Last time I looked, what it cost me to ride the Internet to work was £12 per month. That's way cheaper than taking the car... All right, I confess I actually go into work one week in every two. But that still costs a heck of a lot less than commuting every day, and gives me a heck of a lot more time, too.
Oh - and when you do have to go into work, push-bikes come cheaper than cars (and in urban areas are usually faster).
I guess Settlers can be considered an RTS since it's really about building up a war economy and crushing the opposition, never mind the more recent derailings the franchise got... Maybe many people just don't know about games like Settlers? The genre hasn't seen much attention lately.
The original Settlers, up to Settlers 4, are great games. A more recent game in the same genre that I enjoy is Anno 1701
Exceeding the appropriate speed for conditions gets you killed.
It doesn't, that's the problem. Modern cars are exceedingly good at protecting their drivers in head-on collisions. If you exceed the appropriate speed for conditions you will almost certainly not be killed. Someone else will be killed. Some pedestrian, or cyclist, innocently minding their own business and obeying all the rules of the road will be killed. Or someone turning out of a junction with plenty of time to not impede anyone driving a legal speed, whom you hit broadside on. They get killed. You don't.
If seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones were banned, if every car had a rigid steel spike sticking out of the middle of the steering wheel, then speeding would become a self limiting problem; Darwin would take care of it for us. The problem with the 'safety' features on our cars is that they make the wrong person safe - the idiot behind the wheel, not the person he hits.
Exceeding the appropriate speed for the conditions is not quite as bad a crime as premeditated murder... but the difference is small. And no-one is as good a driver as they think they are.
It would be more practical to hook up a generator to a bike or rowing machine and use a battery or flywheel to store the energy -- that way you'd at least get some exercise out of it.
There's an easy joke to make about 'mericans sitting right there, but I don't have the heart to reach out and grab it right now.:P
"Let's have a moment of silence for all those who are stuck in traffic on their way to the gym to ride the stationary bicycle."
That would be interesting, if you had bothered to say what DP, Armonk, or Amdahl is.
This site is for nerds. Nerds know these things, and don't have to be told. Armonk is where IBM used to build mainframes. Amdahl was a guy who designed mainframes for IBM, and who later went on to found a company of the same name which made mainframes which were compatible with IBM's mainframes.
IBM is a computer company.
Mainframes are a class of large computer, now rare.
Computers are programmable machines for processing data.
Indeed. There is a difference between 'exceeding the speed limit' and 'speeding'. The speed limit is a limit, not an obligation. If you hit someone and kill them then by definition you were driving faster than was safe, whether or not you were exceeding the speed limit.
so we can assume 300 of those are speed related
On the contrary all of them must have been speed related. Stationary cars kill no-one.
even if you dispute the 13% figure and assume all road deaths are speed related, you may wish to see the number of drug related deaths for the same period
The total number of deaths related to drug poisoning in 2007 was 2,640
That number includes my brother-in-law, who died of paracetamol poisoning during that period. Precisely what crime was involved in that?
speeding may not be a very safe or desirable activity, but to suggest it is the most dangerous criminal activity is disingenuous at best
The punishment should fit the crime. Speeding is "essentially" a thought crime; unless and until there is a collision, there is no victim (yes I understand that "people were put at risk"). Crimes without victims should be immediately removed from the books, to help improve the economy.
Speeding motorists kill more people, maim more people, and damage more property than all other criminals put together. Speeding motorists in Britain alone kill more people every single year than Al Quaeda have ever killed in any year. Speeding which does not result in a collision is not victimless; the right of children to play freely in the road, as was normal throughout history until the last fifty years, is infringed. The right of the elderly to walk safely to visit their friends or purchase their shopping, is infringed. The right of all citizens to use the public road as public space to be enjoyed, is infringed.
No-one has the right to drive a ton of metal at 60 miles per hour in a public place; it puts everyone at risk, and severely diminishes everyone's freedom and safety. The community grants revocable licences to people deemed mature enough and responsible enough to manage a motor vehicle safely. A 'three strikes and you're out' approach to speeding - three offences and you never drive on the public road again - seems to me entirely reasonable.
90% of the weight, for a start. Less weight means better performance per unit power. Less weight means lower forces on the tyres, thus smaller contact patch for the same tyre pressure, thus lower rolling resistance without loss of comfort. Less weight means better hill climbing.
We can't afford to be making cars out of steel any more.
Solar auto challenges should be viewed as nothing more than useful engineer training that serves no immediate practical purpose...
Disagree.
