Just thought of another problem I have with "plugable" OS modules and that is security. Any of the security holes in third party modules would be in all likely hood blamed on the os because the division is invisible to the user. Just think of how many IIS security holes are listed as "windows security holes". If some other company has developed Joe's IIS module that is in that place and it has the security hole, it is certainly not fair to say that its a security hole in windows.
Imagine this, someone buys a machine from compaq and its running "modular windows" and has the "real audio module" installed in place of the "windows media player module" and a person can't get thier sound file to play. Who will they call? MS for sure and MS will have to give its best effort to solve real's problem in order keep its image of support for windows
Scenario 2 is someone has windows without the internet module installed and calls in asking "how do I get online, windows is supposed to do that" and ms has to explain that because they got a version without that module installed they will need to go purchase the module (or worse yet an actual complete version of windows). Bad scenario to be in.
This also puts windows in exactly the position that I think is linux's biggest problem for going mainstream. There are just too many versions and no instruction manuals can be written that are comprehensive because there are so many options.
One of the big design goals in creating windows was a unified look and feel. The ability for a person to learn a few core skills and be able to use all of the OS with little trouble. What will certainly happen if modular windows is required is that people will have to learn how to use a far larger set of skills. I am 100% opposed to having windows with major components being plugable unless MS can control the bar for accepting a module as "certified". Its MS's image on the line and they are being forced to put that image in the hands of other companies that won't be affected as much by a failure.
I hope everyone realizes who will be paying the extra cost of making the OS modular if that becomes a requirment. Its the end user both in increased cost of the initial product and in nightmares or usability. Just imagine if instead of real being an application on top of the OS that you installed it as an integrated part? Can we say "My OS doesn't work anymore"? I'm sorry but I don't think any of the other companies have a right to argue that thier products don't integrate as well as MS's.
On the subject of the "search" problem I think MS did fuck up by hard coding the list of search terms (it may have been for perf reasons I don't know). There should be a registry key or something of the sort that holds "rules" for what is a music file. That way Real could add to that if people wanted it. That is extra development time though and development time that mostly benifits competitors. Its not a great analogy but I don't think it should be ford's responsibility to make sure that all the connections are there and working well so that I can put a chevy engine in my truck. Windows is a unified product that is an OS as well as a number of highly integrated utilities for doing common tasks. In that way its like a whole car. They don't manufacture a chassis that you put your own stuff on top of, its more like they build a full truck that just happens to haul some extra cargo and allow add ons to do more things. I agree this is a MAJOR advertisement against MS for some people, but as far as it goes many people would like to pop in 1 cd (or soon dvd) for windows and know that when it installs they will be able to do almost anything that they want to with no further installs. And knowing that if you install a game or two or a music player on top of that it will work is also required.
As far as the "in browser" playing of the files, so long as you remember to say no to that feature your user preference is retained (at least mine was). If you say yes when it asks if you want to play the music "in browser" then you are saying yes I want to use WMP.
What I see is a fight between choice and a unified look and feel for everyone. If you allow choice you blow that unified look and feel all to hell. Personally I don't give a rats behind what program plays my music from the browser as long as it does it well and it doesn't stop me from using a different player to play music outside the browser.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend "civilized", "democratic" societies as the answer to all the woes. Just stating the obvious fact that there is some major trouble mixing the two types of systems.
The alternative is to abolish discount programs completely and fedrally regulate the price of the OS. This would not end up with all OS's being free, this would end up with all OS's being like $50 regardless.
I honestly don't know what side to be on. On one side MS did work to create windows and I feel they should be compensated. On another side I realize that the school is getting a discount for purchasing windows for every machine in the organization and could get around this contractual flaw by buying windows at retail price.
I think the school needs to look at whether overall the total price for windows is cheaper when paying for every machine including non-windows machines, or if they purchased retail and not academic pricing. Then when they have total cost buy using that method and just realize the "real" cost per window machine might be higher than the "per license" cost that MS gives you. I agree that its a shitty policy on MS's side but if overall its cheaper than retail the school can't really complain.
