This is it exactly. You're a manager, jon3k. You don't pay your staff anything. The company does that. You know this because if you leave, they'll still get paid.
You're supposed to be MANAGING your personnel. If you see a problem with the personnel under your management, YOU'RE supposed to be the one coming up with the solution. The problem described is a personnel problem, not an IT problem. IT staff are paid to find, fix, and prevent IT problems, not personnel problems. Managers are paid to find, fix, and prevent personnel problems. If they're not doing that, then they're not doing their jobs as managers.
I'm aware of Bumblebee but after reading about how it worked, I decided against using it. Bumblebee is a work around, not a solution. My comment was primarily referencing Airlie's livejournal about what was needed to make this work. I believe some of the required memory sharing in the kernel is in place now, but nothing else has been done that Nvidia needs to implement Optimus properly in Linux.
I recently had this issue with my Slackware install on a brand new Thinkpad. I can't vouch for all systems, but on mine I was able to tell the BIOS to disable Optimus and use ONLY the Nvidia chip. It was a really simple work around. Although, I did have to use the Intel graphics during installation. But once I rebooted from the installer, I was able to switch the BIOS to the Nvidia chip and have been using it ever since with Nvidia's drivers. I'd like the power savings of the Optimus feature, but that will have to wait until the appropriate dev teams can work up the support. Nvidia has an absolutely top tier driver team. I think if the support were already there in both X and the kernel Nvidia would have simply used it. I imagine it's not all there yet.
And don't worry about Linus and his middle finger. He always acts like a whiny little bitch when things don't go his way. If we followed his example, we'd never know if we're going to use Gnome or KDE on any given day.
Nvidia will work out for you. But you have to be a little patient for the OS support. You could also try looking for a laptop with Nvidia graphics that does not use Optimus. I would imagine they're getting to get difficult to find new these days, but you can probably still get them.
I am primarily a Linux user and rarely boot into Windows but when I do, I use LiteStep. Well, I used to. I only recently converted my Windows install from Windows XP to Windows 7 and haven't tried it on Windows 7 yet.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for. It gives you an entirely different desktop look and feel. It's modeled after the NeXTSTEP desktop so if you're an AfterStep user in the Unix world, LiteStep would be the Windows equivalent. It does offer multiple desktops which was one of its primary attractions for me. It crashed like mad on Windows 98 but was rock solid for me on Windows 95 and Windows XP. The only current support for Windows 7 is in an experimental build you may want to try out. It looks like the project may have stalled but it might still be worth looking into.
I am not a lawyer and as such, do not have the training and experience required to be able to help you. However, I am an American citizen and that makes me responsible for making sure I myself do not break U.S. laws. In our legal system, ignorance of the law is no excuse. While being ignorant of the law can, in some cases, change the punishment you receive, it will not excuse you from breaking the law entirely.
This is why it is so important for us to read at least the aspects of the law that are relevant to what we do. Given the nature of the Internet and computers in general, copyright law is very important to all of us. Despite this, somehow almost no one reads it yet everyone tries to wax intelligent about it.
Many laws are very very cryptic. Luckily, copyright law is not one of them. Go here to obtain a copy of the current U.S. Copyright Law:
Be sure to check back regularly for updates. When reading this document, it is important that you read and understand Chapter 1, Section 101, "Definitions" before reading anything else. If you do not read this and understand it, you *WILL* misunderstand the rest of the document. Once you understand this section, the rest of the document becomes far easier to understand.
Doing this will not prepare you to battle IP lawyers in court, but it will give you a better understanding of copyright in the U.S. and help you avoid copyright issues in the first place. As always, even if you read this law, go hire a real lawyer if you know you are on shaky ground. Attempting to clone someone else' product should immediately make you realize you are on shaky ground, even if you have not read Title 17 of the U.S. Code.
Hint: You don't have to read the entire document. There are sections that do not directly pertain to most modern computing situations. However, it should become very clear very quickly which sections are important to you.
