Who is so rich they need no credit yet so poor they need a job?
Someone who lives within their means. My brother, for example, only has a credit card because I talked him into getting one because I needed one and couldn't get one. Otherwise he would need a job - he has to work for a living to support himself, as we all must do - but have no need for credit.
I have dumped all forms of "casual financing." This includes things like gas cards and other credit cards along with anything else that allows you to pay later.
I see nothing wrong with a gasoline charge card where there is no fee and you pay it off at the end of the month. For one thing, it allows you to use the automated pump as opposed to having to walk into the office. Most gas stations won't take checks, so that leaves cash. Which means if you don't carry plastic, you're at risk if someone robs you. Also, by using the gasoline company's card, you get to delay paying for up to thirty days. And you're not putting your checking account at risk as you would be if you use a check card from a bank, a lot of banks now are using the nasty practice of approving a charge on your check card that exceeds your balance so they can hit you with an overdraft fee. Or charging you a fee to use your card.
I agree that using credit for consumption is a bad idea. But using credit to finance income-producing items is an excellent idea.
Houses are an exception and cars are pretty marginal when it comes to financing stuff. Just pay everything you can with cash!
If you ever decide to go into business or be anything other than a wage-slave, you will eventually need credit to do so, if for no other reason that there may come a time when a really nice opportunity comes up that if you can raise short-term financing you can make money on it.
Let's say there's a guy down the street that you've known as a friend for ten years. He's got temporary emergency money problems, and if you can buy your way out of them for him, he's got a coin collection worth about $100,000 that he'll sell you for $10,000. But he needs the money in two days. And you know you can sell it, but it will take about three weeks. If you can borrow $10,000, you can make a quick profit of $90,000 and help out a friend in trouble. Or maybe he just asks you to loan him the $10,000, with the coin collection as security, and he'll pay you $1,000 instead of paying considerably more to a pawn broker. This is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that having access to credit, even if you don't use it, that can mean the difference between seeing a good opportunity or watching it pass you by.
Ultimately, it's merely a matter of personal discipline whether or not you pay by debit or credit. There's always the "well, buts" and the "what-ifs" but the fact of the matter is that most everyone is simply wasting money playing the whole credit game.
That's exactly the point. It's a game. It's not a system; you can't beat a system but you can win a game. Most people are playing this game and don't know the rules. Learn what the rules are, and new ways to play the game, and you can win big.
I don't NEED credit... with the exception of buying a house. (It'd be ridiculous to presume someone could save up for a house and buy it outright... and if you could, you'd be the target of every investigation imaginable anyway.) I think the whole credit "industry" needs to be abandoned. Provided you actually pay your bills, you're only wasting your money when you could avoid all interest costs by paying cash. Build up a savings.
With the payment of interest on savings near zero, saving up makes no sense. Better to spend your money on finding ways to produce income.
All manner of good things happen to you when you do not the least of which is that warmer, safer feeling you have knowing there's money in the bank instead of "available credit."
Credit is just a tool; use it right and you can do amazing things. Use it wrong and you're in trouble. Use a power tool right and you can build beautiful furniture. Use it wrong and you can lose fingers.
Let me ask you this, which would be a whole lot better to have: $5,000 cash in the bank and no debt and no credit, or $10 in the bank, no debt and an untouched $500,000 line of credit that you can access immediately by check or credit card, and no interest if you pay back whatever you borrow within 29 days? With which of these would you have more capacity to do things?
One can have bad credit or credit problems for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with one's honesty, ability to do work, or even that are not your fault. If you don't pay a bill there may be any number of reasons. One may have forgotten something. One may have a dispute with the merchant. Or something may have gone wrong.
Scenario 1: Let's say you're working somewhere and don't have health coverage. You don't make a lot of money, and you can't afford to buy health insurance. You get laid off or fired and can't pay it any longer if you had it. And you get sick, or you have an accident. Or let's say you have health insurance, but there are gaps. Or you have a pre-existing condition and it's not covered by your health insurance. Let's say you are fixing something and drop a tool, and it cuts you. Or you get hit in the crosswalk by a guy who has no insurance and is judgement proof. Or you're attacked by a mentally ill homeless person. Or some emergency happens. So you go to the emergency room - federal law mandates they must treat you even if you can't pay, or they can't be reimbursed by Medicare - and fortunately the injury is minor and you won't suffer permanent damage or disability. Now, you're okay, but you can't pay the bill, which will probably run a minimum of $600 from the hospital, plus perhaps another $200 for the E.R. doctor's bill. Maybe a few incidental items bring the total bill to about a thousand bucks. Maybe you qualify for the hospital to pay some or all your bill from their fund for the uninsured - some have donation plans where people give money for this purpose - but you have to know about it and ask about it. If you don't, they're not going to tell you it's available.
Guess what, when you can't pay, they're going to report you! Now, not only do you have bad credit, a place that looks at your credit before hiring you isn't going to hire you because you have unpaid bills! Now you're unemployed, and can't get work because you're not employable because of your bad credit history! Watch from there as things get worse as you can't pay your bills and have even worse problems. And forget about asking to have a comment inserted into your record, it won't make any difference, creditors and the people who get these reports will no doubt score these things electronically so that the computer will scan them, a person won't, thus, nobody is going to see it and they won't hear your side.
Scenario 2: Consider this: you're late on one $20 payment on your Sears credit card, and it could cause some company to refuse you a loan to purchase a house, because your credit isn't "pristine." This actually happened in the case of one man who had been seeing Europe for a few months, came back and went to buy a truck after he totalled his car, and needed to finance it because the insurance settlement was for the depreciated value and he couldn't pay cash for the remainder. Seems he left money with someone to pay his bills while he was overseas, such as the utilities and such while he was out of the country, and instead of paying his bills they spent the money. Even if he can get the money back it's irrelevant; he's still got some issues on his credit report. Even if he pays the creditors back, with interest, he's still going to have a bad mark on his credit for several months until the reports clear.
