What's stopping them from doing the same here? Can't they just release a new upgraded version of Visual Studio Express that won't run his stuff? Probably the code base is a monolithic, spaghetti-code mess and they just can't comment out the sections that allow the creation of extensions. If they could, they probably would; but since they haven't, they probably can't, in a cost-effective manner.
You're a little confused, to the point where your statement is ambiguous. Originally, it was free as in beer, now, because of community pressure, it's free as in speech.
Comparing it to MS's products is disingenuous.
How so?
Microsoft has a lot of free software, but Visual Studio has not historically been free.
Uh, I'm not aware of *any* free-as-in-speech software from Microsoft.
They released a dumbed down version so people could play with it, but VS makes MS money. Java is great and all, but Joe Bloe developer never had to pay for it.
What does that have to do with MS trying to control the community, instead of allowing greater freedom, and thus releasing the creative potential of the development community?
Second, comparing Sun to MS also rings a little false. MS makes boatloads of money, Sun doesn't.
Um, so you can only compare MS to companies that make a boatload of money? You mean a company like IBM, a company that has embraced linux solutions, alongside their own?
You're saying that MS, the most successful software company in history by a long stretch, should emulate Sun?
No, that's not what I said at all. This further shows that you focus in on specific details, and miss the larger point. What I'm saying is that MS will not be able to continue to exert tight control over the development community for the long term, say 10 to 20 years.
Third, MS's new generation software is much more open than it has been historically. In fact, Java lags pitifully behind WCF in implementing important web services standards, for example.
Okay, but it's still not open in the sense of interoperability. It's a vertical platform. Yes, they do provide great tools -- I'm not denying that. But if you choose to develop with them, you lock yourself into the MS platform, and you lose horizontal integration, and also backwards and forwards compatibility. MS wants to make money, and they have an interest in having you purchase all new licenses when their latest tools don't work with old versions.
Finally, it's difficult to argue that neither MS nor its developer community have made much contribution to computing. In fact, it's impossible.
No, it's very easy. Name two standards or protocols MS has developed ( or that have 'escaped' from the Windows platform) that have been adopted by other platforms or architectures. Meanwhile, free software has given us ftp, http, TCP/IP, ssh, PKI...
The vast majority of applications run on computers around the world run on Windows. They look and feel largely the same. Dumb people can even sometimes figure them out.
Can't you understand monopoly, vertical development architecture, or vendor lock-in? That's the reason they control most of the computers world-wide.
The fact is that MS is in overdrive lately with respect to how they court developers (queue "developers, developers, developers" remix). They've always been good about it, and they're getting better.
Again, vertical platforms, monopoly, not playing well with others go much further in explaining that. Seriously, go look around MSDN. Look at WCF. Look at WPF. Look at Windows Workflow. Look at the Enterprise library. Look at the software factories. Look around Codeplex. Play with TFS, Silverlight, etc... Believe me or not, I was a hardcore UNIX developer not too long ago - Perl, C/C++, Java stuff. I've moved to.NET and I _absolutely dread_ having to go back to that primitive shit. Unlike most Slashdotters, I know both sides of the aisle very well and developing on the MS side of the fence is far more efficient and enjoyable - _if_ you can afford it, i.e. you work in a corporate environment. I agree with you that they make good tools and they have a great workflow. What I'm saying is that once you start in the MS environment, i
That's not what he was saying. It sure was. Why else would he talk about Sun releasing Java under the GPL, when they had controlled it for so long? Because he's talking about software corporations embracing community, instead of controlling community.
He was saying exactly what I thought he was saying - e.g. why do we need TFS when we have subversion, or MSBuild when we have Nant? You're focusing on a specific detail, which is why you are missing his point. He did say that, but that was a small part of his whole message, and certainly not his point. You're missing the forest for a tree.
As for MS and the developer community, it's alive and kicking. Go check out MSDN and the MSDN forums. Go check out the patterns and practices group and how they've encouraged community participation. Go check out Codeplex.com. I have no doubt that there are people out there who are creating software for MS Windows. People still develop Amiga software and Atari 2600 cartridges. But MS developers are largely vertical developers. Their software scratches an itch and doesn't interact with anything else. It's disposable software -- you can only use it with this generation of application or platform. It won't work with tomorrow's upgrades. Far and away, the software used by the average user is provided by MS. No 'homegrown' Windows software ever finds it's way to a users desktop, without first passing through the gates of MS.
