I'd argue that the WiFi said "Well, I'm not going to stop you". Equally, I should be able to put "Private website, do not enter" on the frontpage of my website, and that should be enough to stop people. WiFi unfortunately doesn't have a way of expressing owner's intent, only of blocking or not blocking systems.
What we need is for WiFi to be set non-password protected, but clearly labelled as private, so that base stations can use that as a default. People are then left in no doubt as to the situation. If you want to share out your connection, let it be set as public.
Here's another thought; we have a cordless phone. Ignoring difficulties getting the same handset model, it's theoretically quite possible for someone to find and use my phone line. Would this be right? I have no way of securing the phone line further, the hardware just doesn't provide for it, does that make a difference? Personally, I think it's reasonably obvious that you shouldn't be using my phone line...
So far GPL violations tend to be sorted out amicably, with the company in question kicking the programmer who thought they could slip GPL code in, without anyone noticing, and either releasing the source code or fixing the problem...
Every time this happens, someone says "What, have they caught all the terrorists?". Believe it or not, the ideal method of law enforcement is not to deal with one type of crime at a time...
"Theft? Err, no, we're still working through all the murders, try again in a few months"
Seriously here people, you may think the copyright holders are big evil faceless corps, but that doesn't make copying their material right. If you object to the companies, don't play their games, listen to their music, watch their videos. Yeah, sure, it'll be tough, you'll miss this stuff, but that's what making a stand is all about.
As it is, I'm fed up of this general attitude of "The company is evil, so I'm going to copy their stuff illegally, that'll teach them!". No, all it does it give them support to the idea they need stronger laws to deal with copyright infringers.
The last game I heard to assume that people were fine with having a network connection, for the single player game, was Half-Life 2. It may have done okay, but a lot of people were not pleased (particularly, for example, students at universities with firewalls blocking access to the Steam system).
Beyond that, like hell am I going anywhere near a game that downloads 15 second movies over my connection. It may not be much, and I may be busy with the game, but I live with two other people who I share the connection with. As it is, we already do downloads late at night to avoid causing problems for the others (a high speed download can really screw up a UDP based MMORPG someone else is playing). And then we can start talking about people who have caps on their monthly bandwidth usage...
Have you thought of using Mac desktops with Linux? It's what we do at work, and it works well for us. One of the things I particularly like about using Linux on servers, is that if something breaks, we can always work out what it is. For example, if an application doesn't seem to be doing what we expect, we can open up the source, and figure out why, it's always a matter of time. Even ended up going through the kernel source once (although that turned out to be faulty memory). Can't do that with Windows!
However, for actually getting work done, and particularly for systems that don't need all the power (and complexity) of Linux, we find OS X is great.
Hate to say this, what the game industry lacks is not killer ideas, but publishers that will go anywhere near them. Finding some way of persuading large numbers of people to buy good games, over this year's update of their favourite sports sim, would also help.
I remember back in, ooh, 1996, seeing discussion on the use of various SQL databases for persistant storage of MUD data. While I've never actually worked on a MMORPG, I would assume that unless the devs are crazy/masochistic/have really freaky persistant storage needs I can't think of, they'll all be using some form of relational database backend.
Obviously, spooling your game content directly from a database server would be... tricky, in performance terms, but like any other application, I'd imagine there's a certain amount of caching going on...
Sure, it's $129 if you're buying a single copy, but if you're in a corporate environment... well, lets just say, we bought 50-odd copies here for a small university department, and that came to around $60 each (I can't quote you an exact figure because I'm not the purchasing guy, it was in UKP, and I suspect the price would vary on what company you are). Okay, it's not great, but it's hardly bad either.
Something there has always been a lack of, is jobs that require no real world experience. I was lucky, in that I got such a job, but I can imagine it's very hard if you don't.
On the other hand, I started on about $25,000/yr. Given that/. would tend to refer to such a salary as "insulting", maybe recruiters don't feel there are enough people that would accept an entry-level position (for reference, I now earn around two thirds more, and hope to have doubled my starting salary by the time I leave next year. I also work actual 40 hour weeks).
My best suggestion would be to try to get to know plenty of people in areas of computing you like, and hope one of them can find you an entry level position, that's more or less what happened to me, and I've been asked twice to recommend people for positions (one entry levelish, one for a student).
