Mostly. But if you found a really, really nasty security bug, does Apache go "OMG we must fix this" and release a vulnerability alert and a new point release even though it's been two years, or do they say that "that one's out of any kind of support, even extended security-only support, go upgrade because we won't even look at it". That is an important cutoff, even though nothing much happens with any product 3+ years after its release.
Welcome to getting older. I can't believe how easy I was to entertain when I was a teen, plus then I didn't really know the meaning of "work". It was all either fun or learning, even the grinding was just a little interlude. And every generation talks about something, like how say vinyl had more soul than CDs, or the people in costumes had more soul than CGI, and how real world makebelieve had more soul than virtual makebelieve and so on.
Each one of these megagames probably used far more skill and time on a professional writer than the computer geek who part-time doubled as gfx artist, sfx artist, composer and sometimes writer on your garage setup obscure game. I can at least say that with most old games I can have kind memories but if I start playing then many of them I get fed up because it's so simple and boring to a mind that's had another ten years of experience at figuring stuff out.
Get your own name. You can go fairly far in cloning gameplay - think how much one FPS or TBS or RTS or RPG looks like the other, but don't steal unique units, characters and storylines. And while I don't approve of astroturfing where you pretend to be a customer, you can generated buzz about it. Go into every forum you can find about the old game, say this game is inspired of it. Right now I'm playing Dragon Age, and boy are there many old chestnuts of dwarves and elves and warriors and rouges and mages and the whole storyline about a blight and an archdemon are hardly original. Go for the one-up, "if you liked [old game], you'll love [new game]". Right now you come of sounding like one of the cheap watch salesmen "same same but different".
The people who want to live on Big Brother, but aren't trashy enough to get in on the show, feel free. And that's what this dude sees, he sees everything people do share. Hint: Lots and lots of people do lots and lots of things they don't put on Facebook. I'm on it, it's basically a contact page, I answer some event invites and that's pretty much it. send me another lame game invite and I'll gladly ignore it. My real life is far, far away from Facebook.
If they can do 12 hours on a laptop that, presumably, has a fast CPU & stuff - how long could they go on a laptop with a modest CPU ?
In practice it depends on how big a battery is reasonable to carry around, it scales very linearly with that. The question is, does anyone regularly need a 30h laptop? Or is there those that need a day's charge (for the hours they use it, not necessarily wall time) and those who are really off the grid for weeks and need a different solution anyway? I would tend to think so, there's not many today who has a "base" without electricity. Maybe there's a weekend market, but if you're spending the entire weekend in front of it you might as well stay at home...
Well, I just did a quick and dirty check on laptop prices, dividing at 7000 NOK which works out to about 1000$ without the VAT.
199 laptop models below that price 149 laptop models above that price
It's above average but it's not really high-end, but it's tight around there... past 1200$ and there's a much fewer left. Of course, I don't have any volume figures, so this may be wildly inaccurate. Doesn't matter how many models there are if the 500$ laptops outsell them 10:1.
With all due respect, there's a huge difference between distribution and aggregation. Even in the "good old days" of IRC they were trying to build huge networks of servers which would be your one place to network with all your (geeky) friends. Everybody was very busy trying to avoid duplication of long-distance transfers because despite even though it looked like one Internet then doing "long distnace" was expensive for the ISPs. They'd probably be more spinning in their graves (though they're probably not old enough for that yet, oh how time flies) over the extremely wasteful torrent protocol where we pull data all around the world over tons of hubs and down and back up last-mile connections just to do tit for tat swapping. Being able to pull off one world-wide system would be more of a dream.
...just like everything else you do in an application process. Duh.
Everything about you should confer a sense of professionalism and competence. How you dress rarely has any direct impact on your performance, but if you dress lame for the interview then it shows you either don't know how or don't care. Same if your application uses language that is informative but too casual for a formal written application and so on.
Those kind of points can really only work one way, against you. They're not buying the suit, they're buying the man in the suit and it'll never land you the job. It's just seeing whether you'll rub people the wrong way, be it customers, coworkers, managers or whoever else you have to relate to. You are going to work with many people you wouldn't hang out with, after all.
Same as saying pi = 3.141 and g = 9.81 ms^-2 at sea level on Earth. Those are imprecise but "close enough" approximations of natural constants
Since we're well into scientific nitpicks already, pi is a natural constant but g = 9.81 ms^2 is definitely not, there's no one true value to approximate because it varies slightly over the earth and earth isn't completely spherical and earth's rotation also has a marginal effect. Were you perhaps thinking of the gravitational constant?
