I dunno if I'd put it quite that way. I won't speak on the Codemasters situation, since you appear better informed than I. As for the popularity of OFP, well, you know I'm a nut. But at the same time, its numbers didn't exactly make it a runaway hit. And, as the article points out, the current development system requires runaway hits. In fact, I'd say that a few factors limited OFP's popularity: 1) The graphics. Yes, when I saw the original OFP demo, I was blown away -- I'd never seen anything like it (and, before someone objects, I was testing WW2OL at the time and as underimpressed by that as I was amazed by OFP). But at the same time, OFP's color rendering is understated -- some might even say desaturated. Also, the 3D models and artwork were uneven. 2) The bizarre english. Having obvious non-actors (without doubt, this was Codemasters' contribution) reading bizarre scripts ("1 2 3 4 Move Shoot Communicate A-Ha") while trying to give the impression of USArmy soldiers was unsettling. 3) (and this is where I think we might share a point of view) The very things that made it innovative hurt its sales potential. I said that I was blown away by the demo -- absolutely. I mean, it's four years later, and we're just now getting FPSs with viewdistances at 900m (while OFP now renders 2500 on new machines), and I still haven't seen any ones with 144 m^2 maps. The reason for this is that graphics hardware and software are optimized towards the "cookie-cutter FPS", with confined spaces (which are easier to draw anyway) and crates: you can make bigger spaces, but they're not as pretty.
And say what you guys will about graphics and sound not mattering -- most people who play games are casual gamers: the decision to buy or not to buy comes within the first few minutes of exposure. The people who buy the most games play each one for a short period of time before moving on to the next.
I think I'm going to be ill. I had no idea webcams were so good at capturing motion. That girl doing the splits on the help page made me give up in dispair. And I'm pretty sure the "in action" screenshot on the front page is faked -- or a cutscene. Webcam apps have cutscenes, don't they?
Now, I too grew up with computers where every byte in memory was fond to me, and many of them I knew personally, but this rant makes my ears bleed.
The Crimes: A) ALL CAPS (almost) ALL THE TIME B) Flameworthy headline reminiscent of a Babelfish treatment: (BIG NEWS ON USA MICROSOFT: Slavery to It Is Ending C) No real news in what follows the "Big News" headline. D) Anti-Microsoft tied to anti-Americanism without even a thin veil of sophistication:
Beware of the US spies at the USAID and beware Microsoft's so-called "Local Economic Development Program for Software," which is insurgent in Brazil and Jordan.)
Why not say: "BIG NEWS: THE WORLD WILL CHANGE FROM BASE. WE ARE NOTHING -- Let Us Be Everything?" E) OS HISTORY -- GROWING LIKE TOPSY F) Okay, now let me get this right: all US corporations, including Sun (praised and damned in the same rant) are evil, or can be evil, but Walmart is good? G) Mentioning that Car Lots have a 108-day supply of SUVs. I don't even know where to begin with that.
I mean, I hate M$ as much as the next guy, but that is the nuttiest troll of an article I've seen in a while.
Okay, so he's whining because: A) On the one hand, the retailers are running along the exhibition floor. These are the lowest level of marketing: the geek in the store who moves the product. B) On the other, blogging and those with "media" access have skyrocketed, so that developers are limiting the access to the "good stuff" to media sources that are likely to have a major impact (=broad readership)
So E3 is and has been for some time, a media frenzy. In pseudocapitalistic terms, you've got developers with a limited supply of "hot marketin information" and a huge demand from members of the media, who want exclusive access to that info. Now, we all know what sort of information software developers can give, and what sort of information they shouldn't; and they usually end up giving out the info they shouldn't: on features that aren't ready to ship, products that are half-baked, and things that may very well not bel. So effectively E3 becomes a celebration of vaporware and empty promises. Each year, we see the "best of E3" reviews and votes, and many of the things touted there reach their ontological peak in some back room upstairs, only to fade back into nothingness.
Let's take the LOTR movies. The copyright holder is the only one who claims the right to propagate a series of ideas or notions that we call "the LOTR movies". Copyright doesn't inhere in the celluloid, or the particular series of charges in memory, or the marks on a DVD; Copyright inheres in the ideas. The counterargument you're making is one of greater and lesser specificity, and that's exactly one of the problems with intellectual property, and one of the points that is constantly being defined (and in contradictory fashion) by the worlds' courts: at what point does it begin? Why should "fair use" be photocopying 10% of a book and not 20%? Why not hit every cover band in the world with nasty infringement suits?
The dude before me mentioned WW2OL. I supposed Planetside is in there as well. There already are FPS RTSs -- specifically Operation Flashpoint Missions. The major problems are the underperforming netcode and the lack of Join in Progress. Both of these, I understand, will be addressed with the next game in the series (Armed Assault or something). The problem with big battle simulations is that modern combat involves a bunch of grunts who get slaughtered and a few guys with nice toys who do the slaughtering. So when you try WW2OL, for example, you'll find that there are a lot of tanks and relatively few infantry. Nobody likes to run thirty minutes just to get machine-gunned.
