It's not a problem, in the same way that it's not a problem to have cameras recording everything that goes on within the sight of a public street at all times, easy to search in a database. How is it different than having a cop walking around the city taking notes?
The difference is price and magnitude. The cost of tailing someone, and the risks of detection, prevent a police department from doing so indiscriminately. When you make it cheap and easy, you increase the use of that practice by orders of magnitude. With such an increase in capabilities, a similar increase in oversight is needed.
Is that really the norm? When I graduated, over a decade ago, most people took a class on relational algebra, and the practical side of it involved writing an app against a relational db, typically using the C bindings.
Against all odds, AC knows about the realities of life. When your production environment includes a dozen Superdomes, RH might not be the right solution for you. And on something like a bank or a big telco, you'll find said big systems all the time, not a very wide array if little machines.
I've seen many people fight and lose in that situation. It was never pretty, and it didn't work.
However, after the 5-10-15th person leaves a department and tell HR that disagreements with management was their reason to leave, Someone might do something about it. I just saw it happen a few months ago. People were even refusing headhunter calls alleging that their network claimed that the work environment was unacceptable.
If the next level of management fails to realize the problem after most positions becomes revolving doors, they'll go under anyway.
For that to matter you'd need a court system in which facing a copyright infringement suit without spending tens of thousands in legal representation is doable.
I'm a godless neutral vegetarian Tourist. How often do you see someone of my kind gets to the bottom of the dungeons of doom? Ascending is pretty much a pipe dream.
Switching jobs is not so easy under H1-B, but not impossible anymore. Still, a barrier.
The real problem is in the Green Card backlog. If a company wants to make an H1-B permanent, they better have a Master's degree, because if they don't they will get approved, but face a backlog between 5 and 10 years. This is one reason many weak international students will go for a master whether they find it useful or not: It shortens the Green Card application process to under 6 months.
By the time an H1-B without a graduate degree gets a green card, chances are he's spent 4-5 years as an H-1B, and an extra 8 on the queue. I'd argue that a programmer with 5 years of experience is more valuable than one that just finished a quick master's degree after graduation.
And if they left, they would compete against qualified Americans from another country with a cheaper standard of living. Claiming that wages would go up if they left is forgetting the other side of the coin altogether.
I'd also argue that, outside of a few companies that have HR departments that are more than ready to exploit the weaknesses of the program, hiring an H1-B is such a hassle that you'll still pick a comparable American instead if the salary is remotely similar.
How could one know that the standard would actually raise, instead of the work being offshored?
When a company actually plays by the rules, they aren't bringing a random programmer to the US: They bring one that, in his home country, would probably be at least leading a team and making them a whole lot more competitive, while the lack of said programmer here makes his firm less competitive.
Make the salary requirements for H1-Bs more stringent, and facilitate the Green Card process, and you'll have a far healthier system than we currently have, where not only are H1-B hitting the cap every year, but there are tems, if not hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs that have applied for Green cards and wait in line over a decade, with a more limited ability to switch jobs looking for a better wage.
And this is informative? The Federal Reserve has the power to print money and make equivalent digital records on their ledger. The currency is not backed by anything. How is that counterfeiting? If you don't like the paper they print, which has no intrinsic value, feel free to trade it to people who value it for gold, carrots, tin foil, or whatever else floats your boat. Luckily for you, the US government asks to receive said pieces of paper in their tax collection. If it's counterfeit and worthless, you'd have no problem giving them all that useless paper, woundn't you?
Counterfeiting is a key world that will separate the libertarians that at least attempt to be rational from the loonies. I doubt that even their high priests Hayek and Mises would like them.
Coming from a European high school, and having spend a decade in the US, it seems to me that the courses that everyone that graduated my high school had to take would be equivalent to what many Americans get if they take a whole lot of AP classes. My biggest gripe with the American University was that the entry level general courses had no material I had not covered in High school: Physics I and II, Chemistry I and II, Calculus I, II and III and College Algebra were all covered in HS. Everything higher level than that had better quality content than what I'd have seen in the local University back home.
I wonder which school you were talking about, and which major. I came to the US precisely because the education that I could get would beat the pants of what I'd find back home, and found plenty of other international students in the same boat: People from a bunch of countries that claimed that their home universities were all about ancient theory, with antiquated labs and no chance of applying anything that they learned in school outside of academia.
In CS, Biology, and most kinds of engineering, the difference in quality is quite noticeable, at least if you are looking at good US schools that still put effort in undergrad work.
And that's not even the whole picture: When dealing with databases, not all IO operations are equal. Reading a million records on a sequential scan in a certain part of the disk is different than reading them on a different part of the disk, or reading said records in a random order.
