I dont think there is any intention to pay for any of this (at least no intention to pay it off). The idea is that the States should become bankrupt. This would make it easier for global corporations to more directly run the country (world) without needing to answer to democratic institutions.
If you think that the public has to much power, then how better to put the unwashed masses under control than by bankrupting the only institution which must (at least partially by way of elections) answer to it.
Sounds dangerous to me. While I can imagine the Bush government being corrupt or stupid enough to go along with this, there is still the possibility that it will lead to a landslide in public opinion towards an anti-corporation party. Which might result in a more or less communist government. And as long as that government controls the army, you have the potential for a REALLY big clash.
Meanwhile, the thousands of cargo containers entering American ports everyday are rarely inspected.
If you believe it's physically and fiscally possible to inspect every single container, I wish you luck. You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams, and I have a bridge you can buy with the proceeds. Perhaps you missed the stories about the month-long backlog at the Port of Los Angeles due to container inspections. Inspecting them all would only exacerbate that problem. So, build more ports! Haha. Not bloody likely.
The point is that the USA have an obvious vulnerability there, and any terrorists that are smart enough to build a nuke might also be smart enough to smuggle it into the country. The same goes for small nations that actually are mad enough to start a nuclear war with the USA. A missile interceptor system is not very helpful there.
Against more rational governments, old-fashioned deterrence should work fine. It worked against the USSR, which was big, expansionist and aggressive.
...and it is true that you have to spend real money to get ahead. PE attracts players by letting them play for free, but you will soon find out that you don't get far without exchanging real money for in-game money. You can earn small amounts of in-game money by gathering "vibrant sweat" which is a raw material for the game's economy, but even so it takes a while until you can buy your first weapon. Then you will find out that the ammo costs more than you earn from hunting. Even in game related forums people admit that only very experienced avatars can break even and at least earn the cost of their ammunition.
For me, this was too frustrating and I got myself a (monthly fee based) Neocron account instead. That game has its own problems, but so far it is more fun than PE.
1. This example would make perfect sense in Pascal. In general, I have never noticed that my bugs tend to stand out by looking like patterns. 2. Many developer tools already have this built in and will provide warnings. 3. Can be difficult, and I am not aware of any tools that are universally usable for this. You will probably end up looking long and hard at the code...
and render everything on the server, then send the image to the client
That takes things to the extreme. The server needs to validate communications between it and the clients. It should run a sanity check to see if the commands from the client are reasonable. But having the server render the image would be a huge waste of resources. Instead, it should have a language that it can use to tell the client to render objects based on server commands. Similar to the way Citrix, RDP, and X do.
In essence, this already happens. The server tells the client that Player X is on position Y, looking to direction Z. The client has all the models it needs to render Player X for you. Now a desirable feature would be to give the client only the information it needs at the moment. For instance, transmit only the positions of the objects that are visible to the player at the moment. *Poof*, no more wallhacks.
Of course, this means extra server side calculations to determine what the client should see, and most MMORPG companies seem to consider this too expensive.
And they are missing in the EU. Right now, the Council of Ministers has at least the same influence on EU legislation as the parliament. This is a bad situation because it concentrates too much power in the hands of a few people who are not even directly elected. If you are from the USA: Imagine Bush being the only one who can propose legislation, and congress being limited to accepting or denying his proposals (apart from nicely asking for changes). That would be roughly equivalent to the current situation in the EU. It is rather insane, and I wonder what the national parliaments were thinking when they ratified the EU treaties that established this rules.
The problem is that the majority of the EU governments has not decided "we will not have software patents". The parliament has said so, but it has not quite the clout it should have in a democratic country. It can still vote the proposed guideline down, which might result in no EU_wide rule about software patents at all. But the parliament lacks the power to make laws on its own, which is probably the greatest flaw in the power structure of the EU. If it had that power, this year's decision would be final and the patent lobby would have lost for the forseeable future.
I have always loved "SF on a grand scale" as Greg Benford would put it; the Lensman and Skylark series of Doc Smith, and Benford's Galactic Center series are some of my favorites.
