Re:What about other software?
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Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Won't this seem daunting to the end user... having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
So, you think we should all just go with one software project and kill the other? Which should we kill? Did you know that Xine did the GUI thing first? Mplayer has been the leader in figuring out how to play new formats (especially Quicktime codecs)
So if we had killed xine, would mplayer have developed a gui without competition? If we had killed mplayer, would we still be griping about not being able to watch Sorenson encoded movie trailers?
What future benefits will this competition bring?
To the users, I say: Try them both and stick to the one you like. This doesn't require genius or even much intelligence. If you can't get mplayer working, then xine. If you'd rather not deal with a GUI, then mplayer. (personally, I hate hunting through a list of files for the video I want, when I could just run mplayer -fs filename.avi and get full screen goodness straight from the start without having to move widgets out of the way or get them behind the video window.)
Maybe people got bored of 15 year old girls in miniskirts casting spells?
And therin lies the problem. This kind of stuff was popular, and now its getting old, but the market hasn't adjusted to this fact yet. In the meantime, quite a lot of interesting games go by unlocalized because they point at the games that sold well and said "those did well, lets translate a few more like that", instead of taking a chance on some of the other games out there, like say the Atelier games, or even a dating sim (or just a game incorporating that concept *cough*Sakura Wars*cough*) ((I take that back, Harvest Moon did this, and it apparently sold well enough to justify several more installments being released in the US...))
Heck, if Bistro Cupid 2 came out on the Xbox here, I'd be 2/3 of the way to buying a used Xbox (panzer dragoon, Bistro Cupid... just need one more game...)
Hopefully we'll see Sakura Taisen V episode 0 (what a name), even if it is more action-oriented than the rest of the series. If it sells well, maybe someone will take a chance on the rest of it (it has become a huge franchise... lots of games to convince fans to buy).
Don't know for sure about the PSU and disk drives.
Disk drives are for the most part sealed. Absolute worst case scenario is that the PCB underneath it is dead, then you can swap it with a PCB from another drive (perhaps one with errors and isn't usable anyway).
And leaving the power off while it dries should prevent most damage (there is always a possibility that the battery powering the CMOS would discharge across something it shouldn't), just make sure you don't get impatient and try to cook it;)
because asking for help with their toaster nets them a "RTFM," leading them to a 400 page manual that explains everything but they kitchen sink when they just want to have a piece of toast.
It also explains that when using a wall-mounted toaster that they have to cut it into 40 pieces and throw it sideways. And when they want to toast a poptart, that it must be affixed to a long pole and hoisted up there. And that bagels need to be tied to a rock to make sure they come back down.
And having Read TFM, they should KNOW this, and NOT have to ask us every time some little thing changes! I've seen people ask on IRC how to extract a tarball, and someone invariably just gives them the command. And they come back to ask how to create a tarball. "What if its.bz2?" they say. "What is a.tgz?" If they had Read TFM the first time, they would have learned how to use tar and saved their time and ours in the long run.
But no, they're too lazy or too "smart" to be bothered to read the instructions. Do these people go through life thinking directions are too good for them? Do they sue the playset manufacturer because they were smarter than the instructions and as a result the swingset fell on their kid?
RTFA: its not a URL, it explicitly says that it "should not" be assumed to point at anything.
It is simply a standardized (by NISO) format for identifying something. Like the example given in the/. post:
"info:lccn/2002022641" becomes the only way to refer to the given LCCN as a URI. No worries about "should it be 'LCCN', or 'LibraryCongressControlNumber', or should the number come first, or is 'lc' enough to let people know that its a library of congress number"... it explicitly sets the proper formatting for a Library of Congress control number URI. And so on. Any organization which wishes to standardize its namespace can apply to NISO to Make It So (tm). NISO assumes the responsibility of making sure that if the Library of Congress is using "lccn", then the Literary Clubs of Congo Nationalists cannot. And thats it. Thats all this does.
Yeah, but given RSA's history with SSL licensing, *you* won't get to buy a blocker tag, only SuperMegaCorp (In minimum lots of 50,000). Sure they'll sell them to resellers, but how do you know that what the resellers are selling you haven't been tampered with (remember they're making these programmable with storage now... what if they sell an unblocker signal they've added to stores)?