On Windows, I would bet that the three most widely used applications are IE, Outlook, and Word/Office. All provided by MS. Like I said earlier, MS wants to be the sole provider of *all* software on your Windows computer. If something they don't control begins to appear somewhat popular, they either squash it or buy it out. They want to be the sole provider, controlling everything.
Comparatively, almost everything in Linux was written by a different person or organization. Some of those command-line utilities are 20 years old, and still going strong. Tools such as 'grep' and 'find' works just as well today as they did 20 years ago. What industry protocol has ever come from a small-time MS developer? Almost all of our modern computing standards -- ftp, http, email, came from small-time unix developers. Neither MS nor its developer community have made much contribution to computing in general.
You've got to be kidding, right? You actually think MS should just not develop products because there are a bunch of various different open source tools people could use instead? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. You're right, it makes no sense whatsoever, because you completely missed the point.
He's saying that MS should not try to squash community efforts to create great software on Windows platforms. You might need to read that again for it to sink in. He's not saying stop writing software altogether. He's not saying discontinue SQL server because there's some shareware database out there.
What he is saying is that they don't need to control every successful application on the Windows platform. If they try to, they will both a) breed bad will amongst the developer community, which will hinder Windows application development, which will cause great development to happen in other platforms, and b) waste a lot of money and time in development and support trying to fill every software niche that exists in a platform. They can't write *all* the software for Windows.
Simply put, MS alone cannot provide as great a Windows experience as MS + developer community can. But every time some great developer makes a wonderful product for Windows, they either squash it or snatch it up and abandon it. At every opportunity they destroy the Windows development community. Not only do they want you to run only Windows, the want you running only MS software on it. And they just won't be able to provide all the software that a user will want on their system. It's the old Soviet model of central planning, where Moscow decided the details of the economy from Khazakstan to Siberia. Eventually it implodes under its own weight.
But Jamie didn't develop TestDriven with Express; he used the full version. He may never had touched the Express version. He never violated Express' license in the course of developing TestDriven -- how could he? He never used it.
However, a user of Express gets access to features they're not supposed to when they fire up TestDriven. That would place any blame on the Express User, not Jamie, right?
Sort of like, it's okay to write a program that's a maphack for WOW, if you never use WOW software when you do it. However, the player who actually uses the maphack is in violation of the agreement with Blizzard.
I'm starting to really believe that this is the end of the road for MS' crappy development and release model. The open source movement has been growing for over 25 years and it's turning out to be a real competitor to MS windows. There are more and more articles about Joe Computer columnist installing Ubuntu and *not* encountering any fatal flaws. More and more apps are available for Windows, OSX and Linux. The endlessly delayed Vista with no real improvements and incredible system requirements shows the fundamental brokenness of MS' development process. Meanwhile OSX and the various Linux distros have given us release after release, with actual improvements, for little or no cost. On top of that, the various Windows emulators might provide a complete Windows experience in the next few years. It looks like MS really may not be able to keep up with open source in the next 5-10 years.
I expect MS to fire up the DRM/legal side of their battle. Utilizing software patents, allying with the various MAFIAA outfits, getting draconian legislation passed -- that seems to be their last and only defense.
Corporations will always trust buying software and maintenance from other corporations rather than those supplied by independent developers. It's still safe to go with MS, no matter how crappy they are for the time being. It will be a long, slow, torturous death for MS.
Obviously I'm missing your point -- are you saying that the local governments should own and control the last-mile part of public utilities, or are you saying something else?
When I talk about the last mile, I'm talking about the closest publicly held right-of-way. Most people don't have property that measures more than a mile in any dimension. The last mile of any given utility in the city probably encompasses several neighborhoods.
So unless you want each competing company throwing up a new cable or copper line on the phone poles -- and they won't, because it would be too expensive to run a new line to compete for existing customers -- we have to figure out a way to have the lines on the telephone poles to be shared. Companies don't like renting lines from their competitors -- they tend to get lousy service from them, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage. One solution would be that the *local* government owns and maintains those lines.
