I recommend a single article recommending that people keep an eye on TED instead of individual users, who apparently have just discovered TED, submitting "articles" suggesting everybody watch the latest one they stumbled upon. Actually I'd like to recommend people do that for a number of web sites, like LifeHacker and Wired. I'm glad you just discovered TED, but the fact that you are now aware of it doesn't qualify as news.
I discover new information on the internet every day and I realize that just because it's the first time it's come into my periphery doesn't make it newsworthy. Just last night I watched a video about OOP by Dan Ingalls, as great as it was and however new to me, it was 20 years old to the rest of the world.
The idea is crap. I don't even know how these ideas get out of someone's mouth without setting warnings off in the brain's "Bad Idea" filter. Like any good programmer, people need to treat warnings as errors and fix them before they infect the whole system.
As a society, we don't need more babysitting. Leave us the hell alone.
We're turning into Demolition Man. I can't believe I live in a society that could produce such a poignant story and fail to grasp the meaning of it. Britain wants to ban salt, we've already banned trans fatty acids, we have our leaders preaching that their should be limits on free speech, cigarettes have almost reached criminal status, and it's illegal to treat terminally ill patients with marijuana, god forbid they miss out on all the pain and anguish of slow deterioration. Yet we're still talking about what other areas need restricting. I'll decide what's good for me and however I end up, it's on me. Big brother can piss off.
In the words of Justice Stewart, "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
I don't need a true definition of intelligence to know that computers can't lie. An adaptive algorithm/learning mechanism may have produced a generation of computers that behave paradoxically, but they're not lying. It's communication module may not be synchronized with its behavior module, but it's still not lying.
It's no different than when a DVR box says that "Seinfeld" is on but it's streaming a football game. The box isn't "lying", it's just that the data coming in isn't synchronized with the show list. In order to lie, the DVR would need to intend for me to believe something other than what it's showing, but it has no intentions at all, it's purely reactive in relation to the inputs it's given.
A robot can't lie because it's a human concept. If you have a watch that says it's 2:00pm when it's actually 3:00pm, it's not lying, it's just broken. In order to lie, it would need to have the intention of deceiving. As computers do not yet have consciousness as we'd recognize it, computers don't have "intention", and therefore cannot lie.
Computers can't lie any more than they can fall in love, meditate, or regret.
I've long felt that "Generation Me" has some serious mental problems, like being narcissists in almost every clinical sense of the word up to even being sociopaths.
What really gets me is the sheer number of people I've heard that blame CES or vendors for the "prank" by leaving themselves exposed and not covering the receivers with electrical tape or some other method of blocking tampering. I hesitate to use the word prank because disrupting people's live demonstrations and presentations is a prank in the same way shooting a tennis player with a pellet gun during Wimbledon would be a prank. (Which, of course, would be the player's fault for not donning battle armor).
I'm sure it was hilarious and I just lack a decent sense of humor. I bet those people who stayed up late into the night practicing their delivery, timing, and preparing for questions thought it was hilarious too. The people who flew over seas to attend CES and make a presentation probably had their sides spitting.
It's too bad the "reporter" was banned and not Gizmodo for supporting him. A prank is either something you do to a friend who's going to understand your joke, or if done to strangers, is insignificant. Controlling a mostly unused TV to baffle people as they wander by would have been funny. Interrupting live presentations goes into a whole class of its own.
In my mind, no matter how obvious an exploit is doesn't make it the fault of the victim. If someone leaves their keys in their car ignition, it's not too smart, but if a person takes the car they're still a thief, not an unsung hero.
Okay, that's all of my ranting for now. I'm gonna go pull a prank on this guy I saw walking by, once he hits the ER he'll remember that hockey masks prevent busted noses.
"...governed by Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2."
I think it's important for people to understand that scientific theories and laws don't "govern", they explain things. Einstein's theories don't direct or influence the universe, they're just an observation on how the universe appears to work.
I know correct grammar on the internet has become a huge point of controversy, but when referring to science there's too much public confusion about how things work. Using words like "govern" in relation to scientific theories is a step towards lending credence to Intelligent Design, like scientific laws are control mechanisms of some "Great Designer".
Will the digital tools be available for Linux / Mac users?
My biggest concern is the availability of the digital tools in non-Windows environments. That's about the only thing that could sour the whole deal for me. I'm hoping they're web-based or Java-based so they can run on any operating system.
The game pipeline isn't the weak link in the chain. Blender, Crystal Space, Irrlicht, Ogre3D, et al. They're all mature products that can produce content at least as good as 95% of the triple A titles that hit shelves every year. Compared to their commercial counterparts (Unreal, Quake, Lithtech, etc.), they stack up very well. The technology works.
Honestly, I don't even know at what point OSS has failed to attract game developers. Maybe it's that the available learning resources aren't well maintained, but wherever the gap is, it's certainly not a problem with the tools.
I don't see this becoming a "game" so much as it'll be a technology demo. The same way Elephants Dream was just masturbation material for artists. There wasn't anything in the way of real story being told, unless you really reach for some meaning in it. It's 11 minutes of "That's neat", but I'm never going to watch it again like Lord of the Rings or X-Men.
I foresee roughly the same thing here, a bunch of people get together to show how deeply functional each of their subsystems is. Most of the "game" won't even have a purpose other than to show you how great Programmer X did collision detection, particle physics, etc. You'll be able to spend 5 minutes shooting cannon balls at a stack of barrels and watching them smash but otherwise there won't be much to do.
