Ah, but now they have a money back guarentee. So if you get a computer from them and send it back they'll cover it. If you "Read Why" they explain that they've never had a return.
I guess you don't get many returns when you don't actually ship the computers.
For people who aren't geeks, "childish" introductions are often the best. They are disarming. The take the terror out of the concept of programming. Even better, if they are too childish, the adult learner will get bored and demand something more stingent. That's the point where you introduce a more adult language - when the person who would have been terrified of it, now demands it.
Oh and a mother may really love one of the early lessons I learned in programming. Programming is about giving simple instructions to a fairly stupid person. It's like telling a 5 year old boy how to tie his shoes with your back turned to him.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I generally approve. I am also one of the many Christians who recognize the usefullness of science and regret some of the stubborness of fundementalists who stick to literal readings of creation.
I do have a minor quibble however. "The restored relationship with God is what allows people to actually succeed in loving others and God..." I agree that Christ provided the reconciliation that allowed us to have a loving relationship with God. I also agree with the other poster who observed that good Christians are great about loving thier fellow man. I don't agree that without relationship with God one can't succeed in loving others. I just think that a relationship with God greases the wheels so to speak.
Hey, these are just my beliefs though. As to the troll who got this going by stating that if we all don't believe in fundementalist creationism, we reject the whole of our religion, I thank you. By launching a crummy strawman argument, you gave numerous slashdotters an oppurtunity to testify that reasonable, thinking people can be Christians.
Yeah, I think the whole MMORPG price structure is pretty messed up. I'd like to see them set a monthly price, say $15.
The price would be: $0 + $0 + $15/month. If you're paying them monthly to make the game better, expansions should be part of the deal. They should be relatively frequent, and incremental as expansions in Muds often are.
The game itself should be free if you download it online or maybe $10 in store to cover distribution costs.
Not knowing much about acoustics, but having followed this discussion, I would speculate that the goal of putting 4 microphones next to the sound source is to surround the sound sound relatively equally and approximate colocation. Imagine a hundred tiny microphones forming a circle around the sound source. Any boost to the original sound given off by a given microphone should be cancelled out by a differant one on the circle. Also, no microphone would be terribly powerful, so the boost wouldn't be that great. The approximation would be of a single sound source in the center of the microphones - I think.
No. This kind of decision is made by senior management at the reccommendation of actuaries or and other analysts. The analyst's job is to predict the amount of money it will cost the corporation to insure something. Then the insurer adds some profit \ buisness expense margin in, and sells some insurance. If the analyst did their job right, on average the corporation will make that extra margin on each insurance sale.
What's happening here, is that a reinsurance company had its analysts look at nanotech. Those analysts decided that the risks from nanotech were too poorly understood to be priceable and furthermore could be very expensive. So if you don't know where to set the price, if you sell the insurance you'll be guessing. If you guess higher than the competition, you won't sell any policies, if you guess too low, you might suddenly be in open to monsterous liabilities you can't cover. For a big financial company, that sounds like a lose/lose situation.
Algae generally would feed on sunlight and ambiant CO2. We'd probably need to seed their waters with appropriate minerals, like iron, so they could grow healthily. A nice perk of this is that instead of digging up carbon in the form of oil or coal which we then send into the atmosphere, we take carbon out of the atmosphere, arrange it into oil using solar powered algae and then burn it back up into the atmosphere.
I think when you look back to things like the American revolution, there were certaintly rules for honorable combat. I'm not sure why they were there but I imagine it was more a historical issue than a way of keeping small powers down.
The small power of the rebellious American forces did what small powers do quite often. They gain a tactical advantage by participating in tactics their enemies find dishonorable.
That being said, when they were captured, they were generally not treated as prisoners of war, but as traitors, found guilty of treason and hanged. The revolutionary war was as much an insurgency as a war, particularly early on.
Keep in mind that most Americans were not gung ho seperatists. About 1/3 were, a third were loyal and a third skirted the issue. Small groups of highly motivated individuals are very, very powerful when their message resonates with a substantial (not dominant) portion of the populace. That's what scares me to death about the US's approach to the Middle East.