The only thing I really have a distaste for is computer manufacturers and assemblers that won't sell a os bare PC. There should be a requirement by law that forces the companies to sell without OS (realize this DOES NOT mean those computers have a lower price than the "with os" computers).
Final note is that I agree with the parent that people need to read the license before they buy. I don't care if its hidden inside the box or you need special glasses to read it, refuse to buy until you understand the terms of the purchase, especially when you are a large institution.
You want to know what WE (meaning people from the "civilized" world) did that caused rampent hunger in the "third world"? Modern Medicine.
As nuts as that sounds its true. Before our wonderful technology got to those parts of the world the societies were capable of feeding themselves because they were a manageble size. Now that you don't have the high mortality rate the old tradition of having lots of kids so a few survive is causing terrible overpopulation.
Basically we didn't complete the job of education because that would be "warping thier culture". Basically it seems that old cultures can't survive in the modern world.
What do we do about this? Well I don't really know, my gut instinct is to continue the education process and modernize the beliefs. It will also help to institute more modern agriculture to those countries. In the end education is all I can think of, modern educated societies have a much smaller population growth.
I personally wish we could let things go back to the way they were before we fiddled with things out of compassion but the cat is out of the bag and now the world has to live with it.
I think you fail to see the actual issue. The OS uses functionality of the browser internally for display rendering and browsing type fucntions. It just happens that many functions in a shell and functions in a browser are similar so MS took the step and made them the same code. MS didn't necessarily do this to have an unfair advantage over other web browsers, they did it to save on development costs by leveraging the browser tech to do OS shell jobs.
The fact that it does put IE in a position to unfairly compete is very unfortunate but are we going to legislate by law that MS has to use a more expensive development path for thier OS because of that? What if someone wrote a windows manager that used gecko to render its UI and parse the file system output to create cool GUI file browser features? Would you say this is awful because now you have gecko on your machine or would you praise the group for the code reuse and cleverness?
I happen to think using HTML for rendering some UI features and using browser capabilites in place of traditional file browser functions to be a good way to leverage user knowledge of one area to introduce them to another. It also means that the cost of "having a browser" is terribly low because you have it for other functionality and so you pay the cost once and get many benifits instead of paying it again and again for every new task.
What I'm trying to say is that the fact that MS has the only OS that can't have the browser removed may be a technological advance rather than the step back that people assume it is. The next step to be taken that would solve a majority of the issues I see is to make this module plugable so that it could be replaced by another rendering engine/browser engine that you prefer. The problem there is compatability and the fact that noone can live up to a standard that is written. Its also a major support issue because MS is responsible for the "look and feel" of there OS from a support standpoint. One of the major things I can't stand about *nixes are the fact that you have 90million different window managers that all work differently. Windows has 1 look and feel and to let that be changed would be to ruin one of the major features of windows. If you don't like that feature don't use windows but don't force the experience to be changed for those users that like it. MS spent a great deal of money building and selling the windows experience and now people that don't like it would like to ligislate and judge it out of existance.
What other browsers need to do to gain back considerable ground in the browser arena is to do something that IE doesn't and can't do. This probably won't happen #1 because MS is spending tons of dev time on IE to keep it doing new things and #2 because what more do you want a browser to do? I am one of those users that doesn't switch away from IE because its already there, but I can tell you I sure as heck would switch away if something was better for me. Unfortunately every time I use Mozilla it doesn't do something that IE does that I like and I get pissed off and drop it again. Anyways thats a different discussion.
Honestly I as a software producer (probably not the company that employs me however) am perfectly willing to require you to sign terms of use before you purchase the software. I think that the producer should have the right to limit distribution in some fundamental way and if the way to enforce that is to require that a person sign a binding contract before purchase then so be it.
