Full machine backups is one legitamate use that I can think of, especially if you have a few computers. Database backups is another use. I am a programmer and an enhusiast user. I have three OS's installed on my hard drive of my desktop, and also back up 3 other computers to this machine using ghost (or dd and netcat for the mac), and multiple image snapshots of each partition in case anything goes wrong. This can take a system that's 80 GB's and easily triple the amount of space that one is using. Add mp3's, a few movies, photos, and games, and yes, you can legitamately use quite a bit of space. I think that it's great that I could now do a weekly snapshot of my entire system, and archive maybe a months worth of snapshots on one DVD. Then I can take this DVD and move it offsite to something like a safety deposit box. Offsite backups is one thing that is missing from my backup strategy, and the reason why is that at this point it is impractical to back up a hard disk to DVD and I haven't budgeted for the extra hard disks necessary to make this practical.
It already has RW built into the standard and they take it one step further than the hack that is known as DVD+-RW. The great thing about it is that you don't need to use sessions to write to a BluRay Disk. They have true random access read/write capability, so that you can record just a single file to the disc without having to go through the hassle of opening and closing a session (i.e. what you do everytime you use burning software). Instead, just stick in the disk and write the file. This will make it the superior format for things such as backing up files. That's why all of the computer hardware manufacturers are backing bluray, it will be quite a bit better for PC users.
Good point. What's important to notice is who the US government is helping and why. Our government is interested in serving the rich inside our country because we are a plutocracy. The Chinese government IS the plutocracy, so naturally, they want to do things to benefit the industry inside their own country, the exclusion of all other industries.
What's funny is that from a class perspective, China's policy is more likely to help the little guy than the US's policy, so if anything, we should encourage China to foster their own industry. The greater the pool of software companies, the more of a demand there will be for labor, which should drive salaries up. This is why workers should encourage governments to help foster new players in industry.
If you make less than $500,000 a year, the last thing you should want is for governments to completely open their markets. The complete opening of markets will result in the eventual consolidation of worldwide industry, with predictable consequence of low wages, no benefits, and poor quality products. Keeping some barriers between large markets can be a good thing.
Wow, anyone whose masculinity would get a boost from buying something like this must have a severely stripped down and incomplete definition of the word man. And the whole idea of fashionable consuption seems kind of quant when you stack it up against all the dead bodies and miserable souls that seem to be a prerequesite to producing all this shiny crap.
But anyway, back to hardware, I'm pretty happy with my BFG 6800 GT OC, anything more than that is overkill for the time being.
Return of the King, of course, but I don't think we're at that point yet. Hslf Life 2 shows that you can still do both, but I agree, it is getting more difficult.
Yeah, these comments have been killing me. People are talking about using the Cell to do per pixel operations, talking about how many flops it can do etc. That's what the graphics card is for, and there hasn't been any evidence showing that the extra FLOPS generated by the cell will be practically useful. Overall, the more specialized a processing unit is, the greater the effort in writing for it tends to be. I experienced this first hand when I tried to rewrite parts of a 3D graphics application I was working on to take advantage of SSE. The application was already 200,000 lines, so an entire rewrite wasn't feasible. The extra work required by the processor to prepare the data for SSE took away any real benefits from using it. The main problem was that the pipeline was written for doubles, but SSE originally only worked with floats, and casting between the two destroyed performance.
This article reminds me of the hype about MXX, SSE (1-3), 3DNOW, Altivec, etc. Yes, you can write special code that can do a lot of vector processing, but for the most part, such situations are either high specialized or extremely contrived, and the performance boost isn't always what you would expect. While I think that the PS3 will be a nice piece of hardware, and plan on buying one for the bluray player alone, I think it's a bit early to make predictions about which piece of hardware will win. From a general purpose computing standpoint, if anything, the Xbox 360 looks more powerful, and from what I've read, the PowerPC cores inside the Xbox 360 are less stripped down. Chances are it will be easier to develop for, but right now it's all speculation.
The other reason that we should take these numbers with a grain of salt it is more difficult to get performance from multiple cores. There has already been talk among game developers (there was an interview with Tim Sweeney talking about this challenge as it applies to the next Unreal Engine)about how difficult it will be to write for TWO cores (i.e. athlon x2 and Pentium D). Now imagine what it will be like having to program for 7 specialized, stripped down cores and actually use them effectively. My prediction is that real world performance will be quite a bit lower than the numbers that are shown.
