f they plan for it, there is no 'port' required. The project can be multi-platform without requiring weeks and weeks of man-hours to do a 'port'.
You've still got to test on every platform you support, you still have to train your support staff on every platform you support, etc. Have you ever worked on a large, commercial multi-platform product? If you had, you would know that the code is only part of the work involved, and over the lifecycle of the product, it's even just a small fraction of the work.
If HL2 can be ported from Win32->OSX, it can run under Linux... so why isn't it?
Obviously, because the company believes it can recoup the cost of porting via OSX sales, but that it could not recoup the cost via Linux sales. Just because something can be done theoretically, it doesn't mean it would be practical to do so. Porting and testing aren't free for the company, after all, neither is providing after-sales support which is likely to be far more expensive on Linux than it is on OSX, where there is only on hardware/software combination to worry about.
Linux on the PC is simply not a viable games platform. That's not to say Linux on a console couldn't be - but on the PC there is too small a market and too many variables to realistically test or support.
I paid 50 bucks for my tin box edition Linux quake3 and installed it on FreeBSD. I paid 40 bucks for my Linux version of RTCW. I paid 50 bucks for UT2003 and it installed on Linux. I paid like 20 for UT because I came it late.
You might have done - but you are not representative of the games market as a whole. If you were, Loki would still be in business.
Oh, how short the geek memory. Remember Loki? A company that tried to bring mainstream games to the Linux platform?
The problem is, while geeks talk the talk, they don't walk the walk with their wallets. There simply isn't a market for games on Linux. A few people might buy a Linux copy, sure, but the majority will buy the Windows version when it's released, then demand the Linux version for free when it's finished porting.
Games companies are in business to make money. They're not charities, and even if they were, even charities need money to operate. Valve is simply making what it believes to be the best decision based on its reading of the market.
It is that programmers can't keep perfect track of everything at once, and have to make assumptions. What am I supposed to tell my boss, something like "I can't start on that bug fix until I have read and perfectly comprehend all 1,500,000 lines of code in the product"? No, I have to try to get an overall idea of how things work, and dig into the details as I think necessary. This sometimes means I will miss a detail that is indirectly connected to the work at hand, and therefore make a mistake.
Great post. Mind if I quote you next time MS announces that it's found and patched another DCOM hole?
The project was $270k over budget and a year late. That's the cost of three senior programmers at $90k per year for a full year.
To be fair, it's actually 3 ordinary programmers at $45k per year. Factor in taxes, benefits, rent, equipment, utilities, subsidized canteen/vending machines and you will find that annual salary is less than half of what it costs to employ someone.
Why can't management understand THAT side of the equation?
If you, the super-smart engineer, don't understand the cost of employing someone, why expect your PHBs to understand either?
It's called capitalism. It works. Get used to it. If offshoring makes sense, companies will do it. If it does not make sense, they will not do it. That's how it works. Engineers don't know anything about finance.
Actually, you are wrong. You see, finance is engineering. The units are dollars instead of joules, but the principles are entirely the same. I mean this quite literally - the equations of certain derivatives are the equations of heat transfer. CFD algorithms are used to price bonds. Managers are engineers. A corporation is a piece of technology, just like an engine.
We don't think it's immoral when an engineer tries to get the most computation done per clock cycle, or the most torque from an engine, or the most heat from a furnace. Why do people get upset when a manager tries to maximize the output of his engine?
What's the idea behind a MBA is greed, greed, greed and more GREED. MBAs are about extremely short-sighted profit-maximizing though any means possible, including disreputable, unethical, slimy and illegal ones.
Go look in your wardrobe, in your garage, in your living room.
See any products that aren't made in your home country?
How well shielded? a few meters of water would sufice, but this is getting expensive to send into space.
That's a common misconception. In The Case for Mars, Dr Robert Zubrin uses NASA's own data to demonstrate that during a trip to Mars, astronauts would receive about as much radiation as someone who'd lived their life in Colorado. Yes, there is a slightly increased risk of cancer but a) you increase your own risk every time you fly and b) they're flying to Mars - and that's pretty damn risky in and of itself!
