Part of the problem for dragon age is time. Once upon a time, OpenGL was superior to Direct3d, substantially so, and had much better in hardware support than Direct 3d. However, since that time, Direct3d has gone through about 8 major releases and improved leaps and bounds whereas OpenGL still hasn't really managed the leap from 2 to 3 yet. Unlike when NWN was first released, when you're picking what 3d API you're going to use today you're more than likely going to choose DirectX unless you have a compelling business driver for supporting Linux. This means that while porting NWN to Linux was almost free, porting Dragon Age would almost certainly involve writing a parallel rendering engine or using a substandard one on Windows.
The other problem is very evidenced in this thread. Nvidia provides free high quality functional graphics card drivers for Linux, and everyone hates them anyway because they're not open source. Very few gaming serious gaming companies are ever going to open source current release code(code for older engines etc is different), and with more and more games being developed on third party engines and frameworks this is even less likely to happen. If game developers believe that Linux is full of people who are vehemently against closed source(and therefor their product) and that most of the remainder have no particular issue with dual booting, then what is their motivation for an expensive parallel development process.
Some of this could be fixed by just having OpenGL get its act together and actually accomplishing something, so that it was once again a reasonable alternative on Windows. Some of it could be fixed by more standardization on the Linux desktop. It would also help if there was an example of a strong market for any sort of closed source software on Linux, which there just isn't.
Linux ports are great when they cost almost nothing for the develoeprs, NWN worked better, for the most part, on linux, that it did on Windows, and most of it was just copied straight from an existing installtion, but with the increasing dominance of DirectX, this is hardly ever the case anymore.
They don't want to open source because they want to stay in business.
There are substantial performance optimizations in their drivers. That combined with the way they design their cards and architectures so that you basically use the same driver for every NVIDIA card(well nearly every desktop card) means that there's some rather substantial work that's been done on those drivers and quite a lot of their competitive advantages come from that work. They don't want to share that with their competitors and they don't want their linux drivers to significantly under perform on Linux, which is fair enough. They could be wrong in their assessment of these risks, but they are more than likely right.
I've always been an nvidia on linux supporter, but that's because, unlike ATI(unless it's changed recently), they're cards have always worked. They kept changes in sync with the kernel, kept up with changes in X, created viable 64 bit drivers. They fully support OpenGL 3d rendering on Linux, and they have for quite a number of years, much farther back than ATI did, and with much better quality.
True some of their extra features aren't implemented in Linux, but PhysX sucks anyway and no one really uses it, so that's no real loss.
The only criticism you can make of NVIDIAs dealings with Linux is that they haven't open sourced their driver. Aside from that, they've provided more resources and more support for the Linux platform than any other hardware company I've ever dealt with. Personally I don't mind the drivers being closed source because I don't fundamentally object to close source software, and I always prefer software which works and does what I want as opposed to software which is crap but conforms to some sort of ideology. Their driver works, and with the exception of some small gaps after major(and usually political) changes in the kernel, it always has. They take Linux seriously and work to support it fully. They haven't, for a number of likely legitimate business reasons, open sourced their driver, and they haven't actively supported attempts to create an open source driver, but they have otherwise done the right thing consistently and in sharp contrast with nearly everyone else.
Well that's actually not even remotely true. Not all societies are patriarchal, majority patriarchal societies are actually fairly recent in that kind of context.
The number of wives and/or husbands has differed during that same period, as well as the rights and/or responsibilities of all parties to the marriage have changed, as well as who performed the marriage and under what circumstances.
At some periods of time in various societies and social groups, marriage to close kin(including siblings) was not only common practice but actively encouraged.
This idea that marriage has had some single definition since the dawn of time is rather silly and the only way you can possibly believe that is if you view the world from the rather narrow perspective that God created Adam and Eve defined marriage for them in the Christian style and everyone who wasn't Christian(or I suppose Jewish prior to that whole change) just doesn't count. I suppose this works, but by that logic I can argue that people have accepted gay marriage since the dawn of time by defining the dawn of time to be where I want it to be and people to be who I want them to be. My argument doesn't work any better than yours.
That is sort of true, however there's a difference between a vote and a petition.
Voting is used to decide the government, petitions are used to sway the government. In a petition you're saying "I the undersigned believe in this cause enough to publicly endorse it", it's supposed to imply that if you were asked to vote on it you would do so, but that's not really the point.
If you're not comfortable with publicly endorsing the cause of a petition then you shouldn't endorse it, since your public support is the whole point of the exercise. They're not anonymous and shouldn't be. Voting is, and should be.
Personally, I don't see how these guys have much of a leg to stand on. If you're ashamed of being a conservative bigot then maybe you should stop being one. If you're not ashamed and truly believe in what you petitioned for, then you shouldn't need to be anonymous.
He's actually a pretty good example of everything you shouldn't do with your Resume.
There's a lot to be said for being concise in your resume, and the first page is the one which gets the most attention. The problem is that this doesn't mean you should cram everything you have onto one page, since one unreadable page is worse than 20 you can actually parse properly.
The reason for a one page resume is that your resume will appear in a gigantic stack of other resumes. If you're really lucky it might be being looked at by someone who actually understands the field, but that person is likely to be busy. They're not going to spend an hour carefully reading each resume, they're going to try to cull that gigantic pile down to a short list as quickly as possible. I can honestly say that, as someone who has been asked for a technical opinion on resumes for the area this guy works in, I'd have binned it because there would almost certainly have been someone(possibly someone with far less experience) whose resume showed me that experience in a more meaningful manner.
