Actually, they've been talking about reducing the legal alcohol limit for drivers quite dramatically for a while now, and it'll probably happen within a year or two.
As more than one pundit has noted, Tony Blair's legacy is now obvious: it is David Cameron. True to form, he started out very promising, saying lots of things we all wanted to hear, but now the spin has started to slip a lot of his policies just sound like bad ideas. (See also "grammar schools".) I wonder how long Gordy will last before falling into the same pit; surely after a decade at the heart of the previous government, he hasn't really suddenly given up on all the bad ideas he's supported over those ten years?
Incidentally, while I am in general opposed to government intervention in people's daily lives, I find the smoking ban to be something of a special case. For one thing, it is a health issue that affects those who do not choose to smoke as well. Secondly, and much less importantly but still in its favour, market forces have not produced the opportunities that non-smokers want more because of (non-)competition concerns and management short-sightedness than any economic reason, and the smoking ban will break this deadlock.
Incidentally, the pre-budget report mentioned comes from the independent Gowers Review, and the government basically just accepted almost all of the review's recommendations. If you're bothered by the influence Europe has on our country, you should really read the full Gowers report (including the parts between the lines), and note how often the review proposes one thing but implies fairly transparently that the reason they don't propose going further is that under European law we can't. For example, it sounds a lot like the Review couldn't recommend generic, US-style fair use exemptions — even though it advocates more specific changes such as a format-shifting exemption explicitly without an accompanying levy on blank media — because EU law basically prevents doing anything that broad without imposing some sort of additional charge to pay off Big Media.
When in the past are you referring to when people "survived" better, on average, than they do today ?
Since forever. Socialism is a very recent invention in the grand scheme of things. It is effectively a prop for the weak, and counter to survival instinct. Of course, we might reasonably decide as a responsible society that supporting those weaker than ourselves is the ethical thing to do. But how many historical records are there of four members of a tribe donating a limb each to the lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest of them for dinner?
The Labour party may have socialist roots, but nowadays it's a center-left social democratic party. And I doubt that many of its members see themselves as "fundamentally socialist".
I'm not quite sure what the Labour Party represents today, but it certainly isn't social democracy. That political ideology fundamentally relies on the freedom of the people, not least from abusive political power. The Blair administration went in exactly the opposite direction, having done more to undermine both the people-government relationship and the power of the elected Parliament than any other administration in living memory. In fact, if we go down the list of contemporary values conveniently provided by Wikipedia, the traditional Labour party might well have supported most of those things, but New Labour is a different beast.
Also, if you get cancer and the state pays for your healthcare, which one of your freedoms is being removed? You remove the freedom of the individual by allowing him to do less and less stuff, not by failing to leave him completely on his own with every single one of his problems. Socially conscious thought isn't about controlling every single aspect of the individual's life, as you make it seem. It's about recognising that a prosperous, stable and fair society must be built on prosperous, reasonably happy people. And then it's about recognising that this simply can't happen if you just leave everyone to their own devices and refuse to offer any help to anyone for ideological reasons. People who need society's help mostly don't need it out of their own irresponsibility, but because of circumstances out of their control.
There are two fundamental problems with that whole argument.
One is that right now, here in the UK, we are paying record levels of taxes (many of them brought in or increased by Gordon Brown during his time as Chancellor), yet seeing precious little improvement in things that matter, and effective cuts in many public services. It's not hard to see why when you consider things like the military and Europe-friendly policies adopted by the Blair administration. But this mean people are stripped of the very economic independence that would allow them to make their own choices: by the time they have paid many thousands of pounds per year to support the NHS and Social Security systems, many people could not afford to take private medical insurance on their own terms instead if they wanted to, for example.
