I can't remember where I saw this before but some one had an intelligent solution to this debate. If telco's want net nuetrality, give it to them but on the condition they no longer have "common carrier" status.
As I understand it, "Common Carrier" status ensures the ISP's don't get sued for people who download child porn or arrange drug deals via email. You could add a provision to the bill saying any ISP that chooses a non neutral way of handling traffic looses the this common carrier status. If any of their users downloads at lease one child porn pic, or email through there system that facilitates a crime, they are held responsible in both criminal and civil court. Politicians would love it as they can show they are cracking down on crime on the internet, and it would pretty much garuntee that every ISP would be net neutral for fear that one users downloads something they aren't suppose to.
"But, you probably don't want to hear that. You just want to stand up for a cult that allows it's leader to have sex with little girls and a bunch of violent, anti-American, tax dodgers who armed themselves with illegally modified weapons."
Funny thing, I never saw the FBI charge into catholic churchs, guns a'blazing, when alter boys were being molested. I guess some citizens are more equal than others.
I have been a reader of slashdot for years and a reader of Digg for a few months. What's going on at Digg doesn't really suprise me. Once a site become popular it's bound to be exploited, for marketing, for personal ego trips, you name it. Letting the community run the show is a neat idea in small doses. But collective intelligence sooner or later devolves into the lowest common denominator and open to manipulation. Just look at congress for a good example of that.
To people who think collective intelligence can truely make us all better, I point you to despair inc's take on it http://www.despair.com/idiocy.html
Slashdot is not perfect, neither is digg. I consider slashdot a tyranny of editors that happen to point stories of interest to me. I consider digg a mob of mindless users who sometimes find stories of interest to me. So now digg is a bit more on the tyranny side. So what?
As a programmer who worked for a firm that was the 3rd party admin for many large companies we always defined data ownership in our contracts. We decided what data we owned (any new data we created) and what data belonged to the client company (say employee data like job title and pay level). It's important to negotiate this so that if your company does outsource like this you know the rules up front. For any non-standard reports the client wanted we would charge "out of scope" fees where we could.
... came about 2 hours into the last movie. I just couldn't take it any more. That damn melodramitic music, war drums playing, for HOURS ON END! Just stick the ring in the mountian so i can go home please.
When i was a kid I read the book and loved it. It was deep and required patiance to read. Something to think about. But now that Golum and Frodo's mug is on every lunch box, slurpee cup, action figure, and fry container from here to Hong Kong I want to deny ever reading the book in the first place.
I like your reply. That's exactly what I was thinking about in my first post. There may be a lag when it seems like bad old DRM types are winning but in the end they will get arrogant. Any DRM scheme requied cordination between vendors, which NEVER works out in the long run. Customers get pissed, look for alternatives, and the whole DRM mess is behind us.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
As I read Linus's comments he's not spitting on them. He's just saying not my cup of tea, thanks, I'll pass.
People who see this as him insulting the GPLV3 advocates are usually the idealouge types who can't stand people not wanting to march in lockstep with them. The us or them types. Linus is simply a different strokes for different folks kind of guy.
DRM will come and go. It's not the real threat you think it is. I have now been programming and dealing with hardware for about 20 years now. Just enough time to see the same things happen over and over again. Many makers will use DRM to lock you into bying there stuff. Consumers will get pissed off and stop bying that stuff.
I used to fret and worry about IBM locking down PC hardware so customers would end up locked in an IBM world. Remember that bus that IBM made, microchannel or something, that was suppose to be better than ISA. IBM was going to charge big time for board makers in liscence fees to make cards for these slots. Well along came a small company called Compaq and gave consumers what they wanted. Over the years I have watched this same scenerio play out over and over again with HD interfaces, Video cards, data file formats, you name it. Each time the open market solution natuarly won.
The consumer market wants cheap and hassle free solutions whether they have the DRM label or not. If John Doe can't plug his USB key and save a file in 10 seconds without sacrificing serious money he will go to a providor that will. Linus is right, vote with your dollars. In the ever competitive hardware market, where margins are as thin as tissue paper, some one will be there to cater to what you want.
