Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams.
Basically Valve contacted him and several other high profile mod authors over a month and a half ago to participate in the rollout. In this particular case, the Art of the Catch mod (adds fishing to Skyrim, I think, I haven't tried it) needed some files from another mod to run, or it had a dependency, or both. Valve told him their legal team thought it would be OK but that the author should consult a lawyer on his own. He didn't, and many butts got hurt over the result.
But your assertion, that they did this with no notice to anyone, least of all the high profile modders, is wrong. They did exactly that.
Time Warner, a copyright focused company would have brought to the relationship.
It's worth pointing out that Time Warner Cable is, confusingly, not owned by Time Warner Inc. It used to be, of course, and for some reason it still has the name (likely some sort of obligation with an expiration date) but since 2009 it's been an independent company.
It's resulted in some asinine incidents, like how TWC for a while could not use HBO Go even though Time Warner proper owns HBO.
You make some good points but there's one thing I think is going on and is worth pointing out.
Apple is in an interesting spot at the moment in that, due to the sheer popularity of just about everything they make, they're selling more Macs now than ever before. People are switching to Macs more now than ever did during that "I'm a Mac" campaign. It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but my wife switched to OS X from Windows and didn't lose any momentum.
The issue Apple faces is that they've always had this small but devoted group of people to sell to. They could get away with software being done the way it was and at the quality level it was because they knew their core contingent would lap it up. And they did. But it likely left them with software that was difficult to maintain and lacking in features which would be difficult to add to the existing code.
Take Microsoft, for instance. By all accounts, the source code for the Office products is a fucking nightmare for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the need to maintain compatibility with all of the documents already out there (and we know they don't always get that right either). The story goes that a several years ago they tried to rewrite everything from scratch while maintaining compatibility with existing documents. It was called Project Pyramid or Triangle or something. It was a disaster and after years of work and millions of dollars it was canceled. Fortunately they had continued to work on the regular Office suite so they still had something to ship (no Netscape level mistake made) but they simply had too much code in use by too many people to merit changing it. Look what happened when they tried to redo large portions of Windows - Vista was the result and it was a disaster that's kept a lot of the world on XP to this day.
Apple has their iWork suite and they realized with as many people getting Macs these days, and with Microsoft for a long time refusing to upgrade Office for Mac, if they were ever going to redo the code base now would be the time. Now, before millions more people use it and maybe make it part of their workflow. Same as Final Cut Pro. Thing is they don't know which features are really being used and which ones aren't so they come out with basic versions missing those features and when people complain that Thing X is missing, they put it back in.
It's true that the killing of Apeture is becaue they're not interested in the pseudo-pro photogtapher scene but I think that their other recent maneuvers with software are because if they want code that is long term maintainable, now would be the time to do it, before tons of other people use it and then they're stuck.
As for the DJ's and the cables, I would think anyone who wants to use a Mac professionally would know to get something other than the new MB. Its likely neither the most durable or portable Mac (11" MBA probably has it beat on portability) but its worth noting that if you have AppleCare (yes, an added expense) they'll replace broken cables for free just by bringing them to the store. Not an option if there's not an Apple store in the area but as a counter point to the "they make the cables crap so you have to buy new ones" argument, they'll replace your worn out cables for free under AppleCare.
decent price? 16 bucks for a re-re-release on a system where you can emulate the original or probably the re-release too.
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's worthless. They spent a lot of time and money making a 3D version of the game for the DS, which they released for $30 and sold a ton of. The iOS version has better graphics and a higher resolution and they charged $16, just over half of what the DS version cost. And you're still complaining.
baldurs gate enhanced edition ios is 9.99$.
Baldur's Gate is $9.99 on iOS because it's on sale. Its normal price is $19.99. Baldur's Gate II is normally $24.99. I know because I bought both at those prices. Also, they sort of suck on touch devices. And even if I'm wrong and they're both $9.99 because the price has permanently dropped it just proves my point that cheap people like yourself drove the price down to such a level that the only reason the games are profitable is because they're 17 years old and only the porting costs need to be covered. But you can fucking forget about new games of that depth coming out.
But thanks for proving my point about how mobile gaming drives prices down to the point where the only good RPG's are going to be ports of ancient games. Enjoy your F2P hell you've created.
The days of selling "kiddie" handhelds with QVGA screens and $40 games are numbered.
God I hope not. Mobile gaming is nice and all but it's a race to the bottom. Every game has to be $0.99 or free, and IAP tied to gameplay (just 5 more moves for $0.99!). This is why there's nothing of any depth in mobile gaming. No one is going to sink millions into an RPG on an iPhone. Square has tried to charge decent prices for their games (like $15.99 for FF3) and no one buys them.
A lot of 3DS games are really good and it's because you can charge $40/pop for them and make a profit. Heck, the stupid AR games that come built into the 3DS are better games than 90% of the stuff on the iPhone.
I agree with your premise that dippy little games on Mobile with Mario will get the kids interested in Nintendo and hopefully pick up a Nintendo system but man I really hope that portable consoles and $40/game pricetags don't go away because otherwise everything is going to be a F2P mess.
People who think portable gaming on the 3DS is in any way analogous to modern Mobile games has no idea what they're talking about. Hopefully the market is large enough to carry both.
Look, I don't give a fuck what you, some sleazy corporate lawyer, or some crooked, bought-off government thinks my "rights" should be, or what rights they think should be privileges.
So... no laws for you then, I guess?
I'll do what I see as right, and that's that.
And the rest of us should just hope you're some upstanding citizen, I suppose?
If some shitbag corp exec makes a decision that legally but unethically screws me, I'll look for a quick way to screw them right back.
Ah, vigilante I see. You're a regular digital Robin Hood.
This system is broken, and going through what's considered proper channels is extremely time-consuming, expensive, and rigged against you.
Are we still talking about region lockouts? Because it sounds like you're trying to take on City Hall or something.
This means you have to take things into your own hands if you want even a minute amount of justice.
Justice? Look just don't buy a CD key from a shady site and you'll be fine.
Seriously, you're acting like some white knight when really you're some jerkoff on Slashdot who wanted Far Cry 4 for $3 or something.
But let me guess, when that shady site then uses your credit card to buy CD keys in bulk from Origin for resale to other suckers you'll want that "system" to protect you and fix things, right?