I'd actually suggest that they should carefully balance both. Students should learn the basic practical knowledge they'll need to be at least semi-useful when they start a job, but should also have enough grounding in theory to be able to pick up new concepts rapidly, and most importantly, be able to find innovative solutions. Practical knowledge is also key to understanding why the theory is important.
Probably a mix of around one third practical to two third theory, sound about right?
After a 4 year CS degree, plus 4 years industry experience, I still don't know how to write a VB app.
But I can learn by Thursday.
And that is why I'm worth hiring. I actually turned up to my first job with a book on the language the application was working on, was written in (Tcl/Tk). If having to learn the language as I went along slowed me down, certainly no-one noticed.
Now, my degree did cover quite a bit of practical stuff (including programming in C, assembly and Java, database commands, etc), but also covered a lot of theory (big-O, algorithms in general, data structures, graph theory, social aspects of computing, etc.). I don't know how many CS degrees stick too much to the theory?
PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that.
Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?
In the meantime; I like PvE, thanks. I've played Planetside, and Guild Wars, and both have good PvP IMHO, but I prefer generally prefer PvE. It may not be as action packed, but maybe when I get home, and I'm tired, stressing myself out isn't what I want to do.
You're right, I'd have to spend countless hours to get the perfect character, but y'know what, I don't mind, because I don't PvP, and therefore just "pretty good" equipment is fine for me and my PvEing.
Sounds great. I've seen existing devices like this, but... well, lets just say, the idea of "Just works" does appeal a lot:)
In particular: If Apple can give me a device that sits underneath my TV, and let me buy episodes (or a licence to watch an episode twice) of TV shows, I'm sold. I can leave the computer to grab the few shows I like, while I'm at work, and watch them when I'm ready.
With all the content protection on HD content, I reckon what will happen is, 5-6 years down the line everyone will have told the companies what to do with their HD content, and be using video scalers. Sure, they're not great now, but give them time... with fractal scaling, and using hints from other frames to improve the current frame, I reckon they'll be able to do pretty good job, with a lot less hassle...
What's even worse is the disks that disable the stop button. Can't remember what it was, but I'd put a DVD in, then suddenly something came up, so tried to stop it. And couldn't. I think I eventually got the standby button to stop the whole mess, but for goodness sake!
And let me guess, you think lines of code is a good indication of how good a program is, right? The lower the number of transistors, the better; less transistors means less heat, less power usage, and less complexity. It is merely an unfortunately fact of life that adding more functionality tends to require more transistors.
While we're on numbers; why is 100W good? What sort of power consumption do the G5 chips have? For a comparison, AMD Athlon 64 chips have a power consumption of 67 to 89W, depending on the exact chip.
There would be companies claiming a hacker should pay for their whole security team because they beat them... Certainly they should also pay for any associated costs the company incurs; particularly cleanup cost, and the cost of paying staff who just sit around doing nothing because systems are down. Tbese are costs the company would not have incurred if the cracker had not chosen to break the law. If they end up spending the rest of their natural life doing community service as punishment, I am fine with that. I see absolutely no reason society should have to pay for their actions.
Strangely enough, I'd rather live in a world where the women felt safe wearing as little (or as much) as they want, and we blamed the people who choose to break the law.
For drinking and driving: This is a choice the person drink and driving, and only the person drinking and driving, makes.
I don't feel I should have to lock my doors, either. The fact that there is a closed door, indicating the part of my property, should be enough to keep people out.
As to walking home at night, what am I meant to do? If I get someone to walk back with me, they then have to walk back home alone. Heck, I'm frequently the guy walking home having walked a friend in a short skirt home.
For example, we firewall off MySQL and SSH ports on most of our systems, so they can only be accessed from the LAN. If someone needs to access either from home, there's an unfirewalled box they can SSH into, and on to the destination system from there.
Testing. Lock the areas off so players can't get into them (except they can), and you can easily make sure none of the changes associated with them have unexpected side effects on the rest of the world/server/client.
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I'd argue that the WiFi said "Well, I'm not going to stop you". Equally, I should be able to put "Private website, do not enter" on the frontpage of my website, and that should be enough to stop people. WiFi unfortunately doesn't have a way of expressing owner's intent, only of blocking or not blocking systems.
