This is what inevitably drove me away from entering the games industry and towards plain old business software development in the end, despite being a game developer having been my lifelong dream up until the point I entered work.
There's just little point being in the games industry working those hours for that wage, on someone elses vision and project when I can work 8:30 - 4:30pm (or 4pm on Fridays) without having had to work a single minute of overtime and have every weekend free and 30 days leave on top of bank holidays, and when I can work at home when I need to and so on on business software which may not be games, but which I'm at least running the projects for and can hence choose the technology and direction and get paid more to boot. The best part? I still have time to both study and work on my own games in my spare time too.
I'm hoping that this indie resurgence will breathe life back into the games industry, I hope it means every other title isn't an FPS World War II shooter or whatever and the ones in between aren't mediocre tat. I hope it means we can see a return of the innovative and most importantly, fun games we saw in the early to mid 90s such as the Syndicate series, Cannon fodder series, the original Command and Conquer and Red Alert, Day of the Tentacle, Little Big Adventure etc.
Indies take risks, game studios repeat the same old "risk-free" games seemingly oblivious to the fact that by making the same game over and over, people become less and less interested in the same tired clones, such that they're effectively making "risk-free" genres risky by boring the shit out of people with them. This is why there's so many AAA flops, and why the studios turned round and think "But what did we do wrong? This is just like Call of Duty 78: Return to D-Day (for the 78th time)". They seem oblivious to the fact that it flopped precisely because it is just yet another clone, and often with the fun of the original not implemented.
When I was in Arizona I was told this is how it works there, I'm not sure if this is just what rangers told us and tell everyone as a matter of course to try and prevent people being stupid or if it really is the case.
I'm not sure how it works in the Grand Canyon as it stems more than one state, would the Arizona law (if it exists) covering this not apply to the Grand Canyon hikers who got lost, or would it simply depend in which section of the Grand Canyon they're in as to which state would be handling the "rescue" and deciding the charge?
It could be the case that those hikers did in fact get charged for those callouts, although if they were chargeable you'd have thought they'd learn after the first time the helicopter arrived and told them, hence why I'm intrigued a little about this law, whether it's real and so on.
I'm sure there's someone from that part of the US here that knows.
Because most of the time, governments own up and say "Yes, this material is authentic".
Then of course there's the people who have desperately tried to have content removed, sometimes by legal means adding an air of authenticity to some of it that hasn't been owned up to.
Then there are 3rd party investigative journalists who have used the material for further research and found it to be truthful in that manner through further digging too.
The fact that so much has been verified means there's a good chance that new content is also valid.
They have credibility because so much of it has been verified. Of course, faking so much material takes some doing as well, if it was really all faked the guy would have to be a fucking god like genius anyway, and as there's so much content you'd need multiple people involved, and with multiple people there's a likelihood of someone admitting it's faked.
So there you have it, the reason they have credibility is because the information thus far has mostly been verifiably credible.
I can only guess you haven't been following the whole story very well, as there's a few good reasons your point doesn't make sense amongst other things.
"A terrible rape allegation that doesn't even stick for a day? Please. With billions of dollars of resources they could manufacture a significantly better, more serious charge with evidence that was hard to refute."
At short notice? Without the cooperation of Swedish intelligence and counter-intelligence if they weren't willing to help the US? Despite all the possible variables, such top prosecutor understanding the situation? You have far too much confidence in the ability of US intelligence. Russia still has one of the best and most capable spy networks in the world, and yet look at the amateur mistakes their spies who were caught recently made. That's assuming the US would even want such charges to stick, association is damaging enough nowadays.
"Personally, if I were in the government and wanted to put a stop to Wikileaks I wouldn't bother with that though. You'd simply find Assange in an ally with a bullet in the back of his head."
You see, this is just it. People like you do work in intelligence, and yet, if you did that then Wikileaks would release the key to the insurance file on the Wikileaks websites which, depending on what's in it, could be more damaging to the US government than anything that's been leaked before. No, killing Assange is a sure fire way to make things worse- not only would there be the issues of people blaming the US government for murder of a civilian, but there'd be the remaining leaked documents as well, including release of the insurance file.
"The "problem" with Wikileaks is that it doesn't need credibility, making some attempt to character-assassinate Assange on the worthless side."
No, it's not. Whilst many people might see through such a character assassination, it's winning the hearts and minds of the voters- the middle American mums, the same ones who fall hook line and sinker for Sarah Palin's "Hockey mom" charade. If they can convince a sizeable portion of the public to say "Oh, Wikileaks? that's the site run by a rapist, why should I believe that". What if they do it again in 6 months? how many people will then think "Hmm, that's a bit suspicious, he's been accused before..."?
The fact is, if they can defame Assange, and if they can continue to tie Wikileaks to a rapist, then they've severely dented it's credibility, such that the US government can actually start calling content their fake, and having such middle American moms and so forth believe it, and believe that their government is doing fine and doesn't need to make any amendments or increase competence to avoid future mistakes.
But what about the insurance file? Well, it's too big a thing for them to release over mere rape charges against one person, they'll hold that until lives are at risk, but as I say what if they keep chipping away with these attempts at character assassination? Do they release the insurance file and risk having no cards to play should they attempt to murder or attack Assange and friends? What happens when things get bad enough to release the file, do they still even have the credibility for people to believe the contents of it aren't faked?
So you see, the issue is that the US can't do anything drastic like you're suggesting such as extraordinary rendition, incarceration, murder, because it risks the leak of the insurance file. All they can do are smaller things, but things which chip away at the credibility of the site amongst a large portion of the voting population. It's not like we don't have countless examples of this type of opinion being formed of people based on lack of case and mere accusation. For example, to his death many people saw Michael Jackson as a paedophile, yet he was never convicted of any such thing, and this is precisely what is likely happening to Assange.
