I dunno, I bought the first game in the store, and hated their serial number activation garbage so much that I refused to consider buying the next. I certainly wouldn't hold it up as a good model to emulate, it treated me, a legitimate customer with a store-bought copy, like a suspect who had to prove he wasn't a thief.
Most technical employees in the US work without contracts, under "employment at will" - legally, the employee can walk away from the job at any time with zero notice, and the employer can redefine or eliminate the job at any time with no notice. In practice, employees tend to give notice to avoid being marked ineligible for rehire, and employers tend to give some amount of severance pay in exchange for employees agreeing not to sue, but legally neither is generally required to except for certain legally regulated situations like the "WARN" act which was implemented to avoid mass zero-notice layoffs like closing an entire plant without warning.
The only group of employees who tend to have firm contracts are those who are unionized, but that is almost exclusively blue collar/hourly/less skilled work.
Have you actually looked for a programming job lately? They're still very easy to find. The biggest thing you need is a good answer to 'why did you quit your last job', and this gives those employees a great 'IBM was getting a little too big and impersonal' answer.
Most people don't do this because performance for "show me everything in the past 7 days" style queries sucks this way. You have to do a lot of like based substring compares, which aren't indexed, so full table scans.
Easy. He finds private investors, promises them a return on their investment, then delivers. One common thing about people with money, they love the idea of being involved with making a movie. His initial movies were able to generate the return while losing money due to German tax law; the tax law has since been fixed so he has had to tighten up a bit and generate a real profit, which he now does. It's not as good as the profit to be made in other things, but the glamour of the movies overcomes that for enough people that he gets to keep making films.
It's not lazy - it's just that the explanation doesn't explain. That description could describe everything from Sharepoint to Wikipedia to SourceForge to kitchen refrigerator magnets, and as such it doesn't actually tell me anything useful, like wtf is Jazz?
This can be difficult. Here's the problem: If your software is good, somebody else can buy a copy from you and then use that copy to sell services (or the software) to customers. They will be able to undercut you because you incur costs writing the software (even if it is just your time), while they don't (since you wrote the software for them). To date, people have relied on either branding (we wrote it, so we know it, so hire our services) or copyright control (we can sell you a version under a different license) or proprietary extensions (buy our Expert version with whizbang feature not found in the open source release) to try to make this work, but it can be a challenge. Personally, I like the branding approach, and the cost of enabling some competition is hopefully offset by the market size growing due to more people knowing and using the software.
Most high-paying corporate jobs are C# or Java, essentially coding database backed websites but often using lots of buzzwords and acronyms and toolkits and whatnot. The skills that pay the bills are basically: Knowing how to use SQL & databases, and developing in an object oriented language with a large support API. Most corporate work at the end of the day is pulling info from a database and slapping it onto a web page. Learning how to quickly teach yourself how to work with somebody else's code based on nothing more than some simple API documentation (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/ and/or Google and approach it from a goal-oriented perspective: How do I sort a list of names? How do I encrypt a credit card number using a standard encryption library?), and understanding basic concepts behind the internet, will pay the bills. Also, read a book or two on 'design patterns' so that it's easier to talk to other programmers and so that you won't constantly be thinking you just invented the wheel.
They'll say all sorts of other buzzwords: in Java, it's Hibernate and EJB and XML and Tapestry or Spring... they're all fancy apis that make your life easier in some way and harder in others and the only school related skill that is relevant to them is being able to learn from a book and/or the published APIs. You expressly do _not_ want your school to give you a degree in one of these things, because they come and go every few years as the Next Big Thing reinvents Smalltalk, again. Instead, learn how to learn them.
Beyond that, learn what interests you. There is all sorts of fascinating fun and specialized stuff to be learned. I know a guy who animates explosions. I know a guy who writes genetic algorithms for game playing. I know a guy who works on an MMO. None of them need a whit of database or web page experience or knowledge for these things, but it's sometimes hard to pay the bills fulltime with the fun stuff, so the database backed websites is a useful fallback. Hopefully you can get into something that fascinates you, but if not, you can always bank a good salary with a day job in the corporate world and tinker on your nights or weekends until you can afford to retire and do whatever fascinates you fulltime.
