Apparently, not enough people have read The Art of Fisting [amazon.com], so there are no "opposite" books to read. Blast it! I read that too quickly, and i thought it said "The Art of Fishing" and i clicked on it while at work!
When trying to figure out why some form of entertainment is made in a certain way or made to promote a certain message, the obvious and usually most simple reaction is to follow the money. Who writes the checks to get CSI: Miami made? Jerry Bruckheimer, the number one purveyor of non-cerebral entertainment in the U.S. He's been responsible for such gems as: The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Enemy of the State, Coyote Ugly, Kangaroo Jack, and more. Not all his projects are bad; in fact, I really enjoyed Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean. However, all his movies are highly dependent on manipulating his viewers' emotions into what he thinks they should feel and rarely do they engage the viewers' intellect. He does this voluntarily and overtly, and his quotes listed on imdb even allude to that philosophy.
All that being said, when someone makes entertainment this way, his product is going to be emotionally engaging (either positively or negatively). Obviously, the write of the article was affected very negatively. On the other hand, i'm sure there were many people who were affected in a way that they did take the viewpoint of the show: that gamers are sheep and game companies will promote murder in order to sell games.
There are already a few comments about how it's not "sequels" but "bad sequels" that are the problem. However, i think the root of the problem is that too many publishers are relying on "sure bets" or franchises they can guarantee will make X amount of sales. If they see that there's a market for some entertainment franchise, they will continue to develop games using that franchise until it's run into the ground. Movie producers are the same way. Stick to the formula, make movies and sequels where we know there's a market, keep the money moving, don't take any risks. That's why there are 6 police academy movies. There was enough of a market for the movie execs to keep making them with no regard to entertainment value.
"The infidels have trapped the soul of an Iraqi in a sorcerer's box and are forcing him to act as a translator, thus preventing him from ascending to paradise?! KILL THEM!!!"
The only games listed above that didn't appear to be tied to an existing property or an existing game franchise were Kameo and Gun. I know it has been more noticeable recently in the current game market, but I worry that the next generation consoles (with their incredibly high budget games) will solidify the publishers' aversion to original titles. There is some truth to the saying, "if it's not broken, don't bother fixing it." But there is also truth in, "familiarity breeds contempt."
Come to think of it, it seems the game industry is suffering from the same ailment as all the other entertainment industries.
Quake was the first PC video game that made me want to play it all night long and disregard sleep. The only other game i remember being able to keep me awake through to the next morning was Lode Runner for the Apple IIc. Those are the only two games for which i have ever lost an entire night's worth of sleep. For Quake, i must have pulled one or two all nighters per week during my sophomore year (and a decent part of my junior year) of college. Coincidentally, i met tons of really cool people doing so (many with whom i am still very good friends). Sadly, i doubt i'll ever have such a good experience again, though HL, UT, and Halo came close. For that reason alone, i'd rather play Quake than any of its glamorous descendants - it's kind of like toasting to old friends.
Is it just me or are the main characters in each new FF slowing morphing into a single gender?
(maybe with exception to FFIX, which had a conquistador and a rastafarian it it)
According to this decibal chart, that's somewhere between "jet at 100 feet" and "death of hearing tissue." I used to go to a summer camp near an air force base, and A-10 warthogs would frequently fly overhead. I doubt they were any closer than a few hundred feet, but they were still incredibly loud. It was near impossible to hear anyone speak/yell until the aircraft had passed. As for this weapon, my guess is that the pain of the sound it produces (while the most noticeable of the effects) is probably no more important than the fear and confusion it imbues.
"The less expensive system, at $229, will feature an advertising service that sends commercials up to 40 seconds long to your unit as many as three times a day. It won't interrupt your game, movie or music, but you'll have to watch them before the unit will allow you to power down. (Well, unless you rip the battery out, I suppose.) A bundle, priced at a staggering $399, will allow you to turn off the ads and comes with extra GPS software.
Let me repeat that price: $399. That's the same price as the high-end Xbox 360."