Computer hardware and software is ultimately a buyers market. Let the market punish dumb hardware and software makers that restrict your use.
I don't think content providors are going to ever seriously consider this. It's a question of economics. Contect providers don't make a lot of money now, even the big ones. Slap on some extra charges from ISP's and those businesses that need high bandwidth will just pack up and leave.
The other factor is that other service providers don't need to find the extra revenue by extorting content providors. In Canada both Rogers and Sympatico (the two big ISP's for most of Canada) went to a price tiered model for there customers. They have caps on how much data per month you can suck up depending on your pricing plan. Go over the limit and you are billed extra for that month. At the time I hated the idea, as well as many other people. But I have to say now I like it. I am willing to pay for the higher price plans to have access to the bandwidth. My mother who doesn't need it gladly chooses the lower price plan.
It's a fee hike plain and simple. Bell South can't raise rates without loosing customers so they go after another source of revenue.
I started a beginner economics course and I learned some interesting things about the market and taxes. When you impose a tax, regardless if you tax the seller or the buyer, it ends up in the buyer paying more for a product. If Bell South wants to charge Apple a fee for each song downloaded, you can bet Apple will pass it on to the customer.
If Bell South needs more revenue to cover costs they can;
1) Raise rates, meaning less customers, meaning less bandwidth usage.
2) Set a tiered usage rate to encourage less use like my service provider does. Have a "low use account" with low bandwidth that charges less, and a heavy user account that charges more.
Going after contect providors for more money is futile and silly.
I am Oracle certified and have talked to a lot of other people who went through various certification processes. Certifications do and don't matter depending on what your looking for.
Some if the points in favour of certs;
- CISCO certs are suppose to be the best for paty increases. Followed by Oracle and I think IBM is not getting into the game.
- It shows you actually know something about the system your certified in. Which is better then some one who just says they are. HR people like that.
- Some places require they have certified people running systems to be compliant with something, say for insurance liability purposes. An employer may get a better insurance rate if they have a certified DBA running there systems.
- Good certification programs make you know something about the product. I took the Oracle exams and I learned more about that DB product then I could ever have hoped at work or on my own.
- It's a good way to enter a field if you have no experience at it. Pass a Java certification and you can land an entry level java programmer position easier than with out it.
The points against certifications;
- Some certs don't seem to make a difference like some of the Microsoft ones (I am Excel certified! woop-ti-doo).
- When I was doing my Oracle DBA cert, a co-worker was also doing it at the same time. She was an utter dolt who knew how to pass a test but was a total idiot in practical matters. Great she is certified but she is still a moron.
- Experience is still a better indicator. People with cert's and no experience should not be put in intermediate or expert level positions. Stick to the entry level positions.
- In some interviews I had recently during job hunts some places didn't give a crap about certification, others did. All depends on the hiring company.
In short, they do help in getting your foot in the door and showing you are capable of something. They do not substitute for experience.
It sounds like you haven't spent time with an IBM mainframe. They never had 3 1/2" disk drives and they still process data at speeds that would melt any PC.
The IBM mainframes I work on regularly process files that are larger than the biggest hard disk on a PC today. You need to get your facts straight.
I disagree. I am glad I switched to the mainframe side of things with my last employer. We ran two systems, high end mainframes and low end PC apps. They felt I was pretty smart so they moved me to the mainframe side of things.
It was the best job insurance I ever had. The words MVS, JCL, COBOL, ISPF, and FileAide have beefed up my resume very well. There are a lot of mainframe jobs out there. You just need the right attitute going in to the interview.
I agree with your post completely. I have been working on OS/390 systems for about 6 years now. They can process a ton of data like no other system I have ever seen.
It does take time and requires a better skill set than the "just reboot" kind of mindset you see in PC people.
If people would just take the time to learn the system, which isn't that hard. It may not be sexy and oh so eye catching, but definately worth it in pay.
I have been working on those clunker mainframes for the last 6 years. As much as you dislike those mainframes they are the back bone of all banking, most payroll, and insurance systems in North America if not the planet. Thats just the industries I have worked in and know of.
