It may be sensible, but it's intellectual. When I'm playing a game, I don't want to be thinking about the controller; I want to feel the right button on a pre-verbal pre-mathematical level.
Something I forgot in my original posting is that Sony *did* make the "arbitrary labels" mistake on the Dual Shock 2--the shoulder buttons. Whenever a game tells me to push L1 or R1 or L2 or R2, I have to stop and think which button is "1" and which is "2". (I also have problems with L and R, but I assume I'm unusual in that respect--I think it's to do with being ambidextrous.)
Part of the problem is that, as I mentioned, the L2/R2 buttons are the ones my fingers naturally rest on, so to me those are the "primary" buttons, and the little L1/R1 buttons I have to move my fingers to push are the secondary ones.
I own a GameCube, and have put in many hours playing games on it.
The Zelda "Ocarina of Time" GameCube disc refers to the buttons by label, without pictures of them. That was how I discovered how utterly useless the labels are. If you have to put up a picture of the button, you might as well skip the letter entirely.
I agree that the GameCube controller has excellent ergonomics. I wasn't criticizing it, I was using it as an example of the uselessness of letters as button labels.
You neglect the fact that the GameCube buttons are DIFFERENT SHAPES, which are typically shown in game. so X is curved one way, and Y the other. A is huge, and B is small.
And once you have to refer to the buttons by shape, you may as well forget the letters, as they're superfluous and unhelpful, which was my point.
I never had any problem remembering which button was which without looking at the controller. There's nothing convoluted about relating the symbols to the physical shape of the controller.
The fire buttons on the Dual Shock 2 are actually a minor masterpiece of ergonomics.
The circle button is the one next to the circular right edge of the joystick. The square button is the one next to the square center section. The triangle button points up. So all the symbols relate to the physical feel of the joystick in your hands, without looking at it, with the sole exception of "X" which I don't find hard to remember.
On the other hand, the GameCube controller does what he suggests, and labels each button with a letter. And as a result, every time a game tells me to push "X" or "Y" I have to pause, look down at the controller, and hunt for the symbols.
I dunno, maybe "X" and "Y" make sense to people who are long time Nintendo zea^H^H^Hfans, but I can't deal with it at all.
At the same time, he misses the really big problem with the Dual Shock 2, which is that the L1 and R1 buttons are impossible to keep fingers on comfortably while using the analog sticks. With my thumbs on the analog controls, my hands raise up and my trigger fingers naturally slide down to L2 and R2.
I did see a third party joystick which had L1 and R1 lower, and L2 and R2 banked slightly behind them, so that the natural grip was to have all four shoulder buttons under fingers, and thumbs on the analog sticks. Unfortunately, my experience of third party joysticks has been pretty negative.
I've already given the fatuous response, so let me go back and try a serious one.
After wasting valuable time every day on mundane problems and upgrades, I'm convinced it's cheaper to pay monthly than maintain our hardware and staff time.
Think about this statement for a minute. The costs you are identifying are hardware and software maintenance. Well, those aren't the costs you save by outsourcing your data center.
Outsourcing is about saving head count, and not needing expertise. Unless your hardware is way over capacity, there's probably no money to be saved there; so all you're hoping to do is save on hardware and software support costs. Well, there might be some savings there, but there's not a huge economy of scale, and remember that hosting companies are in business to make a profit. So, will the economy of scale of shared support offset the profit margin? I'd be doubtful.
Maybe what you ought to do is ask yourself WHY your support costs are so high. Start reducing some of those costs, don't just hide them in some third party contract. I've already pointed out one big cost in my other posting--Exchange servers. Depending on the size of your organization, it might be possible to keep the Exchange client, drop the Exchange server, drop in a replacement server, and consolidate half a dozen crashy Windows boxes into one reliable Linux server.
I know that, you know that, but Slashdot is full of people who have no idea what Notes can do. The fact that you can host 100,000 Exchange clients against a single Domino Mail server is lost on them.
There was an article in Harpers a while back about the cost in fossil fuels of our agricultural system. Scary stuff--basically, Peak Oil means drastic increases in food prices. Not only do you have the effect of massively increased transport costs, but the materials used to fertilize the crops become much more expensive too.
"Galapagos" by Anark had a robot creature with some kind of neural net, and you had to teach him to navigate around by providing him with appropriate stimuli and rewards.
It could get frustrating--sometimes if he hit a particular deadly obstacle too often, he'd become traumatized, and would then refuse to go anywhere near it, which could make the level impossible until you had allowed him to wander around and petted him and calmed him down.
