Or rugby. I remember a lot of "extreme football" type games over the years, but not rubgy.
There have been some good British interactive fiction games. The kind of dry, highbrow "English humor" goes nicely with a text-based format. (Speaking of which, while Spiderweb Software isn't UK-based, does anyone else think that they do a nice job of dark English-style humor? If it weren't for American spellings, I would have thought that the Exile series had British roots.)
One could say that the flood of LoTR takeoffs ow a certain something to the Brits.
Finally, I wonder whether I'm just being a bit over-stereotypical. I mean, there is a "British feel", sure. But how often does that come out in games? I mean, say a game is developed in the United States. Is there really an "American feel" to it? What would an "American feel" be? It doesn't seem that games developed in a nation tend to always stick with the stereotypical feel of that nation. If I had to put forward a few guesses, and try to avoid all the cultural mixing and people moving from one country to the other and whatnot, I'd say that:
* The Japanese seem to do more games with intense personal sacrifice. They seem to use energy weapons (the sort of thing with big fancy beams) in their games more. Soldiers in Japanese games seem to focus on duty, and not on a malfunctioning institution or the individual culture. The Japanese seem to frequently use acronyms (for organizations, military branches, vehicles, weapons, etc). Military uniforms are often more stylish and ornamental than depictions of real uniforms (I have heard that this may derive from the same place anime culture does -- the wildly different hair and clothing colors are to assist viewers in distinguishing between different characters in a nation where many people are of the same race -- a harder task than in the US). I see less topical games, fewer set in present time, and more in either the past or the future.
* The US seem to have more conventional weapons -- I know that the "US gun culture" is probably a bit exaggerated in attempts to pigeonhole the US, but we go for a broad variety of real weapons in a lot of games, and like thumps and thuds. A lot of US-based games seem to focus on soldiers at an individual level -- perhaps four people -- and point out their individuality, rather than their military roles. Dysfunctional institutions seem to play a greater role. Uniforms are toned down, and more often realistic depictions. I see a lot of games set in the present day.
* The UK is very, very different when it comes to weapons. Perhaps it's just because fewer folks are marching around with guns than in the US, but weaponry is often much lighter. (While this is a movie, I still experience a minor bit of culture shock every time I see Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The deal that was made over the machine gun, the deal made over obtaining two shotguns, and the fact that knives played a role were so different from US movies, where it's a good bet that the mercenaries would have been carrying a rocket launcher and blown something up.) I think that there's a greater tendancy to do dry humor, and I think that most would agree (see my example of Spiderweb Software's Exile series for an example of a non-UK game series that has similar style). It may be me just me trying too hard to find differences, but I'd say that UK games have a greater tendancy to include more subtle cultural styles in factions in their games. I think that there are fewer games relying on absolutely split-second twitch elements, and somewhat more puzzle-like elements. The military seems to stay more out of British games.
Now, I'm sure to draw criticism. Yes, I'm trying to extrapolate from an extremely small sample set, but these are admittedly based on feeling and opinion rather than a full-blown study. Furthermnore, there are individual counterexamples to all of these. Bungie, Shiny Entertainment, and Spiderweb Software both put out games that I'd consid
The majority of the open-source games that I've contributed significant quantities of code to have had Europe-based teams, even though I live in the US.
I just stopped adding code to another open source Linux game put out by a UK developer to read Slashdot.
As for commercial games, what about LionHead Studios (Black & White, and one of the nicer game development boards out there)?
One of the most influential games to hit the PC in a long time, Max Payne was developed by Mobius Entertainment, which is UK-based.
Finally, I agree that it's a shame that the UK-based Bullfrog isn't around any more, but they *were* responsible for one of only about three Windows-based games I ever purchased -- Syndicate.
I do wish that games used more British voice actors, especially female. Ah, British accents.:-) God, why haven't the Brits taken over the world on the strength of that accent alone?
Maybe some of it is that (traditionally) computers were rather expensive in the UK. This may have gone away out over the last ten years, but I remember being absolutely appalled at what a number of computer types had to pay for their equipment in the UK. It takes a while to get over a lack of cheap hardware -- I think a lot of people start out game development on a home computer, so you feel the echos for years if people have older hardware. Also, what was with the whole Acorn thing?
I'm curious as to whether there's anyone out there that uses servercove, and what their experiences were. I started looking for good colo prices a while ago using Google and some brute force, and ran across 'em. Going by their webpage, they seem to be pretty Linux-friendly, and quite inexpensive($89/mo/700GB/8IP). I wondered if the inexpensive factor might be because of low reliability or something, though. I've yet to see people on Slashdot talking about them.
I'm beginning to wonder if SCO's second biggest negative impact (after the FUD it spreads) is all the time it is taking away from folks that would otherwise be having fun making open source software better.
I can't even begin to imagine how many man-hours have been blown obsessing about, discussing, worrying, or protesting SCO's latest actions. It really is appalling.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem like there's much point in "fighting" SCO any more. There isn't anyone in the tech community that takes them seriously. They are going to run out of money unless they get more cash influxes. It seems really unlikely that they will ever win even a minor lawsuit, much less something that will impact Linux. To the best of my knowledge, they aren't doing much to prevent Linux adoption -- there were a lot of journalists talking about how SCO might have a chance a couple of months ago, but it seems like everyone is pretty negative now (though I haven't read pure business publications for a while, so I might just be out-of-touch here).
Is there really any point to dealing with SCO any longer? It just wastes our time, and frankly, if I'm going to waste an hour of my life, I'd rather do it playing a video game or modeling something or writing software or cooking something than agonizing over SCO.
