Dilbert: Do you remember last election day... and how you convinced me to not vote. You argued that since we disagreed on all issues, we could both stay home and the outcome would be the same as if we both voted. Dilbert: DOGS CAN'T VOTE! Dogbert: Well, not directly...
Normally I post a link to the NORC Florida Ballots Project, which is the underlying study I think NYT (and all the other organizations that reported "Bush would have won") used. But it's such a pain getting their stupid Access database working, I doubt most bother looking.
Interesting that there's no discussion of over-vote counting methods, which made a difference the last time I got NORC working. This one only seems to cover the possibility of undervotes.
But I've been trying out that link, and the strictest and most lenient standards both show Gore wins. What are the "common standards" you're referring to?
That's the most logical explanation I've heard yet. Surely the authorities know all 9/11 hijackers had valid ID. But just recently my uncle had to cancel a flight when his leave was cancelled, and wanted to fly his wife out to him using the same ticket, but couldn't because he could only reuse the ticket if -he- flew. So, because of circumstances outside his control and this requirement, Northwest gets to slurp up a few hundred dollars without doing giving him anything.
Why do you think it matters what recount method Al Gore wanted to use? It's ironic that his own recount method showed him losing, but it's irrelevent to the question of whether or not he actually won. The only thing that matters to me is the full recount, and that Gore won (by more than two votes, but still a very small amount in a country of hundreds of millions).
The Florida Court agreed, and wanted a full state recount, that was cut short by the SCOTUS decision to stop the clock.
Of course the scientists went with the data. That was entirely the problem: they couldn't reproduce it. So it looked like (and really was) Pons and Fleischman running to the media with wild and unsubstantiated claims for personal gain. P&F were the ones who violated the established scientific processes, opting for the visibility of the media instead. By doing this, they raise the question: How do you know when something is proven? How do you find out? Some kind of news media, perhaps? That's my point.
If they hadn't made way over-reaching claims and gone straight to the press, then these questions of repeatability that came up and have apparently been solved could have been resolved in the scientific community. When they talked to the press, they would have a solid basis in verified experiment. But instead they wanted to pretend they were in a Keanu Reeves movie, and now cold fusion has become a joke in everyone's mind.
I am glad that despite the initial backlash, further research has been done and questions resolved. Gee, wouldn't it have been nice if they'd done this first?
Quick primer on the reality of the nuclear age.
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 1
You don't fuck with countries with nukes. That's why everyone wants them. Not to use, but to deter. Crazy as it is, MAD works.
You'd have to be insane or a Presidential cabinet member to think Iraq was more dangerous to the U.S. than North Korea, but you don't see us doing anything but offering them cash in exchange for a promise to disarm.
Our chances of convincing China to disarm are zero. It would be impossible without us leading the way, but once we did, what would be our lever to convince them to follow suit?
The point isn't that we should be recycling our coal waste in nuclear reactors, it's that nuclear reactors -- particularly modern ones -- are better in almost every way, including environmentally, than coal plants.
There's plenty to be concerned about with nuclear power. What always boggles me is that we ignore the giant radioactive-smoke-spewing elephant in the corner known as "coal".
Game, and all other pure "shrinkwrap" box) developers, make their money by keeping the source (and other IP) closed.
They still could, as the "other IP", a.k.a. the content, would still be proprietary and still would comprise the majority of the value in the game. The main reason to keep the code closed is due to the substantial cost of developing or aquiring it. For developers who don't license their own code, this wouldn't involve changing business models at all.
If there were true benefits to going opensource, then the software houses would do it.
"If it was worth doing, it'd have already beeen done" is logically equivalent to "if it hasn't already been done, it isn't worth doing", which is nonsense. You could just as easily have said, circa 1998: "If there were true benefits to open source development, then system vendors like IBM and Sun would do it".
As was discussed in another thread, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. It'd clearly be ludicrous for Id to distribute the Doom3 engine as GPL code tomorrow, because they have a huge investment in it. For another developer starting from scratch, they could develop their own engine, buy Id's, or use an open source engine. If the open source engine is good enough, it could save them a lot of money and time(= money) to modify it for their needs. That "good enough" game engine needs to be there first, just like Linux needed to be there before IBM would start funding OSS OS development. But once there, there are obvious benefits for anyone more interested in making and selling a game rather than a proprietary engine.