Maybe it's pessimistic of me, but that's been my opinion of most games over the last decade. Everyone seems to be more proud of the intricacy of their work and doesn't understand why you think the game sucks, they think you just don't "get it". It's like they spend 3 years hand-crafting a #2 pencil and when I write a sentence then throw it away they're like "Hey, that thing was a work of art! I spent 13 months renting equipment at NASA to insert the lead using a bleeding-edge particle injector!" and I'm like "Yeah, but it still had one of those hard erasers that just smears what you're trying to erase so it's no good."
I really subscribe to the idea that you need a single visionary to design a game. Otherwise it just becomes a pile of interesting components but it has no gestalt form.
The alternative I'd do is to release Kubuntu 8.04 with LTS using KDE 3.5 for the desktop environment, and place KDE 4.0 in the universe repository. That way, people who know about, and want, KDE 4.0 could get it easily. People with LTS already can't receive support for software obtained from the universe repository, so it creates no conflicts at all.
I think this move is a mistake because the goal of Ubuntu has been to lessen the gap between non-technical users and Linux gurus. This introduces another layer of complexity for those non-technical users. I think it's a mistake to mix LTS and non-LTS in same-numbered/named versions of the OS. They have a variety of options here and I think they picked the worst of the lot. They should just add it to a community maintained repository or a backport from the next version.
Someone with an active interest in Linux isn't likely to be confused, but there's a growing number of Linux users who don't follow Linux as an interest, it's just the thing on their computer. More than most other distros, those are the people that Ubuntu has been trying to cater to. I think they chose the worst possible option given their target audience.
It might seem ridiculous to think a seemingly minor detail could confuse or scare off people, but after years of working in support (and I think any support representatives would agree) you might be surprised at how easily people form mental blocks and shut down (mentally) when faced with any computer-related issue. When you walk someone through a process and a button doesn't say exactly what you indicate, they panic. To them "END" is not the same as "FINISH" or "DONE, even though they should all mentally register as a word signifying completion. And then they won't even tell you the name of the button that appeared on their screen, they'll only tell you that they don't see the one you said, like you're playing some sort of sadistic "I Spy" riddle game. Sorry for the digression. Old trauma.
(I'm not knocking Ubuntu for catering to non-technical users. I prefer Ubuntu myself, though I've been a Linux user much longer.)
You think my knowledge of the history of Netscape and the browser wars is faulty?
Even in viewing my post, I can't seem to locate any mention at all of the browser wars. Upon further review, I also don't see where I mentioned any bit of the history of Netscape, save for the bit about spawning Mozilla. Being that was the only mention of Netscape history, I can only infer you're asserting they did not create Mozilla, is that what you're saying?
My post was almost entirely about AOL and their treatment of the brands they acquired.
The one time they let one of their projects breathe, it turned into Mozilla. Once they realized it wasn't their property that was inherently faulty, they tightened that grip right back up figuring if they just squeezed hard enough maybe they could make another diamond. They're so desperate to turn everything they own into a revenue generator, they'll do it at the expense of the product itself. Yes, every company needs its projects to make money for them, but you can't sacrifice your racing horse for good luck in the race.
They only think of their products in terms of themselves, they don't look at them from a customer viewpoint. I don't think the people in charge at AOL ever stopped to ask "Why would someone want Netscape?" they ask "How can we make Netscape represent us?"
It's like they think of their products as sales reps. Forget that big deal you landed 5 years ago, how are your numbers this week? They want it to make another big score, but without any resources. Coffee is for closers.
Netscape had numerous chances to work its way into people's hearts and minds but they never added a single feature people would actually want. Every feature they added was self serving. The company is just all backwards; they don't want to make great products, they want their products to make them great.
Maybe it's just a semantic difference, but there can never be too much information. Information is useful, it can be easily sorted and digested both mentally and algorithmically. The problem I foresee (and I think it's been here for quite some time) is that there's just far too much data on the internet with almost no value as information.
Duplication, an age old engineering problem, rears its ugly head once again. The massive amount of duplication caused by sites like digg and youtube dramatically decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. For every topic there are 100+ pages added to Digg (and consequently to the page count of the internet) without really adding anything of value to the internet, the same goes for youtube, every video is duplicated and posted by 100 users. It's like having an elevator with a 1000 button panel to service a 5 floor building. Everyone using the elevator gets to add their own button. Operation of the system becomes a more complex task than doing things manually.
The social networking sites seem like a good idea at first, but even if the information you want happens to be there, it's obscured in a vast sea of uncorrelated data.
Jef Raskin dove into this problem in his book The Humane Interface. The idea that there should essentially only be one avenue to each piece of information. The interface on a phone is a good model of what the internet as a whole should look like. On a conceptual level, there's only one way to dial each person, enter their number in the correct sequence. It produces a very quick feedback, either you dialed correctly and got the person you intended to get, or you dialed wrong and don't get them. You don't need to critically evaluate your result.
On the internet, results are very fuzzy. Even with advanced searches, the results often need to be critically examined without even being given the data you need to do so. Crucial data is often missing such as date of publication, author, or any citations. These problems have relegated the majority of the internet to the domain of entertainment. It can only be used for serious work under strict conditions. Things will stay that way until something is done to change the internet from a giant data storage facility into an information catalog.
