The Recording Industry strategy is to invest in a lot of musicians (many of whom fail) and make back their money w/ the successful ones.
Actually, you've got it backwards. The music industry is subsidizing rare underpriced successes with an abundance of overpriced failures.
Prices reflect desirability and supply. A crappy album (i.e. one good song) is priced at $20 becase that's what most people are really willing to pay for one good song. Maybe not you, or the average Slashdot reader, but the average person.
So the industry makes $20 for quickly and cheaply turning out a crappy album. And the industry makes $20 for investing a lot of time and money and risk to produce a good album. So the bad news is that they have no incentive to turn out good albums.
But the good news is that in a world where a good song is valued at $20, if you hunt, you can get an entire album full of good songs for $20. In reality, those of us who carefully select more good albums than bad are getting a tremendous deal, subsidized by all the idiots who buy up bad music.
With all these OSS/FS/*NIX developers moving over to Mac OS X, you can expect the general usability of Mac OS X applications to start degrading terribly. Those kinds of developers will just start polluting the Apple platform with their user-hostile attitudes about computing, ignoring the carefully-crafted approach to software design for which Apple has always stood.
Typical OSS/FS/*NIX developer attitude: If you aren't smart enough to hack a.conf file with vi over a parallel port, that's your fault for being a n00b, and we have no interest in writing software that's actually well-architected, handles error conditions well, or is easy to install, configure, or use. It's not our job to care about you. If you don't like it, fix it yourself!
Do you really want that kind of developer writing Mac software? Seriously? I think they should stay in Linux-land; at least they can't make that platform much worse than it already is.
The best starting point would be formal training in "Video Games Appreciation".
Similar to art appreciation, it would not only teach how to break down a game into its components, style, and cultural context, but it would also make students intimately familiar with classic examples of both good and bad games.
"Why was game X so well-loved? Why did game Y tank so badly? Which game designers consistently turned out the best games, and what were each of their approaches that worked so successfully for them? What were the major recognizable styles of games, and when did each style gain prominence, and what was unique or interesting about each style?"
So many game designers today keep making the same stupid mistakes that have been made ad nauseum for decades now. If they had competent backgrounds in video game appreciation, I think we would see the quality of games rise across the board in the industry.
Or, to put it super-simply: learn from the mistakes of generations past, and stop repeating them.
Well... here's more content I'll be ignoring entirely because of the choice to use Real technology as the media delivery mechanism.
Real is an unethical company. They use every psychological trick in the book to trick users into "opting-in" for spyware, ads, and spam.
Not only does their software suck to the point that I simply refuse to install it, but I will not even use alternative software to play Real media streams, because that still supports the company on the server side.
The sooner Real dies a miserable death, the better off the entire world will be. I'm eager to do my part to help make that happen.
Someone has too much time.
on
PC In An XP Box
·
· Score: 1, Troll
The author even explains how he then fit it in to a Red Hat box and used a sensor to tell the bootloader which OS to run based on which box it is in.
Someone has way too much time on their hands. If this guy is so smart, why doesn't someone put his brain to good use? Get him to fix the lingering IDE disk geometry problems in FreeBSD's installer or something.
<sarcasm overtone="disgust" alt="troll">
Oh, wait, that would actually require motivating the guy to do something useful that he didn't necessarily want to do. Capitalism is evil, I almost forgot.
</sarcasm>
Is the console destined for superiority, or will the ubiquitous need and superior user input of the PC keep it as a viable game platform?
The majority of video gamers have always generally preferred consoles over PCs for two simple reasons: less hassle, less money. You plug it in, turn it on, and it just works. No software to install, drivers to fuck with, or BIOSes to flash. And a console still costs less than a 3rd of what a gaming PC costs. These are the reasons why most gamers bought NES or PS2 rather than C64 or PC.
A minority of the gaming public has traditionally preferred PC gaming because of two advantages: advanced computing capabilities and the keyboard/mouse methods of input. But today's consoles are on the verge of eliminating those two gaps. PS2 and XBOX both support the ability to connect keyboards, mice, and other unique input devices, and they are both plenty powerful enough to appear as good as most people's PCs, but at a much cheaper price (because the console can be subsidized by the sale of games, which is something a business can't do with PCs).
