Is it just me, or do I get the funny feeling the UK will be nullrouted out of our existence Real Soon Now (tm) ?
It seems like every day, they come up with a new, dumber idea that harkens back to the turn of the century... back when the UK actually mattered in the global political arena. Today they're just a funny little piece of history, stuck in the past and fighting the future.
I might care more about these new experimental features if they could at least get the basics down pat.
Right now, KDE 4 is an unusable mess compared to its legacy. I've no need for a social OS if it obstructs my ability to work, like the rest of this checklist-designed WM.
That depends. There are some of us, many former AMD fanboys, who today refuse to buy AMD after a series of failures in performance, quality control and chipset support. This coming from a guy who was damn proud of blowing a chunk of cash on an Athlon FX chip back in the day, and then again when the X2 was launched.
Today's AMD products share the name but not the legacy. Sure, they're cheaper than Intel's offerings, but there are those of us who want/need more than the bargain SKU, and that's where Intel breaks away from the rest.
Monopoly issues aside, Intel must still be making a profit despite "throwing money away" for these bribes or price dumps or whatever they're accused of - otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. That means the are indeed able to compete on price, which suggests their products aren't so out-of-whack with the market as you seem to imply.
I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise. Any idiot can set up a web server and mail drop, and they are free to use the same tools we use. It takes a bit more dedication to do a kickass job of it, and that's where we stand.
If a business feels "threatened" by the GPL, maybe they need to stop selling artificially-rarefied bits. That business model has been slowly collapsing for nearly 30 years.
The laws exist to prevent governments from competing with private businesses. It's a good and bad law, for various reasons, but wouldn't the obvious solution be to spin this out into a separate company ?
I don't know how it is down in the states, but here in Canada we have "Crown Corporations", which are semi-independent gigs owned by the government, but they have their own budgets and are not dependent on taxes - they have their own revenue streams. If I am not mistaken, they are wholly owned by the government but not publicly funded - at least not past the start-up phase.
Most of them are "privatey" types of businesses like industrial associations, artistic ventures (galleries/colleges), things that are too narrow to be treated as a federal service, but not necessarily profitable enough to be left to the free market (or to keep it out of greedy hands).
It sounds like that format would suit this type of ISP. It takes a pretty big investment to get started, but not so much for steady-state operation. Let the gov't give them the initial boost, then kick them out of the next and let them fly.
It's nice that ATI keeps releasing value-conscious products for those cheap gamers, but it is rather short-sighted and sensational to say that "a $99 card is all you need". Ten years ago, a $99 card was enough to play Quake 3 in medium-res medium-graphics. The one thing these graphics companies are good at is marketing. They have figured out how to maximize their sales, and that meant crippling the used resale value of their products to capture the idiotic low-end market. They sell these crippled products in big box stores to people who don't know better, to get them hooked on the upgrade treadmill. Six months later, Joe Stupid is a budding gamer, wants to play Call of Duty 8 and drops another $99 on that month's cheapo card. After a couple of years, Joe has upgraded 3-4 times, while he could have spent the $300 up front for a good card that would still have some fight left in it.
I have seen this cycle far too often. I dunno, maybe these people suck at math, but they're clearly not saving money in the end. Some people are happy with their $99 card and keep it for the lifetime of their PC, but those people would have been just as happy with "free" Intel integrated graphics. Gamers always want more.
That's also why we've seen a ton of movement in the low-end segment, but very little progress at the top end. If you spent $500 on graphics two years ago, you're still within 10-15% of today's $500 graphics solutions, and that's just pathetic.
Giving shit-tons of money to the nation's largest corporations is not quite socialism. Socialism would have been to form a government-owned corporation to deploy and operate the network.
200 billion could have bought a LOT of fibre and routing gear, but instead it bought a bunch of hookers, yachts and bonuses.
So what if there are N social networking sites ? N-5 will fail within a year or two. If you must buy into the social-media hype, pick one or two big ones and stick with them. There's little point in having profiles on obscure sites if you're not going to be an active member, right ?
Your numbers are an order of magnitude off. On a server where the population is estimated at 15k, I keep seeing the same 150 or so people in end-game raids. Pretty much everyone knows each other and their alts.