"push ODF"? It's an open standard. Pushing implies some obligation on the part of the recipient. A proprietary format saddles you with obligation, because it's not possible to read a proprietary format without getting proprietary software. Advocating an open format is the exact opposite of pushing, it frees you from obligations because it becomes possible for any existing application to implement the functionality. A web browser is free to implement the capability of reading ODF. The open format isn't stopping you from using Word format, or whatever format you currently use, it's freeing everyone else. It doesn't even make sense that you somehow interpret other people's freedom as giving some kind of burden to you.
ODF is the document equivilant of generic drugs. You can still have your brand name if you want it, but those of us who aren't buckling under the weight of our fortune can have a low-cost alternative.
I'm not even going to bother with it. Maybe I could figure it out, maybe it's too tough for me, it doesn't really matter. If they were offering a guaranteed position (say 90 days guaranteed?) and a stated salary/benefits package to the people who can figure it out, I'd get to work. When you're sure you've got the best hand, you put your money in the pot. But they're not brave enough to put something at stake here. A game in which my prize is the opportunity to find out what my prize could be.
I despise the entire resume/interview process anyway, adding another step does not make it seem more attractive to me. The prize should be that the winners get to avoid the normal tedium of getting hired.
In my opinion, it's a generic problem with the entire hiring process. Companies focus on getting great resume writers and great interviewers. This all says very little about the job skills of a person unless the job entails writing resumes and getting interviewed.
The entire resume/interview process is designed to be very rewarding for sociopaths, but for normal people just trying to get a job and do something well, it's a minefield where every question has a double meaning, and you're expected to effortlessly rattle off answers to the dumbest questions you've ever heard.
Intelligent people don't want to play semantic games with an HR representative. It's hard enough honing your craft, but trying to hone the skill of convincing someone you're a good choice when they don't even really know what it is you do is another thing entirely. Companies who use a traditional resume/interview process (which isn't so traditional as it's only been around a few decades) don't want skilled workers, they want con men. They want to talk to someone who can spin them a tale that'll knock their socks off, even if they can't do the work.
The best programmers and IT workers I've ever met weren't the most charming people in the world. They're overweight, unkempt, and fucking brilliant. They've got personality problems that make them interview very poorly. Nervousness, short attention span, they seem angry or aggressive, "mister literal syndrome", but if you put them in their element, they swim like a shark, they can fix a program to any specification you deliver faster than all the other people you'll interview combined. And they're exactly the people the resume/interview process is designed to weed out.
Front-loading the interview process with tests or puzzles doesn't increase the quality of the candidate pool, it's just another mine for the good candidate to step on. I even fault Google for justifying this same dubious process. The great and innovative companies in the world wouldn't even exist if their originators had to go through the same process.
If you want to hire great programmers, the person who is doing the hiring should be able to tell when they're talking to someone who's a great programmer. Ask relevant questions that don't have stock answers, don't ask generic personality profile garbage like "What's your greatest weakness?" Ask them if they've ever used a bitshift operator and what they've used it for. Ask them about their process for algorithm building, ask about famous programmers they admire and why, ask them what programs they use for their personal stuff and why they chose them. Those are all things a skilled programmer could answer, and a poser with great interviewing skills would choke on.
On a serious note, I'm surprised the scientific community hasn't been faster to adopt the "electric universe" theories. It really does seem to be another valuable piece of the physics puzzle, it's a shame that it's mostly being ignored, even as new evidence validates many of the theories on a consistent basis. I guess it's just that scientists are scared that it replaces their existing knowledge rather than extending it.
The majority of illegal downloads are a result of commercial enterprises refusing to match demand. They want to have it both ways, they want to make money but they don't want to deliver the product the way the consumer wants it.
They want you to pay to see a movie and they also want to dictate every circumstance surrounding the viewing. What chair you'll sit in, what you'll eat and drink, you can't go to the restroom without missing part of the movie, the location you'll see the movie, and what time you'll see it.
If I'm going to pay to watch a movie, I should get to determine all the surrounding circumstances. If they truly want people to pay to watch movies, they need to seriously relax their restrictions. Offer every new release for download and permanent media purchase. And purchase should be the name of the game, not license or rent. I want to be able to watch whenever I damn well please, if I get interrupted I want to be able to come back in 2 weeks and watch it again. If I like it I should be able to watch it a dozen times.
Licensing schemes and restrictions are all about greed. It has nothing to do with giving the consumer what they want, it's all about milking the consumer for every last dime while giving them as little as possible.
Until the entertainment industry loosens its grip, pirated material is going to be rampant. Even meeting customer demands isn't going to eliminate piracy entirely, but it would reduce it to an insignificant level.
The problem with the "already has a pile of money" idea is that it can be said about virtually everyone. People in third world countries view all Americans as having piles of money in comparison, to change the situation, should your job even pay you? I mean you already have a pile of money, it's not like you need more.
It's just a ridiculous concept that there should be a limit on how much compensation one is entitled to earn. If you do more work, you get more compensation, how much you already have isn't material. By extension, if you produce higher value work, you receive more compensation. (Whether or not you're a Harry Potter fan doesn't matter, as a society we've laid down the dollars to show how much we value it).
