There are good fancy first impressions and bad ones. If I open an envelope and expect I letter, I'll junk a beautiful flyer because it's obviously bulk email and can say nothing that I need to hear - if their product is important Anandtech will review it, or whatever. It'll enter my view through one of the experts who find good products, not a shill who pumps anything.
If however, I open that envelope and find a letter written by a person about a concern of mine and it points to a product, I'll probably at least glance at the product. After comdex I used to get two types of email. Spam fliers that told me nothing, and letters from salespeople who'd had time to talk to their engineers and answered specific questions, even if only, which product in their brochure is for *me*!
If you send something that doesn't look like personal communication, it's not email, it's a webpage you managed to stuff into email.
Expect a brick that I managed to stuff into email.
You piss me off. There's an industry lobbying for ruinous copyright laws and suing security researchers, children, etc. You're funding this industry by re-buying their overpriced schlock *yet again* in a new format. Stop being such a fucking dick and funding the enemy. Try sending money to an industry that doesn't want to destroy the internet to protect their shows.
I now pirate movies and support the cracking of HD-DVD, etc, specifically because I hope to ruin the industry. I can't possibly hope to sue every exec who think the MPAA and RIAA are good ideas, as their organizations have sued others. There are too many of them and they have too many lawyers. But, if we can drive them out of business it's just as good.
I'd imagine DVD John feels much the same, as do thousands of people who are pissed off at mandatory copy "protection" and other forms of their media and computers being set against them in the endless quest to squeeze out a bit more graft for the entertainment industry.
There is no copyright on DRMed goods. You can either have unrestricted copyright and let the law (we the people protect your monopoly in trade for its future release) take over, or you can DRM it and because there's absolutely no hope of a future release, we won't protect it for you. You can try to convince yourself there is, but I pay for copyrights and I'm fucking sick of being tricked into paying for something that's hostile to me (Sony's DRM for one) and paying to fund a massive government crackdown on free computing just because it might be able to break someone's restrictions. I will do my utmost to ruin the value of any DRMed copyrighted works, in proportion to the DRM. Just as that little Thank-You to an industry that loves us so much.
But nobody else can really do anything to change the world, because it's not evil HR, it's HR who now simply aren't doing anything, and car salesmen, and date rapists, and a whole world looking not to take advantage of someone, but to do what they want as long as nobody screams too loudly.
If people pretend that you're just having a rough time and offer you a specific pick-me-up they're saying that you're having too rough of a time to handle. While their hand-up feels nice, it's likely misplaced and will lead to you trying to get jobs you aren't qualified for (get rejected from) because people tell you the interviewers just aren't being nice. If, instead, people attempt to show how life can go on, even while you're apparently being kicked in the balls, you can then change the only thing you can, you, and either learn to like the pain or make an effective change.
For the record, I don't mean that you shouldn't help a friend who's feeling down after a failed interview, just that you shouldn't lie to them to make them feel better. Don't hype their skills, merely encourage them to find informational interviews (arranged via schools and job agencies, or the company directly if you ask) that are designed to give feedback. Then take them out to a movie and help them feel better through having enough to live for that they can't obsess on any one failure.
Often the problem with an employee is total lack of motivation, often for fear of punishment. Makes them worthless because they only do exactly what a supervisor tells them. It's not a skill thing, but an inability to see that you're being hired to make a business make money by performing function X and that's how you'll be judged because that's what you're being paid for...
Two types of interviews, checking for buzzwords and discussing your skills with peers. You *must* differentiate between these two because they are not at all related.
The buzzword people will accept *no* excuses for everything. If an HR person needs perl 5.8.4 and you admit to only having 5.8.1 installed, you're out even if you can explain that there can't be much difference. But, the HR person doesn't know the importance of these technologies or the differences. They're hiring you for your skills in this area, so interpret these questions that way. If you're the type who isn't scared to grab the latest version, glance at the changelog, and get to work then you can say that you do know Perl 5.8.4, as more than 99.9% of it is 5.8.1. If however, you're the type who cringes whenever 'make' breaks over some trivial difference, perhaps you have less leeway here on your answer, as you then couldn't cope with the "Wrong" version.
The technical interview however, is completely different. It's about showing your technical competence in areas they understand - they'll accept answers like "No, but I know 5.8.1 and it's going to be the same" and usually this type rewards honesty. Still, they don't want to hear excuses and each one is bothersome. So if you aren't technically strong in the sense of 'on the spot quiz' you may want to guide the interview towards your strengths so that you don't find yourself being marked as 'acceptable - barely' on yet another of their mental checkmarks.
The problem with the above scenarios is that both types try to pretend to be a technical interview usually. Also, most technical interviewers aren't as good as they'd like to think and if you show them to be wrong, while you're right, you'll be jobless.
So, the thing to do for both is get their technical qualifications out of the way. If they ask for Perl 5.8.4, say "I've kept current on Perl since 5.2". It sidesteps the niggling details and establishes that you easily qualify. Moreover, like a card game where you've taken the trick, it's now your lead. You should follow this up with something that shows your deep understand of Perl and your problem-solving skills. "At my last job I was the one who diagnosed a problem with our regexes, they'd been relying on an older bug and...."
Don't go too heavy into that, but establish that you've got a good handle on the tech they're asking for.
Then, to the real point of the interview which most people don't even understand.
What can you do for them?
"I'm a great tester so my work rarely ever experiences similar bugs twice. I've always been able to avoid painful refactoring costs because of this, so my productivity is higher than average. I've worked on apps like you produce and I've found that Perl's Foolib is buggy, Python's is right but slow - my solution was to..."
If your interviews don't go there, you're really not even reaching level 2 of interview-fu.
Learn to differentiate the flacks and hacks from the technicians. Never forget that you need to please their decision-maker, who may not be the technician. Don't meet requirements, better them. And finally, talk about what you can do for them and explain why by having solutions, or at least, solutions to the question of where to start looking depending on the problem.
And, if patents really were what they were intended to be, a much more fair non-compete as the scope would be limited to the specific technology.
Of course, with patents being a land/gold-mine scenario of extortion, all bets are off.
