This is why OEM bundling is so important to Microsoft, and also why most people don't understand the insidiousness of their monopoly - because they try to make false comparisons to other industries where this level of coercion is not possible.
I'm going to make an analogy here which is also false, but which I hope will shed more light on the truth than some others which have been made regarding Microsoft and perhaps be mildly amusing. For the record, I think Neal Stephenson's "800 lb gorilla that only says, 'Where do you want to go today?'" and doesn't actually go where you tell it to is most correct one.
Microsoft's relationship with its OEM partners is as if the OEM partners made the car and Microsoft made the engine. They have exclusive deals with every car manufacturer in the world, except BMW. Not only this, but they only have two engines: a truck engine and a sedan engine, and they only sell one variety of each at a time. Their new sedan engine comes in 15 different flavors, but they only vary in how crippled they have been (i.e. half the cylinders welded shut). The truck engine, for reference' sakes, is just the sedan engine, except it's incompatible with automatic transmission.
So Microsoft comes out with a new engine, and GM and Honda come up to them and say, "Well, MS, we see that there are a lot of problems with your new V6. We think we're going to make your new engine an option, targetting it at 25% of overall sales, and continue ordering your older, more reliable model until such a time as we see the problems with the new engine have been worked out. This might be up to two years."
The Microsoft rep makes a disappointed face, and says, "Well, if you do that, we're going to sell you all of these engines at triple the cost you're used to paying. In order for you to maintain your current price point, you'll have to have all of the cars carrying the old engine off the lots by April, 3 months after the launch."
At this point, GM and Honda can either
Pay astronomically more for their engines, thus increasing costs, decreasing profits, losing price competitiveness over other brands, and causing the investors to leave in droves, or
Have a crappy engine, but at least it's the same crappy engine that every other company but BMW puts in their cars.
I find nothing more satisfying in a game than facing a challenging opponent of approximately my skill level.
The trouble with most online gaming is that finding such an opponent (nay, finding 15 opponents, and finding 14 allies of your level) is nigh impossible. One side is usually the "winning team" and the other side is the "losing team." This becomes apparent sooner rather than later to most people, and in place of the actual joy of struggling against a challenging opponent, people turn into O'Brien relish in the lesser, more sadistic joy of trampling over a helpless opponent. This happens so much that blind sadism replaces the desire for a true challenge, and people forget what it's like to win or lose by a nose hair, or to face an opponent who is obviously better than you and at *least* get that one kill.
I know I'm making a bit of a broad generalization here. Sure, there are creeps out there who truly would rather face a weaker opponent. But I think that most people don't start out here, and if they get there they quickly get bored and go away.
I think this is more or less true of all online gaming, but it's especially true of MMOs, despite the fact that an MMO is meant to be less twitchy and more of a cerebral thing.
RTSs and FPSs are twitch games no matter how you cut it. This is pretty obvious in the second category, but even with RTSs, eventually a limited set of preferred strategies come to the fore, and all you're doing is implementing them and dividing your attention between the twitch game of the field and the twitch game of building your base. The worst step that most RTSs make is causing micromanaging battles ("fun") to be far less important than micromanaging your base ("dull"), to the point where a player who simply makes endless armies of one unit and throws them suicidally at an opponent will generally win in most games against an opponent who intensively micromanages battles to the detriment of his base.
In MMOs, and WoW in particular, not only does the gameplay resemble an FPS more than it should, but you're going into every fight with a wide gear/level disparity between you and your opponent, in addition to the fact that a player with the time to run dungeons extensively probably has a bit of a skill edge too. The first part probably needs to be harped on quite a bit: success in PVP usually depends on who gets the first shot off, just like in CS once everybody's got a good rifle, except there's autotargetting. Also, damage and defense have scaled at fundamentally different rates. Battles between two geared players usually take a matter of seconds, whereas battles between two ungeared players could last up to a minute.
It probably also bears mentioning that certain class vs class matchups are woefully and incredibly lopsided. Certain classes have the option to choose to develop their character in such a way that they can be great at both dungeons and PVP, and others do not. Certain classes simply cannot beat a halfway competent member of another particular class. And certain classes are just plain more powerful in PVP than other classes all-around due to scaling mechanics ("It was balanced 2 years ago"). Most people's scapegoat for this is as follows: you can't balance a PVE game, where strategy, healing, tanking (designating a damage soak character to engage big monsters), and positioning are important, with a PVP game, where most of these are irrelevant (see above).
In summation, competing directly against other people online inevitably turns into a twitch game dominated by hyperactive, caffeinated adolescents with nothing to do in the evenings. It's perfectly valid that these games exist, I just get peeved that all of them are fundamentally the same. I used to be absurdly, obscenely good at CS, but then I lost interest in it because it was too time-consuming to find a good fight that wasn't lopsided, and in the meantime I became a young man and lost some of my bristling teenage nerve-endings. I think if WAR manages to be slo
I think he's talking about ANY data whatsoever. A lot of people just use these HD-based MP3 players as jumbo thumb drives. I know an IT guy who keeps multiple OS images on his. I have lots of (non-ipod-based) movies on mine.