Great game, though. I wish there were more like it.
How would a big company make money and the govt get taxes on a plant, that anyone could grow themselves in their backyard if legalized?
Do you grow vegetables and herbs in your back yard, or do you buy them from the supermarket?
Convenience has value. Assuming a low price, I'd probably buy my joints pre-rolled rather than have to deal with digging, pesticides, picking and washing, drying and rolling.
You seem to have some strange new usage of the word "negligent". Negligence would be failing to perform background checks.
Knowing someone's criminal record precisely and evaluating that their crimes should not have been crimes and do not indicate any likelihood of violent crime, that isn't negligence, it's laxness.
The trick is to get the job and start working before they know you are a felon, ALWAYS answer "no" to the felony question. [...] Finally, if you have been working a job and the felony comes up, BE HONEST.
I detect a bit of a contradiction here.
Personally, I would be quite happy to employ someone convicted of certain kinds of felony--for example, someone convicted of possession of LSD. However, lying to me would be an instant cause for dismissal.
Well, I have a similar story that I can vouch for as true...
Using BBC Micro computers attached to an Amcom E-net, I discovered that it was possible to write just a few more bytes than I supposedly had allocated to me as space. My guess is that there was some sort of K=1000 vs K=1024 bug between the client and server. The interesting thing was that the free space reported for my user area on the server then wrapped around to a very large 4-byte integer (or a negative integer which was reported as a large positive one).
I was naturally curious as to whether I really now had that much disk space, so I decided to write a quick program to create a very large disk file. I ran it, and it verified that yes, I did indeed now have megabytes of disk space. (This was back in the days when a floppy disk held 100K.)
So, I deleted the file, cleaned up my disk space, and thought no more of it.
The next day I heard that the next few users' disk areas on the server had mysteriously been overwritten with random junk...
So the only major differences between my story and the one you find implausible are (a) it was a server writing directly to disk without bounds checking because of a bug; and (b) I wrote junk to the file rather than digits of pi.
Even as late as the 80s it wasn't all that uncommon for PC software to write directly to the hard disk for speed reasons. So I rate the original story "plausible".
You need to bear in mind that copying more than 10 copies of a piece of software, worth more than $2,500 total, is a felony if it is done (a) deliberately and (b) with intent to violate copyrights.
The courts would have no trouble at all proving that you deliberately made the copies, knew you were violating copyright, and hence did it deliberately.
They would also have no problem proving that it was done for commercial gain, since it was clearly saving the company money. Hence, you would personally be liable for not just a huge fine, but also a term of up to 5 years in federal prison.
As someone else has already pointed out, your boss ordering you to do something illegal does not remove your liability under law. Doesn't matter if you have your orders in writing, you are still expected to obey the law or face the consequences.
Even if you don't report the company, sooner or later someone at Microsoft will notice that a company with N employees only has 1 licensed copy of Windows, and they'll ask questions. They've gone after public schools and charities, damn right they'll go after a profit-making company without hesitation.
So, the real question you should be asking yourself is: do you love your job so much that you are willing to risk an ass-pounding in prison to keep it for a while? Personally, I wouldn't take that risk.
That's the selfish argument. Now the altruistic argument.
By shielding the company from the true costs of proprietary software, you are aiding Microsoft. If your bosses had the choice of paying for Office or using OpenOffice, they might make a smart decision based on the actual merits of the products. Right now, you are assisting Microsoft in maintaining their monopoly.
In case you missed it, the current administration has made the US national debt explode like never before. The country is billions in the red, and a sizeable portion of that debt is owned by--you guessed it--China.
Furthermore, the financial security of practically every US firm that does anything involving electronics, is dictated by China. Apple computers are built in Taiwan and shipped straight from there to the purchaser. Even companies that don't go that far, depend utterly on a steady supply of "just-in-time" electronic components.
Any time China wanted to, they could call in the debts, blockade Taiwan, and destroy the US economy in the space of a week or so. Sure, we'd send the Navy out, but it'd be hard to keep a war running with an economy that looked like the Great Depression Mark 2.
Of course, China has no real interest in destroying the US economy. Much better for them to use their influence to control the people who count, and make sure that nothing stops the flow of wealth from us to them.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be sensible, but it's intellectual. When I'm playing a game, I don't want to be thinking about the controller; I want to feel the right button on a pre-verbal pre-mathematical level.
