Re:I've had this in my office for years
on
Sunlight in a Tube
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· Score: 1
A nifty little invention called a "win-dow".
That's great if you work along the edge of a building. Unfortunately, that approach has limited bandwidth due to size of window, angle of natural light and desk placement. The rest of us have had to wait for them to get the "mirrors" up.
1. IT'S ALL A BUNCH OF USELESS CRAP JUST AS IT WAS WHEN YOU FIRST RECEIVED IT!!
Hey! It has nostalgia value. I love being able to reminisce about the old Enlarge Your Penis offers I used to get back in the days when I could still look down and see it - damn programmer's gut.
Uh... I mean... I hear that's what others use it for.
No one is recieving these ads, no matter what any ham operator can do, or craigs list.
But what if aliens really need a bigger penis that drags on the floor? (Always thought that would be uncomfortable, rather than a good thing)
On the positive side, at least we're not supplying them with the greatest vitamin supplements ever. I for one do not welcome our vitamin enhanced overlords.
That's basically exactly how the railroads were built.
The land was siezed under eminent domain law - including the ten miles on either side. Strangely, a railroad doesn't take up a twenty mile wide strip of land - so why was it needed?
Because the fed declared its value as next to nothing, stole it (claimed eminent domain) and then gave it to the railroad companies as payment for building the railroads wherever the fed wanted them. The railroad companies then had ten miles of land on either side that now went for prime values as it was right next to a railroad.
That also explains why much of Palm Springs is the way it is today. The native Americans who got screwed by their reserve land being taken kicked up a fuss. To shut them up, they were given half the land back. It was divided in to a checkerboard and they could pick whichever squares they wanted. As it was all mountain and desert, the railroad company didn't give a damn - it just sold off the rest anyway. Today, most of those indian squares are right in the heart of Palm Springs and worth a fortune. It also explains why casinos keep popping up in random places through the mountains - wherever a square was left.
It's a fantastic idea. Drug companies make way too much money. Better the states take their patents to more fairly control them. The same goes for most other successful businesses and, indeed, private individuals, too. If the state takes them all over, they'd be able to distribute the assets far more fairly.
It's such a great idea, I can't believe no one's tried it before!
The only concern would be those damn Commie Ruskies trying to undermine our great system.
Game technology developers Havok and Epic both plan to introduce the newest iterations of their systems at this year's GDC... Epic Systems will be showing the Unreal Engine version 3
Unreal Engine 3 was demo'd at E3 last year. True, it hasn't been released yet but it's also not an introduction if the world has already been introduced to it.
I'm looking forward to the aftershow party where Michael Jackson will be unveiling his "Moonwalk", whatever that might be.
I type to fast, am dyslexic, and Slashdot doesn't have an integrated spellchecker...so sue me...
Most compilers don't come with spell checkers either - beyond basic syntax validity checking. Even fewer catch when you do the equivalent of misusing to/too - typoing on to an similar but different term.
Programming, more than most other careers requires a serious degree of accuracy and attention to detail. Sure, you can code messily and debug later but you'll end up with a lot of bugs slipping through.
Would I hire someone who uses the argument "I type too fast, am dyslexic, and there wasn't a spell checker... so sue me"? Most likely not - because I'd be waiting for them to turn around and tell me, "I type too fast, am dyslexic and the integrated debugger sucks... so sue me."
I got diagnosed dyslexic in highschool too. That, to me, is a justification to work even harder on catching those sorts of errors, not an excuse.
As a manager and an employer, that's the kind of attitude I want in my employees too - people who know that a difficulty is a reason to work harder, not an excuse to justify not bothering.
Does typing directly relate to programming? Perhaps not. But it does relate indirectly enough, in that it shows a general attitude.
Thus I go back to the original point: If nearly every other word in a sentence is incorrect on a 40 hour week - and excuses are made, I wouldn't want that person trying to code after an 80 hour one, turning in garbage, justifying it as "well, I was tired" rather than working that much harder to catch bugs and still wanting time and a half for those extra 40.
As a cost efficient business, it makes far more sense to keep two people on 40 hours at regular pay than one at 40 hours of regular and 40 of time and a half. Even if you're using the exempt justification, I'd argue that 80 hours of exhausted garbage, that's dismissed as "well, I was tired" is worse than 40 genuine hours.