Well I see you defining inflation a few times and talking about some causes, but I don't see how you address the novel idea of a self-deflating electronic currency.
Oh, you mean currency units that expire or something? How bizarre - it would make it impossible to assemble large blocks of capital over time. Goodbye to pension funds and large infrastructure projects. In fact, the only organization that could do anything capital-intensive with a self-deflating currency would be the organization that controlled the printing press (or electronic equivalent). Obviously, that is your intent. But, every planned economy in history has failed, and I do have to wonder why its advocates seem to cling to the idea. Actually, I don't, this explains it quite nicely.
You can hardly expect e-retailing to compete with cash when e-currency consists of credit cards issued by usurous, predatory corporate behemouths.
For a start, you can't compare "retailing" with "cash".
Secondly, the dollar is an e-currency. The amount of dollar business transacted electronically dwarfs the amount done with dollar bills.
Thirdly, it's up to you if you want to pay interest on your transactions or not. Pay your card off every month, and it's yours for free. I haven't paid interest on a card in years!
Fourthly, it's spelt "behemoth". You might think this is a spelling flame, but you can hardly expect people to take you seriously when you don't even understand the words that you are using.
The currency could be manipulated in ways previously unheard of. People could be paid simply to live their lives and still there would be no need for inflation.
Currency is a means to facilitate trade. There must exist, over the long term, a 1:1 relationship between the nominal value of the currency in circulation, and the nominal value of the goods and services for sale. Inflation is a corrective mechanism to maintain this relationship. If there is more money than there is stuff that money can be spent on, the the value of each unit of money decreases until balance is regained. It's simply supply and demand - people only value money because it correlates with goods and services for sale. If people see that money is just being printed on a whim, then it ceases to have value - without the link between money and what can be bought with money, money is just paper. Inflation is frequently caused by governments a) printing money or b) issuing bonds (which is shifting future tax revenue into the present).
A system where people are paid without also producing goods and services for sale will experience rampant inflation, leading to collapse. The whole point of a currency is trust. You trust that the dollar in your pocket can be exchanged for goods and services. Some currencies - like the dollar, the pound sterling, the Swiss franc - are considered "hard currency" because people throughout the world trust them. If you "manipulate" the currency, you erode trust, and your currency is worthless.
On the mining side, is it possible with near-future technology to mine the 3He, ship it back to Earth and use it to generate energy and still end up with more energy out than went into the whole process? Or would it require esoteric tech like those magnetic railguns to launch cargo back towards the Earth?
My reference in these matters is Dr Robert Zubrin, who has written extensively on using existing and very-near-future technology (i.e. direct extrapolations from current research) to colonize Mars and the moon. We know from probes that He3 exists on the moon's surface (probably caused by the solar wind hitting the unprotected surface). We have a technique called "shake and bake" used in mining here on Earth for extracting gases from rocks. What would be required would be to deploy a highly automated and solar powered shake and bake plant to process moon rock to extract and store He3.
You would need to process 250,000 tonnes or rock to extract 1kg of He3. That's 1km square to a depth of 10cm. That sounds like terrible odds, but in a 60% efficient MHD fusion reactor, at a price of $0.06/kWh that works out at $1M/kg. If electricity prices go up, obviously that'd be more. So the question really is, how much can you automate bulldozing rock into a furnace? Zubrin estimates if 1kg to LEO can be brought down to $1000, you could get to the moon for $5000/kg, then you could break even in 4 years.
A counterexample would be the fusion of two Helium-3 atoms
He3 fusion is really the holy grail, because since it produces charged particles instead of neutrons, there's no need to attach it to an old-style heat exchanger and steam turbine plant. You can extract the energy and convert it to electricity directly using magnetohydrodynamic induction. It's very elegant. And we know where to get loads of He3, it's abundant on the moon, just not on Earth. Regular deuterium fusion will be the proof of concept and might be the first into commercial production, but He3 fusion won't be too far behind it. It will make mining on the moon commercially viable!
