I wonder how true that really is. I know that there are a lot of people with degrees in CS and CIS(my degree) who are worthless, but I wonder how many people are skilled enough to push data about in databases but not skilled enough to do anything else.
I think that really a lot of it is just that moving data around is what businesses need done, and that's where the jobs are.
Luckily, there are a lot of open source projects out there which give you the opportunity to hack on interesting things.
It definitely seems like that was the plan by both Nintendo and Sony. What I find kinda funny though is that nintendo is that most of the hardcore gamers I know (myself included) are more interested in the Wii than the PS3. Now, that's not to say that hard core gamers might not also want a PS3 (I want one very much- but not quite enough to wait in line- I'll put down my $700 as soon as I can walk into best buy/eb games/gamestop and buy one easily) - but hardcore gamers are following what each company is doing, and see the potential to take innovation in a new direction for this generation.
On the other hand, a lot of casual gamers that I talk to don't seem too interested in the Wii. Most casual gamers haven't even been playing video games for longer than a generation or two, so nintendo isn't a major brand for them. They seem to think "wii is teh ghey" and be really focused on the PS3.
Of course, this still works out well for Nintendo and badly for Sony, since it's the hardcore gamers who will fork over merry bundles of cash for games - while casual gamers will be averse to the idea of spending more than a couple hundred to play the newest football game.
Interestingly enough, that is almost exactly how things worked in the area where I grew up. I'm not sure, but I suspect that it works this way other places as well. Basically, what happened was this:
The City where I grew up had a fairly large budget compared to the schools for the various suburbs, but the $/student ratio was lower. In order to have a more modern educational environment, the city spent a lot of money building expensive magnet schools and adding computers to the public schools.
Then, not too long ago, the school district in the city- dispite all of the novel approaches to educating students- ended up losing its accredidation.
really, there are upsides and downsides to every measure you can take. Using images works well, but it leaves out people who are using screen readers or text based browsers. Right now I doubt that any email harvesters are using OCR to look for images, but if this became more widespread you can bet that an OCR feature would be added to most of the spam harvesters out there. You could display the image as more of a captcha, but even sighted people using graphical browsers can have difficulty reading those.
Using javascrip basically runs into the same problem. A lot of people turn javascript off, and if it was in widespread use then email harvesters would just add javascript support.
One of the better solutions is to never show the email address. Instead use a contact page, and run the message through a filter before sending it. If you find someone who tries to send a message that is marked as spam, block the ip address. The biggest problem with this is that if someone does manage to start automatically sending out spam from your form, you are going to piss a lot of people off, and possibly get yourself blacklisted.
The best thing to do is to probably use a combination of techniques. Display an obfuscated image of the email address, and if someone can't see the image, offer a form to allow them to send email from. Mask the filter so it doesn't look to spambots like a form for sending email (avoid having any fields marked "to" "from" "subject" or "body" specifically) and a honeypot as well.
My degree was in CIS, which is different from CS, but we did this at my university. The way it worked was basically that potential clients would contact the school, and the professors keep track of available projects. A few weeks before the term starts, students would talk to the professors, get the list of projects, start putting teams together, etc.
Once a project was accepted, the students would go from a basic "we want a system to do X" statement all the way through developing a finished project for a client. Students would have meetings with various faculty members to review their designs (we had 3 meetings with faculty, one to approve our database design, one meeting to approve our overall design, and one to check on our progress). Students were allowed to use any technologies and development methods they chose, as long as the client approved. After 15 weeks (or 30 if the students chose a 2 term project) students gave a final presentation. The total number of points given came mostly from the clients themselves, and the percent of those points given to the team members were decided by the team- so your grade relied on how happy the clients were with the project, and how your team members felt you contributed to the project.
On the whole, I think it worked pretty well, but there are a few caveats that need to be addressed when doing something like that. The biggest is that, in most cases, nobody gets to share in all of the experiences because work is delegated, so you still end up with people only really doing on part of a full project. In the worst case, you end up with one person who does all of the work, and other students just coast along (that's pretty much what happened to me during my project, I did 100% of the design, coding, testing, and implementation, and about 80% of the documentation, in a five person group). You also end up with groups taking on projects that are too large or too small, and clients who are uncooperative. It's a delicate balancing act to give students real world experience without essentially setting them up to fail.
