"Except most hunters don't eat the animals they hunt or utilize it in any way."
You wouldn't be pulling these statistics out of thin air, would you?:)
Regardless, it's beside my point anyway. I was merely saying hunting your own food, via Internet or otherwise, is probably better than buying the stuff you get from the mega-corporation slaughterhouses at the supermarket. It was never meant to a lead-in to a larger argument about whether or not hunters actually use the parts of the animals they hunt (which in turn is probably part of the argument you really want to argue - whether or not hunting is "right").
Now to argue the new and only (slightly) related "point" you brought up.
"Especially not when the hunting is being done over the Internet."
Possibly true (nobody knows since it's never been done before). But, playing Devil's Advocate, according to the website, there's a harvesting and meat processing fee that's part of the overall bill. I still don't think that makes it right, for the record.
"I highly doubt the submitter's genes would be alive today, if not for the hunting of "innocent" animals, whatever the hell that means."
Good point. Sometimes it's easy to forget that evolution made us ominivores. Sure the animals didn't do anything to directly hurt us, but they also just happen to contain nutrients that are necessary for us to live. Of course technology advances in agriculture have overcome much of this, but that still doesn't change how we fit into nature in the absence of technology. It's natural for us to eat "innocent" animals.
Also after reading "Fast Food Nation", I'd almost argue that hunting your own food over the internet is certainly healthier/safer than buying the stuff churned from the nation's largest slaughterhouses. In some ways, nothing has changed since Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".
This position assumes the animal can be humanely killed of course. The biggest problem I'd have with Internet hunting is the possibility of maiming the animals without killing or having them die in a tortuous, drawn-out manner because a shot wasn't made properly.
Also, something that I don't think I've seen mentioned here, is the ability to use SVG as a standard data interchange between applications (one of the principle ideas behind XML in the first place).
So you can take a graph that you drew up in Visio, hyperlink to it from your HTML doc, and have the browser's SVG engine render it correctly. I suppose you can fake this with images, but you can't do anything (truely)dynamic with images.
To me, this is the real power of SVG. It becomes a standard way of displaying vector graphics so that you can export and import them between arbitrary applications. And this is why I find it curious when people talk about Adobe/Macromedia wanting to support this. It seems to me, that SVG would be a direct competitor to Flash. But I'm new to this area, so perhaps there's an angle I'm missing.
To this day, I'm annoyed that this movie didn't get more coverage than it did. When it was released, I'd never heard anything about it and my aunt of all people had to drag me to see it. Well, needless to say I was completely blown away. This Penny Arcade comic pretty much captures my state of being after watching Equilibrium.:)
"I hope he has something more substantial to back himself up than a weak joke."
What's suprising is how many people actually believe that's all Tridge had to do reverse engineer the BK protocol. While I'm willing to buy that he didn't need a BK client, the demo is obviously at best a trivial first step.
Unlike most people, I can actually respect McVoy's decision to remove the free client (though not necessarily in the angry way he did it). The SAMBA and BK situations aren't exactly identical. Tridge's reverse engineering for SAMBA is not *that* big a deal to MS. So what if a Windows server gets fooled into thinking that some Linux or VMS box is a Windows machine? While this service is immeasurable to many of us, we represent a small part of MS's customer base. It's unlikely that such a thing will enable anyone to budge MS in it's golden goose OS or office productivity markets.
But I think the situation is a little different with the BitMover guys. It's probably not THAT incredulous to imagine someone coming up with a free BK client that is better than the free version, and at least competitive with the paid-for version. If such a client is released, then no one would have a reason to buy BitMover's non-free client, thus putting a dent in BitMover's income. After all, it's not like BitKeeper has the channels to force their product down people's throats while threatening vendors who dare to sale someone else's product. They don't have the power to articially manipulate the "free" market for their benefit.
So, IMHO, the difference is this: The Free Open Source development community doesn't have the resources to affect a goliath like MS in any significant way. But a smallfry like BitMover? The FOSS bandwidth is there to bring a company like this to its knees and McVoy knows it. No doubt he's reaped many benefits from the free BK client and his company's association with Linux, but now the other shoe has officially dropped...
