I work for a market research firm that focuses exclusively on the bioinformatics market. With a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering I am the worst educated employee of the company if you don't count the President/co-owner with his bachelor's in history.
The main problem we have is that all our employees, regardless of field, need a strong scientific education (there's only 15 people and the company is profitable, so there is a lot of cross-utilization). Even the marketing folks come from a lab background, so they understand what is going on. I am their resident IT geek and in the last year I have been forced to absorb more about biology tools and techniques that I would have even dreamed of, and that's without even trying.
Re:What we need is widespread acceptance of $1 coi
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
True, ours in Virginia should be $1.03455 (VA sales tax is only 4.5%). I guess we could call it a "sales tax friendly" coin.
What we need is widespread acceptance of $1 coins
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
We already have a $1 coin that has a distinctive feel in your pocket (one of the reasons why the Susan B. Anthony dollar sucked). The problem is that people just won't use them.
I lived in Germany from 1993-1997 and I loved how practical the 1+ DM coins where. Each was distinctive so you could count the change just by shuffling the coins in your pocket, and they last a hell of a lot longer than bank notes. The money I got to see in France and Luxemburg had the same practical touches (the Lux money was so cool I carried a few notes in my wallet for probably 3 years after I came back to the states).
We need a real 50 cent coin, more use of the $1 coin and hopefully a $2 piece too. Or screw the coins and let's come up with a real smart card for small purchases. The smart card used in the DC Metro system is practical as hell, and the Mobil SpeedPass is really nice too.
I always use about 1GB out of my 5GB iPod to do backups of my home folder. It is much faster than transferring the files to a network server that is in the tape backups schedule. THAT is business usage and can be written-off.
I am experiencing great turnaround with Netflix. My first rule is that I never keep a movie for more than one night, and I send them back the next day even if I did not have a chance to see it. Overall it works really well and I get to see at least 15 movies per month.
My second rule is that I keep at least 100 movies in my wish list, you just never know when demand changes.
Connect the DSL modem to the Linksys, which is able to do PPPoE. Then you can network your other machines since the Linksys is also a 100MB ethernet switch.
Buy from any dealer except Apple and you will get ripped off. You get a free 256MB SODIMM but they charge you $48 to install it (the stick costs $50). Refuse the install fee? NO free memory for you.
You get a free Lexmark printer after rebate, but you have to wait months for the rebate, and you had to pay extra for the shipping.
And so it goes.
We just leased 4 iMacs from a vendor who I will not mention but somewhere in the name it says "warehouse." We were to get free extra 512MB on each mac (with install fee), plus 2 free printers (after rebate), 2 $20 printers (after rebate) and 4 free USB floppy drives (again after rebate).
1. Two of the macs came with just 512MB instead of 768MB 2. One of the printers was DOA 3. NO paperwork we could use for the rebates 4. We paid shipping for all the extra crap.
It was a total ripoff.
The only company that has ever paid me on time is Microsoft. Many times I bought Microsoft sidewinders or games with $10-$20 rebates and they always showed up as advertised. Everything else I have tried has been a ripoff.
The major role of the consultant these days falls along two major areas of responsibility:
1. Do stuff. 2. Advise on stuff.
On the do stuff role, the consultant is brought into the picture due to many reasons, be it cost, skillset, whatever. You may need something done and nobody in house has the skills. Or you can bring a consultant to do the work for much less than what it costs you to keep this kind of talent on staff full time.
On the advise role, the consultant is brought in to give decision makers an unbiased opinion about whatever. When I say unbiased I mean this person has no ties whatsoever to your organization and will be immune to things like current inhouse politics, legacy issues, etc. Because this person has a fresh mind he/she could care less of things like "that's not how we do things around here" or "if we had not fired Bob this would not be an issue." The consultant here gives the decision maker(s) choices and tries to justify them. The decision maker still has to make the decision itself and cannot blame the consultant.
