Douglas Adams was one of the bigger obstacles in the way of making a movie, and I don't think it would have ever had his blessing. The script sucks (random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere).
New stuff is traditional. All versions of the Hitchhiker's Guide contradict each other, and the movie should be no exception. The movie has all the basic elements of what makes a story The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, except, perhaps, style and humour. And that's a rather big omision.
The movie has some very good bits: the point of view gun is brilliant. Some other bits are pretty good. But Zaphod was not quite right, and Ford completely uninspiring. I think.
Actually, I'm not quite sure what the movie was like. When I dig through my memories, I keep seeing images from the TV series. Perhaps it's better that way.
(Only Zaphod and Marvin seem to survive. I really can't remember what Arthur looked like in the movie, although I guess that kinda fits his character too.)
Reminds me of this correspondence between a Peruvian congressman and M$ http://www.gnu.org.pe/resmseng.html regarding Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration
Let's not forget Peru's involvement. They were led to believe that a child would/could/should only learn one operating system, and since Windows is most pervasive in the world, it's the "right" choice. Convinced, Peru insisted on XP.
But wasn't Peru firmly in the anti-Microsoft camp a few years ago, when they passed a law that all government computers should run open source software?
If you can ask them questions about the code and they know the answers then they either wrote it or could have written it. Besides any code of much worth will be searchable online or obviously a commercial product (stolen from an employer maybe). Pretty simple.
I'm afraid it's not. There's lots of code out there, and not all of it is from a recognisable product. I could take lots of code from my employer, change the package names, and you'd have no idea where they come from.
Of much of it, I could probably explain what it does, and where I can't, well you know the saying: any code you wrote three months ago could just as easily have been written by someone else.
Ofcourse simply hearing me talk about code should give you an impression of whether I know what I'm talking about, even if I would have done it completely differently.
If you see a 100,000 line program with the variables all randomized and the comments stripped then it'll be pretty fishy. If it isn't mucked up then you'll be able to search for a match.
Sounds like a lot of research. Wouldn't it be cheaper to pay the interviewee for a day to see what he produces?
i've found this to be true in almost every company that i've worked for. tech workers are looked down upon,
I think it's only true for companies where techs are looked down upon. There are plenty of companies that are practically being run by the techies, and there the techs tend to understand the need for good business.
What happens if your potential future co-workers figure you're better than them and don't want competition ? How do you deal with WallyException ?-)
If that sort of politics are at play, the company is doomed to mediocrity and you shouldn't want to work there anyway. In a healthy company, good people love working with people who are better than they are.
Are you saying that one of the arguments used to justify increasing the H1B quota is true?
I've got no idea what H1B quota are, but where I live (Netherland), there's a serious shortage of good programmers. Ofcourse this could also be explained by programmers not getting paid all that much here. Not compared to government jobs or managers, at least.
I wonder what you've got, to have employers come looking for you.
I've got a CV on monsterboard. Apparently that's enough to bring tons of job offers in. Most of them I simply declined. The only four that I actually talked with, all offered me a job. (And I took the one that paid the least, so I shouldn't be complaining about how little programmers get paid.)
How ever did you convince them you were a good programmer? Surely not by acing a bunch of mediocre tests, though I'd suppose you could easily enough.
None of the jobs had a test, actually, and that worries me a bit. I really liked the test that my current emplyer gave me when I started on this job 3.5 years ago.
I suppose you must have a long list of successful projects under your belt.
Not all that long, actually. My CV includes spending way too much time in university, not graduating, and being unemployed during the recession of 2003. Then again, I do have some successful projects, I've got some experience, and I guess I sound like I know what I'm talking about. I'm no uberhacker, not the best programmer in the world, not a (social) networker, I don't speak on conferences. But I'm okay, and there's apparently quite a lot of demand for programmers who are okay around here.
Seems like the biggest problem in IT is a lack of honesty all around, a mentality that lack of knowledge is incompetence, a tendency to substitute bad politics for good management. [...] Unskilled PHBs are mismanaging, the inmates are running the asylum.
I don't really recognise much of what you're saying. Well, my first job had an unskilled PHB (son of the CEO), and I was glad I was out of there, but my current bosses are okay, and technical policy is decided by the programmers, not the managers. Not sure how my next boss will be, but I'm confident it won't be too bad.