This is a tough one to call, and it took collaboration between a couple of FS staffers to determine if spending one grand on a graphics card represents the epitome of hardcore or the depths of foolishness. In the end, we fell right about in the middle.
It seemed to be a split right down the middle, which was disappointing in my opinion. The part you quoted (which is right below the excerpt that I just quoted, BTW) came from those among the staff that were against the idea of buying a $1000 card.
a complete waste of money. For an extra $500 you get maybe 1 or 2 fps. What I find strange is that firingsquad is split over whether or not readers should buy it. The whole review seems to be a better benchmark of how much of an industry shill firingsquad is than the graphics card itself.
To get an idea of the difference, try running your computer monitor at 720x480 (DVD widescreen resolution) for a few days, and see how well that resolution works for you. Or, if you are watching DVD's on a normal TV, then try using your computer at a resolution abou 512x384 interlaced. Then change resolutions to 1920x1080, which is the resolution that most HDTV's support. Write back and tell us if you think that 1920x1080 is higher resolution than 512x384. Also, you might want to try using an unshielded VGA cable while viewing your monitor at 512x384, to further simulate the picture quality that you would get on a standard TV. It doesn't seem that bad because you are used to it. HD is by far the superior format.
Yeah, both my girlfriend and I thought that they weren't marketing this to the average 13 year old. They must have been marketing it to a 13 year old with ADD whose parents decided to ween him off ritalin the week they debut the Xbox. I mean, they were doing cutscenes every 5 seconds, and they couldn't play more than 3 or 4 bars of a song before switching to something else. I was disappointed by the lack of content. It would have been nice if Microsoft had put something more technical on Tech TV for those of us in the non-ADHD crowd (or those with it remember to take our medication).
I've flipped through the channels, and watched MTV in the past year, and it's not nearly that bad most of the time. Also, unless your kid has some kind of mental disorder, I can't imagine what you would have to do to them to give them an attention span that low. We're talking about serious neglect.
It seems to me that Bill does get this concept (of not having a central PC), or at least he is starting to. According to this interview on http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000440041962/ that I read the other day. It doesn't seem like he requiring you to have a Media Center PC in order to enjoy some of the media capabilities of the next xbox, nor is he assuming that you will have all of your content on one machine. Here is part of the interview below:
How is the next Xbox going to fit into the rest of Microsoft's home entertainment strategy? Will it be able to double as a digital entertainment hub?
I'm not sure what you mean by the word hub there. Often we would think of the Media Center PC as being the hub and then the living room being able to connect up to all the music on the PCs in the house, all the photos on the PCs in the house, and having remote display capabilities so that if you've got video up on that PC, then great you can watch it, connect to it, set up to record it right with a remote control in the living room. So the high-end scenario for us is you've got Media Center PC, that's where your state is, but then you've got your Xenon out that are connecting up to that. Xenon itself will have some neat capabilities, but we're in pre-introduction here, and that group is brilliant about the unveiling. They've been very coy up 'til this point and I wouldn't want to steal any of their thunder.
But what if someone doesn't have a Media Center PC, will the Xbox have some of that same functionality?
It won't be a Media Center PC, so there's some things you won't be able to do. You'll be able to do a lot of media things including storing music, playing music, connect up your player. There's an overall media vision, and we certainly see households that just have Xenons in them, and we see households that have normal PCs and Xenons, and we see households that have media center PCs and Xenons. We're going to make all those do what you'd expect.
Good idea. I think that some kind of repository that contains the source code would be a good way of registering for copyright. It really should be done this way with all digital works in my opinion. And, since just about anything can be digitized, it makes sense for this to be a requirement going forward, that any work that wants to be protected by copyright should be submitted to a government repository, and that the work will be made publicly available once the copyright expires.
I think that most taxpayers people would go for this (a government site where they could download all publicly available works). If people were up in arms over the cost of maintaining such a beast, then it could be moved to some kind of license setup, where the user could pay a yearly fee for rights to access the government repository. As a classical musician, I would love to be able to download all of the sheet music for Beethoven, free of charge. Just imagine how much work is out there that people could enjoy if only it were easily available.
When a copyright term ends, the author should take reasonable measures to make sure that the work enters the public domain. With books, that work automatically enters the public domain, but with closed source software, the source code remains secret. This undermines the original spirit of copyright, which was to provide government protection (funded by public funds) in exchange for the eventual benefit of the public by adding to the body of works in the public domain. With software, this model is severely broken as copyright owners have done nothing to contribute to the public domain (by the time the copyright expires the platform is usually long gone, and source code is required for porting). If anything, they have tried their best to ensure that they give nothing back.