The biggest benefit to it, and the reason why I think it's an excellent idea- even with the problems I mentioned above- is because it's almost impossible to fake your way through it. Students can try to coast through, but with honest teams they will be marked low and won't pass. Cheating isn't an option, since every project is unique and there isn't anything to copy. You will also find that there are some students who are completely lost on how to see a project through from start to finish, and others who can do it (relatively) easily. If you get a good mix, you end up with a good opportunity for less experienced students to learn from more experienced students, while at the same time giving the more experienced (as developers) students learning about working in groups and dealing with people who are not as good as them (something that the brighter students need to learn, because it is something that really good programmers are going to run into everywhere and need to be able to deal with- I'm glad I learned how to deal with that during my project, it helped me a lot when I got into the real world).
The last thing is that, as I mentioned, I was a CIS major. CS is an academic subject- your teaching people to be scientists who study computers and algorithms, not training analysts and code monkeys. Granted, a lot of CS students will go on to be developers- still something to keep in mind though.
The open source model was developed primarily as a way to write good software. I think in most cases it does that well, but you have to remember that there isn't always a business case for it.
I am not a CEO/MBA/any other business-oriented TLA, but I see three areas where the Open Source model can be a viable business case: You have a lot of customers who pay for support - this seems to be the most touted business model. Give the software away for free, then sell support for it. This generally requires a pretty large user base to profit from though, because you have to make enough from support to cover the cost of developing the software. You have customers with very specialized needs - this is basically the consulting model. You can use an open platform as a springboard for building custom solutions for your clients. This generally works well when you have large clients who can afford consulting fees, and it works best for things with a very large scope. You Open Source the Product to buy Goodwill - basically if you have some software that isn't a huge source of income, you can make a business case for open sourcing it as a way to get good will from the community. Good will counts for a lot, but it can't replace your primary revenue stream.
From what you describe, your product doesn't really fit into any of these main categories. This doesn't mean that you can't make money by open sourcing your project, but the odds are probably stacked against you. If your company is interested in open source, you may consider looking at building porting your application to sit on top of a completely open stack of software.
I know a lot of people on slashdot tout open source as a magic bullet to solve business problems, but in the long run it's only going to give open source a bad name if people aren't honest about when it is a good solution, and when it isn't.
For me, this is a really good thing. I use Java quite a bit for my own hobby programs - which I release under the GPL if I release them at all (most of them are just once-off utilities or quick hacks to test out an idea for an algorithm and wouldn't be much use to anybody else) so this isn't going to really cause me any grief at all. What I'm curious about though is that there were some questions about GPLed programs written in java, because of some ambiguities in what constituted linking, a derivative work, etc. due to the nature of the way Java goes about compiling byte code. I'm not sure if this was ever resolved, but if not, couldn't we be facing the same sort of situation wherein Java applications would be considered a derivative work of the GPLed JVM and therefore have to be released under the GPL?
I'm not sure it could happen quite that simply. From what I understand, Sun still retains the trademark for Java. Microsoft could fork the language, but they couldn't call it "Java". Basically, it should be much the same as it is right now - anyone can make a compatible VM (though now they can build it off the original code) - but it has to meet up with Suns standards before they will give the go-ahead to call the thing Java.
Given Sun and Microsoft's past history I would imagine sun would test anything that came out of Redmond wanting to be called "Java" very carefully.
After I graduated from school I ended up getting three firm offers, each of them said that although I lacked much of a work history (1 month at a company as a developer before being laid off, as well as some contracted work that wasn't development related at all) and a fairly poor GPA (2.7) working on open source software demonstrated that I could be valuable to the company.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the biggest is that code doesn't lie. Anyone can put on their resume or say in an interview that they did "X, Y and Z" - but having open source code out there gives employers a chance to see real code that you've really written.
As I understand it, you have to either: A: get exceptionally lucky, or B: take a job doing tech support and keep looking for something better.
Personally, I worked on F/OSS software during school, which gave me some solid experience to point to when it came time to interview.
I guess it's just a matter of how you hold the controller. The GC controller is comfortable to me, but I could never comfortably hold an XBOX controller.