Scenario 3: A nice old lady, next door to me, put me on her credit card as an authorized user with a card with my name on it back a few years ago so I could rent a car when she wanted to go on vacation and needed someone to drive her around (she doesn't have a license, and I didn't have a regular credit card (most car rental companies won't take a check card or other debit card even if you have enough money). I forgot about it otherwise. She died. She owed the credit card company money, about $20,000. They put a black mark on my credit report even though I'm only an authorized user; I'm not responsible for the bill. While I sor
I've seen this one every time people post about BSD, so I thought I'd repost it here for those who haven't seen it.
----
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
I don't know about you, but $1 per megabyte per month is not cheap; that's $1,000 (or $1024 if they consider a gigabyte 1,000 meg) per GB, PER MONTH, and is more than the cost of storing on Floppy Disk!
Presumably you mean $1 per GB per month, which is $12 per MB per year. Right now, 500 MB hard drives retail - that's retail mind you, not wholesale - for around $350. That puts the retail cost of drives at less than $1 per megabyte. Now, presume that you need eight drives to provide quad raid reliability, and eight separate machines cost as much as the drives, plus about $1000 a month in electricity, plus, $2000 a month for the internet connection and co-location charges, so to provide, say twenty terabytes of space, 350*400 (350*5*80)+ (24000*3) (Drives have about a 3-year warranty), means to provide 20TB of space over 3 years means it will cost the provider about $5 per GB over 3 years, to which they will charge $36. Nice work if you can get it.
Recommendation 1
Buy a 500gb drive (or whatever size you think you need) for $350. Buy an external USB hard drive case for about $40. For $390 you now have a 500gb backup drive that you can now just use drag and drop to copy files to or from.
Recommendation 2
Buy a second (used) computer or use a spare if you have one, and have it simply act as a file server, and have it grab new files off other machines on your network. Or set the new machine up with Linux, and install Amanda, an open-source backup utility and have it automatically backup new files.
Who cares really about mathmatical oriented things unless you write compiliers or something of that nature?
Having both maintained and written compilers, let me asure you that you don't even use "mathematical oriented things" when writing a compiler. A compiler is simply a text processor, taking a source code and translating it into something else, whether that is a source code in another language (for a translator or cross-compiler) or into a binary file. The so-called "mathematical things" are useful in determining ways to define what you should use for targeting the generated code (e.g. whether to translate a divide by 2 as a divide by 2 or as a shift right by 1) depends on the problem domain and the desired outcome. But doing compiling or translating itself is no more complicated than writing a text editor.
On paper, they have a few great plans (for the Aussie market), but don't let your opinion(s)
of their problems get back to their staaff, or you may have to find a new ISP in a hurry
(with all the hassle of informing your correspondents of your new eMail address & shifting
your web sites, etc.)
Never, ever use your provider's address for your website and (especially) NEVER use your provider's domain name for your e-mail if it's of any importance. Look at my e-mail address for a moment, and you get the idea. When you have your own domain name, if your provider terminates you, or you leave, or you want to leave (better service, more features and/or lower price), you simply change the termination point for your service to someone else. In fact, it's not a bad idea to have your DNS service with someone other than your hosting in case you have problems or your hosting becomes overloaded (like being Slashdotted, for example) and you get locked for excessive bandwidth, you can change to someone else fairly quickly if you need to, but you might not be able to do that in a hurry if your DNS provider and your hosting provider are the same. (Especially if you can't get into your provider's control panel because they're overloaded.)
With domain names around $9 a year, there's no excuse using your provider's domain name unless you're so broke you can't afford it. Which I have been, on occasion.
Now, for that, you can often get a geographic-based domain for free (at least, in the.US you can). I established the domain "paul.washington.dc.us" which cost nothing, and ran it under a provider that allowed free hosting if you carried a banner ad, so for more than five years I had my own domain name and e-mail under that domain for free. I still have it, too, going on eight years now.
What does an interviewer have to gain by making the most technically accurate appraisal possible? Instead, s/he votes for people s/he wouldn't mind working with on a daily basis, even if their skills are somewhat deficient.
I was working tech support for a subcontractor to an Internet Service Provider, who had to move out of state because they couldn't get more space in their current building. I was asked if I wanted to go, and I said no (and they would actually have paid relocation costs). So, anyway, near the end of the contract they asked me to stay on two extra days. They had another guy (who had trained me) who was probably better technically than I was (but I'm no slouch, either) but they kept me on specifically because my attitude was better. And I'm no kiss ass either, I had once told my boss that I would no longer give restore estimates to the customers when we had service outages because the estimates were always wrong and I hated lying to the customers. I said from then on that when someone called, and it was a known outage, I'd tell the customer exactly why, because we know what the problem is, they are working on it, but "I'm not going to give you an estimate when we don't know when it will be fixed, rather than lie to you and upset you because it isn't ready when we said." I think this was important in showing that I care about how we do and how we act toward others.
Being someone people can work with is often be more important than technical merit no matter how good you are (unless you're a prima donna, in which case they know that and they take that into account, and that's a whole other issue).
The most interesting part of the responses in this article are all the varied little voodoo that people use to separate the "good" developers from the "bad" developers. Some people seem to focus on the technical questions, i.e. if you can't write an algorithm that reverses a linked-list in 10 minutes, you stink. Ignoring the fact that not all languages even have linked list data structures in them.
Like Cobol, which is about 70% of all programming code, according to estimates.
Fortran doesn't have them either.
Basic doesn't have them either.
And come to think of it, since Java doesn't have pointers, it would stand to reason it can't have linked lists either.
Now, there may be variations on these languages with some dialects that have added pointers so some of these may have changed.