Valve did this same thing in 2007 with keys to The Orange Box bought from Thailand, which were considerably cheaper. They were very up front about it, they showed the Thai box packaging which clearly stated in English that this was not to be used outside of Thailand, etc.
There was a bit of blowback, and some hemming and hawing like we're seeing here, but ultimately it wasn't a big deal. Whether or not you agree with it, most people knew they were basically cheating by buying a cheap key from a shady foreign website, and they got busted for it (although they weren't out much money because, you know, cheap)
Honestly, when you're buying software you have to agree to the terms or else you don't buy it and you don't get to have it. Yes, if you think this is a dick move from Ubisoft then you're perfectly within your rights to avoid buying their products anymore. But don't think that they're the only ones who do this. Or have the right/ability to do this. And don't think this gives you some sort of right to pirate their games. Or that they had better give you what you want or else you'll pirate their games. You're wrong.
There are numerous examples of people writing apps that do something you're not supposed to do in code but it happens to work, or that use something that's depreciated but hasn't been removed from the OS. When the OS upgrades and the code that was written incorrectly stops working, or when the new OS drops the depreciated functionality, the app breaks. It happens. It comes with the territory of having a computer in your pocket. Your old flip phone never had these issues but it was also never upgraded and couldn't do fuckall compared to a smart phone.
I personally had a perfectly fine iOS app I was working on that completely motherfucking broke, layout-wise, in iOS 8's SDK. In studying how to fix it I realized I had been doing a whole bunch of shit wrong and once I got those things fixed it worked great.
Apps breaking and the original author abandoning them is an issue but thems the breaks on a rapidly changing platform.
"My friend believes in evolution and I need to convince him that the world was created by God in a week. What arguments can I use to convince them to see the Light?"
Not the same exact thing but can you see why trying to back up your confirmation bias can be asinine?
And now you're telling me that Swift -- which is essentially a tweaked Obj-C -- is "the biggest new language in a long time"? You can't even USE the language to program on anything other than OS X and iOS!
So, one of the most popular platforms on the planet (Apple is going to sell 71 million iPhones this quarter alone) isn't significant? Also when you say that it's a "tweaked Obj-C" that shows you have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not seeing it, man. If a single popular smartphone and 10% desktop OS market share were enough for a language to piggyback off of to mainstream adoption, Objective C would be mainstream for cross-platform development. And it's not.
I like how you cite a number for OS X but not for iOS.
One last thing? Apple's only the "world's biggest company" because it overcharges for all its shit products, and stupid people don't see what a bad deal they're getting. In importance to the programming community, they're well below Google and Microsoft. Don't believe me? Take a look at C#'s popularity versus Obj-C.
Wow, where to begin. First you try and poison the well by saying that yes, Apple is the world's biggest company but only because they charge money. For their "shit products" no less. However, iOS is sitting at 44% market share which is #2 only to Android at 47%. But Android is only at 47% because it's on everything from high end Samsung devices to the crappy devices you can get at the checkout line at your local grocery store. Your disdain is for a company whose OS is only #2 to an OS that literally built its empire on "shit products".
But that's not the best part. The best part is that your example of a well done programming language is C#. I love C#. I've made my living in C# for close to a decade. It's a fantastic language. It is also, like Swift, a proprietary language designed by one company for their own proprietary OS. That's your yardstick. Yes, there is an always-behind implementation by the open source community but it's also a language that's over ten years old, as opposed to Swift which is literally six months old come Monday.
Again, this is a new, modern programming language introduced by the biggest company on earth for one of the biggest platforms on the planet and the uptake on it is unprecedented. C# didn't experience uptake this quickly because Microsoft had to explain what.NET was. Java didn't grow this fast because people thought it was used to make flashing thingies on websites. Swift has the advantage of a mature Internet age (the official guide is an eBook, not even a printed book, which Apple can patch as need be) and it's being unleashed onto a developer community starving for a better language.
I've been doing Obj-C for a few years now and I'm using Swift in a new project.
Swift all the way, mainly because Swift is just a much nicer language. Obj-C has a bizarre late 80's syntax which is not found anywhere else so it's very strange. Except for random places where it's not. There was a half-assed "Objective-C 2.0" which introduced dot notation but not everywhere or consistently. There's tons of things you can do with it that are unsafe and shouldn't work (found out a lot in translating some Obj-C code to Swift)
There's still going to be a bunch of Cocoa stuff to mess with (i.e., there's no intrinsic date concept so you have to mess with NSDate) but at this point learning Objective-C is a waste of time. At best you will have a few more online resources to consult with versus Swift but Swift is the biggest new language in a long time - a language designed by the biggest company on earth for one of the most popular platforms on the planet. The uptake is more or less unprecedented.
Anyone who prefers Obj-C just doesn't want to learn something new. Apple didn't invent a new language because of hipness reasons, they did it because their platforms are saddled with this shitty language which is missing modern conventions and is difficult to learn and use.
but is there any reason to not have windows that simply rotate 180 degrees so that they can be cleaned from the inside?
Fifty or more floors up the wind flying through would be enough to usurp anything in your office not nailed down.
You would have to design office spaces such that window washers would be able to get in and clean the windows which is tricky and messy especially given a lot of windows go to people who have offices with locked doors.
There's probably a ton of architectural issues involved with a building where very high up you could potentially have openings on a regular basis. One day one of the revolving windows doesn't close right and Susie from accounting trips and falls and lands on the improperly closed window and falls to her death.
A stock trader on a bad day knows the window can be opened so he jumps to his death
This is something a lot of smart people have thought about for decades and the end result is no, there's not a better way. But let's not stop a bunch of computer engineers on Slashdot from thinking they have a better solution after a couple of minutes brainstorming.
The second person you're referring to does not have Ebola. The deputy did not come in contact with the patient.
The patient was not at home when he went in to the apartment.
The family of the patient was home but they were not showing symptoms (still aren't) and so they could not have spread the disease even if they have it.
Ebola is not an airborne virus so a facemask would have been pointless.
Basically you're a moron and the fact that you're doing so on a site famous for science facts and propagating the truth is just sad.
My take on OpenArena was based largely on this comment from last year which reads in part:
I had done all the work necessary to update the OpenArena port to the latest version at the time, and then played "follow the patchlevels cause their dev practices suck" for several more versions. I edited their wiki, writing out directions for getting the game running from source on FreeBSD, which was pretty easy to do...Which they promptly deleted and said, "just use the Linux version."
