Well, there wasn't much to the 'article' in this one except a bunch of odd links on www.starwars.com. But I noticed that CBS's Early Show was covering this and states:
Like it or not, this is probably all you can expect if you're clamoring for new "Star Wars" material. Lucas has vowed not to make any new movies for the series.
"I said it might be amusing to come back with Harrison and Carrie when they're 70-years old and make a movie, but I forgot that I'd be 70-years-old, too," Lucas said, referring to people who ask him about more sequels.
Lucas has talked about doing 3D version of all these films, for theaters. They would be released one-a-year. There is also talk of a 2007 "ultimate set" with all six films and new bonus material. There have also been rumors of a TV series, books, cartoons, and video games.
What, will the 3D releases offer you another chance to alter them? Was your 'original vision' to have Jabba the Hutt slither out on people's laps?
Oh, an ultimate set? You don't have enough of my money?
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him. I would rather see him release 9 mediocre or bad movies than to have him edit, 3D-ify and edit again episodes IV, V & VI.
Damnit Lucas, let the studio technicians re-master the movie (they went to school for it, they know what they're doing) and give us more original content! Look at all the famous directors you've studied. Did Akira Kirosawa edit and re-release Shichinin No Samurai or Rashômon over and over and over again? No, he continued to make more movies, some very very good and some mediocre.
I think a lot of companies (like the companies mentioned in this article) obtain patents but don't hire patent trolls to go about flexing their lawsuit muscles.
What's the point of the patent? Well, especially on standards, you get to maintain complete creative control over the direction of the standard and it's kind of a safety to always make sure everyone depends on you.
I also think that companies might consider patents as an asset when they calculate their balance sheets. I have nothing to back that up but since patents are continually bought and sold (see Intellectual Ventures) so they must be assets to some degree. This looks very good to investors & stockholders.
Afterall, Microsoft might not use these patents but what happens if they sell them for a huge chunk of change after everyone is using the technology? Massive lawsuits?
Developer: "Man, java is the shit!" (hey, it was the 90s, everybody spoke like an idiot)
Microsoft: "Then you'll love J++, it's more efficient and other stuff that we don't need to prove. Plus, it will soon be used by everyone everywhere."
Developer: "Cool, sport me a copy!"
Microsoft: "Not so fast, it's $300 a personal license."
Developer: "No thanks."
(Scene ends)
Act Two
Setting: late 1990s
Developer: "JSP's are stupid awesome."
Microsoft: "Then you'll love ASPs, they're more efficient and other stuff that we don't need to prove. Plus, it will soon be used by everyone everywhere."
Developer: "Cool, where do I get the compiler for VB or this.NET stuff?"
Microsoft: "Well, you can make ASPs for free and stuff and almost everyone has IIS anyways... but to make applications that do anything at all you need our libraries. You need to buy Visual Studio and we're afraid it's a bit pricey..."
Developer: "No thanks."
(Scene ends)
Act Three
Setting: the oughts
Developer: "XML makes my life easier but it's not standardized."
Microsoft: "Use our standard, it's the best! Uh, it's kind of sorta free. You can edit it easy and use it. *cough* but we've got some patents *cough* so go ahead and use it."
Developer: "Wait, what was that last part?"
Microsoft: "Aw, christ, well, to stop everyone from slowly eating away at our dominant market, go ahead and use it. We promise not to sue but no backsies on these patents!"
Developer: "What the fsck, Microsoft, get it through your heads, we just want to get along. Stop charging us for everything (even standards). Change your business model."
(Scene ends, developer storms off to go play nice with the Sun & the rest of the world)
Do you know what an executive producer does? He says, "Hey, I've got shit tons of money, here's some. Go make a movie. I know it's going to suck but you see, even Waterworld made a little money after worldwide sales." Bruckheimer has nothing to do with this movie except fund it. And he's not worried about not making the return, hell even Uwe Boll's bombs make more than he spends creating them. Have you noticed that Tarantino attaches his name to a lot of movies even when he's only producing them? Look at Hostel & Hostel: Part II or even From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter. Do you think that last one was good? It wasn't even though Tarantino attached his name to it, he just wanted to turn a buck off it. The only movies I consider to be true Tarantino are the five he's written, produced and directed. That ensures him total control in the movie.
Executive Producer
AKA: Executive in Charge of Production
A producer who is not involved in any technical aspects of the filmmaking process, but who is still responsible for the overall production. Typically an executive producer handles business and legal issues. See also associate producer, co-producer, line producer.
My point is, a famous person executive producing a movie means nothing. None of their talent, none of their expertise, none of their influence is put into the movie. If you use this as reasoning as to whether or not a movie will do good, you're not using sound judgement.
Why do video game movies suck? Because the name is all that makes the cash. Not the story. Not the acting. Not the originality. Those who are interested in making a profit (and everyone is) will put the money down while the movie makes money only because of title recognition. You need to recognize this and stop playing their game for these horrible movies to end. Everyone has to. We're all falling for this trick where names get attached but you need to realize that they're just "producing" it, not directing or writing it. They know it works, look at the sequels roll out as the viewers pay to see them.