Slightly offtopic, have you tried the following?
-The "Reality Dysfunction" trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton -David Weber's Honor Harrington series (first two novels available online at the Baen Free Library), starts with "On Basilisk Station" -The Gap series by Stephen R.Donaldson -The Miles Vorkosigan Series by Lois Mc Master Bujold
If you are willing to cheat and have some skills with Photoshop, why not make up your own degree? Even if you have to buy a decent printer for generating the diploma first, it should be cheaper than those would-be universities;-)
I don't think that anyone buys them for use in new computers anymore. Except maybe small-series special hardware, where redesigning for another processor would be too expensive. So most of those being sold will be spare parts for some expensive server, and they might even be MORE expensive than, say, a modern celeron. Because the customers cannot switch easily to another product.
Re:Employers are *contributing* to motion from tec
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
And this brings up an interesting question: since there's very little social respect in technical pursuits, and now that we're letting employers remove much of the economic incentive to be trained in math/science, who's going to pick it as a profession?
People whose talent and interests are concentrated (only) in the technical/scientific areas. Of course, that means smaller numbers of engineers in the future, because those with more versatile talents will look for other jobs.
I partly agree. Stupid clicking for hours to "train" my Avatar is a turn off.
On the other hand, exploring huge maps can be fun, if they are well designed, and I like that these games consist of more than just blasting away at some monsters. Trading with other players and chatting with them gives MMORPGs a lot more depth than the usual single player game.
There are two attempts in the pipe to reduce or eliminate the leveling treadmills, and I'm following them with interest. 1) Guild Wars (I played in the mini-open beta). Has traditional leveling, but fun enough missions even for newbie chars. Thus, you can actually enjoy yourself while fighting low level monsters and leveling your avatar. 2) Face Of Mankind. Does reportedly eliminate traditional "skilling" entirely(you still have to work on acquiring the better weapons) and replaces it with a politics system. The players with most mission points are promoted and get to lead the others. It remains to be seen if this leaves enough opportunities for the casual gamer. If yes, I might join the game...
what if someone comes out with a similar program but you can pick the site?
Similar programs exist, they are called mirroring tools. I guess it would not take much scripting to make something like wget repeatedly mirror the same page, thus creating the same effect as the Lycos screensaver. On Windows, there is HTTrack, but I have not tried to start it from a batchfile yet. If that is possible, we have our tool for the Windows skr1ptk11dd13s.
Lawyers for the file-swapping service Kazaa argued in an Australian court Monday that its software is analogous to the old Betamax videocassette recorders.
Lawyer Tony Meagher drew on a 1984 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court...
Any lawyers here that can explain how a precedent from a US court has any bearing in Australia??
Perhaps your Boss topped himself because of the humiliation you caused him in front of his team? Huh? Huh? Didja think of that? Huh? Huh? So what? If he was dressing down the GP in front of the entire team, he should be able to take the retort as well. I have *very* little respect for people who like to be harsh on others but cannot stand being talked back to. One more candidate for the Darwin Award.
From a quick glance at the http://www.iter.org/ site, the cost seems to be around 5.5 billion dollars plus operation. Expensive, but a lot less expensive than waging war in the middle east for oil. As a EU citizen (German, to be exact), I am in favour of the EU doing the project on its own if the US don't want to participate. Even if it will not be a commercially viable power plant yet, that would (hopefully) be the next model.
So then they jacked up gas tax rates, [...], people actually did buy newer, fuel-efficient cars (but still drive them alone), and gas tax revenues (and hence funding for pet projects that have nothing to do with the roads) went down.
Maybe the prices were not high enough to deter from driving. In Germany, there was a modest decline in vehicle use when the price exceeded 1 Euro/liter. At the current exchange rate of 1.30Dollar/1 Euro, that would be 4.91 dollars per gallon. Right now, prices are around 1.10 Euro/liter (5.4 dollars per gallon). Drivers are moaning and in some cases driving less, but the overall impact on traffic remains low.