On the other side I as a consumer would not purchase a product that did not have a contract I was willing to live with. If I buy a sharp knife I should have the right to cut myself with it. If I buy a book I should have the right to warp my mind with it. With software I think the producer should have the right to limit software to one concurrent use per licence (on music I would be careful to interpret this as playing the media from one player at one time regardless of the format of the media playing at the time, so if I own the cd I would want to be able to play an mp3 of the music so long as I'm not playing the CD at the same time. I think thats a valid restriction and gets around the copying for a friend issue without restricting my ability to listen from multiple formats without making multiple purchases). I am sure that none of what I just said is written into any type of law but thats the type of legislation I'd support.
Basically I want the right to choose my media and player (whether that be OS, emulator or music player, or even whether I read electronic text or plain paper text of the work). I also want the right to possess the particular work in multiple formats at one time without requiring multiple purchases to the right to own the said work. That means I want to have the work on cd and tape and electronic format all at the same time. I don't think anyone but me (or my direct family I don't know how exactly thats categorized) should be able to use the work without purchasing that right.
A tricky part is reverse engineering. I think there should be some rights for a user to be able to do this so that they can use the word processor with a mod that they provide to edit a different type of word processor file. I don't think the person should be allowed to reverse engineer the product to make thier own competing product using that knowledge. On the other hand there is the issue of "linux support" (replace linux with your favorite unsupported OS) where it would be nice if reverse engineering were allowed in order to support new platforms. I think that with that the company writing the original product should be a part of the equation in that they came up with the "way to do it" and should keep credit and benifits for that and yet they should be required to offer the new platform support to owners of the original license but maybe not offer the same level of technical support or some requirement that the person writing the new platform option be required to offer support. Thats a tricky relationship that I am not entirely sure how to handle because the orignal creator came up with the "way to do it" and if you reverse engineer that out you should be forced to "pay" for the right to use that information and yet I don't think the manufacturer should be able to limit what OS or media you use thier product on by forced lack of support.
Ok I think I've rambled on here past the point of a coherant thought so I'll close this poist.
I was looking for a place to post my gut reaction to hearing this and a reply here seems perfect.
When its thier "way or the highway" and its terms you can't swallow tell them you are going to walk. The all of the over 60k workers should just bail. I know its hard to find jobs right now but don't let an employer put a noose around your neck and screw you. Once you have dropped down into the 30-40K a year range you are just as well off in a ton of other jobs so start looking.
Also use this as leverage to try and bump up your wage. I think if the company is threatened with losing all of its upper level employees because of a crappy wage cut they will reconsider and look to cut costs elsewhere. Not that I'd want to stick around in a company thats will to try moves like this to make it.
He assumes the worst as does any other open source zealot with a company that is less that forthcoming with specifications or information. I think the rebuttal was excellent however and shows a desire to please the community and get OGG supported.
Yeah but it pumps up the color-depth of the picture making each pixel take 3bytes instead of 1:) If you are using a small number of colors that kind of sux.
Actually for something with large patches of solid colors and low color numbers.gif often has better compression. This is due to the process that creates a jpg which basically is optimized for high frequency change in the colors that can be "thrown out". A gif however is optimized for large patches of the same color which can be squished into one small piece of info. So don't just assume jpg is the best, use the right tool for each job. I would probably use.png instead of.gif though since it doesn't have all the patent problems:)
I agree:) I thought thats what I said. I don't use GPL'd code in any of my projects because I am not willing to release my code under that license.
I also agree that they should be called contracts and there should be some way to formalize the acceptance. I am also for requiring acceptance of the licence before goods are delivered.
I have never read the GPL because I don't like it, its bad enough that it FORCES derivatives to release source (but I won't go into that now).
The interesting part of your post, if its true, is the requirement to release the source of the tools. I bet there is a fair amount (not a majority by ANY means) of software that was developed in closed source development environments and then released as GPL, this means there is a fair amount of software breaking the GPL from the get go.
I can't believe that the GPL actually does this, but if it does its another reason that its a terrible licence. I support authors that want to release thier source because its a good thing to do. I cannot however support a licence as tyranical and draconian in its requirments as the GPL. Someone please come up with an alternative licence that encourages openness yet doesn't take the rights away from developers.