There are indeed rules to war, and there have been more often than not for quite some time. Midevil European armies would meet. Leaders or spokespeople from each side would get together, often discuss if the fight was really need, and go back to rally the troops. What ensued then was often not pretty, but there were rules.
In modern times, we have decided that using chemical weapons is "against the rules." Some don't follow those rules, some do.
You also lack the distinction between a war between armed forces and total war. In total war the civilians of the enemy are legitimate targets. The goal is to demoralize them. In non-total war, civilians are supposed to be kept safe as much as possible. Obviously, if somebody is using a civilian as a shield, and firing at your friends, it would take enourmous restraint not to fire through the civilians. The restraint is sometimes shown and sometimes not.
Guerilla warfare specializes in taking advantage of countries who try to follow civilized rules and avoid total war. There, enemy forces mix with and appear to be civilians, making it very difficult to combat them without breaking the goals of keeping civilians safe. That's why one of the rules of war is that participants should wear uniforms - so that combantants know who to shoot and who not to shoot.
To say that US forces cannot invade Iraq and try to help Iraqis disregards history. Look to WWII. As Allied forces swept into Europe, many friendly civilian Europeans died. I believe those in Belgium had particularly bad experiences, but I may be mixing them up with the Nederlands - my European geography is poor. So like Iraq, there was considerable pain inflicted to the civilian population. Bringing them out of Nazi or Bathist rule, is probably better with that pain than the alternative.
Naive is it may have been to launch this war, once launched, we needed to try and bring a better system to Iraq. Given our inability to make Israelis and Palastinians get along, imposing further force on tha region without making life better for those in the attacked country would just create more mistrust, hate and terrorists. In Slashdot terms, the more we tighten our grip, the more hearts and minds would slip through our fingers. We may still succeed in doing this, but it hasn't been as easy as was suggested by the hawks.
I hold my tounge in check before I discuss too much of the prisoner abuse. Keep in mind that our WWII GIs generally were proud that they did a pretty good job of treating their prisoners decently while the Axis powers committed atrocities. That aided their conviction that they had the moral high ground.
Right now, there might be 50 million pages indexed, but right now it looks like I've got to go through 1 million of those to get to what I searched for.
My two tests were 1: "Hattrick" which is an online soccer management game, and is great. Google it and up it comes with some handy links to some sites about it. Using this engine, I got a bunch of crap. It may have been pages that linked to hattrick, but I didn't check.
2: "Buyer Agent Boulder Colorado" - Exclusive buyer agents are the preferred way of buying real estate. I know some in Boulder and wanted to see how they'd do. While the site I was rooting for didn't show up on the front page of either engine, a major EBA office did pop up as the #1 result on Google, no such luck on this other one.
Hell, with their bias towards open source, I would have expected decent results for a search on Linux, but no luck. This is a nice idea and all, but the interesting part of the search engine is the ranking algorithms. That's what they pay the PHDs to come up with in the proprietary world. That money seems to be well spent. Looks like you need to reach out to academia and beg for some algorithms.
Back in the day when Microsoft was not the biggest player in the office software market, one of the big things they did to get in was read and write to other people's standards. I'd say that strategy didn't hurt them too much.
My wife resents those sorts of harsh rules they have on her box at work. I'd rather do some tech support at home every now and again and have her happy that I give her free reign to control her own computer. Heck, I let her do pretty much whatever she wants to our laptop as well even though I occassionally use it for business. Since its mostly used to surf the internet from the living room, I don't really care. I just pay attention for when I'll be travelling and quietly make the laptop dissapear for a day or two before my trip so that I won't have any surprises.
Wow, math was anything but the easiest thing on my university schedule. Calc I&II for Engineers were classes they used to weed out students. That said, I really value what I learned.
Calc I or better yet, a calc heavy Physics I is the kind of class that will alter how you view the world. It's a must. After that, you might not use a ton of the math you learn in university at work. That said, taking classes in how to program mathmatical algorithms greatly helps me do my job and understand how computers work.
CS students are blessed/cursed with the likelyhood that some of the math that you learn will be from your CS department. It doesn't make matrix multiplication that much more pleasant, but it is interesting to write a simple search engine algorith that matches a terms in a documents to a vector of search terms.