The idea was fairly reasonable. Without patents you get companies keeping processes secret which end up being more harmful for everyone and it's harder to regulate an industry when everyone's secretive about everything. So to get people to open up a bit you had to promise protection against those secrets being used... You can't really have a government involved without it being coercive somewhere.
But, if by the application of a rude dismissal (being a dick) makes this person realize their real place in the world, that of a faker trying to pass off shit, then the world is a better place.
I've known a lot of people who think they can program (search for 'PaulaBean WTF' for a rough example) when instead they can barely scratch the surface. These people need to fail to get a job because of these obvious lacks in skill - nobody would accept a carpenter who could barely make a lame stool. If people don't call them on their obvious fraud they'll just keep trying until they find a dumb HR person. But if they get caught maybe they could reassess and either fix the deficits the interviewer noticed, or at least pick an industry they qualify at a little more.
You're right that there is a difference, but I think that the measures we had in place to detect terrorists, properly followed, are more effective than the crap we have in place now. So yes, had we not made any changes to the way security was handled and merely been more prepared to respond to the inevitable attacks, we would be more secure now.
We can't stop someone getting on a plane with weapons as long as Jackie Chan is allowed to fly. But that's not relevant because there are many ways to potentially steal a plane and take-off then crash, hi-jack a fedex plane, etc. We could never block all of these well enough with ten thousand new rules, as terrorists squeeze into whatever exceptions normal business uses. If people get waved past when the guard knows them, terrorists get known...
Instead we need to have fighter jets ready to intercept these potential terrorist planes sooner than before, better emergency exits, designed to empty buildings in a minute rather than forty-five, fire-fighting UAVs capable of putting out a fire on the 80th floor, etc. All of these would protect against other threats, would actually save lives, and wouldn't interfere with out civil rights in a vain attempt.
Honestly, this isn't hippie "no ID man!" bullshit, this is a serious civil rights issue and I'm all of stopping random attacks (and deaths due to disasters, etc) but that doesn't mean I feel a need to give up my freedoms to do so. None of the less free solutions really look and more secure. Terrorists adapt, as the people do, to live within the system.
Like the other responder so far, I'm working on something similar, though I'm doing a Ruby-based game in the style of Lambda Moo, but with an open architecture and the ability to graft on various tools, such as the neat looking Sauerbraten engine you mention, for design on art, code, or other resource.
The engines and protocols between them aren't my interest, I'm merely concerned with them ending up open and extensible. I'm working on the idea of shared development by sharing a persistent Squeak-like world. I want to make an html front-end for this instead of relying on people using heavy-weight VMs like Squeak, etc.
Thanks for the links. Croquet looks quite interesting as well.
You're right, exactly like domain names. Okay. Yeah, my complaint is just that I see them sort of wasting what I see as a prime option to make a more friendly back-end (see my other message in this thread re my developer experience on SL) which would make it a more flexible platform. And yeah, I realize it's their choice but I think it's the wrong one and yes, am waiting till they 'fix' it or something else comes along.
I am working on something sort of like Lambda Moo but in Ruby. Where the scripting isn't just in the game, but *is* the game, and it's a coding platform first and only game/social as an aspect of working on a shared project.
And be done, something undoubtedly is. My guess is that if nobody can find a nice solution to this soon someone will just declare the module in question to be in need of a rewrite and they'll code it from scratch with a friendlier license. Rewrites of existing code are often much faster and more stable anyways so it's not like it'd be a total loss.
I have "applied" as a developer. I logged in, went through newbie island, had a meat-space coder friend give me a bunch of his stuff (source and all) and I sat down and played with that, the community around me, and the technical climate. I wasn't happy there as a developer, though the lagginess and custom-UI wasn't the issue, it was the strong community feeling of "pay or die" where nobody shared code, or help, because everyone's project was going to be the next big casino or sex toy and make them rich!!1! I also couldn't find much to do as a newb (who presumably would learn much less about the interface, culture, or search capabilities than I would) so I didn't think the game was really "going" anywhere. Finding out the land/server/junk-stock connection was interesting as it explained much of the economic reasoning being the feeling of the game.
I have another meat-space friend who loves Second Life and sounds much like you. She found a great community and just chats and plays with scripts all day. But happy chatting friends aren't a big profit motive, so the game mostly ignores her.
As for land, your comment "bring in servers to support it" shows your mistake. Currently land and CPUs are linked, yes. But land is just small numbers in a database. If your model were 10x taller, so that you were apparently a giant, you wouldn't actually consist of more polygons than the smaller you, or take more rendering or storage resources. Can you imagine the silliness if they charged by cubic-foot of your avatar's body? It'd be silly, and unfairly penalize male characters more than female. They'd be in their rights to do so, but actually doing it would show a lack of technical understanding (charging for the wrong thing) and unwillingness to listen. You could spawn empty land, with no special need for CPU to support it due to its simplicity, in much the same way you spawn custom objects except that they unreasonably penalize those "numbers in a database". They could also then sell CPU resources to fancy custom objects, so that they wouldn't be a drain on the area they're in...
The final straw, for me as a SL developer, was how much clunky work my friend had to go through to express simple program design in SecondLife to get around arbitrary storage and processing limits imposed due to this architecture. He was trying to sell his items (of course) and having problems because they relied on resources of their current location (the mall, casino, etc) and had resource contention problems (this lag of which you speak) because of it. If the SL economic model worked differently, my friend (who is a SL land-owner and thus CPU buyer) could have directly purchased use of a SL server, completely independently of any land, and linked his objects to that server. That would have guaranteed his objects worked to his spec even in laggy areas, and would have let him use the resources he needed. Further, for just this reason there are "cheats" that most professional developers use to get their objects more CPU and client rendering time than other objects, which is an arms race directly harmful to the community.
They could fix this *NOW* by simply decoupling land and servers. Let people put resources where they need them. That they don't suggests they've got a reason. The junk-stock land market and the speculation encouraged by limited releases make prices much higher than they would be for simple server resources.
I consider myself an athiest and maybe I can offer another view on the "belief in science" area.