It's a false economy from managers to try pushing those hours, just as it's a false economy for many workers to offer them when the quality of their output falls so low and all they have are justifications (read excuses).
Do you make $91,840? I don't think too many programmers are making 91k nowadays.
It's irrelevant whether they earn $5, $50 or $500 an hour. The point is that they agreed to work a roughly (accepting some deviation) 40 hour week for a given amount of money. And then the employer abused the exempt laws to force double or triple those hours out of them.
It's entirely valid for EA to turn around and say, "OK, we're offering $20/hour with up to 40 hours overtime at time and a half each week". The problem is, they're not. They're hiring people under one belief and then abusing the system to change the terms of their contract after it's been signed.
I'd bet no EA interview has ever gone, "OK, we'd like to put an offer on the table. $91840 a year for 80 hour weeks nine months of the year and 120 hour weeks the other three".
Yes, the employees do have the right to just up and leave. That said, changing jobs, especially in an industry that deliberately pays advance royalties in order to keep you trapped, where job seeking can take several months, etc. means taking a hit of several, if not tens of, thousands of dollars. So, no, you can't just easily leave once you realise they've screwed you.
I know I don't, it's expected that I work until the job is done.
That's all well and good, when you're doing a job. When they deliberately give you the work of two people then say "oh, you're exempt, make up the extra job's worth out of hours", it stops being about getting your job done and becomes about management abusing the exempt system to avoid hiring the staff levels they need.
A little overtime here and there, with some understanding on the odd Friday when you need to leave early is utterly different to a company that's built around the assumption that everyone will be forced to do 80 hours a week as a norm and 120 when you'd be doing 60.
The UK runs New Year science lectures every year. One I've always remembered went like this.
"There are just over a thousand of you in this room. Everyone on the left, think heads. Everyone on the right, think tails."
A coin was tossed. Heads.
"OK, everyone on the right, you're out. Now, of those who remain, everyone in the front, think heads, everyone in the back think tails."
The same coin was tossed. Tails.
And so it was repeated, ten times. Amazingly, one truly psychic individual in that room was so in tune with the coin that they managed to influence it (or it influenced them) ten times in a row. Irrefutable proof that some people are psychic and such phenominons exist.
Or pure, basic statistics - proving that humans are god awful at guessing standard probabilities and totally normal deviations from them.
Another classic example is the Birthday Problem. How many people do you have to have in a room before the odds are in favor of two people having the same birthday? Most people guess 182ish (half of 365 days in a year). The real figure's 23. p=365! / (365^n(365-n)!) Again, people really have no clue when it comes to basic probability.
So people will move to competition if the competition is more cost effective for them.
Exactly (potentially)...
The original question was, "Should Dual Cores Require Dual Licenses?"
There is no should or shouldn't.
A contract is an agreement between two parties. One sets forward their terms. The other agrees, steps away, or offers ammended terms for consideration. A license is essentially just a representation of that.
"Should" a dual core require dual licenses? There is no should. Oracle are allowed to consider it essential to them and for them to walk away if they don't get their way - and potential users are allowed to consider it too high a cost and walk away if they don't get their way too. Or they can come to an agreement.
Inevitably, one of three things happen:
Customers walk away, Oracle reconsiders its stance.
Customers suck it up, deciding it's still worth it, if less so. Oracle continues.
Oracle loses overall share but profits per customer are higher, thus they're willing to continue with fewer, more valuable customers.
From Oracle's perspective, why should customers halve their license fees by simply upgrading to dual cores? What happens in a few years when Intel has 8 core CPUs? Do they only get 1/8th revenues? As Oracle sees it, they're right.
From the customer's perspective, all they did was upgrade their hardware with a single piece. As they see it, they're right.
In the end, there's not really the notion of right or wrong. Just two different views. Ultimately, equilibrium will likely settle it somewhere in the middle.
I haven't had to set an IRQ or DMA setting in years. I've not had to mess with himem or any other arcane memory configs and boot disks, restarting my entire system each time I want to run a different game.
Each time I plug in a new joystick and it just works, each time I plug in a new digital camera and it's just there as another drive, each time I alt-tab out of a game, check a walkthrough website, then alt-tab back, I think back to the old days where code was really efficient and didn't do any wasteful background tasks like that.
