How does stopping making & managing your own satellites and paying someone else to do it create jobs?
Well, the data is freely redistributable now. Heck, anyone with a good antenna and some simple software can decode GOES images at home. A private satellite operator on the other hand, would have to employ hundreds, maybe thousands of sales people, lawyers, license compliance auditors, DRM programmers, etc. to secure their profits.
They can't build for the max usage scenario, because that's just not going to last.
They don't need to. This is one place where "the cloud" is an improvement over physical in-house servers. Build one complete server image, then in the days after launch you can stand up as many EC2 hosts as it takes to satisfy demand, and later as numbers of simultaneous players drops you can start taking them back down.
It's not impossible to launch without day-long server queues, EA is just either incompetent or too cheap to pay for the sort of infrastructure their always-on DRM requires.
The real question is why "offtopic" instead of "troll".
Does anyone really think "Does (some TI calculator) support RPN?" after 40+ years of HP using RPN and TI using standard notation could be anything but an attempt to wind up the tired postfix vs infix debate?
Ok, for internet-economists and other pedants "the constraining input in the global economy is not labor", or perhaps "full utilization of available natural resources and capital does not require full-time employment of all members of the labor force".
But those are just flowery ways of saying "more people than jobs".
Micro$oft does it they're "declaring war" on their hardware partners.
I think it's an apt analogy, and a good thing (at least from Microsoft's perspective). The "hardware partners" have failed to deliver the mobile goods several times now; they're either incompetent or purposely delivering crap tablets/convertables to preserve their existing laptop lines. Either way, best to route around them if MS wants Win8 to have any chance at all against iOS/Android.
What exactly is new about this story that isn't already well known?
TBH, I'm surprised they charge licensing fees, at least for established game series. I would have suspected it operated more on an under-the-table product placement basis, ie the CEO gets a free rifle, the dev team gets some T-shirts, and the manufacturer gets their new gun front and center in the next CoD game's "big damn heroes" moment.
Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys?
Their legal department. Without a more permissive license, they're stuck with default copyright terms (no copying except for narrow "fair use" exceptions) so they can't distribute it. Ethical companies wont touch it, unethical ones would have no qualms about pirating BSD/MIT/GPL/whatever licensed code anyway, and the hackers and hippies don't care about licenses will use it and carry on not caring about licenses.
We're receiving reports from sources on the ground in Cupertino that there is PORN on the INTERNET! Stay tuned to the Obvious News Network for in-depth analysis of what this new internet pornography phenomenon means for Apple and iOS app vendors, coming up at six o'clock.
So this guy "wrote the exploit code that was later taken by Slammer's authors and used as part of the worm", and he's not dead or serving an eleventy hojillion year federal prison sentence?
People who say its impossible are nearly always wrong, that's just history (see Clark's Laws).
Except when they're not (see Einstein's laws).
Tell ya what: produce a rigorous scientific definition of "mind", then come up with an implementation of all the necessary attributes of mind-ness using data structures and algorithms that we know how to implement in soft/hardware now, then slashdot can have a productive discussion on how many years it will be before silicon can out-think a human.
Contrary to what the cultists of unsigned int(time_t) implementations might tell you, there was in fact time before 00:00:00 1 January 1970. Its vast (but often boring) history is chronicled in records made of ink symbols impressed on sheets of processed wood pulp bound in volumes known as "books".
Bizarrely, the Macintosh Business Unit, which produces Microsoft Office for Mac, is also in the E&D division...
...because while Mac Office isn't quite the license to print money it was 5-6 years ago, it still covers the losses turkeys like Zune and Windows Phone rack up. At least that's the only theory I've heard that makes any sense.
The cost of testing all this software, and replacing what doesn't work is HUGE both in terms of money and man hours.
Eventually the cost of cleaning up the messes script kiddies make every time they pwn one of your XP machines (and lost business that comes with constantly sending out those "sorry, our security sucks, and now your name, password, credit card numbers, and social security number are on pastebin." messages to customers) will be HUGE-er.
