and much like movies, there is debate over whether the plots of some Japanese games (including metal gear) are actually intellectual or simply the result of someone getting high or throwing crap at the screen until it sticks.
That being said, the Shin Megami Tensei series does tend to explore some interesting ideas (of course we've only seen Nocturne released in the US from the main series, but a lot of the spin-offs have been published in the PS2 generation).
Europe suffers a lot from publishers generally waiting for a US release and then picking through the wreckage. I've mostly moved towards buying games from NIS and Atlus over the last few years, but then I do tend towards RPGs and Strategy RPGs, as do they. Occasionally something peaks my interest from other developers/publishers, but it seems that as the plots in action games still seem fairly juvenile I've tended towards going with less plot in my action games (ie Geometry Wars and other non-FP shooters) and making up for it with more RPGs.
Re:My advice - don't look for satisfaction in game
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How Do Games Grow Up?
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Actually, because of the lax system in place in both Guitar Hero and Rock Band (though GH is the worse of the two), they don't do a very good job of teaching rhythm, either. You can be off-beat by quite a bit and still get a perfect score in GH, but you'll sound like crap on a real guitar if you can't at least stretch your rhythm errors out over a few bars.
I can get by in Guitar Hero and Rock Band with a little practice, but I find the songs I have the hardest time playing in those games are the ones I can actually play on a guitar or bass, and the lower you set the difficulty on the game the less likely it is to actually represent even the rhythm of the different instruments in the song accurately.
and most of the newer fighters coming along are video games in a sense anyway, because you no longer have direct control of the plane, and instead feed inputs to a computer which decides how best to interpret those inputs without letting the plane fall out of the sky.
Most of the time the value of the game is in the players' choice of games and purpose for playing them. Games are marketed primarily as entertainment, so most have an entertainment portion, but there are many games trying to teach people things, and many people repurpose games to learn from them (ie driving and flight simulators, the many games commissioned by the military for recruiting and training).
As many have already said, the question is not whether games can convey meaningful messages and expose people to new ideas, as they certainly can do so as much as any book, movie, or TV show. It's a question of what games you decide to play. Action games (whether FPS or otherwise) have started to bring in more story elements, but for the most part they still fall into the same realm as an action movie, and are mostly action-driven entertainment. An RPG, for the most part, is centered on story, it's simply a question of how far the developers were willing to go with a particular story.
Even a fairly light-hearted story like that in Disgaea (a console strategy-RPG) brings about some questions about good vs. evil, and how perspective can change what is good or evil (and for the most part, even though the game doesn't really take itself seriously, it's an idea to which a lot of people seem to need exposure). Even fairly open-ended RPGs like Fallout could have a lot to tell us, and more people are getting involved in writing for games every year that take their work more seriously than anyone involved in Super Mario Bros.
This is why fancy scopes have HPIB interfaces. Get an HPIB card for your computer for which you understand the programming interface and you'll only have to deal with the pain of getting HPIB to work and troubleshooting your code.
Of course, if you're not accustomed to automating this type of work it can take a little bit of time to bend your mind around some of the basic problems (like building a test rig so you don't have to hold the probes in place, or determining what commands you really want or need for the testing).
As there are NO LINUX VIRUSES a setup like this needs no AV software.
Most are short-lived, but they definitely exist. There are also plenty of reasons that people wouldn't need AV software on any system, it's just a matter of how people use their systems and whether or not they trust everything that comes through their browser and email software.
Of course, it also helps to have a firewall, which should be considered far more important than AV software for everyone.
I remember my college getting hit pretty hard by bliss in 1997. Apparently even the network admins had fallen victim to the idea that Linux and Solaris were safe and hadn't bothered to log in as a user to run some bit of code that wasn't part of normal administration. Of course, even some of the normal users managed to do a little damage running infected files on the networked systems, and the thing even managed to spread to remote users because the local ISP was run by the college.
In the end, bliss wasn't a hard mess to clean up (many versions included command line options that would clean themselves up for you). However, it impacted the network and its systems for two days, and the only problem the Windows users on campus had to deal with was the inability to turn in their CS homework with the mail server down.
For the most part under Vista and XP you get a virus for the same reason you would on any other system: - You haven't kept things up to date (installed patches for vulnerabilities) - You have a user running with escalated privileges that is doing something they shouldn't be doing.
The biggest problem with Windows remains that by default you run as administrator. Vista made it less painful to run as a standard user, but still left the default user account as an administrator.
Additionally, since it has always been common for Windows users to have administrator access, a lot of software assumed it was available or did things that required administrator access when they didn't really need it. This meant that when Vista was first released, it was common to get prompted for administrator access when installing non-administrative software and performing some actions that wouldn't normally require administrator access (like running a game, for instance).
This meant that early adopters were either conditioned to grant programs access that shouldn't have needed it or turn off User Access Control (which additionally had/has some performance penalties associated with it), which returned them to the previous state of Windows where everyone ran as administrators and didn't know whether or not the software they are using is doing something it shouldn't be doing.
At this point it's far less common for programs to try to gain administrator access in Windows, but until MS changes the defaults and makes the primary account a user account, or somehow makes it more annoying to run as an administrator than as a normal user (which would just piss people off, I'm sure), these problems will still persist.
