Perhaps Gates should consider funding a skunkworks educational project for retired Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, who was working on networked, self-paced computer assisted instruction in 1974 â" 36 years before Bill and Google discovered Khan Academy!"
To paraphrase Heinlein, who was paraphrasing someone else, "when it's time to railroad, people will build railroads" and the corollary "you can't railroad until it's time to railroad."
Networked computer instruction was a great idea back in the 70's, but the infrastructure wasn't really there to support it. Right now it's entirely possible and it's only entrenched notions about education that are holding it back. A couple decades more and in retrospect it will seem both obvious and inevitable.
Third and probably most importantly they should treat everyone equally. TFA says some high profile users were able to get their accounts restored, this is just plain wrong. "Don't be evil" my ass. Giving someone preferential treatment is in fact evil. If I can't get my mcgrew@gmail.com addy restored, then a high profile blogger shouldn't, either.
I keep coming back to this one. If they're so desperate to get Lady Gaga to sign up for G+ as "Lady Gaga" instead of as "Stefani Germanotta" just because she's famous, then i ought to be able to use whatever name i want too. It shouldn't be up to Google to judge if someone is "high profile" enough for their stage name/pseudonym/whatever to be appropriate.
Given a reasonable amount of corporate responsibility on Google's end, i don't care if they can track me. I care what some members of my family can track. I care what my current employer can track. I care what potential future employers can track. And yet there are things that i'd like to be able to say publicly without the above groups finding out about it. Here on slashdot i can say what i really feel and get responses from total strangers, yet even though i have a consistent identity here it's unlikely that anyone checking up on me for a job entry could get to this account using my real name.
If Google gets their way you will have to choose between saying something in a way that is completely public and clearly linked to your real name, or restrict it to a relatively small circle of friends and give up all hope of sharing those thoughts with people you don't know and possibly getting feedback of some kind from them.
That's true, but we're not talking about allowing anonymity, just pseudonyms. There shouldn't be any need for someone to see my real name as long as they can tell that the account is tied to someone who's been around for awhile. I could post all kinds of crap here on slashdot, but if i did i'd acquire a pretty crappy reputation under this nick, not to mention getting modded down. I've had this nick for years, i've got a lot invested in it. I wouldn't want to screw up my reputation as "daetrin" any more than i'd want to screw up my real reputation, even though the link between the two isn't obvious. (Although yes, i know that you could track my down if you really cared to.)
If you screen out all the Anonymous Cowards the conversations here are fairly civil. People certainly disagree, and those disagreements can get pretty heated, but i've seen the same kind of thing on other forums where people use their real names as well. Certainly people can create sock-puppets, but there's no reason that couldn't be done on G+ as well. I could certainly see a benefit to attaching an "age" to each G+ account, and allowing forums to restrict posting to linked accounts that had only been around for a certain length of time. Combined with any kind of moderation system, it would force real trolls to have to wait days or weeks before they could start abusing people again.
That sounds like a bad idea to me. I don't have any market research to back it up but it seems like part of the problem with indie games on the XBox is that they're relegated to the separate XBLIG channel. On Steam they're right there on the main page mixed in with everything else, and compared to the more mainstream games they look like a great deal for the price. I expect that making a separate platform for the indie games would drastically cut down on the number of people seeing the games and thus the number of people buying the games.
"Instead they told me how great it was that I was going to pay more"
Can you please show me where you see that in the linked page? Personally what jumps out to my eye is:
Netflix: "By offering our lowest prices ever, we hope to provide great value to our current and future DVDs by mail members."
ie This is great for the people who just want DVDs by mail.
Netflix: "Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs."
ie Letting people who are in it for the streaming get DVDs as well for just $2 isn't generally profitable for us, and people who only want the DVDs and aren't interested in the streaming don't appreciate having to pay $2 more for a service they don't want.
Netflix: "We think $7.99 is a terrific value for our unlimited streaming plan and $7.99 a terrific value for our unlimited DVD plan."
ie They think both plans are worth the price they're charging for them. (Well duh!)