All that the consoles need to do is provide some add-on module that lets you get SVGA or HDTV output for high-res viewing (supported by all games on the console, not just special games that support it as a hack), and to let gamers reconfigure any game to use any combination of input devices that are supported by the system (pad/joystick/keyboard/mouse/racing wheel/whatever), and then a console becomes a perfectly reasonable substitute for your typical gaming PC.
So at this point the only limitation is the demographics choices being made by console manufacturers, not the technology itself.
I've noticed that ever since the days of the C64 and NES, many game designers have opted to push their hardware way beyond its limits, resulting in slowdown. Today, the problem persists quite commonly in cross-platform ports where the designers couldn't be bothered to simplify the rendering to get the performance smoother on the target platform.
The most important aspect of any game, and in fact, any user-interface, is responsiveness. Give me an otherwise identical port of an excellent game, but with a choppy framerate, and it completely ruins the game. It feels like wading through molasses.
The reason I have historically liked Nintendo is that they have never pushed the system beyond its limits in their own in-house games. When Nintendo writes a game for its own hardware, it ensures the game runs smoothly. They simplify the game, if necessary, to ensure it performs well. I belive the only time they ever came close to violating this was with the original SNES StarFox game, and that was only because 3D was a new-fangled trick and there really wasn't much else like it availble on home systems at the time.
I want to see game designers stop trying to focus on visual detail, and instead focus on behavioral detail. Zelda WindWaker is an excellent example of how to do it right: the game's visuals are actually pretty simplistic, but that's fine because there's still an attention to detail throughout the game in terms of how the characters move, how the camera angles work, how objects that are just part of the "background" are still interactable, etc. The game looks pretty much like Zelda64 on the N64 if you examine still screenshots, but if you actually play the game you realize that the GameCube is a huge step up.
Incidentally, this is my same primary gripe with graphic operating systems for personal computers. When I click something, I expect it to respond immediately -- not to launch into a hard-drive-thrashing frenzy for 15 seconds before finally doing what I told it to do. Responsiveness to user input should be the highest-priority job for any graphic desktop, rather than an afterthought that enslaves users to frustrating delays. Fifteen seconds is an eternity, after all, in an environment when your mind already runs faster than your fingers can physically type.
They can't win in the marketplace by using their spyware tactics or actually creating a quality product, so now they're trying to remove the ability for businesses to choose any technology other than RealMedia. The obvious desperation here is sickly comic.
I think we should load SCO, Real, and George W on board a European mars probe and launch it, with specific instructions to crash-land on Mars and never be heard from again... after all, Bush wants to go to Mars; SCO could finally find fossil evidence to support their claim that their propriety UNIX code is the basis for all life; and Real could start streaming video to outer space, instead of to us here on Earth.
...goes directly against the idea that nobody can own a fact
So if I write a sentence that says, "If you do this-and-this-and-this-and-this to a DVD, it will be decrypted", that's just a fact. But DeCSS was deemed illegal. So according to the US legal system, certain facts already can not only be owned, but made illegal to utter or to communicate.
Nightsurf.com must be a paying partner with MSN search. I bet they bought the keyword "xfree86" from MSN search, such that any searches on *precisely* that keyword will reroute the user to their search engine.
My theory is backed up by the fact that if you search for "xfree86 xfree86" rather than just "xfree86", you get back the right results.
I bet MSN Search would like to be notified of Nightsurf.com's trickery...
All you have to do to fix the patent system is: (1) charge the filer a penalty at least double the filing fee if the application is rejected, and (2) change patent office employment guidelines such that employees are paid a small bonus per patent rejected.
That motivates patent office employees to try their hardest to reject patents, because they will personally make more money off rejections than approvals. And it motivates them to work on their own time to prove rejections, since they are paid primarily by number of rejections instead of time in the office.
Simultaneously, it places more burden on the filers to thoroughly research the legitimacy of their application before ever submitting it, taking a large research burden off the patent office and significantly reducing the number of applications.
In the end, it results in a system in which filers must challenge the patent office (by submitting a revised version of a rejected application, and doing that as many times as they like), instead of bogus patents getting granted and then everyone having to waste time and money sorting it out in lawsuits.
In January there seems to have been an incident in which it was thought that an object (asteroid) in space might have hit the earth within a couple of days of being spotted. It did miss, though.
No way -- it really missed? I thought I was dead.
