$300 price tag due to the device being subsidized.
And since Google is not a charity organization, that means there will be other costs. Most likely a wireless contract.
unless Google is willing to promote its new OS so hard, that it intends to sell these at loss just to gain a market share. Sounds extremely unlikely but knowing Google and its wild ideas (free 1GB email with POP3 anyone?) not entirely impossible.
Games can provide realistic damage, but they need to provide -something- that makes the effects less permanent than in real life. Games of the old provided "multiple lives". You could try again, repeating some of the work. But that's cheap, you live or you die but you won't be anywhere halfway.
Later games provided savegame, you pick a point in time where you can go back no matter how badly it goes. Very cheap again, there is no challenge if you can repeat each step as many times as needed.
There are these games where you have levels of energy and armor, thing is playing at 10% health is no different than playing at 100%, as long as you don't get hit.
Counter-strike and alikes got it nearly right, a kill is really crippling, making you practically lose the game - while the game itself is quite short.
What is really lacking is crippling damage. In CS, you could still run at full speed at 2% health.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has this concept of bleeding, you need to stop and bandage yourself to stop bleeding or your health will drain. Unfortunately, medikits are so common, fast-acting and easy to use, that bleeding becomes moot.
And meanwhile, I remember the game of Gunship 2000 with extreme fondness, as I would return from missions in a heavily damaged helicopter. Autopilot out of commission, the rotor damaged, so it keeps turning, one of motors destroyed so that I need to run the other at overheating level just to keep from falling, electronics damaged, so that I have to depend on analog displays, and "wounded" like that I had to crawl back to base, fending off enemies that tried to take down the easy prey. These were some of the most memorable moments in my gaming past. Of course it was the machine damaged, not the person, but...
I think FPS games could greatly benefit from a realistic damage model. Something where pain is paralyzing, where blood obscures your vision, explosions stun you - not for 3 seconds, but for half a minute maybe. Shock from pain makes you stop and fall, wounded limbs fail to perform. Instead of running smoothly sideways with aiming cross precisely in the center of the screen, have the aiming cross oscillating in the corner of the screen as you try to hold a carabine with one hand, and your leg is wounded. You can use medikits, but first, using them is an operation of at least a minute or two, then it doesn't magically heal you, it just stops bleeding (which makes things worse), reduces pain to allow better control, allows limited use of limbs that were totally out of use.
Imagine the epicness of a "capture the flag" game as the flag carrier gets severely wounded. Think of a defender of the base who got his both legs shot off, and fights to the last drop of blood, unable to move. Imagine a counter-strike terrorist activating the bomb with his last living breath. A moment of "You go without me", as a team needs to leave a wounded player at a difficult jump point, and he makes his last stand against oncoming horde of enemies.
Of course limping through the game for 16 hours, until the plot grants you mercy of a hospital is no fun. The games with realistic damage model would need to adapt the gameplay style. First, short and sweet sections to allow for -some kind- of respawn. Also, both incentive to keep playing while even heavily wounded, and not forcing a player to wait uselessly for some kind of help/respawn for hours. Some kind of reward for sticking to the same character, even wounded, but with ability to heal (or replace the character with a healthy one, say reinforcements arrive, wounded are sent back to hospital).
It doesn't sound like the 512 bytes per sector is tightly bound to hardware. More like a low-level reformat plus change of some #defines in the firmware to transform from one to another type. Which would mean there could be i.e. a jumper setting for sector size, allowing for backward compatibility.
Also, the fact an OS doesn't enforce partition alignment doesn't mean it won't respect a disk formatted to aligned partitions. Just provide a 3rd party partitioning tool that aligns the partitions right, and install the OS on pre-made partitions. If your business depends on WinXP so much, your IT dept should be capable of doing it.
lossy advertized as lossless? Drop every second outgoing frame from 50FPS stream, send at 25FPS, then double each arriving frame and advertize maintained 50FPS? Provide just some scrambling with zero compression?
Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A couple thousands of binaries of Linux apps installable with a couple of clicks, integrating with the system and each other?
