I would have thought (as a non-owner) that the X-BOX represents one of MS' victories in the consumer space. I wonder sometimes if MS hadn't just made their phone UI more like X-BOX they would have had a highly successful product.
And X-BOX represents an excellent PR opportunity through-out MS' range of products. It introduces consumers to a working, easy to use computer system that builds confidence in their product line and makes them relevant in every living room. I don't understand why companies keep hiring the same bad decision makers.
As someone who needs to read a lot for their job, I find the definition of a book does not necessarily imply a square block made out of slivers of paper. In fact, any of the things like that that I have obtained in recent memory suffer due to lack of portability - I don't have enough additional carrying capacity to keep a book geographically close to myself for times when I want to read it.
If only there was a way for book stores to sell digital versions of the text with the item.... just like they did 12 years ago when I last had to buy an assload of textbooks.
To be fair, I don't own a Kindle. Why would I? I have notebook computers and smart phones and tablets, projectors and text-to-speech applications. Hell, even graphic calculators. I mean, you would HAVE to be blind to actually consider crappy-ass Kindles a realistic threat to your business in the wake of the countless other alternatives to read electronically.
So I guess you could call it the Media Whore Factor (MWF), or, the breadth and depth of data exposed to during a sitting rather than the quantity of media consumed.
So, someone skimming Reddit would have a far greater MWF than, say, someone watching Fox NEWS. This might be another way of indicating the relative worthlessness of conventional media that tend to drive viewers through a set of topics of subjectively varying interest.
I still call BS on this, however. I suspect there is a saturation limit on attention and information density, which this study doesn't seem to take into account. As someone else pointed out, extrapolation gone mad.
Hell, just to make my damn phone work I need an iTunes subscription. That ties my phone to my credit card. Then they start spamming me with music suggesting software. They provide software so that police can remotely suck all the data off it. They release back doors so that even if my company remotely bricks it, I can restore my last backup and keep running.
I think its fair to say, Apple's business model very much relies on them being able to collect user data, or to connect users to ways they can share data.
If what they say is true, the iPhone would be an open platform that let me install what I wanted, rather than existing in this walled Apple Only Garden
Ever since SourceForge started their "8 bonus pieces of malware with every legitimate open source software download" offer, my computer has run like shit. I welcome our new FTP overlords!
... when Starship Troopers came out, I find it reassuring that 'American critics' are finally able to comprehend the humor of this film. Its only taken 16 years for them to get the joke, but better late than never, right?
And is it any wonder that the public's view of professional critics is so poor? Should 15 year old boys be put in charge of this, clearly very challenging job? Is there something slightly 'special' about American critic's sense of humor that prevents them from seeing such an obviously tongue-in-cheek parody of extreme imperialism?
What is Apple attempting to achieve by releasing a non-transparent transparency report? Its hardly 'full disclosure', possibly to the point of false marketing, in accordance with Investopedia's definition of the topic: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/transparency.asp
Myst was, at least to many of my friends, Return to Zork's slightly retarded cousin. The presentation was very similar, yet somewhat more isolated due to a lack of other characters in the world. Elements like Zork's sound recording puzzle were brilliant, and aside from a brutally challenging second last puzzle (if you had dropped any items throughout the game, it could not be beaten) the level of challenge would not be seen again until Access released it's Tex Murphy series with Under a Killing Moon in 1994. For a time adventure style games lulled, but with the rise of companies like Telltale the format is being somewhat revived. 2014 will see a new Tex Murphy instalment
It was not just the unique puzzles that made RTZ a brilliant title, but the inclusion of FMV in a way that rewarded the player but didn't sacrifice to much content at the expense of their inclusion. FMV, at the time, was quite popular, but was often an 'all or nothing' affair. On top of this, video codecs were in their infancy, meaning a minute of data ate up a considerable chunk of a disc. So for RTZ to offer hours upon hours of gameplay in addition to FMV, all on a single disc, was simply remarkable.
So what was Myst's legacy? Beats me. It did nothing that hadn't been done already.
So, I don't get it. Does that mean everyone in Diablo 3 gets their gear reset? 2 years seems like an amazing amount of time for a game to be released yet still clearly be in Beta.
