Probably a better phrasing would be "Fans of the GPL are that way because they're not obsessed with cashing in on every trivial application they happen to make."
And finding partners for sex using bluetooth mobile is as productive as asking a/s/l on IRC channels, or Mrs Gump's box of chocolate.
I've not done this myself, and/. is not the best place for an honest discussion of sexuality by damn sight.
First: There is one criterion for hooking up: looks. Man, woman or otherwise, you know whether you'd screw person x within a half second of meeting them. Chatrooms are a waste of time. thefacebook.com and okcupid.com are a bit better because of the addition of pictures, but those can be faked or obfuscated and the whole process isn't immediate enough, which is key if you're looking to do impulsive.
Second: There is a reason this happened in England. Mainstream American women have tons of hangups about sex that British women simply do not.
Seriously, no matter how horny you are, you wouldn't simply jump on bed with anybody, would you?
This is an excellent example of my last point. Some people, especially women, only acknowledge three roles for women: the virgin, the mother and the slut. That's pretty sad. It's not about doing anybody, it's about finding someone mildly attractive who wants the same thing as you do, and it's more conveniant if you're a commuter than going to a bar.
Your average music fan wants to play fair, but feels positively exploited by 1) the astonishing price inflation of retail chain stores such as Tower and 2) the pressure put on artists to make a catchy single, some second rate padding, and sell it as a full album. They are the basically virtuous Lochean person who is driven to commit petty crimes because of their conditions. The current P2P crisis is really just because *AA haven't kept abreast with technology and absolutely refuse to give up their massive profit margins. Nobody would mind getting Divx quality movies for $5, or even $10 a pop, and the companies might actually make a profit off of it.
For example, when I had a friend who worked for Tower Records, I bought a ton of CDs for cost + 20%, usually like $12. Now I buy few, if any, because they're damn near $20.
CherryOS's developers, or scam artists if you will, want to make a quick buck based on somebody else's product. They are Hobbesian, State-of-Nature types who will do anything to get ahead, steal anything that's not nailed down, and are in every concievable way, "nasty, brutish, and short."
Hilary Clinton is positioning herself as a strong proponent of the "moral values" that were a major component of Bush's reelection in order to conquer the White House in 2008.
My personal gripe is that no one talks about the morality of
invading another country,
letting American jobs go overseas,
cutting services to the poor, and
screwing people in the public educational system.
As described in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, we live in a nation who identifies amorality with dirty words and fictional violence, not real violence and letting the "American Dream" fall to ruin. Sure, I'd rather see a Democrat get into office, but somebody should be setting the dialogue to something besides gay marriage and video games.
I will personally champion the cause of retinal scans as the only valid form of identification, as shown in the book/film, Minority Report. Sure, that will mean having a national database of retina biometrics, but this will be impossible to fake as long as the scanners are powered by a serious, closed-source platform like Longhorn, and equipped with bombs so that the Orrin Hatch can blow up offending units.
In other news, as of 8:00 am this morning, I have filed my application with Berkeley's optomology program, hoping to specialize in ocular surgery.
I learned to program in C++ my first year of college, and Java the second. I forgot most of it by my senior year, but I got a job where programming was majorly helpful. I've picked up ELisp, Perl, and Python in the past few months with relative ease, and have done rather well. I still can't build a GUI worth crap, but my skills with OO and procedural text processing have not waned a bit. You know what you know. Learning a language is trivial.
The only thing to think about, though, is while any competant programmer can get the hang of a language in a few weeks, bureaucracies are monolithically resistant to change.
Add on top of that people have routinely rejected thin-clients. Bandwidth and latency are big problems. I expect acess to my files and data with low latency. That means viewing my 8MB digital photos without waiting for part of all of it to come over a wire. I expect it to be available to me all the time.
The author of the article is a bit too blue-sky, in my opinion. A lot of Google's products - nay, I'd say, the entirety of their moneymakers, since all the other stuff is free - are B2B, like their search appliance and ad program. A smarter strategy than some mass consumer rollout, one they've probably already thought of, is a solution for businesses, a solution for your average office monkey who just uses Excel, Outlook, IE and Word. Put it in an office with a gigabit ethernet <5ms latency, and you're golden. Fork a few FOSS applications and you've got a productivity suite and a browser. Keep it just closed enough to allow you to sell the hardware exclusively, like Apple.
