Most of these are minor annoyances by comparison. The one I would really worry about as American is the Patriot Act: It may be a sign of the USA drifting towards a fascist dictatorship. And where this leads, has been amply demonstrated before...
It does for backups. Assume you have a big fileserver with one terabyte capacity. You want to do one full backup per month and keep it. Would you rather store 4 holo-disks per month or 213 DVD-Rs ??
I'm a World of Warcraft player, and it always pisses me off to hear about things like this. I simply accept that lag and outages are a part of playing an MMORPG.
There are large differences from game to game. Three games I have tried:
-Project Entropia (maybe 2 years ago): High lag, would be inacceptable for a real shooter. -Neocron: somewhat better, but still too much lag for the FPS-like combat. Really goes downhill when many chars meet in one zone. Account canceled, partly because of this. -Auto Assault Beta: Quite good so far, cannot complain. Still has some client issues, but networking and server stability is ready for release (assuming it stays that way with more players online).
So I don't agree that lag and outages are a necessary evil in MMORPGs. Of course, as long as players accept it and keep paying, the company making the game has no reason to fix things.
IIRC, the USA did happily pirate foreign "intellectual property" during the 19th century, because Europe was technologically ahead at the time. Just as China does today, albeit with slightly more subtle methods: Foreign high tech companies who want to do business in China have to do it in cooperation with a local company. If the technology from these joint ventures happens to show up elsewhere, tough luck;-)
Today, the USA have a position as technology leader in many fields, hence the drive to secure this advantage through patents and international treaties. I believe the roles will be reversed again if China actually takes the lead: Then we will have a China that insists on "intellectual property" while the USA steal what they can;-)
PIII 800 (XP pro) 378 seconds (used msconfig to kill all crap running) 474 seconds (lots of junk running) That one is interesting. So XP Pro has enough unnecessary stuff running by default to make it 25% slower??
Maybe in a large company, which has automated software installation and license management anyway. For smaller companies without such sophisticated mechanisms, I would expect things to go the other way: While Microsoft apps need to be watched to prevent illicit extra copies, you can just hand out OOo as needed. No reason to worry about possible under-licensing. This makes things easier on the IT department.
And I can just imagine some of the people who would try to build their own servers to play WoW on Has been done before with BattleNet, see http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/. Blizzard killed that one through ligitation (and got itself on my personal boycott list).
Considering player-supplied suggestions for game features, I have played Neocron for a while and we had all sorts of suggestions. The quality scale ranged from unrealistic to well thought out and worthwile. The company making Neocron did ignore all of them. In 95% of the cases it was the right thing to do, but the remaining 5% would have really improved the game.
This may all be correct, but it gives a plaintiff way much too leeway for nuisance lawsuits. I think there should be a requirement that you have to bring some evidence at the beginning of the lawsuit, else the court can just throw out your case. In that case, SCO vs. IBM would have been a lot shorter;-)
That argumentation might work against someone who actually used the hack.
But disable the player of Granny who has the same model but never thought of hacking it, and I guess she will be able to sue you successfully. This might eventually happen with a popular model of which a few 100.000 are in circulation, and we will have something like the Sony affair;-)
I'm afraid that you may be right. Of course, one might ask "why do you keep buying Microsoft if their software is crap?". Which would put the suit in question back into the position of being responsible. But then again, that would require more forethought than most managements seem capable of.
After reading the test, I think things are not that clear-cut. The Turion and the Pentium M were overall comparable in performance, and while the Turion consumed more energy than the Pentium M under load, it consumed a bit less while idle. Which is the predominant state for most usage patterns. So if I had to choose between the two chips, I would probably go by price.
Sometimes, it is an attempt to get the greater reliability that is frequently attributed to the "big" systems. Justified or not, RDBMS like Oracle or DB2 have a reputation of being less prone to crashing or data loss. This said, I would probably go for somthing like Postgre or Firebird myself. But NOT Access, I've heard from our service department that the Access databases of a certain device tend to crash when they grow beyond 1 GByte.
I've also heard this before. But having it tested by a serious study is still better than relying on anecdotal evidence. So, thumbs up to the guys (and gals?) who organized that research:)
That's something my (freemail!) provider does and it works pretty well: Once you have manually transferred an e-mail by a certain sender from the junk bin to the regular inbox, that sender is on your personal whitelist. In the beginning it is a bit of a hassle, but after a short while all your buddies are cleared.
