Now since I am currently at work and do not have time to read the full artical (This is slashdot, after all) I will mention what I took from it on my first reading, not what it actually says.
I understood it to be commentary on how the future of scientific advancement revolved around convincing the uneducated masses (that includes me with regards to biology) that certain things we found naturally repugnant were actually perfectly safe when done correctly. This is not to say I would trust companies like Monsanto with their atrocious record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto) but if done by a party not driven purely by profit I can see this as being safe.
Unfortunately companies like Monsanto do nothing to convince people like me that the results of their research are safe when they try suppress news stories regarding the possible side effects of some of their products. See the section in earlier Wikipidia link on Related legal actions.
I just looked through your post history. You seem to look for posts by Twitters alter egos and runnish them all. Are you conducting a concerted campaign against him? Do you spend your entire time looking for Twitter posts to try and rubbish his points without reading them? That is how it appears to me.
Is Twitter the only reason you read slashdot? Personally I read it for interesting tech related news stories and the occasional decent debate but looking through your recent post history you look like Twitters stalker. Do you have any idea how goddamn sad that makes you look. Get a life.
The pair of you probably have a lot in common, ever thought of proposing marriage?
......and my karma isn't in the toilet. But it soon will be the way that post was modded.
I have seen you sig before and I think its pure drivel. So what if twitter has multiple accounts. Why is it any of your business?
If you just want to declare you hatred of someone, do it using the friends / foes system, that is what it is there for. And that way those of us who could not care less who your foes are dont have to look.
I also think that a great many of Twitters posts make sense. Ok, he posted some drivel, but so have I, so have you, so has everyone from someones perspective.
Now, I have another suggestion: You are an MS sock puppet who also posts under multiple accounts and gets paid to trash what could be an interesting debate about the future of open source software.
I have no proof of that, but who cares, you obviously do not when it applies to other people so why should it matter to me either.
As someone who used to own decks and mix a bit myself I would like to make another point:
DJ are probably the single largest consumers of Music. I probably spent an average of £20 per week on vinyl alone, and this was then average 12 inch single cost £5. I have not bought any in years so do not know how much it costs now, I would imagine it has certainly gone up a bit. Without buying that much new music DJing becomes too dull. I managed to keep it up for a year or two never getting any money back as I was not famous (or that good) but then gave up.
Over that time I amassed quite a large volume of records that form a pile 1 metre deep. My friends often asked me how much they thought I had spent, and on the odd occasion someone would estimate how many records I had and work it out. At that point I usually stopped paying attention in case I had a heard attack.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that very few DJ's actually make a profit from DJing. It is a hobby, or a loss leader that leads a small minority into a music career producing albums of their own. Even people who make it big and actually get signed to a label to produce their own music usually do it for the love or to keep up their image in clubland so they can sell their own music.
The people who really be hit by this are aspiring DJ's who need to produce mixtapes in order to get any sort of gig. They then hand the mix tapes out for free as a marketing tool and 90% of them go straight in the bin. Are they also expecting these people who are usually young and skint anyway to cough up £500. The irony is that the main people they intend to listen to the tapes / mp3s are the very same record executives and talent scouts who are lining their pocket with the fee the DJ paid to produce them.
If you want to turn your hobby into a career you are better of playing with computers or going outside and playing football, now thats where the real money is. Let the music industry choke to death through lack of new talent then we can reinvent it afterwards when all these stupid laws have been repealed. If you want to listen to music in the meantime, go to your local venue that has a jam session for the evening, maybe even try and take part yourself.
Nope, the actual issue was because some on board sound cards do not support enough as many simultaneous channels as creative cards do. But my main point about competition and market forces was more about the way things used to be when Gravis were still in the game (I am kinda oldish).
They produced a damn decent card that had full Wave Table Synthesis support for general midi. This meant you could use General MIDI for the games sound track and it sounded good while not requiring the CPU to process all the sound samples as they were dealt with by the soundcard. As a result of this creative produced a card that did the same thing. Until then creative viewed it as a luxury feature so never included it in their product line.
