It might be argued that since it's a chairman's/director's/CEO's role to ensure a company remains profitable, when there is an oversupply of the labour-fource, that's down to an error on the part of the directorship in not staffing the company correctly - therefore they should be equally obliged to take pay cuts.
You should also give more thought to your argument. People generally work as near as possible to home as they can so when a business park moves near a residential zone, this has the effect of driving house prices up - this makes mortgages more expensive meaning a need for higher salaries.
What I'm trying to say here is that corporations are equally to blame for the changes in how and where people work and live but they are only concerned with maximising profits for a few "fat cats" and not with any social responsibility.
As far as I'm concerned, each governmemt should intervene to ensure that if a company trades in their country (i.e. takes money out of the economy) then it has an obligation to provide work to the citizens of that country (i.e. put money back into the economy).
Derive some kind of formula based on profits and percentages of local work force and then start taxing profits the more the workforce is outsourced to other countries. This will serve to make foreign workforces less competitive.
A good example could have been the XP Service Pack 2.
This is a bad example. Microsoft are a public corporation who make money from their operating systems and products and therefore have a duty to their customers to plough some of that money back into an infrastrusture that allows them to distribute updates to their customers without impact on the public Internet.
I personally do not use XP and never will do. As a result, I do not expect the bandwidth I legitimately pay to use from my ISP to be affected by millions of people downloading Service Pack 2 from a peer-to-peer network.
Incidentally, the same goes for any profit-making organisation that sells software and updates, not just Microsoft.
Does anyone else see this kind of technology as a very poor reflection of what we are becoming in the "civilised" world? Namely, a whole bunch of separate cublicle-ised voyeurs?
Probably since World War 2, we've seen the breakdown of the family and close-knit social communities for various reasons. Now we don't socialise with our neighbours and entertain ourselves at home a lot - the Internet, DVD & video, games consoles, etc.
Added to that, communications mean we can avoid face-to-face contact with people. Yet I'm beginning to wonder if we are actually yearning for that lost contact and intimacy with other people?
Look at:
- the rise in reality TV which gives us the chance to look "behind the scenes" in peoples' lives
- the increase in celebrity worship and stalking
- DVDs that offer documentaries and commentaries about movies, not just the movies
- mobile phones with "secret" cameras built in
Now the "TV zoom" will allow us to "tear apart" programs and movies to find something new - perhaps the "little yellow van" in the extreme background of a gladiator movie...
All of these technological "advances" seem to succeed because they give us the feeling of some kind of "voyeuristic intimacy" with a particular subject that gives us the feeling of being "one-up" over the rest of the human race.
As a race, I really believe that humans are reaching a turning-point in their evolution - on one hand, we're instinctively social animals enjoying close contact with others but, on the other hand, we're readily accepting technology that allows us to sit back and "view from a distance", probably because ultimately we're being indoctrinated about how important it is to NOT stand out in a crowd - staying at a distance lets us pretend that much more that we are who we're not, just small insecure people who yearn for contact with others.
therefore, doing searches on a relational database filesystem (find me all music files with dates between last week and last month: SELECT * from files WHERE files.type = "music" and files.date NOW() - 7days
you _can't_ do that sort of thing on a traditional filesystem.
This is honestly where I have a problem with the concept of database filesystems and don't understand all the fuss over them.
I can do exactly what you mention above (and more) using a user utility like "find" (in UNIX/Linux).
As far as I'm concerned, if a file-system always knows the names, dates, sizes and locations (on the hard disk) of all my files and does it's best to avoid corruption, what more can I ask of it?
If Microsoft really cared about stopping the scourge of spam on the Internet, the Sender ID source code would have been made free and open, without restriction. In turn, the community at large would have seen the code and probably, in turn, add enhancements and features that MS themselves could have used. This would have been the first tentative steps made by Microsoft to co-operate with the Open Source community, an exercise that would have done more for their PR than any multi-million dollar advertising campaign.
No, instead, they tie it up in legalese and patents because, in Microsoft's eyes, they must make money from it. Consequently, it will not be an Internet standard so Microsoft will either use it and increase their incompatibility with everyone else or just drop the whole thing all together.
Well done to ASF for rejecting it because the moment the Internet standards start becoming controlled is the moment the Internet starts to die.
