I was thinking the same thing, how well will this system handle things like:
"need program to handle customer tracking, should use Java,ASP.NET, and [some random non-existand acronym the boss just made up]. Program should also manage inventory, billing, and must integrate with programs X,Y and Z. Please have it done by the day after tomorrow."
Actually, I always preferred the look of KDE to OS X (not saying that KDE is technically a better UI than OS X, just a personal preference. ALso not saying KDE is necessarily better than GNOME, once again just a personal preference). It's just that the two Linux boxen that have monitors both have relatively low quality CRTs compared to the High-end LCD and CRT I have hooked up to my mac. I also generally find LCD screens easier on the eyes. (While I won't argue that in general CRTs seem to produce a more accurate picture than your average LCD, they generally are less comfortable for me to look at.)
This is great for those of us who like e-books. I have several which are only readable with Adobe Reader 7 (Not that I'll be very likely to read e-books on my Linux boxen anyway, I find the LCD screen on my mac to be much easier on the eyes for reading for long periods of times).
6 weeks notice seems really unreasonable to me, 4 weeks is even a bit long, but if you feel comfortable with it, then there is really no problem. I would suggest giving 2 weeks notice, and offer to come in on a certain day or the next 2 weeks to help interview your replacement.
As for having them be able to call you in to fix anything that might go wrong, don't do it.
Just as an example of what can go wrong, a friend of mine got a job at an upstart company about a year and a half ago, and basically built their entire IT infrastructure. When the company started doing really well, the owner started making some really bad decisions, and my friend decided to get out before the entire company collapsed. Anyway, the owner asked her to do something similar, and she agreed.
Not too long after that, they called her and wanted to know if she could make some minor changes to their file server (IIRC it was just changing some permissions). Anyway, she went in over the next couple of weeks for minor things, and never was paid for her time, she'd basically just assumed that checks were in the mail. A few months later and she'd found another job, and had cut her losses from the old company, and hadn't heard from them again, when the owner called demanding that she come make changes to their website. She basically said that she wasn't going to because it had been about 3 months since she'd quit, and had no obligation to come in, and their current IT person could do it. Well after some pestering she agreed to come in and do it, saying that she wanted paid that day. She went in and made some changes to their site, and once again the guy tried to get out of paying her. After this she decided to just take the guy to court to get the money that he owed her, and he turned around and tried to counter-sue her, saying that she'd intentionally messed stuff up in order to get called back in and charge them more money.
Although she did end up winning, and the guy had to pay all the court costs, it ended up being a big pain.
From the way you say your boss wants you to come in and be willing to do work "on the cheap" and want's you to give such a long notice, it may be possible he too is expecting to basically not higher someone else and outsource all the work to you for free.
I've been saying this for a long time.
For as long as I can remember, I was always driven by both my family, and teachers to "get good grades and go to college so you can get a good job and make lots of money". I guess the argument works for most people, but I honestly never cared about money (grew up poor and relatively happy, am still poor and relatively happy, and see no particular reason to make myself less happy by virtue of working at a job I hate, or working some ridiculous amount of hours a week just so that I am less poor) and frankly was always offended by the implication that the only reason to learn something is the prospect of money.
Of course, I've never really been a good student, got mostly Cs and Ds in Highschool, mainly because I realized that I could pass all my classes without ever turning in a single homework assignment, since I could always manage to ace tests.
Of course, the problem with this is that now that I'm in college, it's rather difficult to break this habbit, except in my college classes (contrary to everything I was ever told about college classes in Highschool) the vast majority of the grade is based on homework (most of my classes have between 50 and 70 percent of the final grade based on homework scores, as opposed to exam or lab scores).
I disagree with the comments about FF VII, Final Fantasy VII was probably the last game during square's "Golden Age" where it produced some of the best games ever made, IMHO. (FF V/VI/VII, Chrono Trigger, FF Tactics, etc.)