Personally, the company I work for mandates AV software on their computers, so the computer I work on, which is technically better than the computer I use at home, is slow and has unusual glitches (like random blue-screens when working with a lot of open files in varied programs that require a lot of resources; or the long periods of thrashing on the hard drive as the virus scanner tries to scan every file I'm accessing).
At home, where I switch between Vista and Linux, I don't use AV software unless Vista starts misbehaving. The computer is much more stable and much faster than the work computer, and when it does start acting up I usually find that it's some piece of spyware that most AV software won't pick up anyway (and running 1 or 2 spyware scanners picks it up right away and kills it). So, someone gets to spy on my surfing habits until they get annoying, and they get the boot.
Of course, I don't assume my Linux system is secure, either, I just don't run a stable enough Linux system to worry about it, and reload the whole thing every other week.
Take crash tests on new vehicles. Name me one that doesn't have a 5-star crash rating?
Most cars do not have 5-star crash ratings across the board (in fact, very few do). They might have a 5-star rating in one or two of the tests, but the reality is that in advertising if you get 1 5-star rating you advertise it, and if you don't, you just don't mention your crash ratings at all (just your number of air-bags and other safety features).
They also manage to advertise it even if only one package of several received a 5-star rating. Of course, your point still stands in one way: very few cars receive 3-star or less ratings, and it's not a required test to begin with...
For example, the 5-star front-impact crash rating is par for the course now... but nobody seems to advertise the offset crashes, such as the right half of your bumper hitting the left half of your 'opponents' bumper. Why? Because it's sad in comparison. It's also not pretty to watch.
Actually, it's two different groups doing the tests. 5-star ratings come from NCAP, which doesn't do offset tests. Offset tests are done by IIHS, and most cars receive a "Good" rating on offset tests, which is the highest rating they give. Further, when the IIHS releases their "Top Safety Pick" awards, they are usually advertised by the recipients, and the vehicle has to have received a "Good" rating in all the overall categories they test. Yes, the tests need to be better and the ratings need to be harder to achieve, but the IIHS has been pointing out that in the just over 10 years they've been doing the offset tests the industry has improved significantly in its results.
The rating systems on crash tests are based on hard numbers, and they list what those numbers are on their respective websites. If they change those numbers over time they remain relevant, though I'm not aware of them changing those numbers in any significant way recently. Of course, you do have to question whether or not it's really possible to get significantly better than a 10% chance of serious injury (a 5-star rating) in a crash test with current technology. They should probably increase the speeds on the tests rather than messing with the survival rates.
So all the power to making the standards hard to achieve. Yes this may not be the 'real world' threat, but it's a threat nonetheless. They're basically saying "Since England isn't going to declare war on the USA, any preparedness for receipt of an attack by the USA shouldn't be considered in overall military preparedness". That's of course rediculous. Protect only against the popular virus and the unpopular virus will begin to spread.
Actually, the tests they failed on were non-threats. Yes, I agree that they should detect breaches of vulnerabilities in the system (though I also agree with them that a known vulnerability should be patched), but the fact is that the reason they weren't detected is because there was no payload.
These tests are like doing the crash tests without actually causing a crash. We usually call those tests crash avoidance or brake tests, not crash tests, and there's a valid reason for both types of testing. You don't give someone a 1-star crash test rating when the car can't avoid a crash but still manages to prevent injuries to the driver and passengers most of the time. Similarly, you don't rate them well for braking and crash avoidance just because everyone can walk away when the car doesn't stop.
Even that is only interesting if you get a phone plan with unlimited local calls or something, which usually costs as least as much as unlimitied mobile internet, depending on where you live.
I think that's a big part of the problem. In the US unlimited local calls have been a part of a standard phone service contract for a very long time. You can get a phone service without it, but they're not regularly advertised and even more rarely purchased (it's roughly $10/month for a Verizon phone line with tolls on local calls, vs. $16+, depending on services, for unlimited local).
So, given a phone company that's charging you for local calls, which cost the company almost nothing after initial costs for the network and maintenance are taken care of, how would you ever expect to get unlimited internet, which is usually in the same boat as local phone service (the ISP usually negotiates a fixed monthly price for links to other networks, and their operational costs are relatively stable).
Of course, the US government and corporations made some interesting choices laying the majority of the backbone the internet uses within the "lower 48" states, and most of the cost for what we're currently using has long since been written off as a loss. For the most part the companies profiting heavily as ISPs today aren't the same people that spent the money to put the fiber in the ground that gives high speed access to servers in New York for end-users in Los Angeles.
On the other hand, the cable and phone companies have been spending a lot of money in some areas laying fiber between local homes and the sites that backbone is wired into, and some of them certainly are complaining about the costs of doing so. Some (like Comcast), seem to simply be looking for ways to get out of doing upgrades at all, or get out of the constant cycle of upgrades that result from users actually using the bandwidth they're told they have.
The real story in the article isn't about the size of MMO updates and managing use on a cap. The juicy bits were the arguments that US broadband carriers may be running trials and leaning towards implementing caps.
