The best job I've ever had was in a small company (of around 100 people) in which the hiring process took around two months to complete. It was a position as a remote developer for iOS.
After the initial interview with the HR people, they instructed me to code a small app in my free time for no monetary reward at all. The software was just a few screens with data and some relatively easy logic. The problem for me was that since I work during the day, and study at night, it took me quite some time to complete.
After presenting the code (it was my first obj-c project), the iOS architect interviewed me. He criticized some of the code, praised some other parts, and asked technical questions. The interview was probably the hardest part of it all.
After getting the job I can tell you it's pretty clear to me that while the whole process was a real PITA, the end result was amazing. The average level of knowledge and expertise I was able to find there, is something I hadn't seen before in other jobs. In retrospective, I can see how the software project they asked was a very good way to see people's willingness to get the job, and their ability to commit and deliver.
If you repeat the question to yourself again, you'll see that the question is about why you are applying to that *particular* company, not why you need a job. Are you truly interested in what the company does and what practice area it is involved in, or as you say, are you applying only because "you need the fucking job". This helps the company determine if you are just going to be a pencil pusher clocking your time and going to be a sourpuss about it, or if you are going to kick some ass in your job.
You're relating not caring about a particular company with being a bad worker, which is a fallacy. Some people simply don't care about the company, as long as the job and the career are good. It doesn't mean they won't do their best, and it doesn't mean they will be pencil pushers clocking their time.
I would imagine that just about *any* company would be interested in you want to do with your career and how the position will fit not just your current needs (bring food on the table as per your statement) but also your future needs as a person AND as a professional. Are you seriously tell me that you are an automaton - you just want to clock in your 8 hrs at work so you get your paycheck and aspire absolutely nothing else from your career??
Why would you react so strongly to an interviewer who is trying to understand your career aspirations? Its not like they are asking you how you lead your life or how you floss your teeth, the question is only about your career goals. Sooner or later, you will end up discussing this with your manager anyway.
You are still assuming he's an automaton just because he doesn't care for that particular company. Respect and responsability are what the employment relationship needs, not some unfounded love and loyalty. It is a two way road, which takes time to build.
Each and every time I've worked at a company, I have done my best. But still I totally disagree with your reasoning that this is related directly with how much I care about the company having a particular name.
...I would rather that someone have the strength of conviction to make and stick with the choice that they believe is right, rather than flip back and forth to fit the prevailing opinion...
In this particular case, I do agree that GoDaddy has no merit in their change of mind - because they are acting consistently bad with their customers, and don't really seem to have changed their mind at all.
But it seems to me as if in our society we preferred that people stick to their decisions, rather than change their mind if there's overwhelming evidence that they've been wrong. Does it make sense?
Recognizing mistakes and dealing properly with them is IMHO a very rare and positive trait, which should always be encouraged. Think of how much better things would be if this was more widely encouraged.
Brief your management on the situation. Explain what condition things are in and what is needed to get them into a manageable state. Give them a list of projects / tasks that you have to deal with and get them to prioritize.
Its sort of unrelated. But my brother was doing some independent audio work for some VIP wedding in Italy, when he realized the electrical hardware & connections were a mess (meaning they were actually dangerous to use). He first talked with the management for the event and let them know about the situation. They ignored him. He quit the job, and was highly criticized for it.
As he was disconnecting all of his hardware with his team, a short circuit caused a fire, which fortunately was controlled easily.
The event's management immediately contacted him to offer him a formal apology and pay for the damages to his hardware. They also offered to hire him back, double the salary. The last part was kind of luck, but had the fire not been controlled as easily as it was, my brother would have shared the responsibility.
Long story short: sometimes you have to know when to step down.
You are partially right, but let me rephrase what I meant.
When some client asks you to get a project done by a certain date, and you tell them explicitly that it's impossible to do so, and maintain quality at the same time... yet they decide to go on, or go to another company to get what they want: don't you think they are partially responsible for what they get?
In any case I totally agree with you in that outsourcing companies have a huge part of the responsibility... but most of the times it's all about unrealistic goals from the client's side in the first place.