This is precisely the sort of thing the US government can do and get away with without fear of any meaningful reprisal from Wikileaks.
It'd be amusing if Assange just played them at their own game and just release some faked documents in a few months purporting to show documentation of a CIA operation to push false rape allegations against him. Who are the public going to mostly believe? the US government nowadays, or Assange?
In a way it's scary that Assange has this power, but still, amusing to see the US government and all the money it puts into intelligence, espionage and so forth beaten, and capable of being beaten by a bunch of guys who run a website.
The only way the US government can win is to simply do the right thing, smarten up their act, accept where they have done wrong and seek to improve the situation. If they keep trying to attack Wikileaks and keep doing the same things wrong they'll only lose more and more credibility, which makes it even harder for them to be taken seriously when someone else stands up against them, be it someone who doesn't hate the US like Assange, or someone that does like President Ahmadinejad. The only way to restore credibility, is to start to be credible, and if they don't do that, they're going to continue to find it ever harder to be the centrepiece of international negotiations and in fact, to be taken seriously at all when it comes to international disputes.
No I'm not, less proof != no proof. You still need to provide some evidence in a civil trial for your case, and if it's your word against theirs then you have fuck all chance.
Only if they're sure they can win them. No one takes on the cases whereby the evidence is merely someone's say so - even if that person is telling the truth. Groups like the ACLU and a career boosting DA or lawyer will only take it on if they're sure they can win, else it's not going to help them and might both cost them and be detrimental to their career.
I don't know the guys circumstances, maybe he does have evidence, but let's be honest, if a cop is smart about it they can basically get someone in shit and there be very little recourse.
I agree that's likely, or even employees stealing code that they simply think is obvious and might be useful for home projects copying it with a completely innocent mindset. I'm just suprised at the customer data figures more than anything!
"Neither of those pronunciations of "albinism" is correct. It's al-buh-niz-uhm."
Where? That's certainly not the correct pronunciation in modern British English, but that's really the point- different cultures have different accepted pronunciations.
"There are certainly correct pronunciations of "Syracuse" and "Osaka" -- ask people who live there."
Of course, but I was just saying that they're so uncommonly used that I'd have no idea personally how the BBC pronounce them and whether that pronunciation is correct. Even if they do pronounce them incorrectly it's a little easier to excuse incorrect pronunciations of such uncommonly used words anyway than it is more commonly used words and phrases. They're words a reporter may only encounter once or twice in their career anyway rather than something they may repeat over and over incorrectly.
That proportion seems a little high for say, IT workers, who'd probably have little use for customer data outside the job they're in, but I could imagine sales staff however being more likely to do such a thing because having a good network of contacts can be a major benefit when moving into other jobs as a salesman- especially if you're on performance related pay and need to hit sales targets, there is quite high financial motive there for it.
Also from another point of view, it's possibly a good indicator of job satifcation, if staff are pissed off at work then they're going to have less loyalty to the company which will in turn leave them less worried about feeling guilty for doing that sort of thing. In many cases, companies probably bear some responsibility in creating this mindset by treating, or allowing their staff to be treated like shit and making them want to get the fuck out of the company and with a vengeance too.
It's not just that, since version 3 inclusive Firefox has just got ever slower, ever more buggy and less stable with each release.
If Firefox 4 continues this trend and does not reverse it then it will be the last version of FireFox I use.
Mozilla seems to be a long way away from where they were when they were running campaign after campaign to get people to switch to their browser from IE some years ago, because they really did have a better browser and were simply fighting against the inherent advantage IE had being distributed with Windows. They don't really have that upperhand now, I don't find Firefox any faster and in fact find it less stable than IE7 and IE8 which is a sad place to be.
The only reason I haven't switch to Chrome is because I don't actually like it's minimalist UI, it's just too minimalist for my liking.
I really hope Mozilla get it right this time and that the browser really is faster and more stable, and that they've concentrated on getting those basics back to an acceptable standard rather than screwing around with crap like themes which make your browser look like some god awful 1990s AOL homepage or some "l33t" kid's first ever project in Visual Basic.
My girlfriend is a Canadian living in the UK and we go back over to see her family and friends quite frequently, so I know what you mean about appreciation of accents, I often get asked to say things when I'm over there which leave them in fits of giggles. Similarly though, I regularly like making my girlfriend say things which she pronounces funny, generally words involving the letters "out" or "old" amuse me the most with that accent.
In the UK we use the term "fag" to refer to cigarette too, so it's commonly used for that purpose rather than just as a derogatory term for homosexuals. I got a rather funny look when I was in California once and when asking where someone was said "Oh, has he gone outside to smoke a fag?". Obviously in the UK such a sentence is quite harmless, but they seemed under the impression I was querying whether he'd gone to shoot a gay person or something, I think they thought I was part of some neo-nazi organisation for a moment. Fortunately this was at our California office and not in front of a client or anything, although when with clients I try and avoid even British slang like that and stick to proper English anyway.
Are you from the UK? Some of your suggestions are just plain weird, no one in the UK says "Al-bine-izm" or "drunk driving". "BBC Sport" is a name so I fail to see what's invalid about that.
The BBC just pronounces things the way their primary audience (i.e. the British public that funds them) speak and expect them to speak. They seem to be using the standard accepted pronunciation that everyone else here in the UK uses.
