I think the people who were killed recently by an American pilot trying to outsmart his plane so it crashed into a house would have to agree: We should know whether we're relying on a calm, reasoned, computer, or a "battle-tested" pilot who can't think straight.
I don't know which coworker that was, but I'll go so far as to say, non-anonymously, that this matches what I've been told. So I can say, yeah, that's what they tell us.
Do we believe them? I do provisionally -- my experience with management over the last couple of years has been such that I am inclined to trust that this is what was represented to them, and that they wouldn't have agreed to the deal if they didn't feel they had genuine reason to believe it.
What we've been told so far (and this was stated in press releases, so I can repeat it) is that we will continue to support all the architectures we currently target.
(/me is the guy who does compiler bundling for wrlinux across several architectures.)
Acclaim and Sega had a lawsuit over Acclaim doing something to make games work on Sega's hardware, which resulted in the display of a Sega logo. The court in that case concluded that it was Sega's fault for making it impossible to interoperate any other way.
There is actually a fairly well-defined formal boundary between "cult" in the technical sense and "religions". Some cults are religious, some aren't.
But bluntly, none of the others can really compete on Scientology's home turf of criminal action. I have griped at some length to Catholic friends about things the Catholic church does that I don't approve of. They have not poisoned my pets, and I haven't died under mysterious circumstances that a Scientologist-linked police force decided were "natural causes". (Such as a self-inflicted gunshot wound with no powder burns.) So that's a pretty big difference.
Sounds like me, complete with the multiple tasks. I'm working right this minute, I'm just between time slices.
I'm on methylphenidate, and yeah, I take it most weekdays, skip on weekends or weekdays when I'm tired anyway, and don't build up much of a tolerance, so it stays useful.
I use eglibc, and I like it better. For instance, when I was a bit distressed to discover that glibc shipped with scripts which require bash or ksh (not a good fit for a TINY embedded system), I went and looked. The dependencies there could be EASILY removed with no significant harm done -- and the scripts would work. One of them took me all of twenty minutes to clean up to make it functional with any POSIX shell.
This isn't rocket science. It also isn't software engineering. I was first disappointed with glibc's performance somewhere around 1996, and it's never really won me over since. eglibc seems to me to be a much nicer approach.
(Full disclosure: I think $dayjob funds some eglibc development, and we certainly use it.)
A friend of mine has a Verizon card. Latency's pretty bad (comparable to dialup), and the software is sorta crappy -- it doesn't lose signal, so much as the USB device suddenly unprobes and reconnects, always defaulting to the wrong network setup.
TigerDirect are spammers and they're not real ethical. No surprise there.
My newegg experiences have been ALMOST uniformly good. Two issues:
1. When I bought an MSI video card through NewEgg, MSI screwed me on the rebate -- and then went around signing me up for spam when I complained. (Yes, I have proof that MSI signed me up for spam -- IP addresses and timestamps and everything.) NewEgg offered me a $25 credit on a future order but never applied it. (I don't actually care that much, I figure it just fell through the cracks.) 2. I ordered an LCD display from them, two-day shipping and all that. A week later, they still could not tell me even whether or not it was in stock, or when they might know whether or not it was in stock. They eventually cancelled it. I would have been MUCH happier with being told sooner; I had specifically wanted it to be there by Friday, and I ended up waiting another full week and change before getting the display. (Got it from one of the photo discounters, since it's a high-end NEC. No problems except for one cyan pixel that showed up a month or so after I got it.)
What value they're adding to the "news" is that if we kill off everyone who did actual investigative reporting, the "news" will be back to the WWW's original list of links to other lists of links none of which ever lead to pages containing information.
You know, the reason all the anti-spam folks have been saying not to do this for the last decade or so is that it is an experiment which has been tried with careful controls repeatedly, and consistently produced the same results.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean silence; I work better with music than without.
But it has to be *my* music.
Apart from that... Large display helps, clear display is essential, good keyboard, good connectivity to wherever the code is. Reference material handy.
Release dates are useful -- if you don't have them, people freak out because they can't find the game, but someone else got it, or whatever.
So there is a purpose to them, and the only way to ensure that everyone can sell the game Tuesday is to aim to ship it to them all by Thursday of the previous week or so. (As in, it should have reached nearly everyone on Thursday. Some stores will need a day or two to ship it from a central office to retail outlets, it has to be unpacked, and so on.)
If I can actually get official PDFs for all the books when I buy them, yes, I'll buy all the books. I find PDFs very useful for looking things up, bookmarking, and so on.
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I think the people who were killed recently by an American pilot trying to outsmart his plane so it crashed into a house would have to agree: We should know whether we're relying on a calm, reasoned, computer, or a "battle-tested" pilot who can't think straight.
Sheesh.
I don't know which coworker that was, but I'll go so far as to say, non-anonymously, that this matches what I've been told. So I can say, yeah, that's what they tell us.
Do we believe them? I do provisionally -- my experience with management over the last couple of years has been such that I am inclined to trust that this is what was represented to them, and that they wouldn't have agreed to the deal if they didn't feel they had genuine reason to believe it.