Unlike most Slashdot topics, SCO usually doesn't bring anything new or interesting to the table. A SCO article doesn't let me know about new LED displays that haven't existed before or a new VM about to be released or anything, really. Most comments in SCO articles are just jokes about SCO or McBride -- real analysis mostly happens at groklaw.
I just think -- every time Alan Cox posts about SCO or an indignant open source author spends a day disproving an new fabricated SCO claim so that they can come out with an analysis on groklaw, that's a driver patch that doesn't get applied, or a bit less threading work that can be done.
Frankly, even if the whole tech world started talking negatively about Windows, the kernel coders at Microsoft are unlikely to notice or care -- to them, that's just some crap for the PR people to deal with. They wouldn't let it affect them. SCO is wasting a good deal of time, time which actually does have value. Aside from passively providing the opinion that SCO is full of it when they come up in conversation, there doesn't seem to be much useful stuff that can be done any more.
Now, if you're really into IP law, of course, the case is interesting. But I just have a really hard time getting upset over whatever latest outrage SCO has come up with to stay in the press. I mean, who *cares* anymore? Noting we're going to say is going to stop them from making claims and getting quoted. Everyone in the tech world already thinks SCO is absolutely ludicrous, and IBM and Red Hat and Novell and God knows who else are already busily dealing with the situation. I'm sure the moment SCO crosses a legal line somewhere (and sooner or later, they have to), there will be a countersuit, maybe with a preliminary injunction against SCO stopping them from making new claims. My time is too valuable to me, and Darl McBride too worthless of a human being, to spend it on him.
The strength of the Open Source world is that one person contributes thoughts, code, analysis, whatever, and then that work propagates and is used and built upon by as many other people as are interested. Finding SCO's logical fallacies is work that is useless by the end of next month, as they're onto something new. It doesn't feel *good* when you're done with it. It's terribly inefficient and ineffective, even if it feels cathartic at the moment.
- The president of programming for Showtime (who gave us all copies of their remake of "12 Angry Men" at the end) - The head of new technologies research for Citibank (who was pretty annoyed at that point that he couldn't get any funding for research on smart chip implementation because all the money was going into the Y2K bug) - A supervisor in Customs at LAX (who, in spite of this being pre-9/11, had some great stories)
Ah, *now* I know a good way to pick up a good job -- network while on jury duty.
As other people have pointed out, your post is at best misleading, at worst factually inaccurate.
McDonalds routinely kept their coffee 40 degrees hotter than other restaurants.
The largest number I've see was from the court, which stated that the hottest other fast food coffee temperature was 20 degF cooler, and that coffee at all the temperatures served can cause third degree burns -- it just takes longer.
But if it comes down to these people getting their 190 degree coffee, or me being safe from having my skin melted off, they can take their coffee and shove it up their asses.
Ah, but see, you can just wait a couple of minutes. In any case, you should sip your drink. Are you literally trying to tell me that when you get a hot drink, you immediately throw it down without sipping it first? I think we can safely say that a person can be expected to sip their drink before throwing it down.
And how fast can you take off your pants while being seated in a car? Especially if you are buckeled in?...the jury found Liebeck 20 percent at fault in the spill....
Guess what? If you buckle yourself in a *straitjacket*, and strap yourself down, you can be killed by drowning in a cupful of *ice water*. The points involved are (a) there is clearly behavior that the woman could have engaged in that would have prevented her from being injured (sipping her drink, not holding it in her lap in a car), and (b) that that behavior is accepted and essentially universal and has been for many, many years.
Well duh, because she was the one who actually spilled it. But McDonalds were the ones who were selling a dangerous product, so they were found to be 80% at fault.
You can hurt yourself with almost anything. Hurting yourself while applying common sense is a bit harder.
No, they kept it that hot to save money, not because customers demanded it.
No. That's absurd. Keeping coffee hotter costs more in energy costs. McDonalds disclosed that their focus groups liked the coffee hot, at the 180 degF range, and that the coffee experts they had consulted said that hotter coffee brought out the flavor more. Seriously, do you *really* not think that every aspect of McDonalds is not run through masses and masses of focus groups? They are a huge franchise that puts out maybe one new product a year. They have a *lot* of time to test things.
Look, why the hell should any food product thats meant to be immediatly served and consumed run the risk of causing you serious injury?
I hope no restauraunt ever gives you steak knives. I can just see you hauling off and sticking yourself in the eye and claiming that the restauraunt was supplying you with 'dangerous objects' when they should have just precut your meat.
Not a very relevant example, as you can't do that during normal use (read: not being a dumbass and shoving your hand down the disposal). It is very likely that you will, at some point in your life, accidently spill coffee on yourself, or someone will spill it on you.
Really. Have you ever had to get skin grafts on your genitals due to spilling a hot liquid? No? Gee, neither have I. That is the point at question -- whether it's reasonable for McDonalds to serve hot coffee (rather than lukewarm) and whether it's reasonable to expect them to assume that a reasonable person would require skin grafts on their genitals. I don't think so, myself.
That is utterly inane. There are plenty of places that sell food or drink that is hot enough to injure yourself with if you handle it improperly.
I wouldn't blink at boiling water, putting it into a mug with some mix, stirring it up, and giving it to a friend at my house, because I expect that they have the common sense not to immediately throw it down. And that would be 40 degF hotter than McDonald's coffee.
Theoretically, you shouldn't be driving and eating/drinking.
A lot of people buy coffee on the way to work and drink it when they get in to work. If they don't buy at 180 degrees, they can't have hot coffee when they get in. The other people can legitimately blow on it.