I have Comcast too. I used to have SSH connections drop on a particular d-link router if somebody else in the house was also using the connection for something; WoW + SSH would trash the connection every time. WoW by itself was fine, SSH by itself was fine, both together = dead in 10 minutes. Near as I could tell, the router couldn't handle something about the traffic. Four other routers I have used all handle this situation just fine, on the same comcast connection. Point is, if you switched from dial-up to Comcast, more than just your provider changed - your equipment is now handling more traffic faster, and you might have a weak link anywhere in your chain. Try removing or replacing your router for a bit, I have had no end of trouble with this part of the chain consumer level home routers are unfortunately garbage.
My Comcast connection in Atlanta only goes truly bad if I run bittorrent, it looks like they are punishing me for file sharing but nothing else.
Nowhere near innovative, you just never learned Smalltalk. Everything mentioned was developed in the 70s. Literally, zero innovation this time around. Zero.
Hibernate is nowhere near state of the art, it's a bizarre mash of cache layer coupled with ORM that tries to reimplement the database inside of the jvm. No thank you. Compare it to "LINQ to SQL" for an example of an ORM that actually helps get work done faster.
Tell that to Apple. They're positively going broke on the idea that consumers don't buy usability at all.
I think the actual problem is that nobody has been able to properly correlate design investment with sales, so it's too hard to explain to the bean counters, and when money or effort is spent on design, 'attractive' is more easily measured than 'improved functionality'.
Many people, particularly older people, have tremendous problems with "context aware" buttons. They simply can't handle the thought of modes. Even for people quite comfortable with the concept, it can introduce additional errors and delays in the interface. Having one button do one thing is actually one of the easiest interfaces for people to learn and master.
52 buttons sure does sound like a lot, probably even a bit much, but switching to multifunction buttons isn't automatically an improvement for either a novice or an expert. Humans are incredibly good at learning cause and effect based on observation. Our brains appear to be wired that way; we assume it makes good sense for survival, etc etc etc. Modes screw with the system by throwing in additional factors that we might not notice and take into account; I pushed this button and it did this thing last time, but this time it does something else, it's no longer a simple cause->effect relationship that is easily observed and learned. The observing must take into account that it's no longer just the button, but also the button before it, or else some other aspect of the system state like a display that I need to read. This requires either more instruction to teach or more practice (and time) to learn. Then, once learned, it needs to be executed right - and users can get confused if they end up pushing the right button while in the wrong mode without realizing it. And even in the best case, it makes me do more to get the same effect, leading to a slower interface. Take it to a logical extreme - you only _need_ two buttons, a 'switch to next function' and an 'execute', but you would go crazy if that is all your remote control had. Clearly less buttons + modes isn't automatically the answer.
Sorry about the rant, just hate to see people automatically assume that buttons can be doubled or tripled up, it leads to stuff that my mom can't figure out and that I don't enjoy using. Ever watched a DVD with the PS2 controller? It sucks trying to figure out which button does what when.
Nonsense. It's a contractual violation to keep CID/CCV2/CVC2 or raw magstripes, yet people still do that, particularly in log files. It's explicitly allowed to keep card numbers on file. How do you think people bill you every month?
Nobody can sell you a used e-book. You can't sell an e-book you bought.
Beyond diminishing the value of your property (by keeping you from truly owning anything), this also means that if a publisher quits selling a particular ebook, tough luck, you have no way to get it. How much would human knowledge have withered if you could only ever get something from the original source, forever? Books should last centuries, not merely years. Supporting this licensing idea, and losing the doctrine of first sale, is bad for human knowledge.
Kindle license: "Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content."
Can't readily find the same document for the Sony books, but I'm sure it's similar.
None of the above. Electronic books currently are nothing but publishers trying to kill used book resale, and I don't see why anybody should stand for it.
They doubled capacity. And still can't meet demand.
I suspect that nobody believed that doubled capacity would continue to sell out during the year; they figured that they would build up a stock to carry them into Christmas season, like every other console ever.
One guy decides to broadcast hdtv streaming video of his pet rock collection to the entire country, and finds a way to do it using enough bandwidth to ruin everything for everyone. There isn't unlimited signal available, no matter how good you make encoding it completely unregulated transmission would find a way to use it all up for nothing. And if you're going to need to have regulation, might as well sell it to a company to regulate rather than trust a government official to get it right.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to imply that it's as wrong to judge someone for their decisions? Why?
I hate the new system, but I can't find the flag to turn it off. Do you remember where the setting is?
I dunno, I bought the first game in the store, and hated their serial number activation garbage so much that I refused to consider buying the next. I certainly wouldn't hold it up as a good model to emulate, it treated me, a legitimate customer with a store-bought copy, like a suspect who had to prove he wasn't a thief.