Granted solar power is not suitable for actual every day transportation in most parts of the world, a great deal of the engineering of these cars will move into the mainstream - and sooner than you think. As fuel gets more expensive, cars will have to get much lighter, much more aerodynamic, and have much lower rolling resistance. Many of them will use battery or hybrid power systems, and regenerative braking will become commonplace. Solar cars are pioneering all these technologies.
Suppose you develop something like -- ooh, I don't know, a computer -- for which there's a world market of only four examples. You have to add a quarter of the development cost to the price of each machine. Suppose you develop something like -- ooh, I don't know, let's say a games console -- of which you expect to sell a million examples. Then you need to add a millionth of the development cost to the price of each machine. But in either case there are a finite number of machines, because the machines actually have to be made, and the factories in which they are made have only so much capacity. And in any case, there's a real cost to building, packaging and shipping each machine.
But take a software product, say a game, delivered as an Internet download. There is no cost of reproduction (or at least there is, but it's trivial). So your pricing does not have to reflect how many of the damn things you can actually build. If you spend (say) $10,000,000 developing it and another $10,000,000 marketing it, then the question is, are you more likely to sell:
20,000,000 copies at $1
4,000,000 copies at $5
1,000,000 copies at $20
500,000 copies at $40
250,000 copies at $80?
To some extent it depends on the genre and on the technical demands of the game. There probably aren't 20,000,000 people world wide with state-of-the-art gaming rigs and and a taste for zombie horror, so if that's what you've produced option 1 is right out.
But as the cost goes up, so does the piracy. It's not worth pirating a $1 game (provided the purchase interface is slick enough that actually buying the games is not a hassle). Not that many people are going to pirate a $5 game. For anyone who has a computer powerful enough to run a modern game, $5 is discretionary spending.
But $80 is a lot bigger bite out of someone's budget. So more people pirate. And if the demand for your game is 2 million units, is it really better to sell 250,000 at $80 and have 1.75 million copies pirated, or to sell 1 million at $20 and have a million pirated? or even to sell two million at $10 and have none pirated?
Yes, of course it doesn't work as straightforwardly as that. But my strong impression, as someone who is working up a business plan to develop a game, is that you've more chance of a profit selling more copies at a lower price than fewer at a higher.
And, of course, anyone who actually spends $10,000,000 developing a game in the current climate is this: mad.
The article claims it is about childporn, but the story reminds me more of the kind of sexual repression of young people that I normally associate with countries like Iran...
I wish I had modpoints. The attitude of western societies towards perfectly normal sexual behaviour among adolescents is becoming horrifyingly hysterical and repressive.
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it disturbing that CmdrTaco put "I-like-the-testing-part" and described the story as "the sextiest" when the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves, and testing to see if they are child pornography?
There were no children involved in this case. There were adolescents well past the age at which people in Western societies routinely engage in voluntary sexual behaviour. Of course adolescent girls experiment with how to attract and interact with potential sexual partners. That's a natural, inevitable and healthy part of growing up. The fact that, given ubiquitous camera phones, they're now using camera phones as part of this behaviour may be new, but its also inevitable.
Seriously, if this Attorney has a problem with these girls sharing these photographs voluntarily with their boyfriends (as opposed to broadcasting them across the web, for example) one has to start asking whether the Attorney has not got an altogether unhealthy interest in adolescent sexuality.
Just to put this in perspective, if the song had been played 100m times on UK National Radio, he'd have been paid GBP2-5bn instead of GBP11. *That's* how much Google are underpaying compared to market rate.
If he doesn't want Google playing his music without paying him, then that's fine: he's got what he wants. Google are not playing his music. What's his beef?
The going rate is whatever rate can be negotiated between the producer and the consumer. Google, as the consumer, has said 'if that's the rate, fine, we don't need the product.' Astley (and people like him) have to decide whether they want their music to reach an internet audience or not. If they don't, that's fine - Google not playing it works for them. But what they can't reasonably do is complain that Google refuse to buy their product. If the supermarket in your high street tries to sell you chocolates at more than what you think they're worth, you don't buy them - no-one needs chocolate. If the PRS tries to sell Google music at more than Google thinks it's worth, Google doesn't buy it. So - where's the beef?
Furthermore, your computation is wrong. When a tune is played in BBC Radio 1 or Radio 2, it's heard by about 6 million people. When a tune is played on YouTube, it's typically heard by one person. So 100 million plays on YouTube is not equivalent to 100 million plays on Radio 2, it's equivalent to seventeen plays on Radio 2. Not seventeen million, seventeen.
So the equivalent payment is not £2-5Bn, it's £340. Which is a lot more than £11, I'd agree - but is that because Google are offering too little, or because radio is paying too much?
C is still number 2 language after java I'll have you know. C is still alive andd well and running most of your stuff.
There are lots of positions for a good C programmer. You have to be good though.