As for the writer, they're kind of forced to adhere to an idea already in someone's mind. Whether it be the original game studio that made the original concept or some hollywood bigshot. If writers aren't given absolute control over the story and script, they tend to suck. Collaboration is good but trying to force feed a writer a plot is bad. You'll see it time and time again.
This really isn't a surprise if HP wanted to hold together as a company. This damage may be deeper than you think as their Head of Global Operations, Giles Bouchard is leaving by October 31st. It doesn't indicate what his reasons are but he's been working there for two years, why now? Will we see others follow or will Dunn's resignation stop others from jumping ship?
Considering China's regulations I don't think it'd be possible for Mr. Wales to accomplish censoring all of Wikipedia from what's on the list from China's Article 19 of censorship policy. This that China requires to be censored:
violating the basic principles as they are confirmed in the Constitution;
jeopardizing the security of the nation, divulging state secrets, subverting of the national regime or jeopardizing the integrity of the nation's unity;
harming the honor or the interests of the nation;
inciting hatred against peoples, racism against peoples, or disrupting the solidarity of peoples;
disrupting national policies on religion, propagating evil cults and feudal superstitions;
spreading rumors, disturbing social order, or disrupting social stability;
spreading obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, terror, or abetting the commission of a crime;
insulting or defaming third parties, infringing on the legal rights and interests of third parties;
inciting illegal assemblies, associations, marches, demonstrations, or gatherings that disturb social order;
conducting activities in the name of an illegal civil organization; and
any other content prohibited by law or rules.
That last one (#11) is my favorite. Kind of open ended, eh? Frankly, it'd be absurd to ask anyone to censor dynamically changing information such as a Wiki with those kinds of rules.
In other news all Chinese residents will see a new homepage for Wikipedia. Just another reason why Tor should stay up and the recent news about it being used as a child pornography shield is terrible.
*All information in this post was gathered via irony.
You provide a great list of lawyers willing to defend us... But would you happen to be able to post the names, phone numbers and home mailing addresses of your colleagues that work for the RIAA?
Don't be shy about telling us which one has won the most cases against low income citizens.
I mean, who is going to chase after these lawsuits and counter sue? What repurcussions can a counter suit have on the RIAA? And, if they do successfully counter sue, how much does that slow down the RIAA?
When will this end? Could there be an epic counter suit that would make the RIAA stop with law suits?
I hear a lot that the RIAA has the weakest evidence ever in these cases. Such as screen shots of dynamic IP addresses taken from Kazaa. How the hell do judges across this country uphold these cases with such lack of concrete evidence? I mean, give me five minutes in photoshop and I'll make you a "screenshot" of Kazaa with www.whitehouse.gov's IP address listed over and over on it. Can't an expert witness cause this evidence to be thrown out quickly?
Ok, so the RIAA's modus operandi seems to be filing suit against someone living half way across the country. If someone in California is charged for file sharing in New York (like what happened here, what can they do to stop this? Doesn't our justice system prevent this we-know-you're-not-going-to-come-all-the-way-over- here-so-just-settle-out-of-court strategy?
A lot of people settle out of court when they are sued and it turns out to be between $12,000 & $17,000. Now, this looks like chump change compared to the $150,000 per violation and 1,000 songs shared means $150,000,000 lawsuit. Is this smart or stupid? I mean, don't you, the lawyers that these people consult, tell them to fold and pay the little amount of money?
Follow up to that, do you believe the RIAA would actually win a $150,000,000 lawsuit if the out of court routes weren't taken? They seem to imply they wouldn't win if they offer these tiny settlements en masse.
Precisely, although, if I may add a bit as to why people might still be afraid of this research...
It's natural to fear what you don't understand. It might even be a quality of a species that determines its success as many things in nature are quite dangerous. For better or for worse, mankind has this built in as a default setting no matter who you are whether you're fearing a black hole or suffering from xenophobia.
I am not a physicist but I think the fears here are quite unfounded. All the math and theory point to a black hole having a finite event horizon. If the black holes they are producing are microscopic and last relatively little amount of time, they shouldn't be very dangerous. I think this has been covered before.
It is interesting though, because I believe a black hole's event horizon has a radius proportionate to the amount of mass it consumes. I believe that if you make them small enough, however, they don't last long enough to expand. I would be concerned if they were attempting to make massive singularities to destroy garbage heaps with these but I don't see how those would be possible to create as the only known method is to accumulate so much mass in such a small volume that gravity crushes it into a singularity. My understanding of the collider is that it smashes particles together at a fast rate and, as a result, very tiny and brief black holes may result. As this article states:
The physicist Stephen Hawking predicted in the 1970s that black holes would evaporate by radiating away their energy. For astrophysical black holes this is a very slow process, but extremely small black holes should last about as long as a snowflake in hell.
