I've never done anything illegal that had consequences for anyone but myself. Never stole, never injured somebody else, etc. I've never been arrested, only been pulled over once and the guy let me go without a ticket or a warning or anything. I realize there's some good cops out there, but for the most part I tend to think their system is broken and riddled with abuse. Look at the stories that were just up on/. about the cops arresting a guy for taking a photo of them. I have no respect for that.
Adding to that... I just don't see the point at all. I priced out a home-level file server and came out to $0.53 per gig, and that's including a backup drive to swap in should one of the raid5 array fail. The rest of the hardware was SATA2, hypertransport system bus, dual core machine... I wouldn't expect it to have any problems at all maxing out 3 or 4 gigabit nics. So how is $1/G all that great?
Agreed. Most people are cultural imbeciles. You have to live somewhere with active indie theaters and film festivals to be able to catch a lot of this stuff in theaters. There are other options though... http://www.nicheflicks.com/ is like netflicks but carries exclusively titles that are usually not available in the US. Even netflix has a pretty wide selection of indie films. It's not impossible to find the good stuff... you just have to try harder. Which personally, is part of the fun.
That's kinda my point, though... the best of the best are always few and far between. Shakespeare wasn't the only playwrite working in those days. Bowie and T Rex weren't the only people writing glam rock. Entertainment media have been rehashing old themes for centuries, but there's always that 2% of the output that's actually really good.
You and the story poster just aren't watching the right movies. I live in Seattle, and just got done watching 52 films in 3 weeks at the local film festival. All but about 5 were absolutely fantastic... well worth seeing, and certainly much better than the dreck pumped out as the "must see blockbuster" of the summer.
And hell, even in mainstream cinema there's some great stuff coming out. Look at anything directed by Chris Nolan (The Prestige is coming out shortly), and anything written by Charlie Kaufman or Aaron Sorkin. In the last couple years we've had fantastic work from Sofia Copola, Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarentino, and Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was just in theaters this spring).
Go see "A Scanner Darkly". Catch Aronofsky's "The Fountain" when it hits theaters. See Ed Norton in "The Illusionist". Keep an eye out for Lynch's "Inland Empire". There have always been crap films coming out, but if you know what to look for, there's some really exciting things coming out right now. Ignore the remakes-of-remakes, and look around a bit. You'll find plenty of new ideas out there.
It will only alienate those companies that probably shouldn't be using GPLed code to begin with. The point of OSS is to build up a code base of "public" code that anybody can use, and that companies can pay for contractors to make minor improvements if needed. This only works if those improvements come back to the community, otherwise it's just hobbyist coders giving code away for free.
Anyway, "service" software is the least likely thing to be damaged by this. If Google open sources some web services, nobody's going to come along and steal their thunder. The code returning some search results or whatever is second fiddle to the database it's running against; to use the GPL code "against" the originators, you'd have to be able to replicate the data associated with the service, and that's a very difficult problem.
Trackballs won't stay dead because they're awesome. I got the Kensington Expert thing that people were talking about elsewhere in this thread, and I love it.
Fuck you - the US does plenty for other countries, PLENTY - fucking aid money out the ass, all the time - where is the rest of the world? Yeah, that's right.
When the Bush administration pulls shit like withholding foreign aid money for 3rd world nations unless aid workers are forced to teach abstinence-only sex education and are not even allowed to mention that condoms can, you know, help prevent the AIDS epidemic that's decimating their population... yeah, I don't think our track record is so hot.
Personally, I would use this to check out my route BEFORE getting in the car, as that's when I'd need to know which route to take. Putting it on a cell phone is just handy because terminals aren't always available.
I am curious why they don't have a "show traffic" option on their normal web-based interface, though... you'd think it would be pretty wildly popular with people about to leave to/from work.
Even using sprocs, a single case where you take a variable straight from user input to sproc input without checking it for injection characters gives a hacker enough access to retrieve the entire contents of your database. I've seen it. Scary stuff.
The only indicator I see is that the PS2 is still, in June, outselling the XBox360.
Isn't that a bad sign for BOTH companies? Think about it: at this point, Sony wants people to be waiting for the PS3 ship, and buying one of those. Instead, they're buying their soon-to-be-out-of-date console in apparently pretty large numbers. Are those same people really going to turn around and buy a PS3 in six months? I seriously doubt it. And with such a lively interest in games for the PS2, how many developers are going to ditch the platform in favor of spending 10x as much money to develop for the new hardware?
I didn't say nobody would develop for it. I'm saying now that there's a set of working interoperable standards (something that really didn't exist back during the browser wars) people aren't going to exclusively develop for a single browser, cutting out the rest of the market in the process.
If MS wanted to bury Firefox, they could just spend the cash to invent and implement standards at a rate that nobody could keep up with.
No, they couldn't. Firefox has passed the point of being a curiosity, and is a serious concern in the business world. They're up to what, 14% global market share? Somewhere in that neighborhood, anyway. No business is going to say, "hey, look at this fancy new extension in IE! That's worth losing 15% of our customers over, right?". The fact that other browsers have taken significant portions of their market share means that Microsoft now HAS to play fair. No matter how many new things they shove into IE, developers are going to make cross-browser compatible pages. Those new features would go largely ignored.
