As for brain drain out of the United States. i believe this if it's visa workers going home, but not americans. I believe that most that leave will be back before long.
One problem with brain drain is we have people being sent by countries like China to earn advanced degrees here in the US. When they go home to China, they're generally not going to come back unless they hide in a cargo container. Technically I guess this isn't so much a drain on our pool of educated residents (or those desirous of residency) as it is a drain on our capacity to educate residents, but the result is the same.
Then it's YOUR turn to bitch at YOUR school for obviously not giving a damn about its own tax base.
Not the school, the STATE. My state sees its university system mostly as a research mill. I could complain all I want, but it won't help.
Instead you bitch at others for having the temerity to complain.
I'm just pointing out that it's all relative. They may think it's terrible that they have to pay so much, but I couldn't get in even if I was willing to pay that much. Count your blessings, man.
What do you care where those Chinese students are getting their money from, as long as it's not YOUR money?!
Ah, but it IS partly my money. The university is funded by my tax dollars under the premise that it's for educating residents of the state. Even the non-resident tuition fees are less than what it actually costs to educate a student, so basically I and my fellow citizens are picking up the tab for the difference. My point with all this in general isn't to impugne the desire of foreign nationals to get a quality education; I'm just illustrating how (at least in MY state) the university system is more concerned with money than anything else. My specific point with regard to Chinese nationals is that in the US we are spending tax dollars to educate foreigners who have no intention of staying in this country. We complain that the education level of citizens and resident aliens is declining, but we increasingly devote our education resources to educating citizens of other countries because they pay more.
Perhaps you should bitch at your government for not giving you the same free ride. Where does all YOUR tax money go?
I would complain, if it would help, but there's no point. The University of California system is, despite it's stated purpose, no longer about providing tax-subsidized education to its constituency. It's about things like grant farming and state budget lobbying. Where does MY tax money go? Down the rathole like everyone else's, I suppose. We have a legislature that thought the dot com boom would last forever and overspent by 30-odd billion dollars. I figure my tax money goes towards about twenty minutes' interest on that debt.
"...saying he had patented the electronic process by which the donations were made. Ziarno demanded a licensing fee from the non-profit agency for infringing on his patent, which he applied for in 1993 -- before most people had even heard of the World Wide Web."
This seams strange (in 1993?). For some reason, I do not think I understand US patents.
He patented an "electronic collection plate" for churches and such, which had a credit card slot and keypad. Kinda like one of those little terminals at the grocery store, only battery powered. The "on da' web" thing comes from his plate just being a data collection platform and, when all collections are complete, the plates are plugged into a "network" which connects to a main computer and sends the transactions to the main computer. This computer then processes the transactions. It's a real bullshit stretch to say the patent applies to web donations via web site as well. That's like having a patent on singing telegrams and saying that UPS owes you license fees because many of their drivers hum show tunes while delivering packages.
I protest that further patents based on online shopping or online money transactions are invalid. There should be no patentable material there; Not if you click once instead of twice, not if the recipient is a charity, not if the transaction is linked to some other action, not if you buy widgets instead of sprockets, not if you do your transaction on a Sunday in your underwear.
I couldn't agree more. The rash of web patents is a clear failure to see computer technology for what it is: a truly multi-purpose tool. Allowing patents on "web variations" is as dumb as allowing patents on shovel usage. You can't patent the process of shoveling pea gravel into a one-wheel wheelbarrow because, despite it being specific, it's an obvious application of the tools and materials. Likewise, sending donation money via a web form is an obvious application of the tools.
Well, they pay handsomely for this education, so that money should also buy them some bitching rights, no? International students don't get to go to that state university for the same $2000 a semester as you do.
(shrug) They still shouldn't complain. I don't get to go to that state university AT ALL because the engineering program is packed with foreign students. There are a number of slots reserved for state resident students, but they're so few that you need a 1580 SAT and a 4.5GPA out of high school to get in. The university prefers non-resident students BECAUSE they pay more. Fully 1/4 of the students in the engineering school here are Chinese nationals whose tuition is paid by the Chinese government!
So foreign students can complain all they want about the cost of tuition, but they should also realize that that's one of the main reasons the scool let them in at all.
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
Song of the piracy apologist:
Or, in other words, if you agree with this screed, please use it to spam any future discussion of intellectual property law with pre-canned arguments rather than engaging in a rational debate framed in your own words.