I wouldn't consider myself a believer in Plank's law, or Newton's laws of motion. I've seen mathematical models of these agree with experiments, but I'm enough of an engineer to understand that the law isn't the thing. I wouldn't "preach" Newton's "third" law (equal and opposite reaction) to anyone, but if I heard someone discussing model rocketry who didn't seem to understand it, I would offer to explain. I believe it in the sense that I've looked at it, in parts and in relation to other "laws" some of which I've tested and that I know I get a usually good answer from those methods. But I *know* that these theories are only our guesses at the functioning of things that will always, at some level, be a black box.
But because I know the weaknesses of these "laws" and don't live by them blindly I can be free to test other "laws" or theories and find perhaps a more precise one, or a less precise but easier abstraction.
Newton's third laws already aren't "truth" in the sense that we understand they're wrong, but they're still as right as when he wrote them because he didn't say they were *the* answer, but that they fit everything he could see. If you're working with parts Newton could see, chances are his laws would work for you. If you're exploring new areas he'd have been the first to tell you his laws wouldn't apply.
So I'm not *sure* of anything, but I've seen that many things produce consistent results in a framework I can loosely describe with a collection of laws, theories, old wives tales, and such. If I find that black cats don't bring bad luck I can discard that rule because I tested it and found it lacking. I'm always reading and playing around with many experimental physical and computational models in order to help refine my view of the world and learn things.
So I'm not sure I've got the right answer to any one thing, but I know that I apply a process of selecting ideas based on their fitness against observed tests. I'm wrong a hundred times a day and it only results in me being more-right next time. Iterative development produces something I can prove trends upwards.
To me that's directly the opposite of being handed a doctrine. When yours was handed to me I tested it against the same plausability filters I used for other religons, stock advice, theories, movie reviews, etc, and I found it wanting. Many opinions of your religion's founder are nice, he's undoubtedly a nice guy, but I simply have never seen any proof of his divinity or any miracle related to him so I doubt the religion built around him.
People of his day believed in him and witnessed miracles, but so do followers of modern-day messiahs and I don't find their proof any more convincing.
Thanks, your technical description was great. Are you a programmer, in game or out?
And yeah, in SL it seems a lot like First Life, a vending machine at every corner and a plethora of malls.
It was interesting to see CopyBot "ravage" SL, it gave an interesting picture of who there makes money from information scarcity and who makes their money from user interaction. The scarcity people were nearly driven away, the user interaction people didn't notice much of a glitch...
Sure, stated like that is sounds pretty good. But when you start looking at designing a profitable user activity you see the limits of 64k m^2 in a square. What if you need 650k+ m^2? Don't develop the activity, or shoehorn it into an inappropriate space? What if you have a high-CPU/bandwidth game? Buy more land for servers even if you don't care about the acreage?
What if web space cost per page only? If you served 200k high-CPU dynamic pages you'd be thrilled. If you served 4k static HTML pages you'd be pissed off. Right now SL's costs serve one sort of user and require all other users to subsidize them.
If this was for the good of SL, they'd be getting people servers as fast as possible for close to cost to encourage development. Instead they tie development resources to vanity resources (personal land) and everyone wonders about the sterile marketing feel the game has where the only custom content costs a ton and all property is full of ways to charge visitors for some consumer shlock in an attempt to offset the property costs.
btw, another user, Mateo_LeFou commented on the same post you did here and restates what I've been trying to much more concisely, check it out.
My first response to you was meant for another poster, it's not a direct answer to your questions, sorry.
What I have against Linden, my sole source of annoyance with them, is in their land-price manipulation scheme. I think they've hampered the game by making the wrong thing cost, thus slowing development of "content".
I don't expect them to run the game for free. I do however expect them not to dump the costs of supporting the crowd on the developers as I feel that, from chatting with SL programmers and land owners who buy attractions, that these policies have slowed growth of the game by changing what's worth developing and what attractions earn money.
New users don't care about land costs, but the economics of the world mean that they encounter less variety and are less likely to stay, as a user or developer. Look at SL's user retention rates. I think land prices and such are the high-level causes, not why the average Joe says he leaves, but it's all connected.
You've stumbled onto my point in your hope to prove me wrong. Linden makes it appear as if Land is limited - they'd claim to sell you light-years of space to make you think that they were selling something limited. But virtual space isn't like that, they could sell an infinite amount of space right next to Earth, despite you thinking you got it all... Similarly, if you bought "all of the land in Second Life" they'd simply print more, the planet would get bigger and the "value of your investment" would change as Linden manipulated the market.
Is it hard for you to understand that while the internet takes servers to run, that these servers serve data to users. Empty space doesn't need dedicated server, but the way the game is billed allocates servers by land space, not by load. So you get a ton of land with low processing requirements and mere virtual feet away, across a line, the CPU load is horrible simply because you step into overused land.
Listen, this is a technical discussion, I don't know any Linden by name, I merely see them doing what's one step about the junk-stock spam that comes into my mailbox daily and failing to run technical stuff correctly because it fits an early, though imho, ill conceived notion of pricing. I want SL to work, but it won't the way it is. Anshe will probably sue them out of existence when they reveal her land isn't worth the paper it's backed up on.
I'm saying that the way its run now borders on fraud because of their promotion of land as an investment it isn't. You know the junk stock spam telling you to buy some hot penny stock... It's also just a cash grab, so it hits people who want vanity land but these server don't directly help speed the game up until players are standing on the virtual land they cover. Doesn't matter if your land blocks are directly adjacent, they'll never load balance across. Yet another development hurdle.
If they did this right you'd be able to attach servers, if nothing else, to content that got executed frequently, meaning that it'd fit the work load. As is, if your game idea requires players to move over a large area your server costs are prohibitive, OR, you cheat and dump your CPU costs on those around you via tricks, which doesn't work as well for you or the other guy.
It's also not just that "my" space sim idea can't be done, I'm trying to point out how the configuration of the game and its servers specifies that will be built with it. As long as their pricing remains the same, SL will attract little other than Casinos and pedestrian malls offering sex toys or sex positions as they are the profit centers. But, for lack of "my" space sim, some other guy's fantasy RPG, etc, the gameplay in SL resembles Barbie Shopping mixed with ESPN: Extreme Donkey Fucker.