Something I forgot in my original posting is that Sony *did* make the "arbitrary labels" mistake on the Dual Shock 2--the shoulder buttons. Whenever a game tells me to push L1 or R1 or L2 or R2, I have to stop and think which button is "1" and which is "2". (I also have problems with L and R, but I assume I'm unusual in that respect--I think it's to do with being ambidextrous.)
Part of the problem is that, as I mentioned, the L2/R2 buttons are the ones my fingers naturally rest on, so to me those are the "primary" buttons, and the little L1/R1 buttons I have to move my fingers to push are the secondary ones.
I own a GameCube, and have put in many hours playing games on it.
The Zelda "Ocarina of Time" GameCube disc refers to the buttons by label, without pictures of them. That was how I discovered how utterly useless the labels are. If you have to put up a picture of the button, you might as well skip the letter entirely.
I agree that the GameCube controller has excellent ergonomics. I wasn't criticizing it, I was using it as an example of the uselessness of letters as button labels.
(Sheesh, some Nintendo fans are sooo touchy.)
And once you have to refer to the buttons by shape, you may as well forget the letters, as they're superfluous and unhelpful, which was my point.
I never had any problem remembering which button was which without looking at the controller. There's nothing convoluted about relating the symbols to the physical shape of the controller.
And a COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT one, considering we're talking about a mail server for Exchange clients.
The fire buttons on the Dual Shock 2 are actually a minor masterpiece of ergonomics.
The circle button is the one next to the circular right edge of the joystick. The square button is the one next to the square center section. The triangle button points up. So all the symbols relate to the physical feel of the joystick in your hands, without looking at it, with the sole exception of "X" which I don't find hard to remember.
On the other hand, the GameCube controller does what he suggests, and labels each button with a letter. And as a result, every time a game tells me to push "X" or "Y" I have to pause, look down at the controller, and hunt for the symbols.
I dunno, maybe "X" and "Y" make sense to people who are long time Nintendo zea^H^H^Hfans, but I can't deal with it at all.
At the same time, he misses the really big problem with the Dual Shock 2, which is that the L1 and R1 buttons are impossible to keep fingers on comfortably while using the analog sticks. With my thumbs on the analog controls, my hands raise up and my trigger fingers naturally slide down to L2 and R2.
I did see a third party joystick which had L1 and R1 lower, and L2 and R2 banked slightly behind them, so that the natural grip was to have all four shoulder buttons under fingers, and thumbs on the analog sticks. Unfortunately, my experience of third party joysticks has been pretty negative.
Perhaps they could follow the model of X11, and call it X110x0C.
Or maybe X11lambda s.lambda z.s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(s(z))))))))))))
Keep taking the laxitives.
I've already given the fatuous response, so let me go back and try a serious one.
Think about this statement for a minute. The costs you are identifying are hardware and software maintenance. Well, those aren't the costs you save by outsourcing your data center.
Outsourcing is about saving head count, and not needing expertise. Unless your hardware is way over capacity, there's probably no money to be saved there; so all you're hoping to do is save on hardware and software support costs. Well, there might be some savings there, but there's not a huge economy of scale, and remember that hosting companies are in business to make a profit. So, will the economy of scale of shared support offset the profit margin? I'd be doubtful.
Maybe what you ought to do is ask yourself WHY your support costs are so high. Start reducing some of those costs, don't just hide them in some third party contract. I've already pointed out one big cost in my other posting--Exchange servers. Depending on the size of your organization, it might be possible to keep the Exchange client, drop the Exchange server, drop in a replacement server, and consolidate half a dozen crashy Windows boxes into one reliable Linux server.
I know that, you know that, but Slashdot is full of people who have no idea what Notes can do. The fact that you can host 100,000 Exchange clients against a single Domino Mail server is lost on them.
I have no joke here, I just like saying "reliable and secure Exchange server".
There was an article in Harpers a while back about the cost in fossil fuels of our agricultural system. Scary stuff--basically, Peak Oil means drastic increases in food prices. Not only do you have the effect of massively increased transport costs, but the materials used to fertilize the crops become much more expensive too.
"Galapagos" by Anark had a robot creature with some kind of neural net, and you had to teach him to navigate around by providing him with appropriate stimuli and rewards.
It could get frustrating--sometimes if he hit a particular deadly obstacle too often, he'd become traumatized, and would then refuse to go anywhere near it, which could make the level impossible until you had allowed him to wander around and petted him and calmed him down.
Great game, though. I wish there were more like it.
