Okay, space weapons are scary... but how cool would it be to giant mechs battling above us?!?!
Okay, enough of the 12-year old Transformers fan that still lives in me. As frightening as potential space weapons and veritable death stars will be. I still find it a morbidly interesting topic. Yes, these could be potentially destructive to a new level, but there are countries who have bio-chemical weapons that don't even have the money to deploy them. The destructive capability we have in our own backyard should terrify us first and foremost.
Another part of me wonders if some kind of space-weapons development could revitalize space and technology in general to achieve the goal before 'terrorists' the way the old space race was against 'communists'. It could be a puff of smoke across the science section of the newspaper, but if it develops, this could be interesting.
I really think this should have been filed under something more like Politics or AskSlashdot from the 'should I support the corporate beast or local charity' desk.
Honestly, I can understand feeling a little cheated to know that the game you may have received only a few bucks for is going to make the store a lot more money, but there's a little more to the economics than that:
To these stores, video games are their life blood while they're simply our replacement for food and sleep. Whereas we would slowly wither and die without games, game stores would drop like flies without this kind of business. Don't get me wrong, charity is a great thing and I'm not telling you trade in ALL your games instead of maybe giving something back to the community, but there's a big difference between what a store gets out of games and what we do.
We need games to make that electric bill worth paying, they pay the bills WITH games.
As a fellow Web Designer/Developer, I feel the same aches and pains of having to deal with IE being the majority among even a tech savvy demographic. However, I don't know if I would say that this article is calling for developers to boycott IE, but rather the peons (or victims of the company's computer lockdowns) that actually surf with IE.
In essense, he's calling for web surfers to boycott it so that when the web admins look at the traffic reports one day and find that IE is only 7% of the browsing audience, us designers and developers may not have to worry about making workarounds for it anymore.</|dream> Or at least I think that's what his boycott is attempting to achieve.
Once again, just an idea. But to supplement that idea, consider this:
I had given that suggestion out as a hypothetical iTunes 5.0 release change. Apple, could actually create a torrenting system within iTunes whereby when you subscribe to a podcast, iTunes stores a copy of the.torrent as well so that each user can become a possible partner. Of course, that would require some sort of bandwidth control properties panel that would handle your connection speed and what you want your max rates to be set at, but most p2p programs have implemented this quite easily. Also, some podcasts are actually extremely popular ever since iTunes 4.9, but all of the theorized torrent technology would still only be provided as the preferred alternative to a server that would still host the files normally.
Maybe I'm in over my head, but it's still just an idea of how sharing bandwidth could actually be more benefit to us as listeners and amateur broadcasters than just for media companies.
Besides, if Internet Movie Company $foo makes a dedicated program to (legally) acquire movies built on BitTorrent technology, who's to say you can't turn off the program once you're done?
The quote we all seem to borrowing from comes off as if we have to permanently offer 1/10th of our total bandwidth at all times to the corporate giant. For one: BitTorrent is a sort of 'You scratch my back, I scratch yours' technology. Unless you want to be branded as a leech, you have to give to receive. The other problem I have with that quote is that I don't understand how we sacrifice our bandwidth for the corporate machine or anything. If we're part of a commercial service that uses torrents, then we're actually benefitting the other users, too. Once again, we all give and receive and therefore, get our files faster. Unless we'll be charged more for using 'advanced technology', then I see this as a benefit for the users more than the companies.
"why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?"
Media companies aren't the only people who can be helped by commercial application of torrent tech. Think of this (and it's just an idea):
What if Apple integrated bittorrent into the next version of iTunes? Users that subscribe to the same podcast could be torrenting from users instead of just from the server. This way, you can get your podcasts faster, and without hogging up one server to do it.
That's just my idea. But why would we want to make things faster for us?;)
I can see your point as well. Something like a six month period or a similarly short period of time could allow a company to collect on a good idea, while still being short enough to provoke them to improve it before someone else does. In theory, that could help boost competition and innovation.
All that aside, though, I doubt any impelementation would be so minimal for an extended period of time. If we let the big companies have a little, they will fight for the whole deal.
The obvious point of user-centric design that these articles is missing is one that Firefox has to a science:
Extensions.