I've never paid for a replacement on anything that I've bought scratched up. Interestingly, I've found that Best Buy (for all their other faults) has always been best about offering me a replacement. Walmart has been the worst. I only experienced the problem once with a game I got from Gamestop, and they did exchange the game, although they guy was kind of an arsehole about it.
Walmart is the only place I've found that point blank refused to allow me to exchange the disk (I wasn't even asking for my money back, just a new disk). Now I never shop at walmart if I can possibly help it.
I remember that happening occasionally with CDs, but the little thing to hold the CDs in seemed to have usally been made with a dozen or more small little tabs, so that even if one or two broke the disk would remain in place. Most DVDs and games I've bought lately seem to use 2 or 4 tabs, so that when one breaks, the entire contraption is useless. CD Jewel cases also had space between the back plastic thing and the part where the CD went in (do I win an award for the most ambiguous descriptions ever?) so there was some space for the little tabs to get stuck, but with DVD cases it's just one bit of plastic, so the tabs float around scratching up the disk.
I never had any trouble with the split D-Pad. I vastly prefer it to the 360's weird dpad- which is absolutely abysmal (to the point that I'm seriously considering waiting until I can get ahold of a PS3 to pick up Tony Hawk's Project 8, just so that I can actually have a controller with a decent D-Pad to play the game with- and the Tony Hawk series is one of my favorite game series of all time). There are a number of 3D games that benefit from having a D-Pad as opposed to analog controls.
I also don't think that the analog stick is in what I would call a secondary position. One of the great things about the Dual Shock design is that I can use either the D-Pad or the control stick on the left, and either the face buttons or the control stick on the right, as though it was the "primary" location. It's amazingly comfortable.
As for the nonsensical button names, I've never had an issue with that. Certainly they can be a little tricky to type if you want to use the symbols when writing a FAQ or something (I generally use X, O, [], Triangle) - but aside from that it's been a complete non-issue.
I know it wasn't really the point of your post, but I've noticed lately a lot of games and movies Ive bought have had problems with the little tab things that keep the disk in place breaking and the disk getting scratched. I haven't generally had any trouble getting an exchange when this happens, but it is really quite annoying. I wonder if manufacturers are using a new sort of plastic or something- because I don't really remember that happening at all in the last 5-6 years except in the last 6 months or so when it's been a problem with nearly every game or move I've bought.
Isn't this one of the things that is being addressed with the GPL3? As I understand it, this could happen with the GPL2 and is being specifically addressed and disallowed under the v3.
From the article... In addition, Microsoft won't assert rights over patents over software technology that may be incorporated into Suse Linux, the people said. Businesses that use Linux have long worried that Microsoft would one day file patent infringement suits against sellers of the rival software.
It worries me that this might end up causing problems where MS agrees not to sue Novell for something the put in suse, so novell develops something and releases it under the GPL, then other distributions get sued for including it.
I would love to think that Microsoft really is going to play nice with Linux, but I have the feeling that this is some sort of ploy that is going to end up hurting the entire Linux community, and quite possibly putting Novell out of business.
The thing of it is, very few people who have HDTVs have CRT HDTVs. Most have LCD or Plasma. I'm not sure about Plasma, but an LCD HDTV looks really crappy showing things in standard definition. It would be nice if the Wii supported some version of HDTV support, even if it's just "render at 480i, upscale the image to 720p and blur it a bit" so it doesn't look as ugly for those of us using LCD TVs.
A general trend that I've noticed among a lot of people is that it seems like a business is always failing. Like, if every single person in the world bought a companies product, they would be failing because everyone isn't buying two.
Business should be "...about building quality products and not taking a loss while doing it." but in reality it's just about making money and every single dime that is not going into the companies bank is an affront to their god-given rights to a profit. The other thing that just bugs the hell out of me is this whole thing businesses have of saying "well, we made X million dollars in profit this year, but we made X+1 million dollars of profit last year- so because of XYZ we didn't make a profit this year- in fact we LOST 1 million dollars". Now I'm no accountant but as I understand it, profit = income - cost, not (thisYearsIncome - thisYearsCost) - lastYearsProfit. </rant>
hmm, I honestly didn't realize this was how they made money. I must be very profitable for the firefox team. For years now I haven't bothered to bookmark or remember URLs, since typing a few keywords into the google bar always gets me to the site I'm looking for just as easily (in fact, it is often faster to do that than to try to hunt through the bookmarks I have for something if I actually bother to bookmark it at all).
