I know what you mean about taking structured chunks of time to do things. If it's something like writing Perl or doing dev work that takes actual concentration, I usually have to take 9-12 hours of uninterrupted time (no phone calls, Tribes, or emails) to accomplish anything. Most of my projects don't require that much focus, but some do.
If you don't think helping small businesses compete in an age of mega-mergers and multi-national conglomerate monoliths counts as real work, then what, pray tell, does? Going to work for Electronic Arts?
Video game development is some of the hardest work you can choose. Long hours, low(er) pay, and the risk of gambling that your title is going to be one of the few that succeeeds out of thousands of releases each year.
That said, I'm a bit sad that you think writing a video game deserves more respect than helping small businesses compete in an age of mega-mergers and multinational conglomerates.
I play games all the time, after work, during work, before work. Mostly Tribes. It's a great stress-reliever, and I find (in the case of Tribes) that the contact with other computer geeks is sometimes nice.
I know what you're thinking...
"If he's playing video games he must not be doing his job very well"
and
"how can anybody mistake playing a computer game with other people for actual human contact?"
To that, I say;
If you're good at your job it shouldn't take you forty hours a week. If you're really good it shouldn't take you more than twenty.
Of course it's not the same as meeting face-to-face, silly. But it is the closest thing I have to being able to hang out with my friends at work.
As for getting sick of computers because of my job, well sure. Don't we all? The fact is, I can't avoid them, so I might as well try to enjoy them.
My point is just this; there are a great many bricks and mortar companies, not just banks, that mistakenly bought in to the whole idea that NT Server and its mutant brethren (Exchange Server, SQL, IIS, etc) were robust, enterprise-quality products.
Some of these companies deployed them in what I consider to be critical areas, i.e. email, legacy applications servers, etc. The departments I worked in used Exchange, for instance, to handle email (which may have not been a critical system ten years ago, but certainly it should be considered one today.) And, you may not believe this, but some of the transaction processing departments relied exclusive on Win95/NT workstations for their access/processing terminals.
Talk about a security hole...with a modem and BO2K, or even PCAnywhere, you could transfer funds, open accounts, etc. without stepping foot in the building.
Anyway, just thought this was sort of an interesting conversation; I'll admit, I heard you wrong (that'll teach me to jump into a conversation suddenly) but you gotta admit, there are more to "critical systems" these days than just database flavors running on big iron...
Obviously we have a problem with semantics here. Before, you said "critical systems", not "stored their money in MS products." Think carefully about the difference here and get back to me.
I use PayPal to pay for (heh) my domain registrations!!! through AlphaPython, and it has worked extremely well so far. So as far as real-world acceptance, it is starting to occur and there are some pretty cool things happening with it. Hopefully it will snowball and become more commonplace.
True, but the micropayment "pioneers" came out around 4-5 years ago IIRC. Cybercash was initially going to be a micropayment service, before they started to reap the fortunes of a credit card authorization service *cough*.
I think Paypal is going to hit critical mass pretty soon; even if it cost them $16 million ($5 referral * 3.3 million) for their current user base that's peanuts for a startup these days. I wonder what their revenue model is? Hmmm...
Oh, that's just a semantic quibble. With the credit card companies making any transaction under $20 prohibitively expensive, they have succintly defined the term "micropayment" to mean anything they won't bother with. And that means that, yes, PayPal is a micropayment service.
Does anybody know if it is healthier to take caffeine in extracted, pill form than drinking it in coffee? I would imagine the impurities present in coffee are partially responsible for some of the side effects.
Um, does anyone know why MS never tried to stop Samba? I'm very curious... were they that confident in their technical ability to surreptitiously corrupt the Kerberos standard (and thereby stop Samba from working with Win2K) that they decided to forgo the legal path? That'd be a first...
I am so sick of waiting for a dual-AMD mobo. It has literally been two years now since I heard the rumours about "oooh, there will be a dual K6-3 mobo by spring". Why, pray tell, does the friggin' CELERON have a dual CPU board, (Abit BP-6) but the Athlon and Duron and K6-2/3 are singular? Supposedly the Athlon has parallel logic built in. I know I'd be buying more AMD chips if they had good dual processor support.
