Whereas I agree we can survive without social networking and entertainment products, I'm not sure Internet search is so easily dispensed with.
Certainly, my job as a software developer would become approximately 5x more inefficient - the Internet is a treasure trove of problem solutions and basic and advanced reference information that is easily located.
In the old days (which I still remember), I'd have to order (often sight unseen) a bunch of books and hope they had the reference material I needed in them and I'd possibly have had to spend significant time resolving problems others had solved (but I had no easy access to their solutions).
Fast Internet search with much useful information available freely is a huge mulitplier to productivity in my work.
Many people use the internet for productive purposes, both at work and in their personal lives (finding out about government services, locating services more effectively than a phonebook, getting directions to places without having to go out and find and buy a map, filing forms online, doing research, etc). Remove that and you make peoples' personal and work lives in many cases far less efficient. That has a clear cost in terms of productivity, dollars, and time.
I remember the early days of the Net. I remember how limited the information available was and the challenges of trying to locate the information that was there in a format that was useful. I also remmeber some of the early balkanization of the corporate parts of the Internet... Compuserve wasn't exactly cheap back in the day, as one very trivial example. Access was expensive and it took a long time to locate and longer to acquire useful information.
Google, when it came along and put the smackdown on the other search companies which, in their day, had been big steps forward, created a net productivity gain for pretty much anyone whose job requires finding things out in a fast and efficient manner. Unsurprisingly, this spills over into people's private lives as well.
So, as much as your comment is far on social networking and entertainment, it is blatant tripe when it comes to fast, broad Internet search. Yes, we would not immediately keel over dead if we didn't have it, but make no mistake, it would cost our economy tens or hundreds of millions of dollars *per day*. That's a serious impact.
There are some questions about BBC and the abuse of language its broadcasters seem to engage in.
BBC : Normal Humans
Reg you lay toe ree : Regulatory (lah instead of lay)
Drugs War : Drug War
Drink Driving : Drunk Driving (or Drinking and Driving)
Al bee nizm : Albinism (with a pine sound in the middle)
BBC Sport : I guess they used up there stocks of the letter s on Drugs War
Sigh rah que suh : Syracuse (with a see sound at the start)
Aw say kah : Osaka (with an oh sound and then a saw sound)
The BBC has a tongue firmly in cheeck if they are addressing the changes in language. Surely they do not speak the Englis of the King anymore. Nor that of the Queen. Nor even some unacknowledged bastard, nine degrees removed variant therof.
I am totally ignoring their pronunciation (or is that pro noun see ae shun?) of various English town names. I assume some of those are at least rooted in antiquity.
Poor planning. Eclipse should not use a 'company' field to be pulling key VM info from. And there should be another more particular way to acquire VM information applications require.
That was a poorly thought out situation from the get-go, but Oracle was mightily short sighted for making this change without much testing of compatible apps. Mind you, it isn't their fault as such, but pissing off all of those using Eclipse is mightily retarded.
While we're on the subject of retarded, automatic updates? You deserve what you get if you trust those. You should be damn sure an update is solid, stable, and won't give you a BOHICA experience before you apply it. No sympathy for auto-update users.... that's just bad planning as well.
So: Oracle: Minor thumbs down. Eclipse devs: Thumbs up overall (except for bloating), but thumbs down for this one. Auto-update Users: Not bothering with a thumb, too busy ROFLMAO.
For example, there are consumers like me for whom single player games are a non-starter. I code for a living and have worked multiple times in video games development - including two massively multi-user projects. For me, playing the computer is for the most part pointless. Either the AI is good and I lose or it is poor and I win.
The entire point of gaming is the social aspect of multiplayer. But I'm part of a small community of friends that buys the same games (evolves over time, but we're still playing IL-2, the original AvP and some other older games), plays them together, and travels half-way across continents sometimes for F2F get togethers that become LAN parties half the time.
As long as the game supports LAN play, I'll be able to get the same fun out of a game years later (Ghost Recon Gold is one example, NWN 1 is another). It's only the MP games that are internet-server-only. Even WOW has now been cracked to allow people to run their own Servers, so even that isn't a cut and dried line.
For me, if it hasn't got MP (and I mostly don't care about SP - haven't finished HL's single player, nor most of the ten or fifteen other games I play... L4D being one of the few exceptions), I won't be buying it (generally).
The only two single player games I really enjoy are both on MAME - Pipes and Tetris. Even Pipes is better played with two players.
If it isn't about socializing with and competing in good nature with your fellow humans, what is it about? Beating a programmer's algorithm? Beating slow AI code or weak hardware? Finding glitches a programmer didn't think of? I guess some of the more story-intensive games may be fun single player experiences, but most of them have little replay value once you've seen the story play out.
To me, MP isn't optional, it's the core feature I shop for. SP is 'meh, so what' and I usually think it a waste of developer cycles.
To each his own but the poster seems to think SP is what matters and MP is an option. I'd argue quite the opposite for some of us.
Skype has reasons for moving their feature set forward at a deliberate (slow by some standards) pace.
If Fring is using their API within the terms of use, then they're good. If they aren't, then not so much. Beyond that, I'll bet the Skype Terms of Use for the API will have a clause allowing them to change at Skype's whim, so ticking off the Skype folks is a quick recipe to a bad end for any clients.
Obviously Fring can shoot their mouths off about how slow the people providing them with something they can't be bothered to develop themselves are. Maybe they should save that energy and develop a replacement that is better and has all the features they want and which they own the IP for. Or maybe they should STFU and use the product within the terms of use.
It's always hilarious when groups not implementing feature X because they get it from (other company/API/open-source project/library/etc) start carping about that stuff they have integrated rather than produce themselves. That sort of approach is both politically stupid (alienate the provider's devs) and ultimately does not help the using group because they aren't going to get the new features they want any faster by acting like infants throwing a tantrum.
Fring, I certainly wouldn't support your product now. Infantile petulance is about as non-professional as it gets.
Know what you know (actually, quite hard when you start out) Know what you don't know (ditto)
Sun Tzu said something to the effect if you know yourself and not your foe, you will win 50% of the time. If you know your foe but not yourself, also 50%. If you know neither, you are borked. If you know both, you can't lose.
This turns out to be fairly accurate in a technology field.
Don't try to convince people you can do things you can't (nor convince yourself of that), but do try to do what you can and know where the boundary of that ends.
One of the things that takes the longest to learn in programming and software design is to recognize when the (as yet unattempted or uninvestigated) task before you is beyond your expertise to deliver quickly and well. But that's also the most critical skill from a perspective of being managed or managing someone - knowing what you/they can or cannot manage.
If I think you can manage something and you can't, we've got a situation for sure. If I know you can't manage something quickly/well, I can use my management skills to find ways to resolve that issue. I can bring in someone to mentor you and oversee you and assist you. I can reallocate the task and find something better suited to your skills. I can accept a longer timeline and more challenges in the production and let you dig away and learn as you go.
But if I think you're going to do something well and you suddenly tell me at the last minute we won't be hitting our deadlines and the project is pooched... then you will be up against a wall (figuratively) because I as your manager will be as well.
I've screwed that up once, badly, in 15 years of good delivery of software for complex real world systems. It was not good. If I hadn't had a long track record, I'd have been gone. I didn't know enough to know that I didn't know near enough. I didn't know enough to know how far I was from done. And so I never threw up the flags management needed to see. So they were blindsided and the customer was pissed.
I don't recomend that. But if it happens to you, it'll be something you'll never want to repeat. Try to really come to terms with what you know, what you don't know, and don't be afraid at the outset not to say 'yes I can do this' when you haven't a schmeck if you can. Say 'I can look at this and quickly try to get an idea how involved this is and how easy this is going to be to manage and get back to you ' or else 'I don't have the information at the moment to know how challenging this will be - any estimate I give you now won't be based on a good understanding of the task'.
Don't be afraid to ask for help. It's better to have someone senior roll their eyes at you a bit but straighten you out than it is to spend two weeks trying to do something you're clueless about. A can-do attitude is important, but so is a realistic impression of what you can do by yourself and what you can do with a bit of guidance. If you are reasonably educated and a smart individual, with some guidance, you can probably manage a lot.
I've been doing this a long time and have delivered over a dozen large scale projects in different domains (public safety, defense, cellular, on-line gaming, enterprise web apps, point of sale, and VOIP of the ones I remember). The best skills I've developed are knowing how to speak and understand the language of my managers or senior company execs (so you know what they want and how they need to have it parcelled) and knowing what I can do immediately (and what I don't) and how to say "I need some time but I'll find out what you need to know".
I like the look of proportional fonts. But if you go for elastic tabstops, everyone using your code (you, your boss, your co-workers, the company you might be developing the code for which might not be yours, maybe co-workers on other teams too that might need to spelunk the code) all have to be using editors capable of using these elastic tab stops.
