...spent $2 million developing a game called Guild of Heroes, but never launched it because 'it didn't drive the right metrics.'
Let's look at the likely story there, shall we? Hell, I'm just guessing, but: It completely drove the right metrics. With that title it was almost certainly designed by committee to cash in on the crossover MMO market. When it became obvious what an abortion it was in practice, they killed it.
Then they had to explain that, so they said 'It didn't drive the right metrics'. What they meant was "It was designed with metrics in mind, of course it drove the right ones. It was right on target for demographic. The problem was that it was shit. Just... wow. Fucking awful shit, man".
If I give you permission to copy word for word something I wrote and to publish and use it without citing the source, there is no plagiarism.
You raise an interesting point, but I think that even permitted reproduction of ideas would be considered plagiarism if it was done without actual citation. Remember, this isn't a copyright issue, it is related to giving credit. If you don't give credit then it may well constitue plagiarism even when done with permission.
Plus, to steal a great quote without citation, "Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
The term is largely meaningless if you accept all works are derivative.
Seems its only use is as writer's equivalent of gorilla feces-pitching.
No, the meaning is utterly clear. Don't pass off the work of other people as your own. Anything you add to the foundation is your contribution, and others wishing to build still further should cite you for that. Plagiarism is, in fact, when you *don't* accept that all works are derivative, and take credit for the whole body of work, not just the ideas that you added.
It's not a copyright issue.
An open-source equivalent would be if I created a cute little font switching extension for Firefox, and then claimed to have singlehandedly coded the browser, standardised HTML, and come up with CSS whilst I was at it.
Plagiarism is copying from one source. Research is copying from many.
Another snappy witticism on slashdot. But it's wrong. And not in a nitpicky killjoy technicality kind of a way, but just plain wrong. So inaccurate, that it's not funny is what I'm saying.
Plagiarism is when you directly copy, or reinterpret with significant similiarity, the work of another without citing the original author. It's got squat to do with how many places you take from. And it's perfectly fine to build on the ideas of others - hell that's the foundation of academia - as long as you don't pass off that work as your own.
Nice cover with the 'alleged' in the title and all... but accidental non-citation is still plagiarism, I do believe. Therefore, since he's admitted himself, it's pretty much not 'alleged' any more. I don't care to share an opinion on the act, but I think we can safely call a spade a spare.
If the SSN is there to verify credit, and only to do this, then a full up-front payment should utterly negate this need. If there's no provision locally for doing this, perhaps writing a letter to regional management will help out. It's likely the staff of your local are not in a position to make decisions about how to accept payment.
On the other hand, perhaps mobile contracts require a SSN these days in order that you can more easily be monitored by law enforcement. In which case, you're SOL till they're on sale SIM-free.
It's pretty likely they'll be unlockable soon enough, and then you'll see them on ebay. You're obviously willing to pay a premium, so keep your eyes open.
Citizen Kane has nothing approaching violence and sex, and yet it's well regarded. And although Shakespeare had violence (and bawdy puns) it's nothing that you couldn't do without being a MA game.
Yes but both of them utterly pushed the boundaries of what was possible at the time. Something in the order of thirty never-before-done special effects were created to realise the vision of Citizen Kane.
A game may not require explicit sexual content. Plently don't.
But since we know that there are art forms which have it, and be improved by it, but that video games generally can't, we know that video games are being limited. Knowing that, of course we take them less seriously.
Look at it this way: do you love the feeling that anything might happen? For me, that's a sign of good narrative, when you don't know what's coming next, but you're rapt to find out. Games don't usually have that, and I know plenty of things that definitely won't be happening next. And the more they hint at those things, the more limited they seem.
It's not time to put sex in all games. It's time to accept sex in the ones that would benefit from that.
However you can search for:
allah is gay
gay
nigger
make bombs
bombing building
bme pain olympics
2 girls 1 cup
... And since Microsoft has blocked the things it disapproves of, we can only assume that they're in favour of all of the above, especially the bottom one.
