Re:Oh, no hot air, I see...
on
The New Boom
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's probably because unlike Amazon, Google has been profitable. The real issue about the dot com bubble was that people forgot about business fundamentals and got caught up in hype. Netscape never made a profit. Amazon took forever to actually make it to an operational profit. However, Google is currently valued way more than it should be. So thinking this isn't another bubble because there is some profit behind it may not be correct. Google is currently trading at 96.20 P/E, which is insane. It's in for a correction.
Consulting in the insurance industry, I'd say that most likely the disks are from a mainframe since most medical companies are still using big mainframes for processing important customer data. I'm not sure how easy it is to read from a mainframe disc without having a mainframe, but it's hardly a proprietary format.
The Amazing GBT looks into his crystal ball... What does he see?
The games you've been patiently waiting on to be released in the US will be delayed by at least 6 months and possibly 18. You'll get Kingdom Hearts II and the next Final Fantasy title about the time the PS3 is released, but probably later. You would think Sony and SE have such a tight relationship, we could see something resembling a FF title at console launch. Or maybe SE would stop telling us we'll get a game and then tacking on extra months before the release date. Could they just automatically add that so that I don't get my hopes up?
and as a gamer, I'm happy to say "Welcome to the club." We're another group of generally law abiding people who get demonized for the stuff the batshit crazy minority does in our name all the time. And our paths are pretty well connected. I was told repeatedly by the media that it was guns and Doom that caused the shooters in Columbine to go on a killing spree. As Chris Rock says, "What ever happened to crazy?" If all 80,000,000 gun owners in the US were crazy (that's 1 in every three people), the streets would truly be running red with blood like I've been told they would by every anti-gun group. But they don't. How many gamers are there in the US? If the violent content of video games was truly a problem, wouldn't we have more of these violent episodes, not less?
Of course, the true issue with Harris and Klebold is that Harris was a pure psychopath. He didn't want to shoot up his school for revenge. He wanted to kill them because he felt nothing but contempt for them. He wanted to be known as one of the greatest mass murderers in US History. So says the psychological profilers who examined his writings. So, it wasn't the game that caused him to be murderous, it was his disgust and contempt for people he saw as beneath him.
Funny, I thought it was Toshiba who was leading the HD-DVD format. Also, Warner has not dropped HD-DVD. Like most studios, they are now backing both formats. This now means that the winner of the HD format war will be the first group to get widespread hardware saturation into homes and win shelf space on retailer shelves. Those two go hand in hand with each other. At this time, that's most likely going to be Blu-Ray. With the PS3 launch somewhere on the horizon, and the ensuring massive sales that have been a art of the PS1 and PS2, it is only a matter of time before Blu-Ray delivers a knockout blow to HD-DVD.
But that doesn't mean HD-DVD couldn't stage a serious coup by getting standalone HD-DVD hardware players out the door, but the price of the PS3 will be easier to swallow than shelling out $400-500 for a first generation standalone HD-DVD player for consumers used to spending less than $100 for a DVD player and serious money on a gaming console. The XBOX 360 launching before an HD-DVD drive is available is certainly not helping the HD-DVD format.
This country is starting to look a bit like a fundamentalist theocracy. From a free speech perspective, it's probably better that the UN control it, rather than our own flaky and corrupt congress.
You know, it's ignorant statements like that one that make it hard for you to be taken seriously. First, Congress doesn't control the Internet! Please, educate yourself. Secondly, we are not a fundamentalist theocracy, nor will we ever be. It won't happen, but it makes for very nice talking points and melodrama. Thirdly, the last time I checked, free speech was alive and well covering everything from Jesus on a cross in a jar of piss to Larry Flynt's right to publish pornography. It even covers political speech! Imagine that!