Now, I'm not arguing that BitMover doesn't deserve such a fate or that I'm siding with them. It is an open market after all and may the best man win. However, I can at least understand why McVoy and crew would be threatened by a free product competing with their non-free product. Yes Tridge building a new client *does* release Linux source from propietary SCM lock-in which is good for the *rest* of us. But let's at least admit that it's also a valid economicthreat to BitMover as well. Again, why buy their non-free client, if I can get a good enough free client off sourceforge? On a purely economic and pragmatic basis, both sides can be right.
For the record, I don't think Tridge is in the wrong and I don't think he's "out to get" BitMover or McVoy. However, I think an unintended side-effect of his development could be the downfall of BitMover.
"But to live up to the title of Software Engineer, you need to be much more proactive and be very involved in the non-programming aspects such as requirements gathering, documenting, designing, documenting, prototyping, documenting, and documenting."
You make an excellent point. It's the difference between being a developer vs being a "programmer", something that Eric Sink (founder of a small ISV called SourceGear) wrote a very nice article about.
It's come to pass as foretold. Bidding for spots in my bunker and spare tin foil hats begin at a grand each, though money will be pretty useless once the Conquerer Penguin rules us all.
Believe me, it's quite possible to be both competent and confident and still not get any respec, especially if your co-workers/bosses are truly clueless about what you bring to the table.
"Competence and confidence are the keys to garnering and maintaining the respect of your coworkers. Really, they're the keys to success at life in general."
Competence and confidence are important, agreed. But they should be natural things that flow from you because want to do a good job. If respect is given, fine. If not, you're competent and confident enough to get a job somewhere where they do appreciate what you bring or start your own business. But living in the real world, you at least accept the possibility that some people will never understand what you do and treat you that way.
Anyway, that's my attitude towards life. While I agree with many of the individual parts of your post, the sum smacks a little too much of "Ways to Act to Get People to Like You". That leads to an unfulfilling life, IMO.
If someone doesn't give you respect and you've honestly done nothing wrong, f*ck 'em I say.
" What are you talking about? Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986, not 1995. "
Correct, and I mistyped. Lucas went *public* with Pixar in 1995 after investing around $50 million over 10 years. Going public is what made him the billionaire and turned him back into a genius after his NeXT failure.
Re:While I'm sure Pixar is a nice place to work...
on
Inside Look at Pixar HQ
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Steve Jobs is still CEO of Pixar, he did not sell it and leave."
In fact he *did* sell Pixar. He sold it to himself and named the new company Pixar. The deal was approved because he was majority shareholder in both companies. The deal was done of course to screw over the employees.
I'm sure Pixar is a great place to work and the salary is and benefits follow this. But it's all relative, right? Financially, the engineers and founders who made Pixar were exploited by Jobs. Many of engineeers who spent years building the company got nothing, while most others got a fraction of their true value.
There is no doubt that Jobs deserved significant financial return since he invested $50 million over the course of 10 years, but some of his actions were exploitation pure and simple. But that's all old news and has been nicely swept under the rug.
While I'm sure Pixar is a nice place to work...
on
Inside Look at Pixar HQ
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· Score: 5, Interesting
...I can't help but think some of the stuff they do for their employees is part media sensation. So while I think Pixar would treat their employees very well regardless, I think they go the extra mile because they know the media and their camera crews will be there (in this specific case, moriarty and his digital camera) and they know they'll (along with the public) flip out when they see the atrium with the statues of Pixar characters.
And while we're on the Steve Jobs praise, don't be so quick to commend him on developing the great environment at Pixar. The truth is (as you'll see in the link) that Jobs bought the Pixar in 1995, sold it to become a billionaire and left the original technical founders with almost squat (in fact, he ran off co-founder Alvy Ray Smith). Yeah, this is a guy only concerned about the employees.
The fact is that Pixar had a family atmosphere before Jobs got there and Jobs in fact tried to destroy it. Jobs was the PHB that many so readily (and rightfully) deride, yet for some reason his reality distortion field is such that it allows him to escape much criticism and be hailed as a genius. He may be a genius, but probably not the kind you want to be around if you don't have to be.
...he's also being a bit of being a crumudgeon about it. For some people, blogs are a way to put out real information. For others, they are like online journals. Assuming this guy is married and has kids, I wonder if he ever went through his daughter's journals and wondered about her ability to read complex texts? Talk about being a fuddy duddy.
Anyway, in other parts of the article, he makes legitimate points (IMO) about using google link as substitutes for deep understanding. But then again, he may be living in a reality distortion field after all.