Doing this now will help you to see the infringements you have made in your game. Just one look at the screenshot of your game reveals too many copyright violations to ignore, let alone the text on your web page.
Re:the only thing worse than a lost fan
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
What bothers me are people who don't like it when other people voice their opinions on the internet . . . but have to come in and shit all over someone else's harmless enjoyments.
My dad was a jet engine mechanic in SAC stationed at Ellsworth AFB when Mount St. Helens erupted. For about a year following the eruption, volcanic ash settled into a visible layer on everything which required cleaning on a daily basis. It really kept settling out of the air for that long. While I understand that eruption was an odd case, it does show that we have had some pretty extensive experience with aircraft flying through significant amounts of volcanic ash. Remember that they had Operation Looking Glass at that time so there was no way we didn't have aircraft flying in those conditions.
Of course, it wasn't just the USAF that had to deal with this, commercial airlines had to deal with that fallout as well.
So I find it hard to believe that we don't have some decent amount of data about this. What about the commercial airline data from that time? Where did it go? While the military data from that period might be classified, it may be time to request declassification of some of that data. I'm willing to bet that with a little bit of effort that data can be scrubbed and the safe portions of it released. As for the taxpayer dollars required to accomplish that task, as a taxpayer, I think it would be a worthwhile investment.
Understood, Mr. Hawke. However, there is no reason to make it easy as a matter of policy. If it is made illegal to use fingerprints, then while you may still be able to get my prints, I can also catch you in the act. This, of course, adds risk to the equation for you. Merely making this illegal will be enough to deter many employers from attempting it. It will also make people who want protection more likely to try to find out who's doing this.
And I agree with some other posters that this isn't really a concern. I personally don't care if the government has my prints. But the OP and posters who think you shouldn't work for that employer because of this probably *DO* think it is a problem. They are the ones who should be fighting it, not running from it. History has shown that governments and corporations tend to be predatory. We all know if you run from a predator, it will chase you.
Not many posts yet but I already see a LOT of posts pushing the idea of not working for this employer. This is not a solution. If we don't fight it and win, it will be adopted by more and more employers until it snowballs into something too big to fight. If we think this is a bad idea, it needs to be fought now while it's still in its infancy.
That's not really the point. Once that hash or checksum or whatever of your fingerprint is stored and linked to you, they can still track you by pulling fingerprints from the items you own or touch. All they have to do is get your fingerprint from something and run it against the database with these stored values.
Use acid on your finger tips to remove the prints and use that for ID. The only problem is that you are now linked to hundreds of crimes where no traces of fingerprints were found. But at least they wont be able to identify YOU when they find your actual fingerprints somewhere.
Perl is a very good language to learn as a beginner. You don't have to go into all the cool uber geek tricks to make it do incredible amounts of work. The syntax is easy to learn for simple programs.
And I might be a bit biased here, but why not dish out a dose of BASIC on an emulator? While BASIC 2.0 on a C64 doesn't provide good graphics and audio controls, BASIC 7.0 on a C128 does. Very importantly is that this could give some pretty instant gratification to a kid who might be interested in writing a game. The VICE emulator provides C128 emulation that would be good for this.
I had no idea Neverwinter Nights was a game back then. And an MMORPG to boot. I was living in the C64 world until 1997 so I had no real desire to keep up with the PC world. I was/am a very big an of the gold box D&D games and I feel totally and completely cheated!
Wow! That would have been nice to know! I think they should have advertised that better. But to be honest, $10 off a $50 game when I just paid $50 for the previous version isn't really a good discount. I would not have gone for it. Instead I would have bought Halo.
I'm sure I'll get labeled as something negative here, but at those prices and with as much overlapped content as there was, I would want a 50% discount for the game. Or rather, I would expect a refund to bring the final price down to $25 based on the receipt.
But thanks for the feedback! In the future when I want something like this, I'll keep my eyes more open. As it was, I didn't bother to look because I figured it would never happen!
There are other factors to consider too. I purchased Unreal Tournament 2003 based on how much I liked the first game and the demo for 2003.