I'll agree with ya there. Audio/Video/Sound editing is CPU/memory intensive. However, trying to coax Windows 2K/NT 4.0 or Win98 into doing these tasks is like herding cats. They simply weren't designed to cope with multiple streams of multimedia. In fact, BeOS does far more with far less hardware investment, for example. Too bad there aren't many apps for it.
Honestly, I can't believe how successful Adobe is these days. Their coding bloat is on par with the worst from Microsoft, their programs are buggy and tend to crash frequently (on my Win systems at least, and according to numerous other posters on Adobe BBS's), and they price gauge their customers like there is no tomorrow.
Of course, I don't run them on Macs, so I know I'll get flamed for this comment. Maybe the 2Ghz chips will run Adobe apps acceptably on Windows; but I think anybody who wants to use Adobe products should get a G4. For me, though, I've just switched to Macromedia for my graphic works; they are far better Windows coders in my opinion.
I've been running it on my web server for Zarakas and Dragonfly Dynamix and my other domains for most of this year. I don't use X or anything, so it runs PHP, MySQL, SSL, and Apache just fine with a P-133 and 32 (!) MB RAM.
For administration it's so nice to have SSH installed by default, so I don't have to worry about some kiddie on my LAN running a port sniffer on my telnet session. It's also kind of nice that it never crashes unless I do something particularly stupid (which I think I have thus far avoided, oh except for that time when I didn't have a swap partition.)
Theo is certainly a character. His work speaks for itself.
The mailing lists are just the way they should be; interesting, very technical, very easy to offend, and really amazingly helpful.
I've also been pleased with the fact that IPSec is built right on in there, so when the time comes for me to play with VPNs, I'm already 90% of the way there.
Now, whether or not I'd call OpenBSD user-friendly or easy to use, that's a different story. I guess I feel pretty good about having a Unix-y/BSD box around that makes me learn more CLI stuff every once in a while.
Whatever, dude. I installed OpenBSD over ftp using DSL and it was a piece of cake. Took about an hour, though, but maybe if my connection was faster...the only part that is slow is the disklabel (fdisk equivalent) stage which is admittedly not very intuitive.
I don't think I'm alone here; ftp installs of FreeBSD and OpenBSD are fairly common/frequent.
Red Hat took about 45 minutes to install off a CD when I re-evaluated the main distros this spring. This was on a P-133 with 32 MB ram and a 24x CD-rom. AFC Archvile, you must have really screwed it up to make it take 3 weeks...or was that FUD?
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Video game development is some of the hardest work you can choose. Long hours, low(er) pay, and the risk of gambling that your title is going to be one of the few that succeeeds out of thousands of releases each year.
That said, I'm a bit sad that you think writing a video game deserves more respect than helping small businesses compete in an age of mega-mergers and multinational conglomerates.
I know what you're thinking...
"If he's playing video games he must not be doing his job very well"
and
"how can anybody mistake playing a computer game with other people for actual human contact?"
To that, I say;
- If you're good at your job it shouldn't take you forty hours a week. If you're really good it shouldn't take you more than twenty.
- Of course it's not the same as meeting face-to-face, silly. But it is the closest thing I have to being able to hang out with my friends at work.
As for getting sick of computers because of my job, well sure. Don't we all? The fact is, I can't avoid them, so I might as well try to enjoy them.That just about makes me want to cry...know of any other forum sites around?
My point is just this; there are a great many bricks and mortar companies, not just banks, that mistakenly bought in to the whole idea that NT Server and its mutant brethren (Exchange Server, SQL, IIS, etc) were robust, enterprise-quality products.
Some of these companies deployed them in what I consider to be critical areas, i.e. email, legacy applications servers, etc. The departments I worked in used Exchange, for instance, to handle email (which may have not been a critical system ten years ago, but certainly it should be considered one today.) And, you may not believe this, but some of the transaction processing departments relied exclusive on Win95/NT workstations for their access/processing terminals.
Talk about a security hole...with a modem and BO2K, or even PCAnywhere, you could transfer funds, open accounts, etc. without stepping foot in the building.
