It's interesting that you question these poll results, but accept your referenced poll results unquestioningly....
Please re-read what I actually wrote. I didn't say that the TSA poll results were wrong or fake. I said that I would like to see a breakdown by age, and that it was quite possible that the discrepancy between the poll and what "everyone on the Internet" knows might be due to generation gaps.
I'd be very interested to see a breakdown in these poll results by age. I would not be at all surprised to see younger, more Internet-connected respondents have a more negative view of the TSA, while the Fox News generation (average viewer age 65, average age for Bill O'Reilly viewers 71) tends toward a more positive view. We see the same thing with numerous other issues where pretty much everyone on sites like Slashdot agrees, but the actual politics seem to be lagging behind. For instance, 50% of Americans now favor legalizing marijuana according to recent Gallup Polls, but while 62% of people in the 18-29 age bracket are in favor, only 31% of senior citizens do. And those seniors vote at a MUCH higher rate than young people. This is why issues relevant to old people are discussed endlessly, while issues important to the young are simply ignored. It's why college funding keeps getting cut every year while Medicare and Social Security remain untouchable.
Get out there and vote this November! Even if it's just for the lesser of two evils, vote anyway. The only way this imbalance will be fixed is if young people start voting at the same rate as older Americans.
A good agile environment forces (yes forces) efficient cross training. If you are a top individual contributor, maybe you resent this. That, in my opinion, is also unprofessional.
So the top individual contributors are tasked with two separate jobs: programming and training. I trust they get paid a lot more for this? Otherwise, they have every reason to "resent" this: They're being asked to carry everyone else, to do double duty, and getting nothing in return.
This may be true, but the reason that I think we should still insist on math being a part of a comp. sci. curriculum isn't because you will use it in your day to day work but because learning it reorganizes your brain.
Is there any actual evidence for this, or just speculation and tradition? They used to say the same thing about Greek and Latin, but those were dropped years ago with no perceptible adverse effect.
Just as one example, as a game programmer your ability to implement, say, Newtonian iteration would likely make a difference in your salary ask by a factor of two.
If you care about salary (or working conditions), you shouldn't become a game programmer in the first place. From an objective standpoint these are among the worst programming jobs in existence; the only reason there are so many applicants is because kids fresh out of college thing these jobs are "cool." (They're not; the kids won't actually get to design the games – that's done by completely different teams of people. They're just coding to spec, like they would in any other job, but with worse pay and longer hours.)
No, a single employee was duped into make an error.
That employee was acting on Apple's behalf as part of his official job duties. Therefore, Apple is legally and morally responsible for his actions.
This right here is at the core of almost all problems in the world: the inability of people to differentiate between the actions of an individual and a group, or projecting the individual actions into a collective mindset.
So I suppose you're also opposed to corporate limited liability? You can't have it both ways.
I've thought for years that Linux on the desktop was a dead end, but it's actually conceivable that Valve could get it to work.
Admittedly, there are still problems to be solved: the utterly horrible font rendering, the reliance on having the obsolete and slow X11 subsystem sitting behind all other graphics, the lack of a UI that matches up with Windows. But three of the major problems – fragmentation, bad hardware support, and lack of commercial software – could be addressed by Valve.
If Valve rolls out a Steam client for Linux, then any distribution which doesn't support it will be relegated to an even smaller niche than it is now. This means that Valve pretty much gets to say what Linux on the desktop is. Less fragmentation. And while some people think Valve will make a "Steambox" console (and who knows, they might), I think it's more likely they will make a "blessed" list of supported and tested hardware. This list will become a reference for anyone who wants to use Linux on the desktop. Valve also has the muscle to push for additional hardware support, while the existing open-source community might simply be ignored.
Regarding commercial software, you're obviously not going to see MS Office there (and this is a major stumbling block) but you might see some other big players. If Adobe brings Photoshop and the rest of Creative Suite to Steam, Microsoft is going to shit a brick.
It's relevant because other than Gates you still have the same personalities running the show as you did 20 years ago. Especially Ballmer.
