Communication (and the understanding that comes with it) really is the key to dealing with most situations that leave you pissed off.
Every single company I have ever worked for in the IT industry, going back over about a decade now, has had asshole management. Every single one has had groups of pissed of grunts (or groups of lower mgmt as I progressed). I finally reached the point where I stopped and wondered what the common link was?
People who work in IT are, now the gold diggers are gone, generally slightly obsessive, lacking in social skills, nerd types.
The managers have next-to no social skills. The grunts have next-to no social skills. Add in to that the grunts used to be treated like gold dust and have entitlement complexes while the management hated that and are now getting their revenge.
The thing is, you can't change the management. Now the economy is tanked, they know you have no leverage over them. You can get together and talk about mass walkouts but the reality is, unless everyone goes, they can hire new and retrain - and probably for less than they're paying you. And you know that at least one of your indignant group will buckle for the job security. Walkouts are a nice dream for taking the power back but they're just that. There goes your one form of leverage.
So, if you can't change them, what can you change? Well, there's the other side of the equation. If shit ain't going to get better, it's probably time to learn to deal with shit.
Find a good anger management book. It'll help you understand that anger is just stress manifesting with an anger trigger. Turning stress in to anger just leaves you pissed off and stressed. It'll help you learn to rephrase situations for yourself so you can dissipate that stress better.
One of the main things they'll talk about is the fallacy of entitlement. The notion of "should"s. You're probably reading this thinking, "Why should I have to be the one to change?!" Simple question for you: Honestly now, is there anything you can do to get them to change? Try thinking of three situations in your life where you've been yelled at and told you "should" change and have actually done so - do you think it'll suddenly work for your managers? If you can't get them to change, do you really want to just stay in the same stressful, unhappy situation?
Get a book, take a class, whatever, on anger management. It'll teach you to dissipate the anger so the next thing that comes up doesn't seem quite so bad. Once you're chilled, you might find better ways to get the change you want. Even if you don't, at least the fucked up job will be more tolerable.
OK, you're a modern school kid, you spend your evernings typing out emails on one of those evil keyboard things.
Now you're a school kid of twenty years ago, spending your evenings kicking about a football, watching TV and doing whatever else it is that young men do alone in their bedrooms at night.
At what point are you doing less writing by hand? Kids never spent their evenings writing long volumes by hand. Save for a few who had pretentions towards being authors or poets, most simply did other things. They simply never did it.
It's like complaining that kids using email means they never learn to fly helecopters.
I guess it's time to move. I was thinking about 51 degrees (pretty much, in fact exactly) right on the equator, south of Grenwich, London. Maybe then I'll be able to remember my own damn address.
You know, if they're going to impose such a completely non-memorable system on people, why not make everyone learn to sketch a barcode representation of their addresses? Then it'd be even easier for the post office to automatically sort mail.
"No mum, it's thick bar, thick bar, thin bar, double bar."
for one agree with his apathy... it's denying the sort of media circus that could result. Think about how much better all our lives would have been if the media had chose apathy in the OJ case (I know I'm going OT here) and just reported "OJ on trail for murder" and then proceeded onto the next story.
Think how much better our lives would have been had the media just reported, "Terrorists attacked the World Trade center today." and then left it largely at that, with maybe a little more on the regional news.
The end result would have been that Osama and the next dozen Osamas would realise terrorism doesn't get publicity and they would have been unable to secure their goals of changing the American way of life.
Instead, the media saw it as an excuse to print money. The president saw it as an excuse to shore up a shaky presidency. Both capitalised on it as much as possible. The end result being that terrorists now know that while fighting the US conventionally is a joke, given their limited resources, acts of terror will be kindly relayed, over and over, to the American people by its media and its president. You don't get much of a better bang for your buck than that.
Why, it's almost as if their desire to abuse 9/11 for their own popularity has condemned us to decades more terrorism.
A similar argument is made about America and guns in Bowling For Columbine - playing to the country's fear, exaserbating the problem, gets more ratings at the expense of both public safety and any semblance of reality.
The question comes though: Are the media responsible for hyping for profit or are the people responsible for reacting in such a way and therefore making it profitable in the first place?
Thank God!!! Maybe next time France is invaded they will call somebody else.
At the rate things are going right now, the next time France is invaded it will probably be *by* the USA.
Last time France was invaded, it was by the USA. No, I'm not talking about the liberation, either.
A convenient fact left out of American history books is that after Poland was invaded and the US refused to help, after Germany entered France and the USA refused to help, after Paris fell and the USA refused to help... The USA invaded a bunch of Free French islands.
That's right, the first thing that the kind, wonderful USA that so selflessly liberated France did after the invasion of France was invade a chunk of what was left, securing a bunch of useful Atlantic fishing islands that were left over from colonial times.
Of course we don't like to talk about that when baiting France for refusing to join in the second oil war. After all, were they to support the USA after 9/11 as well as the USA supported them in 1940, their first act would have been to invade Hawaii.
A pile of CDs ($2), several hours of an IT professional's time (mine) spent backing stuff up (3x$30-50/hr), the pain in the ass when you managed to miss something vs. that shiny new hard drive ($80).
On a straight time and cost equation, it's reached the point where it's now cheaper to buy a new drive and have a complete backup whenever I want one (plus a fully booting system I know at least semi-worked whenever I break my main one). Six months, or however much, later, if I'm sure I don't need that backup version, instead of a bunch of full CDRs, I've got an extra drive for a toy Linux box.