Rather than post completely uninformed comments on the subject, leave that to people in the field.
Awwww, don't we get to do anything? We have such expertize in giving completely uninformed comments, who else has such refined skill at not RTFA, probably not even the summary and yet comment as if it was the topic of our PhD thesis in a field we know nothing about? That sort of thing only comes through years of practice and non-studying. No I think we'll leave them to do the informed comments, for the truly abhorrent comments devoid of all facts, correctness and sanity they should leave it to professionals.
Well, if we're already speculating you may also speculate if you are seeing a biased sample of the student population. At least many of the technically minded students I knew would see no need for a Netflix subscription...
There are really only two codecs to speak of IMO, MPEG2 (MiniDV, HDV) and H.264 (AVCHD) in and MPEG2 (DVD) and H.264 (online or BluRay) out. However, neither of these codecs are trivial to edit in their most effective form and there's a lot of optional encoding methods to cover it all.
For example MiniDV is quite easy because it got rather "dumb" frames, but both HDV and AVCHD use IPB encoding which is really nasty to edit. You can't just cut the video stream at random points, you may need frames both before and after the cut point to decode it. You can't jump to a random frame, you must find the nearest I-frame and work your way from there. That creates a lot of complexity where you must keep a whole different set of indexes than the one the user sees to get frame-accurate editing and a lot of decode logic to get only the intended frames while discarding the extras and so on.
Pro editing tools DO have this mostly sorted out, if you're trying for the "no tool is perfect, therefore the OSS tools are as good as the commercial tools" argument then it's failing. It's not that many combinations that are really useful, it's that the few most important ones are really, really hard to do right. The decoding libs have this straight, I never have a problem playing back MPEG2 or H.264. But there sure is a problem editing them.
I'd be happy to see them outdo iMovie in the first place. My last experience trying to edit movies in Linux was.... unpleasant to say the least, and I wasn't looking to do anything that fancy. Granted, it was HDV footage (but still MPEG2 from what I understand) so not completely mainstream but it'd constantly crash doing simple stuff like splitting up clips and rearranging them with simple crossover effects, or just refuse to recognize it at all and whatnot. I don't remember all the apps I tried but it was the 3-4 most popular ones. I was thinking about getting a new AVCHD camera but can't really imagine that being any better.
Yep. So, what are you going to do? Sue them? Get in line and there won't be anything left for you anyway. Usually I feel sorry for customers abandoned by a bankrupcy but in the case of Psystar I'd say this is more #suckerfail than anything. Anyone with the sligbtest clue about IP law would know that Psystar, right or wrong, would be slapped to hell over this. And probably being in the wrong, too.
Um....there's over 70 committers to PostgreSQL. And even the top 20 work for a wide range of companies. Buying them out would be virtually impossible.
And the whole concept seems to assume that there's a fixed pool of people. I'm guessing that if any of those companies lost their PostgreSQL guy, they'd be looking to hire another one and if it's anything like most open source software there's plenty unpaid or poorly paid people who'd love to take the position. Or with 10% unemployment, there would be soon enough if people knew they lacked developers. For that matter, I think it'd be hard to bury MySQL if just the entire community gathered on one fork and not a dozen.
1. Most people who have their account stolen probably think the same 2. That probably works both ways, if you don't care much then maybe you won't 3. It's hardly worse than a CD check (a physical object needed to play)
In general, I disagree about the "no big deal" - at least not to Blizzard. I have lost lots of savegames on occasions, particularly one nasty hdd crash, and the result is that I look at it and go "Meh, I'd have to do all that over again" and end up never getting started. You don't need to be an epic-spec'd god to think it's extremely frustrating going back to fighting lvl 1 creatures with your puny sword of dullness. For a single-player game then who cares, they got their money already and I'll probably find a new one and everyone will tell me I should have taken backups. Lose your WoW account? Straight hit to their revenue, plus other players fear it'll happen to them and there's no easy way to make sure their machine never will be compromised and their login stolen.
Basically, you're not worried because you're not the one taking most of the hurt. Like I don't fear that much that someone will abuse my visa card, unless I've been careless my exposure is quite limited. But visa definitely cares, which is why I got a free new card with chip in addition to the magnet stripe. To be honest, they're probably more worried about losing customers like you that just don't care that much. The wowholics would be back at grinding pretty soon no matter what.
The only thing he sounded like, was "I'd like to tell you all about that shit and how horribly mismanaged that disaster was, but I've been gagged from telling you"
I think the whole situation is ironic. Quite often when I hear stories about immigrants with degrees getting jobs in the USA, people go ballistic about how they are stealing Americans' jobs and depressing wages.
