Also, the Linux kernel is under GPLv2, not v3. Changing the license may or may not be possible, but currently there seem to be no plans to push for a change to GPLv3.
Day Of Defeat (WW2 Half Life mod) gets it halfway right.
-Rifles are more accurate than submachine guns, especially submachine guns in automatic fire. -Rifles have more stopping power per shot (correct, WW2 rifles used powerful calibers like 7.92x57 or.30-06) -The assault rifles can be switched between single fire and full auto -Recoil in full auto makes your weapon less accurate and lets the muzzle climb. -Crouching and going prone help with accuracy (better stability of the weapon).
There are still a lot of errors (or intentional fudging) in detail, but overall DOD "feels" somewhat credible.
It depends on the application. Reportedly (video is not my hobby) many video editing applications already scale well to multiple cores. I'm sure other applications, including games, will follow. Let alone server applications like database management systems, those are way ahead in going multi-CPU.
But right now, there also is still a lot of older, single-threaded software around.
Imagine a single-threaded game with a high CPU demand that consumes all time on a single CPU, while background processes such as the OS, drivers, pr0n downloads, etc. run on the second core.
Good point, and that is why it is a good idea to buy a PC with at least a dual core processor.
Beyond two cores, however, it still depends on the application. An example: If the above single-threaded game needs more CPU than the OS and other programs combined, the core the game is running on will limit the overall performance. A second core is more than sufficient to handle the rest. A third, fourth... core would only hang around idle.
I think their #1 worst idea ever was automatically executing VB scrips in e-mail attachments. Yes, Outlook did that several years ago. Autorun may well be #2 on the Top Ten Of Microsoft Stupidity. The extension hiding is a minor annoyance by comparison (easily fixed and not half as dangerous). And I actually like the icons in executables. Even if it slows down the Windows Explorer a bit.
Portable media should never be considered "secure".
Correct, and that is why "autorun" functions that are active by default are a bad idea. But convenience over security is typical for certain OS vendors, especially those from Redmond;-)
The only instance when stuff from portable media is automatically executed should be at boot time, if the medium is selected as boot drive in the BIOS (or whatever your system uses in place of the BIOS).
Good point. That's why I either -wait until a decent bundle appears (not necessarily with all expansions, but it has to be playable to the end of the main story) -or buy the game only at a discount that offsets the lack of completeness
Considering MMOs, I've never bought one for the typical retail price of 50 Euros. 10-20 Euro are acceptable, and the publisher can damn well earn his money from the monthly fees.
MySQL needs to be fully archived, including the revision history, outside of Oracle, just in case.
There is already a somewhat credible attempt at maintaining a fork (http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB#What_is_MariaDB.3F). Monty may have been a bit of a hypocrite in first selling MySQL and then whining about what happened to it, but now he does approximately what you asked for:-)
PC hardware being mass produced means Activision could get the parts for cheap, but to make it really closed they would have to replace Windows with their own OS. Legally I guess they could pull it off by perverting some BSD variety, but who would buy such a system?
Without exchanging the OS, Activision can at worst launch a closed software platform. Which puts them in direct competition to Valve's Steam and similar services. Won't be easy for them: While I dislike the DRM in Steam games, I've also noticed that Steam works pretty well. Activision would have a lot of catching up to do;-)
I don't think old CRT SDTVs are the kind of system future development will be aimed at. For starters, those old clunkers tend to have such a poor resolution that you cannot display much text without filling half the screen with huge letters. There goes any game that wants to have a chat window...
Hardware side, a more realistic target system would be -any HDTV with at least 1366x768 pixels and HDMI interface (looking at my preferred online shop, http://www.alternate.de/, most LCD TV sets offer at least these two features) -plus a PC with at least 2GByte RAM and at least a midrange CPU and GPU. Detailed specs open to discussion;-)
Which leaves questions of usability and choice of operating system. The easiest choice would be Windows, and I doubt Activision could make people move to an Activision Linux or whatever. But that means Activision has to work with what Microsoft hands out. So it comes down to setting some reasonable minimum specs and a lot of marketing.
There are a lot of actions that "could" result in people getting killed, like running a red light with your car. Looking up some state laws at findlaw.com, it seems that most states regard this as misdemeanor.
Violating the 65 ft. safety zone is arguably less dangerous by itself, and should be a misdemeanor at worst.
No, in this case the stupidity of the Indian government is at fault.
If they create regulations that make outsourcing to India more problematic, I have no problem with being happy about the lessened competition. If it was a case of my country putting up more trade barriers, that would be different.