RSA makes some really cool stuff, but their licensing schemes for their intellectual property is heavily weighted against the "little guy".
Next time someone comes along and claims that games aren't speech, then we can toss this portfolio of educational/informative/etc. titles into their lap and ask again.
I spent my childhood reading pulp fantasy novels and playing D&D, and I have yet to become lord high archmage of the known world.
Face it. Watching/reading/playing something does not somehow magically force you to become something you're not. If playing a video game or reading a book somehow compels you to go out and kill someone, its because you are a weak-willed idiot who envies Pavlov's dogs for their amazing displays of self-constraint (ie, unlike you, they only drool some of the time). Sure, the guy who who shot Ronald Reagan read Catcher in the Rye, but guess what, so did I. In highschool even. With at least 300 other kids. Where are all these assassins the book somehow created? If even 1% of the readers went on to kill presidents, where have they been these past couple of crappy administrations?
On a side note, I fail to see how video games "train killers" as some mediaheads have been claiming. The first time I shot my father's shotgun at a skeet competition, I nearly broke my shoulder. You give some quake gamer a real gun, and the first thing he's going to do is ask where the mouse is, and what button zooms the scope. They might be able to use a laser sight, since it gives them the floating crosshairs effect they get in a game. Sure, with a handgun they would do serious damage just shooting blindly at close range, but so could anyone else who has never played a videogame. Even the idea of "videogame gore" somehow dulling the player's sensitivity... if you want to see real gore go look at rotten.com once. I'm sure somewhere on there are pics of people who got their faces blown off with a shotgun. It is nothing like the experience that the videogames are claimed to "train" for.
When the program on one of those disks gets run by some curious person, don't you feel that the virus writer is at least somewhat liable, even though he didn't "pull the trigger"?
This scenario is good, but let me share one from my highschool days:
Our computer science department ran on a bunch of old MSDOS computers with no built-in virus scanning (if a computer was behaving oddly, the teacher would come around and boot from an antivirus floppy, and it would be all better). In those days, the popular viruses all spread via floppy boot sectors. Because of this, nearly every floppy anyone used at school was infected with the virus.
So, if I forgot my floppy in the computer and someone else rebooted the machine, is it my fault if that computer gets the virus? What if the computer already had the virus?
Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on.
There is no "Intellectual Property". There are Copyright, Trademark, Patent, and Trade Secret laws to protect your ideas, name, and inventions. Each of these are vastly different, covering different subjects and having different rules. To point at someone and say "you're violating my 'intellectual property'" is bogus. You must pick one of the above, and defend your claim appropriately.
Even if they do approve it, how are they going to enforce it?
Duh, the same way everyone else does it these days. Sue everyone and make them prove their innocence. This is unacceptable, but it is the only way to enforce "intellectual property" laws since there is no crime scene, no fingerprints, no missing goods that someone tries to pawn. Don't even ask how they're going to define "commercial" usage of the codes. Is that codes actually used in commerce? Is that any system run by a company that uses a locale other than "C"? (Is "C" an ISO-owned locale?). Who cares? Just sue them all and let the juries decide who owes what, that is if the people don't wimp out and pay up.
MSIE has been doing this for ages, and I never found it to be a problem, but rather more helpful than the old "404 Not found" messages we used to see
This is why MS gets to claim that the MSN search is the most popular search in the world.
Of course, my own experience with IE is that MS must be pumping up their stats by having IE make up whatever fake excuse it can to not be able to find the hostname you have entered. I know my computer here at work has told me several times that slashdot.org didn't exist and gave me the MSN search page. I can usually reload the page and it goes straight there the second time.
BTW, you forget that DNS is also used for email. Suddenly "mytypingsucks@hotmal.com" can actually attempt to be delivered. How much is that going to suck, having to wait days for a "can't reach this server" bounce message to let you know your typing sucks? (and thats if verisign doesn't send you back a helpful "mytypingsucks is not a user here" error message (without the fact that "here" isn't where you intended to be.)
try to go against it (by vetoing) from a purely political standpoint
From a purely political standpoint these days it seems like the only smart thing to do is to crawl into the pockets of as many big companies as you can. The People be damned.