Rumor had it that Halo was never going to be released on the PC in order to bolster Xbox sales. Lo and behold, that turned out to be false and one year later, Unreal Tournament 2004 comes out to compete with Halo.
What was 2004 but 2003 + vehicles? While I loved the demo, I was pissed that I spent $50 on the game only to have the next one come out 1 year later. Of course, I didn't buy it even though the demo rocked. Had they offered a good discount to 2003 customers, I probably would have bought it.
There are no doubt other factors than this, but release dates too close to each other (whether to competitor's products or your own) are definitely a very big problem.
I understand this was about taxes, but from a non-tax point of view, you can actually come out ahead by other benefits qualifications.
A single mother where I used to work was making a certain wage. Because of how low her income was, she was able to get child care subsidy from the state. She was told she was going to get a raise of $0.25/hour. It was going to put her total annual income over the limit and disqualify her for the subsidy which was worth about $2.00/hour. She asked to only be given an $0.11/hour raise so she would not go over the income limit. $0.25/hour was the maximum annual pay raise for her position and she was going to nursing school part time. She was going to be out of there in a couple of years making more money as a nurse so she came out ahead by making less money.
While reducing income will not help with lowered taxes, it can help with other things and this should not be forgotten.
Not so fast. Gaming on Linux doesn't have to be on the PC. The PS3 runs Linux well. It has decent hardware for gaming purposes already built in. If game developers were to develop games that would run on a PS3 Linux using open APIs, it could be easily recompiled to run on a PC running Linux. Now you've developed for two platforms at the same time.
What we need is very real and very serious (possibly commercial) support of Linux on at least one game console to make this work. Once game devs see that their competition is making more profit on a model like this, they will start to migrate to that platform. So perhaps the console manufacturers need to look at this. Sony did a half-assed attempt at this years ago, but if they (or a third party) introduced official support for a Linux OS on their console, they could make Linux gaming happen and bring more devs to their platform.
How about using a Commodore 64 emulator? If you're only trying to teach the basics of programming, using this will provide an easy way to get students to see the core concepts. Since the C64 had a built-in interpreter for a language, it gives them very fast access to a means to write code. While I don't recommend BASIC 2.0 as a language to really learn, it will still teach them constructs that can be used in any language.
What's more, these emulators are free so they could easily download and install them at home to do homework assignments. You could teach them how to transport a.d64 file from school to home to continue work on existing assignments. When they want to turn in their programs, they give you a.d64 file. Even more than that, there is a large code base out there these students could use as learning tools and examples. There are also abundant resources available as programming reference material for this platform.
I agree that Tilera is making kick ass tech, but Transmeta would give Nvidia x86 compatibility for the existing consumer base. Also keep in mind that Nvidia has stated they believe the CPU will diminish in the home computer while the GPU kicks it up. I don't really agree with that, but if that's their stance then Transmeta is perfect for them. Don't forget that Transmeta has some other really decent patents and Intel would be licensing some of those from Nvidia. Not a bad position for Nvidia at all!
There is also a far greater benefit in buying both companies (if Tilera is even a possibility for an Nvidia buyout.) Tilera's excellent performance and features coupled with Transmeta's x86 emulation layer would give Nvidia a very nice X86 CPU instead of a mediocre x86 CPU.
I'd love to see the x86 architecture simply die, but I don't know if Tilera can really make that happen. If the Tilera procs could get a smooth path into the very large x86 consumer base with something like a Transmeta/Tilera coupling of technologies, it could open the door for a transition that could do just that. I know. I know. Wishful thinking. But a guy's allowed to dream, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on Faceboook daily and didn't even know they had an email service.
What exactly is it that you do then?
This is it exactly. You're a manager, jon3k. You don't pay your staff anything. The company does that. You know this because if you leave, they'll still get paid.
You're supposed to be MANAGING your personnel. If you see a problem with the personnel under your management, YOU'RE supposed to be the one coming up with the solution. The problem described is a personnel problem, not an IT problem. IT staff are paid to find, fix, and prevent IT problems, not personnel problems. Managers are paid to find, fix, and prevent personnel problems. If they're not doing that, then they're not doing their jobs as managers.