Plug-ins do provide great extra content, I'll admit, but what other way can you have content centered on the user than to run content made by the user? Then again, if Microsoft tried that (as far as I know, they haven't), people would be writing extensions with hidden malware just to exploit IE. Point for Firefox.
I completely agree, but I have a more lax attitude towards sex whereas most of America is pretty uptight about the subject. The sad truth of the matter is that America sees a big different between 'Strong Sexual Content' and 'Explicit Sexual Content'
From what I read, it doesn't mention if this woman's grandson even accessed the Hot Coffee game anyway. If that's true, then she's just suing R* because 'it's there' and that offends her.
Not only that, but it looks like she's filing the suit on her behalf as well as that of everyone deceived into buying a game that should have been rating AO. If she's suing on behalf of a group, shouldn't this be a class action suit? If not, she better not get much out of it.
Go grandma, go and represent everyone who bought this game for kids under 17 without recognizing that the game is pretty damned offensive without the mod.
I find it funny that Wired writes these kinds of articles, yet they also wrote one about the amazing innacuracy of futurists.
Okay, I made my irony statement, but what I think Wired is lacking is a good frame of reference. I think that a lot of their predictions (and even parts of this one) could be possible (keywords: could be) by 2015, but the real question is whether they will be implemented or not. For example, we've all seen how much more efficient standards based web design is, but there are still certain entities (Microsoft) holding it back for one reason or another and this happens on many levels for many reasons.
Even a lot of the parent posts predictions could happen by 2015, but whether they actually will happen is something else entirely. A lot of large organizations have proven themselves, over time, to be remarkably stagnant despite the obvious benefits otherwise.
"...the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2"
So in other words, beta 1 is just XP with RSS? They already yanked everything else out of the system as is. The reason they call it Vista is because that's all that's left of the OS; a view.
The most informative sentence in the article is "This is MTV we're talking about, though".The games here are there strictly because of they have the same music you will find on M2 during the two hours a day they play music.
They are not paid to encourage the underground. They aren't trying to expand our minds with anything new or revolutionary. If the candidates in this field were the kinds of scores that most of us would like to see, then the category wouldn't exist next year because the people who vote for anything on MTV wouldn't know the titles.
When I saw the article, I saw an ancient logo for MTV from the days when the M actually stood for something. Given that placement, I can't help but wonder if the the author is a little nostalgic for the old age of Music Television. When they could play almost anything and it was still new. I really can't start a flame war because the title that are on that list are supposed to be on that list. The Source Hip-Hop Awards make no mention of Sarah Brightman, and MTV makes no mention of those that aren't marketed/powerful enough to make it into the mainstream. This isn't to say that everything popular is crap, but pop is what MTV is all about.
In response to my growing number of fans, I'd like to clarify that my post's bias against cross-platform and such is from the point of view of the typical tech-illiterate Point Haired Boss of yesteryear.
These views are starting to change as the many flaws in IE are being revealed and Firefox is gaining some market share as well.
With luck, we'll see some more and more standards based design/development in the years to come:)
It all depends on the target audience. If the company is making Windows only software, then they never had to test something on Safari or IE 5.2(mac). Some companies, also, don't see a point in catering to those that aren't in the majority. If the loss of one or two users that use non-IE browsers is negligible at the time, then why waste the money on cross-platform testing? Too many businesses run thier web sites like a democracy: 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to have for lunch. Mob wins.
On the other hand, if IE starts falling out of power, then some companies may regret those poor choices, and some already are.
I agree, but a large reason that some developers didn't use server-side code was that it was claimed (rightly so or not) that it took longer to get a result. Now, on the other hand, we can use technologies that like AJAX to speed up the process of getting certain pieces of data back. Now, it's a matter of people putting it all together.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, space weapons are scary... but how cool would it be to giant mechs battling above us?!?!
;)
Okay, enough of the 12-year old Transformers fan that still lives in me. As frightening as potential space weapons and veritable death stars will be. I still find it a morbidly interesting topic. Yes, these could be potentially destructive to a new level, but there are countries who have bio-chemical weapons that don't even have the money to deploy them. The destructive capability we have in our own backyard should terrify us first and foremost.
Another part of me wonders if some kind of space-weapons development could revitalize space and technology in general to achieve the goal before 'terrorists' the way the old space race was against 'communists'. It could be a puff of smoke across the science section of the newspaper, but if it develops, this could be interesting.
