I'm pretty sure most people using alternative OSes have access to a windows box at work/uni/friends house. Why make the government waste more money then they already do?
You want me to lug all my tax info to a friends place or to work!? Assuming I can find a way to sensibly move that much paper, and I can get the PC time to enter it all, what am I supposed to do if I forget something? Go back and forth a few times?
Call me cynical, but I'll laugh when we soon witness the kinder gentler PayPal. Sure it only took 5 years, a zillion complaints and...oh yeah...some competition to convince them the time is now! They've listened to their customers, and they're tired of being treated like garbage. PayPal listens!
You'll have to be laughing fairly loud to drown out the booming laughter coming from my place when it happens. Competition from a large entity is what is sorely needed; and of all organisations, one loaded with goodwill like Google. Their customers will leave in droves if they don't adapt. I honestly can't wait to see how it turns out.:)
Note to Google execs: I sell software and will happily pay a much higher margin for a merchant account through a reputable organisation than one with demonstrated poor practices and piles of complaints leveled against them. I am not the only one. You don't even have to match their percentage. This service is sorely needed. I will be watching this one closely.
It's about damn time a company with a reputation like Google's got into this area. I hate PayPal with a passion; they wouldn't accept one of my credit cards for an online payment (there were no other choices for the site I was paying), so I contacted their support. Guess how that went? Long story short, two automated emails and one "we won't help you" email over a few weeks. They don't want to help you, they just want your money. Also check out the horror stories of frozen accounts floating around the web.
Another guide to these type of sites is how many hoops you have to jump through to actually contact them. Try it, drop by and click through. See how long it takes to contact someone.
Anyway, sub-rant over. Imagine how a company like google could shake up this area. It's about time a reputable company came in and did a good job. Maybe even micropayments or something similar in the future? I imagine online comic creators would love that one.:)
I figure they have a few options here: - Make the servers slower and slower until everyone quits playing. - Have a virtual asteroid wipe everything out (like the one that killed the dinosaurs, only not real). - Make a horde of virtual lawyers that sue everyone until they own everything. - Withdraw all the company's cash and flee to some country without extradition treaties with the U.S.
There's an even more effective way of doing this without the nasty side effects.
No high-level content.
I spent a fair amount of time playing an certain online browser game with a stack of low-level content. To reduce the tedious aspects of the game I spent real-world money to purchase in-game items. I reached the majority of the in-game goals and then discovered that I was sensationally bored of repeatedly clicking the same thing over and over to earn in-game currency and left the game. I looked back and realised I had just spent US$60 on a web game that I had essentially discarded in the end. I then realised that it may have been their business model. Make a fun game with tedious aspects. Allow players to pay to remove tedious aspects. Gradually scale up the tedious aspects until the player quits. Repeat with new players.
What pisses me off is that small software developers are treated like the scum of society. 3 strikes against us (in addition to the problems facing any business):
1) Patents 2) Pirates 3) People claiming to be "open source" advocates who want you to share the source with the "community", when all they want is free software (see #2)
I'd rate them in the same order you provided. Patents scare me the most, "pirates" mildly (I hate that term), and the third group the least. I've been asked about the source code for my software a couple of times, and in each case the people asking were extremely polite about it and didn't give me any grief about my decision to not open source it.
Now I like Microsoft as much as the next IT geek (ie. not at all) but I no longer have a clash of conscience over patent issues. The patent system is completely out of control and is causing terrible damage to the industry. As a small developer, patents terrify me. And who are patents supposed to protect in the first place?
Now I don't know the specifics of the case, but given the current rampant abuse of the patent system I'm going to side with the Evil Empire here by default, until I see a decent argument over why this is a fair patent. Most are not. Mind you, MS probably do deserve this sort of thing given their support for software patents.
Invariably, as the shipping date approaches, some similar game will be released, and the client will say, we need to have that feature or this feature.
The developer management has a few more options than rolling over and saying "we'll get out the drums and whips". They can factor in additional time for unspecified features at the start in the initial estimate, and make it known that time is available for the publishers to throw in new features, but no more. They can say "We'd love to, but we'll have to take on another developer or two if you want it on time. That'll cost $X, you pay half, we'll pay half". For a show like E3, you can trade off less visible features to implement after the show and pull the visible ones earlier. You can break off a set of tasks and pass them off to an external contractor ("that'll cost $X, we'll pay half each"). Just because the management in a developer won't take a risk at offending the publisher and decide they'd rather abuse their own employees doesn't mean there aren't options.