"Who cares if you don't get your favorite radio station anymore, and you just get the same payola crap no matter how you spin that dial? Thats ok, because clear channel is making a truckload of money and kicking it back to me!" - Bush
these rules are stupid in an age where barriers to becoming a content distributor are virtually nil (maybe $10/month in web hosting costs).
Riiight. And its so easy to get on the air too, you can set up your licensed radio transmitter on... wait, sorry, it looks like clearchannel just bought all the radio frequencies in your city.
Oh, and that web site? AOL and road runner have both decided to redirect their users to Time's own sites. You can have all the speech you want, but nobody will ever listen to you.
There is a patch, but the server that the advisory referenced on the SANS posting is on went down hard while I was in the middle of getting the page, so I only managed to get part of it (thanks, slashdot!) The advisory also indicated that openSSH 3.7 isn't affected.
Strawman. No one ever said they were getting rid of all the coders, just those whose job can be done by a drain-bamaged chimp.
Maybe in the software world. My neighbor's company has laid off its entire engineering department in favor of outsourcing to a company in mexico that hires Chinese nationals with MS/PhDs in engineering degrees from universities in the United States and gives them wonderful places to live in a nice part of Mexico. He tells me that working with these people is exactly like working with any other fresh-out-of college hire, since thats exactly what they are. Sure, its not the average situation, but it is happening, and brain-dumps like this will probably become more common than even codemonkey outsourcing. Why hire a US-based PhD fresh from US college when you can hire a Mexico-based PhD fresh from US college for much less?
As for my interest in this, I consider myself lucky to have a stable $40k programming job, which took me 6 months to get after college. I'd love to keep it.
Unfortunately, that's management's *job.* Caring about money is what they're there for.
Once upon a time, they were there to manage people and make sure things got done. Since nowadays there just there to cover their own asses and to make sure their department saves as much money as possible, maybe we just need to convence them to call themselves CPAs, not MBAs.
Sure, the bloodletting is probably necessary, though I think the proper solution to overinflated wages would have been to lower them before getting out the slicers and dicers. I guess its easier for the CPAs to tell someone they're fired and never have to see them again, then to tell them that their salary was too high and that they'd have to take a paycut to $50k and face them again the next day.
strengthen itself by keeping overpaid, underskilled, non-management-material American coders on the payroll.
I know, lets see it strengthen itself by only keeping managers on the payroll. We can call the company the Titanic. Oh, and just to make sure, hiring lawyers is off-limits.
First, the most motivated worker is the one whose job is on the line, like it or not.
Yeah, motivated to spend company time and resources farming out his resume. I guess morale can't be measured in dollars so it must not count.
Hell, remember the dot com boom? Where was the employee loyalty to the company then when employees were shopping themselves to the highest bidder?
Thats odd, I thought it was in all those people who put in overtime and ran the company without pay because they really wanted to see it succeed. You can call them stupid, I call them loyal.
Why should they take that cost hit for nothing when their employees leave anyway when the economy gets good?
Is it tit-for-tat then? Companies abused workers and the workers unionized long ago. Then unions started striking and laws were passed in many states outlawing union-only shops. Then the economy got good and people were looking for the best pay they could get. Then the economy got bad and the companies are shafting its employees by firing them rather than reducing their pay. Where did it start? Where will it stop?
All I know is that the American auto industry strengthened itself immeasurably after moving manufacturing jobs overseas.
Amusingly enough, the foreign auto industries strengthened themselves by moving their manufacturing to the US.
We're not talking about people on mission-critical projects fearing for their jobs.
Except that we *are*. Read the article. Do you think DHL's software is not mission critical? And what about the failed projects that didn't get mentioned by name in the article?
the economy will no longer guarantee $60,000 a year and job security to someone who can only write mediocre code with no other skills.