Besides, I want my own Gundam
That's not really intelligent design! By the time Microsoft actually takes a stand against current phising schemes, it's called a reflex ;)
I really think this should have been filed under something more like Politics or AskSlashdot from the 'should I support the corporate beast or local charity' desk.
Honestly, I can understand feeling a little cheated to know that the game you may have received only a few bucks for is going to make the store a lot more money, but there's a little more to the economics than that:
To these stores, video games are their life blood while they're simply our replacement for food and sleep. Whereas we would slowly wither and die without games, game stores would drop like flies without this kind of business. Don't get me wrong, charity is a great thing and I'm not telling you trade in ALL your games instead of maybe giving something back to the community, but there's a big difference between what a store gets out of games and what we do.
We need games to make that electric bill worth paying, they pay the bills WITH games.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/2 7/1923259&tid=191&tid=14
We can bring them back to life!
We're going to have a canine overpopulation with zombie dogs and more being cloned...(hiding behind nearest available corner)
So the price will be comparatively cheaper than it's predecessor...
So how much money are they going to lose per system this time?</toungeincheek>
$59.99?
;)
Damn. If single games get any worse, subscription MMO's might actually become cheaper overall!
(Yes, I know Guild Wars has no fee. I play it with religious fervor)
As a fellow Web Designer/Developer, I feel the same aches and pains of having to deal with IE being the majority among even a tech savvy demographic. However, I don't know if I would say that this article is calling for developers to boycott IE, but rather the peons (or victims of the company's computer lockdowns) that actually surf with IE.
In essense, he's calling for web surfers to boycott it so that when the web admins look at the traffic reports one day and find that IE is only 7% of the browsing audience, us designers and developers may not have to worry about making workarounds for it anymore.</|dream> Or at least I think that's what his boycott is attempting to achieve.
Once again, just an idea. But to supplement that idea, consider this:
.torrent as well so that each user can become a possible partner. Of course, that would require some sort of bandwidth control properties panel that would handle your connection speed and what you want your max rates to be set at, but most p2p programs have implemented this quite easily. Also, some podcasts are actually extremely popular ever since iTunes 4.9, but all of the theorized torrent technology would still only be provided as the preferred alternative to a server that would still host the files normally.
I had given that suggestion out as a hypothetical iTunes 5.0 release change. Apple, could actually create a torrenting system within iTunes whereby when you subscribe to a podcast, iTunes stores a copy of the
Maybe I'm in over my head, but it's still just an idea of how sharing bandwidth could actually be more benefit to us as listeners and amateur broadcasters than just for media companies.
Besides, if Internet Movie Company $foo makes a dedicated program to (legally) acquire movies built on BitTorrent technology, who's to say you can't turn off the program once you're done?
The quote we all seem to borrowing from comes off as if we have to permanently offer 1/10th of our total bandwidth at all times to the corporate giant. For one: BitTorrent is a sort of 'You scratch my back, I scratch yours' technology. Unless you want to be branded as a leech, you have to give to receive. The other problem I have with that quote is that I don't understand how we sacrifice our bandwidth for the corporate machine or anything. If we're part of a commercial service that uses torrents, then we're actually benefitting the other users, too. Once again, we all give and receive and therefore, get our files faster. Unless we'll be charged more for using 'advanced technology', then I see this as a benefit for the users more than the companies.
"why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?"
;)
Media companies aren't the only people who can be helped by commercial application of torrent tech. Think of this (and it's just an idea):
What if Apple integrated bittorrent into the next version of iTunes? Users that subscribe to the same podcast could be torrenting from users instead of just from the server. This way, you can get your podcasts faster, and without hogging up one server to do it.
That's just my idea. But why would we want to make things faster for us?
I can see your point as well. Something like a six month period or a similarly short period of time could allow a company to collect on a good idea, while still being short enough to provoke them to improve it before someone else does. In theory, that could help boost competition and innovation.
All that aside, though, I doubt any impelementation would be so minimal for an extended period of time. If we let the big companies have a little, they will fight for the whole deal.
In a sense, it's already happened.
3 55234&tid=123&tid=95&tid=155
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/01/1
This one just relies on taking an old post out of context to 'shed light' on a current situation.