Despite how great Gmail is, it's not nearly a rich as Thunderbird or Outlook 2003.
Gmail, in my opinion, is an example of a really rich web app just striving to break out of its browser box. I think what things are pointing to is not dynamic HTML with a scripter, but running a widget toolkit remotely.
Different schools have different mentalities. That's why there are professional schools and letters and sciences schools. My uni has separate colleges of Engineering, L&S, Business, Law, etc. I'm in the humanities, and I can tell you without a twitch that they are positively in the stratosphere with their high-falutin' theory gabbledegook. Without a doubt, Milton and Restoration comedy will have no bearing on my job in the years go come. Conversely, I doubt that anyone in an undergrad EE program fifty years ago or now had any intention, at least in the short term, of doing something with themselves after graduation besides engineering. Underscore that and circle it about five times for Business and Law.
The issue is not felons per se, or any kind of deep, logical paradigm about the disenfranchised ex-cons and illegal immigrants. It's about self-interest: Democrats will propose any change to voting laws so long as it helps them. Immigrants, poor, hispanics, and blacks (and like it or not, felons disproportionately fall into the last three categories) are more likely to vote Democratic, so naturally Democrats want them to vote more. Conversely, since Republicans own most voting machines, they will do anything to oppose open voting, at least in part because it constitutes a monetary investment, and tacitly because there's at least a possibility they could fix the election.
The article's not focused on communication and writing skills, but rather how a particular gamer's perspective. That is, the perspective with which an elite gamer looks upon a game does not predict its enjoyment for your average gamer.
I'd describe myself as a casual to avid gamer, but I never saw the fuss about Quake 3, for example. It felt plastic. I've always been a fan of Unreal (original and tournament - 2004, which is traditionally poo-pooed on by the hardcore gamers.
I despute your point for the most part, certainly with respect to gamers. It's a false analogy because a champion football player does so by getting his head knocked around on a daily basis, where being a champion gamer has at least something to do with mental effort, at least in the ideal situation. I know lots of really good gamers who are very well spoken. I do not take this to a representative sample, though.
Hitler's name was never put on any warships because those would be easily destroyed. For example, you saw the Bismarck, and the Hindenberg (which I recall was going to be called the Hitler but they changed it), go up in flames. Stalin so vehemently defended Stalingrad because in the minds of his people that would tarnish his power.
Okay, apples and oranges. Killing somebody's namesake is not killing them. But these highly nationalistic states depend in part on the percieved omnipotence of their leaders. Someone has already posted on how KJI's entire line are worshiped as would-be gods. For them to admit that KJI was or even could be killed by assassins would be to sacrifice this, and threaten the pseudo-religious fantaticism that keeps the nation ticking over.
If you want to hear a funny story, when I worked at Starbucks, a woman complained that her stovetop espresso maker didn't make enough coffee.
"But ma'am, it's an espresso maker. It should only make a small amount of coffee." "It's not an espresso maker, it's a coffee pot!" she retorted. Clearly somebody didn't have their facts straight. It was certainly more likely that a true coffee geek who worked 40 hours a week in caffeinated bliss would not be able to identify a coffee product which he sold and had been trained to use, than a customer would have imperfect understanding of the same product. "Clearly," I said, indicating to the latte on the box, the word "espresso" littered throughout the packaging, "this was designed to make a small amount of highly concentrated coffee, to be mixed with other beverages, such as we sell for upwards of 4 dollars a cup." "No!" she fired back, "It doesn't make enough!" as if her unit was particularly defective, or the entire industry of stovetop espresso makers was an ill-fated, newfangled fad come up with by the marketing guys Bodum.
"Well, regardless of what it is, you don't like it?" "No, I don't." "Refund accepted."
I've also got one about a guy who complained that his latte tasted of milk. Thankfully, I refrained from giving him a lesson in the Italian language and just got him a grande drip.
Coffee makers suck about as much now as they ever did then. I have some kind of vibration that breaks coffee makers on touch. I've gone through four in the last two years.
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can type at about 100wpm on a qwerty (well, with relatively spotty accuracy). This is because my mother forced me to do Mavis Beacon, as her father had forced her to memorize the layout of a qwerty and play-type even before they had enough money to buy a typewriter for the children to use. Also, I think EFNet owns some of the blame in this case.
