That and if your data is that important then you have your screensaver to be password protected. OS X does it, Windows Does it, Linux Does it, Unix does it....
I don't know about you but if I leave my laptop in my hotel room. I tend to lock it up in the safe. (normally I power it off, etc...) It seems to me this will only work for a very ideal set of conditions. And just posted to make people not secure their laptop.
It seems like you are doing a lot of work that is not designing games. So Lets say it took you 6 months to make the game. So with PayPal how much do you get dinged for every sale. How much is the marketing company going to charge you? How much time are you planning to put in making YouTube, developing a nice game site, all the viral marketing. Sometimes Marketing fails, so that is even more risk on your end.
For the most part you may get better margins however you may end up better with a publisher, in terms of better living (not having to do everything) and the fact that you may get say $1.00 from a $60.00 box copy. vs. $30.00 per $60.00 box copy. But it could be the difference between millions of sails (A million dollars to you) vs. 10000 sales ($300,000).
Now the trick it to find the right publisher for you one and make a deal that you feel is fair, and make sure the publisher can do better then you could alone.
But like all business sometimes it is better to do it yourself (say that $300,000 my be the best your game could do due to a niche status your are filling) or sometimes it is better to get a publisher because a lot of people would like your game.
Just out of curiosity why are so many slashdotters pro Pirate Bay. Even if they may not breaking the letter of the law they are going against the intent of the law. It is just an attempt at moral justification so you can sleep at night for downloading that copy of Photoshop? If you want people to respect the GNU policy you really should respect other policies.
Do you see they hypocrisy in the situation. When FSF sues a company for GNU violations then saying how horrible that pirate bay isn't allowed to ignore the licenses and copyright of other peoples code.
Upgrade your Linux distribution... Ooop there goes your custom kernel. Upgrade Firefox, Oh some of my addins don't work any more. When I went from OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard my SVN Client failed to run. It happens sure LInux and OS X are better at this, but still it hapends. Don't let your zealotness for other OS's make you blind to their problems.
1. There is a difference between publicly available and common. When I took my CS degree the idea was more to the fact that the cores will gust get faster not get multiple CPU's. Except for a server environment.
2. Multi-Threading is not parallel processing! Multi-Threaded coded converts easily to parallel processing but it is not parallel processing. If you know the OS's Multi-Tasking schedule then you are able to time events, also with a single CPU can assume consistent memory mapping. If you set the AX register with a value on a parallel system which CPU gets it. Are they both in sync. Do you want them to be in sync as a fast switch. In my undergrad I did take a class in parallel processing however it was based on a Masters class and it was offered only once... Ever... in the college. We found ways to bring computation from O(n) to O(log n) and O(n^n) to O(n). When I took the class that covered multi-threading it wasn't about fully optimizing your code for parallel processing but for those tasks that you don't need done in realtime, and making sure they don't step on each others foot.
3. We all make errors. If we messed up our locking system (even if well planned) the program may still work without knowing it is failing until it is too late. No matter how much planning people will make mistakes. Single process apps make it for easier testing of conditions. Unless you want to put a wait command in every thread for testing you can miss something. I am always worried about people who think that if they just plan far enough they won't have any bugs. As they tend to have the most serious, as they do not realize that the "Code as you Go" is not the opposite but a reality to even the best designed program of any complexity. A good Design makes sure all the pieces are in place however when you get into the details you will find expected results are not working as expected.
It is the EU job to keep down all those awful American Based Companies. If these companies had a strong European presence do you think they would be as hard on them. Probably not.
1. Parallel Software development is normally taught as a Masters Level class for computer science. Only for the last 3 years has multi-processing architecture been available for common PCs. So sorry It is not a common Skill for good parallel software development.
2. Having to rethink your coding methods isn't hard but you need to be retained to think about problems differently. Multi-Threading isn't the only thing about real parallel processing programming.
3. Spending a week to make sure your threads are completing and starting at the right time and are Not creating a race condition where you have just been lucky does require a lot of extra coding that for most applications can be the difference between the software being a benefit or a cost.
Back in the Old days. Like the late 60s cars had full power steering. They were replaced with todays partial power steering as people didn't get the feedback from the road.
However I think internet searching may be more effective then just learning a new skill. When you search threw the stuff you find a lot of stuff that you have never though about based on that topic... For example I just did a google search for well. Thinking of a Well for water where Little Timmy can fall in. Then the first search result was for Wells Fargo then there are a bunch of site for wellness and there is a result for digging a well. So for that search result I was exposed 3 different idea at once. My brain needed to do what a computer cant and process the information for relevancy for the search. So I saw Wells Fargo, I went well that is a Bank (Or the traditional shipping carrier of the old days) So my brain processed all that information and heck even the tune from the Music Man. Then there is wellness my brain scolded me for having a sandwich at McDonalds today saying I need to eat healthier. Then finally I see information about Well. So that was a lot or processing for my brain. Much more if I was just trying to learn a new skill.
