Forbid the idea that anyone should take pride in his work and want to share it with other people!
there's a difference between working on something for yourself to share with the community and showing off something made for your company on a community site. Slashdot is a community, and if you want advertising Slashdot offers that for a fee.
most people keep business and their own lives separate.
and besides that, everyone knows that a slashdot post is free (and sometimes overwhelmingly effective) advertising
you know, it's very sad that after all these years of variouspatches and fixes being availible for people's computers, people still use inferior software more inherently prone to flaw.
google never fails to impress me with how much they are willing to diversify their services. while you could say some of this is kind of weird, at least google is willing to come up with original new ideas on how to advertise to people.
i sometimes catch myself forgetting why google is worth so much.
thank you very much for the MAKE magazine advertisement.
i know, this will get modded down, but that's because it's right. i mean, come on, it's so obvious "i work for this company, and they have a great article. read this article that i made for the company that pays me! The more readers i get for my columns, the more likely i will get promoted! so therefore, i think i'll post on slashdot and get free publicity!"
i mean, really i wouldn't even post something like this for one of the open source projects i have started.
i really don't know of anyone still using IE besides the retards who run the technology in public areas that assume that anything besides microsoft's standard software setup is incompatible and compltely unusable.
i like that idea. some of the problems in games today aren't due to graphics, but they just dont feel real.
i'm all for escaping reality (mario style), but when you are trying to make an immersive (exagerrated), and realistic city setting like in GTA, there should be more people, more cars, etc. it just feels empty sometimes.
and there should be more activity during the (realistically) more active times of the day. it would make the city itself more interesting.
in regards to my first comment, i really think that innovation is in software in hardware. software innovation would be stuff like katamari, super mario bros, tetris, etc. (when they first came out). hardware innovation would be analog stick, rumble, dpad, shoulder buttons, trigger buttons, nintendo's...remote...thing.
notice how none of these comments are on innovating gameplay. GUIs, neat features for developers, etc, but what about the actual game?
half the launch titles are ports, and the other half aren't genre defining or groundbreaking. i don't see, even with the pretty graphics neat GUI (i didn't know playing games had anything to do with having a pretty GUI) any gameplay changes. how can the gameplay be any different, the controller is a perfected S controller.
there's no way that playing an xbox 360 game can be any better than the current generation. this isn't N64 -> PS2 era, the N64/PS1 had actual processing limits and storage space limits and RAM limits that actually affected gameplay. even the current gen consoles introduced innovations like online play, (good) wireless controllers, and graphics that were closer to photorealism.
but xbox 360 makes one innovation - moving closer to photorealism. that's it. there's nothing else. all the other innovations involve money-grabbing (Microsoft Points to buy pointless shit, higher console price, streaming from a media center PC...to get more people to buy media center edition pcs)
take a company like nintendo that continuously adds something to the gaming mix, like the dpad, analog stick, shoulder buttons, online play (famicom modem anyone?), revolution controller, and (good) wireless controllers, and then see real success. sony and microsoft are on their 3rd and 2nd generations, but besides nintendo, there has been no other console company able to survive longer than that in the gaming world.
microsoft (and sony) are just following along with the trends - IMO to be successful, a company has to make the trend, and make the gaming culture. that's why nintendo's still around.
nobody's going to use this service because the truth is that people don't want their music player inside of their cell phone. cell phones are more often than not tied to the service because of 2 year contracts, and they are disposable trash to most people, whereas people want to keep their MP3 players for a long time (they cost more than CD players, hold more music, so they should last longer)
of course, since the nano came out, it'd probably be just better to tape the nano to the back of a normal cell phone that just makes phone calls. you probably wouldn't tell the size difference anyway. then you could have a real music player and a real phone instead of a compromise.
companies seem to hold this myth near and dear that having multiple devices is always inconvenient.
as in about half of the winners probably won due to payoffs.
