You know what? You've made me see the light. We should close our borders to immigration and trade, because clearly we can no longer charge a premium for our country's labor now that we no longer have a monopoly on skills and education in the jobs that were the highest paying a few years ago. We need to use our massive economic power to keep other countries down and keep ourselves rich rather than advance as we have every other time this has happened.
Right.
Ironic that you imply we should be taking the same steps as a country for your own enrichment as you are criticizing Microsoft for taking as a company for their own enrichment. Hypocracy abounds! Being American doesn't entitle you to a wealthy (relative to most other people in the world) lifestyle. You have to get off your ass and *work* for it like most of the rest of us. Get educated. Get skills that can't be outsourced. Then you'll be employed. Otherwise, take what you can get and live with the low wages like all those Indian people you want us to prevent from working.
You're probably thinking about the consumer application level. I'll let you in on a little secret. The money to be made in in software development doesn't come from the "typical consumer", it comes from in-house applications, embedded devices, and government contracts. Most software engineers don't write desktop applications that end up on the shelf at Best Buy, they write software that controls an IC in some device, or that gets used internal to a corporation, or ends up in a standalone appliance. In the last 8 years or so, almost all of those jobs have switched to open source platforms. That's exactly why Wind River is having so much trouble and has had to partner with RedHat. That's exactly why IBM makes so much money on AIX and s/390, and is so keen on Linux. For these types of users, the labor isn't free either way, but it's nice to have a free and open platform and tools. These types of developers are the ones that contrubute the majority of the useful code back into the free software community. They're just too busy getting their jobs done to bother to go out and get famous.
The only people who are pushing the "free of licensing costs" message are the ones who don't get it. Everybody else just wants the best tool they can afford for the job, and that's exactly what they get with free software, because tons of people just like them are contributing a tiny fraction of their time to make it good, and because people start spending less time solving the same problems as each other and more time getting new work done.
My point is, that if you let some shoddy games through, you don't deserve to be held up as a pillar of quality and attention to detail. Sure, they've put out some truly great games, but the've put out some crap too. Hell, Oni alone should be enough to tarnish even the best reputation. It's one of the only games I can think of that doesn't get clipping right. You can kill enemies by shooting their feet when they stick through the wall.
I'm not saying you shouldn't buy Rockstar games, but clearly you can't pick up a Rockstar title off the shelf and be sure it's going to be quality.
The production standards at Rockstar are through the roof.
You're talking about the same company that published "Midnight Club" and "Oni"; two of the buggiest and most incomplete PS2 games ever. They bought DMA design after the GTA3 engine was complete, which is probably why the GTA titles are high quality. With their other titles, they have a bit of a history of pushing things out before they are ready.
This is the biggest myth. The money you make working with free software isn't in *any* of the traditionaly talked about methods. A very tiny few people make money on books, and support is one of the crappiest low-paying jobs there is. Fame may get you a position at a big industry company that needs what you maintain, but there are a select few of these positions too.
The money is in development, modification, and integration. I'm sitting here at work right now with 50 highly qualified engineers who are all well paid, and all work on free software. Since the day I graduated from college I've been doing well paid contract work on and with free software, and I was able to get the positions because I worked on free software for years. I was able to point my potential employers to successful programs that I had worked on, and as a result skipped the entire grind that this guy is talking about in his letter. I didn't have to spend 10 years after college proving my skills, because I already had. My title, salary, and responsibilities reflected that on day one.
Sure, OSS and free software isn't going to make your microsoft options go up in value, but writing the software can bring in a paycheck. All the OSS developers I know had no trouble getting jobs, even during the last 2 years.
the overall cost to the consumer can go down dramatically.
"can" being the operative word there. What I assert is that you are correct for products that fit the description you have provided, but things we already have and take for granted will increase in price at the same time. That increase has the potential to be far greater than any savings elsewhere. That potential will be too great a temptation.
Even if you exclude monetary costs, imagine the implications of being able to cash in by getting a link to your website placed in a high profile location. You thought spam was bad now? Do you like google's cache? Do you like programming fees being included in your monthly cable bill? Want to rewind a rewatch that last scene in the video you're watching? The possibilities for evil are endless.