My piece had the temerity to question the usefulness of Google digitizing millions of books and making bits of them available via its notoriously inefficient search engine. The Google phenomenon is a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality. Hailed as the ultimate example of information retrieval, Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order.
While I agree some things aren't as googable as others, quotes like this make me question whether the guy actually uses the Internet or just trying to make a career complaining about it. Regardless, Google, blogs, and the Blog Subhuman species he refers to all have done wonders to raise the profile of one Michael Gorman, President of the ALA.
Maybe it's just me (in fact, it's *probably* just me), but I can imagine Ed Tuft steaming in the background -- "Whining about the display of information is MY turf, pal! If you know what's good for you Michael, you will let this rest...NOW"
I'm often amazed by how much history is so much BS, especially the stuff you could supposedly hang your hat on. I mean, every grade school kid KNOWS Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone just like every kid KNOWS Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. I consider myself fairly cynical about things in general, but stuff like this makes me feel like a doe-eyed innocent setting eyes on the world for the first time.;)
"No way! The guy posted *FINANCIAL* information about a *PUBLICLY TRADED* company using inside information. There are very strict SEC rules about that stuff. Google had no choice but to fire the guy. This episode will not affect Slashdot's respect for Google at all.
"
That seems a tad sensationalistic. If this is indeed the offending blog post, I seriously doubt this violates any SEC insider trading laws, but IANAL. He just had a few criticisms of google's compensation package (or rather contrast/compared with MS's) and talked about their benefits, many of which are just thinly veiled excuses to keep employees at work. The guy was probably fired because Google didn't come out smelling like roses, not because he broke any laws.
"Is it just me or is the Glider analogy completely wrong?
Do you not find it easier to return to an airport from which the wind is blowing at you - so being downwind of the airport is a good thing."
Well, he mangled the analogy a bit. In the essay, he mentions being upwind of good landing spots, rather than downwind of good landing spots(from the essay):
"Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably"
This goes counter to his earlier advice of exploring different things and seeing what you like. Though in a way I still agree with what he wrote. While I agree with a lot of what he says, in the end, is it completely better than what's going on now? In some ways yes, in others no. For me personally and other like me, this advice would have gone over well. But I don't presume everyone else is like me/us (thank god!). Unfortunately, there are no easy one-size fits all answers in life. I think he could have said just that, though that'd make for a pretty boring speech.:)
"On Monday, September 27th DVD Verdict posted a bantha-sized review of the Star Wars Trilogy. Written by ten people and weighing in at over 11,000 words..."
That's nothing. I've seen more effort put into discussions concerning the far-reaching ramifications of Greedo shooting first and Han stepping over Jabba's tail alone.
I'm just repeating what you said because you said it so well (and I feel this needs to be emphasized). You've nailed PRECISELY what I've been thinking for years. The conflict between "choosing the best tool for the job", the fact that there are a billion tools and being proficient enough in all of them to even be able to choose the right tool for the right job. As you said, reality is just not that simple.
That is why Google has multiple copies of the entire web in memory.
Interesting link, though I wonder if everything it claims is true. Specifically I'm referring to the business about every page Google has indexed necessarily being in memory simultaneously. Possible, but I'd have to hear it from a Google programmer familiar with the area to start to believe it.
And even if it were true, the statement that Google has "multiple copies of the entire web in memory" is certainly false because there are still many webpages that are not indexed by Google.
now with that aside, we can easily spot the problem.
To me the key is to know that the call to Read treats the second parameter as an unsigned hexadecimal number rather than a signed hex. I had trouble understanding your explanation until I realized you had to have made this assumption. The rest was terrific though. Interesting stuff.
It's not obvious if you don't have this kind of training that warns about this specific exploit, specifically with x86 systems. To spot it on your own would require several levels of thinking that nobody (talking untrained here) would do on their own in a complex system. So, this is something you'd have to deliberately be looking out for. To call someone making this mistake stupid seems silly (not talking to parent here, but to some other replies).
Look, delays hurt *all* kinds of businesses. This is why most companies who know what they are doing do not comment on future products, and some (like Apple) go to great lengths to keep folks from knowing about projects in the works. Other companies who are less capable try and build enthusiasm by pre-announcing products to say, "Hey, look how cool we are".