People will, as always, fear what they don't understand so I believe it's hopeless to quell all fears about physics research. I'm sure a lot of people are concerned about this being the next "atomic bomb" technology. Where we "drop" black holes on enemies. Though that doesn't really make sense, it still could have military applications such as creating electromagnetic devices that are so strong they displace gravity and aiming them at your enemies. Sure would make for a cheesy sci-fi book whether it was true or not!
A leveraged buyout (or LBO, or highly-leveraged transaction (HLT), or "bootstrap" transaction) occurs when a financial sponsor gains control of a majority of a target company's equity through the use of borrowed money or debt.
So, they're essentially borrowing money to buy them out. What does this mean? Well, perhaps the people buying them out think they can pay that debt off quickly or they have a lot of money in the bank and qualified for the loan. Either way, it's interesting to me because I would have predicted this company to drop in value after Apple went x86 architecture. I'm sure they have other business and contracts, it's just interesting to see someone borrow money to buy them out. What do they know that we don't? Isn't Freescale's business going to drop dramatically?
HP's reputation has suffered far more from this mess than it ever could have from 'leaked information' - I don't care how sensitive it was (baring forced anal probes of random citizens).
Well, she did something that a lot of people with a lot of power have historically done. She assumed the moral high ground. In our society, it's illegal to murder people. Well, unless you're in Texas or Virginia where they appearantly take it upon themselves to murder someone as a penalty of justice. Kind of ironic that if someone commits a crime, we as a society take it upon ourselves to then commit what would normally be considered a great crime unto them.
Well, what I'm trying to say is that she witnessed bad things happening to HP and so did something probably equally as bad for sake of HP. She might have viewed this as 'justice' or whatever.
The other members of the board that did not resign in protest bear some of the responsibility as well.
Not entirely true. How do we know that we have all the details to this whole story? Perhaps everyone there watched her assume the moral high ground and gave it to her? I mean, it sure was nice of her not to outright fire the leak. Maybe everyone (except the computer founder that quit) acknowledged that the strategy Patricia was correct in taking that strategy to find and silence the leak. Maybe some of them were completely happy that they only had to sacrifice that to find out who was leaking information? Perhaps this invasion of privacy is the norm in corporate America, you just have to accept it once you get to that point -- I'm not sure, that seems to be a completely different culture than what I'm used to. Everyone's pretty cutthroat anyway.
I'm not trying to defend her actions at all, just trying to give you the story from her perspective. I'm sure it's already been said that she didn't act in any inappropriate way compared to some of our political figureheads we have today and have had historically. You can call her Machiavelli but you can't call her stupid, she's still has a job!
Nothing shouts 'unstable' like organizing protests at the drop of a hat.
I hate to sound like a patriotic tool... but it was demonstrations that built America. It was the right to protest at the drop of a hat that made it so appealing. The fact that more people don't take to the streets when anything goes wrong in the government upsets me. We've really forgotten why this country was built and why so many millions gave their lives. We've taken for granted the right to protest and ignored it.
You're exercising your right to free speech by saying this protest is uncalled for. I don't understand your logic for calling it 'unstable' but instead they must have some good control of the situation if they can organize people instantly. No company should be above the scrutiny of the consumer and we're all consumers of facebook. They aren't 'harassing' a company, they're asserting their right to make their voices heard. The fact that you used the following words leads me to believe you don't support demonstrations: "screaming, harassing, radical, freaking out, unstable." These are very negative words and it sounds like something that a Facebook employee would say to defend their company.
These people feel that Facebook breached ethics. Is this true? I'm not sure, but I am willing to listen to a mass of my fellow Americans that feel this is a big deal.
Perhaps mass protests at "the drop of a hat" would keep our politicians in check? Right now, it seems they can get away with murder and spending more money than we have. I honestly only wish more people would non-violently protest and speak their minds.
What are your thoughts -- do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?
And why wouldn't they?
Seriously, any free testing is better than none. Especially when they point out the problems explicitly and hand them to you. As a developer, you're then given one last chance to fix your product -- if these even need to be fixed. I would expect things like the 134 memory leaks to be fixed and fixed fast. I've known Firefox to occasionally go on a memory splurge at my computer's expense and have expected this to be the problem. As far as some of these other problems that are mild security issues, they might not need to fix them at all.
Even the article admits that a lot of these "issues" are trivial to fix:
By far, the majority of the defects reported were null pointer dereferences (446 defects). A large number of defects resulted from the code not checking for null after memory was allocated. In addition, there were many cases where the return value of functions designed to return null were not checked prior to dereferencing.
Sounds like a two week job of an intern to me. Checking for null and handling it after memory allocation could probably be a cut and paste job. If they mention the line numbers and files, there's your fix.
Either way, this is the beauty of open source software, anyone can go in and do this. Now, if you found bugs in a proprietary program from some company and sent them a breakdown of problems, you'd get one of two responses. 1) No response and 2) A charge that you are reverse engineering their product and in violation of many anti-piracy laws. If the company still didn't address the issues and you published the bugs, then you're nothing but a software terrorist.