I remember helping a friend with a C++ assignment, via the net. Each time, she'd have to exit her telnet program, run Borland's C++ compiler from the command line, check the output, quit the compiler, reopen telnet, reconnect to the MUD we were talking over, then describe what had happened. Now... She'd just show me what's on her desktop via Messenger while we kept chatting.
And if some cycles get used up doing weird UI gimicks that I'll never use - like making the UI scalable so the partially sighted can use it, I'm willing to trade that.
For all those reasons, I'm more than happy that my 2^(years / 1.5) faster PC "wastes" all of those extra cycles. And that's before we get on to things like built in spell checkers and real time code debugging as I write it.
I don't want a 2^(years / 1.5) faster experience. I want all those cycles put in to making things work closer and closer to how I just expect them to work.
I don't know about anyone else but I can't code 2^(years / 1.5) faster so I wouldn't be able to keep up with that damn responsive text based compiler. On the other hand, I am that much faster overall as I now call an API that adds all that "bloatware" instead of having to code my own damn mouse drivers, my code is largely debugged on the fly and I can't remember the last time I lost several days just trying to format a newsletter in to columns.
So, before saying the cycles are wasted:
Pick an every day but semi complex task that people do now. For example: For a homework project, go on line, grab half a dozen graphics and ten blocks of text from those websites, put them all in to a stylishly laid out newsletter format. Do that on a P4, then do it on an a DOS PC from 15 years ago.
See if matching the same quality of work doesn't take you 2^10 times as long on that old PC, assuming you can even do it at all.
Those cycles aren't wasted. Sure, we do the same basic tasks but we do them with vastly more flexability and don't have to waste days of our lives wrestling with configs to do what we now consider simple tasks. That's where the speed is.
I work for a game company. Here the numbers are up around 60-70%. As a demographic, we're mostly young tech obsessed males with a reasonably high disposable income.
Microsoft's campus is famous for hiring the extremely nerdy and presenting them with very high disposable incomes - particularly as the campus is also famous for promoting lifestyles that aren't condusive to other things that interfere with those disposable incomes (like dating, wives, kids, etc.)
I may be wrong, of course. It's entirely possible that the way Microsoft's campus is portrayed is entirely incorrect and they match the standard societal demographic and usage patterns. At a guess though, they don't - and so are going to have way over the norm levels of PDAs, MP3 players, etc. compared to say your typical office or engineering firm.
Someone who deliberately takes a contrary stance in order to garner satisfaction from the outrage of others.
On slashdot, a joke about Microsoft's legendary insecurity and unreliability is just that... a joke. Given the audience is well known for its dislike of MS, it is hard to see how it's a deliberately contrary troll. Karmawhoring, perhaps, but not a troll.
Going on to an extreme Christian discussion forum and stating, "God is great, pagans are bad." would be, at worst, seen as lame and immature - but certainly not trolling as it agrees with the prevailing view of that community.
NP Cube is promising some really ambitious things like a 40.000km gameworld without any loading
You know, with a fractal algorithm and high enough precision location variables, I could give you a ten bajillion square mile game world next week. It'd suck as there's be nothing to do there except go up and down some hills and mountains, maybe occasionally swim across an ocean or screen, but it'd be huge.
A large gameworld is utterly meaningless without content. Gameplay is about density of content. Once you have a good density, sure, more is always good.
I'd rather play a game with 4km^2 of content with five really well considered pieces of content per meter than a 40,000 km^2 world with one automatically placed generic feature every 10m. Sure, it may technically have even more content than the smaller world but the quality and density of content will make me choose the smaller one.
At the end of the day, do you really want to play in a huge 1:1 simulation of Nebraska or would you have more fun at a much smaller, well designed theme park?
Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in...
He went on to state, "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees use more than 640k of ram. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in..."
Because, after all, if someone at Microsoft doesn't recognise people's usage patterns and habits, it can't be true.
Remember, this is the same guy who stated, "3) Pay whatever big money it'll take to get... Elton John...[and] Shania Twain to work on designing an entirely new player from the ground up."link
I don't know what world he lives in. I don't think I want to. I do know they'd have fabulous, sequined and ruffled, faux 17th century french MP3 players with a disneyfied country theme. Kind of like Euro Disney, when you think about it. That's enough to tell me I don't want to live there.