Most technical employees in the US work without contracts, under "employment at will" - legally, the employee can walk away from the job at any time with zero notice, and the employer can redefine or eliminate the job at any time with no notice. In practice, employees tend to give notice to avoid being marked ineligible for rehire, and employers tend to give some amount of severance pay in exchange for employees agreeing not to sue, but legally neither is generally required to except for certain legally regulated situations like the "WARN" act which was implemented to avoid mass zero-notice layoffs like closing an entire plant without warning.
The only group of employees who tend to have firm contracts are those who are unionized, but that is almost exclusively blue collar/hourly/less skilled work.
Have you actually looked for a programming job lately? They're still very easy to find. The biggest thing you need is a good answer to 'why did you quit your last job', and this gives those employees a great 'IBM was getting a little too big and impersonal' answer.
Any chance for the Everyday Shooter route, get an agent, make something that shows off well, and convince the console folks that they want to offer it for download? http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/10/10/from-igf-to-ps3-everyday-shooters-backstory/
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=503
Most people don't do this because performance for "show me everything in the past 7 days" style queries sucks this way. You have to do a lot of like based substring compares, which aren't indexed, so full table scans.
Easy. He finds private investors, promises them a return on their investment, then delivers. One common thing about people with money, they love the idea of being involved with making a movie.
His initial movies were able to generate the return while losing money due to German tax law; the tax law has since been fixed so he has had to tighten up a bit and generate a real profit, which he now does. It's not as good as the profit to be made in other things, but the glamour of the movies overcomes that for enough people that he gets to keep making films.
It's not lazy - it's just that the explanation doesn't explain. That description could describe everything from Sharepoint to Wikipedia to SourceForge to kitchen refrigerator magnets, and as such it doesn't actually tell me anything useful, like wtf is Jazz?
Settlements aren't relevant case law. Some of the other cases are interesting, but those are useless.
This can be difficult. Here's the problem: If your software is good, somebody else can buy a copy from you and then use that copy to sell services (or the software) to customers. They will be able to undercut you because you incur costs writing the software (even if it is just your time), while they don't (since you wrote the software for them).
To date, people have relied on either branding (we wrote it, so we know it, so hire our services) or copyright control (we can sell you a version under a different license) or proprietary extensions (buy our Expert version with whizbang feature not found in the open source release) to try to make this work, but it can be a challenge. Personally, I like the branding approach, and the cost of enabling some competition is hopefully offset by the market size growing due to more people knowing and using the software.
Most high-paying corporate jobs are C# or Java, essentially coding database backed websites but often using lots of buzzwords and acronyms and toolkits and whatnot. The skills that pay the bills are basically: Knowing how to use SQL & databases, and developing in an object oriented language with a large support API. Most corporate work at the end of the day is pulling info from a database and slapping it onto a web page. Learning how to quickly teach yourself how to work with somebody else's code based on nothing more than some simple API documentation (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/ and/or Google and approach it from a goal-oriented perspective: How do I sort a list of names? How do I encrypt a credit card number using a standard encryption library?), and understanding basic concepts behind the internet, will pay the bills. Also, read a book or two on 'design patterns' so that it's easier to talk to other programmers and so that you won't constantly be thinking you just invented the wheel.
They'll say all sorts of other buzzwords: in Java, it's Hibernate and EJB and XML and Tapestry or Spring... they're all fancy apis that make your life easier in some way and harder in others and the only school related skill that is relevant to them is being able to learn from a book and/or the published APIs. You expressly do _not_ want your school to give you a degree in one of these things, because they come and go every few years as the Next Big Thing reinvents Smalltalk, again. Instead, learn how to learn them.
Beyond that, learn what interests you. There is all sorts of fascinating fun and specialized stuff to be learned. I know a guy who animates explosions. I know a guy who writes genetic algorithms for game playing. I know a guy who works on an MMO. None of them need a whit of database or web page experience or knowledge for these things, but it's sometimes hard to pay the bills fulltime with the fun stuff, so the database backed websites is a useful fallback. Hopefully you can get into something that fascinates you, but if not, you can always bank a good salary with a day job in the corporate world and tinker on your nights or weekends until you can afford to retire and do whatever fascinates you fulltime.
I have Comcast too. I used to have SSH connections drop on a particular d-link router if somebody else in the house was also using the connection for something; WoW + SSH would trash the connection every time. WoW by itself was fine, SSH by itself was fine, both together = dead in 10 minutes. Near as I could tell, the router couldn't handle something about the traffic. Four other routers I have used all handle this situation just fine, on the same comcast connection.