If you are in the do stuff role, your customer relies on you to actually generate some kind of output. If anything keeps you from providing this output then it is your responsibility to raise the issue (I hate to use PHB language but this is one of them yellow or red flags).
On the other hand, if you are in the advisor role, your responsibility is to inform your customer of valid choices to deal with the problem at hand, but the customer is still the one that makes the decision itself.
Or to hell with it, you can take Dogbert's approach. Consult is the combination of the words "con" and "insult." *You* figure it out.
Here's a common ethical dilemma to us programmer: A pointy-haired boss (PHB) left unchecked:
1. Allowing projects to start without defined deliverables. 2. Allowing time-and-materials (TMA) projects to run wild with no schedule, since the company will eventually get paid regardless of the outcome. 3. Allowing marketroids to lie to the customers and public about your company's capabilities in the hope these can be acquired on the run if a project is signed with a big enough down payment. 4. Forcing people to keep billing on a project when it is a TMA with a "not to exceed" cost. If the cap is $200,000 and so far you have billed $175,000, you will be forced to find something to keep you busy until you hit the $200K or else. 5. Allowing customers to sign on a project without the buy-in of their technical people. Case in point: In a previous job my company got a huge defense contractor (127,000 desktop users) to sign on an intranet project that required IE 5 or Netscape 6. Small problem: The standard for this monstruous organization is Netscape 4.7, and overseeing the upgrade of 127,000 desktops to Netscape 6 or IE 5 would have cost twice as much as our project's budget. This could have been fixed had these people checked with their IT folks.
My fix was simple: I left. I got to see the company shoot itself in the foot, and went thru layoff rounds every 90 days. The day I was going to be handed over my pink slip I was interviewing across town. That afternoon I was told that I was spared at the last second. 2 days later I got offered the job across town and I jumped ship. I still program but only internally, my customers are my own employers so it is in their best interest to not lie to themselves!
We laid off a lot of good people at that previous company, and most of them by now have better jobs elsewhere. The few that are still working there are living thru pure hell every day of the week.
The open source movement needs initiatives like this to distinguish open source from freeloading. A DRM solution tells RIAA and their minions that there are alternatives out there to make DRM work without resorting to obscene violations of privacy.
Almost everybody I know that uses MP3 or other formats want to pay for their music, what they don't want is unfair restrictions and obstacles to interrupt their enjoyment of the music once they purchase it. I even spent over a year using encrypted windows media music at work to prove to the network admin the music was for my own enjoyment and that I was not sharing it. It worked really nice but it was ackward, plus the files became useless once I left that company.
I worked my ass off in engineering school for 5 long frickin miserable years, finished my coursework and enlisted in the Army. AFTER I was enlisted I got my bachelor's degree elsewhere just so I would have the diploma. In Puerto Rico on top of graduating you have to pass a board test just like all medicine doctors, lawyers and CPAs before you are considered a real engineer.
Yes, I got an accredited diploma from a school even bigger than the one I went to, but that does NOT make me an engineer. Just because I have been programming for 15 years that does not give me the excuse to use the title.
And no, MCSE/MCSD or any other alphabet soup certification won't make you an engineer either.
When people ask me what I do I tell them I am a mechanical engineer fallen from grace and that I have never practiced mechanical engineering since the day I walked out of school.
To those of us that survived the dot bomb mess, titles are pretty much useless since we are just happy enough to be employed while all our friends got laid off left and right. In my current job I am CTO/CIO/Technology Director/Senior Programmer/Mac guy/PC guy/Phones guy. Depending on who I am talking to, I change my title. I may be talking to the production folks while wearing the hat of senior programmer, then switch to CTO/CIO when hunting down leads for phone service vendors, etc.
My boss already made it clear he does not care, and he will only make a title official to avoid misunderstandings. Sometimes it goes kind of crazy, but the variety is enough to take away any chance for boredom.
"Works with Windows" is a load of crap. If I am going to spend money buying something for a windows box, I want to know that Windows is not going to have an allergic reaction to it.