This is all a bit sad since I happen to have worked with a lot of the stuff he's apparently actually written, and they're not my favorite examples of the product line, they were well coded and not particularly buggy or difficult to work with. The guy has a lot of years of very solid experience, but he has no idea how to actually apply for a job. This isn't all that surprising since from the looks of his resume, he started off as a consultant, got hired onto one of the firms he was consulting with, which then got bought by Novell, and he hasn't actually gone job hunting in more than a decade. Depending on his age(and whether there's any additional experience he's left off), he may have only ever actually gone job hunting once in his entire life
That said, having coded quite a lot of it, your network speed doesn't really make any difference. Unless you're using it to request totally superfluous information the visitor doesn't need requesting that information via an XMLHttpRequest or through a regular page reload makes no real difference. You could even argue that if the load is going to take an especially long time then allowing the rest of the page to remain is actually more beneficial. The reason for most classic interfaces is that the new AJAX ones tend to be a lot prettier(in addition to being more responsive) and that prettiness uses extra bandwidth. Rather than build two AJAX interfaces one high bandwidth, one low, most places just kept their classic interface. That increase in prettiness has certainly been driven by broadband,but it's been driven on every kind of site not just AJAX ones.
Computer speed(especially if you're using older IE versions) has a lot more impact on javascript performance(and then of course AJAX) than network speed does. That's actually one of the motivators for using all this javascript in the first place(at least in some of my work).
Most computers these days, especially in corporate environments are ridiculously over specced. A lot of the time the vast majority of their CPU time is sitting idle. In these days of tighter budgets however, most servers are not. If I can palm some of the layout work off onto the over specced desktops, then that's work my server(which never gets the love from finance it deserves) doesn't have to do.
I'm correct that, the original implementation of XMLHttpRequest was Microsoft's god awful ActiveX one way back in 2000Before google was doing anything at all with mail, but it was for their web enabled version of outlook, not hotmail.
You can get a whole lot more(I think 80 gig plans are around $70 and you can get hundred gig or more for around $100), I just have a really basic plan because I don't download much, some plans will include an off peak time(still usually capped but with a separate and larger cap).
The point of it all though is that it's the only way it works. In the US if an ISP adds 10% more capacity, its existing users instantly gobble up that capacity, they've spent money and incurred an additional cost, for no additional revenue. Only mentally defective business people make decisions like that.
On the other hand with a cap, you pay for what you use, which means that if an ISP increases capacity, they can generate more revenue(presuming they have the demand of course). This makes financial sense.
I used to live in the states, and I've had uncapped broadband(at substantially lower speeds for what, at the currency exchange rate at the time was about the same cost). I've also had capped broadband, because that's all they've got over here. It took some getting used to, and I had to change my downloading habits a bit, but in the end it's been good.
I get about a hundred times more download speed, and barring the occasional outage or problem with peering partners which every ISP suffers from, I actually get what I pay for. I can download at that speed up until I hit my cap, no shaping, no throttling, no nothing. I get what I pay for and my ISP can survive.
I know we'd all like to get as much as we want of everything, and it was stupid of the US ISPs to have started selling those plans when they knew they could never actually manage it if everyone used it, but none of that changes the simple economics which mean that US ISPs cannot continue to offer unlimited internet and still survive. Personally I'd rather have to pay for my use and get what I paid for as opposed to having them throttle my use anyway and not even give me the option of getting what I want.
That's just great, if all you want from the web is static text. That isn't however, what the vast majority of people and companies want.
AJAX exists because when Microsoft put it into hotmail it was so vastly successful that it actually got implemented as a standard.
The web is about the delivery of information. That is it's function. Believe it or not, for most people, the form in which information is delivered is very important. You cannot separate form from function on the web. It just doesn't work. If you could there wouldn't even have been any HTML, just straight text coming down a pipe.
I personally don't really like some things opening in my web browser either, but I've had clients who insisted that it be done that way. I hate convergence devices too, but everyone still has an iPhone, because that's what they actually want.
Caps work pretty well. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I live in Australia now, and I've got a 10 GB monthly cap on a 24mb connection. It costs me about $AU50, I could get substantially more for not much more, though I don't need it so I don't. If I go over my cap I get shaped(down to 256k as I recall), but not charged extra, but I don't generally do that.
I know this idea sounds scary, but unlike nearly every ISP in the US, I get what I pay for. I get as much as my connection is capable of giving(obviously there's some attenuation with distance from the exchange and latency to US sites and all that).
It works for me, and it works for the ISP because they get more money if they sell more capacity, and they're up front and neutral about it for the most part(there are occasional deals with certain providers that their traffic doesn't count towards your cap, but it doesn't affect service delivery in any way).
The current system in the US does not work, and cannot work, because the only way to ISPs to increase revenue is to increase the number of subscribers on their current infrastructure which leads to the problems you currently have. If they increase capacity their subscribers will just use it all up and they won't make any more money. It's hard to give up totally uncapped bandwidth, but simple economics should show you that no for profit company can ever deliver on that promise in the long term. In the old days no one really used much so they could sell things they didn't think you'd use, but everyone uses it now.
Well, as an Australian taxpayer. It isn't really about the taxes I paid, it's about the taxes that the companies being sued didn't pay.
