The question is whether or not Sony knew the lock was going to blow up before they sold it to their customers. The software didn't fail. It worked exactly as intended. And Sony knew how it was going to work. They decided to use it anyway.
I cannot have confidence in a voting system unless I completely understand how it works. I am a software developer, and I don't trust any voting system which uses software specifically because most people, including myself, wouldn't be able to understand the system, or wouldn't take the time to understand the system, even if they could. With paper ballots that are counted by hand, I completely understand every aspect of the voting and counting system. People from all parties can actually watch the actual count and verify that they are counted correctly. Security measure can be put in place to ensure that there is no ballot stuffing, by checking the box before hand, and comparing the number of votes counted to the number of people who actually voted. I'm not saying paper is infallible, but that I trust it because I can look at it and understand it. Why should I believe the claims that your "VoteHere" system is any more reliable or trustworthy than a system made by Diebold? Like you said, "Trust no one". Why should I trust any organization if I can't verify the voting process by myself.
Also, the other problem with using machines is that they sometimes break, or there aren't enough of them to go around, and people end up waiting hours in line to vote. I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes to cast my ballot, and that's the way it should be. Making people wait so long to vote discourages them, and brings down the number of people who vote, and this invalidates the whole problem.
Nobody is saying the MediaMax software was of poor quality, but rather that it had ill intentions. I can build the most bug free system in the world, but if it allows MS/Sony/Redhat to spy on your every move or completely control what you can do with your computer, then it's probably not the kind of software that you want installed on your system, or even being produced. I think criminal charges and jail time for the people from these companies (Sony and Mediamax) responsible for the production and distribution of this software would be in good order, and would go a long way to stop things like this from happening in the future. Monetary penalties don't mean much to billion dollar companies.
See, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. Even if one state, or a bunch of states actually find a good way of conducting votes, there's still a lot of states who get it really wrong. Having a national system for voting in which all ballots are the same and conducted in the manner is essential for elections to work properly. Not every town should have to conduct elections the same as the next town for electing mayor, but when you're holding the election for President, the ballots should all be the same.
Let me be the first to say that this is completely stupid. Nobody forced Sony to put that software on the CDs, and I wouldn't doubt that Sony knew exactly what they were doing when they put that software on the CDs. If they didn't, well then, it's their own fault. Having them pass the blame on to the company that made this software just make me hate Sony even more. Sony has done so many braindead things in the past couple of years that it's no wonder that Nintendo stock rose above theirs, if only for a short while. From rootkits, to $600+ consoles, to sueing the people who sold them the rootkit, I just can't imagine what they'll do next.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I hate them because they released a $600+ console ( + because it's even more expensive once you buy a game and a second controller) but what I'm saying is that it's a really boneheaded idea, and I don't know how they ever thought it would have mass appeal, no matter how good the graphics are.
Actually, no, we only vote for the people who will represent us in our tiny little area. So we don't vote for the Prime Minister, or the provincial premier, (at least no most of us). We vote for somebody from our area who is (supposedly) looking out for the people in that small area. The leader of the party with the most people voted in become Prime Minister. In the US, people do vote for the supreme overload (the president) but the problem is that they also have to vote for millions of other little things. What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making.
Sorry, I guess I misunderstand US law. I'm from Canada, so I thought things worked the same way down there. Here we have something called the criminal code. There's a couple other things that are considered "criminal" but traffic offenses isn't one of them. This system allows people to be charged with certain offenses such as traffic offenses, or excessive noise complaints, without giving them a criminal record.
My opinion is that the US election system has become too cumbersome/complicated for the average person. I'm Canadian, and I find voting very simple. Federal elections require me to check 1 box. That's it. There is about 7? boxes to choose from depending on which riding you are located in. Each box shows the name of the representative of a specific party. Provincial elections are the same, although there's usually less boxes. Municipal elections are actually the most complicated, in which I have to vote for Mayor, Councillor, and school board trustee. There's too many options on the US ballot, and having different ballots for every state or county when people are electing the president just makes things overly complicated. There would be no need for voting machines if people weren't voting on 75 different issues for every election. A simple pencil and paper ballot works a lot better.
