If someone fulfills the five criteria the GP gave, then they would know that ID isn't science.
My biggest problem with the summary is that many scientists might fail this "basic science literacy" test simply because it's too specific. As pointed out elsewhere, how much of the planet is covered in water is more of a trivia question. And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
Science literacy shouldn't be about what they know, it should be about what they can recognize. Just because I'm literate with books doesn't mean that I can tell you specific details about Edgar Allen Poe, nor does it mean that I necessarily agree with Orwell.
Agreed. If they only had the most popular webcomic, then they wouldn't be worth honoring. If they just did child's play, then they might or might not be, depending on the day. For single-handedly bringing the largest game expo in north america to their state that normally wouldn't have seen it probably would be worth honoring them for. Put all three together and it's a slam dunk.
I'm willing to bet that the senate hasn't seen most of the content of their comic, and if you ignore the content of their webcomic, they're great guys by anyone's standards.
The term "religious people" is much too broad for comparison to one man. If you were to show me someone who was as vehemently, outspokenly, and disrespectfully religious as Richard Dawkins is atheist, I would call them out on it as quickly as I call out Richard Dawkins for the ass-hattery that he pulls.
To be fair, he's not representative of the majority of atheists that I've met, nor are the asshats the majority of religious people that I've met either (although sometimes it feels that way). It's the same as the difference between inviting a republican to speak in San Francisco and inviting Rush Limbaugh to speak there: the uproar isn't so much about his beliefs as the ridiculous way that he presents them.
IMO Steam is a perfect alternative to selling/buying your games on physical media
Just bought Empire: Total War, and the first thing they have you do is log into steam so that they can link it to your account. No steam, no game, and that was with a physical copy. I don't have a problem with buying things on steam and having those limitations, but I bought a physical copy of that game for a reason (lack of internet connectivity everywhere I play it, the sure knowledge that I'll never lose those dvds, etc). Steam is great for the games I play on it, but it has drawbacks that I would have preferred to avoid.
So, while I agree with you about it being a great method for digital distribution, I have a much larger problem with it becoming a method to restrict the physical distribution.
Interesting. So what if I were to sell you the game, and instead of activating it on steam you were to instead crack it and play it to your heart's delight? What's the legality then?
it looks like AMD have taken back the price/performance crown they've always been known for.
For me and my friends, they were known for having the performance crown; the price crown was just thrown in for good measure. Retaking the performance crown would do wonders for their market share, but that doesn't look likely anywhere in the near future.
Have you tried the native stuff for web developers in Chrome? They actually have a lot of really good tools built in. I use Firefox for web development because I use firefox for almost everything, but if you use Chrome all the time, might as well use them for web development if their native tools are good enough.
Also, just to be clear, I'm not trying to suggest you're dumb, but I didn't know that Chrome and Safari had the capabilities they did until a week ago, and I've been doing web development for years.
Yes, but Firefox has a faster turnaround time as it is. Microsoft only patches once a month, often misses critical patches and then didn't update their browser for years. Mozilla was the first true competition that IE had, has a fast turnaround time, and patches vulnerabilities fast, often within days of being made aware of them. Sometimes they don't do as well as they could, but when they're able to put out 3 major versions of their browser, 2.5 versions and many smaller ones within the time that IE's able to put out 2 new versions, they deserve praise instead of scorn.
A cell phone that you can bend any way you want, so you can put it in a wallet, fold it and put it on your pocket, roll it up, etc. Morning newspaper reader, the Kindle3, etc.
The bendable makes it so that it's more flexible in its use (get it? haha!) and the touch sensitive makes it so that it doesn't have to have other controls on it. I don't think this is the sort of thing where everyone says, "yes, this is what we've been waiting for!" but instead waits for development to catch up to it.
When you use being "busy" as an excuse for being ignorant of your options, you do your employer a disservice
Not necessarily. They hired a windows admin, they should expect to have a windows admin. Seeing as they made that decision, they're fine with him using Windows options that cost money, and it's almost certainly worth more to the employer to have him save time using Windows. Is it worth it to the employer to pay him to learn to use samba? Maybe, but that's their decision, not his. It's entirely possible, even likely, that when all is said and done, the cost of training and the extra support time will easily outweigh the cost of using Windows.
There is no reason to be stuck in Windows bondage land. You don't need it. Really, you don't.
Really? Because my multitude of games and windows-specific programs beg to differ. Of course, I don't strictly need those programs, but by that same standard I don't strictly need a computer at all.