I think you gamers 'created' (heh) your own market. I find it hard to believe you 'need' a special card for 'games'. You right but we didnt exactly create the market. We need whatever sound card the companies who create games choose to support. Quite often this will involve deals done behind close doors between the large games companies (EA, TakeTwo, etc) and hardware producers (Nvidia, ATI, Creative).
Executives from the companies will get together over drinks and discuss how to maximise revenues going forward. Usually this happens in the dark and the consumer is none the wiser. In this case we found out because a very enterprising individual invested a huge amount of his own time, unpaid (TFA says he earn $150 in donations, I earnt more than that before lunch). He then published a solution that did not involve buying another creative sound card, thereby costing creative some sales.
The original example I mentioned of GTA San Andreas and Realtek on board sound drove the purchase of my current Audigy2 card as I had already spent money on the game and started playing before I noticed the bug. If when I upgrade to Vista (To get DirectX 10, to run next version of Unreal Tournament or something) I also have to buy a new sound card I might do that, although I will not be happy about it.
Anyone who followed my example through about Vista, DirectX and UT2008 will hopefully realise that these things happen a lot more often than not. Windows XP also drove a huge amount of hardware sales. I had to replace a Mustek Scanner and Voodoo2 card as there was no driver support in XP.
I have had major issues with on board cound being detected as EAX but not fully supporting everything so behaving strangely. The only example I can think of now is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas not working correctly with onboard sound cards.
How are we all going to avoid buying creative soundcards for gaming? Since Gravis went out of business they have a monopoly on high end sound cards for gaming. They can behave as badly as they like and just sell more product.
This is clear example of how market based principles do not always benefit consumers.
Firstly, I want to make clear that this stuff about Gen-X-Y whatever sounds too like biology for me to care, I am 32 and have about 5 years in the (slave) labour market.
Now with regard to some other points I just want to throw in my two pennies worth. When I started my first techie job (I am a web software developer) I was a bit of a pain in the arse to work with. I treated my mentor sometimes with far too little respect. He has almost in his fifties and was very, very good at what he did. I thought I was better, but he was just quieter about what he knew. He would let me struggle with problems as he had struggled with the same ones years ago and knew the value of that struggle. He always used to say he was like me when he was young but I thought he was making excuses or something.
Now I am in the position where I have a co-worker who is like I was and I find it hell to deal with. He NEVER listens. He always thinks he knows better with his fresh perspective (I was no different). He thinks our entire company rests on his shoulders and when he does ask for help it is always twinged with anger at the perception of failure. What he fails to appreciate is that we expect him to need help, and that we would rather he asked for help far more often than struggle with code he sometimes does not fully understand.
As any programmer can probably testify, tinkering with code that you do not fully understand is usually a recipe for making mistakes. If we wanted to audit every line he wrote before it went to testing dept we might as well just do his job for him, he has to learn.
To put this in perspective we have another employee who started after me. He is far younger than me but will shortly be promoted over my head and put in a superior position. I used to get annoyed with this, but over time I have realised this will happen simply because he is damned good at his job, but when he needs help or guidance he just asks, with no connotations attached.
On the subject about corporate culture the biggest thing that fresh employees usually lack as an appreciation for the value of their own time. They will spend days on a problem simply for the piece of mind that the solved a problem without realising that maybe the problem did not actually need solving. Remember: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I my job that usually means, make it work in mozilla when a client pays for it to work under mozilla. I know that every Mozilla fan boy is going to hate me saying this, but the fact is that I no longer work for free, now I work for money as I need money to live. I get more money for developing a site once for IE, then modifying it later to work in Firefox / Opera / whatever.
This is the most important part of corporate culture, it is not a charity, it is a business run to make as much profit as possible.
It's not a browser you can leave open for a week and keep using. Under windows or linux? I have has firefox open for the past week or so on my laptop and it seems fine.
