I can't wait until the mobile virus-loaded spam and SMS messages I'm going to get on my 3G phone corrupts the agent software on this "smart" phone and signs me up for all sorts of mortgages, prescription drugs, porn, printer cartridges and tropical vacations galore.
Early this year, I saw some fairly sophisticated interaction using a flexible input device called ShapeTape, made by Canada's Measurand. While the company is marketing it as a motion-capture and 3D modeling technology, Tovi Grossman at the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project has been working under Ravin Balakrishnan to explore other applications for ShapeTape, including as a general input device. For example, you can use it in computer-assisted design or animation to make and perform some fairly complex 3D curves and manipulations in far less time than it would take with keyboards, mice or drawing tablets.
''The article doesn't detail the intricacies of the law...''
No need to guess about the bill - here's the text of the proposed legislation. See the bold text for the important part:
[BIL148-A.LCA]
[Advance (1)]
South Australia
[Prepared by the Parliamentary Counsel on the instructions of the Hon. I. Gilfillan, M.L.C.]
STATE SUPPLY (PROCUREMENT OF SOFTWARE) AMENDMENT
BILL 2003
A BILL FOR
An Act to amend the State Supply Act 1985.
[OPC-LC]
Contents
Part 1â"Preliminary
1. Short title
2. Amendment provisions
Part 2â"Amendment of State Supply Act 1985
3. Insertion of Part 3A
Part 3Aâ"Special provisions relating to supply operations of public authorities
17A. Principle applying to the procurement of computer software
The Parliament of South Australia enacts as follows:
Part 1â"Preliminary
Short title
1. This Act may be cited as the State Supply (Procurement of Software) Amendment Act 2003.
Amendment provisions
2. In this Act, a provision under a heading referring to the amendment of a specified Act
amends the Act so specified.
Part 2â"Amendment of State Supply Act 1985
Insertion of Part 3A
3. After Part 3 insert:
Part 3Aâ"Special provisions relating to supply operations of public authorities
Principle applying to the procurement of computer software
17A. (1) A public authority must, in making a decision about the procurement of
computer software for its operations, have regard to the principle that, wherever
practicable, a public authority should use open source software in preference to proprietary software.
(2) In this sectionâ"
"distribute" means distribute for free or on payment of the reasonable costs of
distribution;
"open source software" means computer software the subject of a licence granting
a person a rightâ"
(a) without any limitation or restriction, to use the software for any
purpose; and
(b) without any limitation or restriction, to make copies of the
software for any purpose; and
(c) without any limitation or restriction, to access or modify the source
code of the software for any purpose; and
(d) without payment of a royalty or other fee, to distribute copies ofâ"
(i) the software (including as a component of an aggregate distribution containing computer software from several different sources); or
(ii) a derived or modified form of the software,
(whether in compiled form or in the form of source code), under the same terms as the licence applying to the software;
"proprietary software" means computer software that is not open source software.
PRINTED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE GOVERNMENT PRINTER
Part of the implied social contract of any representative government is to adopt policies and legislation that are in the public interest.
It is in the public interest for high-quality, low-cost or no-cost open source software to exist and be available to all levels of society.
It is also in the public interest for their governments to be run in a cost-effective manner. Unless there is a specific technical requirement that open source software cannot meet, there is no substantive reason why OSS should not be considered and adopted in the government sector. This doesn't even address the issue of locking a government into a proprietary solution.
Contrary to the lobbyists, the bill doesn't prevent proprietary solutions from being used. It merely states a preference for OSS as a guiding principle in the decision-making process for procurement "wherever practicable."
This would foster more competition (not less) and hopefully result in higher-quality software on all fronts.
This sort of enlightened legislation definitely falls under the category of a Public Good.
Roland Piquepaille writes "... You'll find more details in this summary"...
Translation:
Roland Piquepaille writes "... You'll find more details [LINKS 1, 2 to the company's site and one from a distributor!] in this summary [THAT'S MY BLOG!]"
What it should have said:
Roland Piquepaille writes "...You'll find links 1, 2 to the company's site and one from a distributor that only L337 H4x0rz [LIKE ME!] can find [GOOGLE IS, LIKE, SO KEWL] and could have linked to directly from my Slashdot post instead of forcing you to go to my blog [LIKE PAVLOVIAN DOGS], Roland Piquepaille's "Slashdot Karma-Whoring" Technology Trends and hunt for it, just so I could bump up my karma here/ try to turn myself into a pundit."