I don't think putting up the warnings reduces your liability, but placing a caution sign on the floor does lower the chance of somebody slipping on that floor, and giving them a reason to sue you. That lady who sued McDonald's because she spilled coffee on herself says different though. Now McD's places a warning label on their coffee, letting you know that it's hot. It's still really damn hot, so I'm not sure how this would remove any liability. I find that their coffee twice as hot as most other coffee places. Obviously not in temperature, but in the way that I can only hold the cup for half the time of any other place before my hand gets uncomfortably hot.
I think that there is a lot more room for innovation in the hardware realm. Whatever happened to VR goggles. We had a couple companies pushing them 10 years ago, and then poof, you don't even hear about them any more. But with our advances in display devices and motion sensing technology it should be possible to create a very affordable set of VR goggles. However, there's nobody doing this. Maybe Nintendo will have to step up to the plate again, and release this. The Wii is a very good family/group gaming system. Maybe next time they will release a personal gaming machine. Not like the VirtualBoy, because that was truly terrible (although I applaud them for thinking outside the box).
What does driving have to be with being a criminal. Are you saying that everyone who drives breaks traffic laws? Well, traffic laws are not criminal offenses. Otherwise, 3/4 of the country wouldn't be able to find jobs because of their criminal record.
Which brings up the question, "what is life?". For millenium we've considered ourselves chosen by god, or at least special among all the animals on earth. However, what if we found another form of life that was as intelligent as we are? What if we found one that was more intelligent. How are we even sure that what we're looking for is going to be anything like us. Who says there won't be a race the size of Smurfs on some other planet. Who says there's no way you could have animals that think and act like humans yet get their energy from the sun and breath carbon dioxide like plants do.
Are mammoths and elephants even closely enough related for this to work? Wouldn't the body just detect the mammoth embryo (oxymoron) as a foreign substance and try to get rid of it. We have enough trouble with transplanting organs from the same species, I can't imagine you'd have much luck growing a fetus from one species in the womb of another species. Also, since the DNA specimens are so degraded, what's the chance that they could fill in the holes in the DNA with some other animal (possibly an Elephant) like they did in Jurassic Park. However, I think I'd have to recommend against using frog DNA.
Wikipedia article on Draenei in case anybody is as lost as I am. This is the great thing about wikipedia over any other traditional encyclopedia. Although some may say it's not as accurate, or reliable, it definitely has a wider breadth of knowledge and obscure articles than any other encyclopedia I've ever seen.
Asking questions about what people put on their resume should be standard practice, especially when they write a laundry list. First if they really do know all the stuff they listed, it's probably a good idea to make sure you find a position in your company for them, even if it's not really the one your interviewing for, because people like this are few and far between. Second, if they don't really know the technology, then you don't want to hire them at all, in fact you want to rule them out as soon as possible, because the people who lie on / embelish their resume are the kind of people you don't want to be working with.
The resume is unimportant once you get the interview, however, for getting the interview, a good resume and cover letter is essential. Spelling and grammatical errors get an automatic circular file, as do padding the resume with useless information and just listing things that you may have used for a week. If you can't name and describe a significant project in which you used a certain skill, then it doesn't belong on your resume. With the quality of some resumes I really feel sorry for some people, because they will probable never get a job. If you're writing skills are that bad, at least do yourself the favour of getting professional or possibly a friend to help you compile a resume. Something like this is definitely worth it.
I recommend against this. As soon as I see a resume for a programmer position with people saying that they know Photoshop, MS Excel, 3DS Max, Adobe Acrobat (yes, I've seen that on a resume), scheme (I know it's related, but did you ever really use it outside that second year CS class) and other completely unrelated skills, or listing things that I'm sure they aren't really that proficient in, I start to think about how they have nothing of real substance to fill up the resume with and toss it in the garbage. You should be able to demonstrate that you have the skills necessary for the job, and to show what projects you've actually done (for school, fun or employers) and not just pad the resume with every piece of software you've ever used.
I agree with you. I mentioned it before in another post but I'll mention it again. I too work in a small company and you really do get more of a chance to work an wide array of projects when you work in a small company. Everybody I talk to at larger companies has very specific job duties and does very specific (often boring) things. However, I get to work on just about all aspects of my company's product, and I find this very rewarding, and very challenging.