Why should laws be changed? Because property is a social construct. There is no inherent characteristic in anything I own that makes it mine; what makes it mine is that we as a society commonly agree it is mine, and the laws generally follow that common agreement.
Intellectual Property is particularly nebulous since we're defining something without physical being (a series of ideas) as being property -- that is, we're assigning a notional value to a notion.
That's all well and good, but when what do we do when a major sector of the society doesn't agree with the attribution of such a notional value to a specific form of that notion? For example, a law could state that all sports cars belong to me. That'd be good and legal, but the sports car owners would think differently. Why should the law be changed?
At heart, the problem is that this particular construction of property collides with millennia of human practice. Heck, even the old copyright law only makes sense for a few centuries of human existence. Add in that, in the case of music, we've got an industry built around oligopolic vertical domination of the industry -- from artists to mass dissemination to retail, and and new technology has basically destroyed the dominant position of the old guard. And no elite is more vehement than one that's being supplanted. So why should they have the privileged voice in law?
First, the concept of monastic "order" really begins in the beginning of the twelfth century with the military orders, the cistercians, and the premonstratensian canons.
Second, you're assuming this is a western manuscript, when some of the other contextual marks suggest that in fact it was produced in Constantinople. Basilean monks did know Greek. And in the west, it depends on where you're talking about. Spain was an active center for Greek/Arabic/Hebrew -> Latin translation of texts, especially scientific ones. Southern Italy had large communities of Greek speaking peoples. Hell, even the bishop of Lincoln and not a bad scientist in his own right, Robert Grosseteste, knew and translated ancient Greek.
Something abstract such as "The Church" is not an historical agent; individual churchmen can be.
There are plenty of twelfth-century scholars in the West and in the Greek East who read and appreciated ancient Greek and Latin texts; and the vast majority of these were churchmen. Their reaction to a 12th-century monk scraping off Archimedes and copying down a prayer-book would be much like ours, as in "Hey Rube, WTF are you doing?" But well, not everybody is educated to the same degree, and a poor monastery may indeed find the parchment more valuable than the indeciphrable gibberish written on it.
For those of you who can't grasp the concept, it's like when ma threw out all the old baseball cards; you fought it at the time, and twenty years later you know the retail value of what you lost. Ignorance spans all periods; but in spite of what crap 19th-century progressivism may make you think about the middle ages, medieval people didn't hate and seek to destroy antique texts; quite the contrary, they liked them, and they found ancient science very useful. Remember this text was copied in the 10th century by a monk as well.
It's nice to see everyone bashing our rich neighbor in Redmond.
The article, though, is a sales pitch. Uncle Bill is talking to a bunch of CEOs, and he's trying to do two things: A) Trash Google and Yahoo and anyone else's desktop search program B) Promote the windows environment and Microsoft's desktop search stuff.
Ultimately, the most annoying part of the whole article is the explicit point that Microsoft is primarily interested in developing software for the corporate world. So the ultimate bottom line for any development is how the new, human power elite accepts it. Sure the slaves in the trenches or in non-corporate fields suffer from information overload, increased stress and lack of concentration -- my life has become an anchorless drift across continents and task panes since Windows XP came out -- where was I? oh yeah -- but as long as the guy making decisions (who, as well all know, is always the worst informed. Hell he's buying microsoft products ain't he?) can yell at some slob and say "give me all my correspondence with Ballmer, except that april-fools yamauchi thing", and that slob can choke it up in the next 15 minutes, nobody suffers .
The sum of the parts that go into that thing are going to be much less than the overall cost. And any good hacker with a few days could slap together something that works; in a few months you might have something completely stable and capable of being used by non-specialists, i.e., this device's target market. Now calculate the costs of that, and the number of signage players you're likely to sell.
On the other hand, take a console, especially early in the product cycle where the manufacturer subsidizes the hardware, and you've got something worthy of hacking.
So the XBox 360 is really slow, churning under added weight, while the PS3 has acceleration so impressive, it blows its own tires off and embeds into the side of a hill?
Someone else complained about Firefox's tabbed implementation with respect to Opera. Well, the article uses windows media player as an esxample of MS tabs. I confess to using that thing from time to time, and I still can't figure that nightmare of an interface out.
Well, that wouldn't be a problem if y'all did like me and got one o' them Microhard Wireless Sexplorer Internet Porn Keyboards, with 105 keys ergonomically laid out for one-handed operation and powered USB ports for the latest in male/female peripherals.
when I was 9, on a brand-spankin' new Pet 2001 Professional Computer with 3.0 ROMs and a full-size K/B. It was right after lunch, and I was showing off to a couple of Australian kids my 1337 programmin' skills, viz:
10 PRINT " IS A DORK" 20 GOTO 10
Went into the other room, got named (older) brother, and dragged him in to see the proggy. He was less than pleased, and expressed such displeasure physically on my back. I had just started to come down with bronchitis, and the combination was too much for my lunch to bear.