FF VII did have some problems, particularly I think the story telling suffered a bit from struggling between the newer/more localized dialog, and still retaining a "T" rating.
On the other hand, it did a lot of things very well. The Materia system I think is one of the best systems of any FF game (although I've always had a personal preference toward the Job system). The graphics were amazing for the time, and still hold up pretty well today. The story (aside from the problems I mentioned earlier with the dialog) was well done.
I've always liked the way Gamestop handles pre-orders (or at least the Gamestop I usually go to, not sure if they all have the same policy). Basically, although you have to put money down to pre-order a game, you are welcome to put down as much or as little as you want, and whatever you put down is taken off the price when you pick up the game. If for some reason they are unable to get enough copies of the game to fill all the pre-orders, then people who put down the most on the game get theirs first.
What I like about this system is that when I hear about a new game that I'm really excited about, I can go and pay for the entire thing, and then forget about it, and the day before the game is released I get a call saying "we have your game,,$foo, in-stock, you can pick it up starting tomorrow at 10 am. Usually I'm up-to-date on release dates, but occasionally it's a nice suprise, since I've already paid for the game I can go pick it up without worrying about my current financial situation.
Whenever there is a thread about pre-orders, people always mention just waiting until there are more copies and the price drop, but I generally like to get a game soon after it's release just because (except during the holidays) the good games worth playing are spaced out so that generally by the time one comes out, I've finished the last great game and probably played through a couple of mediocre bargin-bin titles.
I could have modded you up, but you were already +4 insightful, so I thought I would reply.
First off, I agree, all hail Joss Whedon!
Really, the only bad thing I think Joss has ever done is to put Marti Noxon in charge of Buffy, not that I have anything against Marti Noxon, but I think some of the other writers might have been better choices.
Anyway, I think that a movie like wonder woman is the type of script that Joss could do really well writing.
perhaps I should have clarified my statement a bit. It is in fact a certain "type" of people who, in my personal experience, this happens to. Mostly, people who don't specifically give a damn about technology, and apparently haven't heard that the bubble burst, and are in an IT program to make a buck.
In other words, by "type" I mean people who are poor at just about everything except using AOL and getting spyware.
offtopic, but I have some karma to burn and feel like having a good rant...
The problem that I see, as a student attending a university today, is that what you describe isn't far from the truth. One situation that I often see is where two students are given an identical lab (say a programming lab) and one student does the lab easily, whereas the other student struggles with the lab. When it's due, the first student has a lab that adheres completely to the specifications, and works perfectly, while the other students lab compiles with numerous warnings, contains a number of logic errors, and may even randomly crash.
When the professor grades the students labs, the first student gets 70%, all of the points which are deducted are for trivial things like not having enough comments (I actually had a Java class where the professor required that we comment every single line of code, so that we were required to have code like: System.out.println("Welcome to the Program");//displays "Welcome to the Program" on the screen.). The other student would also receive 70%, or perhaps an even higher grade, because they "tried harder". ...And this is why I don't even bother with trying to get good marks in my classes, I see what kind of people get A's and realize that they are completely meaningless.
I really liked the look of WW, but IMO it was barely passable as a Zelda game.
My biggest problem was the last half of the game, sailing around that damned ocean forever searching for triforce fragments and trying to get rupees to buy tingle maps. The warps helped a little, but it seemed to me that the game really failed where OOT shined, in making the world feel vast, but still dense.
The quality of the zelda games seems to be going down lately, OOT was really great, but Majora's Mask seemed a little rushed to me, it lacked the refinement of OOT. Four Swords seemed like an attempt to sell a crappy game just on the zelda branding (though to be honest, I never explored the game that much in depth).
you might try to introduce the students to something like ALICE which from the site: Alice v2.0b is the next major version of the Alice 3D Authoring system, from the Stage3 Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been completely rewritten from scratch over the last two years.
The focus of the Alice project is now to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students.