PSP as breakthrough technology...BS King Kong winning a bunch of awards...the game isn't even out yet. real legitimate awards shows have deadlines for eligibility.
there are more, but i'm so disgusted i won't bother reading the rest of the winners, though i'm glad resident evil won a few awards.
i'm still shocked that a "legitimate" company that's widely purchased from, and is a household name, would distribute software that anti-virus companies would consider to be malware. i'm still shocked that sony let this kind of thing slide, it's so obvious that they didn't even check to see what they were doing before they did it.
i hope you got the general idea of my point that i was trying to make even though i did not know all of the technical details. i am obviously not a programmer
i guess by hitting a wall microsoft means that because linux is slower, more expensive, has a terrible security track record with thousands of viruses, spyware, and malware, has closed source code so you can't modify the operating system to do whatever you want, and crashes more frequently, that windows is a great alternative to linux. they're making a good point, windows seems like a great deal at this point, i bet a lot of people will switch.
bottom line is, until microsoft can build this OS to be HUGELY FASTER than linux, there's no reason to pay extra for something that doesn't have any speed advantages.
i've never heard of the supercomputing crowd complaining about ease of use, they are looking for more calculations for less money, and for that linux/unix is probably still the best choice. there's no reason to pay thousands for an OS that doesn't increase your performance any further than an OS that costs $0
besides the arguments of whether red hat or OS X would be better for this project, when Steve Jobs offers to put Mac OS on an x86 laptop not made by Apple, this is once in a lifetime event, and I would think that you couldn't turn him down.
besides, i don't see why kids like this need something like red hat linux. all they want to do is run a bunch of learning programs/paint/word processors? what is so bad about having a closed source operating system? 97% of the world does anyway...
not only that, but if you dedicate yourself to only using open source, you miss out on the tons of interactive software for kids that's out there (especially on mac)
not to mention the fact that the mac has much better compatibility than red hat for the majority of commercial products on the market. and the fact is, sometimes open source just doesn't cut it.
don't get me wrong, though, many times open source alternatives are fine programs, but many times they are just alternatives.
i didn't realize how huge linux was in the smartphone market. i figured it was all between windows mobile and symbian.
i can see standardizing mobile linux as being a very good thing for linux in that market.
maybe linux's lead isn't so large - the last link in the article, when you read through it, points out that the data does not inlclude phones/pdas running on microsoft's pocket PC edition of windows.
what suddenly gives you the right to decide that you should be allowed to run their OS on any hardware?
do you sue companies that won't allow you to unlock the processing potential of fancy touch screen cash registers, palm pilots that can't run Windows Mobile, or a watch that doesn't allow you to change it's OS? do you sue palm pilot because they refuse to allow you to buy Palm OS and run it on any machine you please? or the cash register manufacterer for not selling you their cash register OS for normal PCs?
no, because it's absurd. why is it absurd? because these companies depend on hardware sales. just like apple. this is not illegal to the slightest bit, and you can't prove it in court for the following reasons:
the fact is that apple doesn't want to license their OS for any hardware but their own. whether it's Intel, IBM, or Motorola, it's no different. Intel does NOT have a monopoly on the market, as Intel does not hold even close to 100% marketshare of the PC microprocessor market.
Apple has broken no law whatsoever in this regard, and the fact is that by restricting what type of hardware customers can use with OS X, apple can do a number of things that are GOOD for the consumer:
1. integrated hardware/software means there are less drivers to deal with, more plug and play is easily achievable 2. more features can be added to the computers without adding 3rd party programs. Things like the sudden motion sensor and the scrolling trackpad can be integrated in the OS. The OS can have custom versions that are optimized for their particular model. 3. tech support doesn't have to deal with thousands of different parts in beige box PCs, which saves the consumer time on the phone with Apple's tech support representatives. in court, apple could argue that this makes their tech support cheaper than the competition (which it is in many cases). 4. Lowering the hardware confusion makes documentation easier, and reduces to a small extent crashes/bugs/problems. Any bugs/crashes/problems can be detected faster when you know exactly what parts are in the computer and how they interact. 5. Also in respect to #4, reduction of these general problems increases the quality of the product. reducing crash/bug/problem downtime makes for a more valuable, satisfying product. 6. i'm guessing security is easier, too. knowing what hardware is in the computer means knowing exactly where and how information can leave and enter the computer.
