If others are forced to yield their own freedoms and provide for those requiring the artificial means to survive? Absolutely.
Re:Jury duty
on
Free Culture
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't know how jury duty works where you're from, but my experience is that if you're called, you can often spend the better part of the day waiting in the jury pool room without ever being called into a courtroom.
It's an excellent time to have a book you want to read handy.
We could argue easy vs. not easy all day, and I'm not really interested in that. I'd like to share something you might not be aware of, however.
I've been to too many sites that are confused that, the web isn't desktop publishing, where what they see isn't only view way it could be rendered. Sites that do stupid things like assume a fixed font size. Like assuming that every one on the planet uses a 17" at 1024x768, or that no one could concieve of using a 256 color desktop.
I am not a graphic designer, but I can tell you that these kinds of things can't always be chalked up to graphic designer stupidity. A lot of the time, it's corporate stupidity.
If you're doing web-work for a brick-and-mortar corporation, they'll typically have an elaborate and terribly bureaucratic-reading style guide. You must use these fonts this size, pictures of our logo need a border of empty space precisely X pixels around them, etc. Not adhering to such a guide, stupid as it is, is not generally an option. Making something like this work in one specific browser is an exercise in hair-pulling and nitpicking, but it can be done. The more browsers you want to support, the more nightmarish it gets.
I've heard a lot of conversations with clients like that (and it's most of them) that go something like this:
Client: This web site looks great, it finally adheres to our requirements. But look, it looks all weird in Netscape! And it looks weird in different ways in these various versions of Netscape! Fix it!!
Web Dev Company: Sure, we can do that. It's going to take X amount of time and Y amount of money though.
Client: That's a lot of money. Wait, what percentage of our current web site visitors use IE?
WDC: 99%.
Client: Fuck those hippie bastards then. Can we just force them to use IE?
It's not terrible complex to build good looking sites that render in several of the latest browsers.
Having dealt with the nightmare that is cross-browser compatibility for several years (not implicitly part of my job, but I touch on it from time to time and people I've worked with do as well), I would strongly beg to differ on that.
Hell, it's not even trivial to write HTML that works and looks right in the last half a dozen releases of just Netscape without complicating the matter with other non-NS browsers.
Let's be honest... at the moment, writing letters asking web sites to support non-IE web browsers is about on the level of writing the producers of the movie of your choice asking them to release it on laserdisc or betamax.
Being compatible with the technology used by the vast majority of the population is good enough for almost everyone, be they business owner, charitable organization, or random web-site. Be happy when your alternative choice is supported, but don't be surprised or offended when it isn't.
I'd be surprised if 90%+ of even a geek community like gamers didn't use IE.
First off, computer science != computer programming, it's much more than that
Absolutely. That's actually sort of my point. Probably, most people who make it through a four year or greater computer science degree like computer science. They may not like the actual application of the theory, such as it is, in the business world.
Second, if you had good professors and course material, you would have at least been taught how to code things much more efficiantly and using better methodologies.
Alas, I went to a top-rated university for comp sci, which is a nice way of saying I didn't get taught shit in the way of efficient code or better methodologies. Virtually everything I need to know to do my job, I learned either on my own or not on the job -- not in school. I'm not genuinely bitter about that, but it's not for everyone. There are going to be people who are disgruntled because of it.
On the other hand, in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a client ever really needs me to write code to solve systems of linear equations from scratch rather than use existing open source or proprietary libraries that provide that functionality, I'm all set. Just need to get my notes from my several required semesters of numerical methods.
However, I have yet to see (at least in the consulting / custom software development field) a workplace that even approached the ideal. The reality is that because of deadlines, programmers having left the company or simply unavailable for the moment, the overallocation of programmers, etc., there's an awful lot of people working on code that isn't theirs. The client doesn't want to hear that I'm responsible for code X and I'm unfortunately gone for the week or too busy with other work if they want changes made or found a bug -- and they're not going to. Managers will find someone else to work on the code immediately.
The companies that I've worked for that were less willing to bend over backwards to comply with the whimsical demands of their clients are no longer in business. I'm not convinced this is a coincidence.