It's been said that good advertising makes a bad product die even faster. So the comments about the power of "Internet Buzz" and bloggers is true: good advertising lets people know even faster when a product isn't very good. I saw the previews for the movie (in TV ads, no where else) and I thought the premise was ridiculous. Why would someone be shipping hazardous cargo on a passenger plane (instead of on a cargo plane) and how would anyone have a shipping container system so porous that it allows the cargo to escape, then, on top of this, the plane's systems to separate the (unpressurized) cargo hold from the pressurized passenger hold are not working.
Now maybe your average person doesn't know all these facts, but they probably saw the film as mostly pointless and stayed away in droves because the advertising let them know how bad the movie is.
Any one care to take bets on how long before the MPAA tries to claim lackluster ticket sales / DVD rentals/sales is the result of rampant filesharing as opposed to people simply not seeing a really lousy film?:)
Threaten individuals with exorbitant fees for those who don't give in to demands? I think there's a word for that...hmmm...ah, yes! EXTORTION!! It'd be nice to see some criminal charges filed against RIAA executives, although it would never happen. The RIAA and MPAA are like modern day mobs.
It has been settled that threatening to sue someone or demanding money or you will sue someone does not constitute extortion. It is perfectly legal to do so. What it means is that if you threaten to go to the newspapers unless someone pays you off, that is blackmail/extortion, but not if you threaten to go to court.
In a PDF of a motion filing, Google is requesting over $11,000 in attorneys fees from Gordon Roy Parker, also known as Ray Gordon, a Philadelphia alleged self-publisher of books, after his claims in a federal lawsuit (prior slashdot article here) arguing Google's indexing of web pages violated his copyright (among other claims), were determined to be totally lacking even the slightest scintilla of merit whatsoever. The points made in Google's brief may be helpful in this case. As Google's brief says, "A party is improperly motivated if he does not have a good faith intent to protect a valid
copyright interest... or if his intent was to 'vex and harass the defendant.'" Google's argument here seems to fit very closely with the improper suits RIAA has filed or threatened to file unless paid off, against people who were totally innocent, and give further reasons to argue for award of attorneys fees to the defendant when they successfully defend a bogus copyright infringement charge.
And the reason they don't just build a small power plant is...?
Powerplants aren't cheap, and a well-designed UPS solution is a bit more complicated than just a spare power cord.
If you ever visit Washington, DC, there is a power plant located near Interstate 395 and 2nd Street SW. Is this one of PEPCO's plants for general power operations? No, it's operated by the Architect of the Capital, and it is used exclusively to supply power to the Capital. Think about this for a moment: Congress has its own power plant. But NSA apparently doesn't need the same power protection as Congress.
So, we're probably talking half a billion dollars for the building of it, plus additional annual expenses including higher than average salaries for plant workers due to the need for a clearance. This isn't peanuts, even with the NSA budget. It's not a bad idea... but it's not the no-brainer it looks at first pass.
I'll not argue your estimates over cost factors, but I suspect your figures may be high. But even if it is, NSA could conceivably build a big enough plant to sell excess power back to BG&E and perhaps reduce the cost somewhat. But with respect to NSA having its own power plant, nothing says that the people working in a power plant need the same level of clearances - or any clearances at all - of regular NSA information processing employees just because it's a power plant run by NSA instead of BG&E. Nothing says the plant has to be on-site, the plant could be located across the street from them. Or anywhere within a reasonable distance that there aren't huge losses due to long transmission lines. If NSA has its power plant 1/2 mile from its main facility, but still inside of the area it owns, that does not necessarily mean anyone working at the plant has access to or would be exposed to classified information. If the employees of BG&E who work at whatever power plant(s) supplying power to NSA don't need security clearances - and I see no reason why they would - then employees of NSA (or potentially some company contracted by NSA to operate its own plant) who are merely power plant technicians don't need security clearances.
The key with moving an elephant, or any large entity, is to know exactly where it feels pain... but be sure you want its full attention.
Yeah, like with 9/11, whoever did that certainly wanted to get the U.S.'s full attention. It was like what someone else pointed out to me many years ago when both of the license plates from my car turned up missing. One of them can fall off without you noticing. But if two are suddenly missing, it's obvious someone stole them.
can't imagine WHY that might work in toronoto, and not for the NSA
Did you look at the summer temperatures for both cities? They're about the same. The reason this works for Toronto is that Lake Ontario is pretty damned deep as well as big. I don't know if there are any lakes deep enough near Baltimore for this type of cooling to work.
Actually, NSA is not in Baltimore, it's nearer to Columbia, MD, maybe 20 KM from DC and 40 KM from Baltimore. NSA's HQ at Fort Meade, MD is about 1/2 way between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. The question is how much electricity would be needed to run a dual pipeline in which they pump cold water maybe 40km from the Chesapeake bay, and then pump the heated water back; you might still have the same problems. Or perhaps pipe it out of the Potomac, then divert it to Fairfax County in Virginia, they're having problems with Maryland over access to (additional) drinking water due to increased population. After all, NSA doesn't need the water, just the lower temperature. (The water line between Virginia and Maryland, set back in the 1760s, puts the ownership of all the water on the Potomac to Maryland, so Fairfax has to have Maryland's permission to take more water out of the river, and Maryland has been fighting them over this for years. Water wars are everywhere, not just in California.)
Dallas pretty much sucks. The Collin County suburbs north of Dallas (where I live) are basically a less expensive version of Orange County, CA
That brings back some interesting memories. I lived in California for several years, then my family moved. When I was living in Dallas for a very short time back in the '80's I kept referring to the town of "Irving" as "Irvine". (For those of you not familiar with the areas, Irving is a small town about 1/2 way between Dallas and Fort Worth; Irvine is a small town in Orange County about 25 miles from Los Angeles.)
While you try to paint Bush and his administration as a group of thugs that simply disregard the constitution whenever it suits their needs
There's no "painting" here. This is exactly what they have done.
you're quite mistaken. Knowing Bush's character and his record, he hasn't done anything that his advisers and lawyers would deem "unconstitutional".
Oh, so that's why the courts have been regularly handing them their ass on a platter and telling them what they are doing is in violation. I see.
