In terms of convenience, Valve's Steam arguably beats CDs as long as you have a fast internet connection. Switching to a new computer? Download Steam, install it, log in and re-download your whole stuff with a few mouse clicks.
But the problem remains that your access to the games depends on the availability of Valve's servers. If Valve ever goes bankrupt you can probably forget your games:-(
I think the big problem is not with the economy (not that there aren't problems), but with our corporate-controlled political system. I, like you, am tired of seeing millionaire candidates elected to represent us.
I agree, a truly free market would have fixed a lot of the excesses by now. By "truly free market" I mean a market where there is no such thing as "too big to fail". That means no bailout for banks and credit insurance companies. A lot of those who created the current financial mess would be bankrupt by now.
Instead we get what some people call corporate welfare: Mismanaged banks and similar institutions get bailed out by the taxpayer...
If you believe the numbers on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#System_sales), then Wii sales are indeed slowing down and Nintendo might need something new to stay competitive. Also according to Wikipedia, the chips in the Wii are still being made in a 90 nm process while other consoles like the PS3 go through redesigns to make use of more modern manufacturing technology. Eventually, those more capable consoles will be able to compete on price unless Nintendo introduces at least an upgrade in manufacturing methods.
You can't print gold so the government has to try a lot harder to spend money it doesn't actually have.
That's the real point of a hard money currency system, the fact that you hear gold (and silver) all the time is that it's just a convenient, historic store of wealth, if there was something more convenient the argument would be made for that.
There may be other ways of solving the wasteful government problem. One is currently being tested in Germany:
One year ago, our politicians wrote a pretty stringent limit on new public debt into the constitution. One may suspect the sincerity of their intentions, but the debt limit is in the constitution now. Let's see how it works out;-)
Better overall benchmark: require it to have the ability of a competent but not perfect second-language user.
A competent but not perfect second-language user is what I consider myself. I might be able to understand the many-buffalo sentence after some thinking, if I was aware of all the synonyms of "buffalo" that appear in the construct. Let's check: -"buffalo" as animal species: no problem -"Buffalo" as name of a town: There is such a town, but it did not cross my mind at the moment. Not so obvious. -"buffalo" as synonym for "bully": Highly unusual, and most second-language user will fail at this point.
Overall, I think this sentence is too difficult to be a reasonable test for the quality of language recognition.
Unless there are very good reasons that were not in TFA, my response would be:
1) My personal computer will stay at home from now on 2) The IT department does not install anything on my personal computer. 3) I won't check my (work) email from my home anymore. Anyone who wants to contact me can use a phone (and better have a damn good reason if it happens at 2 a.m. in the night).
You also assume that a regular full price game has no DRM. What about disk checks and SN verification? Aside from a few companies like Stardock, you're just replacing disk-based DRM for Steam's.
I don't buy regular full price games with DRM either. The last one where this was relevant was Spore. Seemed to be a great game, I might have paid full retail price for it - if it wasn't for the DRM.
As it is, I'm not playing Spore and EA lost a sale.
True, and customers should treat the purchase of such a game as rental and adjust the sum they are willing to pay downwards to compensate. Personally, I think a 50% discount would be appropriate in this case. If all customers would refuse to pay more than, say, $30 for a new game unless it comes with dedicated server/matchmaking software you can run on your own server, the industry would learn fast.
"That little doodle" looks like it is only a very shallow engraving. If Costco loses the lawsuit, I guss they could remove the logo in question without doing much damage to the watch;-)
According to a developer of web apps I asked, it is not perfect but a lot better than IE6 (I'm using SeaMonkey myself, so I would not know;-). Corporate IT could roll out IE7 and keep XP otherwise. Or if they want to be a bit more radical, a recent version of Firefox. Of course that may require fixing some wep apps, but you don't need Windows 7 to get off IE6.
That is probably the only thing you can buy from Sony these days without being fucked over at some point. Purely analog equipment, without any need for firmware upgrades where Sony can slip in root kits or removal of functions.
The rootkit on Sony music CDs. While I did not buy one of those myself, it was a clear sign that Sony cannot be trusted. Recently, they confirmed that with the PS3 firmware update that kills the Linux functionality.
That's why I attempt to hedge my bets and only purchase content with DRM from locations I expect will be around for a while. I understand my digital purchases' lifetime is directly related to the lifetime of their servers, and I'm alright with that.
