Not initially. But if you ask nice enough Steve Ballmer will squirt you one personally.
Man, I really should have resisted making that joke.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword.
on
The End for Vonage?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I said much the same yesterday about patents.
Patents are a government granted monopoly (on an idea, in this case) to encourage a certain behavior (inventing). This sort of monopoly has lots of hidden costs for the economy and an unknown benefit for the patent holder. Why not keep everything clear and open? Don't allow the patent. If they idea is really great, it should be easy for the company that that discovered it to dominate the market in the future. Their competitors should take some time to get "me too" products to market, and that time can get them some real dough. If the idea isn't that innovative, it'll be copied easily and won't mean much. This system -- the one without patents -- still rewards people with good ideas.
This is the Adam Smith warning all over again. Government granted monopolies seem like cheap ways of subsidizing desired activities (research, in this case), but they end up costing a fortune. It's like funding things on bond issuance. The government regularly gives money to the NSF and the NIH because science has a solid track record of providing big returns on the investment, but using patents to cover research is obviously bad, since we're taking a loan instead of buying an investment. Business patents involve the government taking a loan to subsidize business, but without any public discussion about the possible benefits of taking that loan.
Locking up ideas in patetents is, to me, morally reprehensible too. It inhibits the free flow of ideas by regulating techniques, knowledge, and even the conclusions one can draw from data. I believe that the cost to society of the patent is too high. People invented things before they were granted monopolies, and they will continue to do so after those monopolies are removed. As the pace of innovation accelerates, more people encounter roadblocks caused by this unwise funding. And its exactly that they are paying for the discoveries of a past era through royalties now.
Intellectual property of all sorts is absurd. The idea could sink our culture.
Sure, they can make money this way, but what you're talking about is essentially a government granted monopoly on an idea used to subsidize research. This sort of monopoly has lots of hidden costs for the economy and an unknown benefit for the patent holder. Why not keep everything clear and open? Don't allow the patent. If they idea is really great, it should be easy for the research group that discovered it to get big grants in the future.
This is the Adam Smith warning all over again. Government granted monopolies seem like cheap ways of subsidizing desired activities (research, in this case), but they end up costing a fortune. It's like funding things on bond issuance. The government regularly gives money to the NSF and the NIH because science has a solid track record of providing big returns on the investment.
Locking up ideas in patetents like this is, to me, morally reprehensible too. It inhibits the free flow of ideas by regulating techniques, knowledge, and even the conclusions one can draw from data. I believe that the cost to society of the patent is too high. People invented things before they were granted monopolies, and they will continue to do so after those monopolies are removed. As the pace of innovation accelerates, more people encounter roadblocks caused by this unwise funding. And its exactly that they are paying for the discoveries of a past era through royalties now.
Intellectual property of all sorts is absurd. The idea could sink our culture.
When you were young, did you ever play video games with an older sibling where they played and you watched? Your brother would insist that you were "a team" and wouldn't let you play. Being a manager is like being the little brother, but you do get to fire the other guy if he dies five times in a row on level 8-2.
Seriously, if you like something, why stop doing it and start just watching people do it?
Yikes. If you have a graph with N nodes, it's N-dimensional. There are more than three websites. The difficulty is embedding the graph in two or three dimensional space. There are lots of algorithms for doing this, choosing the distance between nodes, and so on. Each necessarily discards some information, but choosing the right one could help. And maybe such a look at the web would be interesting, but it doesn't seem like it's always the most useful. You're probably interested in the big clusters, the centers of which are found by Google's PageRank and displayed in order. Google can hide the leaves of each cluster, true, but they may be (a) less important or (b) easy to get to from the center.
An excellent list. I'm a big fan of X-Com (UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe), but the publisher never understood what made it a great game. They said, "Oh, people like killing aliens!" so they made shooters, fliers, etc all themed around the same thing.
What X-Com had going for it was a great tactical combat system. It was fire-tested in the team's previous Laser Squad Nemesis game, and worked great here. Plus, the marriage of the tactical battle game to the strategic research game kept the whole thing fresh. Throw in a little stat-building (what the kids these days call "RPG elements"), and you had a fun and varied game. The fact that you shot sectoids wasn't really important.