I was just getting ready to post something indignant, I'm glad someone else recongnized that he was really being kind of an ass with than comment.
My question was basically "You are working really hard to make it so that you have to run windows to develop websites windows users can look at, seriously? what's up with that?" and he seems to assume I'm asking for a free windows license. What I am really asking for is the ability to make a web page that works in IE without using Windows. In fact, I even have a valid license for Windows XP, so it's not like I'm trying to get something for free, I'll pay for Windows - if I have to in order to meet the expectations of my clients, I just don't want to have to actually Install it.
here is why I want tactile feedback:
I usually play games on a moderately large screen (actually, it's only a 24" screen, but it's on my desk so I'm close to it) and I usually play with the sound off or down very low. Because of this, I like tactile feedback as a way to let me know that there is something I need to be paying attention to outside of my field of vision. When things are crazy and there are explosions and stuff going on all over the screen, those red flashing things on the sides of the screen (what game is that from anyway? I remember it distinctly) are easy to miss, and sound queues also do no good if the sound is off, so tactile feedback is a good way to let you know that something offscreen is killing you.
The other thing that tactile feedback is very good for is to let you know that something happened, l ike that you landed a hit.
I guess really for me it comes down to the fact that I think emersion in the game is a more pressing problem than adding ways to control the game (although I suppose you could argue tilt is emerssion).
It took me a minute to parse what you were trying to say, but basically you are saying that the SIXAXIS controller uses six axies, basically three axies on which the controller can be translated, and then the three rotational axies with the origin at the center of gravity of the controller.
That does actually make sense, I didn't realize that the controller supported translation and rotation (I was actually under the impression that transation wasn't recognized, and that it basically sensed tilt only).
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how true that really is. I know that there are a lot of people with degrees in CS and CIS(my degree) who are worthless, but I wonder how many people are skilled enough to push data about in databases but not skilled enough to do anything else.
I think that really a lot of it is just that moving data around is what businesses need done, and that's where the jobs are.
Luckily, there are a lot of open source projects out there which give you the opportunity to hack on interesting things.
The problem is that there seems to be a lot more work pushing data in and out of databases than doing anything interesting.
It definitely seems like that was the plan by both Nintendo and Sony. What I find kinda funny though is that nintendo is that most of the hardcore gamers I know (myself included) are more interested in the Wii than the PS3. Now, that's not to say that hard core gamers might not also want a PS3 (I want one very much- but not quite enough to wait in line- I'll put down my $700 as soon as I can walk into best buy/eb games/gamestop and buy one easily) - but hardcore gamers are following what each company is doing, and see the potential to take innovation in a new direction for this generation.
On the other hand, a lot of casual gamers that I talk to don't seem too interested in the Wii. Most casual gamers haven't even been playing video games for longer than a generation or two, so nintendo isn't a major brand for them. They seem to think "wii is teh ghey" and be really focused on the PS3.
Of course, this still works out well for Nintendo and badly for Sony, since it's the hardcore gamers who will fork over merry bundles of cash for games - while casual gamers will be averse to the idea of spending more than a couple hundred to play the newest football game.
Interestingly enough, that is almost exactly how things worked in the area where I grew up. I'm not sure, but I suspect that it works this way other places as well. Basically, what happened was this:
The City where I grew up had a fairly large budget compared to the schools for the various suburbs, but the $/student ratio was lower. In order to have a more modern educational environment, the city spent a lot of money building expensive magnet schools and adding computers to the public schools.
Then, not too long ago, the school district in the city- dispite all of the novel approaches to educating students- ended up losing its accredidation.
really, there are upsides and downsides to every measure you can take. Using images works well, but it leaves out people who are using screen readers or text based browsers. Right now I doubt that any email harvesters are using OCR to look for images, but if this became more widespread you can bet that an OCR feature would be added to most of the spam harvesters out there. You could display the image as more of a captcha, but even sighted people using graphical browsers can have difficulty reading those.