If they aren't, and the number of tabs inserted was different or if someone mixes spaces and tabs, it'll look like hell if they're using a different-width or different-kerning font (including fixed width).
And yes, some of you say 'too bad for them'. Except of course that quite a few of them may be higher on the corporate food chain than you are and/or perfectly willing to make your life miserable until you conform to a standard.
If everyone moved to Elastic Tabstops, and all the tools did, I'd love that.
Unrelately, my favourite programming fixed width font is: Andale Mono (check it out)
Correction: Does not require *customer supplied* power. POTS does require power. Either that or the phone company has done some neat things with the laws of physics!
This matters insofar as if you lose your POTS line, you're out of comission. In a number of disasters the world over in the last few years, cell networks have stood up when POTS networks were problematic. Sometimes call volumes will flood a cell network, but the distributed nature of the cell towers makes it hard to kill them all in most disasters.
Don't get me wrong, I still get a chuckle when you get the old connect noise from a model and kids today look puzzled and have no idea what the noise is...
POTS and cellular and VOIP (in the PSTN or in the customer premise) all have their place.
POTS doesn't have the same 911 issues that VOIP-Internet does and VOIP-Internet is usually disclaimered all over the place about not using it for 911 because of this. Additionally, VOIP-Internet availability is usually tied to your local access (cable, DSL, whatever) and that does NOT have the same sort of reliability your POTS system has.
In all my life, all the different places I lived, I can count on 2 or 3 fingers the number of times I picked up a POTS phone and had issues connecting out to somewhere.
Cellular, it's probably that many times a day as I move around. VOIP-Internet, about 1/month there is some interfering downtime with my cable connection to the net.
Of course, if the go phone-company VOIP to the customer premise with the kind of gear and network management that will give us the same sorts of uptime you actually achieve with POTS, then that won't be so bad. But that's not going to be your normal DSL or cable line unless there's a big change in there SLAs and networks.
I was that kid that coasted through high-school. The school had streams for regular students and ones having difficulties. It had good vocational and trade training too. I took every math and science course my school offered and made it into a prestidgious university.
Then I discovered I was missing a year of extra education (being from out of province) and hit a wall in a few critical cubjects. We never really did much matrix math in high school and the first time I heard the term eigenvector was in an alleged review segment at the beginning of a university course. Our math and physics in HS didn't involve calculus because only about 15% of the grads took calculus. (This is a couple of decades back, FYI).
My response to an already heavy workload (36 hours of classes + 36-72 hours of homework per week) was to work harder and harder to make up for my defficiencies. I tried to do every assignment, every lab, and attend every lecture. I faithfully copied page after page of notes in a physics course that I just didn't get (we averaged 12 pages per 50 minute period). And I got in deeper and deeper, because I didn't have the experience with how to get past the challenges here. And I sucked in two courses, ran afoul of academic regulations and unfamiliarity with the university bureaucracy, and my university career went down in a flaming heap despite my best efforts.
After a year of arsing about in part-time studies, I elected to attend a local college. Best move I ever made. In college, everything wasn't all about two exam days a year. Success revolved around solid day to day performance, ability to work in teams, and ability to make things that needed to work. Your style and design was considered if your code or electronic hardware project worked. If it didn't, your style or approach didn't matter. There I learned ring theory, queue theory, inferrential and descriptive statistics, control systems, microcontrollers and processors, all sorts of peripherals, programming in assemblers and C, and how to produce professional quality technical documentation for all stages of projects and how to present to groups small and large. I graduated there with distinction. And then took a second college degree in the software side of things. And have been working as a software engineer for 15 years.
The difference was in college, I had to learn to assess my pile of work and figure out what was vital, what was not, what I was going to suck on even if I spent hours on it, and what I was going to get good return on when I worked at it. I also had to figure out when I was too tired to attend a morning class and allow myself the leeway to cut it, despite 'having to be there'. The reality is, with a bit more sleep (working less hard), a lot more targeted work (working more effectively), and an understanding of the processes of going over, around or through obstacles, I graduated with distinction from our local technical college twice in different programs.
High school did little to prepare me for university because it never challenged me. It left me in at the deep end, in a course where the faculty was already out to fail a fair portion just to reduce class sizes and maintain exclusivity, when I was busy trying to learn (with no guidance) the skills needed to handle workload balance, triage of work tasks, and so on. I could not have worked any harder at university (I slept 4-6 hours a night and worked 7 days a week) but I could have worked far more effectively if there had been any prior introduction to these sorts of issues.
If our high school had an enrichment stream, I would have been challenged there, developed the skills there, went into university better prepared, and probably would have a univeristy degree and be a working professional engineer now. Now, to go back and upgrade to something that will let me get a P.Eng. after my name is a harder process and a lengthy and expensive one.
I can't see why anyone thinks there should not be an enrichment stream in public education. Why is it at all logic
This film should vault Neill Blomkamp into sci-fi stardom, on par with George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame). This is certainly a must-see movie -- easily the best movie of the year.
You mean he'll be in the group "those should have stopped their major franchises about two to three movies before they did"?
I admit I'm looking forward to this film. But being declared on par with George Dialog Torturer Lucas and the Wachwoskis (I wish I had taken the blue pill before the second and third movies) isn't saying a lot.
I'm unaware of any case where you can be given 5 years for not opening the trunk of your car. You could probably be charged with something, but it wouldn't be five years in jail.
Here's what I would have posted if Amazon's website would have let me: (apparently I have to buy from the US branch to count in this discussion... no wonder it is a lovefest....)
I am not a fan of any technology which lets a retailer rethink their decision to sell me something post-facto and then decide to yank back that product. In the first place, this simply sets a bad precedent. In the second place, it shows poor foresight and procedure. In the third place, it is a crappy way to resolve the problem.
If someone had sold copies of an illegal paper book, how would this have been resolved? Certianly the move that Amazon pulled with the Kindle would not have been possible unless they have teams of black ops people sneaking into houses, stealing back the offending copies, and leaving a cheque like the tooth fairy. Some other mechanism of return would be required or Amazon would have had to resolve the matter directly with the original rights holder, perhaps by simply writing them a check for the N copies of the book that went out and were unlikely to be recovered.
This 'surreptitious return' was only possible because of invasive Kindle technology and has no amalgam in the actual tangible goods market. THAT is my root problem with this situation - it displays once and for all that the user is no longer buying a tangible physical good, simply a license to use something. This is like having a paper book show up wrapped in shrink wrap with a EULA at the front. Is that on the horizon soon? If not, then why should the consumers condone and support any product/policy that tries to inflict this in the e-book market?
Amazon should not have this capability in their e-book reader period. E-books should be treated analogously to real books, as if they were a tangible physical good. In this event, Amazon would have had to either simply deal with the issue financially with the rights holder or attempt a voluntary recall which would have involved concious choice from the various book owners. They might have had to incentivize the book owners to return the copies. Instead, the pulled a midnight raid on the e-book libraries. Not only should this not have happened, the capability for it should never have existed in the first place.
As to the apology: So far, without tangible actions to back it up and some profound changes in how the Kindle works, all I see is a CEO doing some PR damage control. Mr. Bezos may even mean what he says, but unless the Kindle itself is changed to render this sort of involuntary recall impossible and unless e-books begin to be treated like tangible books, this apology is meaningless.
Yes, what you said. Very much so. And those nuances are very important in some cases. No system I'm aware of comes even close to handling nuance and none handle the extreme variances in accents you get when you have (for instance) English speakers who have Indian background, Asian background, or French background. Each accent changes how the English words sound and even sentence construction.
If I get only a text, I might think I'm being called by a person of dubious education (given the grammatical construction errors) but the reality (which would be obvious in listening to the voicemail) is that they are really not a primary English speaker. People tend to make assumptions like that when they don't have immediate evidence to the contrary.
Also, one of the things people miss when they talk about never wanting to have voicemail and about 'if it is important, they'll call you back' - that's a self-centric view. If it is important *to them* they'll call you back, not necessarily if that call is important *to you*. Voicemail catches plenty of business calls and usually people will leave a callback number. If you don't get back to them, they may well NOT call back and you'll miss a business opportunity or some other key happening.
Voicemail also serves as a screening tool (as others have said). I get a voicemail from someone, I don't have to talk to them *right then*, I can talk to them at a time of my choosing. I can also use their voice message as a way to gauge the urgency and time sensitivity of the issue in order to determine when the optimal time to return their call is.
Voicemail won't be dying anytime soon. Slate just has a penchant for ridiculous prognostications (part of being wannabee futurist types).
It is possible that the people who want to sell you a product don't want to announce the capability they wish to sell you is not necessary.
Besides, if the government is after you, they have such a variety of options to figure out what goes on (pin cameras, laser mics, various other forms of mics, analysis programs that can guess what you are typing, installation of keyloggers, and just simple acquisition with legal means like a warrant) that worrying about whether they may, beyond all known capabilities of industry, be able to recover data off your drive is absolutely hilarious.