I'll never forget the suffering on my father's face when he came home, sat down at the table, and tried for hours to clean that thing. It never really worked right after that. He even replaced the keyboard, and it still had keys that wouldn't always conncect.
Sorry guys, I know very little about this stuff. But poking around the Google cache, I found this here.
The article begins:
Maureen O'Gara writes: SCO CEO Darl McBride claimed during the company's Q1 earnings report Wednesday evening that Pamela Jones, a.k.a. "PJ," the now-famous, albeit shadowy, voice of Groklaw, the web site that follows the SCO v IBM suit and has become a festering thorn in SCO's side, is "not who she says she is."
He didn't say who she is - if she is a she - but he did say that SCO has been "digging" to discover the true identity of its nemesis and claimed that, from what it has learned so far, the situation is "much different than advertised" and that "all is not as it appears.
So, I wonder where she got the idea to "attack the person, not the argument".
A real gem is later:
By definition, journalism is nominally "objective," even as practiced by Dan Rather. There is nothing objective about what Groklaw says or the reaction it gets. Opinion maybe, but not journalism.
Sentence fragments aside and obligatory "pot calling the kettle" comments aside, some "opinions" are back by evidence, at which point they become "arguments". Others remain merely the flatulence of mind.
Seriously guys, if someone's writing crap like that, she's clearly on a payroll. If you pretend to some sort of journalistic integrity, you don't work with them. The outcome of this can only be Mr. Turner's resignation; this is like the bouncer of a tittie bar writing the manager, threatening to quit because the girls are prostitutes. Who do you think is profiting from the arrangement?
How do we know there really is a Maureen O'Gara either? Maybe she's a victim of identity theft too! After all, I followed that linky from the yahoo people search, keyed them in, gave them my credit card, and they gave me this address. I went there and asked if they knew a Maureen O'Gara, and was told that she was a Mormon, or her descendents would baptize her as one. Being a Mormon, even one in the future, is a full-time job. Pretty nice digs though.
fourth declension Latin noun, like syllabus, it is its own plural. Of course, English doesn't like that, so we use viruses and syllabuses, which are, in my book perfectly acceptable. Virii and syllabi are, however, abominations as they are attempts to treat fourth declension Latin nouns as second declension ones.
Dictionaries are based on usage and should never be taken as authoritative. The fact that some dictionaries will allow virii and syllabi don't make them purty engleesh.
A) It's not that hi-res.
B) The images have been cropped or adjusted: the largest dimensions are 425x395 pixels, which does not, to my knowledge, correspond to any camera format. There's no XIF data either.
C) a flash was used (looking at the main picture you can see the outlines of the flash shadow, especially from the plastic case (or wire hanging in front). Judging by the depth of field produced, the flash was not very big. That's consistent with a low-power camera. D) images like that are not outside realm of possibility for a camera phone -- especially the higher-end ones you'd expect nerds at an xbox party to be carrying
Of course, it's hard to imagine someone using a flash on a display -- repeatedly -- without being noticed by someone in charge.
For those of you who didn't read the article, here's some of the interesting points:
A) Academics are looking for the DoD to fund studies of some of the social principles behind MMOGs. The ADL, I think, is a government-academic-corporate initiative to apply "new learning techniques" to the military.
B) As many of us know, militaries are always eager to increase training time, and to inculcate the "military mindset" into soldiers 24/7. That's just common sense: the more the rank and file sees the world in the same way and understands events similarly ("Is on the same page"), the less friction there is.
C) MMOGs have some interesting phenomena: they are world-wide distributed environments where new players are socialized and "taught the ropes" by the old hands. Any environment where leaders naturally emerge, and people willingly provide training in complex activities automatically generates interest for the military.
D) Online shopping mall-cum-anemically performing-MMOG there has managed to team up with the army to build some sort of training environment. Expect hoverboard-riding soldiers wearing custom-designed hawaiian shirts to invade a country near you.
On the other hand, there are some problems with the scope and conception of the project. First, the study focuses on MMORPGs. Massively multiplayer online simulations, such as the flight simulator Aces High and military-style "MMORPG"s, such as the persistent combined-arms battlefield World War II Online, or even the science-fiction combat game planetside, while certainly not as popular as the "big boys", have tasks that are, relatively speaking, much more sophisticated technically, and have evolved social structures around achieving those tasks. Something like the AAR effectiveness experiment they propose would be much better suited to an environment like that then to say a mission in City of Heroes. In addition, the rhetorical gap between the reality to be described and the narrative the DoD would fund is much narrower. For that matter, the gap between the description of MMOG and the military's use of computer games would be narrower too.