Do you grow vegetables and herbs in your back yard, or do you buy them from the supermarket?
Convenience has value. Assuming a low price, I'd probably buy my joints pre-rolled rather than have to deal with digging, pesticides, picking and washing, drying and rolling.
I cry 'bullshit'. By that logic no immigrant would be allowed a job.
Perhaps you could say what it is that RIM devices do, that my phone with its IMAP client doesn't do using open standard protocols?
You seem to have some strange new usage of the word "negligent". Negligence would be failing to perform background checks.
Knowing someone's criminal record precisely and evaluating that their crimes should not have been crimes and do not indicate any likelihood of violent crime, that isn't negligence, it's laxness.
No it wasn't. The Amcom Enet was a competitor to the Acorn Eco-net which offered superior functionality. Google for it if you don't believe me.
I detect a bit of a contradiction here.
Personally, I would be quite happy to employ someone convicted of certain kinds of felony--for example, someone convicted of possession of LSD. However, lying to me would be an instant cause for dismissal.
Then again, I'm not a store owner...
Well, I have a similar story that I can vouch for as true...
Using BBC Micro computers attached to an Amcom E-net, I discovered that it was possible to write just a few more bytes than I supposedly had allocated to me as space. My guess is that there was some sort of K=1000 vs K=1024 bug between the client and server. The interesting thing was that the free space reported for my user area on the server then wrapped around to a very large 4-byte integer (or a negative integer which was reported as a large positive one).
I was naturally curious as to whether I really now had that much disk space, so I decided to write a quick program to create a very large disk file. I ran it, and it verified that yes, I did indeed now have megabytes of disk space. (This was back in the days when a floppy disk held 100K.)
So, I deleted the file, cleaned up my disk space, and thought no more of it.
The next day I heard that the next few users' disk areas on the server had mysteriously been overwritten with random junk...
So the only major differences between my story and the one you find implausible are (a) it was a server writing directly to disk without bounds checking because of a bug; and (b) I wrote junk to the file rather than digits of pi.
Even as late as the 80s it wasn't all that uncommon for PC software to write directly to the hard disk for speed reasons. So I rate the original story "plausible".
You need to bear in mind that copying more than 10 copies of a piece of software, worth more than $2,500 total, is a felony if it is done (a) deliberately and (b) with intent to violate copyrights.
The courts would have no trouble at all proving that you deliberately made the copies, knew you were violating copyright, and hence did it deliberately.
They would also have no problem proving that it was done for commercial gain, since it was clearly saving the company money. Hence, you would personally be liable for not just a huge fine, but also a term of up to 5 years in federal prison.
As someone else has already pointed out, your boss ordering you to do something illegal does not remove your liability under law. Doesn't matter if you have your orders in writing, you are still expected to obey the law or face the consequences.
Even if you don't report the company, sooner or later someone at Microsoft will notice that a company with N employees only has 1 licensed copy of Windows, and they'll ask questions. They've gone after public schools and charities, damn right they'll go after a profit-making company without hesitation.
So, the real question you should be asking yourself is: do you love your job so much that you are willing to risk an ass-pounding in prison to keep it for a while? Personally, I wouldn't take that risk.
That's the selfish argument. Now the altruistic argument.
By shielding the company from the true costs of proprietary software, you are aiding Microsoft. If your bosses had the choice of paying for Office or using OpenOffice, they might make a smart decision based on the actual merits of the products. Right now, you are assisting Microsoft in maintaining their monopoly.
In case you missed it, the current administration has made the US national debt explode like never before. The country is billions in the red, and a sizeable portion of that debt is owned by--you guessed it--China.
Furthermore, the financial security of practically every US firm that does anything involving electronics, is dictated by China. Apple computers are built in Taiwan and shipped straight from there to the purchaser. Even companies that don't go that far, depend utterly on a steady supply of "just-in-time" electronic components.
Any time China wanted to, they could call in the debts, blockade Taiwan, and destroy the US economy in the space of a week or so. Sure, we'd send the Navy out, but it'd be hard to keep a war running with an economy that looked like the Great Depression Mark 2.
Of course, China has no real interest in destroying the US economy. Much better for them to use their influence to control the people who count, and make sure that nothing stops the flow of wealth from us to them.
Maybe you don't, but some of us are very picky about where we choose to live our lives.
Hey, what say we decide to move you to Gary, Indiana?
I own land and a house, and I'm not allowed to vote. Next question?
Yeah, right. Watch "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" to see how well that will work.