When I was working on the port I asked them repeatedly what the build deps were and such...They didn't know. They generally just banged on it and installed stuff until OA built and ran. Never once did they actually document what it took to build the game. They were truly representative of the kids-table level of QA/RE that seems to be commonplace in the small-project OSS development community at large. How many times did they make a major release, followed quickly by several patches to fix minor oversights that resulted in major problems and could have been avoided with checklist of "what to check before we release?"
The person who you reference, Time Doctor, who heads up the ioquake3 project, is the polar opposite: someone who's probably done more for Linux gaming than just about every other developer combined. Also, the original posted said he had to switch to using ioquake3's code for the FreeBSD port because of the OA assholes.
The experience of working with the OpenArena project was similar to that described by HEMI_426. At this point they have cut off communication with us and I would be surprised, but happy, if that relationship ever improves.
So, now we are attempting to create our own freely distributable, creative commons licensed, game to distribute whenever anyone downloads ioquake3 that won't be "adults only" and won't have anything to do with OpenArena's direction.
Time Doctor is widely credited as being the "go to" person if you want to make a Linux port of your game and don't know how. He's personally responsible for the Humble Bundle having Linux games, which is one of the biggest catalyst for the recent surge in Linux gaming and may have led to SteamOS.
Your AC hit and run bashing makes me wonder if you're part of the OA project, which if true basically means that no, it hasn't changed.
I'm a Quake Live Pro subscriber (got a year as part of a QuakeCon package) and I've been playing Quake 3, then Quake Live, since 1999 when it was released.
I'm sure the hardest of the hardcore players will find something to complain about but really, the changes are fine. If the changes attract a lot of new players at the expense of the old guard then fine, the game will be better for it in the long run. The real test will be when the game hits Steam soon and a critical mass of people will have access to it. And like even the article points out - there's still a way to play the old way, and the most popular mode - duels - is unchanged.
And really, the original Quake 3 game has been open source for nine years now, if the old guard really wants to all you would need to do is make a version that uses Quake 3's assets but adds a matchmaking system or a server browser that's up to 2014 standards. To some extent that's what the original goal of Quake Live was, whether or not it ever achieved that is debatable but I know I can fire up QL and be in a game I like in less than a minute. If you think you can do better, go for it.
And as I write that it occurs to me that this is to some extent what the OpenArena project was supposed to be about but nine years in all we have is a dodgy 0.8 release and a core group of developers who are reportedly representative of the absolute worst qualities of the open source movement (slow to release, hostile to newcomers, actively sabotaging any FOSS ports that aren't Linux, etc.). So to some extent people who did think they could do better (albeit slightly different aims - OA wants to not rely on Q3 assets) have tried and not really gotten much of anywhere with it.
Perhaps just recompiling it against the latest SDK (still targeting 4.0 or whatever) would be sufficient.
I'd say have some sort of "hey are you still there?" email from Apple but making sure you can still compile the thing and re-submit it would be enough of a barrier that people with the Justin Bieber Slideshow apps wouldn't bother with.
App doesn't compile in the latest SDK? Well you better get on that. Don't like it? Go to a non-curated platform.
Well and I say maxed out but there's other factors like screen resolution. If you were willing to ratchet down to 1024x768 you could probably beef up a rig of the era to handle max settings. Plus this may have been before widescreen had really taken off so there was only 4:3 to worry with.
Also, define "ran fine" - ran at max settings at 60fps with no stuttering or framerate drops? It definitely ran acceptable in some configurations on release but no one could max it out at a high resolution on day one.
But yeah that was a new idea at the time - the idea of a game being so graphically advanced that it outstripped the hardware of the era. It was always a thing that so long as you had the beefiest system then any game on the market could run perfectly. Games like Quake 3 just gracefully added features like curved surfaces when it was possible to do so. Crysis and ports like GTA4 were the first to say "no your shit still can't run the max".
To some degree it was about the messaging (had the mode been labeled "extreme" instead of "high" it might not have bothered the high end people so much) but really I think the initial issue was that the demo they released proved to everyone that it ate shit on their system. I had a 7800GT (I think) and even at the lowest settings it was crap.
As much as I like the Crysis games and Crytek's work in general, I've got a little schadenfreude going on because they were kinda pretentious dicks a few years back when they switched to console development.
For a recap: they came out with Crysis (the first one) in 2007, and it didn't sell as much as they wanted it to. They blamed piracy. I'm sure the game was pirated, probably a lot, but I don't think that's why it wasn't selling like they wanted it to. It wasn't selling like they wanted it to because it was released at a time when PC's weren't powerful enough to run it. By which I mean, in 2007 when it launched it was literally impossible to run it at the best settings. Like, it was impossible to build a PC that could run it at max settings at a high resolution at a high framerate.
And people knew this because they released a demo. You got a first hand look at how this game was going to turn your PC into a slideshow. So people didn't buy the game because they knew they didn't have the pipe to smoke it. Releasing a demo probably hurt Crysis' initial sales.
And this wasn't unforeseen - in the runup to the game's release people expressed surprise that EA, who had been all about cross platform development or cutting off the PC, here they were releasing a game just for the PC which a lot of people couldn't run.
So, the game didn't sell either because of system requirements or piracy or both. And again, I'm not saying the game wasn't pirated, I'm just saying that Crytek claimed this was the only reason it wasn't selling, and in no possible way could it be linked to the fact that they released a game which just told every PC owner on earth their system wasn't good enough.
That's not the real dick part to me though. The real dick part was when the CEO said their "proof" of piracy was that the patch for the game was downloaded more times than the copies of the games that had been sold.
OK, think way back to 2007. Hard as it is to believe, Crysis wasn't on Steam. Back then it wasn't a given that your PC game would be on Steam. Consider Fallout 3 was released in 2008 on disc-only, no digital services at all, and had GFWL baked in. Two years after that Fallout: New Vegas launches as a Steamworks title on Steam on day one, no GFWL in sight. The switch was quick but in 2007 it hadn't happened yet.
So by that logic when Crytek released a patch for Crysis, people had to go manually download it. So I can see a shred of logic to the idea that if more people are downloading the patch than buying the game then some number of pirated copies are getting patched.
