It's a challenge - but you know, it's a videogame, not a sight-seeing tour. Maybe some people like getting a guided tour of a museum, but there are those of us who like charting our own paths, and have only ourselves to blame if it's not Mathematically Interesting.
Actually, it is a sight-seeing tour. Even in open-ended games like Grand Theft Auto, the missions are still scripted. Everything you see in a game, some artist or programmer had to spend hours creating. So if they spend hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars creating this world with mazes and keycards and interactive bits, you're damn well going to see it. Why even have keycards if it's possible to shoot your way out of the maze? If you do that, all the stuff they put into the level (along with all the time and money that went into producing it) is wasted.
My stint was about 10 years ago (early 90s). At the time I was working there, the policy was very liberal: 30 days with a receipt, no questions asked as long as the item was in good shape. Managers had discretion to make exceptions. The thing was, returns counted against your sales totals. If you took a return, it basically erased a sale, which means it erased a commission (sales associates got minimum wage + a very low commission).
We still had to try very hard to get someone's name and address on every purchase, but it was starting to become painfully obvious that not only did customers hate this, but sales associates hated having to do it, and largely weren't doing it (I hardly ever did).
I think a lot of retail sales workers will cheer for this. I used to work in retail (admittedly a long time ago) at Radio Shack, and I can't count the number of times people borrowed TVs and speakers. Superbowl time was the worst, people would buy a TV to watch the game and then return it a couple of days later. They didn't even have the decency to lie about it, either, they admitted that they only wanted it long enough to watch the game, but Radio Shack policy was to take it back, no questions asked.
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 1
This reminds me of when IE first came out and was the only browser to support the tag. The fun thing to do was to set your font to Wingdings, so anybody using IE couldn't read it, but people using Netscape could. Then Netscape adopted MS's (useful, at the time) proprietary tag. I don't know if this is a lesson for Google to keep in mind, but cheesy tricks like denying MSNBOT from spidering your page aren't going to stop Microsoft taking over the search business the way they took over browsing.
I actually think it's much simpler than that: it's about money. It's cheaper for Diebold to make a machine without a receipt printer than to make one with a receipt printer. The government isn't as fanatical about having a paper trail as a bank is, because a bank can lose lots of money if they don't have that paper trail. Nobody in the government is going to lose money, though, so nobody in government raised a ruckus.
This is a nice, photogenic, easy dry run. Bully for DHS. But are they ready to get their hands really dirty and take on Microsoft? Patching Sendmail is easy - the OSS community wants to help, Sendmail themselves want to help. But somehow I think Microsoft is going to be a little tougher.
I read somewhere in an interview with Tarsem Singh, the director of The Cell, that he would have done the movie completely without dialog if he could have gotten away with it. I dunno, maybe it would have worked.
This suit has nothing to do with copyrights. It isn't the job of AT&T et al. to protect the copyrights of RIAA member companies, especially not by censoring sites on the internet. If they have to block Listen4Ever, then the RIAA have carte blanche to sue any ISP to block any website they want. What's next, blocking sites that are critical of the RIAA? Say goodbye to Slashdot.
Considering the fact that spammers don't feel any compunctions about hijacking an open mail relay, I don't think they're going to consider a law against spamming much of an obstacle.
There's nothing keeping you from installing a fuel cell generator in your house as well as in your car. The two could keep each other charged if necessary.
With the advances that are happening in rapid prototyping and "3d printing", that's not to far-fetched an idea. The only issues would be expense (and modders aren't worried about expense) and crash safety. Crash safety wouldn't be too tough; just make crash-safe base templates, and allow modders to jam around them, the way they jam around an existing chassis now.
I'm wondering if this harvesting and collation of data about our public identities (telephone number, SSN, iris pattern) will actually devalue the worth of any individual's data, making it worthwhile to actually make sure your personal data are widely disseminated rather than kept secret.
First off, the information that makes up your public identity is becoming so commoditized and per-person value so low, I'm wondering if the (so far) sci-fi concept of "micro-marketing" (individually tailored ads that know your name and your tastes, etc.) will actually be cost effective. When you take into account the inevitable transcription errors (how many times has a telemarketer gotten your name wrong because it was misspelled on her list?), the cost of programming individualized ads, etc., versus the actual return on that investment in the form of your purchase of advertised goods/services, will it work out to be a money-making proposition? Or will classic advertising techniques, brand identity, and so forth, continue to be the most cost-effective?