But the adjustable parts don't adjust easily, and tend to wear out quickly. At one job, I had an old Aeron where the lumbar support was so worn, it wouldn't stay on the chair! I think you're supposed to replace parts of it as they wear out, but of course nobody does.
The chairs have a 12 year warranty! Better yet, when something goes wrong (like your lumbar support) they send a tech out to fix the chair for you. You only have yourself to blame if the chair was in that bad of shape.
you could even tilt it forward so you could squint at your screen without straining your back.
See, your problem is that you have a taskbar, which is a flawed utility that is useable with only a fixed number of windows before it runs out of screen space.
You should try out sawfish without gnome. Instead of a taskbar, you'll have a cascading menu when you right click on the root window that groups your application's windows by application. There's probably a taskbar out there somewhere that does something similar, but I've yet to see one, and you'd still be wasting all those pixels.
Just what we need. Single player pay-per-play video games. Um, no-thanks. Asside from the lack of a cap on the total price, suddenly your favorite game would stop working when it wasn't profitable to run the billing server anymore.
While I'm thinking about it, micropayments for online games is a bad idea too. The concept seems fine, but it would turn into a way for publishers to disguise price increases.
Scott wants to find a pet industry to use as a R&D department to build his micropayment dreams for him. The trouble is, once the infrastructure is there, all sorts of advertisement supported and fixed price media will start costing fractions of a cent per use. Don't think for a second that means the ads or the up front fees will go away either. If he wants micropayments so badly, he's apealing to the wrong crowd. The users aren't going to rally to his side, because from the user's perspective micropayments are a genie best kept in the bottle.
What about those of us that *do* like the 1.3 GUI? Fuck you?
Fortunatly it seems that they kept it quite similar. I had these horrid visions of a photoshopesque MDI that will probably give me nightmares now. I like to manage my own windows, thank you.
Absolutely right, unless there is an ulterior motive.
The agent that siezed the equipment probably has a boss who expects to see progress, and that progress is probably propagated up the line to the point where the details have been filtered out and it's just a number on a spreadsheet of how many computer crimes have been procecuted in the last however many days. The ulterior motive is to look like he's being productive in order to keep his job.
As an aside, if you think it's Castro that's still in power in Cuba, you're very naive. Look at the recent events there and you'll see it's clear that those close to him are taking steps to retain power when the man himself is gone. Then again, perhaps you're just one of those left wing cranks (whatever the hell a crank is) that comes to conclusions about what US foreign policy should be based on feelings instead of the painful facts. No wonder congress has to keep bickering about wether we should maintain travel bans and trade sanctions against Cuba.
Linux already supports an execute flag in PTEs, but it's compiled out on chips that don't support it. I suspect that if you looked in the X86-64 branch of the kernel, you'd see that this is in use in linux already.
PPC processors have always had an exec flag in their PTEs, and I would be surprised if OSX didn't use it.
There are two types of headhunters. The ones that find you, and the ones you go find. You'll have a much better experience with the former than the latter.
From what I've seen, those Bigfoot CYs last essentially forever. The real problem with them, and what made them notorious was that they're incredibly slow for random access. Lots of people bought them because they were cheap and figured they couldn't be that much slower, but they were.
Most of them ended up in low-end Presarios anyway, and the people who bought those practically never realize what they ended up with inside the box.
The 960 wasn't a total flop. It was used as an embedded processor, and last I looked (which admitedly was a few years back) intel would license the core for use in devices. Lots of PCI I/O cards contain i960 cores.
but even the manual notes the limitations of the core with TLB entries
When you dug that out of the manual, did you understand what it meant?
Pick a processor, and then show me a programmer that has done virtual memory subsystem level optimization for said processor for applications with large datasets, and I'll show you a programmer that thinks there aren't enough TLB entries on said processor.
Until there is a processor that has a TLB entry for every page in the system, there aren't enough to satisfy the types of people who's performance is signifigantly degraded by a lack of TLB entries. 99% of people (probably more) don't run the types of programs that would see more than a 1% boost in performance from additional TLB slots.