Someone, please tell me: When will the karma-whoring end?!? OH, THE HUMANITY!;)
Let me rewrite the intro to more accurately reflect what this is about.
Bruha writes "Lewt [THAT'S ME!!!] over at Warcry News Network has written his [MY] review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He [I] mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's. Thanks for reading my crappy so-called review, boosting my site's traffic and increasing my Karma, my pageviews and my ad revenue.''
Re:OFDM != 4G - superiority and patents
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The main reason why we are seeing growing implementations of OFDM is because companies want to avoid Qualcomm's CDMA patents and the associated licensing fees.
Ask anybody in the know (who doesn't have a vested interest in seeing one of these technologies implemented) and they will concede OFDM is not inherently superior to to CDMA, or vice versa.
That was my first reaction too. Seems like the kind of thing that homeland (or should that be homeLAN?) security types would see as a potential problem. As for not being Linux-powered (as in fuelled), isn't that obvious?
Well, duh. I don't think I was gaving the/. crowd too much credit by assuming they're smart enough to parse the phrase correctly on their own, but in case I'm wrong... THE ROCKET IS POWERED BY COMBUSTIBLE FUEL! LINUX IS NOT A POWER SOURCE! For those refuse to believe that, try on one of these hats!;)
The issue is not whether age-appropriate spam is sent to kids or not. The issue is spam itself.
I remember back in university, people used to forward those stupid spam jokes and messages all the time. Whenever I pointed out that it really WASN'T free and they were contributing to a problem by doing so, I would get all sorts of angry e-mail back.
Now that spam accounts for the majority of e-mail traffic according to some studies, and those former classmates' companies have to pay for mail administration, filtering and other anti-spam and anti-virus measures, I wonder how they would respond now if I sent them the same type of spam they used to send.
The bottom line is that it's an abuse of the system, and just like you can get a ticket for driving too slow or recklessly on the highway, maybe there's a similar measure that taken against spammers.
The 43 million is secondary (or even tertiary) to the story. The real story is about the changing tactics of the industry and how it continues its attempts to force music-lovers to listen to music how the industry wants them to, instead of being responsive to customers as any good business should.
Now that a direct sales model is viable (iTunes, Prince and others) because the means of production and inexpensive distribution is widely available for a low cost, the industry has lost its main competitive advantage.
The oligopoly that the record companies have had is coming to an end and instead of embracing a new business model they keep trying to force everyone to adhere to the old broken model.
Also, please refer to the following articles from 2 days ago, paying special attention to the editorial:
Music Industry Changes its Tune on Sharing... Sort Of
'Offtopic'? Obviously our moderator has never seen 'The Sopranos'
No its not a complaint - just pointing out that informed moderators are better than uninformed ones
yalla wrote: Perhaps it would be wise to contact the owners of the sites before posting it to/. in the future. That poor people:-)
Actually, the owner of the site is the one who posted it.
At the risk of sounding misanthropic, I'm getting tired of all the karma-whoring I keep seeing here lately. The photos of the Pioneer jacket and blurb about it can be seen on Yahoo News Photos but for some reason/. staff keep encouraging the karma whoring by accepting submissions like i4u's, which routinely fail to mention that he and others like him are driving traffic to their personal sites.
The obvious reasons for this are:
to generate site traffic and sell ads based on that traffic
establish a reputation as a pundit of one kind or another
There's no real problem with either of these. But if you're going to drive people to your site, you should have something of value to add instead of just stealing the COPYRIGHTED Associated Press/Reuters/other news agency photos and posting them there. Using your site as redirect to the source story on another site just so you can boost your own site's traffic is almost as bad.
On top of all that, it's not surprising that ISPs will cut off the bandwidth for sites like that - as they have in i4u's case - leaving/.ers with a broken link.
We differ on the motivations but I think we are in some agreement on the relative worthlessness of this blog. In truth, the number of accepted stories is about 1100% higher than what you thought.
