I hear that argument often enough. What I never heard of is someone who consider himself one of these "Schmucks" -- the Schmucks are always "others".
In fact, it's my belief they don't exist. Not that there aren't bad programmers who write bad programs in any language they come in contact with -- just that there really isn't this mythical threshold beyond which some programmers can't write any program at all -- instead of just producing the bad programs they have always written.
And to write any enterprise Java program nowadays means a knowledge of application servers, annotations and annotation processors, JNDI, and, more likely than not, half a dozen frameworks such as hibernate, a web framework, testing framework and mocking library. Compared to learning all that, closures is a non-issue, currying and currying a curiosity. Path dependent types might be equivalent magic to stuff such as GUICE dependency injection -- something to be repeated by rote learning instead of truly understood (and one is way less likely to stumble on a path dependent type than on a smart annotation).
Much on the contrary of what is claimed here, Scala gains ease acceptance on Java shops that try it out. Take a look at INFOQ's recent interview about The Guardian's introduction of Scala for an example of that.
I have only ever heard of two persons who tried out Scala and didn't like it, one of whom was as much turned off by a bad experience with IDE support than anything else.
Now, if they would just actually deliver anything worthwhile...
It's kinda funny when he mentions the development budget, as EA spends more on marketing and franchise royalties than they spend on actual game development, testing and art.
The present character set, actually, does _not_ cover Latin languages! In fact, it only covers English. I don't know of a single other language that doesn't have either accents or characters not present in English.
You should rewrite the topic to say "ICANN Under Pressure to Include Other Languages Besides English", but that might give the impression that what we actually have doesn't really cover over half of the Internet, right?
This news is a bit old, and seems to be missing the rumor that Blu-Ray licensees are prohibited (by license) from making dual-players. It's a fact that EC is looking into Blu-Ray contract, and some are saying this is the reason.
Interesting. This is something many have already proposed to escape the moon's gravity well in s.f. The twist of using a circle and accelerate it over time is very clever indeed.
Well, you are obviously unaquainted with high-end gaming rigs, or, perhaps, you build your own computer using components with a good price/benefit ratio. Like myself. Which doesn't stop ME from knowing what a good gaming rig costs. For instance, go to Alienware and build an Aurora or an Area51 computer with all optionals. It *starts* at US$5700, and you can't compare the basic model with the model with all optionals. It might be excellent, but it doesn't hold a candle to the model with all optionals. Ergo, the high end, by definition, is the model with all optionals. That model costs 100 times the price of a Playstation 2.
As for Xbox360, it just arrived on the market, so it has a higher price tag. And, even then, you can't match it's price/performance. Which is what I said.
I never said you needed to go to the highest end. I said that the highest end could cost 100 times, and it does. And I said that you can't build a computer that matches XBox 360 (for example) for the PRICE of the XBox 360.
So, maybe if you listen to what is being SAID instead of using your prejudice-colored glasses, YOU will get it someday. I prefer a computer, but I'm not dumb enough to understand the trade offs. I'm just curious why some people are...
Troll??? This was all serious, and, in fact, obvious. I'd like to know from this guy who moderated me troll in what, exactly, does he disagree to the point of thinking this was a troll?
Does he think a US$200 console can beat a US$20000 computer? Does he think a high-end computer starts at anything less than US$20000? (try building the computer of your dreams at Alienware...) Does he think a US$600 computer can beat a PS3, or a US$400 computer an XBox360, or and US$200 any console at all? Does he think a console life cicle takes less than five years? Does he think you can't upgrade a computer every six months for something better? Does he think computer games don't take advantage of computer upgrades? Does he think this year's computer games aren't better than last years? Does he think you can upgrade a console's processor or graphics card? Or add a physics or AI card it doesn't have?
I mean, these are all verifiable facts and numbers. And, still, someone thinks stating the obvious, and notice that I give pro and cons for BOTH sides, is a troll!
Hell, I don't even know which side I'm trolling for!:-) But it amazes me that someone is so blind to the bare facts that he thinks this is a troll... Sheesh!
This has been happening for a while, as a matter of fact. Our ancestors most certainly rued the day when bows replaced the REAL experience of a spear. And, in fact, the spear itself is an evil influence on child, as they lose the experience of hand-to-hand fights.