The problem is, nobody can think at 100 words per minute. The only person who would ever need to type that fast would probably be a professional stenographer. Transcription and "typing pool" work is really on the outs, and if it's not, it damn well should be. I certainly can't think -- can't think WELL -- at 100 words per minute. I'd rather not learn a whole different standard which is fast, but, practically speaking, useless, just like I'd rather not own a DB7 Vantage when the Autoban is an ocean away.
PHP is pretty cool, I'll have to admit. I'm not trying to start a war. I use it. I do OK as long as I have a nice thick reference manual next to me, but I'd rather not have to look up quite so many functions. These words you speak of, "discipline" and "persevere[nce]," aren't really in my forte. It's the same reason I don't like Java very much: accomplishing a simple task (oh, I don't know, like BufferedReader= new BufferedReader(new FileReader(new File(name))) vs open(FILE, "$filename";) requires you to spend five minutes with the manual if you don't know it off the top of your head.
Maybe this is just one of those learning curve things which is totally transparent once you become a coding god, or maybe you've just learned to live with the pain.
I think they're just using the windows stuff as a sales pitch to Windows people. It says, "In most frameworks, this part of the application can grow pretty messy, tedious, verbose, and error-prone. Rails makes it dead simple!" That's marketing language. The toughest job is convincing non-technical managers. They will often look at something without a simple GUI installer like something from the dark ages. To them, presentation conveys product maturity and professionalism.
Let them chew on RoR on their WinXP boxes, while the real work gets done on servers. As far as making "adjustments," I don't want to be a gentoo snob, but all I did was emerge ruby && emerge mysql. And just to throw my hat into the LAMP debate, I am not a professional web programmer, but I find php's cobbledtogetherness and inConSisTent function_names quite aggravating and weird, and I'm sure aforementioned bosses do too.
I've only been playing the game off and on at my friend's house, but I've decided that I'm going to wait until at least midway through the semester, both for scholastic reasons and because I want it to be stable when I do decide to play.
But, to Blizzard's credit, they are doing this smart. This is their first foray into the MMORPG world, and they don't want what has happened to the others to happen to them: a launch disaster, leading to public embarassment and thousands of angry subscribers. If I remember correctly, there hasn't been a really smooth launch in the history of the genre. Rather than let the greed of corporate immediacy taint them, they're actually planning for the future! Fancy that. You know they're planning for an expansion pack at some point (because that's just how Blizzard works, come on - and the current level cap is such a weird number: 60?), so the eyes of the world are really upon them.
Part of the problem is that the big servers get most of the traffic. I was able to play very well on one of the lower-volume servers, but I anticipate that the current disparity will remain. When you're going to a party (for the sake of the analogy), you don't head to your buddy's dinner get-together when Marti Gras in New Orleans is down the street.
Heh. People have this misconception that English majors are really good spellers (conversely: "You're in the College of Engineering? Good. I need somebody to teach me how to use that arc welder"). This is not the case! I know a lot of ten-dollar words and obscure poems, and I type pretty damn fast, but that doesn't mean I can spell worth a damn. Actually, the more literature I study, the worse it gets. My favorite authors died long before spelling standardization, and any textbook or "critical edition" you're likely to read in class won't have modernized spelling.
My favorite was "Seeking Senior ASIC designer, REQUIREMENTS - Experience with VHDL, simulation tools, synthesis and digital design. PhD in EE or CS".
One of my coworkers went to Santa Cruz in the late 90's, and she heard her cohorts in EE/CS lament that many, many Silicon Valley companies were requiring "5 years Java experience," just because it's a nice round number, neglecting the fact that Java had only existed for 2.
I'm frusterated myself. I'm an senior studying English, and most jobs I see demand 2-5 years experience or graduate degrees. I'm not going to school for another 2 (MA) to 9+ (PhD) years, at least not initially. I feel like I'm trying to get a first girlfriend; either I have to bend and twist my current experience (research, writing, and proofing, with a smattering of programming skills for flavor) to imply that "Oh no, this isn't my first time, baby," or widen my search to some hereto unknown quadrant: "So, uh, where'd you get those tattoes? Wait, what are track marks?"
A little late, but today I was writing some shell-scripty type stuff in Perl, and I realized I could represent 4 lines with 1 complex string of gibberish. Then I realized I should learn something like Py or Ruby before it's too late.