So they did say it's great... if you're either Netflix or someone who only wants DVDs. If you're not in either of those categories then they didn't say it was great for you.
Yes they're obviously trying to spin it by focusing on the people who will pay less, but they're not actually saying what you're trying to spin it as.
So does the spelling of your handle "i kan reed" meant to indicate that it's supposed to be taken ironically? If not, you might want to go back and "rereed" the title.
"Activision Trying To 'Reinvent' Guitar Hero"
The company that Kotick works for and which currently owns the rights to Guitar Hero is Activision, not EA.
Here is the reality. If you can focus on multiple planes at varying distances unaided, drive a car, or even walk around without running into shit constantly, you can see stereo 3d.
Sorry, i know at least one person with a diagnosed medical condition that prevents them from seeing 3D, and yet they're perfectly capable of driving and walking around without running into shit constantly. (I believe they do have trouble catching if you throw something at them, but i don't know if that part is really any worse than the stereotypical geek clumsiness.)
I've also heard from a number of people who can see the 3D effect (though not ones i can personally vouch for) that extended use gives them a headache, and i've heard decent technical explanations about how the methods currently used to portray 3D differ from what we see in real life and how that can adversely affect the experience, which makes me think the rest of your post may be just as wrong as well.
Personally i have no issues at all with 3D, despite wearing glasses rather than contact lenses. It works fine for me in theatres (regardless of where i'm sitting, though i admit i haven't tried along the very edges of the theater) and it works fine for me on the 3DS. And so far i've never gotten a headache from it regardless of how long i've played or how high i've had the 3D effect turned up. However just because i seem to be naturally gifted in this one useless area doesn't mean i'm going to assume that everyone else who reports problems with it is either lying or doin it rong.
First, you and MozeeToby are both correct. However it's also true that Galloping Gertie was used for decades as an object lesson for the problems resonance can cause in large engineering works. Even though the attribution of the fault was (somewhat) incorrect, we still learned something from it that was entirely correct when applied appropriately, something that apparently _wasn't_ applied in this case.
Second, and maybe i'm wrong here, but as best as i can understand from the complicated physics the problem with Galloping Gertie wasn't a simple case of "elementary forced resonance." However it was still a case of resonance, just really complicated resonance. From the wikipedia page on Aeroelasticity: "These interactions may become smaller until a condition of equilibrium is reached, or may diverge catastrophically if resonance occurs." So to my mind the real lesson from Galloping Gertie was that you can't just account for elementary resonance, you have to account for all possible sources of resonance. In this case however they didn't even take care of the elementary kind.
It's an attempt to head off the inevitable attempts to discredit the article. Pretty much every science article on Slashdot suffers from one or more lame attacks on its credibility/importance. (I don't know if there's a set of slashdot anti-fanboys, or if it's just simply that there's always someone with poor logic skills who disagrees with any given article.)
The most popular attacks are:
Correlation does not equal causation: Used whenever statistics are involved, even if the researchers who did the study make no claims of causation.
Useless: They simply can't think of any good use for whatever is being discussed, so they just make fun of it.
Too early: The idea is years or possibly decades away from production. Will often be accompanied by comments like "we see a story like this every few months/years and it's always 5-10 years away from production, it's never going to happen." There will often be at least one reference to "where's my flying car?"
Too late: Either of the form "this is old news, there was an article talking about this subject weeks/months/years ago, what's up with the editors at Slashdot?" or "Everyone knew that already! Why are they wasting time researching that?" Will often be accompanied by "Scientists discover that water is wet, news at 11."
Obviously this case falls into the last category. Everyone already "knows" fanboys are irrational about their preferences, so the poster is acknowledging that before the trolls can harp on about it and trying to move us on to the part about trying to figure out _why_ that is.
What you say? Prices go up as time goes on? That's unpossible!
Yes Netflix is going to raise their price again, and so is just about every other company. I myself can remember a time when gas cost about $1 a gallon. I've got old books that used to belong to my parents with a cover price of 25 cents. "That and a nickel will get you a cup of coffee."