It's a game console. Software makers tune the software to the hardware itself. The only reason that I've ever needed to upgrade my PC is that it was running the software too slowly. I don't see this being a problem with a game console.
I disagree, he should end the relationship with his boss immediately. His boss acted in bad faith by threatening to withhold the final paycheck, and the relationship has now become abusive. If a future employer asks, he can say,"In good faith I attempted to give them a month's notice. Then my boss began to become verbally abusive, and threatened to illegally withhold my paycheck. This breach of ethics on his part caused the relationship to be terminated immediately." You have no obligation to continue to stay in an abusive relationship with people who are acting in an abusive and unethical manner. Telling your new employer that unethical behavior will result in the termination of the working relationship tells them that you have character and won't put up with bs. It's just like if you are a cop who finds out that half the force is dealing in illegal drugs, or you are a CEO, and find out your company has been fudging it's accounting records. Your loyalty to your company goes out the window when ethics are violated. That should go without saying.
Giving several weeks notice before leaving is given with the implied condition that your boss and everyone at the company will continue to behave in a reasonable (i.e. sane and non-abusive), courteous, and ethical manner. It's not an unconditional guarantee that you will put up with several weeks of misery at your own expense. If these conditions really needed to be spelled out explicitly, then every offer of good will on an employee's part would need to be backed up with 10 pages of legalese. So, no, he has no obligation to stay, that obligation was voided when his boss became abusive.
There are five major record companies, when is the last time you've seen a new retail CD price below the typical 15-20 for music? So much for the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma only works if there is a strong incentive to break the rules. In this case, all of the incentives point to keeping prices high. After all, how can you apply the prisoner's dilemma when it's tough to tell where one prisoner ends and the other begins?
You seem a bit naive, as your model assumes that large corporations are atomic entities that exist only to compete with each other. I think that you are missing a key element here, and that is class, with the next key element being that corporations are atomic in name only, in terms of ownership, they blend together. Most business owners are in the same social class. They know each other, are often friends, and many times, large corporations will own pieces of each other. e.g., Microsoft owned a part of apple for a while. If you own 60% of company A, and 30% of company B, why would you run company B into the ground for the sake of company A? Wouldn't it be better for all of the companies you invest in to just get along?
Businesses don't exist to teach each other a lesson, they exist to make a profit. If you really believe that a new company would come along and get rid of infineon, and out of the goodness of their own hearts keep the margins low, then do yourself a favor and don't ever own a publicly traded company, as your investors would take you to the cleaners for not giving them the highest return on their investments.
Businesses have several choices. They can wipe out their competitors, and become a monopoly, which will result in heavy government oversight, and possibly a breakup. Or, another choice is that when they reach the stage that there are only a handful of "competitors" left, they can relax the competition and rake in the profits. Most big businesses choose to do the latter, since it's quite likely that you own part of your competition anyway.
Tommy (looking at the hills): Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish? Renton (drunk, 'clean,' and pissed off): It's shite being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low! The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization! Some people hate English. I don't! They're just wankers! We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers! Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized by! We're ruled by effete arseholes! It's a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy! And all the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference.
Hmm, that's not what I've seen. The only time I've worn a suit is to the interview. Right now I'm wearing some New Balance Tennis Shoes, jeans, and a collared shirt. Although they did just make a rule that we couldn't wear open toed sandals to work, which was kind of a dissapointment, since I was getting ready to wear them to work. From what I heard, someone kept asking if it was ok, and they had to have an answer, which ended up being "No". But, I suppose if we're being pedantic, my Tennis Shoes are open-toed, but I think they'll let it go.
Now, I do work at a University, but before that it was SBC (the phone compan), and I wore the same stuff to work. Before that, I did OpenGL programming, and again, wore tennis shoes, jeans and polos to work, etc. I did go to one interview where all the programmers were wearing suits, but decided that my current employer was a better fit.
Good question, right now, I haven't been spending much time installing software, but the problem is, when I'm installing the system and setting things up, I tend to run as root, and by the time I'm done, I have gotten used to running as root.
