>One week Lisa will be super smart and a veggie and the next week suddenly she's as dumb as Bart and >eating a pork chop. those are called reruns.
As for lisa being super smart and being a veggie, I think you must be confused. Lisa starts out a smart and talented saxophonist, later in the series she just becomes preachy and loses most of her character.
It's obvious if you've owned both devices, and noticed that one generates a lot more heat than the other. I don't recall my psx keeping the room quite so warm.
A device can't use more power without producing more heat, or vice versa. Conservation of energy and all that.
>A simple litmus test to see if an action is *ist is to imagine the response if an arbitrary >decision was reveresed Not really... just because someone recognizes the existence of race or sex and treats someone differently based off of it, does not make them a racist or sexist. Strangely enough, many people do seem to think that prejudice is constituted in acknoledging the existence of differences between groups, which is patently rediculous if you think about it. Color blindness is not a morally or socially good any more than sex blindness is. Frankly, if you failed to acknowledge my sex, I'd be pretty offended.
If acknowledgement of distinctions between groups were the the actual definition of prejudice, prejudice would not be a morally bad thing (depending on how you define morality, but we won't get into that. Let's just say that particular screwed up definition of prejudice would sit fine with utilitarian and deontological definitions of morality).
A better definition of prejudice, that actually makes it morally and socially reprehensible, is the idea of falsely identifying characteristics with a group, or overgeneralizing characteristics of some members of a group to all members. This kind of prejudice clearly has both poor reasoning behind it and bad consequences in front of it, thus making it immoral in most systems.
It should be noted, the various "isms" suchs as racism and sexism seem to be stronger than mere prejudice. Sometimes I use them interchangeably, but it would be most accurate to describe a racist as someone who acts on prejudice, whereas someone who merely has prejudiced ideas, but does not act on them (if that's possible) is merely prejudiced, but not racist or sexist.
I think that it's revealing that people have these poorly constructed ideas about what sexism and racism are. It shows that most people, even so called moralists, don't really think about what it means to act morally, but rather just act on their intuition and prejudices, which are a pretty poor guide to proper action in many circumstances.
What sense is there in calling yourself a moral person, or urging people to some moral action, if you haven't even taken the time to think about what morality is and how you determine what is moral? What sense is there in getting on a high horse and proclaiming the evils of sexism, when you doesn't even know what sexism is?
but my understanding that QA people are in strong demand. In my experience QA people are paid at least as well as developers at most big companies.
I can't imagine a development shop doing all of their QA through kids on summer break like the article suggests. High quality QA is essential and without it large development projects will implode.
That said, I don't particularly want to work QA, it seems mindbendingly boring to me. Development may also be hard work, but there's more room for creativity at least to keep it from being boring. Still, I have respect for people who can do the work. Nothing can get done without the people in QA who are willing to tough out the excruciating hours of bughunting.
1. Doesn't have a mouse 2. only plugs into your tv 3. will only be upgradeable with sony made products, which will cost more than the equivalent computer part. 4. Cannot run any windows or mac applications that users are familiar with.
yeah... this, and the fact that we're only hearing *NOW* that it's supposed to be a computer, makes me somewhat sceptical.
On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of proprietary crap that sony would *LOVE* to have everyone running. Make us pay out of the wazoo to use sony only programs and formats...
I suspect that the PS3 will turn into a decent console, but a computer? Common.
>Why? Well, the Free Software/Open Source ideals are inherently political things.
Nothing about using linux or writing OSS, requires me to jump on your political bandwagon.
I'm sure that open source is an ideal to you, but to most people it is not. It is software, and it is a business model to me and many others. It isn't inherently political to use it, and it's annoying when people try to drag the rest of us into their political battles.
Personally, as much as I use and love some open source software, I think that it is a good thing that developers have the freedom to release their software under whatever licensing they want, including a closed source one. I don't even think it would be a good thing if all software was open source. I think that closed source development is an important business model for many people.