The same is true of COBOL, but you wouldn't advise anyone to learn COBOL. The man who lives across the road from me served his apprenticeship as a wheelwright. By the time he'd finished, no-one was using horses and carts any more. So that was not a very useful trade to learn.
Yes, there are lots of jobs for good C (and COBOL) programmers, but there are lots of good C (and COBOL) programmers. The number of jobs needing these skills is shrinking faster than these guys are dying or retiring, so if you choose either of these languages, every job you go for you'll be up against people who are not only better than you but also more experienced than you.
In any case the principal skill of a software person is not knowing language X, it's being able to learn (and become productive in) new languages, new libraries and new technologies quickly. The reason why this industry is fun to be in is because it changes so rapidly.
The final thing to say is, if you're getting a degree from a University where they only taught you C, C++ and Java, the first thing to do is go and do a masters at a proper University. There's nothing wrong with any of those languages as such, but they're so closely related to one another that if that's all you've learned then most of computer science is a closed book to you.
What you consider to be Unix is most likely actually Linux. In reality, Mac OS X is a lot closer to Unix than Linux is, as OS X is indeed certified Unix while Linux is considered a clone of Unix.
I was using UN*X when Linus Torvalds was still in primary school. I've used, administered and programmed on nearly every variant of UN*X there's ever been, except Xenix and Minix. There are at this moment in this house machines running BSD, AIX and Solaris as well as four different Linux distros on three different processor architectures, and yes, they're all mine. So don't tell me what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is that in UN*X you can start with the init process and trace through shell scripts and textual config files to see how every service is started; and if things get buggered, you can fix them with a text editor. With MacOS (as with NeXT Step before it, and with KDE and with Gnome), the users with their pretty pointy clicky tools can make messes that the pretty pointy clicky tools can't get them out of. But with KDE and Gnome, underneath those pointy clicky tools are textual config files which you can fix when the users bugger them up. With NeXT Step and MacOS, the config is in binary files you can't edit except with the pretty pointy clicky tools, so when the user has buggered the machine to the point where the pointy clicky stuff won't run (which was fairly easy on NeXT Step but, to be fair, seems to be a bit harder with MacOS XX), you're stuck.
And that's why MacOS X is not UN*X, no matter what it says on the tin. UN*X is a collection of small tools each of which does one thing well, and which communicate between one another with plain text streams and files. MacOS isn't like that.
But more significantly, the OS actually works. Personally, I hate it - I intensely dislike the fact that when you get under the covers, it looks like UN*X but it isn't UN*X in a lot of ways that matter. It's essentially NeXT Step, and I hated that, too.
How is OS X which is certified Unix (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html) not Unix?
OK, I'm no fan of Apple. I have never owned a Mac, and I haven't programmed on one since 1986. But, when you pay $500 extra for a Mac - if you do - you're getting more than a logo. The hardware is significantly better than average PC hardware. But more significantly, the OS actually works. Personally, I hate it - I intensely dislike the fact that when you get under the covers, it looks like UN*X but it isn't UN*X in a lot of ways that matter. It's essentially NeXT Step, and I hated that, too.
But, it works, and Windows really doesn't. Personally, I think Ubuntu or Debian are much more user-friendly and productive, and you don't have to spend $500 extra for them - but you put a Mac OS box next to a similarly specced Vista box and ask, 'will the user of the Mac be $500 more productive over the life time of the machine than the user of the PC?' the answer has to be 'hell, yeah!'
Believing that just changing what worked for 2000 years in a random way and expect everything to be just fine is perhaps just a bit arrogant.
Don't you believe in evolution (of memes, in this case) ? The only reason that Christianity is still around (and actually somewhat resembles it's original form, or at least much more so than buddhism or islam) is a sign that it must be an ideology that clearly guarantees survival and kids for it's adherents. This ideology got people through the hardest parts of history.
That is so untrue as to be pretty much the opposite of the truth. Early Christians believed that any killing was wrong, and converts who were soldiers suffered death by stoning rather than follow orders to fight. Early Christians believed the world would end in their lifetimes. Early Christians had no priests or ministers. Early Christians recognised Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus. The list goes on. Early Christianity was pretty much the antithesis of modern Christianity, in more or less every way.
Furthermore, atheism failed that particular test, during that time in the desert (not that you should care, but Israel only became a desert after the muslims took it over, there were many pieces of lush forest available in Jesus' time and long after), as history relates, there was no shortage of atheists.