Large amounts of empty space are just the nature of data warehousing, and there's no way to go around that. In some cases, the RAM expense is even higher than the expense on disk, because for cases where a lot of throughput is needed, sometimes you are better off giving up on the disk array and relying on RAM to make your logical IOs faster.
and yet, Zsnes has not received a release in years, and lacks a quality OSX port.
Most of the last decade has been a disaster for emulation, as emulators of ancient systems aren't in as good a shape as they should. Even those emulators that work are typically not even thinking of multi-core, which leads to entire generations of games where there's been very little improvement in years. 5 years ago, you could try to play the arcade version of NFL Blitz, but it'd be too slow to understand the experience. Today, we are in the same boat, since, for the emulator's perspective, a Core i5 is not really that much faster than the single cores we had in 2005.
I'd say that if someone doesn't come and ask for help after they have done the Google search, chances are that they will cause more problems than they solve anyway. If all the information you need to do the job right is easy to find on a search engine, you aren't asking for very much.
What you found is the DREADFUL EA customer support, who can't help in any way.
I have run DA:Origins on my 64 bit Win7 machine with no problems whatsoever, so I can tell you it does work. But don't expect any support whatsoever: Bioware itself doesn't have their own support desk, and the EA support desk has no interest in fixing your problem, but instead try to get you off their back.
Why should I buy their games if they won't support me in any way when one of their games fails to run?
While the selling of in game items is a bad idea IMO, I'd rather play Dragon Age than NWN any day of the week. The only thing that makes it semi-playable is the custom content: What Bioware shipped in the box was about as lackluster as they get.
D&D is not set up to work with a team of 2 adventurers, or 3: It requires 4 characters at the very least, and a group of 5 or 6 is far better. Given the dreadful hireling system NWN has, the main campaign was designed to support extremely handicapped groups, which made it a total bore. I couldn't bring myself to finish it, even in coop play. They obviously realized that this was not going to work when they built their own system in Mass Effect, so that they could support a smaller party of characters without making most classes completely unnecessary. Dragon Age follows the same formula, but with a larger group, which IMO is a good thing.
I mark the release of NWN as the day the old Bioware died.
For those of us that enjoyed older Bioware games, like KOTOR and Baldur's Gate 2, and saw the company release weaker and weaker games over the years, Dragon Age was a breath of fresh air, a glimmer of hope. It's not a perfect game by any means, but the PC version plays pretty well. The difference between what you want and what I want is very simple: What I find important in a computer RPG is the role-playing. I want fleshed out companions, that interact with me and with each other. I want the world to feel at least one bit alive. In that respect, Dragon Age obliterates Oblivion and Fallout 3, with their big, empty worlds, and characters that are made of paper-mache. They might have a sweeping storyline, but the storyline is a very lonely affair, as the NPCs are almost completely non-interactive and uninteresting. In that respect, I think that even Morrowind was better, because while most characters had no personality whatsoever, the world had a sense of culture of some sort, which made the world feel as if it was populated by a society, despite not having one single person actually living on it: Just a few mannequins with a couple of paragraphs of text that you could ask for with the push of a button. Not one single interaction that resembled a conversation in any way.
Not that Bethesda makes bad games, but that their idea of what an RPG is supposed to be is very different than that of Bioware, and areas where a lot of effort is spent in the good Bioware games are completely absent in Bethesda games.
The problem that The Witcher had was that, at launch, it was a buggy mess that was almost unplayable in most rigs. The loading times were the worst since good old Sin. It was pretty hard to love.
Now, after giving the developer enough time to actually finish the game, it's very easy to recommend.
That's a major oversimplification. Groovy is not all that Ruby-like in the end. It has closures, and there's a library that resembles Ruby on Rails on it, but it's not really the same kind of animal. I'd say it's closer to a version of Java that tries to look like a scripting language than it is to a version of Ruby that tries to interact with a JVM.
In newer versions of groovy, you could copy Java code, paste it in a.groovy file, and the groovy compiler will treat it as groovy.
Ah, but by the time you make the download of the remote assistance code, are you sure their computer is in a good state? A guy calls you on the phone and, before asking for any money, manages to make you install a malware dropper. It's just a different vector than the warez/video codec downloaders that do the same thing, and install a fake anti-virus on your computer.
Complex definitions require quire a bit of careful working, but 99.99% of the code that uses generics is trivially easy, and gets rid of the huge amounts of unnecessary typecasts. Remember that, in the end, Generics make no difference whatsoever at they bytecode level: they go away at compile time.
If you don't want to use generics, then don't use them.
When you are attempting to do as little work as possible and still get the million dollars a year kos spends on polls, mocking with the data in such a way that nothing amiss can be detected is rather counter productive: You might as well do the polls right anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a problem, in the same way that it's not a problem to have cameras recording everything that goes on within the sight of a public street at all times, easy to search in a database. How is it different than having a cop walking around the city taking notes?
