Well, need is a non-issue. They're a business, they try to make money. That's what they do.
That said, I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner. Honestly, almost none of the Facebook games are worth a dime without Facebook. The service brings in the customers, handles all the viral advertising (word of mouth), etc. To put it bluntly, Farmville is not a good game... it's Facebook that "puts the asses in the seats". It exists because of Facebook, and only because of Facebook. A 30% cut to the company that makes any of it even remotely viable doesn't seem like an unfair percentage.
Anyone that doesn't like it is free to walk away. But they won't, because despite the fact that they've gotten a free ride, they're worthless without FB. The only other place these craptastic app's could even begin to exist is in the iphone marketplace. And even there they wouldn't do nearly the kind of business they do on facebook, and would have to rewrite their trashy flash games for iOS.
Consider yourself lucky if Experts Exchange isn't showing up like a plague in your search results.
That crap where they show the googlebot one thing and regular visitors something very different (and awful), makes me wish Stackoverflow, etc. will end up putting the final nail in their coffin. In a pinch I've used the google cache to get at the information, but what they're doing is a shitty google cheat and they should've gotten the ban hammer a long time ago.
Also, what is "waste"? is funding fundamental science waste? is funding liberal arts waste? are the likes of the FDA waste? is paying for some dubious piece of art in your own town waste? is paying people to check for fraud waste, or is the fraud the largest cause of waste?
You make a good point. People used to be able to have common sense discussions about this kind of thing. Today it's so polarized that you can't even have the conversation without it turning into a screaming match.
We used to be able to say that 6 workers and 4 trucks filling one pothole over 8 hours is wasteful. Now we see it all the time and nobody does anything. I live in Chicagoland, and we recently found out that numerous gov employees that are now in prison (there are lots here) still get their salaries paid out. Or Maria Pappas, our treasurer, who pays her driver $97,000/yr and her cleaning lady $57,000/yr, at our expense. Or $18 million to redesign Recovery.gov. You're right about many of these being small things... but this kind of waste seems to permeate nearly everything our state and federal governments do if you choose to look for it.
I don't want to get rid of road work projects, or Recovery.gov. I just don't want there to be a 7,000% mark-up on every government project, by way of both profit and waste, just because they can. I'd think many of us could agree on this... but sadly, nobody does anything.
I really don't want to take music class away from kids and I don't want to repeal any environmental legislation. I think both art and science are important. I just want someone with some common sense to do something about the obvious problems.
This "feature" required explicit permission from a user on a per-application basis. I sincerely doubt the entire userbase of Facebook independently visited and authorized each 3rd party they use to glean this data over a 3-day window.
They may be selling information out-of-band to someone, but generally this information is not available to facebook advertisers. You can target groups of people based on some criteria.
As far as 3rd party co's accessing your info when authorized, this stuff is not secret and is worth keeping an eye on. As many have said before me, it is not in FB's interest to notify all their users when there's a change in what devs can and can't access.
It's Apple. They'll crank up the resources on the 2 a bit, then they'll release software updates for all the ipads that make the first one borderline unusable, and leave a few bits out for old ipad users, just like the did with the iphones. Those users will be compelled to go get the new one "cause it's faster and does more stuff".
Boiling frog, good sir. It's not the sum of what's happened over the last decade, it's that we lose one thing at a time to seemingly justifiable causes.
Each of those had a reason that seemed sane at the time. Sad though, I know.
I like both for different reasons. First, the Kindle is tiny. It weighs less than a book, and is about as thin as a pencil. Even so, the screen size is bigger than most novels. As you no-doubt know, I can put a gajillion books on the device. It's readability is about as good as paper. The ebooks never fall apart. If I don't mind having a DRM'd one, I can get a couple sample chapters on a whim, read them at my leisure, then decide if I want to buy the whole ebook later. Every one I've ever bought was considerably less than the paper version. The reader also will play my music while I'm reading, if I want. I can adjust the print size on the fly. Many of my ebooks can be sent to friends without a problem, and without having to meet up with them in person. I can also get my news feeds, newspapers, etc. on the thing automatically. Also, I can use a bookmark in my browser to send an article to my kindle to read later, just one click. Ebooks make it much easier to find something in a technical book. They always lay flat. Paper books have stronger DRM than DRM'd ebooks. Also, they are much harder to send to a friend. And while my friend has it, I don't. I do like having paper books on my bookshelf. Not sure why, but I just like seeing them there. They can't be repo'd by Amazon, though many of my ebooks couldn't be anyways.