If you're that paranoid, just never, ever do or say anything the government will pay attention to. In the maxima, this means never doing or saying anything. Ever.
Roads are an interesting analogy. I'm wondering if, when we built our roads, the assumption was that 90% of the people using them would only take there car out for 15 minutes a day for a very local commute, rather than being in it all day going full tilt (and all night)...
The reality of how the Internet has changed since the earlier days of the 1990s (ROFL!) is that the "E-mail Grannies" aren't the main users and quite a few applications nowadays demand high bandwidth. Yes, I'm thinking of torrents, but also streaming video and audio, massive file downloads, etc). Hell, websites that used to be less than 20Kb per page are now up over 1 Mb/page average - a 50 fold increase (at least) in size. And that's in about 10-15 years.
We like to think of the Intertubes as a digital virtual world. It is that. But it all runs on physical devices, over physical infrastrucure. That stuff takes time to build and is expensive to build. Anyone who has ever tried to get permissions to put up radio towers in an urban area will tell you the administrative steps are often non-trivial. So is last mile connection (or even backbone fiber installation). So this whole process is expensive. And that means it gets done by big companies, who are themselves stuck under lots of regulation and have huge amounts of process. (e.g. Here in Canada, you can take some black humour out of the fact installing a Bell phone involves about 17 different internal groups and costs way more than Bell can actually bill you for the installation).
So we have big behemoth companies (in most cases) owning much of the infrastructure. Their business cycles are ponderous and the physical infrastructure deployment and updates are expensive and time consuming (Hmmm... roads are pretty similar that way). And the infrastructure will take 10-15 years (I'd guess) to pay itself off. So we're still paying off late 1st and 2nd generation hardware while having to deploy later generation networks with far more capacity... and wondering why this isn't all going the way we'd like.
The reality is most roads are underwritten by tax dollars. It's hard to tell when a road 'breaks even', but they are a necessary part of modern infrastructure so they are supported by our taxes - on businesses and personal income. And the road grid couldn't build out capacity to meet 50 fold changes in demand in any short period either. And doubly not so if they're still paying off earlier investments.
So, if we all want a high-bandwidth, no-metering Internet that isn't one big service unavailable situation, the 'alleged free market' may be part of our solution. So too may be declaring the Internet infrastructure just as useful as roads and supporting it with tax revenues. (I can hear the screaming already.)
Or else, go to a 'pay for what you use' scenario. Someone says 'but ISPs would make less money' and that falsely assumes rates would stay similar to today. Occasional access would get more expensive. If you want big, shiny new networks deployed quickly, then ROI for the big companies (if not tax supported) is going to have to be 5 years or less. Figure at least a doubling, possibly a tripling in access costs for most of us. But you'll have that unlimited, unmetered service... for $800 a month. Someone will do the math and find out what to bill you, but most of the current bandwidth offenders (college kids, teenagers, etc - yes I'm stereotyping) could not afford the service and would have to curb their habits.
It's simple economics and the current model doesn't work. If these are the 'information highways', then they need funded like real roads do - high tolls for use or big tax dollars thrown to back them up. Since we need THESE roads redeployed every 5 years to meet increasing demand (not just new roads, but upgrading existing ones), then expect this to cost a lot. Or else expect brownouts, maybe blackouts, crappy performance, dubious contractual offerings from providers, and maybe some provider going bankrupt - bad, but actually the likely course.
Sometimes, game devs hit the home-run and make a story I can't put down (KOTOR II, HL-2). Other times, most of the time... not so much.
I find that people who think they've got to control the narrative or interactions with the world are people who think I need to see their story, rather than help much in making my own. KOTOR was a bit that way, but at least it offered you multiple paths and endings. Things like L4D leave you to fill in a lot of the details. Things like MUDs always did - they rely on players and their characters bringing key interactivity to the world. Modern MMOs, at their best, have elements of that, when they aren't grind-fests or 300 person raids.
There used to be trends like this in RPGs - The DM/GM is god, it is his story, blah blah blah. Works fine with 14 year olds. Get to 24 or 34 and people start saying 'Hmmm, I think I have something to contribute and I don't need railroaded'. Older GMs and players learn that a good RPG is about shared contribution and working together to build a meaningful narrative or story. The GM might still provide some plot elements, but not all of them - his players provide some and he learns to integrate those. Some are by their requests, some are by their actions and interactions, some are accidents - but all make the story more than the sum of its parts. And they help to make the world feel like it is about the players, and not about the GM (or in the case of video games, the authors). What matters in the game - the player or the author? If the author isn't clear and thinks he's what matters, he may end up writing quite a few sucking games.
Again, this may be age related. Or mood related. Some days people like having stories laid out before them like a movie, with little choice. But other times they get pretty sick of not having options and not being able to just punch some of the real jerks in the story lines right in the face (for instance... not saying I have had that experience....always....). I think the older the gamer, the more times he's been along the railroad and the less he's interested in it.
Journalists usually make the mistake of saying "so many of X could supply all of the continental US" but the only sane informed people that advocate "one true energy" are lying to sell things. For example - Tidal power in the Bay of Fundy could supply the continent but at slack water what do you do? A mixture can play to the advantages of each method.
One of the things most people don't understand is the difference between base load and peak load. That difference can be between 50% and 100% of base load.
NOWHERE is there the vast capacitor banks you'd need to turn some generation technologies into something capable of sustaining this variance. Does not exist and won't - sans some amazing miracle of energy storage on a massive scale.
Some sorts of power can be (relatively) quickly spooled up to help cope with peak demands. Having a continental grid where you can vary sourcing for power helps a bit too, as different areas will be in different parts of the daily demand cycle (different time zones, for that matter).
Wind, for instance: It's hard to use it for base load generation because of its variable nature. Nuclear, on the other hand, is good for baseload generation but spooling up or shutting down a reactor is not a quick process (measured in months, IIRC).
So you need a mix of relatively constant output energy sources to provide base load and additional fast ramp-up/down sources for coping with rising and falling demand on top of the base load.
The grid could certainly get smarter, decentralize some generation, create capacity to sell back power to the utility, shunt power around to cope with daily cycles, and actually put certain technologies in place to help change the existing extents of the variance. But ultimately, we'll still have a big bump when everyone gets home from work and turns on the appliances for dinner, cranks the AC, etc.
No one energy technology promises to deal with all of our energy needs. Even nuclear fuel isn't abundant enough to see us beyond a few hundred years at best (last I heard). We'll need all our sources of energy, known and waitin to emerge. We'll also need different sorts of generation for handling variable load and to accomodate regional differences (Solar in Ontario in the winter is not as useful as one might like, panels being under 3' of snow and all...).
That's a long winded way of agreeing with the original poster about no one energy source being our answer. The nuclear side of things... others have tackled that.
I imagine that some things would transfer (for instance, you may know enough to check your six regularly, to use cover and to look for it as you move, etc). This is more in the domain of tactical choices.
The actual muscle skills (marksmanship, running, evasive manouvers, etc) are clearly not similar.
And the physics engine of RealLife(TM) is fairly different than most games. Most games have a slant on how their physics should work and you learn to adapt to it. But it isn't ultra-realistic, unless you play hardcore sim FPSes. Even they aren't real, just more real.
One example of a somewhat similar nature: When my old infantry reserve unit fielded a paintball team, they were mortified when the guys from the local comic shop kicked them around so badly. I heard comments like 'my FN wouldn't have been stopped by a twig' or other equally hilarious complaints. The actual military fieldcraft skills had some benefits for sneaking around, but the performance of the hardware (mainly paintball ballistics and the jam rates of paintball guns of the day) was different enough that the locals put the boots to the soldiers quite handily.
As I pointed out to one of the guys in the unit though: If a fat guy in purple coveralls can get within 30' to kill you with an inaccurate marker, what would a guy with an AK manage? That shut down the complaints pretty fast.
One of the interesting aspects of trying to carry training across to a different situation is that you sometimes learn lessons in training that aren't just un-useful, they're actually dangerous in the real situation.
I'm not bright enough to figure out the whole 'copying is stealing/no it is not!' situation. I'm a software professional and I'm quite sure that my industry needs income to survive. If somebody has done some work that they have spent time and effort and therefore money on to create value and they want paid for it and I then copy their work and use it without paying them, I'm doing them a dirty turn.
Don't look at this in terms of stealing a tangible good, look at it in terms of an author's right to specify under what terms someone can use his product - and no, I'm not talking about what *is enforceable* just what sort of world we might want to live in. Someone created something and they are asking that I respect their terms of use and compensate them. If I don't, I *know* I'm taking the product of their work, deriving a benefit from it, and not respecting their wishes. In a world where that happens all the time, there is a lot less incentive to do such work as you can't afford to eat.
