They put a product placement (Reeboks) on a bob-omb. Right before it exploded. Those four seconds were worth excusing the rest of the excruciatingly bad movie ("Trust the fungus!"). Granted, I don't know how effective the message was -- "Forget those Nikes, kids, who wants to be like a basketball star? You want to be like a suicide bomber, don't ya?" -- but I enjoyed it all the same.
Sorry, ex-English teacher, had to say something. (Sidenote: always nice to see an old spelling mistake in a new word. I see far too much of "concieve" and "beleive" and not nearly enough "siezing". Of course, that is because I don't typically teach children older than middle school, and they don't have much call to say "seizure" unless it is in the context "Spelling nearly gives me a seizure".)
... not on the scale that Sony needs. Look at how squeaky-freaking-clean Nintendo, full of such racy fare as Nintendogs and Brain Training, is dominating the sales charts. My friend looked at the Famitsu Top 30 a few weeks (?) ago -- 4 games, FOUR, were on a non-Nintendo system. Where are the hentai games? Answer: sitting in some store in Akihabara serving a very niche audience, the very existence of which embarasses people and which is not enough to sustain a multi-national like Sony. Take a look at Microsoft, with She Kicks High and their other various "We're edgy and sexy but not porn" marketing moves, for how that is likely to play out in America: sell well to hormone-fueled teenagers (if you marry it to a good game), the core gaming market already, but not move a blue ocean like Nintendo is doing.
And for definition of the word "flat" that means "well, sort of spheroid", the world is indeed flat. This whole stupid squabble isn't about Pluto, its about the word "planet". You know what? I don't care what planet means. I don't care if you can consistently differentiate moons from planets or not. It will never, ever, ever impact my life. When my kid takes astronomy in school I will tell him "Son, here are the list of nine really big rocks which you need to learn to get to the next grade. Get started." Because that is all a planet is -- a big rock, which is special because we traditionally say it is. Whats the difference between a mountain and a hill? The mountain is labeled Mountain on the map, not hill -- its a big important rock, not like that everyday garden variety rock next door.
Astronomy, by the way, is a waste of classtime for science. Its studied purely for aesthetic reasons, always has been ("Ahh, the Heavens, they're so pretty the gods must have made them... and look, they obey convenient mathematical properties too!"), but you can find just as much aesthetic beauty in biology or chemistry or geology for that matter, and any one of these actually has practical applications. Not that any kid is likely to ever need to know the difference between metamorphic and igneous rock, but they will at some point come into physical contact with both of them, which is a heck of a lot more than you can say about Pluto/Eris. Astronomy as I was taught it was "Literature enjoyment of sci-fi novels", where they teach you to disregard everything you will ever learn about physics, math, and economics and pretend that you will, in your lifetime, see thriving and productive human colonies on celestial bodies which we know to be big, barren, worthless rocks.
... but what was Hitler playing? Ban starving artists, save the world!
More constructive advice: economies where young folks can actually get hired might put a dent in that wave of youth crime. I doubt you'll find that many of the 300 cars which will get burned in France tonight were torched by kids with jobs. Thats the liberal part of me talking. The conservative part of me adds that you'll want to figure out how to assimilate more of those immigrants, because I doubt that many of the cars are being burned by boys with names like Jacques or Pierre.
Capsule summary: Like the name suggests, it creates bingo cards, and that is all. At least, that is how most computer programmers perceive the problem, and that is why Bingo Card Creator is in use in a couple hundred classrooms and bingo-cards sees about as many downloads in a year as my free trial sees in a mediocre week.
Programmers hate writing boring code, which is one of the reasons why Ruby on Rails is so phenomenally popular. Printing logic is a good example. There are few things in life which are more boring than getting text to be properly sized in a grid on an arbitrary printer, without crowding the grid lines. Roughly 1/3 of the LOC and 90% of the complexity of my program is making printing pretty and easy enough for your grandmother to do it. The writer of bingo-cards, on the other hand, decided to punt on this: seeing as how many browsers have perfectly good printing routines already, he just exports to HTML and then you can print the resulting files yourself. Simple, right? Well, not to put a fine a point on it, while that is a great choice for the programmer it is a terrible, terrible choice for the user... and there are users out there who *don't know how* to print an arbitrary file in the file system. Trust me, I answer emails from them on a weekly basis.
Another example: aesthetics. My downloads doubled the day I replaced some old freeware new/open/save/print icons (which looked, eh, lets call them "utilitarian") with the big, attractive stock icons you now see on my screenshots. Look at Apple: design is a feature! bingo-cards' design is overly complicated and aesthetically unpleasant. If you can get it to run on a Windows box* take a looksie -- the main interface has several dozen controls on it and will overwhelm many users.
* The install blows up on some systems. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Support: If you mail support@iprintedmydomainabove.com, you'll always get someone happy to help you. If there were hypothetically a mailing list for bingo-cards, most of the technically non-adept teachers asking it for help would be told to RTFM and go away. (Typical support request: "help i cant print. Thanks, Suzy") Folks have been terribly treated by the software industry, and many of them actively fear software. They have been made to think that its both natural when something goes wrong and that, by the way, when something goes wrong it is their fault. I treat every emailer with respect and when Suzy can't print thats because I clearly haven't made it easy enough yet.
