In regards to our ability to record the data and validly determine whether or not global warming is occuring is taken up very well in a particular section of 'State of Fear' by Micheal Chriton. He brings up two very interesting factoids.
1) If there was a globat greenhouse effect, we should see temperature rises in data from pretty much anywhere in the world. This is not the case. There are plenty of data sets from different parts of the world that show either a flat line or a decrease.
2) So, there are some pockets where drastic temperature increases are seen; such as NYC or other populated places. Basically, urbanization of an area increases its temperature. The book wasn't clear as to why but I can imagine that creating a concentration of concrete with people, cars, space heaters, lighting, protection from wind chill, etc. would do a lot to increase temperatures in an urban environment. A good number of weather stations have had urbanization occur around them. There have been some attempts by scientists to account for this but that just means people are fudging raw data.
So, in regards to these questions, I don't have any sort of blind faith that we have properly analyzed data that supports we do indeed having a global warming trend or not. If we could get past all of the politicized science and establish that one fact, then we might start looking into a cause and seeing if there is cause for alarm. There has never been anything close to climate stability on this planet. We may be just observing another similar change.
There is also some very good data in there on whether or not our glacial ice caps are melting. In some locations, they are, in others they are not. In general, our glacial ice caps have been reducing for the last 6,000 years.
All in all, I don't like breathing or looking at smog. However, I do know our media has a way of passing on extremely dire predictions that have some plausibility that just don't play out at all. Anyone remember the horrors and global meltdown that was to occur due to dreaded Y2K bug?
It really seems that this guy has mis-interpreted the reasons why interviewers dropped him. As a hiring manager, I look for people who can objectively look at situations and make knowledgable and logical decisions. There is no problem with asking questions and looking at the fine print, as long as it is relavent. However, if you are looking for all the in-and-outs of how an employer can screw you and asking your questions from this viewpoint, it comes across quite clearly and an intelligent hiring manager will know that you will be someone who will be very difficult to with as you lack any ability to have any trust for management in a business environment.
It is never in an employers best interest to screw over its employees. If an employer does think this, his company will not suceed as he will just drive away his best employees. On the same token, each employee does have some responsibility to watch out for his own interests, demand just compensation and deliver value back to the company to justify any raises in compensation.
As to the original poster questions, it is never too late to attempt a career change, especially if it is something that you are really interested in. Just keep in mind that you will be starting at the pay scale that someone in their early twenties would be getting. Is your life style going to accomodate that?
I had a similar wide-eyed, disappointed reaction to hearing their server platform was on Windows. I guess I just had more time to rationalize why they might have chosen to do so.
Also, I think Windows has become less 'fundamentally flawed' in recent incarnations (Server 2003 and to a lesser extent, 2000). It is still bloatware but there are compelling reasons why someone might choose it as a platform for its features, amongst other concerns. The problems often appear to be no longer Windows, but the uninformed people who think they are Windows experts.
Windows was built to be user-friendly and hide the 'complexity' of computer systems. UNIX developers have, to a large degree, a fundamentally different view. Thus, a UNIX admin worth his salt and manual, learns how to dig deeper and understand the underpinnings of things to a much greater degree while most Windows admins are stuck looking for where to point and click. I found it amusing when I stepped in to help with a tough 2003 server issue a month or so ago and figured out what was occuring and how to resolve it by using 'netstat -an | more'. Yes... from the Windows 2003 CLI.:-)
A badly secured, updated, maintained, etc (in other words administrated) *NIX box running crappy application code will have all the problems that we point the finger and laugh at Windows for. Microsoft has done a decent job, in my opinion, of closing some gaps when it comes to stability and tools.
I guess that is an arugment for a different thread though. And no, I still don't think I would choose to design and implement a scalable server application of this nature to run on Windows if there was anything in my power to avoid it.
With the background that I have, if it would have been my decision, I probably would have included in my specifications that the server components run under Unix or, at least by design specs, be platform independent.
