Yeah, I remember the version for the IIe. It was coded in applesoft basic, but used a lot of advanced functions. For example, when hunting deer, type "POW" or "BLAM" or whatever to shoot, and the faster you type, the more likely the kill - the timing function used a lot of chr$() commands I had no idea what they did.
I mean... maybe, but they're asking them to write a module that could be done in 15 minutes. 3500 words, tops, and 1 playable character, 4 NPC's tops. No combat, no special skills.
Sounds like they're really focusing on the writing to me. And like someone below said, they can't guarantee a job to the winner because the person might not be the kind of person who works well at the company, or is willing to relocate (vs. work from home), or could be the type of person who writes awesome fantasy, but also eats human flesh. Who knows.
For one, it's nice to hear someone who tries to connect with their kid by understanding them, or at least cutting them some slack and embracing the differences.
For two, it's also relatively rare these days to hear a person say a rational, well thought statement involving genuine belief in a god.
I wonder if age differential between kid and parent plays into the interaction and development? My wife and I are 24, and we have an 18 month old... I didn't think we were particularly young to have kids, but we take our little one to the park, and we see all kinds of people who look to be 30, 35, near 40 with kids the same age as ours. I wonder how those people are going to connect with their kids when the kids are 16 - I'm worried enough about how I'll do it, about whether or not I'll be able to remember my life at that age enough to connect... I can't imagine being almost 60 with a high schooler...
I've also had problems with Adblock on firefox 1.5. I mean, I know it's an extension, and not the problem of the developers, but it's also like the 3rd most popular FF extension on the planet, and if they break the API, it's annoying.
Not to mention, some flash stuff has been acting funny - not loading right, or at all... And I still get the occasional popup. I mean, disable disable window.open() for every case other than "onclick". How hard is that?
Oh, I quit using RedHat a long time ago, but I had to support it after I gave up on it.
"Charging for support" to me doesn't mean "Charging you whether you get support or not, just charging a LOT more for support". I mean, if they're charging for support, they shouldn't charge for the version with no support (i.e. the $180 Workstation).
No new weapons were manufactured in Iraq after the first gulf war that violated any part of the agreement. The "weapons violations" where they found "WMD's" were because they had the same missles they had always had, and because the payloads had been removed (per the post-war agreement), the missles could now fly past the range specified by the agreement. These were disabled. The first gulf war eviscerated the iraqi armed forces and slaughtered their economy.
First off, consider the source. Drudge is not a non-biased news source, he's a pundit. He's proven this many times. Second, I've heard and seen similar montages. They all say (some in and some out of context) that Saddam was a threat if he had WMD's, and that he should be removed.
You know what? Kim Jong Il is a threat, and should be removed. The present government of Pakistan is a threat, and it would be nice if they were removed. It would be nice if Jack Valenti were removed. I consider Pat Robertson a threat to the security of the United States, and I wish he were removed.
Guess what's different?
I DIDN'T GO ANYWHERE AND KILL A HUNDRED THOUSAND CIVILIANS.
People can say that things aren't right and should be changed. It doesn't automatically give them the right to go and change them. The first time we invaded Iraq, we did so under the umbrella of protecting a trade ally. Whatever, ok, that's cool. The 2nd time, we did it under the pretext of preemptive war, and operating on information that was at a minimum suspect, and at maximum, knowingly false.
Whether you or anyone else wants saddam, or castro, or anyone else gone, there are rules. You can't just invade someone else's soverign nation with a ruling body in power for no reason other than you think they need to go.
I had a big post on this recently, but the general gist of what I said went something like this:
Gas SHOULD be more expensive in America. It would be a good thing in many many ways. Cheap gas prices have encouraged suburbanization (like, urbanization, except rather than moving into the cities, everyone moves to the suburbs and commutes, while still moving away from rural areas). It's bad for the environment to use a lot of gas, and it's bad for the global economy - it encourages warlords in Venezuela, and stranglehold economies that need "regime change" in the middle east. Steep gas prices would be a good thing (TM).
But, we're just not ready for it. If it gradually happened over the next 15 years, it'd work. People would have time to phase out the big cars and start conserving, towns would create mass transit, and we'd use the tax revenue to balance the stupid fucking budget (to quote Carlin). It would also encourage localization. Rather than your plumber driving 18 miles, a small scale plumbing (or even general home repair) shop would open down the block. Global chains would see more competition from local small business, also a good thing.
Red Hat charges for support, and for the brand name
See the other post I have in this series of threads regarding what it felt like in the small business world when RH pulled regular-redhat in favor of RHEL and Fedora.
