Now this is just a hypothetical, you understand, because I would never suggest that anyone do anything that might possibly upset Hilary Rosen, but if someone wanted to promote use of the.ogg format and started offering interesting files on Gnutella or one of the other peer-to-peer file sharing networks in Ogg Vorbis format, that would certainly encourage more people to find out just what this.ogg thing is, wouldn't it?
Just a thought. Most people would have no idea what MP3's are if it weren't for the Napster effect.
No privacy resulting in a much more pleasant life for all is a naive viewpoint, at best.
Without privacy anything you do that differs from the norm is immediately under scrutiny by any- and everybody, and the tyrrany of the majority becomes much stronger and more pervasive.
For a good example of the result of a lack of privacy, witness the effect the glaring spotlight of the press has had on potential presidential candidates when every last minute detail of their private life is exposed. Would you have any chance at a run for President under those conditions? I know I wouldn't.
Instead of looking at why Linux may be a bad platform for games, how about looking at what might make it a good platform?
What are some of the key advantages of Linux over Windows? Often cited are stability, Internet support, and a real networked GUI (i.e. X). How can those advantages be used to make Linux the platform of choice for a game?
How about games that you want to leave running even when you're not playing them? Or that you want to be able to play (or at least access) from different computers depending on where you are (home, laptop, work(!), etc)? Creatures and SimCity are candidates in this category, but there are others that haven't yet made it onto Linux.
With Linux it's routine to switch back and forth between multiple applications without worrying whether your system will crash. Depending on the application, this is clearly not true under Microsoft Windows. How many times have you been playing a game under Windows and wanted to switch away for a minute to another application (web browser, e-mail, etc), but didn't because there was a good chance it would crash the game (or the whole system)?
There are attributes that make Linux the operating system of choice for many applications. We just need to figure out how best to apply those attributes to games.
This could actually get quite entertaining, since for credibility's sake you'd have to add in a script that selects the right pictures to post based on the time of day and the current weather conditions grabbed from NWS.
Then if you really wanted to be anal about it you could pre-program in your route and dynamically query information from MapQuest to decide what kind of terrain the photo should contain for that particular day and time. And if you wanted to get really ambitious, you could periodically do a lookup on addresses in the vicinity and try to include people and buildings in the photos that might fit for those address (i.e. residential, retail, industrial, agricultural, etc).
Given all of the above, I'd have to say that a site with fake photos may well be much more interesting than a site with real photos.
Point taken -- there is a mention on the project web site, but it's not exactly prominent, to put it mildly. That will have to be corrected.
We ran a nice display ad (US$350 with the University's discount) in the local sunday newspaper a few weeks back, and got just one (1) response. The problem is in part that we can't start someone at $85K/year, but a greater difficulty may actually be just reaching people at all.
You've hit the answer right on the head. We have undergraduate and graduate students on staff, and they're very valuable members of our team, but there's no substitute for experience when it comes to producing high-quality maintainable software. This is particularly true when, as we are, you're developing software tools, standards, and protocols to be used by other organizations in creating their applications and web sites.
(As an aside, it's actually much tougher than you would think to hire capable grad student programmers. If they're in the Computer Science program they can usually find an RA position where they essentially are paid to do their thesis work, and so have no incentive to take a project-based programming position.)
Several folks have posted about MP3s being important or justified because they provide an alternative to the ridiculous mark-ups that record companies add to CDs.
Others have responded, citing high production costs encountered by DIY bands as evidence that CDs are actually expensive to produce.
Well here's a real-world example of a small label pressing and selling CDs at well below the prices that major labels are charging, and they've been doing it for more than ten years. (Note also that their price of US$10 for a CD includes shipping and handling!)
Why do the major labels, pressing discs at thousands of times the volume of a small label like Dischord, charge so much more?
The DMCA wouldn't have anything to do with their desire to preserve these huge margins, would it?
There have been about a hundered comments explaining the lottery system, why don't you read them.
There've been comments explaining the lottery system for directed shares, but what about those of us who went through E*Trade without having received a special invitation? (As discussed here.)
I placed my indication of interest through E*Trade for 300 shares (no limit) during the original two-hour window, made sure I had sufficient cash in the account to cover it up to $14, reconfirmed my indication of interest this morning during the brief time they were accepting same, and still ended up with zero shares.
What I'd like to know is specifically how the shares were allocated:
Was it based partially on a percentage of the number of shares requested? If so would I have been better off requesting 30,000 shares instead of 300?
