He didn't survey Windows developers, which is a problem. Yes, they don't use Linux, but they may have at one point in time. You see, the author is operating on the assumption that once you go Linux, you stay Linux. He doesn't understand that everything is just a tool for our use, and we'll choose the best tool for the job (and typically the most cost-efficient.)
What he should have done is send 400 surveys to each of UNIX, Windows, and Linux developers to see what OS they used to run. That way, he'd be able to accurately determine if Linux is the blackhole of development platforms, or if Windows is taking market share from both UNIX and Linux
I know that the company I work for used to run Novell and TurboLinux (I think), but now is an all Windows environment. My boss hired this Network Admin who was a MS zealot, and the first thing she did when she came in the building was take down those Linux servers. She couldn't stand them, not because of their supposed "difficulty," but mostly because she took some MS classes, and had no clue what UNIX was.
As a result, we have developers here that had to switch from a Linux dev environment to a MS one.
Re:to the tune of "if your'e happy & you know
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
If your corp'rate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq.
If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq.
If your politics are sleazy,
And hiding that ain't easy,
And your manhood's getting queasy,
Bomb Iraq.
If I didn't know any better, I'd pin this verse on the Clinton regime.:-D
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Mod this dude up. He actually uses his brain to think, and not a rash emotional reaction. Even though he may not be fond of it, he has not blatantly denied the truth, and in so doing has accepted that which has been a part of this country for 100's of years.
Anyone who says that Gore was really the winner should check into a psychiatric ward, because they really are not thinking with a human brain.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
The parent post is not flamebait. Some of us are not fans of Michael Moore, and we recognize him as a irrational sensationalist fuck-up. Big deal.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
In fact, Michael Moore makes some very bad points in his letter.
He says "NO ONE" (with exception of...), but I'm for the attack/invasion/war (whatever your doublespeak wants to call it). I have a feeling that Michael feels too much in order to make a valid argument. In fact, all of his movies are steeped in this sentamental "fight for the underdog" mentality. Saddam, obviously, is the underdog. The difference is that Saddam is less than guilty, he's just an evil man.
I watched "Bowling for Columbine." I liked a lot of it, until he confronted Charlton Heston. That was perhaps the worst peice of journalism anyone has ever done. He not only offended Charlton, by cornering him in a way to make him appear completely evil, but he offended me. Maybe that's his point, to be offensive, but he sure didn't help his cause in his search for those things that cause American society to be more violent than others.
Michael doesn't have a logical bone in his body. He also doesn't have the ability to see a situation from all sides. All he sees is a big thing picking on a little thing. Maybe he's venting his gradeschool angst, with him being the unpopular fat kid in school that was made fun of. You may disagree with me on that, but it's fine... It seems to make more sense in explaining his arguments than anything else.
Michael is unqualified to make any judgements in this arena, as are any Hollywood actors/acresses, and any media reporters (read Jennings). Yeah, I'll admit that I'm not a liberal. I'm not really conservative either, though... so the label thing isn't an issue. I hope that I can keep a clear head on these issues, instead of getting my emotions into the whole argument, and risking that I may lose rationale.
Re:Doublespeak
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Mod me off-topic if you must.
Yeah, but the ninja mythos is so much cooler than the cowboy mythos. It's also much much older.
The whole qi/chi thing is quite possibly the coolest thing on the planet.
What should have happened here...
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
...have the same costs placed on me by my country, then d...
huh? Now I know that you aren't very rational. There's absolutely no reason why you can not go in to your boss, and volutarily match the price of the competing guy. The job is rare, the company is the consumer, and you have to sell yourself. If you don't like that, sorry dude... Just don't bitch about it.
The IT industry doesn't owe me anything. My government owes me lots. They should protect me and my job, and my family. It looks like the only way that this is going to happen is if I go to work at a munitions factory.
Actually, the original structure of our government garauntees that you have the right to say anything. That you have the right to start a business if you want to. That you have a right to earn more money than anyone else. It ensures that you can live your own life without fear of being shot, being used to harbor soldiers, without fear of having your liberties stripped underservingly.
The government has no responsibility towards keeping you employed. Seriously... If the government dipped their fingers into the economy that far, we would cease to be a capitalist country. It's important that the government does not interfere with our business in that way. They have created responsibilities over time, as seen in the Sherman Act, the New Deal, and the now defunct healthcare reform bill. These "responsibilities" really should be minimized. The anti-trust responsibilities are interesting as it is, it's necessary for some Government intervention in the market in order for the market to remain free. This does not include whether you have a job or not.