When I'm at work, I try to get work done, and log in as a regular user. But when I'm at home I tend to hack around a lot on linux. Back when I was running LFS (linux from scratch), set up could take weeks, and most of the time I was running LFS I was installing a piece of software or setting something up. Now, I'm sure your reaction is going to be that my usage of linux wasn't serious, but I don't think that we should underestimate the hobby user when you talk about linux. I also tend to experiment quite a bit with different distros, right now I'm running 64 bit fedora when I boot into linux, and colinux from my 32 bit fedora partition when I'm booted into Windows. Again, not a serious use of linux, but when I run at home I'm a hobbyist, not a sysadmin.
What's even scarier is that Win2k is the most stable version of Windows I have ever used. It was their first serious OS in my opinion.
The question I would ask about those 63,000 bugs is what they define as a bug. Back when I was working at a software company as an applications programmer (now I work on software that isn't intended for the end user, in the field of bio informatics), we would have "bugs" that were probably better classified as feature requests. (i.e. it would be better if this button was over here, or, it would be nice if we could do x). And yes, we had several thousand of these less serious "bugs", some of them dating back over a decade. Many of these bugs weren't that big of a deal, but we of course would try to address every single one of them before shipping the software. We would of course get rid of all the showstoppers before a major release (a showstopper was an issue that causes a crash or data loss). Several thousand "bugs" is par for the course if you have a full regression test done on a code base that in our case was several million lines, over 10 years old, some parts nearly 20, and written for multiple platforms. Several thousand showstoppers on the the other hand is hard to imagine. My guess is that finding bugs in a code base as large as Windows XP can be incredibly difficult.
I ghost my machine every week or two, it seems to work fairly well as far as data protection goes. I think that if you properly back up, then the amount of time saved by running as root is actually higher than the time spent when disaster strikes from running as root.
I really think the usage model is important. If you use linux like a windows user, and are constantly installing desktop applications (i.e. games, office apps, etc.), then the convenience of running as root is difficult to beat. If, on the other hand, you want to run a multi-user, commandline environment, then the separation of priveledges makes quite a bit of sense. For me, the convenience of root outweighs the drawbacks of the occasional rm -rf disaster. Proper backups mitigate any real risk.
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Full machine backups is one legitamate use that I can think of, especially if you have a few computers. Database backups is another use. I am a programmer and an enhusiast user. I have three OS's installed on my hard drive of my desktop, and also back up 3 other computers to this machine using ghost (or dd and netcat for the mac), and multiple image snapshots of each partition in case anything goes wrong. This can take a system that's 80 GB's and easily triple the amount of space that one is using. Add mp3's, a few movies, photos, and games, and yes, you can legitamately use quite a bit of space. I think that it's great that I could now do a weekly snapshot of my entire system, and archive maybe a months worth of snapshots on one DVD. Then I can take this DVD and move it offsite to something like a safety deposit box. Offsite backups is one thing that is missing from my backup strategy, and the reason why is that at this point it is impractical to back up a hard disk to DVD and I haven't budgeted for the extra hard disks necessary to make this practical.
I'd be curious to see if the extra registers included in amd64 would be enough to speed up x86 emulation of PPC. How many registers does the PPC have?
It already has RW built into the standard and they take it one step further than the hack that is known as DVD+-RW. The great thing about it is that you don't need to use sessions to write to a BluRay Disk. They have true random access read/write capability, so that you can record just a single file to the disc without having to go through the hassle of opening and closing a session (i.e. what you do everytime you use burning software). Instead, just stick in the disk and write the file. This will make it the superior format for things such as backing up files. That's why all of the computer hardware manufacturers are backing bluray, it will be quite a bit better for PC users.
Good point. What's important to notice is who the US government is helping and why. Our government is interested in serving the rich inside our country because we are a plutocracy. The Chinese government IS the plutocracy, so naturally, they want to do things to benefit the industry inside their own country, the exclusion of all other industries.
What's funny is that from a class perspective, China's policy is more likely to help the little guy than the US's policy, so if anything, we should encourage China to foster their own industry. The greater the pool of software companies, the more of a demand there will be for labor, which should drive salaries up. This is why workers should encourage governments to help foster new players in industry.
If you make less than $500,000 a year, the last thing you should want is for governments to completely open their markets. The complete opening of markets will result in the eventual consolidation of worldwide industry, with predictable consequence of low wages, no benefits, and poor quality products. Keeping some barriers between large markets can be a good thing.
