They deserve a kicking in the courts, it took me 3months for them to repair my laptop properly - it went back 3 times and came back still broken 3 times and took 6 months to resolve the issue once and for all. The issue was a knackered graphics card, display corruption as soon as you boot up even on an external device although after they "fixed" it the second time it came back with the same corruption and after 5mins died completely and failed to boot at all at which point their tech support before offering to repair it properly ran me through a series of diagnostics and intelligent questions like "What is the error message". Quite what error message he was expecting from a laptop which I quite clearly explained initially had display corruption (although explaining "display corruption" to someone who doesn't natively speak English in a call centre is hard enough and shouldn't be something I have to do) preventing viewing of any error if there was one to start with followed by not even powering on at all by the time I called them I've no idea, but then, that's Dell.
In the end they decided to just replace it, told me to send the old one back when the new one was delivered but the courier guy said he only had a drop off.
I phoned Dell 3 times over the next 6 months to collect it and they told me the courier would be there on certain days yet never arrived yet I've never once had a courier let me down here despite using them like once or twice a week for the last 8 years so it was blatantly them not organising it.
After that period Dell decided to threaten me for not letting them have the laptop back by charging my card used for the original purchase 2 years prior for the new laptop despite me making every attempt to get it back to them and them not actually being arsed to properly arrange to collect it. When it came to it cost me a sizeable amount of cash in phone bills, hours on the phone trying to sort it out,
Worst company EVER. It's just a shame they didn't get a harder kicking than this. They used to be awesome, now I wouldn't touch them ever again no matter how able they are to improve because I went in to their service buying the laptop when they were still half-decent and watch them devolve into sheer incompetence and worthlessness over the next few years at which point as unfortunately needed their assistance as above.
Other practices I've noticed they used not mentioned here in the UK is they advertise really good offers on some hardware but when you phone up to purchase it when it's a phone only offer they say the offer doesn't really exist and try and sell you it for up to £100 more, I spoke to trading standards and they said they can do this as long as they sell at least some laptops for the offer price, even if that's only to 2 people in a population of 60 million despite blatantly infering that the offer is open to everyone until the end of the offer data.
All that said, I'm not sure there's really a better option out there for things like laptops either - all the major tech companies seem just as bad.
Google are happy to remove anti-Islam videos, anti-Scientology videos and so forth yet Islamic Extremists and Scientologists are free to post all the propaganda they want.
Google are simply citing free speech when it suits them to further whatever bias they have at the time whilst happily going against free speech and censoring plenty of other things that are far less offensive.
Someone making fun of Scientology, or someone calling Islam evil is treated as being far more evil than videos showing civilians getting shot or maimed yet Google's censorship program goes against this reality.
Presumably in the states with Scientology at least it's because they're scared of being sued by them, well, perhaps it's time the parents of a soldier shot dead in one of these videos also sues them so that they can make their decision based on fear of legal reprisal rather than common sense as it's the only thing that seems to be able to balance their censorship.
Of course I'd rather see the zero censorship option, but Google have already long gone against the idea of that so let's at least have balanced, unbiased censorship shall we?
You shouldn't have to turn your phone off though in case, you know, you receive a call.
How long before they implement this in city centre shopping areas?
Should we then not use our phones in cities, airports, shopping centres, work? There seems little point in having them if the only place you can likely use it safely is at home where most people have landlines anyway.
Blindly ignoring the fact that companies are spying on people isn't the solution, stopping it or messing with it to the point it's useless to them is. Would you just turn off your internet connection to stop companies spying on your online habits too? Especially if the spying occurs on a layer you can't do much about i.e. Phorm's method.
As an ex-DAOC European and US player I only hope the Australian servers will be run by a slightly more competent service than GOA, the European server hosts. Just to get the list started, here are the exciting things you can look forward to if they choose a company like GOA:
- Frequent server crashes with no one to reboot the servers until Monday if it crashes Friday evening because they don't work weekends - Servers getting hacked, random monsters spawned everywhere and summoned upon various players - Passwords reset on every single account and new ones not sent out to people for anything up to a month as a result of said hack - No in game support whatsoever and instead a web based support service that can take between 3 days and 3 years for a response - Billing of customers who have cancelled their accounts - Database corruption due to a faulty processor in a server that apparently has no temperature monitoring, no error checking, and apparently no proper backup regime hence leaves you unable to play for 3 weeks followed by having all your characters gutted and left to start from scratch. - Bias from gamemasters in selectively choosing which sides to penalise whilst allow the others to get away with carrying out the exact same violations of the rules as the side who got penalised - Game masters that actively got involved in trolling and flame wars on various forums - No set rules so game masters could change the rules as and when they saw fit, what was acceptable one minute could become permanently bannable the next then acceptable again a day later. - An upwards of 3 months delay on patches - Free additional bugs that don't come in the US version, some being severely damaging to game balance whilst simultaneously having their existence denied until a fix is available at which point they accept there was a severely game damaging bug and fix it (note, this could take up to 6 months)
If there's one thing Mythic should've learnt from DAOC it's to keep server management and in-house thing and not sub-contract the game to 3rd parties. Unfortunately, as they've not only not learnt this but chosen GOA to host the European game again I wouldn't have much faith in them being able to properly maintain any servers outside the US, as such if I do play I'll be importing a US copy of the game as I had to with DAoC to be able to play it the way it was meant to be played.