Somebody who isn't a shit-eating, racist, lesbian, terrorist ought to sue the pants off them.
It's not always a simple matter of communication skills. Some ideas require a foundation of knowledge, without which, the idea is nearly impossible to conceptualize.
This amounts to a form of inadvertant snobbery.
If you can't effectively summarize the functional or foundational knowledge of your discipline then that is your failure to communicate. You don't need to explain ideas to the nth degree before someone can get on board with them.
"Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is a key reliability issue that is of immediate concern in p-channel MOS devices stressed with negative gate voltages. NBTI manifests as an increase in the threshold voltage and consequent decrease in drain current and transconductance." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBTI
I don't have any background in this stuff, and that summary makes a lot of sense to me. I don't need to know how to do something in order to understand what it does, and even roughly why it does it.
Also, it's funny how DRM has become automatically negative. The reasons are obvious, but as I've said before many times, DRM can be a positive thing.
DRM is about stopping a program from doing what it is meant to do. That is always a negative thing. You are adding, to the design of something that works, something that stops it from working.
Now it may well be that you do not want everyone to have a working copy of your software. But don't pretend for a minute that breaking it makes it better. It creates a circumstance which is more favourable to you, at best - and even that's not proven.
But in the functional sense, your software would be better if it worked in more circumstances - end of story.
If DnF is ever released how good will it have to be to live up to 12 years of expectation? Of course it will make mint regardless, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
I used to worry about that, too. But these days, I'd settle for better than the competition - and frankly it probably already is.
Uhm. Is this technical terminology that I simply don't understand, or just a typo? Because I can understand a '1% margin of error', and I can sort of understand 'accurate to 1%'... but something which is below 1% accurate?
What does Murdoch know about making money, anyway?
I don't know. But I know this: it sets off alarm bells ringing when somebody claims that a business model which has been evolving for nearly two decades is 'malfunctioning' just because it's not working in precisely the way in which they personally want it to work.
Believing that the universe revolves around you may be a useful trait for someone determined to push their agenda onto the world, and make money whilst doing so. But I don't think for a second that makes those people right - just powerful.
Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a 'flawed' business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a "malfunctioning" business model.
On the other hand, everytbody knows that charging for something that everyone else provides for free is a winning strategy.
They'll never get any meaningful data out of these ~100 test users. Sure, I could use 200Mbps, but I wouldn't want to if I knew my ISP were watching me like a hawk.
Try pretending you're only downloading linux distros at 200Mbps! You'd have them all in fifteen minutes, and the rest is warez and tentacle porn - almost by a process of elimination.
Windows® Marketplace for Mobile
Prohibited Application Types:
1. Applications that... etc
Basically 'You can't sell stuff in our store which directly competes with the stuff we sell in our store?'
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable policy for a store owner to have.
That only becomes a problem when you have a monopoly. In this case, Microsoft don't. They don't across Platforms because of Apple, Palm, Android, and they don't within their own platform, because you can go elsewhere for apps (unlike with Apple!)
I found an old USB stick the other day with McAfee's superdat (definitions and engine update) file circa 2006. That's only two and a half years ago. It was a real wake-up call. The superdat was just over 6mb in size.
These days you can't fit the application and latest superdat onto a 128mb stick - and when I tell you that the application in only 20mb in size, you'll realise what a change this is. Their updates been spiralling out of control for two years. Now, some may argue that there's a lot more malware out there now, and I won't disagree. But I will say this: McAfee hasn't been getting significantly better as far as I can tell, and none of the other major players seem to have experienced this definitions file explosion, ergo McAfee is doing something wrong.
Furthermore, their version 8 enterprise has one of the worst failures I've ever seen for a virus scanner, which is hilariously related to the above. The application no longer knows how to handle its own virus defintions catalog: I'm not sure whether that's the sheer size, or the number of entries, but either way the update fails because of it. But get this: it says that the update has succeeded!
Can you imagine a more epic fail for a virus scanner than saying it's up to date, but being wrong? Neither could I, till I read the news today.
