I've been a "59er" for some time now, and you have to give it up for these guys. They work tirelessly to add new features to this great game. A small round of applause please.
Anyone feel that a article summary with this much technical detail should have some links or explanation of what it's actually talking about? And since I'm one of the ignorati who doesn't understand, could some please explain to me?
There should be a national voter database that has the DNA of all citizens in it
Sorry, but you need a really, really good reason to convince me that something like that is necessary. The fact that a relatively tiny proportion of people are able to defraud the system is not one of them.
If you can give me a great argument for a national DNA database, I'll listen, but with all due respect, this is not one of them.
While this makes for a slightly amusing statistical exercise, for it to work right, one candidate would not only have to have unrealistic access to countless voting machines, he'd have had to have guessed WHICH machines he needed unrealistic access to beforehand.
Agreed, it would be impossible to do this in practice. But as you suggest, the important point is that something like this could happen, even in theory. The implication is that electronic voting is much less robust than hand-counting, and certainly more opaque. It's been pointed out on Slashdot before that hand counting is actually not that difficult.
Electronic voting has happened, is happening, and will happen.
In a sense, I agree with you. It doesn't seem like electronic voting is going to go away, so there are probably better issues we could be pursuing, even in the area of the electoral process. On the other hand, saying "It's happened, there's nothing we can ever do about it" seems to be rolling over so The Man can tickle your belly, and that kind of thing never goes down well on Slashdot. We're an idealistic bunch, I suppose, but I respect your right not to be.
You make some good points but I suspect you are really addressing the wrong audience.
On a totally offtopic note, anyone else find it funny that bin Laden's intervention has probably helped Bush's chances of re-election?
Let me be one of the few people to support you on this. I don't think Monkey Island itself would be a great choice, but certainly a Game Boy point-'n'-click game could be really successful. You'd probably have to come up with an efficient way of using the D-pad to do the 'pointing' part, but I think that's a pretty minor problem to be honest. However, the hardware is now there for a great adventure game. A good opportunity, I'd have said.
Let's not get too negative just yet. Legislation like that certainly could come in, and maybe it's even likely, but surely there are enough bad laws out there that we don't need to protest the ones that haven't even been proposed yet.
Only a handful of comments and already the site's down to a crawl, so here's the article text:
Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.
Software market watchers are now taking more serious assessments of the penguin versus butterfly competition, as Microsoft matures and Linux continues to put large growth numbers on the board.
The more vocal observers' voices in this choir are typically located outside the United States. For example, Tectonic, an online open source magazine based in South Africa, recently quoted Novell SA systems engineer and business manager Allison Singh as going on record that Microsoft's Windows juggernaut will become an operating system for niche tasks while Linux takes over the mainstream desktop and server roles. According to Tectonic, Singh forecast that users who need specific applications written for Windows only will stick with the OS, but for most other users, the rapidly evolving Linux desktop will become the standard operating system. Here's the link for that story: www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=324.
But wait! Tectonic calls itself "Africa's Source for Open Source News," and Singh, a Novell SA employee, could not be called an impartial observer. Penguinistas might put stock in Singh's vision over a beer, but the kind of market observers who carry weight with Wall Street would never consider discussing open source as a serious competition for the software market incumbent, would they?
Perhaps not in such blunt terms, but renowned business scholars such as Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, the innovation guru, are taking a hard look at the prospects of open source taking serious market share from Microsoft.
In his recent book, Seeing What's Next, which he coauthored with Erik Roth and Scott Anthony, Christensen provides a sober, theoretical framework for circumstances under which companies offering modular open source solutions have a competitive advantage over companies offering the integrated architectural solutions such as Microsoft's Windows franchise.
In a nutshell, Christensen and his co-authors argue that when modular commodity products such as the Linux kernel are "good enough" for the jobs of price-sensitive market tiers, those commodity products are positioned to take market share from integrated solutions that "overshoot" the performance demands of customers in any given market tier, particularly the more price-sensitive lower market tiers.