The other is that people survived for a very long time without a socialist state to back them up. Today, we have all the worst parts of socialism, and none of the benefits. Literally millions of people are out of work and claiming benefits, when there is no reason they cannot work, but the state is so generous in giving away its (that is, our) money that it is actually financially more sensible for these people to remain unemployed and claim benefits than to get a job paying the minimum wage. Combine this with an unhealthy dose of immigration (legal or otherwise) screwing up several parts of the economy and placing further burdens on the benefits system, and you start to wonder why the rest of us bother to have jobs at all. The most distressing thing about the whole benefits scenario is that many of the people claiming them don't even seem to realise that the money they get didn't grow on trees, but rather was taken under the threat of force in tax from those of us who work. These are exactly the sort of people who vote in a nanny state, which then enacts laws like this one. No taxation without representation is all very well, but when you don't also have the converse or something close to it, you get this sort of lunacy.
It's what the government is getting its ducks in, prior to removing another freedom from its own people.
Alternatively, perhaps it's what the government will be lined up in, prior to being shot when the revolution comes. The way we're going, that won't take much longer, either. I hope Brown and co make good on their talk about a written bill of rights/constitution, because I don't see anything else undoing the damage to civil liberties of the Blair era. They just never seemed to get that you don't beat terrorism by giving up the very freedoms that define your way of life.
Here in London, a web expert (read: someone who knows a bit of HTML/CSS/Javascript and has been working in IT since around 2000) can easily be on £60k-£70k [...] Someone just starting out in the profession with the same skills would have been lucky to get £25k after a couple of years experience until recently.
Two comments:
For one thing, it is vanishingly unlikely that someone just starting out in the profession has the same skills as your well-paid London worker. A lot of people starting out in the profession think they do, but mostly they're wrong, and will come to appreciate this in time. (This is not to say that all developers improve at the same rate or reach the same potential given enough time, just that almost no-one fresh out of education is that good.)
The other thing is that you're talking about London, where salaries are relatively high but living costs or commuting times are astronomical. That same person, if they're only moderately skilled, would be lucky to make much more than £35–40k outside London.
Sure, but that's just because someone further up the chain is making the same mistake. One way or another, it's ultimately caused by some incompetent management or HR person not realising what a good developer is really worth. The developer doesn't really care who screwed up, because the result is still that they can make realise their potential via other means and they can't within the company-employee relationship.
Indeed. What these management types think of as inflated salaries is a perception problem on their part, not the developers'. It is well documented that a really good developer can be at least an order of magnitude more productive than the average. Do they get paid 10x as much for their time buy a business employing them? Of course not, that's "not the market rate"...
...Unless you take a leap of faith and go self-employed or start your own business. Now if you're a talented developer, your greater productivity benefits you directly or a company that you own, and you really can get the financial benefits that your skill level deserves on merit.
Realistically, most managers aren't smart and knowledgeable enough to understand this and offer salaries that really are attractive to people good enough to have the other option open to them. That's why they keep bitching about a shortage of talent, yet in the next breath refer to the "inflated" salaries of the dot com boom (where despite all the failures, quite a few small companies made an awful lot of money very fast using good people).
OK, but in that case, surely the problem is that the standards bodies don't agree with you. Now, this may be a demonstration of technical competence on a par with the USPTO, but it seems rather harsh to blame the state legislature for saying it will adopt recognised standards, and for recognising standards supported by ISO for that purpose. I would think the correct target would be the standards bodies, which seem to be approving documents that shouldn't qualify for the reasons given elsewhere in this discussion. It might seem like an obvious question, but has anyone actually challenged the validity of OOXML as a standard with the organisations concerned? I'm sure every trick in the book is being used to "fast track" the approval, but they do have mechanisms for people to object to proposed standards...
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmm... all the major consoles support USB keyboards. Is the problem simply that the console game developers don't support these keyboards?
I suspect it's just a vicious circle. Most console owners presumably don't have keyboards because games don't tend to need them and they don't come as standard, and vice versa. If someone developed, say, the best ever RTS to run on a console and supporting powerful, keyboard-based controls to execute complex commands, I imagine that situation would reverse pretty quickly in that segment of the user base, but who wants to be the first company to risk something like that in a business like gaming?