I've never heard them say Osaka or Syracuse as they're not words that come up for any reason, but I suspect that's a clue to the fact that you're perhaps not British? If that's the case, then there's the reason you seem to think their pronunciations are abuse of language, rather than the standard accepted pronunciations of British English speaking people.
I guess it's like how in the UK we generally call Mathematics "maths" rather than "math", and pronounce "route" closer to "root", rather than the common North American pronunciation of "rowt".
The BBC is just using the pronunciation native to their staff, and that their primary audience- the ones who pay for their existence, the British license payer, would expect.
What are you on about, you seriously believe the combined iPad/iPhone/iPod touch market is bigger and spends more money than the Windows/Xbox market? Seriously?
Well, sorry to break your dream with reality, but here you go:
As you can see, it totals a little over 51 million units. Do you really believe though, that the 6 million iPhone and 12 million iPhone 3G are still all active and none have been replaced with newer models? It's not unrealistic to think that because there's a 2 - 3 year gap between the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 that people have replaced those handsets when renewing their contract, and some people have even replaced the 3GS with the iPhone 4 just because they want to have the latest device so 30mill - 40mill active devices is a realistic figure. Note that the figures above are directly from Apple's press releases too, so unless you think Apple is also lying about it's sales figures then well, there you have it.
In contrast, there are well over 1 billion Windows PCs in the world, and over 40 million XBox 360s. Many of those Windows PCs are business systems but still hundreds of millions aren't- with the population of North American being around 340mill and the population of Europe being 800mill and a large portion of these populations having a home PC running Windows then there's a massive home market in the west alone, but even if you give the benefit of the doubt and cut the potential PC market down to 1/10th or 1/20th then the current XNA market still dwarfs Apple's platforms.
So you can complain all you want that you don't like the figures, but it doesn't really matter, there they are. The fact is, even the active XBox 360 market is quite possibly as large as the active iOS market before you even consider Windows PCs and Windows phone when it comes out.
True, I guess WinForms usage is still pretty high compared to WPF so there's that consideration too which requires a bit more work in terms of porting as you say.
"I say its poor because it is poor. There are a dozen high end Android handsets and more by the day. Games might work fine with one handset and be completely bugged on another. This happened recently with a bunch of Gameloft titles that worked on the Motorola Droid but crapped out on the HTC Desire and other phones. The reason was the underlying chipset - PowerVR vs Snapdragon as well as other differences between the platforms."
That's fair enough, I wasn't aware of such issues, however this really goes back to my point that catering to hardware differences is something you have to do on the PC for example, so it's not an unsurmountable problem that devs haven't been dealing with for decades already, it just means it's more of a problem than with XNA, and the more the iPhone diverges the more it'll be a problem there also. I'd partly blame the devs for this rather than Android per-se as it sounds like a lack of testing on their behalf as much as a platform issue. I agree that in the modern world we shouldn't have to deal with this kind of shit but then look at graphics programming on Windows, say you want to build a toolchain for a game that you wish to release on XNA platforms and wish to follow best practices by keeping your language the same then you run into problems. You can't use XNA for 3D on Windows if you need any level of flexibility in your tools because the content pipeline is useless for runtime loading of most types of dynamic content, so you really have to use C++ and Direct3D or OpenGL, there are libraries like SlimDX but it's a little behind the curve and has hopeless support and documentation. If you want 2D tools too then you can stay with C# and use WPF, or GDI+, but GDI+ will likely be too slow, but that's yet another framework, you can use C++ and Direct2D for this instead if you want but you're still building your game in C# and XNA. So even with the ease of use for XNA for game development there can be major headaches that make it difficult to share your code across your game and toolset. So again I wouldn't say it's really that Android is shit for gaming, it's just that the development tools requires developers put a little work in than would be ideal in some circumstances, but as I point out here, even XNA which is probably the best out the lot can cause headaches in some situations.
I agree a unified gaming system would be nice and in fact in an ideal world I'd like to see it go a step further- I'd like a unified gaming system that works across all platforms, however I think that's probably too much to hope for, and probably too tricky to implement in reality due to the percent chance of getting the relevant companies working together on such a thing being pretty close to zero. Implementing a high score service is fairly trivial because you can just setup a web service to do that in no time at all of course, but as you say switching to a unified gaming platform would be nice if done properly. There have been rumours about Google going into games, but whether that comes into fruition we'll see I guess.
I'd imagine Microsoft are also factoring in the point that 3rd party developers will often fill in missing features such as a YouTube client with apps in no time at all until a 1st party solution is in place anyway.
As an aside, why do you say there's no doubt that Android is poor for gaming? The hardware is generally more than upto it, it has a full OpenGL ES implementation and you have the NDK if you really want raw performance. I suppose it's not as easy as developing for XNA of course that's true, but other than that what's the big problem? It seems no worse a platform for running games than the iPhone or any potential Windows 7 phones, and no harder to develop games for than Windows, Linux, iOS and Mac OS. It's only real problem so far as far as I can see is simply that it's been neglected as a gaming platform and doesn't have too many games released for it, but I'd say this is the same for apps too and is simply a result of its much smaller userbase than say the iPhone. This is something that does seem to be changing though, Angry Birds for example is being developed for Android now and is due for release shortly.
"Well, if you've been lucky enough for Microsoft to approach you and offer these "inducements" I've heard about"
You keep mentioning this but do you have any evidence of it or are you simply making it up? If you don't have any evidence for it then your point is useless "I've heard about" is not evidence, it's someone spreading rumours.
"On the other hand, there are coming close to 500,000 released apps for the iPhone, a literally staggering amount of apps. Probably more apps than exist for Windows, although that's just speculation."