This move by Office Depot will cut down on the hordes of morons that buy shrinkwrapped software without bothering to read the bottom of the box where 99% of said software tells what runs with it. Said hordes of morons get angry as hell when the poor minimum wage guy at the returns counter tells them that sorry, but he cannot take the return just because it is not compatible with the customer's computer.
I hope they can pull it off
on
TiVo++ from India
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If they can keep that box cheap and the evil lawyer hordes in the US don't try to eat them alive, they can make a killing.
Their idea to provide conditional channel access rocks. The most common complaint I hear about digital cable (this is by the way the one thing that consistently pisses me off about my comcast digital cable) is not being able to tailor the channel package. I personally have the top package that comcast offers here, which is about $80 and has about 400 channels or so. Of these 400 channels I may watch 10 or so all the time and maybe surf thru another 20. The rest is garbage.
Also neat is how they let you upgrade your connection speed temporarily, so you only pay while you use this extra bandwidth.
I used XP Pro from rc1, so I got plenty of time to get used to it. And I was very grateful that most of the extra candy can be turned off if you are using a weak computer. With everything stripped off it is still very usable.
I find it funny that people would think the OS X interface is colorful. The only colorful aspect is the great icons and the three gum drops. Everything else is plain and minimalistic.
The OS X iterface becomes totally invisible once you are used to it. You only notice it when you need it to do something for you. 99% of the time I don't even notice the brushed metal windows in Safari and iTunes! The XP interface constantly screams at you for attention.
That said, I am happy with what Microsoft did with the XP interface. It is not perfect but it is headed in the right direction.
I am a web developer and in the last few years I have written products that use SQL Server 6.5, 7, 2000 and Oracle 7.x and 8.x. MySQL has always been present whenever we discussed data back ends and was always dismissed as "not good enough." Usually because it did not cost a gazillion.
During the last 18 months or so I have run my personal sites with a MySQL back end. I have never had an outage or loss of data that can be traced back to the MySQL servers. I ran it first on Windows 2000, later on freeBSD4.5 and now on a freeBSD4.6 jail. It still works perfectly.
Back when we were still arguing (two jobs ago) about using MySQL, the DBAs usually claimed that you could not trust MySQL because of the lack of stored procedures and the fact that it could not pass an ACID test. Since then I never bothered learning the DB system itself beyond the minimum needed for SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations, I did not try to verify this on my own. Years later and I am convinced that these DBAs probably read that in a magazine, and that none of them had even seen MySQL running.
After the dot-bomb nightmare nobody in his right mind should be proposing to their managers to spend obscene amounts of money in SQL Server and Oracle licenses just to do simple SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations. Sure, stored procedures rock but it does not make any sense to spend that much money just for the 1% of your functionality that will be run by stored procedures!
Most of the people I know that use SQL Server don't even know how to write one, and in the last 5 years I have only written two web applications that have more than 1% of their sql operations as stored procedures. And for Oracle it is even worse!
Actually, it is not so bad. What you want is to be the one that sells the addict the game that keeps him hooked. There are all sorts of marketing hooks to this. Notice that Bethesda Softworks are not crying bloody murder because we, their fans, spend months playing their $50 title. They know it in their hearts that when they issue the next one we will go over hell and highwater to buy it. No CFO in his right mind is going to bitch about a lower revenue stream that is more predictable.
The $50 subscription fee is even less when you take into account the kit came with a headset (which they could have sold by itself for $10-$20).
Also, EA should be completely familiar with the razor margins of this industry. They did not start selling games yesterday.
If I had a gaming company with the resources of EA, and I have had the opportunity to play Mech Assault or Unreal Championship on Live, I would be losing sleep until I could cash out on it. Sure, Microsoft controls it, but they are doing a hell of a job doing that.
