I'm going to take a different angle on your question and compare against Google...
Apple's Spotlight is different than Google's searches (and gmail as well) in that it is not used to build a profile about your interests so that various websites can deliver targeted advertsising. Keep in mind that Google is fighting over who will be able to profile you and sell that information to advertisers in an indirect way.
Enigma was publicly documented to a degree. It was based upon commercial devices from the 1920s, this greatly facilitated those who attacked it. The extensions / revisions made to the basic design were kept secret, however the weaknesses that led to its defeat were not these extensions or revisions but operator error. For example operators would send the same test message each morning, a violation of their training and procedures, and this greatly aided in the discovery of the day's configuration of the machine.
I am not agreeing with the FCC on this one, but I am going to defend "security through obscurity" a little due to expected/. audience oversimplification and knee jerking. At times "security through obscurity" is a perfectly valid and desirable approach when used *alongside* other good techniques. It is only bad when it is the foundation of your security. Note that I am only addressing the security angle and not addressing open source philosophy (or for some out there religion).
But I'd rather be responsible for my own computer security than the bank be allowed to root around in my computer.
That is probably a gross exaggeration. Rather than arbitrarily root around a technician will probably come to your home, and check you OS version and patches, anti-virus version and updates, firewall,... all while you watch. To do otherwise would drive customers from banks that arbitrarily root around to banks that do an appropriately focused search.
Your "eat my own losses" argument has two primary flaws.
(1) You assume the mistake was the customers, not the banks. Those who are sure the error was on the banks side will be more likely to cooperate in ruling out their home computers.
(2) Privacy has a price, and often a limit. If the account emptied was a savings account with a lot of money rather than a checking account with a small amount of money then the customer will become increasingly cooperative.
"What is a bank supposed to do in this situation?"
Go to a judge, and ask for a subpoena?
That is rediculous, that is equivalent to saying a customer should have to sue the bank to get their money back rather than have some prearranged agreed upon process. If you want to bring the courts in on such transactions consider how the judge is likely to rule when it is discovered that the customer didn't have current anti-virus, etc. There is nothing wrong with having some prearranged agreement, and nothing wrong with *both* parties having to give up something, for the bank the stolen funds and for the customer having their anti-virus and firewall settings inspected. I do not think you have thought this through, getting the courts involved will probably not help the consumers.
Google isn't the evil company that we know Microsoft as. Google focusing on the development of a great search engine, instead of taking the money and selling out for media development(Yahoo), is why they have grown to such heights. The fact that a fresh and legit force is now bossing evil Microsoft around, is quite refreshing for the tech world, and should be applauded instead of demeaned.
Google is *not* a search engine company. Google does not develop the search engine to make access to information more efficient and make the world a better place. Google develops the search engine to profile its users so that they can be a provider of targeted advertising. Google *is* in the targeted advertising business. A search engine is just one method of profiling you to determine your needs and wants. The same for gmail. Now some out there mistakenly believe that the advertising is simply what is shown next to your searches, no, it is far more than that. Google helps websites determine which ads to show you on their site. What is being fought over between Microsoft and Google is who will websites turn to in order to purchase targeted ad info.
I think they may have bought one too many $40,000 toilet seats.
Regarding government overspending:
1. If it was a zero G toilet seen and the production run was for a handful of space shuttles and a space station then $40,000 is probably a pretty good price. I suspect this is the source of the $40,000 urban legend.
2. For "commodity" items you can not compare necessarily a military part with a commercial part even when they come off of the same production line, ie. we are not comparing a mil spec part, a radiation hardened CPU for example. Military parts often go through additional testing and this can greatly increase the costs due to a loss of economies of scale. In the field, when a military part is pulled from the box there is an expectation that it will work. In the consumer world it is often cheaper for a manufacture to replace defective parts than to test them. Expecting the customer to return to the store for an exchange is considered acceptable. Alternatively the acceptance standards may be higher. For example no dead pixels being allowed on a flat panel. This requires additional costs with respecting to screening a large batch and cherry picking individual items.