Now maybe he's seen the Light or found Jesus or whatever but I wouldn't count on it.
It's not Ballmer and associates who have changed, it's the rest of the marketplace. Microsoft's competitors are far more numerous, powerful, and skilled than they were 10-15 years ago. Google and Apple (and apparently now Valve as well) are not going to let Microsoft steamroll over everything like they did in the 1990s. Furthermore, businesses have learned the hard way that open standards are a good thing. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" only works when people don't realize what you are doing. Businesses got burned bad with IE6's proprietary features; there are still a ton of legacy Intranet applications out there that will have to run in an XP virtual machine from now until the end of time. This is why, with IE9 and IE10, Microsoft isn't pushing proprietary features but is instead bragging about their "native" HTML5 (standard) support. This (plus litigation from the EU, let's not forget that) is why Microsoft has made at least some nods towards openness with the new Office XML file format.
I'm sure that Steve Ballmer would like to party like it's 1999, but he can't. His competitors won't let him, and his customers won't put up with it any more.
Of course, the reason Angry Birds can be profitably sold for a dollar is that millions of people are buying it. When you're buying a custom solution, you have to pay the whole cost yourself. This is why it's generally best to try to find off-the-shelf (or open-source) software that can be made to work reasonably well, rather than writing a one-off solution.
That is because corporate infrastructure software does not generate revenue. Why spend money that does not directly impact the bottom line?
It does impact the bottom line; it's just harder to see and measure. When lots of employees are wasting time rebooting after crashes, or repeatedly navigating a slow and/or suboptimal user interface, that's wasted time that costs productivity and money. Just because you aren't measuring it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Re-focusing on the main topic of my original post, how is (or was at the dot-com time) paying $60-$70K a year for a person to write HTML, just plain HTML not an "unsustainable bubble."?
If wages had kept pace with productivity, then the median household income would be about $92,000 a year. (It's currently around $50,000.)
So, no, these wages being paid in the 1990s were not out of line. It's the wages that everyone else is being paid that are far too low. Based on productivity improvements over the years, the minimum wage should be about $19-$20 an hour. If the guy flipping burgers was getting paid $38,000-$40,000 a year as he should be, then $60K-$70K a year for HTML doesn't sound too unreasonable any more.
Most Americans have no idea just how badly we're getting screwed by the system.
Apparently there is now some level of convergence between OpenGL and OpenGL ES, so that a valid OpenGL ES 3.0 application is also valid OpenGL 4.2. Does this also apply to ES 2.0? In other words, is a valid ES 2.0 application also a valid non-ES 4.2 application?
Funny how whenever regular employees get paid and treated well it's an "unsustainable bubble", but when executives get millions of dollars a year it's just business as usual.
Especially interesting is the special circuitry that eliminated the need to blow air into the cartridges that plagued the original NES.
The need to blow air into cartridges on the original NES was a result of DRM.
No, seriously.
The NES console contained a chip called the CIC, which had to perform a handshake with a corresponding CIC on the cartridge, or else the system wouldn't boot (and you'd get that blinking red power LED). The purpose of this was to ensure that no one could manufacture NES cartridges without the approval of Nintendo of America. Unfortunately, it also made the boot process far more finicky; even the slightest amount of dirt would cause the handshake to fail and the system to repeatedly reset. (The fact that Nintendo used a weird ZIF-style connector rather than a standard card edge connector didn't help, either. This was done because they didn't want the NES to look like a standard game console, which had a bad reputation after the 1983 crash.)
If the software industry had been as rife with patents (both functional and design) and other litigation tools back then as it is today, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten away with this particular way of copying.
If the legal situation with patents and copyrights had been that bad back then, we'd all still be stuck in the 8-bit era, and the Internet as we know it today wouldn't exist.
It seems highly hypocritical to criticize Bill Gates for cloning CP/M when we (rightly) defend similar actions taken in the present day with Android vis-a-vis Java, Wine regarding Windows, and so forth.
