Me too... exactly the same with an APC UPS with the original batteries. I had to bend the hell out of the UPS casing in order to get the thing out, it was so bloated.
You might be watching too many movies yourself. Some of what you say may be true if we're talking "kids" breaking in, but not for professionals (including burglars, rapists, thieves, kidnappers and murderers).
The major impact on someone being disturbed is the fact that you know they are there, otherwise they'd have come through the door shouting and bawling if they "knew" they could out-gun you. If they did not want to risk a confrontation and had no choice but to hide at your initial appearance, however, they will not show themselves until you are gone or you discover them, even if they then intend to follow you back to the bedroom and bludgeon you to death. And they probably *won't* just run away in most circumstances, anyway. They don't care that you are in (or they wouldn't be burgling you in the first place), they care whether you detect them and strip their advantage.
If someone does break into your home to *kill* you, they would have a weapon. Doesn't need to be a gun. Doesn't even need to be more than their bare hands. Read the case files for just about any serial killer. What they need, though, is for you not to be looking at them when they initiate their attack. If you turn the lights on, look around the house, etc. then no, they probably *won't* stick around if they have a choice. But if between you and your only exit lies a pissed-off homeowner with a gun who's storming around the house looking for intruders and who doesn't *know* you are there, it doesn't matter what you are carrying, you'll try to stay undetected.
As a homeowner, it really is the most stupid, dangerous and ridiculously ineffective thing you can do to go downstairs, especially armed, in that situation. Call police first if you *know* someone is down there, and then either keep absolutely quiet but ready for anyone who comes through the door, or make lots of noise yourself. Don't be a moron and try to walk down the stairs by yourself, even if you have a large gun and are confident in your abilities to use it... that's watching too many zombie movies - "Hey, I know, before we call the police, let's split up and then I'll walk somewhere dark, announce my entrance and wander around everywhere where people who know I'm there can get behind me and overpower me...".
"It was proabably the middle of the night, everyone was sleeping. He wasn't thinking, or was thinking that he had put it away far enough, or that he'd wake up before his kid."
And left a loaded, ready-to-shoot firearm in the middle of the room like you would a discarded plate or an old newspaper. There's no excuse. And this is exactly the problem with gun-owning countries - it's the middle of the night, everybody's sleeping, he hears a sound, panics, he's ***not thinking*** straight, and ends up aiming at things with a gun... a banging door, a stray animal, a kid trying to get his ball back when his parents won't know (weird, yeah, that's a weird situation, but it happens), a partygoer who's accidentally stumbled into the wrong back yard, a neighbour who's jumped over the fence to see what the strange sound was in his friend's back garden...
It's a gun. It's used to kill things, and only to kill things. Don't ready it unnecessarily, don't leave it lying about, don't carry it unnecessarily, don't use it when you're not confident of your abilities and judgement, and keep it THE HELL out of the way of children, or even your whole family. For some reason people seem to think less of that than if he'd left an upturned lawnmower, with the safety features dismantled, turned on and plugged in, in the same room. To be honest, I'd have had a LOT more sympathy for the guy in question if the child had done something with a dismantled lawnmower rather than a gun... at least he *could* have a nearly-plausible reason for having the thing sitting in his house in that kind of state.
Even if we take the "home defence" argument - the pillock left the gun downstairs, with ammunition in it after his initial fears were calmed. If there *had* been someone in the house that he didn't see, he's just handed them a free deadly weapon with which to kill him.
Not just that... pumping water is a lot harder than pumping air - just through sheer mass moved. The mass thing does affect stuff on the way out too, so air can't "push" as big a turbine as water would but everything like that just creates more strain on the equipment. Additionally, water is completely incompressible, so if you want to store 10,000 litres, you have to have 10,000 litres of space (and thus a large environmental concern and also restricts the power you can produce in a certain area. However, air can be compressed incredibly well (someone was talking about 1000psi - that's nearly 700 times more than atmospheric pressure) using quite simple technology and thus you only need one-seven-hundreth of the space (or you get 700 times more "fuel" into the same space). It has to be air-tight but that problem almost solves itself in deep underground caves, which is why we're not all swimming in natural gas at the moment.
Like all things, you can't give a blanket statement here. Yes, there will be some people who "learned" BASIC when they were young and now, when they are let loose on an Excel macro in work, will pine for line numbers and GOTO's. But they would have done that no matter what they learned. However, there's also a damn lot of people who moved on from BASIC very quickly but still have a fond association with it because of their history and because of the simplicity of some tasks in BASIC (of course, a lot of things are more complex but depending on your project you can still "win" on speed using BASIC). If I was to "invent" my own programming language, there are features from just about every language I've ever used that I'd want to be incorporated. Even BASIC has some things that I'd want to include, or that have been copied into lots of other languages.
I think BASIC was an introduction - a way to hide the complexities, to say "don't worry about memory management and data structures just yet, let's learn half-way to being able to program so you can get interested and have some fun quickly". And then when you did that, it was *so* much easier to move to other languages. Of course you still had to learn and change habits - but that's the point of learning. People who drove a moped when they were 17 don't go on to drive a car and keep twisting the indicator stalks to change gear or accelerate.
But BASIC only corrupted those who were corruptible - those who didn't *care* how the computer allocated memory or whether the program was efficient or readable were bound to carry on not caring in other languages. And those people, by definition, would have been like that in any language and probably *never* go on to learn any other.
My dad bought me a ZX Spectrum in 1987 or thereabouts. I was 8. Within the first week I was trying to figure out how to program in BASIC (by the help of that orange-spiral-bound BASIC manual that came with it - damn that should be a compulsory item with all new computers). Without that book being included, I'd probably now only know how to 'LOAD ""' and my life would be very different. If that had been any of the C books that I've ever read, I would have thrown it in the bin immediately. Within a year (in between playing games, school, and pulling girls' hair), I was a pretty proficient BASIC programmer. It helped that I was also doing things like typing in listings from magazines (an early form of Open Source that will forever be sadly missed) and trying to understand Z80 assembly. By the time I got to secondary school (age 11), I was writing games for fun for my friends. I wrote a No-CD crack for Desert Strike when it first come out on PC, I was 13, and was incredibly proud of my first use of x86 assembly / Ralf Brown's Interrupt List - I never distributed it to anyone else but it's still sitting around on my machine somewhere. I did it using DOS "debug" and a hell of a lot of manual path-following and single-stepping through the code. Around the same time, I wrote a program for Windows 3.11 that prevented execution of programs with certain signatures / hashes / paths that integrated into the school's Novell network and was so damn good that even the network administrator (an old-school IT guy) couldn't bypass it on the test accounts. He seriously considered deploying it to help curb a spate of students running programs via Word macros, DOS command prompts and other clever tricks (I never had the heart to tell him how they were doing it, who had taught them that, or why I felt so guilty that I had to counter-act all those methods for him...)
By the time I got to Year 11 (age 15), I was programming on my TI-85 in the back of the class (and sharing those games / programs with the rest of my class) and writing "toy" operating systems for my PC. I was receiving email from Canada (a massive thing at that time) telling me how good my games were, and I was dabbling in everything I could find: C, Pascal, FORTRAN, assembly and even things like DOS Batch scripting and
- Set myself a minimum requirement (run this app, boot up in this amount of time, perform so-many I/O operations per second, etc.) - Look at the specifications available from a range of my usual suppliers. Don't bother to look elsewhere - if you can't buy it, it doesn't exist. If you have to hunt for it, it'll be rare, expensive, not as well supported and probably far too specialist for your needs. - Narrow things down by a sensible budget. - Compare the specifications there against each other and, by looking them up on the net if necessary, find out which one is more suitable and best value-for-money for your needs (Is an Atom faster than whatever is in the other machine? Can my game take advantage of a second core?).
Basically, look at the "recommended" spec on those games you want to play, then go on about 10-12 large websites that sell computers to the market you're in (e.g. gaming) and see what they offer. The chances of being able to build anything comparable for the same / lower price are minimal - those days have gone and you're more likely to balls things up if you don't know what processor socket or PSU you need to run things properly.
Seriously, how hard is it? Ignore ALL of the marketing... see what you can afford, see what you need, see where they match (if at all), then do your research on those 2-3 models of machine (including their major components) that are good for you instead of trying to research every component that's currently available in every model that ever existed. I've managed to sort through a hundred models of PC to get to three in a few minutes, and then I just researched those three and actually spent nearly five times as long doing that last bit of thorough research properly.
If you want to know, I do this for a living for mainstream businesses / schools and that means everything from high-end CAD-stations to netbooks. It's *still* cheaper to buy the right thing from a large retailer's website than it is to mess about trying to cobble things together, whether you're buying one or hundreds. I have no idea what "name" processor is in 90% of the desktops I've bought... I can barely remember if they were Intel or AMD. It really doesn't matter at all what the codename is, I have no idea what the latest interfaces, cache sizes, socket-sizes, memory technology etc. even are. I just look it up when I have already narrowed things down to models with those components and make a decision based on what I can easily buy, how much I want to spend and what I *need* the computer to have / do.
You don't *need* to know all that rubbish, it's all just marketing anyway. What you need to do is see what's available and then check how well it's likely to run your games (e.g. benchmarks on similar games for the individual components, whether the processor is multi-core or not and whether the game can benefit). Let the assembly guys at a large company worry about whether the sockets are compatible, whether the memory timings are right, whether the PSU is powerful enough etc. If they mess it up, it costs them money. If you mess it up because you built it yourself or deviated from their normal bundles, it costs you money.
