Indian programmers are not bad programmers, and some of the Indian universities actually have world class Computer Science departments. There are arguments to be made about different cultures and how they impact an individuals ability to do new and creative work in certain fields, and there's some truth to that, but not enough to make any major impact.
The problem with most second or third world outsourcing is that it's done on the cheap. That means that a lot of companies end up with sub-contractors who are either underqualified, understaffed, or undermanaged. Even the best staff don't really do all that great a job if you don't hire someone to actually go and oversea the project and make sure that it's delivering what you wanted it to deliver and that the project team actually know what that is. Even the companies which get good outsourcing agencies tend to forget about the management side of things and just presume that it will all magically go away.
The lesson is that if you do things on the cheap or if you don't pay attention to what you're buying that you often get burned. In the vast majority of cases companies outsourcing to India do one or both of these things and so the results are fairly poor. Western outsourcing agencies tend to be a bit more expensive so people are more careful with what they're actually getting.
Microsoft has never turned anyone over to the Chinese government. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft rarely even sues or turns anyone over to the US government.
I'll take getting bought out or having my company crushed over being tortured to death any day.
Google started off with "don't be evil" and everyone fell for it. They've done some good, like everyone else, but they're not touchy feely good guys.
Back when I was in university, the engineering department used to offer their students(and some of the CS students as well) the ability to take a semester at 1 credit and still maintain full time status(so you didn't lose health insurance or start having to pay back student loans). I think they were called co-ops or something like that. Essentially you'd work a summer and one semester for a company. That meant you weren't buggering off by the time you actually learned how to do the job and so you got paid fairly reasonably and actually learned something. They were actually a graduation requirement for the engineering students. I didn't do any personally, but I know a lot of people who did and found a lot of value in it.
There are some fairly decent internships, but you've got to be fairly careful. Companies generally won't get any real value out of an intern(which is why interns in most disciplines work for free), and so only a company which is really serious about investing in students will give you anything worthwhile to do(since it'll cost them money and productivity).
Add to that the fact that A+, Network+ and CompTIA are basically meaningless certs that a monkey could pass(no offfense), and you've probably just landed yourself an underpaid stint on the help desk. Maybe you've been lucky, but an internship will only help your future if you do something interesting and real with it, or if you can make some contacts for post graduation. If it's not going to do either of those things, enjoy your summer or work at a job which will actually pay you.
Microsoft is out to get your money. They do this by selling you as many Microsoft products as they can(sometimes whether you want them or not) and occaisionally knifing a competitor. Not exactly perfect behaviour, but predictable and relatively harmless. Microsoft doesn't really care what you do with their products so long as you pay for them. Want to write political manifestos in Word, Microsoft doesn't care. Features of Word may make your document easier to tie back to you, but it's other people doing the tieing.
Google on the other hand has been collecting information on everything they can for as long as they've been around, more and more and more every year. They know about your web searches, if you hit a web site with analytics, they own everthing you create in their application framework, now they're going to start logging your DNS searches.
Why are they doing this? I don't really know. At best they've falled into the "perfect information" trap and and have convinced themselves that if they just knew more about people they could make the world better. It's a common pitfall for IT workers, particularly the kind who are bright enough to get hired at google and sufficiently social retarded to willingly work the kind of hours the company seems to expect. Even that's not exactly a great situation and there are plenty of alternatives which are far more worrying.
Sure they've got to turn this stuff over to every government they deal with who wants it, that's part of doing business. Companies who disagree with that sort of thing tend to fight it by limiting their logging to what is legally required though, and Google sure does't do that.
The sad thing about foreign policy is that it's a game that sometimes it's hard to get players for. While there's certainly an argument that the US position should be made public to the US voters, if the US government made the position of say the Chinese or the Russian or whoever the hell else is at this thing's position public to the US voters, the leaders of those countries might refuse to continue negotiations.
If you're a typical "Information wants to be free" type you might think that this is a good thing because ACTA can only be bad from your perspective, and you might be right. The point is though that opening the doors on international negotiations is a tricky business. Asking for transparency from your own government is one thing, but asking for it from someone else's is a horse of a different colour. Personally I'd like to know what my government is asking for and what they're giving up to get it, but I don't really have the right to ask for that for someone else's government. Openness in politics would be nice, but it's really not completely realistic, even at the national level, forget when you've got a dozen different countries with differing agendas arguing with each other.
Problem is, what you're talking about(grouping windows by task), and what they've done (allowing multiple windows to be tabbed within one main window) are two different things. Your idea is good, their idea is bad.
While you could emulate what you were talking about using this new technology, at least for certain tasks, by setting up a set of windows and putting a tab in each of them for each task, this would only work if you had multiple tasks with similar numbers of applications and windows.
The basic problem with this is that people want to be able to see more than one application at once, not hide more windows.
