It's an obscene expense to run that server the day $blockbuster_game 2 is released. If they're doing it properly, there's going to be an actual cryptographic handshake between the client and the server when you start the game, and maybe intermittently while you play. That costs a surprising amount of CPU time, especially in the aggregate.
Their servers will get hammered and nobody will be able use the game they just bought for the stupidest of reasons, and the people who do manage to play the game won't be able to save (unless they've relented to reality and put local saves back in).
Forgetting languages? I'd suggest you stop drinking. I can understand you become rusty at a language, but forgetting, that's just bad memory. Also, why good is it when you know 100 variations of brainfuck.
Honestly, it's not even a matter of remembering languages. I never remember languages. When I pick up Java again after not using it for a little while, I always forget how to create an array. I can never remember how you declare a const pointer vs a pointer-to-const in C, I have to look up how to do heredocs every single time, and both Windows batch and Bash if statements escape me.
But none of that matters. Programming is not about knowing a language; it's about expressing yourself clearly. It doesn't matter if you're expressing yourself in for loops or while loops or s-expressions or regular expressions or list comprehensions or whatever new and shiny tool they come up with next year; what matters is that you know what you want to do well enough that you can split it into tiny, computer-sized chunks. Without that clarity, you cannot create a non-trivial program in any language.
I may forget every programming language that I have ever learned, but none of them matter as long as I know what I want to do.
Given how willing companies are to hire novice programmers, you gain experience either by magic or by lying.
It's almost like they don't realize that the minor cost incurred due to training a novice programmer now is totally outweighed by the awesome programmer they'll have with a few years of real-world experience.
But these companies that never look more than a year ahead and screw their employees at the drop of a hat would surely have some foresight, right?
My understanding is that in in extremo situations, very few rules apply. The Eucharist can be administered under the weirdest of circumstances, people of any religion (or no religion) can perform baptisms. It'd be up to the local bishop to decide, of course, but I'd guess when someone is dying just about anything goes.
I love that. Our most sacred rules apply always, except when it's inconvenient or bad PR to enforce them.
So Onlive isn't giving you the same experience as a $400-$600 graphics card, it is giving you maybe the same experience as a $50-100 graphics card. Well then, makes it much less worth while.
It's giving you the same experience as the one-time cost of a $50-$100 graphics card, and you're paying $10-$20/month for the privilege.
So the press must cease all coverage of political races during election season, instead airing only paid advertising?
Oh god yes. I was so fucking sick and tired of election coverage by the time November 2008 rolled around I was ready to puke if anyone mentioned politics again.
Election season does not need to last six fucking months, people. Even if there's a black dude and a white chick involved in it.
Let me see if I understand you. If I want to have my views represented in our political system, I should go work for someone (including myself) who shares my views.
Couldn't I just, you know, vote for someone? And maybe donate an amount of money I can afford to their campaign? Because after all, what politician will be beholden to me for donating $1000 when my company can donate $1,000,000?
Also, presumably due to the savings from not having to create physical copies, Steam has been having ridiculous sales over holiday weekends. For instance, over Thanksgiving weekend, they had the THQ pack - nearly every THQ game ever published, including Red Faction: Guerilla and Dawn of War 2 + expansions - for $50. Further, because they don't have to pay for packaging or shipping, they can keep low volume games "in stock", like all of the X-Com games.
They have stifled innovation for years (for an example see IE6 - allowed to totally stagnate once it had a dominant marketshare, only updated again once its share was threatened several years later).
This is what's really insidious about Bing. What happens if Microsoft wins the current search engine wars, like they did the browser wars or the operating system wars? Will they keep on innovating, or will search stagnate for a decade?
Further, it gives introverted geeks a safe and structured environment in which to gain social experience. It may not be the best of environments (after all, the people you're practicing with are also introverted geeks), but it sure beats sitting at home and reading Heinlein.
That's been true since 3E, actually. It's kind of funny in this situation, because the in-game explanation for where clerics of a philosophy or cause get their power is that a friendly divinity (or group thereof) donates it. A cleric of atheism, therefore, would be receiving her rather tangible powers from something she believes doesn't exist.
1) it isn't any of your business how much they make
Seriously, this sort of attitude is part of what makes America so divided. It isn't any of my business how much someone else makes? Then how am I supposed to make a rational decision about my line of work? All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B. I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.