You've stumbled onto my point in your hope to prove me wrong. Linden makes it appear as if Land is limited - they'd claim to sell you light-years of space to make you think that they were selling something limited. But virtual space isn't like that, they could sell an infinite amount of space right next to Earth, despite you thinking you got it all... Similarly, if you bought "all of the land in Second Life" they'd simply print more, the planet would get bigger and the "value of your investment" would change as Linden manipulated the market.
Is it hard for you to understand that while the internet takes servers to run, that these servers serve data to users. Empty space doesn't need dedicated server, but the way the game is billed allocates servers by land space, not by load. So you get a ton of land with low processing requirements and mere virtual feet away, across a line, the CPU load is horrible simply because you step into overused land.
Listen, this is a technical discussion, I don't know any Linden by name, I merely see them doing what's one step about the junk-stock spam that comes into my mailbox daily and failing to run technical stuff correctly because it fits an early, though imho, ill conceived notion of pricing. I want SL to work, but it won't the way it is. Anshe will probably sue them out of existence when they reveal her land isn't worth the paper it's backed up on.
Virtual space is unlimited in that it's data size and bandwidth that matter. If you make a very visually detailed house you'll consume as much of these as a lesser-detail fantasy game using a much larger virtual world. Space is just a floating point number saying where any given piece of data should be displayed. If you call your units light-years you're writing a space game, but it's really the same thing, a player's avatar (ship/hero/car) and various scenery and antagonist units. It's obviously not harder to store a virtual world because their units are larger (see Eve Online), it's the data size and bandwidth.
By Linden's prims/acre/$ pricing they force you into a scale where there numbers are profitable. If you make a corn maze it needs a lot more "room" (horizontal) than a maze in a building on multiple levels. Therefore, people in Second Life will code less corn mazes as their layout makes them less profitable, despite being computationally identical. However, if you shrunk the players Avatars and made them find their way through a virtual corn maze you could make it an object you carry and avoid all land-use charges totally. "My house? Yes, it's right in my pocket here - go on in." These games with scale are silly to illustrate how arbitrary these things are.
So, having established that virtual land scale is arbitrary, this goes to show how it isn't a finite resource. They can always "print" more. You aren't buying into a technically limited market, or a functionally limited one, when you buy land. Like the diamond industry, it's just a price fixing scam because they like the scramble - it enhances sales. They're making you buy land for arbitrary technical reasons and they're screwing with the markets as they sell it off, but unlike an IPO or other sell-off, this is infinitely profitable only by imposing scarcity. They're making money denying people "land", in the same way that cell-phone companies make a lot of money by exploiting your desire for a custom ring-tone and the proprietary nature of the data-cable to your phone.
So the property metaphor is the idea that you should own your piece of virtual land, that there is any value in doing so, or that a real service is being provided. I spoke to the service being provided above, the value is somewhat subjective but limited by the availability of options (technical tricks as I mentioned above) that provide the same effect.
But, neighbors, consistency... and other "features" of real land are missing in virtual land. Your neighbors can change in the blink of an eye (or the upload of a file) and maybe people complain about the value of their virtual land declining for this very reason. Moreover, with teleportation as the main mode of travel in Second Life, your customers don't have to be near you to show up at your door. So there's no consistency and no need for it.
If you buy web space you're buying the logical units you'll be consuming. With Second Life it's like you buy a crate of oranges and throw them away to get the crate, just to use it for a step ladder because the hardware store was closed. I want to buy "space" in SL as the MB consumed, GB transfered, and CPU time consumed. Anything else is a shell game to trick us into overpaying through the nose.
Why do they do this? Because it seems to fit their economic model, one of trickle-down capitalism where they charge you for land, so you trickle those charges down by using it to write a game and charging others to play. However, if by imposing these charges on developers they hurt those in beta (needing space to work), discourage those unwilling to pay (see platforms you need to pay for a Dev kit for, like consoles vs open platforms like X86 PCs and developer #s) and finally is just a matter of killing the golden goose (the developers who attract others).
Instead, for their own blatantly selfish reasons and the good of people who want LL to do better and SL to not suck, they need to revamp their prices, destroy the land market, and encourage policies that encourage development, as a lack of content is SL's main problem.
But when you buy webspace you get 10GB of transfer, be that a 2GB file five times, or your 40k blog, thousands. When you buy server capacity in Second Life you get artificial restrictions on how you can spend your storage and processing. In reality, one really large area can take the same amount of storage and CPU as a more detailed smaller area. If I wanted to do a fantasy adventure game I'd need to buy a ton of space to implement it, if I want a casino, I don't. That's why there are so many casinos and so little of anything else.
The idea of buying land is to make it look like this should be permanent, and like you're getting something out of it. Buy now, the price is going up soon!
You misread that. Why are acreage and CPU requirements linked, as opposed to CPU cycles used and CPU requirements?
I'm just saying that if they let you create your own virtual land they could still bill you for all simulation costs, but it could be dynamic. If you create somewhere nobody goes, why pay for owning that land, as if it's a scarce resource someone else wants?
They should bill based on the number of K sent and the number of CPU seconds used, plus a tiny maintenance fee related to keeping your billing info active. This is how ISPs work - they charge based on resources used.
By making you think you should pay by land area, and they have convinced you, they make you think that it is because this is some finite resource. As if Anshe Chung could someday own all the virtual land and they wouldn't just make more. Because of this you and others buy it as if it's valuable, which convinces others to buy... What are first-edition comic books worth, when you run out of idiots to pay too much for them?
You were billed because you didn't threaten them sufficiently. I record my calls and go to Visa with complaints. Merchants like this are simply told that I will not pay for service I do not receive/want and that I will prove to Visa that I gave them notice of this, personally. When their ass is on the line they play nice. Visa chargebacks cost a fortune in fees and lost payment - merchants are very wary of them.
You owe me 100 Euros for this advice. If you don't pay immediately I'll take it as implied permission to charge your visa.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah yeah, we've heard the claptrap.