Second, as your public data becomes ever more commoditized, will identity theft, or simply mistaken identity, become more commonplace? It seems to me that as it becomes easier to acquire and use someone else's public identity data, the reliability and hence the value of any given individual's public identity data goes down.
Am I way off base here? Or rather, just how far off base am I?:)
My biggest gripe with extra code seems to be that every HTML generator I've used insisted on placing the image size in the code, even if it's not supposed to be modified by the HTML.
That's on purpose. If you define the height and width, the browser can drop in a placeholder and keep rendering the page properly without having to wait to read the size from the image file itself. That's one of the few arguments for HTML generators, IMHO.
The article stated: "Much of the expense came from paying testing facilities to try out the bargain-basement ideas." So yeah, maybe Caltech or somebody could come in under $10k for design and construction, but does that take testing into account?
I think you may have it backward. Your reasoning assumes that the brain works like a computer, and each neuron is a process that takes up a given amount of RAM and a given number of CPU cycles. I think you could equally claim that each neuron is itself a processor, so you have 100 billion processors running in parallel, rather than 100 billion processes tended to by one CPU. And even that is obviously wrong, since it doesn't take into account how adjacent firing neurons affect each other, how a memory seems to be stored holographically throughout the brain rather than sequentially, etc. If true A.I. (whatever that is) is possible at all, it isn't going to run on a Pentium or the like.
I don't know exactly how Williams is going to work it, but publishing fiction on the web (good, commercial fiction, not just fanfic) is already being done. Clockwork Storybook is a good example; it's a SF/fantasy anthology of stories all set in the same city. They publish the stories on the site for a limited time, and then sell print editions. They're not getting rich, but it isn't a loss-leader, either, and the quality of the writing is damned good.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is a sight-seeing tour. Even in open-ended games like Grand Theft Auto, the missions are still scripted. Everything you see in a game, some artist or programmer had to spend hours creating. So if they spend hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars creating this world with mazes and keycards and interactive bits, you're damn well going to see it. Why even have keycards if it's possible to shoot your way out of the maze? If you do that, all the stuff they put into the level (along with all the time and money that went into producing it) is wasted.
My stint was about 10 years ago (early 90s). At the time I was working there, the policy was very liberal: 30 days with a receipt, no questions asked as long as the item was in good shape. Managers had discretion to make exceptions. The thing was, returns counted against your sales totals. If you took a return, it basically erased a sale, which means it erased a commission (sales associates got minimum wage + a very low commission).
We still had to try very hard to get someone's name and address on every purchase, but it was starting to become painfully obvious that not only did customers hate this, but sales associates hated having to do it, and largely weren't doing it (I hardly ever did).
I think a lot of retail sales workers will cheer for this. I used to work in retail (admittedly a long time ago) at Radio Shack, and I can't count the number of times people borrowed TVs and speakers. Superbowl time was the worst, people would buy a TV to watch the game and then return it a couple of days later. They didn't even have the decency to lie about it, either, they admitted that they only wanted it long enough to watch the game, but Radio Shack policy was to take it back, no questions asked.
This reminds me of when IE first came out and was the only browser to support the tag. The fun thing to do was to set your font to Wingdings, so anybody using IE couldn't read it, but people using Netscape could. Then Netscape adopted MS's (useful, at the time) proprietary tag. I don't know if this is a lesson for Google to keep in mind, but cheesy tricks like denying MSNBOT from spidering your page aren't going to stop Microsoft taking over the search business the way they took over browsing.
I actually think it's much simpler than that: it's about money. It's cheaper for Diebold to make a machine without a receipt printer than to make one with a receipt printer. The government isn't as fanatical about having a paper trail as a bank is, because a bank can lose lots of money if they don't have that paper trail. Nobody in the government is going to lose money, though, so nobody in government raised a ruckus.
To misquote Commander Ivanova:
No Doom today, Doom tomorrow... Always Doom tomorrow.
Thousands of microscopic black holes escape the collider and orbit the center of the earth, gradually sucking in matter and growing. OK, if someone has a time machine in the works, I'll shut up, but come on... it's right there in black and white!