When they go back to their home country, people then complain about a brain drain and about how they should make a 'contribution' to the country that educated them
Those who are taking expensive western jobs are the Indian call center guys, because wall clock time can be bought much cheaper where the living costs are lower. I've hung out with quite a few foreign students and for the most parts they were very bright, granted there were a few playboys whose parents simply had the money but they outpaced most of the domestic slackers who were just looking to get an easy degree. They heightened the standard more than anything else, if you wanted to compete for the same jobs they did you'd have to be a very talented and hard-working person. I'm sure Americans lost jobs to that too but that's more fair competition and those people would only feed further high tech dominance. It's far more dangerous to think that you can outsource the bottom of the pyramid and don't think the juniors will eventually become seniors and team leads and architects and managers and take over. That already started with the outsourcing wave and now the bright people are going home too to sit on top of that pyramid. That they're leaving is only great if you want to work at Wal-Mart or be Bill Gates' manservant, there won't be much except retail and services left.
But there's a ton of very smart people with PhDs that don't do public research, only very important private research. Just to pick one I imagine Boeing has tons of people with PhDs in aeronautics whose results aren't published but rather used in fierce competition with Airbus and so on. That kind of brain drain will be a problem.
I'd say the Nobel prizes in physics they'd get from it would more than make up for their little "accident". The odds are about as good as accidentally making FTL travel though.
Encryption algorithm's aren't the weak link, its the implementation.
What's more usually the case is that the implementation of the algorithm is just fine, but you fail at using it in the right way. Usually because then you've handed it off from the cryptography experts and to the general team that's building the rest of the system. Kinda like a door that has a great lock but is easy to take off its hinges, won't do you much good.
To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern?
You forget WINE. Compared to how few people actually work on it, it's surprising how much of DirectX it implements. Of course all the graphics functions is mapped to OpenGL so if the OpenGL implementation sucks so will WINE, but it's a fairly full implementation of DirectX 9 state. The downside is of course that DirectX is patented, not just patent FUD but quite clearly like for example some of the texture compression algorithms. If anyone tried to make a more official version for Linux, they'd probably pull out a few other things as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly. But if you found a really, really nasty security bug, does Apache go "OMG we must fix this" and release a vulnerability alert and a new point release even though it's been two years, or do they say that "that one's out of any kind of support, even extended security-only support, go upgrade because we won't even look at it". That is an important cutoff, even though nothing much happens with any product 3+ years after its release.
I'd settle for going back with a copy of every version of Windows to just before IBM came to see Bill Gates...
Welcome to getting older. I can't believe how easy I was to entertain when I was a teen, plus then I didn't really know the meaning of "work". It was all either fun or learning, even the grinding was just a little interlude. And every generation talks about something, like how say vinyl had more soul than CDs, or the people in costumes had more soul than CGI, and how real world makebelieve had more soul than virtual makebelieve and so on.
Each one of these megagames probably used far more skill and time on a professional writer than the computer geek who part-time doubled as gfx artist, sfx artist, composer and sometimes writer on your garage setup obscure game. I can at least say that with most old games I can have kind memories but if I start playing then many of them I get fed up because it's so simple and boring to a mind that's had another ten years of experience at figuring stuff out.
Get your own name. You can go fairly far in cloning gameplay - think how much one FPS or TBS or RTS or RPG looks like the other, but don't steal unique units, characters and storylines. And while I don't approve of astroturfing where you pretend to be a customer, you can generated buzz about it. Go into every forum you can find about the old game, say this game is inspired of it. Right now I'm playing Dragon Age, and boy are there many old chestnuts of dwarves and elves and warriors and rouges and mages and the whole storyline about a blight and an archdemon are hardly original. Go for the one-up, "if you liked [old game], you'll love [new game]". Right now you come of sounding like one of the cheap watch salesmen "same same but different".
The people who want to live on Big Brother, but aren't trashy enough to get in on the show, feel free. And that's what this dude sees, he sees everything people do share. Hint: Lots and lots of people do lots and lots of things they don't put on Facebook. I'm on it, it's basically a contact page, I answer some event invites and that's pretty much it. send me another lame game invite and I'll gladly ignore it. My real life is far, far away from Facebook.
If they can do 12 hours on a laptop that, presumably, has a fast CPU & stuff - how long could they go on a laptop with a modest CPU ?