Big name Linux games? Sorry, not any time soon
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 1
How much more will the linux market have to grow before linux is added to the list?
Seriously, on financial/market size grounds? I'm guessing at least four orders of magnitude, probably more.
Right now, consoles represent something like 75–80% of the games market. The Windows PC is most of the remaining 20% or so. The Mac gets a look in, just. Nothing else is even relevant.
At that split, there are already few Mac ports of even big name titles that could be converted with relative ease and low cost if you planned for it up-front. You sometimes here senior people at games companies quoted as saying it's not worth going after the Windows market, because consoles are bigger and that's where the growth is.
And of course, that's money talking, not numbers of gamers. Like it or not, Linux comes with a culture that says people don't expect to pay for software, and that makes it a very unattractive target for commercial games developers. For gaming on Linux ever to advance beyond puzzle games and low-budget action titles made by hobbyists, there needs to be a much, much greater number of Linux users, and they need to have a demonstrated willingness to fork out $LOCAL_CURRENCY for real games.
To be brutally honest, I'm not sure I can ever see that happening. I expect consoles to develop replaceable controller technology that makes them more appealing for the genres they don't suit already several years before Linux gets enough of a foothold on the home user desktop to be a serious challenger.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 1
So how many of the biggest FPS games in the past year were Windows titles (and real ones, not just conversions from a console)? I'm guessing it's fewer than half.
In any case, when titles from the Halo series to Gears of War are console-based, I don't think you can credibly argue that consoles can't do FPS.
Re:Egomanical monitoring of the populace?
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The point being made earlier in the thread was that this doesn't always work, because the IP addresses for certain services (Windows Update is one, IIRC) are hard-coded and the hosts file is never checked by Windows when resolving these addresses.
Either that, or they're just using their pool of hundreds of millions of users with tens of millions different hardware/software configurations in order to collect bug data.
There's definitely some genuine intent here, regardless of any dubious practices. The blogs of some of the guys working on the new UI for Office 2007 were quite interesting: it sounds like they basically have big spreadsheets and such of data derived from the user experience feedback program or whatever they call it, which tell them things like which commands people do and don't use in practice, and how they access them. That led directly to the design of the ribbons in Office 2007, which for all the nay-saying at release time, has gone down well with almost everyone I know who's actually tried it for a while.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The genre of game is more the deciding factor for me. Some genres, such as first-person shooters, convert very well to consoles, and indeed many of the best recent titles in this genre have started out or remained exclusively on one console or another. However, many genres naturally have an interface that is too complicated for your average console games platform. Can you imagine controlling a complex real-time strategy title like Supreme Commander via a little handheld unit with a few twiddly things and pushy bits on it? How about a role-playing game where you need to give detailed orders to many party members with many specific abilities?
Incidentally, the Microsoft "Vista-only" games have already been cracked, and apparently operate just fine on XP. It's just a PR stunt, which is probably why (as I've argued before) no-one except Microsoft is making Vista-only titles, or even prioritising Vista for games development. The gamer market isn't as stupid as Microsoft seems to think, and the reviews of Vista as a gaming platform are slating it on both compatibility and performance grounds. That means gamers aren't upgrading, and the developers in such a high-pressure business are always going to follow the market.
Re:This is my single biggest push to free software
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm about to put together a new PC. I fully expect to dual-boot between XP (not Vista) and some flavour of Linux. As with others here, games are the major reason for installing XP at all, with multimedia support a close second. So, I went along to that page with great interest.
Unfortunately, all it tells me is that pretty much every game I want to play on the new machine is completely unplayable under Cedega. As with so much of Linux history, the answer seems to be "it's making progress, but it's just not good enough yet".
I'm afraid that you (and everyone expressing the same "Oh, it's obvious!" argument) are exactly the reason serious management always talk to real lawyers rather than letting developers do their own thing.
It doesn't matter whether there are examples and instructions given. It doesn't matter that, in your personal opinion and with your personal world view, the meaning of the (L)GPL is "obvious". What matters is what the law says and what the licence means.