There are good fancy first impressions and bad ones. If I open an envelope and expect I letter, I'll junk a beautiful flyer because it's obviously bulk email and can say nothing that I need to hear - if their product is important Anandtech will review it, or whatever. It'll enter my view through one of the experts who find good products, not a shill who pumps anything.
If however, I open that envelope and find a letter written by a person about a concern of mine and it points to a product, I'll probably at least glance at the product. After comdex I used to get two types of email. Spam fliers that told me nothing, and letters from salespeople who'd had time to talk to their engineers and answered specific questions, even if only, which product in their brochure is for *me*!
If you send something that doesn't look like personal communication, it's not email, it's a webpage you managed to stuff into email.
Expect a brick that I managed to stuff into email.
You piss me off. There's an industry lobbying for ruinous copyright laws and suing security researchers, children, etc. You're funding this industry by re-buying their overpriced schlock *yet again* in a new format. Stop being such a fucking dick and funding the enemy. Try sending money to an industry that doesn't want to destroy the internet to protect their shows.
I now pirate movies and support the cracking of HD-DVD, etc, specifically because I hope to ruin the industry. I can't possibly hope to sue every exec who think the MPAA and RIAA are good ideas, as their organizations have sued others. There are too many of them and they have too many lawyers. But, if we can drive them out of business it's just as good.
I'd imagine DVD John feels much the same, as do thousands of people who are pissed off at mandatory copy "protection" and other forms of their media and computers being set against them in the endless quest to squeeze out a bit more graft for the entertainment industry.
There is no copyright on DRMed goods. You can either have unrestricted copyright and let the law (we the people protect your monopoly in trade for its future release) take over, or you can DRM it and because there's absolutely no hope of a future release, we won't protect it for you. You can try to convince yourself there is, but I pay for copyrights and I'm fucking sick of being tricked into paying for something that's hostile to me (Sony's DRM for one) and paying to fund a massive government crackdown on free computing just because it might be able to break someone's restrictions. I will do my utmost to ruin the value of any DRMed copyrighted works, in proportion to the DRM. Just as that little Thank-You to an industry that loves us so much.
But nobody else can really do anything to change the world, because it's not evil HR, it's HR who now simply aren't doing anything, and car salesmen, and date rapists, and a whole world looking not to take advantage of someone, but to do what they want as long as nobody screams too loudly.
If people pretend that you're just having a rough time and offer you a specific pick-me-up they're saying that you're having too rough of a time to handle. While their hand-up feels nice, it's likely misplaced and will lead to you trying to get jobs you aren't qualified for (get rejected from) because people tell you the interviewers just aren't being nice. If, instead, people attempt to show how life can go on, even while you're apparently being kicked in the balls, you can then change the only thing you can, you, and either learn to like the pain or make an effective change.
For the record, I don't mean that you shouldn't help a friend who's feeling down after a failed interview, just that you shouldn't lie to them to make them feel better. Don't hype their skills, merely encourage them to find informational interviews (arranged via schools and job agencies, or the company directly if you ask) that are designed to give feedback. Then take them out to a movie and help them feel better through having enough to live for that they can't obsess on any one failure.
Often the problem with an employee is total lack of motivation, often for fear of punishment. Makes them worthless because they only do exactly what a supervisor tells them. It's not a skill thing, but an inability to see that you're being hired to make a business make money by performing function X and that's how you'll be judged because that's what you're being paid for...
Two types of interviews, checking for buzzwords and discussing your skills with peers. You *must* differentiate between these two because they are not at all related.
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The buzzword people will accept *no* excuses for everything. If an HR person needs perl 5.8.4 and you admit to only having 5.8.1 installed, you're out even if you can explain that there can't be much difference. But, the HR person doesn't know the importance of these technologies or the differences. They're hiring you for your skills in this area, so interpret these questions that way. If you're the type who isn't scared to grab the latest version, glance at the changelog, and get to work then you can say that you do know Perl 5.8.4, as more than 99.9% of it is 5.8.1. If however, you're the type who cringes whenever 'make' breaks over some trivial difference, perhaps you have less leeway here on your answer, as you then couldn't cope with the "Wrong" version.
The technical interview however, is completely different. It's about showing your technical competence in areas they understand - they'll accept answers like "No, but I know 5.8.1 and it's going to be the same" and usually this type rewards honesty. Still, they don't want to hear excuses and each one is bothersome. So if you aren't technically strong in the sense of 'on the spot quiz' you may want to guide the interview towards your strengths so that you don't find yourself being marked as 'acceptable - barely' on yet another of their mental checkmarks.
The problem with the above scenarios is that both types try to pretend to be a technical interview usually. Also, most technical interviewers aren't as good as they'd like to think and if you show them to be wrong, while you're right, you'll be jobless.
So, the thing to do for both is get their technical qualifications out of the way. If they ask for Perl 5.8.4, say "I've kept current on Perl since 5.2". It sidesteps the niggling details and establishes that you easily qualify. Moreover, like a card game where you've taken the trick, it's now your lead. You should follow this up with something that shows your deep understand of Perl and your problem-solving skills. "At my last job I was the one who diagnosed a problem with our regexes, they'd been relying on an older bug and
Don't go too heavy into that, but establish that you've got a good handle on the tech they're asking for.
Then, to the real point of the interview which most people don't even understand.
What can you do for them?
"I'm a great tester so my work rarely ever experiences similar bugs twice. I've always been able to avoid painful refactoring costs because of this, so my productivity is higher than average. I've worked on apps like you produce and I've found that Perl's Foolib is buggy, Python's is right but slow - my solution was to
If your interviews don't go there, you're really not even reaching level 2 of interview-fu.
Learn to differentiate the flacks and hacks from the technicians. Never forget that you need to please their decision-maker, who may not be the technician. Don't meet requirements, better them. And finally, talk about what you can do for them and explain why by having solutions, or at least, solutions to the question of where to start looking depending on the problem.
And, if patents really were what they were intended to be, a much more fair non-compete as the scope would be limited to the specific technology.
Of course, with patents being a land/gold-mine scenario of extortion, all bets are off.
The idea was fairly reasonable. Without patents you get companies keeping processes secret which end up being more harmful for everyone and it's harder to regulate an industry when everyone's secretive about everything. So to get people to open up a bit you had to promise protection against those secrets being used... You can't really have a government involved without it being coercive somewhere.
