It's simply not true that anyone can start a website with nothing. I can put up the best website in the world (and have already spent years developing two that I had thought were pretty good), but there are so many websites out there that it probably won't get many hits. The world is flooded with good and bad apps, blogs, videos, and software.
I've spent hundreds of hours putting out press releases, posting links on forums, E-Mailing people, and so on. I E-Mailed 80 different personal messages to people in my site's industry and didn't receive one reply. I was banned from countless forums for spam, and press releases are deleted without being read. The bottom line is that nobody cares about your new site regardless of how good it is. Good sites don't get hits because they are good; they get hits because they happen to be acceptable but they are promoted by big companies or have a lot of money to spend on advertising.
Google and facebook came about in a time when there were fewer choices, so they could stand out. The Internet is becoming like the music business, where there are stories of artists who get jobs as janitors at the studios so that they can continually hound the executives until they finally get noticed. Like everywhere else in today's society, a few big sites increasingly control the destiny of all the little sites.
This whole situation could work out in the best way possible. If Sony is going to release a new hardware update, it will probably cost close to what it would cost to simply move up the Playstation 4. Releasing a Playstation 4 with backwards compatibility and a new DRM scheme both moves Sony ahead of the competition, and eliminates this piracy problem in the long term. The opportunity cost of reassigning all the engineers who are surely investigating the next generation right now into attempting to fix this problem could be devastating, and hiring new engineers unfamiliar with a system that needs to be fixed immediately is unlikely to succeed.
Well, I disagree with this disagreement.
In well-designed browsers, cookies don't simply pull information out of the air. The user has to enter that information or take actions that are then reported back to the server. I've always been of the opinion that, if you don't want someone to know what you're doing, then you should seriously reconsider whether you should do it or not. We spend our lives attempting to hide our actions from others and present a "fake" persona to the world. Imagine what the world would be like if people actually told the truth.
I can see an immediate positive aspect of these cookies: permanently banning people from forums. Anyone who has ever run a website that accepts user input knows that there are hackers or griefers who attempt to ruin things for everyone. With dynamic IP addresses, it's difficult to track these people down. However, unless the user reinstalls Windows, these cookies provide an easy way of denying access.
Well, you're looking at it from the perspective of deciding that it's more important to have children, and then seeing how your job can fit that lifestyle.
These people (and myself included, even though I don't make nearly as much as they do) decided not to have kids or get married so that they have the freedom to work so many hours. At least, freedom is the reason I decided not to get married.
I bet that, among these Wall Street types, you'd find the average greater than the 5% that's normal elsewhere of people who choose to never marry.
Even if these programmers are working 80 hrs/wk, that $75,000 still exceeds my base $71,000/yr salary. But I doubt that they're actually working that many hours.
They may work hard, and they may do 80 hour weeks once in a while, but 50 or 60 hour weeks are probably more normal and that's not that bad.
I work 55 hours per week as a developer and pull in $95,000/yr. Last year, I took a pay cut because the poor economy had driven down salaries and the company decided to take advantage of the lack of competition.
I have trouble feeling sorry for these people making $150,000/yr for 40 hours of work. Sure, the managers shouldn't be making millions, but I'll be happy to give these managers my contact information so they can call me when their "disgruntled" employees quit.
This example continues to show how the people on Wall Street have absolutely no clue about how most people live their lives.
Why not? As time goes on, people make better and better things. It happens in technology, so why not in the arts as well? My computer today is mostly better than the computer I owned ten years ago. Likewise, Inception is far better than The Godfather not only because it has a good story, but also because its special effects and production quality are leaps and bounds ahead of the earlier film. Why would we give an earlier version of a work a handicap because it was good "for its time?"
GET RID OF SAVE POINTS. I don't know how to say that more clearly. I want to be able to save at any time, for any reason. Dump the entire contents of memory to disk if needed - the consoles only contain 512MB of RAM anyway.