Kids need to live in the real world? What, exactly, is the real world THIS guy lived in? Did he help in the farm? Did he hunt? Or, perhaps, were his experiences adjusted to his day and age?
Yeah, go ahead, take the kids away from the computer, the console, the Nintendo DS. Take away their cell phone, their mp3 player. Is not as if you need to operate gadgets like these in one's adult life today, nor is it any important to be familiar with them, able to learn and adapt to new gadgets.
Let them play ball on the streets. After all, if you REALLY want to get ahead in life, you'd better be a sports star. Or, of course, have a hit rock band, but that would require intimacy with all sort of sound equipments, many of them digital, as a matter of fact.
Really, this is all very tiring. It just doesn't seem to occur to people that their children WILL GROW UP IN A DIFFERENT WAY.
So, you, who happens to be reading this, and have stayed with me so far... do me a favor, would you? Would you PLEASE remember that your children will not grow up like you did, *the same way you did not grow up as your parents*? I'm sorry if you think driving a car is a rite of manhood, but the matter of fact is that they'll just teleport themselves to were they want to be, OR be there virtually. Deal with it, and don't bother the rest of us.
I don't even know why people discuss this. Consoles have a better dollar value and always will. And PCs deliver more power and always will.
You can probably buy 100 consoles (*not* games!) for the value of a high-end gaming rig (literally), but there's nothing you can do to your console that will actually improve it.
And, in that respect, a PC evolves more smoothly too. And I don't mean you can "upgrade" your PC. You got PCI? Now there's AGP. You got AGP? Now there's PCI-Express. So you have to change the motherboard, and, by the way, that CPU is now obsolete, and so is the memory. You can usually keep the IDE cables, unless you went to SATA.
But you can buy a whole new PC next year, and play the games you already own *better*. Moreover, next year you can buy games that have improvements that aren't available today. The console cycle is much slower. They jump farther each time, but they take longer to jump.
Meaning, basically, that if you spend money enough to buy 1000 consoles each year, you'll have a much better experience than that which is possible with said consoles. And, on the other side, you just won't buy a PC capable of what that console is capable for the same amount of money.
This is all obvious. Why does anyone bother to argue over it?
Is there anything in the game against a guy playing an evil mastermind of crime? Hey, guys, you don't mind going around killing orcs or whatever, but you do mind when something happens to YOU? Ok, it was something that REALLY sucked, and, guess what? You *let* yourself be sucked, by the rules of the game. It's a GAME, and you LOST.
You feel cheated? Did the guy use some kind of software to take illegal advantage in-game? Did he use exploits in the game? Did he do anything except play by the rules of the game? If he didn't, guess what?, he didn't cheat. He deceived all of you fair and square. Furthermore, I bet there were plenty people advising against putting your money there because there was no guarantees.
Next, whiny boys will start complaining to the FBI that they were killed on Counter Strike. Multiple times. With head shots.
That's easy. Nintendo Wii won't be the best console out there. Not by a very long margin. In fact, it will compete at the same level of present PS2 or XBox.
So, if you can't be the best, and you won't be the cheaper (at that performance level), you'd better be the coolest.
Try to be cool with the name "Wii".
It's like the Ford Pinto, which went on to be a big success in Brazil after they changed its name from "small dick", which is what "Pinto" meant in Brazil. Sure a name can spell doom.
Nintendo "Wii"??? Are they serious??? God, that sucks! As much as I know how silly that is, my desire to buy this thing diminished instantly as I learned of the new name.
Gee, I don't know about how it sounds in English, but it definitely sounds awful for portuguese-spearkes.
It is *NOT* just him that enjoy salt with his Dvorak.
Well, there's bad, and then there's BAD!
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1
An acquaintance recently got a call from a head hunter. The head hunter said there was a position working with Storage in a Telecom company. My acquaintance said, "Ok, I just won't work for X". The head hunter then got all pissed off, as X was precisely the telecom in question.
Here's what happened: in the last two or three years, X mistreated, did not value, and subcontracted most of it's IT. They gave precedence to third party software, even when in-house people already had something to solve the problem, and the manager went so far as to actually terrorize it's employees, though I don't know whether that was intentional (to get rid of them) or not.
Obviously, everyone who could, fled.