If an Australian company(or even a foreign company with a certain amount of presence here) wants license the technology they should get it for free. They are, after all, paying Australian taxes, and creating Australian jobs, all of which is good for Australia.
Companies who don't have a certain amount of presence here, aren't paying taxes here, or creating jobs here, can pay for the license. This provides the dual advantage of giving more funding to the CSIRO(which is good), and providing an advantage to companies who provide an advantage to Australians.
It'd be neat if Australians could get the kit $2 cheaper, but I'm happy to pay the extra $2 and give a leg up to folks who want to create jobs here.
Yes, but best practice for backups has nothing to do with who is following those best practices. Your backup provider doesn't have to be internal, they just have to be doing the right thing.
Governments do not grant rights, people do. All governments function because the people believe they have the right to do so, even dictatorships. If your army doesn't believe you should rule, you don't. If your people are willing to die to prevent you from ruling, you can't.
Most of the time these "granted" rights are just extensions of the right to equal treatment. People don't necessarily have a fundamental right to broadband, but if people who live in city X can have broadband at a reasonable price, and that broadband provides them with an advantage, then people in city Y should have the same ability to get broadband at a reasonable price.
This isn't free broadband, it's guaranteeing service to less profitable areas to prevent creating a second class of citizens. Most societies need the people who live in the rural areas to do what they're doing(usually growing the food the rest of us eat). To deny those people the same access to information that the rest of us have simply because of where they live is the problem, not the access in and of itself.
Every country has useless drains on society. The US, Europe, Asia, absolutely everywhere.
A part of life is that taking care of the people who really need it, often includes taking up the tab for people who are useless. It's generally not a particularly fantastic life, very few countries have welfare payments which are much better than survival level wages, but there are always people who would rather live a really basic life than work. Some of them might work if they had no choice, but they'd probably be useless in their jobs as well.
The alternative to supporting those people with your tax dollars(which trust me, burns me up as much as it does you), is to fail to help people who genuinely need a hand up and not a hand out. There are people who are in need of assistance through no fault of their own. People who work hard, pay their taxes and are genuinely good and productive citizens until some major event outside of their control basically places a massive road block in their path. There have been a lot of these people during the recent recession, people who worked hard, but who lost their jobs because other people were greedy or stupid. People who for one reason or another didn't have high paying jobs and lots of savings they could live on during a downturn.
We as a society can let these people suffer, let them perhaps fall off the path they were on and die or turn to criminal activity, or we can give them a hand up. The same goes for education and health care. At the present time in the US, getting a serious disease, even one which isn't your fault, is basically the end for a lot of people. If you can't work, you lose your job, without your job you lose your insurance, and without your insurance you lose your medical cover. Most HMO's will never give you full cover again if you have a pre-existing condition so even if you have a partner who works, if they lose their job for any reason you're still screwed.
Whenever you display generosity, some people are going to take advantage of you, but that doesn't detract from the act or make it any less important. It would be nice if we lived in a Utopian society and everyone cared for everyone else, and none of this was necessary, but we don't and it is. If you feel that letting good people suffer is worth not having to support the useless few, then that's your decision, it's not one I agree with, but you are free to feel that way. If it makes you feel any better pretend your tax dollars are going towards something you do agree with. If every tiny community were building their own infrastructure instead of the government you'd be paying enough extra for it that you'd end up with the same bills anyway.
Actually our internet isn't half bad. Aside from the general problem of the half a second latency geography adds to most connections. We pay a bit more, and we have caps, but for the most part we actually get what we paid for. You don't in the US.
Well, that's not entirely true. Europeans are voting for more right wing parties, but that's mostly the European population is shifting than anything else. I doubt many Europeans have a problem with the services they receive. What they have a problem with is the services all those foreigners(defined as anyone with a different skin colour) receive.
Europe is having a bit of a difficult time of it at the moment because of a mix of things. For one a few countries let their socialism go a bit too far, beyond reasonable services for everyone and reasonable workers rights into the usual inefficiency and over protection which destroyed most of the US automobile industry a few decades ago. For another, a lot of them suffer from the same problems the US has in that they don't actually make anything that anyone else wants anymore and they're not entirely sure what to do about it. The UK built its entire economy on exporting financial instruments and is currently pretty much screwed.
Whenever things get bad people start getting a bit xenophobic and despite claims about the cosmopolitan nature of Europe, they're as guilty of it as the rest of us.
I live in Australia and we have a fairly reasonable balance between the two(which might be why we've currently got the best performing western economy in the world). There's reasonable protections for workers, but for the most part, employers have rights too(there's a few issues here that need to be fixed, but the previous government instead of trying to fix the problems tried to absolutely dismantle workers rights and got kicked out so it's a bit of a sensitive subject at the moment). We've got excellent public health care, but if you don't want waiting lists or want private rooms or things like that you can pay for private health insurance(in fact if the government feels you should have private health insurance and you don't they'll tax you extra to encourage you to get it). Again it's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Having the government take care of every aspect of your life doesn't work. It never has and it probably never will. Having the government provide a safety net of basic services so that people who aren't Donald Trump get a second change is a very good thing. Getting basic infrastructure and services provided by an efficient central provider and available equally and fairly to everyone is good as well, not just for individuals, but for businesses small and large. Government infrastructure is the only reason that competing telephone companies and ISPs can exist, and the US is actually better at that at the moment than we are. Sometimes it's best to buy once instead of many times, and since the government is somewhat more beholden to its shareholders(everyone) than most corporations, it's not as bad having them as a single point of service.