For those who care to read it here's a recap of a prior comment and open letter that sums it up for me:
Check this column for a summary.
I'm curious why (with one exception) you never seem to point out that ''this column'' is YOUR BLOG?
If you want to be a karma-whore then that's your business. And that's the only conclusion we can reach considering the sheer number of submissions (33 as of this one, not counting however many were rejected) in the 2 months since you set up your account, and the frequency with which you discourage people from reading the original articles (always pointing them to your blog).
I find some of the articles you post interesting so by all means continue to contribute. But please don't pretend that you aren't pointing people to your blog.
Presumably you're trying to turn yourself into another Internet pundit or get the traffic on your site up high enough so that you can charge big bucks for advertising. That's cool too if you want to do that.
But please... just stop pretending that you're directing people somewhere other than your own blog.
Last August I spoke to a couple of senior Infogrames (now Atari) marketing managers who said that they were planning to release a Terminator 3 game on all platforms in conjunction with the movie premier (I guess the launch date slipped). They were pretty excited about it, even for marketing types.
Will those retailers that enforced the ESRB ratings stop now because they may have a First Amendment case on their hands? I think the free speech issues are a little more important than the fact a violent game ban was lifted.
Here's a round-up of the coverage so far (yes it's a rejected post which i'm too lazy to retype):
Or if youre too lazy to do that just read it here.
June 2, 2003 In Computing, Weighing Sheer Power Against Vast Pools of Data By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 -- For almost two decades the federal government has heavily underwritten elaborate centers to house the world's fastest supercomputers. The policy has been based on the assumption that only government money could ensure that the nation's research scientists had the computing power they needed to pursue projects like simulating the flow of air around a jet airplane wing, mimicking the way proteins are folded inside cells or modeling the global climate.
But now two leading American computer researchers are challenging that policy. They argue that federal money would be better spent directly on the scientific research teams that are the largest users of supercomputers, by shifting the financing to vast data-storage systems instead of building ultrafast computers.
Innovation in data-storage technology is now significantly outpacing progress in computer processing power, they say, heralding a new era where vast pools of digital data are becoming the most crucial element in scientific research.
The researchers, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, scientists at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, presented the argument last month in a meeting of the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board at Stanford University.
"Gordon and I have been arguing that today's supercomputer centers will become superdata centers in the future," said Dr. Gray, an expert in large databases who has been working with some of the the nation's leading astronomers to build a powerful computer-based telescope.
The policy challenge spelled out by the Microsoft researchers comes as a quiet national policy debate over the future of supercomputing is taking place among experts in scientific, industrial and military computing.
In February the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure issued a report calling on the nation to spend more than $1 billion annually to modernize its high-performance computing capabilities.
Separately, a study completed last year by a group of military agencies was released in April. Titled "Report on High Performance Computing for National Security," it calls for spending $180 million to $390 million annually for five years to modernize supercomputing for a variety of military applications.
Computer scientists added that the construction of the Japanese Earth Simulator, which is now ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer, has touched off alarm in some parts of the United States government, with some officials advocating even more resources for the nation's three national supercomputer centers, located in Pittsburgh, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of California at San Diego.
Whatever decisions the government makes could have vast implications for computing.
The decision in 1985 to build a group of what were then five supercomputer centers linked together by a 56-kilobit-per-second computer network was a big impetus for development of the modern high-speed Internet, said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.
He said that Dr. Bell and Dr. Gray were correct about the data-centric technology trend and that increasingly the role of the nation's supercomputer centers would shift in the direction of being vast archives. Rapidly increasing network speeds would make it possible to increasingly distribute computing tasks.
Central to the Bell-Gray argument is the vast amount of data now being created by a new class of scientific instruments that integrate sensors and high-speed computers.
While the first generation of supercomputing involved simulating physical processes with relatively small data sets, the tremendous increase in data storage technology has led to a renaissance in
The International Game Developers Association has a PDF Game Submission Guide that gives you ''publisher feedback on submission checklist items, and information on what to expect before, during and after the pitch, along with insight into the publisher decision-making process.'' You have to fill out a free registration before download but it may be worth it to you.
I'm curious why (with one exception) you never seem to point out that ''this column'' is YOUR BLOG?
