How I wish I could agree... However, the meaning is in the mind of the writer, and I guess to much of the public (me included, and I'm supposed to be an engineer!), an engineer is someone who will come up with a complicated method to solve a simple problem. Look at all the engineering jokes.
Now I agree that a good engineer should work for the simplest, most cost-effective solution to a problem. Sadly, that's not what I observe around me, and even in my own work. (But wait, I'm young and learning!)
Words evolve with use, and while I applaud your effort to give positive meaning to the term "over engineered", it is a minority action.
I want to hire the guy who thought about this and implemented it. Well, I wish...
I work at a Big Company, where over-engineering, paying 10k where 1k would do, and endless discussion on the color of the bikeshed happen thrice before lunch every day.
I became an engineer because of McGuyver... how disappointed I am with reality:)
I believe there is magic in a good team: synergy. This means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I regularly see examples of small teams of 5 people outperforming the 40-person team (of course, communication overhead grows very quickly).
Anyhow, with that in mind, Capcom's declaration does not reassure me at all. You can't just "assign" someone to a project and expect to see that project get the same boost as the assignee's previous.
They've kept most of the people, but they've very probably destroyed the magic.
I was rabid about getting a Wii. I still haven't been able to get my hands on one, but the need is much weaker. This is mostly due to being able to play at a friends' place.
I still intend to get a Wii soon. I eagerly await the next Killer Game on the Wii, and suspect I will grow impatient and cranky while I wait. But I won't ditch out for the 360 and PS3 out of impatience.
Doctorow is very active in the field of copyright (against it's overreach). You can be certain he took adequate provisions to be able to use that title without problem.
Doctorow is also a science-fiction author. You could also look up his "I, Row-boat" novella. Here's an excerpt from the intro:
If I return to this theme, it will be with a story about uplifted cheese sandwiches, called "I, Rarebit."
Copying is the highest form of flattery, they say...
Okay, one last item, if I put the sending server's IP address into a browser and get a generic "unsubscribe" page, yeah, you're a spammer.
I didn't understand this at first, so just as a clarification for other innocent minds: the technique above is used by spammers to confirm valid e-mail addresses. You thought you unsubscribed? Quite the opposite!
Here in France, the Wii was released on the 8th of December. I resisted the temptation to preorder, naively confident that Nintendo's production would quickly catch up to demand. Today still (Jan 18th), stocks are empty everywhere I search, with shops depending on Nintendo's trickling supplies to honor preorders. In a prominent consumer electronics shop (FNAC), I was tersely answered "No dates" when I asked for an ETA. Another chain tells me "End of February, start of March"...
So the best I can hope is to get my Wii by the time the PS3 hits the stores. If I don't preorder *now*, it'll probably shift some more.
Also, we don't yet have real HDTVs here (all the big TVs are "HD-ready", that's 720p). It's one of the reasons I'm holding out for one. I wonder how that'll impact the performance of the PS3.
Is it too much speculation to believe the PS3 supply will equalize demand within in a month, here?
All in all, I'm very curious to see how the European market will react to the three consoles, compared to the USA and Japan.
After the initial elation, I'm crashing back down to reality.
The price tag didn't seem that scary at first. My brand new Nokia N70 costs 400E off the shelf.* With a 2-year plan, that came down to 55E, pretty damn affordable for a near-Smartphone. I didn't understand, at first, that the iPhone's price (500$ or 600$) included the 2-year plan! As I fully expect Cingular to charge for services (the very services the iPhone is so cool about) on top of that, the price has suddenly leapt straight out of my potential budget (and I'm a gadget lover with a good pay!).
No 3G? Well, there's no camera on the iPhone, so you won't be suffering bad video-conferencing. And if you're only use text e-mails, that's OK. Too bad for the "our browser isn't crippled and text-only!" hype. At those speeds, you'll want to go back to WAP.
And now no 3rd party apps? Their lame excuses don't even surprise me. I guess they're perfectly understandable for the mid-to-high level risk-averse manager. Whatever. However, I expect they'll catch up by selling apps for the iPhone. This is the final straw that confirms the iPhone beyond "barely affordable but classy social symbol" the iPod was so good to hit, and right into "outrageously priced executive toy".
