The "free" part I'll give you, but "open source" or "software"? I mean, I can see why it's in the same spirit as FOSS, but FOSS isn't a synonym for human cooperation just yet.
Of course they'll say NASA forged these photos. Or that the landers were placed by robots, which is already their excuse for the langer range-finders the Apollo missions placed on the moon. There's no conceivable evidence, even in principle, which could disprove their conspiracy theory. It's a matter of faith. The interpretation of the evidence must bend to that belief, no matter how implausible the leaps involved, to vindicate it.
It was about 6% of the whole American population, IIRC, in a Gallup poll. About the sort of percentage you'll get as a minimum for any claim, because people tend to agree to statements in surveys to get the surveyors to leave them alone.
Yeah, that was a stupid thing to say, given I know fine that it generates secondary species all along its path. My main gist is that there's an easy mental image of ionising radiation striking a DNA molecule and damaging it, which isn't the correct mechanism at all. The correct thing to say is that it can only ionise the DNA if it encouters it, whereas the secondary species effectively give it a larger cross-section. Secondary species are exteremely important to DNA damage. Their lifetimes aren't particularly large but they're monumental compared to the time the original radiation spends in the body.
Most DNA damage isn't primary and physical, it's secondary and chemical. After all, a single quantum or particle of ionising radiation can only ionise one target. The secondary electrons it creates, and the secondary chemical species those create, do the damage.
Digital distribution accounts for the cube root of bugger all as far as these sorts of big-budget projects are concerned, though. For them, retail accounts for most of their humongous revenue, and that revenue will all arrive in a lump over about a fortnight because of retail's aversion to carrying a back catalogue. This isn't to understate how online distribution has led to a sales rebirth for pretty much every game that anyone cares to put up for sale, and how it can keep a title in the public mind long after it's been released, but it is of no consolation to somebody hoping to make money back on a $150m project. They're still going to need that release-day blitz.
The summary even states that Gematik insisted on a back-up less operation, and then provides a quote explicitly stating that they did no such thing! Slashdot: doing for editorial accuracy what Fox does for editorial neutrality.
They've gone through the same thing with each version of Windows that's been released. In 2003, less than 10% of corporate PCs were carrying XP. In 2005, it had only gone up to 38%. That's an OS that'd been out for more than three years, and was up against the incumbent Win2000. If Win7 can hit about 40% within a year against an incumbent XP, then that's actually incredible progress.
It's a well-established and much storied fact that any game, no matter how good, can get totally fucked by the Christmas rush. Pick up a back issue of MCV or Edge and you'll find plenty of rueful developers and publishers discussing how their hundred-million-dollar project simply did not sell because the top three slots were occupied by that year's EA Sports titles and a new GTA. Essentially, the game has to sell within a three month window, and if that window is occupied by six must-haves already, then everything is screwed. Even the must haves are screwed because only a small minority of gamers head out and buy a half-dozen titles in a single quarter. It becomes a lottery. No long tail exists for games retail, so once that chaotic launch window has passed, those games are off the shelves and it's all over.
The actual cost of the phone is rather more transparent in Europe, where it's available contract-free due to legislation. It costs a little under one thousand dollars.
These aren't average users, are they?
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
(What percent of users ever change the default set of toolbars that are displayed at the top of their Web browser window?)
I'm guessing that when it comes to users who administer their own websites, and do it through FTP rather than the Geocities page builder, it's actually pretty high. This is a group of people that could probably navigate a simple menu to the SSH toggle intuitively. Now, the whole phone-number-PIN rigmarole is an un-necessary headache, but generally this isn't an end-user usability issue, it's an end-user risk assessment issue. They assume that because SFTP is an obscure, buried option, then it's not necessary for their everyday work, and ordinary FTP is sufficient. This leads to the same set of solutions - make SFTP default and bury the ability to disable it, or make it hard for the user not to notice that they can secure the connection - but for different reasons.