Point is, if you switched from dial-up to Comcast, more than just your provider changed - your equipment is now handling more traffic faster, and you might have a weak link anywhere in your chain. Try removing or replacing your router for a bit, I have had no end of trouble with this part of the chain consumer level home routers are unfortunately garbage.
My Comcast connection in Atlanta only goes truly bad if I run bittorrent, it looks like they are punishing me for file sharing but nothing else.
Nowhere near innovative, you just never learned Smalltalk. Everything mentioned was developed in the 70s. Literally, zero innovation this time around. Zero.
Hibernate is nowhere near state of the art, it's a bizarre mash of cache layer coupled with ORM that tries to reimplement the database inside of the jvm. No thank you. Compare it to "LINQ to SQL" for an example of an ORM that actually helps get work done faster.
Video demonstration: http://stagecraft.theprices.net/gallery/cablewrap/cablewrap-avi.html
Tell that to Apple. They're positively going broke on the idea that consumers don't buy usability at all.
I think the actual problem is that nobody has been able to properly correlate design investment with sales, so it's too hard to explain to the bean counters, and when money or effort is spent on design, 'attractive' is more easily measured than 'improved functionality'.
Many people, particularly older people, have tremendous problems with "context aware" buttons. They simply can't handle the thought of modes. Even for people quite comfortable with the concept, it can introduce additional errors and delays in the interface. Having one button do one thing is actually one of the easiest interfaces for people to learn and master.
52 buttons sure does sound like a lot, probably even a bit much, but switching to multifunction buttons isn't automatically an improvement for either a novice or an expert. Humans are incredibly good at learning cause and effect based on observation. Our brains appear to be wired that way; we assume it makes good sense for survival, etc etc etc. Modes screw with the system by throwing in additional factors that we might not notice and take into account; I pushed this button and it did this thing last time, but this time it does something else, it's no longer a simple cause->effect relationship that is easily observed and learned. The observing must take into account that it's no longer just the button, but also the button before it, or else some other aspect of the system state like a display that I need to read. This requires either more instruction to teach or more practice (and time) to learn. Then, once learned, it needs to be executed right - and users can get confused if they end up pushing the right button while in the wrong mode without realizing it. And even in the best case, it makes me do more to get the same effect, leading to a slower interface. Take it to a logical extreme - you only _need_ two buttons, a 'switch to next function' and an 'execute', but you would go crazy if that is all your remote control had. Clearly less buttons + modes isn't automatically the answer.
Sorry about the rant, just hate to see people automatically assume that buttons can be doubled or tripled up, it leads to stuff that my mom can't figure out and that I don't enjoy using. Ever watched a DVD with the PS2 controller? It sucks trying to figure out which button does what when.
Rayman's Raving Rabbids 2 is tons of fun. It's from ubisoft.
Beyond that one game, though, I agree with you.
Nonsense.
It's a contractual violation to keep CID/CCV2/CVC2 or raw magstripes, yet people still do that, particularly in log files.
It's explicitly allowed to keep card numbers on file. How do you think people bill you every month?
Nobody can sell you a used e-book.
You can't sell an e-book you bought.
Beyond diminishing the value of your property (by keeping you from truly owning anything), this also means that if a publisher quits selling a particular ebook, tough luck, you have no way to get it. How much would human knowledge have withered if you could only ever get something from the original source, forever?
Books should last centuries, not merely years. Supporting this licensing idea, and losing the doctrine of first sale, is bad for human knowledge.
Kindle license: "Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content."
Can't readily find the same document for the Sony books, but I'm sure it's similar.
None of the above. Electronic books currently are nothing but publishers trying to kill used book resale, and I don't see why anybody should stand for it.
They doubled capacity. And still can't meet demand.
I suspect that nobody believed that doubled capacity would continue to sell out during the year; they figured that they would build up a stock to carry them into Christmas season, like every other console ever.
One guy decides to broadcast hdtv streaming video of his pet rock collection to the entire country, and finds a way to do it using enough bandwidth to ruin everything for everyone.
There isn't unlimited signal available, no matter how good you make encoding it completely unregulated transmission would find a way to use it all up for nothing. And if you're going to need to have regulation, might as well sell it to a company to regulate rather than trust a government official to get it right.
It was tracked down to Greg Walsh, with help from Cleve Moler.
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/