It may not be true for the majority of carriers, and the article certainly is light on details (even regarding the supposed topic of MMO bandwidth usage), but it's something that should be of concern for everyone currently on unlimited access. I know that in the last month I've downloaded several gigs of data without even considering the impact because I have an unlimited connection, and I haven't played an MMO game in a couple of years. A couple of linux distros and several massive updates, a 1.x gig download for the highest-quality version of NIN's internet-release album (and the accompanied uploads since he's using BitTorrent for distribution). Still not in the 20GB range, I would hope, but it's not something I usually have to think about.
Most people put aside something for education as an escape from the news and their own problems. What that entertainment may be and how much someone's willing to spend is going to vary.
Cable TV I could easily toss aside, but internet and cell service isn't going to happen (especially since the rise in cell subscriptions has lead to a decline in the availability of pay phones). I don't see a need for a home phone, but some still cling to that as if it's somehow more likely to still work in an emergency or disaster situation than their cell phone.
I really don't see cutting off the cell phone and internet as entertainment related, though. I see it more as cutting myself off from my family and friends, most of which are on the other side of the country (in fact neither my wife nor myself has any family within an hour's drive, and most of my family is on the opposite coast of the US).
Debt doesn't magically appear just because you reduce taxes. In fact, the tax cuts would have been fairly reasonable if it weren't for all of the increased spending that's come along in the last 8 years. Spending millions a year in a war increases national debt, as does increases in MediCare, spending billions bailing out financial companies that got themselves into trouble, more billions bailing out the US auto makers that haven't made a profit in years (and have been sending jobs out of the country as quickly as possible), and more billions of dollars in foreign aid.
Generally, when people say they're anti-taxes and aren't just looking for some mythical nanny-state that can take the money from someone else and give it to them, they also mean they're anti-government-spending.
At the moment, some of us might have to bite the bullet on paying some extra taxes to get out of this mess, but I don't want to do it if the government's just going to turn around and find ways to spend more money.
It's a shame the Republicans have been turned into the church state party, while the Democrats are pulling towards socialism. It just means that either party turns it into an exercise of bigger government and less rights for all of us.
Then they turn around and do whatever they feel like when they get in office anyway, and you can't even trust what they've done in the past or what they say they'll do.
The numbers were based on people that voted for Bush switching to vote for Kerry, and were actually 57787 for Kerry, and 269 for Gore. In Gore's case, 80% of the votes for almost any of the third party candidates in Florida could have been enough, even if you counted the full number of over 500 votes he would have needed.
The NT kernel numbers were lined up with the "consumer" Windows kernel numbers with which they shared an interface. Therefore: Windows 1 Windows 2 Windows 3 - NT 3 Windows 9x/Me - NT 4 Windows 2000/XP (NT 5) Windows Vista (NT 6)
BTW - 2000 had Intel 64-bit versions as well, and 3 or 4 different named versions because it was (like the previous NT Workstations), aligned with the server OS.
They had a tendency to market the NT and desktop OS versions as complimentary, and this was heavily tied in with the use of similar interfaces in the versions. The idea was that even though they had trouble selling NT on the desktop beyond expensive workstations, they could push the consumer OS as being inter-operable and similar enough that it reduced training costs. This was especially important with the release of NT 3.1 (and forward), where they wanted people to think they could leverage their knowledge base in Windows 3.1 to build a network with higher-end workstations and servers, trying to pull market share from Novell and IBM.
In the end, though, MS has never been particularly careful with their numbering. They changed the numbering on Visual C++ to align it with not only the NT and Windows version numbers, but also the Visual Basic version numbers, skipping 3.x completely. They skipped version 6 of Excel to align the Office application versions. Reversioned Word for Windows to align with the Word for DOS version (skipping from 2 to 6), Outlook's first version number in Office was 8, Access went from 2 to 7, and Visio went from 6 to 10 after MS picked it up.
Of course, they could just increment the kernel to 7.0 when they get around to releasing Windows 7.
Forget the people living here, there were people from parts of Europe and Asia trading with the people living here already.
Maybe when our children grow up learning that Columbus wasn't the only person that believed the world was round, but rather was the only person that believed it was significantly smaller than it actually is, we can start rethinking the Columbus Day thing. Of course, I had to work yesterday, as I always have on Columbus Day.
I blame our parents:) for telling us that a college degree will land us a badass job and a big-ass house right out of college when the unfortunate reality is that the fresh mechanical engineering graduate will take their first job as a hinge or pipe designer or that a CS grad will have to code lazy kids' homework assignments for hire!
It's not really our parents' faults, as it was true when they went into the job market (more or less), while now having a B.S. is roughly equivalent to what used to be a high school diploma, and in some industries it's even worse.
In the case of CS in particular, this is largely a result of the dot-com bust, as people were hiring kids barely out of high school (or in some cases still in high school) for so long just to fill all of the available positions. Most of the job openings are now long gone, along with most of the companies, and there's a glut of people that have programming experience or degrees, but a much smaller number of people with both.
Generally speaking, you need to ask some questions when you go into interviews, and try to find out if they actually have a career path from QA to development. There are companies that do this, and even companies that don't have this career path clearly laid out may give opportunities to employees to prove themselves before hiring someone new for a non-entry-level position.
In other words, as already stated, talk to the managers that deal with the developers and see if there's something you can do to qualify yourself for possible job openings in their departments. If you're looking for work elsewhere, make it clear that while you may be willing to take a QA job, you would like to move up to a development job, and ask questions about the career options.