(p.s. post it anonymously so people don't know who you are and mentally label you a mindless parrot)
The point you're missing is that what is LEGAL is constantly shrinking. If the law was a static, absolute thing, your point would be valid. At some point one must stand up and say "the law goes too far". Are you really suggesting that all laws should be obeyed simply because they're LAWS?
Looks like an old picture. He didn't seem at all like a 15 year old when I last met him.
That might indeed be an old pic. It's entirely possible that he's just another geek with no social skills. He may be an entirely reasonable person in real life, but just doesn't realize that some conversational vernacular that sounds OK when spoken makes you sound like a jerk when written.
"...one isn't a complete cunt for doing that. Perhaps one is only a quarter-clitoris and a couple of damp pubes."
Am I the only one who kind of tuned out after (or even before) reading this?
A lot of people are trying to explain away his juvenile potty mouth by saying "oh, the brits use the word CUNT all the time-- it's not as bad a word there". This is true to some degree, but the kind of people who use the word are generally the same class of people that use the word FAG, or FAGGOT as a derogatory term here in the US. He thinks he's clever, but he sounds like a 13 year old twit who fancies himself worldly. Using the name of a female body part as an insult is as infantile as using homosexuality as one. He's an ass. Take a look at him. Looks like your average stoner that stopped maturing at 15. Of course, all it takes is a quick look at Gridrunner++, his shareware game, and you can tell he is just a stoner-- the game's a stupid "Galaga" style shooter with rotating-palette-psychedelic backgrounds. Lame.
I downloaded Master of Orion 3. It sucked. I deleted in two days.
I actually did worse than you did. I bought it and returned it, thus probably costing them actual money. I should have pirated it. Man did that game SUCK!
Not when I can go to Blockbuster or GameFly and rent as many games as I can handle in a month for $20. Every game out there has somebodys blood, sweat, and tears in it. The least I can do is show them a little respect and pay for their work if I play it.
If you're renting the game, you're not paying the programmers doodly squat, so what's the difference between that and pirating? How about buying a used copy? They don't get doodly squat for that either. Is that as bad as piracy?
"Congratulations! You have captured the red team's flag. To continue with the game, please enter the word on the top of page 948 of the user manual."
Or my favorite:
.________ /_______/--------/\
\\\\\\\\\________\/ .\_______\/
Look at the pictures scattered through the book to ID this thing:
A) it's a GoorKogger
B) it's a ThimFuddler
C) it's a Xum
Imagine this. Id software says "We're not going to sell Doom3. When it's done everyone can just grab copies for free, and copy it as much as they like. To cover the time and effort of our development of the game, however, we are not going to do any more work on it until $15 million (random number, I have idea of game development costs and expected profits) has been donated. Donations can be made by credit card HERE..."
Probably wouldn't work. Stephen King tried that with some story, I think. It was distributed in installments online on the "honor system". He eventually quit working on it because only 1 person was paying for every 100 or so downloading.
I think a good model would be giving the game away free, but charging money for an account # that lets you play the game online. Or perhaps you can play one map online (a really simple one) unless you've paid.
Jeff Minter is one of the most well-respected programmers in the industry, and author of a large number of games on several platforms including at least 2 platform killer apps.
I think he's well respected for his programming ability perhaps, but the stuff he produces has never really impressed me. He doesn't seem to have gotten past his fascination with psychedelic palette rotation-- a trick which was already old in the Commodore 64 days. He's a stoner with a knack for assembly language who hasn't done anything particularly noteworthy as far as I can tell. Gridrunner++ is, at best, a nostalgia game; a throwback to the C64 days. His only other project of late, Unity, sounds like it's going to be a 3D shooter full of more psychedelic crap. I respect him for what he did once, twenty years ago, but he's certainly no Sid Meier.
Re:I don't know who this Jeff Minter guy is... (Score:1)
by hyphz (179185) on Saturday May 01, @04:04PM (#9030514)
> Jeff Minter WAS one of the most well-respected
> programmers in the industry. It has been a
> VERY long time since he did anything notable.
> Now he's just a loud-mouthed boob.
Uh, no, that's not true. He is still highly respected. Gridrunner++ for the PC became one of the few Shareware games to recieve the highest possible award from PC gamer in the UK,
What? Have you PLAYED Gridrunner++? It's not even a good game by Commodore 64 standards! Its distracting background with unnecessary psychedelic palette rotation is a throwback to 1985 (the last time this dork wrote a game that sold well), the graphics quality bites HARD, and the play format (a vertical shooter) has been dead for 15 years. It's like playing Galaga, only with WORSE graphics, and flickering that threatens to induce epilepsy. I'm sorry, this guy has very little "game developer" cred. He's a potty mouth pothead with a knack for assembly language. What a wiener.
and the very announcement of Unity (his next project) was the subject of an entire issue of EDGE.