It has had the same 4 tabs open. One is a very large static image showing all GTA San Andreas Weapons, one is web page showing the walkthrough for GTA San Andreas. The other two tabs get used to check my AA stats on tracker and the master browser site (which requires constantly logging in again, grrrr). I then open other tabs as I need them. My laptop has just been sitting next to my desktop PC since last tuesday and is likely to stay there until this thursday when I will need it for travelling.
My laptop only has 1 gig of memory but it is running Gentoo with everying now compiled and optimised for it so that might make a difference. My laptop also runs a few other apps at the same time (like pan, azureus) and I never notice any issues with memory.
Adding UAC hasn't helped. It was implemented so badly that people just click through the new dialogs without reading the warnings most of the time. No, what most people do is turn it off completely. They do this because it annoys them while they are setting up their machine and they do not understand its value.
When I first configure a linux machine, constantly having to enter the root password anoys me too. My solution is to just log in as root, do all the setup neeeded, then log in as a regular user. I have just been informed by a colleague that vistas implemantation of UAC doesnt really allow this. If this is the case it is a bit of a design flaw.
Maybe we care more about having fun than about worrying about optimum input devices, highest possible mouse resolution, upgrading our video cards every 6 months, and so on. All to end up with a "gaming" PC that makes too much noise and crashes all the time (or is down for repairs). Sorry, but you must have last played PC games quite a long time ago.
I currently own a PC bought several years ago (Athlon XP 3200+, GTX6800 and 1 Gig Ram). Ok, this was fairly expensive when I bought it but it has been good for me ever since. We are not talking about 6 months between upgrades, we are talking 3-4 years, long before your 360 came out. That discounts your first point about upgrades, I will only need to upgrade when games I want to play start comming out Vista only and that hasn't happened yet.
Optimising mice and video cards? If you mean selecting what resolution to run each game this is hardly a chore, most games will autoconfigure by looking at your PC specs now. It is also amazing how many games still run at the top resolution my monitor (1280*1024) even though the PC is now several years old.
Makes too much noise or crashes all the time?? Nope, never. If a PC crashes nowadays then something is wrong with it, probably in hardware. I know windows has a reputation for being buggy, but I have had very few issues with windows XP.
So now I have shot down all you bad points about PC gaming let me elabourate on the better points:
1) Multifunctional
With a PC you can do other stuff as well as play games. You need to write the occasional letter, no problem. Almost all of us nowadays need to do the CV thing occasionally and alot of companies now accept word document CV's so you do not even need a printer.
2) Higher Resolution
PC's can support much higher resolutions than your TV, this has been true for years.
3) Cheaper games
Since your 360 is actually a cheap PC in disguise that was sold at cost Microsoft have to make money somehow, they do that by adding an extra licence fee to the games. They then use a patent or hardware device to prevent people producing software for the system without paying MS a licence fee. This fee makes console software more expensive.
I cant find a real difference in any of the politicians. Sure, they talk differently to appeal to different groups but the end result is the same. That is because all the politicians you have heard of have a huge media budget behind them. This media budget was donated by the same people regardless of party. Ok, each company will have its favourites that it donates more too, but all politicians rely on donations from the same groups of companies.
There is one scientist who springs straight into my mind when you talk about being knowledgeable in many disiplines making for a better scientist is a narrower field as well: Albert Einstein.
He worked as a patent clerk for many years. That required him to research a wide range of scientific subjects and understand whether each item was actually feasable.
If you choose to deploy Windows as a desktop OS you guarantee a high cost of re-training employees 2 to 3 times a decade. Not necesarily.
Since most companies will not touch a new OS until it has been on the market for at least a year, maybe two. That means that by the time you do upgrade a large percentage of your staff will have bought new home machines running windows and already be familiar with the new OS.
That is why using windows saves you money on training. Not because it needs less training to use but simply because it is the most commonly used OS and most people have used it in a previous job or at home.
Your management is amongst the stupidest I have ever seen anywhere and I want to make sure I don't invest in a company being run by such idiots. Do you actually have any money to invest? You sound more like a young student who has not learnt the value of pragmatism yet. I used to be like that, now I have grown up a bit.