My boss tried that on me again last week, just put in a couple more hours, take on another task, work smarter not harder...
That's when you start looking around to see what else is on offer, just in case.
Suggesting something like "perhaps we need to get an additional person on" is useful. The answer you get to that suggestion speaks volumes.
I mean, I don't come up to you and ask you to spend a couple of hours a week working in my garden for free do I? Why is it okay for someone paying you to work "x" hours to ask for an additional "y" hours as a freebie?
What I want to know is if there are any big game companies that have actually done away with crunch time..... With so many reasons to trash crunch time, why haven't we seen this happen??
Huge and steady supply of warm bodies and marketing-driven deadlines being prioritised over software stability. It is cheaper to work star-eyed programmers into the ground and discard them at the end when the overall quality isn't a priority. It's disgusting.
Should we not make some kind of effort to at least appear to be balanced and not start name calling before the fact?
If someone with an established history of violence pulls back to swing a punch at you there is no expectation that you wait for the hit to connect before you defend yourself.
Microsoft have shocking credibility in this area and are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah. "Do No Evil" ranks up there with "Trust Me" or "I Won't Date Rape You But I Spiked Your Drink With Rohypnol So You Won't Remember Anyway".
Urusai, my question to you is one of curiosity: Were you able to make your post equating a positive moral code with drug-assisted rape with a straight face? Genuinely curious.
It's funny, someone was saying exactly the opposite in yet another RIAA/copyright-related thread just a few hours ago.
Obviously I haven't seen the thread or post in question (a link'd be cool if you're sharing), but there are quite a few reasons why a case won't make it to court. Here are some:
1. The entity threatening a case has no ground to stand on and the target knows it. The target tells them to go pound sand. Basically a bluff. 2. The entity threatening a case has solid ground to stand on and the target knows it. The target rolls over and complies. 3. The entity threatening a case has no case whatsoever but is well financed and the target is not. Both know it. The target generally pays their protection money and the lawsuit goes away. 4. The entity threatening a case has solid ground to stand on and the target knows it. The target also knows that the threatening entity does not have the resources to fight it. The target tells them to go pound sand, hoping the entity threatening won't proceed due to the cost to themself. 5. Two parties of limited means have a dispute and they've just been given a quote for the cost of a legal battle. Facing mutual destruction they negotiate.
I'd say a GPL violation case would be mostly 2 and 4. Cases involving the RIAA would be mostly 2 (distributors) and 3 (file sharers).
I'd argue that most court cases are either where the understanding of the situation differs between the entity bringing suit and the target. Much of the remainder would be where a powerful entity is happy to burn a lot of money to weaken a target with little money.
Well, that's it then. I'm changing my name to Mercedes and stealing every Merc I can find. I mean, if the car owner wants to indicate that the car is theirs, why don't they engrave their name on it rather than leaving a Merc logo on it? I mean, it confuses me as to who really owns the car.
Seems like his 'enforcement' has relied on the good nature of the 'violators'.
A quick glance didnt point out any legal findings in real court, so its all just a lot of hot air.
The GPL doesnt stand up.
Lucky all these companies caved in then isn't it? I mean, you'd expect multiple companies to cave in to the demands to fight off the terrifying threat of an individual with a baseless case, right?
Just because it didn't make it to court doesn't mean the case is without merit. In fact quite the opposite. The GPL violators caving before court suggests that they figured there was a good chance they wouldn't win.
Two Jedi and two Sith remain at the end of ROTS and start of ANH. Haven't seen ROTS but I assume only Obi-Wan and Yoda get away. Seems pretty balanced. I always took the Jedi assuming it was a positive to be a flawed assumption, especially since Yoda (generally considered the wise one) keeps expressing doubt as to how to interpret it.
A person has never gotten anywhere near lightspeed, but we accelerate subatomic particles VERY near lightspeed every single day in particle accelerators. Einsteins theories have been very well tested, and they all hold up so far.
A fantastic research area, with great research being done by all involved. I would argue that our knowledge in the area of near-lightspeed travel is hideously incomplete though. Heck, our knowledge in the realm of subatomic particles is hardly complete either.
