But that's somewhat my point, you stress that he lost his lifelong job- why should anyone expect to have a lifelong job if their job becomes obsolete? Why should everyone else be expected to subsidise these industries just because these people have an expectation of a lifelong job without ever having to reskill or retrain?
Certainly part of the disagreement is a generation thing, people nowadays on average apparently change career 4 times in their working life but I still can't help but feel it's naive to expect you can just sail through life doing the same thing without ever having to put any effort in keeping your skills relevant.
I also don't see the issue with destroying our manufacturing base when there's absolutely no way our workforce could compete with Eastern countries in this area (Singapore, Taiwan at the time, nowadays India, mainland China) in what was and still is and increasingly global economy. Again, should other people work hard and pay to subsidise an industry that's no longer profitable or irrelevant just because the people in that industry don't feel they should have to adapt and keep their skills uptodate?
Ironically, I live on the Wakefield/Barnsley border so I know the communities all to well that were hit hardest and meet many people who were there at the time and as you say, I shouldn't generalise because there are two classes of these people- there are those who never bothered to retrain who are sat living off handouts to this day and there are those who got past it who did bother to retrain and are now working in other areas.
Perhaps the only mistake Thatcher made in this situation was not making more effort to help these people retrain but again, if you were laid off today because the industry you work in became irrelevant you have to ask, would anyone help you retrain? Would you expect everyone else to pay for you to keep your job? The same problem exists in France with it's heavily subsidised farming industry and it really hurts their economic potential.
Thatcher also wanted to see fibre cable rolled out across the UK back in the 80s but was never given chance also.
Had she been allowed to push this through, the UK would've been a global leader in terms of broadband running alongside Sweden, South Korea and Japan in that area.
The decisions they made were really forward thinking and exactly the decisions needed to take the country forward, the downside is they also involved a lot of pain for many people, hence the reason she was overthrown. Sadly, these people are the people that somewhat deserve the pain- we're talking about people who believe the world owes them a job without them ever having to look for one, without ever having to change jobs, without ever having to retrain. These are exactly the type of people that have eaten away at the UK for over a decade now and are the people who overspend and have got us into such a financial mess.
But the Labour government still doesn't see this, they think no one is at fault, so they try and increase money available for loans, they try and reduce VAT to make people spend even more.
It's sad, because good politicians force people who aren't willing to play fair to play fair and that ultimately leads to their undoing whilst bad politicians protect the incompetent to keep their votes up or simply because they are themselves equally incompetent.
I'm not a Conservative by the way, nor would I ever vote Conservative or Labour. I'd just rather see people take responsibility for their lives somewhat and this is what Thatcher tried to make people do improving the country as a result whilst Labour has done the opposite, destroying the country as a result.
Apple is a small player in the phone market, Symbian has hundreds of millions more users out there on it's platform, Microsoft has tens of millions more on their Windows mobile platform.
I have to agree, C&C is my favourite RTS of all time. Nothing has ever really come close, I don't think you can pinpoint one thing that made that game stand out it was everything, from the effects of the napalming A10s and the obelisks of light to the pleasing explosions of grenadiers to awesomeness of getting your first mammoth tanks.
I think it was immersive, more so than most games of it's era- the music and video as you saw managed to draw you into the rythm of the game really effectively, the missions were fun, the units were superb.
It's just a shame no Command and Conquer series game since has come close bar the original Red Alert, which whilst not as good was still excellent. I suppose Generals deserves a worthy mention- it was pretty decent as an RTS, it just wasn't really in line with the rest of the C&C games storywise.
I recently got Red Alert 3, what an utter dissapointment- how can a franchise created with much lower budgets, much older technology end up looking and playing so horrifically bad with units that are outright comical.
From what I can see the C&C franchise has made one major mistake- they've gone too futuristic, C&C and Red Alert certainly had fantasy/futuristic units but they weren't the majority. I think it was the A10s, the M113s, the Abrams and so forth on C&C that made it, similarly with Red Alert, there was a lot of fairly real units in there. This is possibly also why Generals was the only modern C&C game to not be too bad.
God only knows why in Red Alert 3 everything is make believe and looks so childish and cartoonish it seems better suited to a kids TV show like Jimbo and the Jet set for anyone that remembers that show in the UK. For those that don't, check here or on YouTube:
Outside of the C&C series, Warcraft games have always been good and I thought Warcraft 3's storyline at the time was pretty impressive. Blizzard at least know how to continue a franchise and keep it consistently good unlike EA/Westwood with C&C games.
You jest, but I learnt C when I was 12 and was doing a little assembly by 14 and I was never classed as one of these "gifted" pupils, far from it.
If they really are gifted then they should be capable of picking up even the hard languages if I could and was't "gifted" so I'm not sure you even need to do much research on what language to teach- anything mainstream should do fine.