And no, you do *not* end up paying a premium to do things this way. You save money even before the things arrive on your doorstep due to the wonders of bulk-buying (Ever wonder *why* those bundle deals are so cheap? Mass purchasing by ordinary businesses, usually, if you ignore the holiday seasons), let alone the savings in not having to worry about destroying a card or PSU because you ordered a standard bundle and a "Super Duper Turbo Hyper Fighting" graphics card and put them together yourself because you heard it gets 1fps better on some random website.
Set yourself a specification (e.g. dual-core or not, speed in GHz, whether you are worried about the power it saps, X amount of RAM, etc.). Set yourself a budget. Find out how much stuff matches those. If it's a lot, set yourself a st
My dad used to repair cars / trucks for a living for about 30 years. He would never have owned one of these cars because he can foresee the consequences when something goes wrong.
He hates anything electronic on a car's engine / controls. There are good reasons for this, as some drivers have recently found out. Worse, though, he hates cars that are designed badly (never ask him to repair a Peugeot) or driven by idiots. Don't design cars that cannot be stopped / disabled / turned off / controlled in an emergency. By definition, in any emergency, that means even with the engine switched off (which should be easy to do from the driver's seat - easy from the passenger's seat being optional) the car should not be out of control (sluggish, not ideal, maybe but not out of control). If you change the normal engine-start interface, damn well provide an easy, obvious analog that can be used by the driver to cut power to the engine but not engage dangerous systems (e.g. steering-lock), and can't be overridden by the car (e.g. a STOP button next to the start button? Sod that "hold the start for X seconds" bullshit, it's completely unintuitive like "Start... Shutdown" on Windows and costs the driver vital seconds).
The *driver* of a car is the person *driving* the car, otherwise we'd call them the drivee. If you're an engine and the driver turns you off, then damn well switch off. If the driver brakes, then brake (and if you can do the sub-millisecond things that help him brake faster, do that, for as long as the driver brakes and not a second more, otherwise don't try to be clever). If the driver puts you into neutral, go into neutral. I don't like the idea of any car that can override a conscious decision on my part... the exceptions to this are emergency features (like airbags, seatbelts, ABS, etc. because I usually don't have a chance to *make* a conscious decision in those instances) but even in its absolute failsafe mode nothing should go wrong (ABS fails? Okay, brakes still work. Airbag fails? Okay, it doesn't explode in your face but just flashes warnings at the driver. Seatbelt fails? All you can do is warn the driver).
More important than design - as a driver, don't buy cars with these ridiculous "features" (the most I've had is a car that has ABS and power-steering, but if I turn off the engine - with a KEY! - the whole ECU turns off and everything is still under my control). Gears are mechanical linkages for a reason. Steering is a mechanical linkage for a reason (power **ASSISTED** steering). Brakes are a mechanical linkage (usually with redundant systems such as dual-braking-systems, handbrakes, etc.) for a reason. Engine ignitions are electrical but key-based ones directly control (via a physical connection) the vital power source that enables the engine to continue running and their failsafe mode unless you tamper with the cabling is engine-cut-out. What does the "drive-by-wire" give you that you didn't have before? Is it really so difficult to turn a key in a slot compared to carrying a fragile, expensive electronic gadget and having to press a button? Does it make it easier to drive? Does it make it safer to drive?
Even *if* the driver is a prat and is doing something incredibly stupid (over-revving), the car should not be overriding his decision without really, really good reasons (e.g. car will explode) and even then it should do the safest course of action (limit revs to their upper safety limit, warn driver, hell - even switch off the damn engine safely and let it coast to a halt is preferable to just exploding). I classify buying a car that doesn't recognise its place as a servant, not the master, as driver error anyway... if you *don't* know how, can't work out how, or actually find it impossible to safely control the car you drive in an emergency (e.g. switch off engine but leave key in, how to change into neutral in an emergency, how to slow yourself if the brakes completely fail, whether it has ABS or you need to pump brakes, etc.) - even if you've *never
My tax bill disagrees with you, especially with the contributions that my country has to make to aid other countries in the EU. That comes from my tax too. Also, the population figures, employment statistics, governmental administrative costs (multiple governing bodies at country / EU level costs more than a single one would in the US), sales figures and basically any other statistic you would like to look at disagree with any assertion that the US has / invests / commands significantly more money / people than the EU as an entity.
However, what the EU does have is differing opinions within itself, various "checks" between each countries (when was the last time that the US was told by another country that one of its laws was illegal and must change immediately and it *did* it? In my country that was a few weeks ago. That's how the EU functions - other countries keep each individual country in check to make sure they're all singing from the same hymn sheet), absolutely no incentive to come up with a single-party plan for any political idea (it will be shot down by other countries no matter what, just for political gain, unless it's *truly* regarded as being in everyone's best interests) and an innate ability to fight *anything* that lands on its desk.
For the record, I'm British and thus, almost naturally, don't like the idea of the EU. But you can't argue that when it came to fining Microsoft and implementing controls, it stood up and did the job (the US DOJ couldn't - and MS are now contributing information that they've been forced to reveal and that the Samba team can actually *USE*, and have to introduce that stupid "browser choice" update, etc.). When it comes to throwing out dodgy laws and software patents, it does the job (on the whole, nothing's perfect). When it comes to uniting many countries into a single entity with common currency, with little hassle, it does the job (UK is an exception because we exercised a "favour", basically, and managed to postpone our conversion to the Euro for the time being).
Knock the EU as much as you like, but if you think this was in any way something the EU could easily do that the US could not, you're wrong. It's just that the US is inherently more easily corrupted at the moment. The EU stands to lose just as much industry support, potential revenue, etc. as anyone else signing up to the agreement. But the EU stands up and says no and it's rarely based purely on political gain. It's hard to convince countries that haven't ever really got on (Cyprus is in the EU, Turkey is a serious candidate to join, very rare occurrence for the two of them to do anything together) to join forces behind any decision. Different countries of the EU are using Open Source operating systems, office applications, file formats, etc. at a national level. ACTA just works against those ideas. ACTA breaks some of the world's strictest privacy / data protection laws. ACTA gives rights to personal searches for copyright material at international borders. It's a dumb idea. The EU have recognised that, and that the benefits to them are incredibly small in comparison, so they've recommended against it. That's called good sense. The other countries signing up to it (and the US isn't alone here) are on the whole being manipulated by the media industries, or drawn by the scent of money.
I see your dubious statistics and replace them with the *updated* statistics which are referenced in the article you posted itself (i.e. the Jan 2010 steam hardware survey). As of this minute, it paints a slightly different picture, but pretty much the same (i.e Windows 7 is still losing out to XP - a nine-year-old OS - despite being force-bundled with every machine sold in the last six months... and Vista didn't get that much of a shoe in the door even with its three-year headstart):
Your article: XP 42.78%, Vista 27.91%, Win7 28.53% Actual hardware survey now: Windows XP 32 bit 43.81% Windows 7 64 bit 19.04% Windows Vista 32 bit 18.39% Windows 7 9.76% Windows Vista 64 bit 7.75% Windows XP 64 bit 0.51%
But also, you're basing that data on the Steam survey. I hereby bring up the fact that Steam only officially runs on Windows anyway (therefore biased) and that even when run through Wine, it appears as "Windows" on their hardware surveys. Steam is a Gold-app on Wine, and most of the Gold/Platinum apps are games, a lot of them Steam games - that amount of development effort isn't done for nothing or because "nobody" plays them using Wine.
Also, the latest games released through Steam produce "spikes" of gameplay on them that disappear over time... if those games *demand* Windows 7 / Vista, then the spike will translate into the hardware survey for that month, but next month will be a different story (the last few times I've looked, Call of Duty 2 was mostly losing out to the *original* Counterstrike in player-minutes, but the situation flip-flopped repeatedly as time went on. Both run on XP but there are other, more recent, games that don't and affect the statistics.) I'd also be interested to see stats on virtualisation, "Windows XP Mode" etc. because that would be interesting too.
I'm not saying that Windows isn't the dominant gaming platform, or that Windows 7 isn't "selling" well, I just hate biased statistics. It's like people who say "Well, no-one uses Opera to visit our website anyway, so it's not worth making it work in Opera..." I just want to slap them.
I've had blue-screen-inducing patches at every time of year, not just near releases of their big software. They just never seem to test them before foisting them upon thousands of users. Patches which blue-screen 1-5% of the computers that you include them on are not that unusual, really. And for some reason, slipstreamed installs seem *much* more reliable than hotfix-installs over an existing installation. I find that weird.
Seriously, a school I worked in with hundreds of desktop from major manufacturers with no "unusual" quirks on the software (basically Office on a Windows domain) had quite obvious blue-screens / hangs when we applied a round of patches. It took seconds to identify the patch, and isolate it, but it was still *blindingly* obvious and should have been caught during testing. Even fresh disk installs and slipstreamed installs produced the same problem.
Microsoft don't test their updates adequately. I don't care if they test them on a thousand models of machine, or include however many beta-testers, whatever they are doing obviously isn't enough to make it safe to apply their testing to millions of computers worldwide. Hence auto-updates are disabled on every network that I've ever worked on (and it was hardly ever me that disabled it), and some places just block the windowsupdate domains entirely to stop that "You *WILL* install this hotfix" crap.
Updates of anything are a risk, there's no doubt about that and I always run my networks on stable software, to which every change is tested first. But OS updates are a black-box change that can have stupidly enormous ramifications if you don't test. The users shouldn't *have* to be the people catching some of these stupid mistakes.
Yeah, this is always the problem that big software projects have... I don't claim that users are perfect and "know" what they want, but it has to be said: if you are making a USER interface, it's probably best if the USER gets some say in that and that you listen to the USERS especially when a large of them speak up. Other parts, sure, you can say "We don't work that way" but the user interface is sacred and your *only* interaction with the program as a user. Mess that up, you might as well not have the program at all.