I disagree with you on stats class. We were allowed to use Excel to do some of the gruelling number crunching for us once we'd done a handful by hand. Now, I can't do any of it by hand from memory but I'm ok with a book. I do understand what they heck is going on with some basic stats work and have a feeling for how to go about doing some vaguely interesting analysis of things I encounter.
The number one reason to learn advanced math is so that when you sit down in a movie and they've scribbled jibberish across a chalkboard in the background, you can follow what's being done, or at very least recognize the symbols.
I wrote a post last night and managed not to post it. Here's the summary:)
1) Software with release dates that are set independant of developer input is a disaster waiting to happen.
2) Asking developers to work more than 45 hours a week consistently breeds more tired developers who make more mistakes who then spend time fixing those mistakes etc.. You can get great productivity from a developer working 80 hour weeks for a week or maybe a month but over time, you're going to be better off with developers working reasonable hours.
3) Throwing more people at a job isn't always the best way of making it work. Software is best developed by relatively small teams. Look inside most of the big game shops and you'll probably see relatively small teams working on most of the individual programs.
4) Small development teams are successful now and aren't going away. I chose a random example of Firaxis who posts their full staff on the website. They've got great leadership, a dozen or so programmers, about the same number of artists and have been pretty successful.
5) Big game shops often lack the creativity of the smaller players. Nitendo would be an exception while Microsoft is the perfect example. Microsoft has thrived on buying great small shops, getting one or two more good products from the aquired team and then suffering from the lack of progress the team makes at that point. Then they go buy another shop or three.
6) Do you really think that Blizzard doesn't have what it takes to compete?
7) You may be right on the console side of things, but expensive development licenses are more likely the culprit than complex software.
I played a lot of Tribes 2. It's unique as far as FPS games go and it's somewhat an aquired taste. Most FPS games, at this point, I can pick up and be successful in. They are either run fast and shoot accurately, or move carefully shoot accurately. Tribes, is about thinking tactically and moving fast by moving precisely - that's some weirdness introduced by everybody wearing a jet pack.
Unless you're sniping, accurate shooting is less about putting the cursor on the other guy and pulling the trigger and more about watching the other guy's jet pack influenced trajectory and aiming at where he's going to land while at the same time realizing that your projectile will aquire your momentum and compensating for that. Learning to shoot in this game is a painfully slow experience.
That said, you can be extremely effective for your team without ever shooting a shot. That's what makes this game great. Teams need people to lay down defensive turret, and sometimes sensor grids to detect and combat enemies closing in on your flag (capture the flag is alomst the only thing played in Tribes 2).
You team's energy generators, repair stations and fixed turrets will likely come under attack and your team will need somebody to go fix those things.
The vehicles offer another dimension. Some people learn to be great fighter pilots, others use jets and hover bikes as personal transport for stealing flags or hunting down flag carriers. Others like to pilot bombers or be bombadeers. In the category of things a new person can do, a bomber can have a third person who is responsible for tossing flares to divert incoming missles as well as attempt to shoot down enemy fighters. There are tanks too. I used vehicles as personal transport mostly.
The biggest difference is that more often than not, when I'm playing something like Unreal, I'm jazzed up and focusing hard all the time. Tribes can offer a less frantic pace with more thought involved. That said, flying into an enemy base and having many turrets focus on you while you carefully time your jet back boosts for a targetted and safe landing is tense as hell. Then you need to run the hell away with the flag.
For me, games like Unreal peak with a dozen players. Tribes is great with 32 as you can take very specific roles. On some maps 12-16 is still good as it offers more wide open game play.
The only time I've had a large player base experience that was better was in Planetside. But so much of the time Planetside was sub-par. Only occassionaly did I see how good that could be. Meanwhile, Tribes occupied a lot of my college years.
Tribes is something you should give a shot. If the learning curve is too tough, I gather that the upcoming game will be a bit gentler, although I fear that will take away from the game somewhat. We'll see.
If I understand things properly, this is somewhat close to what google started like. Except that they thought that cases for their handful of desktop machines were too expensive. They just took out the motherboard and such. Without the cases, you can fit a lot into some tight space.
Some big public companies have a track record of taking risky side ventures and should something good come out, that's great, if not it's ok too. It's harder to bet the company on a new idea, but with a big market cap you don't have to.