Either way, I'd think we can agree that work/time allocation and especially design are almost universally less perfect in the workplace than in the classroom -- something I think many new and then disgruntled grads are not prepared to deal with.
That all said, I'll wager that when the "DotCom Boom" was happening, many of the "other 6 of the 7" got into IT for the money. If you don't love what you do then get out of it.
There's definitely some of that -- don't even ask me how many art or business majors I knew back in the day who were "retrained" for IT -- but I think a lot of those people have been shaken out of it by now, either by leaving the industry entirely or, more frighteningly, by scurrying up to management.
But there are other stories, too. The simple fact is, most college educations will not in the least prepare you for the realities of working as a programmer. (I'll speak to that specifically, since it's what I know -- other IT jobs may vary.)
Some of this is relatively trivial. I was forced to take a lot of comp sci theory classes that have never and will never be useful on the job. Some of that was interesting, some of it was there simply because the university had professors that knew it and did research on it and they didn't know what else to do with them. Instead of, say, 10% of my course load being required to be physics, they could have had me take even a single class involving databases, something many professional programmers will touch on nearly every day of their working lives. That part of it though, is water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned. People who like the field and want to be in it can learn and adapt to overcome those kinds of gaps.
The more troubling thing is that working as a programmer is a whole lot different than doing programming in college.
I've known people who loved programming and did great with it in school and for their own projects, but who were utterly broken by the realities of dealing with clients. Some couldn't handle the (gasp) social skills tasks of having to deal with clients or non-technical people at their own companies. Others were slowly ground down towards insanity by having to continually retrofit their work to comply with the seemingly insane demands of the clients or end users. When you do programming projects in school or for yourself, the spec rarely changes fifty times partway through for (as far as you can tell) no reason. In the real world, it happens all the time.
To take another example, I work with a guy who will probably be shaken out of the IT industry sooner or later. It's obvious to everyone, including him, that he isn't happy. It's not that he doesn't like programming in general. The problem, in his case, are the realities of enterprise level programming. He can't stand that he can write some code, test it and find it working just fine, and come in to work the next day to discover that someone else on the far side of the office working on a seemingly unrelated one of the few thousand files that make up the project has effectively broken his work. He can't take looking at something that works one day and not the next and not even (without doing a fair amount of investigation) know how or why. That's another reality of working in IT that doesn't really come up in school.
Myself, I'm happy, but sometimes it's true what they say: If you love something, the last thing you want to try to do is do it for a living.
For what it's worth, Sun does have testing/cerifications for Java Developers. I'm too slothy to re-dig up the link at the moment, but I'm sure you can find it somewhere on java.sun.com
What does the (insert Blizzard's game name here) end user license agreement say you can and can't do? I admit I haven't read mine in a while, but I suspect there's a clause forbidding you from doing the above.
In our capitalistic system, dollars vote. (How literal that is depends on how cynical you are.) If Blizzard's EULA forbids you from doing something you think you should be able to do, instead buy the product of a company that doesn't. That's your choice.
The problem I have with this whole argument is that some people seem to think that you can divorce the way Blizzard does business with the products they create, and that's completely not true. They make great, widely popular games with strong player loyalty and community support. These things are true, in part, because of what they've done with battle.net.
We could debate all day whether the open source movement or even just a less "evil" company could have concieved of and delivered games equal or superior to those Blizzard has produced, but the reality is, they didn't. Blizzard did. Either live with the way they do things, or play a different game. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Where exactly in the Constitution (or elsewhere) was "Freedom to play Starcraft without buying it" a right?
For the record, I also think Blizzard's business plan (via battle.net) was not only not a bad one but a good and even fairly visionary one for its time.
..Takes maturity on the part of the developer. Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence.
GTA and Vice City have excellent storylines and great voice acting to string together the amusing gameplay. Without the memorable characters or the hilarious radio talk shows the game loses much of its charm.
I couldn't agree more.
In a lot of ways, I think this fixation of game developers upon "mature" games is a mistake. For people not very familiar with GTA, it's easy to make the (incorrect) assumption that the game sells because of its adult content.