Mythic were actually the best MMO subscription service I've had the pleasure to subscribe to, it's just a shame their European operation ironically was by far the worst service I've ever subscribed to.
So Aussies, if I were you, I'd play it safe, ignore this snippet of news and just get the US version which also had the advantage in DAoC of having much healthier game populations when the game was dying, 24/7 populations due to the international player base hence no 5am raids on other teams relics, cheaper subscription, earlier access to expansions (by months) and outright better service by an absolutely massive amount. The only problems I ever had with Mythic were game related rather than service related in that they were shit at game balance to the point some character classes were 10x better than other classes could ever be and that they were much too slow to deal with the cheating (radar) problem even though they got there in the end.
...any company with any involvement in this idea needs to answer.
One of the arguments that's always been bought up regarding technology like this is "What happens when something goes wrong and it inconveniences or prevents users from doing what they should be able to", the answer that's always come back is "Well it wont go wrong", but it does and it has.
Technology like this is one thing if it works, if they want to implement it and it works then it's up to us to decide if we want to use their product. If they convince us to use their product by assuring us it wont be a problem and it is then they've lied to us and should compensate us.
It's a problem for the industry as a whole, they need to accept once and for all that technology like this only servers to inconvenience legitimate users.
For those that don't know Becta is a UK organisation that acts to advice the nations schools on their IT strategies.
It doesn't have any formal powers from what I understand in forcing schools to or not to use certain technologies however it does produce a list of Becta authorised providers which some schools will choose only to work with.
That said it has a lot of power in the UK educational arena and has always been quite pro-open source on many occasions, it's still recommending against Office 2007 in schools and as such has been quite successful in warding many schools off switching to Office 2007.
It's not the most powerful organisation there is and it doesn't really have any power over standards, but it's very influental in UK education and if Microsoft pisses them off enough I could very well imagine them making an ever stronger drive towards open source to the point they will likely put together resources that make it easy for schools to make the switch.
Some areas of local goverment, schools and in some cases, university policy is largely based around what Becta recommends in the UK.
"For many people, that means that China is measurably less repressive than they had feared."
I'd disagree on this point, even news of the Burma cyclone and riots got out but that didn't mean the authorities were any less repressive than everyone thought. The fact they're preventing aid workers and a lot of aid entering the country is evidence enough.
I think what it really shows is that human determination is more powerful and capable than any form of repression is to block it.
The same thing that happens when you get any attack from inside the country, you call the FBI botnet, the state botnet or the national guard botnet. In fact, botnets all round, why not, what possible harm could be caused by it!
When you take into account the fact the US is screwing other nations industries and ignoring WTO organisation rulings against them why do you think people would care about other countries screwing one of America's industries?
Or is it simply that you believe the US deserves to have it's industries protected whilst simultaneously damaging those belonging to other nations?
It's easier for them than someone in say the states. In the states you'd be screwed, it would be the end of your life, it would be the end of the story.
In Sweden they have both public support and political support from many serving politicians. As such any legal ruling against them has the potential to lead to a political shit storm to the point where political supporters of the ruling simply wont ever be elected ever again.
In many countries citizens like file sharing, they disagree with rulings against it and support of the RIAA/MPAA but simply don't care enough to do anything about it. In Sweden it's a big enough issue for people to both care and act.
Nations like Britain, the US and so forth have bigger worries from terrorism/wars in Iraq/Afghanistan to economic worries to general social problems and issues with their health care systems (or in the states, lack of).
I really think Half-Life 2/Doom 3 comparison is pretty pointless, I feel Half-Life is as different from Doom as Ghost Recon series are from Half-Life.
Doom 3 was good for the type of FPS it was but I think that type of FPS appeals to very few people and even then it was as people have said here rather repetitive.
Bioshock was an example of what Doom 3 should've been - it had the darkness and the creepyness whilst remaining fun and innovative with great gameplay. Doom 3 was essentially Bioshock minus a good storyline, minus innovative gameplay.
I felt id has been lacking in these areas for a long while now however, whilst Romero was a complete failure by himself I can't help but feel id went downhill after his departure. Despite being worthless as a CEO of a game company he was a brilliant story teller. Similarly when id lost mappers like American McGee, modellers like Paul Steed it did them a lot of harm. Carmack is their remaining key player being brilliant and developing jaw dropping visuals, but unfortunately that's where their talent ends nowadays when compared to other game developers. They went from having the cream of the crop in most the major areas a game studio needs them (models, maps, design, code) to having only Carmack keeping them ahead of the game in the coding department. This isn't of course intended as a slant against id's other staff, they're perfectly good developers - as good as any other company but that's just it, they're as good as any other company but not better than other companies equivalent employees which leaves them in a weaker position than they historically have been.
