Wow... I really messed that one up. I'm not even sure what I said. Kids that's what happens when you haven't eaten all day. Friends don't let friends post hungry.
I think we're in agreement.
I just take objection to some who believe that they're entitled to some sort of unequivicable privacy in the digital realm. It seems to be a growing movement that there should be no mechanism to ever find out who is who online. It shouldn't be easy and it shouldn't be available without a court order but I think the privacy online backlash is getting a wee bit out of hand. Especially in this case where it's a Jon Doe who is almost certainly guilty and simply needs to be identified to be punished. It's not an invasion of privacy to ask for server logs to apprehend these individuals when you have a court order in hand.
Especially the comments on here like "One more reason to use google cache." Why? Because you might be subpeoned for breaking the law? It's the same position I have with CCTV cameras. Sure put them everywhere. Just encrypt the server and only release the codes with a court order with limited scope of search.
In which case you have to make a case before a judge that libel has occured.
The problem isn't that people can remain anonymous. It's that they can remain anonymous after commiting a crime.
It's a question of rule of law.
I'm completely against not giving private records without a subpeona or warant but to claim that there should never be a mechanism by which a court and or jury of our peers can't decide that you've commited a crime and should stand for it is much akin to saying that we shouldn't be able to enter a convicted murderer's home to arrest him once convicted.
By your logic subpeonas are inherently bad and the last couple hundred years of their use has been an abuse of privacy rights. It seems strange to me that something which is fairly common such as wire taps with a court order are accepted by many privacy advocates but somehow applying a equivalent system to the digital domain is invasive.
As long as there is a court order and a legal and just system in place I fully support the ability to subpeona documents to catch criminals. But maybe I'm just old fashioned where those who do something wrong should face a fair and just court of law to be found guilty or not guilty.
I'm going to disagree because I work in a field where I have to multi-task.
I will often have 3-5 jobs 'open' at any given time. If I were given just one or two jobs I would sit around idle for half the day. With 3-5 I am forced to balance the demands of the clients in real time. Sometimes asking one to wait while doing something that is small and fast to appease another. Sometimes I'm fielding questions for one client while working on another client.
Am I slower while working on each job? Sure. But it would be ridiculous for my employer to have me work for 3 hours a day simply because I will do marginally better and work marginally faster on the 1 or 2 jobs.
Often 20% decreases in efficiency are superior to 50-60% drops in productivity.
It also comes down to dependencies. Often a job will depend on the work of someone else. Now you could do one job one day... and a second job the second day but then you have someone somewhere else sitting idle waiting for you to complete your job. If you can switch tasks. Get what person A needs to proceed done immediately because he has nothing better to do and then switch to the job that Person B will need shortly thereafter or at least finish the parts that are needed for person B to proceed you've probably overall taken longer to complete your job but as a dependency network you've served what's needed in a dramatically faster time.
The job where what you do is completely independent and a person can devote themselves to 100% for extended periods of time is a rare job indeed.
Are you required to consistently install your weather station? It would seem like you could get some inconsistent data if some people mount them in the sun while others in the shade etc. Or are they just depending on the volume of reports to create a median result?
And to think a few years ago people were talking about how odd it was to see someone walking down the street talking to themselves with no phone in sight. Now to make matters worse we'll have people walking down the street just moving their lips.
That's ALL I wanted! 4 simple words. They couldn't even be bothered to deliver that! "I thought we had a very good inventory system." No wonder it was such garbage they're living in denial!
3D through a 2D window will inherently be messy but I do not believe most UIs are terrible. The reason most UIs are awful is because the artist wants to customize it later, will use hotkeys almost exclusively and rely on playing one tool off of another as seamlessly as possible.
Take Maya's hotbox for instance. I wish I could have the hotbox in every application I use. It's my favorite interface paradigm ever developed.
Each application has a specific way of working that once understood is almost always fast and fluent.
Yes worrying about edge topology etc can be a chore, but it's much less so now with sculpting applications and a good foundation on good edge flow.
The math isn't invisible yet, but it's pretty close.
Step 2) can be simplified even further. If you ask nicely at your local dairyqueen or icecream place (and select grocery stores) you can purchase Dairygold Softserve Mix. Which is just the milk, sugar, vanilla etc pre-mixed in a carton.
Except for that little nagging problem of the only evidence for there being a world wide flood is the bible, and not that the bible happens to back up all the evidence of a world wide flood.