I remember playing around with it when my cousin wanted me to teach her programing, though she lost interest before I was ever able to demo the program. It seemed pretty interesting, although a little on the slow side, but that was a couple of years ago.
IANAL but from what I understand "compensation" isn't just to compensate for one groups loss, but also to compensate for the money the other group made illegaly.
In otherwords, it's not so much "we made $x less because you stole our code" but rather "you made $y that you didn't earn, and by violating the agreement that gave you the right to use the code"
you know, there is a distinct lack of open source software to file taxes, so I thought I would help out the community by posting some software to help you calculate your taxes*.
#include <iostream> using namespace std; int main(int argc, char** argv) { float income; cout<<"so how much did you make this year?: "; cin>>income; if(income<1000000) cout<<"you owe $"<<(income - 1)<<endl; else cout<<"the IRS owes you $"<<(income / 2)<<endl; return 0; }
*CYA Clause: I take no responsibility for anything you do with this program. If you pay too much or too little, then it's your fault, not mine.
I think that's difficult to make money from OSS, I think a better question is "how can I make money with OSS".
In other words, if your goal is to make money, then perhaps the best question to make is, how can you use OSS as a way to supplement your business model.
Think of how OSS can be used to make a business operate more efficiently and at a lower cost.
If your main business isn't IT related, then just appy this to your own business.
If your job is IT, then think about how you can appy this to your clients. How can you use OSS as a base to help your clients in thier business. This could mean selling support, or writing custom applications based on open source code.
I have to say that I have positive and negative feelings about this, and about game piracy as a whole.
Overall, I've always thought that games are one of the things that there is very little justification to just strait out pirate. I mean, there is no real requirement that you have game X (as opposed to say, certain Operating Systems or Office applications that such a large portion of the world uses that if you don't have it, in some cases, you are basically screwed), and I've always thought that games as a whole were fairly reasonably priced.
On the other hand, in some cases, piracy probably helps the game companies sell more games than they might otherwise, and in the end I think rewards companies who make good games (there are a number of games that I've purchased because I downloaded a pirate copy of a game that I wasn't really interested in, and then realized that the game was in fact quite good, or ran better under wine than I expected, and I ended up going out and paying for the game).
In the end though, regardless of whether or not this guy was doing the game industry a service or a disservice, it seems to me that if you are in a position like this guy was in, warezing games is a pretty boneheaded move just because it seems like an "insider" is a lot more likely to get caught than John Q. Cracker.
I'm not sure that this is exactly correct.
For one, there are a lot more middle men in game sales. For an average game, you have the costs of development (which is quite high for most of the newer games that sell well). Then you have the cost for the publisher, the licensing fee for the console manufacturer, and the retailer markeup.
For a movie, you basically have the cost to make the movie, which is made up with ticket sales (AFAIK there is not much of a markup on ticket prices at movie theaters, who make most of their profit on concession stand items and pre-show advertisments).
You shouldn't really need to be an expert with 3D software to approximate a new layout. Basically most furniture that people have can be approximated by various sized rectangles anyway.
The biggest challenge is going to be that your going to need some pretty close approximations of the sizes of all of the stuff in your house, within the nearest half a foot or so. Depending on how you plan to lay stuff out, you might find that you need something even more accurate. With this in mind, your biggest problem might be just getting accurate approximate measurements of all of the things in your house, and keeping to that scale when you put things into the program.
You know, it's all well and good to say it's unfair for someone to be fired over talking negatively about their company, or to say that a company should have the right to fire someone who is badmouthing them, I think that I could go either way depending on the situation (for example, I don't think there is anything wrong with an employee saying "my boss is kind of a prick" or "I wish I got more time off, and was paid better", but on the other hand, it would be kind of inappropriate to say "my company has just begun to implement a new plan to build a polution factory powered by burning puppies that will enable the CEOs, powered by nuclear waste, to rape every third newborn in montana").