Technology has allowed us to reverse the prices of some items for various periods of period of time, but it hasn't overturned the general overall trend that over enough time inflation will make everything cost more. (Ideally of course, given a good economy, improved technology and increased wages will allow us to have a better standard of living despite the higher prices. Ideally.)
Netflix isn't being exactly brilliant about the way in which they're raising their prices, but they're also involved in an area that seems to be getting pretty hard hit by rising prices, ie physically shipping stuff through the postal system.
I guess Netflix would rather not have the money I was paying for that part of the service I rarely used.
That is correct. In fact if they could convince _everyone_ to ditch the DVD plan so they could stop having to deal with physical disks and sell off all those warehouses they would probably be ecstatic. They'd certainly be happy if half the people using it stopped and the other half started paying a full $8 rather than just $2 to tack it on to the streaming service.
Shipping DVDs was good enough to get Netflix started, but the price of shipping keeps going up (especially with gas prices fluctuating the way they have been) while broadband access keeps getting more widespread.
Indeed, I make daily use of the differences between a partisan, ranseur, glaive, guisarme, glaive-guisarm, guisarm-glaive, lucern hammer, military fork, volge, etc.
TFA says first "Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs."
I read that as saying "it doesn't make financial sense for us, and it's not the best option for one subset of our customers." I certainly didn't read it as claiming this is a wonderful change that serves everyone's interests. It serves Netflix, and it serves people that only want DVDs.
Now if i were going to complain, it would be about the way everyone is getting automatically bumped up from $10 to $16. I'm not sure how good a job they're doing of making everyone aware of the upcoming change.
$16 is 100% more than $10? (rounding to the nearest dollar.) I'm very interested in your approach to math and would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
A negative side, not for me but for others, would be the lack of games, but we'll see...
There's been some speculation that that's what's up with the Google job postings for people with game developer experience a little while back was about.
As others have said though, hopefully Google will handle them in a way that favors the user rather than companies like Zynga that use them to spam the hell out of everyone.
Well if that's true then it makes more sense for Sony to want to shut it down, but even less sense for LucasArts to force them to shut it down by refusing to renew the license. The subset of those ten thousand users who will sign up for TOR now but wouldn't have if Galaxies was still running is pretty darn insignificant.
A smart move on whose part? LucasArts? Probably not. Sony? Definitely not.
I have a couple friends who _still_ play Galaxies from time to time. They just manged to convince a third friend to hop back in and catch up when this announcement came out. (Needless to say he's given up on the game again now.) As far as i know SOE managed to drive a lot of people away with the one big stupid update, but it seems like they've still got enough people subscribed to pay for the server costs and then some.
If enough people _did_ drop Galaxies and switch to TOR after it come out to make Galaxies no longer cost effective then at _that_ point discontinuing Galaxies would make sense. However announcing the closing before TOR even comes out just comes across as a dick move.
Like they said, Everquest is _still_ going despite Everquest 2. There are still enough people interested in paying money for Everquest for it to be worth keeping the servers open. It's pretty clear that they're not adverse to taking money as long as people are willing to give it to them. On the other hand denying a continuation of the license is exactly the kind of thing Lucas/LucasArts loves to do. They've clearly demonstrated in the past a desire to force the consumer to adapt to what Lucas/LucasArts thinks is best for them.
LucasArts at least can hope that by killing Galaxies they'll convince the people still playing it to get TOR. (That may or may not work out well for them.) However SOE gains absolutely nothing from it.
Alt-text: "On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!"
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Gates should consider funding a skunkworks educational project for retired Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, who was working on networked, self-paced computer assisted instruction in 1974 â" 36 years before Bill and Google discovered Khan Academy!"
To paraphrase Heinlein, who was paraphrasing someone else, "when it's time to railroad, people will build railroads" and the corollary "you can't railroad until it's time to railroad."