Using javascrip basically runs into the same problem. A lot of people turn javascript off, and if it was in widespread use then email harvesters would just add javascript support.
One of the better solutions is to never show the email address. Instead use a contact page, and run the message through a filter before sending it. If you find someone who tries to send a message that is marked as spam, block the ip address. The biggest problem with this is that if someone does manage to start automatically sending out spam from your form, you are going to piss a lot of people off, and possibly get yourself blacklisted.
The best thing to do is to probably use a combination of techniques. Display an obfuscated image of the email address, and if someone can't see the image, offer a form to allow them to send email from. Mask the filter so it doesn't look to spambots like a form for sending email (avoid having any fields marked "to" "from" "subject" or "body" specifically) and a honeypot as well.
to be fair, it's not particularly worse than the "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt I got off thinkgeek...
My degree was in CIS, which is different from CS, but we did this at my university. The way it worked was basically that potential clients would contact the school, and the professors keep track of available projects. A few weeks before the term starts, students would talk to the professors, get the list of projects, start putting teams together, etc.
Once a project was accepted, the students would go from a basic "we want a system to do X" statement all the way through developing a finished project for a client. Students would have meetings with various faculty members to review their designs (we had 3 meetings with faculty, one to approve our database design, one meeting to approve our overall design, and one to check on our progress). Students were allowed to use any technologies and development methods they chose, as long as the client approved. After 15 weeks (or 30 if the students chose a 2 term project) students gave a final presentation. The total number of points given came mostly from the clients themselves, and the percent of those points given to the team members were decided by the team- so your grade relied on how happy the clients were with the project, and how your team members felt you contributed to the project.
On the whole, I think it worked pretty well, but there are a few caveats that need to be addressed when doing something like that. The biggest is that, in most cases, nobody gets to share in all of the experiences because work is delegated, so you still end up with people only really doing on part of a full project. In the worst case, you end up with one person who does all of the work, and other students just coast along (that's pretty much what happened to me during my project, I did 100% of the design, coding, testing, and implementation, and about 80% of the documentation, in a five person group). You also end up with groups taking on projects that are too large or too small, and clients who are uncooperative. It's a delicate balancing act to give students real world experience without essentially setting them up to fail.
The biggest benefit to it, and the reason why I think it's an excellent idea- even with the problems I mentioned above- is because it's almost impossible to fake your way through it. Students can try to coast through, but with honest teams they will be marked low and won't pass. Cheating isn't an option, since every project is unique and there isn't anything to copy. You will also find that there are some students who are completely lost on how to see a project through from start to finish, and others who can do it (relatively) easily. If you get a good mix, you end up with a good opportunity for less experienced students to learn from more experienced students, while at the same time giving the more experienced (as developers) students learning about working in groups and dealing with people who are not as good as them (something that the brighter students need to learn, because it is something that really good programmers are going to run into everywhere and need to be able to deal with- I'm glad I learned how to deal with that during my project, it helped me a lot when I got into the real world).
The last thing is that, as I mentioned, I was a CIS major. CS is an academic subject- your teaching people to be scientists who study computers and algorithms, not training analysts and code monkeys. Granted, a lot of CS students will go on to be developers- still something to keep in mind though.
The open source model was developed primarily as a way to write good software. I think in most cases it does that well, but you have to remember that there isn't always a business case for it.
I am not a CEO/MBA/any other business-oriented TLA, but I see three areas where the Open Source model can be a viable business case:
You have a lot of customers who pay for support - this seems to be the most touted business model. Give the software away for free, then sell support for it. This generally requires a pretty large user base to profit from though, because you have to make enough from support to cover the cost of developing the software.
You have customers with very specialized needs - this is basically the consulting model. You can use an open platform as a springboard for building custom solutions for your clients. This generally works well when you have large clients who can afford consulting fees, and it works best for things with a very large scope.
You Open Source the Product to buy Goodwill - basically if you have some software that isn't a huge source of income, you can make a business case for open sourcing it as a way to get good will from the community. Good will counts for a lot, but it can't replace your primary revenue stream.
