I'm seriously curious here... why is Bioware releasing a Linux client? Please understand, I run Linux and I'm desperate to get a Linux client myself, I just don't understand Bioware's business reasons for this.
Bioware isn't likely to make back the money they've sunk into porting to Linux, not in sales they'd otherwise not have received. Yes, they'll certainly gain some good will from the Linux community but still...
Certainly, matters are different with the stand-alone linux server. Porting that didn't take much effort and this adds value to the product quite obviously.
So what's my theory? Bioware is using NWN to get some cross-platform experience for a future project. They know they aren't going to make their money back on the development of a linux client for NWN but that doesn't matter to them. The experience they get from this port is the value they are looking for and they plan to leverage this experience on future projects. Those are the ones Bioware expects to see a payback.
The company I work at went from 15 people a year ago to just five now. From 12 developers to 2. I used to be an Intermediate Developer. Now, I am Senior Software Developer and I'm also the only one who does system administration, network administration, backups, etc. etc. I am also responsible for maintaining ten software projects even though I've only worked on two of them here (and nobody who worked on five of the remaining is still employed...)
All the while, of course, I'm doing new development.
Note that in the U.S. (not Canada, where I live), administering a test during an interview is illegal. This is because, if memory serves, some people perform badly in test situations and you are therefore discriminating against them.
That said, I've had a test given me at all worthwhile jobs I've ever applied at.
Hey, don't blame me. VB was a very bad choice, in my opinion, for this. The user interface was too complex and we had far too many lines of code. The decision to use VB was made very early on, before the scope of the project was realised. The architecture seriously suffered as a result, the code was almost entirely interdependent. Oh well, I got the hell out of there.:)
Until a little over a year ago, I was employed at a company that wrote gambling software for sports betting houses. It is big business, let me tell you.:) If anyone has any questions, fire away and I'll answer them.
I never put any backdoor code into anything I submitted but it would have been very easy to do so. We had well over 300,000 lines of code and very little of it was audited. The only problem would have been getting the backdoor in without other programmers noticing as everyone was responsible for different areas. Still, I know it could have been done, I can picture exactly what it would have taken to do so.
Would it have been noticed? Possibly eventually, though I have my doubts. Apparently, there was a bug in our code for one of the complex bet types. It ended up _always_ overpaying a specific complex winning bet type by $1. That is, it always rounded up to the next dollar instead of down and this bug went undetected for YEARS.
All the code was written in VB and we worked crazy amounts of overtime ALL the time. Additionally, the 'business experts' could never get their act in gear and agree to how things should work. I ended up resigning my position.
My longest stretch is 81 hours. However, I'm kind of cheating here. I went to classes on Friday, didn't hit the lab until about 2 pm after waking up at around 9:00 am. I then coded straight until 5 pm on Monday afternoon. I took bathroom breaks, of course, and occasionally ate but I ate while programming. The assignment was due at 11:59 pm on Monday so I submitted it with lots of time. Still, only about 75 hours of that was spent in front of a computer.
I didn't get the best grade ever on that assignment but still, got a 9 in the course (9 being the top grade you can get). Later, I went back and TA'ed the course, spending a while as head TA while still an undergrad.
There's no way I could do that now. And even back then, I would have been more productive with some sleep. These days, I figure 12 - 14 hours of coding in a day is my limit and I'm not going to be able to keep up that level all that long. Hey, I'm pushing thirty years old now. Heh.
It wasn't a technique to save memory. Storing the year as a +- offset from 1970 would allow a range from 1842 to 2097 and would only take up ONE BYTE of storage compared to storing two characters (taking up two bytes) giving a range of 1900 - 1999.
Why $0.99 per song? That seems excessively high to me. I mean, most new CDs here with, say, ten songs on them sell for $14 Canadian (around $8.50 U.S.) while even non-new CDs rarely retail over $17 (about $10.50). It seems to me that this company doesn't provide the same nice CD inserts and the like so really, shouldn't they be charging less? Also, I am assuming they provide you with the uncompressed music burnt onto a custom CD for you. If it is MP3 and/or you download it yourself, $0.20 or so seems more reasonable. And yes, I would pay that. Perhaps a little more, say $0.25 or $0.30, for uncompressed music burnt or pressed onto a CD and sent to you.
Secondly, how much of this money goes to the artist? On the assumption that $1.00 of each regular CD goes to the artist, I would expect to see about $0.10 from each track be paid directly to the artist. Yes, that's while I'm paying approximately $0.20 per track. I don't want to pay per track if the artist simply will not see any revenue whatsoever from this. At least if I buy a CD, there's a chance the artist will see some profit from me.