I'm not sure what "taste of the fun the US gov has in the 3rd world" you're talking about here. That's a presentation on a simulation system to try to predict how those sorts of decisions are going to turn out, not some shocking leak that - stop the fucking presses - the US government intervenes in international conflicts in ways that benefit the US. Given the incredible awfulness of the presentation, I'm not sure that it's influenced the real world beyond getting that guy research grants by bamboozling the Air Force into thinking he's on to something.
For the curious. I'm not going to sit down and read out the data and figure out the standard deviation, but you're not kidding. You'd have to do this for decades to know how effective it was, and if it turns out to be useless, the environmental cost would have been wasted. I'd hate to be the guy who gets to do the risk-benefit analysis on that one.
Those limits numbers are probably off by the way, I'm trying to remember them. I may have confused them with figures for the actual deployed hardware, which is probably close to the limits anyway.
I really doubt they meant that in this context. START-I, START-II, and the Treaty of Moscow define launch vehicles as ICBM missiles, SLBM subs, and nuclear bombers. Each of these has a particular limit under those treaties. Currently, less than 100 bombers are permitted, and the Treaty of Moscow would make that even less, so it obviously can't be including F-16s. The current number of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s only just barely makes it under there. A total limit of 500 wouldn't be very strict either: the Treaty of Moscow will set a total launcher limit of under 800, down from about 900 under START-II.
The trick with limiting warheads but not launch vehicles is that you then have a great difficulty in keeping tabs on where the warheads actually are, which is one of the main reasons that nuclear disarment has got this far.
You're selling them short. In two and a half decades, the two nations have dismantled most of the world's entire nuclear stockpile. Compared to the Cold War era it's some kind of miracle. There's a hell of a lot left to do - if the US would ratify the CTBT* it would be an even bigger step in preventing nuclear warfare - but there's a hell of a lot that's been done.
* (They're the most prominent annex II state that has not yet ratified the CTBT, and conversely their ratifying the treaty would be a big political impetus to getting the other holdouts on board. China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan are the other annex II states whose signing and ratification would make the CTBT come into force.)
Reminds me of the time a reviewer described Hot Fuzz as from the creators of "BBC4's Spaced". Aside from the dubious notion that every channel in the UK must be the Beeb, the juxtaposition of Spaced and The Secret Life of Corners tickled me.
Specifically the "serotonin hypothesis" of endogenous depression seems to be a shambles. SSRIs help in some cases but it's clear that low seratonin levels aren't the underlying cause of depression, endogenous or otherwise.
It's not a true SMS-to-root exploit. So far he's only been able to crash part of the device's software with it, he's still looking into whether it can be used to run arbitrary code.
The days when a guy who designed the game's main gameplay might also build the levels and code even parts of the title are long, long gone. If you learn to be a games programmer, you will be coding the engine and/or producing tools for the people who will do the actual game design work, or at the very least adapting middleware for those same purposes. You will have no official creative say in the project, and aside from a few exceptions (Kojima's MGS2 team notebooks) your creative input will not be appreciated by the design team, who have plenty of their own ideas to deal with.
As far as level design goes, you'll want to learn to work with the main creative tools of the trade, actually building levels. Some experience with other CAD software and 3D modelling could do you well there. As far as deep-down games design goes, you're only going to get a job doing that if you are a very, very shit-hot level designer who gets promoted to head of level design and beyond, or you create some incredible mod that goes commercial, or you actually design your own games on your own time and eventually get hired by a developer or build up your own company. I think that the time when you could work your way up from head of testing by proving your experience with games design are long gone.
Basic message: if you're not a game designer, you have to become one first, and then try to get the job. You can become a codemonkey on the back of a good CV, but that's all.
Slashdot Mirror
The "free" part I'll give you, but "open source" or "software"? I mean, I can see why it's in the same spirit as FOSS, but FOSS isn't a synonym for human cooperation just yet.