All the article is really saying is that investigators need to learn how to glean information from the caches and histories of non-IE browsers. Specifically mention was the need to be able to differentiate between urls from clicked links and urls entered into the browser by hand. It didn't even say that learning how to do this was providing any difficulty to them:
"Lewis, who works for risk consulting company Kroll, gave attendees more tips on how to read the cache, history and cookie files that Firefox and Opera generate. He recommended some free tools for investigators, including Opera 4 File Explorer, which displays Opera cache files, and Web Historian from Red Cliff, which exports history information for IE, Opera and Firefox into an easily readable Excel spreadsheet. etc..."
All the article is really saying that the use of non-IE browsers has created the need for investigators to broaden their horizons. The only controversy here was created in the use of buzz (weasel?) words in the summary... "impede," "allegations," so on and so forth. I don't mean to spoil the fun, but there really is very little to see here.
"Brandon Hipsher, who lives in Indiana, says that gaming is no more addictive than watching television... Why is gaming considered addictive when other activities are not?"
I don't think he's helping his argument with that one.
I was reading an article way back (as in four-years-way-back) about the failure of the sega dreamcast. The author mentioned that one contributing factor was that Sega was notorious for stealing ideas from other game developers. They would meet with a game developer, which would pitch a game to them. There would be artwork, digital renderings of characters, and sometimes video. Sega would get interested, feign loyalty towards the game developer, and when they had enough info, they would cut ties with the game developer and make their own knock-off. It obviously became a gamble for game developers to enter into a relationship with Sega. Piss off enough game developers, who are already interested in the next-gen consoles (PS2, XBox, GameCube), and you have a recipe for sucky games and a shortened life cycle.
Related link, but i don't believe it's the one i originally read. Respect the Gord.
The review mentioned CMMI, so i figured i could share my personal knowledge of it to give others at least a basic feel for it. A few years back i worked for a defense contractor at a military base. Don't get worked up: we were glorified librarians, only occasionally writing internal apps to make lights blink, pocket strings loosen, and other such things occur. Our group (being the smallest one on the base), got the crappiest contracts. One of them was to ensure that all software development done on the base was CMMI level 3 compliant. I was one of the "lucky" ones sent to the CMMI classes to be indoctrinated. CMMI has a number of levels, starting at level 1 (very little bureaucracy, minimal documentation, and barely organized) and going level 5 (an amount of bureaucracy that would put Brazil ["Mistakes? We don't make mistakes."] to shame). Working at level 3 is right in the middle of the spectrum, with just a bit too much bureaucracy for my tastes (when you need to generate a paper trail just to write a simple function, it's a tad too much). There was a rumor going around that there was one (maybe two) companies that qualified as CMMI level 5, and they were believed to be in india (where the cost of maintaining such a level would not be prohibitive to sustain). Of course, that may have changed in the past few years.
Now comes the question... why would anyone want such a level of bureaucracy? Well, in our case, we were responsible to the government, and from what i can tell, the government equates "paper trail" with "accountability and transparency." In other cases (commercial software), this would allow a company to switch contractors if the current contractor started acting nutsy or broke a contract in some way.
Think of the group paying for the contract as "the boss" and two contract groups called "Bob" and "Tim." The boss wants to pay someone to develop the MegaApp for him. Bob and Tim both make promises about how fast they can develop the MegaApp and how much it will cost and how much quality the MegaApp will contain after they work their respective voodoos. Bob makes some egregious claims, and the boss (because he's a manager) believes Bob and passes over Tim's more realistic promises. Bob, of course, fails to deliver on his promises, but the boss saw that some of what Bob did met some of the requirements. Since the boss made sure that Bob and Tim implemented CMMI level 3 before they could even be considered for contract, he has the option (or believes he has the option) to take the deliverables (including CMMI documents) to Tim. Tim, who is accustomed to using CMMI level 3, should theoretically be able to pick up the project in a short period of time and run with it due to the high level of documentation.
Just like communism, it can sound good in theory and look good on paper but will probably only work well in a perfect world.
Actually, in this case, the "organizing bodies" are not playing catch-up. eDonkey has been in the attention of said bodies for quite some time. Just because they haven't sued users of a particular network yet doesn't mean they aren't preparing to do so.
I strongly suggest that slashdot readers RTFA before posting your bashing a certain Redmond company. First of all, the study in question (from what i could glean from the article) was this... Subject: A microsoft house. Object: Study the differences in TCO of the company staying with microsoft versus the company moving to linux and open source. Period: Approximately 3 years.
