No holiday time, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no restrictions on hours worked, no mandated breaks, few health and safety regulations, can be fired without notice or reason, can legally discriminate, etc. It is like working in the third world. Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.
Bwuh? What version of the U.S. have you visited? What you describe hasn't existed since the 1930s.
Employee/employer relations is considered to be a state level issue. As the Bill of Rights states that all such issues are exempt from interference by the Federal government (see the 9th and 10th amendments), we've got a patchwork of laws in place. However, I can speak from personal experience of working in several different states that a typical set of laws and regulations looks something like this:
* 10-12 holidays mandated * 2-4 weeks vacation * 2-4 weeks sick leave * 6-12 weeks maternity leave per parent (I personally used this for my kids, btw.) * 40 hour work week considered standard for non-exempt employees. 2 15 minute breaks plus a half hour lunch usually included. Time and a half for overtime. (non-exempt means paid by the hour. Exempt receive an annual salary.) * 'few health and safety regulations??????' This is so off base it's not even wrong. Ever heard of OSHA? The FDA? Department of Transportation? Look them up some time. * 'Firing without reason' -- depends upon the state. There's a fair number with 'right to work' laws that establish a minimum set of ground rules for what grounds can be used for termination of employment. In fact, in some states it's really, REALLY hard to fire the incompetent. Generally speaking, though, companies which exercise this option freely don't stay in business too long. It's a direct reflection of a poorly run organization that people will avoid, even in this economy. * Discrimination is most decidedly NOT legal, for any reason. People being people, that doesn't mean that we don't have scumbags who have found creative ways of ducking or breaking the law, though.
Health care, though, is a complete travesty and a national embarrassment. We spend far more per capita and get less for it than any other industrialized nation and many developing countries.
I can't stand what's happened to my beloved SciFi channel. TechTV became G4. Bad enough. SciFi became home to Friday Night Wrestling??? Now this incredibly stupid name change. .
The Travel channel is now pretty much a thinly disguised food channel. Discovery jumped the shark years ago. What's left? .
Sigh. I always knew that the marketing stiffs who ran networks thought of us all with contempt but to be so blatant about it is just amazing. .
I'm seriously considering dropping my Dish subscription completely at this point. In fact, lately I've been wondering why I'm keeping it. There are exactly 2 channels that hold my interest; IFC and TMC. Both of those could be replaced by Netflix. . . BTW, when did Slashdot quit honoring blank lines between paragraphs?
It didn't even occur to me that it might still be available online (used or otherwise) so I didn't bother looking. A 50 year old text about neighborhood poker? Who would even bother trying to sell it except a mom and pop store? lol
After all this time I'm sometimes still amazed by what's out there.:)
Think about it. Throw a buck or two at a chance to retire? Hey, from a personal point of view it makes a ton a sense. Throw a buck or two at a chance for a six-pack of beer? Maybe not so much.:)
If you ever see a copy of "Friday Night Poker" by Irv Roddy in the used bookstore, pick it up. The guy has some sage observations on risk/reward buried in that book.:)
It's hard to find these days because it originally came out in 1961. (I've got a copy of the fifth publication run from 1972.) If we had sane copyright laws, we'd have it on Project Gutenberg already.
Anyone else starting to see the TSA as a bigger problem than actual terrorists?
Not sure about the solution but what we have is dysfunctional. We know we can't count on the airlines to run airport security. But TSA is starting to treat the flying public like some inconvenience while doing little to thwart actual terrorists.
The game is thought to originated somewhere in the border country of India and Afghanistan around 600 A.D. It came to Europe via Arabic traders a few hundred years later.
Seriously, graphene was a fascinating discovery - doubly so given the simplicity of its discovery. Anyone could have used pencil lead and sellotape, the way these guys did, to create graphene - and may well have done. The only real difference is these guys wondered what they had and took a look. (There have been many discoveries over time like that. I'm beginning to realize just how much genius depends on asking questions others could have - perhaps should have - asked but didn't.)