The truth is that GTA sells because it's a good game.
There's always going to be a market for good games of any genre, platform, maturity level, or whatever. That's the lesson game developers should be learning here.
you'd rather take a vastly inferior system with a half-broken core mechanic?
That's really, at best, a matter of opinion. There've been a hundred different RPG systems over the years and there's yet to be one that did everything better than all the others in the opinion of everyone. At the risk of being tackled and beaten by suggesting as much on/., in that way, the situation is much like operating systems.
For some people, having to do various conversions on most of the numbers in a book is a big deterrent. I don't know that it's a deal-breaker for me, but it'd certainly make me look twice at other systems.
Granted, I don't think the d20 system suits the feel of Call of Cthulhu, but that's a whole other ball of wax.
GURPS has never been my cup of tea, but if releasing a new version of it helps make the system better at the things it does well and appeal to the people who like it? More power to SJG.
The net benefits of full plate mail outweigh all other armor configurations. That's pure nonsense, but the rules make it so "middle" armors like chainmail (which should be the most useful armor for a fighter) are only for people who can't afford full plate.
IMHO, this isn't true anymore in 3/3.5E D&D. It might well outweigh all other armor configurations for a mounted fighter, or one who is both non-dexterous and doesn't particularly care about his mobility, but in the general case, it doesn't.
A lot of changes in the game since 2E, some fairly obvious, some more subtle add up to full plate not being the be-all and end-all of armor anymore. You're at least as likely to see a fighting character in play armored in a chain shirt as in full plate mail.
The longsword thing is more of an opinion matter but I'd say that's much less of an answer to everything as well.
Will there be a rise of an "independent" games industry with more focus on artistry and less focus on profit in much the same way as there is an independent film industry? Will we ever have a widely-known gaming equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival?
Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate both blockbuster Hollywood movies and indie films in their own ways. I'd be interesting to see that kind of balance and contrast come to another entertainment industry.
At its heart, I think this and similar issues (such as baseball and steroids, which I believe someone brought up above) are really just a reflection of our culture.
Somewhere along the line there's been a paradigm shift, and maybe it occured so gradually that no one noticed it was happening at the time. Winning has become more important than anything; this is a generally accepted value.
It may seem like splitting hairs, but I think at some point, the cultural value was more that you wanted to be the best (at whatever). Winning wasn't the goal, per se; it was just the natural consequences of being the best. Somehow that middle step of excelling has been lost, has become a vague ???? not unlike a failed dot.com business plan. Once upon a time working hard and becoming good at your chosen endeavor filled that gap, now whatever means that seems most expedient (including cheating) is permitted to suffice.
According to the report, the PS3 is expected to sell 32 million units in Europe by 2010, more than the combined sales of the Microsoft and Nintendo machines.
I mean, seriously, what are these so-called analysts basing that on? The article doesn't say.
Probably, the PS3 will do well, but it seems beyond premature to make up numbers like these without supporting them in any meaningful way.
This is interesting, but it leaves a lot of important questions unanswered, technically as well as legally/politically.
For example: just how computationally intensive is the Audible Magic "listening" algorithm?
If it occurs client-side, does that unfairly mandate a higher caliber of hardware for a user to partake in file-sharing? How easy would it be to hack or fake out this kind of software? The better question may be: is it easy enough for the kind of non-technical mass user that has made P2P such a success?
If it occurs server-side (at least, as much as this term is accurate in the case of file-sharing paradigms that have supernodes or the like), who's responsible for setting up and maintaining it? Does file-sharing become impossible if these things go down?
The article mentions the Napster era of faking out filters by simply changing file names. Could you fake this out by changing your audio files to have extensions that identified them as something other than audio files? If not, does that mean the software will be stupidly trying to "listen" to pictures I'm sharing of my last kayaking trip?
Ultimately, if this is somehow legally mandated it'll probably kill Kazaa etc. the same way the courts effectively killed Napster. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's interesting to examine the airtightness of the solution nonetheless.
Hoop-jumping or not, it was an interesting story and I'd hate to have missed it.
I think most of us are up to enduring an ad or two for something of this quality. If not, the story warned you and you're not forced to follow the link.
