I think you missed the part was a federal judge ruled that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market. No such ruling has been made against Apple in the portable music market, and for good reason.
As good as Apple is at making iPods, there are clones galore out there that work "just as well", are cheaper, and are selling tons of product.
Comparing the Apple and the iPod to Microsoft and Windows is quite absurd.
(all that said, I think an automatic install of safari with itunes upgrades sounds sleazy. Unfortunately being sleazy isn't illegal...)
I think you have it backwards. Shouldn't you be saying:
"So, we ARE going to get on GCC's case, right? For breaking compatibility with millions of systems, just like Microsoft intentionally broke Firefox, Opera, and Safari?"
Standards compliance is generally a good drum to bang, but whats REALLY important is what you're breaking. It seems to me GCC has a fix in search of a problem. If they really want to meet the standard here, I think it would be reasonable to request the fix from the broken kernels and wait a reasonable amount of time for proliferation before releasing the fix.
I don't care much either way, mainly wanted to point out that the problem with IE has been the fact that it BREAKS other web browsers. The standards are just an easy place to point to determine which browser is the problem. And of course blatant abuse of a monopoly to squash competitors gets some of us a little peeved too.
Agreed on first impressions. But what first impression do you want to give?
Sure, if it's "I'm an overcompensated member of upper management", wear a suit, cut your hair super-short and gel it up, etc.
If the impression you want to give is "I'm a crusty unix expert" then grow a full beard, where a stained shirt, shorts, and sandals, and change your name to Eric or Randy.
Meanwhile if you're going for "I'm a competent developer who isn't a stubborn socially inept dickwad" then go for decent hygeine, jeans, and a t-shirt or button-up shirt, with whatever hair style makes you happy. This is probably where most developers should aim.
Every developer I've interviewed (for regular dev positions) who wore a suit has been overcompensating for incompetence or lack of experience. I'm also highly suspicious of men who shave more than a couple times a week. But that's just me - I'd have to shave twice a day to look clean-shaven for work.:)
(Note: I fall into any of the 3 categories above depending on day of the week, just saying it's important to know the impression you're giving people)
I couldn't help but think about how first impressions applies to meeting girls. If you want to meet cheerleaders, dress preppy. If you want to meet fun intelligent girls, preppy will guarantee they steer clear of you. The same sort of thing applies to the management circle VS development circle.
Agreed, as I said not all meetings are good. In my company the failing has been lack of appropriate communication and meetings.
Too many developers think they know what's right and refuse to communicate with the business/stakeholders to figure out what really is right. Thankfully that boss of mine was finally fired, but we're still left cleaning up his messes.
>> Why are programmers non-productive? >> Because their time is wasted in meetings.
You probably come from a different background than me, but in my case this has been the opposite.
Especially in a smaller company without its own fleet of business analysts, meetings are extremely important. The programming team I work with has been non-productive for a long time simply because they've been *doing the wrong thing*.
It doesn't matter how much of an uber-programmer you think you are, if you aren't meeting with the stakeholders before and during the project to make sure you're giving them what they want, then you're wasting not only the programmers' time, but everyone else's time too.
Of course I don't mean to imply that every meeting at every company is valuable:) This has been my experience with project disasters that had to be redone from scratch. All because programmers insisted on doing "their solution" all by themselves instead of actually talking to the stakeholders.
Exactly. Just fyi, there were some other posts that I found that said the claimed decrease that Apple and other digital companies wanted was specific to internet radio (ie: to avoid killing independent internet radio). IE: no relation to what the labels are trying to do.
>> Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale.
I must be missing something here - how do artist royalties have anything whatsoever to do with "digital music companies such as Apple"? Apple and others purchase music from the labels to resell, it's up to the labels to distribute whatever royalties to the artist. All Apple knows or cares about is the price they pay the label. Right?
What matters isn't whether a game is a "franchise", but whether the game is developed and sold as a franchise, or if the game involves original gameplay direction. Or at least significantly enhanced gameplay direction, if you want to argue that every single game evar is a total ripoff of some previous game.
Take World of Warcraft for instance. It's the Warcraft franchise. But the gameplay itself is much more "Diablo 3D" than "Warcraft 4" or "Everquest 3". The game is a giant leap from any previous Blizzard game, franchise or not.
