Thanks - yes, I had heard that they receive some public money, which surprised me somewhat. I've never been clear exactly how the public money in VS programming out equation was evaluated.
'm a bit more sympathetic about them being pushed around by the content providers since they're mostly commercial and in fairly dire straights at the moment. But really, the standard excuse of "the providers insist" shouldn't be sufficient for them either.
The BBC argues that content providers expect that DRM be provided. Ignore, for a moment, all other strong arguments against the use of DRM (and against it doing any good anyhow).
The BBC is funded by public money, so they get the opportunity to do stuff without being pushed about by commercial interests - for this reason they are already expected to include programming that is for the benefit of society and the public. I'd say that this is another excellent reason that they should be pressured to take a stand against the erosion of fair use rights. Similarly to certain types of programming, this is too important to leave up to commercial stations - in fact, commercial stations seem likely to push their own DRM agenda based on connections to vested interests.
Fundamentally, the BBC is funded by the public and it ought to limit the extent to which it makes itself and its viewers beholden to commercial interests. If content providers won't play ball, the BBC has the clout (currently one of the only UK broadcasters who are actually doing well) to make them see sense, or do without them and take stuff in-house. If the BBC are going to allow themselves to be directed by private content producers then we might as well just leave it to the commercial broadcasters and save ourselves the money.
"Unlike an old-school chalk talk, professors who use PowerPoint tend to present topics very quickly, leaving little time to digest the visuals or to take learning-reinforcing notes"
Sounds like how my professors used to lecture with printed slides and, to a lesser extent, when writing slides by hand during the lecture. To cover the material, the lectures couldn't really have gone much slower but this can be addressed by providing students with decent printed notes, which all too often were missing or of extremely poor quality. The degree was very educational but to a large extent this was due to the hard work of students in their study time and due to the small group teaching that followed the lectures and attempted to pick up the pieces.
Not fantastic value-for-money given how expensive these courses are - but to some extent, that's what's going to happen if you choose *teaching* roles based on how good at research a professor is. Or for that matter, based on how senior and entrenched in the department and university a professor is. If you're going to pay someone to do something, you ought to have some decent oversight and minimum standards they are required to meet. Universities are not good at this sort of thing in my experience.
EA / Bioware to revolutionize viewing and distribution of paintings and photographs
EA and Bioware have teamed up once again to revolutionize an art form that was previously stagnant and unsatisfactory for consumers - the humble picture. "It's hard to believe that when you purchase a work of creative art, such as a photograph or a picture we still have to cope with an entire picture arriving in our hands or on our screens.", said EA's chief executive "this is really a tremendous amount of information overload for a consumer to process.". EA aims to challenge this situation by bringing lessons learned from their decades in the software industry. "We've developed a new technology, which we call Just-in-time Information Gathering with Self Advertising Workloads or JIGSAW for short. We're breaking down the monolithic 'picture' into bite-sized chunks".
The company's chief market researcher commented "Put simply, our consumers, they demanded a solution to the systematic inefficiencies of the current paradigm. By decomposing what we call the 'viewing experience' into a set of micropayments, we have made it possible for consumers to purchase a variety of upgrade to the basic experience or 'piece'. These upgrades take the form of other 'pieces' which the consumer can use to enhance their viewing experience". As well as the empowering nature of allowing consumers to make repeated credit card payments, the company also expects that different consumers will get more out of the product "Our focus groups show our customers taking a variety of unique approaches to consuming the content. Whereas before they were limited to simply looking at a picture, they can now determine the order in which the 'pieces' are discovered. Some individuals enjoy starting with areas of detail, while others prefer to start with the edges. It's really exciting to see existing content reinterpreted in a new way".
Back in 2009, EA and Bioware amazed the world by successfully producing a game which did not restrict customers to a single purchase on launch day. It seems strange to think of this today but prior to Dragon Age: Origins, customers who had queued for hours on launch day were only able to make one payment when purchasing a video game. Die hard fans who wished to pay more were forced to buy multiple boxed copies of the game, bringing the disadvantages of a second physical disk (sometimes called a 'backup') that could not be lost due to computer error and an unfortunate ability to resell the game when bored of it.
EA's JIGSAW technology will be arriving at art galleries in Fall next year.
I was going to say exactly what you've said, basically. Firstly I'm definitely going to buy the game (for the Xbox 360). And I may buy the DLC if it's worth it. But I won't buy the DLC straight away and I'll consider not buying it at all. The excuse is that the DLC couldn't have been put into the game during time constraints - I say, fair enough, but if you have expansions coming out on the same day of release you are Doing It Wrong. If you deliberately end up with DLC that's ready for release day, you look like a cynical nickel-and-diming businessman - don't do that. If you accidentally end up with DLC that can be ready for release day, consider expanding the scope of the DLC, that way it'll be better value for gamers (though you could even charge more and profit) and it doesn't look really really cheeky. There's nothing that forces them to release DLC at the same time as the retail box.
Whilst I'm sure, based on BioWare's previous record, that it'll be an excellent game and excellent DLC I really want publishers and developers discouraged from making the mental link "DLC = printing money". The equation should be "Good DLC, with reasonable restrictions and decent value for money = happy customers and more profit". If they continue the nickel-and-diming trend, I'll move to playing games I can afford. Which probably means instead of buying the DLC for a single retail game, I can buy three second hand games which will provide me with a more varied and enjoyable experience. Yes, that's right EA, you're encouraging the second hand market - well done.