Also, the fact that you can access the drive normally means you can go into a little folder called.iPod_Control (or something) and do fun things like export your songs and hack the iPod database. The songs aren't on a separate partition or anything, they're just named funny things like SFJI.mp3 and put into weird folders.
The whole Zune thing seems weird and sad. I mean, I don't think Microsoft is inherently bad or evil, I just wish they would live up to their own hype. They imagine their OS and associated peripherals as a paradise island of connectivity and ease, and then they go and make Zune and slap a 1000 meter restraining order on it and put it on a raft in the Pacific. What's next, Microsoft, a next-generation PDA for young professionals on the go that is 100% incompatible with any Office document?
I agree for the most part - the most amusing example was when a job required "5 years Java experience" when java itself was only 2 years old - but look at it from a different perspective:
Programmers really aren't interchangable. Even though I'm more of a writer, look at my dev skillset: primarily Perl/Python text processing, Java, JSP, XSLT, MySQL, C/C++ (pretty rusty); fairly strong Unix background. Now, hopefully, somebody could look at this get an idea of what type of things I like to program. Nothing makes me happier than text processing and databases and web apps. But if somebody told me to go design an MFC GUI, I'd just shoot myself. I'm about as interested in MS C++ as I am in oral surgery, and so far I've managed to avoid it on all but two occasions - and I'd prefer to keep it at that.
Moreover, I am keenly aware that my coworkers are better at programming GUIs than I am, a few months of hard work and smiles would not turn me into a good Windows programmer no matter how direly I wanted it.
Ideally, the person looking at your application is conversant enough with these technologies to know that it'd be worth fudging the qualifications a bit and letting you get in front of a real person. This is not always the case, and that's a shame. But I've found it to be true a little bit more than some people describe.
Another thing I've noticed as both a potential hiree and someone looking at prospective associates is that people tend to magnify their apparent enthusiasm for a postition. It takes a LOT of strength to tell someone straight to their face, "You know, I don't think I'd be happy here." And so you continue to appear excited about a job because you know that will increase your chances of getting the job, and because you strongly need a job. Since the recruiter can't read the other's mind and find out whether the culture is just not appealing, the least you can do is just make sure that the person will be doing the kind of work the have become accustomed to and will probably enjoy.
Well, duh, the Republicans will get out of our lives as soon as they're done stopping the terrorists, just like they'll lower taxes when Enron & co get back on their feet and they don't need any more corporate welfare.
Come on. You just have to wait for the answers to come down the pipeline, like in Urinetown. If those people had just sit tight, the UGC would've implemented its long-term solution and the drought would've been over.
I recall hearing a theory that humans live to be elderly because doing so presents a competitive advantage, for reasons that mostly do not apply in our ape cousins. For example:
Our young are pathetically defenseless, require years of constant maintenance, and usually cannot fend for themselves until adolescence.
We do not mentally mature for even longer, and it is only after this point that we can truly learn from the wisdom of our elders.
Our lifestyles are historically pretty high-upkeep, and it helps to have an extra set of hands around the house.
Also, don't fall into the trap of believing that longevity is something that was invented in the 20th century. I mean, going to this wikipedia article, you can see that even though the average life expectency was 33 in the Upper Paleolithic, once you got to age 15 your life expectency was more like 54. Even this number is probably deceptively low, as it accounts for people falling dead due to environmental hazards, rather than their body just giving up after a certain point.
For example, Chaucer quipped when he was 40 or so that he didn't have much life left in him and should probably stop writing because he was a tired old man. A lot of uninformed people look at this and they think, "Well, of course! English people in the high middle ages only lived to be 33!" In fact, this was a self-depricating joke. As a well-to-do author and diplomat with patrons and money to go around, he had no reason to believe he wouldn't hang on into his sixties or even seventies. He was writing the Canterbury Tales right up until his death, and certainly did not write as if he were running out of time.
The average time commitment needed to (for example) run one of the blue instances is about 2 hours. You can get MC (the first 40-man dungeon) down to about 4 hours with relative ease, and if you're really good at what you do Blackwing Lair (the next instance, much shorter but significantly harder) can be done in 3. And from what I hear about the expansion pack, most of the dungeons of the future are going to be shorter, "hub" affairs ala Dire Maul. Every successive dungeon that Blizzard comes out with seems to have less filler content (with the exception of AQ40).
When people compare WoW to drug addiction, I laugh. Such persons must either have seen far worse gaming junkies than I, or more functional drug addicts. Most of my guildies are either adults with good jobs or college students at respected institutions. However, most drug addicts I've known have stolen thousands of dollars from their closest friends, family and parents without a shred of remorse, and spend their time spitting, muttering and screaming incoherently in the Tenderloin hoping to be hit by a car for the possibility of a morphine drip and a nice cash settlement.