It reminds me of Neil Gaiman's situation. He's had a long running dispute with DC, he doesn't get compensated for international sales. Sure he's made a lot of money from his work, but that doesn't mean it's okay to cut him off because he has an arbitrary amount of money someone determined is "enough".
I really have to agree with J.K. Rowling on this. The amount of money she made from the series is immaterial. Actions don't become morally right or wrong based on how much money you've made, unless you're a psychopath. The simple fact is, the person who wrote the lexicon wants to make money because it's easier to expand on an already popular work than it is to come up with an original mythos, make it popular, and then write a lexicon for it.
If he wanted to undertake the project commercially, the appropriate path would have been to approach the author and publisher and pitch them the idea of a joint project. What he's doing is the equivalent of selling a product called Pepsi Snacks because it's easier to sell something if you associate it with an already popular product. If you just sold "Bob's Snacks", it doesn't have any immediate appeal.
Yeah, what a bitch, all she does is write best-selling novels and give huge chunks of money to charity. That's just terrible. I bet there's a special layer of hell reserved for people like that.
"You're not just representing yourself; you're representing [females] with a capital F." ~ Katy Dickinson
That kind of mentality is damaging to anyone's career objectives, personal satisfaction, or mental state in general. You can't approach every task with the attitude "My performance here represents all [insert group]kind!" It's just unrealistic to live your life thinking each action is being used to size up an arbitrary group you may belong to. It's damaging to yourself because every minor failure is perceived as a global failure for all of "your kind", and failures are bound to be far more plentiful than successes, just by definition. You fail a thousand times on the way to every goal, but you only succeed once, when you actually achieve the goal. In this case she's talking about women. Well, women the world over aren't going to be there to congratulate you every time you successfully check-in a working patch or every time you you pitch an idea someone likes. And if you're not getting praise from all the women of the world for everything you do right, it only reasons you shouldn't carry the burden of guilt for all the things you do wrong.
Consider someone like Phil Ivey. He's not working to be a great black poker player, he's just working to be a great poker player. When he had rough years, black people weren't globally down-trodden because of him, so why would he feel like a champion of the black people when he does well? I doubt he does. He probably feels great when he does well, he hones his skills, and he tries to improve his game for completely personal reasons.
It's just not healthy to shoulder the responsibility for half the planet. At most I try to think I'm making things easier for the next person, but not all people everywhere.
You make a good point and I agree with that. For the most part, I'm pro-consumer. In a lot of ways I think the law gives companies too much leeway and unfairly penalizes consumers by allowing companies to accept all the reward without any responsibility. Like with software producers being able to to say they're not responsible for what their software does. They want all the praise if their software does something unique, groundbreaking, or cutting-edge, but then if it erases you're hard drive they say "We're not responsible for that...". Or they want applause for their program because it sorts lists faster than any algorithm in history but if you point out a bug they're quick as Billy the Kid when they sling "It's just a beta version" at you.
Anyway, I've digressed quite a bit. Point was, I'm pro-consumer. But in this instance, the behavior is clearly a violation of theater rules, and like you said, the usher or theater manager has no responsibility to determine, on the spot, exactly how much was recorded, why, and when and why the camera was being used. They have no way of knowing the camera was just turned on. For all they know, it was cleverly hidden under a coat or something and she was just moving it out halfway through the movie to get a better angle or something. The legal system can sort out the specifics of the incident and determine if something criminal occurred.
"Let's not even consider that these questions have been asked and answered[1] for years with the iPod."
Yes, let us not consider it because we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years.
"The iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, but it is replaceable. This is the same as all iPods for the last several years."
Again, we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years. Replaceable but not user-replaceable isn't acceptable to many people, including myself. Why should the plaintiff be expected to be knowledgeable about Apple technology? If he's looking for a cell phone and he buys one that seems to be the best of the bunch, expecting it to have a user-replaceable battery like virtually every other cell phone doesn't seem like an outrageous expectation. If your cell phone is your primary means of communication, having to take it in for service to get the battery replaced can be unacceptable, putting you out of contact for days while you wait for service to be completed.
"It's also utterly and ridiculously false to say that a new battery is required every year."
Lithium-Ion batteries, especially under heavy use and recharge cycles, have their performance severely degrade after a year.
"As to the "difficulty" of finding the information on Apple's site"
"Additionally, asking any Apple retail store, customer service representative, dealer, authorized service provider, etc., will yield a direct and immediate answer about battery replacement."
Yes, the answer is easy to find once you realize what the problem is. Before you know there's a problem, it's not immediately obvious. The same goes for asking a rep. It's a very specific question. You're obviously an iPod fan, you seem to think of it as an iPod+, but consider that it's being marketed at people who think it's a fancy cell phone, people who may not know about Apple's engineering and decision making processes.
"Just pretend that the battery replacement costs $29 more"
Why should someone have to pay $29 extra for a new battery? Why would you even consider that an acceptable additional cost?
"The funniest thing of all is that most iPhone owners won't ever even want or need to replace their batteries. They'll have the same slow degradation everyone experiences with lithium ion batteries over time, and before they'd even care or consider replacing it even if it was user-replaceable, they'll be on their next phone."
That's more of a "Generation Y" mentality. Some of us older folk don't run out to get the latest greatest model of everything. Some of us make periodic upgrades when there's truly a major breakthrough, but largely don't change devices until there's a pressing need.