That's a fair point. But the other way to look at it is, understanding how things work and verifying it has some value. Considering we spent $18 Million on a website redesign for Recovery.gov, and apparently are spending $500 Million on the SSA for a system that won't work... it seems like the $100 Million for the Tevatron would have been pretty reasonable.
Also, aren't they idling the LHC for a year? Seems like it would be useful to have a working collider in the meantime.
The article says it would be a contender for the F-22, and calls it the world's only fully operational stealth fighter. Why don't the f-117 or even the f-35's count?
I haven't prognosticated much here (or at least not successfully) but it might be fair to guess that any government project with a price tag over $1M has some element of shadiness in it, and goes up exponentially for each additional million.
If you find a project worth $700 million dollars that doesn't have shady business deals going on in the background, then you've got surprising news.:)
Maybe there's a distinction here. I don't think I have a problem with DRM. I have a problem with paying someone and getting additional aggravations in return.
Steam's DRM has never aggravated me, and it offers me some added utility in return. Changing machines or rebuilding... Steam has always "just worked" for me. My stuff is kept together. I have one interface for managing gaming software. Contact with gaming friends is consolidated through steam, etc. It's not much, but it's something. And I guess I'm not worried about Valve shutting off access to my games... though I could see why more paranoid types might.
I get that there are people who have philosophical issues with DRM, but it seems that many of us look at the whole thing with a more practical eye and judge accordingly.
It still blows my mind that people can be capable enough to run a little outfit like this, and yet be so amazingly dumb. You know you're going to get caught when you sell this stuff from the US, under your own name, on big name websites.
I've had a lot of these kinds of classes here in the states. Attendance optional, everything was directly from the assigned textbook, multiple choice tests only.
At first I was all about these kinds of arrangements. What eventually got to me, was that I was doing just fine in those classes without ever being taught anything. That meant my (expensive for me) tuition felt like it was spent on a testing center. Maybe it's an outdated idea, but I feel like you pay a school to be taught things by a professional so you'll learn more than you ever could have on your own.
Maybe it's more of a class size / personal attention problem. That was usually the arrangement for large classes.
For everyday exams that HS and college undergrads take, I haven't seen this. Of course my estimations on this are just as anecdotal. That said, if this method kicks out lots of false positives, people will no-doubt notice and adjust the responses accordingly.
Also, just a thought, essay questions are hard to cheat on. They just require someone to actually read them critically.
Incomplete, sure. There's no way to include everything. It's simply not possible, computing power aside. Data sources for "everything" just don't exist for the model to leverage.
That said, "incomplete" doesn't necessarily translates into unusably flawed. That depends entirely on what you're looking at and what conclusions you draw.
Short of some kind of console hack, I'd guess Microsoft could make it nearly impossible for customers to run the game. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd think they have every right to do this.
Though the other big question is, if they're happy with Activision selling many millions of copies of COD games, where kids run around murdering each other with guns, hatchets, napalm, etc... how is a sex game totally inappropriate for their "family platform"? No doubt it reflects the opinions of the market, but it seems a little bizarre to me that we have such a problem with sex, but not extreme violence.
Personally, I have no problem with either. Maybe I'm messed up.
For those who don't know, they actually did this for the Microsoft Courier. I'm usually disinterested in Microsoft products. They're usually conservative, unimaginative knock-offs of other products in their space. But in that case, they nailed it. It was a device people looked at and thought, "this is something I really, really want."
Then they killed the project. Foot... meet bullet.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, need is a non-issue. They're a business, they try to make money. That's what they do.
That said, I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner. Honestly, almost none of the Facebook games are worth a dime without Facebook. The service brings in the customers, handles all the viral advertising (word of mouth), etc. To put it bluntly, Farmville is not a good game... it's Facebook that "puts the asses in the seats". It exists because of Facebook, and only because of Facebook. A 30% cut to the company that makes any of it even remotely viable doesn't seem like an unfair percentage.