Here's a cut from lionhead's description of Unity:
"Unity is a fabulous journey through a succession of beautiful abstract 3D spaces, with gameplay varying in tempo, from fast paced shooting to a more gentle progression"
Great, sounds like another scrolling shooter with irritating psychedelic bullshit thrown in-- but in 3D this time! At least it's a collaberative effort with Peter Molyneaux, so it won't be JUST a tie-dyed circle jerk.
"When I got used to the fact that the 'open' dialog wouldn't show me any of my 'ordinary' Mac folders or anything in my 'files' hard drive I started thinking 'UNIX' and moved some photos into folders where they could be accessed. UNIX has this wonderful habit of trying to protect users from their own stupidity without recognising its own."
My impression of *NIX type OS's has been that if you ask it to point a gun at you and pull the trigger, it'll do so without a second thought (cough)rm -r *(cough). He seems to have confused the "imaginary" file system that is his OS X folders, with the actual file system underneath. Funny how people see the system they're accustomed to as being "real" even after it has had reality abstracted away to another system underneath it.
I'm sure we were all thinkin "That's it! We they should ALL shut them down! That's always the solution! To everything!
Of course y'all weren't. I was trying to gently suggest that "turn it off" is a stupid thing to say because in those situtions where it's a solution it has likely already been implemented.
I thought the C64 had a 6510...
Yes, I know, 6502 code will run fine on a 6510, but you're not utilizing the whole CPU there
Actually, the difference between the two is quite minimal. The instruction set is identical, but the 6510 had a 6-bit IO port that Commodore used with a PLA to implement bank switching. This is how they managed to have a system with 48K ROM and 64K RAM with a CPU limited to a 64K address space. It was a pretty cool setup: you could copy the contents of ROM to the RAM "underneath", flip out the ROM and the kernel would seamlessly switch to running from the copy in RAM. You could then patch it all kinds of ways. Another trick was to load a program that didn't need the kernel into the RAM underneath the ROM, flip out ALL the ROM and give you almost the full 64K to run it. A lot of Commodore games used that trick.
In other words, you put a server next to your bed, and now you're complaining.
Nah, I'm not complaining. I picked up one o' them silly little Qube2 MIPS servers a few months ago. Pull the one nasty little fan it comes with and put a quiet PCI slot blower in and the only sound you hear is the hard drive. I was just pointing out that "shut 'er down" isn't always the solution.
In the end, I have never ever seen a Windows-system without a partially swapped kernel, even with tons of free RAM available.
This is just plain stupid, or is there some sort of "smart" explanation for this?
When you have a bunch of lazy, slacker, multi-megabyte services running in the background, waiting for that once-in-a-blue-moon event that requires their help (yes, I'm talking about YOU spoolsv.exe, you 3.98MB hog!), you might as well shove them into the swap file. Windows can end up with an unGODLY amount of oversized crap just sitting aorund waiting for something to happen. Take a look at the "processes" tab on the task manager-- it's insane! I figure the NT kernel is about the same: a bunch of modular pieces, two thirds of which are used maybe once at startup and then paged out. I guess I understand why they did it-- if I had a 57MB kernel image lolling around memory, I'd look for ways to swap out some too.
Re:Headphones are an even better solution....
on
A Silent PC Solution?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For example, what does the person who has a PC in his room, next to his bed do?
Turn it off?
I'm sure my family and friends who have email addresses at my domain would really like not being able to send or receive mail for 8 hours each night.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with brain drain is we have people being sent by countries like China to earn advanced degrees here in the US. When they go home to China, they're generally not going to come back unless they hide in a cargo container. Technically I guess this isn't so much a drain on our pool of educated residents (or those desirous of residency) as it is a drain on our capacity to educate residents, but the result is the same.
Not the school, the STATE. My state sees its university system mostly as a research mill. I could complain all I want, but it won't help.
Instead you bitch at others for having the temerity to complain.
I'm just pointing out that it's all relative. They may think it's terrible that they have to pay so much, but I couldn't get in even if I was willing to pay that much. Count your blessings, man.
What do you care where those Chinese students are getting their money from, as long as it's not YOUR money?!