Which just shows that the reports about a lack of developers were greatly exaggerated. At the top of the dot-com bubble it was reportedly possible to cross-train to programming within a few months AND get a job as developer. If that situation ever recurs, I will believe the claim that there is a massive lack of programmers.
The initial P6 had bad 16bit performance, which made it a bad choice for consumers are that time, but it was very competitive in normal 32bit mode, idea for NT, Linux and other PC Unixen. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture fixed the 16bit issue and was enormously successful. Sorry, wrong on the 16bit issue. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture, aka Pentium III, still sucked with 16 bit software. It was saved by the introduction of 32bit software and a (mostly) 32 bit OS.
I remember a software project I was working on in 1998, where we still used Delphi 1 (16bit) because the customer still had a Win3.11 environment.
When we ran that program side-by-side on a Pentium MMX with 200MHz and a Pentium III with 450 MHz, the old Pentium MMX was roughly twice as fast.
Of course it was not equal to a masters in CS + 5 years of experience. But if employers are really desparate, a one year course should be sufficient to get you a junior position as developer.
When I was looking for a job the last time (in Germany, 2001) there was a similar situation: The dot-com bubble was in the process of bursting, and while it was still possible to find jobs, an average qualification would NOT allow you to sign up with a company of your choice. Nevertheless, industry associations still clamored loudly for a german equivalent of the US green card, claiming they suffered a massive lack of qualified personnel. It seems that was a political maneuver to increase the supply of developers and let competition push down the wages.
So if you read about a dearth of programmers, look at the author. The reports might be less than honest.
...the members of Congress are guilty of gross negligence for not insisting on more time to check the content of the bills. If necessary, they should have voted against the law because of this.
there were reasons Microsoft was interested in Java over Visual C++ (which I used to develop) that continue to this day, sadly in a wholly divergent language rather than a variant implementation.
OK, I can agree on the technical side of your argument. I do, however, still believe that C# would not have happened without the legal difficulties. Which were not too surprising, considering that both companies had substantial interests at stake that were not easily reconciled. Microsoft wanted to allow the use of existing APIs, which was understandable, given the large installation base of Windows. Unfortunately, that meant undermining the "write once, run everywhere" strength of Java. Sun felt threatened and fought back, which was also understandable: once a majority of Java developers would have used the Microsoft-extensions to Java, the promise of portability would have been moot in practice. I conclude that Microsoft would have been happy to use Java with their usual "embrace and extend" strategy, but they stepped on Sun's toes too hard in the process.
And YOU did not follow the news about Sun vs. Microsoft with regard to Java, did you?... (Congratulations for feeling qualified to ignore the well-documented dispute between Sun and Microsoft just because you like the technology...). Look, I don't claim that C# is a bad language. But if you think that technology has driven THAT decision at Microsoft, you seem to believe in really strange coincidences.
The main reason was that Microsoft and Sun didn't get along with each other on Java development. This ended with the termination of Microsoft's Java licence by Sun, a lawsuit and a settlement that said Microsoft has to leave the Java market. The next move by Microsoft was to introduce C# as an alternative to Java. If it also solves the buffer overflow problem (I don't know C#), that is a beneficial side effect.
Maybe two years ago, the german C't computer magazine did a major test to determine the quality of RAM available in the end-user market.
They bought lots of different RAM, ranging from no-name discount RAM sticks to "premium brands", then tested them in a number of boards. Further tests were done in cooperation with a company that specializes in testing of semiconductors. Here a special analyzer was used that could test the RAM under well-defined electrical conditions.
The results were disillusioning: While most of the "premium brand" modules were of reasonable quality (but not perfect), many of the cheap parts were definitely sub-standard. Sometimes they did simply not meet their specifications, running reliably only at lower clock speeds and higher latencies. But more frequently, the information in the on-module ROM was wrong and misleading those mainboards that relied on it for setting the timing parameters of the RAM. In these cases, the RAM timings had to be set manually to ensure reliable operation.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont think there is any intention to pay for any of this (at least no intention to pay it off). The idea is that the States should become bankrupt. This would make it easier for global corporations to more directly run the country (world) without needing to answer to democratic institutions.