Was it based on prior participation in IPOs through E*Trade. This is my first IPO with them, so it'd be interesting to find out the correlation for those who were allocated shares.
How long you've had an account with E*Trade definitely did not play into it, as I've had an account there since shortly after they opened.
If you went through E*Trade and did receive shares, please share information on your indication of interest and E*Trade account history with us.
For those of us not connected in some fashion this whole thing looks to have been a large waste of time.
Syberghost is right on in his reply above, at least based on my experience starting an ISP.
The one thing that can't be emphasized enough to anyone thinking of jumping into the ISP game, though, is that ISP stands for Internet Service provider. It's a service business, just like a maid service or an automobile repair shop. What this means in practical terms is that your staff (and you, initially, unless you've got alot of capital) are going to spend 95% of your time on repetitive customer support and maintenance tasks. Too many ISPs have been started by people who like to set up and tinker with the internet and computers, without realizing ahead of time that that only represents a small fraction of the work involved in running an ISP.
How many of those workstations are actually running Windows NT? The numbers are based on the number of copies of Windows NT "sold", and I don't know exactly how widespread this is, but I personally have purchased and set up more than a dozen machines in the past year that came (unasked) with Windows NT but are now running Linux.
It's very easy to boost your numbers if you ship heaps of software to people that haven't ordered it. By that measure AOL's software has probably outstripped Netscape and Microsoft combined!
If you're looking for a controller well-suited to first-person shooters, you might want to try the Panther XL from Mad Catz.
I bought a Panther on a friend's recommendation, and it's turned out to be amazingly fast and intuitive. It also had the bonus effect of almost eliminating the headache/nausea that I'd sometimes end up with (and that I've heard others complain about) when playing Quake or another FPS for an extended period of time.
> I find your experience interesting. I have had trouble getting bites on my resume. I live > North of Boston where you can't help bumping in to software weenies all the time. I sent my > resume to a head hunter (admittedly he was somewhat clueless)...
I suspect "somewhat clueless" is a big part of the problem. There are a couple of recruiters in our area that I won't deal with (as potential employer or employee) because they don't know how to match candidates to jobs. A recruiter is supposed to save everyone time by putting the appropriate people in contact with each other, but some seem so desperate to fill a position and collect their commission that they'll tell you anything to place a candidate.
When it comes to filtering through resumes, buzzwords are everything, so I'd suggest taking whatever steps are necessary to gain some hands-on experience with C++ or other newer technology. Since you've been around long enough to have a substantial body of experience you might also want to take the time to tailor your resume for each potential job you're going for, to hilight the aspects of your background that are important for that position.
Anonymous Coward writes: > There might be other reasons for your "shortage".
Since it's currently about 15 degrees F here I can empathize with your enjoyment of the California climate, however I don't think the locale is one of the reasons for our perceived shortage. (We're in Madison WI, which was rated the top city in the nation by Money in 1996 and remains very highly rated by pretty much anyone who tracks that sort of thing.)
As to salary and work environment, ten years ago there may have been a noticeable discrepancy, but today most software development companies in this area are paying better than west coast firms (adjusted for cost-of-living), and the standard uniform is jeans or shorts and a t-shirt. (Our company is actually headquartered outside of San Jose, so it's easy for me to compare at least Madison and the Bay area with some confidence.)
I also know that our situation is not uncommon in this area because of the number of calls I regularly receive from recruiters trying to hire me, and because of the number of acquaintances I have at other local companies complaining of similar difficulties. Qualified people are really in short supply.
There is a shortage of qualified software engineers and system administrators, at least in the midwest. Six years ago we ran a newspaper ad for programmers and received 300 resumes. Two years ago we ran an ad and received 30 resumes. Last year we ran an ad and received 9 resumes. And those numbers are the total number of resumes received, not just those left after filtering.
Right now I'm trying to find a junior-level Unix system administrator and an intermediate-level Unix software engineer. Last month I ran ads in a half-dozen appropriate newsgroups and contacted three local recruiters. To date I've received a grand total of three resumes, all blatantly unqualified for the positions.
If there isn't a shortage then where are all of the candidates? Given the exploding popularity of Linux I can't believe the shortage is limited to Unix-savvy people.
Ed
P.S. If you're from outside the U.S. and you're looking for a job here the absolute most important qualification is near-flawless spoken and written (english) communications skills. You may be an incredible programmer, but unless you can communicate effectively with your co-workers your productivity is going to be hampered from day one, and any knowledgable potential employer is going to take that heavily into account.