Just because a source contradicts the original, it doesn't make it a good one.
Next you'll be challenging the commonly accepted logic:
If your car is speeding towards a pedestrian, don't hit the brakes.
Studies show that fast moving cars, if the breaks are hit, end up further along than they were at the instant the break was hit. Clearly brakes cause cars to travel further!
I have this unit and I really like it (for what I do with it). It's just not the right solution for pure wireless...
Negear makes the really pleasantly affordable Netgear MP101. You can usually find it for about $70 at Best Buy every so often (vs. the normal full price of $150).
It syncs up to UPnP so Windows' free media broadcasting stuff works. It works with Rhapsody - so you can have direct access to 400,000 tracks. It's a really nice solution.
It also works both wired and wireless.
The reason I'm recommending against it is because it suffers from stupidly long handshakes over the network and equally stupidly long searches for servers etc. Wired, as I use it, it's not a problem - it happens once and then you're pretty much done. Wireless... Expect to spend five minutes screwing with its menus each time a telephone rings and briefly interrupts the 2.4 GHz range. Or when someone walks through the signal (yes, that's enough to upset it just enough to trigger a reconnect). Or when there's a brief 1/10th second power outage. You name it, it'll want to spend five minutes reconnecting. It'll drive you nuts.
Microsoft started the digital music explosion?
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BBC Bill Gates Interview
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And we feel very good about the dialogue we have had for many years with the content industries. How we have struck the right balance there and that is why you see an explosion in digital music.
Uh... Microsoft and the content industries (RIAA in this case) are responsible for the explosion in digital music?
Back in my reality, the RIAA were dragged there kicking and screaming while Napster started the illegal method and iTunes started the legal one.
Microsoft never managed to do anything save follow the competition... Ripping from CD got added to media player only after third party MP3 ripping software became popular. Even then, Microsoft initially crippled it with DRM and no one was interested. They finally removed compulsory DRM when they realised no one was using thier product because of it, due to there being dozens of more free options out there. Then Microsoft added CD burning - and even there used an already well established third party. They created an online music store to follow iTunes. Finally there were the portable players - where a bunch of not very useable solutions came out, then Apple created its [over priced but very damn cool so we payed it anyway] iPod - and Microsoft followed up by releasing its standard a while later.
During all of this time, the RIAA tried to bury its head in the sand and hope that suing twelve year old girls and grandmothers would make it go away. When that didn't work, they tried the most restrictive methods they could come up with, fighting the hardware and software industries every time they suggested giving people something free enough that it might be used over the less legal competition. Eventually, when provided with no other option, they accepted iTunes but only at prices where most 15 or 16 track albums were more expensive than buying the hard copy and ripping it yourself.
So, forgive me for not seeing, in my universe, quite how Microsoft and the content industry created that explosion. At best, Microsoft chased the explosion while the content industry were dragged there fighting every step of the way.
It's somewhat like a construction firm turning up to the tsunami hit areas and talking about how they worked with the locals to really start an explosion in land clearance and new construction.
...and then it was also a TV series that Adams was also involved with.
"...mostly due to some uneven performances. But it looks like the film is not a complete bastardization of Adams' work."
Given that the TV series definitely had some uneven performances, uneven sets, uneven effects and uneven everything else... Given that it was written by a man who himself regarded much of his own life as uneven... Given that the books were based of the radio scripts made at the BBC in an era known more for enthusiasm of attempt than genuine quality... Given that the subsequent computer game varied from the brilliant to the utterly frustrating...
Yeah, uneven would be incredibly true to Adams and not a bastardization in the least. Uneven, more than just about any other term, sums up exactly what the whole Hitchhiker's legacy has been. If the preformances were universally good [or universally bad], then it would have been a bastardization.
Slashdot Mirror
A nifty little invention called a "win-dow".
That's great if you work along the edge of a building. Unfortunately, that approach has limited bandwidth due to size of window, angle of natural light and desk placement. The rest of us have had to wait for them to get the "mirrors" up.
Seems to me that with ~two~ high end cards like 6800GTs, cooling would be even more of an issue. What are they doing to deal with the extra heat?
Marketing it as the smallest, most powerful, space heater that money can buy?
