Freedom of speech and science are directly related. Both islamic and stalinist countries violently suppress free speech, consequently having almost no scientific breakthrough.
You missed out right wing totalitarian states which have invariably either been installed or heavily supported by the US/UK. Including the coup in Guatemala, Pinochet, Suharto, Saddam, The Shah of Iran etc etc.
I totally agree. If the UI was more industry standard, I possibly wouldn't be shelling out hundreds for the professional app I use.
It looks very capable as well in terms of features. It's really quite an annoying situation.
Surely they can just use the same technique being applied in Iraq by US forces. It emerged last week that US snipers were baiting Iraqis by planting explosives and ammunition, then shooting anyone who picks them up. So just plant the same things around the airport, and anyone who picks them up can be shot as a terrorist. I'm sure no ordinary citizen would ever pick up a mysterious package so you are absolutely guaranteed never to shoot any innocent people.
I've seen some of it, and its crap. The code might be pretty, well documented and elegant. But if a newcomer who actually new the business ever got a peek at it, they could easily knock the incumbents out of the market....
I used to work as a developer for such a company and there was a real lack of knowledge of the business area. The company was always too stingy to hire people who really knew the particular business sector, so we often just had to make educated guesses. The code could also get pretty bad because they liked to hire cheap people. After 6 months I had usually managed to train them up pretty well, but by that time they had already generated lots of crappy code.
This stuff is expensive! This is mainly due to the small customer base over which the cost of product improvements can be spread. Its not like you can count on the Halo 1/Halo 2 customer base to fund the next version.
Yes, it's expensive due to the low number of sales. We used to have a joke that the ultimate nightmare would be to win the lottery, get really drunk, then wake up in the morning and realise that you had bought ten copies of our software while under the influence.
The marketing is pretty closed as well, probably in part to keep competition away from the market.
Well here in the UK any procurement over a certain cost has to be open to everyone. So if a company is looking for some new electricity system, it has to be public and open to all suppliers. We used to spend a lot of time responding to these RFPs as they are called, but often I think the customer had already made up their mind who was going to win anyway. Everyone just lies on these RFPs anyway because they can't take the risk that the competition is not lying. So if the RFP says "Does your product make cups of tea?", we'd just say yes, because we could not take the chance of being eliminated at an early stage when we knew everyone else was probably going to lie anyway.
In fact, the entire industry is strangely closed. The application vendors have a pretty good deal going in that if the system blows up at one utility, the IT department at the one next door will probably never hear about it.
Well usually the customer would have another company supporting our product and the associated database servers. This was a nightmare because you end up with a game of blame tennis whenever anything goes wrong.
In certain vertical markets e.g. software bought by energy distributors or water companies, rival software companies don't want each other to see their products at all let alone the code. The idea is that if the rival sees some of the cool things in the product, they will just copy it. You usually can't even get to see the software at all unless you are clearly a potential customer.
I'm sure it does all sorts of things, but when you watch it rendered impotent because a Security Council member is good friends with a pack of murderous military rulers, it's hard not to be just a tad cynical about its abilities.
In this case it's Russia and China, but more often that not it is the US. Since 1980 the US has used the Veto more times than any other country. Even the threat of Veto (known as the silent Veto) is enough to kill off proposals. Nobody would even bother trying to officially reprimand Saudi Arabia for being oppressive etc, because the US would just Veto it. It was the use of silent Vetoes by the US and France that made the UN completely impotent over Rwanda, yet the UN gets the blame rather than the individual countries responsible. The structure of the Security council is the complete antithesis of democracy. You have 5 permanent members i.e. dictators that can Veto the opinion of the entire world.
In western countries self-censorship by the media is often just as effective as organised censorship by an oppressive regime. George Orwell wrote about this back in the 1940s in an unpublished preface to Animal Farm. There are plenty of modern analyses of this though including "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and Herman.
In some ways media self-censorship is worse than state censorship, since with state censorship the populations often know they are being routinely lied to and are not getting all the facts. In countries with a free media like the US or UK, people have the illusion that they are getting all the facts and are more likely to trust what they are told. It's not always total censorship either. Sometimes the media will give a tiny mention to something that deserves an enormous amount of attention. That way they can always say they covered it when challenged. An example of this is COINTELPRO. You're likely to have to look that up, yet if I said Watergate, which is a story which broke around the same time, you are likely to know all about it.