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend a single article recommending that people keep an eye on TED instead of individual users, who apparently have just discovered TED, submitting "articles" suggesting everybody watch the latest one they stumbled upon. Actually I'd like to recommend people do that for a number of web sites, like LifeHacker and Wired. I'm glad you just discovered TED, but the fact that you are now aware of it doesn't qualify as news.
I discover new information on the internet every day and I realize that just because it's the first time it's come into my periphery doesn't make it newsworthy. Just last night I watched a video about OOP by Dan Ingalls, as great as it was and however new to me, it was 20 years old to the rest of the world.
The idea is crap. I don't even know how these ideas get out of someone's mouth without setting warnings off in the brain's "Bad Idea" filter. Like any good programmer, people need to treat warnings as errors and fix them before they infect the whole system.
As a society, we don't need more babysitting. Leave us the hell alone.
We're turning into Demolition Man. I can't believe I live in a society that could produce such a poignant story and fail to grasp the meaning of it. Britain wants to ban salt, we've already banned trans fatty acids, we have our leaders preaching that their should be limits on free speech, cigarettes have almost reached criminal status, and it's illegal to treat terminally ill patients with marijuana, god forbid they miss out on all the pain and anguish of slow deterioration. Yet we're still talking about what other areas need restricting. I'll decide what's good for me and however I end up, it's on me. Big brother can piss off.
In the words of Justice Stewart, "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
I don't need a true definition of intelligence to know that computers can't lie. An adaptive algorithm/learning mechanism may have produced a generation of computers that behave paradoxically, but they're not lying. It's communication module may not be synchronized with its behavior module, but it's still not lying.
It's no different than when a DVR box says that "Seinfeld" is on but it's streaming a football game. The box isn't "lying", it's just that the data coming in isn't synchronized with the show list. In order to lie, the DVR would need to intend for me to believe something other than what it's showing, but it has no intentions at all, it's purely reactive in relation to the inputs it's given.
A robot can't lie because it's a human concept. If you have a watch that says it's 2:00pm when it's actually 3:00pm, it's not lying, it's just broken. In order to lie, it would need to have the intention of deceiving. As computers do not yet have consciousness as we'd recognize it, computers don't have "intention", and therefore cannot lie. Computers can't lie any more than they can fall in love, meditate, or regret.
I've long felt that "Generation Me" has some serious mental problems, like being narcissists in almost every clinical sense of the word up to even being sociopaths.
What really gets me is the sheer number of people I've heard that blame CES or vendors for the "prank" by leaving themselves exposed and not covering the receivers with electrical tape or some other method of blocking tampering. I hesitate to use the word prank because disrupting people's live demonstrations and presentations is a prank in the same way shooting a tennis player with a pellet gun during Wimbledon would be a prank. (Which, of course, would be the player's fault for not donning battle armor).
I'm sure it was hilarious and I just lack a decent sense of humor. I bet those people who stayed up late into the night practicing their delivery, timing, and preparing for questions thought it was hilarious too. The people who flew over seas to attend CES and make a presentation probably had their sides spitting.
It's too bad the "reporter" was banned and not Gizmodo for supporting him. A prank is either something you do to a friend who's going to understand your joke, or if done to strangers, is insignificant. Controlling a mostly unused TV to baffle people as they wander by would have been funny. Interrupting live presentations goes into a whole class of its own.
In my mind, no matter how obvious an exploit is doesn't make it the fault of the victim. If someone leaves their keys in their car ignition, it's not too smart, but if a person takes the car they're still a thief, not an unsung hero.
Okay, that's all of my ranting for now. I'm gonna go pull a prank on this guy I saw walking by, once he hits the ER he'll remember that hockey masks prevent busted noses.
"...governed by Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2."
I think it's important for people to understand that scientific theories and laws don't "govern", they explain things. Einstein's theories don't direct or influence the universe, they're just an observation on how the universe appears to work.
I know correct grammar on the internet has become a huge point of controversy, but when referring to science there's too much public confusion about how things work. Using words like "govern" in relation to scientific theories is a step towards lending credence to Intelligent Design, like scientific laws are control mechanisms of some "Great Designer".
Will the digital tools be available for Linux / Mac users?
My biggest concern is the availability of the digital tools in non-Windows environments. That's about the only thing that could sour the whole deal for me. I'm hoping they're web-based or Java-based so they can run on any operating system.
The game pipeline isn't the weak link in the chain. Blender, Crystal Space, Irrlicht, Ogre3D, et al. They're all mature products that can produce content at least as good as 95% of the triple A titles that hit shelves every year. Compared to their commercial counterparts (Unreal, Quake, Lithtech, etc.), they stack up very well. The technology works.
Honestly, I don't even know at what point OSS has failed to attract game developers. Maybe it's that the available learning resources aren't well maintained, but wherever the gap is, it's certainly not a problem with the tools.