If Bush has a question about the legality of something, he's always asked Gonzales and his legal team to find an appropriate, legal way of accomplishing his goals.
And then go right ahead and do what they wanted to do anyway, just have their lawyers claim what they are doing is constitutional or the laws don't apply. For most of those whose rights are violated, they don't have the resources to sue and thus the administration gets away with it. For now, anyway.
So Xen isn't ready for "prime time" yet. Yawn. So what? It's a software kludge that gives low-end (read: "x86") servers a subset of the partitioning capabilities that IBM's Power processors have had for years.
They simply said they felt that it is not ready now and not that it wouldn't be ready. If you had read the article further, it would have noted Red Hat has been working with the software and wants to implement it in their next release. Red Hat tends for more stability over functionality. Novell is including Xen in Suse because customers who want inexpensive virtuality (if you're willing to pay for expensive virtuality you buy VMWare) are willing to put up with the headaches that the software is in its current state, and for a technically savvy customer giving them something over nothing is a whole lot better. These are different choices in how you offer your operating system to the customer, and both are valid strategies.
If you want mission-critical reliability, you should be running hardware that is mission-critical reliable. Hint: that ain't Intel.
Most commodity hardware is extremely reliable (compared with the dreadful reliability of software) and is comparable to most consumer equipment; when is the last time a TV set failed or exploded (other than the software in it getting into a bad spot and you're having to turn it off to reset it)? The days of demanding very expensive extremely mission-critical systems are over because we don't need absolute reliability in the specific hardware, we need it in the overall system. What you really need in a mission-critical system is dependable fallover/failover in the event of failure of any specific component. If a processor fails you need a method to move work to one that has not failed, and so on. Mission critical hardware provides expensive reliability through redundant hardware and hardware-based monitoring systems. If you can get that through use of inexpensive commodity components, and perhaps some less-expensive system to monitor them, then it doesn't matter that you've used less-reliable (cheaper) components as long as your system will do fallover to non-failing components correctly if a component fails.
Let me give an example. If you were doing transmission routing for an internet-based company, you could spend $60,000 to buy a Cisco router. Nice, reliable technology. Or you could do the same thing by installing 60 used computers that each one alone could handle the routing load and cost $100 apiece, plus $100 for a gigabit ethernet card. What are the chances that your $6,000 stack of 60 boxes will all fail, even though some of them might? Now, granted they'll use more electricity, but if they together cost an extra $180 a month in power and a/c costs, in five years it still will only cost you less than $10,000. Your network will do the fallover automatically if one of your 60 "switches" fails. Now, for those reading this adjust for whatever you would use, but I think the concepts are valid; lots of inexpensive "fallible" commodity equipment can do the job of much more expensive and more reliable technology, even in mission-critical environments, provided the failover/fallover capability works correctly.
There is just one problem with this scenario: you have to know what you're doing. You can only spend brainpower for money if you have the knowledge, experience and capacity to do this. Or are willing to learn.
My argument here applies to all embedded software devices (cell phones, microwave ovens, TV sets, routers, etc.) and not just to cell phones but the parent article here refers to cell phones so I'll use that as the example. My comments here would still appliy to any non-computing device (a specific purpose device which is usually not programmable by the user to perform computing tasks; an iPod is a classic example) that has embedded software. Also, where I refer to Linux I mean any "Open-Source"/"Software Libre" licensed operating system released under an OSI compliant license, which essentially means either BSD minus the "advertising clause" or GPL. The comments regarding release of source code to downstream users ("you must release too") would only apply to an operating system released under GPL as BSD does not include that requirement.
Most likely, the companies that are developing cell phones (and not using Linux as their underlying OS) are ones that have been in the market for many years and were doing so back when Linux was not available as a platform for this purpose. That means they bought into an expensive toolchain (operating system, compiler, debugging tools, source code editor, repository if any, system libraries, etc.) and have sunk costs as well as developer inertia to moving to a new platform. As long as they figure in the royalties (if any) as part of that cost they can decide whether staying with that platform makes sense. They may also feel that the requirement to include source code (which might give away what they consider proprietary information about the internals of their system which might give competitors an advantage) may not be appropriate and thus prefer a licensing system that does not require them to do so. This is why some companies pay for licenses from open-source developers in order to get the "you must relase too" requirement of the GPL to be waived.
In switching to another platform (like linux) they also have to figure in training costs (whether or not they are willing to spend money to train people which they then figure will run to another company) and the costs in lost productivity as programmers learn how to use the new toolchain and platform, and/or new APIs for programming the new operating system. Availability of ancillary tools can also be important (is there a PC-based emulator for their phone (or embedded device) available for Linux? There may be one available, included or previously developed with the toolchain they are using.) Any time you change technologies there is a learning curve unless the new and old systems are identical, and chances are they are not. If the new system is considerably better, then the learning curve could be small and there would be an increase in productivity. If it is not better, the learning curve could be steep and there can be a significant permanent decrease or even loss of productivity.
And to put it bluntly, until Eclipse came along, the toolchain for Linux basically sucked with the possible exception of Borland's Kylix, but since most software for Linux is C/C++ and not Pascal, (and quite potentially for very small embedded devices, assembly) that doesn't help much. Having been a programmer for over 20 years, and seeing the difference with tools like Visual Basic and Turbo Pascal for Windows/Delphi, let me tell you there is a big improvement in usability and in productivity over writing Fortran using punch cards on an IBM 370 equivalent mainframe (which tells you how far the technology has changed, at least during the period I've used computers, and the changes (and improvements) are coming even faster). Using text editors alone to develop software (unless you're developing for a text-only environment) to be used in a graphical interface environment is a big pain. Especially once you've experienced the difference. In fact, even if you are developing for a text-only environment, a number of the features of these Rapid Application Development systems can b
I'm not sure about the save issue. I doubt very much it's a technical issue.