It's absolutely ridiculous that you can't die in Final Fantasy XIII, but that you have to go to a save point to quit. I suffered two power outages and lost hours of playing because one never needs to worry about dying in that game, but you have to walk all the way across Pulse just to find a save point.
This analysis is incomplete, because you don't mention that companies have strong incentives to remain under 50 employees now. For example, a family member of mine works at a bank where they have had 49 employees for 10 years, because affirmative action laws kick in at 50 employees. Health insurance, while significant, will only be one burden of a number that already exist for companies crossing the 50-employee threshold.
I agree, but not just because the interviewer got angry. It's not his job to decide whether John deserves sympathy or condemnation. The interviewer's job is to state the facts, and that's all. He should have continued to ask questions and simply published the answers to allow people to comment fairly on the article.
This article is a piece of garbage, and it was a waste of time reading it.
A lot of people here seem to be of the opinion that mental illness is something that is simply being overdiagnosed; people can "get over it," that medications are evil, and that kids should be kids. Obviously, these people have never been mentally ill.
Sure, it is true that today's kids' lives are nothing like the brutal, short, backbreaking existences that were lived by our predecessors, who in 1850 worked over 60 hours a week and barely managed to stay alive for 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, if you've ever had a manic or hypomanic episode, you will know that mania is not a positive state of mind. Mania is one of the worst possible states of existing, only barely better than death and far worse than depression. Imagine not being able to keep a thought in your head for more than 1 second at a time. Imagine how, one day you can go from being considered for a promotion at your office to being fired a month later because you can no longer comprehend programming concepts or remember what was going on a few minutes ago. Imagine it becoming impossible to function with people because you have lost the ability to determine what is the appropriate thing to say in social situations, and so as a result you say nothing.
Most importantly of all, imagine that nobody believes that anything is wrong, that doctor after doctor can't come up with any diagnosis for years, and when you try to get help for yourself people hang up on you because you can't follow the conversation to understand what's being talked about. Imagine that sometimes you are so unable to think that you have trouble determining whether someone is speaking to you or not. Imagine that the rest of the world just keeps going on while you see no reason to keep living through such hell if nobody can figure out what's wrong with you. So you just sit in front of the TV night after night while the images go by too fast to process. Mania is perhaps the most depressing thing that one can experience. This explanation of mania being a sense of extreme well-being is wrong and needs to be better communicated in the mainstream sources, who tend to simplify these diseases as some kind of "excess happiness." There is no happiness in mania.
Of course there is an increase in the incidence of these diseases among people living today. In the past, why would someone want to continue living if their new life was as a stupid and uncontrollable shell of their former selves? The only solution back then was suicide. While suicide is not a good choice today because there are many treatments available, it may be shocking to hear that death certainly would be better than living like that with no hope for a cure. Is it so far-fetched to say that the diseases were less widespread because people culled themselves?
Stating that kids should go off drugs because of the "evil pharmaceutical companies" is naive. The scientific literature does not adequately describe these diseases, and probably never could. Everyone has felt pain, so it's easy to describe the treatment for a headache. But while there are some very smart people here, those who are not ill are simply not able to comprehend what mental illness really is, and should not be offering comments about whether suffers should undergo treatment.
I'm glad to see that someone likes templating and frameworks for application development. I constantly receive criticism from people who say that I should write things from the ground up in PHP, instead of using symfony/Propel. It's easy to say that there will be "performance improvements," but the sites using ground-up PHP seem to never get finished because too much developer time is sucked down the drain reinventing the wheel.
I actually didn't listen to this album until after submitting it here.
The high point of this album is "Fallen Dragoon" (2-12). This song features what appears to be a live solo, and while my background as a violinist might make me partial to this track more than the metal-oriented tracks, it was performed beautifully. The vibrato and modulation in this piece are of professional caliber, and that part of the piece may be the second best remix the community has ever produced. (The best was a recently submitted FF9 vocal track). The artist obviously took the final boss theme from "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time" as an influence to this work.