While what you say is true, it doesn't take into account other realistic scenarios. This isn't so much about fan disappointment from overzealous announcements, as about dealing with sensitive timing when it comes to outside collaborations with non-gaming companies(movie, toys, mags, etc). Tons of money is tied up into these collaborative schedules and unfortunately, game development (or software dev in general) isn't as condusive to predictive scheduling as other areas.
Saying "No comment" or "It'll ship when it's done" is a lame-sounding option when partner companies have money tied up in your success too.
I'm still trying to figure out how this book won a Hugo and why it's received so much critical praise. To me, it was a blandly executed book based on a "sort of" cool idea(though, to be fair, there were a couple of cool parts). The concept of newer personifications of social concious vs older ones is intriguing and maybe there is an interesting story there somewhere; that interesting story was not American Gods. Or maybe there was something else to this book that I missed?
Nothing new here. Move along...
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Honestly, the observation that there have always been things that can and can't be said and that words are used as a means of control is nothing new (hell, there was a whole movie called Matrix:Reloaded in which the latter was a primary theme).
While Paul Graham's insights are nice, a better article would have offered up a better solution to this issue other than "Act phony in public, and hang out with people who think like you"(I'm paraphrasing...slightly).
When will companies learn that the only way to compete in today's market is to NOT dump your crown jewels of technology in favor of an AOL'er me too on Intel. It's the #1 way to KILL your company.
This kind of bad advice nearly killed IBM (remember when mainframes were gonna be the big thing?) and has relegated Apple to a niche player in the personal computer market.
Slashdot Mirror
You wouldn't be pulling these statistics out of thin air, would you? :)
Regardless, it's beside my point anyway. I was merely saying hunting your own food, via Internet or otherwise, is probably better than buying the stuff you get from the mega-corporation slaughterhouses at the supermarket. It was never meant to a lead-in to a larger argument about whether or not hunters actually use the parts of the animals they hunt (which in turn is probably part of the argument you really want to argue - whether or not hunting is "right").
Now to argue the new and only (slightly) related "point" you brought up.
Possibly true (nobody knows since it's never been done before). But, playing Devil's Advocate, according to the website, there's a harvesting and meat processing fee that's part of the overall bill. I still don't think that makes it right, for the record.
Good point. Sometimes it's easy to forget that evolution made us ominivores. Sure the animals didn't do anything to directly hurt us, but they also just happen to contain nutrients that are necessary for us to live. Of course technology advances in agriculture have overcome much of this, but that still doesn't change how we fit into nature in the absence of technology. It's natural for us to eat "innocent" animals.
Also after reading "Fast Food Nation", I'd almost argue that hunting your own food over the internet is certainly healthier/safer than buying the stuff churned from the nation's largest slaughterhouses. In some ways, nothing has changed since Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".
This position assumes the animal can be humanely killed of course. The biggest problem I'd have with Internet hunting is the possibility of maiming the animals without killing or having them die in a tortuous, drawn-out manner because a shot wasn't made properly.
So you can take a graph that you drew up in Visio, hyperlink to it from your HTML doc, and have the browser's SVG engine render it correctly. I suppose you can fake this with images, but you can't do anything (truely)dynamic with images.
To me, this is the real power of SVG. It becomes a standard way of displaying vector graphics so that you can export and import them between arbitrary applications. And this is why I find it curious when people talk about Adobe/Macromedia wanting to support this. It seems to me, that SVG would be a direct competitor to Flash. But I'm new to this area, so perhaps there's an angle I'm missing.
To this day, I'm annoyed that this movie didn't get more coverage than it did. When it was released, I'd never heard anything about it and my aunt of all people had to drag me to see it. Well, needless to say I was completely blown away. This Penny Arcade comic pretty much captures my state of being after watching Equilibrium. :)
What's suprising is how many people actually believe that's all Tridge had to do reverse engineer the BK protocol. While I'm willing to buy that he didn't need a BK client, the demo is obviously at best a trivial first step.
Unlike most people, I can actually respect McVoy's decision to remove the free client (though not necessarily in the angry way he did it). The SAMBA and BK situations aren't exactly identical. Tridge's reverse engineering for SAMBA is not *that* big a deal to MS. So what if a Windows server gets fooled into thinking that some Linux or VMS box is a Windows machine? While this service is immeasurable to many of us, we represent a small part of MS's customer base. It's unlikely that such a thing will enable anyone to budge MS in it's golden goose OS or office productivity markets.
