Asking for a portfolio unethical? Hardly. What's more unethical would be forcing humonguous NDAs on employees like that one, when the competitive advantage of a small piece of code is somewhere between negligable and useless.
Sorry, I just assumed that when I saw the "additional copy" that I was looking at the archival backup clause. I do recall that clause now, however you must be a legitamate owner of a copy. Notice that it implies that you own a copy in the law, not liscence. But I still don't know what makes these EULAs valid.
No more than if they handed me 100 Sacagewea coins... During my stint as a cashier at a movie theater, I recieved two 2 dollar bills, and zero Sacagewas.
tepples, that's a backup copy essentially. As I understand it, you're only allowed to use the software if you accept the agreement. I'm not sure what law holds you to this, though. You've clearly paid for it, its in your hands. Perhaps something about copying the software to the CPU and RAM, therefore, you're in violation of their copyright. Maybe we should invent a system that doesn't copy somehow?
The man (Linus) has avoided the common pitfalls of other Operating System leaders by picking battles carefully and not intentionally leaping into flamewars with those who would otherwise be productive contributers. He's certainly no God, but I'm coming to believe the guy has become pivotal for a reason.
I find it interesting that you simultaneously blame them for not being pragmatic enough reguarding binary drivers and deride them for not coming up with a more usable theoretical economic model (whatever that means). Sveasoft has a working economic model, that doesn't punish openness, or they probably wouldn't bother with it. Redhat has a business model as well. As does Progeny, and Novell.
As far as hardware vs software, well we all know that some things fair better than others. You'd be crazy to do software radio instead of a simple set of DSPs. It's slowly becoming workable, but they still require a hefty set of hardware requirements, some of which is custom. It mostly comes down to parallelizablitity, and the your example, compression, is heavily data dependent. In GNUradio's denfense, their goal is a far more flexible (ie a programmable) radio, rather than a high performance radio. I think they're doing quite well at their goal.
That would be great, execpt that Windows has something called a "Event-Response Architecture." That basically means that every event is passed down to the program to handle, when Windows feels its appropriate (ie the window is in focus and the click was over the window region, etc). So every keystroke is sent to the program, to be handled as it sees fit. Low level access is not needed.
The last real nationwide problem was Y2k. The problem was known about for quite some time but nobody cared. Only after private enterprises decided they couldn't possibly put off the expense ANY longer, was there any real push to fix the problems. What did we do to escape it? Three prongs of government answers * Protection from liabilty to software makers * Tax write offs for y2k related expenses * Extra pressure from the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low to encourage capital expenitures like y2k fixes.
I don't have to tell you how many businesses came close to missing it, and how many accidentally missed a few edge cases. We should all thank god it was a reasonably simple task of reviewing code. If the next crisis to befall us is diminished oil (we should be so lucky), there are major crucial differences between these two. Major political players in several states are invested in oil, and would profit less by reducing demand for oil. Compared to y2k, alternative energy requires a lot more work, and ingeniuity. We have to re-imagine everything from transportation and shipping to manufacturing processes, all of which require copious amounts of oil or oil derivatives. The only saving grace here is that oil supplies are likely to diminish slowly, and costs are likely to rise in step. Should OPEC decide that America represents a small enough market (compared to EU, Russia India and China) to consider embargoing the USA for its political hostility (ousting OPEC regimes and all), that would be the end of the saving grace.
The Libertarian liberated-market philosphy says that we should endure this. The y2k crisis was not a disaster, and we should expect no less concerning oil. If worst comes to worst, a disaster would provide tremendous incentive to find a solution immediately. Unfortunately, that analysis also implies widespread unemployment, with subsequent trickle down consequences. From a utilitarian standpoint, its much better for everyone involved if we address this problem before it matters, not after.
Nader should really get on that. Maybe instead of running for President, he should try getting into office as Governor of Oregon, where he has a lot of supporters?
Even the fairly popular TomsHardware plays dirty. I don't know if they take money for good press (but it seemed to be pretty well implied), but they regularly hand out Blue Sky previews, and their recent 6800gt roundup compared models of the card with overclocked chips, which I haven't seen on the market ANYWHERE. Its borderline fraud, given that the difference between what you're buying and what you think they reviewed is a few letters on the model number.