Again, untrue on all counts. Much of - not all of - Israel was desert in Jesus' time. Jesus was able to go into the desert to fast, as many other religious mystics did. There were, at the time, a few Atheists in Greece several hundred miles away, but they were considered eccentric there - and there's no evidence whatever of any atheists at all in Palestine. And the 'muslims' didn't 'take over' - the modern Palestinian 'Arabs' are much more closely related, genetically, to the Jews of Jesus' time than most of the modern 'Jews'. What happened was simply that the Jews in Palestine mostly accepted Muhammad as a prophet, and the Jews in the diaspora mostly didn't. Judaism always was a religion of prophets; Islam and Judaism are 'different' religions only in the same sense as Catholicism and Anglicanism are different religions - they're the same religion with a few detailed changes at the margins.
In the christian case these people were not prosecuted by religious people (contrast with e.g. the islamic or buddhist cases where jihad and enslaving (not all that different concepts, really) had to do with disappearing atheists).
In the christian case, however this disappearance is interesting since it was atheists who prosecuted christians. These were not just a little bit discriminatory, but regularly massacred religious believers (the Romans, which brings the question why they did this... which is imho not sufficiently answered).
There were no atheists in power anywhere in the Roman Empire at the time. The Christians were persecuted firstly by Jews, and secondly by orthodox Romans.
You see in the christian case you see a very, VERY bad crisis (economic, military, social,... everything combined : the "fall") and somehow the number of atheists dropped (very close) to zero in a period that can't have been much longer than a single human life.
All that happened was that the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. As he was the supreme priest of the orthodox Roman religion, that pretty much died, and Christianity became the new official state religion. However, note also that this new orthodox Christianity was pretty unlike the Christianity that had gone before it. Christianity had to give up pacifism, had to give up women in significant positions in the Church, had to give up many of its fundamental beliefs.
So you're saying he'll be aware of it after he's dead?
*laughs*... no! But he might have been aware of it later on in life. Personally, having experienced the delights of consciousness, I know I'm going to hang on to it as long as I possibly can...
Well, don't judge everyone else by your own standards. My experience is that life is at best tolerable, and not even that all of the time. It isn't imposed on us as a sentence, and if we don't like it we should have the right to leave it, when we want to, on our own terms and with dignity.
As an aside I've always assumed that religion was primarily a defence against a morbid fear of death. I've never feared death - but then, I'm not very religious.
As all naysayers regarding civil liberty chant; "What good is your freedom if you're dead?" seems to be the prevailing wisdom in Europe. Can't fault them too much, poor bastards, they have a legacy of subservience, caving, and generally attempting to wheel and deal their way out of disaster.
I'm frequently amazed, however, at how little regard the average EU citizen has for recent history. Every time something like Al Quaeda comes along they try to send a diplomat to "work it out" and they come home like Chamberlain waving a piece paper and yell "Peace in our time!"
Then Al Qaueda bombs one of their train stations.
What's that about???
Motorists in Britain alone kill, every single year, more people than Al Quaeda have ever killed, world wide, in any single year. On the general scale of things, Al Quaeda are an incredibly minor threat. You are less likely to be killed by Al Quaeda than you are to be killed by falling down and bumping your head.
Yes, we are destroying all the things which made our civilisation worth living in, but we're not doing it because Al Quaeda are a serious threat. We're doing it because our politicians think they can get away with it. In the meantime, we only make Al Quaeda stronger by pandering to this ridiculous and disproportionate fear of them.
Ok, sure. It's a lot of work if you look at it in a simple fashion of throwing an Ubuntu CD at some user and saying "SUCK LESS THX". How about the hours that go into training one or many users in a company on using that new OS?
That's kind of a canard. It's less effort (and cheaper) to train users who are used to XP and MS Office 2003 to use Ubuntu and OpenOffice than it is to train the same users to use Vista and MS Office 2007.
Compatibility problems? Setting up specialized software?
But that, sadly, isn't.
System hardening is more cost-effective decision versus switching OSes or having to clean up every computer that comes up with the problem.
That's kind of moot, and will vary from organisation to organisation. As someone upthread pointed out, many - perhaps most - Windows programs will not run on hardened systems, since they assume access to resources to which they may not have (and often should not have) access. So although it may be easy to lock down a Windows desktop, it isn't at all easy to use a locked down Windows desktop. I think the state of play as of today is that most organisations would benefit hugely in time, cost, and security by moving the majority of users to Ubuntu. In the longer term, if there was a widespread Linux monoculture as there is currently a widespread Windows monoculture, vulnerabilities in it would be found.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I looked, what it cost me to ride the Internet to work was £12 per month. That's way cheaper than taking the car... All right, I confess I actually go into work one week in every two. But that still costs a heck of a lot less than commuting every day, and gives me a heck of a lot more time, too.
Oh - and when you do have to go into work, push-bikes come cheaper than cars (and in urban areas are usually faster).
