I will wait for the Blu-Ray of any new film. It costs about as much as trip to the cinema anyway.
I really want to know where you get new Blu-Ray films for £4 a go.
I'm not the parent, but a movie costs me 1800 yen (about $18) per ticket. Transportation to the movie theater costs me another 3000 yen ($30) (25k bus ride and 10k train ride each way). Since the total transportation time is about 3 hours and another 2 hours for the movie, I really do need food. So despite the ridiculous prices for DVDs (won't touch Blu-Ray) here, it really is cheaper to buy them than to go to the theater...
If I were to say Linux sucks because it doesn't have X or Y, most Linux users/developers would just reply that I should code it myself or shut up.
This is simply a error in translation. What that response means is, "Yes, I agree it sucks, but I'm too busy to fix it. Please have a go yourself."
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Accepting criticism doesn't mean I'll do anything about it. Equally, giving criticism doesn't mean *you'll* do anything about it. However, as the giver of criticism, you certainly have a larger stake than I do in the matter, so probably you should champion it (whether or not you actually code it).
What is often frustrating for the receiver of criticism is that the giver often assumes the receiver should "own" the problem. So "Code it yourself or shutup" means, "Yes, I acknowledge what you are saying, but I will not own the problem. If you won't own the problem either, then there is nothing productive to say on the matter."
Having said all that, I have fallen victim to the occasional moron who won't even accept a patch to a bug because it would be an admission that their precious code might contain a fault. I avoid the software written by those people.
This is true. I now work in a high school in Japan. In my school there isn't even a single student who is interested in programming. I asked some of the students about it and their reply was, "It's too difficult. It's all in English."
I'm going to guess that the people who end up being programmers are those that both have an interest in English and have an interest in computers. That's going to cut out a lot of people. But those that do it feel that English is reasonable.
I've toyed with the idea of creating a Japanese based programming language. The grammar seems to work well for OO since the verb is invariably at the end...
I agree with this totally. These days I'm writing exclusively in Ruby and it is "fast enough" (even with 1.8.X). In fact, this speed issue is such a big red herring for me. I hardly ever have any issues with speed. Instead I spend most of my optimization time trying to cut down on memory usage.
For me, even an order of magnitude difference in speed (i.e., 10X) isn't going to mean too much. There are certainly places where I'd like my code to be faster, but they are very, very small places. I can easily code them in C if I have to (C/Ruby bindings are *very* easy to write). But honestly, I've never gotten to the point where a speed improvement is more important than a functionality improvement. Every program is different, of course. So not every problem is suited to Ruby.
Well, I'm not really for skipping learning about WWII, but learning how to use Wikipedia and how to blog sound like excellent things to teach kids. Should we really teach kids that knowledge comes from a single authoritarian figure like a teacher, or should we tell them that they need to investigate numerous versions of the view of history?
Learning how to use Wikipedia, including how to read the discussion page sounds fantastic. Take a topic, show how there are a lot of varied opinions about it. Show how consensus is formed and most importantly show that we can't always trust consensus.
Blogging including micro-blogging like Twitter is also a very good idea. It's almost impossible to get kids to see the relevance of writing. Read some blogs. Show how poor writing makes someone look like an idiot. Show how good writing makes someone look smart.
Now granted, they probably won't teach it like that. But they *could* and I think it would be a very good idea.
I have had a similar experience just recently. I reported a bug and the author rejected it because he didn't believe that the bug could exist. No amount of explanation of my problem could fix his attitude.
But, first we should realize that this is not true for every project. I have reported bugs in other projects and been welcomed as a valued contributor. I have asked questions and been given service well beyond call of duty.
You say that you have avoided projects based on the fact that the developer community was a bunch of asshats. This is the correct approach. We should all be doing this. I'm not saying unpaid volunteers should be at your beck and call, but regardless of what you pay them, you should choose suppliers that you can count on (incidently, if money is an issue, paying someone to address your problem may be the best option).
I still remember working for a certain large corporation writing a very popular program. We would often get bug reports in from people claiming that the bugs were stopping them from getting their work done. The first question would be, "How many licenses did they buy?" If the answer was less than 1000 the bug was never looked at.
No matter what you pay for software, avoid the asshat suppliers. This is a good principle. Free software lets you help yourself if nobody else is willing. But it only makes sense to choose software with a supplier who is willing to help you.