Seriously guys, it's easy to go "Tut tut, blind people can't possibly play games, what an unreasonable fellow". But the article says *visually impaired*, which does not necessarily mean total blindness. There are phases in between where you can see the computer screen but it'd be nice if the game didn't have to make it really hard to follow what's happening. Are there really as many people here as the posts would indicate who can't see this distinction?
Also: are you the same crowd of people who bitch at Microsoft for releasing OSes that are too bloated to run on your hardware without an upgrade. You *can* at least upgrade your hardware!
Without having seen the demands he made to Sony (as opposed to the rhetoric in the legal proceedings) it's difficult to say how ridiculous they were. It doesn't seem that ridiculous to ask a games manufacturer "Would you consider adopting an accessibility API?", for instance.
Regarding the case in point - if your default-ignore policy had not only created bad will but involved you in a law suit, was that worth the time and money you saved on customer service? Would your shareholders agree?
Many large organizations today seem to use their customer-facing staff solely as a means for getting rid of people who phone up to complain, or to request things or make enquiries. This isn't necessarily the fault of the staff in question, or the intention of the organization. Yet somehow things get structured so that it becomes the function of the support staff. For instance, I suspect that under-staffing the help desk or measuring performance by calls "resolved" as opposed to customers satisfied tends to push things towards a "When customers call, make them go away, otherwise they're stopping us talking to our customers" mode of operation.
The other problem is that it's pretty easy in a large organization (or even a small, highly bureaucratic one) to get into situations where large swathes of problems are "somebody else's responsibility", or likely "nobody in particular". Much as I dislike the idea of a work environment where inappropriate work is dumped on people, or staff are lumped with resolving things they're not responsible for, at the end of the day the buck ought to stop *somewhere*, even if it's just a customer service supervisor writing back. If a customer has a real and legitimate question to which there is *an* answer but there's *nobody* in the organization whose job description allows or requires them to answer it, you're doing something wrong. It's not possible to satisfy all people all of the time but I think most organizations can do a heck of a lot better than they do!
In this instance, the allegation is that Sony ignored requests made of them. Did they ignore them outright, did they fob off the (potential?) customer, or did they make the effort to respond but the gamer didn't like the answer anyhow? Sony may have done everything as well as they possibly could in this case but they should nonetheless evaluate whether engaging more with the gamer in question could have saved them a court case.
Some of the claims in the case could seem a bit dubious but as the article points out, various other companies have at least allowed 3rd parties to develop plugins that assist disabled gamers. So it's not like anybody's saying Sony must develop (for instance) a braille interface to WoW on their own budget.
I was actually coming here to maybe point out the same thing - that (particularly nowadays - blogs are already providing examples of this) the distinction between reporters and ordinary citizens in this regard - even as a concept, when not actually in law - looks pretty bogus. In serious criminal cases I'd say there should perhaps be an obligation to give up information that might help bring the criminal to justice. But for anything else, I just don't see why an individual should have to give up the details of their sources. Whilst it might give rise to some complications to be worked through, I'd expect that this would result in a freer society and eliminate the thorny question of "what is a journalist".
"The announcement comes a few months after Google released and open sourced the NX server."
That's a bit confused... it may just be a typo but it's resulted in a misleading statement. Google released *their* NX server as open source. Previously the FreeNX project had independently created an open source NX server, using libraries provided by NoMachine (inventor of the NX protocol) who provide all of the clever compression stuff from their server as open source libraries.
The summary makes it sound like Google were solely responsible for the existence of an open source NX server, whereas actually I'd say they're "standing on the shoulders of giants (NoMachine), next to some other dude who was already up there (FreeNX)"
Thanks, I may just do that! I know I'm not the only person to be disappointed by the lack of vanilla nethack. Falcon's Eye is nice and all but I really miss the compact xnethack graphics and obviously it's nice to have the option of terminal play for the other weirdos who enjoy that sort of thing;-)
Hopefully this will bear fruit, it arguably is my largest single complaint about 2009.1 on my Eee;-) Although I'm sure I can think of some more good complaints without too much trouble, as with all software.
2009 Spring with the KDE4 desktop has given me an excellent experience on my Eee 701 with 2GB RAM (tried it with 512MB RAM, it was crashy and slow due to out-of-memory, though Mandriva includes a couple of lighter weight desktops which might be worth trying if you don't have KDE as a requirement!).
It works out-of-the-box on Eee 701 with the hardware well-supported without manual fiddling (a few magic function keys don't work, oh well). It looks nice, it's KDE implementation is nice and polished. It's like running a modern desktop OS, really excellent. My main objection is simply that it doesn't have a vanilla (x)nethack package:-(
I'm very excited to see 2010 and will upgrade to it after giving early adopters a chance to shake out any release bugs;-)
I have heard so much about your big list of suspicious people; with so many other people being included I am beginning to feel left out. I'm not a very naughty person but sometimes I wave subversively at CCTV cameras. If it would help, I could also wear a long trenchcoat and shades and carry a briefcase. I've been practicing looking at things through narrowed eyes a lot, so I would probably be quite good at being suspicious.
If you will put me on your special suspicious list, I will return the favour by putting you on my list of suspicious countries. It currently includes every other country in the world, ever - but I'm sure it's still not as long and impressive as your list is.
That's pretty much it, yeah. I've got no idea what the geeks in the lower floors do but, hey, it seems to amuse them. Right now I'm posting from the corporate jet. Or, rather, I'm dictating. Jasper, my Internet Chauffeur is doing the actual posting. He's a great guy, really. Won't do a first post for me, though, something about etiquette - British, like all the best servants.