Seriously, I make hot drinks for myself and friends all the time. None of them grab the cup and immediately gulp down whatevers in it -- they sip it lightly to see whether it's too hot. There is no assumption that a hot drink is acceptably cold to immediately thrown down your throat in any society I've ever seen.
I dunno what I drink it at -- I boil water, pour it into a cup with some drink mix or tea or whatever (so for at least a moment, I'm working with 212 degF water), and start sipping it. If it's too hot for my lips, I wait until it's cooler. Somehow, I and all the other teapot owners in the world have managed to avoid needing skin grafts to our genitals.
The fact that someone can manage to injure themselves with something does not make the selling of that reprehensible, especially if people have been using this product for many years upon end.
Also note that a lot of morning coffee is sold hot because peopel take it in to work and drink it there...and it cools a bit in the car.
One fact that you neatly excised to try and produce an incorrect conclusion (or which you didn't know) was that in the case it came up that competitors' drinks also caused third degree burns. Any hot coffee will. It's just that the range goes from three seconds to ten or twenty seconds if the temperature is significantly reduced.
It's not fucking negligent. Has this woman never used a teapot? Has she had a thermometer with a little LED sign on the teapot that kicks on and says "Hi! You could *potentially burn yourself with this liquid!*? No, because this is ridiculous."
For years McDonalds served their coffee up to 40 degrees hotter than other fast-food restaurants. In this way, they could get more coffee per pound of beans and increase their profits by a few cents per cup.
I believe the metric was 20 deg F more than other fast food places. It's hot, yes. Frankly, anyone that has ever boiled water for tea or hot chocolate or whatnot should be able to handle a cup of hot liquid. I don't have a lot of sympathy for this woman -- at her age, she should be able to cope with containers of hot liquids. It's a pretty basic human skill.
McDonald's coffee was so hot that, if spilled, it could cause third degree burns, which would burn through skin and down to the muscle in less than three seconds.
No, the metric used in court was that at the temperature they served it, one could get third degree burns in less than three seconds, as opposed to nine or so at the temperature their closest competitor served it at. I still think the whole fucking thing is irrelevant. You can stick yourself with a knife in less than *half* a second. The point is that peopld avoid doing so. When I boil water in a kettle, I'm getting 212 degF water. Somehow, I manage to avoid burning myself (oh, sure, I've burned my tongue before, but you let things *cool*). If you're going to drive a car trying to hold a cup of hot coffee between your legs and, you are going to get burned. I'll give you an even better idea -- if this woman *didn't like her coffee that hot* (and as it happens, I do like my drinks as hot as possible, os that I can blow on them to get them to exactly the proper temperature), why couldn't she go to one of these other competitors that used a 20 degF cooler temperature?
# McDonald's has had over 700 previous claims related to serious burns from their coffee to their customers, many of whom had been injured in the genital area, inner thighs, and buttocks areas. Yet, McDonald's refused to lower the temperature of their coffee.
McDonald's is a *huge* franchise that has been around forever. The same could be said of lawsuits WRT, say, Walmart. Frankly, people managed to boil water over a fire or stove and make themselves drinks for a long time. If these people are so inept as to be incapable of doing so, I'm going to say that it's not worth the cost of trying to protect them from themselves.
The injured (burned) plaintiff in this case, 79 year old Stella Lieback, was not driving her car. She was seated as the passenger in her grandson's parked car, holding the coffee cup between her legs while removing the plastic lid. The cup tipped over and poured the scalding hot coffee into her lap causing third degree burns.
Gee, it sounds like that was a bad idea. She could also try cutting vegetables in her lap with a knife and could stab herself. I wouldn't find the knife manufacturer liable.
I just don't understand why people ignore the reasonableness issue. It's unreasonable for some manufacturer to make a handrail that collapses when you lean on it and dumps you over a balcony. It's not unreasonable for a restauraunt to serve a hot drink as a *hot drink*, at a temperature that *many* people serve drinks.
# Lieback required eight days of hospitalization and multiple surgeries, including skin grafts as a result of being scalded by McDonald's coffee.
That has absolutely nothing to do with McDonalds' culpability, and everything to do with trying to sway emotional jurors. I can pick up my keyboard and bludgeon myself in the head with it, giving myself skull fractures, producing a need for over a hundred stitches, causing eye damage, and producing permanent scars. The issues is that McDonalds is doing something that is not unreasonable, and someone managed to injure themselves with it.
Mrs. Lieback only took legal action against McDonald's after they repeatedly refused to reimburse her for her medical expenses.
Was that ever the case? I'd say that people tend to harbour a kind of vague, general goodwill towards other people, but ultimately, money matters to just about everyone.
I hope you feel the same way about the programmer that wrote the software that your doctor uses. Same goes for the data entry clerks that populated the databases that he uses. Same for his secretary. Heck, I'll bet one way or another, people's lives are riding on your job. Nobody expects you to be perfect.
Being from Texas, I remember being up in arms when our legislature, upon prompting from the AMA lobby, funded the the governmental body that oversaw rogue doctors (alcoholics, drug addicts, incompetents and worse) with a budget of just under $1mil.
I really don't care (well, WRT my health) if my doctor is an alcoholic or a drug addict, as long as he's competent and not under the influence when he's diagnosing me.
That's odd. Do they not chlorinate the water, a la swimming pools, in whirlpools? I would have thought that a whirlpool would decrease the chance of infection...