3. I guess there is also the ever popular urban myth that they pad the price of some items in the public budget to hide spending on secret projects.;-)
People don't beat their kids for the better of the child,...
Wrong, most parents do not enjoy corporal punishment, they consider it a necessary evil.
... they beat their kids because they themselves are incapable of acting in a socially acceptable manor...
Sorry, but you are confusing "socially acceptable" with the current fashion, a current social experiment, or more accurately engaging in a overreaction due to past excesses. The latter is very typical. Corporal punishment went too far, and was too heavily relied upon in the past, so some today believe that it should never be used. The truth is in between these two extremes, it is on rare occasion useful.
... beating the children allows the parent to vent the fustrations involved with being a failure in society as well as an incapable parent. Don't beat your kids, better yourself & lead by example. If the children don't follow your example, abandon them.
"Beating" is a poor choice of words, deliberately trying to portray an excess. However it is far more interesting that you consider corporal punishment to indicate that one is a failure in society but that child abandonment is not an indication of failure. Personally I consider it an extremely severe form of child abuse and one of the greatest indications of being a failure in society.
Given the above I don't know whether to consider you a fool who doesn't deserver further comment or a troll who I must congratulate on a masterful piece of work. I'm hoping for a troll.
I'd advise on doing something you enjoy next to all those boring classes...
That is what he had been doing, and that is what led to his current situation where he fears his poor grades will come back to haunt him.
Any hobby is potentially interesting during an interview, as you simply don't know who is sitting across the table.
No, you have misread the interviewer's interest. They don't really care about your specific project. They are merely interested in finding out that you had written some code for your own amusement or curiosity. It does not matter how silly or useless the project was, all that really matters is that the interviewee wrote it for the fun or curiosity of it. That demonstrates they have a genuine interest in programming, that they are not merely studying CS because someone told them it was a good career path. As I said before, there are rare exceptions where the personal project relates to the position being interviewed for. But honestly, we feign interest in your personal project to get you talking about it. It is difficult to get interviewees to talk about these projects.
In any case he's done the FOSS project, he's demonstrated he has a genuine interest in programming, additional FOSS work will not make him any more attractive of a candidate. Better grades might. Your "do what interests you" advice is premature, that's long term career advice, not short term "I need to graduate and get that first post-college job" advice.
I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years, and I've worked on an open source project.
Emphasize the full time job. Many companies have "minimum" GPAs, but that is pretty much due to the volume of resumes that have school and no practical experience. Long long ago when I was graduating an IBM rep told me that the GPA min would not apply to me since I had been working full time (30+ hours per week). The job was software development, that helped even more.
Unless your job has nothing to do with software development I'd drop the open source project. Spend the time on better grades in your remaining classes. Nearly all open source projects are irrelevant and regardless of whether it is fair or not assumed to be a low quality effort. Exceptions involve extremely well known projects, well known outside the FOSS community that is, or something that is specifically related to the company you are hoping to join.
Many large companies won't talk to you if you have under 3.5 GPA or some such bs...
You are misinformed. Many large companies do have flexibility on GPAs. Specifically, GPA "minimums" are often waived if the student was also working more than 30 hours per week. Note the person asking for advice wrote "I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years".
... The same companies are often not considered good employers.
I believe this statement is about as accurate as your first.
Where are those ads you speak of? Oh that's right, next to the search results!
You are mistaken, extremely so. When you are browsing various websites the ads that you see are targeted, not everyone is getting the same ad. Basically the website pays Google to tell the website which banner ad to show you. And of course Google uses the website's query to keep track of your browsing habits and further develop their profile. You do not need to search to be profiled. And of course, Google is not alone in this business, and *that* is what all this fighting is about, *not* about who gets to fulfill your search.
Something is getting lost in all this talk about searching. Google is not really a "search" company, they are a targeted advertising company. Searches are just a means to build profiles on us, as is gmail. Microsoft and Google are fighting over who gets to profile us and collect the targeted advertising revenue streams.