Networked computer instruction was a great idea back in the 70's, but the infrastructure wasn't really there to support it. Right now it's entirely possible and it's only entrenched notions about education that are holding it back. A couple decades more and in retrospect it will seem both obvious and inevitable.
Third and probably most importantly they should treat everyone equally. TFA says some high profile users were able to get their accounts restored, this is just plain wrong. "Don't be evil" my ass. Giving someone preferential treatment is in fact evil. If I can't get my mcgrew@gmail.com addy restored, then a high profile blogger shouldn't, either.
I keep coming back to this one. If they're so desperate to get Lady Gaga to sign up for G+ as "Lady Gaga" instead of as "Stefani Germanotta" just because she's famous, then i ought to be able to use whatever name i want too. It shouldn't be up to Google to judge if someone is "high profile" enough for their stage name/pseudonym/whatever to be appropriate.
Given a reasonable amount of corporate responsibility on Google's end, i don't care if they can track me. I care what some members of my family can track. I care what my current employer can track. I care what potential future employers can track. And yet there are things that i'd like to be able to say publicly without the above groups finding out about it. Here on slashdot i can say what i really feel and get responses from total strangers, yet even though i have a consistent identity here it's unlikely that anyone checking up on me for a job entry could get to this account using my real name.
If Google gets their way you will have to choose between saying something in a way that is completely public and clearly linked to your real name, or restrict it to a relatively small circle of friends and give up all hope of sharing those thoughts with people you don't know and possibly getting feedback of some kind from them.
That's true, but we're not talking about allowing anonymity, just pseudonyms. There shouldn't be any need for someone to see my real name as long as they can tell that the account is tied to someone who's been around for awhile. I could post all kinds of crap here on slashdot, but if i did i'd acquire a pretty crappy reputation under this nick, not to mention getting modded down. I've had this nick for years, i've got a lot invested in it. I wouldn't want to screw up my reputation as "daetrin" any more than i'd want to screw up my real reputation, even though the link between the two isn't obvious. (Although yes, i know that you could track my down if you really cared to.)
If you screen out all the Anonymous Cowards the conversations here are fairly civil. People certainly disagree, and those disagreements can get pretty heated, but i've seen the same kind of thing on other forums where people use their real names as well. Certainly people can create sock-puppets, but there's no reason that couldn't be done on G+ as well. I could certainly see a benefit to attaching an "age" to each G+ account, and allowing forums to restrict posting to linked accounts that had only been around for a certain length of time. Combined with any kind of moderation system, it would force real trolls to have to wait days or weeks before they could start abusing people again.
That sounds like a bad idea to me. I don't have any market research to back it up but it seems like part of the problem with indie games on the XBox is that they're relegated to the separate XBLIG channel. On Steam they're right there on the main page mixed in with everything else, and compared to the more mainstream games they look like a great deal for the price. I expect that making a separate platform for the indie games would drastically cut down on the number of people seeing the games and thus the number of people buying the games.
Uh, sorry, it pretty much has everything to do with the fact that he does not now and has never in the past worked at EA.
"Instead they told me how great it was that I was going to pay more"
Can you please show me where you see that in the linked page? Personally what jumps out to my eye is:
Netflix: "By offering our lowest prices ever, we hope to provide great value to our current and future DVDs by mail members."
ie This is great for the people who just want DVDs by mail.
Netflix: "Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs."
ie Letting people who are in it for the streaming get DVDs as well for just $2 isn't generally profitable for us, and people who only want the DVDs and aren't interested in the streaming don't appreciate having to pay $2 more for a service they don't want.
Netflix: "We think $7.99 is a terrific value for our unlimited streaming plan and $7.99 a terrific value for our unlimited DVD plan."
ie They think both plans are worth the price they're charging for them. (Well duh!)
So they did say it's great... if you're either Netflix or someone who only wants DVDs. If you're not in either of those categories then they didn't say it was great for you.
Yes they're obviously trying to spin it by focusing on the people who will pay less, but they're not actually saying what you're trying to spin it as.