If Apple added wireless & http to the next iPod and marketed it as a must have because of the free, built in iServe software, it would be massive! On launch, ensure it works with Macs and Windows then watch them fly off the shelves!
Apple has a cordial relationship with the recording industry right now, enough for them to dell downloads of songs. Can you imagine what would happen if Apple started selling devices specifically optimized for distributing music to everyone in the same room, for storage on their own devices?
Re:Java is finished for most open source work
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Java vs .NET
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WORA brings with it a lot of costs but few benefits for Linux developers. When I write a Linux desktop application, I want it to work well on Linux, I don't care about whether it runs on Windows.
So, what you're saying is, platform lock-in is bad, unless the platform you're locked into is Linux? I see.
Think about this and answer honestly: If the same guy were a vocal supporter of a politician who you support, would you be convinced he was going to cheat? Or would you see it rationally- the man has opinions, just like every other person in the world?
Indeed; just look at Michael Moore. He's made a lot of noise about the man he calls "Governor Bush", but the problem is, it's very obvious that it's not the democratic process that he's worried about, but rather that his own side lost. Can you even imagine Michael Moore ranting about "Former Vice President Gore"? No, it simply wouldn't happen.
I hate to break it to you, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isn't Microsoft. They are completely different entities. And a change of pace: SuSE Linux Donates Software to Allentown, Pennsylvania Schoolchildren
Please let me know when Open Source luminaries such as Eric Raymond donate to charity even 1% of the cash Bill Gates has donated. Thanks!
Microsoft has a record of using 'donations' and grants to its complete benefit, not the benefit of the people they are donating to. Microsoft is different than other companies in that it does it so blatently.
We have two ESX servers running at work. They both came with Redhat as the core OS.
I wouldn't describe it as the "core" OS, it's just there to provide a basic interface so you can log in an administer the underlying virtualization layer. It's analogous to using DOS to boot Netware. From the docs:
ESX Server runs natively on server hardware, without a host operating system. This allows it to more fully manage the hardware resources and provide the highest levels of security and performance isolation. ESX Server also incorporates a console operating system based on a Linux 2.4 kernel that is used to boot the ESX Server virtualization layer. It also runs ESX Server administration applications.
Like for ages IBM's mainframes has a standard privileged technician account with the password "musigate", very useful when some BOFH expired my accounts. Ooops, you mean it's still musigate now?
Oracle's default SYS password is change_on_install. You'd be surprised at how many people will type that every day, and not change it.
The latest and greatest mainframes are about twice as fast as a G6, but PCs have come a long way since 1 GHz. Currently, 1 CPU on a mainframe running Linux costs about $100K, you can buy a pretty impressive Intel server for that price.
A mainframe is not a supercomputer - the former is build for I/O, the latter for processing speed. There's a little overlap, but they address different markets - the workload for commercial data processing (for example, updating the accounts of your 10M customers with 100M transactions a day) and scientific number crunching (say, modelling a weather front). An IBM mainframe is designed from the ground up for I/O speed, and has dedicated processors that do nothing but shuffle data from storage to memory and back again. You cannot buy an Intel based system that even comes close to a Z series for I/O at any price. Even clustering Intel boxes won't help, because at some point, you have to have something to manage and consolidate all that data so you can do useful things with it. If you need it, there simply is no substitute for a mainframe. But if you don't, I agree that a mainframe is overpriced, just like a tank is overpriced if you just want to drive to the supermarket.
Yet despite all that professionalism, Nader found their cars to be gas-guzzling death traps.
Independant tests found that Nader pretty much made up everything he said about the GM Corvair. He later justified it on the grounds that he was sure some car companies were doing something wrong, so he wanted to attack the largest one.
There have been many attempts to establish such certifications since software arose as a significant part of the world back in the 50's. In almost every case, the same thing has happened: A certification program was established, and the the qualification tests looked for only one thing: Familiarity with the dominant software platforms at the time
While that is true, it must be possible to create such a body; after all, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc managed it, even tho' all those professions change quite rapidly. The medical profession, for example, hasn't held back the development of CAT scanners just because most of its members qualified on stethoscopes (for example). The engineering profession hasn't held back the adoption of CAD even tho' when it was founded the slide rule was the computational tool of choice.