Also, take a look at the popular evening entertainment activities for persons in my age bracket:
Sex with relative strangers, possibly without a condom/dental dam
Alcohol abuse
Drug abuse (see above)
Wandering around dangerous neighborhoods at night to get the above 3
Driving to and from the above 4 activities while possibly under the influence
Watching television
Using MySpace
I fail to see how even involvement in a hardcore guild (4 or 5-day per week commitment, free weekends) matches the amount of damage the above activities can do to your life.
I don't mean to sound elitist, but you couldn't get above a C for the consumption and regurgitation of facts in most of my college courses. In fact, most of the A-level students tended to be not so much bright or insightful as extremely methodical, clearheaded and logical, even in the humanities. Hell, in my case, I think not taking any formal logic or rhetoric courses was why I could never push my GPA into honors territory, no matter how hard I tried.
I don't buy predestination in academia, nor do I think that a bachelor's is a road block. All of the people I knew with good grades who went on to graduate study worked like dogs for it. I grew a lot during that time period, and I feel sad for anybody who didn't. A 4-year degree is not a rubber stamp.
Going into debt while going to school is not necessary for a 4 year degree. In California, for example, most people can get enough grants that their tuition at public schools is free. Then, on top of that, you can trade your subsidized loan money for work-study money, which puts a little bit of cash in your pocket and probably pays for your rent too. And seriously, most on-campus jobs are banal, have good pay, and are designed so that you can study while working.
And then there's community college. Did you know that a lot of community colleges have "transfer agreements" - whereby, if maintain a fairly decent GPA and take the right courses, the University cannot deny you admission? This is how my girlfriend got into the best public school in the nation. Also, most of my CS breadth classes at community college (with the exception of Diff. Eq. *shiver*) were a cakewalk. People who go into those gigantic CS classes where the curve says that the bottom 10% will fail are suckers, too. I find it pretty hard to believe that I learned much less than my Big U counterparts, as well. At this level you pretty much have to teach yourself, and you're basically either talented at programming or you're not.
In my opinion, you are more likely to find a fresh college graduate with the ability to research, reason, argue and comment his damn code properly than a layperson with four years of experience who can do the same. A lot of college students don't know how to reason worth a damn, too, but it is something that college at least attempts to instill in a person. Your 4-year degree does not give you in-depth knowledge of a subject. It gives you the ability to reason analytically, and the subject is almost a pretext. I admit that a humanities major is more likely to succeed in a humanities master's program than an engineering student, but (assuming equal desire and raw ability) either would be more successful at any higher-level study than some scrub fresh out of high school, because 4 years of professors have already installed in the Bachelor's holders the ability to think and the power to see what's there, rather than what they want to be there.
The real question is, how are these things handled by the courts and laws of the countries in which they occur?
"The Indian prosecutors had everything they needed to throw the book at them, until they found out that the police had stapled the CDs and floppies containing the data to their forms."
(elaboration from a story I heard about Indian police a few months ago)
This is probably just some weird, catastrophic oversight of mine. I probably preferentially hear/read distrust just because it's the term I prefer to use. As for which is proper, according to the Shakespeare Search Engine, both terms have been in use for at least 400 years.
This site claims they're rough synonyms, and that distrust adds an air of suspicion in addition to lack of trust.
And I'm still not entirely sure what this cloud is.
I'm surprised that they seem to sprinkle this term "the cloud" around with such childlike glee, and I don't really know precisely what it is. Either that means I'm not in the target audience, who are probably conversant with this term, or that the author has a buzzword fetish. And "mistrust"? I actually had to look at one up to make sure it wasn't, like, place trust in something unworthy thereof, rather than a synonym for everyday, "distrust."
Weirdo writers.
Anyway, on a more salient note, I really don't like how Google's stolen the term "Beta." When you talk to a lot of people out there in "the cloud," or whatever the hell, they think "Beta" means that it's up 98-99% of the time, like GMail, and aren't really aware of the fact that beta software contains bugs, or that there is some inherent risk in using it.
Unlikely. Every time you apply for any kind of an educational program, you have to submit everything, even if it's to the same school, the same department, hell, even the same person.
Shakespeare wrote one truly original story in his whole life (A Midsummer Night's Dream), but he is still regarded as the best English-language playwright and poet. It wouldn't have mattered if R&J was based on Pyramus and Thisbie instead - it still would've been Shakespeare's words and stagecraft that made it great. With this in the back of my mind, I think it's kind of stupid and shallow to say that Warhammer and Warcraft are anything alike because of The Warp vs. The Twisting Nether or Chaos vs. The Burning Legion. They're clearly the same content - even the Warp/Chaos is a Warhammerism for the Christian Hell/Demons, and the idea of sorcerers unwittingly courting Demonic powers is PRETTY DARN OLD - but all that stuff is basically some paint thrown up on the wall and some costumes, where the stories of Illidan and Ner'zhul, and of course, the gameplay, are what keep me enthralled.