If you're patient you'll eventually find the right fit and be able to move on from QA work. Most companies still prefer to promote internally rather than hire new people, because it's easier to fill entry-level jobs opened up by people moving up within the chain, and it improves morale for people to see movement within the company.
.Net is slowly replacing the Win32 API, and doesn't hold the backwards-compatibility issues that are inherent with an API that debuted in NT and Win95. This is why it's popular with Windows developers. Additionally, you can learn one API and use C#, VB, C++, J# (ie Java syntax) and a number of other languages to access the API in a very similar fashion.
In other words, they're trying to address many of the problems developers had with the Windows platform. If developers have fewer problems writing software for Windows, then that obviously is a problem for other platforms.
On the other hand, you can always write software targeting older versions of the run-time, and most developers do so specifically because they don't want to learn the new portions of the API and are often limited by availability within their target audience. Despite.Net being widely available through Windows Update, you don't see a massive migration among end-users to the latest version of.Net, and it's a pain in the ass to tell users they have to download a patch (even if it is on Windows Update, but this applies to Java as well) to run your program.
It doesn't address your base point, but Adobe wouldn't bother moving to.Net for the simple fact that most of their software has a huge base among Mac users. I'm really mildly surprised that they haven't tried to embrace the Linux community by leveraging the code they had to write for OS X compatibility.
As someone that develops for Windows at work and primarily uses Linux at home, I really have come to believe the killer apps on Windows are games and IE. Unfortunately it's not that IE is a good platform, it's that people keep writing to it because it has such high usage numbers. If I could get Netflix movies running through firefox it would eliminate a large percentage of my boots into Windows. DRM and the increasing quality of console ports lead me to playing fewer PC games anyway, leaving me with RTS games and occasional western RPGs as my primary reason for booting the PC into Windows for gaming. Frankly, as my PC ages it gets less important because new games won't even play on the laptop any more.
The Mono Trap is that you might get stuck on a platform encumbered by patents, so that even if you're coding on a 100% FOSS system, a court ruling granting an injunction against further release and development of Mono could yank the rug out from under you. Maybe that's no big deal for cute games or desktop applets, but there's no way on Earth I'd stake my business on a platform that may be nuked from orbit at any moment.
While I wouldn't stake a business on running.Net apps in linux (for a number of reasons, including the above), I would point out that since you can call native code from.Net, it's possible to write your way out of the problem if something like that occurs. Granted, it would be a pain in the ass rewriting your application, but it's completely possible, and can be done incrementally, much like prototyping in python and moving to C.
The tests performed are a little different, especially since N. American tests assume that there are much bigger vehicles on the road than a Ford Focus.
That being said, the modern Ford Focus performs pretty well in NA safety tests (anyone can look them up just fine), scoring 4/5 or 5/5 on all of the tests. 4 or 5 years ago, though, it was another matter.
You have to have the right car to accelerate out of danger. Something with high torque and that is really responsive to the gas pedal (sometimes the computers don't like letting you smash the gas pedal when you're already going down the road at 60+ mph). A lot of the sporty cars are made for top-end speed and don't have the torque you need to accelerate from 60 to 80 really quickly whenever you feel like it (but might not do too badly when you accelerate from 0 to 80 all at once).
I've managed to use the ABS on a '96 Z28 (which I no longer own due to gas prices) 3 or 4 times, and I have to say that the ability to decide where the car was going to end up was always the most important thing on my mind when I needed to hit the brakes like that. Of course, that car weighed a ton, and I was almost always going too fast when I needed to slam on the brakes.
I also have never been in a wreck while driving, and I am far more likely to accelerate to get away from someone than to brake to stay out of an accident. Unless there's nowhere to go and you somehow don't see it coming, braking is not the most likely choice to avoid a problem.
Of course, if you buy drugs from someone that you've complained to the police about several times, and then call the cops and show them the drugs you bought, guess who's going to jail...
But, since it's a civil matter and the RIAA endorsed the actions of the investigator, the downloading of the files is not a crime, while distributing the files may be.
Of course, if the actual copyright holder(s) stepped up and sued the investigator for downloading the file, that might be more interesting. Sometimes copyrights are assigned to the RIAA for these cases, but I often wonder how much time the RIAA spends determining whether or not they have the copyrights to the files they're complaining about.
A lot of that sounds very strange. Which version of the Razr is that? For instance, the Razr I carried around for a couple years:
1) played MP3s (mostly only used this for ring tones)
2) charged from USB in Windows (I forgot my wall charger who knows how many times)
3) had REALLY TERRIBLE battery life (less than a day with little talk time)
Of course, the MP3 playback sucked, but was good enough for ring tones, I only used the calendar to set up alarms (I use my phone as an alarm clock, so if I can't set up 3 or more alarms to go off every weekday morning I don't buy the phone), and the camera definitely sucked.
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and much like movies, there is debate over whether the plots of some Japanese games (including metal gear) are actually intellectual or simply the result of someone getting high or throwing crap at the screen until it sticks.
That being said, the Shin Megami Tensei series does tend to explore some interesting ideas (of course we've only seen Nocturne released in the US from the main series, but a lot of the spin-offs have been published in the PS2 generation).