Happy Feeling's gone:(
I'm not predicting a flop or anything. I think it'll revolutionize the way we use "phones" if other companies can get the hint, and I sure hope they'll do it quickly. All of a sudden the interface of my N70 seems awfully clunky...
*Yep, I live in Europe, which means the iPhone won't be available to me anytime soon anyhow.
If you want reliability, go Sun. That's their field.
I just the other day got a Redhat Linux Quad Opteron with 4gigs of RAM crash under me. RAM was full, OK, but swap wasn't. What's worse, the logs had stopped filling a week before. The Sun server was happily chugging along with 2+ *years* uptime under similar loads.
Now realize that Sun doesn't give you high speed, no-siree. The reason I had stuff running on the Linux box was that it was easily 5 times faster than the Sun station.
Hey, Sun servers are fabled to be able to hot-replace a burning RAID card. What else could you want?;)
The only reason to shun Sun in favor Linux would be economical. The only reason to shun Linux in favor of Windows would be for desktop use. Although, I don't know the comparative prices of Win Server 2003 and Redhat, so I guess there could be economical reasons there...
It'd just end up in a split of the Samba project - the full GPL'd version and the bastardized Novell/Microsoft hybrid.
The worst part is that the bastardized Novell/Microsoft hybrid would probably the best-working version. (Hey, who better than microsoft to know the backward-compatibility quirks of Samba/CIFS?)
... because they want an extra edge in the server market?... because they wanted to grab some free headlines?
And last but not least:... because an engineer was bored?
On a side note, I've read a lot about how ZFS is supposed to be reliable and flexible as hell. Nowhere, however, have I found information about read/write performance. I guess it's a great filesystem for huge mission-critical datasets, but for anybody else? I have my doubts.
I'm going to go on a limb and play devil's advocate here. No, that has nothing to do with Devil May Cry, you may leave now.
Let's say you're a game company. Which word do you think is most important here: "game", or "company"? If you said "game", you should return to Utopia, the Real World will only hurt you more.
The primary goal of such entities such as EA is to make cash. Their secondary goal, by which they achieve their primary goal, is to make games. Think about that.
To make cash through games, their games have to sell well. They have to be popular, in the most primitive sense of the word.
How do you make popular? You either have a well-known brand that will instantly ring a bell in Joe Sixpack's cranium ("Madden" *bing!* You do realize that the Madden series sells really well, right?). That's easily marketable, and MBA-types know this well because it works. Otherwise, you can focus on raw, untested fun. Marketing of fun? I'll come back to that.
Guess which one goes best on a billboard or a TV commercial? If you said "fun", didn't I just tell you to return to Utopia?
People won't believe "fun" on a billboard, but they could believe "fun" from their friends. Marketing of "fun" is by word and mouth, and that one's really unreliable.
By the way, do you know this really fun game called BreakQuest?
Sadly, this rhetoric is true only because there is no straight link between the vague concept of "quality" and sales. There is, however, a link between "marketing" and sales. I celebrate companies such as Blizzard that concentrate on quality (yes.), but I have no illusions regarding the games industry's economics.
While I agree on the negative impact of such an endeavor, I don't think religion as it is used in the USA corresponds to Marx's definition. Marx meant it as a means to tame an oppressed class "Suffering in this life guarantees you Paradise in the afterlife!". We can hardly call the american middle-class "oppressed" in any way.
Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism) is so powerful in such a developped country as the USA...
I wonder if it has anything to do with protestant evangelists taking up the methods of capitalism. Hmm...
Actually, my whole point revolved around the idea that the CIFS stuff provided by Novell as an alternative to Samba would have no code relationship with Samba, and thus not be tied to the GPL.
Did I miss something for everyone to be so certain that Microsoft would somehow get tangled with the GPL?
I really think the last american elections were rigged
You know, it's not the first time such a thing happens. And that time, the poor loser was Nixon, and disgusting winner... Kennedy. (and I'm too lazy to find the innumerable other references).
You're trying to out-lawyer Microsoft? C'mon! They're the guys who weaseled their way out of every anti-trust lawsuit they've been in!
No, I guess they aren't foolish enough to try and take the GPL head-on (anymore).
Instead, I can clearly see them doing something like "hey, buy this perfect SUSE-exclusive CIFS suite, why use that broken Samba thing when you can have this? Oh, besides, we're suing Samba for {patent,IP} infrigement, you don't want to be on the List, do you?"