So let's kick back and watch open source at its best! No software is perfect, but it will be enjoyable to know that a process like this can occur -- with the end result being a better free product on my machine!
Cost Reduction Through Partial Implementation
on
How Retailers Watch You
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Cost is one reason retailers are holding back: Tags run from 7 cents to 20 cents apiece, based on quantity; many are waiting for a 5 cents tag before investing in the technology. "The tags would have to be a lot cheaper... to put them on a bottle of water or pack of gum and add value rather than cost," explains Simon Langford, Wal-Mart's manager of RFID strategy.
Well, that's an interesting point. But equally interesting would be investigating the possibility of putting tags on, say, maybe one in five or a fraction of your products. The idea being that you don't catch everyone who shoplifts your product but you do catch a fraction of them. Ideally, it only takes one infraction for someone to realize that it just isn't a good way strategy for obtaining items. I know this isn't how it is, many shoplifters continue with the infractions but it's better than nothing and might put the solution in your price range.
You jest about this, but I think this is a problem.
The problem facing NDGPS today, in my opinion, is the lack of a 'killer app.' In other words it's a neat tool and serves hundreds (if not thousands) of people on a daily basis, but if it disappeared tomorrow, life would go on. Therefore, when it comes to cutting the budget during tight times, programs like NDGPS are prime targets.
I disagree. The fact that you demand it have a "killer app" instead of clean functionality tells me that you lack sound judgement on this service. It's a service for locating yourself. We put green & blue information plaques by the sides of roads that tell you where you are. They're called 'road signs.' It probably costs more than $10 million a year to maintain them. I, for one, would like a public service that keeps me informed as to where I am.
Now you're telling me that we can't afford to clip another $10 million off the Defense budget and give it to this service (which may, arguably, help the coast guard in defending our shores)? Come on, we spend way more on military than any other country. It's good to maintain military superiority but do we really need it when you look at that chart? The next highest is China with maybe an 1/8th as much spending as we do. Give me a break!
There's no way anyone can justify cutting the spending on this program given what we've invested in it and how useful it is. When you look at where the rest of our spending goes, $10 million is nothing. No one can complain that the cost versus potential utility of this thing isn't high enough.
My initial concerns about these voting machines was someone obtaining one through other means than stealing one from the government and then creating trojan software for it. I mean, if other people can buy these... then they can study them and learn how to hack them. On the converse, if we can't study them, how do we know the government isn't rigging them?
So there was this interesting catch-22 where you couldn't let them into the general population for fear of a trojan being created and inserted into a group of normal ones on election day. But you also can't trust your government. Especially not the current one in the United States and considering the voluntary resignation of the Diebold CEO, I think we should at least ask for third party verification of these machines. In fact, I for one consider Black Box Voting to be a champion protector of my right to vote for publishing this information. You might not feel as strongly about them but had I not read two articles from them, I would still be ready to use a voting machine in the next presidential election.
Black Box Voting had me convinced these machines were at least a liability and at best a luddite's fear. After reading this quick "how-to" about these machines, my perception is no longer that we need to define how these machines are bought, sold & handled... but instead my opinion is now that we may be trying to use something that shouldn't be used at all.
Product created with shoddy security features. Get rid of Diebold and hope the market brings a new contestant into the ring for the much sought after prize of the American public's voting machine contract!
The Diebold Acu-vote has failed as a product that requires the utmost security. I am a dissatisfied consumer and I sincerely hope every citizen of the United States agrees with me.
Pretend you're a news feed or printer and you too can read stories without inhibiting log-ins or advertisements!
Now, for my two cents, I like WoW. But I loved Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU. I had two accounts in that game. It had this special kind of social aspect to it where people were dependent on even the most mundane professions. On top of that, you could level by dancing in a cantina all day, simply chatting with people. The fighting classes had to come in to relieve fatigue and wounds. It was a great system that, in my opinion, could have been more popular than WoW.
In WoW, fighting is the only thing that gains prestige. All the best weapons are looted, there is no dependence on non-fighting classes nor is there such a thing. I think that if anything is going to surpass WoW at this point, it has to be something that so far out there that it's not even well defined yet.
One thing is sure, it needs to accomodate both fighting classes and socializing classes and keep them equally important.
They point out that it's only a 500 people editing most of Wikipedia. But are they talking only the English version. Something to note is that many of the Top Users of Wikipedia are language bots concerned with propagating interwiki information accross languages. Number one is Hashar for the French language. I imagine the strategy is that getting a bad translation only requires someone fluent in French to correct for it to be a good article -- that person doesn't need to know the information because it's pretty much already there in broken French.
Another large contributor by number of edits is GuanoBot who's only job is to bypass redirects.
Are these bots that are helpful skewing the statistics because they are needed for maintenance?
But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.
With the shear mass of people writing on Wikipedia, I think you'd be able to find examples of the articles that were heavily contributed to by a large group of people (say things like Fermat's Theorem) and also things that are primarily the work of one person. Frankly, that's what I expected of Wikipedia.