Another issue skirted in the paper is the failure rate of individual subscribers. While certainly, MMOGs are very popular; I'd say a relatively minor percentage of players play any given MMOG for more than a few months. And many last shorter than that, and that is often precisely because of the social environment they create. The article mentions the Sims online as not being popular; There is another example: Their beta lasted the least amount of time of any game on my hard drive: I logged on to some stupid technicolor world, and as I tried to sort the counterintuitive interface, I discovered the place to be populated by poorly socialized adolescents. Given the choice between learning the interface and deleting the software, I chose the latter. The fact that these communities are self-selecting, and that some of these communities have broad reach, while others do not, separates them from military applications. Would a MMORPG used for military training work? Or would it be dominated by those guys who can't even scrub a latrine right?
Finally, I'm just not sure MMOGs should be considered independently of the current gaming environment as a whole; the article suggests this, but I think we can go further, and suggest that the social division between MMORPGs and regular games with significant online components is indeed an artificial division. If you look at the communities for online games that have direct applications as training tools, such as the R6/GR series, the mods to Falcon 4.0, Battlefront's whole product line and, of course, a href=www.flashpoint1985.com>Operation Flashpoint, and its military twin,
Dunno; I think a better analogy is the old yarn about two hunters -- an older man and a younger one -- in the woods. They spot bear tracks, and the young guy says to the old one: What happens if a bear attacks us? The old guy responds, "We run". The kid says, "but there's no way you can outrun a charging bear." The old man stops, turns to the kid and says, "I don't have to outrun a charging bear; I only have to outrun you." So it's not just a matter of standing in a field catching bullets; it's also a matter of what sort of profile you maintain. VoIP interception, it seems, would follow a path similar to email interception as opposed to that used for hacking the boxes themselves. While practically every port on the net is being scanned by malicious users looking for security holes, a much smaller percentage of (still largely unencrypted) email is being scanned. And, right now, the biggest problem with email is spam and worms; bots harvest email addresses from the internet and now from other peoples' machines and generate tons and tons of garbage. For email, "security by obscurity" works. How many of us have "high-profile" and "low-profile" email accounts, and how much garbage arrives at each?
For an individual VoIP user, the chances of malicious crap happening are pretty small. For a company or government agency, VoIP could be a nightmare: consider what would happen if a competitor or DDoS extortionist were to launch an attack that took down the primary means of corporate communications.
"Security by obscurity" doesn't stop a determined attacker; most of the attackers out there, however, are content with the slowest runner in the bunch.
I love all this sanctimonious stuff.
Was it bad programming practice? Perhaps. Can a company rely on its closed-source software being free of bad code, or a bad assumption?
Just how likely is 32k crew changes in a month anyway? The largest airline in the world, last I checked, was United, and they have ca. 2400 flights a day, spread all over the globe. Comair has 1300 flights, all geographically centered. Worse, they're all centered on CVG, more specifically the Delta terminal, which has grown so rapidly, it's more like a tumor than a concourse. In my experience, the terminal infrastructure doesn't handle delays well either (I've dropped people off at CVG two and a half hours before their scheduled departure and they've missed their flight because of lines through security). So we have weather that affects practically the entire operating area of a 1300-flight airline -- something in itself inconceivable outside of Comair -- and a home base that, to an outsider, has a straining infrastructure. I'm inclined to say that it's not only "insanely high", but something that would only happen in a "perfect storm" of circumstances.
So you hit an "undocumented software limitation" Vendors don't rate software to weather perfect storms. This kind of failure, mutatis mutandis could happen with software you purchased yesterday. So I'd like to say it was a matter of "the company bought a scheduling package suited to a small airline, built everything else around it, and when it got big, the scheduling package was forced to do what it could not and puked." or even "the company should have known of the 32,767-transaction limitation."
Yes, you can have backups. You can buy a second, completely different software package, and train all your personnel to use it too, and double the workload. Or you can bring in a fleet of temps, teach them in 2 hours the ins-and-outs of FAA crew scheduling minima, break out the phones and chalkboards, and hope that by the end of the day you don't break too many laws.
The article suggests that ol' Bill has another reason not to call it a "media hub". M$ already has a "media center edition" version of Windows XP. It's not vapor here, just a clear case of differentiating the markets. Now, whether the Xbox will be a "crippled" media-center, or whether it will do what you want it to do, we'll see. My guess is that it'll play DVDs, CDs, and let you do multimedia stuff that involves extensive and annoying DRM. I also suspect someone's looking at the console market in terms of the iPod phenomenon: people buy iPods to listen to music, not to use the stopwatch feature. Are folks really going to buy a console and expect a HDTV tuner/PVR in there for free?
Yeah, the maintainers will get paid, but the developers won't. For OSS to take off, we'll need to see: A) Current COTS developers switch to an OSS model, and make their money through maintenance (By having some sort of "Authorized" system, or other BS way of passing the costs up the chain). B) Governments not just procuring established OSS projects, but funding the development of new ones. C) The "old guard" of interests be unsuccessful in convincing legislators to waste money on their products; or if they realize that, under the OSS flag, they can convince governments to pay them outright, without all this nonsense of enterprise licenses, "per seat" charges, and so on.