It's also the case that whilst still arguably a genius, Carmack doesn't stand out like he used to either, producing an engine like the Quake 1 engine was a rare feat back in the day, the number of game developers capable of doing so could be counted on one hand with two fingers and missing. Nowadays, due to excellent libraries, better documentation of techniques, superb middleware and simply more people working in the field, developing an engine that looks utterly fantastic is something that many people can do now.
"If it were about a fashion statement, then wouldn't they be:
1. Not listening to them
2. Showing them off
3. Only using Apple-branded headphones, rather than swapping for better-sounding ones that aren't white"
The first two are certainly false, it's like suggesting a woman with a gucci handbag must be actively flashing it around and must not actually have anything in it and hence not use it to carry anything for it to be a fashion statement.
The point is that there are so many better players out there than the iPod - more storage, more features, more formats supported, less DRM, replaceable batteries and a lower price point to boot yet millions still buy the iPod, why? Because it's fashionable.
There's simply no other reason to buy an iPod because they don't hold anything over other players, it's not like iTunes is exactly any easier to use than other portal music device software.
Particularly amongst teenagers it's often the case that things are seen as fashion items even if everyone has them as you put it, mobile phones are a good example - if people just wanted a phone to make calls, send messages, take pictures there's a hell of a lot of cheap easy phones out there yet many will still pay for something more expensive, even if in the case of say the iPhone it's feature-weak and has an atrocious interface for what teenagers do most - texting.
Fashion is something that invades many product areas and to suggest for something to be a fashion item it must have no other item than for showing doesn't make a lot of sense. Even clothes are bought to be worn even if they're needlessly overpriced in the name of fashion.
I'm not even saying it's bad to buy things in the name of fashion to be honest but I do feel it has to be kept in perspective, if something cost twice as much but is also twice as crap I don't feel it's worth it and I personally prefer features over looks with electronic devices but for some the coolness factor is worth a lot and that's fair enough, it's down to personal choice. To pretend the factor outright doesn't exist and that products like the iPod are purchased purely on say technical merit though is being hugely blind to the reality of the market.
Apple's primary method of shifting products is the fashion angle, followed by their proprietary OS and other software that people may prefer. It's certainly not cost/technical merits the products are purchased on as you can get higher spec with equivalent quality (but not style) cheaper elsewhere.
MSDN is a pretty good documentation base, in fact it's one of the best there is out there. I doubt very much they'd have what's widely known to be awesome documentation for large parts of their technologies and then just simply not apply them to others.
Do you have any evidence of your claims?
As it stands Microsoft have made pretty good improvements in a lot of areas this last few years, whilst Vista was indeed a failure, Office 2007 was the most major step forward in Office application productivity and usability in well over a decade. Visual Studio is still moving forward, getting better and better with each iteration which is impressive when it's already arguably the best development environment out there. Similarly languages and libraries like C# and.NET are also improving well. The Zune was a flop but the Xbox 360 whilst having it's fault is a definite improvement over the last iteration - certainly they still have a significant lead on 3rd place at the moment even if they're not able to keep up with the Wii.
To suggest Microsoft lacks direction is rather misguided, clearly many departments at MS do have clearly defined direction and goals and are both following and achieving these goals. You can of course debate if the overall company has direction, but their various product lines are only loosely coupled so an overall direction other than convergence which is on most tech. companies minds isn't really feasible. Certainly to say all departments at Microsoft lack direction though is clearly outright false.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy but...
on
Does Ballmer Need To Go?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Ballmer has been the big driver behind [the Yahoo] deal at Microsoft -- some would say to the point of obsession."
Yet when the bid failed he seemed quite able to drop it. I wouldn't call that obsession, obsession would've been continuing the bid until they got Yahoo no matter how costly and damaging to Microsoft. He knew when to quit and he did.
Of course then the summary goes on to bitch at him FOR dropping it. Make up your mind, was it bad that he continued as far as he did to the point the summary feels he deserves to be called obsessive over it or not?
May I ask what kind of (infinite funding;) ?) educational setting that was? University level perhaps?
Having spent 4 years of my life supporting primary and secondary level schools in the UK any machine in existence in the school was a machine that had to be up and working to reach goverment set targets for computers to pupil ratios. Out of the 173 schools we covered I wasn't aware of a single one that could simply afford to have machines lying around. Furthermore, if a machine went down and was out of warranty the school needed it up and running in the cheapest way possible, if that was replacement hard drive or a replacement memory stick then so be it, paying £30 or so for either of these components the school could push to but having £1000 of hardware sat lying around just in case something went wrong? Not a chance.
I certainly agree that having spare kit available is the best solution but a lot of places both educational and commercial simply can't afford to have spare systems sat around and any budget for doing so is focussed towards having spare servers as a user with a broken system is one thing, but an entire group of users with no server to work with is a much bigger issue.