This reminds me of something I've wondered about the Islamic cultures...
As you mention, there's a definite contribution to global culture and science, historically, from these cultures.
Is there ever an attitude of "Hey, look at all these great things that are part of our heritage, all these brilliant things we came up with. We should modernize, innovate the hell out of everything, and show the world that we can be the scientific and cultural leaders again."?
I've gotten (tech) jobs through Dice, through craigslist (in my bygone Bay Area days), and through local newspapers.
The big internet job boards are worth doing, however I would caution anyone using them not to expect too much. You don't get anywhere near the same kind of per-resume or per-application results you will get with other venues, but sometimes they will pay off anyway. If you're desperately seeking work, you'd be a fool not to explore every avenue that even might help you find gainful employment in the field of your choice.
Five years ago, though? Not so. The menu was about five times the size and the food was much better.
Did it compare favorably with $100+ per person meals I've had? Of course not. The special dinner my girlfriend painstakingly handcrafted for Valentine's Day? Not even close. Can I get any of that at a place where I can grab a quick lunch with my coworkers or play games with my friends? Again, hell no.
The D&B food, in its time, was good for what it was. There's always going to be a market for food made well that tastes good, even if it's simple or fast. I'm sorry if find these simple truths so offensive, but that still won't alter reality to suit it.
I.e., where the mainstream U.S. goes one way (English or Imperial measurement/MS-Office) and U.S. scientists/geeks and the entire rest of the world goes the other way (metric measurement/OpenOffice)?
If I remember correctly, it's 21+ at certain times of day but not others.
One of the guys I used to go with completely agreed with your viewpoint, though. He used to say he wanted to open a place almost exactly like D&B, but with exactly one stripper off in a corner pole-dancin' -- just to make sure that children would never, ever be allowed in there.
Slashdot Mirror
... and?
If others are forced to yield their own freedoms and provide for those requiring the artificial means to survive? Absolutely.
I don't know how jury duty works where you're from, but my experience is that if you're called, you can often spend the better part of the day waiting in the jury pool room without ever being called into a courtroom.
It's an excellent time to have a book you want to read handy.
We could argue easy vs. not easy all day, and I'm not really interested in that. I'd like to share something you might not be aware of, however.
I've been to too many sites that are confused that, the web isn't desktop publishing, where what they see isn't only view way it could be rendered. Sites that do stupid things like assume a fixed font size. Like assuming that every one on the planet uses a 17" at 1024x768, or that no one could concieve of using a 256 color desktop.
I am not a graphic designer, but I can tell you that these kinds of things can't always be chalked up to graphic designer stupidity. A lot of the time, it's corporate stupidity.
If you're doing web-work for a brick-and-mortar corporation, they'll typically have an elaborate and terribly bureaucratic-reading style guide. You must use these fonts this size, pictures of our logo need a border of empty space precisely X pixels around them, etc. Not adhering to such a guide, stupid as it is, is not generally an option. Making something like this work in one specific browser is an exercise in hair-pulling and nitpicking, but it can be done. The more browsers you want to support, the more nightmarish it gets.
I've heard a lot of conversations with clients like that (and it's most of them) that go something like this:
Client: This web site looks great, it finally adheres to our requirements. But look, it looks all weird in Netscape! And it looks weird in different ways in these various versions of Netscape! Fix it!!
Web Dev Company: Sure, we can do that. It's going to take X amount of time and Y amount of money though.
Client: That's a lot of money. Wait, what percentage of our current web site visitors use IE?
WDC: 99%.
Client: Fuck those hippie bastards then. Can we just force them to use IE?
It's not terrible complex to build good looking sites that render in several of the latest browsers.
Having dealt with the nightmare that is cross-browser compatibility for several years (not implicitly part of my job, but I touch on it from time to time and people I've worked with do as well), I would strongly beg to differ on that.
Hell, it's not even trivial to write HTML that works and looks right in the last half a dozen releases of just Netscape without complicating the matter with other non-NS browsers.
Let's be honest... at the moment, writing letters asking web sites to support non-IE web browsers is about on the level of writing the producers of the movie of your choice asking them to release it on laserdisc or betamax.