That reminds me of one of the worst interviews I had. A headhunter got me hooked up with this one company. The company paid for my way down to talk with them, gave me a tour of the city and all in all treated me extremely nicely. When we got to the interview part they said, "Please tell us about your Windows experience".
I replied, "I don't have any."
"But the recruiter said that you had several years of Windows experience."
"X Windows", I said.
"Oh... This is a Windows job. You don't have any Windows experience?"
"No", I replied. "You don't do Unix programming here?"
"No"
When I got back I phoned up the head hunter and yelled at him. "Why did you tell them I have Windows experience?"
"You told me you have X Windows experience. It's not the same thing?"
It's nice to see someone go to the effort to file an amicus brief, but why the FSF? Excessive statutory damages for copyright infringement doesn't necessarily seem like something that's in their area of interest (i.e., I can't see how it affects software freedom one way or another). Or is it simply a lawyer at the FSF who happens to be interested? Do organizations often file these kinds of briefs in areas that the organization isn't primarily interested?
2 pounds of vegetables costs between $1-$2. 3 gallons of gasoline costs about $5.
Now this is an inaccurate measurement (the cost of gasoline and food is inflated to the consumer and doesn't necessarily reflect the cost at production). But regardless, they aren't spending more money on oil than they are charging at the register.
While I personally believe oil is a large percentage of the final price of food, it's nowhere near what this article is suggesting. Even still, I think it's a good idea to grow your own wherever possible and to buy directly from local farmers where not.
Sometimes this is true. If you have to do a lot of math, for instance, it can be true. But, if I look back on my career of 20 years of application programming I can think of only 1 or 2 instances where the problem I was working on was difficult. The rest of the time it was the code that was difficult.
If you find that programming is extraordinarily complex a substantial amount of the time, then you have some problems. It's only that way because you or your team have created complexity when you really don't need it. Pair programming with somebody who is extremely good at refactoring can help you learn how to improve.
I know this is hard to believe. Especially when you are used to being the superstar programmer on the team. You are able to deliver when others can't. And your code is probably better than other code you've seen, so you think it must be really good.
But there's a whole new level you can get to. I'm not saying this to put you down. I'm still working hard to improve myself. But with the approach you are taking, you'll hit a glass ceiling pretty quickly where you can't get any better (from the sounds of it, you've already hit it). I just want to encourage you to look at other methods so that you can break through the place you're in now.
When you do get through it, you'll find that programming extraordinarily simple, but that "good taste" is difficult to refine. And that refinement requires conversations with other programmers (both in code and in human speech). These conversations require give and take, not leadership; learning and sharing, not enforcing direction. I hope that helps (but even if it doesn't, good luck anyway:-) )
Come on... Not even Pope Soap on a Rope? I mean, it "adds more purpose to bathing" and comes with a "thick loop of luxurious rope attached to the Pope's head".
Here's a wacky alternative. Right now I work in Japan as an "Assistant Language Teacher". In other words I assist the English teachers. I help with preparation for the class and during class I "tag-team" with the teacher. Usually one of us is presenting something while the other is giving individual students extra attention. Every 5 minutes or so we swap.
Anyway, this year we had a problem with one of the teachers. She was doing a very poor job. Basically she was showing up to the class, telling the students to open their textbooks and to do written assignments for the whole class -- no instruction. Ordinarily, this kind of poor teaching can go unnoticed. But because I was team teaching with her, it became very obvious. And when some students complained (you *know* it's bad when Japanese students complain), it was easy for the administration to do something about it.
Long story short -- team teaching is an excellent way to both improve the quality of teaching, and provide methods of giving good feedback to teachers so they can improve. The workload would be a little bit harder since the teachers would have to sit in on more classes, but this would be offset by spreading the preparation and marking burden a little bit. I think with a 20% increase in staffing you could do it.
That's what I'd do instead of giving bonuses. Although, from experience, learning how to team teach is even more difficult than learning how to pair program. But the improvement in the quality of teaching is definitely worth it.
Some players actively avoid free games, particularly for MMOs.
I can understand this. And especially for MMOs, I think there is some good justification for this. Personally, I would rather be a paying customer of the MMO so that the providers are focused on giving me the experience I want. If I'm relying on advertising to pay the bill, then I'm not going to be the primary customer -- I'll have to compromise on my experience to some degree.