In practice it depends on how big a battery is reasonable to carry around, it scales very linearly with that. The question is, does anyone regularly need a 30h laptop? Or is there those that need a day's charge (for the hours they use it, not necessarily wall time) and those who are really off the grid for weeks and need a different solution anyway? I would tend to think so, there's not many today who has a "base" without electricity. Maybe there's a weekend market, but if you're spending the entire weekend in front of it you might as well stay at home...
Well, I just did a quick and dirty check on laptop prices, dividing at 7000 NOK which works out to about 1000$ without the VAT.
199 laptop models below that price
149 laptop models above that price
It's above average but it's not really high-end, but it's tight around there... past 1200$ and there's a much fewer left. Of course, I don't have any volume figures, so this may be wildly inaccurate. Doesn't matter how many models there are if the 500$ laptops outsell them 10:1.
With all due respect, there's a huge difference between distribution and aggregation. Even in the "good old days" of IRC they were trying to build huge networks of servers which would be your one place to network with all your (geeky) friends. Everybody was very busy trying to avoid duplication of long-distance transfers because despite even though it looked like one Internet then doing "long distnace" was expensive for the ISPs. They'd probably be more spinning in their graves (though they're probably not old enough for that yet, oh how time flies) over the extremely wasteful torrent protocol where we pull data all around the world over tons of hubs and down and back up last-mile connections just to do tit for tat swapping. Being able to pull off one world-wide system would be more of a dream.
In your case, it is just your insanity.
...just like everything else you do in an application process. Duh.
Everything about you should confer a sense of professionalism and competence. How you dress rarely has any direct impact on your performance, but if you dress lame for the interview then it shows you either don't know how or don't care. Same if your application uses language that is informative but too casual for a formal written application and so on.
Those kind of points can really only work one way, against you. They're not buying the suit, they're buying the man in the suit and it'll never land you the job. It's just seeing whether you'll rub people the wrong way, be it customers, coworkers, managers or whoever else you have to relate to. You are going to work with many people you wouldn't hang out with, after all.
Same as saying pi = 3.141 and g = 9.81 ms^-2 at sea level on Earth. Those are imprecise but "close enough" approximations of natural constants
Since we're well into scientific nitpicks already, pi is a natural constant but g = 9.81 ms^2 is definitely not, there's no one true value to approximate because it varies slightly over the earth and earth isn't completely spherical and earth's rotation also has a marginal effect. Were you perhaps thinking of the gravitational constant?
Rather than post completely uninformed comments on the subject, leave that to people in the field.
Awwww, don't we get to do anything? We have such expertize in giving completely uninformed comments, who else has such refined skill at not RTFA, probably not even the summary and yet comment as if it was the topic of our PhD thesis in a field we know nothing about? That sort of thing only comes through years of practice and non-studying. No I think we'll leave them to do the informed comments, for the truly abhorrent comments devoid of all facts, correctness and sanity they should leave it to professionals.
Well, if we're already speculating you may also speculate if you are seeing a biased sample of the student population. At least many of the technically minded students I knew would see no need for a Netflix subscription...
There are really only two codecs to speak of IMO, MPEG2 (MiniDV, HDV) and H.264 (AVCHD) in and MPEG2 (DVD) and H.264 (online or BluRay) out. However, neither of these codecs are trivial to edit in their most effective form and there's a lot of optional encoding methods to cover it all.
For example MiniDV is quite easy because it got rather "dumb" frames, but both HDV and AVCHD use IPB encoding which is really nasty to edit. You can't just cut the video stream at random points, you may need frames both before and after the cut point to decode it. You can't jump to a random frame, you must find the nearest I-frame and work your way from there. That creates a lot of complexity where you must keep a whole different set of indexes than the one the user sees to get frame-accurate editing and a lot of decode logic to get only the intended frames while discarding the extras and so on.
Pro editing tools DO have this mostly sorted out, if you're trying for the "no tool is perfect, therefore the OSS tools are as good as the commercial tools" argument then it's failing. It's not that many combinations that are really useful, it's that the few most important ones are really, really hard to do right. The decoding libs have this straight, I never have a problem playing back MPEG2 or H.264. But there sure is a problem editing them.
I'd be happy to see them outdo iMovie in the first place. My last experience trying to edit movies in Linux was.... unpleasant to say the least, and I wasn't looking to do anything that fancy. Granted, it was HDV footage (but still MPEG2 from what I understand) so not completely mainstream but it'd constantly crash doing simple stuff like splitting up clips and rearranging them with simple crossover effects, or just refuse to recognize it at all and whatnot. I don't remember all the apps I tried but it was the 3-4 most popular ones. I was thinking about getting a new AVCHD camera but can't really imagine that being any better.
And it's less than 140 characters. Just saying...