If you want to be a karma-whore then that's your business. And that's the only conclusion we can reach considering the sheer number of submissions (33 as of this one, not counting however many were rejected) in the 2 months since you set up your account, and the frequency with which you discourage people from reading the original articles (always pointing them to your blog).
I find some of the articles you post interesting so by all means continue to contribute. But please don't pretend that you aren't pointing people to your blog.
Presumably you're trying to turn yourself into another Internet pundit or get the traffic on your site up high enough so that you can charge big bucks for advertising. That's cool too if you want to do that.
But please... just stop pretending that you're directing people somewhere other than your own blog.
George Lucas was a keen social sciences student before he discovered film, and he was specifically taken with anthropology, sociology and psychology. I recall seeing an interview years ago where he compared The Force to Jung's collective unconscious, as an all-encompassing, all-permeating energy that connects all people. There was more, which I can't recall, but archetypal stories such as Star Wars, The Matrix and others all draw on philosophy, theology and other social sciences, whether we want to admit it or not.
You should read this interview with George Lucas where he says:
When I first got to college, I was very interested in the social sciences, anthropology, sociology, psychology, those kinds of things. And I was still interested in art and photography. I didn't know that I could actually put them all together in one occupation and love it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait until the mobile virus-loaded spam and SMS messages I'm going to get on my 3G phone corrupts the agent software on this "smart" phone and signs me up for all sorts of mortgages, prescription drugs, porn, printer cartridges and tropical vacations galore.
Viral marketing. Priceless.
Early this year, I saw some fairly sophisticated interaction using a flexible input device called ShapeTape, made by Canada's Measurand. While the company is marketing it as a motion-capture and 3D modeling technology, Tovi Grossman at the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project has been working under Ravin Balakrishnan to explore other applications for ShapeTape, including as a general input device. For example, you can use it in computer-assisted design or animation to make and perform some fairly complex 3D curves and manipulations in far less time than it would take with keyboards, mice or drawing tablets.
The Association of Computing Machinery's computer-human interaction publication CHI Letters' latest edition includes their paper on the use of ShapeTape (2 MB PDF), which was presented at the ACM CHI 2003 conference on human factors in computing systems along with MPEG demonstration videos. (3 min. basic - 15 MB | 15 min. complete - 190 MB)
Grossman's Web page includes links to other videos and previous papers.
Computer graphics and animation tool-maker Alias|Wavefront also has several videos that featured former chief scientist Bill Buxton demonstrating ShapeTape in use:
And, of course, ShapeTape maker Measurand also has further information and videos.
But, just as ass regulation, it would need global acceptance, meaning it would probably have to be accepted as a UN resolution.
Yes, and we all know that everyone obeys the UN and its resolutions. Nice notion but I don't think a UN resolution will be of much practical help.
By the way, "ass regulation"???
''The article doesn't detail the intricacies of the law...''
No need to guess about the bill - here's the text of the proposed legislation. See the bold text for the important part:
[BIL148-A.LCA]
[Advance (1)]
South Australia
[Prepared by the Parliamentary Counsel on the instructions of the Hon. I. Gilfillan, M.L.C.]
STATE SUPPLY (PROCUREMENT OF SOFTWARE) AMENDMENT
BILL 2003
A BILL FOR
An Act to amend the State Supply Act 1985.
[OPC-LC]
Contents
Part 1â"Preliminary
1. Short title
2. Amendment provisions
Part 2â"Amendment of State Supply Act 1985
3. Insertion of Part 3A
Part 3Aâ"Special provisions relating to supply operations of public authorities
17A. Principle applying to the procurement of computer software
The Parliament of South Australia enacts as follows:
Part 1â"Preliminary
Short title
1. This Act may be cited as the State Supply (Procurement of Software) Amendment Act 2003.
Amendment provisions
2. In this Act, a provision under a heading referring to the amendment of a specified Act amends the Act so specified.
Part 2â"Amendment of State Supply Act 1985
Insertion of Part 3A
3. After Part 3 insert:
Part 3Aâ"Special provisions relating to supply operations of public authorities
Principle applying to the procurement of computer software
17A. (1) A public authority must, in making a decision about the procurement of computer software for its operations, have regard to the principle that, wherever practicable, a public authority should use open source software in preference to proprietary software.