1. IT'S ALL A BUNCH OF USELESS CRAP JUST AS IT WAS WHEN YOU FIRST RECEIVED IT!!
Hey! It has nostalgia value. I love being able to reminisce about the old Enlarge Your Penis offers I used to get back in the days when I could still look down and see it - damn programmer's gut.
Uh... I mean... I hear that's what others use it for.
No one is recieving these ads, no matter what any ham operator can do, or craigs list.
But what if aliens really need a bigger penis that drags on the floor? (Always thought that would be uncomfortable, rather than a good thing)
On the positive side, at least we're not supplying them with the greatest vitamin supplements ever. I for one do not welcome our vitamin enhanced overlords.
That's basically exactly how the railroads were built.
The land was siezed under eminent domain law - including the ten miles on either side. Strangely, a railroad doesn't take up a twenty mile wide strip of land - so why was it needed?
Because the fed declared its value as next to nothing, stole it (claimed eminent domain) and then gave it to the railroad companies as payment for building the railroads wherever the fed wanted them. The railroad companies then had ten miles of land on either side that now went for prime values as it was right next to a railroad.
That also explains why much of Palm Springs is the way it is today. The native Americans who got screwed by their reserve land being taken kicked up a fuss. To shut them up, they were given half the land back. It was divided in to a checkerboard and they could pick whichever squares they wanted. As it was all mountain and desert, the railroad company didn't give a damn - it just sold off the rest anyway. Today, most of those indian squares are right in the heart of Palm Springs and worth a fortune. It also explains why casinos keep popping up in random places through the mountains - wherever a square was left.
It's a fantastic idea. Drug companies make way too much money. Better the states take their patents to more fairly control them. The same goes for most other successful businesses and, indeed, private individuals, too. If the state takes them all over, they'd be able to distribute the assets far more fairly.
It's such a great idea, I can't believe no one's tried it before!
The only concern would be those damn Commie Ruskies trying to undermine our great system.
Game technology developers Havok and Epic both plan to introduce the newest iterations of their systems at this year's GDC... Epic Systems will be showing the Unreal Engine version 3
Unreal Engine 3 was demo'd at E3 last year. True, it hasn't been released yet but it's also not an introduction if the world has already been introduced to it.
I'm looking forward to the aftershow party where Michael Jackson will be unveiling his "Moonwalk", whatever that might be.
I type to fast, am dyslexic, and Slashdot doesn't have an integrated spellchecker...so sue me...
Most compilers don't come with spell checkers either - beyond basic syntax validity checking. Even fewer catch when you do the equivalent of misusing to/too - typoing on to an similar but different term.
Programming, more than most other careers requires a serious degree of accuracy and attention to detail. Sure, you can code messily and debug later but you'll end up with a lot of bugs slipping through.
Would I hire someone who uses the argument "I type too fast, am dyslexic, and there wasn't a spell checker... so sue me"? Most likely not - because I'd be waiting for them to turn around and tell me, "I type too fast, am dyslexic and the integrated debugger sucks... so sue me."
I got diagnosed dyslexic in highschool too. That, to me, is a justification to work even harder on catching those sorts of errors, not an excuse.
As a manager and an employer, that's the kind of attitude I want in my employees too - people who know that a difficulty is a reason to work harder, not an excuse to justify not bothering.
Does typing directly relate to programming? Perhaps not. But it does relate indirectly enough, in that it shows a general attitude.
Thus I go back to the original point: If nearly every other word in a sentence is incorrect on a 40 hour week - and excuses are made, I wouldn't want that person trying to code after an 80 hour one, turning in garbage, justifying it as "well, I was tired" rather than working that much harder to catch bugs and still wanting time and a half for those extra 40.
As a cost efficient business, it makes far more sense to keep two people on 40 hours at regular pay than one at 40 hours of regular and 40 of time and a half. Even if you're using the exempt justification, I'd argue that 80 hours of exhausted garbage, that's dismissed as "well, I was tired" is worse than 40 genuine hours.
It's a false economy from managers to try pushing those hours, just as it's a false economy for many workers to offer them when the quality of their output falls so low and all they have are justifications (read excuses).
Do you make $91,840? I don't think too many programmers are making 91k nowadays.
It's irrelevant whether they earn $5, $50 or $500 an hour. The point is that they agreed to work a roughly (accepting some deviation) 40 hour week for a given amount of money. And then the employer abused the exempt laws to force double or triple those hours out of them.