If we (falsely) assume the two factions are roughly equal, that means only 2% of my faction is actively playing end-game content. New people hit the level cap, and old people get bored and leave (until the next patch), overall it is quite stable.
I've been playing on-and-off since the the game was launched, so I consider myself a relatively experienced player. When I started my most recent toon, it took me in excess of two months to reach the level cap, playing very aggressively with all the quest-helping tools available to me. A casual player would probably last a whole year without seeing end-game content, and they would still enjoy the experience thoroughly.
Raiding is considered hardcore, but the leveling/questing process is not. You just gang up with whoever you find nearby, start chatting and kill some snakes.
Even more casual than WoW is LoTRO. They made that game so gratuitous, it's actually a turn-off for more hardcore players because there's simply not enough of a challenge/reward benefit in playing well. Even complete imbeciles can get by if they socialize a bit and find equally inept questing buddies.
There is a place for all of these games in the market. Hardcore gamers play the casual stuff too, in fact I am quite fond of small arcadey flash games; they're a nice break from the pressure of competitive raiding.
Actually, I'd say PC gaming has "thrived" largely because of DRM, because the DRM on consoles is much harder to defeat than on the PC. Sure, they have modchips, but that requires:
1. a modchip costing anywhere from $50 to $150 2. someone with the soldering skills to install it, and I mean those solder points are TINY... also costs $50 to $150 3. patience to rip/download, patch, burn, test, worry about bricking etc
On the PC, you just Google the name and you'll get no-cd patches and torrents on the first result page.
Now, the pirate market isn't a directly profitable one, for obvious reasons, but it certainly generates a TON of buzz. The best way to tell if your game has been cracked, is to notice the HUGE jump in web traffic to your site. Those eyeballs have to be worth something...
So, in other words, it's still a figment of their imagination ? I thought these sounded useless at 18 seconds, but 18 microseconds makes them REALLY useless.
So these guys came up with a bootloader that screws with its child process (the OS), and they're calling that an exploit ? I guess "grub" would be considered an exploit too, by their chicken-little standards.
These two Kumar clowns are really just shills for Trusted Computing, fear-mongering in exchange for a little kickback from the related fascist orgs.
The "research" only leads to working around the content filters, posting material the site operators explicitly do not want.
It would be more interesting if there was a productive application for this knowledge. Putting Rihanna songs on Youtube does not fit my idea of "productive".
It's only a matter of time, after all, the U.S. and China are the two largest military powers on the globe. Sooner or later, one of them will get cocky...
If your students laugh at that, I think they should quit the program and choose something more appropriate for their shuttered little minds.
"Programmer's high" is a very real thing, but I think you have to be a true geek to appreciate it. You have to enjoy programming in the first place, in order to hit that feedback loop where coding gets you excited, and the rush helps you code faster/better, until you reach peak performance and the perfect buzz. Those asshats "just doing I.T. for the money" and making our lives miserable, they'll never get it.
I actually find laptops help me focus, because they allow me to find the perfect cozy spot. I find a massively distracting environment is actually helpful, because once you train yourself to tune it all out, you can work in any environment, on command.
My best code was written in a strip club, slouched on a sofa in a far corner (as staff, so the girls left me alone - well, the smart ones anyway). Tune out the boobs and loud music, and you become unstoppable, because your conscious mind is focused while your unconscious mind is gleefully entertained and out of your way. I used to hit a trance-like state, it freaked people out a bit and they'd often watch in amazement as I stared into my code, perfectly still except for the fast rhythmic typing, I didn't even blink. It's the kind of mood where you get really pissed off when someone breaks you out of it; it's like being yanked out of sleep, everything jumps back to real-time and it takes a few moments to get your bearings.
In contrast, I can't code worth shit in an office environment. Phones ring, people chit-chat, nerf toys go flying, and the goddamned neon lighting just feels off-balance. Oh, and people feel the constant need to talk face-to-face when an IM or email would have sufficed. It's the worst environment ever for coding, at least for me.
It's times like this, we should take a step back and honestly evaluate FOSS solutions and how they compare with commercial offerings.
I do a LOT of network admin, in a mixed Windows, Linux and BSD environment. I can't really say that one is better than the other, because they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Windows can be a pain with its disjointed admin apps (hate AD), but it's pretty easy for our developers to VNC in and twiddle checkboxes in IIS. Linux is my favorite, because I know it well, but many things are needlessly obscure (like openssl command lines).
