You don't have to log in, actually. I just visited the page, and it told me I wasn't likely affected, presumably by using a local cookie. I'm pretty sure it's been months since I last logged in.
Yeah, pretty much everyone here predicted their big new overhaul was going to be a disaster. It was an easy prediction to make, since a) it involved UX folks, who always seem gung-ho to radically change stuff, and b) most people hate change.
Of course, the "choose your route" method can flub even in videogames. Mass Effect 3 was an instructive example of how the illusion of choice in videogames collided head-on with reality, not to mention a few bad design & storytelling decisions. The entirety of all the difficult choices and decisions made along the way in three games ended up as a rather anemic A/B/C choice.
They will not sting you unless you aggravate them.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Or unless by "aggravate them", you mean "exist in the same space with them". I've been stung several times in my life completely at random by wasps, always before I had any clue they were there, like standing around on a soccer field or something - obviously nowhere near their nest and not doing anything that would threaten them. On the other hand, I've *never* been stung by a bee of any sort.
Obviously, given this has happened only a few times in my entire life, it's true that they normally leave people alone. So it's not like I panic at the sight of a wasp - odds are pretty good we'll both just live and let live. But what you said their is complete horseshit, unless you put a big qualifier USUALLY on it.
These are rented games from Playstation Now. It's a STREAMING SERVICE. Asking if you can keep them makes as much sense as asking if you get to keep your rental movies. No, of course not.
You always have the option of simply *buying* your games, either with a disc or a download, and playing them as long as you own a PS4. The drama here is a little over the top. No, I don't like this new rental model either, so I don't subscribe to it. The moment I can't actually buy titles is the day I give up consoles and become an exclusive PC gamer.
True. There also has to be a reasonable limit to the staggering just to save on bus costs. While it's admirable to try to save money, at some point, they'll need to get enough buses to transfer all the students at reasonable hours that everyone can live with, rather than spreading start times quite so much - which as you rightly point out, can be hugely inconvenient.
But the larger point I'm making is that there's nothing wrong with algorithmic-derived solutions, so long as you understand all the parameters you're dealing with. Obviously, reasonable maximums and minimums on start times also need to be a factor as well. Trying to minimize the pain of any transition obviously needs to be more heavily factored into the solutions. It's a good lesson worth learning.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - parametrize the costs of change. It's actually a pretty big blind spot that they missed this, but it's understandable. They tried to fix their issues in one giant step, which naturally flopped.
Instead, tune that algorithm to make very small, yearly changes that move things in the desired direction. Essentially, they need to factor in the human / political element of this, which states that people resist change of all sorts. So the challenge then is to find a path which minimizes the pain of this transition for the most people. So it's a ten year plan instead of getting fixed in one shot.
BTW, I searched for "Linux" on the MS Store, and found five explicitly listed Linux distros (Ubundu, openSuze, Suze Linux Enterprise, Debian, and Kali)... but not WLinux. I had to specifically search for it by name before I found it on the store. I'm not sure why they think anyone would pay $10 for a Linux distro when there are plenty of free and well-known alternatives.
If I recall correctly, there were several phases in the bombe design. The original Polish codebreaking efforts, including their bombe, relied on some principles that turned out in the long run to be fragile and unsustainable. That was where Turing came in. He redesigned a British bombe on more general principles, and as such, was able to continue breaking messages when the Polish method stopped working due to changes in the encryption systems.
The Polish definitely got the ball rolling, but Turing made many key breakthroughs, and the Americans helped later with their manufacturing prowess, which was required when a four-rotor Enigma was introduced that required much faster machines, and more of them. So, all three countries created their own bombe designs, and contributed to the codebreaking effort in their own capacity.
I'm assuming what was demonstrated at Bletchley was one of the original British Turing-designed three-rotor-capable bombes, but the article didn't make that completely clear.
If you're interested in stories related to codebreaking, Code Girls is a pretty entertaining and informative read. I've read lots of war-related accounts and biographies, but this one had a different flavor, being about war-related work on the homefront, and about codebreaking women, who were not given much if any credit for the work they did in this or other fields during the war.
Yep, I read it. But you might not be aware that, according to observational data, wildfire smoke may interact with local pollutants to create ground-level ozone.
The Seattle smog was different, but the larger point I was making was that wildfires are huge events that undoubtedly have a very real impact on the regional environment. I'd be very surprised if the two events weren't linked. Can that be proven yet? No, but if you see correlating data, you have to at least LOOK to see if there may be causality before dismissing it out of hand.
Regulators blame the dip in air quality in recent years on hotter weather and stronger, more persistent inversion layers that trap smog near the ground.