The Christensen team writes that as companies race to meet the performance expectations of the more functionality-sensitive upper-tier customers, who are willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest, those companies will inevitably innovate ahead of the performance demands of the more price-sensitive market tiers. For customers in the more price-sensitive market tiers, performance of the modular commodity is often "good enough" to win the job bid or close the sale.
Most industry observers are now coming to see that for the average desktop functions, the operating system and the office productivity suite are basically "done." In other words, the market leader has overshot the demands of customers such as schools, governments, and businesses who only need to provide their office workers with basic office productivity functions and Internet accessibility.
It's the Packaging, Stupid...
The secret is out. The value of open source business models is in the packaging - whether you are talking about the value-add of HP's SUSE Linux nx5000 desktop, or IBM's GNU Linux blade servers, or Google and Amazon.com o
I know you're going to get slaughtered for the above, which is a shame because you make a reasonable point but with a bad example. Anyway, I know this is heading offtopic but it comes up a lot on Slashdot. Let me be the first to say:
Dvorak is NOT better than Qwerty.
The original studies that 'proved' the superiority of Dvorak were conducted by none other than Mr Dvorak himself! The tests were repeatedly and ridiculously unfair, in that they compared groups of typists who could never be reasonably compared.
Subsequent fair tests by independent parties have shown that Dvorak is no better once the typist reaches a reasonable degree of experience, and until that point they will perform much worse than on Qwerty if they are transitioning, as would presumably be the case for anyone reading this.
You can read about the total debunking here,
and here if you still don't believe me.
Lots of things which are better don't catch on. But like Betamax (vs VHS), Dvorak isn't one of them.
Of course it's always pleasing when a ruling goes against the DMCA, but we do need to see this small victory in context. Personally I would see this as "one lawsuit too far" in DMCA terms, and the judge has (rightly) nipped it in the bud. But that's a far cry from stemming the tide and actually starting to reverse the creation of the DMCA, which is what we are ultimately pursuing, isn't it?
So Wahey for this result, and hopefully burning Lexmark's fingers should keep a few of their fellow printer manufacturers away from similar lawsuits. But nevertheless, let's be realistic: this is only a small step in the right direction.
I was arguing with the assertion that no system is inherently more secure than another. The Windows thing was just an example. Quite how I got modded as a Troll, I don't know.
I respectfully disagree. In Windows, a window can pop-up from the Internet and, if you click the wrong button, potentially do anything to your computer. In Linux, if you're running as a user, the heart of the OS is protected from damage. Windows has recently evolved a user/admin architecture, but that doesn't change the fact that some systems are inherently more secure.
On the other hand, it is a valid argument that those who use Linux tend to be more tech-savvy anyway. That accounts for some of difference in problems thrown up by Linux and Windows, but not all of it. I'm no Linux fanboy, but Windows has some ground to make up in the security sector at least.
I swear this is not a troll, but honestly, this is really poor. For a start, I thought Linux was supposed to be at least partly about freedom of information? Now I don't want to tie a philosophy to tightly to a product, and Xandros sure is one of those, but seriously... what is the point of all this harvesting of personal information? They can sell that for a mint as personal information of a cross-section of the market (the tech-savvy) to which it's usually very hard to target ads.
Then, even if you get involved in the beta test (I gave up with all the pointless personal details so I don't know), what do you get? A free copy of a potentially very bug-ridden distro. You then find the bugs (probably the sharp end thereof), suffer the consequences, and they sell the resulting fixed-up distro. I have nothing at all against paying for Linux distros if I'm getting something for my money, but this doesn't seem to be a whole lot more than a bundle of otherwise-free apps.
I can't help but feel there's a cynical "... PROFIT!!!" in there somewhere.
(As I say, I really feel this is NOT what Linux should be about, and I hope I'm not trolling.)
I'm not the expert (come on, this is Slashdot!) but you do make a good point in general. Any test like this might seem or even be 100% accurate in the lab, but once you talk about using it in the real world, you have to be very careful. However simple this test might be to conduct, real people make real mistakes.