Why would you have to maintain dual websites? The changes necessary to make your site accessible to the blind are generally such simple things as using ALT tags for images and make your HTML valid. In fact, the ALT tag has been required (i.e. NOT optional) since at least HTML 4.01.
So really, 90% of the work of making your web site accessible to the blind involves just doing what you should be doing anyway.
I am a computer professional with twenty years of experience in the computer field. I do a variety of jobs, including programming and system administration. I know my computer stuff and I'm still in my (very late) twenties.
I am, however, getting sick of what passes for operating systems and applications these days. Many of my tech-savy friends are taking a serious look at Apple hardware and software 'because it just works'. The company I work for runs a collection of Windows and Linux machines. With Windows machines, we have to spend far too much time keeping the system patches and antivirus software up to date and generally managing them. I love Linux and use it all the time but I am still very aware that I am using a Linux system, not just a 'computer'.
And I am tired of it. Why should I have to care about the operating system? I want to use the computer to do my job. I don't want to fight with patches. I don't want to reinstall software and spend hours tuning the configurations. I'll do that for our servers because, at the moment at least, I have to. But why should I spend large part of my day managing the computers rather than just using the damn things? Why don't they just work? Why do I even still care what operating system I am running?
The reason is, of course, fairly obvious. But how do you see this changing over the next decade? Can we get a handle on the complexity? What influence will Apple have? Do you see operating systems becoming to a simple commodity (choose what you want, all your applications will work regardless)?
I believe the book you are referring to is Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. Note, though, that it is a primary recruiting tool for the cult of Scientology.
I took two years off after high school. I was initially only going to take one year off but then various personal matters conspired against me. Anyway, it was a great choice. I had less problems getting into university than people that did not take time off (as my grades were already known, everyone else I knew only got 'provisional acceptance'). And now that I have my BSc, not one of the four companies I have worked for ever even noticed the two year gap on my resume.
Should you take time off? Sure, if you want to. In my experience, people who do are less likely to drop out of post-secondary education (we had a 90% drop-or-transfer rate from my first year computer classes to final graduation). And hey, maybe you can save some money, or at least get your hard-core partying out of the way before it destroys your grades.
What? The information on your local computer isn't encrypted. So do the deltas on your local computer, send those. Treat the remote storage as multiple data blocks.
There's no need for trust. Store my data on your server but store it encrypted. Only I have the decryption key. Everything I send to you and receive from you is encrypted. You are just providing the storage (and possibly I am paying you for this service).
Now, I don't need to trust you. I, of course, do have to trust my local machine and I have to trust the client I use to access my files. But I do not need to trust you.
If you are worried about the cost to file the patent, why on earth are you bothering? With the exception of your resume, having a patent will be absolutely valuless to you unless you are willing to pay your lawyers to sue someone infringing on your patent.
If you don't have the money to file, you don't have the money to defend your patent.
'learnt' may not be in your dictionary but it is in Dictionary.com and it was in the dictionaries I used in school. I will note that I am British, now living in Canada, but I am not sure if that makes a difference as Dictionary.com is American.
What? Why the heck is algebra being taught in secondary school? Why leave it that late? I mean, they aren't covering linear algebra, are they? They didn't in my high school. Apart from that, I cannot imagine what else they could be teaching about it. The only time I used algebra was in physics class in high school. Everything else, I had learnt by grade 6 (including geometry and trig, though I'll admit that I did not learn about conic sections until high school...)
So what are they talking about? Linear algebra? I doubt it, I can't see that they have been able to catch up that much. So, errm... what?
I picked up a Diamond Rio 500 when it first became available. I really liked it at first, though the Rio Manager software (for Windows) was so gawd-awful that I bought a replacement (musicmatch). There are fairly mature drivers and software for Linux though I must admit I haven't ever played around with them. I suspect they work with the later models as well.
That said, I am now not so happy with my purchase. The RIO contains only 64 megs of memory which, in your case, would probably be fine. I wanted more. More importantly, though, I have been unimpressed with the 'customer service' for this product. At times (last month), Windows drivers were not available for download. Finding a contact email address was difficult (though this may be resolved now). But more importantly, these devices just aren't very sturdy. Mine is now unusable except when left flat on a table and NOT MOVED. If I pick it up, the thing powers down. My brother and sister both bought one as well and at least one of the two no longer works for them, either.