That sucks, and *could* be a serious case. However, there are a lot of things that would be have to be examined first:
* 25 years is also a long time ago. Did many doctors *know* how to properly diagnose whatever this is then? Would it be expected that any doctor in the field should be able to do so, keeping in mind that opinions vary (remember, these are medical *opinions* -- our approach to solving medical problems is still to throw lots of knowledge at someone and them have them look at cases and see what sounds familiar to what they remember). A doctor prescribing leeches for fever today would be in serious trouble -- one a couple of hundred years ago would be doing quite acceptable work.
* She has nothing more than a suspicion that she was misdiagnosed. Doesn't mean she's not right, but doesn't mean that this guy has been simply ignoring his patients' welfare because he doesn't care either.
* What were the potential risks of a misdiagnosis the other direction? Sometimes someone makes a call with horrible results, but it's still an intelligent call, because making the call the *other* way is either likely to result in something bad, or might result in something *awful*. I just finished watching "Master and Commander", where the captain of a ship makes a decision to let someone encounter certain death because the alternative was probable death of two hundred. The call was an intelligent one *even if* he could have saved the one guy without losing the two hundred, because the risks the other way were unacceptable.
The problem is that you're saying "I expect a doctor to provide perfect service and expect him to pay for the full amount of deviation his service moves from being perfect".
What if someone said to me "I expect your code to be perfect and expect me to pay for the full amount of deviation my software moves from being perfect." Heck, in lack of intuitiveness of user interface *alone*, I'd say that there wouldn't have been a single piece of proftable software out there.
Holding people to a perfect standard is not feasible. Yes, you can convince them to check and double-check -- but even NASA loses probes, despite all their double- and triple- checking, and tons of redundant systems. A doctor is going to screw up during their lifetime. It *will* happen. No matter what doctor you go to, you cannot get a certainty of perfect service, so the only other option, the only thing that you can consider service from this doctor a "damaged" variation of, is having your medical problems untreated -- almost certainly worse.
I'd be more than happy to sign a form saying that I waive the right to sue a doctor if I knew that a doctor had a good history of work, if it could get rates down to a sane level, instead of pissing away masses of money into the inefficient insurance industry. People die, for one reason or another. You can't buy perfect safety, and I'm not really worried about having the wrong limb amputated by a doctor -- I'm much more worried about the irresponsible drivers out there.
Code can not unless its used in very unusually and exclusive circumstances like heart monitors, etc.
I doubt that life-critical embedded-class reliability goes into Office or MSIE (if it does, I'm scared). There are many documents published in Word that most definitely *do* have life-critical issues. I was reading up on safe levels of radiation emissions in a government-released PDF the other day, which was probably originally an Office document. All it would take is a bug switching two numbers in some table-layout code somewhere, and I'll bet that if you caught this five years later, you'd *never* track down all the incorrect and potentially life-threatening uses.
Frankly, trying to hold someone to a standard of absolute, lifelong perfection is absurd. It just isn't realistic. It is, however, what our medical system strives to do. I know that I can't write perfect code. Doctors know that they can't perfectly treat anyone, but it isn't *okay* for them to admit that.
If I misplace a variable no one dies. A doctor misplaces a scalpel, well you know.
You might be terribly surprised.
Say there's some guy writing a module to allow, via Visual Basic, some sort of easy Word mail merge functionality. It has a couple of bugs with edge cases, but it works well for him, so he doesn't care. He sells this as shareware for a while. Eventually, his code is sold to a company which sells a bundle of office add-ons. This company is bought out by Microsoft, which is interested in some version-control features that that company provides. They integrate this with Office, along with much of the rest of the Office bundle that company sells. Later on, some guy hired as a subcontractor to a company paid by a hospital to computerize their patient-handling system. He uses the mail-merge system to provide automated daily printouts to each physician of information on each patient they will deal with during the course of a day. Unfortunately, when the mail merge system deals with a database with more than 32K records, it switches to a different allocation scheme for more efficiency. It tries to revert back to the old scheme when it shrinks to a size of less than 32K records, but has an off-by-one problem that causes the second record in the database to be used as both the first and second entries in the mail merge in such a scenario. Unfortunately, three years into using the system, the hospital hits the bug, and a doctor is given incorrect medical information.
What about flow of casuality across software? Suppose I send in a patch to libjpeg that speeds it up on processors that have certain FPU guarantees. I'm unaware of a subtle bug. Someone uses libjpeg in an application (hell, libjpeg use probably exists all over the place)...including, say, Internet Explorer. This makes the application overwrite some memory that it shouldn't, and thus converts a linked list into a cycle. When the linked list is copied, the application consumes all the memory on the system This then causes another *crucial* program running on the system to be unable to get any memory, and basically stops it dead. I wasn't working with airline control software or anything like that, but my innocent mistake just screwed something serious up.
Finally, there are definitely cases of programmers screwing things up and people dying. You *sure* you've never made a thread synchronization mistake? (If you haven't, you're a better man than I -- heck, probably better than Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or John Carmack or any other "big name" developers) If you think you might be open to this, try looking up the Therac-25, a rather nasty case of some synchronization problems combined with some software being reused when it probably shouldn't have been, and you have the reason why most modern medical equipment capable of irradiating humans has hardware locks in addition to software.
Slashdot Mirror
Or rugby. I remember a lot of "extreme football" type games over the years, but not rubgy.
There have been some good British interactive fiction games. The kind of dry, highbrow "English humor" goes nicely with a text-based format. (Speaking of which, while Spiderweb Software isn't UK-based, does anyone else think that they do a nice job of dark English-style humor? If it weren't for American spellings, I would have thought that the Exile series had British roots.)
One could say that the flood of LoTR takeoffs ow a certain something to the Brits.