What about these statistics? Could Wales perhaps post average number of edits per page with a standard distribution? What about the same for average number of users contributing to page? What about statistics for average number of characters changed per edit?
Things that have many books written about them are going to be edited by a lot of people that read those books (like The Beatles). But if I want to read up on Procul Harum (A not-so-well-known rock band), I'm assuming that there is some die hard nutjob out there with two children named Procul and Harum that filled in most of the information in that page.
Is this a good thing? Well, yes and no. I think The Beatles' entry holds to more rigorous standards than Procul Harum's on account of the possibility of one person unintentionally inserting their personal views into Wikipedia. For instance, "Known as the World's Greatest Rock Band" may be appropriate for The Beatles' page but not for Procul Harum's. Yet, we all know how insane fans treat their favorite bands. Passion and emotion are not useful tools when authoring Wikipedia or history in general. And that, in my opinion, is Wikipedia's greatest hinderance.
So there was no article but I found this online that I think I had caught on Digg once (can I say that here?).
Anyway, this all goes back to our friends IDC who have this knack for claiming to be the industry experts in everything. I don't really buy that but they make these reports and then the article gets published and Slashdot usually caries them. In the particular link above, they estimate that 55 million CPUs will be used by Dell in 2007 and that, according to Taiwanese chipmakers, 20 million of them will be AMD chips. So that comes to a little over a third, not half if those estimates are accurate.
Hemos, I know you're pissed because you have to edit Slashdot on labor day weekend but hang in there champ. You forgot a department on the last story and a link on this one but you'll get the next one right, I'm sure of it!
I visited the earthlink help page and noticed that it contained four things.
A box showing suggested search terms
A box in which I could search (through Yahoo!) for my page.
Two banner ads.
When I enter in a term, say 'guitar', I get a page with yet more ads and sponsored links but still directed through earthlink help to Yahoo!
I wasn't born yesterday, I understand the concepts of paid search, sponsored links & banner ads. They generate revenue and insult me. They waste real estate on websites and obscure my information that I would prefer to harvest un assaulted by sales pitches.
I'm betting I'm not the first to say this, but this is insane.
If they wanted to be 'helpful' they would provide you with some sort of new service. In this solution, they are simply deciding which search engine you will use and cashing in off of it also. If we want to search for another answer, I think we know where to go. If you doubt our abilities to select a preferred search engine, at least give us some choices. Do you know what happens in Firefox when I pull down the search engine on the upper right? I can select from a number of sites.
"By presenting users with contextual help based upon the non-existent domain the user entered, we believe we are improving the EarthLink user experience with a system that will not interfere with other network processes."
You're not improving anything, you're laughing all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, an ultimate set? You don't have enough of my money?
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him. I would rather see him release 9 mediocre or bad movies than to have him edit, 3D-ify and edit again episodes IV, V & VI.
Damnit Lucas, let the studio technicians re-master the movie (they went to school for it, they know what they're doing) and give us more original content! Look at all the famous directors you've studied. Did Akira Kirosawa edit and re-release Shichinin No Samurai or Rashômon over and over and over again? No, he continued to make more movies, some very very good and some mediocre.
I think a lot of companies (like the companies mentioned in this article) obtain patents but don't hire patent trolls to go about flexing their lawsuit muscles.
What's the point of the patent? Well, especially on standards, you get to maintain complete creative control over the direction of the standard and it's kind of a safety to always make sure everyone depends on you.
I also think that companies might consider patents as an asset when they calculate their balance sheets. I have nothing to back that up but since patents are continually bought and sold (see Intellectual Ventures) so they must be assets to some degree. This looks very good to investors & stockholders.
Afterall, Microsoft might not use these patents but what happens if they sell them for a huge chunk of change after everyone is using the technology? Massive lawsuits?
Act One
.NET stuff?"
... but to make applications that do anything at all you need our libraries. You need to buy Visual Studio and we're afraid it's a bit pricey ..."
Setting: 1990s
Developer: "Man, java is the shit!" (hey, it was the 90s, everybody spoke like an idiot)
Microsoft: "Then you'll love J++, it's more efficient and other stuff that we don't need to prove. Plus, it will soon be used by everyone everywhere."
Developer: "Cool, sport me a copy!"
Microsoft: "Not so fast, it's $300 a personal license."
Developer: "No thanks."
(Scene ends)
Act Two
Setting: late 1990s
Developer: "JSP's are stupid awesome."
Microsoft: "Then you'll love ASPs, they're more efficient and other stuff that we don't need to prove. Plus, it will soon be used by everyone everywhere."
Developer: "Cool, where do I get the compiler for VB or this
Microsoft: "Well, you can make ASPs for free and stuff and almost everyone has IIS anyways
Developer: "No thanks."
(Scene ends)
Act Three
Setting: the oughts
Developer: "XML makes my life easier but it's not standardized."