So what did I get? A Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. 20 gigs of storage and it works very well. I doubt this would be suitable for you, though... no good Linux support yet and it is very much overkill for 3 mile runs.:) In fact, as it is hard-drive based, I wouldn't want to run with it at all. On the other hand, it is great for a one week trip to Mexico (yay!) and for extended bus trips and the like. Heck, I have ALL my CDs ripped to MP3 and stored on the device and I still have over 1/3 of the storage available to me. Firewire and USB, oh my.
'the need for a common 3D format becomes clear in a simple perusal of the Web, where the volume of 3D content is minuscule -- well under 1 percent.'
What? That strikes me as very very strange. The volume of Jeri Ryan content on the web is similarly minuscule, well under 1 percent. Nobody is saying we need a common format for Jeri Ryan content.
Isn't it just possible that most people don't have 3D content they want to share via the web?
What a crock of sh*t. Requiring IDs wouldn't have prevented those terrorists from boarding the plane. They all already had IDs. At best, assuming that it is impossible to fake an ID (and we all know how true that one is), mandatory ID checks at airports will only prevent currently known and watched terrorists, it will do nothing to stop the vast majority of fanatics, almost all of who have no criminal records.
My experiences... ship the stuff you are planning to need in the foreign country as early as possible. They may claim six weeks for it to arrive but when we moved from England to Canada, it took more than six months.
Take as little as possible. Forget most of your electronics. Forget anything big, like chairs or tables or the like. Ideally, you'd take a few items of clothing, a laptop, and some music CD's, buy pretty much the rest when you get there. Forget about taking your car. You likely will stop driving, anyway, once you get there.
Cost of living in England is expensive. Make sure you have a job and make sure you have somewhere to live. Rent may be several times higher than you are currently paying... four to eight times more than you currently pay if you will be living in or around London, 2 - 4 times more elsewhere in England. Do not even think of going if you do not have a job lined up already.
Get used to the rain. Be willing to accept that people tend to be much more grumpy in England (at least, compared to Canada). A friend of mine who tried moving to England described people as 'angry f*king c*nts' in England and she's not far off the mark.
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What I got this year... a pick slip. Still, this is better than last year. I didn't get anything last year except a missed paycheque. Heh.
I'm seriously curious here... why is Bioware releasing a Linux client? Please understand, I run Linux and I'm desperate to get a Linux client myself, I just don't understand Bioware's business reasons for this.
Bioware isn't likely to make back the money they've sunk into porting to Linux, not in sales they'd otherwise not have received. Yes, they'll certainly gain some good will from the Linux community but still...
Certainly, matters are different with the stand-alone linux server. Porting that didn't take much effort and this adds value to the product quite obviously.
So what's my theory? Bioware is using NWN to get some cross-platform experience for a future project. They know they aren't going to make their money back on the development of a linux client for NWN but that doesn't matter to them. The experience they get from this port is the value they are looking for and they plan to leverage this experience on future projects. Those are the ones Bioware expects to see a payback.
The company I work at went from 15 people a year ago to just five now. From 12 developers to 2. I used to be an Intermediate Developer. Now, I am Senior Software Developer and I'm also the only one who does system administration, network administration, backups, etc. etc. I am also responsible for maintaining ten software projects even though I've only worked on two of them here (and nobody who worked on five of the remaining is still employed...)
All the while, of course, I'm doing new development.
Heh. This can't go on much longer.
Note that in the U.S. (not Canada, where I live), administering a test during an interview is illegal. This is because, if memory serves, some people perform badly in test situations and you are therefore discriminating against them.
That said, I've had a test given me at all worthwhile jobs I've ever applied at.
Hey, don't blame me. VB was a very bad choice, in my opinion, for this. The user interface was too complex and we had far too many lines of code. The decision to use VB was made very early on, before the scope of the project was realised. The architecture seriously suffered as a result, the code was almost entirely interdependent. Oh well, I got the hell out of there. :)
Until a little over a year ago, I was employed at a company that wrote gambling software for sports betting houses. It is big business, let me tell you. :) If anyone has any questions, fire away and I'll answer them.
I never put any backdoor code into anything I submitted but it would have been very easy to do so. We had well over 300,000 lines of code and very little of it was audited. The only problem would have been getting the backdoor in without other programmers noticing as everyone was responsible for different areas. Still, I know it could have been done, I can picture exactly what it would have taken to do so.