If we pulled the plug on them you could kiss your banking services good bye and there is a good chance you would no longer get paid.
When I first started working on the mainframes I thought they were oudated and slow. But after a while I realized the data processing capabilities of these machines is far FAR faster than any non-mainframe platform. I have seen hundreds of terabytes of financial data get crunched in seconds on these mainframes. Thats because they are specialized at processing data. They aren't meant to be pretty.
I can see big Unix systems possibly replacing them over time. But you can't just rip out a sytem that complex and put a new one it. It takes time, somtimes a decade to fully convert these systems over.
Your complaint about your Java applications may be untrue. Many older guys on the mainframe don't want to do the work and no one knows better to question them so they lie and make you do the work around. I have seen this kind of behavour myself. Who's to call them on it if know one knows how the system works.
complicated it may be, un-sexy it definately is. However those ugly complex mainframes run most of the banking, payroll, finance, and insurance processes in North America. Thats just the industries I know heavily rely on those ugly OS 390/zOS mainframes.
This is one of those "think of the kids - what a benefit" ideas that in practice will have zero or negative effect on kids.
As earlier posters have stated the kids won't be doing educational things on the laptops for starters.
What also flies in the face of reality is a large chunk of parents can not afford this. Laptops will become the new status symbol. Who's got the fancy expensive model, as apposed to the on sale this week model. Or worse yet, the government assigned "my family is on welfare" donation laptop model. What kids wants to carry that around. Its the high school social pecking order on steriods.
Nice thought but how about putting money in the actual schools, more specifically the ones in poor neighborhoods that don't even have books.
The first point of the article is obvious. The study is full of crap because its a PR driven move.
But the second point is more interesting to think about. When I was young and eager to please my boss I really beleived that every hour I slacked off was costing the firm money. The billable rate my firm charges for my work is $175 an hour. In theory I better be doing $175 of work for every hour I work.
But reality is they are paying me for what I know and can do, not how much of it I do per hour. This was mentioned in the article regarding support levels. My firm may not need me working right now while I surf the net for non business purposes, but in a couple of hours an important payroll system may go down and they need me to fix it.
It's like being a firemen. Firemen get paid a salary to be available to put out fires. They don't need to put out fires 8 hours a day to be considered cost effective.
There are too many bean counters in business that insist I need to be doing some kind of productive work for every hour I am at work. It's those types of people that drive these kind of silly reports.
Re:Realism is sorely lacking in BF2
on
Review: Battlefield 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While there is a lot to your post that the developers should be listening to my one area of disagreement would be the level of realism.
If they made it as realistic as possible it would push away casual and new users. There is always a balance that has to be made. On the accuracy of the weapons I think you are correct. And it is maddening to have an idiot charge your 50 cal gunner position and kill you with a pistol.
However the difference between TOW versions should be muted in a game. Have one generic personal anti-tank weapon that is less realistic in operations, but use the catastrophic kills points like you mentioned. The tanks need to be vulnerable by non tanks units in some small way so they don't become leathal to infantry in the game.
I can see dumbing down the realistic abilities of the tank for game play. True, real tanks are designed to take out other tanks, but for game play sake they should have some effect on infantry. They had done this in BF1942 very skillfully and made sure most maps only had a couple key tanks for infantry support.
Games need to fudge some what on realism. Otherwise it is no longer fun, its more like a job.
My one complaint against console games seems to be the interface. I much prefer a keyboard and a mouse to the PS2 controller. There is a much faster response time. I beleive thats why the mouse has been disabled in Halo for the PC, at least thats what I have been told by Halo fans.
Mabey BSD's goal is not to work on your machine. What Open BSD wants is a secure system, not something that everyone can use. They have met that goal.
In the short term, you are correct, you can run Linux on your PC. But the over all concern is how long will that be so. Windows was attrocious for a long while until they had to do some serious cleaning up. It's still no where near perfect but they were forced to clean up a lot of stuff with XP.
Linux could be in the same boat some day. A few years from now it may not install on many computers. But I bet you OpenBSD will.
What you should do is ask yourself how many programmers do write software that is not rock solid, release it early, with bugs, and the product gets accepted, refined polished etc...