Live is more addictive than crack. A $50 game and a $50/yr subscription can keep a guy totally hooked for months. Dangle the carrot about posting extra content every X months and they will stick around even longer. I got my Xbox in October 2002 and got Live a few weeks after and I was so busy getting my ass kicked on Mech Assault that I did not even notice Microsoft had posted two new mechs and two new maps. Plus the promise for more. And today I just found out that Splinter Cell, a game that only has single-user mode, has a new module available thru Live.
EA needs to port the Command and Conquer franchise to Xbox and use Live to allow network games and to post extra maps. That will be a good enough experiment to see if it is worth it to them to spend more in the platform. Microsoft went thru the trouble of creating a solid networking arrangement and online community, so the only thing these people have to do is sell the damn games.
I switched to mac OS X last year, which is why I got the Xbox. One of my requisites for buying Xbox games is that they have to be Live enabled. The only game that I currently own that does not have Live is Morrowind, and I am hoping that by the time Bethesda Softworks releases a followup it has some Live functionality.
For those wondering, Satellite Comm techs in the USArmy fall under MOS 31S (it used to be 29Y but it was changed when I was still in the service).
I got to see a few hacks like that when I was in the service. The main problem was that the equipment used to downconvert the RF was too godawful expensive! A 19" rack with just a down converter, a patch panel, a HP spectrum analyzer and a custom DEC drawer was over $300K.
Later we found out there was a card you could plug into a normal retail PC that allowed us to connect to the IEEE-488 data acquisition bus in the spectrum analyzer. Next step was finding the API for talking to the spectrum analyzer and we eventually built our own system without the need for that damn DEC. Suddenly a $300K rack unit got replaced by a PC (it was an AST Pentium 133, ah, the days!) with a $400 or so IEEE-488 card and a $20-50K spectrum analyzer (no, I still have no clue why it was so damn expensive).
That was 10 years ago, I would not be surprised if the whole thing can be done for a few grand.
Within hours of reading about the bug I noticed the patch published in versiontracker.com. Probably minutes after I finished the patch, johncompanies sends me an email with exact instructions on how to patch my freeBSD jail server. I am positive all this happened within an hour!
Ditto. I am tired of getting burned with CDs that only have maybe 1-3 songs I like. I also hope they figure out a way so we keep access to the download, in case the mac or the iPod gets screwed up.
Some guy did this for Mac OS X months ago. I discovered it sometime in January (here is what I posted at my site with my experience with it).
The way this one is set, you can put either 10 GB of data without error correction, or 5GB with error correction. It is rudimentary but in principle works and it is simple to implement. I guess it took me less than an hour to figure out how to make it work with my JVC miniDV cam.
I use BBEdit 7.0 for almost all our development work (ASP, PHP and XML). I think the $179 list price is a bit inflated, I bought 6.5 for $79 at their website (you download the lite version and that was enough to qualify for the "competitive" upgrade to the pro version). Less than two months later Barebones moved up to 7.0, and my purchase fell within the grace period for a free upgrade. My previous weapon of choice was Edit Plus (back when I was still in windows) and even if I absolutely loved it, its developers sort of left it hanging for a long time. I used Edit Plus for many years because the cliptext function was ideal for ASP programming and it did not add any weird gremlins to text files.
Within a week of using BBEdit I was completely weaned-off Edit Plus. Cliptext only allows one substitution, while the BBEdit glossary facility allows you to substitute for whatever you have highlighted, plus whatever is on the clipboard. Plus extra dynamic tags you can use for that. You can of course combine the glossary with GREP patterns and Applescript for some truly evil automation.
The stripped-off tool is just another way of Barebones showing off how they listen to their customers. In every instance that I have had to contact them, they have been very quick and professional. Many times I have emailed them with "hints" for a next version only to have them reply with the page of the manual that explains a function that does exactly what I want to.
I should have mentioned I am playing it on the xbox, so my version has not been extended yet.
If Bethesda figures out how to extend it like the PC version I am definitely buying.
Also, somewhere else in this thread it is mentioned how Elder Scrolls II is really buggy. Well, Morrowind has a nasty bug that kicks in once your save file gets too big. Annoying as hell.