On the flip side, while it is entirely reasonable for a company to want to handle matters like this through the Legal Dept, the fact that the Legal Dept is slow is no excuse in reality or in law for not meeting your legal obligations. They should have checked the terms with Legal before using the code, and they should have access to Legal within a very short amount of time to deal with time-sensitive requests. If they haven't, management and/or Legal screwed up, and it's their problem, not the copyright holder's or a court's.
In a sensible world where litigation is the last resort and not the first, it is probably helpful to wait for the Legal Dept of the company concerned to realise there is some mess and see about clearing it up. In practice, this is likely to resolve matters most quickly if the company wasn't deliberately screwing around, because the Legal Dept will rapidly inform the rest of the company if they are breaking the law and tell them what they need to do about it, and senior management tend to listen to Legal when they shout about things like this. But if they're deliberately screwing around, or just incompetent and unreasonably slow to respond, then I doubt a court will have much sympathy if they wind up there.
Some of the ways the data is being used are of dubious legality/morality and have no obvious defence, most commonly in recent times when people's freedoms are sacrificed on the altar of fighting terrorism. Others are simply businesses exploiting their ability to profile customers in order to maximise prices or target advertising, which is somewhat damaging/annoying but at least fairly obvious and something I can choose to challenge by shopping elsewhere.
While I take your point, and agree with it for that matter, I think the difference now is that when things go wrong, they tend to go wrong significantly and for lots of people. Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes today, and no-one who's been on the wrong side of it and spent the months it often takes to sort it out thinks identity theft is a trivial problem. This can be as simple as a business losing a whole load of credit card numbers and not informing people fast enough to get their cards cancelled (for which the legal protection for the cardholder seems to vary dramatically by jurisdiction). But there are also more insidious problems, such as governments collecting data for one reason and then data mining it to impose charges/fines on many people as a side effect (c.f. ANPR cameras monitoring vehicles on the roads for speeding, and the looming prospect of universal road charging in the UK despite millions of people explicitly objecting).
DDR3 is worthless so far. It's hotter, burns more juice, same speed, and expensive. In time it'll become desirable, but that time is still quite a ways off.
Sure it is, and I fully expect I'll be buying DDR2 when I put my new machine together. But my machines typically last around 4 years, and RAM is one of the few upgrades easy, cheap and useful enough to be worth doing without throwing out the whole core of the machine. Why would I buy a board from last month that was restricted forever to DDR2, when I can buy a board now that takes both DDR2 and DDR3? Gigabyte, for one, already have such an offering on the market.
We can give every person a serial number and an easy means for machines to track that serial number, or we can train the machines to do voice and face recognition to do authentication the way humans do. We can attach RFID tags to every item sold at every store, or we can develop vision algorithms to recognize and track the items with cameras to achieve the same results.
Or, here's a thought: we could not turn the world into one where privacy is dead and your entire life is lived under the watchful eyes of unknown computer-based observers at all. Just sayin'.
I think your accent was wrong there, friend. You need a strong Texan base, with a touch of Australian and a little British. Although given the recent government hand-overs in Germany, France and Britain, you might need to change that again in a few months.
Coincidentally, I started serious research into building my next PC last weekend. I initially looked into the E6600, Asus P5B, DDR2 combination that has been popular in recent months, but was rapidly warned off by others because the next round of hardware is starting to hit.
As an aside for anyone else who's in the same boat and hasn't found the info yet: Intel 3-series chipset motherboards are already available, 6x50 Core 2 chips are due any time now, and DDR3 RAM is starting to filter through the retail channels. All of these like a 1333MHz front-side bus, which potentially brings quite large performance benefits. There are advantages in terms of power consumption and overclocking potential as well. Also, they bring major price cuts in older kit: one retailer here in the UK was listing a much lower price for advance orders of a top-of-the-range E6850 chip than they are listing for buying an E6700 today, which presumably means the price of the latter will plummet when the 6x50 chips arrive.