Then again, the geek factor of getting to fiddle with the minutae kicks in. (Although the extra drives for toy Linux boxes appeal)
If I'm short of time, buying a new drive ultimately works out cheaper. If I've not met my geekiness quota recently, fiddling's more fun.
Of course I was. I was thirteen at the time, in to D&D and computer programming, and couldn't get any girls.
Had they had video labs at my highschool and file sharing networks, back at the end of the 80s, I'd have been the fat kid making lightsaber noises while waving a broomstick around.
We were all supposed to get married while the dot com thing was sexy and exciting to women. Like Taco did and like I did. Then, when the bubble burst, we would already have wives and could still get sex (well, if married people still wanted to, at least).
I guess you were the one working Saturdays and getting the other memo, the one about TPS reports, right? You did get the memo? Why don't I just send you another copy.
...I remember my teacher saying "Computers do exactly what they're told, not necessarily what you want them to do."
D&D summed it up for me, years ago, with the wish spell: At its purest, it's too powerful to give to players - they'll unbalance and destroy the game. However, it can be balanced by giving them exactly what they ask for.
"A demon lord approaches you out of the shadows." "I cast 'wish' - I wish for a +100 sword of almighty vorpal type slayingness." "The sword appears in the demon's hand. He thanks you for it, then hits you."
Writing good code is like making a good wish. All you can do is try to cover as many eventualities as possible. The problem is, code gets really slow to run and even slower to write when you have to add out of bounds checks on every argument, error handling and reporting, garbage collection and all the rest. Even then, there'll always be some twisted scenario that you didn't know could exist so didn't plan for. So most people just give up, wish for the damn sword and hope the PC/Dungeon Master doesn't have too evil an imagination this time.
So, the logic behind AMD's naming structure was that, while their cores ran slower, their names gave you an idea of what speed a comparable Intel chip would run at. That meant a 2000+, while running significantly slower, produced about the same output as a 2GHz Pentium, etc.
Now they have the 3200+ which runs... well a bit slower than the 3Ghz Pentium. It also runs at a 2.2Ghz core. So nowhere in any of its design does it really justify a 3200+ moniker. 3000+ is closer with 2950+ possibly being the most accurate, according to the benchmarks.
If the n+ meaning has nothing to do with real world speeds, core speeds, relative speeds or any other kind of speed anymore, why don't they stop worry and just get on with calling it the "Bajillion Ultra Hertz!" model (note the important exclamation marks)?
You know, I need to get myself a V8+ sticker for a Pinto.
Age itself isn't really the issue. Any negative arguments are generalisations. All you have to do is convince them that while the stereotype may be true about most older coders, you're not most older coders, you're you.
Then you point out how your age means you've got experience to bring to the fore and, most of all, you've learned to deal with issues maturely. One of the main problems in a lot of "younger" software companies is that all the early 20s coders think it's an entitlement and get in to rages at every bit of stupidity, bad mouthing people, talking about how the company sucks, moving on etc.
Once you've been around, you realise every company has its compliment of bad managers etc. and even that sometimes those bad managers are actually perfectly good managers, you personally just happen not to have the full picture. You work well anyway, rather than complaining. That's a huge bonus to an employer.
The question is, and one I find myself asking as I get older, do you want to put up with the same crap the younger coders do? Or do older coders fit the stereotype because, funnily enough, as you get older, you learn more and realise coding can be a sucky lifestyle?
That $50,000 job is great for a single guy but suddenly it's not so great for someone with a house and kids.
Those long hours just before a release are fine for someone who just has to go back to an empty room but a major issue when you have to pick the kids up, take them to ballet and then put them to bed.
The sudden change of deadlines that mean you're working over the weekend and you're not told until Friday afternoon don't give the flexability you need for family.
Having a conference during the school holidays that the company HAS to have a demo ready for becomes an issue if it's the only time your kids can go on holiday with you.
Maternity leave? Sure, it's a protected right. You still expect to be getting the same promotions as the guy who isn't six months behind on the latest technologies?
Your wrists starting to ache? The young coders can burn through five years before their carpal tunnel syndrome gets really bad. Now you're older and know how much pain it can cause, are you prepared to burn your body up like they are?
Coding is a high paying lifestyle. It's also a pretty abusive one to your body and your family life over the long term. Most older people aren't prepared to put up with that once they're old enough to realise. Most younger guys are too stupid to realise. Knowing what it entails, if you're prepared to put up with it anyway, there's still work.
Still, if I were to recommend for a month of gaming freedom, the main constraint would be games you can play and be done with in that time. After all, this is kind of assuming life has to go back to normal.
Max Payne - The writing is so beyond noir it's laughable but it's actually an incredible story, great graphics, the excellent implementation of bullet time and, most importantly of all, it only takes about 10 hours to complete. You'll get a great gaming experience that, even for someone who's out of practice, is completable in the time.
Ghost Recon - If you want a feel for how much first person shooters have advanced since Doom, this is the one I'd recommend. Half Life, Deus Ex, etc. are great games but, as a newbie, you'll be bogged down in them long after she gets back. Ghost Recon is a great game with small enough missions that you can complete it in a week or two.
Civilisation 3 - If you have no twitchy reflexes left but are older and want something that's absorbing, Civ 3 is an incredible game. It'll just keep you sucked in long after she gets back.