I've always wanted a license (and if I ever write anything worth distributing I might try drafting it) that requires derivatives to release my source it its original form but does not require them to release thier modifications. This would keep my ideas open forever, but allow the other people to do what they want with thier ideas.
I knew a game tester for a major company personally. His description of game testing is basically this: You play the same 10 seconds of a game 30 million times just to make sure "something wierd" doesn't happen.
Its UI testing of the most henous kind. Its a testers nightmare because reproducability is next to none. To quote my friend "It makes you hate playing games."
On the other hand being a game reviewer would be total rock, you get to play the game a few times and tell the world what you think.
In short the parent post is 100% correct, testing sux, reviewing is much cooler.
Yeah but in that case the teacher is not teaching well. I used VC++ as my compiler during college and none of my code was hacked together like you mentions. I just prefered the debugger in VS over GDB.
It is my strong opinion that beginning CS students shouldn't be writing GUI programs anyways, there are too many extra issues and wierdness to worry about in a gui that aren't present in a console app.
I am going to assume that the light blinks when the line is high. Considering thats 100% of the data passed to the other side of the pipe you now have all the data on the indicator light. I don't know if you could pick up any data from a full duplex network or how messed up it would be but half duplex isn't even much of a stretch of the imagination.
I work with a girl that went to MIT. She is odd, not terribly quick witted, a horrible programmer, but she is DEFINITELY hot. I wouldn't date her (I would never get along with her personality) but I'd gladly look at her any time.
The reason you don't see AOL as evil is that you are looking in the wrong sector. AOL could give a flying **** about software, they have one single goal and that is to own 100% of your entertainment time. Already its hard not to watch a movie, watch a TV show, read a book or play a game that AOL doesn't have some piece of license over and they are still growing.
Another poster is right, give me the MS monopoly any day, they are focused on 1 thing and I can avoid it. It will soon be impossible to avoid sending revenue to AOL.
Yeah but I'd MUCH rather make the transfer on firewire than on USB:) I remember the nearly 2 days it took to transfer 15gig of data to my nomad on USB.
What I'm surprised that noone has mentioned is the terrible stress that would be put in the spindle itself. If I understand the case construction correclty from the pictures there is a hole in the top of the case for one end of the spindle (or some retainer for the spindle) to fit into. It was not replaced. I don't know if it would cause too much trouble if the drive was run horizontally but mount it vertically and you are going to destroy the lower bearings at no time and I imagine the drive will literally fly apart.
The actual issue is not ad revenue. The issue is control of peoples eyes and thoughts in general. AOL's major marketing strategy is to suck people into the walled garden and never let them out. That way revenue can be garunteed for AOL as well as no chance of supporting competition.
AOL is probably the most evil company we are facing today, they want to own your entertainment time so they can feed you what will make them the most money. The want to be on your TV, in your movie theater, on your computer, in your magazine, and in your childs toys just to name a few markets they own a significant share in. Thier strategy has always been the same, try as hard as they can to not let you see any other content, that way they can't lose.
...is that the proprietary schemes will be lost and we will have boatloads of information that we can no longer read. It is rather scarey that I might need to keep around my sdmi (or whatever scheme) player around forever because nothing else will be able to play those disks/tracks.
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Just thought of another problem I have with "plugable" OS modules and that is security. Any of the security holes in third party modules would be in all likely hood blamed on the os because the division is invisible to the user. Just think of how many IIS security holes are listed as "windows security holes". If some other company has developed Joe's IIS module that is in that place and it has the security hole, it is certainly not fair to say that its a security hole in windows.
Scenario 2 is someone has windows without the internet module installed and calls in asking "how do I get online, windows is supposed to do that" and ms has to explain that because they got a version without that module installed they will need to go purchase the module (or worse yet an actual complete version of windows). Bad scenario to be in.
This also puts windows in exactly the position that I think is linux's biggest problem for going mainstream. There are just too many versions and no instruction manuals can be written that are comprehensive because there are so many options.
