"how many times that software applications created the same problem?"
How many times have software applications that were installed on my machine without my knowledge created the same problem? How many times have software applications that were impossible to uninstall from my system created the same problem?
The only instance I can think of are other root kits and spyware, and I do my best to keep my system free of those criminal pieces of software as well.
The problem with Sony BMG's software is not the defect, it's the underhanded way it is delivered to a computer to begin with. Sony BMG has no right to install software on my computer without my knowledge. When inserting a music CD into my computer, there is no expectation that software will be installed. Sony's software SHOULD pop up a big "I'm about to install this software on your machine" dialog, with a big "OK" and "CANCEL" button, like other comercial software from respectable companies.
The news post claims the greens are upset about this deal, then links to an article in which two different spokespeople from the green party praise the deal.
And what's with the jab at Novell for offering "proprietary versions of OSS". What does that even mean? Is Suse Linux somehow now less open because Novell owns it?
OpenGL is an API, which programmers use to describe a set of graphics primatives.
SwiftShader is a renderer, which draws things.
You would, in fact, program your code in Direct3D or OpenGL, and then use SwiftShader as the renderer, the same way today you would program in Direct3D or OpenGL, and then use your ATI X800 as the renderer. They even mention, in the article, that "OpenGL-compatible APIs are also under development".
The only difference is that, compared to an ATI X800, SwiftShader will be very slow, and compared to the SuperImageCrazyMagic 9000 VGA+++ graphics card in my crappy laptop, SwiftShader will be quite fast.
If you find yourself needing a special "testing" cycle, you're doing it wrong. Without continuous testing and feedback you'll just keep digging yourself into the hole; deeper and deeper.
Umm... no. First of all, testing cannot fix problems. Testing cannot guarantee the absense of defects. All testing does is tell you how good your software is, quality wise. If your testers find 100 defects per hour of test effort, then your software is total crap. Even if you fix all the bugs the testers find, there's still tons left, and you'll never "fix" them all. If your testers find very few defects per unit effort, then you know your software is very good, and is ready to be released into the wild for your customers to use.
Second, the parent was correct; it may be faster in terms of development time to rebuild rather than reuse, but it is definately not faster in terms of your product's overall lifecycle. For every hour you spend implementing something, you spend either a few hours elsewhere in design and code inspection, or in a company like yours, several hours in test and repair. All you have to do is not insert defects into your codebase to begin with, and then you really won't have to spend much time in test at all. This is very easy to do.
If you're not catching the bulk of your defects long before you reach test, then either you are in a very high margin buisness, you need some serious process improvement, or else you should just save yourself the trouble and pack up shop now, before you hemorage any more cash.
"We had a major hard drive crash over here, and IBM is being super slow about replacing our RAID array. We went down to best buy and grabbed a couple fujitsu drives to try and get things up and running for now, but that's just not working out. We have a complete backup of everything, so as soon as IBM gets back to us, we'll be good to go."
then you might feel better. If, on the other hand, the answer was
"Steve and Jake were eating pizza and kicking some back in the server room, and Steve accidently unplugged the server. Jake said 'Oh Shit!', and tried to plug it back in, but spilled beer in the case, and possibly some pepperoni. Unfortunately we're not sure when the last time we ran a full backup was. I think we're going to have to restore the Christmas backup, and then patch in the 200+ incremental backups we did since then (assuming none of them are corrupt of course)."
Well, then you'd probably be MORE angry.
They could only answer when the answer was good, but then their stony silence would be a dead giveaway when they'd done something wrong. They could LIE when they did something wrong, but then you'd never be able to trust anything they said anyways, so the whole exercise would be rendered moot.
Well, actually, I suppose if they had some system for locating you within the cave, they could adjust the projected perspective as required, so you could move around...
But, you still don't have unlimited movement. You can only walk to the edge of the room, then you have a screen in the way.
You can't walk around in the cave. In fact, you'd have to sit in exactly the right spot in the cave, or else the perspective would be out-of-whack at the edges of each of the screens.
I wonder how they're getting the video signal to the HMD? Any decent resolution is going to require a fair ammount of bandwidth. It's obviously not going to be a cabled connection (where would the cables go?).
When books can be converted easily and cheaply into an open digital format, and when someone creates an ebook reader that works effortlessly, the nail in the coffin of copyright laws will finally stick.
There won't be a good ebook reader until ebook publishers stop trying to foist DRM down our throats, and that won't happen any time soon, as publishers remaing convinced that letting people read books will result in a reduction in sales (which I highly suspect is not the case).
