yes, this is a "the entire internet runs on Linux", so yes, this is an arena where they compete and come off worse. No wonder they are desperately trying to extend their monopoly onto the web server marketplace just like the desktop.
Not all large organisations are evil, but this is RBS we're talking about. So they dragged their feet and the company ended up bust so RBS could save a little bit of money, rather than keep the stores trading and keeping people employed.
There was one more aspect to this, the banks. RBS (yewp, thwe bank that had to be bailed out and is now owned by the UK taxpayer) didn't want to allow full use of the credit facilities it already had in place (games retail is a very cyclic business, and we;re just about at the bottom, waiting for new consoles), which made suppliers very nervous about supplying games to Game. This meant Game failed to get any revenue from big titles such as Mass Effect 3, and this pushed it over the edge.
RBS than received a takeover offer from at least 1 other group, which it rejected. So now RBS are busy making fees from splitting it up, whilst jobs are lost.
Digital distribution isn't as big a deal as many think - there are plenty of places that don't get enough download to get a copy of the latest game, even if Steam wants you to buy from them exclusively. Then there's the hardware that is best bought direct from a shop (usually just before christmas).
The 2nd hand sales thing - this is something the game publishers want to see dead, so maybe EA et al are happy to see Game go.
when I have limited time and I want to read through the important parts. When I want to have a brief scan of the topics to see if its something I want to view in depth.
If you only provide video, I have to decide whether its worth spending my time viewing it or not, and typically, that means I pass up and head for the next link. There are plenty of links vying for my attention, I don't need ones that are in less than accessible.
local police, homeland security, federal agents... all the same when you're at the other end of a bat wielded by a bloke with a uniform on.
Besides, there seems to be a lot of issues with US cops being somewhat heavy-handed, like the guy who was arrested for walking in the street (though, to be fair, he did have the temerity to ask the cop if he really was a cop as he wasn't wearing the usual uniform)
there are aspects of 'non profit' where there are no profits because the directors pay themselves such large salaries that there's (strangely!) no cash left over each year. I don't consider these non-profit at all.
eg. from TFA:
the Mozilla Foundation generated the highest compensation levels for Baker and Eich who, while receiving no direct salary from the Mozilla Foundation, were compensated $589,953 each from "reportable compensation from related organizations" and "estimated amount of other compensation from the [Mozilla Foundation] and related organizations."
"Related organizations," in this instance, is the Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that generates much of the Foundation's revenue.
With a revenue of $1,934,659, the Mozilla Foundation ranked fourth of the eighteen FLOSS-related non-profits researched for this report. But with a net cash flow loss of $1,333,815 for the 2010 fiscal year, the Mozilla Foundation was next to last on money lost for the year.
so, basically Mozilla Corp pays Mozilla Foundation cash to make stuff that the corp then sells/advocates/etc. Only the foundation sat on a net loss of $1.3m, yet the corp paid its 2 directors $1.2m..... hmm.
Now I don't mind the directors making a reasonable amount of money from the situation, we all got to eat after all, but I'd say a more reasonable remuneration would be more like $100k, not nearly 600k. And I totally disagree with directors sucking the non-profit cash-cow dry.
Windows has had perfectly scaling high DPI resolutions since Windows 3.0 (possibly before). The old win32 windowing system (that is hated by the kids today) was a pretty good way of implementing windows as individual objects and handling things like screen and dialog units in a display-independant manner.
I guess the addition of bitmaps screwed things up. but if devs had coded to use a high--res bitmap (and allow Windows to scale it to fit) rather than implement a fixed-size bitmap for a fixed-resolution then it wouldn't need fixing today.
yup, harpoon always was a real-world naval combat sim, not a game. Written by some old naval admiral or somesuch IIRC.
Now, there was a boardgame based on these rules but set in space, with 1-shot missiles with x-ray lasers as warhead (so they didn't have to get too close to the target), and repair crews. Can't remember what it was called unfortunately as I played it about 20 years ago.
then you want to play Frontier, which was the sequel to Elite. It has relativistic combat... and it was shite. You and the enemy ship hurtled towards each other, then past each other with a fraction of a second where they were close enough to hit each other, then turn around for the slow decel, and then repeat all over again. dull.
Now, a "real-life" space-game would be much more like Harpoon (an old naval combat system) where you'd chuck remote missiles at each other which would be intelligent enough to do something to the bad guys when they got near them, with counter measures to defend yourself. Obviously this makes the game much more like a tactical sim instead of fighter pilot dogfights, but that's what you get for letting physics in.
