Almost all of the posts here argue about the tech companies' morale and the congressman's hypocrisy.
Nobody yet has touched on the fact that the Chinese government is just as valid as any other (legal) government. They decide the rules, and for a company to do anything but obey those rules would be immoral. If you, as a person, visit another country, you'd better play by their rules. Same goes for companies. If you have a problem with the rules, discuss it with the people who made them - don't just go around and break them.
Some of the rules certainly go against our western values. But those are our western values. Until we can convince the Chinese government otherwise, their values are just as valid as ours, no matter how much we dislike them. It cuts both ways, or course - they have to respect ours too.
This is one of the things that really gets me about political discussions on Slashdot: Very few people acknowledge that other points of view than the politically correct might have some merit.
Another poster wrote: "If it is good for americans, it must be good for the chinese". What a load of BS. China is in many many ways not like US, so isn't necessarily good. And what what on earth made you think that you know what is right anyway? Face it: You don't hold the answer to a perfect government - nobody does. IMO, representative democracy is a rather poor kind of government. But it is very resistant to corruption, which, overall, makes it better than all other known kinds. Oh, and don't think that US has the best implementation of democracy. There are plenty good ones out there.
I do appreciate the feelings that a widow of a policeman must feel when seeing violence against police glorified - or somewhat justified, as it may be. Or the feelings of a policeman who is patrolling the streets every day, in fear of being attacked. A very real fear in some cases.
That said, this game just represents the view of one group of people. Probably not even that. Art (in a broad sense) has always tried to provoke us, to try our morals, feelings and values. A Clockwork Orange is probably the most famous piece of art that depicts violence in a non-judgemental way. The outrage it created at launch is, a thing of the past.
Today we think of it as nothing more than a provocative addition to the debate.
Is 25 to life a piece of art? It does provoke some thought. It probably wasn't made for the cultural elite (to say the least!), but it still caught their attention. It doesn't encourage violence (real violence, that is). So it doesn't qualify to be anything other than art. It isn't a political statement, not a call to arms or religious propaganda. It's just entertainment.
All i'm saying is that this is nothing new. The game is nothing new. The reaction to it is nothing new either. And i'll say to the policemen: Get over it; it doesn't represent the view of the majority of the population. And it won't have an effect on the violence on the streets.
Police say that they "may need more than 14 days to conduct a full investigation, and therefore suspects should be held for 90 days instead of the current 14".
How come they can suddenly justify holding someone without charge, just because their investigation involves hard drives?
1. Censorship
2. Regulation/licensing of certain speech (campaign, medical, educational?)
3. Profit!!! (for the cronies who sell domain names)
There are other, far more important, reasons for government control:
4: Guaranteed reliability
5: Accesibility during conflicts
4: Whoever has interest in a stable internet (i'm assuming governments have) will want some assurance of the reliability. Although ICANN's track-record is fine, I (not being a US citizen) have absolutely no guarantee that it will continue in the future.
5: If some conflict should arise between a nation and US, that nation will still want to be able to use the internet. As the internet becomes a more critical part of infrastructure, this point becomes more important.
Given the current political situation, a country such as Iran may value this much higher than cencorship or regulation.
To make a dumb analogy:
How would you feel, if i - someone you have no reason to trust (or distrust) - owned the road outside your house? If i could, for any reason, close it, regulate traffic, charge draconian road tax, remove it?
If there was a possibility - however far out - that one day, you could come home from work only to find that you can't get to your home, because i disagreed with your latest/. post?
My point is just that some things are too important to be left in the hands of other people/nations.
So if a foreign spy asked you to sell secrets for some cash you would be a taker?
If i knew a secret worth something to a foreign spy, i would probably be a trusted employee with the government, in which case my allegiance would have much stronger ties than me being born in the country.
BTW, the U.N. is a joke. An organization that has a quarter of its membership belonging to authoritarian regimes.
You know... Democracy is about letting everyone participate in the decisions. Otherwise it wouldn't be democracy, but aristocracy or (the opposite) ochlocracy.
How would you feel if all gays/criminals/women/idiots* were excluded from elections in your country?
* Please note that i'm not comparing gays to criminals to women etc.
The Soviet airforce didn't seem to think so during the cold war. The Mig-25 jet fighter entered service in 1969 and had some unusual equipment on board. The majority of the electronics was made with vacuum tubes instead of transistors. To better withstand the EMP.