But I think it's important to understand that there is no reason that a for-pay MMO can't be written as free software, and even with free assets. The *service* of customizing the game experience for your customers is worth money. Also, the customer service of hosting the game and ensuring that customers get good performance is worth money.
This is one of the things I don't like about WoW. Their business model is still tied around selling content. If I'm paying them $15 a month, why do I have to pay another $30 every year or two for an "expansion upgrade". Why not bloody roll it all in together and charge me $18 a month? In fact, I suspect that the cost of maintining the various levels of service costs them as much as they make from the expansions. Also, they regard customer service as a "cost center" not a "revenue center". Those of us who play from Asia with 500 ms latency would happily pay another couple of bucks for a server on this side of the Pacific...:-P
So, I am definitely willing to pay money for an MMO experience. But I still would rather that they made the game and assets free. As a customer, this focuses their attention on retaining my custom through good service, not the artificial scarcity of their content.
Despite excellent function, most OSS developers can't develop an interface or decent icon artwork to save their lives. It's just not where their strength lies.
I'd counter by saying that this is also true of most proprietary developers. I worked for 20 years making crappy interfaces because the PGM just wanted something to stick on the feature list on the box. They weren't interested in something that the user would actually use. The difference for games is that if you have a crappy interface, nobody will play your game.
I've been involved in free software for a long time. At every stage of the way people would say things like "Oh yeah, you can get text editors and simple shell tools, but nobody is going to write an optimizing compiler. It's just too much work." And then, "OK, people will write developer tools because they need them, but nobody will write office software, because programmers don't use them." And then, "OK, people will write office software, but nobody will write a desktop shell that a normal person would want to use". This is just another step in the evolution of free software.
The thing is, we need to develop new skills. I know, I personally have spend a lot more time thinking about user interfaces than I used to. I now spend several days trying out different workflows for every scenario that I'm implementing. I still suck at it, but I am improving. I'm not alone, either. Other people I talk to are starting to understand the importance of this kind of thing.
We have also historically been unable to recruit artistic talent into free software development. But this is changing rapidly. As the general populace sees the benefits of free culture, they begin to want to contribute -- just like programmers. The desire to create something cool on a computer is not limited to programmers. We still have a long way to go, but I've seen huge strides especially in the last 5 years. I agree with the OP. I'm very excited to see what gaming innovations come out of free software in the next 10 years.
There are web developers, and web amateurs. You can see them whining and bitching above. They think that because they read a HTML book while driving the cab, and wrote 5-liners of JavaScript that you can replace with 10 characters of CSS, that they can call themselves "developers".
I know this isn't the point of your post, but I'd like to quibble with this statement. Trying to make a distinction between "amateurs" and "developers" is all well and good, but where do you draw the line?
We already have people trying to control how we can develop things by splitting the camp between "hobbyists" and "professionals" (aka Microsoft). Their intent is to imply that if you aren't paid by a big corporation (like Microsoft) that your application is obviously shit.
We also have people trying to provide "certification" (aka Microsoft) for various programming tasks, in a thinly disguised attempt to control standards.
Labeling a person an "amateur" drives a wedge between the established developers and people trying to learn the ropes. As we know, regardless of qualifications, there is a whole range of ability with respect to development. We've all met the moron who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag, even though he has worked on large systems before and has a stack of paper "certifying" him as qualified. And we also know of people who literally coded their way out of their basement with a huge amount of knowledge.
Those who write applications (both web applications and non-web applications) are developers. I don't care if you can only write "Hello, world."; you're a developer. But each developer has a level of ability and experience. That level must be judged individually for each person.
This can be a problem for those starting a business without development experience. How can they hire good people? Well, let's say you were trying to build a world class soccer team. Would you hire they players by interviewing them and asking them how good they were? Or would you hire a proven coach first and get him/her to help select your team? One of these two ways works most of the time. The other doesn't. Why do we always pick the way that doesn't work?
A friend of mine was a sniper. He told me that he only ever carried 3 bullets. The first was for the target. The second was in case he missed with the first shot. The third was for himself: if he had to use the second bullet he didn't have enough time to get away.