What if this test gave a false positive for E. coli in a Happy Meal? You'd have a screaming mother, a screaming child, and a test approved by that magical flawless black box called SCIENCE to justify their screaming. That's not to say that the average mother is an idiot for trusting science, but I do think that we should be careful when exposing ordinary people to complex things like bacterial testing.
Needless to say, the legal situation from a false negative could be even nastier.
This must be a pretty encouraging article if you are a small company or single person about to embark on developing your first 2D adventure game, but honestly, how many people is that? The article is interesting for its insight on budgets (other people have already mentioned the tiny testing budget) and other nastiness in the games industry, for sure. But most Slashdotters interested making their own adventure game would be well advised to check out something like Adventure Game Studio, which has a friendly interface and very handy scripting language. Sorry if this seems like an offtopic plug for AGS, but really, there's a lot of good adventure game creation tools out there (not just AGS), and they're probably more useful in practical terms than this article.
That said, it's nice to hear that Ron Gilbert still has adventure games on his mind...
Despite the poor quality of the story header (who is Zonk? Why no IGN link?), I do actually think this is good news. Monkey Ball in all it's incarnations has been a pretty funny little game, albeit somewhat simple. Seems strange that we're being warned about this months and months in advance as I can't exactly imagine anyone going really wild with excitement. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to it.
Question is, will anyone actually be bothered to sit through three HUNDRED levels of this?!
For a start, not everyone that writes a virus is an idiot. Yes, there are hundreds of script kiddies re-using someone else's virus code, but somewhere down the line, there's a black hat who is coming up with some pretty smart code. Let's not group together all virus writers as idiots and thus underestimate the threat they pose, which is probably greater than ever.
Secondly, they may have little command of the English language, but there's a fair chance they are not native English speakers. The majority of new viruses these days seem to be eminating from Russia, China, and South Korea (by no coincidence, the relatively unpoliced areas of the internet). Don't take their poor English syntax as a sign of stupidity!
It seems we may be in grave danger of tarring all virus writers with the same brush. These guys may be black hats but they are not all stupid. Let's not leave ourselves vulnerable by assuming that they are.
I use SQL a lot and I agree that has failings. The clumsiness inherent in, say, nested joins is quite amazing when you consider how important databases are in modern industry. This is a consequence of the "near-English"ness that SQL strives for, but that property is also what causes people to adopt SQL in the first place. We'll probably look back at SQL in five years and laugh... but weren't people saying that five years ago?
Isn't it scary that I thought the bit about terrorism was a joke? But no, I RTFA and sure enough, they really are putting this down to terrorism. Will future generations laugh at how easily the masses were seduced by this strawman? This is like the German Jews all over again...
I agree with you that rants are for blogs, but I think the blurb does it a disservice by calling it a "rant". It's certainly an impassioned and angry diatribe by someone who feels very strongly on the subject, and maybe that's what rant means to you. But the article is also well layed out, structured, and an interesting read. I don't think we should label every piece of writing which contains a strong opinion as a "rant" - it's good to know that people care about these patent issues.
Mario is an absolute certainty. No need for discussion there.
Sonic is probably a fair inclusion on balance, but it seems most people who vote in these things are quite "recent-sighted". Sonic hasn't had a decent game in years, and I don't mean that as flamebait. The Genesis games were legendary, but since then? Not much. Sonic was key to the early development of the console, but he's been silent for years now. I don't have a prediction as to who might replace him.
Shigeru Miyamoto is another dead cert, and follows straight from Mario's inclusion.
I'm less certain about John Carmack. I don't doubt his vast influence, from Commander Keen to Doom. But, it does depend on the demographic of the people voting in this Hall of Game (slightly lame name by the way). Techies as most of us on Slashdot are would vote him in without question. But I don't know if his name is so widely recognised by the wider market of gamers. A designer like Metal Gear Solid's Hideo Kojima might be a better known name, perhaps.