Marketing: I know there is a bit of scorn among some in the OSS community for this, but hey, technically superior programs do not always win... and thats a good thing. bingo-cards, for example, has much worse performance in search engines than I do despite the fact that SourceForge has PageRank out the yin-yang and I do not. The main reason is that I actually took the time to write in comprehensible English about how you can use my program to (fill in the blank), and that nobody ever did this for bingo-cards. Documentation adds value to the user! (So do screenshots! And websites which don't make you search for the "What the heck do I need to download to get this running on a Dell?" button.)
"OSS is a great idea because you can have students and teachers reprogram it." Yeaaaaah, you get right to that. My guess is that most elementary English teachers think that programming is similar to papermaking: fascinating that people can do it, truly a worthwhile skill, but just give me something to let me get back on track for the lesson plan because I have 10 kids here who aren't reading at grade level yet. They don't want to spend hours of their acutely limited time hacking any more than they want to physically transform pulp to paper so that they ca
I can sympathize with the view that, say, Brokeback Pirates of the 300 Trojan Gladiators or the latest EminBrittneyBoys creation is not high art, and perhaps not worth $20 in some abstract aesthetic sense. But you know? Given the options of either parting with $20 or being the one kid at school who hasn't heard Oops I Dropped My Knickers Again, large numbers of people consistently choose "Pay $20, get junk". The capitalist in me says, yep, that does indeed demonstrate that for these people the valuation of junk is greater than or equal to $20.
Would folks pay less if there were a free market in music?
There *is* a free market in music -- there isn't a government body out there stopping you from making your own, you can buy it from anyone you like, there are hundreds of thousands of suppliers, and you can get terabytes of the stuff for nothing. Its that "free market in OTHER PEOPLE'S music" that doesn't exist. You, too, can use cheaply available microphones and recording software with low-cut outfits and nonexistent knickers to simulate a talentless hack, or you can buy from a local (or remote!) musician who already specializes in doing it (preferably with knickers). But, given the choice between popular hacks and unknown hacks, some folks like popular. That, by definition, establishes that popular music has value to them, despite any number of aesthetic arguments you might have against it.
I would much rather leave as much as possible about computers to people who actually KNOW computers rather than to the underinformed and woefully overconfident junior staffers of figureheads who think that the Internet is a series of tubes. (Legislators do not write legislation. Their staff and aides write legislation. The legislator reads a summary prepared for him which, on a good day, actually explains what the bill does.)
Darn few people in Texas know the business of computers better than Dell.
>> For less than we've spent on the Iraq war, we *could have had* a constellation of space solar power satellites, and the lifting infrastructure to ensure access to space. >>
For less than the price we spend on one shuttle mission, we could have had a constellation of satellites which are actually useful. Lifting infrastructure is a major challenge for the space program, but the bigger challenge is that there is no purpose to the space program. Here is a magical Wand of Lifting Things Into Orbit +10 -- great, what can you do with that?
* You can put humans in an environment which is certain death if any of ten million things go wrong, which historically has a fatality rate quite a bit higher than that war you were mentioning.
* You can get cool desktop wallpaper.
* You can get high definition pictures of the pores of particularly big chunks of rock which happen to be in the general vicinity of this chunk of rock. These pores typically hold more rock. One of these days, we may discover a pore with ice at the bottom of it. That will be a banner day in the history of rock pore exploration. It proves that it is possible, theoretically, for that ice to have been water at some point. This whole water to ice back to water cycle is apparently Cutting Edge Science when conducted away from this rock.
* You can bring back little rocks from the nearby big rocks, and subject them to years of very expensive scientific testing. This testing will tell you, in excruciating detail, that they are rocks. Scientists hope that if they continue looking at these rocks for decades they will eventually find a rock with dead microbes on it, proving to skeptical microbes of this rock that they are not alone in the universe.
* You could even mobilize the resources of two nation states to have a race to a nearby medium-sized chunk of rock (covered with craters) as a PR-friendly cover for funneling enormous resources into developing missiles capable of adding craters to this crhunk of rock.
* You can achieve intellectual autoeroticism for science fiction fanboys who say "Its high time we got some of our eggs out of this basket", irrespective of the fact that there is no possible way to sustain civilization absent the umbilical cord back to this rock and, heck, we can't even maintain self-sufficient enclosed communities back here where a crack in the bubble DOESN'T immediately kill everyone inside.
... is a wide variety of suitably destructive disasters to blow up carefully created works of art with. Anyone see that Spore video with the Planet Pacification Beam or whatever they call it? Yeah, one of those, please. That will do for a start.
Japan has no Wii Sports bundled with the console, precisely to keep the price point to 25,000 yen. The game is still extraordinarily popular (I think it had the highest attach rate for the console at launch, possibly exceeded by Zelda). You can see the terrible devastation this decision has caused their sales numbers. They only sell six consoles for every PS3 sold...