From Wikipedia:
The majority of the on-board avionics was based on vacuum tube technology, not solid-state electronics. Though the Mig-25's electronics were ridiculed in the West, many experts found it ingenious and quite practical to use vacuum tubes as they were less suceptible to radiation compared to transistor technology in case of nuclear warfare
I don't know of any I/O devices since the 1960's that don't have an internal buffer. If you're using the CPU to read one bit at a time, you have pretty much reduced your brand new AMD CPU to an RS232 port. One that uses 100+ watt, mind you.
Back to GP's post; It has been noted that it is in fact 10.000 cycles and not 10 million. I still think that is a lot. IIRC, an interrupt took about 30 cycles on the Amiga, or 300 including swithing thread context.
I'd like to see versions of this built into other electronic devices.
It all of my portable gadgets, the battery itself is one of the heavier components. It'd be great if it was suspended in a contraption similar to this. You know.. phone recharging while it's in my pocket, laptop in my bag etc. I'm not saying that this should be the only - or even a major - power source, but it would be nice to be recharging the phone whenever i'm walking around - even if i still need to plug it in from time to time.
Publishers have been bashed so much recently (here), being accused of not wanting to make/publish anything that doesn't fit within their established success template.
Everyone has been waiting for an successful game to be developed and distributed independently.
Well, here it is (maybe...)! I sincerely hope they can get distribution in the US market without a publisher, and possibly show the way for other developers. In time this can create a new development and distribution model that does not rely so heavily on marketing and fiscal-year concerns.
"...no larger than a milk carton.... At only 3.5 kilograms..."
Around here, a milk carton is usually 1 litre. What do they make these satellites of? Certainly not aluminum.
Meybe we should calm down and think about what it is we are trying to protect the kids from.
An animation of someone having sex (Hot Coffee) is allowed for 18+ but not 17?
Do parents these days truly believe that their innocent kids and all their friends are virgins until age 18? Do they believe that the kids should be?
The parents that worry about it can follow the guidelines - and teach their kids to do the same.
And before you say that the paren't who don't care/disagree with the ratings can buy the games for their kids, please consider whether censorship of this kind should be opt-out or opt-in.
The guy in the story comes to a door. There's no sign, no shopkeeper - nothing to indicate that this is a shop. Yet, the owners have let a trained monkey guard the door.
The guy goes to the door, asks the monkey if he can come inside. The monkey opens the door for him and gives him a ticket that says "Help yourself to whatever is on the table". He does so. All the time the monkey is watching him and never indicates that what he is doing is against the will of the owners.
This is clearly a case of a poorly trained monkey, and not theft.
10. Unit test. [snip] 11. Test the externals by driving the components via their interfaces. [snip] 12. Build tests that drive the entire architecture. 13. Ship version 1.0 that is ready for end users.
All i see here is automated tests. Where are the real tests, that involve potential users using the product in real-world environments, with real-world data?
After going through all the pains of steps 1-12, you can't even be bothered to test the thing? You'd be lucky to have a useful product by Version 3.
The display itself is VGA resolution, but only half the pixels have lead lines, the other half will have to derive their values from neighbouring pixels?
Or do they just claim to have "invented" supersampling?
Since the function called is virtual, there isn't much the compiler can do in ways of inlining.
Anyway, i ran the "method-call" test myself (with Microsoft VC6 compiler):
100000 iterations:
Original test took ~4500 kcycles
Placing the objects on the stack instead of the heap brought it down to ~1900 kcycles (Note: this is what any decent C++ programmer *should* do)
Using printf instead of cout brought the time further down to ~1300 kcycles (whether this is good or bad style is debateable).
All in all, the tests only measure how well poorly written code can be optimised. Admittedly, it seems that the JVM does a better job than GCC here. I'll never believe that well-written C++ code can be outperformed by Java (Well written meaning that the programmer understands how the cache works, the costs/benefits of using virtual/inline/const functions etc. and most inportantly understands the data he is working with).
Another very important issue, related only to movies, is the region protection on DVDs. I live in Europe. Most movies appear in the US before they are available in Europe (sometimes very long before).
I now have 3 options, if i want to see a movie:
Download the movie
Mod my DVD player to ignore regions and buy the movie online from a US retailer
Wait until they see fit to release the movie in Europe
Two of the options suck if you ask MPAA, the third one does if you ask me.
The games industry has known this for a while and usually distributes new titles simultaneously world wide.
The music industry is beginning to understand this (Metallica's newest released simultaneously world wide)
The movie industry doesnt have a clue yet.
Has anyone thought abut the fact that "real" money have no value either? They are just symbols of the labour that went into obtaining them.
Their value is in the trust we all have, that we can trade the money for tangible items of real worth.
