Believe me, the trend now goes backwards, but a year ago in the total outsourcing craze, evenone of the biggest Banks of germany tried and failed miserably.
They rowed back this year.
And the bank was one of the biggest ones of Germany, and was far from losing money.
Another example might be HP which is considered to be a really big outsourcer (while trying to gather customers for being an outsource resource supplier)
HP as well is far from losing money, although the company goes down the drain slowly bug visibly.
Hydro power is the worst; it absolutely destroys the ecosystem on the river in which they are placed.
Does it really? I come from a country which does not have oceans but had to build up its main energy source without nuclear plants. Therefore hydro energy is big over here. Things seem to look bad first but are not that bad if you look closely. The main problem with hydro energy is that it basically interferes with natural habitats. But so do cities and other manmade resources. What has to be done is to place the plants into areas which interfere least, if possible. (near cities, in areas where there is already a strong influence of man on the surrounding)
Or simply go the micro power plant route, and have thousands of small power plants on already existing water mill places which feed back into the grid.
The other problem is the obvious blocking of fish swarms. This problem is solved to a big degree already by so called fish ladders, which seem to work quite well.
The main problem for certain type of rivers is the blocking of flooding material. The main rivers which are affected by those are the ones, which build Deltas out of the flooding material, this is the biggest problem with hydro plants nowadays, but not all rivers are affected (The Yangtse river in china, the Nile in egypt and the Missispi in the USA)
But those problems are rather small if considered carfully, compared to atomic waste you dont even know to get rid of at the current day.
If there was a secure way to get the waste into the sun without risiking a high chance to pollute huge parts of the planet in an accident, then I would be pro nuclear power plants, but since there is none, oh well.
As for the tree growing problem, I see not a big deal here, in the US, the USA has vast open lands which are untapped at all, a reforestation with some kind of ecological cycle would help as long as there are no mono cultures in the trees.
Also the sea could be a huge ressource for such plants, growing algae in the see would be an excellent ressource for bio material based power plants.
Great, you brought several aknowledged design issues and used that as an argument that adventure games are lame.
HGTG is considered to be one of the worst desigened adventure games of all time puzzlewise.
And Jane Jensens adventure games either are not an example of well designed puzzles. People love the Gabriel Knight series because of the excellent stories, the blend of real existing material with myths and legends, but not for the puzzle design, where the series never did shine.
If you take that argument, then I have to say, ok, I played Daikatana, all shooters are bad.
(Although the works of Jensen are far above Daikatana in quality)
I think you hit the nail directly on the head.
Nobody thinks that Bush is responsible for the environmental mess (well at least not for the one outside of Texas:-) ), but the main problem is, that he has given in public speeches and given his non existent plans basically the whole world the impression, that he does not even care anyting about it, as long as it stops him and his oil buddies to earn their dollars. In fact after hearing a few of his speeches about environment I have the feeling this guy is on a war against nature as well (great drilling oil in national parks hey:-) )
I would not really see it as a sign of coincidence that his brothers butt currently is literally blown away by the environment down in Florida, which currently gives its vote on this issue.
God forbid actual reasoning to interfere with a perfectly good anti-USA hate-Bush rant.
The easiest way to silence critics are as soon as they present proper arguments and valid facts, that you say they are anti german, works every time.
It will but they will run definitely into huge environmental problems, given the fact that everything industrywise settles down around the south coast there mainly Shanghai.
What china will face are huge environmental problems, but even worse because they will be densely focused on a rather small spot of the mainland.
But back to global warming, China already has serious problems with it, did you notice the flood catastrophes this country faces and already has faced. Those were not of normal size.
Well, yes there are certain groups which oppose everything without a plan.
But lets face it, Wind and Water currently are the best and cleanest ways to do the job.
Third probably heat generators, if they dont rely on fossile fuels or on nuclear energy.
A growing burning wood cycle is perfectly acceptable if the trees are replanted, thus take the CO2 from the air and soil again.