What is your ISP's policy towards running servers? The lack of high upload speeds is part of what has pushed the internet toward being another broadcast medium like TV, not to mention pissing me off when someone thinks their crappy 128kb/s upload speed can host 32 people in a game.
As for population dense areas in US being quite a distance apart, you are probably right.
But we have high-speed backbones for connecting the high-density areas. Yet we don't even have our high-density areas covered. Why doesn't LA or New York have this kind of tech? What's the excuse? Eight million people isn't a big enough market?
Yes, the size and population distribution of the U.S. means that rural areas and many smaller town or suburbs are going to be tough to feed with high speed internet. That doesn't explain why we don't have better everywhere else.
Yeah, it's not a great article, though I do welcome the opportunity to broaden peoples' mathematical horizons. Still.
He starts off making it sound like P?=NP could be resolved soon in favor of P=NP, but Adelman says we aren't any closer to solving it than we were in the 70's, and the only one the author quotes as saying a solution may be imminent predicts that it will be shown that P != NP (the answer i think most mathematicions expect).
There's a lot more than just encryption riding on the answer (and as you say, encryption not so much) as tons of useful algorithms would go from intractable (exponential) to tractable (polynomial), and that's why people have been looking at the problem for so many years. Without success.
Which is why open source development would work for commercial developers.
The really time consuming parts, the parts that wouldn't benefit from being "open source" yet are absolutely critical to having a game in the first place, are what justify commercial development.
The article asks the question "is open source development a good model for games?", but it seems to have been morphed into "can hobbiest free software developers on SourcForge produce the next Doom 3?" The answer to the latter question is obviously not. But that doesn't reflect what open source development would mean for the commercial community.
To me the best example of an OSS game would be nethack. None of the need for art that holds other OSS games back, and it thus is simply at the top of its class.
It would clearly be very foolish for id to release the Doom3 engine now, while it is still state-of-the-art, as software libre. That would be taking their years of development work and the huge technological advantage it has given them and simply handing it to their competitors.
However, imagine a software libre game engine that wasn't developed by a single company. The investment in development effort is distributed. Each one benefits from the work of the others. Each company could release their own changes to this engine without handing away years of development work.
Fundamentally, the game engine code is there to expose the content of the game. It enables the modellers, the artists, the mappers to express their ideas. New features in the engine are driven in large by the desire to express new ideas.
The GPL would work fine for such an engine. Remember, the GPL doesn't require you to release code unless you're releasing binaries as well. While developing your new enhancements and more importantly the content, your competiors would not benefit. Once the game is released, they would see those enhancements, but would then have to incorporate them into their own products and create content that uses those features (the most time consuming part). You still get a competitive advantage, just for a limited time. And this is a two-way street, of course. That's the whole idea -- you save by only having to develop the new code that is needed for your particular game's content.
Thus I suggest the answer to the question "can open source work for game developers?" is "definitely yes", while the answer to the question "should a game company with an engine switch to open source right now?" is "probably not". It really isn't that different from the software libre poster child, Linux. Can open source work for OS vendors? Of course it can, reality says so. In 1992, should the OS vendors have released their systems under the GPL? No. But just like with Linux, if and when we see software libre engines that are at or near state of the art it would begin to make much sense for game developers to use it for exactly the same reasons it makes sense to use Linux.
That's not correct. What you're describing may be Intel's Hyperthreading, a type of SMT where multiple threads can execute on the same functional units, which as you say requires only flushing or stalling one thread on a mispredict or long latency op.
What AMD has is really dual-core. There are two complete K8 cores on the die. Everything up to and including the L2 cache is duplicated. The cores communicate through the crossbar in the on-chip northbridge. It's an SMP system on a single chip, or CMP as the TLB (three letter buzzword) goes. It isn't a split pipeline, as each core has the same complement of resources as a single-core K8.
No, 8 sockets is still wrong. What they are demoing is a 4 socket board with 4 dual-core Opterons in it. There aren't any 8-socket boards, and in fact the point is probably to demonstrate that they can make an 8-cpu system by putting their new dual core chip into the existing 4-socket board.
The possibility of making an 8-socket board doesn't make using "8 socket" correct in this context.
blackboxvoting.com is where you learn about the enemies of democracy, not find the enemies of democracy themselves. If I linked to diebold.com, that wouldn't be very informative.
And how do I know your palm pilot app counted my vote correctly?