Anyway, just thought this was sort of an interesting conversation; I'll admit, I heard you wrong (that'll teach me to jump into a conversation suddenly) but you gotta admit, there are more to "critical systems" these days than just database flavors running on big iron...
Obviously we have a problem with semantics here. Before, you said "critical systems", not "stored their money in MS products." Think carefully about the difference here and get back to me.
Ooops bad link, sorry. AlphaPython is here instead.
I think Paypal is going to hit critical mass pretty soon; even if it cost them $16 million ($5 referral * 3.3 million) for their current user base that's peanuts for a startup these days. I wonder what their revenue model is? Hmmm...
Yeah? Well, you're full of shit. I worked at a US bank that used Microsoft products for their so-called critical systems...
And I also consulted for that bank during buyouts of other banks, which also used MS products. So quit spouting off when you don't know jack.
Oh, that's just a semantic quibble. With the credit card companies making any transaction under $20 prohibitively expensive, they have succintly defined the term "micropayment" to mean anything they won't bother with. And that means that, yes, PayPal is a micropayment service.
Does anybody know if it is healthier to take caffeine in extracted, pill form than drinking it in coffee? I would imagine the impurities present in coffee are partially responsible for some of the side effects.
Um, does anyone know why MS never tried to stop Samba? I'm very curious... were they that confident in their technical ability to surreptitiously corrupt the Kerberos standard (and thereby stop Samba from working with Win2K) that they decided to forgo the legal path? That'd be a first...
Don't go giving them any ideas, dammit! I need Samba, ok?
It's wrong, unless the PalmOS has magically become Linux-based.
Must....drink....coffee...
And we're supposed to believe that you are a stock guru? Heh. Well, you're doing great so far...
*g*, thinks of Austin Powers...
"who...does....number....two....work...for....?"
"That's right, buddy, you tell that turd who's boss."
Oh, that sounds great! I'm running to the store RIGHT NOW to buy my own copy! Oh my goodness I'm in Rhapsody! *g*
I am so sick of waiting for a dual-AMD mobo. It has literally been two years now since I heard the rumours about "oooh, there will be a dual K6-3 mobo by spring". Why, pray tell, does the friggin' CELERON have a dual CPU board, (Abit BP-6) but the Athlon and Duron and K6-2/3 are singular? Supposedly the Athlon has parallel logic built in. I know I'd be buying more AMD chips if they had good dual processor support.
Honestly, I can't believe how successful Adobe is these days. Their coding bloat is on par with the worst from Microsoft, their programs are buggy and tend to crash frequently (on my Win systems at least, and according to numerous other posters on Adobe BBS's), and they price gauge their customers like there is no tomorrow.
Of course, I don't run them on Macs, so I know I'll get flamed for this comment. Maybe the 2Ghz chips will run Adobe apps acceptably on Windows; but I think anybody who wants to use Adobe products should get a G4. For me, though, I've just switched to Macromedia for my graphic works; they are far better Windows coders in my opinion.
For administration it's so nice to have SSH installed by default, so I don't have to worry about some kiddie on my LAN running a port sniffer on my telnet session. It's also kind of nice that it never crashes unless I do something particularly stupid (which I think I have thus far avoided, oh except for that time when I didn't have a swap partition.)
Theo is certainly a character. His work speaks for itself.
The mailing lists are just the way they should be; interesting, very technical, very easy to offend, and really amazingly helpful.
I've also been pleased with the fact that IPSec is built right on in there, so when the time comes for me to play with VPNs, I'm already 90% of the way there.
Now, whether or not I'd call OpenBSD user-friendly or easy to use, that's a different story. I guess I feel pretty good about having a Unix-y/BSD box around that makes me learn more CLI stuff every once in a while.
I don't think I'm alone here; ftp installs of FreeBSD and OpenBSD are fairly common/frequent.
Red Hat took about 45 minutes to install off a CD when I re-evaluated the main distros this spring. This was on a P-133 with 32 MB ram and a 24x CD-rom. AFC Archvile, you must have really screwed it up to make it take 3 weeks...or was that FUD?