I guess Settlers can be considered an RTS since it's really about building up a war economy and crushing the opposition, never mind the more recent derailings the franchise got... Maybe many people just don't know about games like Settlers? The genre hasn't seen much attention lately.
The original Settlers, up to Settlers 4, are great games. A more recent game in the same genre that I enjoy is Anno 1701
Sorry, about this, but your .sig just angers me:
It doesn't, that's the problem. Modern cars are exceedingly good at protecting their drivers in head-on collisions. If you exceed the appropriate speed for conditions you will almost certainly not be killed. Someone else will be killed. Some pedestrian, or cyclist, innocently minding their own business and obeying all the rules of the road will be killed. Or someone turning out of a junction with plenty of time to not impede anyone driving a legal speed, whom you hit broadside on. They get killed. You don't.
If seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones were banned, if every car had a rigid steel spike sticking out of the middle of the steering wheel, then speeding would become a self limiting problem; Darwin would take care of it for us. The problem with the 'safety' features on our cars is that they make the wrong person safe - the idiot behind the wheel, not the person he hits.
Exceeding the appropriate speed for the conditions is not quite as bad a crime as premeditated murder... but the difference is small. And no-one is as good a driver as they think they are.
It would be more practical to hook up a generator to a bike or rowing machine and use a battery or flywheel to store the energy -- that way you'd at least get some exercise out of it.
There's an easy joke to make about 'mericans sitting right there, but I don't have the heart to reach out and grab it right now. :P
"Let's have a moment of silence for all those who are stuck in traffic on their way to the gym to ride the stationary bicycle."
Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon)
Is natural gas heating not common in Canada?
It may have escaped your notice, but burning natural gas releases energy (and carbon).
What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?
42.
Oh, the question? How many roads must a man walk down.
âoeThe energy savings will equate to boiling 3,000 kettles continuously,â
Um - that's a really funny way of thinking about saving energy. 9Mw/3000= 3kw/kettle. That's a hell of a kettle.
3Kw is the default for electric kettles in the UK. We drink a lot of tea, you know.
What is the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?
42.
That would be interesting, if you had bothered to say what DP, Armonk, or Amdahl is.
This site is for nerds. Nerds know these things, and don't have to be told. Armonk is where IBM used to build mainframes. Amdahl was a guy who designed mainframes for IBM, and who later went on to found a company of the same name which made mainframes which were compatible with IBM's mainframes.
IBM is a computer company.
Mainframes are a class of large computer, now rare.
Computers are programmable machines for processing data.
DP is an acronym for 'Data Processing'
Is there anything else you'd like to know?
hyperbole doesn't help your argument
What hyperbole? I stated a fact.
the number of accidents where excessive speed is a factor is variously quoted by the police at anywhere from 10-15%
total number of road deaths in GB in 2007 was 2,946
Indeed. There is a difference between 'exceeding the speed limit' and 'speeding'. The speed limit is a limit, not an obligation. If you hit someone and kill them then by definition you were driving faster than was safe, whether or not you were exceeding the speed limit.
so we can assume 300 of those are speed related
On the contrary all of them must have been speed related. Stationary cars kill no-one.
this compares with about 275 knife crime related deaths for the same period or 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007
Drinking alcohol is not, in itself, a crime.
even if you dispute the 13% figure and assume all road deaths are speed related, you may wish to see the number of drug related deaths for the same period The total number of deaths related to drug poisoning in 2007 was 2,640
That number includes my brother-in-law, who died of paracetamol poisoning during that period. Precisely what crime was involved in that?
speeding may not be a very safe or desirable activity, but to suggest it is the most dangerous criminal activity is disingenuous at best
On the contrary it is strictly accurate.
The punishment should fit the crime. Speeding is "essentially" a thought crime; unless and until there is a collision, there is no victim (yes I understand that "people were put at risk"). Crimes without victims should be immediately removed from the books, to help improve the economy.
Speeding motorists kill more people, maim more people, and damage more property than all other criminals put together. Speeding motorists in Britain alone kill more people every single year than Al Quaeda have ever killed in any year. Speeding which does not result in a collision is not victimless; the right of children to play freely in the road, as was normal throughout history until the last fifty years, is infringed. The right of the elderly to walk safely to visit their friends or purchase their shopping, is infringed. The right of all citizens to use the public road as public space to be enjoyed, is infringed.
No-one has the right to drive a ton of metal at 60 miles per hour in a public place; it puts everyone at risk, and severely diminishes everyone's freedom and safety. The community grants revocable licences to people deemed mature enough and responsible enough to manage a motor vehicle safely. A 'three strikes and you're out' approach to speeding - three offences and you never drive on the public road again - seems to me entirely reasonable.