Did you really just say that?
Importantly, this is a negative, it means people have to find your app amongst those half a million others dependent entirely on Apple's interface with little ability yourself to control how much visibility it gets on that marketplace.
"But if you hit it big, you're in there. No such thing exists on WP7 yet since it's not even shipped. So where's the inducement to go WP7 instead of iPhone? Aside from Microsoft bribing you with a large wad of upfront?"
The fact that if you develop for XNA then you've written a game that can run on XBox 360, Windows, Windows Phone 7. In other words, writing for Windows phone 7 is simple because it uses the same tools and codebase as for Microsoft's other platforms. This means you can target hundreds of millions of devices out there with one codebase. In contrast with the iPhone, it's sold around 50 - 60 mill units to date, however many of those are replacements for previous generations so the actual market size is probably more in the 30mill - 40mill range. That's a much smaller market.
Or to cut a long story short, even if Windows Phone 7 doesn't take off, developing for XNA alone means you automatically are developing for a market that dwarfs that of every other mobile operating system out there.
Of course, there's also the point that there are countless XBLIG and.NET apps that already exist which can be moved directly to, or with minor porting to Windows 7 Phone from the outset. That is, the cost for existing XNA developers to produce for this additional platform is next to nothing, but the potential market is large.
For those who don't know, Halo Waypoint is basically just a front end for the Halo series of games that lets you view all your achievements for the series and one or two bits of Halo news. It's not a game in itself, so calling it a "title" is probably giving it a bit too much credit, because it's largely dull and pointless.
Yes, the title of this post was meant in a sarcastic tone
On a different note though, I think XBox Live integration actually has the potential to be a killer feature for Windows 7- if Windows 7 phones are going to succede on anything it'll probably be this. It effectively means it's a gamer oriented phone and if it links into XBox live then there's a potential to harness the 27 million (or however many XBox Live has now) achievements whores and allow them to continue their achievement addiction even when they're not at their XBox.
I think Microsoft actually has a good vision in terms of XBox Live everywhere by linking XBox Live with Windows Games and mobile games, especially as it all integrates with MSN messenger and partially with Facebook too. Of course, the real test will be in the execution- having the right vision is only the start of it, pulling it off through Microsoft's layers upon layers of bureaucracy will be the real challenge.
It's easy to blame console gaming, yet console gaming continues to produce better looking graphics with existing hardware well beyond the life of equivalent PC gaming hardware. This is largely because the entire hardware pipeline in consoles is focussed towards gaming, whilst the PC isn't- it's more generic hardware bus just isn't as suited to gaming, hence why lower spec consoles can still produce better graphics and better framerates than equivalent and higher specced PCs (within reason of course).
The fault isn't console gaming, the fault is of the companies pushing ever more powerful graphics cards, whilst developers on the PC just outright fail to make use of the last generation- and for good reason. The issue is that the PC is such a fragmented platform and suffers from such high piracy rates that developers on the PC are better off spending their time making sure their game works for as wide an audience as possible, which means far less focus and optimisation on high end graphics.
The fact is, the high end PC graphics card market was always going to be unsustainable, because it's simply a niche market in an era where developer focus is more and more turned away from that market due to decreased profit from that segment.
It's not really anything to do with console gaming. The fact is, it's hard for companies like BFG to stay afloat when their target market is declining on the realisation that they don't need the latest and greatest graphics card coupled with the fact the world financial situation is still shakey and if consumers don't need to spend money right now, then they wont. When you build a company for a niche market that exists based purely on testosterone fuelled competitiveness of who can get the highest FPS then it's no suprise that when money is tight things start to decline somewhat.
As an illutration of my point, my current PC has now just hit 2 years old and I can still play the latest games like Starcraft II in maximum detail at 1920x1200. This would be unheard of a decade or so ago, where even 1 year old PCs would struggle to run the latest games at high detail, or in a decent resolution. The fact is, the PC market is changing and there's not much of a place for overclocked SLI graphics cards in that nowadays- the rise of playable, rather than graphics fuelled indie games over the last few years is also another reason why people no longer need to pay for ultra-expensive high end graphics cards now. The focus has moved back somewhat towards playability and fun for the masses rather than just stunning graphics for the elite on the PC.
Can I join in with your sentiment, and just say, WTF?
It's like Slashdot has just discovered early 1990s AI research and confused it with modern news. ACO has been around for so long now that it's a standard tool in the toolbox of the developer who has a basic grounding in AI along with genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimisation. As the AC says, it's already been used in routing protocols.
Why is Slashdot reporting this? What is the story meant to be here exactly? Even TFA just seems to be a very very brief history of this technique following a mention of it.
Still, if anyone finds it interesting then may I suggest you also look at the above mentioned techniques too- genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, neural networks and so forth? None of this is new by a long shot, but it's all part of the larger field of AI, and specifically they all focus on the core principle of achieving order through emergence and self-organisation. In fact, if you really want to delve into it then learning all about emergence and emergent processes is in itself worthwhile.
I should note that ants are one of many species that exhibit this kind of behaviour- bee colonies work in much the same way for example in producing hives and such.
But again, I know Slashdot is slow when it comes to posting news, but being about 15 years give or take a few late- that's a new record even for Slashdot right?
Innovation in bullshit legal arguments and other methods for lawyers involved in these sorts of cases to sponge more cash off of the productive and useful sections of society you mean?
Slashdot Mirror
This is what inevitably drove me away from entering the games industry and towards plain old business software development in the end, despite being a game developer having been my lifelong dream up until the point I entered work.