One of my points is that RH has done a good PR job of convincing people that they're charging for support, when you don't get support unless you pay lots of money. The aforementioned $180 for workstation doesn't cover anything but like web forum support for installation.
But, that's not the thing. I think you hit it with the brand name thing. If anything, I don't like paying for a brand name. But even more so, I don't like being squeezed out of the segment of the population that can afford to pay for the brand name. It's all well and good that expensive OS's mean that the CTO's and PHB's feel good about the expense. I understand how that works - traditional suits don't think that anything that's inexpensive is worth a damn in an enterprise environment. But, I didn't need to be convinced that RH was a good product... I had been using it for years. And all of a sudden, because we weren't a multi-million dollar corporation, we were squeezed out.
You're right, of course. And I'm sorry I went off in that last post.
But, you gotta understand my perspective. I was deep into the small-business webhosting business when the redhat swing went down. There was no way out. At that time, there were "other" linux distros, but other mainly consisted of Mandrake (which was falling off the map, despite bein based on RH), Debian (which most people considered a fringe distro), and slackware (outdated and hard to administer, at least when time-to-learn is a factor). Red Hat was it in the linux world. People distributed binaries in RPM format. Hardware proclaimed RedHat support, not linux support. It was RedHat or it wasn't professional.
And then they pulled the rug out. I mean... we were in the middle of a sign-up boom, we were adding a new server every week practically. We had to find something.
A paralell I thought of after I posted a lot of these comments... It's a similar situation to Apache today. Apache is by far the most popular webserver on posix OS's these days. Imagine if all of a sudden, it cost $300/yr for apache (hypothetical, bear with me). Yes there are other http servers, but none of them have the maturity, support, or general ubiquitiousness of apache. There would be a mad scramble for the leftovers to bring themselves up to maturity, and at the same time, applications that previously depended on and hooked into apache would be facing a partial API rewrite and debug to work with other products. Eventually, two or three other successors would emerge as the contenders, and maybe someone would take an old version of Apache and start re-developing it, but it would fragment the http world and cause mass confusion.
That's what happened in the small business world. It was several months (or a year) until Fedora was usable, and even though it's relatively stable, it's not suitable for a production environment due to support issues. FC isn't perfect, either; there have been problems with compatability between applications in the same distro. And it was years before CentOS came out. We needed something immediately, and we simply could not afford RHEL. We eventually switched to Debian, which was (is) kind of the warm-fuzzy of the linux world. You know it's going to work, because it's been tested for so long, but as a result, it's usually a little behind the times. Debian went through a lot of growing-up in the months after RHEL happened.
Anyway, it shook us pretty hard. We felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us, and that we simply were a market segment who just didn't matter, because we didn't have deep pockets.
Again, sorry everyone for the explosion, but I think this post really explains where my feelings for RH come from.
I'd like a $49 OS that gives me 5 years of security updates. THAT's my point. For $50, I don't expect support. For $300+ I do expect support. I also expect not to be dropped like a bad habit after a year of updates.
I don't want both cheap AND amazing support. One or the other would be ok. But RHEL is neither.
Ok, but in that light, shouldn't emerge, apt-get, the BSD ports, whatever that thing is Ubuntu uses, and pretty much every other package manager get the same accolades?
I don't know how long you've used redhat for, but the one major complaint I've had with them has been RPM. I mean, when it was a problem for me, no one else had fixed it either, but I remember spending hours on rpmfind.net looking for dependencies of depencies of programs for rpm installs on redhat. Thankfully, yum fixes most of this.
But again my point remains... Yes, RPM is a significant project, but no more so than apt-get or probably considerably less so than portage, and to claim it's a good reason to charge your clients thousands of dollars over the life cycle of the product is just... fleecing the very users who you depend on.
Slashdot Mirror
"Razor and Blade?!? They're flakes!"
"They're Elite!"
(see userid... making fun of my name is on topic for once!!)
~Will
Yeah, I remember the version for the IIe. It was coded in applesoft basic, but used a lot of advanced functions. For example, when hunting deer, type "POW" or "BLAM" or whatever to shoot, and the faster you type, the more likely the kill - the timing function used a lot of chr$() commands I had no idea what they did.
~Will
I mean... maybe, but they're asking them to write a module that could be done in 15 minutes. 3500 words, tops, and 1 playable character, 4 NPC's tops. No combat, no special skills.
Sounds like they're really focusing on the writing to me. And like someone below said, they can't guarantee a job to the winner because the person might not be the kind of person who works well at the company, or is willing to relocate (vs. work from home), or could be the type of person who writes awesome fantasy, but also eats human flesh. Who knows.
