I'm not speaking in any official capacity, but let me ask you this... if you were closing off a company filled with valuable equipment, including many $20,000 parts that fit neatly under a winter jacket, would you lay everyone off, then say "now go back to your offices and grab some stuff!!!" -- ?
There's nothing at all strange about how it was handled. When the emotions are high, it's only common sense to work it this way, as there will always be somebody who tries to take advantage of the situation.
Neil, the CEO, flew out to talk to everyone personally. He handled this himself, and he apologized repeatedly, understanding the value that these people place on the old building and the Milpitas area. But that space is huge and costs a ton to keep up, and the projects coming out of there weren't going to help Midway's bottom line much while the economy's in the shape it's in.
Most are being offered jobs in the other Midway studios, and a few are talking about starting their own projects externally.
There wasn't some crazy ape cage full of angry people, ready to explode and tear the place down -- that office had a number of top-notch professionals, and I was frankly floored by some of them when I visited that studio. I'm going to enjoy having some of them in Chicago, and I hope the majority do make their way to the San Diego office as well.
The only games that sell well anymore are ones with unusual cabinet and controller requirements, and even those don't do so well anymore. Why?
Two things: Redemption games and piracy.
Games that give you back little tickets and encourage you to keep pumping coins in for "skill tests" make far, far more money than games where you buy 90 seconds of play. The coin in time is something like 20 seconds when these things are busy. Arcade operators love this, and today's materialistic youth eat it up. If you're in your late 20s and you hit up a Chuck E Cheese or similar today, you'll be disappointed to see what it is today. The arcade games are just in a small corner. The rest is all skee ball, coin tray knock-off and the likes. The positioning used to be the reverse.
On piracy, it used to be that you had a completely different cabinet, new hardware, different controllers, a completely different arrangement for every arcade game. The advent of the JAMA board (a board you swap out to change a cabinet completely) meant that the same cabinets could be reused more easily. Moving to a few standardized arcade boards with different ROMs also meant that it was easier to swap just a few components on the board to give a new game. The problem was that it also meant there were just a few pieces that needed to be duplicated by Taiwanese pirate vendors. With the advent of modular components, piracy skyrocketed and profits plumetted. Arcade manufacturers backed off and started to make intentionally obtuse and difficult-to-copy designs again, however once they'd had a taste of the arcade market, Taiwanese companies ramped up their engineering to match, duplicating the progressively more complex designs as well.
don't forget that the 1.42 GHz, yeah that's right, 1.42, will still operate better than the latest greatest overclocked crap intel spits out
I'm sure this is a troll. Regardless, I'm more than willing to look at any benchmarks which show this to be true. To date, the best anyone's been able to point to has been select features in old versions of Photoshop and Premiere which hadn't yet been optimized for SIMD instructions.
Speed of calculations aside, the Mac is also in dire need of a faster memory bus. DDR266 (PC2100) goes into low-end PCs. You won't likely find a PC with that slow memory at the Mac price point.
The Mac isn't about performance. It's about having a consistent and intuitive UI where you can focus on getting things done without spending half your time fanning out fires.
The Jaguar had some interesting hardware, true. But anyone who thinks the system was superior never tried playing a game on that hellish phone pad of a controller. It literally hurt after just a few minutes!
People will just delete the junk and keep the good copies (think about spam).
You're assuming people listen to half the stuff they download in a reasonable timeframe. Many people just collect for the sake of collecting. May grab huge piles of music all at once and don't listen until much much later.
I know a lot of people with upward of 80 gigs of MP3s. At sixteen hours per gig, it would take two months of non-stop listening to hear all those tunes.
Every time I see this my immediate reaction is "So _that's_ why Microsoft is so successful." I'm not trolling; I just find it hilarious that so many Linux advocates consider crazed zealotry and endless flames about other operating systems to be passive resistance.
I don't know many actual developers who concern themselves with the above mentality. The most successful ones just seem interested in cobbling together interesting bits of code regardless of how big or little the perceived audience for the code is.
I think the real importance of most of the zealots is about on par with the importance of the MS user groups. They're promotional mouthpieces, but their real-world effect is shadowed almost entirely by the effect of the actual software.
I'd like to propose the idea of a mass Unisys mooning day to show the old dinosaur what we think of obvious patent abuse.
When June '03 rolls around, how could we get as many asses in.gif format presented to Unisys? Someone with a lot of bandwidth wanna register 'fuckuni.com' or 'unidinosaur.com' for this purpose?
If you want immediate gratification, download the book and send him some money.
He explicitly asks people not to do this, though I do understand the appeal; that was my first thought too. But his thinking seems to be that if it looks like he's making a profit away from the publisher, the publisher may not agree to letting him publish a free version next time.