Even here in Seattle, we had a week or so of horribly, smoggy air that was outside the "safe" levels, and that's pretty rare for this area. You could see the haze drifting over from the fires on satellite imagery.
One could argue that a warming and drier climate encouraged the development and spread of wildfires over a sustained period, but it's pretty odd to not even mention them as a major contributing factor for this season's bad air.
It doesn't have to be that way, but that's probably just more indications of poor management.
When I was laid off at a game company I worked for many years ago, one morning the company was split into two meetings, the folks being laid off, and everyone else, although we obviously only found this out at the meeting. The CEO came in to talk to us personally, was very straight with us about what was happening and why, and took time to answer all our questions. We were given the time we needed to clear things out, and there wasn't anyone hovering over us. We shook hands with our former bosses and co-workers as we left, and that was that.
Afterwards, another laid-off co-worker and I joked that "it was the nicest firing ever." There was little danger of us doing anything untoward, because when people are treated with respect and dignity, they're likely to respond in kind, even in a bad situation. And as a more practical matter, we wanted good references from our employer, and hoped to remain working in the game industry. That wouldn't be likely to happen if someone pulled any particularly malicious stunts, as it's a relatively small industry - and was smaller still back then.
so I hope all those laid off can find other work they like.
Whenever a studio closes down, there's typically a flurry of recruitment activity. After I finish this post, I'm going to send a quick reminder to contact my current contracting company and client recruiters on Monday. It's partly to try to help fellow industry devs, of course, but its also a great opportunity to grab some experienced people you might not have otherwise tempted away from their current job.
I've been in their shoes, and yeah, it stinks. I've had one game studio close under me, and one large layoff round which I got caught up in. I managed to find new jobs in the same area without much problem, and this was before I had nearly the experience I do now. So, sure, it's going to cause a lot of anxiety for some of them, but I think they're likely to land on their feet.
At $40, it seemed like a reasonable experiment to see if it might be useful to me. I'm interested in technology like this, and I have disposable income. I'm also a game developer, so I kind of wanted to investigate it's potential for audio-only games.
And don't play holier-than-thou and tell me you've never purchased any gizmo that turned out to be less than practical, because I wouldn't believe it.
I own an Echo dot. I've complained previously that it couldn't really even manage a shopping list, so I thought I'd give it another try when I saw this story. Just now I tried saying "Alexa, add eggs, milk, and cheese to my shopping list", I was surprised when she didn't add "eggs, milk, and cheese" as a single item, like before, and added three separate items as you'd generally expect.
When I indicated I'd like to clear my shopping list, Alexa used to tell me to use the shopping list app to do that (wtf). Now, she asked if I'd like to check off all items on my shopping list, and I answered "yes". Pleased, I said, "Alexa, that was really good.", and she said "Thank you."
Well, I guess the point of these devices is that since they're basically dumb terminals into Amazon services, they should keep improving. I'm glad to see they're still working on improving the basics.
Hahah, I've steadfastly refused to post a picture of myself just because it apparently is bugging the hell out of them. They even started asking "Why are you not posting a picture of yourself?" at some point, which only made me more determined (I guess I'm a bit contrary / stubborn). Who cares what I look like? None of the recruiters or employers ever seemed to.
Speaking of... a few years ago I got a random-seeming link request from some woman who was unbelievably beautiful, and I mean that literally, as in "I didn't believe it." I did an image search, and found that picture was of some model on Alibaba, which I found pretty amusing. Looking a bit more closely, the profile seemed to be of a university student, and I always wonder if that was some sort of social science experiment, like "can a beautiful woman collect more links than an average-looking man or woman" or something like that.
And just like others have posted, LinkedIn has worked out fine for me. I manage my online public resume and my more important professional contacts with it. It's super convenient for that, because otherwise, there's no way I'd be able to stay in touch with people. E-mails are constantly changing, people move, etc. And recruiters know where to find me. I'm not sure what people are expecting of it beyond that, but it's seems like it's doing more or less what its intended to do.
I think people have gotten a bit jaded regarding e-mail, which is probably the natural result when 95% of it is probably spam. I tend to assume that anything I get about "my new Dodge vehicle from XXX dealership in YYY state" is more likely to be spam than an honest mistake, and I just mark it as such.
In fact, if you think about it, it seems possible some of your messages are getting caught up in spam filters too, since I've seen a number of spam messages that follow patterns that you might have used if you were contacting someone out of the blue.
I think you missed the sarcasm implied in my post. But given recent AI hype, I could see how that might be taken seriously. That being said...