Maybe IT companies over here are run better than in the US, or maybe it's because I prefer to work at small companies instead of large ones (I haven't worked at a company with more than 40 employees yet). I do know there's quite a lot of horrible IT mismanagement in Netherland, but I haven't encountered it personally yet. (Well, at one consultancy job with a big bank perhaps, but even that wasn't completely horrible, and the project succeeded just before the bank itself tanked.)
There's the desire to quantify and measure everything no matter how inapplicable or useless, and then force them to fit fantasy expectations. Or, rather, the fantasy expectations come first, then the measurements are "adjusted". Tests are tools that can be slanted, bent and twisted into near uselessness. Which programmers are "good", and which aren't?
Well, the perfect test was the one I got for my current job: I got a programming assignment, partially to familiarise myself with their technology, partially so they could get a look at how I worked. I had to learn Cocoon and XSLT for it, slightly misinterpreted the asignment, wrote my code, held a presentation in front of all the programmers of the company, showed then my code and showed that it worked, they asked questions, I answered them, and after I'd left, they all voted (by email) whether I would make a good addition to the team.
The only ones qualified to decide which programmers are good and which aren't, are other programmers. You can't let random managers make that decision, unless they also have a solid programming background (and the good one
The PHB told me another guy had been in the day before and done a "similar project" and even showed me his work. That clinched it... I wrote something that worked fine. I just hope they dont read the html comments in it.
It seems like a lot of trouble to do interviews for a single day of work. If the work is good, you want to keep the guy who wrote it.
Our assessments are quite clearly not for a real project, and the interviewee gets to take it home and work on it in his own time. And when he shows his work, he gets to do a whole presentation around it to explain how he did it and what choices he made. He wastes a lot of people's time, so it'd be a really bad way to get some free work done. But if it's good, we hire him, and the invested time was well worth it.
This 'test' here? Am I getting PAID for my time to take the thing?
I don't work for free, and my time is valuable.
Do you get paid for going to job interviews? And would you rather do even more unpaid job interviews than spend some time in an interesting technical issue?
Getting a cool new job often costs some investment of private time. I don't mind, because I prefer a cool job over a lousy job.
Real life: I wrote some hibernate code that ran against an Oracle database.
CV: Experience of XML and XSLT
Real life: I configured tomcat, that's XML. XSLT? Isn't that the same thing?
This is exactly why I'm not sure if I should mention J2EE on my CV. I wrote lots of stuff that runs on J2EE servers, but I have no idea whay makes J2EE so different from running J2SE on Jetty. I don't want people to expect EJB2 experience from me. I just want them to expect Java webdevelopment experience.
One of these actually got the Job, because he apologised for his CV and then gave a real account of what he knew that matched our tests. He said the agency put all that rubbish in after he filled in a check-box questionnaire!
Sounds like a good reason not to make use of that agency anymore.
The best thing an employer can look for is a portfolio. Look the work over, ask questions about the work, double check that it isn't just stolen from some open source project. If their work is good, even if unrelated to what you're doing, then they'll be good. If not, or if they lack a portfolio, then toss them.
How are you going to test if they wrote it themselves? The only way to be sure is if either they're committer for a reasonably respectable open source project, or they wrote it for a specific problem you gave them.
And this happens to be my employer's hiring policy: either you're a committer, or you do a programming assessment.
Yes, it is. I've known plenty of "qualified" IT "professionals" who don't know the first thing about changing a user's password on a Windows domain, basic network troubleshooting, what Linux is, etc. The truth is, it is much easier to "fake it" in IT because the non-techies have no clue about any of it either.
Lots of people "fake it" in different jobs. Have you never encountered managers who didn't have a clue what they were doing? Problem is, good management is hard to test. Good programming is a lot easier to test.
It definitely can. My (FLOSS) employer gives almost everybody a programming assessment, but I get the impression that existing committers of Apache projects are hired without assessment.
So if there are any Wicket, Jetspeed, Jackrabbit or Cocoon committers here looking for a job in Amsterdam or San Francisco, contact me.
It depends a lot on the kind of test, ofcourse. There's a lot of stupid testing out there.
My current employer gives job applicants a programming assessment. Solve a simple problem related to the work you'll be doing, and your future co-workers look at the code. If your code looks good and its works, you get the job. If it doesn't work or you handle your exceptions badly or something like that, you don't get the job.
I think that's a brilliant test to give people. Diploma's, experience, certificates, they mean nothing if you can't get the job done.