... cares a rat's ass about what your "conventions of war" say. Its not like we're going to be fighting a country where there are more international law lawyers than generals. Heck, its going to be pretty rare from here out out that we'll be fighting countries, period. The enemy will just use the presence of a safety zone on the field for tactical advantage, as we saw in the Israeli war with Lebanon (when Hezbollah took over UN observer positions to avoid artillery fire or exploit it to propaganda advantage), the use of ambulances to smuggle explosives into Israel, yadda yadda.
Given that that is the reality of who we are fighting, I say you use the traditional method of encouraging friendly troops: put a flag on its side, a gun in its hands, and give it a visual design which leaves the enemy with the impression that if they tangle with it they will be meeting those 72 virgins earlier than they had planned. Has any soldier, shot and under suppressive fire, ever mistaken a bunch of Marines rushing to cover him for teddy bears? Probably not. Does he regret that they're not teddy bears? Probably not.
There is a mathematical certainy of penises, nothing random about it. Perhaps if you confined the region of inspection to one particular avatar the probability of penis would drop to its Linden Limit, which is unknown but has been proven to be lower bounded at.9954.
Seriously for a moment: I was asked by my technology incubator bosses to study the feasibility of us putting up a little virtual office to increase our international awareness (yeah, yeah, bigwigs read too many magazines, same story the world over). It took me about thirty seconds to disabuse them of that notion.
I'm going to approach this from the perspective of A Bad Guy, because realistically if you're not A Bad Guy and you get arrested you have already hit your security worse case scenario. You're now arrested, your computer is in government hands, and you are about to take major financial and reputational damage before being released. (Some folks might say I'm naiive for assuming you'll be released. Fine, don the tinfoil hats if it please you, but if The Man can lock you up when you haven't done anything then encrypting what you haven't done doesn't afford you additional protection now does it? Similar for the "good guy using encryption" examples like dissidents in China -- lack of discoverable evidence does not render the back of your head immune to gunfire.)
If you're A Bad Guy, on the other hand, there might be a significant difference between "major financial and reputation damage" and "being convicted of possession of child pornography". So lets consider a savvy Bad Guy who has screwed up and somehow alerted law enforcement of his existence. Maybe he was indiscreet with an accomplice, maybe the ISP logs show him as downloading young-kids-get-it-on.avi, maybe the feds caught him receiving a tape in the mail (the Postal Service has a division devoted to investigation for a reason, folks). So somebody had enough evidence to get their boss to sign off on a use of department resources to open an investigation, probably enough evidence to convince a judge to order a search or arrest warrant, and the fishing expedition begins in earnest.
At this point, Bad Guy is boned. He not only has the same problems Not A Bad Guy has with being arrested, but he has an adversary with virtually limitless resources relative to him now picking his security apart. And they will almost certainly find a place where he screwed up. Do they need to beat his passwords out of him? Hardly. If they're confident Bad Guy is a bad guy, when the computer shows clean they'll say "Hmm, we're quite sure these records say he is downloading young-kids-get-it-on.avi... widen the scope of the investigation", and then they'll start strip mining every bit of data they can get about the guy, and when you have a badge and a concerned looking face you can get an awful lot.
And, somewhere, Bad Guy screwed up. It doesn't matter how careful or exotic his protections were, he screwed up somewhere and its probably somewhere that will look stupid in hindsight. The CIA does it all the time, too -- covert ops blown by cell phone records, doesn't matter how many things you get right when the adversary has the luxury of winning from your first mistake. Maybe a photo fell behind his printer, maybe he used his credit card to pay for something sketchy 4 years ago, maybe one of his pedo buddies got picked up three weeks ago and turned state's evidence. Doesn't matter -- a significantly interested adversary will find the 1% of screwups eventually given enough time to look for them. And for the 99% that are behind the impenetrable security barrier? Doesn't matter, that one photo which fell behind your printer will send you to prison for years anyhow.
The Doom spoof video where he introduces DirectX and how it will revolutionize PC gaming. He still sounds geeky and a little off, but he is clearly geek, a little off, and loving it.
>> Fourteen-year-olds hook up together all the time. It's called high school. >>
Yes, and when fourty year olds are emotionally invested in watching, reading, or writing about it? That creeps me the heck out. Oh sure, I get it, when you're talking about Harry and Snape taking a disciplinary infraction to a whole new level, thats fantasy. Yes, understood. Its just pretty freaking creepy. Am I that worried that Livejournal doesn't want to be associated with you? No. Many sane people, you know, the kinds who don't have to make up a semi-Japanese word to describe their sexual perversions, do not want to be associated with you. I wouldn't be touching your business with a ten-foot pole... and why does that sound suddenly pornographic in this context.
Riddle me this Slashdot: Why is it that when a product achieves......10% of the MP3 player market, it is less than an also-ran....10% of the browser market, it is a signal that the world is changing....10% of the OS market, it is news that would rival the second coming of Christ.
(Hey, put down that Troll mod -- part-time Linux-based programmer with an iPod here... Really.)