The Sims - Cheesy as it may sound, everyone loves The Sims for the first two weeks. It takes most people about that long before it all starts to feel samey. During that time, you'll actually have a fascinating, also non-twitchy, gaming experience.
Grand Theft Auto 3 - Possibly too immature but then it's strangely satisfying for its immaturity and you can get a pretty good fix in the time you have.
All of the above are old enough that you can buy a current $100 graphics card (Radeon 9100, GeForce 4200/5200 etc.) and play them well, even if you haven't been keeping up to date with gaming hardware.
Ones I'd argue against...
Any MMORPG - You'll either not get in to it enough or be so hooked you'll never leave. Either way, it's not a good one month only idea.
Any major RPG - The Baldur's Gate series are incredible but you'll likely not finish them. Same goes for Neverwinter Nights.
Quake 3, Unreal Tournament etc. - They're probably way too twitchy for someone who's out of practice. It'll just be depressing playing them against hopped up 13 year olds.
Uh, 50% income tax? Maybe 30% on a healthy salary... the highest is around 43% above ~$100,000 CAD.
You're all slaves to your communist taxing ideals in Canada. I moved to the U.S. to get away from that shit in Britain. Here a man can go out, work, pay minimal taxes, then bring home the majority of his wage!
I mean, look at me. As a married man in California, I hardly pay any state and federal taxes. I am free from the yoke of high taxation. Granted, there's this weird medicare tax, the social security payments, the health insurance, the dental insurance, the eye care program and the minimal 401K payments.
But even with all of those things, only 43% of my paycheck disappears before I ever see it. Now compare that to the insane 43% you... have to... uh... pay in Canada. Oh, shit!
You mean I pay just as much by the time all the things that aren't officially labeled as taxes get taken out, yet I still have to live in a country which takes all of that away from me the moment I can't pay?
Funny how most Americans, when talking about how much freedom they get from taxation, miss how they will take that money from you. They're just better at dressing it up as non-optional optional payments, rather than taxes.
Good thing I moved here for my wife and the weather then, not the wonderful liberal taxes. The beer still sucks though. *grins*
Hmm, even with a list as long as that, I missed a couple.
Online - Discovering muds. I played NannyMUD but the specific one is almost meaningless. It's just about the discovery of playing in a persistent universe with dozens of others from all over the world.
Max Payne - For that dark storyline. The writing was the worst any game has ever had, yet somehow it was perfect. Maybe it's being recently married, but having your wife and baby killed off and there's nothing you can do, no matter how you play through, then the constant spiral of betrayal and discovery... I play it through every six months or so and enjoy it much the same way I would a movie or a great book.
I've been playing home computer games pretty much since there were home computer games. I've skipped the really old stuff (defender etc.) because most of them are too obscure and tended to go by different names as they were cloned from platform to platform.
Anyway, in rough chronological order...
Repton Infinity - For being the first game with any complexity that was really modable. You could design graphics, levels, animations and even code.
Elite - For stealing not just weeks or months but years of my childhood.
1940 Their Finest Hour, The Battle Of Brittain - For endless playing, over and over, while making igniting a complete fascination in that period of history. I'd tried Falcon 1 through 3, FS4, F-15 Strike Eagle II but that was the first flight sim that really had everything just perfect for me.
Wing Commander - Despite it being a little over blown as a claim, it still was close enough to an interactive movie (compared to what was around) that it really did make you feel like a sci-fi movie star.
Gunship 2000 - For, to this day, being the only flight sim where you could control a whole diverse unit of choppers in much the same way as you can a diverse unit of troops in Ghost Recon.
Alone In The Dark - Primitive polygons now. But at the time, it was the scariest game ever. Especially when you first realised that there were some things you couldn't possibly kill, you just had to run. You weren't an indestructable hero, you were just plain scared.
Doom - For having an interface so simple that you were the game. It was the first game where your fingers just rested on a set of keys, never moving, yet you really felt like you were interacting. That was the genius of the game - you weren't playing it, you were it. That and introducing deathmatches (damn we killed a lot of early LANs) and [excluding Repton Infinity] mods.
No One Lives Forever - For, despite games like Thief trying to do it before, being the first game to really capture me and make me feel like I could play a game my own way, using stealth instead of insane violence. It was also funny as all hell.
Aliens Vs. Predator 2 - For unbelievable balancing. Every time you think you've found an invincible trick, some means of defeating it comes up.
Civ 3 - Because now I can totally understand why South East Asia is important, why Hitler went for Blitzkriegs, why Europe advanced in to industrialisation faster. It's taught me more than any game I've ever known. That and every quick session always turns in to four hours.
Ghost Recon - It finally did what the D-Day part of Medal Of Honor on high difficulty hinted at but then abandonned on later levels. You finally get a military sim where you're scared of getting shot because one shot is all it takes. Much like Gunship 2000, you finally get a good system for controlling multiple troops, which makes it possible to plan really advanced strategies, rather than just rush'n'shoot.
Planetside - OK, I'm biased, I work for SOE. Still, being one part of epic battles, being able to define my own roles (a lone stealth assassin amongst the maelstrom; a scout pilot; a sniper searching out perfect ridgeline positions), it's honestly been proving good enough for me to regularly find something new to just go "Wow!" over. Most of all though, it's the fun of the even more endless than AvP2 discussions over what makes for the perfect squad, the perfect tactics.