This is the same woman that felt she had the right to hold up an entire airplane of passengers because she wasn't willing to part with her script despite it not being allowed as part of her hand luggage and being told it had to go in the hold with the rest of her luggage.
Why the fuck should she think she has some special right to bypass airline/anti-terrorism laws when no one else does? Arguments aside about how stupid the laws surrounding hand luggage are, this is just one of many examples where she's decided since becoming famous that she can do what she wants and is above everyone else.
What an absolutely amazing solution. Instead of dealing with people traffickers and abuse of women we'll hide it all from public view by making it illegal hence pushing it underground so that it only continues in the background where no one can see it and no one need care whilst simultaneously removing the personal freedoms of those innocent people who enjoy BDSM in an absolutely harmless manner.
What pure genius, have you thought about working as a law maker for the British government?
You can have sex at 16 in the UK but as far as I'm aware you can't photograph it for pornographic purposes until you're 18. I always found this equally odd.
So is uploading to a secure FTP site and downloading from wherever else I am classed as distribution on behalf of whoever hosts my FTP site?
Of course your argument is based on the idea that it's for moving around copyrighted content from the big labels but why is that the case any more so than my ISPs FTP space they provide me? I could just as well be moving files that I made myself and own the copyright to. Taking in the wider context like this it must be realised that this kind of case has wide ranging implications for any kind of hosting provider, if EMI decides they're suddenly responsible for the legitimacy of the content then many providers will no longer be able to afford to operate due to the costs of vetting every incoming file.
I also disagree that it's even distribution in the sense you suggest, certainly copying a file to some hard drive space you've paid to use on the net seems really no different from copying from a local hard drive such as c: to a local hard drive such as e:. Is that distribution? Are Seagate or whoever makes my drive, or my motherboard manufacturer or Microsoft guilty for helping me "distribute" it from one drive to the other?
Actually yeah I did and quit after a week out of boredom;)
I was hoping it'll only be based on WoW though and have a story more akin to that of Warcraft 1 thru 3 because they were pretty awesome. Perhaps just use the WoW name as it's much better known than the original games I think.
I have to agree in a way, I've always liked the Warcraft series games and have always felt Warcraft III had one of the best storylines of any game I'd played.
I'd honestly rather see Blizzards people do the majority of the work as I honestly think they could do an as good if not better than job than Hollywood could. If it was animated I doubt they'd need much outside help, if not then primarily they'd just need actors and costumes people - certainly I don't believe they'd need any effects people or writers.
There are differences between film and game storyline creation certainly, but I think they could probably do it, certainly as you say with the help of a "game-friendly" director such as Jackson rather than someone whose about as good with the difference between films and games as Boll.
That said I don't entirely disagree with the points she put across to the BBC, the BBC were somewhat misrepresenting some of the facts in the original article by failing to point out clearly enough that a short term trend of cooling (almost certainly due to La Nina) does not mean there's not a longer term trend of warming. Their approach in the article essentially also gave voice to those who were making unfounded claims about global warming not being true whilst not giving enough time to the thousands of scientists who have worked hard to actually provide some factual evidence to demonstrate the existence of global warming.
Whilst not all are statistical methods, you're correct in saying that some are but no more so than natural phenomena unwittingly are and in most cases AI solutions are biologically inspired in this way such that they are just models of natural processes adapted to solve a specific problem. This seems to be the basic image problem AI suffers in that as I mentioned, the more we understand how intelligence arises, the less mystical it actually becomes and hence ends up no longer being treated as intelligence.
I think the thing to take away is not necessarily that AI is failing to produce anything, but that what AI is producing is no longer classed as AI for the previously mentioned reasons. People misbelieve therefore that AI is useless, but by studying the underlying processes behind intelligence and applying that to computer science it still produces extraordinarily useful methods for solving real life problems. Essentially AI is taking problems that we perceive as requiring intelligence to solve and finding solutions that we then no longer see as intelligent, regardless of the fact this doesn't live up to the idea that sci-fi shows have told us we should come to expect from AI (androids etc.) it's still immensely useful. To answer the original posters question as to where's the beef - all around us when you make a telephone call, when you undergo medical diagnosis, when your banks are playing with your money on world markets, when your kids lesson plan is calculated, when warehouses want to calculate optimal storage layouts. All these problems can and very often are solved with AI gone mainstream.
It's worth noting that the OP is equally wrong about the usefulness about Chaos in this respect as emergence plays a vital part in some areas of AI that have indeed been used to produce solutions to real life problems. Whilst I don't really know anything about the other areas he mentions I'd question his credibility in those areas also based on his comments about Chaos and AI failing to produce useful results being outright false.