Wow, anyone whose masculinity would get a boost from buying something like this must have a severely stripped down and incomplete definition of the word man. And the whole idea of fashionable consuption seems kind of quant when you stack it up against all the dead bodies and miserable souls that seem to be a prerequesite to producing all this shiny crap.
But anyway, back to hardware, I'm pretty happy with my BFG 6800 GT OC, anything more than that is overkill for the time being.
Return of the King, of course, but I don't think we're at that point yet. Hslf Life 2 shows that you can still do both, but I agree, it is getting more difficult.
Yeah, these comments have been killing me. People are talking about using the Cell to do per pixel operations, talking about how many flops it can do etc. That's what the graphics card is for, and there hasn't been any evidence showing that the extra FLOPS generated by the cell will be practically useful. Overall, the more specialized a processing unit is, the greater the effort in writing for it tends to be. I experienced this first hand when I tried to rewrite parts of a 3D graphics application I was working on to take advantage of SSE. The application was already 200,000 lines, so an entire rewrite wasn't feasible. The extra work required by the processor to prepare the data for SSE took away any real benefits from using it. The main problem was that the pipeline was written for doubles, but SSE originally only worked with floats, and casting between the two destroyed performance.
This article reminds me of the hype about MXX, SSE (1-3), 3DNOW, Altivec, etc. Yes, you can write special code that can do a lot of vector processing, but for the most part, such situations are either high specialized or extremely contrived, and the performance boost isn't always what you would expect. While I think that the PS3 will be a nice piece of hardware, and plan on buying one for the bluray player alone, I think it's a bit early to make predictions about which piece of hardware will win. From a general purpose computing standpoint, if anything, the Xbox 360 looks more powerful, and from what I've read, the PowerPC cores inside the Xbox 360 are less stripped down. Chances are it will be easier to develop for, but right now it's all speculation.
The other reason that we should take these numbers with a grain of salt it is more difficult to get performance from multiple cores. There has already been talk among game developers (there was an interview with Tim Sweeney talking about this challenge as it applies to the next Unreal Engine)about how difficult it will be to write for TWO cores (i.e. athlon x2 and Pentium D). Now imagine what it will be like having to program for 7 specialized, stripped down cores and actually use them effectively. My prediction is that real world performance will be quite a bit lower than the numbers that are shown.
The part I saw was this:
This is a tough one to call, and it took collaboration between a couple of FS staffers to determine if spending one grand on a graphics card represents the epitome of hardcore or the depths of foolishness. In the end, we fell right about in the middle.
It seemed to be a split right down the middle, which was disappointing in my opinion. The part you quoted (which is right below the excerpt that I just quoted, BTW) came from those among the staff that were against the idea of buying a $1000 card.
a complete waste of money. For an extra $500 you get maybe 1 or 2 fps. What I find strange is that firingsquad is split over whether or not readers should buy it. The whole review seems to be a better benchmark of how much of an industry shill firingsquad is than the graphics card itself.
To get an idea of the difference, try running your computer monitor at 720x480 (DVD widescreen resolution) for a few days, and see how well that resolution works for you. Or, if you are watching DVD's on a normal TV, then try using your computer at a resolution abou 512x384 interlaced. Then change resolutions to 1920x1080, which is the resolution that most HDTV's support. Write back and tell us if you think that 1920x1080 is higher resolution than 512x384. Also, you might want to try using an unshielded VGA cable while viewing your monitor at 512x384, to further simulate the picture quality that you would get on a standard TV. It doesn't seem that bad because you are used to it. HD is by far the superior format.
Yeah, both my girlfriend and I thought that they weren't marketing this to the average 13 year old. They must have been marketing it to a 13 year old with ADD whose parents decided to ween him off ritalin the week they debut the Xbox. I mean, they were doing cutscenes every 5 seconds, and they couldn't play more than 3 or 4 bars of a song before switching to something else. I was disappointed by the lack of content. It would have been nice if Microsoft had put something more technical on Tech TV for those of us in the non-ADHD crowd (or those with it remember to take our medication).
I've flipped through the channels, and watched MTV in the past year, and it's not nearly that bad most of the time. Also, unless your kid has some kind of mental disorder, I can't imagine what you would have to do to them to give them an attention span that low. We're talking about serious neglect.
It seems to me that Bill does get this concept (of not having a central PC), or at least he is starting to. According to this interview on http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000440041962/ that I read the other day. It doesn't seem like he requiring you to have a Media Center PC in order to enjoy some of the media capabilities of the next xbox, nor is he assuming that you will have all of your content on one machine. Here is part of the interview below:
How is the next Xbox going to fit into the rest of Microsoft's home entertainment strategy? Will it be able to double as a digital entertainment hub?