Arrghhh... replying to my own post. But I did some more digging, and discovered why I never see any American rice for sale here. This article should shed some light on it:
Long story short: the Japanese stockpile all of the rice that they buy from the US. Now they've been given the OK to resell it on the world market to help with growing food prices in Asia (article is dated a year ago, so I'm not sure if it went through or not).
The thing is, people here remember the famine that happened after WWII. Because the country was not self sufficient in food and was blockaded, many many people died. In fact, after the war it took a long time to get the supply chains up an running. The law on the restriction of imports of rice was put in place to make sure this never happened again. Even though I am against protectionist market policies, in this case it makes total sense. A free market is one thing. Food security is something else altogether, and I think they have their priorities right.
Actually, I checked the importation rules and you are correct. There is some importation because the WTO forced Japan into a quota of rice imports (on the request of the US). As of 2008 the imposed importation of rice (all from the US) was 770,000 tons (and actually Japan didn't import all of it's quota, falling 70,000 tons short). However, the *surplus* of rice in 2008 was 1.3 million tons. So, I was also correct that Japan does not import rice unless it has a surplus (the one exception was 1992, where there was a shortage of rice).
But anyway, I live in Shizuoka and I have never seen American rice for sale. I admit that I live in the countryside, though. Possibly it's available in bigger cities.
Japanese people are very, very nice people for the most part. If you are a visitor, they will compliment you. But, unless Ooita is radically different than Shizuoka, I don't think *anybody* is going to go out of their way to find Californian rice.
I did exactly that when I was unemployed last time (actually, intentionally unemployed -- decided to take some time off to do other things). I worked on a couple of open source projects. When went looking for a job, I took parts of the stuff I'd done and annotated it to show what I was thinking with respect to the design, etc. I also wrote up a document explaining my approach to making changes; how I decided what to do first, how I documented what I was doing, how I communicated to others, etc.
The person who hired me said that the reason they chose me was 100% the portfolio I showed them. Actually, my eventual boss didn't understand half of what I'd written. But it was enough for him to say, "This is the guy we need for the team."
On a side note, I've left programming as a profession now. I'm teaching instead (and even landed a nice job that only takes 35-40 hours of my time a week). In my free time I'm coding and I find that I can do *much* more quality work in my free time than I could ever do working full time (given the constraints of always having to work on legacy code and in legacy teams).
It was a strange moment when I realized the truth of RMS's comment in his manifesto. "Not everyone has to be a professional programmer". I'm still a programmer, but not a professional one. It's a very nice place to be.
Actually, this isn't true. Japanese people generally like the rice from the area they grow up in. You can't even buy Californian rice here (it's illegal to import unless Japan has a surplus).
Having tasted both, though, IMHO most Japanese rice is much better than Californian rice. For instance the CalRose rice that you can buy in North America is acceptable, but at the lower end of what you can buy here. Texture is everything.
I'm sure that Japanese people who visit California heap praise on the rice. But I suspect it's partly because they are just so happy that they don't have to eat long grain rice (or worse, bread), and partly to be polite.
They have decided all this means he was planning to bring the network down for some unspecified reason. Of course he could bring the network, any network admin knows enough to bring the network down. If they don't, they don't know enough to do their job keeping it up.
I don't have any idea what the prosecution is thinking, but what you say totally right. I mean, what's the easiest way to bring down the network as a network admin? Simply decide to sleep in one day. Those guys are always having to recite magical incantations to keep everything up.
I helped out with this stuff (I'm definitely not qualified) in one of the small companies I worked with. I vividly remember the day I came to work and my boss said, "I just got a phone call saying that we sent somebody 40 gigs of spam in the last hour". All I could think to say was, "Oh, *that's* why we don't have any bandwidth right now..."
OK. I only read half the page. But as far as I can tell, the King Kong defense is this:
1) Somebody flags your page for deletion 2) You counter by flagging the page for rescue 3) Then somebody says that it's current event and may be changing rapidly. 4) You suggest that the page be merged.
After that I'm confused (????) because I didn't read any more. But I'm sure the last step is "Profit".
I'm going to use this defense next time I write something for Wikipedia!
Slashdot Mirror
I will wait for the Blu-Ray of any new film. It costs about as much as trip to the cinema anyway.
I really want to know where you get new Blu-Ray films for £4 a go.