Based upon what evidence? None other than unbacked up speculation that "we just don't know". We do know what happens with a high degree of accuracy. Of course it's _always_ possible there's something going on we don't understand. But that's not a good enough reason to doubt the existing theories are accurate.
Well, I can hardly disprove the current state of theory as the body of knowledge is still somewhat small, a similar reason to why you can't conclusively prove the current theory. Thus it is going to be very hard to back up my feelings on the issue. This is akin to you asking me to disprove a particular religious theory; the burden is on you to prove your claims, not me to disprove them. In this case though there is supporting evidence to suggest the theory is quite accurate in the realms of knowledge we have tested thus far. But not nearly enough, that is my doubt; I feel we've barely scratched the surface on this issue. Also note that I state I believe the current theory will turn out to be inaccurate, but I'm not flat-out dismissing it entirely, that would be the realm of fools. An hideously incomplete understanding of an area of knowledge is a perfectly acceptable reason to express doubt about existing theories. As we gain more and more knowledge in the area the current theory will be revised and improved. This has happened countless times throughout the history of science and it would be naive to think that our current state of knowledge is perfect. I presume and hope you aren't suggesting this. Likewise there have been people who have criticised others for questioning the current state of knowledge, and from time to time such criticism has been shown to be wrong.
Looking back over my words, using "inaccurate" may have been a poor choice. Perhaps I should have used "hideously incomplete", as that would have been easier to defend if I was called on it. Anyway, this is getting somewhat offtopic, so I'll self-mod by dropping the karma bonus.
Here's hoping that the current theory is wrong or the rules can be stretched. I'm kinda hoping that interstellar exploration becomes a practical possibility one day, even if I'll never be around to see it myself. A speed limit would make such travel impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always gone to the spammers sites, collected email addresses, and submitted them all to each other. I thought everyone did this already. ;)
I'm pretty sure most people using alternative OSes have access to a windows box at work/uni/friends house. Why make the government waste more money then they already do?
You want me to lug all my tax info to a friends place or to work!? Assuming I can find a way to sensibly move that much paper, and I can get the PC time to enter it all, what am I supposed to do if I forget something? Go back and forth a few times?
Call me cynical, but I'll laugh when we soon witness the kinder gentler PayPal. Sure it only took 5 years, a zillion complaints and...oh yeah...some competition to convince them the time is now! They've listened to their customers, and they're tired of being treated like garbage. PayPal listens!
:)
You'll have to be laughing fairly loud to drown out the booming laughter coming from my place when it happens. Competition from a large entity is what is sorely needed; and of all organisations, one loaded with goodwill like Google. Their customers will leave in droves if they don't adapt. I honestly can't wait to see how it turns out.
Note to Google execs: I sell software and will happily pay a much higher margin for a merchant account through a reputable organisation than one with demonstrated poor practices and piles of complaints leveled against them. I am not the only one. You don't even have to match their percentage. This service is sorely needed. I will be watching this one closely.
Finally!
:)
It's about damn time a company with a reputation like Google's got into this area. I hate PayPal with a passion; they wouldn't accept one of my credit cards for an online payment (there were no other choices for the site I was paying), so I contacted their support. Guess how that went? Long story short, two automated emails and one "we won't help you" email over a few weeks. They don't want to help you, they just want your money. Also check out the horror stories of frozen accounts floating around the web.
Another guide to these type of sites is how many hoops you have to jump through to actually contact them. Try it, drop by and click through. See how long it takes to contact someone.
Anyway, sub-rant over. Imagine how a company like google could shake up this area. It's about time a reputable company came in and did a good job. Maybe even micropayments or something similar in the future? I imagine online comic creators would love that one.
I figure they have a few options here:
- Make the servers slower and slower until everyone quits playing.
- Have a virtual asteroid wipe everything out (like the one that killed the dinosaurs, only not real).
- Make a horde of virtual lawyers that sue everyone until they own everything.
- Withdraw all the company's cash and flee to some country without extradition treaties with the U.S.
There's an even more effective way of doing this without the nasty side effects.
No high-level content.