Having been involved in many outsourced projects, a number of problems tend to crop up again and again:
1. Offshore programmers frequently lie about their programming skills
2. Competent Indian programmers tend to do fairly well if given very explicit instructions, but are at a loss if something unexpected comes up. They tend to be less adaptable and nimble than U.S. programmers.
3. It ends up taking longer than estimated, even for simple projects.
4. Hand-holding and rework end up eating up all time and money savings.
5. By the time an offshore programmer has skilled up enough to actually be useful, they leave for a better position. (Especially true for India.)
To my mind, outsourcing programming is a management fad that is (hopefully) already falling out of favor due to poor results.
Having been involved in many outsourced projects, from the other side, this is what I can tell you:
1 - Cost & time over quality: doesn't need much explanation. When a client asks you for a product and puts cost & time above anything else, they shouldn't be surprise when the final product sucks.
2 - Requirements: most of the times, the problem is not that offsourced programmers need more instructions, but that you simply can't talk to them as you would talk to someone who is physically sitting right besides you. You are talking to someone who will spend the next coding day without any other chances to ask for clarification. A simple interpretation mistake can make them have to trash a full working day.
3 - Trust: you need to get people involved from the very beginning - let them know you trust them (otherwise why did you hire them in the first place). This is related to point #2 as well. You need to give people a chance to participate, sometimes make decisions, let them know you trust them, if you want them to care at all for what they do. If you treat people like mindless morons, that's what you will get - and this is something you see plenty of when working for remote customers.
4 - Selection process: get involved in the selection process. Talk to your programmers. Get to know them. Don't let the outsourcing company of choice screen you out on this. Because most often it is NOT the programmers that lie to you, but the very companies that hired them. They will hire just about anyone without any programming skills at all, if you let them do it.
I work at a company that does outsourced programming for for US and EU companies. I have been working at this for the last 5 years aproximately (always in programming & analysis roles).
I am really amazed at how much our clients undermine their own goals. I understand that cost is what drives programming jobs to my country - but I still have to see a really successful product come out of this. It would be difficult to find a single cause for this, but all of the following are at least partially responsible:
1 - Low wages.
2 - Lack of good programmers getting involved: some of the programmers you can get for the lower wages are great, some suck. I've seen companies taking just anyone interested to fill programmer positions for such jobs (you can train them, right?). Getting involved in the selection process may help prevent this.
3 - Lack of trust in the the outsourced team: you can't think of the outsourced team as a bunch of mindless morons and expect them to care about your product. In those cases in which the outsourced team was a very good team, it didn't make the slightest difference because people was told what to do, and not to think - which makes hiring inexperienced people a pretty attractive alternative.
4 - Giving more importance to cost & time, than to quality: what would anyone expect to get, when quality is secondary to time & cost? This is a huge way to undermine your projects.
5 - Communication: communication is harder when people is spread all over the world. IMHO you need to compensate this difficulty by having some tool to help you keep in touch. In my current company, we use skype, and we keep in touch at all times with the client, which really helped solve this particular problem.
6 - Planning: planning is much more difficult when delivering work to someone who is not right at your side.
This is a fake story about a fake hole. The "vulnerability" is that some sandbox profile, called "no-network", which isn't part of App Sandbox (a totally different sandbox technology, that will be required for apps on March 2012), but rather part of the legacy sandbox technology that was unused by 3rd party developers, only prevents network access. Yes, the no-network profile only prevents network access.
It's sad what's happened to Core Security in the past year or so.
No, it's not a fake vulnerability. You should read the report (RTFR?).
The vulnerability is about how apple events can be used to bypass the sandboxing of an application, and in this particular case to gain unrestrained network access even though the app is tagged as "no-network". According to the report it can be used to bypass other restrictions too.
For a single moment forget about everything you know. Forget about laws... forget about your religion... about your studies... forget everything.
Now, with a fresh and clean mind go watch the video and tell me: does it look right to you?
I sometimes wonder at how we let ourselves be fooled by our own rules, and end up confused to such an extent as to allow and consider appropiate something like this kind of physical punishment on a kid due to "copyright infringement"... whatever the fuck that is supposed to really mean.
Because, like it or not, scientific method dictates that creationism must be disproven before it can be dismissed. Since you can't possibly prove or disprove it... open end.
The scientific method also dictates that hypotheses must be testable through experiments and results should be measurable.