That said, google is not human. It might be made up of humans, but it is not human. I cannot express this enough to people. Google are governed by the same laws and the same rules as every other major corporation. They are required to maxmize shareholder value by US law, the exact same way that every other company is.
That's why they helped with the great firewall of China, that's why they did any number of questionable things over the years. They're not your friends, and they're not doing things out of the pure goodness of their hearts. Even if they wanted to, they're not legally allowed to. They're doing what they're doing because they believe and can apparently convince others, that what they're doing will maximize stockholder value.
When Intel first put the unique identifiers into their CPUs everyone was up in arms, despite the fact that Intel had never actually done anything to anyone. They were up in arms because a large corporation was getting access to information it didn't need and shouldn't have.
For some reason everyone seems to think that Google is above reproach that they've never turned anyone into the authorities, or complied with a subpoena, or helped a totalitarian regime oppress its citizens. Guess what, they have. Guess what, they will continue to do so. Why? Because they're a public for profit corporation and that's their legal obligation.
Or you can accept that everyone is moderately untrustworthy and google's level of untrustworthiness is acceptable so far.
That said, ChromeOS is starting to cross a boundary, as is potentially this DNS thing. This is my point, they're starting to go a little too far in their data collection, and I'm not happy about it.
I don't use gmail or google apps, I do use search because there's not really much choice. I occasionally use chrome.
No, thinking that a multi-billion dollar corporation are the good guys because they say they are is naive. Google are as profit driven as Microsoft or anyone else.
They collect every search on google that's ever been done. They collect every page hit on a google analytics page. They collect an awful lot of information from Chrome and from google accounts. The fact that they anonymize it doesn't change that, they're still collecting it, and we only have a corporate policy saying that they purge it at all. That's not a contract it's what they say they're going to do, and it can change.
They can't be doing something nice because they are a publicly traded company worth several billion dollars. They are legally obligated just like everyone else to maximize shareholder value. Providing expensive services "to be nice" is not maximizing shareholder value.
I'm not specifically saying I distrust them. I'm saying I don't trust them. There's a line in between the two. I continue to use their services because in some arenas they're the best products available and everyone else is collecting your information too.
Google isn't your friend, they're not the IT guy from down the road, they're a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company, and they're driven by exactly the same motivations as every other publicly traded company.
It's not so much about the DNS, it's about google in general.
I'm not saying that this DNS is a problem, or anything else they've got. I just said that people who explicity trust google because they haven't done anything evil with all the information they collect yet, are at best somewhat naive.
Google collects an awful lot of info about you, what you search for, which web sites you visit(if they have analytics), all your e-mails(if you're on gmail), all your documents(if you use their apps), the places you look for on google maps, and with DNS which domain names you request. They're getting scarily close to having information about everything that people do on the web, and an alarming amount of what they do off of it.
Now they don't really have any particular need to be collecting this information. Sure knowing what the most popular searches are is interesting, but it's not commercially interesting unless they use that information to make money.
I use google products, I might even use this DNS service, but I don't trust google, I don't understand their motivations and to be perfectly honest that makes me a little nervous.
There is no obvious financial motivation for Google collecting all the information about us that they are collecting. It doesn't impact their advertising revenue, it's not needed to provide better searches, and it certainly costs them money to collect it.
They might anonomize it, but why on earth are they even collecting it. What do they plan to do with it, and what do we do if they stop anonmizing it or if it isn't as anonymous as we think(they only say they purge the IP address as far as I can tell).
Metaphorically Google are like the guy with the wild eyes and a machine gun. Yeah he hasn't shot anyone yet, and maybe he won't ever shoot anyone, but who the hell knows what he's thinking.
Hospitals have always been best of breed, that's just the way they work. They don't buy the medical equipment from one manufacturer, so they don't buy their software from one developer either, that's just not the way they think.
As a software developer in the health care world you MUST make your system compatible with any standard you can find, AND your integration services have to actually work properly. I do integrations and presentation layers for health care fore a living, trust me on this.
I would also like to say that if you spent a year doing a simple repeatable task instead of just building a system where your customer could do it themselves, especially in your own time, then you're an idiot. It takes a couple of days to knock up a system where if the customer sticks their images in a certain location your system will suck them up and convert them. Maybe a month if you're trying to build something that will never require support again. If you went and did it manually you were doing it wrong.
Bioshock was about 6 as I recall, the same size as the full game.
I can get a higher cap, but it would cost me more money, and I don't really need it. That doesn't change the fact that even a couple of gig of data for what generally ends up being half an hour or less of game play is really rather pointless.
I'm not excusing the developers. I'm excusing the reviewers.
It's the responsibility of the developers(and testers) to design and test code appropriately to find bugs.
It's not the job of some magazine reviewer to test out the software they're reviewing on every single variant of PC. That's not part of the review process. My point was more that while the bugs are still the fault of the developers(at least most of the time), they're often triggered by hardware or software issues which the developers may not have. It is entirely possible, and possibly even likely that game reviewers might never encounter certain bugs, or even any bugs.