I think this stems from the often repeated idea that to a good programmer, language is irrelevant and at this age or even regardless of age- at this point in their programming studies they aint gonna be good progammers. I think anyone can learn to program but not so many can become good programmers- that takes real talent and real experience.
So forget about OOP, good design practices, testing and all that, just pick a language whether it's Pascal, C, C#, PHP or whatever and get stuck in with some simple programs and work your way up. Let whoever is teaching them how to become real programmers (the type that know what language/library/framework/development paradigm to use and when) worry about whether they should be teaching them about design patterns, about paradigms, language concepts in a year or two.
The key right now is to not bore them with the comp sci. and software engineering stuff, it's far less interesting at that age than it will be to them in a few years when they're ready to learn it for real. The best you should be doing right now is giving them a taster of how programming works- i.e. you write code using variables, conditional statements, functions and so on and get a specific output. It's upto them then whether they enjoy it enough to continue on to learn the real stuff. More to the point, at this age if they really enjoy it and are inquisitive they'll go and learn more themselves- that's what I did and how I became skilled enough to become a professional developer before even starting my degree.
At least in the UK, salaries for graduate programmers are pretty decent.
The real issue is that advancement up the payscale as they get experience and get better and the top level payscales are too few or too low to maintain a good pool of really good programmers.
To suggest developers should get paid more straight out of uni is, imo, a joke, more than £23k a year when they're effectively still being trained at this point? I don't think so. After a couple of years or so I do think they should've had chance to move off that payscale though and that's where the problem seems to lie. The issue we have is graduates gaining experience and then not being able to go anywhere and hence become discontent and leaving the field.
Graduates in recent years absolutely do not leave university with the skills to go straight onto decent payscales that good programmers deserve unless they have heavily augmented their education with personal projects or contribution to open source projects and so forth.
Just keep in mind, regardless of all the doom and gloom reports, the Games industry is still posting new record profits year on year, so it's obviously not that big a problem.
What they really mean is they want to make even more profit and rather than produce games that are of better quality and/or appeal to wider audiences they want to keep shifting the same old crap but make more from it.
Make no mistake, the whole Spore DRM debacle had nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with preventing second hand sales. The games industry has set it's sights on the second hand market as a way to increase profits without increasing effort, I do not think it will win, but accept consumers to have to listen to whines from the industry and take it from behind on DRM and stuff for a little while yet.
...that an internet organisation that's been around since 1996 would understand the internet and would've realised the storm that censoring Wikipedia would cause and the resultant effect.
But frankly, to me there's a more important issue here- the IWF has accepted they're wrong which raises the question as to whether procedures need to be put in place to prevent mistakes happening again. The IWF is in a position of immense power and failures to perform their duties correctly need to have repercussions.
There have been various conspiracy theories as to whether the IWF was testing the water in light of Britain's new extreme porn law which makes BDSM and such illegal and hence whether the IWF was seeing what the response would be if they were to start filtering this out- particularly as scenes that could be deemed to be extreme porn exist in many common and publicly accesible places. To filter extreme porn as they do child porn they'd most certainly have to go after a lot more mainstream sites, it would no longer be a case of simply filtering out underground sites that only a small minority of people who are already classed as criminals visit.
Whatever the real aim of this was, whether it was simply a blunder or not, I hope for one thing- that the IWF now ensure they concentrate on what they're supposed to concentrate on, helping prevent child abuse and access to sites that really do gain money and so forth from such abuse and also that this has put to sleep any ideas of a power grab or increase in censorship to other, arguably harmless areas for the IWF.
I don't really understand how translating from speech into text is equal to translating from speech to text in a different language.
I could listen to every word you say and write it down no problem, but ask me to translate it into Japanese or something and I wouldn't have a clue.
You only have to look at games like Endwar to see how good speech recognition has gotten, it requires no calibration (well, maybe a word or two at the start) and has yet to fail me once and it seems to work for people with many different accents.
That said, Endwar does use specific commands so I suppose it could be a somewhat simplified scenario in that if the command words are selected sensibly there is no overlap in commands sounding nearly similar, but regardless even much of the voice reconigtion software for dictating documents etc. out there now does a great job with little to no training now.
In the grand scheme of things isn't that like someone being about 1 minute overdue for a party?
Big numbers sound scary when used in such a context but I'm not sure the reality is quite so scary when it could very well be 10s of millions more years before we really probably do need to start worrying why it's not here yet.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know how accurate these things are with keeping their dates, but it just doesn't sound like a big deal if something is only 250,000 years overdue when we're talking on a universal scale.
Will be interesting to see if ISPs are willing to pull out or not, blocking the entire page including text and causing problems for British Wikipedia editors is clearly a case of overstepping the mark.