OK. Or have all of the ISPs build their own switches. That's what competition is all about. The problem I'm talking about is the redundancy of infrastructure that would result in the last mile. In the power lines on your street, there is one line that delivers the cable signal to your neighborhood. If we have 5 different competing providers, do you want four additional cables up there? All five of those cables would still be providing the same amount of service, so all of that additional material ( copper wire, etc) is wasted as far as it is not being used. So you would have 5x the infrastructure to deliver the same amount of product. The added expense of running new lines means less profit in a competitive market that's heating up. Who would bother to run those lines? You wouldn't really be making much money on them. It would be a lousy return on investment.
That's why we have a regulated marketplace in above our heads on those telephone polls. To make sure that copper wire got run everywhere, including to places where it wasn't profitable to do so, like the sticks, and also that a new company could deliver their product over a competitor's lines, without having to run their own lines and create expensive, redundant infrastructure.
Balance is the secret. Blizzard spent two years polishing the balance of WCIII. *Two* whole years just balancing the races. That's why they sell #1 titles for years.
There are plenty of other games that have better controls, better features, less repetition and clicking, more races, equal or better storytelling, better graphics. But the one thing that they do not have that blizzard does is racial balance. That's what truly makes the multiplayer experience a game, where any round could almost always go any way, instead of it always being a blow-out because one player knew the surefire technique. Blizzard's games are about strategy, not tricks.
Well, what about the 'natural monopoly' of the owners of the last mile of copper wire/fiber optic cable to the homes? Unless we want 15 different cables and wires coming into each home for 15 different competing providers, how will we provide competition in the marketplace?
Maybe the neighborhood switches should be held as 'commons' by the local government, with the competitive marketplace created at the switch station?
I think it's key for Obsidian to develop games that don't have 50 bugs around every corner. If you don't want to deal with killing spiders, scorpions, and the occasional rat for the first few levels your character, try a sci-fi themed game.
You have not shown that feeling good is selfish. Is there a limited amount of good feeling to go around? If I feel good, am I using up someone else's good feelings? Are Buddhists monks experiencing pure Bliss in Nepal causing anxiety and depression in the US?
What's most surprising is that scientists are still surprised by this, as if they have never heard of evolution or thought about it's affect on society. Perhaps these are the same scientists who agree that emotions are in primitive parts of our brain yet insist "primitive" animals don't have emotions. What's surprising about this is that scientists found hard, verifiable evidence to support this "common knowledge" or "folk wisdom". Otherwise it's your "common sense" against my "common sense". Objective data is very useful in convincing someone who doesn't believe what you claim is true. It's also useful in disproving someone who believes something else.
Any true scientists believes whatever reasonable conclusions are derived from the data. If you want to convince them that animals have emotions, show them the data.
What you're describing is basically the hunter-gatherer tribal lifestyle that modern humans evolved in. It was a great big extended family, and more often then not, people would freely help each other. The tribe had ambiguous relationships with other tribes; they need each other for trade and intermarriage, but they also compete for resources and usually have long-running revenge cycles ( for instance, check out the Yanomamo. The anthropologist Chagnon's informants were surprised to find out he had no son -- "Who will avenge your death?" )
Nowadays, we live separated from our extended families literally amongst strangers. A city is basically a bunch of different families and tribes mashed together in close quarters. In hunter-gatherer societies, when "strangers" or different families and tribes get together, strict ritual is followed, so that nobody does or says something that would unintendedly hurt one another, and it doesn't escalate to violence. Our civilized social rules or "manners" are basically rituals for dealing with strangers, which we have to do a lot in modern society. We have very complex and subtle rituals to deal with cashiers, bosses, people on the sidewalk; all of the casual acquaintances that make up most of our social interaction in the city. These rituals override our innate helping behavior, which evolved to help our relatives living with us.
What about optimizing the MySQL queries? I've found that lousy PHP programmers are even lousy database designers and query writers. Lousy PHP tends to make up for even lousier DB structure and querying.
I think that's largely the case in America, but in the third world, it's largely poor migrants moving from a village to an already sprawling metropolis, looking for work and education for their kids. Mexico city has some 12 million people and they come from villages all over Mexico.
Problem is, that creates a lot of slum and ghetto areas.
