Wrong. Someone is getting older. Next year is the year that the first cohort of Baby Boomers turns 65. Perhaps their "Market" will find a price they can bare in the coming months.
First, I think the entire article applies only to AAA titles
Actually, I think the opposite is more often the case. AAA titles are lauded, hyped, and their flaws swallowed without complaint by the vast majority of nigh hysterical fans.
Personally, I think the article authors have been hanging around/v/ too much.
Shrinking government spending (while deregulating private activity) caused a boom in China. It has also made Germany the only stable economy in Western Europe in the recent years.
Where do I begin here?
OK, firstly, both the economies you mention are export led ones. In fact, China and Germany are respectively the first and second largest exporters in the world.
Secondly, when we talk about China, we're certainly not talking about a free market economy. Every significant Chinese company is more or less a branch of the officially communist government. The government has an active level of involvement at every possible level of the economy, from setting up medium sized businesses, to its pegging of the yuan to the US dollar.
The economy in China is entirely state managed, and arguing that somehow, amidst all this direct management and capital infrastructure projects, China is actually shrinking its government spending is complete non-sense. Go ahead; trawl up some myopic statistic which "proves" that China is spending less on government. I'm sure it will be true in whatever world economic view you present alongside it.
As to Germany, beneath their boom is the stark reality that many manufacturing jobs across the eurozone have been transferred there as a result of the introduction of the euro. German spending on welfare and education has thus been reduced, even as those cost have gone up in other countries. Again, your example ignores the wider picture.
"Austerity" in the modern context simply means that the ordinary workers are squeezed to pay back money to reckless lenders. Those who lent recklessly are rewarded, those who borrowed are punished, and those who are close to the borrowers are also made to pay. That is the essence of austerity. If you believe that this was the same austerity that lead to booms in China and Germany, be my guest. But you'd be completely wrong.
You basically rob all of the people that lived within their means and saved their whole life to bail out those that borrowed to the hilt and lived like there is no tomorrow.
A lot of those "prudent savers" left their money on deposit at bank, or even better, in pension funds where it earned +5% interests in some years. Like it or not, savers rode the same rocket ship as everyone else in the boom years and will just have to pony up with the rest of us.
This goes treble for the older generation (boomers) now approaching retirement. They were the generation that drove the world over the cliff, yet still expect their inflated, largely unearned pensions to be funded at boom time levels.
The world is in trouble because a) borrowers borrowed money recklessly and b) lenders lent money recklessly. Savers and pensioners fall into the latter category, as they invested their money in risky investments which promised them the world(and don't try to fool me, I've seen dozens of those fancy pension fun brochures on the kitchen tables of older people). As imprudent investors, they too must take a hit.
What needs to happen is Mozilla needs to get with Microsoft, Chrome, Apple etc and say unless you submit yourself to an INDEPENDENT audit you will be revoked from our default trusted root certs.
The recent "Too big to fail" CA == Bank comparision story was all too succinct a comparision, and this method won't work for the same reason an independent audit of the banks won't work. In short, most if not all CAs are likely security bankrupt.
Investigation is likely to find that CAs are only one step above flight by night organisations, with slipshod practices, procedures and security at every possible level, from the main servers to the secretaries email inbox. Are you ready to deal with the fallout from such revelations?
Are you ready to actually revoke security authentication from millions of sites across the internet? Are you ready to deal with every major browser throwing a blue screaming fit every time a user connects to a major web commerce login? Are you ready and able unclog a seized up system, signed up to by every major player on the internet, and which a substantial portion of the modern net itself now rests on?
The major problem here is the browsers, and Mozilla's actions here--requesting the CAs to police themselves--are exactly analogous to how our international banking system was woefully mismanaged over the last decades. What Mozilla should be doing is moving away from reliance on the Certification Authority system altogether. It has failed. It has become dangerous to users and website. It must be replaced or abandoned.
Removing the DEFCON 2 warnings for self signed certs will be the first step in the right direction. Until then, Mozilla is just continuing to be part of the problem.