2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it
You know why they deserve it? Because CEO 1 is on the board of company 2, so he says that CEO 2 should have a ridiculous salary. CEO 2 is on the board of company 1, so he says that CEO 1 should have a ridiculous salary.
3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss
No real loss, except for the opportunity cost of all that extra money going into improving the CEO's bankroll instead of into improving the company.
Why does anyone care about being quiet in a library nowadays? Just check out the books you want and go read them at home. There's nothing keeping you there.
In earlier ages, the reason why you were supposed to be quiet in a library was because some people were there to do research and couldn't check out all the reference books they could possibly need. Who needs that, now that we have the Internet? And if your library has the materials to support the sort of hard-core research that requires dead-tree copies of things that aren't on the Internet yet, they probably have quiet research rooms.
An actual idiot from Nigeria just set his pants on fire in an attempt to blow up an airplane and the government was criticized since they had "clues" but didn't act on it.
The underwear bomber's dad walked into an American embassy and said, "My son's been hanging out with terrorists, he might have gone to Yemen for terrorist training, I'm afraid of what he might do."
This guy posted on Twitter.
Do you not see the orders of magnitude difference here?
To support the position that the DHS/CIA/whatever haven't actually prevented any terrorist attacks, I would make an argument from silence: if any such attacks had been prevented, the media would have bombarded us with crowing politicians. Preventing an attack that could have killed dozens of people would be worth incredible amounts of political capital; why keep quiet about it? Doing so wouldn't help security, either - keeping so totally mum about how awesome our security forces are doesn't do anything to deter potential future terrorists.
Instead, we've heard nothing. All we ever hear is when some idiot sets fire to his extra-flammable underpants.
Set up a government body that accepts memberships from people who practice in the field for a yearly fee. In practice, requests for membership will come from corporations, working groups, or professional associations.
When you get to the point where the patent office would normally be okay with a patent, ask three different members from the patent's domain to summarize the problem the patent solves. They would of course do this under NDAs, and may choose to recuse themselves after reading the patent's title or some other non-NDA information. They may also make comments like "wrong domain" or "vague claims". A patent officer harmonizes these three problem summaries.
Pass this problem summary to some number of other members in the patent's domain. These members will be individually secluded for some amount of time related to the number of claims in the patent (or some other metric that relates to the problem's complexity) in a government office; they will only have access to basic forms of information, like textbooks in their field or Wikipedia, as well as a database of previous patents. Their goal is to give a sketch of how they, as practitioners in the domain, would solve the problem. These people would not be under NDAs.
If some number of solutions are largely the same as the one in the patent (as judged by other people in the field), the patent is denied. If practitioners in the domain, when exposed to the same problem, come up the same solution, it must be an obvious step.
I think it would work out really well - the agency would charge a fee per patent, as well as for memberships; businesses and special interest groups would clamor to have as many of their people as possible as members, so they can get an idea of what problems their competitors are solving. However, truly unique and innovative ideas aren't reproducible in a day, and will get a pass.
There's a black market for booze? Why? Making your own stuff ridiculously easy - ancient Egyptian farmers managed it, and they didn't even have plastics or germ theory. The end result might not be the best stuff you've ever tasted, but it's definitely cheap and alcoholic.
Palin couldn't stop Joe Biden "o'Biden", which is why she asked if she could call him "Joe" in the VP debates. She still slipped during the debate and called him o'Biden anyway.
Experience is one thing, the ability to remember your opponents names is another.
My fiancee's father grew up poor, and so has untreated and undiagnosed ADD mixed in with anger issues. At various times as a child he broke a couple of his siblings limbs and punched holes in a few walls. He's learned to control it (primarily by being passive-aggressive, instead of aggressive-aggressive), but you can tell it's a struggle sometimes. He's lucky - he would probably be in jail for aggravated assault and battery, not a researcher.
One of my fiancee's sisters inherited all of these traits and more from her father. She takes about four different pills a day and is much shorter than everyone else in the family (we think the pills stunted her growth). She's also currently attending a good college, and is not in juvenile hall because she clawed someone's eyes out. Would she have been able to learn to control herself like her father did, without medication? Maybe, maybe not. This way, she can definitely control herself, without risking her sister's limbs.