I think probably some kind of sun based energy source (which water and wind is indirectly) might be the best solution in the long term, given the huge deserts the earth has. Also the oceans are somehwat an untapped territority for energy production (algae production and burning comes ot my mind), but those things currently are sci fi given the current technologies.
Given water and wind, I think, micro plants are an untapped territorrity, in many countries there is the potential to do small micro sized power plants relying on wind and water which can feed back in thousands into the national grid, those things are untapped possiblities.
Lets go back to nuclear energy. The waste problem is there and still is unsolved. I would say, this is the last option if everything else fails.
For me it is less the scarity, but the waste problem which does not make it a clean energy.
Great to hear the news, about the home energy problem.
Anyway, I think the US has lots of potential for energy generation without the nuclear waste problem.
The wide open spaces of US are an untapped potential, for wind energy, for plant growing (wood for instance) which could be burned within a short term CO2 cycle.
This would be a solution for now. Would definitely save several power plants. But the problem is, that the lobbyists wouldnt be too happy about it, if every average joe in the midwest put out his/her small wind energy station and feeds it back into the national grid.
Sounds reasonable to me, if I remember 20 years back , there was a huge move away from that stuff in various things. The first public ozone hole warnings came along around 20 years ago.
Well the problem with nuclear energy is, besides the saftey problems, that it is a long term waste problem.
The halftime of the waste of those plants can be measured in 10.000 years or more.
The next thing is, that the conatainer storage problem is not fully solved then.
The containers start to leak and then what?
Dont expect the inhabitants on earth in 10.000 years to now about those issues.
It is like, we have this clean energy, see no CO2 but the waste is absolutely deadly and will become tolerable by mammals again at a time when mammals maybe dont exist anymore.
The first way to reduce green house gases is to cut down on energy consumption not to increase the production, which would be the second way.
The more energy you produce the more it it gets consumed.
Somebody mentioned France, yes they produce a lot of energy via nuclear power. But the problems are not solved. The waste is a long term problem which lasts 10 thousands of years, basically pushing the problem into the far future to a time where the containers start to leak.
What I meant was that the USA has a much easier task to reduce the power consumption than for instance Europe, because they have so many things which are already covered over here still lingering.
The first measuer of giving tax refunds on people who build heat saving measures into their homes already probably would be enough to fulfill Kyoto. This is a nono over here in europe in many areas already because every house already is built with that in mind over here. We face a much harder task.
The problem with the big cars is not a US only problem. Cross country cars are also things to have over here, by people who mainly drive them only on roads. But that problem has to be targeted as well.
After those problems are solved we should and can think about raising the energy production.
The US has lots of untapped potential here. Vast plains which would be perfect for wind driven power plants (this is not experimental stuff I am talking about)
Lots of area which could used for artificial reforestation and then out of those forests several heat driven power plants could be built (I am talking about a natural CO2 circle here which does not increase the short term CO2 level) the list of ideas is probably endless. And as I said the US has a much easier task than Europe in this regard.
The problem is that the Kyoto treaty is by far not enough. The Kyoto treaty was not even enough at the time of the ratification.
See more problems chugging along, in europe we have felt the impact of global warming almost since 1985 when the winters from one year to the next suddenly had much less snow.
These things dont usually become worse gradually and slowly but basically from one year to the next, then things seddle for a while and then wham, the next smack.
Well I see it as a real sign of god (not the one Bush seems to believe to talk to) that Florida was one of the most devastated states this year so, that the Bush familiy in general gets a lousy feeling on what the environment thinks about their politics.
The funny thing is that the USA probably would have very easy ways to save much more energy than the kyoto treaty. From what I could see the USAs one family homes have a lousys system of preserve warmth within their walls. The constructions over here in europe are much more sophisticated in this regard (the problem and saving energy has been a big issue for a long time over here)
The people have to cut down on big cars, which they probably will never need. Face it, there already exists cars which suck 6 liters (about 1 1/2 gallons) / 100kms and much more.
Cut down on those dreaded air conditions, cut down on the power consumption of computers and so on.