I wonder if I could interest him in devising some guidelines for ShashDot postings that even amateurs could apply with some improvement to the quality of their posts. Anyone enthusiastic about this?
Not in the slightest. I am, in fact, enthusiastically unenthusiastic about bringing the assumption that your reader needs all the 'the five Ws' answered or technical background spoon-fed to him onto the web.
Newspaper style guides were written for a time when a person who didn't understand the technical background had to pedal down to the library and find a book on the subject, read it, and come back to finish the story days or weeks later. It was better to give them a layman's understanding of the science than hope he would come back. Those assumptions don't hold when we have tabbed browsers and wikipedia.
*never quite understood that - it's not *that* much harder than the blocks-and-holes puzzles they solved as a toddler.
Users have experienced the USB disorientability principle (try to plug in USB cable, doesn't fit, rotate connector 180 degrees, still doesn't fit, rotate connector again, plugs right in) enough times that they're concluded computer cables exist in some inscrutable 5-dimensional space and given up trying to understand what plugs in where and why.
"The cuts affected marquee names like Rhianna, Beyonce and Justin Bieber."
This restores a tiny bit of my faith in humanity. Now if we could just get confirmation that 90% of the people watching "Here Comes Honey Boo-boo" are bots too...
Slashdot Mirror
How does stopping making & managing your own satellites and paying someone else to do it create jobs?
Well, the data is freely redistributable now. Heck, anyone with a good antenna and some simple software can decode GOES images at home. A private satellite operator on the other hand, would have to employ hundreds, maybe thousands of sales people, lawyers, license compliance auditors, DRM programmers, etc. to secure their profits.
Shenanigans. Link to the NTSB crash reports, please.
Please. Mozilla was lightyears more "credible" than Opera ever has been, and available in 2000. Firefox is a Johnny-come-lately like Chrom(e||ium).
Reading the same set of feeds from more than one device.
Doubly inadequate when at least one of the devices is not a Linux box with all the Gnome libraries installed.
They can't build for the max usage scenario, because that's just not going to last.
They don't need to. This is one place where "the cloud" is an improvement over physical in-house servers. Build one complete server image, then in the days after launch you can stand up as many EC2 hosts as it takes to satisfy demand, and later as numbers of simultaneous players drops you can start taking them back down.
It's not impossible to launch without day-long server queues, EA is just either incompetent or too cheap to pay for the sort of infrastructure their always-on DRM requires.
Wouldn't that require that google+ at least had half of the features of the products they kill?
Apparently it doesn't. That's why the blatant G+ railroading is pissing off so many users.
It's relevant to the slashdot demographic in that it's the same damn calculator we used in high school... 15+ years ago.
Battery Life: Officially 5 days of classroom use or 2 weeks of homework use
So, in practical terms 5 hours of dopewars or 1-2 hours of Mario.
The real question is why "offtopic" instead of "troll".
Does anyone really think "Does (some TI calculator) support RPN?" after 40+ years of HP using RPN and TI using standard notation could be anything but an attempt to wind up the tired postfix vs infix debate?
Ok, for internet-economists and other pedants "the constraining input in the global economy is not labor", or perhaps "full utilization of available natural resources and capital does not require full-time employment of all members of the labor force".
But those are just flowery ways of saying "more people than jobs".
...when people regularly died from it?
Micro$oft does it they're "declaring war" on their hardware partners.
I think it's an apt analogy, and a good thing (at least from Microsoft's perspective). The "hardware partners" have failed to deliver the mobile goods several times now; they're either incompetent or purposely delivering crap tablets/convertables to preserve their existing laptop lines. Either way, best to route around them if MS wants Win8 to have any chance at all against iOS/Android.
What exactly is new about this story that isn't already well known?
TBH, I'm surprised they charge licensing fees, at least for established game series. I would have suspected it operated more on an under-the-table product placement basis, ie the CEO gets a free rifle, the dev team gets some T-shirts, and the manufacturer gets their new gun front and center in the next CoD game's "big damn heroes" moment.