The thing is, the statement doesn't make sense. How many more times are we talking here? I know back then I personally downloaded the patches a few times, usually after I would format and reinstall the game (this being before Steam made that sort of unneccessary). If the patch was downloaded 10x as much then you might have a point. But how do you even know how many times it was downloaded? The file was mirrored everywhere (I think FilePlanet still existed, etc.) did you add up all the downloads? Do all those services even give download numbers? Why are you not providing more evidence for your case?
Crytek's CEO also lamented how the Call Of Duty games were selling more copies. At the time, Crysis had sold less than a million copies whereas the CoD game of the year had sold ten million. The CoD games which had the advantage of being on consoles as well. Disregarding the fact that Crysis would hit the 1M mark soon (and according to Wikipedia has sold over 3M overall as of 2010), the CoD game sold better due to better marketing and just generally being a better game.
To be fair this was that dark era in PC gaming of the console games selling 9-10x their PC counterparts, to the point where some developers wanted to drop the PC entirely. However, if Cryek wanted to get into console gaming just do it, don't give us some sort of "you're all horrible software pirates" argument on your way
Re:the problem is not coding, but coding well.
on
'Just Let Me Code!'
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· Score: 0
Anyone can write software
No they can't.
If you switched me with a sales guy I could do the sales guy's job on a technical level. I could talk to people, I could make calls, I could ask for money. I couldn't do it nearly as well as the sales guy and I'm an antisocial introvert so I'm all wrong for the job on a proficiency level but I could do their job, albeit poorly.
The sales guy can't do my job at all. He wouldn't know an IDE from his own ass. He has no idea how to write code. He sure as fuck doesn't know how to interface with COM objects or write cross platform code or perform code signing to get apps to run on mobile devices. Not "I can do it but not do it well", he can't do it at all. Not even halfass.
This isn't me trying to say programmers are special snowflakes, this is me saying that programming is fundamentally more difficult than anything normal people do, and most normal people don't actually want anything to do with it, which is why you often hear "hire a programmer" and not "learn how to program"
So with all due respect, no not just "anyone" can write software.
The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon's live tech support service for devices.
I haven't experienced it myself but when I see the Amazon Kindle Fire commercials where they demonstrate you can talk to a live Amazon person to help you use your tablet, my first thought was "that would be great for my parents", especially since it would lessen the number of calls I would get from them on how to do something with their technology device du jour.
You would think that something locked down like an iOS device wouldn't lend itself to needing this kind of tech support help, but in certain areas - especially phone calls - there's a certain level of resistance to technology complexity with the older crowd. It sounds like I'm being mean with regards to age but I have known several older people over the last few years who went out and bought an iPhone because it was the new shiny thing and then took it back because they couldn't figure out how to use it or didn't like how complicated it made things. As much as it makes perfect sense to you and I that the phone is a more generalized computing device nowadays and wanting to make a phone call is basically launching a program, the older set knows that you used to just open the fucking thing and start dialing.
I'm not sure if the Fire Phone will make all that better (in particular I can almost guarantee my parents in particular would fucking hate the 3D screen thing) but I do think perhaps there's an untapped market out there for people who want a less-smartphone. After all, isn't that basically what "locked down" Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and the Nook are? Google, Apple and Microsoft are all trying to outdo each other on technical whiz-bang, and this entry from Amazon doesn't seem to impress the Slashdot crowd at all. Maybe this one is for our parents?
Or state very clearly (not in the fine print) that said device or software will likely cease to work past some date, but is guaranteed to work until that date.
They have done exactly that for many many years.
Look at the back of the Battlefield 1942 box - the game was released in September 2002 and it states that they only guarantee it can be played online until September 2003. This isn't in the fine print, it's on the back of the package like you said it should be, so that you can read it before you buy the game.
This caused quite a stink back in 2002 because people thought it meant that they absolutely would cause the games to stop working at that time but really EA was just covering their ass because they had been sued already by people who didn't get that Ultima Online required a subscription fee because it wasn't spelled out on the box well enough
Instead, EA has supported online for BF1942 through GameSpy for close to 12 years now. And you think they're assholes for going way beyond what they promised and don't release source code. And your other suggested fix is exactly what they did over a decade ago when they fucking released the game but you're too goddamn stupid to know what you're talking about.
My first gig out of college was for the same University I graduated from, and I worked on a mainframe doing COBOL programming, and some scripting in a proprietary language called NATURAL which I've never seen used anywhere else, ever.
One project I was handed was to update the 1098-T form. It's basically the IRS tax form for tuition writeoffs. Every year we had to produce a 1098-T form for every student which basically detailed what they paid in tuition. Every year the form was a little different (of course) so every year our generation program had to be updated.
What I got handed was basically a program which drew the form and then printed the data on the correct parts of the form. And when I saw drew the form, I don't mean we had a PDF or JPEG or whatever of the form, we actually recreated the form with whatever bog standard graphics package we used. Like, you would literally say go to (X1,Y1) and draw a line to (X2,Y2), then a line from (X2,Y2) to (X3,Y3), etc. It was like programming in LOGO, but for a legal purpose and without the cool turtles.
This doesn't sound like such a big deal, and it wasn't too bad, but what was tedious was the fact that you would program all this in, then run the program against a single fake student's data, and then you headed to the printer. The printer, in this case was the print room and it was three floors down and a few hallways away. Then you waited for the printout. Which would print as soon as anyone else's job who was in (virtual) line in front of you was done. The time it took to accomplish this was basically random.
And when you found out whatever small change you made didn't work, had the wrong effect, got the numbers backwards, etc. you got to do this all over again. Make small change, compile, run, wait hour(s) for result, lather, rinse, repeat. All with no GUI, no preview, no nothing. Oh, and the program I had, comparing the form printed last year to the actual 1098-T form from the IRS' site was not a 1:1 recreation - it had basically the same info as the source form but it wasn't a dead-on match. I'm guessing this was good enough for the IRS, and either no one had ever bothered to make this thing picture perfect, or the motivation to do so got lost along the way. Lord knows I wasn't going to do it either.
Over time of course you started to average out how long it took to get the printout and you'd wait at least that long before going to get it. And of course this wasn't anywhere near as bad as "come back tomorrow to see if it worked", but that whole process sucked and I don't miss that job at all.
Oh, and this was in ~2002 or so. I didn't really want to be a mainframe programmer but I had little experience in a shitty economy and I was told/promised that they'd be moving to an "all new web-based system within the next six months". When I quit two and a half years later to move to a better gig, it was still "within the next six months". I learned a lot from that job, I guess.