All those things can be done without hurting the industry. Give tax returns on measures which add heat saving mechanisms to the average homes.
Do the taxing system according to the consumption of the cars and so on.
Bushs plan was to kick the kyoto treaty and let Enron decide what to do. Aka build more nuclear plants which yet still have an unresolved waste problem.
Ah dont worry, his brother said, global warming was a myth, and his brother must be right, because he is president and kicked the Kyoto treaty with that argument. Therefore the hurricanes cannot become stronger anymore, or do they?
I dont know, his interviews are more like a geek babbling over his latest creation.
The problem was probably that he didnt get the direct feedback over forums until this game, otherwise he probably would have cut back on the early designs talk after black and white.
Its not the tree growing itself, but you have to do that for the entire tree population probably and that basically means constantly updating stats for thousands of them.
Intel probably did this, because they already have cross licensing contracts with Via and AMD and probably a bunch of others.
The Itanium as I see it, should have been the death blow to AMD and others in the x86 arena.
Although the concept is interesting, from this angle I am glad that they failed.
I just wonder if there ever was any single printer of the 4 or 5 LJ series which ever failed. I have yet to encounter one. All I know is that the toners are still sold (some refurbished some new) to a cheap price. So there must be many still living. I think they probably will live to the next atomic blast.
Judging from my 4m at home, this thing is solid metal from the outside and every part which can break during normal operation is exchanged at every toner exchange.
I don't think this thing even can break if you dont misuse it heavily or one of the integrated electronic components give up.
Dont tell me, I have one of those old ones (4m) at home. This thing basically is unbreakable and also built to last because with every toner change basically every mechanical part is changed with it.
I would call it the tank of laser printers, very expensive back then (around 4000 USD when it was bought around 10-15 years ago) but still going fine and probably for another 15-20 years.
This thing was the reason why I bought lots of HP stuff afterwards, but not anymore.
If I compare this printer "tank" with the newer stuff (which in fact is just rebranded Canon) I can say there is a night and day difference in durability and facturing quality. But its not like the newer printers have become so much better in this regard.
We had a discussion at work the other day, and the general concensus was that we'd rather drive a jap car with 150,000 km on it than a north american car with 75,000 km on it. The Ford Focus with the door latches that rust shut within a year or so, defective fuel pump design, etc., are a prime example of crap passing for engineering.
Thats basically what you get if you work for the shareholder value instead of having satisfied customers. In the end you get none of both.
Actually no, I think in its current state Swing is better regarding the desktop integration than SWT is.
Given XP, the look and feel integration is excellent. The speed in the meanwhile has become a non issue. In windows since 1.4 in Linux since 1.5 (if you want another good boost turn on OpenGL, but it already is faster than Qt)
Wheras SWT looks sort of native on Windows and looks like Windows with molasses underneath GTK2 on Linux. Cannot speak for the Mac and Photon though.
Although I love eclipse, currently my preferred toolkit of choice is swing unless I want to have a decent GTK2 integration.
(and even that is questionable in SWT given the GTK2 speed problems)
I think the biggest problem Swing has is neither the speed nor the Look and Feel. Speed is ok on every platform. The look and feel integration is excellent if you run WindowsXP (it even allows WinXP skin switches during a running program, tried it, excellent, really)
The main problem it has, face it, Swing although an excellent library is hard to handle, it definitely needs an abstraction layer on top of it, which gets the job done for 99.9% of all applications out there.
Swing is more like a meta library with the core you need for a good gui but sometimes missing components, sometimes to much features which are forcedly exposed onto the programmer, make it hard to handle.
Miguel, thanks for answering in this thread.
This question probably has been asked over and over again, but how are you guys are going to cope with the patent problem. I mean everything is dependend in parts of your projects on the goodwill of Microsoft (I am not speaking about the EMCA parts and your bindings into GTK2 and Gnome, but about things like WinForms or ADO, which war plastered all over with patents)
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Believe me, the trend now goes backwards, but a year ago in the total outsourcing craze, evenone of the biggest Banks of germany tried and failed miserably. They rowed back this year. And the bank was one of the biggest ones of Germany, and was far from losing money.