But, if by the application of a rude dismissal (being a dick) makes this person realize their real place in the world, that of a faker trying to pass off shit, then the world is a better place.
I've known a lot of people who think they can program (search for 'PaulaBean WTF' for a rough example) when instead they can barely scratch the surface. These people need to fail to get a job because of these obvious lacks in skill - nobody would accept a carpenter who could barely make a lame stool. If people don't call them on their obvious fraud they'll just keep trying until they find a dumb HR person. But if they get caught maybe they could reassess and either fix the deficits the interviewer noticed, or at least pick an industry they qualify at a little more.
There's no valid way to enforce post-sale contracts, EULAs aren't valid.
You're right that there is a difference, but I think that the measures we had in place to detect terrorists, properly followed, are more effective than the crap we have in place now. So yes, had we not made any changes to the way security was handled and merely been more prepared to respond to the inevitable attacks, we would be more secure now.
We can't stop someone getting on a plane with weapons as long as Jackie Chan is allowed to fly. But that's not relevant because there are many ways to potentially steal a plane and take-off then crash, hi-jack a fedex plane, etc. We could never block all of these well enough with ten thousand new rules, as terrorists squeeze into whatever exceptions normal business uses. If people get waved past when the guard knows them, terrorists get known...
Instead we need to have fighter jets ready to intercept these potential terrorist planes sooner than before, better emergency exits, designed to empty buildings in a minute rather than forty-five, fire-fighting UAVs capable of putting out a fire on the 80th floor, etc. All of these would protect against other threats, would actually save lives, and wouldn't interfere with out civil rights in a vain attempt.
Honestly, this isn't hippie "no ID man!" bullshit, this is a serious civil rights issue and I'm all of stopping random attacks (and deaths due to disasters, etc) but that doesn't mean I feel a need to give up my freedoms to do so. None of the less free solutions really look and more secure. Terrorists adapt, as the people do, to live within the system.
Like the other responder so far, I'm working on something similar, though I'm doing a Ruby-based game in the style of Lambda Moo, but with an open architecture and the ability to graft on various tools, such as the neat looking Sauerbraten engine you mention, for design on art, code, or other resource.
The engines and protocols between them aren't my interest, I'm merely concerned with them ending up open and extensible. I'm working on the idea of shared development by sharing a persistent Squeak-like world. I want to make an html front-end for this instead of relying on people using heavy-weight VMs like Squeak, etc.
Thanks for the links. Croquet looks quite interesting as well.
You're right, exactly like domain names. Okay. Yeah, my complaint is just that I see them sort of wasting what I see as a prime option to make a more friendly back-end (see my other message in this thread re my developer experience on SL) which would make it a more flexible platform. And yeah, I realize it's their choice but I think it's the wrong one and yes, am waiting till they 'fix' it or something else comes along.
I am working on something sort of like Lambda Moo but in Ruby. Where the scripting isn't just in the game, but *is* the game, and it's a coding platform first and only game/social as an aspect of working on a shared project.
And be done, something undoubtedly is. My guess is that if nobody can find a nice solution to this soon someone will just declare the module in question to be in need of a rewrite and they'll code it from scratch with a friendlier license. Rewrites of existing code are often much faster and more stable anyways so it's not like it'd be a total loss.
I have "applied" as a developer. I logged in, went through newbie island, had a meat-space coder friend give me a bunch of his stuff (source and all) and I sat down and played with that, the community around me, and the technical climate. I wasn't happy there as a developer, though the lagginess and custom-UI wasn't the issue, it was the strong community feeling of "pay or die" where nobody shared code, or help, because everyone's project was going to be the next big casino or sex toy and make them rich!!1! I also couldn't find much to do as a newb (who presumably would learn much less about the interface, culture, or search capabilities than I would) so I didn't think the game was really "going" anywhere. Finding out the land/server/junk-stock connection was interesting as it explained much of the economic reasoning being the feeling of the game.
I have another meat-space friend who loves Second Life and sounds much like you. She found a great community and just chats and plays with scripts all day. But happy chatting friends aren't a big profit motive, so the game mostly ignores her.
As for land, your comment "bring in servers to support it" shows your mistake. Currently land and CPUs are linked, yes. But land is just small numbers in a database. If your model were 10x taller, so that you were apparently a giant, you wouldn't actually consist of more polygons than the smaller you, or take more rendering or storage resources. Can you imagine the silliness if they charged by cubic-foot of your avatar's body? It'd be silly, and unfairly penalize male characters more than female. They'd be in their rights to do so, but actually doing it would show a lack of technical understanding (charging for the wrong thing) and unwillingness to listen. You could spawn empty land, with no special need for CPU to support it due to its simplicity, in much the same way you spawn custom objects except that they unreasonably penalize those "numbers in a database". They could also then sell CPU resources to fancy custom objects, so that they wouldn't be a drain on the area they're in...
The final straw, for me as a SL developer, was how much clunky work my friend had to go through to express simple program design in SecondLife to get around arbitrary storage and processing limits imposed due to this architecture. He was trying to sell his items (of course) and having problems because they relied on resources of their current location (the mall, casino, etc) and had resource contention problems (this lag of which you speak) because of it. If the SL economic model worked differently, my friend (who is a SL land-owner and thus CPU buyer) could have directly purchased use of a SL server, completely independently of any land, and linked his objects to that server. That would have guaranteed his objects worked to his spec even in laggy areas, and would have let him use the resources he needed. Further, for just this reason there are "cheats" that most professional developers use to get their objects more CPU and client rendering time than other objects, which is an arms race directly harmful to the community.
They could fix this *NOW* by simply decoupling land and servers. Let people put resources where they need them. That they don't suggests they've got a reason. The junk-stock land market and the speculation encouraged by limited releases make prices much higher than they would be for simple server resources.
But if you understand that anything you "know" might be wrong and are willing to correct those mistakes, that's called learning.
I consider myself an athiest and maybe I can offer another view on the "belief in science" area.