One of the big design goals in creating windows was a unified look and feel. The ability for a person to learn a few core skills and be able to use all of the OS with little trouble. What will certainly happen if modular windows is required is that people will have to learn how to use a far larger set of skills. I am 100% opposed to having windows with major components being plugable unless MS can control the bar for accepting a module as "certified". Its MS's image on the line and they are being forced to put that image in the hands of other companies that won't be affected as much by a failure.
On the subject of the "search" problem I think MS did fuck up by hard coding the list of search terms (it may have been for perf reasons I don't know). There should be a registry key or something of the sort that holds "rules" for what is a music file. That way Real could add to that if people wanted it. That is extra development time though and development time that mostly benifits competitors. Its not a great analogy but I don't think it should be ford's responsibility to make sure that all the connections are there and working well so that I can put a chevy engine in my truck. Windows is a unified product that is an OS as well as a number of highly integrated utilities for doing common tasks. In that way its like a whole car. They don't manufacture a chassis that you put your own stuff on top of, its more like they build a full truck that just happens to haul some extra cargo and allow add ons to do more things. I agree this is a MAJOR advertisement against MS for some people, but as far as it goes many people would like to pop in 1 cd (or soon dvd) for windows and know that when it installs they will be able to do almost anything that they want to with no further installs. And knowing that if you install a game or two or a music player on top of that it will work is also required.
As far as the "in browser" playing of the files, so long as you remember to say no to that feature your user preference is retained (at least mine was). If you say yes when it asks if you want to play the music "in browser" then you are saying yes I want to use WMP.
What I see is a fight between choice and a unified look and feel for everyone. If you allow choice you blow that unified look and feel all to hell. Personally I don't give a rats behind what program plays my music from the browser as long as it does it well and it doesn't stop me from using a different player to play music outside the browser.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend "civilized", "democratic" societies as the answer to all the woes. Just stating the obvious fact that there is some major trouble mixing the two types of systems.
I honestly don't know what side to be on. On one side MS did work to create windows and I feel they should be compensated. On another side I realize that the school is getting a discount for purchasing windows for every machine in the organization and could get around this contractual flaw by buying windows at retail price.
I think the school needs to look at whether overall the total price for windows is cheaper when paying for every machine including non-windows machines, or if they purchased retail and not academic pricing. Then when they have total cost buy using that method and just realize the "real" cost per window machine might be higher than the "per license" cost that MS gives you. I agree that its a shitty policy on MS's side but if overall its cheaper than retail the school can't really complain.
The only thing I really have a distaste for is computer manufacturers and assemblers that won't sell a os bare PC. There should be a requirement by law that forces the companies to sell without OS (realize this DOES NOT mean those computers have a lower price than the "with os" computers).
Final note is that I agree with the parent that people need to read the license before they buy. I don't care if its hidden inside the box or you need special glasses to read it, refuse to buy until you understand the terms of the purchase, especially when you are a large institution.
As nuts as that sounds its true. Before our wonderful technology got to those parts of the world the societies were capable of feeding themselves because they were a manageble size. Now that you don't have the high mortality rate the old tradition of having lots of kids so a few survive is causing terrible overpopulation.
Basically we didn't complete the job of education because that would be "warping thier culture". Basically it seems that old cultures can't survive in the modern world.
What do we do about this? Well I don't really know, my gut instinct is to continue the education process and modernize the beliefs. It will also help to institute more modern agriculture to those countries. In the end education is all I can think of, modern educated societies have a much smaller population growth.
I personally wish we could let things go back to the way they were before we fiddled with things out of compassion but the cat is out of the bag and now the world has to live with it.
The fact that it does put IE in a position to unfairly compete is very unfortunate but are we going to legislate by law that MS has to use a more expensive development path for thier OS because of that? What if someone wrote a windows manager that used gecko to render its UI and parse the file system output to create cool GUI file browser features? Would you say this is awful because now you have gecko on your machine or would you praise the group for the code reuse and cleverness?