What the new languages and OS's are doing, are just making it easier for developers to make code that runs on parallel processors. However most of us are not trained to write parallel code. And there are some algorithms that cannot be parallelized. What the moderns OS are doing is taking code that was designed to run multi-threaded or parallel in the first place and in essence have them run more efficient on multi-processors. As well as giving you some tools to make development easier and stop us from trying to work around all those conflicts that distracts us from software development. Much like how String classes came common for developers so we didn't need to fuss around with allocations just to do some basic string manipulation... (Alocate space, calculate the memory offset insure the last character was a 0x00...) aka making development really easy for buffer overflow errors if you missed a step.
Unless you are calculating area then you need to calculate it as (Pi/2)*r^2 vs Pi*r^2. In general it is a good idea to avoid division if possible. Messing around with 1/2 pi is tricker and can lead to more errors then messing with 2pi. In essence Pi is the lowest common factor so it is more correct for a constant.
In essence Unions Cripple the Companies Human Resource. If you are not a Union Player you are at a disadvantage. First any gripes you have are not as seriously put into consideration. Or if you are up for promotion the Union may place someone else.
Company tells people to vote a particular way: Bad. Union tells people to vote a particular way: Good. Because the Company is all about its own self interest. Unions are for the employees and don't have any self interests.
If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Any large organization will want to control its masses.
Yes I have. Especially if they are renting from high rise buildings. Where the landlord will often offer telephone service/infrastructure or even Gasp! VoIP telephone service where the "Server area" consists of a Cable Modem, an 8 port switch (for VoIP phones (small office 7 phones) and a WiFi for internet. So all that is less then 1/2 cubic feet of space even with the MacMini. So that can be stuffed behind a desk.
Small offices might need that. I have seen offices that are designed to look real slick. However there is a bulky PC as a server in the corner. If you have a nice Mac Mini on a desk or behind a flat screen doing the work for the small office. Hey it would be worth it as for a small business your appearance is very important.
But OS X for a server, is rather lame. OS X is a Desktop OS Windows is kinda mediocre for both Desktop and Server but gets the job done. Using Linux for normal desktop use for normal actives is just doing extra work... However it is perfect for a server.
Sure they can all do the Job as a Server and Desktop and they have their variants which make them a bit better at it. However OS X even being Unix Based doesn't make it a good server. It might make it a reliable server just as long as you do what Apple want you to do with it.
When you sell your pride and joy. The best thing to do is take your money and no longer think about it. Otherwise you will be frustrated because the new owner doesn't care about it as much as you did.
We will have to see... Apple could repeat old history and make the first popular mainstream smartphone (like they did with the Apple II) Get good market share then have a competitor with a more open solution take over the market. Or what could happen is all the carriers who wants to make sure they don't blow it like IBM did. Will keep Android Locked down and each version incompatible with each other, so in essence keeping a bunch of branches of Android which won't work seamlessly. Allowing Apple to keep the main market share. As the carriers keep their control by keeping every android version locked to themselfs.
Also don't forget as we get older we loose the ability to hear tones. So as we get older and gain the ability to appreciate a better audio our brains and ears loose the ability to hear them. Secondly we are often not listening to such music on Top Quality Thousand dollars speakers but with rather little poor quality cheap speakers. So many of the advantages you get are not going threw the speakers. Finally when people listen to an iPod they tend to do it while they are doing something else, not in full focus of the music and it nuances.
So for my online music I much rather get a fast download over a minor marginal increase in quality that I may or may not hear. I minored in Music in college, my ear should be slightly better then the average. As I have been trained to listen to a lot of details... However even for the best of ears the difference will be like those 2 frames when you take you eye exam and they ask you better or worse. And they need to flip them about 5 6 times until you think you know the difference.
The Amega OS was almost 10 years ahead of its time in features, however that was 20 years ago. Because of the rather stagnate growth in Amega it is now basically 10 years behind the times. While that is a far way it isn't as bad as it seems.
Because of Vista failures most people are still using XP (Windows 7 hasn't gone out yet) so right now Microsoft is about 8 year behind the time... However because of Windows 7 and the fact they they learned from vista. They are expected to be caught up real soon.