There's just little point being in the games industry working those hours for that wage, on someone elses vision and project when I can work 8:30 - 4:30pm (or 4pm on Fridays) without having had to work a single minute of overtime and have every weekend free and 30 days leave on top of bank holidays, and when I can work at home when I need to and so on on business software which may not be games, but which I'm at least running the projects for and can hence choose the technology and direction and get paid more to boot. The best part? I still have time to both study and work on my own games in my spare time too.
I'm hoping that this indie resurgence will breathe life back into the games industry, I hope it means every other title isn't an FPS World War II shooter or whatever and the ones in between aren't mediocre tat. I hope it means we can see a return of the innovative and most importantly, fun games we saw in the early to mid 90s such as the Syndicate series, Cannon fodder series, the original Command and Conquer and Red Alert, Day of the Tentacle, Little Big Adventure etc.
Indies take risks, game studios repeat the same old "risk-free" games seemingly oblivious to the fact that by making the same game over and over, people become less and less interested in the same tired clones, such that they're effectively making "risk-free" genres risky by boring the shit out of people with them. This is why there's so many AAA flops, and why the studios turned round and think "But what did we do wrong? This is just like Call of Duty 78: Return to D-Day (for the 78th time)". They seem oblivious to the fact that it flopped precisely because it is just yet another clone, and often with the fun of the original not implemented.
When I was in Arizona I was told this is how it works there, I'm not sure if this is just what rangers told us and tell everyone as a matter of course to try and prevent people being stupid or if it really is the case.
I'm not sure how it works in the Grand Canyon as it stems more than one state, would the Arizona law (if it exists) covering this not apply to the Grand Canyon hikers who got lost, or would it simply depend in which section of the Grand Canyon they're in as to which state would be handling the "rescue" and deciding the charge?
It could be the case that those hikers did in fact get charged for those callouts, although if they were chargeable you'd have thought they'd learn after the first time the helicopter arrived and told them, hence why I'm intrigued a little about this law, whether it's real and so on.
I'm sure there's someone from that part of the US here that knows.
Because most of the time, governments own up and say "Yes, this material is authentic".
Then of course there's the people who have desperately tried to have content removed, sometimes by legal means adding an air of authenticity to some of it that hasn't been owned up to.
Then there are 3rd party investigative journalists who have used the material for further research and found it to be truthful in that manner through further digging too.
The fact that so much has been verified means there's a good chance that new content is also valid.
They have credibility because so much of it has been verified. Of course, faking so much material takes some doing as well, if it was really all faked the guy would have to be a fucking god like genius anyway, and as there's so much content you'd need multiple people involved, and with multiple people there's a likelihood of someone admitting it's faked.
So there you have it, the reason they have credibility is because the information thus far has mostly been verifiably credible.
I can only guess you haven't been following the whole story very well, as there's a few good reasons your point doesn't make sense amongst other things.
"A terrible rape allegation that doesn't even stick for a day? Please. With billions of dollars of resources they could manufacture a significantly better, more serious charge with evidence that was hard to refute."
At short notice? Without the cooperation of Swedish intelligence and counter-intelligence if they weren't willing to help the US? Despite all the possible variables, such top prosecutor understanding the situation? You have far too much confidence in the ability of US intelligence. Russia still has one of the best and most capable spy networks in the world, and yet look at the amateur mistakes their spies who were caught recently made. That's assuming the US would even want such charges to stick, association is damaging enough nowadays.
"Personally, if I were in the government and wanted to put a stop to Wikileaks I wouldn't bother with that though. You'd simply find Assange in an ally with a bullet in the back of his head."
You see, this is just it. People like you do work in intelligence, and yet, if you did that then Wikileaks would release the key to the insurance file on the Wikileaks websites which, depending on what's in it, could be more damaging to the US government than anything that's been leaked before. No, killing Assange is a sure fire way to make things worse- not only would there be the issues of people blaming the US government for murder of a civilian, but there'd be the remaining leaked documents as well, including release of the insurance file.
"The "problem" with Wikileaks is that it doesn't need credibility, making some attempt to character-assassinate Assange on the worthless side."
No, it's not. Whilst many people might see through such a character assassination, it's winning the hearts and minds of the voters- the middle American mums, the same ones who fall hook line and sinker for Sarah Palin's "Hockey mom" charade. If they can convince a sizeable portion of the public to say "Oh, Wikileaks? that's the site run by a rapist, why should I believe that". What if they do it again in 6 months? how many people will then think "Hmm, that's a bit suspicious, he's been accused before..."?
The fact is, if they can defame Assange, and if they can continue to tie Wikileaks to a rapist, then they've severely dented it's credibility, such that the US government can actually start calling content their fake, and having such middle American moms and so forth believe it, and believe that their government is doing fine and doesn't need to make any amendments or increase competence to avoid future mistakes.
But what about the insurance file? Well, it's too big a thing for them to release over mere rape charges against one person, they'll hold that until lives are at risk, but as I say what if they keep chipping away with these attempts at character assassination? Do they release the insurance file and risk having no cards to play should they attempt to murder or attack Assange and friends? What happens when things get bad enough to release the file, do they still even have the credibility for people to believe the contents of it aren't faked?
So you see, the issue is that the US can't do anything drastic like you're suggesting such as extraordinary rendition, incarceration, murder, because it risks the leak of the insurance file. All they can do are smaller things, but things which chip away at the credibility of the site amongst a large portion of the voting population. It's not like we don't have countless examples of this type of opinion being formed of people based on lack of case and mere accusation. For example, to his death many people saw Michael Jackson as a paedophile, yet he was never convicted of any such thing, and this is precisely what is likely happening to Assange.