It's called "X: Rebirth" and is a follow-on to the quite successful X series of games (the current version being X3:Albion Prelude). These are pretty much Elite type trading/fighting sandboxes, but with multiple ships, remote controlled fleets (ie you can buy traders and set them off on autopilot trading for you), fighting (of course, but with wingmen ships or just sent your fleet of frigates or carriers to defend your trading sectors from the bad aliens, robot aliens or pirates), plus missions to keep things interesting - both small "transport a passenger to x", and large "follow a whole set of missions in a series to do something major".
What's a bit special (and controversial in the X community) is that the new game will be based around a single spacecraft (previously you could decide what kind of ship to pilot) but that has different 'rooms' to play from - so your co-pilot can be set to fly while you remote-control your combat drones or play the stock market or whatever.
Nobody's quite sure exactly what it'll be like, but I think we can be confident Egosoft will pull the rabbit out, X3 served me very well for over a year, and I still didn't manage to finish all the plot missions. You can buy X3 on steam or impulse (or whatever impulse is called nowadays) for next to nothing, it cost me $10 in a special offer that seems to be repeated regularly.
its the same logic that says unfettered capitalism is just as bad as unfettered communism.
In one, the state decides what you can or can't do. In the other, opposite extreme, everyone's so free to do whatever they want, that the big corporations end up telling you what you can or can't do.
See the difference? opposite extreme positions and still extreme. Neither are good. You need to temper them with some pragmatic exemptions, like personal freedoms for the communists or regulation for the capitalist.
yep, that's pretty much what I'm getting at. Just because you insist on one extreme over the other (and therefore claim your view is good, while the opposing view is evil), the reality is that they're both extreme positions that attempt to impose your ideals on someone else.
Sure, I like OSS, but there is still the argument that a closed environment allows a company more freedom (internally) to produce better products knowing that they can make more money from it, thus encouraging them to do so.
The graphics driver issue is one anomaly in the OSS world though, I agree OSS is better than closed, but I'm quite happy to use a proprietary driver for a gfx card as I need to buy that card and the driver only works with that card. So it doesn't matter if its free and open or not. When I buy a new card, I expect the best driver there is to work with it, regardless of openness. If this means I have to 'suffer' a closed driver, then that makes no difference to me. It definitely makes a difference to me if the only driver available is poor though.
Hence my position that the "only open" view is just as extreme as the "everything closed" view.
I'm glad I'm not dependent on winning over people that are willing pay extra for devices that are locked down physically and ideologically
unfortunately this applies to Linux more than any other OS. Which graphics card drivers do you use? If you don't care and use the proprietary ones from the card maker, fine. If you get all panty-bunched about they have to be open, then you're just as bad as Apple is with their locked-down-only stuff.
Our.NET apps suffer occasionally, we'll report slowdowns (seconds usually) and the devs say "can you reproduce it", and we can't. Not reliably enough to get them to fix it. Looking at perf stats shows these times are when the GC goes into overdrive.
But, everybody knows this. GC are designed to speed up allocations, with the performance penalty hitting when it needs to deallocate. Apologists say it's not a problem as the dealloc can take place in the 'slow time' when the CPU is not taxed, but the problem is thaat deallocating memory *is* an IO problem - you have to hit main page RAM to determine the blocks that need collecting, and you need to hit all of it (well, lots of it to check for dependencies between objects)
Then there's the user problem - when told "the compiler will take care of memory for you, just use it, memory's cheap" most programmers do exactly that, and you see the GC allocating millions of blocks of RAM. Hence all the calls to use stringbuilder type classes for string manipulation - why would a language designer say that except that they know the 'magic' GC doesn't work perfectly, and this string concatentation case is the easiest fruit to pick to improve performance.
Python's fine, but just use it as a tool for tasks its best suited to - a kind of perl replacement or prototype tool IMHO - and not for high performance computing tasks.
no. If this is the argument, they you should be writing in VB.NET, not C#. VB.NEt is faster and it helps you along a lot more than C# (seriously, I was very surprised C# wasn't as good seeing as its the same bytecode under the covers). So if you really want the programmer performance with a bit of C/C++ (implemented as an inproc COM object, that VB.NET again helps you consume better than C#), you need to be dumping C# today.