All of this makes it an odd sort of time to run a data-based comparison like TFA. There are things that matter about processors beyond raw performance and price, but those are the dominant factors. Similarly, you can always say something better is just a few months away in this business, but right now, the annual upgrades are literally starting to arrive in retail channels as I type this and in less than a month many of the data points used in the article will be obsolete. That said, some of their notes are likely to remain valid, so it's worth a read for anyone not familiar with the recent processor line-ups. Some of the results are counter-intuitive if all you do is look at the theoretical numbers and go for what looks like the best price performance: the relative lack of advantage of a Q6600 over an E6600 for many applications because the extra cores aren't used effectively in practice is one example.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they've been talking about reducing the legal alcohol limit for drivers quite dramatically for a while now, and it'll probably happen within a year or two.
As more than one pundit has noted, Tony Blair's legacy is now obvious: it is David Cameron. True to form, he started out very promising, saying lots of things we all wanted to hear, but now the spin has started to slip a lot of his policies just sound like bad ideas. (See also "grammar schools".) I wonder how long Gordy will last before falling into the same pit; surely after a decade at the heart of the previous government, he hasn't really suddenly given up on all the bad ideas he's supported over those ten years?
Incidentally, while I am in general opposed to government intervention in people's daily lives, I find the smoking ban to be something of a special case. For one thing, it is a health issue that affects those who do not choose to smoke as well. Secondly, and much less importantly but still in its favour, market forces have not produced the opportunities that non-smokers want more because of (non-)competition concerns and management short-sightedness than any economic reason, and the smoking ban will break this deadlock.
Incidentally, the pre-budget report mentioned comes from the independent Gowers Review, and the government basically just accepted almost all of the review's recommendations. If you're bothered by the influence Europe has on our country, you should really read the full Gowers report (including the parts between the lines), and note how often the review proposes one thing but implies fairly transparently that the reason they don't propose going further is that under European law we can't. For example, it sounds a lot like the Review couldn't recommend generic, US-style fair use exemptions — even though it advocates more specific changes such as a format-shifting exemption explicitly without an accompanying levy on blank media — because EU law basically prevents doing anything that broad without imposing some sort of additional charge to pay off Big Media.
Since forever. Socialism is a very recent invention in the grand scheme of things. It is effectively a prop for the weak, and counter to survival instinct. Of course, we might reasonably decide as a responsible society that supporting those weaker than ourselves is the ethical thing to do. But how many historical records are there of four members of a tribe donating a limb each to the lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest of them for dinner?
I'm not quite sure what the Labour Party represents today, but it certainly isn't social democracy. That political ideology fundamentally relies on the freedom of the people, not least from abusive political power. The Blair administration went in exactly the opposite direction, having done more to undermine both the people-government relationship and the power of the elected Parliament than any other administration in living memory. In fact, if we go down the list of contemporary values conveniently provided by Wikipedia, the traditional Labour party might well have supported most of those things, but New Labour is a different beast.
There are two fundamental problems with that whole argument.
One is that right now, here in the UK, we are paying record levels of taxes (many of them brought in or increased by Gordon Brown during his time as Chancellor), yet seeing precious little improvement in things that matter, and effective cuts in many public services. It's not hard to see why when you consider things like the military and Europe-friendly policies adopted by the Blair administration. But this mean people are stripped of the very economic independence that would allow them to make their own choices: by the time they have paid many thousands of pounds per year to support the NHS and Social Security systems, many people could not afford to take private medical insurance on their own terms instead if they wanted to, for example.
The other is that people survived for a very long time without a socialist state to back them up. Today, we have all the worst parts of socialism, and none of the benefits. Literally millions of people are out of work and claiming benefits, when there is no reason they cannot work, but the state is so generous in giving away its (that is, our) money that it is actually financially more sensible for these people to remain unemployed and claim benefits than to get a job paying the minimum wage. Combine this with an unhealthy dose of immigration (legal or otherwise) screwing up several parts of the economy and placing further burdens on the benefits system, and you start to wonder why the rest of us bother to have jobs at all. The most distressing thing about the whole benefits scenario is that many of the people claiming them don't even seem to realise that the money they get didn't grow on trees, but rather was taken under the threat of force in tax from those of us who work. These are exactly the sort of people who vote in a nanny state, which then enacts laws like this one. No taxation without representation is all very well, but when you don't also have the converse or something close to it, you get this sort of lunacy.