I find Java to be way too restricting. But then again, I'm a script monkey.
I'm pulling this from "The Corporation," but I recall that any form of life except a human being IS patentable.
Sure, of course it's wrong. But it doesn't really matter that it's wrong, it's law. If you want the law struck down, bring the case before a court and argue persuasively, or start worming your way into the hearts and minds of legislators. That's all we can do.
You could argue that by making lawyers feel angry and hurt you're affecting their performance or reptuation. What we're talking about is "SLANDER - A false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed; distinguished from libel."
A lot of lawyers are really sensitive about that kind of thing. Hell, I'd be pissed off if people thought less of me for going through a very competitive graduate program and working 120 hour weeks. People are convicted of libel and slander for insulting organizations, ethnic minorites, etc. Why should this apply to one group and not another?
Yeah, it's a very bad system. The way we use SSNs nowadays is an outgrowth of the increasing need for a national id #, and the government's complete unwillingness to administrate such identification in the face of "big government" paranoia. To work (and in my case go to school as well) you have to show two of the following: Social Security card, driver's license, or birth certificate. And what you say about, "Here. Take my money. Please, have it," totally rings true: I tried to pay my electricity bill (which was in my ex-roomate's name for 1 more billing cycle) and they said they needed her SSN and verbal confirmation to even tell me how much was on the account. What am I going to do, increase her credit rating?
And as far as unable to work and undeserving of credit, I'd think that's more a thing with your student visa than anything else.
Your sarcasm has exposed the genius of what Apple is doing. They're not even hiding it anymore. They're targeting the PC user full-bore: you just swap out your hulking Dell ATX case, and replace it with your new, tiny Mac.
Right. The good news is that while a lot of people will cry out to be screwed, there will be people serious about security who say, "Your products have been so virus-prone in the past. Why should I trust them now?" One of my friends is in the latter group; he's the IT/security guy with multi-million-dollar company, and they are absolutely fanatical about security. Guess what? The whole organization uses Macs. Believe me, these kinds of institutions have significant purchasing power.
On a tangent, I'll admit that my understanding of trusted computing is limited, but wouldn't the "master key" which would allow any software to be run on your computer (which would of course be held by the vendor) be the ultimate prize for malware purveyors and virus authors? The temptation to sell and steal these would be extremely high. All it takes, buddy, is one corrupt employee. Or, for that matter, companies could willingly sell the right to "advertise" on their customer's computers.
And with regard to shareware, I recently discovered how many of my favorite GPL'd applications also run on Windows, like Pan or Gaim. Point more of your friends to http://sf.net/.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a better phrasing would be "Fans of the GPL are that way because they're not obsessed with cashing in on every trivial application they happen to make."
I've not done this myself, and /. is not the best place for an honest discussion of sexuality by damn sight.
First: There is one criterion for hooking up: looks. Man, woman or otherwise, you know whether you'd screw person x within a half second of meeting them. Chatrooms are a waste of time. thefacebook.com and okcupid.com are a bit better because of the addition of pictures, but those can be faked or obfuscated and the whole process isn't immediate enough, which is key if you're looking to do impulsive.
Second: There is a reason this happened in England. Mainstream American women have tons of hangups about sex that British women simply do not.
This is an excellent example of my last point. Some people, especially women, only acknowledge three roles for women: the virgin, the mother and the slut. That's pretty sad. It's not about doing anybody, it's about finding someone mildly attractive who wants the same thing as you do, and it's more conveniant if you're a commuter than going to a bar.
Your average music fan wants to play fair, but feels positively exploited by 1) the astonishing price inflation of retail chain stores such as Tower and 2) the pressure put on artists to make a catchy single, some second rate padding, and sell it as a full album. They are the basically virtuous Lochean person who is driven to commit petty crimes because of their conditions. The current P2P crisis is really just because *AA haven't kept abreast with technology and absolutely refuse to give up their massive profit margins. Nobody would mind getting Divx quality movies for $5, or even $10 a pop, and the companies might actually make a profit off of it.
For example, when I had a friend who worked for Tower Records, I bought a ton of CDs for cost + 20%, usually like $12. Now I buy few, if any, because they're damn near $20.
CherryOS's developers, or scam artists if you will, want to make a quick buck based on somebody else's product. They are Hobbesian, State-of-Nature types who will do anything to get ahead, steal anything that's not nailed down, and are in every concievable way, "nasty, brutish, and short."