He suggests buying a book and donating it to a library. I'd also suggest buying a copy or two as gifts... it's good reading!
If you're being brought in to do security audits, the only honest thing for you to do is to focus on looking at code and have someone else look at the bigger picture stuff.
You can not learn enough about an OS to consult on its security, and if I'd hired you to look at my systems and later found out you hadn't even been on them a week prior, I'd likely turn around and sue you pantless.
If strictly looking at code or similar is your plan, and you're only worried about being able to navigate the system enough to look at source, I'd suggest looking at the little intros that are part of any college coursework involving the OS. Chance are you can find all kinds of class notes and course workbooks with Google.
Also, it's worth mentioning that Cory's got a new book out. You can read about (or download!) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom online, or you can make Cory a buck and pick it up in dead tree form.
He's enjoyed a few brief jumps up the best seller lists at Amazon. He's been up to the triple digits. It'd be cool to see him pushed into the double digits.
I placed an order and they required me to fax a photocopy of my driver's license and credit card over because I was shipping to my work address with my personal credit card.
Two days later, they informed me that they lost that and asked me to fax again, then acknowledged that they had the fax.
A week and a half later, when I inquired about the order, they said that they suspected me of fraud for shipping to an address other than the billing one. After getting that all straightened out yet again, nothing happened for a week. I checked in again, and the order had been cancelled.
Since the order was closed according to their Yahoo shopping record, I purchased elsewhere, only to have the newegg.com order show up a week later. When I turned it around for a refund, they then tried to charge me a restocking fee!
Yes, but when you attach that slogan to silly things like justifying theft, you weaken its legitimate usage.
Question Authority and Live Responsibly and Respectfully of Others. Encouraging your children to steal for personal convenience seems incompatible with any kind of rational thinking.
I assume you mean illegal MP3s. If you encourage your children to steal music and software, please be sure it's a conscious decision. Liability issues aside, you send a very clear message to your kid when you teach them that it's okay to pick and choose which laws they obey.
There's some info related to the SPARCLite here. It claims that Fuji's SPARCLite core is used in a large number of embedded devices.
Is this related to the embedded Java processor Sun announced a while back? I never read up on that, and I wasn't sure if they really meant it was running Java bytecode, or if it was merely a processor that was well-suited for Java. Native bytecode sure sounded unlikely.
Okay, register windows are interesting. That means very fast context switching. So between that, Sun's use of SPARCs and the running profile of most Java apps I've seen, I'm guessing that SPARCs are geared toward software with nasty-obscene thread counts.:)
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I'm not speaking in any official capacity, but let me ask you this... if you were closing off a company filled with valuable equipment, including many $20,000 parts that fit neatly under a winter jacket, would you lay everyone off, then say "now go back to your offices and grab some stuff!!!" -- ?
There's nothing at all strange about how it was handled. When the emotions are high, it's only common sense to work it this way, as there will always be somebody who tries to take advantage of the situation.
Neil, the CEO, flew out to talk to everyone personally. He handled this himself, and he apologized repeatedly, understanding the value that these people place on the old building and the Milpitas area. But that space is huge and costs a ton to keep up, and the projects coming out of there weren't going to help Midway's bottom line much while the economy's in the shape it's in.
Most are being offered jobs in the other Midway studios, and a few are talking about starting their own projects externally.
There wasn't some crazy ape cage full of angry people, ready to explode and tear the place down -- that office had a number of top-notch professionals, and I was frankly floored by some of them when I visited that studio. I'm going to enjoy having some of them in Chicago, and I hope the majority do make their way to the San Diego office as well.
CmdrTaco and Timothy are in charge of the Slashdot "Best of the Week" category!
Two things: Redemption games and piracy.
Games that give you back little tickets and encourage you to keep pumping coins in for "skill tests" make far, far more money than games where you buy 90 seconds of play. The coin in time is something like 20 seconds when these things are busy. Arcade operators love this, and today's materialistic youth eat it up. If you're in your late 20s and you hit up a Chuck E Cheese or similar today, you'll be disappointed to see what it is today. The arcade games are just in a small corner. The rest is all skee ball, coin tray knock-off and the likes. The positioning used to be the reverse.
On piracy, it used to be that you had a completely different cabinet, new hardware, different controllers, a completely different arrangement for every arcade game. The advent of the JAMA board (a board you swap out to change a cabinet completely) meant that the same cabinets could be reused more easily. Moving to a few standardized arcade boards with different ROMs also meant that it was easier to swap just a few components on the board to give a new game. The problem was that it also meant there were just a few pieces that needed to be duplicated by Taiwanese pirate vendors. With the advent of modular components, piracy skyrocketed and profits plumetted. Arcade manufacturers backed off and started to make intentionally obtuse and difficult-to-copy designs again, however once they'd had a taste of the arcade market, Taiwanese companies ramped up their engineering to match, duplicating the progressively more complex designs as well.