Right now it won't guarantee $60k to people with excellent skills. It won't guarantee anything at all to anyone just graduating from college regardless of their skills. Management has been blinded by the capitalist $ worship, and rarely takes other things into account. After all, morale, skills, and other touchy-feely stuff like that doesn't even figure in to the bonus your buddy-buddy incestuous board members voted you last month (don't forget to vote for their raises at their board meetings, thats the deal, right?)
So is your site blocked? How do you know? Are you going to call the attourney general's office (who is the sole group responsible for this probably very private list) and ask them if you are running a pedo porn site?
And if you are being blocked, what are you going to do about it? Quietly change ISPs and hope that the damages of having your addresses, DNS hosts, mailservers, etc. change are minimal? Call up the AG office and demand they unblock your site?
And if the AG blocked your site because it was your "Me for Attourney General!" campaign site. What do you think you're going to get? Other than an ad on TV mudslinging about how you used a kiddy porn host for your campaign (it must be true, otherwise it wouldn't be blocked, right)?
Do everything on time, always have all your documents in order
You do realize that this is the kind of thing people hire lawyers for, right? You don't get to ask for a recess while you flip through a 1000 page book to see just what you're supposed to be saying.
Obligatory pointing out the OBVIOUS about the McDonald's case:
The woman was still stupid and should have been at greater fault (she was found to be partially at fault and the reward was reduced proportionally) because opening hot coffee in your lap is stupid regardless of the temperature.
The fact that the coffee was hot enough to give third degree burns doesn't make this any less stupid. Do you think she would have cared what temperature the coffee was at when she did this? If the sign had said "Warning: Coffee causes third degree burns" do you think she would have acted differently? Assuming she's mentally stable she doesn't go around her daily life deciding whether to do things or not based on how bad a burn she gets ("Gee, I should touch the hot stove, I only get a second degree burn this way!") so why was this important for her coffee?
Some games I've played have a save counter, where it keeps track of the number of times you've saved, challenging you to keep this to a minimum.
Other ideas I can think of would be to allow you to save anywhere but only once per dungeon or level or whatnot, maybe more on a very large map. This lets someone who needs to get up and go do so, while requiring the people who try to use savegames to replace skill or luck to wonder if they'll be needing that one save right after this part of the map. Or have movable savepoints, where you can carry a save point with you, but you have to give up something else. (probably more for find-and-use-the-item type puzzle games than anything else)
Hidden savepoints that take work (or a strategy guide) to find would be an interesting twist also, but I think this fails to fix the "uhoh, mom wants to use the TV now" form of urgently needing to save;)
What I'd like to see is a combination of the two shadowrun videogames I've seen: online combat from the genesis version (which was more of a twitch-shooter than the minesweeper-like puzzles of the SNES) and the real world and controls from the SNES version, which I think completely blew the genesis out of the water.
why can't we all, as nerds, talk about things that might help someone?
Yeah, like how people need to learn to moderate their game playing? Or how people need to learn to recognize their addiction?
Or are you talking about how every day people in this world want to fuck up the world by stupidifying the world until it reaches their level of intelligence? Is it the job of the smart to make sure that the stupids don't pick up a knife by the wrong end and slice their hand open while trying to cut a tomato with the handle? Why is it our job to make sure the stupids don't leave their kids in cars? Here's an idea for you: why not have cars automatically open all the doors when the interior passes 102 degrees while occupied and parked? Throw in a voice saying "Please remove the children from this car" to anyone walking past, and I'd call it a done deal.
Obviously the parents realised BEFORE hand that they had problems.. but were unable to solve that problem
Then they failed and should have admitted to themselves that they were incapable of solving their problem alone and gotten help. The number of EQ addict support groups boggle the mind. They are the sociological effects of a culture which refuses to accept online interaction as human interaction and finds the idea of an online community far more foreign than most foreign cultures. If they couldn't find a support group near them they could have probably found enough addicts to start their own.
If I'm wrong and some company is already doing this, let me know.
Actually there are several GPL'd official drivers out there, but the only one I know of off the bat is some recent LKML traffic indicating that Promise GPL'd their pdc-ultra Serial ATA driver, and that it might be getting worked into the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't this seem daunting to the end user ... having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
So, you think we should all just go with one software project and kill the other? Which should we kill? Did you know that Xine did the GUI thing first? Mplayer has been the leader in figuring out how to play new formats (especially Quicktime codecs)
So if we had killed xine, would mplayer have developed a gui without competition? If we had killed mplayer, would we still be griping about not being able to watch Sorenson encoded movie trailers?