If you live in a part of the world with bandwidth caps, 8 GB(which is how big some demos are) can be a bit of a problem. It doesn't take a long time for me to download it, but it uses most of my cap, and more importantly it's as big as the full game off a torrent site.
It's not really all that simple. A sand boxed area of GTA wouldn't feel like the real GTA does, and more than half the beauty of Dragon Age is how deep and rich and real the world is, one town even the best town wouldn't give you that.
Add in the fact that in a lot of cases the demos, even with everything cut out of it, are as large as the full game, and you're sort of in a bit of a tough situation.
Not really certain about how much scores are creeping. There are a lot fewer really shit games out there these days, plenty of games I don't like, and plenty of let downs, but really shocking crap either doesn't make it or doesn't get reviewed. I've also seen games with huge full page adverts get panned in the same magazine, though I haven't read one in a few years.
Game bugs are a funny thing. Sometimes they're really massive game crippling bugs which should have been caught, but a lot of the times they're the result, especially on PC of odd hardware or software configurations, old equipment, or unexpected user behavior. If game studios can't find bugs with a huge team of testers and beta testers and everything else they do you can't really expect some single reviewer to find and mention every one. Add in the fact that if you're reviewing games for a living having a rig in reasonable condition at all times is a justifiable business expense(and also not an experimental toy), and you won't see an awful lot of reviewers running on 5 year old equipment or bleeding edge beta software.
Hype is always an issue, especially with games like Spore. Mostly because ideas always sound really really cool, and execution doesn't always live up to what it was supposed to be. Spore was a classic example of this, as is pretty much every game Peter Molyneux has ever produced. A lot of the hype comes before the actual game is reviewed, or before reviewers discover how eminently disappointing the actual feature is over the long term. Black and White is a perfect example of that sort of thing, the tutorial mission was absolutely awe inspiring, but they never really did anything with the idea.
Shallow reviews are a problem, but they're largely unavoidable. Review sites are commercial entities, that means they have to generate enough content to keep readers reading, and they have to review the latest greatest games while people are still interested. This means a reviewer can't spend a month exploring every aspect of a game, it's just not economically viable. Add in the fact that a lot of reviewers are probably sick to death of most game mechanics just because of the nature of their jobs, and you might find it's sometimes hard to tell when a mechanic is actually grating and tedious and when it just seems that way because you've played 150 WW2 shooters this month already.
DRM is an odd issue. Generally speaking, for the most part, if you follow the rules, it doesn't actually cause all that many problems for most people. Is it really a reviewers job to talk about the anti-piracy measures if they don't interfere with the game? Most PCs that are powerful enough for gaming are constantly connected to the internet these days anyway, and while I wasn't a huge fan of securom, and still am not, it's not really all that inconvenient if you've paid for all your software.
Personally I also prefer user reviews, particularly on consumer electronics, not necessarily because the users are any better at reviewing things, but because reading the reviews will give you an idea of what kind of problems you might encounter. If the worst the kind of rabid complainers who visit forums can complain about is something you can live with you can be fairly certain the problems aren't going to be all that bad. 99.999% of the time you won't even experience those problems, but they do give you an idea of the worst you can expect.
Reviews aren't perfect, nothing which has to make money generally is. That said, in an area in which you are not an expert, reading a variety of reviews can give you a fairly good idea of whether a product is any good. This isn't so good for games(most people who buy games have a pretty good idea of what a good game is, and what they like playing), but for a lot of things where you aren't an expert, they're not half bad. I am not, for instance, a refrigerator or car expert. I don't buy them all that often, and they aren't my areas of expertise. I certainly wouldn't take everything in a review for either as gospel truth, but reviews are generally better than guessing, and I don't have time to become an auto mechanic just so I can properly judge a new car.
I won't argue whether Windows 7 would be what it is without Vista, Microsoft have quite a history of releasing Operating Systems the way they were supposed to be in the next revision. As for bloat, bloat is just features you don't want or need. That doesn't mean everyone doesn't want or need them.
Personally if it costs more than a grand to have a notebook which does what I need it to do, then I'm happy to pay that, $500 for a web browsing appliance isn't really all that cheap. If I want a computer, I want a computer, not some web browsing toy I can't type on. I'd rather spend that $500 on an e-book reader if I'm looking for something to do while I'm waiting, it doesn't require me to have wireless access everywhere I go.
You must have much smaller hands than me, or not be a touch typist, there's no way I could spend more than about 10 minutes on a keyboard that small without going insane.
I'm not precisely saying they don't work, just that they won't work for long. Mobile phones are moving towards laptops functionality wise, and small notebooks are getting smaller. There just isn't going to be room for a device to fill that niche for very long.