...to take on heavy server loads.
Everybody knows that Mac^H^H^HPalm MHz are faster than PocketPC MHz!
I'm sure this is a troll. Regardless, I'm more than willing to look at any benchmarks which show this to be true. To date, the best anyone's been able to point to has been select features in old versions of Photoshop and Premiere which hadn't yet been optimized for SIMD instructions.
Speed of calculations aside, the Mac is also in dire need of a faster memory bus. DDR266 (PC2100) goes into low-end PCs. You won't likely find a PC with that slow memory at the Mac price point.
The Mac isn't about performance. It's about having a consistent and intuitive UI where you can focus on getting things done without spending half your time fanning out fires.
In many ways, the Jaguar was like the PS2. :)
The Jaguar had some interesting hardware, true. But anyone who thinks the system was superior never tried playing a game on that hellish phone pad of a controller. It literally hurt after just a few minutes!
"Shirts versus Skins this year."
She bounced, smiled and thanked me.
You're assuming people listen to half the stuff they download in a reasonable timeframe. Many people just collect for the sake of collecting. May grab huge piles of music all at once and don't listen until much much later.
I know a lot of people with upward of 80 gigs of MP3s. At sixteen hours per gig, it would take two months of non-stop listening to hear all those tunes.
Kaching! Finally something decent looking for PocketPC users who're sick of the joke that's portable IE!
I don't know many actual developers who concern themselves with the above mentality. The most successful ones just seem interested in cobbling together interesting bits of code regardless of how big or little the perceived audience for the code is.
I think the real importance of most of the zealots is about on par with the importance of the MS user groups. They're promotional mouthpieces, but their real-world effect is shadowed almost entirely by the effect of the actual software.
When June '03 rolls around, how could we get as many asses in .gif format presented to Unisys? Someone with a lot of bandwidth wanna register 'fuckuni.com' or 'unidinosaur.com' for this purpose?
He explicitly asks people not to do this, though I do understand the appeal; that was my first thought too. But his thinking seems to be that if it looks like he's making a profit away from the publisher, the publisher may not agree to letting him publish a free version next time.
He suggests buying a book and donating it to a library. I'd also suggest buying a copy or two as gifts... it's good reading!
You can not learn enough about an OS to consult on its security, and if I'd hired you to look at my systems and later found out you hadn't even been on them a week prior, I'd likely turn around and sue you pantless.
If strictly looking at code or similar is your plan, and you're only worried about being able to navigate the system enough to look at source, I'd suggest looking at the little intros that are part of any college coursework involving the OS. Chance are you can find all kinds of class notes and course workbooks with Google.
He's enjoyed a few brief jumps up the best seller lists at Amazon. He's been up to the triple digits. It'd be cool to see him pushed into the double digits.
Wonder if this means they're recalling the Flower Power iMacs.
Surprisingly, this can happen when you spend the evolution of most current technology in a cave somewhere or, say, jail?
I just checked, and your foil suit's RFID is 208350830850934:0304. Sleep well...
I placed an order and they required me to fax a photocopy of my driver's license and credit card over because I was shipping to my work address with my personal credit card.
Two days later, they informed me that they lost that and asked me to fax again, then acknowledged that they had the fax.
A week and a half later, when I inquired about the order, they said that they suspected me of fraud for shipping to an address other than the billing one. After getting that all straightened out yet again, nothing happened for a week. I checked in again, and the order had been cancelled.
Since the order was closed according to their Yahoo shopping record, I purchased elsewhere, only to have the newegg.com order show up a week later. When I turned it around for a refund, they then tried to charge me a restocking fee!
Question Authority and Live Responsibly and Respectfully of Others. Encouraging your children to steal for personal convenience seems incompatible with any kind of rational thinking.
I assume you mean illegal MP3s. If you encourage your children to steal music and software, please be sure it's a conscious decision. Liability issues aside, you send a very clear message to your kid when you teach them that it's okay to pick and choose which laws they obey.
Is this related to the embedded Java processor Sun announced a while back? I never read up on that, and I wasn't sure if they really meant it was running Java bytecode, or if it was merely a processor that was well-suited for Java. Native bytecode sure sounded unlikely.
I could see why SMP would be a priority.
Out of curiosity, where are SPARCs being used the most? What are some of the unique characteristics of SPARC processors?