Does PC get any other updates, like evade rolls, or larger portraits of toons? Sounds like Blizzard is attempting to completely gimp their PC version now to raise sales on console offerings.
not to mention scammy business practices. I once paid $35 at Sanity for a Nine Inch Nails single that only came with one of the two disks. They litterally sent out a two CD case with a note on the empty side telling you how to buy the second disk of the pack. Also, you had to buy the single to determine that you only got half of the tracks listed on the back.
To be fair, during a visit, Trent Reznor discovered that his album was being sold at $30 instead of his RRP of $20 and released his next few albums for free. I think Radio Head and a few others followed suit, and I think you will find THAT had one of the most profound changes on the music industry. When the big bands that didn't necessarily need money started to become hostile to the recording industry. What they started has simply become the norm, and radio stations have picked up on this and now often have segments for non-contracted artists.
which is that no-one wants to buy them because they can't be used on your lap comfortably unless you remove the keyboard, and then its just bloody screen!
As much as I find it completely unproductive to hold my computer at all times in one hand and bash out words at about 3WPM with my other hand, I just can't help but feel that all of the parts you might want on a computer have been left out in the cold.... like the input devices. If it instead came with, I don't know, MIND READING capabilities, it would be a fancy little unit, but as it is, it can't even stand up on my lap.
Why would you want to spend good money in order to double-handle a download? "For the mere price of the actual game, and twice the space and bandwidth requirements, you can now own the broken-game AND a working copy!"
This is why Microsoft will never generate any trust from consumers. They break their platforms prior to the consumer's vision of the end of their lifetime. And apparently we've all been earning MS points for nothing.
It makes it difficult as well when you have to support MS technologies. As a dev, its hard for me to fully get on board with tech like Powershell, knowing that it will just be retired in 4 years, where as C++, VB or Bash scripting tends to remain relevant for generations. Anyone remember widgets?
I think the real problem may be the environment that the top game developers have created over the past few years. Either Romero is telling everyone to be his bitch, or Jay Wilson is saying "Fuck that guy" to any devs he doesn't like. Then you can look at some of these same developers make game-breaking choices and inform fans of the franchises they have been made "Better" (online only in Diablo 3 and Simcity... micro-transactions..... DLC) that either make the game incomplete, or worse yet, entirely unplayable.
If your devs are hostile, your fans will learn to respond in kind. If your game is deeply flawed, you are probably also going to receive angry criticism. An example of this I've seen recently is that poor bastard Rocket from DayZ. He has had constant grief over complaints of hackers, and because his game is so engaging, fans get very passionate when they have to start again for no fair reason. The only unfortunate part of this situation is that Rocket didn't have anything to do with the infrastructure (Arma2) that runs the game, and unfortunately Arma 2 security is trivial to defeat, so he cops abuse as a result. But his game is definately broken as a result of Arma2. I suspect many of those fans will be silenced once an actual product arrives.
So, is the abuse unfair? Sometimes it is without merit, but often it seems just a little justified.
If the polygraph were in any way effective, it would have outed the two agents to the instructor the first time they were hooked up to the machine. Seems like a bit of a double-edged case they have walked into. Either (A) The agents were outed early by actual science behind the 'lie detector', thus the Instructors weren't doing anything wrong or (B) No crime was committed because a company was being paid to train someone on the use of a product that doesn't actually do anything. They may as well have been training them on using Astrology to beat the police, or Psychic redirection.
to use the Patent system as a weapon against innovation? I bought my first $57 android phone last week, and it outperforms the iPhone 4 it was replacing. It seems like its against my interests as a consumer to be limited to a device that retails at over 10x that figure.
Sorry, Slashdot, but why did a story from CSM ever arrive here? In Australia, Christianity is a subversive religion with an agenda to create ridiculous laws that support their beliefs and to silence their critics. More over, they are a militant religion that discriminates against any one or any religion outside of its own. Unlike most of the other religions I have experienced, who choose to live along side one and other, Christianity serves as the one true fascist religion.
As a person who has had to live under religious persecution from the Christians for the first 18 years of my life, I think I can fairly safely say that they have no place in the Tech or science community, now or in the future.