Sun, perhaps not a shining example right now, had a fairly long track record of sending teams away from their main campuses to act like a start-up with new ideas. Some of these efforts were successful and were rolled back into the company, others weren't. They took risks, but they treated it almost as though they were making VC investments.
Xerox has had PARC were they just let guys do interesting research and if it looks cool, Xerox theoretically rolls it in. They have a history of letting it out the back door, but hey, you can't be perfect.
Both these, and similar programs elsewhere, are essentially efforts in sending your smart people off to do interesting work and seeing what sticks. It smells a whole lot like Google labs. I seriously don't expect Google labs to go away. It's possible that an increasing number of their projects won't be posted publicly, but that won't mean the interesting research isn't being done.
The example you give is particularly interesting as many of the products being advertized are in fact drugs which are illegal to purchase without a perscription. I recently heard an interview with somebody I believe was in the FTC trying to crack down on these sellers. While upset that many were selling subpar drugs or simply taking the money and running, she was somewhat amused that people who were trying to buy these drugs illegally would notify the FTC that they'd been ripped off. She did say that they had no intention of going after normal buyers though.
My impression was that if you work as an employee for somebody, they have to pay you at least minimum wage. For instance, some waiters and waitresses make half of minimum wage + tips, but if there aren't enough tips to bring their earnings to minimum wage, the employer has to cover the difference.
The only way I can imagine that its legal to employee somebody on the kind of scam described here is if they are actually hired as a contractor and not an employee. Still, if you are making the calls from the marketer's place of business and not your home phone, it would seem likely that this sort of relationship would be deemed bogus and that you were actually an employee with a crappy contract.
No, if you're making that much they are assuming that you have a strong decision making / leadership / management type role. Those sorts of positions do not qualify for overtime and haven't for quite some time.
First off, I think I got a really first rate education myself and have since been working for 2 years. I think I have some talent too. I'm fairly confident when I say that in your first job or so, you are really learning more than you providing the employer - at least if you're learning enough. If the job will give you a chance to learn and improve yourself and pay rent at the same time, you're probably getting paid too much when your contribution is compared to the salary of senior developer who really knows his shit - of course there are crappy "senior" developers as well. Anyway, take what you're offered, the main goal is to learn and become better.
Just to share what I've been making.
I interned my senior year at a forture 500 IT type company. I was paid an outrageous $20/hr.
I graduated into the burst bubble and picked up with a small software shop in an expensive area that paid me 40K + a sizeable end of year bonus but lacked benifits.
I moved to a less expensive area and got a job at another small shop at 40K and a weak benifits package.
True, I'm paid better than most Americans, but frankly I salary isn't the most important thing to me. I love what I do, and I'm resigned to my wife making more money than I do in the long term. She's an actuary.
What would I expect coming out into today's market? 35-40K would be fine. When I was at the big company and looked over their pay scales I saw that I would start at 55-60K. I didn't get a job there as they were laying people off when I graduated. That really warped my views of what was reasonable. I suspect that many college students are still feeling the after shocks of that shift as well.
Wire capability is a short answer. The wires in your house easily support 100Mb. Maybe some of them support ten times that. If you try running a 3 mile CAT5 cable over to your ISP you'll find that the signal doesn't get there. The wires I use to get the signal to someone whose on the internet happen to be my phone line. Those are capable of something like 2Mb/s if I live very very close to the central office. Since there still is signal degradation, if I live two or three miles from a collection area (CO) I can probably only get 256Kb/s without the signal getting too scrambled.
To transfer data over very, very long distances, you pretty much want to have a fiber optic cable. That can carry a lot of data a good long distance before it needs a repeater. Convincing somebody to run fiber from the nearest drop to your house isn't going to happen anytime soon.
There's also the problem of bottlenecks. In our houses, we don't see them very often. Our hub can keep up with all the traffic we generate. Get 20 machines doing constant work over the network, and a simple hub or three will start to be a slowdown. The problem is magnitudes harder at an ISP.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but now they have a money back guarentee. So if you get a computer from them and send it back they'll cover it. If you "Read Why" they explain that they've never had a return.