Yes, a program that counts selections from a finite list is incredibly simple. I'm sure you could do a better job than Diebold -- it truly is a 10th grade coding project -- but that isn't the standard.
Unless your palm pilot is hooked up to a printer that produces a record that is both scanable and human-readable so the voter can verify the result before consigning the record to the ballot box then you haven't demonstrated a secure voting system at all.
Um... not that adding a printer makes it that much harder. So your point that this should be really simple still stands.
There is some truth to Windows being targetted because it is the most popular. However, the example of Apache vs IIS demonstrates that it isn't necessarily the most popular target that is targeted, but the easiest target. That Windows/IE/Outlook are both popular and insecure just makes them even more attractive.
"ALL SOFTWARE IS INSECURE" is just a cheap way of avoiding the fact that some software is less secure than others, that some architectural decisions lead to less secure designs than others, that some corporate environments are more conducive to insecure software than others, etc. The maxim "all sufficiently complicated software contains bugs" is absolutely not an excuse in any way for exceptionally buggy software.
I don't want to abuse your car analogy too much, but if one of the major auto manufacturers was lagging in safety technology by forty years would you still use the excuse that such things are incremental and no car is 100% safe? Did "all cars are capable of crashing" save the Corsair or the Pinto, or were these in fact crap designs?
I couldn't prove that Linux/Mozilla/whatever have fewer vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, your belief that they would be the same, based on the assumption that known vulnerabilities scale with popularity and nothing else, including the design of the software in question I find highly suspect.
RedHat saw that Linux + Gnome/KDE and whatever were good enough first and then decided to support it. I very much doubt that they would just be willing to support just any OpenSource product.
Of course. Just like they wouldn't purchase a proprietary product that was beyond hope. Only idiot venture capitalists from the Dot Bomb era paid to develop things that had no demonstrable worth. Yet as it stood Gnome wasn't anywhere near where it needed to be. Red Hat thus had an incentive to fund further development, and they acted on this incentive.
Or they can wait until the Linux community improves it on their own. If they never get to as good as Z-series customers expect, then they could either say "Its not our product, how about ours that does perform well" or "We will support it but at a lower cost but don't expect it to run as well." Nothing is forcing IBM to improve Linux on hardware X.
Except that maintaining and developing their own product in addition to Linux is expensive, and waiting for Linux to support hardware that basically no hobbiest developer could afford is a losing proposition. Nothing is forcing IBM to improve Linux except their own desire to satisfy customer demand in a cost efficient and timely manner.
What you are describing is possible, though I doubt a company that exclusively depended on the community for necessary development would be very competitive. Whereas what I'm describing is what is actually happening. Which idea then carries more veritas?
I'm a laissez-faire, free market, anarcho-capitalist libertarian.
And thus I'm sure there are a number of things on which we'd disagree. But on this we agree completely because we're right. Enhancing the common pool of ideas -- the ultimate resource, because it yields further advancement and cannot be exhausted by sharing -- can only benefit everyone who dips into that pool. I shudder to think what would have happened had Newton decided that the Calculus was too valuable to share freely. Of course the origins of calculus show the other great lie of "intellectual property" thinking: that new ideas, always based on that common pool, are so unique that they would not exist if one person wasn't granted ownership of them. Instead, the effort will be duplicated somewhere else, and efficiency is lost.
I do believe we are seeing the truth of this played out before our eyes. The ones arguing against it aren't capitalists, they are power hoarders. They'll be the last ones to open their eyes, but it won't matter, because they will have already lost.
Except that isn't how it's working out in practice. Because obviously Red Hat can't make tons of money off the free software if it isn't good enough for their customers. If Linux performs poorly on Z-series machines, IBM isn't going to make any money selling services for Linux on Z-series. Thus it is in their best interest to fund development, in particular by funding development in a direction that benefits their customers, and thus they hire programmers to do this development.
Software libre is amazing, but it doesn't just write itself. The vast majority of software is written for businesses which have a specific need, and they are still willing to pay to meet that need.
Right. The conclusion, then, would be that the only worthwhile "convergence" device is one which is completely general-purpose in design and upgradable/extensible in function. Not by successively hacking on one feature onto a previous design, releasing it, then repeating. Particularly not in the highly price/space/power conscious environments of cell phones and consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
Another one I find apropos:
Dilbert: Do you remember last election day... and how you convinced me to not vote. You argued that since we disagreed on all issues, we could both stay home and the outcome would be the same as if we both voted.
