Yeah, both slash and reddit's codebases are available for reuse and have been for about ever. Personally, I much prefer reddit for this, since in the technical subs I actually find good shit in the comments fairly frequently because the stuff gets massively upvoted. Then again, it is a downside in the less technical stuff since it leads to nothing at all but hivemind there.
Whoa there, Hoss. I think we are in violent agreement. I am just pointing out that the term engineer, which is what the poster was rabid about, can't be misused in the way he was objecting to. Which makes your point and I am agreeing with. It is just like chef. Anyone can call themselves a chef, anyone can call themselves a computer engineer. So yeah, getting a good degree from a good school is important. That was actually the point I was making. "Engineer" doesn't mean dick in the US. A good degree to start and a good track record later, those mean everything.
Should we have government certification for what makes a computer engineer? Personally I think that is a retarded idea and didn't say I thought we needed one.
The general gist of this thread is a good one and getting a degree is a great idea. But CS engineering has no licensing requirements in the US, so no, it doesn't actually mean something. I have met more than my share of people with engineering degrees from third rate state schools who are absolutely abysmal. And equally I have met a very few absolutely brilliant engineers who have no degree at all and are completely self taught.
Again, I don't disagree on the whole with your general sentiment. Nor am I trying to attack state school education, I have met some solid folks who came out of state schools (Berkeley comes to mind immediately). Just that the generic statement that engineer means something in the US is demonstrably wrong. Personally, I don't have much respect for CS as an *undergraduate* degree in general. Folks coming out of Berkeley, Princeton, MIT, Caltech and a few other schools, a BS in CS is a pretty serious piece of paper. But if I had to make a generic call, MS and up is where I would put the engineer tag if you wanted to be really serious about it.
And this slightly less than brilliant original poster, if I were him I would go for one of those life experience degrees from a lower ranked state school, assuming he actually has the life experience, which can require only a couple of semesters of additional coursework if he has enough documentable experience, and then use that to get into an MS program at a not-to-competitive institution (since a top ranked institution won't look kindly on the GED of college degrees). Of course, the odds of him failing horribly due to not having the fundamentals solid is high. But it would meet his personal goals of avoiding as much non-CS coursework as possible.
You sir, are completely correct and I stand corrected. While I do feel there is a little more we could do in terms of education and ease of use for end users, you hit the key points on the head here.
Sorry, sport, I don't have a netbook. I have a laptop. Oh, they are the same thing? But the marketing on netbooks and notebooks doesn't say that. Netbook = limited little OS things. So that doesn't apply to me. Oh, wait, it does? I _am_ supposed to use that on my notebook?
You see where I am going here? And the netbook distro is fairly recent so that is why I hadn't seen it. But it doesn't matter. It still reinforces the point of consumer confusion. Which the thing we are talking about here. I personally don't care about this because I can and do compile my own kernels when the mood strikes. We are talking about general consumers here. And the point still stands that this issue causes unncessary confusion and is a clear barrier to adoption.
Would you? Really? Cause I have been using Linux exclusively for my servers, desktops and notebooks for years and I didn't know there was a "laptop" ubuntu. Or suse. Or redhat.
Actually, I still don't know that. But I will take your word for it that something like that exists in some niche under a rock. Everything does. Linux distros are like porn on the net, if you can think of it, someone has done it. And heck, there are probably even supported ones from the three distros above maybe. Just I never heard of them because I haven't cared enough to look.
Which brings us to the odds of "the average computer user" having heard of them: Zero. Zip. None, Nil.
Plus, they have absolutely no conditioning for it, coming from either Mac or Win, where you don't need a magic special install to make your laptop work with your OS. You just do it.
So basically this isn't negating the OP's point, but instead reinforcing it. It is just another reason for people who aren't geeks to say: linux, I tried that but my battery life cut in half, so I put Win back on my machine.
One stops are mid level distributors that carry product from multiple labels. Somewhere the person writing this article got very confused by what is going on here.
If you look at the article comments there is a guy there who is also pointing this out.
Not saying EMI isn't annoying as are most of the labels, but this article is seriously confused.