Slashdot: facts for hermits, stuff that's obvious.
Re:What's the solution? How can we take their mone
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 1
The best market opportunity that exists right now is to create your own local shop which provides highly competent charge-by-the-hour technical support for other company's products and services.
People haul their PC's into your shop, or you send your knowledgeable support people out to people's homes. If you fix the problem, then you charge the customer based on time spent helping them. If you don't fix the problem, the customer pays nothing. Therefore you have built-in motivation right there to track both time-efficiency AND problem resolution, with problem resolution being of primary importance.
The face-to-face/hands-on/in-person aspect to this is very important, as the reality of technical support is that it's just not possible to do it over the phone and rely on uneducated customers to do the actual work. You have to get someone knowledgeable on the actual problem, dealing with it directly.
Nearly all software and engineering problems I see are due to unnecessary complexity. The more complex the system, the more prone it is to error, and the more difficult it is to fix. Since we cannot easily *prove* large programs correct, the best we can do is try to intuit our way through the program's structure and flow to spot problems and try to ensure correctness. So making code as understandable and simple as possible is the best way to reduce flaws, since the human brain is the last line of defense/validation as to the program's correctness.
I've been a developer on a major Microsoft product for 5 years. The source for this application is very large and it requires a team of roughly 30 developers to work on it for each release. Even when you become an expert on one area, you still know nothing about other areas, because there's just so much code.
There are areas of our code that are considered very touchy. They are expensive areas to work in because they are difficult to understand, are architected poorly, and break in unexpected ways nearly every time someone makes a change. This is directly due to the code not being as intuitive or as simple as it should be.
There are other areas of our code that are very readable, smartly commented, and intuitively architected. These areas are pretty inexpensive to work in, and they tend not to have many bugs. These areas do some very complex work, and are sometimes optimized in ways that don't make a lot of sense at first glance, but because the code is commented and architected cleanly, it is still quite understandable even to a newcomer.
When people start building houses of cards just because they can, instead of it actually being necessary to get the job done, that's when you end up with a mess on your hands. I've seen plenty of code (not at my job, but on my own time) written by "kiddies" who had just discovered recursive functions, and they do their damndest to try to tackle everything using recursion. I've seen the same thing with people who have just discovered C++ classes -- everything is over-encapsulated as a class, just because they think classes are cool, rather than using classes to aid in organizing things in any sane fashion.
Hey, man, not all of us Americans are "so sensitive". I'm a US native, and I'm a callous mean fucker with a dry sarcastic wit and a hatred for political correctness.
So, like, uh, fuck you. Yeah.
Re:Anything you say will be taken down and used ..
on
Darl Goes to Harvard
·
· Score: 1
There's this thing called a "joke". Perhaps you've heard of it.
Please remove Part A ("stick") from Part B ("ass"), and then proceed to Step 7.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons, I'm not sure where to begin.
First off, it's "security by obscurity", which, as any security-knowledgable computer person can tell you, is no security at all.
Secondly, it relies on the computers not having any kind of firewall in place between them, which is simply not the reality of the Internet world. Firewalls are everywhere, in both hardware and software form, and to write any Internet-based software that assumes the availability of weird port ranges is just stupid at this point, because very few people will be able to use it.
Thirdly, the ensuing terminology that would result from wide-spread adoption of this technology would be terrible:
"big knockers" - people who knock heavily on hundreds of servers to try to brute-force their way in
"fart knockers" - people who knock on your ports just enough to make you get up and see who's there, only to run away again giggling that they made you check
"knocked up" - when a computer has been broken into by a big knocker or a fart knocker
Having a single, global capitalistic economy is good for the world. However, in the short-term, in may not be good for many countries or individuals, because it will take a lot of time for economic forces to work on a global scale to bring all countries up to the same level.
In other words, when you are starting out with numerous closed economies that each have radically different characteristics, and then you open them up to each other, at first there will be huge imbalance, outflux/influx of jobs, etc. One economy will gain while the other will suffer. But once everything equalizes, then the global situation and the economic future are better off for both countries.
The only arguments I've heard against globalization and free markets are short-sighted, self-interested ones: I'll lose my job!, or My country will suffer as jobs go elsewhere!
Outsourcing to other countries for any type of labor is good. If they can do the work at equal or better quality, and do it faster or cheaper, then they should be getting the jobs. That's the entire point of a capitalistic economy: efficiency.