It'd be the same with any MS product. If they release the source, they've basically documented all the API calls they use for that product.
Not to mention that the first two are for Apache running under Windows. *cough*
This is a nice, photogenic, easy dry run. Bully for DHS. But are they ready to get their hands really dirty and take on Microsoft? Patching Sendmail is easy - the OSS community wants to help, Sendmail themselves want to help. But somehow I think Microsoft is going to be a little tougher.
That was an awesome clip. They did a "making of" section on their website which was informative and entertaining as well.
I read somewhere in an interview with Tarsem Singh, the director of The Cell, that he would have done the movie completely without dialog if he could have gotten away with it. I dunno, maybe it would have worked.
This suit has nothing to do with copyrights. It isn't the job of AT&T et al. to protect the copyrights of RIAA member companies, especially not by censoring sites on the internet. If they have to block Listen4Ever, then the RIAA have carte blanche to sue any ISP to block any website they want. What's next, blocking sites that are critical of the RIAA? Say goodbye to Slashdot.
Considering the fact that spammers don't feel any compunctions about hijacking an open mail relay, I don't think they're going to consider a law against spamming much of an obstacle.
There's nothing keeping you from installing a fuel cell generator in your house as well as in your car. The two could keep each other charged if necessary.
That would be no bad thing, in my book. We could have a Rural De-electrification Project. :)
With the advances that are happening in rapid prototyping and "3d printing", that's not to far-fetched an idea. The only issues would be expense (and modders aren't worried about expense) and crash safety. Crash safety wouldn't be too tough; just make crash-safe base templates, and allow modders to jam around them, the way they jam around an existing chassis now.
I'm wondering if this harvesting and collation of data about our public identities (telephone number, SSN, iris pattern) will actually devalue the worth of any individual's data, making it worthwhile to actually make sure your personal data are widely disseminated rather than kept secret.
:)
First off, the information that makes up your public identity is becoming so commoditized and per-person value so low, I'm wondering if the (so far) sci-fi concept of "micro-marketing" (individually tailored ads that know your name and your tastes, etc.) will actually be cost effective. When you take into account the inevitable transcription errors (how many times has a telemarketer gotten your name wrong because it was misspelled on her list?), the cost of programming individualized ads, etc., versus the actual return on that investment in the form of your purchase of advertised goods/services, will it work out to be a money-making proposition? Or will classic advertising techniques, brand identity, and so forth, continue to be the most cost-effective?
Second, as your public data becomes ever more commoditized, will identity theft, or simply mistaken identity, become more commonplace? It seems to me that as it becomes easier to acquire and use someone else's public identity data, the reliability and hence the value of any given individual's public identity data goes down.
Am I way off base here? Or rather, just how far off base am I?
My biggest gripe with extra code seems to be that every HTML generator I've used insisted on placing the image size in the code, even if it's not supposed to be modified by the HTML.
That's on purpose. If you define the height and width, the browser can drop in a placeholder and keep rendering the page properly without having to wait to read the size from the image file itself. That's one of the few arguments for HTML generators, IMHO.
and tries to make its own proprietary HTML tags
*cough*<blink>*cough*
...but does it run Linux?
The article stated: "Much of the expense came from paying testing facilities to try out the bargain-basement ideas." So yeah, maybe Caltech or somebody could come in under $10k for design and construction, but does that take testing into account?
I think you may have it backward. Your reasoning assumes that the brain works like a computer, and each neuron is a process that takes up a given amount of RAM and a given number of CPU cycles. I think you could equally claim that each neuron is itself a processor, so you have 100 billion processors running in parallel, rather than 100 billion processes tended to by one CPU. And even that is obviously wrong, since it doesn't take into account how adjacent firing neurons affect each other, how a memory seems to be stored holographically throughout the brain rather than sequentially, etc. If true A.I. (whatever that is) is possible at all, it isn't going to run on a Pentium or the like.
I don't know exactly how Williams is going to work it, but publishing fiction on the web (good, commercial fiction, not just fanfic) is already being done. Clockwork Storybook is a good example; it's a SF/fantasy anthology of stories all set in the same city. They publish the stories on the site for a limited time, and then sell print editions. They're not getting rich, but it isn't a loss-leader, either, and the quality of the writing is damned good.
A coating of computers? Or possibly a patina.