Based on what I have seen and those I know who work at other companies most programmers wright bad software. Because buisiness is a short term world, quarterly profits and all, things are planed short term.
If you are correct and software development is like evelution, there are a lot of extinctions coming forward.
One other common thing I have seen in business practice as a developer. Healthy profitable projects are used to feed crazy bad unprofitible projects. In my work for instance, 20% of our projects generate a profit, while 80% are way over budget. But the 20% helps pay for the lousy 80%. At the end of the day the business people say "Hey we made 5% profit on our operations". So things continue as they were.
In nature the profitible animals survive, while the unprofitible ones die off. In business (the big multi-nationals any how) the few good projects are used to prop up the idiotic ones. So bad code/genes live on the backs of the good ones.
Perhaps you are right, and some company is going to come along that makes awesome code all the time and wipe us all out. But I doubt it, our firm has lawyers to kill off those kind of smart people.
If the economic benefit of near perfection is less than the cost of near perfection then it would silly to try. The problem with patches is a problem of complexity not quality
I will agree with you so long as its near perfection code. But thats not what we are talking about. Its bad crappy code. In practice bad code, while economical in the short term, is costly in the long term. I have witnessed this first hand over the years. Things I watched get implemented 7 years ago are costing us more on a monthly basis to fix than the total revenue of the contract we won.
People who are willing to sacrifice quality over getting it done on time view the problem from a short term perspective. In that sense it's ok, cause things got done quicker, less time means less cost here and now. In the long term its the crappy code that kills us years later.
I am not saying it has to be picture perfect code. That's the other extreme. But you want to get as close to perfect as your short term goals allow. Saying crappy code is good enough cause it works is an excuse to slack off. I have seen many millions of lines of code to know there is a lot more slacking off than should ever be tolerable.
You missed the point. It installs for now, but 3 or 4 years from now what makes you think it will? What happens when it can no longer support the weight of its own bloat?
I have seen it over and over and over again. Let crappy code pass cause it works now and pay later in frustration.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't remember where I saw this before but some one had an intelligent solution to this debate. If telco's want net nuetrality, give it to them but on the condition they no longer have "common carrier" status.
As I understand it, "Common Carrier" status ensures the ISP's don't get sued for people who download child porn or arrange drug deals via email. You could add a provision to the bill saying any ISP that chooses a non neutral way of handling traffic looses the this common carrier status. If any of their users downloads at lease one child porn pic, or email through there system that facilitates a crime, they are held responsible in both criminal and civil court. Politicians would love it as they can show they are cracking down on crime on the internet, and it would pretty much garuntee that every ISP would be net neutral for fear that one users downloads something they aren't suppose to.
"But, you probably don't want to hear that. You just want to stand up for a cult that allows it's leader to have sex with little girls and a bunch of violent, anti-American, tax dodgers who armed themselves with illegally modified weapons."
Funny thing, I never saw the FBI charge into catholic churchs, guns a'blazing, when alter boys were being molested. I guess some citizens are more equal than others.
I have been a reader of slashdot for years and a reader of Digg for a few months. What's going on at Digg doesn't really suprise me. Once a site become popular it's bound to be exploited, for marketing, for personal ego trips, you name it. Letting the community run the show is a neat idea in small doses. But collective intelligence sooner or later devolves into the lowest common denominator and open to manipulation. Just look at congress for a good example of that.
To people who think collective intelligence can truely make us all better, I point you to despair inc's take on it http://www.despair.com/idiocy.html
Slashdot is not perfect, neither is digg. I consider slashdot a tyranny of editors that happen to point stories of interest to me. I consider digg a mob of mindless users who sometimes find stories of interest to me. So now digg is a bit more on the tyranny side. So what?
As a programmer who worked for a firm that was the 3rd party admin for many large companies we always defined data ownership in our contracts. We decided what data we owned (any new data we created) and what data belonged to the client company (say employee data like job title and pay level). It's important to negotiate this so that if your company does outsource like this you know the rules up front. For any non-standard reports the client wanted we would charge "out of scope" fees where we could.