How long, since you decide you want to, until you can start writing, compiling and running GCC, perl, python and such apps, on "Services for Unix"? On Cygwin it's about 20 minutes from which 15 you spend drinking coffee watching the progress bars.
3) If possible test network changes on the production equipment at 2am so that impact on users will be less step
That's dangerous. You leave it apparently running and crawl back to sleep at 4:30AM, to get an angry call at 7:05AM when the first users to log in report something essential is fucked up.
Prepare and test at 2AM, then roll back to original. Then re-apply around lunch break and wait with your fingers on roll-back for the first reports of failure.
The purchaseable license would be license to use, not to redistribute. (otherwise anyone could buy my license and then sell copies cheaply) So even the basic $10 fee would suffice to keep GNU GPL working (putting a cap of $0.01 on license fee I can ask for 2002 Linux, but not obligating me to require the fee).
Anyway, the 7 years is a number pulled by grandparent post out of a hat. It can be 15 years, or whatever. The idea is that you can't claim monopoly on something after certain date, only request reasonable reward, and that maintaining barrier prices will be prohibitively expensive in the long run so you'd have to reduce the price increasing availability.
If I'm producing software for 1000 customers, it will be obsolete in 7 years. Or if it isn't, it will be a couple major versions ahead, with new copyright on each of them. This is pretty much non-problem for software where 7 years is eternity.
Instead of $50-$100, make the copyright holder choose and pay a fee of 1000x the cost of license. If you paid $1000, I can have a copy of your work for $1. If you paid $10k, I can have it for $10. If you paid $10, I can get a copy for $0.01. And you're not permitted not to license the work to me for that amount.
so unless you've blocked all third party images If you block only images (and frames) originating from different second-level domain than webpages displaying them, the web looks pretty much the same, with less ads though.
I have just days ago upgraded from XP to Windows 7.
At first I was completely lost. In half a hour I stripped most of features that confused me the most and got it to behave mostly like XP. I'm still trying to get used to the whole "libraries" thing, which I think is what XP sorely lacked (I had an extension to do something similar), but is hopelessly confusing at times, esp. when "directory up" leads completely elsewhere than directory structure would suggest.
Also, bugs I'd expect a year of public beta would strip. Obvious bugs early adopters were bound to spot and report.
The system architect is long home with the family.
The boss should have spent a hour or a few talking to him about the new project to learn how the new system fits with each others and what are the requirements.
Sure if there is a separate technical lead, he should be doing this part instead - if he knows. Anyway, if he doesn't, and neither the boss does, the boss should pick up the phone and call the system architect.
One of better roles a boss can take is a buffer between the team and the rest of the world. You don't have to know a dozen of different phone numbers, know who is responsible for which subsystem and so on. You know the architecture of the system and your program interfaces with it. Your boss knows the architecture of the human resources behind the system, and he is your interface to it.
We had one more nice rule: never say "yes" to strangers when asked to do anything. The politically correct answer was "It is technically doable, but we have some backlog of work. Please talk to our boss to enqueue this job if you want it done." This way no business unit could smuggle features through backdoors behind design dept, get work done without getting billed for it, violate system architecture rules and anything like that. Anyone can consult with anyone but tasks come only from boss.
Likely if the HDD fails, a bigger model will have to be installed. If RAM fails, possibly second-hand/refurbished will have to be used as replacement. Considering the price of the whole setup, even if the whole motherboard-CPU-RAM combo has to be replaced with a "current" model, it's still doable and not very expensive.
Note the customer has no business asking what's inside that thing as long as it works to the specs, so whatever the subcontractor puts inside that still performs, is okay. The boxes may even vary wildly between each other, but as long as they are capable of running the "client app" okay, that's not a problem to anyone except of the warranty service guys.
Well, you can swap a PC-as-terminal just as well, then troubleshoot the faulty unit and store for replacement when fixed. If a terminal breaks, you swap them just the same then send to manufacturer for replacement or discard if the warranty has expired, because they are usually not serviceable.