So why don't they give lawyers and managers assessments like this? Perhaps because their work is harder to test like this. Perhaps the quality of their work doesn't matter quite as much. I don't know. But I do like knowing that my programming co-workers aren't complete idiots.
In fact, wouldn't the high-performance javascript of Chrome make more complex web-based games possible?
Not really. Seen many games in Java these days? It has 3D and sound, though... but its perf still suck too much. So I'm not betting on Chrome's JS interpreter having better perfs than Sun's Java VM.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here. Yes, for 3D games and other situations where performance matters, Java is no doubt much more suitable than javascript. But Java is not really web-based like javascript is. Javascript does DOM and Ajaxy stuff (which Google likes a lot), whereas a Java applet (a surprisingly unpopular way of running Java) is pretty much a desktop application surrounded by a website.
Exactly why Java applets are so unpopular while javascript is, is a mystery. I do actually know a site with a Java-based map similar to Google Maps, and it's fast and smooth, and yet it's Google Maps with its javascript that rules.
Pick a word, feature, item or concept that's in the news a lot, subject to hype or whatever, paste "war" after it, and hope it catches on. If it does, you're suddenly a big name in journalism for having been the first to see it coming.
Of course I've heard of it. And I get it... where? Oh, it's not available generally yet.
Recently I read about a crappy phone that already used Android. According to a review, it didn't feel finished yet, and it definitely wasn't an iPhone killer.
Let's check again in a couple of years, when it comes out of beta.
a good interface is crucial for many people... like Myron Krueger said: "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life."
This is exactly why I'm considering the iPhone. I'm sure there are other smart phones that are technically better, but if I have trouble finding or using the features, it's useless.
A device (computer, phone, whatever) is only worth what the user is able to use. And since nobody ever reads manuals, that means: what the user is able to figure out for himself. So a good, intuitive user interface is vital for getting value out of your phone.
Or maybe it's my age. I used to have no problem at all memorising vi commands, but nowadays I just want stuff to work without having to work for it myself.
A good game has a good concept, content, gameplay and eye candy. What Google has is just eye candy, and from a gamer's perspective it's not even very good eye candy.
Google isn't a content provider, they provide services. I think if Google is really going into game development, they'll be writing engines and frameworks for others to use, and others (companies, fans) will develop the actual storylines and gameplay.
And Google will analyse which games people play, and how they play them, and figure out some way to make money from that data.
Ofcourse the engines will be open source and work on every platform. Or perhaps they'll be in javascript.
Yeah, but they won't. If they bought a company that inserts ads in games, it's to push their ads, not to make games, and that is so fucking obvious that the person who even thought Google would make games based on that must have their brains wired backwards.
Why is that so fucking obvious? Yes, ofcourse they're interested in ads, but how do some of their other products fit into that? Like Google Earth, Gmail, GWT, Talk, Agenda, and now Chrome. In fact, wouldn't the high-performance javascript of Chrome make more complex web-based games possible?
Google has a history of surprising us, so I'm not willing to rule out anything yet.
And they'd all be free, mostly open source, but untested.
Re:Rootkit? WTF are you talking about?
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
I have no idea what differentiates a rootkit from other secretive malware that compromises your machine at a level that even root/Administrator can't fix, but DRM that cripples the correct functionality of your PC is simply wrong, and needs to be forbidden.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case in many countries. How about a class action suit?
If web surfing is such a high priority for you, you are not looking for a smart phone, you are looking for an iPhone.
Pick almost any other smart phone feature and put it head-to-head against the iPhone and the iPhone loses.
I'm not really looking for a phone (I've already got one), I'm looking for a tiny mobile computer. Web surfing is essential, and so is reading email, a flexible calender/alarm system, installing/writing whatever applications I choose, and, perhaps most importantly, having a smooth UI so I will actually use all these features.
My old non-smart phone also does web-browsing, has a calender, and I think I should technically be able to install my own applications on it, but it has a crap UI, so I only use it to call people.
Slashdot Mirror
Douglas Adams was one of the bigger obstacles in the way of making a movie, and I don't think it would have ever had his blessing. The script sucks (random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere).
New stuff is traditional. All versions of the Hitchhiker's Guide contradict each other, and the movie should be no exception. The movie has all the basic elements of what makes a story The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, except, perhaps, style and humour. And that's a rather big omision.
The movie has some very good bits: the point of view gun is brilliant. Some other bits are pretty good. But Zaphod was not quite right, and Ford completely uninspiring. I think.