But I think the situation is a little different with the BitMover guys. It's probably not THAT incredulous to imagine someone coming up with a free BK client that is better than the free version, and at least competitive with the paid-for version. If such a client is released, then no one would have a reason to buy BitMover's non-free client, thus putting a dent in BitMover's income. After all, it's not like BitKeeper has the channels to force their product down people's throats while threatening vendors who dare to sale someone else's product. They don't have the power to articially manipulate the "free" market for their benefit.
So, IMHO, the difference is this: The Free Open Source development community doesn't have the resources to affect a goliath like MS in any significant way. But a smallfry like BitMover? The FOSS bandwidth is there to bring a company like this to its knees and McVoy knows it. No doubt he's reaped many benefits from the free BK client and his company's association with Linux, but now the other shoe has officially dropped...
Now, I'm not arguing that BitMover doesn't deserve such a fate or that I'm siding with them. It is an open market after all and may the best man win. However, I can at least understand why McVoy and crew would be threatened by a free product competing with their non-free product. Yes Tridge building a new client *does* release Linux source from propietary SCM lock-in which is good for the *rest* of us. But let's at least admit that it's also a valid economicthreat to BitMover as well. Again, why buy their non-free client, if I can get a good enough free client off sourceforge? On a purely economic and pragmatic basis, both sides can be right.
For the record, I don't think Tridge is in the wrong and I don't think he's "out to get" BitMover or McVoy. However, I think an unintended side-effect of his development could be the downfall of BitMover.
You make an excellent point. It's the difference between being a developer vs being a "programmer", something that Eric Sink (founder of a small ISV called SourceGear) wrote a very nice article about.
It's come to pass as foretold. Bidding for spots in my bunker and spare tin foil hats begin at a grand each, though money will be pretty useless once the Conquerer Penguin rules us all.
You should know by now that America is the center of the universe. :)
Competence and confidence are important, agreed. But they should be natural things that flow from you because want to do a good job. If respect is given, fine. If not, you're competent and confident enough to get a job somewhere where they do appreciate what you bring or start your own business. But living in the real world, you at least accept the possibility that some people will never understand what you do and treat you that way.
Anyway, that's my attitude towards life. While I agree with many of the individual parts of your post, the sum smacks a little too much of "Ways to Act to Get People to Like You". That leads to an unfulfilling life, IMO.
If someone doesn't give you respect and you've honestly done nothing wrong, f*ck 'em I say.
I'm sure Pixar is a great place to work and the salary is and benefits follow this. But it's all relative, right? Financially, the engineers and founders who made Pixar were exploited by Jobs. Many of engineeers who spent years building the company got nothing, while most others got a fraction of their true value.
There is no doubt that Jobs deserved significant financial return since he invested $50 million over the course of 10 years, but some of his actions were exploitation pure and simple. But that's all old news and has been nicely swept under the rug.
And while we're on the Steve Jobs praise, don't be so quick to commend him on developing the great environment at Pixar. The truth is (as you'll see in the link) that Jobs bought the Pixar in 1995, sold it to become a billionaire and left the original technical founders with almost squat (in fact, he ran off co-founder Alvy Ray Smith). Yeah, this is a guy only concerned about the employees.
The fact is that Pixar had a family atmosphere before Jobs got there and Jobs in fact tried to destroy it. Jobs was the PHB that many so readily (and rightfully) deride, yet for some reason his reality distortion field is such that it allows him to escape much criticism and be hailed as a genius. He may be a genius, but probably not the kind you want to be around if you don't have to be.
Anyway, in other parts of the article, he makes legitimate points (IMO) about using google link as substitutes for deep understanding. But then again, he may be living in a reality distortion field after all.
While I agree some things aren't as googable as others, quotes like this make me question whether the guy actually uses the Internet or just trying to make a career complaining about it. Regardless, Google, blogs, and the Blog Subhuman species he refers to all have done wonders to raise the profile of one Michael Gorman, President of the ALA.