Language is important too. For example, if these protesters in Burma were to take up arms, they would be correctly described as insurgents, since the definition of insurgency (in all the major dictionaries) is about trying to overthrow your own government. Insurgency is completely the wrong term (again in all the major dictionaries) for armed groups attacking an occupying force, as in Iraq. With Iraq the media desperately tries to avoid using the term Resistance (despite it being the correct term) because it reminds people of the French resistance, who were clearly the good guys. Another example is the term "Private Security Contractor". Under the Geneva conventions there is no such thing as a Private Security Contractor. There are soldiers, civilians and mercenaries. The technically correct term for these "hired soldiers" is mercenaries, yet the media almost unanimously avoids the term. Talking about Private Security Contractors sounds ok, whereas if the media kept talking about mercenaries, people might not accept their deployment so readily.
All this talk of better realism is great, but surely one of the most unrealistic aspects of games is that everything happens in a small stationary window in front of you. In the real world, if I look up at the top of a tall building, I have to tilt my head back and I have a real sense that I'm small and the building is big. Moving my wrist to look up on a small window just doesn't give me the same sense of bigness. I don't really feel like I'm in a game yet, it's just there on the screen.
More than 15 years back it seemed like VR had arrived. There were VR machines in the arcades where you could try out games like Dactly Nightmare. Sure the headset was like having two house bricks glued to your head, and the resolution was poor, but it was a really cool experience. It looked like it was really going somewhere. Now, 15 or more years later and zilch. No Sony VR game system, no Nintendo VR game system, no home VR systems in site.
It doesn't seem to me like there has been much drive to develop VR hardware, yet surely VR is one of those things that would get consumers really excited. You can get consumer level VR Headsets but the field of view is always so crappy that they have to disguise it by saying something like "It looks like a 90 inch screen at 14 feet away". I really think it's time we had decent VR. We have the processing power, but we are still waiting for companies to invest in the hardware. Yes there are some issues. Some people will feel a bit sick, but not everyone. Also I've heard worries about people injuring themselves, but people are already smacking each other in the face with Wii remotes. I want VR now!
Shrink-wrapped commercial stuff like Word and Excel might be under threat, but there will always be jobs for people working on bespoke business projects. For example, I can't imagine an altruistic bunch of people getting together to write a special flight booking system for British Airways.
At the moment, it's not difficult to fake fingerprints if you have a good image. In the future it may be just as easy to fake DNA and spread it at the scene of a crime.
I totally agree. It's 10 years since I was at Uni, but I remember frantically scribbling things down at the expense of really trying to understand what the lecturer was saying. I remember occasionally pausing to shake my hand in an attempt to alleviate the cramp. Then there is the almost inevitable point when the ring binder goes wrong and all your notes fall out on the lecture room floor.
I know what you mean. The gulf between hard drive sizes and burnable disc sizes has become too large. The concept of making a DVD-R backup of my stuff is laughable.
the government's desire to have so many young people go to university. In case you hadn't noticed in everyday life, most people just aren't that smart so the only way you can achieve it is to make things simpler. It runs from GCSE right up to degree level. It's a massive mistake. Our qualifications have been losing international respect for many years.
Another issue is that with so many people going to university, you can't possibly hope to pay for it all, so the whole experience becomes very expensive for young people. University should attract clever people and it should be for clever people. If the people coming out of universities with degrees are no smarter than anyone else, what is the point of it all?
The whole university experience has become so expensive that I have doubts whether I would go for a degree now. Back in 1994, I recived a grant and I think without that university wouldn't have been a real option. I worry that the next Newton or Einstein will take one look at the huge cost of it all, and how dumbed down it has become, and will just decide work at Tesco's instead.
Very good point. For example, you may remember a popular Sci-Fi Series called Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski absolutely killed himself making it, writing entire seasons by himself. It was a very successful show and has made a huge amount of money in DVD sales. Yet Warner Bros have done some amazing Hollywood accounting with it and have managed to make it all look in debt, so no-one gets a dime.
So you could ask, "Piracy may effect the money made by hard working writers and actors, but do you think your members should perhaps set an example by not stealing from them through Hollywood Accounting trickery?"
and shun DirectX since it is controlled by one company which does stupid things like tie it to particular OS versions? Is OpenGL not advanced enough for modern games?
In the UK, Virgin Media has started throttling customers who download more than 350MB within an 8 hour period. Pretty miserly I think, especially when they are trying to push 20MB speed deals onto customers. What's the point of having all that speed if you quickly get throttled anyway? Also people have been reporting throttling even when they haven't downloaded the limit.
I was trying to investigate this issue last week, but it was a problem because there was a fault affecting the whole town and it took them over a week to repair it. Since they took over Blueyonder, service has really gone down!
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that no-one wants Vista is a good opportunity for more widespread OpenGL adoption.