But the thing of it is, if someone hates their job so much that they have to spend all their free time bitching about it on a blog, then maybe they are better off fired. A company doesn't need employees who are unproductive because they absolutely dispise what they do, and a person doesn't need to live a myserable life shortened by stress because they a working a job they hate.
The biggest feature of OO.org over MS Office is the ability to read OO.org files.
Sure, everyone makes a big fuss about compatibility and OO.org's ability to read MS Word files (which still needs some improvement IMO), but what's a big pita is that MS Word doesn't support viewing of OO.org files.
Actually, it seems to me that a lot of Sci-Fi is being replaced with shows that have a bit more of a paranormal twist, like the (now defunct) Buffy and Angel, and shows like Charmed.
They have a tendancy to follow some of the same themes and styles, like the morally ambiguous choices of heros, and the sort of adventure feeling.
Of course, it's been quite a while since I've watched TV, so I could be on the wrong track.
I have limited experience with this, I worked very briefly for a company (about 6 months) where I telecommuted, and when I first started I was expected to write up a budget for things like a computer, desk, chair, printer, stuff like that.
I told my boss that I had a home office set up already with all the stuff I needed, but according to my boss, it was company policy. The explanation given was basically that any work I did had to be on a company computer, even it it was located at my house. Basically all of the company policies for computer use applied to that machine, and I wasn't supposed to network it with any of my other machines (they paid for a dedicated net connection for that computer).
The explanation for the desk and stuff was a bit more vauge, but had something to do with red tape and ensuring that they were providing an acceptable work place environment (never made any sence to me, but hey, whatever).
It's really pretty simple, just don't try to "get away with something". Try to keep work and home things seperate as much as possible, for example, try to have a single room as a dedicated office. Try to have 1 machine that's dedicated to work, etc. For things that are shared between business and home (cost of your net connection for example), try to figgure out what percent of the time it's used for work and use that percent of the cost.
A lot of times it seems like people either try to cheat their company into paying for more stuff than they need to do their job, or for significantly better stuff than they need to do their job (if, say, you'll only be using SSH to talk to servers via command line, then there's no reason to try to get the company to pay for a bleeding edge machine when something a generation or two old will do just fine).
On the other hand, a lot of people let themselves be screwed by just eating the costs of things like a desk and chair, or a router (for some reason everyone manages to get at least part of their internet bill paid).
In the end, you probably won't get the company to pay for everything that you cite as a cost, but the difference might be made up wholly or partially just buy things like the money you save on commuting, the money you save on health care by not getting sick from stress from having to go into the office every day, etc.
You might reconsider if your 8 year-old would enjoy FF7, or any other RPG (maybe ease her in with something like Paper Mario).
I remember being 6 or 7 and I got Dragon Warrior on NES. My dad (who was never really into games himself) sat down with me while I played it and helped me with some of the strategy (don't waste all your MP at once), and understanding some of that god-awful pseudo-old-english dialog.
From there I moved on to Final Fanasy, then to the SNES with FFII/III, Breath of Fire/II, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound (one of my favorite RPGs of all time),Lufia/II, Secret of Mana/Evermore, Super Mario RPG, all of the classics.
I never really read many books as a kid, and I really credit the fact that from about 7 or 8 on I played RPGs almost exlusively to the fact that all through school I had an above average reading level.
Thought about modding you up, but decided to make a "me-too" post.
All of my Linux boxen run KDE 3.3 (well, the runs that aren't running headless), and I also have a couple of macs (an iBook running 10.2 and a dual G5 running 10.3).
While OS X's GUI certainly looks pretty when you first see it, and it does have some useful UI features (I love transparent terminal windows for coding), and after using OS X for any extended period of time, I find myself longing for KDE.
I'm not going to say that, technically, according to standard UI design, KDE is better than OS X, but one thing is that KDE has allowed me to customize it to the point where I can do things extremely efficiently. It doesn't "Just Work" but with some effort it "Eventually Works Really Really Well".