Just as the game designers can decide to create more of the very rare 20-in-the-world-only item, the people working at the mint can create more coins, notes - money. This would have dire consequences for the national economy - just as it would have dire consequences for the sales of the game.
My point is that virtual money are just as real (or unreal) as real-world money. Both of them are just symbols of value. They are not value in themselves. And yes, both of them can be traded for items with a real value (real in Marx' and Smith's sense).
Now the real world money can be used in more places than virtual money; you can use any currency almost anywhere in the world, if you can find a bank. But you would need to go through the pains of trading on ebay in order to exchange your virtual money to real money or vice versa.
So you're saying that the global community is in such a bad shape that we can only give up and treat just the symptoms?
Surely we're in better shape than someone with terminal cancer.
I was there a few weeks back and none of the people i was supposed to meet picked up their cell phone when i called. I tried and tried and couldn't get through. They kept leaving messages at my hotel, that i should call them!
Later i realized that they had all set up their phones to ignore incoming calls with no caller id (phone number). Apparently this works well to keep telemarketers away.
And people like myself who stay in a hotel that "protects your privacy by not revealing your phone number".
Quote the article: The increase in productivity is not worth the extra cost and it takes away from the key focus, which has to be work
Last time i checked, there was no extra cost imposed on an employer when employees didn't wear suits.
And if it takes focus away from work, it can hardly be considered an increase in productivity, can it?
Or... If it is an increase in productivity, it can't be taking focus from work?
As has been posted somewhere else, the point of copy protection is not to make it impossible to copy a game. It serves two purposes.
- to keep your average kiddie from copying it.
- to delay the release of a cracked version.
At my company we used the new version of SecuRom and it serves both purposes very well. To my knowledge, there exists no software that can copy a protected disc. And there might never be.
Our previous release was on the net within a few hours of the release, whereas this one was delayed for six days. Not a lot, i admit - but at least it made sure that the title was available in stores everywhere before it was on the net.
Outsourcing doesn't necessarily mean having someone else write your applications.
I've seen it work quite well with smaller tasks. Such as (which we do in my company) hiring a company to perform backups. Or produce some of the (non-code) content.
Or write installers for your own software. Or create the copy protection. Or port the software to other platforms. There are plenty of examples where outsourcing can work fine.
Even testing could be outsourced. I have yet to see good results from that, but it could work, i guess.
But the art of acting will never disappear. It will just be expressed through different means.
Imagine a movie made with an entire cast of plain boring actors, recorded by a fresh-out-of-college photographer. That is what you get if you try to make a movie with simulated animations (many years from now). There is no point in making a movie unless there are some people behind it to give it personality.
The exact same argument applies to present day music. So many people argue that music created entirely with electronic instruments has no nerve, no personality, no... artistic expression.
They just tend to forget that there were actually some people playing - or programming - those instruments. And that those people are making music just as interesting as they did in the good ol' days. There is one important difference, though. In the old days music was performed. In real time. Today it is possible to edit it until it is right (ignoring for a moment the live-performing musicians).
that being said, there is a lot of nondescript, uninteresting music being published today.
My point is just that even if there are no more live actors, there will still be people behind the movies. Someone to write them, someone to edit them, someone to direct them, someone to create the animations, the voices, the camera movements.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody yet has touched on the fact that the Chinese government is just as valid as any other (legal) government. They decide the rules, and for a company to do anything but obey those rules would be immoral. If you, as a person, visit another country, you'd better play by their rules. Same goes for companies. If you have a problem with the rules, discuss it with the people who made them - don't just go around and break them.
Some of the rules certainly go against our western values. But those are our western values. Until we can convince the Chinese government otherwise, their values are just as valid as ours, no matter how much we dislike them. It cuts both ways, or course - they have to respect ours too.
This is one of the things that really gets me about political discussions on Slashdot: Very few people acknowledge that other points of view than the politically correct might have some merit.
Another poster wrote: "If it is good for americans, it must be good for the chinese". What a load of BS. China is in many many ways not like US, so isn't necessarily good. And what what on earth made you think that you know what is right anyway? Face it: You don't hold the answer to a perfect government - nobody does. IMO, representative democracy is a rather poor kind of government. But it is very resistant to corruption, which, overall, makes it better than all other known kinds. Oh, and don't think that US has the best implementation of democracy. There are plenty good ones out there.
That said, this game just represents the view of one group of people. Probably not even that. Art (in a broad sense) has always tried to provoke us, to try our morals, feelings and values. A Clockwork Orange is probably the most famous piece of art that depicts violence in a non-judgemental way. The outrage it created at launch is, a thing of the past. Today we think of it as nothing more than a provocative addition to the debate.