Re:Anything you say will be taken down and used ..
on
Darl Goes to Harvard
·
· Score: 1
Since I created the magical CString class, which exists only in my mind.
Re:Anything you say will be taken down and used ..
on
Darl Goes to Harvard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Suggested Linux kernel addition:
if (UserName=="DarylMcB") {
DeleteAllPartitions();
int x=x/0; }
The cell phone market is slowly evolving, just as the automobile market did.
In the beginning, cars were simple and unreliable. Then lots of extra fancy features got added, but the cars were still unreliable. Finally, the cars got reliable, and now you can get them with or without the fancy features.
Right now, the cell phone manufacturers are foolishly thinking that they can cell more phones by adding more features. And for a short while, their sales will go up. But the sales will drop again as people learn that the phones still aren't reliable or easy to use.
Slowly, the manufacturers will learn that reliability is important for both simple phones and snazzy ones. If a phone isn't durable, is difficult to use, doesn't get good reception, or has bad sound quality, nothing else matters.
Market forces do work in a true capitalistic economy... they just take a long time to balance out.
While I agree with most of what you say (turn our resources to problems at home first), the one point I violently disagree with is that we should be spending tons of money on medical research.
I hate to say it, but we have too many people on this planet as it is, and we should quit trying to save the least fortunate. We could afford to let more people die, in terms of both population and quality of genes over time. And, we are becoming more physically defective as a species as we keep trying to save more and more flawed people from their own conditions.
Haven't you noticed how more people than ever have poor eyesight, because now we have fancy contact lenses and laser surgery to enable these people to function and reproduce in the world? Haven't you noticed the boom in severe peanut allergies in children, because fewer of them are dying from allergic reactions due to medication and prevention?
It's time we as a species stop mucking with the natural filters that weed out medical problems from our genes. Let people with horrible conditions die out, and let the conditions die with them, and let humanity as a whole be better off for it. If you want to do something truly helpful for individuals and mankind as a whole, start legalizing assisted suicide and finding more humane ways for people with fatal medical conditions to die more quickly and without pain.
Instead of trying to save people with horrible medical problems, we should let them die out so that fewer people with horrible medical problems will be brought into the world in the first place. In the long run that is the more humane and intelligent thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The Recording Industry strategy is to invest in a lot of musicians (many of whom fail) and make back their money w/ the successful ones.
Actually, you've got it backwards. The music industry is subsidizing rare underpriced successes with an abundance of overpriced failures.
Prices reflect desirability and supply. A crappy album (i.e. one good song) is priced at $20 becase that's what most people are really willing to pay for one good song. Maybe not you, or the average Slashdot reader, but the average person.
So the industry makes $20 for quickly and cheaply turning out a crappy album. And the industry makes $20 for investing a lot of time and money and risk to produce a good album. So the bad news is that they have no incentive to turn out good albums.
But the good news is that in a world where a good song is valued at $20, if you hunt, you can get an entire album full of good songs for $20. In reality, those of us who carefully select more good albums than bad are getting a tremendous deal, subsidized by all the idiots who buy up bad music.
Is that really so bad?
Talk about completely missing the point!
With all these OSS/FS/*NIX developers moving over to Mac OS X, you can expect the general usability of Mac OS X applications to start degrading terribly. Those kinds of developers will just start polluting the Apple platform with their user-hostile attitudes about computing, ignoring the carefully-crafted approach to software design for which Apple has always stood.
.conf file with vi over a parallel port, that's your fault for being a n00b, and we have no interest in writing software that's actually well-architected, handles error conditions well, or is easy to install, configure, or use. It's not our job to care about you. If you don't like it, fix it yourself!
Typical OSS/FS/*NIX developer attitude: If you aren't smart enough to hack a
Do you really want that kind of developer writing Mac software? Seriously? I think they should stay in Linux-land; at least they can't make that platform much worse than it already is.
The best starting point would be formal training in "Video Games Appreciation".
Similar to art appreciation, it would not only teach how to break down a game into its components, style, and cultural context, but it would also make students intimately familiar with classic examples of both good and bad games.
"Why was game X so well-loved? Why did game Y tank so badly? Which game designers consistently turned out the best games, and what were each of their approaches that worked so successfully for them? What were the major recognizable styles of games, and when did each style gain prominence, and what was unique or interesting about each style?"