Being compatible with the technology used by the vast majority of the population is good enough for almost everyone, be they business owner, charitable organization, or random web-site. Be happy when your alternative choice is supported, but don't be surprised or offended when it isn't.
I'd be surprised if 90%+ of even a geek community like gamers didn't use IE.
First off, computer science != computer programming, it's much more than that
Absolutely. That's actually sort of my point. Probably, most people who make it through a four year or greater computer science degree like computer science. They may not like the actual application of the theory, such as it is, in the business world.
Second, if you had good professors and course material, you would have at least been taught how to code things much more efficiantly and using better methodologies.
Alas, I went to a top-rated university for comp sci, which is a nice way of saying I didn't get taught shit in the way of efficient code or better methodologies. Virtually everything I need to know to do my job, I learned either on my own or not on the job -- not in school. I'm not genuinely bitter about that, but it's not for everyone. There are going to be people who are disgruntled because of it.
On the other hand, in the extremely unlikely circumstance that a client ever really needs me to write code to solve systems of linear equations from scratch rather than use existing open source or proprietary libraries that provide that functionality, I'm all set. Just need to get my notes from my several required semesters of numerical methods.
Ideally, I would agree with you completely.
However, I have yet to see (at least in the consulting / custom software development field) a workplace that even approached the ideal. The reality is that because of deadlines, programmers having left the company or simply unavailable for the moment, the overallocation of programmers, etc., there's an awful lot of people working on code that isn't theirs. The client doesn't want to hear that I'm responsible for code X and I'm unfortunately gone for the week or too busy with other work if they want changes made or found a bug -- and they're not going to. Managers will find someone else to work on the code immediately.
The companies that I've worked for that were less willing to bend over backwards to comply with the whimsical demands of their clients are no longer in business. I'm not convinced this is a coincidence.
Either way, I'd think we can agree that work/time allocation and especially design are almost universally less perfect in the workplace than in the classroom -- something I think many new and then disgruntled grads are not prepared to deal with.
That all said, I'll wager that when the "DotCom Boom" was happening, many of the "other 6 of the 7" got into IT for the money. If you don't love what you do then get out of it.
There's definitely some of that -- don't even ask me how many art or business majors I knew back in the day who were "retrained" for IT -- but I think a lot of those people have been shaken out of it by now, either by leaving the industry entirely or, more frighteningly, by scurrying up to management.
But there are other stories, too. The simple fact is, most college educations will not in the least prepare you for the realities of working as a programmer. (I'll speak to that specifically, since it's what I know -- other IT jobs may vary.)
Some of this is relatively trivial. I was forced to take a lot of comp sci theory classes that have never and will never be useful on the job. Some of that was interesting, some of it was there simply because the university had professors that knew it and did research on it and they didn't know what else to do with them. Instead of, say, 10% of my course load being required to be physics, they could have had me take even a single class involving databases, something many professional programmers will touch on nearly every day of their working lives. That part of it though, is water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned. People who like the field and want to be in it can learn and adapt to overcome those kinds of gaps.
The more troubling thing is that working as a programmer is a whole lot different than doing programming in college.
I've known people who loved programming and did great with it in school and for their own projects, but who were utterly broken by the realities of dealing with clients. Some couldn't handle the (gasp) social skills tasks of having to deal with clients or non-technical people at their own companies. Others were slowly ground down towards insanity by having to continually retrofit their work to comply with the seemingly insane demands of the clients or end users. When you do programming projects in school or for yourself, the spec rarely changes fifty times partway through for (as far as you can tell) no reason. In the real world, it happens all the time.
To take another example, I work with a guy who will probably be shaken out of the IT industry sooner or later. It's obvious to everyone, including him, that he isn't happy. It's not that he doesn't like programming in general. The problem, in his case, are the realities of enterprise level programming. He can't stand that he can write some code, test it and find it working just fine, and come in to work the next day to discover that someone else on the far side of the office working on a seemingly unrelated one of the few thousand files that make up the project has effectively broken his work. He can't take looking at something that works one day and not the next and not even (without doing a fair amount of investigation) know how or why. That's another reality of working in IT that doesn't really come up in school.