I'm going to let you in on a secret, and it's not something you mention in company of Slashdot users and OSX nuts: people use what they like and are familiar with, and windows is good enough to get the job done. Vista is still miles ahead of Ubuntu in typical, every day usability, and this is coming from someone who likes to fire up the command line and edit iptables by hand. The gui in Ubuntu is still brittle and requires a lot of command line usage to use it like I want to use it. Windows, on the other hand, works a ton better without ever touching the command line. For a good server, I'll use Ubuntu. For a workable computer to play games on and browse the internet, I'll use windows.
This choice is reasonable, logical, and entirely dependent on opinion. If someone tells me I'm wrong, all they're doing is showing that they're being irrational. I like windows, and it's not because I'm masochistic, it's because it's just plain more usable for what I do.
And yet everyone on this site is offended by Microsoft's action and acting like it should be corrected. I don't agree with what Microsoft did, and I think it would be entirely appropriate for people to abandon XBox Live in droves, but I'm not sure the argument can be made that Microsoft banning this woman is any worse than other people abandoning/attacking Microsoft for this.
I sure do hate how the literal/historic meaning of the word has been overtaken by another meaning, almost the direct inverse (ie instead of 10% destroyed, it's 90% destroyed and 10% remaining). It makes communication difficult, especially when conversing with people outside the range of your colloquialisms.
It also has to do with the fact that 'W' and 'M' look so similar. I think the lower case and the space would have helped, but probably not enough to clear it up completely.
The comparison against firefox that's in the summary is a good one, since the firefox engine is nearly as fast as the chrome engine, certainly close enough to call it equal for these purposes. The problem is that we need Resig and others to post their own benchmarks since the firefox engine slows significantly under certain recursive circumstances.
In other words, they give a good comparison to modern and fast javascript engines, but they can't do anything to remove the bias from their tests.
There is no "shortage", only a desire to be picky for less.
From what you've said, he wasn't talking about a discount, he was merely talking about quality, and anyone who has half a brain can tell you that good programmers are hard to find. Are you saying that terrible American programmers deserve the job over great foreign programmers because they're American?
Yeah, and video game laws lead in the number that wind up being reversed, too. I can only imagine how frustrated lawmakers must be that free speech applies to things they dislike, too.
If you were to graph the price on the X axis and the profits on the Y axis, it creates an inverted parabola. If you charge too little, you get a lot of sales but you earn less money. If you charge too much, you lose so many sales that you eventually lose out on profit. What TFA is saying is that games have overshot the peak of the parabola, and he's hinting that it's by something like 3x.
This completely agrees with what I think is happening. In my experience, there are only a few games I'd be willing to pay $50 for, maybe a dozen in the past 3 years. With my siblings, they'll buy maybe one in that time period. With my parents, they're old fashioned and wouldn't pay that for any game. If you were to lower that to $20, it would at least quadruple my buying, my siblings would at least reach the level I was at, and my parents would be willing to buy a few a year if they were able to try them out first.
There would also be the side effect of reducing the used game market to nearly nothing. The reason that the used game market exists is because the games are too expensive in the first place. The trade in value for a used game would go down so far that if there's even the remote possibility of playing the game again, I'd keep it around. I'd use it as a gift before trading it in. Whereas right now, I'll trade in a game if I don't believe there's replay value.
I will sum up my response in one word: strategery.
I'm still playing strategy games from the 90s on my computer. With a good group of friends, a penchant for experimentation and the ability to shake things up with the game (different maps, many different factions, etc), you can get almost endless replay out of them.
I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.
I don't think that was the one event, although I'm sure it played a part. Microsoft keeps their stranglehold on markets by appealing to the developers, and it's been clear for a while that the developers were flocking to Firefox. I saw the development of IE7 as being more of an attempt to stop the bleeding of devs to firefox. I don't think it was coincidence that development of their next browser started after their first real competition since netscape emerged. Competition is what made them release the first six versions of IE, I don't see any reason that would be true with these latest two as well.
Unfortunately, it'll probably mean that your boss will stop forcing you to mess with IE7. If people are willing to upgrade their browser, they'll have 8. If they're not, they'll have 6. The only people that will still have 7 are those unwilling to upgrade and with Vista on their computer, which I imagine is a very small segment. I expect to see next to no one running 7 a year after 8's released, but for 6 to still be in the top 4 browsers.
At least the market share for 6 is shrinking, and you've got to give props to Microsoft for at least moving it forward. IE7 is easier to work with for new sites than IE6 ever was, and if that trend continues through IE8 then the biggest headache in web programming will soon disappear.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone fulfills the five criteria the GP gave, then they would know that ID isn't science.
My biggest problem with the summary is that many scientists might fail this "basic science literacy" test simply because it's too specific. As pointed out elsewhere, how much of the planet is covered in water is more of a trivia question. And asking if humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an opinion question, not a question about science. It's entirely possible for someone to believe, for religious reasons, that humans and dinosaurs lived together but to also understand the science.
