Changing where you publish from doesn't change your nationality, unless you stay to apply for citizenship, and then through direct action before the U.S. judicial system, revoke your own U.S. citizenship (If you don't formally revoke your citizenship in front of the U.S. judicial system, you will retain dual citizenship, even if that's in contradiction with the laws of your new country).
Actually, that's not entirely true. While you are correct is saying that being naturalized by a foreign nation does not automatically cause loss of citizenship, that person does not automatically retain citizenship either. If the person commits the act with the intent of renouncing his U.S. citizenship, then the citizenship is lost.
The way they handle intent is they simply ask you the next time a question of your citizenship comes up before the consulate. If you say you intended to keep it, you keep it. If you say you intended to lose it, you lose it.
You can also formally renounce your citizenship at any U.S. Consulate, or by affirming in writing to any U.S. Consular officer after being naturalized by a foreign country (basically, making the issue come before them now, and affirming you intended to lose it).
Why don't you look at the website in archive.org? It looked like a piece of shit. Besides, even if he worked full-time on that POS for 3 years, $100K/year is not the going rate for a web designer.
Also, how the hell can you donate something and then ask for money back? What the guy did is regular extortion. Go read up on it sometime.
1) Full time + hardware/hosting costs. But it doesn't matter, because the number is irrelevant.
2) Did you not even read the other article? Did you not read the original reply in this thread? Did you read anything beyond the immediate parent post? He contends that he did not ask for his initial investment back. He simply asked that they pay going forward. So, regardless of how real or ridiculous the $300k figure is, if he didn't ask for it back, your point is irrelevant. Also, if I choose to provide you a service for free, and I tell you I'm going to stop providing you my volunteer work unless I get compensated, to call that extortion is ridiculous. It's my time, if I don't want to donate it unless I get paid, I don't have to. No one is forcing you to hire me.
For two years, Pat attempted to negotiate a way to pay for the site. For two years, Pat worked without pay. For two years, RunningWolf was not compensated for its server space or its bandwidth costs. For two years Pat spent $300,000 of his own money to host and maintain the site, never asking for nor receiving a profit.
Pat did not ask for payment of any of that investment, but simply explained to the county he could no longer afford to host and maintain the site for free. For 2 years the sheriff refused to negotiate a way to continue paying for the site.
Considering that it is undisputed that this guy donated nearly 3 years of his time to this county before asking for anything, I find it much more likely that his side of the story is more accurate. You don't see greedy/selfish people work selflessly for 3 years with no return on investment.
You do however, see greedy/selfish people willingly leach off of generous people for years, and then sue or otherwise take legal action when those generous people stop.
You seem to be very ready to believe that a guy would be willing to work for you pro bono for 3 years, then suddenly turn and try to extort you by withholding his free service? How am I the one with the tin-foil hat? I have more faith in people than that.
According to the second link in the article, he spent $300,000 of his own money and is not asking for his inventment back. He simply tried to tell the county that, going forward, he couldn't afford to pay for it himself. When they ignored him, he closed up shop to keep from losing more money. They retaliated by arresting him and slapping him with exortion and other charges.
In other words, SCO is saying, "The only people we are going to try and charge for Linux right now are the people with enough money to sue us into oblivion."
Never do less than RAID 5 on critical data- preferably RAID 1 or 0+1.
How is RAID 1 or 0+1 preferable to RAID 5? In a RAID 5 array, 1 drive can fail and your system is still fine. With RAID 1, 1 drive can fail. In a Raid 0+1, 1 drive can fail in a worst case scenario (both the primary drive and mirror for the same stripe could fail at once). In a setup where you can afford a hot-spare drive that rebuilds immediately when another drive fails, a RAID 5 serves most purposes just as effeciently and cheaper than a RAID 1 or 0+1 solution (it depends on how many drives you have to work with obviously). Actually, in the cases where you couldn't afford an extra hot spare drive, you couldn't afford a more costly RAID 1 or 0+1 setup anyways.
For critical data where you want true multiple points of redundancy, you would use a 5+1 array. In the worst case scenario, a 5+1 array tolerates 3 simultaneous points of failure, something none of the solutions you've suggested offer.