I'm not a nutritionist, I don't really know if the kid is malnourished. Besides being short, he 'looked' younger than he was supposed to be. I mean, it seems that his growth was slowed.
People do vary in size, and some of that is due to malnutrition. I don't know if you can call it malnutrition, but people just don't grow as tall as they could if they had access to as many calories as they want (and I'm not talking about fat). It happened with the waves of immigrants in the US. People would come from Italy or Ireland being about 5'5" on average, and their children would sprout up taller than them. Same population, same genes, different nutrition.
But even if the average height of an adult male is 5'5", there is still a growth plan of children that is more or less the same throughout our species, provided they have enough caloric intake. Basically, if the body has to ration, it chooses to grow a proper brain and peripheral nervous system rather than long bones. It's just that the full adult height potential is never achieved.
I think the problem is that it's just redundant, or too precise for a year that long ago.
Really, what is the difference between 1916-1917, a 2 year range, and 1915-1919, a four year range? You could have either said "around the years 1916-1917" or just say "the later part of the 1910s". Combining the words 'early' and 'late' to describe the same time period borders on illogical. You're creating a precision with an awkward phrasing that really doesn't communicate any more than a much simpler phrase could.
OLPC and this are feel good ideas when too much of this world does have clean drinking water and adequate medicine or food for the day. I think it was Smithsonian that ran an article about the impact of cell phones in Africa and how it improved people's nutrition.
It's long been too expensive to run phone lines all across Africa. However, once the mining companies starting throwing up cell towers, poor people got a hold of used cell phones on their own. Now they are lining up buyers for their crops in the field, instead of harvesting them, trotting them all the way to market, and then letting them rot in the hot sun.
I spent a 10 weeks with a poor indigenous family in Ecuador. They were more or less malnourished -- a 5-year-old looked like a 3-year-old. However, all their kids were in school. They brought home homework that they did in candle light in their open-air thatch-roof plywood-platform 'houses'. Poor people all over the world take incredible advantage of the meager tools they have in front of them. If they can talk to people in far away villages with an OLPC mesh network, they will. They will use it to communicate and improve their lives.
Most people in the world understand that education, whether it's how to hunt monkeys in the canopy, or how to speak English to guide jungle tours. It's only in relatively wealthy countries with enough infrastructure and social programs that people can afford to stay stupid.
I think it would change the gameplay from mouse-click dexterity to more strategy and planning.
Sure you can have your base build itself according to your script. But then your opponent attacks, and destroys your base. How fun is that? None at all. What did you do wrong? Well, obviously, your opponent had a better build script, or one that was more tailored for this map. You had better write a better script.
In the next game, you start your improved script, and you do some scouting of the other base. Hey, he's got all his resources in buildings and climbing the tech tree! If you attacked right now, you could destroy him! So you stop your script, and start massing an army.
After playing a few games, you realize there are different build strategies for different games. It depends on the map, what you want to do, and what your opponent is doing. You have a collection of scripts, which you choose and abandon at appropriate times, and other times just manage real time to deal with the situation in front of you.
So instead of being a game of who has better mouse-fu, it's who has better strategy, better build scripts, and knows when to use and when to ignore them. More like a game of chess than a game of slap-jack.
I don't think it matters that the surveillance system sees two 'you's. At work, you're Joe Java Developer, and the ads are targeted towards him. At home, you're Antoine Apple User, and the ads are targeted to him. But wait -- what's that, you say! Joe Java and Antoine Apple are the same man!? You don't say!
It doesn't help the targeted ads to try to much your profiles together. At work you get java ads, and at home you get ads for thinkgeek.com.
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A few things. First, Java was free.
You're a little confused, to the point where your statement is ambiguous. Originally, it was free as in beer, now, because of community pressure, it's free as in speech.
Comparing it to MS's products is disingenuous.
How so?
Microsoft has a lot of free software, but Visual Studio has not historically been free.
Uh, I'm not aware of *any* free-as-in-speech software from Microsoft.
They released a dumbed down version so people could play with it, but VS makes MS money. Java is great and all, but Joe Bloe developer never had to pay for it.
What does that have to do with MS trying to control the community, instead of allowing greater freedom, and thus releasing the creative potential of the development community?
Second, comparing Sun to MS also rings a little false. MS makes boatloads of money, Sun doesn't.