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I work for a market research firm that focuses exclusively on the bioinformatics market. With a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering I am the worst educated employee of the company if you don't count the President/co-owner with his bachelor's in history.
The main problem we have is that all our employees, regardless of field, need a strong scientific education (there's only 15 people and the company is profitable, so there is a lot of cross-utilization). Even the marketing folks come from a lab background, so they understand what is going on. I am their resident IT geek and in the last year I have been forced to absorb more about biology tools and techniques that I would have even dreamed of, and that's without even trying.
True, ours in Virginia should be $1.03455 (VA sales tax is only 4.5%). I guess we could call it a "sales tax friendly" coin.
We already have a $1 coin that has a distinctive feel in your pocket (one of the reasons why the Susan B. Anthony dollar sucked). The problem is that people just won't use them.
I lived in Germany from 1993-1997 and I loved how practical the 1+ DM coins where. Each was distinctive so you could count the change just by shuffling the coins in your pocket, and they last a hell of a lot longer than bank notes. The money I got to see in France and Luxemburg had the same practical touches (the Lux money was so cool I carried a few notes in my wallet for probably 3 years after I came back to the states).
We need a real 50 cent coin, more use of the $1 coin and hopefully a $2 piece too. Or screw the coins and let's come up with a real smart card for small purchases. The smart card used in the DC Metro system is practical as hell, and the Mobil SpeedPass is really nice too.
I always use about 1GB out of my 5GB iPod to do backups of my home folder. It is much faster than transferring the files to a network server that is in the tape backups schedule. THAT is business usage and can be written-off.
I am experiencing great turnaround with Netflix. My first rule is that I never keep a movie for more than one night, and I send them back the next day even if I did not have a chance to see it. Overall it works really well and I get to see at least 15 movies per month.
My second rule is that I keep at least 100 movies in my wish list, you just never know when demand changes.
Connect the DSL modem to the Linksys, which is able to do PPPoE. Then you can network your other machines since the Linksys is also a 100MB ethernet switch.
Buy from any dealer except Apple and you will get ripped off. You get a free 256MB SODIMM but they charge you $48 to install it (the stick costs $50). Refuse the install fee? NO free memory for you.
You get a free Lexmark printer after rebate, but you have to wait months for the rebate, and you had to pay extra for the shipping.
And so it goes.
We just leased 4 iMacs from a vendor who I will not mention but somewhere in the name it says "warehouse." We were to get free extra 512MB on each mac (with install fee), plus 2 free printers (after rebate), 2 $20 printers (after rebate) and 4 free USB floppy drives (again after rebate).
1. Two of the macs came with just 512MB instead of 768MB
2. One of the printers was DOA
3. NO paperwork we could use for the rebates
4. We paid shipping for all the extra crap.
It was a total ripoff.
The only company that has ever paid me on time is Microsoft. Many times I bought Microsoft sidewinders or games with $10-$20 rebates and they always showed up as advertised. Everything else I have tried has been a ripoff.
The major role of the consultant these days falls along two major areas of responsibility:
1. Do stuff.
2. Advise on stuff.
On the do stuff role, the consultant is brought into the picture due to many reasons, be it cost, skillset, whatever. You may need something done and nobody in house has the skills. Or you can bring a consultant to do the work for much less than what it costs you to keep this kind of talent on staff full time.
On the advise role, the consultant is brought in to give decision makers an unbiased opinion about whatever. When I say unbiased I mean this person has no ties whatsoever to your organization and will be immune to things like current inhouse politics, legacy issues, etc. Because this person has a fresh mind he/she could care less of things like "that's not how we do things around here" or "if we had not fired Bob this would not be an issue." The consultant here gives the decision maker(s) choices and tries to justify them. The decision maker still has to make the decision itself and cannot blame the consultant.