Hilary Clinton is positioning herself as a strong proponent of the "moral values" that were a major component of Bush's reelection in order to conquer the White House in 2008.
My personal gripe is that no one talks about the morality of
- invading another country,
- letting American jobs go overseas,
- cutting services to the poor, and
- screwing people in the public educational system.
As described in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, we live in a nation who identifies amorality with dirty words and fictional violence, not real violence and letting the "American Dream" fall to ruin. Sure, I'd rather see a Democrat get into office, but somebody should be setting the dialogue to something besides gay marriage and video games.I will personally champion the cause of retinal scans as the only valid form of identification, as shown in the book/film, Minority Report. Sure, that will mean having a national database of retina biometrics, but this will be impossible to fake as long as the scanners are powered by a serious, closed-source platform like Longhorn, and equipped with bombs so that the Orrin Hatch can blow up offending units.
In other news, as of 8:00 am this morning, I have filed my application with Berkeley's optomology program, hoping to specialize in ocular surgery.
I learned to program in C++ my first year of college, and Java the second. I forgot most of it by my senior year, but I got a job where programming was majorly helpful. I've picked up ELisp, Perl, and Python in the past few months with relative ease, and have done rather well. I still can't build a GUI worth crap, but my skills with OO and procedural text processing have not waned a bit. You know what you know. Learning a language is trivial.
The only thing to think about, though, is while any competant programmer can get the hang of a language in a few weeks, bureaucracies are monolithically resistant to change.
The author of the article is a bit too blue-sky, in my opinion. A lot of Google's products - nay, I'd say, the entirety of their moneymakers, since all the other stuff is free - are B2B, like their search appliance and ad program. A smarter strategy than some mass consumer rollout, one they've probably already thought of, is a solution for businesses, a solution for your average office monkey who just uses Excel, Outlook, IE and Word. Put it in an office with a gigabit ethernet <5ms latency, and you're golden. Fork a few FOSS applications and you've got a productivity suite and a browser. Keep it just closed enough to allow you to sell the hardware exclusively, like Apple.
Gmail, in my opinion, is an example of a really rich web app just striving to break out of its browser box. I think what things are pointing to is not dynamic HTML with a scripter, but running a widget toolkit remotely.
Different schools have different mentalities. That's why there are professional schools and letters and sciences schools. My uni has separate colleges of Engineering, L&S, Business, Law, etc. I'm in the humanities, and I can tell you without a twitch that they are positively in the stratosphere with their high-falutin' theory gabbledegook. Without a doubt, Milton and Restoration comedy will have no bearing on my job in the years go come. Conversely, I doubt that anyone in an undergrad EE program fifty years ago or now had any intention, at least in the short term, of doing something with themselves after graduation besides engineering. Underscore that and circle it about five times for Business and Law.
The issue is not felons per se, or any kind of deep, logical paradigm about the disenfranchised ex-cons and illegal immigrants. It's about self-interest: Democrats will propose any change to voting laws so long as it helps them. Immigrants, poor, hispanics, and blacks (and like it or not, felons disproportionately fall into the last three categories) are more likely to vote Democratic, so naturally Democrats want them to vote more. Conversely, since Republicans own most voting machines, they will do anything to oppose open voting, at least in part because it constitutes a monetary investment, and tacitly because there's at least a possibility they could fix the election.
The article's not focused on communication and writing skills, but rather how a particular gamer's perspective. That is, the perspective with which an elite gamer looks upon a game does not predict its enjoyment for your average gamer.
I'd describe myself as a casual to avid gamer, but I never saw the fuss about Quake 3, for example. It felt plastic. I've always been a fan of Unreal (original and tournament - 2004, which is traditionally poo-pooed on by the hardcore gamers.
I despute your point for the most part, certainly with respect to gamers. It's a false analogy because a champion football player does so by getting his head knocked around on a daily basis, where being a champion gamer has at least something to do with mental effort, at least in the ideal situation. I know lots of really good gamers who are very well spoken. I do not take this to a representative sample, though.
Hitler's name was never put on any warships because those would be easily destroyed. For example, you saw the Bismarck, and the Hindenberg (which I recall was going to be called the Hitler but they changed it), go up in flames. Stalin so vehemently defended Stalingrad because in the minds of his people that would tarnish his power.