Starcraft was and is the best game they ever made. The warcraft stuff is nice too. I think their major strengths have been 1. making cartoony, lovable characters to get you into the game, and a cliched but enjoyable plot. 2. having competitive multiplayer that's pretty meticulously ballanced. 3. good support in terms of patches. also, their stuff rarely seems to be buggy. 4. allowing a whole lan party to be run off one copy of starcraft or warcraft (just pop the disk back out after launch).
I don't think my win xp install has ever crashed... it has problems, but crashes? No.
>XP is hardly a major upgrade in stability over the Win9x series. It is just as pathetic and broken and even more burdensome. However, it >does a great job in hiding it. Really? Have you ever used windows 98 or 95? I recall them crashing... a lot. I recall a lot of bugs.
>XP really only does a good job of hiding how horrible it actually is.
What does that even mean? If the machine never crashes, it is stable by definition. It isn't just "hiding" instability.
>4% crashes with WinNT, 8% crashes with Win2k, and 12% crashes with WinXP - that would make Vista be 16% crashes if they do. 4% of what? what are you taking a percentage of? You can't take a percentage of "crashes." That's totally incoherent.
Are you actually claiming that win95 was more stable than winxp? Fine... I'll tell you what. Go ahead and when you need to run windows run 95 instead of xp. Most win32 applications can still be made to run on it. Have fun.
of how modern people's understanding of the bible have little to do with the text itself, or how people understood it in the past.
The fact is, Christianity isn't really one continuous set of beliefs, so much as numerous sects based around the same set of "proofs." People take the miracles recorded in the bible, the prophesies, and the various grand moral pronouncements and pseudo-philosophical ramblings, and they use it as their proof for... whatever the hell it is they happen to believe. Some people use it to justify their superstitions, some their codes of ethics, and some just use it to justify their existence. The bible leads some people to believe in a vengeful god, and some to believe in a merciful god. Those who believe that the person worshiping the vengeful god and the person worshiping the merciful god are worshiping the *same* god are kidding themselves. If what defines one god contradicts what defines the other, they cannot be the same. Just because you got the idea for the god from the same book, does not make them the same. It is the characteristics and not the name of the god you worship that is meaningful.
Regardless of whether the bible describes myths, or actual events, it seems clear that *christianity* itself, as a single religion is a myth. It seems more accurate to describe Christianity as a multitude of religions, who happen to have the same prophets. That's not necessarily a bad thing... but it does mean that it is not sufficient to use the bible as a reference when trying to establish common ground with other christians. At the very least, a certain amount of real philosophy has to be done, (scripture quoting doesn't count as philosophy!!) to establish moral imperatives and common beliefs. People who go to the bible as a first source aren't going to be particularly effective at establishing consensus with people who have differing views.
Most of them probably don't have a free text book though... but it's still cheaper than tuition. Generally lecture slides are there too. I don't know if they put these pages together with public consumption in mind though.
btw, speaking as a student, the UW is an excellent school for computer science.
A number of people have been commenting on how outsourcing is being scaled back after initial enthusiasm due to communication problems (language and time lag) primarily.
Really, this has been pretty obvious from the start. Outsourcing makes sense for some companies, but for companies whose bread and butter is software, like apple, it's pretty crazy to put your workers on the other side of the planet from you management. The different time zones alone make it difficult to hear back from someone on the same day for any issue
However, there's an important question that most people gloss over. If there are so many indian developers, why aren't they starting their own companies and selling us the software directly, instead of working through an intermediary. Hiring an american firm to do localization, but keeping management in india makes a lot more sense than having the software designers and the software implementers on the other side of the world.
Really, an important question is, why is software development still so centered in american, canada, and europe? Even the Japanese and Koreans seem to mostly only put out software in terms of video games.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with distribution. It might be difficult for a startup company in india to make the necessary contacts to get their product onto shelves in walmarts in america, or to get them pre-loaded on a dell OEM disk. Even so, that shouldn't apply to Japan, where many companies have a strong presence here. Why doesn't Sony have consumer software division? Why isn't there a Japanese Microsoft or IBM? Why isn't there a Microsoft or IBM in *any* country aside from America?