Gtg anyhow, the Steves are opening another bottle of Bollinger. They're a riot, I love how they pretend not to be friends in real life. Later they're giving me a demo of Windows 9 running on the iPod Thought. Ooops, Jasper, delete that, it's probably secret or something.
I certainly find the viewpoint of the article very appealing - essentially that just being a manager isn't enough to enable you to manage anything you want. That you need to understand what your company does at a highly intimate level to really run it well. Who wants to be pushed around by people whose only qualification is to manage others? What about the real folks at the coalface who know what the business is really like?
Question is - is it true? Certainly appeals to me. But has anyone done a study into this? It'd be interesting to see. Although really, the backgrounds of the CEOs and the records of their companies are out there for all to see. MS under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs - these certainly look like convincing individual cases. What would happen if you analysed the whole computing industry? What about other industries?
I would suggest that to a certain extent a really good manager could manage anything they choose - because a truly good manager will make sure he understands what he's getting into. But even then, everyone has different aptitudes for different things, so there's no way to guarantee that they'd be as skilled in any given job. You can probably adapt to that, as long as you're aware of it and don't assume that your previous experience will carry you. For CEOs, there's perhaps a requirement to be a good general businessman - maybe those skills do transfer well. But I think understanding the business ought to be pretty darn important if you want to run the company *well* as opposed to just keeping it ticking over. I don't think there should be any excuse for appointing a CEO who doesn't, can't or won't understand the business adequately. But hey, I'm not on any company boards nor am I a shareholder in anything *shrug*
It's a GPS60, I believe. But it won't suit everyone - it doesn't have route finding and it's somewhat limited by having a small (non-expandable) storage and a monochrome display. Some of the more expensive outdoorsy models rectify these faults. I never really looked into putting maps on the thing - I assume you can do that even on the GPS60 if they'll fit into storage. I mostly use it for extracting distance / time / speed statistics whilst I'm out and then getting track logs of my journey when I get home (I use it for OpenStreetMap stuff).
I was going to buy online but ended up going to an outdoors shop in town, who gave me a load of advice on receiver and antenna quality that I wouldn't have realised if I'd just purchased from e.g. Amazon. (assuming what they told me was correct of course! My experience with the device and their customer service leaves me no reason to doubt them).
I'll personally replace my outdoors-oriented Garmin when I can get a bicycle-mountable, rucksack-clippable, fully waterproof (i.e. submerge for a significant length of time, not just splashproof), robust and accurate GPS device. That doesn't cost more than I paid for the Garmin in the first place. And can run on AA batteries for long periods of time, so I can swap batteries when they run down.
In fact, I probably still won't replace my Garmin even if they match those features. If I'm trekking around outdoors with the thing, it's nice to know that losing or smashing it won't result in the loss of my phone, address book, PDA, MP3 and video player, camera... I like the idea of having everything available in one device but for some applications it's nicer not to have all my eggs in one valuable (in monetary, information and functionality terms) device.
For stuff like car satnav devices I can see GPS-enabled phones making more of a dent, since the top of a car dashboard is a much friendlier environment for a phone. Moreover it's somewhere you'd probably want a phone anyhow, so you can use it handsfree, listen to music, etc. The really slick car satnav designs are integrated into the dash, though. Given we've already seen ipod docks built into cars, maybe in the future we're looking at a much more full-featured dock that'll connect the phone to audio, dash display, GPS antenna, etc. On the other hand, given computers are cheap and get cheaper, maybe that'll be unnecessary as the car will have bucketloads of integrated computers already.
Why is everyone finding against TPB simultaneously all of a sudden? I understood there had been changes in Swedish law but there was also a verdict from a Dutch court recently so... what gives? Years of little activity then suddenly courts are falling over themselves to rule on it? The courts can only hear cases that are brought to them, of course - but why all these separate cases at the same time?
Argh. I'm not terribly keen on sharing a road with people who are changing tracks / radio stations but it's only a quick button press so I trust you can be sensible about when you do it and hopefully you won't kill yourself or me. But drinking hot liquids whilst driving? Seriously? If you're stopped in traffic with the car in neutral then I guess that's fair enough, maybe you expect that on your commute and so you bring the coffee to give you something to do. But if you're drinking it whilst actually driving - that's less a question of a "a sensible driver can do it safely" and more a way of self-identifying as an unsafe driver. I contend that *by definition* if you think you can drive safely whilst drinking coffee you probably can't drive safely.
Maybe I'm being a little harsh since where I live we have quite a dense city road network and a lot of windy rural roads. It's also very busy. Maybe if I lived in Canada with its wide open spaces I'd think it was less of a problem. Nevertheless, I'd *still* think it's irresponsible to drive whilst drinking coffee (what if you met an animal on the road?) and as soon as you get into an urban area it's just ridiculous and irresponsible. Drinking hot drinks is worse than drinking water (which would still be bad if you took hands off the controls) since you will instinctively not drop it into your lap, even if there's an on-road emergency.
If anyone's thinking "I can do this safely because I'm an above-average driver"... Welcome to the 99.99999...% of drivers who believe they're above average!
The fact that people overestimate their skills in this way is why intrusive legislation like this becomes necessary. I'd be much more in favour of leaving this matters to individual judgment if people were able to perceive their own failings accurately. Next time you get cut up, think to yourself "maybe I should have driven more defensively" and strike a blow for freedom of choice.