Okay, apples and oranges. Killing somebody's namesake is not killing them. But these highly nationalistic states depend in part on the percieved omnipotence of their leaders. Someone has already posted on how KJI's entire line are worshiped as would-be gods. For them to admit that KJI was or even could be killed by assassins would be to sacrifice this, and threaten the pseudo-religious fantaticism that keeps the nation ticking over.
If you want to hear a funny story, when I worked at Starbucks, a woman complained that her stovetop espresso maker didn't make enough coffee.
"But ma'am, it's an espresso maker. It should only make a small amount of coffee." "It's not an espresso maker, it's a coffee pot!" she retorted. Clearly somebody didn't have their facts straight. It was certainly more likely that a true coffee geek who worked 40 hours a week in caffeinated bliss would not be able to identify a coffee product which he sold and had been trained to use, than a customer would have imperfect understanding of the same product. "Clearly," I said, indicating to the latte on the box, the word "espresso" littered throughout the packaging, "this was designed to make a small amount of highly concentrated coffee, to be mixed with other beverages, such as we sell for upwards of 4 dollars a cup." "No!" she fired back, "It doesn't make enough!" as if her unit was particularly defective, or the entire industry of stovetop espresso makers was an ill-fated, newfangled fad come up with by the marketing guys Bodum.
"Well, regardless of what it is, you don't like it?" "No, I don't." "Refund accepted."
I've also got one about a guy who complained that his latte tasted of milk. Thankfully, I refrained from giving him a lesson in the Italian language and just got him a grande drip.
Get a french press. You'll never go back, I swear. http://tinyurl.com/4sggd
I can type at about 100wpm on a qwerty (well, with relatively spotty accuracy). This is because my mother forced me to do Mavis Beacon, as her father had forced her to memorize the layout of a qwerty and play-type even before they had enough money to buy a typewriter for the children to use. Also, I think EFNet owns some of the blame in this case.
The problem is, nobody can think at 100 words per minute. The only person who would ever need to type that fast would probably be a professional stenographer. Transcription and "typing pool" work is really on the outs, and if it's not, it damn well should be. I certainly can't think -- can't think WELL -- at 100 words per minute. I'd rather not learn a whole different standard which is fast, but, practically speaking, useless, just like I'd rather not own a DB7 Vantage when the Autoban is an ocean away.
PHP is pretty cool, I'll have to admit. I'm not trying to start a war. I use it. I do OK as long as I have a nice thick reference manual next to me, but I'd rather not have to look up quite so many functions. These words you speak of, "discipline" and "persevere[nce]," aren't really in my forte. It's the same reason I don't like Java very much: accomplishing a simple task (oh, I don't know, like BufferedReader= new BufferedReader(new FileReader(new File(name))) vs open(FILE, "$filename";) requires you to spend five minutes with the manual if you don't know it off the top of your head.
Maybe this is just one of those learning curve things which is totally transparent once you become a coding god, or maybe you've just learned to live with the pain.
I think they're just using the windows stuff as a sales pitch to Windows people. It says, "In most frameworks, this part of the application can grow pretty messy, tedious, verbose, and error-prone. Rails makes it dead simple!" That's marketing language. The toughest job is convincing non-technical managers. They will often look at something without a simple GUI installer like something from the dark ages. To them, presentation conveys product maturity and professionalism.
Let them chew on RoR on their WinXP boxes, while the real work gets done on servers. As far as making "adjustments," I don't want to be a gentoo snob, but all I did was emerge ruby && emerge mysql. And just to throw my hat into the LAMP debate, I am not a professional web programmer, but I find php's cobbledtogetherness and inConSisTent function_names quite aggravating and weird, and I'm sure aforementioned bosses do too.
I've only been playing the game off and on at my friend's house, but I've decided that I'm going to wait until at least midway through the semester, both for scholastic reasons and because I want it to be stable when I do decide to play.
But, to Blizzard's credit, they are doing this smart. This is their first foray into the MMORPG world, and they don't want what has happened to the others to happen to them: a launch disaster, leading to public embarassment and thousands of angry subscribers. If I remember correctly, there hasn't been a really smooth launch in the history of the genre. Rather than let the greed of corporate immediacy taint them, they're actually planning for the future! Fancy that. You know they're planning for an expansion pack at some point (because that's just how Blizzard works, come on - and the current level cap is such a weird number: 60?), so the eyes of the world are really upon them.
