This is a big win for transparency. I am glad that Facebook did this and that they are being open about it.

Marketers have known this forever. The media has been manipulating the emotions of the American populace for generations. Through their actions, Facebook is bringing the discussion into the open and making people aware of it. I think that by now, most people are aware of the fact that the "news" is just a propaganda tool used to maintain the narrative of the powers that be.

This is also a big win for personal responsibility. It has now been proven that what we focus on and what we choose to share impacts not only our moods, but the moods of those in our network. The question now becomes, "Will you share positive stories that make people feel good, or negative stories that make them feel bad?" Given control over your own information channel, will you continue to parrot the party line and share mainstream propaganda? Or will you amplify alternate signals?

http://socnetmastermind.blogsp... (ignore the other posts, this is just a place for random, social networking related thoughts)

Linguistic bot fairy tales defeat Baysean filterings none of the times

On a related note, I just received an email from Ubisoft this morning offering 20% off of Watch Dogs. The game has been out for a month.

That is a really interesting PDF. I never would have guessed that the average gamer is 31 years old.

I was thinking about the multi-player server stranglehold while I was typing my post, so it is interesting that you brought it up. I do not know if anything can be done about it. I cannot conceive of any legal way to obligate companies to keep infrastructure online, and as much as it might benefit me, I would be opposed to governmental intervention in the matter.

While we might rant about these subjects on /., I do not see it changing any time soon.. if at all. The studios are multi-billion dollar organizations that have to keep thousands of people working. The only way to do that is to keep the games flowing, and develop various franchises. Games like GTA are more and more like interactive movies. The production costs are huge. The idea of DLC, on one level, is not a bad one. Develop a compelling game world / context and then sell short stories that add life to the context.

The most legitimate gripe that people have relates to quality control issues, especially around launch. The only way I can see to address that, as a consumer, is to refuse to purchase a game until the publisher proves that it is stable. The only way the publishers will ever be compelled to deliver a solid title at launch is if pre-orders cease. It is a Catch 22. The average American psyche is too hung up on having new things, and having them FIRST. With competitive online games, nobody wants to be left behind. The psychology behind the industry is such that change in consumer behavior is highly unlikely.

The only way that the studios will ever get the message is if parents refuse to buy this garbage for their children. Older gamers are a minority of the market. There are plenty of gamers in the 18-30 age bracket who will continue to buy this garbage. The only way out is for parents who game, to make wise choices for their children.

It will take a generation to change things, but it can happen.

I finally learned my lesson, but I am guilty of pre-ordering way too many crap releases from EA. BF4 was the last one I will buy. Between the broken at release model, the DLC, and the rapid release cycle that guarantees a game will be dead 12-18 months after it comes out, I am over it.

I think the best that we, as a community, can hope for is that enough people exercise impulse control and wait to buy the game until the price is reduced once or twice. Doing that would communicate two messages. One, we are tired of buggy beta (at best) releases and refuse to tolerate them. Two, the release prices are way too high and we are not going to pay $60+ for crappy code.

Yes, Win7 x64 Professional. I am using a Samsung 840 (128GB) for the pagefile disk. I have been putting pagefile.sys (and TEMP, TMP) on a separate disk since NT 4.0. I have not run any benchmarks on Windows 7 to see what the improvement is like.

If you are curious about the impact of the pagefile on the OS drive, I would look at disk queue depth and file latency. As long as your queue depth isn't over 2 and your file latency stays in 5-10ms range, you should be fine.

Before I went SSD on the data drive, I was running 7200 SATA drives in RAID1. The write penalty kind of sucked, but having two spindles for reads was nice. The benefit only really showed up during sustained reads, like loading new levels in various games.

To be completely honest, as soon as the system starts hitting the pagefile with any sort of regularity, you need to buy more RAM. Tuning the disk subsystem is not going to get you much benefit. For example with WatchDogs, I started playing it with 6GB of RAM. That was not enough, and the OS was paging at 16MB/s. That was just too much IO, even with a dedicated drive. The drive itself can handle way more than 16MB/s, but the application could not deal with the latency of having to go to disk.

Where did you get the impression that I am not running SSDs?