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They deserve a kicking in the courts, it took me 3months for them to repair my laptop properly - it went back 3 times and came back still broken 3 times and took 6 months to resolve the issue once and for all. The issue was a knackered graphics card, display corruption as soon as you boot up even on an external device although after they "fixed" it the second time it came back with the same corruption and after 5mins died completely and failed to boot at all at which point their tech support before offering to repair it properly ran me through a series of diagnostics and intelligent questions like "What is the error message". Quite what error message he was expecting from a laptop which I quite clearly explained initially had display corruption (although explaining "display corruption" to someone who doesn't natively speak English in a call centre is hard enough and shouldn't be something I have to do) preventing viewing of any error if there was one to start with followed by not even powering on at all by the time I called them I've no idea, but then, that's Dell.
In the end they decided to just replace it, told me to send the old one back when the new one was delivered but the courier guy said he only had a drop off.
I phoned Dell 3 times over the next 6 months to collect it and they told me the courier would be there on certain days yet never arrived yet I've never once had a courier let me down here despite using them like once or twice a week for the last 8 years so it was blatantly them not organising it.
After that period Dell decided to threaten me for not letting them have the laptop back by charging my card used for the original purchase 2 years prior for the new laptop despite me making every attempt to get it back to them and them not actually being arsed to properly arrange to collect it. When it came to it cost me a sizeable amount of cash in phone bills, hours on the phone trying to sort it out,
Worst company EVER. It's just a shame they didn't get a harder kicking than this. They used to be awesome, now I wouldn't touch them ever again no matter how able they are to improve because I went in to their service buying the laptop when they were still half-decent and watch them devolve into sheer incompetence and worthlessness over the next few years at which point as unfortunately needed their assistance as above.
Other practices I've noticed they used not mentioned here in the UK is they advertise really good offers on some hardware but when you phone up to purchase it when it's a phone only offer they say the offer doesn't really exist and try and sell you it for up to £100 more, I spoke to trading standards and they said they can do this as long as they sell at least some laptops for the offer price, even if that's only to 2 people in a population of 60 million despite blatantly infering that the offer is open to everyone until the end of the offer data.
All that said, I'm not sure there's really a better option out there for things like laptops either - all the major tech companies seem just as bad.
They're not folding fairly.
Google are happy to remove anti-Islam videos, anti-Scientology videos and so forth yet Islamic Extremists and Scientologists are free to post all the propaganda they want.
Google are simply citing free speech when it suits them to further whatever bias they have at the time whilst happily going against free speech and censoring plenty of other things that are far less offensive.
Someone making fun of Scientology, or someone calling Islam evil is treated as being far more evil than videos showing civilians getting shot or maimed yet Google's censorship program goes against this reality.
Presumably in the states with Scientology at least it's because they're scared of being sued by them, well, perhaps it's time the parents of a soldier shot dead in one of these videos also sues them so that they can make their decision based on fear of legal reprisal rather than common sense as it's the only thing that seems to be able to balance their censorship.
Of course I'd rather see the zero censorship option, but Google have already long gone against the idea of that so let's at least have balanced, unbiased censorship shall we?
You shouldn't have to turn your phone off though in case, you know, you receive a call.
How long before they implement this in city centre shopping areas?
Should we then not use our phones in cities, airports, shopping centres, work? There seems little point in having them if the only place you can likely use it safely is at home where most people have landlines anyway.
Blindly ignoring the fact that companies are spying on people isn't the solution, stopping it or messing with it to the point it's useless to them is. Would you just turn off your internet connection to stop companies spying on your online habits too? Especially if the spying occurs on a layer you can't do much about i.e. Phorm's method.
As an ex-DAOC European and US player I only hope the Australian servers will be run by a slightly more competent service than GOA, the European server hosts. Just to get the list started, here are the exciting things you can look forward to if they choose a company like GOA:
- Frequent server crashes with no one to reboot the servers until Monday if it crashes Friday evening because they don't work weekends
- Servers getting hacked, random monsters spawned everywhere and summoned upon various players
- Passwords reset on every single account and new ones not sent out to people for anything up to a month as a result of said hack
- No in game support whatsoever and instead a web based support service that can take between 3 days and 3 years for a response
- Billing of customers who have cancelled their accounts
- Database corruption due to a faulty processor in a server that apparently has no temperature monitoring, no error checking, and apparently no proper backup regime hence leaves you unable to play for 3 weeks followed by having all your characters gutted and left to start from scratch.
- Bias from gamemasters in selectively choosing which sides to penalise whilst allow the others to get away with carrying out the exact same violations of the rules as the side who got penalised
- Game masters that actively got involved in trolling and flame wars on various forums
- No set rules so game masters could change the rules as and when they saw fit, what was acceptable one minute could become permanently bannable the next then acceptable again a day later.