There's often a lot of talk about the material differences between the first and third world nations (does china still count as a 2nd world nation? how many people still remember what the 2nd world refers to?), but there is there seems to be a major economic disparity among the first world nations. This disparity isn't so much in the standard of living, but in the ability of local industries to sprout up and end up dominating in the international scene. The mcdonalds, starbucks, microsoft, coca cola phenomena.
If I stop and think about it, what foreign brands are there that are really prevalent in the US? There's quite a few japanese brands in electronics, games, and cars. There's some german car brands... hmm.. ikea? Really, you'd think there'd be a stronger showing from the historically economically powerful countries like Britain, Germany, and France. What's keeping them on the sidelines?
It sounds like vista offers a bunch of API improvements, ala directx 10 and the presentation foundation. What's interesting is how few things *won't* be back-ported.
WPF is being back-ported to service pack 2 according the the wikipedia article. The powershell has already been released for xp. Directx 10 won't have games coming out for it for quite a while... what features exactly does that leave for vista?
XP offered a major upgrade in stability, to the point where it's almost on par with most other operating systems, an that was the selling point. What's Vista's selling point? Seriously, after all these years of development, does it have 1 single exclusive killer feature?
So far, the only thing I've seen are improved themes and hi res icons... I'd heard about built in virtualization in the past, but that hasn't been mentioned for quite a while. Was that dropped?
OSX has benched quite a bit for games than windows on the same hardware... I'm not sure what the slowdown is, but it probably just has to do with mac ports usually being done as quickly and shoddily as possible. I've also heard some people saying that the kernel just isn't that fast, although I'm not sure that would have much of an effect on games.
I love OSX, but it is definitely not the ideal gaming platform. The fact is that what makes a gaming platform is game industry support, and support from the platform maker, and there's only limited support from both on osx compared to windows or ps2 etc. The truth is there's just more money behind windows game development, and there's no particular reason for that to change.
I think many of us play indie games... indie game makers may not get rich, but their works don't go unnoticed.
How many people here have played escape velocity, galactic civilizations, lugaru, or exile/avernum?
In some way the market is expanding as more and more people decide they can't afford or just don't care enough to pay 400 dollars to buy the video card necessary to run all the latest industry games. The indies have historically focussed on games that are either 2D or can be run on shitty embedded graphics. They have also usually offered a lower price point. This is going to turn out to be a win for them in the long run. There's 6 billion potential gamers out there, most of which are probably going to be gaming on a tight budget.
>custom-built technology like the Cell processor and Blu-ray to distinguish their product from the others >(compare this to Microsoft's more nimble strategy of outsourcing the 360's chip-design to IBM).
Actually, didn't IBM help sony make the cell too? At the very least, IBM is manufacturing them...
Does anyone know what companies were involved with the development of the cell and what responsibilities they had?
that couldn't be done by setting up standards and best practices within the industry, and then testing software and source against those metrics.
It seems like there could be an organization setup to certify software as meeting some security standards. Some people might think this would be a problem for open source, but they forget that there is a lot of money behind open source. I'm sure IBM and others would help foot the bill behind getting linux certified.
The real problem with certification or government regulation is that it might cause innovation to stall in the industry. If an expensive certification process is required for huge classes of applications, then it will be difficult for smaller companies to introduce new products. The way the industry is structured, most innovative products come from smaller companies, which are often bought out by larger companies. If software must be certified, then these companies can never sell anything on their own, and their only hope is being bought out immediately after they have a product, but before they can bring it to market. This keeps such products from being tested by the market before being bought out by a larger company, and makes being a startup so unattractive that even fewer people would be willing to do it.
In other words, regulation might pretty much ruins the whole scheme that has fueled the software industry.
That's a pretty big generalization though. Some qualifications on what regulation or certification would mean could actually make it pretty attractive. Doing security certification for only small classes of products where the market is already pretty solidified could minimize the damage and maximize the benefit. Varying degrees of certification, where the minimal level is within the range of a small companies budget, would certainly help.