Is 25 to life a piece of art? It does provoke some thought. It probably wasn't made for the cultural elite (to say the least!), but it still caught their attention. It doesn't encourage violence (real violence, that is). So it doesn't qualify to be anything other than art. It isn't a political statement, not a call to arms or religious propaganda. It's just entertainment.
All i'm saying is that this is nothing new. The game is nothing new. The reaction to it is nothing new either. And i'll say to the policemen: Get over it; it doesn't represent the view of the majority of the population. And it won't have an effect on the violence on the streets.
How come they can suddenly justify holding someone without charge, just because their investigation involves hard drives?
2. Regulation/licensing of certain speech (campaign, medical, educational?)
3. Profit!!! (for the cronies who sell domain names)
There are other, far more important, reasons for government control:
4: Guaranteed reliability
5: Accesibility during conflicts
4: Whoever has interest in a stable internet (i'm assuming governments have) will want some assurance of the reliability. Although ICANN's track-record is fine, I (not being a US citizen) have absolutely no guarantee that it will continue in the future.
5: If some conflict should arise between a nation and US, that nation will still want to be able to use the internet. As the internet becomes a more critical part of infrastructure, this point becomes more important.
Given the current political situation, a country such as Iran may value this much higher than cencorship or regulation.
To make a dumb analogy: /. post?
How would you feel, if i - someone you have no reason to trust (or distrust) - owned the road outside your house? If i could, for any reason, close it, regulate traffic, charge draconian road tax, remove it?
If there was a possibility - however far out - that one day, you could come home from work only to find that you can't get to your home, because i disagreed with your latest
My point is just that some things are too important to be left in the hands of other people/nations.
If i knew a secret worth something to a foreign spy, i would probably be a trusted employee with the government, in which case my allegiance would have much stronger ties than me being born in the country.
BTW, the U.N. is a joke. An organization that has a quarter of its membership belonging to authoritarian regimes.
You know... Democracy is about letting everyone participate in the decisions. Otherwise it wouldn't be democracy, but aristocracy or (the opposite) ochlocracy.
How would you feel if all gays/criminals/women/idiots* were excluded from elections in your country?
* Please note that i'm not comparing gays to criminals to women etc.
From Wikipedia:
The majority of the on-board avionics was based on vacuum tube technology, not solid-state electronics. Though the Mig-25's electronics were ridiculed in the West, many experts found it ingenious and quite practical to use vacuum tubes as they were less suceptible to radiation compared to transistor technology in case of nuclear warfare
Back to GP's post; It has been noted that it is in fact 10.000 cycles and not 10 million. I still think that is a lot. IIRC, an interrupt took about 30 cycles on the Amiga, or 300 including swithing thread context.
Or did i miss what the fuss is all about?
It all of my portable gadgets, the battery itself is one of the heavier components. It'd be great if it was suspended in a contraption similar to this. You know.. phone recharging while it's in my pocket, laptop in my bag etc. I'm not saying that this should be the only - or even a major - power source, but it would be nice to be recharging the phone whenever i'm walking around - even if i still need to plug it in from time to time.
Everyone has been waiting for an successful game to be developed and distributed independently. Well, here it is (maybe...)! I sincerely hope they can get distribution in the US market without a publisher, and possibly show the way for other developers. In time this can create a new development and distribution model that does not rely so heavily on marketing and fiscal-year concerns.
"...no larger than a milk carton.... At only 3.5 kilograms..." Around here, a milk carton is usually 1 litre. What do they make these satellites of? Certainly not aluminum.
Do parents these days truly believe that their innocent kids and all their friends are virgins until age 18? Do they believe that the kids should be?
The parents that worry about it can follow the guidelines - and teach their kids to do the same.
And before you say that the paren't who don't care/disagree with the ratings can buy the games for their kids, please consider whether censorship of this kind should be opt-out or opt-in.
The guy in the story comes to a door. There's no sign, no shopkeeper - nothing to indicate that this is a shop. Yet, the owners have let a trained monkey guard the door.
The guy goes to the door, asks the monkey if he can come inside. The monkey opens the door for him and gives him a ticket that says "Help yourself to whatever is on the table". He does so. All the time the monkey is watching him and never indicates that what he is doing is against the will of the owners.
This is clearly a case of a poorly trained monkey, and not theft.
Or a poorly "trained" wifi router.