WHAT?! Five grand for a "decent" guitar and amp? Outstanding guitars and amps can be had for less than half of that figure. Much less, in fact.
True. And yet look at the number of Les Pauls that appear to be used by just about any given band. Look at the custom shop PRS' that guys like Santana play. You can get a great set up for less. And yet somehow a lot (granted, not all) of successful bands still seem to use the expensive stuff.
From my experience, that $100 acoustic I started on sounded great and I do still love the feeling it invokes. Yet it doesn't compare to the $350 ones I was looking at replacing it with. Even less does it compare to the $700 one I ended up getting. Funny how the guys selling guitars know that all they have to do is put the next level of guitar up in to your hands, off a discount and you'll find some way to squeeze up because that little bit of difference makes all the difference.
True, you can get by on cheaper gear, particularly if you want a dirty grunge sound. And yet, strangely, the evidence points to [most] successful acts not sticking to the cheap stuff. Maybe it's vanity, maybe it's something subtler in the quality of the result that affects their sales, I honestly couldn't say - it's too hard to quantify.
And every Kurt Kobain with his repeatedly rebuilt guitar or Brian May with his homebuild, I can point out two or three Santanas with custom shop guitars. (Granted, that often negates the price as they're given them)
now multiply by about five for all the variations used on a typical album.
Unless you'd rather use something like a VG-8, which can produce just about any sound one would want, not to mention the fact that guitarists (real ones) usually develop their own sound, and part of that is their choice of guitar and amp, effects, strings, etc.
Read a guitar mag, just about any of them will do. Now find a modelling amp review. The conclusions are always the same. It may be good, it may be astonishingly so, it may come very close, yet it never quite does.
Again, perhaps it's splitting hairs, yet the numbers of bands that made it big (or even make it big if you want to argue modelling amps haven't been around long enough) each way still implies that there's something in the traditional route. It's just like solid state has been around for decades, yet most people with the choice still choose valve. Maybe it is just ego, it's still a fact.
When I was about twelve, I justified that I couldn't be bothered to learn piano because computers and midi were where it was at. Anything I could realistically be taught on the piano, I could do on a PC and an 8 bit sound blaster. Funnily enough, as I've got older, I've realised how stupid I was back then and how tempting it is to claim, "If you're l33t enough, you can do anything on your home set up."
Yet, I keep coming back to the same point: If that's true, how come there aren't dozens of successful home recording bands out there? And don't try and blame the RIAA (you think they wouldn't love to slash their costs?
As for the other points, the other reply has already refuted them admirably.
I'm really looking forward to my free as in beer copies of "Algol-68 In A Nutshell", "Colossus, the missing manuals" and "BBC BASIC: The Definitive Reference"
Seriously, the day after an article on VIC20 catridges is posted on games.slashdot.org, it's pretty hard to claim that resources on out of date hardware/software aren't going to be pretty useful to the retro gamers in another thirty years. Imagine how much easier it would be, building emulators, writing new Atari games, etc. if you have an O'Reilly level guide from the era.
"$495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version.
why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Because that's one program. Install it on your Alienware PC and you'll still create terrible sounding crap.
Now pay rent on a building. Properly set it up for acoustics. Add perfectly matched, pro level monitors. Add some seriously expensive sound cards that can work with multiple sources and no lag. Add a set of mics at a couple of grand a pop. Add a mixing desk that connects to pro-tools so you can actually make smooth fine controls. Add a decent guitar/amp (about $5k), now multiply by about five for all the variations used on a typical album. Add a drum kit and a lot of heads (Dave Grohl reportedly got through a set of heads per track when recording Nevermind). Add pro-grade cabling so your sound doesn't get muddied up. Add a PC capable of dealing with it all, fast SCSI drives and all.
Those are just the bits and pieces I can think of, just being an amateur guitarist who never records but does spend too much time in guitar shops. I'd imagine there's a hell of a lot more.
All of a sudden, the $495 seems insignificant. Even the $15,000 for the pro version.
Yes, you can record music with pro-tools and a typical home PC. A lot of people do. And it sounds fairly good compared to recordings of say the 1950s.
Just because one aspect gets a bit cheaper, doesn't mean the process gets cheaper. It just means that the capabilities get higher. I remember paying $200 for 4mb of ram, $3,000 for a 16mhz 286. Now I can get a hundred times that power for about $250 yet I still buy $3,000 PCs. How can that be?
And even if it's not due for a while, the Halo series continues to be a serious killer app for Microsoft's console.
In other news, Sony are hyping Final Fantasy 17 for the PS4. While they accept that neither game nor console are out yet, they don't see why Microsoft should have all the fun claiming killer apps that aren't anywhere near release.
The graphics are reported to be in a different league to anything X-Box users have ever dreamed of.
Speaking of which, isn't it time to declare Apple dead?;)
They died a good half a decade ago, back before they released the iMac and iPod, G4s and OS-X, when they were so screwed Microsoft was giving them money to keep going just so it couldn't be acused of being a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Communication (and the understanding that comes with it) really is the key to dealing with most situations that leave you pissed off.
Every single company I have ever worked for in the IT industry, going back over about a decade now, has had asshole management. Every single one has had groups of pissed of grunts (or groups of lower mgmt as I progressed). I finally reached the point where I stopped and wondered what the common link was?
People who work in IT are, now the gold diggers are gone, generally slightly obsessive, lacking in social skills, nerd types.