Makes sense, and I agree in principle. But I also adjust the amount I'm willing to pay downwards to compensate for the expected lower lifetime. In the case of Valve's Steam for instance (which actually works well so far) I might spend a maximum of 20 Euros for a game with DRM instead of 50 Euros without DRM. I doubt Valve is happy with that.
Then we diesel truck the manure off and bury it in a landfill.
Definitely not. You feed the manure into a anaerobic digestion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion) plant and make more electricity from the biogas. Then you use the digestate (the remnants of the manure) as fertilizer.
At this point you still have some diesel vehicles for trucking stuff around, but the bottom line looks much better than before.
But how many people will care about the fact that Sony screws over its customers again? Probably some more.
Personally, I have NOT bought one of the CD Sony infected with a rootkit http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/10/31/2016223.shtml, so by your logic I should not care. But I noticed that Sony cannot be trusted. Now they have shown the same attitude again.
As a consequence, I will certainly not buy any computing equipment from Sony, because it seems quite likely that they will fuck with it at some time. What will be next? Planned obsolescence in Sony PCs, via expiration date in the BIOS? Sony => no thanks!
The other respondent who said you should have blamed the managers was more reasonable. Unfortunately current management theory claims that managers don't need to know anything about what they're managing. So the individual managers, themselves, probably aren't to blame.
They were probably told at some point that the current solution would not last beyond the year 2000. That is where even under the current management theory, ignoring the problem becomes their mistake.
In practice, however, I have seen it happen too. Some kind of short term pressure leads to a fishy compromise, and later on management refuses to be bothered by engineers who want to revisit the issue. Until a major breakdown happens or is at least imminent. At that point, lots of money and work goes into fixing things quickly...
you can just avoid sending the position of not visible players, but the problem is that _as soon_ as one is visible the aimbot will kill him all the same. also another problem is that in "somewhat geared toward realism" games as modern warfare (seriously kids, famas&m16 are not 3 round burst only) you have to give position away to allow for bullet penetrations. and then you still have to send sound effects, which give away your position to a potential aimbot/wallhack.
Good point, but it would be a start to improve things. Let's discuss it in more detail:
1) Why not do bullet/target collision detection on the server? That way, you don't need to transmit the position of not visible players to the other clients. Instead, someone shooting through a wall would do so blindly even if he has installed a wallhack, and the server would decide if he hit someone.
2) The sound effects could be somewhat distorted to prevent calculating the position of the other player from the sound. If there is no clear line of sight between both players, that may even be more realistic than unmodified sound. A simple version (at the expense of losing some realism): Transmit sound from other avatars in monaural mode, that way there is no directional information in the signal.
Ever heard of Metropolis? Famous movie from the silent film era?
Parts of it were lost, but a few years ago most of those were dicovered (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)#Rediscovery) on a 16mm copy in Argentine that was not destroyed (as required) after showing the film. Technically that makes the cinema owner from the 1920s a pirate, but thanks to his breach of contract(?) Metropolis is almost complete again.
Windows 7 seems to place a lot of data in swap, even when gobs of RAM are available. With a large enough page file and Superfetch+Prefetching enabled, physical RAM that's actually in use (not cache!) is usually between 50% and 60% full.
Disable the page file, and the RAM that's in use skyrockets to 70%+ with the same processes running.
I suspect the same on Windows XP, albeit based on different observations.
When I run enough applications to fill most (but not all) of my 2GB RAM on XP, switching between these applications tends to trigger several seconds of disk activity before the newly selected application is in the foreground and fully responsible. I've noticed this when running Day Of Defeat: Source and EVE Online in parallel. Total memory use according to the Windows Task Manager: over 1 GB, but well below the installed amount of 2GB.
From a well designed memory management and caching system, I'd expect in this situation that the previous background application still sits in memory (one way or the other) and is retrieved quickly without resorting to the hard disk. But obviously that does not happen. Possible conclusions: 1) Task Manager is lying and not reporting some of the actual memory use. So XP really needs to swap. 2) Memory management is poorly designed and swaps needlessly.
Perhaps that "tested, trusted company code" is a steaming mess of spaghetti code that's been cautiously poked, prodded, and duct-taped over the years into something that in the end works but is a maintainability nightmare?
Probably. I've seen my share of that.
An interesting aspect is that a quick hack can actually be the fastest way to get the job done - in the first two or three iterations. But later on, the side effects of even minor changes grow dificult to contain and things that should be minor programming tasks start taking weeks. So if you are content to use the old code exactly as it is, GP's approach of leaving the code alone is fine. But in my experience, sooner or later some business requirement comes up that means changing the functionality. At that point, the steaming mess of spaghetti code will really hurt you.