'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!") but rather "hmm....that's funny..."' -- generally attributed to Isaac Asimov
If you could run a "pure" server (to steal a term from Unreal Tournament)...
I think this term pre-dates UT by quite some time. I used to run a QuakeWorld server back in the day and I could swear that I had the option of running a 'pure' server for that. I know I was running a Q2 server with that variable enabled.
China never had a "golden age" in the sense of the Roman or British Empires, largely because China was never interested in conquering foreign lands as a way of expanding wealth./blockquote
Excuse me? I suggest you do a little reading about Ghengis Khan and his ancestors. At the time of his grandson's death, they controlled one fifth of the entire landmass of this planet, including all of China. Or go back further and read about the Han Dynasty's expansion policies. Before that, the Warring States.
Added support for it, yes. Actually supplied a laptop configuration with it OOTB? No. Yet another reason that I HATE HATE HATE the Apple UI. Still, a lot of people love it. Thank Ghu for choice in the marketplace!:)
Yes, Dell screwed up. Yes, they should have known better. However, once someone pointed out the error of their ways, they moved to resolve the problem about as fast as any large company can.
Compare what Dell did to what Cisco has done. The FSF was finally forced to file a lawsuit to get their attention because Cisco couldn't even be bothered to _talk_ to the the FSF about their GPL violations, let alone resolve them.
Sounds to me like we're violently agreeing to a large extent, then.:) I think the major sticking point is still that your focus on the DM aspect of multi-player Quake and its successors as a significant factor in their success or failure. My admittedly fairly hazy memory is that MP QW didn't REALLY take off until after Threewave, the original online CTF mod, came out. Threewave showed what could be done in terms of developing true team based gameplay. Modders seized on the that path forward and never looked back. Until, that is, the woeful state of tools in Q3A forced them away from the game engine and in different directions.
Take a look at Valve's offerings, for example. Three out of four of their most popular lines (TF, DoD, and CS) started out as player mods. Original CS still dominates virtually every player chart that I've seen some 8? years after the first beta. DoD has been around for about six, I think. TF we've already talked about.
Frankly, I think the game companies are missing a HUGE bet by discouraging player developed mods and add-ons. (sigh) Oh, well. There's always Urban Terror to fall back on if any of those games disappear.:)
You do know that the original TF was written for Quake, right? IMO, it's still the best class and objective based gameplay ever written. TFC was merely a rewrite for the Half-Life engine. The only other mod that ever came close was Weapons Factory (written for the Q2 engine), and that borrowed a lot of concepts from TF.
I've said this before and I'll probably say something like it many times more: The sheer diversity and creativity demonstrated by the modding community for Quake and Q2 was mind boggling. I agree; a big part of what limited widespread adoption of Q3A and Q4 was the deterioration of the modding tools that id software made available. Too many modders found porting their projects from Q2 to Q3A's engine too difficult. Those that stayed interested ended up moving over to Half-Life and Unreal engines instead.
I ran across a copy of a history of Europe that he wrote back in the '50s or '60s while I was a young sprout in the U.S. Navy in the late '70s and early '80s. His take on all the back and forth squabbling among the all the interrelated royals and their impact on trade, religion, law, economics, etc. opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. He is sorely missed.
Quake. John Carmack was asked about the plot prior to its release. His response was basically, "Plot? What plot? (laughter)":) But then, id software's focus was always on selling the engine. Any SP that they included was mostly there just to demonstrate the engine.
So far as I know, it was also the first commercially released game that used a client server TCP/IP connection even for singleplayer. The first attempt wasn't great for online play, though, so id software released Quakeworld as an engine update. A couple of revs of QW later, and online play took off like crazy.