What we have here is a failure to manage
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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I know having 2,500 emails unread would cause me stress. It used to. Here is how I learned to cope:
* POPFile to weed out the overwhelming majority of the spam. If you've got 4 spams to 1 legit email life seems pretty freaking unimaginably difficult, and nowadays my server inboxes are closer to 100 to 1. My actual client inbox is about 1 to 100 thanks to POPFile.
* Automatically filter automated emails (trade confirmations, bank statements, EBay whatever, anything without a human on the line) to a "I will probably never need this but just in case" folder. This generally requires setting up one rule in your client per business you do business with, or if you're like me you double up on the POPFile goodness and tag them all "auto" then just move based on that tag.
* Check email twice per day, moving every email out of the inbox after it is dealt with. Anything left in your inbox should be a pressing work matter -- if not, move it out, its done. In between my scheduled email checks I only fire it up if I'm looking to make some work for myself. If someone thinks they need a response immediately and I care that they think they need a response immediately, then they have my phone number.
Re:I commercially exploit a copyright, am not a th
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Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
You seem to be under the impression that I used the bingo-cards (OSS project) codebase. I didn't (wrote my program in Java from scratch with two legitimately licensed pieces of code in it, bingo-cards is in C). When I said "fixed the hole" I meant the hole in the market, not the holes in bingo-cards... somebody else can fix those. I suspect they're too boring to actually motivate anyone to do it without a profit incentive, which is why they've existed for years.
I commercially exploit a copyright, am not a thief
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Piracy Economics
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm just a wee little guy with a software business I run in my spare time (it makes bingo cards for teachers: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ). Can you run by, exactly, how I am stealing my income from writing (and marketing/supporting) that?
Its not like people were happily playing bingo for free one day and then, in Carmen Sandiego-like fashion, I just grabbed the entire concept and absconded with it, then hid clues to my location while confounding the player with a series of inept accomplices. There are at least 12 people/companies who sell or offer for free similar software. There is even an OSS bingo card maker. (Its buggy, unsupported, has a GUI which can induce heart attacks, can't actually print the cards it creates, bluescreens some windows systems on an install, and hasn't had a patch in years... but its Free!)
It wasn't like there was a copy of the 2,500 lines of source code sitting online for free since the 1980s until I sent my squads of lawyers to DMCA anybody who looked at them. No. I saw a hole in the market, because the existing software which creates bingo cards for teachers was a) too hard to use, b) too expensive, c) poorly marketed and d) in general, sucked, and the non-software ways to get bingo cards are overpriced (educational publisher) or time-consuming (making them by hand).
So I spent a week of my own time and fixed that. Had I not spent a week, that problem would remain unfixed, and the circa five thousand people who played a game of bingo this year that was printed from my software would be bingo-less. Two hundred teachers would be wasting their time writing bingo cards by hand when they could be educating kids. Little kiddies would be missing their Friday sight words fun activities (See aye tee CAT! I win bingoes!). For making the world just a wee bit better than it was before I sat down, yes, I think I deserve to get compensated. Or to take all the moral freighting out of that word "deserve": had there been no compensation in the offing, I would not have written this, and the world would be just a wee bit poorer than it is today.
Tom Clancy details a variation on this in one of his books: if you suspect you have a leak, you draw up a document which is a mix of truth and plausible lies which is interesting, will largely congeal with what the mole's handlers already know, and includes lurid phrasing at several locations. Then you leak N copies of that memo to your N possible leaks, and listen for what combinations of key phrases (or, not quite as easily, key facts) make it into unapproved channels. For example, you might embed twenty-five key phrases in a document about (hypothetical) insurgent activity in Iraq, and then if the New York Times quotes a briefing as saying that "Baghdad will be covered in rivers of blood" (given to 4 suspects) and that the military fears "total strategic defeat not just in Iraq but elsewhere" (given to 8 suspects) then the intersection of the two sets identifies the leak.
My mother never saw the attraction of video games when we were growing up. When I came home for Christmas last year, I showed her Wii Sports and BAM she was hooked. She spent the rest of the break taking on family, friends, neighbors, anyone she could convince to sit down for a nice casual game of bowling. I never knew Mom used to bowl in college! She was mostly disabled by a stroke three years ago and I had to hold her up so she could bowl, but she looked happier throwing strikes ("Mom, what comes after a turkey?" "A Double Turkey, silly!" *BAM*) than I've seen her in years. It was an Old Granny Hardcore moment for me -- here is my mother, the took-six-years-to-master-email types-in-ALL-CAPS never-gamed-a-day-in-her-life stroke survivor who was too busy kicking our "#$"#es to remember she was supposed to be taking it easy.
She had Pro in bowling by the end of Christmas break, too. I think I should really get her a Wii, although what would really help is folks at home to play it with her all of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
They put a product placement (Reeboks) on a bob-omb. Right before it exploded. Those four seconds were worth excusing the rest of the excruciatingly bad movie ("Trust the fungus!"). Granted, I don't know how effective the message was -- "Forget those Nikes, kids, who wants to be like a basketball star? You want to be like a suicide bomber, don't ya?" -- but I enjoyed it all the same.
