Yeah, there was some "Chatter" that OBL was aiming to take down a couple of spy satellites with a modified ICBM, so they took the information offline, forcing him back to "Plan B": firing that sucker at the US's Eastern Seaboard, where the vaunted US Missile Defense will interceive it with technology that Really Works(TM).
In a related development, Lockheed-Martin announced today it's new SatTrac(TM) feature, where your company can receive daily updates on the orbital patterns of nearly 1500 earth satellites for a modest starting subscription of $20,000/month. Specialized Hardware, Training seminars and Software customization can also be had for a modest fee.
A lot of the difference comes from the distinction between fads and niche markets. Fads are very short lived and generally spill down from the core market to less sophisticated markets: people will buy macarena-based garbage, not a movie. Niche markets are the ones with a die-hard core of nerds that will shell out for anything related to the product. Few people are buying Light Sabre flashlights and bartman dolls, but Star Wars videogames, simpsons filmographies, and any number of related pieces of merchandise are selling pretty hard.
Still, things are getting better. There was a period when I remember seeing the California Raisins and VAnilla Ice both having video games in production, and neither being able to make it to the market before the fad was passe'.
I'd say the worse thing here would be being a published user of a system with an "interesting" security hole like that; all of a sudden, a friendly testimonial becomes an advertisement of a vulnerability.
Unless, of course, they've got everything firewalled to tuesday.
Excellent. Always happy to see those contributions get recognized. Heck, Defender was the game that set the standard for obsessive 48-hour "high score" binges. I don't think any other game had that effect (i.e., both the ability and the challenge to play it for 2 days straight for no good reason than an honorable mention in Newsweek).
Now, as for "posthumous" being "posthumas", well, I'd make a comment, but first I have to wait for this WILE {}; loop to end.
Several reasons why this isn't a good idea:
A) if you grant legal property rights to junk in games, then you subject your company, which maintains the servers, to all kinds of legal nonsense. Nerf a weapon? someone files a lawsuit. Add a new weapon? Someone files a lawsuit because their weapon was de facto nerfed. Basically, you resign all control over the game balance, and you lose customers.
B) If you ignore that, companies have the ability to print money and sell it. And if they engage in it directly (a la "there"), nobody's going to be interested. Playing a game that can be "bought" is simply no fun. It might work for certain "religions", but the rest of us just don't like the idea.
So tacit collaboration helps everybody. No need to advertise it, but you cut a deal with a company like IGE, and everybody benefits.
Of course, the real problem would be a game design that rewards tedious menial labour. The game itself should be rewarding, not the prestige gained from doing crap simpler than flipping burgers.
Now, if you're running a virtual currency, and you're looking to keep the power in the hands of producers (and not hoarders), may I suggest a solution from the Federal Prison system? Establish two currencies: 20 dollar bills and cigarettes are traiditional, but you can use Quatloons and Augustan Denarii if you prefer. At regular intervals, change the exchange rates from 2:1 to 1:2, and back: and make sure that no vendor takes both currencies.
If you want to have some BS magic devices, have their efficacy follow similar cycles.
Dunno folks. It'd be interesting to see who they go after. I read that thing, and I wasn't thinking of Joe Sixpack linking to orbitz.com with a ilttle orbitz logo banner, but rather of someone ripping off their C/C page, with all the other links intact. But heck, maybe that doesn't make any sense either.
Another possibility is someone slapping together a meta-airline search engine, that runs its own army of accounts and automatically sends requests to Orbitz, Travelocity, Expeida, Opopo (or whatever it is) at once, then returns the data
hey, you know, that sounds like a prtty good Firefox plugin...
"If you just want to listen to music on your computer, think about what you have to go through to listen to that Ashlee Simpson song.
I'd have to go through a brick wall head first to even want to listen to that Ashlee Simpsons song. I don't have to lobotomize myself before I'd listen to music on my computer
Of course, you buy something, it's tangible and it's cool. But CDs never really had that feel: they were always small and fragile. Now Vinyl, there's something we all miss.
Once considered the final stage of software development, beta versions...
and
The beta version, named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, typically refers to the second stage of software testing. Traditionally distributed to a limited group of testers, it follows the alpha version, which is tested in the lab.