For graduates who are trained to a reasonable level of knowledge and skills, it often is beneath them, in the sense that they are capable of doing much more demanding (and better compensated) things.
Yet it can be a way to get into the business with a bit of luck. My first "real" job after university was 2nd level support, after graduating as electrical engineer right into the mid-90s layoff wave in engineering. Not really what I hoped for. The whole thing happened in Europe BTW.
But my next job was advertised as "supporter with some additional software development" and turned out to be 70% software development, 30% support. With the experience from that I was eventually able to find a genuine development job.
Bottom line: Even a slightly different entry position can eventually get you into an OK place.
That will make their per-unit profit even smaller but they hope to compensate with volume
If they make a profit on the hardware at all, they are in a better position then before.
Most of the time (and including earlier PS3), console hardware is sold at a loss to push it into the market and the vendor regains the money from game sales. The Wii was the first among the current generation consoles that broke this tradition. Now, after some cost-saving redesigns, PS3 sales also cover the cost for the hardware. I'm not sure about the present situation of the XBox 360, but when it was new it was sold at a loss too.
For users who depend on Windows applications, Linux or MacOS may not count as "close substitute". Not everything runs under WINE. A lot of businesses that have been around for a while fall in that category.
For new startups you have a point: If you don't have 10 years of Windows-only custom applications to replace, choosing an alternative system will be much easier. In case of Open Source systems, "oligopoly" may be a formally correct definition. From the customer's point of view, I think the situation is even more favorable, because the classic definitions do not reflect how much Open Source licenses drive down license costs:-)
But let's assume for a moment that the "battery dead after 8 years" is correct. Then it still looks like a good deal. On top of that, advanced battery technology as used in the Leaf is still getting cheaper, as more vendors get into the business and competition drives down prices. So you may get a pretty good deal on replacement batteries a few years from now.
So without claiming that this benchmark is the final word, I'd expect the AMD to be at least on a similar performance level to the Xeon. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it;-)
Checking at alternate.de (not the cheapest online shop, but good for comparisons because they have both consumer and server parts):
Intel: The only Socket 775 boards that support ECC seem to be those with the 32xx MCH chipset. Starting at 195 Euros (Asus P5BV-C). For Socket 1156, the consumer chipsets allow ECC but you still need to find a board with BIOS support. Sadly Alternate does not list the ECC support status, but you might find one that supports ECC among the cheaper ones for 80-90 Euros. You do, however, need a Xeon which starts at 213 Euros (Xeon X3430, 4 x 2.4 GHz) So mainboard plus a quad CPU costs you around 300 Euros at Alternate.
AMD: Board situation (Socket AM3) similar to Intel's Socket 1156, boards with ECC support are available for 80-90 Euros. Unlike Intel, even cheap desktop CPUs support ECC. As a cheap quad, Alternate offers the Athlon II X4 635 for 108 Euros. So mainboard plus quad CPU costs you around 200 Euros, 100 less than with Intel.
I agree that an attempt by China to attempt to liquidate all their US holdings won't work well. What they could more realistically do is stop buying new US Treasure bonds/notes/etc. Then
-the US would have to pay out lots of dollars over the next 10 years or so as the Y dates arrive, without the usual influx of new dollars from China buying bonds. Unless they freeze the Chinese assets (more about that below).
-the US would have a far weaker case for calling it "economic warfare", and freezing Chinese account might result in a massive loss of trust in US bonds. Result: No one wants to buy US bonds anymore.
Re:Staying with XP
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The difference is that XP requires activation once when installing, then it does not check again (except for getting certain additional downloads). AFAIK Vista and Win7 do periodically recheck their activation, calling a Microsoft server in the process. If something goes wrong with that, you may end up with a complaining Win7.
For me this is the main reason to stick to XP (and have an eye on Linux, which might be my next OS once XP becomes impractical to support).
That said we still have an IDIOT consultant that writes new stuff for the Win95 box and another writing stuff in a mixed collection of dotnet versions that all needs to be run as Admin - and both are too paranoid about "code theft" to let anyone have the source code.
In that case, your management sucks. Starting with the manager who is supposed to supervise these consultants. If you pay those guys for writing the software, the very least I'd demand is source code and licensing terms that allow reuse of the code at least internally. If they don't accept that, no more contracts.
Only up to the moment when the customers get their hands on the distribution. At this point the Open Source licenses guarantee the right to re-distribution, and anyone who feels motivated enough can re-publish the softeware at a price of his choice.