(2) In this sectionâ"
"distribute" means distribute for free or on payment of the reasonable costs of distribution;
"open source software" means computer software the subject of a licence granting a person a rightâ"
(a) without any limitation or restriction, to use the software for any purpose; and
(b) without any limitation or restriction, to make copies of the software for any purpose; and
(c) without any limitation or restriction, to access or modify the source code of the software for any purpose; and
(d) without payment of a royalty or other fee, to distribute copies ofâ"
(i) the software (including as a component of an aggregate distribution containing computer software from several different sources); or
(ii) a derived or modified form of the software, (whether in compiled form or in the form of source code), under the same terms as the licence applying to the software;
"proprietary software" means computer software that is not open source software.
PRINTED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE GOVERNMENT PRINTER
Part of the implied social contract of any representative government is to adopt policies and legislation that are in the public interest.
It is in the public interest for high-quality, low-cost or no-cost open source software to exist and be available to all levels of society.
It is also in the public interest for their governments to be run in a cost-effective manner. Unless there is a specific technical requirement that open source software cannot meet, there is no substantive reason why OSS should not be considered and adopted in the government sector. This doesn't even address the issue of locking a government into a proprietary solution.
Contrary to the lobbyists, the bill doesn't prevent proprietary solutions from being used. It merely states a preference for OSS as a guiding principle in the decision-making process for procurement "wherever practicable."
This would foster more competition (not less) and hopefully result in higher-quality software on all fronts.
This sort of enlightened legislation definitely falls under the category of a Public Good.
Translation:
Roland Piquepaille writes "... You'll find more details [LINKS 1, 2 to the company's site and one from a distributor!] in this summary [THAT'S MY BLOG!]"
What it should have said:
Roland Piquepaille writes "...You'll find links 1, 2 to the company's site and one from a distributor that only L337 H4x0rz [LIKE ME!] can find [GOOGLE IS, LIKE, SO KEWL] and could have linked to directly from my Slashdot post instead of forcing you to go to my blog [LIKE PAVLOVIAN DOGS], Roland Piquepaille's "Slashdot Karma-Whoring" Technology Trends and hunt for it, just so I could bump up my karma here/ try to turn myself into a pundit."
Someone, please tell me: When will the karma-whoring end?!? OH, THE HUMANITY! ;)
Bruha writes "Lewt [THAT'S ME!!!] over at Warcry News Network has written his [MY] review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He [I] mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's. Thanks for reading my crappy so-called review, boosting my site's traffic and increasing my Karma, my pageviews and my ad revenue.''
The main reason why we are seeing growing implementations of OFDM is because companies want to avoid Qualcomm's CDMA patents and the associated licensing fees.
Ask anybody in the know (who doesn't have a vested interest in seeing one of these technologies implemented) and they will concede OFDM is not inherently superior to to CDMA, or vice versa.
Through your usage of capital letters, I have become a wiser man.
Hey, if they don't understand you... talk slowly and loudly until they do! That's what Homer Simpson says, anyway! ;)
That was my first reaction too. Seems like the kind of thing that homeland (or should that be homeLAN?) security types would see as a potential problem. As for not being Linux-powered (as in fuelled), isn't that obvious?
Well, duh. I don't think I was gaving the /. crowd too much credit by assuming they're smart enough to parse the phrase correctly on their own, but in case I'm wrong... THE ROCKET IS POWERED BY COMBUSTIBLE FUEL! LINUX IS NOT A POWER SOURCE! For those refuse to believe that, try on one of these hats! ;)
There's an explanation of how they intend to achieve this on the site, along with a link to a news release that cites the Swedish Space Corporation's success transmitting data over 310 kilometers using 802.11b.
I remember back in university, people used to forward those stupid spam jokes and messages all the time. Whenever I pointed out that it really WASN'T free and they were contributing to a problem by doing so, I would get all sorts of angry e-mail back.
Now that spam accounts for the majority of e-mail traffic according to some studies, and those former classmates' companies have to pay for mail administration, filtering and other anti-spam and anti-virus measures, I wonder how they would respond now if I sent them the same type of spam they used to send.