Just like the bands I love, book promotion will eventually be the right way to sell,
Except, bands actually make money from travelling around and giving concerts. You pay a ticket price to go watch the band play, and this is where most bands make most of their income. (Income from CD sales, on the other hand, goes to the label).
Authors, on the other hand, do not make anything from going to a book store and signing books, aside from what they get in increased sales.
Open 'piracy' of books en masse will give someone a reason to create a good ebook reader....and will make it pretty much pointless for anyone to write books.
DRM and crappy ebook readers are certainly the reason ebooks aren't doing well now, IMHO. If I could buy books as straight up PDF files, with no DRM, (and if they actually cost less than their paper counterparts), I'd be all over this ebook thing.
As it stands, though, if I buy an ebook, I pay the same ammount for the ebook as I would have for the paper version. If I buy it on my home PC, I can't read it on the bus or at work on my lunch hour. If I buy it on my laptop, the book is tied to my laptop, and next time my hard-drive crashes, or someone steals my laptop, I have to re-buy my whole library. I can't lend the book to friends, or even to my wife. So, pay the same ammount for something with less functionality... No thanks.
I honestly believe that if publishers started offering un-DRMed books, e-books would start doing much better. Large-scale piracy would lead to more DRM, which would lead us away from a "good" ebook reader.
I own a copy of, for example, the 1990 Honda CRX service manual, published by Honda. I use this book anywhere from one to ten times a year.
If this were available online, I would not need to own it, since when I need to change my timing belt, I could just lookup the procedure online, and print out the relevant pages.
If this book were available at my local library, I'd still own it. I refer to it often enough that there's no point in repeatedly borrowing it from the library.
I can think of several similar examples. The IBM Power PC Programming Environments is another good one (which is available online, and which I don't own a dead-tree version of).
An email client without a calendar is like a lawnmower without a toaster.
Seriously, why would you want to integrate an email client and a calendar? You want something to email you when you have a meeting? Most calendars will do that anyways, without the need for integration with your email client.
About the only advantage I can see to such a union is that I could share an adress book between them (which I can largely do anyways, thanks to the miracle of LDAP). I could spam my project team members, and then invite them all to a meeting, without having to verify that my two team-member-lists are in synch with each other.
Most corporations like having someone they can go to for support. If open office crashes and burns on you, all you can do is post a bug repot and hope someone fixes it soon.
Right now it's an "open-format" vs. "accountability" tradeoff. If MS supported open formats, that would change in favor of MS, for most companies.
On ebgames.com right now, a 2-pack of 8MB PS2 memory cards is $40. I don't know how big the xbox card is, but I'm willing to bet it's bigger.
With the PS2, though, you have all kinds of third party memory cards which are dirt cheap. I would say that a short while after launch, you'd be able to pick up a MadCatz Xbox360 SuperMegaMemoryStick in a variety of flourecent colors for half that.
I *would* say that, except rumor has it that the 360 will only work with "approved peripherals", so MadCatz will have to pay a licensing fee to MS, which will drive up the cost of the MadCatz memory card too.
Exactly. If Sony REALLY cared about your media experience, if Sony REALLY wanted to create a kick-ass portable player, they would have not used a proprietary format, but used 3" DVDs. Or at least would have released a UMD burner to market, (or better, released software to convert DVDs to some kind of memory stick or UMD format).
However there is no financial motivation for Sony to do this; they stand to gain (or, at least, believe they stand to gain) more by using a closed format, forcing you to buy your movies on UMD, and driving Sony's profit up. It's a clever idea on paper, but of course it falls apart since instead, people just won't use the PSP as a portable player.
Here, I think, we see the real reason why companies like Sony and other big studios are making such a big deal about DRM and copy protection; it has nothing to do with piracy. The studios aren't stupid, and they all know, just like we do, that piracy is not a real problem (or at least, the kind of casual copying that DRM protects against is not a real problem. DRM does nothing to stop internet trading, nor to stop the kind of mass-scale piracy we see in countries like China).
DRM is all about getting the casual consumer, who can't get around the DRM, to buy their movies on DVD, then re-buy them on HD-DVD, and re-buy them on UMD, and re-buy them on whatever other formats they can come out with.
Sony is now discovering that people, for some strange unfathomable reason, don't want to pay for the same movie more than once.