It's not. There is no reason other than policy - the rules the game designer chooses - to prohibit a save at any time. Where a game does not allow saving it's because the designer/programmer has chosen to prohibit it. Being a programmer "I can say that I know this as a fact, a certainty beyond any shadow of a doubt whatsoever."
Being able to save all the time removes all death penalty, so there's no fear of failure.
Why should there be a death penalty? Why should there be a fear of failure? The whole point of playing a game is to be entertained. If you prefer to have the game be harder, that's you're choice. It should not be forced to be mine.
That can remove the sense of achievement in a game.
I doubt that reducing the difficulty in completing a game by allowing one to "checkpoint" the status of where they are in a game means that the game is any less a challenge in completing.
How boring would Resident Evil 4 be if you could save after killing every bad guy? It also makes the "Die, memorise level, win" method easier.
Which is the whole point. Everyone has different ways of playing games. If you want the game to be harder, don't use the extra save features. For some people it can mean the difference between being able to win and being frustrated in trying to play a game you want to use but can't. Some people use cheat codes continuously. Some know them but don't use them at all. Some will use them to get past a "rough spot" where it's otherwise just too hard. The more features or capabilities a program has the better the game is for everyone and the experience is improved. These capacities are just tools, people can use them or not use them, it's their choice. But we should have the choice.
I remember thinking about this playing Half Life. Initially I would only save between major encounters, but as I progressed I gradually started quick saving more and more often until I was doing it before every room.
I think that's an important point. Better save capability reduces the penalty of failure. A gane that you can't lose is probably not going to be interesting. A game you can't win is going to be painful. Better save capability can bridge the difference without necessarily meaning one can't ever lose.
Making overly complicated and basically unusable level editors.
If they're good enough to make the original game, which was so good you paid money for it, how are they unusable? Most of the level editors available are evolved versions of years old editors.
Just because they have been around for a long period of time does not mean they are good, it simply means that they've been around for a long time.
All games using the Unreal-engine have been done with UnrealEd. For engines related to Quakes and Doom3 you've got the QERadiant-family of editors, as well as the Worldcraft/Hammer-editors for early Quakes and Half-Lifes.
I've tried QERadiant. It sucks. Point being, all I want to do is create an area. The tools get in the way of this because they make the process too difficult. I can understand needing a lot of key controls and such to use the editor; I have to use the instruction sheet all the time to use the editor for Duke Nukem 3D because there are too many features and when it was written games ran mostly in DOS. That's reasonable. But I have found the QERadiant editor to be too difficult to use.
So there you have 3 sets of editors, not very different from their early versions.
And they all probably suck, since all of the ones I have seen for this genre do so.
Hardly ad-hoc.
Do they work the same as all the prior editors (with the exception of new features for enhanced capability)? Creating points, lines, closed regions and sectors should be easy to do. I could do them easily enough in DEU (the 3rd-party editor for DOOM). I can do them quite well in BUILD (the included editor for DUKE Nukem 3d), but when I try to use QERadiant, or other three-screen vector and line-drawing tools, I can't get anything accomplished. I may look into them again, but basically they are extremely hard to use.
They cover most of the FPS market. If a teenage geek can figure out how to follow a tutorial on a web page about how to make 2 rooms and a player spawn, why can't you?
That's right, blame the victim. There will be someone who can use a tool, or at least the designer can. Other people may not. It is this sort of arrogance that explains why ordinary people do not understand why people would want to use Linux in view of the problems of usability. And that's what this whole argument boils down to. I am a programmer with 25 years of experience, going back to using punch cards. I know how to program. I know how to use programs, and how to use GUI applications. I have found earlier editing tools for game maps to be usable. I find the QERadiant editing tool to be too complicated and difficult to use. That other people do not have a problem is not relevant. And I don't think I'm alone in this.
I have seen bad programs written in almost every language. And good programs written in some of the badly-slammed languages. It's the skill of the programmer that determines how good the application is. Badly designed (programming) languages can make it harder to do good work, but really good people can still do at least decent work in limited capability systems. And going further than that, well-designed problem definition systems can give even low-skilled people the chance to do considerably better. (Look what spreadsheets have done for ordinary people.)
This is the point that needs to be made: really good tools can give people better capability to do more, but they give the really good people the ability to shine! But, as someone said, "A decent surgeon, given good tools, can do reasonably well, but a great surgeon can do good work even if all he has is the sharpened lid of a tin can."
I have normal hearing but I use closed captioning on TV quite a bit. In noisy environments it can help. Bars have discovered that closed captioning is extremely useful when carrying a sports program because you can't hear the commentary.
In many films there is background dialog or additional statements that may not be audible. The caption writer works from the script so they can type in whatever is said and it can add important and subtle details which might otherwise be missed.
About the only thing I find distressing in closed captions is the common misspelling, errors and omissions occurring on pre-recorded closed-captioned programs. I can understand errors in live programs, there is no time for correction when typing in real-time. But commercials, recorded programs and movies often have misspellings, errors, and worse, sync problems where the caption trails the dialog, sometimes by as much as 1/2 a minute, or sometimes leaves whole segments of dialog uncaptioned. My brother also notices that sometimes the captioning does not match the dialog, such as the spoken dialog "What are you going to do about it?" "Don't worry about me; you should be more concerned about you" being captioned as "What will you do?" "You should worry about yourself." but I think that's often minor, usually to shorten the caption and as long as it gets the gist of the dialog that's not a big issue.
I hadn't thought of closed captioning for games but now that someone mentions it I think it is a good idea. And criticizing someone for using it is insolent arrogance. If you put a feature in the game you should not insult the user for taking advantage of it, especially in the case of the Parent poster to this thread, who couldn't understand the game if the subtitles weren't there in the first place.