10. Unit test. [snip]
11. Test the externals by driving the components via their interfaces. [snip]
12. Build tests that drive the entire architecture.
13. Ship version 1.0 that is ready for end users.
All i see here is automated tests. Where are the real tests, that involve potential users using the product in real-world environments, with real-world data?
After going through all the pains of steps 1-12, you can't even be bothered to test the thing? You'd be lucky to have a useful product by Version 3.
The display itself is VGA resolution, but only half the pixels have lead lines, the other half will have to derive their values from neighbouring pixels?
Or do they just claim to have "invented" supersampling?
Anyway, i ran the "method-call" test myself (with Microsoft VC6 compiler):
100000 iterations:
Original test took ~4500 kcycles
Placing the objects on the stack instead of the heap brought it down to ~1900 kcycles (Note: this is what any decent C++ programmer *should* do)
Using printf instead of cout brought the time further down to ~1300 kcycles (whether this is good or bad style is debateable).
All in all, the tests only measure how well poorly written code can be optimised. Admittedly, it seems that the JVM does a better job than GCC here. I'll never believe that well-written C++ code can be outperformed by Java (Well written meaning that the programmer understands how the cache works, the costs/benefits of using virtual/inline/const functions etc. and most inportantly understands the data he is working with).
I now have 3 options, if i want to see a movie:
- Download the movie
- Mod my DVD player to ignore regions and buy the movie online from a US retailer
- Wait until they see fit to release the movie in Europe
Two of the options suck if you ask MPAA, the third one does if you ask me.The games industry has known this for a while and usually distributes new titles simultaneously world wide.
The music industry is beginning to understand this (Metallica's newest released simultaneously world wide)
The movie industry doesnt have a clue yet.
Their value is in the trust we all have, that we can trade the money for tangible items of real worth.
Just as the game designers can decide to create more of the very rare 20-in-the-world-only item, the people working at the mint can create more coins, notes - money. This would have dire consequences for the national economy - just as it would have dire consequences for the sales of the game.
My point is that virtual money are just as real (or unreal) as real-world money. Both of them are just symbols of value. They are not value in themselves. And yes, both of them can be traded for items with a real value (real in Marx' and Smith's sense).
Now the real world money can be used in more places than virtual money; you can use any currency almost anywhere in the world, if you can find a bank. But you would need to go through the pains of trading on ebay in order to exchange your virtual money to real money or vice versa.
Surely we're in better shape than someone with terminal cancer.
Aren't we?
Later i realized that they had all set up their phones to ignore incoming calls with no caller id (phone number). Apparently this works well to keep telemarketers away.
And people like myself who stay in a hotel that "protects your privacy by not revealing your phone number".
The increase in productivity is not worth the extra cost and it takes away from the key focus, which has to be work
Last time i checked, there was no extra cost imposed on an employer when employees didn't wear suits.
And if it takes focus away from work, it can hardly be considered an increase in productivity, can it?
Or... If it is an increase in productivity, it can't be taking focus from work?
What did i miss?
- to keep your average kiddie from copying it.
- to delay the release of a cracked version.
At my company we used the new version of SecuRom and it serves both purposes very well. To my knowledge, there exists no software that can copy a protected disc. And there might never be.
Our previous release was on the net within a few hours of the release, whereas this one was delayed for six days. Not a lot, i admit - but at least it made sure that the title was available in stores everywhere before it was on the net.
I've seen it work quite well with smaller tasks. Such as (which we do in my company) hiring a company to perform backups. Or produce some of the (non-code) content.
Or write installers for your own software. Or create the copy protection. Or port the software to other platforms. There are plenty of examples where outsourcing can work fine.
Even testing could be outsourced. I have yet to see good results from that, but it could work, i guess.
Imagine a movie made with an entire cast of plain boring actors, recorded by a fresh-out-of-college photographer. That is what you get if you try to make a movie with simulated animations (many years from now). There is no point in making a movie unless there are some people behind it to give it personality.
The exact same argument applies to present day music. So many people argue that music created entirely with electronic instruments has no nerve, no personality, no ... artistic expression.
They just tend to forget that there were actually some people playing - or programming - those instruments. And that those people are making music just as interesting as they did in the good ol' days. There is one important difference, though. In the old days music was performed. In real time. Today it is possible to edit it until it is right (ignoring for a moment the live-performing musicians).
that being said, there is a lot of nondescript, uninteresting music being published today.
My point is just that even if there are no more live actors, there will still be people behind the movies. Someone to write them, someone to edit them, someone to direct them, someone to create the animations, the voices, the camera movements.