Dilbert: DOGS CAN'T VOTE!
Dogbert: Well, not directly...
Normally I post a link to the NORC Florida Ballots Project, which is the underlying study I think NYT (and all the other organizations that reported "Bush would have won") used. But it's such a pain getting their stupid Access database working, I doubt most bother looking.
Interesting that there's no discussion of over-vote counting methods, which made a difference the last time I got NORC working. This one only seems to cover the possibility of undervotes.
But I've been trying out that link, and the strictest and most lenient standards both show Gore wins. What are the "common standards" you're referring to?
That's the most logical explanation I've heard yet. Surely the authorities know all 9/11 hijackers had valid ID. But just recently my uncle had to cancel a flight when his leave was cancelled, and wanted to fly his wife out to him using the same ticket, but couldn't because he could only reuse the ticket if -he- flew. So, because of circumstances outside his control and this requirement, Northwest gets to slurp up a few hundred dollars without doing giving him anything.
Why do you think it matters what recount method Al Gore wanted to use? It's ironic that his own recount method showed him losing, but it's irrelevent to the question of whether or not he actually won. The only thing that matters to me is the full recount, and that Gore won (by more than two votes, but still a very small amount in a country of hundreds of millions).
The Florida Court agreed, and wanted a full state recount, that was cut short by the SCOTUS decision to stop the clock.
Of course the scientists went with the data. That was entirely the problem: they couldn't reproduce it. So it looked like (and really was) Pons and Fleischman running to the media with wild and unsubstantiated claims for personal gain. P&F were the ones who violated the established scientific processes, opting for the visibility of the media instead. By doing this, they raise the question: How do you know when something is proven? How do you find out? Some kind of news media, perhaps? That's my point.
So fuck the both of them anyway.
If they hadn't made way over-reaching claims and gone straight to the press, then these questions of repeatability that came up and have apparently been solved could have been resolved in the scientific community. When they talked to the press, they would have a solid basis in verified experiment. But instead they wanted to pretend they were in a Keanu Reeves movie, and now cold fusion has become a joke in everyone's mind.
I am glad that despite the initial backlash, further research has been done and questions resolved. Gee, wouldn't it have been nice if they'd done this first?
You don't fuck with countries with nukes. That's why everyone wants them. Not to use, but to deter. Crazy as it is, MAD works.
You'd have to be insane or a Presidential cabinet member to think Iraq was more dangerous to the U.S. than North Korea, but you don't see us doing anything but offering them cash in exchange for a promise to disarm.
Our chances of convincing China to disarm are zero. It would be impossible without us leading the way, but once we did, what would be our lever to convince them to follow suit?
The point isn't that we should be recycling our coal waste in nuclear reactors, it's that nuclear reactors -- particularly modern ones -- are better in almost every way, including environmentally, than coal plants.
There's plenty to be concerned about with nuclear power. What always boggles me is that we ignore the giant radioactive-smoke-spewing elephant in the corner known as "coal".
Game, and all other pure "shrinkwrap" box) developers, make their money by keeping the source (and other IP) closed.
They still could, as the "other IP", a.k.a. the content, would still be proprietary and still would comprise the majority of the value in the game. The main reason to keep the code closed is due to the substantial cost of developing or aquiring it. For developers who don't license their own code, this wouldn't involve changing business models at all.
If there were true benefits to going opensource, then the software houses would do it.
"If it was worth doing, it'd have already beeen done" is logically equivalent to "if it hasn't already been done, it isn't worth doing", which is nonsense. You could just as easily have said, circa 1998: "If there were true benefits to open source development, then system vendors like IBM and Sun would do it".
As was discussed in another thread, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. It'd clearly be ludicrous for Id to distribute the Doom3 engine as GPL code tomorrow, because they have a huge investment in it. For another developer starting from scratch, they could develop their own engine, buy Id's, or use an open source engine. If the open source engine is good enough, it could save them a lot of money and time(= money) to modify it for their needs. That "good enough" game engine needs to be there first, just like Linux needed to be there before IBM would start funding OSS OS development. But once there, there are obvious benefits for anyone more interested in making and selling a game rather than a proprietary engine.
What is your ISP's policy towards running servers? The lack of high upload speeds is part of what has pushed the internet toward being another broadcast medium like TV, not to mention pissing me off when someone thinks their crappy 128kb/s upload speed can host 32 people in a game.
