Gordon Moore, the guy the "law" was named after, works for Intel. Intel puts a fair bit of weight behind the notion behind it, and they even have a page on their research section about it.
So what we're really doing it devaluing IT work in the US.
No, the price is being brought down to it's true value, because obviously people in America demand to be paid far more than what other people around the world are willing to be paid to do the same job. You can bitch about quality all you like, but not many people make a living building high quality chairs and tables for people with the money to spend on it. Most people just buy the cheap ones and are content to moan about how poor the quality is afterward because fact that it's cheap is far more important.
If making a certain amount of money is what is important to you, I'd switch fields right about now, pal. You're never going to make that kind of money in IT anymore unless you are King Hell Programmer from the Black Lagoon. If working with computers is what you love to do, I'd try and find a segment where there aren't aproximately half a billion people out there with the skills, ability, and willingess to do the job wherever it is (thanks to cheap, high speed comminucations networks that overpaid American IT consultants helped develop, design and implement). Failing that, at least be happy that you're doing what you love. Not many highly paid people can say that.
I don't understand this mentality. Why would buying a product that's presumably been tested and deemed ready for the marketplace be "begging for trouble", whatever "generation" it is?
The mentality arises because people have been presuming that these products have been tested before they are deemed ready for the marketplace. Have you been on a different planet or do you just not play games? Shoddy QA is the industry's stock in trade. No reason at all to be surprised that the newest units don't have some kind of major bug in them.
Maybe if the advertisers actually offered something I wanted, they would see more success.
Problem with that is the only way that advertisers would know what you wanted is if you gave them some information about yourself, which runs headlong into privacy issues (with good reason, I might add). So pretty much you either have no information about you, and shotgun advertising, or targetted ads through personally identifiable information. There really isn't any solid middle ground, save ads on sites which are dedicated to a specific subject (like slashdot). You can't say anything about the people that visit weather.com other than they want to know what the weather will be, and at last count that included damn near everyone. Hard to target something there.
With that said, HL2 does have room for improvement, but not much. It really is a damn good game. I've yet to hear from anyone who's played it all the way through to be disappointed.
Half Life 2 has plenty of room for improvement. However, it's got less room than any other FPS game out there, so it really is quite good. It has many of the same flaws that plague other "tech demo" games like Doom 3, with gimmick sections where they show off all the neat things the engine can do for a level. The section where you control the ant lions is nice, but you're never able to do it again in the game. The scanners guiding the strider, the crane with the electromagnet, playing catch with Dog, etc. Amusing little one-offs, but on the whole pointless additions that didn't expand the story, or enhance gameplay one bit.
However, all those gimmicks are still fun gimmicks, so it's not quite as painful as it sometimes can be. It's got a very good engine it runs through. Very involved and engaging plotline (though I hesitate to call it a story, because there isn't much dialogue...you really have to be able to infer a lot of what's happening from the snatches you hear/see/etc). However, Half Life 2 isn't near the best game ever. Not in my opinion at least, and my opinion is frankly the only one that matters to me.
Where does most gas tax $$$ go to? Highway maintenance.
Numbers please? I'll believe that when I see it. Most of the gas tax is SUPPOSED to go there, but with the roads I've been travelling on lately, I seriously doubt it. When lawmakers get their hands on gas tax money, it's as fungible as any other tax revenue source.
They complain endlessly about how the public doesn't support mass transit yet they refuse to make it a viable option for those that do want to utilize it.
Depends on who "they" are. "They" tend to be the ones that want to utilize it.
"The public", at least in America, likes cars. The government likes cars, because the various industries that support the automobile contribute to politicians. Gas taxes are a large subset of tax revenues. Getting rid of cars requires those tax revenues be made up somewhere. Not a simple thing.
And frankly, mass transit is only really viable if LOTS of people use it. And even then, not without significant government contribution to the system. Lots of people these days in America don't like government contribution to keeping people alive, let alone transport.
Self-updating Windows isn't evil. The problem with Windows is that a significant percentage of the major updates Microsoft pushes to Windows users break things instead of fixing them.
One would hope that the QA department of this theoretical Linux-based office systems company would be a bit better.
Implementations are not fun, but pound for pound, you get serous cash. Especially if you wrote the software to begin with. You can charge the most.
I work as a consultant. I can't code worth a damn. I write the odd Perl script for kicks, and every so often I get it in my head that I'm going to be a programmer and open up a C book, but I'm really just plain awful at it. What I'm really good at is figuring out how to get things to work. I go to clients houses and offices and spend an awful lot of time watching progress bars slide left, at $90-$50/hour (depending on the contract with the customer, and whether it's Windows or MacOS work) plus travel time so they don't have to, and I keep getting checks in the mail, and handed to me. Yeah, there's a fair amount of work, too, but half the time I get paid serious money to do stuff that is so simple and easy to me, but is fiendishly complex to these designers, lawyers, print shop owners, and moms.