I also found that the syntax differences helped. Its easy to get confused about the subtle differences between C++ and C# because it all looks very similar. Write in VB.NET and you know which language you're dealing with and code accordingly.
yes, and the audit is, you guessed it, at the company's expense!
Combine that with the fact that Microsoft' licensing terms is so obscure that even Microsoft salesman don't get it right, and you've got a win-win situation (for Microsoft, of course)
Really, it is easier to understand program flow by watching it work, but that doesn't mean its going to be a good program. Its far batter to understand a program by dividing it into pieces that are more manageable to us poor humans. That means defined interfaces and components (objects are generally too small to allow us to make good programs with), so go with a sensible middle ground and think about what you're trying to do. Works wonders for me.
I did a quick search and couldn't find other references already so:
The Uplift War by David Brin. (do not read his comet thing he also wrote, its pants but...) this series is exceptional. The concept: we find we're not alone, but the galactic society we enter is quite bureaucratic and snobbish about itself, where each race is not only ecologically conscious (by ancient rules) but also has a hierarchy of 'uplifting' races by helping them evolve to consciousness. And there's the poxy humans who've not only trashed their own planet (tut tut) but also have managed to 'uplift' chimps and dolphins, so the senior races have no choice but to accept humanity as a senior race in their own right... which pisses them off royally, and starts a whole series of underhand and back-door intrigue against us, while the true heroes of the books (the uplifted animals) struggle to fight back in almost naive and innocent ways.
I'd also like to recommend all of C.J.Cherryh's works, an exercise in feminist ideals in space, with books you can appreciate - as can your gf as there's a lot of 'how people feel' type stuff in there too, along with the usual society changing as factions develop, almost like you can see history being made.
For much older stuff, Harrison, von Vogt, Vance, Carter, Ellison. All good stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess its a role where you'll be chained to your desk.
yes, this is a "the entire internet runs on Linux", so yes, this is an arena where they compete and come off worse. No wonder they are desperately trying to extend their monopoly onto the web server marketplace just like the desktop.
Your customers directors, managers, CIOs, and others will be using ...... Iphones, and Andriod devices to view their web apps and to get work done
fixed that for you.
Not all large organisations are evil, but this is RBS we're talking about. So they dragged their feet and the company ended up bust so RBS could save a little bit of money, rather than keep the stores trading and keeping people employed.
There was one more aspect to this, the banks. RBS (yewp, thwe bank that had to be bailed out and is now owned by the UK taxpayer) didn't want to allow full use of the credit facilities it already had in place (games retail is a very cyclic business, and we;re just about at the bottom, waiting for new consoles), which made suppliers very nervous about supplying games to Game. This meant Game failed to get any revenue from big titles such as Mass Effect 3, and this pushed it over the edge.
RBS than received a takeover offer from at least 1 other group, which it rejected. So now RBS are busy making fees from splitting it up, whilst jobs are lost.
Digital distribution isn't as big a deal as many think - there are plenty of places that don't get enough download to get a copy of the latest game, even if Steam wants you to buy from them exclusively. Then there's the hardware that is best bought direct from a shop (usually just before christmas).
The 2nd hand sales thing - this is something the game publishers want to see dead, so maybe EA et al are happy to see Game go.
and there are reasons why a transcript is better:
when I have limited time and I want to read through the important parts.
When I want to have a brief scan of the topics to see if its something I want to view in depth.
If you only provide video, I have to decide whether its worth spending my time viewing it or not, and typically, that means I pass up and head for the next link. There are plenty of links vying for my attention, I don't need ones that are in less than accessible.
local police, homeland security, federal agents... all the same when you're at the other end of a bat wielded by a bloke with a uniform on.
Besides, there seems to be a lot of issues with US cops being somewhat heavy-handed, like the guy who was arrested for walking in the street (though, to be fair, he did have the temerity to ask the cop if he really was a cop as he wasn't wearing the usual uniform)
there are aspects of 'non profit' where there are no profits because the directors pay themselves such large salaries that there's (strangely!) no cash left over each year. I don't consider these non-profit at all.
eg. from TFA:
the Mozilla Foundation generated the highest compensation levels for Baker and Eich who, while receiving no direct salary from the Mozilla Foundation, were compensated $589,953 each from "reportable compensation from related organizations" and "estimated amount of other compensation from the [Mozilla Foundation] and related organizations."
"Related organizations," in this instance, is the Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that generates much of the Foundation's revenue.