Slashdot Mirror
Now this is just a hypothetical, you understand, because I would never suggest that anyone do anything that might possibly upset Hilary Rosen, but if someone wanted to promote use of the .ogg format and started offering interesting files on Gnutella or one of the other peer-to-peer file sharing networks in Ogg Vorbis format, that would certainly encourage more people to find out just what this .ogg thing is, wouldn't it?
Just a thought. Most people would have no idea what MP3's are if it weren't for the Napster effect.
No privacy resulting in a much more pleasant life for all is a naive viewpoint, at best.
Without privacy anything you do that differs from the norm is immediately under scrutiny by any- and everybody, and the tyrrany of the majority becomes much stronger and more pervasive.
For a good example of the result of a lack of privacy, witness the effect the glaring spotlight of the press has had on potential presidential candidates when every last minute detail of their private life is exposed. Would you have any chance at a run for President under those conditions? I know I wouldn't.
Instead of looking at why Linux may be a bad platform for games, how about looking at what might make it a good platform?
What are some of the key advantages of Linux over Windows? Often cited are stability, Internet support, and a real networked GUI (i.e. X). How can those advantages be used to make Linux the platform of choice for a game?
How about games that you want to leave running even when you're not playing them? Or that you want to be able to play (or at least access) from different computers depending on where you are (home, laptop, work(!), etc)? Creatures and SimCity are candidates in this category, but there are others that haven't yet made it onto Linux.
With Linux it's routine to switch back and forth between multiple applications without worrying whether your system will crash. Depending on the application, this is clearly not true under Microsoft Windows. How many times have you been playing a game under Windows and wanted to switch away for a minute to another application (web browser, e-mail, etc), but didn't because there was a good chance it would crash the game (or the whole system)?
There are attributes that make Linux the operating system of choice for many applications. We just need to figure out how best to apply those attributes to games.
This could actually get quite entertaining, since for credibility's sake you'd have to add in a script that selects the right pictures to post based on the time of day and the current weather conditions grabbed from NWS.
Then if you really wanted to be anal about it you could pre-program in your route and dynamically query information from MapQuest to decide what kind of terrain the photo should contain for that particular day and time. And if you wanted to get really ambitious, you could periodically do a lookup on addresses in the vicinity and try to include people and buildings in the photos that might fit for those address (i.e. residential, retail, industrial, agricultural, etc).
Given all of the above, I'd have to say that a site with fake photos may well be much more interesting than a site with real photos.
Point taken -- there is a mention on the project web site, but it's not exactly prominent, to put it mildly. That will have to be corrected.
We ran a nice display ad (US$350 with the University's discount) in the local sunday newspaper a few weeks back, and got just one (1) response. The problem is in part that we can't start someone at $85K/year, but a greater difficulty may actually be just reaching people at all.
You've hit the answer right on the head. We have undergraduate and graduate students on staff, and they're very valuable members of our team, but there's no substitute for experience when it comes to producing high-quality maintainable software. This is particularly true when, as we are, you're developing software tools, standards, and protocols to be used by other organizations in creating their applications and web sites.
(As an aside, it's actually much tougher than you would think to hire capable grad student programmers. If they're in the Computer Science program they can usually find an RA position where they essentially are paid to do their thesis work, and so have no incentive to take a project-based programming position.)
Several folks have posted about MP3s being important or justified because they provide an alternative to the ridiculous mark-ups that record companies add to CDs.
Others have responded, citing high production costs encountered by DIY bands as evidence that CDs are actually expensive to produce.
Well here's a real-world example of a small label pressing and selling CDs at well below the prices that major labels are charging, and they've been doing it for more than ten years. (Note also that their price of US$10 for a CD includes shipping and handling!)
Why do the major labels, pressing discs at thousands of times the volume of a small label like Dischord, charge so much more?
The DMCA wouldn't have anything to do with their desire to preserve these huge margins, would it?
There have been about a hundered comments explaining the lottery system, why don't you read them.
There've been comments explaining the lottery system for directed shares, but what about those of us who went through E*Trade without having received a special invitation? (As discussed here.)
Snowdog
I placed my indication of interest through E*Trade for 300 shares (no limit) during the original two-hour window, made sure I had sufficient cash in the account to cover it up to $14, reconfirmed my indication of interest this morning during the brief time they were accepting same, and still ended up with zero shares.
What I'd like to know is specifically how the shares were allocated:
Was it based partially on a percentage of the number of shares requested? If so would I have been better off requesting 30,000 shares instead of 300?