If you spent more than 10 minutes looking for a source of some seemingly simple bug (or corresponding longer time for a bigger one), call someone for help. Someone not busy at the moment. Two pairs of eyes on the code are able to spot problems in 10% the time one pair can. It often suffices to lend an ear to let the developer explain how is the code supposed to work, and then the developer will often spot discrepancy between "supposed to" and "is written to".
When a programmer can do something two or more ways, with both ways having their advantages. The boss should have the image of the whole system in his head and see the load put on given component and its requirements. So I know I have to push incoming elements through a FIFO while filtering them on the way through an external function. I know how to do this, I know 10 ways how to do this. Now how fast will the elements arrive? how fast is the external function? how much resources do we have at our disposal? is queue overflow acceptable? and so on. This decides upon choice of the algorithm. Make it simple (simple static lists), make it failsafe (unlimited queue depth), make it fast (chase pointers), make it memory-conservative (outsource buffers to external caches) - these are decisions I expect from my boss, and to be made pretty fast.
on copyright holder of the material that is being infringed upon. Now the answer would be clear if the material they claim is infringed upon is the same as the infringing material. Now what if they wrongly accuse me of infringing upon X, by claiming I'm not allowed to distribute Y to which they have no legal rights?
That is, if I distribute Open Office, and Microsoft comes claiming I'm not authorized to distribute these copyrighted files...
it is then arguable if they are okay because they believe I am distributing MS Office they own,
or are they disallowing me to distribute OOo, for which they have no copyrights?
If space taken up by the PC is of concern to you, your employees are cramped in way too little space anyway. As for power, downclocked CPU, the hdd set to spin down pretty fast and such mitigate most of the problem. In my climate, over most of the year power-hungry appliances mean just that much savings on heating anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
$300 price tag due to the device being subsidized.
And since Google is not a charity organization, that means there will be other costs.
Most likely a wireless contract.
unless Google is willing to promote its new OS so hard, that it intends to sell these at loss just to gain a market share. Sounds extremely unlikely but knowing Google and its wild ideas (free 1GB email with POP3 anyone?) not entirely impossible.
Games can provide realistic damage, but they need to provide -something- that makes the effects less permanent than in real life.
Games of the old provided "multiple lives". You could try again, repeating some of the work. But that's cheap, you live or you die but you won't be anywhere halfway.
Later games provided savegame, you pick a point in time where you can go back no matter how badly it goes. Very cheap again, there is no challenge if you can repeat each step as many times as needed.
There are these games where you have levels of energy and armor, thing is playing at 10% health is no different than playing at 100%, as long as you don't get hit.
Counter-strike and alikes got it nearly right, a kill is really crippling, making you practically lose the game - while the game itself is quite short.
What is really lacking is crippling damage. In CS, you could still run at full speed at 2% health.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has this concept of bleeding, you need to stop and bandage yourself to stop bleeding or your health will drain. Unfortunately, medikits are so common, fast-acting and easy to use, that bleeding becomes moot.
And meanwhile, I remember the game of Gunship 2000 with extreme fondness, as I would return from missions in a heavily damaged helicopter. Autopilot out of commission, the rotor damaged, so it keeps turning, one of motors destroyed so that I need to run the other at overheating level just to keep from falling, electronics damaged, so that I have to depend on analog displays, and "wounded" like that I had to crawl back to base, fending off enemies that tried to take down the easy prey. These were some of the most memorable moments in my gaming past. Of course it was the machine damaged, not the person, but...
I think FPS games could greatly benefit from a realistic damage model. Something where pain is paralyzing, where blood obscures your vision, explosions stun you - not for 3 seconds, but for half a minute maybe. Shock from pain makes you stop and fall, wounded limbs fail to perform. Instead of running smoothly sideways with aiming cross precisely in the center of the screen, have the aiming cross oscillating in the corner of the screen as you try to hold a carabine with one hand, and your leg is wounded.
You can use medikits, but first, using them is an operation of at least a minute or two, then it doesn't magically heal you, it just stops bleeding (which makes things worse), reduces pain to allow better control, allows limited use of limbs that were totally out of use.