Microsoft: "Use our standard, it's the best! Uh, it's kind of sorta free. You can edit it easy and use it. *cough* but we've got some patents *cough* so go ahead and use it."
Developer: "Wait, what was that last part?"
Microsoft: "Aw, christ, well, to stop everyone from slowly eating away at our dominant market, go ahead and use it. We promise not to sue but no backsies on these patents!"
Developer: "What the fsck, Microsoft, get it through your heads, we just want to get along. Stop charging us for everything (even standards). Change your business model."
(Scene ends, developer storms off to go play nice with the Sun & the rest of the world)
Here's the Definition of Executive Producer: My point is, a famous person executive producing a movie means nothing. None of their talent, none of their expertise, none of their influence is put into the movie. If you use this as reasoning as to whether or not a movie will do good, you're not using sound judgement.
Why do video game movies suck? Because the name is all that makes the cash. Not the story. Not the acting. Not the originality. Those who are interested in making a profit (and everyone is) will put the money down while the movie makes money only because of title recognition. You need to recognize this and stop playing their game for these horrible movies to end. Everyone has to. We're all falling for this trick where names get attached but you need to realize that they're just "producing" it, not directing or writing it. They know it works, look at the sequels roll out as the viewers pay to see them.
As for the writer, they're kind of forced to adhere to an idea already in someone's mind. Whether it be the original game studio that made the original concept or some hollywood bigshot. If writers aren't given absolute control over the story and script, they tend to suck. Collaboration is good but trying to force feed a writer a plot is bad. You'll see it time and time again.
This really isn't a surprise if HP wanted to hold together as a company. This damage may be deeper than you think as their Head of Global Operations, Giles Bouchard is leaving by October 31st. It doesn't indicate what his reasons are but he's been working there for two years, why now? Will we see others follow or will Dunn's resignation stop others from jumping ship?
Considering China's regulations I don't think it'd be possible for Mr. Wales to accomplish censoring all of Wikipedia from what's on the list from China's Article 19 of censorship policy. This that China requires to be censored:
- violating the basic principles as they are confirmed in the Constitution;
- jeopardizing the security of the nation, divulging state secrets, subverting of the national regime or jeopardizing the integrity of the nation's unity;
- harming the honor or the interests of the nation;
- inciting hatred against peoples, racism against peoples, or disrupting the solidarity of peoples;
- disrupting national policies on religion, propagating evil cults and feudal superstitions;
- spreading rumors, disturbing social order, or disrupting social stability;
- spreading obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, terror, or abetting the commission of a crime;
- insulting or defaming third parties, infringing on the legal rights and interests of third parties;
- inciting illegal assemblies, associations, marches, demonstrations, or gatherings that disturb social order;
- conducting activities in the name of an illegal civil organization; and
- any other content prohibited by law or rules.
That last one (#11) is my favorite. Kind of open ended, eh? Frankly, it'd be absurd to ask anyone to censor dynamically changing information such as a Wiki with those kinds of rules.In other news all Chinese residents will see a new homepage for Wikipedia. Just another reason why Tor should stay up and the recent news about it being used as a child pornography shield is terrible.
*All information in this post was gathered via irony.
You provide a great list of lawyers willing to defend us ... But would you happen to be able to post the names, phone numbers and home mailing addresses of your colleagues that work for the RIAA?
Don't be shy about telling us which one has won the most cases against low income citizens.
Is there anyway to ask a judge to throw out cases when the RIAA's lawsuits become unbelievably ridiculous?
I mean, who is going to chase after these lawsuits and counter sue? What repurcussions can a counter suit have on the RIAA? And, if they do successfully counter sue, how much does that slow down the RIAA?
When will this end? Could there be an epic counter suit that would make the RIAA stop with law suits?
I hear a lot that the RIAA has the weakest evidence ever in these cases. Such as screen shots of dynamic IP addresses taken from Kazaa. How the hell do judges across this country uphold these cases with such lack of concrete evidence? I mean, give me five minutes in photoshop and I'll make you a "screenshot" of Kazaa with www.whitehouse.gov's IP address listed over and over on it. Can't an expert witness cause this evidence to be thrown out quickly?
Ok, so the RIAA's modus operandi seems to be filing suit against someone living half way across the country. If someone in California is charged for file sharing in New York (like what happened here, what can they do to stop this? Doesn't our justice system prevent this we-know-you're-not-going-to-come-all-the-way-over- here-so-just-settle-out-of-court strategy?
A lot of people settle out of court when they are sued and it turns out to be between $12,000 & $17,000. Now, this looks like chump change compared to the $150,000 per violation and 1,000 songs shared means $150,000,000 lawsuit. Is this smart or stupid? I mean, don't you, the lawyers that these people consult, tell them to fold and pay the little amount of money?
Follow up to that, do you believe the RIAA would actually win a $150,000,000 lawsuit if the out of court routes weren't taken? They seem to imply they wouldn't win if they offer these tiny settlements en masse.
What's the biggest mistake you've seen people make historically in cases where they're charged by the RIAA?