In fact the scientific method does not claim to be able to prove something is true, but rather to prove that it is NOT wrong, and to do so it is a basic requirement for the hypotheses to be testable someway.
To say it in other words: intelligent design may or may not be true, but it certainly is outside of the scope of science and cannot be considered to have any relation with it.
As a side note: scientifical theories must be testable through experiment (this means there should be a way to look for some evidence to prove the theory wrong).
Perhaps pedantic, but its an important point in this context:
A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable through experiment (that is, it must make some prediction[s] about how things will work in specific circumstances that can be tested and which, if the test fails, will demonstrate that the hypothesis is incorrect.)
A scientific theory is not merely a testable hypothesis, but a hypothesis which has been subjected to testing and not yet been falsified.
Never pedantic if it clears out misconceptions. Thanks for the correction, I found it insightful.:)
I'll give you the ID argument, as, that is true, I know little about it. I understand scientific theory (the simplest way to explain a phenomenon based on observations from the past - generally the most plausible way to explain something - i am no expert, obviously). However, it is still theory and not law. Also, I do think these beliefs would be interesting to teach from a historical or philosophical standpoint, but the only one you could possible teach from a scientific standpoint would be evolution (at least right now)... even though, it still might (a minuscule chance) be wrong (still could be those fucking colossal space monkeys).
There's nothing wrong with teaching ID from a phylosophical point of view. The problem is when people want's to teach it as if it was science.
As I mentioned in another post: scientifical theories must be testable through experiment (this means there should be a way to look for some evidence to prove the theory wrong). This is enough to filter ID and Creationism out as scientific theories. They can still be taught as other kind of theories though and that would be fine.
Yet, we still call it a "Theory" for some reason. And yes, I know about most of the evidence, and yes I buy that (more than anything else right now). I also understand that we might possibly be all wrong at any moment.
We still call gravity a "Theory" as well. You are making the common mistake about the scientific use of the word.
According to the United States National Academy of Sciences:
Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time.
As a side note: scientifical theories must be testable through experiment (this means there should be a way to look for some evidence to prove the theory wrong). This is enough to filter ID and Creationism out.
If Sco wins the copyright holder wouldn't have been right at the time anymore. The means they had no right to license it under the GPL.
If IBM was affected by this they would have to sue Novell.
But Sco doesn't stand a chance.
Maybe the sales figures in the press releases are true, but there's no way to know how big the sales could have been if there had not been such bad word of mouth before release.
IMHO, the true impact of this decision will be seen when they release the next game in the series. I purchased the game, not knowing about the lack of dedicated servers support. It won't happen again (it's unplayable online for me at 160 ms minimum ping).
The only problem is that probably they won't realize why people won't be buying the game as much next time.
I forced my GF to get a Mac. Zero problems now.
BTW this is not against Windows. But if I have to do the tech support for computer-illiterate people I find Macs server the purpose better.
Thing is I fail to see any advantages either. Why spend time on something if it won't bring a benefit?
The way I see it, this is unnecessary because computing in general is getting divided in 3 rough groups:
1. Desktops. All modern hardware will run i386 code, macs included. All modern Linux distros will run 32 bit code. So if you feel a need to ship a tarred binary for some reson, ship 32 bit code, and no problem. No need to compile twice.
2. Special purpose devices. Those have special screens, small disk sizes, slow CPUs, and so on. It makes very little sense to provide a fat ELF for those, because even if OpenOffice came with a fat ELF with code that could technically work on my cell phone, it probably wouldn't work right anyway, if it managed to find enough memory to load. If the application does work fine, you're still wasting very limited resources.
3. Niche architectures like SPARC and Itanium. Nobody cares about these for "user friendliness" purposes.
Why not let Ryan spend his time on it? After all he was willing to take care of it himself... he wasn't asking for other developers to maintain it. I am not arguing that people should like the feature, or support it... just that if it comes at no cost, and it adds more options and more freedom, we should let it at least move forward.
What good is a "free" OS if features are rejected just because?
Why would it? Linux users install openoffice as a package. I don't really know anybody who downloads it from a website, it's just not the standard way to install things on Linux. If you're doing that, you're not a typical user, but have a special need of some sort. If you're a third party provider, you provide a third party package server.