Um, so you can only compare MS to companies that make a boatload of money? You mean a company like IBM, a company that has embraced linux solutions, alongside their own?
You're saying that MS, the most successful software company in history by a long stretch, should emulate Sun?
No, that's not what I said at all. This further shows that you focus in on specific details, and miss the larger point. What I'm saying is that MS will not be able to continue to exert tight control over the development community for the long term, say 10 to 20 years.
Third, MS's new generation software is much more open than it has been historically. In fact, Java lags pitifully behind WCF in implementing important web services standards, for example.
Okay, but it's still not open in the sense of interoperability. It's a vertical platform. Yes, they do provide great tools -- I'm not denying that. But if you choose to develop with them, you lock yourself into the MS platform, and you lose horizontal integration, and also backwards and forwards compatibility. MS wants to make money, and they have an interest in having you purchase all new licenses when their latest tools don't work with old versions.
Finally, it's difficult to argue that neither MS nor its developer community have made much contribution to computing. In fact, it's impossible.
No, it's very easy. Name two standards or protocols MS has developed ( or that have 'escaped' from the Windows platform) that have been adopted by other platforms or architectures. Meanwhile, free software has given us ftp, http, TCP/IP, ssh, PKI...
The vast majority of applications run on computers around the world run on Windows. They look and feel largely the same. Dumb people can even sometimes figure them out.
Can't you understand monopoly, vertical development architecture, or vendor lock-in? That's the reason they control most of the computers world-wide.
The fact is that MS is in overdrive lately with respect to how they court developers (queue "developers, developers, developers" remix). They've always been good about it, and they're getting better.
Again, vertical platforms, monopoly, not playing well with others go much further in explaining that. Seriously, go look around MSDN. Look at WCF. Look at WPF. Look at Windows Workflow. Look at the Enterprise library. Look at the software factories. Look around Codeplex. Play with TFS, Silverlight, etc... Believe me or not, I was a hardcore UNIX developer not too long ago - Perl, C/C++, Java stuff. I've moved to .NET and I _absolutely dread_ having to go back to that primitive shit. Unlike most Slashdotters, I know both sides of the aisle very well and developing on the MS side of the fence is far more efficient and enjoyable - _if_ you can afford it, i.e. you work in a corporate environment. I agree with you that they make good tools and they have a great workflow. What I'm saying is that once you start in the MS environment, i
Where do you live?
On Windows, I would bet that the three most widely used applications are IE, Outlook, and Word/Office. All provided by MS. Like I said earlier, MS wants to be the sole provider of *all* software on your Windows computer. If something they don't control begins to appear somewhat popular, they either squash it or buy it out. They want to be the sole provider, controlling everything.
Comparatively, almost everything in Linux was written by a different person or organization. Some of those command-line utilities are 20 years old, and still going strong. Tools such as 'grep' and 'find' works just as well today as they did 20 years ago. What industry protocol has ever come from a small-time MS developer? Almost all of our modern computing standards -- ftp, http, email, came from small-time unix developers. Neither MS nor its developer community have made much contribution to computing in general.
He's saying that MS should not try to squash community efforts to create great software on Windows platforms. You might need to read that again for it to sink in. He's not saying stop writing software altogether. He's not saying discontinue SQL server because there's some shareware database out there.
What he is saying is that they don't need to control every successful application on the Windows platform. If they try to, they will both a) breed bad will amongst the developer community, which will hinder Windows application development, which will cause great development to happen in other platforms, and b) waste a lot of money and time in development and support trying to fill every software niche that exists in a platform. They can't write *all* the software for Windows.
Simply put, MS alone cannot provide as great a Windows experience as MS + developer community can. But every time some great developer makes a wonderful product for Windows, they either squash it or snatch it up and abandon it. At every opportunity they destroy the Windows development community. Not only do they want you to run only Windows, the want you running only MS software on it. And they just won't be able to provide all the software that a user will want on their system. It's the old Soviet model of central planning, where Moscow decided the details of the economy from Khazakstan to Siberia. Eventually it implodes under its own weight.
But Jamie didn't develop TestDriven with Express; he used the full version. He may never had touched the Express version. He never violated Express' license in the course of developing TestDriven -- how could he? He never used it.