What future benefits will this competition bring?
To the users, I say: Try them both and stick to the one you like. This doesn't require genius or even much intelligence. If you can't get mplayer working, then xine. If you'd rather not deal with a GUI, then mplayer. (personally, I hate hunting through a list of files for the video I want, when I could just run mplayer -fs filename.avi and get full screen goodness straight from the start without having to move widgets out of the way or get them behind the video window.)
Maybe people got bored of 15 year old girls in miniskirts casting spells?
And therin lies the problem. This kind of stuff was popular, and now its getting old, but the market hasn't adjusted to this fact yet. In the meantime, quite a lot of interesting games go by unlocalized because they point at the games that sold well and said "those did well, lets translate a few more like that", instead of taking a chance on some of the other games out there, like say the Atelier games, or even a dating sim (or just a game incorporating that concept *cough*Sakura Wars*cough*) ((I take that back, Harvest Moon did this, and it apparently sold well enough to justify several more installments being released in the US...))
Heck, if Bistro Cupid 2 came out on the Xbox here, I'd be 2/3 of the way to buying a used Xbox (panzer dragoon, Bistro Cupid... just need one more game...)
Hopefully we'll see Sakura Taisen V episode 0 (what a name), even if it is more action-oriented than the rest of the series. If it sells well, maybe someone will take a chance on the rest of it (it has become a huge franchise... lots of games to convince fans to buy).
Don't know for sure about the PSU and disk drives.
;)
Disk drives are for the most part sealed. Absolute worst case scenario is that the PCB underneath it is dead, then you can swap it with a PCB from another drive (perhaps one with errors and isn't usable anyway).
And leaving the power off while it dries should prevent most damage (there is always a possibility that the battery powering the CMOS would discharge across something it shouldn't), just make sure you don't get impatient and try to cook it
because asking for help with their toaster nets them a "RTFM," leading them to a 400 page manual that explains everything but they kitchen sink when they just want to have a piece of toast.
.bz2?" they say. "What is a .tgz?" If they had Read TFM the first time, they would have learned how to use tar and saved their time and ours in the long run.
It also explains that when using a wall-mounted toaster that they have to cut it into 40 pieces and throw it sideways. And when they want to toast a poptart, that it must be affixed to a long pole and hoisted up there. And that bagels need to be tied to a rock to make sure they come back down.
And having Read TFM, they should KNOW this, and NOT have to ask us every time some little thing changes! I've seen people ask on IRC how to extract a tarball, and someone invariably just gives them the command. And they come back to ask how to create a tarball. "What if its
But no, they're too lazy or too "smart" to be bothered to read the instructions. Do these people go through life thinking directions are too good for them? Do they sue the playset manufacturer because they were smarter than the instructions and as a result the swingset fell on their kid?
RTFA: its not a URL, it explicitly says that it "should not" be assumed to point at anything.
/. post:
It is simply a standardized (by NISO) format for identifying something. Like the example given in the
"info:lccn/2002022641" becomes the only way to refer to the given LCCN as a URI. No worries about "should it be 'LCCN', or 'LibraryCongressControlNumber', or should the number come first, or is 'lc' enough to let people know that its a library of congress number"... it explicitly sets the proper formatting for a Library of Congress control number URI. And so on. Any organization which wishes to standardize its namespace can apply to NISO to Make It So (tm). NISO assumes the responsibility of making sure that if the Library of Congress is using "lccn", then the Literary Clubs of Congo Nationalists cannot. And thats it. Thats all this does.
Yeah, but given RSA's history with SSL licensing, *you* won't get to buy a blocker tag, only SuperMegaCorp (In minimum lots of 50,000). Sure they'll sell them to resellers, but how do you know that what the resellers are selling you haven't been tampered with (remember they're making these programmable with storage now... what if they sell an unblocker signal they've added to stores)?
RSA makes some really cool stuff, but their licensing schemes for their intellectual property is heavily weighted against the "little guy".