Personally, I'd like to see a good faith effort at industry self regulation through certification before we consider government regulation.
when you say aerospace company, I bet that means you will be flying to different sites around the world, not a particular work spot. I think that most slashdotters are speaking from their experience where they've been asked to move where the company is, but that doesn't really apply here.
I know one boeing engineer who flies to the middle east and africa on a regular basis to help with sales. He seems ok with it, but has drawn a firm line as regards how many hours he's willing to spend at work and how much time he's willing to spend overseas. I've been told he's refused promotions several times that would have required too much time out off his family life.
My suggestion is that when you are in town, make sure you aren't working overtime, and that you get home to spend time with your family. I'd also explore the option of bringing your family along on vacations once in a while (I don't know how practical this is though...).
If you still don't get enough time with your family, I suggest starting new families at the various locations you fly to. If you marry the right people you might even turn a profit and be able to quit your job and be a husband full time.
it doesn't legitimize theft. I realize that software piracy is not seen as a particularly serious crime by, but it is still a crime.
Realistically, it is also a more serious crime than most people treat it as. It is essentially theft, and it does clearly violate the right of property of the copyright owner. The counterargument, which is usually only made halfheartedly, is that piracy does not subtract from the material possessions of the copyright holder. This is essentially a silly argument, and only shows that theft of material possession and theft of intellectual property are not the same thing and have a different set of repercussions.
The repercussions of intellectual property theft are different from the repercussions of material theft, but they do share one thing in common that keeps them in the same class. The theft of intellectual property violates the right to property, including the right to control access to said property, and the right to use said property for profit. Some other crimes that would fall into this category would include breaking into someone's house to use their bathroom or telephone without asking, sneaking into a theater, or breaking into an amusement park at night to ride the ride for free.
People often also make the argument that they are trying out software that they pirate, and that if it is good they will purchase it later. This does sound like a good business model for software in some cases. Indeed, many developers do publish software under a contract that allows some degree of trial usage. These are shareware publishers. However, if businesses don't want to give trial licenses to their software, it is quite clearly their right not to do so, even if this appears shortsighted to users.
By using software in a trial system that developer has not licensed you to participate in, users are behaving paternalistically towards the developers and content producers. By paternalistically I mean that they are saying the the developers aren't competent to choose their own ends, and that these are their proper ends, and then forcing them to comply with them. This is actually worse than simply violating someone's rights or coercing them, since normally when someone violate another's rights they at least admit that they have rights which can be violated. Paternalism is pretending the other agent isn't a rational agent, ignoring their will, and choosing their ends for them. Authorities often do this to individual citizens with things like nanny laws, and I think that it is deeply troubling that as a society we are becomming more comfortable with proscribing what is in another's "best interest" even when it is against their actual consent.
I want to be clear that I'm not trying to be self righteous here. I pirate software and I fully intend to continue to do so. However, I think it is very important to realize that this is a moral failing on my part. To pretend that it is not my moral failing, but wholly the failing of the developer to not recognize his own best interest that causes me to pirate software is to commit a crime far wose than theft. It is to essentially deny developers as rational entities. Another way to put it is to deny that they have rights, or they have personhood.
It is not a counterargument to say that these decisions are made by corporations and not by actual human beings. All decisions made by corporations are made by beings who are at least somewhat rational, their executives, etc. To disrespect the basic rights of a corporation and to deny it's entityhood, isn't to deny the entityhood of an artificial social construction, but to deny the entityhood of the particular persons who made particular decisions. Similarly, to deny that the results of a popular election is the actual will of the people because the election polled a large group of people who is not an actual individual rational agent is to deny the personhood and natural rights of all of the individuals polled. Arguably (although this seems to me to be on less stable ground), it eve
Like redmond? There's a ton of software companies in redmond, not just microsoft. Does Cupertino have something that Redmond lacks aside from a cool nickname?
Slashdot Mirror
>One week Lisa will be super smart and a veggie and the next week suddenly she's as dumb as Bart and
>eating a pork chop.
those are called reruns.
As for lisa being super smart and being a veggie, I think you must be confused. Lisa starts out a smart and talented saxophonist, later in the series she just becomes preachy and loses most of her character.