Rinse and repeat for every Microsoft-compatible open-source Linux product.
The main thing this shows me as that as Wikipedia is growing popular, more parasites are grappling on. Or rather, those parasites have a greater impact. As they say in french: "C'est la rancon du succes".
I say, let them go no holds barred and let natural selection do its work!
(original quote is, I believe, "Let's remove all the safety labels and let natural selection do its work!" by I-can't-remember)
God, I'm not even ironic. It's sad that stupid people have power enough through suing to provoke this kind of action.
I'll expect my kids to come home bruised, having learnt important things, not sheltered and pampered, ready to be later eaten up by the first passing fox/politician. But then, I don't currently live in the US of A..
I indeed didn't point out the economically more important reason against using pure hydrogen, that of energy density: A gallon of liquid hydrogen, the highest attainable compression of hydrogen, has about 33% less energy than a gallon of gasoline. Granted, I don't have the energy efficiencies of each engine on-hand to compare*. Then we have all the practical problems of handling the cold cold stuff. Nevertheless, this has motivated the pursuit of the "hydrogen carriers" mentioned. Ammonia and hydrides are just two examples of hydrogen carriers, each with their own defects.
Nevertheless, lower energy density, combined with the dangers of manipulating pure hydrogen (which can be mitigated in the derivatives), not to mention overhauling the entire distribution network to handle it, keep pure hydrogen from ever being in large-scale use.
*I wonder how heating the habitacle in cold environments affects this, since it's a "free" (ok no, just energy lost through heat) side effect of gasoline vehicles but requires a dedicated heating circuit in fuel-cell vehicles.
Maybe I'm taking you too literally here, but remember that no fuel cell system aimed at the mass market take pure hydrogen as an input, mainly because of it's inherent danger (think Hindenburg). Instead, they take some other compound, like ammonia or hydrides, from which they extract the hydrogen to power the fuel cell. The advantage is that at no point do you have a large enough quantity of hydrogen to cause an explosion.
So my point is, generating the appropriate "fuel" for a fuel cell isn't as easy as electrolysing water to get it's hydrogen. You'll then want to combine that hydrogen with a carrier, which is what will be injected into your fuel cell. That's the complicated part.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon, let's give'em credit.. their PR isn't as bad as Sony's!
How I wish I could agree... However, the meaning is in the mind of the writer, and I guess to much of the public (me included, and I'm supposed to be an engineer!), an engineer is someone who will come up with a complicated method to solve a simple problem. Look at all the engineering jokes.
Now I agree that a good engineer should work for the simplest, most cost-effective solution to a problem. Sadly, that's not what I observe around me, and even in my own work. (But wait, I'm young and learning!)
Words evolve with use, and while I applaud your effort to give positive meaning to the term "over engineered", it is a minority action.
I want to hire the guy who thought about this and implemented it. Well, I wish...
:)
I work at a Big Company, where over-engineering, paying 10k where 1k would do, and endless discussion on the color of the bikeshed happen thrice before lunch every day.
I became an engineer because of McGuyver... how disappointed I am with reality
I believe there is magic in a good team: synergy. This means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I regularly see examples of small teams of 5 people outperforming the 40-person team (of course, communication overhead grows very quickly).
Anyhow, with that in mind, Capcom's declaration does not reassure me at all. You can't just "assign" someone to a project and expect to see that project get the same boost as the assignee's previous.
They've kept most of the people, but they've very probably destroyed the magic.
I was rabid about getting a Wii. I still haven't been able to get my hands on one, but the need is much weaker. This is mostly due to being able to play at a friends' place.
I still intend to get a Wii soon. I eagerly await the next Killer Game on the Wii, and suspect I will grow impatient and cranky while I wait. But I won't ditch out for the 360 and PS3 out of impatience.
Heh, remember that Cassandra lady in antique Troy? "Don't bring in that horse, it'll be your doom!"
They locked her up.
Don't ever expect gratitude when you prove someone wrong.
you got it wrong, it's "iPod, Vista killer?"
Doctorow is also a science-fiction author. You could also look up his "I, Row-boat" novella. Here's an excerpt from the intro: Copying is the highest form of flattery, they say...
I think it's not entirely offtopic to state:
I want a Wii.
Here in France, the Wii was released on the 8th of December. I resisted the temptation to preorder, naively confident that Nintendo's production would quickly catch up to demand.