Look, I get that we're all getting older and that there's traditionally been something of an age bias in IT but can we please stop having a "hey am I too old do be doing programming?" story every fucking week?
No you're not too old. Yes you might have a harder time finding work at your age (whatever age it is) but there's so many other factors (choice of technologies, state of local technology scene where you're at, whether or not you have people/hygiene skills) that no one can really say what it is. Yes you have commitments and debt and maybe a wife and kids and the fresh kids out of college just have those to look forward to. But come the fuck on.
There's basically two things people worry about - is your age causing you to lose job opportunities and is your age making your mind slower/worse/etc. If you're asking for an absolute answer to either then it's no. We've established this over and over and over. There are just as many jobs out there looking for fresh faced kids as there are looking for seasoned professionals. The reason that the game industry, with its cutting edge technology, is mostly young people is not because young people's minds are more amenable to cutting edge technologies, but because the game industry overworks, under pays, and generally churns through most of its non-Carmack-level talent and causes people to switch to mundane business rules programming for 2x the salary and 100x the stability.
Now can we please move on to something important like whether or not Bitcoins cause Libertarians to commit suicide?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you missed it but they did exactly that.
Creator of removed paid Skyrim mod gives his side of the story
Basically Valve contacted him and several other high profile mod authors over a month and a half ago to participate in the rollout. In this particular case, the Art of the Catch mod (adds fishing to Skyrim, I think, I haven't tried it) needed some files from another mod to run, or it had a dependency, or both. Valve told him their legal team thought it would be OK but that the author should consult a lawyer on his own. He didn't, and many butts got hurt over the result.
But your assertion, that they did this with no notice to anyone, least of all the high profile modders, is wrong. They did exactly that.
It's worth pointing out that Time Warner Cable is, confusingly, not owned by Time Warner Inc. It used to be, of course, and for some reason it still has the name (likely some sort of obligation with an expiration date) but since 2009 it's been an independent company.
It's resulted in some asinine incidents, like how TWC for a while could not use HBO Go even though Time Warner proper owns HBO.
You make some good points but there's one thing I think is going on and is worth pointing out.
Apple is in an interesting spot at the moment in that, due to the sheer popularity of just about everything they make, they're selling more Macs now than ever before. People are switching to Macs more now than ever did during that "I'm a Mac" campaign. It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but my wife switched to OS X from Windows and didn't lose any momentum.
The issue Apple faces is that they've always had this small but devoted group of people to sell to. They could get away with software being done the way it was and at the quality level it was because they knew their core contingent would lap it up. And they did. But it likely left them with software that was difficult to maintain and lacking in features which would be difficult to add to the existing code.
Take Microsoft, for instance. By all accounts, the source code for the Office products is a fucking nightmare for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the need to maintain compatibility with all of the documents already out there (and we know they don't always get that right either). The story goes that a several years ago they tried to rewrite everything from scratch while maintaining compatibility with existing documents. It was called Project Pyramid or Triangle or something. It was a disaster and after years of work and millions of dollars it was canceled. Fortunately they had continued to work on the regular Office suite so they still had something to ship (no Netscape level mistake made) but they simply had too much code in use by too many people to merit changing it. Look what happened when they tried to redo large portions of Windows - Vista was the result and it was a disaster that's kept a lot of the world on XP to this day.
Apple has their iWork suite and they realized with as many people getting Macs these days, and with Microsoft for a long time refusing to upgrade Office for Mac, if they were ever going to redo the code base now would be the time. Now, before millions more people use it and maybe make it part of their workflow. Same as Final Cut Pro. Thing is they don't know which features are really being used and which ones aren't so they come out with basic versions missing those features and when people complain that Thing X is missing, they put it back in.
It's true that the killing of Apeture is becaue they're not interested in the pseudo-pro photogtapher scene but I think that their other recent maneuvers with software are because if they want code that is long term maintainable, now would be the time to do it, before tons of other people use it and then they're stuck.
As for the DJ's and the cables, I would think anyone who wants to use a Mac professionally would know to get something other than the new MB. Its likely neither the most durable or portable Mac (11" MBA probably has it beat on portability) but its worth noting that if you have AppleCare (yes, an added expense) they'll replace broken cables for free just by bringing them to the store. Not an option if there's not an Apple store in the area but as a counter point to the "they make the cables crap so you have to buy new ones" argument, they'll replace your worn out cables for free under AppleCare.
Where in the hell did you get that idea?
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's worthless. They spent a lot of time and money making a 3D version of the game for the DS, which they released for $30 and sold a ton of. The iOS version has better graphics and a higher resolution and they charged $16, just over half of what the DS version cost. And you're still complaining.
Baldur's Gate is $9.99 on iOS because it's on sale. Its normal price is $19.99. Baldur's Gate II is normally $24.99. I know because I bought both at those prices. Also, they sort of suck on touch devices. And even if I'm wrong and they're both $9.99 because the price has permanently dropped it just proves my point that cheap people like yourself drove the price down to such a level that the only reason the games are profitable is because they're 17 years old and only the porting costs need to be covered. But you can fucking forget about new games of that depth coming out.
But thanks for proving my point about how mobile gaming drives prices down to the point where the only good RPG's are going to be ports of ancient games. Enjoy your F2P hell you've created.
God I hope not. Mobile gaming is nice and all but it's a race to the bottom. Every game has to be $0.99 or free, and IAP tied to gameplay (just 5 more moves for $0.99!). This is why there's nothing of any depth in mobile gaming. No one is going to sink millions into an RPG on an iPhone. Square has tried to charge decent prices for their games (like $15.99 for FF3) and no one buys them.
A lot of 3DS games are really good and it's because you can charge $40/pop for them and make a profit. Heck, the stupid AR games that come built into the 3DS are better games than 90% of the stuff on the iPhone.
I agree with your premise that dippy little games on Mobile with Mario will get the kids interested in Nintendo and hopefully pick up a Nintendo system but man I really hope that portable consoles and $40/game pricetags don't go away because otherwise everything is going to be a F2P mess.
People who think portable gaming on the 3DS is in any way analogous to modern Mobile games has no idea what they're talking about. Hopefully the market is large enough to carry both.
Says the coward.
So... no laws for you then, I guess?
And the rest of us should just hope you're some upstanding citizen, I suppose?