That's basically what I've done, although in my case it's also because my current house doesn't have an aerial to receive terrestrial broadcasts and I don't want to pay for a cable subscription. But - don't get rid of your TV, plug your laptop into it so that it's just like watching TV but without the license fee:->
The current government is obsessed with control and can't resist the urge to just poke at anything they can. The TV license isn't an example of this government's craziness, it goes back waaaaay longer. I don't mind paying the TV license, since the BBC is really very good. It's pretty likely that most people will use the BBC, so they'll get their money's worth (not that that's really sufficient excuse for a bizarre TV taxation system!). What I - and everybody else - do mind is the aggressive and intimidatory way license fee collection is done. I think the TV licensing people have recently been told they have to tone things down a bit but they are still really annoying.
I'm hoping if we get a change of government next year (and, barring something extraordinary happening, this seems likely) that they'll be able to resist the urge to have total control of society for at least a little while! The Conservatives (other main party) say they'll scrap plans for a national ID card. I'm skeptical, if the Civil Service is already committed to it, whether it will go away forever. But hopefully a delay will keep us safe for a little longer - and make the thing more likely to die of old age before it's rolled out.
Over the past decade or so the situation here (as I perceive it) has changed from "Ooooh, Patriot Act, scary stuff. The US is becoming very totalitarian. Glad we live in the UK." to "Help, the government wants to control every aspect of my life!". The UK used to operate sanely in practice, despite lots of archaisms like having an official religion, a monarchy, a TV tax, etc. Now the UK is going pretty insane - and interestingly, it has nothing to do with those other oddities, they're mostly just introducing new oddities at a high rate.
That said, depending on your sources you shouldn't necessarily read too much into the robo-trashcan scenario depending on where you read it. Certain news sources (Daily Mail is one in particular!) have an obsession with trashcans. It is true, however, that a few local councils (i.e. town administration) have used anti-terrorism laws to spy on people for stupid stuff like determining what school district they live in and whether they're doing the trash correctly (the latter might just be hyperbole on my part but I think it might actually have happened anyhow).
Otherwise maybe it's time to look at moving to a saner country... if there is one:-S
The BBC is a really weird organisation. It's a state-run TV channel, which usually we assume means "propaganda mouthpiece". The BBC is set up in a peculiar way whereby the state collects the money for them but the government is not allowed (in theory) control over the BBC itself. The BBC's charter has various requirements to show balance in political reporting and the government is denied direct mechanisms to interfere in editorial decisions. This generally works pretty well and the BBC is widely considered a fairly accurate, relatively unbiased news source.
This independence can fall down a bit; when the BBC aired allegations that the government had exaggerated evidence in support of the Iraq war, a whole complicated scandal resulted including the suicide of the civil servant who made the allegations (after he was basically abandoned by his department and hounded by the media). The government set up an enquiry called the Hutton Report, which viewed a lot of evidence (including a draft where a political advisor / spin doctor suggested changing "may have weapons of mass destruction" to "has weapons of mass destruction") and came to the conclusion that nobody was really at fault but the BBC should have done better. A bit mystifying to many of us. Anyhow, some say that the BBC has been a bit more cautious about government criticism since then. Nevertheless it (appears to) remain a fairly comprehensive and unbiased source, compared to many of the other major players in news.
Be careful. They might start trying to pull money from people that have already paid the "taxes" (there is some piece of semantics that makes the tv license not quite a tax). For instance dvds of bbc shows aren't noticebly cheaper than other channels despite the bbc's funding model. It's possible that they might take this route with online content if charging becomes normal for other channels.
Indeed. I'd actually say that DVDs of BBC shows (at least the popular ones) are more expensive than those from other channels, given the amount of content. UK series tend to be waaaay shorter than US series (and lower budget per episode, often) and yet somehow I'd be roughly looking at paying the same price for a series of Dr Who as for a US series. Dr Who is good but it's not good enough for me to pay that much, so I never buy any.
Also, I do object to the tv license, mostly because of their marketing department. Junkmail is never welcome but theirs often contains borderline threats. They also have a nasty habbit of sending salesmen to people who ask not to be spammed.
I've heard it alleged that the BBC don't have direct control over the license collection people. But regardless, the TV licensing people behave disgracefully on a continual basis. For those outside the UK who might be interested, the procedure is basically:
If TV Licensing think you might have a TV they will write to you and tell you to buy a license. If you ignore them they will write again. And again. And then they'll start warning you in writing that you may be taken to court. And they threaten to send an inspector round to see if you are watching TV. And eventually they will send an inspector around to check. If you buy a television, I think *perhaps* TV licensing sometimes get notified of the purchase address so they can update their database but I'd have to check that factoid.
You don't have to have a TV license to own an operate a TV but you do have to have it to watch live TV programmes. Even if you never ever watch the BBC, which is where most of the license money goes (which is how come we get to watch programmes for free on the iPlayer - already paid for by license fees - although somehow we're not allowed access to shows for more than about a week after broadcast).
There was a GSOC project to port it to Linux, don't know how far that got. Matt Dillon has said, I think, that he separated most Dfly-specific interfacing out reasonably cleanly when he was writing the filesystem in the first place.
It's a fork of FreeBSD 4.x on which they've spent years refactoring the kernel (and updating the userland, come to that). The VFS interface has had a lot of refactoring so that they can pull tricks other OSes aren't well suited for. As such it's now, as I understand it, really quite different from the norm and certainly not shared with the other BSDs.
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Thanks - yes, I had heard that they receive some public money, which surprised me somewhat. I've never been clear exactly how the public money in VS programming out equation was evaluated.