With a revenue of $1,934,659, the Mozilla Foundation ranked fourth of the eighteen FLOSS-related non-profits researched for this report. But with a net cash flow loss of $1,333,815 for the 2010 fiscal year, the Mozilla Foundation was next to last on money lost for the year.
so, basically Mozilla Corp pays Mozilla Foundation cash to make stuff that the corp then sells/advocates/etc. Only the foundation sat on a net loss of $1.3m, yet the corp paid its 2 directors $1.2m..... hmm.
Now I don't mind the directors making a reasonable amount of money from the situation, we all got to eat after all, but I'd say a more reasonable remuneration would be more like $100k, not nearly 600k. And I totally disagree with directors sucking the non-profit cash-cow dry.
There are some Dells with 1920x1200 displays - the E6500 for example (remember to spec it as an option) or the XPS17, Vostro 1720 and Precision 6400.
I think they're becoming harder to source though, so get one now if you need one.
Windows has had perfectly scaling high DPI resolutions since Windows 3.0 (possibly before). The old win32 windowing system (that is hated by the kids today) was a pretty good way of implementing windows as individual objects and handling things like screen and dialog units in a display-independant manner.
I guess the addition of bitmaps screwed things up. but if devs had coded to use a high--res bitmap (and allow Windows to scale it to fit) rather than implement a fixed-size bitmap for a fixed-resolution then it wouldn't need fixing today.
yup, harpoon always was a real-world naval combat sim, not a game. Written by some old naval admiral or somesuch IIRC.
Now, there was a boardgame based on these rules but set in space, with 1-shot missiles with x-ray lasers as warhead (so they didn't have to get too close to the target), and repair crews. Can't remember what it was called unfortunately as I played it about 20 years ago.
rebirth is supposed to be more of a character inside a spaceship, not just a first-person view out of a cockpit.
then you want to play Frontier, which was the sequel to Elite. It has relativistic combat... and it was shite. You and the enemy ship hurtled towards each other, then past each other with a fraction of a second where they were close enough to hit each other, then turn around for the slow decel, and then repeat all over again. dull.
Now, a "real-life" space-game would be much more like Harpoon (an old naval combat system) where you'd chuck remote missiles at each other which would be intelligent enough to do something to the bad guys when they got near them, with counter measures to defend yourself. Obviously this makes the game much more like a tactical sim instead of fighter pilot dogfights, but that's what you get for letting physics in.
It's called "X: Rebirth" and is a follow-on to the quite successful X series of games (the current version being X3:Albion Prelude). These are pretty much Elite type trading/fighting sandboxes, but with multiple ships, remote controlled fleets (ie you can buy traders and set them off on autopilot trading for you), fighting (of course, but with wingmen ships or just sent your fleet of frigates or carriers to defend your trading sectors from the bad aliens, robot aliens or pirates), plus missions to keep things interesting - both small "transport a passenger to x", and large "follow a whole set of missions in a series to do something major".
What's a bit special (and controversial in the X community) is that the new game will be based around a single spacecraft (previously you could decide what kind of ship to pilot) but that has different 'rooms' to play from - so your co-pilot can be set to fly while you remote-control your combat drones or play the stock market or whatever.
Read more on the developer's forums
Nobody's quite sure exactly what it'll be like, but I think we can be confident Egosoft will pull the rabbit out, X3 served me very well for over a year, and I still didn't manage to finish all the plot missions. You can buy X3 on steam or impulse (or whatever impulse is called nowadays) for next to nothing, it cost me $10 in a special offer that seems to be repeated regularly.
yep, nothing to see at all
Just figure out what the gestures and sounds to avoid are when you first plug it in.
actually, it's even easier. Leave the entire TV in its box. In the shop.
its the same logic that says unfettered capitalism is just as bad as unfettered communism.
In one, the state decides what you can or can't do.
In the other, opposite extreme, everyone's so free to do whatever they want, that the big corporations end up telling you what you can or can't do.
See the difference? opposite extreme positions and still extreme. Neither are good. You need to temper them with some pragmatic exemptions, like personal freedoms for the communists or regulation for the capitalist.
yep, that's pretty much what I'm getting at. Just because you insist on one extreme over the other (and therefore claim your view is good, while the opposing view is evil), the reality is that they're both extreme positions that attempt to impose your ideals on someone else.