However, a user of Express gets access to features they're not supposed to when they fire up TestDriven. That would place any blame on the Express User, not Jamie, right?
Sort of like, it's okay to write a program that's a maphack for WOW, if you never use WOW software when you do it. However, the player who actually uses the maphack is in violation of the agreement with Blizzard.
I'm starting to really believe that this is the end of the road for MS' crappy development and release model. The open source movement has been growing for over 25 years and it's turning out to be a real competitor to MS windows. There are more and more articles about Joe Computer columnist installing Ubuntu and *not* encountering any fatal flaws. More and more apps are available for Windows, OSX and Linux. The endlessly delayed Vista with no real improvements and incredible system requirements shows the fundamental brokenness of MS' development process. Meanwhile OSX and the various Linux distros have given us release after release, with actual improvements, for little or no cost. On top of that, the various Windows emulators might provide a complete Windows experience in the next few years. It looks like MS really may not be able to keep up with open source in the next 5-10 years.
I expect MS to fire up the DRM/legal side of their battle. Utilizing software patents, allying with the various MAFIAA outfits, getting draconian legislation passed -- that seems to be their last and only defense.
Corporations will always trust buying software and maintenance from other corporations rather than those supplied by independent developers. It's still safe to go with MS, no matter how crappy they are for the time being. It will be a long, slow, torturous death for MS.
Obviously I'm missing your point -- are you saying that the local governments should own and control the last-mile part of public utilities, or are you saying something else?
When I talk about the last mile, I'm talking about the closest publicly held right-of-way. Most people don't have property that measures more than a mile in any dimension. The last mile of any given utility in the city probably encompasses several neighborhoods.
So unless you want each competing company throwing up a new cable or copper line on the phone poles -- and they won't, because it would be too expensive to run a new line to compete for existing customers -- we have to figure out a way to have the lines on the telephone poles to be shared. Companies don't like renting lines from their competitors -- they tend to get lousy service from them, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage. One solution would be that the *local* government owns and maintains those lines.
That's why we have a regulated marketplace in above our heads on those telephone polls. To make sure that copper wire got run everywhere, including to places where it wasn't profitable to do so, like the sticks, and also that a new company could deliver their product over a competitor's lines, without having to run their own lines and create expensive, redundant infrastructure.
Balance is the secret. Blizzard spent two years polishing the balance of WCIII. *Two* whole years just balancing the races. That's why they sell #1 titles for years.
There are plenty of other games that have better controls, better features, less repetition and clicking, more races, equal or better storytelling, better graphics. But the one thing that they do not have that blizzard does is racial balance. That's what truly makes the multiplayer experience a game, where any round could almost always go any way, instead of it always being a blow-out because one player knew the surefire technique. Blizzard's games are about strategy, not tricks.
Well, what about the 'natural monopoly' of the owners of the last mile of copper wire/fiber optic cable to the homes? Unless we want 15 different cables and wires coming into each home for 15 different competing providers, how will we provide competition in the marketplace?
Maybe the neighborhood switches should be held as 'commons' by the local government, with the competitive marketplace created at the switch station?
You have not shown that feeling good is selfish. Is there a limited amount of good feeling to go around? If I feel good, am I using up someone else's good feelings? Are Buddhists monks experiencing pure Bliss in Nepal causing anxiety and depression in the US?
Any true scientists believes whatever reasonable conclusions are derived from the data. If you want to convince them that animals have emotions, show them the data.
What you're describing is basically the hunter-gatherer tribal lifestyle that modern humans evolved in. It was a great big extended family, and more often then not, people would freely help each other. The tribe had ambiguous relationships with other tribes; they need each other for trade and intermarriage, but they also compete for resources and usually have long-running revenge cycles ( for instance, check out the Yanomamo. The anthropologist Chagnon's informants were surprised to find out he had no son -- "Who will avenge your death?" )
Nowadays, we live separated from our extended families literally amongst strangers. A city is basically a bunch of different families and tribes mashed together in close quarters. In hunter-gatherer societies, when "strangers" or different families and tribes get together, strict ritual is followed, so that nobody does or says something that would unintendedly hurt one another, and it doesn't escalate to violence. Our civilized social rules or "manners" are basically rituals for dealing with strangers, which we have to do a lot in modern society. We have very complex and subtle rituals to deal with cashiers, bosses, people on the sidewalk; all of the casual acquaintances that make up most of our social interaction in the city. These rituals override our innate helping behavior, which evolved to help our relatives living with us.