It's what the government is getting its ducks in, prior to removing another freedom from its own people.
Alternatively, perhaps it's what the government will be lined up in, prior to being shot when the revolution comes. The way we're going, that won't take much longer, either. I hope Brown and co make good on their talk about a written bill of rights/constitution, because I don't see anything else undoing the damage to civil liberties of the Blair era. They just never seemed to get that you don't beat terrorism by giving up the very freedoms that define your way of life.
Movie censorship... check.
Smoking... check.
Drugs... check.
Restrictions on sale of alcohol... check.
What was next, again?
So you all know the old joke, right?
Masochist: "Hit me! Hit me!"
Sadist: "Noooo!"
Two comments:
For one thing, it is vanishingly unlikely that someone just starting out in the profession has the same skills as your well-paid London worker. A lot of people starting out in the profession think they do, but mostly they're wrong, and will come to appreciate this in time. (This is not to say that all developers improve at the same rate or reach the same potential given enough time, just that almost no-one fresh out of education is that good.)
The other thing is that you're talking about London, where salaries are relatively high but living costs or commuting times are astronomical. That same person, if they're only moderately skilled, would be lucky to make much more than £35–40k outside London.
Sure, but that's just because someone further up the chain is making the same mistake. One way or another, it's ultimately caused by some incompetent management or HR person not realising what a good developer is really worth. The developer doesn't really care who screwed up, because the result is still that they can make realise their potential via other means and they can't within the company-employee relationship.
Indeed. What these management types think of as inflated salaries is a perception problem on their part, not the developers'. It is well documented that a really good developer can be at least an order of magnitude more productive than the average. Do they get paid 10x as much for their time buy a business employing them? Of course not, that's "not the market rate"...
...Unless you take a leap of faith and go self-employed or start your own business. Now if you're a talented developer, your greater productivity benefits you directly or a company that you own, and you really can get the financial benefits that your skill level deserves on merit.
Realistically, most managers aren't smart and knowledgeable enough to understand this and offer salaries that really are attractive to people good enough to have the other option open to them. That's why they keep bitching about a shortage of talent, yet in the next breath refer to the "inflated" salaries of the dot com boom (where despite all the failures, quite a few small companies made an awful lot of money very fast using good people).
OK, but in that case, surely the problem is that the standards bodies don't agree with you. Now, this may be a demonstration of technical competence on a par with the USPTO, but it seems rather harsh to blame the state legislature for saying it will adopt recognised standards, and for recognising standards supported by ISO for that purpose. I would think the correct target would be the standards bodies, which seem to be approving documents that shouldn't qualify for the reasons given elsewhere in this discussion. It might seem like an obvious question, but has anyone actually challenged the validity of OOXML as a standard with the organisations concerned? I'm sure every trick in the book is being used to "fast track" the approval, but they do have mechanisms for people to object to proposed standards...
Hmm... all the major consoles support USB keyboards. Is the problem simply that the console game developers don't support these keyboards?
I suspect it's just a vicious circle. Most console owners presumably don't have keyboards because games don't tend to need them and they don't come as standard, and vice versa. If someone developed, say, the best ever RTS to run on a console and supporting powerful, keyboard-based controls to execute complex commands, I imagine that situation would reverse pretty quickly in that segment of the user base, but who wants to be the first company to risk something like that in a business like gaming?
Seriously, on financial/market size grounds? I'm guessing at least four orders of magnitude, probably more.
Right now, consoles represent something like 75–80% of the games market. The Windows PC is most of the remaining 20% or so. The Mac gets a look in, just. Nothing else is even relevant.