The study found that the TCO of staying with microsoft was considerably lower than the TCO of moving to open source. The findings of the study are true; though they can be presented deceptively. Due to the short period of the study, as mentioned in the article, microsoft can "...emphasize the cost of migration and associated training costs..." If the period was longer (say 10 to 15 years), the TCO would definitely be lower for linux and open source products.
Does this mean that the study is invalid ot that it should be thrown out? I don't think. For companies with a steady income but small savings, companies who depend on rapid application development, or small businesses with proportionally small IT departments, this study is very valid. It would hurt any company to lose a couple months or fall behind on their development for a year. For the types of companies i have just mentioned, the effect of losing time can be much more disastrous. I am sure that there is anecdotal evidence that shows a company in one of those situations can do it, but i believe many companies would be disinclined to take the risk. For companies with larger bank accounts or with the flexibility to not release any code for an extended period of time, the findings of this study could more readily be ignored.
Through the article, there was one bit of good advice about such studies repeated by those from both microsoft and linux houses: "... no research that has been funded by Microsoft, a Linux vendor or otherwise should be taken seriously."
I have some relatives who have lived in colorado for since well before the airport was built and opened. From what i've heard it's been a shady deal from the start. If you've ever been to the airport, you'll notice that it's miles from anything. It's just sort of sitting out in the middle of undeveloped land. From what i've heard, some politician's wife bought up a bunch of property for dirt cheap out the middle of no-man's land (well away from Denver). When someone proposed a new airport, guess what... it got built in the middle of no-man's land, which it bought at a premium price.
Now, i'm not saying that this has something to do with an automative system failing, but i do think it indicates the culture of hubris surrounding the development of said airport. When someone gets away with whatever they want for long enough, they start to think they can do no wrong. Perhaps that's why it's taken them over ten years (and way too much money) to admit that, "hmmm... i guess it doesn't work." (It probably didn't help too much that it was built during the tech bubble when any less-then-phenominal system could be made perfect by any old computer programmer armed with the almighty dollar.)
That's pretty much what Mr. Zalewski said. He specified that a hacker was a "skillful, passionate enthusiast" as opposed to someone who approached what they did as simply "just a job." Of course, he's speaking in the context of computers, but i doubt he'd be offended if that term was stretched into other areas of study/work. That's just my two cents.
(i didn't have a good referral link to put here, so i'll just leave this)
Slashdot Mirror
Six Sigma is a process management... process.
I think.
But it's definitely not karate!
When trying to figure out why some form of entertainment is made in a certain way or made to promote a certain message, the obvious and usually most simple reaction is to follow the money. Who writes the checks to get CSI: Miami made? Jerry Bruckheimer, the number one purveyor of non-cerebral entertainment in the U.S. He's been responsible for such gems as: The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Enemy of the State, Coyote Ugly, Kangaroo Jack, and more. Not all his projects are bad; in fact, I really enjoyed Black Hawk Down and Pirates of the Caribbean. However, all his movies are highly dependent on manipulating his viewers' emotions into what he thinks they should feel and rarely do they engage the viewers' intellect. He does this voluntarily and overtly, and his quotes listed on imdb even allude to that philosophy.
All that being said, when someone makes entertainment this way, his product is going to be emotionally engaging (either positively or negatively). Obviously, the write of the article was affected very negatively. On the other hand, i'm sure there were many people who were affected in a way that they did take the viewpoint of the show: that gamers are sheep and game companies will promote murder in order to sell games.
There are already a few comments about how it's not "sequels" but "bad sequels" that are the problem. However, i think the root of the problem is that too many publishers are relying on "sure bets" or franchises they can guarantee will make X amount of sales. If they see that there's a market for some entertainment franchise, they will continue to develop games using that franchise until it's run into the ground. Movie producers are the same way. Stick to the formula, make movies and sequels where we know there's a market, keep the money moving, don't take any risks. That's why there are 6 police academy movies. There was enough of a market for the movie execs to keep making them with no regard to entertainment value.
What myth doled out the worst punishment on Buster?
"The infidels have trapped the soul of an Iraqi in a sorcerer's box and are forcing him to act as a translator, thus preventing him from ascending to paradise?! KILL THEM!!!"
This generation of artists seems to be lacking inspiration and vision beyond making the quick buck.
Actually, i believe the problem isn't with the artists, but with the bean-counters and decision-makers.