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f they plan for it, there is no 'port' required. The project can be multi-platform without requiring weeks and weeks of man-hours to do a 'port'.
You've still got to test on every platform you support, you still have to train your support staff on every platform you support, etc. Have you ever worked on a large, commercial multi-platform product? If you had, you would know that the code is only part of the work involved, and over the lifecycle of the product, it's even just a small fraction of the work.
If HL2 can be ported from Win32->OSX, it can run under Linux ... so why isn't it?
Obviously, because the company believes it can recoup the cost of porting via OSX sales, but that it could not recoup the cost via Linux sales. Just because something can be done theoretically, it doesn't mean it would be practical to do so. Porting and testing aren't free for the company, after all, neither is providing after-sales support which is likely to be far more expensive on Linux than it is on OSX, where there is only on hardware/software combination to worry about.
Linux on the PC is simply not a viable games platform. That's not to say Linux on a console couldn't be - but on the PC there is too small a market and too many variables to realistically test or support.
I paid 50 bucks for my tin box edition Linux quake3 and installed it on FreeBSD. I paid 40 bucks for my Linux version of RTCW. I paid 50 bucks for UT2003 and it installed on Linux. I paid like 20 for UT because I came it late.
You might have done - but you are not representative of the games market as a whole. If you were, Loki would still be in business.
This is an inexcusable insult on Valve's behalf.
Oh, how short the geek memory. Remember Loki? A company that tried to bring mainstream games to the Linux platform?
The problem is, while geeks talk the talk, they don't walk the walk with their wallets. There simply isn't a market for games on Linux. A few people might buy a Linux copy, sure, but the majority will buy the Windows version when it's released, then demand the Linux version for free when it's finished porting.
Games companies are in business to make money. They're not charities, and even if they were, even charities need money to operate. Valve is simply making what it believes to be the best decision based on its reading of the market.
It is that programmers can't keep perfect track of everything at once, and have to make assumptions. What am I supposed to tell my boss, something like "I can't start on that bug fix until I have read and perfectly comprehend all 1,500,000 lines of code in the product"? No, I have to try to get an overall idea of how things work, and dig into the details as I think necessary. This sometimes means I will miss a detail that is indirectly connected to the work at hand, and therefore make a mistake.
Great post. Mind if I quote you next time MS announces that it's found and patched another DCOM hole?
The project was $270k over budget and a year late. That's the cost of three senior programmers at $90k per year for a full year.
To be fair, it's actually 3 ordinary programmers at $45k per year. Factor in taxes, benefits, rent, equipment, utilities, subsidized canteen/vending machines and you will find that annual salary is less than half of what it costs to employ someone.
Why can't management understand THAT side of the equation?
If you, the super-smart engineer, don't understand the cost of employing someone, why expect your PHBs to understand either?
It's called capitalism. It works. Get used to it. If offshoring makes sense, companies will do it. If it does not make sense, they will not do it. That's how it works. Engineers don't know anything about finance.
Actually, you are wrong. You see, finance is engineering. The units are dollars instead of joules, but the principles are entirely the same. I mean this quite literally - the equations of certain derivatives are the equations of heat transfer. CFD algorithms are used to price bonds. Managers are engineers. A corporation is a piece of technology, just like an engine.
We don't think it's immoral when an engineer tries to get the most computation done per clock cycle, or the most torque from an engine, or the most heat from a furnace. Why do people get upset when a manager tries to maximize the output of his engine?
What's the idea behind a MBA is greed, greed, greed and more GREED. MBAs are about extremely short-sighted profit-maximizing though any means possible, including disreputable, unethical, slimy and illegal ones.
Go look in your wardrobe, in your garage, in your living room.
See any products that aren't made in your home country?
Then you, my friend are part of the problem.
How well shielded? a few meters of water would sufice, but this is getting expensive to send into space.