From what you describe, your product doesn't really fit into any of these main categories. This doesn't mean that you can't make money by open sourcing your project, but the odds are probably stacked against you. If your company is interested in open source, you may consider looking at building porting your application to sit on top of a completely open stack of software.
I know a lot of people on slashdot tout open source as a magic bullet to solve business problems, but in the long run it's only going to give open source a bad name if people aren't honest about when it is a good solution, and when it isn't.
For me, this is a really good thing. I use Java quite a bit for my own hobby programs - which I release under the GPL if I release them at all (most of them are just once-off utilities or quick hacks to test out an idea for an algorithm and wouldn't be much use to anybody else) so this isn't going to really cause me any grief at all. What I'm curious about though is that there were some questions about GPLed programs written in java, because of some ambiguities in what constituted linking, a derivative work, etc. due to the nature of the way Java goes about compiling byte code. I'm not sure if this was ever resolved, but if not, couldn't we be facing the same sort of situation wherein Java applications would be considered a derivative work of the GPLed JVM and therefore have to be released under the GPL?
I'm not sure it could happen quite that simply. From what I understand, Sun still retains the trademark for Java. Microsoft could fork the language, but they couldn't call it "Java". Basically, it should be much the same as it is right now - anyone can make a compatible VM (though now they can build it off the original code) - but it has to meet up with Suns standards before they will give the go-ahead to call the thing Java.
Given Sun and Microsoft's past history I would imagine sun would test anything that came out of Redmond wanting to be called "Java" very carefully.
After I graduated from school I ended up getting three firm offers, each of them said that although I lacked much of a work history (1 month at a company as a developer before being laid off, as well as some contracted work that wasn't development related at all) and a fairly poor GPA (2.7) working on open source software demonstrated that I could be valuable to the company.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the biggest is that code doesn't lie. Anyone can put on their resume or say in an interview that they did "X, Y and Z" - but having open source code out there gives employers a chance to see real code that you've really written.
As I understand it, you have to either: A: get exceptionally lucky, or B: take a job doing tech support and keep looking for something better.
Personally, I worked on F/OSS software during school, which gave me some solid experience to point to when it came time to interview.
I guess it's just a matter of how you hold the controller. The GC controller is comfortable to me, but I could never comfortably hold an XBOX controller.
I've never paid for a replacement on anything that I've bought scratched up. Interestingly, I've found that Best Buy (for all their other faults) has always been best about offering me a replacement. Walmart has been the worst. I only experienced the problem once with a game I got from Gamestop, and they did exchange the game, although they guy was kind of an arsehole about it.
Walmart is the only place I've found that point blank refused to allow me to exchange the disk (I wasn't even asking for my money back, just a new disk). Now I never shop at walmart if I can possibly help it.
I remember that happening occasionally with CDs, but the little thing to hold the CDs in seemed to have usally been made with a dozen or more small little tabs, so that even if one or two broke the disk would remain in place. Most DVDs and games I've bought lately seem to use 2 or 4 tabs, so that when one breaks, the entire contraption is useless. CD Jewel cases also had space between the back plastic thing and the part where the CD went in (do I win an award for the most ambiguous descriptions ever?) so there was some space for the little tabs to get stuck, but with DVD cases it's just one bit of plastic, so the tabs float around scratching up the disk.
I never had any trouble with the split D-Pad. I vastly prefer it to the 360's weird dpad- which is absolutely abysmal (to the point that I'm seriously considering waiting until I can get ahold of a PS3 to pick up Tony Hawk's Project 8, just so that I can actually have a controller with a decent D-Pad to play the game with- and the Tony Hawk series is one of my favorite game series of all time). There are a number of 3D games that benefit from having a D-Pad as opposed to analog controls.
I also don't think that the analog stick is in what I would call a secondary position. One of the great things about the Dual Shock design is that I can use either the D-Pad or the control stick on the left, and either the face buttons or the control stick on the right, as though it was the "primary" location. It's amazingly comfortable.
As for the nonsensical button names, I've never had an issue with that. Certainly they can be a little tricky to type if you want to use the symbols when writing a FAQ or something (I generally use X, O, [], Triangle) - but aside from that it's been a complete non-issue.