If you think that the public has to much power, then how better to put the unwashed masses under control than by bankrupting the only institution which must (at least partially by way of elections) answer to it.
Sounds dangerous to me. While I can imagine the Bush government being corrupt or stupid enough to go along with this, there is still the possibility that it will lead to a landslide in public opinion towards an anti-corporation party. Which might result in a more or less communist government.
And as long as that government controls the army, you have the potential for a REALLY big clash.
Meanwhile, the thousands of cargo containers entering American ports everyday are rarely inspected.
If you believe it's physically and fiscally possible to inspect every single container, I wish you luck. You'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams, and I have a bridge you can buy with the proceeds. Perhaps you missed the stories about the month-long backlog at the Port of Los Angeles due to container inspections. Inspecting them all would only exacerbate that problem. So, build more ports! Haha. Not bloody likely.
The point is that the USA have an obvious vulnerability there, and any terrorists that are smart enough to build a nuke might also be smart enough to smuggle it into the country. The same goes for small nations that actually are mad enough to start a nuclear war with the USA. A missile interceptor system is not very helpful there.
Against more rational governments, old-fashioned deterrence should work fine. It worked against the USSR, which was big, expansionist and aggressive.
...and it is true that you have to spend real money to get ahead. PE attracts players by letting them play for free, but you will soon find out that you don't get far without exchanging real money for in-game money.
You can earn small amounts of in-game money by gathering "vibrant sweat" which is a raw material for the game's economy, but even so it takes a while until you can buy your first weapon. Then you will find out that the ammo costs more than you earn from hunting. Even in game related forums people admit that only very experienced avatars can break even and at least earn the cost of their ammunition.
For me, this was too frustrating and I got myself a (monthly fee based) Neocron account instead. That game has its own problems, but so far it is more fun than PE.
1. This example would make perfect sense in Pascal. In general, I have never noticed that my bugs tend to stand out by looking like patterns.
2. Many developer tools already have this built in and will provide warnings.
3. Can be difficult, and I am not aware of any tools that are universally usable for this. You will probably end up looking long and hard at the code...
and render everything on the server, then send the image to the client
That takes things to the extreme. The server needs to validate communications between it and the clients. It should run a sanity check to see if the commands from the client are reasonable. But having the server render the image would be a huge waste of resources. Instead, it should have a language that it can use to tell the client to render objects based on server commands. Similar to the way Citrix, RDP, and X do.
In essence, this already happens.
The server tells the client that Player X is on position Y, looking to direction Z. The client has all the models it needs to render Player X for you.
Now a desirable feature would be to give the client only the information it needs at the moment. For instance, transmit only the positions of the objects that are visible to the player at the moment. *Poof*, no more wallhacks.
Of course, this means extra server side calculations to determine what the client should see, and most MMORPG companies seem to consider this too expensive.
And they are missing in the EU. Right now, the Council of Ministers has at least the same influence on EU legislation as the parliament. This is a bad situation because it concentrates too much power in the hands of a few people who are not even directly elected. If you are from the USA:
Imagine Bush being the only one who can propose legislation, and congress being limited to accepting or denying his proposals (apart from nicely asking for changes). That would be roughly equivalent to the current situation in the EU.
It is rather insane, and I wonder what the national parliaments were thinking when they ratified the EU treaties that established this rules.
The problem is that the majority of the EU governments has not decided "we will not have software patents".
The parliament has said so, but it has not quite the clout it should have in a democratic country.
It can still vote the proposed guideline down, which might result in no EU_wide rule about software patents at all.
But the parliament lacks the power to make laws on its own, which is probably the greatest flaw in the power structure of the EU. If it had that power, this year's decision would be final and the patent lobby would have lost for the forseeable future.
I have always loved "SF on a grand scale" as Greg Benford would put it; the Lensman and Skylark series of Doc Smith, and Benford's Galactic Center series are some of my favorites.