I spent a fair amount of time playing an certain online browser game with a stack of low-level content. To reduce the tedious aspects of the game I spent real-world money to purchase in-game items. I reached the majority of the in-game goals and then discovered that I was sensationally bored of repeatedly clicking the same thing over and over to earn in-game currency and left the game. I looked back and realised I had just spent US$60 on a web game that I had essentially discarded in the end. I then realised that it may have been their business model. Make a fun game with tedious aspects. Allow players to pay to remove tedious aspects. Gradually scale up the tedious aspects until the player quits. Repeat with new players.
I went from bleach blonde, to red, to bald in a month
Now that would look awesome under time-lapse photography. It would look like your head had gone into critical meltdown.
The cd label said "FINAL FANTASY", but only until she selected a bolder typeface.
:)
I stared at this for a good minute until it struck. Thankyou Sir, that was absolutely hilarious.
What pisses me off is that small software developers are treated like the scum of society. 3 strikes against us (in addition to the problems facing any business):
1) Patents
2) Pirates
3) People claiming to be "open source" advocates who want you to share the source with the "community", when all they want is free software (see #2)
I'd rate them in the same order you provided. Patents scare me the most, "pirates" mildly (I hate that term), and the third group the least. I've been asked about the source code for my software a couple of times, and in each case the people asking were extremely polite about it and didn't give me any grief about my decision to not open source it.
Now I like Microsoft as much as the next IT geek (ie. not at all) but I no longer have a clash of conscience over patent issues. The patent system is completely out of control and is causing terrible damage to the industry. As a small developer, patents terrify me. And who are patents supposed to protect in the first place?
Now I don't know the specifics of the case, but given the current rampant abuse of the patent system I'm going to side with the Evil Empire here by default, until I see a decent argument over why this is a fair patent. Most are not. Mind you, MS probably do deserve this sort of thing given their support for software patents.
Invariably, as the shipping date approaches, some similar game will be released, and the client will say, we need to have that feature or this feature.
The developer management has a few more options than rolling over and saying "we'll get out the drums and whips". They can factor in additional time for unspecified features at the start in the initial estimate, and make it known that time is available for the publishers to throw in new features, but no more. They can say "We'd love to, but we'll have to take on another developer or two if you want it on time. That'll cost $X, you pay half, we'll pay half". For a show like E3, you can trade off less visible features to implement after the show and pull the visible ones earlier. You can break off a set of tasks and pass them off to an external contractor ("that'll cost $X, we'll pay half each"). Just because the management in a developer won't take a risk at offending the publisher and decide they'd rather abuse their own employees doesn't mean there aren't options.
My boss tried that on me again last week, just put in a couple more hours, take on another task, work smarter not harder...
That's when you start looking around to see what else is on offer, just in case.
Suggesting something like "perhaps we need to get an additional person on" is useful. The answer you get to that suggestion speaks volumes.
I mean, I don't come up to you and ask you to spend a couple of hours a week working in my garden for free do I? Why is it okay for someone paying you to work "x" hours to ask for an additional "y" hours as a freebie?
What I want to know is if there are any big game companies that have actually done away with crunch time. .... With so many reasons to trash crunch time, why haven't we seen this happen??
Huge and steady supply of warm bodies and marketing-driven deadlines being prioritised over software stability. It is cheaper to work star-eyed programmers into the ground and discard them at the end when the overall quality isn't a priority. It's disgusting.
Should we not make some kind of effort to at least appear to be balanced and not start name calling before the fact?
If someone with an established history of violence pulls back to swing a punch at you there is no expectation that you wait for the hit to connect before you defend yourself.
Microsoft have shocking credibility in this area and are not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
Size matters not.
Dammit that's the last thing I want to hear when I'm sitting at that kind of desk given the view from the cockpit of that thing.
Yeah. "Do No Evil" ranks up there with "Trust Me" or "I Won't Date Rape You But I Spiked Your Drink With Rohypnol So You Won't Remember Anyway".
Urusai, my question to you is one of curiosity: Were you able to make your post equating a positive moral code with drug-assisted rape with a straight face? Genuinely curious.
Thanks. :)
Badass-fu trumps all. ;)
It's funny, someone was saying exactly the opposite in yet another RIAA/copyright-related thread just a few hours ago.
Obviously I haven't seen the thread or post in question (a link'd be cool if you're sharing), but there are quite a few reasons why a case won't make it to court. Here are some:
1. The entity threatening a case has no ground to stand on and the target knows it. The target tells them to go pound sand. Basically a bluff.