I was anticipating the humor of your post, and then you blew the punchline. Here, let me help:
Scour the university surplus for an old IBM Model M keyboard, and whack you roommate with it next time they type while you're trying to sleep! Those things weight a ton. Your roommate will be out cold.
Adding the dimension of time to data storage as in the link you provide is hardly revolutionary (cf cvs and other version control systems).
There have long been snapshoting solutions too, the key diference here is that you can go back to any point in time, and that is truly new. With other version control systems you can only go back to where you manually told it to checkpoint.
As for revolutions in indexing and searching storage, I have yet to see something that's not a new take on an old concept. There are lots of companies with cluster file systems and database filesystems out there. When somebody comes up with one that's more than incrementally better than what we had 20 years ago, and they can make it work, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I predict that the storage industry will continue to produce boring incremental improvements on archaic paradigms untill somebody comes out with something revolutionary. Yes, that was vague and truly deep. Since you probably didn't read the article, here's the spoiler: it's esentially the same thing the author of the story said. Given the history of the industry, you can bet you'll get old and go grey before something revolutionary comes from one of the established players.
If that's your attitude to life, always looking over your shoulder, you're going to be eternally stressed.
I've never had a company give me a hard time for wanting to change similar language in my contract. I've had one pass it through their legal department, but they approved it. Once it's in your file and in the drwaer, they're never going to think about it again, so it's not going to factor into how replaceble you are. Giving up your ability to have personal projects isn't a good tradeoff for employment. If you're going to get a job that you'll be unhappy with anyway, pick one that pays overtime. Those jobs don't have copyright waivers, and since they're no fun, there's lots of openings.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what? You've made me see the light. We should close our borders to immigration and trade, because clearly we can no longer charge a premium for our country's labor now that we no longer have a monopoly on skills and education in the jobs that were the highest paying a few years ago. We need to use our massive economic power to keep other countries down and keep ourselves rich rather than advance as we have every other time this has happened.
Right.
Ironic that you imply we should be taking the same steps as a country for your own enrichment as you are criticizing Microsoft for taking as a company for their own enrichment. Hypocracy abounds! Being American doesn't entitle you to a wealthy (relative to most other people in the world) lifestyle. You have to get off your ass and *work* for it like most of the rest of us. Get educated. Get skills that can't be outsourced. Then you'll be employed. Otherwise, take what you can get and live with the low wages like all those Indian people you want us to prevent from working.
Going back to a previous story about the same subject and copying an +5 comment.
You're so wrong I don't know where to begin.
You're probably thinking about the consumer application level. I'll let you in on a little secret. The money to be made in in software development doesn't come from the "typical consumer", it comes from in-house applications, embedded devices, and government contracts. Most software engineers don't write desktop applications that end up on the shelf at Best Buy, they write software that controls an IC in some device, or that gets used internal to a corporation, or ends up in a standalone appliance. In the last 8 years or so, almost all of those jobs have switched to open source platforms. That's exactly why Wind River is having so much trouble and has had to partner with RedHat. That's exactly why IBM makes so much money on AIX and s/390, and is so keen on Linux. For these types of users, the labor isn't free either way, but it's nice to have a free and open platform and tools. These types of developers are the ones that contrubute the majority of the useful code back into the free software community. They're just too busy getting their jobs done to bother to go out and get famous.
The only people who are pushing the "free of licensing costs" message are the ones who don't get it. Everybody else just wants the best tool they can afford for the job, and that's exactly what they get with free software, because tons of people just like them are contributing a tiny fraction of their time to make it good, and because people start spending less time solving the same problems as each other and more time getting new work done.
My point is, that if you let some shoddy games through, you don't deserve to be held up as a pillar of quality and attention to detail. Sure, they've put out some truly great games, but the've put out some crap too. Hell, Oni alone should be enough to tarnish even the best reputation. It's one of the only games I can think of that doesn't get clipping right. You can kill enemies by shooting their feet when they stick through the wall.