- An upwards of 3 months delay on patches
- Free additional bugs that don't come in the US version, some being severely damaging to game balance whilst simultaneously having their existence denied until a fix is available at which point they accept there was a severely game damaging bug and fix it (note, this could take up to 6 months)
If there's one thing Mythic should've learnt from DAOC it's to keep server management and in-house thing and not sub-contract the game to 3rd parties. Unfortunately, as they've not only not learnt this but chosen GOA to host the European game again I wouldn't have much faith in them being able to properly maintain any servers outside the US, as such if I do play I'll be importing a US copy of the game as I had to with DAoC to be able to play it the way it was meant to be played.
Mythic were actually the best MMO subscription service I've had the pleasure to subscribe to, it's just a shame their European operation ironically was by far the worst service I've ever subscribed to.
So Aussies, if I were you, I'd play it safe, ignore this snippet of news and just get the US version which also had the advantage in DAoC of having much healthier game populations when the game was dying, 24/7 populations due to the international player base hence no 5am raids on other teams relics, cheaper subscription, earlier access to expansions (by months) and outright better service by an absolutely massive amount. The only problems I ever had with Mythic were game related rather than service related in that they were shit at game balance to the point some character classes were 10x better than other classes could ever be and that they were much too slow to deal with the cheating (radar) problem even though they got there in the end.
...any company with any involvement in this idea needs to answer.
One of the arguments that's always been bought up regarding technology like this is "What happens when something goes wrong and it inconveniences or prevents users from doing what they should be able to", the answer that's always come back is "Well it wont go wrong", but it does and it has.
Technology like this is one thing if it works, if they want to implement it and it works then it's up to us to decide if we want to use their product. If they convince us to use their product by assuring us it wont be a problem and it is then they've lied to us and should compensate us.
It's a problem for the industry as a whole, they need to accept once and for all that technology like this only servers to inconvenience legitimate users.
For those that don't know Becta is a UK organisation that acts to advice the nations schools on their IT strategies.
It doesn't have any formal powers from what I understand in forcing schools to or not to use certain technologies however it does produce a list of Becta authorised providers which some schools will choose only to work with.
That said it has a lot of power in the UK educational arena and has always been quite pro-open source on many occasions, it's still recommending against Office 2007 in schools and as such has been quite successful in warding many schools off switching to Office 2007.
It's not the most powerful organisation there is and it doesn't really have any power over standards, but it's very influental in UK education and if Microsoft pisses them off enough I could very well imagine them making an ever stronger drive towards open source to the point they will likely put together resources that make it easy for schools to make the switch.
Some areas of local goverment, schools and in some cases, university policy is largely based around what Becta recommends in the UK.
"For many people, that means that China is measurably less repressive than they had feared."
I'd disagree on this point, even news of the Burma cyclone and riots got out but that didn't mean the authorities were any less repressive than everyone thought. The fact they're preventing aid workers and a lot of aid entering the country is evidence enough.
I think what it really shows is that human determination is more powerful and capable than any form of repression is to block it.
The same thing that happens when you get any attack from inside the country, you call the FBI botnet, the state botnet or the national guard botnet. In fact, botnets all round, why not, what possible harm could be caused by it!
"Airship Ventures notes that airships are already flying safely in Japan and Germany"
;) ? I'd hate to think Hindenburg was their idea of flying safely!
I take it they're not taking history into account with this comment
When you take into account the fact the US is screwing other nations industries and ignoring WTO organisation rulings against them why do you think people would care about other countries screwing one of America's industries?
Or is it simply that you believe the US deserves to have it's industries protected whilst simultaneously damaging those belonging to other nations?
It's easier for them than someone in say the states. In the states you'd be screwed, it would be the end of your life, it would be the end of the story.
In Sweden they have both public support and political support from many serving politicians. As such any legal ruling against them has the potential to lead to a political shit storm to the point where political supporters of the ruling simply wont ever be elected ever again.
In many countries citizens like file sharing, they disagree with rulings against it and support of the RIAA/MPAA but simply don't care enough to do anything about it. In Sweden it's a big enough issue for people to both care and act.
Nations like Britain, the US and so forth have bigger worries from terrorism/wars in Iraq/Afghanistan to economic worries to general social problems and issues with their health care systems (or in the states, lack of).
I really think Half-Life 2/Doom 3 comparison is pretty pointless, I feel Half-Life is as different from Doom as Ghost Recon series are from Half-Life.
Doom 3 was good for the type of FPS it was but I think that type of FPS appeals to very few people and even then it was as people have said here rather repetitive.
Bioshock was an example of what Doom 3 should've been - it had the darkness and the creepyness whilst remaining fun and innovative with great gameplay. Doom 3 was essentially Bioshock minus a good storyline, minus innovative gameplay.
I felt id has been lacking in these areas for a long while now however, whilst Romero was a complete failure by himself I can't help but feel id went downhill after his departure. Despite being worthless as a CEO of a game company he was a brilliant story teller. Similarly when id lost mappers like American McGee, modellers like Paul Steed it did them a lot of harm. Carmack is their remaining key player being brilliant and developing jaw dropping visuals, but unfortunately that's where their talent ends nowadays when compared to other game developers. They went from having the cream of the crop in most the major areas a game studio needs them (models, maps, design, code) to having only Carmack keeping them ahead of the game in the coding department. This isn't of course intended as a slant against id's other staff, they're perfectly good developers - as good as any other company but that's just it, they're as good as any other company but not better than other companies equivalent employees which leaves them in a weaker position than they historically have been.