And I'm sorry, but I'm a single-window person. I've work in IT for years and the *easiest* way to work is on a commandline or in a full-screen window (alt-tab's, multiple desktops etc. vital, of course). Rarely do I need two things side by side on the screen but when I do, it's usually TWO and that's it, and that's easily handled by tiling the windows. Bear in mind that I have 18 windows open on my machine at the moment, everything from instant messengers, shell sessions, folder views, web browsers, development environments etc. The only "non-full-screen" ones are two shell windows where I'm referring to one file in another and need to check consistency between the two, and the instant messengers (because they don't need full-screen, are minimised, and are only on the taskbar so that they flash when I get a message). MDI is an invaluable tool - I can't web-browse without my Opera tabs - and ignoring it because of some "religious" argument is stupid. I've seen even the cheapest paint programs offer a "Do you want an MDI or SDI interface?" dialog on first run... Serif software springs to mind.
The only other program I ever really used a lot that didn't do single-window nicely was some of the old versions of Visual Basic. But there they had a reason - you were designing a UI within an UI, so it's not an easy task to do.
At last, though, GIMP has woken up to the protests of almost *every* non-professional-user that's ever wanted to use it. When the new version is released, it will be downloaded and tried, if for no other reason than to add another number to the download stats for the single-window-capable versions.
I have a hard enough time convincing people they need to re-buy cables (and peripherals) for their new TV as it is.
"You need an HDMI cable" "But I already have this SCART thing and this composite thing" "Yeah, but you only have HDMI on your new TV" "Is that because it's HD?" "Well, no, you can send an HD signal over SCART or composite just the same, but they just don't want to let you. They want you to buy HDMI leads and TV's and equipment with HDMI." "Who's they?" "The people who license the HDMI technology." "Er... so I have to throw away my DVD player unless I pay extra to get legacy ports too?" "Or buy a Blu-Ray with HDMI or a newer player with HDMI. The new ones upscale the DVD so it *looks* like HD but isn't really." "Mmm..."
And then add an hour of conversation as you explain the various *revisions* of HDMI and everything else, and why they can't just buy a £10 signal-splitter or cable-switcher without it potentially interfering with their recording of HD programmes, or why some models just won't negotiate a HD signal with some other models, or why the cheap, shit imported versions of DVD players and Blu-Ray let you just use a composite output, or why all this was to stop pirates when you can find and download HD-anything online in the same time as you used to be able to download SD content.
Call me when consumers get bored of this crap. Then I might have a look and see if there's a *standard* (i.e. unchanging, common, open, useful) cable set I can use to watch TV and record the stuff I want. To be honest, there already is - it's called "ADSL over a phone line from a widescreen laptop".
I have a free local newspaper dropped through my door every week. I glance at the front page (usually an advert, or a school promoting itself with a "news" story), I skip to the classified ads / jobs for anything unusual, that's about it unless someone I know will be in the paper. My housemate doesn't even look at it. I really don't care about local news as anything more than a sideline... "Hey, did you read that someone go stabbed in town the other day?" "Oh, really? Another?" (I live in London, if they reported everything like that, it would be even more boring). The rest is filler material and promotional stuff for schools, fetes, etc.
On a country-wide scale, I often skip at least 95% of the "headline" stories entirely. I just don't care enough about politicians or scaremongering. On an international scale, I skip almost everything except for the Science sections (where I pretty much read every story). Why? Because I'm ignorant of the world? Far from it, I'm just tired of reading about it every day and want something more "interesting" and positive (reported news is almost all negative).
If something is "important" (for my definition of important) it sometimes never gets reported (science, medical breakthroughs, etc. are boring, didn't you know? And major world events, e.g. earthquakes, focus on how many British people died in Haiti... I really couldn't give a shit about that particular statistic - how about the actual news of the earthquake itself?). If it does get reported, I find more material that I'm interested in elsewhere than I do wherever I spotted that piece of news (whether that's contradictory reports, or just more details).
Localised news is, for the most part, irrelevant. I work in education in the UK so I often read about anything education-related. Does that make me ignorant because I ignore the front page story about two US celebrities possibly breaking up? Not really. Who cares?
It's all to do with your definitions of: news, important and interesting.
Ha, I'm laughing at the "put food on the table" crowd. Putting food on the table is a day-to-day chore. Job satisfaction, a suitable home life, unstressed parents and most importantly JOB SECURITY are a million times more important in the long run. It's short-sighted to claim that you have to be completely disrepected as a person in order to feed your family. Baby doesn't care that dad's a road sweeper, or a baker, or an IT manager, so long as he's home after work, and happy, and that he'll *probably* have a job tomorrow.
Working for companies that treat their employees like that is *not* security - security for today, maybe, but not for tomorrow. And the more you "suck it up" and "just deal with it" by continuing to work with employers that are *abusing* you as a human, the more they'll take you to the cleaners. And the more those employers will thrive and really not care about their employees at all. When do the companies stand up and listen and improve pay and conditions? When all their employees start to walk (and no, I'm not and never have been a member of any union, because I have a tendency to believe that other people are just as wet and short-sighted as some of the posters on this thread and I don't want them dictating what work / pay I'm limited to).
Think I'm just mouthing off and haven't ever been in the position? Been there, done that, several times, with a wife, newborn, toddler, etc., with a mortgage to pay, bills everywhere, loan payments, and balancing a thousand other spinning plates. Every time that I got screwed (or sensed it coming), I moved onwards and upwards and got happier in my work (and higher-paid, but that's neither here nor there). One of those times was when my daughter was barely a month old and I walked from a job because they wanted to treat me like shit (they also thought that the *best* candidate for my replacement wasn't suitable because "He's been working at a supermarket for the last month" in the middle of a economic crisis... so f***ing what? He's working, when he could be sitting at home, and he has more than enough experience / skill to do the job). Call me an idiot if you want, but my daughter did not go without at any point and within a week I was working somewhere else for infinitely more respect and a little bit more money.
I'm sorry, but I owe it to my family to keep my self-respect, to teach my daughter that I'm not a faceless, numbered drone, to come home healthy and happy, and if that means we eat bread and water rather than smoked salmon, so be it. And if a large company offering me huge wages for screwing other people over and / or a paycut that I haven't agreed to has to be told to stick their offer where the sun don't shine, I can, will and have done that (on both counts actually - I've turned down jobs that were handed to me on a plate purely because I didn't agree with how the company were making their sales).
Your family need to be fed, but they also need to know that Daddy isn't a robot that can be stepped on by everyone around him. That's teaching your kids nothing but subservience to people with money, and they'll grow up to hate you or follow you in that path. Like any sensible parent, I want my kid to grow up to question things that are wrong, learn the value of money, the value of respect, and to do better at life than I have. In a modern, developed country, starvation is a *long* way off and, if you seek proper help, almost impossible. If it means a choice between giving up my mortgage and making me / my daughter unhappy, it's an easy choice. Sorry, but my daughter's respect for her father cannot be bought for any job, price or token gesture. And nothing buys my daughter's happiness except my own, and that can't be had by knowing I'm "only" putting food on the table.
Live your corporate existence being abused and trodden on because there "aren't many jobs about". But it's not for me. I'll take my kid to the park rather than to a stadium, I'll show her how to cook masses of cheap soup instead of takeaways and restaurants, and I'll end up having more fun and gaining more respect in the process.
I've used that with my parents a lot - they often "bubble" and then wait for me to do the tricky bits for them. Not really a useful trick on the more difficult areas - all you do is increase the risk that if the non-bubbled person dies then you have to start the level over (possibly from a halfway point). Non-bubbled, you can at least continue with the other player. There's no reason the screen can't zoom out a bit more, or prevent one player running off too far in one of the directions. The game itself even enforces "the screen will push you" at certain points, so why it couldn't just work like that rather than the player disappearing off-screen into certain death, I don't know.
And "BUBBLE!" is a common shout when the poorer player is about to die - if you can hit A fast enough, you can avoid the death and just bubble harmlessly back to your partner.
Well, my family and I have played and completed just about every Mario game imaginable (my parents are mad for it, but virtually no other game at all). We played through the Wii version just the other day and I can't say I noticed any delay in the controls at all. It *would* piss me off because I can't stand things like that (even if a good player learns to compensate for them very quickly) - SuperTux, for instance, annoys me because it's "not the same" as Mario jumps, etc. There's something about the Yoshis that is different but I can't pinpoint it, it just "feels" different to SMW Yoshi. I wouldn't say better or worse, just slightly different.
And Wii Mario is actually very good. It could do with a rethink of the "player dies if their friend pulls the screen too far" part (Gauntlet used to handle that exact situation much better nearly 20 years ago), but the game mechanics are pretty solid and traditional. I wouldn't call Wii Mario highly graphical at all - I view it in the same class as Mario All-Stars - an old game, with some revamped but virtually identical graphics, and the same old gameplay. All they've done is tuck some moves from newer Mario games into it and upped the animation / graphics a little. I actually found it pleasingly traditional, as did my parents who have never really enjoyed the 3D games... they still like to trounce each other on All-Stars Mario 3 Battle Game. The only question that remains, really, is when is Super Mario War coming out for the Wii?:-)
Yes, in terms of distance, but you'd immediately cut out about 99.9% of the noise, debris and other man-made junk in your way that interferes with a typical SETI search... most "hits" on SETI are man-made objects and stray signals bouncing at odd angles. A few million tons of rock in between you and the only source of confusion tends to make the signals a bit easier to spot amongst the noise.
Don't like it? Don't watch it. Don't buy the equipment. Don't support it. Seems pretty simple.