But to attain such a shift in understanding, one must eliminate the idea -- present at least in the part of the document I was able to read -- that one of the major advantages of OSS is that development is for free, by highly motivated nerds. As long as that's predominantly the case, OSS projects will suffer from the instability, amateurism and inconsistency that we all love, but that professional end users would rather do away with. For business, a predictable mediocrity is better than uncertain brilliance.
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Hi toadlife,
I dunno if I'd put it quite that way.
I won't speak on the Codemasters situation, since you appear better informed than I.
As for the popularity of OFP, well, you know I'm a nut. But at the same time, its numbers didn't exactly make it a runaway hit. And, as the article points out, the current development system requires runaway hits.
In fact, I'd say that a few factors limited OFP's popularity:
1) The graphics. Yes, when I saw the original OFP demo, I was blown away -- I'd never seen anything like it (and, before someone objects, I was testing WW2OL at the time and as underimpressed by that as I was amazed by OFP). But at the same time, OFP's color rendering is understated -- some might even say desaturated. Also, the 3D models and artwork were uneven.
2) The bizarre english. Having obvious non-actors (without doubt, this was Codemasters' contribution) reading bizarre scripts ("1 2 3 4 Move Shoot Communicate A-Ha") while trying to give the impression of USArmy soldiers was unsettling.
3) (and this is where I think we might share a point of view) The very things that made it innovative hurt its sales potential. I said that I was blown away by the demo -- absolutely. I mean, it's four years later, and we're just now getting FPSs with viewdistances at 900m (while OFP now renders 2500 on new machines), and I still haven't seen any ones with 144 m^2 maps. The reason for this is that graphics hardware and software are optimized towards the "cookie-cutter FPS", with confined spaces (which are easier to draw anyway) and crates: you can make bigger spaces, but they're not as pretty.
And say what you guys will about graphics and sound not mattering -- most people who play games are casual gamers: the decision to buy or not to buy comes within the first few minutes of exposure. The people who buy the most games play each one for a short period of time before moving on to the next.
I think I'm going to be ill. I had no idea webcams were so good at capturing motion. That girl doing the splits on the help page made me give up in dispair. And I'm pretty sure the "in action" screenshot on the front page is faked -- or a cutscene. Webcam apps have cutscenes, don't they?
The Crimes:
A) ALL CAPS (almost) ALL THE TIME
B) Flameworthy headline reminiscent of a Babelfish treatment: (BIG NEWS ON USA MICROSOFT: Slavery to It Is Ending
C) No real news in what follows the "Big News" headline.
D) Anti-Microsoft tied to anti-Americanism without even a thin veil of sophistication:
Why not say: "BIG NEWS: THE WORLD WILL CHANGE FROM BASE. WE ARE NOTHING -- Let Us Be Everything?"
E) OS HISTORY -- GROWING LIKE TOPSY
F) Okay, now let me get this right: all US corporations, including Sun (praised and damned in the same rant) are evil, or can be evil, but Walmart is good?
G) Mentioning that Car Lots have a 108-day supply of SUVs. I don't even know where to begin with that.
I mean, I hate M$ as much as the next guy, but that is the nuttiest troll of an article I've seen in a while.
Okay, so he's whining because:
A) On the one hand, the retailers are running along the exhibition floor. These are the lowest level of marketing: the geek in the store who moves the product.
B) On the other, blogging and those with "media" access have skyrocketed, so that developers are limiting the access to the "good stuff" to media sources that are likely to have a major impact (=broad readership)
So E3 is and has been for some time, a media frenzy. In pseudocapitalistic terms, you've got developers with a limited supply of "hot marketin information" and a huge demand from members of the media, who want exclusive access to that info.
Now, we all know what sort of information software developers can give, and what sort of information they shouldn't; and they usually end up giving out the info they shouldn't: on features that aren't ready to ship, products that are half-baked, and things that may very well not bel. So effectively E3 becomes a celebration of vaporware and empty promises. Each year, we see the "best of E3" reviews and votes, and many of the things touted there reach their ontological peak in some back room upstairs, only to fade back into nothingness.
Well, no, I don't.
Let's take the LOTR movies. The copyright holder is the only one who claims the right to propagate a series of ideas or notions that we call "the LOTR movies". Copyright doesn't inhere in the celluloid, or the particular series of charges in memory, or the marks on a DVD; Copyright inheres in the ideas. The counterargument you're making is one of greater and lesser specificity, and that's exactly one of the problems with intellectual property, and one of the points that is constantly being defined (and in contradictory fashion) by the worlds' courts: at what point does it begin? Why should "fair use" be photocopying 10% of a book and not 20%? Why not hit every cover band in the world with nasty infringement suits?
The dude before me mentioned WW2OL.
I supposed Planetside is in there as well.
There already are FPS RTSs -- specifically Operation Flashpoint Missions. The major problems are the underperforming netcode and the lack of Join in Progress. Both of these, I understand, will be addressed with the next game in the series (Armed Assault or something).