I think the other thing that hurt X-Com (and lots of other games from this era) was the craze to have 3D, real-time, and realism. You can find old reviews still online. It's amazing to see these great games slighted for not including the buzzwords of the time. When the publishers commissioned sequels, they had to implement buzzwords even if they didn't fit with the game.
Also, the notion of having a "hot property" blinds producers. They'll just recombine window-dressings from games, discarding the mechanics that made the games fun. It's a poisonous idea, and it's everywhere.
Question: What is Web 2.0?
Answer: Web 2.0 is a combination of Web 1.0 and being punched in the dick.
Question: How do I know I'm using a website / service / product that is officially "Web 2.0" and not actually "Web 1.0" with various patches and enhancements added to it? Answer: Web 2.0 is made obvious by the addition of completely and highly unnecessary bells and whistles that don't do anything besides annoy you and make life more complicated. If Web 1.0 was the equivalent of reading a book, Web 2.0 is reading a book while all the words are flying around and changing pages as the book rotates randomly and sets your hands on fire. Also there's this parrot that keeps on flying towards your head in repeated attempts to gouge out your eyes.
Question: I read about this one website in Wired Magazine. Is that Web 2.0?? Answer: Oh definitely. Wired won't even mention Web 1.0 sites. Every single site in their magazine is at least Web 2.0. Sometimes they're even up to Web 45.2 (such as www.ebutts-and-credit-reports-delivered-via-carrie r-pidgeon.com)!
Question: My roommate said he "digged" a "wikipedia entry" about "the blogosphere" which mentioned "podcasting" as a viable form of "crowdsourcing." Answer: Your roommate is a faggot. Also, this wasn't technically a question.
--------- You have to watch out for those parrots.
I agree that they screwed up HD. I think it started when they couldn't pick ONE aspect ratio/resolution/connector. That confused boatloads of people. What was so hard about picking something nice (1080p, 16:9, and a nice digital connector) and waiting until the hardware to drive it came about? It'd be a format that could last a while. It would eliminate all of the confusion too.
If they really had their act together, they would have picked one new video connector format for both the new HD tv's and computer graphics cards. Then the videogame console makers could sell home office software, as their consoles would hook directly to monitors. It seems like both Sony and Microsoft want to do this, but nothing happened from it.
HD, and the ancillary disk formats try to get everyone to pay more (a lot more!) for quality. In the past, consumers have been most interested in convenience first. With multiple formats and standards, HD is less convenient.
About the only good thing in all this is the digital broadcasting. At least in the US, the digital signals are mpeg2 streams, making them easy to capture and much less snowy.
For the most part, they aren't too wrong. Sure they're obsessed with ISDN, but only because it seemed like the only fast internet solution at the time. Other predictions, like better web browsers, were inevitable anyway. And they certainly nailed the fact that the TCP/IP stack would become common equipment in the next generation of OSes.
But they really liked usenet. The web forum has supplanted it, but they didn't really see that. http is the monster protocol that gobbled up almost all of the web functions. One poster talks about an application evolving that encapsulated all of the internet protocols in one easy interface. The modern webbrowser is pretty much that, with webmail, webforums, and built in (but less functional) ftp clients.
There are some predictions that are still up in the air. Do people prefer moderated content? It's hard to say. Sure, lots of people read cnn.com, but lots of people post on unmoderated forums, or use myspace, or other "user-generated" content.
I think the biggest thing they missed was data-mining. They thought people had to be involved in searching for information, in moderating content, etc in a centralized way. Using links, pageviews, user reviews, and user moderation some systems can organize themselves. (This isn't to cast doubt on experts. I still prefer a good editor to 1000 monkeys.)
And I guess one more thing: the whole idea of "everybody" is silly on the net. If a million people use usenet, it's still useful. The fact that ten or a hundred times more people use some sort of webforum is in many ways irrelevant. Both exist side-by-side. The first list on the article listed online Diplomacy as a fun game on the net. It still exists, probably with about the same number of players. Not anywhere near some flashgame sites in traffic, sure, but that doesn't change anything.
Will it be able to arrest, charge, and try the terrorist in a court of law? If it can't, you're building an assassination weapon, and you are building up criminals into enemies. You don't fight criminals by gunning them down in the street.