You want to talk about free speech? How many EU countries have "hate speech" laws that severely limit oppositional speech? France and Germany for a start. We don't in the US because we believe that even if you want to be an idiot and spout neo-Nazi rhetoric you have the right. How many countries in the UN limit/filter their internet access? How about most countries in the Middle East, and China for a start. How about the fact that Canada puts restrictions on freedom of speech by not allowing reporters to cover certain types of trials like murders? How many countries in the UN are run by countries that aren't democracies and have lengthly human rights violation records with Amnesty International and others? How many countries send political dissidents to 'reeducation camps' to have their crazy ideas of freedom, free speech, and democracy beat out of them? Start with China and the glorious worker's paradise of Cuba.
You know what? I'd rather have Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), a slimy weezle whom I despise, in charge of the Internet before you put the UN or the EU in charge of it.
And it always has been with DVDs. All a pirating house has to do is make a simple bit for bit copy of the media, and the player will look at it like any other manufactured disk. What happens when you see complete disk images of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs floating around on Usenet or Bittorent, just like we see of DVD's now?
DRM doesn't stop piracy. DRM cannot stop piracy. DRM only protects the underlying content from being extracted and converted to new media, but that doesn't accomplish anything when you can make a bit for bit copy of the disk. Sure, you won't be able to put the latest copy of whatever crappy movie based on a previously popular TV show Hollywood decides to put out on your Sony PSP, but that won't stop the pirate DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray market. The only way to stop that is to individually watermark each disk and try and blacklist duplicates, similar to what HD-DVD is calling for. But since the disks themselves all still look the same, it's a non-issue. One copy of iRobot in HD-DVD should look identical to another, so an ISO of the disk should appear as normal to the player.
Darth Bush? I can only imasgine what you'd say if we had men like Teddy Roosevelt and Gen. Pershing in charge right now.
Now, did you notice that the author of the bill, Rep. Hoyer is a DEMOCRAT? How about three of the four co-sponsors who are also DEMOCRATS? Do you understand how insanely hard it is to make amendments to the US Constitution?
If you're going to be critical, at least take the time to do some research before you start talking sillyness.
Last year, the only security training my company's Infosec director and manager took was to Gartner's Security Conference, but only because they paid for everything including travel and hotel costs because attendance is always low. When my boss got back, and she's not exactly a security expert by any sense of the word, she said it was horrible. That says a lot coming from someone as ignorant of security as her. She said people would show up, the presentations would start, and over the next hour or so people would file out the doors and never return. She said the rooms ended up being less thant 10% full by the end of the talks because no one wanted to hear them.
This company, which I left recently, based all of their decisions on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Of course, it was always funny doing the conference calls with their analysts to discuss technologies we were interested in, and they could never go beyond the script they had prepared for the call. When my boss wanted to buy some form of HIDS, they basically did a call on why we should purchase Symantec's new product over Symantec's older product. Nevermind that there were better products from their own literature. The guy couldn't answer any question about the product that wasn't on the literature he'd sent or was reading from. It was depressing, because his opinion mattered more to my management than the opinions of those who would be using and monitoring the software and knew what our requirements were.
Also, this is interesting because Project Gotham was published by MS, but it was developed by Bizarre Creations. Did MS require Bizarre Creations to give up their IP in order to be published to the console? PC game developers have different options when it comes to bypassing the regular brick and mortar distribution system, but console games are contorlled rather exclusively by the manufacturers, and there's a good bit of money to be made in the games for those platforms.
Is it just me, or does that patent seem to apply to Project Gotham Racing? What is interesting is that the game was only published by MS, but was developed by Bizzare Creations. And there are similar elements in Fable.
The gaming industry is getting stale. The FPS was a revolution in gaming with the original Wolfenstein, but even that was only an offshoot of the Contra/Commander Keen style side scrolling shooter. It only changed the perspective and gave the gameplay some added depth, but thats it.
OpenGL was another technology that revolutionized games, but it only made them look better and allowed for added depth and realism.
The type of profound advancements that we've seen in gaming since Pong are going to become less and less. There really aren't any more distinct categories/genres of games that can be created. What we'll see is that advances in technology allow the games to look more realistic, the AI will continue to improve, and new features will be added that make things interesting. And let's not forget that ultimately, there are some games out there with really great stories!