That, combined with the most open, moddable engine ever released led to an absolute explosion of creativity. There were literally thousands of player created mods available that went from something as simple as reskinning player characters to some really in-depth, brand new from the ground up designs. Off the top of my head, I can think of Threewave (the original CTF based mod that all others derive from), the original Team Fortress, Loki's Minions (a CTF based mod with a sort of cops and robbers feel to it), Headhunter(KOTH type mod where the current leader trailed a bunch of skulls behind him that grew as he killed other players until he himself was killed), Quess (online chess!), and QRally (racing game).
Since then, I don't think we've ever seen any other engine come close to seeing that huge range of stuff built upon it. The only examples that I'm aware of were the Unreal engines. As a player, I really miss seeing what other players can come up with when they're granted that kind of freedom of expression.:(
* The cars will be scrupulous about obeying traffic laws and speed limits. But even with a small part self-driving cars, they will act as pace cars and slow and smooth traffic for everyone. Even more so, as they'll be recording everything happening around them, and other drivers know it. Pace will be slower, but people will arrive sooner.
Oh? Does this mean that the cars will know the traffic laws in every jurisdiction? For example, it is illegal to slow traffic down in the fast lane in Minnesota. So, your theoretical pace car would be breaking the law if it was holding up faster traffic in the left hand lane.
How about Germany where speed limits on the autobahn change due to weather, current traffic load, accidents, construction, and probably other factors that I'm not aware of? Will a smart car be able to correctly interpret a speed limit sign that's marked '120 kph' with a cancelled circle on it one moment, then '70 kph', then '25 kph'?
That just covers speed limits. Traffic merging laws vary by jurisdiction, too. Other examples that I can think of off the top of my head include parking, behavior when passing a cop pulled over to the side with his lights going, etc.
All, I repeat, ALL of the negative commentary that I've read has correctly identified this as a multi-national corporation led by greedy, self serving, evil bastards. The fact that some of them happen to be British is understood to be a minor detail not worth talking about. After all, some (many?) of the BP people making key decisions are American, French, Dutch, or Ghu knows what else.
The traditional Unix security model simply doesn't give the level of control I'm suggesting, whence much Unix software even today choosing the lowest common denominator of temporarily becoming root for anything requiring more than regular user privileges.
SELinux does go way beyond the traditional model but it's a royal pain to get distributors/developers/users moved over to thinking in its terms. It's not helped that - for whatever reason - genuinely skilled security types are almost universally bad at making accessible interfaces and documentation.
Well, for systemwide installations you pretty much have to grant root (or its equivalent) on any OS. Everything else can generally be handled by appropriate group and permissions assignments. (Granted, that assumes appropriate group configuration in the first place.) What other example are you thinking about?
BTW, SELinux tends to be avoided not because people can't think in its terms, but because configuring it correctly is nearly impossible for mere mortals and still difficult for security specialists.
This isn't an org sysadmin granting privileges to users, it's a user granting privileges to apps. Apps tend not to change their scope so frequently.
Ideally[tm] all data collected by a web page using a client machine is, as others have suggested, tagged with a level of importance. As the data passes through the browser it can be walled off from any apps which are not given permission to see that class of data. For example, a default for any data collected in an input type="password" entry to be regarded as a login which requires third party password collection privilege to find its way into any other app, whether that's by keystroke listeners or login db readers.
IOW, buidling off something like Firestarter for all apps? That, I agree, would be great to have.
Do you mean to say that, when I install a Firefox add-on, Firefox won't give a list of requested privileges? Why has it taken 30 years for people who think in Unix security terms to not catch up to the VMS "fine-grained privileges to executables for users" security model?
The whole regular user / root thing is awful.
While the rest of your post is pretty good, the above shows a great deal of ignorance about how the Unix security model works. Please spend a bit of time looking into groups, permissions, PAM, etc. before making such broad statements.
P.S. I agree that the VMS model was really nice from a sysadmin's point of view. As a former VMS/Unix sysadmin myself, I also know it was a major PITA for anyone who had a job that changed scope frequently. I can't imagine how you'd successfully implement it in a consumer friendly way.