The "Dinosaurs etc were burried in the flood" argument also holds no water because there is this bizzare trend in the fossil record where the deeper you go the more primitive the organism is. And I don't want to hear any of that "smaller simpler organisms sunk faster" garbage because that's based on density and unless you can prove that a dinosaur is denser than a modern horse or a prehistoric mammal is denser than a modern mammal somehow...
*Author product of 12 years of christian science education, has read the entire bible from start to finish, grew up in household with father who is PhD Systematic Theology and has heard every possible conceivable defense, argument and explanation conceived by the young earth researchers.*
I also remember rampant cheating, accusations of cheat, terribly stacked teams, asshole administrators, taking like 15 minutes to get 5 friends into a good server and another 20 to get all onto one team. I remembering only about 2 good servers I would play on to avoid those things.
Haven't experienced any of that since the horrible horrible horrible days of GRAW when the 360 first launched (and was later patched out of existance.)
XBox Live does a bit more than just find an IP Address for you. It also does a superb job of navigating the treacherous waters of NATs to make sure people find each other and make p2p game hosting possible at all.
Microsoft has been telling us that they're going to include IPTV and DVR functionality through a software upgrade for more than a year! This isn't news.
I was more surprised that it wasn't part of the fall update (since they claimed it would be available by the end of 07) than a rumor that they might actually announce what's happened to it and why it was delayed (probably because of a lack of service providers).
The technology is built. Microsoft desperately wants to sell more cable providers on microsoft's IPTV servers. How is this even speculation?
I take 0 deductions and as a result pay as much in taxes as anybody else until the end of the year and I am doing just fine.
I agree that the super-rich should take on a greater burden but once you're putting money towards retirement, leasing a brand new car, living in a nice apartment and can purchase groceries and cable TV I think you're doing very well and should start to take on a progressively greater role in helping those who weren't provided with the same advantages you were to be able to get where you are. (Say it's personal determination that got you there and I would ask where you got that personal determination. IF you grew up in a stable, supportive household don't tell me you didn't have help in getting to where you are.)
I'm not saying everybody should be able to drive a brand new car but as a middle class working professional I have benefited from a prosperous stable, well funded government in many more ways than someone who lives on welfare, works 70 hours a week, subsists on food stamps and goes home to a ratty apartment.
Many studies have found a link between violent media and aggressive tendencies (coming from someone who plays violent video games and watches violent movies myself.)
The MPAA's 'self regulation' is abhorrant and would be better replaced by an open, transparent, voter controlled institution with public oversight.
Who would you rather put your trust in? A privately funded industry trade group who has to answer to nobody or a public organization who answers to you the tax payer?
Everything she suggested are things that the video games industry *THEMSELVES* are trying to do except for the ability to actually prosecute anybody who breaks the policies.
She's not even saying that parents can't let kids play violent videogames. She's just saying the kid shouldn't be able to buy them on his own without parental consent. How is that giving the government responsibility for parenting!?
If you want to walk into walmart and purchase that AO copy of manhunt and you're over 18 none of this legislatin will in any manner or form even slighlty affect you except the need to pull out an ID.
REGULATING the game industry would be censoring games and saying "You can't release games with lots of violence or sexual themes." That's not what's happening.
If I had a 12 year old kid and they walked into an EBGames and asked for a playboy magazine I would hope they would have to show ID and have parental consent. That's not the governemnt interfering with my parenting. That's the government ensuring I'm *able* to parent effectively.
"Why not if parents approve"
That's the problem. They don't have to approve right now.
While I agree with just about everything you say it sounds like most of the other posters either A) don't understand this in no way censors games or B) are whiny little kids who can't vote and want to be able to buy Gears of War without telling their parents.
Until Spiderman 3 there were no wide-release films that I know of that were laser printed for every copy. However the company who printed Spiderman 3 (whose name is currently escaping me) had just figured out a way to dramatically reduce the time per frame (aka $ per frame) and is trying to make it economical for more films to go straight to stock without an optical dup process.
Believe it or not Microsoft's innovations and patents quite often end up in other pieces of software that don't cary the Microsoft brand name.
Microsoft's image processing research fund is really quite enormous. Just read all of the Siggraph papers every year and take note of how many are Microsoft Labs projects. Microsoft themselves almost never commercialize those image processing tools because they aren't a graphics software company (with the exception of the very impressive DirectX) and almost always pass off the patents and development to other companies.
Did I say Core? Is there even such a thing for sale anymore? No. I said the Xbox 360 Arcade.