You forgot the convention of 'Shirtless o'clock'
The obvious point of user-centric design that these articles is missing is one that Firefox has to a science:
Extensions.
Plug-ins do provide great extra content, I'll admit, but what other way can you have content centered on the user than to run content made by the user? Then again, if Microsoft tried that (as far as I know, they haven't), people would be writing extensions with hidden malware just to exploit IE. Point for Firefox.
Here is the breakdown of that statements and the reality of it:
It should actually start by reversing the last two actions so it reads:
they are using their classic method of catering to the needs of the user by producing superior softare
Next, you have to change 'superior' to 'embedded, adequate' so the sentence becomes:
they are using their classic method of catering to the needs of the user by producing embedded, adequate softare
Methinks I need to add more smileys or tags to let people know that I'm joking.
I completely agree, but I have a more lax attitude towards sex whereas most of America is pretty uptight about the subject. The sad truth of the matter is that America sees a big different between 'Strong Sexual Content' and 'Explicit Sexual Content'
From what I read, it doesn't mention if this woman's grandson even accessed the Hot Coffee game anyway. If that's true, then she's just suing R* because 'it's there' and that offends her.
Not only that, but it looks like she's filing the suit on her behalf as well as that of everyone deceived into buying a game that should have been rating AO. If she's suing on behalf of a group, shouldn't this be a class action suit? If not, she better not get much out of it.
Go grandma, go and represent everyone who bought this game for kids under 17 without recognizing that the game is pretty damned offensive without the mod.
I find it funny that Wired writes these kinds of articles, yet they also wrote one about the amazing innacuracy of futurists.
Okay, I made my irony statement, but what I think Wired is lacking is a good frame of reference. I think that a lot of their predictions (and even parts of this one) could be possible (keywords: could be) by 2015, but the real question is whether they will be implemented or not. For example, we've all seen how much more efficient standards based web design is, but there are still certain entities (Microsoft) holding it back for one reason or another and this happens on many levels for many reasons.
Even a lot of the parent posts predictions could happen by 2015, but whether they actually will happen is something else entirely. A lot of large organizations have proven themselves, over time, to be remarkably stagnant despite the obvious benefits otherwise.
"...the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2"
So in other words, beta 1 is just XP with RSS? They already yanked everything else out of the system as is. The reason they call it Vista is because that's all that's left of the OS; a view.
And another 2 to afford!
The most informative sentence in the article is "This is MTV we're talking about, though".The games here are there strictly because of they have the same music you will find on M2 during the two hours a day they play music.
They are not paid to encourage the underground. They aren't trying to expand our minds with anything new or revolutionary. If the candidates in this field were the kinds of scores that most of us would like to see, then the category wouldn't exist next year because the people who vote for anything on MTV wouldn't know the titles.
When I saw the article, I saw an ancient logo for MTV from the days when the M actually stood for something. Given that placement, I can't help but wonder if the the author is a little nostalgic for the old age of Music Television. When they could play almost anything and it was still new. I really can't start a flame war because the title that are on that list are supposed to be on that list. The Source Hip-Hop Awards make no mention of Sarah Brightman, and MTV makes no mention of those that aren't marketed/powerful enough to make it into the mainstream. This isn't to say that everything popular is crap, but pop is what MTV is all about.
In response to my growing number of fans, I'd like to clarify that my post's bias against cross-platform and such is from the point of view of the typical tech-illiterate Point Haired Boss of yesteryear.
:)
These views are starting to change as the many flaws in IE are being revealed and Firefox is gaining some market share as well.
With luck, we'll see some more and more standards based design/development in the years to come
It all depends on the target audience. If the company is making Windows only software, then they never had to test something on Safari or IE 5.2(mac). Some companies, also, don't see a point in catering to those that aren't in the majority. If the loss of one or two users that use non-IE browsers is negligible at the time, then why waste the money on cross-platform testing? Too many businesses run thier web sites like a democracy: 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to have for lunch. Mob wins.
On the other hand, if IE starts falling out of power, then some companies may regret those poor choices, and some already are.
I agree, but a large reason that some developers didn't use server-side code was that it was claimed (rightly so or not) that it took longer to get a result. Now, on the other hand, we can use technologies that like AJAX to speed up the process of getting certain pieces of data back. Now, it's a matter of people putting it all together.