It's entirely valid for EA to turn around and say, "OK, we're offering $20/hour with up to 40 hours overtime at time and a half each week". The problem is, they're not. They're hiring people under one belief and then abusing the system to change the terms of their contract after it's been signed.
I'd bet no EA interview has ever gone, "OK, we'd like to put an offer on the table. $91840 a year for 80 hour weeks nine months of the year and 120 hour weeks the other three".
Yes, the employees do have the right to just up and leave. That said, changing jobs, especially in an industry that deliberately pays advance royalties in order to keep you trapped, where job seeking can take several months, etc. means taking a hit of several, if not tens of, thousands of dollars. So, no, you can't just easily leave once you realise they've screwed you.
I know I don't, it's expected that I work until the job is done.
That's all well and good, when you're doing a job. When they deliberately give you the work of two people then say "oh, you're exempt, make up the extra job's worth out of hours", it stops being about getting your job done and becomes about management abusing the exempt system to avoid hiring the staff levels they need.
A little overtime here and there, with some understanding on the odd Friday when you need to leave early is utterly different to a company that's built around the assumption that everyone will be forced to do 80 hours a week as a norm and 120 when you'd be doing 60.
It[']s really to bad because pervious to the change I would regualrly work 55 hour weeks
If this is yuor atenshion too detale when back down to fourty huors, mayb 55 was a mistaik?
Not normally one for being a spelling/grammar Nazi but it has validity in the midst of a discussion about how long hours effect accuracy.
Was I the only one who misread that as:
There is a pretty interesting site (uses flesh)
You say that now. Just wait until they get bigger, whiter, and bounce.
I am a slashdot uid not a number!
Are you aware this is slashdot you are posting your reasoned, level-headed and thoughtful post to?
Damn. I thought it was Fark. My bad.
The UK runs New Year science lectures every year. One I've always remembered went like this.
"There are just over a thousand of you in this room. Everyone on the left, think heads. Everyone on the right, think tails."
A coin was tossed. Heads.
"OK, everyone on the right, you're out. Now, of those who remain, everyone in the front, think heads, everyone in the back think tails."
The same coin was tossed. Tails.
And so it was repeated, ten times. Amazingly, one truly psychic individual in that room was so in tune with the coin that they managed to influence it (or it influenced them) ten times in a row. Irrefutable proof that some people are psychic and such phenominons exist.
Or pure, basic statistics - proving that humans are god awful at guessing standard probabilities and totally normal deviations from them.
Another classic example is the Birthday Problem. How many people do you have to have in a room before the odds are in favor of two people having the same birthday? Most people guess 182ish (half of 365 days in a year). The real figure's 23. p=365! / (365^n(365-n)!) Again, people really have no clue when it comes to basic probability.
So people will move to competition if the competition is more cost effective for them.
Exactly (potentially)...
The original question was, "Should Dual Cores Require Dual Licenses?"
There is no should or shouldn't.
A contract is an agreement between two parties.
One sets forward their terms. The other agrees, steps away, or offers ammended terms for consideration. A license is essentially just a representation of that.
"Should" a dual core require dual licenses? There is no should. Oracle are allowed to consider it essential to them and for them to walk away if they don't get their way - and potential users are allowed to consider it too high a cost and walk away if they don't get their way too. Or they can come to an agreement.
Inevitably, one of three things happen:
Customers walk away, Oracle reconsiders its stance.
Customers suck it up, deciding it's still worth it, if less so. Oracle continues.
Oracle loses overall share but profits per customer are higher, thus they're willing to continue with fewer, more valuable customers.
From Oracle's perspective, why should customers halve their license fees by simply upgrading to dual cores? What happens in a few years when Intel has 8 core CPUs? Do they only get 1/8th revenues? As Oracle sees it, they're right.
From the customer's perspective, all they did was upgrade their hardware with a single piece. As they see it, they're right.
In the end, there's not really the notion of right or wrong. Just two different views. Ultimately, equilibrium will likely settle it somewhere in the middle.
I haven't had to set an IRQ or DMA setting in years. I've not had to mess with himem or any other arcane memory configs and boot disks, restarting my entire system each time I want to run a different game.