Sure, I like OSS, but there is still the argument that a closed environment allows a company more freedom (internally) to produce better products knowing that they can make more money from it, thus encouraging them to do so.
The graphics driver issue is one anomaly in the OSS world though, I agree OSS is better than closed, but I'm quite happy to use a proprietary driver for a gfx card as I need to buy that card and the driver only works with that card. So it doesn't matter if its free and open or not. When I buy a new card, I expect the best driver there is to work with it, regardless of openness.
If this means I have to 'suffer' a closed driver, then that makes no difference to me. It definitely makes a difference to me if the only driver available is poor though.
Hence my position that the "only open" view is just as extreme as the "everything closed" view.
I'm glad I'm not dependent on winning over people that are willing pay extra for devices that are locked down physically and ideologically
unfortunately this applies to Linux more than any other OS. Which graphics card drivers do you use? If you don't care and use the proprietary ones from the card maker, fine. If you get all panty-bunched about they have to be open, then you're just as bad as Apple is with their locked-down-only stuff.
don't worry, Ballmer won't let you down. Metro is coming.
Yep, its an inherent property of GC.
Our .NET apps suffer occasionally, we'll report slowdowns (seconds usually) and the devs say "can you reproduce it", and we can't. Not reliably enough to get them to fix it. Looking at perf stats shows these times are when the GC goes into overdrive.
But, everybody knows this. GC are designed to speed up allocations, with the performance penalty hitting when it needs to deallocate. Apologists say it's not a problem as the dealloc can take place in the 'slow time' when the CPU is not taxed, but the problem is thaat deallocating memory *is* an IO problem - you have to hit main page RAM to determine the blocks that need collecting, and you need to hit all of it (well, lots of it to check for dependencies between objects)
Then there's the user problem - when told "the compiler will take care of memory for you, just use it, memory's cheap" most programmers do exactly that, and you see the GC allocating millions of blocks of RAM. Hence all the calls to use stringbuilder type classes for string manipulation - why would a language designer say that except that they know the 'magic' GC doesn't work perfectly, and this string concatentation case is the easiest fruit to pick to improve performance.
Python's fine, but just use it as a tool for tasks its best suited to - a kind of perl replacement or prototype tool IMHO - and not for high performance computing tasks.
no. If this is the argument, they you should be writing in VB.NET, not C#. VB.NEt is faster and it helps you along a lot more than C# (seriously, I was very surprised C# wasn't as good seeing as its the same bytecode under the covers). So if you really want the programmer performance with a bit of C/C++ (implemented as an inproc COM object, that VB.NET again helps you consume better than C#), you need to be dumping C# today.
I also found that the syntax differences helped. Its easy to get confused about the subtle differences between C++ and C# because it all looks very similar. Write in VB.NET and you know which language you're dealing with and code accordingly.
yes, and the audit is, you guessed it, at the company's expense!
Combine that with the fact that Microsoft' licensing terms is so obscure that even Microsoft salesman don't get it right, and you've got a win-win situation (for Microsoft, of course)
no, someone invented an interactive debugger.
Really, it is easier to understand program flow by watching it work, but that doesn't mean its going to be a good program. Its far batter to understand a program by dividing it into pieces that are more manageable to us poor humans. That means defined interfaces and components (objects are generally too small to allow us to make good programs with), so go with a sensible middle ground and think about what you're trying to do. Works wonders for me.
I did a quick search and couldn't find other references already so:
The Uplift War by David Brin. (do not read his comet thing he also wrote, its pants but...) this series is exceptional. The concept: we find we're not alone, but the galactic society we enter is quite bureaucratic and snobbish about itself, where each race is not only ecologically conscious (by ancient rules) but also has a hierarchy of 'uplifting' races by helping them evolve to consciousness. And there's the poxy humans who've not only trashed their own planet (tut tut) but also have managed to 'uplift' chimps and dolphins, so the senior races have no choice but to accept humanity as a senior race in their own right... which pisses them off royally, and starts a whole series of underhand and back-door intrigue against us, while the true heroes of the books (the uplifted animals) struggle to fight back in almost naive and innocent ways.
I'd also like to recommend all of C.J.Cherryh's works, an exercise in feminist ideals in space, with books you can appreciate - as can your gf as there's a lot of 'how people feel' type stuff in there too, along with the usual society changing as factions develop, almost like you can see history being made.
For much older stuff, Harrison, von Vogt, Vance, Carter, Ellison. All good stuff.