I guess you don't get many returns when you don't actually ship the computers.
For people who aren't geeks, "childish" introductions are often the best. They are disarming. The take the terror out of the concept of programming. Even better, if they are too childish, the adult learner will get bored and demand something more stingent. That's the point where you introduce a more adult language - when the person who would have been terrified of it, now demands it.
Oh and a mother may really love one of the early lessons I learned in programming. Programming is about giving simple instructions to a fairly stupid person. It's like telling a 5 year old boy how to tie his shoes with your back turned to him.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I generally approve. I am also one of the many Christians who recognize the usefullness of science and regret some of the stubborness of fundementalists who stick to literal readings of creation.
I do have a minor quibble however. "The restored relationship with God is what allows people to actually succeed in loving others and God..." I agree that Christ provided the reconciliation that allowed us to have a loving relationship with God. I also agree with the other poster who observed that good Christians are great about loving thier fellow man. I don't agree that without relationship with God one can't succeed in loving others. I just think that a relationship with God greases the wheels so to speak.
Hey, these are just my beliefs though. As to the troll who got this going by stating that if we all don't believe in fundementalist creationism, we reject the whole of our religion, I thank you. By launching a crummy strawman argument, you gave numerous slashdotters an oppurtunity to testify that reasonable, thinking people can be Christians.
Thanks, I figured I was wrong but would draw out someone who knew more. I was hoped I was a little more right, but I guess that's how it goes.
Yeah, I think the whole MMORPG price structure is pretty messed up. I'd like to see them set a monthly price, say $15.
The price would be: $0 + $0 + $15/month. If you're paying them monthly to make the game better, expansions should be part of the deal. They should be relatively frequent, and incremental as expansions in Muds often are.
The game itself should be free if you download it online or maybe $10 in store to cover distribution costs.
Not knowing much about acoustics, but having followed this discussion, I would speculate that the goal of putting 4 microphones next to the sound source is to surround the sound sound relatively equally and approximate colocation. Imagine a hundred tiny microphones forming a circle around the sound source. Any boost to the original sound given off by a given microphone should be cancelled out by a differant one on the circle. Also, no microphone would be terribly powerful, so the boost wouldn't be that great. The approximation would be of a single sound source in the center of the microphones - I think.
No. This kind of decision is made by senior management at the reccommendation of actuaries or and other analysts. The analyst's job is to predict the amount of money it will cost the corporation to insure something. Then the insurer adds some profit \ buisness expense margin in, and sells some insurance. If the analyst did their job right, on average the corporation will make that extra margin on each insurance sale.
What's happening here, is that a reinsurance company had its analysts look at nanotech. Those analysts decided that the risks from nanotech were too poorly understood to be priceable and furthermore could be very expensive. So if you don't know where to set the price, if you sell the insurance you'll be guessing. If you guess higher than the competition, you won't sell any policies, if you guess too low, you might suddenly be in open to monsterous liabilities you can't cover. For a big financial company, that sounds like a lose/lose situation.
Algae generally would feed on sunlight and ambiant CO2. We'd probably need to seed their waters with appropriate minerals, like iron, so they could grow healthily. A nice perk of this is that instead of digging up carbon in the form of oil or coal which we then send into the atmosphere, we take carbon out of the atmosphere, arrange it into oil using solar powered algae and then burn it back up into the atmosphere.
I think when you look back to things like the American revolution, there were certaintly rules for honorable combat. I'm not sure why they were there but I imagine it was more a historical issue than a way of keeping small powers down.
The small power of the rebellious American forces did what small powers do quite often. They gain a tactical advantage by participating in tactics their enemies find dishonorable.
That being said, when they were captured, they were generally not treated as prisoners of war, but as traitors, found guilty of treason and hanged. The revolutionary war was as much an insurgency as a war, particularly early on.
Keep in mind that most Americans were not gung ho seperatists. About 1/3 were, a third were loyal and a third skirted the issue. Small groups of highly motivated individuals are very, very powerful when their message resonates with a substantial (not dominant) portion of the populace. That's what scares me to death about the US's approach to the Middle East.