There's also at least in my opinion, a certain amount of over-estimation of MySQL because it was originally an European product.
Only the most die hard MySQL fanatics ever really believed that Oracle and MySQL were ever really going to be competitors. Any market share that MySQL ever has or ever will take away from Oracle is market share where Oracle was vastly inappropriate anyway. You'd be an idiot to run your web server on a LAOP box, and you'd be an idiot to stick your billion record banking system into MySQL. MySQL still doesn't really scale up all that well and Oracle has never scaled down particularly well. From a competition point of view I'd be much more concerned about Microsoft buying MySQL since SQL Server seems to be playing in more of a middle space at the moment and is much more likely to see both products as a threat.
It's all really rather silly, since if MySQL can survive not being bought by Oracle it can certainly survive being bought by them since the only real question is whether it can survive on just community input and without major corporate investment.
Personally I'm not entirely sure if it was a good idea for Sun to buy MySQL in the first place. I know why they did, they were trying to achieve a world where you ran Solaris on SPARC(or at least Sun made Intel Boxes), running software written in Java in Sun containers. Essentially a vertical monopoly with enterprise support contracts which would be any vendors wet dream. I honestly think that aside from hoping they'd get some free development out of it, the main reason they open sourced it all was because if they'd tried to do the same thing as a closed source company they'd have been sued for anti-trust violations. Tragically for them, the move caused them to hemorrhage money when they'd already fallen behind Linux in adoption and they just couldn't turn it around fast enough. If someone doesn't buy them and infuse them with some cash, they'll bleed to death within a year or so, and since absolutely everything is open sourced including the hardware, they don't even have all that much in the way of IP to sell off. It's highly unlikely you'd see a bid for them from anyone who wouldn't be as much a problem for the EU as Oracle. HP, IBM, and Oracle are pretty much the only major candidates for the whole company. You might see a couple of other folks like AMD, Intel, or even Microsoft try to snatch up individual technologies if they came up for individual sale, but they're not a profitable company and they don't have any massively successful product lines aside from Java which they don't really own anymore.
We're currently in a situation where the low hanging fruit of operating system design has pretty much all been plucked. There haven't been very many major advances in Operating Systems in quite some time. The only reason why Linux appears to be moving ahead more rapidly is because its UI was previously so abysmally poor, and UI Is what is most apparent to people actually using the system. That's not to say that Linux is bad, or Microsoft is good, or Apple or anyone else for that matter. I'm just saying that the only places we've seen major advances in Operating Systems are in areas where the previous iterations of that product were particularly abysmal(Security for Windows, User Interface for Linux). Even OS X which is arguably the largest OS change in the last decade wasn't really any sort of great leap forward in design, even if combining the Unix back end with the Mac front end was rather clever.
Microsoft Operating systems are ubiquitous because people are familiar with them, and because for the most part they do what they're supposed to and are relatively stable. There are certainly a number of specialized devices running on Windows(particularly XP) which would probably be better served with a customized Unix or Linux implementation, but the companies producing them obviously don't want to go down that route.
As for the price argument. Hardware is getting a lot cheaper to make, and Software is getting a lot more expensive to make, of course the OS is becoming more and more a part of the cost of the machine. Linux isn't getting any cheaper to make than Windows is, the people who make it just donate their time for free for their own reasons.
Mobile computing is being held back(if you can call it held back) because netbooks are a stupid idea. They'll be gone in less than 5 years. An underpowered computer with a tiny screen which is barely more capable than your phone, and barely lighter(or for that matter all that much cheaper) than a fully functional laptop computer is not a long term viable strategy. Laptops will get lighter and phones will become more functional and the netbook niche will rapidly vanish. It also has huge problems with power consumption. Netbooks aren't low powered because they're cheap(the screen is a lot bigger part of the cost of one of those things than the hard drive anyway), they're low powered because they have to run for several hours on a tiny battery, and they have to do so without catching on fire. Making a netbook isn't as simple as just cramming hardware into a tiny box.
It's also fundamentally critical to having responsive applications over the web.
Not to mention the fact that you could always send data over the network without noticing through things like parameters on image tag sources and any number of other methods. Most XSS isn't even done via XMLHttpRequest, since the only thing it allows you to do that you couldn't do already is retrieve information or send data which isn't present at page load, neither of which are particularly useful(that's not to say that you couldn't get some interesting information from something like a web form, but if you've hacked the page far enough that you can meaningfully manipulate its content you have other options.
Yes, but public hospitals everywhere in the world are generally chronically underfunded. The US doesn't have the problem to the same extent, but that's because they've set up the system so that the poorest third of their population(generally the folks most likely to get sick) can't actually afford to use the service.
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Yes, and no.
Indian programmers are not bad programmers, and some of the Indian universities actually have world class Computer Science departments. There are arguments to be made about different cultures and how they impact an individuals ability to do new and creative work in certain fields, and there's some truth to that, but not enough to make any major impact.