"Activision Trying To 'Reinvent' Guitar Hero"
The company that Kotick works for and which currently owns the rights to Guitar Hero is Activision, not EA.
How DARE you compare Avatar to Ferngully! I am Outraged! OUTRAGED i tell you!!!11!!1one!!
Avatar is CLEARLY actually Pocahontas... IN SPAAAACE!!!!
Here is the reality. If you can focus on multiple planes at varying distances unaided, drive a car, or even walk around without running into shit constantly, you can see stereo 3d.
Sorry, i know at least one person with a diagnosed medical condition that prevents them from seeing 3D, and yet they're perfectly capable of driving and walking around without running into shit constantly. (I believe they do have trouble catching if you throw something at them, but i don't know if that part is really any worse than the stereotypical geek clumsiness.)
I've also heard from a number of people who can see the 3D effect (though not ones i can personally vouch for) that extended use gives them a headache, and i've heard decent technical explanations about how the methods currently used to portray 3D differ from what we see in real life and how that can adversely affect the experience, which makes me think the rest of your post may be just as wrong as well.
Personally i have no issues at all with 3D, despite wearing glasses rather than contact lenses. It works fine for me in theatres (regardless of where i'm sitting, though i admit i haven't tried along the very edges of the theater) and it works fine for me on the 3DS. And so far i've never gotten a headache from it regardless of how long i've played or how high i've had the 3D effect turned up. However just because i seem to be naturally gifted in this one useless area doesn't mean i'm going to assume that everyone else who reports problems with it is either lying or doin it rong.
First, you and MozeeToby are both correct. However it's also true that Galloping Gertie was used for decades as an object lesson for the problems resonance can cause in large engineering works. Even though the attribution of the fault was (somewhat) incorrect, we still learned something from it that was entirely correct when applied appropriately, something that apparently _wasn't_ applied in this case.
Second, and maybe i'm wrong here, but as best as i can understand from the complicated physics the problem with Galloping Gertie wasn't a simple case of "elementary forced resonance." However it was still a case of resonance, just really complicated resonance. From the wikipedia page on Aeroelasticity: "These interactions may become smaller until a condition of equilibrium is reached, or may diverge catastrophically if resonance occurs." So to my mind the real lesson from Galloping Gertie was that you can't just account for elementary resonance, you have to account for all possible sources of resonance. In this case however they didn't even take care of the elementary kind.
Apparently we have learned nothing from Galloping Gertie?
No wait, some of us have. Mythbusters proved that properly designed modern bridges aren't anywhere near as susceptible to forced resonance anymore.
This seems to be along the same lines as "Yes, but are you a Catholic [atheist/Jew/whatever] or a Protestant [atheist/Jew/whatever]?" :)
Only if you follow the rest of the sheep
Hey, i resent that! I'm not one to just blindly follow the hurd!
It's an attempt to head off the inevitable attempts to discredit the article. Pretty much every science article on Slashdot suffers from one or more lame attacks on its credibility/importance. (I don't know if there's a set of slashdot anti-fanboys, or if it's just simply that there's always someone with poor logic skills who disagrees with any given article.)
The most popular attacks are:
Correlation does not equal causation: Used whenever statistics are involved, even if the researchers who did the study make no claims of causation.
Useless: They simply can't think of any good use for whatever is being discussed, so they just make fun of it.
Too early: The idea is years or possibly decades away from production. Will often be accompanied by comments like "we see a story like this every few months/years and it's always 5-10 years away from production, it's never going to happen." There will often be at least one reference to "where's my flying car?"
Too late: Either of the form "this is old news, there was an article talking about this subject weeks/months/years ago, what's up with the editors at Slashdot?" or "Everyone knew that already! Why are they wasting time researching that?" Will often be accompanied by "Scientists discover that water is wet, news at 11."
Obviously this case falls into the last category. Everyone already "knows" fanboys are irrational about their preferences, so the poster is acknowledging that before the trolls can harp on about it and trying to move us on to the part about trying to figure out _why_ that is.