I'm aware of Bumblebee but after reading about how it worked, I decided against using it. Bumblebee is a work around, not a solution. My comment was primarily referencing Airlie's livejournal about what was needed to make this work. I believe some of the required memory sharing in the kernel is in place now, but nothing else has been done that Nvidia needs to implement Optimus properly in Linux.
I recently had this issue with my Slackware install on a brand new Thinkpad. I can't vouch for all systems, but on mine I was able to tell the BIOS to disable Optimus and use ONLY the Nvidia chip. It was a really simple work around. Although, I did have to use the Intel graphics during installation. But once I rebooted from the installer, I was able to switch the BIOS to the Nvidia chip and have been using it ever since with Nvidia's drivers. I'd like the power savings of the Optimus feature, but that will have to wait until the appropriate dev teams can work up the support. Nvidia has an absolutely top tier driver team. I think if the support were already there in both X and the kernel Nvidia would have simply used it. I imagine it's not all there yet.
And don't worry about Linus and his middle finger. He always acts like a whiny little bitch when things don't go his way. If we followed his example, we'd never know if we're going to use Gnome or KDE on any given day.
Nvidia will work out for you. But you have to be a little patient for the OS support. You could also try looking for a laptop with Nvidia graphics that does not use Optimus. I would imagine they're getting to get difficult to find new these days, but you can probably still get them.
Hahaha! No I am not, but I do have a similar beard and am at least 10% as interesting as that guy.
I wish I could mod your post "funny as hell."
I am primarily a Linux user and rarely boot into Windows but when I do, I use LiteStep. Well, I used to. I only recently converted my Windows install from Windows XP to Windows 7 and haven't tried it on Windows 7 yet.
http://litestep.info/
It may not be exactly what you're looking for. It gives you an entirely different desktop look and feel. It's modeled after the NeXTSTEP desktop so if you're an AfterStep user in the Unix world, LiteStep would be the Windows equivalent. It does offer multiple desktops which was one of its primary attractions for me. It crashed like mad on Windows 98 but was rock solid for me on Windows 95 and Windows XP. The only current support for Windows 7 is in an experimental build you may want to try out. It looks like the project may have stalled but it might still be worth looking into.
I am not a lawyer and as such, do not have the training and experience required to be able to help you. However, I am an American citizen and that makes me responsible for making sure I myself do not break U.S. laws. In our legal system, ignorance of the law is no excuse. While being ignorant of the law can, in some cases, change the punishment you receive, it will not excuse you from breaking the law entirely.
This is why it is so important for us to read at least the aspects of the law that are relevant to what we do. Given the nature of the Internet and computers in general, copyright law is very important to all of us. Despite this, somehow almost no one reads it yet everyone tries to wax intelligent about it.
Many laws are very very cryptic. Luckily, copyright law is not one of them. Go here to obtain a copy of the current U.S. Copyright Law:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/
Be sure to check back regularly for updates. When reading this document, it is important that you read and understand Chapter 1, Section 101, "Definitions" before reading anything else. If you do not read this and understand it, you *WILL* misunderstand the rest of the document. Once you understand this section, the rest of the document becomes far easier to understand.
Doing this will not prepare you to battle IP lawyers in court, but it will give you a better understanding of copyright in the U.S. and help you avoid copyright issues in the first place. As always, even if you read this law, go hire a real lawyer if you know you are on shaky ground. Attempting to clone someone else' product should immediately make you realize you are on shaky ground, even if you have not read Title 17 of the U.S. Code.
Hint: You don't have to read the entire document. There are sections that do not directly pertain to most modern computing situations. However, it should become very clear very quickly which sections are important to you.
Doing this now will help you to see the infringements you have made in your game. Just one look at the screenshot of your game reveals too many copyright violations to ignore, let alone the text on your web page.