Actually, the original phrase was "fish, cut bait, or go ashore." It was a common saying among working fishermen for generations. It meant if you weren't prepared to work and work hard, you had no business trying to earn your living out on the water. So, the real meaning of "fish or cut bait" is basically, "Get to work!":)
Relevancy is 91.3% of the web for Windows. Operating System Market Share Relevancy is a trend line that is moving visibly upwards. Top Operating System Share Trend
Well, let's take a look at that second link of yours. In July 2009, the market share of the three major versions of Windows listed was 91.72%. In May 2010, it was 90.48%.
Meanwhile, Linux dropped from 1.05% in July 2009 to 0.94% in August, then managed to climb to 1.13% by May 2010 for a 20% growth rate in 9 months. OS/X went from 3.44% to 4.3% for a 25% growth in 10 months. Even the category of Other rose from 3.78% to 4.09% (~8% growth).
So, relevance based upon a trend line moving visibly upwards? I don't think Microsoft Windows qualifies. Still dominating, yes, which most certainly makes that OS relevant. But I think Microsoft has plenty of reason to be worried about how relevant they'll be in the future when the others are growing so fast.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of, if not the most, informative posts that I've read on the subject. I burned up my mod points yesterday, unfortunately. :(
Bwuh? What version of the U.S. have you visited? What you describe hasn't existed since the 1930s.
Employee/employer relations is considered to be a state level issue. As the Bill of Rights states that all such issues are exempt from interference by the Federal government (see the 9th and 10th amendments), we've got a patchwork of laws in place. However, I can speak from personal experience of working in several different states that a typical set of laws and regulations looks something like this:
* 10-12 holidays mandated
* 2-4 weeks vacation
* 2-4 weeks sick leave
* 6-12 weeks maternity leave per parent (I personally used this for my kids, btw.)
* 40 hour work week considered standard for non-exempt employees. 2 15 minute breaks plus a half hour lunch usually included. Time and a half for overtime. (non-exempt means paid by the hour. Exempt receive an annual salary.)
* 'few health and safety regulations??????' This is so off base it's not even wrong. Ever heard of OSHA? The FDA? Department of Transportation? Look them up some time.
* 'Firing without reason' -- depends upon the state. There's a fair number with 'right to work' laws that establish a minimum set of ground rules for what grounds can be used for termination of employment. In fact, in some states it's really, REALLY hard to fire the incompetent. Generally speaking, though, companies which exercise this option freely don't stay in business too long. It's a direct reflection of a poorly run organization that people will avoid, even in this economy.
* Discrimination is most decidedly NOT legal, for any reason. People being people, that doesn't mean that we don't have scumbags who have found creative ways of ducking or breaking the law, though.
Health care, though, is a complete travesty and a national embarrassment. We spend far more per capita and get less for it than any other industrialized nation and many developing countries.
+1!
.
I can't stand what's happened to my beloved SciFi channel. TechTV became G4. Bad enough. SciFi became home to Friday Night Wrestling??? Now this incredibly stupid name change.
.
The Travel channel is now pretty much a thinly disguised food channel. Discovery jumped the shark years ago. What's left?
.
Sigh. I always knew that the marketing stiffs who ran networks thought of us all with contempt but to be so blatant about it is just amazing.
.
I'm seriously considering dropping my Dish subscription completely at this point. In fact, lately I've been wondering why I'm keeping it. There are exactly 2 channels that hold my interest; IFC and TMC. Both of those could be replaced by Netflix.
.
.
BTW, when did Slashdot quit honoring blank lines between paragraphs?
It didn't even occur to me that it might still be available online (used or otherwise) so I didn't bother looking. A 50 year old text about neighborhood poker? Who would even bother trying to sell it except a mom and pop store? lol
After all this time I'm sometimes still amazed by what's out there. :)
Depends on how you play.
