"The issue is that in the beginning we where told that nothing you could buy for "real money" would give you an advantage over non-paying players."
If it gives no competitive advantage then why in the world would it be worth real money?
Seems to me that they did an initial forecast as to the game's cashflow and profitability, potential ad revenue, and so on. They then tried it out in the real world and found out that people weren't buying enough pretty clothes and other useless items, nor was the ad revenue what they expected.
Look at the sunlight on the left wingtip. See the shadow from the tail and engine nozzle? Sun is fairly high to the immediate right. Now look at the ridge lines on the ground, top of the frame: shadows cast left, sun high to the right. It matches.
"Science complements the gambler's fallacy with the same flaw but the opposite conclusion--that the 4 is more probable because of the sequence."
And you're arguing by analogy, another fallacy.
Speaking in those terms, and to use my example: the sun may rise tomorrow, or it may not. But thousands of years of observation, coupled with the scientific inference and deduction of natural laws, all tell us the mechanics of just what it means for the sun to "rise" tomorrow, and that it's not a simple 50/50 proposition.
Or to use your example, four straight 4's may be a statistical fluke... or one might begin to use that statistical anomaly to make some deduction as to the nature of the dice themselves (loaded). Accumulate enough observations, and you might decide that it's in your best interests to do go play dice with someone else, "probabilities" be damned.
"Even if you could assert something definitive from the repetition of events..."
If you truly believe that, then I invite you to step off the top of the nearest ten-story roof. Under your assertion, repetition and past experience will not necessarily hold true, and you'll float there and win your argument. From my perspective, however, if you do so then I'll need to make a call to 911 so they can scrape the pieces off the sidewalk.
So... unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, I suggest you go back to counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
"You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future."
Flip side, you can't prove that it won't hold true in the future either. In essence, your argument is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
The bottom line is that you're engaging in fancy footwork trying to get to him to use the word "faith", in which case you then have a basis for moving on to a discussion of "true faith", a belief in God or some such. Faith is belief without proof.
But... if you have proof then you don't need faith. Past personal observation, history, science, math, and orbital mechanics all say that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith is not needed.
"I don't think wristwatches will become obsolete, but they will certainly be (and in many cases have been) relegated to the role of optional fashion accessory."
The article is correct. Watch sales are down worldwide by 30-40%.
"Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the late 80's."
Oh, I don't know. Children of Men was a good Sci-Fi "what if" kind of story. The Matrix (not the sequels) was a great "what's the nature of reality" story. GATTACA (cloning), Contact (SETI), Final Cut and Strange Days (recording memories and images), Sunshine (should man continue), and Phenomenon (how we might react to paranormal abilities).
Even The Island and Paycheck and Deja Vu (human cloning and memory erasure and time travel), while over the top only as Bay and Woo and Scott can do, still offered some interesting insights into the consequences of those actions.
Science fiction is the genre of the "what if", presented in a plausible form.
You mean, all of those databases that the government wants you to believe that aren't real???
Seriously though, how complete and accurate a picture of you and your activities could I create with complete and total access to your credit history? Bank and credit card statements? Health and medical records? Phone and SMS text records? Amazon purchases and NetFlix rentals? Credit cards linked with grocery store loyalty cards and purchases? Access to your Gmail and Facebook and Twitter accounts? Your ISP's logs of every web site you've visited?
"If this is not true, then why are so many fart apps on iphone..."
Because, like making a "flashlight" app, making a app that does little more than play a sound is dead simple. In fact, the developer site even has demo code for it.
And it's not "sheeple" as much as it is that the iPhone is extremely popular among kids, students, and college types. Not exactly a high-brow audience, if you know what I mean.
Do you think that developers would NOT flock to a dedicated application sales channel for OS X desktop applications? One that handles listing, payment, downloads, and security for a mere 30% of the application price?
What third party vendors lack above all else is VISIBILITY. Most don't even know their applications and solutions exist. Having a OS X App Store would be a godsend to most of these people.
"... some righteous macros to make the code more readable..."