Linux in terms of graphics and User Interface it is about the same now as XP... With some more modern elements so I will be nice and say Linux is about 5 years behind the time, in GUI. Some of the internals are state of the art the other are 30 years old and probably should be re-looked at but probably won't in fear of breaking compatibility.
OS X is mostly pretty modern. However some parts like Linux are 30 years old tech that are left behind. (Having to reformat my drive because of bad iNodes remind me of that)
So Amiga has a chance to get caught up. And I think there is a hungry market for an other OS.
Sure Most people use Windows however people want a good choices.
OS X will only work with Mac Hardware... Although Mac Hardware isn't more expensive then PC for the same specs you really have a limited choices for models and specs.
Linux for desktop and UI still isn't that great. And there is a lot of idealism that the average joe just doesn't care about... Why can't linux support this driver? Well because the manufacuture won't make it open source so We will not put it in our pure distribution. So what I want my hardware to work for the OS! And if you get people who are above grandma and below Tech Geek. You get a lot of questions on how you do a lot of rather basic (advanced) things.
I think programers are more tolerated for their quarks then other fields. However as time goes on I see this becoming more rare. The Baby Boomer Tech people didn't have any replacements. There wasn't an alternative if you fire the guy then you are stuck. They know that so they will just be as quirky as they could. Generation X Comes into play during the 90's and 2000's They enter a field where the environment celebrates quirky behavior so they continue it... However there are new threats going on Best Practices for Information technology and development are being found, the reckless push for technology for technology sake has open up communications around the world. Now it is possible for people around to world to compete with your job. The idea that the guy is too smart to fire is becoming passé so what if he is the best if he is that big of a jerk then fire him, if he is becoming irreplaceable then that means there is no exit stradigy and if he chooses to quit or pisses off someone enough to shoot him then you are dead in the water. So better off in the long term with a less skilled good employee then a high skill bad employee. So this has been increasing from around 2003 and upwards. A lot of the quirkiness is now limited to more water cooler weirdness vs. professional weirdness. Now generation Y is comming on board. They are actually more sane then the other generations as they entered a completive market and they know they are not irreplaceable. However there is still a bit of the culture going on so they will take part of it. But to a lesser extent. I expect around 2020 that IT people will professional like the accounting or sales department is.
Slashdot Mirror
That and if your data is that important then you have your screensaver to be password protected. OS X does it, Windows Does it, Linux Does it, Unix does it....
I don't know about you but if I leave my laptop in my hotel room. I tend to lock it up in the safe. (normally I power it off, etc...) It seems to me this will only work for a very ideal set of conditions. And just posted to make people not secure their laptop.
It seems like you are doing a lot of work that is not designing games.
So Lets say it took you 6 months to make the game.
So with PayPal how much do you get dinged for every sale. How much is the marketing company going to charge you? How much time are you planning to put in making YouTube, developing a nice game site, all the viral marketing. Sometimes Marketing fails, so that is even more risk on your end.
For the most part you may get better margins however you may end up better with a publisher, in terms of better living (not having to do everything) and the fact that you may get say $1.00 from a $60.00 box copy. vs. $30.00 per $60.00 box copy. But it could be the difference between millions of sails (A million dollars to you) vs. 10000 sales ($300,000).
Now the trick it to find the right publisher for you one and make a deal that you feel is fair, and make sure the publisher can do better then you could alone.
But like all business sometimes it is better to do it yourself (say that $300,000 my be the best your game could do due to a niche status your are filling) or sometimes it is better to get a publisher because a lot of people would like your game.
Google Toolbar is a "Custom" product put on IE.
Just out of curiosity why are so many slashdotters pro Pirate Bay. Even if they may not breaking the letter of the law they are going against the intent of the law. It is just an attempt at moral justification so you can sleep at night for downloading that copy of Photoshop? If you want people to respect the GNU policy you really should respect other policies.
Do you see they hypocrisy in the situation. When FSF sues a company for GNU violations then saying how horrible that pirate bay isn't allowed to ignore the licenses and copyright of other peoples code.
Upgrade your Linux distribution... Ooop there goes your custom kernel. Upgrade Firefox, Oh some of my addins don't work any more.
When I went from OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard my SVN Client failed to run. It happens sure LInux and OS X are better at this, but still it hapends. Don't let your zealotness for other OS's make you blind to their problems.
1. There is a difference between publicly available and common. When I took my CS degree the idea was more to the fact that the cores will gust get faster not get multiple CPU's. Except for a server environment.