I really wish that sony would wise up start issuing its formal stamp of approval to emulators so and certain other homebrew apps so there would be no other legitimate excuse for non-pirates not to upgrade their psp firmware
Because no one using an emulator is a pirate. All those roms, they ripped themselves from the cartridges.
Forced firmware updates on new games WOULD be an intelligent way to enforce copy protection, but first they'd have to come out with new games that aren't just ports of PS2 games, you know, that someone might actually buy.
The problem with this argument is that a "stable, well maintained car with good tires" may be plenty safer to drive at 85 MPH, in terms of your ability to handle the car. But, it does not matter how stable your car is, or what condition your tires are in, if a little old lady comes out of a blind intersection in front of you; then it's mostly down to reaction time - what kind of car you're driving is largely irrelevant.
Every car has limits, but every driver has limits too. Most anyone could drive a well tuned car at insane speeds around a closed circuit, and this tends to make us overestimate our own limits. Driving on public roads has really very little to do with your ability to handle an automobile, and more with your ability to deal with the unexpected. (And you have a lot more time to deal with the unexpected at 55 MPH than at 85.:)
You can argue that a good driver in a good car can get out of a tight spot much more readily than in a poor car, but then you can argue that, again in terms of driving on a public road, a "good" driver will avoid the tight spot to begin with.
Now, that said, there are certainly roads around here where I think 85 would be a perfectly acceptable speed limit, especially since average traffic speeds rarely fall below that anyway. The problem is that speed limits are generally set by politicians instead of traffic engineers. The problem with ignoring speed limits is that then the speed limit is STILL not being set by traffic engineers, but by the general public, and that's even scarier.
Grab the high-res overhead shot, and look at the bottom left edge of the ice patch. There's what a faint green discoloration which look like some sort of "tendrils" creeping up the side of the ice. Anyone have any theory what those are? Could they just be some sort of color distortion introduced by the camera? Or is this possibly some sort of organism?
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"how many times that software applications created the same problem?"
How many times have software applications that were installed on my machine without my knowledge created the same problem? How many times have software applications that were impossible to uninstall from my system created the same problem?
The only instance I can think of are other root kits and spyware, and I do my best to keep my system free of those criminal pieces of software as well.
The problem with Sony BMG's software is not the defect, it's the underhanded way it is delivered to a computer to begin with. Sony BMG has no right to install software on my computer without my knowledge. When inserting a music CD into my computer, there is no expectation that software will be installed. Sony's software SHOULD pop up a big "I'm about to install this software on your machine" dialog, with a big "OK" and "CANCEL" button, like other comercial software from respectable companies.
The news post claims the greens are upset about this deal, then links to an article in which two different spokespeople from the green party praise the deal.
And what's with the jab at Novell for offering "proprietary versions of OSS". What does that even mean? Is Suse Linux somehow now less open because Novell owns it?
Am I missing something here?
OpenGL is an API, which programmers use to describe a set of graphics primatives.
SwiftShader is a renderer, which draws things.
You would, in fact, program your code in Direct3D or OpenGL, and then use SwiftShader as the renderer, the same way today you would program in Direct3D or OpenGL, and then use your ATI X800 as the renderer. They even mention, in the article, that "OpenGL-compatible APIs are also under development".
The only difference is that, compared to an ATI X800, SwiftShader will be very slow, and compared to the SuperImageCrazyMagic 9000 VGA+++ graphics card in my crappy laptop, SwiftShader will be quite fast.
If you find yourself needing a special "testing" cycle, you're doing it wrong. Without continuous testing and feedback you'll just keep digging yourself into the hole; deeper and deeper.
Umm... no. First of all, testing cannot fix problems. Testing cannot guarantee the absense of defects. All testing does is tell you how good your software is, quality wise. If your testers find 100 defects per hour of test effort, then your software is total crap. Even if you fix all the bugs the testers find, there's still tons left, and you'll never "fix" them all. If your testers find very few defects per unit effort, then you know your software is very good, and is ready to be released into the wild for your customers to use.
Second, the parent was correct; it may be faster in terms of development time to rebuild rather than reuse, but it is definately not faster in terms of your product's overall lifecycle. For every hour you spend implementing something, you spend either a few hours elsewhere in design and code inspection, or in a company like yours, several hours in test and repair. All you have to do is not insert defects into your codebase to begin with, and then you really won't have to spend much time in test at all. This is very easy to do.
If you're not catching the bulk of your defects long before you reach test, then either you are in a very high margin buisness, you need some serious process improvement, or else you should just save yourself the trouble and pack up shop now, before you hemorage any more cash.