Up until a year or so ago I was a TV licence payer in the UK - then I discovered that not having a TV didn't make any difference to my viewing habits i.e. there was nothing but shit on and the stuff I did want to see I could get other ways *legally* which, for the most part, didn't involve giving corporations money - BBC iPlayer etc. aren't subject to the license because that only covers having the capability to watch the programmes on British TV as they are broadcast - so you don't need a TV license, but get the same programmes.
And the things that are worth watching, I buy a DVD of (which I then rip, of course, but seeing as I "own" it, that's my decision). I paid for Sky until it became a million channels of crap, ten minute advert breaks and re-re-re-re-re-peats of programmes. I paid for a TV licence until the same thing happened and I realised I could just watch on iPlayer / ITV Player / 4od without (most of) the crap any time I liked. Why *pay* for something you disagree with? Voting with your feet is the most powerful commercial incentive for a large corporation... if you don't buy, say, a DAB radio, then they won't want to support it (that's what happening with DAB at the moment). It's the same thing. Stop giving your money to people you don't like... you don't go to buskers on the streets and say "I'll give you a pound, but only if you improve the way you play and correct the second note in the third stave..."... you either like it and pay for it, or you don't. And the news is that millions of people *will* pay for it (HD seems to be an addiction even amongst my techie friends that I just don't understand).
Come on, people, if you have such ideals, take a sacrifice for them - stop watching and supporting media/hardware that is DRM if you feel so strongly about it.
Anything that works will be accepted, like every other driver in the kernel... if it doesn't make *everything* work, that's not a big problem. Especially new drivers rarely have code that actually makes the device inherently useful, or supremely accelerated, immediately - but it will function. That's how you code - one bit at a time, gradually building as you go. When you have all the DMA, 2D drawing, multiscreen crap worked out *THEN* you can think about 3D. At the moment, even simple combinations like dual-displays can cause major headaches with some chipsets, whether the hardware supports them or not.
The programmers are effectively working blind with unknown hardware - and programmers don't work that way, that's a reverse engineer's job. To say they can't merge *anything* until all the features are working just means you'll never see *anything* at all. But if they merge a 2D driver today, they can add basic 3D access tomorrow and 3D acceleration the day after and maybe some day you'll see something of use. If not, at least you'll be able to boot Linux and *see* something in X-Windows on any computer that runs off that chipset (or has backwards compatibility for it).
You will not see full 3D accelerated drivers for any chipset (especially not any that compete with manufacturer's drivers in terms of acceleration) that matters to you on a new computer until manufacturers fully co-operate and help get coding too. Don't expect it, don't complain about it, don't moan when it doesn't happen or only "obsolete" chipsets ever get 3D support. When the manufacturer's co-operate, it takes nothing to make a driver. When they don't, it means knowing *everything* they know before you can really start properly.
Played the new mario game? It's a combination of all the previous Mario games. Played Wii Sports Resort? It's Wii Sports with knobs on. Played Mario Kart Wii? It's like every Mario kart game.
So, yes, the Wii itself is almost *entirely* rehash. Really hurt their sales figures, didn't it? And why? Because it's still *new* and *fun* at the same time as being *familiar*.
I don't care about them rehashing, so long as it's still fun to play with a crowd of friends. And there's still new stuff too. If you want to get technical, Half-life 2 was just a rehash of Half-life 1, which was a rehash of Quake, which was a rehash of Doom... just because it's the same thing again doesn't mean you can't be innovative and create a game that people want to play.
I don't mean rehashing specifically, but just the fact that you can make a game for a stable platform that's going to be around for years to come. I'd rather know that people were still making Wii games than focusing all their efforts on some "Wii 2"... hell, I still play NES, SNES, and N64 games and I'd love that people were still making them, even if they were within the limits of the technology of those consoles.
Good for Nintendo. I don't really care about flashy sequels and having to re-buy consoles/accessories/games or hope that the backward compatibility works (if there is one). I just want people to carry on making games for a console that almost everyone has played. It's good business sense to keep your customers on a stable platform and sell optional extras / games that enhance their original purchase's value without *forcing* them to upgrade and alienating them, not to mention keeping the online Wii stores alive - how many people who have never touched emulation have been playing emulated titles on Wii without even knowing? It's good gaming sense (what matters is the game and the price, not the number of / type of peripherals, graphics, sound...) and at the end of the day, the Wii is forefront on the general public's mind... not including persistent gamers, people would struggle to give the correct name of the current version of the Xbox / Playstation, and would probably name Wii first.
"Wii 2" isn't required. Wii already proved that state-of-the-art isn't required, just a little bit of fun and know-how and something a bit different. Whether you hate it or not, you've played Wii at least once and tried it. I know that I can't say the same about the Xbox (any version) / Playstation (any version past the original PS1) consoles, yet my PC is full of every genre of game. Give it another 5 years or so, then people will be making games that actually test the limits of the Wii to the extreme all the time, then a successor that has full backwards compatibility will sell like hot cakes. And, to be honest, everyone I know that owns a Wii would actually be happier with some bundled accessory that enhances the whole console rather than a whole new console... a "HD addon" or even some processing upgrade that the Wii can interface with (like the N64 memory expansion modules, or the SuperFX/DSP chips that were in SNES games - Nintendo know what they are doing when it comes to getting the most out of a huge investment, which is why they're pretty much the only one making a decent return on hardware alone, not just the software).
If it works, and it sells, and it makes money, don't ditch it for a sequel... enhance it a bit at a time, one expenditure at a time, and keep your customers happy without shoving them between major purchases and platforms. If only MS could follow the same suit...
It depends on the gamers but endings really don't mean much to me. The first game I ever completed personally was Nonterraqueous on the Spectrum... it took ages, I had my father/brother mapping my progress as I went (we were going to send it in to a magazine but, the next day, they published someone else's map of it!) and, yes, it was fun to finish it. But since then, an ending doesn't really mean much at all... I don't think I really complete the majority of games I play that *could* be completed... at some point, it stops being entertainment and starts being "training" and that's not why I play games.
My family have completed just about every Mario game in existence (including those stupid 100-levels things in the Paper Mario's) but we don't get satisfaction from finishing and frequently it's a curve - our excitement builds as we go through all the levels and unlock the last worlds and then when it gets to the tedious "You must have 50 stars / do 100 levels / beat these last ten extraordinarily difficult levels" part, our enthusiasm drops off and it becomes a chore. We usually push past that, mainly because we play those games as a family, but there's little sense of achievement when we do finish things.
And we play a lot more games that don't have any ending at all... this has been true for *years* - Gauntlet never had an ending (except on NES, I believe) but it's still a brilliant game to play. You do find yourself setting little "achievements" in those sorts of games sometimes ("Let's get to level 100 and then leave it", "Let's get further than last time", "Let's do it without skipping levels", etc.) but they are just entertainment. I can't remember the last time I *didn't* skip a cutscene / end sequence when it was possible... possibly Half-Life 2, but I had a lot of time on my hands when I was playing that and did the full HL2+Ep1+Ep2 run through in a couple of days.
Endings are really finalisations of plot and reward for those players dedicated enough. I get my reward from my own achievements (which sometimes include things like "I'll see if I can get that Steam achievement this time", admittedly) and from just playing the game. Plot is really secondary to me because even when it's excellent, it gets in the way of my freedom and play-time. To me, games for play-time, I'm under no illusion of that as an adult... I don't consider them artwork, or anything else, they are just some play-time. If I want plot, I watch a movie or (better) read a book. When I pick up a game, I just want to play.
"It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community..."
The priority of the open-source community has, generally speaking, never been nor will ever be business. Once you learn that, you learn everything you need to know about open-source, and why it does it's job so damn well. The priority of open-source is "source" that is "open". End of.
And what you're asking is basically for legally-binding forms, documents and contracts. That's not something that "open-source" (or more accurately in that case "open-content") has ever really even attempted to produce because it's such a legal minefield that it would be pointless - nobody would use it and those that did would be getting themselves into trouble the second they used them. There's a reason that all big companies have a legal department, and a reason that even "standard" forms for many things (like renting houses, employing people, writing a will) etc. are looked down upon - because legally speaking you have to know *exactly* what you're doing, customise each and every line and constantly update it and that's a lot of time and money - the vital difference being if your Apache crashes, so what? If you end up in jail because your tax form had the wrong thing in the wrong box and you ended up mis-declaring, or your employment contract contained a clause that was illegal in your state rendering the contract void, that's much more of an issue.
Don't look for this stuff. That's my advice. I ran my own small business - I did all my tax forms on tax-office-supplied paper forms and, later, their own official secure website. I worked the numbers out on computer, sure, but that was nothing more than a spreadsheet and knowing what I was doing. I would never have drawn up my own contracts without professional legal assistance. This is the part of a business where 99.9% of the cost is in support, not content - that's why people hire accountants and lawyers rather than do those jobs themselves. If you're struggling to do it yourself, sink your money into an accountant / lawyer. If you can't afford that, your business really isn't big enough to require them, or anything past what you can do yourself, and spending time looking for software and pre-fab documents would be better spent on selling stuff.
"and turn one dangerous falling object into many"...
Nuking the thing isn't at all sensible but it's all we can really do. It's like ants trying to spit at the shoe that's heading towards them though... chances are we'll make things worse but at that point, we're dead anyway. Worrying about an international treaty at that point is like worrying about the lawsuit when the mugger pulls out a gun.
The radiation is hardly a concern at all. More important is how the hell do you survive the 200-foot-high wave, even if it is just a one-off?
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Me too... exactly the same with an APC UPS with the original batteries. I had to bend the hell out of the UPS casing in order to get the thing out, it was so bloated.
