The game is actually being developed by Virtual Heroes and from what I understand is being offered as a educational tool for 9th graders and they are encouraged to use development tools to build content for the game themselves.
If this isn't a good investment for our country - not sure what is - especially if its an educational game that is fun to play.
Dept of Agriculture should do the same thing - to help younger generations get interested in working on and developing technology in the field of agriculture. If it works - I'd be for it - America needs more good farmers and people working in that field.
Having worked at Adobe I helped a ton of different enterprises deploy and install Flash actually.
Flash player 6 was installed by default with XP, not sure about Vista.
I also helped a number of OEM's (every one you've heard of and recognize) integrate Flash into images they deploy with the machine brand new.
Many of the remote support tools I used were based on Flash as well - and I can count the number of times on one hand someone didn't have it installed - and most of the time it was because it was a clean Windows install.
So while I'm sure its not 99%, its definitely up there - if nothing else because brand new home users want to view videos on youtube.
The Chinese government does nothing (or seemingly nothing) about any of this. In the US we have laws on how long someone can work, and minimum pay rates (while many aren't enforced, they are there).
If anything blame this on corporate greed, not consumer greed.
Actually this is only kind of true. One of the only reasons you'd need cmyk support in gimp (or photoshop for that matter) is proofing - otherwise these days you can work in both color spaces and live to tell about it. Some actual facts:
Most of the entire cmyk colorspace fits in rgb
Windows print path (sans Adobe postscript passthrough - which only adobe apps support) actually converts the colorspace to rgb anyhow.
Most any rip worth its money today will handle rgb data.
Even if you are using rgb images in photoshop and indesign - you can proof how it will look on a cmyk device using color management.
(disclaimer: yes I at one point had a job in the industry as a developer... but I don't know anything about gimp really)
So you could use gimp or paintshop along with microsoft publisher in a printshop, you just need to do a lot of proofs - something Acrobat is good for. Typically in rgb the kinds of colors you can use far exceed what the device can use - and that is primarily the only difference these days.
My father used to download tons of stuff using bittorrent and emule (I've since mended him of his ways), when he complained about wierd problems happening on his machine I found he had a rootkit installed, and several viruses. After removing the rootkit (sora or sosa.sys? - this was 2 years ago) and getting a virus scanner installed a lot of the software he had downloaded did have some extra payloads.
While none of this was anything major like Office or anything Adobe, plenty of pirated apps did have viruses attached - and many of them were associated with control of the machine and key logging.
I used to support (like many lost my job just before christmas) some of these apps these banks used - I used to wonder why every single one of them was Indian, but I disagree that they are the brightest in their field - many weren't doing key roles with this product and were simply hired to work with vendors like me on support problems, but at the same time often had a lack of understanding on basic computing.
More than once I had to call these guys up and give the "I thought we had an understanding about this issue" line.
Shame it doesn't have good defaults - I've read at least 3-4 players they lost over that alone.
New mmo's don't seem to understand that you need to appease new players within the trial period or they may never come back. Sometimes they have even less time if they are already happy with an exist MMO (like WoW). This whole release now, and patch later thing really doesn't cut it anymore - even though WoW had a lot of launch issues as well.
It really doesn't matter what someone says in life - its the results of what he/she does that makes a difference.
Ceo exchange had Carla Fiona on there once - she came across as quite pleasant, and not the CEO that destroyed the HP way and fired so many American workers building and developing HP products and then campaigning for McCain on a platform of "we need to create more jobs in America" (something she said with a straight face).
Symantec is no better - they outsource and ship more work off to India/China than most companies.
So in reading some of those articles - the only one written by a police like agency "police chief magazine" says that the only law (in Ontario) is that meter technicians are supposed to report if a residence has tampered with the meter, bypassed the junction or wired lights directly into the mains.
Another article wants to make it legal for power companies to shut off suspected growers, but there's controversy in that they don't think the power companies should play the role of the police (which is what the riaa is doing).
The only sites that claim that the power companies actively report spikes in usage are sites that tell you how to setup your own grow operation.
One site said in Florida the police will under warrant ask the utility company for a history of power usage in a suspected operation.