Now, what stops a company from taking your code and making massive changes to it and shipping that code for mad moneys?
Their legal department. Without a more permissive license, they're stuck with default copyright terms (no copying except for narrow "fair use" exceptions) so they can't distribute it. Ethical companies wont touch it, unethical ones would have no qualms about pirating BSD/MIT/GPL/whatever licensed code anyway, and the hackers and hippies don't care about licenses will use it and carry on not caring about licenses.
We're receiving reports from sources on the ground in Cupertino that there is PORN on the INTERNET! Stay tuned to the Obvious News Network for in-depth analysis of what this new internet pornography phenomenon means for Apple and iOS app vendors, coming up at six o'clock.
So this guy "wrote the exploit code that was later taken by Slammer's authors and used as part of the worm", and he's not dead or serving an eleventy hojillion year federal prison sentence?
Times change indeed...
People who say its impossible are nearly always wrong, that's just history (see Clark's Laws).
Except when they're not (see Einstein's laws).
Tell ya what: produce a rigorous scientific definition of "mind", then come up with an implementation of all the necessary attributes of mind-ness using data structures and algorithms that we know how to implement in soft/hardware now, then slashdot can have a productive discussion on how many years it will be before silicon can out-think a human.
Contrary to what the cultists of unsigned int(time_t) implementations might tell you, there was in fact time before 00:00:00 1 January 1970. Its vast (but often boring) history is chronicled in records made of ink symbols impressed on sheets of processed wood pulp bound in volumes known as "books".
Bizarrely, the Macintosh Business Unit, which produces Microsoft Office for Mac, is also in the E&D division...
...because while Mac Office isn't quite the license to print money it was 5-6 years ago, it still covers the losses turkeys like Zune and Windows Phone rack up. At least that's the only theory I've heard that makes any sense.
Somebody says to ignore the problem as long as they can. Then they band-aid it.
Then senior management looks at how much the band-aids cost, and targets a 10% across-the-board cost reduction next year.
See: BP Texas City refinery fire.
Lastly, if gas tax money is supposed to fix roads...why are all the roads that aren't toll or interstate in such poor shape?
Because 20 cents a gallon doesn't buy what it did the last time Texas gas taxes were raised... in 1991!
The cost of testing all this software, and replacing what doesn't work is HUGE both in terms of money and man hours.
Eventually the cost of cleaning up the messes script kiddies make every time they pwn one of your XP machines (and lost business that comes with constantly sending out those "sorry, our security sucks, and now your name, password, credit card numbers, and social security number are on pastebin." messages to customers) will be HUGE-er.
I wonder if I could interest him in devising some guidelines for ShashDot postings that even amateurs could apply with some improvement to the quality of their posts. Anyone enthusiastic about this?
Not in the slightest. I am, in fact, enthusiastically unenthusiastic about bringing the assumption that your reader needs all the 'the five Ws' answered or technical background spoon-fed to him onto the web.
Newspaper style guides were written for a time when a person who didn't understand the technical background had to pedal down to the library and find a book on the subject, read it, and come back to finish the story days or weeks later. It was better to give them a layman's understanding of the science than hope he would come back. Those assumptions don't hold when we have tabbed browsers and wikipedia.
*never quite understood that - it's not *that* much harder than the blocks-and-holes puzzles they solved as a toddler.
Users have experienced the USB disorientability principle (try to plug in USB cable, doesn't fit, rotate connector 180 degrees, still doesn't fit, rotate connector again, plugs right in) enough times that they're concluded computer cables exist in some inscrutable 5-dimensional space and given up trying to understand what plugs in where and why.
"The cuts affected marquee names like Rhianna, Beyonce and Justin Bieber."
This restores a tiny bit of my faith in humanity. Now if we could just get confirmation that 90% of the people watching "Here Comes Honey Boo-boo" are bots too...