You are right that by the very fact that there is a Mac version of the WoW client that they are not a Windows only shop - of course, they might have outsourced the porting of their software.
Given the fact that my professional computing background has all been client/server based, I (and you evidently) would have approached this issue entirely differently. I think taking the hardline approach that Windows is not the right tool for any job may be a bit impractical, especially if you are writing gaming software intended for a large audience.
There were probably a lot of internal, economic decisions that went into deciding what hardware to run their servers on. For one thing, the size of Blizzard when they started this project was probably entirely different when WoW started. Also, there is no telling that they wouldn't have had similar scaling issues, working with a *NIX based server environment.
Growing pains are a part of an expanding business model and to implement a network that goes from zero users to a million ( made up user number) literally overnight is not a task I would be willing to bet my life on doing perfectly.
My whole arugment is just to take a look at the whole of what Blizzard did and has had to deal with. The MMO market is still a relatively new one and WoW took it to all new levels of penetration. Remember how crappy cable internet used to be (at least in Northern California) when it was new? You have game developers all of sudden in the business of having to manage mission critical, rapidly scalable networks. Give'm a break.
Oh... and no, I don't work at Blizzard... but if they wanted a resume...;-)
I spoke to a game producer (I think that was his title) at Blizzcon about it. They use Linux (or did at the time) for things like DNS and such but the game servers are windows.
It actually makes perfect sense. What platform do all of their developers have experience with? They've been programming since Day 1 for Windows, correct? If you've never looked at the development platform that Microsoft provides for their licensed developers, it may be hard to understand why a game company would be loathe to move away from it for any sort of development. Microsoft has put (it seems to me) much, much, much more work in maintaining developer loyalty than it has on user loyalty it seems in cases... just look at the feature richness of.Net and such.
However, in any case, there are always going to be limitations when looking at how much you can do with hardware. It is obvious from the fact that they have realm servers and add more to accomodate customer base expansion that their code doesn't really utilize clustering concepts to any large degree. How did they handle load issues? They put in server queues. If their enviroment was able to utilize clustering to a higher degree, they could easily just add more servers to the farm for that realm.
I don't really blame them for not having strong clustering capability. Just look at the complexity of the game and how much work went into it. Take away any sort of server issues and lag issues, the game is as 'addicting' as it is because it really is just an awesome game. The only thing Blizzard should be blamed for is underestimating how incredibly large it would be as a hit and taking more steps earlier to handle this.
Remember opening weekend and the weeks that followed where servers would be down for hours? I think I got at least 1/2 month of service comped to me due to outages. Would you say that Blizzard has made no efforts to improve from that? Would you also say they haven't made improvements since then?
You, sir, are the veriest addict that he doth describe.
(The servers are not that bad for a platform that runs on Windows and in my time playing, I have seen them make improvements - don't blame Blizzard, blame Microsoft)
In my opinion, cosmology is very limited as a science, from the standpoint of physics. It is trying to take something as large and relatively unobserved/unobservable as the entirety of the universe and fit observation into data points that can be put into equations that can be used to extrapolate out what hasn't been observed yet. This has lead to some pretty wild and interesting theories, such as the analogy of every point in space expanding away from every other point, dark matter, dark energy, etc., etc.
This is a bit of the blind men studying the elephant analogy. 5 different blind men feel different parts of an elephant; its tusk, its leg, its snout, its ear, etc; and with this limited amount of data surmise that the elephant in its entirety is like what it was able to observe. Physicists are doing just about the same thing but are still trying to have all thier math work so come up with these unobservable factors so that their math continues to make sense.
As a side note, I think this amounts to something akin to what an aethiest would deride someone with a religious faith in an all powerful creator for, albiet in an almost opposite direction.
I went there by myself and really didn't know what to expect. However, they had scheduled realm meetings so when I first got in, I wandered over to our table and met up with a group of players from my server and we wound up hanging together the whole time, forming a team for the Arathi Basin tournament, etc.