Each time I plug in a new joystick and it just works, each time I plug in a new digital camera and it's just there as another drive, each time I alt-tab out of a game, check a walkthrough website, then alt-tab back, I think back to the old days where code was really efficient and didn't do any wasteful background tasks like that.
I remember helping a friend with a C++ assignment, via the net. Each time, she'd have to exit her telnet program, run Borland's C++ compiler from the command line, check the output, quit the compiler, reopen telnet, reconnect to the MUD we were talking over, then describe what had happened. Now... She'd just show me what's on her desktop via Messenger while we kept chatting.
And if some cycles get used up doing weird UI gimicks that I'll never use - like making the UI scalable so the partially sighted can use it, I'm willing to trade that.
For all those reasons, I'm more than happy that my 2^(years / 1.5) faster PC "wastes" all of those extra cycles. And that's before we get on to things like built in spell checkers and real time code debugging as I write it.
I don't want a 2^(years / 1.5) faster experience. I want all those cycles put in to making things work closer and closer to how I just expect them to work.
I don't know about anyone else but I can't code 2^(years / 1.5) faster so I wouldn't be able to keep up with that damn responsive text based compiler. On the other hand, I am that much faster overall as I now call an API that adds all that "bloatware" instead of having to code my own damn mouse drivers, my code is largely debugged on the fly and I can't remember the last time I lost several days just trying to format a newsletter in to columns.
So, before saying the cycles are wasted:
Pick an every day but semi complex task that people do now. For example: For a homework project, go on line, grab half a dozen graphics and ten blocks of text from those websites, put them all in to a stylishly laid out newsletter format. Do that on a P4, then do it on an a DOS PC from 15 years ago.
See if matching the same quality of work doesn't take you 2^10 times as long on that old PC, assuming you can even do it at all.
Those cycles aren't wasted. Sure, we do the same basic tasks but we do them with vastly more flexability and don't have to waste days of our lives wrestling with configs to do what we now consider simple tasks. That's where the speed is.
Do you work for Microsoft?
I work for a game company. Here the numbers are up around 60-70%. As a demographic, we're mostly young tech obsessed males with a reasonably high disposable income.
Microsoft's campus is famous for hiring the extremely nerdy and presenting them with very high disposable incomes - particularly as the campus is also famous for promoting lifestyles that aren't condusive to other things that interfere with those disposable incomes (like dating, wives, kids, etc.)
I may be wrong, of course. It's entirely possible that the way Microsoft's campus is portrayed is entirely incorrect and they match the standard societal demographic and usage patterns. At a guess though, they don't - and so are going to have way over the norm levels of PDAs, MP3 players, etc. compared to say your typical office or engineering firm.
Definition of a troll:
Someone who deliberately takes a contrary stance in order to garner satisfaction from the outrage of others.
On slashdot, a joke about Microsoft's legendary insecurity and unreliability is just that... a joke. Given the audience is well known for its dislike of MS, it is hard to see how it's a deliberately contrary troll. Karmawhoring, perhaps, but not a troll.
Going on to an extreme Christian discussion forum and stating, "God is great, pagans are bad." would be, at worst, seen as lame and immature - but certainly not trolling as it agrees with the prevailing view of that community.
NP Cube is promising some really ambitious things like a 40.000km gameworld without any loading
You know, with a fractal algorithm and high enough precision location variables, I could give you a ten bajillion square mile game world next week. It'd suck as there's be nothing to do there except go up and down some hills and mountains, maybe occasionally swim across an ocean or screen, but it'd be huge.
A large gameworld is utterly meaningless without content. Gameplay is about density of content. Once you have a good density, sure, more is always good.
I'd rather play a game with 4km^2 of content with five really well considered pieces of content per meter than a 40,000 km^2 world with one automatically placed generic feature every 10m. Sure, it may technically have even more content than the smaller world but the quality and density of content will make me choose the smaller one.
At the end of the day, do you really want to play in a huge 1:1 simulation of Nebraska or would you have more fun at a much smaller, well designed theme park?
Robert Scoble--one of the people mentioned in the article--has already written about it. "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees own an MP3 player. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in...
... Elton John ...[and] Shania Twain to work on designing an entirely new player from the ground up." link
He went on to state, "Personally there's no way that 80% of our employees use more than 640k of ram. I don't know what world that source is living in, but it's not the one I live in..."
