disadvantage.
The thing is, you won't ever get FILTHY RICH without the promotional muscle of the big labels. THAT is the carrot that the labels use to get artists to agree to ridiculous contracts. And almost all of them DO agree to those contracts.
Very few artists are going to be willing to give up the chance to be millionaires. The catch is, of course, that if you don't become a HUGE SUPERSTAR, you aren't going to be a millionaire, and in fact you'll probably end up far worse off than if you signed with a smaller label or simply did self-promotion.
It's greed all-around. Don't pretend that the so-called "artists" are blameless in all of this. They aren't being forced into anything.
You're doing it wrong.
You need an IDS/IPS system like a Fortigate or ASA that scans all incoming/outgoing packets for viruses/spyware/whatever, and blocks them before they get to the computer (as well as performing standard firewall duties like NAT and traffic filtering). You need Websense Express (or something similar) to block access to malicious websites (and inappropriate websites, which are often malicious anyway). You need to take away the Local Administrator rights from every user on the network, and use Group Policy to a) lock down Internet Explorer, and b) prevent them from installing any software and c)making any system changes.
This is all easy to do. Why aren't you doing it? For a small office, it wouldn't even be expensive.
Now that we have CPUs with literally more cores than we know what to do with, it makes sense to use those cores for graphics processing. I think that within a few years, we'll start seeing games that don't require a high-end graphics card- they'll just use a couple of the cores on your CPU. It makes sense, and is actually a good thing. Fewer discrete chips is better, as far as power consumption and heat, ease-of-programming and compatibility are concerned.
Along with the patent examiners, of course.
If you look at the patents that Blackboard has, they basically make it *impossible* to have any kind of "intranet" site at an educational institution. Everything (almost literally everything) that you would want to have/do on a school's intranet, Blackboard has a patent for.
It's fucking ridiculous, and if their patents are invalidated, everyone in the education industry will RUN AWAY from their product, which sucks.
Uh, self-signed certificates shouldn't be trusted. Not on a public website.
On an intranet, they're acceptable, but you should be adding your own server as a CA on every client machines, so that people don't get the warning. Even then, hell, pay and get a certificate from one of the big CAs and be done with it. Saves hassle, and it's cheap.
That big scary page that Firefox shows you is EXACTLY what every browser should show you. Self-signed certificates are NOT OKAY for production/public use. Encryption is more or less worthless without proof-of-identity. Now, if you want to argue about how the the big CAs don't require much in the way of proof anymore, I'll agree with you.
Game development is HARD. It's definitely in the "deep-end" of computer programming. You better know some serious math, too.
What I'm saying is, most of the game developers who have jobs doing it have been doing it "for fun" since they were kids. It takes YEARS of work/experimentation/dedication to develop the skills to write a modern game.
If you are planning just to learn some programming and get a job in the game industry, don't be surprised if you get are stuck in entry-level positions for a LONG time. You aren't going to be game programming, per se. You're going to be debugging the installer for the game, stuff like that.
ZoneAlarm? ZONEALARM?!
Why on earth are you using that piece of shit, when Vista has a better firewall built-in?
All of your problems would go away if you ditched ZoneAlarm. You simply CANNOT use ZoneAlarm on your computer and expect it to work correctly. Seriously, get rid of it.
The problem with line-item veto, or any kind of system that tries to minimize the practice of "sneaking things into" a bill, is that the party in power (majority party) can simply choose to remove any part of the bill they don't like, or ADD whatever they want to any bill, confident that they will be able to pass it.
Basically, you have to be careful about any kind of legislative system that does to much to increase the power of the majority. The current system makes sure that EVERY bill is a compromise on multiple issues. Yeah, that means that most bills have all kinds of ridiculous things attached that we could probably live without, but it some of those attachments are GOOD, but would never manage to get passed if they weren't part of some larger bill with wide support.
Hardware has advanced to the point that we don't care about performance all that much.
What is more of a concern is how easy it is to write software, and how easy it is to maintain that software, and how easy it is to port that software to other architectures. Efficiency of code generally means efficient use of a single architecture. That's fine, but for code that has to last a long time (i.e., anything besides games), you want it to be written in a nice, easy-to-change way that can be moved around to different platforms for the next 20 years.
You don't *honestly* think that you're going to get WiMAX coverage everywhere you go, do you? WiMAX isn't magic. It has most of the same limitations that regular 802.11 b/g has. It's an *improvement*, but you still aren't going to get good signal inside of most public buildings.
I think there is a market for a *really cheap* console, but really cheap is sub-$100. Probably sub-$75.
$200? For this? Didn't the Gamecube, which is VASTLY more powerful, sell for $99? Yes. It did. NO ONE is going to pay $200 for this piece of shit.
Which raises the question, why don't we have cheap Gamecube-level consoles? Or even Playstation/N64-level consoles? It would seem like you could build something like that for $50 or so. That would probably sell pretty well, if the games maxed out at $15.
The only answer is to encrypt the data. Nothing else could POSSIBLY keep someone from getting at your data if they have physical access to your hardware.
The PSP was/is *truly* a "portable Playstation". Which is neat, technically, but the games just don't lend themselves to a portable gaming system.
The DS is probably the single greatest portable gaming hardware so far. The touch screen is just the perfect input devices for the kind of goofy, simple, easy-to-play games that most people want on a system that they'll likely only play for 20 minutes at a time. Basically, the DS has lots of games that appeal to the casual player. Much like the Wii.
You have to almost feel bad for Sony. If the PSP had come out at the same time as the Gameboy Advance, it probably would've done a lot better. Maybe even dominated the market. But then Nintendo came and changed the rules with the DS, and the PSP just seems like more of the same. Again, reminds me of the Wii.
Keep in mind that I'm no Nintendo fanboy (in fact, I don't even own a Wii or DS, though I have played both quite a bit). You simply can't deny that Nintendo has really hit the market perfectly these last few years.
Actually, an argument could be made that *Vista* was the OS that they rushed, and released too early. Remember how about a year before it was released, they rewrote HUGE chunks of it because it sucked?
Windows 7 is basically "Vista done right" (at least, as right as MS can ever make anything). You should try it. Even the beta version of Windows 7 is pretty nice.
Never mind that Vista is actually pretty good now. Post-SP1 Vista is good. Better than XP in almost every way.
Of course, getting big corporate customers to switch is still going to be tough. XP just works to well, and both Vista and Windows 7 require more powerful hardware. Many companies are happily running on XP systems from 2002, and in a corporate environment, the new versions of Windows don't really offer much. Yeah, the security is VASTLY improved, but what business with a halfway-decent IT department doesn't already have XP locked down like crazy?
MS is 2 or 3 years away from seeing huge sales from their latest OS, I think. By then, everyone will have new hardware that will run the new stuff, and will go ahead and switch away from XP. But not before then.
Your IT people are idiots. That's really all there is to it. All the problems you had are basically a result of them not doing their jobs properly. Pretty typical of IT employees in the "education" sector, unfortunately. If they were any good, they wouldn't be working at a community college.