If opening up yourself to legal action when someone downloads illegal material by refusing to implement it is voluntary then that's a fair point but that's not really my definition of voluntary.
The IWF was created in response to the police wanting to launch a case against ISPs for holding illegal material on newsgroups, if an ISP therefore refuses to implement it they will put themselves in the line of fire of this legal action that they have been safe from for almost a decade due to the police accepting the IWF as a suitable option for dealing with the issue.
Seeing as ISPs wont even point out to the courts that the proof against file sharers isn't enough to demonstrate any specific individual comitted any offence and instead just roll over and let the music and games industry walk all over people's privacy in that regard then I have a lot less faith in them doing the right thing than you. Coupled with the phorm trials and interest by some ISPs as well as the disgustingly over the top, unfair bandwidth caps and entirely unethical "unlimited" broadband advertising I'd in fact say that whilst ISPs may grunt a little about such an event, they'd ultimately just say "take it up with the IWF or the government" and sit enjoying the fact they weren't having to use up bandwidth for the blocked sites whilst simultaneously maintaining subscriber levels as hardly anyone would give up the internet over it.
Yes because despite all that, Chinese dissidents are still successfully getting the information they want in and out of China via the internet.
I understand that not every Chinese person can but the quote isn't necessarily referring to the individual but the populace as a whole and if even one or two dissidents can get their message out where it's spread further or can get information in where they can spread it further then their task is complete and the quote is valid. This is the case and hence the quote is indeed therefore valid.
Britain has been doing steps 1 and 2 for years via the IWF.
Of course, we don't know if they've been doing 3 (realistically not, I'm sure parties would've complained if they had!) but we know Jacqui Smith is trying her damn hardest to take us to 5!
I really did, I tried so hard to think up an insightful comment in response to this story but all that I could do was sit giggling to myself at how upset Jacqui Smith is over this and how she aint gonna sleep well tonight.
For those that don't know, Jacqui Smith has been involved in or is responsible for: - UK ID card scheme where every citizen has a biometric ID card - A national database of every single child's details - 42 days of detention without trial for terror suspects - This very DNA database of even innocent people - Plans for a scheme to store all telephone call, text message and e-mail records - Massive nationwide CCTV surveillance programs - Silencing of political opponents by using heavy police force - Allowing local councils to use terrorist laws to spy on citizens to catch them for such offences as trying to get their kids into a specific school outside their catchment area or letting their dog foul in a public place - Creating a scheme for newspapers to put up wanted posters from CCTV images of people dropping litter
There are plenty more but simply too many for me to remember all of them right now. This woman is evil and must be stopped, period. We can't put the blame on just her however because people like Gordon Brown have the power to stop her but aren't and opposition parties could be far, far more vocal about how evil this woman actually is and yet they're not.
I'm pretty sure the lives of our grandparents here in the UK and the rest of the world weren't given on the beaches of Normandy, the fields of France and other places so that it would eventually be our own government that would rise up against us and begin to enforce the same level of dictatorship as seen in the many facist nations during World War II. The very fact Jacqui Smith is pushing for this kind of regime should make it the responsibility of everyone with the power to make a noise- politicians, media and so forth to stand up and refuse to accept this. It is the complacency and ignorance amongst the average joe on the street towards this type of thing that makes me understand now how over time evil totalitarian regimes can arise.
I do not believe Britain will every reach the point Jacqui Smith is hoping thanks to the EU injecting at least a little bit of common sense into the situation as per this article but the very fact that she has been allowed to get this far is simply unacceptable in a modern, free society.
I can't help but think you could make a game of this.
Announce something to get the government's back up, wait until they've done loads and loads of preparation then rip their opportunity from under them just before they get chance.
The only downside is it's a waste of tax payers cash, not that most public sector jobs aren't a waste of tax payers cash anyway though.
You probably wont hear many people talk about patterns. It's rare that a programmer says "Oh we need a factory pattern for this", they'll usually just go ahead and implement using a factory pattern because that's what design patterns are about- the fact that many parts of programs actually follow a small set of patterns to get jobs done and these patterns show their head over and over.
If you have been doing a decent amount of OO programming then you probably have been using some of the common patterns without ever even realising it. This could explain why you've missed the term because it's just so common no one really talks about it, they just do it although if you're involved in application architecture at the higher level- putting together UML diagrams and so forth you are more likely to come across these terms.
Templates in the context of this article just refer to the idea of website templates, i.e. the basic layout of the site or site components where the content is filled in by different parts of the application (i.e. different layers such as the controller fed by the model). Of course, the idea extends beyond the web, normal applications can use UI templates for example or even the more obvious document templates but I don't imagine you do much UI or web stuff if you're using C and assembly mostly? Presumably if you use those languages it's lower level, perhaps embedded stuff you do?