Another example might be HP which is considered to be a really big outsourcer (while trying to gather customers for being an outsource resource supplier) HP as well is far from losing money, although the company goes down the drain slowly bug visibly.
Hydro power is the worst; it absolutely destroys the ecosystem on the river in which they are placed. Does it really? I come from a country which does not have oceans but had to build up its main energy source without nuclear plants. Therefore hydro energy is big over here. Things seem to look bad first but are not that bad if you look closely. The main problem with hydro energy is that it basically interferes with natural habitats. But so do cities and other manmade resources. What has to be done is to place the plants into areas which interfere least, if possible. (near cities, in areas where there is already a strong influence of man on the surrounding) Or simply go the micro power plant route, and have thousands of small power plants on already existing water mill places which feed back into the grid.
The other problem is the obvious blocking of fish swarms. This problem is solved to a big degree already by so called fish ladders, which seem to work quite well.
The main problem for certain type of rivers is the blocking of flooding material. The main rivers which are affected by those are the ones, which build Deltas out of the flooding material, this is the biggest problem with hydro plants nowadays, but not all rivers are affected (The Yangtse river in china, the Nile in egypt and the Missispi in the USA)
But those problems are rather small if considered carfully, compared to atomic waste you dont even know to get rid of at the current day. If there was a secure way to get the waste into the sun without risiking a high chance to pollute huge parts of the planet in an accident, then I would be pro nuclear power plants, but since there is none, oh well.
As for the tree growing problem, I see not a big deal here, in the US, the USA has vast open lands which are untapped at all, a reforestation with some kind of ecological cycle would help as long as there are no mono cultures in the trees. Also the sea could be a huge ressource for such plants, growing algae in the see would be an excellent ressource for bio material based power plants.
Great, you brought several aknowledged design issues and used that as an argument that adventure games are lame.
HGTG is considered to be one of the worst desigened adventure games of all time puzzlewise. And Jane Jensens adventure games either are not an example of well designed puzzles. People love the Gabriel Knight series because of the excellent stories, the blend of real existing material with myths and legends, but not for the puzzle design, where the series never did shine.
If you take that argument, then I have to say, ok, I played Daikatana, all shooters are bad. (Although the works of Jensen are far above Daikatana in quality)
Great, somebody who is against your view of the world is a marxist.... I think you should readjust your opinions about it a little bit.
I think you hit the nail directly on the head. Nobody thinks that Bush is responsible for the environmental mess (well at least not for the one outside of Texas :-) ), but the main problem is, that he has given in public speeches and given his non existent plans basically the whole world the impression, that he does not even care anyting about it, as long as it stops him and his oil buddies to earn their dollars. In fact after hearing a few of his speeches about environment I have the feeling this guy is on a war against nature as well (great drilling oil in national parks hey :-) )
I would not really see it as a sign of coincidence that his brothers butt currently is literally blown away by the environment down in Florida, which currently gives its vote on this issue.
God forbid actual reasoning to interfere with a perfectly good anti-USA hate-Bush rant.
The easiest way to silence critics are as soon as they present proper arguments and valid facts, that you say they are anti german, works every time.
Alexander Goebbels of Nazi Germany.
It will but they will run definitely into huge environmental problems, given the fact that everything industrywise settles down around the south coast there mainly Shanghai. What china will face are huge environmental problems, but even worse because they will be densely focused on a rather small spot of the mainland.
But back to global warming, China already has serious problems with it, did you notice the flood catastrophes this country faces and already has faced. Those were not of normal size.
Well, yes there are certain groups which oppose everything without a plan. But lets face it, Wind and Water currently are the best and cleanest ways to do the job.
Third probably heat generators, if they dont rely on fossile fuels or on nuclear energy. A growing burning wood cycle is perfectly acceptable if the trees are replanted, thus take the CO2 from the air and soil again. I think probably some kind of sun based energy source (which water and wind is indirectly) might be the best solution in the long term, given the huge deserts the earth has. Also the oceans are somehwat an untapped territority for energy production (algae production and burning comes ot my mind), but those things currently are sci fi given the current technologies.