Imagine the epicness of a "capture the flag" game as the flag carrier gets severely wounded. Think of a defender of the base who got his both legs shot off, and fights to the last drop of blood, unable to move. Imagine a counter-strike terrorist activating the bomb with his last living breath. A moment of "You go without me", as a team needs to leave a wounded player at a difficult jump point, and he makes his last stand against oncoming horde of enemies.
Of course limping through the game for 16 hours, until the plot grants you mercy of a hospital is no fun. The games with realistic damage model would need to adapt the gameplay style. First, short and sweet sections to allow for -some kind- of respawn. Also, both incentive to keep playing while even heavily wounded, and not forcing a player to wait uselessly for some kind of help/respawn for hours. Some kind of reward for sticking to the same character, even wounded, but with ability to heal (or replace the character with a healthy one, say reinforcements arrive, wounded are sent back to hospital).
But almost the same conversion is done already!
Do you really believe your hard drive has 256 heads?
It doesn't sound like the 512 bytes per sector is tightly bound to hardware. More like a low-level reformat plus change of some #defines in the firmware to transform from one to another type. Which would mean there could be i.e. a jumper setting for sector size, allowing for backward compatibility.
Also, the fact an OS doesn't enforce partition alignment doesn't mean it won't respect a disk formatted to aligned partitions. Just provide a 3rd party partitioning tool that aligns the partitions right, and install the OS on pre-made partitions. If your business depends on WinXP so much, your IT dept should be capable of doing it.
Dances With Smurfs. That's what it was.
Yep, just think how much Microsoft lost due to Windows Vista...
lossy advertized as lossless?
Drop every second outgoing frame from 50FPS stream, send at 25FPS, then double each arriving frame and advertize maintained 50FPS?
Provide just some scrambling with zero compression?
A couple thousands of binaries of Linux apps installable with a couple of clicks, integrating with the system and each other?
How long, since you decide you want to, until you can start writing, compiling and running GCC, perl, python and such apps, on "Services for Unix"? On Cygwin it's about 20 minutes from which 15 you spend drinking coffee watching the progress bars.
3) If possible test network changes on the production equipment at 2am so that impact on users will be less step
That's dangerous. You leave it apparently running and crawl back to sleep at 4:30AM, to get an angry call at 7:05AM when the first users to log in report something essential is fucked up.
Prepare and test at 2AM, then roll back to original. Then re-apply around lunch break and wait with your fingers on roll-back for the first reports of failure.
I think you're confusing Open Source with Free Software.
Also, while not necessarily benefiting the community, it benefits the customers.
Look, we could argue that Postal was the best of Uwe Boll's movies. It tells just as much about its quality.
The purchaseable license would be license to use, not to redistribute. (otherwise anyone could buy my license and then sell copies cheaply) So even the basic $10 fee would suffice to keep GNU GPL working (putting a cap of $0.01 on license fee I can ask for 2002 Linux, but not obligating me to require the fee).
Anyway, the 7 years is a number pulled by grandparent post out of a hat. It can be 15 years, or whatever. The idea is that you can't claim monopoly on something after certain date, only request reasonable reward, and that maintaining barrier prices will be prohibitively expensive in the long run so you'd have to reduce the price increasing availability.
If I'm producing software for 1000 customers, it will be obsolete in 7 years. Or if it isn't, it will be a couple major versions ahead, with new copyright on each of them. This is pretty much non-problem for software where 7 years is eternity.
Instead of $50-$100, make the copyright holder choose and pay a fee of 1000x the cost of license.
If you paid $1000, I can have a copy of your work for $1. If you paid $10k, I can have it for $10. If you paid $10, I can get a copy for $0.01. And you're not permitted not to license the work to me for that amount.
Post that with your real name.
If you are a professional developer and that statemet is true, you have no reason to hide behind AC.
so unless you've blocked all third party images
If you block only images (and frames) originating from different second-level domain than webpages displaying them, the web looks pretty much the same, with less ads though.
I have just days ago upgraded from XP to Windows 7.