Exactly! The UK is bristling with cctv cameras running into police stations and campaigns to have citizens turn in other citizens over simply taking pictures on the street. This isn't a society that, as a whole, has shown a whole lot of wanna when it comes to protecting their privacy or really giving a crap.
How many people are going to keep popping off to a guy who has Flamebait in his name? Jesus. TheVelvetFlamebait, you get a cookie for flashing up huge signs and still gettting people to drink the koolaid. Although, it *is* slashdot, so it isn't like it is a hard crowd...
Microsoft has referred to their MSDN stuff as a subscription, or at least used to. I dunno, I weened myself off the redmond teat a long time ago and no longer have to deal with their crappy products.
And now that I think about it, Value is a pretty normal thing to put in the name of something. So that leaves us with Open, and if you read what the thing actually is, a slightly flexible account without exact license numbers on it, that actually makes some sense.
In other words, this is a pretty normal product name, a guy going off in a post for no reason to abuse Microsoft when there are plenty of GOOD reasons to abuse Microsoft, and an editor who really, really can't tell what is news.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. Although, now that I am fairly hooked on the endorphins, that is helping. But podcasts and magazines for some cardio are what I use when alone, with my mp3 player, I literally don't think I would be able to keep going to the gym alone half as much.
And mostly I try to work out with friends. Since I am a slight gym junkie at this point (not as bad as when I started, but still pretty into it) I actually have recruited a number of workout partners, so I don't burn any one of them out.
You hit the nail on the head. About 10 months ago, I looked down and realized my gut had hidden my belt buckle and hit the gym. Admittedly, I did this a lot harder than most people are likely to really stick with. Along the way I have actually upped my calorie intake (although, breaking it into quite a few more meals a day) and lost 12-15 pounds. And that isn't much, but it would require before and after pictures that I don't have to get across what has actually happened. There isn't any fat on me at this point and the weight that is left has gone into muscle. It took a few months to really start kicking in, but once it did, this pretty much ended any bs arguments over this for me.
I know too many geek friends with weight problems who used to argue all this stuff incessantly with me (heck, I used to argue it incessantly before I was willing to do something serious about it). They say they tried exercise and going to the gym. Then I ask them how much and they basically come down to something like 2 hours a week for a month or so. The rest of the time they are sitting in a chair in front of their TV or terminal eating cheetos.
Hit the gym hard for 12+ hours a week for six months and come back and talk to me. Yeah, it is a lot of time, but the payoff in health and feeling good and concentration increase is huge. And after you get to the point you feel okay with, you don't have to keep up with crazy gym time to maintain.
I dunno, those guys have stopped arguing with me about this now that I have shown by doing it that a 42 year old desk slug who was never previously a weight lifter or gym rat can still lose weight and build muscle just by adding plenty of exercise to my day.
I worked in the game press as a writer and editor for over a decade at many magazines and sites, and this wasn't true at least up to 2002, past then I wasn't on a masthead anywhere and don't know. A lot of people have this perception that game companies do this, and it doesn't happen. Yes, magazines pretty much have to have review copies, because a magazine takes weeks to get from the point it is written to the shelf. When a new game is coming out, who is going to wait a month after it is on the shelf for a review? So yes, the magazines need review copies. But the publishers need the magazines to review the games just as much. The idea that one bad review is going to cause a publisher to cut off one of their sources of possible buzz for their future titles is just not the way it works. It might be that way for small fry sites, but not for the larger sites or magazines, the publishers can't afford it.
What does happen then? Why do magazines end up publishing good reviews of fairly crappy titles? Because a lot of the time what they are reviewing isn't a finished game, for one thing. It is a 90% done beta because, remember, magazines have to hit the shelves on time, so they have to review what they can get, and they give the publisher the bennie of the doubt. Then there are the trips and tchokies. Want to go to Candlestick Park and take batting practice from Vita Blue? I got that junket for Electronic Games Magazine once. Want a $250 leather jacket for free? Well, you should see the ones we got for the last of the Harpoon series, they kicked ass. And so on. I had closets full of this stuff... Finally, there is simply workload. If you are working in the industry, you never finish a game. You never come close. When I was at the height of my work in that field, I was burning through 200 games or so a year to keep up. How many of them do you think I really *played*? The four or so a year I wrote strategy guides on got completely played, the others got a day, if that.