With regards to the whole resident evil 5 thing I don't understand why it's okay for game developers to bring violence to the streets of New York, to bring violence between nations that are nowadays allies, to bring violence against even civilians or to kill arabs because that's now (rather ignorantly) seen as a fair game terrorist stereotype to some....But it's not okay to bring violence to one of the most violent places on Earth - Africa. I can't help but wonder if the reason people make a fuss about that is because they don't want to accept the reality there, that they'd rather ignore it and pretend everything is okay there, god forbid the idea that anyone ever have to carry a gun in Africa.
Most of these concepts are over a decade old, so I'm not sure where you've been but it suggests you've not really learnt anything new in that last 10 years. You could be forgiven over templates as they're something you could get by without ever needing to know if you right software that doesn't need them but patterns? you've never heard of design patterns?
I'd recommend getting some software development education as it sounds like whilst you may know how to program, you don't know even the basics of software engineering. For information what patterns are, see here:
I understand that if you've used only C and assembly and have barely touched C++ you probably don't even really have an understanding of OOP (object oriented programming) which is probably part the problem, this would be a good starting point- learn a language where OOP is enforced, Java perhaps?
I find this is more of a problem in web development than in classic application development. The problem stems from the fact that anyone can do HTML and many web "developers" have moved from that to languages like PHP that don't teach or enforce good use of OOP, type safety and other important concepts. It's not bad that PHP doesn't do that in itself, because it's still a good language for knowledgable, sensible programmers but that's not a large part of it's userbase unfortunately.
The problem is demonstrated strongly with the likes of HTML5, this goes against everything good that has been done in XHTML to push separation of concerns because doing so is important for an accessible, consistent, well built web. I don't agree entirely with some of the design decision of the newer releases of XHTML- phasing out tables seems to be one of the worst ideas but it's still a whole lot better than mixing up content, presentation and so on into one big single mess.
The two sides are basically this, if we allow lazier development we end up with a much less accessible, much less portable web but we get more content because anyone can publish even if what they publish is badly developed. The alternative is we push for much stricter web development that requires a lot more skill and discipline to do properly and results in a much more portable, accessible web but has the downside of less people publishing because some wont want to make the effort.
It's a hard choice for sure, personally I'm on the side of forcing people to do it properly if they want to do it at all, but I do understand that may isolate people who do benefit the web with useful (albeit poorly implemented) sites and content.
They only harm themselves too. I find most PHP frameworks are much more difficult to learn than they really should be simply because they muddy the waters so much with regards to what is in and where each of the components of MVC sits in their particular implementation.
The summary takes the decision somewhat out of context.
They're not planning to remotely connect to any old joes computer they can and search it, they're planning to connect to zombie computers that have been hijacked by criminals to try and trace back where the criminals are coming from.
Apparently, there will be strict rules on what they can do on said machine too, that is, they're not allowed to start rummaging through people's personal data. Don't think I'm naive by saying that- I'm just repeating what I read on the issue, I don't believe for a minute those rules will be enforceable and I truly think as soon as they have access to these machines and their boss aint looking they're going to start rummaging like crazy.
I'm not sure how I feel about the general idea, if a machine has a backdoor and they can manage to connect to it also then in a way I feel they should just temporarily patch it for the user and inform the user at absolute worse although I'm not sure this is ideal- what if they patch some security researcher's honey pot for instance!
It certainly concerned me a bit when I read it but it's certainly not a plan to just use 0-day exploits to connect to everyone and anyone's PC or anything.
I was fortunate enough to work on quite a few good mods through the years but it was the politics that put me off in the end.
There's a lot of time wasters out there and you find yourself spending a lot of time dealing with them. As your mod picks up pace you can start to get some good people on board and not deal with this but getting their is tough. When you do get there you still have the issue of people having differing visions and sometimes showing their true colours when they don't get their own way and stuff like that.
This is why I have to have a lot of respect for people behind projects like this here because I know all too well what the hazards are in getting this far. Building a mature team that's willing to accept a single person in charge of the actual vision of the mod/game whilst having someone capable of carrying that vision through in a solid manner and not pandering to personal nags or people on the team simply not adhering to that vision is easily as hard as actually producing the game assets and code- particular in a distributed environment like many mod teams across the internet.
The alternative is to go it alone and build code based mods- presumably this is how Garry's mod started, I don't know if that's still that way if it ever was but his mod is about the only HL2 mod I tried and even then only shortly after it's early releases but it was pretty fun to play around with.
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But that's somewhat my point, you stress that he lost his lifelong job- why should anyone expect to have a lifelong job if their job becomes obsolete? Why should everyone else be expected to subsidise these industries just because these people have an expectation of a lifelong job without ever having to reskill or retrain?