This is true, and perfectly ok for an informed decision. The issue is that society hasn't really woken up to understanding gaming which is bad for society and for gaming.
A large number of people still view gaming as a bit like watching sesame street, alright for kids but not something any self respecting adult ought to be doing with their time.
This has a number of problems, the least of which is the continued stigmatization of people who play computer games for fun. More pressingly, kids are exposed to things they probably shouldn't be exposed to and parents are, despite everything the ESRB and similar organizations try to tell them, blissfully unaware of what they're buying. This would be bad enough, but when they find out what they bought they get angry because "games are supposed to be for kids" and we get all sorts of cries for censorship and idiocy.
Gaming has changed over the years because gamers have changed over the years, but the way parents who are not gamers view games hasn't changed fast enough to match reality. This isn't good for anyone.
The solution to Social Security is actually very simple. A number of other countries have already done it, including the one I live in. It's just not an idea which would be tremendously popular in the US, and especially not with Libertarians.
Here in Australia, we have mandatory superannuation(that is to say your employer is required to contribute a certain percentage of your wage to a retirement fund of your choice) and the old aged pension(our equivalent of Social Security) is means tested. Rich enough that you don't need it, then you don't get it.
Certainly if you want a more comfortable retirement you should put away additional funds, but the basic rate is enough that hopefully(this hasn't been in all that long) a lot fewer people will need the pension when the time comes. It's good that it's mandatory because it means that people(especially younger people who are less likely to negotiate hard for a 401k) are saving money which will save everyone money later.
The unpopular bit of course is that everyone pays, but not everyone gets any benefit out of it(like most government services really). This pisses off rich people(who don't generally benefit) and libertarians(who generally don't want anyone else to have any of their money), but it works quite well. The system is relatively manageable on our much lower GDP, people who need it get it, it's not going bankrupt, all of that sort of thing.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of wasteful government projects whose only real goal is to win votes, but Social Security doesn't actually have to be.
Certainly Bill Gates made the most of his opportunities and there was certainly a very large element of hard work and personal ambition there.
That said, if he'd been born a few years later or probably even a few years earlier, or done almost anything differently in his life he wouldn't have been there to have the opportunities he took advantage of. Hard work is definitely important. Being able to see your opportunities and take advantage of them is important. A certain degree of ruthlessness is also important, and you are very unlikely to succeed in any major way without them.
That said, the way to get rich beyond your wildest dreams is to be in the right place at the right time. All the hard work in the world will not get you there without that. It'll keep you from starving, it'll probably get you a decent living(if you're smart(not necessarily intelligent) enough to work hard at the right things. Bill Gates is Bill Gates because he was there when opportunity knocked and grabbed it with both hands.
True, but that comes under the banner of taking it seriously.
There's this huge push on Slashdot that you have to do everything yourself and that all forms of outsourcing are bad. Neither of these things is true. I didn't build my house, and I don't do my own surgery. I have someone else do those things because they can do it better, I do manage my own computer because I can do it better and cheaper than I could hire someone for.
The same is true with outsourcing, not every organization has a full complement of IT staff and their own fully kitted out data center, nor should they. If they did there would be a whole lot of really bored staff, bankrupt businesses, and every spare inch would be filled up with gigantic DCs.
Replacing your existing staff with outside people you can't manage properly and aren't paying enough for is stupid. Hiring a company to provide you with a service you don't have the internal expertise for and which isn't a core part of your business(and while the data may be core, the storage probably isn't) is sensible. I shouldn't build a house and most bricklayers probably shouldn't architect a computer system, other people can do it better.
The graphics issue was a problem on some corporate machines, but everything else had a good enough card.
UAC has issues, not least of which is a "this application is ok" flag, but it's a good idea.
Apparently the copy times were because Windows XP closed the copy dialogue when the copy finished caching, not when it finished copying, so XP wasn't faster it was lying.
Backward compatibility is an important Windows feature, on the other hand it's the cause of nearly all of the security problems associated with the OS, sometimes some of it has to go.
As for the rest of it, I haven't had unresponsive UI, I've turned off UAC, and some of the cheap SSD's have crap controllers that don't interact well with anything. They're known to cause freezes in Windows.
If your data is important then you take it's storage seriously. Sometimes that means you host it yourself, sometimes it means you get someone else to host it for you. You don't host your critical data if you can't afford the staff and infrastructure to support it, and if you've already got the staff and infrastructure you don't pay someone else to do it.
The important thing is that you take it seriously. That means contracts with your data storage provider with exactly what backup and restoration services they're promising and penalties for failing to meet those promises. It means full disaster recovery plans and proper due diligence including understanding what kind of outages you can afford and what it's going to cost you to keep outages under that value.
There's nothing inherently more safe about storing your own data or inherently unsafe about having someone else do it. In most cases the person who stores the data and the person who actually needs it are different anyway. What is unsafe is trusting someone else to look after your data without checking up that they actually are, be they internal or external.
I don't really care if a politician is a stripper, and WINE is a separate issue.
Working on WINE would probably be fine depending on what you were working on. The issue wouldn't be that you were or weren't coding it would be a confidentiality one. Your employer shouldn't care what you're doing with your spare time, but they will care if you're sharing confidential information.