I heard the Army, Navy, and Air Force are hiring. Why don't you go check them out? That way, government actually would be responsibile for your job.
Imagine having an e-mail application that handles 15,000 peices of e-mail a day. This sort of application would require algorithms to be used or created that are very low order. Anything that has to do with data processing had better be coded by an individual who has a higher education than just algebra. This individual should be able to reduce an algorithm to it's bottlenecking factor, optimize it, and recode it.
That is something you learn in Computer Science. It is not something that uses simple algebra, but something much more complex.
Stow looks like emerge for binaries, only with fewer options.:-)
It's the user's choice, as always. Emerge/portage will give the user an optimized system at the expense of compile time, looks like stow will have that same ease of use.
Looks cool. I hope that they come up with a good graphical frontend for it. Package management is one of those Really Important things when it comes to Linux on the desktop. We don't want end-users to have to deal with dependancies and all that.
If you plan to design operating systems for Sun or compilers for Intel, you had better hope that you hail from Bangalore or Shanghai -- because that's where that work is being done now.
Ignore this dude. He obviously has forgotten about Redmond. He's forgotten about Transmeta. He's forgotten about a little company in North Carolina. He's forgotten about another little company in Germany. Oh, and then there's another one in Michigan. and one in......
They know how to spell: Busch, Bud, Lite (yes, it's incorrect.), Beer, Budweiser (stretching the limit there).
Pardon the sarcasm, please. I've had much exposure to frat boys, at least the ones from Michigan Tech. The collective IQ of those guys is equivalent to that of a monkey. I'm a little biased against frat guys. If I find that a frat-boy bunghole has been hired in my place, I'm likely to hunt down his new BMW and put superglue in his locks, and on his wipers.
Damn frat boys. Stealing the pussy, and then my job!
The Government is always hiring, and don't let anyone tell you that you have to get a security clearance to work on something cool.
Join Air Force ROTC. They're always looking for people, and they pay for school, and give you (beer.. did I say that?) money on the side. You also get a secret security clearance by your third year.
They've got some really fascinating shit in Dayton, OH. Wright Patterson has massive computation facilities, and one kick-ass 3-D display system.
The problem lies in too many institutions that are willing to give a CS degree for undergrade work. I know kids that can get out of a particular school with a CS degree, knowing only the basics in data structures and minimal C++. They can program a X's and O's ASCII java applet. They can do a simple program in VB. That's about as much as they picked up, but they'll graduate with a bachelor's in CS. Why? Because the school is not tough enough. These skills would be suitable for say, an associates or something.
Engineering schools usually have weeder classes. I know, I've been subjected to them. It's when the student realizes that the degree is difficult, and in a field of study that may not be suited to them. I realized that EE would be really really boring (to me.). I hated circuit analysis with a passion, so I switched majors. I went to CS. I loved it, I took to it like a fish in the water.
Unfortunately, a lot of schools don't have engineering programs, but do offer CS. The CS they offer is second rate at best. They don't give hard core algorithms as a required course. You can take the course, but it's not gaurranteed to be taught by an instructor who knows the subject. There are no standards placed upon CS, that I know of. They should have a test or something that you need to pass in order to be certified as having graduated with a CS degree. If you're not good with tests, they should offer it for free, and often.:shrug:
It bugs me that people say that there are idiots in the industry. It's more a story of people jumping on a bandwagon that they just don't belong on. The tech industry got fat with money, people saw that, and went to school for the money. That's about the time when all of those shitty certifications showed up. They were like having a CS degree without having a CS degree. Companies didn't give a shit about what you knew or understood, they just cared about your credentials.
Fortunately, the bubble popped. The people that were better suited for other things have moved on, for the most part. There are a few straglers, but that's what the help desk is for.;-)
What I can't stand is the ones who had no real training in programming. It helps to have profs and TA's slapping the backs of your hands with yardsticks if you don't have good style. I got killed on a lot of homework programs at first, because I was using cutsie variable names, and not relevant ones. This is a thing that you learn early, and quickly.
I work with a dude that writes tons with a OO type program, but writes everything in a massive procedure. It bugs me. His technique is also non-standard, causing the code to look... just wierd. It's hard to follow. Which brings me to another rant:
COMMENTS! Geesh. I use comments to talk the way through the program like in normal conversation. That way, non-tech types can see my code, and maybe learn something. It helps my boss too, cuz he doesn't like to try to figure things out. Granted, the code is fairly obvious, but comments never hurt. Those who don't comment... grrr.