It is easy to fall into that trap, and getting out of it takes patient refactoring. Usually takes more time than a proper design would have taken in the first place.
What you say may be correct for talking to the customer, but when one of the first level supporters (who presumably have at least a bit of experience) asks 2nd level to check server X, doing so might be smarter than to argue with the 1st level.
After all, the whole purpose of 1st level support is to solve simple stuff and escalate those things that are not obvious cases. If you treat 1st level like a potentially dumb customer, you end up with a $30/hour guy asking standard questions to a $8/hour guy. Exactly what isolating 2nd level from the dumb customer was meant to avoid, only that you pay both guys for it;-)
With the spam factor that other posters have already mentioned, this only means the right time to pirate it is once artwork and lyrics have been added. At that point, any further "content" is likely unwanted.
This said, if the copyright owners play it smart, they might be able to delay the inevitable rise of pirate editions by a few months. Release an album with the bare minimum of content, then keep adding bonus tracks and more artwork for some time. That gives a reason for either buying it or waiting. People with "must-have-now-syndrome" might buy in that situation.
I agree with regard to putting GUIs together. Typing the code for placement and properties of your standard widgets by hand is so much more tedious than just dropping them on the form by Drag&Drop. Also, itegrated debuggers are nice. But Visual Studio is by no means the only IDE to offer that functionality. Borland Delphi, which was released roughly at the same time, provides the same benefits. So you could as well ask for a Delphi replacement;-)
Fast forward to today: Visual Studio is admittedly quite good, while there seems to be not as much choice on Linux. Eclipse does AFAIK not have the GUI editor (somewhat understandable due to the huge variety of widget sets, and which to support?). So helping to create one for eclipse might be a worthwhile project for the thread starter. Or maybe supporting Lazarus development if he likes Pascal. Lazarus is so far the closest thing to a complete IDE I have seen in the Open Source scene.
Slashdot Mirror
"Against intellectual monopoly" by Boldrin and Levine:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
This book nicely sums up the arguments against patents :-)
About item #1: I live in Germany, near Munich. 6mbps DSL w/o transfer volume limit in the contract is cheap enough.
About item #2: Sounds nice, but we only have their word for it ;-)
In terms of convenience, Valve's Steam arguably beats CDs as long as you have a fast internet connection. Switching to a new computer? Download Steam, install it, log in and re-download your whole stuff with a few mouse clicks.
But the problem remains that your access to the games depends on the availability of Valve's servers. If Valve ever goes bankrupt you can probably forget your games :-(
I think the big problem is not with the economy (not that there aren't problems), but with our corporate-controlled political system. I, like you, am tired of seeing millionaire candidates elected to represent us.
I agree, a truly free market would have fixed a lot of the excesses by now. By "truly free market" I mean a market where there is no such thing as "too big to fail". That means no bailout for banks and credit insurance companies. A lot of those who created the current financial mess would be bankrupt by now.
Instead we get what some people call corporate welfare: Mismanaged banks and similar institutions get bailed out by the taxpayer...
If you believe the numbers on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#System_sales), then Wii sales are indeed slowing down and Nintendo might need something new to stay competitive.
Also according to Wikipedia, the chips in the Wii are still being made in a 90 nm process while other consoles like the PS3 go through redesigns to make use of more modern manufacturing technology. Eventually, those more capable consoles will be able to compete on price unless Nintendo introduces at least an upgrade in manufacturing methods.
You can't print gold so the government has to try a lot harder to spend money it doesn't actually have.
That's the real point of a hard money currency system, the fact that you hear gold (and silver) all the time is that it's just a convenient, historic store of wealth, if there was something more convenient the argument would be made for that.
There may be other ways of solving the wasteful government problem. One is currently being tested in Germany:
One year ago, our politicians wrote a pretty stringent limit on new public debt into the constitution. One may suspect the sincerity of their intentions, but the debt limit is in the constitution now. Let's see how it works out ;-)
Better overall benchmark: require it to have the ability of a competent but not perfect second-language user.
A competent but not perfect second-language user is what I consider myself. I might be able to understand the many-buffalo sentence after some thinking, if I was aware of all the synonyms of "buffalo" that appear in the construct. Let's check:
-"buffalo" as animal species: no problem
-"Buffalo" as name of a town: There is such a town, but it did not cross my mind at the moment. Not so obvious.