If, for example, the answer was
"We had a major hard drive crash over here, and IBM is being super slow about replacing our RAID array. We went down to best buy and grabbed a couple fujitsu drives to try and get things up and running for now, but that's just not working out. We have a complete backup of everything, so as soon as IBM gets back to us, we'll be good to go."
then you might feel better. If, on the other hand, the answer was
"Steve and Jake were eating pizza and kicking some back in the server room, and Steve accidently unplugged the server. Jake said 'Oh Shit!', and tried to plug it back in, but spilled beer in the case, and possibly some pepperoni. Unfortunately we're not sure when the last time we ran a full backup was. I think we're going to have to restore the Christmas backup, and then patch in the 200+ incremental backups we did since then (assuming none of them are corrupt of course)."
Well, then you'd probably be MORE angry.
They could only answer when the answer was good, but then their stony silence would be a dead giveaway when they'd done something wrong. They could LIE when they did something wrong, but then you'd never be able to trust anything they said anyways, so the whole exercise would be rendered moot.
Well, actually, I suppose if they had some system for locating you within the cave, they could adjust the projected perspective as required, so you could move around...
But, you still don't have unlimited movement. You can only walk to the edge of the room, then you have a screen in the way.
You can't walk around in the cave. In fact, you'd have to sit in exactly the right spot in the cave, or else the perspective would be out-of-whack at the edges of each of the screens.
I wonder how they're getting the video signal to the HMD? Any decent resolution is going to require a fair ammount of bandwidth. It's obviously not going to be a cabled connection (where would the cables go?).
When books can be converted easily and cheaply into an open digital format, and when someone creates an ebook reader that works effortlessly, the nail in the coffin of copyright laws will finally stick.
...and will make it pretty much pointless for anyone to write books.
There won't be a good ebook reader until ebook publishers stop trying to foist DRM down our throats, and that won't happen any time soon, as publishers remaing convinced that letting people read books will result in a reduction in sales (which I highly suspect is not the case).
Just like the bands I love, book promotion will eventually be the right way to sell,
Except, bands actually make money from travelling around and giving concerts. You pay a ticket price to go watch the band play, and this is where most bands make most of their income. (Income from CD sales, on the other hand, goes to the label).
Authors, on the other hand, do not make anything from going to a book store and signing books, aside from what they get in increased sales.
Open 'piracy' of books en masse will give someone a reason to create a good ebook reader.
DRM and crappy ebook readers are certainly the reason ebooks aren't doing well now, IMHO. If I could buy books as straight up PDF files, with no DRM, (and if they actually cost less than their paper counterparts), I'd be all over this ebook thing.
As it stands, though, if I buy an ebook, I pay the same ammount for the ebook as I would have for the paper version. If I buy it on my home PC, I can't read it on the bus or at work on my lunch hour. If I buy it on my laptop, the book is tied to my laptop, and next time my hard-drive crashes, or someone steals my laptop, I have to re-buy my whole library. I can't lend the book to friends, or even to my wife. So, pay the same ammount for something with less functionality... No thanks.
I honestly believe that if publishers started offering un-DRMed books, e-books would start doing much better. Large-scale piracy would lead to more DRM, which would lead us away from a "good" ebook reader.
I own a copy of, for example, the 1990 Honda CRX service manual, published by Honda. I use this book anywhere from one to ten times a year.
If this were available online, I would not need to own it, since when I need to change my timing belt, I could just lookup the procedure online, and print out the relevant pages.
If this book were available at my local library, I'd still own it. I refer to it often enough that there's no point in repeatedly borrowing it from the library.
I can think of several similar examples. The IBM Power PC Programming Environments is another good one (which is available online, and which I don't own a dead-tree version of).
LOL.
An email client without a calendar is like a lawnmower without a toaster.
Seriously, why would you want to integrate an email client and a calendar? You want something to email you when you have a meeting? Most calendars will do that anyways, without the need for integration with your email client.
About the only advantage I can see to such a union is that I could share an adress book between them (which I can largely do anyways, thanks to the miracle of LDAP). I could spam my project team members, and then invite them all to a meeting, without having to verify that my two team-member-lists are in synch with each other.
Actually, lawsuit is just one word.
Unless, perhaps, you were refering to some sort of suit, made of law. Like a "law jacket" and some "law pants".
I find it interesting that Jack Thompson refers to himself exclusively in the third person everywhere he is quoted...
This is a little off topic, but...
That's something I've been advocating over here in Canada. Right now in Ontario, a car has to pass a safety check only when it is sold to a new owner.