Also, vegetarians are never smart.
It's obvious if you've owned both devices, and noticed that one generates a lot more heat than the other. I don't recall my psx keeping the room quite so warm.
A device can't use more power without producing more heat, or vice versa. Conservation of energy and all that.
it's because the earth
is spinning faster
>A simple litmus test to see if an action is *ist is to imagine the response if an arbitrary
>decision was reveresed
Not really... just because someone recognizes the existence of race or sex and treats someone differently based off of it, does not make them a racist or sexist. Strangely enough, many people do seem to think that prejudice is constituted in acknoledging the existence of differences between groups, which is patently rediculous if you think about it. Color blindness is not a morally or socially good any more than sex blindness is. Frankly, if you failed to acknowledge my sex, I'd be pretty offended.
If acknowledgement of distinctions between groups were the the actual definition of prejudice, prejudice would not be a morally bad thing (depending on how you define morality, but we won't get into that. Let's just say that particular screwed up definition of prejudice would sit fine with utilitarian and deontological definitions of morality).
A better definition of prejudice, that actually makes it morally and socially reprehensible, is the idea of falsely identifying characteristics with a group, or overgeneralizing characteristics of some members of a group to all members. This kind of prejudice clearly has both poor reasoning behind it and bad consequences in front of it, thus making it immoral in most systems.
It should be noted, the various "isms" suchs as racism and sexism seem to be stronger than mere prejudice. Sometimes I use them interchangeably, but it would be most accurate to describe a racist as someone who acts on prejudice, whereas someone who merely has prejudiced ideas, but does not act on them (if that's possible) is merely prejudiced, but not racist or sexist.
I think that it's revealing that people have these poorly constructed ideas about what sexism and racism are. It shows that most people, even so called moralists, don't really think about what it means to act morally, but rather just act on their intuition and prejudices, which are a pretty poor guide to proper action in many circumstances.
What sense is there in calling yourself a moral person, or urging people to some moral action, if you haven't even taken the time to think about what morality is and how you determine what is moral? What sense is there in getting on a high horse and proclaiming the evils of sexism, when you doesn't even know what sexism is?
but my understanding that QA people are in strong demand. In my experience QA people are paid at least as well as developers at most big companies.
I can't imagine a development shop doing all of their QA through kids on summer break like the article suggests. High quality QA is essential and without it large development projects will implode.
That said, I don't particularly want to work QA, it seems mindbendingly boring to me. Development may also be hard work, but there's more room for creativity at least to keep it from being boring. Still, I have respect for people who can do the work. Nothing can get done without the people in QA who are willing to tough out the excruciating hours of bughunting.
I can't wait to plug it into my hdt... oh wait, never mind.
1. Doesn't have a mouse
2. only plugs into your tv
3. will only be upgradeable with sony made products, which will cost more than the equivalent computer part.
4. Cannot run any windows or mac applications that users are familiar with.
yeah... this, and the fact that we're only hearing *NOW* that it's supposed to be a computer, makes me somewhat sceptical.
On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of proprietary crap that sony would *LOVE* to have everyone running. Make us pay out of the wazoo to use sony only programs and formats...
I suspect that the PS3 will turn into a decent console, but a computer? Common.
anyone who reads slashdot can take a good guess at what pr0n sites *you* visit.
>Why? Well, the Free Software/Open Source ideals are inherently political things.
Nothing about using linux or writing OSS, requires me to jump on your political bandwagon.
I'm sure that open source is an ideal to you, but to most people it is not. It is software, and it is a business model to me and many others. It isn't inherently political to use it, and it's annoying when people try to drag the rest of us into their political battles.
Personally, as much as I use and love some open source software, I think that it is a good thing that developers have the freedom to release their software under whatever licensing they want, including a closed source one. I don't even think it would be a good thing if all software was open source. I think that closed source development is an important business model for many people.
starcraft, and battlenet.