Why spend millions on something that is free and good?
Because if you don't the browser with almost 40% market share will throw a hyperventilating fit whenever users connect to your site, and will try its earnest best to frighten them away from you before they so much as see your site logo.
But other than that, yeah, you can go right ahead and self sign your certs. No problem.
These people are not in the security business; They are in the confidence business.
Like Calvin Klein, and psychic hot-lines, the CA's are not selling a product so much as they are selling "peace of mind". They sell a special pen which companies use to fill in that special website check-box next to the word "Secure connections". That's it.
There is nothing magical about a CA issued cert. The Certification Authorities neither certify connections, nor have the authority to do so. They host public numbers on their servers and end users must rely solely on the CAs unearned reputation that the connection is in fact a) secure and b) to the right party. There is no guarantee that the connection is actually either and the CA's cannot issue such guarantees or even verify the situation before or after the fact. Not that they would bother too either.
The CA's certs are best compared to the sale of church indulgences. You pay money, and your encryption sins are forgiven. What sins are those? Well, according to RSA: Chapter 2, verse 7; a self signed cert (while perfectly functional) is a blasphemy against the holy powers and will be punished with eternal damnation unless you repent and fork over a wad of cash to your nearest CA immediately. By the way, bad things can still happen to you because Security works in mysterious ways, but as long as you gave the CA's money, your soul/ass is covered.
I hope someone at Mozilla is reading this, because the next time I have to click through that irritating little yellow jerk four times just to stop people sniffing my web traffic, I'm switching to Chrome. Hope that doesn't make you spill coffee out of your complementary Verisign mugs fellas.
Not on bootup or program launch, I that is where I personally spend 80% of my time waiting.
I bought an expensive 60GB SSD for my/boot and / partitions and I can say that I've rarely been happier with a tech purchase. The difference between regular program launches and those launched from my/home partition on a separate 1TB HDD is staggering. No more 30-60s waits for firefox and open office to load. No more "LOADING" screens while reading pdfs off the drive. No more chronic wait for octave to load its packages.
I agree that per byte, you are getting hardly anything for your money. But for the time saved, the expense of an additional SSD more than pays for itself in the first month.
You don't have to use Google if you don't want to.
Yes, but since that more or less equates to not using the internet at all, it rather misses the point. And the point is becoming a lot bigger than you think with each passing day.
Once solution to this growing Google problem would be the nationalisation/public-domaining of their code. algorithms, and or infrastructure. Since these now comprise a vital and increasingly central part of national if not international commerce, government, and society, it is somewhat irresponsible to leave them entirely in private hands.
If Google really does decide to become evil in a big way, or simply goes belly up, the splash may literally be big enough to sink a small state or two. I dare say the company is reaching the "too big to fail" status of the banks, and as such, it is probably time to look into nationalisation or quasi-nationalisation options now rather than when it all hits the fan.
If they conceal the misdeeds of their fellow cops -- they're just as bad as they are.
Like it or not, the police force is a civilian militia. You cannot expect it to operate without some kind of collective group code of conduct. I agree that such unwritten "codes" can be a source of very serious problems and even crime. But you cannot expect police forces to behave like just any other company or state organisation.
A better response is to instil a powerful sense of ethics in police forces, so that those who commit misdeeds are seen to have betrayed the collective trust of the group. Unfortunately, this would require promoting values which are practically unheard of in modern society into the very forces responsible for enforcing those values as they are written in law(which paradoxically they are). Probably not a move we can expect any-time soon.
I grew up on sci-fi, reading about the possibilities - things humanity can do if it sets out to accomplish something grand.
I grew up in an age of irresponsibility and incompetence, where no institution was too grand, no system too safe, no position too trusted, to be above being laid low by gross negligence, mismanagement, fraud, or scandal. I'd rather go back to worshipping sky gods than trust the fate of the world to a project run by the overpaid car salesmen who run everything else these days.