The bottom line is that it's an abuse of the system, and just like you can get a ticket for driving too slow or recklessly on the highway, maybe there's a similar measure that taken against spammers.
The 43 million is secondary (or even tertiary) to the story. The real story is about the changing tactics of the industry and how it continues its attempts to force music-lovers to listen to music how the industry wants them to, instead of being responsive to customers as any good business should.
Now that a direct sales model is viable (iTunes, Prince and others) because the means of production and inexpensive distribution is widely available for a low cost, the industry has lost its main competitive advantage.
The oligopoly that the record companies have had is coming to an end and instead of embracing a new business model they keep trying to force everyone to adhere to the old broken model.
Also, please refer to the following articles from 2 days ago, paying special attention to the editorial:
Music Industry Changes its Tune on Sharing ... Sort Of
The NYT has a pair of stories about online music today. The first is a long article about how the music industry is trying to transform its image and its business by embracing online music and sharing ... within limits. But at the same time comments about filesharing like ''We're going to continue to address this with harsher and harsher means,'' by Universal's CEO aren't encouraging that the attitude has changed. The NYT Editorial page comes down firmly on the side of music-lovers with this gem: ''You don't have to be a 19-year-old college student to sense that there's something indecent in the concentration of the recording industry...''
* 2003-06-07 19:15:59 Music Industry Changes its Tune on Sharing ... Sor (articles,music) (rejected)
'Offtopic'? Obviously our moderator has never seen 'The Sopranos' No its not a complaint - just pointing out that informed moderators are better than uninformed ones
yalla wrote: /. in the future. That poor people :-)
Perhaps it would be wise to contact the owners of the sites before posting it to
Actually, the owner of the site is the one who posted it.
At the risk of sounding misanthropic, I'm getting tired of all the karma-whoring I keep seeing here lately. The photos of the Pioneer jacket and blurb about it can be seen on Yahoo News Photos but for some reason /. staff keep encouraging the karma whoring by accepting submissions like i4u's, which routinely fail to mention that he and others like him are driving traffic to their personal sites.
The obvious reasons for this are:
There's no real problem with either of these. But if you're going to drive people to your site, you should have something of value to add instead of just stealing the COPYRIGHTED Associated Press/Reuters/other news agency photos and posting them there. Using your site as redirect to the source story on another site just so you can boost your own site's traffic is almost as bad.
On top of all that, it's not surprising that ISPs will cut off the bandwidth for sites like that - as they have in i4u's case - leaving /.ers with a broken link.
More content, less karma whoring, please.
We differ on the motivations but I think we are in some agreement on the relative worthlessness of this blog. In truth, the number of accepted stories is about 1100% higher than what you thought. For those who care to read it here's a recap of a prior comment and open letter that sums it up for me:
I'm curious why (with one exception) you never seem to point out that ''this column'' is YOUR BLOG?
If you want to be a karma-whore then that's your business. And that's the only conclusion we can reach considering the sheer number of submissions (33 as of this one, not counting however many were rejected) in the 2 months since you set up your account, and the frequency with which you discourage people from reading the original articles (always pointing them to your blog).
I find some of the articles you post interesting so by all means continue to contribute. But please don't pretend that you aren't pointing people to your blog.
Presumably you're trying to turn yourself into another Internet pundit or get the traffic on your site up high enough so that you can charge big bucks for advertising. That's cool too if you want to do that.
But please ... just stop pretending that you're directing people somewhere other than your own blog.
Sincerely,
HardcoreGamer
Last August I spoke to a couple of senior Infogrames (now Atari) marketing managers who said that they were planning to release a Terminator 3 game on all platforms in conjunction with the movie premier (I guess the launch date slipped). They were pretty excited about it, even for marketing types.
Will those retailers that enforced the ESRB ratings stop now because they may have a First Amendment case on their hands? I think the free speech issues are a little more important than the fact a violent game ban was lifted.
Here's a round-up of the coverage so far (yes it's a rejected post which i'm too lazy to retype):
The federal 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that games are protected by the First Amendment as free speech, striking down a judgement last year that ruled games do not qualify as protected speech. This also means that banning minors from buying or renting mature-themed games is unconstitutional. Part of the judgement read that games 'are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature.'
Or if youre too lazy to do that just read it here.