I think corruption is a bigger problem. Without good governance, change is hard. How soon until one laptop per child becomes one warlord with all the laptops? He'll have to let some children use them (such is the nature of feudalism), but I can't see it being otherwise. Laptops aren't the same as education, anyway. It sounds like silicon snake-oil to me.
I should also say that the corruption is hardly just some internal matter for various African states. These leaders are aided and abbedded by rich nations across the world. Foreign meddling in the affairs of Africa has been intense and ongoing, but no one wants to talk about how they secure their oil rights, fishing rights, the use of their GM crops over local varieties, and so on. It's unpleasant.
Africa needs clean government to have a chance as much as it needs clean water. I can't see the laptop as part of the solution. You could argue that laptops make education easier, and that education drives economic growth. However, the prime examples of that (Japan, Korea, Singapore) all had stable governments and some measure of physical safety for citizens. In the absence of these things, what will stop the newly educated adults from leaving for the US, the EU, India, or China?
Why settle for hamburger when you can have steak?
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
·
· Score: 1
Why go for Bush Senior's man, when you could go for Henry Kissinger? He's the right man for our time, again.
Yeah, kind of. This type of big big model tells you that all of its pieces are essentially correct in modeling the bacteria behavior. My criticism of this type of modeling is that you don't learn much more. Simplified models are usually more revealing, in my opinion, because
(1) You have to know which pieces you can simplify how, and doing so shows you what's important and what's just details.
(2) You can actually analyze a simple model to see if it predicts things you didn't learn from direct experiments, and then check these new predictions with experiments. So much of science is sifting through the noise to find the pattern. Big models model everything, but they can't tell you what's important, or at least you can't get that information out easily. You can probably tell from my bias what kind of modeling I do. Still, I think the big tools in mathematical biology haven't been developed yet. There are big ideas in analysis and topology being used to analyze data from experiments to identify broad trends and hidden patterns. These sort of techniques really help with (1).
Still, I'd go see a talk on this. I'll bet he has some cool movies:)
(Also, this thing probably involves estimating hundreds, if not thousands of reaction rates, and other such constants. Getting everything to work must have been hell.)
That term makes me want to cry. At least it isn't the "Techade confrence on nettiquite". Maybe someone should "linkroll" that one. All these new words, but no new ideas.
Why Upstart? Why not initng? Why not minit?
on
Ubuntu 6.10 is Out
·
· Score: 1
What are the advantages of their sysv init replacement over others, like initng? I looked over the linked page. Some of it seems interesting, like the event-based nature, but I'm turned off by the continued use of numbered run-levels. Wouldn't names (startup, reboot, shutdown, nonetwork, default, etc) be easier and less cryptic.
I also didn't see, but did they do away with the ugly numbered symlink crap? It seems to me that init scripts should state what other services they depend on, then some other program sorts out the optimum (and correct) order to start them in. I did line numbers back in Apple II BASIC, and I don't want to touch them again.
I'm all for a new init system. I can't wait to try this puppy out. It could be cool.
Is the submitter upset at the amount of knowledge and culture McGraw-Hill controls, or the amount of culture Google will soon control? Both are corporate entities and not private.
On the other hand, this experiment with copyright is getting out of control. It's difficult for modern works to achieve classic status. Just last week I was reading that many anthology creators pick and choose their contents based more and more on what rights they can afford. Some modern authors might make a splash, but they're pricing their work out of range for posterity.
You could say that the market will sort this out -- but it's a tragedy what happens in the mean time. Good works will moulder and die as publishers and author's families try to pimp them for the final dollar. All I can think is, doesn't it make more sense to SHORTEN copyright periods as technology improves rather than to extend them? A book can be published, shipped, promoted, bought, and read the world over in a few years now rather than a decade.
Despite the hyperbolic title, it's an interesting article. NetGen is a US console game maker's rag, so that's its slant. People around here seem to hate it, but I feel like I have a better handle on their bias than the "for gamer" sites. You might argue about sales in Japan or the triumph of PC gaming, but that's not the point. This article is telling us what games sell in the US market.