Peh! You, sir, have no vision. I see a potential laugh-a-polousa as the Doctor gets up to crazy antics like his first period, his first accidental pregnancy, "that" buttfloss episode, lesbians again, and so much more! The writing team can go home!
aside from those jokes really not being that funny, is that they are also counter intuitive, with perhaps the exception of the first. Assuming the AI lives in the computer, the last thing it would like is bad sectors. In fact, they often grind the operation to a halt. The same goes for coffee. Assuming a computer would, in fact, want coffee in any form, wouldn't it want it hot?
Its a pity that, rather than announcing the news of their close, they didn't think to inform Slashdot of their existence. The fact that I, and so many others, seem completely oblivious to this offering is probably a sign that Amazon wasn't the problem in the slightest. SEO, on the other hand, may have gone some distance. (Hell, Amazon only sell books! How is this even competition? Sure, they might sell other stuff in the US, but not to the rest of the world! Last time I checked, the rest of the world actually contained more than twice the population of the US alone. Some food for thought)
I can certainly see where this argument is coming from, however, it illustrates a distinct double standard in regards to consumers. In Australia we have been burnt a few times by Apple winning injunctions against Samsung which limited our options for a while to Apple's offerings. http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/11/samsung-wins-appeal-against-apple-injunction-overturned/
Worse, most of the infringement case seemed to centre on prior art, so I'm not sure what all Apple's litigation is protecting us from. I'll say this, though. Its nice to be able to buy Samsung devices again without glaring security holes and NSA backdoors. I know the latter is a bit of a buzzword in the media right now, but I don't think its any more relevant to IT people now than it was back when MS's forensic tools were being leaked.
Reading comments like this only make Linus\ position all the more relevant. His methodology ensures he gets only experienced developers. I think we all appreciate blankinthefill's desire to contribute, but Linux Kernel development is a very technical project, and requires the best of the best. If you want to get your feet wet, find a non-mission critical OSS project, and leave the experts to developing core OS components.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have thought (as a non-owner) that the X-BOX represents one of MS' victories in the consumer space. I wonder sometimes if MS hadn't just made their phone UI more like X-BOX they would have had a highly successful product.
And X-BOX represents an excellent PR opportunity through-out MS' range of products. It introduces consumers to a working, easy to use computer system that builds confidence in their product line and makes them relevant in every living room. I don't understand why companies keep hiring the same bad decision makers.
As someone who needs to read a lot for their job, I find the definition of a book does not necessarily imply a square block made out of slivers of paper. In fact, any of the things like that that I have obtained in recent memory suffer due to lack of portability - I don't have enough additional carrying capacity to keep a book geographically close to myself for times when I want to read it.
If only there was a way for book stores to sell digital versions of the text with the item.... just like they did 12 years ago when I last had to buy an assload of textbooks.
To be fair, I don't own a Kindle. Why would I? I have notebook computers and smart phones and tablets, projectors and text-to-speech applications. Hell, even graphic calculators. I mean, you would HAVE to be blind to actually consider crappy-ass Kindles a realistic threat to your business in the wake of the countless other alternatives to read electronically.
So I guess you could call it the Media Whore Factor (MWF), or, the breadth and depth of data exposed to during a sitting rather than the quantity of media consumed.
So, someone skimming Reddit would have a far greater MWF than, say, someone watching Fox NEWS. This might be another way of indicating the relative worthlessness of conventional media that tend to drive viewers through a set of topics of subjectively varying interest.
I still call BS on this, however. I suspect there is a saturation limit on attention and information density, which this study doesn't seem to take into account. As someone else pointed out, extrapolation gone mad.
Hell, just to make my damn phone work I need an iTunes subscription. That ties my phone to my credit card. Then they start spamming me with music suggesting software. They provide software so that police can remotely suck all the data off it. They release back doors so that even if my company remotely bricks it, I can restore my last backup and keep running.
I think its fair to say, Apple's business model very much relies on them being able to collect user data, or to connect users to ways they can share data.
If what they say is true, the iPhone would be an open platform that let me install what I wanted, rather than existing in this walled Apple Only Garden
HEY! HEY! We want flexible tools, not a bunch of malware! Consider hosting your own FTP?