Half-Life changed the way people look at FPS games because it had an interesting story. It wasn't just run and gun. But, the industry is still being driven by how realistic the scenery and the killing is in the game. I doubt we'll have true photorealism any time soon, so that's enough to sustain the industry for a while.
Hell, someone needs to get Dvorak a copy of Final Fantasy X. Say what you want about consoles and games being dead, but that RPG had one of the best stories of any game I've ever seen. My wife and kids actually enjoyed watching me play it. It's going to be games like that, where we see sort of a merge of gameplay and movie/story like entertainment that will continue to succeed.
I have food, water, and weapons burried in the woods for the coming Apocalypse, and even I think this guy is a little too paranoid. Then again, he's a refreshing, even if slightly frightening, change from most security professionals who normally have the worst security practices in their personal lives.
It looks as if Color Kinetics is about to have much, if not all, of their IP portfolio ruled invalid because of a plethora of existing prior art from as far back as the 1970's. All of this has come to light (no pun intended) after their lawsuit with Super Vision International. With that in mind, I don't now how to take this one. Is this a stupid patent that just injures Color Kinetics IP case more, or are they serious? Wouldn't the existing LED based technology that is used to illuminate pools be considered prior art, i.e. the Boca Flash products?
I think the Dark Warriors at Lackland AFB's Information Warfare Battlelab in San Antonio might have something to say about this article's BS/speculation rating, if they aren't already part of the joint task force.
And unlike the joint task force listed, they seem to spend a good portion of their time actually building tools and technologies to defend networks.
After attending last year's Quake Con, I had a blast. The only down side was that I was one of the few 'normal' people there, and there were many people who obviously did not believe in showering or wearing deoderant. They even had signs posted to encourage proper hygiene while attending the event. Someone needs to get Right Guard and Dial as a sponsor, handing out soap and deoderant to the participants as they register.
That's a bad analogy, and factually incorrect. The idea that online content distribution is zero cost is absurd. Online content has distribution costs: bandwidth, infrastructure (servers, equipment, support contracts), and employees to support the above items. The websites, servers, and bandwidth don't just get provided by magic.
It's not that simple. What Amazon brings to the table is exposure. Amazon is without a doubt the world's largest on-line retailer with the most exposure, and that's something that Netflix can capitalize on. Most retailers or sales oriented companies would give up body parts to partner with Amazon, and that includes some very high profile companies like my previous employer who was the market leader in luxury retail.
Writing zeros doesn't work. The way modern hard drives operate, it is never possible for the sectors on a hard disk platter to be put back into a truly neutral state by the write heads, especially if all you do is write zeros over it. The current DOD standard for sanitizing confidential and secret data, 5220.22-M, requires for a sector to overwritten seven times with an alternating pattern to hopefully render the recovery of data from the sector impossible. However the DOD, as of 2003, suspended the use of this practice because a GAO audit determined that the inability to control the flow of top secret data combined with problems with the accepted algorithm caused top secret data to be recovered from hard drives removed from non-classified systems. The ruling came down that all hard drives from deprecated systems had to be physically destroyed in the interim until another solution was discovered.
You may or may not remember that part of the UN resolution that stopped Gulf War I was not only that they end their chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, but that they also show PROOF that they had done so. Saddam never presented any such proof. Hence, Saddam didn't comply with the UN resoltuions in the first place.
However, now this whole SNAFU is a convenient excuse to ignore UN resolutions, but again, they usually got ignored anyway.
It's time for Microsoft to admit that ActiveX is a bad idea, and needs to be done away with. Even with their new secure way of handling content in the browswer with XP SP2, it's still a problem. In IE 5 you could turn it off, in IE6 you can't.
Find a school in Japane that teaches English and setup video conferencing or VoIP with them. That way they can practice their English and your students can practice their Japanese. Being able to interact with native speakers is key to learning a language and actually retaining it.