Have you ever actually looked at an adult bicycle helmet? The top is basically just a thin shell to keep the thing from sliding over your ears. Most of the padding and protection is around the rim of the helmet, and projects out pretty far - which means that if you fall off your bike somehow and hit something, the rim of the helmet will hit the ground before your head does.
Bicycles under normal conditions simply do not go fast enough to pose a serious threat to any part of you besides your head. You can mess up your joints if you fall on them badly, maybe even break a limb - but if you fall off your bicycle and hit your head, you may die.
I vaguely remember reading that Sam Raimi did not want to include Venom in the movie at all, because he was more interested in the other aspects of Spiderman 3. However, the executives thought that Venom would make the movie more profitable, so they forced Raimi to include that plot.
Apparently, Spiderman 3 makes a lot more sense if you just cut out the parts with Venom. Not that that makes me want to watch it again.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an obscene expense to run that server the day $blockbuster_game 2 is released. If they're doing it properly, there's going to be an actual cryptographic handshake between the client and the server when you start the game, and maybe intermittently while you play. That costs a surprising amount of CPU time, especially in the aggregate.
Their servers will get hammered and nobody will be able use the game they just bought for the stupidest of reasons, and the people who do manage to play the game won't be able to save (unless they've relented to reality and put local saves back in).
Honestly, it's not even a matter of remembering languages. I never remember languages. When I pick up Java again after not using it for a little while, I always forget how to create an array. I can never remember how you declare a const pointer vs a pointer-to-const in C, I have to look up how to do heredocs every single time, and both Windows batch and Bash if statements escape me.
But none of that matters. Programming is not about knowing a language; it's about expressing yourself clearly. It doesn't matter if you're expressing yourself in for loops or while loops or s-expressions or regular expressions or list comprehensions or whatever new and shiny tool they come up with next year; what matters is that you know what you want to do well enough that you can split it into tiny, computer-sized chunks. Without that clarity, you cannot create a non-trivial program in any language.
I may forget every programming language that I have ever learned, but none of them matter as long as I know what I want to do.
Given how willing companies are to hire novice programmers, you gain experience either by magic or by lying.
It's almost like they don't realize that the minor cost incurred due to training a novice programmer now is totally outweighed by the awesome programmer they'll have with a few years of real-world experience.
But these companies that never look more than a year ahead and screw their employees at the drop of a hat would surely have some foresight, right?
I love that. Our most sacred rules apply always, except when it's inconvenient or bad PR to enforce them.
You have to flip the crab over and stab it in the belly for bassive damage.
It's giving you the same experience as the one-time cost of a $50-$100 graphics card, and you're paying $10-$20/month for the privilege.
Oh god yes. I was so fucking sick and tired of election coverage by the time November 2008 rolled around I was ready to puke if anyone mentioned politics again.
Election season does not need to last six fucking months, people. Even if there's a black dude and a white chick involved in it.
Let me see if I understand you. If I want to have my views represented in our political system, I should go work for someone (including myself) who shares my views.
Couldn't I just, you know, vote for someone? And maybe donate an amount of money I can afford to their campaign? Because after all, what politician will be beholden to me for donating $1000 when my company can donate $1,000,000?
Also, presumably due to the savings from not having to create physical copies, Steam has been having ridiculous sales over holiday weekends. For instance, over Thanksgiving weekend, they had the THQ pack - nearly every THQ game ever published, including Red Faction: Guerilla and Dawn of War 2 + expansions - for $50. Further, because they don't have to pay for packaging or shipping, they can keep low volume games "in stock", like all of the X-Com games.
This is what's really insidious about Bing. What happens if Microsoft wins the current search engine wars, like they did the browser wars or the operating system wars? Will they keep on innovating, or will search stagnate for a decade?
Whenever Microsoft wins, everyone else loses.
Further, it gives introverted geeks a safe and structured environment in which to gain social experience. It may not be the best of environments (after all, the people you're practicing with are also introverted geeks), but it sure beats sitting at home and reading Heinlein.
That's been true since 3E, actually. It's kind of funny in this situation, because the in-game explanation for where clerics of a philosophy or cause get their power is that a friendly divinity (or group thereof) donates it. A cleric of atheism, therefore, would be receiving her rather tangible powers from something she believes doesn't exist.