Starcraft was and is the best game they ever made. The warcraft stuff is nice too. I think their major strengths have been
1. making cartoony, lovable characters to get you into the game, and a cliched but enjoyable plot.
2. having competitive multiplayer that's pretty meticulously ballanced.
3. good support in terms of patches. also, their stuff rarely seems to be buggy.
4. allowing a whole lan party to be run off one copy of starcraft or warcraft (just pop the disk back out after launch).
I don't think my win xp install has ever crashed... it has problems, but crashes? No.
>XP is hardly a major upgrade in stability over the Win9x series. It is just as pathetic and broken and even more burdensome. However, it
>does a great job in hiding it.
Really? Have you ever used windows 98 or 95? I recall them crashing... a lot. I recall a lot of bugs.
>XP really only does a good job of hiding how horrible it actually is.
What does that even mean? If the machine never crashes, it is stable by definition. It isn't just "hiding" instability.
>4% crashes with WinNT, 8% crashes with Win2k, and 12% crashes with WinXP - that would make Vista be 16% crashes if they do.
4% of what? what are you taking a percentage of? You can't take a percentage of "crashes." That's totally incoherent.
Are you actually claiming that win95 was more stable than winxp? Fine... I'll tell you what. Go ahead and when you need to run windows run 95 instead of xp. Most win32 applications can still be made to run on it. Have fun.
of how modern people's understanding of the bible have little to do with the text itself, or how people understood it in the past.
The fact is, Christianity isn't really one continuous set of beliefs, so much as numerous sects based around the same set of "proofs." People take the miracles recorded in the bible, the prophesies, and the various grand moral pronouncements and pseudo-philosophical ramblings, and they use it as their proof for... whatever the hell it is they happen to believe. Some people use it to justify their superstitions, some their codes of ethics, and some just use it to justify their existence. The bible leads some people to believe in a vengeful god, and some to believe in a merciful god. Those who believe that the person worshiping the vengeful god and the person worshiping the merciful god are worshiping the *same* god are kidding themselves. If what defines one god contradicts what defines the other, they cannot be the same. Just because you got the idea for the god from the same book, does not make them the same. It is the characteristics and not the name of the god you worship that is meaningful.
Regardless of whether the bible describes myths, or actual events, it seems clear that *christianity* itself, as a single religion is a myth. It seems more accurate to describe Christianity as a multitude of religions, who happen to have the same prophets. That's not necessarily a bad thing... but it does mean that it is not sufficient to use the bible as a reference when trying to establish common ground with other christians. At the very least, a certain amount of real philosophy has to be done, (scripture quoting doesn't count as philosophy!!) to establish moral imperatives and common beliefs. People who go to the bible as a first source aren't going to be particularly effective at establishing consensus with people who have differing views.
are publicly accessible.
s .html
check out
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/course-web
Most of them probably don't have a free text book though... but it's still cheaper than tuition. Generally lecture slides are there too. I don't know if they put these pages together with public consumption in mind though.
btw, speaking as a student, the UW is an excellent school for computer science.
A number of people have been commenting on how outsourcing is being scaled back after initial enthusiasm due to communication problems (language and time lag) primarily.
Really, this has been pretty obvious from the start. Outsourcing makes sense for some companies, but for companies whose bread and butter is software, like apple, it's pretty crazy to put your workers on the other side of the planet from you management. The different time zones alone make it difficult to hear back from someone on the same day for any issue
However, there's an important question that most people gloss over. If there are so many indian developers, why aren't they starting their own companies and selling us the software directly, instead of working through an intermediary. Hiring an american firm to do localization, but keeping management in india makes a lot more sense than having the software designers and the software implementers on the other side of the world.
Really, an important question is, why is software development still so centered in american, canada, and europe? Even the Japanese and Koreans seem to mostly only put out software in terms of video games.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with distribution. It might be difficult for a startup company in india to make the necessary contacts to get their product onto shelves in walmarts in america, or to get them pre-loaded on a dell OEM disk. Even so, that shouldn't apply to Japan, where many companies have a strong presence here. Why doesn't Sony have consumer software division? Why isn't there a Japanese Microsoft or IBM? Why isn't there a Microsoft or IBM in *any* country aside from America?