Imagine taking down every server and cramming it full or RAM rather than fixing a bug. It was not so much one bug as huge number of memory leaks in a codebase that takes up several hundred megabytes. That is a lot of code to go dredging through looking for every object that hasnt been destroyed properly. Finding and fixing every leak would probably have taken 250-300 man hours. Going to datacentree and upgrading a few servers takes 10 man hours max (it actually took 2-3). When you compare those two numbers and decent manager will want to know what the ROI is on the first option, since that is a huge number if you convert into dollars.
Each man hour = approximately $150, assuming 1 day dev time costs $1200 (My companies current rate).
That means one solution would have cost $37,500 - $45,000. The other solution costs a maximum of $1700 including the cost of the memory. If you can see why we went for option 2 then you are pretty daft.
I know that any decent techie will want to fix the bugs, but in this instance it just was not worth the expense on a project that was due to expire in just over a year, even though it did generate more than $200,000 in revenue for our company in that year.
Why do people always say OS when they mean GUI/UI? No idea. But I actually meant OS not GUI.
The retraining would not be limited to the GUI, it would have to include elements of the underlying OS. Although that is probably just because we are a development shop, most office staff would probably just need to learn the new GUI.
Aparently his version of TCO doesn't include buying completely new machines in order to run Vista. A new machine is usually cheaper than single day wasted by a highly skilled member or staff. If you are taking about some executives then a single hour can buy a laptop.
Where I work we used to have a large number of memory leaks in one of our applications code (written by someone else before I joined the company). I wanted to audit the code and fix them as that seemed like the correct thing to do. I was overruled and told to just go and put vast amounts of memory in each server running the application. Since the application in question was only intended to be used for a five year project and that is nearly up this was a sound financial bet, we never fixed the code, but we did fix the issue effecting our customers by the cheapest possible means.
Since everyone out there is familiar with windows from their home machine Windows gets it's much lower TCO from the money saved by not having to train your staff in the use of a new OS. The occasional inconvenience windows throws at us is not enough to justify the loss in productivity of training all our staff to a new and unfamiliar OS.
I don't want a program to look and see I have a couple gigs of memory and assume it can use it all. Why not? Surely if you have memory spare it should allocate as much as it needs / wants. If something else needs memory more than firefox it will just get swapped out to disk. I have often heard people complaining about firefox taking to much memory but I have always wondered if this was actually effecting them or they just did not like the number visible in process explorer.
I used to have a windows development box with 384 meg of ram and I never had an issue with firefox taking too much memory. I generally have a minimum of 7 or 8 apps running (mail client, IE, Firefox, Windows Explorer, Editplus, Database Software, Web Traffic Sniffer, Excel, Word). I have never had an issue with excessive swapping when using alt-tab to change between apps. I did find some apps that eventually meant I had to upgrade that machine but browsing was not one of them.
The fact is that memory is cheap and windows seems to have pretty decent memory management nowadays so surely application should allocate as much memory as they can possible use, certainly something like a browser that can just us it all as a cache. The internet is a far bigger bottleneck than the pagefile so more caching is better in my book.
Further, businesses do have rights, and if I started talking about how telecoms had the "right" to tap our phones because the government bloody well said they did, I'd be getting similarly flamed. So get past your hatred of "M$" and look at it objectively. The point you seem to be missing is that the EU is a government body that has the ability to legislate. That means that you have to obey EU competition laws if you are doing business in Europe. Saying anything else is like saying that I can come to the US and ignore local laws, I can not. This is not saying I do not have rights when I visit the US, but it is saying that my rights when in the US are dictated to me by the US Government, which it turn has to follow the constitution and whatever else. If I do not want to follow US federal or state laws I only have one choice assuming I do not want to risk prison: Do not visit the US.