Seriously, this sort of attitude is part of what makes America so divided. It isn't any of my business how much someone else makes? Then how am I supposed to make a rational decision about my line of work? All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B. I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.
You know why they deserve it? Because CEO 1 is on the board of company 2, so he says that CEO 2 should have a ridiculous salary. CEO 2 is on the board of company 1, so he says that CEO 1 should have a ridiculous salary.
No real loss, except for the opportunity cost of all that extra money going into improving the CEO's bankroll instead of into improving the company.
Why does anyone care about being quiet in a library nowadays? Just check out the books you want and go read them at home. There's nothing keeping you there.
In earlier ages, the reason why you were supposed to be quiet in a library was because some people were there to do research and couldn't check out all the reference books they could possibly need. Who needs that, now that we have the Internet? And if your library has the materials to support the sort of hard-core research that requires dead-tree copies of things that aren't on the Internet yet, they probably have quiet research rooms.
The underwear bomber's dad walked into an American embassy and said, "My son's been hanging out with terrorists, he might have gone to Yemen for terrorist training, I'm afraid of what he might do."
This guy posted on Twitter.
Do you not see the orders of magnitude difference here?
To support the position that the DHS/CIA/whatever haven't actually prevented any terrorist attacks, I would make an argument from silence: if any such attacks had been prevented, the media would have bombarded us with crowing politicians. Preventing an attack that could have killed dozens of people would be worth incredible amounts of political capital; why keep quiet about it? Doing so wouldn't help security, either - keeping so totally mum about how awesome our security forces are doesn't do anything to deter potential future terrorists.
Instead, we've heard nothing. All we ever hear is when some idiot sets fire to his extra-flammable underpants.
Here's how I would set up a patent system:
I think it would work out really well - the agency would charge a fee per patent, as well as for memberships; businesses and special interest groups would clamor to have as many of their people as possible as members, so they can get an idea of what problems their competitors are solving. However, truly unique and innovative ideas aren't reproducible in a day, and will get a pass.
There's a black market for booze? Why? Making your own stuff ridiculously easy - ancient Egyptian farmers managed it, and they didn't even have plastics or germ theory. The end result might not be the best stuff you've ever tasted, but it's definitely cheap and alcoholic.
Palin couldn't stop Joe Biden "o'Biden", which is why she asked if she could call him "Joe" in the VP debates. She still slipped during the debate and called him o'Biden anyway.
Experience is one thing, the ability to remember your opponents names is another.
98-1 means all of the Republicans voted for it as well; at least one Democrat voted no.
Did Mark McGwire use steroids?
What do the bacteria under the sofa have to do with Google?
My fiancee's father grew up poor, and so has untreated and undiagnosed ADD mixed in with anger issues. At various times as a child he broke a couple of his siblings limbs and punched holes in a few walls. He's learned to control it (primarily by being passive-aggressive, instead of aggressive-aggressive), but you can tell it's a struggle sometimes. He's lucky - he would probably be in jail for aggravated assault and battery, not a researcher.
One of my fiancee's sisters inherited all of these traits and more from her father. She takes about four different pills a day and is much shorter than everyone else in the family (we think the pills stunted her growth). She's also currently attending a good college, and is not in juvenile hall because she clawed someone's eyes out. Would she have been able to learn to control herself like her father did, without medication? Maybe, maybe not. This way, she can definitely control herself, without risking her sister's limbs.
Have you ever actually looked at an adult bicycle helmet? The top is basically just a thin shell to keep the thing from sliding over your ears. Most of the padding and protection is around the rim of the helmet, and projects out pretty far - which means that if you fall off your bike somehow and hit something, the rim of the helmet will hit the ground before your head does.
Bicycles under normal conditions simply do not go fast enough to pose a serious threat to any part of you besides your head. You can mess up your joints if you fall on them badly, maybe even break a limb - but if you fall off your bicycle and hit your head, you may die.
I vaguely remember reading that Sam Raimi did not want to include Venom in the movie at all, because he was more interested in the other aspects of Spiderman 3. However, the executives thought that Venom would make the movie more profitable, so they forced Raimi to include that plot.
Apparently, Spiderman 3 makes a lot more sense if you just cut out the parts with Venom. Not that that makes me want to watch it again.