Interesting that I should wake up to find this article when I finished reading Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice last night before going to bed. It's one of the earliest books I've read that deals seriously with communications from space. I won't get into the details fo the book but instead pose equally speculative assumptions about advanced life that contradict Hawking (a man much respected in my eyes).
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive. Well, this is apparent to me anyway. And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale, there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II. Were it not for this movement towards sanity and science, a lot of our technological advances would have been inhibited by 1) the effort it takes to exterminate your neighbor and 2) being killed by your neighbor. While military research brings advancements in other fields, the primary goal is stopping the enemy. Had scientists that invented napalm at Dow Chemical been given the same amount of resources to invent more efficient fuels and engines, I've no doubt they could have.
Simply put: why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced? Those two categories are not mutually exclusive and I would argue that any alien race not ethically advanced before becoming militarily advanced will simply continue to focus on killing each other. I will also posit that intergalactic travel is near impossible without the ability to understand anthropology. Using this logic, I would wager that the nomadic roving death squads are no more likely than the aliens in Asimov's Childhood's End that show up and help us technologically as well as ethically (we've still got quite a ways to go in some areas more than others).
It's hard to agree with Hawking's assumption of aliens as it's more apparent they would simply die out from lack of resources before ever finding their first victims. I suppose all I have to offer is science fiction references since that's all that's being discussed here.
For some games randomly generated levels work, but for a lot of games it just means un-inspired bland levels most of the time.
It might work for some games like Mario; but even in the relatively simple genre of 2D scrollers there are some examples of where it wouldn't work, take Braid for example.
I'm not so sure I agree with you. I usually don't agree with people who oversell AI but I'm going to have to claim that Braid could be coded to generate levels -- albeit a bland start you could start to think of the kinds of interleaved time relative solutions necessary on each level and mimic them in your procedural content generation to vary them and even combine them randomly.
Difficult? Yes. Impossible? I don't think so.
IEEE is smart for picking this as an AI competition. All other famous AI (like beating The Turing Test or video analysis) is so very hard and computationally expensive. A competition involving them would be nothing more than babies crawling. So why not do something more hands on and pragmatic?
... government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn...
So when they were studying boobs online they should have been studying the boobs that were busy running/ruining our financial and housing industries? Understandable how those orders could get confused.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Look at the man in the cubicle across from you. Now look at the two men to the left of you. Now look at the two men to the right of you. One of them is surfing porn at work.*
* Unless it's you. And if it is you, how stupid are you? Seriously? Seriously you'd jeopardize your job for that?
...is generally not that deadly. My uncle used to deal with cattle with black leg all the time. This story is ONCE AGAIN blown out of proportion--thanks, FBI.
Depends. I'm not a microbiologist but you know there are different strains (89 I think) of anthrax and it is delivered many different ways. I believe the concern here is spore anthrax or aerosol anthrax which is probably a bit more problematic than black leg. If you think it isn't deadly, there are about a hundred graves in Russia you could visit for an interview.
Those damn researchers, trying to study other diseases and discover our true heritage! How dare they?!
So where do you draw the line? And what kind of signal does this send to other people who are unsure of what their DNA samples will be used for? Regardless of good intentions or the betterment of science, that's a sure fire what to screw up any trust a community might have with you and anyone looking to use DNA analysis.
At the end of the EULA there's an agreement that you agree to an expanded EULA online that morphs and changes as Sony sees fit. I tracked down the extra bullet points:
By agreeing to this you allow Sony to house and feed shocktroops as they pass through your city in your civilian houses and from your civilian food stocks.
In the event that Sony finishes a year in the red, you agree to become liable to pay a portion of restitution such that the sum of all signees of this EULA pays Sony back to profitability.
By signing this EULA you agree to name (or rename) your first born child "Sonny" or (in the absence of a 'Y' chromosome) "Sonya."
After agreeing to this EULA, you will start all prayers and services -- regardless of denomination -- with "The Lord Our God Sony who Art in Playstation."
By agreeing to this, you will be issued a Sony Playstation Network UID which will be tattooed on your forearm by a Sony representative and will be needed to activate the Playstation 3.
In the next console war, should conscription take place your Sony PSN UID will determine your eligibility for the draft so please do not lose the aforementioned tattoo.
Sounds pretty reasonable. At least there's no mention of rootkits for now.
This guy sounds like a really good storyline author for games. In addition to that he is evidently a talented developer. Most people running game companies don't need this, they need business skills. So I'm going to guess he's got a little business know-how as well. To be good at all three of these things is rare and I suspect that his position is unique. Hats off to him, though.
He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade.