Ah, vigilante I see. You're a regular digital Robin Hood.
Are we still talking about region lockouts? Because it sounds like you're trying to take on City Hall or something.
Justice? Look just don't buy a CD key from a shady site and you'll be fine.
Seriously, you're acting like some white knight when really you're some jerkoff on Slashdot who wanted Far Cry 4 for $3 or something.
But let me guess, when that shady site then uses your credit card to buy CD keys in bulk from Origin for resale to other suckers you'll want that "system" to protect you and fix things, right?
You're pathetic.
Valve did this same thing in 2007 with keys to The Orange Box bought from Thailand, which were considerably cheaper. They were very up front about it, they showed the Thai box packaging which clearly stated in English that this was not to be used outside of Thailand, etc.
There was a bit of blowback, and some hemming and hawing like we're seeing here, but ultimately it wasn't a big deal. Whether or not you agree with it, most people knew they were basically cheating by buying a cheap key from a shady foreign website, and they got busted for it (although they weren't out much money because, you know, cheap)
Honestly, when you're buying software you have to agree to the terms or else you don't buy it and you don't get to have it. Yes, if you think this is a dick move from Ubisoft then you're perfectly within your rights to avoid buying their products anymore. But don't think that they're the only ones who do this. Or have the right/ability to do this. And don't think this gives you some sort of right to pirate their games. Or that they had better give you what you want or else you'll pirate their games. You're wrong.
There are numerous examples of people writing apps that do something you're not supposed to do in code but it happens to work, or that use something that's depreciated but hasn't been removed from the OS. When the OS upgrades and the code that was written incorrectly stops working, or when the new OS drops the depreciated functionality, the app breaks. It happens. It comes with the territory of having a computer in your pocket. Your old flip phone never had these issues but it was also never upgraded and couldn't do fuckall compared to a smart phone.
I personally had a perfectly fine iOS app I was working on that completely motherfucking broke, layout-wise, in iOS 8's SDK. In studying how to fix it I realized I had been doing a whole bunch of shit wrong and once I got those things fixed it worked great.
Apps breaking and the original author abandoning them is an issue but thems the breaks on a rapidly changing platform.
"My friend believes in evolution and I need to convince him that the world was created by God in a week. What arguments can I use to convince them to see the Light?"
Not the same exact thing but can you see why trying to back up your confirmation bias can be asinine?
Suddenly becoming one of the fastest growing programming languages in use and making several top ten lists isn't terribly impressive? Ok...
So, one of the most popular platforms on the planet (Apple is going to sell 71 million iPhones this quarter alone) isn't significant? Also when you say that it's a "tweaked Obj-C" that shows you have no idea what you're talking about.
I like how you cite a number for OS X but not for iOS.
Wow, where to begin. First you try and poison the well by saying that yes, Apple is the world's biggest company but only because they charge money. For their "shit products" no less. However, iOS is sitting at 44% market share which is #2 only to Android at 47%. But Android is only at 47% because it's on everything from high end Samsung devices to the crappy devices you can get at the checkout line at your local grocery store. Your disdain is for a company whose OS is only #2 to an OS that literally built its empire on "shit products".
.NET was. Java didn't grow this fast because people thought it was used to make flashing thingies on websites. Swift has the advantage of a mature Internet age (the official guide is an eBook, not even a printed book, which Apple can patch as need be) and it's being unleashed onto a developer community starving for a better language.
But that's not the best part. The best part is that your example of a well done programming language is C#. I love C#. I've made my living in C# for close to a decade. It's a fantastic language. It is also, like Swift, a proprietary language designed by one company for their own proprietary OS. That's your yardstick. Yes, there is an always-behind implementation by the open source community but it's also a language that's over ten years old, as opposed to Swift which is literally six months old come Monday.
Again, this is a new, modern programming language introduced by the biggest company on earth for one of the biggest platforms on the planet and the uptake on it is unprecedented. C# didn't experience uptake this quickly because Microsoft had to explain what
I've been doing Obj-C for a few years now and I'm using Swift in a new project.
Swift all the way, mainly because Swift is just a much nicer language. Obj-C has a bizarre late 80's syntax which is not found anywhere else so it's very strange. Except for random places where it's not. There was a half-assed "Objective-C 2.0" which introduced dot notation but not everywhere or consistently. There's tons of things you can do with it that are unsafe and shouldn't work (found out a lot in translating some Obj-C code to Swift)
There's still going to be a bunch of Cocoa stuff to mess with (i.e., there's no intrinsic date concept so you have to mess with NSDate) but at this point learning Objective-C is a waste of time. At best you will have a few more online resources to consult with versus Swift but Swift is the biggest new language in a long time - a language designed by the biggest company on earth for one of the most popular platforms on the planet. The uptake is more or less unprecedented.
Anyone who prefers Obj-C just doesn't want to learn something new. Apple didn't invent a new language because of hipness reasons, they did it because their platforms are saddled with this shitty language which is missing modern conventions and is difficult to learn and use.
Just use Swift.
Fifty or more floors up the wind flying through would be enough to usurp anything in your office not nailed down.
You would have to design office spaces such that window washers would be able to get in and clean the windows which is tricky and messy especially given a lot of windows go to people who have offices with locked doors.
There's probably a ton of architectural issues involved with a building where very high up you could potentially have openings on a regular basis. One day one of the revolving windows doesn't close right and Susie from accounting trips and falls and lands on the improperly closed window and falls to her death.
A stock trader on a bad day knows the window can be opened so he jumps to his death
This is something a lot of smart people have thought about for decades and the end result is no, there's not a better way. But let's not stop a bunch of computer engineers on Slashdot from thinking they have a better solution after a couple of minutes brainstorming.
The second person you're referring to does not have Ebola. The deputy did not come in contact with the patient.
The patient was not at home when he went in to the apartment.
The family of the patient was home but they were not showing symptoms (still aren't) and so they could not have spread the disease even if they have it.
Ebola is not an airborne virus so a facemask would have been pointless.
Basically you're a moron and the fact that you're doing so on a site famous for science facts and propagating the truth is just sad.
My take on OpenArena was based largely on this comment from last year which reads in part:
The person who you reference, Time Doctor, who heads up the ioquake3 project, is the polar opposite: someone who's probably done more for Linux gaming than just about every other developer combined. Also, the original posted said he had to switch to using ioquake3's code for the FreeBSD port because of the OA assholes.