as the avant-garde, intellectual sort of film that Lucas keeps saying it is.
jar-jar binks is most definatly not intellectual, and he wasted half the time in the first two prequel star wars movies. so i guess maybe you could argue that episode III was intellectual, but I and II vaporized my brain.
any idiot would get out of that deal with disney, because it sucks.
disney spends NO time and NO effort actually making the film, bringing the characters to life, and making the script, animating, etc, and just by distributing they suddenly get rights to the characters, and gets to split the profit in half.
i'm sure just about every other film company could give pixar a better deal AND would be willing to sign them up immediatly, it's not like their movies are floundering. pixar movies consistantly rake in huge profits.
rootkits are an example of DRM gone horribly wrong. at least with online music stores, they let you make copies of a CD and it doesn't run buggy Sony code and screw with your already insecure windows environment.
DRM is acceptable if it's consumer friendly and is only made to stop mass illegal distribution. Ideally DRM should make copying and sharing digital music over the internet equally inconvenient as it is for analog mediums.
DRM shouldn't be a way to make up for lost music sales due to piracy. the industry needs to adapt. they have to realize, if they embrace online distribution with extremely light DRM, then piracy won't be an issue.
If the industry sold songs for around $0.39, or something low like that, people wouldn't find it worth the effort to even download illegal copies. lowering the outrageous prices for music is a DRM in itself. Everyone knows that it costs way less to put a song online than it does to package it and distribute it to 900,000,000 WalMarts. Heck, with BitTorrent I could distribute a whole album at absolutely no cost to me, no real bandwidth concerns, nothing.
Okay I'm straying from the topic...but what if online music stores used technology like that in BitTorrent plus light DRM so that the online music stores could make more money? They would eliminate bandwidth costs, and they could possibly set up some backup servers to do normal http/ftp downloads if a songs aren't popular enough to find enough peers.
even i can think up so many ways to squeeze out more money of music sales without taking advantage of the consumer.
hopefully we can get something out of this if enough people leave some good comments.
bottom line is, if i buy a DVD, i should be able to make backup copies for myself. if the media companies are going to sell a license for their media, the disc shouldn't matter, i should be entitled to that license regardless. on DVD movies, the license is for home exibition in one household, and i am following that license agreement whether i have one or 50 copies, as long as i use only one copy at a time in one household.
i'm thinking about the upgrades you would need to do to enable your VoIP phone to be wiretapped. wouldn't that require you to basically set up a wiretap yourself?
i'm glad that the appeal is being pushed through, because when new communications standards are made, new rules for them need to be made. you can't recycle postage rules for email, just like you can't recycle telephone rules for broadband phones. you have to make new ones. there shouldn't be a rule that governs a new standard until our politicians figure out what the standard actually does.
news - an email bug affecting 300 people is not news for nerds - email isn't nerdy stuff - it is indeed stuff that matters - 300 people getting their email shut off for a couple weeks is not news at all. it isn't even their PC email, it's email sent JUST between blackberries.
this story is so useless that i'm not even going to finish my
i personally think that if there was some type of law that effectively required the salary of the worker + worker's visa sponsorship = salary of U.S. Citizen, it would force companies to choose their workers based on skill, giving skilled foreigners a chance for high paying work, and it would allow U.S. and foreign workers to compete on an equal level, so that could end the job "stealing".
on an offtopic note, to reduce outsourcing, the government could establish some type of tax on products made by American companies using foreign labor.