Europe suffers a lot from publishers generally waiting for a US release and then picking through the wreckage. I've mostly moved towards buying games from NIS and Atlus over the last few years, but then I do tend towards RPGs and Strategy RPGs, as do they. Occasionally something peaks my interest from other developers/publishers, but it seems that as the plots in action games still seem fairly juvenile I've tended towards going with less plot in my action games (ie Geometry Wars and other non-FP shooters) and making up for it with more RPGs.
Actually, because of the lax system in place in both Guitar Hero and Rock Band (though GH is the worse of the two), they don't do a very good job of teaching rhythm, either. You can be off-beat by quite a bit and still get a perfect score in GH, but you'll sound like crap on a real guitar if you can't at least stretch your rhythm errors out over a few bars.
I can get by in Guitar Hero and Rock Band with a little practice, but I find the songs I have the hardest time playing in those games are the ones I can actually play on a guitar or bass, and the lower you set the difficulty on the game the less likely it is to actually represent even the rhythm of the different instruments in the song accurately.
and most of the newer fighters coming along are video games in a sense anyway, because you no longer have direct control of the plane, and instead feed inputs to a computer which decides how best to interpret those inputs without letting the plane fall out of the sky.
Most of the time the value of the game is in the players' choice of games and purpose for playing them. Games are marketed primarily as entertainment, so most have an entertainment portion, but there are many games trying to teach people things, and many people repurpose games to learn from them (ie driving and flight simulators, the many games commissioned by the military for recruiting and training).
As many have already said, the question is not whether games can convey meaningful messages and expose people to new ideas, as they certainly can do so as much as any book, movie, or TV show. It's a question of what games you decide to play. Action games (whether FPS or otherwise) have started to bring in more story elements, but for the most part they still fall into the same realm as an action movie, and are mostly action-driven entertainment. An RPG, for the most part, is centered on story, it's simply a question of how far the developers were willing to go with a particular story.
Even a fairly light-hearted story like that in Disgaea (a console strategy-RPG) brings about some questions about good vs. evil, and how perspective can change what is good or evil (and for the most part, even though the game doesn't really take itself seriously, it's an idea to which a lot of people seem to need exposure). Even fairly open-ended RPGs like Fallout could have a lot to tell us, and more people are getting involved in writing for games every year that take their work more seriously than anyone involved in Super Mario Bros.
This is why fancy scopes have HPIB interfaces. Get an HPIB card for your computer for which you understand the programming interface and you'll only have to deal with the pain of getting HPIB to work and troubleshooting your code.
Of course, if you're not accustomed to automating this type of work it can take a little bit of time to bend your mind around some of the basic problems (like building a test rig so you don't have to hold the probes in place, or determining what commands you really want or need for the testing).
As there are NO LINUX VIRUSES a setup like this needs no AV software.
Most are short-lived, but they definitely exist. There are also plenty of reasons that people wouldn't need AV software on any system, it's just a matter of how people use their systems and whether or not they trust everything that comes through their browser and email software.
Of course, it also helps to have a firewall, which should be considered far more important than AV software for everyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_computer_viruses
I remember my college getting hit pretty hard by bliss in 1997. Apparently even the network admins had fallen victim to the idea that Linux and Solaris were safe and hadn't bothered to log in as a user to run some bit of code that wasn't part of normal administration. Of course, even some of the normal users managed to do a little damage running infected files on the networked systems, and the thing even managed to spread to remote users because the local ISP was run by the college.
In the end, bliss wasn't a hard mess to clean up (many versions included command line options that would clean themselves up for you). However, it impacted the network and its systems for two days, and the only problem the Windows users on campus had to deal with was the inability to turn in their CS homework with the mail server down.
For the most part under Vista and XP you get a virus for the same reason you would on any other system:
- You haven't kept things up to date (installed patches for vulnerabilities)
- You have a user running with escalated privileges that is doing something they shouldn't be doing.
The biggest problem with Windows remains that by default you run as administrator. Vista made it less painful to run as a standard user, but still left the default user account as an administrator.
Additionally, since it has always been common for Windows users to have administrator access, a lot of software assumed it was available or did things that required administrator access when they didn't really need it. This meant that when Vista was first released, it was common to get prompted for administrator access when installing non-administrative software and performing some actions that wouldn't normally require administrator access (like running a game, for instance).
This meant that early adopters were either conditioned to grant programs access that shouldn't have needed it or turn off User Access Control (which additionally had/has some performance penalties associated with it), which returned them to the previous state of Windows where everyone ran as administrators and didn't know whether or not the software they are using is doing something it shouldn't be doing.
At this point it's far less common for programs to try to gain administrator access in Windows, but until MS changes the defaults and makes the primary account a user account, or somehow makes it more annoying to run as an administrator than as a normal user (which would just piss people off, I'm sure), these problems will still persist.
Personally, the company I work for mandates AV software on their computers, so the computer I work on, which is technically better than the computer I use at home, is slow and has unusual glitches (like random blue-screens when working with a lot of open files in varied programs that require a lot of resources; or the long periods of thrashing on the hard drive as the virus scanner tries to scan every file I'm accessing).