You might be watching too many movies yourself. Some of what you say may be true if we're talking "kids" breaking in, but not for professionals (including burglars, rapists, thieves, kidnappers and murderers).
The major impact on someone being disturbed is the fact that you know they are there, otherwise they'd have come through the door shouting and bawling if they "knew" they could out-gun you. If they did not want to risk a confrontation and had no choice but to hide at your initial appearance, however, they will not show themselves until you are gone or you discover them, even if they then intend to follow you back to the bedroom and bludgeon you to death. And they probably *won't* just run away in most circumstances, anyway. They don't care that you are in (or they wouldn't be burgling you in the first place), they care whether you detect them and strip their advantage.
If someone does break into your home to *kill* you, they would have a weapon. Doesn't need to be a gun. Doesn't even need to be more than their bare hands. Read the case files for just about any serial killer. What they need, though, is for you not to be looking at them when they initiate their attack. If you turn the lights on, look around the house, etc. then no, they probably *won't* stick around if they have a choice. But if between you and your only exit lies a pissed-off homeowner with a gun who's storming around the house looking for intruders and who doesn't *know* you are there, it doesn't matter what you are carrying, you'll try to stay undetected.
As a homeowner, it really is the most stupid, dangerous and ridiculously ineffective thing you can do to go downstairs, especially armed, in that situation. Call police first if you *know* someone is down there, and then either keep absolutely quiet but ready for anyone who comes through the door, or make lots of noise yourself. Don't be a moron and try to walk down the stairs by yourself, even if you have a large gun and are confident in your abilities to use it... that's watching too many zombie movies - "Hey, I know, before we call the police, let's split up and then I'll walk somewhere dark, announce my entrance and wander around everywhere where people who know I'm there can get behind me and overpower me...".
"It was proabably the middle of the night, everyone was sleeping. He wasn't thinking, or was thinking that he had put it away far enough, or that he'd wake up before his kid."
And left a loaded, ready-to-shoot firearm in the middle of the room like you would a discarded plate or an old newspaper. There's no excuse. And this is exactly the problem with gun-owning countries - it's the middle of the night, everybody's sleeping, he hears a sound, panics, he's ***not thinking*** straight, and ends up aiming at things with a gun... a banging door, a stray animal, a kid trying to get his ball back when his parents won't know (weird, yeah, that's a weird situation, but it happens), a partygoer who's accidentally stumbled into the wrong back yard, a neighbour who's jumped over the fence to see what the strange sound was in his friend's back garden...
It's a gun. It's used to kill things, and only to kill things. Don't ready it unnecessarily, don't leave it lying about, don't carry it unnecessarily, don't use it when you're not confident of your abilities and judgement, and keep it THE HELL out of the way of children, or even your whole family. For some reason people seem to think less of that than if he'd left an upturned lawnmower, with the safety features dismantled, turned on and plugged in, in the same room. To be honest, I'd have had a LOT more sympathy for the guy in question if the child had done something with a dismantled lawnmower rather than a gun... at least he *could* have a nearly-plausible reason for having the thing sitting in his house in that kind of state.
Even if we take the "home defence" argument - the pillock left the gun downstairs, with ammunition in it after his initial fears were calmed. If there *had* been someone in the house that he didn't see, he's just handed them a free deadly weapon with which to kill him.
Not just that... pumping water is a lot harder than pumping air - just through sheer mass moved. The mass thing does affect stuff on the way out too, so air can't "push" as big a turbine as water would but everything like that just creates more strain on the equipment. Additionally, water is completely incompressible, so if you want to store 10,000 litres, you have to have 10,000 litres of space (and thus a large environmental concern and also restricts the power you can produce in a certain area. However, air can be compressed incredibly well (someone was talking about 1000psi - that's nearly 700 times more than atmospheric pressure) using quite simple technology and thus you only need one-seven-hundreth of the space (or you get 700 times more "fuel" into the same space). It has to be air-tight but that problem almost solves itself in deep underground caves, which is why we're not all swimming in natural gas at the moment.
Like all things, you can't give a blanket statement here. Yes, there will be some people who "learned" BASIC when they were young and now, when they are let loose on an Excel macro in work, will pine for line numbers and GOTO's. But they would have done that no matter what they learned. However, there's also a damn lot of people who moved on from BASIC very quickly but still have a fond association with it because of their history and because of the simplicity of some tasks in BASIC (of course, a lot of things are more complex but depending on your project you can still "win" on speed using BASIC). If I was to "invent" my own programming language, there are features from just about every language I've ever used that I'd want to be incorporated. Even BASIC has some things that I'd want to include, or that have been copied into lots of other languages.
I think BASIC was an introduction - a way to hide the complexities, to say "don't worry about memory management and data structures just yet, let's learn half-way to being able to program so you can get interested and have some fun quickly". And then when you did that, it was *so* much easier to move to other languages. Of course you still had to learn and change habits - but that's the point of learning. People who drove a moped when they were 17 don't go on to drive a car and keep twisting the indicator stalks to change gear or accelerate.
But BASIC only corrupted those who were corruptible - those who didn't *care* how the computer allocated memory or whether the program was efficient or readable were bound to carry on not caring in other languages. And those people, by definition, would have been like that in any language and probably *never* go on to learn any other.
My dad bought me a ZX Spectrum in 1987 or thereabouts. I was 8. Within the first week I was trying to figure out how to program in BASIC (by the help of that orange-spiral-bound BASIC manual that came with it - damn that should be a compulsory item with all new computers). Without that book being included, I'd probably now only know how to 'LOAD ""' and my life would be very different. If that had been any of the C books that I've ever read, I would have thrown it in the bin immediately. Within a year (in between playing games, school, and pulling girls' hair), I was a pretty proficient BASIC programmer. It helped that I was also doing things like typing in listings from magazines (an early form of Open Source that will forever be sadly missed) and trying to understand Z80 assembly. By the time I got to secondary school (age 11), I was writing games for fun for my friends. I wrote a No-CD crack for Desert Strike when it first come out on PC, I was 13, and was incredibly proud of my first use of x86 assembly / Ralf Brown's Interrupt List - I never distributed it to anyone else but it's still sitting around on my machine somewhere. I did it using DOS "debug" and a hell of a lot of manual path-following and single-stepping through the code. Around the same time, I wrote a program for Windows 3.11 that prevented execution of programs with certain signatures / hashes / paths that integrated into the school's Novell network and was so damn good that even the network administrator (an old-school IT guy) couldn't bypass it on the test accounts. He seriously considered deploying it to help curb a spate of students running programs via Word macros, DOS command prompts and other clever tricks (I never had the heart to tell him how they were doing it, who had taught them that, or why I felt so guilty that I had to counter-act all those methods for him...)
By the time I got to Year 11 (age 15), I was programming on my TI-85 in the back of the class (and sharing those games / programs with the rest of my class) and writing "toy" operating systems for my PC. I was receiving email from Canada (a massive thing at that time) telling me how good my games were, and I was dabbling in everything I could find: C, Pascal, FORTRAN, assembly and even things like DOS Batch scripting and
"how do you buy a computer these days?"
- Set myself a minimum requirement (run this app, boot up in this amount of time, perform so-many I/O operations per second, etc.)
- Look at the specifications available from a range of my usual suppliers. Don't bother to look elsewhere - if you can't buy it, it doesn't exist. If you have to hunt for it, it'll be rare, expensive, not as well supported and probably far too specialist for your needs.
- Narrow things down by a sensible budget.
- Compare the specifications there against each other and, by looking them up on the net if necessary, find out which one is more suitable and best value-for-money for your needs (Is an Atom faster than whatever is in the other machine? Can my game take advantage of a second core?).
Basically, look at the "recommended" spec on those games you want to play, then go on about 10-12 large websites that sell computers to the market you're in (e.g. gaming) and see what they offer. The chances of being able to build anything comparable for the same / lower price are minimal - those days have gone and you're more likely to balls things up if you don't know what processor socket or PSU you need to run things properly.
Seriously, how hard is it? Ignore ALL of the marketing... see what you can afford, see what you need, see where they match (if at all), then do your research on those 2-3 models of machine (including their major components) that are good for you instead of trying to research every component that's currently available in every model that ever existed. I've managed to sort through a hundred models of PC to get to three in a few minutes, and then I just researched those three and actually spent nearly five times as long doing that last bit of thorough research properly.
If you want to know, I do this for a living for mainstream businesses / schools and that means everything from high-end CAD-stations to netbooks. It's *still* cheaper to buy the right thing from a large retailer's website than it is to mess about trying to cobble things together, whether you're buying one or hundreds. I have no idea what "name" processor is in 90% of the desktops I've bought... I can barely remember if they were Intel or AMD. It really doesn't matter at all what the codename is, I have no idea what the latest interfaces, cache sizes, socket-sizes, memory technology etc. even are. I just look it up when I have already narrowed things down to models with those components and make a decision based on what I can easily buy, how much I want to spend and what I *need* the computer to have / do.
You don't *need* to know all that rubbish, it's all just marketing anyway. What you need to do is see what's available and then check how well it's likely to run your games (e.g. benchmarks on similar games for the individual components, whether the processor is multi-core or not and whether the game can benefit). Let the assembly guys at a large company worry about whether the sockets are compatible, whether the memory timings are right, whether the PSU is powerful enough etc. If they mess it up, it costs them money. If you mess it up because you built it yourself or deviated from their normal bundles, it costs you money.