So, at the very least, I try to buy my albums or songs, buy the software I use, etc. I do use some open source freeware - I also appreciate the people who build this. But I don't assume everyone wants to operate like this. I know some bands want me to send them 'what I think their product is worth' and if they're good, I'll send a fair bit. I want to support these folks. But again, I'm letting *them* determine the terms of use they wish to set for their efforts/products.
I do this because I'd very much prefer living in a world where, when I write something at work, others respect the terms of use for my work as created by my employer. It's simply a matter of thinking how I'd like to be treated and extending that into the world which seems an ethical way to go about life.
I know there will be pirates. I know in some cases, people need a piece of software and can't afford it, so they boost it. I don't like it, but I know it happens. However, I also know a lot of the time, people say they can't afford it when what they really mean is 'I could afford it, but I'm going to spend the money on something else instead' because if they can get free stuff, they feel no ethical obligation to remunerate the producer, even if that person has asked them to by creating terms of use that require it.
But knowing these folks exist doesn't mean their sort of world is the one I'd want to encourage. Maybe this is the way we should think about the whole pirate/not-pirate issue. At least it strikes me as a decent sort of scenario if most people approach things thus.
Now, my pet peeve about software licensing:
I have a big hate on for inflexible licenses. If someone sells me a piece of software (say an office suite) for my home office and I'm one guy, I have a dev/work desktop, a dev/work laptop, and a netbook (plus maybe a few servers for backup or web surfing at home). Now, most modern licensing schemes want me to buy N copies (where N = number of computers) even though *I can only be using one of them at a time*.
Given the evolution of modern small networks in people's houses, why the heck haven't they developed better small network floating licenses? I'm not talking a corporate floating license which will be used by N people at a company who are employees. I'm talking about a home or home office license that has one 'employee' or 'owner' who needs to use things on multiple computers. I guess I'm arguing for 'per user' licensing rather than 'per machine' (for most things - maybe not OS). The lack of such flexible licensing probably leads to a lot of small office and home software piracy.
The one piece of software I recently downloaded that gets this, oddly enough, was an RPG tool called KloogeWerks. It actually allows you to buy floating license packs for clients so your local small server can support a varied group of clients. That's the sort of modernization of licensing paradigms we need to see more of. Either per-user or floating office licenses for reasonable prices.
Some of the responses in this thread make me think a lot of the folks responding either don't do contract software development for a customer, don't work on any sort of mission critical software, or aren't terribly mature.
An easter egg is:
a) extra code that could introduce a new bug (accidents happen, even in easter eggs - I've seen a screwed up easter egg crash a program and leave the machine locked up)
b) something that is not part of requirements and if caught during client code reviews or after installation, would put your employer in a complicated position since your spending time on such an unallocated task could basically be considered a form of fraud if the client is paying for your services
c) a sign of vanity - professionals do the job, do it well, and move on, not write silly-ass amateur crap just to amuse themselves and stroke their egos
d) something some other poor software engineer might have to fix or remove and they might not find so darn funny
A professional should take satisfaction in a job done well.
Do civil or mechanical engineers leave easter eggs? Do nurses? Do doctors? Grow the hell up... people bitch about software folks never being given the same respect as other engineering fields and it is the attitude of the average programmer that has a sizable part in explaining this.
Would you want your doctor leaving an easter egg? Would you want your dentist? Or would you find it funny if your phone dialed random numbers on some developers birthday? Or if your traffic light flashed all green every summer solstice? I think not.
I suspect the gulf here between those respondents who manage programmers and deal with clients or who work in any form of mission critical software or professional services and those who write shrink-wrapped software or less critical applications when it comes to easter eggs is probably sizable. All it takes is seeing a co-worker having his ass kicked because a manager had his chewed off by an angry client to understand that, in professional environments, this kind of stuff doesn't fly (and shouldn't).
You're not paid to be an artist. If you were, they'd cut one copy of your code and display it up in a museum. You're paid to implement requirements as defined by your employer and possibly your customer. When you aren't doing that, you're basically screwing the pooch and exploiting your employer. Some may feel justified doing this, but that's a crock. If you don't like the job, GTFO. If you do like the job, be a professional and leave the high-school hijinks behind.
(And yes, I've worked for 15 years in mission critical software for the police, the military, air navigation training systems, cell phone portals, VOIP and call processors, HR systems, and so on, so it does colour my view on easter eggs...)
Can't say as I agree with you on that. The original poster was right - it would be a different story if it happened to you. And besides, your own argument is flawed - if these events have a nil chance of happening to you, there literally is nothing to worry about. But as far as being singled out for an exceptional search, there is a non-nil chance that this can occur to pretty much anyone.
The degree of concern one should exercise vs. low-percentage risks is not zero. If you think that, you're the childish and ignorant one. Proper risk management involves considering these risks and planning according to both their likelihood of occurence and the severity of the event if it occurs.
Now, if you value your sense (or illusion) of privacy to the point where having it compromised is significant disturbance, even a low odds risk to that might be unacceptable. If, for instance, you're someone from outside the US that may be travelling with work-related materials governed by either government rules or private NDAs back home, you can't be truly compliant with those security regimes if you cross a border where there is a non-zero chance of a confiscation or copying of your media since you can't garantee its security once Border Services snags it. You have a legal and moral obligation to insure its safety in accordance with the legal instruments which may pertain in your country of origin.
For instance, I was supposed to be making a trip to the US from Canada this weekend. I was debating taking a DB backup with me so I could do some SQL related work on my travels. Nothing at all related to anything in the US, strictly me doing work for my customer's customer back in Canada. But that information is covered by an NDA. And there is a very low odds but non-zero chance that someone at customs may seize it (they have the legal right). If I proceed and bring the data en clair, I am setting myself up for a potential violation of my NDA. So I get stuck with the choice of letting the project languish or not taking my trip. Or taking substantial precautions to protect that data so that I can work while I'm in the USA.
If you think it won't happen to you or the consequences are acceptable if it does, that's fine for you. But don't go accusing those who may have different levels of concern or obligation of being childish - that's ultimately an ignorant assertion.
Good post, Jollyreaper.
This is the way things evolve. They arrive, have bugs, and then get taken away and rethought and improved. Field trials serve to help this process and deployments inevitably result in improvements. In a few cases, gear gets binned but most of the time it gets improved then becomes a handy tool in the arsenal.
I had a friend who was at NTC when they were initially testing out the high-tech gear vs. the older tech gear in the hands of instructors. The good guys got their heads handed to them by the instructors, partly due to being overwhelmed by the information flow from the new gear (and part of its newness I suppose). Move forward a year or three, the reverse result ensues - people start to figure out how to best manage the information flow and to leverage the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of the technologies.
I think we'll start seeing some of the Land Warrior stuff coming into true utility sooner than 30 years off, maybe 10 more likely. Some ideas will get tossed, some amended into a better form, some adopted more or less as is. The end result will be a more capable soldier.
There is a reason that no one wins stand up fights with the USA. An insurgency with roadside bombs and attacks against troops manning static defenses... that can be fought by a well organized and trained group with far less technology. Get those same insurgents into a stand up fight and they lose and they die. That's not just technology - it is training and experience. The US has a good supply of all of the above.
Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect both allow you to reverse engineer OO projects to produce a model. Of course, the product depends a lot on the complexity of the architecture. I've tried with EA and found that it didn't like (at least the version we had) STL. And the COM stuff through it for a bit of a loop too. But it did show some interesting (and correct) relationships. I've seen MFC reverse engineered in Rational Rose and, with some tweaking, provided some useful insights.
I also second the recommendation to pick a place you think matters to you in the code and start using breakpoints and observing program flow. The code base itself (and even any model made) can be misleading because it may well include dead code, code which the comments say does X but actually does Y and code which is included, but never called (some other mechanism subsequently put in place or a feature unimplemented). Understanding what the actual code is doing, rather than what some of the files might appear to indicate that it might do, can be quite critical in places.
Of course, external design and functional documentation and API specs should be helpful, right? (Yeah, mod that part "+1, Funny"....)
Trying to grok a big new project is tough. I'm trying to come to terms with a project using a lot of Javascript and XSLT (including some XSLT that generates more javascript), as well as WFS and SVG. The fact that I'm used to working in strongly typed languages like Java and C/C++ where object heirarchies are a little more stringently defined (unlike JS) and where tools make browsing that heirarchy or data content while running easier (unlike XSLT building dynamic JS!) makes it a fair challenge. But perserverance, patience, and experiment are the tools that serve you best.
Not to be foolish, but exactly what do you suppose "laser light" is?
A laser emitter should probably have a fairly set wavelength, but the light is just plain old vanilla photons. We can make lasers (and do) in a variety of colours. So what do you do, start blocking out red, blue and green colours from your canopy?
Maybe I'm off in left field, but that doesn't seem like a workable solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas I agree we can survive without social networking and entertainment products, I'm not sure Internet search is so easily dispensed with.