The only thing distributors can do about this is trademark based: They can place restrictions on using the product name. But the users can still change the name and logo and re-distribute the cosmetically changed product. Examples include -The Iceweasel browser in debian, which is a rebranded Firefox. -The CentOS Linux distribution, which is essentially Red hat Enterprise with the serial numbers filed off.
If the same would apply to articles from Nature, any subscriber to the electronic version could legally copy the articles to his own homepage. He probably would have to remove the publisher's name to avoid being sued over trademarks, but that is all.
Unless you have a good firewall, unpatched Windows = being owned real quick when you connect to the internet. Happened to me once when setting up a new computer with Windows 2000: I duly installed SP4 but forgot the post-SP4 hotfixes. Hello MSBLAST:-(
Some internal apps we have(and cannot dump) will just not run in 7.... It's easy to say "dump XP". Doing it is another matter. I hope you have not lost the source code to these internal apps, otherwise it looks like a really big problem.
But if you are lucky, it might be a case of changing a few directories where the old applications wrote into stupid locations. Only half a year ago, I was developing an application where an explicit requirement was "a non-admin must be able to install it so it is available to all users". Explaining that and why this is not really good practice was useless.
The target OS was Windows XP, where the default security settings are lax enough that I could make it happen. By doing stuff that might be the same thing that keeps your old applications from running under Windows 7. Like writing config data not into the user's profile but elsewhere. So I won't be the least surprised if "my" app fails in Windows 7 too.
You are suggesting by repeatedly using the diminutive phrase "oh noes" that this isn't *real* punishment, but you fail to make clear what you think *real* punishment for a corporate entity is. Expropriation of assets by the Federal government and transfer to a state-owned oil corporation? Forced liquidation of the firm?
It is often theorized that large companies are like socipaths, devoid of ethics and only interested in maximizing profits.
Assuming this is true (and i believe so), the appropriate punishment would be massive fines that exceed any savings the company has realized by skimping on necessary safety measures. If that results in chapter 7 liquidation because the company cannot pay the fine, so be it. Only if the wrongdoing is more expensive than responsible behavior, the goal of maximizing profits will also create acceptable behavior in corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the Linux kernel is under GPLv2, not v3.
Changing the license may or may not be possible, but currently there seem to be no plans to push for a change to GPLv3.
Day Of Defeat (WW2 Half Life mod) gets it halfway right.
-Rifles are more accurate than submachine guns, especially submachine guns in automatic fire. .30-06)
-Rifles have more stopping power per shot (correct, WW2 rifles used powerful calibers like 7.92x57 or
-The assault rifles can be switched between single fire and full auto
-Recoil in full auto makes your weapon less accurate and lets the muzzle climb.
-Crouching and going prone help with accuracy (better stability of the weapon).
There are still a lot of errors (or intentional fudging) in detail, but overall DOD "feels" somewhat credible.
It depends on the application.
Reportedly (video is not my hobby) many video editing applications already scale well to multiple cores. I'm sure other applications, including games, will follow. Let alone server applications like database management systems, those are way ahead in going multi-CPU.
But right now, there also is still a lot of older, single-threaded software around.
Imagine a single-threaded game with a high CPU demand that consumes all time on a single CPU, while background processes such as the OS, drivers, pr0n downloads, etc. run on the second core.
Good point, and that is why it is a good idea to buy a PC with at least a dual core processor.
Beyond two cores, however, it still depends on the application. An example:
If the above single-threaded game needs more CPU than the OS and other programs combined, the core the game is running on will limit the overall performance. A second core is more than sufficient to handle the rest. A third, fourth... core would only hang around idle.
I think their #1 worst idea ever was automatically executing VB scrips in e-mail attachments. Yes, Outlook did that several years ago.
Autorun may well be #2 on the Top Ten Of Microsoft Stupidity.
The extension hiding is a minor annoyance by comparison (easily fixed and not half as dangerous). And I actually like the icons in executables. Even if it slows down the Windows Explorer a bit.
Portable media should never be considered "secure".
Correct, and that is why "autorun" functions that are active by default are a bad idea. But convenience over security is typical for certain OS vendors, especially those from Redmond ;-)
The only instance when stuff from portable media is automatically executed should be at boot time, if the medium is selected as boot drive in the BIOS (or whatever your system uses in place of the BIOS).
Good point. That's why I either
-wait until a decent bundle appears (not necessarily with all expansions, but it has to be playable to the end of the main story)
-or buy the game only at a discount that offsets the lack of completeness
Considering MMOs, I've never bought one for the typical retail price of 50 Euros. 10-20 Euro are acceptable, and the publisher can damn well earn his money from the monthly fees.