Ever since SourceForge started their "8 bonus pieces of malware with every legitimate open source software download" offer, my computer has run like shit. I welcome our new FTP overlords!
... when Starship Troopers came out, I find it reassuring that 'American critics' are finally able to comprehend the humor of this film. Its only taken 16 years for them to get the joke, but better late than never, right? And is it any wonder that the public's view of professional critics is so poor? Should 15 year old boys be put in charge of this, clearly very challenging job? Is there something slightly 'special' about American critic's sense of humor that prevents them from seeing such an obviously tongue-in-cheek parody of extreme imperialism?
What is Apple attempting to achieve by releasing a non-transparent transparency report? Its hardly 'full disclosure', possibly to the point of false marketing, in accordance with Investopedia's definition of the topic: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/transparency.asp
Myst was, at least to many of my friends, Return to Zork's slightly retarded cousin. The presentation was very similar, yet somewhat more isolated due to a lack of other characters in the world. Elements like Zork's sound recording puzzle were brilliant, and aside from a brutally challenging second last puzzle (if you had dropped any items throughout the game, it could not be beaten) the level of challenge would not be seen again until Access released it's Tex Murphy series with Under a Killing Moon in 1994. For a time adventure style games lulled, but with the rise of companies like Telltale the format is being somewhat revived. 2014 will see a new Tex Murphy instalment
It was not just the unique puzzles that made RTZ a brilliant title, but the inclusion of FMV in a way that rewarded the player but didn't sacrifice to much content at the expense of their inclusion. FMV, at the time, was quite popular, but was often an 'all or nothing' affair. On top of this, video codecs were in their infancy, meaning a minute of data ate up a considerable chunk of a disc. So for RTZ to offer hours upon hours of gameplay in addition to FMV, all on a single disc, was simply remarkable.
So what was Myst's legacy? Beats me. It did nothing that hadn't been done already.
The land of the watched, and home of the scared.
So, I don't get it. Does that mean everyone in Diablo 3 gets their gear reset? 2 years seems like an amazing amount of time for a game to be released yet still clearly be in Beta.
Does PC get any other updates, like evade rolls, or larger portraits of toons? Sounds like Blizzard is attempting to completely gimp their PC version now to raise sales on console offerings.
I know I'll be celebrating.
not to mention scammy business practices. I once paid $35 at Sanity for a Nine Inch Nails single that only came with one of the two disks. They litterally sent out a two CD case with a note on the empty side telling you how to buy the second disk of the pack. Also, you had to buy the single to determine that you only got half of the tracks listed on the back.
To be fair, during a visit, Trent Reznor discovered that his album was being sold at $30 instead of his RRP of $20 and released his next few albums for free. I think Radio Head and a few others followed suit, and I think you will find THAT had one of the most profound changes on the music industry. When the big bands that didn't necessarily need money started to become hostile to the recording industry. What they started has simply become the norm, and radio stations have picked up on this and now often have segments for non-contracted artists.
Whats wrong with eComStation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EComStation
which is that no-one wants to buy them because they can't be used on your lap comfortably unless you remove the keyboard, and then its just bloody screen!
As much as I find it completely unproductive to hold my computer at all times in one hand and bash out words at about 3WPM with my other hand, I just can't help but feel that all of the parts you might want on a computer have been left out in the cold.... like the input devices. If it instead came with, I don't know, MIND READING capabilities, it would be a fancy little unit, but as it is, it can't even stand up on my lap.
How about "steroids"?
Why would you want to spend good money in order to double-handle a download? "For the mere price of the actual game, and twice the space and bandwidth requirements, you can now own the broken-game AND a working copy!"
This is why Microsoft will never generate any trust from consumers. They break their platforms prior to the consumer's vision of the end of their lifetime. And apparently we've all been earning MS points for nothing.
It makes it difficult as well when you have to support MS technologies. As a dev, its hard for me to fully get on board with tech like Powershell, knowing that it will just be retired in 4 years, where as C++, VB or Bash scripting tends to remain relevant for generations. Anyone remember widgets?