... came about 2 hours into the last movie. I just couldn't take it any more. That damn melodramitic music, war drums playing, for HOURS ON END! Just stick the ring in the mountian so i can go home please.
When i was a kid I read the book and loved it. It was deep and required patiance to read. Something to think about. But now that Golum and Frodo's mug is on every lunch box, slurpee cup, action figure, and fry container from here to Hong Kong I want to deny ever reading the book in the first place.
I like your reply. That's exactly what I was thinking about in my first post. There may be a lag when it seems like bad old DRM types are winning but in the end they will get arrogant. Any DRM scheme requied cordination between vendors, which NEVER works out in the long run. Customers get pissed, look for alternatives, and the whole DRM mess is behind us.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
As I read Linus's comments he's not spitting on them. He's just saying not my cup of tea, thanks, I'll pass.
People who see this as him insulting the GPLV3 advocates are usually the idealouge types who can't stand people not wanting to march in lockstep with them. The us or them types. Linus is simply a different strokes for different folks kind of guy.
DRM will come and go. It's not the real threat you think it is. I have now been programming and dealing with hardware for about 20 years now. Just enough time to see the same things happen over and over again. Many makers will use DRM to lock you into bying there stuff. Consumers will get pissed off and stop bying that stuff.
I used to fret and worry about IBM locking down PC hardware so customers would end up locked in an IBM world. Remember that bus that IBM made, microchannel or something, that was suppose to be better than ISA. IBM was going to charge big time for board makers in liscence fees to make cards for these slots. Well along came a small company called Compaq and gave consumers what they wanted. Over the years I have watched this same scenerio play out over and over again with HD interfaces, Video cards, data file formats, you name it. Each time the open market solution natuarly won.
The consumer market wants cheap and hassle free solutions whether they have the DRM label or not. If John Doe can't plug his USB key and save a file in 10 seconds without sacrificing serious money he will go to a providor that will. Linus is right, vote with your dollars. In the ever competitive hardware market, where margins are as thin as tissue paper, some one will be there to cater to what you want.
Computer hardware and software is ultimately a buyers market. Let the market punish dumb hardware and software makers that restrict your use.
unless of course your only allowed to share with others that have "bought" the same rights as you.
I don't think content providors are going to ever seriously consider this. It's a question of economics. Contect providers don't make a lot of money now, even the big ones. Slap on some extra charges from ISP's and those businesses that need high bandwidth will just pack up and leave.
The other factor is that other service providers don't need to find the extra revenue by extorting content providors. In Canada both Rogers and Sympatico (the two big ISP's for most of Canada) went to a price tiered model for there customers. They have caps on how much data per month you can suck up depending on your pricing plan. Go over the limit and you are billed extra for that month. At the time I hated the idea, as well as many other people. But I have to say now I like it. I am willing to pay for the higher price plans to have access to the bandwidth. My mother who doesn't need it gladly chooses the lower price plan.
Voila, problem solved.
It's a fee hike plain and simple. Bell South can't raise rates without loosing customers so they go after another source of revenue.
I started a beginner economics course and I learned some interesting things about the market and taxes. When you impose a tax, regardless if you tax the seller or the buyer, it ends up in the buyer paying more for a product. If Bell South wants to charge Apple a fee for each song downloaded, you can bet Apple will pass it on to the customer.
If Bell South needs more revenue to cover costs they can;
1) Raise rates, meaning less customers, meaning less bandwidth usage.
2) Set a tiered usage rate to encourage less use like my service provider does. Have a "low use account" with low bandwidth that charges less, and a heavy user account that charges more.
Going after contect providors for more money is futile and silly.
I am Oracle certified and have talked to a lot of other people who went through various certification processes. Certifications do and don't matter depending on what your looking for.
Some if the points in favour of certs;
- CISCO certs are suppose to be the best for paty increases. Followed by Oracle and I think IBM is not getting into the game.
- It shows you actually know something about the system your certified in. Which is better then some one who just says they are. HR people like that.
- Some places require they have certified people running systems to be compliant with something, say for insurance liability purposes. An employer may get a better insurance rate if they have a certified DBA running there systems.