And no, you do *not* end up paying a premium to do things this way. You save money even before the things arrive on your doorstep due to the wonders of bulk-buying (Ever wonder *why* those bundle deals are so cheap? Mass purchasing by ordinary businesses, usually, if you ignore the holiday seasons), let alone the savings in not having to worry about destroying a card or PSU because you ordered a standard bundle and a "Super Duper Turbo Hyper Fighting" graphics card and put them together yourself because you heard it gets 1fps better on some random website.
Set yourself a specification (e.g. dual-core or not, speed in GHz, whether you are worried about the power it saps, X amount of RAM, etc.). Set yourself a budget. Find out how much stuff matches those. If it's a lot, set yourself a st
My dad used to repair cars / trucks for a living for about 30 years. He would never have owned one of these cars because he can foresee the consequences when something goes wrong.
He hates anything electronic on a car's engine / controls. There are good reasons for this, as some drivers have recently found out. Worse, though, he hates cars that are designed badly (never ask him to repair a Peugeot) or driven by idiots. Don't design cars that cannot be stopped / disabled / turned off / controlled in an emergency. By definition, in any emergency, that means even with the engine switched off (which should be easy to do from the driver's seat - easy from the passenger's seat being optional) the car should not be out of control (sluggish, not ideal, maybe but not out of control). If you change the normal engine-start interface, damn well provide an easy, obvious analog that can be used by the driver to cut power to the engine but not engage dangerous systems (e.g. steering-lock), and can't be overridden by the car (e.g. a STOP button next to the start button? Sod that "hold the start for X seconds" bullshit, it's completely unintuitive like "Start... Shutdown" on Windows and costs the driver vital seconds).
The *driver* of a car is the person *driving* the car, otherwise we'd call them the drivee. If you're an engine and the driver turns you off, then damn well switch off. If the driver brakes, then brake (and if you can do the sub-millisecond things that help him brake faster, do that, for as long as the driver brakes and not a second more, otherwise don't try to be clever). If the driver puts you into neutral, go into neutral. I don't like the idea of any car that can override a conscious decision on my part... the exceptions to this are emergency features (like airbags, seatbelts, ABS, etc. because I usually don't have a chance to *make* a conscious decision in those instances) but even in its absolute failsafe mode nothing should go wrong (ABS fails? Okay, brakes still work. Airbag fails? Okay, it doesn't explode in your face but just flashes warnings at the driver. Seatbelt fails? All you can do is warn the driver).
More important than design - as a driver, don't buy cars with these ridiculous "features" (the most I've had is a car that has ABS and power-steering, but if I turn off the engine - with a KEY! - the whole ECU turns off and everything is still under my control). Gears are mechanical linkages for a reason. Steering is a mechanical linkage for a reason (power **ASSISTED** steering). Brakes are a mechanical linkage (usually with redundant systems such as dual-braking-systems, handbrakes, etc.) for a reason. Engine ignitions are electrical but key-based ones directly control (via a physical connection) the vital power source that enables the engine to continue running and their failsafe mode unless you tamper with the cabling is engine-cut-out. What does the "drive-by-wire" give you that you didn't have before? Is it really so difficult to turn a key in a slot compared to carrying a fragile, expensive electronic gadget and having to press a button? Does it make it easier to drive? Does it make it safer to drive?
Even *if* the driver is a prat and is doing something incredibly stupid (over-revving), the car should not be overriding his decision without really, really good reasons (e.g. car will explode) and even then it should do the safest course of action (limit revs to their upper safety limit, warn driver, hell - even switch off the damn engine safely and let it coast to a halt is preferable to just exploding). I classify buying a car that doesn't recognise its place as a servant, not the master, as driver error anyway... if you *don't* know how, can't work out how, or actually find it impossible to safely control the car you drive in an emergency (e.g. switch off engine but leave key in, how to change into neutral in an emergency, how to slow yourself if the brakes completely fail, whether it has ABS or you need to pump brakes, etc.) - even if you've *never
My tax bill disagrees with you, especially with the contributions that my country has to make to aid other countries in the EU. That comes from my tax too. Also, the population figures, employment statistics, governmental administrative costs (multiple governing bodies at country / EU level costs more than a single one would in the US), sales figures and basically any other statistic you would like to look at disagree with any assertion that the US has / invests / commands significantly more money / people than the EU as an entity.
However, what the EU does have is differing opinions within itself, various "checks" between each countries (when was the last time that the US was told by another country that one of its laws was illegal and must change immediately and it *did* it? In my country that was a few weeks ago. That's how the EU functions - other countries keep each individual country in check to make sure they're all singing from the same hymn sheet), absolutely no incentive to come up with a single-party plan for any political idea (it will be shot down by other countries no matter what, just for political gain, unless it's *truly* regarded as being in everyone's best interests) and an innate ability to fight *anything* that lands on its desk.
For the record, I'm British and thus, almost naturally, don't like the idea of the EU. But you can't argue that when it came to fining Microsoft and implementing controls, it stood up and did the job (the US DOJ couldn't - and MS are now contributing information that they've been forced to reveal and that the Samba team can actually *USE*, and have to introduce that stupid "browser choice" update, etc.). When it comes to throwing out dodgy laws and software patents, it does the job (on the whole, nothing's perfect). When it comes to uniting many countries into a single entity with common currency, with little hassle, it does the job (UK is an exception because we exercised a "favour", basically, and managed to postpone our conversion to the Euro for the time being).
Knock the EU as much as you like, but if you think this was in any way something the EU could easily do that the US could not, you're wrong. It's just that the US is inherently more easily corrupted at the moment. The EU stands to lose just as much industry support, potential revenue, etc. as anyone else signing up to the agreement. But the EU stands up and says no and it's rarely based purely on political gain. It's hard to convince countries that haven't ever really got on (Cyprus is in the EU, Turkey is a serious candidate to join, very rare occurrence for the two of them to do anything together) to join forces behind any decision. Different countries of the EU are using Open Source operating systems, office applications, file formats, etc. at a national level. ACTA just works against those ideas. ACTA breaks some of the world's strictest privacy / data protection laws. ACTA gives rights to personal searches for copyright material at international borders. It's a dumb idea. The EU have recognised that, and that the benefits to them are incredibly small in comparison, so they've recommended against it. That's called good sense. The other countries signing up to it (and the US isn't alone here) are on the whole being manipulated by the media industries, or drawn by the scent of money.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I see your dubious statistics and replace them with the *updated* statistics which are referenced in the article you posted itself (i.e. the Jan 2010 steam hardware survey). As of this minute, it paints a slightly different picture, but pretty much the same (i.e Windows 7 is still losing out to XP - a nine-year-old OS - despite being force-bundled with every machine sold in the last six months... and Vista didn't get that much of a shoe in the door even with its three-year headstart):
Your article: XP 42.78%, Vista 27.91%, Win7 28.53%
Actual hardware survey now:
Windows XP 32 bit 43.81%
Windows 7 64 bit 19.04%
Windows Vista 32 bit 18.39%
Windows 7 9.76%
Windows Vista 64 bit 7.75%
Windows XP 64 bit 0.51%
But also, you're basing that data on the Steam survey. I hereby bring up the fact that Steam only officially runs on Windows anyway (therefore biased) and that even when run through Wine, it appears as "Windows" on their hardware surveys. Steam is a Gold-app on Wine, and most of the Gold/Platinum apps are games, a lot of them Steam games - that amount of development effort isn't done for nothing or because "nobody" plays them using Wine.
Also, the latest games released through Steam produce "spikes" of gameplay on them that disappear over time... if those games *demand* Windows 7 / Vista, then the spike will translate into the hardware survey for that month, but next month will be a different story (the last few times I've looked, Call of Duty 2 was mostly losing out to the *original* Counterstrike in player-minutes, but the situation flip-flopped repeatedly as time went on. Both run on XP but there are other, more recent, games that don't and affect the statistics.) I'd also be interested to see stats on virtualisation, "Windows XP Mode" etc. because that would be interesting too.
I'm not saying that Windows isn't the dominant gaming platform, or that Windows 7 isn't "selling" well, I just hate biased statistics. It's like people who say "Well, no-one uses Opera to visit our website anyway, so it's not worth making it work in Opera..." I just want to slap them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I've had blue-screen-inducing patches at every time of year, not just near releases of their big software. They just never seem to test them before foisting them upon thousands of users. Patches which blue-screen 1-5% of the computers that you include them on are not that unusual, really. And for some reason, slipstreamed installs seem *much* more reliable than hotfix-installs over an existing installation. I find that weird.
Seriously, a school I worked in with hundreds of desktop from major manufacturers with no "unusual" quirks on the software (basically Office on a Windows domain) had quite obvious blue-screens / hangs when we applied a round of patches. It took seconds to identify the patch, and isolate it, but it was still *blindingly* obvious and should have been caught during testing. Even fresh disk installs and slipstreamed installs produced the same problem.
Microsoft don't test their updates adequately. I don't care if they test them on a thousand models of machine, or include however many beta-testers, whatever they are doing obviously isn't enough to make it safe to apply their testing to millions of computers worldwide. Hence auto-updates are disabled on every network that I've ever worked on (and it was hardly ever me that disabled it), and some places just block the windowsupdate domains entirely to stop that "You *WILL* install this hotfix" crap.
Updates of anything are a risk, there's no doubt about that and I always run my networks on stable software, to which every change is tested first. But OS updates are a black-box change that can have stupidly enormous ramifications if you don't test. The users shouldn't *have* to be the people catching some of these stupid mistakes.
Yeah, this is always the problem that big software projects have... I don't claim that users are perfect and "know" what they want, but it has to be said: if you are making a USER interface, it's probably best if the USER gets some say in that and that you listen to the USERS especially when a large of them speak up. Other parts, sure, you can say "We don't work that way" but the user interface is sacred and your *only* interaction with the program as a user. Mess that up, you might as well not have the program at all.