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking the same thing, how well will this system handle things like:
"need program to handle customer tracking, should use Java,ASP.NET, and [some random non-existand acronym the boss just made up]. Program should also manage inventory, billing, and must integrate with programs X,Y and Z. Please have it done by the day after tomorrow."
Actually, I always preferred the look of KDE to OS X (not saying that KDE is technically a better UI than OS X, just a personal preference. ALso not saying KDE is necessarily better than GNOME, once again just a personal preference). It's just that the two Linux boxen that have monitors both have relatively low quality CRTs compared to the High-end LCD and CRT I have hooked up to my mac. I also generally find LCD screens easier on the eyes. (While I won't argue that in general CRTs seem to produce a more accurate picture than your average LCD, they generally are less comfortable for me to look at.)
This is great for those of us who like e-books. I have several which are only readable with Adobe Reader 7 (Not that I'll be very likely to read e-books on my Linux boxen anyway, I find the LCD screen on my mac to be much easier on the eyes for reading for long periods of times).
6 weeks notice seems really unreasonable to me, 4 weeks is even a bit long, but if you feel comfortable with it, then there is really no problem. I would suggest giving 2 weeks notice, and offer to come in on a certain day or the next 2 weeks to help interview your replacement.
As for having them be able to call you in to fix anything that might go wrong, don't do it.
Just as an example of what can go wrong, a friend of mine got a job at an upstart company about a year and a half ago, and basically built their entire IT infrastructure. When the company started doing really well, the owner started making some really bad decisions, and my friend decided to get out before the entire company collapsed. Anyway, the owner asked her to do something similar, and she agreed.
Not too long after that, they called her and wanted to know if she could make some minor changes to their file server (IIRC it was just changing some permissions). Anyway, she went in over the next couple of weeks for minor things, and never was paid for her time, she'd basically just assumed that checks were in the mail. A few months later and she'd found another job, and had cut her losses from the old company, and hadn't heard from them again, when the owner called demanding that she come make changes to their website. She basically said that she wasn't going to because it had been about 3 months since she'd quit, and had no obligation to come in, and their current IT person could do it. Well after some pestering she agreed to come in and do it, saying that she wanted paid that day. She went in and made some changes to their site, and once again the guy tried to get out of paying her. After this she decided to just take the guy to court to get the money that he owed her, and he turned around and tried to counter-sue her, saying that she'd intentionally messed stuff up in order to get called back in and charge them more money.
Although she did end up winning, and the guy had to pay all the court costs, it ended up being a big pain.
From the way you say your boss wants you to come in and be willing to do work "on the cheap" and want's you to give such a long notice, it may be possible he too is expecting to basically not higher someone else and outsource all the work to you for free.
I've been saying this for a long time.
For as long as I can remember, I was always driven by both my family, and teachers to "get good grades and go to college so you can get a good job and make lots of money". I guess the argument works for most people, but I honestly never cared about money (grew up poor and relatively happy, am still poor and relatively happy, and see no particular reason to make myself less happy by virtue of working at a job I hate, or working some ridiculous amount of hours a week just so that I am less poor) and frankly was always offended by the implication that the only reason to learn something is the prospect of money.
Of course, I've never really been a good student, got mostly Cs and Ds in Highschool, mainly because I realized that I could pass all my classes without ever turning in a single homework assignment, since I could always manage to ace tests.
Of course, the problem with this is that now that I'm in college, it's rather difficult to break this habbit, except in my college classes (contrary to everything I was ever told about college classes in Highschool) the vast majority of the grade is based on homework (most of my classes have between 50 and 70 percent of the final grade based on homework scores, as opposed to exam or lab scores).
I disagree with the comments about FF VII, Final Fantasy VII was probably the last game during square's "Golden Age" where it produced some of the best games ever made, IMHO. (FF V/VI/VII, Chrono Trigger, FF Tactics, etc.)