Personally, I do miss the big epic games. Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 had a ton of content, loads of hidden paths and things to discover. On the 3d side of things, Deus Ex had fantastic writing, amazingly complex areas to explore, and a fantastic feel of scope. Even more recently, HL2 proved that you can make a killing on a large-scope game based around a well-written story. The article's point, I think, is that although this is still possible, it also requires a risk: it requires that you actually find a good writer and work with him to bring his vision to the screen. Why do that, when you could just license the latest fantasy action film and build a game around a bastardized version of the story already written for the movie?
Software frameworks are not a replacement for software management and development methods. Do you blame the C# libraries for poor software written in it? Do you blame the STL for un-maintanable code? Tools are tools, they should work as efficiently as possible. The person using the tools is responsible for what they do with them.
Exactly my point. Your manager can show up in clogs, nobody cares. YOU can show up in clogs, and nobody cares, but being able to show up in clogs isn't something you care about. This non-stop "google is teh awesomex" just because they have a casual work environment is stupid. Lots of places have casual work environments, but Google has a bunch of new grads who take the relaxed work environment to very visible extremes.
If that's what they're looking for, I hope they like re-hiring their entire workforce every 5 years. People who love their job to the exclusion of other free-time activities tend to burn out quite rapidly. Single-minded devotion to a task isn't usually a sign of bright individuals, either. The ones who are really good at what they do understand that they need downtime to stay an enriched individual, and to perform better at their jobs during the time they do spend on it.
That's an interesting point. I think a lot of companies are actually that way. I work for *undisclosed faceless corporation* and people show up here in shorts and birkenstocks. A guy on our team walks around the offices barefoot. Invader Zim posters, figurines, calendars of cheerleaders, etc. are all over the place. You could show up in flip flops if you wanted to... but people choose not to. There's something about that Google mentality that sounds neat at first, but then you realize that you're not in college anymore, and even though you CAN wear flip flops to work, you probably don't want to.
So is it neat to have a trendy office space? Sure. Is it neat to have communal centres scattered around the building, and be encouraged to stay afterhours to play games? I guess. But it's the kind of thing that gets old once you realize you've got a family and a life outside of work. Working for Google sounds like working in a basement with a bunch of friends, but that only really works if you don't have other things you want to be devoting time to. Once their workforce matures a bit, I'd guess their "kooky, trippy workspace" won't work quite so well. Don't forget, they're still basically a glorified startup. I'm sure Microsoft had a lot of the same feel back in '86.
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I've never done anything illegal that had consequences for anyone but myself. Never stole, never injured somebody else, etc. I've never been arrested, only been pulled over once and the guy let me go without a ticket or a warning or anything. I realize there's some good cops out there, but for the most part I tend to think their system is broken and riddled with abuse. Look at the stories that were just up on /. about the cops arresting a guy for taking a photo of them. I have no respect for that.
Adding to that... I just don't see the point at all. I priced out a home-level file server and came out to $0.53 per gig, and that's including a backup drive to swap in should one of the raid5 array fail. The rest of the hardware was SATA2, hypertransport system bus, dual core machine... I wouldn't expect it to have any problems at all maxing out 3 or 4 gigabit nics. So how is $1/G all that great?
Agreed. Most people are cultural imbeciles. You have to live somewhere with active indie theaters and film festivals to be able to catch a lot of this stuff in theaters. There are other options though... http://www.nicheflicks.com/ is like netflicks but carries exclusively titles that are usually not available in the US. Even netflix has a pretty wide selection of indie films. It's not impossible to find the good stuff... you just have to try harder. Which personally, is part of the fun.
That's kinda my point, though... the best of the best are always few and far between. Shakespeare wasn't the only playwrite working in those days. Bowie and T Rex weren't the only people writing glam rock. Entertainment media have been rehashing old themes for centuries, but there's always that 2% of the output that's actually really good.
You and the story poster just aren't watching the right movies. I live in Seattle, and just got done watching 52 films in 3 weeks at the local film festival. All but about 5 were absolutely fantastic... well worth seeing, and certainly much better than the dreck pumped out as the "must see blockbuster" of the summer.
And hell, even in mainstream cinema there's some great stuff coming out. Look at anything directed by Chris Nolan (The Prestige is coming out shortly), and anything written by Charlie Kaufman or Aaron Sorkin. In the last couple years we've had fantastic work from Sofia Copola, Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarentino, and Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was just in theaters this spring).
Go see "A Scanner Darkly". Catch Aronofsky's "The Fountain" when it hits theaters. See Ed Norton in "The Illusionist". Keep an eye out for Lynch's "Inland Empire". There have always been crap films coming out, but if you know what to look for, there's some really exciting things coming out right now. Ignore the remakes-of-remakes, and look around a bit. You'll find plenty of new ideas out there.
It will only alienate those companies that probably shouldn't be using GPLed code to begin with. The point of OSS is to build up a code base of "public" code that anybody can use, and that companies can pay for contractors to make minor improvements if needed. This only works if those improvements come back to the community, otherwise it's just hobbyist coders giving code away for free.