Only time will tell. I do think this is a nice idea, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a "59er" for some time now, and you have to give it up for these guys. They work tirelessly to add new features to this great game. A small round of applause please.
I'm sure I ordered a McKool Smith in McDonald's the other day. Tasted of bullshit.
Anyone feel that a article summary with this much technical detail should have some links or explanation of what it's actually talking about? And since I'm one of the ignorati who doesn't understand, could some please explain to me?
Sorry, but you need a really, really good reason to convince me that something like that is necessary. The fact that a relatively tiny proportion of people are able to defraud the system is not one of them.
If you can give me a great argument for a national DNA database, I'll listen, but with all due respect, this is not one of them.
Agreed, it would be impossible to do this in practice. But as you suggest, the important point is that something like this could happen, even in theory. The implication is that electronic voting is much less robust than hand-counting, and certainly more opaque. It's been pointed out on Slashdot before that hand counting is actually not that difficult.
In a sense, I agree with you. It doesn't seem like electronic voting is going to go away, so there are probably better issues we could be pursuing, even in the area of the electoral process. On the other hand, saying "It's happened, there's nothing we can ever do about it" seems to be rolling over so The Man can tickle your belly, and that kind of thing never goes down well on Slashdot. We're an idealistic bunch, I suppose, but I respect your right not to be.
You make some good points but I suspect you are really addressing the wrong audience.
On a totally offtopic note, anyone else find it funny that bin Laden's intervention has probably helped Bush's chances of re-election?
Let me be one of the few people to support you on this. I don't think Monkey Island itself would be a great choice, but certainly a Game Boy point-'n'-click game could be really successful. You'd probably have to come up with an efficient way of using the D-pad to do the 'pointing' part, but I think that's a pretty minor problem to be honest. However, the hardware is now there for a great adventure game. A good opportunity, I'd have said.
Let's not get too negative just yet. Legislation like that certainly could come in, and maybe it's even likely, but surely there are enough bad laws out there that we don't need to protest the ones that haven't even been proposed yet.
Only a handful of comments and already the site's down to a crawl, so here's the article text:
Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.
Software market watchers are now taking more serious assessments of the penguin versus butterfly competition, as Microsoft matures and Linux continues to put large growth numbers on the board.
The more vocal observers' voices in this choir are typically located outside the United States. For example, Tectonic, an online open source magazine based in South Africa, recently quoted Novell SA systems engineer and business manager Allison Singh as going on record that Microsoft's Windows juggernaut will become an operating system for niche tasks while Linux takes over the mainstream desktop and server roles. According to Tectonic, Singh forecast that users who need specific applications written for Windows only will stick with the OS, but for most other users, the rapidly evolving Linux desktop will become the standard operating system. Here's the link for that story: www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=324.
But wait! Tectonic calls itself "Africa's Source for Open Source News," and Singh, a Novell SA employee, could not be called an impartial observer. Penguinistas might put stock in Singh's vision over a beer, but the kind of market observers who carry weight with Wall Street would never consider discussing open source as a serious competition for the software market incumbent, would they?
Perhaps not in such blunt terms, but renowned business scholars such as Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, the innovation guru, are taking a hard look at the prospects of open source taking serious market share from Microsoft.
In his recent book, Seeing What's Next, which he coauthored with Erik Roth and Scott Anthony, Christensen provides a sober, theoretical framework for circumstances under which companies offering modular open source solutions have a competitive advantage over companies offering the integrated architectural solutions such as Microsoft's Windows franchise.
In a nutshell, Christensen and his co-authors argue that when modular commodity products such as the Linux kernel are "good enough" for the jobs of price-sensitive market tiers, those commodity products are positioned to take market share from integrated solutions that "overshoot" the performance demands of customers in any given market tier, particularly the more price-sensitive lower market tiers.
The Christensen team writes that as companies race to meet the performance expectations of the more functionality-sensitive upper-tier customers, who are willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest, those companies will inevitably innovate ahead of the performance demands of the more price-sensitive market tiers. For customers in the more price-sensitive market tiers, performance of the modular commodity is often "good enough" to win the job bid or close the sale.