June 2, 2003
In Computing, Weighing Sheer Power Against Vast Pools of Data
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 -- For almost two decades the federal government has heavily underwritten elaborate centers to house the world's fastest supercomputers. The policy has been based on the assumption that only government money could ensure that the nation's research scientists had the computing power they needed to pursue projects like simulating the flow of air around a jet airplane wing, mimicking the way proteins are folded inside cells or modeling the global climate.
But now two leading American computer researchers are challenging that policy. They argue that federal money would be better spent directly on the scientific research teams that are the largest users of supercomputers, by shifting the financing to vast data-storage systems instead of building ultrafast computers.
Innovation in data-storage technology is now significantly outpacing progress in computer processing power, they say, heralding a new era where vast pools of digital data are becoming the most crucial element in scientific research.
The researchers, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, scientists at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, presented the argument last month in a meeting of the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board at Stanford University.
"Gordon and I have been arguing that today's supercomputer centers will become superdata centers in the future," said Dr. Gray, an expert in large databases who has been working with some of the the nation's leading astronomers to build a powerful computer-based telescope.
The policy challenge spelled out by the Microsoft researchers comes as a quiet national policy debate over the future of supercomputing is taking place among experts in scientific, industrial and military computing.
In February the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure issued a report calling on the nation to spend more than $1 billion annually to modernize its high-performance computing capabilities.
Separately, a study completed last year by a group of military agencies was released in April. Titled "Report on High Performance Computing for National Security," it calls for spending $180 million to $390 million annually for five years to modernize supercomputing for a variety of military applications.
Computer scientists added that the construction of the Japanese Earth Simulator, which is now ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer, has touched off alarm in some parts of the United States government, with some officials advocating even more resources for the nation's three national supercomputer centers, located in Pittsburgh, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of California at San Diego.
Whatever decisions the government makes could have vast implications for computing.
The decision in 1985 to build a group of what were then five supercomputer centers linked together by a 56-kilobit-per-second computer network was a big impetus for development of the modern high-speed Internet, said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.
He said that Dr. Bell and Dr. Gray were correct about the data-centric technology trend and that increasingly the role of the nation's supercomputer centers would shift in the direction of being vast archives. Rapidly increasing network speeds would make it possible to increasingly distribute computing tasks.
Central to the Bell-Gray argument is the vast amount of data now being created by a new class of scientific instruments that integrate sensors and high-speed computers.
While the first generation of supercomputing involved simulating physical processes with relatively small data sets, the tremendous increase in data storage technology has led to a renaissance in
The International Game Developers Association has a PDF Game Submission Guide that gives you ''publisher feedback on submission checklist items, and information on what to expect before, during and after the pitch, along with insight into the publisher decision-making process.'' You have to fill out a free registration before download but it may be worth it to you.
I'm curious why (with one exception) you never seem to point out that ''this column'' is YOUR BLOG?
If you want to be a karma-whore then that's your business. And that's the only conclusion we can reach considering the sheer number of submissions (33 as of this one, not counting however many were rejected) in the 2 months since you set up your account, and the frequency with which you discourage people from reading the original articles (always pointing them to your blog).
I find some of the articles you post interesting so by all means continue to contribute. But please don't pretend that you aren't pointing people to your blog.
Presumably you're trying to turn yourself into another Internet pundit or get the traffic on your site up high enough so that you can charge big bucks for advertising. That's cool too if you want to do that.
But please ... just stop pretending that you're directing people somewhere other than your own blog.
Sincerely,
HardcoreGamer
That's it. Not quite up to snuff on my Italian slang. The question is will you faint in Everquest every time you see some meat a la Tony Soprano.
What's the Everquest equivalent of "gabba-goo"?
George Lucas was a keen social sciences student before he discovered film, and he was specifically taken with anthropology, sociology and psychology. I recall seeing an interview years ago where he compared The Force to Jung's collective unconscious, as an all-encompassing, all-permeating energy that connects all people. There was more, which I can't recall, but archetypal stories such as Star Wars, The Matrix and others all draw on philosophy, theology and other social sciences, whether we want to admit it or not. You should read this interview with George Lucas where he says:
Also take a look at this article about the influence of anthropologist Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces on George Lucas and his thinking.