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Part of the problem for dragon age is time. Once upon a time, OpenGL was superior to Direct3d, substantially so, and had much better in hardware support than Direct 3d. However, since that time, Direct3d has gone through about 8 major releases and improved leaps and bounds whereas OpenGL still hasn't really managed the leap from 2 to 3 yet. Unlike when NWN was first released, when you're picking what 3d API you're going to use today you're more than likely going to choose DirectX unless you have a compelling business driver for supporting Linux. This means that while porting NWN to Linux was almost free, porting Dragon Age would almost certainly involve writing a parallel rendering engine or using a substandard one on Windows.
The other problem is very evidenced in this thread. Nvidia provides free high quality functional graphics card drivers for Linux, and everyone hates them anyway because they're not open source. Very few gaming serious gaming companies are ever going to open source current release code(code for older engines etc is different), and with more and more games being developed on third party engines and frameworks this is even less likely to happen. If game developers believe that Linux is full of people who are vehemently against closed source(and therefor their product) and that most of the remainder have no particular issue with dual booting, then what is their motivation for an expensive parallel development process.
Some of this could be fixed by just having OpenGL get its act together and actually accomplishing something, so that it was once again a reasonable alternative on Windows. Some of it could be fixed by more standardization on the Linux desktop. It would also help if there was an example of a strong market for any sort of closed source software on Linux, which there just isn't.
Linux ports are great when they cost almost nothing for the develoeprs, NWN worked better, for the most part, on linux, that it did on Windows, and most of it was just copied straight from an existing installtion, but with the increasing dominance of DirectX, this is hardly ever the case anymore.
They don't want to open source because they want to stay in business.
There are substantial performance optimizations in their drivers. That combined with the way they design their cards and architectures so that you basically use the same driver for every NVIDIA card(well nearly every desktop card) means that there's some rather substantial work that's been done on those drivers and quite a lot of their competitive advantages come from that work. They don't want to share that with their competitors and they don't want their linux drivers to significantly under perform on Linux, which is fair enough. They could be wrong in their assessment of these risks, but they are more than likely right.
I've always been an nvidia on linux supporter, but that's because, unlike ATI(unless it's changed recently), they're cards have always worked. They kept changes in sync with the kernel, kept up with changes in X, created viable 64 bit drivers. They fully support OpenGL 3d rendering on Linux, and they have for quite a number of years, much farther back than ATI did, and with much better quality.
True some of their extra features aren't implemented in Linux, but PhysX sucks anyway and no one really uses it, so that's no real loss.
The only criticism you can make of NVIDIAs dealings with Linux is that they haven't open sourced their driver. Aside from that, they've provided more resources and more support for the Linux platform than any other hardware company I've ever dealt with. Personally I don't mind the drivers being closed source because I don't fundamentally object to close source software, and I always prefer software which works and does what I want as opposed to software which is crap but conforms to some sort of ideology. Their driver works, and with the exception of some small gaps after major(and usually political) changes in the kernel, it always has. They take Linux seriously and work to support it fully. They haven't, for a number of likely legitimate business reasons, open sourced their driver, and they haven't actively supported attempts to create an open source driver, but they have otherwise done the right thing consistently and in sharp contrast with nearly everyone else.
Well that's actually not even remotely true. Not all societies are patriarchal, majority patriarchal societies are actually fairly recent in that kind of context.
The number of wives and/or husbands has differed during that same period, as well as the rights and/or responsibilities of all parties to the marriage have changed, as well as who performed the marriage and under what circumstances.
At some periods of time in various societies and social groups, marriage to close kin(including siblings) was not only common practice but actively encouraged.
This idea that marriage has had some single definition since the dawn of time is rather silly and the only way you can possibly believe that is if you view the world from the rather narrow perspective that God created Adam and Eve defined marriage for them in the Christian style and everyone who wasn't Christian(or I suppose Jewish prior to that whole change) just doesn't count. I suppose this works, but by that logic I can argue that people have accepted gay marriage since the dawn of time by defining the dawn of time to be where I want it to be and people to be who I want them to be. My argument doesn't work any better than yours.
That is sort of true, however there's a difference between a vote and a petition.
Voting is used to decide the government, petitions are used to sway the government. In a petition you're saying "I the undersigned believe in this cause enough to publicly endorse it", it's supposed to imply that if you were asked to vote on it you would do so, but that's not really the point.
If you're not comfortable with publicly endorsing the cause of a petition then you shouldn't endorse it, since your public support is the whole point of the exercise. They're not anonymous and shouldn't be. Voting is, and should be.
Personally, I don't see how these guys have much of a leg to stand on. If you're ashamed of being a conservative bigot then maybe you should stop being one. If you're not ashamed and truly believe in what you petitioned for, then you shouldn't need to be anonymous.
He's actually a pretty good example of everything you shouldn't do with your Resume.
There's a lot to be said for being concise in your resume, and the first page is the one which gets the most attention. The problem is that this doesn't mean you should cram everything you have onto one page, since one unreadable page is worse than 20 you can actually parse properly.
The reason for a one page resume is that your resume will appear in a gigantic stack of other resumes. If you're really lucky it might be being looked at by someone who actually understands the field, but that person is likely to be busy. They're not going to spend an hour carefully reading each resume, they're going to try to cull that gigantic pile down to a short list as quickly as possible. I can honestly say that, as someone who has been asked for a technical opinion on resumes for the area this guy works in, I'd have binned it because there would almost certainly have been someone(possibly someone with far less experience) whose resume showed me that experience in a more meaningful manner.