I have noticed for a lot of games a problem which I refer to as "coin-op crapola," stunts that should have ended when the user paid for the game all at once, and should have been dropped when they no longer had to keep making the game too hard in order to get you to drop more quarters in the video game. These include, but are not limited to:
Making it impossible to save except at limited points. It's inexcusable to not allow someone to save state at (almost) any time. I'll grant that it may be impossible due to too many temporary variables or state saving requirements) to allow save state in the middle of a mission or a scenario (such as with Grand Theft Auto III, but even then I'm still suspicious) but other than that, it's inexcusable misconduct amounting to negligence to say that I have to find a save icon or save location in order to save what I'm doing.
Making the game so difficult it's unplayable. We are not all hard-core gamers, making the game so hard that it's unplayable or unwinnable is ridiculous. I have Quake III arena. I can't play more than one or two levels because the AI on the game, at the weakest and least difficult level, is impossible to beat. This also means the rest of the game is inaccessible because until I win the levels I can't win, I can't play anything further. Which brings me to...
Having locked levels, or locked features. I'm paying for the damned game, let me decide if I want to play other levels or other features. If it's that significant, put it in as a "cheat mode" but let me decide; I'm the one paying for the game, not you.
Making "cheat mode" contaminate the game. If I want to unlock something early I should be able to do so, without causing it to make the game reduce functionality or become unworkable. The so-called "cheat mode" simply either disables some policy of the game, or adds features early; there is no reason - other than pure spite - to have it cause other features to degrade or fail.
Making overly complicated and basically unusable level editors. Level editors have increased in complexity with the increase in complexity of these games to the point that you can't use them. I have never been able to figure out how to use the editor for Half-Life, or Quake III Arena, or any of these. You look at the simplicity of the editor for Duke Nukem, which includes a 2D and 3D mode, and while it has a lot of options and key controls, you can still use it. These 3D wireframe editor tools are basically unusable. For most purposes, I simply want to carve out a space such as a room, a corridor or other such, and perhaps connect them. Later I may want to do some special features. Why is it so hard to make it possible to get the job done? Game editor tools are not important, nobody bothers to standardize so they're ad-hoc and recreated from scratch for every new game, and it shows in the results, with overly complicated and extremely user-hostile tools that are basically unusual for someone who simply wants to do what they have to do. Look at the object builder tools in the on-line game Second Life. They have to have easy to use tools, most people developing objects for such a game are not hard-core gamers willing to put up with crapola.
Having done programming professionally for over 25 years (including game programming), I am aware of what it takes to write programs or to develop them. And nothing I have said is excessively hard to implement, or in most cases, even necessary. But it still continues over and over and over and...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that using credit for consumption is a bad idea. But using credit to finance income-producing items is an excellent idea.
If you ever decide to go into business or be anything other than a wage-slave, you will eventually need credit to do so, if for no other reason that there may come a time when a really nice opportunity comes up that if you can raise short-term financing you can make money on it.Let's say there's a guy down the street that you've known as a friend for ten years. He's got temporary emergency money problems, and if you can buy your way out of them for him, he's got a coin collection worth about $100,000 that he'll sell you for $10,000. But he needs the money in two days. And you know you can sell it, but it will take about three weeks. If you can borrow $10,000, you can make a quick profit of $90,000 and help out a friend in trouble. Or maybe he just asks you to loan him the $10,000, with the coin collection as security, and he'll pay you $1,000 instead of paying considerably more to a pawn broker. This is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that having access to credit, even if you don't use it, that can mean the difference between seeing a good opportunity or watching it pass you by.
That's exactly the point. It's a game. It's not a system; you can't beat a system but you can win a game. Most people are playing this game and don't know the rules. Learn what the rules are, and new ways to play the game, and you can win big. With the payment of interest on savings near zero, saving up makes no sense. Better to spend your money on finding ways to produce income. Credit is just a tool; use it right and you can do amazing things. Use it wrong and you're in trouble. Use a power tool right and you can build beautiful furniture. Use it wrong and you can lose fingers. Let me ask you this, which would be a whole lot better to have: $5,000 cash in the bank and no debt and no credit, or $10 in the bank, no debt and an untouched $500,000 line of credit that you can access immediately by check or credit card, and no interest if you pay back whatever you borrow within 29 days? With which of these would you have more capacity to do things?Scenario 1: Let's say you're working somewhere and don't have health coverage. You don't make a lot of money, and you can't afford to buy health insurance. You get laid off or fired and can't pay it any longer if you had it. And you get sick, or you have an accident. Or let's say you have health insurance, but there are gaps. Or you have a pre-existing condition and it's not covered by your health insurance. Let's say you are fixing something and drop a tool, and it cuts you. Or you get hit in the crosswalk by a guy who has no insurance and is judgement proof. Or you're attacked by a mentally ill homeless person. Or some emergency happens. So you go to the emergency room - federal law mandates they must treat you even if you can't pay, or they can't be reimbursed by Medicare - and fortunately the injury is minor and you won't suffer permanent damage or disability. Now, you're okay, but you can't pay the bill, which will probably run a minimum of $600 from the hospital, plus perhaps another $200 for the E.R. doctor's bill. Maybe a few incidental items bring the total bill to about a thousand bucks. Maybe you qualify for the hospital to pay some or all your bill from their fund for the uninsured - some have donation plans where people give money for this purpose - but you have to know about it and ask about it. If you don't, they're not going to tell you it's available.
Guess what, when you can't pay, they're going to report you! Now, not only do you have bad credit, a place that looks at your credit before hiring you isn't going to hire you because you have unpaid bills! Now you're unemployed, and can't get work because you're not employable because of your bad credit history! Watch from there as things get worse as you can't pay your bills and have even worse problems. And forget about asking to have a comment inserted into your record, it won't make any difference, creditors and the people who get these reports will no doubt score these things electronically so that the computer will scan them, a person won't, thus, nobody is going to see it and they won't hear your side.