Re:Move out of USA or fork without USA developers
on
ReactOS Code Audit
·
· Score: 1
It would still make sense for the EU. Of course, the US developers would have to bail out at that point to avoid being dragged into court. Now I don't know how much of the development team would be affected by this, so this may or may not be realistic.
People want stuff. Faster computers. LCD monitors. More RAM. Software they saw on the internet. Software they invented in their head, in the shower that morning. Teleportation. Warp drive. Amazingly, few of them would buy this stuff for themselves if they were spending their own money, and an alarming percentage have no idea what the benefits of buying the crap they want might be. Heh. Reminds me of the pseudo-marketing guys at my company who represent the "voice of the customer". They create an amazing amount of requests for new features. And the frightening thing is they may be right in terms of marketability of the software. At least, Microsoft is quite successful with over-featured, unstable crap. The obvious downside is that building that over-featured and sometimes unstable crap is no fun.
I also believe that Bush honestly believes that his actions are necessary, legal (whether or not they really are is another question), are not for his personal gain, and are in the best interests of the US.
Maybe Bush honestly believes that his actions are necessary, but this does not automatically make them acceptable. When reading "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler, I also had the impression that he honestly believed in his actions being good for the German people. Beware of misguided fanatics, they can be just as destructive as people who are intentionally evil.
I don't completely refuse to buy it, but the amount of money I am willing to pay goes down drastically when the game is linked to something like Steam. Instead of 50 Euros, Valve might get 20 from me. If the game gets that cheap someday;-) I don't think that is the sort of revenue they were planning for.
6 times 30/month = 180/month. That is a nice chunk of money. I don't doubt that a few enthusiasts are willing to pay that, but I don't see a large proportion of the users signing up for it. SDSL might be a lot more popular if you could get 1000in/1000out at the same price as 2000in/192out. Considering your 15000bps inbound and 1000 outbound for 30/month, it is far from available everywhere. Otherwise it would be a pretty nice substitute for 1000in/1000out;-)
The benchmarks all have wildly different results. Either the benchmarks are that way normally, or WINE (or Linux) is inconsistent. The data is presented such that, again, we have no clue as to the consistency of the results. My first guess would be that WINE is inconsistent. Especially in the areas where it falls behind. After all, it is still a beta and has not achieved 100% compatibility yet, so the developers might not care too much about optimization at this point. But Linux or even Windows are also possible culprits. Maybe the guys at Redmond also have a few sub-optimal routines buried in their codebase?
In Germany, most people have a highly asymmetric connection. DSL (which is by far the most popular version of broadband) usually comes with bandwiths like -1000kBit/s down and 128 kBit/s up -2000kBit/s down and 192 kBit/s up [...] -6000kBit/s down and 576 kBit/s up There are offers with higher upstream bandwidth, but those tend to be more expensive.
So distribution per P2P will usually be hampered by the lack of upstream bandwith. Why should a paying customer accept that (and have his own upstream blocked for hours), unless he gets the content cheaper as compensation for his cooperation?
Sorry, I forgot to mention the obvious step of trying to log in as administrator with blank password. Which is the first thing most halfway knowledgeable people would do when they try to hax0r their neigbours home PC. And yes, I know that this may be a stupid move in a network with REAL security.
For some employees, your description is certainly accurate. But what I was aiming at is that the implied contract for a tech worker does not apply in this situation.
So if you'd want to hire me for a dead end job for which I don't have the skills yet, I would NOT spend my own time on training.
Ignoring for a moment that your attitude towards people doing those jobs implies that we would not get along well (and that might be a reason for me not to start work in your department/company, even if I would otherwise put up with the job).
IANAL too, but I understand this much: -The first amendment is only binding for the government -A corp can do what ever the fuck they want to, as long as they
break no laws. But they also have no police or lawmaking powers,
so they still need to rely on the state to enforce their will.
Hence all the generous donations to politicians, to make them
more inclined to pass corp-friendly laws. -A law made by congress may be overturned by the Supreme Court
as unconstitutional. If that happens, the corps are back at
square one
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these are minor annoyances by comparison. The one I would really worry about as American is the Patriot Act:
It may be a sign of the USA drifting towards a fascist dictatorship. And where this leads, has been amply demonstrated before...