What little training I had seemed to involve code existing in four stages of development, and beta was the second:
Alpha: the phase in the development cycle where code first comes into being. Subsystems are being built, and testing takes place on the that (subsystem) level. Beta: the phase in the cycle where all subsystems are nominally in place, and testing occurs on the system level; not everything works, and features may be added, but we're looking at the whole code. Final: features are locked down, the system is tested in the form it intends to be released. I believe, under the influence of someone like Microsoft, this is now referred to as "Release Candidate" stage. Released: The software has been distributed.
On the other hand, this article implies another notion of software development stages, one that I see applied rather frequently:
Alpha: Testing done in house. Beta: Product released to a group of testers who aren't in-house QA specialists.
So does someone have the answer? What the hell do these terms mean, and are they useful any more?
1) okay, conceded. Still, keep your eyes on the prize.
2)Security and safety/environmental issues are, as I said, the two issues in which the National Labs are beaten up on. (funny you didn't mention the earthquake fault running through the tritium storage building. That was always my favorite).
3) Yup, in other words, it was a needless bureaucratic system slapped on top "to improve security" that backfired. This is a symptom of overregulation, and not a cry for more regulation. It parallels the "ChemTrack" fiasco of a decade ago: some bright fellow decided to be "proactive" about toxic substances, and devised a tracking system where every toxic and semitoxic substance that came into the laboratories was entered into a computer, given a discrete tracking number and a barcode. When the end user wanted to dispose of said material, instead of chucking it directly into the hazardous waste bin, that person would go into the office, grab a ChemTrack form, fill it out, and attach the barcode. Now remember, hazardous waste includes things like paint, WD-40, any number of detergents: basically, any chemical you're likely to find in someone's garage. And working in a laboratory, people tend to use a lot of these things. Since we're dealing with an academic environment(=research), there are still some creative people, and they generally don't like being treated like beancounters. So many of those cans of WD-40, white-out, used paintbrushes and the rest ended up in the toxic waste bin without the ChemTrack form being filled out; or with it filled out improperly. The result? 2 years after it was initiated, the headlines break "Tens of Thousands of toxic chemicals missing at National Laboratories!". My point is that overregulation can lead to false positives. In geek terms, the systems in place would count every time a website tried to use an ActiveX control on IE as a hacking attempt. 4) I'm gathering you don't do classified research. LANL and LLNL are not UC campuses, and follow an entirely different safety and security regime. If you doubt this, pay a visit to Livermore some day; do some winetasting, and, when you're feeling bold enough, try getting in to either LLNL or Sandia. Or just hang outside the gates and watch them search cars and check badges. And ask an National Laboratory employee about how many insipid warning signs there are (again, classic overregulation mistake akin to what happens with IE: desensitize the user to warning signs).
A few things about Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
They're under the direction of the Department of Energy and are managed by the University of California.
Across the street from both one finds Sandia National Laboratories, managed by Martin-Marietta.
Election-year antics with these two labs have become rampant of late: usually, the republicans go for security lapses and the democrats for environmental issues. This is in spite of the fact that the laboratories have a negligable environmental impact (the measuring devices at LLNL to detect toxic releases in the air from the research facility had to be brilliantly engineered to filter out the noise from the freeway 1 mile away, noise which is 1000 times larger than the "damaging environmental releases" they're supposed to detect and help prevent), and have an excellent security record (the "security incidents" are in fact created by failures in the security bureaucracy. If, for example, you have a policy to destroy secret documents after 20 years, and someone slaps a secret-document tracking program on top, suddenly the news reports "tens of thousands of secrets lost"). In effect, these have beome largely political attacks on the Secretary of Energy, a cabinet-level appointment, and through that person, to the president and party in power.
So why the "lax security" during a Republican administration? Those two labs employ something on the order of 15,000 people. THey're managed by the University of California. The University of California has one of the most solvent pension funds in the country. Martin Marietta(or Lockheed Martin, I forget. same company) has long expressed an interest in stretching their management across the street from Sandia to LANL and LLNL; in addition to the money they can make directly from government spending, they'll be free to raid that sweet pension fund.