Myself, I'm happy, but sometimes it's true what they say: If you love something, the last thing you want to try to do is do it for a living.
For what it's worth, Sun does have testing/cerifications for Java Developers. I'm too slothy to re-dig up the link at the moment, but I'm sure you can find it somewhere on java.sun.com
What does the (insert Blizzard's game name here) end user license agreement say you can and can't do? I admit I haven't read mine in a while, but I suspect there's a clause forbidding you from doing the above.
In our capitalistic system, dollars vote. (How literal that is depends on how cynical you are.) If Blizzard's EULA forbids you from doing something you think you should be able to do, instead buy the product of a company that doesn't. That's your choice.
The problem I have with this whole argument is that some people seem to think that you can divorce the way Blizzard does business with the products they create, and that's completely not true. They make great, widely popular games with strong player loyalty and community support. These things are true, in part, because of what they've done with battle.net.
We could debate all day whether the open source movement or even just a less "evil" company could have concieved of and delivered games equal or superior to those Blizzard has produced, but the reality is, they didn't. Blizzard did. Either live with the way they do things, or play a different game. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
But I'm curious.
Freedom of speech is a right.
Freedom of religion is a right.
Where exactly in the Constitution (or elsewhere) was "Freedom to play Starcraft without buying it" a right?
For the record, I also think Blizzard's business plan (via battle.net) was not only not a bad one but a good and even fairly visionary one for its time.
..Takes maturity on the part of the developer. Assuming an "M" rating when creating a game should be a freedom to not worry about toning down the game's flavor, not an excuse to add meaningless cursing, sexuality, and violence.
GTA and Vice City have excellent storylines and great voice acting to string together the amusing gameplay. Without the memorable characters or the hilarious radio talk shows the game loses much of its charm.
I couldn't agree more.
In a lot of ways, I think this fixation of game developers upon "mature" games is a mistake. For people not very familiar with GTA, it's easy to make the (incorrect) assumption that the game sells because of its adult content.
The truth is that GTA sells because it's a good game.
There's always going to be a market for good games of any genre, platform, maturity level, or whatever. That's the lesson game developers should be learning here.
you'd rather take a vastly inferior system with a half-broken core mechanic?
/., in that way, the situation is much like operating systems.
That's really, at best, a matter of opinion. There've been a hundred different RPG systems over the years and there's yet to be one that did everything better than all the others in the opinion of everyone. At the risk of being tackled and beaten by suggesting as much on
For some people, having to do various conversions on most of the numbers in a book is a big deterrent. I don't know that it's a deal-breaker for me, but it'd certainly make me look twice at other systems.
Granted, I don't think the d20 system suits the feel of Call of Cthulhu, but that's a whole other ball of wax.
GURPS has never been my cup of tea, but if releasing a new version of it helps make the system better at the things it does well and appeal to the people who like it? More power to SJG.
The net benefits of full plate mail outweigh all other armor configurations. That's pure nonsense, but the rules make it so "middle" armors like chainmail (which should be the most useful armor for a fighter) are only for people who can't afford full plate.
IMHO, this isn't true anymore in 3/3.5E D&D. It might well outweigh all other armor configurations for a mounted fighter, or one who is both non-dexterous and doesn't particularly care about his mobility, but in the general case, it doesn't.
A lot of changes in the game since 2E, some fairly obvious, some more subtle add up to full plate not being the be-all and end-all of armor anymore. You're at least as likely to see a fighting character in play armored in a chain shirt as in full plate mail.
The longsword thing is more of an opinion matter but I'd say that's much less of an answer to everything as well.
Will there be a rise of an "independent" games industry with more focus on artistry and less focus on profit in much the same way as there is an independent film industry? Will we ever have a widely-known gaming equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival?
Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate both blockbuster Hollywood movies and indie films in their own ways. I'd be interesting to see that kind of balance and contrast come to another entertainment industry.
At its heart, I think this and similar issues (such as baseball and steroids, which I believe someone brought up above) are really just a reflection of our culture.