To me, something being good enough doesn't mean it can't improve. For example you may not want to provide a third party package server, or may not want to maintain it. Or maybe you want to make the most user friendly software available in Linux (a la Apple)... some game to deliver in a CD for Kids to play by just double clicking it. Who knows? The thing is there are reasons why this might be a good option to have, even if most developers could not need it at all.
I just feel this feature is being rejected because it's unnecessary for most tech-savy people. If we, as developers, forget to have our users in mind... we will fail in our job to deliver solutions.
Ok, but what do you expect to come out of this? For instance, suppose this patch goes in. But you won't get an i386/amd64/ARM binary from me, because I don't have an ARM system, so I won't compile for something I can't test...
That's not worse than the current situation. The fact you won't use the feature doesn't mean other developers won't, and that would offer the end user more options, not less than we have today.
In any case most of the people arguing against this feature do so because they don't think it's needed. But I fail to see the disadvantages in implementing FatELF in Linux. Nothing prevents a developer from building binaries for a single architecture, and ignore this feature. Nothing prevents a developer from releasing their software in source-code only. There are no technical disadvantages that I can think of, even after reading most criticism.
Some architectures have things like alignment requirements. Not all code will work everywhere even if a binary for the platform can be produced. Different byteorder will require writing code that will correctly read data files on all platforms.
There are certainly going to be difficulties, but if you really think about it, nothing prevents solutions for these problems to be crafted. On top of that, this particular problem you mention is not specific to FatELF, and it needs to be handled properly in the source code regardless of FatELF (if you want to create a source code that can be cross-compiled). FatELF is about easier deployment in situations where it's needed. It's not about making it easier for the developer to program for different platforms (it would be interesting though to see variants of fread/fwrite that abstract you from endianness, but that's a different topic anyway).
And why would you want code for 8 different architectures on a low power device that has a much more limited amount of space than a desktop?
Maybe you wouldn't... but FatELF would probably be targetted mostly at software for users that don't have a clue. Nothing would force software like "ls" or "man" to be compiled in a FatELF package. But I could easily see Open Office distributed like this, and it would be neat.
Anyway, this is not an attack on your stance. I just wanted to offer a different point of view. Sometimes I think people is too reluctant to change, and in this particular case I think there are no real disadvantages for this to be rejected so flatly.
People need to quit saying they want a "realistic" game, but just remove all the real stuff that we don't exactly like. No, you want realism, here it is. deal with it.
I think at least some of the people that want realism are referring to the physics mainly. In any case, I don't particularly enjoy games because of how much they resemble reality. Same for movies. I know the difference between a real war and a game, and I'm glad there IS a difference.
The two-year-old startup's Tile-GX series of chips are targeted at servers and appliances that execute Web-related functions such as indexing, Web search and video search.
Can someone explain to me how a chip can be targetted at much higher-level tasks like these?
I realize there are surely technical means to achieve this goal, I just can't imagine myself what these means could be.
Nothing prevents Palm from writing its own iTunes plugin to sync the library with their own devices. I would agree with you if Apple was attempting to block its competition out of iTunes, but here it seems like they are trying to avoid absorbing the support costs for Palm's devices.
How is this unfair to you?
He's right to complain though. It's like when your boss tells you you did something wrong, and you need to fix it. He could fix it himself instead of telling you, and it would be faster, but you wouldn't have feedback to improve your working methods.
In this case he's not the boss, but IMO he's right about not describing what GCD is. It is not THAT popular.
Slashdot Mirror
The best job I've ever had was in a small company (of around 100 people) in which the hiring process took around two months to complete. It was a position as a remote developer for iOS.
After the initial interview with the HR people, they instructed me to code a small app in my free time for no monetary reward at all. The software was just a few screens with data and some relatively easy logic. The problem for me was that since I work during the day, and study at night, it took me quite some time to complete.
After presenting the code (it was my first obj-c project), the iOS architect interviewed me. He criticized some of the code, praised some other parts, and asked technical questions. The interview was probably the hardest part of it all.
After getting the job I can tell you it's pretty clear to me that while the whole process was a real PITA, the end result was amazing. The average level of knowledge and expertise I was able to find there, is something I hadn't seen before in other jobs. In retrospective, I can see how the software project they asked was a very good way to see people's willingness to get the job, and their ability to commit and deliver.