I can whip up a 'screenshot' showing an IP at RIAA headquarters looking at kiddy porn on a few hours. It's absolutely crazy that a printout of an alledged screenshot can stand as evidence on Court.
And it would probably take mere minutes for an expert to expose the fake.
Your tin foil hat is wound a little tight today, loosen it up and let a little blood flow to the brain. What do you think is more likely, the person was involved in public file sharing or the RIAA was so hard up for someone to sue and unable to find someone involved in public file sharing that they decided to fake some screen shots? Do you have any clue as to what would happen if the RIAA got caught faking something like this? Disbarment, jail time, massive punative fines, etc. Now why would they risk all that when there is no apparent shortage of people who are actually involved in public file sharing?
"Home is probably more likely to just go with a canned configuration, business more likely to customize the Linux installation."
Ummmmm Did you really think about that before you wrote it? If not , have you ever used Ubuntu?
By customization I am not referring to selecting packages and/or compiling code straight from the repository. I am referring to situations where a custom kernel is used, a stripped down set of services, etc. Basically professionally built and managed servers.
Something about this has always amazed me. The only possible way that a screenshot could be obtained is by one of the following ways:
1. Illegal trespassing upon a computer system ("hacking" or "cracking")
2. Doctoring the screenshot
So how is it that this "evidence" is even allowed?
... but businesses are more likely to purchase support...
Out of greater need, not out of some desire to spend more money. That greater need requires greater capabilities from the support staff. Dell offers Red Hat (and Debian ?) to business, it is far from clear that they need to add Ubuntu to this list.
... Is Dell trying to avoid supporting these machines in a corporate environment? That's half-assed support, and Dell should be held accountable for it. Either stand behind your product, with the disclaimer that Linux-based may not work for everyone, or don't sell the damn things at all...
Dell is doing exactly what you recommend, they do not want to offer half-assed support to businesses so they do not sell it to businesses. Keep in mind that Dell has completely different support teams for home and business. The business side will take a much longer time to train up on Linux than the home side, more variations and usage patterns. Also keep in mind that the economics/profitability of Linux is entirely different for home vs business. Home is probably more likely to just go with a canned configuration, business more likely to customize the Linux installation. Ubuntu should have been a clue that this was home centric.
id software was once asked why they ported to GNU/Linux. There reason was that porting to GNU/Linux helped them weed out any bugs in their games while supporting a platform they all enjoyed using...
The same thing happens by targetting Win32 and Mac OS X.
... and if your going to sell your engine for use in other games (like id does) it adds value to be able to say that your engine works on GNU/Linux
Id had stated years ago that Linux clients do not make business sense, that they do them because they think it is cool to do so. This was stated during an interview appearing in Game Developer Magazine a number of years ago. The fact that they leave the Linux client in a perpetual unsupported beta shows nothing has really changed since then. Their "cool" little hobby is subsidized by the engine bullet item, which in itself is not a strong endorsement of Linux since they let others take the business risk of offering a real and supported Linux retail product. Also note that the engine business also supports other decisions that would not make business sense for a company that is just selling retail games, for example the extrememly high system requirements. That's fine for the engine developer since it will be years before someone buys a license and ships a AAA game, but death for someone who just ships games. Being in the engine and the game business make id a poor example with respect to retail game decisions.
Again, things are far more complicated than you suggest.
Avoiding Carbon and Cocoa lead to a least common denominator approach, perhaps shareware can get away with that under Mac OS X but not major releases.
It is not the publisher's role to jump start Linux. Why should they damage their reputation by not supporting paying customers, treating some customers as second class citizens? Also keep in mind that even without support there is still development and testing resources being consumed by the Linux version, and allowing a Linux user to run natively rather than dual boot or use Wine does not add any revenue to pay for these resources. The only source of revenue are those extremely rare Linux users who refuse to dual boot or use Wine.
Things are far more complicated than you suggest, both on the coding side and the publishing side.
What I was saying that the API would be the same between all platforms this way. I realize that there still will be minor differences especially when using different compilers...
Mac games use platform specific APIs such Carbon and Cocoa. Whoever told you that everything is done with standard UNIX APIs didn't have a clue.