I dreamed of the stars, and of people inhabiting the entire solar system one day.
And I dreamed that a better race of people would inhabit them. You know, one thing people always admired about sci-fi like Star Trek wasn't the flashy technology or wild adventure, but the depiction of a society that was better than the one we have now. A society where prejudice and greed have been eliminated, and where responsibility and self-improvement are aspired to. That's not the society we live in today.
If the debacles of the last decade have taught us anything, it's that we need to work on our society before we can work at the big projects. If the man in charge of any asteroid moving project is wearing a business suit, it's time to cancel your insurance.
Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are two completely different games. Both are centred on 3D discrete block grids. The similarities end there.
Minecraft is a 3D first person interactive environment manipulation game. Dwarf Fortress is a quasi-interactive, procedurally generated, virtual world simulation. In Minecraft, players make their own fun. In Dwarf Fortress, players are told that "Losing is Fun". In Minecraft, the ultimate goal is to make epic creations. In Dwarf Fortress, the ultimate goal is to make epics.
Even their distribution models differ. These two games are really chalk and cheese.
It means that the creativity is no longer limited to what the designer of the game could come up with, but the players can add their own creativity.
It's worth noting that Notch has explicitly stated that one of his development goals is to promote emergent gameplay and creativity. Minecraft is like LittleBigPLanet in this sense; user created content and creativity was the goal from the beginning.
This way if the company continues to win and prosper, he will become wealthy. Otherwise no honey.
This is an outrageous affront to the principles of merit and earned reward which made this country great. If CEOs cannot expect an honest $5 million bonus payment for liquidating divisions and rolling back R&D in the short term, how will we attract the best people to run our companies?
It's no surprise to hear this from a company run by a known former hippie. This kind of peace and love "fairness" will sink Apple as it will sink that other great coropration, the U.S.A. Ambitious, driven people will be forced out by poor remunerations, to be replaced by steady, long-term focused, family men whose decisions will be stymied by their senses of "responsibility" or--God Almighty forbid--"fiscal prudence".
That's not the America I know! The America I know gives 29 years olds a chance to run multi-million dollar companies and over three times their own age. It allows new technologies to be brought to market cheaply by giving their secrets to foreign contractors. It allows billions of dollars to soak up the economic chain to the righteous, hard-working, low-taxed millionaire hands where it belongs. The America I know embraces inequality as a founding principle!
If this catches on, expect myself and the rest of your betters moving on to a better life in Shanghai, under a Government which recognises and rewards our ability.
I wonder how long it will be before the (current) editors and employees of Slashdot will have their names sullied by a rogue.xxx domain.
You're assuming that such domains will actually "sully" people's names. If too many of these things appear, it will be the entire xxx domain whose reputation will suffer--to the benefit of all I might add.
Nonsense. It takes institution wide use of an operating system with systemic security issues. It take a network where a secretaries computer effectively has access to files relating to defence contractors. It takes a tinderbox network, pre-doused in gasoline in order for one tiny spark to ignite such an inferno.
An international military security verifcation network, compromised by a single flash file in an Excel sheet, opened on a secretaries computer; And it's the secretaries fault? Give me a break.
In a sense, this is such a watershed moment. Slashdot is one of the few early internet sites which made it big and is still around. It certainly pre-dates Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing and son on. And CmdrTaco's continued involvement since the sites inception gave it a tangible link to the dorm-room/garage/basement origins of so many websites of those days.
So, CmdrTaco is going. The question is, what will go with him? It is a possibility that the site will see significant and off-putting feature creep in the coming months, driving away the steady commentators who made this place what it is.
Of course as many will be keen to add, it's possible that the dupes and spelling errors will go as well. However since those serve to drive off grammar and spelling nazi's, I'm not sure the site can really afford to lose those particular features.
Meanwhile Asia hasn't had this problem because they're genetic selection had preference for smaller cuter types to begin with. Yes obesity occasionally shows up in Asia, but you don't see it like you do in the Americas.