I'm not the parent, but a movie costs me 1800 yen (about $18) per ticket. Transportation to the movie theater costs me another 3000 yen ($30) (25k bus ride and 10k train ride each way). Since the total transportation time is about 3 hours and another 2 hours for the movie, I really do need food. So despite the ridiculous prices for DVDs (won't touch Blu-Ray) here, it really is cheaper to buy them than to go to the theater...
If I were to say Linux sucks because it doesn't have X or Y, most Linux users/developers would just reply that I should code it myself or shut up.
This is simply a error in translation. What that response means is, "Yes, I agree it sucks, but I'm too busy to fix it. Please have a go yourself."
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Accepting criticism doesn't mean I'll do anything about it. Equally, giving criticism doesn't mean *you'll* do anything about it. However, as the giver of criticism, you certainly have a larger stake than I do in the matter, so probably you should champion it (whether or not you actually code it).
What is often frustrating for the receiver of criticism is that the giver often assumes the receiver should "own" the problem. So "Code it yourself or shutup" means, "Yes, I acknowledge what you are saying, but I will not own the problem. If you won't own the problem either, then there is nothing productive to say on the matter."
Having said all that, I have fallen victim to the occasional moron who won't even accept a patch to a bug because it would be an admission that their precious code might contain a fault. I avoid the software written by those people.
This is true. I now work in a high school in Japan. In my school there isn't even a single student who is interested in programming. I asked some of the students about it and their reply was, "It's too difficult. It's all in English."
I'm going to guess that the people who end up being programmers are those that both have an interest in English and have an interest in computers. That's going to cut out a lot of people. But those that do it feel that English is reasonable.
I've toyed with the idea of creating a Japanese based programming language. The grammar seems to work well for OO since the verb is invariably at the end...
I agree with this totally. These days I'm writing exclusively in Ruby and it is "fast enough" (even with 1.8.X). In fact, this speed issue is such a big red herring for me. I hardly ever have any issues with speed. Instead I spend most of my optimization time trying to cut down on memory usage.
For me, even an order of magnitude difference in speed (i.e., 10X) isn't going to mean too much. There are certainly places where I'd like my code to be faster, but they are very, very small places. I can easily code them in C if I have to (C/Ruby bindings are *very* easy to write). But honestly, I've never gotten to the point where a speed improvement is more important than a functionality improvement. Every program is different, of course. So not every problem is suited to Ruby.
Well, I'm not really for skipping learning about WWII, but learning how to use Wikipedia and how to blog sound like excellent things to teach kids. Should we really teach kids that knowledge comes from a single authoritarian figure like a teacher, or should we tell them that they need to investigate numerous versions of the view of history?
Learning how to use Wikipedia, including how to read the discussion page sounds fantastic. Take a topic, show how there are a lot of varied opinions about it. Show how consensus is formed and most importantly show that we can't always trust consensus.
Blogging including micro-blogging like Twitter is also a very good idea. It's almost impossible to get kids to see the relevance of writing. Read some blogs. Show how poor writing makes someone look like an idiot. Show how good writing makes someone look smart.
Now granted, they probably won't teach it like that. But they *could* and I think it would be a very good idea.
If one wanted to help the plight of the Tasmanian devil, what would be the best thing to do (keeping in mind that I'm not in Australia)?
I have had a similar experience just recently. I reported a bug and the author rejected it because he didn't believe that the bug could exist. No amount of explanation of my problem could fix his attitude.
But, first we should realize that this is not true for every project. I have reported bugs in other projects and been welcomed as a valued contributor. I have asked questions and been given service well beyond call of duty.
You say that you have avoided projects based on the fact that the developer community was a bunch of asshats. This is the correct approach. We should all be doing this. I'm not saying unpaid volunteers should be at your beck and call, but regardless of what you pay them, you should choose suppliers that you can count on (incidently, if money is an issue, paying someone to address your problem may be the best option).
I still remember working for a certain large corporation writing a very popular program. We would often get bug reports in from people claiming that the bugs were stopping them from getting their work done. The first question would be, "How many licenses did they buy?" If the answer was less than 1000 the bug was never looked at.
No matter what you pay for software, avoid the asshat suppliers. This is a good principle. Free software lets you help yourself if nobody else is willing. But it only makes sense to choose software with a supplier who is willing to help you.