So you'll train the AI to spot fakes based on what, real-world training data for which you can't reliably determine they're fakes?
Yes. It's not like you can't find a bunch of training material which you know are fakes to train your algorithm on. I can't tell most visual effects in movies are fake, but I know they are. Same principle.
Also, note that it's *humans* that can't reliably tell if they're fakes. The whole point is that computers have much deeper powers of analysis than humans do - they tend to be good at that. Our brains fill in a lot of missing information, which is how psycho-accoustic audio encoding or video compression works. There's a possibility that deepfake generation algorithms leave telltale clues that are perceptibly lossless to humans, but would stand out with rigorous analysis.
Obviously, I have to allow for the possibility that deepfakes can't be algorithmically detected either, but I wouldn't be surprised if some researcher or tech firm takes up the challenge. Someone like Facebook is perhaps already researching this, as they seemed determined to play Arbiter-of-Truth in their sandbox.
The first time I saw a PC actually turn it's own power off, I thought that was voodoo. A button that physically changes state on its own beats that for sheer geekiness.
In fact, the entire legal system uses nothing but scientifically invalid "proof"... Our legal system doesn't even remotely adhere to that.
The threshold for legal conviction in the US (and a few other countries) is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and not "absolute proof" for good reason. If you demand 100% proof, you would almost never convict anyone, and that wouldn't serve justice either. The legal system has to carefully balance the ability to obtain a conviction when warranted versus protection against false accusations. Real life tends to be a bit messier than a peer-reviewed scientific paper, and rarely deals in absolutes.
I actually believe global warming is a thing. But as you can see by my "offtopic" mod, it's become a fucking religion to some people. Any hint of dissension is responded to with a vehement effort to *silence* any dissension. On this particular forums, that takes the form mod-bombing, or people like you making assumptions that I've fallen from the true path.
So yeah, I believe global warming is happening, and I'm a supporter of efforts to convert to a more carbon neutral lifestyle. But I've also come to absolutely loathe the Church of Global Warming's acolytes.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to log in, actually. I just visited the page, and it told me I wasn't likely affected, presumably by using a local cookie. I'm pretty sure it's been months since I last logged in.
Maybe I should feel lucky that neither of my Windows 10 machines can update past the Fall 2017 release?
Yeah, pretty much everyone here predicted their big new overhaul was going to be a disaster. It was an easy prediction to make, since a) it involved UX folks, who always seem gung-ho to radically change stuff, and b) most people hate change.
I'd kill an Ewok for a remake of the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter games.
Of course, the "choose your route" method can flub even in videogames. Mass Effect 3 was an instructive example of how the illusion of choice in videogames collided head-on with reality, not to mention a few bad design & storytelling decisions. The entirety of all the difficult choices and decisions made along the way in three games ended up as a rather anemic A/B/C choice.
They will not sting you unless you aggravate them.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Or unless by "aggravate them", you mean "exist in the same space with them". I've been stung several times in my life completely at random by wasps, always before I had any clue they were there, like standing around on a soccer field or something - obviously nowhere near their nest and not doing anything that would threaten them. On the other hand, I've *never* been stung by a bee of any sort.
Obviously, given this has happened only a few times in my entire life, it's true that they normally leave people alone. So it's not like I panic at the sight of a wasp - odds are pretty good we'll both just live and let live. But what you said their is complete horseshit, unless you put a big qualifier USUALLY on it.
These are rented games from Playstation Now. It's a STREAMING SERVICE. Asking if you can keep them makes as much sense as asking if you get to keep your rental movies. No, of course not.
You always have the option of simply *buying* your games, either with a disc or a download, and playing them as long as you own a PS4. The drama here is a little over the top. No, I don't like this new rental model either, so I don't subscribe to it. The moment I can't actually buy titles is the day I give up consoles and become an exclusive PC gamer.
True. There also has to be a reasonable limit to the staggering just to save on bus costs. While it's admirable to try to save money, at some point, they'll need to get enough buses to transfer all the students at reasonable hours that everyone can live with, rather than spreading start times quite so much - which as you rightly point out, can be hugely inconvenient.
But the larger point I'm making is that there's nothing wrong with algorithmic-derived solutions, so long as you understand all the parameters you're dealing with. Obviously, reasonable maximums and minimums on start times also need to be a factor as well. Trying to minimize the pain of any transition obviously needs to be more heavily factored into the solutions. It's a good lesson worth learning.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - parametrize the costs of change. It's actually a pretty big blind spot that they missed this, but it's understandable. They tried to fix their issues in one giant step, which naturally flopped.