If you are in the do stuff role, your customer relies on you to actually generate some kind of output. If anything keeps you from providing this output then it is your responsibility to raise the issue (I hate to use PHB language but this is one of them yellow or red flags).
On the other hand, if you are in the advisor role, your responsibility is to inform your customer of valid choices to deal with the problem at hand, but the customer is still the one that makes the decision itself.
Or to hell with it, you can take Dogbert's approach. Consult is the combination of the words "con" and "insult." *You* figure it out.
Here's a common ethical dilemma to us programmer: A pointy-haired boss (PHB) left unchecked:
1. Allowing projects to start without defined deliverables.
2. Allowing time-and-materials (TMA) projects to run wild with no schedule, since the company will eventually get paid regardless of the outcome.
3. Allowing marketroids to lie to the customers and public about your company's capabilities in the hope these can be acquired on the run if a project is signed with a big enough down payment.
4. Forcing people to keep billing on a project when it is a TMA with a "not to exceed" cost. If the cap is $200,000 and so far you have billed $175,000, you will be forced to find something to keep you busy until you hit the $200K or else.
5. Allowing customers to sign on a project without the buy-in of their technical people. Case in point: In a previous job my company got a huge defense contractor (127,000 desktop users) to sign on an intranet project that required IE 5 or Netscape 6. Small problem: The standard for this monstruous organization is Netscape 4.7, and overseeing the upgrade of 127,000 desktops to Netscape 6 or IE 5 would have cost twice as much as our project's budget. This could have been fixed had these people checked with their IT folks.
My fix was simple: I left. I got to see the company shoot itself in the foot, and went thru layoff rounds every 90 days. The day I was going to be handed over my pink slip I was interviewing across town. That afternoon I was told that I was spared at the last second. 2 days later I got offered the job across town and I jumped ship. I still program but only internally, my customers are my own employers so it is in their best interest to not lie to themselves!
We laid off a lot of good people at that previous company, and most of them by now have better jobs elsewhere. The few that are still working there are living thru pure hell every day of the week.
The open source movement needs initiatives like this to distinguish open source from freeloading. A DRM solution tells RIAA and their minions that there are alternatives out there to make DRM work without resorting to obscene violations of privacy.
Almost everybody I know that uses MP3 or other formats want to pay for their music, what they don't want is unfair restrictions and obstacles to interrupt their enjoyment of the music once they purchase it. I even spent over a year using encrypted windows media music at work to prove to the network admin the music was for my own enjoyment and that I was not sharing it. It worked really nice but it was ackward, plus the files became useless once I left that company.
I worked my ass off in engineering school for 5 long frickin miserable years, finished my coursework and enlisted in the Army. AFTER I was enlisted I got my bachelor's degree elsewhere just so I would have the diploma. In Puerto Rico on top of graduating you have to pass a board test just like all medicine doctors, lawyers and CPAs before you are considered a real engineer.
Yes, I got an accredited diploma from a school even bigger than the one I went to, but that does NOT make me an engineer. Just because I have been programming for 15 years that does not give me the excuse to use the title.
And no, MCSE/MCSD or any other alphabet soup certification won't make you an engineer either.
When people ask me what I do I tell them I am a mechanical engineer fallen from grace and that I have never practiced mechanical engineering since the day I walked out of school.
To those of us that survived the dot bomb mess, titles are pretty much useless since we are just happy enough to be employed while all our friends got laid off left and right. In my current job I am CTO/CIO/Technology Director/Senior Programmer/Mac guy/PC guy/Phones guy. Depending on who I am talking to, I change my title. I may be talking to the production folks while wearing the hat of senior programmer, then switch to CTO/CIO when hunting down leads for phone service vendors, etc.
My boss already made it clear he does not care, and he will only make a title official to avoid misunderstandings. Sometimes it goes kind of crazy, but the variety is enough to take away any chance for boredom.
"Works with Windows" is a load of crap. If I am going to spend money buying something for a windows box, I want to know that Windows is not going to have an allergic reaction to it.