Because, after all, if someone at Microsoft doesn't recognise people's usage patterns and habits, it can't be true.
Remember, this is the same guy who stated, "3) Pay whatever big money it'll take to get
I don't know what world he lives in. I don't think I want to. I do know they'd have fabulous, sequined and ruffled, faux 17th century french MP3 players with a disneyfied country theme. Kind of like Euro Disney, when you think about it. That's enough to tell me I don't want to live there.
Just because a source contradicts the original, it doesn't make it a good one.
A 40Gb writable device that easily attaches to one's computer.
Yeah, but Microsoft knows that all of their PCs run Windows and hence will never stay up long enough to write that kind of data anyway.
Security through ineptitude. It's the new rage.
Next you'll be challenging the commonly accepted logic:
If your car is speeding towards a pedestrian, don't hit the brakes.
Studies show that fast moving cars, if the breaks are hit, end up further along than they were at the instant the break was hit. Clearly brakes cause cars to travel further!
I have this unit and I really like it (for what I do with it). It's just not the right solution for pure wireless...
Negear makes the really pleasantly affordable Netgear MP101. You can usually find it for about $70 at Best Buy every so often (vs. the normal full price of $150).
It syncs up to UPnP so Windows' free media broadcasting stuff works. It works with Rhapsody - so you can have direct access to 400,000 tracks. It's a really nice solution.
It also works both wired and wireless.
The reason I'm recommending against it is because it suffers from stupidly long handshakes over the network and equally stupidly long searches for servers etc. Wired, as I use it, it's not a problem - it happens once and then you're pretty much done. Wireless... Expect to spend five minutes screwing with its menus each time a telephone rings and briefly interrupts the 2.4 GHz range. Or when someone walks through the signal (yes, that's enough to upset it just enough to trigger a reconnect). Or when there's a brief 1/10th second power outage. You name it, it'll want to spend five minutes reconnecting. It'll drive you nuts.
And we feel very good about the dialogue we have had for many years with the content industries. How we have struck the right balance there and that is why you see an explosion in digital music.
Uh... Microsoft and the content industries (RIAA in this case) are responsible for the explosion in digital music?
Back in my reality, the RIAA were dragged there kicking and screaming while Napster started the illegal method and iTunes started the legal one.
Microsoft never managed to do anything save follow the competition... Ripping from CD got added to media player only after third party MP3 ripping software became popular. Even then, Microsoft initially crippled it with DRM and no one was interested. They finally removed compulsory DRM when they realised no one was using thier product because of it, due to there being dozens of more free options out there. Then Microsoft added CD burning - and even there used an already well established third party. They created an online music store to follow iTunes. Finally there were the portable players - where a bunch of not very useable solutions came out, then Apple created its [over priced but very damn cool so we payed it anyway] iPod - and Microsoft followed up by releasing its standard a while later.
During all of this time, the RIAA tried to bury its head in the sand and hope that suing twelve year old girls and grandmothers would make it go away. When that didn't work, they tried the most restrictive methods they could come up with, fighting the hardware and software industries every time they suggested giving people something free enough that it might be used over the less legal competition. Eventually, when provided with no other option, they accepted iTunes but only at prices where most 15 or 16 track albums were more expensive than buying the hard copy and ripping it yourself.
So, forgive me for not seeing, in my universe, quite how Microsoft and the content industry created that explosion. At best, Microsoft chased the explosion while the content industry were dragged there fighting every step of the way.
It's somewhat like a construction firm turning up to the tsunami hit areas and talking about how they worked with the locals to really start an explosion in land clearance and new construction.
...and then it was also a TV series that Adams was also involved with.
"...mostly due to some uneven performances. But it looks like the film is not a complete bastardization of Adams' work."
Given that the TV series definitely had some uneven performances, uneven sets, uneven effects and uneven everything else... Given that it was written by a man who himself regarded much of his own life as uneven... Given that the books were based of the radio scripts made at the BBC in an era known more for enthusiasm of attempt than genuine quality... Given that the subsequent computer game varied from the brilliant to the utterly frustrating...
Yeah, uneven would be incredibly true to Adams and not a bastardization in the least. Uneven, more than just about any other term, sums up exactly what the whole Hitchhiker's legacy has been. If the preformances were universally good [or universally bad], then it would have been a bastardization.