There are indeed rules to war, and there have been more often than not for quite some time. Midevil European armies would meet. Leaders or spokespeople from each side would get together, often discuss if the fight was really need, and go back to rally the troops. What ensued then was often not pretty, but there were rules.
In modern times, we have decided that using chemical weapons is "against the rules." Some don't follow those rules, some do.
You also lack the distinction between a war between armed forces and total war. In total war the civilians of the enemy are legitimate targets. The goal is to demoralize them. In non-total war, civilians are supposed to be kept safe as much as possible. Obviously, if somebody is using a civilian as a shield, and firing at your friends, it would take enourmous restraint not to fire through the civilians. The restraint is sometimes shown and sometimes not.
Guerilla warfare specializes in taking advantage of countries who try to follow civilized rules and avoid total war. There, enemy forces mix with and appear to be civilians, making it very difficult to combat them without breaking the goals of keeping civilians safe. That's why one of the rules of war is that participants should wear uniforms - so that combantants know who to shoot and who not to shoot.
To say that US forces cannot invade Iraq and try to help Iraqis disregards history. Look to WWII. As Allied forces swept into Europe, many friendly civilian Europeans died. I believe those in Belgium had particularly bad experiences, but I may be mixing them up with the Nederlands - my European geography is poor. So like Iraq, there was considerable pain inflicted to the civilian population. Bringing them out of Nazi or Bathist rule, is probably better with that pain than the alternative.
Naive is it may have been to launch this war, once launched, we needed to try and bring a better system to Iraq. Given our inability to make Israelis and Palastinians get along, imposing further force on tha region without making life better for those in the attacked country would just create more mistrust, hate and terrorists. In Slashdot terms, the more we tighten our grip, the more hearts and minds would slip through our fingers. We may still succeed in doing this, but it hasn't been as easy as was suggested by the hawks.
I hold my tounge in check before I discuss too much of the prisoner abuse. Keep in mind that our WWII GIs generally were proud that they did a pretty good job of treating their prisoners decently while the Axis powers committed atrocities. That aided their conviction that they had the moral high ground.
This has excactly 0 impact on their suit.
Right now, there might be 50 million pages indexed, but right now it looks like I've got to go through 1 million of those to get to what I searched for.
My two tests were 1: "Hattrick" which is an online soccer management game, and is great. Google it and up it comes with some handy links to some sites about it. Using this engine, I got a bunch of crap. It may have been pages that linked to hattrick, but I didn't check.
2: "Buyer Agent Boulder Colorado" - Exclusive buyer agents are the preferred way of buying real estate. I know some in Boulder and wanted to see how they'd do. While the site I was rooting for didn't show up on the front page of either engine, a major EBA office did pop up as the #1 result on Google, no such luck on this other one.
Hell, with their bias towards open source, I would have expected decent results for a search on Linux, but no luck. This is a nice idea and all, but the interesting part of the search engine is the ranking algorithms. That's what they pay the PHDs to come up with in the proprietary world. That money seems to be well spent. Looks like you need to reach out to academia and beg for some algorithms.
Back in the day when Microsoft was not the biggest player in the office software market, one of the big things they did to get in was read and write to other people's standards. I'd say that strategy didn't hurt them too much.
My wife resents those sorts of harsh rules they have on her box at work. I'd rather do some tech support at home every now and again and have her happy that I give her free reign to control her own computer. Heck, I let her do pretty much whatever she wants to our laptop as well even though I occassionally use it for business. Since its mostly used to surf the internet from the living room, I don't really care. I just pay attention for when I'll be travelling and quietly make the laptop dissapear for a day or two before my trip so that I won't have any surprises.
It's just not that hard.
Didn't look at the article? The image the point at is so realistic partially because it has a blemish. The lips are not so good.
Wow, math was anything but the easiest thing on my university schedule. Calc I&II for Engineers were classes they used to weed out students. That said, I really value what I learned.
Calc I or better yet, a calc heavy Physics I is the kind of class that will alter how you view the world. It's a must. After that, you might not use a ton of the math you learn in university at work. That said, taking classes in how to program mathmatical algorithms greatly helps me do my job and understand how computers work.
CS students are blessed/cursed with the likelyhood that some of the math that you learn will be from your CS department. It doesn't make matrix multiplication that much more pleasant, but it is interesting to write a simple search engine algorith that matches a terms in a documents to a vector of search terms.