I really doubt much has changed in the last five years. The industry is very good at influencing the game mags and the game mags and everyone makes money off the gamer. It is a symbotic relationship, but not one where anyone ever actually threatens to "pull" review copies or anything so crass. Again, it might happen to the small fry websites, but not to any of the players.
I'm the last one to defend the MPAA, but the only reason for sharing this number is so that cheapskates can get free movies. Right? Or use your legally purchased DVD's on your homebrew video server maybe? Or back them up?
I don't know how accurate my analysis is - I am certainly not a lawyer - That's easy, it isn't accurate at all.
This is somewhere else in this discussion, but I will go ahead and repost Stephen Bainbridge's link. He is a law professor at UCLA http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/.
Basically you are jumping through all kinds of hoops but it all comes down to the definition of a grass roots lobbyiest and the language is very clear that you have to be retained by a client. Period. Not make money off of ads, not be a democrat/republican/jedi, not talk to more than 500 people. You have to be retained by a client. And if you are a blogger being retained by a client to push a particular political agenda and making more than 25k a quarter at it, it would probably be a good thing for you to cop to being a lobbyiest.
No, actually it was 25,000 a quarter and it required that you be retained by a client. Pretty clear. The 500 thing was totally different than the payment. Read the actual bill and not the crap spin that was spouted by a lobbyist on PR Wire and picked up here yesterday.
And I don't think it was dems not wanting competition. MoveOn.org is equal to anything the right has going in this area, and I can promise you the Dems sure don't want it to have to fall under K street kinda rules.
If anyone had bothered to read the text instead of buying the PR piece by a professional lobbyiest that went up yesterday as news, they would have seen that the provision in question only applied to blogging for pay by a client. Not getting money for your ads or anything else. This was aimed at astroturfing, not bloggers. And paid political speach, which is what we are talking about here, IS regulated already. This wasn't the evil to end all evils and an attack on blogs, it was an attack on lobbyists and it would have likely as not been a good thing if it had gone through.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
R2.0, I thought I was the only person left on the planet who remembered that. Hands down the funniest single moment of network television since I have been alive. The show in general doesn't hold up to rewatching, but that one bit still makes me spurt coffee through my nose when it happens to come to mind.
Your comment about the no last names was amusing as well.
Dude, that platform had King of Fighters and King of Fighters and, for variety, King of Fighters.
I know it wasn't actually 6 games, but it was dwarfed by the games available to the other systems out there then that people were actually playing (snes and genesis). PLUS the high price tag. And you also need to note that on that list some of those games were never translated into English, a problem I remember well.
You wanna play with lists, compare the one you just dug up to:
You don't have to count the games, just count the number of times you have to page down, since they are all in the same format. And you will find that neo-geo was straight up crushed by SNES and Genesis, Beaten by about a third by Saturn (Which pretty much tells the tale right there, when the Saturn's game selection takes you down), comes in roughly the same as 3do and only beats the Jaguar. Again: the jaguar is the only system out there around that period that the Neo-Geo had more games than.
I loved the neo-geo, it was a great system and better than anything out at the time, but it had like 6 games.
Depends on which one, IIRC. There wasn't one 3DO, there were at least two and maybe three by different manufactuers. 3do was a specification and not a particular console, a number of companies put them out, and I think some of them had different price points.
Yeah, you are probably right. The renaming of the dll with the program still working shows there is another one available and it hooks into something differently.
Although, now that I am awake and had my tea, I am realizing it is equally or more likely that it never hooked into IE at all, and that MS just made changes to some of the API machinery and supporting dll to make IE 7 work better but at the expense of breaking legacy code that shipped pointing at its own copy of the dll. Still will maintain that MS and orthoganal aren't words that belong in the same sentence, but my earlier post might have been gratitious bashing and wrong. Enough to bash about MS (or most os'es really, just more fun to bash MS) without gratitious leaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, both slash and reddit's codebases are available for reuse and have been for about ever. Personally, I much prefer reddit for this, since in the technical subs I actually find good shit in the comments fairly frequently because the stuff gets massively upvoted. Then again, it is a downside in the less technical stuff since it leads to nothing at all but hivemind there.