You're relating not caring about a particular company with being a bad worker, which is a fallacy. Some people simply don't care about the company, as long as the job and the career are good. It doesn't mean they won't do their best, and it doesn't mean they will be pencil pushers clocking their time.
You are still assuming he's an automaton just because he doesn't care for that particular company. Respect and responsability are what the employment relationship needs, not some unfounded love and loyalty. It is a two way road, which takes time to build.
Each and every time I've worked at a company, I have done my best. But still I totally disagree with your reasoning that this is related directly with how much I care about the company having a particular name.
In this particular case, I do agree that GoDaddy has no merit in their change of mind - because they are acting consistently bad with their customers, and don't really seem to have changed their mind at all.
But it seems to me as if in our society we preferred that people stick to their decisions, rather than change their mind if there's overwhelming evidence that they've been wrong. Does it make sense?
Recognizing mistakes and dealing properly with them is IMHO a very rare and positive trait, which should always be encouraged. Think of how much better things would be if this was more widely encouraged.
Brief your management on the situation. Explain what condition things are in and what is needed to get them into a manageable state. Give them a list of projects / tasks that you have to deal with and get them to prioritize.
Its sort of unrelated. But my brother was doing some independent audio work for some VIP wedding in Italy, when he realized the electrical hardware & connections were a mess (meaning they were actually dangerous to use). He first talked with the management for the event and let them know about the situation. They ignored him. He quit the job, and was highly criticized for it.
As he was disconnecting all of his hardware with his team, a short circuit caused a fire, which fortunately was controlled easily.
The event's management immediately contacted him to offer him a formal apology and pay for the damages to his hardware. They also offered to hire him back, double the salary. The last part was kind of luck, but had the fire not been controlled as easily as it was, my brother would have shared the responsibility.
Long story short: sometimes you have to know when to step down.
Nope it's not. That was the whole point of my post. :)
You are partially right, but let me rephrase what I meant.
When some client asks you to get a project done by a certain date, and you tell them explicitly that it's impossible to do so, and maintain quality at the same time... yet they decide to go on, or go to another company to get what they want: don't you think they are partially responsible for what they get?
In any case I totally agree with you in that outsourcing companies have a huge part of the responsibility... but most of the times it's all about unrealistic goals from the client's side in the first place.
Having been involved in many outsourced projects, a number of problems tend to crop up again and again:
1. Offshore programmers frequently lie about their programming skills 2. Competent Indian programmers tend to do fairly well if given very explicit instructions, but are at a loss if something unexpected comes up. They tend to be less adaptable and nimble than U.S. programmers. 3. It ends up taking longer than estimated, even for simple projects. 4. Hand-holding and rework end up eating up all time and money savings. 5. By the time an offshore programmer has skilled up enough to actually be useful, they leave for a better position. (Especially true for India.)
To my mind, outsourcing programming is a management fad that is (hopefully) already falling out of favor due to poor results.
Having been involved in many outsourced projects, from the other side, this is what I can tell you: 1 - Cost & time over quality: doesn't need much explanation. When a client asks you for a product and puts cost & time above anything else, they shouldn't be surprise when the final product sucks.
2 - Requirements: most of the times, the problem is not that offsourced programmers need more instructions, but that you simply can't talk to them as you would talk to someone who is physically sitting right besides you. You are talking to someone who will spend the next coding day without any other chances to ask for clarification. A simple interpretation mistake can make them have to trash a full working day.
3 - Trust: you need to get people involved from the very beginning - let them know you trust them (otherwise why did you hire them in the first place). This is related to point #2 as well. You need to give people a chance to participate, sometimes make decisions, let them know you trust them, if you want them to care at all for what they do. If you treat people like mindless morons, that's what you will get - and this is something you see plenty of when working for remote customers.
4 - Selection process: get involved in the selection process. Talk to your programmers. Get to know them. Don't let the outsourcing company of choice screen you out on this. Because most often it is NOT the programmers that lie to you, but the very companies that hired them. They will hire just about anyone without any programming skills at all, if you let them do it.
Regards.