Next time someone comes along and claims that games aren't speech, then we can toss this portfolio of educational/informative/etc. titles into their lap and ask again.
I spent my childhood reading pulp fantasy novels and playing D&D, and I have yet to become lord high archmage of the known world.
Face it. Watching/reading/playing something does not somehow magically force you to become something you're not. If playing a video game or reading a book somehow compels you to go out and kill someone, its because you are a weak-willed idiot who envies Pavlov's dogs for their amazing displays of self-constraint (ie, unlike you, they only drool some of the time). Sure, the guy who who shot Ronald Reagan read Catcher in the Rye, but guess what, so did I. In highschool even. With at least 300 other kids. Where are all these assassins the book somehow created? If even 1% of the readers went on to kill presidents, where have they been these past couple of crappy administrations?
On a side note, I fail to see how video games "train killers" as some mediaheads have been claiming. The first time I shot my father's shotgun at a skeet competition, I nearly broke my shoulder. You give some quake gamer a real gun, and the first thing he's going to do is ask where the mouse is, and what button zooms the scope. They might be able to use a laser sight, since it gives them the floating crosshairs effect they get in a game. Sure, with a handgun they would do serious damage just shooting blindly at close range, but so could anyone else who has never played a videogame. Even the idea of "videogame gore" somehow dulling the player's sensitivity... if you want to see real gore go look at rotten.com once. I'm sure somewhere on there are pics of people who got their faces blown off with a shotgun. It is nothing like the experience that the videogames are claimed to "train" for.
When the program on one of those disks gets run by some curious person, don't you feel that the virus writer is at least somewhat liable, even though he didn't "pull the trigger"?
This scenario is good, but let me share one from my highschool days:
Our computer science department ran on a bunch of old MSDOS computers with no built-in virus scanning (if a computer was behaving oddly, the teacher would come around and boot from an antivirus floppy, and it would be all better). In those days, the popular viruses all spread via floppy boot sectors. Because of this, nearly every floppy anyone used at school was infected with the virus.
So, if I forgot my floppy in the computer and someone else rebooted the machine, is it my fault if that computer gets the virus? What if the computer already had the virus?
Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on.
There is no "Intellectual Property". There are Copyright, Trademark, Patent, and Trade Secret laws to protect your ideas, name, and inventions. Each of these are vastly different, covering different subjects and having different rules. To point at someone and say "you're violating my 'intellectual property'" is bogus. You must pick one of the above, and defend your claim appropriately.
Even if they do approve it, how are they going to enforce it?
Duh, the same way everyone else does it these days. Sue everyone and make them prove their innocence. This is unacceptable, but it is the only way to enforce "intellectual property" laws since there is no crime scene, no fingerprints, no missing goods that someone tries to pawn. Don't even ask how they're going to define "commercial" usage of the codes. Is that codes actually used in commerce? Is that any system run by a company that uses a locale other than "C"? (Is "C" an ISO-owned locale?). Who cares? Just sue them all and let the juries decide who owes what, that is if the people don't wimp out and pay up.
MSIE has been doing this for ages, and I never found it to be a problem, but rather more helpful than the old "404 Not found" messages we used to see
This is why MS gets to claim that the MSN search is the most popular search in the world.
Of course, my own experience with IE is that MS must be pumping up their stats by having IE make up whatever fake excuse it can to not be able to find the hostname you have entered. I know my computer here at work has told me several times that slashdot.org didn't exist and gave me the MSN search page. I can usually reload the page and it goes straight there the second time.
BTW, you forget that DNS is also used for email. Suddenly "mytypingsucks@hotmal.com" can actually attempt to be delivered. How much is that going to suck, having to wait days for a "can't reach this server" bounce message to let you know your typing sucks? (and thats if verisign doesn't send you back a helpful "mytypingsucks is not a user here" error message (without the fact that "here" isn't where you intended to be.)
try to go against it (by vetoing) from a purely political standpoint
From a purely political standpoint these days it seems like the only smart thing to do is to crawl into the pockets of as many big companies as you can. The People be damned.