2. Multi-Threading is not parallel processing! Multi-Threaded coded converts easily to parallel processing but it is not parallel processing. If you know the OS's Multi-Tasking schedule then you are able to time events, also with a single CPU can assume consistent memory mapping. If you set the AX register with a value on a parallel system which CPU gets it. Are they both in sync. Do you want them to be in sync as a fast switch. In my undergrad I did take a class in parallel processing however it was based on a Masters class and it was offered only once... Ever... in the college. We found ways to bring computation from O(n) to O(log n) and O(n^n) to O(n). When I took the class that covered multi-threading it wasn't about fully optimizing your code for parallel processing but for those tasks that you don't need done in realtime, and making sure they don't step on each others foot.
3. We all make errors. If we messed up our locking system (even if well planned) the program may still work without knowing it is failing until it is too late. No matter how much planning people will make mistakes. Single process apps make it for easier testing of conditions. Unless you want to put a wait command in every thread for testing you can miss something. I am always worried about people who think that if they just plan far enough they won't have any bugs. As they tend to have the most serious, as they do not realize that the "Code as you Go" is not the opposite but a reality to even the best designed program of any complexity. A good Design makes sure all the pieces are in place however when you get into the details you will find expected results are not working as expected.
It is the EU job to keep down all those awful American Based Companies. If these companies had a strong European presence do you think they would be as hard on them. Probably not.
1. Parallel Software development is normally taught as a Masters Level class for computer science. Only for the last 3 years has multi-processing architecture been available for common PCs. So sorry It is not a common Skill for good parallel software development.
2. Having to rethink your coding methods isn't hard but you need to be retained to think about problems differently. Multi-Threading isn't the only thing about real parallel processing programming.
3. Spending a week to make sure your threads are completing and starting at the right time and are Not creating a race condition where you have just been lucky does require a lot of extra coding that for most applications can be the difference between the software being a benefit or a cost.
Back in the Old days. Like the late 60s cars had full power steering. They were replaced with todays partial power steering as people didn't get the feedback from the road.
However I think internet searching may be more effective then just learning a new skill. When you search threw the stuff you find a lot of stuff that you have never though about based on that topic... For example I just did a google search for well. Thinking of a Well for water where Little Timmy can fall in. Then the first search result was for Wells Fargo then there are a bunch of site for wellness and there is a result for digging a well. So for that search result I was exposed 3 different idea at once. My brain needed to do what a computer cant and process the information for relevancy for the search. So I saw Wells Fargo, I went well that is a Bank (Or the traditional shipping carrier of the old days) So my brain processed all that information and heck even the tune from the Music Man. Then there is wellness my brain scolded me for having a sandwich at McDonalds today saying I need to eat healthier. Then finally I see information about Well. So that was a lot or processing for my brain. Much more if I was just trying to learn a new skill.
What the new languages and OS's are doing, are just making it easier for developers to make code that runs on parallel processors. However most of us are not trained to write parallel code. And there are some algorithms that cannot be parallelized. What the moderns OS are doing is taking code that was designed to run multi-threaded or parallel in the first place and in essence have them run more efficient on multi-processors. As well as giving you some tools to make development easier and stop us from trying to work around all those conflicts that distracts us from software development. Much like how String classes came common for developers so we didn't need to fuss around with allocations just to do some basic string manipulation... (Alocate space, calculate the memory offset insure the last character was a 0x00...) aka making development really easy for buffer overflow errors if you missed a step.
Unless you are calculating area then you need to calculate it as (Pi/2)*r^2 vs Pi*r^2. In general it is a good idea to avoid division if possible. Messing around with 1/2 pi is tricker and can lead to more errors then messing with 2pi. In essence Pi is the lowest common factor so it is more correct for a constant.
In essence Unions Cripple the Companies Human Resource. If you are not a Union Player you are at a disadvantage. First any gripes you have are not as seriously put into consideration. Or if you are up for promotion the Union may place someone else.
Company tells people to vote a particular way: Bad.
Union tells people to vote a particular way: Good.
Because the Company is all about its own self interest.
Unions are for the employees and don't have any self interests.
If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Any large organization will want to control its masses.
Yes I have. Especially if they are renting from high rise buildings. Where the landlord will often offer telephone service/infrastructure or even Gasp! VoIP telephone service where the "Server area" consists of a Cable Modem, an 8 port switch (for VoIP phones (small office 7 phones) and a WiFi for internet. So all that is less then 1/2 cubic feet of space even with the MacMini. So that can be stuffed behind a desk.
Small offices might need that. I have seen offices that are designed to look real slick. However there is a bulky PC as a server in the corner. If you have a nice Mac Mini on a desk or behind a flat screen doing the work for the small office. Hey it would be worth it as for a small business your appearance is very important.
But OS X for a server, is rather lame. OS X is a Desktop OS
Windows is kinda mediocre for both Desktop and Server but gets the job done.