On the otherhand, we are able to observe gravity in nature. We have been able to quantify gravity; modeling it and testing those models. Just to clarify, The current theory of Gravity also has its shortcomings so should probably not be taught as undisputed fact either. The main problem is its inability to apply to situations where you have several bodies with approximately the same mass.
Examine the following formula:
F = (G * m1 * m2) / d^2
Where m1 = mass of first body m2 - mass of 2nd body
d^2 = Distance between two bodies centre of mass squared. G = Einstein's Gravitational constant
This only predicts the attractive force between two bodies (m1, m2), if you try and apply it to three bodies you have to approximate two of the bodies into one. Sometimes this works well but sometimes it falls down.
The other main issue is the value of G. 6.67 * 10^-11 is an awful number that Einstein hated. This was one of reasons why he spent the entire rest of his life searching for something better in the form of a Grand Theory of Everything. Unfortunately he never found it.
My point after all this Physics rambling is that everything is a theory and should be taught accordingly. You should teach that the most important skill is to question everything, especially with regard to science. Nothing is set in stone when it comes to science and our understanding of the universe since we view everything from a very narrow perspective.
I think that Darwin's theory of evolution is far more likely to explain how we came to be on this earth than any junk involving Adam and Eve. The entire Bible is a series of metaphors to try and illustrate how we should live our lives. We should very soon be at a state when we can ditch all religions and just act in a humane manor for humanities sake alone. At least, I hope we should since the bible is getting very old now and although the morals of the stories have not changed the actual settings are becoming less and less relevant with each passing decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Several years ago I remember reading an article in Wired title "Overcoming Yuk". I actually managed to find a link here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/morton_pr.html
Now since I am currently at work and do not have time to read the full artical (This is slashdot, after all) I will mention what I took from it on my first reading, not what it actually says.
I understood it to be commentary on how the future of scientific advancement revolved around convincing the uneducated masses (that includes me with regards to biology) that certain things we found naturally repugnant were actually perfectly safe when done correctly. This is not to say I would trust companies like Monsanto with their atrocious record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto) but if done by a party not driven purely by profit I can see this as being safe.
Unfortunately companies like Monsanto do nothing to convince people like me that the results of their research are safe when they try suppress news stories regarding the possible side effects of some of their products. See the section in earlier Wikipidia link on Related legal actions.
And no one still mentioned the old favourite:
"He accidentally fell down some stairs over and over again with his hands cuffed behind his back."
They loved that during the 80's.
I just looked through your post history. You seem to look for posts by Twitters alter egos and runnish them all. Are you conducting a concerted campaign against him? Do you spend your entire time looking for Twitter posts to try and rubbish his points without reading them? That is how it appears to me.
Is Twitter the only reason you read slashdot? Personally I read it for interesting tech related news stories and the occasional decent debate but looking through your recent post history you look like Twitters stalker. Do you have any idea how goddamn sad that makes you look. Get a life.
The pair of you probably have a lot in common, ever thought of proposing marriage?
......and my karma isn't in the toilet. But it soon will be the way that post was modded.I have seen you sig before and I think its pure drivel. So what if twitter has multiple accounts. Why is it any of your business?
If you just want to declare you hatred of someone, do it using the friends / foes system, that is what it is there for. And that way those of us who could not care less who your foes are dont have to look.
I also think that a great many of Twitters posts make sense. Ok, he posted some drivel, but so have I, so have you, so has everyone from someones perspective.
Now, I have another suggestion: You are an MS sock puppet who also posts under multiple accounts and gets paid to trash what could be an interesting debate about the future of open source software.
I have no proof of that, but who cares, you obviously do not when it applies to other people so why should it matter to me either.
As someone who used to own decks and mix a bit myself I would like to make another point:
DJ are probably the single largest consumers of Music. I probably spent an average of £20 per week on vinyl alone, and this was then average 12 inch single cost £5. I have not bought any in years so do not know how much it costs now, I would imagine it has certainly gone up a bit. Without buying that much new music DJing becomes too dull. I managed to keep it up for a year or two never getting any money back as I was not famous (or that good) but then gave up.