Time Doctor posted a follow-up comment:
Time Doctor is widely credited as being the "go to" person if you want to make a Linux port of your game and don't know how. He's personally responsible for the Humble Bundle having Linux games, which is one of the biggest catalyst for the recent surge in Linux gaming and may have led to SteamOS.
Your AC hit and run bashing makes me wonder if you're part of the OA project, which if true basically means that no, it hasn't changed.
I'm a Quake Live Pro subscriber (got a year as part of a QuakeCon package) and I've been playing Quake 3, then Quake Live, since 1999 when it was released.
I'm sure the hardest of the hardcore players will find something to complain about but really, the changes are fine. If the changes attract a lot of new players at the expense of the old guard then fine, the game will be better for it in the long run. The real test will be when the game hits Steam soon and a critical mass of people will have access to it. And like even the article points out - there's still a way to play the old way, and the most popular mode - duels - is unchanged.
And really, the original Quake 3 game has been open source for nine years now, if the old guard really wants to all you would need to do is make a version that uses Quake 3's assets but adds a matchmaking system or a server browser that's up to 2014 standards. To some extent that's what the original goal of Quake Live was, whether or not it ever achieved that is debatable but I know I can fire up QL and be in a game I like in less than a minute. If you think you can do better, go for it.
And as I write that it occurs to me that this is to some extent what the OpenArena project was supposed to be about but nine years in all we have is a dodgy 0.8 release and a core group of developers who are reportedly representative of the absolute worst qualities of the open source movement (slow to release, hostile to newcomers, actively sabotaging any FOSS ports that aren't Linux, etc.). So to some extent people who did think they could do better (albeit slightly different aims - OA wants to not rely on Q3 assets) have tried and not really gotten much of anywhere with it.
Perhaps just recompiling it against the latest SDK (still targeting 4.0 or whatever) would be sufficient.
I'd say have some sort of "hey are you still there?" email from Apple but making sure you can still compile the thing and re-submit it would be enough of a barrier that people with the Justin Bieber Slideshow apps wouldn't bother with.
App doesn't compile in the latest SDK? Well you better get on that. Don't like it? Go to a non-curated platform.
Just an idea.
Well then they sucked in that area, too, since most of the games that use the engine are their own games.
Well and I say maxed out but there's other factors like screen resolution. If you were willing to ratchet down to 1024x768 you could probably beef up a rig of the era to handle max settings. Plus this may have been before widescreen had really taken off so there was only 4:3 to worry with.
Also, define "ran fine" - ran at max settings at 60fps with no stuttering or framerate drops? It definitely ran acceptable in some configurations on release but no one could max it out at a high resolution on day one.
But yeah that was a new idea at the time - the idea of a game being so graphically advanced that it outstripped the hardware of the era. It was always a thing that so long as you had the beefiest system then any game on the market could run perfectly. Games like Quake 3 just gracefully added features like curved surfaces when it was possible to do so. Crysis and ports like GTA4 were the first to say "no your shit still can't run the max".
To some degree it was about the messaging (had the mode been labeled "extreme" instead of "high" it might not have bothered the high end people so much) but really I think the initial issue was that the demo they released proved to everyone that it ate shit on their system. I had a 7800GT (I think) and even at the lowest settings it was crap.
As much as I like the Crysis games and Crytek's work in general, I've got a little schadenfreude going on because they were kinda pretentious dicks a few years back when they switched to console development.
For a recap: they came out with Crysis (the first one) in 2007, and it didn't sell as much as they wanted it to. They blamed piracy. I'm sure the game was pirated, probably a lot, but I don't think that's why it wasn't selling like they wanted it to. It wasn't selling like they wanted it to because it was released at a time when PC's weren't powerful enough to run it. By which I mean, in 2007 when it launched it was literally impossible to run it at the best settings. Like, it was impossible to build a PC that could run it at max settings at a high resolution at a high framerate.
And people knew this because they released a demo. You got a first hand look at how this game was going to turn your PC into a slideshow. So people didn't buy the game because they knew they didn't have the pipe to smoke it. Releasing a demo probably hurt Crysis' initial sales.
And this wasn't unforeseen - in the runup to the game's release people expressed surprise that EA, who had been all about cross platform development or cutting off the PC, here they were releasing a game just for the PC which a lot of people couldn't run.
So, the game didn't sell either because of system requirements or piracy or both. And again, I'm not saying the game wasn't pirated, I'm just saying that Crytek claimed this was the only reason it wasn't selling, and in no possible way could it be linked to the fact that they released a game which just told every PC owner on earth their system wasn't good enough.
That's not the real dick part to me though. The real dick part was when the CEO said their "proof" of piracy was that the patch for the game was downloaded more times than the copies of the games that had been sold.
OK, think way back to 2007. Hard as it is to believe, Crysis wasn't on Steam. Back then it wasn't a given that your PC game would be on Steam. Consider Fallout 3 was released in 2008 on disc-only, no digital services at all, and had GFWL baked in. Two years after that Fallout: New Vegas launches as a Steamworks title on Steam on day one, no GFWL in sight. The switch was quick but in 2007 it hadn't happened yet.
So by that logic when Crytek released a patch for Crysis, people had to go manually download it. So I can see a shred of logic to the idea that if more people are downloading the patch than buying the game then some number of pirated copies are getting patched.
The thing is, the statement doesn't make sense. How many more times are we talking here? I know back then I personally downloaded the patches a few times, usually after I would format and reinstall the game (this being before Steam made that sort of unneccessary). If the patch was downloaded 10x as much then you might have a point. But how do you even know how many times it was downloaded? The file was mirrored everywhere (I think FilePlanet still existed, etc.) did you add up all the downloads? Do all those services even give download numbers? Why are you not providing more evidence for your case?
Crytek's CEO also lamented how the Call Of Duty games were selling more copies. At the time, Crysis had sold less than a million copies whereas the CoD game of the year had sold ten million. The CoD games which had the advantage of being on consoles as well. Disregarding the fact that Crysis would hit the 1M mark soon (and according to Wikipedia has sold over 3M overall as of 2010), the CoD game sold better due to better marketing and just generally being a better game.
To be fair this was that dark era in PC gaming of the console games selling 9-10x their PC counterparts, to the point where some developers wanted to drop the PC entirely. However, if Cryek wanted to get into console gaming just do it, don't give us some sort of "you're all horrible software pirates" argument on your way
No they can't.