Be careful. A lot of that stuff at Zophar's Domain is way out of date. Much of it is based on speculation or trial-and-error emulator testing or is flatly incorrect.
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.
For example, the Dolphin GC/Wii emulator managed to get pretty accurate graphics emulation in less time than PCSX2 because the GC/Wii's GPU is a lot saner and has a model that is relatively easy to map to OpenGL/DX, unlike the PS2's GPU and vector units which are horribly painful to emulate.
Dolphin still can't emulate Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker perfectly: the heat and smoke effects are badly broken (this is especially noticeable in Dragon Roost Cavern). It must be doing something weird with the hardware that the plugins can't emulate. I'm surprised that the issue hasn't been fixed in all these years for such a popular game, though I don't know whether or not that's for want of trying.
The Radio Shack used to be like that, except that they had a reasonable markup of perhaps up to 20% over normal price. Not 200%.
After they lost the "The", they have gone downhill, and are now completely useless. I ran out of solder, and didn't even try to find that at Best Buy. I figured I'd stop at Radio Shack, and pay a little more than I normally do.
"Oh, we don't carry that, but we can order it for you." Um. Had I entered the wrong store, or been transported to a weird parallel universe?
It's sad to say, but I really miss the old TRS, and even CompUSA, Tweeter and CIrcuit City. Because Best Buy and RS are the pits, whether you want computer stuff, generic stuff, or AV stuff.
This is why those of us who have a Fry's in our area like it so much – they have the kind of inventory that these other stores used to have, and in most cases their prices aren't even that much higher than the online retailers. For instance, my local Fry's has a whole aisle full of soldering-related supplies: pretty much every different type of solder (standard tin-lead, lead-free, silver-bearing, etc.), lots of different types of soldering and desoldering stations (including some nice offerings from Hakko), heat-shrink tubing, spare tips, and so forth.
I don't know how they manage to pull it off when other bricks-and-mortar retailers are having so much trouble, but they do.
Yes, PCSX2 can play from the original disc and you do not need any special hardware to do that. However, ripping your disc to an ISO is a better choice because this pretty much does away with access times.
Russian doesn't give a damn about US copyright claims.
Ukraine != Russia.
The former Soviet republics that are now independent states (including Ukraine) tend to be friendlier to the US and EU than Russia itself is, because they rely upon NATO support to maintain effective independence from Russian control.
What we need is a fork called "Firefox Classic", which combines the up-to-date internals of the current Firefox codebase with the user interface of Firefox 3.6 (with at least the option to use the standard URL bar from Firefox 2 instead of the "Awesome Bar"). Most of the recent complaints I've heard have been about the UI "experts" screwing things up right and left, not about the core browser. (There used to be a lot of issues with memory leaks, but those are largely fixed now. And the recent Flash issues are Adobe's fault, not Mozilla's.)
Posner's opinion seems to say that while someone uploading a video is guilty of copyright infringement, the viewers who merely streamed the video are not.
But as long as the
visitor makes no copy of the copyrighted video that he
is watching, he is not violating the copyright ownerâ(TM)s
exclusive right, conferred by the Copyright Act, "to
reproduce the copyrighted work in copiesâ and âoedistribute
copies . . . of the copyrighted work to the public." 17
U.S.C. ÂÂ 106(1), (3). [...] The infringer is the customer
of Flava who copied Flavaâ(TM)s copyrighted video by uploading
it to the Internet.
There is only one case I'm aware of where any company attempted to sue someone for simply watching a stream: the UFC lawsuit against Greenfeedz users. In this article, an attorney was skeptical that such claims would hold up, and Posner's judicial opinion seems to provide strong backing for throwing out those lawsuits.
It is not clear to me whether downloading a video (as opposed to streaming it) would be considered making "a copy of the copyrighted video" under the Copyright Act. Has this ever been discussed in any other court case in the United States? Except for the UFC incident, I'm not aware of any lawsuits filed against end users for downloading alone.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting that you question these poll results, but accept your referenced poll results unquestioningly....