Of course they'll say NASA forged these photos. Or that the landers were placed by robots, which is already their excuse for the langer range-finders the Apollo missions placed on the moon. There's no conceivable evidence, even in principle, which could disprove their conspiracy theory. It's a matter of faith. The interpretation of the evidence must bend to that belief, no matter how implausible the leaps involved, to vindicate it.
It was about 6% of the whole American population, IIRC, in a Gallup poll. About the sort of percentage you'll get as a minimum for any claim, because people tend to agree to statements in surveys to get the surveyors to leave them alone.
Yeah, that was a stupid thing to say, given I know fine that it generates secondary species all along its path. My main gist is that there's an easy mental image of ionising radiation striking a DNA molecule and damaging it, which isn't the correct mechanism at all. The correct thing to say is that it can only ionise the DNA if it encouters it, whereas the secondary species effectively give it a larger cross-section. Secondary species are exteremely important to DNA damage. Their lifetimes aren't particularly large but they're monumental compared to the time the original radiation spends in the body.
Most DNA damage isn't primary and physical, it's secondary and chemical. After all, a single quantum or particle of ionising radiation can only ionise one target. The secondary electrons it creates, and the secondary chemical species those create, do the damage.
I didn't realise that the fear of typecasting had become a physical entity yet. Mind you, that explains why it's off the west coast.
I'm guessing that our self-evidently poor (well, my self-evidently poor) reading ability is to blame somewhere.
Digital distribution accounts for the cube root of bugger all as far as these sorts of big-budget projects are concerned, though. For them, retail accounts for most of their humongous revenue, and that revenue will all arrive in a lump over about a fortnight because of retail's aversion to carrying a back catalogue. This isn't to understate how online distribution has led to a sales rebirth for pretty much every game that anyone cares to put up for sale, and how it can keep a title in the public mind long after it's been released, but it is of no consolation to somebody hoping to make money back on a $150m project. They're still going to need that release-day blitz.
The summary even states that Gematik insisted on a back-up less operation, and then provides a quote explicitly stating that they did no such thing! Slashdot: doing for editorial accuracy what Fox does for editorial neutrality.
They've gone through the same thing with each version of Windows that's been released. In 2003, less than 10% of corporate PCs were carrying XP. In 2005, it had only gone up to 38%. That's an OS that'd been out for more than three years, and was up against the incumbent Win2000. If Win7 can hit about 40% within a year against an incumbent XP, then that's actually incredible progress.
I dunno, any game that ends in 30 seconds of badly rendered movie sounds like a spiritual successor SS2 to me.
It's a well-established and much storied fact that any game, no matter how good, can get totally fucked by the Christmas rush. Pick up a back issue of MCV or Edge and you'll find plenty of rueful developers and publishers discussing how their hundred-million-dollar project simply did not sell because the top three slots were occupied by that year's EA Sports titles and a new GTA. Essentially, the game has to sell within a three month window, and if that window is occupied by six must-haves already, then everything is screwed. Even the must haves are screwed because only a small minority of gamers head out and buy a half-dozen titles in a single quarter. It becomes a lottery. No long tail exists for games retail, so once that chaotic launch window has passed, those games are off the shelves and it's all over.
The actual cost of the phone is rather more transparent in Europe, where it's available contract-free due to legislation. It costs a little under one thousand dollars.
(What percent of users ever change the default set of toolbars that are displayed at the top of their Web browser window?)
I'm guessing that when it comes to users who administer their own websites, and do it through FTP rather than the Geocities page builder, it's actually pretty high. This is a group of people that could probably navigate a simple menu to the SSH toggle intuitively. Now, the whole phone-number-PIN rigmarole is an un-necessary headache, but generally this isn't an end-user usability issue, it's an end-user risk assessment issue. They assume that because SFTP is an obscure, buried option, then it's not necessary for their everyday work, and ordinary FTP is sufficient. This leads to the same set of solutions - make SFTP default and bury the ability to disable it, or make it hard for the user not to notice that they can secure the connection - but for different reasons.