Or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh.
Sorry, ex-English teacher, had to say something. (Sidenote: always nice to see an old spelling mistake in a new word. I see far too much of "concieve" and "beleive" and not nearly enough "siezing". Of course, that is because I don't typically teach children older than middle school, and they don't have much call to say "seizure" unless it is in the context "Spelling nearly gives me a seizure".)
... not on the scale that Sony needs. Look at how squeaky-freaking-clean Nintendo, full of such racy fare as Nintendogs and Brain Training, is dominating the sales charts. My friend looked at the Famitsu Top 30 a few weeks (?) ago -- 4 games, FOUR, were on a non-Nintendo system. Where are the hentai games? Answer: sitting in some store in Akihabara serving a very niche audience, the very existence of which embarasses people and which is not enough to sustain a multi-national like Sony. Take a look at Microsoft, with She Kicks High and their other various "We're edgy and sexy but not porn" marketing moves, for how that is likely to play out in America: sell well to hormone-fueled teenagers (if you marry it to a good game), the core gaming market already, but not move a blue ocean like Nintendo is doing.
And for definition of the word "flat" that means "well, sort of spheroid", the world is indeed flat. This whole stupid squabble isn't about Pluto, its about the word "planet". You know what? I don't care what planet means. I don't care if you can consistently differentiate moons from planets or not. It will never, ever, ever impact my life. When my kid takes astronomy in school I will tell him "Son, here are the list of nine really big rocks which you need to learn to get to the next grade. Get started." Because that is all a planet is -- a big rock, which is special because we traditionally say it is. Whats the difference between a mountain and a hill? The mountain is labeled Mountain on the map, not hill -- its a big important rock, not like that everyday garden variety rock next door.
Astronomy, by the way, is a waste of classtime for science. Its studied purely for aesthetic reasons, always has been ("Ahh, the Heavens, they're so pretty the gods must have made them... and look, they obey convenient mathematical properties too!"), but you can find just as much aesthetic beauty in biology or chemistry or geology for that matter, and any one of these actually has practical applications. Not that any kid is likely to ever need to know the difference between metamorphic and igneous rock, but they will at some point come into physical contact with both of them, which is a heck of a lot more than you can say about Pluto/Eris. Astronomy as I was taught it was "Literature enjoyment of sci-fi novels", where they teach you to disregard everything you will ever learn about physics, math, and economics and pretend that you will, in your lifetime, see thriving and productive human colonies on celestial bodies which we know to be big, barren, worthless rocks.
... but what was Hitler playing? Ban starving artists, save the world!
More constructive advice: economies where young folks can actually get hired might put a dent in that wave of youth crime. I doubt you'll find that many of the 300 cars which will get burned in France tonight were torched by kids with jobs. Thats the liberal part of me talking. The conservative part of me adds that you'll want to figure out how to assimilate more of those immigrants, because I doubt that many of the cars are being burned by boys with names like Jacques or Pierre.
My software: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
A similarly featured bit of OSS: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/
Capsule summary: Like the name suggests, it creates bingo cards, and that is all. At least, that is how most computer programmers perceive the problem, and that is why Bingo Card Creator is in use in a couple hundred classrooms and bingo-cards sees about as many downloads in a year as my free trial sees in a mediocre week.
Programmers hate writing boring code, which is one of the reasons why Ruby on Rails is so phenomenally popular. Printing logic is a good example. There are few things in life which are more boring than getting text to be properly sized in a grid on an arbitrary printer, without crowding the grid lines. Roughly 1/3 of the LOC and 90% of the complexity of my program is making printing pretty and easy enough for your grandmother to do it. The writer of bingo-cards, on the other hand, decided to punt on this: seeing as how many browsers have perfectly good printing routines already, he just exports to HTML and then you can print the resulting files yourself. Simple, right? Well, not to put a fine a point on it, while that is a great choice for the programmer it is a terrible, terrible choice for the user... and there are users out there who *don't know how* to print an arbitrary file in the file system. Trust me, I answer emails from them on a weekly basis.
Another example: aesthetics. My downloads doubled the day I replaced some old freeware new/open/save/print icons (which looked, eh, lets call them "utilitarian") with the big, attractive stock icons you now see on my screenshots. Look at Apple: design is a feature! bingo-cards' design is overly complicated and aesthetically unpleasant. If you can get it to run on a Windows box* take a looksie -- the main interface has several dozen controls on it and will overwhelm many users.
* The install blows up on some systems. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Support: If you mail support@iprintedmydomainabove.com, you'll always get someone happy to help you. If there were hypothetically a mailing list for bingo-cards, most of the technically non-adept teachers asking it for help would be told to RTFM and go away. (Typical support request: "help i cant print. Thanks, Suzy") Folks have been terribly treated by the software industry, and many of them actively fear software. They have been made to think that its both natural when something goes wrong and that, by the way, when something goes wrong it is their fault. I treat every emailer with respect and when Suzy can't print thats because I clearly haven't made it easy enough yet.