What bothers me are people who don't like it when other people voice their opinions on the internet . . . but have to come in and shit all over someone else's harmless enjoyments.
My dad was a jet engine mechanic in SAC stationed at Ellsworth AFB when Mount St. Helens erupted. For about a year following the eruption, volcanic ash settled into a visible layer on everything which required cleaning on a daily basis. It really kept settling out of the air for that long. While I understand that eruption was an odd case, it does show that we have had some pretty extensive experience with aircraft flying through significant amounts of volcanic ash. Remember that they had Operation Looking Glass at that time so there was no way we didn't have aircraft flying in those conditions.
Of course, it wasn't just the USAF that had to deal with this, commercial airlines had to deal with that fallout as well.
So I find it hard to believe that we don't have some decent amount of data about this. What about the commercial airline data from that time? Where did it go? While the military data from that period might be classified, it may be time to request declassification of some of that data. I'm willing to bet that with a little bit of effort that data can be scrubbed and the safe portions of it released. As for the taxpayer dollars required to accomplish that task, as a taxpayer, I think it would be a worthwhile investment.
Understood, Mr. Hawke. However, there is no reason to make it easy as a matter of policy. If it is made illegal to use fingerprints, then while you may still be able to get my prints, I can also catch you in the act. This, of course, adds risk to the equation for you. Merely making this illegal will be enough to deter many employers from attempting it. It will also make people who want protection more likely to try to find out who's doing this.
And I agree with some other posters that this isn't really a concern. I personally don't care if the government has my prints. But the OP and posters who think you shouldn't work for that employer because of this probably *DO* think it is a problem. They are the ones who should be fighting it, not running from it. History has shown that governments and corporations tend to be predatory. We all know if you run from a predator, it will chase you.
Not many posts yet but I already see a LOT of posts pushing the idea of not working for this employer. This is not a solution. If we don't fight it and win, it will be adopted by more and more employers until it snowballs into something too big to fight. If we think this is a bad idea, it needs to be fought now while it's still in its infancy.
That's not really the point. Once that hash or checksum or whatever of your fingerprint is stored and linked to you, they can still track you by pulling fingerprints from the items you own or touch. All they have to do is get your fingerprint from something and run it against the database with these stored values.
Use acid on your finger tips to remove the prints and use that for ID. The only problem is that you are now linked to hundreds of crimes where no traces of fingerprints were found. But at least they wont be able to identify YOU when they find your actual fingerprints somewhere.
Perl is a very good language to learn as a beginner. You don't have to go into all the cool uber geek tricks to make it do incredible amounts of work. The syntax is easy to learn for simple programs.
And I might be a bit biased here, but why not dish out a dose of BASIC on an emulator? While BASIC 2.0 on a C64 doesn't provide good graphics and audio controls, BASIC 7.0 on a C128 does. Very importantly is that this could give some pretty instant gratification to a kid who might be interested in writing a game. The VICE emulator provides C128 emulation that would be good for this.
They will find flaws
Your sentence is missing a period at the end.
I have no moderator points right now, but those who do need to moderate the parent, "Funny as Hell."
And while I know I will ultimately lose this battle, thomasdz, YOUR Slashdot ID (178114) is too high. :)
I had no idea Neverwinter Nights was a game back then. And an MMORPG to boot. I was living in the C64 world until 1997 so I had no real desire to keep up with the PC world. I was/am a very big an of the gold box D&D games and I feel totally and completely cheated!
Wow! That would have been nice to know! I think they should have advertised that better. But to be honest, $10 off a $50 game when I just paid $50 for the previous version isn't really a good discount. I would not have gone for it. Instead I would have bought Halo.
I'm sure I'll get labeled as something negative here, but at those prices and with as much overlapped content as there was, I would want a 50% discount for the game. Or rather, I would expect a refund to bring the final price down to $25 based on the receipt.
But thanks for the feedback! In the future when I want something like this, I'll keep my eyes more open. As it was, I didn't bother to look because I figured it would never happen!