It does for backups.
Assume you have a big fileserver with one terabyte capacity. You want to do one full backup per month and keep it.
Would you rather store 4 holo-disks per month or 213 DVD-Rs ??
I'm a World of Warcraft player, and it always pisses me off to hear about things like this. I simply accept that lag and outages are a part of playing an MMORPG.
There are large differences from game to game. Three games I have tried:
-Project Entropia (maybe 2 years ago): High lag, would be inacceptable for a real shooter.
-Neocron: somewhat better, but still too much lag for the FPS-like combat. Really goes downhill when many chars meet in one zone. Account canceled, partly because of this.
-Auto Assault Beta: Quite good so far, cannot complain. Still has some client issues, but networking and server stability is ready for release (assuming it stays that way with more players online).
So I don't agree that lag and outages are a necessary evil in MMORPGs. Of course, as long as players accept it and keep paying, the company making the game has no reason to fix things.
IIRC, the USA did happily pirate foreign "intellectual property" during the 19th century, because Europe was technologically ahead at the time. Just as China does today, albeit with slightly more subtle methods: ;-)
;-)
Foreign high tech companies who want to do business in China have to do it in cooperation with a local company. If the technology from these joint ventures happens to show up elsewhere, tough luck
Today, the USA have a position as technology leader in many fields, hence the drive to secure this advantage through patents and international treaties. I believe the roles will be reversed again if China actually takes the lead:
Then we will have a China that insists on "intellectual property" while the USA steal what they can
PIII 800 (XP pro) 378 seconds (used msconfig to kill all crap running)
474 seconds (lots of junk running)
That one is interesting. So XP Pro has enough unnecessary stuff running by default to make it 25% slower??
Maybe in a large company, which has automated software installation and license management anyway. For smaller companies without such sophisticated mechanisms, I would expect things to go the other way:
While Microsoft apps need to be watched to prevent illicit extra copies, you can just hand out OOo as needed. No reason to worry about possible under-licensing. This makes things easier on the IT department.
And I can just imagine some of the people who would try to build their own servers to play WoW on.
Has been done before with BattleNet, see http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/
Blizzard killed that one through ligitation (and got itself on my personal boycott list).
Considering player-supplied suggestions for game features, I have played Neocron for a while and we had all sorts of suggestions. The quality scale ranged from unrealistic to well thought out and worthwile.
The company making Neocron did ignore all of them. In 95% of the cases it was the right thing to do, but the remaining 5% would have really improved the game.
This may all be correct, but it gives a plaintiff way much too leeway for nuisance lawsuits. ;-)
I think there should be a requirement that you have to bring some evidence at the beginning of the lawsuit, else the court can just throw out your case. In that case, SCO vs. IBM would have been a lot shorter
That argumentation might work against someone who actually used the hack.
;-)
But disable the player of Granny who has the same model but never thought of hacking it, and I guess she will be able to sue you successfully. This might eventually happen with a popular model of which a few 100.000 are in circulation, and we will have something like the Sony affair
I'm afraid that you may be right. Of course, one might ask "why do you keep buying Microsoft if their software is crap?". Which would put the suit in question back into the position of being responsible.
But then again, that would require more forethought than most managements seem capable of.
After reading the test, I think things are not that clear-cut.
The Turion and the Pentium M were overall comparable in performance, and while the Turion consumed more energy than the Pentium M under load, it consumed a bit less while idle. Which is the predominant state for most usage patterns.
So if I had to choose between the two chips, I would probably go by price.
One question in return:
Do you still make a profit on the $469 computer after throwing in 2 hours of lessons by your trained staff?
Sometimes, it is an attempt to get the greater reliability that is frequently attributed to the "big" systems. Justified or not, RDBMS like Oracle or DB2 have a reputation of being less prone to crashing or data loss.
This said, I would probably go for somthing like Postgre or Firebird myself. But NOT Access, I've heard from our service department that the Access databases of a certain device tend to crash when they grow beyond 1 GByte.