"In other news, SCO's stock surged $4.97, or 32 percent, to close at $20.50 Wednesday, after Deutsche Bank analysts Brian Skiba and Matthew Kelly initiated coverage of the company with a "buy" rating and a $45 price target for the stock"
Here's Mr. Skiba's analysis:
"The IBM lawsuit and the potential for Linux licensing deals offer plenty to be excited about, while failure would render the shares worthless, in our view," Mr. Skiba wrote in a research note.
Mr. Skiba said he isn't attempting to predict the outcome of the legal case and doesn't know whether SCO Group's claims have merit. He warned the "risks are numerous and the shares should be considered speculative."
To paraphrase: If SCO wins, they will be worth more. If they lose, they will be worth crap. Other than that, I have no clue what I'm talking about. But, here's my guess anyways, based on a complete lack of technical and legal knowledge about the subject at hand.
IMO, people in a position to influence the market like this have a responsibility to not be an idiot. He, obviously, has failed in this regard.
If students want to file share (legit or otherwise), or game, or whatever, without restrictions, they can drop the cash for DSL or cable.
Your argument would be sound if the student had a choice of providers. If I as a student had the right to refuse the terms of service provided by my University, and get an alternative provider instead, I would agree, the University should be able to create whatever policies it wants. But since the University is basically shoving this down the throats of the students, forcing them to pay for it without offering them a choice, I have a problem with them getting a blank check on how they set their policies.
Plus, back when I was in school, our land lines ran through a proprietary on-campus system (you could dial 5 digits for on-campus calls), so no DSL was available. Our cable ran through the campus cable system, so no CM was available.
Given that I could not get DSL or cable as alternative access, and I was forced to pay the "Technology Fee" whether I used the ethernet access or not, you can be sure I would have raised hell if they tried to pull this kind of nonsense back in the day.
Provided you have the grades and the motivation, I consider a college education to be a right (one which the government agrees with, if you look at all the grants and scholarships given based on need). A public school should not have the right to invade a student's privacy with scans of their machines in a situation where a student is forced to pay for the service, under a threat of "If you don't like it, go somewhere else for college."
I would be very tempted to have all requests that come back as sitefinder.verisign.com display a DNS resolution error instead.
Yeah yeah, I know 2 wrongs do not make a right, but it would definitely send a clear message to Verisign. They need to realize that in order for techologies to work, people need to work together. No one holds all the power; anyone can come and screw you at any given time. That's why everyone needs to play nice, because the alternative is everyone loses.
Re:Don't flame the devs
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Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Doesn't the author understand how the Linux/OSS community works, or what? Its not the devs' job to make shiny installation druids that you can click through. That's what distros are for. If you want to compile software, be prepared to do your homework. If not wait for the.deb to become available or subscribe to RedHat network etc.
The idea that a user should expect to be a guru and that the developer has no responsibilities towards the community is part of what prevents the open source community from achieving more mainstream acceptance.
I respect an open source developer's right to do what he wants to his project, but I have no remorse whatsoever for him when the community exersizes their right to flame the hell out of him when parts of his product are crap.
Seems odd to single it out because the lines already exist. I thought that the phone companies were regulated in large part because of the necessity of having only one line per house, rather than 20 providers digging up your town.
Don't most people already pay these access charges in one way or another via ISPs or other downstream providers.
I suspect that the politicians are much more stupid than we assumed. And I mean that.
They aren't stupid, they are just trying to wrangle as much for themeselves as they can out of new technologies.
What they fail to realize is that this is the Internet age. The location of a company hardly matters any more. If Yahoo chooses to spin off their VoIP division and move it to Arizona as a subsidiary, the end user wouldn't even notice.
Being the first state to tax something Internet related is a great way to drive businesses out of your state.
If you agree whole-heartedly with the Denver judge, then you believe that commercial speech is just as important as political and charitable speech. Looking at the roots of the words commerce, politics, and love, I'd conclude that, to you, money is as important as people and love. That's a pretty sad set of values. I think you need to either examine them or express yourself more clearly
The problem is that the discrimination is being applied to speech. The government is allowed to choose contractor A over contractor B. The government does not, however, have the right to choose speech A over speech B.