I was really looking forward to the game and pre-ordered it for PC. My experience has been horrible. I am running an i7-960 (8 cores, 3.20ghz), 12GB of RAM and 2 GeForce 660s in SLI (4GB of total video RAM). I have a dedicated OS drive, a dedicated games drive and a dedicated pagefile drive. By way of background, I run ~1400VMs for a living. The VMs support a number of SaaS applications that are sensitive to transaction latency. I tune applications for performance for a living.

The game runs like crap on my PC, even on medium settings. It reads files from all over the place. It pulls textures out of the temp directory. It pulls data files out of the game directory. Even with over 4GB of FREE (not Available) RAM, it still manages to make the system do a steady 2MB/s of paging.

The game play is horrible. The driving is clunky. The interface scheme was obviously designed for a game pad. The multi-player is embarassing. The net code is crap. With 6 people, there were serious rubber banding issues. That was with a very small slice of the map. It is not like they had to render the entire thing. In a good 50% of the multi-player games I was in, there was at least one invulnerable person. That leads me to believe that the code is obviously pretty easy to exploit.

The game concept was a good one, but the execution was horrible. I have learned my lesson. In this day and age, everything is in beta. Developers are okay with releasing incomplete products and patching them later. I spent my youth couriering warez and getting a free ride. Now that I can afford games, I have been willingly purchasing them to support the studios. I cannot do it anymore. They just release crap products. They are not even worth pirating.

I was more concerned with the Americans who are going to be eating the bananas that, according to the article, are being sent to the States.

File this under donotwant. Unlike most vitamins, A is not water soluble and can build up to toxic levels in the body. Of special importance to Africans is that it also makes the body more susceptible to sun burns.

I was thinking something similar. Now instead of having a bunch of numbers easily accessible to thieves in a compromised POS system, they are simply going to be discarding a bunch of imprints covered in Chinese food waste.

My experience with the technology has been peripheral. The demonstration I saw showed clustering and with that technology, it removed the need to know what to look for. It put the concepts / clusters together for you and let you see, at a high level, basically what the data set was about. This was assuming that the data set was trained on itself. If you had a more focused training set, say one derived from already vetted intelligence, the algorithms could sort through the noise to find conceptually similar result sets.

The above assumes that there are compute and storage resources available to do the initial training. Obviously the entire data set is too large, so it needs to be culled and that is the challenge.

Off topic and not terrorism related, but it would be interesting to see the correlations between big wins in the stock market and communications patterns between individuals leading up to them. Not that the SEC has the stomach for it, nor am I comfortable with the civil liberties implications of such a setup, but it would be cool to let the algos go for a year or two and see what potential prosecutions they bring back.

Isilon + Hadoop + Content Analyst (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Analyst_Company)

The last piece is just what the civilians have access to. It came out of the intelligence community. You can guarantee that the NSA has something way more advanced and/or better optimized at this point. Specifically look at Conceptual Clustering and Categorization.

Their challenge is not going to be pulling the data out of the haystack. It is going to be having enough analysts to sort through the results and enough guidance from on high as to which result sets to review first.

The difference is that the banks are being sued and the underlying data (loan records, underwriting guidelines, securities information, etc.) is being preserved and provided to plaintiffs and defendants. The NSA is refusing to do collection / preservation / discovery at all.

Right. And every child is a special snowflake, so different than their peers and the generations that came before them. Heaven forbid that people who have dedicated their lives to educating children should be allowed to leverage data sets and discuss those data sets with their peers.

Children inherit their values from their parents until they are old enough to develop their own. The community are the educators who are teaching the children. Nerds talk about nerd stuff. Jocks talk about sports. Teachers talk about education. Children have plenty of opportunities to choose various paths. If as a parent you have problems with teachers doing what teachers do, then maybe you should educate your children yourself.

Personally, I went through the public school system and I turned out well enough. I can support myself and my family. I contribute to my community. I was in GATE (Gifted and Talented Education). It was one of those evil programs where educators got together and put together curriculums tailored to "Gifted and Talented" students. (http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/gt/gt/) There were criteria and tests required to get into it. I was ranked against my peers. Oddly enough, everything turned out alright in the end.