No kidding. I work at an in-home Healthcare company. It's a great job, I've earned a lot of respect, and I work on projects that expand the resources available to our field staff. Did I find this job through normal channels? No.
I started at the CSC (corporate support center) as a payroll clerk, moved to the receptionist position, and after a long while of getting to know everyone... I gave a resume' to the IT director. He knew me by then, and thought I was a nice guy... he used to quiz me on general old-skool computer trivia too.
I became aware of the need for a programmer at the company as well, right before I turned in a resume. It turns out that I didn't fill that role, rather I ended up creating my own role (in a sense.). I was put in charge of intranet development... I'll say that the intranet at the time was a collection of html files sitting somewhere. I reorganized it and had some help getting it database - based. After that, I started learning a lot, and applied it. I started branching out, creating my own projects, submitting them to my boss, and then working on them to completion. It's quite satisfying.
Now, I'm looked to whenever a solution is necessary for a lot of programming issues. I contribute a large part to our IT system now, when I was viewed as "just a newb." Of course, it helps that our IT department has only 8 members.
Find someplace small, that's in an industry that isn't dead (pretty much, non-tech). There's always a demand for IT people, you just have to realize that most people don't have the glamour of working at Intel or AMD or Motorola or IBM or Microsoft.
I'll concede to that point. I didn't say that every game came from the U.K., I said that almost ever game...:-P
But, that's all just word twisting and whatever. You are absolutely right that there have been some fantastic games that have sprung from the U.S. I'd say that Ultima is the biggest example of them all. I guess the point I was hedging on, but hadn't really thought out, was the fact that English games don't have the same mentality that U.S. games do. They've got a different mood, a different attitude.
There was a poster here that said that it doesn't matter what country it is, but as long as it came from somewhere non-US. I think it's not even that... it's just the mentality has to be non-US. Lord British certainly does not have the typical US attitude, he seems to be 'eccentric'. Of course, it's the eccentricity that spawns awesome ideas. Alice in Wonderland is a good example (not a game, though.:shrug:)
The UK, and it's denizens, definitely have a different view of life than most Americans. My sister married some dude from England, and I'd say that they are both rather odd (according to my standard American attitude.:shrug:)
But yeah, I've seen a few games come from places other than England that were good. Including a few from the U.S. I would hope that you agree with me when I say that although there are few good ones, most U.S. games are crap. A fine example of crapulence: expansion packs.
Over the years, I've been a large purchaser of games. I've got all sorts of games, FPS's, RPG's, Action, Adventure, Puzzle, you name it. What I have noticed, though, is that almost every game that I thought was insanely *cool* have come from the U.K. Let's start with Lemmings. Lemmings managed to hook my dad into playing non-stop, he kept going and going. You have to understand that pre-and-post lemmings, my dad is decidedly not a games guy. It was the first game of it's kind, and it was perhaps the best lemmings game that came out.
Populace, Relentless, Syndicate (the original mafia), Theme Park... These all came from somewhere in England (usually Bullfrog, sometimes Psygnosis). Compare this to 15 iterations of Wolfenstein 3D, each building graphically but little else. Not until Half-Life, which included a bit of a story, and Deus-Ex were FPS's actually innovative. No, Unreal was just the same as all the others at the time.
American games tend to have one thing in common: Push the hardware limit. Doom ran on a 386, although slowly and in a tiny window. Quake demanded a 486 DX/2 66 and higher to run. Quake 3 demanded a 3-D accelerator. It seems that the U.S. is the test bed for all the newest technology, and it's up to the U.K. to implement it with any of that addicting story/gameplay.
SimCity was the first "Sim" game. It was fun. Every other sim game the came after has sucked, with exception of SC2K. SC2K extended the graphics, but didn't fuck too much with the gameplay. It was really fun. SC3K and SC4 suck ass. SimEarth sucks ass. SimTower sucks ass. SimFarm, wtf? SimAnt (cool premise, boring game). The best game that came out was origially done by the Japs in A-Train, anyone remember that? Maxis just bought the rights to it, and managed to kill the game.
So yeah, Peter's got a point. As long as the heads of business don't steal the money, I think it would benefit the U.K. to pony up some cash. They are the imaginative ones. We, Americans, are the inventive ones.