Marketing: I know there is a bit of scorn among some in the OSS community for this, but hey, technically superior programs do not always win... and thats a good thing. bingo-cards, for example, has much worse performance in search engines than I do despite the fact that SourceForge has PageRank out the yin-yang and I do not. The main reason is that I actually took the time to write in comprehensible English about how you can use my program to (fill in the blank), and that nobody ever did this for bingo-cards. Documentation adds value to the user! (So do screenshots! And websites which don't make you search for the "What the heck do I need to download to get this running on a Dell?" button.)
"OSS is a great idea because you can have students and teachers reprogram it." Yeaaaaah, you get right to that. My guess is that most elementary English teachers think that programming is similar to papermaking: fascinating that people can do it, truly a worthwhile skill, but just give me something to let me get back on track for the lesson plan because I have 10 kids here who aren't reading at grade level yet. They don't want to spend hours of their acutely limited time hacking any more than they want to physically transform pulp to paper so that they ca
I can sympathize with the view that, say, Brokeback Pirates of the 300 Trojan Gladiators or the latest EminBrittneyBoys creation is not high art, and perhaps not worth $20 in some abstract aesthetic sense. But you know? Given the options of either parting with $20 or being the one kid at school who hasn't heard Oops I Dropped My Knickers Again, large numbers of people consistently choose "Pay $20, get junk". The capitalist in me says, yep, that does indeed demonstrate that for these people the valuation of junk is greater than or equal to $20.
Would folks pay less if there were a free market in music?
There *is* a free market in music -- there isn't a government body out there stopping you from making your own, you can buy it from anyone you like, there are hundreds of thousands of suppliers, and you can get terabytes of the stuff for nothing. Its that "free market in OTHER PEOPLE'S music" that doesn't exist. You, too, can use cheaply available microphones and recording software with low-cut outfits and nonexistent knickers to simulate a talentless hack, or you can buy from a local (or remote!) musician who already specializes in doing it (preferably with knickers). But, given the choice between popular hacks and unknown hacks, some folks like popular. That, by definition, establishes that popular music has value to them, despite any number of aesthetic arguments you might have against it.
I would much rather leave as much as possible about computers to people who actually KNOW computers rather than to the underinformed and woefully overconfident junior staffers of figureheads who think that the Internet is a series of tubes. (Legislators do not write legislation. Their staff and aides write legislation. The legislator reads a summary prepared for him which, on a good day, actually explains what the bill does.)
Darn few people in Texas know the business of computers better than Dell.
>>
For less than we've spent on the Iraq war, we *could have had* a constellation of space solar power satellites, and the lifting infrastructure to ensure access to space.
>>
For less than the price we spend on one shuttle mission, we could have had a constellation of satellites which are actually useful. Lifting infrastructure is a major challenge for the space program, but the bigger challenge is that there is no purpose to the space program. Here is a magical Wand of Lifting Things Into Orbit +10 -- great, what can you do with that?
* You can put humans in an environment which is certain death if any of ten million things go wrong, which historically has a fatality rate quite a bit higher than that war you were mentioning.
* You can get cool desktop wallpaper.
* You can get high definition pictures of the pores of particularly big chunks of rock which happen to be in the general vicinity of this chunk of rock. These pores typically hold more rock. One of these days, we may discover a pore with ice at the bottom of it. That will be a banner day in the history of rock pore exploration. It proves that it is possible, theoretically, for that ice to have been water at some point. This whole water to ice back to water cycle is apparently Cutting Edge Science when conducted away from this rock.
* You can bring back little rocks from the nearby big rocks, and subject them to years of very expensive scientific testing. This testing will tell you, in excruciating detail, that they are rocks. Scientists hope that if they continue looking at these rocks for decades they will eventually find a rock with dead microbes on it, proving to skeptical microbes of this rock that they are not alone in the universe.
* You could even mobilize the resources of two nation states to have a race to a nearby medium-sized chunk of rock (covered with craters) as a PR-friendly cover for funneling enormous resources into developing missiles capable of adding craters to this crhunk of rock.
* You can achieve intellectual autoeroticism for science fiction fanboys who say "Its high time we got some of our eggs out of this basket", irrespective of the fact that there is no possible way to sustain civilization absent the umbilical cord back to this rock and, heck, we can't even maintain self-sufficient enclosed communities back here where a crack in the bubble DOESN'T immediately kill everyone inside.
... is a wide variety of suitably destructive disasters to blow up carefully created works of art with. Anyone see that Spore video with the Planet Pacification Beam or whatever they call it? Yeah, one of those, please. That will do for a start.
Japan has no Wii Sports bundled with the console, precisely to keep the price point to 25,000 yen. The game is still extraordinarily popular (I think it had the highest attach rate for the console at launch, possibly exceeded by Zelda). You can see the terrible devastation this decision has caused their sales numbers. They only sell six consoles for every PS3 sold...
t endo-still-dominates-Japan/pg/49/aid/93613
Here is a random week in May.