This is all a bit sad since I happen to have worked with a lot of the stuff he's apparently actually written, and they're not my favorite examples of the product line, they were well coded and not particularly buggy or difficult to work with. The guy has a lot of years of very solid experience, but he has no idea how to actually apply for a job. This isn't all that surprising since from the looks of his resume, he started off as a consultant, got hired onto one of the firms he was consulting with, which then got bought by Novell, and he hasn't actually gone job hunting in more than a decade. Depending on his age(and whether there's any additional experience he's left off), he may have only ever actually gone job hunting once in his entire life
Lord knows AJAX is a horrible hack.
That said, having coded quite a lot of it, your network speed doesn't really make any difference. Unless you're using it to request totally superfluous information the visitor doesn't need requesting that information via an XMLHttpRequest or through a regular page reload makes no real difference. You could even argue that if the load is going to take an especially long time then allowing the rest of the page to remain is actually more beneficial. The reason for most classic interfaces is that the new AJAX ones tend to be a lot prettier(in addition to being more responsive) and that prettiness uses extra bandwidth. Rather than build two AJAX interfaces one high bandwidth, one low, most places just kept their classic interface. That increase in prettiness has certainly been driven by broadband,but it's been driven on every kind of site not just AJAX ones.
Computer speed(especially if you're using older IE versions) has a lot more impact on javascript performance(and then of course AJAX) than network speed does. That's actually one of the motivators for using all this javascript in the first place(at least in some of my work).
Most computers these days, especially in corporate environments are ridiculously over specced. A lot of the time the vast majority of their CPU time is sitting idle. In these days of tighter budgets however, most servers are not. If I can palm some of the layout work off onto the over specced desktops, then that's work my server(which never gets the love from finance it deserves) doesn't have to do.
I double checked, and corrected my mistake.
I'm correct that, the original implementation of XMLHttpRequest was Microsoft's god awful ActiveX one way back in 2000Before google was doing anything at all with mail, but it was for their web enabled version of outlook, not hotmail.
You can get a whole lot more(I think 80 gig plans are around $70 and you can get hundred gig or more for around $100), I just have a really basic plan because I don't download much, some plans will include an off peak time(still usually capped but with a separate and larger cap).
The point of it all though is that it's the only way it works. In the US if an ISP adds 10% more capacity, its existing users instantly gobble up that capacity, they've spent money and incurred an additional cost, for no additional revenue. Only mentally defective business people make decisions like that.
On the other hand with a cap, you pay for what you use, which means that if an ISP increases capacity, they can generate more revenue(presuming they have the demand of course). This makes financial sense.
I used to live in the states, and I've had uncapped broadband(at substantially lower speeds for what, at the currency exchange rate at the time was about the same cost). I've also had capped broadband, because that's all they've got over here. It took some getting used to, and I had to change my downloading habits a bit, but in the end it's been good.
I get about a hundred times more download speed, and barring the occasional outage or problem with peering partners which every ISP suffers from, I actually get what I pay for. I can download at that speed up until I hit my cap, no shaping, no throttling, no nothing. I get what I pay for and my ISP can survive.
I know we'd all like to get as much as we want of everything, and it was stupid of the US ISPs to have started selling those plans when they knew they could never actually manage it if everyone used it, but none of that changes the simple economics which mean that US ISPs cannot continue to offer unlimited internet and still survive. Personally I'd rather have to pay for my use and get what I paid for as opposed to having them throttle my use anyway and not even give me the option of getting what I want.
That's just great, if all you want from the web is static text. That isn't however, what the vast majority of people and companies want.
AJAX exists because when Microsoft put it into hotmail it was so vastly successful that it actually got implemented as a standard.
The web is about the delivery of information. That is it's function. Believe it or not, for most people, the form in which information is delivered is very important. You cannot separate form from function on the web. It just doesn't work. If you could there wouldn't even have been any HTML, just straight text coming down a pipe.
I personally don't really like some things opening in my web browser either, but I've had clients who insisted that it be done that way. I hate convergence devices too, but everyone still has an iPhone, because that's what they actually want.
FFS, the BBC website cost 30 million pounds to develop and 100 million pounds a year to run of course it runs properly on your bloody mobile phone. Most web developers don't have anywhere near that kind of budget.
Caps work pretty well. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I live in Australia now, and I've got a 10 GB monthly cap on a 24mb connection. It costs me about $AU50, I could get substantially more for not much more, though I don't need it so I don't. If I go over my cap I get shaped(down to 256k as I recall), but not charged extra, but I don't generally do that.
I know this idea sounds scary, but unlike nearly every ISP in the US, I get what I pay for. I get as much as my connection is capable of giving(obviously there's some attenuation with distance from the exchange and latency to US sites and all that).
It works for me, and it works for the ISP because they get more money if they sell more capacity, and they're up front and neutral about it for the most part(there are occasional deals with certain providers that their traffic doesn't count towards your cap, but it doesn't affect service delivery in any way).
The current system in the US does not work, and cannot work, because the only way to ISPs to increase revenue is to increase the number of subscribers on their current infrastructure which leads to the problems you currently have. If they increase capacity their subscribers will just use it all up and they won't make any more money. It's hard to give up totally uncapped bandwidth, but simple economics should show you that no for profit company can ever deliver on that promise in the long term. In the old days no one really used much so they could sell things they didn't think you'd use, but everyone uses it now.
Just because it doesn't work doesn't mean you can't sell it. If it's illegal that's a bit more of a problem.