The problem with most second or third world outsourcing is that it's done on the cheap. That means that a lot of companies end up with sub-contractors who are either underqualified, understaffed, or undermanaged. Even the best staff don't really do all that great a job if you don't hire someone to actually go and oversea the project and make sure that it's delivering what you wanted it to deliver and that the project team actually know what that is. Even the companies which get good outsourcing agencies tend to forget about the management side of things and just presume that it will all magically go away.
The lesson is that if you do things on the cheap or if you don't pay attention to what you're buying that you often get burned. In the vast majority of cases companies outsourcing to India do one or both of these things and so the results are fairly poor. Western outsourcing agencies tend to be a bit more expensive so people are more careful with what they're actually getting.
Microsoft has never turned anyone over to the Chinese government. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft rarely even sues or turns anyone over to the US government.
I'll take getting bought out or having my company crushed over being tortured to death any day.
Google started off with "don't be evil" and everyone fell for it. They've done some good, like everyone else, but they're not touchy feely good guys.
Back when I was in university, the engineering department used to offer their students(and some of the CS students as well) the ability to take a semester at 1 credit and still maintain full time status(so you didn't lose health insurance or start having to pay back student loans). I think they were called co-ops or something like that. Essentially you'd work a summer and one semester for a company. That meant you weren't buggering off by the time you actually learned how to do the job and so you got paid fairly reasonably and actually learned something. They were actually a graduation requirement for the engineering students. I didn't do any personally, but I know a lot of people who did and found a lot of value in it.
There are some fairly decent internships, but you've got to be fairly careful. Companies generally won't get any real value out of an intern(which is why interns in most disciplines work for free), and so only a company which is really serious about investing in students will give you anything worthwhile to do(since it'll cost them money and productivity).
Add to that the fact that A+, Network+ and CompTIA are basically meaningless certs that a monkey could pass(no offfense), and you've probably just landed yourself an underpaid stint on the help desk. Maybe you've been lucky, but an internship will only help your future if you do something interesting and real with it, or if you can make some contacts for post graduation. If it's not going to do either of those things, enjoy your summer or work at a job which will actually pay you.
Personally I reckon they're probably worse.
Microsoft is out to get your money. They do this by selling you as many Microsoft products as they can(sometimes whether you want them or not) and occaisionally knifing a competitor. Not exactly perfect behaviour, but predictable and relatively harmless. Microsoft doesn't really care what you do with their products so long as you pay for them. Want to write political manifestos in Word, Microsoft doesn't care. Features of Word may make your document easier to tie back to you, but it's other people doing the tieing.
Google on the other hand has been collecting information on everything they can for as long as they've been around, more and more and more every year. They know about your web searches, if you hit a web site with analytics, they own everthing you create in their application framework, now they're going to start logging your DNS searches.
Why are they doing this? I don't really know. At best they've falled into the "perfect information" trap and and have convinced themselves that if they just knew more about people they could make the world better. It's a common pitfall for IT workers, particularly the kind who are bright enough to get hired at google and sufficiently social retarded to willingly work the kind of hours the company seems to expect. Even that's not exactly a great situation and there are plenty of alternatives which are far more worrying.
Sure they've got to turn this stuff over to every government they deal with who wants it, that's part of doing business. Companies who disagree with that sort of thing tend to fight it by limiting their logging to what is legally required though, and Google sure does't do that.
You make the presumption they all have voters.
The sad thing about foreign policy is that it's a game that sometimes it's hard to get players for. While there's certainly an argument that the US position should be made public to the US voters, if the US government made the position of say the Chinese or the Russian or whoever the hell else is at this thing's position public to the US voters, the leaders of those countries might refuse to continue negotiations.
If you're a typical "Information wants to be free" type you might think that this is a good thing because ACTA can only be bad from your perspective, and you might be right. The point is though that opening the doors on international negotiations is a tricky business. Asking for transparency from your own government is one thing, but asking for it from someone else's is a horse of a different colour. Personally I'd like to know what my government is asking for and what they're giving up to get it, but I don't really have the right to ask for that for someone else's government. Openness in politics would be nice, but it's really not completely realistic, even at the national level, forget when you've got a dozen different countries with differing agendas arguing with each other.
Problem is, what you're talking about(grouping windows by task), and what they've done (allowing multiple windows to be tabbed within one main window) are two different things. Your idea is good, their idea is bad.
While you could emulate what you were talking about using this new technology, at least for certain tasks, by setting up a set of windows and putting a tab in each of them for each task, this would only work if you had multiple tasks with similar numbers of applications and windows.
The basic problem with this is that people want to be able to see more than one application at once, not hide more windows.
I trust my human friends to.
That said, google is not human. It might be made up of humans, but it is not human. I cannot express this enough to people. Google are governed by the same laws and the same rules as every other major corporation. They are required to maxmize shareholder value by US law, the exact same way that every other company is.