I don't know where to begin. Your entire post reads like the introverted ravings of someone with entirely too many opinions. Here's a link on the growing obesity problem in China, clearly clinking urbanisation and economic growth to widening waistlines. Also, most people of European descent live not in America, but in Europe where waistlines are substantially slimmer. Genetics has nothing on diet and lifestyle.
Maybe in another 200 years the average North American will be some blend of Asian, European and African. If only we can breed the stupid out, I'm fine with that.
We can never breed the stupid out. We can only educate it away.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Someone is getting older. Next year is the year that the first cohort of Baby Boomers turns 65. Perhaps their "Market" will find a price they can bare in the coming months.
Actually, I think the opposite is more often the case. AAA titles are lauded, hyped, and their flaws swallowed without complaint by the vast majority of nigh hysterical fans.
Personally, I think the article authors have been hanging around /v/ too much.
Where do I begin here?
OK, firstly, both the economies you mention are export led ones. In fact, China and Germany are respectively the first and second largest exporters in the world.
Secondly, when we talk about China, we're certainly not talking about a free market economy. Every significant Chinese company is more or less a branch of the officially communist government. The government has an active level of involvement at every possible level of the economy, from setting up medium sized businesses, to its pegging of the yuan to the US dollar.
The economy in China is entirely state managed, and arguing that somehow, amidst all this direct management and capital infrastructure projects, China is actually shrinking its government spending is complete non-sense. Go ahead; trawl up some myopic statistic which "proves" that China is spending less on government. I'm sure it will be true in whatever world economic view you present alongside it.
As to Germany, beneath their boom is the stark reality that many manufacturing jobs across the eurozone have been transferred there as a result of the introduction of the euro. German spending on welfare and education has thus been reduced, even as those cost have gone up in other countries. Again, your example ignores the wider picture.
"Austerity" in the modern context simply means that the ordinary workers are squeezed to pay back money to reckless lenders. Those who lent recklessly are rewarded, those who borrowed are punished, and those who are close to the borrowers are also made to pay. That is the essence of austerity. If you believe that this was the same austerity that lead to booms in China and Germany, be my guest. But you'd be completely wrong.
A lot of those "prudent savers" left their money on deposit at bank, or even better, in pension funds where it earned +5% interests in some years. Like it or not, savers rode the same rocket ship as everyone else in the boom years and will just have to pony up with the rest of us.
This goes treble for the older generation (boomers) now approaching retirement. They were the generation that drove the world over the cliff, yet still expect their inflated, largely unearned pensions to be funded at boom time levels.
The world is in trouble because a) borrowers borrowed money recklessly and b) lenders lent money recklessly. Savers and pensioners fall into the latter category, as they invested their money in risky investments which promised them the world(and don't try to fool me, I've seen dozens of those fancy pension fun brochures on the kitchen tables of older people). As imprudent investors, they too must take a hit.
THAT'S IT!!! I'm moving to Gentoo!
PWC were (are) the auditors for AIG and Bank of Ireland.
The recent "Too big to fail" CA == Bank comparision story was all too succinct a comparision, and this method won't work for the same reason an independent audit of the banks won't work. In short, most if not all CAs are likely security bankrupt.
Investigation is likely to find that CAs are only one step above flight by night organisations, with slipshod practices, procedures and security at every possible level, from the main servers to the secretaries email inbox. Are you ready to deal with the fallout from such revelations?
Are you ready to actually revoke security authentication from millions of sites across the internet? Are you ready to deal with every major browser throwing a blue screaming fit every time a user connects to a major web commerce login? Are you ready and able unclog a seized up system, signed up to by every major player on the internet, and which a substantial portion of the modern net itself now rests on?
The major problem here is the browsers, and Mozilla's actions here--requesting the CAs to police themselves--are exactly analogous to how our international banking system was woefully mismanaged over the last decades. What Mozilla should be doing is moving away from reliance on the Certification Authority system altogether. It has failed. It has become dangerous to users and website. It must be replaced or abandoned.