Regarding the pally being the running joke of the Alliance, my whole view shifted after playing on the Horde side (for once) in AB and seeing a well played pally become an unstopable force as well as an escape artist. Shammies just don't compare IMHO. Shammies have better burst DPS but loose out on the survivability.
I assume this is an attempt to stop the sharing of DVDs or something. However, it does not do anything effectively other than make DVD sales and DVD use more cumbersome.
I need a password to use a DVD? Well, I'll either use a common one used only for DVDs that I don't care about giving out and/or print the password on the DVD.
Gosh, what would happen if you forgot the password? I mean, working on a help desk, I know no users ever forget their password but what if they did. How would they reset it? What would be the security measures required to reset it? Chances are this would have to be made trivially easy with no way to monitor who bought what where when unless a region wide database was kept of all sales. Privacy issues any one?
The biometric idea, if enforced, would instally kill all online DVD sales which I am sure counts for a large amount of DVD sales. This is not something they are going to do.
The obvious gaping holes in this type of proposal make me think this is likely typical media FUD.
From my observations, this is a fight that is continued by small minded people on both sides of the fence.
You bring up the very valid points that religious mysticism will not help us build better bridges while pure, hard materialistic science does not answer any questions about how to life harmoniously with each other.
Religion and the physical sciences are not mutually exclusive. They are just treated as such within many circles. I find it very sad that many people think you have to an atheistic materialist in order to perform good science.
You want to see the fruits of a godless society? Think of Communist Russia. Did the Russians continue to thank Stalin for ridding them of that pesky religion thing? No, they welcomed it back into their country with open arms. It does seem to provide some solutions or at least the hope thereof that science alone doesn't provide.
I don't disagree with you on either point. However, you have to look at this within context.
Lindows is attempting to provide a better alternative to Windows. They have to give up certain things that we hold as truisms in the Unix world.
I personally feel, especially after reading the interview, that the approach of running the user as root for lindows is a good idea. It does offer the choice of setting up users but doesn't force you too.
Lindows is meant for a workstation platform, not a windows platform. A proper default confirugation for a workstation will still be incredibly more secure and stable than a Windows workstation will be, even if all local user apps are running as root.
If this is a home user, he is going to be just as responsible for his security as a windows user. Here education and experience is needed in either case. At least, he won't wind up with an infected machine in the 20 minutes it takes him to connect to the internet and download any needed security patches.
In a corporate environment, the IT department will be responsible for deciding which configuration gets deployed and can easily take root privileges from the user since that is an option during install.
Man, I had the exact same issue. I bought it before the 4 day weekend of Thanksgiving and pretty much spent the whole weekend barely sleeping and playing as much as possible. Come Sunday night, I attempted to get a regular night's sleep.
I started dreaming of running around, completing quests, getting exp and everything. I became convinced while dreaming that I had somehow developed a psychic client and that that I was actually making progress in the game. *sigh* not the case when I logged in... so disappointing.
I also had wierd experiences when I would go out to the store within walking distance. I found myself looking around for poeple with red letters above their head. Lol...
Or an old movie. Remember Starship Troopers. The bugs attacked us by hurling asteroids at Earth. If I remember properly that is how they colonized as well.
The argument being made is that basically application choice is what causes people to pick an OS. I do not necessarily think that this fundamental assumption is correct. Rather, I think the converse is more likely true. Application development follows the primary choices of OSes in the market. Commercial vendors want to apply to the biggest markets to get a return on their development investment. Open Source Developers are going to be likely developing on projects they themselves are interested in; i.e. providing code for their platform of choice.
Even without looking at the validity of that first assertion, I don't follow the rest of his argument. Providing software for Windows platforms will take away the OS community's ability to compete... how so?