There's often a lot of talk about the material differences between the first and third world nations (does china still count as a 2nd world nation? how many people still remember what the 2nd world refers to?), but there is there seems to be a major economic disparity among the first world nations. This disparity isn't so much in the standard of living, but in the ability of local industries to sprout up and end up dominating in the international scene. The mcdonalds, starbucks, microsoft, coca cola phenomena.
If I stop and think about it, what foreign brands are there that are really prevalent in the US? There's quite a few japanese brands in electronics, games, and cars. There's some german car brands... hmm.. ikea? Really, you'd think there'd be a stronger showing from the historically economically powerful countries like Britain, Germany, and France. What's keeping them on the sidelines?
need I say more?
It sounds like vista offers a bunch of API improvements, ala directx 10 and the presentation foundation. What's interesting is how few things *won't* be back-ported.
WPF is being back-ported to service pack 2 according the the wikipedia article. The powershell has already been released for xp. Directx 10 won't have games coming out for it for quite a while... what features exactly does that leave for vista?
XP offered a major upgrade in stability, to the point where it's almost on par with most other operating systems, an that was the selling point. What's Vista's selling point? Seriously, after all these years of development, does it have 1 single exclusive killer feature?
So far, the only thing I've seen are improved themes and hi res icons... I'd heard about built in virtualization in the past, but that hasn't been mentioned for quite a while. Was that dropped?
no... not really.
Osx, is sadly not a "linux platform."
OSX has benched quite a bit for games than windows on the same hardware... I'm not sure what the slowdown is, but it probably just has to do with mac ports usually being done as quickly and shoddily as possible. I've also heard some people saying that the kernel just isn't that fast, although I'm not sure that would have much of an effect on games.
I love OSX, but it is definitely not the ideal gaming platform. The fact is that what makes a gaming platform is game industry support, and support from the platform maker, and there's only limited support from both on osx compared to windows or ps2 etc. The truth is there's just more money behind windows game development, and there's no particular reason for that to change.
they're hiring someone to port minesweeper to the mac!
I think many of us play indie games... indie game makers may not get rich, but their works don't go unnoticed.
How many people here have played escape velocity, galactic civilizations, lugaru, or exile/avernum?
In some way the market is expanding as more and more people decide they can't afford or just don't care enough to pay 400 dollars to buy the video card necessary to run all the latest industry games. The indies have historically focussed on games that are either 2D or can be run on shitty embedded graphics. They have also usually offered a lower price point. This is going to turn out to be a win for them in the long run. There's 6 billion potential gamers out there, most of which are probably going to be gaming on a tight budget.
>custom-built technology like the Cell processor and Blu-ray to distinguish their product from the others
>(compare this to Microsoft's more nimble strategy of outsourcing the 360's chip-design to IBM).
Actually, didn't IBM help sony make the cell too? At the very least, IBM is manufacturing them...
Does anyone know what companies were involved with the development of the cell and what responsibilities they had?
that couldn't be done by setting up standards and best practices within the industry, and then testing software and source against those metrics.
It seems like there could be an organization setup to certify software as meeting some security standards. Some people might think this would be a problem for open source, but they forget that there is a lot of money behind open source. I'm sure IBM and others would help foot the bill behind getting linux certified.
The real problem with certification or government regulation is that it might cause innovation to stall in the industry. If an expensive certification process is required for huge classes of applications, then it will be difficult for smaller companies to introduce new products. The way the industry is structured, most innovative products come from smaller companies, which are often bought out by larger companies. If software must be certified, then these companies can never sell anything on their own, and their only hope is being bought out immediately after they have a product, but before they can bring it to market. This keeps such products from being tested by the market before being bought out by a larger company, and makes being a startup so unattractive that even fewer people would be willing to do it.
In other words, regulation might pretty much ruins the whole scheme that has fueled the software industry.