Please re-read what I actually wrote. I didn't say that the TSA poll results were wrong or fake. I said that I would like to see a breakdown by age, and that it was quite possible that the discrepancy between the poll and what "everyone on the Internet" knows might be due to generation gaps.
I'd be very interested to see a breakdown in these poll results by age. I would not be at all surprised to see younger, more Internet-connected respondents have a more negative view of the TSA, while the Fox News generation (average viewer age 65, average age for Bill O'Reilly viewers 71) tends toward a more positive view. We see the same thing with numerous other issues where pretty much everyone on sites like Slashdot agrees, but the actual politics seem to be lagging behind. For instance, 50% of Americans now favor legalizing marijuana according to recent Gallup Polls, but while 62% of people in the 18-29 age bracket are in favor, only 31% of senior citizens do. And those seniors vote at a MUCH higher rate than young people. This is why issues relevant to old people are discussed endlessly, while issues important to the young are simply ignored. It's why college funding keeps getting cut every year while Medicare and Social Security remain untouchable.
Get out there and vote this November! Even if it's just for the lesser of two evils, vote anyway. The only way this imbalance will be fixed is if young people start voting at the same rate as older Americans.
A good agile environment forces (yes forces) efficient cross training. If you are a top individual contributor, maybe you resent this. That, in my opinion, is also unprofessional.
So the top individual contributors are tasked with two separate jobs: programming and training. I trust they get paid a lot more for this? Otherwise, they have every reason to "resent" this: They're being asked to carry everyone else, to do double duty, and getting nothing in return.
This may be true, but the reason that I think we should still insist on math being a part of a comp. sci. curriculum isn't because you will use it in your day to day work but because learning it reorganizes your brain.
Is there any actual evidence for this, or just speculation and tradition? They used to say the same thing about Greek and Latin, but those were dropped years ago with no perceptible adverse effect.
Just as one example, as a game programmer your ability to implement, say, Newtonian iteration would likely make a difference in your salary ask by a factor of two.
If you care about salary (or working conditions), you shouldn't become a game programmer in the first place. From an objective standpoint these are among the worst programming jobs in existence; the only reason there are so many applicants is because kids fresh out of college thing these jobs are "cool." (They're not; the kids won't actually get to design the games – that's done by completely different teams of people. They're just coding to spec, like they would in any other job, but with worse pay and longer hours.)
No, a single employee was duped into make an error.
That employee was acting on Apple's behalf as part of his official job duties. Therefore, Apple is legally and morally responsible for his actions.
This right here is at the core of almost all problems in the world: the inability of people to differentiate between the actions of an individual and a group, or projecting the individual actions into a collective mindset.
So I suppose you're also opposed to corporate limited liability? You can't have it both ways.
Unless you know some way for the atmosphere to clear all the heat trapping CO2 we've been dumping for the past 100 years
Step 1: Plant a shitload of fast-growing trees.
Step 2: When they reach maturity, cut them down and bury or sink the wood. (Or use it for furniture or housing if it's suitable.)
Step 3: Repeat.
I've thought for years that Linux on the desktop was a dead end, but it's actually conceivable that Valve could get it to work.
Admittedly, there are still problems to be solved: the utterly horrible font rendering, the reliance on having the obsolete and slow X11 subsystem sitting behind all other graphics, the lack of a UI that matches up with Windows. But three of the major problems – fragmentation, bad hardware support, and lack of commercial software – could be addressed by Valve.
If Valve rolls out a Steam client for Linux, then any distribution which doesn't support it will be relegated to an even smaller niche than it is now. This means that Valve pretty much gets to say what Linux on the desktop is. Less fragmentation. And while some people think Valve will make a "Steambox" console (and who knows, they might), I think it's more likely they will make a "blessed" list of supported and tested hardware. This list will become a reference for anyone who wants to use Linux on the desktop. Valve also has the muscle to push for additional hardware support, while the existing open-source community might simply be ignored.