Firefox has risen in popularity because many people see IE as a bloated, overly feature-rich, insecure web browser. A lot of people choose to run Unix based servers, and in some cases workstations, for the same reason. I know that I recently switched my workstations over to Debian Linux because I became increasingly disgusted with host Microsoft (mis)handled the patch availability and update choices for their software.
There are some things that Microsoft does better than any OSS package (or set of packages does). You do not need to have the same level of knowledge to be a Windows user or even a Windows System Administrator as you do to be proficient in the Unix world. I still use dual boot systems because I did not want to take the issues of trying to get my games to work under Debian.
Over the recent years, certain distros have really done a good job of utilizing the improvements available in the OSS community as a whole to provide good quality distributions to do things that are mostly on par with what is available on Windows. It is possible to set up a corporate workstation that can interface with a largely Windows network that provides similiar functionality, with things such as Samba and OpenOffice. You could not say the same thing 5 years ago.
All in all, the gap in functionality is closing between OSS and Windows or even Mac. We have already seen several OSS projects can dominance even on the MS side of things. Apache on MS is an example of this as well as Firefox. This is a very valuable movement because it does demonstrate to the computing community as a whole that OSS is viable and stable and breaks down that wall that commercial software vendors have helped build.
Rather than worrying about what MS will do to crush competition, the OSS community needs to continue doing what its been doing; providing quality software and continually improving the usuability and feature set of the software. More and more users and IT managers will take note and migrate if we can truly provide as rich a feature set as MS, without any of the liabilities of MS.
Yeah, you are right about that. I even remember things from Archie comics where they were on some colony planet, righting mechanical rocket steeds.
As I think about it, I am coming up with more and more examples. It does seem to leap to mind when you think about pushing out the boundaries of human civilization and creating a new frontier.
I am not from the south, fyi.:-) The thing that drew me into the series were the interesting characters and how they reacted to the world around them as well as with each other.
Initially however, it reminded me a lot of Bebop, just with the whole space western thing, even though the two series and incredibly different.
I remember watching the first couple episodes when it first came out. I was really attracted to it because it had a lot of depth to it. You would thought that the pacing would have been a lot different since it was about space marines. However, it definitely was a lot more character driven than anything else. More recently I some reruns that didn't grab me as hard as the first ones did.
You know, it just occured to me. I remember their Christmas episode where they were stranded and running out of life support. That seems like such a cliche now. Firefly had their stranded episode, too.
I watched the Firefly DVDs and thought they were good, not the best thing I ever watched, but good. Definitely up there with the good episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It seems like there is this new genre in sci fi developing. You've seen it before if you watch anime. Things like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop where they mix western elements with sci-fi. I wonder if Whelon drew inspiration from these.
And to throw something else into this posting, anyone remember Space: Above and Beyond? Yet another great sci-fi show that was cancelled early.
The main reason that jobs are being outsourced to other sections of the globe is because the cost of labor in the US is high. We have minimum wage laws that prevent us from hiring people at the low wages that people in third world countries are willing to work for. Remember, their cost of living is a lot less as well. Also, remember their average quality of living is a lot lower, too.
As an aside, I wonder if people who scream against outsourcing are the same people that will chatise you for not giving a quarter to a homeless man. In the former, at least the money is going to someone who is willing to honestly work for it.
Overall, you only need to look back over the last several hundred years to realize there have been constant and often, much more drastic changes in economies and job distribution as technology advances have allowed for more effecient organizations of said economies. Have these left mankind as a whole in a worse condition? If you only look at the immediate effects, you might say yes but I see that there has always been an adaption that occurs to handle whatever real problems are presented by the change. Things have always stabalized at a higher level.
Slashdot Mirror
In regards to our ability to record the data and validly determine whether or not global warming is occuring is taken up very well in a particular section of 'State of Fear' by Micheal Chriton. He brings up two very interesting factoids.
1) If there was a globat greenhouse effect, we should see temperature rises in data from pretty much anywhere in the world. This is not the case. There are plenty of data sets from different parts of the world that show either a flat line or a decrease.