That reminds me of one of the worst interviews I had. A headhunter got me hooked up with this one company. The company paid for my way down to talk with them, gave me a tour of the city and all in all treated me extremely nicely. When we got to the interview part they said, "Please tell us about your Windows experience".
I replied, "I don't have any."
"But the recruiter said that you had several years of Windows experience."
"X Windows", I said.
"Oh... This is a Windows job. You don't have any Windows experience?"
"No", I replied. "You don't do Unix programming here?"
"No"
When I got back I phoned up the head hunter and yelled at him. "Why did you tell them I have Windows experience?"
"You told me you have X Windows experience. It's not the same thing?"
It's nice to see someone go to the effort to file an amicus brief, but why the FSF? Excessive statutory damages for copyright infringement doesn't necessarily seem like something that's in their area of interest (i.e., I can't see how it affects software freedom one way or another). Or is it simply a lawyer at the FSF who happens to be interested? Do organizations often file these kinds of briefs in areas that the organization isn't primarily interested?
2 pounds of vegetables costs between $1-$2. 3 gallons of gasoline costs about $5.
Now this is an inaccurate measurement (the cost of gasoline and food is inflated to the consumer and doesn't necessarily reflect the cost at production). But regardless, they aren't spending more money on oil than they are charging at the register.
While I personally believe oil is a large percentage of the final price of food, it's nowhere near what this article is suggesting. Even still, I think it's a good idea to grow your own wherever possible and to buy directly from local farmers where not.
Programming can be an extraordinarily complex
Sometimes this is true. If you have to do a lot of math, for instance, it can be true. But, if I look back on my career of 20 years of application programming I can think of only 1 or 2 instances where the problem I was working on was difficult. The rest of the time it was the code that was difficult.
If you find that programming is extraordinarily complex a substantial amount of the time, then you have some problems. It's only that way because you or your team have created complexity when you really don't need it. Pair programming with somebody who is extremely good at refactoring can help you learn how to improve.
I know this is hard to believe. Especially when you are used to being the superstar programmer on the team. You are able to deliver when others can't. And your code is probably better than other code you've seen, so you think it must be really good.
But there's a whole new level you can get to. I'm not saying this to put you down. I'm still working hard to improve myself. But with the approach you are taking, you'll hit a glass ceiling pretty quickly where you can't get any better (from the sounds of it, you've already hit it). I just want to encourage you to look at other methods so that you can break through the place you're in now.
When you do get through it, you'll find that programming extraordinarily simple, but that "good taste" is difficult to refine. And that refinement requires conversations with other programmers (both in code and in human speech). These conversations require give and take, not leadership; learning and sharing, not enforcing direction. I hope that helps (but even if it doesn't, good luck anyway :-) )
hopefully without soap on a rope.
Come on... Not even Pope Soap on a Rope? I mean, it "adds more purpose to bathing" and comes with a "thick loop of luxurious rope attached to the Pope's head".
Here's a wacky alternative. Right now I work in Japan as an "Assistant Language Teacher". In other words I assist the English teachers. I help with preparation for the class and during class I "tag-team" with the teacher. Usually one of us is presenting something while the other is giving individual students extra attention. Every 5 minutes or so we swap.
Anyway, this year we had a problem with one of the teachers. She was doing a very poor job. Basically she was showing up to the class, telling the students to open their textbooks and to do written assignments for the whole class -- no instruction. Ordinarily, this kind of poor teaching can go unnoticed. But because I was team teaching with her, it became very obvious. And when some students complained (you *know* it's bad when Japanese students complain), it was easy for the administration to do something about it.
Long story short -- team teaching is an excellent way to both improve the quality of teaching, and provide methods of giving good feedback to teachers so they can improve. The workload would be a little bit harder since the teachers would have to sit in on more classes, but this would be offset by spreading the preparation and marking burden a little bit. I think with a 20% increase in staffing you could do it.
That's what I'd do instead of giving bonuses. Although, from experience, learning how to team teach is even more difficult than learning how to pair program. But the improvement in the quality of teaching is definitely worth it.
Some players actively avoid free games, particularly for MMOs.
I can understand this. And especially for MMOs, I think there is some good justification for this. Personally, I would rather be a paying customer of the MMO so that the providers are focused on giving me the experience I want. If I'm relying on advertising to pay the bill, then I'm not going to be the primary customer -- I'll have to compromise on my experience to some degree.