If you switched me with a sales guy I could do the sales guy's job on a technical level. I could talk to people, I could make calls, I could ask for money. I couldn't do it nearly as well as the sales guy and I'm an antisocial introvert so I'm all wrong for the job on a proficiency level but I could do their job, albeit poorly.
The sales guy can't do my job at all. He wouldn't know an IDE from his own ass. He has no idea how to write code. He sure as fuck doesn't know how to interface with COM objects or write cross platform code or perform code signing to get apps to run on mobile devices. Not "I can do it but not do it well", he can't do it at all. Not even halfass.
This isn't me trying to say programmers are special snowflakes, this is me saying that programming is fundamentally more difficult than anything normal people do, and most normal people don't actually want anything to do with it, which is why you often hear "hire a programmer" and not "learn how to program"
So with all due respect, no not just "anyone" can write software.
I haven't experienced it myself but when I see the Amazon Kindle Fire commercials where they demonstrate you can talk to a live Amazon person to help you use your tablet, my first thought was "that would be great for my parents", especially since it would lessen the number of calls I would get from them on how to do something with their technology device du jour.
You would think that something locked down like an iOS device wouldn't lend itself to needing this kind of tech support help, but in certain areas - especially phone calls - there's a certain level of resistance to technology complexity with the older crowd. It sounds like I'm being mean with regards to age but I have known several older people over the last few years who went out and bought an iPhone because it was the new shiny thing and then took it back because they couldn't figure out how to use it or didn't like how complicated it made things. As much as it makes perfect sense to you and I that the phone is a more generalized computing device nowadays and wanting to make a phone call is basically launching a program, the older set knows that you used to just open the fucking thing and start dialing.
I'm not sure if the Fire Phone will make all that better (in particular I can almost guarantee my parents in particular would fucking hate the 3D screen thing) but I do think perhaps there's an untapped market out there for people who want a less-smartphone. After all, isn't that basically what "locked down" Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and the Nook are? Google, Apple and Microsoft are all trying to outdo each other on technical whiz-bang, and this entry from Amazon doesn't seem to impress the Slashdot crowd at all. Maybe this one is for our parents?
They have done exactly that for many many years.
Look at the back of the Battlefield 1942 box - the game was released in September 2002 and it states that they only guarantee it can be played online until September 2003. This isn't in the fine print, it's on the back of the package like you said it should be, so that you can read it before you buy the game.
This caused quite a stink back in 2002 because people thought it meant that they absolutely would cause the games to stop working at that time but really EA was just covering their ass because they had been sued already by people who didn't get that Ultima Online required a subscription fee because it wasn't spelled out on the box well enough
Instead, EA has supported online for BF1942 through GameSpy for close to 12 years now. And you think they're assholes for going way beyond what they promised and don't release source code. And your other suggested fix is exactly what they did over a decade ago when they fucking released the game but you're too goddamn stupid to know what you're talking about.
My first gig out of college was for the same University I graduated from, and I worked on a mainframe doing COBOL programming, and some scripting in a proprietary language called NATURAL which I've never seen used anywhere else, ever.
One project I was handed was to update the 1098-T form. It's basically the IRS tax form for tuition writeoffs. Every year we had to produce a 1098-T form for every student which basically detailed what they paid in tuition. Every year the form was a little different (of course) so every year our generation program had to be updated.
What I got handed was basically a program which drew the form and then printed the data on the correct parts of the form. And when I saw drew the form, I don't mean we had a PDF or JPEG or whatever of the form, we actually recreated the form with whatever bog standard graphics package we used. Like, you would literally say go to (X1,Y1) and draw a line to (X2,Y2), then a line from (X2,Y2) to (X3,Y3), etc. It was like programming in LOGO, but for a legal purpose and without the cool turtles.
This doesn't sound like such a big deal, and it wasn't too bad, but what was tedious was the fact that you would program all this in, then run the program against a single fake student's data, and then you headed to the printer. The printer, in this case was the print room and it was three floors down and a few hallways away. Then you waited for the printout. Which would print as soon as anyone else's job who was in (virtual) line in front of you was done. The time it took to accomplish this was basically random.
And when you found out whatever small change you made didn't work, had the wrong effect, got the numbers backwards, etc. you got to do this all over again. Make small change, compile, run, wait hour(s) for result, lather, rinse, repeat. All with no GUI, no preview, no nothing. Oh, and the program I had, comparing the form printed last year to the actual 1098-T form from the IRS' site was not a 1:1 recreation - it had basically the same info as the source form but it wasn't a dead-on match. I'm guessing this was good enough for the IRS, and either no one had ever bothered to make this thing picture perfect, or the motivation to do so got lost along the way. Lord knows I wasn't going to do it either.
Over time of course you started to average out how long it took to get the printout and you'd wait at least that long before going to get it. And of course this wasn't anywhere near as bad as "come back tomorrow to see if it worked", but that whole process sucked and I don't miss that job at all.
Oh, and this was in ~2002 or so. I didn't really want to be a mainframe programmer but I had little experience in a shitty economy and I was told/promised that they'd be moving to an "all new web-based system within the next six months". When I quit two and a half years later to move to a better gig, it was still "within the next six months". I learned a lot from that job, I guess.
Look, I get that we're all getting older and that there's traditionally been something of an age bias in IT but can we please stop having a "hey am I too old do be doing programming?" story every fucking week?
No you're not too old. Yes you might have a harder time finding work at your age (whatever age it is) but there's so many other factors (choice of technologies, state of local technology scene where you're at, whether or not you have people/hygiene skills) that no one can really say what it is. Yes you have commitments and debt and maybe a wife and kids and the fresh kids out of college just have those to look forward to. But come the fuck on.
There's basically two things people worry about - is your age causing you to lose job opportunities and is your age making your mind slower/worse/etc. If you're asking for an absolute answer to either then it's no. We've established this over and over and over. There are just as many jobs out there looking for fresh faced kids as there are looking for seasoned professionals. The reason that the game industry, with its cutting edge technology, is mostly young people is not because young people's minds are more amenable to cutting edge technologies, but because the game industry overworks, under pays, and generally churns through most of its non-Carmack-level talent and causes people to switch to mundane business rules programming for 2x the salary and 100x the stability.
Now can we please move on to something important like whether or not Bitcoins cause Libertarians to commit suicide?