Today still (Jan 18th), stocks are empty everywhere I search, with shops depending on Nintendo's trickling supplies to honor preorders.
In a prominent consumer electronics shop (FNAC), I was tersely answered "No dates" when I asked for an ETA. Another chain tells me "End of February, start of March"...
So the best I can hope is to get my Wii by the time the PS3 hits the stores. If I don't preorder *now*, it'll probably shift some more.
Also, we don't yet have real HDTVs here (all the big TVs are "HD-ready", that's 720p). It's one of the reasons I'm holding out for one. I wonder how that'll impact the performance of the PS3.
Is it too much speculation to believe the PS3 supply will equalize demand within in a month, here?
All in all, I'm very curious to see how the European market will react to the three consoles, compared to the USA and Japan.
After the initial elation, I'm crashing back down to reality.
:(
The price tag didn't seem that scary at first. My brand new Nokia N70 costs 400E off the shelf.* With a 2-year plan, that came down to 55E, pretty damn affordable for a near-Smartphone. I didn't understand, at first, that the iPhone's price (500$ or 600$) included the 2-year plan! As I fully expect Cingular to charge for services (the very services the iPhone is so cool about) on top of that, the price has suddenly leapt straight out of my potential budget (and I'm a gadget lover with a good pay!).
No 3G? Well, there's no camera on the iPhone, so you won't be suffering bad video-conferencing. And if you're only use text e-mails, that's OK. Too bad for the "our browser isn't crippled and text-only!" hype. At those speeds, you'll want to go back to WAP.
And now no 3rd party apps? Their lame excuses don't even surprise me. I guess they're perfectly understandable for the mid-to-high level risk-averse manager. Whatever. However, I expect they'll catch up by selling apps for the iPhone. This is the final straw that confirms the iPhone beyond "barely affordable but classy social symbol" the iPod was so good to hit, and right into "outrageously priced executive toy".
Happy Feeling's gone
I'm not predicting a flop or anything. I think it'll revolutionize the way we use "phones" if other companies can get the hint, and I sure hope they'll do it quickly. All of a sudden the interface of my N70 seems awfully clunky...
*Yep, I live in Europe, which means the iPhone won't be available to me anytime soon anyhow.
If you want reliability, go Sun. That's their field.
;)
I just the other day got a Redhat Linux Quad Opteron with 4gigs of RAM crash under me. RAM was full, OK, but swap wasn't. What's worse, the logs had stopped filling a week before. The Sun server was happily chugging along with 2+ *years* uptime under similar loads.
Now realize that Sun doesn't give you high speed, no-siree. The reason I had stuff running on the Linux box was that it was easily 5 times faster than the Sun station.
Hey, Sun servers are fabled to be able to hot-replace a burning RAID card. What else could you want?
The only reason to shun Sun in favor Linux would be economical. The only reason to shun Linux in favor of Windows would be for desktop use. Although, I don't know the comparative prices of Win Server 2003 and Redhat, so I guess there could be economical reasons there...
The worst part is that the bastardized Novell/Microsoft hybrid would probably the best-working version. (Hey, who better than microsoft to know the backward-compatibility quirks of Samba/CIFS?)
... because they want an extra edge in the server market? ... because they wanted to grab some free headlines?
... because an engineer was bored?
And last but not least:
On a side note, I've read a lot about how ZFS is supposed to be reliable and flexible as hell. Nowhere, however, have I found information about read/write performance. I guess it's a great filesystem for huge mission-critical datasets, but for anybody else? I have my doubts.
Or can somebody enlighten me?
I'm going to go on a limb and play devil's advocate here. No, that has nothing to do with Devil May Cry, you may leave now.
Let's say you're a game company. Which word do you think is most important here: "game", or "company"? If you said "game", you should return to Utopia, the Real World will only hurt you more.
The primary goal of such entities such as EA is to make cash. Their secondary goal, by which they achieve their primary goal, is to make games. Think about that.
To make cash through games, their games have to sell well. They have to be popular, in the most primitive sense of the word.
How do you make popular? You either have a well-known brand that will instantly ring a bell in Joe Sixpack's cranium ("Madden" *bing!* You do realize that the Madden series sells really well, right?). That's easily marketable, and MBA-types know this well because it works. Otherwise, you can focus on raw, untested fun. Marketing of fun? I'll come back to that.