FF VII did have some problems, particularly I think the story telling suffered a bit from struggling between the newer/more localized dialog, and still retaining a "T" rating.
On the other hand, it did a lot of things very well. The Materia system I think is one of the best systems of any FF game (although I've always had a personal preference toward the Job system). The graphics were amazing for the time, and still hold up pretty well today. The story (aside from the problems I mentioned earlier with the dialog) was well done.
I've always liked the way Gamestop handles pre-orders (or at least the Gamestop I usually go to, not sure if they all have the same policy). Basically, although you have to put money down to pre-order a game, you are welcome to put down as much or as little as you want, and whatever you put down is taken off the price when you pick up the game. If for some reason they are unable to get enough copies of the game to fill all the pre-orders, then people who put down the most on the game get theirs first. ,$foo, in-stock, you can pick it up starting tomorrow at 10 am. Usually I'm up-to-date on release dates, but occasionally it's a nice suprise, since I've already paid for the game I can go pick it up without worrying about my current financial situation.
What I like about this system is that when I hear about a new game that I'm really excited about, I can go and pay for the entire thing, and then forget about it, and the day before the game is released I get a call saying "we have your game,
Whenever there is a thread about pre-orders, people always mention just waiting until there are more copies and the price drop, but I generally like to get a game soon after it's release just because (except during the holidays) the good games worth playing are spaced out so that generally by the time one comes out, I've finished the last great game and probably played through a couple of mediocre bargin-bin titles.
I could have modded you up, but you were already +4 insightful, so I thought I would reply.
First off, I agree, all hail Joss Whedon!
Really, the only bad thing I think Joss has ever done is to put Marti Noxon in charge of Buffy, not that I have anything against Marti Noxon, but I think some of the other writers might have been better choices.
Anyway, I think that a movie like wonder woman is the type of script that Joss could do really well writing.
perhaps I should have clarified my statement a bit. It is in fact a certain "type" of people who, in my personal experience, this happens to. Mostly, people who don't specifically give a damn about technology, and apparently haven't heard that the bubble burst, and are in an IT program to make a buck.
In other words, by "type" I mean people who are poor at just about everything except using AOL and getting spyware.
offtopic, but I have some karma to burn and feel like having a good rant...
...And this is why I don't even bother with trying to get good marks in my classes, I see what kind of people get A's and realize that they are completely meaningless.
The problem that I see, as a student attending a university today, is that what you describe isn't far from the truth. One situation that I often see is where two students are given an identical lab (say a programming lab) and one student does the lab easily, whereas the other student struggles with the lab. When it's due, the first student has a lab that adheres completely to the specifications, and works perfectly, while the other students lab compiles with numerous warnings, contains a number of logic errors, and may even randomly crash.
When the professor grades the students labs, the first student gets 70%, all of the points which are deducted are for trivial things like not having enough comments (I actually had a Java class where the professor required that we comment every single line of code, so that we were required to have code like: System.out.println("Welcome to the Program");//displays "Welcome to the Program" on the screen.). The other student would also receive 70%, or perhaps an even higher grade, because they "tried harder".
I really liked the look of WW, but IMO it was barely passable as a Zelda game.
My biggest problem was the last half of the game, sailing around that damned ocean forever searching for triforce fragments and trying to get rupees to buy tingle maps. The warps helped a little, but it seemed to me that the game really failed where OOT shined, in making the world feel vast, but still dense.
The quality of the zelda games seems to be going down lately, OOT was really great, but Majora's Mask seemed a little rushed to me, it lacked the refinement of OOT. Four Swords seemed like an attempt to sell a crappy game just on the zelda branding (though to be honest, I never explored the game that much in depth).
you might try to introduce the students to something like ALICE which from the site: Alice v2.0b is the next major version of the Alice 3D Authoring system, from the Stage3 Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been completely rewritten from scratch over the last two years.
The focus of the Alice project is now to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students.