Think about it. Throw a buck or two at a chance to retire? Hey, from a personal point of view it makes a ton a sense. Throw a buck or two at a chance for a six-pack of beer? Maybe not so much. :)
If you ever see a copy of "Friday Night Poker" by Irv Roddy in the used bookstore, pick it up. The guy has some sage observations on risk/reward buried in that book. :)
It's hard to find these days because it originally came out in 1961. (I've got a copy of the fifth publication run from 1972.) If we had sane copyright laws, we'd have it on Project Gutenberg already.
Anyone else starting to see the TSA as a bigger problem than actual terrorists?
Not sure about the solution but what we have is dysfunctional. We know we can't count on the airlines to run airport security. But TSA is starting to treat the flying public like some inconvenience while doing little to thwart actual terrorists.
They've been the bigger problem all along!
The game is thought to originated somewhere in the border country of India and Afghanistan around 600 A.D. It came to Europe via Arabic traders a few hundred years later.
'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!") but rather "hmm....that's funny..."' -- generally attributed to Isaac Asimov
I think this term pre-dates UT by quite some time. I used to run a QuakeWorld server back in the day and I could swear that I had the option of running a 'pure' server for that. I know I was running a Q2 server with that variable enabled.
Added support for it, yes. Actually supplied a laptop configuration with it OOTB? No. Yet another reason that I HATE HATE HATE the Apple UI. Still, a lot of people love it. Thank Ghu for choice in the marketplace! :)
Yes, Dell screwed up. Yes, they should have known better. However, once someone pointed out the error of their ways, they moved to resolve the problem about as fast as any large company can.
Compare what Dell did to what Cisco has done. The FSF was finally forced to file a lawsuit to get their attention because Cisco couldn't even be bothered to _talk_ to the the FSF about their GPL violations, let alone resolve them.
Sounds to me like we're violently agreeing to a large extent, then. :) I think the major sticking point is still that your focus on the DM aspect of multi-player Quake and its successors as a significant factor in their success or failure. My admittedly fairly hazy memory is that MP QW didn't REALLY take off until after Threewave, the original online CTF mod, came out. Threewave showed what could be done in terms of developing true team based gameplay. Modders seized on the that path forward and never looked back. Until, that is, the woeful state of tools in Q3A forced them away from the game engine and in different directions.
Take a look at Valve's offerings, for example. Three out of four of their most popular lines (TF, DoD, and CS) started out as player mods. Original CS still dominates virtually every player chart that I've seen some 8? years after the first beta. DoD has been around for about six, I think. TF we've already talked about.
Frankly, I think the game companies are missing a HUGE bet by discouraging player developed mods and add-ons. (sigh) Oh, well. There's always Urban Terror to fall back on if any of those games disappear. :)
You do know that the original TF was written for Quake, right? IMO, it's still the best class and objective based gameplay ever written. TFC was merely a rewrite for the Half-Life engine. The only other mod that ever came close was Weapons Factory (written for the Q2 engine), and that borrowed a lot of concepts from TF.
I've said this before and I'll probably say something like it many times more: The sheer diversity and creativity demonstrated by the modding community for Quake and Q2 was mind boggling. I agree; a big part of what limited widespread adoption of Q3A and Q4 was the deterioration of the modding tools that id software made available. Too many modders found porting their projects from Q2 to Q3A's engine too difficult. Those that stayed interested ended up moving over to Half-Life and Unreal engines instead.
The first time you hear that wha-THUMP, wha-THUMP, wha-THUMP, wha-THUMP, RRRROOOAAARRR! at 2 AM!
I ran across a copy of a history of Europe that he wrote back in the '50s or '60s while I was a young sprout in the U.S. Navy in the late '70s and early '80s. His take on all the back and forth squabbling among the all the interrelated royals and their impact on trade, religion, law, economics, etc. opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. He is sorely missed.
Quake. John Carmack was asked about the plot prior to its release. His response was basically, "Plot? What plot? (laughter)" :) But then, id software's focus was always on selling the engine. Any SP that they included was mostly there just to demonstrate the engine.