-"buffalo" as synonym for "bully": Highly unusual, and most second-language user will fail at this point.
Overall, I think this sentence is too difficult to be a reasonable test for the quality of language recognition.
Unless there are very good reasons that were not in TFA, my response would be:
1) My personal computer will stay at home from now on
2) The IT department does not install anything on my personal computer.
3) I won't check my (work) email from my home anymore. Anyone who wants to contact me can use a phone (and better have a damn good reason if it happens at 2 a.m. in the night).
You also assume that a regular full price game has no DRM. What about disk checks and SN verification? Aside from a few companies like Stardock, you're just replacing disk-based DRM for Steam's.
I don't buy regular full price games with DRM either. The last one where this was relevant was Spore. Seemed to be a great game, I might have paid full retail price for it - if it wasn't for the DRM.
As it is, I'm not playing Spore and EA lost a sale.
True, and customers should treat the purchase of such a game as rental and adjust the sum they are willing to pay downwards to compensate.
Personally, I think a 50% discount would be appropriate in this case. If all customers would refuse to pay more than, say, $30 for a new game unless it comes with dedicated server/matchmaking software you can run on your own server, the industry would learn fast.
"That little doodle" looks like it is only a very shallow engraving. If Costco loses the lawsuit, I guss they could remove the logo in question without doing much damage to the watch ;-)
According to a developer of web apps I asked, it is not perfect but a lot better than IE6 (I'm using SeaMonkey myself, so I would not know ;-).
Corporate IT could roll out IE7 and keep XP otherwise. Or if they want to be a bit more radical, a recent version of Firefox. Of course that may require fixing some wep apps, but you don't need Windows 7 to get off IE6.
That is probably the only thing you can buy from Sony these days without being fucked over at some point. Purely analog equipment, without any need for firmware upgrades where Sony can slip in root kits or removal of functions.
what for you was the tipping point?
The rootkit on Sony music CDs. While I did not buy one of those myself, it was a clear sign that Sony cannot be trusted. Recently, they confirmed that with the PS3 firmware update that kills the Linux functionality.
That's why I attempt to hedge my bets and only purchase content with DRM from locations I expect will be around for a while. I understand my digital purchases' lifetime is directly related to the lifetime of their servers, and I'm alright with that.
Makes sense, and I agree in principle. But I also adjust the amount I'm willing to pay downwards to compensate for the expected lower lifetime.
In the case of Valve's Steam for instance (which actually works well so far) I might spend a maximum of 20 Euros for a game with DRM instead of 50 Euros without DRM. I doubt Valve is happy with that.
Then we diesel truck the manure off and bury it in a landfill.
Definitely not. You feed the manure into a anaerobic digestion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion) plant and make more electricity from the biogas. Then you use the digestate (the remnants of the manure) as fertilizer.
At this point you still have some diesel vehicles for trucking stuff around, but the bottom line looks much better than before.
But how many people will care about the fact that Sony screws over its customers again? Probably some more.
Personally, I have NOT bought one of the CD Sony infected with a rootkit http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/10/31/2016223.shtml, so by your logic I should not care. But I noticed that Sony cannot be trusted. Now they have shown the same attitude again.
As a consequence, I will certainly not buy any computing equipment from Sony, because it seems quite likely that they will fuck with it at some time.
What will be next?
Planned obsolescence in Sony PCs, via expiration date in the BIOS?
Sony => no thanks!
The other respondent who said you should have blamed the managers was more reasonable. Unfortunately current management theory claims that managers don't need to know anything about what they're managing. So the individual managers, themselves, probably aren't to blame.
They were probably told at some point that the current solution would not last beyond the year 2000. That is where even under the current management theory, ignoring the problem becomes their mistake.
In practice, however, I have seen it happen too. Some kind of short term pressure leads to a fishy compromise, and later on management refuses to be bothered by engineers who want to revisit the issue. Until a major breakdown happens or is at least imminent. At that point, lots of money and work goes into fixing things quickly...
you can just avoid sending the position of not visible players, but the problem is that _as soon_ as one is visible the aimbot will kill him all the same. also another problem is that in "somewhat geared toward realism" games as modern warfare (seriously kids, famas&m16 are not 3 round burst only) you have to give position away to allow for bullet penetrations. and then you still have to send sound effects, which give away your position to a potential aimbot/wallhack.