I disagree with you on stats class. We were allowed to use Excel to do some of the gruelling number crunching for us once we'd done a handful by hand. Now, I can't do any of it by hand from memory but I'm ok with a book. I do understand what they heck is going on with some basic stats work and have a feeling for how to go about doing some vaguely interesting analysis of things I encounter.
The number one reason to learn advanced math is so that when you sit down in a movie and they've scribbled jibberish across a chalkboard in the background, you can follow what's being done, or at very least recognize the symbols.
I wrote a post last night and managed not to post it. Here's the summary :)
1) Software with release dates that are set independant of developer input is a disaster waiting to happen.
2) Asking developers to work more than 45 hours a week consistently breeds more tired developers who make more mistakes who then spend time fixing those mistakes etc.. You can get great productivity from a developer working 80 hour weeks for a week or maybe a month but over time, you're going to be better off with developers working reasonable hours.
3) Throwing more people at a job isn't always the best way of making it work. Software is best developed by relatively small teams. Look inside most of the big game shops and you'll probably see relatively small teams working on most of the individual programs.
4) Small development teams are successful now and aren't going away. I chose a random example of Firaxis who posts their full staff on the website. They've got great leadership, a dozen or so programmers, about the same number of artists and have been pretty successful.
5) Big game shops often lack the creativity of the smaller players. Nitendo would be an exception while Microsoft is the perfect example. Microsoft has thrived on buying great small shops, getting one or two more good products from the aquired team and then suffering from the lack of progress the team makes at that point. Then they go buy another shop or three.
6) Do you really think that Blizzard doesn't have what it takes to compete?
7) You may be right on the console side of things, but expensive development licenses are more likely the culprit than complex software.
I played a lot of Tribes 2. It's unique as far as FPS games go and it's somewhat an aquired taste. Most FPS games, at this point, I can pick up and be successful in. They are either run fast and shoot accurately, or move carefully shoot accurately. Tribes, is about thinking tactically and moving fast by moving precisely - that's some weirdness introduced by everybody wearing a jet pack.
Unless you're sniping, accurate shooting is less about putting the cursor on the other guy and pulling the trigger and more about watching the other guy's jet pack influenced trajectory and aiming at where he's going to land while at the same time realizing that your projectile will aquire your momentum and compensating for that. Learning to shoot in this game is a painfully slow experience.
That said, you can be extremely effective for your team without ever shooting a shot. That's what makes this game great. Teams need people to lay down defensive turret, and sometimes sensor grids to detect and combat enemies closing in on your flag (capture the flag is alomst the only thing played in Tribes 2).
You team's energy generators, repair stations and fixed turrets will likely come under attack and your team will need somebody to go fix those things.
The vehicles offer another dimension. Some people learn to be great fighter pilots, others use jets and hover bikes as personal transport for stealing flags or hunting down flag carriers. Others like to pilot bombers or be bombadeers. In the category of things a new person can do, a bomber can have a third person who is responsible for tossing flares to divert incoming missles as well as attempt to shoot down enemy fighters. There are tanks too. I used vehicles as personal transport mostly.
The biggest difference is that more often than not, when I'm playing something like Unreal, I'm jazzed up and focusing hard all the time. Tribes can offer a less frantic pace with more thought involved. That said, flying into an enemy base and having many turrets focus on you while you carefully time your jet back boosts for a targetted and safe landing is tense as hell. Then you need to run the hell away with the flag.
For me, games like Unreal peak with a dozen players. Tribes is great with 32 as you can take very specific roles. On some maps 12-16 is still good as it offers more wide open game play.
The only time I've had a large player base experience that was better was in Planetside. But so much of the time Planetside was sub-par. Only occassionaly did I see how good that could be. Meanwhile, Tribes occupied a lot of my college years.
Tribes is something you should give a shot. If the learning curve is too tough, I gather that the upcoming game will be a bit gentler, although I fear that will take away from the game somewhat. We'll see.
If I understand things properly, this is somewhat close to what google started like. Except that they thought that cases for their handful of desktop machines were too expensive. They just took out the motherboard and such. Without the cases, you can fit a lot into some tight space.