2) So, there are some pockets where drastic temperature increases are seen; such as NYC or other populated places. Basically, urbanization of an area increases its temperature. The book wasn't clear as to why but I can imagine that creating a concentration of concrete with people, cars, space heaters, lighting, protection from wind chill, etc. would do a lot to increase temperatures in an urban environment. A good number of weather stations have had urbanization occur around them. There have been some attempts by scientists to account for this but that just means people are fudging raw data.
So, in regards to these questions, I don't have any sort of blind faith that we have properly analyzed data that supports we do indeed having a global warming trend or not. If we could get past all of the politicized science and establish that one fact, then we might start looking into a cause and seeing if there is cause for alarm. There has never been anything close to climate stability on this planet. We may be just observing another similar change.
There is also some very good data in there on whether or not our glacial ice caps are melting. In some locations, they are, in others they are not. In general, our glacial ice caps have been reducing for the last 6,000 years.
All in all, I don't like breathing or looking at smog. However, I do know our media has a way of passing on extremely dire predictions that have some plausibility that just don't play out at all. Anyone remember the horrors and global meltdown that was to occur due to dreaded Y2K bug?
It really seems that this guy has mis-interpreted the reasons why interviewers dropped him. As a hiring manager, I look for people who can objectively look at situations and make knowledgable and logical decisions. There is no problem with asking questions and looking at the fine print, as long as it is relavent. However, if you are looking for all the in-and-outs of how an employer can screw you and asking your questions from this viewpoint, it comes across quite clearly and an intelligent hiring manager will know that you will be someone who will be very difficult to with as you lack any ability to have any trust for management in a business environment.
It is never in an employers best interest to screw over its employees. If an employer does think this, his company will not suceed as he will just drive away his best employees. On the same token, each employee does have some responsibility to watch out for his own interests, demand just compensation and deliver value back to the company to justify any raises in compensation.
As to the original poster questions, it is never too late to attempt a career change, especially if it is something that you are really interested in. Just keep in mind that you will be starting at the pay scale that someone in their early twenties would be getting. Is your life style going to accomodate that?
I had a similar wide-eyed, disappointed reaction to hearing their server platform was on Windows. I guess I just had more time to rationalize why they might have chosen to do so.
:-)
Also, I think Windows has become less 'fundamentally flawed' in recent incarnations (Server 2003 and to a lesser extent, 2000). It is still bloatware but there are compelling reasons why someone might choose it as a platform for its features, amongst other concerns. The problems often appear to be no longer Windows, but the uninformed people who think they are Windows experts.
Windows was built to be user-friendly and hide the 'complexity' of computer systems. UNIX developers have, to a large degree, a fundamentally different view. Thus, a UNIX admin worth his salt and manual, learns how to dig deeper and understand the underpinnings of things to a much greater degree while most Windows admins are stuck looking for where to point and click. I found it amusing when I stepped in to help with a tough 2003 server issue a month or so ago and figured out what was occuring and how to resolve it by using 'netstat -an | more'. Yes... from the Windows 2003 CLI.
A badly secured, updated, maintained, etc (in other words administrated) *NIX box running crappy application code will have all the problems that we point the finger and laugh at Windows for. Microsoft has done a decent job, in my opinion, of closing some gaps when it comes to stability and tools.
I guess that is an arugment for a different thread though. And no, I still don't think I would choose to design and implement a scalable server application of this nature to run on Windows if there was anything in my power to avoid it.
With the background that I have, if it would have been my decision, I probably would have included in my specifications that the server components run under Unix or, at least by design specs, be platform independent.
;-)
You are right that by the very fact that there is a Mac version of the WoW client that they are not a Windows only shop - of course, they might have outsourced the porting of their software.
Given the fact that my professional computing background has all been client/server based, I (and you evidently) would have approached this issue entirely differently. I think taking the hardline approach that Windows is not the right tool for any job may be a bit impractical, especially if you are writing gaming software intended for a large audience.