- Good certification programs make you know something about the product. I took the Oracle exams and I learned more about that DB product then I could ever have hoped at work or on my own.
- It's a good way to enter a field if you have no experience at it. Pass a Java certification and you can land an entry level java programmer position easier than with out it.
The points against certifications;
- Some certs don't seem to make a difference like some of the Microsoft ones (I am Excel certified! woop-ti-doo).
- When I was doing my Oracle DBA cert, a co-worker was also doing it at the same time. She was an utter dolt who knew how to pass a test but was a total idiot in practical matters. Great she is certified but she is still a moron.
- Experience is still a better indicator. People with cert's and no experience should not be put in intermediate or expert level positions. Stick to the entry level positions.
- In some interviews I had recently during job hunts some places didn't give a crap about certification, others did. All depends on the hiring company.
In short, they do help in getting your foot in the door and showing you are capable of something. They do not substitute for experience.
It sounds like you haven't spent time with an IBM mainframe. They never had 3 1/2" disk drives and they still process data at speeds that would melt any PC.
The IBM mainframes I work on regularly process files that are larger than the biggest hard disk on a PC today. You need to get your facts straight.
I disagree. I am glad I switched to the mainframe side of things with my last employer. We ran two systems, high end mainframes and low end PC apps. They felt I was pretty smart so they moved me to the mainframe side of things.
It was the best job insurance I ever had. The words MVS, JCL, COBOL, ISPF, and FileAide have beefed up my resume very well. There are a lot of mainframe jobs out there. You just need the right attitute going in to the interview.
I agree with your post completely. I have been working on OS/390 systems for about 6 years now. They can process a ton of data like no other system I have ever seen.
It does take time and requires a better skill set than the "just reboot" kind of mindset you see in PC people.
If people would just take the time to learn the system, which isn't that hard. It may not be sexy and oh so eye catching, but definately worth it in pay.
I have been working on those clunker mainframes for the last 6 years. As much as you dislike those mainframes they are the back bone of all banking, most payroll, and insurance systems in North America if not the planet. Thats just the industries I have worked in and know of.
If we pulled the plug on them you could kiss your banking services good bye and there is a good chance you would no longer get paid.
When I first started working on the mainframes I thought they were oudated and slow. But after a while I realized the data processing capabilities of these machines is far FAR faster than any non-mainframe platform. I have seen hundreds of terabytes of financial data get crunched in seconds on these mainframes. Thats because they are specialized at processing data. They aren't meant to be pretty.
I can see big Unix systems possibly replacing them over time. But you can't just rip out a sytem that complex and put a new one it. It takes time, somtimes a decade to fully convert these systems over.
Your complaint about your Java applications may be untrue. Many older guys on the mainframe don't want to do the work and no one knows better to question them so they lie and make you do the work around. I have seen this kind of behavour myself. Who's to call them on it if know one knows how the system works.
complicated it may be, un-sexy it definately is. However those ugly complex mainframes run most of the banking, payroll, finance, and insurance processes in North America. Thats just the industries I know heavily rely on those ugly OS 390/zOS mainframes.
This is one of those "think of the kids - what a benefit" ideas that in practice will have zero or negative effect on kids.
As earlier posters have stated the kids won't be doing educational things on the laptops for starters.
What also flies in the face of reality is a large chunk of parents can not afford this. Laptops will become the new status symbol. Who's got the fancy expensive model, as apposed to the on sale this week model. Or worse yet, the government assigned "my family is on welfare" donation laptop model. What kids wants to carry that around. Its the high school social pecking order on steriods.
Nice thought but how about putting money in the actual schools, more specifically the ones in poor neighborhoods that don't even have books.
The first point of the article is obvious. The study is full of crap because its a PR driven move.
But the second point is more interesting to think about. When I was young and eager to please my boss I really beleived that every hour I slacked off was costing the firm money. The billable rate my firm charges for my work is $175 an hour. In theory I better be doing $175 of work for every hour I work.