I wouldn't consider myself a believer in Plank's law, or Newton's laws of motion. I've seen mathematical models of these agree with experiments, but I'm enough of an engineer to understand that the law isn't the thing. I wouldn't "preach" Newton's "third" law (equal and opposite reaction) to anyone, but if I heard someone discussing model rocketry who didn't seem to understand it, I would offer to explain. I believe it in the sense that I've looked at it, in parts and in relation to other "laws" some of which I've tested and that I know I get a usually good answer from those methods. But I *know* that these theories are only our guesses at the functioning of things that will always, at some level, be a black box.
But because I know the weaknesses of these "laws" and don't live by them blindly I can be free to test other "laws" or theories and find perhaps a more precise one, or a less precise but easier abstraction.
Newton's third laws already aren't "truth" in the sense that we understand they're wrong, but they're still as right as when he wrote them because he didn't say they were *the* answer, but that they fit everything he could see. If you're working with parts Newton could see, chances are his laws would work for you. If you're exploring new areas he'd have been the first to tell you his laws wouldn't apply.
So I'm not *sure* of anything, but I've seen that many things produce consistent results in a framework I can loosely describe with a collection of laws, theories, old wives tales, and such. If I find that black cats don't bring bad luck I can discard that rule because I tested it and found it lacking. I'm always reading and playing around with many experimental physical and computational models in order to help refine my view of the world and learn things.
So I'm not sure I've got the right answer to any one thing, but I know that I apply a process of selecting ideas based on their fitness against observed tests. I'm wrong a hundred times a day and it only results in me being more-right next time. Iterative development produces something I can prove trends upwards.
To me that's directly the opposite of being handed a doctrine. When yours was handed to me I tested it against the same plausability filters I used for other religons, stock advice, theories, movie reviews, etc, and I found it wanting. Many opinions of your religion's founder are nice, he's undoubtedly a nice guy, but I simply have never seen any proof of his divinity or any miracle related to him so I doubt the religion built around him.
People of his day believed in him and witnessed miracles, but so do followers of modern-day messiahs and I don't find their proof any more convincing.
He hasn't noticed that players teleport across SecondLife now instead of walking...
Thanks, your technical description was great. Are you a programmer, in game or out?
And yeah, in SL it seems a lot like First Life, a vending machine at every corner and a plethora of malls.
It was interesting to see CopyBot "ravage" SL, it gave an interesting picture of who there makes money from information scarcity and who makes their money from user interaction. The scarcity people were nearly driven away, the user interaction people didn't notice much of a glitch...
Sure, stated like that is sounds pretty good. But when you start looking at designing a profitable user activity you see the limits of 64k m^2 in a square. What if you need 650k+ m^2? Don't develop the activity, or shoehorn it into an inappropriate space? What if you have a high-CPU/bandwidth game? Buy more land for servers even if you don't care about the acreage?
What if web space cost per page only? If you served 200k high-CPU dynamic pages you'd be thrilled. If you served 4k static HTML pages you'd be pissed off. Right now SL's costs serve one sort of user and require all other users to subsidize them.
If this was for the good of SL, they'd be getting people servers as fast as possible for close to cost to encourage development. Instead they tie development resources to vanity resources (personal land) and everyone wonders about the sterile marketing feel the game has where the only custom content costs a ton and all property is full of ways to charge visitors for some consumer shlock in an attempt to offset the property costs.
btw, another user, Mateo_LeFou commented on the same post you did here and restates what I've been trying to much more concisely, check it out.
My first response to you was meant for another poster, it's not a direct answer to your questions, sorry.
What I have against Linden, my sole source of annoyance with them, is in their land-price manipulation scheme. I think they've hampered the game by making the wrong thing cost, thus slowing development of "content".
I don't expect them to run the game for free. I do however expect them not to dump the costs of supporting the crowd on the developers as I feel that, from chatting with SL programmers and land owners who buy attractions, that these policies have slowed growth of the game by changing what's worth developing and what attractions earn money.
New users don't care about land costs, but the economics of the world mean that they encounter less variety and are less likely to stay, as a user or developer. Look at SL's user retention rates. I think land prices and such are the high-level causes, not why the average Joe says he leaves, but it's all connected.
You've stumbled onto my point in your hope to prove me wrong. Linden makes it appear as if Land is limited - they'd claim to sell you light-years of space to make you think that they were selling something limited. But virtual space isn't like that, they could sell an infinite amount of space right next to Earth, despite you thinking you got it all... Similarly, if you bought "all of the land in Second Life" they'd simply print more, the planet would get bigger and the "value of your investment" would change as Linden manipulated the market.
Is it hard for you to understand that while the internet takes servers to run, that these servers serve data to users. Empty space doesn't need dedicated server, but the way the game is billed allocates servers by land space, not by load. So you get a ton of land with low processing requirements and mere virtual feet away, across a line, the CPU load is horrible simply because you step into overused land.
Listen, this is a technical discussion, I don't know any Linden by name, I merely see them doing what's one step about the junk-stock spam that comes into my mailbox daily and failing to run technical stuff correctly because it fits an early, though imho, ill conceived notion of pricing. I want SL to work, but it won't the way it is. Anshe will probably sue them out of existence when they reveal her land isn't worth the paper it's backed up on.
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I'm saying that the way its run now borders on fraud because of their promotion of land as an investment it isn't. You know the junk stock spam telling you to buy some hot penny stock... It's also just a cash grab, so it hits people who want vanity land but these server don't directly help speed the game up until players are standing on the virtual land they cover. Doesn't matter if your land blocks are directly adjacent, they'll never load balance across. Yet another development hurdle.
If they did this right you'd be able to attach servers, if nothing else, to content that got executed frequently, meaning that it'd fit the work load. As is, if your game idea requires players to move over a large area your server costs are prohibitive, OR, you cheat and dump your CPU costs on those around you via tricks, which doesn't work as well for you or the other guy.
It's also not just that "my" space sim idea can't be done, I'm trying to point out how the configuration of the game and its servers specifies that will be built with it. As long as their pricing remains the same, SL will attract little other than Casinos and pedestrian malls offering sex toys or sex positions as they are the profit centers. But, for lack of "my" space sim, some other guy's fantasy RPG, etc, the gameplay in SL resembles Barbie Shopping mixed with ESPN: Extreme Donkey Fucker.