Anyway, it's really interesting to see how blatently GW is willing to rip off their ideas. It's really alright, because they add a lot to them in terms of making the game a fun tabletop warfare game, just like Blizzard adds a lot in making the games playable on the computer. The law mongering is disgusting, however, and is a pretty crappy practice. Authors and artists are all basically copycats, and the fact that the laws don't recognize or support it is pretty shameful and can ultimately only be detrimental to our culture.
The best wireless security solution is just to not use wireless. Yes, it's sexy. Yes, I know it can be a pain when there's a split in an ethernet cable that's in the rafters. Yes, I like to be able to use this laptop on the couch because it helps my creative energies get flowing. But seriously, if I were at all concerned about security, I'd just stick at CAT5E into the side and be done with it. Big wireless deployments are things for college students and people who like cafes. If I were running a business, I wouldn't throw money at a wireless project to begin with, let alone build an elaborate jamming/shielding system to correct problems which could've been avoided by not doing anything in the first place.
San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 2006: Happyemoticon today disclosed breaking news on behalf of Channel 2 that sometime, possibly within the year, there would be breaking news of titanic proportions reported by Channel 2.
"We cannot overstate the magnitude of this 'newsish' report," Happyemoticon stated, his jowls flapping manically with the stress, "Although none of our reporters have yet been tasked with the assignment of finding this 'news,' current research by the boys in R&D suggests that we're onto something. We're not ready to disclose what this 'something' is, but rest assured, when we ascertain what this news is, the release of the news that our breaking news is ascertained will certainly be big news. Really big. News."
A variety of claims and speculation have emerged as people try to piece together facts in an attempt to determine what the news referred to by this news report is referring to, from aliens to typhoons to the Rapture, many of them in turn framed as news stories. Jim Joebob, a news theorist working for News Corporation (parent company of Fox Channel 2), theorizes that the news' news may be so new it hasn't even happened yet. "A contact in their lab mentioned they had a perpetual random number generator which they use to 'sniff out' incoming stories, by sensing local anomalies in causality as evinced by the frequency of 1 or 0. I am sure of the integrity of this device, as it is apparently powered by a hamster, gerbil, or some other rodent, known to be extremely high sources of entropy."
"Apparently for the last two weeks," he continued, "they've been coming up with nothing but 1/2. If this hearsay news is news, then there should even be a news story about the news flibbilityblah."
Sixty hours is only bad if you're a lazy pampered American like me and your number one concern is having enough time to level your character in World of Warcraft.
Fascinating! That's the biggest concern of Chinse gold farmers, too!
Personally, my only beef with the way the holocaust is generally portrayed is that it is not very holistic (excuse the pun if you will).
5-6 million Jews
Okay. But (pulled from wikipedia):
1.8 -1.9 million non-Jewish Poles
500,000-1.2 million Serbs
200,000-800,000 Gypsies
200,000-300,000 people with disabilities
80,000-200,000 Freemasons
100,000 communists
10,000-25,000 homosexual men
2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses
Thus, the number of non-Jews killed is around 2.8 million at the low end, and 4.5 million at the high end. It really doesn't get mentioned to any extent. And what I've never heard anybody shed a tear over is the total of 62 million people in graves because of World War II itself. What I'd really like to hear, actually, is why this kind of thing goes unmentioned, especially in primary and secondary education.
It's really hard for me to swallow that x number of people can die and it's a tragedy and.5x people die in the same manner for similar reasons and nobody gives a shit, and 10x people die a few miles away and it's not even really talked about.
Is it because the Hebrew people were hit hardest by percentage, and that they have no homeland to speak of to retreat to? False premises. Romani were hit hardest in raw percentages, and are also wanderers as a people. So is it because most cultures LIKE Jewish people more than the Romani? It's basically true: hardworking people of scientists, engineers, lawyers, and leaders vs. lazy people who live by stealing, trickery and exploitation. I wish somebody would fess up to it, though.
Is it because more Jews were killed in raw numbers? Well, more people were killed by the war in raw numbers, so that leads to the rather disgusting idea that Jewish lives are worth ten times what the lives of non-Jews are. I don't think anybody actually believes this, but the horror of the war itself is completely and utterly ignored, it really makes me wonder.
Is it because the Jewish portion of the Holocaust makes for good, simple rhetoric in tolerance and religious freedom? I guess that's true, but it really comes off as, "Don't hate the Jews," rather than, "Don't hate people who are different than you." See our treatment of Muslims.
Is it because the Jews were the primary targets of the holocaust? This probably has a lot to do with it. But seriously, if the primary term is 6 million, and the secondary terms add up is 4.5 million, it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that the secondary terms are a significant portion of the final number.