There were probably a lot of internal, economic decisions that went into deciding what hardware to run their servers on. For one thing, the size of Blizzard when they started this project was probably entirely different when WoW started. Also, there is no telling that they wouldn't have had similar scaling issues, working with a *NIX based server environment.
Growing pains are a part of an expanding business model and to implement a network that goes from zero users to a million ( made up user number) literally overnight is not a task I would be willing to bet my life on doing perfectly.
My whole arugment is just to take a look at the whole of what Blizzard did and has had to deal with. The MMO market is still a relatively new one and WoW took it to all new levels of penetration. Remember how crappy cable internet used to be (at least in Northern California) when it was new? You have game developers all of sudden in the business of having to manage mission critical, rapidly scalable networks. Give'm a break.
Oh... and no, I don't work at Blizzard... but if they wanted a resume...
I spoke to a game producer (I think that was his title) at Blizzcon about it. They use Linux (or did at the time) for things like DNS and such but the game servers are windows.
.Net and such.
It actually makes perfect sense. What platform do all of their developers have experience with? They've been programming since Day 1 for Windows, correct? If you've never looked at the development platform that Microsoft provides for their licensed developers, it may be hard to understand why a game company would be loathe to move away from it for any sort of development. Microsoft has put (it seems to me) much, much, much more work in maintaining developer loyalty than it has on user loyalty it seems in cases... just look at the feature richness of
However, in any case, there are always going to be limitations when looking at how much you can do with hardware. It is obvious from the fact that they have realm servers and add more to accomodate customer base expansion that their code doesn't really utilize clustering concepts to any large degree. How did they handle load issues? They put in server queues. If their enviroment was able to utilize clustering to a higher degree, they could easily just add more servers to the farm for that realm.
I don't really blame them for not having strong clustering capability. Just look at the complexity of the game and how much work went into it. Take away any sort of server issues and lag issues, the game is as 'addicting' as it is because it really is just an awesome game. The only thing Blizzard should be blamed for is underestimating how incredibly large it would be as a hit and taking more steps earlier to handle this.
Remember opening weekend and the weeks that followed where servers would be down for hours? I think I got at least 1/2 month of service comped to me due to outages. Would you say that Blizzard has made no efforts to improve from that? Would you also say they haven't made improvements since then?
You, sir, are the veriest addict that he doth describe.
(The servers are not that bad for a platform that runs on Windows and in my time playing, I have seen them make improvements - don't blame Blizzard, blame Microsoft)
In my opinion, cosmology is very limited as a science, from the standpoint of physics. It is trying to take something as large and relatively unobserved/unobservable as the entirety of the universe and fit observation into data points that can be put into equations that can be used to extrapolate out what hasn't been observed yet. This has lead to some pretty wild and interesting theories, such as the analogy of every point in space expanding away from every other point, dark matter, dark energy, etc., etc.
This is a bit of the blind men studying the elephant analogy. 5 different blind men feel different parts of an elephant; its tusk, its leg, its snout, its ear, etc; and with this limited amount of data surmise that the elephant in its entirety is like what it was able to observe. Physicists are doing just about the same thing but are still trying to have all thier math work so come up with these unobservable factors so that their math continues to make sense.
As a side note, I think this amounts to something akin to what an aethiest would deride someone with a religious faith in an all powerful creator for, albiet in an almost opposite direction.
No interactivity and boring roles?
Only if PVE when they are elected to be out of combat rezzers.
In PVP, they wade into battle and cast heals as no one can do enough damage to interrupt them as well doing decent damage if they are pvp specced.
I went there by myself and really didn't know what to expect. However, they had scheduled realm meetings so when I first got in, I wandered over to our table and met up with a group of players from my server and we wound up hanging together the whole time, forming a team for the Arathi Basin tournament, etc.