Finally, I wonder whether I'm just being a bit over-stereotypical. I mean, there is a "British feel", sure. But how often does that come out in games? I mean, say a game is developed in the United States. Is there really an "American feel" to it? What would an "American feel" be? It doesn't seem that games developed in a nation tend to always stick with the stereotypical feel of that nation. If I had to put forward a few guesses, and try to avoid all the cultural mixing and people moving from one country to the other and whatnot, I'd say that:
* The Japanese seem to do more games with intense personal sacrifice. They seem to use energy weapons (the sort of thing with big fancy beams) in their games more. Soldiers in Japanese games seem to focus on duty, and not on a malfunctioning institution or the individual culture. The Japanese seem to frequently use acronyms (for organizations, military branches, vehicles, weapons, etc). Military uniforms are often more stylish and ornamental than depictions of real uniforms (I have heard that this may derive from the same place anime culture does -- the wildly different hair and clothing colors are to assist viewers in distinguishing between different characters in a nation where many people are of the same race -- a harder task than in the US). I see less topical games, fewer set in present time, and more in either the past or the future.
* The US seem to have more conventional weapons -- I know that the "US gun culture" is probably a bit exaggerated in attempts to pigeonhole the US, but we go for a broad variety of real weapons in a lot of games, and like thumps and thuds. A lot of US-based games seem to focus on soldiers at an individual level -- perhaps four people -- and point out their individuality, rather than their military roles. Dysfunctional institutions seem to play a greater role. Uniforms are toned down, and more often realistic depictions. I see a lot of games set in the present day.
* The UK is very, very different when it comes to weapons. Perhaps it's just because fewer folks are marching around with guns than in the US, but weaponry is often much lighter. (While this is a movie, I still experience a minor bit of culture shock every time I see Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The deal that was made over the machine gun, the deal made over obtaining two shotguns, and the fact that knives played a role were so different from US movies, where it's a good bet that the mercenaries would have been carrying a rocket launcher and blown something up.) I think that there's a greater tendancy to do dry humor, and I think that most would agree (see my example of Spiderweb Software's Exile series for an example of a non-UK game series that has similar style). It may be me just me trying too hard to find differences, but I'd say that UK games have a greater tendancy to include more subtle cultural styles in factions in their games. I think that there are fewer games relying on absolutely split-second twitch elements, and somewhat more puzzle-like elements. The military seems to stay more out of British games.
Now, I'm sure to draw criticism. Yes, I'm trying to extrapolate from an extremely small sample set, but these are admittedly based on feeling and opinion rather than a full-blown study. Furthermnore, there are individual counterexamples to all of these. Bungie, Shiny Entertainment, and Spiderweb Software both put out games that I'd consid
The majority of the open-source games that I've contributed significant quantities of code to have had Europe-based teams, even though I live in the US.
:-) God, why haven't the Brits taken over the world on the strength of that accent alone?
I just stopped adding code to another open source Linux game put out by a UK developer to read Slashdot.
As for commercial games, what about LionHead Studios (Black & White, and one of the nicer game development boards out there)?
One of the most influential games to hit the PC in a long time, Max Payne was developed by Mobius Entertainment, which is UK-based.
Finally, I agree that it's a shame that the UK-based Bullfrog isn't around any more, but they *were* responsible for one of only about three Windows-based games I ever purchased -- Syndicate.
I do wish that games used more British voice actors, especially female. Ah, British accents.
Maybe some of it is that (traditionally) computers were rather expensive in the UK. This may have gone away out over the last ten years, but I remember being absolutely appalled at what a number of computer types had to pay for their equipment in the UK. It takes a while to get over a lack of cheap hardware -- I think a lot of people start out game development on a home computer, so you feel the echos for years if people have older hardware. Also, what was with the whole Acorn thing?
I'm curious as to whether there's anyone out there that uses servercove, and what their experiences were. I started looking for good colo prices a while ago using Google and some brute force, and ran across 'em. Going by their webpage, they seem to be pretty Linux-friendly, and quite inexpensive($89/mo/700GB/8IP). I wondered if the inexpensive factor might be because of low reliability or something, though. I've yet to see people on Slashdot talking about them.
I'm beginning to wonder if SCO's second biggest negative impact (after the FUD it spreads) is all the time it is taking away from folks that would otherwise be having fun making open source software better.
I can't even begin to imagine how many man-hours have been blown obsessing about, discussing, worrying, or protesting SCO's latest actions. It really is appalling.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem like there's much point in "fighting" SCO any more. There isn't anyone in the tech community that takes them seriously. They are going to run out of money unless they get more cash influxes. It seems really unlikely that they will ever win even a minor lawsuit, much less something that will impact Linux. To the best of my knowledge, they aren't doing much to prevent Linux adoption -- there were a lot of journalists talking about how SCO might have a chance a couple of months ago, but it seems like everyone is pretty negative now (though I haven't read pure business publications for a while, so I might just be out-of-touch here).
Is there really any point to dealing with SCO any longer? It just wastes our time, and frankly, if I'm going to waste an hour of my life, I'd rather do it playing a video game or modeling something or writing software or cooking something than agonizing over SCO.
Unlike most Slashdot topics, SCO usually doesn't bring anything new or interesting to the table. A SCO article doesn't let me know about new LED displays that haven't existed before or a new VM about to be released or anything, really. Most comments in SCO articles are just jokes about SCO or McBride -- real analysis mostly happens at groklaw.
I just think -- every time Alan Cox posts about SCO or an indignant open source author spends a day disproving an new fabricated SCO claim so that they can come out with an analysis on groklaw, that's a driver patch that doesn't get applied, or a bit less threading work that can be done.