Over that time I amassed quite a large volume of records that form a pile 1 metre deep. My friends often asked me how much they thought I had spent, and on the odd occasion someone would estimate how many records I had and work it out. At that point I usually stopped paying attention in case I had a heard attack.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that very few DJ's actually make a profit from DJing. It is a hobby, or a loss leader that leads a small minority into a music career producing albums of their own. Even people who make it big and actually get signed to a label to produce their own music usually do it for the love or to keep up their image in clubland so they can sell their own music.
The people who really be hit by this are aspiring DJ's who need to produce mixtapes in order to get any sort of gig. They then hand the mix tapes out for free as a marketing tool and 90% of them go straight in the bin. Are they also expecting these people who are usually young and skint anyway to cough up £500. The irony is that the main people they intend to listen to the tapes / mp3s are the very same record executives and talent scouts who are lining their pocket with the fee the DJ paid to produce them.
If you want to turn your hobby into a career you are better of playing with computers or going outside and playing football, now thats where the real money is. Let the music industry choke to death through lack of new talent then we can reinvent it afterwards when all these stupid laws have been repealed. If you want to listen to music in the meantime, go to your local venue that has a jam session for the evening, maybe even try and take part yourself.
And would this be the same IRA that used to do most of its fundraising in the US.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1563119.stm
Wow, can you link to some proof or something? An example or quote possibly?
Nope, the actual issue was because some on board sound cards do not support enough as many simultaneous channels as creative cards do. But my main point about competition and market forces was more about the way things used to be when Gravis were still in the game (I am kinda oldish).
They produced a damn decent card that had full Wave Table Synthesis support for general midi. This meant you could use General MIDI for the games sound track and it sounded good while not requiring the CPU to process all the sound samples as they were dealt with by the soundcard. As a result of this creative produced a card that did the same thing. Until then creative viewed it as a luxury feature so never included it in their product line.
Executives from the companies will get together over drinks and discuss how to maximise revenues going forward. Usually this happens in the dark and the consumer is none the wiser. In this case we found out because a very enterprising individual invested a huge amount of his own time, unpaid (TFA says he earn $150 in donations, I earnt more than that before lunch). He then published a solution that did not involve buying another creative sound card, thereby costing creative some sales.
The original example I mentioned of GTA San Andreas and Realtek on board sound drove the purchase of my current Audigy2 card as I had already spent money on the game and started playing before I noticed the bug. If when I upgrade to Vista (To get DirectX 10, to run next version of Unreal Tournament or something) I also have to buy a new sound card I might do that, although I will not be happy about it.
Anyone who followed my example through about Vista, DirectX and UT2008 will hopefully realise that these things happen a lot more often than not. Windows XP also drove a huge amount of hardware sales. I had to replace a Mustek Scanner and Voodoo2 card as there was no driver support in XP.
Does it work properly with all games?
I have had major issues with on board cound being detected as EAX but not fully supporting everything so behaving strangely. The only example I can think of now is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas not working correctly with onboard sound cards.
How are we all going to avoid buying creative soundcards for gaming? Since Gravis went out of business they have a monopoly on high end sound cards for gaming. They can behave as badly as they like and just sell more product.
This is clear example of how market based principles do not always benefit consumers.
Firstly, I want to make clear that this stuff about Gen-X-Y whatever sounds too like biology for me to care, I am 32 and have about 5 years in the (slave) labour market.
Now with regard to some other points I just want to throw in my two pennies worth. When I started my first techie job (I am a web software developer) I was a bit of a pain in the arse to work with. I treated my mentor sometimes with far too little respect. He has almost in his fifties and was very, very good at what he did. I thought I was better, but he was just quieter about what he knew. He would let me struggle with problems as he had struggled with the same ones years ago and knew the value of that struggle. He always used to say he was like me when he was young but I thought he was making excuses or something.