If Linux wasn't that big a deal to you, you wouldn't keep going on about it.
It's putting you off your food, it's keeping you awake at nights, you know it so just admit it.
They pay you millions of dollars in salary a year yet you cannot see what is in front of your face - Microsoft must adapt, must become more open, must embrace open standards or it will die.
Microsoft's a cold blooded dinosaur and the climate's changing - whatcha gonna do, Steve?
I can't escape the morons in restaurants and cinemas that have ringing cellphones and/or speak very loudly, an airline flight was one place where I was guaranteed some peace and quiet.
We must have had commercial air travel now for something like 80-odd years but all of a sudden it's just SO important that we remain constantly in touch on our phones.
It seems like most of the human race these days needs to look up from their little screen occasionally and see what's happening in the real world.
A mobile phone is a tool, nothing more. Sometimes you need it, most of the time you don't.
Populous was excellent, Theme Hospital & Theme Park were also very good. However, creatures was bugged to hell and at times unplayable.
When The Bitmap Brothers can do Speedball 2, Team 17 can do Alien Breed, ID can do Doom & Quake, Sid Meier can do Civilisation and Alpha Centauri, and Chris Sawyer can do Transport Tycoon, Peter Molyneux's output actually drops quite far down that table of "great games".
Yes, the guy has some nice ideas but perhaps needs to give his over-inflated ego a rest and actually get on with his game design a little more.
Perhaps if he sent more time debugging his output (all of Molyneux's games are renowned for wierd and wonderful bugs) rather than hyping himself, he'd get a bit more respect for what he does.
Open Source doesn't let me interoperate with Microsoft's proprietary format - but I'll sleep soundly tonight knowing I've not handed over my freedoms to Microsoft for at least today...
Don't get me wrong, iPods are good for at least supporting MP3 and the ability to rip your own CDs. Likewise, if that's all you listen to music on, then you're probably happy..
However, you can tell the difference in quality when playing MP3s and CDs through a decent hi-fi, there's just no comparison.
Also, be aware that each time you "burn and rip", you lose a little more quality.
I have a reasonable hi-fi system at home and I can quite clearly hear the difference between a normal CD and one created from MP3s - at least up to about 192kb/s sampling. (I'm also in my 40's and if I believe what I read, my hearing has already started to deteriorate anyway!)
I also used to buy anything up to 6 or so CDs a month purely because the stuff I listen to isn't usually mainstream, doesn't get radio airplay and was therefore bought "as seen" - suffice it to say, about 50% of my CD purchases weren't worth it.
Now I get MP3s from Usenet to check what an album is like before I decide to buy it - if the songs are good, I buy the CD because it's the only way I'll get the quality I want through my hi-fi; if they're crap, they're deleted because they're not even worth wasting disk space on.
If I can't find the CD at a good price (I live in "rip-off Britain"), then I go to Ebay for it or maybe a local second-hand store.
Sure, I accept people want to download music but they're being ripped off because they're getting poorer quality product.
Although I'm of the "whole album" generation, I have no problem with people who want to download and pay for individual songs.
But people really need to stop being dazzled by the "cool factor" of iPods and other digital music players and face reality.
iTunes and MSN Music both use DRM which restricts what you were previously able to do with music. 99c a downloadable song probably seems cheap but please remember that with downloadable music, the record companies are no longer having to press CDs, print covers or factor in the mark-ups of traditional music stores. In other words, they are making just as much (if not more) money from music and treating you like a criminal at the same time. The price you pay for your cool little music player is your freedom.
The solution is to still buy CDs (provided they are unprotected ones) and rip the music yourself in an un-DRM'ed format. If you don't like the prices of CDs then find them as cheap as possible, buy them second-hand or just don't buy them.
It's no different to walking into your bank in, say, a black leather jacket and being ushered out immediately by a security guard just because you look like a criminal.
It's time to take the red pill and wake up people...
A lot of people in this topic, so far, have looked only at modern PC computer games like Doom 3 without considering the wider picture.
For starters, look at the games available on the Gameboy Advance and mobile phones. Most of these games are equivalent to the Amiga/Atari ST/PC games of the mid to late 1980s - all that's really changed in the mobile gaming arena is miniaturisation. However, this demonstrates a continuing demand for those older games - hence the likes of Manic Miner, Speedball 2, etc. appearing on the Gameboy Advance.