I think the real problem may be the environment that the top game developers have created over the past few years. Either Romero is telling everyone to be his bitch, or Jay Wilson is saying "Fuck that guy" to any devs he doesn't like. Then you can look at some of these same developers make game-breaking choices and inform fans of the franchises they have been made "Better" (online only in Diablo 3 and Simcity... micro-transactions..... DLC) that either make the game incomplete, or worse yet, entirely unplayable.
If your devs are hostile, your fans will learn to respond in kind. If your game is deeply flawed, you are probably also going to receive angry criticism. An example of this I've seen recently is that poor bastard Rocket from DayZ. He has had constant grief over complaints of hackers, and because his game is so engaging, fans get very passionate when they have to start again for no fair reason. The only unfortunate part of this situation is that Rocket didn't have anything to do with the infrastructure (Arma2) that runs the game, and unfortunately Arma 2 security is trivial to defeat, so he cops abuse as a result. But his game is definately broken as a result of Arma2. I suspect many of those fans will be silenced once an actual product arrives.
So, is the abuse unfair? Sometimes it is without merit, but often it seems just a little justified.
If the polygraph were in any way effective, it would have outed the two agents to the instructor the first time they were hooked up to the machine. Seems like a bit of a double-edged case they have walked into. Either (A) The agents were outed early by actual science behind the 'lie detector', thus the Instructors weren't doing anything wrong or (B) No crime was committed because a company was being paid to train someone on the use of a product that doesn't actually do anything. They may as well have been training them on using Astrology to beat the police, or Psychic redirection.
to use the Patent system as a weapon against innovation? I bought my first $57 android phone last week, and it outperforms the iPhone 4 it was replacing. It seems like its against my interests as a consumer to be limited to a device that retails at over 10x that figure.
Sorry, Slashdot, but why did a story from CSM ever arrive here? In Australia, Christianity is a subversive religion with an agenda to create ridiculous laws that support their beliefs and to silence their critics. More over, they are a militant religion that discriminates against any one or any religion outside of its own. Unlike most of the other religions I have experienced, who choose to live along side one and other, Christianity serves as the one true fascist religion.
As a person who has had to live under religious persecution from the Christians for the first 18 years of my life, I think I can fairly safely say that they have no place in the Tech or science community, now or in the future.
Peh! You, sir, have no vision. I see a potential laugh-a-polousa as the Doctor gets up to crazy antics like his first period, his first accidental pregnancy, "that" buttfloss episode, lesbians again, and so much more! The writing team can go home!
aside from those jokes really not being that funny, is that they are also counter intuitive, with perhaps the exception of the first. Assuming the AI lives in the computer, the last thing it would like is bad sectors. In fact, they often grind the operation to a halt. The same goes for coffee. Assuming a computer would, in fact, want coffee in any form, wouldn't it want it hot?
If(punchline="hot" || coffee="cold"){return "fail"}
Its a pity that, rather than announcing the news of their close, they didn't think to inform Slashdot of their existence. The fact that I, and so many others, seem completely oblivious to this offering is probably a sign that Amazon wasn't the problem in the slightest. SEO, on the other hand, may have gone some distance. (Hell, Amazon only sell books! How is this even competition? Sure, they might sell other stuff in the US, but not to the rest of the world! Last time I checked, the rest of the world actually contained more than twice the population of the US alone. Some food for thought)
I can certainly see where this argument is coming from, however, it illustrates a distinct double standard in regards to consumers. In Australia we have been burnt a few times by Apple winning injunctions against Samsung which limited our options for a while to Apple's offerings. http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/11/samsung-wins-appeal-against-apple-injunction-overturned/
Worse, most of the infringement case seemed to centre on prior art, so I'm not sure what all Apple's litigation is protecting us from. I'll say this, though. Its nice to be able to buy Samsung devices again without glaring security holes and NSA backdoors. I know the latter is a bit of a buzzword in the media right now, but I don't think its any more relevant to IT people now than it was back when MS's forensic tools were being leaked.
Reading comments like this only make Linus\ position all the more relevant. His methodology ensures he gets only experienced developers. I think we all appreciate blankinthefill's desire to contribute, but Linux Kernel development is a very technical project, and requires the best of the best. If you want to get your feet wet, find a non-mission critical OSS project, and leave the experts to developing core OS components.