What new engineering is needed for a normal car?
90% of the weight, for a start. Less weight means better performance per unit power. Less weight means lower forces on the tyres, thus smaller contact patch for the same tyre pressure, thus lower rolling resistance without loss of comfort. Less weight means better hill climbing.
We can't afford to be making cars out of steel any more.
Solar auto challenges should be viewed as nothing more than useful engineer training that serves no immediate practical purpose...
Disagree.
Granted solar power is not suitable for actual every day transportation in most parts of the world, a great deal of the engineering of these cars will move into the mainstream - and sooner than you think. As fuel gets more expensive, cars will have to get much lighter, much more aerodynamic, and have much lower rolling resistance. Many of them will use battery or hybrid power systems, and regenerative braking will become commonplace. Solar cars are pioneering all these technologies.
Suppose you develop something like -- ooh, I don't know, a computer -- for which there's a world market of only four examples. You have to add a quarter of the development cost to the price of each machine. Suppose you develop something like -- ooh, I don't know, let's say a games console -- of which you expect to sell a million examples. Then you need to add a millionth of the development cost to the price of each machine. But in either case there are a finite number of machines, because the machines actually have to be made, and the factories in which they are made have only so much capacity. And in any case, there's a real cost to building, packaging and shipping each machine.
But take a software product, say a game, delivered as an Internet download. There is no cost of reproduction (or at least there is, but it's trivial). So your pricing does not have to reflect how many of the damn things you can actually build. If you spend (say) $10,000,000 developing it and another $10,000,000 marketing it, then the question is, are you more likely to sell:
To some extent it depends on the genre and on the technical demands of the game. There probably aren't 20,000,000 people world wide with state-of-the-art gaming rigs and and a taste for zombie horror, so if that's what you've produced option 1 is right out.
But as the cost goes up, so does the piracy. It's not worth pirating a $1 game (provided the purchase interface is slick enough that actually buying the games is not a hassle). Not that many people are going to pirate a $5 game. For anyone who has a computer powerful enough to run a modern game, $5 is discretionary spending.
But $80 is a lot bigger bite out of someone's budget. So more people pirate. And if the demand for your game is 2 million units, is it really better to sell 250,000 at $80 and have 1.75 million copies pirated, or to sell 1 million at $20 and have a million pirated? or even to sell two million at $10 and have none pirated?
Yes, of course it doesn't work as straightforwardly as that. But my strong impression, as someone who is working up a business plan to develop a game, is that you've more chance of a profit selling more copies at a lower price than fewer at a higher.
And, of course, anyone who actually spends $10,000,000 developing a game in the current climate is this: mad.
The article claims it is about childporn, but the story reminds me more of the kind of sexual repression of young people that I normally associate with countries like Iran...
I wish I had modpoints. The attitude of western societies towards perfectly normal sexual behaviour among adolescents is becoming horrifyingly hysterical and repressive.
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it disturbing that CmdrTaco put "I-like-the-testing-part" and described the story as "the sextiest" when the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves, and testing to see if they are child pornography?
There were no children involved in this case. There were adolescents well past the age at which people in Western societies routinely engage in voluntary sexual behaviour. Of course adolescent girls experiment with how to attract and interact with potential sexual partners. That's a natural, inevitable and healthy part of growing up. The fact that, given ubiquitous camera phones, they're now using camera phones as part of this behaviour may be new, but its also inevitable.
Seriously, if this Attorney has a problem with these girls sharing these photographs voluntarily with their boyfriends (as opposed to broadcasting them across the web, for example) one has to start asking whether the Attorney has not got an altogether unhealthy interest in adolescent sexuality.
Just to put this in perspective, if the song had been played 100m times on UK National Radio, he'd have been paid GBP2-5bn instead of GBP11. *That's* how much Google are underpaying compared to market rate.
If he doesn't want Google playing his music without paying him, then that's fine: he's got what he wants. Google are not playing his music. What's his beef?
The going rate is whatever rate can be negotiated between the producer and the consumer. Google, as the consumer, has said 'if that's the rate, fine, we don't need the product.' Astley (and people like him) have to decide whether they want their music to reach an internet audience or not. If they don't, that's fine - Google not playing it works for them. But what they can't reasonably do is complain that Google refuse to buy their product. If the supermarket in your high street tries to sell you chocolates at more than what you think they're worth, you don't buy them - no-one needs chocolate. If the PRS tries to sell Google music at more than Google thinks it's worth, Google doesn't buy it. So - where's the beef?
Furthermore, your computation is wrong. When a tune is played in BBC Radio 1 or Radio 2, it's heard by about 6 million people. When a tune is played on YouTube, it's typically heard by one person. So 100 million plays on YouTube is not equivalent to 100 million plays on Radio 2, it's equivalent to seventeen plays on Radio 2. Not seventeen million, seventeen.