... They offer official support for Win and OSX but your on your own for GNU/Linux support. The GNU/Linux community would be very happy with that.
(1) That is a sleezy way to treat a paying customer. (2) The GNU/Linux community is not happy with being treated as second class citizens, they merely accept it due to a lack of options.
"Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product."
Maybe that "little guy" doesn't deserve the patent if he's not going to put that idea into action then - have you thought about that?... As an alternative, the "little guy" is always free to sell his services or ideas to someone or some entity who IS willing to invest the time and money in the invention.
Uh, "alternative"? I thought it was obvious that a little guy would patent something he couldn't afford to build so that he could license it to others. I think your tinfoil hat is wound a little too tight if you are thinking the primary reason little guys patent things are for patent ambushes. If you bother to study the topic a little you will find that little guys generally are in a pretty big hurry, they hear that clock ticking. Your "17 years" focus is a bit naive. The value of a patent is not constant, it diminishes as each year ticks by. When you consider the time to find a buyer, negotiate, close, develop, produce, develop the market, recoup the investment, that "17 years" does not seem as long as it once did.
... and that's why software patents fail. These guys had no "product" so they didn't actually reveal their invention to the industry...
The patent system did not fail, you merely misunderstand it. They don't need a product to reveal their invention, the patent is the revelation. Anyone interested in using the "invention" was free to go to the owner and license it. Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product.
... are now at fault for doing something that came thru the natural order of things... evolution if you will
That is a somewhat bogus claim. Through increasing knowledge of materials and electricity the light bulb becomes obvious too. You grossly undervalue the usefulness of the first person to find the answer and the necessity of having a reward for being the first. Software confuses this issue because software advances at a faster rate than previous technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to take a different angle on your question and compare against Google ...
Apple's Spotlight is different than Google's searches (and gmail as well) in that it is not used to build a profile about your interests so that various websites can deliver targeted advertsising. Keep in mind that Google is fighting over who will be able to profile you and sell that information to advertisers in an indirect way.
Enigma was publicly documented to a degree. It was based upon commercial devices from the 1920s, this greatly facilitated those who attacked it. The extensions / revisions made to the basic design were kept secret, however the weaknesses that led to its defeat were not these extensions or revisions but operator error. For example operators would send the same test message each morning, a violation of their training and procedures, and this greatly aided in the discovery of the day's configuration of the machine.
7 70229.
This example aside, your suggestion that "security through obscurity" is bad is wrong. See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=246437&cid=19
I am not agreeing with the FCC on this one, but I am going to defend "security through obscurity" a little due to expected /. audience oversimplification and knee jerking. At times "security through obscurity" is a perfectly valid and desirable approach when used *alongside* other good techniques. It is only bad when it is the foundation of your security. Note that I am only addressing the security angle and not addressing open source philosophy (or for some out there religion).
So, if they're allowed to inspect my client, may I inspect their server? No?
There is no need. If your system is clean they are not holding you liable and you are getting your money back.
But I'd rather be responsible for my own computer security than the bank be allowed to root around in my computer.
... all while you watch. To do otherwise would drive customers from banks that arbitrarily root around to banks that do an appropriately focused search.
That is probably a gross exaggeration. Rather than arbitrarily root around a technician will probably come to your home, and check you OS version and patches, anti-virus version and updates, firewall,
Your "eat my own losses" argument has two primary flaws.
(1) You assume the mistake was the customers, not the banks. Those who are sure the error was on the banks side will be more likely to cooperate in ruling out their home computers.
(2) Privacy has a price, and often a limit. If the account emptied was a savings account with a lot of money rather than a checking account with a small amount of money then the customer will become increasingly cooperative.
"What is a bank supposed to do in this situation?"
Go to a judge, and ask for a subpoena?