So, now, they find out that it really sucks when something goes wrong with the storage where your billing is stored, and you have no one capable of fixing it. Sure, they have all sort of contracts with third parties ensuring someone can be called to fix the problem (they love that, don't they?), if only it didn't took a week for someone (capable) with no familiarity with the system to fix it...
Later, my acquaintance gets a call from a manager from the company, asking why he didn't want to work for them, and he spends 45 minutes giving the smallest particulars of his reasons. The manager admits to the policies the company had, but said they were "a strategic mistake", and they are changing. Hah!
Well, the manager tries one last time, and says how much they are willing to pay. Would you believe they offered entry-level salary??? Being an ex-employee (and I was lucky to have been misallocated on engineering instead of IT, so I was actually well treated), I can only manifest my happiness in seeing them going down the drain.
Here in Brazil we change it twice a year. I mean, every year, the government changes the date DST begins and then the date it ends based on a number of spurious factors. Mostly, I think, some politician discovers his wife bought the wrong air tickets and then pressures whoever to change it. Well, maybe not that, but it sure looks like it.
Get the tzdata for Brazil and check it out some time. Real funny. Hah Hah.
As a matter of fact, one something like that did happen. The Papa (yes, the one who just died) was arriving in Brazil in the first or second DST week, and international TV stations covering it found out they bought the wrong time slot on the satellite. So, screw us, they changed DST's date.
Because of all that, honestly, US plight is ridiculous. No decent system works with local time instead of absolute time, and Windows doesn't work anyway (EVEN if the date didn't change here every year, they mixed the sundays it begins/ends -- hell, does Outlook work with DST yet?).
Will they replace ALL their projectors, or will they follow the path of other countries, such as Brazil, in having digital projectors available in some places and analog ones elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
I hear that argument often enough. What I never heard of is someone who consider himself one of these "Schmucks" -- the Schmucks are always "others".
In fact, it's my belief they don't exist. Not that there aren't bad programmers who write bad programs in any language they come in contact with -- just that there really isn't this mythical threshold beyond which some programmers can't write any program at all -- instead of just producing the bad programs they have always written.
And to write any enterprise Java program nowadays means a knowledge of application servers, annotations and annotation processors, JNDI, and, more likely than not, half a dozen frameworks such as hibernate, a web framework, testing framework and mocking library. Compared to learning all that, closures is a non-issue, currying and currying a curiosity. Path dependent types might be equivalent magic to stuff such as GUICE dependency injection -- something to be repeated by rote learning instead of truly understood (and one is way less likely to stumble on a path dependent type than on a smart annotation).
Much on the contrary of what is claimed here, Scala gains ease acceptance on Java shops that try it out. Take a look at INFOQ's recent interview about The Guardian's introduction of Scala for an example of that.
I have only ever heard of two persons who tried out Scala and didn't like it, one of whom was as much turned off by a bad experience with IDE support than anything else.
Well, sounds like Steam. I love Steam. If that protection means no CD in the drive (and, possibly, buying through the Internet), then I'm all for it.
So what if it can't be played off-line? It can't be played without a computer either, so get in line and get on line.
Now, if they would just actually deliver anything worthwhile...
It's kinda funny when he mentions the development budget, as EA spends more on marketing and franchise royalties than they spend on actual game development, testing and art.
The present character set, actually, does _not_ cover Latin languages! In fact, it only covers English. I don't know of a single other language that doesn't have either accents or characters not present in English.
You should rewrite the topic to say "ICANN Under Pressure to Include Other Languages Besides English", but that might give the impression that what we actually have doesn't really cover over half of the Internet, right?
This news is a bit old, and seems to be missing the rumor that Blu-Ray licensees are prohibited (by license) from making dual-players. It's a fact that EC is looking into Blu-Ray contract, and some are saying this is the reason.
Interesting. This is something many have already proposed to escape the moon's gravity well in s.f. The twist of using a circle and accelerate it over time is very clever indeed.
Well, you are obviously unaquainted with high-end gaming rigs, or, perhaps, you build your own computer using components with a good price/benefit ratio. Like myself. Which doesn't stop ME from knowing what a good gaming rig costs. For instance, go to Alienware and build an Aurora or an Area51 computer with all optionals. It *starts* at US$5700, and you can't compare the basic model with the model with all optionals. It might be excellent, but it doesn't hold a candle to the model with all optionals. Ergo, the high end, by definition, is the model with all optionals. That model costs 100 times the price of a Playstation 2.