So he's on the far end of the spectrum making it work. I guess if I where him I'd point out the (far opposite end of the spectrum) Duke Nukem Forever style of business where you couldn't settle on a damned engine if your company depended on it. But the truth is that there are plenty of in between companies among the big fish that are using the rehashed Unreal engine or some Flash game engine for a social game. They are probably closer to him than the "must rewrite everything" crowd. I'm impressed with this situation and profits but I'm not sold that this extreme is the best answer. Everyone has a happy medium where they feel most comfortable and big companies probably feel differently about rewriting pieces since they are expected to produce wildly new things with their large revenues. I certainly grow tired of the rehashed music game that seems to be the same damned thing to merely a different song every title.
Most people will dismiss this idea out of hand, saying that I don't know anything about the realities of the business. And they are probably right. I'm just a dumb, little nobody. But I am running a profitable game company. But Electronic Arts and Activision (the company that owns Blizzard!) are losing bazillions of dollars.
Maybe you should pay yourself $15 million a year and then hire a bunch of middle management and pay them more than the developers that do all your actual work. Be sure to insulate yourself from any actual work. That's when you can be considered "in the know" about the gaming industry or more specifically "in the money laughing as consumers suffer through your titles." Then you too can siphon off funds while your company languishes in the red just like the big guys.
I believe NetworkWorld may have been less than prudent in failing to put a thumbnail in place of scaling a 4,096 x 4,096 image totaling 8.6 MB down to 300 x 400. Although I guess since they are sourcing it from nasa.gov this slashdotting is going to come at the taxpayer's expense?:-)
Seeing one closed off, 'play by our rules or gtfo' company, whining about another closed off 'play by our rules or gtfo' company is golden.
Right, and my personal take is that they both offer very seksi very clean UIs and user experiences. It's probably a pissing match between two companies that are concerned about the being the one who controls the de facto look and feel. Because when you're in control of that situation, you're situated to make a handsome profit. And when you have a proprietary product under the well executed marketing guise of being open then you get to decide who lives and who dies on your platform.
The reverse is also true though, this is getting Al Amrikee much more attention than he deserves.
Really? I think he deserves a little more attention. I eagerly await the South Park episode where a whiny little pissant runs around saying, "This is not a threat but a warning that you are on murder lists..." to everyone in South Park. It'd be hard but I have confidence that Matt and Trey would adequately portray the stupidity of Al Amrikee. "Raising awareness?" More like a power trip or inciting a murder.
Al Amrikee said the website is considering a protest against the "disgusting" show, which also depicted the Prophet Muhammad in an episode on July 4, 2001.
I remember that one, I think it opened with a bugs bunny-ish skit depicting Bin Laden in some slapstick comedy.
What I want to know is how Al Amrikee feels about Fox news hosting the image of Muhammad in a bear suit in the article? And how does he feel now that his comment has had the Streisand effect and Foxnews.com is showing it to many more people that don't have access to cable television. Wouldn't he, as part of the distribution channel and medium, be also on said "black lists" he warns of?
"I view this as Hollywood coming to Boston," said Turbine's chief executive Jim Crowley, who said the deal underscores Greater Boston's increasing prominence as a center for video game development.
Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved Lord of the Rings novels.
Well, Warner Bros is the parent company of New Line Cinema, The Lord of the Rings film studio. Although I'm uneasy that Warner could roll out trashy videogames, I don't think it's too evil for studios to try to retain those kinds of rights as long as they exercise them and I suspect WB will.
It's going to be really really hard to convince me that Asian electronics manufacturers aren't engaged in price fixing en masse against the rest of the world whenever a technology cost remains unnaturally high. Hell, after realizing how many times I was the victim of it with LCDs I pretty much expect it.
I mean, really, I feel like a moron for ever knowing that they allowed price fixing -- even promoted it -- inside their borders and then believing that stopped at the rim of the continent. Right now the only question is how many markets is this happening in? They're obviously very good about it, little chance the regulators in other countries will catch it let alone the easily bribed authorities isntalled there.
We need that kind of will in the fight against spam. It is expensive at first, but less expensive as people get out of the business.
The problem with your analogy is that kidnapping is a binary operation. You're either doing it or you're not. It's also often coupled with extortion and bodily harm and a host of other very serious crimes.
Spamming, on the other hand, is very hazy. What is unsolicited e-mail? People don't take the time to read shit. They just "click click oops, why am I getting these e-mail?" So if they clicked an ad and entered their e-mail address to get thirty thousand acres in farmwars by putting in their e-mail and checking a box that they understand... where was the failure there?
I just got five messages in a minute from Boingo this weekend. Followed by an apology letter. It was some database template test process run amok that informed me about my account (which I don't have with them). I used them once in an airport. They apologized to me today in another e-mail I didn't ask for! Do we vigilantly hunt them down and jail them?