Also impressive is "Chocobo Chocobo." This song is a hit that could be played on the radio. The words are hilarious, the rapping is expertly done, and the song did not come out "corny" as videogame lyrics can (and as did happen with the final battle theme on this CD). Larry Orj obviously took his time writing exactly what he was going to say, and I'd be interested to know how many takes he needed to get the rapping right. It must have taken a hundred tries. The mixing and the baseline are also of the same quality as today's top 40 songs.
One of the things I noticed about Overclocked albums is that all of them advertise a "story" or a "build up" towards a finale, which is usually the final boss theme. I like this idea - I myself think that the final boss theme is the most important work in a game soundtrack. But, like the FF7 album, I was extremely disappointed in the way that the final boss theme (against Zeromus) was done here. In the Voices of the Lifestream album, the artists actually shortened One Winged Angel, which I thought was not a fitting conclusion to a four-disc, years long effort.
In this album, the Zeromus theme was similarly remixed too far from the original to make it a fitting conclusion to the work. The original melody was hidden behind the newer vocals and lost in the excessive guitars and bass, and, as stated above, the words selected did come out as "corny."
All in all, I think this project would have been better if some tracks were cut. There are far too many iterations of the "Main Theme," and the fist five mixes on the first disc had some variation of it. While each is good on its own, I became tired of listening to the same music over and over. Someone at The Shizz pointed out that many of the original influences for this OC ReMix CD were themselves remixes of the Main Theme, but I still think that the "story" didn't move forward during these similar pieces even though they weren't influenced by the same tracks. The original FF4 soundtrack, being from the SNES era, didn't have as much material to work with as FF7 or the other OC ReMix albums, and that shows in the repetition of many themes and tracks.
Nobody here has asked why you are looking to find dates in the first place.
Dating is not a solution to all your problems. In fact, I am single because I decided that being with someone causes more problems than it is worth. It's hard to appreciate the freedom of being single until you've gotten involved with someone and have to spend most of your time with her (or him). When you're single, you can choose what you want to do, when you want to do it. It's great to spend time with people when you want, and then come home to a quiet house at night where there is nobody to bother you when you want to be alone.
You'll have a sacrifice a lot. For example, if I were in a relationship, I wouldn't be able to save as much to start a business in a few years. I won't have as much time to devote to the business. I have time to devote to both computers and other hobbies, and I have the opportunity to spend time with a number of different people without being required to compromise on things I want to do. Now, if what some people are doing doesn't interest me, then I make plans with other people who are doing something that does. You have to deal with interpersonal problems and drama. You'll have to cut back on time with computers and video games, whether you want to or not. You'll have a lot of stress with dealing with constant rejections while trying to find someone. Some girls will even make plans and simply not show up, without even calling to cancel, even though you paid and drove a long way to be there.
In short, you should consider whether you really want to be involved in a relationship, or whether society is pressuring you to become involved in one. Ever since I ditched the dating scene, I've never been happier.
This is NOT true. I joined a swing dancing club in 2004, and there were two men to every woman. I quit the club because I got tired of standing around waiting to dance with people.
DDR is great. I played it all the time and never understood why it became unpopular. What does Guitar Hero have that DDR did not? Especially the "cool" factor - people get amazed when you jump around and pass a song on DDR, but playing a guitar just looks.. boring.
I won't be buying another Square game either. This decision isn't entirely due to the Chrono Trigger debacle, but because their software is too buggy. I was unable to finish Star Ocean: The Last Hope because of showstopper bugs. I've had it with this company and will never buy anything from them again.
As to Chrono Trigger, if they were smart, they would have offered to purchase the fan-made game instead of sending a cease-and-desist letter. The creators would probably have been happy to sell well below the market rate for the development time required for such a game, and it could be released on Xbox Live or the Virtual Console. If the game is of the high quality that it seems, then they could have made a killing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simply not true that anyone can start a website with nothing. I can put up the best website in the world (and have already spent years developing two that I had thought were pretty good), but there are so many websites out there that it probably won't get many hits. The world is flooded with good and bad apps, blogs, videos, and software.