Of course, I'm just ranting. The Bush administration has set a steadfast policy of protecting the country's resources against corporate raiders.
well, first off, because the principle of non-contradiction reads something like:
The same statement cannot both be true and be false at the same time in the same way.
In this case "A vulnerability that is not discovered is not a vulnerability" does not use "vulnerability" univocally. In first case, "Vulnerability" is not used in absolute, but in a certain sense: "A vulnerability that is not discovered"; that is, a vulnerability in potency. The the second case, VUlnerability is used in an absolute sense. Compare: "A man who is not yet born is not a man". "Physically test the laws of physics" -- yes I see how similar those words are, and I conncede the connection. That's why your argument is circular. You don't test a law of physics by physics: no science can prove its own principles. You assume those principles. As for experimental science, you assume that "because something happened 1000 times the same way, it will happen that way for the 1001th time as well". And that statement assumes a whole bunch of other things. Ultimately, there's no way to prove anything outside your own mind is real, just as there's no way to prove the principle of non-contradiction (for you cannot prove as true what states what true is); you just have to be content with saying that, unless you accept these principles, the world is pretty damn absurd. But that doesn't give those principles any extramental being, which is what you seem to be arguing.
And sure, you are vulnerable to high speed bullets, but only because other people, a species to which you belong, have been shot.
"A vulnerability that is undiscovered is not a vulnerability" is not a contradiction in terms, and dictionaries are not, the last time I checked, reliable sources for metaphysics.
According to your logic, a law of Physics exists. I ask you: what kind of existence does it have? What sort of reality do you give to a law of Physics? Laws of Physics do not belong to the sensible world: you can't touch, see, feel, smell, taste or hear one (but merely the words that supposedly convey the idea). Do you posit some sort of Platonic "realm of ideas" where laws of Physics exist? Maybe these exist in a sort of Speusippean hierarchy, with Number having the ultimate reality.
Another way to describe the "vulnerability is not a vulnerability" argument is in terms of actuality and potency. I ask: what is vulnerability? Vulnerability is the habit of being capable of suffering a wound. (and someone can correct me, but a habit is a passive disposition to receive some actuality). But, as Aristotle points out, no habit exists before its actualization. We do not have the habit of getting drunk before we get drunk for the first time. Likewise, we are not vulnerable until we are wounded. And if my arse contains more profound thoughts than other's brains, why shouldn't I reach up there?
Actually, no, that's quite true. A vulnerability that is undiscovered is not a vulnerability. Just as a word (e.g., "miostizr") is not a word until somebody assigns meaning to it.
Of course, someone other than Symantec's friendly competitors may already have discovered the vulnerability. He didn't say "A vulnerability isn't a vulnerability until we discover it".
And, yeah, sure, "A law of Physics isn't a law of Physics until somebody discovers it." After all, if it doesn't help us understand our world, what good is it?
It's a nasty world out there. Google's big business; Blogging's big news: sure most of them are full of dumb crap, trite poetry and junk. But for people searching for up-to-date information, blogs can be quite handy.
For modern companies, the need to manage information flow is only increasing. It's not just lazy slashdotters who would be curious about what goes on inside Google on an operational level. Competitors, investors, thieves, customers, freaks and regulatory agencies are also curious, and none of them share all the interests of the company. It may seem harmless for some idiot to go out and spout seemingly harmless information about the personnel composition of the adsense project. And all those data points may not seem like much, when considered individually. As a whole, however, they constitute a very real vulnerability. Free flow of ideas is a good thing; just as long as capitalism ain't involved.
So they set out with a vague idea of what the game was, basically an "emotional interface", no idea of how to work out the game itself; no run-throughs of what the concept was. They had limited artistic assets, which were essential for an impressionist game, and these were squandered by the shifting scope and requirements of the game. In other words, they didn't have a clear idea at the start, nor a clear execution.
I guess that's why it's a learning experience. "great ideas" are very simple ones, backed up by a bunch of tedious execution.