Windows costs money up front, but for non-CLI people the TCO could be lower due to the often self-explanatory interfaces. Linux is free, but I've invested quite a bit of time writing touchy-feely scripts to bridge the usability gap, and that time is money. Hell, half of my billable hours involve supporting clients' Linux servers. I haven't billed Windows support time in over 6 months.
Regarding Microsoft's marketing attacks on FOSS, we should see it as a challenge. We have the advantage of zero up-front cost, now we need to focus on reducing maintenance costs. Don't leave it up to individual distros to write the touchy-feely front-ends, we don't need 15 different network config apps, just one but a good one. I shouldn't have to learn contorted, error-prone MD/LVM commands just to set up and monitor disks, how about a little wizard to do it for me ? Thinks like that have a far greater impact on TCO than any sticker value. Enterprise deployments have a lifetime measured in years, it doesn't take a huge difference in maintenance costs to catch up with the difference in sticker price.
I think if game companies really wanted to get their value out of beta testers, they would implement simple, trivial changes like requiring a questionnaire after every N hours of game time. I'm not saying bug reports, but at least a 10-minute form where developers can ping the gamers for feedback, at least once or twice weekly.
If the kids can't take 10 minutes of their time to help improve the game they sink 20 hours a week into, they can fuck right off and wait for retail. They will buy it anyway, and if they don't, well fuck 'em. That's business.
The beginning ? MMOs have been around for decades.
Oh, you mean graphical big-money MMOs... riiight!
Joking aside, even "modern" MMOs have been around since the 90's. The formula has not changed much since Everquest. Perhaps the MMO producers are just too dense to actually think beyond their quarterly report.
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Otherwise the government could just privatize everything to effectively outlaw protest
Nice way to sum up the last 30 years.
Is it just me, or do I get the funny feeling the UK will be nullrouted out of our existence Real Soon Now (tm) ?
It seems like every day, they come up with a new, dumber idea that harkens back to the turn of the century... back when the UK actually mattered in the global political arena. Today they're just a funny little piece of history, stuck in the past and fighting the future.
I might care more about these new experimental features if they could at least get the basics down pat.
Right now, KDE 4 is an unusable mess compared to its legacy. I've no need for a social OS if it obstructs my ability to work, like the rest of this checklist-designed WM.
Yay Canada! From a time when our leaders weren't U.S. lapdogs...
My, how things have degenerated over the century.
You do realize all you need to be a "doctor" is a Ph.d. It could be a Ph.d. in liberal arts, for all we know.
I'm sure everyone here knows at least one useless "doctor" who is certifiably retarded.
That depends. There are some of us, many former AMD fanboys, who today refuse to buy AMD after a series of failures in performance, quality control and chipset support. This coming from a guy who was damn proud of blowing a chunk of cash on an Athlon FX chip back in the day, and then again when the X2 was launched.
Today's AMD products share the name but not the legacy. Sure, they're cheaper than Intel's offerings, but there are those of us who want/need more than the bargain SKU, and that's where Intel breaks away from the rest.
Monopoly issues aside, Intel must still be making a profit despite "throwing money away" for these bribes or price dumps or whatever they're accused of - otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. That means the are indeed able to compete on price, which suggests their products aren't so out-of-whack with the market as you seem to imply.
I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise. Any idiot can set up a web server and mail drop, and they are free to use the same tools we use. It takes a bit more dedication to do a kickass job of it, and that's where we stand.
If a business feels "threatened" by the GPL, maybe they need to stop selling artificially-rarefied bits. That business model has been slowly collapsing for nearly 30 years.
The laws exist to prevent governments from competing with private businesses. It's a good and bad law, for various reasons, but wouldn't the obvious solution be to spin this out into a separate company ?
I don't know how it is down in the states, but here in Canada we have "Crown Corporations", which are semi-independent gigs owned by the government, but they have their own budgets and are not dependent on taxes - they have their own revenue streams. If I am not mistaken, they are wholly owned by the government but not publicly funded - at least not past the start-up phase.
Most of them are "privatey" types of businesses like industrial associations, artistic ventures (galleries/colleges), things that are too narrow to be treated as a federal service, but not necessarily profitable enough to be left to the free market (or to keep it out of greedy hands).