Well, as an Australian taxpayer. It isn't really about the taxes I paid, it's about the taxes that the companies being sued didn't pay.
If an Australian company(or even a foreign company with a certain amount of presence here) wants license the technology they should get it for free. They are, after all, paying Australian taxes, and creating Australian jobs, all of which is good for Australia.
Companies who don't have a certain amount of presence here, aren't paying taxes here, or creating jobs here, can pay for the license. This provides the dual advantage of giving more funding to the CSIRO(which is good), and providing an advantage to companies who provide an advantage to Australians.
It'd be neat if Australians could get the kit $2 cheaper, but I'm happy to pay the extra $2 and give a leg up to folks who want to create jobs here.
Yes, but best practice for backups has nothing to do with who is following those best practices. Your backup provider doesn't have to be internal, they just have to be doing the right thing.
Governments do not grant rights, people do. All governments function because the people believe they have the right to do so, even dictatorships. If your army doesn't believe you should rule, you don't. If your people are willing to die to prevent you from ruling, you can't.
Most of the time these "granted" rights are just extensions of the right to equal treatment. People don't necessarily have a fundamental right to broadband, but if people who live in city X can have broadband at a reasonable price, and that broadband provides them with an advantage, then people in city Y should have the same ability to get broadband at a reasonable price.
This isn't free broadband, it's guaranteeing service to less profitable areas to prevent creating a second class of citizens. Most societies need the people who live in the rural areas to do what they're doing(usually growing the food the rest of us eat). To deny those people the same access to information that the rest of us have simply because of where they live is the problem, not the access in and of itself.
Every country has useless drains on society. The US, Europe, Asia, absolutely everywhere.
A part of life is that taking care of the people who really need it, often includes taking up the tab for people who are useless. It's generally not a particularly fantastic life, very few countries have welfare payments which are much better than survival level wages, but there are always people who would rather live a really basic life than work. Some of them might work if they had no choice, but they'd probably be useless in their jobs as well.
The alternative to supporting those people with your tax dollars(which trust me, burns me up as much as it does you), is to fail to help people who genuinely need a hand up and not a hand out. There are people who are in need of assistance through no fault of their own. People who work hard, pay their taxes and are genuinely good and productive citizens until some major event outside of their control basically places a massive road block in their path. There have been a lot of these people during the recent recession, people who worked hard, but who lost their jobs because other people were greedy or stupid. People who for one reason or another didn't have high paying jobs and lots of savings they could live on during a downturn.
We as a society can let these people suffer, let them perhaps fall off the path they were on and die or turn to criminal activity, or we can give them a hand up. The same goes for education and health care. At the present time in the US, getting a serious disease, even one which isn't your fault, is basically the end for a lot of people. If you can't work, you lose your job, without your job you lose your insurance, and without your insurance you lose your medical cover. Most HMO's will never give you full cover again if you have a pre-existing condition so even if you have a partner who works, if they lose their job for any reason you're still screwed.
Whenever you display generosity, some people are going to take advantage of you, but that doesn't detract from the act or make it any less important. It would be nice if we lived in a Utopian society and everyone cared for everyone else, and none of this was necessary, but we don't and it is. If you feel that letting good people suffer is worth not having to support the useless few, then that's your decision, it's not one I agree with, but you are free to feel that way. If it makes you feel any better pretend your tax dollars are going towards something you do agree with. If every tiny community were building their own infrastructure instead of the government you'd be paying enough extra for it that you'd end up with the same bills anyway.
Actually our internet isn't half bad. Aside from the general problem of the half a second latency geography adds to most connections. We pay a bit more, and we have caps, but for the most part we actually get what we paid for. You don't in the US.
Well, that's not entirely true. Europeans are voting for more right wing parties, but that's mostly the European population is shifting than anything else. I doubt many Europeans have a problem with the services they receive. What they have a problem with is the services all those foreigners(defined as anyone with a different skin colour) receive.
Europe is having a bit of a difficult time of it at the moment because of a mix of things. For one a few countries let their socialism go a bit too far, beyond reasonable services for everyone and reasonable workers rights into the usual inefficiency and over protection which destroyed most of the US automobile industry a few decades ago. For another, a lot of them suffer from the same problems the US has in that they don't actually make anything that anyone else wants anymore and they're not entirely sure what to do about it. The UK built its entire economy on exporting financial instruments and is currently pretty much screwed.
Whenever things get bad people start getting a bit xenophobic and despite claims about the cosmopolitan nature of Europe, they're as guilty of it as the rest of us.
I live in Australia and we have a fairly reasonable balance between the two(which might be why we've currently got the best performing western economy in the world). There's reasonable protections for workers, but for the most part, employers have rights too(there's a few issues here that need to be fixed, but the previous government instead of trying to fix the problems tried to absolutely dismantle workers rights and got kicked out so it's a bit of a sensitive subject at the moment). We've got excellent public health care, but if you don't want waiting lists or want private rooms or things like that you can pay for private health insurance(in fact if the government feels you should have private health insurance and you don't they'll tax you extra to encourage you to get it). Again it's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Having the government take care of every aspect of your life doesn't work. It never has and it probably never will. Having the government provide a safety net of basic services so that people who aren't Donald Trump get a second change is a very good thing. Getting basic infrastructure and services provided by an efficient central provider and available equally and fairly to everyone is good as well, not just for individuals, but for businesses small and large. Government infrastructure is the only reason that competing telephone companies and ISPs can exist, and the US is actually better at that at the moment than we are. Sometimes it's best to buy once instead of many times, and since the government is somewhat more beholden to its shareholders(everyone) than most corporations, it's not as bad having them as a single point of service.