While I find a Jack of all trades very useful myself, and consider myself to be in that category, I don't think a lot of companies are looking for that. Most mid to large size companies like people to do very specific tasks with very specific job descriptions. Somebody who is a jack of all trades would probably fit in a lot better at a small company, which is where I happen to be, because they will have much more opportunity to work in many different areas. Small companies don't have entire teams devoted to database design, UI design, middle tier design, requirements gathering, architecture, testing, and all those other areas of software design, so the people who do work for small companies probably get to see at least a little bit, if not a lot from all those areas. Also remember that the full term is "Jack of all trades, master of none", however, I consider myself to be a "master" or at least really good in quite a few areas, and the all the rest of the "trades" just really help to back that up.
However, if they were able to go to the moon in 1969 and deal with the dust there, where AFAIK they didn't have a sample of lunar dust either, then I think that in 2007 we should have no problem dealing with Martian dust. I find it kind of amazing that we went to the moon so long ago, and yet we are still having people say that the next time we will go to the moon will be 2020, when the first time we went to the moon was 8 years after the first person landed on the moon.
Maybe I'm just really good at Zelda games, but I find Twilight Princess to have a very small chance of sudden death. I've made it to the end of the desert temple, and I have yet to use a single potion. Ok, maybe 1 or 2, but still... I find this style of Zelda games much better than the older Zelda games. I'd much rather be figuring out puzzles and finding my way through maze-like dungeons than worrying about where my next heart was coming from.
I can't remember if it was a limitation on Java specifically, but the JPEG library I was using for image recognition in my univeristy robotics class didn't support multidimensional arrays for accessing pixels. So if you want the to access pixel i in row j of an image that's x * y pixels, you'd have to use image[j*x + i] (or something like that). Also figuring out where a particular pixel was located just based on it's index was equally cumbersome. From that moment on, I decided that working with graphics in Java was terrible.
Still it doesn't add much to the game. Those games wouldn't be any less enjoyable if you took out the customized Miis. Plus, it's not like no other game has ever had customizable characters. It is kind of neat to have the same characters in many games. I think it would be fun to have your Mii show up in Zelda or Mario though. But like I said, Mii's don't really add much to the whole gaming aspect.
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The question is whether or not Sony knew the lock was going to blow up before they sold it to their customers. The software didn't fail. It worked exactly as intended. And Sony knew how it was going to work. They decided to use it anyway.
I cannot have confidence in a voting system unless I completely understand how it works. I am a software developer, and I don't trust any voting system which uses software specifically because most people, including myself, wouldn't be able to understand the system, or wouldn't take the time to understand the system, even if they could. With paper ballots that are counted by hand, I completely understand every aspect of the voting and counting system. People from all parties can actually watch the actual count and verify that they are counted correctly. Security measure can be put in place to ensure that there is no ballot stuffing, by checking the box before hand, and comparing the number of votes counted to the number of people who actually voted. I'm not saying paper is infallible, but that I trust it because I can look at it and understand it. Why should I believe the claims that your "VoteHere" system is any more reliable or trustworthy than a system made by Diebold? Like you said, "Trust no one". Why should I trust any organization if I can't verify the voting process by myself.
Also, the other problem with using machines is that they sometimes break, or there aren't enough of them to go around, and people end up waiting hours in line to vote. I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes to cast my ballot, and that's the way it should be. Making people wait so long to vote discourages them, and brings down the number of people who vote, and this invalidates the whole problem.
Nobody is saying the MediaMax software was of poor quality, but rather that it had ill intentions. I can build the most bug free system in the world, but if it allows MS/Sony/Redhat to spy on your every move or completely control what you can do with your computer, then it's probably not the kind of software that you want installed on your system, or even being produced. I think criminal charges and jail time for the people from these companies (Sony and Mediamax) responsible for the production and distribution of this software would be in good order, and would go a long way to stop things like this from happening in the future. Monetary penalties don't mean much to billion dollar companies.
See, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. Even if one state, or a bunch of states actually find a good way of conducting votes, there's still a lot of states who get it really wrong. Having a national system for voting in which all ballots are the same and conducted in the manner is essential for elections to work properly. Not every town should have to conduct elections the same as the next town for electing mayor, but when you're holding the election for President, the ballots should all be the same.