Dude, I think I've got some of the Plasticsmith's other work in my closet. If you get the 18-inch Acrylic model, he throws in an extra bowl for "Tasting and testing fine tobaccoes". Combines portability and durability into a classy package. I knew this dude who made his own homemade stand, and it broke right in the middle of a party. his room still smells like bongwater.
So yeah, dude, this guy's stuff for the mac mini will be like killer.
The report cites repeated reviews finding highlighting those funding and design issues, yet no action was ever taken on most of it. Add to that a schedule with effectively zero margin for error, no central organization to manage the disparate groups (or sort out the fights when Martin Baker and Astrium couldn't work things out), and inadequate documentation, and you have a guaranteed disaster.
You can't build a complicated system without command, control and communication. Bad design is the effect, not the cause.
He spoke specifically to this. In fact, he admits to buying machines without Windows on them. The problem is, companies don't buy computers that way. Company procurement follows rules; rules which he is trying to follow.
...is on the US White Male 14-29 demographic. Give men some credit. We can objectify women in any number of ways beyond gravity-defying boobs and tiny butts. There's a whole section of the population that maintains the height of female aesthetics is expresseed by the term badonkadonk. And there are plenty of fans of a biologically plausible, no-back-pain boob solution out there as well. If your game is so lame you need the resonance supplied by the ultimate in synthetic breasts, a G4 Spot and a waist the likes of which I haven't seen since -- well, okay, I saw one this afternoon at the office, and she was an archaeologist, wearing combat boots no less, but that's neither here nor there.
anyway, the point is that we've hit the point where not all male figures in these things look like the intimidating Testosterone fest of Duke Nukem; so why do the females have to be equally off-putting in their irreal sexuality?
oh yeah, right, 14-29 demographic. So the solution is simple: require white males under thirty to purchase video games only when escorted by womyn or people of color. Come on guys, it's about the gameplay. If you want to just beat your joystick, teh intardnet awaits, with every kind of objectionable objectification.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there was some "Chatter" that OBL was aiming to take down a couple of spy satellites with a modified ICBM, so they took the information offline, forcing him back to "Plan B": firing that sucker at the US's Eastern Seaboard, where the vaunted US Missile Defense will interceive it with technology that Really Works(TM).
In a related development, Lockheed-Martin announced today it's new SatTrac(TM) feature, where your company can receive daily updates on the orbital patterns of nearly 1500 earth satellites for a modest starting subscription of $20,000/month. Specialized Hardware, Training seminars and Software customization can also be had for a modest fee.
A lot of the difference comes from the distinction between fads and niche markets. Fads are very short lived and generally spill down from the core market to less sophisticated markets: people will buy macarena-based garbage, not a movie. Niche markets are the ones with a die-hard core of nerds that will shell out for anything related to the product. Few people are buying Light Sabre flashlights and bartman dolls, but Star Wars videogames, simpsons filmographies, and any number of related pieces of merchandise are selling pretty hard.
Still, things are getting better. There was a period when I remember seeing the California Raisins and VAnilla Ice both having video games in production, and neither being able to make it to the market before the fad was passe'.
I'd say the worse thing here would be being a published user of a system with an "interesting" security hole like that; all of a sudden, a friendly testimonial becomes an advertisement of a vulnerability.
Unless, of course, they've got everything firewalled to tuesday.
Zzzzapp
Nope, metal.
Excellent. Always happy to see those contributions get recognized. Heck, Defender was the game that set the standard for obsessive 48-hour "high score" binges. I don't think any other game had that effect (i.e., both the ability and the challenge to play it for 2 days straight for no good reason than an honorable mention in Newsweek).
Now, as for "posthumous" being "posthumas", well, I'd make a comment, but first I have to wait for this WILE {}; loop to end.
Do you have to pay a license fee for TV viewed on your computer? What's the difference in cost between a broadband connection and a license fee?
...and when you're calling Detroit from Qatar, does your calling card still give you those 3 cents a minute?
...downloading the torrent now.
Several reasons why this isn't a good idea: A) if you grant legal property rights to junk in games, then you subject your company, which maintains the servers, to all kinds of legal nonsense. Nerf a weapon? someone files a lawsuit. Add a new weapon? Someone files a lawsuit because their weapon was de facto nerfed. Basically, you resign all control over the game balance, and you lose customers.