Actually, I'm not quite sure what the movie was like. When I dig through my memories, I keep seeing images from the TV series. Perhaps it's better that way.
(Only Zaphod and Marvin seem to survive. I really can't remember what Arthur looked like in the movie, although I guess that kinda fits his character too.)
Reminds me of this correspondence between a Peruvian congressman and M$ http://www.gnu.org.pe/resmseng.html regarding Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration
That's exactly the one I was talking about.
Never happened.
A quick google shows that the bill does indeed not prohibit MS software entirely, but it sounds like it does prohibit a pro-MS preference:
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/09/29/peru-rejects-microsoft-windows
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/perus-green-light-to-opensource-software/2005/09/28/1127804508352.html
http://news.cnet.com/Perus-president-approves-open-source-bill/2110-7344_3-5907226.html
And some older articles that sound a bit more extreme (like I remembered it):
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2002/07/54141
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/19/ms_in_peruvian_opensource_nightmare/
Let's not forget Peru's involvement. They were led to believe that a child would/could/should only learn one operating system, and since Windows is most pervasive in the world, it's the "right" choice. Convinced, Peru insisted on XP.
But wasn't Peru firmly in the anti-Microsoft camp a few years ago, when they passed a law that all government computers should run open source software?
If you can ask them questions about the code and they know the answers then they either wrote it or could have written it. Besides any code of much worth will be searchable online or obviously a commercial product (stolen from an employer maybe). Pretty simple.
I'm afraid it's not. There's lots of code out there, and not all of it is from a recognisable product. I could take lots of code from my employer, change the package names, and you'd have no idea where they come from.
Of much of it, I could probably explain what it does, and where I can't, well you know the saying: any code you wrote three months ago could just as easily have been written by someone else.
Ofcourse simply hearing me talk about code should give you an impression of whether I know what I'm talking about, even if I would have done it completely differently.
If you see a 100,000 line program with the variables all randomized and the comments stripped then it'll be pretty fishy. If it isn't mucked up then you'll be able to search for a match.
Sounds like a lot of research. Wouldn't it be cheaper to pay the interviewee for a day to see what he produces?
i've found this to be true in almost every company that i've worked for. tech workers are looked down upon,
I think it's only true for companies where techs are looked down upon. There are plenty of companies that are practically being run by the techies, and there the techs tend to understand the need for good business.
What happens if your potential future co-workers figure you're better than them and don't want competition ? How do you deal with WallyException ?-)
If that sort of politics are at play, the company is doomed to mediocrity and you shouldn't want to work there anyway. In a healthy company, good people love working with people who are better than they are.
There's no shortage of work
Are you saying that one of the arguments used to justify increasing the H1B quota is true?
I've got no idea what H1B quota are, but where I live (Netherland), there's a serious shortage of good programmers. Ofcourse this could also be explained by programmers not getting paid all that much here. Not compared to government jobs or managers, at least.
I wonder what you've got, to have employers come looking for you.
I've got a CV on monsterboard. Apparently that's enough to bring tons of job offers in. Most of them I simply declined. The only four that I actually talked with, all offered me a job. (And I took the one that paid the least, so I shouldn't be complaining about how little programmers get paid.)
How ever did you convince them you were a good programmer? Surely not by acing a bunch of mediocre tests, though I'd suppose you could easily enough.
None of the jobs had a test, actually, and that worries me a bit. I really liked the test that my current emplyer gave me when I started on this job 3.5 years ago.
I suppose you must have a long list of successful projects under your belt.
Not all that long, actually. My CV includes spending way too much time in university, not graduating, and being unemployed during the recession of 2003. Then again, I do have some successful projects, I've got some experience, and I guess I sound like I know what I'm talking about. I'm no uberhacker, not the best programmer in the world, not a (social) networker, I don't speak on conferences. But I'm okay, and there's apparently quite a lot of demand for programmers who are okay around here.
Seems like the biggest problem in IT is a lack of honesty all around, a mentality that lack of knowledge is incompetence, a tendency to substitute bad politics for good management. [...] Unskilled PHBs are mismanaging, the inmates are running the asylum.
I don't really recognise much of what you're saying. Well, my first job had an unskilled PHB (son of the CEO), and I was glad I was out of there, but my current bosses are okay, and technical policy is decided by the programmers, not the managers. Not sure how my next boss will be, but I'm confident it won't be too bad.