The problem with your vigilance is that it's often objective to draw the line where spamming stops and legitimate business e-mails start. The crimes that come with spam aren't on the level of human trafficking... you get tax evasion or another white collar crime at best. Sometimes theft or grand larceny across all victims. But come on, the FBI isn't going to get the resources from the federal government to chase that rabbit down its hole when they need back hoes to dig up the whole internet.
The government's CanSPAM act has increased the severity of it when we're sure you were doing it. That's the most you can ask for... not a special FBI initiative to relentlessly track everyone who spams. Enforcement should be increased but not to the level of tracking kidnappers.
If you are successful at combating spam, you will see a rising volume. Here is the chain reaction that takes place:
A spammer has an established source of income that he profits from his operations. Let's say it's ten grand a month. Everything is going well--he kicks back and watches watches the money machine.
You implement a better spam blocking program or a better educate users or do something so that the five hundred clicks he gets a day drops to four hundred clicks a day.
The spammer now finishes at eight grand at the end of the month and notices something is wrong.
The spammer is certain that he can grab back those clicks and all he (did you ever notice how spammers are always men?) has to do is crank up the volume whether it be by getting more e-mails to spam or sending more frequent spams or revolutionizing his spamming tactic and adding new templates and variables to trick people or get around blocks.
In the end we see spam rise.
Now, maybe he makes that two grand back in his push and maybe he don't. Maybe your new method reduced his clicks from five hundred to five per month. Either way the best we can hope is that at some point that income shrinks to negative or so little it's not worth his time. The problem is that even if 0.0001% of his spam messages generates a click, he's making bank.
The battle for clean e-mail should be fought on a number of fronts. Public awareness is the key weak link in the chain in my opinion. And as a new net savvy generation arises, that will come naturally.
No matter how much I tell my friends and family to be safe on the net, my friend in Cairo had ten credit cards opened in her name and I had to help her clean it up over here. To make sure it didn't happen again we went over smart procedures like if your bank sends you an e-mail you should read it and then open up your browser by hand and type in the bank's URL as you know it by hand and look for the corresponding information on the site. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass but if you can't find it you can always just call them. Don't click the e-mail link and drop your username and password into some site you don't trust. If I had to guess how she got tripped up, it was when she went to Cairo for school she couldn't afford to talk on the phone and had gotten lazy and careless with doing all her banking online.
Look, you aren't stealing. You aren't stealing until you're fired and you keep coming to work and forcibly removing money from your employer without their consent. That doesn't happen very often. Whoever says you're stealing by investing your time as you see fit is full of bullshit. You control your productivity and if your employer don't like it, they'll get someone else. It's that simple.
Now that said, I have no problem doing forty hours of sheer coding in a week. Meetings take up a lot of time but in one of my former positions as a lead developer, I did serious coding to make us look really really good. It involved 50-60 hours a week of being there and 30-40 was actually coding to make sprint deadlines. I mean code overnight into the next day with no sleep. And no interruptions! My god, you would not believe the lines of code (note: bad metric) I can put away with no interruptions. That's what headphones are for. Amen to the large DJ sized headphones I have at work. It's a polite do-not-disturb sign to my coworkers.
Coding involves also searching online so you don't re-invent the wheel. Aside from that, your list is good. And yeah, meetings are important for coding. How else do I get my requirements other than directly meeting the customer? That's part of coding unless you're leaving that up to some other guy to get (which is a horrible idea in my opinion).
Anyway, sounds like you're getting the job done and you're not pulling your hair out like I once was. So what's the problem? You may not realize it but you may produce forty hours of normal developer work in those ten hours. I don't know, maybe your code is less buggy than mine? Either way if the paychecks keep rolling in and your employer isn't hold an axe over your head, what's the problem?
"By the time all is said and done, Chinese censorship is little more than mocked by thousands of people like Xiaomi"
Now, let's put that number, "thousands", into perspective: China has a population of about 1.3 billion.
And 384 million of which are Internet users--nearly a quarter of the world total. The 'thousands' I was referring to are the people like Xiaomi who translate the content. Then thousands for each of those people post to their blogs. Then some undetermined chain goes into effect where they keep reposting and sending. It's immeasurable but this is just on the producing end of it. There's obviously a demand for this material so you can be sure that millions are reading these posts and reposts and e-mails. While we'll never be able to settle on whether it's 10 million or 100 million that have accessed a non-harmonious article in the past year, you can be sure it's in the millions for readership... maybe even production and distribution have over a million.
If you read the article (and I thought I made it clear in the summary with the pyramid analogy), it sounds like there are a lot of eyes on this stuff. Nothing to sneeze at like you did. In the end, the article made it seem like accessing the New York Times interview with Google cofounder Sergey Brin (in wihch he speaks out against China's censorship) was not that hard of a thing to do if you wanted to do it in China.