Certainly part of the disagreement is a generation thing, people nowadays on average apparently change career 4 times in their working life but I still can't help but feel it's naive to expect you can just sail through life doing the same thing without ever having to put any effort in keeping your skills relevant.
I also don't see the issue with destroying our manufacturing base when there's absolutely no way our workforce could compete with Eastern countries in this area (Singapore, Taiwan at the time, nowadays India, mainland China) in what was and still is and increasingly global economy. Again, should other people work hard and pay to subsidise an industry that's no longer profitable or irrelevant just because the people in that industry don't feel they should have to adapt and keep their skills uptodate?
Ironically, I live on the Wakefield/Barnsley border so I know the communities all to well that were hit hardest and meet many people who were there at the time and as you say, I shouldn't generalise because there are two classes of these people- there are those who never bothered to retrain who are sat living off handouts to this day and there are those who got past it who did bother to retrain and are now working in other areas.
Perhaps the only mistake Thatcher made in this situation was not making more effort to help these people retrain but again, if you were laid off today because the industry you work in became irrelevant you have to ask, would anyone help you retrain? Would you expect everyone else to pay for you to keep your job? The same problem exists in France with it's heavily subsidised farming industry and it really hurts their economic potential.
Thatcher also wanted to see fibre cable rolled out across the UK back in the 80s but was never given chance also.
Had she been allowed to push this through, the UK would've been a global leader in terms of broadband running alongside Sweden, South Korea and Japan in that area.
The decisions they made were really forward thinking and exactly the decisions needed to take the country forward, the downside is they also involved a lot of pain for many people, hence the reason she was overthrown. Sadly, these people are the people that somewhat deserve the pain- we're talking about people who believe the world owes them a job without them ever having to look for one, without ever having to change jobs, without ever having to retrain. These are exactly the type of people that have eaten away at the UK for over a decade now and are the people who overspend and have got us into such a financial mess.
But the Labour government still doesn't see this, they think no one is at fault, so they try and increase money available for loans, they try and reduce VAT to make people spend even more.
It's sad, because good politicians force people who aren't willing to play fair to play fair and that ultimately leads to their undoing whilst bad politicians protect the incompetent to keep their votes up or simply because they are themselves equally incompetent.
I'm not a Conservative by the way, nor would I ever vote Conservative or Labour. I'd just rather see people take responsibility for their lives somewhat and this is what Thatcher tried to make people do improving the country as a result whilst Labour has done the opposite, destroying the country as a result.
So still not Apple then in other words?
Apple is a small player in the phone market, Symbian has hundreds of millions more users out there on it's platform, Microsoft has tens of millions more on their Windows mobile platform.
I have to agree, C&C is my favourite RTS of all time. Nothing has ever really come close, I don't think you can pinpoint one thing that made that game stand out it was everything, from the effects of the napalming A10s and the obelisks of light to the pleasing explosions of grenadiers to awesomeness of getting your first mammoth tanks.
I think it was immersive, more so than most games of it's era- the music and video as you saw managed to draw you into the rythm of the game really effectively, the missions were fun, the units were superb.
It's just a shame no Command and Conquer series game since has come close bar the original Red Alert, which whilst not as good was still excellent. I suppose Generals deserves a worthy mention- it was pretty decent as an RTS, it just wasn't really in line with the rest of the C&C games storywise.
I recently got Red Alert 3, what an utter dissapointment- how can a franchise created with much lower budgets, much older technology end up looking and playing so horrifically bad with units that are outright comical.
From what I can see the C&C franchise has made one major mistake- they've gone too futuristic, C&C and Red Alert certainly had fantasy/futuristic units but they weren't the majority. I think it was the A10s, the M113s, the Abrams and so forth on C&C that made it, similarly with Red Alert, there was a lot of fairly real units in there. This is possibly also why Generals was the only modern C&C game to not be too bad.
God only knows why in Red Alert 3 everything is make believe and looks so childish and cartoonish it seems better suited to a kids TV show like Jimbo and the Jet set for anyone that remembers that show in the UK. For those that don't, check here or on YouTube:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimbo_and_the_Jet_Set
Outside of the C&C series, Warcraft games have always been good and I thought Warcraft 3's storyline at the time was pretty impressive. Blizzard at least know how to continue a franchise and keep it consistently good unlike EA/Westwood with C&C games.
In Europe the Milky Way with nougat and caramel is Mars!
You jest, but I learnt C when I was 12 and was doing a little assembly by 14 and I was never classed as one of these "gifted" pupils, far from it.
If they really are gifted then they should be capable of picking up even the hard languages if I could and was't "gifted" so I'm not sure you even need to do much research on what language to teach- anything mainstream should do fine.