But I think it's important to understand that there is no reason that a for-pay MMO can't be written as free software, and even with free assets. The *service* of customizing the game experience for your customers is worth money. Also, the customer service of hosting the game and ensuring that customers get good performance is worth money.
This is one of the things I don't like about WoW. Their business model is still tied around selling content. If I'm paying them $15 a month, why do I have to pay another $30 every year or two for an "expansion upgrade". Why not bloody roll it all in together and charge me $18 a month? In fact, I suspect that the cost of maintining the various levels of service costs them as much as they make from the expansions. Also, they regard customer service as a "cost center" not a "revenue center". Those of us who play from Asia with 500 ms latency would happily pay another couple of bucks for a server on this side of the Pacific... :-P
So, I am definitely willing to pay money for an MMO experience. But I still would rather that they made the game and assets free. As a customer, this focuses their attention on retaining my custom through good service, not the artificial scarcity of their content.
Despite excellent function, most OSS developers can't develop an interface or decent icon artwork to save their lives. It's just not where their strength lies.
I'd counter by saying that this is also true of most proprietary developers. I worked for 20 years making crappy interfaces because the PGM just wanted something to stick on the feature list on the box. They weren't interested in something that the user would actually use. The difference for games is that if you have a crappy interface, nobody will play your game.
I've been involved in free software for a long time. At every stage of the way people would say things like "Oh yeah, you can get text editors and simple shell tools, but nobody is going to write an optimizing compiler. It's just too much work." And then, "OK, people will write developer tools because they need them, but nobody will write office software, because programmers don't use them." And then, "OK, people will write office software, but nobody will write a desktop shell that a normal person would want to use". This is just another step in the evolution of free software.
The thing is, we need to develop new skills. I know, I personally have spend a lot more time thinking about user interfaces than I used to. I now spend several days trying out different workflows for every scenario that I'm implementing. I still suck at it, but I am improving. I'm not alone, either. Other people I talk to are starting to understand the importance of this kind of thing.
We have also historically been unable to recruit artistic talent into free software development. But this is changing rapidly. As the general populace sees the benefits of free culture, they begin to want to contribute -- just like programmers. The desire to create something cool on a computer is not limited to programmers. We still have a long way to go, but I've seen huge strides especially in the last 5 years. I agree with the OP. I'm very excited to see what gaming innovations come out of free software in the next 10 years.
There are web developers, and web amateurs. You can see them whining and bitching above.
They think that because they read a HTML book while driving the cab, and wrote 5-liners of JavaScript that you can replace with 10 characters of CSS, that they can call themselves "developers".
I know this isn't the point of your post, but I'd like to quibble with this statement. Trying to make a distinction between "amateurs" and "developers" is all well and good, but where do you draw the line?
We already have people trying to control how we can develop things by splitting the camp between "hobbyists" and "professionals" (aka Microsoft). Their intent is to imply that if you aren't paid by a big corporation (like Microsoft) that your application is obviously shit.
We also have people trying to provide "certification" (aka Microsoft) for various programming tasks, in a thinly disguised attempt to control standards.
Labeling a person an "amateur" drives a wedge between the established developers and people trying to learn the ropes. As we know, regardless of qualifications, there is a whole range of ability with respect to development. We've all met the moron who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag, even though he has worked on large systems before and has a stack of paper "certifying" him as qualified. And we also know of people who literally coded their way out of their basement with a huge amount of knowledge.
Those who write applications (both web applications and non-web applications) are developers. I don't care if you can only write "Hello, world."; you're a developer. But each developer has a level of ability and experience. That level must be judged individually for each person.
This can be a problem for those starting a business without development experience. How can they hire good people? Well, let's say you were trying to build a world class soccer team. Would you hire they players by interviewing them and asking them how good they were? Or would you hire a proven coach first and get him/her to help select your team? One of these two ways works most of the time. The other doesn't. Why do we always pick the way that doesn't work?
A friend of mine was a sniper. He told me that he only ever carried 3 bullets. The first was for the target. The second was in case he missed with the first shot. The third was for himself: if he had to use the second bullet he didn't have enough time to get away.