Not to mention the humongous ads on every page saying "Two is better, buy NVIDIA!" I'm sure that's a great way to establish yourself as a credible reviewer, having one of the biggest draws for reviews advertise on your site. No wonder the old editor quit; whores get paid much better than editors and at least they're upfront about it all.
See, the compression stroke doesn't care how dense the air is, it will still reduce volume. That's all it cares about, making room for the piston to move. The turbo compresses the air somewhat during the intake stroke, when the piston is all the way up. So taking a regular combustion engine and using a turbo onto it, that will cost you some work, compressing air that's already somewhat compressed. It's not saving any energy by coming in "pre compressed."
Na. The thing to remember is that cars work ass-backwards. When you hit the "gas" pedal, you're really opening up a valve to allow more oxygen into the system. Sensors then measure how much oxygen is in the mix, and use an appropriate amount of fuel. The benefit of compressed air is that you can burn more fuel per stroke, which isn't exactly a green idea. It's also worse on the parts, because of the added heat, which is why they don't typically encourage these things.
At least, that's my layman's understanding of it, as a meager computer scientist peering into the world of mechanical engineering.
I guess too much innovation means the drive to pay less than full attention to the standard video game market: 16 year old boys who want to play games marketed to 24 year old boys. People who've already been playing games for a while. Nintendo wants mothers to think "I'd like to try that," while Sony and Microsoft are quick to say "This isn't your mommy's games" and include liberal amounts of blood, gore and violence. It might be sad, but you have to pretty much expect the new Zelda to outsell the "cel-da" approach.
I suppose I should make the statement that I only own a gamecube and a GBA SP. I don't think that nintendo will ever go away, but its been a long while since we've seen a console from them that wasn't designed around a single game. All I really meant by innovating themselves into the ground is that they keep pushing wierder and wierder stuff. The n64 claw, the "Just push the Big Button" cube controller, and the "how the hell do you hold this?" DS. I shudder to think what the revolution will use. Maybe something stupidly expensive that will ensure that nobody will buy it, like using the DS as a primary controller.
At this pace, Nintendo is going to innovate themselves into the ground. Sony has been moving forward in a very conservative manner, and it's only lead them to greater success. The PSX controller was essentially a SNES pad with two extra buttons. I forget which game introduced the dualshocks, but again, an incremental update to the standard design. The Dualshock 2s were similar.
The advantage here is ports from arcade games, especially fighters. Smash bros proved that if you take the time to think and examine the hardware, you can brainstorm up something really great and really platform specific. Mortal Kombat proved you don't need to think nearly that hard to get millions in sales, as long as the controller fits the same style they used ten years ago.
Donno if that's the same as what I've seen, but... You can do something similar with Li-ions. To explain the tech to laymans who were kids in the 80s, imagine a fruit rollup turned into a battery. the contact area becomes MUCH larger and provides some beneficial drop in resistance.
You're assuming that the regular brakes come on because the battery can't take the charge quickly enough. I'm not a mechano-electrical engineer, but I'm pretty sure there's only so much force a given engine can put out that way.
Remember, its a graph of dollar revenues, not unit sales. Even with Apple dropping the prices of their Macs, its still not enough to compete with the open standard of the PC. The real interesting question is why the iPod is/will succeed where the mac dropped off. Apple computers suffered because their competitor opened the schematic, so what protects the iPod music player from the same fate?
I think the answer to why Apple failed is because IBM fucked themselves over when they released the specs. It certainly brought them marketshare, but they wound up losing significant forms of control and sales in the end. Ultimately, IBM sold their PC division to Lenova, presumably to focus on their business consulting side and give them the flexibility to recommend their former competitors. There are, of course, rumors that the sale was about fixing their mistake and introducing the Cell processor as a desktop platform.
The iPod, on the other hand, represents an excellent bridge between Apple's high markup strategy and the consumer market. Whereas the switch campaign focused on regular people who wanted something that just works and can't afford it, the ipod appeals to people as a status indicator. They're expensive, and everyone knows it. The "it just works" campaign certainly helped ease the fear of new technologies on the consumer market (as did the actual ease of use) . Think of it as akin to using a powerbook. Highly reguarded among geeks, but also reputed to be expensive as hell and generally not worth the money.