So many game designers today keep making the same stupid mistakes that have been made ad nauseum for decades now. If they had competent backgrounds in video game appreciation, I think we would see the quality of games rise across the board in the industry.
Or, to put it super-simply: learn from the mistakes of generations past, and stop repeating them.
Well... here's more content I'll be ignoring entirely because of the choice to use Real technology as the media delivery mechanism.
Real is an unethical company. They use every psychological trick in the book to trick users into "opting-in" for spyware, ads, and spam.
Not only does their software suck to the point that I simply refuse to install it, but I will not even use alternative software to play Real media streams, because that still supports the company on the server side.
The sooner Real dies a miserable death, the better off the entire world will be. I'm eager to do my part to help make that happen.
The author even explains how he then fit it in to a Red Hat box and used a sensor to tell the bootloader which OS to run based on which box it is in.
Someone has way too much time on their hands. If this guy is so smart, why doesn't someone put his brain to good use? Get him to fix the lingering IDE disk geometry problems in FreeBSD's installer or something.
<sarcasm overtone="disgust" alt="troll"> Oh, wait, that would actually require motivating the guy to do something useful that he didn't necessarily want to do. Capitalism is evil, I almost forgot. </sarcasm>
One wonders how the US government would react if a foreign nation tried a similar approach.
No I don't. We would undoubtedly bomb the living shit out of them, and take their oil and establish a fictitious democracy while we were at it.
Is the console destined for superiority, or will the ubiquitous need and superior user input of the PC keep it as a viable game platform?
The majority of video gamers have always generally preferred consoles over PCs for two simple reasons: less hassle, less money. You plug it in, turn it on, and it just works. No software to install, drivers to fuck with, or BIOSes to flash. And a console still costs less than a 3rd of what a gaming PC costs. These are the reasons why most gamers bought NES or PS2 rather than C64 or PC.
A minority of the gaming public has traditionally preferred PC gaming because of two advantages: advanced computing capabilities and the keyboard/mouse methods of input. But today's consoles are on the verge of eliminating those two gaps. PS2 and XBOX both support the ability to connect keyboards, mice, and other unique input devices, and they are both plenty powerful enough to appear as good as most people's PCs, but at a much cheaper price (because the console can be subsidized by the sale of games, which is something a business can't do with PCs).
All that the consoles need to do is provide some add-on module that lets you get SVGA or HDTV output for high-res viewing (supported by all games on the console, not just special games that support it as a hack), and to let gamers reconfigure any game to use any combination of input devices that are supported by the system (pad/joystick/keyboard/mouse/racing wheel/whatever), and then a console becomes a perfectly reasonable substitute for your typical gaming PC.
So at this point the only limitation is the demographics choices being made by console manufacturers, not the technology itself.
I've noticed that ever since the days of the C64 and NES, many game designers have opted to push their hardware way beyond its limits, resulting in slowdown. Today, the problem persists quite commonly in cross-platform ports where the designers couldn't be bothered to simplify the rendering to get the performance smoother on the target platform.
The most important aspect of any game, and in fact, any user-interface, is responsiveness. Give me an otherwise identical port of an excellent game, but with a choppy framerate, and it completely ruins the game. It feels like wading through molasses.
The reason I have historically liked Nintendo is that they have never pushed the system beyond its limits in their own in-house games. When Nintendo writes a game for its own hardware, it ensures the game runs smoothly. They simplify the game, if necessary, to ensure it performs well. I belive the only time they ever came close to violating this was with the original SNES StarFox game, and that was only because 3D was a new-fangled trick and there really wasn't much else like it availble on home systems at the time.
I want to see game designers stop trying to focus on visual detail, and instead focus on behavioral detail. Zelda WindWaker is an excellent example of how to do it right: the game's visuals are actually pretty simplistic, but that's fine because there's still an attention to detail throughout the game in terms of how the characters move, how the camera angles work, how objects that are just part of the "background" are still interactable, etc. The game looks pretty much like Zelda64 on the N64 if you examine still screenshots, but if you actually play the game you realize that the GameCube is a huge step up.