This is true, and perfectly ok for an informed decision. The issue is that society hasn't really woken up to understanding gaming which is bad for society and for gaming.
A large number of people still view gaming as a bit like watching sesame street, alright for kids but not something any self respecting adult ought to be doing with their time.
This has a number of problems, the least of which is the continued stigmatization of people who play computer games for fun. More pressingly, kids are exposed to things they probably shouldn't be exposed to and parents are, despite everything the ESRB and similar organizations try to tell them, blissfully unaware of what they're buying. This would be bad enough, but when they find out what they bought they get angry because "games are supposed to be for kids" and we get all sorts of cries for censorship and idiocy.
Gaming has changed over the years because gamers have changed over the years, but the way parents who are not gamers view games hasn't changed fast enough to match reality. This isn't good for anyone.
The solution to Social Security is actually very simple. A number of other countries have already done it, including the one I live in. It's just not an idea which would be tremendously popular in the US, and especially not with Libertarians.
Here in Australia, we have mandatory superannuation(that is to say your employer is required to contribute a certain percentage of your wage to a retirement fund of your choice) and the old aged pension(our equivalent of Social Security) is means tested. Rich enough that you don't need it, then you don't get it.
Certainly if you want a more comfortable retirement you should put away additional funds, but the basic rate is enough that hopefully(this hasn't been in all that long) a lot fewer people will need the pension when the time comes. It's good that it's mandatory because it means that people(especially younger people who are less likely to negotiate hard for a 401k) are saving money which will save everyone money later.
The unpopular bit of course is that everyone pays, but not everyone gets any benefit out of it(like most government services really). This pisses off rich people(who don't generally benefit) and libertarians(who generally don't want anyone else to have any of their money), but it works quite well. The system is relatively manageable on our much lower GDP, people who need it get it, it's not going bankrupt, all of that sort of thing.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of wasteful government projects whose only real goal is to win votes, but Social Security doesn't actually have to be.
Certainly Bill Gates made the most of his opportunities and there was certainly a very large element of hard work and personal ambition there.
That said, if he'd been born a few years later or probably even a few years earlier, or done almost anything differently in his life he wouldn't have been there to have the opportunities he took advantage of. Hard work is definitely important. Being able to see your opportunities and take advantage of them is important. A certain degree of ruthlessness is also important, and you are very unlikely to succeed in any major way without them.
That said, the way to get rich beyond your wildest dreams is to be in the right place at the right time. All the hard work in the world will not get you there without that. It'll keep you from starving, it'll probably get you a decent living(if you're smart(not necessarily intelligent) enough to work hard at the right things. Bill Gates is Bill Gates because he was there when opportunity knocked and grabbed it with both hands.
True, but that comes under the banner of taking it seriously.
There's this huge push on Slashdot that you have to do everything yourself and that all forms of outsourcing are bad. Neither of these things is true. I didn't build my house, and I don't do my own surgery. I have someone else do those things because they can do it better, I do manage my own computer because I can do it better and cheaper than I could hire someone for.
The same is true with outsourcing, not every organization has a full complement of IT staff and their own fully kitted out data center, nor should they. If they did there would be a whole lot of really bored staff, bankrupt businesses, and every spare inch would be filled up with gigantic DCs.
Replacing your existing staff with outside people you can't manage properly and aren't paying enough for is stupid. Hiring a company to provide you with a service you don't have the internal expertise for and which isn't a core part of your business(and while the data may be core, the storage probably isn't) is sensible. I shouldn't build a house and most bricklayers probably shouldn't architect a computer system, other people can do it better.
The graphics issue was a problem on some corporate machines, but everything else had a good enough card.
UAC has issues, not least of which is a "this application is ok" flag, but it's a good idea.
Apparently the copy times were because Windows XP closed the copy dialogue when the copy finished caching, not when it finished copying, so XP wasn't faster it was lying.
Backward compatibility is an important Windows feature, on the other hand it's the cause of nearly all of the security problems associated with the OS, sometimes some of it has to go.
As for the rest of it, I haven't had unresponsive UI, I've turned off UAC, and some of the cheap SSD's have crap controllers that don't interact well with anything. They're known to cause freezes in Windows.
That's really a rather idiotic statement.
If your data is important then you take it's storage seriously. Sometimes that means you host it yourself, sometimes it means you get someone else to host it for you. You don't host your critical data if you can't afford the staff and infrastructure to support it, and if you've already got the staff and infrastructure you don't pay someone else to do it.
The important thing is that you take it seriously. That means contracts with your data storage provider with exactly what backup and restoration services they're promising and penalties for failing to meet those promises. It means full disaster recovery plans and proper due diligence including understanding what kind of outages you can afford and what it's going to cost you to keep outages under that value.
There's nothing inherently more safe about storing your own data or inherently unsafe about having someone else do it. In most cases the person who stores the data and the person who actually needs it are different anyway. What is unsafe is trusting someone else to look after your data without checking up that they actually are, be they internal or external.
I don't really care if a politician is a stripper, and WINE is a separate issue.
Working on WINE would probably be fine depending on what you were working on. The issue wouldn't be that you were or weren't coding it would be a confidentiality one. Your employer shouldn't care what you're doing with your spare time, but they will care if you're sharing confidential information.