Instead, tune that algorithm to make very small, yearly changes that move things in the desired direction. Essentially, they need to factor in the human / political element of this, which states that people resist change of all sorts. So the challenge then is to find a path which minimizes the pain of this transition for the most people. So it's a ten year plan instead of getting fixed in one shot.
WLinux is based on Debian, and the developer, Whitewater Foundry
It's developed by Whitewater Foundry, not Microsoft. And yes, you can sell GPL software if you also distribute the source.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
BTW, I searched for "Linux" on the MS Store, and found five explicitly listed Linux distros (Ubundu, openSuze, Suze Linux Enterprise, Debian, and Kali)... but not WLinux. I had to specifically search for it by name before I found it on the store. I'm not sure why they think anyone would pay $10 for a Linux distro when there are plenty of free and well-known alternatives.
If I recall correctly, there were several phases in the bombe design. The original Polish codebreaking efforts, including their bombe, relied on some principles that turned out in the long run to be fragile and unsustainable. That was where Turing came in. He redesigned a British bombe on more general principles, and as such, was able to continue breaking messages when the Polish method stopped working due to changes in the encryption systems.
The Polish definitely got the ball rolling, but Turing made many key breakthroughs, and the Americans helped later with their manufacturing prowess, which was required when a four-rotor Enigma was introduced that required much faster machines, and more of them. So, all three countries created their own bombe designs, and contributed to the codebreaking effort in their own capacity.
I'm assuming what was demonstrated at Bletchley was one of the original British Turing-designed three-rotor-capable bombes, but the article didn't make that completely clear.
If you're interested in stories related to codebreaking, Code Girls is a pretty entertaining and informative read. I've read lots of war-related accounts and biographies, but this one had a different flavor, being about war-related work on the homefront, and about codebreaking women, who were not given much if any credit for the work they did in this or other fields during the war.
Yep, I read it. But you might not be aware that, according to observational data, wildfire smoke may interact with local pollutants to create ground-level ozone.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
The Seattle smog was different, but the larger point I was making was that wildfires are huge events that undoubtedly have a very real impact on the regional environment. I'd be very surprised if the two events weren't linked. Can that be proven yet? No, but if you see correlating data, you have to at least LOOK to see if there may be causality before dismissing it out of hand.
From the article:
Regulators blame the dip in air quality in recent years on hotter weather and stronger, more persistent inversion layers that trap smog near the ground.
Yeah. And the fires.
Even here in Seattle, we had a week or so of horribly, smoggy air that was outside the "safe" levels, and that's pretty rare for this area. You could see the haze drifting over from the fires on satellite imagery.
One could argue that a warming and drier climate encouraged the development and spread of wildfires over a sustained period, but it's pretty odd to not even mention them as a major contributing factor for this season's bad air.
It doesn't have to be that way, but that's probably just more indications of poor management.
When I was laid off at a game company I worked for many years ago, one morning the company was split into two meetings, the folks being laid off, and everyone else, although we obviously only found this out at the meeting. The CEO came in to talk to us personally, was very straight with us about what was happening and why, and took time to answer all our questions. We were given the time we needed to clear things out, and there wasn't anyone hovering over us. We shook hands with our former bosses and co-workers as we left, and that was that.
Afterwards, another laid-off co-worker and I joked that "it was the nicest firing ever." There was little danger of us doing anything untoward, because when people are treated with respect and dignity, they're likely to respond in kind, even in a bad situation. And as a more practical matter, we wanted good references from our employer, and hoped to remain working in the game industry. That wouldn't be likely to happen if someone pulled any particularly malicious stunts, as it's a relatively small industry - and was smaller still back then.
so I hope all those laid off can find other work they like.
Whenever a studio closes down, there's typically a flurry of recruitment activity. After I finish this post, I'm going to send a quick reminder to contact my current contracting company and client recruiters on Monday. It's partly to try to help fellow industry devs, of course, but its also a great opportunity to grab some experienced people you might not have otherwise tempted away from their current job.
I've been in their shoes, and yeah, it stinks. I've had one game studio close under me, and one large layoff round which I got caught up in. I managed to find new jobs in the same area without much problem, and this was before I had nearly the experience I do now. So, sure, it's going to cause a lot of anxiety for some of them, but I think they're likely to land on their feet.
At $40, it seemed like a reasonable experiment to see if it might be useful to me. I'm interested in technology like this, and I have disposable income. I'm also a game developer, so I kind of wanted to investigate it's potential for audio-only games.