Science literacy shouldn't be about what they know, it should be about what they can recognize. Just because I'm literate with books doesn't mean that I can tell you specific details about Edgar Allen Poe, nor does it mean that I necessarily agree with Orwell.
Agreed. If they only had the most popular webcomic, then they wouldn't be worth honoring. If they just did child's play, then they might or might not be, depending on the day. For single-handedly bringing the largest game expo in north america to their state that normally wouldn't have seen it probably would be worth honoring them for. Put all three together and it's a slam dunk.
I'm willing to bet that the senate hasn't seen most of the content of their comic, and if you ignore the content of their webcomic, they're great guys by anyone's standards.
Full disclosure: I'm not an atheist.
The term "religious people" is much too broad for comparison to one man. If you were to show me someone who was as vehemently, outspokenly, and disrespectfully religious as Richard Dawkins is atheist, I would call them out on it as quickly as I call out Richard Dawkins for the ass-hattery that he pulls.
To be fair, he's not representative of the majority of atheists that I've met, nor are the asshats the majority of religious people that I've met either (although sometimes it feels that way). It's the same as the difference between inviting a republican to speak in San Francisco and inviting Rush Limbaugh to speak there: the uproar isn't so much about his beliefs as the ridiculous way that he presents them.
Congratulations, Mr. +5 informative. This takes karma whoring by means of link sharing to a whole new level.
IMO Steam is a perfect alternative to selling/buying your games on physical media
Just bought Empire: Total War, and the first thing they have you do is log into steam so that they can link it to your account. No steam, no game, and that was with a physical copy. I don't have a problem with buying things on steam and having those limitations, but I bought a physical copy of that game for a reason (lack of internet connectivity everywhere I play it, the sure knowledge that I'll never lose those dvds, etc). Steam is great for the games I play on it, but it has drawbacks that I would have preferred to avoid.
So, while I agree with you about it being a great method for digital distribution, I have a much larger problem with it becoming a method to restrict the physical distribution.
Interesting. So what if I were to sell you the game, and instead of activating it on steam you were to instead crack it and play it to your heart's delight? What's the legality then?
Gratuitous use of the word "dude" in their marketing? Packaging that resembled bovines?
it looks like AMD have taken back the price/performance crown they've always been known for.
For me and my friends, they were known for having the performance crown; the price crown was just thrown in for good measure. Retaking the performance crown would do wonders for their market share, but that doesn't look likely anywhere in the near future.
Have you tried the native stuff for web developers in Chrome? They actually have a lot of really good tools built in. I use Firefox for web development because I use firefox for almost everything, but if you use Chrome all the time, might as well use them for web development if their native tools are good enough.
Also, just to be clear, I'm not trying to suggest you're dumb, but I didn't know that Chrome and Safari had the capabilities they did until a week ago, and I've been doing web development for years.
Yes, but Firefox has a faster turnaround time as it is. Microsoft only patches once a month, often misses critical patches and then didn't update their browser for years. Mozilla was the first true competition that IE had, has a fast turnaround time, and patches vulnerabilities fast, often within days of being made aware of them. Sometimes they don't do as well as they could, but when they're able to put out 3 major versions of their browser, 2 .5 versions and many smaller ones within the time that IE's able to put out 2 new versions, they deserve praise instead of scorn.
A cell phone that you can bend any way you want, so you can put it in a wallet, fold it and put it on your pocket, roll it up, etc. Morning newspaper reader, the Kindle3, etc.
The bendable makes it so that it's more flexible in its use (get it? haha!) and the touch sensitive makes it so that it doesn't have to have other controls on it. I don't think this is the sort of thing where everyone says, "yes, this is what we've been waiting for!" but instead waits for development to catch up to it.
When you use being "busy" as an excuse for being ignorant of your options, you do your employer a disservice
Not necessarily. They hired a windows admin, they should expect to have a windows admin. Seeing as they made that decision, they're fine with him using Windows options that cost money, and it's almost certainly worth more to the employer to have him save time using Windows. Is it worth it to the employer to pay him to learn to use samba? Maybe, but that's their decision, not his. It's entirely possible, even likely, that when all is said and done, the cost of training and the extra support time will easily outweigh the cost of using Windows.
Then it's really quite simple: make your password "I'm guilty".
Because that would be illegal. Duh.
There is no reason to be stuck in Windows bondage land. You don't need it. Really, you don't.
Really? Because my multitude of games and windows-specific programs beg to differ. Of course, I don't strictly need those programs, but by that same standard I don't strictly need a computer at all.