I figure I get twice the average return on investment that the average one-man-software-business gets, and I'm just Joe Consultant.
It just doesn't seem like good business sense anymore to spend so much time and effort coding on closed source projects if you are a small-time operator. If you get in on an open source version of the software you are currently writing for profit, you've got many more eyes looking at bugs, and you have a foot in the services door as a comtributor to a piece of software with, 9 out of 10 times, WAY more name recognition than your software will ever have, and access to a far bigger pool of available cash, at a rate of investment far more in your favor.
They wouldn't need to have the driver contact Lexmark to do that. I'm sure you could easily write the driver to detect all that without talking to home.
Well, you obviously didn't glance through all of the points, as you neglect to mention the opcode simmilarities, timeline of significant releases of both pieces of software and the activites of groups known to use Send Safe, and SoBig.
Not to mention the exhaustive opcode comparison diagram at the end of the document.
Circumstantial evidence, it may be, but that doesn't mean it's not valid. And what is forensics aside from a circumstantial investigation? Getting as many facts as you are able to directly observe in order to come to a logical conclusion about a question you can't directly observe the solution to.
One has to wonder, what kind of protection will they be using to prevent these modules from being simply moved from one computer to another?
My guess is...the price. The real w4r3z junkies have gone and passed Neverwinter Nights by LONG ago. They're sinking their teeth into leaked version of Halo 2, burning Xbox and PS2 games, etc. Most people that still play Neverwinter Nights are the same kind of people that would normally pay $10-$15 for a decent D&D module in a hobby store. Those kind of people MAY copy it out to some friends or other, but for 5 or 8 bucks, much cheaper than your normal module, there's no reason not to pay it really. Much better than $30+ for some new generally crappy RPG.
Only one of the modules has more than 2-3 hours of play time so I doubt I'd even bother downloading most of them if they were free. But if they put out some seriously sized modules I would definitely be taking a second look.
I would venture to guess that remakes are important to Nintendo because those are the games that sell like blazes. The Super Mario remakes all sold like crazy when they game out for the GBA. I own a GBA expressly because there are many remakes of the good old games I used to play. I own a single game for the system that isn't a sequel or direct remake (Golden Sun 1). I will more than likely skip buying a GBA SP to replace my original GBA in order to get a DS because Nintendo is remaking more good old games for it.
You may not like it, but money talks a lot louder than the grumbling
Self defeating? That would have to mean I'm in conflict with myself. Aiming for martyrdom just gets you killed, not marytred. Especially for something as ultimately useless as a video game.
If it's the click that generates the acceptance, than people will just start making tools to extract the software without running any install code. (I've actually seen tools that do this already in limited circumstances.)
I've seen games that do this. Prime example being the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights. Following these instructions, given to me by the copyright holder no less, I installed Neverwinter Nights on my Linux system without EVER being prompted with an End User License Agreement. This includes both of the expansions. I wasn't required to agree to anything before I downloaded any of the packages either.
I can't believe I am reading a complaint about a beta service.
You've obviously never been in on any kind of PC game beta then. The whining, moaning, and outright hatred expressed in those places is a regular feature. Constant reminders about how these people are participating in a beta, for free, go unheeded, and likely completely unnoticed.
I completely concur. Right now I do work as a hourly computer consultant (or "tech support for hire" as I like to call it) and I charge full hourly rate for all time on the phone to the useless tech support people, which only really happens with Internet stuff generally, as I generally build all the machines my clients use myself.
We do no advertising, and even then we have more work than we can handle sometimes, just through word of mouth. Personally, I hope computer stuff gets more and more compliacted and touchy, because that means more money for me. Plumbers make a damn good living, and I don't see why I don't stand to do much the same, seeing as the plumbing I work on is way more complex and far more prone to break down.
checking for mass_quantities_of_bass_ale in -lFridge... no checking for mass_quantities_of_any_ale in -lFridge... no Warning: No ales were found in your refrigerator.
I have plenty of ale in my fridge and the script couldn't find it. Somone let the E guys know. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem!!
Slashdot Mirror
Gordon Moore, the guy the "law" was named after, works for Intel. Intel puts a fair bit of weight behind the notion behind it, and they even have a page on their research section about it.
So what we're really doing it devaluing IT work in the US.
No, the price is being brought down to it's true value, because obviously people in America demand to be paid far more than what other people around the world are willing to be paid to do the same job. You can bitch about quality all you like, but not many people make a living building high quality chairs and tables for people with the money to spend on it. Most people just buy the cheap ones and are content to moan about how poor the quality is afterward because fact that it's cheap is far more important.