And don't play holier-than-thou and tell me you've never purchased any gizmo that turned out to be less than practical, because I wouldn't believe it.
I own an Echo dot. I've complained previously that it couldn't really even manage a shopping list, so I thought I'd give it another try when I saw this story. Just now I tried saying "Alexa, add eggs, milk, and cheese to my shopping list", I was surprised when she didn't add "eggs, milk, and cheese" as a single item, like before, and added three separate items as you'd generally expect.
When I indicated I'd like to clear my shopping list, Alexa used to tell me to use the shopping list app to do that (wtf). Now, she asked if I'd like to check off all items on my shopping list, and I answered "yes". Pleased, I said, "Alexa, that was really good.", and she said "Thank you."
Well, I guess the point of these devices is that since they're basically dumb terminals into Amazon services, they should keep improving. I'm glad to see they're still working on improving the basics.
Hahah, I've steadfastly refused to post a picture of myself just because it apparently is bugging the hell out of them. They even started asking "Why are you not posting a picture of yourself?" at some point, which only made me more determined (I guess I'm a bit contrary / stubborn). Who cares what I look like? None of the recruiters or employers ever seemed to.
Speaking of... a few years ago I got a random-seeming link request from some woman who was unbelievably beautiful, and I mean that literally, as in "I didn't believe it." I did an image search, and found that picture was of some model on Alibaba, which I found pretty amusing. Looking a bit more closely, the profile seemed to be of a university student, and I always wonder if that was some sort of social science experiment, like "can a beautiful woman collect more links than an average-looking man or woman" or something like that.
And just like others have posted, LinkedIn has worked out fine for me. I manage my online public resume and my more important professional contacts with it. It's super convenient for that, because otherwise, there's no way I'd be able to stay in touch with people. E-mails are constantly changing, people move, etc. And recruiters know where to find me. I'm not sure what people are expecting of it beyond that, but it's seems like it's doing more or less what its intended to do.
I think people have gotten a bit jaded regarding e-mail, which is probably the natural result when 95% of it is probably spam. I tend to assume that anything I get about "my new Dodge vehicle from XXX dealership in YYY state" is more likely to be spam than an honest mistake, and I just mark it as such.
In fact, if you think about it, it seems possible some of your messages are getting caught up in spam filters too, since I've seen a number of spam messages that follow patterns that you might have used if you were contacting someone out of the blue.
Or, maybe some people are just jerks.
I think you missed the sarcasm implied in my post. But given recent AI hype, I could see how that might be taken seriously. That being said...
So you'll train the AI to spot fakes based on what, real-world training data for which you can't reliably determine they're fakes?
Yes. It's not like you can't find a bunch of training material which you know are fakes to train your algorithm on. I can't tell most visual effects in movies are fake, but I know they are. Same principle.
Also, note that it's *humans* that can't reliably tell if they're fakes. The whole point is that computers have much deeper powers of analysis than humans do - they tend to be good at that. Our brains fill in a lot of missing information, which is how psycho-accoustic audio encoding or video compression works. There's a possibility that deepfake generation algorithms leave telltale clues that are perceptibly lossless to humans, but would stand out with rigorous analysis.
Obviously, I have to allow for the possibility that deepfakes can't be algorithmically detected either, but I wouldn't be surprised if some researcher or tech firm takes up the challenge. Someone like Facebook is perhaps already researching this, as they seemed determined to play Arbiter-of-Truth in their sandbox.
The first time I saw a PC actually turn it's own power off, I thought that was voodoo. A button that physically changes state on its own beats that for sheer geekiness.
In fact, the entire legal system uses nothing but scientifically invalid "proof"... Our legal system doesn't even remotely adhere to that.
The threshold for legal conviction in the US (and a few other countries) is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and not "absolute proof" for good reason. If you demand 100% proof, you would almost never convict anyone, and that wouldn't serve justice either. The legal system has to carefully balance the ability to obtain a conviction when warranted versus protection against false accusations. Real life tends to be a bit messier than a peer-reviewed scientific paper, and rarely deals in absolutes.
Agreed. If nothing else, we'll train an AI to spot the fakes. I mean, apparently AI can do anything these days, right?
I actually believe global warming is a thing. But as you can see by my "offtopic" mod, it's become a fucking religion to some people. Any hint of dissension is responded to with a vehement effort to *silence* any dissension. On this particular forums, that takes the form mod-bombing, or people like you making assumptions that I've fallen from the true path.
So yeah, I believe global warming is happening, and I'm a supporter of efforts to convert to a more carbon neutral lifestyle. But I've also come to absolutely loathe the Church of Global Warming's acolytes.