Ah, but it IS partly my money. The university is funded by my tax dollars under the premise that it's for educating residents of the state. Even the non-resident tuition fees are less than what it actually costs to educate a student, so basically I and my fellow citizens are picking up the tab for the difference. My point with all this in general isn't to impugne the desire of foreign nationals to get a quality education; I'm just illustrating how (at least in MY state) the university system is more concerned with money than anything else. My specific point with regard to Chinese nationals is that in the US we are spending tax dollars to educate foreigners who have no intention of staying in this country. We complain that the education level of citizens and resident aliens is declining, but we increasingly devote our education resources to educating citizens of other countries because they pay more.
Perhaps you should bitch at your government for not giving you the same free ride. Where does all YOUR tax money go?
I would complain, if it would help, but there's no point. The University of California system is, despite it's stated purpose, no longer about providing tax-subsidized education to its constituency. It's about things like grant farming and state budget lobbying. Where does MY tax money go? Down the rathole like everyone else's, I suppose. We have a legislature that thought the dot com boom would last forever and overspent by 30-odd billion dollars. I figure my tax money goes towards about twenty minutes' interest on that debt.
He patented an "electronic collection plate" for churches and such, which had a credit card slot and keypad. Kinda like one of those little terminals at the grocery store, only battery powered. The "on da' web" thing comes from his plate just being a data collection platform and, when all collections are complete, the plates are plugged into a "network" which connects to a main computer and sends the transactions to the main computer. This computer then processes the transactions. It's a real bullshit stretch to say the patent applies to web donations via web site as well. That's like having a patent on singing telegrams and saying that UPS owes you license fees because many of their drivers hum show tunes while delivering packages.
I couldn't agree more. The rash of web patents is a clear failure to see computer technology for what it is: a truly multi-purpose tool. Allowing patents on "web variations" is as dumb as allowing patents on shovel usage. You can't patent the process of shoveling pea gravel into a one-wheel wheelbarrow because, despite it being specific, it's an obvious application of the tools and materials. Likewise, sending donation money via a web form is an obvious application of the tools.
(shrug) They still shouldn't complain. I don't get to go to that state university AT ALL because the engineering program is packed with foreign students. There are a number of slots reserved for state resident students, but they're so few that you need a 1580 SAT and a 4.5GPA out of high school to get in. The university prefers non-resident students BECAUSE they pay more. Fully 1/4 of the students in the engineering school here are Chinese nationals whose tuition is paid by the Chinese government!
So foreign students can complain all they want about the cost of tuition, but they should also realize that that's one of the main reasons the scool let them in at all.
Hey, how about a link!
I'm an idiot.
Here's a nice, classic 80's air guitar for sale. It looks pretty rad.
Song of the piracy apologist:
Or, in other words, if you agree with this screed, please use it to spam any future discussion of intellectual property law with pre-canned arguments rather than engaging in a rational debate framed in your own words.
(p.s. post it anonymously so people don't know who you are and mentally label you a mindless parrot)
The point you're missing is that what is LEGAL is constantly shrinking. If the law was a static, absolute thing, your point would be valid. At some point one must stand up and say "the law goes too far". Are you really suggesting that all laws should be obeyed simply because they're LAWS?
That might indeed be an old pic. It's entirely possible that he's just another geek with no social skills. He may be an entirely reasonable person in real life, but just doesn't realize that some conversational vernacular that sounds OK when spoken makes you sound like a jerk when written.
Heh. Modded troll already. Must've struck a nerve with some brit who thinks calling people "cunt" is the height of culture.
Am I the only one who kind of tuned out after (or even before) reading this?
A lot of people are trying to explain away his juvenile potty mouth by saying "oh, the brits use the word CUNT all the time-- it's not as bad a word there". This is true to some degree, but the kind of people who use the word are generally the same class of people that use the word FAG, or FAGGOT as a derogatory term here in the US. He thinks he's clever, but he sounds like a 13 year old twit who fancies himself worldly. Using the name of a female body part as an insult is as infantile as using homosexuality as one. He's an ass. Take a look at him. Looks like your average stoner that stopped maturing at 15. Of course, all it takes is a quick look at Gridrunner++, his shareware game, and you can tell he is just a stoner-- the game's a stupid "Galaga" style shooter with rotating-palette-psychedelic backgrounds. Lame.
I actually did worse than you did. I bought it and returned it, thus probably costing them actual money. I should have pirated it. Man did that game SUCK!
If you're renting the game, you're not paying the programmers doodly squat, so what's the difference between that and pirating? How about buying a used copy? They don't get doodly squat for that either. Is that as bad as piracy?