Some big public companies have a track record of taking risky side ventures and should something good come out, that's great, if not it's ok too. It's harder to bet the company on a new idea, but with a big market cap you don't have to.
Sun, perhaps not a shining example right now, had a fairly long track record of sending teams away from their main campuses to act like a start-up with new ideas. Some of these efforts were successful and were rolled back into the company, others weren't. They took risks, but they treated it almost as though they were making VC investments.
Xerox has had PARC were they just let guys do interesting research and if it looks cool, Xerox theoretically rolls it in. They have a history of letting it out the back door, but hey, you can't be perfect.
Both these, and similar programs elsewhere, are essentially efforts in sending your smart people off to do interesting work and seeing what sticks. It smells a whole lot like Google labs. I seriously don't expect Google labs to go away. It's possible that an increasing number of their projects won't be posted publicly, but that won't mean the interesting research isn't being done.
The example you give is particularly interesting as many of the products being advertized are in fact drugs which are illegal to purchase without a perscription. I recently heard an interview with somebody I believe was in the FTC trying to crack down on these sellers. While upset that many were selling subpar drugs or simply taking the money and running, she was somewhat amused that people who were trying to buy these drugs illegally would notify the FTC that they'd been ripped off. She did say that they had no intention of going after normal buyers though.
My impression was that if you work as an employee for somebody, they have to pay you at least minimum wage. For instance, some waiters and waitresses make half of minimum wage + tips, but if there aren't enough tips to bring their earnings to minimum wage, the employer has to cover the difference.
The only way I can imagine that its legal to employee somebody on the kind of scam described here is if they are actually hired as a contractor and not an employee. Still, if you are making the calls from the marketer's place of business and not your home phone, it would seem likely that this sort of relationship would be deemed bogus and that you were actually an employee with a crappy contract.
No, if you're making that much they are assuming that you have a strong decision making / leadership / management type role. Those sorts of positions do not qualify for overtime and haven't for quite some time.
First off, I think I got a really first rate education myself and have since been working for 2 years. I think I have some talent too. I'm fairly confident when I say that in your first job or so, you are really learning more than you providing the employer - at least if you're learning enough. If the job will give you a chance to learn and improve yourself and pay rent at the same time, you're probably getting paid too much when your contribution is compared to the salary of senior developer who really knows his shit - of course there are crappy "senior" developers as well. Anyway, take what you're offered, the main goal is to learn and become better.
Just to share what I've been making.
I interned my senior year at a forture 500 IT type company. I was paid an outrageous $20/hr.
I graduated into the burst bubble and picked up with a small software shop in an expensive area that paid me 40K + a sizeable end of year bonus but lacked benifits.
I moved to a less expensive area and got a job at another small shop at 40K and a weak benifits package.
True, I'm paid better than most Americans, but frankly I salary isn't the most important thing to me. I love what I do, and I'm resigned to my wife making more money than I do in the long term. She's an actuary.
What would I expect coming out into today's market? 35-40K would be fine. When I was at the big company and looked over their pay scales I saw that I would start at 55-60K. I didn't get a job there as they were laying people off when I graduated. That really warped my views of what was reasonable. I suspect that many college students are still feeling the after shocks of that shift as well.
Wire capability is a short answer. The wires in your house easily support 100Mb. Maybe some of them support ten times that. If you try running a 3 mile CAT5 cable over to your ISP you'll find that the signal doesn't get there. The wires I use to get the signal to someone whose on the internet happen to be my phone line. Those are capable of something like 2Mb/s if I live very very close to the central office. Since there still is signal degradation, if I live two or three miles from a collection area (CO) I can probably only get 256Kb/s without the signal getting too scrambled.
To transfer data over very, very long distances, you pretty much want to have a fiber optic cable. That can carry a lot of data a good long distance before it needs a repeater. Convincing somebody to run fiber from the nearest drop to your house isn't going to happen anytime soon.
There's also the problem of bottlenecks. In our houses, we don't see them very often. Our hub can keep up with all the traffic we generate. Get 20 machines doing constant work over the network, and a simple hub or three will start to be a slowdown. The problem is magnitudes harder at an ISP.