If making a certain amount of money is what is important to you, I'd switch fields right about now, pal. You're never going to make that kind of money in IT anymore unless you are King Hell Programmer from the Black Lagoon. If working with computers is what you love to do, I'd try and find a segment where there aren't aproximately half a billion people out there with the skills, ability, and willingess to do the job wherever it is (thanks to cheap, high speed comminucations networks that overpaid American IT consultants helped develop, design and implement). Failing that, at least be happy that you're doing what you love. Not many highly paid people can say that.
I don't understand this mentality. Why would buying a product that's presumably been tested and deemed ready for the marketplace be "begging for trouble", whatever "generation" it is?
The mentality arises because people have been presuming that these products have been tested before they are deemed ready for the marketplace. Have you been on a different planet or do you just not play games? Shoddy QA is the industry's stock in trade. No reason at all to be surprised that the newest units don't have some kind of major bug in them.
Maybe if the advertisers actually offered something I wanted, they would see more success.
Problem with that is the only way that advertisers would know what you wanted is if you gave them some information about yourself, which runs headlong into privacy issues (with good reason, I might add). So pretty much you either have no information about you, and shotgun advertising, or targetted ads through personally identifiable information. There really isn't any solid middle ground, save ads on sites which are dedicated to a specific subject (like slashdot). You can't say anything about the people that visit weather.com other than they want to know what the weather will be, and at last count that included damn near everyone. Hard to target something there.
However, when there's no real death penalty to speak of, why bother with the invincibility?
Would you buy a ticket if it cost twice what they do now?
If it was a special 12 hour showing of all three extended editions, I'd easily pay 6 times what I normally pay to see a movie.
With that said, HL2 does have room for improvement, but not much. It really is a damn good game. I've yet to hear from anyone who's played it all the way through to be disappointed.
Half Life 2 has plenty of room for improvement. However, it's got less room than any other FPS game out there, so it really is quite good. It has many of the same flaws that plague other "tech demo" games like Doom 3, with gimmick sections where they show off all the neat things the engine can do for a level. The section where you control the ant lions is nice, but you're never able to do it again in the game. The scanners guiding the strider, the crane with the electromagnet, playing catch with Dog, etc. Amusing little one-offs, but on the whole pointless additions that didn't expand the story, or enhance gameplay one bit.
However, all those gimmicks are still fun gimmicks, so it's not quite as painful as it sometimes can be. It's got a very good engine it runs through. Very involved and engaging plotline (though I hesitate to call it a story, because there isn't much dialogue...you really have to be able to infer a lot of what's happening from the snatches you hear/see/etc). However, Half Life 2 isn't near the best game ever. Not in my opinion at least, and my opinion is frankly the only one that matters to me.
Where does most gas tax $$$ go to? Highway maintenance.
Numbers please? I'll believe that when I see it. Most of the gas tax is SUPPOSED to go there, but with the roads I've been travelling on lately, I seriously doubt it. When lawmakers get their hands on gas tax money, it's as fungible as any other tax revenue source.
Hrm, a Zen master with attatchment issues? Intriguing.
They complain endlessly about how the public doesn't support mass transit yet they refuse to make it a viable option for those that do want to utilize it.
Depends on who "they" are. "They" tend to be the ones that want to utilize it.
"The public", at least in America, likes cars. The government likes cars, because the various industries that support the automobile contribute to politicians. Gas taxes are a large subset of tax revenues. Getting rid of cars requires those tax revenues be made up somewhere. Not a simple thing.
And frankly, mass transit is only really viable if LOTS of people use it. And even then, not without significant government contribution to the system. Lots of people these days in America don't like government contribution to keeping people alive, let alone transport.
The counterargument is that we shouldn't be teaching teenagers and kids that they are A. always being monitored and have no privacy
We should be teaching them that they are always being monitored and have no privacy BECAUSE THAT IS TRUE.
What they do with that knowledge is something else we should be teaching them.
Self-updating Windows isn't evil. The problem with Windows is that a significant percentage of the major updates Microsoft pushes to Windows users break things instead of fixing them.
One would hope that the QA department of this theoretical Linux-based office systems company would be a bit better.
Implementations are not fun, but pound for pound, you get serous cash. Especially if you wrote the software to begin with. You can charge the most.