We might see some 'revolutionary' developments in collaboration come from this, hopefully we can all learn from it.
The problem is that we're all using the same tools to achieve different goals. I use Google Docs to share song names and artists that I like with my friends simply because all the other site solutions (like Last.FM) are flash laden crap that I have no control over and never can find the bands I listen to like The Wapsipinicon. And I can throw a link to a blog with a publicly legally available promotional mp3. So the Chinese goal is a lot more serious and has this oppressive government forcing them to be anonymous. Me, I trust people to view and help edit my spreadsheet. My friends know who I am and we're pass the anonymous stage. Our revolutionary collaboration is going to be done with various levels of contribution, reputation, trust and background knowledge or technology wise (what if I could build mix CD song lists in tandem with friends through a site and publish it to facebook?). All the Chinese have is anonymity because of their different situation and they are dealing with words and information. The advancements they find are stunted by their situation.
So unless our government gets to be as bad as theirs (and I'm not saying that's out of the question), I don't know what tactics they are dreaming up that are going to help me right now or improve my collaboration. And they don't seem to be writing a whole lot of ground breaking software... at least not for English speaking only users like myself. I'm not complaining, I'm just confused how I'm going to learn from this aside from maintaining an underground if I need it which -- thank god -- I don't. But perhaps the future holds a RIAA stasi that finds people like me transmitting information about non-RIAA bands and dispatches death squads to my door...
Actually I was referring to Amazon's referal program where I was released back into the Amazon jungle and accepted by a pack of developers. In time I relearned their ways and mated with their women.
Lie.
No, I swear it's true. One of the developers even called me up on Monday to give me "some friendly advice to hit up a clinic" (whatever that means).
and shaven
Lie lie lie.
I'm not misleading you. Everyone else calls this time phenomenon Friday and Saturday or, if you're a PHP developer, you have to call it Satruday because when someone misspells something in software that you use you have to persist that misspelling when you speak about that topic until the end of time.
He wasn't. He was referring to the Amazon referral program.
Actually I was referring to Amazon's referal program where I was released back into the Amazon jungle and accepted by a pack of developers. In time I relearned their ways and mated with their women. As fate would have it, Amazon had only deferred their deferal program and as soon as it went back into effect I took advantage of it and here I am clean and shaven--almost fully capable of using a keyboard again!
The 500GB hard drive will sell for a special promotional price of $100.
Oh yeah that is, of course, if you don't want to watch the titles. If you want to watch the movies:
The other movies distributed by Paramount, including "GI Joe," ''Nacho Libre" and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" come pre-loaded with a digital lock that requires a code that can be purchased online for $10 to $15 each. Even watching "Star Trek" requires registration.
So yeah it's $100 or over triple that if you actually want to watch the "promotional" material. Otherwise you're buying a hard drive with a (presumably Windows) partition that has Windows DRM and twenty movies taking up 50 gigabytes of space. Sounds to me like a lame AOL CD that gets you working with the shit and then hopes that you just keep using their platform for buying and downloading movies.
I guess a brave soul could buy the drive and leave the 50 gigs intact and then download the 20 movies and feign ignorance if the MPAA comes knocking at the door. I wonder if there's some consumer protection laws that states if you buy something legally you have a right to enjoy it. Because right now you're buying a digital copy of something that is encrypted but you're not receiving the license that is required to watch it. They better carefully label that the PROMOTION part of the sale lest a consumer figures that they're paying 10% for the movies and 90% for the drive and then becomes upset when they get home and can't watch the movies without ponying up an additional 200%-300%.
Both companies declined to say if they were taking a loss on the promotional price.
Really? Oh yeah, sounds like Sony is bending over backwards to trap you into paying the retail price of owning the digital movie that sells for $15 right now on Amazon. They're using Seagate and Seagate customers are rubes to get around paying for streaming bandwidth of these 50 gigs to potential customers.
I choose to rate this tactic as USDA certified lame. Shame on Seagate. Shame on Sony. I feel sorry for those that might buy this without realizing what they're getting themselves into.
I've seen fire and I've seen rain. But the amount of work game programmers put in, and for such meager rewards in most cases, makes me raise a pint or 4 to them.
So you're raising a pint or a half gallon to them because they've just left one evil company for a seemingly more evil company? Don't get me wrong, they should be well paid by now and if they aren't they are free to leave. But you're kind of overlooking the risks associated with publishing games. Some are bombs and very unenjoyable. Developing games is certainly close to the entertainment arm of coding. You make coders do a lot of work and it either pays off huge or (and this is the most common scenario) barely pays the bills. Just like starving musicians.