I remember playing around with it when my cousin wanted me to teach her programing, though she lost interest before I was ever able to demo the program. It seemed pretty interesting, although a little on the slow side, but that was a couple of years ago.
IANAL but from what I understand "compensation" isn't just to compensate for one groups loss, but also to compensate for the money the other group made illegaly.
In otherwords, it's not so much "we made $x less because you stole our code" but rather "you made $y that you didn't earn, and by violating the agreement that gave you the right to use the code"
you know, there is a distinct lack of open source software to file taxes, so I thought I would help out the community by posting some software to help you calculate your taxes*.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
float income;
cout<<"so how much did you make this year?: ";
cin>>income;
if(income<1000000)
cout<<"you owe $"<<(income - 1)<<endl;
else
cout<<"the IRS owes you $"<<(income / 2)<<endl;
return 0;
}
*CYA Clause: I take no responsibility for anything you do with this program. If you pay too much or too little, then it's your fault, not mine.
I think that's difficult to make money
from OSS, I think a better question is "how can I make money with OSS".
In other words, if your goal is to make money, then perhaps the best question to make is, how can you use OSS as a way to supplement your business model.
Think of how OSS can be used to make a business operate more efficiently and at a lower cost.
If your main business isn't IT related, then just appy this to your own business.
If your job is IT, then think about how you can appy this to your clients. How can you use OSS as a base to help your clients in thier business. This could mean selling support, or writing custom applications based on open source code.
I have to say that I have positive and negative feelings about this, and about game piracy as a whole.
Overall, I've always thought that games are one of the things that there is very little justification to just strait out pirate. I mean, there is no real requirement that you have game X (as opposed to say, certain Operating Systems or Office applications that such a large portion of the world uses that if you don't have it, in some cases, you are basically screwed), and I've always thought that games as a whole were fairly reasonably priced.
On the other hand, in some cases, piracy probably helps the game companies sell more games than they might otherwise, and in the end I think rewards companies who make good games (there are a number of games that I've purchased because I downloaded a pirate copy of a game that I wasn't really interested in, and then realized that the game was in fact quite good, or ran better under wine than I expected, and I ended up going out and paying for the game).
In the end though, regardless of whether or not this guy was doing the game industry a service or a disservice, it seems to me that if you are in a position like this guy was in, warezing games is a pretty boneheaded move just because it seems like an "insider" is a lot more likely to get caught than John Q. Cracker.
I'm not sure that this is exactly correct.
For one, there are a lot more middle men in game sales. For an average game, you have the costs of development (which is quite high for most of the newer games that sell well). Then you have the cost for the publisher, the licensing fee for the console manufacturer, and the retailer markeup.
For a movie, you basically have the cost to make the movie, which is made up with ticket sales (AFAIK there is not much of a markup on ticket prices at movie theaters, who make most of their profit on concession stand items and pre-show advertisments).
You shouldn't really need to be an expert with 3D software to approximate a new layout. Basically most furniture that people have can be approximated by various sized rectangles anyway.
The biggest challenge is going to be that your going to need some pretty close approximations of the sizes of all of the stuff in your house, within the nearest half a foot or so. Depending on how you plan to lay stuff out, you might find that you need something even more accurate. With this in mind, your biggest problem might be just getting accurate approximate measurements of all of the things in your house, and keeping to that scale when you put things into the program.
You know, it's all well and good to say it's unfair for someone to be fired over talking negatively about their company, or to say that a company should have the right to fire someone who is badmouthing them, I think that I could go either way depending on the situation (for example, I don't think there is anything wrong with an employee saying "my boss is kind of a prick" or "I wish I got more time off, and was paid better", but on the other hand, it would be kind of inappropriate to say "my company has just begun to implement a new plan to build a polution factory powered by burning puppies that will enable the CEOs, powered by nuclear waste, to rape every third newborn in montana").