B) If you ignore that, companies have the ability to print money and sell it. And if they engage in it directly (a la "there"), nobody's going to be interested. Playing a game that can be "bought" is simply no fun. It might work for certain "religions", but the rest of us just don't like the idea.
So tacit collaboration helps everybody. No need to advertise it, but you cut a deal with a company like IGE, and everybody benefits.
Of course, the real problem would be a game design that rewards tedious menial labour. The game itself should be rewarding, not the prestige gained from doing crap simpler than flipping burgers.
Now, if you're running a virtual currency, and you're looking to keep the power in the hands of producers (and not hoarders), may I suggest a solution from the Federal Prison system?
Establish two currencies: 20 dollar bills and cigarettes are traiditional, but you can use Quatloons and Augustan Denarii if you prefer. At regular intervals, change the exchange rates from 2:1 to 1:2, and back: and make sure that no vendor takes both currencies.
If you want to have some BS magic devices, have their efficacy follow similar cycles.
Dunno folks. It'd be interesting to see who they go after. I read that thing, and I wasn't thinking of Joe Sixpack linking to orbitz.com with a ilttle orbitz logo banner, but rather of someone ripping off their C/C page, with all the other links intact.
But heck, maybe that doesn't make any sense either.
Another possibility is someone slapping together a meta-airline search engine, that runs its own army of accounts and automatically sends requests to Orbitz, Travelocity, Expeida, Opopo (or whatever it is) at once, then returns the data
hey, you know, that sounds like a prtty good Firefox plugin...
I'd have to go through a brick wall head first to even want to listen to that Ashlee Simpsons song. I don't have to lobotomize myself before I'd listen to music on my computer
Of course, you buy something, it's tangible and it's cool. But CDs never really had that feel: they were always small and fragile. Now Vinyl, there's something we all miss.
and
What little training I had seemed to involve code existing in four stages of development, and beta was the second:
Alpha: the phase in the development cycle where code first comes into being. Subsystems are being built, and testing takes place on the that (subsystem) level.
Beta: the phase in the cycle where all subsystems are nominally in place, and testing occurs on the system level; not everything works, and features may be added, but we're looking at the whole code.
Final: features are locked down, the system is tested in the form it intends to be released. I believe, under the influence of someone like Microsoft, this is now referred to as "Release Candidate" stage.
Released: The software has been distributed.
On the other hand, this article implies another notion of software development stages, one that I see applied rather frequently:
Alpha: Testing done in house.
Beta: Product released to a group of testers who aren't in-house QA specialists.
So does someone have the answer? What the hell do these terms mean, and are they useful any more?
1) okay, conceded. Still, keep your eyes on the prize.
2)Security and safety/environmental issues are, as I said, the two issues in which the National Labs are beaten up on. (funny you didn't mention the earthquake fault running through the tritium storage building. That was always my favorite).
3) Yup, in other words, it was a needless bureaucratic system slapped on top "to improve security" that backfired. This is a symptom of overregulation, and not a cry for more regulation. It parallels the "ChemTrack" fiasco of a decade ago: some bright fellow decided to be "proactive" about toxic substances, and devised a tracking system where every toxic and semitoxic substance that came into the laboratories was entered into a computer, given a discrete tracking number and a barcode. When the end user wanted to dispose of said material, instead of chucking it directly into the hazardous waste bin, that person would go into the office, grab a ChemTrack form, fill it out, and attach the barcode.
Now remember, hazardous waste includes things like paint, WD-40, any number of detergents: basically, any chemical you're likely to find in someone's garage. And working in a laboratory, people tend to use a lot of these things. Since we're dealing with an academic environment(=research), there are still some creative people, and they generally don't like being treated like beancounters. So many of those cans of WD-40, white-out, used paintbrushes and the rest ended up in the toxic waste bin without the ChemTrack form being filled out; or with it filled out improperly.
The result? 2 years after it was initiated, the headlines break "Tens of Thousands of toxic chemicals missing at National Laboratories!".