Slightly offtopic, have you tried the following?
-The "Reality Dysfunction" trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
-David Weber's Honor Harrington series (first two novels available online at the Baen Free Library), starts with "On Basilisk Station"
-The Gap series by Stephen R.Donaldson
-The Miles Vorkosigan Series by Lois Mc Master Bujold
If you are willing to cheat and have some skills with Photoshop, why not make up your own degree? ;-)
Even if you have to buy a decent printer for generating the diploma first, it should be cheaper than those would-be universities
I don't think that anyone buys them for use in new computers anymore. Except maybe small-series special hardware, where redesigning for another processor would be too expensive.
So most of those being sold will be spare parts for some expensive server, and they might even be MORE expensive than, say, a modern celeron. Because the customers cannot switch easily to another product.
And this brings up an interesting question: since there's very little social respect in technical pursuits, and now that we're letting employers remove much of the economic incentive to be trained in math/science, who's going to pick it as a profession?
People whose talent and interests are concentrated (only) in the technical/scientific areas. Of course, that means smaller numbers of engineers in the future, because those with more versatile talents will look for other jobs.
I partly agree. Stupid clicking for hours to "train" my Avatar is a turn off.
On the other hand, exploring huge maps can be fun, if they are well designed, and I like that these games consist of more than just blasting away at some monsters. Trading with other players and chatting with them gives MMORPGs a lot more depth than the usual single player game.
There are two attempts in the pipe to reduce or eliminate the leveling treadmills, and I'm following them with interest.
1) Guild Wars (I played in the mini-open beta). Has traditional leveling, but fun enough missions even for newbie chars. Thus, you can actually enjoy yourself while fighting low level monsters and leveling your avatar.
2) Face Of Mankind. Does reportedly eliminate traditional "skilling" entirely(you still have to work on acquiring the better weapons) and replaces it with a politics system. The players with most mission points are promoted and get to lead the others. It remains to be seen if this leaves enough opportunities for the casual gamer. If yes, I might join the game...
what if someone comes out with a similar program but you can pick the site?
Similar programs exist, they are called mirroring tools. I guess it would not take much scripting to make something like wget repeatedly mirror the same page, thus creating the same effect as the Lycos screensaver.
On Windows, there is HTTrack, but I have not tried to start it from a batchfile yet. If that is possible, we have our tool for the Windows skr1ptk11dd13s.
From the articke:
Lawyers for the file-swapping service Kazaa argued in an Australian court Monday that its software is analogous to the old Betamax videocassette recorders.
Lawyer Tony Meagher drew on a 1984 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court...
Any lawyers here that can explain how a precedent from a US court has any bearing in Australia??
Perhaps your Boss topped himself because of the humiliation you caused him in front of his team? Huh? Huh? Didja think of that? Huh? Huh?
So what? If he was dressing down the GP in front of the entire team, he should be able to take the retort as well.
I have *very* little respect for people who like to be harsh on others but cannot stand being talked back to.
One more candidate for the Darwin Award.
From a quick glance at the http://www.iter.org/ site, the cost seems to be around 5.5 billion dollars plus operation. Expensive, but a lot less expensive than waging war in the middle east for oil.
As a EU citizen (German, to be exact), I am in favour of the EU doing the project on its own if the US don't want to participate. Even if it will not be a commercially viable power plant yet, that would (hopefully) be the next model.
So then they jacked up gas tax rates, [...], people actually did buy newer, fuel-efficient cars (but still drive them alone), and gas tax revenues (and hence funding for pet projects that have nothing to do with the roads) went down.
Maybe the prices were not high enough to deter from driving. In Germany, there was a modest decline in vehicle use when the price exceeded 1 Euro/liter.
At the current exchange rate of 1.30Dollar/1 Euro, that would be 4.91 dollars per gallon. Right now, prices are around 1.10 Euro/liter (5.4 dollars per gallon). Drivers are moaning and in some cases driving less, but the overall impact on traffic remains low.