Unlike those of you who have worked yourselves into a rabid frenzy over the short term gain of having the DNC list implemented, some of us still actually remember we have a Bill of Rights, and we would like to preserve those rights our founding fathers fought so hard to give us.
There are legitmate arguments for going ahead with the DNC list. Some argue that there is an unreasonable burden on the receiver, like junk faxes. Therefore, it should not fall under protected speech. I can understand that logic.
But, to argue that it's somehow ok because it's "not as important"? That is the most ignorant thing I've ever heard. You may as well try living in China for awhile. I hear their government still decides what speech is important for their people too.
MS update downloaded the patch and it's already installed. It seems to me that hardly anyone is hearing about these bugs nowadays until after MS updates Windows. The lesson here (other than the obvious and silly "Don't use Windows") is to run MS update
Just remember that during the "Scan for updates" procedure, the little tagline about "Windows Update does not collect any form of personally identifiable information from your computer" is a lie. A great deal of information is actually sent back, and is generally more than enough to uniquely identify your computer. Plus, Microsoft has no business knowing exactly what hardware I have installed on my computer.
You can go here for a more comprehensive article on this subject.
Impact on console gaming
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High Density CDs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I remember systems such as the Dreamcast had their discs designed to hold more than 700MB specifically so people pirating them couldn't do a perfect job, requiring audio tracks and cutscenes to be surgically removed from the game to fit on a normal CD. I know some PS2 games are just out of reach for CD pirates due to their > 700MB size as well. It seems to me it's quite possible for a soldering iron based firmware upgrade to put those games within reach for pirates now.
Pirates are always the early adopters of these kind of technologies:).
It might be eventually
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High Density CDs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
secondly the average user does not need any more space per CD than what is currently available, because for the average user the largest single file they'll burn on a CD is usually a divx movie, and that doesn't usually exceed 800 megabytes. if an entire back-up of a hard drive is what's needed, most would simply use a few cheap CDs as opposed to a single expensive DVD blank.
Eventually, if the new technology is cost affordable enough, the savings on number of CD's needed might be worth it.
Two years ago I would've told anyone who was getting a burner that it was extremely difficult to require more than 1 CD to back up all of a person's data (not apps, just the documents and other data created by them), especially on a Windows box that begs for a clean re-install every 6-12 months. However, nowadays with people having multi-gig MP3 collections being commonplace, it seems 640KB is in fact NOT enough for everyone.:)
Reducing Network Traffic?
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FTC vs Spammers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If it's going to take over 40k in e-mails per spammer to get the FTC to take action, think how much in terms of time and resources it's going to cost us just to report these guys. It's almost as if the FTC is some sort of reverse spammer, draining network resources by forcing us to spam them to get them to do something about spamming... Somewhat ironic if nothing else.
I am sitting at The Gathering at the moment, and I can say that there is not only gamers here. They made one section of the area a demoscene area (with a no gamers allowed banner).
Ah, the demoscene. Am I the only one reminded of conventions like Assembly '9X where groups like Future Crew and others made our machines do ridiculous things?
It's hard not to miss the good old days before bloatware became the status quo.
Since 9/11 there seems to be a growing desire by governments to abolish double jeopardy - the idea that you cannot be tried twice for the same offense. One way around it is that many countries now have so many statutes that one action can be held to break several different laws - so they can try one thing and then if it doesn't work, try another until they get you. We possibly shouldn't be surprised that Norway is one of them: underneath the clean and friendly image, Scandinavian states have a history of social control, significant right-wing politics, and social repression of dissident groups. Just like us, in fact.
Why are we as Americans so quick to assume that any country who doesn't do things our way is somehow inferior?
I like the idea of double jeopardy. This and other reasons are why I live in the United States. I believe that the idea of government lends itself to the abuse of power and I want every protection from them.
However, there are people and societies that believe removing criminals from the streets is better for the greater good of the community and outweighs the dangers of innocent people being affected by their methods. It's not better or worse, just different. Stop judging them.
I'm still hearing about layoffs, about the horrible time people are having in trying to locate a job. Friends and co-workers feel no sense of job security. Apparently, they need to put a caveat in their article: "Your mileage may vary."