My point is that overregulation can lead to false positives. In geek terms, the systems in place would count every time a website tried to use an ActiveX control on IE as a hacking attempt.
4) I'm gathering you don't do classified research. LANL and LLNL are not UC campuses, and follow an entirely different safety and security regime. If you doubt this, pay a visit to Livermore some day; do some winetasting, and, when you're feeling bold enough, try getting in to either LLNL or Sandia. Or just hang outside the gates and watch them search cars and check badges. And ask an National Laboratory employee about how many insipid warning signs there are (again, classic overregulation mistake akin to what happens with IE: desensitize the user to warning signs).
oh, yeah, that's right. Sandia Labs is only in New Mexico, and not in Livermore
In order for something to be raided, it has to be owned by someone else, and the state has always been an ideal target.
A few things about Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
They're under the direction of the Department of Energy and are managed by the University of California.
Across the street from both one finds Sandia National Laboratories, managed by Martin-Marietta.
Election-year antics with these two labs have become rampant of late: usually, the republicans go for security lapses and the democrats for environmental issues. This is in spite of the fact that the laboratories have a negligable environmental impact (the measuring devices at LLNL to detect toxic releases in the air from the research facility had to be brilliantly engineered to filter out the noise from the freeway 1 mile away, noise which is 1000 times larger than the "damaging environmental releases" they're supposed to detect and help prevent), and have an excellent security record (the "security incidents" are in fact created by failures in the security bureaucracy. If, for example, you have a policy to destroy secret documents after 20 years, and someone slaps a secret-document tracking program on top, suddenly the news reports "tens of thousands of secrets lost").
In effect, these have beome largely political attacks on the Secretary of Energy, a cabinet-level appointment, and through that person, to the president and party in power.
So why the "lax security" during a Republican administration? Those two labs employ something on the order of 15,000 people. THey're managed by the University of California. The University of California has one of the most solvent pension funds in the country. Martin Marietta(or Lockheed Martin, I forget. same company) has long expressed an interest in stretching their management across the street from Sandia to LANL and LLNL; in addition to the money they can make directly from government spending, they'll be free to raid that sweet pension fund.
Of course, I'm just ranting. The Bush administration has set a steadfast policy of protecting the country's resources against corporate raiders.
well, first off, because the principle of non-contradiction reads something like:
The same statement cannot both be true and be false at the same time in the same way.
In this case "A vulnerability that is not discovered is not a vulnerability" does not use "vulnerability" univocally. In first case, "Vulnerability" is not used in absolute, but in a certain sense: "A vulnerability that is not discovered"; that is, a vulnerability in potency. The the second case, VUlnerability is used in an absolute sense.
Compare: "A man who is not yet born is not a man".
"Physically test the laws of physics" -- yes I see how similar those words are, and I conncede the connection. That's why your argument is circular. You don't test a law of physics by physics: no science can prove its own principles. You assume those principles. As for experimental science, you assume that "because something happened 1000 times the same way, it will happen that way for the 1001th time as well". And that statement assumes a whole bunch of other things. Ultimately, there's no way to prove anything outside your own mind is real, just as there's no way to prove the principle of non-contradiction (for you cannot prove as true what states what true is); you just have to be content with saying that, unless you accept these principles, the world is pretty damn absurd. But that doesn't give those principles any extramental being, which is what you seem to be arguing.
And sure, you are vulnerable to high speed bullets, but only because other people, a species to which you belong, have been shot.
"A vulnerability that is undiscovered is not a vulnerability" is not a contradiction in terms, and dictionaries are not, the last time I checked, reliable sources for metaphysics.
According to your logic, a law of Physics exists. I ask you: what kind of existence does it have? What sort of reality do you give to a law of Physics? Laws of Physics do not belong to the sensible world: you can't touch, see, feel, smell, taste or hear one (but merely the words that supposedly convey the idea). Do you posit some sort of Platonic "realm of ideas" where laws of Physics exist? Maybe these exist in a sort of Speusippean hierarchy, with Number having the ultimate reality.
Another way to describe the "vulnerability is not a vulnerability" argument is in terms of actuality and potency. I ask: what is vulnerability?