I'm not sure what you mean by the word hub there. Often we would think of the Media Center PC as being the hub and then the living room being able to connect up to all the music on the PCs in the house, all the photos on the PCs in the house, and having remote display capabilities so that if you've got video up on that PC, then great you can watch it, connect to it, set up to record it right with a remote control in the living room. So the high-end scenario for us is you've got Media Center PC, that's where your state is, but then you've got your Xenon out that are connecting up to that. Xenon itself will have some neat capabilities, but we're in pre-introduction here, and that group is brilliant about the unveiling. They've been very coy up 'til this point and I wouldn't want to steal any of their thunder.
But what if someone doesn't have a Media Center PC, will the Xbox have some of that same functionality?
It won't be a Media Center PC, so there's some things you won't be able to do. You'll be able to do a lot of media things including storing music, playing music, connect up your player. There's an overall media vision, and we certainly see households that just have Xenons in them, and we see households that have normal PCs and Xenons, and we see households that have media center PCs and Xenons. We're going to make all those do what you'd expect.
Good idea. I think that some kind of repository that contains the source code would be a good way of registering for copyright. It really should be done this way with all digital works in my opinion. And, since just about anything can be digitized, it makes sense for this to be a requirement going forward, that any work that wants to be protected by copyright should be submitted to a government repository, and that the work will be made publicly available once the copyright expires.
I think that most taxpayers people would go for this (a government site where they could download all publicly available works). If people were up in arms over the cost of maintaining such a beast, then it could be moved to some kind of license setup, where the user could pay a yearly fee for rights to access the government repository. As a classical musician, I would love to be able to download all of the sheet music for Beethoven, free of charge. Just imagine how much work is out there that people could enjoy if only it were easily available.
When a copyright term ends, the author should take reasonable measures to make sure that the work enters the public domain. With books, that work automatically enters the public domain, but with closed source software, the source code remains secret. This undermines the original spirit of copyright, which was to provide government protection (funded by public funds) in exchange for the eventual benefit of the public by adding to the body of works in the public domain. With software, this model is severely broken as copyright owners have done nothing to contribute to the public domain (by the time the copyright expires the platform is usually long gone, and source code is required for porting). If anything, they have tried their best to ensure that they give nothing back.
It's a game console. Software makers tune the software to the hardware itself. The only reason that I've ever needed to upgrade my PC is that it was running the software too slowly. I don't see this being a problem with a game console.
I disagree, he should end the relationship with his boss immediately. His boss acted in bad faith by threatening to withhold the final paycheck, and the relationship has now become abusive. If a future employer asks, he can say,"In good faith I attempted to give them a month's notice. Then my boss began to become verbally abusive, and threatened to illegally withhold my paycheck. This breach of ethics on his part caused the relationship to be terminated immediately." You have no obligation to continue to stay in an abusive relationship with people who are acting in an abusive and unethical manner. Telling your new employer that unethical behavior will result in the termination of the working relationship tells them that you have character and won't put up with bs. It's just like if you are a cop who finds out that half the force is dealing in illegal drugs, or you are a CEO, and find out your company has been fudging it's accounting records. Your loyalty to your company goes out the window when ethics are violated. That should go without saying.
Giving several weeks notice before leaving is given with the implied condition that your boss and everyone at the company will continue to behave in a reasonable (i.e. sane and non-abusive), courteous, and ethical manner. It's not an unconditional guarantee that you will put up with several weeks of misery at your own expense. If these conditions really needed to be spelled out explicitly, then every offer of good will on an employee's part would need to be backed up with 10 pages of legalese. So, no, he has no obligation to stay, that obligation was voided when his boss became abusive.
There are five major record companies, when is the last time you've seen a new retail CD price below the typical 15-20 for music? So much for the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma only works if there is a strong incentive to break the rules. In this case, all of the incentives point to keeping prices high. After all, how can you apply the prisoner's dilemma when it's tough to tell where one prisoner ends and the other begins?
You seem a bit naive, as your model assumes that large corporations are atomic entities that exist only to compete with each other. I think that you are missing a key element here, and that is class, with the next key element being that corporations are atomic in name only, in terms of ownership, they blend together. Most business owners are in the same social class. They know each other, are often friends, and many times, large corporations will own pieces of each other. e.g., Microsoft owned a part of apple for a while. If you own 60% of company A, and 30% of company B, why would you run company B into the ground for the sake of company A? Wouldn't it be better for all of the companies you invest in to just get along?