This move by Office Depot will cut down on the hordes of morons that buy shrinkwrapped software without bothering to read the bottom of the box where 99% of said software tells what runs with it. Said hordes of morons get angry as hell when the poor minimum wage guy at the returns counter tells them that sorry, but he cannot take the return just because it is not compatible with the customer's computer.
If they can keep that box cheap and the evil lawyer hordes in the US don't try to eat them alive, they can make a killing.
Their idea to provide conditional channel access rocks. The most common complaint I hear about digital cable (this is by the way the one thing that consistently pisses me off about my comcast digital cable) is not being able to tailor the channel package. I personally have the top package that comcast offers here, which is about $80 and has about 400 channels or so. Of these 400 channels I may watch 10 or so all the time and maybe surf thru another 20. The rest is garbage.
Also neat is how they let you upgrade your connection speed temporarily, so you only pay while you use this extra bandwidth.
I used XP Pro from rc1, so I got plenty of time to get used to it. And I was very grateful that most of the extra candy can be turned off if you are using a weak computer. With everything stripped off it is still very usable.
I find it funny that people would think the OS X interface is colorful. The only colorful aspect is the great icons and the three gum drops. Everything else is plain and minimalistic.
The OS X iterface becomes totally invisible once you are used to it. You only notice it when you need it to do something for you. 99% of the time I don't even notice the brushed metal windows in Safari and iTunes! The XP interface constantly screams at you for attention.
That said, I am happy with what Microsoft did with the XP interface. It is not perfect but it is headed in the right direction.
I am a web developer and in the last few years I have written products that use SQL Server 6.5, 7, 2000 and Oracle 7.x and 8.x. MySQL has always been present whenever we discussed data back ends and was always dismissed as "not good enough." Usually because it did not cost a gazillion.
During the last 18 months or so I have run my personal sites with a MySQL back end. I have never had an outage or loss of data that can be traced back to the MySQL servers. I ran it first on Windows 2000, later on freeBSD4.5 and now on a freeBSD4.6 jail. It still works perfectly.
Back when we were still arguing (two jobs ago) about using MySQL, the DBAs usually claimed that you could not trust MySQL because of the lack of stored procedures and the fact that it could not pass an ACID test. Since then I never bothered learning the DB system itself beyond the minimum needed for SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations, I did not try to verify this on my own. Years later and I am convinced that these DBAs probably read that in a magazine, and that none of them had even seen MySQL running.
After the dot-bomb nightmare nobody in his right mind should be proposing to their managers to spend obscene amounts of money in SQL Server and Oracle licenses just to do simple SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations. Sure, stored procedures rock but it does not make any sense to spend that much money just for the 1% of your functionality that will be run by stored procedures!
Most of the people I know that use SQL Server don't even know how to write one, and in the last 5 years I have only written two web applications that have more than 1% of their sql operations as stored procedures. And for Oracle it is even worse!
Actually, it is not so bad. What you want is to be the one that sells the addict the game that keeps him hooked. There are all sorts of marketing hooks to this. Notice that Bethesda Softworks are not crying bloody murder because we, their fans, spend months playing their $50 title. They know it in their hearts that when they issue the next one we will go over hell and highwater to buy it. No CFO in his right mind is going to bitch about a lower revenue stream that is more predictable.
The $50 subscription fee is even less when you take into account the kit came with a headset (which they could have sold by itself for $10-$20).
Also, EA should be completely familiar with the razor margins of this industry. They did not start selling games yesterday.
If I had a gaming company with the resources of EA, and I have had the opportunity to play Mech Assault or Unreal Championship on Live, I would be losing sleep until I could cash out on it. Sure, Microsoft controls it, but they are doing a hell of a job doing that.
Live is more addictive than crack. A $50 game and a $50/yr subscription can keep a guy totally hooked for months. Dangle the carrot about posting extra content every X months and they will stick around even longer. I got my Xbox in October 2002 and got Live a few weeks after and I was so busy getting my ass kicked on Mech Assault that I did not even notice Microsoft had posted two new mechs and two new maps. Plus the promise for more. And today I just found out that Splinter Cell, a game that only has single-user mode, has a new module available thru Live.