It seems that they wouldn't get much through the door, though they seem the most likely to be creative problem solvers. They're the ones that try to figure out a way to minimize the amount of actual work that they have to do, which is typically reflected in the grade. My resume would suck ass if I were just coming out of college.
They should administer some kind of multi-faceted IQ test. Sorry, all of you poor test takers really show your ability to operate under pressure. I never worried about tests, it was the required homework assignments that always did me in. Of course, I doubt MS is gonna want to hire full-fledged hacker types. They prefer to have their choice of the amateurs.
If you really knew anything you would know that the "inconsistent" program is Emacs, which takes Ctrl+Y to paste. There are also very old programs that have no idea about pasting at all, but I'm sure you can find some Windows programs like DOS ports that don't pay attention to pasting either.
Don't go bashing one without the other. ESC + Anything is not exactly in the standard keystroke lib. I'm surprised that ctl+v is even used, considering the "v" couldn't really stand for anything. Why didn't MS just bite the bullet, and make it Ctl+Y, so that it would more in tune with the "older" programs.
You forgot the reading of an executable image into RAM. Depending on the executable, and the binary files associated with it, HDD performance is a big factore there.
Sontag declined to comment on how his company's actions would affect its UnitedLinux partners, but said customers who buy Linux from SCO have no intellectual property concerns. "Those that purchase our Linux product have nothing to fear. They have our full license to our Unix intellectual property when they're purchasing our Linux products," he said.
So... All IBM has to do is go pick up a copy of Caldera Linux. They get a free coater out of it, but more importantly a full license to SCO's Unix IP.:-D
[H]ard|OCP usually raises a big stink if a company comes out with a stinker. I remember when there were some GeForce3 cards that were a little out of spec, and some of the capacitors on the card were rubbing up on capacitors on the mobo. They called the company and demanded that they explain why they messed up.
Granted, Kyle and crew do have their favorites, as it seems. Anything that has to do with a massive sized heatsink, or water cooling usually gets more air-time than the generic ship-with stuff. After reading their reviews tho, you get to know that they don't give any bullshit, nor will they praise a card just because it was given to them for free.
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He didn't survey Windows developers, which is a problem. Yes, they don't use Linux, but they may have at one point in time. You see, the author is operating on the assumption that once you go Linux, you stay Linux. He doesn't understand that everything is just a tool for our use, and we'll choose the best tool for the job (and typically the most cost-efficient.)
What he should have done is send 400 surveys to each of UNIX, Windows, and Linux developers to see what OS they used to run. That way, he'd be able to accurately determine if Linux is the blackhole of development platforms, or if Windows is taking market share from both UNIX and Linux
I know that the company I work for used to run Novell and TurboLinux (I think), but now is an all Windows environment. My boss hired this Network Admin who was a MS zealot, and the first thing she did when she came in the building was take down those Linux servers. She couldn't stand them, not because of their supposed "difficulty," but mostly because she took some MS classes, and had no clue what UNIX was.
As a result, we have developers here that had to switch from a Linux dev environment to a MS one.
If your corp'rate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq.
If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq.
If your politics are sleazy,
And hiding that ain't easy,
And your manhood's getting queasy,
Bomb Iraq.
If I didn't know any better, I'd pin this verse on the Clinton regime. :-D
Mod this dude up. He actually uses his brain to think, and not a rash emotional reaction. Even though he may not be fond of it, he has not blatantly denied the truth, and in so doing has accepted that which has been a part of this country for 100's of years.
Anyone who says that Gore was really the winner should check into a psychiatric ward, because they really are not thinking with a human brain.
The parent post is not flamebait. Some of us are not fans of Michael Moore, and we recognize him as a irrational sensationalist fuck-up. Big deal.
In fact, Michael Moore makes some very bad points in his letter.
He says "NO ONE" (with exception of ...), but I'm for the attack/invasion/war (whatever your doublespeak wants to call it). I have a feeling that Michael feels too much in order to make a valid argument. In fact, all of his movies are steeped in this sentamental "fight for the underdog" mentality. Saddam, obviously, is the underdog. The difference is that Saddam is less than guilty, he's just an evil man.
I watched "Bowling for Columbine." I liked a lot of it, until he confronted Charlton Heston. That was perhaps the worst peice of journalism anyone has ever done. He not only offended Charlton, by cornering him in a way to make him appear completely evil, but he offended me. Maybe that's his point, to be offensive, but he sure didn't help his cause in his search for those things that cause American society to be more violent than others.