Is it because you can learn from the Holocaust, but you can't learn from the war? You can learn plenty from the war in my opinion, but not everybody agrees on what that is. You can learn, for example, that it's a bad idea to fight a land war against Russia. Or that it's a bad idea to cripple the loser in a war to the point where they turn to extremists for hope - but nobody really likes the idea that the Treaty of Versailles was the cause of all that death. Or that ultra-nationalist wars for resources end in massive amounts of death.
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This is why OEM bundling is so important to Microsoft, and also why most people don't understand the insidiousness of their monopoly - because they try to make false comparisons to other industries where this level of coercion is not possible.
I'm going to make an analogy here which is also false, but which I hope will shed more light on the truth than some others which have been made regarding Microsoft and perhaps be mildly amusing. For the record, I think Neal Stephenson's "800 lb gorilla that only says, 'Where do you want to go today?'" and doesn't actually go where you tell it to is most correct one.
Microsoft's relationship with its OEM partners is as if the OEM partners made the car and Microsoft made the engine. They have exclusive deals with every car manufacturer in the world, except BMW. Not only this, but they only have two engines: a truck engine and a sedan engine, and they only sell one variety of each at a time. Their new sedan engine comes in 15 different flavors, but they only vary in how crippled they have been (i.e. half the cylinders welded shut). The truck engine, for reference' sakes, is just the sedan engine, except it's incompatible with automatic transmission.
So Microsoft comes out with a new engine, and GM and Honda come up to them and say, "Well, MS, we see that there are a lot of problems with your new V6. We think we're going to make your new engine an option, targetting it at 25% of overall sales, and continue ordering your older, more reliable model until such a time as we see the problems with the new engine have been worked out. This might be up to two years."
The Microsoft rep makes a disappointed face, and says, "Well, if you do that, we're going to sell you all of these engines at triple the cost you're used to paying. In order for you to maintain your current price point, you'll have to have all of the cars carrying the old engine off the lots by April, 3 months after the launch."
At this point, GM and Honda can either
I find nothing more satisfying in a game than facing a challenging opponent of approximately my skill level.
The trouble with most online gaming is that finding such an opponent (nay, finding 15 opponents, and finding 14 allies of your level) is nigh impossible. One side is usually the "winning team" and the other side is the "losing team." This becomes apparent sooner rather than later to most people, and in place of the actual joy of struggling against a challenging opponent, people turn into O'Brien relish in the lesser, more sadistic joy of trampling over a helpless opponent. This happens so much that blind sadism replaces the desire for a true challenge, and people forget what it's like to win or lose by a nose hair, or to face an opponent who is obviously better than you and at *least* get that one kill.
I know I'm making a bit of a broad generalization here. Sure, there are creeps out there who truly would rather face a weaker opponent. But I think that most people don't start out here, and if they get there they quickly get bored and go away.
I think this is more or less true of all online gaming, but it's especially true of MMOs, despite the fact that an MMO is meant to be less twitchy and more of a cerebral thing.
RTSs and FPSs are twitch games no matter how you cut it. This is pretty obvious in the second category, but even with RTSs, eventually a limited set of preferred strategies come to the fore, and all you're doing is implementing them and dividing your attention between the twitch game of the field and the twitch game of building your base. The worst step that most RTSs make is causing micromanaging battles ("fun") to be far less important than micromanaging your base ("dull"), to the point where a player who simply makes endless armies of one unit and throws them suicidally at an opponent will generally win in most games against an opponent who intensively micromanages battles to the detriment of his base.
In MMOs, and WoW in particular, not only does the gameplay resemble an FPS more than it should, but you're going into every fight with a wide gear/level disparity between you and your opponent, in addition to the fact that a player with the time to run dungeons extensively probably has a bit of a skill edge too. The first part probably needs to be harped on quite a bit: success in PVP usually depends on who gets the first shot off, just like in CS once everybody's got a good rifle, except there's autotargetting. Also, damage and defense have scaled at fundamentally different rates. Battles between two geared players usually take a matter of seconds, whereas battles between two ungeared players could last up to a minute.
It probably also bears mentioning that certain class vs class matchups are woefully and incredibly lopsided. Certain classes have the option to choose to develop their character in such a way that they can be great at both dungeons and PVP, and others do not. Certain classes simply cannot beat a halfway competent member of another particular class. And certain classes are just plain more powerful in PVP than other classes all-around due to scaling mechanics ("It was balanced 2 years ago"). Most people's scapegoat for this is as follows: you can't balance a PVE game, where strategy, healing, tanking (designating a damage soak character to engage big monsters), and positioning are important, with a PVP game, where most of these are irrelevant (see above).