That is rediculous, that is equivalent to saying a customer should have to sue the bank to get their money back rather than have some prearranged agreed upon process. If you want to bring the courts in on such transactions consider how the judge is likely to rule when it is discovered that the customer didn't have current anti-virus, etc. There is nothing wrong with having some prearranged agreement, and nothing wrong with *both* parties having to give up something, for the bank the stolen funds and for the customer having their anti-virus and firewall settings inspected. I do not think you have thought this through, getting the courts involved will probably not help the consumers.
Google isn't the evil company that we know Microsoft as. Google focusing on the development of a great search engine, instead of taking the money and selling out for media development(Yahoo), is why they have grown to such heights. The fact that a fresh and legit force is now bossing evil Microsoft around, is quite refreshing for the tech world, and should be applauded instead of demeaned.
Google is *not* a search engine company. Google does not develop the search engine to make access to information more efficient and make the world a better place. Google develops the search engine to profile its users so that they can be a provider of targeted advertising. Google *is* in the targeted advertising business. A search engine is just one method of profiling you to determine your needs and wants. The same for gmail. Now some out there mistakenly believe that the advertising is simply what is shown next to your searches, no, it is far more than that. Google helps websites determine which ads to show you on their site. What is being fought over between Microsoft and Google is who will websites turn to in order to purchase targeted ad info.
I think they may have bought one too many $40,000 toilet seats.
;-)
Regarding government overspending:
1. If it was a zero G toilet seen and the production run was for a handful of space shuttles and a space station then $40,000 is probably a pretty good price. I suspect this is the source of the $40,000 urban legend.
2. For "commodity" items you can not compare necessarily a military part with a commercial part even when they come off of the same production line, ie. we are not comparing a mil spec part, a radiation hardened CPU for example. Military parts often go through additional testing and this can greatly increase the costs due to a loss of economies of scale. In the field, when a military part is pulled from the box there is an expectation that it will work. In the consumer world it is often cheaper for a manufacture to replace defective parts than to test them. Expecting the customer to return to the store for an exchange is considered acceptable. Alternatively the acceptance standards may be higher. For example no dead pixels being allowed on a flat panel. This requires additional costs with respecting to screening a large batch and cherry picking individual items.
3. I guess there is also the ever popular urban myth that they pad the price of some items in the public budget to hide spending on secret projects.
People don't beat their kids for the better of the child, ...
... they beat their kids because they themselves are incapable of acting in a socially acceptable manor ...
... beating the children allows the parent to vent the fustrations involved with being a failure in society as well as an incapable parent. Don't beat your kids, better yourself & lead by example. If the children don't follow your example, abandon them.
Wrong, most parents do not enjoy corporal punishment, they consider it a necessary evil.
Sorry, but you are confusing "socially acceptable" with the current fashion, a current social experiment, or more accurately engaging in a overreaction due to past excesses. The latter is very typical. Corporal punishment went too far, and was too heavily relied upon in the past, so some today believe that it should never be used. The truth is in between these two extremes, it is on rare occasion useful.
"Beating" is a poor choice of words, deliberately trying to portray an excess. However it is far more interesting that you consider corporal punishment to indicate that one is a failure in society but that child abandonment is not an indication of failure. Personally I consider it an extremely severe form of child abuse and one of the greatest indications of being a failure in society.
Given the above I don't know whether to consider you a fool who doesn't deserver further comment or a troll who I must congratulate on a masterful piece of work. I'm hoping for a troll.
"Many large companies do X" and "Many large companies do not X" can both be true at the same time.
It is actually "few are inflexible" on GPA, I didn't bother to explicitly correct the GP's error.
I'd advise on doing something you enjoy next to all those boring classes ...
That is what he had been doing, and that is what led to his current situation where he fears his poor grades will come back to haunt him.
Any hobby is potentially interesting during an interview, as you simply don't know who is sitting across the table.
No, you have misread the interviewer's interest. They don't really care about your specific project. They are merely interested in finding out that you had written some code for your own amusement or curiosity. It does not matter how silly or useless the project was, all that really matters is that the interviewee wrote it for the fun or curiosity of it. That demonstrates they have a genuine interest in programming, that they are not merely studying CS because someone told them it was a good career path. As I said before, there are rare exceptions where the personal project relates to the position being interviewed for. But honestly, we feign interest in your personal project to get you talking about it. It is difficult to get interviewees to talk about these projects.