I've spent hundreds of hours putting out press releases, posting links on forums, E-Mailing people, and so on. I E-Mailed 80 different personal messages to people in my site's industry and didn't receive one reply. I was banned from countless forums for spam, and press releases are deleted without being read. The bottom line is that nobody cares about your new site regardless of how good it is. Good sites don't get hits because they are good; they get hits because they happen to be acceptable but they are promoted by big companies or have a lot of money to spend on advertising.
Google and facebook came about in a time when there were fewer choices, so they could stand out. The Internet is becoming like the music business, where there are stories of artists who get jobs as janitors at the studios so that they can continually hound the executives until they finally get noticed. Like everywhere else in today's society, a few big sites increasingly control the destiny of all the little sites.
This whole situation could work out in the best way possible. If Sony is going to release a new hardware update, it will probably cost close to what it would cost to simply move up the Playstation 4. Releasing a Playstation 4 with backwards compatibility and a new DRM scheme both moves Sony ahead of the competition, and eliminates this piracy problem in the long term. The opportunity cost of reassigning all the engineers who are surely investigating the next generation right now into attempting to fix this problem could be devastating, and hiring new engineers unfamiliar with a system that needs to be fixed immediately is unlikely to succeed.
Well, I disagree with this disagreement. In well-designed browsers, cookies don't simply pull information out of the air. The user has to enter that information or take actions that are then reported back to the server. I've always been of the opinion that, if you don't want someone to know what you're doing, then you should seriously reconsider whether you should do it or not. We spend our lives attempting to hide our actions from others and present a "fake" persona to the world. Imagine what the world would be like if people actually told the truth. I can see an immediate positive aspect of these cookies: permanently banning people from forums. Anyone who has ever run a website that accepts user input knows that there are hackers or griefers who attempt to ruin things for everyone. With dynamic IP addresses, it's difficult to track these people down. However, unless the user reinstalls Windows, these cookies provide an easy way of denying access.
Well, you're looking at it from the perspective of deciding that it's more important to have children, and then seeing how your job can fit that lifestyle. These people (and myself included, even though I don't make nearly as much as they do) decided not to have kids or get married so that they have the freedom to work so many hours. At least, freedom is the reason I decided not to get married. I bet that, among these Wall Street types, you'd find the average greater than the 5% that's normal elsewhere of people who choose to never marry.
Even if these programmers are working 80 hrs/wk, that $75,000 still exceeds my base $71,000/yr salary. But I doubt that they're actually working that many hours. They may work hard, and they may do 80 hour weeks once in a while, but 50 or 60 hour weeks are probably more normal and that's not that bad.
I work 55 hours per week as a developer and pull in $95,000/yr. Last year, I took a pay cut because the poor economy had driven down salaries and the company decided to take advantage of the lack of competition. I have trouble feeling sorry for these people making $150,000/yr for 40 hours of work. Sure, the managers shouldn't be making millions, but I'll be happy to give these managers my contact information so they can call me when their "disgruntled" employees quit. This example continues to show how the people on Wall Street have absolutely no clue about how most people live their lives.
Why not? As time goes on, people make better and better things. It happens in technology, so why not in the arts as well? My computer today is mostly better than the computer I owned ten years ago. Likewise, Inception is far better than The Godfather not only because it has a good story, but also because its special effects and production quality are leaps and bounds ahead of the earlier film. Why would we give an earlier version of a work a handicap because it was good "for its time?"
GET RID OF SAVE POINTS. I don't know how to say that more clearly. I want to be able to save at any time, for any reason. Dump the entire contents of memory to disk if needed - the consoles only contain 512MB of RAM anyway. It's absolutely ridiculous that you can't die in Final Fantasy XIII, but that you have to go to a save point to quit. I suffered two power outages and lost hours of playing because one never needs to worry about dying in that game, but you have to walk all the way across Pulse just to find a save point.