As for population dense areas in US being quite a distance apart, you are probably right.
But we have high-speed backbones for connecting the high-density areas. Yet we don't even have our high-density areas covered. Why doesn't LA or New York have this kind of tech? What's the excuse? Eight million people isn't a big enough market?
Yes, the size and population distribution of the U.S. means that rural areas and many smaller town or suburbs are going to be tough to feed with high speed internet. That doesn't explain why we don't have better everywhere else.
Yeah, it's not a great article, though I do welcome the opportunity to broaden peoples' mathematical horizons. Still.
He starts off making it sound like P?=NP could be resolved soon in favor of P=NP, but Adelman says we aren't any closer to solving it than we were in the 70's, and the only one the author quotes as saying a solution may be imminent predicts that it will be shown that P != NP (the answer i think most mathematicions expect).
There's a lot more than just encryption riding on the answer (and as you say, encryption not so much) as tons of useful algorithms would go from intractable (exponential) to tractable (polynomial), and that's why people have been looking at the problem for so many years. Without success.
ROT-13 is considered horribly weak with modern computing power.
Much better to use double-ROT-13.
Which is why open source development would work for commercial developers.
The really time consuming parts, the parts that wouldn't benefit from being "open source" yet are absolutely critical to having a game in the first place, are what justify commercial development.
The article asks the question "is open source development a good model for games?", but it seems to have been morphed into "can hobbiest free software developers on SourcForge produce the next Doom 3?" The answer to the latter question is obviously not. But that doesn't reflect what open source development would mean for the commercial community.
To me the best example of an OSS game would be nethack. None of the need for art that holds other OSS games back, and it thus is simply at the top of its class.
It would clearly be very foolish for id to release the Doom3 engine now, while it is still state-of-the-art, as software libre. That would be taking their years of development work and the huge technological advantage it has given them and simply handing it to their competitors.
However, imagine a software libre game engine that wasn't developed by a single company. The investment in development effort is distributed. Each one benefits from the work of the others. Each company could release their own changes to this engine without handing away years of development work.
Fundamentally, the game engine code is there to expose the content of the game. It enables the modellers, the artists, the mappers to express their ideas. New features in the engine are driven in large by the desire to express new ideas.
The GPL would work fine for such an engine. Remember, the GPL doesn't require you to release code unless you're releasing binaries as well. While developing your new enhancements and more importantly the content, your competiors would not benefit. Once the game is released, they would see those enhancements, but would then have to incorporate them into their own products and create content that uses those features (the most time consuming part). You still get a competitive advantage, just for a limited time. And this is a two-way street, of course. That's the whole idea -- you save by only having to develop the new code that is needed for your particular game's content.
Thus I suggest the answer to the question "can open source work for game developers?" is "definitely yes", while the answer to the question "should a game company with an engine switch to open source right now?" is "probably not". It really isn't that different from the software libre poster child, Linux. Can open source work for OS vendors? Of course it can, reality says so. In 1992, should the OS vendors have released their systems under the GPL? No. But just like with Linux, if and when we see software libre engines that are at or near state of the art it would begin to make much sense for game developers to use it for exactly the same reasons it makes sense to use Linux.
That's not correct. What you're describing may be Intel's Hyperthreading, a type of SMT where multiple threads can execute on the same functional units, which as you say requires only flushing or stalling one thread on a mispredict or long latency op.
What AMD has is really dual-core. There are two complete K8 cores on the die. Everything up to and including the L2 cache is duplicated. The cores communicate through the crossbar in the on-chip northbridge. It's an SMP system on a single chip, or CMP as the TLB (three letter buzzword) goes. It isn't a split pipeline, as each core has the same complement of resources as a single-core K8.
No, 8 sockets is still wrong. What they are demoing is a 4 socket board with 4 dual-core Opterons in it. There aren't any 8-socket boards, and in fact the point is probably to demonstrate that they can make an 8-cpu system by putting their new dual core chip into the existing 4-socket board.
The possibility of making an 8-socket board doesn't make using "8 socket" correct in this context.
blackboxvoting.com is where you learn about the enemies of democracy, not find the enemies of democracy themselves. If I linked to diebold.com, that wouldn't be very informative.
And how do I know your palm pilot app counted my vote correctly?
Yes, a program that counts selections from a finite list is incredibly simple. I'm sure you could do a better job than Diebold -- it truly is a 10th grade coding project -- but that isn't the standard.