Slashdot Mirror
Forbid the idea that anyone should take pride in his work and want to share it with other people!
there's a difference between working on something for yourself to share with the community and showing off something made for your company on a community site. Slashdot is a community, and if you want advertising Slashdot offers that for a fee.
most people keep business and their own lives separate.
and besides that, everyone knows that a slashdot post is free (and sometimes overwhelmingly effective) advertising
you know, it's very sad that after all these years of variouspatches and fixes being availible for people's computers, people still use inferior software more inherently prone to flaw.
google never fails to impress me with how much they are willing to diversify their services. while you could say some of this is kind of weird, at least google is willing to come up with original new ideas on how to advertise to people.
i sometimes catch myself forgetting why google is worth so much.
thank you very much for the MAKE magazine advertisement.
i know, this will get modded down, but that's because it's right. i mean, come on, it's so obvious "i work for this company, and they have a great article. read this article that i made for the company that pays me! The more readers i get for my columns, the more likely i will get promoted! so therefore, i think i'll post on slashdot and get free publicity!"
i mean, really i wouldn't even post something like this for one of the open source projects i have started.
i really don't know of anyone still using IE besides the retards who run the technology in public areas that assume that anything besides microsoft's standard software setup is incompatible and compltely unusable.
i like that idea. some of the problems in games today aren't due to graphics, but they just dont feel real.
i'm all for escaping reality (mario style), but when you are trying to make an immersive (exagerrated), and realistic city setting like in GTA, there should be more people, more cars, etc. it just feels empty sometimes.
and there should be more activity during the (realistically) more active times of the day. it would make the city itself more interesting.
in regards to my first comment, i really think that innovation is in software in hardware. software innovation would be stuff like katamari, super mario bros, tetris, etc. (when they first came out). hardware innovation would be analog stick, rumble, dpad, shoulder buttons, trigger buttons, nintendo's...remote...thing.
notice how none of these comments are on innovating gameplay. GUIs, neat features for developers, etc, but what about the actual game?
half the launch titles are ports, and the other half aren't genre defining or groundbreaking. i don't see, even with the pretty graphics neat GUI (i didn't know playing games had anything to do with having a pretty GUI) any gameplay changes. how can the gameplay be any different, the controller is a perfected S controller.
there's no way that playing an xbox 360 game can be any better than the current generation. this isn't N64 -> PS2 era, the N64/PS1 had actual processing limits and storage space limits and RAM limits that actually affected gameplay. even the current gen consoles introduced innovations like online play, (good) wireless controllers, and graphics that were closer to photorealism.
but xbox 360 makes one innovation - moving closer to photorealism. that's it. there's nothing else. all the other innovations involve money-grabbing (Microsoft Points to buy pointless shit, higher console price, streaming from a media center PC...to get more people to buy media center edition pcs)
take a company like nintendo that continuously adds something to the gaming mix, like the dpad, analog stick, shoulder buttons, online play (famicom modem anyone?), revolution controller, and (good) wireless controllers, and then see real success. sony and microsoft are on their 3rd and 2nd generations, but besides nintendo, there has been no other console company able to survive longer than that in the gaming world.
microsoft (and sony) are just following along with the trends - IMO to be successful, a company has to make the trend, and make the gaming culture. that's why nintendo's still around.
nobody's going to use this service because the truth is that people don't want their music player inside of their cell phone. cell phones are more often than not tied to the service because of 2 year contracts, and they are disposable trash to most people, whereas people want to keep their MP3 players for a long time (they cost more than CD players, hold more music, so they should last longer)
of course, since the nano came out, it'd probably be just better to tape the nano to the back of a normal cell phone that just makes phone calls. you probably wouldn't tell the size difference anyway. then you could have a real music player and a real phone instead of a compromise.
companies seem to hold this myth near and dear that having multiple devices is always inconvenient.
this award show is full of paid awards.
as in about half of the winners probably won due to payoffs.