MySQL needs to be fully archived, including the revision history, outside of Oracle, just in case.
There is already a somewhat credible attempt at maintaining a fork (http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB#What_is_MariaDB.3F). :-)
Monty may have been a bit of a hypocrite in first selling MySQL and then whining about what happened to it, but now he does approximately what you asked for
Fat chance.
PC hardware being mass produced means Activision could get the parts for cheap, but to make it really closed they would have to replace Windows with their own OS. Legally I guess they could pull it off by perverting some BSD variety, but who would buy such a system?
Without exchanging the OS, Activision can at worst launch a closed software platform. Which puts them in direct competition to Valve's Steam and similar services. Won't be easy for them: ;-)
While I dislike the DRM in Steam games, I've also noticed that Steam works pretty well. Activision would have a lot of catching up to do
I don't think old CRT SDTVs are the kind of system future development will be aimed at.
For starters, those old clunkers tend to have such a poor resolution that you cannot display much text without filling half the screen with huge letters. There goes any game that wants to have a chat window...
Hardware side, a more realistic target system would be ;-)
-any HDTV with at least 1366x768 pixels and HDMI interface (looking at my preferred online shop, http://www.alternate.de/, most LCD TV sets offer at least these two features)
-plus a PC with at least 2GByte RAM and at least a midrange CPU and GPU. Detailed specs open to discussion
Which leaves questions of usability and choice of operating system.
The easiest choice would be Windows, and I doubt Activision could make people move to an Activision Linux or whatever. But that means Activision has to work with what Microsoft hands out.
So it comes down to setting some reasonable minimum specs and a lot of marketing.
There are a lot of actions that "could" result in people getting killed, like running a red light with your car. Looking up some state laws at findlaw.com, it seems that most states regard this as misdemeanor.
Violating the 65 ft. safety zone is arguably less dangerous by itself, and should be a misdemeanor at worst.
No, in this case the stupidity of the Indian government is at fault.
If they create regulations that make outsourcing to India more problematic, I have no problem with being happy about the lessened competition. If it was a case of my country putting up more trade barriers, that would be different.
For graduates who are trained to a reasonable level of knowledge and skills, it often is beneath them, in the sense that they are capable of doing much more demanding (and better compensated) things.
Yet it can be a way to get into the business with a bit of luck. My first "real" job after university was 2nd level support, after graduating as electrical engineer right into the mid-90s layoff wave in engineering. Not really what I hoped for. The whole thing happened in Europe BTW.
But my next job was advertised as "supporter with some additional software development" and turned out to be 70% software development, 30% support. With the experience from that I was eventually able to find a genuine development job.
Bottom line:
Even a slightly different entry position can eventually get you into an OK place.
That will make their per-unit profit even smaller but they hope to compensate with volume
If they make a profit on the hardware at all, they are in a better position then before.
Most of the time (and including earlier PS3), console hardware is sold at a loss to push it into the market and the vendor regains the money from game sales. The Wii was the first among the current generation consoles that broke this tradition. Now, after some cost-saving redesigns, PS3 sales also cover the cost for the hardware. I'm not sure about the present situation of the XBox 360, but when it was new it was sold at a loss too.
For users who depend on Windows applications, Linux or MacOS may not count as "close substitute". Not everything runs under WINE. A lot of businesses that have been around for a while fall in that category.
For new startups you have a point: :-)
If you don't have 10 years of Windows-only custom applications to replace, choosing an alternative system will be much easier. In case of Open Source systems, "oligopoly" may be a formally correct definition. From the customer's point of view, I think the situation is even more favorable, because the classic definitions do not reflect how much Open Source licenses drive down license costs
Other sources (http://green.autoblog.com/2010/05/27/details-on-nissan-leaf-battery-pack-including-how-recharging-sp/) claim an estimated 70% - 80% capacity left after 10 years.
But let's assume for a moment that the "battery dead after 8 years" is correct. Then it still looks like a good deal. On top of that, advanced battery technology as used in the Leaf is still getting cheaper, as more vendors get into the business and competition drives down prices. So you may get a pretty good deal on replacement batteries a few years from now.
Citing the first benchmark I could find, the Passmark CPU list
(http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X3430+%40+2.40GHz) rates
-the Xeon X3430 @ 2.40GHz with 2,962 points
-and the AMD Athlon II X4 635 at 3,360 points
So without claiming that this benchmark is the final word, I'd expect the AMD to be at least on a similar performance level to the Xeon. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it ;-)
Checking at alternate.de (not the cheapest online shop, but good for comparisons because they have both consumer and server parts):
Intel:
The only Socket 775 boards that support ECC seem to be those with the 32xx MCH chipset. Starting at 195 Euros (Asus P5BV-C).