Regarding commercial software, you're obviously not going to see MS Office there (and this is a major stumbling block) but you might see some other big players. If Adobe brings Photoshop and the rest of Creative Suite to Steam, Microsoft is going to shit a brick.
It's relevant because other than Gates you still have the same personalities running the show as you did 20 years ago. Especially Ballmer. Now maybe he's seen the Light or found Jesus or whatever but I wouldn't count on it.
It's not Ballmer and associates who have changed, it's the rest of the marketplace. Microsoft's competitors are far more numerous, powerful, and skilled than they were 10-15 years ago. Google and Apple (and apparently now Valve as well) are not going to let Microsoft steamroll over everything like they did in the 1990s. Furthermore, businesses have learned the hard way that open standards are a good thing. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" only works when people don't realize what you are doing. Businesses got burned bad with IE6's proprietary features; there are still a ton of legacy Intranet applications out there that will have to run in an XP virtual machine from now until the end of time. This is why, with IE9 and IE10, Microsoft isn't pushing proprietary features but is instead bragging about their "native" HTML5 (standard) support. This (plus litigation from the EU, let's not forget that) is why Microsoft has made at least some nods towards openness with the new Office XML file format.
I'm sure that Steve Ballmer would like to party like it's 1999, but he can't. His competitors won't let him, and his customers won't put up with it any more.
Of course, the reason Angry Birds can be profitably sold for a dollar is that millions of people are buying it. When you're buying a custom solution, you have to pay the whole cost yourself. This is why it's generally best to try to find off-the-shelf (or open-source) software that can be made to work reasonably well, rather than writing a one-off solution.
That is because corporate infrastructure software does not generate revenue. Why spend money that does not directly impact the bottom line?
It does impact the bottom line; it's just harder to see and measure. When lots of employees are wasting time rebooting after crashes, or repeatedly navigating a slow and/or suboptimal user interface, that's wasted time that costs productivity and money. Just because you aren't measuring it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Re-focusing on the main topic of my original post, how is (or was at the dot-com time) paying $60-$70K a year for a person to write HTML, just plain HTML not an "unsustainable bubble."?
If wages had kept pace with productivity, then the median household income would be about $92,000 a year. (It's currently around $50,000.)
So, no, these wages being paid in the 1990s were not out of line. It's the wages that everyone else is being paid that are far too low. Based on productivity improvements over the years, the minimum wage should be about $19-$20 an hour. If the guy flipping burgers was getting paid $38,000-$40,000 a year as he should be, then $60K-$70K a year for HTML doesn't sound too unreasonable any more.
Most Americans have no idea just how badly we're getting screwed by the system.
We have set the goal of having a touch-compatible GNOME 3 within a maximum of 18 months
Remember when your mom asked you "If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"
Well, apparently the GNOME developers' answer was "Yes."
Apparently there is now some level of convergence between OpenGL and OpenGL ES, so that a valid OpenGL ES 3.0 application is also valid OpenGL 4.2. Does this also apply to ES 2.0? In other words, is a valid ES 2.0 application also a valid non-ES 4.2 application?
Funny how whenever regular employees get paid and treated well it's an "unsustainable bubble", but when executives get millions of dollars a year it's just business as usual.
Especially interesting is the special circuitry that eliminated the need to blow air into the cartridges that plagued the original NES.
The need to blow air into cartridges on the original NES was a result of DRM.
No, seriously.
The NES console contained a chip called the CIC, which had to perform a handshake with a corresponding CIC on the cartridge, or else the system wouldn't boot (and you'd get that blinking red power LED). The purpose of this was to ensure that no one could manufacture NES cartridges without the approval of Nintendo of America. Unfortunately, it also made the boot process far more finicky; even the slightest amount of dirt would cause the handshake to fail and the system to repeatedly reset. (The fact that Nintendo used a weird ZIF-style connector rather than a standard card edge connector didn't help, either. This was done because they didn't want the NES to look like a standard game console, which had a bad reputation after the 1983 crash.)