OMG, somebody fire this jerk. In most cases adding macros MAY make the code more readable for you, but the next poor guy who comes along can no longer look at that section of code to see what's going on, but must now combine the code he's reading with a macro that he can only assume was implemented properly in the first place.
And if by "righteous" you mean some complex and convoluted code boiled down into a single line... then you should not only be fired, but shot.
Unless the above should have been in [sarcasm] tags, in which case, the immortal words of Miss Emily Litella apply. (grin)
"... by separating your raw data into 100 raw input files, one for each page..."
Except that most reports have totals and breaks and subtotals that wouldn't work across such pagination. In fact, you'd practically have to paginate the entire report first to determine what elements to assign to each page.
Stream it? With that much processing power it should be able to create it on the spot: "Computer, let's start today's scenario with Angelina Jolie surrounded by...."
Actually, our boy Cringely wants the net to travel in a polar orbit to catch junk that's mainly traveling in a equatorial orbit. Think of a bit of junk t-boning your net at 17,000 MPH.
"In Go you just have to confirm to an interface, you don't have to inherit from it. Which removes most cases for which you would need inheritance for in the first place. The rest can be handled by good old composition. "
Which prevents you from doing any kind of framework that provides core functionality that you then extend. Worse, there's no delegation either.
And "conforming" to an interface requires that you implement all of the interface's methods. ALL of them. From scratch.
This is basically the OLE Component/Interface model. A component model, not an object model.
True object oriented systems include features such as data abstraction and encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Lose one and you may have objects of some sort, but you've also lost one of the fundamental building blocks of OOP and design.
"I can turn off one of my web servers or database servers, literally killing tens of thousands of connections, and the worst case is a half a second of delay or so while the cluster removes it from the loop. The most the user sees is some web pages don't load some content."
So if that server is running a shopping cart, then "thousands" of users might just have had their credit card submissions fail. They don't get confirmations and they don't know if the order went through or not. And I'd almost guarantee that your web server code sending the payment info to the payment processor and then updating the order database isn't atomic and will NOT fail gracefully, as two different systems are involved. Sure, your database may (repeat, may) have rolled back on a dropped connection, but that payment processor request to their server was applied and was NOT recorded.
In short, your scenario wasn't "worst case" at all.
If I were you I'd THINK about the consequences of such events occuring and not snidely assume that you have all the bases covered and that someone else is automatically "doing it wrong". In fact, I'll bet you a hundred bucks I could walk into your server room right now, pull just one power cord to the right switch, router, or load-balancer, and bring down the entire house.
"Session mgmt: store the session in a distributed way at least after each request."
Bingo. With your solution, a submitted page request will fail. In fact, every page request and connection being handled by that server when it fails will fail.
With the article's solution, things automagically switch over and everyone gets the data they requested. Users notice nothing.
"... so nobody ever sees the downtime..."
Except all of the users that clicked register or buy and get nothing at all.
"If your primary and secondary systems are physically located next to each other then they aren't in the category of highly available."
High availability covers more than just distributed data centers. Load-balancing, fail-over, clustering, mirroring, reduntant switches, routers, and other hardware: all are zero-point-of-failure, high availability solutions.
"Now, randomly, arbitrarily, they are being punished for 'gaming' their system."
How can you write stuff like this with a straight face? It's all Microsoft's problem because they didn't lock the hardware down enough?
I suppose I can rob your house and blame you because your locks suck, you have no alarm system, and you didn't install iron bars on every window and door?
And enthusiasts that steal? Keep 'em off the system. If they're not enthusiastic enough to actually buy the game then they're simply parasites on the system as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
"The issue is that in the beginning we where told that nothing you could buy for "real money" would give you an advantage over non-paying players."
If it gives no competitive advantage then why in the world would it be worth real money?
Seems to me that they did an initial forecast as to the game's cashflow and profitability, potential ad revenue, and so on. They then tried it out in the real world and found out that people weren't buying enough pretty clothes and other useless items, nor was the ad revenue what they expected.
So. Either adjust pricing or fold the game.
Which would you prefer?
Look at the sunlight on the left wingtip. See the shadow from the tail and engine nozzle? Sun is fairly high to the immediate right. Now look at the ridge lines on the ground, top of the frame: shadows cast left, sun high to the right. It matches.