The problem with franchises is when they consist of the same engine, same story, and same gameplay, released to make a quick buck with very low development costs. And even that is OK as long as you take it for what it is - an add-on pack for people who want more of the same.
nah, the regular bullets are free, but 5c per Super Bullet. After all, we need to make sure rich people have the same advantages in video games as they do in real life!
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I disagree. Episodic gaming could hypothetically work a lot like Agile Programming. Shorter development cycles means quicker feedback means better products. As a gamer, you get to pay less to play better games, and potentially play a bigger breadth of games rather than being stuck with 2 or 3 $60 games. Sort of like how you can go buy singles on iTunes instead of buying entire albums when you only care for the first couple songs.
Episodic gaming could put control firmly in the hand of gamers to encourage good content, and kill off bad content rapidly. It's as much a liability for companies as anything, because now people can "turn down" the crappy second half of their game. But for a company, it's also a big help. Instead of spending 2+ years and massive resources creating a "full" $60 game, the company can make the first installment for $20, and only continue if it's successful. Everyone wins.
I think Episode 1 selling so few copies forced Valve to sell "Orange Box" instead of selling each piece as a $15-$20 game. It's very important that companies do something unique to earn interest in "episodes". Otherwise it'll get viewed (and ignored) just like most expansion packs, as "more of the same". And hey, if people want "more of the same" they'll buy it. Just like they bought HL2 Episode 1.
TF2 and Portal are solid and original (enough) concepts to get purchases at $20 a piece - possibly even MORE purchases. Friends could "just" get TF2 to play with their buddy for $20, instead of having to plunk down $60 for a full game for which only the multiplayer component will be used. But as for HL2 Episode 2, I'm a big fan of Valve and Half-life, but I still have no idea why I would buy and play Episode 2.
Panzer Dragoon Saga really got the short end of the stick, being released past death of an already poorly received console (Sega Saturn). I had a Saturn and wanted the game, but I simply never saw it for sale in the United States. I've tried to find it online, and the few copies that are up for sale are $150 or higher.
This would be a perfect game to release on the Wii console, or to port to a new console and re-release. PLEASE SEGA GIVE US PANZER DRAGOON SAGA!
I completely agree on not wanting Cingular, but can't blame Apple. They had to partner with a single network to get new network features added (eg: visual voicemail) and Verizon turned them down. As others mention, GSM is also more popular in general and will make porting to other networks and countries easier.
So while I'm not interested in getting a Cingular iPhone, maybe in a couple years after the iPhone improves, the Cingular network improves, and potentially, the iPhone becomes available on other networks...
Ummm, "yes"? Something like that:) I didn't program the reports themselves, just the portion that let them enter all the data. But yes, you entered how much gas you bought in what state, plus how many miles you drove in every state you drove through.
So hypothetically you were getting all the taxes you paid back from the state you bought gas in, then paying back out to all the states you drove in. I'm not sure if that's precisely how it gets added up - there did still seem to be an incentive to buy gas in cheaper states or at cheaper pumps, so I'm sure the system is more elaborate than I've stated here.
IPAFTTS (I programmed a fuel tax tracking system) and this is how it works. The trucking industry is *heavily* regulated. Truckers are required to keep log books recording much of their travels. In the end, it really doesn't matter too much what state you buy gas in - it's just delaying the inevitable. You track how many miles you drive in each state, and pay fuel taxes to each state based on miles. So you can fill up 2 miles over the border in Virginia, but if you drove 1,000 miles in North Carolina this quarter, you're still required to pay North Carolina taxes on those 1,000 miles as if you bought gas there.
The penalties for not filing your fuel taxes on time every quarter as pretty hefty too.
Wish I had mod points...parent and grandparent are hitting at the real issue here. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the site has covered its own ass already by having the EULA/TOS say "ALL YOUR PAPERS ARE BELONG TO US".
The real questions involve the fact that teachers are submitting papers which are not their own IP to the site. Perhaps the teachers or school system can be held liable for copyright infringement, or some sort of fraud for claiming ownership of the copyrighted work of others?
Which battle in Deus Ex are you referring to? I'm curious because from what I remember, Deus Ex actually did an excellent job of handling alternate scenarios.