In any case he's done the FOSS project, he's demonstrated he has a genuine interest in programming, additional FOSS work will not make him any more attractive of a candidate. Better grades might. Your "do what interests you" advice is premature, that's long term career advice, not short term "I need to graduate and get that first post-college job" advice.
I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years, and I've worked on an open source project.
Emphasize the full time job. Many companies have "minimum" GPAs, but that is pretty much due to the volume of resumes that have school and no practical experience. Long long ago when I was graduating an IBM rep told me that the GPA min would not apply to me since I had been working full time (30+ hours per week). The job was software development, that helped even more.
Unless your job has nothing to do with software development I'd drop the open source project. Spend the time on better grades in your remaining classes. Nearly all open source projects are irrelevant and regardless of whether it is fair or not assumed to be a low quality effort. Exceptions involve extremely well known projects, well known outside the FOSS community that is, or something that is specifically related to the company you are hoping to join.
Many large companies won't talk to you if you have under 3.5 GPA or some such bs ...
... The same companies are often not considered good employers.
You are misinformed. Many large companies do have flexibility on GPAs. Specifically, GPA "minimums" are often waived if the student was also working more than 30 hours per week. Note the person asking for advice wrote "I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years".
I believe this statement is about as accurate as your first.
Where are those ads you speak of? Oh that's right, next to the search results!
You are mistaken, extremely so. When you are browsing various websites the ads that you see are targeted, not everyone is getting the same ad. Basically the website pays Google to tell the website which banner ad to show you. And of course Google uses the website's query to keep track of your browsing habits and further develop their profile. You do not need to search to be profiled. And of course, Google is not alone in this business, and *that* is what all this fighting is about, *not* about who gets to fulfill your search.
Something is getting lost in all this talk about searching. Google is not really a "search" company, they are a targeted advertising company. Searches are just a means to build profiles on us, as is gmail. Microsoft and Google are fighting over who gets to profile us and collect the targeted advertising revenue streams.
And YOU missed: Photoshop.
No, that was the GP's #2.
I can whip up a 'screenshot' showing an IP at RIAA headquarters looking at kiddy porn on a few hours. It's absolutely crazy that a printout of an alledged screenshot can stand as evidence on Court.
And it would probably take mere minutes for an expert to expose the fake.
Your tin foil hat is wound a little tight today, loosen it up and let a little blood flow to the brain. What do you think is more likely, the person was involved in public file sharing or the RIAA was so hard up for someone to sue and unable to find someone involved in public file sharing that they decided to fake some screen shots? Do you have any clue as to what would happen if the RIAA got caught faking something like this? Disbarment, jail time, massive punative fines, etc. Now why would they risk all that when there is no apparent shortage of people who are actually involved in public file sharing?
"Home is probably more likely to just go with a canned configuration, business more likely to customize the Linux installation."
Ummmmm Did you really think about that before you wrote it? If not , have you ever used Ubuntu?
By customization I am not referring to selecting packages and/or compiling code straight from the repository. I am referring to situations where a custom kernel is used, a stripped down set of services, etc. Basically professionally built and managed servers.
Something about this has always amazed me. The only possible way that a screenshot could be obtained is by one of the following ways:
1. Illegal trespassing upon a computer system ("hacking" or "cracking")
2. Doctoring the screenshot
So how is it that this "evidence" is even allowed?
You missed:
3. Public file sharing.
... but businesses are more likely to purchase support ...
Out of greater need, not out of some desire to spend more money. That greater need requires greater capabilities from the support staff. Dell offers Red Hat (and Debian ?) to business, it is far from clear that they need to add Ubuntu to this list.
... Is Dell trying to avoid supporting these machines in a corporate environment? That's half-assed support, and Dell should be held accountable for it. Either stand behind your product, with the disclaimer that Linux-based may not work for everyone, or don't sell the damn things at all ...