Ditto. Nicer without 25% of the footage overlaid with graphics and credits.
"Science complements the gambler's fallacy with the same flaw but the opposite conclusion--that the 4 is more probable because of the sequence."
And you're arguing by analogy, another fallacy.
Speaking in those terms, and to use my example: the sun may rise tomorrow, or it may not. But thousands of years of observation, coupled with the scientific inference and deduction of natural laws, all tell us the mechanics of just what it means for the sun to "rise" tomorrow, and that it's not a simple 50/50 proposition.
Or to use your example, four straight 4's may be a statistical fluke... or one might begin to use that statistical anomaly to make some deduction as to the nature of the dice themselves (loaded). Accumulate enough observations, and you might decide that it's in your best interests to do go play dice with someone else, "probabilities" be damned.
"Even if you could assert something definitive from the repetition of events..."
If you truly believe that, then I invite you to step off the top of the nearest ten-story roof. Under your assertion, repetition and past experience will not necessarily hold true, and you'll float there and win your argument. From my perspective, however, if you do so then I'll need to make a call to 911 so they can scrape the pieces off the sidewalk.
So... unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, I suggest you go back to counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
"You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future."
Flip side, you can't prove that it won't hold true in the future either. In essence, your argument is a case of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
The bottom line is that you're engaging in fancy footwork trying to get to him to use the word "faith", in which case you then have a basis for moving on to a discussion of "true faith", a belief in God or some such. Faith is belief without proof.
But... if you have proof then you don't need faith. Past personal observation, history, science, math, and orbital mechanics all say that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith is not needed.
"I don't think wristwatches will become obsolete, but they will certainly be (and in many cases have been) relegated to the role of optional fashion accessory."
The article is correct. Watch sales are down worldwide by 30-40%.
"Good sci-fi (movies anyway) tapered off in the late 80's."
Oh, I don't know. Children of Men was a good Sci-Fi "what if" kind of story. The Matrix (not the sequels) was a great "what's the nature of reality" story. GATTACA (cloning), Contact (SETI), Final Cut and Strange Days (recording memories and images), Sunshine (should man continue), and Phenomenon (how we might react to paranormal abilities).
Even The Island and Paycheck and Deja Vu (human cloning and memory erasure and time travel), while over the top only as Bay and Woo and Scott can do, still offered some interesting insights into the consequences of those actions.
Science fiction is the genre of the "what if", presented in a plausible form.
You mean, all of those databases that the government wants you to believe that aren't real???
Seriously though, how complete and accurate a picture of you and your activities could I create with complete and total access to your credit history? Bank and credit card statements? Health and medical records? Phone and SMS text records? Amazon purchases and NetFlix rentals? Credit cards linked with grocery store loyalty cards and purchases? Access to your Gmail and Facebook and Twitter accounts? Your ISP's logs of every web site you've visited?
Sobering, if you stop to think about it.
"If this is not true, then why are so many fart apps on iphone..."
Because, like making a "flashlight" app, making a app that does little more than play a sound is dead simple. In fact, the developer site even has demo code for it.
And it's not "sheeple" as much as it is that the iPhone is extremely popular among kids, students, and college types. Not exactly a high-brow audience, if you know what I mean.
Do you think that developers would NOT flock to a dedicated application sales channel for OS X desktop applications? One that handles listing, payment, downloads, and security for a mere 30% of the application price?
What third party vendors lack above all else is VISIBILITY. Most don't even know their applications and solutions exist. Having a OS X App Store would be a godsend to most of these people.
"Vlingo's app is crippled on the iPhone because of Apple policies."
Proof? Link? Citation?
Or is it "crippled" because they have to use the API's and can't root around in the hardware like they can on the Crackberry?
"Now, if you are talking about something like these then I'm with you. Up against the wall!"
Since he said, "some righteous macros", I had to assume he meant more than just a few constants.
"I had to look that one up."
Kids these days... (grin)
"Maintenance isn't a rewrite from scratch to do the same thing, as much as we'd like it to be."