In my experience, programmers like to write code. Period. They don't like to write documentation, they don't like to write system tests, and they don't like to write unit tests.
In a corporate environment, isn't this what testers are for? You don't waste the programmers time on this, you have testers write the test cases, write system test scripts, automate the testing process, and execute tests. The programmers can do what they're paid to do. As long as the requirements are well defined, the people writing the test cases and the people writing the code don't have to be the same people.
In fact, they shouldn't be the same people. That way there are two sets of people going over the requirements. Sometimes a developer will interpret a requirement differently than a tester. It allows ambiguous requirements to be found during the development cycle rather than having a person write the test, write the code, and have the customer say "I didn't want it to work like that."
Flash is virtually ubiquitous (77% browser penetration...)
In other words, using flash eliminates 23% of your potential audience. Not to mention that the statistics in reference probably came from a sample size of 2,000 or so, and with over 507 million internet users, i would hardly consider 2,000 representative. (The number 2,000 came from the macromedia page where they explain the browser survey)
Wow, you really don't understand the first thing about sample sizes do you?
Here's some data, assuming the population of web surfers is 507 million users:
With a sample size of 2000, you can be 95% sure the results are accurate to +-1.84%. You can be 99% sure that the results are accurate to 2.43%.
The fact of the matter is, the required sample size required to get an accurate result does not go up linearly. Probability has proven that population size is mostly irrelevant when it's this large.
And, in response to your statement about Flash denying the content to 23% of the user base, if we don't introduce new technology to the web somehow, nothing will ever evolve. Frankly, I find the idea of giving up on innovation for the sake of compatibility to be asinine. Go ahead and innovate, if your product is good enough, people will become compatible. If not, the fact your product is incompatible with existing technology will cause it to die all the faster.
They shouldn't be regulated for one very good reason.
Personal responsibility!
At one point, I might have agreed with you. Now, I think I have a slightly more grounded outlook on the issue.
I used to play EQ... a lot, an unhealthy amount.
At the high point in my addiction, I took a week off to fly out to L.A. for E3. I had never been addicted to anything in my life before, but I can tell you without a doubt I know what withdrawl feels like. I couldn't sleep well, I couldn't eat well, I was jittery and just desperately wanted to get back to the game. I was at E3, probably my favorite geek convention of all time, and I was miserable.
Yeah yeah, I was pretty pathetic. Everyone has their moments of weakness. That was mine. But my point is, EQ is a drug. It's a drug where there are no warning labels, no program during high school to tell you the consequences of becoming addicted. It just looked like a game, no one knew at the time that playing it would slowly entice you into a downward spiral.
The lack of education is the problem. You can bitch and moan that people should have personal responsibility all you want, but you can't blame them if they don't know. Nor can you blame people for wanting to put the word out on the street.
Designing a game where you psychologically induce people to play 40+ hours a week is akin to producing cigarettes. In fact, I would argue it's even worse in the MMOG industry because the public isn't educated about the psychological impact.
It's very easy for those of you who've never suffered from an addiction to sit on your high horse and say "Well, you should've just quit." You have no clue how much mental anguish one has to go through to make a break from something so addictive.
Where am I today? I graduated college and I have a nice job at a software company. I did manage to fix my life, but "personal responsibility" is what got me out of the hole. Don't use it to blame how people got there in the first place.
I'm not blaming Verant or Sony for my situation. Perhaps they didn't know any better either. But the important thing is, now that we DO know the effects of these kinds of games, the risks need to be made known, to the kids playing these games and their parents. If it takes government regulation to do that, perhaps it is needed.
I'm a libertarian and a card carrying member of the ACLU. I hate the idea of legislating morality, but in this case, I see it more of a case of legislating corporate responsibility.
God knows some people will take advantage of you anyway they can. Sometimes, unfortunately, the government does need to step in.
If open source has such a direct correlation to better quality, why do you feel companies are still keeping their source proprietary? Do you think that we should try and convince them to open source their code in every case, and if so, what do you think needs to happen before they can be convinced to change their minds?