Michael doesn't have a logical bone in his body. He also doesn't have the ability to see a situation from all sides. All he sees is a big thing picking on a little thing. Maybe he's venting his gradeschool angst, with him being the unpopular fat kid in school that was made fun of. You may disagree with me on that, but it's fine... It seems to make more sense in explaining his arguments than anything else.
Michael is unqualified to make any judgements in this arena, as are any Hollywood actors/acresses, and any media reporters (read Jennings). Yeah, I'll admit that I'm not a liberal. I'm not really conservative either, though... so the label thing isn't an issue. I hope that I can keep a clear head on these issues, instead of getting my emotions into the whole argument, and risking that I may lose rationale.
Mod me off-topic if you must.
Yeah, but the ninja mythos is so much cooler than the cowboy mythos. It's also much much older.
The whole qi/chi thing is quite possibly the coolest thing on the planet.
Well, the first post should have said ...
FLAME ON!!!
huh? Now I know that you aren't very rational. There's absolutely no reason why you can not go in to your boss, and volutarily match the price of the competing guy. The job is rare, the company is the consumer, and you have to sell yourself. If you don't like that, sorry dude... Just don't bitch about it.
The IT industry doesn't owe me anything. My government owes me lots. They should protect me and my job, and my family. It looks like the only way that this is going to happen is if I go to work at a munitions factory.
Actually, the original structure of our government garauntees that you have the right to say anything. That you have the right to start a business if you want to. That you have a right to earn more money than anyone else. It ensures that you can live your own life without fear of being shot, being used to harbor soldiers, without fear of having your liberties stripped underservingly.
The government has no responsibility towards keeping you employed. Seriously... If the government dipped their fingers into the economy that far, we would cease to be a capitalist country. It's important that the government does not interfere with our business in that way. They have created responsibilities over time, as seen in the Sherman Act, the New Deal, and the now defunct healthcare reform bill. These "responsibilities" really should be minimized. The anti-trust responsibilities are interesting as it is, it's necessary for some Government intervention in the market in order for the market to remain free. This does not include whether you have a job or not.
I heard the Army, Navy, and Air Force are hiring. Why don't you go check them out? That way, government actually would be responsibile for your job.
Time to find that old "Stunt Doubling for Dummies" book...
Nice double entendre'.
Not so.
Imagine having an e-mail application that handles 15,000 peices of e-mail a day. This sort of application would require algorithms to be used or created that are very low order. Anything that has to do with data processing had better be coded by an individual who has a higher education than just algebra. This individual should be able to reduce an algorithm to it's bottlenecking factor, optimize it, and recode it.
That is something you learn in Computer Science. It is not something that uses simple algebra, but something much more complex.
Stow looks like emerge for binaries, only with fewer options. :-)
It's the user's choice, as always. Emerge/portage will give the user an optimized system at the expense of compile time, looks like stow will have that same ease of use.
Looks cool. I hope that they come up with a good graphical frontend for it. Package management is one of those Really Important things when it comes to Linux on the desktop. We don't want end-users to have to deal with dependancies and all that.
If you plan to design operating systems for Sun or compilers for Intel, you had better hope that you hail from Bangalore or Shanghai -- because that's where that work is being done now.
Ignore this dude. He obviously has forgotten about Redmond. He's forgotten about Transmeta. He's forgotten about a little company in North Carolina. He's forgotten about another little company in Germany. Oh, and then there's another one in Michigan. and one in ......
He's just a bitter dimwit.
Har har!
But at least Johnnie Frat Boy knows how to spell!
They know how to spell: Busch, Bud, Lite (yes, it's incorrect.), Beer, Budweiser (stretching the limit there).
Pardon the sarcasm, please. I've had much exposure to frat boys, at least the ones from Michigan Tech. The collective IQ of those guys is equivalent to that of a monkey. I'm a little biased against frat guys. If I find that a frat-boy bunghole has been hired in my place, I'm likely to hunt down his new BMW and put superglue in his locks, and on his wipers.
Damn frat boys. Stealing the pussy, and then my job!
The Government is always hiring, and don't let anyone tell you that you have to get a security clearance to work on something cool.
Join Air Force ROTC. They're always looking for people, and they pay for school, and give you (beer.. did I say that?) money on the side. You also get a secret security clearance by your third year.
They've got some really fascinating shit in Dayton, OH. Wright Patterson has massive computation facilities, and one kick-ass 3-D display system.