Success comes from 1) Tie-ins (take Lego Star Wars with *two* tie-ins) 2) Franchise 3) Price (there are a good number of B-grade games that got moved to the $20 rack quickly)
The analysis of the games is interesting. If you play console games in the US, this is what the people with the money are thinking about when they fund their next game. Mostly, its scary to me. Tie-in games are mostly crap, and I don't buy them anymore. Franchise games are a big part of the copy-cat problem in the industry, but we all eat them up because we have some familiarity with the game. Price-wise, it looks like many games would benefit from a lower price to sell more units. But the price might be firmly controlled by the console company. Free market it ain't.
One of the gems in the list was some Iraqi invasion game that was bad by all accounts, but it sold well because it came out just after the start of the ongoing conflict. It's a disgusting use of suffering as marketing, but whatever I feel about it, it sold like hotcakes.
You should check out the article linked a few days ago from Slashdot: http://www.next-gen.biz/page1.html Ignore the hyperbolic title. The listing is in terms of money made. Look at how many sequels and tie-in games there are. Look how much money they make. Tie-in games (especially movie tie-in games) are the first thing I ignore since they are routinely crap, but they seem to make someone a lot of money. Publishers will likewise keep making franchise games because they produce the big bucks. They aren't great games, but the business isn't about making great games.
I do hope that an aging gamer demographic will help counter these trends. I feel like lots of tie-in games move because parents buy them for the kids, but the parent-for-kids market is shrinking against the adult-for-self market.
Right on. I've also been afflicted with Blackboard. Here, at Duke, it's down all Sunday for maintenance. I can't tell you how many times I was in on Sunday doing some grading and couldn't post stuff to the page. It's annoying. What kind of software needs a day of down-time per week? Also, as a grad student I had the dubious honor of also using it as a student. The navigation sucks, plus you can't link to your course pages. You'll always have to navigate down the tree of courses your in to find info on one class or the other. If I want to keep my courses as bookmarks in a folder, shouldn't your software support this?
Now, to find out their trying to use a patent to protect their crap... That's balls. The "school social software" scene needs more entries, not fewer.
Also, I haven't had coffee yet and that makes me angry.
Slashdot Mirror
Not initially. But if you ask nice enough Steve Ballmer will squirt you one personally.
Man, I really should have resisted making that joke.
I said much the same yesterday about patents.
Patents are a government granted monopoly (on an idea, in this case) to encourage a certain behavior (inventing). This sort of monopoly has lots of hidden costs for the economy and an unknown benefit for the patent holder. Why not keep everything clear and open? Don't allow the patent. If they idea is really great, it should be easy for the company that that discovered it to dominate the market in the future. Their competitors should take some time to get "me too" products to market, and that time can get them some real dough. If the idea isn't that innovative, it'll be copied easily and won't mean much. This system -- the one without patents -- still rewards people with good ideas.
This is the Adam Smith warning all over again. Government granted monopolies seem like cheap ways of subsidizing desired activities (research, in this case), but they end up costing a fortune. It's like funding things on bond issuance. The government regularly gives money to the NSF and the NIH because science has a solid track record of providing big returns on the investment, but using patents to cover research is obviously bad, since we're taking a loan instead of buying an investment. Business patents involve the government taking a loan to subsidize business, but without any public discussion about the possible benefits of taking that loan.
Locking up ideas in patetents is, to me, morally reprehensible too. It inhibits the free flow of ideas by regulating techniques, knowledge, and even the conclusions one can draw from data. I believe that the cost to society of the patent is too high. People invented things before they were granted monopolies, and they will continue to do so after those monopolies are removed. As the pace of innovation accelerates, more people encounter roadblocks caused by this unwise funding. And its exactly that they are paying for the discoveries of a past era through royalties now.
Intellectual property of all sorts is absurd. The idea could sink our culture.
Sure, they can make money this way, but what you're talking about is essentially a government granted monopoly on an idea used to subsidize research. This sort of monopoly has lots of hidden costs for the economy and an unknown benefit for the patent holder. Why not keep everything clear and open? Don't allow the patent. If they idea is really great, it should be easy for the research group that discovered it to get big grants in the future.
This is the Adam Smith warning all over again. Government granted monopolies seem like cheap ways of subsidizing desired activities (research, in this case), but they end up costing a fortune. It's like funding things on bond issuance. The government regularly gives money to the NSF and the NIH because science has a solid track record of providing big returns on the investment.