Most industry observers are now coming to see that for the average desktop functions, the operating system and the office productivity suite are basically "done." In other words, the market leader has overshot the demands of customers such as schools, governments, and businesses who only need to provide their office workers with basic office productivity functions and Internet accessibility.
It's the Packaging, Stupid...
The secret is out. The value of open source business models is in the packaging - whether you are talking about the value-add of HP's SUSE Linux nx5000 desktop, or IBM's GNU Linux blade servers, or Google and Amazon.com o
I know you're going to get slaughtered for the above, which is a shame because you make a reasonable point but with a bad example. Anyway, I know this is heading offtopic but it comes up a lot on Slashdot. Let me be the first to say:
Dvorak is NOT better than Qwerty.
The original studies that 'proved' the superiority of Dvorak were conducted by none other than Mr Dvorak himself! The tests were repeatedly and ridiculously unfair, in that they compared groups of typists who could never be reasonably compared.
Subsequent fair tests by independent parties have shown that Dvorak is no better once the typist reaches a reasonable degree of experience, and until that point they will perform much worse than on Qwerty if they are transitioning, as would presumably be the case for anyone reading this.
You can read about the total debunking here, and here if you still don't believe me.
Lots of things which are better don't catch on. But like Betamax (vs VHS), Dvorak isn't one of them.
Of course it's always pleasing when a ruling goes against the DMCA, but we do need to see this small victory in context. Personally I would see this as "one lawsuit too far" in DMCA terms, and the judge has (rightly) nipped it in the bud. But that's a far cry from stemming the tide and actually starting to reverse the creation of the DMCA, which is what we are ultimately pursuing, isn't it?
So Wahey for this result, and hopefully burning Lexmark's fingers should keep a few of their fellow printer manufacturers away from similar lawsuits. But nevertheless, let's be realistic: this is only a small step in the right direction.
Someone actually RTFA. What's going on? This isn't the Slashdot I know! ;)
I was arguing with the assertion that no system is inherently more secure than another. The Windows thing was just an example. Quite how I got modded as a Troll, I don't know.
I respectfully disagree. In Windows, a window can pop-up from the Internet and, if you click the wrong button, potentially do anything to your computer. In Linux, if you're running as a user, the heart of the OS is protected from damage. Windows has recently evolved a user/admin architecture, but that doesn't change the fact that some systems are inherently more secure.
On the other hand, it is a valid argument that those who use Linux tend to be more tech-savvy anyway. That accounts for some of difference in problems thrown up by Linux and Windows, but not all of it. I'm no Linux fanboy, but Windows has some ground to make up in the security sector at least.
The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from...
I swear this is not a troll, but honestly, this is really poor. For a start, I thought Linux was supposed to be at least partly about freedom of information? Now I don't want to tie a philosophy to tightly to a product, and Xandros sure is one of those, but seriously... what is the point of all this harvesting of personal information? They can sell that for a mint as personal information of a cross-section of the market (the tech-savvy) to which it's usually very hard to target ads.
Then, even if you get involved in the beta test (I gave up with all the pointless personal details so I don't know), what do you get? A free copy of a potentially very bug-ridden distro. You then find the bugs (probably the sharp end thereof), suffer the consequences, and they sell the resulting fixed-up distro. I have nothing at all against paying for Linux distros if I'm getting something for my money, but this doesn't seem to be a whole lot more than a bundle of otherwise-free apps.
I can't help but feel there's a cynical "... PROFIT!!!" in there somewhere.
(As I say, I really feel this is NOT what Linux should be about, and I hope I'm not trolling.)
I'm not the expert (come on, this is Slashdot!) but you do make a good point in general. Any test like this might seem or even be 100% accurate in the lab, but once you talk about using it in the real world, you have to be very careful. However simple this test might be to conduct, real people make real mistakes.