You've stumbled onto my point in your hope to prove me wrong. Linden makes it appear as if Land is limited - they'd claim to sell you light-years of space to make you think that they were selling something limited. But virtual space isn't like that, they could sell an infinite amount of space right next to Earth, despite you thinking you got it all... Similarly, if you bought "all of the land in Second Life" they'd simply print more, the planet would get bigger and the "value of your investment" would change as Linden manipulated the market.
Is it hard for you to understand that while the internet takes servers to run, that these servers serve data to users. Empty space doesn't need dedicated server, but the way the game is billed allocates servers by land space, not by load. So you get a ton of land with low processing requirements and mere virtual feet away, across a line, the CPU load is horrible simply because you step into overused land.
Listen, this is a technical discussion, I don't know any Linden by name, I merely see them doing what's one step about the junk-stock spam that comes into my mailbox daily and failing to run technical stuff correctly because it fits an early, though imho, ill conceived notion of pricing. I want SL to work, but it won't the way it is. Anshe will probably sue them out of existence when they reveal her land isn't worth the paper it's backed up on.
Virtual space is unlimited in that it's data size and bandwidth that matter. If you make a very visually detailed house you'll consume as much of these as a lesser-detail fantasy game using a much larger virtual world. Space is just a floating point number saying where any given piece of data should be displayed. If you call your units light-years you're writing a space game, but it's really the same thing, a player's avatar (ship/hero/car) and various scenery and antagonist units. It's obviously not harder to store a virtual world because their units are larger (see Eve Online), it's the data size and bandwidth.
By Linden's prims/acre/$ pricing they force you into a scale where there numbers are profitable. If you make a corn maze it needs a lot more "room" (horizontal) than a maze in a building on multiple levels. Therefore, people in Second Life will code less corn mazes as their layout makes them less profitable, despite being computationally identical. However, if you shrunk the players Avatars and made them find their way through a virtual corn maze you could make it an object you carry and avoid all land-use charges totally. "My house? Yes, it's right in my pocket here - go on in." These games with scale are silly to illustrate how arbitrary these things are.
So, having established that virtual land scale is arbitrary, this goes to show how it isn't a finite resource. They can always "print" more. You aren't buying into a technically limited market, or a functionally limited one, when you buy land. Like the diamond industry, it's just a price fixing scam because they like the scramble - it enhances sales. They're making you buy land for arbitrary technical reasons and they're screwing with the markets as they sell it off, but unlike an IPO or other sell-off, this is infinitely profitable only by imposing scarcity. They're making money denying people "land", in the same way that cell-phone companies make a lot of money by exploiting your desire for a custom ring-tone and the proprietary nature of the data-cable to your phone.
So the property metaphor is the idea that you should own your piece of virtual land, that there is any value in doing so, or that a real service is being provided. I spoke to the service being provided above, the value is somewhat subjective but limited by the availability of options (technical tricks as I mentioned above) that provide the same effect.
But, neighbors, consistency... and other "features" of real land are missing in virtual land. Your neighbors can change in the blink of an eye (or the upload of a file) and maybe people complain about the value of their virtual land declining for this very reason. Moreover, with teleportation as the main mode of travel in Second Life, your customers don't have to be near you to show up at your door. So there's no consistency and no need for it.
If you buy web space you're buying the logical units you'll be consuming. With Second Life it's like you buy a crate of oranges and throw them away to get the crate, just to use it for a step ladder because the hardware store was closed. I want to buy "space" in SL as the MB consumed, GB transfered, and CPU time consumed. Anything else is a shell game to trick us into overpaying through the nose.
Why do they do this? Because it seems to fit their economic model, one of trickle-down capitalism where they charge you for land, so you trickle those charges down by using it to write a game and charging others to play. However, if by imposing these charges on developers they hurt those in beta (needing space to work), discourage those unwilling to pay (see platforms you need to pay for a Dev kit for, like consoles vs open platforms like X86 PCs and developer #s) and finally is just a matter of killing the golden goose (the developers who attract others).
Instead, for their own blatantly selfish reasons and the good of people who want LL to do better and SL to not suck, they need to revamp their prices, destroy the land market, and encourage policies that encourage development, as a lack of content is SL's main problem.
Stop the land fraud.
But when you buy webspace you get 10GB of transfer, be that a 2GB file five times, or your 40k blog, thousands. When you buy server capacity in Second Life you get artificial restrictions on how you can spend your storage and processing. In reality, one really large area can take the same amount of storage and CPU as a more detailed smaller area. If I wanted to do a fantasy adventure game I'd need to buy a ton of space to implement it, if I want a casino, I don't. That's why there are so many casinos and so little of anything else.
The idea of buying land is to make it look like this should be permanent, and like you're getting something out of it. Buy now, the price is going up soon!
You misread that. Why are acreage and CPU requirements linked, as opposed to CPU cycles used and CPU requirements?
I'm just saying that if they let you create your own virtual land they could still bill you for all simulation costs, but it could be dynamic. If you create somewhere nobody goes, why pay for owning that land, as if it's a scarce resource someone else wants?
They should bill based on the number of K sent and the number of CPU seconds used, plus a tiny maintenance fee related to keeping your billing info active. This is how ISPs work - they charge based on resources used.
By making you think you should pay by land area, and they have convinced you, they make you think that it is because this is some finite resource. As if Anshe Chung could someday own all the virtual land and they wouldn't just make more. Because of this you and others buy it as if it's valuable, which convinces others to buy... What are first-edition comic books worth, when you run out of idiots to pay too much for them?
You were billed because you didn't threaten them sufficiently. I record my calls and go to Visa with complaints. Merchants like this are simply told that I will not pay for service I do not receive/want and that I will prove to Visa that I gave them notice of this, personally. When their ass is on the line they play nice. Visa chargebacks cost a fortune in fees and lost payment - merchants are very wary of them.
:)
You owe me 100 Euros for this advice. If you don't pay immediately I'll take it as implied permission to charge your visa.