Unless your palm pilot is hooked up to a printer that produces a record that is both scanable and human-readable so the voter can verify the result before consigning the record to the ballot box then you haven't demonstrated a secure voting system at all.
Um... not that adding a printer makes it that much harder. So your point that this should be really simple still stands.
There is some truth to Windows being targetted because it is the most popular. However, the example of Apache vs IIS demonstrates that it isn't necessarily the most popular target that is targeted, but the easiest target. That Windows/IE/Outlook are both popular and insecure just makes them even more attractive.
"ALL SOFTWARE IS INSECURE" is just a cheap way of avoiding the fact that some software is less secure than others, that some architectural decisions lead to less secure designs than others, that some corporate environments are more conducive to insecure software than others, etc. The maxim "all sufficiently complicated software contains bugs" is absolutely not an excuse in any way for exceptionally buggy software.
I don't want to abuse your car analogy too much, but if one of the major auto manufacturers was lagging in safety technology by forty years would you still use the excuse that such things are incremental and no car is 100% safe? Did "all cars are capable of crashing" save the Corsair or the Pinto, or were these in fact crap designs?
I couldn't prove that Linux/Mozilla/whatever have fewer vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, your belief that they would be the same, based on the assumption that known vulnerabilities scale with popularity and nothing else, including the design of the software in question I find highly suspect.
RedHat saw that Linux + Gnome/KDE and whatever were good enough first and then decided to support it. I very much doubt that they would just be willing to support just any OpenSource product.
Of course. Just like they wouldn't purchase a proprietary product that was beyond hope. Only idiot venture capitalists from the Dot Bomb era paid to develop things that had no demonstrable worth. Yet as it stood Gnome wasn't anywhere near where it needed to be. Red Hat thus had an incentive to fund further development, and they acted on this incentive.
Or they can wait until the Linux community improves it on their own. If they never get to as good as Z-series customers expect, then they could either say "Its not our product, how about ours that does perform well" or "We will support it but at a lower cost but don't expect it to run as well." Nothing is forcing IBM to improve Linux on hardware X.
Except that maintaining and developing their own product in addition to Linux is expensive, and waiting for Linux to support hardware that basically no hobbiest developer could afford is a losing proposition. Nothing is forcing IBM to improve Linux except their own desire to satisfy customer demand in a cost efficient and timely manner.
What you are describing is possible, though I doubt a company that exclusively depended on the community for necessary development would be very competitive. Whereas what I'm describing is what is actually happening. Which idea then carries more veritas?
I'm a laissez-faire, free market, anarcho-capitalist libertarian.
And thus I'm sure there are a number of things on which we'd disagree. But on this we agree completely because we're right. Enhancing the common pool of ideas -- the ultimate resource, because it yields further advancement and cannot be exhausted by sharing -- can only benefit everyone who dips into that pool. I shudder to think what would have happened had Newton decided that the Calculus was too valuable to share freely. Of course the origins of calculus show the other great lie of "intellectual property" thinking: that new ideas, always based on that common pool, are so unique that they would not exist if one person wasn't granted ownership of them. Instead, the effort will be duplicated somewhere else, and efficiency is lost.
I do believe we are seeing the truth of this played out before our eyes. The ones arguing against it aren't capitalists, they are power hoarders. They'll be the last ones to open their eyes, but it won't matter, because they will have already lost.
Except that isn't how it's working out in practice. Because obviously Red Hat can't make tons of money off the free software if it isn't good enough for their customers. If Linux performs poorly on Z-series machines, IBM isn't going to make any money selling services for Linux on Z-series. Thus it is in their best interest to fund development, in particular by funding development in a direction that benefits their customers, and thus they hire programmers to do this development.
Software libre is amazing, but it doesn't just write itself. The vast majority of software is written for businesses which have a specific need, and they are still willing to pay to meet that need.
Right. The conclusion, then, would be that the only worthwhile "convergence" device is one which is completely general-purpose in design and upgradable/extensible in function. Not by successively hacking on one feature onto a previous design, releasing it, then repeating. Particularly not in the highly price/space/power conscious environments of cell phones and consoles.
No shit. Wake up and smell the sarcasm, my friend.
So just stop saying girl are stupid or whatever, that's the kind of attitude that make our profession looks like a freak show.
Um, yeah, that's exactly my point. Thank you, but please parse more carefully, or you'll fall into the Chasm of Sar.