Case in point, you can save your brother. He's supposed to run out of his apartment and get killed. But as with the grandparent poster, I didn't know hes "supposed" to die, and figured I needed to try harder to save him. So I stacked furniture in the doorway, used poison grenades, etc. to try to keep him from running out into the trap and dying.
It was difficult, but I succeeded. I saved him, and the game knew it. He appears in later cutscenes and the plot changes based on the fact that you saved your brother. That was a great example of why Deus Ex was such an awesome game.
Are you trying to suggest that there ARENT really patterns in DNA? DNA is not random data that people are "making up" patterns out of. It is also not structured data (like the bible), that people are trying to find sub-meaning within. DNA is essentially byte code for creating and running entire organisms. It's highly structured, and we understand relatively little about it.
Visualizing this data allows us to use our eyes to search for patterns. Which is actually a great idea, considering how good our eyes are at finding patterns that computer scientists are still struggling with. Just look at captchas as an example. Why NOT use a tool to study DNA that can in many ways operate better than modern machines?
Finally, someone talking sense. "scratches easily" is short hand for "OMG I put glass in my pocket with my keys and somehow it got scratched!" The only thing that changed between the regular ipod and ipod nano is that the nano was small enough for people to easily put in their pocket with their keys. The nano comes with a cloth sleeve for exactly this reason.
My last phone was extremely scratched up by keeping it in my pocket with my keys. For that reason when I got a new phone, I decided to keep it in my other pocket with my wallet. Four months and not a single scratch on it. Amazing how that works out, isn't it?
Children have fear of god and punishment ground into them early, overcoming that fear to maintain disbelief requires dogma and faith
Not all, or even the majority of children, are taught to fear a god. Also, I don't think the majority of children consider god and punishment to by synonyms. That's old testament, not new testament.
Your argument is that ignorance of god is "more active" than your own ignorance of green nazi unicorns. Regardless, the two are still strictly parallel. You are still making a choice not to believe in green nazi unicorns, now that you know about the concept. The majority of religious mechanisms, like Pascal's Wager, apply equally to the unicorns as it does to any other unsubstantiated belief, no matter how widespread or obscure.
A more accurate wording regarding atheism is that it is typically a set of "religious beliefs", or "beliefs regarding religion". The latter being the most accurate, as there is no requirement that atheists hold their beliefs religiously.:)
Basically this guy has a side job of helping companies up their pageranks, and made all this up as an "experiment in viral marketing". Nothing to see here...and sure explains why he's keeping the company name and search terms secret.
Serious tip: get a Mac, and run Safari. Safari (or mac OS, not sure which you would call it) has built-in PDF support, and its not through adobe's cruddy acrobat product.
I'm the type of guy who gets REALLY sick of browser extensions causing problems on my browser. I typically have 4-8 browser windows open, with 5-10 tabs in each, so a crash seriously pisses me off. For this reason I haven't allowed Adobe's browser plugin near any browser of mine for years - it just causes crashes. But on my Mac (first time mac user here) pdfs open in Safari and have never ever caused me any problems. Of course you may have a different experience with such heavy pdf usage.
Find a friend or computer lab with a Mac and go browse pdfs in Safari and see what you think.
(also just to note, I also use Firefox 1.5 all day at work (often leaving it open for weeks) and have never had Firefox crash - but again, I pretty much disable all plugins because they tend to just piss me off)
"I think that I'm not the only one that could care less about "the future of TV" just for the sake of what I'd consider small resolution enhancments."
I couldn't agree more. I have seen absolutely nothing positive about "upgrading" to HD (or flat panel!) so far. Just a lot of risky new technology, both for the flat digital screen and the brand new ultra-restrictive DRM. And they want me to PAY for it. Pay a LOT. No thanks!
And as you point out, much less will I shell out 600$ for a game system that supports HD. Thats all money down the toilet IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed the part was a federal judge ruled that Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market. No such ruling has been made against Apple in the portable music market, and for good reason.
As good as Apple is at making iPods, there are clones galore out there that work "just as well", are cheaper, and are selling tons of product.
Comparing the Apple and the iPod to Microsoft and Windows is quite absurd.