Funny, last i hurd it was going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
What you say? Prices go up as time goes on? That's unpossible!
Yes Netflix is going to raise their price again, and so is just about every other company. I myself can remember a time when gas cost about $1 a gallon. I've got old books that used to belong to my parents with a cover price of 25 cents. "That and a nickel will get you a cup of coffee."
Technology has allowed us to reverse the prices of some items for various periods of period of time, but it hasn't overturned the general overall trend that over enough time inflation will make everything cost more. (Ideally of course, given a good economy, improved technology and increased wages will allow us to have a better standard of living despite the higher prices. Ideally.)
Netflix isn't being exactly brilliant about the way in which they're raising their prices, but they're also involved in an area that seems to be getting pretty hard hit by rising prices, ie physically shipping stuff through the postal system.
I guess Netflix would rather not have the money I was paying for that part of the service I rarely used.
That is correct. In fact if they could convince _everyone_ to ditch the DVD plan so they could stop having to deal with physical disks and sell off all those warehouses they would probably be ecstatic. They'd certainly be happy if half the people using it stopped and the other half started paying a full $8 rather than just $2 to tack it on to the streaming service.
Shipping DVDs was good enough to get Netflix started, but the price of shipping keeps going up (especially with gas prices fluctuating the way they have been) while broadband access keeps getting more widespread.
Indeed, I make daily use of the differences between a partisan, ranseur, glaive, guisarme, glaive-guisarm, guisarm-glaive, lucern hammer, military fork, volge, etc.
SRSLY? Where do you shop? I've been having some issues at my local store.
TFA says first "Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs."
I read that as saying "it doesn't make financial sense for us, and it's not the best option for one subset of our customers." I certainly didn't read it as claiming this is a wonderful change that serves everyone's interests. It serves Netflix, and it serves people that only want DVDs.
Now if i were going to complain, it would be about the way everyone is getting automatically bumped up from $10 to $16. I'm not sure how good a job they're doing of making everyone aware of the upcoming change.
$16 is 100% more than $10? (rounding to the nearest dollar.) I'm very interested in your approach to math and would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
A negative side, not for me but for others, would be the lack of games, but we'll see...
There's been some speculation that that's what's up with the Google job postings for people with game developer experience a little while back was about.
As others have said though, hopefully Google will handle them in a way that favors the user rather than companies like Zynga that use them to spam the hell out of everyone.
Well if that's true then it makes more sense for Sony to want to shut it down, but even less sense for LucasArts to force them to shut it down by refusing to renew the license. The subset of those ten thousand users who will sign up for TOR now but wouldn't have if Galaxies was still running is pretty darn insignificant.
A smart move on whose part? LucasArts? Probably not. Sony? Definitely not.
I have a couple friends who _still_ play Galaxies from time to time. They just manged to convince a third friend to hop back in and catch up when this announcement came out. (Needless to say he's given up on the game again now.) As far as i know SOE managed to drive a lot of people away with the one big stupid update, but it seems like they've still got enough people subscribed to pay for the server costs and then some.
If enough people _did_ drop Galaxies and switch to TOR after it come out to make Galaxies no longer cost effective then at _that_ point discontinuing Galaxies would make sense. However announcing the closing before TOR even comes out just comes across as a dick move.
Like they said, Everquest is _still_ going despite Everquest 2. There are still enough people interested in paying money for Everquest for it to be worth keeping the servers open. It's pretty clear that they're not adverse to taking money as long as people are willing to give it to them. On the other hand denying a continuation of the license is exactly the kind of thing Lucas/LucasArts loves to do. They've clearly demonstrated in the past a desire to force the consumer to adapt to what Lucas/LucasArts thinks is best for them.
LucasArts at least can hope that by killing Galaxies they'll convince the people still playing it to get TOR. (That may or may not work out well for them.) However SOE gains absolutely nothing from it.
Have you not seen the obligatory xkcd yet?
Alt-text: "On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!"