* DS Lite - 160,009
* Wii - 55,725
* PSP - 33438
* PS2 - 11854
* PS3 - 8562
* X360 - 2369
* GBM - 403
* GBASP - 398
* DS - 303
http://ds.qj.net/Famitsu-weekly-console-sales-Nin
... cares a rat's ass about what your "conventions of war" say. Its not like we're going to be fighting a country where there are more international law lawyers than generals. Heck, its going to be pretty rare from here out out that we'll be fighting countries, period. The enemy will just use the presence of a safety zone on the field for tactical advantage, as we saw in the Israeli war with Lebanon (when Hezbollah took over UN observer positions to avoid artillery fire or exploit it to propaganda advantage), the use of ambulances to smuggle explosives into Israel, yadda yadda.
Given that that is the reality of who we are fighting, I say you use the traditional method of encouraging friendly troops: put a flag on its side, a gun in its hands, and give it a visual design which leaves the enemy with the impression that if they tangle with it they will be meeting those 72 virgins earlier than they had planned. Has any soldier, shot and under suppressive fire, ever mistaken a bunch of Marines rushing to cover him for teddy bears? Probably not. Does he regret that they're not teddy bears? Probably not.
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.9954.
SL is known for random penises.
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There is a mathematical certainy of penises, nothing random about it. Perhaps if you confined the region of inspection to one particular avatar the probability of penis would drop to its Linden Limit, which is unknown but has been proven to be lower bounded at
Seriously for a moment: I was asked by my technology incubator bosses to study the feasibility of us putting up a little virtual office to increase our international awareness (yeah, yeah, bigwigs read too many magazines, same story the world over). It took me about thirty seconds to disabuse them of that notion.
I'm going to approach this from the perspective of A Bad Guy, because realistically if you're not A Bad Guy and you get arrested you have already hit your security worse case scenario. You're now arrested, your computer is in government hands, and you are about to take major financial and reputational damage before being released. (Some folks might say I'm naiive for assuming you'll be released. Fine, don the tinfoil hats if it please you, but if The Man can lock you up when you haven't done anything then encrypting what you haven't done doesn't afford you additional protection now does it? Similar for the "good guy using encryption" examples like dissidents in China -- lack of discoverable evidence does not render the back of your head immune to gunfire.)
If you're A Bad Guy, on the other hand, there might be a significant difference between "major financial and reputation damage" and "being convicted of possession of child pornography". So lets consider a savvy Bad Guy who has screwed up and somehow alerted law enforcement of his existence. Maybe he was indiscreet with an accomplice, maybe the ISP logs show him as downloading young-kids-get-it-on.avi, maybe the feds caught him receiving a tape in the mail (the Postal Service has a division devoted to investigation for a reason, folks). So somebody had enough evidence to get their boss to sign off on a use of department resources to open an investigation, probably enough evidence to convince a judge to order a search or arrest warrant, and the fishing expedition begins in earnest.
At this point, Bad Guy is boned. He not only has the same problems Not A Bad Guy has with being arrested, but he has an adversary with virtually limitless resources relative to him now picking his security apart. And they will almost certainly find a place where he screwed up. Do they need to beat his passwords out of him? Hardly. If they're confident Bad Guy is a bad guy, when the computer shows clean they'll say "Hmm, we're quite sure these records say he is downloading young-kids-get-it-on.avi... widen the scope of the investigation", and then they'll start strip mining every bit of data they can get about the guy, and when you have a badge and a concerned looking face you can get an awful lot.
And, somewhere, Bad Guy screwed up. It doesn't matter how careful or exotic his protections were, he screwed up somewhere and its probably somewhere that will look stupid in hindsight. The CIA does it all the time, too -- covert ops blown by cell phone records, doesn't matter how many things you get right when the adversary has the luxury of winning from your first mistake. Maybe a photo fell behind his printer, maybe he used his credit card to pay for something sketchy 4 years ago, maybe one of his pedo buddies got picked up three weeks ago and turned state's evidence. Doesn't matter -- a significantly interested adversary will find the 1% of screwups eventually given enough time to look for them. And for the 99% that are behind the impenetrable security barrier? Doesn't matter, that one photo which fell behind your printer will send you to prison for years anyhow.
The Doom spoof video where he introduces DirectX and how it will revolutionize PC gaming. He still sounds geeky and a little off, but he is clearly geek, a little off, and loving it.
2 1579845295
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-16906094
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Fourteen-year-olds hook up together all the time. It's called high school.
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Yes, and when fourty year olds are emotionally invested in watching, reading, or writing about it? That creeps me the heck out. Oh sure, I get it, when you're talking about Harry and Snape taking a disciplinary infraction to a whole new level, thats fantasy. Yes, understood. Its just pretty freaking creepy. Am I that worried that Livejournal doesn't want to be associated with you? No. Many sane people, you know, the kinds who don't have to make up a semi-Japanese word to describe their sexual perversions, do not want to be associated with you. I wouldn't be touching your business with a ten-foot pole... and why does that sound suddenly pornographic in this context.
32i people is imaginary. Sheesh, schools these days.