Good point, but it would be a start to improve things. Let's discuss it in more detail:
1) Why not do bullet/target collision detection on the server? That way, you don't need to transmit the position of not visible players to the other clients. Instead, someone shooting through a wall would do so blindly even if he has installed a wallhack, and the server would decide if he hit someone.
2) The sound effects could be somewhat distorted to prevent calculating the position of the other player from the sound. If there is no clear line of sight between both players, that may even be more realistic than unmodified sound.
A simple version (at the expense of losing some realism): Transmit sound from other avatars in monaural mode, that way there is no directional information in the signal.
Ever heard of Metropolis? Famous movie from the silent film era?
Parts of it were lost, but a few years ago most of those were dicovered (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)#Rediscovery) on a 16mm copy in Argentine that was not destroyed (as required) after showing the film.
Technically that makes the cinema owner from the 1920s a pirate, but thanks to his breach of contract(?) Metropolis is almost complete again.
Windows 7 seems to place a lot of data in swap, even when gobs of RAM are available. With a large enough page file and Superfetch+Prefetching enabled, physical RAM that's actually in use (not cache!) is usually between 50% and 60% full.
Disable the page file, and the RAM that's in use skyrockets to 70%+ with the same processes running.
I suspect the same on Windows XP, albeit based on different observations.
When I run enough applications to fill most (but not all) of my 2GB RAM on XP, switching between these applications tends to trigger several seconds of disk activity before the newly selected application is in the foreground and fully responsible. I've noticed this when running Day Of Defeat: Source and EVE Online in parallel. Total memory use according to the Windows Task Manager: over 1 GB, but well below the installed amount of 2GB.
From a well designed memory management and caching system, I'd expect in this situation that the previous background application still sits in memory (one way or the other) and is retrieved quickly without resorting to the hard disk. But obviously that does not happen. Possible conclusions:
1) Task Manager is lying and not reporting some of the actual memory use. So XP really needs to swap.
2) Memory management is poorly designed and swaps needlessly.
Perhaps that "tested, trusted company code" is a steaming mess of spaghetti code that's been cautiously poked, prodded, and duct-taped over the years into something that in the end works but is a maintainability nightmare?
Probably. I've seen my share of that.
An interesting aspect is that a quick hack can actually be the fastest way to get the job done - in the first two or three iterations. But later on, the side effects of even minor changes grow dificult to contain and things that should be minor programming tasks start taking weeks.
So if you are content to use the old code exactly as it is, GP's approach of leaving the code alone is fine. But in my experience, sooner or later some business requirement comes up that means changing the functionality. At that point, the steaming mess of spaghetti code will really hurt you.
It is easy to fall into that trap, and getting out of it takes patient refactoring. Usually takes more time than a proper design would have taken in the first place.
What you say may be correct for talking to the customer, but when one of the first level supporters (who presumably have at least a bit of experience) asks 2nd level to check server X, doing so might be smarter than to argue with the 1st level.
After all, the whole purpose of 1st level support is to solve simple stuff and escalate those things that are not obvious cases. If you treat 1st level like a potentially dumb customer, you end up with a $30/hour guy asking standard questions to a $8/hour guy. ;-)
Exactly what isolating 2nd level from the dumb customer was meant to avoid, only that you pay both guys for it
With the spam factor that other posters have already mentioned, this only means the right time to pirate it is once artwork and lyrics have been added. At that point, any further "content" is likely unwanted.
This said, if the copyright owners play it smart, they might be able to delay the inevitable rise of pirate editions by a few months. Release an album with the bare minimum of content, then keep adding bonus tracks and more artwork for some time. That gives a reason for either buying it or waiting. People with "must-have-now-syndrome" might buy in that situation.
I agree with regard to putting GUIs together. Typing the code for placement and properties of your standard widgets by hand is so much more tedious than just dropping them on the form by Drag&Drop. Also, itegrated debuggers are nice. ;-)
But Visual Studio is by no means the only IDE to offer that functionality. Borland Delphi, which was released roughly at the same time, provides the same benefits. So you could as well ask for a Delphi replacement
Fast forward to today:
Visual Studio is admittedly quite good, while there seems to be not as much choice on Linux. Eclipse does AFAIK not have the GUI editor (somewhat understandable due to the huge variety of widget sets, and which to support?). So helping to create one for eclipse might be a worthwhile project for the thread starter.
Or maybe supporting Lazarus development if he likes Pascal. Lazarus is so far the closest thing to a complete IDE I have seen in the Open Source scene.