So long McAfee, I hope you enjoyed your time with the big players.
As they also claim Microsoft Windows is Posix compliant! It is simply to be able to tic a "mandated" requirement in some government procurement, not as something one would actually use or deploy.
Ah, I think you might have misread that one. The latest version of Windows is fully compliant with the ISO's 'Piece of Shit v9' standard. POS IX, not POSIX.
The movie industry is going to slaughter itself, and it can't happen soon enough for me -- not because I want less movies to be produced, but because I think that moviestars have too much influence in our culture.
After the rest of your quite cogent argument, this one strikes me as a total non-sequitur.
How much influence do you think movie stars have over the cost of a theatre ticket? Only a handful call any kind of shots, and even those are subject - entirely - to the whims of the players in the industry.
Celebrity culture is a major irritation, don't get me wrong. But those glossy idiots are just puppets, held on a string and doted on with a somewhat generous allowance.
I've heard that the estimated budget was $100 million. So they've made $80 million over that... so what is the problem exactly?
The problem is that Hollywood Execs are not looking to be successful on a scale of 'job well done', and nor should they, from their paradigm. Their paradigm is manufacturing success, through advertising, TV spots, trailers, awareness campaigns, viral marketing, celebrity whoring, and as many other nefarious tactics as they can get away with, in order to absolutely 100% guarantee a certain level of success.
Just doing alright is a failure, from that paradigm.
A success would be the biggest opening weekend of all time. And that's what we see, again and again. Look, and you will see that this record is broken by every other truly triple-A blockbuster, probably happens a couple of times a year or more.
The real sign of failure is that video games now have even bigger opening weekends - Halo 3, followed hotly by GTA 4, really showed Holywood what an opening weekend could be.
This explains why I'm never sure if I want the ice cream or the banoffee pie, until the waiter brings it over, and I realise I've made the wrong choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Clear customer David Maynor, who is CTO with Errata Security in Atlanta, wants Clear to delete his information but that isn't happening
Shouldn't the CTO of what I assume is a company involved in security know better? Should he have read the fine print before signing up?
You may be missing the greater irony. Errata Security? A list of errors, which have now been corrected.
...spent $2 million developing a game called Guild of Heroes, but never launched it because 'it didn't drive the right metrics.'
Let's look at the likely story there, shall we? Hell, I'm just guessing, but: It completely drove the right metrics. With that title it was almost certainly designed by committee to cash in on the crossover MMO market. When it became obvious what an abortion it was in practice, they killed it.
Then they had to explain that, so they said 'It didn't drive the right metrics'. What they meant was "It was designed with metrics in mind, of course it drove the right ones. It was right on target for demographic. The problem was that it was shit. Just... wow. Fucking awful shit, man".
If I give you permission to copy word for word something I wrote and to publish and use it without citing the source, there is no plagiarism.
You raise an interesting point, but I think that even permitted reproduction of ideas would be considered plagiarism if it was done without actual citation. Remember, this isn't a copyright issue, it is related to giving credit. If you don't give credit then it may well constitue plagiarism even when done with permission.
Plus, to steal a great quote without citation, "Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
The term is largely meaningless if you accept all works are derivative. Seems its only use is as writer's equivalent of gorilla feces-pitching.
No, the meaning is utterly clear. Don't pass off the work of other people as your own. Anything you add to the foundation is your contribution, and others wishing to build still further should cite you for that. Plagiarism is, in fact, when you *don't* accept that all works are derivative, and take credit for the whole body of work, not just the ideas that you added.
It's not a copyright issue.
An open-source equivalent would be if I created a cute little font switching extension for Firefox, and then claimed to have singlehandedly coded the browser, standardised HTML, and come up with CSS whilst I was at it.
Plagiarism is copying from one source. Research is copying from many.
Another snappy witticism on slashdot. But it's wrong. And not in a nitpicky killjoy technicality kind of a way, but just plain wrong. So inaccurate, that it's not funny is what I'm saying. Plagiarism is when you directly copy, or reinterpret with significant similiarity, the work of another without citing the original author. It's got squat to do with how many places you take from. And it's perfectly fine to build on the ideas of others - hell that's the foundation of academia - as long as you don't pass off that work as your own.