The problem with big battle simulations is that modern combat involves a bunch of grunts who get slaughtered and a few guys with nice toys who do the slaughtering. So when you try WW2OL, for example, you'll find that there are a lot of tanks and relatively few infantry. Nobody likes to run thirty minutes just to get machine-gunned.
Why should laws be changed?
Because property is a social construct. There is no inherent characteristic in anything I own that makes it mine; what makes it mine is that we as a society commonly agree it is mine, and the laws generally follow that common agreement.
Intellectual Property is particularly nebulous since we're defining something without physical being (a series of ideas) as being property -- that is, we're assigning a notional value to a notion.
That's all well and good, but when what do we do when a major sector of the society doesn't agree with the attribution of such a notional value to a specific form of that notion?
For example, a law could state that all sports cars belong to me. That'd be good and legal, but the sports car owners would think differently. Why should the law be changed?
At heart, the problem is that this particular construction of property collides with millennia of human practice. Heck, even the old copyright law only makes sense for a few centuries of human existence. Add in that, in the case of music, we've got an industry built around oligopolic vertical domination of the industry -- from artists to mass dissemination to retail, and and new technology has basically destroyed the dominant position of the old guard. And no elite is more vehement than one that's being supplanted.
So why should they have the privileged voice in law?
First, the concept of monastic "order" really begins in the beginning of the twelfth century with the military orders, the cistercians, and the premonstratensian canons.
Second, you're assuming this is a western manuscript, when some of the other contextual marks suggest that in fact it was produced in Constantinople. Basilean monks did know Greek. And in the west, it depends on where you're talking about. Spain was an active center for Greek/Arabic/Hebrew -> Latin translation of texts, especially scientific ones. Southern Italy had large communities of Greek speaking peoples. Hell, even the bishop of Lincoln and not a bad scientist in his own right, Robert Grosseteste, knew and translated ancient Greek.
Something abstract such as "The Church" is not an historical agent; individual churchmen can be.
Virtuous act? My ass.
There are plenty of twelfth-century scholars in the West and in the Greek East who read and appreciated ancient Greek and Latin texts; and the vast majority of these were churchmen. Their reaction to a 12th-century monk scraping off Archimedes and copying down a prayer-book would be much like ours, as in "Hey Rube, WTF are you doing?" But well, not everybody is educated to the same degree, and a poor monastery may indeed find the parchment more valuable than the indeciphrable gibberish written on it.
For those of you who can't grasp the concept, it's like when ma threw out all the old baseball cards; you fought it at the time, and twenty years later you know the retail value of what you lost. Ignorance spans all periods; but in spite of what crap 19th-century progressivism may make you think about the middle ages, medieval people didn't hate and seek to destroy antique texts; quite the contrary, they liked them, and they found ancient science very useful. Remember this text was copied in the 10th century by a monk as well.
It's nice to see everyone bashing our rich neighbor in Redmond.
The article, though, is a sales pitch. Uncle Bill is talking to a bunch of CEOs, and he's trying to do two things:
A) Trash Google and Yahoo and anyone else's desktop search program
B) Promote the windows environment and Microsoft's desktop search stuff.
Ultimately, the most annoying part of the whole article is the explicit point that Microsoft is primarily interested in developing software for the corporate world. So the ultimate bottom line for any development is how the new, human power elite accepts it. Sure the slaves in the trenches or in non-corporate fields suffer from information overload, increased stress and lack of concentration -- my life has become an anchorless drift across continents and task panes since Windows XP came out -- where was I? oh yeah -- but as long as the guy making decisions (who, as well all know, is always the worst informed. Hell he's buying microsoft products ain't he?) can yell at some slob and say "give me all my correspondence with Ballmer, except that april-fools yamauchi thing", and that slob can choke it up in the next 15 minutes, nobody suffers .
Actually, the approved phrase is:
Wa-la[voilà|videlicet|ecce]
But even that's not fully backwards compatible; don't expect your linear-B titles to work.
The sum of the parts that go into that thing are going to be much less than the overall cost. And any good hacker with a few days could slap together something that works; in a few months you might have something completely stable and capable of being used by non-specialists, i.e., this device's target market.
Now calculate the costs of that, and the number of signage players you're likely to sell.
On the other hand, take a console, especially early in the product cycle where the manufacturer subsidizes the hardware, and you've got something worthy of hacking.
So the XBox 360 is really slow, churning under added weight, while the PS3 has acceleration so impressive, it blows its own tires off and embeds into the side of a hill?
Article said he "almost added them in word".
Someone else complained about Firefox's tabbed implementation with respect to Opera. Well, the article uses windows media player as an esxample of MS tabs. I confess to using that thing from time to time, and I still can't figure that nightmare of an interface out.
Well, that wouldn't be a problem if y'all did like me and got one o' them Microhard Wireless Sexplorer Internet Porn Keyboards, with 105 keys ergonomically laid out for one-handed operation and powered USB ports for the latest in male/female peripherals.
when I was 9, on a brand-spankin' new Pet 2001 Professional Computer with 3.0 ROMs and a full-size K/B.