Would it have been noticed? Possibly eventually, though I have my doubts. Apparently, there was a bug in our code for one of the complex bet types. It ended up _always_ overpaying a specific complex winning bet type by $1. That is, it always rounded up to the next dollar instead of down and this bug went undetected for YEARS.
All the code was written in VB and we worked crazy amounts of overtime ALL the time. Additionally, the 'business experts' could never get their act in gear and agree to how things should work. I ended up resigning my position.
My longest stretch is 81 hours. However, I'm kind of cheating here. I went to classes on Friday, didn't hit the lab until about 2 pm after waking up at around 9:00 am. I then coded straight until 5 pm on Monday afternoon. I took bathroom breaks, of course, and occasionally ate but I ate while programming. The assignment was due at 11:59 pm on Monday so I submitted it with lots of time. Still, only about 75 hours of that was spent in front of a computer.
I didn't get the best grade ever on that assignment but still, got a 9 in the course (9 being the top grade you can get). Later, I went back and TA'ed the course, spending a while as head TA while still an undergrad.
There's no way I could do that now. And even back then, I would have been more productive with some sleep. These days, I figure 12 - 14 hours of coding in a day is my limit and I'm not going to be able to keep up that level all that long. Hey, I'm pushing thirty years old now. Heh.
It wasn't a technique to save memory. Storing the year as a +- offset from 1970 would allow a range from 1842 to 2097 and would only take up ONE BYTE of storage compared to storing two characters (taking up two bytes) giving a range of 1900 - 1999.
Sorry, I meant new-release CDs vs. older releases.
Why $0.99 per song? That seems excessively high to me. I mean, most new CDs here with, say, ten songs on them sell for $14 Canadian (around $8.50 U.S.) while even non-new CDs rarely retail over $17 (about $10.50). It seems to me that this company doesn't provide the same nice CD inserts and the like so really, shouldn't they be charging less? Also, I am assuming they provide you with the uncompressed music burnt onto a custom CD for you. If it is MP3 and/or you download it yourself, $0.20 or so seems more reasonable. And yes, I would pay that. Perhaps a little more, say $0.25 or $0.30, for uncompressed music burnt or pressed onto a CD and sent to you.
Secondly, how much of this money goes to the artist? On the assumption that $1.00 of each regular CD goes to the artist, I would expect to see about $0.10 from each track be paid directly to the artist. Yes, that's while I'm paying approximately $0.20 per track. I don't want to pay per track if the artist simply will not see any revenue whatsoever from this. At least if I buy a CD, there's a chance the artist will see some profit from me.
Why would you have to maintain dual websites? The changes necessary to make your site accessible to the blind are generally such simple things as using ALT tags for images and make your HTML valid. In fact, the ALT tag has been required (i.e. NOT optional) since at least HTML 4.01.
So really, 90% of the work of making your web site accessible to the blind involves just doing what you should be doing anyway.
'Bad magic number failure'. I was a first year university student and had no idea what was going on. It was a Unix system. :)
A 'one time pad' that isn't completely random is NOT A ONE-TIME PAD. Simple as that. So yes, your point about generating randomness is very valid.
I am a computer professional with twenty years of experience in the computer field. I do a variety of jobs, including programming and system administration. I know my computer stuff and I'm still in my (very late) twenties.
I am, however, getting sick of what passes for operating systems and applications these days. Many of my tech-savy friends are taking a serious look at Apple hardware and software 'because it just works'. The company I work for runs a collection of Windows and Linux machines. With Windows machines, we have to spend far too much time keeping the system patches and antivirus software up to date and generally managing them. I love Linux and use it all the time but I am still very aware that I am using a Linux system, not just a 'computer'.
And I am tired of it. Why should I have to care about the operating system? I want to use the computer to do my job. I don't want to fight with patches. I don't want to reinstall software and spend hours tuning the configurations. I'll do that for our servers because, at the moment at least, I have to. But why should I spend large part of my day managing the computers rather than just using the damn things? Why don't they just work? Why do I even still care what operating system I am running?
The reason is, of course, fairly obvious. But how do you see this changing over the next decade? Can we get a handle on the complexity? What influence will Apple have? Do you see operating systems becoming to a simple commodity (choose what you want, all your applications will work regardless)?
I believe the book you are referring to is Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. Note, though, that it is a primary recruiting tool for the cult of Scientology.
I took two years off after high school. I was initially only going to take one year off but then various personal matters conspired against me. Anyway, it was a great choice. I had less problems getting into university than people that did not take time off (as my grades were already known, everyone else I knew only got 'provisional acceptance'). And now that I have my BSc, not one of the four companies I have worked for ever even noticed the two year gap on my resume.