"Who cares if you don't get your favorite radio station anymore, and you just get the same payola crap no matter how you spin that dial? Thats ok, because clear channel is making a truckload of money and kicking it back to me!" - Bush
these rules are stupid in an age where barriers to becoming a content distributor are virtually nil (maybe $10/month in web hosting costs).
Riiight. And its so easy to get on the air too, you can set up your licensed radio transmitter on... wait, sorry, it looks like clearchannel just bought all the radio frequencies in your city.
Oh, and that web site? AOL and road runner have both decided to redirect their users to Time's own sites. You can have all the speech you want, but nobody will ever listen to you.
There is a patch, but the server that the advisory referenced on the SANS posting is on went down hard while I was in the middle of getting the page, so I only managed to get part of it (thanks, slashdot!) The advisory also indicated that openSSH 3.7 isn't affected.
Strawman. No one ever said they were getting rid of all the coders, just those whose job can be done by a drain-bamaged chimp.
Maybe in the software world. My neighbor's company has laid off its entire engineering department in favor of outsourcing to a company in mexico that hires Chinese nationals with MS/PhDs in engineering degrees from universities in the United States and gives them wonderful places to live in a nice part of Mexico. He tells me that working with these people is exactly like working with any other fresh-out-of college hire, since thats exactly what they are. Sure, its not the average situation, but it is happening, and brain-dumps like this will probably become more common than even codemonkey outsourcing. Why hire a US-based PhD fresh from US college when you can hire a Mexico-based PhD fresh from US college for much less?
As for my interest in this, I consider myself lucky to have a stable $40k programming job, which took me 6 months to get after college. I'd love to keep it.
Unfortunately, that's management's *job.* Caring about money is what they're there for.
Once upon a time, they were there to manage people and make sure things got done. Since nowadays there just there to cover their own asses and to make sure their department saves as much money as possible, maybe we just need to convence them to call themselves CPAs, not MBAs.
Sure, the bloodletting is probably necessary, though I think the proper solution to overinflated wages would have been to lower them before getting out the slicers and dicers. I guess its easier for the CPAs to tell someone they're fired and never have to see them again, then to tell them that their salary was too high and that they'd have to take a paycut to $50k and face them again the next day.
strengthen itself by keeping overpaid, underskilled, non-management-material American coders on the payroll.
I know, lets see it strengthen itself by only keeping managers on the payroll. We can call the company the Titanic. Oh, and just to make sure, hiring lawyers is off-limits.
First, the most motivated worker is the one whose job is on the line, like it or not.
Yeah, motivated to spend company time and resources farming out his resume. I guess morale can't be measured in dollars so it must not count.
Hell, remember the dot com boom? Where was the employee loyalty to the company then when employees were shopping themselves to the highest bidder?
Thats odd, I thought it was in all those people who put in overtime and ran the company without pay because they really wanted to see it succeed. You can call them stupid, I call them loyal.
Why should they take that cost hit for nothing when their employees leave anyway when the economy gets good?
Is it tit-for-tat then? Companies abused workers and the workers unionized long ago. Then unions started striking and laws were passed in many states outlawing union-only shops. Then the economy got good and people were looking for the best pay they could get. Then the economy got bad and the companies are shafting its employees by firing them rather than reducing their pay. Where did it start? Where will it stop?
All I know is that the American auto industry strengthened itself immeasurably after moving manufacturing jobs overseas.
Amusingly enough, the foreign auto industries strengthened themselves by moving their manufacturing to the US.
We're not talking about people on mission-critical projects fearing for their jobs.
Except that we *are*. Read the article. Do you think DHL's software is not mission critical? And what about the failed projects that didn't get mentioned by name in the article?
the economy will no longer guarantee $60,000 a year and job security to someone who can only write mediocre code with no other skills.
Right now it won't guarantee $60k to people with excellent skills. It won't guarantee anything at all to anyone just graduating from college regardless of their skills. Management has been blinded by the capitalist $ worship, and rarely takes other things into account. After all, morale, skills, and other touchy-feely stuff like that doesn't even figure in to the bonus your buddy-buddy incestuous board members voted you last month (don't forget to vote for their raises at their board meetings, thats the deal, right?)