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That's probably because unlike Amazon, Google has been profitable. The real issue about the dot com bubble was that people forgot about business fundamentals and got caught up in hype. Netscape never made a profit. Amazon took forever to actually make it to an operational profit. However, Google is currently valued way more than it should be. So thinking this isn't another bubble because there is some profit behind it may not be correct. Google is currently trading at 96.20 P/E, which is insane. It's in for a correction.
Consulting in the insurance industry, I'd say that most likely the disks are from a mainframe since most medical companies are still using big mainframes for processing important customer data. I'm not sure how easy it is to read from a mainframe disc without having a mainframe, but it's hardly a proprietary format.
The Amazing GBT looks into his crystal ball... What does he see?
The games you've been patiently waiting on to be released in the US will be delayed by at least 6 months and possibly 18. You'll get Kingdom Hearts II and the next Final Fantasy title about the time the PS3 is released, but probably later. You would think Sony and SE have such a tight relationship, we could see something resembling a FF title at console launch. Or maybe SE would stop telling us we'll get a game and then tacking on extra months before the release date. Could they just automatically add that so that I don't get my hopes up?
and as a gamer, I'm happy to say "Welcome to the club." We're another group of generally law abiding people who get demonized for the stuff the batshit crazy minority does in our name all the time. And our paths are pretty well connected. I was told repeatedly by the media that it was guns and Doom that caused the shooters in Columbine to go on a killing spree. As Chris Rock says, "What ever happened to crazy?" If all 80,000,000 gun owners in the US were crazy (that's 1 in every three people), the streets would truly be running red with blood like I've been told they would by every anti-gun group. But they don't. How many gamers are there in the US? If the violent content of video games was truly a problem, wouldn't we have more of these violent episodes, not less? Of course, the true issue with Harris and Klebold is that Harris was a pure psychopath. He didn't want to shoot up his school for revenge. He wanted to kill them because he felt nothing but contempt for them. He wanted to be known as one of the greatest mass murderers in US History. So says the psychological profilers who examined his writings. So, it wasn't the game that caused him to be murderous, it was his disgust and contempt for people he saw as beneath him.
Funny, I thought it was Toshiba who was leading the HD-DVD format. Also, Warner has not dropped HD-DVD. Like most studios, they are now backing both formats. This now means that the winner of the HD format war will be the first group to get widespread hardware saturation into homes and win shelf space on retailer shelves. Those two go hand in hand with each other. At this time, that's most likely going to be Blu-Ray. With the PS3 launch somewhere on the horizon, and the ensuring massive sales that have been a art of the PS1 and PS2, it is only a matter of time before Blu-Ray delivers a knockout blow to HD-DVD.
But that doesn't mean HD-DVD couldn't stage a serious coup by getting standalone HD-DVD hardware players out the door, but the price of the PS3 will be easier to swallow than shelling out $400-500 for a first generation standalone HD-DVD player for consumers used to spending less than $100 for a DVD player and serious money on a gaming console. The XBOX 360 launching before an HD-DVD drive is available is certainly not helping the HD-DVD format.
This country is starting to look a bit like a fundamentalist theocracy. From a free speech perspective, it's probably better that the UN control it, rather than our own flaky and corrupt congress.
You know, it's ignorant statements like that one that make it hard for you to be taken seriously. First, Congress doesn't control the Internet! Please, educate yourself. Secondly, we are not a fundamentalist theocracy, nor will we ever be. It won't happen, but it makes for very nice talking points and melodrama. Thirdly, the last time I checked, free speech was alive and well covering everything from Jesus on a cross in a jar of piss to Larry Flynt's right to publish pornography. It even covers political speech! Imagine that! You want to talk about free speech? How many EU countries have "hate speech" laws that severely limit oppositional speech? France and Germany for a start. We don't in the US because we believe that even if you want to be an idiot and spout neo-Nazi rhetoric you have the right. How many countries in the UN limit/filter their internet access? How about most countries in the Middle East, and China for a start. How about the fact that Canada puts restrictions on freedom of speech by not allowing reporters to cover certain types of trials like murders? How many countries in the UN are run by countries that aren't democracies and have lengthly human rights violation records with Amnesty International and others? How many countries send political dissidents to 'reeducation camps' to have their crazy ideas of freedom, free speech, and democracy beat out of them? Start with China and the glorious worker's paradise of Cuba.