The only games listed above that didn't appear to be tied to an existing property or an existing game franchise were Kameo and Gun. I know it has been more noticeable recently in the current game market, but I worry that the next generation consoles (with their incredibly high budget games) will solidify the publishers' aversion to original titles. There is some truth to the saying, "if it's not broken, don't bother fixing it." But there is also truth in, "familiarity breeds contempt."
Come to think of it, it seems the game industry is suffering from the same ailment as all the other entertainment industries.
Quake was the first PC video game that made me want to play it all night long and disregard sleep. The only other game i remember being able to keep me awake through to the next morning was Lode Runner for the Apple IIc. Those are the only two games for which i have ever lost an entire night's worth of sleep. For Quake, i must have pulled one or two all nighters per week during my sophomore year (and a decent part of my junior year) of college. Coincidentally, i met tons of really cool people doing so (many with whom i am still very good friends). Sadly, i doubt i'll ever have such a good experience again, though HL, UT, and Halo came close. For that reason alone, i'd rather play Quake than any of its glamorous descendants - it's kind of like toasting to old friends.
Is it just me or are the main characters in each new FF slowing morphing into a single gender?
(maybe with exception to FFIX, which had a conquistador and a rastafarian it it)
"It can be as loud as about 150 decibels..."
According to this decibal chart, that's somewhere between "jet at 100 feet" and "death of hearing tissue." I used to go to a summer camp near an air force base, and A-10 warthogs would frequently fly overhead. I doubt they were any closer than a few hundred feet, but they were still incredibly loud. It was near impossible to hear anyone speak/yell until the aircraft had passed. As for this weapon, my guess is that the pain of the sound it produces (while the most noticeable of the effects) is probably no more important than the fear and confusion it imbues.
"... football fields are rarely 30m long ..."
100 yards < 30 meters?
#4 - Clunky controls.
#5 - GPS capability (maybe).
My favorite part of the article:
"The less expensive system, at $229, will feature an advertising service that sends commercials up to 40 seconds long to your unit as many as three times a day. It won't interrupt your game, movie or music, but you'll have to watch them before the unit will allow you to power down. (Well, unless you rip the battery out, I suppose.) A bundle, priced at a staggering $399, will allow you to turn off the ads and comes with extra GPS software.
Let me repeat that price: $399. That's the same price as the high-end Xbox 360."
I went looking for my favorite death-dealing-devices, and it looks like slappers were missing from the weapons page!
what gives?!
All the article is really saying is that investigators need to learn how to glean information from the caches and histories of non-IE browsers. Specifically mention was the need to be able to differentiate between urls from clicked links and urls entered into the browser by hand. It didn't even say that learning how to do this was providing any difficulty to them:
"Lewis, who works for risk consulting company Kroll, gave attendees more tips on how to read the cache, history and cookie files that Firefox and Opera generate. He recommended some free tools for investigators, including Opera 4 File Explorer, which displays Opera cache files, and Web Historian from Red Cliff, which exports history information for IE, Opera and Firefox into an easily readable Excel spreadsheet. etc..."
All the article is really saying that the use of non-IE browsers has created the need for investigators to broaden their horizons. The only controversy here was created in the use of buzz (weasel?) words in the summary... "impede," "allegations," so on and so forth. I don't mean to spoil the fun, but there really is very little to see here.
"Brandon Hipsher, who lives in Indiana, says that gaming is no more addictive than watching television... Why is gaming considered addictive when other activities are not?"
I don't think he's helping his argument with that one.
I was reading an article way back (as in four-years-way-back) about the failure of the sega dreamcast. The author mentioned that one contributing factor was that Sega was notorious for stealing ideas from other game developers. They would meet with a game developer, which would pitch a game to them. There would be artwork, digital renderings of characters, and sometimes video. Sega would get interested, feign loyalty towards the game developer, and when they had enough info, they would cut ties with the game developer and make their own knock-off. It obviously became a gamble for game developers to enter into a relationship with Sega. Piss off enough game developers, who are already interested in the next-gen consoles (PS2, XBox, GameCube), and you have a recipe for sucky games and a shortened life cycle.
Related link, but i don't believe it's the one i originally read. Respect the Gord.