Frankly, even if the whole tech world started talking negatively about Windows, the kernel coders at Microsoft are unlikely to notice or care -- to them, that's just some crap for the PR people to deal with. They wouldn't let it affect them. SCO is wasting a good deal of time, time which actually does have value. Aside from passively providing the opinion that SCO is full of it when they come up in conversation, there doesn't seem to be much useful stuff that can be done any more.
Now, if you're really into IP law, of course, the case is interesting. But I just have a really hard time getting upset over whatever latest outrage SCO has come up with to stay in the press. I mean, who *cares* anymore? Noting we're going to say is going to stop them from making claims and getting quoted. Everyone in the tech world already thinks SCO is absolutely ludicrous, and IBM and Red Hat and Novell and God knows who else are already busily dealing with the situation. I'm sure the moment SCO crosses a legal line somewhere (and sooner or later, they have to), there will be a countersuit, maybe with a preliminary injunction against SCO stopping them from making new claims. My time is too valuable to me, and Darl McBride too worthless of a human being, to spend it on him.
The strength of the Open Source world is that one person contributes thoughts, code, analysis, whatever, and then that work propagates and is used and built upon by as many other people as are interested. Finding SCO's logical fallacies is work that is useless by the end of next month, as they're onto something new. It doesn't feel *good* when you're done with it. It's terribly inefficient and ineffective, even if it feels cathartic at the moment.
Or force Microsoft to pay fees that will be used to fund the production of free equivalents.
What everyone actually has is Quicktime.
:-)
Linux support for QuickTime does not include all codecs, IIRC, and it was reverse-engineered.
What everyone actually *could* have is divx.
- The president of programming for Showtime (who gave us all copies of their remake of "12 Angry Men" at the end)
- The head of new technologies research for Citibank (who was pretty annoyed at that point that he couldn't get any funding for research on smart chip implementation because all the money was going into the Y2K bug)
- A supervisor in Customs at LAX (who, in spite of this being pre-9/11, had some great stories)
Ah, *now* I know a good way to pick up a good job -- network while on jury duty.
As other people have pointed out, your post is at best misleading, at worst factually inaccurate.
...the jury found Liebeck 20 percent at fault in the spill....
McDonalds routinely kept their coffee 40 degrees hotter than other restaurants.
The largest number I've see was from the court, which stated that the hottest other fast food coffee temperature was 20 degF cooler, and that coffee at all the temperatures served can cause third degree burns -- it just takes longer.
But if it comes down to these people getting their 190 degree coffee, or me being safe from having my skin melted off, they can take their coffee and shove it up their asses.
Ah, but see, you can just wait a couple of minutes. In any case, you should sip your drink. Are you literally trying to tell me that when you get a hot drink, you immediately throw it down without sipping it first? I think we can safely say that a person can be expected to sip their drink before throwing it down.
And how fast can you take off your pants while being seated in a car? Especially if you are buckeled in?
Guess what? If you buckle yourself in a *straitjacket*, and strap yourself down, you can be killed by drowning in a cupful of *ice water*. The points involved are (a) there is clearly behavior that the woman could have engaged in that would have prevented her from being injured (sipping her drink, not holding it in her lap in a car), and (b) that that behavior is accepted and essentially universal and has been for many, many years.
Well duh, because she was the one who actually spilled it. But McDonalds were the ones who were selling a dangerous product, so they were found to be 80% at fault.
You can hurt yourself with almost anything. Hurting yourself while applying common sense is a bit harder.
No, they kept it that hot to save money, not because customers demanded it.
No. That's absurd. Keeping coffee hotter costs more in energy costs. McDonalds disclosed that their focus groups liked the coffee hot, at the 180 degF range, and that the coffee experts they had consulted said that hotter coffee brought out the flavor more. Seriously, do you *really* not think that every aspect of McDonalds is not run through masses and masses of focus groups? They are a huge franchise that puts out maybe one new product a year. They have a *lot* of time to test things.
Look, why the hell should any food product thats meant to be immediatly served and consumed run the risk of causing you serious injury?
I hope no restauraunt ever gives you steak knives. I can just see you hauling off and sticking yourself in the eye and claiming that the restauraunt was supplying you with 'dangerous objects' when they should have just precut your meat.
Any material capable of causing 3rd degree burns is not fit for human cunsumption, it is not even fit for casual handling.
That so many idiots like you do not understand this frankly makes one lose faith on humanity.
You, on the other hand, are advocating that humans are incapable of handling teakettles. Or making spaghetti.
Frankly, if I had to choose one person here who was an "idiot" that "makes one lose faith on [sic] humanity", it wouldn't be the parent of your post.
Not a very relevant example, as you can't do that during normal use (read: not being a dumbass and shoving your hand down the disposal). It is very likely that you will, at some point in your life, accidently spill coffee on yourself, or someone will spill it on you.
Really. Have you ever had to get skin grafts on your genitals due to spilling a hot liquid? No? Gee, neither have I. That is the point at question -- whether it's reasonable for McDonalds to serve hot coffee (rather than lukewarm) and whether it's reasonable to expect them to assume that a reasonable person would require skin grafts on their genitals. I don't think so, myself.
And yet water boils at 1 atm at 212 degF, and McDonald's was serving it at 180 degF, less than what teakettles produce.
That is utterly inane. There are plenty of places that sell food or drink that is hot enough to injure yourself with if you handle it improperly.
I wouldn't blink at boiling water, putting it into a mug with some mix, stirring it up, and giving it to a friend at my house, because I expect that they have the common sense not to immediately throw it down. And that would be 40 degF hotter than McDonald's coffee.