Slashdot Mirror
Changing where you publish from doesn't change your nationality, unless you stay to apply for citizenship, and then through direct action before the U.S. judicial system, revoke your own U.S. citizenship (If you don't formally revoke your citizenship in front of the U.S. judicial system, you will retain dual citizenship, even if that's in contradiction with the laws of your new country).
Actually, that's not entirely true. While you are correct is saying that being naturalized by a foreign nation does not automatically cause loss of citizenship, that person does not automatically retain citizenship either. If the person commits the act with the intent of renouncing his U.S. citizenship, then the citizenship is lost.
The way they handle intent is they simply ask you the next time a question of your citizenship comes up before the consulate. If you say you intended to keep it, you keep it. If you say you intended to lose it, you lose it.
You can also formally renounce your citizenship at any U.S. Consulate, or by affirming in writing to any U.S. Consular officer after being naturalized by a foreign country (basically, making the issue come before them now, and affirming you intended to lose it).
Why don't you look at the website in archive.org? It looked like a piece of shit. Besides, even if he worked full-time on that POS for 3 years, $100K/year is not the going rate for a web designer.
Also, how the hell can you donate something and then ask for money back? What the guy did is regular extortion. Go read up on it sometime. 1) Full time + hardware/hosting costs. But it doesn't matter, because the number is irrelevant.
2) Did you not even read the other article? Did you not read the original reply in this thread? Did you read anything beyond the immediate parent post? He contends that he did not ask for his initial investment back. He simply asked that they pay going forward. So, regardless of how real or ridiculous the $300k figure is, if he didn't ask for it back, your point is irrelevant. Also, if I choose to provide you a service for free, and I tell you I'm going to stop providing you my volunteer work unless I get compensated, to call that extortion is ridiculous. It's my time, if I don't want to donate it unless I get paid, I don't have to. No one is forcing you to hire me.
For two years, Pat attempted to negotiate a way to pay for the site. For two years, Pat worked without pay. For two years, RunningWolf was not compensated for its server space or its bandwidth costs. For two years Pat spent $300,000 of his own money to host and maintain the site, never asking for nor receiving a profit.
Pat did not ask for payment of any of that investment, but simply explained to the county he could no longer afford to host and maintain the site for free. For 2 years the sheriff refused to negotiate a way to continue paying for the site.
Considering that it is undisputed that this guy donated nearly 3 years of his time to this county before asking for anything, I find it much more likely that his side of the story is more accurate. You don't see greedy/selfish people work selflessly for 3 years with no return on investment.
You do however, see greedy/selfish people willingly leach off of generous people for years, and then sue or otherwise take legal action when those generous people stop.
You seem to be very ready to believe that a guy would be willing to work for you pro bono for 3 years, then suddenly turn and try to extort you by withholding his free service? How am I the one with the tin-foil hat? I have more faith in people than that.
Read TFA, not skim TFA.
According to the second link in the article, he spent $300,000 of his own money and is not asking for his inventment back. He simply tried to tell the county that, going forward, he couldn't afford to pay for it himself. When they ignored him, he closed up shop to keep from losing more money. They retaliated by arresting him and slapping him with exortion and other charges.
M$ providing IE with Windows is very useful, I think it would be fine with a new name. I propose "GUI for downloading Mozilla/Opera".
In other words, SCO is saying, "The only people we are going to try and charge for Linux right now are the people with enough money to sue us into oblivion."
I am OK with this.
Never do less than RAID 5 on critical data- preferably RAID 1 or 0+1.
How is RAID 1 or 0+1 preferable to RAID 5? In a RAID 5 array, 1 drive can fail and your system is still fine. With RAID 1, 1 drive can fail. In a Raid 0+1, 1 drive can fail in a worst case scenario (both the primary drive and mirror for the same stripe could fail at once). In a setup where you can afford a hot-spare drive that rebuilds immediately when another drive fails, a RAID 5 serves most purposes just as effeciently and cheaper than a RAID 1 or 0+1 solution (it depends on how many drives you have to work with obviously). Actually, in the cases where you couldn't afford an extra hot spare drive, you couldn't afford a more costly RAID 1 or 0+1 setup anyways.