I work at a company that does outsourced programming for for US and EU companies. I have been working at this for the last 5 years aproximately (always in programming & analysis roles).
I am really amazed at how much our clients undermine their own goals. I understand that cost is what drives programming jobs to my country - but I still have to see a really successful product come out of this. It would be difficult to find a single cause for this, but all of the following are at least partially responsible:
1 - Low wages.
2 - Lack of good programmers getting involved: some of the programmers you can get for the lower wages are great, some suck. I've seen companies taking just anyone interested to fill programmer positions for such jobs (you can train them, right?). Getting involved in the selection process may help prevent this.
3 - Lack of trust in the the outsourced team: you can't think of the outsourced team as a bunch of mindless morons and expect them to care about your product. In those cases in which the outsourced team was a very good team, it didn't make the slightest difference because people was told what to do, and not to think - which makes hiring inexperienced people a pretty attractive alternative.
4 - Giving more importance to cost & time, than to quality: what would anyone expect to get, when quality is secondary to time & cost? This is a huge way to undermine your projects.
5 - Communication: communication is harder when people is spread all over the world. IMHO you need to compensate this difficulty by having some tool to help you keep in touch. In my current company, we use skype, and we keep in touch at all times with the client, which really helped solve this particular problem.
6 - Planning: planning is much more difficult when delivering work to someone who is not right at your side.
5 - Etc, etc.
This is a fake story about a fake hole. The "vulnerability" is that some sandbox profile, called "no-network", which isn't part of App Sandbox (a totally different sandbox technology, that will be required for apps on March 2012), but rather part of the legacy sandbox technology that was unused by 3rd party developers, only prevents network access. Yes, the no-network profile only prevents network access.
It's sad what's happened to Core Security in the past year or so.
No, it's not a fake vulnerability. You should read the report (RTFR?).
The vulnerability is about how apple events can be used to bypass the sandboxing of an application, and in this particular case to gain unrestrained network access even though the app is tagged as "no-network". According to the report it can be used to bypass other restrictions too.
For a single moment forget about everything you know. Forget about laws... forget about your religion... about your studies... forget everything. Now, with a fresh and clean mind go watch the video and tell me: does it look right to you? I sometimes wonder at how we let ourselves be fooled by our own rules, and end up confused to such an extent as to allow and consider appropiate something like this kind of physical punishment on a kid due to "copyright infringement"... whatever the fuck that is supposed to really mean.
Because, like it or not, scientific method dictates that creationism must be disproven before it can be dismissed. Since you can't possibly prove or disprove it... open end.
The scientific method also dictates that hypotheses must be testable through experiments and results should be measurable.
In fact the scientific method does not claim to be able to prove something is true, but rather to prove that it is NOT wrong, and to do so it is a basic requirement for the hypotheses to be testable someway.
To say it in other words: intelligent design may or may not be true, but it certainly is outside of the scope of science and cannot be considered to have any relation with it.
Perhaps pedantic, but its an important point in this context:
A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable through experiment (that is, it must make some prediction[s] about how things will work in specific circumstances that can be tested and which, if the test fails, will demonstrate that the hypothesis is incorrect.)
A scientific theory is not merely a testable hypothesis, but a hypothesis which has been subjected to testing and not yet been falsified.
Never pedantic if it clears out misconceptions. Thanks for the correction, I found it insightful. :)
I'll give you the ID argument, as, that is true, I know little about it. I understand scientific theory (the simplest way to explain a phenomenon based on observations from the past - generally the most plausible way to explain something - i am no expert, obviously). However, it is still theory and not law. Also, I do think these beliefs would be interesting to teach from a historical or philosophical standpoint, but the only one you could possible teach from a scientific standpoint would be evolution (at least right now)... even though, it still might (a minuscule chance) be wrong (still could be those fucking colossal space monkeys).
There's nothing wrong with teaching ID from a phylosophical point of view. The problem is when people want's to teach it as if it was science. As I mentioned in another post: scientifical theories must be testable through experiment (this means there should be a way to look for some evidence to prove the theory wrong). This is enough to filter ID and Creationism out as scientific theories. They can still be taught as other kind of theories though and that would be fine.