Now I am in the position where I have a co-worker who is like I was and I find it hell to deal with. He NEVER listens. He always thinks he knows better with his fresh perspective (I was no different). He thinks our entire company rests on his shoulders and when he does ask for help it is always twinged with anger at the perception of failure. What he fails to appreciate is that we expect him to need help, and that we would rather he asked for help far more often than struggle with code he sometimes does not fully understand.
As any programmer can probably testify, tinkering with code that you do not fully understand is usually a recipe for making mistakes. If we wanted to audit every line he wrote before it went to testing dept we might as well just do his job for him, he has to learn.
To put this in perspective we have another employee who started after me. He is far younger than me but will shortly be promoted over my head and put in a superior position. I used to get annoyed with this, but over time I have realised this will happen simply because he is damned good at his job, but when he needs help or guidance he just asks, with no connotations attached.
On the subject about corporate culture the biggest thing that fresh employees usually lack as an appreciation for the value of their own time. They will spend days on a problem simply for the piece of mind that the solved a problem without realising that maybe the problem did not actually need solving. Remember: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I my job that usually means, make it work in mozilla when a client pays for it to work under mozilla. I know that every Mozilla fan boy is going to hate me saying this, but the fact is that I no longer work for free, now I work for money as I need money to live. I get more money for developing a site once for IE, then modifying it later to work in Firefox / Opera / whatever.
This is the most important part of corporate culture, it is not a charity, it is a business run to make as much profit as possible.
It's not a browser you can leave open for a week and keep using. Under windows or linux? I have has firefox open for the past week or so on my laptop and it seems fine.
It has had the same 4 tabs open. One is a very large static image showing all GTA San Andreas Weapons, one is web page showing the walkthrough for GTA San Andreas. The other two tabs get used to check my AA stats on tracker and the master browser site (which requires constantly logging in again, grrrr). I then open other tabs as I need them. My laptop has just been sitting next to my desktop PC since last tuesday and is likely to stay there until this thursday when I will need it for travelling.
My laptop only has 1 gig of memory but it is running Gentoo with everying now compiled and optimised for it so that might make a difference. My laptop also runs a few other apps at the same time (like pan, azureus) and I never notice any issues with memory.
When I first configure a linux machine, constantly having to enter the root password anoys me too. My solution is to just log in as root, do all the setup neeeded, then log in as a regular user. I have just been informed by a colleague that vistas implemantation of UAC doesnt really allow this. If this is the case it is a bit of a design flaw.
Might be worth bearing in mind that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have taken huge campaign donations from RIAA associated companies.
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?CID=N00000019&cycle=2008
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.asp?id=N00009638&cycle=2008
I currently own a PC bought several years ago (Athlon XP 3200+, GTX6800 and 1 Gig Ram). Ok, this was fairly expensive when I bought it but it has been good for me ever since. We are not talking about 6 months between upgrades, we are talking 3-4 years, long before your 360 came out. That discounts your first point about upgrades, I will only need to upgrade when games I want to play start comming out Vista only and that hasn't happened yet.
Optimising mice and video cards? If you mean selecting what resolution to run each game this is hardly a chore, most games will autoconfigure by looking at your PC specs now. It is also amazing how many games still run at the top resolution my monitor (1280*1024) even though the PC is now several years old.
Makes too much noise or crashes all the time?? Nope, never. If a PC crashes nowadays then something is wrong with it, probably in hardware. I know windows has a reputation for being buggy, but I have had very few issues with windows XP.
So now I have shot down all you bad points about PC gaming let me elabourate on the better points:
1) Multifunctional
With a PC you can do other stuff as well as play games. You need to write the occasional letter, no problem. Almost all of us nowadays need to do the CV thing occasionally and alot of companies now accept word document CV's so you do not even need a printer.
2) Higher Resolution
PC's can support much higher resolutions than your TV, this has been true for years.
3) Cheaper games
Since your 360 is actually a cheap PC in disguise that was sold at cost Microsoft have to make money somehow, they do that by adding an extra licence fee to the games. They then use a patent or hardware device to prevent people producing software for the system without paying MS a licence fee. This fee makes console software more expensive.