So far as I know, it was also the first commercially released game that used a client server TCP/IP connection even for singleplayer. The first attempt wasn't great for online play, though, so id software released Quakeworld as an engine update. A couple of revs of QW later, and online play took off like crazy.
That, combined with the most open, moddable engine ever released led to an absolute explosion of creativity. There were literally thousands of player created mods available that went from something as simple as reskinning player characters to some really in-depth, brand new from the ground up designs. Off the top of my head, I can think of Threewave (the original CTF based mod that all others derive from), the original Team Fortress, Loki's Minions (a CTF based mod with a sort of cops and robbers feel to it), Headhunter(KOTH type mod where the current leader trailed a bunch of skulls behind him that grew as he killed other players until he himself was killed), Quess (online chess!), and QRally (racing game).
Since then, I don't think we've ever seen any other engine come close to seeing that huge range of stuff built upon it. The only examples that I'm aware of were the Unreal engines. As a player, I really miss seeing what other players can come up with when they're granted that kind of freedom of expression. :(
But don't take my word for it.
Oh? Does this mean that the cars will know the traffic laws in every jurisdiction? For example, it is illegal to slow traffic down in the fast lane in Minnesota. So, your theoretical pace car would be breaking the law if it was holding up faster traffic in the left hand lane.
How about Germany where speed limits on the autobahn change due to weather, current traffic load, accidents, construction, and probably other factors that I'm not aware of? Will a smart car be able to correctly interpret a speed limit sign that's marked '120 kph' with a cancelled circle on it one moment, then '70 kph', then '25 kph'?
That just covers speed limits. Traffic merging laws vary by jurisdiction, too. Other examples that I can think of off the top of my head include parking, behavior when passing a cop pulled over to the side with his lights going, etc.
All, I repeat, ALL of the negative commentary that I've read has correctly identified this as a multi-national corporation led by greedy, self serving, evil bastards. The fact that some of them happen to be British is understood to be a minor detail not worth talking about. After all, some (many?) of the BP people making key decisions are American, French, Dutch, or Ghu knows what else.
Well, for systemwide installations you pretty much have to grant root (or its equivalent) on any OS. Everything else can generally be handled by appropriate group and permissions assignments. (Granted, that assumes appropriate group configuration in the first place.) What other example are you thinking about?
BTW, SELinux tends to be avoided not because people can't think in its terms, but because configuring it correctly is nearly impossible for mere mortals and still difficult for security specialists.
IOW, buidling off something like Firestarter for all apps? That, I agree, would be great to have.
While the rest of your post is pretty good, the above shows a great deal of ignorance about how the Unix security model works. Please spend a bit of time looking into groups, permissions, PAM, etc. before making such broad statements.
P.S. I agree that the VMS model was really nice from a sysadmin's point of view. As a former VMS/Unix sysadmin myself, I also know it was a major PITA for anyone who had a job that changed scope frequently. I can't imagine how you'd successfully implement it in a consumer friendly way.
Most relevant and informative post so far. :)
Actually, the original phrase was "fish, cut bait, or go ashore." It was a common saying among working fishermen for generations. It meant if you weren't prepared to work and work hard, you had no business trying to earn your living out on the water. So, the real meaning of "fish or cut bait" is basically, "Get to work!" :)
Well, let's take a look at that second link of yours. In July 2009, the market share of the three major versions of Windows listed was 91.72%. In May 2010, it was 90.48%.
Meanwhile, Linux dropped from 1.05% in July 2009 to 0.94% in August, then managed to climb to 1.13% by May 2010 for a 20% growth rate in 9 months. OS/X went from 3.44% to 4.3% for a 25% growth in 10 months. Even the category of Other rose from 3.78% to 4.09% (~8% growth).
So, relevance based upon a trend line moving visibly upwards? I don't think Microsoft Windows qualifies. Still dominating, yes, which most certainly makes that OS relevant. But I think Microsoft has plenty of reason to be worried about how relevant they'll be in the future when the others are growing so fast.