Or my favorite:
\\\\\\\\\________\/
Look at the pictures scattered through the book to ID this thing:
A) it's a GoorKogger
B) it's a ThimFuddler
C) it's a Xum
Probably wouldn't work. Stephen King tried that with some story, I think. It was distributed in installments online on the "honor system". He eventually quit working on it because only 1 person was paying for every 100 or so downloading.
I think a good model would be giving the game away free, but charging money for an account # that lets you play the game online. Or perhaps you can play one map online (a really simple one) unless you've paid.
I think he's well respected for his programming ability perhaps, but the stuff he produces has never really impressed me. He doesn't seem to have gotten past his fascination with psychedelic palette rotation-- a trick which was already old in the Commodore 64 days. He's a stoner with a knack for assembly language who hasn't done anything particularly noteworthy as far as I can tell. Gridrunner++ is, at best, a nostalgia game; a throwback to the C64 days. His only other project of late, Unity, sounds like it's going to be a 3D shooter full of more psychedelic crap. I respect him for what he did once, twenty years ago, but he's certainly no Sid Meier.
> Jeff Minter WAS one of the most well-respected
> programmers in the industry. It has been a
> VERY long time since he did anything notable.
> Now he's just a loud-mouthed boob.
Uh, no, that's not true. He is still highly respected. Gridrunner++ for the PC became one of the few Shareware games to recieve the highest possible award from PC gamer in the UK,
What? Have you PLAYED Gridrunner++? It's not even a good game by Commodore 64 standards! Its distracting background with unnecessary psychedelic palette rotation is a throwback to 1985 (the last time this dork wrote a game that sold well), the graphics quality bites HARD, and the play format (a vertical shooter) has been dead for 15 years. It's like playing Galaga, only with WORSE graphics, and flickering that threatens to induce epilepsy. I'm sorry, this guy has very little "game developer" cred. He's a potty mouth pothead with a knack for assembly language. What a wiener.
and the very announcement of Unity (his next project) was the subject of an entire issue of EDGE.
Here's a cut from lionhead's description of Unity:
Great, sounds like another scrolling shooter with irritating psychedelic bullshit thrown in-- but in 3D this time! At least it's a collaberative effort with Peter Molyneaux, so it won't be JUST a tie-dyed circle jerk.
My impression of *NIX type OS's has been that if you ask it to point a gun at you and pull the trigger, it'll do so without a second thought (cough)rm -r *(cough). He seems to have confused the "imaginary" file system that is his OS X folders, with the actual file system underneath. Funny how people see the system they're accustomed to as being "real" even after it has had reality abstracted away to another system underneath it.
Of course y'all weren't. I was trying to gently suggest that "turn it off" is a stupid thing to say because in those situtions where it's a solution it has likely already been implemented.
What? You mean put my nice hardware where someone else can....can.... LOOK AT IT ? That's CRAZY talk!
I actually have a quiet, fanless MIPS based Qube2 now, so noise is no longer an issue.
Actually, the difference between the two is quite minimal. The instruction set is identical, but the 6510 had a 6-bit IO port that Commodore used with a PLA to implement bank switching. This is how they managed to have a system with 48K ROM and 64K RAM with a CPU limited to a 64K address space. It was a pretty cool setup: you could copy the contents of ROM to the RAM "underneath", flip out the ROM and the kernel would seamlessly switch to running from the copy in RAM. You could then patch it all kinds of ways. Another trick was to load a program that didn't need the kernel into the RAM underneath the ROM, flip out ALL the ROM and give you almost the full 64K to run it. A lot of Commodore games used that trick.
Nah, I'm not complaining. I picked up one o' them silly little Qube2 MIPS servers a few months ago. Pull the one nasty little fan it comes with and put a quiet PCI slot blower in and the only sound you hear is the hard drive. I was just pointing out that "shut 'er down" isn't always the solution.
When you have a bunch of lazy, slacker, multi-megabyte services running in the background, waiting for that once-in-a-blue-moon event that requires their help (yes, I'm talking about YOU spoolsv.exe, you 3.98MB hog!), you might as well shove them into the swap file. Windows can end up with an unGODLY amount of oversized crap just sitting aorund waiting for something to happen. Take a look at the "processes" tab on the task manager-- it's insane! I figure the NT kernel is about the same: a bunch of modular pieces, two thirds of which are used maybe once at startup and then paged out. I guess I understand why they did it-- if I had a 57MB kernel image lolling around memory, I'd look for ways to swap out some too.
Turn it off?
I'm sure my family and friends who have email addresses at my domain would really like not being able to send or receive mail for 8 hours each night.