But the thing of it is, if someone hates their job so much that they have to spend all their free time bitching about it on a blog, then maybe they are better off fired. A company doesn't need employees who are unproductive because they absolutely dispise what they do, and a person doesn't need to live a myserable life shortened by stress because they a working a job they hate.
The biggest feature of OO.org over MS Office is the ability to read OO.org files.
Sure, everyone makes a big fuss about compatibility and OO.org's ability to read MS Word files (which still needs some improvement IMO), but what's a big pita is that MS Word doesn't support viewing of OO.org files.
Actually, it seems to me that a lot of Sci-Fi is being replaced with shows that have a bit more of a paranormal twist, like the (now defunct) Buffy and Angel, and shows like Charmed.
They have a tendancy to follow some of the same themes and styles, like the morally ambiguous choices of heros, and the sort of adventure feeling.
Of course, it's been quite a while since I've watched TV, so I could be on the wrong track.
I have limited experience with this, I worked very briefly for a company (about 6 months) where I telecommuted, and when I first started I was expected to write up a budget for things like a computer, desk, chair, printer, stuff like that.
I told my boss that I had a home office set up already with all the stuff I needed, but according to my boss, it was company policy. The explanation given was basically that any work I did had to be on a company computer, even it it was located at my house. Basically all of the company policies for computer use applied to that machine, and I wasn't supposed to network it with any of my other machines (they paid for a dedicated net connection for that computer).
The explanation for the desk and stuff was a bit more vauge, but had something to do with red tape and ensuring that they were providing an acceptable work place environment (never made any sence to me, but hey, whatever).
It's really pretty simple, just don't try to "get away with something". Try to keep work and home things seperate as much as possible, for example, try to have a single room as a dedicated office. Try to have 1 machine that's dedicated to work, etc. For things that are shared between business and home (cost of your net connection for example), try to figgure out what percent of the time it's used for work and use that percent of the cost.
A lot of times it seems like people either try to cheat their company into paying for more stuff than they need to do their job, or for significantly better stuff than they need to do their job (if, say, you'll only be using SSH to talk to servers via command line, then there's no reason to try to get the company to pay for a bleeding edge machine when something a generation or two old will do just fine).
On the other hand, a lot of people let themselves be screwed by just eating the costs of things like a desk and chair, or a router (for some reason everyone manages to get at least part of their internet bill paid).
In the end, you probably won't get the company to pay for everything that you cite as a cost, but the difference might be made up wholly or partially just buy things like the money you save on commuting, the money you save on health care by not getting sick from stress from having to go into the office every day, etc.
You might reconsider if your 8 year-old would enjoy FF7, or any other RPG (maybe ease her in with something like Paper Mario).
I remember being 6 or 7 and I got Dragon Warrior on NES. My dad (who was never really into games himself) sat down with me while I played it and helped me with some of the strategy (don't waste all your MP at once), and understanding some of that god-awful pseudo-old-english dialog.
From there I moved on to Final Fanasy, then to the SNES with FFII/III, Breath of Fire/II, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound (one of my favorite RPGs of all time),Lufia/II, Secret of Mana/Evermore, Super Mario RPG, all of the classics.
I never really read many books as a kid, and I really credit the fact that from about 7 or 8 on I played RPGs almost exlusively to the fact that all through school I had an above average reading level.
Thought about modding you up, but decided to make a "me-too" post.
All of my Linux boxen run KDE 3.3 (well, the runs that aren't running headless), and I also have a couple of macs (an iBook running 10.2 and a dual G5 running 10.3).
While OS X's GUI certainly looks pretty when you first see it, and it does have some useful UI features (I love transparent terminal windows for coding), and after using OS X for any extended period of time, I find myself longing for KDE.
I'm not going to say that, technically, according to standard UI design, KDE is better than OS X, but one thing is that KDE has allowed me to customize it to the point where I can do things extremely efficiently. It doesn't "Just Work" but with some effort it "Eventually Works Really Really Well".