This is precisely the sort of thing the US government can do and get away with without fear of any meaningful reprisal from Wikileaks.
It'd be amusing if Assange just played them at their own game and just release some faked documents in a few months purporting to show documentation of a CIA operation to push false rape allegations against him. Who are the public going to mostly believe? the US government nowadays, or Assange?
In a way it's scary that Assange has this power, but still, amusing to see the US government and all the money it puts into intelligence, espionage and so forth beaten, and capable of being beaten by a bunch of guys who run a website.
The only way the US government can win is to simply do the right thing, smarten up their act, accept where they have done wrong and seek to improve the situation. If they keep trying to attack Wikileaks and keep doing the same things wrong they'll only lose more and more credibility, which makes it even harder for them to be taken seriously when someone else stands up against them, be it someone who doesn't hate the US like Assange, or someone that does like President Ahmadinejad. The only way to restore credibility, is to start to be credible, and if they don't do that, they're going to continue to find it ever harder to be the centrepiece of international negotiations and in fact, to be taken seriously at all when it comes to international disputes.
No I'm not, less proof != no proof. You still need to provide some evidence in a civil trial for your case, and if it's your word against theirs then you have fuck all chance.
Only if they're sure they can win them. No one takes on the cases whereby the evidence is merely someone's say so - even if that person is telling the truth. Groups like the ACLU and a career boosting DA or lawyer will only take it on if they're sure they can win, else it's not going to help them and might both cost them and be detrimental to their career.
I don't know the guys circumstances, maybe he does have evidence, but let's be honest, if a cop is smart about it they can basically get someone in shit and there be very little recourse.
But isn't that just the irony? What chance does the word of a convicted felon have against a fine upstanding member of society like a Sheriff?
"I wonder if there's some easy way to trigger an algorithm in the ant's brain that homes them to the right spot?"
Yes, just leave a pheromone trail to where you want it to go.
Ants aren't thinking creatures, they're just composed of relatively simple mechanisms that work towards fulfilling the goals of their drives.
I agree that's likely, or even employees stealing code that they simply think is obvious and might be useful for home projects copying it with a completely innocent mindset. I'm just suprised at the customer data figures more than anything!
"Neither of those pronunciations of "albinism" is correct. It's al-buh-niz-uhm."
Where? That's certainly not the correct pronunciation in modern British English, but that's really the point- different cultures have different accepted pronunciations.
"There are certainly correct pronunciations of "Syracuse" and "Osaka" -- ask people who live there."
Of course, but I was just saying that they're so uncommonly used that I'd have no idea personally how the BBC pronounce them and whether that pronunciation is correct. Even if they do pronounce them incorrectly it's a little easier to excuse incorrect pronunciations of such uncommonly used words anyway than it is more commonly used words and phrases. They're words a reporter may only encounter once or twice in their career anyway rather than something they may repeat over and over incorrectly.
That proportion seems a little high for say, IT workers, who'd probably have little use for customer data outside the job they're in, but I could imagine sales staff however being more likely to do such a thing because having a good network of contacts can be a major benefit when moving into other jobs as a salesman- especially if you're on performance related pay and need to hit sales targets, there is quite high financial motive there for it.
Also from another point of view, it's possibly a good indicator of job satifcation, if staff are pissed off at work then they're going to have less loyalty to the company which will in turn leave them less worried about feeling guilty for doing that sort of thing. In many cases, companies probably bear some responsibility in creating this mindset by treating, or allowing their staff to be treated like shit and making them want to get the fuck out of the company and with a vengeance too.
It's not just that, since version 3 inclusive Firefox has just got ever slower, ever more buggy and less stable with each release.
If Firefox 4 continues this trend and does not reverse it then it will be the last version of FireFox I use.
Mozilla seems to be a long way away from where they were when they were running campaign after campaign to get people to switch to their browser from IE some years ago, because they really did have a better browser and were simply fighting against the inherent advantage IE had being distributed with Windows. They don't really have that upperhand now, I don't find Firefox any faster and in fact find it less stable than IE7 and IE8 which is a sad place to be.
The only reason I haven't switch to Chrome is because I don't actually like it's minimalist UI, it's just too minimalist for my liking.
I really hope Mozilla get it right this time and that the browser really is faster and more stable, and that they've concentrated on getting those basics back to an acceptable standard rather than screwing around with crap like themes which make your browser look like some god awful 1990s AOL homepage or some "l33t" kid's first ever project in Visual Basic.
My girlfriend is a Canadian living in the UK and we go back over to see her family and friends quite frequently, so I know what you mean about appreciation of accents, I often get asked to say things when I'm over there which leave them in fits of giggles. Similarly though, I regularly like making my girlfriend say things which she pronounces funny, generally words involving the letters "out" or "old" amuse me the most with that accent.
In the UK we use the term "fag" to refer to cigarette too, so it's commonly used for that purpose rather than just as a derogatory term for homosexuals. I got a rather funny look when I was in California once and when asking where someone was said "Oh, has he gone outside to smoke a fag?". Obviously in the UK such a sentence is quite harmless, but they seemed under the impression I was querying whether he'd gone to shoot a gay person or something, I think they thought I was part of some neo-nazi organisation for a moment. Fortunately this was at our California office and not in front of a client or anything, although when with clients I try and avoid even British slang like that and stick to proper English anyway.
Are you from the UK? Some of your suggestions are just plain weird, no one in the UK says "Al-bine-izm" or "drunk driving". "BBC Sport" is a name so I fail to see what's invalid about that.