It's also the case that whilst still arguably a genius, Carmack doesn't stand out like he used to either, producing an engine like the Quake 1 engine was a rare feat back in the day, the number of game developers capable of doing so could be counted on one hand with two fingers and missing. Nowadays, due to excellent libraries, better documentation of techniques, superb middleware and simply more people working in the field, developing an engine that looks utterly fantastic is something that many people can do now.
"If it were about a fashion statement, then wouldn't they be:
1. Not listening to them
2. Showing them off
3. Only using Apple-branded headphones, rather than swapping for better-sounding ones that aren't white"
The first two are certainly false, it's like suggesting a woman with a gucci handbag must be actively flashing it around and must not actually have anything in it and hence not use it to carry anything for it to be a fashion statement.
The point is that there are so many better players out there than the iPod - more storage, more features, more formats supported, less DRM, replaceable batteries and a lower price point to boot yet millions still buy the iPod, why? Because it's fashionable.
There's simply no other reason to buy an iPod because they don't hold anything over other players, it's not like iTunes is exactly any easier to use than other portal music device software.
Particularly amongst teenagers it's often the case that things are seen as fashion items even if everyone has them as you put it, mobile phones are a good example - if people just wanted a phone to make calls, send messages, take pictures there's a hell of a lot of cheap easy phones out there yet many will still pay for something more expensive, even if in the case of say the iPhone it's feature-weak and has an atrocious interface for what teenagers do most - texting.
Fashion is something that invades many product areas and to suggest for something to be a fashion item it must have no other item than for showing doesn't make a lot of sense. Even clothes are bought to be worn even if they're needlessly overpriced in the name of fashion.
I'm not even saying it's bad to buy things in the name of fashion to be honest but I do feel it has to be kept in perspective, if something cost twice as much but is also twice as crap I don't feel it's worth it and I personally prefer features over looks with electronic devices but for some the coolness factor is worth a lot and that's fair enough, it's down to personal choice. To pretend the factor outright doesn't exist and that products like the iPod are purchased purely on say technical merit though is being hugely blind to the reality of the market.
Apple's primary method of shifting products is the fashion angle, followed by their proprietary OS and other software that people may prefer. It's certainly not cost/technical merits the products are purchased on as you can get higher spec with equivalent quality (but not style) cheaper elsewhere.
MSDN is a pretty good documentation base, in fact it's one of the best there is out there. I doubt very much they'd have what's widely known to be awesome documentation for large parts of their technologies and then just simply not apply them to others.
.NET are also improving well. The Zune was a flop but the Xbox 360 whilst having it's fault is a definite improvement over the last iteration - certainly they still have a significant lead on 3rd place at the moment even if they're not able to keep up with the Wii.
Do you have any evidence of your claims?
As it stands Microsoft have made pretty good improvements in a lot of areas this last few years, whilst Vista was indeed a failure, Office 2007 was the most major step forward in Office application productivity and usability in well over a decade. Visual Studio is still moving forward, getting better and better with each iteration which is impressive when it's already arguably the best development environment out there. Similarly languages and libraries like C# and
To suggest Microsoft lacks direction is rather misguided, clearly many departments at MS do have clearly defined direction and goals and are both following and achieving these goals. You can of course debate if the overall company has direction, but their various product lines are only loosely coupled so an overall direction other than convergence which is on most tech. companies minds isn't really feasible. Certainly to say all departments at Microsoft lack direction though is clearly outright false.
"Ballmer has been the big driver behind [the Yahoo] deal at Microsoft -- some would say to the point of obsession."
Yet when the bid failed he seemed quite able to drop it. I wouldn't call that obsession, obsession would've been continuing the bid until they got Yahoo no matter how costly and damaging to Microsoft. He knew when to quit and he did.
Of course then the summary goes on to bitch at him FOR dropping it. Make up your mind, was it bad that he continued as far as he did to the point the summary feels he deserves to be called obsessive over it or not?
May I ask what kind of (infinite funding ;) ?) educational setting that was? University level perhaps?
Having spent 4 years of my life supporting primary and secondary level schools in the UK any machine in existence in the school was a machine that had to be up and working to reach goverment set targets for computers to pupil ratios. Out of the 173 schools we covered I wasn't aware of a single one that could simply afford to have machines lying around. Furthermore, if a machine went down and was out of warranty the school needed it up and running in the cheapest way possible, if that was replacement hard drive or a replacement memory stick then so be it, paying £30 or so for either of these components the school could push to but having £1000 of hardware sat lying around just in case something went wrong? Not a chance.