It sounds like that format would suit this type of ISP. It takes a pretty big investment to get started, but not so much for steady-state operation. Let the gov't give them the initial boost, then kick them out of the next and let them fly.
It's nice that ATI keeps releasing value-conscious products for those cheap gamers, but it is rather short-sighted and sensational to say that "a $99 card is all you need". Ten years ago, a $99 card was enough to play Quake 3 in medium-res medium-graphics. The one thing these graphics companies are good at is marketing. They have figured out how to maximize their sales, and that meant crippling the used resale value of their products to capture the idiotic low-end market. They sell these crippled products in big box stores to people who don't know better, to get them hooked on the upgrade treadmill. Six months later, Joe Stupid is a budding gamer, wants to play Call of Duty 8 and drops another $99 on that month's cheapo card. After a couple of years, Joe has upgraded 3-4 times, while he could have spent the $300 up front for a good card that would still have some fight left in it.
I have seen this cycle far too often. I dunno, maybe these people suck at math, but they're clearly not saving money in the end. Some people are happy with their $99 card and keep it for the lifetime of their PC, but those people would have been just as happy with "free" Intel integrated graphics. Gamers always want more.
That's also why we've seen a ton of movement in the low-end segment, but very little progress at the top end. If you spent $500 on graphics two years ago, you're still within 10-15% of today's $500 graphics solutions, and that's just pathetic.
Giving shit-tons of money to the nation's largest corporations is not quite socialism. Socialism would have been to form a government-owned corporation to deploy and operate the network.
200 billion could have bought a LOT of fibre and routing gear, but instead it bought a bunch of hookers, yachts and bonuses.
So what if there are N social networking sites ? N-5 will fail within a year or two. If you must buy into the social-media hype, pick one or two big ones and stick with them. There's little point in having profiles on obscure sites if you're not going to be an active member, right ?
Your numbers are an order of magnitude off. On a server where the population is estimated at 15k, I keep seeing the same 150 or so people in end-game raids. Pretty much everyone knows each other and their alts.
If we (falsely) assume the two factions are roughly equal, that means only 2% of my faction is actively playing end-game content. New people hit the level cap, and old people get bored and leave (until the next patch), overall it is quite stable.
I've been playing on-and-off since the the game was launched, so I consider myself a relatively experienced player. When I started my most recent toon, it took me in excess of two months to reach the level cap, playing very aggressively with all the quest-helping tools available to me. A casual player would probably last a whole year without seeing end-game content, and they would still enjoy the experience thoroughly.
Raiding is considered hardcore, but the leveling/questing process is not. You just gang up with whoever you find nearby, start chatting and kill some snakes.
Even more casual than WoW is LoTRO. They made that game so gratuitous, it's actually a turn-off for more hardcore players because there's simply not enough of a challenge/reward benefit in playing well. Even complete imbeciles can get by if they socialize a bit and find equally inept questing buddies.
There is a place for all of these games in the market. Hardcore gamers play the casual stuff too, in fact I am quite fond of small arcadey flash games; they're a nice break from the pressure of competitive raiding.
Actually, I'd say PC gaming has "thrived" largely because of DRM, because the DRM on consoles is much harder to defeat than on the PC. Sure, they have modchips, but that requires:
1. a modchip costing anywhere from $50 to $150
2. someone with the soldering skills to install it, and I mean those solder points are TINY... also costs $50 to $150
3. patience to rip/download, patch, burn, test, worry about bricking etc
On the PC, you just Google the name and you'll get no-cd patches and torrents on the first result page.
Now, the pirate market isn't a directly profitable one, for obvious reasons, but it certainly generates a TON of buzz. The best way to tell if your game has been cracked, is to notice the HUGE jump in web traffic to your site. Those eyeballs have to be worth something...
So, in other words, it's still a figment of their imagination ? I thought these sounded useless at 18 seconds, but 18 microseconds makes them REALLY useless.
Our R&D dollars at work...
That's fine, because you upload a 2nd copy to Youtube for all eyes to see. Sure, it will get taken down, but at least they'll have to fight for it.
So these guys came up with a bootloader that screws with its child process (the OS), and they're calling that an exploit ? I guess "grub" would be considered an exploit too, by their chicken-little standards.