At home, where I switch between Vista and Linux, I don't use AV software unless Vista starts misbehaving. The computer is much more stable and much faster than the work computer, and when it does start acting up I usually find that it's some piece of spyware that most AV software won't pick up anyway (and running 1 or 2 spyware scanners picks it up right away and kills it). So, someone gets to spy on my surfing habits until they get annoying, and they get the boot.
Of course, I don't assume my Linux system is secure, either, I just don't run a stable enough Linux system to worry about it, and reload the whole thing every other week.
Take crash tests on new vehicles. Name me one that doesn't have a 5-star crash rating?
Most cars do not have 5-star crash ratings across the board (in fact, very few do). They might have a 5-star rating in one or two of the tests, but the reality is that in advertising if you get 1 5-star rating you advertise it, and if you don't, you just don't mention your crash ratings at all (just your number of air-bags and other safety features).
They also manage to advertise it even if only one package of several received a 5-star rating. Of course, your point still stands in one way: very few cars receive 3-star or less ratings, and it's not a required test to begin with...
For example, the 5-star front-impact crash rating is par for the course now... but nobody seems to advertise the offset crashes, such as the right half of your bumper hitting the left half of your 'opponents' bumper. Why? Because it's sad in comparison. It's also not pretty to watch.
Actually, it's two different groups doing the tests. 5-star ratings come from NCAP, which doesn't do offset tests. Offset tests are done by IIHS, and most cars receive a "Good" rating on offset tests, which is the highest rating they give. Further, when the IIHS releases their "Top Safety Pick" awards, they are usually advertised by the recipients, and the vehicle has to have received a "Good" rating in all the overall categories they test. Yes, the tests need to be better and the ratings need to be harder to achieve, but the IIHS has been pointing out that in the just over 10 years they've been doing the offset tests the industry has improved significantly in its results.
The rating systems on crash tests are based on hard numbers, and they list what those numbers are on their respective websites. If they change those numbers over time they remain relevant, though I'm not aware of them changing those numbers in any significant way recently. Of course, you do have to question whether or not it's really possible to get significantly better than a 10% chance of serious injury (a 5-star rating) in a crash test with current technology. They should probably increase the speeds on the tests rather than messing with the survival rates.
So all the power to making the standards hard to achieve. Yes this may not be the 'real world' threat, but it's a threat nonetheless. They're basically saying "Since England isn't going to declare war on the USA, any preparedness for receipt of an attack by the USA shouldn't be considered in overall military preparedness". That's of course rediculous. Protect only against the popular virus and the unpopular virus will begin to spread.
Actually, the tests they failed on were non-threats. Yes, I agree that they should detect breaches of vulnerabilities in the system (though I also agree with them that a known vulnerability should be patched), but the fact is that the reason they weren't detected is because there was no payload.
These tests are like doing the crash tests without actually causing a crash. We usually call those tests crash avoidance or brake tests, not crash tests, and there's a valid reason for both types of testing. You don't give someone a 1-star crash test rating when the car can't avoid a crash but still manages to prevent injuries to the driver and passengers most of the time. Similarly, you don't rate them well for braking and crash avoidance just because everyone can walk away when the car doesn't stop.
Even that is only interesting if you get a phone plan with unlimited local calls or something, which usually costs as least as much as unlimitied mobile internet, depending on where you live.
I think that's a big part of the problem. In the US unlimited local calls have been a part of a standard phone service contract for a very long time. You can get a phone service without it, but they're not regularly advertised and even more rarely purchased (it's roughly $10/month for a Verizon phone line with tolls on local calls, vs. $16+, depending on services, for unlimited local).
So, given a phone company that's charging you for local calls, which cost the company almost nothing after initial costs for the network and maintenance are taken care of, how would you ever expect to get unlimited internet, which is usually in the same boat as local phone service (the ISP usually negotiates a fixed monthly price for links to other networks, and their operational costs are relatively stable).
Of course, the US government and corporations made some interesting choices laying the majority of the backbone the internet uses within the "lower 48" states, and most of the cost for what we're currently using has long since been written off as a loss. For the most part the companies profiting heavily as ISPs today aren't the same people that spent the money to put the fiber in the ground that gives high speed access to servers in New York for end-users in Los Angeles.
On the other hand, the cable and phone companies have been spending a lot of money in some areas laying fiber between local homes and the sites that backbone is wired into, and some of them certainly are complaining about the costs of doing so. Some (like Comcast), seem to simply be looking for ways to get out of doing upgrades at all, or get out of the constant cycle of upgrades that result from users actually using the bandwidth they're told they have.
The real story in the article isn't about the size of MMO updates and managing use on a cap. The juicy bits were the arguments that US broadband carriers may be running trials and leaning towards implementing caps.
It may not be true for the majority of carriers, and the article certainly is light on details (even regarding the supposed topic of MMO bandwidth usage), but it's something that should be of concern for everyone currently on unlimited access. I know that in the last month I've downloaded several gigs of data without even considering the impact because I have an unlimited connection, and I haven't played an MMO game in a couple of years. A couple of linux distros and several massive updates, a 1.x gig download for the highest-quality version of NIN's internet-release album (and the accompanied uploads since he's using BitTorrent for distribution). Still not in the 20GB range, I would hope, but it's not something I usually have to think about.