I'm not saying you shouldn't buy Rockstar games, but clearly you can't pick up a Rockstar title off the shelf and be sure it's going to be quality.
The production standards at Rockstar are through the roof.
You're talking about the same company that published "Midnight Club" and "Oni"; two of the buggiest and most incomplete PS2 games ever. They bought DMA design after the GTA3 engine was complete, which is probably why the GTA titles are high quality. With their other titles, they have a bit of a history of pushing things out before they are ready.
This is the biggest myth. The money you make working with free software isn't in *any* of the traditionaly talked about methods. A very tiny few people make money on books, and support is one of the crappiest low-paying jobs there is. Fame may get you a position at a big industry company that needs what you maintain, but there are a select few of these positions too.
The money is in development, modification, and integration. I'm sitting here at work right now with 50 highly qualified engineers who are all well paid, and all work on free software. Since the day I graduated from college I've been doing well paid contract work on and with free software, and I was able to get the positions because I worked on free software for years. I was able to point my potential employers to successful programs that I had worked on, and as a result skipped the entire grind that this guy is talking about in his letter. I didn't have to spend 10 years after college proving my skills, because I already had. My title, salary, and responsibilities reflected that on day one.
Sure, OSS and free software isn't going to make your microsoft options go up in value, but writing the software can bring in a paycheck. All the OSS developers I know had no trouble getting jobs, even during the last 2 years.
I have a 20Gb iPod with a mere 2.6 GB of music on it. I'd much rather have the less bulky mini and $50.
the overall cost to the consumer can go down dramatically.
"can" being the operative word there. What I assert is that you are correct for products that fit the description you have provided, but things we already have and take for granted will increase in price at the same time. That increase has the potential to be far greater than any savings elsewhere. That potential will be too great a temptation.
Even if you exclude monetary costs, imagine the implications of being able to cash in by getting a link to your website placed in a high profile location. You thought spam was bad now? Do you like google's cache? Do you like programming fees being included in your monthly cable bill? Want to rewind a rewatch that last scene in the video you're watching? The possibilities for evil are endless.
But the adjustable parts don't adjust easily, and tend to wear out quickly. At one job, I had an old Aeron where the lumbar support was so worn, it wouldn't stay on the chair! I think you're supposed to replace parts of it as they wear out, but of course nobody does.
The chairs have a 12 year warranty! Better yet, when something goes wrong (like your lumbar support) they send a tech out to fix the chair for you. You only have yourself to blame if the chair was in that bad of shape.
you could even tilt it forward so you could squint at your screen without straining your back.
Are you sure you've ever sat in an Aeron?
See, your problem is that you have a taskbar, which is a flawed utility that is useable with only a fixed number of windows before it runs out of screen space.
You should try out sawfish without gnome. Instead of a taskbar, you'll have a cascading menu when you right click on the root window that groups your application's windows by application. There's probably a taskbar out there somewhere that does something similar, but I've yet to see one, and you'd still be wasting all those pixels.
McCloud's hands-on interest in micropayments
read:
McCloud's hands-on obsession with micropayments
Just what we need. Single player pay-per-play video games. Um, no-thanks. Asside from the lack of a cap on the total price, suddenly your favorite game would stop working when it wasn't profitable to run the billing server anymore.
While I'm thinking about it, micropayments for online games is a bad idea too. The concept seems fine, but it would turn into a way for publishers to disguise price increases.
Scott wants to find a pet industry to use as a R&D department to build his micropayment dreams for him. The trouble is, once the infrastructure is there, all sorts of advertisement supported and fixed price media will start costing fractions of a cent per use. Don't think for a second that means the ads or the up front fees will go away either. If he wants micropayments so badly, he's apealing to the wrong crowd. The users aren't going to rally to his side, because from the user's perspective micropayments are a genie best kept in the bottle.
What about those of us that *do* like the 1.3 GUI? Fuck you?
Fortunatly it seems that they kept it quite similar. I had these horrid visions of a photoshopesque MDI that will probably give me nightmares now. I like to manage my own windows, thank you.
Absolutely right, unless there is an ulterior motive.