If the software industry had been as rife with patents (both functional and design) and other litigation tools back then as it is today, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten away with this particular way of copying.
If the legal situation with patents and copyrights had been that bad back then, we'd all still be stuck in the 8-bit era, and the Internet as we know it today wouldn't exist.
It seems highly hypocritical to criticize Bill Gates for cloning CP/M when we (rightly) defend similar actions taken in the present day with Android vis-a-vis Java, Wine regarding Windows, and so forth.
Be careful. A lot of that stuff at Zophar's Domain is way out of date. Much of it is based on speculation or trial-and-error emulator testing or is flatly incorrect.
you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?
The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.
For example, the Dolphin GC/Wii emulator managed to get pretty accurate graphics emulation in less time than PCSX2 because the GC/Wii's GPU is a lot saner and has a model that is relatively easy to map to OpenGL/DX, unlike the PS2's GPU and vector units which are horribly painful to emulate.
Dolphin still can't emulate Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker perfectly: the heat and smoke effects are badly broken (this is especially noticeable in Dragon Roost Cavern). It must be doing something weird with the hardware that the plugins can't emulate. I'm surprised that the issue hasn't been fixed in all these years for such a popular game, though I don't know whether or not that's for want of trying.
The Radio Shack used to be like that, except that they had a reasonable markup of perhaps up to 20% over normal price. Not 200%. After they lost the "The", they have gone downhill, and are now completely useless. I ran out of solder, and didn't even try to find that at Best Buy. I figured I'd stop at Radio Shack, and pay a little more than I normally do. "Oh, we don't carry that, but we can order it for you." Um. Had I entered the wrong store, or been transported to a weird parallel universe? It's sad to say, but I really miss the old TRS, and even CompUSA, Tweeter and CIrcuit City. Because Best Buy and RS are the pits, whether you want computer stuff, generic stuff, or AV stuff.
This is why those of us who have a Fry's in our area like it so much – they have the kind of inventory that these other stores used to have, and in most cases their prices aren't even that much higher than the online retailers. For instance, my local Fry's has a whole aisle full of soldering-related supplies: pretty much every different type of solder (standard tin-lead, lead-free, silver-bearing, etc.), lots of different types of soldering and desoldering stations (including some nice offerings from Hakko), heat-shrink tubing, spare tips, and so forth.
I don't know how they manage to pull it off when other bricks-and-mortar retailers are having so much trouble, but they do.
Yes, PCSX2 can play from the original disc and you do not need any special hardware to do that. However, ripping your disc to an ISO is a better choice because this pretty much does away with access times.
Russian doesn't give a damn about US copyright claims.
Ukraine != Russia.
The former Soviet republics that are now independent states (including Ukraine) tend to be friendlier to the US and EU than Russia itself is, because they rely upon NATO support to maintain effective independence from Russian control.
What we need is a fork called "Firefox Classic", which combines the up-to-date internals of the current Firefox codebase with the user interface of Firefox 3.6 (with at least the option to use the standard URL bar from Firefox 2 instead of the "Awesome Bar"). Most of the recent complaints I've heard have been about the UI "experts" screwing things up right and left, not about the core browser. (There used to be a lot of issues with memory leaks, but those are largely fixed now. And the recent Flash issues are Adobe's fault, not Mozilla's.)
Posner's opinion seems to say that while someone uploading a video is guilty of copyright infringement, the viewers who merely streamed the video are not.
There is only one case I'm aware of where any company attempted to sue someone for simply watching a stream: the UFC lawsuit against Greenfeedz users. In this article, an attorney was skeptical that such claims would hold up, and Posner's judicial opinion seems to provide strong backing for throwing out those lawsuits.
It is not clear to me whether downloading a video (as opposed to streaming it) would be considered making "a copy of the copyrighted video" under the Copyright Act. Has this ever been discussed in any other court case in the United States? Except for the UFC incident, I'm not aware of any lawsuits filed against end users for downloading alone.