Retrogaming also is filling a need for those who want to play some of those old games again, through emulation and remakes. The advantage here is that the copyrights for many old games is so tied up in knots (due to company mergers etc.) that this area is ideal for Open Source games programmers to take advantage of because games are usually small and many, of course, are released into the public domain anyway.
Finally, there's the Open Sourcing of older games allowing programming groups to improve older games, remake game engines, etc.
From my perspective, I'm happy to continue paying for the PC games that I do play and the only reason I keep a couple of Windows installations handy is to play these on, networked with a few buddies occasionally. If commercial games were released on Linux then, yes, I could save a few gigs of hard disk space and ditch Windows for good - but the games will still look and play the same and I wouldn't expect to pay anything less for them.
However, I get as much as a buzz these days out of Space Invaders running in MAME, Lords of Midnight on a ZX Spectrum emulator, the occasional text Infocom text adventure or Speedball 2 in WinUAE or on my trusty Amiga as I do from Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament.
Plus, if I ever fancy something different to play, I can always go trawling the Web for a new emulator or some free games...
Open source games currently fill a need but there's no way FOSS can displace the huge development budgets given to modern commercial game releases, end of story.
However, for me, it's great the way it is currently because I can pick up the latest PC release at the local computer store or jump back and forth through my quarter century of games playing whenever I like.
Scotty would have the solution to this scenario also...
When you explain to your boss why the solution will take so long, you fill your explanation with relevant but complex jargon that he has no hope of understanding.
If your boss admits to not understanding what you are on about, you can counter with a question asking him how he can impose a timescale on something he doesn't understand...
If he stays quiet, then keep throwing complicated questions at him until he gives up anyway - e.g. "Would you like me to compile the kernel with better gcc oprimisations?"
Believe me, it never fails and you get to look like a genius:-)
James Doohan also did a a number of the Star Trek audio books for Simon & Schuster during the late 1980s and 1990s - alongside Leonard Nimoy & George Takei.
I must say that his readings were of very high quality and he was able to do the voices of the other characters very convincingly.
With the current popularity of PC game modding, if product advertising within games becomes too overpowering, I'm sure a lot of people within the modding community will end up creating patches that delete advertising completely.
If it happens to be a "must have" mod, a fair proportion of the game buyers end up applying it and the advertiser gets less coverage and revenue as a result.
In that instance, I guess the only litigation the advertiser can take would be against the game creator or publisher.
...the patronising Coca Cola advert where the black girl walks and sings down the street while she hands out free bottles of fizzy vegetable extract...
...the McDonalds/Burger King/KFC adverts where the pile of half-digested mush handed out to you by the bored teenager behind the counter looks nothing like the product handed out by the male/female model in the TV advert...
...Britney Spears drinks as much Pepsi as she sings about so that she ends up with no teeth, an obesity problem and a dissolved digestive system...
...the car advert that implies any Indian male (yes, racial sterotyping, now that's a first for advertising... NOT!) can take a hammer to any old piece of crap car and turn it into a Peugeot.
Slashdot Mirror
You should also give more thought to your argument. People generally work as near as possible to home as they can so when a business park moves near a residential zone, this has the effect of driving house prices up - this makes mortgages more expensive meaning a need for higher salaries.
What I'm trying to say here is that corporations are equally to blame for the changes in how and where people work and live but they are only concerned with maximising profits for a few "fat cats" and not with any social responsibility.
As far as I'm concerned, each governmemt should intervene to ensure that if a company trades in their country (i.e. takes money out of the economy) then it has an obligation to provide work to the citizens of that country (i.e. put money back into the economy).
Derive some kind of formula based on profits and percentages of local work force and then start taxing profits the more the workforce is outsourced to other countries. This will serve to make foreign workforces less competitive.
This is a bad example. Microsoft are a public corporation who make money from their operating systems and products and therefore have a duty to their customers to plough some of that money back into an infrastrusture that allows them to distribute updates to their customers without impact on the public Internet.
I personally do not use XP and never will do. As a result, I do not expect the bandwidth I legitimately pay to use from my ISP to be affected by millions of people downloading Service Pack 2 from a peer-to-peer network.
Incidentally, the same goes for any profit-making organisation that sells software and updates, not just Microsoft.