I didn't find anything credible or official that says the power company has some filter or auditor on their billing system to flag this info.
Disclaimer: America isn't the only country that does this kind of stuff, but as arguably the most vocal advocate of the above economic philosophies, it's probably the most hypocritical for doing so.
Yeah but America gave them the opportunity to do what they have done and in my eyes - owe Uncle Sam something.
America isn't the only country that does this sort of thing, but all of this technology was invented and pioneered here.
Let's be clear here. We are talking about H1B program, not outsourcing. Companies outsource entire department to save costs, because they can pay less to equivalent workers overseas. On the other hand, when sponsoring a H1B visa, the employer has to show that the guest worker gets the prevailing wage, on par with all the "similarly qualified" U.S. citizens in the same business. On top of that, the government increases the application fee every now and then to make it costlier to hire H1B workers. In general, it's actually more expensive and difficult to hire a truly qualified H1B employee. Nobody would hire a permanent employee holding H1B visa unless they can't find anyone else equally competent. If anything they've probably already prioritized the H1B holders in their layoff plan, because it makes business sense.
Companies that manage by visio and spreadsheets (and Microsoft is one of these) never take into account the true costs of doing business.
My experience is H1B visa employees are a mixed bag. They seem to hire whoever they can find immediately with minimal interview process or background check. I couldn't tell you if they were paid the "prevailing wage", but I suspect its generally lower than a local engineer.
Also - on outsourcing - H1B's are like virtual oursourcing. I've really never seen it save all that much. I remember we were outsourcing all our support and it was still costing 75 dollars per call - which worked out to something like 300$ per hour (assuming each call is around 15 minutes) and they did a half arsed job which required a bunch of regular employees to clean up constantly.
"Those that you want to hire are not hirable, but those that are hirable you don't want."
Having a hard time wrapping my head around this one.
Interesting to see the manager mind at work here though. Wouldn't it make sense to hire the person with the correct skillset? You know - like actually read resumes, and talk to people and make decisions based on that?
I send my resume off to apply for various jobs, but I highly doubt anyone even reads it. They probably just look at how well I filled out the application, or if I spelled everything properly.
People automatically assume "Chinese or Indian = Brilliant worker we can hire for 20-35k a year" - H1B or not - and since most of these companies have hundreds of open req's in India they'll take whatever they can get.
Its an economic miracle if true - and I think we should be wary of anyone who thinks otherwise.
When did IBM go public? I have pictures and remember stories from my grandfather and mother (who was a customer service engineer - went onsite to fix mainframes - based out of the Salem Oregon IBM Computing center) in the 50's, 60's and 70's where they hosted huge camping trips and vacations at various resorts for all their employees.
Remember the days where you could walk into a place and hand them the help wanted sign in the window, and after a few questions, you were hired? The interviews were usually on the spot with the manager on duty and you had your job right then.
I'm only 33, but I don't remember those days ever.
Maybe Microsoft won over Apple's System 7, Mac OS 8/9 because a) it was more stable, b) could actually multi-task and c) didn't treat their developers with contempt. Also - Microsoft made its meteoric rise while Apple was still trying to figure out how to fix Mac OS - even a fanboy would admit that OSX was a much needed, but late addition to the Mac platform.
I was there - if you were a mac developer - apple's developer support was practically non-existant and expensive. Microsoft's was (and actually still us) practically free, helpful and plentiful.
Actually I'd argue that Apple still treats developers with contempt - as they don't ever test any 3rd party software/hardware when releasing an OS (I've honestly lost track of how many methods and api's they've changed, removed and broken to break our apps) and never respond to or fix radar bugs.
Yes Microsoft is evil, but a lot of their success was handed to them and actually well deserved.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of companies actually use Acrobat/Reader for forms management - the code behind these forms is - you guessed it - javascript.
The game is actually being developed by Virtual Heroes and from what I understand is being offered as a educational tool for 9th graders and they are encouraged to use development tools to build content for the game themselves.
If this isn't a good investment for our country - not sure what is - especially if its an educational game that is fun to play.
Dept of Agriculture should do the same thing - to help younger generations get interested in working on and developing technology in the field of agriculture. If it works - I'd be for it - America needs more good farmers and people working in that field.