That's a common misconception. In The Case for Mars, Dr Robert Zubrin uses NASA's own data to demonstrate that during a trip to Mars, astronauts would receive about as much radiation as someone who'd lived their life in Colorado. Yes, there is a slightly increased risk of cancer but a) you increase your own risk every time you fly and b) they're flying to Mars - and that's pretty damn risky in and of itself!
Well I see you defining inflation a few times and talking about some causes, but I don't see how you address the novel idea of a self-deflating electronic currency.
Oh, you mean currency units that expire or something? How bizarre - it would make it impossible to assemble large blocks of capital over time. Goodbye to pension funds and large infrastructure projects. In fact, the only organization that could do anything capital-intensive with a self-deflating currency would be the organization that controlled the printing press (or electronic equivalent). Obviously, that is your intent. But, every planned economy in history has failed, and I do have to wonder why its advocates seem to cling to the idea. Actually, I don't, this explains it quite nicely.
You can hardly expect e-retailing to compete with cash when e-currency consists of credit cards issued by usurous, predatory corporate behemouths.
For a start, you can't compare "retailing" with "cash".
Secondly, the dollar is an e-currency. The amount of dollar business transacted electronically dwarfs the amount done with dollar bills.
Thirdly, it's up to you if you want to pay interest on your transactions or not. Pay your card off every month, and it's yours for free. I haven't paid interest on a card in years!
Fourthly, it's spelt "behemoth". You might think this is a spelling flame, but you can hardly expect people to take you seriously when you don't even understand the words that you are using.
The currency could be manipulated in ways previously unheard of. People could be paid simply to live their lives and still there would be no need for inflation.
Currency is a means to facilitate trade. There must exist, over the long term, a 1:1 relationship between the nominal value of the currency in circulation, and the nominal value of the goods and services for sale. Inflation is a corrective mechanism to maintain this relationship. If there is more money than there is stuff that money can be spent on, the the value of each unit of money decreases until balance is regained. It's simply supply and demand - people only value money because it correlates with goods and services for sale. If people see that money is just being printed on a whim, then it ceases to have value - without the link between money and what can be bought with money, money is just paper. Inflation is frequently caused by governments a) printing money or b) issuing bonds (which is shifting future tax revenue into the present).
A system where people are paid without also producing goods and services for sale will experience rampant inflation, leading to collapse. The whole point of a currency is trust. You trust that the dollar in your pocket can be exchanged for goods and services. Some currencies - like the dollar, the pound sterling, the Swiss franc - are considered "hard currency" because people throughout the world trust them. If you "manipulate" the currency, you erode trust, and your currency is worthless.
On the mining side, is it possible with near-future technology to mine the 3He, ship it back to Earth and use it to generate energy and still end up with more energy out than went into the whole process? Or would it require esoteric tech like those magnetic railguns to launch cargo back towards the Earth?
My reference in these matters is Dr Robert Zubrin, who has written extensively on using existing and very-near-future technology (i.e. direct extrapolations from current research) to colonize Mars and the moon. We know from probes that He3 exists on the moon's surface (probably caused by the solar wind hitting the unprotected surface). We have a technique called "shake and bake" used in mining here on Earth for extracting gases from rocks. What would be required would be to deploy a highly automated and solar powered shake and bake plant to process moon rock to extract and store He3.
You would need to process 250,000 tonnes or rock to extract 1kg of He3. That's 1km square to a depth of 10cm. That sounds like terrible odds, but in a 60% efficient MHD fusion reactor, at a price of $0.06/kWh that works out at $1M/kg. If electricity prices go up, obviously that'd be more. So the question really is, how much can you automate bulldozing rock into a furnace? Zubrin estimates if 1kg to LEO can be brought down to $1000, you could get to the moon for $5000/kg, then you could break even in 4 years.
A counterexample would be the fusion of two Helium-3 atoms
He3 fusion is really the holy grail, because since it produces charged particles instead of neutrons, there's no need to attach it to an old-style heat exchanger and steam turbine plant. You can extract the energy and convert it to electricity directly using magnetohydrodynamic induction. It's very elegant. And we know where to get loads of He3, it's abundant on the moon, just not on Earth. Regular deuterium fusion will be the proof of concept and might be the first into commercial production, but He3 fusion won't be too far behind it. It will make mining on the moon commercially viable!