(all that said, I think an automatic install of safari with itunes upgrades sounds sleazy. Unfortunately being sleazy isn't illegal...)
I think you have it backwards. Shouldn't you be saying:
"So, we ARE going to get on GCC's case, right? For breaking compatibility with millions of systems, just like Microsoft intentionally broke Firefox, Opera, and Safari?"
Standards compliance is generally a good drum to bang, but whats REALLY important is what you're breaking. It seems to me GCC has a fix in search of a problem. If they really want to meet the standard here, I think it would be reasonable to request the fix from the broken kernels and wait a reasonable amount of time for proliferation before releasing the fix.
I don't care much either way, mainly wanted to point out that the problem with IE has been the fact that it BREAKS other web browsers. The standards are just an easy place to point to determine which browser is the problem. And of course blatant abuse of a monopoly to squash competitors gets some of us a little peeved too.
Agreed on first impressions. But what first impression do you want to give?
:)
Sure, if it's "I'm an overcompensated member of upper management", wear a suit, cut your hair super-short and gel it up, etc.
If the impression you want to give is "I'm a crusty unix expert" then grow a full beard, where a stained shirt, shorts, and sandals, and change your name to Eric or Randy.
Meanwhile if you're going for "I'm a competent developer who isn't a stubborn socially inept dickwad" then go for decent hygeine, jeans, and a t-shirt or button-up shirt, with whatever hair style makes you happy. This is probably where most developers should aim.
Every developer I've interviewed (for regular dev positions) who wore a suit has been overcompensating for incompetence or lack of experience. I'm also highly suspicious of men who shave more than a couple times a week. But that's just me - I'd have to shave twice a day to look clean-shaven for work.
(Note: I fall into any of the 3 categories above depending on day of the week, just saying it's important to know the impression you're giving people)
I couldn't help but think about how first impressions applies to meeting girls. If you want to meet cheerleaders, dress preppy. If you want to meet fun intelligent girls, preppy will guarantee they steer clear of you. The same sort of thing applies to the management circle VS development circle.
Agreed, as I said not all meetings are good. In my company the failing has been lack of appropriate communication and meetings.
Too many developers think they know what's right and refuse to communicate with the business/stakeholders to figure out what really is right. Thankfully that boss of mine was finally fired, but we're still left cleaning up his messes.
>> Why are programmers non-productive?
:) This has been my experience with project disasters that had to be redone from scratch. All because programmers insisted on doing "their solution" all by themselves instead of actually talking to the stakeholders.
>> Because their time is wasted in meetings.
You probably come from a different background than me, but in my case this has been the opposite.
Especially in a smaller company without its own fleet of business analysts, meetings are extremely important. The programming team I work with has been non-productive for a long time simply because they've been *doing the wrong thing*.
It doesn't matter how much of an uber-programmer you think you are, if you aren't meeting with the stakeholders before and during the project to make sure you're giving them what they want, then you're wasting not only the programmers' time, but everyone else's time too.
Of course I don't mean to imply that every meeting at every company is valuable
Exactly. Just fyi, there were some other posts that I found that said the claimed decrease that Apple and other digital companies wanted was specific to internet radio (ie: to avoid killing independent internet radio). IE: no relation to what the labels are trying to do.
>> Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale.
I must be missing something here - how do artist royalties have anything whatsoever to do with "digital music companies such as Apple"? Apple and others purchase music from the labels to resell, it's up to the labels to distribute whatever royalties to the artist. All Apple knows or cares about is the price they pay the label. Right?
What matters isn't whether a game is a "franchise", but whether the game is developed and sold as a franchise, or if the game involves original gameplay direction. Or at least significantly enhanced gameplay direction, if you want to argue that every single game evar is a total ripoff of some previous game.
Take World of Warcraft for instance. It's the Warcraft franchise. But the gameplay itself is much more "Diablo 3D" than "Warcraft 4" or "Everquest 3". The game is a giant leap from any previous Blizzard game, franchise or not.
The problem with franchises is when they consist of the same engine, same story, and same gameplay, released to make a quick buck with very low development costs. And even that is OK as long as you take it for what it is - an add-on pack for people who want more of the same.
nah, the regular bullets are free, but 5c per Super Bullet. After all, we need to make sure rich people have the same advantages in video games as they do in real life!