Having worked at Adobe I helped a ton of different enterprises deploy and install Flash actually.
Flash player 6 was installed by default with XP, not sure about Vista.
I also helped a number of OEM's (every one you've heard of and recognize) integrate Flash into images they deploy with the machine brand new.
Many of the remote support tools I used were based on Flash as well - and I can count the number of times on one hand someone didn't have it installed - and most of the time it was because it was a clean Windows install.
So while I'm sure its not 99%, its definitely up there - if nothing else because brand new home users want to view videos on youtube.
The Chinese government does nothing (or seemingly nothing) about any of this. In the US we have laws on how long someone can work, and minimum pay rates (while many aren't enforced, they are there).
If anything blame this on corporate greed, not consumer greed.
Yes, but its American companies contracting these companies to do this - I don't think that should be legal.
Go to any industry trade show :) (Adobe Max comes to mind as an example)
Actually this is only kind of true. One of the only reasons you'd need cmyk support in gimp (or photoshop for that matter) is proofing - otherwise these days you can work in both color spaces and live to tell about it. Some actual facts:
Most of the entire cmyk colorspace fits in rgb
Windows print path (sans Adobe postscript passthrough - which only adobe apps support) actually converts the colorspace to rgb anyhow.
Most any rip worth its money today will handle rgb data.
Even if you are using rgb images in photoshop and indesign - you can proof how it will look on a cmyk device using color management.
(disclaimer: yes I at one point had a job in the industry as a developer... but I don't know anything about gimp really)
So you could use gimp or paintshop along with microsoft publisher in a printshop, you just need to do a lot of proofs - something Acrobat is good for. Typically in rgb the kinds of colors you can use far exceed what the device can use - and that is primarily the only difference these days.
My father used to download tons of stuff using bittorrent and emule (I've since mended him of his ways), when he complained about wierd problems happening on his machine I found he had a rootkit installed, and several viruses. After removing the rootkit (sora or sosa.sys? - this was 2 years ago) and getting a virus scanner installed a lot of the software he had downloaded did have some extra payloads.
While none of this was anything major like Office or anything Adobe, plenty of pirated apps did have viruses attached - and many of them were associated with control of the machine and key logging.
So yes - I have seen it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TJBkO3PM14
Just a bunch of stories...
I used to support (like many lost my job just before christmas) some of these apps these banks used - I used to wonder why every single one of them was Indian, but I disagree that they are the brightest in their field - many weren't doing key roles with this product and were simply hired to work with vendors like me on support problems, but at the same time often had a lack of understanding on basic computing.
More than once I had to call these guys up and give the "I thought we had an understanding about this issue" line.
Shame it doesn't have good defaults - I've read at least 3-4 players they lost over that alone.
New mmo's don't seem to understand that you need to appease new players within the trial period or they may never come back. Sometimes they have even less time if they are already happy with an exist MMO (like WoW). This whole release now, and patch later thing really doesn't cut it anymore - even though WoW had a lot of launch issues as well.
To be fair - most of eve's expansions are new ships (or ship in the last one) and a bunch of low-sec systems for hard-core players to fight over.
It really doesn't matter what someone says in life - its the results of what he/she does that makes a difference.
Ceo exchange had Carla Fiona on there once - she came across as quite pleasant, and not the CEO that destroyed the HP way and fired so many American workers building and developing HP products and then campaigning for McCain on a platform of "we need to create more jobs in America" (something she said with a straight face).
Symantec is no better - they outsource and ship more work off to India/China than most companies.
Try ghost on a unicode (ie non english) FS - I guarantee you won't like it anymore.
2 years ago it would FAIL to restore an image (the entire sodding image!) with any file that had a unicode character in its name.
No clue if they fixed it lately because I binned it all and went with something else.
So in reading some of those articles - the only one written by a police like agency "police chief magazine" says that the only law (in Ontario) is that meter technicians are supposed to report if a residence has tampered with the meter, bypassed the junction or wired lights directly into the mains.
Another article wants to make it legal for power companies to shut off suspected growers, but there's controversy in that they don't think the power companies should play the role of the police (which is what the riaa is doing).
The only sites that claim that the power companies actively report spikes in usage are sites that tell you how to setup your own grow operation.