2. The entity threatening a case has solid ground to stand on and the target knows it. The target rolls over and complies.
3. The entity threatening a case has no case whatsoever but is well financed and the target is not. Both know it. The target generally pays their protection money and the lawsuit goes away.
4. The entity threatening a case has solid ground to stand on and the target knows it. The target also knows that the threatening entity does not have the resources to fight it. The target tells them to go pound sand, hoping the entity threatening won't proceed due to the cost to themself.
5. Two parties of limited means have a dispute and they've just been given a quote for the cost of a legal battle. Facing mutual destruction they negotiate.
I'd say a GPL violation case would be mostly 2 and 4. Cases involving the RIAA would be mostly 2 (distributors) and 3 (file sharers).
I'd argue that most court cases are either where the understanding of the situation differs between the entity bringing suit and the target. Much of the remainder would be where a powerful entity is happy to burn a lot of money to weaken a target with little money.
Well, that's it then. I'm changing my name to Mercedes and stealing every Merc I can find. I mean, if the car owner wants to indicate that the car is theirs, why don't they engrave their name on it rather than leaving a Merc logo on it? I mean, it confuses me as to who really owns the car.
Seems like his 'enforcement' has relied on the good nature of the 'violators'.
A quick glance didnt point out any legal findings in real court, so its all just a lot of hot air.
The GPL doesnt stand up.
Lucky all these companies caved in then isn't it? I mean, you'd expect multiple companies to cave in to the demands to fight off the terrifying threat of an individual with a baseless case, right?
Just because it didn't make it to court doesn't mean the case is without merit. In fact quite the opposite. The GPL violators caving before court suggests that they figured there was a good chance they wouldn't win.
I'd like to see how they discover midi-chlorians
Holy crap! Lucas actually posts on Slashdot!
And let that be a lesson to any other pea-sized hydrogen capsules that plan to screw with us.
Two Jedi and two Sith remain at the end of ROTS and start of ANH. Haven't seen ROTS but I assume only Obi-Wan and Yoda get away. Seems pretty balanced. I always took the Jedi assuming it was a positive to be a flawed assumption, especially since Yoda (generally considered the wise one) keeps expressing doubt as to how to interpret it.
A person has never gotten anywhere near lightspeed, but we accelerate subatomic particles VERY near lightspeed every single day in particle accelerators. Einsteins theories have been very well tested, and they all hold up so far.
A fantastic research area, with great research being done by all involved. I would argue that our knowledge in the area of near-lightspeed travel is hideously incomplete though. Heck, our knowledge in the realm of subatomic particles is hardly complete either.
Based upon what evidence? None other than unbacked up speculation that "we just don't know". We do know what happens with a high degree of accuracy. Of course it's _always_ possible there's something going on we don't understand. But that's not a good enough reason to doubt the existing theories are accurate.
Well, I can hardly disprove the current state of theory as the body of knowledge is still somewhat small, a similar reason to why you can't conclusively prove the current theory. Thus it is going to be very hard to back up my feelings on the issue. This is akin to you asking me to disprove a particular religious theory; the burden is on you to prove your claims, not me to disprove them. In this case though there is supporting evidence to suggest the theory is quite accurate in the realms of knowledge we have tested thus far. But not nearly enough, that is my doubt; I feel we've barely scratched the surface on this issue. Also note that I state I believe the current theory will turn out to be inaccurate, but I'm not flat-out dismissing it entirely, that would be the realm of fools. An hideously incomplete understanding of an area of knowledge is a perfectly acceptable reason to express doubt about existing theories. As we gain more and more knowledge in the area the current theory will be revised and improved. This has happened countless times throughout the history of science and it would be naive to think that our current state of knowledge is perfect. I presume and hope you aren't suggesting this. Likewise there have been people who have criticised others for questioning the current state of knowledge, and from time to time such criticism has been shown to be wrong.
Looking back over my words, using "inaccurate" may have been a poor choice. Perhaps I should have used "hideously incomplete", as that would have been easier to defend if I was called on it. Anyway, this is getting somewhat offtopic, so I'll self-mod by dropping the karma bonus.
Here's hoping that the current theory is wrong or the rules can be stretched. I'm kinda hoping that interstellar exploration becomes a practical possibility one day, even if I'll never be around to see it myself. A speed limit would make such travel impractical.