Anyway, "service" software is the least likely thing to be damaged by this. If Google open sources some web services, nobody's going to come along and steal their thunder. The code returning some search results or whatever is second fiddle to the database it's running against; to use the GPL code "against" the originators, you'd have to be able to replicate the data associated with the service, and that's a very difficult problem.
Trackballs won't stay dead because they're awesome. I got the Kensington Expert thing that people were talking about elsewhere in this thread, and I love it.
We actually did something in the spirit of cooperation with other countries.
I think my head is going to explode.
Personally, I would use this to check out my route BEFORE getting in the car, as that's when I'd need to know which route to take. Putting it on a cell phone is just handy because terminals aren't always available.
I am curious why they don't have a "show traffic" option on their normal web-based interface, though... you'd think it would be pretty wildly popular with people about to leave to/from work.
The Firefox 2 Beta mutilated smiley is a lot more recognizable than the IE 7 Beta mutilated smiley. What's this "dead last" you're talking about?
Even using sprocs, a single case where you take a variable straight from user input to sproc input without checking it for injection characters gives a hacker enough access to retrieve the entire contents of your database. I've seen it. Scary stuff.
The only indicator I see is that the PS2 is still, in June, outselling the XBox360.
Isn't that a bad sign for BOTH companies? Think about it: at this point, Sony wants people to be waiting for the PS3 ship, and buying one of those. Instead, they're buying their soon-to-be-out-of-date console in apparently pretty large numbers. Are those same people really going to turn around and buy a PS3 in six months? I seriously doubt it. And with such a lively interest in games for the PS2, how many developers are going to ditch the platform in favor of spending 10x as much money to develop for the new hardware?
I didn't say nobody would develop for it. I'm saying now that there's a set of working interoperable standards (something that really didn't exist back during the browser wars) people aren't going to exclusively develop for a single browser, cutting out the rest of the market in the process.
If MS wanted to bury Firefox, they could just spend the cash to invent and implement standards at a rate that nobody could keep up with.
No, they couldn't. Firefox has passed the point of being a curiosity, and is a serious concern in the business world. They're up to what, 14% global market share? Somewhere in that neighborhood, anyway. No business is going to say, "hey, look at this fancy new extension in IE! That's worth losing 15% of our customers over, right?". The fact that other browsers have taken significant portions of their market share means that Microsoft now HAS to play fair. No matter how many new things they shove into IE, developers are going to make cross-browser compatible pages. Those new features would go largely ignored.
Google's corporate search appliance has been around for how many years? And since when did Microsoft have a corporate search program anyway?
Personally, I do miss the big epic games. Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2 had a ton of content, loads of hidden paths and things to discover. On the 3d side of things, Deus Ex had fantastic writing, amazingly complex areas to explore, and a fantastic feel of scope. Even more recently, HL2 proved that you can make a killing on a large-scope game based around a well-written story. The article's point, I think, is that although this is still possible, it also requires a risk: it requires that you actually find a good writer and work with him to bring his vision to the screen. Why do that, when you could just license the latest fantasy action film and build a game around a bastardized version of the story already written for the movie?
Software frameworks are not a replacement for software management and development methods. Do you blame the C# libraries for poor software written in it? Do you blame the STL for un-maintanable code? Tools are tools, they should work as efficiently as possible. The person using the tools is responsible for what they do with them.
Exactly my point. Your manager can show up in clogs, nobody cares. YOU can show up in clogs, and nobody cares, but being able to show up in clogs isn't something you care about. This non-stop "google is teh awesomex" just because they have a casual work environment is stupid. Lots of places have casual work environments, but Google has a bunch of new grads who take the relaxed work environment to very visible extremes.
If that's what they're looking for, I hope they like re-hiring their entire workforce every 5 years. People who love their job to the exclusion of other free-time activities tend to burn out quite rapidly. Single-minded devotion to a task isn't usually a sign of bright individuals, either. The ones who are really good at what they do understand that they need downtime to stay an enriched individual, and to perform better at their jobs during the time they do spend on it.
That's an interesting point. I think a lot of companies are actually that way. I work for *undisclosed faceless corporation* and people show up here in shorts and birkenstocks. A guy on our team walks around the offices barefoot. Invader Zim posters, figurines, calendars of cheerleaders, etc. are all over the place. You could show up in flip flops if you wanted to... but people choose not to. There's something about that Google mentality that sounds neat at first, but then you realize that you're not in college anymore, and even though you CAN wear flip flops to work, you probably don't want to.
So is it neat to have a trendy office space? Sure. Is it neat to have communal centres scattered around the building, and be encouraged to stay afterhours to play games? I guess. But it's the kind of thing that gets old once you realize you've got a family and a life outside of work. Working for Google sounds like working in a basement with a bunch of friends, but that only really works if you don't have other things you want to be devoting time to. Once their workforce matures a bit, I'd guess their "kooky, trippy workspace" won't work quite so well. Don't forget, they're still basically a glorified startup. I'm sure Microsoft had a lot of the same feel back in '86.