There is one scientist who springs straight into my mind when you talk about being knowledgeable in many disiplines making for a better scientist is a narrower field as well: Albert Einstein.
He worked as a patent clerk for many years. That required him to research a wide range of scientific subjects and understand whether each item was actually feasable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_examiner
http://www.kpkb.com/news-article-patent-intellectual-property.html
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/ae10.htm
I could try and explain this in more depth but simply following the links above will do a much better job than I ever could.
Since most companies will not touch a new OS until it has been on the market for at least a year, maybe two. That means that by the time you do upgrade a large percentage of your staff will have bought new home machines running windows and already be familiar with the new OS.
That is why using windows saves you money on training. Not because it needs less training to use but simply because it is the most commonly used OS and most people have used it in a previous job or at home.
Each man hour = approximately $150, assuming 1 day dev time costs $1200 (My companies current rate).
That means one solution would have cost $37,500 - $45,000. The other solution costs a maximum of $1700 including the cost of the memory. If you can see why we went for option 2 then you are pretty daft.
I know that any decent techie will want to fix the bugs, but in this instance it just was not worth the expense on a project that was due to expire in just over a year, even though it did generate more than $200,000 in revenue for our company in that year.
The retraining would not be limited to the GUI, it would have to include elements of the underlying OS. Although that is probably just because we are a development shop, most office staff would probably just need to learn the new GUI.
Where I work we used to have a large number of memory leaks in one of our applications code (written by someone else before I joined the company). I wanted to audit the code and fix them as that seemed like the correct thing to do. I was overruled and told to just go and put vast amounts of memory in each server running the application. Since the application in question was only intended to be used for a five year project and that is nearly up this was a sound financial bet, we never fixed the code, but we did fix the issue effecting our customers by the cheapest possible means.
Since everyone out there is familiar with windows from their home machine Windows gets it's much lower TCO from the money saved by not having to train your staff in the use of a new OS. The occasional inconvenience windows throws at us is not enough to justify the loss in productivity of training all our staff to a new and unfamiliar OS.
I used to have a windows development box with 384 meg of ram and I never had an issue with firefox taking too much memory. I generally have a minimum of 7 or 8 apps running (mail client, IE, Firefox, Windows Explorer, Editplus, Database Software, Web Traffic Sniffer, Excel, Word). I have never had an issue with excessive swapping when using alt-tab to change between apps. I did find some apps that eventually meant I had to upgrade that machine but browsing was not one of them.
The fact is that memory is cheap and windows seems to have pretty decent memory management nowadays so surely application should allocate as much memory as they can possible use, certainly something like a browser that can just us it all as a cache. The internet is a far bigger bottleneck than the pagefile so more caching is better in my book.
Examine the following formula:
F = (G * m1 * m2) / d^2
Where
m1 = mass of first body
m2 - mass of 2nd body
d^2 = Distance between two bodies centre of mass squared.
G = Einstein's Gravitational constant
This only predicts the attractive force between two bodies (m1, m2), if you try and apply it to three bodies you have to approximate two of the bodies into one. Sometimes this works well but sometimes it falls down.
The other main issue is the value of G. 6.67 * 10^-11 is an awful number that Einstein hated. This was one of reasons why he spent the entire rest of his life searching for something better in the form of a Grand Theory of Everything. Unfortunately he never found it.
My point after all this Physics rambling is that everything is a theory and should be taught accordingly. You should teach that the most important skill is to question everything, especially with regard to science. Nothing is set in stone when it comes to science and our understanding of the universe since we view everything from a very narrow perspective.
I think that Darwin's theory of evolution is far more likely to explain how we came to be on this earth than any junk involving Adam and Eve. The entire Bible is a series of metaphors to try and illustrate how we should live our lives. We should very soon be at a state when we can ditch all religions and just act in a humane manor for humanities sake alone. At least, I hope we should since the bible is getting very old now and although the morals of the stories have not changed the actual settings are becoming less and less relevant with each passing decade.