Scenario 2: Consider this: you're late on one $20 payment on your Sears credit card, and it could cause some company to refuse you a loan to purchase a house, because your credit isn't "pristine." This actually happened in the case of one man who had been seeing Europe for a few months, came back and went to buy a truck after he totalled his car, and needed to finance it because the insurance settlement was for the depreciated value and he couldn't pay cash for the remainder. Seems he left money with someone to pay his bills while he was overseas, such as the utilities and such while he was out of the country, and instead of paying his bills they spent the money. Even if he can get the money back it's irrelevant; he's still got some issues on his credit report. Even if he pays the creditors back, with interest, he's still going to have a bad mark on his credit for several months until the reports clear.
Scenario 3: A nice old lady, next door to me, put me on her credit card as an authorized user with a card with my name on it back a few years ago so I could rent a car when she wanted to go on vacation and needed someone to drive her around (she doesn't have a license, and I didn't have a regular credit card (most car rental companies won't take a check card or other debit card even if you have enough money). I forgot about it otherwise. She died. She owed the credit card company money, about $20,000. They put a black mark on my credit report even though I'm only an authorized user; I'm not responsible for the bill. While I sor
----
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
----I don't know about you, but $1 per megabyte per month is not cheap; that's $1,000 (or $1024 if they consider a gigabyte 1,000 meg) per GB, PER MONTH, and is more than the cost of storing on Floppy Disk!
Presumably you mean $1 per GB per month, which is $12 per MB per year. Right now, 500 MB hard drives retail - that's retail mind you, not wholesale - for around $350. That puts the retail cost of drives at less than $1 per megabyte. Now, presume that you need eight drives to provide quad raid reliability, and eight separate machines cost as much as the drives, plus about $1000 a month in electricity, plus, $2000 a month for the internet connection and co-location charges, so to provide, say twenty terabytes of space, 350*400 (350*5*80)+ (24000*3) (Drives have about a 3-year warranty), means to provide 20TB of space over 3 years means it will cost the provider about $5 per GB over 3 years, to which they will charge $36. Nice work if you can get it.
Recommendation 1
Buy a 500gb drive (or whatever size you think you need) for $350. Buy an external USB hard drive case for about $40. For $390 you now have a 500gb backup drive that you can now just use drag and drop to copy files to or from.
Recommendation 2
Buy a second (used) computer or use a spare if you have one, and have it simply act as a file server, and have it grab new files off other machines on your network. Or set the new machine up with Linux, and install Amanda, an open-source backup utility and have it automatically backup new files.
Never, ever use your provider's address for your website and (especially) NEVER use your provider's domain name for your e-mail if it's of any importance. Look at my e-mail address for a moment, and you get the idea. When you have your own domain name, if your provider terminates you, or you leave, or you want to leave (better service, more features and/or lower price), you simply change the termination point for your service to someone else. In fact, it's not a bad idea to have your DNS service with someone other than your hosting in case you have problems or your hosting becomes overloaded (like being Slashdotted, for example) and you get locked for excessive bandwidth, you can change to someone else fairly quickly if you need to, but you might not be able to do that in a hurry if your DNS provider and your hosting provider are the same. (Especially if you can't get into your provider's control panel because they're overloaded.)
With domain names around $9 a year, there's no excuse using your provider's domain name unless you're so broke you can't afford it. Which I have been, on occasion.
Now, for that, you can often get a geographic-based domain for free (at least, in the .US you can). I established the domain "paul.washington.dc.us" which cost nothing, and ran it under a provider that allowed free hosting if you carried a banner ad, so for more than five years I had my own domain name and e-mail under that domain for free. I still have it, too, going on eight years now.
Being someone people can work with is often be more important than technical merit no matter how good you are (unless you're a prima donna, in which case they know that and they take that into account, and that's a whole other issue).
Fortran doesn't have them either.
Basic doesn't have them either.
And come to think of it, since Java doesn't have pointers, it would stand to reason it can't have linked lists either.
Now, there may be variations on these languages with some dialects that have added pointers so some of these may have changed.Now maybe your average person doesn't know all these facts, but they probably saw the film as mostly pointless and stayed away in droves because the advertising let them know how bad the movie is.
Any one care to take bets on how long before the MPAA tries to claim lackluster ticket sales / DVD rentals/sales is the result of rampant filesharing as opposed to people simply not seeing a really lousy film? :)
In a PDF of a motion filing, Google is requesting over $11,000 in attorneys fees from Gordon Roy Parker, also known as Ray Gordon, a Philadelphia alleged self-publisher of books, after his claims in a federal lawsuit (prior slashdot article here) arguing Google's indexing of web pages violated his copyright (among other claims), were determined to be totally lacking even the slightest scintilla of merit whatsoever. The points made in Google's brief may be helpful in this case. As Google's brief says, "A party is improperly motivated if he does not have a good faith intent to protect a valid copyright interest... or if his intent was to 'vex and harass the defendant.'" Google's argument here seems to fit very closely with the improper suits RIAA has filed or threatened to file unless paid off, against people who were totally innocent, and give further reasons to argue for award of attorneys fees to the defendant when they successfully defend a bogus copyright infringement charge.
They simply said they felt that it is not ready now and not that it wouldn't be ready. If you had read the article further, it would have noted Red Hat has been working with the software and wants to implement it in their next release. Red Hat tends for more stability over functionality. Novell is including Xen in Suse because customers who want inexpensive virtuality (if you're willing to pay for expensive virtuality you buy VMWare) are willing to put up with the headaches that the software is in its current state, and for a technically savvy customer giving them something over nothing is a whole lot better. These are different choices in how you offer your operating system to the customer, and both are valid strategies.
Most commodity hardware is extremely reliable (compared with the dreadful reliability of software) and is comparable to most consumer equipment; when is the last time a TV set failed or exploded (other than the software in it getting into a bad spot and you're having to turn it off to reset it)? The days of demanding very expensive extremely mission-critical systems are over because we don't need absolute reliability in the specific hardware, we need it in the overall system. What you really need in a mission-critical system is dependable fallover/failover in the event of failure of any specific component. If a processor fails you need a method to move work to one that has not failed, and so on. Mission critical hardware provides expensive reliability through redundant hardware and hardware-based monitoring systems. If you can get that through use of inexpensive commodity components, and perhaps some less-expensive system to monitor them, then it doesn't matter that you've used less-reliable (cheaper) components as long as your system will do fallover to non-failing components correctly if a component fails.