I'm pretty sure though that Google will allow anonymous accounts in the future.
Well, there we go then. He-sk is pretty sure. So that's settled.
Whoa there, Hoss. I think we are in violent agreement. I am just pointing out that the term engineer, which is what the poster was rabid about, can't be misused in the way he was objecting to. Which makes your point and I am agreeing with. It is just like chef. Anyone can call themselves a chef, anyone can call themselves a computer engineer. So yeah, getting a good degree from a good school is important. That was actually the point I was making. "Engineer" doesn't mean dick in the US. A good degree to start and a good track record later, those mean everything.
Should we have government certification for what makes a computer engineer? Personally I think that is a retarded idea and didn't say I thought we needed one.
Switch to decaf.
The general gist of this thread is a good one and getting a degree is a great idea. But CS engineering has no licensing requirements in the US, so no, it doesn't actually mean something. I have met more than my share of people with engineering degrees from third rate state schools who are absolutely abysmal. And equally I have met a very few absolutely brilliant engineers who have no degree at all and are completely self taught.
Again, I don't disagree on the whole with your general sentiment. Nor am I trying to attack state school education, I have met some solid folks who came out of state schools (Berkeley comes to mind immediately). Just that the generic statement that engineer means something in the US is demonstrably wrong. Personally, I don't have much respect for CS as an *undergraduate* degree in general. Folks coming out of Berkeley, Princeton, MIT, Caltech and a few other schools, a BS in CS is a pretty serious piece of paper. But if I had to make a generic call, MS and up is where I would put the engineer tag if you wanted to be really serious about it.
And this slightly less than brilliant original poster, if I were him I would go for one of those life experience degrees from a lower ranked state school, assuming he actually has the life experience, which can require only a couple of semesters of additional coursework if he has enough documentable experience, and then use that to get into an MS program at a not-to-competitive institution (since a top ranked institution won't look kindly on the GED of college degrees). Of course, the odds of him failing horribly due to not having the fundamentals solid is high. But it would meet his personal goals of avoiding as much non-CS coursework as possible.
You sir, are completely correct and I stand corrected. While I do feel there is a little more we could do in terms of education and ease of use for end users, you hit the key points on the head here.
Sorry, sport, I don't have a netbook. I have a laptop. Oh, they are the same thing? But the marketing on netbooks and notebooks doesn't say that. Netbook = limited little OS things. So that doesn't apply to me. Oh, wait, it does? I _am_ supposed to use that on my notebook?
You see where I am going here? And the netbook distro is fairly recent so that is why I hadn't seen it. But it doesn't matter. It still reinforces the point of consumer confusion. Which the thing we are talking about here. I personally don't care about this because I can and do compile my own kernels when the mood strikes. We are talking about general consumers here. And the point still stands that this issue causes unncessary confusion and is a clear barrier to adoption.
For the love of mod points, mod this AC up. Linux is my true love of OS'es, but we do think funny when it comes to ease of use for normal people.
Would you? Really? Cause I have been using Linux exclusively for my servers, desktops and notebooks for years and I didn't know there was a "laptop" ubuntu. Or suse. Or redhat.
Actually, I still don't know that. But I will take your word for it that something like that exists in some niche under a rock. Everything does. Linux distros are like porn on the net, if you can think of it, someone has done it. And heck, there are probably even supported ones from the three distros above maybe. Just I never heard of them because I haven't cared enough to look.
Which brings us to the odds of "the average computer user" having heard of them: Zero. Zip. None, Nil.
Plus, they have absolutely no conditioning for it, coming from either Mac or Win, where you don't need a magic special install to make your laptop work with your OS. You just do it.
So basically this isn't negating the OP's point, but instead reinforcing it. It is just another reason for people who aren't geeks to say: linux, I tried that but my battery life cut in half, so I put Win back on my machine.
One stops are mid level distributors that carry product from multiple labels. Somewhere the person writing this article got very confused by what is going on here.
If you look at the article comments there is a guy there who is also pointing this out.
Not saying EMI isn't annoying as are most of the labels, but this article is seriously confused.