What we need is for WiFi to be set non-password protected, but clearly labelled as private, so that base stations can use that as a default. People are then left in no doubt as to the situation. If you want to share out your connection, let it be set as public.
Here's another thought; we have a cordless phone. Ignoring difficulties getting the same handset model, it's theoretically quite possible for someone to find and use my phone line. Would this be right? I have no way of securing the phone line further, the hardware just doesn't provide for it, does that make a difference? Personally, I think it's reasonably obvious that you shouldn't be using my phone line...
Doesn't the XBox 360 have a maximum resolution of 720p? Just a thought...
So far GPL violations tend to be sorted out amicably, with the company in question kicking the programmer who thought they could slip GPL code in, without anyone noticing, and either releasing the source code or fixing the problem...
Every time this happens, someone says "What, have they caught all the terrorists?". Believe it or not, the ideal method of law enforcement is not to deal with one type of crime at a time...
"Theft? Err, no, we're still working through all the murders, try again in a few months"
Seriously here people, you may think the copyright holders are big evil faceless corps, but that doesn't make copying their material right. If you object to the companies, don't play their games, listen to their music, watch their videos. Yeah, sure, it'll be tough, you'll miss this stuff, but that's what making a stand is all about.
As it is, I'm fed up of this general attitude of "The company is evil, so I'm going to copy their stuff illegally, that'll teach them!". No, all it does it give them support to the idea they need stronger laws to deal with copyright infringers.
The last game I heard to assume that people were fine with having a network connection, for the single player game, was Half-Life 2. It may have done okay, but a lot of people were not pleased (particularly, for example, students at universities with firewalls blocking access to the Steam system).
Beyond that, like hell am I going anywhere near a game that downloads 15 second movies over my connection. It may not be much, and I may be busy with the game, but I live with two other people who I share the connection with. As it is, we already do downloads late at night to avoid causing problems for the others (a high speed download can really screw up a UDP based MMORPG someone else is playing). And then we can start talking about people who have caps on their monthly bandwidth usage...
Have you thought of using Mac desktops with Linux? It's what we do at work, and it works well for us. One of the things I particularly like about using Linux on servers, is that if something breaks, we can always work out what it is. For example, if an application doesn't seem to be doing what we expect, we can open up the source, and figure out why, it's always a matter of time. Even ended up going through the kernel source once (although that turned out to be faulty memory). Can't do that with Windows!
However, for actually getting work done, and particularly for systems that don't need all the power (and complexity) of Linux, we find OS X is great.
Hate to say this, what the game industry lacks is not killer ideas, but publishers that will go anywhere near them. Finding some way of persuading large numbers of people to buy good games, over this year's update of their favourite sports sim, would also help.
I remember back in, ooh, 1996, seeing discussion on the use of various SQL databases for persistant storage of MUD data. While I've never actually worked on a MMORPG, I would assume that unless the devs are crazy/masochistic/have really freaky persistant storage needs I can't think of, they'll all be using some form of relational database backend.
Obviously, spooling your game content directly from a database server would be... tricky, in performance terms, but like any other application, I'd imagine there's a certain amount of caching going on...
Sure, it's $129 if you're buying a single copy, but if you're in a corporate environment... well, lets just say, we bought 50-odd copies here for a small university department, and that came to around $60 each (I can't quote you an exact figure because I'm not the purchasing guy, it was in UKP, and I suspect the price would vary on what company you are). Okay, it's not great, but it's hardly bad either.
Something there has always been a lack of, is jobs that require no real world experience. I was lucky, in that I got such a job, but I can imagine it's very hard if you don't.
/. would tend to refer to such a salary as "insulting", maybe recruiters don't feel there are enough people that would accept an entry-level position (for reference, I now earn around two thirds more, and hope to have doubled my starting salary by the time I leave next year. I also work actual 40 hour weeks).
On the other hand, I started on about $25,000/yr. Given that
My best suggestion would be to try to get to know plenty of people in areas of computing you like, and hope one of them can find you an entry level position, that's more or less what happened to me, and I've been asked twice to recommend people for positions (one entry levelish, one for a student).