Most people put aside something for education as an escape from the news and their own problems. What that entertainment may be and how much someone's willing to spend is going to vary.
Cable TV I could easily toss aside, but internet and cell service isn't going to happen (especially since the rise in cell subscriptions has lead to a decline in the availability of pay phones). I don't see a need for a home phone, but some still cling to that as if it's somehow more likely to still work in an emergency or disaster situation than their cell phone.
I really don't see cutting off the cell phone and internet as entertainment related, though. I see it more as cutting myself off from my family and friends, most of which are on the other side of the country (in fact neither my wife nor myself has any family within an hour's drive, and most of my family is on the opposite coast of the US).
and we wouldn't have slashdot!
Debt doesn't magically appear just because you reduce taxes. In fact, the tax cuts would have been fairly reasonable if it weren't for all of the increased spending that's come along in the last 8 years. Spending millions a year in a war increases national debt, as does increases in MediCare, spending billions bailing out financial companies that got themselves into trouble, more billions bailing out the US auto makers that haven't made a profit in years (and have been sending jobs out of the country as quickly as possible), and more billions of dollars in foreign aid.
Generally, when people say they're anti-taxes and aren't just looking for some mythical nanny-state that can take the money from someone else and give it to them, they also mean they're anti-government-spending.
At the moment, some of us might have to bite the bullet on paying some extra taxes to get out of this mess, but I don't want to do it if the government's just going to turn around and find ways to spend more money.
I just have to say I agree.
It's a shame the Republicans have been turned into the church state party, while the Democrats are pulling towards socialism. It just means that either party turns it into an exercise of bigger government and less rights for all of us.
Then they turn around and do whatever they feel like when they get in office anyway, and you can't even trust what they've done in the past or what they say they'll do.
The numbers were based on people that voted for Bush switching to vote for Kerry, and were actually 57787 for Kerry, and 269 for Gore. In Gore's case, 80% of the votes for almost any of the third party candidates in Florida could have been enough, even if you counted the full number of over 500 votes he would have needed.
https://www.msu.edu/~sheppa28/elections.html
In the case of Kerry's loss, there weren't enough votes for Nader in the states mentioned on the site to swing things in Kerry's favor.
Further, we pay for rape exams in the hopes that the rapist is caught, and won't be raping our family members and friends.
We pay to educate our neighbors' children in the hopes that they won't grow up to be criminals, as well.
The NT kernel numbers were lined up with the "consumer" Windows kernel numbers with which they shared an interface. Therefore:
Windows 1
Windows 2
Windows 3 - NT 3
Windows 9x/Me - NT 4
Windows 2000/XP (NT 5)
Windows Vista (NT 6)
BTW - 2000 had Intel 64-bit versions as well, and 3 or 4 different named versions because it was (like the previous NT Workstations), aligned with the server OS.
They had a tendency to market the NT and desktop OS versions as complimentary, and this was heavily tied in with the use of similar interfaces in the versions. The idea was that even though they had trouble selling NT on the desktop beyond expensive workstations, they could push the consumer OS as being inter-operable and similar enough that it reduced training costs. This was especially important with the release of NT 3.1 (and forward), where they wanted people to think they could leverage their knowledge base in Windows 3.1 to build a network with higher-end workstations and servers, trying to pull market share from Novell and IBM.
In the end, though, MS has never been particularly careful with their numbering. They changed the numbering on Visual C++ to align it with not only the NT and Windows version numbers, but also the Visual Basic version numbers, skipping 3.x completely. They skipped version 6 of Excel to align the Office application versions. Reversioned Word for Windows to align with the Word for DOS version (skipping from 2 to 6), Outlook's first version number in Office was 8, Access went from 2 to 7, and Visio went from 6 to 10 after MS picked it up.
Of course, they could just increment the kernel to 7.0 when they get around to releasing Windows 7.
Forget the people living here, there were people from parts of Europe and Asia trading with the people living here already.
Maybe when our children grow up learning that Columbus wasn't the only person that believed the world was round, but rather was the only person that believed it was significantly smaller than it actually is, we can start rethinking the Columbus Day thing. Of course, I had to work yesterday, as I always have on Columbus Day.
NT 3 goes in there with Win 3, NT4 with 9x/Me, and 2000/XP are 5.
The only thing that's really unusual here is 7 being 7 when the kernel is still 6.x.
I blame our parents :) for telling us that a college degree will land us a badass job and a big-ass house right out of college when the unfortunate reality is that the fresh mechanical engineering graduate will take their first job as a hinge or pipe designer or that a CS grad will have to code lazy kids' homework assignments for hire!
It's not really our parents' faults, as it was true when they went into the job market (more or less), while now having a B.S. is roughly equivalent to what used to be a high school diploma, and in some industries it's even worse.
In the case of CS in particular, this is largely a result of the dot-com bust, as people were hiring kids barely out of high school (or in some cases still in high school) for so long just to fill all of the available positions. Most of the job openings are now long gone, along with most of the companies, and there's a glut of people that have programming experience or degrees, but a much smaller number of people with both.