What if this test gave a false positive for E. coli in a Happy Meal? You'd have a screaming mother, a screaming child, and a test approved by that magical flawless black box called SCIENCE to justify their screaming. That's not to say that the average mother is an idiot for trusting science, but I do think that we should be careful when exposing ordinary people to complex things like bacterial testing.
Needless to say, the legal situation from a false negative could be even nastier.
This must be a pretty encouraging article if you are a small company or single person about to embark on developing your first 2D adventure game, but honestly, how many people is that? The article is interesting for its insight on budgets (other people have already mentioned the tiny testing budget) and other nastiness in the games industry, for sure. But most Slashdotters interested making their own adventure game would be well advised to check out something like Adventure Game Studio, which has a friendly interface and very handy scripting language. Sorry if this seems like an offtopic plug for AGS, but really, there's a lot of good adventure game creation tools out there (not just AGS), and they're probably more useful in practical terms than this article.
That said, it's nice to hear that Ron Gilbert still has adventure games on his mind...
Despite the poor quality of the story header (who is Zonk? Why no IGN link?), I do actually think this is good news. Monkey Ball in all it's incarnations has been a pretty funny little game, albeit somewhat simple. Seems strange that we're being warned about this months and months in advance as I can't exactly imagine anyone going really wild with excitement. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to it.
Question is, will anyone actually be bothered to sit through three HUNDRED levels of this?!
Let's not over-simplify things.
For a start, not everyone that writes a virus is an idiot. Yes, there are hundreds of script kiddies re-using someone else's virus code, but somewhere down the line, there's a black hat who is coming up with some pretty smart code. Let's not group together all virus writers as idiots and thus underestimate the threat they pose, which is probably greater than ever.
Secondly, they may have little command of the English language, but there's a fair chance they are not native English speakers. The majority of new viruses these days seem to be eminating from Russia, China, and South Korea (by no coincidence, the relatively unpoliced areas of the internet). Don't take their poor English syntax as a sign of stupidity!
It seems we may be in grave danger of tarring all virus writers with the same brush. These guys may be black hats but they are not all stupid. Let's not leave ourselves vulnerable by assuming that they are.
I use SQL a lot and I agree that has failings. The clumsiness inherent in, say, nested joins is quite amazing when you consider how important databases are in modern industry. This is a consequence of the "near-English"ness that SQL strives for, but that property is also what causes people to adopt SQL in the first place. We'll probably look back at SQL in five years and laugh... but weren't people saying that five years ago?
Isn't it scary that I thought the bit about terrorism was a joke? But no, I RTFA and sure enough, they really are putting this down to terrorism. Will future generations laugh at how easily the masses were seduced by this strawman? This is like the German Jews all over again...
I agree with you that rants are for blogs, but I think the blurb does it a disservice by calling it a "rant". It's certainly an impassioned and angry diatribe by someone who feels very strongly on the subject, and maybe that's what rant means to you. But the article is also well layed out, structured, and an interesting read. I don't think we should label every piece of writing which contains a strong opinion as a "rant" - it's good to know that people care about these patent issues.
Mario is an absolute certainty. No need for discussion there. Sonic is probably a fair inclusion on balance, but it seems most people who vote in these things are quite "recent-sighted". Sonic hasn't had a decent game in years, and I don't mean that as flamebait. The Genesis games were legendary, but since then? Not much. Sonic was key to the early development of the console, but he's been silent for years now. I don't have a prediction as to who might replace him. Shigeru Miyamoto is another dead cert, and follows straight from Mario's inclusion. I'm less certain about John Carmack. I don't doubt his vast influence, from Commander Keen to Doom. But, it does depend on the demographic of the people voting in this Hall of Game (slightly lame name by the way). Techies as most of us on Slashdot are would vote him in without question. But I don't know if his name is so widely recognised by the wider market of gamers. A designer like Metal Gear Solid's Hideo Kojima might be a better known name, perhaps. Only time will tell. I do think this is a nice idea, though.
No, PROFIT!!!!