At that split, there are already few Mac ports of even big name titles that could be converted with relative ease and low cost if you planned for it up-front. You sometimes here senior people at games companies quoted as saying it's not worth going after the Windows market, because consoles are bigger and that's where the growth is.
And of course, that's money talking, not numbers of gamers. Like it or not, Linux comes with a culture that says people don't expect to pay for software, and that makes it a very unattractive target for commercial games developers. For gaming on Linux ever to advance beyond puzzle games and low-budget action titles made by hobbyists, there needs to be a much, much greater number of Linux users, and they need to have a demonstrated willingness to fork out $LOCAL_CURRENCY for real games.
To be brutally honest, I'm not sure I can ever see that happening. I expect consoles to develop replaceable controller technology that makes them more appealing for the genres they don't suit already several years before Linux gets enough of a foothold on the home user desktop to be a serious challenger.
So how many of the biggest FPS games in the past year were Windows titles (and real ones, not just conversions from a console)? I'm guessing it's fewer than half.
In any case, when titles from the Halo series to Gears of War are console-based, I don't think you can credibly argue that consoles can't do FPS.
The point being made earlier in the thread was that this doesn't always work, because the IP addresses for certain services (Windows Update is one, IIRC) are hard-coded and the hosts file is never checked by Windows when resolving these addresses.
There's definitely some genuine intent here, regardless of any dubious practices. The blogs of some of the guys working on the new UI for Office 2007 were quite interesting: it sounds like they basically have big spreadsheets and such of data derived from the user experience feedback program or whatever they call it, which tell them things like which commands people do and don't use in practice, and how they access them. That led directly to the design of the ribbons in Office 2007, which for all the nay-saying at release time, has gone down well with almost everyone I know who's actually tried it for a while.
The genre of game is more the deciding factor for me. Some genres, such as first-person shooters, convert very well to consoles, and indeed many of the best recent titles in this genre have started out or remained exclusively on one console or another. However, many genres naturally have an interface that is too complicated for your average console games platform. Can you imagine controlling a complex real-time strategy title like Supreme Commander via a little handheld unit with a few twiddly things and pushy bits on it? How about a role-playing game where you need to give detailed orders to many party members with many specific abilities?
Incidentally, the Microsoft "Vista-only" games have already been cracked, and apparently operate just fine on XP. It's just a PR stunt, which is probably why (as I've argued before) no-one except Microsoft is making Vista-only titles, or even prioritising Vista for games development. The gamer market isn't as stupid as Microsoft seems to think, and the reviews of Vista as a gaming platform are slating it on both compatibility and performance grounds. That means gamers aren't upgrading, and the developers in such a high-pressure business are always going to follow the market.
I'm about to put together a new PC. I fully expect to dual-boot between XP (not Vista) and some flavour of Linux. As with others here, games are the major reason for installing XP at all, with multimedia support a close second. So, I went along to that page with great interest.
Unfortunately, all it tells me is that pretty much every game I want to play on the new machine is completely unplayable under Cedega. As with so much of Linux history, the answer seems to be "it's making progress, but it's just not good enough yet".
I'm afraid that you (and everyone expressing the same "Oh, it's obvious!" argument) are exactly the reason serious management always talk to real lawyers rather than letting developers do their own thing.
It doesn't matter whether there are examples and instructions given. It doesn't matter that, in your personal opinion and with your personal world view, the meaning of the (L)GPL is "obvious". What matters is what the law says and what the licence means.
On the flip side, while it is entirely reasonable for a company to want to handle matters like this through the Legal Dept, the fact that the Legal Dept is slow is no excuse in reality or in law for not meeting your legal obligations. They should have checked the terms with Legal before using the code, and they should have access to Legal within a very short amount of time to deal with time-sensitive requests. If they haven't, management and/or Legal screwed up, and it's their problem, not the copyright holder's or a court's.