I happen to think using HTML for rendering some UI features and using browser capabilites in place of traditional file browser functions to be a good way to leverage user knowledge of one area to introduce them to another. It also means that the cost of "having a browser" is terribly low because you have it for other functionality and so you pay the cost once and get many benifits instead of paying it again and again for every new task.
What I'm trying to say is that the fact that MS has the only OS that can't have the browser removed may be a technological advance rather than the step back that people assume it is. The next step to be taken that would solve a majority of the issues I see is to make this module plugable so that it could be replaced by another rendering engine/browser engine that you prefer. The problem there is compatability and the fact that noone can live up to a standard that is written. Its also a major support issue because MS is responsible for the "look and feel" of there OS from a support standpoint. One of the major things I can't stand about *nixes are the fact that you have 90million different window managers that all work differently. Windows has 1 look and feel and to let that be changed would be to ruin one of the major features of windows. If you don't like that feature don't use windows but don't force the experience to be changed for those users that like it. MS spent a great deal of money building and selling the windows experience and now people that don't like it would like to ligislate and judge it out of existance.
What other browsers need to do to gain back considerable ground in the browser arena is to do something that IE doesn't and can't do. This probably won't happen #1 because MS is spending tons of dev time on IE to keep it doing new things and #2 because what more do you want a browser to do? I am one of those users that doesn't switch away from IE because its already there, but I can tell you I sure as heck would switch away if something was better for me. Unfortunately every time I use Mozilla it doesn't do something that IE does that I like and I get pissed off and drop it again. Anyways thats a different discussion.
On the other side I as a consumer would not purchase a product that did not have a contract I was willing to live with. If I buy a sharp knife I should have the right to cut myself with it. If I buy a book I should have the right to warp my mind with it. With software I think the producer should have the right to limit software to one concurrent use per licence (on music I would be careful to interpret this as playing the media from one player at one time regardless of the format of the media playing at the time, so if I own the cd I would want to be able to play an mp3 of the music so long as I'm not playing the CD at the same time. I think thats a valid restriction and gets around the copying for a friend issue without restricting my ability to listen from multiple formats without making multiple purchases). I am sure that none of what I just said is written into any type of law but thats the type of legislation I'd support.
Basically I want the right to choose my media and player (whether that be OS, emulator or music player, or even whether I read electronic text or plain paper text of the work). I also want the right to possess the particular work in multiple formats at one time without requiring multiple purchases to the right to own the said work. That means I want to have the work on cd and tape and electronic format all at the same time. I don't think anyone but me (or my direct family I don't know how exactly thats categorized) should be able to use the work without purchasing that right.
A tricky part is reverse engineering. I think there should be some rights for a user to be able to do this so that they can use the word processor with a mod that they provide to edit a different type of word processor file. I don't think the person should be allowed to reverse engineer the product to make thier own competing product using that knowledge. On the other hand there is the issue of "linux support" (replace linux with your favorite unsupported OS) where it would be nice if reverse engineering were allowed in order to support new platforms. I think that with that the company writing the original product should be a part of the equation in that they came up with the "way to do it" and should keep credit and benifits for that and yet they should be required to offer the new platform support to owners of the original license but maybe not offer the same level of technical support or some requirement that the person writing the new platform option be required to offer support. Thats a tricky relationship that I am not entirely sure how to handle because the orignal creator came up with the "way to do it" and if you reverse engineer that out you should be forced to "pay" for the right to use that information and yet I don't think the manufacturer should be able to limit what OS or media you use thier product on by forced lack of support.
Ok I think I've rambled on here past the point of a coherant thought so I'll close this poist.
When its thier "way or the highway" and its terms you can't swallow tell them you are going to walk. The all of the over 60k workers should just bail. I know its hard to find jobs right now but don't let an employer put a noose around your neck and screw you. Once you have dropped down into the 30-40K a year range you are just as well off in a ton of other jobs so start looking.
Also use this as leverage to try and bump up your wage. I think if the company is threatened with losing all of its upper level employees because of a crappy wage cut they will reconsider and look to cut costs elsewhere. Not that I'd want to stick around in a company thats will to try moves like this to make it.