In Quebec, a car must only pass safety if the car is sold to a new owner, and the previous owner didn't live in Quebec.
Most corporations like having someone they can go to for support. If open office crashes and burns on you, all you can do is post a bug repot and hope someone fixes it soon.
Right now it's an "open-format" vs. "accountability" tradeoff. If MS supported open formats, that would change in favor of MS, for most companies.
On ebgames.com right now, a 2-pack of 8MB PS2 memory cards is $40. I don't know how big the xbox card is, but I'm willing to bet it's bigger.
With the PS2, though, you have all kinds of third party memory cards which are dirt cheap. I would say that a short while after launch, you'd be able to pick up a MadCatz Xbox360 SuperMegaMemoryStick in a variety of flourecent colors for half that.
I *would* say that, except rumor has it that the 360 will only work with "approved peripherals", so MadCatz will have to pay a licensing fee to MS, which will drive up the cost of the MadCatz memory card too.
Exactly. If Sony REALLY cared about your media experience, if Sony REALLY wanted to create a kick-ass portable player, they would have not used a proprietary format, but used 3" DVDs. Or at least would have released a UMD burner to market, (or better, released software to convert DVDs to some kind of memory stick or UMD format).
However there is no financial motivation for Sony to do this; they stand to gain (or, at least, believe they stand to gain) more by using a closed format, forcing you to buy your movies on UMD, and driving Sony's profit up. It's a clever idea on paper, but of course it falls apart since instead, people just won't use the PSP as a portable player.
Here, I think, we see the real reason why companies like Sony and other big studios are making such a big deal about DRM and copy protection; it has nothing to do with piracy. The studios aren't stupid, and they all know, just like we do, that piracy is not a real problem (or at least, the kind of casual copying that DRM protects against is not a real problem. DRM does nothing to stop internet trading, nor to stop the kind of mass-scale piracy we see in countries like China).
DRM is all about getting the casual consumer, who can't get around the DRM, to buy their movies on DVD, then re-buy them on HD-DVD, and re-buy them on UMD, and re-buy them on whatever other formats they can come out with.
Sony is now discovering that people, for some strange unfathomable reason, don't want to pay for the same movie more than once.
I really wish that sony would wise up start issuing its formal stamp of approval to emulators so and certain other homebrew apps so there would be no other legitimate excuse for non-pirates not to upgrade their psp firmware
Because no one using an emulator is a pirate. All those roms, they ripped themselves from the cartridges.
Forced firmware updates on new games WOULD be an intelligent way to enforce copy protection, but first they'd have to come out with new games that aren't just ports of PS2 games, you know, that someone might actually buy.
Here's an older article from Wired on just the opposite; a group of students who sucessfully hacked vegas;
. html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas_pr
It's an older article, but it's a good read.
The problem with this argument is that a "stable, well maintained car with good tires" may be plenty safer to drive at 85 MPH, in terms of your ability to handle the car. But, it does not matter how stable your car is, or what condition your tires are in, if a little old lady comes out of a blind intersection in front of you; then it's mostly down to reaction time - what kind of car you're driving is largely irrelevant.
:)
Every car has limits, but every driver has limits too. Most anyone could drive a well tuned car at insane speeds around a closed circuit, and this tends to make us overestimate our own limits. Driving on public roads has really very little to do with your ability to handle an automobile, and more with your ability to deal with the unexpected. (And you have a lot more time to deal with the unexpected at 55 MPH than at 85.
You can argue that a good driver in a good car can get out of a tight spot much more readily than in a poor car, but then you can argue that, again in terms of driving on a public road, a "good" driver will avoid the tight spot to begin with.
Now, that said, there are certainly roads around here where I think 85 would be a perfectly acceptable speed limit, especially since average traffic speeds rarely fall below that anyway. The problem is that speed limits are generally set by politicians instead of traffic engineers. The problem with ignoring speed limits is that then the speed limit is STILL not being set by traffic engineers, but by the general public, and that's even scarier.
Not terribly exciting, but the official press release is here:
s e.asp
http://www.sabertoothgames.com/stg/pa_press_relea
Exact same text, but there's two illustrations from the cards.
Grab the high-res overhead shot, and look at the bottom left edge of the ice patch. There's what a faint green discoloration which look like some sort of "tendrils" creeping up the side of the ice. Anyone have any theory what those are? Could they just be some sort of color distortion introduced by the camera? Or is this possibly some sort of organism?