Part of the problem is that the big servers get most of the traffic. I was able to play very well on one of the lower-volume servers, but I anticipate that the current disparity will remain. When you're going to a party (for the sake of the analogy), you don't head to your buddy's dinner get-together when Marti Gras in New Orleans is down the street.
Heh. People have this misconception that English majors are really good spellers (conversely: "You're in the College of Engineering? Good. I need somebody to teach me how to use that arc welder"). This is not the case! I know a lot of ten-dollar words and obscure poems, and I type pretty damn fast, but that doesn't mean I can spell worth a damn. Actually, the more literature I study, the worse it gets. My favorite authors died long before spelling standardization, and any textbook or "critical edition" you're likely to read in class won't have modernized spelling.
One of my coworkers went to Santa Cruz in the late 90's, and she heard her cohorts in EE/CS lament that many, many Silicon Valley companies were requiring "5 years Java experience," just because it's a nice round number, neglecting the fact that Java had only existed for 2.
I'm frusterated myself. I'm an senior studying English, and most jobs I see demand 2-5 years experience or graduate degrees. I'm not going to school for another 2 (MA) to 9+ (PhD) years, at least not initially. I feel like I'm trying to get a first girlfriend; either I have to bend and twist my current experience (research, writing, and proofing, with a smattering of programming skills for flavor) to imply that "Oh no, this isn't my first time, baby," or widen my search to some hereto unknown quadrant: "So, uh, where'd you get those tattoes? Wait, what are track marks?"
A little late, but today I was writing some shell-scripty type stuff in Perl, and I realized I could represent 4 lines with 1 complex string of gibberish. Then I realized I should learn something like Py or Ruby before it's too late.
I find Java to be way too restricting. But then again, I'm a script monkey.
I'm pulling this from "The Corporation," but I recall that any form of life except a human being IS patentable.
Sure, of course it's wrong. But it doesn't really matter that it's wrong, it's law. If you want the law struck down, bring the case before a court and argue persuasively, or start worming your way into the hearts and minds of legislators. That's all we can do.
You could argue that by making lawyers feel angry and hurt you're affecting their performance or reptuation. What we're talking about is "SLANDER - A false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed; distinguished from libel."
A lot of lawyers are really sensitive about that kind of thing. Hell, I'd be pissed off if people thought less of me for going through a very competitive graduate program and working 120 hour weeks. People are convicted of libel and slander for insulting organizations, ethnic minorites, etc. Why should this apply to one group and not another?
Yeah, it's a very bad system. The way we use SSNs nowadays is an outgrowth of the increasing need for a national id #, and the government's complete unwillingness to administrate such identification in the face of "big government" paranoia. To work (and in my case go to school as well) you have to show two of the following: Social Security card, driver's license, or birth certificate. And what you say about, "Here. Take my money. Please, have it," totally rings true: I tried to pay my electricity bill (which was in my ex-roomate's name for 1 more billing cycle) and they said they needed her SSN and verbal confirmation to even tell me how much was on the account. What am I going to do, increase her credit rating?
And as far as unable to work and undeserving of credit, I'd think that's more a thing with your student visa than anything else.
Your sarcasm has exposed the genius of what Apple is doing. They're not even hiding it anymore. They're targeting the PC user full-bore: you just swap out your hulking Dell ATX case, and replace it with your new, tiny Mac.
Right. The good news is that while a lot of people will cry out to be screwed, there will be people serious about security who say, "Your products have been so virus-prone in the past. Why should I trust them now?" One of my friends is in the latter group; he's the IT/security guy with multi-million-dollar company, and they are absolutely fanatical about security. Guess what? The whole organization uses Macs. Believe me, these kinds of institutions have significant purchasing power.
On a tangent, I'll admit that my understanding of trusted computing is limited, but wouldn't the "master key" which would allow any software to be run on your computer (which would of course be held by the vendor) be the ultimate prize for malware purveyors and virus authors? The temptation to sell and steal these would be extremely high. All it takes, buddy, is one corrupt employee. Or, for that matter, companies could willingly sell the right to "advertise" on their customer's computers.
And with regard to shareware, I recently discovered how many of my favorite GPL'd applications also run on Windows, like Pan or Gaim. Point more of your friends to http://sf.net/.