Certainly, my job as a software developer would become approximately 5x more inefficient - the Internet is a treasure trove of problem solutions and basic and advanced reference information that is easily located.
In the old days (which I still remember), I'd have to order (often sight unseen) a bunch of books and hope they had the reference material I needed in them and I'd possibly have had to spend significant time resolving problems others had solved (but I had no easy access to their solutions).
Fast Internet search with much useful information available freely is a huge mulitplier to productivity in my work.
Many people use the internet for productive purposes, both at work and in their personal lives (finding out about government services, locating services more effectively than a phonebook, getting directions to places without having to go out and find and buy a map, filing forms online, doing research, etc). Remove that and you make peoples' personal and work lives in many cases far less efficient. That has a clear cost in terms of productivity, dollars, and time.
I remember the early days of the Net. I remember how limited the information available was and the challenges of trying to locate the information that was there in a format that was useful. I also remmeber some of the early balkanization of the corporate parts of the Internet... Compuserve wasn't exactly cheap back in the day, as one very trivial example. Access was expensive and it took a long time to locate and longer to acquire useful information.
Google, when it came along and put the smackdown on the other search companies which, in their day, had been big steps forward, created a net productivity gain for pretty much anyone whose job requires finding things out in a fast and efficient manner. Unsurprisingly, this spills over into people's private lives as well.
So, as much as your comment is far on social networking and entertainment, it is blatant tripe when it comes to fast, broad Internet search. Yes, we would not immediately keel over dead if we didn't have it, but make no mistake, it would cost our economy tens or hundreds of millions of dollars *per day*. That's a serious impact.
Oh, the pain....
That's one of the most witty and singularly painful jokes I've seen in a long, long time.
There are some questions about BBC and the abuse of language its broadcasters seem to engage in.
BBC : Normal Humans
Reg you lay toe ree : Regulatory (lah instead of lay)
Drugs War : Drug War
Drink Driving : Drunk Driving (or Drinking and Driving)
Al bee nizm : Albinism (with a pine sound in the middle)
BBC Sport : I guess they used up there stocks of the letter s on Drugs War
Sigh rah que suh : Syracuse (with a see sound at the start)
Aw say kah : Osaka (with an oh sound and then a saw sound)
The BBC has a tongue firmly in cheeck if they are addressing the changes in language. Surely they do not speak the Englis of the King anymore. Nor that of the Queen. Nor even some unacknowledged bastard, nine degrees removed variant therof.
I am totally ignoring their pronunciation (or is that pro noun see ae shun?) of various English town names. I assume some of those are at least rooted in antiquity.
Poor planning. Eclipse should not use a 'company' field to be pulling key VM info from. And there should be another more particular way to acquire VM information applications require. That was a poorly thought out situation from the get-go, but Oracle was mightily short sighted for making this change without much testing of compatible apps. Mind you, it isn't their fault as such, but pissing off all of those using Eclipse is mightily retarded. While we're on the subject of retarded, automatic updates? You deserve what you get if you trust those. You should be damn sure an update is solid, stable, and won't give you a BOHICA experience before you apply it. No sympathy for auto-update users.... that's just bad planning as well. So: Oracle: Minor thumbs down. Eclipse devs: Thumbs up overall (except for bloating), but thumbs down for this one. Auto-update Users: Not bothering with a thumb, too busy ROFLMAO.
Not so sure about that.
For example, there are consumers like me for whom single player games are a non-starter. I code for a living and have worked multiple times in video games development - including two massively multi-user projects. For me, playing the computer is for the most part pointless. Either the AI is good and I lose or it is poor and I win.
The entire point of gaming is the social aspect of multiplayer. But I'm part of a small community of friends that buys the same games (evolves over time, but we're still playing IL-2, the original AvP and some other older games), plays them together, and travels half-way across continents sometimes for F2F get togethers that become LAN parties half the time.
As long as the game supports LAN play, I'll be able to get the same fun out of a game years later (Ghost Recon Gold is one example, NWN 1 is another). It's only the MP games that are internet-server-only. Even WOW has now been cracked to allow people to run their own Servers, so even that isn't a cut and dried line.
For me, if it hasn't got MP (and I mostly don't care about SP - haven't finished HL's single player, nor most of the ten or fifteen other games I play... L4D being one of the few exceptions), I won't be buying it (generally).
The only two single player games I really enjoy are both on MAME - Pipes and Tetris. Even Pipes is better played with two players.
If it isn't about socializing with and competing in good nature with your fellow humans, what is it about? Beating a programmer's algorithm? Beating slow AI code or weak hardware? Finding glitches a programmer didn't think of? I guess some of the more story-intensive games may be fun single player experiences, but most of them have little replay value once you've seen the story play out.
To me, MP isn't optional, it's the core feature I shop for. SP is 'meh, so what' and I usually think it a waste of developer cycles.
To each his own but the poster seems to think SP is what matters and MP is an option. I'd argue quite the opposite for some of us.
Well said.
Skype has reasons for moving their feature set forward at a deliberate (slow by some standards) pace.
If Fring is using their API within the terms of use, then they're good. If they aren't, then not so much. Beyond that, I'll bet the Skype Terms of Use for the API will have a clause allowing them to change at Skype's whim, so ticking off the Skype folks is a quick recipe to a bad end for any clients.
Obviously Fring can shoot their mouths off about how slow the people providing them with something they can't be bothered to develop themselves are. Maybe they should save that energy and develop a replacement that is better and has all the features they want and which they own the IP for. Or maybe they should STFU and use the product within the terms of use.
It's always hilarious when groups not implementing feature X because they get it from (other company/API/open-source project/library/etc) start carping about that stuff they have integrated rather than produce themselves. That sort of approach is both politically stupid (alienate the provider's devs) and ultimately does not help the using group because they aren't going to get the new features they want any faster by acting like infants throwing a tantrum.
Fring, I certainly wouldn't support your product now. Infantile petulance is about as non-professional as it gets.
Know what you know (actually, quite hard when you start out)
Know what you don't know (ditto)
Sun Tzu said something to the effect if you know yourself and not your foe, you will win 50% of the time. If you know your foe but not yourself, also 50%. If you know neither, you are borked. If you know both, you can't lose.
This turns out to be fairly accurate in a technology field.
Don't try to convince people you can do things you can't (nor convince yourself of that), but do try to do what you can and know where the boundary of that ends.
One of the things that takes the longest to learn in programming and software design is to recognize when the (as yet unattempted or uninvestigated) task before you is beyond your expertise to deliver quickly and well. But that's also the most critical skill from a perspective of being managed or managing someone - knowing what you/they can or cannot manage.
If I think you can manage something and you can't, we've got a situation for sure. If I know you can't manage something quickly/well, I can use my management skills to find ways to resolve that issue. I can bring in someone to mentor you and oversee you and assist you. I can reallocate the task and find something better suited to your skills. I can accept a longer timeline and more challenges in the production and let you dig away and learn as you go.
But if I think you're going to do something well and you suddenly tell me at the last minute we won't be hitting our deadlines and the project is pooched... then you will be up against a wall (figuratively) because I as your manager will be as well.
I've screwed that up once, badly, in 15 years of good delivery of software for complex real world systems. It was not good. If I hadn't had a long track record, I'd have been gone. I didn't know enough to know that I didn't know near enough. I didn't know enough to know how far I was from done. And so I never threw up the flags management needed to see. So they were blindsided and the customer was pissed.
I don't recomend that. But if it happens to you, it'll be something you'll never want to repeat. Try to really come to terms with what you know, what you don't know, and don't be afraid at the outset not to say 'yes I can do this' when you haven't a schmeck if you can. Say 'I can look at this and quickly try to get an idea how involved this is and how easy this is going to be to manage and get back to you ' or else 'I don't have the information at the moment to know how challenging this will be - any estimate I give you now won't be based on a good understanding of the task'.
Don't be afraid to ask for help. It's better to have someone senior roll their eyes at you a bit but straighten you out than it is to spend two weeks trying to do something you're clueless about. A can-do attitude is important, but so is a realistic impression of what you can do by yourself and what you can do with a bit of guidance. If you are reasonably educated and a smart individual, with some guidance, you can probably manage a lot.
I've been doing this a long time and have delivered over a dozen large scale projects in different domains (public safety, defense, cellular, on-line gaming, enterprise web apps, point of sale, and VOIP of the ones I remember). The best skills I've developed are knowing how to speak and understand the language of my managers or senior company execs (so you know what they want and how they need to have it parcelled) and knowing what I can do immediately (and what I don't) and how to say "I need some time but I'll find out what you need to know".
I like the look of proportional fonts. But if you go for elastic tabstops, everyone using your code (you, your boss, your co-workers, the company you might be developing the code for which might not be yours, maybe co-workers on other teams too that might need to spelunk the code) all have to be using editors capable of using these elastic tab stops.