The difference is price and magnitude. The cost of tailing someone, and the risks of detection, prevent a police department from doing so indiscriminately. When you make it cheap and easy, you increase the use of that practice by orders of magnitude. With such an increase in capabilities, a similar increase in oversight is needed.
Is that really the norm? When I graduated, over a decade ago, most people took a class on relational algebra, and the practical side of it involved writing an app against a relational db, typically using the C bindings.
Against all odds, AC knows about the realities of life. When your production environment includes a dozen Superdomes, RH might not be the right solution for you. And on something like a bank or a big telco, you'll find said big systems all the time, not a very wide array if little machines.
I've seen many people fight and lose in that situation. It was never pretty, and it didn't work.
However, after the 5-10-15th person leaves a department and tell HR that disagreements with management was their reason to leave, Someone might do something about it. I just saw it happen a few months ago. People were even refusing headhunter calls alleging that their network claimed that the work environment was unacceptable.
If the next level of management fails to realize the problem after most positions becomes revolving doors, they'll go under anyway.
For that to matter you'd need a court system in which facing a copyright infringement suit without spending tens of thousands in legal representation is doable.
I'm a godless neutral vegetarian Tourist. How often do you see someone of my kind gets to the bottom of the dungeons of doom? Ascending is pretty much a pipe dream.
Switching jobs is not so easy under H1-B, but not impossible anymore. Still, a barrier.
The real problem is in the Green Card backlog. If a company wants to make an H1-B permanent, they better have a Master's degree, because if they don't they will get approved, but face a backlog between 5 and 10 years. This is one reason many weak international students will go for a master whether they find it useful or not: It shortens the Green Card application process to under 6 months.
By the time an H1-B without a graduate degree gets a green card, chances are he's spent 4-5 years as an H-1B, and an extra 8 on the queue. I'd argue that a programmer with 5 years of experience is more valuable than one that just finished a quick master's degree after graduation.
And if they left, they would compete against qualified Americans from another country with a cheaper standard of living. Claiming that wages would go up if they left is forgetting the other side of the coin altogether.
I'd also argue that, outside of a few companies that have HR departments that are more than ready to exploit the weaknesses of the program, hiring an H1-B is such a hassle that you'll still pick a comparable American instead if the salary is remotely similar.
How could one know that the standard would actually raise, instead of the work being offshored?
When a company actually plays by the rules, they aren't bringing a random programmer to the US: They bring one that, in his home country, would probably be at least leading a team and making them a whole lot more competitive, while the lack of said programmer here makes his firm less competitive.
Make the salary requirements for H1-Bs more stringent, and facilitate the Green Card process, and you'll have a far healthier system than we currently have, where not only are H1-B hitting the cap every year, but there are tems, if not hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs that have applied for Green cards and wait in line over a decade, with a more limited ability to switch jobs looking for a better wage.
And this is informative? The Federal Reserve has the power to print money and make equivalent digital records on their ledger. The currency is not backed by anything. How is that counterfeiting? If you don't like the paper they print, which has no intrinsic value, feel free to trade it to people who value it for gold, carrots, tin foil, or whatever else floats your boat. Luckily for you, the US government asks to receive said pieces of paper in their tax collection. If it's counterfeit and worthless, you'd have no problem giving them all that useless paper, woundn't you?
Counterfeiting is a key world that will separate the libertarians that at least attempt to be rational from the loonies. I doubt that even their high priests Hayek and Mises would like them.
Coming from a European high school, and having spend a decade in the US, it seems to me that the courses that everyone that graduated my high school had to take would be equivalent to what many Americans get if they take a whole lot of AP classes. My biggest gripe with the American University was that the entry level general courses had no material I had not covered in High school: Physics I and II, Chemistry I and II, Calculus I, II and III and College Algebra were all covered in HS. Everything higher level than that had better quality content than what I'd have seen in the local University back home.
I wonder which school you were talking about, and which major. I came to the US precisely because the education that I could get would beat the pants of what I'd find back home, and found plenty of other international students in the same boat: People from a bunch of countries that claimed that their home universities were all about ancient theory, with antiquated labs and no chance of applying anything that they learned in school outside of academia.
In CS, Biology, and most kinds of engineering, the difference in quality is quite noticeable, at least if you are looking at good US schools that still put effort in undergrad work.
And that's not even the whole picture: When dealing with databases, not all IO operations are equal. Reading a million records on a sequential scan in a certain part of the disk is different than reading them on a different part of the disk, or reading said records in a random order.
Large amounts of empty space are just the nature of data warehousing, and there's no way to go around that. In some cases, the RAM expense is even higher than the expense on disk, because for cases where a lot of throughput is needed, sometimes you are better off giving up on the disk array and relying on RAM to make your logical IOs faster.
and yet, Zsnes has not received a release in years, and lacks a quality OSX port.