I'd actually suggest that they should carefully balance both. Students should learn the basic practical knowledge they'll need to be at least semi-useful when they start a job, but should also have enough grounding in theory to be able to pick up new concepts rapidly, and most importantly, be able to find innovative solutions. Practical knowledge is also key to understanding why the theory is important.
Probably a mix of around one third practical to two third theory, sound about right?
After a 4 year CS degree, plus 4 years industry experience, I still don't know how to write a VB app.
But I can learn by Thursday.
And that is why I'm worth hiring. I actually turned up to my first job with a book on the language the application was working on, was written in (Tcl/Tk). If having to learn the language as I went along slowed me down, certainly no-one noticed.
Now, my degree did cover quite a bit of practical stuff (including programming in C, assembly and Java, database commands, etc), but also covered a lot of theory (big-O, algorithms in general, data structures, graph theory, social aspects of computing, etc.). I don't know how many CS degrees stick too much to the theory?
PVE is lame. Anyone who has pvp'd in any decent pvp mmorpg knows that.
Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?
In the meantime; I like PvE, thanks. I've played Planetside, and Guild Wars, and both have good PvP IMHO, but I prefer generally prefer PvE. It may not be as action packed, but maybe when I get home, and I'm tired, stressing myself out isn't what I want to do.
You're right, I'd have to spend countless hours to get the perfect character, but y'know what, I don't mind, because I don't PvP, and therefore just "pretty good" equipment is fine for me and my PvEing.
Sounds great. I've seen existing devices like this, but... well, lets just say, the idea of "Just works" does appeal a lot :)
In particular: If Apple can give me a device that sits underneath my TV, and let me buy episodes (or a licence to watch an episode twice) of TV shows, I'm sold. I can leave the computer to grab the few shows I like, while I'm at work, and watch them when I'm ready.
Then you'll hate Firesomething. It randomly re-brands your (Firefox) browser :)
With all the content protection on HD content, I reckon what will happen is, 5-6 years down the line everyone will have told the companies what to do with their HD content, and be using video scalers. Sure, they're not great now, but give them time... with fractal scaling, and using hints from other frames to improve the current frame, I reckon they'll be able to do pretty good job, with a lot less hassle...
What's even worse is the disks that disable the stop button. Can't remember what it was, but I'd put a DVD in, then suddenly something came up, so tried to stop it. And couldn't. I think I eventually got the standby button to stop the whole mess, but for goodness sake!
And let me guess, you think lines of code is a good indication of how good a program is, right? The lower the number of transistors, the better; less transistors means less heat, less power usage, and less complexity. It is merely an unfortunately fact of life that adding more functionality tends to require more transistors.
While we're on numbers; why is 100W good? What sort of power consumption do the G5 chips have? For a comparison, AMD Athlon 64 chips have a power consumption of 67 to 89W, depending on the exact chip.
There would be companies claiming a hacker should pay for their whole security team because they beat them...
Certainly they should also pay for any associated costs the company incurs; particularly cleanup cost, and the cost of paying staff who just sit around doing nothing because systems are down. Tbese are costs the company would not have incurred if the cracker had not chosen to break the law. If they end up spending the rest of their natural life doing community service as punishment, I am fine with that. I see absolutely no reason society should have to pay for their actions.
Strangely enough, I'd rather live in a world where the women felt safe wearing as little (or as much) as they want, and we blamed the people who choose to break the law.
For drinking and driving: This is a choice the person drink and driving, and only the person drinking and driving, makes.
I don't feel I should have to lock my doors, either. The fact that there is a closed door, indicating the part of my property, should be enough to keep people out.
As to walking home at night, what am I meant to do? If I get someone to walk back with me, they then have to walk back home alone. Heck, I'm frequently the guy walking home having walked a friend in a short skirt home.
Well, I'd suggest more what we do: develop to the standards, then work around the idiosyncracies of mainstream browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari).
For example, we firewall off MySQL and SSH ports on most of our systems, so they can only be accessed from the LAN. If someone needs to access either from home, there's an unfirewalled box they can SSH into, and on to the destination system from there.
And yet, I don't fancy having to try convincing someone holding a knife, of this fact...
I'm strangely reminded of this.
Testing. Lock the areas off so players can't get into them (except they can), and you can easily make sure none of the changes associated with them have unexpected side effects on the rest of the world/server/client.