In summation, competing directly against other people online inevitably turns into a twitch game dominated by hyperactive, caffeinated adolescents with nothing to do in the evenings. It's perfectly valid that these games exist, I just get peeved that all of them are fundamentally the same. I used to be absurdly, obscenely good at CS, but then I lost interest in it because it was too time-consuming to find a good fight that wasn't lopsided, and in the meantime I became a young man and lost some of my bristling teenage nerve-endings. I think if WAR manages to be slo
I think he's talking about ANY data whatsoever. A lot of people just use these HD-based MP3 players as jumbo thumb drives. I know an IT guy who keeps multiple OS images on his. I have lots of (non-ipod-based) movies on mine.
Also, the fact that you can access the drive normally means you can go into a little folder called .iPod_Control (or something) and do fun things like export your songs and hack the iPod database. The songs aren't on a separate partition or anything, they're just named funny things like SFJI.mp3 and put into weird folders.
The whole Zune thing seems weird and sad. I mean, I don't think Microsoft is inherently bad or evil, I just wish they would live up to their own hype. They imagine their OS and associated peripherals as a paradise island of connectivity and ease, and then they go and make Zune and slap a 1000 meter restraining order on it and put it on a raft in the Pacific. What's next, Microsoft, a next-generation PDA for young professionals on the go that is 100% incompatible with any Office document?
Maybe not, but I'm sure it has an emergency fan-shutoff system wired to the windows and doors.
I agree for the most part - the most amusing example was when a job required "5 years Java experience" when java itself was only 2 years old - but look at it from a different perspective:
Programmers really aren't interchangable. Even though I'm more of a writer, look at my dev skillset: primarily Perl/Python text processing, Java, JSP, XSLT, MySQL, C/C++ (pretty rusty); fairly strong Unix background. Now, hopefully, somebody could look at this get an idea of what type of things I like to program. Nothing makes me happier than text processing and databases and web apps. But if somebody told me to go design an MFC GUI, I'd just shoot myself. I'm about as interested in MS C++ as I am in oral surgery, and so far I've managed to avoid it on all but two occasions - and I'd prefer to keep it at that.
Moreover, I am keenly aware that my coworkers are better at programming GUIs than I am, a few months of hard work and smiles would not turn me into a good Windows programmer no matter how direly I wanted it.
Ideally, the person looking at your application is conversant enough with these technologies to know that it'd be worth fudging the qualifications a bit and letting you get in front of a real person. This is not always the case, and that's a shame. But I've found it to be true a little bit more than some people describe.
Another thing I've noticed as both a potential hiree and someone looking at prospective associates is that people tend to magnify their apparent enthusiasm for a postition. It takes a LOT of strength to tell someone straight to their face, "You know, I don't think I'd be happy here." And so you continue to appear excited about a job because you know that will increase your chances of getting the job, and because you strongly need a job. Since the recruiter can't read the other's mind and find out whether the culture is just not appealing, the least you can do is just make sure that the person will be doing the kind of work the have become accustomed to and will probably enjoy.
How about, "Non-geeks beginning to be aware botnets behind spam increase" ?
No worries; Africa's got it covered.
Well, duh, the Republicans will get out of our lives as soon as they're done stopping the terrorists, just like they'll lower taxes when Enron & co get back on their feet and they don't need any more corporate welfare.
Come on. You just have to wait for the answers to come down the pipeline, like in Urinetown. If those people had just sit tight, the UGC would've implemented its long-term solution and the drought would've been over.
I recall hearing a theory that humans live to be elderly because doing so presents a competitive advantage, for reasons that mostly do not apply in our ape cousins. For example:
Also, don't fall into the trap of believing that longevity is something that was invented in the 20th century. I mean, going to this wikipedia article, you can see that even though the average life expectency was 33 in the Upper Paleolithic, once you got to age 15 your life expectency was more like 54. Even this number is probably deceptively low, as it accounts for people falling dead due to environmental hazards, rather than their body just giving up after a certain point.
For example, Chaucer quipped when he was 40 or so that he didn't have much life left in him and should probably stop writing because he was a tired old man. A lot of uninformed people look at this and they think, "Well, of course! English people in the high middle ages only lived to be 33!" In fact, this was a self-depricating joke. As a well-to-do author and diplomat with patrons and money to go around, he had no reason to believe he wouldn't hang on into his sixties or even seventies. He was writing the Canterbury Tales right up until his death, and certainly did not write as if he were running out of time.
The average time commitment needed to (for example) run one of the blue instances is about 2 hours. You can get MC (the first 40-man dungeon) down to about 4 hours with relative ease, and if you're really good at what you do Blackwing Lair (the next instance, much shorter but significantly harder) can be done in 3. And from what I hear about the expansion pack, most of the dungeons of the future are going to be shorter, "hub" affairs ala Dire Maul. Every successive dungeon that Blizzard comes out with seems to have less filler content (with the exception of AQ40).
When people compare WoW to drug addiction, I laugh. Such persons must either have seen far worse gaming junkies than I, or more functional drug addicts. Most of my guildies are either adults with good jobs or college students at respected institutions. However, most drug addicts I've known have stolen thousands of dollars from their closest friends, family and parents without a shred of remorse, and spend their time spitting, muttering and screaming incoherently in the Tenderloin hoping to be hit by a car for the possibility of a morphine drip and a nice cash settlement.