Generally speaking, you need to ask some questions when you go into interviews, and try to find out if they actually have a career path from QA to development. There are companies that do this, and even companies that don't have this career path clearly laid out may give opportunities to employees to prove themselves before hiring someone new for a non-entry-level position.
In other words, as already stated, talk to the managers that deal with the developers and see if there's something you can do to qualify yourself for possible job openings in their departments. If you're looking for work elsewhere, make it clear that while you may be willing to take a QA job, you would like to move up to a development job, and ask questions about the career options.
If you're patient you'll eventually find the right fit and be able to move on from QA work. Most companies still prefer to promote internally rather than hire new people, because it's easier to fill entry-level jobs opened up by people moving up within the chain, and it improves morale for people to see movement within the company.
.Net is slowly replacing the Win32 API, and doesn't hold the backwards-compatibility issues that are inherent with an API that debuted in NT and Win95. This is why it's popular with Windows developers. Additionally, you can learn one API and use C#, VB, C++, J# (ie Java syntax) and a number of other languages to access the API in a very similar fashion.
In other words, they're trying to address many of the problems developers had with the Windows platform. If developers have fewer problems writing software for Windows, then that obviously is a problem for other platforms.
On the other hand, you can always write software targeting older versions of the run-time, and most developers do so specifically because they don't want to learn the new portions of the API and are often limited by availability within their target audience. Despite .Net being widely available through Windows Update, you don't see a massive migration among end-users to the latest version of .Net, and it's a pain in the ass to tell users they have to download a patch (even if it is on Windows Update, but this applies to Java as well) to run your program.
It doesn't address your base point, but Adobe wouldn't bother moving to .Net for the simple fact that most of their software has a huge base among Mac users. I'm really mildly surprised that they haven't tried to embrace the Linux community by leveraging the code they had to write for OS X compatibility.
As someone that develops for Windows at work and primarily uses Linux at home, I really have come to believe the killer apps on Windows are games and IE. Unfortunately it's not that IE is a good platform, it's that people keep writing to it because it has such high usage numbers. If I could get Netflix movies running through firefox it would eliminate a large percentage of my boots into Windows. DRM and the increasing quality of console ports lead me to playing fewer PC games anyway, leaving me with RTS games and occasional western RPGs as my primary reason for booting the PC into Windows for gaming. Frankly, as my PC ages it gets less important because new games won't even play on the laptop any more.
The Mono Trap is that you might get stuck on a platform encumbered by patents, so that even if you're coding on a 100% FOSS system, a court ruling granting an injunction against further release and development of Mono could yank the rug out from under you. Maybe that's no big deal for cute games or desktop applets, but there's no way on Earth I'd stake my business on a platform that may be nuked from orbit at any moment.
While I wouldn't stake a business on running .Net apps in linux (for a number of reasons, including the above), I would point out that since you can call native code from .Net, it's possible to write your way out of the problem if something like that occurs. Granted, it would be a pain in the ass rewriting your application, but it's completely possible, and can be done incrementally, much like prototyping in python and moving to C.
The tests performed are a little different, especially since N. American tests assume that there are much bigger vehicles on the road than a Ford Focus.
That being said, the modern Ford Focus performs pretty well in NA safety tests (anyone can look them up just fine), scoring 4/5 or 5/5 on all of the tests. 4 or 5 years ago, though, it was another matter.
You have to have the right car to accelerate out of danger. Something with high torque and that is really responsive to the gas pedal (sometimes the computers don't like letting you smash the gas pedal when you're already going down the road at 60+ mph). A lot of the sporty cars are made for top-end speed and don't have the torque you need to accelerate from 60 to 80 really quickly whenever you feel like it (but might not do too badly when you accelerate from 0 to 80 all at once).
I've managed to use the ABS on a '96 Z28 (which I no longer own due to gas prices) 3 or 4 times, and I have to say that the ability to decide where the car was going to end up was always the most important thing on my mind when I needed to hit the brakes like that. Of course, that car weighed a ton, and I was almost always going too fast when I needed to slam on the brakes.
I also have never been in a wreck while driving, and I am far more likely to accelerate to get away from someone than to brake to stay out of an accident. Unless there's nowhere to go and you somehow don't see it coming, braking is not the most likely choice to avoid a problem.
Of course, if you buy drugs from someone that you've complained to the police about several times, and then call the cops and show them the drugs you bought, guess who's going to jail...
But, since it's a civil matter and the RIAA endorsed the actions of the investigator, the downloading of the files is not a crime, while distributing the files may be.
Of course, if the actual copyright holder(s) stepped up and sued the investigator for downloading the file, that might be more interesting. Sometimes copyrights are assigned to the RIAA for these cases, but I often wonder how much time the RIAA spends determining whether or not they have the copyrights to the files they're complaining about.
A lot of that sounds very strange. Which version of the Razr is that? For instance, the Razr I carried around for a couple years:
1) played MP3s (mostly only used this for ring tones)
2) charged from USB in Windows (I forgot my wall charger who knows how many times)
3) had REALLY TERRIBLE battery life (less than a day with little talk time)
Of course, the MP3 playback sucked, but was good enough for ring tones, I only used the calendar to set up alarms (I use my phone as an alarm clock, so if I can't set up 3 or more alarms to go off every weekday morning I don't buy the phone), and the camera definitely sucked.