Probably since World War 2, we've seen the breakdown of the family and close-knit social communities for various reasons. Now we don't socialise with our neighbours and entertain ourselves at home a lot - the Internet, DVD & video, games consoles, etc.
Added to that, communications mean we can avoid face-to-face contact with people. Yet I'm beginning to wonder if we are actually yearning for that lost contact and intimacy with other people?
Look at:
- the rise in reality TV which gives us the chance to look "behind the scenes" in peoples' lives
- the increase in celebrity worship and stalking
- DVDs that offer documentaries and commentaries about movies, not just the movies
- mobile phones with "secret" cameras built in
Now the "TV zoom" will allow us to "tear apart" programs and movies to find something new - perhaps the "little yellow van" in the extreme background of a gladiator movie...
All of these technological "advances" seem to succeed because they give us the feeling of some kind of "voyeuristic intimacy" with a particular subject that gives us the feeling of being "one-up" over the rest of the human race.
As a race, I really believe that humans are reaching a turning-point in their evolution - on one hand, we're instinctively social animals enjoying close contact with others but, on the other hand, we're readily accepting technology that allows us to sit back and "view from a distance", probably because ultimately we're being indoctrinated about how important it is to NOT stand out in a crowd - staying at a distance lets us pretend that much more that we are who we're not, just small insecure people who yearn for contact with others.
you _can't_ do that sort of thing on a traditional filesystem.
This is honestly where I have a problem with the concept of database filesystems and don't understand all the fuss over them.
I can do exactly what you mention above (and more) using a user utility like "find" (in UNIX/Linux).
As far as I'm concerned, if a file-system always knows the names, dates, sizes and locations (on the hard disk) of all my files and does it's best to avoid corruption, what more can I ask of it?
Would you like me to:
- Make your dinner?
- Massage your feet?
- Get you a beer from the fridge?
I worked out that if you bought *THE BEST* PC components there are currently, you'd spend about £1000 (= $1500) in total.
That means Alienware is charging you $2000+ for a pretty PC case...
I'm sure the group of people who buy overpriced Alienware products are the same group who'd pay for penis extensions.
No, instead, they tie it up in legalese and patents because, in Microsoft's eyes, they must make money from it. Consequently, it will not be an Internet standard so Microsoft will either use it and increase their incompatibility with everyone else or just drop the whole thing all together.
Well done to ASF for rejecting it because the moment the Internet standards start becoming controlled is the moment the Internet starts to die.
It's putting you off your food, it's keeping you awake at nights, you know it so just admit it.
They pay you millions of dollars in salary a year yet you cannot see what is in front of your face - Microsoft must adapt, must become more open, must embrace open standards or it will die.
Microsoft's a cold blooded dinosaur and the climate's changing - whatcha gonna do, Steve?
We must have had commercial air travel now for something like 80-odd years but all of a sudden it's just SO important that we remain constantly in touch on our phones.
It seems like most of the human race these days needs to look up from their little screen occasionally and see what's happening in the real world.
A mobile phone is a tool, nothing more. Sometimes you need it, most of the time you don't.
Get used to it, get a life!
Populous was excellent, Theme Hospital & Theme Park were also very good. However, creatures was bugged to hell and at times unplayable.
When The Bitmap Brothers can do Speedball 2, Team 17 can do Alien Breed, ID can do Doom & Quake, Sid Meier can do Civilisation and Alpha Centauri, and Chris Sawyer can do Transport Tycoon, Peter Molyneux's output actually drops quite far down that table of "great games".
Yes, the guy has some nice ideas but perhaps needs to give his over-inflated ego a rest and actually get on with his game design a little more.
Perhaps if he sent more time debugging his output (all of Molyneux's games are renowned for wierd and wonderful bugs) rather than hyping himself, he'd get a bit more respect for what he does.
Well thank my lucky stars!!!
The graciousness of MS and Real now allows me to do something I previously took as my right to do with products I legitimately bought previously.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Open Source doesn't let me interoperate with Microsoft's proprietary format - but I'll sleep soundly tonight knowing I've not handed over my freedoms to Microsoft for at least today...
However, you can tell the difference in quality when playing MP3s and CDs through a decent hi-fi, there's just no comparison.