Also, take a look at the popular evening entertainment activities for persons in my age bracket:
I fail to see how even involvement in a hardcore guild (4 or 5-day per week commitment, free weekends) matches the amount of damage the above activities can do to your life.
I don't mean to sound elitist, but you couldn't get above a C for the consumption and regurgitation of facts in most of my college courses. In fact, most of the A-level students tended to be not so much bright or insightful as extremely methodical, clearheaded and logical, even in the humanities. Hell, in my case, I think not taking any formal logic or rhetoric courses was why I could never push my GPA into honors territory, no matter how hard I tried.
I don't buy predestination in academia, nor do I think that a bachelor's is a road block. All of the people I knew with good grades who went on to graduate study worked like dogs for it. I grew a lot during that time period, and I feel sad for anybody who didn't. A 4-year degree is not a rubber stamp.
Going into debt while going to school is not necessary for a 4 year degree. In California, for example, most people can get enough grants that their tuition at public schools is free. Then, on top of that, you can trade your subsidized loan money for work-study money, which puts a little bit of cash in your pocket and probably pays for your rent too. And seriously, most on-campus jobs are banal, have good pay, and are designed so that you can study while working.
And then there's community college. Did you know that a lot of community colleges have "transfer agreements" - whereby, if maintain a fairly decent GPA and take the right courses, the University cannot deny you admission? This is how my girlfriend got into the best public school in the nation. Also, most of my CS breadth classes at community college (with the exception of Diff. Eq. *shiver*) were a cakewalk. People who go into those gigantic CS classes where the curve says that the bottom 10% will fail are suckers, too. I find it pretty hard to believe that I learned much less than my Big U counterparts, as well. At this level you pretty much have to teach yourself, and you're basically either talented at programming or you're not.
In my opinion, you are more likely to find a fresh college graduate with the ability to research, reason, argue and comment his damn code properly than a layperson with four years of experience who can do the same. A lot of college students don't know how to reason worth a damn, too, but it is something that college at least attempts to instill in a person. Your 4-year degree does not give you in-depth knowledge of a subject. It gives you the ability to reason analytically, and the subject is almost a pretext. I admit that a humanities major is more likely to succeed in a humanities master's program than an engineering student, but (assuming equal desire and raw ability) either would be more successful at any higher-level study than some scrub fresh out of high school, because 4 years of professors have already installed in the Bachelor's holders the ability to think and the power to see what's there, rather than what they want to be there.
"The Indian prosecutors had everything they needed to throw the book at them, until they found out that the police had stapled the CDs and floppies containing the data to their forms."
(elaboration from a story I heard about Indian police a few months ago)
Would you say that he is "more better" at xbox modding than english modding?
That's very interesting. Thanks.
This is probably just some weird, catastrophic oversight of mine. I probably preferentially hear/read distrust just because it's the term I prefer to use. As for which is proper, according to the Shakespeare Search Engine, both terms have been in use for at least 400 years.
This site claims they're rough synonyms, and that distrust adds an air of suspicion in addition to lack of trust.
And I'm still not entirely sure what this cloud is.
I'm surprised that they seem to sprinkle this term "the cloud" around with such childlike glee, and I don't really know precisely what it is. Either that means I'm not in the target audience, who are probably conversant with this term, or that the author has a buzzword fetish. And "mistrust"? I actually had to look at one up to make sure it wasn't, like, place trust in something unworthy thereof, rather than a synonym for everyday, "distrust."
Weirdo writers.
Anyway, on a more salient note, I really don't like how Google's stolen the term "Beta." When you talk to a lot of people out there in "the cloud," or whatever the hell, they think "Beta" means that it's up 98-99% of the time, like GMail, and aren't really aware of the fact that beta software contains bugs, or that there is some inherent risk in using it.
Bah. I'm already wasting several hours a week farming Cenarion Circle rep for my new axe, and now I've gotta farm wikipedia rep?
Unlikely. Every time you apply for any kind of an educational program, you have to submit everything, even if it's to the same school, the same department, hell, even the same person.
Shakespeare wrote one truly original story in his whole life (A Midsummer Night's Dream), but he is still regarded as the best English-language playwright and poet. It wouldn't have mattered if R&J was based on Pyramus and Thisbie instead - it still would've been Shakespeare's words and stagecraft that made it great. With this in the back of my mind, I think it's kind of stupid and shallow to say that Warhammer and Warcraft are anything alike because of The Warp vs. The Twisting Nether or Chaos vs. The Burning Legion. They're clearly the same content - even the Warp/Chaos is a Warhammerism for the Christian Hell/Demons, and the idea of sorcerers unwittingly courting Demonic powers is PRETTY DARN OLD - but all that stuff is basically some paint thrown up on the wall and some costumes, where the stories of Illidan and Ner'zhul, and of course, the gameplay, are what keep me enthralled.