Also, powerbook sales are down because they haven't changed since like 2002.
Damn, 1gb stick? Way to get suckered into Sony's proprietary trap. I mean, the PSP seems like a pretty good gaming platform, but it looks like a hella expensive music player and shitty movie dispenser.
The good news is that you've still got 3/4ths a year left to blow more money with!
Or maybe thats honestly what people pay. It's only 14 a year, but that's more than one a month. Given the wild success the original halflife (and its mods) still enjoys, at least some empirical evidence exists in favor of the "averages gamers sit on their ass less than McKinney83" theory.
John Carmack is one man, and a fairly intelligent programmer. But there are also several others who write programs, and you'd be naive to assume them all as talented and knowledgable about programming vulnerabilities as The Man. Normally this isn't a problem, as any program you write only affects your device. But being connected to a network changes all this. One bluetooth virus exploit unleashed during CES (probably the largest orgy of mobile devices known to man) turns that deal with Motorola to provide your software on the default firmware into a deal to provide a security exploit to Motorola.
So not only do you need Java for your cross platform compatibility that is so very nessecary on mobile phone programming, but you need the JVM's enforced behavior checks so you don't run up a rather large bill on behalf of your paying users. It's very unlikely that a small gaming company can afford to defend its "NO GUARENTEES OF USABILITY FOR ANY KIND AND WE'RE TOTALLY NOT LIABLE IF THIS COSTS YOU A FORTUNE IN FEES" disclaimer in their EULA when that buffer check SHOULD have been implemented. Java provides them with a fairly strong guarentee that their buffers are safe, and that even if something else happens, you should be effectively quarantined from networking functionality. Ultimately, John Carmack is dissapointed, but writing games is probably a waste of his skills versus writing the JVM itself.
Maybe Sun should just go ahead and fork the damn code. Another window manager can't hurt much. Maybe it will go to show how forks can be postitive elements of open-sourcery.
Slashdot Mirror
Or was it? I'd have to say it would be amusing to discover that they submitted their paper to a randomly generated journal.
On the other hand, I've seen my brother crash OpenOffice.org multiple times by cutting and pasting from IE. Top notch, no really.
Asking for a portfolio unethical? Hardly. What's more unethical would be forcing humonguous NDAs on employees like that one, when the competitive advantage of a small piece of code is somewhere between negligable and useless.
Sorry, I just assumed that when I saw the "additional copy" that I was looking at the archival backup clause. I do recall that clause now, however you must be a legitamate owner of a copy. Notice that it implies that you own a copy in the law, not liscence. But I still don't know what makes these EULAs valid.
No more than if they handed me 100 Sacagewea coins... During my stint as a cashier at a movie theater, I recieved two 2 dollar bills, and zero Sacagewas.
tepples, that's a backup copy essentially. As I understand it, you're only allowed to use the software if you accept the agreement. I'm not sure what law holds you to this, though. You've clearly paid for it, its in your hands. Perhaps something about copying the software to the CPU and RAM, therefore, you're in violation of their copyright. Maybe we should invent a system that doesn't copy somehow?
Hey, the comparisons between the GNU and Communist Russia deepen!
The man (Linus) has avoided the common pitfalls of other Operating System leaders by picking battles carefully and not intentionally leaping into flamewars with those who would otherwise be productive contributers. He's certainly no God, but I'm coming to believe the guy has become pivotal for a reason.
I find it interesting that you simultaneously blame them for not being pragmatic enough reguarding binary drivers and deride them for not coming up with a more usable theoretical economic model (whatever that means). Sveasoft has a working economic model, that doesn't punish openness, or they probably wouldn't bother with it. Redhat has a business model as well. As does Progeny, and Novell.
As far as hardware vs software, well we all know that some things fair better than others. You'd be crazy to do software radio instead of a simple set of DSPs. It's slowly becoming workable, but they still require a hefty set of hardware requirements, some of which is custom. It mostly comes down to parallelizablitity, and the your example, compression, is heavily data dependent. In GNUradio's denfense, their goal is a far more flexible (ie a programmable) radio, rather than a high performance radio. I think they're doing quite well at their goal.
That would be great, execpt that Windows has something called a "Event-Response Architecture." That basically means that every event is passed down to the program to handle, when Windows feels its appropriate (ie the window is in focus and the click was over the window region, etc). So every keystroke is sent to the program, to be handled as it sees fit. Low level access is not needed.