'm a bit more sympathetic about them being pushed around by the content providers since they're mostly commercial and in fairly dire straights at the moment. But really, the standard excuse of "the providers insist" shouldn't be sufficient for them either.
The BBC argues that content providers expect that DRM be provided. Ignore, for a moment, all other strong arguments against the use of DRM (and against it doing any good anyhow).
The BBC is funded by public money, so they get the opportunity to do stuff without being pushed about by commercial interests - for this reason they are already expected to include programming that is for the benefit of society and the public. I'd say that this is another excellent reason that they should be pressured to take a stand against the erosion of fair use rights. Similarly to certain types of programming, this is too important to leave up to commercial stations - in fact, commercial stations seem likely to push their own DRM agenda based on connections to vested interests.
Fundamentally, the BBC is funded by the public and it ought to limit the extent to which it makes itself and its viewers beholden to commercial interests. If content providers won't play ball, the BBC has the clout (currently one of the only UK broadcasters who are actually doing well) to make them see sense, or do without them and take stuff in-house. If the BBC are going to allow themselves to be directed by private content producers then we might as well just leave it to the commercial broadcasters and save ourselves the money.
"Unlike an old-school chalk talk, professors who use PowerPoint tend to present topics very quickly, leaving little time to digest the visuals or to take learning-reinforcing notes"
Sounds like how my professors used to lecture with printed slides and, to a lesser extent, when writing slides by hand during the lecture. To cover the material, the lectures couldn't really have gone much slower but this can be addressed by providing students with decent printed notes, which all too often were missing or of extremely poor quality. The degree was very educational but to a large extent this was due to the hard work of students in their study time and due to the small group teaching that followed the lectures and attempted to pick up the pieces.
Not fantastic value-for-money given how expensive these courses are - but to some extent, that's what's going to happen if you choose *teaching* roles based on how good at research a professor is. Or for that matter, based on how senior and entrenched in the department and university a professor is. If you're going to pay someone to do something, you ought to have some decent oversight and minimum standards they are required to meet. Universities are not good at this sort of thing in my experience.
EA / Bioware to revolutionize viewing and distribution of paintings and photographs
EA and Bioware have teamed up once again to revolutionize an art form that was previously stagnant and unsatisfactory for consumers - the humble picture. "It's hard to believe that when you purchase a work of creative art, such as a photograph or a picture we still have to cope with an entire picture arriving in our hands or on our screens.", said EA's chief executive "this is really a tremendous amount of information overload for a consumer to process.". EA aims to challenge this situation by bringing lessons learned from their decades in the software industry. "We've developed a new technology, which we call Just-in-time Information Gathering with Self Advertising Workloads or JIGSAW for short. We're breaking down the monolithic 'picture' into bite-sized chunks".
The company's chief market researcher commented "Put simply, our consumers, they demanded a solution to the systematic inefficiencies of the current paradigm. By decomposing what we call the 'viewing experience' into a set of micropayments, we have made it possible for consumers to purchase a variety of upgrade to the basic experience or 'piece'. These upgrades take the form of other 'pieces' which the consumer can use to enhance their viewing experience". As well as the empowering nature of allowing consumers to make repeated credit card payments, the company also expects that different consumers will get more out of the product "Our focus groups show our customers taking a variety of unique approaches to consuming the content. Whereas before they were limited to simply looking at a picture, they can now determine the order in which the 'pieces' are discovered. Some individuals enjoy starting with areas of detail, while others prefer to start with the edges. It's really exciting to see existing content reinterpreted in a new way".
Back in 2009, EA and Bioware amazed the world by successfully producing a game which did not restrict customers to a single purchase on launch day. It seems strange to think of this today but prior to Dragon Age: Origins, customers who had queued for hours on launch day were only able to make one payment when purchasing a video game. Die hard fans who wished to pay more were forced to buy multiple boxed copies of the game, bringing the disadvantages of a second physical disk (sometimes called a 'backup') that could not be lost due to computer error and an unfortunate ability to resell the game when bored of it.
EA's JIGSAW technology will be arriving at art galleries in Fall next year.
I was going to say exactly what you've said, basically. Firstly I'm definitely going to buy the game (for the Xbox 360). And I may buy the DLC if it's worth it. But I won't buy the DLC straight away and I'll consider not buying it at all. The excuse is that the DLC couldn't have been put into the game during time constraints - I say, fair enough, but if you have expansions coming out on the same day of release you are Doing It Wrong. If you deliberately end up with DLC that's ready for release day, you look like a cynical nickel-and-diming businessman - don't do that. If you accidentally end up with DLC that can be ready for release day, consider expanding the scope of the DLC, that way it'll be better value for gamers (though you could even charge more and profit) and it doesn't look really really cheeky. There's nothing that forces them to release DLC at the same time as the retail box.
Whilst I'm sure, based on BioWare's previous record, that it'll be an excellent game and excellent DLC I really want publishers and developers discouraged from making the mental link "DLC = printing money". The equation should be "Good DLC, with reasonable restrictions and decent value for money = happy customers and more profit". If they continue the nickel-and-diming trend, I'll move to playing games I can afford. Which probably means instead of buying the DLC for a single retail game, I can buy three second hand games which will provide me with a more varied and enjoyable experience. Yes, that's right EA, you're encouraging the second hand market - well done.