I've also heard this before. :)
But having it tested by a serious study is still better than relying on anecdotal evidence. So, thumbs up to the guys (and gals?) who organized that research
That's something my (freemail!) provider does and it works pretty well:
Once you have manually transferred an e-mail by a certain sender from the junk bin to the regular inbox, that sender is on your personal whitelist. In the beginning it is a bit of a hassle, but after a short while all your buddies are cleared.
It would still make sense for the EU. Of course, the US developers would have to bail out at that point to avoid being dragged into court.
Now I don't know how much of the development team would be affected by this, so this may or may not be realistic.
People want stuff. Faster computers. LCD monitors. More RAM. Software they saw on the internet. Software they invented in their head, in the shower that morning. Teleportation. Warp drive. Amazingly, few of them would buy this stuff for themselves if they were spending their own money, and an alarming percentage have no idea what the benefits of buying the crap they want might be.
Heh.
Reminds me of the pseudo-marketing guys at my company who represent the "voice of the customer". They create an amazing amount of requests for new features. And the frightening thing is they may be right in terms of marketability of the software. At least, Microsoft is quite successful with over-featured, unstable crap.
The obvious downside is that building that over-featured and sometimes unstable crap is no fun.
I also believe that Bush honestly believes that his actions are necessary, legal (whether or not they really are is another question), are not for his personal gain, and are in the best interests of the US.
Maybe Bush honestly believes that his actions are necessary, but this does not automatically make them acceptable.
When reading "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler, I also had the impression that he honestly believed in his actions being good for the German people. Beware of misguided fanatics, they can be just as destructive as people who are intentionally evil.
I don't completely refuse to buy it, but the amount of money I am willing to pay goes down drastically when the game is linked to something like Steam. Instead of 50 Euros, Valve might get 20 from me. If the game gets that cheap someday ;-)
I don't think that is the sort of revenue they were planning for.
6 times 30/month = 180/month. That is a nice chunk of money. I don't doubt that a few enthusiasts are willing to pay that, but I don't see a large proportion of the users signing up for it. ;-)
SDSL might be a lot more popular if you could get 1000in/1000out at the same price as 2000in/192out. Considering your 15000bps inbound and 1000 outbound for 30/month, it is far from available everywhere. Otherwise it would be a pretty nice substitute for 1000in/1000out
The benchmarks all have wildly different results. Either the benchmarks are that way normally, or WINE (or Linux) is inconsistent. The data is presented such that, again, we have no clue as to the consistency of the results.
My first guess would be that WINE is inconsistent. Especially in the areas where it falls behind. After all, it is still a beta and has not achieved 100% compatibility yet, so the developers might not care too much about optimization at this point.
But Linux or even Windows are also possible culprits. Maybe the guys at Redmond also have a few sub-optimal routines buried in their codebase?
In Germany, most people have a highly asymmetric connection. DSL (which is by far the most popular version of broadband) usually comes with bandwiths like
-1000kBit/s down and 128 kBit/s up
-2000kBit/s down and 192 kBit/s up
[...]
-6000kBit/s down and 576 kBit/s up
There are offers with higher upstream bandwidth, but those tend to be more expensive.
So distribution per P2P will usually be hampered by the lack of upstream bandwith. Why should a paying customer accept that (and have his own upstream blocked for hours), unless he gets the content cheaper as compensation for his cooperation?
Sorry, I forgot to mention the obvious step of trying to log in as administrator with blank password.
Which is the first thing most halfway knowledgeable people would do when they try to hax0r their neigbours home PC. And yes, I know that this may be a stupid move in a network with REAL security.
For some employees, your description is certainly accurate. But what I was aiming at is that the implied contract for a tech worker does not apply in this situation.
So if you'd want to hire me for a dead end job for which I don't have the skills yet, I would NOT spend my own time on training.
Ignoring for a moment that your attitude towards people doing those jobs implies that we would not get along well (and that might be a reason for me not to start work in your department/company, even if I would otherwise put up with the job).
IANAL too, but I understand this much:
-The first amendment is only binding for the government
-A corp can do what ever the fuck they want to, as long as they
break no laws. But they also have no police or lawmaking powers,
so they still need to rely on the state to enforce their will.
Hence all the generous donations to politicians, to make them
more inclined to pass corp-friendly laws.
-A law made by congress may be overturned by the Supreme Court
as unconstitutional. If that happens, the corps are back at
square one