The BBC just pronounces things the way their primary audience (i.e. the British public that funds them) speak and expect them to speak. They seem to be using the standard accepted pronunciation that everyone else here in the UK uses.
I've never heard them say Osaka or Syracuse as they're not words that come up for any reason, but I suspect that's a clue to the fact that you're perhaps not British? If that's the case, then there's the reason you seem to think their pronunciations are abuse of language, rather than the standard accepted pronunciations of British English speaking people.
I guess it's like how in the UK we generally call Mathematics "maths" rather than "math", and pronounce "route" closer to "root", rather than the common North American pronunciation of "rowt".
The BBC is just using the pronunciation native to their staff, and that their primary audience- the ones who pay for their existence, the British license payer, would expect.
What are you on about, you seriously believe the combined iPad/iPhone/iPod touch market is bigger and spends more money than the Windows/Xbox market? Seriously?
Well, sorry to break your dream with reality, but here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_simple.svg
As you can see, it totals a little over 51 million units. Do you really believe though, that the 6 million iPhone and 12 million iPhone 3G are still all active and none have been replaced with newer models? It's not unrealistic to think that because there's a 2 - 3 year gap between the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 that people have replaced those handsets when renewing their contract, and some people have even replaced the 3GS with the iPhone 4 just because they want to have the latest device so 30mill - 40mill active devices is a realistic figure. Note that the figures above are directly from Apple's press releases too, so unless you think Apple is also lying about it's sales figures then well, there you have it.
In contrast, there are well over 1 billion Windows PCs in the world, and over 40 million XBox 360s. Many of those Windows PCs are business systems but still hundreds of millions aren't- with the population of North American being around 340mill and the population of Europe being 800mill and a large portion of these populations having a home PC running Windows then there's a massive home market in the west alone, but even if you give the benefit of the doubt and cut the potential PC market down to 1/10th or 1/20th then the current XNA market still dwarfs Apple's platforms.
So you can complain all you want that you don't like the figures, but it doesn't really matter, there they are. The fact is, even the active XBox 360 market is quite possibly as large as the active iOS market before you even consider Windows PCs and Windows phone when it comes out.
True, I guess WinForms usage is still pretty high compared to WPF so there's that consideration too which requires a bit more work in terms of porting as you say.
"I say its poor because it is poor. There are a dozen high end Android handsets and more by the day. Games might work fine with one handset and be completely bugged on another. This happened recently with a bunch of Gameloft titles that worked on the Motorola Droid but crapped out on the HTC Desire and other phones. The reason was the underlying chipset - PowerVR vs Snapdragon as well as other differences between the platforms."
That's fair enough, I wasn't aware of such issues, however this really goes back to my point that catering to hardware differences is something you have to do on the PC for example, so it's not an unsurmountable problem that devs haven't been dealing with for decades already, it just means it's more of a problem than with XNA, and the more the iPhone diverges the more it'll be a problem there also. I'd partly blame the devs for this rather than Android per-se as it sounds like a lack of testing on their behalf as much as a platform issue. I agree that in the modern world we shouldn't have to deal with this kind of shit but then look at graphics programming on Windows, say you want to build a toolchain for a game that you wish to release on XNA platforms and wish to follow best practices by keeping your language the same then you run into problems. You can't use XNA for 3D on Windows if you need any level of flexibility in your tools because the content pipeline is useless for runtime loading of most types of dynamic content, so you really have to use C++ and Direct3D or OpenGL, there are libraries like SlimDX but it's a little behind the curve and has hopeless support and documentation. If you want 2D tools too then you can stay with C# and use WPF, or GDI+, but GDI+ will likely be too slow, but that's yet another framework, you can use C++ and Direct2D for this instead if you want but you're still building your game in C# and XNA. So even with the ease of use for XNA for game development there can be major headaches that make it difficult to share your code across your game and toolset. So again I wouldn't say it's really that Android is shit for gaming, it's just that the development tools requires developers put a little work in than would be ideal in some circumstances, but as I point out here, even XNA which is probably the best out the lot can cause headaches in some situations.
I agree a unified gaming system would be nice and in fact in an ideal world I'd like to see it go a step further- I'd like a unified gaming system that works across all platforms, however I think that's probably too much to hope for, and probably too tricky to implement in reality due to the percent chance of getting the relevant companies working together on such a thing being pretty close to zero. Implementing a high score service is fairly trivial because you can just setup a web service to do that in no time at all of course, but as you say switching to a unified gaming platform would be nice if done properly. There have been rumours about Google going into games, but whether that comes into fruition we'll see I guess.
I'd imagine Microsoft are also factoring in the point that 3rd party developers will often fill in missing features such as a YouTube client with apps in no time at all until a 1st party solution is in place anyway.
As an aside, why do you say there's no doubt that Android is poor for gaming? The hardware is generally more than upto it, it has a full OpenGL ES implementation and you have the NDK if you really want raw performance. I suppose it's not as easy as developing for XNA of course that's true, but other than that what's the big problem? It seems no worse a platform for running games than the iPhone or any potential Windows 7 phones, and no harder to develop games for than Windows, Linux, iOS and Mac OS. It's only real problem so far as far as I can see is simply that it's been neglected as a gaming platform and doesn't have too many games released for it, but I'd say this is the same for apps too and is simply a result of its much smaller userbase than say the iPhone. This is something that does seem to be changing though, Angry Birds for example is being developed for Android now and is due for release shortly.
"Well, if you've been lucky enough for Microsoft to approach you and offer these "inducements" I've heard about"
You keep mentioning this but do you have any evidence of it or are you simply making it up? If you don't have any evidence for it then your point is useless "I've heard about" is not evidence, it's someone spreading rumours.