I know it wasn't really the point of your post, but I've noticed lately a lot of games and movies Ive bought have had problems with the little tab things that keep the disk in place breaking and the disk getting scratched. I haven't generally had any trouble getting an exchange when this happens, but it is really quite annoying. I wonder if manufacturers are using a new sort of plastic or something- because I don't really remember that happening at all in the last 5-6 years except in the last 6 months or so when it's been a problem with nearly every game or move I've bought.
Isn't this one of the things that is being addressed with the GPL3? As I understand it, this could happen with the GPL2 and is being specifically addressed and disallowed under the v3.
From the article...
In addition, Microsoft won't assert rights over patents over software technology that may be incorporated into Suse Linux, the people said. Businesses that use Linux have long worried that Microsoft would one day file patent infringement suits against sellers of the rival software.
It worries me that this might end up causing problems where MS agrees not to sue Novell for something the put in suse, so novell develops something and releases it under the GPL, then other distributions get sued for including it.
I would love to think that Microsoft really is going to play nice with Linux, but I have the feeling that this is some sort of ploy that is going to end up hurting the entire Linux community, and quite possibly putting Novell out of business.
The thing of it is, very few people who have HDTVs have CRT HDTVs. Most have LCD or Plasma. I'm not sure about Plasma, but an LCD HDTV looks really crappy showing things in standard definition. It would be nice if the Wii supported some version of HDTV support, even if it's just "render at 480i, upscale the image to 720p and blur it a bit" so it doesn't look as ugly for those of us using LCD TVs.
A general trend that I've noticed among a lot of people is that it seems like a business is always failing. Like, if every single person in the world bought a companies product, they would be failing because everyone isn't buying two.
Business should be "...about building quality products and not taking a loss while doing it." but in reality it's just about making money and every single dime that is not going into the companies bank is an affront to their god-given rights to a profit. The other thing that just bugs the hell out of me is this whole thing businesses have of saying "well, we made X million dollars in profit this year, but we made X+1 million dollars of profit last year- so because of XYZ we didn't make a profit this year- in fact we LOST 1 million dollars". Now I'm no accountant but as I understand it, profit = income - cost, not (thisYearsIncome - thisYearsCost) - lastYearsProfit.
</rant>
hmm, I honestly didn't realize this was how they made money. I must be very profitable for the firefox team. For years now I haven't bothered to bookmark or remember URLs, since typing a few keywords into the google bar always gets me to the site I'm looking for just as easily (in fact, it is often faster to do that than to try to hunt through the bookmarks I have for something if I actually bother to bookmark it at all).
I was just getting ready to post something indignant, I'm glad someone else recongnized that he was really being kind of an ass with than comment.
My question was basically "You are working really hard to make it so that you have to run windows to develop websites windows users can look at, seriously? what's up with that?" and he seems to assume I'm asking for a free windows license. What I am really asking for is the ability to make a web page that works in IE without using Windows. In fact, I even have a valid license for Windows XP, so it's not like I'm trying to get something for free, I'll pay for Windows - if I have to in order to meet the expectations of my clients, I just don't want to have to actually Install it.
here is why I want tactile feedback:
I usually play games on a moderately large screen (actually, it's only a 24" screen, but it's on my desk so I'm close to it) and I usually play with the sound off or down very low. Because of this, I like tactile feedback as a way to let me know that there is something I need to be paying attention to outside of my field of vision. When things are crazy and there are explosions and stuff going on all over the screen, those red flashing things on the sides of the screen (what game is that from anyway? I remember it distinctly) are easy to miss, and sound queues also do no good if the sound is off, so tactile feedback is a good way to let you know that something offscreen is killing you.
The other thing that tactile feedback is very good for is to let you know that something happened, l ike that you landed a hit.
I guess really for me it comes down to the fact that I think emersion in the game is a more pressing problem than adding ways to control the game (although I suppose you could argue tilt is emerssion).
It took me a minute to parse what you were trying to say, but basically you are saying that the SIXAXIS controller uses six axies, basically three axies on which the controller can be translated, and then the three rotational axies with the origin at the center of gravity of the controller.
That does actually make sense, I didn't realize that the controller supported translation and rotation (I was actually under the impression that transation wasn't recognized, and that it basically sensed tilt only).