I work as a consultant. I can't code worth a damn. I write the odd Perl script for kicks, and every so often I get it in my head that I'm going to be a programmer and open up a C book, but I'm really just plain awful at it. What I'm really good at is figuring out how to get things to work. I go to clients houses and offices and spend an awful lot of time watching progress bars slide left, at $90-$50/hour (depending on the contract with the customer, and whether it's Windows or MacOS work) plus travel time so they don't have to, and I keep getting checks in the mail, and handed to me. Yeah, there's a fair amount of work, too, but half the time I get paid serious money to do stuff that is so simple and easy to me, but is fiendishly complex to these designers, lawyers, print shop owners, and moms.
I figure I get twice the average return on investment that the average one-man-software-business gets, and I'm just Joe Consultant.
It just doesn't seem like good business sense anymore to spend so much time and effort coding on closed source projects if you are a small-time operator. If you get in on an open source version of the software you are currently writing for profit, you've got many more eyes looking at bugs, and you have a foot in the services door as a comtributor to a piece of software with, 9 out of 10 times, WAY more name recognition than your software will ever have, and access to a far bigger pool of available cash, at a rate of investment far more in your favor.
They wouldn't need to have the driver contact Lexmark to do that. I'm sure you could easily write the driver to detect all that without talking to home.
Well, you obviously didn't glance through all of the points, as you neglect to mention the opcode simmilarities, timeline of significant releases of both pieces of software and the activites of groups known to use Send Safe, and SoBig.
Not to mention the exhaustive opcode comparison diagram at the end of the document.
Circumstantial evidence, it may be, but that doesn't mean it's not valid. And what is forensics aside from a circumstantial investigation? Getting as many facts as you are able to directly observe in order to come to a logical conclusion about a question you can't directly observe the solution to.
One has to wonder, what kind of protection will they be using to prevent these modules from being simply moved from one computer to another?
My guess is...the price. The real w4r3z junkies have gone and passed Neverwinter Nights by LONG ago. They're sinking their teeth into leaked version of Halo 2, burning Xbox and PS2 games, etc. Most people that still play Neverwinter Nights are the same kind of people that would normally pay $10-$15 for a decent D&D module in a hobby store. Those kind of people MAY copy it out to some friends or other, but for 5 or 8 bucks, much cheaper than your normal module, there's no reason not to pay it really. Much better than $30+ for some new generally crappy RPG.
Only one of the modules has more than 2-3 hours of play time so I doubt I'd even bother downloading most of them if they were free. But if they put out some seriously sized modules I would definitely be taking a second look.
I would venture to guess that remakes are important to Nintendo because those are the games that sell like blazes. The Super Mario remakes all sold like crazy when they game out for the GBA. I own a GBA expressly because there are many remakes of the good old games I used to play. I own a single game for the system that isn't a sequel or direct remake (Golden Sun 1). I will more than likely skip buying a GBA SP to replace my original GBA in order to get a DS because Nintendo is remaking more good old games for it.
You may not like it, but money talks a lot louder than the grumbling
Take your selfdefeating attitude and shove it.
Self defeating? That would have to mean I'm in conflict with myself. Aiming for martyrdom just gets you killed, not marytred. Especially for something as ultimately useless as a video game.
Besides, Blizzard is only one head of the hydra.
If it's the click that generates the acceptance, than people will just start making tools to extract the software without running any install code. (I've actually seen tools that do this already in limited circumstances.)
I've seen games that do this. Prime example being the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights. Following these instructions, given to me by the copyright holder no less, I installed Neverwinter Nights on my Linux system without EVER being prompted with an End User License Agreement. This includes both of the expansions. I wasn't required to agree to anything before I downloaded any of the packages either.
No one's gonna remember your sacrifice against a game company.
The truest statement yet posted in this entire thread.
More likely that they'd be moshing to "CHEWBACCA!!! *guitar riff* WHAT A WOOKIE!!!!"
YEAH!
I can't believe I am reading a complaint about a beta service.
You've obviously never been in on any kind of PC game beta then. The whining, moaning, and outright hatred expressed in those places is a regular feature. Constant reminders about how these people are participating in a beta, for free, go unheeded, and likely completely unnoticed.
I completely concur. Right now I do work as a hourly computer consultant (or "tech support for hire" as I like to call it) and I charge full hourly rate for all time on the phone to the useless tech support people, which only really happens with Internet stuff generally, as I generally build all the machines my clients use myself.
We do no advertising, and even then we have more work than we can handle sometimes, just through word of mouth. Personally, I hope computer stuff gets more and more compliacted and touchy, because that means more money for me. Plumbers make a damn good living, and I don't see why I don't stand to do much the same, seeing as the plumbing I work on is way more complex and far more prone to break down.
checking for mass_quantities_of_bass_ale in -lFridge... no
checking for mass_quantities_of_any_ale in -lFridge... no
Warning: No ales were found in your refrigerator.
I have plenty of ale in my fridge and the script couldn't find it. Somone let the E guys know. I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem!!