For Socket 1156, the consumer chipsets allow ECC but you still need to find a board with BIOS support. Sadly Alternate does not list the ECC support status, but you might find one that supports ECC among the cheaper ones for 80-90 Euros. You do, however, need a Xeon which starts at 213 Euros (Xeon X3430, 4 x 2.4 GHz)
So mainboard plus a quad CPU costs you around 300 Euros at Alternate.
AMD:
Board situation (Socket AM3) similar to Intel's Socket 1156, boards with ECC support are available for 80-90 Euros.
Unlike Intel, even cheap desktop CPUs support ECC. As a cheap quad, Alternate offers the Athlon II X4 635 for 108 Euros.
So mainboard plus quad CPU costs you around 200 Euros, 100 less than with Intel.
I agree that an attempt by China to attempt to liquidate all their US holdings won't work well. What they could more realistically do is stop buying new US Treasure bonds/notes/etc. Then
-the US would have to pay out lots of dollars over the next 10 years or so as the Y dates arrive, without the usual influx of new dollars from China buying bonds. Unless they freeze the Chinese assets (more about that below).
-the US would have a far weaker case for calling it "economic warfare", and freezing Chinese account might result in a massive loss of trust in US bonds. Result: No one wants to buy US bonds anymore.
The difference is that XP requires activation once when installing, then it does not check again (except for getting certain additional downloads). AFAIK Vista and Win7 do periodically recheck their activation, calling a Microsoft server in the process. If something goes wrong with that, you may end up with a complaining Win7.
For me this is the main reason to stick to XP (and have an eye on Linux, which might be my next OS once XP becomes impractical to support).
That said we still have an IDIOT consultant that writes new stuff for the Win95 box and another writing stuff in a mixed collection of dotnet versions that all needs to be run as Admin - and both are too paranoid about "code theft" to let anyone have the source code.
In that case, your management sucks. Starting with the manager who is supposed to supervise these consultants. If you pay those guys for writing the software, the very least I'd demand is source code and licensing terms that allow reuse of the code at least internally. If they don't accept that, no more contracts.
Only up to the moment when the customers get their hands on the distribution. At this point the Open Source licenses guarantee the right to re-distribution, and anyone who feels motivated enough can re-publish the softeware at a price of his choice.
The only thing distributors can do about this is trademark based:
They can place restrictions on using the product name. But the users can still change the name and logo and re-distribute the cosmetically changed product. Examples include
-The Iceweasel browser in debian, which is a rebranded Firefox.
-The CentOS Linux distribution, which is essentially Red hat Enterprise with the serial numbers filed off.
If the same would apply to articles from Nature, any subscriber to the electronic version could legally copy the articles to his own homepage. He probably would have to remove the publisher's name to avoid being sued over trademarks, but that is all.
Actually it is worse with Windows:
Unless you have a good firewall, unpatched Windows = being owned real quick when you connect to the internet. :-(
Happened to me once when setting up a new computer with Windows 2000:
I duly installed SP4 but forgot the post-SP4 hotfixes. Hello MSBLAST
Some internal apps we have(and cannot dump) will just not run in 7.... It's easy to say "dump XP". Doing it is another matter.
I hope you have not lost the source code to these internal apps, otherwise it looks like a really big problem.
But if you are lucky, it might be a case of changing a few directories where the old applications wrote into stupid locations. Only half a year ago, I was developing an application where an explicit requirement was "a non-admin must be able to install it so it is available to all users". Explaining that and why this is not really good practice was useless.
The target OS was Windows XP, where the default security settings are lax enough that I could make it happen. By doing stuff that might be the same thing that keeps your old applications from running under Windows 7. Like writing config data not into the user's profile but elsewhere. So I won't be the least surprised if "my" app fails in Windows 7 too.
You are suggesting by repeatedly using the diminutive phrase "oh noes" that this isn't *real* punishment, but you fail to make clear what you think *real* punishment for a corporate entity is. Expropriation of assets by the Federal government and transfer to a state-owned oil corporation? Forced liquidation of the firm?
It is often theorized that large companies are like socipaths, devoid of ethics and only interested in maximizing profits.
Assuming this is true (and i believe so), the appropriate punishment would be massive fines that exceed any savings the company has realized by skimping on necessary safety measures. If that results in chapter 7 liquidation because the company cannot pay the fine, so be it. Only if the wrongdoing is more expensive than responsible behavior, the goal of maximizing profits will also create acceptable behavior in corporations.