But Oracle DOES say to make backups....
Not on paper it doesn't!
If Apple added wireless & http to the next iPod and marketed it as a must have because of the free, built in iServe software, it would be massive! On launch, ensure it works with Macs and Windows then watch them fly off the shelves!
Apple has a cordial relationship with the recording industry right now, enough for them to dell downloads of songs. Can you imagine what would happen if Apple started selling devices specifically optimized for distributing music to everyone in the same room, for storage on their own devices?
WORA brings with it a lot of costs but few benefits for Linux developers. When I write a Linux desktop application, I want it to work well on Linux, I don't care about whether it runs on Windows.
So, what you're saying is, platform lock-in is bad, unless the platform you're locked into is Linux? I see.
Think about this and answer honestly: If the same guy were a vocal supporter of a politician who you support, would you be convinced he was going to cheat? Or would you see it rationally- the man has opinions, just like every other person in the world?
Indeed; just look at Michael Moore. He's made a lot of noise about the man he calls "Governor Bush", but the problem is, it's very obvious that it's not the democratic process that he's worried about, but rather that his own side lost. Can you even imagine Michael Moore ranting about "Former Vice President Gore"? No, it simply wouldn't happen.
I hate to break it to you, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isn't Microsoft. They are completely different entities. And a change of pace: SuSE Linux Donates Software to Allentown, Pennsylvania Schoolchildren
Please let me know when Open Source luminaries such as Eric Raymond donate to charity even 1% of the cash Bill Gates has donated. Thanks!
Let's see what Google has to say, shall we?
You were saying?
I wouldn't describe it as the "core" OS, it's just there to provide a basic interface so you can log in an administer the underlying virtualization layer. It's analogous to using DOS to boot Netware. From the docs:
Like for ages IBM's mainframes has a standard privileged technician account with the password "musigate", very useful when some BOFH expired my accounts. Ooops, you mean it's still musigate now?
Oracle's default SYS password is change_on_install. You'd be surprised at how many people will type that every day, and not change it.
The latest and greatest mainframes are about twice as fast as a G6, but PCs have come a long way since 1 GHz. Currently, 1 CPU on a mainframe running Linux costs about $100K, you can buy a pretty impressive Intel server for that price.
A mainframe is not a supercomputer - the former is build for I/O, the latter for processing speed. There's a little overlap, but they address different markets - the workload for commercial data processing (for example, updating the accounts of your 10M customers with 100M transactions a day) and scientific number crunching (say, modelling a weather front). An IBM mainframe is designed from the ground up for I/O speed, and has dedicated processors that do nothing but shuffle data from storage to memory and back again. You cannot buy an Intel based system that even comes close to a Z series for I/O at any price. Even clustering Intel boxes won't help, because at some point, you have to have something to manage and consolidate all that data so you can do useful things with it. If you need it, there simply is no substitute for a mainframe. But if you don't, I agree that a mainframe is overpriced, just like a tank is overpriced if you just want to drive to the supermarket.
I have a 3G mobile video phone on my desk and it works, so that one can be struck off the list.
Indeed, and a self-parking car has just been announced in Japan.
Truly these are great days we are living in!
Yet despite all that professionalism, Nader found their cars to be gas-guzzling death traps.
Independant tests found that Nader pretty much made up everything he said about the GM Corvair. He later justified it on the grounds that he was sure some car companies were doing something wrong, so he wanted to attack the largest one.
There have been many attempts to establish such certifications since software arose as a significant part of the world back in the 50's. In almost every case, the same thing has happened: A certification program was established, and the the qualification tests looked for only one thing: Familiarity with the dominant software platforms at the time
While that is true, it must be possible to create such a body; after all, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc managed it, even tho' all those professions change quite rapidly. The medical profession, for example, hasn't held back the development of CAT scanners just because most of its members qualified on stethoscopes (for example). The engineering profession hasn't held back the adoption of CAD even tho' when it was founded the slide rule was the computational tool of choice.