This analysis is incomplete, because you don't mention that companies have strong incentives to remain under 50 employees now. For example, a family member of mine works at a bank where they have had 49 employees for 10 years, because affirmative action laws kick in at 50 employees. Health insurance, while significant, will only be one burden of a number that already exist for companies crossing the 50-employee threshold.
I agree, but not just because the interviewer got angry. It's not his job to decide whether John deserves sympathy or condemnation. The interviewer's job is to state the facts, and that's all. He should have continued to ask questions and simply published the answers to allow people to comment fairly on the article. This article is a piece of garbage, and it was a waste of time reading it.
A lot of people here seem to be of the opinion that mental illness is something that is simply being overdiagnosed; people can "get over it," that medications are evil, and that kids should be kids. Obviously, these people have never been mentally ill.
Sure, it is true that today's kids' lives are nothing like the brutal, short, backbreaking existences that were lived by our predecessors, who in 1850 worked over 60 hours a week and barely managed to stay alive for 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, if you've ever had a manic or hypomanic episode, you will know that mania is not a positive state of mind. Mania is one of the worst possible states of existing, only barely better than death and far worse than depression. Imagine not being able to keep a thought in your head for more than 1 second at a time. Imagine how, one day you can go from being considered for a promotion at your office to being fired a month later because you can no longer comprehend programming concepts or remember what was going on a few minutes ago. Imagine it becoming impossible to function with people because you have lost the ability to determine what is the appropriate thing to say in social situations, and so as a result you say nothing.
Most importantly of all, imagine that nobody believes that anything is wrong, that doctor after doctor can't come up with any diagnosis for years, and when you try to get help for yourself people hang up on you because you can't follow the conversation to understand what's being talked about. Imagine that sometimes you are so unable to think that you have trouble determining whether someone is speaking to you or not. Imagine that the rest of the world just keeps going on while you see no reason to keep living through such hell if nobody can figure out what's wrong with you. So you just sit in front of the TV night after night while the images go by too fast to process. Mania is perhaps the most depressing thing that one can experience. This explanation of mania being a sense of extreme well-being is wrong and needs to be better communicated in the mainstream sources, who tend to simplify these diseases as some kind of "excess happiness." There is no happiness in mania.
Of course there is an increase in the incidence of these diseases among people living today. In the past, why would someone want to continue living if their new life was as a stupid and uncontrollable shell of their former selves? The only solution back then was suicide. While suicide is not a good choice today because there are many treatments available, it may be shocking to hear that death certainly would be better than living like that with no hope for a cure. Is it so far-fetched to say that the diseases were less widespread because people culled themselves?
Stating that kids should go off drugs because of the "evil pharmaceutical companies" is naive. The scientific literature does not adequately describe these diseases, and probably never could. Everyone has felt pain, so it's easy to describe the treatment for a headache. But while there are some very smart people here, those who are not ill are simply not able to comprehend what mental illness really is, and should not be offering comments about whether suffers should undergo treatment.
I'm glad to see that someone likes templating and frameworks for application development. I constantly receive criticism from people who say that I should write things from the ground up in PHP, instead of using symfony/Propel. It's easy to say that there will be "performance improvements," but the sites using ground-up PHP seem to never get finished because too much developer time is sucked down the drain reinventing the wheel.
I actually didn't listen to this album until after submitting it here.
The high point of this album is "Fallen Dragoon" (2-12). This song features what appears to be a live solo, and while my background as a violinist might make me partial to this track more than the metal-oriented tracks, it was performed beautifully. The vibrato and modulation in this piece are of professional caliber, and that part of the piece may be the second best remix the community has ever produced. (The best was a recently submitted FF9 vocal track). The artist obviously took the final boss theme from "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time" as an influence to this work.