The managers have next-to no social skills. The grunts have next-to no social skills. Add in to that the grunts used to be treated like gold dust and have entitlement complexes while the management hated that and are now getting their revenge.
The thing is, you can't change the management. Now the economy is tanked, they know you have no leverage over them. You can get together and talk about mass walkouts but the reality is, unless everyone goes, they can hire new and retrain - and probably for less than they're paying you. And you know that at least one of your indignant group will buckle for the job security. Walkouts are a nice dream for taking the power back but they're just that. There goes your one form of leverage.
So, if you can't change them, what can you change? Well, there's the other side of the equation. If shit ain't going to get better, it's probably time to learn to deal with shit.
Find a good anger management book. It'll help you understand that anger is just stress manifesting with an anger trigger. Turning stress in to anger just leaves you pissed off and stressed. It'll help you learn to rephrase situations for yourself so you can dissipate that stress better.
One of the main things they'll talk about is the fallacy of entitlement. The notion of "should"s. You're probably reading this thinking, "Why should I have to be the one to change?!" Simple question for you: Honestly now, is there anything you can do to get them to change? Try thinking of three situations in your life where you've been yelled at and told you "should" change and have actually done so - do you think it'll suddenly work for your managers? If you can't get them to change, do you really want to just stay in the same stressful, unhappy situation?
Get a book, take a class, whatever, on anger management. It'll teach you to dissipate the anger so the next thing that comes up doesn't seem quite so bad. Once you're chilled, you might find better ways to get the change you want. Even if you don't, at least the fucked up job will be more tolerable.
OK, you're a modern school kid, you spend your evernings typing out emails on one of those evil keyboard things.
Now you're a school kid of twenty years ago, spending your evenings kicking about a football, watching TV and doing whatever else it is that young men do alone in their bedrooms at night.
At what point are you doing less writing by hand? Kids never spent their evenings writing long volumes by hand. Save for a few who had pretentions towards being authors or poets, most simply did other things. They simply never did it.
It's like complaining that kids using email means they never learn to fly helecopters.
It seems like I still see a lot of wheel reinvention going on, even with the wealth of code and information now available on the Net.
SCO
"A petition campaigning for someone to accurately recreate DOAX: Beach Volleyball is expected to be up and running within the week."
Have you any idea of the amount of silicon it would take to power that?
I guess it's time to move. I was thinking about 51 degrees (pretty much, in fact exactly) right on the equator, south of Grenwich, London. Maybe then I'll be able to remember my own damn address.
You know, if they're going to impose such a completely non-memorable system on people, why not make everyone learn to sketch a barcode representation of their addresses? Then it'd be even easier for the post office to automatically sort mail.
"No mum, it's thick bar, thick bar, thin bar, double bar."
I'm waiting for a version with seriously inteligent AI and high quality VR before I plug MY bio energy in.
for one agree with his apathy... it's denying the sort of media circus that could result. Think about how much better all our lives would have been if the media had chose apathy in the OJ case (I know I'm going OT here) and just reported "OJ on trail for murder" and then proceeded onto the next story.
Think how much better our lives would have been had the media just reported, "Terrorists attacked the World Trade center today." and then left it largely at that, with maybe a little more on the regional news.
The end result would have been that Osama and the next dozen Osamas would realise terrorism doesn't get publicity and they would have been unable to secure their goals of changing the American way of life.
Instead, the media saw it as an excuse to print money. The president saw it as an excuse to shore up a shaky presidency. Both capitalised on it as much as possible. The end result being that terrorists now know that while fighting the US conventionally is a joke, given their limited resources, acts of terror will be kindly relayed, over and over, to the American people by its media and its president. You don't get much of a better bang for your buck than that.
Why, it's almost as if their desire to abuse 9/11 for their own popularity has condemned us to decades more terrorism.
A similar argument is made about America and guns in Bowling For Columbine - playing to the country's fear, exaserbating the problem, gets more ratings at the expense of both public safety and any semblance of reality.
The question comes though: Are the media responsible for hyping for profit or are the people responsible for reacting in such a way and therefore making it profitable in the first place?
Last time France was invaded, it was by the USA. No, I'm not talking about the liberation, either.
A convenient fact left out of American history books is that after Poland was invaded and the US refused to help, after Germany entered France and the USA refused to help, after Paris fell and the USA refused to help... The USA invaded a bunch of Free French islands.
That's right, the first thing that the kind, wonderful USA that so selflessly liberated France did after the invasion of France was invade a chunk of what was left, securing a bunch of useful Atlantic fishing islands that were left over from colonial times.
Of course we don't like to talk about that when baiting France for refusing to join in the second oil war. After all, were they to support the USA after 9/11 as well as the USA supported them in 1940, their first act would have been to invade Hawaii.
For me it comes down to a balance...
A pile of CDs ($2), several hours of an IT professional's time (mine) spent backing stuff up (3x$30-50/hr), the pain in the ass when you managed to miss something vs. that shiny new hard drive ($80).
On a straight time and cost equation, it's reached the point where it's now cheaper to buy a new drive and have a complete backup whenever I want one (plus a fully booting system I know at least semi-worked whenever I break my main one). Six months, or however much, later, if I'm sure I don't need that backup version, instead of a bunch of full CDRs, I've got an extra drive for a toy Linux box.