Anyone that doesn't like it is free to walk away. But they won't, because despite the fact that they've gotten a free ride, they're worthless without FB. The only other place these craptastic app's could even begin to exist is in the iphone marketplace. And even there they wouldn't do nearly the kind of business they do on facebook, and would have to rewrite their trashy flash games for iOS.
Yeah it's cool. Not practical (I was looking for ways to fry my neighbors stereo), but interesting.
I'd think you're better off with a laser and targeting system to blind the drone. No HE involved. :/
Consider yourself lucky if Experts Exchange isn't showing up like a plague in your search results.
That crap where they show the googlebot one thing and regular visitors something very different (and awful), makes me wish Stackoverflow, etc. will end up putting the final nail in their coffin. In a pinch I've used the google cache to get at the information, but what they're doing is a shitty google cheat and they should've gotten the ban hammer a long time ago.
Do places like SpaceX skip the background checks? That doesn't seem wise.
Also, what is "waste"? is funding fundamental science waste? is funding liberal arts waste? are the likes of the FDA waste? is paying for some dubious piece of art in your own town waste? is paying people to check for fraud waste, or is the fraud the largest cause of waste?
You make a good point. People used to be able to have common sense discussions about this kind of thing. Today it's so polarized that you can't even have the conversation without it turning into a screaming match.
We used to be able to say that 6 workers and 4 trucks filling one pothole over 8 hours is wasteful. Now we see it all the time and nobody does anything. I live in Chicagoland, and we recently found out that numerous gov employees that are now in prison (there are lots here) still get their salaries paid out. Or Maria Pappas, our treasurer, who pays her driver $97,000/yr and her cleaning lady $57,000/yr, at our expense. Or $18 million to redesign Recovery.gov. You're right about many of these being small things... but this kind of waste seems to permeate nearly everything our state and federal governments do if you choose to look for it.
I don't want to get rid of road work projects, or Recovery.gov. I just don't want there to be a 7,000% mark-up on every government project, by way of both profit and waste, just because they can. I'd think many of us could agree on this... but sadly, nobody does anything.
I really don't want to take music class away from kids and I don't want to repeal any environmental legislation. I think both art and science are important. I just want someone with some common sense to do something about the obvious problems.
This "feature" required explicit permission from a user on a per-application basis. I sincerely doubt the entire userbase of Facebook independently visited and authorized each 3rd party they use to glean this data over a 3-day window.
They may be selling information out-of-band to someone, but generally this information is not available to facebook advertisers. You can target groups of people based on some criteria.
As far as 3rd party co's accessing your info when authorized, this stuff is not secret and is worth keeping an eye on. As many have said before me, it is not in FB's interest to notify all their users when there's a change in what devs can and can't access.
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/446
I bet it would be fun to see... if they hadn't hosted the site on the device too.
It's Apple. They'll crank up the resources on the 2 a bit, then they'll release software updates for all the ipads that make the first one borderline unusable, and leave a few bits out for old ipad users, just like the did with the iphones. Those users will be compelled to go get the new one "cause it's faster and does more stuff".
Boiling frog, good sir. It's not the sum of what's happened over the last decade, it's that we lose one thing at a time to seemingly justifiable causes.
Each of those had a reason that seemed sane at the time. Sad though, I know.
I like both for different reasons. First, the Kindle is tiny. It weighs less than a book, and is about as thin as a pencil. Even so, the screen size is bigger than most novels. As you no-doubt know, I can put a gajillion books on the device. It's readability is about as good as paper. The ebooks never fall apart. If I don't mind having a DRM'd one, I can get a couple sample chapters on a whim, read them at my leisure, then decide if I want to buy the whole ebook later. Every one I've ever bought was considerably less than the paper version. The reader also will play my music while I'm reading, if I want. I can adjust the print size on the fly. Many of my ebooks can be sent to friends without a problem, and without having to meet up with them in person. I can also get my news feeds, newspapers, etc. on the thing automatically. Also, I can use a bookmark in my browser to send an article to my kindle to read later, just one click. Ebooks make it much easier to find something in a technical book. They always lay flat. Paper books have stronger DRM than DRM'd ebooks. Also, they are much harder to send to a friend. And while my friend has it, I don't. I do like having paper books on my bookshelf. Not sure why, but I just like seeing them there. They can't be repo'd by Amazon, though many of my ebooks couldn't be anyways.