Theoretically, you shouldn't be driving and eating/drinking.
A lot of people buy coffee on the way to work and drink it when they get in to work. If they don't buy at 180 degrees, they can't have hot coffee when they get in. The other people can legitimately blow on it.
Seriously, I make hot drinks for myself and friends all the time. None of them grab the cup and immediately gulp down whatevers in it -- they sip it lightly to see whether it's too hot. There is no assumption that a hot drink is acceptably cold to immediately thrown down your throat in any society I've ever seen.
McDonalds was serving it at about 180 degF.
Competitors started at about 160 degF.
I dunno what I drink it at -- I boil water, pour it into a cup with some drink mix or tea or whatever (so for at least a moment, I'm working with 212 degF water), and start sipping it. If it's too hot for my lips, I wait until it's cooler. Somehow, I and all the other teapot owners in the world have managed to avoid needing skin grafts to our genitals.
The fact that someone can manage to injure themselves with something does not make the selling of that reprehensible, especially if people have been using this product for many years upon end.
Also note that a lot of morning coffee is sold hot because peopel take it in to work and drink it there...and it cools a bit in the car.
One fact that you neatly excised to try and produce an incorrect conclusion (or which you didn't know) was that in the case it came up that competitors' drinks also caused third degree burns. Any hot coffee will. It's just that the range goes from three seconds to ten or twenty seconds if the temperature is significantly reduced.
It's not fucking negligent. Has this woman never used a teapot? Has she had a thermometer with a little LED sign on the teapot that kicks on and says "Hi! You could *potentially burn yourself with this liquid!*? No, because this is ridiculous."
For years McDonalds served their coffee up to 40 degrees hotter than other fast-food restaurants. In this way, they could get more coffee per pound of beans and increase their profits by a few cents per cup.
I believe the metric was 20 deg F more than other fast food places. It's hot, yes. Frankly, anyone that has ever boiled water for tea or hot chocolate or whatnot should be able to handle a cup of hot liquid. I don't have a lot of sympathy for this woman -- at her age, she should be able to cope with containers of hot liquids. It's a pretty basic human skill.
McDonald's coffee was so hot that, if spilled, it could cause third degree burns, which would burn through skin and down to the muscle in less than three seconds.
No, the metric used in court was that at the temperature they served it, one could get third degree burns in less than three seconds, as opposed to nine or so at the temperature their closest competitor served it at. I still think the whole fucking thing is irrelevant. You can stick yourself with a knife in less than *half* a second. The point is that peopld avoid doing so. When I boil water in a kettle, I'm getting 212 degF water. Somehow, I manage to avoid burning myself (oh, sure, I've burned my tongue before, but you let things *cool*). If you're going to drive a car trying to hold a cup of hot coffee between your legs and, you are going to get burned. I'll give you an even better idea -- if this woman *didn't like her coffee that hot* (and as it happens, I do like my drinks as hot as possible, os that I can blow on them to get them to exactly the proper temperature), why couldn't she go to one of these other competitors that used a 20 degF cooler temperature?
# McDonald's has had over 700 previous claims related to serious burns from their coffee to their customers, many of whom had been injured in the genital area, inner thighs, and buttocks areas. Yet, McDonald's refused to lower the temperature of their coffee.
McDonald's is a *huge* franchise that has been around forever. The same could be said of lawsuits WRT, say, Walmart. Frankly, people managed to boil water over a fire or stove and make themselves drinks for a long time. If these people are so inept as to be incapable of doing so, I'm going to say that it's not worth the cost of trying to protect them from themselves.
The injured (burned) plaintiff in this case, 79 year old Stella Lieback, was not driving her car. She was seated as the passenger in her grandson's parked car, holding the coffee cup between her legs while removing the plastic lid. The cup tipped over and poured the scalding hot coffee into her lap causing third degree burns.
Gee, it sounds like that was a bad idea. She could also try cutting vegetables in her lap with a knife and could stab herself. I wouldn't find the knife manufacturer liable.
I just don't understand why people ignore the reasonableness issue. It's unreasonable for some manufacturer to make a handrail that collapses when you lean on it and dumps you over a balcony. It's not unreasonable for a restauraunt to serve a hot drink as a *hot drink*, at a temperature that *many* people serve drinks.
# Lieback required eight days of hospitalization and multiple surgeries, including skin grafts as a result of being scalded by McDonald's coffee.
That has absolutely nothing to do with McDonalds' culpability, and everything to do with trying to sway emotional jurors. I can pick up my keyboard and bludgeon myself in the head with it, giving myself skull fractures, producing a need for over a hundred stitches, causing eye damage, and producing permanent scars. The issues is that McDonalds is doing something that is not unreasonable, and someone managed to injure themselves with it.
Mrs. Lieback only took legal action against McDonald's after they repeatedly refused to reimburse her for her medical expenses.
I wouldn't either. She *burned herself on
Was that ever the case? I'd say that people tend to harbour a kind of vague, general goodwill towards other people, but ultimately, money matters to just about everyone.
I hope you feel the same way about the programmer that wrote the software that your doctor uses. Same goes for the data entry clerks that populated the databases that he uses. Same for his secretary. Heck, I'll bet one way or another, people's lives are riding on your job. Nobody expects you to be perfect.
Being from Texas, I remember being up in arms when our legislature, upon prompting from the AMA lobby, funded the the governmental body that oversaw rogue doctors (alcoholics, drug addicts, incompetents and worse) with a budget of just under $1mil.
I really don't care (well, WRT my health) if my doctor is an alcoholic or a drug addict, as long as he's competent and not under the influence when he's diagnosing me.