Then again, the geek factor of getting to fiddle with the minutae kicks in. (Although the extra drives for toy Linux boxes appeal)
If I'm short of time, buying a new drive ultimately works out cheaper. If I've not met my geekiness quota recently, fiddling's more fun.
I've been in your game and you're a dick. ;)
Of course I was. I was thirteen at the time, in to D&D and computer programming, and couldn't get any girls.
Had they had video labs at my highschool and file sharing networks, back at the end of the 80s, I'd have been the fat kid making lightsaber noises while waving a broomstick around.
Dude, I'm sorry, I thought you got the memo...
We were all supposed to get married while the dot com thing was sexy and exciting to women. Like Taco did and like I did. Then, when the bubble burst, we would already have wives and could still get sex (well, if married people still wanted to, at least).
I guess you were the one working Saturdays and getting the other memo, the one about TPS reports, right? You did get the memo? Why don't I just send you another copy.
...I remember my teacher saying "Computers do exactly what they're told, not necessarily what you want them to do."
D&D summed it up for me, years ago, with the wish spell: At its purest, it's too powerful to give to players - they'll unbalance and destroy the game. However, it can be balanced by giving them exactly what they ask for.
"A demon lord approaches you out of the shadows."
"I cast 'wish' - I wish for a +100 sword of almighty vorpal type slayingness."
"The sword appears in the demon's hand. He thanks you for it, then hits you."
Writing good code is like making a good wish. All you can do is try to cover as many eventualities as possible. The problem is, code gets really slow to run and even slower to write when you have to add out of bounds checks on every argument, error handling and reporting, garbage collection and all the rest. Even then, there'll always be some twisted scenario that you didn't know could exist so didn't plan for. So most people just give up, wish for the damn sword and hope the PC/Dungeon Master doesn't have too evil an imagination this time.
"And what actor/game combination are you secretly yearning for?"
Anthony Hopkins, reprising his role as Hannibal, in any Mary Kate And Ashley title.
So, the logic behind AMD's naming structure was that, while their cores ran slower, their names gave you an idea of what speed a comparable Intel chip would run at. That meant a 2000+, while running significantly slower, produced about the same output as a 2GHz Pentium, etc.
Now they have the 3200+ which runs... well a bit slower than the 3Ghz Pentium. It also runs at a 2.2Ghz core. So nowhere in any of its design does it really justify a 3200+ moniker. 3000+ is closer with 2950+ possibly being the most accurate, according to the benchmarks.
If the n+ meaning has nothing to do with real world speeds, core speeds, relative speeds or any other kind of speed anymore, why don't they stop worry and just get on with calling it the "Bajillion Ultra Hertz!" model (note the important exclamation marks)?
You know, I need to get myself a V8+ sticker for a Pinto.
Age itself isn't really the issue. Any negative arguments are generalisations. All you have to do is convince them that while the stereotype may be true about most older coders, you're not most older coders, you're you.
Then you point out how your age means you've got experience to bring to the fore and, most of all, you've learned to deal with issues maturely. One of the main problems in a lot of "younger" software companies is that all the early 20s coders think it's an entitlement and get in to rages at every bit of stupidity, bad mouthing people, talking about how the company sucks, moving on etc.
Once you've been around, you realise every company has its compliment of bad managers etc. and even that sometimes those bad managers are actually perfectly good managers, you personally just happen not to have the full picture. You work well anyway, rather than complaining. That's a huge bonus to an employer.
The question is, and one I find myself asking as I get older, do you want to put up with the same crap the younger coders do? Or do older coders fit the stereotype because, funnily enough, as you get older, you learn more and realise coding can be a sucky lifestyle?
That $50,000 job is great for a single guy but suddenly it's not so great for someone with a house and kids.
Those long hours just before a release are fine for someone who just has to go back to an empty room but a major issue when you have to pick the kids up, take them to ballet and then put them to bed.
The sudden change of deadlines that mean you're working over the weekend and you're not told until Friday afternoon don't give the flexability you need for family.
Having a conference during the school holidays that the company HAS to have a demo ready for becomes an issue if it's the only time your kids can go on holiday with you.
Maternity leave? Sure, it's a protected right. You still expect to be getting the same promotions as the guy who isn't six months behind on the latest technologies?
Your wrists starting to ache? The young coders can burn through five years before their carpal tunnel syndrome gets really bad. Now you're older and know how much pain it can cause, are you prepared to burn your body up like they are?
Coding is a high paying lifestyle. It's also a pretty abusive one to your body and your family life over the long term. Most older people aren't prepared to put up with that once they're old enough to realise. Most younger guys are too stupid to realise. Knowing what it entails, if you're prepared to put up with it anyway, there's still work.
NASA Sending Probe to Saturn
And I thought it was just a damn uncomfortable car seat. I feel so violated!
(For Europeans, Saturn is a US car company that make relatively... let's call them "efficient"... cars.)
A previous thread covered a lot of games that moved players.
Still, if I were to recommend for a month of gaming freedom, the main constraint would be games you can play and be done with in that time. After all, this is kind of assuming life has to go back to normal.
Max Payne - The writing is so beyond noir it's laughable but it's actually an incredible story, great graphics, the excellent implementation of bullet time and, most importantly of all, it only takes about 10 hours to complete. You'll get a great gaming experience that, even for someone who's out of practice, is completable in the time.