That's why they helped with the great firewall of China, that's why they did any number of questionable things over the years. They're not your friends, and they're not doing things out of the pure goodness of their hearts. Even if they wanted to, they're not legally allowed to. They're doing what they're doing because they believe and can apparently convince others, that what they're doing will maximize stockholder value.
When Intel first put the unique identifiers into their CPUs everyone was up in arms, despite the fact that Intel had never actually done anything to anyone. They were up in arms because a large corporation was getting access to information it didn't need and shouldn't have.
For some reason everyone seems to think that Google is above reproach that they've never turned anyone into the authorities, or complied with a subpoena, or helped a totalitarian regime oppress its citizens. Guess what, they have. Guess what, they will continue to do so. Why? Because they're a public for profit corporation and that's their legal obligation.
Or you can accept that everyone is moderately untrustworthy and google's level of untrustworthiness is acceptable so far.
That said, ChromeOS is starting to cross a boundary, as is potentially this DNS thing. This is my point, they're starting to go a little too far in their data collection, and I'm not happy about it.
I don't use gmail or google apps, I do use search because there's not really much choice. I occasionally use chrome.
No, thinking that a multi-billion dollar corporation are the good guys because they say they are is naive. Google are as profit driven as Microsoft or anyone else.
They collect every search on google that's ever been done. They collect every page hit on a google analytics page. They collect an awful lot of information from Chrome and from google accounts. The fact that they anonymize it doesn't change that, they're still collecting it, and we only have a corporate policy saying that they purge it at all. That's not a contract it's what they say they're going to do, and it can change.
They can't be doing something nice because they are a publicly traded company worth several billion dollars. They are legally obligated just like everyone else to maximize shareholder value. Providing expensive services "to be nice" is not maximizing shareholder value.
I'm not specifically saying I distrust them. I'm saying I don't trust them. There's a line in between the two. I continue to use their services because in some arenas they're the best products available and everyone else is collecting your information too.
Google isn't your friend, they're not the IT guy from down the road, they're a publicly traded multi-billion dollar company, and they're driven by exactly the same motivations as every other publicly traded company.
It's not so much about the DNS, it's about google in general.
I'm not saying that this DNS is a problem, or anything else they've got. I just said that people who explicity trust google because they haven't done anything evil with all the information they collect yet, are at best somewhat naive.
Google collects an awful lot of info about you, what you search for, which web sites you visit(if they have analytics), all your e-mails(if you're on gmail), all your documents(if you use their apps), the places you look for on google maps, and with DNS which domain names you request. They're getting scarily close to having information about everything that people do on the web, and an alarming amount of what they do off of it.
Now they don't really have any particular need to be collecting this information. Sure knowing what the most popular searches are is interesting, but it's not commercially interesting unless they use that information to make money.
I use google products, I might even use this DNS service, but I don't trust google, I don't understand their motivations and to be perfectly honest that makes me a little nervous.
What basis do you trust google?
There is no obvious financial motivation for Google collecting all the information about us that they are collecting. It doesn't impact their advertising revenue, it's not needed to provide better searches, and it certainly costs them money to collect it.
They might anonomize it, but why on earth are they even collecting it. What do they plan to do with it, and what do we do if they stop anonmizing it or if it isn't as anonymous as we think(they only say they purge the IP address as far as I can tell).
Metaphorically Google are like the guy with the wild eyes and a machine gun. Yeah he hasn't shot anyone yet, and maybe he won't ever shoot anyone, but who the hell knows what he's thinking.
I have indeed, and plenty of useless end users who can't follow instructions too.
My point was more that that's how the industry works and you've got to accomodate it, it's part of the cost of doing business.
Hospitals have always been best of breed, that's just the way they work. They don't buy the medical equipment from one manufacturer, so they don't buy their software from one developer either, that's just not the way they think.
As a software developer in the health care world you MUST make your system compatible with any standard you can find, AND your integration services have to actually work properly. I do integrations and presentation layers for health care fore a living, trust me on this.
I would also like to say that if you spent a year doing a simple repeatable task instead of just building a system where your customer could do it themselves, especially in your own time, then you're an idiot. It takes a couple of days to knock up a system where if the customer sticks their images in a certain location your system will suck them up and convert them. Maybe a month if you're trying to build something that will never require support again. If you went and did it manually you were doing it wrong.
Bioshock was about 6 as I recall, the same size as the full game.
I can get a higher cap, but it would cost me more money, and I don't really need it. That doesn't change the fact that even a couple of gig of data for what generally ends up being half an hour or less of game play is really rather pointless.
I'm not excusing the developers. I'm excusing the reviewers.
It's the responsibility of the developers(and testers) to design and test code appropriately to find bugs.