~Will
Hrm... Sounds a little more godfather than neverwinter.
I gotta have more Grue!
Yeah, that pent up hostility can only lead to presidential assassinations, if you ask me.
Holy Crap.
Holy Crap. Holy Crap.
Speechless.
I applaud you sir.
For one, it's nice to hear someone who tries to connect with their kid by understanding them, or at least cutting them some slack and embracing the differences.
For two, it's also relatively rare these days to hear a person say a rational, well thought statement involving genuine belief in a god.
I wonder if age differential between kid and parent plays into the interaction and development? My wife and I are 24, and we have an 18 month old... I didn't think we were particularly young to have kids, but we take our little one to the park, and we see all kinds of people who look to be 30, 35, near 40 with kids the same age as ours. I wonder how those people are going to connect with their kids when the kids are 16 - I'm worried enough about how I'll do it, about whether or not I'll be able to remember my life at that age enough to connect... I can't imagine being almost 60 with a high schooler...
~W
Yeah, here's a bug fix in meta-code:How hard is this? The ONLY time I want a popup is when I click on something designed to open a new browser window.
~W
I've also had problems with Adblock on firefox 1.5. I mean, I know it's an extension, and not the problem of the developers, but it's also like the 3rd most popular FF extension on the planet, and if they break the API, it's annoying.
Not to mention, some flash stuff has been acting funny - not loading right, or at all... And I still get the occasional popup. I mean, disable disable window.open() for every case other than "onclick". How hard is that?
~W
And the tree-huggers reminding us to all "make clean"...
Double Kill!
Multi Kill!
Mega Kill!
Ultra Kill!
M M M MONSTER KILL (kill kill)
Ludicrous Kill!
HOLY SHIT!!
Why, yes, I do play UT2004. A lot.
Supposedly, pot is the biggest grossing cash crop in america, or 2nd biggest after corn, or something.
~W
I'd venture to say "still not hard to find in CS departments today". As long as you're not picky about gender, that is.
~W
Ah.
When you said "crappy laptops", I wasn't aware that you really meant it.
Yeah, dude, upgrade time.
haha gg newb no re pwnedj00
Can't you attach your X session to a remote server and just set the display locally? That way, all the processing is taking place on your fileboxen.
~W
Oh, I quit using RedHat a long time ago, but I had to support it after I gave up on it.
"Charging for support" to me doesn't mean "Charging you whether you get support or not, just charging a LOT more for support". I mean, if they're charging for support, they shouldn't charge for the version with no support (i.e. the $180 Workstation).
*sigh*
No new weapons were manufactured in Iraq after the first gulf war that violated any part of the agreement. The "weapons violations" where they found "WMD's" were because they had the same missles they had always had, and because the payloads had been removed (per the post-war agreement), the missles could now fly past the range specified by the agreement. These were disabled. The first gulf war eviscerated the iraqi armed forces and slaughtered their economy.
First off, consider the source. Drudge is not a non-biased news source, he's a pundit. He's proven this many times. Second, I've heard and seen similar montages. They all say (some in and some out of context) that Saddam was a threat if he had WMD's, and that he should be removed.
You know what? Kim Jong Il is a threat, and should be removed. The present government of Pakistan is a threat, and it would be nice if they were removed. It would be nice if Jack Valenti were removed. I consider Pat Robertson a threat to the security of the United States, and I wish he were removed.
Guess what's different?
I DIDN'T GO ANYWHERE AND KILL A HUNDRED THOUSAND CIVILIANS.
People can say that things aren't right and should be changed. It doesn't automatically give them the right to go and change them. The first time we invaded Iraq, we did so under the umbrella of protecting a trade ally. Whatever, ok, that's cool. The 2nd time, we did it under the pretext of preemptive war, and operating on information that was at a minimum suspect, and at maximum, knowingly false.
Whether you or anyone else wants saddam, or castro, or anyone else gone, there are rules. You can't just invade someone else's soverign nation with a ruling body in power for no reason other than you think they need to go.
~W
I had a big post on this recently, but the general gist of what I said went something like this:
Gas SHOULD be more expensive in America. It would be a good thing in many many ways. Cheap gas prices have encouraged suburbanization (like, urbanization, except rather than moving into the cities, everyone moves to the suburbs and commutes, while still moving away from rural areas). It's bad for the environment to use a lot of gas, and it's bad for the global economy - it encourages warlords in Venezuela, and stranglehold economies that need "regime change" in the middle east. Steep gas prices would be a good thing (TM).