"REDMOND, Wash. -- Oct. 22, 2007 -- Just in time for holiday, Microsoft Corp. today released a new Xbox 360® console that delivers games and content to everyone in the family for an incredible value of $279.99 (U.S. estimated retail price)*. Available in stores beginning today, Xbox 360 Arcade console is the first Xbox 360 console to include five family-friendly games, a wireless controller, a high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) connection to enable high-definition output if desired and 256 MB of memory useful for storing games and entertainment content. At $279.99, the Xbox 360 Arcade console will include five best-selling games: "PAC-MAN Championship Edition" (NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc.), "Uno" (Carbonated Games), "Luxor 2" (MumboJumbo), "Boom Boom Rocket" (Electronic Arts Inc.) and "Feeding Frenzy" (Sprout Games)."
Just in case you missed the press release.
The audience for the Core was NEVER somebody who played Assassin's creed. It was for people like my mom who love playing lumen's live online.
And what is this bullshit about never adding new content? You claim to be a '360 fanboy' but apparently you've never heard of the map packs for: Halo 2, Halo 3, Gears of War, Oblivion, Guitar Hero, Worms, Lumines... I could probably name 40 games which have downloadable content and have changed the game balance.
I call bullshit on you even owning a 360. How is it that you've played a 360 and never patched a game?
Next you're going to tell me "because there was no HDD required developers couldn't do cool things like release movies and TV shows."
Crippled for you maybe but not for its TARGET AUDIENCE. That's like saying the Wii's hardware is so cripled compared to the 360 and PS3 that it's not even worth mentioning.
The Wii is 'living proof' that not everybody needs the uber-edition and just wants to play a simple game. The new 360 "arcade" is an excellent option for a large portion of the population.
There are almost no supply limitations right now. IF nobody was buying the Arcade edition, Microsoft would stop selling it. The fact that it still exists is proof that there are people buying it.
It would seem like some sort of super intelligent artificial intelligence system which actively protects the cyber world would be the obvious solution to all of our problems. We should also give it some sort of cool name and since it sort of watches over the Internet like a big super powerful being in the sky we should call it skynet. That would solve all of our problems once and for all.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... I really messed that one up. I'm not even sure what I said. Kids that's what happens when you haven't eaten all day. Friends don't let friends post hungry.
I think we're in agreement.
I just take objection to some who believe that they're entitled to some sort of unequivicable privacy in the digital realm. It seems to be a growing movement that there should be no mechanism to ever find out who is who online. It shouldn't be easy and it shouldn't be available without a court order but I think the privacy online backlash is getting a wee bit out of hand. Especially in this case where it's a Jon Doe who is almost certainly guilty and simply needs to be identified to be punished. It's not an invasion of privacy to ask for server logs to apprehend these individuals when you have a court order in hand.
Especially the comments on here like "One more reason to use google cache." Why? Because you might be subpeoned for breaking the law? It's the same position I have with CCTV cameras. Sure put them everywhere. Just encrypt the server and only release the codes with a court order with limited scope of search.
In which case you have to make a case before a judge that libel has occured.
The problem isn't that people can remain anonymous. It's that they can remain anonymous after commiting a crime.
It's a question of rule of law.
I'm completely against not giving private records without a subpeona or warant but to claim that there should never be a mechanism by which a court and or jury of our peers can't decide that you've commited a crime and should stand for it is much akin to saying that we shouldn't be able to enter a convicted murderer's home to arrest him once convicted.
By your logic subpeonas are inherently bad and the last couple hundred years of their use has been an abuse of privacy rights. It seems strange to me that something which is fairly common such as wire taps with a court order are accepted by many privacy advocates but somehow applying a equivalent system to the digital domain is invasive.
As long as there is a court order and a legal and just system in place I fully support the ability to subpeona documents to catch criminals. But maybe I'm just old fashioned where those who do something wrong should face a fair and just court of law to be found guilty or not guilty.
I'm going to disagree because I work in a field where I have to multi-task.
I will often have 3-5 jobs 'open' at any given time. If I were given just one or two jobs I would sit around idle for half the day. With 3-5 I am forced to balance the demands of the clients in real time. Sometimes asking one to wait while doing something that is small and fast to appease another. Sometimes I'm fielding questions for one client while working on another client.
Am I slower while working on each job? Sure. But it would be ridiculous for my employer to have me work for 3 hours a day simply because I will do marginally better and work marginally faster on the 1 or 2 jobs.
Often 20% decreases in efficiency are superior to 50-60% drops in productivity.
It also comes down to dependencies. Often a job will depend on the work of someone else. Now you could do one job one day... and a second job the second day but then you have someone somewhere else sitting idle waiting for you to complete your job. If you can switch tasks. Get what person A needs to proceed done immediately because he has nothing better to do and then switch to the job that Person B will need shortly thereafter or at least finish the parts that are needed for person B to proceed you've probably overall taken longer to complete your job but as a dependency network you've served what's needed in a dramatically faster time.