So the equivalent payment is not £2-5Bn, it's £340. Which is a lot more than £11, I'd agree - but is that because Google are offering too little, or because radio is paying too much?
Hey,
C is still number 2 language after java I'll have you know. C is still alive andd well and running most of your stuff.
There are lots of positions for a good C programmer. You have to be good though.
The same is true of COBOL, but you wouldn't advise anyone to learn COBOL. The man who lives across the road from me served his apprenticeship as a wheelwright. By the time he'd finished, no-one was using horses and carts any more. So that was not a very useful trade to learn.
Yes, there are lots of jobs for good C (and COBOL) programmers, but there are lots of good C (and COBOL) programmers. The number of jobs needing these skills is shrinking faster than these guys are dying or retiring, so if you choose either of these languages, every job you go for you'll be up against people who are not only better than you but also more experienced than you.
In any case the principal skill of a software person is not knowing language X, it's being able to learn (and become productive in) new languages, new libraries and new technologies quickly. The reason why this industry is fun to be in is because it changes so rapidly.
The final thing to say is, if you're getting a degree from a University where they only taught you C, C++ and Java, the first thing to do is go and do a masters at a proper University. There's nothing wrong with any of those languages as such, but they're so closely related to one another that if that's all you've learned then most of computer science is a closed book to you.
What you consider to be Unix is most likely actually Linux. In reality, Mac OS X is a lot closer to Unix than Linux is, as OS X is indeed certified Unix while Linux is considered a clone of Unix.
I was using UN*X when Linus Torvalds was still in primary school. I've used, administered and programmed on nearly every variant of UN*X there's ever been, except Xenix and Minix. There are at this moment in this house machines running BSD, AIX and Solaris as well as four different Linux distros on three different processor architectures, and yes, they're all mine. So don't tell me what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is that in UN*X you can start with the init process and trace through shell scripts and textual config files to see how every service is started; and if things get buggered, you can fix them with a text editor. With MacOS (as with NeXT Step before it, and with KDE and with Gnome), the users with their pretty pointy clicky tools can make messes that the pretty pointy clicky tools can't get them out of. But with KDE and Gnome, underneath those pointy clicky tools are textual config files which you can fix when the users bugger them up. With NeXT Step and MacOS, the config is in binary files you can't edit except with the pretty pointy clicky tools, so when the user has buggered the machine to the point where the pointy clicky stuff won't run (which was fairly easy on NeXT Step but, to be fair, seems to be a bit harder with MacOS XX), you're stuck.
And that's why MacOS X is not UN*X, no matter what it says on the tin. UN*X is a collection of small tools each of which does one thing well, and which communicate between one another with plain text streams and files. MacOS isn't like that.
How is OS X which is certified Unix (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html) not Unix?
ls -l /etc/init.d/
OK, I'm no fan of Apple. I have never owned a Mac, and I haven't programmed on one since 1986. But, when you pay $500 extra for a Mac - if you do - you're getting more than a logo. The hardware is significantly better than average PC hardware. But more significantly, the OS actually works. Personally, I hate it - I intensely dislike the fact that when you get under the covers, it looks like UN*X but it isn't UN*X in a lot of ways that matter. It's essentially NeXT Step, and I hated that, too.
But, it works, and Windows really doesn't. Personally, I think Ubuntu or Debian are much more user-friendly and productive, and you don't have to spend $500 extra for them - but you put a Mac OS box next to a similarly specced Vista box and ask, 'will the user of the Mac be $500 more productive over the life time of the machine than the user of the PC?' the answer has to be 'hell, yeah!'
Believing that just changing what worked for 2000 years in a random way and expect everything to be just fine is perhaps just a bit arrogant.
Don't you believe in evolution (of memes, in this case) ? The only reason that Christianity is still around (and actually somewhat resembles it's original form, or at least much more so than buddhism or islam) is a sign that it must be an ideology that clearly guarantees survival and kids for it's adherents. This ideology got people through the hardest parts of history.
That is so untrue as to be pretty much the opposite of the truth. Early Christians believed that any killing was wrong, and converts who were soldiers suffered death by stoning rather than follow orders to fight. Early Christians believed the world would end in their lifetimes. Early Christians had no priests or ministers. Early Christians recognised Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus. The list goes on. Early Christianity was pretty much the antithesis of modern Christianity, in more or less every way.
Furthermore, atheism failed that particular test, during that time in the desert (not that you should care, but Israel only became a desert after the muslims took it over, there were many pieces of lush forest available in Jesus' time and long after), as history relates, there was no shortage of atheists.