I think this stems from the often repeated idea that to a good programmer, language is irrelevant and at this age or even regardless of age- at this point in their programming studies they aint gonna be good progammers. I think anyone can learn to program but not so many can become good programmers- that takes real talent and real experience.
So forget about OOP, good design practices, testing and all that, just pick a language whether it's Pascal, C, C#, PHP or whatever and get stuck in with some simple programs and work your way up. Let whoever is teaching them how to become real programmers (the type that know what language/library/framework/development paradigm to use and when) worry about whether they should be teaching them about design patterns, about paradigms, language concepts in a year or two.
The key right now is to not bore them with the comp sci. and software engineering stuff, it's far less interesting at that age than it will be to them in a few years when they're ready to learn it for real. The best you should be doing right now is giving them a taster of how programming works- i.e. you write code using variables, conditional statements, functions and so on and get a specific output. It's upto them then whether they enjoy it enough to continue on to learn the real stuff. More to the point, at this age if they really enjoy it and are inquisitive they'll go and learn more themselves- that's what I did and how I became skilled enough to become a professional developer before even starting my degree.
At least in the UK, salaries for graduate programmers are pretty decent.
The real issue is that advancement up the payscale as they get experience and get better and the top level payscales are too few or too low to maintain a good pool of really good programmers.
To suggest developers should get paid more straight out of uni is, imo, a joke, more than £23k a year when they're effectively still being trained at this point? I don't think so. After a couple of years or so I do think they should've had chance to move off that payscale though and that's where the problem seems to lie. The issue we have is graduates gaining experience and then not being able to go anywhere and hence become discontent and leaving the field.
Graduates in recent years absolutely do not leave university with the skills to go straight onto decent payscales that good programmers deserve unless they have heavily augmented their education with personal projects or contribution to open source projects and so forth.
Just keep in mind, regardless of all the doom and gloom reports, the Games industry is still posting new record profits year on year, so it's obviously not that big a problem.
What they really mean is they want to make even more profit and rather than produce games that are of better quality and/or appeal to wider audiences they want to keep shifting the same old crap but make more from it.
Make no mistake, the whole Spore DRM debacle had nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with preventing second hand sales. The games industry has set it's sights on the second hand market as a way to increase profits without increasing effort, I do not think it will win, but accept consumers to have to listen to whines from the industry and take it from behind on DRM and stuff for a little while yet.
...that an internet organisation that's been around since 1996 would understand the internet and would've realised the storm that censoring Wikipedia would cause and the resultant effect.
But frankly, to me there's a more important issue here- the IWF has accepted they're wrong which raises the question as to whether procedures need to be put in place to prevent mistakes happening again. The IWF is in a position of immense power and failures to perform their duties correctly need to have repercussions.
There have been various conspiracy theories as to whether the IWF was testing the water in light of Britain's new extreme porn law which makes BDSM and such illegal and hence whether the IWF was seeing what the response would be if they were to start filtering this out- particularly as scenes that could be deemed to be extreme porn exist in many common and publicly accesible places. To filter extreme porn as they do child porn they'd most certainly have to go after a lot more mainstream sites, it would no longer be a case of simply filtering out underground sites that only a small minority of people who are already classed as criminals visit.
Whatever the real aim of this was, whether it was simply a blunder or not, I hope for one thing- that the IWF now ensure they concentrate on what they're supposed to concentrate on, helping prevent child abuse and access to sites that really do gain money and so forth from such abuse and also that this has put to sleep any ideas of a power grab or increase in censorship to other, arguably harmless areas for the IWF.
I don't really understand how translating from speech into text is equal to translating from speech to text in a different language.
I could listen to every word you say and write it down no problem, but ask me to translate it into Japanese or something and I wouldn't have a clue.
You only have to look at games like Endwar to see how good speech recognition has gotten, it requires no calibration (well, maybe a word or two at the start) and has yet to fail me once and it seems to work for people with many different accents.
That said, Endwar does use specific commands so I suppose it could be a somewhat simplified scenario in that if the command words are selected sensibly there is no overlap in commands sounding nearly similar, but regardless even much of the voice reconigtion software for dictating documents etc. out there now does a great job with little to no training now.
In the grand scheme of things isn't that like someone being about 1 minute overdue for a party?
Big numbers sound scary when used in such a context but I'm not sure the reality is quite so scary when it could very well be 10s of millions more years before we really probably do need to start worrying why it's not here yet.
Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know how accurate these things are with keeping their dates, but it just doesn't sound like a big deal if something is only 250,000 years overdue when we're talking on a universal scale.
Just noticed this today if you're interested:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7770456.stm
Will be interesting to see if ISPs are willing to pull out or not, blocking the entire page including text and causing problems for British Wikipedia editors is clearly a case of overstepping the mark.