If they aren't, and the number of tabs inserted was different or if someone mixes spaces and tabs, it'll look like hell if they're using a different-width or different-kerning font (including fixed width).
And yes, some of you say 'too bad for them'. Except of course that quite a few of them may be higher on the corporate food chain than you are and/or perfectly willing to make your life miserable until you conform to a standard.
If everyone moved to Elastic Tabstops, and all the tools did, I'd love that.
Unrelately, my favourite programming fixed width font is: Andale Mono (check it out)
Correction: Does not require *customer supplied* power. POTS does require power. Either that or the phone company has done some neat things with the laws of physics!
This matters insofar as if you lose your POTS line, you're out of comission. In a number of disasters the world over in the last few years, cell networks have stood up when POTS networks were problematic. Sometimes call volumes will flood a cell network, but the distributed nature of the cell towers makes it hard to kill them all in most disasters.
Don't get me wrong, I still get a chuckle when you get the old connect noise from a model and kids today look puzzled and have no idea what the noise is...
POTS and cellular and VOIP (in the PSTN or in the customer premise) all have their place.
POTS doesn't have the same 911 issues that VOIP-Internet does and VOIP-Internet is usually disclaimered all over the place about not using it for 911 because of this. Additionally, VOIP-Internet availability is usually tied to your local access (cable, DSL, whatever) and that does NOT have the same sort of reliability your POTS system has.
In all my life, all the different places I lived, I can count on 2 or 3 fingers the number of times I picked up a POTS phone and had issues connecting out to somewhere.
Cellular, it's probably that many times a day as I move around. VOIP-Internet, about 1/month there is some interfering downtime with my cable connection to the net.
Of course, if the go phone-company VOIP to the customer premise with the kind of gear and network management that will give us the same sorts of uptime you actually achieve with POTS, then that won't be so bad. But that's not going to be your normal DSL or cable line unless there's a big change in there SLAs and networks.
I was that kid that coasted through high-school. The school had streams for regular students and ones having difficulties. It had good vocational and trade training too. I took every math and science course my school offered and made it into a prestidgious university.
Then I discovered I was missing a year of extra education (being from out of province) and hit a wall in a few critical cubjects. We never really did much matrix math in high school and the first time I heard the term eigenvector was in an alleged review segment at the beginning of a university course. Our math and physics in HS didn't involve calculus because only about 15% of the grads took calculus. (This is a couple of decades back, FYI).
My response to an already heavy workload (36 hours of classes + 36-72 hours of homework per week) was to work harder and harder to make up for my defficiencies. I tried to do every assignment, every lab, and attend every lecture. I faithfully copied page after page of notes in a physics course that I just didn't get (we averaged 12 pages per 50 minute period). And I got in deeper and deeper, because I didn't have the experience with how to get past the challenges here. And I sucked in two courses, ran afoul of academic regulations and unfamiliarity with the university bureaucracy, and my university career went down in a flaming heap despite my best efforts.
After a year of arsing about in part-time studies, I elected to attend a local college. Best move I ever made. In college, everything wasn't all about two exam days a year. Success revolved around solid day to day performance, ability to work in teams, and ability to make things that needed to work. Your style and design was considered if your code or electronic hardware project worked. If it didn't, your style or approach didn't matter. There I learned ring theory, queue theory, inferrential and descriptive statistics, control systems, microcontrollers and processors, all sorts of peripherals, programming in assemblers and C, and how to produce professional quality technical documentation for all stages of projects and how to present to groups small and large. I graduated there with distinction. And then took a second college degree in the software side of things. And have been working as a software engineer for 15 years.
The difference was in college, I had to learn to assess my pile of work and figure out what was vital, what was not, what I was going to suck on even if I spent hours on it, and what I was going to get good return on when I worked at it. I also had to figure out when I was too tired to attend a morning class and allow myself the leeway to cut it, despite 'having to be there'. The reality is, with a bit more sleep (working less hard), a lot more targeted work (working more effectively), and an understanding of the processes of going over, around or through obstacles, I graduated with distinction from our local technical college twice in different programs.
High school did little to prepare me for university because it never challenged me. It left me in at the deep end, in a course where the faculty was already out to fail a fair portion just to reduce class sizes and maintain exclusivity, when I was busy trying to learn (with no guidance) the skills needed to handle workload balance, triage of work tasks, and so on. I could not have worked any harder at university (I slept 4-6 hours a night and worked 7 days a week) but I could have worked far more effectively if there had been any prior introduction to these sorts of issues.
If our high school had an enrichment stream, I would have been challenged there, developed the skills there, went into university better prepared, and probably would have a univeristy degree and be a working professional engineer now. Now, to go back and upgrade to something that will let me get a P.Eng. after my name is a harder process and a lengthy and expensive one.
I can't see why anyone thinks there should not be an enrichment stream in public education. Why is it at all logic
This film should vault Neill Blomkamp into sci-fi stardom, on par with George Lucas and the Wachowski Brothers (of Matrix fame). This is certainly a must-see movie -- easily the best movie of the year.
You mean he'll be in the group "those should have stopped their major franchises about two to three movies before they did"? I admit I'm looking forward to this film. But being declared on par with George Dialog Torturer Lucas and the Wachwoskis (I wish I had taken the blue pill before the second and third movies) isn't saying a lot.
I'm unaware of any case where you can be given 5 years for not opening the trunk of your car. You could probably be charged with something, but it wouldn't be five years in jail.
Here's what I would have posted if Amazon's website would have let me: (apparently I have to buy from the US branch to count in this discussion... no wonder it is a lovefest....)
I am not a fan of any technology which lets a retailer rethink their decision to sell me something post-facto and then decide to yank back that product. In the first place, this simply sets a bad precedent. In the second place, it shows poor foresight and procedure. In the third place, it is a crappy way to resolve the problem.
If someone had sold copies of an illegal paper book, how would this have been resolved? Certianly the move that Amazon pulled with the Kindle would not have been possible unless they have teams of black ops people sneaking into houses, stealing back the offending copies, and leaving a cheque like the tooth fairy. Some other mechanism of return would be required or Amazon would have had to resolve the matter directly with the original rights holder, perhaps by simply writing them a check for the N copies of the book that went out and were unlikely to be recovered.
This 'surreptitious return' was only possible because of invasive Kindle technology and has no amalgam in the actual tangible goods market. THAT is my root problem with this situation - it displays once and for all that the user is no longer buying a tangible physical good, simply a license to use something. This is like having a paper book show up wrapped in shrink wrap with a EULA at the front. Is that on the horizon soon? If not, then why should the consumers condone and support any product/policy that tries to inflict this in the e-book market?
Amazon should not have this capability in their e-book reader period. E-books should be treated analogously to real books, as if they were a tangible physical good. In this event, Amazon would have had to either simply deal with the issue financially with the rights holder or attempt a voluntary recall which would have involved concious choice from the various book owners. They might have had to incentivize the book owners to return the copies. Instead, the pulled a midnight raid on the e-book libraries. Not only should this not have happened, the capability for it should never have existed in the first place.
As to the apology: So far, without tangible actions to back it up and some profound changes in how the Kindle works, all I see is a CEO doing some PR damage control. Mr. Bezos may even mean what he says, but unless the Kindle itself is changed to render this sort of involuntary recall impossible and unless e-books begin to be treated like tangible books, this apology is meaningless.
Yes, what you said. Very much so. And those nuances are very important in some cases. No system I'm aware of comes even close to handling nuance and none handle the extreme variances in accents you get when you have (for instance) English speakers who have Indian background, Asian background, or French background. Each accent changes how the English words sound and even sentence construction.
If I get only a text, I might think I'm being called by a person of dubious education (given the grammatical construction errors) but the reality (which would be obvious in listening to the voicemail) is that they are really not a primary English speaker. People tend to make assumptions like that when they don't have immediate evidence to the contrary.
Also, one of the things people miss when they talk about never wanting to have voicemail and about 'if it is important, they'll call you back' - that's a self-centric view. If it is important *to them* they'll call you back, not necessarily if that call is important *to you*. Voicemail catches plenty of business calls and usually people will leave a callback number. If you don't get back to them, they may well NOT call back and you'll miss a business opportunity or some other key happening.
Voicemail also serves as a screening tool (as others have said). I get a voicemail from someone, I don't have to talk to them *right then*, I can talk to them at a time of my choosing. I can also use their voice message as a way to gauge the urgency and time sensitivity of the issue in order to determine when the optimal time to return their call is.
Voicemail won't be dying anytime soon. Slate just has a penchant for ridiculous prognostications (part of being wannabee futurist types).
It is possible that the people who want to sell you a product don't want to announce the capability they wish to sell you is not necessary.