Most of the last decade has been a disaster for emulation, as emulators of ancient systems aren't in as good a shape as they should. Even those emulators that work are typically not even thinking of multi-core, which leads to entire generations of games where there's been very little improvement in years. 5 years ago, you could try to play the arcade version of NFL Blitz, but it'd be too slow to understand the experience. Today, we are in the same boat, since, for the emulator's perspective, a Core i5 is not really that much faster than the single cores we had in 2005.
Does FoobarFactoryFactory keep all of it's possible factory configuration options in a ConfigurationMapMapMap>>?
I'd say that if someone doesn't come and ask for help after they have done the Google search, chances are that they will cause more problems than they solve anyway. If all the information you need to do the job right is easy to find on a search engine, you aren't asking for very much.
What you found is the DREADFUL EA customer support, who can't help in any way.
I have run DA:Origins on my 64 bit Win7 machine with no problems whatsoever, so I can tell you it does work. But don't expect any support whatsoever: Bioware itself doesn't have their own support desk, and the EA support desk has no interest in fixing your problem, but instead try to get you off their back.
Why should I buy their games if they won't support me in any way when one of their games fails to run?
While the selling of in game items is a bad idea IMO, I'd rather play Dragon Age than NWN any day of the week. The only thing that makes it semi-playable is the custom content: What Bioware shipped in the box was about as lackluster as they get.
D&D is not set up to work with a team of 2 adventurers, or 3: It requires 4 characters at the very least, and a group of 5 or 6 is far better. Given the dreadful hireling system NWN has, the main campaign was designed to support extremely handicapped groups, which made it a total bore. I couldn't bring myself to finish it, even in coop play. They obviously realized that this was not going to work when they built their own system in Mass Effect, so that they could support a smaller party of characters without making most classes completely unnecessary. Dragon Age follows the same formula, but with a larger group, which IMO is a good thing.
I mark the release of NWN as the day the old Bioware died.
For those of us that enjoyed older Bioware games, like KOTOR and Baldur's Gate 2, and saw the company release weaker and weaker games over the years, Dragon Age was a breath of fresh air, a glimmer of hope. It's not a perfect game by any means, but the PC version plays pretty well. The difference between what you want and what I want is very simple: What I find important in a computer RPG is the role-playing. I want fleshed out companions, that interact with me and with each other. I want the world to feel at least one bit alive. In that respect, Dragon Age obliterates Oblivion and Fallout 3, with their big, empty worlds, and characters that are made of paper-mache. They might have a sweeping storyline, but the storyline is a very lonely affair, as the NPCs are almost completely non-interactive and uninteresting. In that respect, I think that even Morrowind was better, because while most characters had no personality whatsoever, the world had a sense of culture of some sort, which made the world feel as if it was populated by a society, despite not having one single person actually living on it: Just a few mannequins with a couple of paragraphs of text that you could ask for with the push of a button. Not one single interaction that resembled a conversation in any way.
Not that Bethesda makes bad games, but that their idea of what an RPG is supposed to be is very different than that of Bioware, and areas where a lot of effort is spent in the good Bioware games are completely absent in Bethesda games.
The problem that The Witcher had was that, at launch, it was a buggy mess that was almost unplayable in most rigs. The loading times were the worst since good old Sin. It was pretty hard to love.
Now, after giving the developer enough time to actually finish the game, it's very easy to recommend.
That's a major oversimplification. Groovy is not all that Ruby-like in the end. It has closures, and there's a library that resembles Ruby on Rails on it, but it's not really the same kind of animal. I'd say it's closer to a version of Java that tries to look like a scripting language than it is to a version of Ruby that tries to interact with a JVM.
In newer versions of groovy, you could copy Java code, paste it in a .groovy file, and the groovy compiler will treat it as groovy.
But if you are browsing on a maximized window on a widescreen monitor, you are already failing. Books and fliers aren't landscaped for a reason.
Ah, but by the time you make the download of the remote assistance code, are you sure their computer is in a good state? A guy calls you on the phone and, before asking for any money, manages to make you install a malware dropper. It's just a different vector than the warez/video codec downloaders that do the same thing, and install a fake anti-virus on your computer.
Complex definitions require quire a bit of careful working, but 99.99% of the code that uses generics is trivially easy, and gets rid of the huge amounts of unnecessary typecasts. Remember that, in the end, Generics make no difference whatsoever at they bytecode level: they go away at compile time.
If you don't want to use generics, then don't use them.
When you are attempting to do as little work as possible and still get the million dollars a year kos spends on polls, mocking with the data in such a way that nothing amiss can be detected is rather counter productive: You might as well do the polls right anyway.