I agree, because then I could ignore them just like years of seeing them in real life in such places has tuned me into ignoring them there too.
I suppose it depends how you define voluntary.
If opening up yourself to legal action when someone downloads illegal material by refusing to implement it is voluntary then that's a fair point but that's not really my definition of voluntary.
The IWF was created in response to the police wanting to launch a case against ISPs for holding illegal material on newsgroups, if an ISP therefore refuses to implement it they will put themselves in the line of fire of this legal action that they have been safe from for almost a decade due to the police accepting the IWF as a suitable option for dealing with the issue.
Seeing as ISPs wont even point out to the courts that the proof against file sharers isn't enough to demonstrate any specific individual comitted any offence and instead just roll over and let the music and games industry walk all over people's privacy in that regard then I have a lot less faith in them doing the right thing than you. Coupled with the phorm trials and interest by some ISPs as well as the disgustingly over the top, unfair bandwidth caps and entirely unethical "unlimited" broadband advertising I'd in fact say that whilst ISPs may grunt a little about such an event, they'd ultimately just say "take it up with the IWF or the government" and sit enjoying the fact they weren't having to use up bandwidth for the blocked sites whilst simultaneously maintaining subscriber levels as hardly anyone would give up the internet over it.
Yes because despite all that, Chinese dissidents are still successfully getting the information they want in and out of China via the internet.
I understand that not every Chinese person can but the quote isn't necessarily referring to the individual but the populace as a whole and if even one or two dissidents can get their message out where it's spread further or can get information in where they can spread it further then their task is complete and the quote is valid. This is the case and hence the quote is indeed therefore valid.
Britain has been doing steps 1 and 2 for years via the IWF.
Of course, we don't know if they've been doing 3 (realistically not, I'm sure parties would've complained if they had!) but we know Jacqui Smith is trying her damn hardest to take us to 5!
I really did, I tried so hard to think up an insightful comment in response to this story but all that I could do was sit giggling to myself at how upset Jacqui Smith is over this and how she aint gonna sleep well tonight.
For those that don't know, Jacqui Smith has been involved in or is responsible for:
- UK ID card scheme where every citizen has a biometric ID card
- A national database of every single child's details
- 42 days of detention without trial for terror suspects
- This very DNA database of even innocent people
- Plans for a scheme to store all telephone call, text message and e-mail records
- Massive nationwide CCTV surveillance programs
- Silencing of political opponents by using heavy police force
- Allowing local councils to use terrorist laws to spy on citizens to catch them for such offences as trying to get their kids into a specific school outside their catchment area or letting their dog foul in a public place
- Creating a scheme for newspapers to put up wanted posters from CCTV images of people dropping litter
There are plenty more but simply too many for me to remember all of them right now. This woman is evil and must be stopped, period. We can't put the blame on just her however because people like Gordon Brown have the power to stop her but aren't and opposition parties could be far, far more vocal about how evil this woman actually is and yet they're not.
I'm pretty sure the lives of our grandparents here in the UK and the rest of the world weren't given on the beaches of Normandy, the fields of France and other places so that it would eventually be our own government that would rise up against us and begin to enforce the same level of dictatorship as seen in the many facist nations during World War II. The very fact Jacqui Smith is pushing for this kind of regime should make it the responsibility of everyone with the power to make a noise- politicians, media and so forth to stand up and refuse to accept this. It is the complacency and ignorance amongst the average joe on the street towards this type of thing that makes me understand now how over time evil totalitarian regimes can arise.
I do not believe Britain will every reach the point Jacqui Smith is hoping thanks to the EU injecting at least a little bit of common sense into the situation as per this article but the very fact that she has been allowed to get this far is simply unacceptable in a modern, free society.
I can't help but think you could make a game of this.
Announce something to get the government's back up, wait until they've done loads and loads of preparation then rip their opportunity from under them just before they get chance.
The only downside is it's a waste of tax payers cash, not that most public sector jobs aren't a waste of tax payers cash anyway though.
You probably wont hear many people talk about patterns. It's rare that a programmer says "Oh we need a factory pattern for this", they'll usually just go ahead and implement using a factory pattern because that's what design patterns are about- the fact that many parts of programs actually follow a small set of patterns to get jobs done and these patterns show their head over and over.
If you have been doing a decent amount of OO programming then you probably have been using some of the common patterns without ever even realising it. This could explain why you've missed the term because it's just so common no one really talks about it, they just do it although if you're involved in application architecture at the higher level- putting together UML diagrams and so forth you are more likely to come across these terms.