But reality is they are paying me for what I know and can do, not how much of it I do per hour. This was mentioned in the article regarding support levels. My firm may not need me working right now while I surf the net for non business purposes, but in a couple of hours an important payroll system may go down and they need me to fix it.
It's like being a firemen. Firemen get paid a salary to be available to put out fires. They don't need to put out fires 8 hours a day to be considered cost effective.
There are too many bean counters in business that insist I need to be doing some kind of productive work for every hour I am at work. It's those types of people that drive these kind of silly reports.
While there is a lot to your post that the developers should be listening to my one area of disagreement would be the level of realism.
If they made it as realistic as possible it would push away casual and new users. There is always a balance that has to be made. On the accuracy of the weapons I think you are correct. And it is maddening to have an idiot charge your 50 cal gunner position and kill you with a pistol.
However the difference between TOW versions should be muted in a game. Have one generic personal anti-tank weapon that is less realistic in operations, but use the catastrophic kills points like you mentioned. The tanks need to be vulnerable by non tanks units in some small way so they don't become leathal to infantry in the game.
I can see dumbing down the realistic abilities of the tank for game play. True, real tanks are designed to take out other tanks, but for game play sake they should have some effect on infantry. They had done this in BF1942 very skillfully and made sure most maps only had a couple key tanks for infantry support.
Games need to fudge some what on realism. Otherwise it is no longer fun, its more like a job.
My one complaint against console games seems to be the interface. I much prefer a keyboard and a mouse to the PS2 controller. There is a much faster response time. I beleive thats why the mouse has been disabled in Halo for the PC, at least thats what I have been told by Halo fans.
Mabey BSD's goal is not to work on your machine. What Open BSD wants is a secure system, not something that everyone can use. They have met that goal.
In the short term, you are correct, you can run Linux on your PC. But the over all concern is how long will that be so. Windows was attrocious for a long while until they had to do some serious cleaning up. It's still no where near perfect but they were forced to clean up a lot of stuff with XP.
Linux could be in the same boat some day. A few years from now it may not install on many computers. But I bet you OpenBSD will.
What you should do is ask yourself how many programmers do write software that is not rock solid, release it early, with bugs, and the product gets accepted, refined polished etc...
Based on what I have seen and those I know who work at other companies most programmers wright bad software. Because buisiness is a short term world, quarterly profits and all, things are planed short term.
If you are correct and software development is like evelution, there are a lot of extinctions coming forward.
One other common thing I have seen in business practice as a developer. Healthy profitable projects are used to feed crazy bad unprofitible projects. In my work for instance, 20% of our projects generate a profit, while 80% are way over budget. But the 20% helps pay for the lousy 80%. At the end of the day the business people say "Hey we made 5% profit on our operations". So things continue as they were.
In nature the profitible animals survive, while the unprofitible ones die off. In business (the big multi-nationals any how) the few good projects are used to prop up the idiotic ones. So bad code/genes live on the backs of the good ones.
Perhaps you are right, and some company is going to come along that makes awesome code all the time and wipe us all out. But I doubt it, our firm has lawyers to kill off those kind of smart people.
If the economic benefit of near perfection is less than the cost of near perfection then it would silly to try. The problem with patches is a problem of complexity not quality
I will agree with you so long as its near perfection code. But thats not what we are talking about. Its bad crappy code. In practice bad code, while economical in the short term, is costly in the long term. I have witnessed this first hand over the years. Things I watched get implemented 7 years ago are costing us more on a monthly basis to fix than the total revenue of the contract we won.
People who are willing to sacrifice quality over getting it done on time view the problem from a short term perspective. In that sense it's ok, cause things got done quicker, less time means less cost here and now. In the long term its the crappy code that kills us years later.
I am not saying it has to be picture perfect code. That's the other extreme. But you want to get as close to perfect as your short term goals allow. Saying crappy code is good enough cause it works is an excuse to slack off. I have seen many millions of lines of code to know there is a lot more slacking off than should ever be tolerable.
You missed the point. It installs for now, but 3 or 4 years from now what makes you think it will? What happens when it can no longer support the weight of its own bloat?
I have seen it over and over and over again. Let crappy code pass cause it works now and pay later in frustration.