Given water and wind, I think, micro plants are an untapped territorrity, in many countries there is the potential to do small micro sized power plants relying on wind and water which can feed back in thousands into the national grid, those things are untapped possiblities.
Lets go back to nuclear energy. The waste problem is there and still is unsolved. I would say, this is the last option if everything else fails. For me it is less the scarity, but the waste problem which does not make it a clean energy.
Great to hear the news, about the home energy problem. Anyway, I think the US has lots of potential for energy generation without the nuclear waste problem. The wide open spaces of US are an untapped potential, for wind energy, for plant growing (wood for instance) which could be burned within a short term CO2 cycle. This would be a solution for now. Would definitely save several power plants. But the problem is, that the lobbyists wouldnt be too happy about it, if every average joe in the midwest put out his/her small wind energy station and feeds it back into the national grid.
Sounds reasonable to me, if I remember 20 years back , there was a huge move away from that stuff in various things. The first public ozone hole warnings came along around 20 years ago.
Well, that could work at least it worked for the guy who did Dark Fall all by himself to get enough money to do a sequel.
Well the problem with nuclear energy is, besides the saftey problems, that it is a long term waste problem. The halftime of the waste of those plants can be measured in 10.000 years or more. The next thing is, that the conatainer storage problem is not fully solved then. The containers start to leak and then what? Dont expect the inhabitants on earth in 10.000 years to now about those issues. It is like, we have this clean energy, see no CO2 but the waste is absolutely deadly and will become tolerable by mammals again at a time when mammals maybe dont exist anymore.
The first way to reduce green house gases is to cut down on energy consumption not to increase the production, which would be the second way. The more energy you produce the more it it gets consumed.
Somebody mentioned France, yes they produce a lot of energy via nuclear power. But the problems are not solved. The waste is a long term problem which lasts 10 thousands of years, basically pushing the problem into the far future to a time where the containers start to leak.
What I meant was that the USA has a much easier task to reduce the power consumption than for instance Europe, because they have so many things which are already covered over here still lingering. The first measuer of giving tax refunds on people who build heat saving measures into their homes already probably would be enough to fulfill Kyoto. This is a nono over here in europe in many areas already because every house already is built with that in mind over here. We face a much harder task.
The problem with the big cars is not a US only problem. Cross country cars are also things to have over here, by people who mainly drive them only on roads. But that problem has to be targeted as well. After those problems are solved we should and can think about raising the energy production. The US has lots of untapped potential here. Vast plains which would be perfect for wind driven power plants (this is not experimental stuff I am talking about) Lots of area which could used for artificial reforestation and then out of those forests several heat driven power plants could be built (I am talking about a natural CO2 circle here which does not increase the short term CO2 level) the list of ideas is probably endless. And as I said the US has a much easier task than Europe in this regard.
The problem is that the Kyoto treaty is by far not enough. The Kyoto treaty was not even enough at the time of the ratification.
See more problems chugging along, in europe we have felt the impact of global warming almost since 1985 when the winters from one year to the next suddenly had much less snow. These things dont usually become worse gradually and slowly but basically from one year to the next, then things seddle for a while and then wham, the next smack.
Well I see it as a real sign of god (not the one Bush seems to believe to talk to) that Florida was one of the most devastated states this year so, that the Bush familiy in general gets a lousy feeling on what the environment thinks about their politics.
The funny thing is that the USA probably would have very easy ways to save much more energy than the kyoto treaty. From what I could see the USAs one family homes have a lousys system of preserve warmth within their walls. The constructions over here in europe are much more sophisticated in this regard (the problem and saving energy has been a big issue for a long time over here)
The people have to cut down on big cars, which they probably will never need. Face it, there already exists cars which suck 6 liters (about 1 1/2 gallons) / 100kms and much more.