Anyway, it's really interesting to see how blatently GW is willing to rip off their ideas. It's really alright, because they add a lot to them in terms of making the game a fun tabletop warfare game, just like Blizzard adds a lot in making the games playable on the computer. The law mongering is disgusting, however, and is a pretty crappy practice. Authors and artists are all basically copycats, and the fact that the laws don't recognize or support it is pretty shameful and can ultimately only be detrimental to our culture.
I do that too, it just involves some scissors and duct tape.
The best wireless security solution is just to not use wireless. Yes, it's sexy. Yes, I know it can be a pain when there's a split in an ethernet cable that's in the rafters. Yes, I like to be able to use this laptop on the couch because it helps my creative energies get flowing. But seriously, if I were at all concerned about security, I'd just stick at CAT5E into the side and be done with it. Big wireless deployments are things for college students and people who like cafes. If I were running a business, I wouldn't throw money at a wireless project to begin with, let alone build an elaborate jamming/shielding system to correct problems which could've been avoided by not doing anything in the first place.
San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 2006: Happyemoticon today disclosed breaking news on behalf of Channel 2 that sometime, possibly within the year, there would be breaking news of titanic proportions reported by Channel 2.
"We cannot overstate the magnitude of this 'newsish' report," Happyemoticon stated, his jowls flapping manically with the stress, "Although none of our reporters have yet been tasked with the assignment of finding this 'news,' current research by the boys in R&D suggests that we're onto something. We're not ready to disclose what this 'something' is, but rest assured, when we ascertain what this news is, the release of the news that our breaking news is ascertained will certainly be big news. Really big. News."
A variety of claims and speculation have emerged as people try to piece together facts in an attempt to determine what the news referred to by this news report is referring to, from aliens to typhoons to the Rapture, many of them in turn framed as news stories. Jim Joebob, a news theorist working for News Corporation (parent company of Fox Channel 2), theorizes that the news' news may be so new it hasn't even happened yet. "A contact in their lab mentioned they had a perpetual random number generator which they use to 'sniff out' incoming stories, by sensing local anomalies in causality as evinced by the frequency of 1 or 0. I am sure of the integrity of this device, as it is apparently powered by a hamster, gerbil, or some other rodent, known to be extremely high sources of entropy."
"Apparently for the last two weeks," he continued, "they've been coming up with nothing but 1/2. If this hearsay news is news, then there should even be a news story about the news flibbilityblah."
Fascinating! That's the biggest concern of Chinse gold farmers, too!
Personally, my only beef with the way the holocaust is generally portrayed is that it is not very holistic (excuse the pun if you will).
Okay. But (pulled from wikipedia):
Thus, the number of non-Jews killed is around 2.8 million at the low end, and 4.5 million at the high end. It really doesn't get mentioned to any extent. And what I've never heard anybody shed a tear over is the total of 62 million people in graves because of World War II itself. What I'd really like to hear, actually, is why this kind of thing goes unmentioned, especially in primary and secondary education.
It's really hard for me to swallow that x number of people can die and it's a tragedy and .5x people die in the same manner for similar reasons and nobody gives a shit, and 10x people die a few miles away and it's not even really talked about.
Is it because the Hebrew people were hit hardest by percentage, and that they have no homeland to speak of to retreat to? False premises. Romani were hit hardest in raw percentages, and are also wanderers as a people. So is it because most cultures LIKE Jewish people more than the Romani? It's basically true: hardworking people of scientists, engineers, lawyers, and leaders vs. lazy people who live by stealing, trickery and exploitation. I wish somebody would fess up to it, though.
Is it because more Jews were killed in raw numbers? Well, more people were killed by the war in raw numbers, so that leads to the rather disgusting idea that Jewish lives are worth ten times what the lives of non-Jews are. I don't think anybody actually believes this, but the horror of the war itself is completely and utterly ignored, it really makes me wonder.
Is it because the Jewish portion of the Holocaust makes for good, simple rhetoric in tolerance and religious freedom? I guess that's true, but it really comes off as, "Don't hate the Jews," rather than, "Don't hate people who are different than you." See our treatment of Muslims.
Is it because the Jews were the primary targets of the holocaust? This probably has a lot to do with it. But seriously, if the primary term is 6 million, and the secondary terms add up is 4.5 million, it doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that the secondary terms are a significant portion of the final number.
Is it because you can learn from the Holocaust, but you can't learn from the war? You can learn plenty from the war in my opinion, but not everybody agrees on what that is. You can learn, for example, that it's a bad idea to fight a land war against Russia. Or that it's a bad idea to cripple the loser in a war to the point where they turn to extremists for hope - but nobody really likes the idea that the Treaty of Versailles was the cause of all that death. Or that ultra-nationalist wars for resources end in massive amounts of death.