As for Xbox360, it just arrived on the market, so it has a higher price tag. And, even then, you can't match it's price/performance. Which is what I said.
I never said you needed to go to the highest end. I said that the highest end could cost 100 times, and it does. And I said that you can't build a computer that matches XBox 360 (for example) for the PRICE of the XBox 360.
So, maybe if you listen to what is being SAID instead of using your prejudice-colored glasses, YOU will get it someday. I prefer a computer, but I'm not dumb enough to understand the trade offs. I'm just curious why some people are...
Troll??? This was all serious, and, in fact, obvious. I'd like to know from this guy who moderated me troll in what, exactly, does he disagree to the point of thinking this was a troll?
:-) But it amazes me that someone is so blind to the bare facts that he thinks this is a troll... Sheesh!
Does he think a US$200 console can beat a US$20000 computer?
Does he think a high-end computer starts at anything less than US$20000? (try building the computer of your dreams at Alienware...)
Does he think a US$600 computer can beat a PS3, or a US$400 computer an XBox360, or and US$200 any console at all?
Does he think a console life cicle takes less than five years?
Does he think you can't upgrade a computer every six months for something better?
Does he think computer games don't take advantage of computer upgrades?
Does he think this year's computer games aren't better than last years?
Does he think you can upgrade a console's processor or graphics card? Or add a physics or AI card it doesn't have?
I mean, these are all verifiable facts and numbers. And, still, someone thinks stating the obvious, and notice that I give pro and cons for BOTH sides, is a troll!
Hell, I don't even know which side I'm trolling for!
This has been happening for a while, as a matter of fact. Our ancestors most certainly rued the day when bows replaced the REAL experience of a spear. And, in fact, the spear itself is an evil influence on child, as they lose the experience of hand-to-hand fights.
Kids need to live in the real world? What, exactly, is the real world THIS guy lived in? Did he help in the farm? Did he hunt? Or, perhaps, were his experiences adjusted to his day and age?
Yeah, go ahead, take the kids away from the computer, the console, the Nintendo DS. Take away their cell phone, their mp3 player. Is not as if you need to operate gadgets like these in one's adult life today, nor is it any important to be familiar with them, able to learn and adapt to new gadgets.
Let them play ball on the streets. After all, if you REALLY want to get ahead in life, you'd better be a sports star. Or, of course, have a hit rock band, but that would require intimacy with all sort of sound equipments, many of them digital, as a matter of fact.
Really, this is all very tiring. It just doesn't seem to occur to people that their children WILL GROW UP IN A DIFFERENT WAY.
So, you, who happens to be reading this, and have stayed with me so far... do me a favor, would you? Would you PLEASE remember that your children will not grow up like you did, *the same way you did not grow up as your parents*? I'm sorry if you think driving a car is a rite of manhood, but the matter of fact is that they'll just teleport themselves to were they want to be, OR be there virtually. Deal with it, and don't bother the rest of us.
I don't even know why people discuss this. Consoles have a better dollar value and always will. And PCs deliver more power and always will.
You can probably buy 100 consoles (*not* games!) for the value of a high-end gaming rig (literally), but there's nothing you can do to your console that will actually improve it.
And, in that respect, a PC evolves more smoothly too. And I don't mean you can "upgrade" your PC. You got PCI? Now there's AGP. You got AGP? Now there's PCI-Express. So you have to change the motherboard, and, by the way, that CPU is now obsolete, and so is the memory. You can usually keep the IDE cables, unless you went to SATA.
But you can buy a whole new PC next year, and play the games you already own *better*. Moreover, next year you can buy games that have improvements that aren't available today. The console cycle is much slower. They jump farther each time, but they take longer to jump.
Meaning, basically, that if you spend money enough to buy 1000 consoles each year, you'll have a much better experience than that which is possible with said consoles. And, on the other side, you just won't buy a PC capable of what that console is capable for the same amount of money.
This is all obvious. Why does anyone bother to argue over it?
Is there anything in the game against a guy playing an evil mastermind of crime? Hey, guys, you don't mind going around killing orcs or whatever, but you do mind when something happens to YOU? Ok, it was something that REALLY sucked, and, guess what? You *let* yourself be sucked, by the rules of the game. It's a GAME, and you LOST.