Which just shows that the reports about a lack of developers were greatly exaggerated.
At the top of the dot-com bubble it was reportedly possible to cross-train to programming within a few months AND get a job as developer.
If that situation ever recurs, I will believe the claim that there is a massive lack of programmers.
The initial P6 had bad 16bit performance, which made it a bad choice for consumers are that time, but it was very competitive in normal 32bit mode, idea for NT, Linux and other PC Unixen. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture fixed the 16bit issue and was enormously successful.
Sorry, wrong on the 16bit issue. The 2nd iteration of the P6 architecture, aka Pentium III, still sucked with 16 bit software. It was saved by the introduction of 32bit software and a (mostly) 32 bit OS.
I remember a software project I was working on in 1998, where we still used Delphi 1 (16bit) because the customer still had a Win3.11 environment.
When we ran that program side-by-side on a Pentium MMX with 200MHz and a Pentium III with 450 MHz, the old Pentium MMX was roughly twice as fast.
Of course it was not equal to a masters in CS + 5 years of experience. But if employers are really desparate, a one year course should be sufficient to get you a junior position as developer.
When I was looking for a job the last time (in Germany, 2001) there was a similar situation:
The dot-com bubble was in the process of bursting, and while it was still possible to find jobs, an average qualification would NOT allow you to sign up with a company of your choice. Nevertheless, industry associations still clamored loudly for a german equivalent of the US green card, claiming they suffered a massive lack of qualified personnel. It seems that was a political maneuver to increase the supply of developers and let competition push down the wages.
So if you read about a dearth of programmers, look at the author. The reports might be less than honest.
...the members of Congress are guilty of gross negligence for not insisting on more time to check the content of the bills. If necessary, they should have voted against the law because of this.
there were reasons Microsoft was interested in Java over Visual C++ (which I used to develop) that continue to this day, sadly in a wholly divergent language rather than a variant implementation.
OK, I can agree on the technical side of your argument. I do, however, still believe that C# would not have happened without the legal difficulties.
Which were not too surprising, considering that both companies had substantial interests at stake that were not easily reconciled.
Microsoft wanted to allow the use of existing APIs, which was understandable, given the large installation base of Windows. Unfortunately, that meant undermining the "write once, run everywhere" strength of Java.
Sun felt threatened and fought back, which was also understandable: once a majority of Java developers would have used the Microsoft-extensions to Java, the promise of portability would have been moot in practice.
I conclude that Microsoft would have been happy to use Java with their usual "embrace and extend" strategy, but they stepped on Sun's toes too hard in the process.
And YOU did not follow the news about Sun vs. Microsoft with regard to Java, did you?... (Congratulations for feeling qualified to ignore the well-documented dispute between Sun and Microsoft just because you like the technology...).
Look, I don't claim that C# is a bad language. But if you think that technology has driven THAT decision at Microsoft, you seem to believe in really strange coincidences.
The main reason was that Microsoft and Sun didn't get along with each other on Java development. This ended with the termination of Microsoft's Java licence by Sun, a lawsuit and a settlement that said Microsoft has to leave the Java market.
The next move by Microsoft was to introduce C# as an alternative to Java. If it also solves the buffer overflow problem (I don't know C#), that is a beneficial side effect.
Maybe two years ago, the german C't computer magazine did a major test to determine the quality of RAM available in the end-user market.
They bought lots of different RAM, ranging from no-name discount RAM sticks to "premium brands", then tested them in a number of boards. Further tests were done in cooperation with a company that specializes in testing of semiconductors. Here a special analyzer was used that could test the RAM under well-defined electrical conditions.
The results were disillusioning:
While most of the "premium brand" modules were of reasonable quality (but not perfect), many of the cheap parts were definitely sub-standard.
Sometimes they did simply not meet their specifications, running reliably only at lower clock speeds and higher latencies.
But more frequently, the information in the on-module ROM was wrong and misleading those mainboards that relied on it for setting the timing parameters of the RAM. In these cases, the RAM timings had to be set manually to ensure reliable operation.