Somewhere along the line there's been a paradigm shift, and maybe it occured so gradually that no one noticed it was happening at the time. Winning has become more important than anything; this is a generally accepted value.
It may seem like splitting hairs, but I think at some point, the cultural value was more that you wanted to be the best (at whatever). Winning wasn't the goal, per se; it was just the natural consequences of being the best. Somehow that middle step of excelling has been lost, has become a vague ???? not unlike a failed dot.com business plan. Once upon a time working hard and becoming good at your chosen endeavor filled that gap, now whatever means that seems most expedient (including cheating) is permitted to suffice.
How or why that happened, I couldn't say.
Is it just me, or is this kind of hokey?
According to the report, the PS3 is expected to sell 32 million units in Europe by 2010, more than the combined sales of the Microsoft and Nintendo machines.
I mean, seriously, what are these so-called analysts basing that on? The article doesn't say.
Probably, the PS3 will do well, but it seems beyond premature to make up numbers like these without supporting them in any meaningful way.
This is interesting, but it leaves a lot of important questions unanswered, technically as well as legally/politically.
For example: just how computationally intensive is the Audible Magic "listening" algorithm?
If it occurs client-side, does that unfairly mandate a higher caliber of hardware for a user to partake in file-sharing? How easy would it be to hack or fake out this kind of software? The better question may be: is it easy enough for the kind of non-technical mass user that has made P2P such a success?
If it occurs server-side (at least, as much as this term is accurate in the case of file-sharing paradigms that have supernodes or the like), who's responsible for setting up and maintaining it? Does file-sharing become impossible if these things go down?
The article mentions the Napster era of faking out filters by simply changing file names. Could you fake this out by changing your audio files to have extensions that identified them as something other than audio files? If not, does that mean the software will be stupidly trying to "listen" to pictures I'm sharing of my last kayaking trip?
Ultimately, if this is somehow legally mandated it'll probably kill Kazaa etc. the same way the courts effectively killed Napster. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's interesting to examine the airtightness of the solution nonetheless.
Hoop-jumping or not, it was an interesting story and I'd hate to have missed it.
I think most of us are up to enduring an ad or two for something of this quality. If not, the story warned you and you're not forced to follow the link.
This reminds me of something I've wondered about the Islamic cultures...
As you mention, there's a definite contribution to global culture and science, historically, from these cultures.
Is there ever an attitude of "Hey, look at all these great things that are part of our heritage, all these brilliant things we came up with. We should modernize, innovate the hell out of everything, and show the world that we can be the scientific and cultural leaders again."?
I've gotten (tech) jobs through Dice, through craigslist (in my bygone Bay Area days), and through local newspapers.
The big internet job boards are worth doing, however I would caution anyone using them not to expect too much. You don't get anywhere near the same kind of per-resume or per-application results you will get with other venues, but sometimes they will pay off anyway. If you're desperately seeking work, you'd be a fool not to explore every avenue that even might help you find gainful employment in the field of your choice.
D&B food is shit, plain and simple.
I done told you that already.
Five years ago, though? Not so. The menu was about five times the size and the food was much better.
Did it compare favorably with $100+ per person meals I've had? Of course not. The special dinner my girlfriend painstakingly handcrafted for Valentine's Day? Not even close. Can I get any of that at a place where I can grab a quick lunch with my coworkers or play games with my friends? Again, hell no.
The D&B food, in its time, was good for what it was. There's always going to be a market for food made well that tastes good, even if it's simple or fast. I'm sorry if find these simple truths so offensive, but that still won't alter reality to suit it.
Will this end up being the next metric system?
I.e., where the mainstream U.S. goes one way (English or Imperial measurement/MS-Office) and U.S. scientists/geeks and the entire rest of the world goes the other way (metric measurement/OpenOffice)?
Too soon to call, probably.
If I remember correctly, it's 21+ at certain times of day but not others.
One of the guys I used to go with completely agreed with your viewpoint, though. He used to say he wanted to open a place almost exactly like D&B, but with exactly one stripper off in a corner pole-dancin' -- just to make sure that children would never, ever be allowed in there.