You know what? I'd rather have Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), a slimy weezle whom I despise, in charge of the Internet before you put the UN or the EU in charge of it.
And it always has been with DVDs. All a pirating house has to do is make a simple bit for bit copy of the media, and the player will look at it like any other manufactured disk. What happens when you see complete disk images of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs floating around on Usenet or Bittorent, just like we see of DVD's now?
DRM doesn't stop piracy. DRM cannot stop piracy. DRM only protects the underlying content from being extracted and converted to new media, but that doesn't accomplish anything when you can make a bit for bit copy of the disk. Sure, you won't be able to put the latest copy of whatever crappy movie based on a previously popular TV show Hollywood decides to put out on your Sony PSP, but that won't stop the pirate DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray market. The only way to stop that is to individually watermark each disk and try and blacklist duplicates, similar to what HD-DVD is calling for. But since the disks themselves all still look the same, it's a non-issue. One copy of iRobot in HD-DVD should look identical to another, so an ISO of the disk should appear as normal to the player.
Hah! I love Stephenson's work, but I imagine he hears "It's ok, it happens to lots of guys" often.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
Darth Bush? I can only imasgine what you'd say if we had men like Teddy Roosevelt and Gen. Pershing in charge right now.
Now, did you notice that the author of the bill, Rep. Hoyer is a DEMOCRAT? How about three of the four co-sponsors who are also DEMOCRATS? Do you understand how insanely hard it is to make amendments to the US Constitution?
If you're going to be critical, at least take the time to do some research before you start talking sillyness.
Last year, the only security training my company's Infosec director and manager took was to Gartner's Security Conference, but only because they paid for everything including travel and hotel costs because attendance is always low. When my boss got back, and she's not exactly a security expert by any sense of the word, she said it was horrible. That says a lot coming from someone as ignorant of security as her. She said people would show up, the presentations would start, and over the next hour or so people would file out the doors and never return. She said the rooms ended up being less thant 10% full by the end of the talks because no one wanted to hear them.
This company, which I left recently, based all of their decisions on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Of course, it was always funny doing the conference calls with their analysts to discuss technologies we were interested in, and they could never go beyond the script they had prepared for the call. When my boss wanted to buy some form of HIDS, they basically did a call on why we should purchase Symantec's new product over Symantec's older product. Nevermind that there were better products from their own literature. The guy couldn't answer any question about the product that wasn't on the literature he'd sent or was reading from. It was depressing, because his opinion mattered more to my management than the opinions of those who would be using and monitoring the software and knew what our requirements were.
Also, this is interesting because Project Gotham was published by MS, but it was developed by Bizarre Creations. Did MS require Bizarre Creations to give up their IP in order to be published to the console? PC game developers have different options when it comes to bypassing the regular brick and mortar distribution system, but console games are contorlled rather exclusively by the manufacturers, and there's a good bit of money to be made in the games for those platforms.
Is it just me, or does that patent seem to apply to Project Gotham Racing? What is interesting is that the game was only published by MS, but was developed by Bizzare Creations. And there are similar elements in Fable.
The gaming industry is getting stale. The FPS was a revolution in gaming with the original Wolfenstein, but even that was only an offshoot of the Contra/Commander Keen style side scrolling shooter. It only changed the perspective and gave the gameplay some added depth, but thats it. OpenGL was another technology that revolutionized games, but it only made them look better and allowed for added depth and realism. The type of profound advancements that we've seen in gaming since Pong are going to become less and less. There really aren't any more distinct categories/genres of games that can be created. What we'll see is that advances in technology allow the games to look more realistic, the AI will continue to improve, and new features will be added that make things interesting. And let's not forget that ultimately, there are some games out there with really great stories! Half-Life changed the way people look at FPS games because it had an interesting story. It wasn't just run and gun. But, the industry is still being driven by how realistic the scenery and the killing is in the game. I doubt we'll have true photorealism any time soon, so that's enough to sustain the industry for a while. Hell, someone needs to get Dvorak a copy of Final Fantasy X. Say what you want about consoles and games being dead, but that RPG had one of the best stories of any game I've ever seen. My wife and kids actually enjoyed watching me play it. It's going to be games like that, where we see sort of a merge of gameplay and movie/story like entertainment that will continue to succeed.