That's a pretty big generalization though. Some qualifications on what regulation or certification would mean could actually make it pretty attractive. Doing security certification for only small classes of products where the market is already pretty solidified could minimize the damage and maximize the benefit. Varying degrees of certification, where the minimal level is within the range of a small companies budget, would certainly help.
Personally, I'd like to see a good faith effort at industry self regulation through certification before we consider government regulation.
when you say aerospace company, I bet that means you will be flying to different sites around the world, not a particular work spot. I think that most slashdotters are speaking from their experience where they've been asked to move where the company is, but that doesn't really apply here.
I know one boeing engineer who flies to the middle east and africa on a regular basis to help with sales. He seems ok with it, but has drawn a firm line as regards how many hours he's willing to spend at work and how much time he's willing to spend overseas. I've been told he's refused promotions several times that would have required too much time out off his family life.
My suggestion is that when you are in town, make sure you aren't working overtime, and that you get home to spend time with your family. I'd also explore the option of bringing your family along on vacations once in a while (I don't know how practical this is though...).
If you still don't get enough time with your family, I suggest starting new families at the various locations you fly to. If you marry the right people you might even turn a profit and be able to quit your job and be a husband full time.
it doesn't legitimize theft. I realize that software piracy is not seen as a particularly serious crime by, but it is still a crime.
Realistically, it is also a more serious crime than most people treat it as. It is essentially theft, and it does clearly violate the right of property of the copyright owner. The counterargument, which is usually only made halfheartedly, is that piracy does not subtract from the material possessions of the copyright holder. This is essentially a silly argument, and only shows that theft of material possession and theft of intellectual property are not the same thing and have a different set of repercussions.
The repercussions of intellectual property theft are different from the repercussions of material theft, but they do share one thing in common that keeps them in the same class. The theft of intellectual property violates the right to property, including the right to control access to said property, and the right to use said property for profit. Some other crimes that would fall into this category would include breaking into someone's house to use their bathroom or telephone without asking, sneaking into a theater, or breaking into an amusement park at night to ride the ride for free.
People often also make the argument that they are trying out software that they pirate, and that if it is good they will purchase it later. This does sound like a good business model for software in some cases. Indeed, many developers do publish software under a contract that allows some degree of trial usage. These are shareware publishers. However, if businesses don't want to give trial licenses to their software, it is quite clearly their right not to do so, even if this appears shortsighted to users.
By using software in a trial system that developer has not licensed you to participate in, users are behaving paternalistically towards the developers and content producers. By paternalistically I mean that they are saying the the developers aren't competent to choose their own ends, and that these are their proper ends, and then forcing them to comply with them. This is actually worse than simply violating someone's rights or coercing them, since normally when someone violate another's rights they at least admit that they have rights which can be violated. Paternalism is pretending the other agent isn't a rational agent, ignoring their will, and choosing their ends for them. Authorities often do this to individual citizens with things like nanny laws, and I think that it is deeply troubling that as a society we are becomming more comfortable with proscribing what is in another's "best interest" even when it is against their actual consent.
I want to be clear that I'm not trying to be self righteous here. I pirate software and I fully intend to continue to do so. However, I think it is very important to realize that this is a moral failing on my part. To pretend that it is not my moral failing, but wholly the failing of the developer to not recognize his own best interest that causes me to pirate software is to commit a crime far wose than theft. It is to essentially deny developers as rational entities. Another way to put it is to deny that they have rights, or they have personhood.
It is not a counterargument to say that these decisions are made by corporations and not by actual human beings. All decisions made by corporations are made by beings who are at least somewhat rational, their executives, etc. To disrespect the basic rights of a corporation and to deny it's entityhood, isn't to deny the entityhood of an artificial social construction, but to deny the entityhood of the particular persons who made particular decisions. Similarly, to deny that the results of a popular election is the actual will of the people because the election polled a large group of people who is not an actual individual rational agent is to deny the personhood and natural rights of all of the individuals polled. Arguably (although this seems to me to be on less stable ground), it eve
to form an axis of evil... software.
Like redmond? There's a ton of software companies in redmond, not just microsoft. Does Cupertino have something that Redmond lacks aside from a cool nickname?