Cut down on those dreaded air conditions, cut down on the power consumption of computers and so on.
All those things can be done without hurting the industry. Give tax returns on measures which add heat saving mechanisms to the average homes.
Do the taxing system according to the consumption of the cars and so on.
Bushs plan was to kick the kyoto treaty and let Enron decide what to do. Aka build more nuclear plants which yet still have an unresolved waste problem.
Ah dont worry, his brother said, global warming was a myth, and his brother must be right, because he is president and kicked the Kyoto treaty with that argument. Therefore the hurricanes cannot become stronger anymore, or do they?
The environment seems to solve the Bush problem at least in Florida itself.
I dont know, his interviews are more like a geek babbling over his latest creation. The problem was probably that he didnt get the direct feedback over forums until this game, otherwise he probably would have cut back on the early designs talk after black and white.
Its not the tree growing itself, but you have to do that for the entire tree population probably and that basically means constantly updating stats for thousands of them.
Intel probably did this, because they already have cross licensing contracts with Via and AMD and probably a bunch of others. The Itanium as I see it, should have been the death blow to AMD and others in the x86 arena. Although the concept is interesting, from this angle I am glad that they failed.
I just wonder if there ever was any single printer of the 4 or 5 LJ series which ever failed. I have yet to encounter one.
All I know is that the toners are still sold (some refurbished some new) to a cheap price. So there must be many still living. I think they probably will live to the next atomic blast.
Judging from my 4m at home, this thing is solid metal from the outside and every part which can break during normal operation is exchanged at every toner exchange.
I don't think this thing even can break if you dont misuse it heavily or one of the integrated electronic components give up.
Dont tell me, I have one of those old ones (4m) at home. This thing basically is unbreakable and also built to last because with every toner change basically every mechanical part is changed with it.
I would call it the tank of laser printers, very expensive back then (around 4000 USD when it was bought around 10-15 years ago) but still going fine and probably for another 15-20 years. This thing was the reason why I bought lots of HP stuff afterwards, but not anymore. If I compare this printer "tank" with the newer stuff (which in fact is just rebranded Canon) I can say there is a night and day difference in durability and facturing quality. But its not like the newer printers have become so much better in this regard.
We had a discussion at work the other day, and the general concensus was that we'd rather drive a jap car with 150,000 km on it than a north american car with 75,000 km on it. The Ford Focus with the door latches that rust shut within a year or so, defective fuel pump design, etc., are a prime example of crap passing for engineering. Thats basically what you get if you work for the shareholder value instead of having satisfied customers. In the end you get none of both.
Actually no, I think in its current state Swing is better regarding the desktop integration than SWT is. Given XP, the look and feel integration is excellent. The speed in the meanwhile has become a non issue. In windows since 1.4 in Linux since 1.5 (if you want another good boost turn on OpenGL, but it already is faster than Qt) Wheras SWT looks sort of native on Windows and looks like Windows with molasses underneath GTK2 on Linux. Cannot speak for the Mac and Photon though. Although I love eclipse, currently my preferred toolkit of choice is swing unless I want to have a decent GTK2 integration. (and even that is questionable in SWT given the GTK2 speed problems)
I think the biggest problem Swing has is neither the speed nor the Look and Feel. Speed is ok on every platform. The look and feel integration is excellent if you run WindowsXP (it even allows WinXP skin switches during a running program, tried it, excellent, really) The main problem it has, face it, Swing although an excellent library is hard to handle, it definitely needs an abstraction layer on top of it, which gets the job done for 99.9% of all applications out there. Swing is more like a meta library with the core you need for a good gui but sometimes missing components, sometimes to much features which are forcedly exposed onto the programmer, make it hard to handle.
Miguel, thanks for answering in this thread. This question probably has been asked over and over again, but how are you guys are going to cope with the patent problem. I mean everything is dependend in parts of your projects on the goodwill of Microsoft (I am not speaking about the EMCA parts and your bindings into GTK2 and Gnome, but about things like WinForms or ADO, which war plastered all over with patents)