Should you take time off? Sure, if you want to. In my experience, people who do are less likely to drop out of post-secondary education (we had a 90% drop-or-transfer rate from my first year computer classes to final graduation). And hey, maybe you can save some money, or at least get your hard-core partying out of the way before it destroys your grades.
What? The information on your local computer isn't encrypted. So do the deltas on your local computer, send those. Treat the remote storage as multiple data blocks.
There's no need for trust. Store my data on your server but store it encrypted. Only I have the decryption key. Everything I send to you and receive from you is encrypted. You are just providing the storage (and possibly I am paying you for this service).
Now, I don't need to trust you. I, of course, do have to trust my local machine and I have to trust the client I use to access my files. But I do not need to trust you.
If you are worried about the cost to file the patent, why on earth are you bothering? With the exception of your resume, having a patent will be absolutely valuless to you unless you are willing to pay your lawyers to sue someone infringing on your patent.
If you don't have the money to file, you don't have the money to defend your patent.
'learnt' may not be in your dictionary but it is in Dictionary.com and it was in the dictionaries I used in school. I will note that I am British, now living in Canada, but I am not sure if that makes a difference as Dictionary.com is American.
What? Why the heck is algebra being taught in secondary school? Why leave it that late? I mean, they aren't covering linear algebra, are they? They didn't in my high school. Apart from that, I cannot imagine what else they could be teaching about it. The only time I used algebra was in physics class in high school. Everything else, I had learnt by grade 6 (including geometry and trig, though I'll admit that I did not learn about conic sections until high school...)
So what are they talking about? Linear algebra? I doubt it, I can't see that they have been able to catch up that much. So, errm... what?
I picked up a Diamond Rio 500 when it first became available. I really liked it at first, though the Rio Manager software (for Windows) was so gawd-awful that I bought a replacement (musicmatch). There are fairly mature drivers and software for Linux though I must admit I haven't ever played around with them. I suspect they work with the later models as well.
That said, I am now not so happy with my purchase. The RIO contains only 64 megs of memory which, in your case, would probably be fine. I wanted more. More importantly, though, I have been unimpressed with the 'customer service' for this product. At times (last month), Windows drivers were not available for download. Finding a contact email address was difficult (though this may be resolved now). But more importantly, these devices just aren't very sturdy. Mine is now unusable except when left flat on a table and NOT MOVED. If I pick it up, the thing powers down. My brother and sister both bought one as well and at least one of the two no longer works for them, either.
So what did I get? A Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. 20 gigs of storage and it works very well. I doubt this would be suitable for you, though... no good Linux support yet and it is very much overkill for 3 mile runs. :) In fact, as it is hard-drive based, I wouldn't want to run with it at all. On the other hand, it is great for a one week trip to Mexico (yay!) and for extended bus trips and the like. Heck, I have ALL my CDs ripped to MP3 and stored on the device and I still have over 1/3 of the storage available to me. Firewire and USB, oh my.
What? That strikes me as very very strange. The volume of Jeri Ryan content on the web is similarly minuscule, well under 1 percent. Nobody is saying we need a common format for Jeri Ryan content.
Isn't it just possible that most people don't have 3D content they want to share via the web?
What a crock of sh*t. Requiring IDs wouldn't have prevented those terrorists from boarding the plane. They all already had IDs. At best, assuming that it is impossible to fake an ID (and we all know how true that one is), mandatory ID checks at airports will only prevent currently known and watched terrorists, it will do nothing to stop the vast majority of fanatics, almost all of who have no criminal records.
My experiences... ship the stuff you are planning to need in the foreign country as early as possible. They may claim six weeks for it to arrive but when we moved from England to Canada, it took more than six months.
Take as little as possible. Forget most of your electronics. Forget anything big, like chairs or tables or the like. Ideally, you'd take a few items of clothing, a laptop, and some music CD's, buy pretty much the rest when you get there. Forget about taking your car. You likely will stop driving, anyway, once you get there.
Cost of living in England is expensive. Make sure you have a job and make sure you have somewhere to live. Rent may be several times higher than you are currently paying... four to eight times more than you currently pay if you will be living in or around London, 2 - 4 times more elsewhere in England. Do not even think of going if you do not have a job lined up already.
Get used to the rain. Be willing to accept that people tend to be much more grumpy in England (at least, compared to Canada). A friend of mine who tried moving to England described people as 'angry f*king c*nts' in England and she's not far off the mark.