It was right after lunch, and I was showing off to a couple of Australian kids my 1337 programmin' skills, viz:
10 PRINT " IS A DORK"
20 GOTO 10
Went into the other room, got named (older) brother, and dragged him in to see the proggy. He was less than pleased, and expressed such displeasure physically on my back. I had just started to come down with bronchitis, and the combination was too much for my lunch to bear.
I'll never forget the suffering on my father's face when he came home, sat down at the table, and tried for hours to clean that thing.
It never really worked right after that. He even replaced the keyboard, and it still had keys that wouldn't always conncect.
The article begins:
So, I wonder where she got the idea to "attack the person, not the argument".
A real gem is later:
Sentence fragments aside and obligatory "pot calling the kettle" comments aside, some "opinions" are back by evidence, at which point they become "arguments". Others remain merely the flatulence of mind.
Seriously guys, if someone's writing crap like that, she's clearly on a payroll. If you pretend to some sort of journalistic integrity, you don't work with them. The outcome of this can only be Mr. Turner's resignation; this is like the bouncer of a tittie bar writing the manager, threatening to quit because the girls are prostitutes. Who do you think is profiting from the arrangement?
How do we know there really is a Maureen O'Gara either? Maybe she's a victim of identity theft too! After all, I followed that linky from the yahoo people search, keyed them in, gave them my credit card, and they gave me this address. I went there and asked if they knew a Maureen O'Gara, and was told that she was a Mormon, or her descendents would baptize her as one. Being a Mormon, even one in the future, is a full-time job. Pretty nice digs though.
fourth declension Latin noun, like syllabus, it is its own plural. Of course, English doesn't like that, so we use viruses and syllabuses, which are, in my book perfectly acceptable. Virii and syllabi are, however, abominations as they are attempts to treat fourth declension Latin nouns as second declension ones.
Dictionaries are based on usage and should never be taken as authoritative. The fact that some dictionaries will allow virii and syllabi don't make them purty engleesh.
A) It's not that hi-res.
B) The images have been cropped or adjusted: the largest dimensions are 425x395 pixels, which does not, to my knowledge, correspond to any camera format. There's no XIF data either.
C) a flash was used (looking at the main picture you can see the outlines of the flash shadow, especially from the plastic case (or wire hanging in front). Judging by the depth of field produced, the flash was not very big. That's consistent with a low-power camera.
D) images like that are not outside realm of possibility for a camera phone -- especially the higher-end ones you'd expect nerds at an xbox party to be carrying
Of course, it's hard to imagine someone using a flash on a display -- repeatedly -- without being noticed by someone in charge.
For those of you who didn't read the article, here's some of the interesting points:
A) Academics are looking for the DoD to fund studies of some of the social principles behind MMOGs. The ADL, I think, is a government-academic-corporate initiative to apply "new learning techniques" to the military.
B) As many of us know, militaries are always eager to increase training time, and to inculcate the "military mindset" into soldiers 24/7. That's just common sense: the more the rank and file sees the world in the same way and understands events similarly ("Is on the same page"), the less friction there is.
C) MMOGs have some interesting phenomena: they are world-wide distributed environments where new players are socialized and "taught the ropes" by the old hands. Any environment where leaders naturally emerge, and people willingly provide training in complex activities automatically generates interest for the military.
D) Online shopping mall-cum-anemically performing-MMOG there has managed to team up with the army to build some sort of training environment. Expect hoverboard-riding soldiers wearing custom-designed hawaiian shirts to invade a country near you.
On the other hand, there are some problems with the scope and conception of the project.
First, the study focuses on MMORPGs. Massively multiplayer online simulations, such as the flight simulator Aces High and military-style "MMORPG"s, such as the persistent combined-arms battlefield World War II Online, or even the science-fiction combat game planetside, while certainly not as popular as the "big boys", have tasks that are, relatively speaking, much more sophisticated technically, and have evolved social structures around achieving those tasks. Something like the AAR effectiveness experiment they propose would be much better suited to an environment like that then to say a mission in City of Heroes. In addition, the rhetorical gap between the reality to be described and the narrative the DoD would fund is much narrower. For that matter, the gap between the description of MMOG and the military's use of computer games would be narrower too.
Another issue skirted in the paper is the failure rate of individual subscribers. While certainly, MMOGs are very popular; I'd say a relatively minor percentage of players play any given MMOG for more than a few months. And many last shorter than that, and that is often precisely because of the social environment they create. The article mentions the Sims online as not being popular; There is another example: Their beta lasted the least amount of time of any game on my hard drive: I logged on to some stupid technicolor world, and as I tried to sort the counterintuitive interface, I discovered the place to be populated by poorly socialized adolescents. Given the choice between learning the interface and deleting the software, I chose the latter. The fact that these communities are self-selecting, and that some of these communities have broad reach, while others do not, separates them from military applications. Would a MMORPG used for military training work? Or would it be dominated by those guys who can't even scrub a latrine right?