Meaning that you can't figure out how the previous developer did what he did, and if you rewrite it from scratch at least YOU will understand it.
Unfortunately, that doesn't help the next developer, who's now totally unable to read and parse your brilliant semi-logical code...
And wants to rewrite IT from scratch.
"... some righteous macros to make the code more readable..."
OMG, somebody fire this jerk. In most cases adding macros MAY make the code more readable for you, but the next poor guy who comes along can no longer look at that section of code to see what's going on, but must now combine the code he's reading with a macro that he can only assume was implemented properly in the first place.
And if by "righteous" you mean some complex and convoluted code boiled down into a single line... then you should not only be fired, but shot.
Unless the above should have been in [sarcasm] tags, in which case, the immortal words of Miss Emily Litella apply. (grin)
"... this is The Year of the Linux Desktop..."
I thought that was 2004? Or was it 2005? Or 2006? Or 2007? Or 2008?
"... by separating your raw data into 100 raw input files, one for each page..."
Except that most reports have totals and breaks and subtotals that wouldn't work across such pagination. In fact, you'd practically have to paginate the entire report first to determine what elements to assign to each page.
Stream it? With that much processing power it should be able to create it on the spot: "Computer, let's start today's scenario with Angelina Jolie surrounded by...."
Actually, our boy Cringely wants the net to travel in a polar orbit to catch junk that's mainly traveling in a equatorial orbit. Think of a bit of junk t-boning your net at 17,000 MPH.
Too bad the language doesn't support delegates either. (As does Objective-C.)
"In Go you just have to confirm to an interface, you don't have to inherit from it. Which removes most cases for which you would need inheritance for in the first place. The rest can be handled by good old composition. "
Which prevents you from doing any kind of framework that provides core functionality that you then extend. Worse, there's no delegation either.
And "conforming" to an interface requires that you implement all of the interface's methods. ALL of them. From scratch.
This is basically the OLE Component/Interface model. A component model, not an object model.
True object oriented systems include features such as data abstraction and encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Lose one and you may have objects of some sort, but you've also lost one of the fundamental building blocks of OOP and design.
"I can turn off one of my web servers or database servers, literally killing tens of thousands of connections, and the worst case is a half a second of delay or so while the cluster removes it from the loop. The most the user sees is some web pages don't load some content."
So if that server is running a shopping cart, then "thousands" of users might just have had their credit card submissions fail. They don't get confirmations and they don't know if the order went through or not. And I'd almost guarantee that your web server code sending the payment info to the payment processor and then updating the order database isn't atomic and will NOT fail gracefully, as two different systems are involved. Sure, your database may (repeat, may) have rolled back on a dropped connection, but that payment processor request to their server was applied and was NOT recorded.
In short, your scenario wasn't "worst case" at all.
If I were you I'd THINK about the consequences of such events occuring and not snidely assume that you have all the bases covered and that someone else is automatically "doing it wrong". In fact, I'll bet you a hundred bucks I could walk into your server room right now, pull just one power cord to the right switch, router, or load-balancer, and bring down the entire house.
"Session mgmt: store the session in a distributed way at least after each request."
Bingo. With your solution, a submitted page request will fail. In fact, every page request and connection being handled by that server when it fails will fail.
With the article's solution, things automagically switch over and everyone gets the data they requested. Users notice nothing.
"... so nobody ever sees the downtime..."
Except all of the users that clicked register or buy and get nothing at all.
"If your primary and secondary systems are physically located next to each other then they aren't in the category of highly available."
High availability covers more than just distributed data centers. Load-balancing, fail-over, clustering, mirroring, reduntant switches, routers, and other hardware: all are zero-point-of-failure, high availability solutions.
"Now, randomly, arbitrarily, they are being punished for 'gaming' their system."
How can you write stuff like this with a straight face? It's all Microsoft's problem because they didn't lock the hardware down enough?
I suppose I can rob your house and blame you because your locks suck, you have no alarm system, and you didn't install iron bars on every window and door?
And enthusiasts that steal? Keep 'em off the system. If they're not enthusiastic enough to actually buy the game then they're simply parasites on the system as a whole.