The last real nationwide problem was Y2k. The problem was known about for quite some time but nobody cared. Only after private enterprises decided they couldn't possibly put off the expense ANY longer, was there any real push to fix the problems. What did we do to escape it? Three prongs of government answers
* Protection from liabilty to software makers
* Tax write offs for y2k related expenses
* Extra pressure from the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low to encourage capital expenitures like y2k fixes.
I don't have to tell you how many businesses came close to missing it, and how many accidentally missed a few edge cases. We should all thank god it was a reasonably simple task of reviewing code. If the next crisis to befall us is diminished oil (we should be so lucky), there are major crucial differences between these two. Major political players in several states are invested in oil, and would profit less by reducing demand for oil. Compared to y2k, alternative energy requires a lot more work, and ingeniuity. We have to re-imagine everything from transportation and shipping to manufacturing processes, all of which require copious amounts of oil or oil derivatives. The only saving grace here is that oil supplies are likely to diminish slowly, and costs are likely to rise in step. Should OPEC decide that America represents a small enough market (compared to EU, Russia India and China) to consider embargoing the USA for its political hostility (ousting OPEC regimes and all), that would be the end of the saving grace.
The Libertarian liberated-market philosphy says that we should endure this. The y2k crisis was not a disaster, and we should expect no less concerning oil. If worst comes to worst, a disaster would provide tremendous incentive to find a solution immediately. Unfortunately, that analysis also implies widespread unemployment, with subsequent trickle down consequences. From a utilitarian standpoint, its much better for everyone involved if we address this problem before it matters, not after.
Nader should really get on that. Maybe instead of running for President, he should try getting into office as Governor of Oregon, where he has a lot of supporters?
Even the fairly popular TomsHardware plays dirty. I don't know if they take money for good press (but it seemed to be pretty well implied), but they regularly hand out Blue Sky previews, and their recent 6800gt roundup compared models of the card with overclocked chips, which I haven't seen on the market ANYWHERE. Its borderline fraud, given that the difference between what you're buying and what you think they reviewed is a few letters on the model number.
Not to mention the humongous ads on every page saying "Two is better, buy NVIDIA!" I'm sure that's a great way to establish yourself as a credible reviewer, having one of the biggest draws for reviews advertise on your site. No wonder the old editor quit; whores get paid much better than editors and at least they're upfront about it all.
See, the compression stroke doesn't care how dense the air is, it will still reduce volume. That's all it cares about, making room for the piston to move. The turbo compresses the air somewhat during the intake stroke, when the piston is all the way up. So taking a regular combustion engine and using a turbo onto it, that will cost you some work, compressing air that's already somewhat compressed. It's not saving any energy by coming in "pre compressed."
Na. The thing to remember is that cars work ass-backwards. When you hit the "gas" pedal, you're really opening up a valve to allow more oxygen into the system. Sensors then measure how much oxygen is in the mix, and use an appropriate amount of fuel. The benefit of compressed air is that you can burn more fuel per stroke, which isn't exactly a green idea. It's also worse on the parts, because of the added heat, which is why they don't typically encourage these things.
At least, that's my layman's understanding of it, as a meager computer scientist peering into the world of mechanical engineering.
I guess too much innovation means the drive to pay less than full attention to the standard video game market: 16 year old boys who want to play games marketed to 24 year old boys. People who've already been playing games for a while. Nintendo wants mothers to think "I'd like to try that," while Sony and Microsoft are quick to say "This isn't your mommy's games" and include liberal amounts of blood, gore and violence. It might be sad, but you have to pretty much expect the new Zelda to outsell the "cel-da" approach.
I suppose I should make the statement that I only own a gamecube and a GBA SP. I don't think that nintendo will ever go away, but its been a long while since we've seen a console from them that wasn't designed around a single game. All I really meant by innovating themselves into the ground is that they keep pushing wierder and wierder stuff. The n64 claw, the "Just push the Big Button" cube controller, and the "how the hell do you hold this?" DS. I shudder to think what the revolution will use. Maybe something stupidly expensive that will ensure that nobody will buy it, like using the DS as a primary controller.