There's a direct link to the Penny Arcade strip here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/6/ (nb. contains profanity, as you'd expect from PA)
Also, Tycho's take on the situation is here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/11/6/
Seriously guys, it's easy to go "Tut tut, blind people can't possibly play games, what an unreasonable fellow". But the article says *visually impaired*, which does not necessarily mean total blindness. There are phases in between where you can see the computer screen but it'd be nice if the game didn't have to make it really hard to follow what's happening. Are there really as many people here as the posts would indicate who can't see this distinction?
Also: are you the same crowd of people who bitch at Microsoft for releasing OSes that are too bloated to run on your hardware without an upgrade. You *can* at least upgrade your hardware!
Without having seen the demands he made to Sony (as opposed to the rhetoric in the legal proceedings) it's difficult to say how ridiculous they were. It doesn't seem that ridiculous to ask a games manufacturer "Would you consider adopting an accessibility API?", for instance.
Regarding the case in point - if your default-ignore policy had not only created bad will but involved you in a law suit, was that worth the time and money you saved on customer service? Would your shareholders agree?
Many large organizations today seem to use their customer-facing staff solely as a means for getting rid of people who phone up to complain, or to request things or make enquiries. This isn't necessarily the fault of the staff in question, or the intention of the organization. Yet somehow things get structured so that it becomes the function of the support staff. For instance, I suspect that under-staffing the help desk or measuring performance by calls "resolved" as opposed to customers satisfied tends to push things towards a "When customers call, make them go away, otherwise they're stopping us talking to our customers" mode of operation.
The other problem is that it's pretty easy in a large organization (or even a small, highly bureaucratic one) to get into situations where large swathes of problems are "somebody else's responsibility", or likely "nobody in particular". Much as I dislike the idea of a work environment where inappropriate work is dumped on people, or staff are lumped with resolving things they're not responsible for, at the end of the day the buck ought to stop *somewhere*, even if it's just a customer service supervisor writing back. If a customer has a real and legitimate question to which there is *an* answer but there's *nobody* in the organization whose job description allows or requires them to answer it, you're doing something wrong. It's not possible to satisfy all people all of the time but I think most organizations can do a heck of a lot better than they do!
In this instance, the allegation is that Sony ignored requests made of them. Did they ignore them outright, did they fob off the (potential?) customer, or did they make the effort to respond but the gamer didn't like the answer anyhow? Sony may have done everything as well as they possibly could in this case but they should nonetheless evaluate whether engaging more with the gamer in question could have saved them a court case.
Some of the claims in the case could seem a bit dubious but as the article points out, various other companies have at least allowed 3rd parties to develop plugins that assist disabled gamers. So it's not like anybody's saying Sony must develop (for instance) a braille interface to WoW on their own budget.
I was actually coming here to maybe point out the same thing - that (particularly nowadays - blogs are already providing examples of this) the distinction between reporters and ordinary citizens in this regard - even as a concept, when not actually in law - looks pretty bogus. In serious criminal cases I'd say there should perhaps be an obligation to give up information that might help bring the criminal to justice. But for anything else, I just don't see why an individual should have to give up the details of their sources. Whilst it might give rise to some complications to be worked through, I'd expect that this would result in a freer society and eliminate the thorny question of "what is a journalist".
"The announcement comes a few months after Google released and open sourced the NX server."
That's a bit confused... it may just be a typo but it's resulted in a misleading statement. Google released *their* NX server as open source. Previously the FreeNX project had independently created an open source NX server, using libraries provided by NoMachine (inventor of the NX protocol) who provide all of the clever compression stuff from their server as open source libraries.
The summary makes it sound like Google were solely responsible for the existence of an open source NX server, whereas actually I'd say they're "standing on the shoulders of giants (NoMachine), next to some other dude who was already up there (FreeNX)"
Thanks, I may just do that! I know I'm not the only person to be disappointed by the lack of vanilla nethack. Falcon's Eye is nice and all but I really miss the compact xnethack graphics and obviously it's nice to have the option of terminal play for the other weirdos who enjoy that sort of thing ;-)
Hopefully this will bear fruit, it arguably is my largest single complaint about 2009.1 on my Eee ;-) Although I'm sure I can think of some more good complaints without too much trouble, as with all software.
2009 Spring with the KDE4 desktop has given me an excellent experience on my Eee 701 with 2GB RAM (tried it with 512MB RAM, it was crashy and slow due to out-of-memory, though Mandriva includes a couple of lighter weight desktops which might be worth trying if you don't have KDE as a requirement!).
It works out-of-the-box on Eee 701 with the hardware well-supported without manual fiddling (a few magic function keys don't work, oh well). It looks nice, it's KDE implementation is nice and polished. It's like running a modern desktop OS, really excellent. My main objection is simply that it doesn't have a vanilla (x)nethack package :-(
I'm very excited to see 2010 and will upgrade to it after giving early adopters a chance to shake out any release bugs ;-)
Dear US Authorities,
I have heard so much about your big list of suspicious people; with so many other people being included I am beginning to feel left out. I'm not a very naughty person but sometimes I wave subversively at CCTV cameras. If it would help, I could also wear a long trenchcoat and shades and carry a briefcase. I've been practicing looking at things through narrowed eyes a lot, so I would probably be quite good at being suspicious.
If you will put me on your special suspicious list, I will return the favour by putting you on my list of suspicious countries. It currently includes every other country in the world, ever - but I'm sure it's still not as long and impressive as your list is.
Love and hugs,
Lemming Mark
I would have said that that meaning of "bogus" is also a popular UK usage (conceivably due to American influence but still...).