It's not the job of some magazine reviewer to test out the software they're reviewing on every single variant of PC. That's not part of the review process. My point was more that while the bugs are still the fault of the developers(at least most of the time), they're often triggered by hardware or software issues which the developers may not have. It is entirely possible, and possibly even likely that game reviewers might never encounter certain bugs, or even any bugs.
I'm well aware that Spore is from the Sims guy. Peter Molyneux is just a great example of games with lots of promise that failed to deliver.
If you live in a part of the world with bandwidth caps, 8 GB(which is how big some demos are) can be a bit of a problem. It doesn't take a long time for me to download it, but it uses most of my cap, and more importantly it's as big as the full game off a torrent site.
It's not really all that simple. A sand boxed area of GTA wouldn't feel like the real GTA does, and more than half the beauty of Dragon Age is how deep and rich and real the world is, one town even the best town wouldn't give you that.
Add in the fact that in a lot of cases the demos, even with everything cut out of it, are as large as the full game, and you're sort of in a bit of a tough situation.
Not really certain about how much scores are creeping. There are a lot fewer really shit games out there these days, plenty of games I don't like, and plenty of let downs, but really shocking crap either doesn't make it or doesn't get reviewed. I've also seen games with huge full page adverts get panned in the same magazine, though I haven't read one in a few years.
Game bugs are a funny thing. Sometimes they're really massive game crippling bugs which should have been caught, but a lot of the times they're the result, especially on PC of odd hardware or software configurations, old equipment, or unexpected user behavior. If game studios can't find bugs with a huge team of testers and beta testers and everything else they do you can't really expect some single reviewer to find and mention every one. Add in the fact that if you're reviewing games for a living having a rig in reasonable condition at all times is a justifiable business expense(and also not an experimental toy), and you won't see an awful lot of reviewers running on 5 year old equipment or bleeding edge beta software.
Hype is always an issue, especially with games like Spore. Mostly because ideas always sound really really cool, and execution doesn't always live up to what it was supposed to be. Spore was a classic example of this, as is pretty much every game Peter Molyneux has ever produced. A lot of the hype comes before the actual game is reviewed, or before reviewers discover how eminently disappointing the actual feature is over the long term. Black and White is a perfect example of that sort of thing, the tutorial mission was absolutely awe inspiring, but they never really did anything with the idea.
Shallow reviews are a problem, but they're largely unavoidable. Review sites are commercial entities, that means they have to generate enough content to keep readers reading, and they have to review the latest greatest games while people are still interested. This means a reviewer can't spend a month exploring every aspect of a game, it's just not economically viable. Add in the fact that a lot of reviewers are probably sick to death of most game mechanics just because of the nature of their jobs, and you might find it's sometimes hard to tell when a mechanic is actually grating and tedious and when it just seems that way because you've played 150 WW2 shooters this month already.
DRM is an odd issue. Generally speaking, for the most part, if you follow the rules, it doesn't actually cause all that many problems for most people. Is it really a reviewers job to talk about the anti-piracy measures if they don't interfere with the game? Most PCs that are powerful enough for gaming are constantly connected to the internet these days anyway, and while I wasn't a huge fan of securom, and still am not, it's not really all that inconvenient if you've paid for all your software.
Personally I also prefer user reviews, particularly on consumer electronics, not necessarily because the users are any better at reviewing things, but because reading the reviews will give you an idea of what kind of problems you might encounter. If the worst the kind of rabid complainers who visit forums can complain about is something you can live with you can be fairly certain the problems aren't going to be all that bad. 99.999% of the time you won't even experience those problems, but they do give you an idea of the worst you can expect.
Reviews aren't perfect, nothing which has to make money generally is. That said, in an area in which you are not an expert, reading a variety of reviews can give you a fairly good idea of whether a product is any good. This isn't so good for games(most people who buy games have a pretty good idea of what a good game is, and what they like playing), but for a lot of things where you aren't an expert, they're not half bad. I am not, for instance, a refrigerator or car expert. I don't buy them all that often, and they aren't my areas of expertise. I certainly wouldn't take everything in a review for either as gospel truth, but reviews are generally better than guessing, and I don't have time to become an auto mechanic just so I can properly judge a new car.
I won't argue whether Windows 7 would be what it is without Vista, Microsoft have quite a history of releasing Operating Systems the way they were supposed to be in the next revision. As for bloat, bloat is just features you don't want or need. That doesn't mean everyone doesn't want or need them.
Personally if it costs more than a grand to have a notebook which does what I need it to do, then I'm happy to pay that, $500 for a web browsing appliance isn't really all that cheap. If I want a computer, I want a computer, not some web browsing toy I can't type on. I'd rather spend that $500 on an e-book reader if I'm looking for something to do while I'm waiting, it doesn't require me to have wireless access everywhere I go.
You must have much smaller hands than me, or not be a touch typist, there's no way I could spend more than about 10 minutes on a keyboard that small without going insane.