Both have their advantages.
That's a fair point. But the other way to look at it is, understanding how things work and verifying it has some value. Considering we spent $18 Million on a website redesign for Recovery.gov, and apparently are spending $500 Million on the SSA for a system that won't work... it seems like the $100 Million for the Tevatron would have been pretty reasonable.
Also, aren't they idling the LHC for a year? Seems like it would be useful to have a working collider in the meantime.
Wooooooosh! ;)
The article says it would be a contender for the F-22, and calls it the world's only fully operational stealth fighter. Why don't the f-117 or even the f-35's count?
I once heard someone comment that IT folks' personal machines are often like plumbers and carpenters homes, we often have some pretty haggard shit.
We can get by on less, we worry too much about invisible details and no project is ever finished.
If a Revue is $300 and an AppleTV is $100, it seems like a $200 device is aimed at both of them.
I haven't prognosticated much here (or at least not successfully) but it might be fair to guess that any government project with a price tag over $1M has some element of shadiness in it, and goes up exponentially for each additional million.
If you find a project worth $700 million dollars that doesn't have shady business deals going on in the background, then you've got surprising news. :)
Maybe there's a distinction here. I don't think I have a problem with DRM. I have a problem with paying someone and getting additional aggravations in return.
Steam's DRM has never aggravated me, and it offers me some added utility in return. Changing machines or rebuilding... Steam has always "just worked" for me. My stuff is kept together. I have one interface for managing gaming software. Contact with gaming friends is consolidated through steam, etc. It's not much, but it's something. And I guess I'm not worried about Valve shutting off access to my games... though I could see why more paranoid types might.
I get that there are people who have philosophical issues with DRM, but it seems that many of us look at the whole thing with a more practical eye and judge accordingly.
It still blows my mind that people can be capable enough to run a little outfit like this, and yet be so amazingly dumb. You know you're going to get caught when you sell this stuff from the US, under your own name, on big name websites.
I've had a lot of these kinds of classes here in the states. Attendance optional, everything was directly from the assigned textbook, multiple choice tests only.
At first I was all about these kinds of arrangements. What eventually got to me, was that I was doing just fine in those classes without ever being taught anything. That meant my (expensive for me) tuition felt like it was spent on a testing center. Maybe it's an outdated idea, but I feel like you pay a school to be taught things by a professional so you'll learn more than you ever could have on your own.
Maybe it's more of a class size / personal attention problem. That was usually the arrangement for large classes.
For everyday exams that HS and college undergrads take, I haven't seen this. Of course my estimations on this are just as anecdotal. That said, if this method kicks out lots of false positives, people will no-doubt notice and adjust the responses accordingly.
Also, just a thought, essay questions are hard to cheat on. They just require someone to actually read them critically.
Incomplete, sure. There's no way to include everything. It's simply not possible, computing power aside. Data sources for "everything" just don't exist for the model to leverage.
That said, "incomplete" doesn't necessarily translates into unusably flawed. That depends entirely on what you're looking at and what conclusions you draw.
Short of some kind of console hack, I'd guess Microsoft could make it nearly impossible for customers to run the game. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd think they have every right to do this.
Though the other big question is, if they're happy with Activision selling many millions of copies of COD games, where kids run around murdering each other with guns, hatchets, napalm, etc... how is a sex game totally inappropriate for their "family platform"? No doubt it reflects the opinions of the market, but it seems a little bizarre to me that we have such a problem with sex, but not extreme violence.
Personally, I have no problem with either. Maybe I'm messed up.
The even shorter way of saying all of this is... it was boring as hell.
That said, it was finally starting to pick up, but only at the very end. Too bad.
For those who don't know, they actually did this for the Microsoft Courier. I'm usually disinterested in Microsoft products. They're usually conservative, unimaginative knock-offs of other products in their space. But in that case, they nailed it. It was a device people looked at and thought, "this is something I really, really want."
Then they killed the project. Foot... meet bullet.
http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft%20courier
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFQWc79TYcU