The job where what you do is completely independent and a person can devote themselves to 100% for extended periods of time is a rare job indeed.
Are you required to consistently install your weather station? It would seem like you could get some inconsistent data if some people mount them in the sun while others in the shade etc. Or are they just depending on the volume of reports to create a median result?
And to think a few years ago people were talking about how odd it was to see someone walking down the street talking to themselves with no phone in sight. Now to make matters worse we'll have people walking down the street just moving their lips.
What was wrong with touch screens again?
How is this faster?
How is this any different from using your finger to touch the display?
Are touch screens so expensive that we need to find a free alternative to use normal LCDs instead?
...ORDER BY ItemName ASC
:)
That's ALL I wanted! 4 simple words. They couldn't even be bothered to deliver that! "I thought we had a very good inventory system." No wonder it was such garbage they're living in denial!
Rest of the game was brilliant.
3D through a 2D window will inherently be messy but I do not believe most UIs are terrible. The reason most UIs are awful is because the artist wants to customize it later, will use hotkeys almost exclusively and rely on playing one tool off of another as seamlessly as possible.
Take Maya's hotbox for instance. I wish I could have the hotbox in every application I use. It's my favorite interface paradigm ever developed.
Each application has a specific way of working that once understood is almost always fast and fluent.
Yes worrying about edge topology etc can be a chore, but it's much less so now with sculpting applications and a good foundation on good edge flow.
The math isn't invisible yet, but it's pretty close.
To suggest that
Step 2) can be simplified even further. If you ask nicely at your local dairyqueen or icecream place (and select grocery stores) you can purchase Dairygold Softserve Mix. Which is just the milk, sugar, vanilla etc pre-mixed in a carton.
Except for that little nagging problem of the only evidence for there being a world wide flood is the bible, and not that the bible happens to back up all the evidence of a world wide flood.
The "Dinosaurs etc were burried in the flood" argument also holds no water because there is this bizzare trend in the fossil record where the deeper you go the more primitive the organism is. And I don't want to hear any of that "smaller simpler organisms sunk faster" garbage because that's based on density and unless you can prove that a dinosaur is denser than a modern horse or a prehistoric mammal is denser than a modern mammal somehow...
*Author product of 12 years of christian science education, has read the entire bible from start to finish, grew up in household with father who is PhD Systematic Theology and has heard every possible conceivable defense, argument and explanation conceived by the young earth researchers.*
And it only takes me one viewing of a 'buggy product' to think poorly of it.
I also remember rampant cheating, accusations of cheat, terribly stacked teams, asshole administrators, taking like 15 minutes to get 5 friends into a good server and another 20 to get all onto one team. I remembering only about 2 good servers I would play on to avoid those things.
Haven't experienced any of that since the horrible horrible horrible days of GRAW when the 360 first launched (and was later patched out of existance.)
XBox Live does a bit more than just find an IP Address for you. It also does a superb job of navigating the treacherous waters of NATs to make sure people find each other and make p2p game hosting possible at all.
Microsoft has been telling us that they're going to include IPTV and DVR functionality through a software upgrade for more than a year! This isn't news.
I was more surprised that it wasn't part of the fall update (since they claimed it would be available by the end of 07) than a rumor that they might actually announce what's happened to it and why it was delayed (probably because of a lack of service providers).
The technology is built. Microsoft desperately wants to sell more cable providers on microsoft's IPTV servers. How is this even speculation?
In fact, I haven't even noticed the XBLive outages because on the first day of my time off I hooked up two Xboxes and have only played LAN games.
It even autoswitches so you don't need a crossover cable.
But that's also complete garbage.
I take 0 deductions and as a result pay as much in taxes as anybody else until the end of the year and I am doing just fine.
I agree that the super-rich should take on a greater burden but once you're putting money towards retirement, leasing a brand new car, living in a nice apartment and can purchase groceries and cable TV I think you're doing very well and should start to take on a progressively greater role in helping those who weren't provided with the same advantages you were to be able to get where you are. (Say it's personal determination that got you there and I would ask where you got that personal determination. IF you grew up in a stable, supportive household don't tell me you didn't have help in getting to where you are.)
I'm not saying everybody should be able to drive a brand new car but as a middle class working professional I have benefited from a prosperous stable, well funded government in many more ways than someone who lives on welfare, works 70 hours a week, subsists on food stamps and goes home to a ratty apartment.