Again, untrue on all counts. Much of - not all of - Israel was desert in Jesus' time. Jesus was able to go into the desert to fast, as many other religious mystics did. There were, at the time, a few Atheists in Greece several hundred miles away, but they were considered eccentric there - and there's no evidence whatever of any atheists at all in Palestine. And the 'muslims' didn't 'take over' - the modern Palestinian 'Arabs' are much more closely related, genetically, to the Jews of Jesus' time than most of the modern 'Jews'. What happened was simply that the Jews in Palestine mostly accepted Muhammad as a prophet, and the Jews in the diaspora mostly didn't. Judaism always was a religion of prophets; Islam and Judaism are 'different' religions only in the same sense as Catholicism and Anglicanism are different religions - they're the same religion with a few detailed changes at the margins.
In the christian case these people were not prosecuted by religious people (contrast with e.g. the islamic or buddhist cases where jihad and enslaving (not all that different concepts, really) had to do with disappearing atheists).
In the christian case, however this disappearance is interesting since it was atheists who prosecuted christians. These were not just a little bit discriminatory, but regularly massacred religious believers (the Romans, which brings the question why they did this ... which is imho not sufficiently answered).
There were no atheists in power anywhere in the Roman Empire at the time. The Christians were persecuted firstly by Jews, and secondly by orthodox Romans.
You see in the christian case you see a very, VERY bad crisis (economic, military, social, ... everything combined : the "fall") and somehow the number of atheists dropped (very close) to zero in a period that can't have been much longer than a single human life.
All that happened was that the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. As he was the supreme priest of the orthodox Roman religion, that pretty much died, and Christianity became the new official state religion. However, note also that this new orthodox Christianity was pretty unlike the Christianity that had gone before it. Christianity had to give up pacifism, had to give up women in significant positions in the Church, had to give up many of its fundamental beliefs.
So you're saying he'll be aware of it after he's dead?
*laughs* ... no! But he might have been aware of it later on in life. Personally, having experienced the delights of consciousness, I know I'm going to hang on to it as long as I possibly can ...
Well, don't judge everyone else by your own standards. My experience is that life is at best tolerable, and not even that all of the time. It isn't imposed on us as a sentence, and if we don't like it we should have the right to leave it, when we want to, on our own terms and with dignity.
As an aside I've always assumed that religion was primarily a defence against a morbid fear of death. I've never feared death - but then, I'm not very religious.
As all naysayers regarding civil liberty chant; "What good is your freedom if you're dead?" seems to be the prevailing wisdom in Europe. Can't fault them too much, poor bastards, they have a legacy of subservience, caving, and generally attempting to wheel and deal their way out of disaster.
I'm frequently amazed, however, at how little regard the average EU citizen has for recent history. Every time something like Al Quaeda comes along they try to send a diplomat to "work it out" and they come home like Chamberlain waving a piece paper and yell "Peace in our time!"
Then Al Qaueda bombs one of their train stations.
What's that about???
Motorists in Britain alone kill, every single year, more people than Al Quaeda have ever killed, world wide, in any single year. On the general scale of things, Al Quaeda are an incredibly minor threat. You are less likely to be killed by Al Quaeda than you are to be killed by falling down and bumping your head.
Yes, we are destroying all the things which made our civilisation worth living in, but we're not doing it because Al Quaeda are a serious threat. We're doing it because our politicians think they can get away with it. In the meantime, we only make Al Quaeda stronger by pandering to this ridiculous and disproportionate fear of them.
Maybe move to a different OS?
Ok, sure. It's a lot of work if you look at it in a simple fashion of throwing an Ubuntu CD at some user and saying "SUCK LESS THX". How about the hours that go into training one or many users in a company on using that new OS?
That's kind of a canard. It's less effort (and cheaper) to train users who are used to XP and MS Office 2003 to use Ubuntu and OpenOffice than it is to train the same users to use Vista and MS Office 2007.
Compatibility problems? Setting up specialized software?
But that, sadly, isn't.
System hardening is more cost-effective decision versus switching OSes or having to clean up every computer that comes up with the problem.
That's kind of moot, and will vary from organisation to organisation. As someone upthread pointed out, many - perhaps most - Windows programs will not run on hardened systems, since they assume access to resources to which they may not have (and often should not have) access. So although it may be easy to lock down a Windows desktop, it isn't at all easy to use a locked down Windows desktop. I think the state of play as of today is that most organisations would benefit hugely in time, cost, and security by moving the majority of users to Ubuntu. In the longer term, if there was a widespread Linux monoculture as there is currently a widespread Windows monoculture, vulnerabilities in it would be found.
The solution is to avoid moncultures.