I'm going to let you in on a secret, and it's not something you mention in company of Slashdot users and OSX nuts: people use what they like and are familiar with, and windows is good enough to get the job done. Vista is still miles ahead of Ubuntu in typical, every day usability, and this is coming from someone who likes to fire up the command line and edit iptables by hand. The gui in Ubuntu is still brittle and requires a lot of command line usage to use it like I want to use it. Windows, on the other hand, works a ton better without ever touching the command line. For a good server, I'll use Ubuntu. For a workable computer to play games on and browse the internet, I'll use windows.
This choice is reasonable, logical, and entirely dependent on opinion. If someone tells me I'm wrong, all they're doing is showing that they're being irrational. I like windows, and it's not because I'm masochistic, it's because it's just plain more usable for what I do.
And yet everyone on this site is offended by Microsoft's action and acting like it should be corrected. I don't agree with what Microsoft did, and I think it would be entirely appropriate for people to abandon XBox Live in droves, but I'm not sure the argument can be made that Microsoft banning this woman is any worse than other people abandoning/attacking Microsoft for this.
I would love for someone to prove me wrong.
I sure do hate how the literal/historic meaning of the word has been overtaken by another meaning, almost the direct inverse (ie instead of 10% destroyed, it's 90% destroyed and 10% remaining). It makes communication difficult, especially when conversing with people outside the range of your colloquialisms.
It also has to do with the fact that 'W' and 'M' look so similar. I think the lower case and the space would have helped, but probably not enough to clear it up completely.
The comparison against firefox that's in the summary is a good one, since the firefox engine is nearly as fast as the chrome engine, certainly close enough to call it equal for these purposes. The problem is that we need Resig and others to post their own benchmarks since the firefox engine slows significantly under certain recursive circumstances.
In other words, they give a good comparison to modern and fast javascript engines, but they can't do anything to remove the bias from their tests.
There is no "shortage", only a desire to be picky for less.
From what you've said, he wasn't talking about a discount, he was merely talking about quality, and anyone who has half a brain can tell you that good programmers are hard to find. Are you saying that terrible American programmers deserve the job over great foreign programmers because they're American?
Yeah, and video game laws lead in the number that wind up being reversed, too. I can only imagine how frustrated lawmakers must be that free speech applies to things they dislike, too.
If you were to graph the price on the X axis and the profits on the Y axis, it creates an inverted parabola. If you charge too little, you get a lot of sales but you earn less money. If you charge too much, you lose so many sales that you eventually lose out on profit. What TFA is saying is that games have overshot the peak of the parabola, and he's hinting that it's by something like 3x.
This completely agrees with what I think is happening. In my experience, there are only a few games I'd be willing to pay $50 for, maybe a dozen in the past 3 years. With my siblings, they'll buy maybe one in that time period. With my parents, they're old fashioned and wouldn't pay that for any game. If you were to lower that to $20, it would at least quadruple my buying, my siblings would at least reach the level I was at, and my parents would be willing to buy a few a year if they were able to try them out first.
There would also be the side effect of reducing the used game market to nearly nothing. The reason that the used game market exists is because the games are too expensive in the first place. The trade in value for a used game would go down so far that if there's even the remote possibility of playing the game again, I'd keep it around. I'd use it as a gift before trading it in. Whereas right now, I'll trade in a game if I don't believe there's replay value.
I will sum up my response in one word: strategery.
I'm still playing strategy games from the 90s on my computer. With a good group of friends, a penchant for experimentation and the ability to shake things up with the game (different maps, many different factions, etc), you can get almost endless replay out of them.
I believe if there was one event that caused them to change their minds and become web-standard compliant it was their losing fight with the EU monopoly courts and their punishment: to become standards-compliant with respect to APIs, networking and, apparently, at least in MS' mind, the internet as well.
I don't think that was the one event, although I'm sure it played a part. Microsoft keeps their stranglehold on markets by appealing to the developers, and it's been clear for a while that the developers were flocking to Firefox. I saw the development of IE7 as being more of an attempt to stop the bleeding of devs to firefox. I don't think it was coincidence that development of their next browser started after their first real competition since netscape emerged. Competition is what made them release the first six versions of IE, I don't see any reason that would be true with these latest two as well.
Unfortunately, it'll probably mean that your boss will stop forcing you to mess with IE7. If people are willing to upgrade their browser, they'll have 8. If they're not, they'll have 6. The only people that will still have 7 are those unwilling to upgrade and with Vista on their computer, which I imagine is a very small segment. I expect to see next to no one running 7 a year after 8's released, but for 6 to still be in the top 4 browsers.
At least the market share for 6 is shrinking, and you've got to give props to Microsoft for at least moving it forward. IE7 is easier to work with for new sites than IE6 ever was, and if that trend continues through IE8 then the biggest headache in web programming will soon disappear.