For critical data where you want true multiple points of redundancy, you would use a 5+1 array. In the worst case scenario, a 5+1 array tolerates 3 simultaneous points of failure, something none of the solutions you've suggested offer.
"The IBM lawsuit and the potential for Linux licensing deals offer plenty to be excited about, while failure would render the shares worthless, in our view," Mr. Skiba wrote in a research note.
Mr. Skiba said he isn't attempting to predict the outcome of the legal case and doesn't know whether SCO Group's claims have merit. He warned the "risks are numerous and the shares should be considered speculative."
To paraphrase: If SCO wins, they will be worth more. If they lose, they will be worth crap. Other than that, I have no clue what I'm talking about. But, here's my guess anyways, based on a complete lack of technical and legal knowledge about the subject at hand.
IMO, people in a position to influence the market like this have a responsibility to not be an idiot. He, obviously, has failed in this regard.
Plus, back when I was in school, our land lines ran through a proprietary on-campus system (you could dial 5 digits for on-campus calls), so no DSL was available. Our cable ran through the campus cable system, so no CM was available.
Given that I could not get DSL or cable as alternative access, and I was forced to pay the "Technology Fee" whether I used the ethernet access or not, you can be sure I would have raised hell if they tried to pull this kind of nonsense back in the day.
Provided you have the grades and the motivation, I consider a college education to be a right (one which the government agrees with, if you look at all the grants and scholarships given based on need). A public school should not have the right to invade a student's privacy with scans of their machines in a situation where a student is forced to pay for the service, under a threat of "If you don't like it, go somewhere else for college."
I would be very tempted to have all requests that come back as sitefinder.verisign.com display a DNS resolution error instead.
Yeah yeah, I know 2 wrongs do not make a right, but it would definitely send a clear message to Verisign. They need to realize that in order for techologies to work, people need to work together. No one holds all the power; anyone can come and screw you at any given time. That's why everyone needs to play nice, because the alternative is everyone loses.
I respect an open source developer's right to do what he wants to his project, but I have no remorse whatsoever for him when the community exersizes their right to flame the hell out of him when parts of his product are crap.
What they fail to realize is that this is the Internet age. The location of a company hardly matters any more. If Yahoo chooses to spin off their VoIP division and move it to Arizona as a subsidiary, the end user wouldn't even notice.
Being the first state to tax something Internet related is a great way to drive businesses out of your state.
The problem is that the discrimination is being applied to speech. The government is allowed to choose contractor A over contractor B. The government does not, however, have the right to choose speech A over speech B.
Unlike those of you who have worked yourselves into a rabid frenzy over the short term gain of having the DNC list implemented, some of us still actually remember we have a Bill of Rights, and we would like to preserve those rights our founding fathers fought so hard to give us.
There are legitmate arguments for going ahead with the DNC list. Some argue that there is an unreasonable burden on the receiver, like junk faxes. Therefore, it should not fall under protected speech. I can understand that logic.
But, to argue that it's somehow ok because it's "not as important"? That is the most ignorant thing I've ever heard. You may as well try living in China for awhile. I hear their government still decides what speech is important for their people too.
Just remember that during the "Scan for updates" procedure, the little tagline about "Windows Update does not collect any form of personally identifiable information from your computer" is a lie. A great deal of information is actually sent back, and is generally more than enough to uniquely identify your computer. Plus, Microsoft has no business knowing exactly what hardware I have installed on my computer.
You can go here for a more comprehensive article on this subject.
I remember systems such as the Dreamcast had their discs designed to hold more than 700MB specifically so people pirating them couldn't do a perfect job, requiring audio tracks and cutscenes to be surgically removed from the game to fit on a normal CD. I know some PS2 games are just out of reach for CD pirates due to their > 700MB size as well. It seems to me it's quite possible for a soldering iron based firmware upgrade to put those games within reach for pirates now.
:).
Pirates are always the early adopters of these kind of technologies
Two years ago I would've told anyone who was getting a burner that it was extremely difficult to require more than 1 CD to back up all of a person's data (not apps, just the documents and other data created by them), especially on a Windows box that begs for a clean re-install every 6-12 months. However, nowadays with people having multi-gig MP3 collections being commonplace, it seems 640KB is in fact NOT enough for everyone.