Maybe it's just me (in fact, it's *probably* just me), but I can imagine Ed Tuft steaming in the background -- "Whining about the display of information is MY turf, pal! If you know what's good for you Michael, you will let this rest...NOW"
I'm often amazed by how much history is so much BS, especially the stuff you could supposedly hang your hat on. I mean, every grade school kid KNOWS Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone just like every kid KNOWS Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. I consider myself fairly cynical about things in general, but stuff like this makes me feel like a doe-eyed innocent setting eyes on the world for the first time. ;)
That seems a tad sensationalistic. If this is indeed the offending blog post, I seriously doubt this violates any SEC insider trading laws, but IANAL. He just had a few criticisms of google's compensation package (or rather contrast/compared with MS's) and talked about their benefits, many of which are just thinly veiled excuses to keep employees at work. The guy was probably fired because Google didn't come out smelling like roses, not because he broke any laws.
Well, he mangled the analogy a bit. In the essay, he mentions being upwind of good landing spots, rather than downwind of good landing spots(from the essay):
"Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably"
This goes counter to his earlier advice of exploring different things and seeing what you like. Though in a way I still agree with what he wrote. While I agree with a lot of what he says, in the end, is it completely better than what's going on now? In some ways yes, in others no. For me personally and other like me, this advice would have gone over well. But I don't presume everyone else is like me/us (thank god!). Unfortunately, there are no easy one-size fits all answers in life. I think he could have said just that, though that'd make for a pretty boring speech. :)
"On Monday, September 27th DVD Verdict posted a bantha-sized review of the Star Wars Trilogy. Written by ten people and weighing in at over 11,000 words..."
That's nothing. I've seen more effort put into discussions concerning the far-reaching ramifications of Greedo shooting first and Han stepping over Jabba's tail alone.
I'm just repeating what you said because you said it so well (and I feel this needs to be emphasized). You've nailed PRECISELY what I've been thinking for years. The conflict between "choosing the best tool for the job", the fact that there are a billion tools and being proficient enough in all of them to even be able to choose the right tool for the right job. As you said, reality is just not that simple.
That is why Google has multiple copies of the entire web in memory.
Interesting link, though I wonder if everything it claims is true. Specifically I'm referring to the business about every page Google has indexed necessarily being in memory simultaneously. Possible, but I'd have to hear it from a Google programmer familiar with the area to start to believe it.
And even if it were true, the statement that Google has "multiple copies of the entire web in memory" is certainly false because there are still many webpages that are not indexed by Google.
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I literally laughed out loud at that post. Very funny...
now with that aside, we can easily spot the problem.
To me the key is to know that the call to Read treats the second parameter as an unsigned hexadecimal number rather than a signed hex. I had trouble understanding your explanation until I realized you had to have made this assumption. The rest was terrific though. Interesting stuff.
It's not obvious if you don't have this kind of training that warns about this specific exploit, specifically with x86 systems. To spot it on your own would require several levels of thinking that nobody (talking untrained here) would do on their own in a complex system. So, this is something you'd have to deliberately be looking out for. To call someone making this mistake stupid seems silly (not talking to parent here, but to some other replies).
Look, delays hurt *all* kinds of businesses. This is why most companies who know what they are doing do not comment on future products, and some (like Apple) go to great lengths to keep folks from knowing about projects in the works. Other companies who are less capable try and build enthusiasm by pre-announcing products to say, "Hey, look how cool we are".
While what you say is true, it doesn't take into account other realistic scenarios. This isn't so much about fan disappointment from overzealous announcements, as about dealing with sensitive timing when it comes to outside collaborations with non-gaming companies(movie, toys, mags, etc). Tons of money is tied up into these collaborative schedules and unfortunately, game development (or software dev in general) isn't as condusive to predictive scheduling as other areas.
Saying "No comment" or "It'll ship when it's done" is a lame-sounding option when partner companies have money tied up in your success too.
I'm still trying to figure out how this book won a Hugo and why it's received so much critical praise. To me, it was a blandly executed book based on a "sort of" cool idea(though, to be fair, there were a couple of cool parts). The concept of newer personifications of social concious vs older ones is intriguing and maybe there is an interesting story there somewhere; that interesting story was not American Gods. Or maybe there was something else to this book that I missed?
While Paul Graham's insights are nice, a better article would have offered up a better solution to this issue other than "Act phony in public, and hang out with people who think like you"(I'm paraphrasing...slightly).
When will companies learn that the only way to compete in today's market is to NOT dump your crown jewels of technology in favor of an AOL'er me too on Intel. It's the #1 way to KILL your company.
This kind of bad advice nearly killed IBM (remember when mainframes were gonna be the big thing?) and has relegated Apple to a niche player in the personal computer market.