Who needs a court order and subpoena when your IP address resolves to your name.
Try it.
whois your.ip.addr.ess -h whois.arin.net
So is your site blocked? How do you know? Are you going to call the attourney general's office (who is the sole group responsible for this probably very private list) and ask them if you are running a pedo porn site?
And if you are being blocked, what are you going to do about it? Quietly change ISPs and hope that the damages of having your addresses, DNS hosts, mailservers, etc. change are minimal? Call up the AG office and demand they unblock your site?
And if the AG blocked your site because it was your "Me for Attourney General!" campaign site. What do you think you're going to get? Other than an ad on TV mudslinging about how you used a kiddy porn host for your campaign (it must be true, otherwise it wouldn't be blocked, right)?
Do everything on time, always have all your documents in order
You do realize that this is the kind of thing people hire lawyers for, right? You don't get to ask for a recess while you flip through a 1000 page book to see just what you're supposed to be saying.
He's worried about possible terrorist actions taken against the U.S. government by its own citizens?
What, you mean like the mostly-forgotten oklahoma city bombing? The forgotten and still unsolved anthrax mailings?
Obligatory pointing out the OBVIOUS about the McDonald's case:
The woman was still stupid and should have been at greater fault (she was found to be partially at fault and the reward was reduced proportionally) because opening hot coffee in your lap is stupid regardless of the temperature.
The fact that the coffee was hot enough to give third degree burns doesn't make this any less stupid. Do you think she would have cared what temperature the coffee was at when she did this? If the sign had said "Warning: Coffee causes third degree burns" do you think she would have acted differently? Assuming she's mentally stable she doesn't go around her daily life deciding whether to do things or not based on how bad a burn she gets ("Gee, I should touch the hot stove, I only get a second degree burn this way!") so why was this important for her coffee?
Some games I've played have a save counter, where it keeps track of the number of times you've saved, challenging you to keep this to a minimum.
;)
Other ideas I can think of would be to allow you to save anywhere but only once per dungeon or level or whatnot, maybe more on a very large map. This lets someone who needs to get up and go do so, while requiring the people who try to use savegames to replace skill or luck to wonder if they'll be needing that one save right after this part of the map. Or have movable savepoints, where you can carry a save point with you, but you have to give up something else. (probably more for find-and-use-the-item type puzzle games than anything else)
Hidden savepoints that take work (or a strategy guide) to find would be an interesting twist also, but I think this fails to fix the "uhoh, mom wants to use the TV now" form of urgently needing to save
What I'd like to see is a combination of the two shadowrun videogames I've seen: online combat from the genesis version (which was more of a twitch-shooter than the minesweeper-like puzzles of the SNES) and the real world and controls from the SNES version, which I think completely blew the genesis out of the water.
why can't we all, as nerds, talk about things that might help someone?
Yeah, like how people need to learn to moderate their game playing? Or how people need to learn to recognize their addiction?
Or are you talking about how every day people in this world want to fuck up the world by stupidifying the world until it reaches their level of intelligence? Is it the job of the smart to make sure that the stupids don't pick up a knife by the wrong end and slice their hand open while trying to cut a tomato with the handle? Why is it our job to make sure the stupids don't leave their kids in cars? Here's an idea for you: why not have cars automatically open all the doors when the interior passes 102 degrees while occupied and parked? Throw in a voice saying "Please remove the children from this car" to anyone walking past, and I'd call it a done deal.
Obviously the parents realised BEFORE hand that they had problems.. but were unable to solve that problem
Then they failed and should have admitted to themselves that they were incapable of solving their problem alone and gotten help. The number of EQ addict support groups boggle the mind. They are the sociological effects of a culture which refuses to accept online interaction as human interaction and finds the idea of an online community far more foreign than most foreign cultures. If they couldn't find a support group near them they could have probably found enough addicts to start their own.
If I'm wrong and some company is already doing this, let me know.
Actually there are several GPL'd official drivers out there, but the only one I know of off the bat is some recent LKML traffic indicating that Promise GPL'd their pdc-ultra Serial ATA driver, and that it might be getting worked into the kernel.