At first I was completely lost. In half a hour I stripped most of features that confused me the most and got it to behave mostly like XP. I'm still trying to get used to the whole "libraries" thing, which I think is what XP sorely lacked (I had an extension to do something similar), but is hopelessly confusing at times, esp. when "directory up" leads completely elsewhere than directory structure would suggest.
Also, bugs I'd expect a year of public beta would strip. Obvious bugs early adopters were bound to spot and report.
Currently, nobody buys its dirty tricks of the times past.
The only way it can win now, is by being better.
And that means we all profit.
The system architect is long home with the family.
The boss should have spent a hour or a few talking to him about the new project to learn how the new system fits with each others and what are the requirements.
Sure if there is a separate technical lead, he should be doing this part instead - if he knows. Anyway, if he doesn't, and neither the boss does, the boss should pick up the phone and call the system architect.
One of better roles a boss can take is a buffer between the team and the rest of the world. You don't have to know a dozen of different phone numbers, know who is responsible for which subsystem and so on. You know the architecture of the system and your program interfaces with it. Your boss knows the architecture of the human resources behind the system, and he is your interface to it.
We had one more nice rule: never say "yes" to strangers when asked to do anything. The politically correct answer was "It is technically doable, but we have some backlog of work. Please talk to our boss to enqueue this job if you want it done." This way no business unit could smuggle features through backdoors behind design dept, get work done without getting billed for it, violate system architecture rules and anything like that. Anyone can consult with anyone but tasks come only from boss.
Usually quite easy, minus no 1:1 replacement.
Likely if the HDD fails, a bigger model will have to be installed. If RAM fails, possibly second-hand/refurbished will have to be used as replacement. Considering the price of the whole setup, even if the whole motherboard-CPU-RAM combo has to be replaced with a "current" model, it's still doable and not very expensive.
Note the customer has no business asking what's inside that thing as long as it works to the specs, so whatever the subcontractor puts inside that still performs, is okay. The boxes may even vary wildly between each other, but as long as they are capable of running the "client app" okay, that's not a problem to anyone except of the warranty service guys.
Well, you can swap a PC-as-terminal just as well, then troubleshoot the faulty unit and store for replacement when fixed.
If a terminal breaks, you swap them just the same then send to manufacturer for replacement or discard if the warranty has expired, because they are usually not serviceable.
5) Help find bugs.
If you spent more than 10 minutes looking for a source of some seemingly simple bug (or corresponding longer time for a bigger one), call someone for help. Someone not busy at the moment. Two pairs of eyes on the code are able to spot problems in 10% the time one pair can. It often suffices to lend an ear to let the developer explain how is the code supposed to work, and then the developer will often spot discrepancy between "supposed to" and "is written to".
Decisions.
When a programmer can do something two or more ways, with both ways having their advantages. The boss should have the image of the whole system in his head and see the load put on given component and its requirements. So I know I have to push incoming elements through a FIFO while filtering them on the way through an external function. I know how to do this, I know 10 ways how to do this. Now how fast will the elements arrive? how fast is the external function? how much resources do we have at our disposal? is queue overflow acceptable? and so on. This decides upon choice of the algorithm. Make it simple (simple static lists), make it failsafe (unlimited queue depth), make it fast (chase pointers), make it memory-conservative (outsource buffers to external caches) - these are decisions I expect from my boss, and to be made pretty fast.
on copyright holder of the material that is being infringed upon. Now the answer would be clear if the material they claim is infringed upon is the same as the infringing material. Now what if they wrongly accuse me of infringing upon X, by claiming I'm not allowed to distribute Y to which they have no legal rights?
That is, if I distribute Open Office, and Microsoft comes claiming I'm not authorized to distribute these copyrighted files...
it is then arguable if they are okay because they believe I am distributing MS Office they own,
or are they disallowing me to distribute OOo, for which they have no copyrights?
If space taken up by the PC is of concern to you, your employees are cramped in way too little space anyway.
As for power, downclocked CPU, the hdd set to spin down pretty fast and such mitigate most of the problem. In my climate, over most of the year power-hungry appliances mean just that much savings on heating anyway.