Let me be the first to say that this is completely stupid. Nobody forced Sony to put that software on the CDs, and I wouldn't doubt that Sony knew exactly what they were doing when they put that software on the CDs. If they didn't, well then, it's their own fault. Having them pass the blame on to the company that made this software just make me hate Sony even more. Sony has done so many braindead things in the past couple of years that it's no wonder that Nintendo stock rose above theirs, if only for a short while. From rootkits, to $600+ consoles, to sueing the people who sold them the rootkit, I just can't imagine what they'll do next.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I hate them because they released a $600+ console ( + because it's even more expensive once you buy a game and a second controller) but what I'm saying is that it's a really boneheaded idea, and I don't know how they ever thought it would have mass appeal, no matter how good the graphics are.
Actually, no, we only vote for the people who will represent us in our tiny little area. So we don't vote for the Prime Minister, or the provincial premier, (at least no most of us). We vote for somebody from our area who is (supposedly) looking out for the people in that small area. The leader of the party with the most people voted in become Prime Minister. In the US, people do vote for the supreme overload (the president) but the problem is that they also have to vote for millions of other little things. What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making.
Sorry, I guess I misunderstand US law. I'm from Canada, so I thought things worked the same way down there. Here we have something called the criminal code. There's a couple other things that are considered "criminal" but traffic offenses isn't one of them. This system allows people to be charged with certain offenses such as traffic offenses, or excessive noise complaints, without giving them a criminal record.
My opinion is that the US election system has become too cumbersome/complicated for the average person. I'm Canadian, and I find voting very simple. Federal elections require me to check 1 box. That's it. There is about 7? boxes to choose from depending on which riding you are located in. Each box shows the name of the representative of a specific party. Provincial elections are the same, although there's usually less boxes. Municipal elections are actually the most complicated, in which I have to vote for Mayor, Councillor, and school board trustee. There's too many options on the US ballot, and having different ballots for every state or county when people are electing the president just makes things overly complicated. There would be no need for voting machines if people weren't voting on 75 different issues for every election. A simple pencil and paper ballot works a lot better.
I don't think putting up the warnings reduces your liability, but placing a caution sign on the floor does lower the chance of somebody slipping on that floor, and giving them a reason to sue you. That lady who sued McDonald's because she spilled coffee on herself says different though. Now McD's places a warning label on their coffee, letting you know that it's hot. It's still really damn hot, so I'm not sure how this would remove any liability. I find that their coffee twice as hot as most other coffee places. Obviously not in temperature, but in the way that I can only hold the cup for half the time of any other place before my hand gets uncomfortably hot.
I think that there is a lot more room for innovation in the hardware realm. Whatever happened to VR goggles. We had a couple companies pushing them 10 years ago, and then poof, you don't even hear about them any more. But with our advances in display devices and motion sensing technology it should be possible to create a very affordable set of VR goggles. However, there's nobody doing this. Maybe Nintendo will have to step up to the plate again, and release this. The Wii is a very good family/group gaming system. Maybe next time they will release a personal gaming machine. Not like the VirtualBoy, because that was truly terrible (although I applaud them for thinking outside the box).
What does driving have to be with being a criminal. Are you saying that everyone who drives breaks traffic laws? Well, traffic laws are not criminal offenses. Otherwise, 3/4 of the country wouldn't be able to find jobs because of their criminal record.
Which brings up the question, "what is life?". For millenium we've considered ourselves chosen by god, or at least special among all the animals on earth. However, what if we found another form of life that was as intelligent as we are? What if we found one that was more intelligent. How are we even sure that what we're looking for is going to be anything like us. Who says there won't be a race the size of Smurfs on some other planet. Who says there's no way you could have animals that think and act like humans yet get their energy from the sun and breath carbon dioxide like plants do.
Sounds a lot like DRM to me. I think the military should try this. It's working so well for the music/movie industry.
I won't accept that answer until they've spend 3 days examining each cell.
Are mammoths and elephants even closely enough related for this to work? Wouldn't the body just detect the mammoth embryo (oxymoron) as a foreign substance and try to get rid of it. We have enough trouble with transplanting organs from the same species, I can't imagine you'd have much luck growing a fetus from one species in the womb of another species. Also, since the DNA specimens are so degraded, what's the chance that they could fill in the holes in the DNA with some other animal (possibly an Elephant) like they did in Jurassic Park. However, I think I'd have to recommend against using frog DNA.