Maybe IT companies over here are run better than in the US, or maybe it's because I prefer to work at small companies instead of large ones (I haven't worked at a company with more than 40 employees yet). I do know there's quite a lot of horrible IT mismanagement in Netherland, but I haven't encountered it personally yet. (Well, at one consultancy job with a big bank perhaps, but even that wasn't completely horrible, and the project succeeded just before the bank itself tanked.)
There's the desire to quantify and measure everything no matter how inapplicable or useless, and then force them to fit fantasy expectations. Or, rather, the fantasy expectations come first, then the measurements are "adjusted". Tests are tools that can be slanted, bent and twisted into near uselessness. Which programmers are "good", and which aren't?
Well, the perfect test was the one I got for my current job: I got a programming assignment, partially to familiarise myself with their technology, partially so they could get a look at how I worked. I had to learn Cocoon and XSLT for it, slightly misinterpreted the asignment, wrote my code, held a presentation in front of all the programmers of the company, showed then my code and showed that it worked, they asked questions, I answered them, and after I'd left, they all voted (by email) whether I would make a good addition to the team.
The only ones qualified to decide which programmers are good and which aren't, are other programmers. You can't let random managers make that decision, unless they also have a solid programming background (and the good one
The PHB told me another guy had been in the day before and done a "similar project" and even showed me his work. That clinched it... I wrote something that worked fine. I just hope they dont read the html comments in it.
It seems like a lot of trouble to do interviews for a single day of work. If the work is good, you want to keep the guy who wrote it.
Our assessments are quite clearly not for a real project, and the interviewee gets to take it home and work on it in his own time. And when he shows his work, he gets to do a whole presentation around it to explain how he did it and what choices he made. He wastes a lot of people's time, so it'd be a really bad way to get some free work done. But if it's good, we hire him, and the invested time was well worth it.
This 'test' here? Am I getting PAID for my time to take the thing?
I don't work for free, and my time is valuable.
Do you get paid for going to job interviews? And would you rather do even more unpaid job interviews than spend some time in an interesting technical issue?
Getting a cool new job often costs some investment of private time. I don't mind, because I prefer a cool job over a lousy job.
CV: Two Years Oracle Database Experience
Real life: I wrote some hibernate code that ran against an Oracle database.
CV: Experience of XML and XSLT
Real life: I configured tomcat, that's XML. XSLT? Isn't that the same thing?
This is exactly why I'm not sure if I should mention J2EE on my CV. I wrote lots of stuff that runs on J2EE servers, but I have no idea whay makes J2EE so different from running J2SE on Jetty. I don't want people to expect EJB2 experience from me. I just want them to expect Java webdevelopment experience.
One of these actually got the Job, because he apologised for his CV and then gave a real account of what he knew that matched our tests. He said the agency put all that rubbish in after he filled in a check-box questionnaire!
Sounds like a good reason not to make use of that agency anymore.
The best thing an employer can look for is a portfolio. Look the work over, ask questions about the work, double check that it isn't just stolen from some open source project. If their work is good, even if unrelated to what you're doing, then they'll be good. If not, or if they lack a portfolio, then toss them.
How are you going to test if they wrote it themselves? The only way to be sure is if either they're committer for a reasonably respectable open source project, or they wrote it for a specific problem you gave them.
And this happens to be my employer's hiring policy: either you're a committer, or you do a programming assessment.
Yes, it is. I've known plenty of "qualified" IT "professionals" who don't know the first thing about changing a user's password on a Windows domain, basic network troubleshooting, what Linux is, etc. The truth is, it is much easier to "fake it" in IT because the non-techies have no clue about any of it either.
Lots of people "fake it" in different jobs. Have you never encountered managers who didn't have a clue what they were doing? Problem is, good management is hard to test. Good programming is a lot easier to test.
A FLOSS(ed) resume helps avoid them.
It definitely can. My (FLOSS) employer gives almost everybody a programming assessment, but I get the impression that existing committers of Apache projects are hired without assessment.
So if there are any Wicket, Jetspeed, Jackrabbit or Cocoon committers here looking for a job in Amsterdam or San Francisco, contact me.
It depends a lot on the kind of test, ofcourse. There's a lot of stupid testing out there.
My current employer gives job applicants a programming assessment. Solve a simple problem related to the work you'll be doing, and your future co-workers look at the code. If your code looks good and its works, you get the job. If it doesn't work or you handle your exceptions badly or something like that, you don't get the job.