I have food, water, and weapons burried in the woods for the coming Apocalypse, and even I think this guy is a little too paranoid. Then again, he's a refreshing, even if slightly frightening, change from most security professionals who normally have the worst security practices in their personal lives.
It looks as if Color Kinetics is about to have much, if not all, of their IP portfolio ruled invalid because of a plethora of existing prior art from as far back as the 1970's. All of this has come to light (no pun intended) after their lawsuit with Super Vision International. With that in mind, I don't now how to take this one. Is this a stupid patent that just injures Color Kinetics IP case more, or are they serious? Wouldn't the existing LED based technology that is used to illuminate pools be considered prior art, i.e. the Boca Flash products?
I think the Dark Warriors at Lackland AFB's Information Warfare Battlelab in San Antonio might have something to say about this article's BS/speculation rating, if they aren't already part of the joint task force. And unlike the joint task force listed, they seem to spend a good portion of their time actually building tools and technologies to defend networks.
After attending last year's Quake Con, I had a blast. The only down side was that I was one of the few 'normal' people there, and there were many people who obviously did not believe in showering or wearing deoderant. They even had signs posted to encourage proper hygiene while attending the event. Someone needs to get Right Guard and Dial as a sponsor, handing out soap and deoderant to the participants as they register.
That's a bad analogy, and factually incorrect. The idea that online content distribution is zero cost is absurd. Online content has distribution costs: bandwidth, infrastructure (servers, equipment, support contracts), and employees to support the above items. The websites, servers, and bandwidth don't just get provided by magic.
It's not that simple. What Amazon brings to the table is exposure. Amazon is without a doubt the world's largest on-line retailer with the most exposure, and that's something that Netflix can capitalize on. Most retailers or sales oriented companies would give up body parts to partner with Amazon, and that includes some very high profile companies like my previous employer who was the market leader in luxury retail.
As long as you like full-frame DVDs. They even sell widescreen TVs now, but their DVD selection is still slanted towards full-frame.
Writing zeros doesn't work. The way modern hard drives operate, it is never possible for the sectors on a hard disk platter to be put back into a truly neutral state by the write heads, especially if all you do is write zeros over it. The current DOD standard for sanitizing confidential and secret data, 5220.22-M, requires for a sector to overwritten seven times with an alternating pattern to hopefully render the recovery of data from the sector impossible. However the DOD, as of 2003, suspended the use of this practice because a GAO audit determined that the inability to control the flow of top secret data combined with problems with the accepted algorithm caused top secret data to be recovered from hard drives removed from non-classified systems. The ruling came down that all hard drives from deprecated systems had to be physically destroyed in the interim until another solution was discovered.
You may or may not remember that part of the UN resolution that stopped Gulf War I was not only that they end their chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, but that they also show PROOF that they had done so. Saddam never presented any such proof. Hence, Saddam didn't comply with the UN resoltuions in the first place.
However, now this whole SNAFU is a convenient excuse to ignore UN resolutions, but again, they usually got ignored anyway.
It's time for Microsoft to admit that ActiveX is a bad idea, and needs to be done away with. Even with their new secure way of handling content in the browswer with XP SP2, it's still a problem. In IE 5 you could turn it off, in IE6 you can't.
It's time to dump ActiveX.
This is both fascinating and frightening. Imagine the possibilities! Though the prospect of nanoparasites is somewhat frightening.
Find a school in Japane that teaches English and setup video conferencing or VoIP with them. That way they can practice their English and your students can practice their Japanese. Being able to interact with native speakers is key to learning a language and actually retaining it.