You feel cheated? Did the guy use some kind of software to take illegal advantage in-game? Did he use exploits in the game? Did he do anything except play by the rules of the game? If he didn't, guess what?, he didn't cheat. He deceived all of you fair and square. Furthermore, I bet there were plenty people advising against putting your money there because there was no guarantees.
Next, whiny boys will start complaining to the FBI that they were killed on Counter Strike. Multiple times. With head shots.
So, exactly how isn't Tetris an indie smash hit?
It draw unanimous scorn from slashdotters. Now I _know_ it's doomed.
That's easy. Nintendo Wii won't be the best console out there. Not by a very long margin. In fact, it will compete at the same level of present PS2 or XBox.
So, if you can't be the best, and you won't be the cheaper (at that performance level), you'd better be the coolest.
Try to be cool with the name "Wii".
It's like the Ford Pinto, which went on to be a big success in Brazil after they changed its name from "small dick", which is what "Pinto" meant in Brazil. Sure a name can spell doom.
Nintendo "Wii"??? Are they serious??? God, that sucks! As much as I know how silly that is, my desire to buy this thing diminished instantly as I learned of the new name.
Gee, I don't know about how it sounds in English, but it definitely sounds awful for portuguese-spearkes.
You did the professional thing. It was the company that was unprofessional.
Tell that to the Nigerian scammers!
It is *NOT* just him that enjoy salt with his Dvorak.
An acquaintance recently got a call from a head hunter. The head hunter said there was a position working with Storage in a Telecom company. My acquaintance said, "Ok, I just won't work for X". The head hunter then got all pissed off, as X was precisely the telecom in question.
Here's what happened: in the last two or three years, X mistreated, did not value, and subcontracted most of it's IT. They gave precedence to third party software, even when in-house people already had something to solve the problem, and the manager went so far as to actually terrorize it's employees, though I don't know whether that was intentional (to get rid of them) or not.
Obviously, everyone who could, fled.
So, now, they find out that it really sucks when something goes wrong with the storage where your billing is stored, and you have no one capable of fixing it. Sure, they have all sort of contracts with third parties ensuring someone can be called to fix the problem (they love that, don't they?), if only it didn't took a week for someone (capable) with no familiarity with the system to fix it...
Later, my acquaintance gets a call from a manager from the company, asking why he didn't want to work for them, and he spends 45 minutes giving the smallest particulars of his reasons. The manager admits to the policies the company had, but said they were "a strategic mistake", and they are changing. Hah!
Well, the manager tries one last time, and says how much they are willing to pay. Would you believe they offered entry-level salary??? Being an ex-employee (and I was lucky to have been misallocated on engineering instead of IT, so I was actually well treated), I can only manifest my happiness in seeing them going down the drain.
I tried using it, but it seems half the games out there won't work in this mode. What am I supposed to do?
That's not exactly new. This kind of feature is offered by some telecoms. For example, Brasil Telecom.
Interesting stories. Here in Brazil people are required by law to accept cash. So, to actually refuse some uncommon bill would be a crime.
Then again, we have had to many of them in the last 20 years that I think such situations are unlikely here.
Here in Brazil we change it twice a year. I mean, every year, the government changes the date DST begins and then the date it ends based on a number of spurious factors. Mostly, I think, some politician discovers his wife bought the wrong air tickets and then pressures whoever to change it. Well, maybe not that, but it sure looks like it.
Get the tzdata for Brazil and check it out some time. Real funny. Hah Hah.
As a matter of fact, one something like that did happen. The Papa (yes, the one who just died) was arriving in Brazil in the first or second DST week, and international TV stations covering it found out they bought the wrong time slot on the satellite. So, screw us, they changed DST's date.
Because of all that, honestly, US plight is ridiculous. No decent system works with local time instead of absolute time, and Windows doesn't work anyway (EVEN if the date didn't change here every year, they mixed the sundays it begins/ends -- hell, does Outlook work with DST yet?).
Will they replace ALL their projectors, or will they follow the path of other countries, such as Brazil, in having digital projectors available in some places and analog ones elsewhere?
And now we are reinventing Forth and Lisp in XML!
Sure, it's 30/40 years later, and sure, it sucks lemons like nothing I have ever seen, but, hey, it's XML!