Guess which one goes best on a billboard or a TV commercial? If you said "fun", didn't I just tell you to return to Utopia?
People won't believe "fun" on a billboard, but they could believe "fun" from their friends. Marketing of "fun" is by word and mouth, and that one's really unreliable.
By the way, do you know this really fun game called BreakQuest?
Sadly, this rhetoric is true only because there is no straight link between the vague concept of "quality" and sales. There is, however, a link between "marketing" and sales. I celebrate companies such as Blizzard that concentrate on quality (yes.), but I have no illusions regarding the games industry's economics.
While I agree on the negative impact of such an endeavor, I don't think religion as it is used in the USA corresponds to Marx's definition.
Marx meant it as a means to tame an oppressed class "Suffering in this life guarantees you Paradise in the afterlife!".
We can hardly call the american middle-class "oppressed" in any way.
Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism) is so powerful in such a developped country as the USA...
I wonder if it has anything to do with protestant evangelists taking up the methods of capitalism. Hmm...
Actually, my whole point revolved around the idea that the CIFS stuff provided by Novell as an alternative to Samba would have no code relationship with Samba, and thus not be tied to the GPL.
Did I miss something for everyone to be so certain that Microsoft would somehow get tangled with the GPL?
You know, it's not the first time such a thing happens. And that time, the poor loser was Nixon, and disgusting winner... Kennedy. (and I'm too lazy to find the innumerable other references).
You're trying to out-lawyer Microsoft? C'mon! They're the guys who weaseled their way out of every anti-trust lawsuit they've been in!
No, I guess they aren't foolish enough to try and take the GPL head-on (anymore).
Instead, I can clearly see them doing something like "hey, buy this perfect SUSE-exclusive CIFS suite, why use that broken Samba thing when you can have this? Oh, besides, we're suing Samba for {patent,IP} infrigement, you don't want to be on the List, do you?"
Rinse and repeat for every Microsoft-compatible open-source Linux product.
and succes -> succès, but my keyboard's QWERTY and I'm too lazy for an international layout :P
The main thing this shows me as that as Wikipedia is growing popular, more parasites are grappling on. Or rather, those parasites have a greater impact. As they say in french: "C'est la rancon du succes".
I say, let them go no holds barred and let natural selection do its work!
(original quote is, I believe, "Let's remove all the safety labels and let natural selection do its work!" by I-can't-remember)
God, I'm not even ironic. It's sad that stupid people have power enough through suing to provoke this kind of action.
I'll expect my kids to come home bruised, having learnt important things, not sheltered and pampered, ready to be later eaten up by the first passing fox/politician. But then, I don't currently live in the US of A..
I indeed didn't point out the economically more important reason against using pure hydrogen, that of energy density:
A gallon of liquid hydrogen, the highest attainable compression of hydrogen, has about 33% less energy than a gallon of gasoline. Granted, I don't have the energy efficiencies of each engine on-hand to compare*. Then we have all the practical problems of handling the cold cold stuff.
Nevertheless, this has motivated the pursuit of the "hydrogen carriers" mentioned. Ammonia and hydrides are just two examples of hydrogen carriers, each with their own defects.
Nevertheless, lower energy density, combined with the dangers of manipulating pure hydrogen (which can be mitigated in the derivatives), not to mention overhauling the entire distribution network to handle it, keep pure hydrogen from ever being in large-scale use.
*I wonder how heating the habitacle in cold environments affects this, since it's a "free" (ok no, just energy lost through heat) side effect of gasoline vehicles but requires a dedicated heating circuit in fuel-cell vehicles.
Maybe I'm taking you too literally here, but remember that no fuel cell system aimed at the mass market take pure hydrogen as an input, mainly because of it's inherent danger (think Hindenburg).
Instead, they take some other compound, like ammonia or hydrides, from which they extract the hydrogen to power the fuel cell. The advantage is that at no point do you have a large enough quantity of hydrogen to cause an explosion.
So my point is, generating the appropriate "fuel" for a fuel cell isn't as easy as electrolysing water to get it's hydrogen. You'll then want to combine that hydrogen with a carrier, which is what will be injected into your fuel cell. That's the complicated part.
I'm just an innocent bystander here, but do you have proof for your claims? Or at least a little more development?