One site said in Florida the police will under warrant ask the utility company for a history of power usage in a suspected operation.
I didn't find anything credible or official that says the power company has some filter or auditor on their billing system to flag this info.
You're graded based on clicks per minute.
We could always have the patent office re-examin the patent :).
Disclaimer: America isn't the only country that does this kind of stuff, but as arguably the most vocal advocate of the above economic philosophies, it's probably the most hypocritical for doing so.
Yeah but America gave them the opportunity to do what they have done and in my eyes - owe Uncle Sam something.
America isn't the only country that does this sort of thing, but all of this technology was invented and pioneered here.
Let's be clear here. We are talking about H1B program, not outsourcing. Companies outsource entire department to save costs, because they can pay less to equivalent workers overseas. On the other hand, when sponsoring a H1B visa, the employer has to show that the guest worker gets the prevailing wage, on par with all the "similarly qualified" U.S. citizens in the same business. On top of that, the government increases the application fee every now and then to make it costlier to hire H1B workers. In general, it's actually more expensive and difficult to hire a truly qualified H1B employee. Nobody would hire a permanent employee holding H1B visa unless they can't find anyone else equally competent. If anything they've probably already prioritized the H1B holders in their layoff plan, because it makes business sense.
Companies that manage by visio and spreadsheets (and Microsoft is one of these) never take into account the true costs of doing business.
My experience is H1B visa employees are a mixed bag. They seem to hire whoever they can find immediately with minimal interview process or background check. I couldn't tell you if they were paid the "prevailing wage", but I suspect its generally lower than a local engineer.
Also - on outsourcing - H1B's are like virtual oursourcing. I've really never seen it save all that much. I remember we were outsourcing all our support and it was still costing 75 dollars per call - which worked out to something like 300$ per hour (assuming each call is around 15 minutes) and they did a half arsed job which required a bunch of regular employees to clean up constantly.
"Those that you want to hire are not hirable, but those that are hirable you don't want."
Having a hard time wrapping my head around this one.
Interesting to see the manager mind at work here though. Wouldn't it make sense to hire the person with the correct skillset? You know - like actually read resumes, and talk to people and make decisions based on that?
I send my resume off to apply for various jobs, but I highly doubt anyone even reads it. They probably just look at how well I filled out the application, or if I spelled everything properly.
People automatically assume "Chinese or Indian = Brilliant worker we can hire for 20-35k a year" - H1B or not - and since most of these companies have hundreds of open req's in India they'll take whatever they can get.
Its an economic miracle if true - and I think we should be wary of anyone who thinks otherwise.
Wooosh...
When did IBM go public? I have pictures and remember stories from my grandfather and mother (who was a customer service engineer - went onsite to fix mainframes - based out of the Salem Oregon IBM Computing center) in the 50's, 60's and 70's where they hosted huge camping trips and vacations at various resorts for all their employees.
Repeat after me: government does not create wealth. Even if it makes some men wealthy.
Yeah that internet thing will never go anywhere...
Remember the days where you could walk into a place and hand them the help wanted sign in the window, and after a few questions, you were hired? The interviews were usually on the spot with the manager on duty and you had your job right then.
I'm only 33, but I don't remember those days ever.
Now who's being a revisionist?
Maybe Microsoft won over Apple's System 7, Mac OS 8/9 because a) it was more stable, b) could actually multi-task and c) didn't treat their developers with contempt. Also - Microsoft made its meteoric rise while Apple was still trying to figure out how to fix Mac OS - even a fanboy would admit that OSX was a much needed, but late addition to the Mac platform.
I was there - if you were a mac developer - apple's developer support was practically non-existant and expensive. Microsoft's was (and actually still us) practically free, helpful and plentiful.
Actually I'd argue that Apple still treats developers with contempt - as they don't ever test any 3rd party software/hardware when releasing an OS (I've honestly lost track of how many methods and api's they've changed, removed and broken to break our apps) and never respond to or fix radar bugs.
Yes Microsoft is evil, but a lot of their success was handed to them and actually well deserved.
How am I supposed to play World of Warcraft 12 hours a day without internet?
This game was designed for unemployed people right?