PSP as breakthrough technology...BS
King Kong winning a bunch of awards...the game isn't even out yet. real legitimate awards shows have deadlines for eligibility.
there are more, but i'm so disgusted i won't bother reading the rest of the winners, though i'm glad resident evil won a few awards.
i'm still shocked that a "legitimate" company that's widely purchased from, and is a household name, would distribute software that anti-virus companies would consider to be malware. i'm still shocked that sony let this kind of thing slide, it's so obvious that they didn't even check to see what they were doing before they did it.
i hope you got the general idea of my point that i was trying to make even though i did not know all of the technical details. i am obviously not a programmer
i guess by hitting a wall microsoft means that because linux is slower, more expensive, has a terrible security track record with thousands of viruses, spyware, and malware, has closed source code so you can't modify the operating system to do whatever you want, and crashes more frequently, that windows is a great alternative to linux. they're making a good point, windows seems like a great deal at this point, i bet a lot of people will switch.
bottom line is, until microsoft can build this OS to be HUGELY FASTER than linux, there's no reason to pay extra for something that doesn't have any speed advantages.
i've never heard of the supercomputing crowd complaining about ease of use, they are looking for more calculations for less money, and for that linux/unix is probably still the best choice. there's no reason to pay thousands for an OS that doesn't increase your performance any further than an OS that costs $0
besides the arguments of whether red hat or OS X would be better for this project, when Steve Jobs offers to put Mac OS on an x86 laptop not made by Apple, this is once in a lifetime event, and I would think that you couldn't turn him down.
besides, i don't see why kids like this need something like red hat linux. all they want to do is run a bunch of learning programs/paint/word processors? what is so bad about having a closed source operating system? 97% of the world does anyway...
not only that, but if you dedicate yourself to only using open source, you miss out on the tons of interactive software for kids that's out there (especially on mac)
not to mention the fact that the mac has much better compatibility than red hat for the majority of commercial products on the market. and the fact is, sometimes open source just doesn't cut it.
don't get me wrong, though, many times open source alternatives are fine programs, but many times they are just alternatives.
i didn't realize how huge linux was in the smartphone market. i figured it was all between windows mobile and symbian.
i can see standardizing mobile linux as being a very good thing for linux in that market.
maybe linux's lead isn't so large - the last link in the article, when you read through it, points out that the data does not inlclude phones/pdas running on microsoft's pocket PC edition of windows.
i don't know what activa's all angry about, slashdot probably just took down her site anyway.
what suddenly gives you the right to decide that you should be allowed to run their OS on any hardware?
do you sue companies that won't allow you to unlock the processing potential of fancy touch screen cash registers, palm pilots that can't run Windows Mobile, or a watch that doesn't allow you to change it's OS? do you sue palm pilot because they refuse to allow you to buy Palm OS and run it on any machine you please? or the cash register manufacterer for not selling you their cash register OS for normal PCs?
no, because it's absurd. why is it absurd? because these companies depend on hardware sales. just like apple. this is not illegal to the slightest bit, and you can't prove it in court for the following reasons:
the fact is that apple doesn't want to license their OS for any hardware but their own. whether it's Intel, IBM, or Motorola, it's no different. Intel does NOT have a monopoly on the market, as Intel does not hold even close to 100% marketshare of the PC microprocessor market.
Apple has broken no law whatsoever in this regard, and the fact is that by restricting what type of hardware customers can use with OS X, apple can do a number of things that are GOOD for the consumer:
1. integrated hardware/software means there are less drivers to deal with, more plug and play is easily achievable
2. more features can be added to the computers without adding 3rd party programs. Things like the sudden motion sensor and the scrolling trackpad can be integrated in the OS. The OS can have custom versions that are optimized for their particular model.
3. tech support doesn't have to deal with thousands of different parts in beige box PCs, which saves the consumer time on the phone with Apple's tech support representatives. in court, apple could argue that this makes their tech support cheaper than the competition (which it is in many cases).
4. Lowering the hardware confusion makes documentation easier, and reduces to a small extent crashes/bugs/problems. Any bugs/crashes/problems can be detected faster when you know exactly what parts are in the computer and how they interact.