Yeah, it's too bad all that innocent stuff was replaced by a center for satanic ritual.
;)
You mean all those conspiracy web sites that claim that the shape of the pentagon and capitol hill are giant satanic drawings are bullshit!?
What about optimizing the MySQL queries? I've found that lousy PHP programmers are even lousy database designers and query writers. Lousy PHP tends to make up for even lousier DB structure and querying.
I think that's largely the case in America, but in the third world, it's largely poor migrants moving from a village to an already sprawling metropolis, looking for work and education for their kids. Mexico city has some 12 million people and they come from villages all over Mexico.
Problem is, that creates a lot of slum and ghetto areas.
I'm not a nutritionist, I don't really know if the kid is malnourished. Besides being short, he 'looked' younger than he was supposed to be. I mean, it seems that his growth was slowed.
People do vary in size, and some of that is due to malnutrition. I don't know if you can call it malnutrition, but people just don't grow as tall as they could if they had access to as many calories as they want (and I'm not talking about fat). It happened with the waves of immigrants in the US. People would come from Italy or Ireland being about 5'5" on average, and their children would sprout up taller than them. Same population, same genes, different nutrition.
But even if the average height of an adult male is 5'5", there is still a growth plan of children that is more or less the same throughout our species, provided they have enough caloric intake. Basically, if the body has to ration, it chooses to grow a proper brain and peripheral nervous system rather than long bones. It's just that the full adult height potential is never achieved.
I think the problem is that it's just redundant, or too precise for a year that long ago.
Really, what is the difference between 1916-1917, a 2 year range, and 1915-1919, a four year range? You could have either said "around the years 1916-1917" or just say "the later part of the 1910s". Combining the words 'early' and 'late' to describe the same time period borders on illogical. You're creating a precision with an awkward phrasing that really doesn't communicate any more than a much simpler phrase could.
It's long been too expensive to run phone lines all across Africa. However, once the mining companies starting throwing up cell towers, poor people got a hold of used cell phones on their own. Now they are lining up buyers for their crops in the field, instead of harvesting them, trotting them all the way to market, and then letting them rot in the hot sun.
I spent a 10 weeks with a poor indigenous family in Ecuador. They were more or less malnourished -- a 5-year-old looked like a 3-year-old. However, all their kids were in school. They brought home homework that they did in candle light in their open-air thatch-roof plywood-platform 'houses'. Poor people all over the world take incredible advantage of the meager tools they have in front of them. If they can talk to people in far away villages with an OLPC mesh network, they will. They will use it to communicate and improve their lives.
Most people in the world understand that education, whether it's how to hunt monkeys in the canopy, or how to speak English to guide jungle tours. It's only in relatively wealthy countries with enough infrastructure and social programs that people can afford to stay stupid.
I think it would change the gameplay from mouse-click dexterity to more strategy and planning.
Sure you can have your base build itself according to your script. But then your opponent attacks, and destroys your base. How fun is that? None at all. What did you do wrong? Well, obviously, your opponent had a better build script, or one that was more tailored for this map. You had better write a better script.
In the next game, you start your improved script, and you do some scouting of the other base. Hey, he's got all his resources in buildings and climbing the tech tree! If you attacked right now, you could destroy him! So you stop your script, and start massing an army.
After playing a few games, you realize there are different build strategies for different games. It depends on the map, what you want to do, and what your opponent is doing. You have a collection of scripts, which you choose and abandon at appropriate times, and other times just manage real time to deal with the situation in front of you.
So instead of being a game of who has better mouse-fu, it's who has better strategy, better build scripts, and knows when to use and when to ignore them. More like a game of chess than a game of slap-jack.
I don't think it matters that the surveillance system sees two 'you's. At work, you're Joe Java Developer, and the ads are targeted towards him. At home, you're Antoine Apple User, and the ads are targeted to him. But wait -- what's that, you say! Joe Java and Antoine Apple are the same man!? You don't say!
It doesn't help the targeted ads to try to much your profiles together. At work you get java ads, and at home you get ads for thinkgeek.com.