Now comes the question... why would anyone want such a level of bureaucracy? Well, in our case, we were responsible to the government, and from what i can tell, the government equates "paper trail" with "accountability and transparency." In other cases (commercial software), this would allow a company to switch contractors if the current contractor started acting nutsy or broke a contract in some way.
Think of the group paying for the contract as "the boss" and two contract groups called "Bob" and "Tim." The boss wants to pay someone to develop the MegaApp for him. Bob and Tim both make promises about how fast they can develop the MegaApp and how much it will cost and how much quality the MegaApp will contain after they work their respective voodoos. Bob makes some egregious claims, and the boss (because he's a manager) believes Bob and passes over Tim's more realistic promises. Bob, of course, fails to deliver on his promises, but the boss saw that some of what Bob did met some of the requirements. Since the boss made sure that Bob and Tim implemented CMMI level 3 before they could even be considered for contract, he has the option (or believes he has the option) to take the deliverables (including CMMI documents) to Tim. Tim, who is accustomed to using CMMI level 3, should theoretically be able to pick up the project in a short period of time and run with it due to the high level of documentation.
Just like communism, it can sound good in theory and look good on paper but will probably only work well in a perfect world.
Note: Carnegie Mellon developed CMMI.
Disclaimers:
Actually, in this case, the "organizing bodies" are not playing catch-up. eDonkey has been in the attention of said bodies for quite some time. Just because they haven't sued users of a particular network yet doesn't mean they aren't preparing to do so.
hey, there are plenty of other places on the web to catch some S&M.
<action>duck</action>
I strongly suggest that slashdot readers RTFA before posting your bashing a certain Redmond company. First of all, the study in question (from what i could glean from the article) was this...
Subject: A microsoft house.
Object: Study the differences in TCO of the company staying with microsoft versus the company moving to linux and open source.
Period: Approximately 3 years.
The study found that the TCO of staying with microsoft was considerably lower than the TCO of moving to open source. The findings of the study are true; though they can be presented deceptively. Due to the short period of the study, as mentioned in the article, microsoft can "...emphasize the cost of migration and associated training costs..." If the period was longer (say 10 to 15 years), the TCO would definitely be lower for linux and open source products.
Does this mean that the study is invalid ot that it should be thrown out? I don't think. For companies with a steady income but small savings, companies who depend on rapid application development, or small businesses with proportionally small IT departments, this study is very valid. It would hurt any company to lose a couple months or fall behind on their development for a year. For the types of companies i have just mentioned, the effect of losing time can be much more disastrous. I am sure that there is anecdotal evidence that shows a company in one of those situations can do it, but i believe many companies would be disinclined to take the risk. For companies with larger bank accounts or with the flexibility to not release any code for an extended period of time, the findings of this study could more readily be ignored.
Through the article, there was one bit of good advice about such studies repeated by those from both microsoft and linux houses: "... no research that has been funded by Microsoft, a Linux vendor or otherwise should be taken seriously."
I have some relatives who have lived in colorado for since well before the airport was built and opened. From what i've heard it's been a shady deal from the start. If you've ever been to the airport, you'll notice that it's miles from anything. It's just sort of sitting out in the middle of undeveloped land. From what i've heard, some politician's wife bought up a bunch of property for dirt cheap out the middle of no-man's land (well away from Denver). When someone proposed a new airport, guess what... it got built in the middle of no-man's land, which it bought at a premium price.
Now, i'm not saying that this has something to do with an automative system failing, but i do think it indicates the culture of hubris surrounding the development of said airport. When someone gets away with whatever they want for long enough, they start to think they can do no wrong. Perhaps that's why it's taken them over ten years (and way too much money) to admit that, "hmmm... i guess it doesn't work." (It probably didn't help too much that it was built during the tech bubble when any less-then-phenominal system could be made perfect by any old computer programmer armed with the almighty dollar.)
That's pretty much what Mr. Zalewski said. He specified that a hacker was a "skillful, passionate enthusiast" as opposed to someone who approached what they did as simply "just a job." Of course, he's speaking in the context of computers, but i doubt he'd be offended if that term was stretched into other areas of study/work. That's just my two cents.
(i didn't have a good referral link to put here, so i'll just leave this)
Sorry, i was talking specifically (and implicitly) about the context of Asimov's stories.
Yes, they would be applicable to any device that had a thought process.