"On the other hand, there are coming close to 500,000 released apps for the iPhone, a literally staggering amount of apps. Probably more apps than exist for Windows, although that's just speculation."
Did you really just say that?
Importantly, this is a negative, it means people have to find your app amongst those half a million others dependent entirely on Apple's interface with little ability yourself to control how much visibility it gets on that marketplace.
"But if you hit it big, you're in there. No such thing exists on WP7 yet since it's not even shipped. So where's the inducement to go WP7 instead of iPhone? Aside from Microsoft bribing you with a large wad of upfront?"
The fact that if you develop for XNA then you've written a game that can run on XBox 360, Windows, Windows Phone 7. In other words, writing for Windows phone 7 is simple because it uses the same tools and codebase as for Microsoft's other platforms. This means you can target hundreds of millions of devices out there with one codebase. In contrast with the iPhone, it's sold around 50 - 60 mill units to date, however many of those are replacements for previous generations so the actual market size is probably more in the 30mill - 40mill range. That's a much smaller market.
Or to cut a long story short, even if Windows Phone 7 doesn't take off, developing for XNA alone means you automatically are developing for a market that dwarfs that of every other mobile operating system out there.
Of course, there's also the point that there are countless XBLIG and .NET apps that already exist which can be moved directly to, or with minor porting to Windows 7 Phone from the outset. That is, the cost for existing XNA developers to produce for this additional platform is next to nothing, but the potential market is large.
For those who don't know, Halo Waypoint is basically just a front end for the Halo series of games that lets you view all your achievements for the series and one or two bits of Halo news. It's not a game in itself, so calling it a "title" is probably giving it a bit too much credit, because it's largely dull and pointless.
Yes, the title of this post was meant in a sarcastic tone
On a different note though, I think XBox Live integration actually has the potential to be a killer feature for Windows 7- if Windows 7 phones are going to succede on anything it'll probably be this. It effectively means it's a gamer oriented phone and if it links into XBox live then there's a potential to harness the 27 million (or however many XBox Live has now) achievements whores and allow them to continue their achievement addiction even when they're not at their XBox.
I think Microsoft actually has a good vision in terms of XBox Live everywhere by linking XBox Live with Windows Games and mobile games, especially as it all integrates with MSN messenger and partially with Facebook too. Of course, the real test will be in the execution- having the right vision is only the start of it, pulling it off through Microsoft's layers upon layers of bureaucracy will be the real challenge.
It's easy to blame console gaming, yet console gaming continues to produce better looking graphics with existing hardware well beyond the life of equivalent PC gaming hardware. This is largely because the entire hardware pipeline in consoles is focussed towards gaming, whilst the PC isn't- it's more generic hardware bus just isn't as suited to gaming, hence why lower spec consoles can still produce better graphics and better framerates than equivalent and higher specced PCs (within reason of course).
The fault isn't console gaming, the fault is of the companies pushing ever more powerful graphics cards, whilst developers on the PC just outright fail to make use of the last generation- and for good reason. The issue is that the PC is such a fragmented platform and suffers from such high piracy rates that developers on the PC are better off spending their time making sure their game works for as wide an audience as possible, which means far less focus and optimisation on high end graphics.
The fact is, the high end PC graphics card market was always going to be unsustainable, because it's simply a niche market in an era where developer focus is more and more turned away from that market due to decreased profit from that segment.
It's not really anything to do with console gaming. The fact is, it's hard for companies like BFG to stay afloat when their target market is declining on the realisation that they don't need the latest and greatest graphics card coupled with the fact the world financial situation is still shakey and if consumers don't need to spend money right now, then they wont. When you build a company for a niche market that exists based purely on testosterone fuelled competitiveness of who can get the highest FPS then it's no suprise that when money is tight things start to decline somewhat.
As an illutration of my point, my current PC has now just hit 2 years old and I can still play the latest games like Starcraft II in maximum detail at 1920x1200. This would be unheard of a decade or so ago, where even 1 year old PCs would struggle to run the latest games at high detail, or in a decent resolution. The fact is, the PC market is changing and there's not much of a place for overclocked SLI graphics cards in that nowadays- the rise of playable, rather than graphics fuelled indie games over the last few years is also another reason why people no longer need to pay for ultra-expensive high end graphics cards now. The focus has moved back somewhat towards playability and fun for the masses rather than just stunning graphics for the elite on the PC.
Can I join in with your sentiment, and just say, WTF?
It's like Slashdot has just discovered early 1990s AI research and confused it with modern news. ACO has been around for so long now that it's a standard tool in the toolbox of the developer who has a basic grounding in AI along with genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimisation. As the AC says, it's already been used in routing protocols.
Why is Slashdot reporting this? What is the story meant to be here exactly? Even TFA just seems to be a very very brief history of this technique following a mention of it.
Still, if anyone finds it interesting then may I suggest you also look at the above mentioned techniques too- genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, neural networks and so forth? None of this is new by a long shot, but it's all part of the larger field of AI, and specifically they all focus on the core principle of achieving order through emergence and self-organisation. In fact, if you really want to delve into it then learning all about emergence and emergent processes is in itself worthwhile.
I should note that ants are one of many species that exhibit this kind of behaviour- bee colonies work in much the same way for example in producing hives and such.
But again, I know Slashdot is slow when it comes to posting news, but being about 15 years give or take a few late- that's a new record even for Slashdot right?
Innovation in bullshit legal arguments and other methods for lawyers involved in these sorts of cases to sponge more cash off of the productive and useful sections of society you mean?