Removing the DEFCON 2 warnings for self signed certs will be the first step in the right direction. Until then, Mozilla is just continuing to be part of the problem.
Because if you don't the browser with almost 40% market share will throw a hyperventilating fit whenever users connect to your site, and will try its earnest best to frighten them away from you before they so much as see your site logo.
But other than that, yeah, you can go right ahead and self sign your certs. No problem.
These people are not in the security business; They are in the confidence business.
Like Calvin Klein, and psychic hot-lines, the CA's are not selling a product so much as they are selling "peace of mind". They sell a special pen which companies use to fill in that special website check-box next to the word "Secure connections". That's it.
There is nothing magical about a CA issued cert. The Certification Authorities neither certify connections, nor have the authority to do so. They host public numbers on their servers and end users must rely solely on the CAs unearned reputation that the connection is in fact a) secure and b) to the right party. There is no guarantee that the connection is actually either and the CA's cannot issue such guarantees or even verify the situation before or after the fact. Not that they would bother too either.
The CA's certs are best compared to the sale of church indulgences. You pay money, and your encryption sins are forgiven. What sins are those? Well, according to RSA: Chapter 2, verse 7; a self signed cert (while perfectly functional) is a blasphemy against the holy powers and will be punished with eternal damnation unless you repent and fork over a wad of cash to your nearest CA immediately. By the way, bad things can still happen to you because Security works in mysterious ways, but as long as you gave the CA's money, your soul/ass is covered.
I hope someone at Mozilla is reading this, because the next time I have to click through that irritating little yellow jerk four times just to stop people sniffing my web traffic, I'm switching to Chrome. Hope that doesn't make you spill coffee out of your complementary Verisign mugs fellas.
Not on bootup or program launch, I that is where I personally spend 80% of my time waiting.
I bought an expensive 60GB SSD for my /boot and / partitions and I can say that I've rarely been happier with a tech purchase. The difference between regular program launches and those launched from my /home partition on a separate 1TB HDD is staggering. No more 30-60s waits for firefox and open office to load. No more "LOADING" screens while reading pdfs off the drive. No more chronic wait for octave to load its packages.
I agree that per byte, you are getting hardly anything for your money. But for the time saved, the expense of an additional SSD more than pays for itself in the first month.
Yes, but since that more or less equates to not using the internet at all, it rather misses the point. And the point is becoming a lot bigger than you think with each passing day.
Once solution to this growing Google problem would be the nationalisation/public-domaining of their code. algorithms, and or infrastructure. Since these now comprise a vital and increasingly central part of national if not international commerce, government, and society, it is somewhat irresponsible to leave them entirely in private hands.
If Google really does decide to become evil in a big way, or simply goes belly up, the splash may literally be big enough to sink a small state or two. I dare say the company is reaching the "too big to fail" status of the banks, and as such, it is probably time to look into nationalisation or quasi-nationalisation options now rather than when it all hits the fan.
Who is Glenn Beck? What is Fox News?
I'll take "Non-Edible Fruits" for $800 please Alex.
Like it or not, the police force is a civilian militia. You cannot expect it to operate without some kind of collective group code of conduct. I agree that such unwritten "codes" can be a source of very serious problems and even crime. But you cannot expect police forces to behave like just any other company or state organisation.
A better response is to instil a powerful sense of ethics in police forces, so that those who commit misdeeds are seen to have betrayed the collective trust of the group. Unfortunately, this would require promoting values which are practically unheard of in modern society into the very forces responsible for enforcing those values as they are written in law(which paradoxically they are). Probably not a move we can expect any-time soon.
To hazard a guess, everyone where you work is probably not that attractive.
I grew up in an age of irresponsibility and incompetence, where no institution was too grand, no system too safe, no position too trusted, to be above being laid low by gross negligence, mismanagement, fraud, or scandal. I'd rather go back to worshipping sky gods than trust the fate of the world to a project run by the overpaid car salesmen who run everything else these days.