I think that's a brilliant test to give people.
Diploma's, experience, certificates, they mean nothing if you can't get the job done.
So why don't they give lawyers and managers assessments like this? Perhaps because their work is harder to test like this. Perhaps the quality of their work doesn't matter quite as much. I don't know. But I do like knowing that my programming co-workers aren't complete idiots.
I am interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me.
That's the entire point of a job interview, if you ask me. I've probably turned down more prospective employers than they've turned down me.
There's no shortage of work, and there is a shortage of good programmers. They'd be just as picky if the situation was reversed.
In fact, wouldn't the high-performance javascript of Chrome make more complex web-based games possible?
Not really. Seen many games in Java these days? It has 3D and sound, though... but its perf still suck too much. So I'm not betting on Chrome's JS interpreter having better perfs than Sun's Java VM.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here. Yes, for 3D games and other situations where performance matters, Java is no doubt much more suitable than javascript. But Java is not really web-based like javascript is. Javascript does DOM and Ajaxy stuff (which Google likes a lot), whereas a Java applet (a surprisingly unpopular way of running Java) is pretty much a desktop application surrounded by a website.
Exactly why Java applets are so unpopular while javascript is, is a mystery. I do actually know a site with a Java-based map similar to Google Maps, and it's fast and smooth, and yet it's Google Maps with its javascript that rules.
Plus, who ever heard of a "touchscreen war"?
Pick a word, feature, item or concept that's in the news a lot, subject to hype or whatever, paste "war" after it, and hope it catches on. If it does, you're suddenly a big name in journalism for having been the first to see it coming.
Of course I've heard of it. And I get it... where? Oh, it's not available generally yet.
Recently I read about a crappy phone that already used Android. According to a review, it didn't feel finished yet, and it definitely wasn't an iPhone killer.
Let's check again in a couple of years, when it comes out of beta.
a good interface is crucial for many people...
like Myron Krueger said: "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life."
This is exactly why I'm considering the iPhone. I'm sure there are other smart phones that are technically better, but if I have trouble finding or using the features, it's useless.
A device (computer, phone, whatever) is only worth what the user is able to use. And since nobody ever reads manuals, that means: what the user is able to figure out for himself. So a good, intuitive user interface is vital for getting value out of your phone.
Or maybe it's my age. I used to have no problem at all memorising vi commands, but nowadays I just want stuff to work without having to work for it myself.
A good game has a good concept, content, gameplay and eye candy. What Google has is just eye candy, and from a gamer's perspective it's not even very good eye candy.
Google isn't a content provider, they provide services. I think if Google is really going into game development, they'll be writing engines and frameworks for others to use, and others (companies, fans) will develop the actual storylines and gameplay.
And Google will analyse which games people play, and how they play them, and figure out some way to make money from that data.
Ofcourse the engines will be open source and work on every platform. Or perhaps they'll be in javascript.
Yeah, but they won't. If they bought a company that inserts ads in games, it's to push their ads, not to make games, and that is so fucking obvious that the person who even thought Google would make games based on that must have their brains wired backwards.
Why is that so fucking obvious? Yes, ofcourse they're interested in ads, but how do some of their other products fit into that? Like Google Earth, Gmail, GWT, Talk, Agenda, and now Chrome.
In fact, wouldn't the high-performance javascript of Chrome make more complex web-based games possible?
Google has a history of surprising us, so I'm not willing to rule out anything yet.
And they'd all be free, mostly open source, but untested.
I have no idea what differentiates a rootkit from other secretive malware that compromises your machine at a level that even root/Administrator can't fix, but DRM that cripples the correct functionality of your PC is simply wrong, and needs to be forbidden.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case in many countries. How about a class action suit?
If web surfing is such a high priority for you, you are not looking for a smart phone, you are looking for an iPhone.
Pick almost any other smart phone feature and put it head-to-head against the iPhone and the iPhone loses.
I'm not really looking for a phone (I've already got one), I'm looking for a tiny mobile computer. Web surfing is essential, and so is reading email, a flexible calender/alarm system, installing/writing whatever applications I choose, and, perhaps most importantly, having a smooth UI so I will actually use all these features.
My old non-smart phone also does web-browsing, has a calender, and I think I should technically be able to install my own applications on it, but it has a crap UI, so I only use it to call people.