Locking up ideas in patetents like this is, to me, morally reprehensible too. It inhibits the free flow of ideas by regulating techniques, knowledge, and even the conclusions one can draw from data. I believe that the cost to society of the patent is too high. People invented things before they were granted monopolies, and they will continue to do so after those monopolies are removed. As the pace of innovation accelerates, more people encounter roadblocks caused by this unwise funding. And its exactly that they are paying for the discoveries of a past era through royalties now.
Intellectual property of all sorts is absurd. The idea could sink our culture.
When you were young, did you ever play video games with an older sibling where they played and you watched? Your brother would insist that you were "a team" and wouldn't let you play. Being a manager is like being the little brother, but you do get to fire the other guy if he dies five times in a row on level 8-2.
Seriously, if you like something, why stop doing it and start just watching people do it?
Oh, money.
I'm pre-not-ordering so I can not-buy it first!
I'm surprised they'd keep throwing money at that disaster.
Yikes. If you have a graph with N nodes, it's N-dimensional. There are more than three websites. The difficulty is embedding the graph in two or three dimensional space. There are lots of algorithms for doing this, choosing the distance between nodes, and so on. Each necessarily discards some information, but choosing the right one could help. And maybe such a look at the web would be interesting, but it doesn't seem like it's always the most useful. You're probably interested in the big clusters, the centers of which are found by Google's PageRank and displayed in order. Google can hide the leaves of each cluster, true, but they may be (a) less important or (b) easy to get to from the center.
BS. People protect or take away dignity. Machines are props for dignity games.
An excellent list. I'm a big fan of X-Com (UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe), but the publisher never understood what made it a great game. They said, "Oh, people like killing aliens!" so they made shooters, fliers, etc all themed around the same thing.
What X-Com had going for it was a great tactical combat system. It was fire-tested in the team's previous Laser Squad Nemesis game, and worked great here. Plus, the marriage of the tactical battle game to the strategic research game kept the whole thing fresh. Throw in a little stat-building (what the kids these days call "RPG elements"), and you had a fun and varied game. The fact that you shot sectoids wasn't really important.
I think the other thing that hurt X-Com (and lots of other games from this era) was the craze to have 3D, real-time, and realism. You can find old reviews still online. It's amazing to see these great games slighted for not including the buzzwords of the time. When the publishers commissioned sequels, they had to implement buzzwords even if they didn't fit with the game.
Also, the notion of having a "hot property" blinds producers. They'll just recombine window-dressings from games, discarding the mechanics that made the games fun. It's a poisonous idea, and it's everywhere.
From Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka at somethingawful.com:
e r-pidgeon.com)!
Question: What is Web 2.0?
Answer: Web 2.0 is a combination of Web 1.0 and being punched in the dick.
Question: How do I know I'm using a website / service / product that is officially "Web 2.0" and not actually "Web 1.0" with various patches and enhancements added to it?
Answer: Web 2.0 is made obvious by the addition of completely and highly unnecessary bells and whistles that don't do anything besides annoy you and make life more complicated. If Web 1.0 was the equivalent of reading a book, Web 2.0 is reading a book while all the words are flying around and changing pages as the book rotates randomly and sets your hands on fire. Also there's this parrot that keeps on flying towards your head in repeated attempts to gouge out your eyes.
Question: I read about this one website in Wired Magazine. Is that Web 2.0??
Answer: Oh definitely. Wired won't even mention Web 1.0 sites. Every single site in their magazine is at least Web 2.0. Sometimes they're even up to Web 45.2 (such as www.ebutts-and-credit-reports-delivered-via-carri
Question: My roommate said he "digged" a "wikipedia entry" about "the blogosphere" which mentioned "podcasting" as a viable form of "crowdsourcing."
Answer: Your roommate is a faggot. Also, this wasn't technically a question.
---------
You have to watch out for those parrots.
Yeah, that's dead-on.
I agree that they screwed up HD. I think it started when they couldn't pick ONE aspect ratio/resolution/connector. That confused boatloads of people. What was so hard about picking something nice (1080p, 16:9, and a nice digital connector) and waiting until the hardware to drive it came about? It'd be a format that could last a while. It would eliminate all of the confusion too.
If they really had their act together, they would have picked one new video connector format for both the new HD tv's and computer graphics cards. Then the videogame console makers could sell home office software, as their consoles would hook directly to monitors. It seems like both Sony and Microsoft want to do this, but nothing happened from it.