Regarding the pally being the running joke of the Alliance, my whole view shifted after playing on the Horde side (for once) in AB and seeing a well played pally become an unstopable force as well as an escape artist. Shammies just don't compare IMHO. Shammies have better burst DPS but loose out on the survivability.
Anyways, here are the pics that I took there:
www.gilbertcon.com/wow
Couldn't you just make the same statement about the existence of God? That His existence is merely unable to be confirmed with current technology?
I assume this is an attempt to stop the sharing of DVDs or something. However, it does not do anything effectively other than make DVD sales and DVD use more cumbersome.
I need a password to use a DVD? Well, I'll either use a common one used only for DVDs that I don't care about giving out and/or print the password on the DVD.
Gosh, what would happen if you forgot the password? I mean, working on a help desk, I know no users ever forget their password but what if they did. How would they reset it? What would be the security measures required to reset it? Chances are this would have to be made trivially easy with no way to monitor who bought what where when unless a region wide database was kept of all sales. Privacy issues any one?
The biometric idea, if enforced, would instally kill all online DVD sales which I am sure counts for a large amount of DVD sales. This is not something they are going to do.
The obvious gaping holes in this type of proposal make me think this is likely typical media FUD.
From my observations, this is a fight that is continued by small minded people on both sides of the fence.
You bring up the very valid points that religious mysticism will not help us build better bridges while pure, hard materialistic science does not answer any questions about how to life harmoniously with each other.
Religion and the physical sciences are not mutually exclusive. They are just treated as such within many circles. I find it very sad that many people think you have to an atheistic materialist in order to perform good science.
You want to see the fruits of a godless society? Think of Communist Russia. Did the Russians continue to thank Stalin for ridding them of that pesky religion thing? No, they welcomed it back into their country with open arms. It does seem to provide some solutions or at least the hope thereof that science alone doesn't provide.
I don't disagree with you on either point. However, you have to look at this within context.
Lindows is attempting to provide a better alternative to Windows. They have to give up certain things that we hold as truisms in the Unix world.
I personally feel, especially after reading the interview, that the approach of running the user as root for lindows is a good idea. It does offer the choice of setting up users but doesn't force you too.
Lindows is meant for a workstation platform, not a windows platform. A proper default confirugation for a workstation will still be incredibly more secure and stable than a Windows workstation will be, even if all local user apps are running as root.
If this is a home user, he is going to be just as responsible for his security as a windows user. Here education and experience is needed in either case. At least, he won't wind up with an infected machine in the 20 minutes it takes him to connect to the internet and download any needed security patches.
In a corporate environment, the IT department will be responsible for deciding which configuration gets deployed and can easily take root privileges from the user since that is an option during install.
Man, I had the exact same issue. I bought it before the 4 day weekend of Thanksgiving and pretty much spent the whole weekend barely sleeping and playing as much as possible. Come Sunday night, I attempted to get a regular night's sleep.
I started dreaming of running around, completing quests, getting exp and everything. I became convinced while dreaming that I had somehow developed a psychic client and that that I was actually making progress in the game. *sigh* not the case when I logged in... so disappointing.
I also had wierd experiences when I would go out to the store within walking distance. I found myself looking around for poeple with red letters above their head. Lol...
Sounds like a plot for a new movie
Or an old movie. Remember Starship Troopers. The bugs attacked us by hurling asteroids at Earth. If I remember properly that is how they colonized as well.
*cough* *cough*
Flamebait
The argument being made is that basically application choice is what causes people to pick an OS. I do not necessarily think that this fundamental assumption is correct. Rather, I think the converse is more likely true. Application development follows the primary choices of OSes in the market. Commercial vendors want to apply to the biggest markets to get a return on their development investment. Open Source Developers are going to be likely developing on projects they themselves are interested in; i.e. providing code for their platform of choice.
Even without looking at the validity of that first assertion, I don't follow the rest of his argument. Providing software for Windows platforms will take away the OS community's ability to compete... how so?