I don't see this becoming a "game" so much as it'll be a technology demo. The same way Elephants Dream was just masturbation material for artists. There wasn't anything in the way of real story being told, unless you really reach for some meaning in it. It's 11 minutes of "That's neat", but I'm never going to watch it again like Lord of the Rings or X-Men. I foresee roughly the same thing here, a bunch of people get together to show how deeply functional each of their subsystems is. Most of the "game" won't even have a purpose other than to show you how great Programmer X did collision detection, particle physics, etc. You'll be able to spend 5 minutes shooting cannon balls at a stack of barrels and watching them smash but otherwise there won't be much to do. Maybe it's pessimistic of me, but that's been my opinion of most games over the last decade. Everyone seems to be more proud of the intricacy of their work and doesn't understand why you think the game sucks, they think you just don't "get it". It's like they spend 3 years hand-crafting a #2 pencil and when I write a sentence then throw it away they're like "Hey, that thing was a work of art! I spent 13 months renting equipment at NASA to insert the lead using a bleeding-edge particle injector!" and I'm like "Yeah, but it still had one of those hard erasers that just smears what you're trying to erase so it's no good." I really subscribe to the idea that you need a single visionary to design a game. Otherwise it just becomes a pile of interesting components but it has no gestalt form.
The alternative I'd do is to release Kubuntu 8.04 with LTS using KDE 3.5 for the desktop environment, and place KDE 4.0 in the universe repository. That way, people who know about, and want, KDE 4.0 could get it easily. People with LTS already can't receive support for software obtained from the universe repository, so it creates no conflicts at all.
I think this move is a mistake because the goal of Ubuntu has been to lessen the gap between non-technical users and Linux gurus. This introduces another layer of complexity for those non-technical users. I think it's a mistake to mix LTS and non-LTS in same-numbered/named versions of the OS. They have a variety of options here and I think they picked the worst of the lot. They should just add it to a community maintained repository or a backport from the next version.
Someone with an active interest in Linux isn't likely to be confused, but there's a growing number of Linux users who don't follow Linux as an interest, it's just the thing on their computer. More than most other distros, those are the people that Ubuntu has been trying to cater to. I think they chose the worst possible option given their target audience.
It might seem ridiculous to think a seemingly minor detail could confuse or scare off people, but after years of working in support (and I think any support representatives would agree) you might be surprised at how easily people form mental blocks and shut down (mentally) when faced with any computer-related issue. When you walk someone through a process and a button doesn't say exactly what you indicate, they panic. To them "END" is not the same as "FINISH" or "DONE, even though they should all mentally register as a word signifying completion. And then they won't even tell you the name of the button that appeared on their screen, they'll only tell you that they don't see the one you said, like you're playing some sort of sadistic "I Spy" riddle game. Sorry for the digression. Old trauma.
(I'm not knocking Ubuntu for catering to non-technical users. I prefer Ubuntu myself, though I've been a Linux user much longer.)
You think my knowledge of the history of Netscape and the browser wars is faulty?
Even in viewing my post, I can't seem to locate any mention at all of the browser wars. Upon further review, I also don't see where I mentioned any bit of the history of Netscape, save for the bit about spawning Mozilla. Being that was the only mention of Netscape history, I can only infer you're asserting they did not create Mozilla, is that what you're saying?
My post was almost entirely about AOL and their treatment of the brands they acquired.
The one time they let one of their projects breathe, it turned into Mozilla. Once they realized it wasn't their property that was inherently faulty, they tightened that grip right back up figuring if they just squeezed hard enough maybe they could make another diamond. They're so desperate to turn everything they own into a revenue generator, they'll do it at the expense of the product itself. Yes, every company needs its projects to make money for them, but you can't sacrifice your racing horse for good luck in the race.
They only think of their products in terms of themselves, they don't look at them from a customer viewpoint. I don't think the people in charge at AOL ever stopped to ask "Why would someone want Netscape?" they ask "How can we make Netscape represent us?"
It's like they think of their products as sales reps. Forget that big deal you landed 5 years ago, how are your numbers this week? They want it to make another big score, but without any resources. Coffee is for closers.
Netscape had numerous chances to work its way into people's hearts and minds but they never added a single feature people would actually want. Every feature they added was self serving. The company is just all backwards; they don't want to make great products, they want their products to make them great.
Maybe it's just a semantic difference, but there can never be too much information. Information is useful, it can be easily sorted and digested both mentally and algorithmically. The problem I foresee (and I think it's been here for quite some time) is that there's just far too much data on the internet with almost no value as information.
Duplication, an age old engineering problem, rears its ugly head once again. The massive amount of duplication caused by sites like digg and youtube dramatically decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. For every topic there are 100+ pages added to Digg (and consequently to the page count of the internet) without really adding anything of value to the internet, the same goes for youtube, every video is duplicated and posted by 100 users. It's like having an elevator with a 1000 button panel to service a 5 floor building. Everyone using the elevator gets to add their own button. Operation of the system becomes a more complex task than doing things manually.
The social networking sites seem like a good idea at first, but even if the information you want happens to be there, it's obscured in a vast sea of uncorrelated data.
Jef Raskin dove into this problem in his book The Humane Interface. The idea that there should essentially only be one avenue to each piece of information. The interface on a phone is a good model of what the internet as a whole should look like. On a conceptual level, there's only one way to dial each person, enter their number in the correct sequence. It produces a very quick feedback, either you dialed correctly and got the person you intended to get, or you dialed wrong and don't get them. You don't need to critically evaluate your result.
On the internet, results are very fuzzy. Even with advanced searches, the results often need to be critically examined without even being given the data you need to do so. Crucial data is often missing such as date of publication, author, or any citations. These problems have relegated the majority of the internet to the domain of entertainment. It can only be used for serious work under strict conditions. Things will stay that way until something is done to change the internet from a giant data storage facility into an information catalog.