HD, and the ancillary disk formats try to get everyone to pay more (a lot more!) for quality. In the past, consumers have been most interested in convenience first. With multiple formats and standards, HD is less convenient.
About the only good thing in all this is the digital broadcasting. At least in the US, the digital signals are mpeg2 streams, making them easy to capture and much less snowy.
For the most part, they aren't too wrong. Sure they're obsessed with ISDN, but only because it seemed like the only fast internet solution at the time. Other predictions, like better web browsers, were inevitable anyway. And they certainly nailed the fact that the TCP/IP stack would become common equipment in the next generation of OSes.
But they really liked usenet. The web forum has supplanted it, but they didn't really see that. http is the monster protocol that gobbled up almost all of the web functions. One poster talks about an application evolving that encapsulated all of the internet protocols in one easy interface. The modern webbrowser is pretty much that, with webmail, webforums, and built in (but less functional) ftp clients.
There are some predictions that are still up in the air. Do people prefer moderated content? It's hard to say. Sure, lots of people read cnn.com, but lots of people post on unmoderated forums, or use myspace, or other "user-generated" content.
I think the biggest thing they missed was data-mining. They thought people had to be involved in searching for information, in moderating content, etc in a centralized way. Using links, pageviews, user reviews, and user moderation some systems can organize themselves. (This isn't to cast doubt on experts. I still prefer a good editor to 1000 monkeys.)
And I guess one more thing: the whole idea of "everybody" is silly on the net. If a million people use usenet, it's still useful. The fact that ten or a hundred times more people use some sort of webforum is in many ways irrelevant. Both exist side-by-side. The first list on the article listed online Diplomacy as a fun game on the net. It still exists, probably with about the same number of players. Not anywhere near some flashgame sites in traffic, sure, but that doesn't change anything.
Will it be able to arrest, charge, and try the terrorist in a court of law? If it can't, you're building an assassination weapon, and you are building up criminals into enemies. You don't fight criminals by gunning them down in the street.
I think corruption is a bigger problem. Without good governance, change is hard. How soon until one laptop per child becomes one warlord with all the laptops? He'll have to let some children use them (such is the nature of feudalism), but I can't see it being otherwise. Laptops aren't the same as education, anyway. It sounds like silicon snake-oil to me.
I should also say that the corruption is hardly just some internal matter for various African states. These leaders are aided and abbedded by rich nations across the world. Foreign meddling in the affairs of Africa has been intense and ongoing, but no one wants to talk about how they secure their oil rights, fishing rights, the use of their GM crops over local varieties, and so on. It's unpleasant.
Africa needs clean government to have a chance as much as it needs clean water. I can't see the laptop as part of the solution. You could argue that laptops make education easier, and that education drives economic growth. However, the prime examples of that (Japan, Korea, Singapore) all had stable governments and some measure of physical safety for citizens. In the absence of these things, what will stop the newly educated adults from leaving for the US, the EU, India, or China?
Why go for Bush Senior's man, when you could go for Henry Kissinger? He's the right man for our time, again.
(Well, I think it's funny.)
Yeah, kind of. This type of big big model tells you that all of its pieces are essentially correct in modeling the bacteria behavior. My criticism of this type of modeling is that you don't learn much more. Simplified models are usually more revealing, in my opinion, because
:)
(1) You have to know which pieces you can simplify how, and doing so shows you what's important and what's just details.
(2) You can actually analyze a simple model to see if it predicts things you didn't learn from direct experiments, and then check these new predictions with experiments.
So much of science is sifting through the noise to find the pattern. Big models model everything, but they can't tell you what's important, or at least you can't get that information out easily. You can probably tell from my bias what kind of modeling I do. Still, I think the big tools in mathematical biology haven't been developed yet. There are big ideas in analysis and topology being used to analyze data from experiments to identify broad trends and hidden patterns. These sort of techniques really help with (1).
Still, I'd go see a talk on this. I'll bet he has some cool movies
(Also, this thing probably involves estimating hundreds, if not thousands of reaction rates, and other such constants. Getting everything to work must have been hell.)
That term makes me want to cry. At least it isn't the "Techade confrence on nettiquite". Maybe someone should "linkroll" that one. All these new words, but no new ideas.