Incidentally, this is my same primary gripe with graphic operating systems for personal computers. When I click something, I expect it to respond immediately -- not to launch into a hard-drive-thrashing frenzy for 15 seconds before finally doing what I told it to do. Responsiveness to user input should be the highest-priority job for any graphic desktop, rather than an afterthought that enslaves users to frustrating delays. Fifteen seconds is an eternity, after all, in an environment when your mind already runs faster than your fingers can physically type.
They can't win in the marketplace by using their spyware tactics or actually creating a quality product, so now they're trying to remove the ability for businesses to choose any technology other than RealMedia. The obvious desperation here is sickly comic.
I think we should load SCO, Real, and George W on board a European mars probe and launch it, with specific instructions to crash-land on Mars and never be heard from again... after all, Bush wants to go to Mars; SCO could finally find fossil evidence to support their claim that their propriety UNIX code is the basis for all life; and Real could start streaming video to outer space, instead of to us here on Earth.
So if I write a sentence that says, "If you do this-and-this-and-this-and-this to a DVD, it will be decrypted", that's just a fact. But DeCSS was deemed illegal. So according to the US legal system, certain facts already can not only be owned, but made illegal to utter or to communicate.
Nightsurf.com must be a paying partner with MSN search. I bet they bought the keyword "xfree86" from MSN search, such that any searches on *precisely* that keyword will reroute the user to their search engine.
My theory is backed up by the fact that if you search for "xfree86 xfree86" rather than just "xfree86", you get back the right results.
I bet MSN Search would like to be notified of Nightsurf.com's trickery...
All you have to do to fix the patent system is: (1) charge the filer a penalty at least double the filing fee if the application is rejected, and (2) change patent office employment guidelines such that employees are paid a small bonus per patent rejected.
That motivates patent office employees to try their hardest to reject patents, because they will personally make more money off rejections than approvals. And it motivates them to work on their own time to prove rejections, since they are paid primarily by number of rejections instead of time in the office.
Simultaneously, it places more burden on the filers to thoroughly research the legitimacy of their application before ever submitting it, taking a large research burden off the patent office and significantly reducing the number of applications.
In the end, it results in a system in which filers must challenge the patent office (by submitting a revised version of a rejected application, and doing that as many times as they like), instead of bogus patents getting granted and then everyone having to waste time and money sorting it out in lawsuits.
In January there seems to have been an incident in which it was thought that an object (asteroid) in space might have hit the earth within a couple of days of being spotted. It did miss, though.
No way -- it really missed? I thought I was dead.
Slashdot: facts for hermits, stuff that's obvious.
The best market opportunity that exists right now is to create your own local shop which provides highly competent charge-by-the-hour technical support for other company's products and services.
People haul their PC's into your shop, or you send your knowledgeable support people out to people's homes. If you fix the problem, then you charge the customer based on time spent helping them. If you don't fix the problem, the customer pays nothing. Therefore you have built-in motivation right there to track both time-efficiency AND problem resolution, with problem resolution being of primary importance.
The face-to-face/hands-on/in-person aspect to this is very important, as the reality of technical support is that it's just not possible to do it over the phone and rely on uneducated customers to do the actual work. You have to get someone knowledgeable on the actual problem, dealing with it directly.
Nearly all software and engineering problems I see are due to unnecessary complexity. The more complex the system, the more prone it is to error, and the more difficult it is to fix. Since we cannot easily *prove* large programs correct, the best we can do is try to intuit our way through the program's structure and flow to spot problems and try to ensure correctness. So making code as understandable and simple as possible is the best way to reduce flaws, since the human brain is the last line of defense/validation as to the program's correctness.
I've been a developer on a major Microsoft product for 5 years. The source for this application is very large and it requires a team of roughly 30 developers to work on it for each release. Even when you become an expert on one area, you still know nothing about other areas, because there's just so much code.
There are areas of our code that are considered very touchy. They are expensive areas to work in because they are difficult to understand, are architected poorly, and break in unexpected ways nearly every time someone makes a change. This is directly due to the code not being as intuitive or as simple as it should be.
There are other areas of our code that are very readable, smartly commented, and intuitively architected. These areas are pretty inexpensive to work in, and they tend not to have many bugs. These areas do some very complex work, and are sometimes optimized in ways that don't make a lot of sense at first glance, but because the code is commented and architected cleanly, it is still quite understandable even to a newcomer.