"push ODF"? It's an open standard. Pushing implies some obligation on the part of the recipient. A proprietary format saddles you with obligation, because it's not possible to read a proprietary format without getting proprietary software. Advocating an open format is the exact opposite of pushing, it frees you from obligations because it becomes possible for any existing application to implement the functionality. A web browser is free to implement the capability of reading ODF. The open format isn't stopping you from using Word format, or whatever format you currently use, it's freeing everyone else. It doesn't even make sense that you somehow interpret other people's freedom as giving some kind of burden to you. ODF is the document equivilant of generic drugs. You can still have your brand name if you want it, but those of us who aren't buckling under the weight of our fortune can have a low-cost alternative.
I'm not even going to bother with it. Maybe I could figure it out, maybe it's too tough for me, it doesn't really matter. If they were offering a guaranteed position (say 90 days guaranteed?) and a stated salary/benefits package to the people who can figure it out, I'd get to work. When you're sure you've got the best hand, you put your money in the pot. But they're not brave enough to put something at stake here. A game in which my prize is the opportunity to find out what my prize could be.
I despise the entire resume/interview process anyway, adding another step does not make it seem more attractive to me. The prize should be that the winners get to avoid the normal tedium of getting hired.
In my opinion, it's a generic problem with the entire hiring process. Companies focus on getting great resume writers and great interviewers. This all says very little about the job skills of a person unless the job entails writing resumes and getting interviewed.
The entire resume/interview process is designed to be very rewarding for sociopaths, but for normal people just trying to get a job and do something well, it's a minefield where every question has a double meaning, and you're expected to effortlessly rattle off answers to the dumbest questions you've ever heard.
Intelligent people don't want to play semantic games with an HR representative. It's hard enough honing your craft, but trying to hone the skill of convincing someone you're a good choice when they don't even really know what it is you do is another thing entirely. Companies who use a traditional resume/interview process (which isn't so traditional as it's only been around a few decades) don't want skilled workers, they want con men. They want to talk to someone who can spin them a tale that'll knock their socks off, even if they can't do the work.
The best programmers and IT workers I've ever met weren't the most charming people in the world. They're overweight, unkempt, and fucking brilliant. They've got personality problems that make them interview very poorly. Nervousness, short attention span, they seem angry or aggressive, "mister literal syndrome", but if you put them in their element, they swim like a shark, they can fix a program to any specification you deliver faster than all the other people you'll interview combined. And they're exactly the people the resume/interview process is designed to weed out.
Front-loading the interview process with tests or puzzles doesn't increase the quality of the candidate pool, it's just another mine for the good candidate to step on. I even fault Google for justifying this same dubious process. The great and innovative companies in the world wouldn't even exist if their originators had to go through the same process.
If you want to hire great programmers, the person who is doing the hiring should be able to tell when they're talking to someone who's a great programmer. Ask relevant questions that don't have stock answers, don't ask generic personality profile garbage like "What's your greatest weakness?" Ask them if they've ever used a bitshift operator and what they've used it for. Ask them about their process for algorithm building, ask about famous programmers they admire and why, ask them what programs they use for their personal stuff and why they chose them. Those are all things a skilled programmer could answer, and a poser with great interviewing skills would choke on.
On a serious note, I'm surprised the scientific community hasn't been faster to adopt the "electric universe" theories. It really does seem to be another valuable piece of the physics puzzle, it's a shame that it's mostly being ignored, even as new evidence validates many of the theories on a consistent basis. I guess it's just that scientists are scared that it replaces their existing knowledge rather than extending it.
The majority of illegal downloads are a result of commercial enterprises refusing to match demand. They want to have it both ways, they want to make money but they don't want to deliver the product the way the consumer wants it.
They want you to pay to see a movie and they also want to dictate every circumstance surrounding the viewing. What chair you'll sit in, what you'll eat and drink, you can't go to the restroom without missing part of the movie, the location you'll see the movie, and what time you'll see it.
If I'm going to pay to watch a movie, I should get to determine all the surrounding circumstances. If they truly want people to pay to watch movies, they need to seriously relax their restrictions. Offer every new release for download and permanent media purchase. And purchase should be the name of the game, not license or rent. I want to be able to watch whenever I damn well please, if I get interrupted I want to be able to come back in 2 weeks and watch it again. If I like it I should be able to watch it a dozen times.
Licensing schemes and restrictions are all about greed. It has nothing to do with giving the consumer what they want, it's all about milking the consumer for every last dime while giving them as little as possible.
Until the entertainment industry loosens its grip, pirated material is going to be rampant. Even meeting customer demands isn't going to eliminate piracy entirely, but it would reduce it to an insignificant level.
The problem with the "already has a pile of money" idea is that it can be said about virtually everyone. People in third world countries view all Americans as having piles of money in comparison, to change the situation, should your job even pay you? I mean you already have a pile of money, it's not like you need more.
It's just a ridiculous concept that there should be a limit on how much compensation one is entitled to earn. If you do more work, you get more compensation, how much you already have isn't material. By extension, if you produce higher value work, you receive more compensation. (Whether or not you're a Harry Potter fan doesn't matter, as a society we've laid down the dollars to show how much we value it).