And I dreamed that a better race of people would inhabit them. You know, one thing people always admired about sci-fi like Star Trek wasn't the flashy technology or wild adventure, but the depiction of a society that was better than the one we have now. A society where prejudice and greed have been eliminated, and where responsibility and self-improvement are aspired to. That's not the society we live in today.
If the debacles of the last decade have taught us anything, it's that we need to work on our society before we can work at the big projects. If the man in charge of any asteroid moving project is wearing a business suit, it's time to cancel your insurance.
Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are two completely different games. Both are centred on 3D discrete block grids. The similarities end there.
Minecraft is a 3D first person interactive environment manipulation game. Dwarf Fortress is a quasi-interactive, procedurally generated, virtual world simulation. In Minecraft, players make their own fun. In Dwarf Fortress, players are told that "Losing is Fun". In Minecraft, the ultimate goal is to make epic creations. In Dwarf Fortress, the ultimate goal is to make epics.
Even their distribution models differ. These two games are really chalk and cheese.
It's worth noting that Notch has explicitly stated that one of his development goals is to promote emergent gameplay and creativity. Minecraft is like LittleBigPLanet in this sense; user created content and creativity was the goal from the beginning.
This is an outrageous affront to the principles of merit and earned reward which made this country great. If CEOs cannot expect an honest $5 million bonus payment for liquidating divisions and rolling back R&D in the short term, how will we attract the best people to run our companies?
It's no surprise to hear this from a company run by a known former hippie. This kind of peace and love "fairness" will sink Apple as it will sink that other great coropration, the U.S.A. Ambitious, driven people will be forced out by poor remunerations, to be replaced by steady, long-term focused, family men whose decisions will be stymied by their senses of "responsibility" or--God Almighty forbid--"fiscal prudence".
That's not the America I know! The America I know gives 29 years olds a chance to run multi-million dollar companies and over three times their own age. It allows new technologies to be brought to market cheaply by giving their secrets to foreign contractors. It allows billions of dollars to soak up the economic chain to the righteous, hard-working, low-taxed millionaire hands where it belongs. The America I know embraces inequality as a founding principle!
If this catches on, expect myself and the rest of your betters moving on to a better life in Shanghai, under a Government which recognises and rewards our ability.
You're assuming that such domains will actually "sully" people's names. If too many of these things appear, it will be the entire xxx domain whose reputation will suffer--to the benefit of all I might add.
And whatever you do, do NOT try to dig through it.
China's internet surveillance records?
Nonsense. It takes institution wide use of an operating system with systemic security issues. It take a network where a secretaries computer effectively has access to files relating to defence contractors. It takes a tinderbox network, pre-doused in gasoline in order for one tiny spark to ignite such an inferno.
An international military security verifcation network, compromised by a single flash file in an Excel sheet, opened on a secretaries computer; And it's the secretaries fault? Give me a break.
Hopefully, the bigger whoops will come when someone decides to look over the (offsite?) data backups.
In a sense, this is such a watershed moment. Slashdot is one of the few early internet sites which made it big and is still around. It certainly pre-dates Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing and son on. And CmdrTaco's continued involvement since the sites inception gave it a tangible link to the dorm-room/garage/basement origins of so many websites of those days.
So, CmdrTaco is going. The question is, what will go with him? It is a possibility that the site will see significant and off-putting feature creep in the coming months, driving away the steady commentators who made this place what it is.
Of course as many will be keen to add, it's possible that the dupes and spelling errors will go as well. However since those serve to drive off grammar and spelling nazi's, I'm not sure the site can really afford to lose those particular features.
I don't know where to begin. Your entire post reads like the introverted ravings of someone with entirely too many opinions. Here's a link on the growing obesity problem in China, clearly clinking urbanisation and economic growth to widening waistlines. Also, most people of European descent live not in America, but in Europe where waistlines are substantially slimmer. Genetics has nothing on diet and lifestyle.
We can never breed the stupid out. We can only educate it away.