Was it based on prior participation in IPOs through E*Trade. This is my first IPO with them, so it'd be interesting to find out the correlation for those who were allocated shares.
How long you've had an account with E*Trade definitely did not play into it, as I've had an account there since shortly after they opened.
If you went through E*Trade and did receive shares, please share information on your indication of interest and E*Trade account history with us.
For those of us not connected in some fashion this whole thing looks to have been a large waste of time.
Snowdog
Syberghost is right on in his reply above, at least based on my experience starting an ISP.
The one thing that can't be emphasized enough to anyone thinking of jumping into the ISP game, though, is that ISP stands for Internet Service provider. It's a service business, just like a maid service or an automobile repair shop. What this means in practical terms is that your staff (and you, initially, unless you've got alot of capital) are going to spend 95% of your time on repetitive customer support and maintenance tasks. Too many ISPs have been started by people who like to set up and tinker with the internet and computers, without realizing ahead of time that that only represents a small fraction of the work involved in running an ISP.
How many of those workstations are actually running Windows NT? The numbers are based on the number of copies of Windows NT "sold", and I don't know exactly how widespread this is, but I personally have purchased and set up more than a dozen machines in the past year that came (unasked) with Windows NT but are now running Linux.
It's very easy to boost your numbers if you ship heaps of software to people that haven't ordered it. By that measure AOL's software has probably outstripped Netscape and Microsoft combined!
If you're looking for a controller well-suited to
first-person shooters, you might want to try the
Panther XL from Mad Catz.
I bought a Panther on a friend's recommendation, and
it's turned out to be amazingly fast and intuitive.
It also had the bonus effect of almost eliminating the
headache/nausea that I'd sometimes end up with (and
that I've heard others complain about) when playing
Quake or another FPS for an extended period of time.
> I find your experience interesting. I have had trouble getting bites on my resume. I live
> North of Boston where you can't help bumping in to software weenies all the time. I sent my
> resume to a head hunter (admittedly he was somewhat clueless)...
I suspect "somewhat clueless" is a big part of the problem. There are a couple of recruiters in our area that I won't deal with (as potential employer or employee) because they don't know how to match candidates to jobs. A recruiter is supposed to save everyone time by putting the appropriate people in contact with each other, but some seem so desperate to fill a position and collect their commission that they'll tell you anything to place a candidate.
When it comes to filtering through resumes, buzzwords are everything, so I'd suggest taking whatever steps are necessary to gain some hands-on experience with C++ or other newer technology. Since you've been around long enough to have a substantial body of experience you might also want to take the time to tailor your resume for each potential job you're going for, to hilight the aspects of your background that are important for that position.
Anonymous Coward writes:
> There might be other reasons for your "shortage".
Since it's currently about 15 degrees F here I can empathize with your enjoyment of the California climate, however I don't think the locale is one of the reasons for our perceived shortage. (We're in Madison WI, which was rated the top city in the nation by Money in 1996 and remains very highly rated by pretty much anyone who tracks that sort of thing.)
As to salary and work environment, ten years ago there may have been a noticeable discrepancy, but today most software development companies in this area are paying better than west coast firms (adjusted for cost-of-living), and the standard uniform is jeans or shorts and a t-shirt. (Our company is actually headquartered outside of San Jose, so it's easy for me to compare at least Madison and the Bay area with some confidence.)
I also know that our situation is not uncommon in this area because of the number of calls I regularly receive from recruiters trying to hire me, and because of the number of acquaintances I have at other local companies complaining of similar difficulties. Qualified people are really in short supply.
There is a shortage of qualified software engineers and system administrators, at least in the midwest. Six years ago we ran a newspaper ad for programmers and received 300 resumes. Two years ago we ran an ad and received 30 resumes. Last year we ran an ad and received 9 resumes. And those numbers are the total number of resumes received, not just those left after filtering.
Right now I'm trying to find a junior-level Unix system administrator and an intermediate-level Unix software engineer. Last month I ran ads in a half-dozen appropriate newsgroups and contacted three local recruiters. To date I've received a grand total of three resumes, all blatantly unqualified for the positions.
If there isn't a shortage then where are all of the candidates? Given the exploding popularity of Linux I can't believe the shortage is limited to Unix-savvy people.
Ed
P.S. If you're from outside the U.S. and you're looking for a job here the absolute most important qualification is near-flawless spoken and written (english) communications skills. You may be an incredible programmer, but unless you can communicate effectively with your co-workers your productivity is going to be hampered from day one, and any knowledgable potential employer is going to take that heavily into account.