In a sensible world where litigation is the last resort and not the first, it is probably helpful to wait for the Legal Dept of the company concerned to realise there is some mess and see about clearing it up. In practice, this is likely to resolve matters most quickly if the company wasn't deliberately screwing around, because the Legal Dept will rapidly inform the rest of the company if they are breaking the law and tell them what they need to do about it, and senior management tend to listen to Legal when they shout about things like this. But if they're deliberately screwing around, or just incompetent and unreasonably slow to respond, then I doubt a court will have much sympathy if they wind up there.
Some of the ways the data is being used are of dubious legality/morality and have no obvious defence, most commonly in recent times when people's freedoms are sacrificed on the altar of fighting terrorism. Others are simply businesses exploiting their ability to profile customers in order to maximise prices or target advertising, which is somewhat damaging/annoying but at least fairly obvious and something I can choose to challenge by shopping elsewhere.
While I take your point, and agree with it for that matter, I think the difference now is that when things go wrong, they tend to go wrong significantly and for lots of people. Identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes today, and no-one who's been on the wrong side of it and spent the months it often takes to sort it out thinks identity theft is a trivial problem. This can be as simple as a business losing a whole load of credit card numbers and not informing people fast enough to get their cards cancelled (for which the legal protection for the cardholder seems to vary dramatically by jurisdiction). But there are also more insidious problems, such as governments collecting data for one reason and then data mining it to impose charges/fines on many people as a side effect (c.f. ANPR cameras monitoring vehicles on the roads for speeding, and the looming prospect of universal road charging in the UK despite millions of people explicitly objecting).
Sure it is, and I fully expect I'll be buying DDR2 when I put my new machine together. But my machines typically last around 4 years, and RAM is one of the few upgrades easy, cheap and useful enough to be worth doing without throwing out the whole core of the machine. Why would I buy a board from last month that was restricted forever to DDR2, when I can buy a board now that takes both DDR2 and DDR3? Gigabyte, for one, already have such an offering on the market.
We can give every person a serial number and an easy means for machines to track that serial number, or we can train the machines to do voice and face recognition to do authentication the way humans do. We can attach RFID tags to every item sold at every store, or we can develop vision algorithms to recognize and track the items with cameras to achieve the same results.
Or, here's a thought: we could not turn the world into one where privacy is dead and your entire life is lived under the watchful eyes of unknown computer-based observers at all. Just sayin'.
I think your accent was wrong there, friend. You need a strong Texan base, with a touch of Australian and a little British. Although given the recent government hand-overs in Germany, France and Britain, you might need to change that again in a few months.
Coincidentally, I started serious research into building my next PC last weekend. I initially looked into the E6600, Asus P5B, DDR2 combination that has been popular in recent months, but was rapidly warned off by others because the next round of hardware is starting to hit.
As an aside for anyone else who's in the same boat and hasn't found the info yet: Intel 3-series chipset motherboards are already available, 6x50 Core 2 chips are due any time now, and DDR3 RAM is starting to filter through the retail channels. All of these like a 1333MHz front-side bus, which potentially brings quite large performance benefits. There are advantages in terms of power consumption and overclocking potential as well. Also, they bring major price cuts in older kit: one retailer here in the UK was listing a much lower price for advance orders of a top-of-the-range E6850 chip than they are listing for buying an E6700 today, which presumably means the price of the latter will plummet when the 6x50 chips arrive.
All of this makes it an odd sort of time to run a data-based comparison like TFA. There are things that matter about processors beyond raw performance and price, but those are the dominant factors. Similarly, you can always say something better is just a few months away in this business, but right now, the annual upgrades are literally starting to arrive in retail channels as I type this and in less than a month many of the data points used in the article will be obsolete. That said, some of their notes are likely to remain valid, so it's worth a read for anyone not familiar with the recent processor line-ups. Some of the results are counter-intuitive if all you do is look at the theoretical numbers and go for what looks like the best price performance: the relative lack of advantage of a Q6600 over an E6600 for many applications because the extra cores aren't used effectively in practice is one example.