What we've been told so far (and this was stated in press releases, so I can repeat it) is that we will continue to support all the architectures we currently target.
(/me is the guy who does compiler bundling for wrlinux across several architectures.)
In practice, I doubt there's a single instance of someone doing this who isn't committing copyright violations.
Acclaim and Sega had a lawsuit over Acclaim doing something to make games work on Sega's hardware, which resulted in the display of a Sega logo. The court in that case concluded that it was Sega's fault for making it impossible to interoperate any other way.
The Wikipedia experiment always allowed for taking more thorough action against malicious actors. Nothing's failing; it's working as designed.
There is actually a fairly well-defined formal boundary between "cult" in the technical sense and "religions". Some cults are religious, some aren't.
But bluntly, none of the others can really compete on Scientology's home turf of criminal action. I have griped at some length to Catholic friends about things the Catholic church does that I don't approve of. They have not poisoned my pets, and I haven't died under mysterious circumstances that a Scientologist-linked police force decided were "natural causes". (Such as a self-inflicted gunshot wound with no powder burns.) So that's a pretty big difference.
I guess the whole "child slavery" thing hasn't been working out so well lately.
Sounds like me, complete with the multiple tasks. I'm working right this minute, I'm just between time slices.
I'm on methylphenidate, and yeah, I take it most weekdays, skip on weekends or weekdays when I'm tired anyway, and don't build up much of a tolerance, so it stays useful.
I use eglibc, and I like it better. For instance, when I was a bit distressed to discover that glibc shipped with scripts which require bash or ksh (not a good fit for a TINY embedded system), I went and looked. The dependencies there could be EASILY removed with no significant harm done -- and the scripts would work. One of them took me all of twenty minutes to clean up to make it functional with any POSIX shell.
This isn't rocket science. It also isn't software engineering. I was first disappointed with glibc's performance somewhere around 1996, and it's never really won me over since. eglibc seems to me to be a much nicer approach.
(Full disclosure: I think $dayjob funds some eglibc development, and we certainly use it.)
A friend of mine has a Verizon card. Latency's pretty bad (comparable to dialup), and the software is sorta crappy -- it doesn't lose signal, so much as the USB device suddenly unprobes and reconnects, always defaulting to the wrong network setup.
TigerDirect are spammers and they're not real ethical. No surprise there.
My newegg experiences have been ALMOST uniformly good. Two issues:
1. When I bought an MSI video card through NewEgg, MSI screwed me on the rebate -- and then went around signing me up for spam when I complained. (Yes, I have proof that MSI signed me up for spam -- IP addresses and timestamps and everything.) NewEgg offered me a $25 credit on a future order but never applied it. (I don't actually care that much, I figure it just fell through the cracks.)
2. I ordered an LCD display from them, two-day shipping and all that. A week later, they still could not tell me even whether or not it was in stock, or when they might know whether or not it was in stock. They eventually cancelled it. I would have been MUCH happier with being told sooner; I had specifically wanted it to be there by Friday, and I ended up waiting another full week and change before getting the display. (Got it from one of the photo discounters, since it's a high-end NEC. No problems except for one cyan pixel that showed up a month or so after I got it.)
What value they're adding to the "news" is that if we kill off everyone who did actual investigative reporting, the "news" will be back to the WWW's original list of links to other lists of links none of which ever lead to pages containing information.
You know, the reason all the anti-spam folks have been saying not to do this for the last decade or so is that it is an experiment which has been tried with careful controls repeatedly, and consistently produced the same results.
In short, duh.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean silence; I work better with music than without.
But it has to be *my* music.
Apart from that... Large display helps, clear display is essential, good keyboard, good connectivity to wherever the code is. Reference material handy.
Release dates are useful -- if you don't have them, people freak out because they can't find the game, but someone else got it, or whatever.
So there is a purpose to them, and the only way to ensure that everyone can sell the game Tuesday is to aim to ship it to them all by Thursday of the previous week or so. (As in, it should have reached nearly everyone on Thursday. Some stores will need a day or two to ship it from a central office to retail outlets, it has to be unpacked, and so on.)
You're right, people shouldn't make games that are too expensive to develop as a hobby, we should just live with Solitaire.
I wackyparsed that as "I wouldn't take advice on good paste from them", and I wondered why, since presumably they eat a lot of it?
That only works if the necessities are free.
If music is free, and food isn't, it's hard to get food if you make music.
Amazon are habitual liars. Why would you believe anything they say that you can't verify independently?
Agreed, I'm a big fan of Powell's. Also, they've never spammed me.
Why not just use a Vista box and play an MP3?
If I can actually get official PDFs for all the books when I buy them, yes, I'll buy all the books. I find PDFs very useful for looking things up, bookmarking, and so on.
Price of an Eee 1000H at Best Buy with XP on it: $329
Price of an Eee 1000 (different model) with Linux: $499
The Linux model is in some ways arguably better, but the one "with Windows" is what I could get cheaply and quickly... And it runs Ubuntu.
I got a Motorola somethingorother a year ago with $19.99/month data which is either unlimited or enough that I've never hit the limit.