Yet, we still call it a "Theory" for some reason. And yes, I know about most of the evidence, and yes I buy that (more than anything else right now). I also understand that we might possibly be all wrong at any moment.
We still call gravity a "Theory" as well. You are making the common mistake about the scientific use of the word.
According to the United States National Academy of Sciences: Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time.
As a side note: scientifical theories must be testable through experiment (this means there should be a way to look for some evidence to prove the theory wrong). This is enough to filter ID and Creationism out.
If Sco wins the copyright holder wouldn't have been right at the time anymore. The means they had no right to license it under the GPL. If IBM was affected by this they would have to sue Novell. But Sco doesn't stand a chance.
IMHO evolution is the only way. People put too much content into this "old" internet to make it feasible to start from scratch "just like that".
IMHO, the true impact of this decision will be seen when they release the next game in the series. I purchased the game, not knowing about the lack of dedicated servers support. It won't happen again (it's unplayable online for me at 160 ms minimum ping).
The only problem is that probably they won't realize why people won't be buying the game as much next time.
I forced my GF to get a Mac. Zero problems now. BTW this is not against Windows. But if I have to do the tech support for computer-illiterate people I find Macs server the purpose better.
Why not let Ryan spend his time on it? After all he was willing to take care of it himself... he wasn't asking for other developers to maintain it. I am not arguing that people should like the feature, or support it... just that if it comes at no cost, and it adds more options and more freedom, we should let it at least move forward.
What good is a "free" OS if features are rejected just because?
To me, something being good enough doesn't mean it can't improve. For example you may not want to provide a third party package server, or may not want to maintain it. Or maybe you want to make the most user friendly software available in Linux (a la Apple)... some game to deliver in a CD for Kids to play by just double clicking it. Who knows? The thing is there are reasons why this might be a good option to have, even if most developers could not need it at all.
I just feel this feature is being rejected because it's unnecessary for most tech-savy people. If we, as developers, forget to have our users in mind... we will fail in our job to deliver solutions.
That's not worse than the current situation. The fact you won't use the feature doesn't mean other developers won't, and that would offer the end user more options, not less than we have today.
In any case most of the people arguing against this feature do so because they don't think it's needed. But I fail to see the disadvantages in implementing FatELF in Linux. Nothing prevents a developer from building binaries for a single architecture, and ignore this feature. Nothing prevents a developer from releasing their software in source-code only. There are no technical disadvantages that I can think of, even after reading most criticism.
There are certainly going to be difficulties, but if you really think about it, nothing prevents solutions for these problems to be crafted. On top of that, this particular problem you mention is not specific to FatELF, and it needs to be handled properly in the source code regardless of FatELF (if you want to create a source code that can be cross-compiled). FatELF is about easier deployment in situations where it's needed. It's not about making it easier for the developer to program for different platforms (it would be interesting though to see variants of fread/fwrite that abstract you from endianness, but that's a different topic anyway).
Maybe you wouldn't... but FatELF would probably be targetted mostly at software for users that don't have a clue. Nothing would force software like "ls" or "man" to be compiled in a FatELF package. But I could easily see Open Office distributed like this, and it would be neat.
Anyway, this is not an attack on your stance. I just wanted to offer a different point of view. Sometimes I think people is too reluctant to change, and in this particular case I think there are no real disadvantages for this to be rejected so flatly.
I think at least some of the people that want realism are referring to the physics mainly. In any case, I don't particularly enjoy games because of how much they resemble reality. Same for movies. I know the difference between a real war and a game, and I'm glad there IS a difference.
Can someone explain to me how a chip can be targetted at much higher-level tasks like these?
I realize there are surely technical means to achieve this goal, I just can't imagine myself what these means could be.
Nothing prevents Palm from writing its own iTunes plugin to sync the library with their own devices. I would agree with you if Apple was attempting to block its competition out of iTunes, but here it seems like they are trying to avoid absorbing the support costs for Palm's devices. How is this unfair to you?
He's right to complain though. It's like when your boss tells you you did something wrong, and you need to fix it. He could fix it himself instead of telling you, and it would be faster, but you wouldn't have feedback to improve your working methods. In this case he's not the boss, but IMO he's right about not describing what GCD is. It is not THAT popular.
Pushing deadlines is the road to failure.