Exactly! The UK is bristling with cctv cameras running into police stations and campaigns to have citizens turn in other citizens over simply taking pictures on the street. This isn't a society that, as a whole, has shown a whole lot of wanna when it comes to protecting their privacy or really giving a crap.
How many people are going to keep popping off to a guy who has Flamebait in his name? Jesus. TheVelvetFlamebait, you get a cookie for flashing up huge signs and still gettting people to drink the koolaid. Although, it *is* slashdot, so it isn't like it is a hard crowd...
Microsoft has referred to their MSDN stuff as a subscription, or at least used to. I dunno, I weened myself off the redmond teat a long time ago and no longer have to deal with their crappy products.
And now that I think about it, Value is a pretty normal thing to put in the name of something. So that leaves us with Open, and if you read what the thing actually is, a slightly flexible account without exact license numbers on it, that actually makes some sense.
In other words, this is a pretty normal product name, a guy going off in a post for no reason to abuse Microsoft when there are plenty of GOOD reasons to abuse Microsoft, and an editor who really, really can't tell what is news.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. Although, now that I am fairly hooked on the endorphins, that is helping. But podcasts and magazines for some cardio are what I use when alone, with my mp3 player, I literally don't think I would be able to keep going to the gym alone half as much.
And mostly I try to work out with friends. Since I am a slight gym junkie at this point (not as bad as when I started, but still pretty into it) I actually have recruited a number of workout partners, so I don't burn any one of them out.
You hit the nail on the head. About 10 months ago, I looked down and realized my gut had hidden my belt buckle and hit the gym. Admittedly, I did this a lot harder than most people are likely to really stick with. Along the way I have actually upped my calorie intake (although, breaking it into quite a few more meals a day) and lost 12-15 pounds. And that isn't much, but it would require before and after pictures that I don't have to get across what has actually happened. There isn't any fat on me at this point and the weight that is left has gone into muscle. It took a few months to really start kicking in, but once it did, this pretty much ended any bs arguments over this for me.
I know too many geek friends with weight problems who used to argue all this stuff incessantly with me (heck, I used to argue it incessantly before I was willing to do something serious about it). They say they tried exercise and going to the gym. Then I ask them how much and they basically come down to something like 2 hours a week for a month or so. The rest of the time they are sitting in a chair in front of their TV or terminal eating cheetos.
Hit the gym hard for 12+ hours a week for six months and come back and talk to me. Yeah, it is a lot of time, but the payoff in health and feeling good and concentration increase is huge. And after you get to the point you feel okay with, you don't have to keep up with crazy gym time to maintain.
I dunno, those guys have stopped arguing with me about this now that I have shown by doing it that a 42 year old desk slug who was never previously a weight lifter or gym rat can still lose weight and build muscle just by adding plenty of exercise to my day.
I worked in the game press as a writer and editor for over a decade at many magazines and sites, and this wasn't true at least up to 2002, past then I wasn't on a masthead anywhere and don't know. A lot of people have this perception that game companies do this, and it doesn't happen. Yes, magazines pretty much have to have review copies, because a magazine takes weeks to get from the point it is written to the shelf. When a new game is coming out, who is going to wait a month after it is on the shelf for a review? So yes, the magazines need review copies. But the publishers need the magazines to review the games just as much. The idea that one bad review is going to cause a publisher to cut off one of their sources of possible buzz for their future titles is just not the way it works. It might be that way for small fry sites, but not for the larger sites or magazines, the publishers can't afford it.
What does happen then? Why do magazines end up publishing good reviews of fairly crappy titles? Because a lot of the time what they are reviewing isn't a finished game, for one thing. It is a 90% done beta because, remember, magazines have to hit the shelves on time, so they have to review what they can get, and they give the publisher the bennie of the doubt. Then there are the trips and tchokies. Want to go to Candlestick Park and take batting practice from Vita Blue? I got that junket for Electronic Games Magazine once. Want a $250 leather jacket for free? Well, you should see the ones we got for the last of the Harpoon series, they kicked ass. And so on. I had closets full of this stuff... Finally, there is simply workload. If you are working in the industry, you never finish a game. You never come close. When I was at the height of my work in that field, I was burning through 200 games or so a year to keep up. How many of them do you think I really *played*? The four or so a year I wrote strategy guides on got completely played, the others got a day, if that.