Dell is doing exactly what you recommend, they do not want to offer half-assed support to businesses so they do not sell it to businesses. Keep in mind that Dell has completely different support teams for home and business. The business side will take a much longer time to train up on Linux than the home side, more variations and usage patterns. Also keep in mind that the economics/profitability of Linux is entirely different for home vs business. Home is probably more likely to just go with a canned configuration, business more likely to customize the Linux installation. Ubuntu should have been a clue that this was home centric.
id software was once asked why they ported to GNU/Linux. There reason was that porting to GNU/Linux helped them weed out any bugs in their games while supporting a platform they all enjoyed using ...
... and if your going to sell your engine for use in other games (like id does) it adds value to be able to say that your engine works on GNU/Linux
The same thing happens by targetting Win32 and Mac OS X.
Id had stated years ago that Linux clients do not make business sense, that they do them because they think it is cool to do so. This was stated during an interview appearing in Game Developer Magazine a number of years ago. The fact that they leave the Linux client in a perpetual unsupported beta shows nothing has really changed since then. Their "cool" little hobby is subsidized by the engine bullet item, which in itself is not a strong endorsement of Linux since they let others take the business risk of offering a real and supported Linux retail product. Also note that the engine business also supports other decisions that would not make business sense for a company that is just selling retail games, for example the extrememly high system requirements. That's fine for the engine developer since it will be years before someone buys a license and ships a AAA game, but death for someone who just ships games. Being in the engine and the game business make id a poor example with respect to retail game decisions.
Again, things are far more complicated than you suggest.
Avoiding Carbon and Cocoa lead to a least common denominator approach, perhaps shareware can get away with that under Mac OS X but not major releases.
It is not the publisher's role to jump start Linux. Why should they damage their reputation by not supporting paying customers, treating some customers as second class citizens? Also keep in mind that even without support there is still development and testing resources being consumed by the Linux version, and allowing a Linux user to run natively rather than dual boot or use Wine does not add any revenue to pay for these resources. The only source of revenue are those extremely rare Linux users who refuse to dual boot or use Wine.
Things are far more complicated than you suggest, both on the coding side and the publishing side.
What I was saying that the API would be the same between all platforms this way. I realize that there still will be minor differences especially when using different compilers ...
... They offer official support for Win and OSX but your on your own for GNU/Linux support. The GNU/Linux community would be very happy with that.
Mac games use platform specific APIs such Carbon and Cocoa. Whoever told you that everything is done with standard UNIX APIs didn't have a clue.
(1) That is a sleezy way to treat a paying customer. (2) The GNU/Linux community is not happy with being treated as second class citizens, they merely accept it due to a lack of options.
"Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product."
... As an alternative, the "little guy" is always free to sell his services or ideas to someone or some entity who IS willing to invest the time and money in the invention.
Maybe that "little guy" doesn't deserve the patent if he's not going to put that idea into action then - have you thought about that?
Uh, "alternative"? I thought it was obvious that a little guy would patent something he couldn't afford to build so that he could license it to others. I think your tinfoil hat is wound a little too tight if you are thinking the primary reason little guys patent things are for patent ambushes. If you bother to study the topic a little you will find that little guys generally are in a pretty big hurry, they hear that clock ticking. Your "17 years" focus is a bit naive. The value of a patent is not constant, it diminishes as each year ticks by. When you consider the time to find a buyer, negotiate, close, develop, produce, develop the market, recoup the investment, that "17 years" does not seem as long as it once did.
... and that's why software patents fail. These guys had no "product" so they didn't actually reveal their invention to the industry ...
... are now at fault for doing something that came thru the natural order of things... evolution if you will
The patent system did not fail, you merely misunderstand it. They don't need a product to reveal their invention, the patent is the revelation. Anyone interested in using the "invention" was free to go to the owner and license it. Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product.
That is a somewhat bogus claim. Through increasing knowledge of materials and electricity the light bulb becomes obvious too. You grossly undervalue the usefulness of the first person to find the answer and the necessity of having a reward for being the first. Software confuses this issue because software advances at a faster rate than previous technologies.