Ghost Recon - If you want a feel for how much first person shooters have advanced since Doom, this is the one I'd recommend. Half Life, Deus Ex, etc. are great games but, as a newbie, you'll be bogged down in them long after she gets back. Ghost Recon is a great game with small enough missions that you can complete it in a week or two.
Civilisation 3 - If you have no twitchy reflexes left but are older and want something that's absorbing, Civ 3 is an incredible game. It'll just keep you sucked in long after she gets back.
The Sims - Cheesy as it may sound, everyone loves The Sims for the first two weeks. It takes most people about that long before it all starts to feel samey. During that time, you'll actually have a fascinating, also non-twitchy, gaming experience.
Grand Theft Auto 3 - Possibly too immature but then it's strangely satisfying for its immaturity and you can get a pretty good fix in the time you have.
All of the above are old enough that you can buy a current $100 graphics card (Radeon 9100, GeForce 4200/5200 etc.) and play them well, even if you haven't been keeping up to date with gaming hardware.
Ones I'd argue against...
Any MMORPG - You'll either not get in to it enough or be so hooked you'll never leave. Either way, it's not a good one month only idea.
Any major RPG - The Baldur's Gate series are incredible but you'll likely not finish them. Same goes for Neverwinter Nights.
Quake 3, Unreal Tournament etc. - They're probably way too twitchy for someone who's out of practice. It'll just be depressing playing them against hopped up 13 year olds.
Uh, 50% income tax? Maybe 30% on a healthy salary... the highest is around 43% above ~$100,000 CAD.
You're all slaves to your communist taxing ideals in Canada. I moved to the U.S. to get away from that shit in Britain. Here a man can go out, work, pay minimal taxes, then bring home the majority of his wage!
I mean, look at me. As a married man in California, I hardly pay any state and federal taxes. I am free from the yoke of high taxation. Granted, there's this weird medicare tax, the social security payments, the health insurance, the dental insurance, the eye care program and the minimal 401K payments.
But even with all of those things, only 43% of my paycheck disappears before I ever see it. Now compare that to the insane 43% you... have to... uh... pay in Canada. Oh, shit!
You mean I pay just as much by the time all the things that aren't officially labeled as taxes get taken out, yet I still have to live in a country which takes all of that away from me the moment I can't pay?
Funny how most Americans, when talking about how much freedom they get from taxation, miss how they will take that money from you. They're just better at dressing it up as non-optional optional payments, rather than taxes.
Good thing I moved here for my wife and the weather then, not the wonderful liberal taxes. The beer still sucks though. *grins*
Hmm, even with a list as long as that, I missed a couple.
Online - Discovering muds. I played NannyMUD but the specific one is almost meaningless. It's just about the discovery of playing in a persistent universe with dozens of others from all over the world.
Max Payne - For that dark storyline. The writing was the worst any game has ever had, yet somehow it was perfect. Maybe it's being recently married, but having your wife and baby killed off and there's nothing you can do, no matter how you play through, then the constant spiral of betrayal and discovery... I play it through every six months or so and enjoy it much the same way I would a movie or a great book.
I've been playing home computer games pretty much since there were home computer games. I've skipped the really old stuff (defender etc.) because most of them are too obscure and tended to go by different names as they were cloned from platform to platform.
Anyway, in rough chronological order...
Repton Infinity - For being the first game with any complexity that was really modable. You could design graphics, levels, animations and even code.
Elite - For stealing not just weeks or months but years of my childhood.
1940 Their Finest Hour, The Battle Of Brittain - For endless playing, over and over, while making igniting a complete fascination in that period of history. I'd tried Falcon 1 through 3, FS4, F-15 Strike Eagle II but that was the first flight sim that really had everything just perfect for me.
Wing Commander - Despite it being a little over blown as a claim, it still was close enough to an interactive movie (compared to what was around) that it really did make you feel like a sci-fi movie star.
Gunship 2000 - For, to this day, being the only flight sim where you could control a whole diverse unit of choppers in much the same way as you can a diverse unit of troops in Ghost Recon.
Alone In The Dark - Primitive polygons now. But at the time, it was the scariest game ever. Especially when you first realised that there were some things you couldn't possibly kill, you just had to run. You weren't an indestructable hero, you were just plain scared.
Doom - For having an interface so simple that you were the game. It was the first game where your fingers just rested on a set of keys, never moving, yet you really felt like you were interacting. That was the genius of the game - you weren't playing it, you were it. That and introducing deathmatches (damn we killed a lot of early LANs) and [excluding Repton Infinity] mods.
No One Lives Forever - For, despite games like Thief trying to do it before, being the first game to really capture me and make me feel like I could play a game my own way, using stealth instead of insane violence. It was also funny as all hell.
Aliens Vs. Predator 2 - For unbelievable balancing. Every time you think you've found an invincible trick, some means of defeating it comes up.
Civ 3 - Because now I can totally understand why South East Asia is important, why Hitler went for Blitzkriegs, why Europe advanced in to industrialisation faster. It's taught me more than any game I've ever known. That and every quick session always turns in to four hours.
Ghost Recon - It finally did what the D-Day part of Medal Of Honor on high difficulty hinted at but then abandonned on later levels. You finally get a military sim where you're scared of getting shot because one shot is all it takes. Much like Gunship 2000, you finally get a good system for controlling multiple troops, which makes it possible to plan really advanced strategies, rather than just rush'n'shoot.