It's natural to fear what you don't understand. It might even be a quality of a species that determines its success as many things in nature are quite dangerous. For better or for worse, mankind has this built in as a default setting no matter who you are whether you're fearing a black hole or suffering from xenophobia.
I am not a physicist but I think the fears here are quite unfounded. All the math and theory point to a black hole having a finite event horizon. If the black holes they are producing are microscopic and last relatively little amount of time, they shouldn't be very dangerous. I think this has been covered before.
It is interesting though, because I believe a black hole's event horizon has a radius proportionate to the amount of mass it consumes. I believe that if you make them small enough, however, they don't last long enough to expand. I would be concerned if they were attempting to make massive singularities to destroy garbage heaps with these but I don't see how those would be possible to create as the only known method is to accumulate so much mass in such a small volume that gravity crushes it into a singularity. My understanding of the collider is that it smashes particles together at a fast rate and, as a result, very tiny and brief black holes may result. As this article states:
People will, as always, fear what they don't understand so I believe it's hopeless to quell all fears about physics research. I'm sure a lot of people are concerned about this being the next "atomic bomb" technology. Where we "drop" black holes on enemies. Though that doesn't really make sense, it still could have military applications such as creating electromagnetic devices that are so strong they displace gravity and aiming them at your enemies. Sure would make for a cheesy sci-fi book whether it was true or not!
Well, what I'm trying to say is that she witnessed bad things happening to HP and so did something probably equally as bad for sake of HP. She might have viewed this as 'justice' or whatever. Not entirely true. How do we know that we have all the details to this whole story? Perhaps everyone there watched her assume the moral high ground and gave it to her? I mean, it sure was nice of her not to outright fire the leak. Maybe everyone (except the computer founder that quit) acknowledged that the strategy Patricia was correct in taking that strategy to find and silence the leak. Maybe some of them were completely happy that they only had to sacrifice that to find out who was leaking information? Perhaps this invasion of privacy is the norm in corporate America, you just have to accept it once you get to that point -- I'm not sure, that seems to be a completely different culture than what I'm used to. Everyone's pretty cutthroat anyway.
I'm not trying to defend her actions at all, just trying to give you the story from her perspective. I'm sure it's already been said that she didn't act in any inappropriate way compared to some of our political figureheads we have today and have had historically. You can call her Machiavelli but you can't call her stupid, she's still has a job!
You're exercising your right to free speech by saying this protest is uncalled for. I don't understand your logic for calling it 'unstable' but instead they must have some good control of the situation if they can organize people instantly. No company should be above the scrutiny of the consumer and we're all consumers of facebook. They aren't 'harassing' a company, they're asserting their right to make their voices heard. The fact that you used the following words leads me to believe you don't support demonstrations: "screaming, harassing, radical, freaking out, unstable." These are very negative words and it sounds like something that a Facebook employee would say to defend their company.
These people feel that Facebook breached ethics. Is this true? I'm not sure, but I am willing to listen to a mass of my fellow Americans that feel this is a big deal.
Perhaps mass protests at "the drop of a hat" would keep our politicians in check? Right now, it seems they can get away with murder and spending more money than we have. I honestly only wish more people would non-violently protest and speak their minds.
Seriously, any free testing is better than none. Especially when they point out the problems explicitly and hand them to you. As a developer, you're then given one last chance to fix your product -- if these even need to be fixed. I would expect things like the 134 memory leaks to be fixed and fixed fast. I've known Firefox to occasionally go on a memory splurge at my computer's expense and have expected this to be the problem. As far as some of these other problems that are mild security issues, they might not need to fix them at all.
Even the article admits that a lot of these "issues" are trivial to fix: Sounds like a two week job of an intern to me. Checking for null and handling it after memory allocation could probably be a cut and paste job. If they mention the line numbers and files, there's your fix.
Either way, this is the beauty of open source software, anyone can go in and do this. Now, if you found bugs in a proprietary program from some company and sent them a breakdown of problems, you'd get one of two responses. 1) No response and 2) A charge that you are reverse engineering their product and in violation of many anti-piracy laws. If the company still didn't address the issues and you published the bugs, then you're nothing but a software terrorist.
So let's kick back and watch open source at its best! No software is perfect, but it will be enjoyable to know that a process like this can occur -- with the end result being a better free product on my machine!
Now you're telling me that we can't afford to clip another $10 million off the Defense budget and give it to this service (which may, arguably, help the coast guard in defending our shores)? Come on, we spend way more on military than any other country. It's good to maintain military superiority but do we really need it when you look at that chart? The next highest is China with maybe an 1/8th as much spending as we do. Give me a break!
There's no way anyone can justify cutting the spending on this program given what we've invested in it and how useful it is. When you look at where the rest of our spending goes, $10 million is nothing. No one can complain that the cost versus potential utility of this thing isn't high enough.
My initial concerns about these voting machines was someone obtaining one through other means than stealing one from the government and then creating trojan software for it. I mean, if other people can buy these ... then they can study them and learn how to hack them. On the converse, if we can't study them, how do we know the government isn't rigging them?