Vulnerability is the habit of being capable of suffering a wound. (and someone can correct me, but a habit is a passive disposition to receive some actuality).
But, as Aristotle points out, no habit exists before its actualization. We do not have the habit of getting drunk before we get drunk for the first time. Likewise, we are not vulnerable until we are wounded.
And if my arse contains more profound thoughts than other's brains, why shouldn't I reach up there?
Actually, no, that's quite true. A vulnerability that is undiscovered is not a vulnerability. Just as a word (e.g., "miostizr") is not a word until somebody assigns meaning to it.
Of course, someone other than Symantec's friendly competitors may already have discovered the vulnerability. He didn't say "A vulnerability isn't a vulnerability until we discover it".
And, yeah, sure, "A law of Physics isn't a law of Physics until somebody discovers it." After all, if it doesn't help us understand our world, what good is it?
It's a nasty world out there. Google's big business; Blogging's big news: sure most of them are full of dumb crap, trite poetry and junk. But for people searching for up-to-date information, blogs can be quite handy.
For modern companies, the need to manage information flow is only increasing. It's not just lazy slashdotters who would be curious about what goes on inside Google on an operational level. Competitors, investors, thieves, customers, freaks and regulatory agencies are also curious, and none of them share all the interests of the company. It may seem harmless for some idiot to go out and spout seemingly harmless information about the personnel composition of the adsense project. And all those data points may not seem like much, when considered individually. As a whole, however, they constitute a very real vulnerability. Free flow of ideas is a good thing; just as long as capitalism ain't involved.
So they set out with a vague idea of what the game was, basically an "emotional interface", no idea of how to work out the game itself; no run-throughs of what the concept was. They had limited artistic assets, which were essential for an impressionist game, and these were squandered by the shifting scope and requirements of the game. In other words, they didn't have a clear idea at the start, nor a clear execution.
I guess that's why it's a learning experience. "great ideas" are very simple ones, backed up by a bunch of tedious execution.
Heh. THG had a "First Look" three weeks ago. Whatever generates revenue, I suppose.
Dude, I think I've got some of the Plasticsmith's other work in my closet. If you get the 18-inch Acrylic model, he throws in an extra bowl for "Tasting and testing fine tobaccoes".
Combines portability and durability into a classy package. I knew this dude who made his own homemade stand, and it broke right in the middle of a party. his room still smells like bongwater.
So yeah, dude, this guy's stuff for the mac mini will be like killer.
Well, I wouldn't leave administration out either.
The report cites repeated reviews finding highlighting those funding and design issues, yet no action was ever taken on most of it.
Add to that a schedule with effectively zero margin for error, no central organization to manage the disparate groups (or sort out the fights when Martin Baker and Astrium couldn't work things out), and inadequate documentation, and you have a guaranteed disaster.
You can't build a complicated system without command, control and communication. Bad design is the effect, not the cause.
He spoke specifically to this. In fact, he admits to buying machines without Windows on them. The problem is, companies don't buy computers that way. Company procurement follows rules; rules which he is trying to follow.
Nobody every got fired for buying IBM.
...is on the US White Male 14-29 demographic. Give men some credit. We can objectify women in any number of ways beyond gravity-defying boobs and tiny butts. There's a whole section of the population that maintains the height of female aesthetics is expresseed by the term badonkadonk. And there are plenty of fans of a biologically plausible, no-back-pain boob solution out there as well. If your game is so lame you need the resonance supplied by the ultimate in synthetic breasts, a G4 Spot and a waist the likes of which I haven't seen since -- well, okay, I saw one this afternoon at the office, and she was an archaeologist, wearing combat boots no less, but that's neither here nor there.
anyway, the point is that we've hit the point where not all male figures in these things look like the intimidating Testosterone fest of Duke Nukem; so why do the females have to be equally off-putting in their irreal sexuality?
oh yeah, right, 14-29 demographic.
So the solution is simple: require white males under thirty to purchase video games only when escorted by womyn or people of color. Come on guys, it's about the gameplay. If you want to just beat your joystick, teh intardnet awaits, with every kind of objectionable objectification.
For if cooking were art, some chefs would serve motor oil.
err... better not give him any more ideas.