5. Also in respect to #4, reduction of these general problems increases the quality of the product. reducing crash/bug/problem downtime makes for a more valuable, satisfying product.
6. i'm guessing security is easier, too. knowing what hardware is in the computer means knowing exactly where and how information can leave and enter the computer.
as the avant-garde, intellectual sort of film that Lucas keeps saying it is.
jar-jar binks is most definatly not intellectual, and he wasted half the time in the first two prequel star wars movies. so i guess maybe you could argue that episode III was intellectual, but I and II vaporized my brain.
any idiot would get out of that deal with disney, because it sucks.
disney spends NO time and NO effort actually making the film, bringing the characters to life, and making the script, animating, etc, and just by distributing they suddenly get rights to the characters, and gets to split the profit in half.
i'm sure just about every other film company could give pixar a better deal AND would be willing to sign them up immediatly, it's not like their movies are floundering. pixar movies consistantly rake in huge profits.
rootkits are an example of DRM gone horribly wrong. at least with online music stores, they let you make copies of a CD and it doesn't run buggy Sony code and screw with your already insecure windows environment.
DRM is acceptable if it's consumer friendly and is only made to stop mass illegal distribution. Ideally DRM should make copying and sharing digital music over the internet equally inconvenient as it is for analog mediums.
DRM shouldn't be a way to make up for lost music sales due to piracy. the industry needs to adapt. they have to realize, if they embrace online distribution with extremely light DRM, then piracy won't be an issue.
If the industry sold songs for around $0.39, or something low like that, people wouldn't find it worth the effort to even download illegal copies. lowering the outrageous prices for music is a DRM in itself. Everyone knows that it costs way less to put a song online than it does to package it and distribute it to 900,000,000 WalMarts. Heck, with BitTorrent I could distribute a whole album at absolutely no cost to me, no real bandwidth concerns, nothing.
Okay I'm straying from the topic...but what if online music stores used technology like that in BitTorrent plus light DRM so that the online music stores could make more money? They would eliminate bandwidth costs, and they could possibly set up some backup servers to do normal http/ftp downloads if a songs aren't popular enough to find enough peers.
even i can think up so many ways to squeeze out more money of music sales without taking advantage of the consumer.
haha! wow! another joke about how bush talks! seriously, where do you come up with this!? excellent originallity, what wit!
hopefully we can get something out of this if enough people leave some good comments.
bottom line is, if i buy a DVD, i should be able to make backup copies for myself. if the media companies are going to sell a license for their media, the disc shouldn't matter, i should be entitled to that license regardless. on DVD movies, the license is for home exibition in one household, and i am following that license agreement whether i have one or 50 copies, as long as i use only one copy at a time in one household.
i'm thinking about the upgrades you would need to do to enable your VoIP phone to be wiretapped. wouldn't that require you to basically set up a wiretap yourself?
i'm glad that the appeal is being pushed through, because when new communications standards are made, new rules for them need to be made. you can't recycle postage rules for email, just like you can't recycle telephone rules for broadband phones. you have to make new ones. there shouldn't be a rule that governs a new standard until our politicians figure out what the standard actually does.
"news for nerds, stuff that matters"
news - an email bug affecting 300 people is not news
for nerds - email isn't nerdy
stuff - it is indeed stuff
that matters - 300 people getting their email shut off for a couple weeks is not news at all. it isn't even their PC email, it's email sent JUST between blackberries.
this story is so useless that i'm not even going to finish my
i personally think that if there was some type of law that effectively required the salary of the worker + worker's visa sponsorship = salary of U.S. Citizen, it would force companies to choose their workers based on skill, giving skilled foreigners a chance for high paying work, and it would allow U.S. and foreign workers to compete on an equal level, so that could end the job "stealing".
on an offtopic note, to reduce outsourcing, the government could establish some type of tax on products made by American companies using foreign labor.
or maybe i'm just thinking too idealistically.