What are the advantages of their sysv init replacement over others, like initng? I looked over the linked page. Some of it seems interesting, like the event-based nature, but I'm turned off by the continued use of numbered run-levels. Wouldn't names (startup, reboot, shutdown, nonetwork, default, etc) be easier and less cryptic.
I also didn't see, but did they do away with the ugly numbered symlink crap? It seems to me that init scripts should state what other services they depend on, then some other program sorts out the optimum (and correct) order to start them in. I did line numbers back in Apple II BASIC, and I don't want to touch them again.
I'm all for a new init system. I can't wait to try this puppy out. It could be cool.
Is the submitter upset at the amount of knowledge and culture McGraw-Hill controls, or the amount of culture Google will soon control? Both are corporate entities and not private.
On the other hand, this experiment with copyright is getting out of control. It's difficult for modern works to achieve classic status. Just last week I was reading that many anthology creators pick and choose their contents based more and more on what rights they can afford. Some modern authors might make a splash, but they're pricing their work out of range for posterity.
You could say that the market will sort this out -- but it's a tragedy what happens in the mean time. Good works will moulder and die as publishers and author's families try to pimp them for the final dollar. All I can think is, doesn't it make more sense to SHORTEN copyright periods as technology improves rather than to extend them? A book can be published, shipped, promoted, bought, and read the world over in a few years now rather than a decade.
I saw this here before.
Despite the hyperbolic title, it's an interesting article. NetGen is a US console game maker's rag, so that's its slant. People around here seem to hate it, but I feel like I have a better handle on their bias than the "for gamer" sites. You might argue about sales in Japan or the triumph of PC gaming, but that's not the point. This article is telling us what games sell in the US market.
Success comes from
1) Tie-ins (take Lego Star Wars with *two* tie-ins)
2) Franchise
3) Price (there are a good number of B-grade games that got moved to the $20 rack quickly)
The analysis of the games is interesting. If you play console games in the US, this is what the people with the money are thinking about when they fund their next game. Mostly, its scary to me. Tie-in games are mostly crap, and I don't buy them anymore. Franchise games are a big part of the copy-cat problem in the industry, but we all eat them up because we have some familiarity with the game. Price-wise, it looks like many games would benefit from a lower price to sell more units. But the price might be firmly controlled by the console company. Free market it ain't.
One of the gems in the list was some Iraqi invasion game that was bad by all accounts, but it sold well because it came out just after the start of the ongoing conflict. It's a disgusting use of suffering as marketing, but whatever I feel about it, it sold like hotcakes.
Time for step two: deliver a mild electric shock to neologism users. Then I won't have to hear "blogosphere" ever again.
$ apt-get install apt
bash: apt-get: command not found
It's not working...
They need to take better care of their cats at apple. That way they can avoid having it leak and ruin the rug.
Seriously, though. $150 a year for your OS. It seems a bit shady to me. Do you apple fans have plans to skip eve/odd releases or something?
You should check out the article linked a few days ago from Slashdot:
http://www.next-gen.biz/page1.html
Ignore the hyperbolic title. The listing is in terms of money made. Look at how many sequels and tie-in games there are. Look how much money they make. Tie-in games (especially movie tie-in games) are the first thing I ignore since they are routinely crap, but they seem to make someone a lot of money. Publishers will likewise keep making franchise games because they produce the big bucks. They aren't great games, but the business isn't about making great games.
I do hope that an aging gamer demographic will help counter these trends. I feel like lots of tie-in games move because parents buy them for the kids, but the parent-for-kids market is shrinking against the adult-for-self market.
Right on. I've also been afflicted with Blackboard. Here, at Duke, it's down all Sunday for maintenance. I can't tell you how many times I was in on Sunday doing some grading and couldn't post stuff to the page. It's annoying. What kind of software needs a day of down-time per week? Also, as a grad student I had the dubious honor of also using it as a student. The navigation sucks, plus you can't link to your course pages. You'll always have to navigate down the tree of courses your in to find info on one class or the other. If I want to keep my courses as bookmarks in a folder, shouldn't your software support this?
... That's balls. The "school social software" scene needs more entries, not fewer.
Now, to find out their trying to use a patent to protect their crap
Also, I haven't had coffee yet and that makes me angry.
Will it be overpriced too?