I really doubt much has changed in the last five years. The industry is very good at influencing the game mags and the game mags and everyone makes money off the gamer. It is a symbotic relationship, but not one where anyone ever actually threatens to "pull" review copies or anything so crass. Again, it might happen to the small fry websites, but not to any of the players.
idjit.
This is somewhere else in this discussion, but I will go ahead and repost Stephen Bainbridge's link. He is a law professor at UCLA http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/.
Basically you are jumping through all kinds of hoops but it all comes down to the definition of a grass roots lobbyiest and the language is very clear that you have to be retained by a client. Period. Not make money off of ads, not be a democrat/republican/jedi, not talk to more than 500 people. You have to be retained by a client. And if you are a blogger being retained by a client to push a particular political agenda and making more than 25k a quarter at it, it would probably be a good thing for you to cop to being a lobbyiest.
As another poster pointed out, I had forgotten that MoveOn is already a PAC. Bad me.
No, actually it was 25,000 a quarter and it required that you be retained by a client. Pretty clear. The 500 thing was totally different than the payment. Read the actual bill and not the crap spin that was spouted by a lobbyist on PR Wire and picked up here yesterday.
And I don't think it was dems not wanting competition. MoveOn.org is equal to anything the right has going in this area, and I can promise you the Dems sure don't want it to have to fall under K street kinda rules.
Ah, but you are a troll posting anonymously...
If anyone had bothered to read the text instead of buying the PR piece by a professional lobbyiest that went up yesterday as news, they would have seen that the provision in question only applied to blogging for pay by a client. Not getting money for your ads or anything else. This was aimed at astroturfing, not bloggers. And paid political speach, which is what we are talking about here, IS regulated already. This wasn't the evil to end all evils and an attack on blogs, it was an attack on lobbyists and it would have likely as not been a good thing if it had gone through.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."
R2.0, I thought I was the only person left on the planet who remembered that. Hands down the funniest single moment of network television since I have been alive. The show in general doesn't hold up to rewatching, but that one bit still makes me spurt coffee through my nose when it happens to come to mind.
Your comment about the no last names was amusing as well.
Now without the broken links:
SNES
Genesis
Saturn
3DO
Jaguar
Neo-Geo
Dude, that platform had King of Fighters and King of Fighters and, for variety, King of Fighters.
I know it wasn't actually 6 games, but it was dwarfed by the games available to the other systems out there then that people were actually playing (snes and genesis). PLUS the high price tag. And you also need to note that on that list some of those games were never translated into English, a problem I remember well.
You wanna play with lists, compare the one you just dug up to:
SNES
Gensis
Saturn
3DO
Jaguar
Neo-Geo in this format
You don't have to count the games, just count the number of times you have to page down, since they are all in the same format. And you will find that neo-geo was straight up crushed by SNES and Genesis, Beaten by about a third by Saturn (Which pretty much tells the tale right there, when the Saturn's game selection takes you down), comes in roughly the same as 3do and only beats the Jaguar. Again: the jaguar is the only system out there around that period that the Neo-Geo had more games than.
I loved the neo-geo, it was a great system and better than anything out at the time, but it had like 6 games.
Depends on which one, IIRC. There wasn't one 3DO, there were at least two and maybe three by different manufactuers. 3do was a specification and not a particular console, a number of companies put them out, and I think some of them had different price points.
Wikipedia article here.
Yeah, you are probably right. The renaming of the dll with the program still working shows there is another one available and it hooks into something differently.
Although, now that I am awake and had my tea, I am realizing it is equally or more likely that it never hooked into IE at all, and that MS just made changes to some of the API machinery and supporting dll to make IE 7 work better but at the expense of breaking legacy code that shipped pointing at its own copy of the dll. Still will maintain that MS and orthoganal aren't words that belong in the same sentence, but my earlier post might have been gratitious bashing and wrong. Enough to bash about MS (or most os'es really, just more fun to bash MS) without gratitious leaps.