Businesses don't exist to teach each other a lesson, they exist to make a profit. If you really believe that a new company would come along and get rid of infineon, and out of the goodness of their own hearts keep the margins low, then do yourself a favor and don't ever own a publicly traded company, as your investors would take you to the cleaners for not giving them the highest return on their investments.
Businesses have several choices. They can wipe out their competitors, and become a monopoly, which will result in heavy government oversight, and possibly a breakup. Or, another choice is that when they reach the stage that there are only a handful of "competitors" left, they can relax the competition and rake in the profits. Most big businesses choose to do the latter, since it's quite likely that you own part of your competition anyway.
Tommy (looking at the hills): Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish?
Renton (drunk, 'clean,' and pissed off): It's shite being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low! The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization! Some people hate English. I don't! They're just wankers! We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers! Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized by! We're ruled by effete arseholes! It's a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy! And all the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference.
we're the scum of the fucking earth. The British.., well, they're just wankers. We, on the other hand, have been colonized by wankers.
Hmm, that's not what I've seen. The only time I've worn a suit is to the interview. Right now I'm wearing some New Balance Tennis Shoes, jeans, and a collared shirt. Although they did just make a rule that we couldn't wear open toed sandals to work, which was kind of a dissapointment, since I was getting ready to wear them to work. From what I heard, someone kept asking if it was ok, and they had to have an answer, which ended up being "No". But, I suppose if we're being pedantic, my Tennis Shoes are open-toed, but I think they'll let it go.
Now, I do work at a University, but before that it was SBC (the phone compan), and I wore the same stuff to work. Before that, I did OpenGL programming, and again, wore tennis shoes, jeans and polos to work, etc. I did go to one interview where all the programmers were wearing suits, but decided that my current employer was a better fit.
I have not heard of LSB.
Good question, right now, I haven't been spending much time installing software, but the problem is, when I'm installing the system and setting things up, I tend to run as root, and by the time I'm done, I have gotten used to running as root.
When I'm at work, I try to get work done, and log in as a regular user. But when I'm at home I tend to hack around a lot on linux. Back when I was running LFS (linux from scratch), set up could take weeks, and most of the time I was running LFS I was installing a piece of software or setting something up. Now, I'm sure your reaction is going to be that my usage of linux wasn't serious, but I don't think that we should underestimate the hobby user when you talk about linux. I also tend to experiment quite a bit with different distros, right now I'm running 64 bit fedora when I boot into linux, and colinux from my 32 bit fedora partition when I'm booted into Windows. Again, not a serious use of linux, but when I run at home I'm a hobbyist, not a sysadmin.
What's even scarier is that Win2k is the most stable version of Windows I have ever used. It was their first serious OS in my opinion.
The question I would ask about those 63,000 bugs is what they define as a bug. Back when I was working at a software company as an applications programmer (now I work on software that isn't intended for the end user, in the field of bio informatics), we would have "bugs" that were probably better classified as feature requests. (i.e. it would be better if this button was over here, or, it would be nice if we could do x). And yes, we had several thousand of these less serious "bugs", some of them dating back over a decade. Many of these bugs weren't that big of a deal, but we of course would try to address every single one of them before shipping the software. We would of course get rid of all the showstoppers before a major release (a showstopper was an issue that causes a crash or data loss). Several thousand "bugs" is par for the course if you have a full regression test done on a code base that in our case was several million lines, over 10 years old, some parts nearly 20, and written for multiple platforms. Several thousand showstoppers on the the other hand is hard to imagine. My guess is that finding bugs in a code base as large as Windows XP can be incredibly difficult.
At least they are finally admitting that it's beta quality.
I ghost my machine every week or two, it seems to work fairly well as far as data protection goes. I think that if you properly back up, then the amount of time saved by running as root is actually higher than the time spent when disaster strikes from running as root.
I really think the usage model is important. If you use linux like a windows user, and are constantly installing desktop applications (i.e. games, office apps, etc.), then the convenience of running as root is difficult to beat. If, on the other hand, you want to run a multi-user, commandline environment, then the separation of priveledges makes quite a bit of sense. For me, the convenience of root outweighs the drawbacks of the occasional rm -rf disaster. Proper backups mitigate any real risk.