I wouldn't say that.
The problem lies in too many institutions that are willing to give a CS degree for undergrade work. I know kids that can get out of a particular school with a CS degree, knowing only the basics in data structures and minimal C++. They can program a X's and O's ASCII java applet. They can do a simple program in VB. That's about as much as they picked up, but they'll graduate with a bachelor's in CS. Why? Because the school is not tough enough. These skills would be suitable for say, an associates or something.
Engineering schools usually have weeder classes. I know, I've been subjected to them. It's when the student realizes that the degree is difficult, and in a field of study that may not be suited to them. I realized that EE would be really really boring (to me.). I hated circuit analysis with a passion, so I switched majors. I went to CS. I loved it, I took to it like a fish in the water.
Unfortunately, a lot of schools don't have engineering programs, but do offer CS. The CS they offer is second rate at best. They don't give hard core algorithms as a required course. You can take the course, but it's not gaurranteed to be taught by an instructor who knows the subject. There are no standards placed upon CS, that I know of. They should have a test or something that you need to pass in order to be certified as having graduated with a CS degree. If you're not good with tests, they should offer it for free, and often. :shrug:
It bugs me that people say that there are idiots in the industry. It's more a story of people jumping on a bandwagon that they just don't belong on. The tech industry got fat with money, people saw that, and went to school for the money. That's about the time when all of those shitty certifications showed up. They were like having a CS degree without having a CS degree. Companies didn't give a shit about what you knew or understood, they just cared about your credentials.
Fortunately, the bubble popped. The people that were better suited for other things have moved on, for the most part. There are a few straglers, but that's what the help desk is for. ;-)
What I can't stand is the ones who had no real training in programming. It helps to have profs and TA's slapping the backs of your hands with yardsticks if you don't have good style. I got killed on a lot of homework programs at first, because I was using cutsie variable names, and not relevant ones. This is a thing that you learn early, and quickly.
I work with a dude that writes tons with a OO type program, but writes everything in a massive procedure. It bugs me. His technique is also non-standard, causing the code to look... just wierd. It's hard to follow. Which brings me to another rant:
COMMENTS! Geesh. I use comments to talk the way through the program like in normal conversation. That way, non-tech types can see my code, and maybe learn something. It helps my boss too, cuz he doesn't like to try to figure things out. Granted, the code is fairly obvious, but comments never hurt. Those who don't comment... grrr.
No kidding. I work at an in-home Healthcare company. It's a great job, I've earned a lot of respect, and I work on projects that expand the resources available to our field staff. Did I find this job through normal channels? No.
I started at the CSC (corporate support center) as a payroll clerk, moved to the receptionist position, and after a long while of getting to know everyone... I gave a resume' to the IT director. He knew me by then, and thought I was a nice guy... he used to quiz me on general old-skool computer trivia too.
I became aware of the need for a programmer at the company as well, right before I turned in a resume. It turns out that I didn't fill that role, rather I ended up creating my own role (in a sense.). I was put in charge of intranet development... I'll say that the intranet at the time was a collection of html files sitting somewhere. I reorganized it and had some help getting it database - based. After that, I started learning a lot, and applied it. I started branching out, creating my own projects, submitting them to my boss, and then working on them to completion. It's quite satisfying.
Now, I'm looked to whenever a solution is necessary for a lot of programming issues. I contribute a large part to our IT system now, when I was viewed as "just a newb." Of course, it helps that our IT department has only 8 members.
Find someplace small, that's in an industry that isn't dead (pretty much, non-tech). There's always a demand for IT people, you just have to realize that most people don't have the glamour of working at Intel or AMD or Motorola or IBM or Microsoft.
I'll concede to that point. I didn't say that every game came from the U.K., I said that almost ever game... :-P
But, that's all just word twisting and whatever. You are absolutely right that there have been some fantastic games that have sprung from the U.S. I'd say that Ultima is the biggest example of them all. I guess the point I was hedging on, but hadn't really thought out, was the fact that English games don't have the same mentality that U.S. games do. They've got a different mood, a different attitude.