Finally, I'm just not sure MMOGs should be considered independently of the current gaming environment as a whole; the article suggests this, but I think we can go further, and suggest that the social division between MMORPGs and regular games with significant online components is indeed an artificial division. If you look at the communities for online games that have direct applications as training tools, such as the R6/GR series, the mods to Falcon 4.0, Battlefront's whole product line and, of course, a href=www.flashpoint1985.com>Operation Flashpoint, and its military twin,
Dunno; I think a better analogy is the old yarn about two hunters -- an older man and a younger one -- in the woods. They spot bear tracks, and the young guy says to the old one:
What happens if a bear attacks us?
The old guy responds, "We run".
The kid says, "but there's no way you can outrun a charging bear."
The old man stops, turns to the kid and says, "I don't have to outrun a charging bear; I only have to outrun you."
So it's not just a matter of standing in a field catching bullets; it's also a matter of what sort of profile you maintain. VoIP interception, it seems, would follow a path similar to email interception as opposed to that used for hacking the boxes themselves.
While practically every port on the net is being scanned by malicious users looking for security holes, a much smaller percentage of (still largely unencrypted) email is being scanned. And, right now, the biggest problem with email is spam and worms; bots harvest email addresses from the internet and now from other peoples' machines and generate tons and tons of garbage.
For email, "security by obscurity" works. How many of us have "high-profile" and "low-profile" email accounts, and how much garbage arrives at each?
For an individual VoIP user, the chances of malicious crap happening are pretty small. For a company or government agency, VoIP could be a nightmare: consider what would happen if a competitor or DDoS extortionist were to launch an attack that took down the primary means of corporate communications.
"Security by obscurity" doesn't stop a determined attacker; most of the attackers out there, however, are content with the slowest runner in the bunch.
I love all this sanctimonious stuff.
Was it bad programming practice? Perhaps.
Can a company rely on its closed-source software being free of bad code, or a bad assumption?
Just how likely is 32k crew changes in a month anyway?
The largest airline in the world, last I checked, was United, and they have ca. 2400 flights a day, spread all over the globe. Comair has 1300 flights, all geographically centered. Worse, they're all centered on CVG, more specifically the Delta terminal, which has grown so rapidly, it's more like a tumor than a concourse. In my experience, the terminal infrastructure doesn't handle delays well either (I've dropped people off at CVG two and a half hours before their scheduled departure and they've missed their flight because of lines through security).
So we have weather that affects practically the entire operating area of a 1300-flight airline -- something in itself inconceivable outside of Comair -- and a home base that, to an outsider, has a straining infrastructure. I'm inclined to say that it's not only "insanely high", but something that would only happen in a "perfect storm" of circumstances.
So you hit an "undocumented software limitation"
Vendors don't rate software to weather perfect storms. This kind of failure, mutatis mutandis could happen with software you purchased yesterday.
So I'd like to say it was a matter of "the company bought a scheduling package suited to a small airline, built everything else around it, and when it got big, the scheduling package was forced to do what it could not and puked." or even "the company should have known of the 32,767-transaction limitation."
Yes, you can have backups. You can buy a second, completely different software package, and train all your personnel to use it too, and double the workload. Or you can bring in a fleet of temps, teach them in 2 hours the ins-and-outs of FAA crew scheduling minima, break out the phones and chalkboards, and hope that by the end of the day you don't break too many laws.
The article suggests that ol' Bill has another reason not to call it a "media hub". M$ already has a "media center edition" version of Windows XP. It's not vapor here, just a clear case of differentiating the markets. Now, whether the Xbox will be a "crippled" media-center, or whether it will do what you want it to do, we'll see. My guess is that it'll play DVDs, CDs, and let you do multimedia stuff that involves extensive and annoying DRM.
I also suspect someone's looking at the console market in terms of the iPod phenomenon: people buy iPods to listen to music, not to use the stopwatch feature. Are folks really going to buy a console and expect a HDTV tuner/PVR in there for free?
Yeah, the maintainers will get paid, but the developers won't. For OSS to take off, we'll need to see:
A) Current COTS developers switch to an OSS model, and make their money through maintenance (By having some sort of "Authorized" system, or other BS way of passing the costs up the chain).
B) Governments not just procuring established OSS projects, but funding the development of new ones.
C) The "old guard" of interests be unsuccessful in convincing legislators to waste money on their products; or if they realize that, under the OSS flag, they can convince governments to pay them outright, without all this nonsense of enterprise licenses, "per seat" charges, and so on.
But to attain such a shift in understanding, one must eliminate the idea -- present at least in the part of the document I was able to read -- that one of the major advantages of OSS is that development is for free, by highly motivated nerds. As long as that's predominantly the case, OSS projects will suffer from the instability, amateurism and inconsistency that we all love, but that professional end users would rather do away with. For business, a predictable mediocrity is better than uncertain brilliance.