On the other hand, we may never see MW3 because two developers (not even all of Infinity Ward) decided that they owned the title. Maybe they did half the work on those titles between the two of themselves. I don't know. What I do know is that a lawsuit is ongoing which will prevent anyone from continuing the MW storyline or building on MW multiplayer. This is not desired. If it was a matter of these two excelling individuals not being paid enough, they should put MW & MW2 on their resumes and leave it behind them. If they are so talented, any game development firm will hire them on the spot for gainful employment and maybe even give them a chance to explore developing other kinds of games. Unfortunately the situation calls for everyone to suffer--even the fans.
If you're reading this and you're choosing game development as a life profession, know the above risks or work to change that paradigm. Because right now it seems like overworking, DRM and lawsuits are the norm.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that I should wake up to find this article when I finished reading Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice last night before going to bed. It's one of the earliest books I've read that deals seriously with communications from space. I won't get into the details fo the book but instead pose equally speculative assumptions about advanced life that contradict Hawking (a man much respected in my eyes).
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive. Well, this is apparent to me anyway. And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale, there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II. Were it not for this movement towards sanity and science, a lot of our technological advances would have been inhibited by 1) the effort it takes to exterminate your neighbor and 2) being killed by your neighbor. While military research brings advancements in other fields, the primary goal is stopping the enemy. Had scientists that invented napalm at Dow Chemical been given the same amount of resources to invent more efficient fuels and engines, I've no doubt they could have.
Simply put: why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced? Those two categories are not mutually exclusive and I would argue that any alien race not ethically advanced before becoming militarily advanced will simply continue to focus on killing each other. I will also posit that intergalactic travel is near impossible without the ability to understand anthropology. Using this logic, I would wager that the nomadic roving death squads are no more likely than the aliens in Asimov's Childhood's End that show up and help us technologically as well as ethically (we've still got quite a ways to go in some areas more than others).
It's hard to agree with Hawking's assumption of aliens as it's more apparent they would simply die out from lack of resources before ever finding their first victims. I suppose all I have to offer is science fiction references since that's all that's being discussed here.
For some games randomly generated levels work, but for a lot of games it just means un-inspired bland levels most of the time.
It might work for some games like Mario; but even in the relatively simple genre of 2D scrollers there are some examples of where it wouldn't work, take Braid for example.
I'm not so sure I agree with you. I usually don't agree with people who oversell AI but I'm going to have to claim that Braid could be coded to generate levels -- albeit a bland start you could start to think of the kinds of interleaved time relative solutions necessary on each level and mimic them in your procedural content generation to vary them and even combine them randomly.
Difficult? Yes. Impossible? I don't think so.
IEEE is smart for picking this as an AI competition. All other famous AI (like beating The Turing Test or video analysis) is so very hard and computationally expensive. A competition involving them would be nothing more than babies crawling. So why not do something more hands on and pragmatic?
If you can stomach ads, here's a decent list of games that use procedurally derived content. Check out Eufloria where the music, art and levels are all procedurally generated. I think that has a free demo on Steam. While the PCG wiki isn't the greatest, it's a good starting point if you want to get into this IEEE thing.
... government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn ...
So when they were studying boobs online they should have been studying the boobs that were busy running/ruining our financial and housing industries? Understandable how those orders could get confused.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Look at the man in the cubicle across from you. Now look at the two men to the left of you. Now look at the two men to the right of you. One of them is surfing porn at work.*
* Unless it's you. And if it is you, how stupid are you? Seriously? Seriously you'd jeopardize your job for that?
...is generally not that deadly. My uncle used to deal with cattle with black leg all the time. This story is ONCE AGAIN blown out of proportion--thanks, FBI.
Depends. I'm not a microbiologist but you know there are different strains (89 I think) of anthrax and it is delivered many different ways. I believe the concern here is spore anthrax or aerosol anthrax which is probably a bit more problematic than black leg. If you think it isn't deadly, there are about a hundred graves in Russia you could visit for an interview.
Those damn researchers, trying to study other diseases and discover our true heritage! How dare they?!
So where do you draw the line? And what kind of signal does this send to other people who are unsure of what their DNA samples will be used for? Regardless of good intentions or the betterment of science, that's a sure fire what to screw up any trust a community might have with you and anyone looking to use DNA analysis.
Sounds pretty reasonable. At least there's no mention of rootkits for now.
He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade.
So he's on the far end of the spectrum making it work. I guess if I where him I'd point out the (far opposite end of the spectrum) Duke Nukem Forever style of business where you couldn't settle on a damned engine if your company depended on it. But the truth is that there are plenty of in between companies among the big fish that are using the rehashed Unreal engine or some Flash game engine for a social game. They are probably closer to him than the "must rewrite everything" crowd. I'm impressed with this situation and profits but I'm not sold that this extreme is the best answer. Everyone has a happy medium where they feel most comfortable and big companies probably feel differently about rewriting pieces since they are expected to produce wildly new things with their large revenues. I certainly grow tired of the rehashed music game that seems to be the same damned thing to merely a different song every title.