Arrghhh... replying to my own post. But I did some more digging, and discovered why I never see any American rice for sale here. This article should shed some light on it:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/consumer_goods/article3948493.ece
Long story short: the Japanese stockpile all of the rice that they buy from the US. Now they've been given the OK to resell it on the world market to help with growing food prices in Asia (article is dated a year ago, so I'm not sure if it went through or not).
The thing is, people here remember the famine that happened after WWII. Because the country was not self sufficient in food and was blockaded, many many people died. In fact, after the war it took a long time to get the supply chains up an running. The law on the restriction of imports of rice was put in place to make sure this never happened again. Even though I am against protectionist market policies, in this case it makes total sense. A free market is one thing. Food security is something else altogether, and I think they have their priorities right.
I live in Japan right now.
Actually, I checked the importation rules and you are correct. There is some importation because the WTO forced Japan into a quota of rice imports (on the request of the US). As of 2008 the imposed importation of rice (all from the US) was 770,000 tons (and actually Japan didn't import all of it's quota, falling 70,000 tons short). However, the *surplus* of rice in 2008 was 1.3 million tons. So, I was also correct that Japan does not import rice unless it has a surplus (the one exception was 1992, where there was a shortage of rice).
But anyway, I live in Shizuoka and I have never seen American rice for sale. I admit that I live in the countryside, though. Possibly it's available in bigger cities.
Japanese people are very, very nice people for the most part. If you are a visitor, they will compliment you. But, unless Ooita is radically different than Shizuoka, I don't think *anybody* is going to go out of their way to find Californian rice.
I did exactly that when I was unemployed last time (actually, intentionally unemployed -- decided to take some time off to do other things). I worked on a couple of open source projects. When went looking for a job, I took parts of the stuff I'd done and annotated it to show what I was thinking with respect to the design, etc. I also wrote up a document explaining my approach to making changes; how I decided what to do first, how I documented what I was doing, how I communicated to others, etc.
The person who hired me said that the reason they chose me was 100% the portfolio I showed them. Actually, my eventual boss didn't understand half of what I'd written. But it was enough for him to say, "This is the guy we need for the team."
On a side note, I've left programming as a profession now. I'm teaching instead (and even landed a nice job that only takes 35-40 hours of my time a week). In my free time I'm coding and I find that I can do *much* more quality work in my free time than I could ever do working full time (given the constraints of always having to work on legacy code and in legacy teams).
It was a strange moment when I realized the truth of RMS's comment in his manifesto. "Not everyone has to be a professional programmer". I'm still a programmer, but not a professional one. It's a very nice place to be.
Actually, this isn't true. Japanese people generally like the rice from the area they grow up in. You can't even buy Californian rice here (it's illegal to import unless Japan has a surplus).
Having tasted both, though, IMHO most Japanese rice is much better than Californian rice. For instance the CalRose rice that you can buy in North America is acceptable, but at the lower end of what you can buy here. Texture is everything.
I'm sure that Japanese people who visit California heap praise on the rice. But I suspect it's partly because they are just so happy that they don't have to eat long grain rice (or worse, bread), and partly to be polite.
Damn it! You've given away the whole plot of the game!
Now they're going to have to start all over again. I hope you're happy!
I loved the BBC radio report that went something like this (from memory):
"Government officials said that nobody was duped by the emails.
Indeed. Nobody sent money to free him."
They have decided all this means he was planning to bring the network down for some unspecified reason. Of course he could bring the network, any network admin knows enough to bring the network down. If they don't, they don't know enough to do their job keeping it up.
I don't have any idea what the prosecution is thinking, but what you say totally right. I mean, what's the easiest way to bring down the network as a network admin? Simply decide to sleep in one day. Those guys are always having to recite magical incantations to keep everything up.
I helped out with this stuff (I'm definitely not qualified) in one of the small companies I worked with. I vividly remember the day I came to work and my boss said, "I just got a phone call saying that we sent somebody 40 gigs of spam in the last hour". All I could think to say was, "Oh, *that's* why we don't have any bandwidth right now..."
OK. I only read half the page. But as far as I can tell, the King Kong defense is this:
1) Somebody flags your page for deletion
2) You counter by flagging the page for rescue
3) Then somebody says that it's current event and may be changing rapidly.
4) You suggest that the page be merged.
After that I'm confused (????) because I didn't read any more. But I'm sure the last step is "Profit".
I'm going to use this defense next time I write something for Wikipedia!