Riddle me this Slashdot: Why is it that when a product achieves ... ...10% of the MP3 player market, it is less than an also-ran. ...10% of the browser market, it is a signal that the world is changing. ...10% of the OS market, it is news that would rival the second coming of Christ.
(Hey, put down that Troll mod -- part-time Linux-based programmer with an iPod here... Really.)
I know having 2,500 emails unread would cause me stress. It used to. Here is how I learned to cope:
* POPFile to weed out the overwhelming majority of the spam. If you've got 4 spams to 1 legit email life seems pretty freaking unimaginably difficult, and nowadays my server inboxes are closer to 100 to 1. My actual client inbox is about 1 to 100 thanks to POPFile.
* Automatically filter automated emails (trade confirmations, bank statements, EBay whatever, anything without a human on the line) to a "I will probably never need this but just in case" folder. This generally requires setting up one rule in your client per business you do business with, or if you're like me you double up on the POPFile goodness and tag them all "auto" then just move based on that tag.
* Check email twice per day, moving every email out of the inbox after it is dealt with. Anything left in your inbox should be a pressing work matter -- if not, move it out, its done. In between my scheduled email checks I only fire it up if I'm looking to make some work for myself. If someone thinks they need a response immediately and I care that they think they need a response immediately, then they have my phone number.
* Get on with life.
Icepicks, man, icepicks. Now if you'll excuse me I have to track one down myself.
You must be new here.
You seem to be under the impression that I used the bingo-cards (OSS project) codebase. I didn't (wrote my program in Java from scratch with two legitimately licensed pieces of code in it, bingo-cards is in C). When I said "fixed the hole" I meant the hole in the market, not the holes in bingo-cards... somebody else can fix those. I suspect they're too boring to actually motivate anyone to do it without a profit incentive, which is why they've existed for years.
I'm just a wee little guy with a software business I run in my spare time (it makes bingo cards for teachers: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ). Can you run by, exactly, how I am stealing my income from writing (and marketing/supporting) that?
Its not like people were happily playing bingo for free one day and then, in Carmen Sandiego-like fashion, I just grabbed the entire concept and absconded with it, then hid clues to my location while confounding the player with a series of inept accomplices. There are at least 12 people/companies who sell or offer for free similar software. There is even an OSS bingo card maker. (Its buggy, unsupported, has a GUI which can induce heart attacks, can't actually print the cards it creates, bluescreens some windows systems on an install, and hasn't had a patch in years... but its Free!)
It wasn't like there was a copy of the 2,500 lines of source code sitting online for free since the 1980s until I sent my squads of lawyers to DMCA anybody who looked at them. No. I saw a hole in the market, because the existing software which creates bingo cards for teachers was a) too hard to use, b) too expensive, c) poorly marketed and d) in general, sucked, and the non-software ways to get bingo cards are overpriced (educational publisher) or time-consuming (making them by hand).
So I spent a week of my own time and fixed that. Had I not spent a week, that problem would remain unfixed, and the circa five thousand people who played a game of bingo this year that was printed from my software would be bingo-less. Two hundred teachers would be wasting their time writing bingo cards by hand when they could be educating kids. Little kiddies would be missing their Friday sight words fun activities (See aye tee CAT! I win bingoes!). For making the world just a wee bit better than it was before I sat down, yes, I think I deserve to get compensated. Or to take all the moral freighting out of that word "deserve": had there been no compensation in the offing, I would not have written this, and the world would be just a wee bit poorer than it is today.
So, again, how am I stealing from anyone?
Tom Clancy details a variation on this in one of his books: if you suspect you have a leak, you draw up a document which is a mix of truth and plausible lies which is interesting, will largely congeal with what the mole's handlers already know, and includes lurid phrasing at several locations. Then you leak N copies of that memo to your N possible leaks, and listen for what combinations of key phrases (or, not quite as easily, key facts) make it into unapproved channels. For example, you might embed twenty-five key phrases in a document about (hypothetical) insurgent activity in Iraq, and then if the New York Times quotes a briefing as saying that "Baghdad will be covered in rivers of blood" (given to 4 suspects) and that the military fears "total strategic defeat not just in Iraq but elsewhere" (given to 8 suspects) then the intersection of the two sets identifies the leak.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
My mother never saw the attraction of video games when we were growing up. When I came home for Christmas last year, I showed her Wii Sports and BAM she was hooked. She spent the rest of the break taking on family, friends, neighbors, anyone she could convince to sit down for a nice casual game of bowling. I never knew Mom used to bowl in college! She was mostly disabled by a stroke three years ago and I had to hold her up so she could bowl, but she looked happier throwing strikes ("Mom, what comes after a turkey?" "A Double Turkey, silly!" *BAM*) than I've seen her in years. It was an Old Granny Hardcore moment for me -- here is my mother, the took-six-years-to-master-email types-in-ALL-CAPS never-gamed-a-day-in-her-life stroke survivor who was too busy kicking our "#$"#es
to remember she was supposed to be taking it easy.
She had Pro in bowling by the end of Christmas break, too. I think I should really get her a Wii, although what would really help is folks at home to play it with her all of the time.