Most people will dismiss this idea out of hand, saying that I don't know anything about the realities of the business. And they are probably right. I'm just a dumb, little nobody. But I am running a profitable game company. But Electronic Arts and Activision (the company that owns Blizzard!) are losing bazillions of dollars.
Maybe you should pay yourself $15 million a year and then hire a bunch of middle management and pay them more than the developers that do all your actual work. Be sure to insulate yourself from any actual work. That's when you can be considered "in the know" about the gaming industry or more specifically "in the money laughing as consumers suffer through your titles." Then you too can siphon off funds while your company languishes in the red just like the big guys.
I believe NetworkWorld may have been less than prudent in failing to put a thumbnail in place of scaling a 4,096 x 4,096 image totaling 8.6 MB down to 300 x 400. Although I guess since they are sourcing it from nasa.gov this slashdotting is going to come at the taxpayer's expense? :-)
I didn't see a link in the article, but here's the original NASA press release.
Seeing one closed off, 'play by our rules or gtfo' company, whining about another closed off 'play by our rules or gtfo' company is golden.
Right, and my personal take is that they both offer very seksi very clean UIs and user experiences. It's probably a pissing match between two companies that are concerned about the being the one who controls the de facto look and feel. Because when you're in control of that situation, you're situated to make a handsome profit. And when you have a proprietary product under the well executed marketing guise of being open then you get to decide who lives and who dies on your platform.
The reverse is also true though, this is getting Al Amrikee much more attention than he deserves.
Really? I think he deserves a little more attention. I eagerly await the South Park episode where a whiny little pissant runs around saying, "This is not a threat but a warning that you are on murder lists ..." to everyone in South Park. It'd be hard but I have confidence that Matt and Trey would adequately portray the stupidity of Al Amrikee. "Raising awareness?" More like a power trip or inciting a murder.
Al Amrikee said the website is considering a protest against the "disgusting" show, which also depicted the Prophet Muhammad in an episode on July 4, 2001.
I remember that one, I think it opened with a bugs bunny-ish skit depicting Bin Laden in some slapstick comedy.
What I want to know is how Al Amrikee feels about Fox news hosting the image of Muhammad in a bear suit in the article? And how does he feel now that his comment has had the Streisand effect and Foxnews.com is showing it to many more people that don't have access to cable television. Wouldn't he, as part of the distribution channel and medium, be also on said "black lists" he warns of?
"I view this as Hollywood coming to Boston," said Turbine's chief executive Jim Crowley, who said the deal underscores Greater Boston's increasing prominence as a center for video game development.
Ha. I view this as a move to capitalize off of the upcoming Hobbit movies.
Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved Lord of the Rings novels.
Well, Warner Bros is the parent company of New Line Cinema, The Lord of the Rings film studio. Although I'm uneasy that Warner could roll out trashy videogames, I don't think it's too evil for studios to try to retain those kinds of rights as long as they exercise them and I suspect WB will.
It's going to be really really hard to convince me that Asian electronics manufacturers aren't engaged in price fixing en masse against the rest of the world whenever a technology cost remains unnaturally high. Hell, after realizing how many times I was the victim of it with LCDs I pretty much expect it.
I mean, really, I feel like a moron for ever knowing that they allowed price fixing -- even promoted it -- inside their borders and then believing that stopped at the rim of the continent. Right now the only question is how many markets is this happening in? They're obviously very good about it, little chance the regulators in other countries will catch it let alone the easily bribed authorities isntalled there.
We need that kind of will in the fight against spam. It is expensive at first, but less expensive as people get out of the business.
The problem with your analogy is that kidnapping is a binary operation. You're either doing it or you're not. It's also often coupled with extortion and bodily harm and a host of other very serious crimes.
... where was the failure there?
... you get tax evasion or another white collar crime at best. Sometimes theft or grand larceny across all victims. But come on, the FBI isn't going to get the resources from the federal government to chase that rabbit down its hole when they need back hoes to dig up the whole internet.
... not a special FBI initiative to relentlessly track everyone who spams. Enforcement should be increased but not to the level of tracking kidnappers.
Spamming, on the other hand, is very hazy. What is unsolicited e-mail? People don't take the time to read shit. They just "click click oops, why am I getting these e-mail?" So if they clicked an ad and entered their e-mail address to get thirty thousand acres in farmwars by putting in their e-mail and checking a box that they understand
I just got five messages in a minute from Boingo this weekend. Followed by an apology letter. It was some database template test process run amok that informed me about my account (which I don't have with them). I used them once in an airport. They apologized to me today in another e-mail I didn't ask for! Do we vigilantly hunt them down and jail them?