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I disagree. Episodic gaming could hypothetically work a lot like Agile Programming. Shorter development cycles means quicker feedback means better products. As a gamer, you get to pay less to play better games, and potentially play a bigger breadth of games rather than being stuck with 2 or 3 $60 games. Sort of like how you can go buy singles on iTunes instead of buying entire albums when you only care for the first couple songs.
Episodic gaming could put control firmly in the hand of gamers to encourage good content, and kill off bad content rapidly. It's as much a liability for companies as anything, because now people can "turn down" the crappy second half of their game. But for a company, it's also a big help. Instead of spending 2+ years and massive resources creating a "full" $60 game, the company can make the first installment for $20, and only continue if it's successful. Everyone wins.
I think Episode 1 selling so few copies forced Valve to sell "Orange Box" instead of selling each piece as a $15-$20 game. It's very important that companies do something unique to earn interest in "episodes". Otherwise it'll get viewed (and ignored) just like most expansion packs, as "more of the same". And hey, if people want "more of the same" they'll buy it. Just like they bought HL2 Episode 1.
TF2 and Portal are solid and original (enough) concepts to get purchases at $20 a piece - possibly even MORE purchases. Friends could "just" get TF2 to play with their buddy for $20, instead of having to plunk down $60 for a full game for which only the multiplayer component will be used. But as for HL2 Episode 2, I'm a big fan of Valve and Half-life, but I still have no idea why I would buy and play Episode 2.
Panzer Dragoon Saga really got the short end of the stick, being released past death of an already poorly received console (Sega Saturn). I had a Saturn and wanted the game, but I simply never saw it for sale in the United States. I've tried to find it online, and the few copies that are up for sale are $150 or higher.
This would be a perfect game to release on the Wii console, or to port to a new console and re-release. PLEASE SEGA GIVE US PANZER DRAGOON SAGA!
I completely agree on not wanting Cingular, but can't blame Apple. They had to partner with a single network to get new network features added (eg: visual voicemail) and Verizon turned them down. As others mention, GSM is also more popular in general and will make porting to other networks and countries easier.
So while I'm not interested in getting a Cingular iPhone, maybe in a couple years after the iPhone improves, the Cingular network improves, and potentially, the iPhone becomes available on other networks...
Ummm, "yes"? Something like that :) I didn't program the reports themselves, just the portion that let them enter all the data. But yes, you entered how much gas you bought in what state, plus how many miles you drove in every state you drove through.
So hypothetically you were getting all the taxes you paid back from the state you bought gas in, then paying back out to all the states you drove in. I'm not sure if that's precisely how it gets added up - there did still seem to be an incentive to buy gas in cheaper states or at cheaper pumps, so I'm sure the system is more elaborate than I've stated here.
IPAFTTS (I programmed a fuel tax tracking system) and this is how it works. The trucking industry is *heavily* regulated. Truckers are required to keep log books recording much of their travels. In the end, it really doesn't matter too much what state you buy gas in - it's just delaying the inevitable. You track how many miles you drive in each state, and pay fuel taxes to each state based on miles. So you can fill up 2 miles over the border in Virginia, but if you drove 1,000 miles in North Carolina this quarter, you're still required to pay North Carolina taxes on those 1,000 miles as if you bought gas there.
The penalties for not filing your fuel taxes on time every quarter as pretty hefty too.
Yep, it's a royal pain in the ass.
Wish I had mod points...parent and grandparent are hitting at the real issue here. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the site has covered its own ass already by having the EULA/TOS say "ALL YOUR PAPERS ARE BELONG TO US".
The real questions involve the fact that teachers are submitting papers which are not their own IP to the site. Perhaps the teachers or school system can be held liable for copyright infringement, or some sort of fraud for claiming ownership of the copyrighted work of others?
Gotcha! I vaguely remember that, but it's been quite a few years :)
Which battle in Deus Ex are you referring to? I'm curious because from what I remember, Deus Ex actually did an excellent job of handling alternate scenarios.