Nice cover with the 'alleged' in the title and all... but accidental non-citation is still plagiarism, I do believe. Therefore, since he's admitted himself, it's pretty much not 'alleged' any more. I don't care to share an opinion on the act, but I think we can safely call a spade a spare.
So how much should that up-front payment be? Let's set it at $25,000 just in case you make $24500-worth of calls before you default on payment.
Put a credit cap on your account at $100 a month. It's not rocket science.
On the other hand, perhaps mobile contracts require a SSN these days in order that you can more easily be monitored by law enforcement. In which case, you're SOL till they're on sale SIM-free.
It's pretty likely they'll be unlockable soon enough, and then you'll see them on ebay. You're obviously willing to pay a premium, so keep your eyes open.
Citizen Kane has nothing approaching violence and sex, and yet it's well regarded. And although Shakespeare had violence (and bawdy puns) it's nothing that you couldn't do without being a MA game.
Yes but both of them utterly pushed the boundaries of what was possible at the time. Something in the order of thirty never-before-done special effects were created to realise the vision of Citizen Kane.
A game may not require explicit sexual content. Plently don't.
But since we know that there are art forms which have it, and be improved by it, but that video games generally can't, we know that video games are being limited. Knowing that, of course we take them less seriously.
Look at it this way: do you love the feeling that anything might happen? For me, that's a sign of good narrative, when you don't know what's coming next, but you're rapt to find out. Games don't usually have that, and I know plenty of things that definitely won't be happening next. And the more they hint at those things, the more limited they seem.
It's not time to put sex in all games. It's time to accept sex in the ones that would benefit from that.
However you can search for: allah is gay gay nigger make bombs bombing building bme pain olympics 2 girls 1 cup
... And since Microsoft has blocked the things it disapproves of, we can only assume that they're in favour of all of the above, especially the bottom one.
Somebody who isn't a shit-eating, racist, lesbian, terrorist ought to sue the pants off them.
It's not always a simple matter of communication skills. Some ideas require a foundation of knowledge, without which, the idea is nearly impossible to conceptualize.
This amounts to a form of inadvertant snobbery.
If you can't effectively summarize the functional or foundational knowledge of your discipline then that is your failure to communicate. You don't need to explain ideas to the nth degree before someone can get on board with them.
"Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is a key reliability issue that is of immediate concern in p-channel MOS devices stressed with negative gate voltages. NBTI manifests as an increase in the threshold voltage and consequent decrease in drain current and transconductance." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBTI
I don't have any background in this stuff, and that summary makes a lot of sense to me. I don't need to know how to do something in order to understand what it does, and even roughly why it does it.
Also, it's funny how DRM has become automatically negative. The reasons are obvious, but as I've said before many times, DRM can be a positive thing.
DRM is about stopping a program from doing what it is meant to do. That is always a negative thing. You are adding, to the design of something that works, something that stops it from working.
Now it may well be that you do not want everyone to have a working copy of your software. But don't pretend for a minute that breaking it makes it better. It creates a circumstance which is more favourable to you, at best - and even that's not proven.
But in the functional sense, your software would be better if it worked in more circumstances - end of story.
If DnF is ever released how good will it have to be to live up to 12 years of expectation? Of course it will make mint regardless, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
I used to worry about that, too. But these days, I'd settle for better than the competition - and frankly it probably already is.
The bad news is that will be 9% accurate, followed by 9% accurate, followed by...
On the plus side, it'll still be nearly ten times better than this one.
Planck will measure CMB with accuracy below 1%
Uhm. Is this technical terminology that I simply don't understand, or just a typo? Because I can understand a '1% margin of error', and I can sort of understand 'accurate to 1%'... but something which is below 1% accurate?
If only I could get away with that in my job.
1) Go to hell
2) At least mod down for 'troll'.