The problem with your vigilance is that it's often objective to draw the line where spamming stops and legitimate business e-mails start. The crimes that come with spam aren't on the level of human trafficking
The government's CanSPAM act has increased the severity of it when we're sure you were doing it. That's the most you can ask for
Now, maybe he makes that two grand back in his push and maybe he don't. Maybe your new method reduced his clicks from five hundred to five per month. Either way the best we can hope is that at some point that income shrinks to negative or so little it's not worth his time. The problem is that even if 0.0001% of his spam messages generates a click, he's making bank.
The battle for clean e-mail should be fought on a number of fronts. Public awareness is the key weak link in the chain in my opinion. And as a new net savvy generation arises, that will come naturally.
No matter how much I tell my friends and family to be safe on the net, my friend in Cairo had ten credit cards opened in her name and I had to help her clean it up over here. To make sure it didn't happen again we went over smart procedures like if your bank sends you an e-mail you should read it and then open up your browser by hand and type in the bank's URL as you know it by hand and look for the corresponding information on the site. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass but if you can't find it you can always just call them. Don't click the e-mail link and drop your username and password into some site you don't trust. If I had to guess how she got tripped up, it was when she went to Cairo for school she couldn't afford to talk on the phone and had gotten lazy and careless with doing all her banking online.
At least according to this site. Now how about some comparisons of the Courier versus the iPad!
Look, you aren't stealing. You aren't stealing until you're fired and you keep coming to work and forcibly removing money from your employer without their consent. That doesn't happen very often. Whoever says you're stealing by investing your time as you see fit is full of bullshit. You control your productivity and if your employer don't like it, they'll get someone else. It's that simple.
Now that said, I have no problem doing forty hours of sheer coding in a week. Meetings take up a lot of time but in one of my former positions as a lead developer, I did serious coding to make us look really really good. It involved 50-60 hours a week of being there and 30-40 was actually coding to make sprint deadlines. I mean code overnight into the next day with no sleep. And no interruptions! My god, you would not believe the lines of code (note: bad metric) I can put away with no interruptions. That's what headphones are for. Amen to the large DJ sized headphones I have at work. It's a polite do-not-disturb sign to my coworkers.
Coding involves also searching online so you don't re-invent the wheel. Aside from that, your list is good. And yeah, meetings are important for coding. How else do I get my requirements other than directly meeting the customer? That's part of coding unless you're leaving that up to some other guy to get (which is a horrible idea in my opinion).
Anyway, sounds like you're getting the job done and you're not pulling your hair out like I once was. So what's the problem? You may not realize it but you may produce forty hours of normal developer work in those ten hours. I don't know, maybe your code is less buggy than mine? Either way if the paychecks keep rolling in and your employer isn't hold an axe over your head, what's the problem?
"By the time all is said and done, Chinese censorship is little more than mocked by thousands of people like Xiaomi" Now, let's put that number, "thousands", into perspective: China has a population of about 1.3 billion.
And 384 million of which are Internet users--nearly a quarter of the world total. The 'thousands' I was referring to are the people like Xiaomi who translate the content. Then thousands for each of those people post to their blogs. Then some undetermined chain goes into effect where they keep reposting and sending. It's immeasurable but this is just on the producing end of it. There's obviously a demand for this material so you can be sure that millions are reading these posts and reposts and e-mails. While we'll never be able to settle on whether it's 10 million or 100 million that have accessed a non-harmonious article in the past year, you can be sure it's in the millions for readership ... maybe even production and distribution have over a million.
If you read the article (and I thought I made it clear in the summary with the pyramid analogy), it sounds like there are a lot of eyes on this stuff. Nothing to sneeze at like you did. In the end, the article made it seem like accessing the New York Times interview with Google cofounder Sergey Brin (in wihch he speaks out against China's censorship) was not that hard of a thing to do if you wanted to do it in China.
then you end up wiith better lock pickers.
We might see some 'revolutionary' developments in collaboration come from this, hopefully we can all learn from it.
The problem is that we're all using the same tools to achieve different goals. I use Google Docs to share song names and artists that I like with my friends simply because all the other site solutions (like Last.FM) are flash laden crap that I have no control over and never can find the bands I listen to like The Wapsipinicon. And I can throw a link to a blog with a publicly legally available promotional mp3. So the Chinese goal is a lot more serious and has this oppressive government forcing them to be anonymous. Me, I trust people to view and help edit my spreadsheet. My friends know who I am and we're pass the anonymous stage. Our revolutionary collaboration is going to be done with various levels of contribution, reputation, trust and background knowledge or technology wise (what if I could build mix CD song lists in tandem with friends through a site and publish it to facebook?). All the Chinese have is anonymity because of their different situation and they are dealing with words and information. The advancements they find are stunted by their situation.