If it's going to take over 40k in e-mails per spammer to get the FTC to take action, think how much in terms of time and resources it's going to cost us just to report these guys. It's almost as if the FTC is some sort of reverse spammer, draining network resources by forcing us to spam them to get them to do something about spamming... Somewhat ironic if nothing else.
It's hard not to miss the good old days before bloatware became the status quo.
I like the idea of double jeopardy. This and other reasons are why I live in the United States. I believe that the idea of government lends itself to the abuse of power and I want every protection from them.
However, there are people and societies that believe removing criminals from the streets is better for the greater good of the community and outweighs the dangers of innocent people being affected by their methods. It's not better or worse, just different. Stop judging them.
What to tell the pointy-haired boss:
Linux finally has a feature M$ Windows doesn't have, 64 bit support! It's why we need to switch all our servers to Linux!
I'm still hearing about layoffs, about the horrible time people are having in trying to locate a job. Friends and co-workers feel no sense of job security. Apparently, they need to put a caveat in their article: "Your mileage may vary."
In fact, they shouldn't be the same people. That way there are two sets of people going over the requirements. Sometimes a developer will interpret a requirement differently than a tester. It allows ambiguous requirements to be found during the development cycle rather than having a person write the test, write the code, and have the customer say "I didn't want it to work like that."
Wow, you really don't understand the first thing about sample sizes do you?
Here's some data, assuming the population of web surfers is 507 million users:
With a sample size of 2000, you can be 95% sure the results are accurate to +-1.84%. You can be 99% sure that the results are accurate to 2.43%.
The fact of the matter is, the required sample size required to get an accurate result does not go up linearly. Probability has proven that population size is mostly irrelevant when it's this large.
And, in response to your statement about Flash denying the content to 23% of the user base, if we don't introduce new technology to the web somehow, nothing will ever evolve. Frankly, I find the idea of giving up on innovation for the sake of compatibility to be asinine. Go ahead and innovate, if your product is good enough, people will become compatible. If not, the fact your product is incompatible with existing technology will cause it to die all the faster.
I used to play EQ... a lot, an unhealthy amount.
At the high point in my addiction, I took a week off to fly out to L.A. for E3. I had never been addicted to anything in my life before, but I can tell you without a doubt I know what withdrawl feels like. I couldn't sleep well, I couldn't eat well, I was jittery and just desperately wanted to get back to the game. I was at E3, probably my favorite geek convention of all time, and I was miserable.
Yeah yeah, I was pretty pathetic. Everyone has their moments of weakness. That was mine. But my point is, EQ is a drug. It's a drug where there are no warning labels, no program during high school to tell you the consequences of becoming addicted. It just looked like a game, no one knew at the time that playing it would slowly entice you into a downward spiral.
The lack of education is the problem. You can bitch and moan that people should have personal responsibility all you want, but you can't blame them if they don't know. Nor can you blame people for wanting to put the word out on the street.
Designing a game where you psychologically induce people to play 40+ hours a week is akin to producing cigarettes. In fact, I would argue it's even worse in the MMOG industry because the public isn't educated about the psychological impact.
It's very easy for those of you who've never suffered from an addiction to sit on your high horse and say "Well, you should've just quit." You have no clue how much mental anguish one has to go through to make a break from something so addictive.
Where am I today? I graduated college and I have a nice job at a software company. I did manage to fix my life, but "personal responsibility" is what got me out of the hole. Don't use it to blame how people got there in the first place.
I'm not blaming Verant or Sony for my situation. Perhaps they didn't know any better either. But the important thing is, now that we DO know the effects of these kinds of games, the risks need to be made known, to the kids playing these games and their parents. If it takes government regulation to do that, perhaps it is needed.
I'm a libertarian and a card carrying member of the ACLU. I hate the idea of legislating morality, but in this case, I see it more of a case of legislating corporate responsibility.
God knows some people will take advantage of you anyway they can. Sometimes, unfortunately, the government does need to step in.
If open source has such a direct correlation to better quality, why do you feel companies are still keeping their source proprietary? Do you think that we should try and convince them to open source their code in every case, and if so, what do you think needs to happen before they can be convinced to change their minds?