The agent that siezed the equipment probably has a boss who expects to see progress, and that progress is probably propagated up the line to the point where the details have been filtered out and it's just a number on a spreadsheet of how many computer crimes have been procecuted in the last however many days. The ulterior motive is to look like he's being productive in order to keep his job.
As an aside, if you think it's Castro that's still in power in Cuba, you're very naive. Look at the recent events there and you'll see it's clear that those close to him are taking steps to retain power when the man himself is gone. Then again, perhaps you're just one of those left wing cranks (whatever the hell a crank is) that comes to conclusions about what US foreign policy should be based on feelings instead of the painful facts. No wonder congress has to keep bickering about wether we should maintain travel bans and trade sanctions against Cuba.
Linux already supports an execute flag in PTEs, but it's compiled out on chips that don't support it. I suspect that if you looked in the X86-64 branch of the kernel, you'd see that this is in use in linux already.
PPC processors have always had an exec flag in their PTEs, and I would be surprised if OSX didn't use it.
There are two types of headhunters. The ones that find you, and the ones you go find. You'll have a much better experience with the former than the latter.
From what I've seen, those Bigfoot CYs last essentially forever. The real problem with them, and what made them notorious was that they're incredibly slow for random access. Lots of people bought them because they were cheap and figured they couldn't be that much slower, but they were.
Most of them ended up in low-end Presarios anyway, and the people who bought those practically never realize what they ended up with inside the box.
The 960 wasn't a total flop. It was used as an embedded processor, and last I looked (which admitedly was a few years back) intel would license the core for use in devices. Lots of PCI I/O cards contain i960 cores.
but even the manual notes the limitations of the core with TLB entries
When you dug that out of the manual, did you understand what it meant?
Pick a processor, and then show me a programmer that has done virtual memory subsystem level optimization for said processor for applications with large datasets, and I'll show you a programmer that thinks there aren't enough TLB entries on said processor.
Until there is a processor that has a TLB entry for every page in the system, there aren't enough to satisfy the types of people who's performance is signifigantly degraded by a lack of TLB entries. 99% of people (probably more) don't run the types of programs that would see more than a 1% boost in performance from additional TLB slots.
So what you're saying is that all those 900# astrologers on late night TV aren't frauds after all?
The disc does not spin backwards. It does read from the outside in though.
I was anticipating the humor of your post, and then you blew the punchline. Here, let me help:
Scour the university surplus for an old IBM Model M keyboard, and whack you roommate with it next time they type while you're trying to sleep! Those things weight a ton. Your roommate will be out cold.
Adding the dimension of time to data storage as in the link you provide is hardly revolutionary (cf cvs and other version control systems).
There have long been snapshoting solutions too, the key diference here is that you can go back to any point in time, and that is truly new. With other version control systems you can only go back to where you manually told it to checkpoint.
As for revolutions in indexing and searching storage, I have yet to see something that's not a new take on an old concept. There are lots of companies with cluster file systems and database filesystems out there. When somebody comes up with one that's more than incrementally better than what we had 20 years ago, and they can make it work, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I predict that the storage industry will continue to produce boring incremental improvements on archaic paradigms untill somebody comes out with something revolutionary. Yes, that was vague and truly deep. Since you probably didn't read the article, here's the spoiler: it's esentially the same thing the author of the story said. Given the history of the industry, you can bet you'll get old and go grey before something revolutionary comes from one of the established players.
Something revolutionary is coming soon though.
If that's your attitude to life, always looking over your shoulder, you're going to be eternally stressed.
I've never had a company give me a hard time for wanting to change similar language in my contract. I've had one pass it through their legal department, but they approved it. Once it's in your file and in the drwaer, they're never going to think about it again, so it's not going to factor into how replaceble you are. Giving up your ability to have personal projects isn't a good tradeoff for employment. If you're going to get a job that you'll be unhappy with anyway, pick one that pays overtime. Those jobs don't have copyright waivers, and since they're no fun, there's lots of openings.
Aak! Don't remind me... ozone generators for swimming pools and hottubs are obnoxious too. I've grown tolerant to chlorine though.