You missed out right wing totalitarian states which have invariably either been installed or heavily supported by the US/UK. Including the coup in Guatemala, Pinochet, Suharto, Saddam, The Shah of Iran etc etc.
I totally agree. If the UI was more industry standard, I possibly wouldn't be shelling out hundreds for the professional app I use. It looks very capable as well in terms of features. It's really quite an annoying situation.
Surely they can just use the same technique being applied in Iraq by US forces. It emerged last week that US snipers were baiting Iraqis by planting explosives and ammunition, then shooting anyone who picks them up. So just plant the same things around the airport, and anyone who picks them up can be shot as a terrorist. I'm sure no ordinary citizen would ever pick up a mysterious package so you are absolutely guaranteed never to shoot any innocent people.
I used to work as a developer for such a company and there was a real lack of knowledge of the business area. The company was always too stingy to hire people who really knew the particular business sector, so we often just had to make educated guesses. The code could also get pretty bad because they liked to hire cheap people. After 6 months I had usually managed to train them up pretty well, but by that time they had already generated lots of crappy code.
This stuff is expensive! This is mainly due to the small customer base over which the cost of product improvements can be spread. Its not like you can count on the Halo 1/Halo 2 customer base to fund the next version.
Yes, it's expensive due to the low number of sales. We used to have a joke that the ultimate nightmare would be to win the lottery, get really drunk, then wake up in the morning and realise that you had bought ten copies of our software while under the influence.
The marketing is pretty closed as well, probably in part to keep competition away from the market.
Well here in the UK any procurement over a certain cost has to be open to everyone. So if a company is looking for some new electricity system, it has to be public and open to all suppliers. We used to spend a lot of time responding to these RFPs as they are called, but often I think the customer had already made up their mind who was going to win anyway. Everyone just lies on these RFPs anyway because they can't take the risk that the competition is not lying. So if the RFP says "Does your product make cups of tea?", we'd just say yes, because we could not take the chance of being eliminated at an early stage when we knew everyone else was probably going to lie anyway.
In fact, the entire industry is strangely closed. The application vendors have a pretty good deal going in that if the system blows up at one utility, the IT department at the one next door will probably never hear about it.
Well usually the customer would have another company supporting our product and the associated database servers. This was a nightmare because you end up with a game of blame tennis whenever anything goes wrong.
In certain vertical markets e.g. software bought by energy distributors or water companies, rival software companies don't want each other to see their products at all let alone the code. The idea is that if the rival sees some of the cool things in the product, they will just copy it. You usually can't even get to see the software at all unless you are clearly a potential customer.
In this case it's Russia and China, but more often that not it is the US. Since 1980 the US has used the Veto more times than any other country. Even the threat of Veto (known as the silent Veto) is enough to kill off proposals. Nobody would even bother trying to officially reprimand Saudi Arabia for being oppressive etc, because the US would just Veto it. It was the use of silent Vetoes by the US and France that made the UN completely impotent over Rwanda, yet the UN gets the blame rather than the individual countries responsible. The structure of the Security council is the complete antithesis of democracy. You have 5 permanent members i.e. dictators that can Veto the opinion of the entire world.
I can't get away with it. As soon as I start to doze off I make a big snort sound like a pig :(
In western countries self-censorship by the media is often just as effective as organised censorship by an oppressive regime. George Orwell wrote about this back in the 1940s in an unpublished preface to Animal Farm. There are plenty of modern analyses of this though including "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and Herman.
In some ways media self-censorship is worse than state censorship, since with state censorship the populations often know they are being routinely lied to and are not getting all the facts. In countries with a free media like the US or UK, people have the illusion that they are getting all the facts and are more likely to trust what they are told. It's not always total censorship either. Sometimes the media will give a tiny mention to something that deserves an enormous amount of attention. That way they can always say they covered it when challenged. An example of this is COINTELPRO. You're likely to have to look that up, yet if I said Watergate, which is a story which broke around the same time, you are likely to know all about it.
Language is important too. For example, if these protesters in Burma were to take up arms, they would be correctly described as insurgents, since the definition of insurgency (in all the major dictionaries) is about trying to overthrow your own government. Insurgency is completely the wrong term (again in all the major dictionaries) for armed groups attacking an occupying force, as in Iraq. With Iraq the media desperately tries to avoid using the term Resistance (despite it being the correct term) because it reminds people of the French resistance, who were clearly the good guys. Another example is the term "Private Security Contractor". Under the Geneva conventions there is no such thing as a Private Security Contractor. There are soldiers, civilians and mercenaries. The technically correct term for these "hired soldiers" is mercenaries, yet the media almost unanimously avoids the term. Talking about Private Security Contractors sounds ok, whereas if the media kept talking about mercenaries, people might not accept their deployment so readily.