I certainly agree that having spare kit available is the best solution but a lot of places both educational and commercial simply can't afford to have spare systems sat around and any budget for doing so is focussed towards having spare servers as a user with a broken system is one thing, but an entire group of users with no server to work with is a much bigger issue.
This is the same woman that felt she had the right to hold up an entire airplane of passengers because she wasn't willing to part with her script despite it not being allowed as part of her hand luggage and being told it had to go in the hold with the rest of her luggage.
Why the fuck should she think she has some special right to bypass airline/anti-terrorism laws when no one else does? Arguments aside about how stupid the laws surrounding hand luggage are, this is just one of many examples where she's decided since becoming famous that she can do what she wants and is above everyone else.
What an absolutely amazing solution. Instead of dealing with people traffickers and abuse of women we'll hide it all from public view by making it illegal hence pushing it underground so that it only continues in the background where no one can see it and no one need care whilst simultaneously removing the personal freedoms of those innocent people who enjoy BDSM in an absolutely harmless manner.
What pure genius, have you thought about working as a law maker for the British government?
You can have sex at 16 in the UK but as far as I'm aware you can't photograph it for pornographic purposes until you're 18. I always found this equally odd.
So is uploading to a secure FTP site and downloading from wherever else I am classed as distribution on behalf of whoever hosts my FTP site?
Of course your argument is based on the idea that it's for moving around copyrighted content from the big labels but why is that the case any more so than my ISPs FTP space they provide me? I could just as well be moving files that I made myself and own the copyright to. Taking in the wider context like this it must be realised that this kind of case has wide ranging implications for any kind of hosting provider, if EMI decides they're suddenly responsible for the legitimacy of the content then many providers will no longer be able to afford to operate due to the costs of vetting every incoming file.
I also disagree that it's even distribution in the sense you suggest, certainly copying a file to some hard drive space you've paid to use on the net seems really no different from copying from a local hard drive such as c: to a local hard drive such as e:. Is that distribution? Are Seagate or whoever makes my drive, or my motherboard manufacturer or Microsoft guilty for helping me "distribute" it from one drive to the other?
Yes, just don't spend it here in Britain itself else it'll only buy you half a vote ;)
Actually yeah I did and quit after a week out of boredom ;)
I was hoping it'll only be based on WoW though and have a story more akin to that of Warcraft 1 thru 3 because they were pretty awesome. Perhaps just use the WoW name as it's much better known than the original games I think.
I have to agree in a way, I've always liked the Warcraft series games and have always felt Warcraft III had one of the best storylines of any game I'd played.
I'd honestly rather see Blizzards people do the majority of the work as I honestly think they could do an as good if not better than job than Hollywood could. If it was animated I doubt they'd need much outside help, if not then primarily they'd just need actors and costumes people - certainly I don't believe they'd need any effects people or writers.
There are differences between film and game storyline creation certainly, but I think they could probably do it, certainly as you say with the help of a "game-friendly" director such as Jackson rather than someone whose about as good with the difference between films and games as Boll.
She is a religious zealot or close enough! -
http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk/ealing.htm
That said I don't entirely disagree with the points she put across to the BBC, the BBC were somewhat misrepresenting some of the facts in the original article by failing to point out clearly enough that a short term trend of cooling (almost certainly due to La Nina) does not mean there's not a longer term trend of warming. Their approach in the article essentially also gave voice to those who were making unfounded claims about global warming not being true whilst not giving enough time to the thousands of scientists who have worked hard to actually provide some factual evidence to demonstrate the existence of global warming.
Whilst not all are statistical methods, you're correct in saying that some are but no more so than natural phenomena unwittingly are and in most cases AI solutions are biologically inspired in this way such that they are just models of natural processes adapted to solve a specific problem. This seems to be the basic image problem AI suffers in that as I mentioned, the more we understand how intelligence arises, the less mystical it actually becomes and hence ends up no longer being treated as intelligence.
I think the thing to take away is not necessarily that AI is failing to produce anything, but that what AI is producing is no longer classed as AI for the previously mentioned reasons. People misbelieve therefore that AI is useless, but by studying the underlying processes behind intelligence and applying that to computer science it still produces extraordinarily useful methods for solving real life problems. Essentially AI is taking problems that we perceive as requiring intelligence to solve and finding solutions that we then no longer see as intelligent, regardless of the fact this doesn't live up to the idea that sci-fi shows have told us we should come to expect from AI (androids etc.) it's still immensely useful. To answer the original posters question as to where's the beef - all around us when you make a telephone call, when you undergo medical diagnosis, when your banks are playing with your money on world markets, when your kids lesson plan is calculated, when warehouses want to calculate optimal storage layouts. All these problems can and very often are solved with AI gone mainstream.
It's worth noting that the OP is equally wrong about the usefulness about Chaos in this respect as emergence plays a vital part in some areas of AI that have indeed been used to produce solutions to real life problems. Whilst I don't really know anything about the other areas he mentions I'd question his credibility in those areas also based on his comments about Chaos and AI failing to produce useful results being outright false.