And I'm sorry, but I'm a single-window person. I've work in IT for years and the *easiest* way to work is on a commandline or in a full-screen window (alt-tab's, multiple desktops etc. vital, of course). Rarely do I need two things side by side on the screen but when I do, it's usually TWO and that's it, and that's easily handled by tiling the windows. Bear in mind that I have 18 windows open on my machine at the moment, everything from instant messengers, shell sessions, folder views, web browsers, development environments etc. The only "non-full-screen" ones are two shell windows where I'm referring to one file in another and need to check consistency between the two, and the instant messengers (because they don't need full-screen, are minimised, and are only on the taskbar so that they flash when I get a message). MDI is an invaluable tool - I can't web-browse without my Opera tabs - and ignoring it because of some "religious" argument is stupid. I've seen even the cheapest paint programs offer a "Do you want an MDI or SDI interface?" dialog on first run... Serif software springs to mind.
The only other program I ever really used a lot that didn't do single-window nicely was some of the old versions of Visual Basic. But there they had a reason - you were designing a UI within an UI, so it's not an easy task to do.
At last, though, GIMP has woken up to the protests of almost *every* non-professional-user that's ever wanted to use it. When the new version is released, it will be downloaded and tried, if for no other reason than to add another number to the download stats for the single-window-capable versions.
I have a hard enough time convincing people they need to re-buy cables (and peripherals) for their new TV as it is.
"You need an HDMI cable"
"But I already have this SCART thing and this composite thing"
"Yeah, but you only have HDMI on your new TV"
"Is that because it's HD?"
"Well, no, you can send an HD signal over SCART or composite just the same, but they just don't want to let you. They want you to buy HDMI leads and TV's and equipment with HDMI."
"Who's they?"
"The people who license the HDMI technology."
"Er... so I have to throw away my DVD player unless I pay extra to get legacy ports too?"
"Or buy a Blu-Ray with HDMI or a newer player with HDMI. The new ones upscale the DVD so it *looks* like HD but isn't really."
"Mmm..."
And then add an hour of conversation as you explain the various *revisions* of HDMI and everything else, and why they can't just buy a £10 signal-splitter or cable-switcher without it potentially interfering with their recording of HD programmes, or why some models just won't negotiate a HD signal with some other models, or why the cheap, shit imported versions of DVD players and Blu-Ray let you just use a composite output, or why all this was to stop pirates when you can find and download HD-anything online in the same time as you used to be able to download SD content.
Call me when consumers get bored of this crap. Then I might have a look and see if there's a *standard* (i.e. unchanging, common, open, useful) cable set I can use to watch TV and record the stuff I want. To be honest, there already is - it's called "ADSL over a phone line from a widescreen laptop".
You're fired.
Because I just don't give a damn, basically.
I have a free local newspaper dropped through my door every week. I glance at the front page (usually an advert, or a school promoting itself with a "news" story), I skip to the classified ads / jobs for anything unusual, that's about it unless someone I know will be in the paper. My housemate doesn't even look at it. I really don't care about local news as anything more than a sideline... "Hey, did you read that someone go stabbed in town the other day?" "Oh, really? Another?" (I live in London, if they reported everything like that, it would be even more boring). The rest is filler material and promotional stuff for schools, fetes, etc.
On a country-wide scale, I often skip at least 95% of the "headline" stories entirely. I just don't care enough about politicians or scaremongering. On an international scale, I skip almost everything except for the Science sections (where I pretty much read every story). Why? Because I'm ignorant of the world? Far from it, I'm just tired of reading about it every day and want something more "interesting" and positive (reported news is almost all negative).
If something is "important" (for my definition of important) it sometimes never gets reported (science, medical breakthroughs, etc. are boring, didn't you know? And major world events, e.g. earthquakes, focus on how many British people died in Haiti... I really couldn't give a shit about that particular statistic - how about the actual news of the earthquake itself?). If it does get reported, I find more material that I'm interested in elsewhere than I do wherever I spotted that piece of news (whether that's contradictory reports, or just more details).
Localised news is, for the most part, irrelevant. I work in education in the UK so I often read about anything education-related. Does that make me ignorant because I ignore the front page story about two US celebrities possibly breaking up? Not really. Who cares?
It's all to do with your definitions of: news, important and interesting.
Ha, I'm laughing at the "put food on the table" crowd. Putting food on the table is a day-to-day chore. Job satisfaction, a suitable home life, unstressed parents and most importantly JOB SECURITY are a million times more important in the long run. It's short-sighted to claim that you have to be completely disrepected as a person in order to feed your family. Baby doesn't care that dad's a road sweeper, or a baker, or an IT manager, so long as he's home after work, and happy, and that he'll *probably* have a job tomorrow.
Working for companies that treat their employees like that is *not* security - security for today, maybe, but not for tomorrow. And the more you "suck it up" and "just deal with it" by continuing to work with employers that are *abusing* you as a human, the more they'll take you to the cleaners. And the more those employers will thrive and really not care about their employees at all. When do the companies stand up and listen and improve pay and conditions? When all their employees start to walk (and no, I'm not and never have been a member of any union, because I have a tendency to believe that other people are just as wet and short-sighted as some of the posters on this thread and I don't want them dictating what work / pay I'm limited to).
Think I'm just mouthing off and haven't ever been in the position? Been there, done that, several times, with a wife, newborn, toddler, etc., with a mortgage to pay, bills everywhere, loan payments, and balancing a thousand other spinning plates. Every time that I got screwed (or sensed it coming), I moved onwards and upwards and got happier in my work (and higher-paid, but that's neither here nor there). One of those times was when my daughter was barely a month old and I walked from a job because they wanted to treat me like shit (they also thought that the *best* candidate for my replacement wasn't suitable because "He's been working at a supermarket for the last month" in the middle of a economic crisis... so f***ing what? He's working, when he could be sitting at home, and he has more than enough experience / skill to do the job). Call me an idiot if you want, but my daughter did not go without at any point and within a week I was working somewhere else for infinitely more respect and a little bit more money.
I'm sorry, but I owe it to my family to keep my self-respect, to teach my daughter that I'm not a faceless, numbered drone, to come home healthy and happy, and if that means we eat bread and water rather than smoked salmon, so be it. And if a large company offering me huge wages for screwing other people over and / or a paycut that I haven't agreed to has to be told to stick their offer where the sun don't shine, I can, will and have done that (on both counts actually - I've turned down jobs that were handed to me on a plate purely because I didn't agree with how the company were making their sales).
Your family need to be fed, but they also need to know that Daddy isn't a robot that can be stepped on by everyone around him. That's teaching your kids nothing but subservience to people with money, and they'll grow up to hate you or follow you in that path. Like any sensible parent, I want my kid to grow up to question things that are wrong, learn the value of money, the value of respect, and to do better at life than I have. In a modern, developed country, starvation is a *long* way off and, if you seek proper help, almost impossible. If it means a choice between giving up my mortgage and making me / my daughter unhappy, it's an easy choice. Sorry, but my daughter's respect for her father cannot be bought for any job, price or token gesture. And nothing buys my daughter's happiness except my own, and that can't be had by knowing I'm "only" putting food on the table.
Live your corporate existence being abused and trodden on because there "aren't many jobs about". But it's not for me. I'll take my kid to the park rather than to a stadium, I'll show her how to cook masses of cheap soup instead of takeaways and restaurants, and I'll end up having more fun and gaining more respect in the process.
I've used that with my parents a lot - they often "bubble" and then wait for me to do the tricky bits for them. Not really a useful trick on the more difficult areas - all you do is increase the risk that if the non-bubbled person dies then you have to start the level over (possibly from a halfway point). Non-bubbled, you can at least continue with the other player. There's no reason the screen can't zoom out a bit more, or prevent one player running off too far in one of the directions. The game itself even enforces "the screen will push you" at certain points, so why it couldn't just work like that rather than the player disappearing off-screen into certain death, I don't know.
And "BUBBLE!" is a common shout when the poorer player is about to die - if you can hit A fast enough, you can avoid the death and just bubble harmlessly back to your partner.
Well, my family and I have played and completed just about every Mario game imaginable (my parents are mad for it, but virtually no other game at all). We played through the Wii version just the other day and I can't say I noticed any delay in the controls at all. It *would* piss me off because I can't stand things like that (even if a good player learns to compensate for them very quickly) - SuperTux, for instance, annoys me because it's "not the same" as Mario jumps, etc. There's something about the Yoshis that is different but I can't pinpoint it, it just "feels" different to SMW Yoshi. I wouldn't say better or worse, just slightly different.
And Wii Mario is actually very good. It could do with a rethink of the "player dies if their friend pulls the screen too far" part (Gauntlet used to handle that exact situation much better nearly 20 years ago), but the game mechanics are pretty solid and traditional. I wouldn't call Wii Mario highly graphical at all - I view it in the same class as Mario All-Stars - an old game, with some revamped but virtually identical graphics, and the same old gameplay. All they've done is tuck some moves from newer Mario games into it and upped the animation / graphics a little. I actually found it pleasingly traditional, as did my parents who have never really enjoyed the 3D games... they still like to trounce each other on All-Stars Mario 3 Battle Game. The only question that remains, really, is when is Super Mario War coming out for the Wii? :-)
Yes, in terms of distance, but you'd immediately cut out about 99.9% of the noise, debris and other man-made junk in your way that interferes with a typical SETI search... most "hits" on SETI are man-made objects and stray signals bouncing at odd angles. A few million tons of rock in between you and the only source of confusion tends to make the signals a bit easier to spot amongst the noise.