There are other factors to consider too. I purchased Unreal Tournament 2003 based on how much I liked the first game and the demo for 2003.
Rumor had it that Halo was never going to be released on the PC in order to bolster Xbox sales. Lo and behold, that turned out to be false and one year later, Unreal Tournament 2004 comes out to compete with Halo.
What was 2004 but 2003 + vehicles? While I loved the demo, I was pissed that I spent $50 on the game only to have the next one come out 1 year later. Of course, I didn't buy it even though the demo rocked. Had they offered a good discount to 2003 customers, I probably would have bought it.
There are no doubt other factors than this, but release dates too close to each other (whether to competitor's products or your own) are definitely a very big problem.
I understand this was about taxes, but from a non-tax point of view, you can actually come out ahead by other benefits qualifications.
A single mother where I used to work was making a certain wage. Because of how low her income was, she was able to get child care subsidy from the state. She was told she was going to get a raise of $0.25/hour. It was going to put her total annual income over the limit and disqualify her for the subsidy which was worth about $2.00/hour. She asked to only be given an $0.11/hour raise so she would not go over the income limit. $0.25/hour was the maximum annual pay raise for her position and she was going to nursing school part time. She was going to be out of there in a couple of years making more money as a nurse so she came out ahead by making less money.
While reducing income will not help with lowered taxes, it can help with other things and this should not be forgotten.
Wow! Had I posted this on a site whose users had at least half a brain, that would have been modded funny.
The previous comment was funny. This one is the troll, you stupid fucks.
News from theonion.com? That's more legit than Apple's advertising team in the 1970s. Mac fans probably wont be able to tell the difference!
Not so fast. Gaming on Linux doesn't have to be on the PC. The PS3 runs Linux well. It has decent hardware for gaming purposes already built in. If game developers were to develop games that would run on a PS3 Linux using open APIs, it could be easily recompiled to run on a PC running Linux. Now you've developed for two platforms at the same time.
What we need is very real and very serious (possibly commercial) support of Linux on at least one game console to make this work. Once game devs see that their competition is making more profit on a model like this, they will start to migrate to that platform. So perhaps the console manufacturers need to look at this. Sony did a half-assed attempt at this years ago, but if they (or a third party) introduced official support for a Linux OS on their console, they could make Linux gaming happen and bring more devs to their platform.
Oh for fuck's sake, the parent post is hardly a troll post. Mod the parent funny.
How about using a Commodore 64 emulator? If you're only trying to teach the basics of programming, using this will provide an easy way to get students to see the core concepts. Since the C64 had a built-in interpreter for a language, it gives them very fast access to a means to write code. While I don't recommend BASIC 2.0 as a language to really learn, it will still teach them constructs that can be used in any language.
What's more, these emulators are free so they could easily download and install them at home to do homework assignments. You could teach them how to transport a .d64 file from school to home to continue work on existing assignments. When they want to turn in their programs, they give you a .d64 file. Even more than that, there is a large code base out there these students could use as learning tools and examples. There are also abundant resources available as programming reference material for this platform.
I agree that Tilera is making kick ass tech, but Transmeta would give Nvidia x86 compatibility for the existing consumer base. Also keep in mind that Nvidia has stated they believe the CPU will diminish in the home computer while the GPU kicks it up. I don't really agree with that, but if that's their stance then Transmeta is perfect for them. Don't forget that Transmeta has some other really decent patents and Intel would be licensing some of those from Nvidia. Not a bad position for Nvidia at all!
There is also a far greater benefit in buying both companies (if Tilera is even a possibility for an Nvidia buyout.) Tilera's excellent performance and features coupled with Transmeta's x86 emulation layer would give Nvidia a very nice X86 CPU instead of a mediocre x86 CPU.
I'd love to see the x86 architecture simply die, but I don't know if Tilera can really make that happen. If the Tilera procs could get a smooth path into the very large x86 consumer base with something like a Transmeta/Tilera coupling of technologies, it could open the door for a transition that could do just that. I know. I know. Wishful thinking. But a guy's allowed to dream, right?