Besides, if the government is after you, they have such a variety of options to figure out what goes on (pin cameras, laser mics, various other forms of mics, analysis programs that can guess what you are typing, installation of keyloggers, and just simple acquisition with legal means like a warrant) that worrying about whether they may, beyond all known capabilities of industry, be able to recover data off your drive is absolutely hilarious.
If you're that paranoid, just never, ever do or say anything the government will pay attention to. In the maxima, this means never doing or saying anything. Ever.
Roads are an interesting analogy. I'm wondering if, when we built our roads, the assumption was that 90% of the people using them would only take there car out for 15 minutes a day for a very local commute, rather than being in it all day going full tilt (and all night)...
The reality of how the Internet has changed since the earlier days of the 1990s (ROFL!) is that the "E-mail Grannies" aren't the main users and quite a few applications nowadays demand high bandwidth. Yes, I'm thinking of torrents, but also streaming video and audio, massive file downloads, etc). Hell, websites that used to be less than 20Kb per page are now up over 1 Mb/page average - a 50 fold increase (at least) in size. And that's in about 10-15 years.
We like to think of the Intertubes as a digital virtual world. It is that. But it all runs on physical devices, over physical infrastrucure. That stuff takes time to build and is expensive to build. Anyone who has ever tried to get permissions to put up radio towers in an urban area will tell you the administrative steps are often non-trivial. So is last mile connection (or even backbone fiber installation). So this whole process is expensive. And that means it gets done by big companies, who are themselves stuck under lots of regulation and have huge amounts of process. (e.g. Here in Canada, you can take some black humour out of the fact installing a Bell phone involves about 17 different internal groups and costs way more than Bell can actually bill you for the installation).
So we have big behemoth companies (in most cases) owning much of the infrastructure. Their business cycles are ponderous and the physical infrastructure deployment and updates are expensive and time consuming (Hmmm... roads are pretty similar that way). And the infrastructure will take 10-15 years (I'd guess) to pay itself off. So we're still paying off late 1st and 2nd generation hardware while having to deploy later generation networks with far more capacity... and wondering why this isn't all going the way we'd like.
The reality is most roads are underwritten by tax dollars. It's hard to tell when a road 'breaks even', but they are a necessary part of modern infrastructure so they are supported by our taxes - on businesses and personal income. And the road grid couldn't build out capacity to meet 50 fold changes in demand in any short period either. And doubly not so if they're still paying off earlier investments.
So, if we all want a high-bandwidth, no-metering Internet that isn't one big service unavailable situation, the 'alleged free market' may be part of our solution. So too may be declaring the Internet infrastructure just as useful as roads and supporting it with tax revenues. (I can hear the screaming already.)
Or else, go to a 'pay for what you use' scenario. Someone says 'but ISPs would make less money' and that falsely assumes rates would stay similar to today. Occasional access would get more expensive. If you want big, shiny new networks deployed quickly, then ROI for the big companies (if not tax supported) is going to have to be 5 years or less. Figure at least a doubling, possibly a tripling in access costs for most of us. But you'll have that unlimited, unmetered service... for $800 a month. Someone will do the math and find out what to bill you, but most of the current bandwidth offenders (college kids, teenagers, etc - yes I'm stereotyping) could not afford the service and would have to curb their habits.
It's simple economics and the current model doesn't work. If these are the 'information highways', then they need funded like real roads do - high tolls for use or big tax dollars thrown to back them up. Since we need THESE roads redeployed every 5 years to meet increasing demand (not just new roads, but upgrading existing ones), then expect this to cost a lot. Or else expect brownouts, maybe blackouts, crappy performance, dubious contractual offerings from providers, and maybe some provider going bankrupt - bad, but actually the likely course.
Sometimes, game devs hit the home-run and make a story I can't put down (KOTOR II, HL-2). Other times, most of the time... not so much.
I find that people who think they've got to control the narrative or interactions with the world are people who think I need to see their story, rather than help much in making my own. KOTOR was a bit that way, but at least it offered you multiple paths and endings. Things like L4D leave you to fill in a lot of the details. Things like MUDs always did - they rely on players and their characters bringing key interactivity to the world. Modern MMOs, at their best, have elements of that, when they aren't grind-fests or 300 person raids.
There used to be trends like this in RPGs - The DM/GM is god, it is his story, blah blah blah. Works fine with 14 year olds. Get to 24 or 34 and people start saying 'Hmmm, I think I have something to contribute and I don't need railroaded'. Older GMs and players learn that a good RPG is about shared contribution and working together to build a meaningful narrative or story. The GM might still provide some plot elements, but not all of them - his players provide some and he learns to integrate those. Some are by their requests, some are by their actions and interactions, some are accidents - but all make the story more than the sum of its parts. And they help to make the world feel like it is about the players, and not about the GM (or in the case of video games, the authors). What matters in the game - the player or the author? If the author isn't clear and thinks he's what matters, he may end up writing quite a few sucking games.
Again, this may be age related. Or mood related. Some days people like having stories laid out before them like a movie, with little choice. But other times they get pretty sick of not having options and not being able to just punch some of the real jerks in the story lines right in the face (for instance... not saying I have had that experience....always....). I think the older the gamer, the more times he's been along the railroad and the less he's interested in it.
Journalists usually make the mistake of saying "so many of X could supply all of the continental US" but the only sane informed people that advocate "one true energy" are lying to sell things. For example - Tidal power in the Bay of Fundy could supply the continent but at slack water what do you do? A mixture can play to the advantages of each method.
One of the things most people don't understand is the difference between base load and peak load. That difference can be between 50% and 100% of base load.
NOWHERE is there the vast capacitor banks you'd need to turn some generation technologies into something capable of sustaining this variance. Does not exist and won't - sans some amazing miracle of energy storage on a massive scale.
Some sorts of power can be (relatively) quickly spooled up to help cope with peak demands. Having a continental grid where you can vary sourcing for power helps a bit too, as different areas will be in different parts of the daily demand cycle (different time zones, for that matter).
Wind, for instance: It's hard to use it for base load generation because of its variable nature. Nuclear, on the other hand, is good for baseload generation but spooling up or shutting down a reactor is not a quick process (measured in months, IIRC).
So you need a mix of relatively constant output energy sources to provide base load and additional fast ramp-up/down sources for coping with rising and falling demand on top of the base load.
The grid could certainly get smarter, decentralize some generation, create capacity to sell back power to the utility, shunt power around to cope with daily cycles, and actually put certain technologies in place to help change the existing extents of the variance. But ultimately, we'll still have a big bump when everyone gets home from work and turns on the appliances for dinner, cranks the AC, etc.
No one energy technology promises to deal with all of our energy needs. Even nuclear fuel isn't abundant enough to see us beyond a few hundred years at best (last I heard). We'll need all our sources of energy, known and waitin to emerge. We'll also need different sorts of generation for handling variable load and to accomodate regional differences (Solar in Ontario in the winter is not as useful as one might like, panels being under 3' of snow and all...).
That's a long winded way of agreeing with the original poster about no one energy source being our answer. The nuclear side of things... others have tackled that.
I imagine that some things would transfer (for instance, you may know enough to check your six regularly, to use cover and to look for it as you move, etc). This is more in the domain of tactical choices. The actual muscle skills (marksmanship, running, evasive manouvers, etc) are clearly not similar. And the physics engine of RealLife(TM) is fairly different than most games. Most games have a slant on how their physics should work and you learn to adapt to it. But it isn't ultra-realistic, unless you play hardcore sim FPSes. Even they aren't real, just more real. One example of a somewhat similar nature: When my old infantry reserve unit fielded a paintball team, they were mortified when the guys from the local comic shop kicked them around so badly. I heard comments like 'my FN wouldn't have been stopped by a twig' or other equally hilarious complaints. The actual military fieldcraft skills had some benefits for sneaking around, but the performance of the hardware (mainly paintball ballistics and the jam rates of paintball guns of the day) was different enough that the locals put the boots to the soldiers quite handily. As I pointed out to one of the guys in the unit though: If a fat guy in purple coveralls can get within 30' to kill you with an inaccurate marker, what would a guy with an AK manage? That shut down the complaints pretty fast. One of the interesting aspects of trying to carry training across to a different situation is that you sometimes learn lessons in training that aren't just un-useful, they're actually dangerous in the real situation.
I'm not bright enough to figure out the whole 'copying is stealing/no it is not!' situation. I'm a software professional and I'm quite sure that my industry needs income to survive. If somebody has done some work that they have spent time and effort and therefore money on to create value and they want paid for it and I then copy their work and use it without paying them, I'm doing them a dirty turn.
Don't look at this in terms of stealing a tangible good, look at it in terms of an author's right to specify under what terms someone can use his product - and no, I'm not talking about what *is enforceable* just what sort of world we might want to live in. Someone created something and they are asking that I respect their terms of use and compensate them. If I don't, I *know* I'm taking the product of their work, deriving a benefit from it, and not respecting their wishes. In a world where that happens all the time, there is a lot less incentive to do such work as you can't afford to eat.