Using Linux for normal desktop use for normal actives is just doing extra work... However it is perfect for a server.
Sure they can all do the Job as a Server and Desktop and they have their variants which make them a bit better at it. However OS X even being Unix Based doesn't make it a good server. It might make it a reliable server just as long as you do what Apple want you to do with it.
When you sell your pride and joy. The best thing to do is take your money and no longer think about it. Otherwise you will be frustrated because the new owner doesn't care about it as much as you did.
We will have to see... Apple could repeat old history and make the first popular mainstream smartphone (like they did with the Apple II) Get good market share then have a competitor with a more open solution take over the market. Or what could happen is all the carriers who wants to make sure they don't blow it like IBM did. Will keep Android Locked down and each version incompatible with each other, so in essence keeping a bunch of branches of Android which won't work seamlessly. Allowing Apple to keep the main market share. As the carriers keep their control by keeping every android version locked to themselfs.
Why do you think Slashdot is smarter then everyone else?
I can't find proof in these comments.
Also don't forget as we get older we loose the ability to hear tones. So as we get older and gain the ability to appreciate a better audio our brains and ears loose the ability to hear them. Secondly we are often not listening to such music on Top Quality Thousand dollars speakers but with rather little poor quality cheap speakers. So many of the advantages you get are not going threw the speakers.
Finally when people listen to an iPod they tend to do it while they are doing something else, not in full focus of the music and it nuances.
So for my online music I much rather get a fast download over a minor marginal increase in quality that I may or may not hear. I minored in Music in college, my ear should be slightly better then the average. As I have been trained to listen to a lot of details... However even for the best of ears the difference will be like those 2 frames when you take you eye exam and they ask you better or worse. And they need to flip them about 5 6 times until you think you know the difference.
Perhaps his next job will be at Microsoft. That company is in need of self destructive management.
The Amega OS was almost 10 years ahead of its time in features, however that was 20 years ago. Because of the rather stagnate growth in Amega it is now basically 10 years behind the times. While that is a far way it isn't as bad as it seems.
Because of Vista failures most people are still using XP (Windows 7 hasn't gone out yet) so right now Microsoft is about 8 year behind the time... However because of Windows 7 and the fact they they learned from vista. They are expected to be caught up real soon.
Linux in terms of graphics and User Interface it is about the same now as XP... With some more modern elements so I will be nice and say Linux is about 5 years behind the time, in GUI. Some of the internals are state of the art the other are 30 years old and probably should be re-looked at but probably won't in fear of breaking compatibility.
OS X is mostly pretty modern. However some parts like Linux are 30 years old tech that are left behind. (Having to reformat my drive because of bad iNodes remind me of that)
So Amiga has a chance to get caught up. And I think there is a hungry market for an other OS.
Sure Most people use Windows however people want a good choices.
OS X will only work with Mac Hardware... Although Mac Hardware isn't more expensive then PC for the same specs you really have a limited choices for models and specs.
Linux for desktop and UI still isn't that great. And there is a lot of idealism that the average joe just doesn't care about... Why can't linux support this driver? Well because the manufacuture won't make it open source so We will not put it in our pure distribution. So what I want my hardware to work for the OS! And if you get people who are above grandma and below Tech Geek. You get a lot of questions on how you do a lot of rather basic (advanced) things.
I think programers are more tolerated for their quarks then other fields. However as time goes on I see this becoming more rare.
The Baby Boomer Tech people didn't have any replacements. There wasn't an alternative if you fire the guy then you are stuck. They know that so they will just be as quirky as they could.
Generation X Comes into play during the 90's and 2000's They enter a field where the environment celebrates quirky behavior so they continue it...
However there are new threats going on Best Practices for Information technology and development are being found, the reckless push for technology for technology sake has open up communications around the world. Now it is possible for people around to world to compete with your job. The idea that the guy is too smart to fire is becoming passé so what if he is the best if he is that big of a jerk then fire him, if he is becoming irreplaceable then that means there is no exit stradigy and if he chooses to quit or pisses off someone enough to shoot him then you are dead in the water. So better off in the long term with a less skilled good employee then a high skill bad employee. So this has been increasing from around 2003 and upwards. A lot of the quirkiness is now limited to more water cooler weirdness vs. professional weirdness.
Now generation Y is comming on board. They are actually more sane then the other generations as they entered a completive market and they know they are not irreplaceable. However there is still a bit of the culture going on so they will take part of it. But to a lesser extent. I expect around 2020 that IT people will professional like the accounting or sales department is.
Open up your firewall for say 20-30 minutes...