Dude, if you twitter about how twitter is bad you get a recursive epic FAIL.
Yep. So, what are you going to do? Sue them? Get in line and there won't be anything left for you anyway. Usually I feel sorry for customers abandoned by a bankrupcy but in the case of Psystar I'd say this is more #suckerfail than anything. Anyone with the sligbtest clue about IP law would know that Psystar, right or wrong, would be slapped to hell over this. And probably being in the wrong, too.
Um....there's over 70 committers to PostgreSQL. And even the top 20 work for a wide range of companies. Buying them out would be virtually impossible.
And the whole concept seems to assume that there's a fixed pool of people. I'm guessing that if any of those companies lost their PostgreSQL guy, they'd be looking to hire another one and if it's anything like most open source software there's plenty unpaid or poorly paid people who'd love to take the position. Or with 10% unemployment, there would be soon enough if people knew they lacked developers. For that matter, I think it'd be hard to bury MySQL if just the entire community gathered on one fork and not a dozen.
1. Most people who have their account stolen probably think the same
2. That probably works both ways, if you don't care much then maybe you won't
3. It's hardly worse than a CD check (a physical object needed to play)
In general, I disagree about the "no big deal" - at least not to Blizzard. I have lost lots of savegames on occasions, particularly one nasty hdd crash, and the result is that I look at it and go "Meh, I'd have to do all that over again" and end up never getting started. You don't need to be an epic-spec'd god to think it's extremely frustrating going back to fighting lvl 1 creatures with your puny sword of dullness. For a single-player game then who cares, they got their money already and I'll probably find a new one and everyone will tell me I should have taken backups. Lose your WoW account? Straight hit to their revenue, plus other players fear it'll happen to them and there's no easy way to make sure their machine never will be compromised and their login stolen.
Basically, you're not worried because you're not the one taking most of the hurt. Like I don't fear that much that someone will abuse my visa card, unless I've been careless my exposure is quite limited. But visa definitely cares, which is why I got a free new card with chip in addition to the magnet stripe. To be honest, they're probably more worried about losing customers like you that just don't care that much. The wowholics would be back at grinding pretty soon no matter what.
The only thing he sounded like, was "I'd like to tell you all about that shit and how horribly mismanaged that disaster was, but I've been gagged from telling you"
I think the whole situation is ironic. Quite often when I hear stories about immigrants with degrees getting jobs in the USA, people go ballistic about how they are stealing Americans' jobs and depressing wages.
When they go back to their home country, people then complain about a brain drain and about how they should make a 'contribution' to the country that educated them
Those who are taking expensive western jobs are the Indian call center guys, because wall clock time can be bought much cheaper where the living costs are lower. I've hung out with quite a few foreign students and for the most parts they were very bright, granted there were a few playboys whose parents simply had the money but they outpaced most of the domestic slackers who were just looking to get an easy degree. They heightened the standard more than anything else, if you wanted to compete for the same jobs they did you'd have to be a very talented and hard-working person. I'm sure Americans lost jobs to that too but that's more fair competition and those people would only feed further high tech dominance. It's far more dangerous to think that you can outsource the bottom of the pyramid and don't think the juniors will eventually become seniors and team leads and architects and managers and take over. That already started with the outsourcing wave and now the bright people are going home too to sit on top of that pyramid. That they're leaving is only great if you want to work at Wal-Mart or be Bill Gates' manservant, there won't be much except retail and services left.
Public research, yes.
But there's a ton of very smart people with PhDs that don't do public research, only very important private research. Just to pick one I imagine Boeing has tons of people with PhDs in aeronautics whose results aren't published but rather used in fierce competition with Airbus and so on. That kind of brain drain will be a problem.
I'd say the Nobel prizes in physics they'd get from it would more than make up for their little "accident". The odds are about as good as accidentally making FTL travel though.
Encryption algorithm's aren't the weak link, its the implementation.
What's more usually the case is that the implementation of the algorithm is just fine, but you fail at using it in the right way. Usually because then you've handed it off from the cryptography experts and to the general team that's building the rest of the system. Kinda like a door that has a great lock but is easy to take off its hinges, won't do you much good.
To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern?
You forget WINE. Compared to how few people actually work on it, it's surprising how much of DirectX it implements. Of course all the graphics functions is mapped to OpenGL so if the OpenGL implementation sucks so will WINE, but it's a fairly full implementation of DirectX 9 state. The downside is of course that DirectX is patented, not just patent FUD but quite clearly like for example some of the texture compression algorithms. If anyone tried to make a more official version for Linux, they'd probably pull out a few other things as well.