That's pretty much it, yeah. I've got no idea what the geeks in the lower floors do but, hey, it seems to amuse them. Right now I'm posting from the corporate jet. Or, rather, I'm dictating. Jasper, my Internet Chauffeur is doing the actual posting. He's a great guy, really. Won't do a first post for me, though, something about etiquette - British, like all the best servants.
Gtg anyhow, the Steves are opening another bottle of Bollinger. They're a riot, I love how they pretend not to be friends in real life. Later they're giving me a demo of Windows 9 running on the iPod Thought. Ooops, Jasper, delete that, it's probably secret or something.
I certainly find the viewpoint of the article very appealing - essentially that just being a manager isn't enough to enable you to manage anything you want. That you need to understand what your company does at a highly intimate level to really run it well. Who wants to be pushed around by people whose only qualification is to manage others? What about the real folks at the coalface who know what the business is really like?
Question is - is it true? Certainly appeals to me. But has anyone done a study into this? It'd be interesting to see. Although really, the backgrounds of the CEOs and the records of their companies are out there for all to see. MS under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs - these certainly look like convincing individual cases. What would happen if you analysed the whole computing industry? What about other industries?
I would suggest that to a certain extent a really good manager could manage anything they choose - because a truly good manager will make sure he understands what he's getting into. But even then, everyone has different aptitudes for different things, so there's no way to guarantee that they'd be as skilled in any given job. You can probably adapt to that, as long as you're aware of it and don't assume that your previous experience will carry you. For CEOs, there's perhaps a requirement to be a good general businessman - maybe those skills do transfer well. But I think understanding the business ought to be pretty darn important if you want to run the company *well* as opposed to just keeping it ticking over. I don't think there should be any excuse for appointing a CEO who doesn't, can't or won't understand the business adequately. But hey, I'm not on any company boards nor am I a shareholder in anything *shrug*
It's a GPS60, I believe. But it won't suit everyone - it doesn't have route finding and it's somewhat limited by having a small (non-expandable) storage and a monochrome display. Some of the more expensive outdoorsy models rectify these faults. I never really looked into putting maps on the thing - I assume you can do that even on the GPS60 if they'll fit into storage. I mostly use it for extracting distance / time / speed statistics whilst I'm out and then getting track logs of my journey when I get home (I use it for OpenStreetMap stuff).
I was going to buy online but ended up going to an outdoors shop in town, who gave me a load of advice on receiver and antenna quality that I wouldn't have realised if I'd just purchased from e.g. Amazon. (assuming what they told me was correct of course! My experience with the device and their customer service leaves me no reason to doubt them).
I'll personally replace my outdoors-oriented Garmin when I can get a bicycle-mountable, rucksack-clippable, fully waterproof (i.e. submerge for a significant length of time, not just splashproof), robust and accurate GPS device. That doesn't cost more than I paid for the Garmin in the first place. And can run on AA batteries for long periods of time, so I can swap batteries when they run down.
In fact, I probably still won't replace my Garmin even if they match those features. If I'm trekking around outdoors with the thing, it's nice to know that losing or smashing it won't result in the loss of my phone, address book, PDA, MP3 and video player, camera ... I like the idea of having everything available in one device but for some applications it's nicer not to have all my eggs in one valuable (in monetary, information and functionality terms) device.
For stuff like car satnav devices I can see GPS-enabled phones making more of a dent, since the top of a car dashboard is a much friendlier environment for a phone. Moreover it's somewhere you'd probably want a phone anyhow, so you can use it handsfree, listen to music, etc. The really slick car satnav designs are integrated into the dash, though. Given we've already seen ipod docks built into cars, maybe in the future we're looking at a much more full-featured dock that'll connect the phone to audio, dash display, GPS antenna, etc. On the other hand, given computers are cheap and get cheaper, maybe that'll be unnecessary as the car will have bucketloads of integrated computers already.
Why is everyone finding against TPB simultaneously all of a sudden? I understood there had been changes in Swedish law but there was also a verdict from a Dutch court recently so ... what gives? Years of little activity then suddenly courts are falling over themselves to rule on it? The courts can only hear cases that are brought to them, of course - but why all these separate cases at the same time?
Argh. I'm not terribly keen on sharing a road with people who are changing tracks / radio stations but it's only a quick button press so I trust you can be sensible about when you do it and hopefully you won't kill yourself or me. But drinking hot liquids whilst driving? Seriously? If you're stopped in traffic with the car in neutral then I guess that's fair enough, maybe you expect that on your commute and so you bring the coffee to give you something to do. But if you're drinking it whilst actually driving - that's less a question of a "a sensible driver can do it safely" and more a way of self-identifying as an unsafe driver. I contend that *by definition* if you think you can drive safely whilst drinking coffee you probably can't drive safely.
Maybe I'm being a little harsh since where I live we have quite a dense city road network and a lot of windy rural roads. It's also very busy. Maybe if I lived in Canada with its wide open spaces I'd think it was less of a problem. Nevertheless, I'd *still* think it's irresponsible to drive whilst drinking coffee (what if you met an animal on the road?) and as soon as you get into an urban area it's just ridiculous and irresponsible. Drinking hot drinks is worse than drinking water (which would still be bad if you took hands off the controls) since you will instinctively not drop it into your lap, even if there's an on-road emergency.
If anyone's thinking "I can do this safely because I'm an above-average driver"... Welcome to the 99.99999...% of drivers who believe they're above average!
The fact that people overestimate their skills in this way is why intrusive legislation like this becomes necessary. I'd be much more in favour of leaving this matters to individual judgment if people were able to perceive their own failings accurately. Next time you get cut up, think to yourself "maybe I should have driven more defensively" and strike a blow for freedom of choice.