So, at the very least, I try to buy my albums or songs, buy the software I use, etc. I do use some open source freeware - I also appreciate the people who build this. But I don't assume everyone wants to operate like this. I know some bands want me to send them 'what I think their product is worth' and if they're good, I'll send a fair bit. I want to support these folks. But again, I'm letting *them* determine the terms of use they wish to set for their efforts/products.
I do this because I'd very much prefer living in a world where, when I write something at work, others respect the terms of use for my work as created by my employer. It's simply a matter of thinking how I'd like to be treated and extending that into the world which seems an ethical way to go about life.
I know there will be pirates. I know in some cases, people need a piece of software and can't afford it, so they boost it. I don't like it, but I know it happens. However, I also know a lot of the time, people say they can't afford it when what they really mean is 'I could afford it, but I'm going to spend the money on something else instead' because if they can get free stuff, they feel no ethical obligation to remunerate the producer, even if that person has asked them to by creating terms of use that require it.
But knowing these folks exist doesn't mean their sort of world is the one I'd want to encourage. Maybe this is the way we should think about the whole pirate/not-pirate issue. At least it strikes me as a decent sort of scenario if most people approach things thus.
Now, my pet peeve about software licensing:
I have a big hate on for inflexible licenses. If someone sells me a piece of software (say an office suite) for my home office and I'm one guy, I have a dev/work desktop, a dev/work laptop, and a netbook (plus maybe a few servers for backup or web surfing at home). Now, most modern licensing schemes want me to buy N copies (where N = number of computers) even though *I can only be using one of them at a time*.
Given the evolution of modern small networks in people's houses, why the heck haven't they developed better small network floating licenses? I'm not talking a corporate floating license which will be used by N people at a company who are employees. I'm talking about a home or home office license that has one 'employee' or 'owner' who needs to use things on multiple computers. I guess I'm arguing for 'per user' licensing rather than 'per machine' (for most things - maybe not OS). The lack of such flexible licensing probably leads to a lot of small office and home software piracy.
The one piece of software I recently downloaded that gets this, oddly enough, was an RPG tool called KloogeWerks. It actually allows you to buy floating license packs for clients so your local small server can support a varied group of clients. That's the sort of modernization of licensing paradigms we need to see more of. Either per-user or floating office licenses for reasonable prices.
Some of the responses in this thread make me think a lot of the folks responding either don't do contract software development for a customer, don't work on any sort of mission critical software, or aren't terribly mature.
An easter egg is: a) extra code that could introduce a new bug (accidents happen, even in easter eggs - I've seen a screwed up easter egg crash a program and leave the machine locked up)
b) something that is not part of requirements and if caught during client code reviews or after installation, would put your employer in a complicated position since your spending time on such an unallocated task could basically be considered a form of fraud if the client is paying for your services
c) a sign of vanity - professionals do the job, do it well, and move on, not write silly-ass amateur crap just to amuse themselves and stroke their egos
d) something some other poor software engineer might have to fix or remove and they might not find so darn funny
A professional should take satisfaction in a job done well.
Do civil or mechanical engineers leave easter eggs? Do nurses? Do doctors? Grow the hell up... people bitch about software folks never being given the same respect as other engineering fields and it is the attitude of the average programmer that has a sizable part in explaining this.
Would you want your doctor leaving an easter egg? Would you want your dentist? Or would you find it funny if your phone dialed random numbers on some developers birthday? Or if your traffic light flashed all green every summer solstice? I think not.
I suspect the gulf here between those respondents who manage programmers and deal with clients or who work in any form of mission critical software or professional services and those who write shrink-wrapped software or less critical applications when it comes to easter eggs is probably sizable. All it takes is seeing a co-worker having his ass kicked because a manager had his chewed off by an angry client to understand that, in professional environments, this kind of stuff doesn't fly (and shouldn't).
You're not paid to be an artist. If you were, they'd cut one copy of your code and display it up in a museum. You're paid to implement requirements as defined by your employer and possibly your customer. When you aren't doing that, you're basically screwing the pooch and exploiting your employer. Some may feel justified doing this, but that's a crock. If you don't like the job, GTFO. If you do like the job, be a professional and leave the high-school hijinks behind.
(And yes, I've worked for 15 years in mission critical software for the police, the military, air navigation training systems, cell phone portals, VOIP and call processors, HR systems, and so on, so it does colour my view on easter eggs...)
Can't say as I agree with you on that. The original poster was right - it would be a different story if it happened to you. And besides, your own argument is flawed - if these events have a nil chance of happening to you, there literally is nothing to worry about. But as far as being singled out for an exceptional search, there is a non-nil chance that this can occur to pretty much anyone.
The degree of concern one should exercise vs. low-percentage risks is not zero. If you think that, you're the childish and ignorant one. Proper risk management involves considering these risks and planning according to both their likelihood of occurence and the severity of the event if it occurs.
Now, if you value your sense (or illusion) of privacy to the point where having it compromised is significant disturbance, even a low odds risk to that might be unacceptable. If, for instance, you're someone from outside the US that may be travelling with work-related materials governed by either government rules or private NDAs back home, you can't be truly compliant with those security regimes if you cross a border where there is a non-zero chance of a confiscation or copying of your media since you can't garantee its security once Border Services snags it. You have a legal and moral obligation to insure its safety in accordance with the legal instruments which may pertain in your country of origin.
For instance, I was supposed to be making a trip to the US from Canada this weekend. I was debating taking a DB backup with me so I could do some SQL related work on my travels. Nothing at all related to anything in the US, strictly me doing work for my customer's customer back in Canada. But that information is covered by an NDA. And there is a very low odds but non-zero chance that someone at customs may seize it (they have the legal right). If I proceed and bring the data en clair, I am setting myself up for a potential violation of my NDA. So I get stuck with the choice of letting the project languish or not taking my trip. Or taking substantial precautions to protect that data so that I can work while I'm in the USA.
If you think it won't happen to you or the consequences are acceptable if it does, that's fine for you. But don't go accusing those who may have different levels of concern or obligation of being childish - that's ultimately an ignorant assertion.
Good post, Jollyreaper. This is the way things evolve. They arrive, have bugs, and then get taken away and rethought and improved. Field trials serve to help this process and deployments inevitably result in improvements. In a few cases, gear gets binned but most of the time it gets improved then becomes a handy tool in the arsenal. I had a friend who was at NTC when they were initially testing out the high-tech gear vs. the older tech gear in the hands of instructors. The good guys got their heads handed to them by the instructors, partly due to being overwhelmed by the information flow from the new gear (and part of its newness I suppose). Move forward a year or three, the reverse result ensues - people start to figure out how to best manage the information flow and to leverage the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of the technologies. I think we'll start seeing some of the Land Warrior stuff coming into true utility sooner than 30 years off, maybe 10 more likely. Some ideas will get tossed, some amended into a better form, some adopted more or less as is. The end result will be a more capable soldier. There is a reason that no one wins stand up fights with the USA. An insurgency with roadside bombs and attacks against troops manning static defenses... that can be fought by a well organized and trained group with far less technology. Get those same insurgents into a stand up fight and they lose and they die. That's not just technology - it is training and experience. The US has a good supply of all of the above.
Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect both allow you to reverse engineer OO projects to produce a model. Of course, the product depends a lot on the complexity of the architecture. I've tried with EA and found that it didn't like (at least the version we had) STL. And the COM stuff through it for a bit of a loop too. But it did show some interesting (and correct) relationships. I've seen MFC reverse engineered in Rational Rose and, with some tweaking, provided some useful insights.
I also second the recommendation to pick a place you think matters to you in the code and start using breakpoints and observing program flow. The code base itself (and even any model made) can be misleading because it may well include dead code, code which the comments say does X but actually does Y and code which is included, but never called (some other mechanism subsequently put in place or a feature unimplemented). Understanding what the actual code is doing, rather than what some of the files might appear to indicate that it might do, can be quite critical in places.
Of course, external design and functional documentation and API specs should be helpful, right? (Yeah, mod that part "+1, Funny"....)
Trying to grok a big new project is tough. I'm trying to come to terms with a project using a lot of Javascript and XSLT (including some XSLT that generates more javascript), as well as WFS and SVG. The fact that I'm used to working in strongly typed languages like Java and C/C++ where object heirarchies are a little more stringently defined (unlike JS) and where tools make browsing that heirarchy or data content while running easier (unlike XSLT building dynamic JS!) makes it a fair challenge. But perserverance, patience, and experiment are the tools that serve you best.
Not to be foolish, but exactly what do you suppose "laser light" is?
A laser emitter should probably have a fairly set wavelength, but the light is just plain old vanilla photons. We can make lasers (and do) in a variety of colours. So what do you do, start blocking out red, blue and green colours from your canopy?
Maybe I'm off in left field, but that doesn't seem like a workable solution.