Don't like it? Don't watch it. Don't buy the equipment. Don't support it. Seems pretty simple.
Up until a year or so ago I was a TV licence payer in the UK - then I discovered that not having a TV didn't make any difference to my viewing habits i.e. there was nothing but shit on and the stuff I did want to see I could get other ways *legally* which, for the most part, didn't involve giving corporations money - BBC iPlayer etc. aren't subject to the license because that only covers having the capability to watch the programmes on British TV as they are broadcast - so you don't need a TV license, but get the same programmes.
And the things that are worth watching, I buy a DVD of (which I then rip, of course, but seeing as I "own" it, that's my decision). I paid for Sky until it became a million channels of crap, ten minute advert breaks and re-re-re-re-re-peats of programmes. I paid for a TV licence until the same thing happened and I realised I could just watch on iPlayer / ITV Player / 4od without (most of) the crap any time I liked. Why *pay* for something you disagree with? Voting with your feet is the most powerful commercial incentive for a large corporation... if you don't buy, say, a DAB radio, then they won't want to support it (that's what happening with DAB at the moment). It's the same thing. Stop giving your money to people you don't like... you don't go to buskers on the streets and say "I'll give you a pound, but only if you improve the way you play and correct the second note in the third stave..."... you either like it and pay for it, or you don't. And the news is that millions of people *will* pay for it (HD seems to be an addiction even amongst my techie friends that I just don't understand).
Come on, people, if you have such ideals, take a sacrifice for them - stop watching and supporting media/hardware that is DRM if you feel so strongly about it.
Ignoring the obvious troll:
Anything that works will be accepted, like every other driver in the kernel... if it doesn't make *everything* work, that's not a big problem. Especially new drivers rarely have code that actually makes the device inherently useful, or supremely accelerated, immediately - but it will function. That's how you code - one bit at a time, gradually building as you go. When you have all the DMA, 2D drawing, multiscreen crap worked out *THEN* you can think about 3D. At the moment, even simple combinations like dual-displays can cause major headaches with some chipsets, whether the hardware supports them or not.
The programmers are effectively working blind with unknown hardware - and programmers don't work that way, that's a reverse engineer's job. To say they can't merge *anything* until all the features are working just means you'll never see *anything* at all. But if they merge a 2D driver today, they can add basic 3D access tomorrow and 3D acceleration the day after and maybe some day you'll see something of use. If not, at least you'll be able to boot Linux and *see* something in X-Windows on any computer that runs off that chipset (or has backwards compatibility for it).
You will not see full 3D accelerated drivers for any chipset (especially not any that compete with manufacturer's drivers in terms of acceleration) that matters to you on a new computer until manufacturers fully co-operate and help get coding too. Don't expect it, don't complain about it, don't moan when it doesn't happen or only "obsolete" chipsets ever get 3D support. When the manufacturer's co-operate, it takes nothing to make a driver. When they don't, it means knowing *everything* they know before you can really start properly.
Played the new mario game? It's a combination of all the previous Mario games.
Played Wii Sports Resort? It's Wii Sports with knobs on.
Played Mario Kart Wii? It's like every Mario kart game.
So, yes, the Wii itself is almost *entirely* rehash. Really hurt their sales figures, didn't it? And why? Because it's still *new* and *fun* at the same time as being *familiar*.
I don't care about them rehashing, so long as it's still fun to play with a crowd of friends. And there's still new stuff too. If you want to get technical, Half-life 2 was just a rehash of Half-life 1, which was a rehash of Quake, which was a rehash of Doom... just because it's the same thing again doesn't mean you can't be innovative and create a game that people want to play.
I don't mean rehashing specifically, but just the fact that you can make a game for a stable platform that's going to be around for years to come. I'd rather know that people were still making Wii games than focusing all their efforts on some "Wii 2"... hell, I still play NES, SNES, and N64 games and I'd love that people were still making them, even if they were within the limits of the technology of those consoles.
Good for Nintendo. I don't really care about flashy sequels and having to re-buy consoles/accessories/games or hope that the backward compatibility works (if there is one). I just want people to carry on making games for a console that almost everyone has played. It's good business sense to keep your customers on a stable platform and sell optional extras / games that enhance their original purchase's value without *forcing* them to upgrade and alienating them, not to mention keeping the online Wii stores alive - how many people who have never touched emulation have been playing emulated titles on Wii without even knowing? It's good gaming sense (what matters is the game and the price, not the number of / type of peripherals, graphics, sound...) and at the end of the day, the Wii is forefront on the general public's mind... not including persistent gamers, people would struggle to give the correct name of the current version of the Xbox / Playstation, and would probably name Wii first.
"Wii 2" isn't required. Wii already proved that state-of-the-art isn't required, just a little bit of fun and know-how and something a bit different. Whether you hate it or not, you've played Wii at least once and tried it. I know that I can't say the same about the Xbox (any version) / Playstation (any version past the original PS1) consoles, yet my PC is full of every genre of game. Give it another 5 years or so, then people will be making games that actually test the limits of the Wii to the extreme all the time, then a successor that has full backwards compatibility will sell like hot cakes. And, to be honest, everyone I know that owns a Wii would actually be happier with some bundled accessory that enhances the whole console rather than a whole new console... a "HD addon" or even some processing upgrade that the Wii can interface with (like the N64 memory expansion modules, or the SuperFX/DSP chips that were in SNES games - Nintendo know what they are doing when it comes to getting the most out of a huge investment, which is why they're pretty much the only one making a decent return on hardware alone, not just the software).
If it works, and it sells, and it makes money, don't ditch it for a sequel... enhance it a bit at a time, one expenditure at a time, and keep your customers happy without shoving them between major purchases and platforms. If only MS could follow the same suit...
It depends on the gamers but endings really don't mean much to me. The first game I ever completed personally was Nonterraqueous on the Spectrum... it took ages, I had my father/brother mapping my progress as I went (we were going to send it in to a magazine but, the next day, they published someone else's map of it!) and, yes, it was fun to finish it. But since then, an ending doesn't really mean much at all... I don't think I really complete the majority of games I play that *could* be completed... at some point, it stops being entertainment and starts being "training" and that's not why I play games.
My family have completed just about every Mario game in existence (including those stupid 100-levels things in the Paper Mario's) but we don't get satisfaction from finishing and frequently it's a curve - our excitement builds as we go through all the levels and unlock the last worlds and then when it gets to the tedious "You must have 50 stars / do 100 levels / beat these last ten extraordinarily difficult levels" part, our enthusiasm drops off and it becomes a chore. We usually push past that, mainly because we play those games as a family, but there's little sense of achievement when we do finish things.
And we play a lot more games that don't have any ending at all... this has been true for *years* - Gauntlet never had an ending (except on NES, I believe) but it's still a brilliant game to play. You do find yourself setting little "achievements" in those sorts of games sometimes ("Let's get to level 100 and then leave it", "Let's get further than last time", "Let's do it without skipping levels", etc.) but they are just entertainment. I can't remember the last time I *didn't* skip a cutscene / end sequence when it was possible... possibly Half-Life 2, but I had a lot of time on my hands when I was playing that and did the full HL2+Ep1+Ep2 run through in a couple of days.
Endings are really finalisations of plot and reward for those players dedicated enough. I get my reward from my own achievements (which sometimes include things like "I'll see if I can get that Steam achievement this time", admittedly) and from just playing the game. Plot is really secondary to me because even when it's excellent, it gets in the way of my freedom and play-time. To me, games for play-time, I'm under no illusion of that as an adult... I don't consider them artwork, or anything else, they are just some play-time. If I want plot, I watch a movie or (better) read a book. When I pick up a game, I just want to play.
"It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community..."
The priority of the open-source community has, generally speaking, never been nor will ever be business. Once you learn that, you learn everything you need to know about open-source, and why it does it's job so damn well. The priority of open-source is "source" that is "open". End of.
And what you're asking is basically for legally-binding forms, documents and contracts. That's not something that "open-source" (or more accurately in that case "open-content") has ever really even attempted to produce because it's such a legal minefield that it would be pointless - nobody would use it and those that did would be getting themselves into trouble the second they used them. There's a reason that all big companies have a legal department, and a reason that even "standard" forms for many things (like renting houses, employing people, writing a will) etc. are looked down upon - because legally speaking you have to know *exactly* what you're doing, customise each and every line and constantly update it and that's a lot of time and money - the vital difference being if your Apache crashes, so what? If you end up in jail because your tax form had the wrong thing in the wrong box and you ended up mis-declaring, or your employment contract contained a clause that was illegal in your state rendering the contract void, that's much more of an issue.
Don't look for this stuff. That's my advice. I ran my own small business - I did all my tax forms on tax-office-supplied paper forms and, later, their own official secure website. I worked the numbers out on computer, sure, but that was nothing more than a spreadsheet and knowing what I was doing. I would never have drawn up my own contracts without professional legal assistance. This is the part of a business where 99.9% of the cost is in support, not content - that's why people hire accountants and lawyers rather than do those jobs themselves. If you're struggling to do it yourself, sink your money into an accountant / lawyer. If you can't afford that, your business really isn't big enough to require them, or anything past what you can do yourself, and spending time looking for software and pre-fab documents would be better spent on selling stuff.
To quote a movie:
"and turn one dangerous falling object into many"...
Nuking the thing isn't at all sensible but it's all we can really do. It's like ants trying to spit at the shoe that's heading towards them though... chances are we'll make things worse but at that point, we're dead anyway. Worrying about an international treaty at that point is like worrying about the lawsuit when the mugger pulls out a gun.
The radiation is hardly a concern at all. More important is how the hell do you survive the 200-foot-high wave, even if it is just a one-off?