Also, be aware that each time you "burn and rip", you lose a little more quality.
I also used to buy anything up to 6 or so CDs a month purely because the stuff I listen to isn't usually mainstream, doesn't get radio airplay and was therefore bought "as seen" - suffice it to say, about 50% of my CD purchases weren't worth it.
Now I get MP3s from Usenet to check what an album is like before I decide to buy it - if the songs are good, I buy the CD because it's the only way I'll get the quality I want through my hi-fi; if they're crap, they're deleted because they're not even worth wasting disk space on.
If I can't find the CD at a good price (I live in "rip-off Britain"), then I go to Ebay for it or maybe a local second-hand store.
Sure, I accept people want to download music but they're being ripped off because they're getting poorer quality product.
But people really need to stop being dazzled by the "cool factor" of iPods and other digital music players and face reality.
iTunes and MSN Music both use DRM which restricts what you were previously able to do with music. 99c a downloadable song probably seems cheap but please remember that with downloadable music, the record companies are no longer having to press CDs, print covers or factor in the mark-ups of traditional music stores. In other words, they are making just as much (if not more) money from music and treating you like a criminal at the same time. The price you pay for your cool little music player is your freedom.
The solution is to still buy CDs (provided they are unprotected ones) and rip the music yourself in an un-DRM'ed format. If you don't like the prices of CDs then find them as cheap as possible, buy them second-hand or just don't buy them.
It's no different to walking into your bank in, say, a black leather jacket and being ushered out immediately by a security guard just because you look like a criminal.
It's time to take the red pill and wake up people...
For starters, look at the games available on the Gameboy Advance and mobile phones. Most of these games are equivalent to the Amiga/Atari ST/PC games of the mid to late 1980s - all that's really changed in the mobile gaming arena is miniaturisation. However, this demonstrates a continuing demand for those older games - hence the likes of Manic Miner, Speedball 2, etc. appearing on the Gameboy Advance.
Retrogaming also is filling a need for those who want to play some of those old games again, through emulation and remakes. The advantage here is that the copyrights for many old games is so tied up in knots (due to company mergers etc.) that this area is ideal for Open Source games programmers to take advantage of because games are usually small and many, of course, are released into the public domain anyway.
Finally, there's the Open Sourcing of older games allowing programming groups to improve older games, remake game engines, etc.
From my perspective, I'm happy to continue paying for the PC games that I do play and the only reason I keep a couple of Windows installations handy is to play these on, networked with a few buddies occasionally. If commercial games were released on Linux then, yes, I could save a few gigs of hard disk space and ditch Windows for good - but the games will still look and play the same and I wouldn't expect to pay anything less for them.
However, I get as much as a buzz these days out of Space Invaders running in MAME, Lords of Midnight on a ZX Spectrum emulator, the occasional text Infocom text adventure or Speedball 2 in WinUAE or on my trusty Amiga as I do from Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament.
Plus, if I ever fancy something different to play, I can always go trawling the Web for a new emulator or some free games...
Open source games currently fill a need but there's no way FOSS can displace the huge development budgets given to modern commercial game releases, end of story.
However, for me, it's great the way it is currently because I can pick up the latest PC release at the local computer store or jump back and forth through my quarter century of games playing whenever I like.
When you explain to your boss why the solution will take so long, you fill your explanation with relevant but complex jargon that he has no hope of understanding.
If your boss admits to not understanding what you are on about, you can counter with a question asking him how he can impose a timescale on something he doesn't understand...
If he stays quiet, then keep throwing complicated questions at him until he gives up anyway - e.g. "Would you like me to compile the kernel with better gcc oprimisations?"
Believe me, it never fails and you get to look like a genius :-)
I must say that his readings were of very high quality and he was able to do the voices of the other characters very convincingly.
A great actor.
"Yes, sir, don't worry about the problem, we'll have it all worked out and fixed for you by 2011."
If there was ever an excuse to use an alternative software supplier to Microsoft, this is it.
I guess I'll have to stay up extra late tonight then in order to finish downloading the entire Internet onto my laptop...
If it happens to be a "must have" mod, a fair proportion of the game buyers end up applying it and the advertiser gets less coverage and revenue as a result.
In that instance, I guess the only litigation the advertiser can take would be against the game creator or publisher.
What? You mean you're having to change some hardware?