Offtopic, when I'm discussing the fucking issue at stake? You do realise there's no way that can look right?
Hell, if Murdoch actually has that much influence, maybe he can make it work after all.
What does Murdoch know about making money, anyway?
I don't know. But I know this: it sets off alarm bells ringing when somebody claims that a business model which has been evolving for nearly two decades is 'malfunctioning' just because it's not working in precisely the way in which they personally want it to work.
Believing that the universe revolves around you may be a useful trait for someone determined to push their agenda onto the world, and make money whilst doing so. But I don't think for a second that makes those people right - just powerful.
Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a 'flawed' business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a "malfunctioning" business model.
On the other hand, everytbody knows that charging for something that everyone else provides for free is a winning strategy.
Try pretending you're only downloading linux distros at 200Mbps! You'd have them all in fifteen minutes, and the rest is warez and tentacle porn - almost by a process of elimination.
Windows® Marketplace for Mobile
Prohibited Application Types:
1. Applications that... etc
Basically 'You can't sell stuff in our store which directly competes with the stuff we sell in our store?'
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable policy for a store owner to have.
That only becomes a problem when you have a monopoly. In this case, Microsoft don't. They don't across Platforms because of Apple, Palm, Android, and they don't within their own platform, because you can go elsewhere for apps (unlike with Apple!)
These days you can't fit the application and latest superdat onto a 128mb stick - and when I tell you that the application in only 20mb in size, you'll realise what a change this is. Their updates been spiralling out of control for two years. Now, some may argue that there's a lot more malware out there now, and I won't disagree. But I will say this: McAfee hasn't been getting significantly better as far as I can tell, and none of the other major players seem to have experienced this definitions file explosion, ergo McAfee is doing something wrong.
Furthermore, their version 8 enterprise has one of the worst failures I've ever seen for a virus scanner, which is hilariously related to the above. The application no longer knows how to handle its own virus defintions catalog: I'm not sure whether that's the sheer size, or the number of entries, but either way the update fails because of it. But get this: it says that the update has succeeded!
Can you imagine a more epic fail for a virus scanner than saying it's up to date, but being wrong? Neither could I, till I read the news today.
So long McAfee, I hope you enjoyed your time with the big players.
As they also claim Microsoft Windows is Posix compliant! It is simply to be able to tic a "mandated" requirement in some government procurement, not as something one would actually use or deploy.
Ah, I think you might have misread that one. The latest version of Windows is fully compliant with the ISO's 'Piece of Shit v9' standard. POS IX, not POSIX.
The movie industry is going to slaughter itself, and it can't happen soon enough for me -- not because I want less movies to be produced, but because I think that moviestars have too much influence in our culture.
After the rest of your quite cogent argument, this one strikes me as a total non-sequitur.
How much influence do you think movie stars have over the cost of a theatre ticket? Only a handful call any kind of shots, and even those are subject - entirely - to the whims of the players in the industry.
Celebrity culture is a major irritation, don't get me wrong. But those glossy idiots are just puppets, held on a string and doted on with a somewhat generous allowance.
I've heard that the estimated budget was $100 million. So they've made $80 million over that ... so what is the problem exactly?
The problem is that Hollywood Execs are not looking to be successful on a scale of 'job well done', and nor should they, from their paradigm. Their paradigm is manufacturing success, through advertising, TV spots, trailers, awareness campaigns, viral marketing, celebrity whoring, and as many other nefarious tactics as they can get away with, in order to absolutely 100% guarantee a certain level of success.
Just doing alright is a failure, from that paradigm.
A success would be the biggest opening weekend of all time. And that's what we see, again and again. Look, and you will see that this record is broken by every other truly triple-A blockbuster, probably happens a couple of times a year or more.
The real sign of failure is that video games now have even bigger opening weekends - Halo 3, followed hotly by GTA 4, really showed Holywood what an opening weekend could be.
Let the whoring begin!
This explains why I'm never sure if I want the ice cream or the banoffee pie, until the waiter brings it over, and I realise I've made the wrong choice.