I'm not precisely saying they don't work, just that they won't work for long. Mobile phones are moving towards laptops functionality wise, and small notebooks are getting smaller. There just isn't going to be room for a device to fill that niche for very long.
There's also at least in my opinion, a certain amount of over-estimation of MySQL because it was originally an European product.
Only the most die hard MySQL fanatics ever really believed that Oracle and MySQL were ever really going to be competitors. Any market share that MySQL ever has or ever will take away from Oracle is market share where Oracle was vastly inappropriate anyway. You'd be an idiot to run your web server on a LAOP box, and you'd be an idiot to stick your billion record banking system into MySQL. MySQL still doesn't really scale up all that well and Oracle has never scaled down particularly well. From a competition point of view I'd be much more concerned about Microsoft buying MySQL since SQL Server seems to be playing in more of a middle space at the moment and is much more likely to see both products as a threat.
It's all really rather silly, since if MySQL can survive not being bought by Oracle it can certainly survive being bought by them since the only real question is whether it can survive on just community input and without major corporate investment.
Personally I'm not entirely sure if it was a good idea for Sun to buy MySQL in the first place. I know why they did, they were trying to achieve a world where you ran Solaris on SPARC(or at least Sun made Intel Boxes), running software written in Java in Sun containers. Essentially a vertical monopoly with enterprise support contracts which would be any vendors wet dream. I honestly think that aside from hoping they'd get some free development out of it, the main reason they open sourced it all was because if they'd tried to do the same thing as a closed source company they'd have been sued for anti-trust violations. Tragically for them, the move caused them to hemorrhage money when they'd already fallen behind Linux in adoption and they just couldn't turn it around fast enough. If someone doesn't buy them and infuse them with some cash, they'll bleed to death within a year or so, and since absolutely everything is open sourced including the hardware, they don't even have all that much in the way of IP to sell off. It's highly unlikely you'd see a bid for them from anyone who wouldn't be as much a problem for the EU as Oracle. HP, IBM, and Oracle are pretty much the only major candidates for the whole company. You might see a couple of other folks like AMD, Intel, or even Microsoft try to snatch up individual technologies if they came up for individual sale, but they're not a profitable company and they don't have any massively successful product lines aside from Java which they don't really own anymore.
We're currently in a situation where the low hanging fruit of operating system design has pretty much all been plucked. There haven't been very many major advances in Operating Systems in quite some time. The only reason why Linux appears to be moving ahead more rapidly is because its UI was previously so abysmally poor, and UI Is what is most apparent to people actually using the system. That's not to say that Linux is bad, or Microsoft is good, or Apple or anyone else for that matter. I'm just saying that the only places we've seen major advances in Operating Systems are in areas where the previous iterations of that product were particularly abysmal(Security for Windows, User Interface for Linux). Even OS X which is arguably the largest OS change in the last decade wasn't really any sort of great leap forward in design, even if combining the Unix back end with the Mac front end was rather clever.
Microsoft Operating systems are ubiquitous because people are familiar with them, and because for the most part they do what they're supposed to and are relatively stable. There are certainly a number of specialized devices running on Windows(particularly XP) which would probably be better served with a customized Unix or Linux implementation, but the companies producing them obviously don't want to go down that route.
As for the price argument. Hardware is getting a lot cheaper to make, and Software is getting a lot more expensive to make, of course the OS is becoming more and more a part of the cost of the machine. Linux isn't getting any cheaper to make than Windows is, the people who make it just donate their time for free for their own reasons.
Mobile computing is being held back(if you can call it held back) because netbooks are a stupid idea. They'll be gone in less than 5 years. An underpowered computer with a tiny screen which is barely more capable than your phone, and barely lighter(or for that matter all that much cheaper) than a fully functional laptop computer is not a long term viable strategy. Laptops will get lighter and phones will become more functional and the netbook niche will rapidly vanish. It also has huge problems with power consumption. Netbooks aren't low powered because they're cheap(the screen is a lot bigger part of the cost of one of those things than the hard drive anyway), they're low powered because they have to run for several hours on a tiny battery, and they have to do so without catching on fire. Making a netbook isn't as simple as just cramming hardware into a tiny box.
It's also fundamentally critical to having responsive applications over the web.
Not to mention the fact that you could always send data over the network without noticing through things like parameters on image tag sources and any number of other methods. Most XSS isn't even done via XMLHttpRequest, since the only thing it allows you to do that you couldn't do already is retrieve information or send data which isn't present at page load, neither of which are particularly useful(that's not to say that you couldn't get some interesting information from something like a web form, but if you've hacked the page far enough that you can meaningfully manipulate its content you have other options.
Yes, but public hospitals everywhere in the world are generally chronically underfunded. The US doesn't have the problem to the same extent, but that's because they've set up the system so that the poorest third of their population(generally the folks most likely to get sick) can't actually afford to use the service.