At this pace, Nintendo is going to innovate themselves into the ground. Sony has been moving forward in a very conservative manner, and it's only lead them to greater success. The PSX controller was essentially a SNES pad with two extra buttons. I forget which game introduced the dualshocks, but again, an incremental update to the standard design. The Dualshock 2s were similar.
The advantage here is ports from arcade games, especially fighters. Smash bros proved that if you take the time to think and examine the hardware, you can brainstorm up something really great and really platform specific. Mortal Kombat proved you don't need to think nearly that hard to get millions in sales, as long as the controller fits the same style they used ten years ago.
Announce on April Fool's day, and then just mine the April Fool's posts on slashdot for good ideas!
Donno if that's the same as what I've seen, but... You can do something similar with Li-ions. To explain the tech to laymans who were kids in the 80s, imagine a fruit rollup turned into a battery. the contact area becomes MUCH larger and provides some beneficial drop in resistance.
You're assuming that the regular brakes come on because the battery can't take the charge quickly enough. I'm not a mechano-electrical engineer, but I'm pretty sure there's only so much force a given engine can put out that way.
So if I telecommute for the same company to multiple states, am i subject to ALL of their taxes?
Remember, its a graph of dollar revenues, not unit sales. Even with Apple dropping the prices of their Macs, its still not enough to compete with the open standard of the PC. The real interesting question is why the iPod is/will succeed where the mac dropped off. Apple computers suffered because their competitor opened the schematic, so what protects the iPod music player from the same fate?
I think the answer to why Apple failed is because IBM fucked themselves over when they released the specs. It certainly brought them marketshare, but they wound up losing significant forms of control and sales in the end. Ultimately, IBM sold their PC division to Lenova, presumably to focus on their business consulting side and give them the flexibility to recommend their former competitors. There are, of course, rumors that the sale was about fixing their mistake and introducing the Cell processor as a desktop platform.
The iPod, on the other hand, represents an excellent bridge between Apple's high markup strategy and the consumer market. Whereas the switch campaign focused on regular people who wanted something that just works and can't afford it, the ipod appeals to people as a status indicator. They're expensive, and everyone knows it. The "it just works" campaign certainly helped ease the fear of new technologies on the consumer market (as did the actual ease of use) . Think of it as akin to using a powerbook. Highly reguarded among geeks, but also reputed to be expensive as hell and generally not worth the money.
Also, powerbook sales are down because they haven't changed since like 2002.
Damn, 1gb stick? Way to get suckered into Sony's proprietary trap. I mean, the PSP seems like a pretty good gaming platform, but it looks like a hella expensive music player and shitty movie dispenser.
The good news is that you've still got 3/4ths a year left to blow more money with!
Or maybe thats honestly what people pay. It's only 14 a year, but that's more than one a month. Given the wild success the original halflife (and its mods) still enjoys, at least some empirical evidence exists in favor of the "averages gamers sit on their ass less than McKinney83" theory.
John Carmack is one man, and a fairly intelligent programmer. But there are also several others who write programs, and you'd be naive to assume them all as talented and knowledgable about programming vulnerabilities as The Man. Normally this isn't a problem, as any program you write only affects your device. But being connected to a network changes all this. One bluetooth virus exploit unleashed during CES (probably the largest orgy of mobile devices known to man) turns that deal with Motorola to provide your software on the default firmware into a deal to provide a security exploit to Motorola.
So not only do you need Java for your cross platform compatibility that is so very nessecary on mobile phone programming, but you need the JVM's enforced behavior checks so you don't run up a rather large bill on behalf of your paying users. It's very unlikely that a small gaming company can afford to defend its "NO GUARENTEES OF USABILITY FOR ANY KIND AND WE'RE TOTALLY NOT LIABLE IF THIS COSTS YOU A FORTUNE IN FEES" disclaimer in their EULA when that buffer check SHOULD have been implemented. Java provides them with a fairly strong guarentee that their buffers are safe, and that even if something else happens, you should be effectively quarantined from networking functionality. Ultimately, John Carmack is dissapointed, but writing games is probably a waste of his skills versus writing the JVM itself.
Maybe Sun should just go ahead and fork the damn code. Another window manager can't hurt much. Maybe it will go to show how forks can be postitive elements of open-sourcery.