Make the lawmakers agree to this. Start by convincing the people. Then they'll have to listen.
Wouldn't the easiest solution just be to legislate that the data must be thrown out after 30 days and can only be viewed by a court order?
Many studies have found a link between violent media and aggressive tendencies (coming from someone who plays violent video games and watches violent movies myself.)
The MPAA's 'self regulation' is abhorrant and would be better replaced by an open, transparent, voter controlled institution with public oversight.
Who would you rather put your trust in? A privately funded industry trade group who has to answer to nobody or a public organization who answers to you the tax payer?
Everything she suggested are things that the video games industry *THEMSELVES* are trying to do except for the ability to actually prosecute anybody who breaks the policies.
She's not even saying that parents can't let kids play violent videogames. She's just saying the kid shouldn't be able to buy them on his own without parental consent. How is that giving the government responsibility for parenting!?
If you want to walk into walmart and purchase that AO copy of manhunt and you're over 18 none of this legislatin will in any manner or form even slighlty affect you except the need to pull out an ID.
REGULATING the game industry would be censoring games and saying "You can't release games with lots of violence or sexual themes." That's not what's happening.
If I had a 12 year old kid and they walked into an EBGames and asked for a playboy magazine I would hope they would have to show ID and have parental consent. That's not the governemnt interfering with my parenting. That's the government ensuring I'm *able* to parent effectively.
"Why not if parents approve"
That's the problem. They don't have to approve right now.
While I agree with just about everything you say it sounds like most of the other posters either A) don't understand this in no way censors games or B) are whiny little kids who can't vote and want to be able to buy Gears of War without telling their parents.
Until Spiderman 3 there were no wide-release films that I know of that were laser printed for every copy. However the company who printed Spiderman 3 (whose name is currently escaping me) had just figured out a way to dramatically reduce the time per frame (aka $ per frame) and is trying to make it economical for more films to go straight to stock without an optical dup process.
Believe it or not Microsoft's innovations and patents quite often end up in other pieces of software that don't cary the Microsoft brand name.
Microsoft's image processing research fund is really quite enormous. Just read all of the Siggraph papers every year and take note of how many are Microsoft Labs projects. Microsoft themselves almost never commercialize those image processing tools because they aren't a graphics software company (with the exception of the very impressive DirectX) and almost always pass off the patents and development to other companies.
Richard M. Wolff is that you?
Did I say Core? Is there even such a thing for sale anymore? No. I said the Xbox 360 Arcade.
"REDMOND, Wash. -- Oct. 22, 2007 -- Just in time for holiday, Microsoft Corp. today released a new Xbox 360® console that delivers games and content to everyone in the family for an incredible value of $279.99 (U.S. estimated retail price)*. Available in stores beginning today, Xbox 360 Arcade console is the first Xbox 360 console to include five family-friendly games, a wireless controller, a high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) connection to enable high-definition output if desired and 256 MB of memory useful for storing games and entertainment content. At $279.99, the Xbox 360 Arcade console will include five best-selling games: "PAC-MAN Championship Edition" (NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc.), "Uno" (Carbonated Games), "Luxor 2" (MumboJumbo), "Boom Boom Rocket" (Electronic Arts Inc.) and "Feeding Frenzy" (Sprout Games)."
Just in case you missed the press release.
The audience for the Core was NEVER somebody who played Assassin's creed. It was for people like my mom who love playing lumen's live online.
And what is this bullshit about never adding new content? You claim to be a '360 fanboy' but apparently you've never heard of the map packs for: Halo 2, Halo 3, Gears of War, Oblivion, Guitar Hero, Worms, Lumines... I could probably name 40 games which have downloadable content and have changed the game balance.
I call bullshit on you even owning a 360. How is it that you've played a 360 and never patched a game?
Next you're going to tell me "because there was no HDD required developers couldn't do cool things like release movies and TV shows."
Crippled for you maybe but not for its TARGET AUDIENCE. That's like saying the Wii's hardware is so cripled compared to the 360 and PS3 that it's not even worth mentioning.
The Wii is 'living proof' that not everybody needs the uber-edition and just wants to play a simple game. The new 360 "arcade" is an excellent option for a large portion of the population.
There are almost no supply limitations right now. IF nobody was buying the Arcade edition, Microsoft would stop selling it. The fact that it still exists is proof that there are people buying it.
It would seem like some sort of super intelligent artificial intelligence system which actively protects the cyber world would be the obvious solution to all of our problems. We should also give it some sort of cool name and since it sort of watches over the Internet like a big super powerful being in the sky we should call it skynet. That would solve all of our problems once and for all.