Planetside - OK, I'm biased, I work for SOE. Still, being one part of epic battles, being able to define my own roles (a lone stealth assassin amongst the maelstrom; a scout pilot; a sniper searching out perfect ridgeline positions), it's honestly been proving good enough for me to regularly find something new to just go "Wow!" over. Most of all though, it's the fun of the even more endless than AvP2 discussions over what makes for the perfect squad, the perfect tactics.
Add a decent guitar/amp (about $5k)
WHAT?! Five grand for a "decent" guitar and amp? Outstanding guitars and amps can be had for less than half of that figure. Much less, in fact.
True. And yet look at the number of Les Pauls that appear to be used by just about any given band. Look at the custom shop PRS' that guys like Santana play. You can get a great set up for less. And yet somehow a lot (granted, not all) of successful bands still seem to use the expensive stuff.
From my experience, that $100 acoustic I started on sounded great and I do still love the feeling it invokes. Yet it doesn't compare to the $350 ones I was looking at replacing it with. Even less does it compare to the $700 one I ended up getting. Funny how the guys selling guitars know that all they have to do is put the next level of guitar up in to your hands, off a discount and you'll find some way to squeeze up because that little bit of difference makes all the difference.
True, you can get by on cheaper gear, particularly if you want a dirty grunge sound. And yet, strangely, the evidence points to [most] successful acts not sticking to the cheap stuff. Maybe it's vanity, maybe it's something subtler in the quality of the result that affects their sales, I honestly couldn't say - it's too hard to quantify.
And every Kurt Kobain with his repeatedly rebuilt guitar or Brian May with his homebuild, I can point out two or three Santanas with custom shop guitars. (Granted, that often negates the price as they're given them)
now multiply by about five for all the variations used on a typical album.
Unless you'd rather use something like a VG-8, which can produce just about any sound one would want, not to mention the fact that guitarists (real ones) usually develop their own sound, and part of that is their choice of guitar and amp, effects, strings, etc.
Read a guitar mag, just about any of them will do. Now find a modelling amp review. The conclusions are always the same. It may be good, it may be astonishingly so, it may come very close, yet it never quite does.
Again, perhaps it's splitting hairs, yet the numbers of bands that made it big (or even make it big if you want to argue modelling amps haven't been around long enough) each way still implies that there's something in the traditional route. It's just like solid state has been around for decades, yet most people with the choice still choose valve. Maybe it is just ego, it's still a fact.
When I was about twelve, I justified that I couldn't be bothered to learn piano because computers and midi were where it was at. Anything I could realistically be taught on the piano, I could do on a PC and an 8 bit sound blaster. Funnily enough, as I've got older, I've realised how stupid I was back then and how tempting it is to claim, "If you're l33t enough, you can do anything on your home set up."
Yet, I keep coming back to the same point: If that's true, how come there aren't dozens of successful home recording bands out there? And don't try and blame the RIAA (you think they wouldn't love to slash their costs?
As for the other points, the other reply has already refuted them admirably.
I'm really looking forward to my free as in beer copies of "Algol-68 In A Nutshell", "Colossus, the missing manuals" and "BBC BASIC: The Definitive Reference"
Seriously, the day after an article on VIC20 catridges is posted on games.slashdot.org, it's pretty hard to claim that resources on out of date hardware/software aren't going to be pretty useful to the retro gamers in another thirty years. Imagine how much easier it would be, building emulators, writing new Atari games, etc. if you have an O'Reilly level guide from the era.
"$495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version.
why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"
Because that's one program. Install it on your Alienware PC and you'll still create terrible sounding crap.
Now pay rent on a building. Properly set it up for acoustics. Add perfectly matched, pro level monitors. Add some seriously expensive sound cards that can work with multiple sources and no lag. Add a set of mics at a couple of grand a pop. Add a mixing desk that connects to pro-tools so you can actually make smooth fine controls. Add a decent guitar/amp (about $5k), now multiply by about five for all the variations used on a typical album. Add a drum kit and a lot of heads (Dave Grohl reportedly got through a set of heads per track when recording Nevermind). Add pro-grade cabling so your sound doesn't get muddied up. Add a PC capable of dealing with it all, fast SCSI drives and all.
Those are just the bits and pieces I can think of, just being an amateur guitarist who never records but does spend too much time in guitar shops. I'd imagine there's a hell of a lot more.
All of a sudden, the $495 seems insignificant. Even the $15,000 for the pro version.
Yes, you can record music with pro-tools and a typical home PC. A lot of people do. And it sounds fairly good compared to recordings of say the 1950s.
Just because one aspect gets a bit cheaper, doesn't mean the process gets cheaper. It just means that the capabilities get higher. I remember paying $200 for 4mb of ram, $3,000 for a 16mhz 286. Now I can get a hundred times that power for about $250 yet I still buy $3,000 PCs. How can that be?
And even if it's not due for a while, the Halo series continues to be a serious killer app for Microsoft's console.
In other news, Sony are hyping Final Fantasy 17 for the PS4. While they accept that neither game nor console are out yet, they don't see why Microsoft should have all the fun claiming killer apps that aren't anywhere near release.
The graphics are reported to be in a different league to anything X-Box users have ever dreamed of.
Speaking of which, isn't it time to declare Apple dead? ;)
They died a good half a decade ago, back before they released the iMac and iPod, G4s and OS-X, when they were so screwed Microsoft was giving them money to keep going just so it couldn't be acused of being a monopoly.
Geez! Don't you read the magazines!?!