Let me give an example. If you were doing transmission routing for an internet-based company, you could spend $60,000 to buy a Cisco router. Nice, reliable technology. Or you could do the same thing by installing 60 used computers that each one alone could handle the routing load and cost $100 apiece, plus $100 for a gigabit ethernet card. What are the chances that your $6,000 stack of 60 boxes will all fail, even though some of them might? Now, granted they'll use more electricity, but if they together cost an extra $180 a month in power and a/c costs, in five years it still will only cost you less than $10,000. Your network will do the fallover automatically if one of your 60 "switches" fails. Now, for those reading this adjust for whatever you would use, but I think the concepts are valid; lots of inexpensive "fallible" commodity equipment can do the job of much more expensive and more reliable technology, even in mission-critical environments, provided the failover/fallover capability works correctly.
There is just one problem with this scenario: you have to know what you're doing. You can only spend brainpower for money if you have the knowledge, experience and capacity to do this. Or are willing to learn.
Most likely, the companies that are developing cell phones (and not using Linux as their underlying OS) are ones that have been in the market for many years and were doing so back when Linux was not available as a platform for this purpose. That means they bought into an expensive toolchain (operating system, compiler, debugging tools, source code editor, repository if any, system libraries, etc.) and have sunk costs as well as developer inertia to moving to a new platform. As long as they figure in the royalties (if any) as part of that cost they can decide whether staying with that platform makes sense. They may also feel that the requirement to include source code (which might give away what they consider proprietary information about the internals of their system which might give competitors an advantage) may not be appropriate and thus prefer a licensing system that does not require them to do so. This is why some companies pay for licenses from open-source developers in order to get the "you must relase too" requirement of the GPL to be waived.
In switching to another platform (like linux) they also have to figure in training costs (whether or not they are willing to spend money to train people which they then figure will run to another company) and the costs in lost productivity as programmers learn how to use the new toolchain and platform, and/or new APIs for programming the new operating system. Availability of ancillary tools can also be important (is there a PC-based emulator for their phone (or embedded device) available for Linux? There may be one available, included or previously developed with the toolchain they are using.) Any time you change technologies there is a learning curve unless the new and old systems are identical, and chances are they are not. If the new system is considerably better, then the learning curve could be small and there would be an increase in productivity. If it is not better, the learning curve could be steep and there can be a significant permanent decrease or even loss of productivity.
And to put it bluntly, until Eclipse came along, the toolchain for Linux basically sucked with the possible exception of Borland's Kylix, but since most software for Linux is C/C++ and not Pascal, (and quite potentially for very small embedded devices, assembly) that doesn't help much. Having been a programmer for over 20 years, and seeing the difference with tools like Visual Basic and Turbo Pascal for Windows/Delphi, let me tell you there is a big improvement in usability and in productivity over writing Fortran using punch cards on an IBM 370 equivalent mainframe (which tells you how far the technology has changed, at least during the period I've used computers, and the changes (and improvements) are coming even faster). Using text editors alone to develop software (unless you're developing for a text-only environment) to be used in a graphical interface environment is a big pain. Especially once you've experienced the difference. In fact, even if you are developing for a text-only environment, a number of the features of these Rapid Application Development systems can b
Hear, hear!
I have seen bad programs written in almost every language. And good programs written in some of the badly-slammed languages. It's the skill of the programmer that determines how good the application is. Badly designed (programming) languages can make it harder to do good work, but really good people can still do at least decent work in limited capability systems. And going further than that, well-designed problem definition systems can give even low-skilled people the chance to do considerably better. (Look what spreadsheets have done for ordinary people.)
This is the point that needs to be made: really good tools can give people better capability to do more, but they give the really good people the ability to shine! But, as someone said, "A decent surgeon, given good tools, can do reasonably well, but a great surgeon can do good work even if all he has is the sharpened lid of a tin can."
I have normal hearing but I use closed captioning on TV quite a bit. In noisy environments it can help. Bars have discovered that closed captioning is extremely useful when carrying a sports program because you can't hear the commentary.
In many films there is background dialog or additional statements that may not be audible. The caption writer works from the script so they can type in whatever is said and it can add important and subtle details which might otherwise be missed.
About the only thing I find distressing in closed captions is the common misspelling, errors and omissions occurring on pre-recorded closed-captioned programs. I can understand errors in live programs, there is no time for correction when typing in real-time. But commercials, recorded programs and movies often have misspellings, errors, and worse, sync problems where the caption trails the dialog, sometimes by as much as 1/2 a minute, or sometimes leaves whole segments of dialog uncaptioned. My brother also notices that sometimes the captioning does not match the dialog, such as the spoken dialog "What are you going to do about it?" "Don't worry about me; you should be more concerned about you" being captioned as "What will you do?" "You should worry about yourself." but I think that's often minor, usually to shorten the caption and as long as it gets the gist of the dialog that's not a big issue.
I hadn't thought of closed captioning for games but now that someone mentions it I think it is a good idea. And criticizing someone for using it is insolent arrogance. If you put a feature in the game you should not insult the user for taking advantage of it, especially in the case of the Parent poster to this thread, who couldn't understand the game if the subtitles weren't there in the first place.
I have noticed for a lot of games a problem which I refer to as "coin-op crapola," stunts that should have ended when the user paid for the game all at once, and should have been dropped when they no longer had to keep making the game too hard in order to get you to drop more quarters in the video game. These include, but are not limited to:
Having done programming professionally for over 25 years (including game programming), I am aware of what it takes to write programs or to develop them. And nothing I have said is excessively hard to implement, or in most cases, even necessary. But it still continues over and over and over and...
Paul Robinson <paul@paul-robinson.us>