Hey, don't dis Sony Batteries! And extra grenade always comes in handy.
As the Video pirate captain in "Amazon Women on the Moon" said, "I'm soooo scared". See the Video Pirates in action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I5dVBezF9k
All this talk of better realism is great, but surely one of the most unrealistic aspects of games is that everything happens in a small stationary window in front of you. In the real world, if I look up at the top of a tall building, I have to tilt my head back and I have a real sense that I'm small and the building is big. Moving my wrist to look up on a small window just doesn't give me the same sense of bigness. I don't really feel like I'm in a game yet, it's just there on the screen.
More than 15 years back it seemed like VR had arrived. There were VR machines in the arcades where you could try out games like Dactly Nightmare. Sure the headset was like having two house bricks glued to your head, and the resolution was poor, but it was a really cool experience. It looked like it was really going somewhere. Now, 15 or more years later and zilch. No Sony VR game system, no Nintendo VR game system, no home VR systems in site.
It doesn't seem to me like there has been much drive to develop VR hardware, yet surely VR is one of those things that would get consumers really excited. You can get consumer level VR Headsets but the field of view is always so crappy that they have to disguise it by saying something like "It looks like a 90 inch screen at 14 feet away". I really think it's time we had decent VR. We have the processing power, but we are still waiting for companies to invest in the hardware. Yes there are some issues. Some people will feel a bit sick, but not everyone. Also I've heard worries about people injuring themselves, but people are already smacking each other in the face with Wii remotes. I want VR now!
Shrink-wrapped commercial stuff like Word and Excel might be under threat, but there will always be jobs for people working on bespoke business projects. For example, I can't imagine an altruistic bunch of people getting together to write a special flight booking system for British Airways.
At the moment, it's not difficult to fake fingerprints if you have a good image. In the future it may be just as easy to fake DNA and spread it at the scene of a crime.
It sounds like the beginning of some Sci-Fi B-Movie. When will the people start exhibiting strange powers?
I totally agree. It's 10 years since I was at Uni, but I remember frantically scribbling things down at the expense of really trying to understand what the lecturer was saying. I remember occasionally pausing to shake my hand in an attempt to alleviate the cramp. Then there is the almost inevitable point when the ring binder goes wrong and all your notes fall out on the lecture room floor.
I know what you mean. The gulf between hard drive sizes and burnable disc sizes has become too large. The concept of making a DVD-R backup of my stuff is laughable.
Politicians agree to have video cameras strapped to their heads 24/7, recording everything they say and do.
I thought the Trojans were wiped out long ago.
Of course, many people would only bother drinking the duplicate milk because it was free. For those people the dairy is losing nothing.
the government's desire to have so many young people go to university. In case you hadn't noticed in everyday life, most people just aren't that smart so the only way you can achieve it is to make things simpler. It runs from GCSE right up to degree level. It's a massive mistake. Our qualifications have been losing international respect for many years.
Another issue is that with so many people going to university, you can't possibly hope to pay for it all, so the whole experience becomes very expensive for young people. University should attract clever people and it should be for clever people. If the people coming out of universities with degrees are no smarter than anyone else, what is the point of it all?
The whole university experience has become so expensive that I have doubts whether I would go for a degree now. Back in 1994, I recived a grant and I think without that university wouldn't have been a real option. I worry that the next Newton or Einstein will take one look at the huge cost of it all, and how dumbed down it has become, and will just decide work at Tesco's instead.
Very good point. For example, you may remember a popular Sci-Fi Series called Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski absolutely killed himself making it, writing entire seasons by himself. It was a very successful show and has made a huge amount of money in DVD sales. Yet Warner Bros have done some amazing Hollywood accounting with it and have managed to make it all look in debt, so no-one gets a dime.
So you could ask, "Piracy may effect the money made by hard working writers and actors, but do you think your members should perhaps set an example by not stealing from them through Hollywood Accounting trickery?"
as long as long as you can control it, and as long as it has a cool sounding countdown.
and shun DirectX since it is controlled by one company which does stupid things like tie it to particular OS versions? Is OpenGL not advanced enough for modern games?
In the UK, Virgin Media has started throttling customers who download more than 350MB within an 8 hour period. Pretty miserly I think, especially when they are trying to push 20MB speed deals onto customers. What's the point of having all that speed if you quickly get throttled anyway? Also people have been reporting throttling even when they haven't downloaded the limit.
I was trying to investigate this issue last week, but it was a problem because there was a fault affecting the whole town and it took them over a week to repair it. Since they took over Blueyonder, service has really gone down!