That's basically what I've done, although in my case it's also because my current house doesn't have an aerial to receive terrestrial broadcasts and I don't want to pay for a cable subscription. But - don't get rid of your TV, plug your laptop into it so that it's just like watching TV but without the license fee :->
The current government is obsessed with control and can't resist the urge to just poke at anything they can. The TV license isn't an example of this government's craziness, it goes back waaaaay longer. I don't mind paying the TV license, since the BBC is really very good. It's pretty likely that most people will use the BBC, so they'll get their money's worth (not that that's really sufficient excuse for a bizarre TV taxation system!). What I - and everybody else - do mind is the aggressive and intimidatory way license fee collection is done. I think the TV licensing people have recently been told they have to tone things down a bit but they are still really annoying.
I'm hoping if we get a change of government next year (and, barring something extraordinary happening, this seems likely) that they'll be able to resist the urge to have total control of society for at least a little while! The Conservatives (other main party) say they'll scrap plans for a national ID card. I'm skeptical, if the Civil Service is already committed to it, whether it will go away forever. But hopefully a delay will keep us safe for a little longer - and make the thing more likely to die of old age before it's rolled out.
Over the past decade or so the situation here (as I perceive it) has changed from "Ooooh, Patriot Act, scary stuff. The US is becoming very totalitarian. Glad we live in the UK." to "Help, the government wants to control every aspect of my life!". The UK used to operate sanely in practice, despite lots of archaisms like having an official religion, a monarchy, a TV tax, etc. Now the UK is going pretty insane - and interestingly, it has nothing to do with those other oddities, they're mostly just introducing new oddities at a high rate.
That said, depending on your sources you shouldn't necessarily read too much into the robo-trashcan scenario depending on where you read it. Certain news sources (Daily Mail is one in particular!) have an obsession with trashcans. It is true, however, that a few local councils (i.e. town administration) have used anti-terrorism laws to spy on people for stupid stuff like determining what school district they live in and whether they're doing the trash correctly (the latter might just be hyperbole on my part but I think it might actually have happened anyhow).
Otherwise maybe it's time to look at moving to a saner country... if there is one :-S
The BBC is a really weird organisation. It's a state-run TV channel, which usually we assume means "propaganda mouthpiece". The BBC is set up in a peculiar way whereby the state collects the money for them but the government is not allowed (in theory) control over the BBC itself. The BBC's charter has various requirements to show balance in political reporting and the government is denied direct mechanisms to interfere in editorial decisions. This generally works pretty well and the BBC is widely considered a fairly accurate, relatively unbiased news source.
This independence can fall down a bit; when the BBC aired allegations that the government had exaggerated evidence in support of the Iraq war, a whole complicated scandal resulted including the suicide of the civil servant who made the allegations (after he was basically abandoned by his department and hounded by the media). The government set up an enquiry called the Hutton Report, which viewed a lot of evidence (including a draft where a political advisor / spin doctor suggested changing "may have weapons of mass destruction" to "has weapons of mass destruction") and came to the conclusion that nobody was really at fault but the BBC should have done better. A bit mystifying to many of us. Anyhow, some say that the BBC has been a bit more cautious about government criticism since then. Nevertheless it (appears to) remain a fairly comprehensive and unbiased source, compared to many of the other major players in news.
Be careful. They might start trying to pull money from people that have already paid the "taxes" (there is some piece of semantics that makes the tv license not quite a tax). For instance dvds of bbc shows aren't noticebly cheaper than other channels despite the bbc's funding model. It's possible that they might take this route with online content if charging becomes normal for other channels.
Indeed. I'd actually say that DVDs of BBC shows (at least the popular ones) are more expensive than those from other channels, given the amount of content. UK series tend to be waaaay shorter than US series (and lower budget per episode, often) and yet somehow I'd be roughly looking at paying the same price for a series of Dr Who as for a US series. Dr Who is good but it's not good enough for me to pay that much, so I never buy any.
Also, I do object to the tv license, mostly because of their marketing department. Junkmail is never welcome but theirs often contains borderline threats. They also have a nasty habbit of sending salesmen to people who ask not to be spammed.
I've heard it alleged that the BBC don't have direct control over the license collection people. But regardless, the TV licensing people behave disgracefully on a continual basis. For those outside the UK who might be interested, the procedure is basically:
If TV Licensing think you might have a TV they will write to you and tell you to buy a license. If you ignore them they will write again. And again. And then they'll start warning you in writing that you may be taken to court. And they threaten to send an inspector round to see if you are watching TV. And eventually they will send an inspector around to check. If you buy a television, I think *perhaps* TV licensing sometimes get notified of the purchase address so they can update their database but I'd have to check that factoid.
You don't have to have a TV license to own an operate a TV but you do have to have it to watch live TV programmes. Even if you never ever watch the BBC, which is where most of the license money goes (which is how come we get to watch programmes for free on the iPlayer - already paid for by license fees - although somehow we're not allowed access to shows for more than about a week after broadcast).
There was a GSOC project to port it to Linux, don't know how far that got. Matt Dillon has said, I think, that he separated most Dfly-specific interfacing out reasonably cleanly when he was writing the filesystem in the first place.
It's a fork of FreeBSD 4.x on which they've spent years refactoring the kernel (and updating the userland, come to that). The VFS interface has had a lot of refactoring so that they can pull tricks other OSes aren't well suited for. As such it's now, as I understand it, really quite different from the norm and certainly not shared with the other BSDs.