Wikipedia article on Draenei in case anybody is as lost as I am. This is the great thing about wikipedia over any other traditional encyclopedia. Although some may say it's not as accurate, or reliable, it definitely has a wider breadth of knowledge and obscure articles than any other encyclopedia I've ever seen.
Asking questions about what people put on their resume should be standard practice, especially when they write a laundry list. First if they really do know all the stuff they listed, it's probably a good idea to make sure you find a position in your company for them, even if it's not really the one your interviewing for, because people like this are few and far between. Second, if they don't really know the technology, then you don't want to hire them at all, in fact you want to rule them out as soon as possible, because the people who lie on / embelish their resume are the kind of people you don't want to be working with.
The resume is unimportant once you get the interview, however, for getting the interview, a good resume and cover letter is essential. Spelling and grammatical errors get an automatic circular file, as do padding the resume with useless information and just listing things that you may have used for a week. If you can't name and describe a significant project in which you used a certain skill, then it doesn't belong on your resume. With the quality of some resumes I really feel sorry for some people, because they will probable never get a job. If you're writing skills are that bad, at least do yourself the favour of getting professional or possibly a friend to help you compile a resume. Something like this is definitely worth it.
I recommend against this. As soon as I see a resume for a programmer position with people saying that they know Photoshop, MS Excel, 3DS Max, Adobe Acrobat (yes, I've seen that on a resume), scheme (I know it's related, but did you ever really use it outside that second year CS class) and other completely unrelated skills, or listing things that I'm sure they aren't really that proficient in, I start to think about how they have nothing of real substance to fill up the resume with and toss it in the garbage. You should be able to demonstrate that you have the skills necessary for the job, and to show what projects you've actually done (for school, fun or employers) and not just pad the resume with every piece of software you've ever used.
I agree with you. I mentioned it before in another post but I'll mention it again. I too work in a small company and you really do get more of a chance to work an wide array of projects when you work in a small company. Everybody I talk to at larger companies has very specific job duties and does very specific (often boring) things. However, I get to work on just about all aspects of my company's product, and I find this very rewarding, and very challenging.
While I find a Jack of all trades very useful myself, and consider myself to be in that category, I don't think a lot of companies are looking for that. Most mid to large size companies like people to do very specific tasks with very specific job descriptions. Somebody who is a jack of all trades would probably fit in a lot better at a small company, which is where I happen to be, because they will have much more opportunity to work in many different areas. Small companies don't have entire teams devoted to database design, UI design, middle tier design, requirements gathering, architecture, testing, and all those other areas of software design, so the people who do work for small companies probably get to see at least a little bit, if not a lot from all those areas. Also remember that the full term is "Jack of all trades, master of none", however, I consider myself to be a "master" or at least really good in quite a few areas, and the all the rest of the "trades" just really help to back that up.
However, if they were able to go to the moon in 1969 and deal with the dust there, where AFAIK they didn't have a sample of lunar dust either, then I think that in 2007 we should have no problem dealing with Martian dust. I find it kind of amazing that we went to the moon so long ago, and yet we are still having people say that the next time we will go to the moon will be 2020, when the first time we went to the moon was 8 years after the first person landed on the moon.
Maybe I'm just really good at Zelda games, but I find Twilight Princess to have a very small chance of sudden death. I've made it to the end of the desert temple, and I have yet to use a single potion. Ok, maybe 1 or 2, but still... I find this style of Zelda games much better than the older Zelda games. I'd much rather be figuring out puzzles and finding my way through maze-like dungeons than worrying about where my next heart was coming from.
I can't remember if it was a limitation on Java specifically, but the JPEG library I was using for image recognition in my univeristy robotics class didn't support multidimensional arrays for accessing pixels. So if you want the to access pixel i in row j of an image that's x * y pixels, you'd have to use image[j*x + i] (or something like that). Also figuring out where a particular pixel was located just based on it's index was equally cumbersome. From that moment on, I decided that working with graphics in Java was terrible.
Still it doesn't add much to the game. Those games wouldn't be any less enjoyable if you took out the customized Miis. Plus, it's not like no other game has ever had customizable characters. It is kind of neat to have the same characters in many games. I think it would be fun to have your Mii show up in Zelda or Mario though. But like I said, Mii's don't really add much to the whole gaming aspect.