He assumes the worst as does any other open source zealot with a company that is less that forthcoming with specifications or information. I think the rebuttal was excellent however and shows a desire to please the community and get OGG supported.
Yeah but it pumps up the color-depth of the picture making each pixel take 3bytes instead of 1 :) If you are using a small number of colors that kind of sux.
Actually for something with large patches of solid colors and low color numbers .gif often has better compression. This is due to the process that creates a jpg which basically is optimized for high frequency change in the colors that can be "thrown out". A gif however is optimized for large patches of the same color which can be squished into one small piece of info. So don't just assume jpg is the best, use the right tool for each job. I would probably use .png instead of .gif though since it doesn't have all the patent problems :)
I also agree that they should be called contracts and there should be some way to formalize the acceptance. I am also for requiring acceptance of the licence before goods are delivered.
I have never read the GPL because I don't like it, its bad enough that it FORCES derivatives to release source (but I won't go into that now).
The interesting part of your post, if its true, is the requirement to release the source of the tools. I bet there is a fair amount (not a majority by ANY means) of software that was developed in closed source development environments and then released as GPL, this means there is a fair amount of software breaking the GPL from the get go.
I can't believe that the GPL actually does this, but if it does its another reason that its a terrible licence. I support authors that want to release thier source because its a good thing to do. I cannot however support a licence as tyranical and draconian in its requirments as the GPL. Someone please come up with an alternative licence that encourages openness yet doesn't take the rights away from developers.
I've always wanted a license (and if I ever write anything worth distributing I might try drafting it) that requires derivatives to release my source it its original form but does not require them to release thier modifications. This would keep my ideas open forever, but allow the other people to do what they want with thier ideas.
Its UI testing of the most henous kind. Its a testers nightmare because reproducability is next to none. To quote my friend "It makes you hate playing games."
On the other hand being a game reviewer would be total rock, you get to play the game a few times and tell the world what you think.
In short the parent post is 100% correct, testing sux, reviewing is much cooler.
It is my strong opinion that beginning CS students shouldn't be writing GUI programs anyways, there are too many extra issues and wierdness to worry about in a gui that aren't present in a console app.
I am going to assume that the light blinks when the line is high. Considering thats 100% of the data passed to the other side of the pipe you now have all the data on the indicator light. I don't know if you could pick up any data from a full duplex network or how messed up it would be but half duplex isn't even much of a stretch of the imagination.
I work with a girl that went to MIT. She is odd, not terribly quick witted, a horrible programmer, but she is DEFINITELY hot. I wouldn't date her (I would never get along with her personality) but I'd gladly look at her any time.
Another poster is right, give me the MS monopoly any day, they are focused on 1 thing and I can avoid it. It will soon be impossible to avoid sending revenue to AOL.
Yeah but I'd MUCH rather make the transfer on firewire than on USB :) I remember the nearly 2 days it took to transfer 15gig of data to my nomad on USB.
I never needed a credit card to create an ebay account. Is this a recent policy change?
What I'm surprised that noone has mentioned is the terrible stress that would be put in the spindle itself. If I understand the case construction correclty from the pictures there is a hole in the top of the case for one end of the spindle (or some retainer for the spindle) to fit into. It was not replaced. I don't know if it would cause too much trouble if the drive was run horizontally but mount it vertically and you are going to destroy the lower bearings at no time and I imagine the drive will literally fly apart.
AOL is probably the most evil company we are facing today, they want to own your entertainment time so they can feed you what will make them the most money. The want to be on your TV, in your movie theater, on your computer, in your magazine, and in your childs toys just to name a few markets they own a significant share in. Thier strategy has always been the same, try as hard as they can to not let you see any other content, that way they can't lose.
Thats our main document retention policy. I don't know about code or specifications though.
...is that the proprietary schemes will be lost and we will have boatloads of information that we can no longer read. It is rather scarey that I might need to keep around my sdmi (or whatever scheme) player around forever because nothing else will be able to play those disks/tracks.