I'm not sure what "taste of the fun the US gov has in the 3rd world" you're talking about here. That's a presentation on a simulation system to try to predict how those sorts of decisions are going to turn out, not some shocking leak that - stop the fucking presses - the US government intervenes in international conflicts in ways that benefit the US. Given the incredible awfulness of the presentation, I'm not sure that it's influenced the real world beyond getting that guy research grants by bamboozling the Air Force into thinking he's on to something.
The article is transparent in saying that he chose to cancel his own presentation on his own volition, because it hadn't been fixed yet.
For the curious. I'm not going to sit down and read out the data and figure out the standard deviation, but you're not kidding. You'd have to do this for decades to know how effective it was, and if it turns out to be useless, the environmental cost would have been wasted. I'd hate to be the guy who gets to do the risk-benefit analysis on that one.
It's already a very low number, I guess is the main thing I'm trying to say, because it's the main part I can remember accurately.
Those limits numbers are probably off by the way, I'm trying to remember them. I may have confused them with figures for the actual deployed hardware, which is probably close to the limits anyway.
I really doubt they meant that in this context. START-I, START-II, and the Treaty of Moscow define launch vehicles as ICBM missiles, SLBM subs, and nuclear bombers. Each of these has a particular limit under those treaties. Currently, less than 100 bombers are permitted, and the Treaty of Moscow would make that even less, so it obviously can't be including F-16s. The current number of B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s only just barely makes it under there. A total limit of 500 wouldn't be very strict either: the Treaty of Moscow will set a total launcher limit of under 800, down from about 900 under START-II.
The trick with limiting warheads but not launch vehicles is that you then have a great difficulty in keeping tabs on where the warheads actually are, which is one of the main reasons that nuclear disarment has got this far.
You're selling them short. In two and a half decades, the two nations have dismantled most of the world's entire nuclear stockpile. Compared to the Cold War era it's some kind of miracle. There's a hell of a lot left to do - if the US would ratify the CTBT* it would be an even bigger step in preventing nuclear warfare - but there's a hell of a lot that's been done.
* (They're the most prominent annex II state that has not yet ratified the CTBT, and conversely their ratifying the treaty would be a big political impetus to getting the other holdouts on board. China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan are the other annex II states whose signing and ratification would make the CTBT come into force.)
Reminds me of the time a reviewer described Hot Fuzz as from the creators of "BBC4's Spaced". Aside from the dubious notion that every channel in the UK must be the Beeb, the juxtaposition of Spaced and The Secret Life of Corners tickled me.
Specifically the "serotonin hypothesis" of endogenous depression seems to be a shambles. SSRIs help in some cases but it's clear that low seratonin levels aren't the underlying cause of depression, endogenous or otherwise.
It's not a true SMS-to-root exploit. So far he's only been able to crash part of the device's software with it, he's still looking into whether it can be used to run arbitrary code.
The days when a guy who designed the game's main gameplay might also build the levels and code even parts of the title are long, long gone. If you learn to be a games programmer, you will be coding the engine and/or producing tools for the people who will do the actual game design work, or at the very least adapting middleware for those same purposes. You will have no official creative say in the project, and aside from a few exceptions (Kojima's MGS2 team notebooks) your creative input will not be appreciated by the design team, who have plenty of their own ideas to deal with.
As far as level design goes, you'll want to learn to work with the main creative tools of the trade, actually building levels. Some experience with other CAD software and 3D modelling could do you well there. As far as deep-down games design goes, you're only going to get a job doing that if you are a very, very shit-hot level designer who gets promoted to head of level design and beyond, or you create some incredible mod that goes commercial, or you actually design your own games on your own time and eventually get hired by a developer or build up your own company. I think that the time when you could work your way up from head of testing by proving your experience with games design are long gone.
Basic message: if you're not a game designer, you have to become one first, and then try to get the job. You can become a codemonkey on the back of a good CV, but that's all.