Also impressive is "Chocobo Chocobo." This song is a hit that could be played on the radio. The words are hilarious, the rapping is expertly done, and the song did not come out "corny" as videogame lyrics can (and as did happen with the final battle theme on this CD). Larry Orj obviously took his time writing exactly what he was going to say, and I'd be interested to know how many takes he needed to get the rapping right. It must have taken a hundred tries. The mixing and the baseline are also of the same quality as today's top 40 songs.
One of the things I noticed about Overclocked albums is that all of them advertise a "story" or a "build up" towards a finale, which is usually the final boss theme. I like this idea - I myself think that the final boss theme is the most important work in a game soundtrack. But, like the FF7 album, I was extremely disappointed in the way that the final boss theme (against Zeromus) was done here. In the Voices of the Lifestream album, the artists actually shortened One Winged Angel, which I thought was not a fitting conclusion to a four-disc, years long effort.
In this album, the Zeromus theme was similarly remixed too far from the original to make it a fitting conclusion to the work. The original melody was hidden behind the newer vocals and lost in the excessive guitars and bass, and, as stated above, the words selected did come out as "corny."
All in all, I think this project would have been better if some tracks were cut. There are far too many iterations of the "Main Theme," and the fist five mixes on the first disc had some variation of it. While each is good on its own, I became tired of listening to the same music over and over. Someone at The Shizz pointed out that many of the original influences for this OC ReMix CD were themselves remixes of the Main Theme, but I still think that the "story" didn't move forward during these similar pieces even though they weren't influenced by the same tracks. The original FF4 soundtrack, being from the SNES era, didn't have as much material to work with as FF7 or the other OC ReMix albums, and that shows in the repetition of many themes and tracks.
Nobody here has asked why you are looking to find dates in the first place.
Dating is not a solution to all your problems. In fact, I am single because I decided that being with someone causes more problems than it is worth. It's hard to appreciate the freedom of being single until you've gotten involved with someone and have to spend most of your time with her (or him). When you're single, you can choose what you want to do, when you want to do it. It's great to spend time with people when you want, and then come home to a quiet house at night where there is nobody to bother you when you want to be alone.
You'll have a sacrifice a lot. For example, if I were in a relationship, I wouldn't be able to save as much to start a business in a few years. I won't have as much time to devote to the business. I have time to devote to both computers and other hobbies, and I have the opportunity to spend time with a number of different people without being required to compromise on things I want to do. Now, if what some people are doing doesn't interest me, then I make plans with other people who are doing something that does. You have to deal with interpersonal problems and drama. You'll have to cut back on time with computers and video games, whether you want to or not. You'll have a lot of stress with dealing with constant rejections while trying to find someone. Some girls will even make plans and simply not show up, without even calling to cancel, even though you paid and drove a long way to be there.
In short, you should consider whether you really want to be involved in a relationship, or whether society is pressuring you to become involved in one. Ever since I ditched the dating scene, I've never been happier.
This is NOT true. I joined a swing dancing club in 2004, and there were two men to every woman. I quit the club because I got tired of standing around waiting to dance with people.
DDR is great. I played it all the time and never understood why it became unpopular. What does Guitar Hero have that DDR did not? Especially the "cool" factor - people get amazed when you jump around and pass a song on DDR, but playing a guitar just looks.. boring.
I won't be buying another Square game either. This decision isn't entirely due to the Chrono Trigger debacle, but because their software is too buggy. I was unable to finish Star Ocean: The Last Hope because of showstopper bugs. I've had it with this company and will never buy anything from them again. As to Chrono Trigger, if they were smart, they would have offered to purchase the fan-made game instead of sending a cease-and-desist letter. The creators would probably have been happy to sell well below the market rate for the development time required for such a game, and it could be released on Xbox Live or the Virtual Console. If the game is of the high quality that it seems, then they could have made a killing.