Case in point, you can save your brother. He's supposed to run out of his apartment and get killed. But as with the grandparent poster, I didn't know hes "supposed" to die, and figured I needed to try harder to save him. So I stacked furniture in the doorway, used poison grenades, etc. to try to keep him from running out into the trap and dying.
It was difficult, but I succeeded. I saved him, and the game knew it. He appears in later cutscenes and the plot changes based on the fact that you saved your brother. That was a great example of why Deus Ex was such an awesome game.
Are you trying to suggest that there ARENT really patterns in DNA? DNA is not random data that people are "making up" patterns out of. It is also not structured data (like the bible), that people are trying to find sub-meaning within. DNA is essentially byte code for creating and running entire organisms. It's highly structured, and we understand relatively little about it.
Visualizing this data allows us to use our eyes to search for patterns. Which is actually a great idea, considering how good our eyes are at finding patterns that computer scientists are still struggling with. Just look at captchas as an example. Why NOT use a tool to study DNA that can in many ways operate better than modern machines?
Yeah, I definitely agree that I'm being overly technical, and it's an at-best awkward thing for them to be saying on January 10th :)
Finally, someone talking sense. "scratches easily" is short hand for "OMG I put glass in my pocket with my keys and somehow it got scratched!" The only thing that changed between the regular ipod and ipod nano is that the nano was small enough for people to easily put in their pocket with their keys. The nano comes with a cloth sleeve for exactly this reason.
My last phone was extremely scratched up by keeping it in my pocket with my keys. For that reason when I got a new phone, I decided to keep it in my other pocket with my wallet. Four months and not a single scratch on it. Amazing how that works out, isn't it?
I know you're mostly joking, but you're also creating a strawman argument.
The quote says "ONE OF the year's biggest tech launches". Then you sarcastically quote it as "THE biggest tech launch".
No one claimed it as such besides yourself.
Children have fear of god and punishment ground into them early, overcoming that fear to maintain disbelief requires dogma and faith
:)
Not all, or even the majority of children, are taught to fear a god. Also, I don't think the majority of children consider god and punishment to by synonyms. That's old testament, not new testament.
Your argument is that ignorance of god is "more active" than your own ignorance of green nazi unicorns. Regardless, the two are still strictly parallel. You are still making a choice not to believe in green nazi unicorns, now that you know about the concept. The majority of religious mechanisms, like Pascal's Wager, apply equally to the unicorns as it does to any other unsubstantiated belief, no matter how widespread or obscure.
A more accurate wording regarding atheism is that it is typically a set of "religious beliefs", or "beliefs regarding religion". The latter being the most accurate, as there is no requirement that atheists hold their beliefs religiously.
Just to reiterate what someone else tracked down in hopes of getting this (wholly ambiguous and suspect to begin with) story checked out:
http://deanhunt.com/category/seo/
Basically this guy has a side job of helping companies up their pageranks, and made all this up as an "experiment in viral marketing". Nothing to see here...and sure explains why he's keeping the company name and search terms secret.
Serious tip: get a Mac, and run Safari. Safari (or mac OS, not sure which you would call it) has built-in PDF support, and its not through adobe's cruddy acrobat product.
I'm the type of guy who gets REALLY sick of browser extensions causing problems on my browser. I typically have 4-8 browser windows open, with 5-10 tabs in each, so a crash seriously pisses me off. For this reason I haven't allowed Adobe's browser plugin near any browser of mine for years - it just causes crashes. But on my Mac (first time mac user here) pdfs open in Safari and have never ever caused me any problems. Of course you may have a different experience with such heavy pdf usage.
Find a friend or computer lab with a Mac and go browse pdfs in Safari and see what you think.
(also just to note, I also use Firefox 1.5 all day at work (often leaving it open for weeks) and have never had Firefox crash - but again, I pretty much disable all plugins because they tend to just piss me off)
"I think that I'm not the only one that could care less about "the future of TV" just for the sake of what I'd consider small resolution enhancments."
I couldn't agree more. I have seen absolutely nothing positive about "upgrading" to HD (or flat panel!) so far. Just a lot of risky new technology, both for the flat digital screen and the brand new ultra-restrictive DRM. And they want me to PAY for it. Pay a LOT. No thanks!
And as you point out, much less will I shell out 600$ for a game system that supports HD. Thats all money down the toilet IMO.