There was a poster here that said that it doesn't matter what country it is, but as long as it came from somewhere non-US. I think it's not even that... it's just the mentality has to be non-US. Lord British certainly does not have the typical US attitude, he seems to be 'eccentric'. Of course, it's the eccentricity that spawns awesome ideas. Alice in Wonderland is a good example (not a game, though. :shrug:)
The UK, and it's denizens, definitely have a different view of life than most Americans. My sister married some dude from England, and I'd say that they are both rather odd (according to my standard American attitude. :shrug:)
But yeah, I've seen a few games come from places other than England that were good. Including a few from the U.S. I would hope that you agree with me when I say that although there are few good ones, most U.S. games are crap. A fine example of crapulence: expansion packs.
I was hoping for a thread like this to begin.
Over the years, I've been a large purchaser of games. I've got all sorts of games, FPS's, RPG's, Action, Adventure, Puzzle, you name it. What I have noticed, though, is that almost every game that I thought was insanely *cool* have come from the U.K. Let's start with Lemmings. Lemmings managed to hook my dad into playing non-stop, he kept going and going. You have to understand that pre-and-post lemmings, my dad is decidedly not a games guy. It was the first game of it's kind, and it was perhaps the best lemmings game that came out.
Populace, Relentless, Syndicate (the original mafia), Theme Park... These all came from somewhere in England (usually Bullfrog, sometimes Psygnosis). Compare this to 15 iterations of Wolfenstein 3D, each building graphically but little else. Not until Half-Life, which included a bit of a story, and Deus-Ex were FPS's actually innovative. No, Unreal was just the same as all the others at the time.
American games tend to have one thing in common: Push the hardware limit. Doom ran on a 386, although slowly and in a tiny window. Quake demanded a 486 DX/2 66 and higher to run. Quake 3 demanded a 3-D accelerator. It seems that the U.S. is the test bed for all the newest technology, and it's up to the U.K. to implement it with any of that addicting story/gameplay.
SimCity was the first "Sim" game. It was fun. Every other sim game the came after has sucked, with exception of SC2K. SC2K extended the graphics, but didn't fuck too much with the gameplay. It was really fun. SC3K and SC4 suck ass. SimEarth sucks ass. SimTower sucks ass. SimFarm, wtf? SimAnt (cool premise, boring game). The best game that came out was origially done by the Japs in A-Train, anyone remember that? Maxis just bought the rights to it, and managed to kill the game.
So yeah, Peter's got a point. As long as the heads of business don't steal the money, I think it would benefit the U.K. to pony up some cash. They are the imaginative ones. We, Americans, are the inventive ones.
It seems that they wouldn't get much through the door, though they seem the most likely to be creative problem solvers. They're the ones that try to figure out a way to minimize the amount of actual work that they have to do, which is typically reflected in the grade. My resume would suck ass if I were just coming out of college.
They should administer some kind of multi-faceted IQ test. Sorry, all of you poor test takers really show your ability to operate under pressure. I never worried about tests, it was the required homework assignments that always did me in. Of course, I doubt MS is gonna want to hire full-fledged hacker types. They prefer to have their choice of the amateurs.
</FLAME ON!>If you really knew anything you would know that the "inconsistent" program is Emacs, which takes Ctrl+Y to paste. There are also very old programs that have no idea about pasting at all, but I'm sure you can find some Windows programs like DOS ports that don't pay attention to pasting either.
Don't go bashing one without the other. ESC + Anything is not exactly in the standard keystroke lib. I'm surprised that ctl+v is even used, considering the "v" couldn't really stand for anything. Why didn't MS just bite the bullet, and make it Ctl+Y, so that it would more in tune with the "older" programs.
You forgot the reading of an executable image into RAM. Depending on the executable, and the binary files associated with it, HDD performance is a big factore there.
Sontag declined to comment on how his company's actions would affect its UnitedLinux partners, but said customers who buy Linux from SCO have no intellectual property concerns. "Those that purchase our Linux product have nothing to fear. They have our full license to our Unix intellectual property when they're purchasing our Linux products," he said.
So... All IBM has to do is go pick up a copy of Caldera Linux. They get a free coater out of it, but more importantly a full license to SCO's Unix IP. :-D
[H]ard|OCP usually raises a big stink if a company comes out with a stinker. I remember when there were some GeForce3 cards that were a little out of spec, and some of the capacitors on the card were rubbing up on capacitors on the mobo. They called the company and demanded that they explain why they messed up.
Granted, Kyle and crew do have their favorites, as it seems. Anything that has to do with a massive sized heatsink, or water cooling usually gets more air-time than the generic ship-with stuff. After reading their reviews tho, you get to know that they don't give any bullshit, nor will they praise a card just because it was given to them for free.