... at least not for English speaking only users like myself. I'm not complaining, I'm just confused how I'm going to learn from this aside from maintaining an underground if I need it which -- thank god -- I don't. But perhaps the future holds a RIAA stasi that finds people like me transmitting information about non-RIAA bands and dispatches death squads to my door ...
So unless our government gets to be as bad as theirs (and I'm not saying that's out of the question), I don't know what tactics they are dreaming up that are going to help me right now or improve my collaboration. And they don't seem to be writing a whole lot of ground breaking software
Actually I was referring to Amazon's referal program where I was released back into the Amazon jungle and accepted by a pack of developers. In time I relearned their ways and mated with their women.
Lie.
No, I swear it's true. One of the developers even called me up on Monday to give me "some friendly advice to hit up a clinic" (whatever that means).
and shaven
Lie lie lie.
I'm not misleading you. Everyone else calls this time phenomenon Friday and Saturday or, if you're a PHP developer, you have to call it Satruday because when someone misspells something in software that you use you have to persist that misspelling when you speak about that topic until the end of time.
He wasn't. He was referring to the Amazon referral program.
Actually I was referring to Amazon's referal program where I was released back into the Amazon jungle and accepted by a pack of developers. In time I relearned their ways and mated with their women. As fate would have it, Amazon had only deferred their deferal program and as soon as it went back into effect I took advantage of it and here I am clean and shaven--almost fully capable of using a keyboard again!
Thanks for sneaking in your Amazon referer ID in the URL, asshole!
The 500GB hard drive will sell for a special promotional price of $100.
Oh yeah that is, of course, if you don't want to watch the titles. If you want to watch the movies:
The other movies distributed by Paramount, including "GI Joe," ''Nacho Libre" and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" come pre-loaded with a digital lock that requires a code that can be purchased online for $10 to $15 each. Even watching "Star Trek" requires registration.
So yeah it's $100 or over triple that if you actually want to watch the "promotional" material. Otherwise you're buying a hard drive with a (presumably Windows) partition that has Windows DRM and twenty movies taking up 50 gigabytes of space. Sounds to me like a lame AOL CD that gets you working with the shit and then hopes that you just keep using their platform for buying and downloading movies.
I guess a brave soul could buy the drive and leave the 50 gigs intact and then download the 20 movies and feign ignorance if the MPAA comes knocking at the door. I wonder if there's some consumer protection laws that states if you buy something legally you have a right to enjoy it. Because right now you're buying a digital copy of something that is encrypted but you're not receiving the license that is required to watch it. They better carefully label that the PROMOTION part of the sale lest a consumer figures that they're paying 10% for the movies and 90% for the drive and then becomes upset when they get home and can't watch the movies without ponying up an additional 200%-300%.
Both companies declined to say if they were taking a loss on the promotional price.
Really? Oh yeah, sounds like Sony is bending over backwards to trap you into paying the retail price of owning the digital movie that sells for $15 right now on Amazon. They're using Seagate and Seagate customers are rubes to get around paying for streaming bandwidth of these 50 gigs to potential customers.
I choose to rate this tactic as USDA certified lame. Shame on Seagate. Shame on Sony. I feel sorry for those that might buy this without realizing what they're getting themselves into.
I've seen fire and I've seen rain. But the amount of work game programmers put in, and for such meager rewards in most cases, makes me raise a pint or 4 to them.
So you're raising a pint or a half gallon to them because they've just left one evil company for a seemingly more evil company? Don't get me wrong, they should be well paid by now and if they aren't they are free to leave. But you're kind of overlooking the risks associated with publishing games. Some are bombs and very unenjoyable. Developing games is certainly close to the entertainment arm of coding. You make coders do a lot of work and it either pays off huge or (and this is the most common scenario) barely pays the bills. Just like starving musicians.
On the other hand, we may never see MW3 because two developers (not even all of Infinity Ward) decided that they owned the title. Maybe they did half the work on those titles between the two of themselves. I don't know. What I do know is that a lawsuit is ongoing which will prevent anyone from continuing the MW storyline or building on MW multiplayer. This is not desired. If it was a matter of these two excelling individuals not being paid enough, they should put MW & MW2 on their resumes and leave it behind them. If they are so talented, any game development firm will hire them on the spot for gainful employment and maybe even give them a chance to explore developing other kinds of games. Unfortunately the situation calls for everyone to suffer--even the fans.
If you're reading this and you're choosing game development as a life profession, know the above risks or work to change that paradigm. Because right now it seems like overworking, DRM and lawsuits are the norm.