It reminds me of Neil Gaiman's situation. He's had a long running dispute with DC, he doesn't get compensated for international sales. Sure he's made a lot of money from his work, but that doesn't mean it's okay to cut him off because he has an arbitrary amount of money someone determined is "enough".
I really have to agree with J.K. Rowling on this. The amount of money she made from the series is immaterial. Actions don't become morally right or wrong based on how much money you've made, unless you're a psychopath. The simple fact is, the person who wrote the lexicon wants to make money because it's easier to expand on an already popular work than it is to come up with an original mythos, make it popular, and then write a lexicon for it. If he wanted to undertake the project commercially, the appropriate path would have been to approach the author and publisher and pitch them the idea of a joint project. What he's doing is the equivalent of selling a product called Pepsi Snacks because it's easier to sell something if you associate it with an already popular product. If you just sold "Bob's Snacks", it doesn't have any immediate appeal. Yeah, what a bitch, all she does is write best-selling novels and give huge chunks of money to charity. That's just terrible. I bet there's a special layer of hell reserved for people like that.
"You're not just representing yourself; you're representing [females] with a capital F." ~ Katy Dickinson
That kind of mentality is damaging to anyone's career objectives, personal satisfaction, or mental state in general. You can't approach every task with the attitude "My performance here represents all [insert group]kind!" It's just unrealistic to live your life thinking each action is being used to size up an arbitrary group you may belong to. It's damaging to yourself because every minor failure is perceived as a global failure for all of "your kind", and failures are bound to be far more plentiful than successes, just by definition. You fail a thousand times on the way to every goal, but you only succeed once, when you actually achieve the goal. In this case she's talking about women. Well, women the world over aren't going to be there to congratulate you every time you successfully check-in a working patch or every time you you pitch an idea someone likes. And if you're not getting praise from all the women of the world for everything you do right, it only reasons you shouldn't carry the burden of guilt for all the things you do wrong.
Consider someone like Phil Ivey. He's not working to be a great black poker player, he's just working to be a great poker player. When he had rough years, black people weren't globally down-trodden because of him, so why would he feel like a champion of the black people when he does well? I doubt he does. He probably feels great when he does well, he hones his skills, and he tries to improve his game for completely personal reasons.
It's just not healthy to shoulder the responsibility for half the planet. At most I try to think I'm making things easier for the next person, but not all people everywhere.
You make a good point and I agree with that. For the most part, I'm pro-consumer. In a lot of ways I think the law gives companies too much leeway and unfairly penalizes consumers by allowing companies to accept all the reward without any responsibility. Like with software producers being able to to say they're not responsible for what their software does. They want all the praise if their software does something unique, groundbreaking, or cutting-edge, but then if it erases you're hard drive they say "We're not responsible for that...". Or they want applause for their program because it sorts lists faster than any algorithm in history but if you point out a bug they're quick as Billy the Kid when they sling "It's just a beta version" at you.
Anyway, I've digressed quite a bit. Point was, I'm pro-consumer. But in this instance, the behavior is clearly a violation of theater rules, and like you said, the usher or theater manager has no responsibility to determine, on the spot, exactly how much was recorded, why, and when and why the camera was being used. They have no way of knowing the camera was just turned on. For all they know, it was cleverly hidden under a coat or something and she was just moving it out halfway through the movie to get a better angle or something. The legal system can sort out the specifics of the incident and determine if something criminal occurred.
"Let's not even consider that these questions have been asked and answered[1] for years with the iPod."
Yes, let us not consider it because we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years.
"The iPhone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, but it is replaceable. This is the same as all iPods for the last several years."
Again, we have no reason to assume the plaintiff has been following the iPod issues for years. Replaceable but not user-replaceable isn't acceptable to many people, including myself. Why should the plaintiff be expected to be knowledgeable about Apple technology? If he's looking for a cell phone and he buys one that seems to be the best of the bunch, expecting it to have a user-replaceable battery like virtually every other cell phone doesn't seem like an outrageous expectation. If your cell phone is your primary means of communication, having to take it in for service to get the battery replaced can be unacceptable, putting you out of contact for days while you wait for service to be completed.
"It's also utterly and ridiculously false to say that a new battery is required every year."
Lithium-Ion batteries, especially under heavy use and recharge cycles, have their performance severely degrade after a year.
"As to the "difficulty" of finding the information on Apple's site"
"Additionally, asking any Apple retail store, customer service representative, dealer, authorized service provider, etc., will yield a direct and immediate answer about battery replacement."
Yes, the answer is easy to find once you realize what the problem is. Before you know there's a problem, it's not immediately obvious. The same goes for asking a rep. It's a very specific question. You're obviously an iPod fan, you seem to think of it as an iPod+, but consider that it's being marketed at people who think it's a fancy cell phone, people who may not know about Apple's engineering and decision making processes.
"Just pretend that the battery replacement costs $29 more"
Why should someone have to pay $29 extra for a new battery? Why would you even consider that an acceptable additional cost?
"The funniest thing of all is that most iPhone owners won't ever even want or need to replace their batteries. They'll have the same slow degradation everyone experiences with lithium ion batteries over time, and before they'd even care or consider replacing it even if it was user-replaceable, they'll be on their next phone."
That's more of a "Generation Y" mentality. Some of us older folk don't run out to get the latest greatest model of everything. Some of us make periodic upgrades when there's truly a major breakthrough, but largely don't change devices until there's a pressing need.