EA needs to port the Command and Conquer franchise to Xbox and use Live to allow network games and to post extra maps. That will be a good enough experiment to see if it is worth it to them to spend more in the platform. Microsoft went thru the trouble of creating a solid networking arrangement and online community, so the only thing these people have to do is sell the damn games.
I switched to mac OS X last year, which is why I got the Xbox. One of my requisites for buying Xbox games is that they have to be Live enabled. The only game that I currently own that does not have Live is Morrowind, and I am hoping that by the time Bethesda Softworks releases a followup it has some Live functionality.
For those wondering, Satellite Comm techs in the USArmy fall under MOS 31S (it used to be 29Y but it was changed when I was still in the service).
I got to see a few hacks like that when I was in the service. The main problem was that the equipment used to downconvert the RF was too godawful expensive! A 19" rack with just a down converter, a patch panel, a HP spectrum analyzer and a custom DEC drawer was over $300K.
Later we found out there was a card you could plug into a normal retail PC that allowed us to connect to the IEEE-488 data acquisition bus in the spectrum analyzer. Next step was finding the API for talking to the spectrum analyzer and we eventually built our own system without the need for that damn DEC. Suddenly a $300K rack unit got replaced by a PC (it was an AST Pentium 133, ah, the days!) with a $400 or so IEEE-488 card and a $20-50K spectrum analyzer (no, I still have no clue why it was so damn expensive).
That was 10 years ago, I would not be surprised if the whole thing can be done for a few grand.
Any
Within hours of reading about the bug I noticed the patch published in versiontracker.com. Probably minutes after I finished the patch, johncompanies sends me an email with exact instructions on how to patch my freeBSD jail server. I am positive all this happened within an hour!
Ditto. I am tired of getting burned with CDs that only have maybe 1-3 songs I like. I also hope they figure out a way so we keep access to the download, in case the mac or the iPod gets screwed up.
Some guy did this for Mac OS X months ago. I discovered it sometime in January (here is what I posted at my site with my experience with it).
The way this one is set, you can put either 10 GB of data without error correction, or 5GB with error correction. It is rudimentary but in principle works and it is simple to implement. I guess it took me less than an hour to figure out how to make it work with my JVC miniDV cam.
I use BBEdit 7.0 for almost all our development work (ASP, PHP and XML). I think the $179 list price is a bit inflated, I bought 6.5 for $79 at their website (you download the lite version and that was enough to qualify for the "competitive" upgrade to the pro version). Less than two months later Barebones moved up to 7.0, and my purchase fell within the grace period for a free upgrade. My previous weapon of choice was Edit Plus (back when I was still in windows) and even if I absolutely loved it, its developers sort of left it hanging for a long time. I used Edit Plus for many years because the cliptext function was ideal for ASP programming and it did not add any weird gremlins to text files.
Within a week of using BBEdit I was completely weaned-off Edit Plus. Cliptext only allows one substitution, while the BBEdit glossary facility allows you to substitute for whatever you have highlighted, plus whatever is on the clipboard. Plus extra dynamic tags you can use for that. You can of course combine the glossary with GREP patterns and Applescript for some truly evil automation.
The stripped-off tool is just another way of Barebones showing off how they listen to their customers. In every instance that I have had to contact them, they have been very quick and professional. Many times I have emailed them with "hints" for a next version only to have them reply with the page of the manual that explains a function that does exactly what I want to.
I should have mentioned I am playing it on the xbox, so my version has not been extended yet.
If Bethesda figures out how to extend it like the PC version I am definitely buying.
Also, somewhere else in this thread it is mentioned how Elder Scrolls II is really buggy. Well, Morrowind has a nasty bug that kicks in once your save file gets too big. Annoying as hell.