But, we're just not ready for it. If it gradually happened over the next 15 years, it'd work. People would have time to phase out the big cars and start conserving, towns would create mass transit, and we'd use the tax revenue to balance the stupid fucking budget (to quote Carlin). It would also encourage localization. Rather than your plumber driving 18 miles, a small scale plumbing (or even general home repair) shop would open down the block. Global chains would see more competition from local small business, also a good thing.
Et Cetera, yada yada.
~W
Urine is sterile, and unless there's something kind of wrong with you, there shouldn't be any glucose to encourage bacteria growth.
Now, it is warm and wet, and that helps with bacteria growth, but the same could be said of any warm, wet, non-corrosive liquid.
~W
Red Hat charges for support, and for the brand name
See the other post I have in this series of threads regarding what it felt like in the small business world when RH pulled regular-redhat in favor of RHEL and Fedora.
One of my points is that RH has done a good PR job of convincing people that they're charging for support, when you don't get support unless you pay lots of money. The aforementioned $180 for workstation doesn't cover anything but like web forum support for installation.
But, that's not the thing. I think you hit it with the brand name thing. If anything, I don't like paying for a brand name. But even more so, I don't like being squeezed out of the segment of the population that can afford to pay for the brand name. It's all well and good that expensive OS's mean that the CTO's and PHB's feel good about the expense. I understand how that works - traditional suits don't think that anything that's inexpensive is worth a damn in an enterprise environment. But, I didn't need to be convinced that RH was a good product... I had been using it for years. And all of a sudden, because we weren't a multi-million dollar corporation, we were squeezed out.
~W
You're right, of course. And I'm sorry I went off in that last post.
But, you gotta understand my perspective. I was deep into the small-business webhosting business when the redhat swing went down. There was no way out. At that time, there were "other" linux distros, but other mainly consisted of Mandrake (which was falling off the map, despite bein based on RH), Debian (which most people considered a fringe distro), and slackware (outdated and hard to administer, at least when time-to-learn is a factor). Red Hat was it in the linux world. People distributed binaries in RPM format. Hardware proclaimed RedHat support, not linux support. It was RedHat or it wasn't professional.
And then they pulled the rug out. I mean... we were in the middle of a sign-up boom, we were adding a new server every week practically. We had to find something.
A paralell I thought of after I posted a lot of these comments... It's a similar situation to Apache today. Apache is by far the most popular webserver on posix OS's these days. Imagine if all of a sudden, it cost $300/yr for apache (hypothetical, bear with me). Yes there are other http servers, but none of them have the maturity, support, or general ubiquitiousness of apache. There would be a mad scramble for the leftovers to bring themselves up to maturity, and at the same time, applications that previously depended on and hooked into apache would be facing a partial API rewrite and debug to work with other products. Eventually, two or three other successors would emerge as the contenders, and maybe someone would take an old version of Apache and start re-developing it, but it would fragment the http world and cause mass confusion.
That's what happened in the small business world. It was several months (or a year) until Fedora was usable, and even though it's relatively stable, it's not suitable for a production environment due to support issues. FC isn't perfect, either; there have been problems with compatability between applications in the same distro. And it was years before CentOS came out. We needed something immediately, and we simply could not afford RHEL. We eventually switched to Debian, which was (is) kind of the warm-fuzzy of the linux world. You know it's going to work, because it's been tested for so long, but as a result, it's usually a little behind the times. Debian went through a lot of growing-up in the months after RHEL happened.
Anyway, it shook us pretty hard. We felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us, and that we simply were a market segment who just didn't matter, because we didn't have deep pockets.
Again, sorry everyone for the explosion, but I think this post really explains where my feelings for RH come from.
~Will
No, no, no!
I'd like a $49 OS that gives me 5 years of security updates. THAT's my point. For $50, I don't expect support. For $300+ I do expect support. I also expect not to be dropped like a bad habit after a year of updates.
I don't want both cheap AND amazing support. One or the other would be ok. But RHEL is neither.
~W
Ok, but in that light, shouldn't emerge, apt-get, the BSD ports, whatever that thing is Ubuntu uses, and pretty much every other package manager get the same accolades?
I don't know how long you've used redhat for, but the one major complaint I've had with them has been RPM. I mean, when it was a problem for me, no one else had fixed it either, but I remember spending hours on rpmfind.net looking for dependencies of depencies of programs for rpm installs on redhat. Thankfully, yum fixes most of this.
But again my point remains... Yes, RPM is a significant project, but no more so than apt-get or probably considerably less so than portage, and to claim it's a good reason to charge your clients thousands of dollars over the life cycle of the product is just... fleecing the very users who you depend on.
~W