These two Kumar clowns are really just shills for Trusted Computing, fear-mongering in exchange for a little kickback from the related fascist orgs.
Why the hell would anyone go through the trouble of pulling a motherboard-specific cache exploit, if the program is already running with root privs ?
How about "cp hax0red-vmlinz /boot" and have a nice day...
The "research" only leads to working around the content filters, posting material the site operators explicitly do not want.
It would be more interesting if there was a productive application for this knowledge. Putting Rihanna songs on Youtube does not fit my idea of "productive".
It's only a matter of time, after all, the U.S. and China are the two largest military powers on the globe. Sooner or later, one of them will get cocky...
If your students laugh at that, I think they should quit the program and choose something more appropriate for their shuttered little minds.
"Programmer's high" is a very real thing, but I think you have to be a true geek to appreciate it. You have to enjoy programming in the first place, in order to hit that feedback loop where coding gets you excited, and the rush helps you code faster/better, until you reach peak performance and the perfect buzz. Those asshats "just doing I.T. for the money" and making our lives miserable, they'll never get it.
I actually find laptops help me focus, because they allow me to find the perfect cozy spot. I find a massively distracting environment is actually helpful, because once you train yourself to tune it all out, you can work in any environment, on command.
My best code was written in a strip club, slouched on a sofa in a far corner (as staff, so the girls left me alone - well, the smart ones anyway). Tune out the boobs and loud music, and you become unstoppable, because your conscious mind is focused while your unconscious mind is gleefully entertained and out of your way. I used to hit a trance-like state, it freaked people out a bit and they'd often watch in amazement as I stared into my code, perfectly still except for the fast rhythmic typing, I didn't even blink. It's the kind of mood where you get really pissed off when someone breaks you out of it; it's like being yanked out of sleep, everything jumps back to real-time and it takes a few moments to get your bearings.
In contrast, I can't code worth shit in an office environment. Phones ring, people chit-chat, nerf toys go flying, and the goddamned neon lighting just feels off-balance. Oh, and people feel the constant need to talk face-to-face when an IM or email would have sufficed. It's the worst environment ever for coding, at least for me.
It's times like this, we should take a step back and honestly evaluate FOSS solutions and how they compare with commercial offerings.
I do a LOT of network admin, in a mixed Windows, Linux and BSD environment. I can't really say that one is better than the other, because they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Windows can be a pain with its disjointed admin apps (hate AD), but it's pretty easy for our developers to VNC in and twiddle checkboxes in IIS. Linux is my favorite, because I know it well, but many things are needlessly obscure (like openssl command lines).
Windows costs money up front, but for non-CLI people the TCO could be lower due to the often self-explanatory interfaces. Linux is free, but I've invested quite a bit of time writing touchy-feely scripts to bridge the usability gap, and that time is money. Hell, half of my billable hours involve supporting clients' Linux servers. I haven't billed Windows support time in over 6 months.
Regarding Microsoft's marketing attacks on FOSS, we should see it as a challenge. We have the advantage of zero up-front cost, now we need to focus on reducing maintenance costs. Don't leave it up to individual distros to write the touchy-feely front-ends, we don't need 15 different network config apps, just one but a good one. I shouldn't have to learn contorted, error-prone MD/LVM commands just to set up and monitor disks, how about a little wizard to do it for me ? Thinks like that have a far greater impact on TCO than any sticker value. Enterprise deployments have a lifetime measured in years, it doesn't take a huge difference in maintenance costs to catch up with the difference in sticker price.
I think if game companies really wanted to get their value out of beta testers, they would implement simple, trivial changes like requiring a questionnaire after every N hours of game time. I'm not saying bug reports, but at least a 10-minute form where developers can ping the gamers for feedback, at least once or twice weekly.
If the kids can't take 10 minutes of their time to help improve the game they sink 20 hours a week into, they can fuck right off and wait for retail. They will buy it anyway, and if they don't, well fuck 'em. That's business.
The beginning ? MMOs have been around for decades.
Oh, you mean graphical big-money MMOs... riiight!
Joking aside, even "modern" MMOs have been around since the 90's. The formula has not changed much since Everquest. Perhaps the MMO producers are just too dense to actually think beyond their quarterly report.