Firefox has risen in popularity because many people see IE as a bloated, overly feature-rich, insecure web browser. A lot of people choose to run Unix based servers, and in some cases workstations, for the same reason. I know that I recently switched my workstations over to Debian Linux because I became increasingly disgusted with host Microsoft (mis)handled the patch availability and update choices for their software.
There are some things that Microsoft does better than any OSS package (or set of packages does). You do not need to have the same level of knowledge to be a Windows user or even a Windows System Administrator as you do to be proficient in the Unix world. I still use dual boot systems because I did not want to take the issues of trying to get my games to work under Debian.
Over the recent years, certain distros have really done a good job of utilizing the improvements available in the OSS community as a whole to provide good quality distributions to do things that are mostly on par with what is available on Windows. It is possible to set up a corporate workstation that can interface with a largely Windows network that provides similiar functionality, with things such as Samba and OpenOffice. You could not say the same thing 5 years ago.
All in all, the gap in functionality is closing between OSS and Windows or even Mac. We have already seen several OSS projects can dominance even on the MS side of things. Apache on MS is an example of this as well as Firefox. This is a very valuable movement because it does demonstrate to the computing community as a whole that OSS is viable and stable and breaks down that wall that commercial software vendors have helped build.
Rather than worrying about what MS will do to crush competition, the OSS community needs to continue doing what its been doing; providing quality software and continually improving the usuability and feature set of the software. More and more users and IT managers will take note and migrate if we can truly provide as rich a feature set as MS, without any of the liabilities of MS.
I completely agree and this holes in the statement in the post are immediately obvious to anyone with any sort of critical thinking ability, IMHO.
(That last line should silence the trolls.)
Yeah, you are right about that. I even remember things from Archie comics where they were on some colony planet, righting mechanical rocket steeds.
As I think about it, I am coming up with more and more examples. It does seem to leap to mind when you think about pushing out the boundaries of human civilization and creating a new frontier.
I am not from the south, fyi. :-) The thing that drew me into the series were the interesting characters and how they reacted to the world around them as well as with each other.
Initially however, it reminded me a lot of Bebop, just with the whole space western thing, even though the two series and incredibly different.
I remember watching the first couple episodes when it first came out. I was really attracted to it because it had a lot of depth to it. You would thought that the pacing would have been a lot different since it was about space marines. However, it definitely was a lot more character driven than anything else. More recently I some reruns that didn't grab me as hard as the first ones did.
You know, it just occured to me. I remember their Christmas episode where they were stranded and running out of life support. That seems like such a cliche now. Firefly had their stranded episode, too.
I watched the Firefly DVDs and thought they were good, not the best thing I ever watched, but good. Definitely up there with the good episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It seems like there is this new genre in sci fi developing. You've seen it before if you watch anime. Things like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop where they mix western elements with sci-fi. I wonder if Whelon drew inspiration from these.
And to throw something else into this posting, anyone remember Space: Above and Beyond? Yet another great sci-fi show that was cancelled early.
Flamebait? Sometimes too much logic is itself a failure.
Guess I should migrate to Windows.
The main reason that jobs are being outsourced to other sections of the globe is because the cost of labor in the US is high. We have minimum wage laws that prevent us from hiring people at the low wages that people in third world countries are willing to work for. Remember, their cost of living is a lot less as well. Also, remember their average quality of living is a lot lower, too.
As an aside, I wonder if people who scream against outsourcing are the same people that will chatise you for not giving a quarter to a homeless man. In the former, at least the money is going to someone who is willing to honestly work for it.
Overall, you only need to look back over the last several hundred years to realize there have been constant and often, much more drastic changes in economies and job distribution as technology advances have allowed for more effecient organizations of said economies. Have these left mankind as a whole in a worse condition? If you only look at the immediate effects, you might say yes but I see that there has always been an adaption that occurs to handle whatever real problems are presented by the change. Things have always stabalized at a higher level.