When people start building houses of cards just because they can, instead of it actually being necessary to get the job done, that's when you end up with a mess on your hands. I've seen plenty of code (not at my job, but on my own time) written by "kiddies" who had just discovered recursive functions, and they do their damndest to try to tackle everything using recursion. I've seen the same thing with people who have just discovered C++ classes -- everything is over-encapsulated as a class, just because they think classes are cool, rather than using classes to aid in organizing things in any sane fashion.
Download ZSNES or Gens and go grab Mega Turrican or Super Turrican. Far better than the old lame Amiga Turrican games anyway.
Hey, man, not all of us Americans are "so sensitive". I'm a US native, and I'm a callous mean fucker with a dry sarcastic wit and a hatred for political correctness.
So, like, uh, fuck you. Yeah.
There's this thing called a "joke". Perhaps you've heard of it.
Please remove Part A ("stick") from Part B ("ass"), and then proceed to Step 7.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons, I'm not sure where to begin.
First off, it's "security by obscurity", which, as any security-knowledgable computer person can tell you, is no security at all.
Secondly, it relies on the computers not having any kind of firewall in place between them, which is simply not the reality of the Internet world. Firewalls are everywhere, in both hardware and software form, and to write any Internet-based software that assumes the availability of weird port ranges is just stupid at this point, because very few people will be able to use it.
Thirdly, the ensuing terminology that would result from wide-spread adoption of this technology would be terrible:
It just gets worse from there...
Having a single, global capitalistic economy is good for the world. However, in the short-term, in may not be good for many countries or individuals, because it will take a lot of time for economic forces to work on a global scale to bring all countries up to the same level.
In other words, when you are starting out with numerous closed economies that each have radically different characteristics, and then you open them up to each other, at first there will be huge imbalance, outflux/influx of jobs, etc. One economy will gain while the other will suffer. But once everything equalizes, then the global situation and the economic future are better off for both countries.
The only arguments I've heard against globalization and free markets are short-sighted, self-interested ones: I'll lose my job!, or My country will suffer as jobs go elsewhere!
Outsourcing to other countries for any type of labor is good. If they can do the work at equal or better quality, and do it faster or cheaper, then they should be getting the jobs. That's the entire point of a capitalistic economy: efficiency.
Since I created the magical CString class, which exists only in my mind.
Suggested Linux kernel addition:
if (UserName=="DarylMcB")
{
DeleteAllPartitions();
int x=x/0;
}
The cell phone market is slowly evolving, just as the automobile market did.
In the beginning, cars were simple and unreliable. Then lots of extra fancy features got added, but the cars were still unreliable. Finally, the cars got reliable, and now you can get them with or without the fancy features.
Right now, the cell phone manufacturers are foolishly thinking that they can cell more phones by adding more features. And for a short while, their sales will go up. But the sales will drop again as people learn that the phones still aren't reliable or easy to use.
Slowly, the manufacturers will learn that reliability is important for both simple phones and snazzy ones. If a phone isn't durable, is difficult to use, doesn't get good reception, or has bad sound quality, nothing else matters.
Market forces do work in a true capitalistic economy... they just take a long time to balance out.
While I agree with most of what you say (turn our resources to problems at home first), the one point I violently disagree with is that we should be spending tons of money on medical research.
I hate to say it, but we have too many people on this planet as it is, and we should quit trying to save the least fortunate. We could afford to let more people die, in terms of both population and quality of genes over time. And, we are becoming more physically defective as a species as we keep trying to save more and more flawed people from their own conditions.
Haven't you noticed how more people than ever have poor eyesight, because now we have fancy contact lenses and laser surgery to enable these people to function and reproduce in the world? Haven't you noticed the boom in severe peanut allergies in children, because fewer of them are dying from allergic reactions due to medication and prevention?
It's time we as a species stop mucking with the natural filters that weed out medical problems from our genes. Let people with horrible conditions die out, and let the conditions die with them, and let humanity as a whole be better off for it. If you want to do something truly helpful for individuals and mankind as a whole, start legalizing assisted suicide and finding more humane ways for people with fatal medical conditions to die more quickly and without pain.
Instead of trying to save people with horrible medical problems, we should let them die out so that fewer people with horrible medical problems will be brought into the world in the first place. In the long run that is the more humane and intelligent thing.