That's odd. Do they not chlorinate the water, a la swimming pools, in whirlpools? I would have thought that a whirlpool would decrease the chance of infection...
That sucks, and *could* be a serious case. However, there are a lot of things that would be have to be examined first:
* 25 years is also a long time ago. Did many doctors *know* how to properly diagnose whatever this is then? Would it be expected that any doctor in the field should be able to do so, keeping in mind that opinions vary (remember, these are medical *opinions* -- our approach to solving medical problems is still to throw lots of knowledge at someone and them have them look at cases and see what sounds familiar to what they remember). A doctor prescribing leeches for fever today would be in serious trouble -- one a couple of hundred years ago would be doing quite acceptable work.
* She has nothing more than a suspicion that she was misdiagnosed. Doesn't mean she's not right, but doesn't mean that this guy has been simply ignoring his patients' welfare because he doesn't care either.
* What were the potential risks of a misdiagnosis the other direction? Sometimes someone makes a call with horrible results, but it's still an intelligent call, because making the call the *other* way is either likely to result in something bad, or might result in something *awful*. I just finished watching "Master and Commander", where the captain of a ship makes a decision to let someone encounter certain death because the alternative was probable death of two hundred. The call was an intelligent one *even if* he could have saved the one guy without losing the two hundred, because the risks the other way were unacceptable.
That's still shoving the issue to "someone else". It's easy to dump things on "someone else".
Ever written software that *might* potentially run on the same system as crucial software and *might* potentially inhibit its proper operation?
The problem is that you're saying "I expect a doctor to provide perfect service and expect him to pay for the full amount of deviation his service moves from being perfect".
What if someone said to me "I expect your code to be perfect and expect me to pay for the full amount of deviation my software moves from being perfect." Heck, in lack of intuitiveness of user interface *alone*, I'd say that there wouldn't have been a single piece of proftable software out there.
Holding people to a perfect standard is not feasible. Yes, you can convince them to check and double-check -- but even NASA loses probes, despite all their double- and triple- checking, and tons of redundant systems. A doctor is going to screw up during their lifetime. It *will* happen. No matter what doctor you go to, you cannot get a certainty of perfect service, so the only other option, the only thing that you can consider service from this doctor a "damaged" variation of, is having your medical problems untreated -- almost certainly worse.
I'd be more than happy to sign a form saying that I waive the right to sue a doctor if I knew that a doctor had a good history of work, if it could get rates down to a sane level, instead of pissing away masses of money into the inefficient insurance industry. People die, for one reason or another. You can't buy perfect safety, and I'm not really worried about having the wrong limb amputated by a doctor -- I'm much more worried about the irresponsible drivers out there.
Code can not unless its used in very unusually and exclusive circumstances like heart monitors, etc.
I doubt that life-critical embedded-class reliability goes into Office or MSIE (if it does, I'm scared). There are many documents published in Word that most definitely *do* have life-critical issues. I was reading up on safe levels of radiation emissions in a government-released PDF the other day, which was probably originally an Office document. All it would take is a bug switching two numbers in some table-layout code somewhere, and I'll bet that if you caught this five years later, you'd *never* track down all the incorrect and potentially life-threatening uses.
Frankly, trying to hold someone to a standard of absolute, lifelong perfection is absurd. It just isn't realistic. It is, however, what our medical system strives to do. I know that I can't write perfect code. Doctors know that they can't perfectly treat anyone, but it isn't *okay* for them to admit that.
If I misplace a variable no one dies. A doctor misplaces a scalpel, well you know.
You might be terribly surprised.
Say there's some guy writing a module to allow, via Visual Basic, some sort of easy Word mail merge functionality. It has a couple of bugs with edge cases, but it works well for him, so he doesn't care. He sells this as shareware for a while. Eventually, his code is sold to a company which sells a bundle of office add-ons. This company is bought out by Microsoft, which is interested in some version-control features that that company provides. They integrate this with Office, along with much of the rest of the Office bundle that company sells. Later on, some guy hired as a subcontractor to a company paid by a hospital to computerize their patient-handling system. He uses the mail-merge system to provide automated daily printouts to each physician of information on each patient they will deal with during the course of a day. Unfortunately, when the mail merge system deals with a database with more than 32K records, it switches to a different allocation scheme for more efficiency. It tries to revert back to the old scheme when it shrinks to a size of less than 32K records, but has an off-by-one problem that causes the second record in the database to be used as both the first and second entries in the mail merge in such a scenario. Unfortunately, three years into using the system, the hospital hits the bug, and a doctor is given incorrect medical information.
What about flow of casuality across software? Suppose I send in a patch to libjpeg that speeds it up on processors that have certain FPU guarantees. I'm unaware of a subtle bug. Someone uses libjpeg in an application (hell, libjpeg use probably exists all over the place)...including, say, Internet Explorer. This makes the application overwrite some memory that it shouldn't, and thus converts a linked list into a cycle. When the linked list is copied, the application consumes all the memory on the system This then causes another *crucial* program running on the system to be unable to get any memory, and basically stops it dead. I wasn't working with airline control software or anything like that, but my innocent mistake just screwed something serious up.
Finally, there are definitely cases of programmers screwing things up and people dying. You *sure* you've never made a thread synchronization mistake? (If you haven't, you're a better man than I -- heck, probably better than Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox or John Carmack or any other "big name" developers) If you think you might be open to this, try looking up the Therac-25, a rather nasty case of some synchronization problems combined with some software being reused when it probably shouldn't have been, and you have the reason why most modern medical equipment capable of irradiating humans has hardware locks in addition to software.