Templates in the context of this article just refer to the idea of website templates, i.e. the basic layout of the site or site components where the content is filled in by different parts of the application (i.e. different layers such as the controller fed by the model). Of course, the idea extends beyond the web, normal applications can use UI templates for example or even the more obvious document templates but I don't imagine you do much UI or web stuff if you're using C and assembly mostly? Presumably if you use those languages it's lower level, perhaps embedded stuff you do?
With regards to the whole resident evil 5 thing I don't understand why it's okay for game developers to bring violence to the streets of New York, to bring violence between nations that are nowadays allies, to bring violence against even civilians or to kill arabs because that's now (rather ignorantly) seen as a fair game terrorist stereotype to some. ...But it's not okay to bring violence to one of the most violent places on Earth - Africa. I can't help but wonder if the reason people make a fuss about that is because they don't want to accept the reality there, that they'd rather ignore it and pretend everything is okay there, god forbid the idea that anyone ever have to carry a gun in Africa.
Most of these concepts are over a decade old, so I'm not sure where you've been but it suggests you've not really learnt anything new in that last 10 years. You could be forgiven over templates as they're something you could get by without ever needing to know if you right software that doesn't need them but patterns? you've never heard of design patterns?
I'd recommend getting some software development education as it sounds like whilst you may know how to program, you don't know even the basics of software engineering. For information what patterns are, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_science)
I understand that if you've used only C and assembly and have barely touched C++ you probably don't even really have an understanding of OOP (object oriented programming) which is probably part the problem, this would be a good starting point- learn a language where OOP is enforced, Java perhaps?
I find this is more of a problem in web development than in classic application development. The problem stems from the fact that anyone can do HTML and many web "developers" have moved from that to languages like PHP that don't teach or enforce good use of OOP, type safety and other important concepts. It's not bad that PHP doesn't do that in itself, because it's still a good language for knowledgable, sensible programmers but that's not a large part of it's userbase unfortunately.
The problem is demonstrated strongly with the likes of HTML5, this goes against everything good that has been done in XHTML to push separation of concerns because doing so is important for an accessible, consistent, well built web. I don't agree entirely with some of the design decision of the newer releases of XHTML- phasing out tables seems to be one of the worst ideas but it's still a whole lot better than mixing up content, presentation and so on into one big single mess.
The two sides are basically this, if we allow lazier development we end up with a much less accessible, much less portable web but we get more content because anyone can publish even if what they publish is badly developed. The alternative is we push for much stricter web development that requires a lot more skill and discipline to do properly and results in a much more portable, accessible web but has the downside of less people publishing because some wont want to make the effort.
It's a hard choice for sure, personally I'm on the side of forcing people to do it properly if they want to do it at all, but I do understand that may isolate people who do benefit the web with useful (albeit poorly implemented) sites and content.
They only harm themselves too. I find most PHP frameworks are much more difficult to learn than they really should be simply because they muddy the waters so much with regards to what is in and where each of the components of MVC sits in their particular implementation.
The summary takes the decision somewhat out of context.
They're not planning to remotely connect to any old joes computer they can and search it, they're planning to connect to zombie computers that have been hijacked by criminals to try and trace back where the criminals are coming from.
Apparently, there will be strict rules on what they can do on said machine too, that is, they're not allowed to start rummaging through people's personal data. Don't think I'm naive by saying that- I'm just repeating what I read on the issue, I don't believe for a minute those rules will be enforceable and I truly think as soon as they have access to these machines and their boss aint looking they're going to start rummaging like crazy.
I'm not sure how I feel about the general idea, if a machine has a backdoor and they can manage to connect to it also then in a way I feel they should just temporarily patch it for the user and inform the user at absolute worse although I'm not sure this is ideal- what if they patch some security researcher's honey pot for instance!
It certainly concerned me a bit when I read it but it's certainly not a plan to just use 0-day exploits to connect to everyone and anyone's PC or anything.
I was fortunate enough to work on quite a few good mods through the years but it was the politics that put me off in the end.
There's a lot of time wasters out there and you find yourself spending a lot of time dealing with them. As your mod picks up pace you can start to get some good people on board and not deal with this but getting their is tough. When you do get there you still have the issue of people having differing visions and sometimes showing their true colours when they don't get their own way and stuff like that.
This is why I have to have a lot of respect for people behind projects like this here because I know all too well what the hazards are in getting this far. Building a mature team that's willing to accept a single person in charge of the actual vision of the mod/game whilst having someone capable of carrying that vision through in a solid manner and not pandering to personal nags or people on the team simply not adhering to that vision is easily as hard as actually producing the game assets and code- particular in a distributed environment like many mod teams across the internet.
The alternative is to go it alone and build code based mods- presumably this is how Garry's mod started, I don't know if that's still that way if it ever was but his mod is about the only HL2 mod I tried and even then only shortly after it's early releases but it was pretty fun to play around with.