... but instead my opinion is now that we may be trying to use something that shouldn't be used at all.
So there was this interesting catch-22 where you couldn't let them into the general population for fear of a trojan being created and inserted into a group of normal ones on election day. But you also can't trust your government. Especially not the current one in the United States and considering the voluntary resignation of the Diebold CEO, I think we should at least ask for third party verification of these machines. In fact, I for one consider Black Box Voting to be a champion protector of my right to vote for publishing this information. You might not feel as strongly about them but had I not read two articles from them, I would still be ready to use a voting machine in the next presidential election.
Black Box Voting had me convinced these machines were at least a liability and at best a luddite's fear. After reading this quick "how-to" about these machines, my perception is no longer that we need to define how these machines are bought, sold & handled
Product created with shoddy security features. Get rid of Diebold and hope the market brings a new contestant into the ring for the much sought after prize of the American public's voting machine contract!
The Diebold Acu-vote has failed as a product that requires the utmost security. I am a dissatisfied consumer and I sincerely hope every citizen of the United States agrees with me.
Sorry for the karma whoring but here's an RSS link to the site that doesn't require registration and the no-ads no pictures version.
Pretend you're a news feed or printer and you too can read stories without inhibiting log-ins or advertisements!
Now, for my two cents, I like WoW. But I loved Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU. I had two accounts in that game. It had this special kind of social aspect to it where people were dependent on even the most mundane professions. On top of that, you could level by dancing in a cantina all day, simply chatting with people. The fighting classes had to come in to relieve fatigue and wounds. It was a great system that, in my opinion, could have been more popular than WoW.
In WoW, fighting is the only thing that gains prestige. All the best weapons are looted, there is no dependence on non-fighting classes nor is there such a thing. I think that if anything is going to surpass WoW at this point, it has to be something that so far out there that it's not even well defined yet.
One thing is sure, it needs to accomodate both fighting classes and socializing classes and keep them equally important.
They point out that it's only a 500 people editing most of Wikipedia. But are they talking only the English version. Something to note is that many of the Top Users of Wikipedia are language bots concerned with propagating interwiki information accross languages. Number one is Hashar for the French language. I imagine the strategy is that getting a bad translation only requires someone fluent in French to correct for it to be a good article -- that person doesn't need to know the information because it's pretty much already there in broken French.
Another large contributor by number of edits is GuanoBot who's only job is to bypass redirects.
Are these bots that are helpful skewing the statistics because they are needed for maintenance?
What about these statistics? Could Wales perhaps post average number of edits per page with a standard distribution? What about the same for average number of users contributing to page? What about statistics for average number of characters changed per edit?
Things that have many books written about them are going to be edited by a lot of people that read those books (like The Beatles). But if I want to read up on Procul Harum (A not-so-well-known rock band), I'm assuming that there is some die hard nutjob out there with two children named Procul and Harum that filled in most of the information in that page.
Is this a good thing? Well, yes and no. I think The Beatles' entry holds to more rigorous standards than Procul Harum's on account of the possibility of one person unintentionally inserting their personal views into Wikipedia. For instance, "Known as the World's Greatest Rock Band" may be appropriate for The Beatles' page but not for Procul Harum's. Yet, we all know how insane fans treat their favorite bands. Passion and emotion are not useful tools when authoring Wikipedia or history in general. And that, in my opinion, is Wikipedia's greatest hinderance.
So there was no article but I found this online that I think I had caught on Digg once (can I say that here?).
Anyway, this all goes back to our friends IDC who have this knack for claiming to be the industry experts in everything. I don't really buy that but they make these reports and then the article gets published and Slashdot usually caries them. In the particular link above, they estimate that 55 million CPUs will be used by Dell in 2007 and that, according to Taiwanese chipmakers, 20 million of them will be AMD chips. So that comes to a little over a third, not half if those estimates are accurate.
Hemos, I know you're pissed because you have to edit Slashdot on labor day weekend but hang in there champ. You forgot a department on the last story and a link on this one but you'll get the next one right, I'm sure of it!
- A box showing suggested search terms
- A box in which I could search (through Yahoo!) for my page.
- Two banner ads.
When I enter in a term, say 'guitar', I get a page with yet more ads and sponsored links but still directed through earthlink help to Yahoo!I wasn't born yesterday, I understand the concepts of paid search, sponsored links & banner ads. They generate revenue and insult me. They waste real estate on websites and obscure my information that I would prefer to harvest un assaulted by sales pitches.
I'm betting I'm not the first to say this, but this is insane.
If they wanted to be 'helpful' they would provide you with some sort of new service. In this solution, they are simply deciding which search engine you will use and cashing in off of it also. If we want to search for another answer, I think we know where to go. If you doubt our abilities to select a preferred search engine, at least give us some choices. Do you know what happens in Firefox when I pull down the search engine on the upper right? I can select from a number of sites.
You're not improving anything, you're laughing all the way to the bank.